Sid Meier’s Civilization VII is the latest in the long-running 4X strategy franchise that first debuted in 1991 on MS-DOS. The new turn-based game from Firaxis Games and the titular, legendary designer is set to release on PC and modern consoles in on February 11th, 2025 — over eight years after the last installment.

Civ VII promises to expand the scope of how players can write their own historical fantasy, offering the freedom to mix and match civilizations with different historical figures, such as Hatshepsut reigning over the Roman empire in the Age of Exploration. It’s the kind of game that easily consumes hundreds of hours of playtime, constantly offering new and unexpected ways to engage with its deep city-building systems. Our own Ash Parrish details in her hands-on impressions how she only managed to scratch the surface in a lengthy three-hour demo.

Here’s all our coverage of the next major title in the Civilization series.

• Here are the PC requirements for Civilization 7.
• Civilization 7 launches in February
• Baba yetu, yetu uliye!
• Civilization 7 is launching in 2025
• A new mainline Civilization game is in development at Firaxis

In 2016, Apple started including an auto power-on feature for its new MacBook models that activated when you opened the notebook lid or plugged in USB-C power when the lid was open. This is a cool little convenience if you don’t want the added step of pressing the power button — plus it could get the computer running if, for some reason, that button stops working.

But what if you open the lid just to clean the screen or are troubleshooting the computer for some other issue? Or perhaps you are building a slabtop and don’t want it to power on just because you plugged it into power? Or what if you don’t want to automate everything? In these cases, auto power-on is either a minor inconvenience or a straight-up annoyance.

The first MacBooks to get this feature had Intel processors, and it continued over to every new model, including when Apple switched to its own Apple Silicon M-series processors. There’s a Terminal command for the Intel MacBooks that can be used to disable open lid power-on, but when Apple launched the M1 MacBook Air in 2020, that command no longer worked. However, in January 2025, Apple finally added an official way to disable autoboot upon opening the li …

Read the full story at The Verge.

While Mark Zuckerberg and Meta press forward with augmented glasses projects buoyed by its million-selling set of smart Ray-Bans, Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman says that Apple just pulled the plug on an AR glasses project. Codenamed N107, they’re described as something that would’ve looked similar to regular glasses but with added displays in the lenses that could connect to a Mac.

With features that sound similar to devices like the Xreal One AR glasses, the glasses could’ve delivered on the Vision Pro feature that’s closest to being any kind of a killer app (popping up a huge virtual monitor anywhere) without the $3,499 price and heavy design that required a head strap. The glasses also would’ve had tint-changing lenses that, like the Vision Pro’s Eye Sight, could signal to onlookers whether the wearer was busy or not. While other details are fuzzy, it doesn’t appear as if the N107 glasses would’ve had a camera or any of the mixed-reality features of the Vision Pro.

A big problem, according to Gurman, was developing something that worked well while being cost-effective proved to be a challenge. Apple initially wanted the N107 to connect to an iPhone, but it proved to be a battery-guzzler, and the iPhone itself didn’t have enough juice to power the glasses — hence the shift to a Mac. Unfortunately, that switch purportedly didn’t seem to go over well with executives in testing.

This most recent cancellation puts a big question mark over Apple’s future AR and XR plans. Apple purportedly canceled a separate AR glasses project in 2023, and rumor has it that work on a Vision Pro 2 has been put on hold in favor of trying to create a cheaper Vision Pro. Meanwhile, the Vision Pro itself has struggled to find a foothold.

The cancellation also means Apple is falling further behind the competition. CES 2025 was a playground for all sorts of smart glasses, and Google recently entered the fray with Android XR. Samsung has also thrown its hat in the ring with its Project Moohan headset. Last year, Meta showcased its Orion glasses, an AR glasses prototype with advanced Micro LED displays and a neural wristband for controls. Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has also been bullish on smart glasses as an ultimate vehicle for AI assistants, and the company is expected to release both Oakley-branded smart glasses for athletes and a higher-end version of its current Ray-Ban glasses with a display this year.

In Adult Swim’s Common Side Effects from Joe Bennett (Scavengers Reign) and Steve Hely (American Dad!), the discovery of a strange mushroom that can heal any sickness or injury is either a miracle or a doomsday scenario, depending on who you ask. The plant is a godsend to people suffering from debilitating illnesses, but its curative properties make it an existential threat to powerful pharmaceutical companies. And while all Marshall Cuso (Dave King), the show’s hero, wants to do with his fungus is help people in need, that’s enough to make the American Drug Enforcement Administration label him as a menace to society.

