What initially appeared to be a power play by Elon Musk and the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) to take over the US Copyright Office by having Donald Trump remove the officials in charge has now backfired in spectacular fashion, as Trump's acting replacements are known to be unfriendly - and even downright hostile - to the tech industry. When Trump fired Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden last week and Register of Copyrights Shira Perlmutter over the weekend, it was seen as another move driven by the tech wing of the Republican Party - especially in light of the Copyright Office releasing a pre-publication report saying some kinds of generative AI training would not be considered fair use. And when two men showed up at the Copyright Office inside the Library of Congress carrying letters purporting to appoint them to acting leadership positions, the DOGE takeover appeared to be complete.But those two men, Paul Perkins and Brian Nieves, were not DOGE at all, but instead approved by the MAGA wing of the Trump coalition that aims to put tech companies in check. Perkins, now the supposed acting Register of Copyrights, is an eight-year veteran of the DOJ who served in t …Read the full story at The Verge.

Overheating isn't just a concern for your CPU and graphics card; even your unassuming SSD is prone to it. While overheating storage drives wasn't a problem a few years ago, Gen4 and Gen5 NVMe SSDs can heat up under load, depending on the drive model, your PC's airflow situation, and even which M.2 slot you pick. Most SSDs are designed to run under 70℃, beyond which they can throttle and reduce performance. Fortunately, there's a lot you can do to give your drive the best chance of avoiding overheating, thereby extending its lifespan.

I recently took up travel journaling as an honest alternative to performative social media. My kit cobbles together the best pen, paper, and photo printer I could find to document vanlife adventures for my spawn and some version of my future self that I've yet to meet.My father left behind a typewritten memoir that I've returned to again and again since his passing so many years ago. Oh, how I wish there was a hand-written version instead of an impersonal Microsoft Word file - his all-capped lettering forged by a career as an engineer, replete with scribbles and smears made by his ever-callused right hand. Even better if those pages had been adorned with photos of the people, places, and things he wanted me to see.My journaling kit consists of three main parts: a Pilot V7 pen, a notebook from the Traveler's Company, and a Fujifilm Instax Mini Link 3 photo printer. The pen choice was easy - I just listened to Liz. I value her opinion over Sam Altman's, so the first thing I did was buy a pack of four Pilot V7 pens for less than $10.The paper journal was a bit tougher decision and resulted in a few false starts. I should have known better than to cheap out on somethin …Read the full story at The Verge.

Gaming mice get all the glory when it comes to media coverage, but what if you want something simple, compact, and more importantly affordable? That's where the Lenovo 300 wireless mouse comes in, delivering all the above at a fantastic price. While its usual retail price is set at $17, you can now score a huge discount that knocks 53% off as it drops to just $8.

TrueNAS Scale, Unraid, and OpenMediaVault stand at the apex of the Network-Attached Storage OS landscape, with each distribution featuring its own perks and quirks. However, they’re far from the only options at your disposal. Even without harnessing the power of virtualization, you can turn Proxmox into a reliable file-sharing server once you arm it with the right set of packages – and the same holds for Debian, Fedora, and other general-purpose distributions.

By the time you read these words, it's quite possible that Adorama will be out of stock of the new DJI Mavic 4 Pro. But when I wrote them, the US-based retailer was still selling a drone that wasn't supposed to go on sale in the US at all, with roughly 70 left in stock.This morning, I wrote how DJI was skipping the US with its most advanced drone yet, citing Trump's tariffs among other reasons for the decision. DJI did not send the drone to US reviewers, and it wouldn't provide US prices when we asked.But Adorama and B&H, two rival camera stores based in New York City, apparently didn't get the message! @verge It might be a while until you can buy the new DJI Mavic 4 Pro in the US. #dji #mavic4pro #drone #tech #techtok ♬ original sound - The Verge Today, they both listed the drone for $2,699 - or $3,549 for the Fly More Kit, or $4,649 for the Creator Combo with the fancy new controller with the folding sticks and swiveling 1600-nit screen, or $1,299 for that controller all by its lonesome. B&H even issued a press release. B&H is only offering preorders today; I confirmed with Miguel Perez in the store's drone department that "we don't yet have it in stock," and he …Read the full story at The Verge.

Doom: The Dark Ages has once again brought the realm-hopping, demon-punching, face-stabbing Slayer to our screens, and this time, he’s going medieval on the forces of hell. A noteworthy change this time around is how id Software has presented maps and arenas bigger than ever before in a Doom game.

In a world increasingly dominated by a small handful of tech giants, many people are looking for ways to escape the grasp of big companies like Google and Microsoft. Recently, I've become one such person and began my self-hosting journey using a spare mini PC I had lying around. One of the many services I'm interested in replacing is Google Calendar, and perhaps unsurprisingly, there are quite a few options.

With new FOSS applications and self-hosted utilities popping up at a breakneck pace, now’s the best time to deploy useful services on your own hardware. From a privacy standpoint, locally-hosted apps are free from the prying eyes of large corporations. Most popular self-hosted services have FOSS roots, so you don’t have to worry about your wallet getting bled dry by regular subscription fees.

Raspberry Pis can be a lot of fun to tinker with and make strange and amusing trinkets with, but they can also be the workhorse of devices around your home. In fact, it's so easy to get caught up in the weird and wonderful that it's easy to forget that these are little computers you can use to perform useful things around your home. And once you start using the Raspberry Pi to enhance your home, you really can't stop thinking of ways to use it. So, here are some ways I use a Raspberry Pi around the home.

If you frequently use Steam, now would be an excellent time to change your password. There has been news that 89 million account details have gone up for sale on the dark web, and if it turns out to be legitimate, it would mean a ton of user accounts are now at risk. Given how some accounts can contain hundreds (if not thousands) of games, this could mean people losing their entire selection of PC games.

Long-simmering tension between Silicon Valley and the press that covers it is surfacing during the Federal Trade Commission's antitrust trial against Meta. During a heated cross-examination of the FTC's key economic expert, Scott Hemphill, Meta's lead attorney, Mark Hansen, noted that Hemphill joined Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes and former Biden official Tim Wu in pitching regulators on an antitrust probe of the company back in 2019. The pitch deck for the probe that was shown in court included "public recognition" of the company's aggressive acquisition strategy from two reporters: Kara Swisher, who currently hosts two podcasts for The Verge's parent company, Vox Media, and Om Malik, the founder of the early tech blog GigaOm who is now a venture capitalist.In an attempt to undercut Hemphill's credibility, Hansen caught Swisher and Malik in the crossfire. He called Malik a "failed blogger" with an axe to grind against Meta. He then suggested that Swisher, whom he referred to as a Vanity Fair columnist (she last wrote for the site in 2015), was similarly biased against the company. In court, he projected a headline about her recently calling Mark Zuckerberg a "small little …Read the full story at The Verge.