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The pioneer of robot vacuums, iRobot, significantly updated its product line during 2025. The company's Roombas received LiDAR light radars for the first time, and at the same time, the smartphone application intended for controlling the robots was significantly updated (actually, several times).

From the new product line, we put one of the most interesting cases to a long test, the Roomba Plus 505 Combo, christened with a confusing name monster, which, to avoid any confusion, also bears the name Roomba 505 Combo+.

This is a robot vacuum that mops floors with rotating mop pads, intelligently avoids obstacles with the help of a camera, empties its own dustbin, and washes its own mops. In other words, a direct answer to the currently most popular category of robot vacuums.

As is our custom, we put the new product to a user test lasting about six months, where the robot was the only tool responsible for the cleanliness of the apartment's floors throughout our test period. Conveniently, the test also fell in the middle of the Nordic winter, meaning that grit, slush, and various other dirt were carried indoors with shoes, hindering Roomba's work.

For the past few years, there have been warnings online that software should always be downloaded from trusted sources - and preferably from the developers' own websites.

But even this advice doesn't always help.

The official website for HWMonitor and CPU-Z, hugely popular programs among PC enthusiasts, was successfully hijacked. Both programs are developed by the same company, CPUID, and both programs are available for download through the same site.

The perpetrators who hijacked the site did not cause any easily noticeable damage to the sites; instead, they only changed the official download links for both programs to point to fake download files containing malware. The issue came to light when users who had downloaded the programs started complaining on social media about how antivirus software completely freaked out over recently downloaded CPU-Z or HWMonitor. Some users also contacted CPUID directly.

CPUID managed to rectify the situation six hours after the site's download links were changed to point to installation files containing malware. However, users who downloaded either program from its official site between April 9, 2026, and April 10, 2026, also received malware on their computers as a bonus with the program. According to the company's statement (X/Twitter), the incident was caused by a vulnerability in CPUID's API interface, which attackers successfully exploited.

Microsoft has started removing its Copilot AI brand from Windows applications.

The company has, in recent years, pushed AI into almost all possible applications - including utilities shipped with Windows. At the same time, every single update that even slightly smelled of AI has been branded with the company's Copilot brand.

Now, a clear rollback has begun, and the first results are already visible. According to Windows Central, Copilot branding and Copilot logos have already been removed from a recent experimental version of Windows 11, at least from Notepad.

However, the AI functionalities have not disappeared; they have only been renamed. So, Notepad's AI-assisted writing mode, previously branded with the Copilot logo, is now simply named the "Writing Tools" menu.

On the other hand, significant updates are apparently coming to Windows applications already this year, as the company has formed a new team whose task is to lighten Windows applications. The team leader states that the majority of Windows applications will be implemented with so-called native code, focusing on the lightness and speed of the applications.

Most people are likely well aware that Signal is one of the most strongly encrypted instant messaging apps available.

Signal has even added so-called quantum-resistant encryptionto its app, designed to prevent message encryption from being broken by future quantum computers.

Naturally, this creates challenges for authorities, as all communication on Signal is end-to-end encrypted. Put simply, this means that Signal messages cannot be accessed on any device other than the intended recipient's phone running the Signal app.

404 Media reports (paywalled) on a case where the United States federal police, the FBI, managed to obtain part of a suspect's Signal message history.

The individual was suspected of vandalizing property belonging to the United States immigration authority, ICE. He was arrested and authorities gained access to his iPhone. However, the suspect had deleted the Signal app entirely from the phone, along with all of its message history.

Despite this, the FBI managed to recover the suspect's received messages in a rather unexpected way.

Chrome's desktop version has received two desired new features: vertical tabs and an improved immersive reading mode.

According to Google, this is one of the biggest user interface changes in Chrome's history, as the traditional horizontal orientation of tabs has been in use since the browser's early days. At the same time, Chrome is catching up with other browsers, as vertical tabs, which are placed on the side, have already arrived in most of its competitors.

Vertical tabs offer an alternative to the traditional tab bar. In the new view, all open tabs are listed on the left side of the browser window, allowing website titles to be seen better - even when many tabs are open. This particularly eases the workflow for users who use many tabs simultaneously. The view can also be condensed into mere icons, so that the side tabs do not consume as much browser screen real estate.

Enabling the feature is simple: the user only needs to right-click the top of the browser window and select "Show tabs vertically" from the menu. Returning to the traditional horizontal tab bar is done in the same way.

