As we all know, winter time is cinema time, and the Oscars are drawing ever closer. So it’s no wonder that more and more films are being released that are attracting the attention of the masses. September saw the release of One Battle After Another, a fast-paced drama starring Leonardo DiCaprio, which is already being touted as an Oscar favorite. However, with a running time of just under three hours, it seems that not everyone wants to go to the movies, preferring instead to watch it from home. And they are also resorting to illegal means. Criminals are now exploiting this, as security experts from Bitdefender warn. Torrents of One Battle After Another are currently in circulation, spreading a dangerous Trojan called “Agent Tesla.” This Trojan can not only steal access data, but also monitor PCs, take them over completely and even control them remotely. The campaign appears to be large-scale and has therefore aroused the interest of researchers. In their report, they also describe the unusual method used by the malware to access affected systems. This is how the infection works After downloading the file that is supposed to contain the film, the user is shown a folder containing various seemingly harmless files such as CD.lnk or Part2.subtitles.srt. If the first file is executed in the hope that this will start the film, a Powershell script starts in the background instead. This accesses the second file, which actually contains subtitles in the form of a text file, but also code snippets. The script jumps to the point where the hidden code is contained and then executes it. Another file called One Battle After Another.m2ts, which is disguised as a video file, is also used to continue the infection chain. The same happens with other seemingly harmless files that together contain malicious code. The end result: the Trojan is installed on the system and the attackers can strike immediately. Undetectable even by virus scanners The procedure seems complicated, but serves one main purpose: neither Windows nor common virus protection programs can reliably detect that this is malicious software. As the attackers use seemingly harmless file types and existing tools such as Powershell, the individual processes look like completely normal accesses. Only at the very end could the user realize that it is a Trojan. But by then it is already too late and the hackers can simply block all attempts to protect the device. Even a system restart no longer blocks the attackers. The security experts do not specify exactly how many systems have already been hit by the wave of attacks. However, there is talk of thousands of downloads. In addition, attackers have already been successful with similar tactics in the past. For example, with fake downloads of the Marvel film Shang Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings or the blockbuster Mission Impossible: The Final Reckoning, which curiously warns of the dangers of modern technology. In any case, you should refrain from obtaining films or series from illegal sites, as otherwise you could catch a malware-infected file at any time (and potentially make yourself liable to prosecution). Instead, wait for the films you are interested in to land on legal streaming services — or go to the movies while they’re still in theaters. Read...

With gift season here, why not treat yourself to a gaming upgrade? This 27-inch LG UltraGear monitor is just $157 right now, which is 37 percent off of the original price. View at Amazon This LG monitor is more than ready for your favorite games, thanks to its 180Hz refresh rate and 1ms GtG response time–that’s extremely fast for smooth gameplay. The 2560×1440 resolution is equally impressive, delivering sharp visuals whether you’re gaming or streaming content. Think that’s great? But wait, there’s more. This monitor features a 1000R curvature, wrapping the screen around your field of view for deeper immersion. It also has a sleek borderless design for an even better experience. Plus, the LG UltraGear includes AMD FreeSync technology to minimize screen tearing and stuttering. Frankly, at $157, the LG UltraGear gaming monitor is an absolute gem, so add it to your collection sooner rather than later. The perfect deal exists — it`s 37% off for the LG UltraGearBuy now at Amazon Read...

