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Anker issued a recall for five popular power banks back in June - here's the latest update

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Back in June, several Anker power banks were called for safety issues. The list included the popular PowerCore 10000 power bank. We've listed the steps to follow if you own one of the recalled products. Anker has had a rough summer. Between June and July 2025, the company issued two separate recalls for a number of power banks over the past few weeks. This has prompted a question from o

Epic will let Fortnite creators sell in-game items in latest attempt to compete with Roblox

Creators building experiences in Fortnite are getting a new way to earn revenue. Epic says developers will soon have the ability to make and sell in-game items in Fortnite, and earn a cut of the V-Bucks users spend to buy them. Previously, developers only earned money through Fortnite based on the amount of time users spent on their "islands," the in-game name for third-party experiences creators can offer through Fortnite. Developers will be able to create their consumable and durable in-game

Google Tasks may finally add this critical time-management feature (APK teardown)

Andy Walker / Android Authority TL;DR We’ve spotted that Google Tasks looks to be testing deadline support. Deadlines would only be an option to add when editing a task, rather than when it’s created. The test version does not allow you to specify a deadline time and does not display the due date in the main list view. Google Tasks has always been a bare-bones tool. For some, that’s part of the appeal, but its stripped-down approach often leaves power users wanting more. The lack of sharing,

Zoning out in meetings? Google Meet's new feature can catch you up in real time

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways Ask Gemini is now available for some Google Meet users. It offers meeting notes, key takeaways, and live summaries. The AI assistant protects user privacy and has some limitations. Your Google Meet meetings are about to get more helpful, thanks to additional Gemini features built into the platform. According to Google, new Ask Gemini features include real-time summaries of what someone

Configuration files are user interfaces

18 Sep, 2025 We have all been there. Your software keeps growing and you feel the need to make it customizable. It is too soon for a full-blown UI with all the bells and whistles, so your pragmatic instinct suggests a text-based configuration file. Yes, that’s exactly it! You rejoice knowing the software’s configuration will be trivial to version control. Your pragmatic instinct is satisfied as well; the door remains open to creating a proper UI later, since it would be merely a graphical view

Anker’s recent power bank recall involves over 481,000 units

is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid. The US Consumer Product Safety Commission (USCPSC) has issued a formal notice with more details about the five power banks that Anker voluntarily recalled earlier this year. The agency has received 33 reports of incidents involving fires and explosions caused by the power banks, with four of them causing “minor burn injuries” and one resulting in

Coinbase CEO says banks are fighting stablecoin rewards with 'boogeyman' issues

Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong and other crypto executives took to Capitol Hill this week as part of a regulatory showdown between the industry and banks with potentially trillions at stake. Banking advocacy groups are urging lawmakers to prohibit crypto exchanges like Coinbase from offering customers rewards that are structured like interest payments banks offer. "I'm not sure why the banks would want to bring that up again at this point, but they should have to compete on a level playing field

TernFS – An exabyte scale, multi-region distributed filesystem

TernFS — an exabyte scale, multi-region distributed filesystem September 2025 XTX is an algorithmic trading firm: it builds statistical models that produce price forecasts for over 50,000 financial instruments worldwide. We use those forecasts to make trades. As XTX's research efforts to build better models ramped up, the demand for resources kept increasing. The firm started out with a couple of desktops and an NFS server, and 10 years later ended up with tens of thousands of high-end GPUs,

PSA: The Starbucks app is broken, but here’s how to use it anyway

A slew of people are reporting that the Starbucks app is completely broken. With too-perfect irony, the thing that is breaking it is an app satisfaction survey … Multiple users are reporting that the app forces you to complete the survey before you can use the app to do anything radical like, oh, I don’t know, ordering a cup of coffee. The problem is that even after you have completed the survey, it still doesn’t let you in: it just loops back to the survey. Twitter user Ike found a workaround

The quality of AI-assisted software depends on unit of work management

The craft of AI-assisted software creation is substantially about correctly managing units of work. When I was new to this emerging craft of AI-assisted coding, I was getting lousy results, despite the models being rather intelligent. Turns out the major bottleneck is not intelligence, but rather providing the correct context. Andrej Karpathy, while referencing my earlier article on this topic, described the work of AI-assisted engineering as “putting AI on a tight leash”. What does a tight le

Democrats are investigating Trump crypto advisor David Sacks over a possible SGE violation

Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) and Representative Melanie Stansbury (D-N.M.) are leading a group of congressional Democrats in investigating White House Special Advisor David Sacks for possibly serving in his position for longer than he's allowed. Sacks, a former PayPal executive and venture capitalist at Craft Ventures, was originally picked by President Donald Trump to be the "White House A.I. & Crypto Czar" in 2024. "Any effort to stay beyond the time limits imposed on you as a Special Gove

