I've looked through the retailer's entire Mother's Day sale to find deals from Dyson, Kitchenaid, and other leading brands.

A fully electronic braking system is being built into a car for the first time — are we sure removing hydraulic brakes is a good idea?

A known RAT was given new capabilities in order to exfiltrate 2FA codes and more.

Freshworks and Coinbase are joining the list of companies laying off employees due to AI in 2026

Amazon has confirmed Prime Day will take place in June this year, and it's giving us a preview of the summer sale with incredible device deals that you can shop right now.

Willow will let you know exactly what your houseplants need to grow strong and healthy — if you don't mind being bossed about by a fern.

The LG C6 is a great upgrade over the already fantastic LG C5, and another blockbuster entry in the C-series OLED lineage.

ExpressVPN's new 14.1.0 update for Windows, Mac, and Linux brings a minimized startup option, faster kill switch toggling, more reliable reconnections, and full keyboard and screen reader support.

Google is focusing on Linux kernel components, and prioritizing bugs that can't be easily found with AI.

This lightweight cordless vacuum cleaner is reasonably priced, with great anti-wrap hair tech, but its battery life is relatively short.

The Russian media regulator, Roskomnadzor, has set an ambitious and alarming goal: to block 92% of all Virtual Private Network (VPN) services operating within the country by 2030. Here's all we know.

The Gemini app for macOS could be getting new agentic powers to let it control your computer, just like Claude Cowork.

Here's how to watch Mint online from anywhere in the world, completely FREE.

Daredevil: Born Again's showrunner has also teased that their season 2 finale cameo is just the start of their MCU journey.

The new feature is a small win for Android users, as it gives them more control over how much location data they share with websites.

While citing web forums and discussion boards can help users find answers to more niche queries, this design choice could also prove chaotic.

Genesis AI, a startup that raised a $105 million seed round to build foundational AI for robotics, has unveiled its first model, GENE-26.5, but also a demo showcasing a set of robotic hands performing complex tasks.

Match Group said that it's slowing its hiring plans for the rest of the year because AI tools "cost a lot of money."

We’ve rounded up the top ways you can use Google’s AI Mode, Search Live and Shopping to help your plants thrive.

We're partnering with Believe to offer Google Flow Music to artists, producers and songwriters.

Google is expanding its Analytics Data API to include cross-channel conversion reporting — giving developers programmatic access to paid and organic performance data.

What’s happening. The new feature, currently in alpha, allows Google Analytics and Google Ads users to pull conversion data across channels via the API — mirroring what’s available in the Conversion performance report in the Analytics interface.

This means developers can now access the same insights without relying on manual reporting.

Why we care. As measurement becomes more complex, advertisers need unified views of performance across paid and organic channels. This update enables teams to automate reporting, integrate data into their own systems and build more advanced analysis workflows.

It’s particularly valuable for businesses managing multiple platforms and looking to centralise performance data.

The caveat. This feature may not be available to every Google Analytics property yet. Google says it is actively working to expand access, and advertisers should check with their support teams to confirm eligibility.

What to watch:

• When the feature moves beyond alpha and becomes widely available
• How advertisers use API access to build custom attribution models
• Whether more reporting capabilities are added to the Data API

Bottom line. By bringing cross-channel conversion data into the API, Google is giving advertisers and developers more control over how they access, analyse and act on performance data.

Negative keywords aren’t a checklist anymore. In 2026, they’re a series of strategic decisions — and how you make them shapes how the algorithm interprets your account.

If you’re still treating negatives like maintenance, you’re missing the point. Every exclusion is a signal: who you want to reach, what you’re willing to pay for, and how your campaigns should perform.

Here are six decisions that define modern negative keyword strategy — and why they matter more than ever.

How negative keywords shape campaign performance

Negative keywords are how you sculpt a campaign so the right ad shows up for the right person. The user’s query should match the ad. The ad should match the landing page. That alignment is what creates a good experience for the person on the other side of the screen (a.k.a., your ideal client).

When that alignment breaks down, you waste budget. You also drag down click-through rate (CTR) and Quality Score, and push CPCs up. All of this is what ultimately makes the algorithm work against you in an ads account.

But many of us were never really taught how negatives fit into an overall account strategy. We were taught how to add them. There’s a big difference.

Now let’s get into the six strategic choices.

1. How aggressive should you be with negatives?

This is the first decision an account manager needs to make, and most people skip it.

Are you scraping the bottom of the barrel every week, pulling out every search term that didn’t convert? Are you letting things slide so you can keep mining new keyword opportunities? Or are you somewhere in the middle, adding negatives mostly to show that you’re doing something?

There’s no universal right answer. But you do need to pick a level of aggression and back it up based on the account’s performance and goals.

A growth-focused account probably shouldn’t be aggressive. An efficiency-focused account probably should. A small-budget account that can’t afford to learn slowly often needs to be more aggressive than an enterprise account that can.

Pick the level. Defend the level when you’re working in the account and talking to your team. Then the rest of your choices become easier.

2. How to use match types for negative keywords

Negatives don’t match the same way regular keywords do — broad, phrase, and exact — but most advertisers default to one match type without thinking about why.

Here’s how I think about it:

• Negative exact match: Use this for strict removal. A specific long-tail variation that’s wasting budget, but you don’t want to nuke similar queries.
• Negative phrase match: Use this for groups of related queries you want gone. Competitor names, certain question phrases, and intent modifiers like “tutorial” or “review.”
• Negative broad match: Use this for words you want eliminated entirely — words like “cheap,” “dangerous,” or “free,” that signal a misaligned audience no matter how the rest of the query is constructed.

This isn’t an either/or decision. A real negative keyword strategy uses all three match types intentionally, in different places, and for different reasons.

3. When should you add negative keywords?

I’ve seen everything here. Some account managers add negatives on a strict weekly cadence, even when the data doesn’t call for it. Some only touch them when something stops converting. Some only review when a quarterly check-in forces them to. And some add them just to look busy on a status report.

My recommendation: don’t add a negative just because a keyword didn’t convert, especially when you’re trying to scale. You never know if it would’ve converted with a little more volume. Be careful, and tie the trigger back to your account’s goals.

• For accounts in growth mode, the trigger might be: “This query has cost more than 3x my target CPA with zero conversions over 90 days.”
• For accounts focused on efficiency, the trigger might be: “This query cost more than $X without converting, period.”

Both are valid. They just align to different goals in different accounts.

4. What time frame should guide your decisions?

How far back are you looking when you make the call to add something as a negative?

A 30-day window is aggressive. You’re cutting things off before they’ve had a real chance to convert. That’s appropriate for short-cycle ecommerce, fast-moving promotions, or tightly capped budgets. But this might not work for all accounts.

A 90-day window is balanced. Long enough for sales cycles to play out, short enough to actually act on. This is the default I recommend for most paid search accounts.

A 365-day window is conservative. You’re giving every query maximum runway. Appropriate for high-consideration B2B or anything with a long buying cycle.

Longer time frames give individual queries more chances to succeed. Shorter time frames protect your budget faster. Pick the time frame that matches the aggressiveness level you set in your top choice, and don’t make these decisions in isolation from each other.

5. How much should you sculpt your campaigns?

This is where the role of AI really starts to matter when it comes to negative keywords.

• How much control do you want over your account?
• And maybe more importantly: how much do you trust the machine?

Some advertisers embed competitor keywords as negatives in non-brand campaigns just to keep the targeting clean. Some account managers let those queries through because they’re converting, even if they technically “shouldn’t.” Some refuse to add negatives at the campaign level at all, because they trust the algorithm to figure out what should match where.

Consider that the machine and the algorithms have more information than we do. The platforms know what was searched before the query and more about user behavior. They know what was searched after. They know what session context the user is in. They can match queries to keywords in ways we can’t replicate manually.

But sculpting accounts is still how we communicate intent to that machine. If you don’t sculpt, the bidding algorithm doesn’t know what you actually want, and it just optimizes against the goals you handed it, which isn’t always the same thing as the outcomes you actually care about.

I lean toward more sculpting in 2026, not less. The algorithm has gotten better and will continue to improve, but so have the ways it can spend your budget on the wrong queries.

6. How should you manage negatives in practice?

This is the choice that didn’t exist five years ago.

In 2026, you have options that previous generations of account managers never had:

• A fully manual review with a spreadsheet and a search term report.
• Google Ads’ built-in negative keyword suggestions.
• A third-party tool that surfaces negatives semantically.
• Pasting your search term report into a chat and letting AI flag candidates for you.
• Delegating the entire task to a tool that adds negatives on autopilot, with no human in the loop.

The question isn’t which one is best. The question is: how comfortable are you removing yourself from the loop? At what level do you want AI to handle this task?

For some accounts that are highly templated, low-stakes, and high-volume, maybe fully delegated AI negative keyword management is fine. For most accounts, I’d recommend a hybrid: AI surfaces candidates, and you approve them. The middle ground gives you speed without sacrificing oversight.

But the most important part is to make this decision intentionally, not by default, and to be able to defend the choice to key stakeholders. If you’re still doing all your negatives by hand in 2026, that should be a deliberate choice, not just “how I’ve always done it.”

A few golden rules that hold up in any era

No matter which choices you make above, a handful of things still hold true:

• Pull the search terms report regularly. The data won’t tell you what to decide, but it will tell you what to decide about. Make sure you look at the reports regularly, and remember no decision is still a decision.
• Keep your negatives updated as your campaigns evolve. The negatives that made sense for last quarter’s strategy may be the wrong ones now.
• Start with a few negatives and build from there. Being too negative too soon is genuinely harmful when an account is in a growth phase.
• Humans don’t search in straight lines. The query that looks irrelevant to your offer might be the final step before a conversion. Ad platforms try to teach us this in their documentation and training and reiterate that intent is messy, nonlinear, and often unpredictable. But as PPC practitioners, we still find ourselves resisting the idea that the system can make these judgment calls on our behalf.

Paul DeMott, owner of Helium, sees this most clearly in high-spend accounts:

• “Most negative keyword lists are too exhaustive and haven’t been revisited in years… aggressive negative lists often hurt more than they help. You’re constraining the algorithm’s exploration on the exact accounts where it has the signal to make smart calls.”

The risk today isn’t under-negating. It’s over-sculpting based on outdated assumptions.

Jordan Brunelle, owner of Good Growth Marketing, points to a related issue: shutting down queries too quickly because they don’t match the product or service literally.

• “A lot of account managers are quick to negate keywords that don’t perfectly match their product/service… we must get into the head of the searcher and consider what their ultimate need is.”

Intent isn’t always obvious at the query level. It often becomes clear only at the conversion level.

Breanne Bartlett, a paid search consultant, frames it simply:

• “Most account managers still treat ‘vague’ queries as bad and overuse negatives to control them… the mistake isn’t allowing these queries, it’s blocking them before you’ve seen how they actually convert.”

Top accounts aren’t restrictive. They’re responsive. They remove proven irrelevance, not theoretical inefficiency.

That tension between control and trust is showing up everywhere. As platforms introduce features like previewing the impact of negative keywords before applying them — something Menachem Ani, founder of a Google Premier Partner agency JXT, recently highlighted — the direction is clear: more data-driven decisions, less reactive cleanup.

At the same time, the core principle hasn’t changed. As Boris Beceric, a Google Ads consultant, reminded practitioners, efficiency starts with exclusion:

• “Most small budgets don’t fail because the offer is bad. They fail because the ads get shown for the wrong searches.”

Beceric’s post on LinkedIn reframes negatives as a proactive efficiency tool, not just a cleanup task, and underscores that deciding what not to target is just as strategic as deciding what to include.

Together, these perspectives capture the evolution of negative keyword strategy: from maintenance to signal-shaping, from exclusion to intent communication. The smartest account managers aren’t just adding negatives — they’re auditing, previewing, and sculpting them with purpose and a larger goal in mind.

What your negative keyword decisions are really doing

Negative keywords have always been part of paid search. What’s changed in 2026 is how much depends on how you guide — or defer to — the machine.

The real risk is making decisions about negative keywords on autopilot. Stale lists, over-sculpting, and unexamined habits quietly shape how the algorithm interprets your intent.

Every choice ties back to one question: what are the goals of this ad account?

A growth-focused account makes different choices than an efficiency-focused one. A small-budget account behaves differently from an enterprise one. A B2B account isn’t the same as high-velocity ecommerce. Even the “right” level of control shifts as Smart Bidding gains more signal.

Negative keywords aren’t a checklist in 2026. They’re a series of decisions that compound over time — and the account managers who make them intentionally, with fresh data, and clear goals, are the ones who deliver better results and can explain why.

Xbox cancels its Copilot plans Xbox’s new CEO, Asha Sharma, has announced that they have stopped the development of Copilot for consoles and will be winding down Copilot for mobile. Xbox is stepping away from Microsoft’s “AI everything” mantra and aims to bring Xbox “back on track”. In her post on the matter, Sharma claims […]

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PCI-SIG members now have access to version 0.5 of the PCI Express 8.0 standard PCI-SIG members have today gained access to version 0.5 of the PCIe 8.0 standard, arriving ahead of schedule to industry partners. This is the official first draft of the PCIe 8.0 specification, incorporating feedback from the standard’s 0.3 release last year. Currently, the […]

The post PCIe 8.0 version 0.5 has been released – On track for 256 GT/s speeds appeared first on OC3D.

