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The First At-Home Cervical Cancer Screening Wand Is Now Available

If you've ever had a Pap smear, you know how uncomfortable a cervical cancer screening can be, especially from inside a cold, clinical doctor's office. Cervical cancer is highly preventable with routine screening. To provide people with a cervix a comfortable and private screening option, women's health company Teal Health developed the Teal Wand, the first and only at-home vaginal sample self-collection device for cervical cancer screening in the US. Following its FDA approval in May, the Tea

AOL announces September shutdown for dial-up Internet access

After decades of connecting Americans to its online service and the Internet through telephone lines, AOL recently announced it is finally shutting down its dial-up modem service on September 30, 2025. The announcement marks the end of a technology that served as the primary gateway to the World Wide Web for millions of users throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. AOL confirmed the shutdown date in a help message to customers: "AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to

AOL pulls the plug on dial-up - a reminder that 'dead' tech has a long expiration date

AOL / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways Generation X says goodbye to the past. Old technology can linger long after you thought it was dead and done. AOL, once a technology giant, is now little more than a footnote. For millions of people who first heard "You've got mail" over crackling phone lines, an iconic chapter in digital history is coming to a close. AOL, also known as America Online, has announced it will shut down its dial-up internet service on Sept. 30, 2025, eff

3 ways Google Chrome and Wallet just made shopping a whole lot easer

Google / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET ZDNET's takeaways Google adds new features to give you more ways to pay online. See reward details for 100+ cards to find your best option. More "buy now, pay later" options, including Affirm and more. The next time you check out online with Chrome or Google Wallet, you might notice things look a little different. Google has announced several upgrades, each one designed to give you more flexibility and convenience when you shop online. 1. Support for m

New data shows AI agents invading the workplace, with mixed results

imaginima ZDNET's key takeaways: Employee trust in AI agents is growing, but only for some tasks. Research found that trust increases the more people use agents. The rapid embrace of agents is rewriting some workplace norms. AI agents are becoming a common fixture in the workplace as businesses look to automate a variety of routine, time-consuming tasks. A growing body of research, however, is revealing the boundaries of the degree of control that employees are willing to hand over to these

AOL pulls the plug on dial-up after 30+ years - feeling old yet?

AOL / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways Generation X says goodbye to the past. Old technology can linger long after you thought it was dead and done. AOL, once a technology giant, is now little more than a footnote. For millions of people who first heard "You've got mail" over crackling phone lines, an iconic chapter in digital history is coming to a close. AOL, also known as America Online, has announced it will shut down its dial-up internet service on September 30, 2025,

AOL ends dial-up service after more than 30 years

AOL ends dial-up service after more than 30 years AOL is shutting down the dial-up service that introduced homes across the US to the internet. The firm's dial-up offering connects to the internet via a phone line and currently only exists in the US and Canada. Launched more than 30 years ago, AOL dial-up was known for its chirpy whirring start-up sound, but it has long since been replaced by faster alternatives. Fewer than 300,000 people in the US reported having only a dial-up internet con

AOL announces September shutdown for dial-up Internet after 34 years

After 34 years of connecting Americans to the Internet through phone lines, AOL recently announced it is shutting down its dial-up modem service on September 30, 2025. The announcement marks the end of a technology that served as the primary gateway to the World Wide Web for millions of users throughout the 1990s and early 2000s. AOL confirmed the shutdown date in a help message to customers: "AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Internet. Thi

Microsoft tests cloud-based Windows 365 disaster recovery PCs

Microsoft has announced the limited public preview of Windows 365 Reserve, a service that provides temporary desktop access to pre-configured cloud PCs for employees whose computers have become unavailable due to cyberattacks, hardware issues, or software problems. Windows 365 Reserve provides up to 10 days of access per user annually to these cloud-based Windows 365 disaster recovery PCs, enabling organizations to mitigate productivity issues during outages without requiring physical replaceme

After 34 Years of Booop-Beep-Beep-Beep-Krsssh-Eee-Brrrrrrr, AOL’s Dial-Up Service Is Finally Shutting Down

It’s the end of an era. After 34 years, AOL is pulling the plug on its dial-up internet service. It’s hard to believe that In 2025, with 5G, Wi-Fi, and fiber-optic broadband seemingly everywhere, AOL’s classic dial-up service is still operating. Sadly, for the thousands of people still relying on the old school internet service, the company recently announced that it’s discontinuing it on Sept. 30. “AOL routinely evaluates its products and services and has decided to discontinue Dial-up Intern

