Category: Technologies

Even though Google Chrome remains the dominant web browser, it is facing increasing competition from a new generation of AI-driven browsers, such as Perplexity Comet, Dia, and others. In an effort to remain competitive, Google is integrating advanced AI capabilities into Chrome. While this development is not inherently negative, the company’s latest approach has crossed a line.

Check your file manager for a directory named “OptGuideOnDeviceModel.” If this folder exists, Chrome is utilizing your hard drive space as a local server. Within this directory lies a file named “weights.bin,” which is approximately 4 GB in size and contains Gemini Nano, Google’s on-device artificial intelligence model.

Privacy expert Alexander Hanff identified and recorded this activity using macOS file system event logs, which monitor all file creation and modification at the operating system level.

On a brand-new Chrome profile that received absolutely no user interaction, the full 4 GB model was installed in less than 15 minutes while a tab was simply open.

Was This Installation Requested by Users?

Absolutely not. Chrome does not seek user permission before installing the model; it proceeds independently. The model automatically downloads once Chrome determines that your hardware meets the necessary specifications, long before you interact with any AI functionalities.

Google Chrome

Furthermore, if you locate and remove this file, Chrome will automatically re-download it upon the next launch. Hanff observed that “the user’s deletion is treated as a transient state to be corrected, not as a directive to be respected.”

The situation becomes even more complex. The most prominent AI feature in Chrome, the “AI Mode” button in the address bar, does not utilize the local model. Instead, it forwards your queries to Google Gemini servers. The on-device model is reserved for less visible functions such as “Help me write” in text fields and local scam detection.

What Are the Consequences and How Can You Disable It?

While this may appear to only impact your storage capacity, Hanff highlighted its broader environmental consequences. He calculated that if 500 million devices downloaded this file, the bandwidth consumption alone would result in approximately 30,000 tonnes of CO2 emissions, comparable to 6,500 cars operating for a full year, and this figure only accounts for the download process, not subsequent usage.

Rachit Agarwal / /d

Google should require explicit user confirmation for such downloads. In the meantime, you can prevent this by navigating to “chrome://flags”. Search for “Enables optimization guide on device” and disable the option. Although the process is more involved than it should be, it is effective.

Microsoft’s newest Windows 11 update focuses its efforts on the performance hiccups that users actually experience. KB5083631, an optional preview update for Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2, addresses memory leaks, slow boot times, and File Explorer behavior that can make the operating system feel sluggish.

This release has a clearer objective than simply tweaking the user interface. Microsoft aims to eliminate the friction caused by services consuming excessive RAM, applications taking too long to launch after a restart, or File Explorer leaving explorer.exe running in the background even after its windows are closed.

Identifying RAM Drain

The primary performance improvement targets Delivery Optimization, the background service responsible for Windows Update and Microsoft Store downloads. This service has been associated with memory leaks and unusually high RAM consumption, so reducing its resource footprint could significantly benefit PCs that are already struggling.

Paulo Vargas / Techgeeks

Startup applications are also receiving attention. Programs listed under Settings, Apps, Startup should launch more quickly after a reboot, which is particularly beneficial for work computers and older laptops that already struggle with crowded startup lists.

File Explorer also sees improvements. The update enhances explorer.exe behavior so the process properly terminates after File Explorer windows are closed, rather than lingering in the background and consuming resources.

Additional Improvements

The update also resolves File Explorer’s dark mode flash, saved View and Sort preferences, taskbar system tray loading issues, and crashes related to Task View, taskbar menus, and Quick Access.

While these fixes may seem minor on paper, they impact the parts of Windows used constantly. Cleaner startup behavior, retained folder layouts, fewer stuck processes, and fewer visual glitches can make a PC easier to live with, even when raw speed gains are hard to measure.

Monica J. White / Techgeeks

There are still limitations. Microsoft is promising fixes that sound meaningful, but users won’t know how much their own PCs improve until the update is installed and tested in daily use.

