While residents of metropolitan areas usually have a lot of internet providers to pick from, the same can't be said about consumers in rural parts of the world. SpaceX launched Starlink as an effective means of providing high-speed internet in such areas. The service has been around for a couple of years now, with the beta going up in late 2020. More recently, Starlink reached a noteworthy milestone by averaging 100 Mbps download speeds in 15 countries. Ookla is now sharing the latest...

Some may say Niantic is a one-trick pony. They wouldn't be wrong, as the company has been pumping out similar augmented reality games for years. Of course, Pokémon GO is the developer's largest success, though lesser games like Pikmin Bloom and Ingress have their own audiences. Well, there's a new release coming from the studio, officially licensed through the NBA, and it's called NBA All-World. While details are light, we know the game will offer Niantic's...

Not everyone is aware of the complex technical lineage involved in the parts nestled inside their smartphone, even if they know of names like Qualcomm or MediaTek and the chips these companies make. Basically all consumer Android devices use a CPU design and architecture created by a company called ARM, tweaking and customizing bits as they see fit. Today ARM announced its new CPUs and GPUs, which, over the next year or two, will trickle down into actual hardware released by chipset...

Qualcomm has historically released its flagship chipsets at the tail end of the year, usually holding a press junket in Hawaii during the first week of December. The Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 was announced last December 1, the Snapdragon 888 went public the same date a year before while the Snapdragon 865 did not come to the fore until December 4, 2019. However, new leaks suggest that Qualcomm might break tradition and release the Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 chip a few weeks earlier.

Finding your order history through Amazon is helpful in several ways. For instance, you can take advantage of the Buy Again option if you want to purchase an item you bought previously or double-check on any orders you've canceled. Looking up your order history ensures you won't buy the wrong replacement, whether you're restocking stationery supplies or checking a few things that were on sale last Amazon Prime Day. If you're not looking to rebuy any items or scout out...

HTC’s smartphone division of old may have mostly moved on to work at Google, but the company still hasn’t given up on creating the occasional smartphone of its own. The formerly immensely successful smartphone manufacturer teased the launch of a metaverse-focused smartphone during MWC 2022 along with its own spin on the whole web 3.0 stuff under the buzzy “Viveverse” branding, and today, this phone has finally arrived. It comes in the form of the entirely...

Between the banking apps, email accounts, work chat apps, and spicy pictures you may or may not be sending to your romantic partner, there are probably about a dozen different ways your phone can seriously ruin your day if anyone other than you got hold of it and somehow managed to access the data on it. For the sake of data privacy and security, it's a good idea to always do a full factory reset of your device before you send it to its next life, whether you plan on handing it down,...

The massive growth in online shopping over the last 20 years has brought with it a new problem: package thieves. Despite the fact that stealing any kind of mail can come with federal charges and land you in jail for five years, up to 210 million packages were stolen last year. How can you prevent your Amazon deliveries from being swiped from your porch while you watch helplessly from work on your Blink doorbell? Amazon Hub, of course.

For most of us, the majority of our writing is composed of simple numbers and letters mixed and matched to convey some semblance of meaning. If you happen to be writing about math or science, however, you’ll need more than the standard toolbox of bold, italic, and underline formatting tools most word processors provide on their default toolbar.

Call forwarding is a relatively simple process. It can be helpful when you are going on a vacation or don't want to be accessible for a few days over the phone. If you expect important calls to arrive in between, you can use call forwarding to re-route them to your wife, assistant, or friends. No matter which network you are on: AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, or Google Fi, follow the guide below to get started with call forwarding.

Enlarge / Streamlined aircraft of the 1930s and 1940s were an inspiration for the Hyundai Ioniq 6. (credit: Hyundai)

The physical unveiling of the Hyundai Prophecy concept car was an early casualty of COVID, originally scheduled for the hastily canceled 2020 Geneva auto show. That didn't stop it from blowing my socks off...

Enlarge / "Your feedback is appreciated." (credit: Epic Games)

Last week, Epic finally added a user review system to its PC Game Store, nearly 3.5 years after the service's initial launch. The first set of public ratings produced by that system is now live for hundreds of titles on the Epic Games Store (skip to the end of this article for a handy breakdown of some of the best-reviewed EGS games thus far).

After sifting through those ratings a bit, some pros and cons of Epic's...

Enlarge / HTC's metaverse phone. (credit: HTC)

HTC is somehow still making smartphones. The latest from the company is the HTC Desire 22 Pro, a 399 British pound (~$486) mid-ranger that represents the company's first smartphone of 2022.

