Reverse-engineered games: All the news on video game decomps, recomps, VR and web and 3D ports

It’s a wild time for retro gaming. Thanks to decompilations and recompilations of classic titles, those games are becoming unshackled from their proprietary code and original hardware to be ported to new devices or updated in ways to completely change the original game. Ever imagined skateboarding in Call of Duty? Or playing the original Halo right … Read more

All the drama around AI’s takeover of mathematics

This past year, OpenAI, Anthropic, and other labs have announced breakthroughs on numerous long-standing mathematical problems, in some cases pushing well beyond what researchers expected current systems to be capable of — including resolving one of the famous Millennium Prize problems. But in classic Silicon Valley style, AI labs are moving fast and breaking things, … Read more

Wikipedia operator says OpenAI’s ‘rogue’ bots may be linked to a May outage

Following many recent disclosures about AI agents accessing third-party websites and services, the Wikimedia Foundation, which hosts Wikipedia, says that it “can confirm that we have discovered some activity” by “rogue” OpenAI agents on Wikimedia platforms. The activity includes edits to Wikimedia wikis, “unsuccessful attempts” to “exploit” the Etherpad note-taking tool that the Wikimedia Foundation … Read more

OpenAI is adding text watermarking in ChatGPT and Codex

An invisible, machine-readable watermark in text output is rolling out to ChatGPT and Codex, but only for users in the European Union at first. OpenAI says its textGrain watermarking “matched or exceeded” other approaches like Google DeepMind’s SynthID for text, which is also the basis for the watermarking Anthropic announced in August. Like OpenAI, Anthropic … Read more

OpenAI PR tells journalist to ‘move on’ while asking Sam Altman about a ChatGPT user’s suicide

An OpenAI publicist tried to change the topic of CEO Sam Altman’s interview with Vanity Fair‘s Mark Guiducci after the editor brought up a ChatGPT user’s suicide. When Guiducci confronted Altman about the incident, the publicist warned Guiducci about running out of time, saying she’d like to “move on” to another topic. The interruption came … Read more

Nvidia’s Shield TV Pro just got a $100 price hike

Nvidia’s Shield TV streaming boxes are the latest victims of the memory shortage that has seen prices increase dramatically for everything from digital cameras to game consoles. When the Shield TV Pro launched nearly seven years ago with an upgraded Tegra X1+ processor, 3GB of RAM, and 16GB of storage, it sold for $199.99. But … Read more

Apple’s new M6 Mac Mini is over $100 off

Really the only negative associated with the new M6-powered Mac Mini is its high price. While the last-gen model debuted at just $599, the faster, but mostly unchanged 2026 edition starts at $899 — except for right now. You can grab the base model that has 256GB of storage, 16GB RAM, and a 12-core CPU … Read more

Sen. Adam Schiff on AI regulation, free speech, and impeaching Trump one more time

Today, I’m talking with Senator Adam Schiff, a Democrat from California. Sen. Schiff sits on a number of committees with oversight into tech and AI: intellectual property, antitrust, privacy and technology — it’s all there. I really wanted to ask him about how we might regulate anything related to the tech industry at this moment … Read more

OpenAI is sticking more ads in ChatGPT

OpenAI’s latest ad format will put images of sponsored products and services on your screen. The ads, which OpenAI will begin testing in the US later this month, will “initially” appear when you generate images with ChatGPT, according to an announcement on Monday. The company first brought ads to ChatGPT in February. Until now, ChatGPT’s … Read more

Our minds aren’t equipped to handle AI

Norbert Wiener, godfather of cybernetics, once said, “The thought of every age is reflected in its technique.” For the past century, our thought has been reflected in our computers, including by those in the AI industry. Google’s Demis Hassabis calls the brain “a biological approximation to a Turing machine.” Elon Musk puts it more bluntly, … Read more

The new Fitbit Edge leaks

We don’t know a ton about the Fitbit Edge, but it appears to be a successor to the midrange Charge line. It had leaked previously, but we can clearly see in these images posted by Android Headlines, you can see that Google’s rumored fitness tracker sort of splits the difference between the Pixel Watch and … Read more

An AI couldn’t beat humans at StarCraft, so it decided to cheat

StarSkirmish pits AI-made StarCraft-playing bots against one another, as well as against human-made bots. OpenAI’s GPT-6 Astra and Claude Opus 5.5 were essentially tied as the best-performing AI-made bots, but they couldn’t top Stardust, the top-rated human-made bot. On Friday, GPT was facing off against Claude and the human-created bot Pluto, but according to Kotaku, … Read more

The forgotten Chromebook that started it all

Google didn’t even call the first Chromebook a “Chromebook.” The Cr-48 had no interesting design and no bright logos – it wasn’t even designed to be a product you could buy. Instead, it was a portal to a big new idea about computers. In this week’s episode of Version History, The Verge‘s Nilay Patel and … Read more

The rise, fall, and rise of portable MP3 players

This is The Stepback, a weekly newsletter breaking down one essential story from the tech world. For more on the collapse and the resurgence of the portable media player, follow Terrence O’Brien. The Stepback arrives in our subscribers’ inboxes on Sunday at 8AM ET. Opt in for The Stepback here. How it started We are … Read more