The new Windows Run box has been officially unveiled, and it's a genuine improvement over the legacy interface with faster launch times and more features. This is what happens when the people working on Windows actually care.

In the world of Hall effect and TMR gaming keyboards, tactile switches are somewhat of a rarity, largely because the tactile bump somewhat defeats the object of having an adjustable actuation point. Despite this, Keychron has just announced not one, but two tactile magnetic switches for its Ultra-Fast Lime Magnetic Switch line-up: the Banana and Silent Banana switches. There is also a new Silent Red linear switch joining the two Banana variants and the original Lime linear switch. The new switches are available on Keychron's online store for $29.99 for a pack of 110 switches, which is very much on the affordable side of the spectrum, especially compared to the Gateron Magnetic Jade Emerald Heavy Tactile switch, which comes in at $59.50 for 70 switches or $76.50 for 90.

All three new switches share similar characteristics, with 3.5 mm of total travel, pre-lubed construction, N-pole magnet configurations for compatibility with most HE keyboards, like Wooting and Keychron's own HE 8K series, and 30 gf starting actuation force—the Silent Red and Lime bottom out at 55 gf, while the Banana variants both bottom out at 50 gf. Curiously, the Silent Red switch uses silicone buffers in side rails to silence the bottom-out, while the Silent Banana tactile switch features a silencing circlip to dampen the bottom out. This was likely a consideration to prioritize the switch's bottom-out feel, but it may result in a switch that is not completely silent, but rather with a damped bottom-out sound.

AMD's CPU offerings will soon expand into more categories, specializing in different tasks and use cases. During the latest Q1 earnings call, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed that customers are increasingly interested in specialized EPYC solutions and that future CPU generations will cater to different customer needs. This means that agentic AI will receive a dedicated EPYC CPU SKU, HPC workloads will have their own EPYC CPU SKU, AI training and inference will get a separate EPYC SKU, and cloud workloads will have a distinct SKU. This expansion of task-specialized CPU designs will go beyond the "Venice" CPU platform, which is expected to be released this year. At CES 2026, AMD confirmed that EPYC "Venice" will be a highly dense CPU package with up to 256 cores and 512 threads of "Zen 6c" cores, while the regular "Zen 6" configuration will have a maximum of 192 cores and 384 threads.

With this generation of EPYC CPUs based on the "Zen 6" core IP, AMD will promote "Venice" CPUs broadly, while the "Verona" CPU generation will be complemented by the "Verano" CPUs. These appear to use the same "Zen 6" microarchitecture but have optimizations specifically designed for AI infrastructure. Contrary to previous assumptions that "Verano" would be a "Zen 7" IP, it is now confirmed to be part of the 6th-generation EPYC CPU family. This indicates that AMD is starting its CPU customization for different workloads as early as this year. As the server CPU market is projected to reach $120 billion by the end of this decade, less than 3.5 years away in 2030, it makes sense to have different CPU SKUs for each task and capture a significant portion of that revenue. Server CPUs are also expected to grow at a 35% compound annual growth rate, which is impressive for a relatively mature market.

CCP Games, the developer of EVE Online, just announced that it has been bought out by its board of directors, meaning it will no longer operate as a subsidiary of Pearl Abyss. As the announcement highlights, the studio is "returning to a model similar to how the company operated before 2018, and one designed to support strategic decision-making for persistent live games and long-running virtual worlds." The company was sold by Pearl Abyss for $120 million, and the transaction was executed using both cash and non-cash assets. Following the sale, CCP Games will also rebrand to Fenris Creations, and it has also forged a new partnership with Google DeepMind, who owns a minority stake in the company.

Hilmar Veigar Pétursson, CEO of Fenris Creations, says that "EVE Online exists today because of pioneering thinking, patience, and trust between developers and players," and that the DeepMind partnership will "enable us to carry that legacy forward—continuously evolving a living universe and actively exploring what it can become, with forever in mind." The collaboration with DeepMind will also see Google's AI project develop an offline version of EVE Online running in a local server in order to "test and evaluate models in a controlled setting" and "explore new gameplay experiences enabled by these technologies." It remains to be seen how the studio and EVE Online will change with the new strategy and alongside the DeepMind partnership, but there don't seem to be any real structural changes at the time of writing.

According to Economic Daily News, TSMC is overhauling Fab 15A in Central Taiwan Science Park, transitioning it from 28/22 nm to 4 nm production. Old equipment is being cleared out and replaced with new tooling, and the total bill (cleanrooms and machinery included) is expected to top NT$100 billion (US$3.16 billion). The displaced 28/22 nm tools aren't going to waste either, heading to TSMC facility in Dresden, Germany, which is ramping toward mass production in 2027 on mature nodes aimed at the automotive and industrial market. Fab 15B stays on 7 nm for now. Further up the process roadmap, TSMC's 1.4 nm fab at the Phase 2 Central Taiwan site in Taichung is coming together faster than planned. Groundwork is mostly completed and construction bidding is expected to start shortly. If things keep moving at this pace, trial production could start as early as Q3 2027, with full mass production following in the second half of 2028.

There are also talks of 1 nm arriving at the Central Taiwan site earlier than previously expected. Worth noting that 1.4 nm isn't part of TSMC's US fab plans at all. Once all four Phase 2 fabs are running at capacity, the Taichung complex is expected to be the single largest production base for AI and HPC chips anywhere in the world. In April, TSMC introduced its A13 (1.3 nm) process at the 2026 North America Technology Symposium as a direct shrink of the previously announced A14 (1.4 nm) node. The new node offers around 6% area reduction, along with improved performance and power efficiency through design-technology co-optimization. The A13 node remains fully backward compatible with A14 design rules to allow easier migration. TSMC A13 node is expected to enter mass production in 2029, one year after A14.

"Search is dead" has been a recurring headline for years. First, it was social media that was supposed to replace it. Then apps. Then, voice assistants. Now it's generative AI.

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The recently introduced 6600 ION SSD is available in both U.2 and E3.L form factors and can provide up to 245 terabytes of storage in a single drive. Micron describes the new unit as the highest-capacity commercially available SSD in the industry, in line with other high-capacity drives released in...

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The complaints focused on how Apple marketed its AI features alongside the iPhone 16 and certain iPhone 15 models. Consumers who purchased those handsets between June 2024 and March 2025 may be eligible for payments of up to $95 per device. Apple denied any wrongdoing as part of the settlement.

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Apple iPhone 18 Pro is now widely expected to sport a more efficient display sourced from Samsung and LG, leaving China's BOE scrambling for the proverbial crumbs. At the same time, tipsters continue to feud over the size of the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max, with the latest CAD renders inviting some hefty skepticism. The LTPO+ OLED screens from Samsung and LG will allow for an improved battery life on the Apple iPhone 18 Pro duo as the Dynamic Island conundrum continues According to The Elec, Samsung and LG are now expected to supply the […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/iphone-18-pro-tipsters-are-now-openly-feuding-over-the-dynamic-island-as-apple-sidelines-chinas-boe-from-display-orders/

Among the games rumored to launch in the coming months on Nintendo Switch 2 is a The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time remake. Little is known about this project, but today, some additional details on the remake of one of the best games of all time have been shared by Nash Weedle. Speaking during the latest episode of the Attack The Backlog podcast, the leaker said the developers are rebuilding the entire game from scratch for this remake. The leaker first heard about the project back in 2022, at which point the studio was hiring creative and artistic leads. […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/zelda-ocarina-of-time-remake-building-scratch-2d-anniversary/

According to a new survey conducted by Ipsos at the end of last year, almost half of all queried Americans said they would oppose an AI data center being built near their community.

Valve just released the 3D CAD files for the Steam Controller and Puck under a CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 International license, allowing gamers and enthusiasts to design and 3D print their own accessories for these gadgets. The company even encouraged everyone to share their creations.

ElevateForward.ai unifies diagnostics, strategy design, and execution in one platform so leaders gain clarity and move faster. Use guided Insight Reports and Elevate Studio to spot misalignment, set priorities, and turn plans into 90-day roadmaps with real-time progress tracking. Invite your team, align KPIs, and refine decisions with cross-report intelligence and AI assistance.

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Vetano is a mobile hiring and gig platform that helps employers see real people and real work before the interview. Employers can post jobs or gigs, share a Vetano link anywhere they already recruit, and review ID-verified profiles, intro videos, and proof-of-skill videos to shortlist candidates faster. Talent can build a verified profile, show their skills through video, apply to jobs, find gigs, and keep 100% of what they earn. Vetano is built for restaurants, trades, retail, automotive, haircare, and other hands-on industries where resumes often do not show the full story.

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The Iranian state-sponsored hacking group known as MuddyWater (aka Mango Sandstorm, Seedworm, and Static Kitten) has been attributed to a ransomware attack in what has been described as a "false flag" operation. The attack, observed by Rapid7 in early 2026, has been found to leverage social engineering techniques via Microsoft Teams to initiate the infection sequence. Although the incident

Passenger's new teaser video dials up the scares ahead of a horror-filled May schedule.

Norton Neo just got a massive privacy and security upgrade. The AI-native browser now features a built-in adaptive VPN, proactive anti-phishing tools, and zero-setup anti-fingerprinting to keep your data safe.

Anthropic has launched 10 prebuilt AI agents specifically for finance workers powered by Claude Opus 4.7.

Despite business leaders feeling 'AI-ready', the data tells a different story. Leaders must now take a pragmatic approach to ensure long-term success.

All the ways to watch Bayern Munich vs PSG live streams online – including for FREE – in the Champions League semi-final 2nd leg at Allianz Arena.

Autonomous AI fraud agents steal massive data, hiding their tracks beyond human attribution

Sender packs automation, segmentation, and SMS into an affordable email marketing tool with a useful free plan — built for small businesses and solo operators.

Cybersecurity must be reimagined with AI technologies, strong governance and operational discipline, and rapid skill and capability development in 2026.

ShinyHunters leaks the stolen database that allegedly contains emails and names.

Apple has agreed to pay $250 million to settle a class action lawsuit for overpromising the arrival of Siri's AI features.

Ethos says it is onboarding 35,000 experts per week.

Aurora said it plans to expand to new routes between McLane distribution centers across the U.S. Sun Belt by the end of 2026.

Leaders from Coinbase, M13, and Mignano Law Group talk about how M&A is an early-stage strategy at TechCrunch Disrupt 2026. Register to hear this live.

Three days left to lock in 50% off a second ticket to Disrupt 2026. Buy one TechCrunch Disrupt 2026 ticket, and get a second ticket at 50% off. Gain more visibility in the tech industry. Offer ends May 8 at 11:59 p.m. PT.

Samsung crossed the $1 trillion valuation mark after shares surged on AI-driven chip demand, making it only the second Asian company after TSMC to hit the milestone.

A new survey found that kids find it easy to bypass age checks, despite a rise in age-verification laws around the world.

New updates to AI Mode and AI Overviews in Google Search make it easier for you to dive deeper online.

AI makes it easy to generate ad creative quickly, but that speed can’t come at the cost of accuracy, brand loyalty or performance.

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Generating high-quality leads from Google Ads often comes down to one unexpected factor: speed. If potential customers have to jump through hoops to reach you, you’ll lose business fast.

That’s why Google Ads offers a trio of what I call “Contact Us assets.” Instead of sending users to a landing page, Call Assets, Lead Forms, and Message Assets let customers call you, fill out a form, or start a conversation directly from your search ads.

Let’s dive into how to set up and optimize these three essential assets to simplify your funnel, capture valuable personally identifiable information (PII), and turn an expensive click into a lasting customer relationship.

Call Assets: The must-have for phone leads

If the action you want someone to take after clicking your ad is calling you, you need to use Call Assets. They display your phone number alongside your ads, allowing users to call you directly from the ad with a single click.

If you’ve been relying on Call Ads to drive phone calls from Google Search, those are being deprecated. You’ll need to use Call Assets alongside Responsive Search Ads instead.

3 essential tips for Call Assets

1. If you want Google’s bidding algorithms to prioritize phone calls, you need to set “Calls from ads” as a Primary conversion action.
2. There’s nothing worse for a customer than calling a business and getting voicemail — or worse, no answer at all. Use asset scheduling to show your phone number only when someone is available to answer. If your business closes at 5 p.m., consider stopping your call asset at 4:55 p.m.
3. Getting a phone call is important, but it’s just as important for Google to know that call happened so it can optimize for more of them. When you enable call tracking, Google uses a forwarding number. That means the number shown in the ad may not be your actual business number, but it lets Google (and you) track call duration and see which keywords triggered the calls.

Lead form assets: Capturing data in the ad

Lead Form Assets let users submit their email address or phone number directly within the ad. If you’ve run lead generation ads on Meta or TikTok, the experience will feel familiar.

The main difference is that on social media, the lead form is the ad. In Google Search, it’s an optional asset attached to your Responsive Search Ad alongside your primary headlines.

Because of that, you probably won’t see the same volume from Lead Form Assets as you would from a dedicated landing page. But if generating form fills is your primary goal, Lead Form Assets are absolutely worth enabling.

