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'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean? ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or

A smart sensor assessed my home's risk of electrical fires, and I was impressed

'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean? ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or

Document.write

This is really cool: ...blah... <script>writeImage("dog.jpg", "my dog")</script> ... blah blah... Under the hood it works like this: function writeImage(url, title) { document.write(` <img src="${url}"><div class="caption">${title}</div> `); } And leads to: ...blah... <img src="dog.jpg"><div class="caption">My dog</div> ...blah blah... Whoa, HTML templating? It inserts the stuff directly where the function is called, and it just works? And it's been available in browsers forever? Stop the

Once Again, Oil States Thwart Agreement on Plastics

Diplomats from around the world concluded nine days of talks in Geneva — plus a marathon overnight session that lasted into the early hours of Friday — with no agreement on a global plastics treaty. During a closing plenary that started on Friday at 6:30 a.m. — more than 15 hours after it was originally scheduled to begin — nearly all countries opposed an updated draft of the U.N. treaty that was put forward by the negotiating committee chair, the Ecuadorian diplomat Luis Vayas Valdivieso. Many

How One Wikipedia Editor Unraveled the ‘Single Largest Self-Promotion Operation’ in the Site's History

Quick—what are the top entries in the category "Wikipedia articles written in the greatest number of languages"? The answer is countries. Turkey tops the list with Wikipedia entries in 332 different languages, while the US is second with 327 and Japan is third with 324. Other common words make their appearance as one looks down the list. "Dog" (275 languages) tops "cat" (273). Jesus (274) beats "Adolf Hitler" (242). And all of them beat "sex" (122), which is also bested by "fever," "Chiang Kai

19 Best Back-to-School Deals for 2025

It's “back to school” season for some and “been back in school” season for others, but regardless of your specific situation, now is the time of year when retailers are discounting all the school essentials. We've hunted down discounts on the best back-to-school gear our reviewers have hand-tested, from laptops and mattress toppers to bags and chairs. Be sure to check out our related guides, including the Best Back-to-School Laptop Deals, the Best Dorm Gear, and the Best Kids Backpacks. Top Ba

Laura Loomer and the limits of posting everything

For all the power she wields with the White House’s affairs, Laura Loomer does not have the traditional tools that her rivals in the MAGA influencer industrial complex have — the highest follower count, the most political power, the most internet platforms, etc. But the fact remains that she’s the influencer responsible for getting Donald Trump to fire over a dozen members of his administration (and counting) for the hazily-defined crime of being disloyal to MAGA. This is something that none of

Single Sign on for Furries

Single Sign On for Furries Published Today If I were to bootstrap a furry convention today for its first year, without writing any code, I'd probably start with a square store to handle both online and in person transactions, a custom domain, a social media account, and an email address for any business communications. Check in for pre-registrations will be clunky, but for a 100-300 attendance event, it should be feasible. Disclosure: I have no personal experience with Square. I know people t

PuTTY has a new website

PuTTY landing page PuTTY is a free software SSH client for Windows and also Unix, including an xterm -style terminal emulator. It is written and maintained primarily by Simon Tatham. Go straight to the download page for the latest version, or to the main website.

Best Practices for Building Agentic AI Systems

I’ve been experimenting with adding AI agents to UserJot, our feedback, roadmap, and changelog platform. Not the simple “one prompt, one response” stuff. Real agent systems where multiple specialized agents communicate, delegate tasks, and somehow don’t crash into each other. The goal was to analyze customer feedback at scale. Find patterns across hundreds of posts. Auto-generate changelog entries. Things that were basically impossible to do manually. I spent weeks reverse engineering tools lik

Lawyers File AI Slop in Murder Case

This is getting out of hand. Fool Me Twice Yet another team of lawyers was found leaving AI slop in court documents. It's the latest example of white-collar professionals outsourcing their work to confidently wrong AI tools — and this time, it's not just about any old frivolous lawsuit. As The Guardian reports, a pair of Australian lawyers named Rishi Nathwani and Amelia Beech, who are representing a 16-year-old defendant in a murder case, were caught using AI after documents they submitted t

Timothy Olyphant’s 8 Greatest Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and Horror Roles

After Deadwood and Justified, Timothy Olyphant will forever be linked first and foremost to Westerns. And while he’s clearly aware of that—playing off that association in roles that veer into other genres—he’s also a versatile star who’s popped up in comedies and dramas, as well as the sci-fi, horror, and fantasy tales we cover at io9. Here are our eight favorite genre roles so far, starting with his current project… Alien: Earth The newly launched FX sci-fi series is mapping out a fresh small

Today's Wordle Hints, Answer and Help for Aug. 16, #1519

Looking for the most recent Wordle answer? Click here for today's Wordle hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Connections, Connections: Sports Edition and Strands puzzles. Today's Wordle puzzle was a puzzler for me. I know the answer word, and the letters aren't super-rare, but I didn't seem to be able to put them in the right places. If you need a new starter word, check out our list of which letters show up the most in English words. If you need

This Country Wants to Replace Its Corrupt Government With AI

With so much buzzy tech floating around these days, it's only natural for national governments to experiment as well. For the past few years, the country of El Salvador's been experimenting with Bitcoin as legal tender, a woefully ineffective system that's had he opposite of its stated effects. In the United States, president Donald Trump is experimenting with a $500 billion AI infrastructure project, a massive campaign that's sat dormant for half a year. And in Albania, which is home to 2.7 m

