Just when you thought Google Chrome couldn't get more resource-intensive and invasive, it has quietly downloaded a massive AI-related file on systems running the browser. This includes both Windows and macOS, and the worst part, users were never asked for it, nor were they even notified.

The Trump administration is fighting for the right to keep some social media moderation advocates out of the US. On Wednesday, US District Court Judge James Boasberg heard arguments in a lawsuit between the nonprofit Coalition for Independent Technology Research (CITR) and Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other Trump administration officials. The suit concerns a policy that allows restricting visas to foreign officials who "demand that American tech platforms adopt global content moderation policies." The CITR is arguing for a preliminary injunction blocking the policy, which the State Department already referenced when it sanctioned fiv …Read the full story at The Verge.

In the ongoing fight for content and talent, YouTube is pitching itself as the connector between the creators and advertisers - and marketing its creators not just as the future of social media, but also of advertising, TV, streaming, and entertainment more broadly.At the company's annual advertiser event in New York on Wednesday, YouTube introduced a new slate of exclusive shows coming to the platform, hosted by some big names: a travel show with Trevor Noah, a Met Gala documentary series from podcaster Alex Cooper, a new series from Kareem Rahma, the host of the popular show Subway Takes, and more. The pitch to advertisers: Invest in the …Read the full story at The Verge.

NotebookLM is one of those rare tools that actually lives up to the hype. For the past few months, it quietly changed how I work, turning scattered documents into a sharp, AI-powered brain. But as I started relying on it for my full research hub, I hit a hidden catch. My data piled up much faster than the system could handle. I went from loving the simplicity to fighting the limits very fast.

Microsoft is on a mission to fix Windows 11, and part of that involves improving the often-frustrating Windows Update experience. While you'll soon be able to pause updates indefinitely, Microsoft is also adding a new feature that automatically rolls back problematic drivers that have been installed through Windows Update.Microsoft has created a new "Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery" feature that can replace a faulty driver installed on a PC with a previously working driver through Windows Update. Right now, Windows 11 users have to manually roll back a driver or hardware vendors have to publish a new one to work around any problems, but th …Read the full story at The Verge.

It has been pretty confusing keeping track of what you can and can't use with your Claude subscription right now. Anthropic tried removing Claude Code from new Pro tier subscribers as part of an A/B test, and then we caught wind about the company potentially locking Opus behind a minor paywall, which ended up being just some unupdated documentation.

The late '90s were an exciting time for tech enthusiasts, with new and experimental gadgets appearing constantly. Looking back now, it's easy to remember early portable storage media like floppy disks, CDs, and flash drives. But that's because those are the devices that won the war, at least for a little while. A plethora of other storage technologies helped mold the industry into what it is today, but many of them were so short-lived that their impact is easy to overlook.

Microsoft Edge is adding a new feature that will allow its Copilot AI chatbot to gather information from all of your open tabs. When you start a conversation with Copilot, you can ask the chatbot questions about what's in your tabs, compare the products you're looking at, summarize your open articles, and more.In its announcement, Microsoft says you can "select which experiences you want or leave off the ones you don't." The company is retiring Copilot Mode as well, which could similarly draw information from your tabs but offered some agentic features, like the ability to book a reservation on your behalf. Microsoft has since folded these …Read the full story at The Verge.

Browsing files on Windows 11 has never been the most pleasant experience, but it gets the job done about as well as you'd expect. Things work and your files are where you'd expect them to be. But for all the talk of AI in Windows, file management has never been particularly smart.

PCIe 5.0 or Gen5 SSDs have been on the market for a few years now, even dropping to relatively affordable levels before the DRAM crisis upended everything. The adoption, however, has been rather tepid. For one, countless PC users are still using PCIe 4.0 systems, and building a new PC with PCIe 5.0 support is anything but affordable right now. Even before PC hardware prices skyrocketed, there was little incentive for a complete platform overhaul. Secondly, the much-hyped transfer speeds of Gen5 SSDs don't translate to any real-world benefits for the majority of gamers. Gen4 SSDs are still more than enough for gaming. PCIe 5.0 storage does, however, benefit heavy file transfer and productivity workloads, more than justifying the investment in these cases. Before you shell out a premium for an expensive Gen5 drive with 15,000 MB/s speeds, decide whether it will even benefit your use case.

I've met people with every reason imaginable to dive into the 3D printing hobby, and it typically stems from a good reason and the need for custom plastic things or a genuine frustration built up over years of buying tiny, overpriced accessories. Once you get a printer, you aren't forced to buy a grocery chain's dozen-pack of bag clips just because you only needed a couple. These become simple, hour-long prints that serve you well, and replacements are easier, too, because you just replace the broken part instead of the whole item.

It's been a wild few days for Chromebook fans.