Imminent danger is always right around the corner as Marshall goes on the run in hopes of finding a way to spread his mushrooms far and wide. Often, he feels like the show’s only character who has a conscience and wants to do good in the world. But when I recently spoke with Bennett and Hely, they explained that even though the people around Marshall might seem terrible, the show’s true villain is the (American) healthcare system they have all been forced to live within.

Marshall knows that he can’t really relax or trust anyone (aside from his pet torto …

Read the full story at The Verge.

A popular Bloodborne framerate mod is no longer available thanks to a DMCA takedown request from Sony. Australia-based Twitch streamer Lance McDonald first developed the mod back in 2020 before making it available to download in 2021. Lance announced today in a post on X that Sony Interactive Entertainment asked them to remove download links for the patch.

The hack’s sole purpose was to get Bloodborne running at a smoother 60 fps with improved frame pacing. FromSoftware originally released Bloodborne back in 2015 for the PlayStation 4, and the game has always been locked at 30 fps with occasional stuttering from inconsistent pacing (the 30 frames within each second were not always on-screen for equal amounts of time). The beloved game’s graphical limitations have persisted even on the PS4 Pro and while playing it via backwards compatibility on the PlayStation 5.

Lance’s mod has received its share of testing and praise from the “Soulsbourne” community that covet FromSoftware games but wish their technical and graphical chops were more cutting-edge. This includes being spotlighted by creators like Digital Foundry, who interviewed McDonald about his hack back in 2020, used his mod to make a 4K / 60 fps representation on PS5 using AI upscaling, and recently published a Bloodborne PS4 emulation video that really juices up the performance and has an extra-spicy video thumbnail aimed squarely at Sony.

For years, the most rabid of Bloodborne fans have been quick to jump at any Bloodborne-related news as a potential clue to an upcoming, long-awaited remake. And in this case, it only takes a short scroll of McDonald’s replies on his post to see people speculating that this takedown means Sony must be nearing some kind of announcement in time for the 10-year anniversary of Bloodborne’s release. Or, perhaps, Sony is just taking a page from Nintendo’s playbook.

Nvidia is touting the performance of DeepSeek’s open source AI models on its just-launched RTX 50-series GPUs, claiming that they can “run the DeepSeek family of distilled models faster than anything on the PC market.” But this announcement from Nvidia might be somewhat missing the point.

This week, Nvidia’s market cap suffered the single biggest one-day market cap loss for a US company ever, a loss widely attributed to DeepSeek. DeepSeek said that its new R1 reasoning model didn’t require powerful Nvidia hardware to achieve comparable performance to OpenAI’s o1 model, letting the Chinese company train it at a significantly lower cost. What DeepSeek accomplished with R1 appears to show that Nvidia’s best chips may not be strictly needed to make strides in AI, which could affect the company’s fortunes in the future. 

That said, DeepSeek did train its models using Nvidia GPUs, merely weaker ones (H800) that the US government allows Nvidia to export to China. And today’s blog post from Nvidia wants to show that its new 50-series RTX GPUs can be useful for R1 inference – or what an AI model actually generates – saying that the GPUs are built on the “same NVIDIA Blackwell GPU architecture that fuels world-leading AI innovation in the data center” and that “RTX fully accelerates DeepSeek, offering maximum inference performance on PCs.” 

But how DeepSeek did its training is part of what has been such a big deal. (And it’s worth noting that China is getting a less powerful version of the RTX 5090.) 

Other tech companies are trying to ride the DeepSeek wave, too. R1 is also now available on AWS, and Microsoft made it available on its Azure AI Foundry platform and GitHub this week. However, Microsoft and OpenAI are reportedly investigating if DeepSeek took OpenAI data, Bloomberg reports.

I would have preferred any other Super Bowl matchup than another showdown between the Kansas City Chiefs and the Philadelphia Eagles, but the world doesn’t revolve around me. Regardless, I love a good championship football game, especially one enhanced by an immersive sound system. If you’re in need of a home theater audio upgrade yourself, Sonos might be the play, as it’s offering up to $250 off its connected soundbars and speakers through February 8th.