Essential tips for lead form assets

1. Because Lead Form Assets are so easy to complete directly from the SERP, they’re often more vulnerable to low-quality submissions. To improve lead quality, add a screening question. A simple question about budget or specific needs forces users to pause and qualify themselves before submitting.
2. Don’t let these leads sit idle in the Google Ads interface. You need a system that pushes them directly into your CRM through a third-party integration. The longer it takes to respond, the colder the lead becomes.
3. Make sure to set “Lead form submission” as a Primary conversion action if you want Smart Bidding to prioritize lead generation. You can run it alongside your standard website lead form conversion action, which should also remain set to Primary.

Message assets: The beta that means business?

Message Assets are the newest addition to Google’s “Contact Us” assets, and they’re currently in beta. I wrote about them last year.

These assets let potential customers start a conversation with you through WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, or Zalo directly from your search ads. They don’t support SMS text messaging — only third-party messaging apps.

Essential tips for Message assets

1. You can’t use Message Assets until you complete Google’s full advertiser verification process. It’s part of Google’s effort to keep the advertising ecosystem safe.
2. Message Assets only appear on mobile devices, which makes sense—most people aren’t trying to start a WhatsApp chat from a desktop browser.
3. Message Assets are compatible with Search and Performance Max campaigns.

What sets ‘Contact Us’ assets apart

The biggest reason to use these three “Contact Us” assets is to capture personally identifiable information (PII) from potential customers. When someone calls you, fills out a form, or sends a message, they’re giving you a direct way to follow up.

This data is incredibly valuable. Once you have an email address or phone number, you can follow up through email marketing or direct outreach without paying for another ad click. It turns a one-time ad interaction into a potential long-term customer relationship.

How to get the best results from Call, lead form, and Message Assets

Whichever asset you use, implement third-party lead tracking software to capture, filter, track, and respond to your leads. Once calls, forms, and messages start coming in, you need a system for responding quickly.

You also need a way to tell Google which leads were high quality and which were spam or a poor fit. Lead tracking software lets you send that data back into Google Ads so the platform can learn what a qualified customer looks like for your business—and stop wasting budget on junk leads.

If direct contact is central to how you win business, these contact assets aren’t just nice to have. They’re essential for effective lead generation.

This article is part of our ongoing Search Engine Land series, Everything you need to know about Google Ads in less than 3 minutes. In each edition, Jyll highlights a different Google Ads feature, and what you need to know to get the best results from it – all in a quick 3-minute read.

Everything looked normal in the SEO data. Google Search Console, traffic, and indexing — no red flags. Then I opened Scrunch, our AI citation monitoring tool, and looked at platform-by-platform presence for searchinfluence.com over the prior 30 days:

• Google AI Mode: 37.8%
• Copilot: 22.2%
• Google Gemini: 16.3%
• ChatGPT: 9.6%
• Perplexity: 7.8%
• Claude: 0.0%
• Meta AI: 0.0%

Two platforms at zero. Every crawler reads the same site, so content quality and topical authority can’t account for that gap. They’re identical for every platform on the list.

What varies is access — whether each platform’s crawler is allowed in. Nothing else explains how Google AI Mode hits 37.8% while Claude lands at 0%. So I opened the logs.

What 7 days of Cloudflare logs showed

Seven days of Cloudflare data (April 4-10) for searchinfluence.com revealed 29,099 bot requests, 65.8% of them AI bots. Here’s a per-bot share of those requests rate-limited (HTTP 429, “too many requests”), broken out by bot user-agent (UA, the identifier each request sends):

• Amazonbot: 51% rate-limited
• ClaudeBot: 29%
• GPTBot: 29%
• Bytespider: 61% blocked (different mechanism: 403/5xx, not 429)
• ChatGPT-User: 0%
• PerplexityBot: 0%

The split isn’t random. Training crawlers, the ones that pull whole sites in big bursts, get throttled. User-facing crawlers, the ones that fire human-paced requests during a live user query, don’t.

For context: Cloudflare’s Q1 2026 crawl-to-referral analysis shows ClaudeBot makes 20,583 crawl requests for every referral it sends back. 

• GPTBot: 1,255 to 1. 
• Perplexity: 111 to 1. 
• Google: 5 to 1. 

AI training crawlers take far more than they give back, so it makes sense that hosting infrastructure has started fighting back. Whether that’s the right fight for your site is a separate question.

The 429s in our logs were being passed through Cloudflare with a cache status of dynamic or bypass. So I wrote them off as downstream of Cloudflare, must be a web application firewall (WAF) or security plugin. That assumption sent me down a multi-hour rabbit hole through the wrong layers.

Where we looked first, and why we were wrong

Suspect 1: Solid Security’s HackRepair default ban list

A WordPress security plugin we use for hardening, with a built-in bot UA blocklist. Toggled it off, ran a 24-hour before/after on per-bot 429 counts. No change. 

Two bots even spiked higher in the post-toggle window. Coincidental crawl bursts, not a regression. Ruled out.

Suspect 2: Solid Security’s other firewall subsystems

24,538 firewall log entries over 30 days. Every single one was a /wp-login.php brute-force lockout. Zero entries for ClaudeBot, GPTBot, or Amazonbot. Rules empty. IP Management clean. Ruled out.

Suspect 3: Sucuri Cloud WAF

SI has a Sucuri subscription. Logged into the portal and saw warnings across every service column (Monitoring, Firewall/CDN, SSL, Backups). A dig and curl confirmed why: DNS resolved to Cloudflare ranges, and response headers showed no x-sucuri-id. Sucuri was never in the request path. The subscription existed; the activation never happened. Ruled out.

Suspect 4: Cloudflare itself

Originally written off because cache-status was dynamic/bypass. That inference was sloppy: Cloudflare can return 429 from rate-limit rules with the same cache-status. Going back to the right view (Security → Analytics → Events tab, filtered by ClaudeBot UA, last 24 hours): zero events. Cloudflare took no security action on ClaudeBot in 24 hours while passing through 608 ClaudeBot 429s. Ruled out.

At that point, we were out of suspects on layers we could see.

The reproduction test that changed everything

We ran 60 fast curl requests with a ClaudeBot UA against three different paths. 60 x 429 every time. Control runs: same paths, browser UA → 60 x 200 (HTTP “OK”). Same paths, Googlebot UA → 60 x 200. The block was unambiguously UA-based — not path-based, not rate-based.

The headers gave it away. A single curl -I showed x-powered-by: WP Engine. We were on a managed host, and the block was firing from a layer that hadn’t been on the suspect list: the host’s own platform infrastructure, sitting between Cloudflare and WordPress. The hosting platform itself.

The bot-by-bot fingerprint

Once we knew which question to ask, we ran the rest of the AI bot UA list through the same curl harness.

Bot UA	Result	Status
ClaudeBot	60/60 x 429	Blocked
GPTBot	8/10 x 429, 2/10 cached (200)	Blocked
Amazonbot	10/10 x 429	Blocked
Bytespider	10/10 x 520	Blocked (520 is a Cloudflare-specific error: origin returned an invalid response, possibly IP-blackholed)
anthropic-ai (older Anthropic UA)	10/10 x 200	Not blocked
CCBot (Common Crawl)	10/10 x 200	Not blocked

Two findings:

• The blocklist is dated: It targets the AI training crawler set as of mid-2024. The older anthropic-ai UA is allowed. CCBot, the Common Crawl bot that feeds many LLM training pipelines, is allowed. If the intent is “no LLM training data,” this gap defeats it. Scrapers can use CCBot’s UA, or Common Crawl can pull the site directly, and the data ends up in training sets anyway. The named-bot list is a fence with a gate left open.
• Cached responses serve through the block: WP Engine’s edge cache returns cached pages to ClaudeBot just fine (x-cache: HIT in the headers). Cache-miss requests hit the origin handler and get 429. This explains the Cloudflare data exactly: in 24 hours, 1,054 ClaudeBot requests returned 200 (cache hits) and 608 returned 429 (cache misses). Same UA, same site, two outcomes.

It’s worth flagging that ~100% of our 24-hour “ClaudeBot” traffic came from a single Microsoft/Azure IP (AS8075, Microsoft’s network), not Anthropic’s published AWS ranges. Almost certainly, it’s a spoofed UA: a scraper on Azure pretending to be ClaudeBot. A meaningful slice of “AI crawler 429s” in WAF reports may be appropriate for blocking imposter traffic, not legitimate Anthropic crawl.

Why this is hard to find

Start with what WP Engine itself says about its firewall. From their support page on the security environment: 

• “Further information cannot be provided around our firewall, as this can compromise its secure integrity.” 

That’s the company’s own statement, verbatim. Whatever the rules are, customers don’t get to see them.

Their 2025 Year in Review reports 75 billion bot requests mitigated via Cloudflare-powered bot management. No documented user portal control opts you out per-site or per-bot. I checked every customer-facing setting that could plausibly fire AI bot 429s:

• Utilities → Redirect bots: Off (default).
• Web rules: Empty.
• Robots.txt setting: Not customized. Live /robots.txt only disallows a few specific PDFs.

All clean. The block is somewhere customers can’t reach.

A few more reasons it’s invisible:

• It returns 429, not 403: Returning “forbidden” can get a site flagged by search engines as a site-wide failure, so 429 is the safer choice. But 429 reads as “rate limit” in every WAF analytics tool, which sends investigators chasing rate-limit configurations at the wrong layer.
• It fires below the WAF plugins: Wordfence, Sucuri, and Solid Security all log at the WordPress application layer. WP Engine’s block fires at the platform edge, before the request reaches WordPress. Plugin logs show nothing.
• It fires below customer Cloudflare, too: WP Engine runs its own Cloudflare-backed bot management at the hosting edge. That’s a separate Cloudflare layer behind your own Cloudflare zone. Events fired there don’t appear in your Cloudflare dashboard.
• WP Engine’s billing already accounts for the block: They exclude “suspected bots” from billable metrics. From a hosting-cost perspective, the customer benefits. From a GEO/AEO perspective, the customer pays in citation absence, without ever knowing they signed up.

What WP Engine confirmed when I asked

After several rounds of canned auto-replies, I reached a live agent. The relevant exchanges:

On the policy itself: 

• “WP Engine does enforce platform‑wide rate limiting on certain high‑impact bots to protect overall server performance, and that part can’t be selectively disabled per bot.”

On whether the customer-facing Web Rules Engine could route around it: 

• “Allowing AI bot IPs via Web Rules Engine does not override WP Engine’s platform-wide rate limiting rules, which operate at the infrastructure level.”

On whether the SEO downside was acknowledged anywhere internally: 

• “The documentation acknowledges that blocking or rate limiting bots like Amazonbot and similar user agents can impact their crawling and indexing… It emphasizes balancing bot management with SEO considerations and suggests customers be empathetic as many did not configure these bots themselves.”

Read that last bit twice. The internal framing assumes the customer is being protected from bots they didn’t ask for. For agencies, content sites, B2B SaaS, and anyone whose growth depends on AI search citations, the assumption inverts. Those bots are the audience the customer is trying to reach.

There’s an escalation path: 

• “If you have an exceptional use case or need a bot to behave differently than the platform defaults allow, we can escalate it to ProdEng (product engineering) for review.” 

So the policy isn’t immutable. It’s just not a self-service setting.

WP Engine appears to be the outlier here

We assumed every managed host did this. Public record on the other three top-managed WordPress hosts contradicts that:

• Kinsta’s CTO said in March 2026 that they will not block at the platform level and will not bill for bot bandwidth. Their Bot Protection feature is opt-in, with four customer-controllable levels.
• Pressable explicitly states in its knowledge base: “Pressable does not currently disallow these bots by default.” Customer manages it via robots.txt.
• Pantheon explicitly states: “We do not block identified bot traffic from entering the platform.” They detect and exclude bots from billing only.

Outside managed WP, the closest analog is SiteGround, which blocks training crawlers by default but is more transparent about the policy and distinguishes training bots from user-action bots.

One wrinkle: Flywheel, a managed WP host owned by WP Engine since 2019, has no documented AI bot block. Same parent company, two products, two different stated policies. Not a corporate-wide stance. A product-level decision specific to WP Engine.

Caveat on the comparison: we confirmed WP Engine’s block empirically with curl. We didn’t run the same diagnostic against Kinsta, Pressable, or Pantheon. What we have for them is their public documentation, which is reliable but not the same as a live test. 

The precise claim: based on what each host publicly discloses, WP Engine appears to be the only top-tier managed WP host with a default-on, non-disableable platform-level AI bot block.

The question shifts. It’s not “Are other hosts doing this?” It’s “Why is WP Engine, and apparently only WP Engine, doing it this way?”

How to check whether it’s happening to you

The standard audit advice for your WAF logs doesn’t catch this. Below are three steps that don’t require root access.

Step 1: Reproduce with curl (a command-line tool that fetches URLs)

for i in $(seq 1 30); do
  curl -sI -A "ClaudeBot/1.0 (+https://www.anthropic.com/claudebot)" \
    "https://yourdomain.com/" \
    -o /dev/null -w "%{http_code}\n"
  sleep 0.05
done | sort | uniq -c

Then run the same loop with a Mozilla/5.0 … browser UA. If the browser run returns 200s and the ClaudeBot run returns 429s, the block is UA-based and someone in your stack is doing it. If both return the same code, you don’t have this problem.