HTC says this phone will somehow help you "enter the metaverse," as "the phone to carry you into the future." The metaverse is the latest tech buzzword companies have been hyping up. It's roughly used to mean "VR-related." The phone itself...

Enlarge / A Charter Spectrum service truck in McKinney, Texas, on Tuesday, Feb. 16, 2021. (credit: Getty Images | Bloomberg)

A Texas jury last week found that Charter Communications was responsible for the death of an 83-year-old woman murdered in her home by a Spectrum cable technician who is now serving a life sentence.

A six-member jury at Dallas County Court awarded the family of murder victim Betty Thomas $375 million in compensatory damages, of which Charter would have...

Enlarge / The Grand Canyon viewed from the South Rim adjacent to the El Tovar Hotel on November 11, 2019, in Grand Canyon National Park, Arizona. (credit: Getty | George Rose)

The Grand Canyon is an immense, vibrantly painted geological wonder, treasured for its awe-inspiring stratified architecture, which has been spectacularly sculpted over millions of years. Up close, it will blow your mind and take your breath away—and if you've visited recently, it may also violently flush...

When Ron Gilbert and Dave Grossman spoke to Ars in April, shortly after the surprise announcement of Return to Monkey Island, they weren't ready to discuss details on where the franchise's story would be going after LeChuck's Revenge. Today, though, a new trailer and marketing materials for the game give us our first hints of what Guybrush Threepwood himself says is "a story about the time I finally found the secret of Monkey Island" (and the first mention of a Switch version, which will...

Enlarge / MNT's "Pocket Reform" is the same open hardware in a smaller enclosure. (credit: MNT)

A few months ago, we reviewed the MNT Reform, which attempts to bring the dream of entirely open source hardware to an audience that doesn't want to design and build a laptop totally from scratch. Now, MNT is bringing its open-hardware ethos to a second PC, a 7-inch "Pocket Reform" laptop that recalls the design of old clamshell Pocket PCs, just like the big Reform references the design...

Enlarge (credit: picture alliance | Getty Images)

Soon after the devastating Glass Fire sparked in California’s Napa Valley in September 2020, wine chemist Anita Oberholster’s inbox was brimming with hundreds of emails from panicked viticulturists. They wanted to know if they could harvest their grapes without a dreaded effect on their wine: the odious ashtray flavor known as smoke taint.

Oberholster, of the University of California, Davis, could only tell them, “Maybe.”

Enlarge / The Cadillac Lyriq is the first expression of the classic American luxury brand's future as an electric automaker. (credit: Jonathan Gitlin)

PARK CITY, UTAH—They say—accurately, in my opinion—that nothing focuses the mind like a deadline. I'm not sure what the amplification factor is when that deadline suddenly...

Enlarge / Drowning in a sea of data. (credit: Getty Images)

Internet services in Lithuania came under "intense" distributed denial of service attacks on Monday as the pro-Russia threat-actor group Killnet took credit. Killnet said its attacks were in retaliation regarding Lithuania's recent banning of shipments sanctioned by the European Union to the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad.

Lithuania's government said that the flood of malicious traffic disrupted parts of the Secure...

Robot vacuum deals have always been a pillar of Prime Day. Oddly, though, many of the best deals on robot vacuums ahead of Prime Day aren't from Amazon. Thanks to competing summer sales from Best Buy and Walmart, you have a handful of options to find the model that best suits your budget.

BEST BUDGET DEAL: The Wyze Robot Vacuum is the rare ultra-affordable pick that can be sent to specific rooms — $165 $329 (save $164)

BEST SELF-EMPTYING DEAL: The Shark IQ RV1002AE cleans...

White noise has been a trustworthy aid for a variety of reasons, such as meditation, studying, sleeping with insomnia, and helping young children (and their parents) fall asleep faster. After stumbling across #brownnoise TikTok, however, I may never go back to white noise again. 

Whereas white noise encompasses sounds from all over the spectrum, including low, mid-range, and high...

If nothing else, it seems like Elon Musk’s satellite internet service is at least usable.

That’s one conclusion you can draw from Ookla’s latest Speedtest report measuring the first full year of Starlink service after its beta launch in late 2020. From the first quarter of 2021 through the first quarter of 2022, Starlink’s median download speed in the United States jumped a hefty 38 percent, from 65Mbps (Megabits per second) to 90Mbps. Interestingly, the...