The Sonos Arc, for example, is on sale at Amazon, Best Buy, and Walmart starting at just $649 ($250 off) right now, which is the lowest price we’ve seen on the high-end soundbar. It was the most impressive soundbar in the Sonos lineup before the Sonos Arc Ultra showed up. Although it doesn’t have the expanded soundstage offered by the Ultra’s extra virtual channels and Sound Motion tech, it’s still terrific as a standalone Dolby Atmos soundbar with eight woofers, two tweeters, and two upfiring speakers. It supports Apple’s AirPlay 2 and does the Sonos trick of offering voice-activated control using Amazon Alexa or Google Assistant, too.

The Arc could still use a bit of bass help, though, assuming you want to get the most out of movies and games after the final whistle blows. You can get that by pairing it with a Sonos Sub Mini, which is matching its all-time of $343 ($86 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Sonos’ online storefront right now. It’s a compact wireless subwoofer that should be much easier to find space for in tighter home theaters than the fourth-gen Sonos Sub. The latter is bigger and more powerful, but also pretty expensive. Thankfully, it’s available for $679 ($120 off) from Sonos as part of the company’s ongoing Super Bowl promo.

If these pairings would stretch your budget too much, Sonos also makes several budget-friendly soundbars. The second-gen Sonos Beam is available for $399 ($100 off) from Amazon, Best Buy, and Sonos, which is $30 more than its lowest price to date. It’s more compact than the Arc, but still offers good sound, an eARC HDMI port, and support for Dolby Atmos with virtualized surround sound channels (though, no up-firing Atmos speakers).

Amazon, Best Buy, and Sonos are also discounting the entry-level Sonos Ray to $179, which is $100 off and $30 more than its all-time low. It can’t match the sound coming out of the Sonos Arc or the latest Beam, but it’ll surely trump what most TVs can output. Plus, at 22 inches wide, it’s the ideal size if your entertainment center doesn’t have much space. That said, you’ll need an optical cable for audio from your TV as it doesn’t have an HDMI eARC port like the other soundbars do.

If you prefer a smart speaker over a soundbar, the Sonos Era 100 is also currently matching the record low of $199 ($50 off) at Amazon, Best Buy, and Sonos’ online storefront. With a pair, you can add rear surround sound to make it feel as though you’re in the stands hearing cheers and jeers. That said, the Era 100 doesn’t support Dolby Atmos like the beefier Sonos Era 300 does. The latter is the only Atmos-supporting Sonos speaker, and it also happens to be on sale for an all-time low of $359.99 (about $89 off) at Best Buy.

The Era 100 does well on its own as an all-around music speaker, though. Like the Era 300, it offers both Wi-Fi and Bluetooth connectivity, AirPlay 2 support, and Amazon Alexa compatibility (with a dedicated switch to disable the microphone). It also supports Sonos’ handy Trueplay tuning feature and USB-C line-in, which lets you connect wired devices using an optional 3.5mm to USB-C adapter.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman teased exactly two weeks ago that o3-mini would ship in “a couple of weeks,” and it’s arriving on time today. OpenAI is launching its latest o3-mini reasoning model inside ChatGPT and its API services and making a version with rate limits available to free users of ChatGPT for the first time.

Originally announced as part of OpenAI’s 12 days of “ship-mas” in December, o3-mini is designed to match o1’s performance in math, coding, and science, while responding faster than the existing reasoning model. OpenAI says o3-mini should respond 24 percent faster than o1-mini and provide more accurate answers in the process. Much like o1-mini, this latest model will show how it worked out an answer, rather than just providing a response.

OpenAI provided some early benchmarks showing its o3 model outperforming o1 in December, and it now says the o3-mini version will outperform o1 in a number of coding and reasoning tasks at less cost and latency. Developers will be able to leverage o3-mini through OpenAI’s API services, including the Chat Completions API, Assistants API, and Batch API.

Paid users also be able to select o3-mini-high, which OpenAI says will be the “best coding option in ChatGPT” and include higher intelligence responses that take a little longer to generate. o3-mini will also work with search to find answers with links to web sources.

