Browsing: Tech Reviews

Surfshark’s exclusive deal for TechRadar readers is about to end. The offer includes savings of up to 88% and an extra 4 months of protection.Surfshark ranks second on our list of the best VPNs overall and is the best cheap VPN available. With this offer, prices now start from only $1.78 per month.Remember, this is paid upfront. So in reality, it’s a little under $50 for 28 months of protection — more than $30 less than you’d pay for NordVPN.For the best value, pick up a One plan. It’s still over $20 cheaper than a Basic NordVPN plan and you…

Automated Frequency Coordination, or AFC, is a valuable wireless networking feature that has recently become a reality with the release of the Wi-Fi 7 standard. It enables a Wi-Fi 7 access point (standalone or integrated inside a router) to significantly increase the range of its super-fast 6GHz frequency band. However, similar to Wi-Fi 7’s MLO feature, AFC has proven to be a complex concept. This post aims to explain it in detail and set the right expectations based on my real-world testing and serious use of Wi-Fi 7 hardware. You’ll also find a list of the top 5 AFC-enabled access…

Grinex, a US-sanctioned cryptocurrency exchange registered in Kyrgyzstan, said it’s halting operations after experiencing a $13 million heist carried out by “western special services” hackers. Researchers from TRM, which has confirmed the theft, put the value of stolen assets at $15 million after discovering roughly 70 drained addresses, about 16 more than Grinex reported. Neither TRM nor fellow blockchain research firm Elliptic has said how the attackers slipped past Grinex’s defenses. Grinex said it has been under almost constant attack attempts since incorporating 16 months ago. The latest attacks, it said, targeted Russian users of the exchange. Damaging “Russia’s financial…

The James Bond franchise has a long history of getting pop stars to record its theme songs (perhaps most memorably with Live and Let Die), and it looks like that tradition will now extend to video game adaptations about the fictional spy. IO Interactive has announced that Lana Del Rey co-wrote and performed the theme for 007 First Light, the developer’s playable James Bond origin story.”First Light” is written and performed by Lana Del Rey and composer David Arnold, and like the moody and abstract opening credits released alongside the song, could vaguely gesture at the themes of the game.…

Would you like some cheese with that iPhone? If a new rumor is true, the big new bold color for Apple’s next flagship phones will look more like red wine than bright orange.The latest rumor comes from Macworld, which cites a leak from an unnamed source close to the supply chain. According to the leak, the upcoming iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max will have a dark cherry color option. The source also said that those new flagships, as well as Apple’s first foldable phone, will launch in September. According to different reports over the past several months, the foldable might be…

Facial recognition has become one of the default ways we prove who we are online, from unlocking our phones to logging into banking apps. But according to a senior figure at a Sam Altman-backed startup, that entire system may not hold for much longer, thanks to AI.“Over time the AI is going to get so powerful that really, the face thing is probably going to break,” says Tiago Sanda, Chief Product Officer for Tools for Humanity, as I catch up with him to discuss the latest upgrade to its World ID system.The company behind the controversial Orb device, is rolling…

Sometime around 2010, sophisticated malware known as Flame hijacked the mechanism that Microsoft used to distribute updates to millions of Windows computers around the world. The malware—reportedly jointly developed by the US and Israel—pushed a malicious update throughout an infected network belonging to the Iranian government. The lynchpin of the “collision” attack was an exploit of MD5, a cryptographic hash function Microsoft was using to authenticate digital certificates. By minting a cryptographically perfect digital signature based on MD5, the attackers forged a certificate that authenticated their malicious update server. Had the attack been used more broadly, it would have had…

Casely has reannounced a recall of its Power Pods 5,000mAh MagSafe E33A charger after dozens of people were injured and one even killed by the defective devices, the US Consumer Product Safety Commission (USCPSC) announced. It’s recommended that you stop using the devices immediately, dispose of them safely and seek a replacement from the manufacturer.A year ago, Casely and the USPSC published a recall of 429,000 units of the power bank with the model number E33A. That followed 51 incidents of the devices “overheating, expanding or catching fire” and burning users in multiple cases.However, many of the devices have remained…

Opera announced Thursday the launch of a new tool that allows users of its browsers to include more AI chatbots in their browsing experience.Browser Connector is a free feature for Opera One and Opera GX browsers that allows users to integrate AI tools such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Anthropic’s Claude into their live browsing sessions via Model Context Protocol. MCP is an open standard developed by Anthropic that allows for a secure two-way connection between AI models, external data sources and tools such as search engines. (Disclosure: Ziff Davis, CNET’s parent company, in 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging…

Engineered wood stores solar heat and releases it to generate electricityNanoscale modifications turn balsa into a heat-driven power materialPhosphorene coating enables broad-spectrum sunlight absorption and efficient heat conversionOrdinary balsa wood can now absorb sunlight, store heat, and generate electricity even in the dark after a team of Chinese scientists reengineered its cellular architecture.A team from Kunming University of Science and Technology and Guangdong University of Technology says the wood’s internal structure was transformed at the nanoscale to achieve this result.They chose balsa not for its strength but for its natural alignment of microchannels, which guide heat and hold other materials…