Smartwatches have come along way since the first Apple Watch arrived on the scene more than a decade ago. However, despite how ubiquitous they’ve become, they’re still nowhere near as discrete — or long-lasting — as a smart ring like the Samsung Galaxy Ring. Thankfully, if you’re looking to ditch the watch, Samsung’s first-gen smart ring is available with a $100 gift card at Best Buy and Amazon, where you can pick it up in a variety of sizes starting at $299.99 ($100 off), an all-time low.In many ways, the Android-only Galaxy Ring is more of an accessory for existing Samsung users than it is a standalone device. It’s not as a capable as the Oura Ring 4, our No. 1 pick for the best smart ring, though it does showcase excellent hardware and comes in wide ranges of sizes, from 5 to 15. Plus, unlike the Oura, the Galaxy Ring provides standard activity and sleep tracking without requiring you to pay a monthly fee. That’s a boon for anyone with subscription fatigue.In terms of basics, Samsung’s IP68 water-resistant ring can measure your blood oxygen level, skin temperature, heart rate, and track your steps and workouts. That being said, you’ll need a Galaxy phone to leverage all of Samsung’s ecosystem-centric tricks, including the ability to access insights about your quality of sleep and Samsung’s Energy Score feature, which attempts to quantify your fatigue levels. If you own a Samsung Galaxy Watch 7 or Ultra, you’ll even get several additional days of battery life, thanks in part to the way Samsung’s Health app prioritizes which device’s sensors to pull from.All that is to say that the Galaxy Ring remains best suited for existing Samsung users, rather than those tapped into other ecosystems. But if that’s you, the current promo is the best deal we’ve seen.Read our full Samsung Galaxy Ring review.More deals and discountsThe holidays might be a ways off, but that also means it’s the best time of the year to load up on discounted decorations. Right now, for instance, Govee’s 50-foot Outdoor Dots String Lights are on sale at Amazon for an all-time low of $89.99 ($90 off) — the lowest price we’ve seen on the Matter-compatible, smart LED string.I’m a firm believer in bone conduction headphones like the Shokz OpenRun Pro 2, which leave your ears more exposed while working out. Thankfully, if you haven’t tried them before, they’re available at Amazon, Walmart, and Best Buy for $139.95 ($40 off), matching their all-time low. The latest open-ear Shokz still offer big sound and plenty of bass, only this time around, they now support USB-C charging and AI noise cancellation. Read our review.The Xbox Series X version of Metaphor: ReFantazio, a game that deftly build upon a winning RPG formula with a powerful narrative and harrowing turn-based combat, is going for $24.99 ($45 off) at Woot this weekend. It was easily one of our favorite games of 2024, even if it does feel like a remixed Persona title. Read our review.

Building a home lab is a process, and the more self-hosted services you add, the more complicated it becomes to provide security and manage them. It gets to be a headache eventually, but you can make things easier by using a reverse proxy to expose your services using human-readable URLs instead of IP and port combinations. There are plenty of options to choose from, depending if you need versatility, ease of setup and use, and how well you're versed in the command line, but Nginx Proxy Manager ticks all the boxes for most home lab users. It's got a web-based GUI, is quick to set up thanks to a Docker container, and has the option of advanced configuration if you need it down the road.