This is also the first time free users of ChatGPT will be able to try out OpenAI’s reasoning models, just days after Microsoft made o1 free for all Copilot users and DeepSeek shook up the AI world. You can try o3-mini free of charge in ChatGPT by selecting the Reason feature in the chat bar, and the rate limits will be similar to the existing GPT-4o limits. o3-mini will also be available for ChatGPT Plus, Team, and Pro users worldwide today, and OpenAI is tripling its message limits for Plus and Teams users to 150 messages per day. Only Pro users, who are willing to pay $200 a month, will get unlimited access to o3-mini.

MultiVersus will go offline at the end of its next season, Warner Bros. Games announced on Friday. The free-to-play brawler’s fifth and final season starts on February 4th and runs through May 30th, 2025, after which you’ll only be able to play against AI opponents or through local co-op. It will also no longer be available to download.

To gain access to the offline version of MultiVersus, you need to download the latest version of the game and log in during season five. From there, you’ll get a local save file connected to your PlayStation, Microsoft, Steam, or Epic Games account, “allowing you to enjoy the game offline with all earned and purchased content moving forward.​”

The Super Smash Bros.–like MultiVersus first launched in an open beta in 2022, but it went offline in 2023 after its player count dropped. It relaunched in May 2024, adding characters from across Warner Bros. Discovery’s intellectual property, like Samurai Jack, the Powerpuff Girls, and Beetlejuice. The fifth season will add the game’s final characters: Aquaman and the Looney Tunes’ Lola Bunny.

MultiVersus is also ending in-game purchases starting today, which means you can no longer buy Gleamium. You can still use any remaining Gleamium or character tokens until the end of season five, however.

It’s been a pretty rough past few months for live service games like MultiVersus, as Sony shut down Concord last year and canceled two unannounced live service projects, while XDefiant servers go offline in June.

Ugreen has announced another Apple AirTag alternative with its new Finder Slim wallet tracker. It’s not only much thinner than an Apple AirTag, at just 1.7mm thick, the Finder Slim is also thinner than the 2.4mm Chipolo Card Spot, the 2.8mm Pebblebee Card Universal, the 2.5mm Tile Slim, and the 2.6mm Eufy SmartTrack Card E30.

It’s now available through Amazon for $26.99, also making it one of the cheapest wallet trackers compatible with Apple’s Find My network.

Like Eufy and Pebblebee’s wallet trackers, Ugreen’s Finder Slim features a rechargeable battery instead of a disposable one. Battery life is claimed to be up to 12 months between charges, which is much shorter than the three years Tile says its wallet tracker will work, but you can potentially keep using Ugreen’s for even longer than that.

The downside to ultra-thin rechargeable wallet trackers like the Finder Slim is that they’re too thin to use a standard USB-C charging port. It instead relies on a proprietary charging cable with a magnetic connector you’ll need to make sure you don’t misplace before needing it again in another 12 months. On top of that, if product imagery is accurate, the proprietary charging cable Ugreen includes is only USB-A compatible.

The Finder Slim works with Apple’s Find My network but skips support for Google’s Find My Device network entirely. Remote tracking allows you to see the Finder Slim’s last reported location on the network, and it will also trigger left behind reminders when it’s initially separated from your iPhone. A built-in 80dB alarm should make it easy to pinpoint the exact location of the tracker when it’s nearby and within earshot — even when it’s stuffed inside a wallet — and it’s IP68 rated, so it can survive a complete dunking for up to 30 minutes. Just don’t expect to be able to track it down if it ends up in the drink.

WhatsApp has disrupted a spyware campaign last month that targeted journalists and civil society members, the company announced on Friday. The campaign originated from an Israeli spyware company called Paragon Solutions and impacted around 90 users.

In a statement to The Guardian, WhatsApp says it has reached out to affected users, saying it had “high confidence” that they were targeted and “possibly compromised.” The Meta-owned app also sent a cease-and-desist order to Paragon and is “exploring its legal options,” The Guardian reports.

Paragon, which Reuters called a competitor to Pegasus maker NSO Group, bills itself as an “ethical” cyber defense company. It was acquired by the Florida-based private investment firm AE Industrial Partners last year, while a recent report from Wired revealed that US Immigration and Customs Enforcement signed a $2 million contract with Paragon in September 2024.

WhatsApp sued NSO Group in 2019 for targeting 1,400 users, including journalists, activists, and government officials. The spyware company has since been found liable.