You don't have to go home, but you can't party here: Airbnb hosts, everywhere.

Airbnb, the short-term rental app, announced Tuesday that it would permanently ban parties. Lots of hosts have long barred their guests from having large events, but now the platform itself has instituted the ban.

Airbnb first put a temporary kibosh on parties when the COVID pandemic began in 2020. The policy was put in effect "until further notice" because folks were using rentals to party when...

In 2018, 12 boys and the coach of their soccer team were trapped in the Tham Luang caves in Thailand after a sudden rainstorm. In the days that followed, a daring rescue mission traveled through the flooded caves to get them out alive. The incredible true story was the focus of the documentary The Rescue, and now it's the subject of Ron Howard's upcoming film Thirteen Lives.

Save $50: As of June 28, the Cuisinart 3-in-1 Pizza Oven Plus is only $197 as part of Walmart's Fourth of July savings event. The $50 drop works out to about a 20% discount.

Outdoor cooking in a tiny outdoor cooking space doesn't necessarily mean making hotdogs over a fire.

Cuisinart's 3-in-1 Pizza Oven Plus is a clutch little addition if a full-sized grill or pizza oven is out of the question, and you can grab it for $197 at Walmart. This Fourth of July rollback cuts $50 off...

SAVE $30: As of June 28, the Ecobee3 Lite smart thermostat is $30 off the original price as an early Prime Day deal — grab one for just $149.

It's hot as hell out. And not even the fun kind of summer heat that feels like you're on a tropical vacation. No, this is like the "oh my god, I'm sweating from everywhere. Why are my knees sweating? I do not usually sweat from there" kind of heat.

Let's distract ourselves by shopping for something to beat the heat (our favorite...

Save $100: Just because you need a powered-up tablet doesn't mean you need to pay powered-up prices. As of June 28, the 11-inch iPad Pro (128GB) is back to its lowest price ever at just $699, or a 13% discount, at Amazon.

The iPad Pro, though famously powerful, is infamously pricey, easily running into the price territory of MacBooks. But ahead of Prime Day, Amazon has given us a little treat.

The 11-inch iPad Pro with 128GB of storage is on sale for $699, marking a...

Ready for outdoor adventures this summer? Stock up on all the gear you need at REI's Fourth of July Sale.

BEST CAMP CHAIR DEAL: REI Co-op Flexlite Camp Chair, a packable chair that's great for backpacking and car camping — $34.89 $69.95 (members save $35.06)

BEST CAMP STOVE DEAL: Eureka Ignite 2-Burner Camp Stove, a versatile stove that will help you cook killer meals in the outdoors — $86.19 $114.95 (save $28.76)

BEST CAMP FOOD STORAGE DEAL: Grubcan Bear...

SAVE $119.01: You can grab a pair of refurbished Apple AirPods Pro at Woot for only $129.99 through June 28. New ones typically retail for $249, so this will save you close to 50%.

Amazon's early Prime Day offers are slowly trickling out, but Woot is the place to go if you want a steal on a pair of Apple earbuds.

Through Tuesday, June 28 or while supplies last, the daily deals site has refurbished AirPods Pro up for grabs for just $129.99. (For comparison's sake, Amazon was...

A cybercrime gang claims that it recently stole 450 gigabytes of data from global chipmaker AMD by merely guessing employees’ terrible passwords.

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You know the Bored Ape Yacht Club, the popular NFT collection that has enticed the likes of Justin Bieber, Paris Hilton, Jimmy Fallon? Well, the company behind the collection, Yuga Labs, is suing an artist they believe is trying to devalue the Bored Ape Yacht Club. The first rule of Bored Ape Yacht Club: Do not…

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Sony is expanding its gaming footprint beyond the console with a family of monitors and headphones debuting under a new brand called “Inzone.” To be clear, these are not Playstation products. They are meant for both console and PC gamers, unlike Sony’s “Pulse” headset, which was made exclusively for the PS5. Since…

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Sony’s Inzone H series headsets are out, and their arrival marks the company’s first proper attempt at making PC gaming peripherals. (You might be able to find odd PC gaming one-offs like the Sony DR-GA500 headset if you squint at the company’s past hard enough, but it’s clear that Inzone indicates new dedication to…

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Proprietary space-grade cameras are expensive, limited, and a pain to develop. Smallsat manufacturer NanoAvionics recently sidestepped any development issues and opted for something off the shelf instead. The company used a GoPro Hero 7 mounted to a custom-built selfie stick to take a selfie that’s truly out of this…

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There’s been a bit of a strange recurrence in Star Wars recently: more often than not, people just don’t die. The Rise of Skywalker, infamously perhaps, is predicated on the return of the Emperor with little explanation as to how he got out of a one-way trip down an exploding reactor shaft. Obi-Wan Kenobi just gave us…

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Pharmacy chains around the U.S have started to limit the amount of emergency contraceptive pills customers can purchase. This comes after the overturning of Roe v. Wade by the Supreme Court.