When ChatGPT first debuted, I thought my days as a writer were numbered. There are so many things it can do, and I imagine artists have had similar pangs of fearful panic as generative AI keeps getting ever better at creating lifelike and/or stylized images. But I’m still here! Still getting paid to put the right words in the right order on the digital page. And even within my small world of image manipulation, I still use Photoshop every single day. Generative AI is neat, but it isn’t perfect. In fact, it’s so far from perfect that I rarely use it. It’s only good for very specific needs, and even then I still have to do some manual touch-ups. I’m no Photoshop wizard, but even my rudimentary skills surpass what AI can do—most of the time. Where generative AI images shine As I’m not a Photoshop expert, my skills are definitely limited. There are things I just can’t do because I don’t know how to do them, and AI is nice for those bits. AI is also nice for quick little tasks where I don’t care for perfect results, like prototypes and ideations. Generative AI is fantastic for quickly whipping up concept art and creating fun digital props for a roleplaying game. I’ve used it to create phony sci-fi tablet overlays for sending pretend messages to my tabletop RPG players, and Photoshop’s own Generative Fill feature is a quick and dirty healing brush/clone tool replacement that makes it way easier to fill in any gaps in an image or just make it a little bigger. Creating an image of my tabletop RPG characters stylized like it’s on a terminal screen? That’s one task for which I don’t mind using AI.Jon Martindale / Foundry I’ve used generative AI to create prototype card layouts for a game I’m designing, for quick personal memes between friends, and for portraits representing the characters I want to roleplay as. But for me? That’s where generative AI’s usefulness ends. I don’t use it to create sprawling vistas or gigantic works of art. Why would I? Sure, it might be impressive from a technical standpoint that AI tools can create those things out of thin air. But I don’t really have any use for that. At their core, large language model AIs just aren’t capable of understanding anything meaningfully. Even when I do need generative AI, the lack of accuracy, precision, verisimilitude, and ability to follow specific instructions kills its usefulness. It still mostly feels like a tech demo, and that makes it largely ineffective for anything beyond novelty. The glaring weaknesses of generative AI One time, I was making a character portraint for one of my players in an upcoming Alien RPG tabletop game. I wanted a sci-fi guy in a jumpsuit with corporate vibes and to have his fingers in “W” and “Y” shapes to represent his loyalty to Weyland-Yutani Corporation (his employer). I struggled a lot with that one. I mean, I just wanted the character to have his fingers splayed in the right way. But could AI do it? Oh boy, could it not. No matter how hard I tried to finagle it, the results sucked. I tried upwards of 10 different prompts to get it to understand that I wanted three fingers up on one hand and two on the other, splayed to create the impressions of “W” and “Y” letters. Sometimes it made the hands face the wrong way. It never got the number of fingers right, and it never splayed them in the right way. It utterly failed. After trying—and failing—to get the AI generating what I wanted for close to 20 minutes, I gave up and just made it myself using the first generated image as a reference. I cloned one of the fingers, moved into the right spot, adjusted the lighting, blended the layers, and it came out great. All of that took five minutes. Okay, fine. You might say that I built upon the original creation put forth by the AI. Yes, I’m glad it gave me that initial design to work with, and it was easier to edit that than create the same thing from scratch. But as a final product? It failed to do what I needed. It was no more usable than a random image I could’ve grabbed from somewhere online. More often than not, it’s just quicker for me to make edits manually. With AI, I have to think about how to prompt the AI correctly and making sure the AI will interpret my instructions the exact way I intend to get what I need from it—not something else, not something that gets it right in one area but randomly changes something in another area, not the right image but with an overhauled art style. With the latest crop of LLMs, doing this proves frustratingly and opaquely difficult. And that’s my main problem with today’s generative AI: it takes so much time to fix what it creates that I might as well have done it myself in the first place. Just look at the infamous Coca-Cola Christmas ad that came out atrocious yet cost far more to create than if they’d just paid some animators and artists—and they ended up doing that anyway because the AI results sucked and needed to be punched up. Now, if you’re an individual and you don’t know the first thing about Photoshop, then AI can be a tool to get you halfway there. But we’re not yet at the point where manual adjustments, punch-ups, and handcrafted art—even by amateurs like myself—are