SpaceX is now offering 12-month residential service plans that bring the price of the dish and router — normally $349 in the US — down to $0 in select markets, without increasing the monthly fee. You have 30 days to test or return the kit for a full refund, but after that there’s some fine print to be aware of. If you change the service address or cancel service, for example, you’ll be hit with a change fee equal to the cost of the hardware but prorated over time. Some subscribers will also be slapped with a one-time “demand surcharge” of around $100 in areas where SpaceX sees high usage.Nevertheless, for many, this might be a good deal. At my home in the Netherlands, for example, the Standard Kit costs €349 under the normal Residential plan costing €50 per month. The new 12-month commitment plan brings the hardware cost down to €0 without increasing the monthly fee. The change fee is listed at €349. Presumably, SpaceX did the math and found that bringing in more monthly subscribers by lowering the barrier to entry offsets any losses on the hardware sideThe 12-month residential plan has been quietly advertised in some countries over the last month but now Starlink is promoting it globally. It’s available in select markets in the US, Canada, UK, Australia, and New Zealand, and nationwide in most European countries. In Croatia, the plan only applies to the smaller and slower Starlink Mini kit.

Duolingo co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn. | Photo: Getty ImagesDuolingo will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle,” according to an all-hands email sent by co-founder and CEO Luis von Ahn announcing that the company will be “AI-first.” The email was posted on Duolingo’s LinkedIn account.According to von Ahn, being “AI-first” means the company will “need to rethink much of how we work” and that “making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won’t get us there.” As part of the shift, the company will roll out “a few constructive constraints,” including the changes to how it works with contractors, looking for AI use in hiring and in performance reviews, and that “headcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their work.”von Ahn says that “Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees” and that “this isn’t about replacing Duos with AI.” Instead, he says that the changes are “about removing bottlenecks” so that employees can “focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks.”“AI isn’t just a productivity boost,” von Ahn says. “It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.”von Ahn’s email follows a similar memo Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke sent to employees and recently shared online. In that memo, Lütke said that before teams asked for more headcount or resources, they needed to show “why they cannot get what they want done using AI.”Here’s the text of von Ahn’s memo from Duolingo’s LinkedIn post:I’ve said this in Q&As and many meetings, but I want to make it official: Duolingo is going to be AI-first.AI is already changing how work gets done. It’s not a question of if or when. It’s happening now. When there’s a shift this big, the worst thing you can do is wait. In 2012, we bet on mobile. While others were focused on mobile companion apps for websites, we decided to build mobile-first because we saw it was the future. That decision helped us win the 2013 iPhone App of the Year and unlocked the organic word-of-mouth growth that followed.Betting on mobile made all the difference. We’re making a similar call now, and this time the platform shift is AI.AI isn’t just a productivity boost. It helps us get closer to our mission. To teach well, we need to create a massive amount of content, and doing that manually doesn’t scale. One of the best decisions we made recently was replacing a slow, manual content creation process with one powered by AI. Without AI, it would take us decades to scale our content to more learners. We owe it to our learners to get them this content ASAP.AI also helps us build features like Video Call that were impossible to build before. For the first time ever, teaching as well as the best human tutors is within our reach.Being AI-first means we will need to rethink much of how we work. Making minor tweaks to systems designed for humans won’t get us there. In many cases, we’ll need to start from scratch. We’re not going to rebuild everything overnight, and some things-like getting AI to understand our codebase-will take time. However, we can’t wait until the technology is 100% perfect. We’d rather move with urgency and take occasional small hits on quality than move slowly and miss the moment.We’ll be rolling out a few constructive constraints to help guide this shift:We’ll gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handleAI use will be part of what we look for in hiringAI use will be part of what we evaluate in performance reviewsHeadcount will only be given if a team cannot automate more of their workMost functions will have specific initiatives to fundamentally change how they workAll of this said, Duolingo will remain a company that cares deeply about its employees. This isn’t about replacing Duos with AI. It’s about removing bottlenecks so we can do more with the outstanding Duos we already have. We want you to focus on creative work and real problems, not repetitive tasks. We’re going to support you with more training, mentorship, and tooling for AI in your function.Change can be scary, but I’m confident this will be a great step for Duolingo. It will help us better deliver on our mission — and for Duos, it means staying ahead of the curve in using this technology to get things done.–Luis

Webcams have become an important tool for many, especially as more and more meetings and calls are held online. And while your webcam is most likely going to be okay, it could also most likely be much better. Now, it's easy to splurge over $100 and get great results, but what we're after here is something that achieves roughly the same performance boost but doesn't cost a whole lot.

Tweaking the BIOS/UEFI settings is one of the best ways to ensure you're not only extracting the most out of your PC, but also getting the basics right. Settings like XMP/EXPO, Secure Boot, TPM, and fan curves are something that every user should configure when they set up a new PC. However, there are some settings that only power users should care about. For most people, messing around with these settings can cause more problems than they're worth, especially when the performance benefits are slim at best.

