Browsing: Tech Reviews

Sadly, aliens weren’t involved. Queensland Fire Department The Schwartz is strong with a small Australian beach town that’s having its own “space balls” moment. Six metallic spheres, each roughly twice the size of a basketball, washed ashore over the weekend on Forrest Beach in Queensland. The appearance of the mysterious objects has led to wild theories, UFO jokes and tongue-in-cheek alien promotions from local shops. Authorities, though, have a much more mundane explanation: space junk. The Australian Space Agency said the spheres are likely pressure vessels from a (human-made) rocket. “The Agency has identified the likely source,”…

Nearly a decade ago, the first Moana animated movie hit theaters and showed the world what professional wrestling fans already knew: Dwayne Johnson can sing. More importantly, though, the movie was a game changer for Walt Disney and opened the door to broader representation in stories like this — centering on an all-Polynesian cast, aside from Jemaine Clement, who plays a giant jewel-loving crab. Moana, in its first two animated installments, continued the refreshing trend that Frozen and Brave began, subverting the romantic princess trope that has long been established as a Disney mainstay.All this is to say that, as a…

Zero Parades has a free to play TTRPGIt adapts the game’s setting and mechanics for pen and paperIt also comes with a free premade one shot to help you learn the gameLet’s face it, 2026 — with its component price hikes, sweeping layoffs, cancellations, expensive AAA titles, and Sony’s promise to stop making physical games — has been something of a year of Ls. But one of the few lights in this darkness, and game of the year contender, Zero Parades for Dead Spies just announced brand new content is dropping: it’s a tabletop version of its gameplay, and it’s…

“Is it time to replace my Wi-Fi router? I’ve had it for a few years!” I receive questions like that regularly, especially from those who still use Wi-Fi 5. Since the introduction of Wi-Fi 7, folks have been worried about replacing their Wi-Fi routers, sometimes for the wrong reasons. They think that their router is “dated,” “out of date,” or “no longer relevant.” And that’s understandable. Wi-Fi 7 is two generations newer than Wi-Fi 5 — two and a half if you include Wi-Fi 6E. The marketing hype and online clickbait can create a huge sense of FoMO, at the…

A Linux vulnerability that allows untrusted virtual machines to gain root access to host machines is one of two high-severity flaws to surface this week in the open source operating system. The vulnerability resides in KVM, which is, in essence, a virtual machine app included in the kernel of many Linux distributions. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-53359, allows guest virtual machines—such as those used in cloud platforms to isolate one user’s instance from the host OS and other user instances—to break out of that container. Januscape: A threat to cloud platforms The vulnerability affects KVM running on both AMD and…

The barebones automaker has teamed up with the legendary crayon brand. Slate Up to this point, Slate’s barebones EV has adopted Henry Ford’s maxim about having it any color you like so long as it’s black grey(-ish). But if you were looking to snag the affordable electric truck with something a little different, you can thanks to the company’s new partnership with Crayola. The pair are introducing five wraps in (apparently) famous Crayola colors for you to show the world your true colors. Those five shades are Cerulean (blue), Dandelion (yellow), Fern (green), Razzmatazz (pink) and…

Each year, as the Super Bowl approaches, all three major US carriers announce their latest upgrades to ensure the stadium hosting the Big Game has enough high-speed network capacity to handle the hordes of fans attending with a smartphone in every pocket. But every year, some are left complaining that they couldn’t post their bragging rights live because everyone was trying to send messages, photos and videos all at the same time.Just four months after this year’s Super Bowl, the game’s site in Santa Clara, California, was transformed — its Levi’s logo famously covered up — to host several FIFA…

25 million viewers watch the first-ever 4K livestream beamed from the Moon260Mbps transfer speeds send video more than 250,000 milesAWS GovCloud has an important role in NASA simulationsAmazon Web Services – the biggest cloud hyperscaler with a market share equaling the combined share of both Microsoft and Google – just helped to enable the first-ever like 4K video stream from the Moon.The company transmitted video footage from the Orion spacecraft by laser, with an estimated 25 million people watching the coverage across NASA+, YouTube and Amazon’s own Prime Video platform.Not only is this the first time 4K video has ever…

US rare earths produced by Washington-backed companies are flowing to Japan and South Korea, as American demand has yet to materialize despite the Trump administration’s push to develop a national supply chain. Rare earths products produced by MP Materials, Energy Fuels and Phoenix Tailings—which together have won billions of dollars in US government support—are being sold to companies in Asia, where the scale of magnet manufacturing remains larger than the nascent production in the US. China’s lock on global supplies of rare earths and critical minerals has become a national security concern in the US and other Western nations, since…

An unsubtle shot at Chrome. DuckDuckGo DuckDuckGo announced that it can now block most video ads, particularly those on YouTube, when a video is playing in its browser.  In a blog post about the new feature, the company explained that its YouTube ad detection and blocking is based on the open-source community filter lists from uBlockOrigin. DuckDuckGo noted that it may also apply its own rules for better compatibility, but viewers may see longer buffering times when using the blocker and there may still be some unexpected hiccups. The blocking feature will be on by default…