Step 2: Identify your host

Run curl -I https://yourdomain.com/ and look at the response headers for x-powered-by or server. They often name the host (WP Engine, Pressable, Kinsta, etc.). If your host is unmanaged or self-hosted, this article likely doesn’t apply. Investigate your WAF instead.

Step 3: Check what the host actually controls 

For WP Engine specifically, confirm Utilities > Redirect Bots is off and that Web Rules has no AI UA blocks, then open a support ticket. Here’s recommended wording: 

• “We’ve reproduced via curl that requests with ClaudeBot/GPTBot/Amazonbot user-agent strings receive HTTP 429 responses for cache-miss requests on our environment. Cloudflare and our security plugins are not the source. Is this WP Engine’s platform-level AI crawler mitigation? Can it be disabled or scoped per-bot for our environment?”

For other hosts, the equivalent path is their portal’s security section first, then a support ticket with the same evidence.

What to do once you know

Four real options, in order of effort.

Escalate to your host’s product engineering

WP Engine’s support agent named an “exceptional use case” escalation path. The policy isn’t immutable; it’s just not a self-service toggle. SEO and AI search visibility is exactly the kind of case that the escalation path is built for.

Allowlist via the customer-controllable Web Rules Engine

WREn lets you allowlist UAs at the site level, but the support agent confirmed it doesn’t override the platform rules. It’s useful for the bots not on the platform list (CCBot, anthropic-ai), but not a fix for the ones that are.

Move to a host that doesn’t impose this

A nuclear option, but worth costing out if AI search visibility is a strategic priority and ProdEng escalation goes nowhere. Kinsta’s and Pressable’s documented stances both leave AI crawler access to the customer.

And to be clear: AI search visibility absolutely should be a strategic priority right now. ChatGPT alone handles billions of queries a week, and the answers cite a small set of sources. If your category is being decided in those answers and your site can’t be crawled, you don’t get cited.

There is no “I’ll just rank later” backup plan, because the citation set hardens fast. Treating AI access as optional in 2026 is the same call as treating organic search as optional in 2008. It worked for a while. Then it didn’t.

Accept the block as a deliberate policy

Some companies will conclude that staying out of AI training data is the right call. The honest version: tell the team that’s what’s happening, factor it into AI-search expectations, stop running GEO/AEO audits that score you on missing citations you weren’t going to get anyway.

The wrong move is to keep running the WAF audit playbook and concluding that nothing’s wrong. The block fires invisibly, and the citation’s absence shows up months later in dashboards that no one connects back to it.

The citation correlation

• Googlebot ~100% access → Google AI Mode 37.8% citation presence
• GPTBot 54% access → ChatGPT 9.6%
• PerplexityBot 100% access → Perplexity 7.8%
• ClaudeBot 57% access → Claude 0.0%

The platform-by-platform split in citations matches the platform-by-platform split in crawl access. Where the bot can read the site, the AI cites it at meaningful rates. Where the bot is blocked, citation presence collapses.

Suggestive, not proof: 7-day correlation on a single site, no controlled before/after. Part 2 publishes the post-fix numbers if we get the block lifted (or move hosts). The intuition: crawl access is the floor; content quality, topical authority, and freshness are the ceiling. If the bot can’t read you, the ceiling doesn’t matter.

Perplexity is the wrinkle: 100% access, 7.8% citation. Full access alone doesn’t guarantee citation. But the absence of access (Claude at 0%) is decisive.

Caveats

• Single-site case study: The diagnostic generalizes; the specific numbers don’t.
• AI citation is multi-factor: Content quality, topical authority, entity coverage, freshness, schema, brand recognition: all of those matter. Crawl access is the floor, not the whole game.
• Bot UAs can be spoofed: Roughly 100% of our “ClaudeBot” traffic was from a non-Anthropic IP. The host-level block is doing the right thing for those impostors.
• AI bots don’t fully respect crawl-delay: InMotion’s coverage is a good reference: GPTBot and ClaudeBot only partially honor crawl-delay in robots.txt, so the 429 is one of the few signals they actually act on. That’s a feature, until they improve crawl-delay compliance.
• WP Engine’s defaults aren’t malicious: They’re protecting customers who didn’t ask for AI bot traffic. The opacity is the issue, not the intent. Customers who do want the traffic should have a way to say so without escalating to product engineering.

What you should do next

If you’re on WP Engine, run the diagnostic above. If the curl reproduction shows the same pattern, you’ve got the same issue. Open a ticket and see where that goes, or switch providers.

If you’re on a different managed host, run it anyway. The diagnostic takes three minutes.

If you’re spending months on content updates, schema markup, and llms.txt files while a default-on platform setting is silently blocking the crawlers you’re trying to reach, you’re optimizing the ceiling of a building with no floor.

Full disclosure on method: An AI assistant (Claude) ran the curl tests, parsed headers, and walked the architecture with me. Where this piece says “we” tested or reproduced something, that’s me plus the AI. Where it says “I,” it was me directly: portal logins, the WP Engine support chat.

Google announced five changes to how the search engine will show links and citations within its AI Search features – AI Mode and AI Overviews. These changes aim to make it “easy for you to connect with authentic voices and explore useful information across the web,” Google’s Hema Budaraju, VP, Product Management, wrote.

Here are the five changes that are rolling out in AI Mode and AI Overviews:

(1) Suggested angles at the end of the AI responses. Google may show suggestions for where to go next at the end of many AI responses within AI Mode or AI Overviews. This “section links to unique articles or in-depth analyses on different facets of your topic, making it easy to satisfy your curiosity,” Google explained.

Here is what it looks like:

(2) Easier access to your news subscriptions. Google will highlight links from your news subscriptions in AI Mode and AI Overviews. Google said this makes it easier for “you can quickly access the content you trust and get more value from your subscriptions.” Google added in its early testing that searchers were “significantly more likely to click links that were labeled as their subscriptions.”

Publishers can enable subscription linking using this documentation.

Here is what it looks like:

(3) Social media and online discussions include creator’s name, handle and community name. When Google’s AI features cite social media or online discussions, Google will not just include the name of the website, but also the creator’s name and handle – along with the community name.

This is to make it easier to understand these responses are from firsthand sources. We saw Google testing this earlier.

Here is what it looks like:

(4) More links, next to relevant text. Google also said it will show more links directly within the AI responses, right next to the relevant text it was citing. This should encourage searchers to dig deeper into those websites because those citations and links are right next to the related text.

Here is what it looks like:

(5) Hover over inline links. Google’s AI features will give you a quick preview of a website when you hover your cursor over an inline link in the AI feature, AI Mode or AI Overviews, on desktop. We saw Google testing this in February and I feel this is a better method to encourage searchers to click over.

The information in the overlay includes name of the website or title of the web page and maybe more useful information.

Here is what it looks like:

Why we care. Google wrote, “We’ll keep testing, learning and improving these features based on what works best for you.”

These changes, in my opinion, should increase the chances of searchers clicking from the AI experiences to the cited page. And it also shows Google is making changes to try to improve the overall ecosystem. The big question is, will these changes be enough?

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Xbox Mode has officially started rolling out on Windows 11, but early feedback from users has been mixed. From rollout confusion and missing features to glitchy UI behavior and disappointing performance gains, fans are already questioning whether the new gaming-focused mode is ready for prime time.

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Over the past few months, a growing number of users have reported being locked out of their Facebook accounts — often suddenly, and sometimes permanently. What used to feel like a rare inconvenience has become a widespread frustration, affecting everyday users, creators, and business owners alike.

So what’s actually driving the increase? It’s a combination of AI moderation, security shifts, platform economics, and evolving user behavior.

Here’s what’s really going on behind the scenes.

The rise of AI moderation — and its tradeoffs

At the center of the issue is Facebook’s parent company, Meta, which now relies heavily on artificial intelligence to monitor activity across billions of accounts. These systems are designed to:

• Detect harmful content.
• Prevent scams and abuse.
• Enforce community standards at scale.

But there’s a tradeoff. AI systems don’t understand nuance the way humans do. As a result, they can:

• Flag normal behavior as suspicious.
• Misinterpret context (especially in messages or posts).
• Trigger account restrictions based on patterns rather than intent.

This has led to a rise in false positives, where legitimate users are locked out without clear justification. Reports of wrongful account disabling are widespread, often driven by AI-only moderation with little to no meaningful human review. In some cases, appeals are resolved almost instantly — suggesting minimal human intervention despite stated policies.

Account takeovers are increasing

Cybercrime has surged in recent years, prompting social platforms to tighten security measures.

Facebook now uses more aggressive signals to detect:

• Logins from new locations or devices.
• Rapid changes to account details.
• Unusual messaging or posting behavior.

While these measures help stop bad actors, they also create unintended consequences:

• Traveling, using a VPN, or switching devices can trigger lockouts.
• Legitimate users can get caught in the same net as bad actors.

The system is designed to act quickly — but sometimes, that speed comes at the cost of accuracy.

Once a hacker gains access, they often change the email and password associated with the account, triggering security flags and locking the original owner out completely. From Facebook’s perspective, the account is now compromised — which it is — but recovery systems don’t always prioritize quickly restoring access to the rightful owner.

The role of new features and identity verification

Recent years have introduced additional layers of security, including:

• Two-factor authentication requirements.
• Identity verification checks.
• Paid support options tied to account verification.

While these features improve security, they also introduce friction:

• Add friction to account recovery.
• Create barriers for users who can’t easily verify their identity.
• Lead to lockouts if verification fails.

In some cases, users report being asked to submit identification multiple times without resolution, further compounding frustration.

The business incentive behind platform changes

Meta’s primary reason for heavily investing in AI moderation, automated enforcement and Meta’s heavy investment in AI moderation, automated enforcement, and self-service recovery tools is driven by a simple reality: it’s more cost-effective.

Automation offers instant scalability, lower operational costs, and efficient handling of “standard” cases. However, this efficiency comes at a cost. Unless you are an agency or a larger entity operating within Business Manager, access to meaningful support is often limited — leaving many users stuck without a clear escalation path.

Meta’s dominant position in social media advertising, combined with strong financial performance and significant political influence, creates relatively little external pressure to overhaul its support systems.

Meanwhile, search results related to account recovery are often dominated by Meta’s own resources, funneling users back into the same limited support ecosystem — even when alternative solutions may exist.

---

Platform scale is working against users

There’s a fundamental reality at play: Facebook operates at an enormous scale.

With billions of users, even a small error rate can impact millions of people. As a result, Meta’s support systems cannot realistically provide personalized assistance to everyone. Automation becomes the default — even when it’s imperfect.

Internal fragmentation further complicates the issue. Facebook isn’t a single system — it’s an ecosystem that includes:

• Personal profiles.
• Pages.
• Ad accounts.
• Business Manager.
• Instagram, Threads, and WhatsApp.

Each of these systems operates with its own rules, infrastructure, and support pathways. When issues span multiple systems — which is often the case — there’s no single team that fully “owns” the problem. This makes resolution slower, more complex, and more difficult to navigate.

What feels like a deeply personal issue is often the result of a system optimized for global efficiency, not individual nuance. Facebook is designed to minimize large-scale risk — and that priority can conflict directly with fast, human-centered support.

Lack of human support and regaining access

One of the most consistent complaints isn’t just the lockouts — it’s what happens after. Users frequently report:

• Limited access to human support.
• Automated responses that don’t resolve the issue.
• Confusing or broken recovery workflows.

While Meta has introduced new support tools, much of the process remains automated. If your issue doesn’t fit neatly into predefined categories, resolution becomes significantly more difficult.

That’s largely because Facebook’s support system is built around rigid, predefined pathways — like “my account was hacked,” “I can’t log in,” or “my ad was rejected.” In reality, most issues don’t fall cleanly into one of these buckets. They’re often layered: part hack, part lockout, or tied to both personal accounts and Business Manager access, sometimes compounded by unclear or incorrect policy flags.

When a case doesn’t align with a single category, the system struggles to route it properly. Instead of moving toward resolution, users are often pushed through repetitive workflows — submitting forms that don’t fully apply — leaving them stuck in frustrating loops with no clear path forward.

William Jennings, sole proprietor of WKJ Consulting, a social account recovery consultancy, has seen firsthand how these gaps have fueled an underground recovery market. In some cases, fraudulent services exploit locked-out users by demanding payment through unconventional methods like game credits — an ecosystem that exists largely because legitimate, accessible recovery channels are limited.

Accounts linked through Meta’s Account Center (Facebook and Instagram) tend to have a smoother recovery path. In some cases, users can subscribe to Meta Verified on a linked Instagram account to unlock chat support and file an admin dispute claim.

Jennings notes: 

• “Meta Verified acts like paid protection — roughly 90% effective at preventing wrongful restrictions or disabling, though it offers no guarantee if rules are actually broken.”

A structured recovery approach often includes:

• Subscribing to Meta Verified for access to chat support.
• Filing an admin dispute claim with proper documentation (error screenshots, emails, account URL, and ID verification).
• Escalating to legal support in more severe cases.

It’s important to note that hacked accounts must go through dedicated recovery flows (such as facebook.com/hacked or instagram.com/hacked), and prevention is significantly more effective than recovery.

After regaining access, essential protective steps include enabling two-factor authentication, saving recovery codes, and maintaining enhanced security measures.

