ACT

13 of the best Record Store Day releases for 2021

Home Features (Image credit: Rough Trade) The first drop of Record Store Day 2021 records arrives on Saturday 12th June. It’s that time of year when record shops stock all manner of rarities, reissues, special editions and exclusives produced especially for the big day itself. For us vinyl anoraks, it’s like Christmas, but without the… Read more

House lawmakers introduce five bipartisan bills to unwind tech monopolies

On Friday, House Democrats introduced five new bills meant to chip away at the power of big tech companies, targeting a variety of practices that antitrust advocates say are stifling competition. These measures are the House Judiciary Committee’s historic, 16-month long investigation into the business tactics of companies like Apple, Amazon, Facebook, and Google. With… Read more

iOS 15 gives you better tools to fight the firehose of notifications — with a catch

Apple’s iOS 15 preview earlier this week gave us a look at an important new feature coming to your iPhone’s notifications: help. A few new tools may act as a life preserver for those of us up to our eyeballs in a sea of notifications every day, regulating which apps and people are allowed to… Read more

Pack 12 M.2 SSDs Into Your DVD Bay With Icy Dock’s New Enclosure

Home News (Image credit: IcyDock) Icy Dock this week announced a new M.2 enclosure that can house up to 12 M.2 SSDs and is the size of a single, 5.25-inch optical drive bay. You can install the ToughArmor MB872MP-B directly into your best PC case — if you still have a case that even supports external… Read more

Here’s a List of All the RTX 3070 Ti Cards You Can Dream About Buying

Home News (Image credit: Inno3D) With the launch of the Nvidia GeForce RTX 3070 Ti, we’re collecting information about all of the partner cards that have launched or will launch soon. We have listings from seven companies, ranging from top-end liquid cooling models to budget-friendly cards. The RTX 3070 Ti, is Nvidia’s latest mid-range to… Read more

The Senate just advanced the beef between SpaceX and Blue Origin

A controversial amendment pushed by Jeff Bezos’ space firm Blue Origin passed the Senate Wednesday night, inching closer to becoming law. Crammed inside a mammoth science and technology bill designed primarily to counter competition from China, the amendment would allow NASA to spend up to $10 billion on its embattled Moon lander program. Aside from… Read more

Battlefield 2042 features giant 128-player battles and devastating tornadoes

The next Battlefield is coming this fall — and it appears to be bringing plenty of mayhem. At an event today, EA revealed Battlefield 2042, the latest entry in Dice’s long-running shooter series, for the Xbox One, Series X, PS4, PS5, and PC through Origin, Steam, and the Epic Game Store. Among other changes to… Read more

Is there any way out of Clearview’s facial recognition database?

In March 2020, two months after The New York Times exposed that Clearview AI had scraped billions of images from the internet to create a facial recognition database, Thomas Smith received a dossier encompassing most of his digital life. Using the recently enacted California Consumer Privacy Act, Smith asked Clearview for what they had on… Read more

Senate approves billions for US semiconductor manufacturing

After months of political jockeying and procedural hurdles, the Senate approved a massive science and technology bill Tuesday to boost US competitiveness with China. The bill invests billions into emerging technology industries like artificial intelligence, semiconductors, and quantum computing in the US. The bill — titled the US Innovation and Competition Act or USICA —… Read more

Sony WF-1000XM4 review: Class-leading noise-cancelling wireless earbuds, ’nuff said

(Pocket-lint) – There’s no beating around the bush, the Sony WF-1000XM4 true wireless in-ears are exceptional for their price. And, while there are one or two competitors that offer slightly better sound quality, they are usually more expensive and cannot match these for adaptive noise-cancelling (ANC) tech. Sony has taken an already excellent pair of… Read more

macOS Monterey lets you run Shortcuts and share input and files between Macs and iPads

Apple has announced the next version of macOS at its WWDC keynote, after showing off iOS, iPadOS, and watchOS. The company is promising even more interoperability with iOS, including the ability to share a keyboard and mouse between a Mac and an iPad. The feature is similar to the one found on Logitech keyboards and… Read more

Apple WWDC 2021: iOS 15, new MacBook Pros, and what else to expect

Apple’s annual developer extravaganza, the Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), is coming up fast, kicking off with the keynote presentation on June 7th at 1PM ET. Like last year, WWDC will be an entirely digital and online-only event due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and for the keynote, that means we can likely expect another tightly produced… Read more

Nanoleaf’s light-up wall panels now look like wood accent pieces

Nanoleaf, the company best known for illuminated panels that you stick to your wall, has announced the new Nanoleaf Elements line, a set of wall panels that are designed to look as nice turned off as they do when on. The new Elements line accomplishes this through a wood-like veneer that allows the light to… Read more

Have autonomous robots started killing in war? The reality is messier than it appears

It’s the sort of thing that can almost pass for background noise these days: over the past week, a number of publications tentatively declared, based on a UN report from the Libyan civil war, that killer robots may have hunted down humans autonomously for the first time. As one headline put it: “The Age of… Read more

Amazon will stop testing most employees for weed

Amazon is relaxing its policy around employees using weed, according to a new blog post, and will no longer enforce marijuana drug tests for any employee who isn’t also regulated by the Department of Transportation, like a delivery driver. In the past, Amazon used positive tests as a reason to disqualify applicants during the hiring… Read more