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Cassidy Hutchinson, a former aide to President Donald Trump’s chief of staff Mark Meadows, dropped a series of bombshells Tuesday during an impromptu hearing of the House select committee investigating the Jan. 6 insurrection. She said the former president and his chief of staff knew of the threat of violence in…

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Somehow, 2022 is a little over halfway over. It’s been a wild year for so many reasons and the movies that have come out have followed suit. We’ve seen everything bagels, flying tigers, fanboy murderers, and giant red pandas, just to name a few. The unpredictability and originality of the films has been over the top…

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Facebook users writing about mailing abortion pills had their posts removed this week, and in some cases, their accounts temporarily suspended, for violating the company’s terms of service rules against buying, selling, or exchanging drugs. However, testing conducted by Gizmodo and previous reporting from Vice suggests…

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Square Enix is moving into the farming sim world with Harvestella, which is coming to Nintendo Switch and PC on November 4th. While this is a 3D game with a distinct art style, you'll surely recognize some elements if you're one of the tens of millions of Stardew Valley players out there. You'll till land, sow seeds, water crops, collect items for cooking and crafting, go fishing, take care of pets, explore dungeons, slay monsters and so on.

You'll be able to visit...

Facebook is experimenting with a new audio feature for Groups. The company is testing audio channels, which will bring Discord-like voice chats to Groups, Facebook shared in a blog post.

Facebook has already had audio features for Groups with rooms. But unlike that feature, which is meant for one-time audio chats, audio channels are dedicated spaces where group members can speak with each other at any time, much like Discord.

The change is one of several updates the social...

When Return to Monkey Island arrives later this year, players will finally discover the secret of Monkey Island. That’s the pitch series creator Ron Gilbert made in the game’s newest trailer, which premiered today during Nintendo’s latest Direct showcase. “My name is Guybrush Threepwood, and this is a story about the time I finally found the secret of Monkey Island,” voice actor Dominic Armato declares at the start of the clip.

As you might imagine, the trailer is full of...

Pokémon Go developer Niantic is creating a new augmented reality mobile game with more big-name partners: the NBA and its players' association. NBA All-World will task you with exploring your neighborhood to find some of the league's stars such as Chris Paul, Steph Curry and James Harden. You can challenge and compete against virtual players in mini-games like three-point contests before recruiting them to your team.

NBA All-World players will be able to deck out their...

ARM’s newest flagship GPU will offer hardware-based ray tracing, a first for the company. Announced today, the Immortalis-G715 promises a 15 percent performance boost compared to the firm’s previous generation of premium Mali GPUs. The performance improvement is courtesy of architectural improvements and a design that can accommodate up to 16 cores.

ARM already offered support for software-based ray tracing with last year’s Mali-G710. However, the company claims the Immortalis-G715...

Last year, hurricanes hammered the Southern and Eastern US coasts at the cost of more than 160 lives and $70 billion in damages. Thanks to climate change, it's only going to get worse. In order to quickly and accurately predict these increasingly severe weather patterns, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced Tuesday that it has effectively tripled its supercomputing (and therefore weather modelling) capacity with the addition of two high-performance...

Sayonara Wild Hearts developer Simogo has revealed its next game and the eclectic studio is again moving in a different direction. Lorelei and the Laser Eyes is a non-linear adventure title that will land on Nintendo Switch and Steam in 2023.

Simogo and publisher Annapurna Interactive announced the game during today's Nintendo Direct Mini: Partner Showcase. The first trailer depicts a dark, atmospheric world in which you'll need to solve puzzles to get to the bottom of a...

Russia has fined Airbnb, Twitch and Pinterest for violating the country’s personal data legislation, Reuters reports. On Tuesday, a court in Moscow ordered all three companies to pay fines of 2 million roubles (approximately $37,700) for not storing the data of Russian citizens within the country. The decision came after Russia’s Roskomnadzor internet commission opened administrative cases against the three platforms in May. Airbnb, Twitch and Pinterest did not immediately respond to...