Enforcement has scaled — recovery hasn’t

Facebook lockouts are a direct byproduct of the platform’s evolution. As Meta continues to scale automation and prioritize efficiency, users are increasingly interacting with systems designed for speed, safety, and risk mitigation.

Most of the time, these systems work quietly in the background. But when they fail, they can feel abrupt, opaque, and incredibly difficult to navigate.

Access to real support is often tied to high ad spend, established business accounts, and paid verification products. This creates an uneven support landscape where large advertisers receive faster assistance, while individuals and small businesses are left with limited options.

For a platform operating at global scale, this is largely by design. But for users caught in the system, the experience can feel deeply frustrating.

For over two decades, parked domains generated income for advertisers and publishers. Recent Google Ads policy changes restricting ads on parked, expired, or mistyped domains show that nothing lasts forever.

If industry shifts have affected you, this article may interest you. Today, we’ll take a deeper look at domain monetization and whether you can still stabilize and optimize income from domain traffic.

The domain market shake-up

In 2025, Google began rolling out significant changes to its Search Partner Network to improve inventory quality. These updates tightened controls and limited ad delivery across parked, expired, and mistyped domains.

That process concluded Feb. 10, “Parked Domains” were removed as a dedicated ad placement option. Since then, ads no longer appear on these sites through the previous opt-in setup, signaling a broader shift away from this inventory.

Given Google’s scale, this change affected many publishers and domain owners and couldn’t be ignored. It drove a notable market adjustment: some long-standing domain parking and monetization businesses shut down, others rebuilt their frameworks from scratch, and new entrants began exploring opportunities in the evolving landscape.

New developments in domain monetization

This shift is clear in recent developments.

Across domain forums, users show uncertainty as they navigate the transition and assess new ways to monetize idle domains. At the same time, the rise of domain conferences worldwide highlights growing interest, attracting new players and creating new opportunities.

Though this transformation is still in its early stages, a positive trajectory is emerging. Opportunities to monetize domains remain — this is a phase where new structures are taking shape. 

New players are building and testing solutions, some of which will likely prove viable and help move the market toward a more stable, sustainable direction.

RollerAds’ domain monetization solution

In response, several monetization platforms have adapted their infrastructure to better support domain traffic. One example is RollerAds, which supports parked domain traffic through its existing ad delivery ecosystem.

The platform draws on experience in domain traffic monetization and focuses on formats such as Direct Click ads.

A key factor in performance stability is a monetization model based on content-safe, high-demand verticals like eeommerce, which tend to deliver stronger payouts. A large share of revenue also comes from RSOC (Related Search on Content) units that guide users to sponsored search results, capturing and monetizing intent-based traffic.

Through simple DNS integration, the platform lets you connect large domain portfolios at scale, turning them into ongoing revenue streams instead of unused holdings.

Domain monetization example from RollerAds

Here’s a representative example of monetization results from the RollerAds platform. A publisher acquired the ******.ws domain for $5.95 to monetize it. After connecting it exclusively to the platform, the domain began generating about $7 per month consistently, covering its initial cost relatively quickly.

While the amount is modest, it comes from a single low-traffic domain and requires no ongoing management, making it a fully passive income stream.

Now consider a scenario where the same publisher owns hundreds or thousands of similar domains. Instead of managing each individually, they can focus on expanding their portfolio or core business while maintaining automated revenue streams. With higher-quality domains and stronger traffic, earning potential scales upward.

During its operation, this domain did not generate any abuse reports.

Domains sale & monetization

One key advantage of modern domain monetization setups is that you don’t have to choose between earning from a domain and selling it. You can do both in one place. A domain can keep generating income from traffic while it’s listed for sale, so it doesn’t sit idle.

At the same time, the revenue it generates provides a clearer picture of its actual value instead of relying on guesswork.

This combined approach is also available on RollerAds, where you can monetize domains and list them for sale within the same platform.

Adapting to change in domain monetization

The domain market is undergoing a period of change that brings challenges and new opportunities. In this environment, the key is to stay flexible, test different approaches, and use available tools — whether to monetize domains or sell them.

If you’re facing monetization challenges or looking to list domains for sale, RollerAds may be the right partner. Get in touch with the managers to find a convenient, profitable solution for your needs. Domain monetization remains active and continues to build a more stable foundation as the market evolves.

AMD predicts major gaming decline due to “higher memory and component costs” During the company’s Q1 2026 earnings call, AMD predicted that its “gaming” revenue would decline substantially during the second half of this year. Why? Rampant AI datacenter demand has substantially raised memory prices and component costs. This has made AMD’s gaming products more […]

The post AMD predicts 20%+ gaming decline due to higher costs appeared first on OC3D.

Microsoft's partnership with OpenAI just became non-exclusive, meaning rival companies like Google can access OpenAI's models, making Copilot AI in Windows 11 less exclusive, consequently costing it its bargaining chip and competitive edge.

Elon Musk recently announced an ambitious project called Terafab, which he plans to build on Tesla's campus in eastern Travis County, Austin, Texas. Thanks to recent court hearings in Grimes County, Texas, we have learned that the first phase of the Terafab project is expected to cost $55 billion. However, if additional phases are constructed, this figure could rise to $119 billion. While this is an astonishingly high amount, it seems justified given Terafab's ambitious goals. Semiconductor manufacturing is one of the greatest marvels of the modern world, with only a few companies competing for the top spot. The engineering and scientific expertise required for building modern semiconductor manufacturing facilities is so rare that it is concentrated in just a few places around the globe.

The goal of Terafab is to consolidate the entire chip manufacturing process under one roof. The plant is expected to integrate several stages of semiconductor production at a single site, including logic fabrication, memory, packaging, testing, and mask production. This setup is unusual, as these steps are typically spread across multiple specialized facilities and companies. The idea behind Terafab is that consolidating these processes could accelerate development by allowing engineers to design, test, and revise chips with fewer delays, essentially enabling rapid prototyping. This contrasts with the traditional, lengthy process of manufacturing chips at one site, packaging them at another, and testing them in-house. A typical semiconductor fab for nodes below 3 nm costs over $20 billion, but that only covers silicon manufacturing. Terafab's goal to handle everything will push that cost astronomically high.

Logitech International (SIX: LOGN) (Nasdaq: LOGI) today announced financial results for the fourth quarter and full Fiscal Year 2026.

For Fiscal Year 2026:

• Sales were $4.84 billion, up 6 percent in US dollars and 4 percent in constant currency compared to the prior year.
• GAAP operating income was $775 million, up 18 percent compared to the prior year. Non-GAAP operating income was $911 million, up 18 percent compared to the prior year.
• GAAP earnings per share was $4.80, up 16 percent compared to the prior year. Non-GAAP EPS was $5.78, up 19 percent compared to the prior year.
• Cash flow from operations was $1.04 billion. The year-ending cash balance was $1.7 billion. The Company returned $768 million of cash to shareholders through its annual dividend payment and share repurchases.

Valve's recent launch of the Steam Controller was successful from day one, and the company is now releasing something for the modding community to begin their adventures. Today, Valve has released 3D CAD files, providing modders with a 3D model for their needs. This means anyone can now access Steam Controller and Puck drawings in STP and STL formats, along with engineering drawings that highlight critical features and areas to avoid when modding. This allows anyone to design accessories with known clearances. The community's efforts should soon bear fruit, as Valve recognizes that its community is full of enthusiasts with a wealth of expertise who create new accessories daily. This will include 3D prints from creative individuals, as well as potential accessories to enhance the Steam Controller experience for some users.

Yesterday, Valve reassured customers that a restock of the Steam Controller is happening soon, as the initial release was so successful that the entire stock sold out in just 30 minutes. The demand has been exceptional, even for a controller priced at $99. The site experienced such a high volume of traffic that the payment processing system froze, causing many customers to encounter errors before both the website and payment processor resumed functioning. To prepare, some customers loaded their Steam Wallets with funds days in advance, but the high demand still prevented them from securing a unit immediately. For those who managed to purchase one, congratulations. However, those who didn't are turning to resellers, who are charging about $300 for the controller. Valve is reassuring customers not to worry, as another stock drop is coming soon. With the 3D files now in the hands of the modding community, we should start seeing some interesting designs on social media.

Rambus Inc. (NASDAQ: RMBS), a premier chip and silicon IP provider making data faster and safer, today announced the Rambus PCIe 7.0 Switch IP with Time Division Multiplexing (TDM), a new addition to its advanced interconnect IP portfolio designed to address the rapidly escalating bandwidth, latency, and scalability requirements of AI, cloud, and high-performance computing (HPC) systems.

As AI infrastructure grows in scale and architectural complexity, system designers are increasingly challenged to move massive volumes of data efficiently across CPUs, GPUs, accelerators, and NVMe storage. The Rambus PCIe 7.0 Switch IP with TDM is architected to help meet these demands by enabling more flexible and efficient utilization of PCIe links, supporting emerging disaggregated and pooled compute architectures while maintaining low latency and deterministic performance.

By the time of the retraction, the paper had already traveled far. Published in May 2025 in Humanities & Social Sciences Communications, it attempted to measure ChatGPT's impact by combining results from 51 separate studies. The authors compared outcomes between students who used the chatbot and those who did not,...

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It was only two months ago at GDC 2026 when Sonali Yadav, Xbox's Gaming AI partner group product manager, said Gaming Copilot would be coming to current-gen Microsoft consoles, with the rollout expected to take place this year.

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Dell’s revived XPS 16 delivers the elite experience the brand is renowned for, though be prepared to pay for the privilege.

This Samsung Odyssey OLED G60SF gaming monitor is now at an all-time low price of just $649.99 for a limited-time only, thanks to Woot, saving you $349.

For just a snip over $1000, you can bag yourself an RTX 5060 Ti 16GB-powered gaming rig when you apply these stackable discounts.

The capital figures in this filing far exceed what was disclosed when Elon Musk announced Terafab in March, where the project carried a $20 billion price tag.

Apple quietly pulls high Unified Memory capacity Mac Studios and Mac minis from the Apple store as the memory crunch continues to affect consumer products.

AMD sets record data center revenue as demand for CPUs from the AI sector skyrockets and is poised to increase even further as agentic AI gains momentum.

AIRankCite helps solo founders see and improve how AI answer engines cite their products. Paste your URL to analyze your homepage, extract your category, and surface Reddit, Hacker News, and forum threads that shape recommendations for queries in your niche. It delivers a ranked hitlist with confidence scores, evidence, and a context-aware seeding kit, plus competitor tracking and keyword monitoring across ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Gemini, Copilot, and Meta AI. The first scan is free.

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Qujam is a self-serve geofence advertising platform that lets you build, target, and launch campaigns in minutes. You can draw geofences, run addressable and event geofencing, and deliver OTT, CTV, display, video pre-roll, and digital audio ads to devices seen at specific locations. Manage budgets, flights, and creative uploads, then monitor performance in a live reporting dashboard with multi-campaign views and custom date ranges. Register for free, use credit card billing, and get creative support when needed.

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TickerLeague brings financial markets to life with interactive data, rankings, and games across stocks, indices, crypto, commodities, and forex. Explore market cap and revenue leaderboards, track upcoming earnings, and compare dividends with clear, visual tools. Build a profile, test forecasts in the Earnings Estimates game, and climb global leaderboards. Use free calculators like investment growth and compound interest, plus story-driven If You Invested tools to see how strategies would have performed.

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AI can get a lot done, but companies are actually struggling to trust it and legacy identity management software doesn't quite cut it.

The Bose QuietComfort Earbuds are a great pair of earbuds that just got even cheaper thanks to this Amazon deal.

Scammers are targeting prospective workers with dodgy job postings – younger workers might actually be most at risk.

Xbox is no longer developing Copilot for consoles.

Utah is pioneering controversial new internet restrictions, making a reliable VPN essential for digital privacy. Here are the top three providers offering the best speeds, local servers, and security for residents of the Beehive State.

This flagship shaver from Philips is smooth, smart, and slightly over-engineered.

Industrialized cybercrime means AI has moved from a double-edged to a triple-edged sword.

Garmin has unveiled some hi-fi speakers through its JL Audio brand, including a streamer, loudspeakers and floor speakers.

A sweeping Pentagon push to integrate AI into military systems includes nearly every major tech player except Anthropic, exposing a growing divide over how far such technology should go.

Images of the Samsung Galaxy Wide Fold and Z Fold 8 have both been spotted in Samsung code.

RUSE has been re-released on Steam with full Steam Deck support After ten years of being MIA, the one-of-a-kind real-time strategy (RTS) game RUSE has returned to PC. The game returns to Steam with all its DLC included, and existing owners will now receive all the game’s DLC. RUSE is an RTS game from Eugen […]

The post RUSE returns to Steam after 10 years – The unique strategy game has returned appeared first on OC3D.

Biostar plans to showcase next-generation AMD motherboards at Computex 2026 Biostar has claimed that it plans to showcase “next-generation AMD” motherboards at Computex 2026. This should include a new Valkyrie gaming model and other, more mainstream, motherboard designs. Given their “next-generation” teaser, these new motherboards are unlikely to be refreshed versions of AMD 800-series motherboards. […]

The post Expect to see “Next-Generation AMD” motherboards at Computex – Biostar confirms appeared first on OC3D.

The LG gram Book 15 for 2026 has made its debut at a discounted $599, which immediately makes me think of the MacBook Neo. Here's how the two laptops compare.