“This is the latest example of why spyware companies must be held accountable for their unlawful actions,” WhatsApp spokesperson Zade Alsawah said in a statement to The Verge. “WhatsApp will continue to protect people’s ability to communicate privately.”

Update, January 31st: Added information from WhatsApp.

If you’re tired of watching your heating bill soar every month, now is a good time to invest in Google’s latest Nest Learning Thermostat. Normally $279.99, right now Amazon, Best Buy, and Google are selling the smart thermostat in all three color options for $239.99 ($40 off), which is just $10 shy of its lowest price to date.

Google’s fourth-gen smart thermostat is the smartest on the market — full stop. It can learn your preferences and habits over time, much like previous models, and automatically adjusts your heating and cooling schedule based on how you go about using it, ensuring you’re always comfortable. It also supports the newer Matter standard, so you can connect it to any major smart home platform once you set up using the Google Home app, paving the way for native controls in Apple Home and Amazon Alexa. What’s more, it comes with a remote temperature sensor so that you can focus on heating and cooling specific rooms in your home, not just the room in which the thermostat resides.

Despite its host of smart capabilities, the stylish thermostat is relatively simple to set up and use. It features a large, customizable display that functions much like an oversized Pixel Watch, one shows basic info like the time, weather, and temperature settings. What’s cool is that it provides more detailed insights up close, letting you quickly view the humidity or the outdoor air quality index score, among other data points.

Read our Google Nest Learning Thermostat review.

A few more deals and discounts

• You can currently grab a pair of Technics’ EAH-AZ80 starting at $185.37 ($115 off) at Amazon and Best Buy, which is an all-time low. The wireless earbuds impressed us with their unique ability to pair with three devices simultaneously, making them a good choice for multitaskers. They also feature terrific sound and noise cancellation, along with a feature-packed companion app that lets you preview your voice call quality, adjust various EQ settings, and dial in the helpful transparency mode. Read our review.
• Lego’s Bouquet of Roses, one of our V-Day gift guide picks from last year, is down to its all-time low price of $47.99 ($12 off) at Amazon, Target, and Walmart. The clever set comes with enough pieces to assemble a dozen red roses and four sprigs of baby’s breath — all in bloom — which you can then drop in whatever vase you have lying around when you’re done, just like an actual bouquet.
• The 2022 Tile Mate is on sale at Amazon for $14.99 ($10 off), which is just $2 shy of its best price to date. The 2024 Tile Mate features a wider Bluetooth range, but the 2022 model still accurately tracks items within a respectable range of 250 feet. And, just like Tile’s newer location trackers, the last-gen model is both platform-agnostic and water-resistant.

Apple has agreed to a $20 million settlement in a class action lawsuit over battery swelling in early Apple Watch models. If you experienced the issue and owned an Apple Watch Series 0, 1, 2, or 3, you may be eligible for a small payout.

The lawsuit, Smith et al. v. Apple Inc, was filed in the United States District Court for the Northern District of California. In both the settlement agreement and claim website, Apple explicitly denies that its smartwatches ever had battery swelling issues and “denies all allegations of wrongdoing” and liability. Instead, it says that Apple is choosing to settle to “avoid further costs of litigation.”

In a statement sent to The Verge, Apple spokesperson Aushawna Collins says the company “strongly disagree[s] with the claims made against these early generation Apple Watch models.”

To be eligible for a payout, you have to have owned an eligible watch model and have reported any potential battery swelling issues to Apple between April 24th, 2015 and February 6th, 2024. Anyone who fits those criteria has until April 10th to confirm or update their payment information to receive a payout. According to the settlement’s FAQ site, the payment is estimated to be roughly $20 to $50 per covered watch. Accepting a payment means you also give up any future action regarding battery issues on these particular watches. Those who do not wish to be part of the settlement have until February 24th, 2025 to exclude themselves or object to the settlement.

Update, January 31st: Added comment from Apple.

Apple wants to ensure it has a voice in the remedies trial for the Justice Department’s search monopolization case against Google, and filed an emergency motion to stay the proceedings while it appeals the district court’s denial of its request to be more directly heard in the case.

The remedies phase of the trial is set to begin in April, since US District Court Judge Amit Mehta already found Google liable for illegal monopolization in the general search market. Even though Apple is not technically a party in the case, it has played a significant role in it — the billions of dollars Google pays Apple each year for default placement on iOS helped convinced Mehta of Google’s monopoly power.