Sen. Warren presses Trump AI and crypto czar Sacks on whether he's overstayed his job

U.S. President Donald Trump sits next to Crypto czar David Sacks at the White House Crypto Summit at the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., March 7, 2025. What was meant to be a short-term assignment for venture capitalist David Sacks in President Donald Trump's White House appears to have stretched into something much bigger, according to leading Democratic lawmakers. Sen. Elizabeth Warren, D-Mass., and Rep. Melanie Stansbury, D-N.M., have teamed up with a number of other progressive poli

Zoom's New AI Tool Will Tell You What Meetings to Skip

The next time your boss asks you why you skipped a meeting, you could blame it on Zoom. The video conferencing company unveiled a host of new AI upgrades on Wednesday, all aimed at improving its AI to do tasks for you. Zoom introduced its AI companion two years ago, letting people use it to take notes, transcribe meetings or ask its chatbot follow-up questions after a meeting is over. Now, Zoom is upgrading it to what it calls AI Companion 3.0. The tool will be more agentic, meaning it is built

Topics: ai meeting new tasks zoom

How to Change Your Kindle’s Language: Spanish, French, Japanese, and More (2025)

Looking to learn a new language? Reading is a great way to start, and you don't need a physical book to do it: Here's how to change your Kindle's language (and download books in other languages!) to learn right from your favorite e-reader. Reading a different language helps you expand your vocabulary and nail down nuances like sentence structure, and for visual learners like myself it can be the ideal way to start really learning information. Lucky for all of us e-reader lovers, Kindle's ebook

WIRED’s Best E-Readers, Tested and Reviewed (2025): Kindle, Kobo, Boox

Comparing Our Favorite E-Readers Model Display Resolution Color? Storage Weight Battery Life and Charging Kindle Paperwhite (2024, 12th Generation) 7 inches, adjustable warm light 300 ppi (pixels per inch) No 6 GB 7.4 ounces Up to 12 weeks, USB-C charging Kindle Paperwhite Signature Edition (2024, 12th Generation) 7 inches, auto-adjusting front light 300 ppi No 32 GB 7.55 ounces Up to 12 weeks, USB-C and wireless charging Kobo Libra Colour 7 inches, adjustable front light 300 ppi, black-and-whi

Google Ventures doubles down on dev tool startup Blacksmith just 4 months after its seed round

As speed becomes the defining currency in an AI-driven software world, Blacksmith has raised another round led by Google Ventures — just four months after its seed — to accelerate how code gets shipped. The $10 million Series A closed in just 14 days, with Google Ventures doubling down after first backing Blacksmith’s $3.5 million seed in May. At the time, Alphabet’s VC arm bet on the size of the market and the founding team, which included veterans of Cockroach Labs, another GV portfolio compa

Cloudflare CEO’s ‘Frighteningly Likely’ Forecast for How AI Will Ruin the Internet

Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince is the latest tech executive to ring the warning bells for a near-term dystopian AI scenario. Speaking to WIRED’s Big Interview Podcast on Tuesday, Prince said that he thinks the days of search engines being “the dominant interface of the web” are already long gone. “Now, if you run a search, it gives you back an answer at the top of the page. It doesn’t give you a treasure map. Instead, it provides you with what they call an AI Overview, which has taken a whole b

One Vigilante, 22 Cell Tower Fires, and a World of Conspiracies

As dawn spread over San Antonio on September 9, 2021, almond-colored smoke began to fill the sky above the city’s Far West Side. The plumes were whorling off the top of a 132-foot-tall cell tower that overshadows an office park just north of SeaWorld. At a hotel a mile away, a paramedic snapped a photo of the spectacle and posted it to the r/sanantonio subreddit. “Cell tower on fire around 1604 and Culebra,” he wrote. In typical Reddit fashion, the comments section piled up with corny jokes. “B

One Vigilante, 22 Cell Towers, and a World of Conspiracies

As dawn spread over San Antonio on September 9, 2021, almond-colored smoke began to fill the sky above the city’s Far West Side. The plumes were whorling off the top of a 132-foot-tall cell tower that overshadows an office park just north of SeaWorld. At a hotel a mile away, a paramedic snapped a photo of the spectacle and posted it to the r/sanantonio subreddit. “Cell tower on fire around 1604 and Culebra,” he wrote. In typical Reddit fashion, the comments section piled up with corny jokes. “B

React is winning by default and slowing innovation

React-by-default has hidden costs. Here's a case for making deliberate choices to select the right framework for the job. React Won by Default – And It’s Killing Frontend Innovation React is no longer winning by technical merit. Today it is winning by default. That default is now slowing innovation across the frontend ecosystem. When teams need a new frontend, the conversation rarely starts with “What are the constraints and which tool best fits them?” It often starts with “Let’s use React; e