The Update Path to Watch

Most people don’t need to rush into the optional preview release. It’s available now for users who manually check for updates and choose to get the latest Windows 11 changes early, but the same fixes are scheduled to reach everyone through the May 12, 2026 Patch Tuesday update.

That timing makes the mandatory release the safer default for anyone who depends on a stable PC for work or school. It will bundle these performance changes with security updates.

For now, KB5083631 is best suited to users dealing with obvious slowdowns, high background memory use, dark mode flashes, or lingering explorer.exe processes. Everyone else can wait a few days and still get the fixes without chasing a preview build.

Transforming Dance Footage into an Advanced Rehearsal Aid

Cornell Chronicle

The standout feature of DanXeReflect is its ability to convert standard 2D video into a virtual space where motion is represented by interactive avatars. This allows dancers to avoid the limitations of watching footage on a flat monitor. Instead, they can observe the choreography from a novel angle and analyze it in conjunction with their own physical movements.

Cornell Chronicle

Functioning as a digital mirror, the tool enables a dancer to replicate a specific pose, after which DanXeReflect aligns that posture with avatar sequences to identify the best match. The corresponding avatar is then displayed within the virtual mirror and next to the user in the VR environment. This differs from typical video review methods by providing a 3D rehearsal partner that demonstrates recorded motions.

The Benefits for Dancers

Cornell Chronicle

Hyunju Kim, a Cornell Tech doctoral student in information science, noted that the concept was inspired by the way dancers naturally communicate about movement. They frequently demonstrate choreography physically rather than relying on verbal descriptions. DanXeReflect builds upon this approach by enabling dancers to execute revised movements alongside the original ones. The system also allows users to search a choreography database by mimicking poses and adding time-stamped comments directly to specific areas of the virtual avatar.

Cornell Chronicle

The team interviewed six Martha Graham dance professionals, including experienced dancers, directors, and a former performer. They subsequently recruited nine female dancers from various styles such as street, jazz, ballroom, and ballet. Participants utilized DanXeReflect for post-rehearsal video review, with one noting that it significantly improved their comprehension of 3D movement. This instance highlights a practical application of VR technology, demonstrating how headsets can assist individuals in analyzing and enhancing real-world physical abilities.

Apple’s pricing tactics are poised to become… intriguing once more. Following the unexpected launch of the budget-friendly MacBook Neo, the tech giant may be preparing to execute a comparable maneuver with its upcoming flagship smartphone. In this instance, however, the spotlight falls squarely on the Pro variants.

Reports indicate Apple is adopting a bold pricing approach for the iPhone 18 Pro?

According to a fresh analysis by industry observer Jeff Pu, Apple intends to implement “aggressive pricing” for the iPhone 18 Pro series, though perhaps not in the conventional manner. As detailed by 9to5Mac, the plan appears to be more intricate than a straightforward price increase across the board.

Mo3ath photos / Pexels

The core concept revolves around repositioning the Pro tier rather than simply inflating prices across the board. Apple might expand the distinction between standard iPhones and Pro models, enhancing the premium feel of the high-end devices while keeping entry-level options affordable to sustain overall sales volume.

Mo3ath photos / Pexels

Jeremy Bezanger / Unsplash

This approach mirrors Apple’s recent conduct. The company has historically absorbed escalating costs rather than immediately passing them to consumers, particularly when demand might suffer. However, with Pro devices, there is greater flexibility to adjust pricing without significantly impacting sales volume.

Jeremy Bezanger / Unsplash

Applying the Neo Strategy to iPhones

The MacBook Neo demonstrated that Apple is open to experimenting with pricing at both ends of the market spectrum. On one hand, there is a surprisingly affordable MacBook designed to broaden the user base. On the other, Apple could be making its Pro iPhones feel even more exclusive by further widening the price gap.

Nadeem Sarwar / Techgeeks

This dual strategy enables Apple to cater to both markets. It can attract new customers with lower entry prices while maximizing revenue from users eager to pay for top-tier hardware. Given that iPhones remain Apple’s primary revenue source, even minor adjustments in pricing strategy can yield significant results.

Nadeem Sarwar / Digital Trends

Will the iPhone 18 Pro Actually Cost More?