obsolete. Faster, cheaper, more sustainable Indeed, there are a million quick little things I still use Photoshop for where it only takes me a few seconds to do. It doesn’t make sense to use AI for these things, even if AI is capable of them: resizing images, adjusting lighting, tweaking contrast, reframing an image, converting to a different file type, changing aspect ratios, etc. I can still resize an image faster and more accurately with Photoshop than any LLM.Jon Martindale / Foundry These are all important tasks I do every single day, and there’s no way I’m going to 1) trust an unreliable AI to do what I need done correctly, or 2) waste all that GPU time, electricity, and water on something I can do faster and more effectively with existing software. (Yes, the environmental costs of generative AI are frighteningly expensive.) Look, I’m not anti-AI. It’s not like I hope the technology dies, and it’s not like I can’t see how it might be useful. But it’s important to be mindful of what we’re using and how we’re using it, and I think it’s unnecessary to use generative AI for anything I can do myself, especially if I can do it better, faster, and with less frustration. The best of both worlds? There’s probably an end game sometime in the next decade or two where generative AI will be able to do what I do well enough… and I might end up losing my niche altogether. Some even think that’ll happen to everyone and we’ll have to contend with a post-work world. But I don’t think LLMs are what’s going to make that happen. For now, AI tools can help. They’re useful, but they have limitations. I use AI for fun, novelty, and unimportant stuff. I’ll spin up some images and videos to send my friends, or inspiration for our next roleplaying session, or a quick concept for a creative project. It’s invaluable for placeholder art in a work-in-progress game design, for example. But when it comes to anything critical, anything that demands specificity, anything that could land me in hot water if it contains mistakes, anything I can already do myself in no time? I’ll just do it myself. No way I’m going to entrust any of that to an unreliable AI that won’t listen to instructions and will instead inject a bunch of its own hallucinations. If AI is going to make my life harder, then I’ll just do it myself. Read...

Google Gemini has launched real-time, continuous translation using your phone and a pair of connected earbuds, in what looks like a powerful transformative change to the way in which we interact with speakers from other countries. Google buried its announcement in an update to Gemini voice model updates on Friday, but the additional translation features look like they could change the way in which people interact with foreign speakers. Google is launching a beta of Google Translate to accommodate both real-time translation and two-way conversations, powered by Gemini. Wander through the markets in Bangkok, and the update promises that you’ll hear the ambient conversations of vendors around you translated into English, via a pair of connected earbuds. In a two-way conversation, you’ll have the same experience, but you’ll have a chance to speak, and then your phone will play back what you’ve said via your phone’s speaker. Google is promising that Translate will auto-detect over 70 languages and 2,000 language pairs, or a direct back-and-forth translation between English, for example, and Italian. The company is also promising that the phone will filter out extraneous noise as well as preserve the nuance of the conversation using AI. Translate will even accommodate multiple languages in a single session. Those are all issues that I’ve wrestled with while traveling overseas, using various translation devices. In Taiwan, for example, I naively thought that Mandarin would be the primary spoken language, and it seems to be. But locals use others, including Hakka or Hokkien, and switched back and forth at will. I also can speak some French, but like others who lack immersion training I can speak French far better than I understand it — and probably not all that well at that. Put simply, in my experience translation apps have almost reached a level of utility where I could depend upon them. If Google’s services works as advertised, however, this could really put translation services over that critical threshold. Google published a video showing off what the new service could do, and it’s amazing in its simplicity. One of the things that I personally have loved about technology is watching its impact on culture. ReplayTV and TiVo introduced the ability to pause live TV, which was revolutionary to a generation of consumers, even those who owned VCRs. Remember GPS devices? When Google released its free Google Maps app for Android phones with GPS and directions, companies like Magellan faded from public view almost overnight. Many, many people own smartphones and headphones or earbuds, and travel overseas without fluency in the local language. A few years ago, you’d be at the mercy of a local who understood English. Google’s updated Translator app really looks like we’ve moved past that, where translators will always be available in our ear. Read...