Multiple users have raised concerns about Teams' status indicator, noting that it marks them as unavailable after only a few minutes of inactivity. They argue this feature feels intrusive surveillance and micromanagement rather than a helpful productivity tool.

Lego Batman is advertising 60 FPS, but it's really 15 FPS. Frame generation is supposed to make good performance better, not hide the fact that a game is running poorly. Lego Batman's spec sheet just crossed that line.

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Well over five years since its release in late 2020, it is now possible to run Linux on PlayStation 5 with older system software, opening the way for many interesting applications, including turning the current-generation Sony system into an emulation beast. This is exactly what one user did, proving how the system has all it takes to run PlayStation 3 games natively with little intervention, further highlighting Sony's disinterest in delivering the sort of backward compatibility users would love to see. Shortly after developer Andrew Nguyen released their Linux loader online, X user Retropierdolnik shared a video showcasing the PlayStation […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/playstation-5-runs-ps3-games-natively-sony-not-care/

Being the first ever remake of the series, and the remake of one of its most popular entries, Ubisoft is going all in with Assassin’s Creed Black Flag Resynced. With a new post on its official website, the publisher moved away from the visual comparisons with the original and instead provided some additional details on parkour and core movement improvements, stealth and combat, complete with brand new gameplay footage. All of the improvements detailed this week seem to be based on the idea of improving what the original had and making it smoother for a more enjoyable experience. "One thing […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/ubisoft-rebuilds-assassins-creed-black-flag-resynceds-parkour-and-combat/

Sales of chips in Q1 2026 hit $298.5 billion and are on track to exceed $1 trillion this year, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association.

Security researcher says that Google is likely in violation of EU law and wasting thousands upon thousands of kilowatts.

Denmark's Energinet grid operator has pressed pause on new connection requests in the country as potential new data centers and other installations put total demands of up to 60 GW on its docket.

Microsoft's study says that it's not just enough to give employees access to AI tools for them to make the most of it. Instead, they should revamp their processes and systems to integrate AI use from the top-down.

Innovative game engine applications in Japan stretch from civil construction projects and urban planning to 'traditional' 3D avatar clothing.

The Apex Legends Season 29 update reduces stuttering by addressing physics calculations that struggled to keep up at high frame rates enabled by modern high-end CPUs.

Digital safety compliance platform built for construction companies and trades businesses. It offers GPS-verified work sessions, a custom form builder, AI paper-to-digital conversion, credential tracking with expiry alerts, and crew broadcasting. Workers always join free.

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WaiverKit replaces paper waivers with secure digital forms that customers sign on their own phones. Build custom templates with an AI composer or drag-and-drop builder, share via QR code, and receive legally timestamped PDFs compliant with ESIGN and UETA. Search and retrieve waivers instantly, automate receipts and reminders, and translate forms into multiple languages. WaiverKit supports custom branding, guardian signing, and multi-location teams for gyms, studios, rentals, events, and more.

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Google has announced expanded Binary Transparency for Android as a way to safeguard the ecosystem from supply chain attacks. "This new public ledger ensures the Google apps on your device are exactly what we intended to build and distribute," Google's product and security teams said. The initiative builds upon the foundation of Pixel Binary Transparency, which Google introduced in October 2021

Cybersecurity researchers have disclosed details of an intrusion that involved the use of a CloudZ remote access tool (RAT) and a previous undocumented plugin dubbed Pheno with the aim of facilitating credential theft. "According to the functionalities of the CloudZ RAT and Pheno plugin, this was with the intention of stealing victims' credentials and potentially one-time passwords (OTPs),"

While we still don't know for certain when Landman season 3 will be released on Paramount+, we do have an new update from its director that confirms a working release date theory.

As workflows digitize, signatures are shifting from familiarity to verifiable, system-driven trust.

We uncovered a sneaky way to watch Peacock for $1 – from anywhere in the world, without coughing up for a premium streaming subscription.

Here's how to watch Amandaland season 2 online from anywhere in the world, completely FREE, as Lucy Punch and Joanna Lumley return for more chaos.

Valve releases official Steam Controller and Puck CAD files for modders and accessories makers With the release of official CAD files for its Steam Controller and Puck, Valve has made it much easier for modders and accessories makers to create mods, stands, and custom add-ons for Valve’s new gamepad. Valve’s package contains STL and STP […]

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Synology today announced the availability of the new FS6420 and FS3420, two all-flash block and file storage systems built for latency-sensitive enterprise workloads. The new systems offer significant improvements in IOPS and throughput performance for on-premises virtualization, databases, and enterprise applications.

"More organizations than ever are running demanding on-premises workloads and need storage that can accommodate them." says Jeffrey Huang, Product Manager at Synology. "The FS6420 and FS3420 deliver substantial IOPS improvements over their predecessors, boosting performance for latency-sensitive workloads. They're strong options for a wide range of mid-size and large enterprises and colocation environments looking to implement enterprise applications and virtualization workloads."

AMD reported impressive first-quarter 2026 earnings, and during the earnings call, CEO Dr. Lisa Su shared some intriguing insights about the agentic AI era. This era is driving CPU usage to unprecedented levels, to the extent that the number of CPUs in a single compute node is becoming almost equal to the number of GPUs. In response to a question from an analyst, Dr. Lisa Su explained that the traditional setup of one CPU paired with four or even eight GPUs is shifting towards a one-to-one ratio of CPUs to GPUs. This change indicates a surge in CPU demand due to the agentic features, which require large language models to utilize the host CPU for continuous updates and orchestration of these agents. Previously, CPUs primarily served as hosts to initiate GPU operations for training and inferencing AI models. However, as AI becomes more agentic, the CPU's role is becoming significantly more important.

AMD's Lisa Su...We certainly see the movement towards where in the past, the CPU to GPU ratio was primarily just as a host node in like a 1:4 or 1:8 configuration node, now changing and getting closer to a 1:1 configuration or even -- you can even imagine if you get lots and lots of agents that you could have more CPUs and GPUs...

AMD today announced financial results for the first quarter of 2026. First quarter revenue was $10.3 billion, gross margin was 53%, operating income was $1.5 billion, net income was $1.4 billion and diluted earnings per share was $0.84. On a non-GAAP(*) basis, gross margin was 55%, operating income was $2.5 billion, net income was $2.3 billion and diluted earnings per share was $1.37.

"We delivered an outstanding first quarter, driven by accelerating demand for AI infrastructure, with Data Center now the primary driver of our revenue and earnings growth," said Dr. Lisa Su, AMD chair and CEO. "We are seeing strong momentum as inferencing and agentic AI drive increasing demand for high-performance CPUs and accelerators. Looking ahead, we expect server growth to accelerate meaningfully as we scale supply to meet demand. Customer engagement around MI450 Series and Helios is strengthening, with leading customer forecasts exceeding our initial expectations and a growing pipeline of large-scale deployments providing us with increasing visibility into our growth trajectory."

A few hours ago, Ubisoft leaker xj0nathan decided to share a screenshot from a private playtest of Assassin's Creed Invictus, the rumored multiplayer Fall Guys-inspired spin-off. However, the official Assassin's Creed X account responded to him quickly, claiming that the screenshot had been heavily altered with AI tools: Nice try… This might have started as an image from our private test, but it’s been heavily altered (most probably with AI). Not great to spread misinformation. 👎 For those genuinely curious about the project: we'll share more when the time is right! As you would expect, the leaker didn't take too […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/ubisoft-assassins-creed-invictus-leaker-misinformation-screenshot/

Poddle is an AI-powered decision intelligence platform designed to help founders, product teams, and business leaders think better, faster, and more strategically. It transforms scattered information, ideas, and signals into structured insights by combining human input with intelligent agents. Instead of passively consuming content, users actively co-create ideas, validate assumptions, and explore strategic directions through collaborative spaces like decisions, insights, and ideas archive.

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Raziel centralizes startup equity, venture funds, crypto, real estate, and public equities into one portfolio management dashboard. Track performance, analyze returns, manage capital calls, and generate reports with AI-powered data ingestion and over 12,000 integrations.

Raziel offers enterprise-grade security with SOC 2 in progress and supports users from individual angels to family offices and funds.

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Ceyla unifies creative tools, multi-model chat, and intelligent agents so you can create, converse, and build in one place. It lets you produce consistent characters, generate influencer-style photos in global locations, and reimagine rooms with interior design styles. You can explore personalities for companionship, coaching, and planning, and equip teams with industry-focused AI, shared billing, and commercial usage rights.

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Your documents. AI ready.

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Discover, access, and pay for any API autonomously

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100s of Dollars Could Be Sitting in Your Inbox 📥

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The work your meetings create, done before they end

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Run 100s of coding agents on any machine from anywhere

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The tool that maps founder networks for any company

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Turn Once UI into a $10k agency

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Access your bank data in ChatGPT & Claude via Open Finance

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Blend your content into real-world locations

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Exit tax-free using Trusts. For startup founders.

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Cut Claude Code costs by up to 50%

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Create, manage, and measure your ChatGPT ad campaigns

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No one likes waiting in a damn line.

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Your cursor's tutor. For every Mac app.

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build your own software factory

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Bring missing data into Databox without writing code

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An open-source brain for your team

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The AI recruiting platform powered by expert recruiters

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The first truly agentic AI sidebar for Google Workspace™

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LLM Wiki + NotebookLM, in one closed-loop Proactive AI

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AI powered accessibility compliance for teams who ship fast

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Voice AI that feels as good as it sounds

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Palo Alto Networks has released an advisory warning that a critical buffer overflow vulnerability in its PAN-OS software has been exploited in the wild. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-0300, has been described as a case of unauthenticated remote code execution. It carries a CVSS score of 9.3 if the User-ID Authentication Portal is configured to enable access from the internet or any

AI's trillion-dollar supply chain breaks at the documentation layer.

The shift from QoS to QoE reveals gaps between network performance and real user experience.

QuTwo, the Finnish AI lab founded by former AMD Silo AI CEO Peter Sarlin, is now valued at €325 million (approximately $380 million) after raising a €25 million angel round ($29 million). It's a sign of enduring tailwinds for AI, quantum computing, and sovereign tech, especially for Europe-made companies.

Wonder wants to turn its robotic kitchens into AI-powered “restaurant factories,” letting anyone spin up a virtual food brand with a prompt.

Boox’s phone-like ereader gets a flashy Pro upgrade, with color E Ink, stylus support and mobile data making it more versatile, though the even higher price stings.

The Daredevil: Born Again season 2 finale has finally aired on Disney+ — here's how it comes to an end.

With a little over a month left before the launch of Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced, Ubisoft has given us a look at what to expect from the latest entry into the long-running game franchise, specifically the overhauled combat, parkour, and stealth. The game studio showed off a long list of features and updates to the game, but the gist of it is that Ubisoft has invested time making the combat more reactive and challenging, the parkour more responsive and fluid, and the stealth gameplay more engaging and intuitive.

Possibly the most important and exciting new mechanic coming to Assassin's Creed: Black Flag Resynced is a combat rework that makes enemy NPCs more interesting to face off against. According to Ubisoft, the combat in Black Flag Resynced will be "more demanding," thanks to what it calls Adaptive Enemies, which will spot attack patterns and adapt to them over the course of a combat encounter. "For example, wait around too much for a Parry, and enemies will react by performing Unstoppable Attacks that cannot be parried. Abuse a Kick too much, and enemies will quickly dodge them. The trick is to alternate between offense and defense. Varying your combos helps. Rotate between Kicks, Sweeps, Rope Darts, Pistols and Heavy Strikes at the end of your attack combos to confuse enemies." Enemies will also come with different archetypes, each of which have their own strengths and weaknesses, like the soldiers, who prefer to work in pairs and coordinate attacks, or the Brute, Captain, and Demolitionist, which will require players to break their guard before going in for a takedown.

Phinite is a cloud-agnostic platform to design, deploy, manage, observe, and scale multi-agent AI systems across the full lifecycle. It centralizes orchestration, integrations, and real-time supervision so teams can build reliable agent workflows, enforce guardrails, and ship to production faster. Developers connect channels and APIs, monitor performance, and audit activity from one control plane built for enterprise compliance.

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Tapni is a business card CRM that helps you turn real-life meetings into qualified leads. Share your profile with a tap or QR code, capture contacts via forms or an AI business card scanner, and auto-sync every lead to CRMs like Salesforce, HubSpot, and many others.

Teams brand profiles, track analytics, and manage lead ownership from a central dashboard, while automated follow-ups keep deals moving and eliminate manual data entry.

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Fluenta is a startup-idea validator for solo founders and indie hackers who want to avoid shipping dead ideas. Unlike ChatGPT, which uses 18-month-old press releases, Fluenta scans over 200 live sources daily across six market signals: search demand, social pain, competition density, monetization, funding momentum, and urgency triggers. Each idea gets a 0-100 Launch Readiness Score with sourced data and a build, kill, or pivot verdict.

Explore more than 1,000 pre-scored ideas for free from sources including YC, a16z, McKinsey, and GitHub, or run an Idea X-Ray on your own concept for a detailed report in about 15 minutes. Plans start at $9/month with pay-as-you-go credits.