Model intelligence is no longer the constraint for automation

The perception is that model improvement seems to be stagnating. GPT-5 wasn’t the step change that people were expecting. Yet, models continue to improve on reasoning benchmarks. Recently, both OpenAI and Google models were on par with gold medallists in the International Mathematical Olympiad 2025 (IMO). At the same time it’s still difficult to make AI agents work for relatively simple enterprise use cases. Why is there such a disparity in model performance between problem domains? Why are mode

Do yourself a favor and skip buying a Google Pixel right now - it'll be worth it

'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean? ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or

A mind–reading brain implant that comes with password protection

A brain scan (artificially coloured) produced by magnetic resonance imaging. Credit: K H Fung/Science Photo Library A brain implant can decode a person’s internal chatter — but the device works only if the user thinks of a preset password1. The mind-reading device, or brain–computer interface (BCI), accurately deciphered up to 74% of imagined sentences. The system began decoding users’ internal speech — the silent dialogue in people’s minds — only when they thought of a specific keyword. This

TextKit 2 – The Promised Land

TextKit 2 (NSTextLayoutManager) API was announced publicly during WWDC21, which is over 4 years ago. Before that, it was in private development for a few years and gained widespread adoption in the macOS and iOS frameworks. Promised an easier, faster, overall better API and text layout engine that replaces the aged TextKit 1 (NSLayoutManager) engine. Over the years, I gained some level of expertise in TextKit 2 and macOS/iOS text processing, which resulted in STTextView - a re-implementation of

dbrand’s Joy-Con grip nightmare is coming to an end as it starts shipping replacements

Oliver Cragg / Android Authority TL;DR Accessory maker dbrand has officially started shipping its Joy-Lock Grips. The replacement grips are designed so that Joy-Cons won’t detach from the Switch 2, even when 87% of the console’s weight is put on the magnetic hinge. The replacement kit also includes a set of Dock Adapter Friction Pads. Accessory maker dbrand is well-known for its high-quality products. However, the company recently found itself embroiled in controversy shortly after releasing

Next week’s Google event is sounding more like a late-night talk show lineup

TL;DR The Made by Google event next week will feature celebrity guests alongside product reveals. Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Curry, Lando Norris, and the Jonas Brothers are among the teased guests. The event celebrates 10 generations of Pixel and ends with the tagline “Get outside your comfort phone.” It looks like Google’s big Pixel launch next week won’t just be about the hardware. In what appears to be a bid to draw a wider audience than tech nerds like us, Google is rolling out the red carpet

Cisco patches critical security hole in Firewall Management Center - act now

Olemedia/iStock/Getty Images Plus via Getty Images ZDNET's key takeaways Cisco's Secure Firewall Management Center security hole is as bad as they get. There is no mitigation and no workaround. Patch immediately. So far, no confirmed active exploits have been confirmed. Get more in-depth ZDNET tech coverage: Add us as a preferred Google source on Chrome and Chromium browsers. Do you use Cisco's Secure Firewall Management Center (FMC) software? If your company operates a serious network usi

Launch HN: Embedder (YC S25) – Claude code for embedded software

Hey HN - We’re Bob and Ethan from Embedder ( https://embedder.dev ), a hardware-aware AI coding agent that can write firmware and test it on physical hardware. Here’s a demo in which we integrate a magnetometer for the Pebble 2 smartwatch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WOpAfeiFQkQ We were frustrated by the gap between coding agents and the realities of writing firmware. We'd ask Cursor to, say, write an I2C driver for a new sensor on an STM32, and it would confidently spit out code that used

Notorious Boar’s Head Plant to Reopen a Year After Listeria Outbreak That Killed 10

Boar’s Head plans to reopen a meat packaging plant in Jarratt, Virginia, that was the source of a listeria outbreak in 2024 that sickened dozens of people and killed 10. The company had closed the plant indefinitely after liverwurst packaged there had been linked to the deaths. A shocking report from the New York Times shortly after the Boar’s Head recall explained that the plant had evidence of meat that was exposed to wet ceilings, extensive rust, and the presence of green mold. But last mont

TikTok’s new guidelines add subtle changes for LIVE creators, AI content, and more

TikTok is preparing an update to its Community Guidelines, which dictate the rules for participating on the social video platform as well as what standards the company uses to determine the videos that make it onto its For You feed. While the update largely rewrites the original text for simplicity’s sake, there are a few items that jump out in the new revision — notably how TikTok prioritizes its marketplace, how deeply it personalizes the experience per user, and a small change to the type of

iPhone 17 release is rumored for September: Here's what to know ahead of Apple's fall event

The Apple iPhone event is right around the corner, which means the huge tech company will finally reveal its iPhone 17 lineup. The latest iOS 26 features will come preinstalled on the new models, as well as any additional features Apple reveals at the launch event. But since we still have to wait a few weeks (presumably) until the iPhone event, we can at least speculate what the new phones will look like. As with most unreleased iPhone models, rumors and leaks have trickled in about the hardware

Samsung offers $250 discount on its latest Galaxy S25 model - multiple retailers included

'ZDNET Recommends': What exactly does it mean? ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or