Mehta denied Apple’s request to take a limited role in the remedies phase of the case in an order earlier this week, saying it didn’t file fast enough. Instead, he said, Apple could file post-hearing briefs explaining its views. The DOJ and state plaintiffs had opposed Apple taking part in the proceedings, while Google did not take a position.

Apple believes it now needs to take a role in the case because unlike in the earlier stage, its interests may no longer be sufficiently represented by Google. The government’s proposals to end lucrative deals for Apple — where Google pays for default positioning — “implicates concerns unique to Apple,” it says. Apple worries that Google will need to decide which arguments to focus on most — including the government’s request that the Chrome browser business be spun out — and the ones that concern Apple might not be adequately covered.

Apple writes that if its appeal isn’t handled until after the remedies trial has begun and it’s unable to participate, “Apple may well be forced to stand mute at trial, as a mere spectator, while the government pursues an extreme remedy that targets Apple by name and would prohibit any commercial arrangement between Apple and Google for a decade. This would leave Apple without the ability to defend its right to reach other arrangements with Google that could benefit millions of users and Apple’s entitlement to compensation for distributing Google search to its users.”

While Mehta hopes to resolve the case by August, Apple says that “the concern about a short delay is outweighed by the need for a fully developed record that includes information that only Apple can develop,” like how the DOJ’s proposals to eliminate Google’s monopoly power would impact Apple, and why they might not work. Apple said in its initial motion to intervene that it would offer evidence that despite the government’s suggestions, it would not create a general search engine were it not bound by its default agreement with Google.

If Mehta doesn’t grant the stay pending appeal, Apple requested at the very least that it gain access to discovery and depositions as a non-party while the Circuit Court considers its appeal. “Absent a stay,” the company writes, “Apple will suffer irreparable harm.”

DeepSeek startled everyone last month with the claim that its AI model uses roughly one-tenth the amount of computing power as Meta’s Llama 3.1 model, upending an entire worldview of how much energy and resources it’ll take to develop artificial intelligence. 

Taken at face value, that claim could have tremendous implications for the environmental impact of AI. Tech giants are rushing to build out massive AI data centers, with plans for some to use as much electricity as small cities. Generating that much electricity creates pollution, raising fears about how the physical infrastructure undergirding new generative AI tools could exacerbate climate change and worsen air quality.

Reducing how much energy it takes to train and run generative AI models could alleviate much of that stress. But it’s still too early to gauge whether DeepSeek will be a game-changer when it comes to AI’s environmental footprint. Much will depend on how other major players respond to the Chinese startup’s breakthroughs, especially considering plans to build new data centers. 

“It just shows that AI doesn’t have to be an energy hog,” says Madalsa Singh, …

Read the full story at The Verge.

Blackmagic Design has announced that it’s finally bringing several advanced features already available for the iOS version of its free camera app to Android. The Blackmagic Camera for Android 2.0 update released this week allows several smartphones running the app to be monitored and controlled from a single device, including, for the first time, a small selection of Android tablets.

The new multicam remote functionality, which was introduced on the iOS and iPadOS versions of the app last August, allows a single Android smartphone or tablet to be connected to up to nine other phones running the camera app over a Wi-Fi or wired network. The controller device can be used to monitor the live video feeds from all the connected phones in a multi-view layout, start or stop recordings, and adjust settings such as focus, zoom, frame rate, white balance, and shutter angle individually or on all the phones at once.

Although the Blackmagic Camera app was originally released in September 2023 for iOS devices, the rollout for Android has been much slower and staggered. When the app finally launched on Android last June, it was only compatible with a handful of Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel smartphones. Blackmagic Design has been slowly expanding the app’s compatibility to other Android devices, and this week’s update adds support for the Samsung Galaxy S25, S25 Plus, and S25 Ultra. The newly added support for Android tablets is limited to the Xiaomi Pad 6 and Samsung Tab S9.

Other features introduced in the Blackmagic Camera for Android 2.0 update include support for Tilta’s USB lens control system, a UI update allowing users to “drag-select multiple media clips,” German language support, and the ability to capture video at 120 and 240fps on Sony Xperia smartphones that support that feature.