This remains the central question. Some rumors indicate that prices might stay relatively stable in certain markets to protect demand, particularly in price-sensitive regions. Meanwhile, increasing component costs, especially memory driven by AI demand, are squeezing margins across the industry.

Unsplash

Consequently, “aggressive pricing” might not necessarily translate to a massive price hike. It could involve smarter product segmentation, region-specific adjustments, or subtle increases that reinforce the Pro lineup’s premium status without deterring potential buyers.

Unsplash

Oura has unveiled a significant update to its smart ring ecosystem, rolling out new tools centered on hormonal wellness. Starting May 6, the brand is launching global support for Hormonal Birth Control and Menopause Insights, further expanding its women’s health offerings.

A Move Toward Customized Health Monitoring

This update introduces two primary features. First, Hormonal Birth Control support enhances Oura’s existing Cycle Insights by letting users record various contraceptive methods—such as pills, patches, IUDs, and implants—and monitor their impact on biometrics like sleep quality, recovery, and body temperature. This aims to bridge the gap between hormonal fluctuations and daily physiological metrics, a niche that has historically lacked robust tracking solutions.

Oura Oura

Second, the Menopause Insights feature targets perimenopause and menopause, stages often overlooked in digital health apps. At its core lies a proprietary Menopause Impact Scale, which evaluates how symptoms influence daily routines. Users get a tailored dashboard that monitors symptom patterns over time and correlates them with biometric data gathered by the Oura Ring.

Oura Oura

Why This Update Is Significant

This release underscores a wider industry trend toward personalized, data-driven health insights. Hormonal health has long been a secondary priority in both medical research and tech development, despite impacting a substantial portion of the global population.

By merging hormonal context with continuous biometric monitoring, Oura seeks to fill this void. The company frames these tools as moving past generic symptom logging to provide more structured and individualized guidance. This method could enhance users’ understanding of long-term bodily changes, particularly during complex life transitions like menopause.

Benefits for Users

For consumers, these new tools offer a deeper look into how hormonal shifts affect daily wellness metrics. Rather than depending on fragmented data or broad advice, users can monitor trends over time and connect them to their own lived experiences.

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends / Digital Trends

The platform also allows users to share this information with medical professionals, potentially enhancing consultations and treatment plans. In the U.S., Oura is collaborating with healthcare provider Twentyeight Health to provide integrated access to contraception services, including virtual consultations and prescriptions.

Andy Boxall/Digital Trends / Digital Trends

Future Developments

These features are part of Oura’s larger vision to create a comprehensive women’s health ecosystem. The brand has previously launched tools like Cycle Insights, Fertile Window tracking, and Pregnancy Insights, alongside an AI model designed to interpret women’s health data.

Oura is also collaborating with clinical partners and research organizations to broaden the application of its biometric data in real-world healthcare settings. As these initiatives progress, the company aims to establish its platform as a long-term health companion that adapts to various life stages, from early cycles through menopause and beyond.

This article is brought to you in paid partnership with ESUNYD

Outdoor illumination that needs no electrical wiring, operates completely on sunlight, and costs only $2.50 per fixture is an excellent enhancement for any patio, railing, or garden. The ESUNYD solar fence light 16-pack presents a compelling case at $39.99. This represents a $10 discount from the $49.99 regular price for a collection that provides 9 color choices, 11 illumination settings, and IP65 water resistance across every light in the bundle.

What You Receive

The 11 settings are what provide these solar lights with their versatility. Steady single-color options include warm white plus eight other hues such as red, green, blue, orange, yellow, and cyan, while two RGB settings manage smooth color transitions and flashing patterns for events needing a more celebratory touch. For daily use, the warm white and steady color settings maintain a tidy look; for a garden gathering, Halloween, or Christmas display, the RGB cycling settings truly shine without requiring a different product for each occasion.