Calif. construction worker unofficially broke a fabled world record

It was a muggy July day in Santa Cruz and life could not have been more mundane for Alessandro “Alo” Slebir. The 24-year-old was pounding wooden concrete forms into a missing section of sidewalk. Cars raced by on a suburban highway as a neighbor walked over, looked at Slebir and asked, “Should I move my car?” “Hey, no worries, you’re fine! You’re not in the way,” Slebir said, in his characteristically friendly demeanor before returning to his hammer. You wouldn’t know it from the work boots or

Google thinks it can have AI summaries and a healthy web, too

So, I don’t want to speak about the specifics of the lawsuit, but I can speak to our philosophy here, which is, look, we want a healthy ecosystem. The 10 blue links serve the ecosystem very well, and it was a simple value proposition. We provided links that directed users free of charge to billions of publications around the world. We’re not going to abandon that model. We think that there’s use for that model. It’s still an important part of the ecosystem. But user preferences, and what users

Crowdstrike and Meta just made evaluating AI security tools easier

fotograzia/Moment via Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways AI is both a cybersecurity threat and a solution. Benchmarks will test LLMs for real-world cybersecurity tasks. The suite could help developers build better models. Overwhelmed with cybersecurity tool options? A new set of benchmark tests aims to help you evaluate them and find the right ones for you. Also: Navigating AI-powered cyber threats in 2025: 4 expert security tips for b

The madness of SaaS chargebacks

Press enter or click to view image in full size The $10 Payment That Cost Me $43.95 — The Madness of SaaS Chargebacks Mike Kulakov 5 min read · Just now Just now -- Listen Share We run several SaaS products at Everhour, all billed through Stripe. Majority of the time everything works fine, but sometimes we get chargebacks. Even thought we do everything possible to prevent them. We don’t ask for a credit card until the moment of subscription. A few days before each renewal, we send an email no

PayPal adds new one-to-one payment links that will soon support crypto

PayPal is introducing a new way for people to send money to one another through peer-to-peer (p2p) payments made via personalized, one-time links. The system, called PayPal Links, complements the company’s existing feature called PayPal Me, which will continue to exist as a way to share your profile information and make it easier to get found and paid. The company explains that PayPal Me links are not payment requests tied to a specific amount — at least until the receiver inputs how much they

PayPal Links lets you send and receive money much faster now - even crypto

Silas Stein/picture alliance via Getty Images Follow ZDNET: Add us as a preferred source on Google. ZDNET's key takeaways PayPal Links lets you send and request money with other PayPal users. You can share the payment link in an email, direct message, or text. PayPal is also adding cryptocurrency as a payment method. Move over, Zelle. Watch out, CashApp. PayPal has unveiled a new type of peer-to-peer payment method that promises to be easier and simpler than other options. On Monday, the

The $10 Payment That Cost Me $43.95 – The Madness of SaaS Chargebacks

Press enter or click to view image in full size The $10 Payment That Cost Me $43.95 — The Madness of SaaS Chargebacks Mike Kulakov 5 min read · Just now Just now -- Listen Share We run several SaaS products at Everhour, all billed through Stripe. Majority of the time everything works fine, but sometimes we get chargebacks. Even thought we do everything possible to prevent them. We don’t ask for a credit card until the moment of subscription. A few days before each renewal, we send an email no

'Gen V' Season 2: How to Watch New Episodes of 'The Boys' Spinoff

Prime Video's standard service comes with ad breaks for viewers in the US. If you want to go ad-free, there's an additional fee of $3 per month. This option is available to both Amazon Prime subscribers and those who pay for a standalone Prime Video membership. For more information about the streamer, check out our recently updated review.

In Silksong, spite is my motivation to keep playing

is a reporter who covers the business, culture, and communities of video games, with a focus on marginalized gamers and the quirky, horny culture of video game communities. I would not call the time I’m having with Hollow Knight: Silksong “fun,” and yet I’m still playing. In the depths of The Marrow, the second major area of Silksong, there’s a particularly nasty midboss. I eventually beat him, but my reward wasn’t a new ability, item, or a bench where I could rest and save my progress. All I

Snapchat rolls out Group Streaks and 'Infinite Retention' for chats

Snapchat has introduced a couple of new features it says are "highly requested" by its users. The first is "Infinite Retention," which as its name implies will allow you to keep a chat history like you could on a messaging app and prevent your messages from disappearing. "We’ve often heard from our community that Snapchatters want to save their chats forever and wish they could build streaks with their favorite groups," its announcement reads. The app has been testing the feature since 2024, an