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What the heck is a Passkey?
If you're like me, you've probably been seeing prompts to set up a passkey for about a year now. And if you're also like me, you may have been hitting "not now" every time you see them. Every few weeks Google asks
Joel Folgner
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Outlook icon confusion
If you've opened the Start menu on Windows in the last few years and found yourself staring at multiple different Outlook icons, you're not losing your mind. There is a reason the meme above exists. It's confusing. What is the Outlook (new) anyway? Microsoft
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IT twins wipe 96 government databases.
On February 18, 2025, twin brothers Sohaib and Muneeb Akhter were fired during a video call from Opexus, a Washington D.C. tech contractor that hosts data for more than 45 federal agencies. By the time the call ended, 96 federal databases were gone. The window from termination to destruction
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The data center boom reaches Hillsboro, OR.
In Fayette County, Georgia, a data center used over 30 million gallons of water without paying for it. Investigators eventually found two industrial hookups that weren't being monitored. One hookup had been installed without the utility's knowledge. This happened while drought conditions had local officials asking
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The Chatbot: What We Actually Know About AI Companions and Mental Health
Headlines about AI chatbots and mental health have largely been about teenagers, but the data points elsewhere. In January, JAMA Network Open published a survey of nearly 21,000 American adults led by Roy Perlis at Massachusetts General Hospital. Daily users of generative AI were more likely to screen positive
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The Disturbing Reality of AI-Powered Plush Toys
Last fall, a $99 plush bear named Kumma told researchers from the US Public Interest Research Group where to find pills and matches and engaged in graphic sexual conversation. The bear is sold on Amazon. It runs on OpenAI's GPT-4o. It's part of the wave Wired
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Google is sending a few clicks back to your website
Google announced five changes to AI Overviews on Tuesday. The most visible one is a new "Further Exploration" section at the bottom of AI-generated answers that links out to articles, case studies, and reports. The other four are smaller: a "Subscribed" label that flags content from
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Four steps to fix your printer (and the rule for when to stop)
People just don't have the need to print as often as they used to. But every once in a while, you end up needing a nice freshly printed document. Usually for something important. You hit the print button and wipe the dust off your old printer waiting for
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Fake face. Real money.
A reporter at 404 Media got on a Microsoft Teams call recently and watched his own face appear on someone else, in real time. The face moved when the other person moved. Lighting changes held. Expressions tracked. The software is designed and sold for impersonation scams, and it works as
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A third of new websites are AI-generated. A Stanford study explains what changed.
Researchers from Stanford, Imperial College London, and the Internet Archive sampled the web for 33 months and found that by mid-2025, roughly 35% of newly published websites were classified as AI-generated or AI-assisted. That number was zero before ChatGPT launched in late 2022. Three years to remake a third of
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I Can’t Let You Save That, Dave: The AI Hard Drive Hostage Crisis
The AI data center boom has bought up enough storage to break the market for everyone else. Western Digital, one of the biggest hard drive makers, has sold out its entire 2026 enterprise inventory. Micron, the parent company of Crucial, just quit the consumer SSD market entirely. The Internet Archive
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The big ChatGPT-in-education study just got retracted.
Springer Nature pulled a meta-analysis last month that claimed ChatGPT helps students learn. The paper had been cited hundreds of times. It was a year old. The journal said discrepancies in the analysis undermined their confidence in the findings. The authors didn't respond to the journal's