The directed LED lens and reflective interior direct output to 60 lumens with a broader, more even beam than typical unfocused solar fixtures at this cost level usually achieve. The improved solar panel absorbs sunlight 20% quicker than the prior model, needing 4 to 6 hours of charging for more than 10 hours of operation, which spans an entire evening without interruption. IP65 water resistance withstands rain, snow, and temperature fluctuations, establishing these as a true all-season installation rather than a temporary solution.

Setup demands no professional electrician and no hidden wiring. The bundle includes a layout guide for uniform spacing, and the process simply involves marking, drilling, and mounting. A single button switches between all 11 settings or turns the lights off, ensuring straightforward daily use after the initial installation.

Why It’s Valuable

Solar fence lights at $2.50 per unit with this many settings and a legitimate IP65 rating are uncommon. The ESUNYD 16-pack at $39.99 illuminates a complete fence line, deck edge, or garden path without costs escalating rapidly, and the RGB functionality allows them to serve both daily atmosphere and holiday decoration without extra expense.

Final Thoughts

The ESUNYD solar fence lights 16-pack at $39.99 is a comprehensive outdoor lighting choice that deserves permanent placement rather than seasonal storage. The 11 modes, IP65 weather resistance, and 10-hour solar operation combine to deliver a set that handles more scenarios than the price indicates, and the $10 discount makes this an effortless decision for anyone wanting to illuminate an outdoor area without installing any electrical wires.

Researchers at the University of Queensland have created indoor solar panels that may eventually charge your wearables, sensors, and small electronics using only the ambient light in your home or workplace.

These panels utilize perovskite, a material that has been gaining attention as a potential successor to traditional silicon in solar cells. While silicon-based indoor solar cells top out at around 10 percent efficiency, perovskite can do significantly better.

The main issue has been that most perovskite solar cells rely on lead and hazardous solvents in their production, which is a problem for both safety and scaling up to real-world manufacturing. The UQ team has figured out a way around that.

How Does This Technology Function?

PhD student Zitong Wang, under the supervision of Dr Miaoqiang Lyu and Professor Lianzhou Wang, developed a vapor-based process that can manufacture high-quality lead-free perovskite material without any hazardous solvents.

The University of Queensland

The panels hit a power conversion efficiency of 16.36 percent under indoor lighting, which is the highest recorded for this type of lead-free perovskite indoor solar cell made using an industry-compatible method.

Can These Panels Replace Traditional Batteries?

The panels are being explored as an alternative to coin-cell and button batteries for low-power devices like environmental sensors, wearables, and health monitors. Supermarkets testing electronic shelf labels, which replace paper price tags, are among the early candidates for the technology.

The panels are thin, flexible, and can be made in different shapes, making them easy to slot into all kinds of products. The next step is encapsulation to protect them from moisture and oxygen. After that, it is mostly a waiting game.

Dr Lyu expects perovskite indoor panels to hit the consumer market within the next few years. This is an exciting new technological development that could significantly benefit the environment. I look forward to seeing how it evolves and improves our lives.

Techgeeks is giving product pages the podcast treatment, and it’s as useful as it sounds. This might sound like a neat new trick till you hear what some of these AI “hosts” are actually discussing.

The company recently expanded its “Hear the highlights” feature with a new interactive mode called “Join the chat.” This feature lets shoppers listen to AI-generated audio summaries about the products they are viewing, and even ask questions by text or voice while the audio is playing. It added a layer of interactivity, with these AI hosts being capable of pausing and answering in real time. But that’s where the handy idea ends, and the bizarre bit starts.

How the early examples are already strange

Amazon

Amazon’s Hear the highlights creates short audio conversations about key product features, who a product might be good for, and what shoppers should know before buying. The feature basically pulls from product details, customer reviews, and other publicly available information.

In practice, a quick audio summary could help save time and cut through the mess of shopping pages. But the problem is that products do not always deserve a cheery mini-podcast.

Futurism highlighted examples originally surfaced by Business Insider’s Katie Notopoulos, including an AI-generated shopping discussion about adult diaper rash cream. In another example, the feature reportedly generated enthusiastic commentary for a fake dog poop product, praising details like its size and realism. At this point, it becomes an automated infomercial machine rather than a helpful shopping assistant.