Corporate greed, unchecked hubris, technology advancing too fast without any regard for its impact. All these themes are explored in the Fallout games, and in the wildly successful TV series that Amazon debuted in 2024. Someone at Amazon probably should have watched it, before submitting an “AI”-generated recap so full of errors and flubs that the company was forced to blow it up. You’re probably familiar with the short recap video format, a little “previously on Battlestar Galactica” segment that now precedes many scripted streaming shows when they drop a new season. They can be essential for viewers who need a refresh, especially since the large scale of prestige streaming TV means it can be more than a year since the last one debuted. They’re short and easy, probably a couple of days’ work in the editing room, maybe a bit of voice-over. But this small bit of human effort, to enhance the viewing experience of a show that reportedly costs more than $100 million per season to produce, is apparently too much for Amazon. The company has been using auto-generated alternatives that splice together short clips of the show with “AI”-powered voice-over to catch viewers up. If you watched the slop video for Fallout season 1, like Games Radar did, you’d think that the nuclear war that takes place in the show’s flashbacks occurred in the 1950s. In the games and the show, as is constantly repeated and confirmed, the Great War occurred in 2077. It’s the kind of error that you’d see in a million “recap” edits posted to YouTube by people who didn’t actually watch the movie or TV show, and which are now, of course, replaced with AI slop. After the issues with the recap video were spotted by Games Radar, the recap was taken down from Amazon Prime Video. The Verge reports that similar recaps were made for other shows like Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, and have since been deleted. Bethesda The aesthetics of Fallout are indeed steeped in 1950s and 60s American imagery, though its fictional timeline extends far into our future even before the world gets destroyed. It’s an intentional and ironic choice meant to echo real history, when the world seemed to look forward to a mythical “atomic age” of technology even while dreading nuclear escalation during the Cold War. Fallout‘s pre-war culture and technology are, in many ways, frozen for over a century as unchecked commercialism and corporate power runs rampant. It’s a detail that’s crucial to the series’ identity and themes…and the kind of subtle distinction that large language models aren’t very good at spotting. This isn’t Amazon’s first issue with AI slop on Prime Video. Just a couple of weeks ago the company pulled AI-generated English and Spanish audio tracks from several anime series, apparently generated and applied to the shows without the knowledge or consent of some of the original creators. Viewers complained of terrible audio “performances” from the AI-generated voices, and started sharing clips that would embarrass fan dub torrents from the 2000s. Remember when Amazon made you pay extra for Prime in order to watch video without ads? I wonder where all that money is going. Read...

Governments are using the movie Minority Report, just like the novel 1984, as a blueprint for the future and are already harnessing the power of AI technology to create a powerful surveillance state. Read...

A new study from the Pew Research Center shows that three in 10 American teens use AI chatbots every day, Techcrunch reports. Four percent say they do so almost constantly. Among respondents, 59 percent say they use Open AI’s ChatGPT, more than twice as many as runner-up Google Gemini, which is used by 23 percent. Meta AI is used by 20 percent, while 36 percent say they never use AI chatbots. The study also shows that older teens (15-17 years old) use the technology significantly more often than younger ones. At the same time, social media continues to dominate teenagers’ online habits. 92% use YouTube, 69% Tiktok, 63% Instagram and 55% Snapchat. Pew’s survey is based on responses from 1,458 teenagers, collected between September 25 and October 9, 2025. Further reading: A beginner’s guide to ChatGPT: Make AI work for you Read...