The holidays are over, a new year is here, and along with all the various upheavals that we are facing (including some possible changes in tax law), most of us have to deal with our annual income taxes. Sorry about that.

Tax day this year falls, for most of us, on the traditional April 15th. There are exceptions: for example, if you live in California and in an area that’s been affected by wildfires, you are eligible for tax relief and an extended deadline of October 15th.

Despite the stress that many of us feel at the thought of tackling our yearly taxes, try not to worry — we’re going to list some resources that are available so that you can prepare your taxes. As always, it might not be a bad idea to start working on those taxes as soon as possible to avoid any last-minute panic. And whether you’re a full-time worker dealing with a single W-2 or a freelancer / gig worker getting a series of 1099s, the fastest way to pay the piper these days is to do it online.

On the positive side of the ledger, if you live and work in one of 25 states, there’s now a new way to figure out your taxes: via the IRS’s own Direct File program. We’ll get to that in a moment.

To begi …

Read the full story at The Verge.

TikTok’s traffic is almost back to normal despite its delayed return to US app stores, according to Cloudflare Radar data seen by CNBC. The “DNS traffic for TikTok-related domains” is around 10 percent lower than the levels before its abrupt shutdown, David Belson, Cloudflare’s head of data insight, told CNBC.

To compare, TikTok’s traffic dipped as much as 85 percent when the app went dark in response to the US divest-or-ban law, Cloudflare reported at the time. TikTok started coming back online on January 19th, but the app has remained unavailable on Google Play and the Apple App Store ever since.

The shutdown also affected other apps owned by TikTok parent company ByteDance, including Marvel Snap, CapCut, and Lemon8. Even though all three apps have restored their services in the US, they aren’t available in app stores, either — and there’s no indication when they might return. Many users unable to download the apps have resorted to methods like using a VPN or changing their Apple ID region to Canada in an attempt to get them back.

President Donald Trump has since signed an executive order delaying TikTok’s ban, but the app still isn’t in the clear just yet. That legal uncertainty might be what’s making Apple and Google hesitant to bring TikTok and other ByteDance-owned apps back to their stores.

Dell is the latest tech company to announce it’s ending its hybrid and remote work policy. Starting March 3rd, Dell employees will have to show up in person five days a week.

In an email obtained by Business Insider, CEO Michael Dell writes that “all hybrid and remote team members who live near a Dell office will work in the office five days a week. We are retiring the hybrid policy effective that day.”

“What we’re finding is that for all the technology in the world, nothing is faster than the speed of human interaction. A thirty second conversation can replace an email back-and-forth that goes on for hours or even days,” Dell writes.

Despite this mandate, Dell also continues to sell remote work solutions, noting that remote work offers “benefits such as flexibility, reduced commute times, and cost savings for employees, while employers can access a broader talent pool, reduce overhead costs, and increase productivity.”

Technically, Dell had already required its sales, manufacturing, and lab engineers to return to office. The email cites the “new speed, energy, and passion” from those teams as a reason for implementing it company-wide globally. For previously remote workers who don’t live near an office, Dell says they can continue to work remotely.

Dell is not the only company to issue return-to-office mandates in recent months. AT&T, Amazon, Stellantis, and JP Morgan have all either started or announced return-to-work policies this month. Meanwhile, President Trump also issued an executive order last week requiring all federal employees to return to office, noting that all government departments “terminate remote work arrangements.”

Stargate is a staggering power grab.

OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has spent the past year seeking an absurd amount of computing power to train the company’s AI models — one report says Japanese officials literally laughed at the amount of electricity he demanded. The stakes were clear: without massive computing resources, OpenAI risked losing ground to tech giants like Google and Meta, who’ve spent years building their AI infrastructure.

But last week, this impossible dream became a press release. Altman secured a mind-boggling $500 billion commitment to build OpenAI’s data center empire, called Stargate, thanks to backing from SoftBank, Oracle, and the Abu Dhabi fund MGX. The White House added its stamp of approval in a press conference, with President Donald Trump flanked by Altman, Oracle cofounder Larry Ellison, and SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son. (The name references a 1994 sci-fi movie, where the stargate is an ancient transportation portal controlled by an all-powerful ruler.)

If it materializes, Stargate could effectively be the largest private computing infrastructure project in history. It would mean a network of massive computing complexes — each spanning hundreds of ac …

Read the full story at The Verge.