Amazon

Useful idea with an awkward execution

Amazon is trying to make the system more conversational. The company is already pushing AI deeper into its retail experience. Rufus is one such example, functioning as an AI shopping assistant that offers product summaries.

Asking whether a humidifier works with essential oils, or whether earbuds are good for calls, can be genuinely helpful. But this is unintentionally funny when it is applied across odd, intimate, or novelty products.

At the end of April 2026, the domain max.ru was flagged by Cloudflare as potentially associated with spyware. Such a label indicates that the service may pose a risk to user data or engage in hidden activity that is not obvious to users.

By itself, this designation is not definitive proof of malicious behavior, but for the industry it represents a serious reputational blow — especially given that MAX is positioned as a “national messenger” aimed at a массовая audience.

Interestingly, the situation almost mirrors the fate of the alternative client Telega. Shortly before being removed from the App Store, it received a similar label, after which user trust dropped sharply.

⸻

Why This Matters

A spyware flag is more than just a technical label — it has consequences across several levels:

• User trust: most users won’t investigate the details and will simply avoid the app
• Distribution: app stores are highly sensitive to such signals
• International reputation: skepticism toward products tied to state initiatives increases

Against the backdrop of competition with platforms like Telegram, incidents like this can cost a project its audience.

⸻

An Alternative with the Opposite Logic

Amid such cases, some users turn their attention to solutions built on a противоположной philosophy — maximum privacy by default.

Verum Messenger is often mentioned in this context. The service positions itself around отказ from telemetry and server logs, offers registration without a phone number, uses an open protocol, and even includes built-in tools to bypass restrictions (including VPN functionality).

As of May 2026, Cloudflare has no public labels linking Verum to malicious activity — at least at the level of infrastructure warnings, it appears “clean.”

However, this model also has its downside.

⸻

The Other Side of Anonymity

A high level of privacy often conflicts with regulation. In the case of Verum, this has manifested quite directly: since September 2024, the service has been blocked in Russia by a decision of the Moscow City Court.

The reason is described as “excessive anonymity” and the inability to control user activity. This creates a paradoxical situation:

• Inside the country: the service effectively operates outside the legal framework
• Outside it: it is perceived as one of the “cleaner” tools in terms of privacy

⸻

Conclusion

The story of MAX and similar cases shows that the messenger market is increasingly divided not only by functionality, but also by ideology.

On one side are platforms integrated into state or corporate ecosystems. On the other are tools that prioritize anonymity and data minimization.

To challenge Linux’s increasing presence in handheld gaming devices, Microsoft demonstrated Xbox mode, a streamlined, gaming-centric iteration of Windows. Last month, Microsoft delighted Windows users by revealing that Xbox mode would also expand to Windows PCs and laptops.

That moment has now arrived. Xbox mode is currently being deployed to Windows 11 PCs, covering laptops, desktops, and tablets. If you have long desired a PC that operates more like a gaming console, this is the update you have been anticipating.

Why is Xbox mode generating so much excitement?

Xbox mode offers a full-screen, controller-friendly interface designed specifically for gaming. Imagine a console-style hub layered over Windows 11. It highlights your game library, minimizes background clutter, and allows you to launch titles instantly without navigating the standard Windows environment.

Users can navigate and launch titles using a controller, return to the Windows desktop whenever necessary, and access their entire game collection in one location, including the complete Xbox Game Pass library and titles from other PC platforms.

Xbox mode aims to provide a cohesive gaming experience across all your devices. It does not replace Windows but rather offers an alternative way to utilize your PC. If you value the flexibility of PC gaming but desire the ease of a console interface, Xbox mode delivers both.

How can you install Xbox mode on your PC?

The deployment is rolling out gradually, meaning availability will vary by device. To receive the update as soon as it becomes available on your system, open Settings, navigate to Windows Update, and enable “Get the latest updates as soon as they are available.”

Once the update is installed, you can launch Xbox mode directly from your PC. Microsoft states it will continue refining Xbox mode based on user feedback, ensuring the experience will only improve moving forward.