The FTC and 22 state attorneys general are suing Amazon for allegedly using a "secret ad surcharge" to drive up prices for ads on its website and app. FTC chairman Andrew Ferguson claims in a blog post on the lawsuit that the higher advertising prices "were largely passed on to American consumers." According to the complaint, Amazon violated the FTC Act and over a dozen state laws. This lawsuit comes almost a year after Amazon agreed to pay $2.5 billion to settle an earlier FTC lawsuit over Prime subscription practices. In Amazon's "second price" auctions for ads on its platform, the winning bidder is supposed to only pay one cent more tha …Read the full story at The Verge.

JMGO’s Iris Ultra Max 4K 120Hz Google TV projector. | Image: JMGO JMGO's 4K 120Hz Iris Ultra Max all-in-one Google TV projector is now available outside China. It gets its name from a new dual-iris system that lets it produce an impressive 10,000:1 native contrast, according to JMGO. It boosts the contrast - always an issue with projectors - by placing two separate physical apertures (irises) along different points of the internal optical path to control light scatter and brightness far more aggressively than a single iris can. It also promises to produce a very bright 6,500 ISO lumen image from its triple-laser light engine.Last year at IFA, 6,000 lumens from an all-in-one projector was breaking new gro …Read the full story at The Verge.

Here you can see the Archer 8 Ultra (bottom) and the Deco 8 Ultra (top). | Image: TP-Link The Wi-Fi 8 standard is far from finalized, but TP-Link is almost ready to release its first hardware targeting the next-gen spec. It unveiled the Archer 8 Ultra tri-band router and Deco 8 Ultra mesh system at IFA 2026, which utilize the upcoming IEEE 802.11bn standard to "address the connectivity problems people actually notice" instead of focusing on speed upgrades, according to TP-Link's announcement.The Archer 8 Ultra features 18 internal antennas, and can deliver wireless speeds of up to 19Gbps and 10Gbps over wired connection. The Deco 8 Ultra mesh system provides up to 22Gbps over wireless and 10Gbps wired connectivity, according to …Read the full story at The Verge.

Well, that was sudden. In an unannounced price increase, Google has raised the price of its TV Streamer by 50%. That puts the price up from $99 to $149, which is pretty nasty given how we didn't see it coming. However, there is a silver lining; if you're quick, you can still pick up a Streamer for its original price, but I'm not sure how long that window's going to last.

The Nvidia Shield TV was truly ahead of its time when it launched more than six years ago. It’s one of the few streaming devices that remain usable and is still among the best on the market more than half a decade later. I’m talking about the Shield TV Pro released in 2019, and I still know people who use the first-generation models without any issues. Mind you, that device is more than a decade old now.

Local AI means different things depending on who's saying it, and it stopped being a crucial part of the conversation once we got semi-competent models we could self-host. I'd spent a lot of time thinking about home automation in terms of cloud vs. local, and I'd missed one big point. Where the model runs is a minor detail; what matters is who can see your automations and who gets to edit them.

The cool part about open-source software is that, if you really don't like where it's headed, you can always fork it and make your own. That's exactly what happened late last year when the development team for the popular Doom modernising engine, GZDoom, imploded due to some drama. But fret not, for the team forked the code and made UZDoom, which seems to be the version people should use going forward.

Apple SVP John Ternus takes over as CEO from Tim Cook. | AFP via Getty Images For the first time since 2011, one of the world's most valuable companies has a new leader, as today marks John Ternus' first day as Apple's CEO. He's replacing Tim Cook, who will continue on as the executive chairman on Apple's board and departed with a letter to employees that remarked, "This place is proof that culture triumphs over everything. We share a belief that what we build matters, and that we have both the opportunity and the responsibility to leave the world better than we found it."Ternus is taking over a company dealing with the rise of AI, shortages of RAM and other components due to that growth in AI, and a political and e …Read the full story at The Verge.

Despite my initial scepticism, locally-hosted LLM models have gotten a lot of oomph to their reasoning capabilities as of late. Newer Mixture-of-Experts models, for example, can run at respectable token rates on my outdated Pascal-era cards, and with a little bit of tinkering, LLMs such as Qwen3.6-35B-A3B and Gemma-4-26B-A4B can easily replace their cloud counterparts for my FOSS stack.

Dyson is expanding into oral care with its first toothbrush featuring a camera and flossing capabilities. | Image: Dyson Dyson is once again expanding its line of personal care products with a device that focuses on your teeth instead of your hair. As the name implies, the $499 CameraJet is the first electric toothbrush to incorporate a camera into the brush head. Available starting today in ceramic blue or ceramic pink color options, it can let you inspect the inside of your mouth by livestreaming video over Wi-Fi to your phone. But the camera also works alongside an AI algorithm to detect and blast the gaps between your teeth with mouthwash. So while you're brushing, the CameraJet simultaneously takes care of flossing.That price isn't cheap, but it's also …Read the full story at The Verge.

Google raised the price of its 4K streaming box to $149, up $50 from its original $99 price. The new price is currently live at the Google Store and Best Buy, but Amazon appears to still be offering the original price. The price hike comes just a couple of weeks after Google launched its new lineup of Pixel 11 phones with a $100 price hike over their Pixel 10 counterparts. The Google TV Streamer originally launched in 2024 and doubles as a smart home hub. It isn't the only streaming device getting more expensive - component shortages have been driving up prices on everything from laptops to game consoles. Earlier this month, Amazon incre …Read the full story at The Verge.

I've been running Lemonade Server on the ROG Flow Z13 for months now, running the same LLMs as my PC thanks to 128GB of unified memory. So when I pointed Charm's Crush at it, I expected something close to Cursor without the subscription. After all, I loved this terminal-based AI coding tool the first time I tried it, and routing means my local LLM can call Claude when it's stuck, so the pieces were all there. What I got instead was a very capable chatbot with a shell. It could list files and run commands, and that was about it.