The iconic blue screen of death (BSOD) has graced some of our worst Windows moments over the years —moments when your PC completely gave up. This error screen is reserved for catastrophic errors that prevent Windows from functioning normally. The OS displays the details of whichever process caused the fatal crash, and restarts itself to avoid damage to your data and hardware.

There are plenty of ways you can write down notes and documents on your PC, and we tend to be drawn to the ones that offer more features. Fancy formatting, syncing capabilities, and others can make it appealing to opt for a more advanced editor.

My Pixel 8 has sat unused since I switched to my Galaxy S25 Ultra, and I was looking for a practical way to get it working again.

While VS Code has served me well, I recently started wondering whether there was a faster way to handle complex coding projects. Instead of comparing features on paper, I decided to put Google’s Antigravity to the test.

I jailbroke my Kindle a few months ago to use it for more than reading, like sideloading games and playing music. I figured kTerm would be enough to reach my self-hosted services and my Linux home server. But kTerm just opens a shell into a stripped-down BusyBox environment. It’s there to run the e-reader, not to act as a general Linux machine, and there’s no apt to pull in the tools I’d normally reach for on a server.

Apple’s HomeView smart display seems tailor-made for the kitchen. (That aluminum base looks like it will hold up better than my now off-white kitchen HomePod.) I'm just going to come right out and say it. I love the approach Apple has taken with the HomeView. I think it's the shared, always-available household interface that my family might finally use. Is Apple's first smart display my dream smart home dashboard? No. But is it the right product for Apple Home at this moment? Absolutely.A lot of initial reactions to the $299 HomeView (which looks like a giant Apple Watch on a flatter metallic HomePod Mini) ask why you would want it when you can do most of what it offers on your iPhone or iPad. And yes, its features replicate many of the things you already do on the devices you use all the time. B …Read the full story at The Verge.

We've all gotten a scam text about a nonexistent parking ticket or a fake package delivery, but hopefully you'll start seeing fewer of them. Microsoft says it helped dismantle a marketplace for scammers sending phishing messages like those around the world. Through an investigation with Japan's National Police Agency, it tracked scam activity back to a marketplace called YAM Store and a pair of phishing kits, CoGUI and Iron Man:Since January 2026, YAM Store, CoGUI and Iron Man have collectively enabled more than one billion malicious messages targeting over 75,000 organizations worldwide, including more than 750 million messages geared to …Read the full story at The Verge.

Last week, Anthropic and OpenAI looked like they had the AI race to themselves, pulling ahead with increasingly powerful models that left their rivals in the dust. Google seemed hopelessly far behind, while Meta, despite spending billions to revive its floundering AI ambitions, had yet to establish itself as a serious contender. Even the latest models coming out of China, impressive as they were, appeared to be playing catch-up.Then, in the space of a few days, everything changed. Google and Meta both unveiled frontier models they claim can go toe to toe with the best from OpenAI and Anthropic. Suddenly, the race is back on - and it's anyo …Read the full story at The Verge.

OpenAI is facing a new wave of lawsuits from eight US states that accuse the company of harming children and misleading customers about the safety of ChatGPT, as reported earlier by Reuters. The lawsuits, filed separately by Iowa, Kansas, Nebraska, West Virginia, Arkansas, Arizona, Idaho, and Montana, allege OpenAI unlawfully put profits over safety when developing ChatGPT.The string of complaints claims that OpenAI violated local consumer protection laws by failing to warn customers about the dangers of ChatGPT, citing several lawsuits filed by the family members of teens and adults that allege the AI chatbot played a role in their loved …Read the full story at The Verge.

Some smart homes fail at the most basic of tasks, and that might be because your setup relies entirely on sluggish smartphone GPS geofencing. When you rely on the Home Assistant companion app or native platform geofences to track home vs. away states, you assume your phone GPS is enough to run an automated household. While your phone GPS is designed for navigating highways, it's not built to manage your doorstep. It suffers from massive latency, battery-draining polling intervals, and dead zones that leave you standing in the dark.

Consulting firm McKinsey & Company is going to ask some entry-level candidates to have a 10-minute conversation with an AI simulation of a client as part of the interview process, according to The Wall Street Journal.The AI simulation "aims to reflect 80% of the scenarios McKinsey consultants might encounter in their day-to-day work," the WSJ says, and it isn't designed to "mimic an unhinged client." The AI won't score the candidates - humans will be in the room to assess the candidates and see how well they deal with the simulated situations.The McKinsey tool will be in testing for undergrads seeking business-analyst jobs in "some" offi …Read the full story at The Verge.

So, you're one of the lucky ones who built a PC or upgraded your SSD way before the DRAM crisis exploded prices across the industry. Your NVMe SSD may have been blazing-fast when new, but you might feel that it has lost some of that speed over the years. It's not your imagination; SSDs can slow down over time if you aren't careful about upkeep and updates.