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In a recent post on X, Xbox CEO, Asha Sharma, announced that Copilot on console will officially exit active development, while Copilot on mobile will also be wound down. Copilot for Gaming was previously announced in March 2025, with the feature first making its way to mobile and later announcements predicting that Copilot would be coming to Xbox Series consoles sometime in 2026. Copilot was slated to land on Xbox consoles in the form of an AI that effectively watches you game by taking screenshots and monitoring inputs and then providing suggestions and recommendations based on that data. Judging by the wording in the announcement, this appears to be another move by Xbox Gaming CEO, Asha Sharma, to earn back the trust of gamers in what she calls "a return to Xbox." It's unclear what this means for the rest of the Xbox Gaming software suite, especially when it comes to devices like the ASUS ROG Xbox Ally and its Xbox Game Bar, but it seems likely at this point that those integrations may also eventually be removed.

The full post by Sharma reads:

Xbox needs to move faster, deepen our connection with the community, and address friction for both players and developers.
Today, we promoted leaders who helped build Xbox, while also bringing in new voices to help push us forward. This balance is important as we get the business back on track.
As part of this shift, you'll see us begin to retire features that don't align with where we're headed. We will begin winding down Copilot on mobile and will stop development of Copilot on console.

Columns unifies data connection, preparation, and visualization so teams turn messy files into clear, shareable insights. Use Flow to define transformations in plain language and keep everything in sync from input to output. With Drive, drop in CSVs, PDFs, or spreadsheets to automatically extract and structure data. With Graph, build brand-matched charts and dashboards you can embed or export, and schedule updates and alerts when metrics change.

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savvio turns any video, article, or document into clear notes, a visual map of ideas, and a step-by-step action plan you can follow. Drop in tutorials, lectures, or recordings and see summaries, connections, and checklists in seconds. Grow your plans as you learn, expand steps when you’re stuck, and keep everything organized in one place while you track progress.

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This modder's gaming PC build meets the definition of unique, as it's quite literally the size of a room.

OpenAI officially launches self-serve ChatGPT ads with CPC bidding, conversion tracking, and expanded advertiser access through its new Ads Manager platform.

The post OpenAI Launches Self-Serve Ads Manager for ChatGPT appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

During her firm's fourth quarter earnings call, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su discussed the company's AI growth, the impact of agentic AI on her firm's business and competition in the AI CPU market. AMD's earnings call comes at a time when CPUs are believed to be playing a crucial role in the AI industry due the growth in agentic AI workloads. AMD's larger rival Intel saw its shares close 23% higher last month following its earnings report which saw a major profit beat and CEO Lip-Bu Tan explain the importance of CPUs in today's world. AMD CEO Discusses CPU Market […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/amds-lisa-su-pushes-back-on-gpu-cannibalization-fears-calling-agentic-ais-cpu-surge-largely-additive-to-accelerator-demand/

Apple had gone all-in on AI at its WWDC 2024, promising a veritable suite of AI-powered capabilities that have yet to materialize even after two years. And now, the Cupertino-based tech giant is paying the price for over-promising and under-delivering on its much-hyped AI-powered Siri. Apple to pay $250 million to settle a class-action lawsuit that had accused it of running a false advertisement campaign by hyping up the yet-to-be-seen AI capabilities of its Siri voice assistant For the benefit of those who might not be aware, Apple had extensively touted a more personalized Siri at its WWDC 2024, promising […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-pays-quarter-of-a-billion-dollars-for-overpromising-and-underdelivering-on-ai-powered-siri/

While the Kindle Scribe Colorsoft might be a tempting upgrade for a digital notebook, there's no word on when, or if, it will be released in Australia. The 2024 Kindle Scribe from AU$449 will serve you very well indeed.

Mouse P.I. for Hire’s gameplay and visuals are like a beautiful vintage cheddar — it's just a shame that the Switch 2 edition grates some performance problems on the top.

Looking for NYT Strands answers and hints? Here's all you need to know to solve today's game, including the spangram.

Looking for NYT Connections answers and hints? Here's all you need to know to solve today's game, plus my commentary on the puzzles.

Looking for Quordle clues? We can help. Plus get the answers to Quordle today and past solutions.

Google Gemini is rolling out to millions of cars, but some owners are concerned about data privacy.

Nuro has been granted a permit to begin driverless testing of Lucid Gravity SUVs equipped with its autonomous tech on California public roads — vehicles that will eventually be used in Uber’s premium robotaxi service. But the Silicon Valley-based startup says it isn’t quite ready to begin.

SAP plans to buy German AI startup Prior Labs and invest heavily in it. It is also prohibiting customers' agents use to a select few like Nvidia's NemoClaw.

The company is making a big bet that the swiping model is outdated and most matches never turn into actual dates. The company wants to fix that by redesigning profiles, changing how people interact, and focusing a lot more on getting users to meet in real life.

Google is testing a cryptographic protocol for verifying bot traffic that could make unwanted crawlers easier to identify.

The post Google Is Testing New Bot Authorization Standard appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

The Federal Trade Commission and Media Matters agreed to a settlement and the lawsuit was dismissed this week.

The much-requested update will offer social media managers new options in terms of integrating messages into their workflows.

The company wants to showcase its value as a shopping destination with the new tagline, “Watch it. Love it. Want it.”

The company added 12 million more users, mainly from regions outside the U.S. and the EU, where the online discovery platform is gaining traction.

New tools include artificial intelligence-powered visual analysis systems that estimate a user’s age based on height and bone structure.

The feature will allow users to generate audio samples that replicate their own voices, offering new capabilities in digital audio.

A security researcher has discovered that Microsoft Edge will load all your stored passwords into memory in plaintext at startup, making it easy for malware to scrape those passwords.

Google Chrome users who have noticed unusual disk activity or unexplained drops in available storage should look for a folder called "OptGuideOnDeviceModel" inside their Chrome directory. It holds roughly 4GB of weights for Google's Gemini Nano LLM, downloaded by the browser without user consent.

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AMD expects that overall PC and Gaming demand will decline in the second half of this year due to rising memory and component prices. RAMpocalypse Is The Primary Reason Why PC and Gaming Demand Will Decline In The Second Half of This Year, Says AMD In its Q1 2026 earnings, AMD's Client and Gaming segment saw a 23% increase in revenue versus the prior year, reaching $3.94 billion, while declining 9% versus the previous quarter. AMD states that its client side, which includes desktop and laptop segments, saw great traction through a strong portfolio of products, which includes its latest […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/amd-warns-pc-gaming-demand-will-decline-in-h2-as-memory-prices-surge/

AMD's MI450 GPUs are now being sampled to customers, and there's already huge interest in the MI500 series within AI Inference data centers. Customers Are Lining Up To Deploy AMD's MI450 GPUs As Sampling Begins, Next-Gen MI500 Also Gains Traction In The "AI Inferencing" Segment During the Q1 2026 earnings call, AMD CEO Dr. Lisa Su confirmed that they have started sampling the first Instinct MI450 GPUs to "lead" customers, and the chips remain on track for deployments at various data centers in the Helios rack, which will see production shipments commence in the second half of this year. Several […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/amd-sampling-mi450-gpus-engaged-with-customers-on-mi500-largest-ai-deployments-are-for-inference/

AMD has just announced its earnings for Q1 2026, posting a record revenue of $10.3 billion driven by strong demand for its EPYC CPUs & Instinct accelerators in the AI segment. AMD Delivers An Outstanding Q1 2026, Driven By Strong Sales of EPYC CPUs & Instinct Accelerators While Tackling Supply Constraints In The Agentic AI Era AMD's CEO outlined an "outstanding" first quarter for the company, with revenue of $10.3 billion, a 38% increase versus the previous year. This growth was driven mainly by strong demand in the data center and AI segments, which were up 7% year over year […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/amd-doubles-server-cpu-forecast-to-120-billion-as-agentic-ai-rewrites-demand-ceo-says-epyc-verano-built-purely-for-ai/

Apple’s launch strategy for this year is going to be a little different, as the base iPhone 18 isn’t going to be a part of the lineup, with the company delaying the unveiling to early 2027. It turns out that the device’s absence from the September keynote is part of a bigger plan to maintain healthier margins during the DRAM shortage, at least that’s what a tipster wants you to believe. The base iPhone 17 is already the best-selling smartphone in the world, with Apple expected to dominate markets by keeping it around for longer With Apple previously claimed by Weibo […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/base-iphone-18-launch-delay-to-keep-iphone-17-around-for-higher-margins/

AMD is expecting the memory crunch to hit its gaming business in the second half of the year, with revenue expected to decline by "more than 20%."

Global Reach Hub is a global platform of smart apps to sell, organize, automate, and scale businesses. It brings together an ecosystem of connected apps covering areas like payments, logistics, mobility, health, sales, and finance, operating in multiple countries and languages. You use, sell, and promote the apps from a single place, with trackable links and an affiliate program to monetize. The hub continuously grows, allowing new projects to be added without changing the structure while keeping everything integrated.

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Researchers took a 40-year-old design and applied some software and 3D printing to bring the Y-zipper to life

Here's how to watch The Other Bennet Sister online from anywhere in the world, completely FREE.

Chinese researchers developed a coal fuel cell that generates electricity without combustion while capturing carbon dioxide and potentially achieving significantly higher efficiency levels.

Altara’s AI aims to diagnose failures and help speed up R&D by unifying data siloed across spreadsheets and legacy systems.

Lucid Motors pulled its guidance for the year, as it navigates swelling inventory and a companywide cost-cutting measure.

As some of the biggest VCs in crypto start to consider funding AI startups, a16z crypto's new fund will stay the course.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma confirms the end of Copilot on console and mobile, marking a shift away from AI features as the company focuses on speed, community, and core priorities.

The Logitech Astro A50 X is an extremely expensive item that can connect to multiple platforms and provide immensely satisfying sound quality, and now people have a better chance at owning one with this 25% discount.

SteelSeries has unveiled the Arctis Nova Pro Omni, offering feature-rich audiophile-quality performance in a wireless, platform-agnostic gaming headset.

The Steam Controller sold out instantly when it launched this week, but Valve has issued a new statement confirming it's working hard to get a restock.

Halo Infinite has received a surprise update introducing Firefight Gauntlet, a new mode with escalating challenges, alongside new Forge maps.

Another day and another Apple Mac configuration appears to have been pulled, all in a bid to conserve precious memory resources for Apple's upcoming M5-based Mac Studio and Mac mini devices. Just days after pulling the base M4 Mac mini, Apple has narrowed the M3 Ultra Mac Studio configurator to the lone 96GB memory option First, Apple increased their lead times. And now, entire memory configurations for the Mac Studio and Mac mini devices are going offline. Just last week, Apple pulled the base variant of the Mac mini, which sported the M4 chip, 16GB RAM, 256GB of storage, and a […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-m3-ultra-mac-studio-only-available-in-the-96gb-memory-configuration-now-as-apple-hoards-memory-for-m5-based-macs/

Shortly after the new leadership cabinet for Xbox chief executive officer Asha Sharma was made public, Sharma took to her personal X (formerly Twitter) account to comment on the appointments but also to reveal another change regarding Xbox's direction. Microsoft's Copilot AI, which had been introduced into the gaming ecosystem as Gaming Copilot through the mobile Xbox app and the Xbox PC app, is seemingly something that no longer aligns with platform's direction. "Xbox needs to move faster, deepen our connection with the community, and address friction for both players and developers," Sharma began in her statement. "Today, we promoted […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/xbox-ends-gaming-copilot-development-consoles-mobile/

HitKeep is an open-source, privacy-first web analytics platform you can self-host or run in managed EU or US regions. It ships as a single auditable binary with zero external dependencies—no PostgreSQL, Redis, or ClickHouse—and stores data in embedded DuckDB.

Track conversions and multi-step funnels, compare periods, share read-only dashboards, and get scheduled email reports. Enforce data sovereignty with cookie-free tracking, zero telemetry, RBAC, and WebAuthn/TOTP 2FA, and export everything to Parquet, JSON, or CSV.

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Kit.Club is a skincare community and product discovery platform that helps you find routines and products that truly fit. Explore honest reviews, follow real routines, and browse curated Kits from people you'd actually ask. Search in your own words or let guided discovery narrow choices by concerns, ingredients, or goals. Track what’s trending, read editorials explaining ingredients and techniques, and share your own Kit to help others.

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GetHireToday is an AI-powered resume builder designed to help resumes pass ATS filters. It uses AI to rewrite weak resume bullets with measurable impact, scores resumes against job descriptions, and exports clean ATS-safe PDFs. A free tier lets users build a complete resume before upgrading.

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64 new fabs are expected to start operating in Asia by 2029, but only six are planned for Southeast Asia.

Jurisphere's software is used by over 500 teams for legal review, research, drafting, and collaboration.

Ripple shares LinkedIn profiles and phone numbers to help spot repeat hacker applicants.

The sale is part of CK Hutchison’s wider portfolio reshuffle, which includes a planned disposal of most of its ports business.

Here are the companies in India that are attracting tons of investors and have the resources to spend on software, talent, and expansion.

The company said it supports number provisioning in more than 130 countries and outbound connectivity to 190 countries.

The works aims to identify exploitable software flaws, rank them by risk, and support faster mitigation.

Huang said he respected the company but disagreed with some of its positions.

Abhishek Das, co-founder and co-CEO of Yutori, says building reliable automation requires strict standards, not optimistic assumptions about user patience.