The second update is an "immersive" reading mode, which is not a new function per se, but an improved version of the reading mode already present in Chrome. The new function expands the reading mode to the size of the entire browser window, removing extra visual elements from web pages and focusing solely on text. Reading mode can be activated either from the right-click menu or from a separate reading mode icon found in the address bar.

The US space agency NASA has noticed that space has garnered a great deal of interest from people following the Artemis II moon mission.

The internet has indeed been full of derivative works created from images published by NASA.

But NASA wanted to make life a bit easier for space fans and released a collection of the best images taken during the Artemis II moon mission, in a format suitable for phone wallpaper.

Among the ready-made, free wallpapers is, for example, the delightful "earthset," where Earth slowly disappears behind the Moon.

NASA's wallpapers intended for mobile phones can be found here.

Better known for its cars, part of the VAG group, Skoda has developed an invention that we perhaps didn't even realize we needed - but which seems ingenious.

Skoda's engineers have developed a bicycle bell which rings in such a way that it manages to bypass the algorithms of noise-cancelling headphones used by pedestrians.

Nowadays, there is a huge number of pedestrians using noise-cancelling headphones in traffic, who probably follow car traffic, but not so much cyclists. And in many countries pedestrians and cyclists have traditionally been made to use the same pathways.

This, of course, leads to the problem that when a cyclist tries to warn a pedestrian with their bell, the pedestrian using noise-cancelling headphones may not hear the bell's sound at all.

Instead of just making the bell louder, the company's engineers decided to make it smarter instead. Researchers found that virtually all noise-cancelling headphones let sounds through in a specific frequency range (between 750 Hz and 780 Hz).

YouTube has introduced two new experimental features for its Premium users, designed to make consuming content on mobile devices easier. The most notable addition is On-the-Go, which transforms the user interface to allow safer management of videos and podcasts even when on the move.

Many people listen to podcasts or other programs from YouTube during a walk or commute. Until now, managing the video has required precision, as the interface buttons have been small and surrounded by distracting elements, such as comments.

The new On-the-Go mode is specifically designed to bring relief to such situations. Its simplified mode offers large and easy-to-hit buttons for playback, rewinding, and pausing.

On Android phones, YouTube can automatically suggest turning on the mode if the device's motion sensors detect that the user has been moving (for example, walking) for at least 60 seconds.

In addition, unnecessary visual elements, such as comments, are hidden so that the user can focus on listening and easier control.

The feature can also be turned on manually via video settings. Google states that the feature is only available for Android.

Another new experiment is Auto Speed. It is an AI-based function that dynamically adjusts video playback speed according to the content.

Almost all electronics companies have been struggling due to the memory crisis that began in autumn 2025. Companies have been forced to cut their margins, downgrade the specs of their upcoming products - and gradually pass on sharply increased costs to consumers.

The surge in prices of memory chips and NAND flash used in SSDs is largely driven by AI companies, which are racing to build data centers around the world. In the process, they are effectively buying up all available memory chips on the market - at any price.

Naturally, there are also winners in this otherwise grim development. One of the biggest beneficiaries is Korean conglomerate Samsung, and particularly its electronics manufacturing arm, Samsung Electronics. For consumers, Samsung Electronics is best known for its smartphones and televisions - businesses that are also being hit hard by rising component costs.

But at the same time, Samsung Electronics is also the world's largest manufacturer of memory chips. The company itself has directly contributed to the current price surge by raising its own memory prices amid virtually unlimited demand.

The social media service TikTok, known for short videos, has today announced it will build a second data center in Finland.

The newly announced data center will be located in Lahti, while the first data center, announced less than a year ago, is located approximately 60 kilometers away in Kouvola.

The data centers are thus located quite close to each other, which may facilitate maintenance and the connection between the two data centers for data transfer. According to the press release, another reason is the availability of clean and reliable energy in the region and in Finland generally.

The investment for the Lahti data center is one billion euros. A similar sum will also be invested in the Kouvola data center, meaning TikTok is investing a total of 2 billion euros in Finland. Few individual companies have invested such large sums in Finland in such a short time. Lahti and Kouvola together form the backbone of TikTok's European infrastructure.

"Both investments are part of Project Clover, our 12 billion euro European data protection initiative, which provides industry-leading protection for the data of over 200 million European users. As part of the project, we have established a dedicated European data protection entity with enhanced technical, operational, and administrative safeguards," TikTok's press release states.

