Browsing: Tech Reviews

Microsoft said it has steadily worked over the past decade to deprecate RC4, but that the task wasn’t easy. No salt, no iteration? Really? “The problem though is that it’s hard to kill off a cryptographic algorithm that is present in every OS that’s shipped for the last 25 years and was the default algorithm for so long, Steve Syfuhs, who runs Microsoft’s Windows Authentication team, wrote on Bluesky. “See,” he continued, “the problem is not that the algorithm exists. The problem is how the algorithm is chosen, and the rules governing that spanned 20 years of code changes.” Over…

Anthropic is finally letting more people use Claude in Google Chrome. The company’s AI browser plugin is expanding beyond $200-per-month Max subscribers and is now available to anyone who pays for a Claude subscription.The Claude Chrome plugin allows for easy access to Anthropic’s AI regardless of where you are on the web, but its real draw is how it lets Claude navigate and use websites on your behalf. Anthropic says that Claude can fill out forms, manage your calendar and email and complete multi-step workflows based on a prompt. The latest version of the plugin also features integration with Claude…

DNA tests can help you learn more about your family’s history and your genetic background. These tests also make great gifts during the holiday season. When we initially wrote this article, it compared 23andMe and Ancestry. Since then, 23andMe has experienced a data breach, a subsequent lawsuit, board members’ resignations and layoffs amid financial struggles. As a result, we removed it from this comparison and now outline why AncestryDNA is the best at-home DNA kit for learning more about your heritage, ancestry and even your medical predispositions. If you’ve used 23andMe, here is how you can delete your account and…

Pinned chats have arrived in ChatGPTYou can only pin up to three conversations at a timeYou can also rename conversations to help find themOpenAI has been on a roll as the holiday season approaches, releasing more and more updates to ChatGPT. We’ve had ChatGPT-5.2, better AI image generation, branched chats, new apps like Apple Music, and now… drum roll please… pinned chats.OK, pinned chats might not be the most exciting feature OpenAI has released in the last few days, but it’s a welcome addition because it helps you organize your conversations.It’s exactly what it sounds like: a way to pin…

Besides ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, the extensions harvest all conversations from Copilot, Perplexity, DeepSeek, Grok, and Meta AI. Koi said the full description of the data captured includes: Every prompt a user sends to the AI Every response received Conversation identifiers and timestamps Session metadata The specific AI platform and model used The executor script runs independently from the VPN networking, ad blocking, or other core functionality. That means that even when a user toggles off VPN networking, AI protection, ad blocking, or other functions, the conversation collection continues. The only way to stop the harvesting is to disable the…

Holiday shopping is in full swing, which means it’s about time for the Steam Winter Sale. This go-around, Valve’s sale runs from December 18, 2025 through January 5, 2026, and includes discounts on some of this year’s hit games, like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, Silent Hill f and Assassin’s Creed Shadows.Clair Obscur is available for $40, down from its normal $50, Silent Hill f is 40 percent off, bringing its price down to $42, and the normally $70 Assassin’s Creed Shadows is selling for $35, a solid deal on what was somewhat of a comeback for the long-running Ubisoft series.…

Sometimes it takes a single moment to change your life. It’s easy to fall into the routine of going to work, procrastinating the things you really want to do and waiting for a day that will never come … until something happens to wake you up and make you start living. That’s the plot behind one of my favorite not-quite-holiday movies. Last Holiday is a 2006 romantic comedy-drama starring Queen Latifah as a department store clerk who is told she has a rare brain condition that will kill her in a few weeks. She decides on a fabulous vacation as a…

For all the hype around cloud storage, there are some significant benefits to storing and backing up your files locally. If that sounds good to you, I have a deal that makes it all affordable. Right now, you can get the Crucial X9 2TB Portable SSD at Amazon for £105.99 (was £124.99).This is a fantastic price for a reasonably sized and fast portable SSD that is more secure, provides fast access, and has no recurring subscription fees compared to cloud storage.If 2TB of storage isn’t the right fit for you, then other sizes are available and also discounted. 1TB can…

For most of photography’s roughly 200-year history, altering a photo convincingly required either a darkroom, some Photoshop expertise, or, at minimum, a steady hand with scissors and glue. On Tuesday, OpenAI released a tool that reduces the process to typing a sentence. It’s not the first company to do so. While OpenAI had a conversational image-editing model in the works since GPT-4o in 2024, Google beat OpenAI to market in March with a public prototype, then refined it to a popular model called Nano Banana image model (and Nano Banana Pro). The enthusiastic response to Google’s image-editing model in the…

Creators and publishers have long worried about Meta’s ability to throttle links to outside content. Now, the company is testing out a new scheme that effectively puts link-sharing behind a paywall for creators on Facebook.Under the test, a Meta Verified subscription will determine how many links a creator can share another profile per month. According to a screenshot shared by social meda consultant Matt Navarra, creators in the test recently received a notification from Meta informing them that “certain Facebook profiles without Meta Verified, including yours, will be limited to sharing links in 2 organic posts per month.”Meta is making…