Airbnb is permanently banning all parties and events at host properties around the world, it announced. That follows a temporary 2020 ban it had instituted on house parties to comply with COVID-related social distancing restrictions. "Over time, the party ban became much more than a public health measure," Airbnb said in a blog post. "It developed into a bedrock community policy to support our Hosts and their neighbors."

Airbnb had already banned "chronic...

Google is working on a way to ensure emails from US political campaigns reach users' Gmail inboxes instead of automatically getting dumped into the spam folder. The company has asked the Federal Election Commission for approval on a plan to make emails from "authorized candidate committees, political party committees and leadership political action committees registered with the FEC" exempt from spam detection, as long they abide by Gmail's rules on phishing, malware and...

When Sonic Frontiers debuted the first little bits of gameplay, fans immediately drew comparisons to Breath of the Wild. It wasn’t hard to do. We were shown Sonic racing through realistic, natural-looking environments, exploring great stone artifacts that dotted the landscape. There was no timer, no counter ticking up the number of rings acquired, just Sonic and a seemingly open world.

And while Sonic Frontiers’ creative officer Takashi Iizuka understood why, to...

In the midst of an otherwise unremarkable new build of Android’s 13 developer beta, 9to5Google uncovered something fun: our annual Android Easter egg. This year’s hidden feature builds on the colorful splash screen from Android 12, this time filling it with emoji. Like, a lot of emoji.

The way it functions in the current beta version (13.3) is much like last year — start the Easter egg by going to Settings > About phone > Android version,...

Sony is attempting to reach out to more than just PS5 gamers with its new InZone brand of gaming monitors and headsets. I got my hands on them in the video embedded above if you’d rather see or hear me talk about these gadgets.

Made for PC but with specs to take full advantage of the PS5, along with Xbox Series X, the $899 InZone M9 is the flagship product of the bunch. It’s a 27-inch 4K IPS gaming monitor built to match the aesthetic of the PS5 while having basically every...

Amazon is limiting customers to three units of emergency contraceptive pills a week in response to a spike in demand after the Supreme Court ended federal abortion rights, the company told CNBC.

Other retailers are also limiting purchases of drugs like Plan B and Aftera — CVS and Rite Aid are likewise limiting customers to three pills per customer. The companies say there is enough supply of the drugs but...

Text discovered in iOS 16 beta code indicated that Apple plans to drop iPad home hub support in the new update, but it turns out that’s not quite the full story. According to the company, the iPad isn’t losing support for what it can already do, but it won’t get an important upgrade that will be available later.

“iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 will continue to support iPad as a home hub with no loss in functionality,” Apple spokesperson Catherine Franklin...

One of the difficulties of cryptocurrency is figuring out who to believe. Case in point: the conflict between Mark Lamb, CEO of CoinFlex, and Roger “Bitcoin Jesus” Ver, an early Bitcoin investor. Lamb says Ver owes his company $47 million and is the reason the company froze customer withdrawals last week. Ver denies this and says that, in fact, CoinFlex owes him money.

CoinFlex, an exchange, froze withdrawals...

Text discovered in iOS 16 beta code indicated that Apple plans to drop iPad home hub support in the new update, but it turns out that’s not quite the full story. According to the company, the iPad isn’t losing support for what it can already do, but it won’t get an important upgrade that will be available later.

“iOS 16 and iPadOS 16 will continue to support iPad as a home hub with no loss in functionality,” Apple spokesperson Catherine Franklin...

SpaceX emailed Starlink customers today asking for help in its battle against Dish Network over radio frequencies for its Starlink internet-from-space effort. Some Starlink customers received an email urging them to contact the Federal Communications Commission and members of Congress in order to support SpaceX in the ongoing dispute.

“Today we ask for your support in ending a lobbying campaign that threatens to make Starlink unusable for you...

Microsoft Edge is building what seems like a mini version of Pinterest inside its browser. Its Collections window will soon start displaying a feed of recommended content based on the topics you’ve saved.

As someone who has used Edge since the browser first came out, I’m a bit embarrassed to admit that I never really knew much about Collections (until now, at least). So if you’re anything like me,...

Yesterday was a pleasant surprise on the PlayStation 5 console restock front. Sony opened up a public queue for PS5 consoles, and unlike many times before, it stayed open and viable for much longer than usual. Now, there’s another one happening right now, and you can queue up without an invite.

There’s no guarantee that this one will be as easy to get into as yesterday’s, but if you have not bought a PS5...