The year age verification laws came for the open internet

When the nonprofit Freedom House recently published its annual report, it noted that 2025 marked the 15th straight year of decline for global internet freedom. The biggest decline, after Georgia and G [...]

DataGrail report finds your vendor may be sending data to AI models you never approved

The data processing agreement (DPA) — the bedrock contract companies use to evaluate how vendors handle personal data — can no longer be trusted at face value. That is the central, and arguably mo [...]

Thinking Machines shows off preview of near-realtime AI voice and video conversation with new 'interaction models'

Is AI leaving the era of "turn-based" chat?Right now, all of us who use AI models regularly for work or in our personal lives know that the basic interaction mode across text, imagery, audio [...]

Thinking Machines open sources first multimodal language model, Inkling, focused on low cost and 'resistance to censorship'

Enterprises looking to move more of their agentic AI workloads to open weights models they can customize, control and run on-premises or in virtual private clouds have a strong new contender to consid [...]

The robots we saw at CES 2026: The lovable, the creepy and the utterly confusing

CES always has its share of attention-grabbing robots. But this year in particular seemed to be a landmark year for robotics. The advancement in AI technology has not only given robots better “brain [...]

Google Deepmind unveils Gemini Robotics 2 to power robots of all shapes from tabletop arms to humanoids

Google Deepmind's Gemini Robotics 2 is its most advanced vision-language-action model yet, built to control everything from tabletop robots to full-body humanoids. Gemini Robotics ER 2 adds a hig [...]

Mullvad VPN review: Near-total privacy with a few sacrifices

Mullvad, a virtual private network (VPN) named after the Swedish word for "mole," is often recognized as one of the best VPNs for privacy. I put it on my best VPN list for exactly that reaso [...]

Microsoft plans to bring Xbox age verification to countries outside of the UK

Microsoft is implementing an age verification system on Xbox accounts to comply with the UK's Online Safety Act, and in a new blog post announcing the move, the company suggests it'll come t [...]

Roblox is adding an 'age estimation' feature for teens

Roblox is joining the growing ranks of online platforms that are trying to better understand the ages of their teen users. The company is rolling out a new "age estimation" feature for teens [...]