In a way, a historical moment is approaching, as Linux will most likely discontinue support for the 80486 processors by the end of this year.

The Register reported around Easter how changes have already been accepted into the Linux 7.1 codebase, which will remove support for the 486 processor family from the Linux kernel (kernel).

The change does not affect a very large audience, and Linux's lead maintainer Linus Torvalds has himself stated that 486 support is no longer "very relevant" in the 2020s.

Intel unveiled the 80486 processor family in 1989, and it dominated the PC market for several years until its successor, the Pentium, was unveiled. Intel itself manufactured 486-based processors until 2007.

The 486 was also a significant processor for PC technology, in that during its era, Intel saw the emergence of the first serious competitors manufacturing so-called clone x86 processors - including companies like AMD and Cyrix.

Three well-known American YouTubers have sued Apple, accusing the company of unauthorized use of their own videos for training Apple's AI models. The lawsuit was filed by h3h3 Productions, MrShortGameGolf, and Golfholics.

The creators who filed the lawsuit want the court to handle the case as a class action lawsuit, meaning other content creators on YouTube whose videos Apple has (allegedly) used as training material for its AI models could join.

According to MacRumors, the content creators accuse Apple of violating the U.S. DMCA law. According to the creators, Apple illegally collected (scraped) millions upon millions of YouTube videos, which it then used to train its AI. Based on court documents, Apple collected data from the so-called Panda-70M dataset, which contains links to videos, their subtitles, and verbal descriptions of each video's content.

Apple published an AI research paper (Scalable Text and Image Conditioned Video Generation) in late 2024, where the Panda-70M dataset was used to train a video generation model. According to the content creators (PDF), their created content appears in the said material over 500 times. Although the research description states that only video links were used, the content creators believe that instead of just links, Apple would have downloaded the videos and utilized the content of the videos themselves - which in turn violates both YouTube's terms of service and U.S. copyright laws.

Microsoft has started automatically updating computers using the soon-outdated Windows 11 version.

The mandatory update applies to all computers using Windows 11 24H2, i.e., the major version of Windows released in the autumn of 2024. According to Bleeping Computer, only computers used by businesses and managed by IT support are currently exempt from the mandatory update.

The official support period for Windows 11 version 24H2 ends in October 2026, after which no security updates will be released for it.

Computers being force-updated are updated to the latest major Windows update, 25H2, which was released in autumn 2025. For the user, the update appears so that Windows simply states there are updates ready to be installed - and the user can choose whether to install the update immediately or only during the next restart. No other options are offered.

Microsoft, obviously, wants to avoid a situation where (once again) outdated Windows computers are left hanging in the real world, possibly connected to the internet, for which security updates are no longer released. Such PCs would eventually become ticking time bombs, risking the security of the entire internet.

Strict age limit enforcement is expanding globally and it is gradually becoming part of operating systems. Apple began requiring age verification from all iPhone users in Britain earlier this year, and the practice has now expanded to two new countries: Singapore and South Korea.

The age must be genuinely verified, meaning simply faking the birth date is not enough - nor is the good old adult entertainment sites' "are you an adult?" query.

In Britain, a nationwide digital method to verify age is not widely used yet, the age can be verified in several different ways. If an Apple user account has existed for at least 18 years, no special tricks are needed when setting up a new iPhone.

But if the user account is not old enough, user's age must be proven by other means. These methods include entering a credit card issued in Britain during phone setup (a minor cannot obtain a credit card acting as a 'main card' in Britain) or some method of age verification according to the recently introduced PASS scheme. The last option offered is scanning and sending a passport or driving license to Apple for verification.

A much-desired update is coming to Steam, the world's largest PC game marketplace, owned by Valve.

Steam will start showing an estimate of how well each game would perform on the specific computer you are logged into the Steam marketplace with.

The estimate is based on real performance statistics from other users who have already played the game, and the computer configurations used by those players. In other words: you will directly see how fast the game runs on your own computer, because it is very likely that someone has already played the game with exactly the same hardware you are using.

According to Steam's latest change history, the collected game performance data is anonymized, meaning no individual player can be identified from it. Smoothness is simply described by the fps number, which indicates how many times per second the computer in use can update the image displayed on the screen with that particular game.

The feature is currently in beta testing and focuses on players using the SteamOS operating system.