Valve enters the console wars

Valve is rebooting its failed Steam Machine initiative — and this time, it’s building the living room console itself

Valve is ready to rejoin the VR hardware race with the Steam Frame, a lightweight standalone SteamOS headset

At the same time, though, the scope of private life itself seems to be shrinking. Our experiences are flattened by the mass culture that everyone consumes, regurgitates, remixes (and that AI is now beginning to remix for us). Social science and marketing—combined with coercive technology—turn what seem, from the first-person perspective, like deeply personal choices into statistically predictable and controllable behaviors

Bayer considers exiting the glyphosate market

The company even went so far as to partner with music library services and production companies under a program called Perfect Fit Content, or PFC. This saw the creation of fake or "ghost" artists that flooded Spotify with songs that were specifically designed to be pleasant and ignorable. It's music as content, not art. [...] Artists, especially new ones trying to break through, actually started changing how they composed to play better in the algorithmically driven streaming era. Songs got shorter, albums got longer, and intros went away. The hook got pushed to the front of the song to try to grab listeners' attention immediately, and things like guitar solos all but disappeared from pop music. The palette of sounds artists pulled from got smaller, arrangements became more simplified, pop music flattened

Meta is retiring Facebook's external Like and Share buttons for third-party websites on February 10, 2026, officially closing the book on a once-dominant traffic driver as usage declines and Facebook's role within Meta continues to shrink

Privacy activists say proposed changes to Europe's landmark privacy law, including making it easier for Big Tech to harvest Europeans' personal data for AI training, would flout EU case law and gut the legislation

Hobart woman Renee Woodleigh is selling a 1937 edition of JRR Tolkien's classic The Hobbit.

She says it is a first edition, which a rare book specialist says could "absolutely" be true

The 512KB Club is a collection of performance-focused web pages from across the Internet.

To qualify your website must satisfy both of the following requirements: It must be an actual site that contains a reasonable amount of information, not just a couple of links on a page; Your total UNCOMPRESSED web resources must not exceed 512KB

superfan has recreated Frodo’s exact journey from Bag End to Mount Doom in a 10-hour virtual trek through Lord of the Rings Online, an 18-year-old MMO.

Despite Boromir’s iconic warning, it turns out you can, in fact, simply walk into Mordor

How a huge dinosaur trackway was uncovered in the UK

Cocktails and checkmates: the young Britons giving chess a new lease of life

Laid-back clubs proving a hit in London, Birmingham and elsewhere as people look for new ways to socialise

xD

study from the Complexity Science Hub Vienna finds that as people's close social circles expanded from two to five friends around the rise of social media (2008-2010), polarization in society spiked

My robot vacuum was constantly communicating with its manufacturer, transmitting logs and telemetry that I had never consented to share

Everyone knows what the Internet is. But do you know how it actually works?

In my mind, "Apple" as a brand used to be synonymous with "attention to detail" but sadly, over the course of the last 8 - 10 years, their choices have become anything but detail oriented.

This year, things have gotten so bad that I'm starting to think they've stopped caring about user experience, accessibility, and detailed QA tests altogether.

AI Assistants Misrepresent News Content 45% of the Time

Wayback Machine is projected to hit a once-in-a-generation milestone: 1 trillion web pages archived. That's one trillion memories, moments, and movements -- preserved for the public and available to access

Foreign hackers breached the National Nuclear Security Administration's Kansas City National Security Campus (KCNSC) by exploiting unpatched Microsoft SharePoint