It’s not just on dubious trading platforms such as Temu. Even Amazon can be infiltrated by dubious dealers who advertise SSDs with large storage capacities as supposed bargains. These cheat packs do not come from Amazon’s own warehouse, but from external service providers who offer their counterfeit products via the favorable “Warehouse” deals (i.e. as returned goods). The quality of the counterfeit drives varies — from cheap fakes to professional counterfeits that cannot be recognized as such from the outside at first glance. In addition to genuine flash memory media that have simply been given a different sticker with product specifications, there are also completely counterfeit circuit boards with a fraudulent controller. This scam can be found on external drives with a USB connection. The controller tricks the operating system into believing a false drive size, simulates write operations, but only actually stores a fraction of the data. Foundry F3: Check for flash drives With Linux tools, counterfeit or simply defective flash drives can at least be clearly and reliably recognized. The F3 (Fight Flash Fraud) tool can scrutinize flash drives of all kinds and also detects subtle errors caused by normal ageing processes. It is not fooled by manipulated controller chips, but empirically determines the real capacity of a drive as well as its read and write speeds. F3 can also check the integrity of written data by writing and reading the entire space to identify old, unreliable flash memory. F3 is a collection of command-line tools that is present in the repositories of most distributions. In Debian, Ubuntu, and others, for example, it can be installed in the terminal with the command sudo apt install f3 For flash drives such as SD cards, USB sticks, external drives with flash media, but also for internal NVMe SSDs, the program f3probe is the most suitable tool in this collection of tools. It immediately determines the real capacity of a drive and is not fooled by controller chips. Check with f3probe: The test program determines the total capacity reported by the controller and compares written data in high memory areas to see whether they are actually readable.Foundry An initial test is also non-destructive — i.e. it keeps the contents of a drive intact. Like the other F3 tools, f3probe requires root authorization or a prefixed sudo, as well as the device ID of the drive, with the command lsblk -d The command then starts (example) sudo f3probe /dev/sdd the non-destructive drive test. The device must not be mounted for this. If everything is okay with a drive, the tool returns the below message after the check, which compares the actual size with the capacity reported by the controller by means of write and read operations: Good news. The device /dev/sdd is the real thing. Check with data loss: If the data on the drive is irrelevant, the “–destructive” parameter performs a faster test run. This also requires less memory, but overwrites the entire contents of the drive. The rudely opened housing of a fake external “SSD”: The circuit board contains a manipulated controller chip and only a small SD card! Foundry Also for HDDs: Thorough test While f3probe compares the information from the controller with the memory addresses actually available on the data carrier, the F3 tools f3write and f3read take a more universal approach. f3write writes files with checksums to a mounted medium until it is completely written, and f3read then verifies this data. Because these tools work at file system level, regardless of the type of disc being tested, they require partitions that are already mounted and writable. For example, if a drive to be tested is mounted under “/media/user/5EBD- 5C80/”, then f3write /media/user/5EBD-5C80/ executes the write process and f3read /media/user/5EBD-5C80/ verifies the checksums of the written files. In general, this check only uses the free, remaining space on a drive and is therefore not destructive. NAS hard drives: The recording technology is crucial The Network Attached Storage (NAS) device class should be permanently available in the network. The mechanical hard drives, which are still the most cost-effective solution for large NAS systems, must therefore be able to withstand continuous operation. The specifications of conventional SATA hard drives for desktop PCs do not provide for such continuous operation. Hard drive manufacturers therefore offer drives for these application scenarios with the label “NAS” and a surcharge. However, as many users have realized, even the addition of “NAS” is no guarantee of problem-free operation in the NAS. Only hard disks that do not use modern SMR (Shingled Magnetic Recording) are generally suitable for a RAID network of any kind and for the ZFS file system. With SMR, the internal hard disk controller uses the disks very sparingly: Read-write heads are aligned so that the tracks on a platter overlap in order to maximize storage density. However, this approach requires several passes before a data record is reliably written and read. For RAID, which performs a checksum comparison of written data blocks, this recording technique is unsuitable and leads to errors and long waiting times. The Linux kernel developers have documented the problems observed to date at raid.wiki.kernel.org/index.php/Timeout_Mismatch. According to this, only the conventional recording technology CMR (Conventional Magnetic Recording) with linear tracks is suitable for hard disks in a RAID network. In recent years, the hard drive manufacturers Western Digital, Seagate, and Toshiba caused a major scandal when hard drives with Shingled Magnetic Recording (SMR) were marketed as NAS hard drives without sufficient labelling. Unfortunately, a hard drive does not even reveal via SMART analysis whether SMR or CMR is used. At m6u.de/cmr, a NAS service provider collects a list of suitable CMR hard drives based on user information. Related content Best SSDs: From SATA to PCIe 5.0, from budget to premium Best external drives 2025: Top picks in portable storage Buying an external drive? Wait! 5 reasons to build your own instead Read...

