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Tech News
Taiwanese prosecutors have charged nine individuals connected to a scheme accused of illegally routing AI servers containing Nvidia chips to China, circumventing U.S. export restrictions. The case highlights ongoing efforts by Chinese buyers to obtain restricted American semiconductor technology through indirect channels.
Digital car keys, which rely on UWB or NFC to confirm phone proximity, avoid the relay attacks that plague traditional key fobs. However, they introduce new vulnerabilities: a stolen or dead phone could theoretically lock owners out or grant access to thieves, though automakers build in safeguards like remote lockdown features and reserve battery power for NFC access lasting up to five hours after a phone dies.
Android Authority polled over 4,200 readers on the best alternative to Google's new Pixel 11, and the Samsung Galaxy S26 won with roughly 26% of the vote. The budget-friendly Motorola Edge (2026) finished a close second, trailing by just 54 votes, while the pricier Pixel 11 Pro came in third with about 18.5% support.
A Reddit user with an Asus ROG Zephyrus G14 found that running the laptop in Asus' Eco mode, which disables the discrete GeForce RTX 5070 Ti GPU to save battery, caused Windows to eventually uninstall the Nvidia drivers entirely. Investigation of Windows logs revealed that pnpclean.dll, a routine that purges drivers for hardware absent past a timeout period, treated the disabled GPU as permanently disconnected after 15 days and wiped its drivers.
OpenAI has introduced ChatGPT Work, a version of its assistant that goes beyond answering questions to actually performing multi-step tasks like browsing the web, managing files, and completing sequences of actions autonomously. The feature is available to both free and paid ChatGPT users, though paid tiers unlock greater capacity for agentic tasks.
CD Projekt Red joint CEO Michał Nowakowski said in a new video that the studio is aiming to release The Witcher 4 in 2028. Before that, the company plans a 2027 launch for Songs of the Past, an expansion for The Witcher 3, which will be featured at Gamescom's Opening Night Live this week.
A gear guide covering Kindle accessories has been refreshed for August 2026, adding a section on compatible wall and portable chargers alongside updated pricing. The guide, written by a reviewer who owns every current Kindle model, covers cases, straps, stickers, charms, book holders and page-turning remotes meant to make reading more comfortable or personalized.
Chuwi has released the Unibook, a budget laptop built around Intel's new Core Series 3 'Wildcat Lake' processor, priced at $449 with 8GB of RAM. The launch comes as rivals like Dell and Acer struggle to match or undercut Apple's MacBook Neo, which itself saw a $100 price hike just three months after debuting amid a wider memory-chip price surge.
Vivo product manager Han Boxiao revealed on Weibo that the upcoming X500 Pro will use a custom 'Ultra Dynamic Camera' sensor, co-developed with ZEISS and Sony, offering 17 stops of dynamic range. The phone is also claimed to be the first to record slow-motion video at 4K resolution and 240 frames per second, ahead of an expected September launch.
Valve, the studio behind Half-Life and Steam, was founded on August 24, 1996, by former Microsoft engineers Gabe Newell and Mike Harrington. The company released Half-Life in 1998, reshaping first-person shooter design, then launched Steam in 2003, establishing digital game distribution as an industry standard. Today the company celebrates its 30th anniversary with both products still shaping the industry.
Researchers at Kyoto University led by Mitsuaki Kaneko, Shunya Shibata, and Tsunenobu Kimoto built a silicon carbide transistor that operates at 600°C using standard ion implantation, the same doping process used in commercial chip fabs. Their bottom-gate, double-well design narrowed the gap between designed and measured threshold voltage to under 0.1V at 400°C, a sharp improvement from the more than 2V drift seen in conventional layouts, while also curbing substrate leakage as temperatures rise.
HP has cut $2,200 off its Omen Max 45L gaming desktop, dropping the price to $4,799.99 for a complete system built around an RTX 5090 GPU, 64GB of DDR5 RAM, a 2TB SSD, and an Intel Core Ultra 9 285K processor. That price is roughly $30 less than what the RTX 5090 graphics card alone currently costs at retail, making the entire prebuilt machine effectively cheaper than one of its components.