For as much that has changed over the last few years regarding Windows, there's also so much that has stayed exactly the same. Windows' underlying architecture has remained mostly the same, sticking with the monolithic NT construction.

Xbox Game Pass is a fantastic service, offering a massive library of games for a monthly subscription, including new releases on the highest tier, Game Pass Ultimate. Game Pass has a massive lineup for 2025, including one of the best JRPGs from 2024, but a recent addition to the service has added over 50 games. Those games are Activision classics, although probably older games from Activision than you might have expected. The new collection is called Retro Classics, marking a collaboration between Xbox and Antstream Arcade. Here's what you need to know about the new collection.

Disney Plus and Hulu are both launching new Perks programs that offer subscribers discounts, digital freebies, and sweepstakes in an effort to stand out from the streaming competition.The Disney Plus Perks program is available now in the US, with an international rollout planned later this year. Offers include a six-month DashPass membership from DoorDash, discounted stays at Walt Disney World, and savings when you shop from Adidas or Funko, along with rotating contests. Hulu is launching its own loyalty scheme on June 2nd. Details on that are still to come, but it will include offers from companies including Microsoft, Pure Green, and LG, with new perks dropping weekly over the summer.To take advantage of the perks you simply have to be a subscriber to either streaming service, and you’ll get access to both programs if you subscribe to one of the company’s Disney Plus and Hulu bundle plans.Disney Plus first introduced Perks last year with a handful of contests and early access ticket offers, but the new program has been expanded substantially to what Disney calls an “always-on” array of bonuses.

Summer is synonymous with adventure, but the thought of planning an entire trip can often feel tiring. You need to juggle flights, hotel reservations, itineraries, to-do lists, and more within budgets. What if there were a way to centralize every detail, streamline your research, and transform chaotic planning into an organized process? Here is where a versatile productivity tool like Notion comes into play. Let me show you how I leveraged Notion’s flexibility to plan my entire summer trip with minute details.

Two years after legal proceedings began, the SEC has formally dropped its lawsuit against Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange. It was one of the US government’s final ongoing actions against crypto companies.Lawyers for the SEC and Binance jointly moved to dismiss the case in a filing on Thursday. It follows a 60-day pause requested by both parties in February. The case has been dismissed with prejudice, meaning the SEC can’t pursue it again. “We’re deeply grateful to [SEC] Chairman Paul Atkins and the Trump administration for recognizing that innovation can’t thrive under regulation by enforcement,” Binance told Reuters in a statement, calling the dismissal “a landmark moment.”The SEC sued Binance in 2023, accusing it, and founder Changpeng Zhao, of operating an illegal exchange in the US and defrauding investors, along with a string of other offenses. Binance settled a separate case with the Department of Justice in 2023, which saw the company agree to pay $4.3 billion in fines. Zhao himself stepped down from the company and pled guilty to breaking anti-money-laundering laws, paying $50 million in personal fines and serving a four-month prison sentence.The SEC dismissal is the latest sign of the Trump administration’s embrace of the cryptocurrency industry. In April it disbanded a DOJ unit dedicated to enforcing cryptocurrency fraud, and already this year the SEC has dropped investigations into both Coinbase and Robinhood. Meanwhile Trump has bolstered the crypto industry by launching a Crypto Strategic Reserve and hosting a private dinner for those willing to back (or short) his own $TRUMP meme coin.

I’ve been reviewing NAS devices in all shapes and forms for months. While I keep spare drives specifically just to test the samples sent to me, I often go out of my way to grab new SSDs and HDDs for my home lab. NVMe SSDs, in particular, are an essential part of my setup, as I use them with everything from SBCs and mini-PCs to NAS units and server rigs.

SBCs and microcontrollers (like the Raspberry Pi and ESP32, respectively) make for excellent choices when creating a dashboard. Because they don't use a lot of power, you can leave them running for days on end without making a crater in your electricity bill. This is perfect for when you want to keep tabs on things in an all-in-one dashboard that tells you what you want to know at a glance.

The White House says a “formatting issue” was behind the citation errors. | Image: Demetrius Freeman / Getty ImagesThere are some questionable sources underpinning Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s controversial “Make America Healthy Again” commission report. Signs point to AI tomfoolery, and the use of ChatGPT specifically, which calls into question the veracity of the White House report meant to address reasons for the decline in US life expectancy.An investigation by NOTUS found dozens of errors in the MAHA report, including broken links, wrong issue numbers, and missing or incorrect authors. Some studies were misstated to back up the report’s conclusions, or more damningly, didn’t exist at all. At least seven of the cited sources were entirely fictitious, according to NOTUS.Another investigation by The Washington Post found that at least 37 of the 522 citations appeared multiple times throughout the report. Notably, the URLs of several references included “oaicite,” a marker that OpenAI applies to responses provided by artificial intelligence models like ChatGPT, which strongly suggests its use to develop the reportGenerative AI tools have a tendency to spit out false or incorrect information, known as “hallucinations.” That would certainly explain the various errors throughout the report — chatbots have been found responsible for similar citation issues in legal filings submitted by AI experts and even the companies building the models. Nevertheless, RFK Jr has long advocated for the “AI Revolution,” and announced during a House Committee meeting in May that “we are already using these new technologies to manage health care data more efficiently and securely.”In a briefing on Thursday, press secretary Karoline Leavitt responded to concerns about the accuracy of the citations while evading any mention of AI tools. Leavitt described the errors as “formatting issues” and defended the health report for being “backed on good science that has never been recognized by the federal government.” The Washington Post notes that the MAHA report file was updated on Thursday to remove some of the oaicite markers and replace some of the non-existent sources with alternative citations. In a statement given to the publication, Department of Health and Human Services spokesman Andrew Nixon said “minor citation and formatting errors have been corrected, but the substance of the MAHA report remains the same — a historic and transformative assessment by the federal government to understand the chronic disease epidemic afflicting our nation’s children.”