A mannequin explodes as part of a live demonstration warning consumers of fireworks hazards. The Consumer Product Safety Commission (CPSC) held this educational event on June 29, 2023. | Photo by Getty ImagesOn Friday, Donald Trump abruptly removed the three sitting Democrat appointees on the five-person U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission — the independent watchdog agency that issues recalls and regulates everyday products, including consumer electronics. With no apparent cause for removal, the firings violate existing Supreme Court precedent dating back to 1935, as did Trump’s removals of the Democratic commissioners of the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) back in March.The firing comes in the wake of a draft budget proposal that would have eliminated the CSPC, whose commissioners are bipartisan by law and who serve five-year terms. The proposal would have instead rolled the commission’s regulatory powers into the Department of Health and Human Services, which is led by a political appointee — presently, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.The Washington Post reported that the firings came shortly after the three Democrats on the commission — Richard Trumka, Mary Boyle and Alexander Hoehn-Saric, all Biden appointees — voted to publish safety standards for small lithium-ion batteries used in electric bikes and electric scooters, with the two Republicans voting against it. The report specifically noted that these batteries have a record of catching on fire and “resulting in at least 39 fatalities and 181 injuries nationwide.”The following Thursday, two members of DOGE appeared at the CPSC’s offices. The next day, Trumka and Boyle received letters notifying them that they were fired. Hoehn-Saric did not receive a letter, but according to The Hill, he and his staff found themselves locked out of the building. All three members released statements saying that they planned to appeal their firings to the courts and that Trump had acted illegally. The three members received support from Consumer Reports, which stated in a press release that the firings were “an appalling and lawless attack on the independence of our country’s product safety watchdog.” Rather than state a cause for removal, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt once again reiterated the White House’s position that the president “has the right to fire people within the executive branch.” In March, the president fired the Democrats serving on the Federal Trade Commission, another independent agency, in contravention of the longstanding Supreme Court precedent, Humphrey’s Executor, which limits presidential power to remove officers at independent agencies — like the FTC — that have authority delegated to them from the legislative branch. The White House has consistently asserted that the president has the power to fire anyone under him, and Trump’s Department of Justice has announced its intention to overturn Humphrey’s Executor at the Supreme Court. The new Republican chair of the FTC has also publicly backed this interpretation of the Constitution. Fired FTC commissioners Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Alvaro Bedoya have since sued the administration. The Supreme Court has previously signaled a willingness to overturn its own precedent in favor of expanding executive power, but the FTC case has not yet reached the court. Humphrey’s Executor remains the law of the land for now, though that could very well change in the near future. But that only makes it all the more baffling as to why the president is, once again, illegally firing commissioners of independent agencies. 

Tech event season is in full swing. This week, Stripe and Figma gathered thousands of people in downtown San Francisco for their respective conferences. I caught up with Figma CEO Dylan Field after his opening keynote at Config, where he announced the most significant product expansion in the company's history. Below, you'll find our chat about how he sees AI fitting into Figma after a rough start to integrating the technology last year, the new areas he's targeting to grow the platform, and more. And keep reading for how Meta is turning up the heat on its AI team, my thoughts about this week's OpenAI news, and more…"Design and craft are the differentiator"These days, it seems like Figma has the entire creative software industry in its sights.On Wednesday, CEO Dylan Field walked onstage in front of about 8,000 people at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to announce four new products: a ChatGPT-like prototyping tool, a website builder and hosting platform, an AI-branded ad tool that's similar to Canva, and an Adobe Illustrator competitor.The last time I interviewed Field, he was resetting Figma's internal culture after its $20 billion sale to Adobe was blocked. When w …Read the full story at The Verge.

PS5 users can now buy games in the PlayStation Store using a new payment method: Apple Pay. You could use Apple Pay in the browser or via the mobile app already, but now the method joins other on-console options like using a saved credit or debit card, and PayPal.As reported by 9to5Mac, you may now see a new option for Apple Pay available at checkout. It’s using the QR code-style method that Apple introduced on iOS 18 last year, and also lets you buy things on third-party browsers like Chrome. The PlayStation support page for using Apple Pay has more information on which regions this works in, which includes the US.Once you select the game you want on your PS5, choose Apple Pay, then scan the code on your TV screen with your iPhone. iOS will then pull up a checkout screen that lets you confirm the transaction. And if you’re an Apple Card user, that means your PS5 purchases are good for 2 percent cash back as well. 9to5Mac also says Apple Pay may come to PS4 consoles as well after a future software update.

No matter what device you have, this Lexar 2TB M.2 SSD is going to be the perfect storage upgrade. Not only are you getting tons of space, but you're also getting an SSD that delivers excellent performance as well. Best of all, it's not all that expensive thanks to a recent 22% discount that drops the price down to just $130.

After years of Windows 11, Microsoft is finally taking a wrench to the Start menu. While not everyone dislikes it, it's definitely one of the sore spots people have when upgrading from Windows 10 to 11, given the lack of customization you have versus the older Windows version. Now, the company has broken down the reasoning behind its new Start redesign, giving everyone a sneak peek into what they can expect from it.

The Doom series has always been gaming royalty — it’s one of the most important games that changed the medium forever. 2016’s reboot and 2020’s Doom Eternal — both fantastic FPS games and even better Doom games — reinvented and cemented the franchise’s modern identity — a breakneck, ultra-violent ballet of speed, strategy, and hellish spectacle.

You probably know what goes into buying a new GPU. You need to know what kind of games you'll play, what resolution you'll play at, and how much you want to spend before you can make a good purchase decision. However, you should also know what not to do. While you might be focused on GPU specs, it's also critical to avoid some buying mistakes that can come back to bite you. I learned the hard way not to get bogged down by brands, variants, and unimportant specs when upgrading my graphics card. Here's why you should avoid these GPU buying mistakes.