AOL to discontinue dial-up internet

AOL announced that its dial-up internet service will be discontinued next month. If this is how you learned that AOL’s dial-up still exists — presumably you read this on a broadband internet connection — you’re not alone. The service, seen by many as a relic of the early days of the internet, will be discontinued Sept. 30 along with its associated software, the company said. AOL made the announcement quietly via a statement on its help portal on Friday: “AOL routinely evaluates its products an

Over 29,000 Exchange servers unpatched against high-severity flaw

Over 29,000 Exchange servers exposed online remain unpatched against a high-severity vulnerability that can let attackers move laterally in Microsoft cloud environments, potentially leading to complete domain compromise. The security flaw (tracked as CVE-2025-53786) helps threat actors who gain administrative access to on-premises Exchange servers to escalate privileges within the organization's connected cloud environment by forging or manipulating trusted tokens or API calls, without leaving

AOL's dial-up internet still exists, but not for much longer

It may have been decades since you last heard the crunching screeches of connecting with dial-up Internet, but AOL said it will discontinue its dial-up service on September 30, officially marking the end of an era in Internet history. As first spotted by PC Gamer, AOL made the surprising announcement in a post buried in its AOL Help pages. Along with the dial-up service, AOL Dialer software and AOL Shield browser will also be discontinued by the end of September. It may come as a shock to most

Fight Chat Control

You Will Be Impacted Every photo, every message, every file you send will be automatically scanned—without your consent or suspicion. This is not about catching criminals. It is mass surveillance imposed on all 450 million citizens of the European Union. 📱 Mass Surveillance Every private message, photo, and file scanned automatically: no suspicion required, no exceptions*, even encrypted communications. 🔓️ Breaking Encryption Weakening or breaking end-to-end encryption exposes everyone’s commu

Booting 5000 Erlangs on Ampere One 192-core

Booting 5000 Erlangs on Ampere One 192-core Underjord is an artisanal consultancy doing consulting in Elixir, Nerves with an accidental speciality in marketing and outreach. If you like the writing you should really try the pro version. In the previous post on 500 virtual linux devices on ARM64 I hinted that I expected serious improvements if we got KVM working. Well. We’re there. Let’s see what we got going on. Disclosure: I am running a conference called Goatmire Elixir which Ampere is a sp

An engineer's perspective on hiring

note for my friends: this post is targeted at companies and engineering managers. i know you know that hiring sucks and companies waste your time. this is a business case for why they shouldn't do that. hiring sucks most companies suck at hiring. they waste everyone’s time (i once had a 9-round interview pipeline!), they chase the trendiest programmers, and they can’t even tell programmers apart from an LLM. in short, they are not playing moneyball. things are bad for interviewees too. some o

Viral Myanmar Earthquake Video Shows First Visual Evidence of Rare Seismic Phenomena

In May, we reported on a first-of-its-kind video that captured surface rupture during Myanmar’s devastating 7.7 magnitude earthquake. While the YouTube video now has 1.6 million views, two geophysicists spotted something many people probably didn’t notice. The video seems like a gift that just keeps on giving. As the Kyoto University scientists explain in a study published last month in The Seismic Record, it also includes the first direct visual evidence of pulse-like rupturing and a curved fa

I went camping in a heat dome, and these five gadgets saved my vacation

is a senior reviewer focused on smart home and connected tech, with over twenty years of experience. She has written previously for Wirecutter, Wired, Dwell, BBC, and US News. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. I recently returned from a family camping trip to Cades Cove in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. I live in South Carolina, so in mid-July, a trip to the mountains is usually an excellent way to seek out cooler temperatures. No

An Engineer's Perspective on Hiring

note for my friends: this post is targeted at companies and engineering managers. i know you know that hiring sucks and companies waste your time. this is a business case for why they shouldn't do that. hiring sucks most companies suck at hiring. they waste everyone’s time (i once had a 9-round interview pipeline!), they chase the trendiest programmers, and they can’t even tell programmers apart from an LLM. in short, they are not playing moneyball. things are bad for interviewees too. some o

A Bug at Social Security Admin Has Been Rerouting Phone Calls to Random Offices

A technical issue at the Social Security Administration recently caused phone calls to various field offices to be routed to other offices that didn’t have jurisdiction over the claims, thus making service fulfillment difficult. On Tuesday, NPR reported that the agency’s field offices were having difficulties connecting callers to the proper staff who could fulfill their requests. “If it’s someone else’s office, the jurisdiction is someone else’s,” Angela Digeronimo, a SS claims specialist in W