Nebraska Governor Jim Pillen has signed a bill that cracks down on social platforms’ features that could keep kids online for longer. Under the Age-Appropriate Online Design Code Act (LB504), major platforms must let users choose to see a chronological feed, rather than one provided by a recommendation algorithm, which experts have found could negatively affect children’s mental health and development. In addition to pausing potentially disruptive notifications at nighttime and during school days, platforms must offer users the option to voluntarily limit how much time they spend on the services. Online services are required to let users limit certain categories of content from getting recommended, too.The law also places several limitations on user tracking and requires platforms to apply strict privacy settings to users identified as minors by default. These settings allow platforms to only collect the “minimum” amount of data from young users, block targeted advertising, and limit the use of dark patterns.Though California and Maryland have passed similar laws, NetChoice is fighting them in court over claims they violate the First Amendment. NetChoice is a technology trade group that includes Meta, Google, Amazon, Reddit, X, Snap, and other tech giants. In February, NetChoice sued Maryland to block its Age-Appropriate Design Code Act, while a judge sided with NetChoice in a ruling that blocked California’s version of the rule in March.Amy Bos, NetChoice’s director of state and federal affairs, wrote in a letter to Governor Pillen that Nebraska’s design code law could impose age verification requirements “on most websites available to Nebraska users, including news sites, popular blogs, and certain online retailers,” potentially posing a security risk. Bos also argues that tracking requirements conflict with existing requirements under the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA). NetChoice similarly believes that Nebraska’s design code law violates the First Amendment, though this particular bill doesn’t include limits on the types of content children can access.States that have more recently introduced design code laws have overhauled the legislation in an attempt to harden it against potential lawsuits from such trade groups and companies. Nebraska’s design code law goes into effect on January 1st, 2026. Companies that violate the law could face an up to $50,000 fine for each violation starting July 1st, 2026.

Since Windows Notepad was launched, its focus has always been on providing a straightforward, distraction-free environment for plain text. The application, which comes pre-installed on every Windows PC, has been around for nearly half a century now, and aside from a few updates here and there, it has remained largely unchanged.

Microsoft is adding text formatting to its Windows Notepad app. The significant Notepad update is available for Canary and Dev Channel testers on Windows 11, and introduces bold and italic styling, alongside hyperlinks and even Markdown support.The addition of text formatting in Notepad means there’s now a formatting toolbar at the top of the app, alongside the existing File, Edit, and View options. The toolbar includes access to bold, italic, and hyperlink options, but it also includes support for lists and headings.“The experience supports Markdown style input and files for users who prefer to work directly with the lightweight markup language,” explains Dave Grochocki, principal product manager lead for Microsoft’s Windows inbox apps. “You can switch between formatted Markdown and Markdown syntax views in the view menu or by selecting the toggle button in the status bar at the bottom of the window.”Since Notepad is usually used with plain text, you can also easily clear all formatting from the formatting toolbar or from the edit menu in the app. If you’re not a fan of the lightweight formatting options, you can also fully disable this new support in the Notepad app settings.This formatting addition to Notepad comes just a week after Microsoft started testing a new feature in the app that can generate text for you using AI. The new Write feature in Notepad can be used to “quickly draft text based on your prompt,” and alongside these formatting options Notepad is starting to look a lot more like Microsoft Word. Like I wrote in my Notepad newsletter earlier this week, it’s amazing that Microsoft barely touched Notepad for decades, and now it’s gone from basic log file reader to writing messages itself. A lot of Notepad’s new features have arrived since Microsoft decided to remove WordPad from Windows, after nearly 30 years.

Gemini will now summarize select email threads without you asking.Google Workspace users are going to see a lot more of Gemini’s efforts to summarize their emails. Gmail now creates summaries automatically for complex threads, and they’ll appear above the emails themselves.AI-powered summaries of emails have been found in Google Workspace accounts since last year, but until now you’ve had to manually trigger them. Instead, Google’s AI will now decide for itself when a summary might be helpful, generating them without asking for “longer email threads or messages with several replies.” Summaries of email threads will be kept up-to-date with new replies as they come in.The automatic summaries will now appear above English-language emails, but only on mobile, and may take up to two weeks to appear for your account. Google hasn’t announced if or when the feature will expand to Gmail on desktop, or to Gmail users without paid Workspace accounts.If Gmail doesn’t generate an AI summary automatically you’ll still be able to ask it to create one, much as you’ve been able to so far. And if you’d rather not see them at all, you can deactivate all of Gmail’s AI features by turning off “Smart features” in the app’s settings.