If there's one piece of technology that even your least tech-savvy friend probably has at least a vague understanding of, it's a VPN. Sure, they might not necessarily know what the acronym stands for or how one actually works. However, what they likely do know is that using one is supposed to make their internet activity more private. Beyond privacy, they might also associate VPNs with accessing websites and streaming content that would otherwise be unavailable in their region.

Earlier this year, Mercedes' AMG performance brand grabbed our attention with the GT four-door coupe, a souped-up sports sedan with three axial flux motors delivering over 1,150 horsepower. Well, now meet its beefier cousin, the 2028 Mercedes-AMG GT SUV, an equally powerful, ultra-fast-charging electric people-hauler.The AMG GT SUV (say that five times fast) marks the first time in the performance brand's 59-year history that it has developed a full-size SUV entirely in-house from the ground up. Scheduled to hit the US next summer, the new EV is built on Merc's high-performance AMG.EA architecture to combine sports-car handling with full-s …Read the full story at The Verge.

You know what the worst part of getting a new Windows PC or doing a clean Windows install is? Once you boot up for the first time, the PC is blank, and it takes many hours to make it yours. As someone who is into consumer tech journalism and keeps testing new hardware, I have been in that situation many times.

Tesla and SpaceX CEO Elon Musk gestures as he speaks during the inaugural parade inside Capitol One Arena, in Washington, DC, on January 20, 2025. (Photo by ANGELA WEISS / AFP) (Photo by ANGELA WEISS/AFP via Getty Images) | AFP via Getty Images Just ahead of the wider release of Alex Gibney's Musk documentary, TikTok has banned the film's social media account from its platform. TikTok did not immediately respond to a request for comment. According to The Hollywood Reporter, the film's distributor, Bleecker Street, was informed Friday afternoon that a "permanent suspension" was imminent. Bleecker Street has not yet responded to a request for comment from The Verge.While TikTok has no official affiliation with Elon Musk, part owner Larry Ellison appears in the film via a text message offering to help Musk fund his Twitter purchase.Last month, YouTube, Meta, X, and TikTok all face …Read the full story at The Verge.

I had an old PC collecting dust in a corner, and I was seriously considering retiring it for good. Its aging hardware couldn’t keep up with my demanding workflow, and upgrading it didn’t make much financial sense. However, instead of letting it go to waste, I decided to give it one last chance with Docker.

Note-taking apps have a habit of promising you organization, then handing the actual organizing back to you anyway. Obsidian gives you a blank vault and leaves every folder and link up to you. Notion's a bit different since it has a template for everything, but I've lost whole weekends tweaking those before writing a single line in them. Even Windows Notepad renders Markdown now, so there's no shortage of places to put notes.

Modern motherboards still ship with obscure headers that are almost useless for the average user. The reasons range from legacy compatibility and niche relevance to enterprise usage, but some headers can become a security risk under the wrong circumstances. If your PC is old enough, your motherboard may be using a discrete TPM (Trusted Platform Module), leaving the door open for a security exploit using your unpopulated debug header.

It's no secret that I love handheld gaming, whether that's a small device emulating older games or using one of the most powerful gaming handhelds on the market. But some games deserve a larger screen, or just aren't playable on the handhelds you can carry around, especially if you want to play strategy games.

If you use Claude daily or for heavy projects, you've probably watched the usage meter as closely as the actual output. Anthropic has raised the limits a few times this year, which does help, though there's still a weekly cap behind all of it, and Opus chews through that faster than the lighter models. I think what stings is how much of the allowance goes to tasks that never needed a top model in the first place, like asking what one setting in a config file does.

Ask Claude Opus 5.5 something that brushes against security, and the reply can come back from a different model. A notice appears, the answer gets tagged Opus 4.8, and Anthropic's newest flagship stays switched to the older model for the rest of the chat.

I already run local LLMs on my Mac through LM Studio, and I’ve found plenty of uses for them outside the chat window. Coding is one of the most useful uses because I can connect a model directly to VS Code and get help without switching apps. It also means I don’t lose that assistance when I’m offline, which is a limitation of the Copilot setup I’m replacing. I am using the Continue extension to connect VS Code to LM Studio, with separate models for autocomplete and chat.

In 2024, Elon Musk promised to give away $1 million a day to a randomly selected registered voter in a swing state. That prompted legal challenges, raised questions about its legality, and drew lawsuits from two Arizona residents claiming the lottery was a fraud. Musk has now agreed to settle the two lawsuits filed in Austin, Texas, though the details of the settlement have not been made public.The plaintiffs claim that when Musk announced the sweepstakes, he falsely claimed the prizes would be awarded randomly. Philadelphia's District Attorney sued to stop the giveaway, claiming that Musk was running an illegal lottery. During a hearing, …Read the full story at The Verge.