The Take It Down Act is heading to President Donald Trump’s desk after the House voted 409-2 to pass the bill, which will require social media companies to take down content flagged as nonconsensual (including AI-generated) sexual images. Trump has pledged to sign it.The bill is among the only pieces of online safety legislation to successfully pass both chambers in years of furor over deepfakes, child safety, and other issues — but it’s one that critics fear will be used as a weapon against content the administration or its allies dislike. It criminalizes the publication of nonconsensual intimate images (NCII), whether real or computer-generated, and requires social media platforms to have a system to remove those images within 48 hours of being flagged. In his address to Congress this year, Trump quipped that once he signed it, “I’m going to use that bill for myself too, if you don’t mind, because nobody gets treated worse than I do online, nobody.”The proliferation of AI tools that make it easier than ever to generate realistic-looking images has supercharged concerns about deepfaked, damaging content spreading through schools and creating a new vector of bullying and abuse. But while critics say that’s an important issue to deal with, they worry that the Take It Down Act’s approach could be exploited to inflict harm in other ways. The Cyber Civil Rights Initiative (CCRI), which was created to combat image-based sexual abuse, said that it can’t cheer the Take It Down Act’s passage. “While we welcome the long-overdue federal criminalization of NDII [the nonconsensual distribution of intimate images], we regret that it is combined with a takedown provision that is highly susceptible to misuse and will likely be counter-productive for victims,” the group writes. It fears that the bill, which empowers the Federal Trade Commission — whose Democratic minority commissioners Trump fired in a break with decades of  Supreme Court precedent —  will be selectively enforced in a way that ultimately only props up “unscrupulous platforms.”“Platforms that feel confident that they are unlikely to be targeted by the FTC (for example, platforms that are closely aligned with the current administration) may feel emboldened to  simply ignore reports of NDII,” they write. “Platforms attempting to identify authentic complaints may encounter a sea of false reports that could overwhelm their efforts and jeopardize their ability to operate at all.”“Platforms may respond by abandoning encryption entirely”Because of the quick turnaround for platforms to remove content flagged as nonconsensual intimate imagery, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) warns that especially smaller platforms “will have to comply so quickly to avoid legal risk that they won’t be able to verify claims.” Instead, they’ll likely turn to flawed filters to crack down on duplicates, they write. The group also cautions that end-to-end encrypted services including private messaging systems and cloud storage are not exempted from the bill, posing a risk to the privacy technology. Since encrypted services can’t monitor what their users send to one another, the EFF asks, “How could such services comply with the takedown requests mandated in this bill? Platforms may respond by abandoning encryption entirely in order to be able to monitor content—turning private conversations into surveilled spaces,” including ones that abuse survivors commonly turn to.Even so, the Take It Down Act quickly garnered a wide base of support. First Lady Melania Trump has become a leading champion of the bill, but it’s also seen backing from parent and youth advocates, as well as some in the tech industry. Google’s president of global affairs Kent Walker called the passage “a big step toward protecting individuals from nonconsensual explicit imagery,” and Snap similarly applauded the vote. Internet Works, a group whose members include medium-sized companies like Discord, Etsy, Reddit, Roblox, and others, praised the House vote, with executive director Peter Chandler saying the bill “would empower victims to remove NCII materials from the Internet and end the cycle of victimization by those who publish this heinous content.”Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), one of two members (both Republican) who voted against the bill, wrote on X that he couldn’t support it because “I feel this is a slippery slope, ripe for abuse, with unintended consequences.”

As someone who likes to work in security, I get incredibly frustrated with poor security practices. While most users have nothing to worry about in general, there are still common attack vectors out there that attackers can and will exploit when given the chance. It's essentially a path of least resistance; where there's a possible attack vector in your network and there isn't on another, it's easier to go for the one that's possible, rather than looking for one that might be possible. That's why I plead with you to stop exposing your Internet of Things (IoT) devices to the internet.

M.2 SSDs have been the go-to choice for storage for a number of years now, and provide an experience that many feel is far superior to older storage devices. Of course, there are a number of different options that you can go with, but it's important for most to find that sweet spot between performance and price.

How many Raspberry Pis are too many? Trick question, there is no upper limit. And if you ever feel bad about how many SBCs you have littering your home, you can, at least, take refuge in the fact that you don't own 1,050 of them. Or at least, I hope.

There's just something really cool about people making really, really tiny devices for the sole purpose of making them. If you're making a notetaker, for instance, you'll at least want some real estate to, you know, type comfortably on. Or, you can squish all that hardware down to the size of a matchbox and roll with it, because why not?

Windows Vista had it rough. Looking back, it had the misfortune of being the operating system stuck between Windows XP, a legendary OS, and Windows 7, another legendary OS. And while we can argue until the sun sets over whether XP or 7 was the better operating system, you'll find very few that want to debate that Vista was the best of the three.

Your password is the first line of defense for your online data, regardless of its type. Best practices suggest using a different password for each website and using long, complex passwords with random character strings. Needless to say, that's a lot to remember, and many people skip this part and use only a handful of passwords for all their accounts. That method might be easier, but it leaves you open to unwanted access. Just think: if someone obtained your email password, they might then go on to try the same combination on PayPal. If you don't have a different login, then someone just gained access to your finances.

Microsoft 365 and Google Workspace dominate the productivity scene. But what if you could have a comprehensive suite of tools for file sharing, collaboration, communication, and more, all while maintaining complete control over your data? Enter Nextcloud, the open-source powerhouse that puts you back in charge of your digital life and work. This compelling alternative ticks all the right boxes, doesn’t cost a dime, and offers a refreshing approach to getting things done.