It’s hard to find a graphics card that can do everything. The most powerful ones are usually hot, loud, and expensive, while the smallest ones just don’t have the performance you need to deliver high-resolution gameplay experiences. ZOTAC GAMING’s new GeForce RTX™ 50 Series GPUs are built to give the best of all worlds: Compact performance with quiet cooling, at an affordable price. If you’ve found your gaming system starting to lag during demanding gameplay, micro-stutters are throwing off your aim, or it’s outright freezing entirely, then it’s probably time to upgrade your graphics card. That doesn’t have to mean emptying your wallet, though. With the new ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX™ 5050 and 5060 Ti, you can get serious gaming power with support for all the latest features – and they’re quiet and compact, too. Cutting-edge tech without the sky-high price ZOTAC GAMING The ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX™ 5050 Solo Edition gives you every cutting-edge technology NVIDIA has to offer, but without the sky-high price tag of the flagship GPUs. It has full support for DLSS 4 and multi-frame generation, unlocking much higher frame rates in compatible games, letting you play at higher detail settings and resolutions, or enjoy smoother gameplay. Its low power consumption means it can run with a single fan, too, making it supremely cool and quiet to run. That’s ideal for small form factor and ultra-compact builds. If you’re upgrading an older GPU from a mini PC, you’ll be pleasantly surprised with just how far entry-level graphics cards have come in just a few years. This card can easily outpace the top-cards from just a few generations ago, and it does so far more efficiently, too. If you want to keep energy bills down as you move into the New Year, upgrading to an efficient modern GPU is a great way to do it. Buy the ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX™ 5050 Solo Edition at NeweggView Deal Buy the ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX™ 5050 Solo Edition at AmazonView Deal Unlock faster frame rates in AAA games ZOTAC GAMING If you have a little more space to work with and want to use it for more power, then the ZOTAC GAMING Twin Edge OC GeForce RTX™ 5060 Ti is a fantastic alternative. Boosting VRAM to 16GB of GDDR7 unlocks higher detail settings in even the most demanding games, and its more capable GPU core can hold fast even when gaming at 1440p and 4K resolutions. Perfect for enjoying the visuals of the latest AAA games – and powered by the NVIDIA Blackwell architecture, enables game-changing AI capabilities in the latest games and apps. Multiply performance with NVIDIA DLSS 4, enjoy realistic graphics with ray tracing, and take your creativity further with NVIDIA Studio. With next-generation NVIDIA RT cores, the GeForce RTX™ 5060 Ti is even ready for the most demanding of gaming features: Real time ray-tracing and path tracing. The best looking games often need the best hardware to run well, and with the ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX™ 5060 Ti Twin Edge OC you can rest assured that there isn’t a game out there you can’t run, and run well. To keep temperatures down with all that added power, the ZOTAC GAMING GeForce RTX™ 5060 Ti Twin Edge OC is fitted with ZOTAC GAMING’s IceStorm 2.0 dual-fan cooling system which keeps temperatures and noise levels down, even during demanding gaming sessions. When it’s not working so hard, the 0dB fan-stop technology means it’ll run completely silent until you need it for a cooler and calmer gaming experience. Buy the ZOTAC GAMING Twin Edge OC GeForce RTX™ 5060 Ti at NeweggView Deal Buy the ZOTAC GAMING Twin Edge OC GeForce RTX™ 5060 Ti at AmazonView Deal Read...

By 2026, APJ enterprises harness hidden internal data, embrace open virtualisation and mainstream isolated recovery to battle cyber risk. Read...