Browsing: Tech Reviews

Two security professionals who were arrested in 2019 after performing an authorized security assessment of a county courthouse in Iowa will receive $600,000 to settle a lawsuit they brought alleging wrongful arrest and defamation. The case was brought by Gary DeMercurio and Justin Wynn, two penetration testers who at the time were employed by Colorado-based security firm Coalfire Labs. The men had written authorization from the Iowa Judicial Branch to conduct “red-team” exercises, meaning attempted security breaches that mimic techniques used by criminal hackers or burglars. The objective of such exercises is to test the resilience of existing defenses using…

Drake Maye and the New England Patriots face Sam Darnold and the Seattle Seahawks at Super Bowl LX, which will be held at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, CA this year. For those of you who don’t have your calendars blocked off already, the game is on February 8, with kickoff scheduled for 6:30 p.m. ET.Like all other Sunday Night Football games this season, the championship game will be broadcast on NBC, and will stream live on Peacock. (Oh, and in case the Super Bowl isn’t enough for you, you can catch coverage of the Winter Olympics all morning and…

The RedMagic 11 Air may have figured out how to fit one of the biggest phone batteries available into a slimmer design. Unveiled Thursday, the new gaming phone has a 7,000-mAh silicon carbon battery and a cooling fan, along with many of the same features as last year’s RedMagic 10S Pro.The new phone has the same depth as the prior RedMagic 10 Air at 7.85mm (0.3 inches), and is a smidge heavier at 207 grams (7.3 ounces) versus the prior phone’s 205 grams. This is a comparable weight and depth to phones like Apple’s iPhone 16 Pro, but the specs list of…

If you’ve been running out of mobile data a lot on your current phone plan but don’t want to shell out more cash on a bigger data plan, then this deal from Tangerine Mobile may be what you’ve been looking for.For a limited time, Tangerine is slashing the price of its SIM-only 5G plans by 50% for the first four months, starting with AU$15 per month for its base 30GB plan. The plan will then revert back to $30 from the fifth month onwards.Moreover, each plan will also get double data for the first six months as well, boosting that…

IP reservation is the process of assigning a specific IP address to a device, such as a computer, so it receives the same address each time it (re)connects to the network, such as when you restart it or the network’s router. This post explains when IP reservation applies and how to set it up on popular router brands. Related stories on home networking Each time you connect a computer (or any device) to a router, it gets an IP address, which might change when reconnecting, such as when the device or the router restarts. IP reservation keeps that IP address…

Still, Nvidia wants the business because China is a huge market. The latest approvals came during Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang’s visit to China this week, according to sources who spoke with Reuters on the condition of anonymity. Other Chinese firms are now waiting for their own approvals in future rounds, though Beijing is attaching conditions to the licenses that have not yet been finalized. One source told Reuters that the license terms were too restrictive and buyers had not yet turned their approvals into actual orders. Beijing’s balancing act The approval signals Beijing’s prioritization of its major Internet companies, which…

Windscribe is a virtual private network (VPN) with intense “How do you do, fellow kids?” energy. It has servers in 69 countries and an annual plan that costs $69, an obsession with the sex number that rivals Elon Musk’s. I’m shocked that it doesn’t have a subscription costing $4.20 per month.But there’s another side to Windscribe’s cringe: an obsession with independence and a Bernie Sanders-like anger on behalf of an exploited public. In a market where the best VPNs aim for professionalism, Windscribe aspires to be punk. Its iconoclasm may have led it to develop an app that looks like…

Bose Ultra Open Earbuds: They weren’t the first clip-on earbuds, but Bose’s Ultra Open Earbuds really kickstarted this sub-genre of true-wireless earbuds. They’re somewhat overpriced, but otherwise, there’s a lot to like about them, including a surprisingly comfortable, secure fit and very good sound quality for open buds. Initially, the buds didn’t feature multipoint Bluetooth pairing, but the feature was added in July of 2024. Read my Bose Ultra Open Earbuds review.JBL Endurance Peak 3: With JBL releasing a new Endurance Peak model in the spring of 2026, its 3rd-gen ear-hook style sport earbuds should be available at a decent…

Greek photographer Athanasios Maloukos scooped the top prizeThey entered two series of low-light images: ‘Whirling Devotion’ and ‘Night of Sorrows’Judges billed the winner’s portfolio as among the best they’d seen in the contest’s 23-year historyForget picture postcard views and Instagram-worthy shots of popular landmarks, the winner of this year’s Travel Photographer of the Year scooped the top prize with an altogether different portfolio.Greek photographer Athanasios Maloukos submitted two haunting series of low-light images: Night of Sorrows: The Yacente’ Procession of Zamora, and Whirling Devotion: Rituals of Sufism in Anatolia.I am speechless seeing that one of my most intimate, spiritual personal…

This post will walk you through combining two or more ASUS routers for a well-performing, seamless AiMesh setup. “Well-performing” is the key here, and you might want to pay close attention to the details. This post is part of my series on ASUS’s AiMesh, a popular way to build a robust home Wi-Fi (mesh) system. Other parts of this series are in the Related Stories box below. Dong’s note: I first published this piece on April 13, 2023, and last updated it on January 26, 2026, to add the latest information. Related stories on ASUS routers and the AiMesh feature Picking…