Outer Wilds developer Mobius Digital is working on a new game, but it might be a very long time before we hear anything about it, the studio’s head of production tells The Verge.“It’s going to be quite awhile before we have any news or hints about our next game,” says Jackie Kreitzberg. “Likely on the order of years.” The studio also doesn’t plan to share “public development logs” in order to “preserve the mystery of the next game.”In 2021, Mobius released the Echoes of the Eye expansion for Outer Wilds, which Kreitzberg says is the game’s last. “We’re excited to make something new.”I reached out to Mobius after seeing Outer Wilds patch notes spotted by Rock Paper Shotgun that said the team is “hard at work on our next game.” But while that was the first I had heard of a new game, Kreitzberg notes that the studio confirmed it was in the works after last year’s resignations at Annapurna Interactive. Even if Mobius doesn’t want to talk about the new game, it appreciates the recent attention. “We’re thrilled that folks are excited to see what we make next and hope we don’t leave everyone hanging forever,” Kreitzberg says.

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) plans on photographing every single person who leaves the US by car, an agency spokesperson told Wired. The agency says it will start using facial recognition technology at official border crossings to match all outbound travelers’ faces to their passports, visas, or other travel documents, though there’s no public timeline for when this will happen.“Although we are still working on how we would handle outbound vehicle lanes, we will ultimately expand to this area,” CBP spokesperson Jessica Turner told Wired. It’s an expansion of the agency’s current practice of photographing travelers as they enter the country and matching those photos with “all documented photos, i.e., passports, visas, green cards, etc,” the agency has on record.CBP has been working on ways to track people as they leave the US for over a decade. After two years of lab tests, CBP experimented with collecting travelers’ biometrics at airports in 2016. That year, the agency partnered with Delta Air Lines to photograph passengers boarding a Tokyo-bound flight at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport. The agency’s collection of outgoing travelers’ biometric data has expanded since then. CBP currently uses “biometric facial comparison technology” to process travelers exiting the US at 57 airports, including Hartsfield-Jackson in Atlanta, Los Angeles International Airport, Dallas-Fort Worth International Airport, and John F. Kennedy International Airport in New York — some of the busiest airports in the country. The airport panopticon continues to expand.“We found that facial recognition was intuitive for people. Everybody knows how to stand in front of a camera and have his or her photo taken,” John Wagner, the deputy assistant commissioner of CBP’s office of field operations, said in an agency article promoting CBP’s biometric technologies. “Not so with iris scans and fingerprints. Every time a traveler does the process wrong, someone has to instruct him or her the right way to do it.”Collecting passengers’ fingerprints may be less intuitive than taking their pictures, but CBP does that, too. Agents stationed at airports across the country use a handheld device called Biometric Exit Mobile to take certain travelers’ fingerprints before they board their flights. Those fingerprints are then run against law enforcement databases.If CBP’s role is to process people for entry into the US, why track people on the way out? Wired notes that biometric databases could be used to monitor self-deportations. Having realized that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) lacks the resources to arrest, detain, and deport each and every one of the estimated 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the US, President Donald Trump is encouraging undocumented immigrants to leave the US on their own, offering people $1,000 if they leave the country voluntarily. But CBP was devising ways to collect travelers’ photos, fingerprints, and other biometric data long before Trump took office. The agency says it collects this data to run people’s biometrics against law enforcement databases, therefore ensuring that people with criminal records are removed from the US. The agency’s promotional article touting its biometric technologies includes a “success story” involving a Polish couple who had “criminal histories with multiple identities” caught leaving the US under false names. Since DHS’s formation in the wake of the September 11th attacks, immigration enforcement has blurred the lines between criminal enforcement and national security. Every international traveler is a potential criminal or terrorist, justifying mass surveillance.Trump didn’t invent this playbook. But his mass deportation agenda is getting a helpful boost from decades of bipartisan turbocharging of the surveillance state.

Considering I'm somewhat of a PC Luddite, and avoid updating my BIOS, Windows, or drivers unless it's critical, flashing my GPU BIOS was certainly out of the ordinary. I've known about custom vBIOS for a while, and how it can increase performance by tweaking the stock power limits or clock speeds, but I decided to actually do it only recently. My existing graphics card is starting to show its age, and I wanted some extra performance.