Food, housing, & health care costs are a source of major stress for many people

August 4, 2025 About half of the public consider the cost of groceries to be a major source of stress in their life right now, and 19% of those concerned have used deferred payment services to fund groceries at some point. Overall, 29% of the public have ever used deferred payment services, sometimes called Buy Now Pay Later, for health care, entertainment, groceries, or restaurant meals. Use of these services is higher among adults under age 45 compared with older adults. People experiencing

Virtual Linux Devices on ARM64

500 virtual Linux devices on ARM 64 Underjord is an artisanal consultancy doing consulting in Elixir, Nerves with an accidental speciality in marketing and outreach. If you like the writing you should really try the pro version. This is the first part of an experimental journey as I explore how many instances of my favorite IoT framework I can run on the 192 core Ampere One. Background I work on the Nerves project which is an IoT framework providing best-practice underpinnings and support so

I used Perplexity to make a restaurant reservation - now I'm wondering if Google is holding us back

Tang Ming Tung/Getty Images ZDNET's takeaways Perplexity's new feature lets you make a restaurant reservation straight through OpenTable. The feature uses OpenTable's system, so you don't have to trust the AI to do it for you. Instead of navigating between apps or tabs to find a restaurant and then book a table, Perplexity handles everything. Finding the perfect restaurant and making a reservation just got a whole lot easier thanks to a new feature in Perplexity. The chatbot (which ZDNET's

Starlink Teases ‘Community’ Discount for Shared Satellite Access. Here’s How It Works

SpaceX may soon allow multiple Starlink users to share access to a single dish for a lower monthly rate, according to a post on a customer support page. (The news was first reported by PCMag, which is owned by the same parent company as CNET, Ziff Davis.) The post, which has since been taken down, stated, “Starlink is launching a new affordable way to deliver high-speed internet: one Starlink, multiple subscribers -- each with their own Starlink account and seamless experience.” A Starlink Com

The Disturbing AI Interview That Has Everyone Fuming

It was billed as a “one-of-a-kind interview,” but it may be remembered as a new low for journalism. Jim Acosta, the former CNN anchor turned Substack host, has ignited a firestorm of controversy by conducting what may be one of the most unsettling interviews of the AI era: a televised conversation with an AI-generated version of Joaquin Oliver, the 17-year-old who was killed in the 2018 mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida. The interview aired at the reques

Amazon's cloud business giving federal agencies up to $1 billion in discounts

Attendees walk through an exposition hall at AWS re:Invent, a conference hosted by Amazon Web Services, in Las Vegas on Dec. 3, 2024. Amazon Web Services has agreed to provide U.S. federal agencies with up to $1 billion in discounts for cloud adoption, modernization and training through 2028, an agency overseeing government procurement announced Thursday. The agreement is expected to speed up migration to the cloud, as well as adoption of artificial intelligence tools, the General Services Adm

Cryptomixer founders pled guilty to laundering money for cybercriminals

The founders of the Samourai Wallet (Samourai) cryptocurrency mixer have pleaded guilty to laundering over $200 million for criminals. ​Samourai CEO Keonne Rodriguez and CTO William Lonergan Hill admitted to their involvement in the Samourai money laundering operation, pleading guilty to conspiracy for operating a money transmitting business that handled criminal proceeds, and are now facing a maximum sentence of five years in prison. As part of their plea agreements, Rodriguez and Hill have a

Show HN: Aura – Like robots.txt, but for AI actions

AURA: The Protocol for a Machine-Readable Web AURA (Agent-Usable Resource Assertion) is an open protocol for making websites understandable and operable by AI agents. It proposes a new standard for AI-web interaction that moves beyond fragile screen scraping and DOM manipulation towards a robust, secure, and efficient machine-readable layer for the internet. The web was built for human eyes. AURA is a specification for giving it a machine-readable "API". The Vision: Why AURA? Current AI agen

Massive IPTV piracy service with 28,000 channels taken offline

The Alliance for Creativity and Entertainment (ACE) announced the shutdown of Rare Breed TV, a major illegal IPTV service provider, after reaching a financial settlement with its operators. North Carolina-based Rare Breed TV was one of the world's largest digital piracy operations, claiming to offer subscribers access to over 28,000 channels and more than 100,000 movies and series. "As part of the agreement, the operators will permanently shut down their illegal service and pay a significant f

Microsoft warns of high-severity flaw in hybrid Exchange deployments

Microsoft has warned customers to mitigate a high-severity vulnerability in Exchange Server hybrid deployments that could allow attackers to escalate their privileges in Exchange Online cloud environments without leaving any traces. Exchange hybrid configurations connect on-premises Exchange servers to Exchange Online (part of Microsoft 365), allowing for seamless integration of email and calendar features between on-premises and cloud mailboxes, including shared calendars, global address lists