Browsing: Tech Reviews

NASA’s Mars rovers have accomplished a whole lot since the first one landed on the red planet in the late ’90s, but even the latest members of the fleet still have plenty of limitations. For one, they’re very slow; Perseverance, which NASA considers a “standout,” achieves a top speed of just under .1 mph on flat ground. On top of that, the rough terrain is hard on the rovers’ wheels, and steep slopes with hazards like rocks and sand pose a real challenge, sometimes requiring long detours to reach certain targets. But this week, NASA showed off its progress on…

Looking for the most recent Connections answers? Click here for today’s Connections hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles. Today’s NYT Connections puzzle offers a diverse group of topics. I liked the blue group best. Read on for clues and today’s Connections answers. The Times has a Connections Bot, like the one for Wordle. Go there after you play to receive a numeric score and to have the program analyze your answers. Players who are registered with the Times Games section can now nerd out by…

Welcome to a bonus edition of my Blu-ray Bounty column, where I test the latest physical media film releases to see which make great showcases for your setup.Normally, the Bounty arrives at the end of the month, but in celebration of Blu-ray’s 20th anniversary (on 20th June), I thought I’d check out a few discs released in 2026 that didn’t make it into the Blu-ray Bounty the first time. If you’re thinking it just sounds like I wanted to find an excuse to watch some cool movies while at work… well, no comment.As usual, I’ll be using a setup consisting…

Since the beginning of 2025, Ubiquiti’s UniFi has become increasingly relevant for the home, in addition to the business and enterprise environments that were once its original sole focus. This post includes the current five best Wi-Fi UniFi Cloud Gateways, a.k.a. UniFi consoles or “UniFi Wi-Fi routers” if you will, based on my real-world experience, for home users or small offices. Dong’s note: I first published this frequently revised roundup on April 26, 2025, and last updated it on June 19, 2026, with the latest, up-to-date picks. Related stories on Ubiquiti and Wi-Fi Best Wi-Fi UniFi Cloud Gateways: The UniFi Express 7…

Security firm Sentinel One has a deeper dive into CVE-2025-20701 here. Heinze and Steinmetz said last year that the full chain of attacks gave attackers the ability to do other malicious things, including retrieving call history and contacts, and even calling arbitrary numbers. Many of those capabilities are dependent on the specific devices being paired, since the functionality built into them differs from platform to platform. Devices affected by the Airoha vulnerabilities are by no means alone. In January, researchers disclosed WhisperPair, a series of vulnerabilities that allows an attacker to hijack Bluetooth devices connected through Google Fast Pair, a…

The last thing you want to happen after dropping hundreds of dollars on a wearable is to discover that it doesn’t work with your body. But, that’s a fairly common problem people with wrist tattoos have been running into since the advent of smartwatches and fitness trackers. As countless posts on device support pages and Reddit have chronicled over the years, tattooed skin and the sensors used by wearables often don’t mix well. One of the main issues people experience is with heart rate sensing. Wearables use a light-based technique called photoplethysmography (PPG) to measure heart rate. That’s the green…

Once the purview of crime labs and TV shows, DNA tests have instead become common gifts for birthdays, holidays and special occasions like Mother’s Day and Father’s Day. Quick tests like 23andMe and AncestryDNA have made the process of learning more about your family history easier, cheaper and faster than ever. But in her new book, The Psychology of Genealogy, psychologist Susan Moore warns that you should consider all the risks before undergoing a test. “Should you give DNA kits as gifts? It can be fun; it can be risky,” Moore said. Why you should exercise caution Beyond the safety concerns of a company having…

A Nothing exec has announced that there won’t be a new CMF phone this yearThey say the ongoing RAM crisis is to blameThere will, however, be other CMF products and other Nothing phonesThe CMF Phone 2 Pro from Nothing combined distinctive looks with a bargain price when it launched last year, but if you’ve been hoping for a CMF Phone 3 Pro this year, you’re out of luck, as the company has just confirmed that no new models are coming.Posting on X, Nothing’s co-founder Akis Evangelidis claimed that while the company was previously working on a successor, “with memory prices…

Microsoft says it has detected new self-propagating malware that spreads through USB drives in search of cryptocurrency credentials, which it then sends to attacker-controlled servers. The company named the worm Crypto Clipper because it monitors the contents of device clipboards for patterns consistent with wallet addresses or seed phrases. When found, the malware also takes five screenshots over a 10-second period. Both the credentials and the screenshots are then sent to the attacker through Tor, a network protocol that provides anonymous routing by sending traffic through redundant nodes so logs can’t capture both the sending and receiving IP addresses. Crypto…

Nathan Ingraham for Engadget Google just introduced a new smart home speaker yesterday, but the arrival of a new product heralds the end of others. The company has confirmed that it will end production of the Nest Home Mini and Nest Audio. These Nest devices have been on the market for around five years (or longer, if you count 2017’s Google Home Mini) and it seems logical for Google to prioritize the newer generation given the current strategy of putting its Gemini chatbot everywhere it possibly can. Although the pair of speakers has been discontinued, any…