Amazon said the service lets companies store and ship goods through its freight, warehousing, fulfillment, and parcel network.

More of Singapore’s fintech firms are launching stablecoin-related services to drive lower fees and faster cross-border settlements.

Narrative Architects maps the undocumented workarounds that cause AI systems to fail, saving companies from costly engineering mistakes.

Which are the startups that are on the path to becoming the next big thing?

GSR spokesperson said the deal values the firm at more than US$1 billion and it is also seeking up to US$150 million from strategic investors.

Some officials praised Tesla's Full Self-Driving system for strong performance in city tests.

The rule applies to public and private electronic system operators.

It added that Apple executives visited Samsung’s Texas facility, which is expected to produce advanced chips.

Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase are leading the process, while the rest of the package is expected to be equity.

The shift paused its chip design efforts and redirected capital and talent to its cloud business.

Mapping Japan's cleantech sector: Key players, top investors, and funding insights in one report.

The company said the change is expected to mainly affect its two-wheel services in its largest market.

Trading volume on Ventuals and PreStocks has surged over threefold since early 2026.

The deal included about 3.6 billion rupees (US$37.6 million) in primary capital and 1.3 billion rupees (US$13.2 million) in secondary sales.

The company said it will use the money for research and development, new clinically validated products, and expansion.

Grab posted a record quarterly revenue of US$955 million in Q1 2026.

Fervo's Cape Station project aims to generate electricity at about $7,000 per kilowatt installed.

ReN3's AI platform supports deployment on premises, private clouds, or hybrid setups.

Mapping Japan’s fintech sector: Key players, top investors, and funding insights in one report.

Haun Ventures plans to invest globally in startups blending financial services, AI, and alternative assets.

A May 4 filing showing Musk’s revocable trust will pay a US$1.5 million civil penalty if a judge approves the deal.

The funding will support capital spending linked to recent customer contract wins and ongoing data center developments.

Binance's Withdraw Protection lock cannot be overridden by customer service or law enforcement orders.

It aims to help businesses earn revenue from backup batteries through power market services.

AMI's technology will enhance Lattice's offerings in system security, manageability, and control.

HKGAI's model is optimized for domestic chips including Huawei’s Ascend 910C.

Its global monthly active users rose 11% to 631 million and average revenue per user came in at US$1.61.

Ukraine repurposes Antonov An-28 into an anti-drone platform using miniguns and interceptor drones, balancing cost efficiency with operational limitations.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says AI is the "United States’ best opportunity to re-industrialize".

Disney+ subscribers have spotted changes in Dolby Atmos availability based on the time of day, believing its due to peak streaming times.

With Apple's latest operating system updates, users will reportedly have their pick of which third-party AI models they want to use for a host of tasks.

Christophe Fouquet, who became ASML's CEO in 2024 after more than a decade at the company, sat down with this editor on the rooftop deck of his Beverly Hills hotel Tuesday morning ahead of his appearance at the Milken Institute Global Conference. Dressed in a blue suit and white shirt, he was relaxed — even when the conversation turned to the rivals.

VW Group's stake will continue to grow under the $5.8 billion joint venture with Rivian.

Google is testing Web Bot Auth, an experimental protocol for verifying some AI agent requests with cryptographic signatures alongside existing checks.

The post Google Testing Web Bot Auth To Verify AI Agent Requests appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Micron’s 6600 ION SSD is the storage density king Micron has officially launched the “world’s highest capacity commercially available SSD”, their 245.76 TB 6600 ION. This datacenter SSD is designed for rack-scale deployments to support AI, cloud, enterprise, and hyperscale workloads. This drive allows an absurd amount of data to be stored on a single […]

The post Micron ships the world’s “highest capacity” SSD – 245TB 6600 ION appeared first on OC3D.

Microsoft reveals Xbox Game Pass's first batch of new games coming in the first half of May 2026, and it's stacked with highly anticipated titles like Forza Horizon 6 and Subnautica 2, and critically-acclaimed hits like Doom: The Dark Ages.

Star Wars: Fate of the Old Republic director Casey Hudson announced the game's lead dev team on Star Wars Day, and it's full of KotOR and Mass Effect talent.

Xbox CEO Asha Sharma is overhauling the brand’s leadership team following a difficult earnings report, bringing in new talent from CoreAI and Instacart while Kevin Gammill and Roanne Sones depart.

PassMark's MemTest86 update version 11.7 (Build 1000) has added preliminary testing for the LPCAMM2 memory type, primarily for Intel's "Meteor Lake" and "Arrow Lake" chips. This means that the latest memory form factor can now be tested using a standardized testing methodology. With the rise of LPCAMM2 appearances, it is only logical that MemTest86 adds support for this form factor, which we have started seeing on Lenovo ThinkBook 14+ and 16+ and Framework Laptop 13 Pro models, especially from major DRAM manufacturers such as CXMT and Samsung. CXMT's LPCAMM2 memory uses LPDDR5X-8533 modules, while Samsung's modules are running LPDDR5X-9600 memory stacks. Interestingly, with further support from SK hynix, Samsung, Micron, and now CXMT, LPCAMM2 is aiming to become a universal standard for memory. Since the upcoming DDR6 memory is scheduled to be the main driver behind (LP)CAMM2, having a memory testing tool is essential.Below is the list of fixes and enhancements.

Fuse Games' highly anticipated sci-fi arcade racer Star Wars Galactic Racer is due to arrive on PC, PlayStation, and Xbox this coming October 6, 2026. That much we (officially) learned last week, and today NVIDIA revealed that it'll arrive this coming fall with support for NVIDIA DLSS 4.5 with Dynamic Multi-Frame Generation and NVIDIA Super Resolution. It'll also support DLSS Ray Reconstruction on PCs and laptops powered by NVIDIA's GeForce RTX graphics cards, and of course, players who are running NVIDIA's latest RTX 50 Series graphics cards will be able to take full advantage of NVIDIA's suite of graphical technologies. […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/star-wars-galactic-racer-nvidia-dlss-multi-frame-gen-super-resolution/

The wins in Apple’s column haven’t stopped increasing, and that’s terrible news for rivals as the latest data reveals that the iPhone maker is now the top manufacturer when comparing global smartphone revenue share for Q1 2026. In fact, the latest statistics show that Apple rules this segment with an iron fist, with its mobile devices accounting for 48 percent of the world’s revenue, with the remaining firms left to fight over breadcrumbs. The latest research reveals that the Average Selling Price (ASP) of Apple’s iPhones is $908, with a record 21 percent share in global shipments for Q1 2026 […]

Read full article at https://wccftech.com/apple-iphone-top-global-revenue-share-for-q1-2026/

Every child has untapped potential. TUTOREM is the AI learning companion that finds it by generating endless adaptive questions across 11 subjects, learning from every answer, and adapting to exactly how your child thinks. It includes a parent dashboard, Focus Lock sessions, Kids Mode for ages 5-7, MAP test prep, and works offline. A free tier is included.

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Samsung and partners propose floating data centers to accelerate AI infrastructure deployment, though execution challenges and offshore risks remain unresolved.

Chinese labs are set to lose their FCC testing accreditation after a unanimous commission vote.

The Argos bank holiday sale continues this week, so I've looked through the event once again to pick out all the best new tech deals that are still available.

Southwest Airlines had a robot passenger problem which caused an hour-long flight delay.

By bringing messaging to the web, Threads is aligning its desktop experience more closely with competitors like X and Bluesky.

Arnell joins Gebbia’s National Design Studio under Trump to unify UX across 27,000 federal sites and streamline how Americans use government services.

A lawsuit alleges Google's AI Overview falsely identified musician Ashley MacIsaac as a sex offender. It seeks $1.5M in damages.

The post Google Sued Over False AI Overview About Musician appeared first on Search Engine Journal.

Updates to the Gemini API File Search tool makes building efficient, multimodal file retrieval systems easier for developers.

OpenAI is taking the next step in building its ChatGPT ads platform — introducing self-serve buying, CPC bidding and improved measurement to bring more advertisers into the ecosystem

What’s happening. Ads in ChatGPT are moving beyond a limited pilot, with new ways for businesses to buy and manage campaigns. Advertisers can now access inventory through agency and tech partners — or directly via a new beta Ads Manager rolling out in the U.S.

This marks a shift from a controlled test environment to a more scalable ad platform.

Why we care. Until now, access to ChatGPT ads has been restricted and expensive, limiting participation to large advertisers. These updates lower the barrier to entry, opening the door for SMBs, startups and a wider range of brands to test the channel.

At the same time, introducing CPC bidding brings ChatGPT closer to established performance platforms, allowing advertisers to optimise for actions — not just impressions.

Self-serve Ads Manager. The new Ads Manager gives advertisers direct control over campaigns, including budgeting, bidding, creative uploads and performance tracking.

While still in beta, it signals OpenAI’s intention to build a full-service ad platform — not just a partner-led ecosystem.

Between the lines. This is a familiar playbook. Platforms typically start with high-touch, partner-led campaigns before moving to self-serve tools that unlock scale. ChatGPT is now entering that second phase.

CPC bidding arrives. Previously, ChatGPT ads were sold on a CPM basis. The addition of CPC means advertisers can now align spend with user actions — a critical step for performance marketers.

Given the nature of ChatGPT queries — often exploratory, comparative and decision-driven — clicks could become a strong proxy for intent.

Measurement catches up. OpenAI is also rolling out pixel-based tracking and a Conversions API, allowing advertisers to measure actions like purchases, sign-ups and leads.

Importantly, this data is aggregated, with no access to individual conversations — reinforcing OpenAI’s emphasis on privacy.

Why this is a big deal. Measurement has been one of the biggest gaps in early ChatGPT ads. Without it, advertisers struggled to justify spend. These updates begin to close that gap and make optimisation more viable.

The ecosystem grows. OpenAI is also expanding its partner network, working with agencies like WPP and Publicis Groupe, as well as tech platforms such as Criteo and Adobe.

This allows advertisers to buy ChatGPT ads through tools and workflows they already use.

What to watch:

• How quickly self-serve adoption scales
• Whether CPC performance holds as competition increases
• How measurement evolves to match advertiser expectations

Bottom line. ChatGPT ads are moving from experiment to platform — and with self-serve tools, CPC bidding and better measurement, OpenAI is laying the groundwork for scale.

Earlier this year, Google announced Universal Commerce Protocol (UCP), a protocol to allow AI-agents to buy directly from search. This went live only in Google’s AI Mode interface in February. But now, it seems to be rolling out in the main Google Search results where there are retailers that support UCP.

What it looks like. Brodie Clark posted a screenshot, which I can replicate, of the UCP-powered “Buy” button in the product detail overlay within Google Search, specifically for the retailer Wayfair. Here is his screenshot:

Clicking the Buy button will connect your Google checkout account with Wayfair and make the purchase without having to go to the Wayfair website to checkout.

About UCP. UCP establishes a shared language between AI agents and commerce systems, removing the need for custom integrations across agents or platforms.

• UCP works with existing standards (e.g., Agent2Agent, Agent Payments Protocol, and Model Context Protocol).
• Google co-developed it with partners including Shopify, Etsy, Wayfair, and Target.
• More than 20 additional companies across retail and payments have already endorsed it.

Why we care. A lot of people are saying AI-agents are the future of the web, well, here is a clear sign of how agents can help retailers make money. While Wayfair did not get any traffic from Google for this query, and there is no click, 0 click-through rates from Google Search. There was an impression in Google Search that led to a purchase without any clicks to the web site.

This won’t necessarily stop all searchers for wanting to visit the site and learn more about the product before purchasing. Just like it doesn’t stop all buyers from going into a physical store to touch and feel the product before purchasing. But some may just click “Buy” and never visit your site.

Now that it is rolling out in the main search results, it is something to keep a closer eye on.

Valve plans to update Steam fans on their controller restock plans soon Valve’s Steam Controller went on sale yesterday, and as expected, it quickly sold out worldwide. Today, Valve has confirmed that it is “working on getting more stock”, and that it plans to give gamers an update and a restock timeline soon. Scalpers have […]

The post Valve confirms Steam Controller restock plans appeared first on OC3D.

N‑Studio is now available on the Microsoft Store, offering a free Starter version with screen recording, audio capture and export tools. A $36 Professional upgrade adds timelapse support, extra adjustments and a full multi‑layer editor.

Valve's highly anticipated release of the Steam Controller was so successful that the entire stock sold out in just 30 minutes. The demand has been nothing short of exceptional, even for a controller priced at $99 in the United States, €99 in European Union countries, £85 in the UK, $149 CAD in Canada, and $149 AUD in Australia. At around 17:00 UTC on May 4, the Steam Controller officially went on sale through Valve's website. The site experienced such a high volume of customers that the payment processing system froze, causing many to encounter errors before both the website and payment processor resumed functioning. To prepare, some customers loaded their Steam Wallets with funds days in advance, but the high demand still prevented them from securing a unit immediately. For those who managed to purchase one, congratulations. However, those who didn't are turning to resellers, who are charging about $300 for the controller. Valve is reassuring customers not to worry, as another stock drop is coming soon.

ValveSteam Controller ran out faster than we anticipated, and we hate that not everyone who wanted one was able to get it. We're working on getting more in stock and will have an update on expected timeline soon.