IT General

The three-row SUV world is packed with big names like the Toyota Grand Highlander, Honda Pilot, Kia Telluride, and Hyundai Palisade. Somehow, the Volkswagen Atlas keeps flying under the radar even though it nails the stuff most families actually care about: space, comfort, visibility, and everyday usability.

Google previewed new Gemini-powered features coming to Android Auto and Google Built-in at I/O 2026. The updates are designed to make in-car interactions more helpful while keeping drivers focused on the road. Here’s an early look at Google’s expanding AI ambitions in vehicles.

Whether you like it or not, the 2026 FIFA World Cup is bicycle-kicking its way to North America in a few weeks, bringing with it endless soccer chatter and swamped social media feeds. For my money, the excitement of the World Cup is best experienced in a pub among fans losing the plot over free kicks and absolute missiles screaming past goalkeepers. If 90 minutes of ping-ponging midfield action makes your eyes glaze over, fair play.

Despite the availability of electric vehicles, most Americans won't give up gasoline. A 2025 AAA survey found that only 16 percent of U.S. adults say they are likely to purchase an electric vehicle as their next car, the lowest since 2019. Meanwhile, EV sales in the United States fell by 4% in 2025, marking the first decline in a decade.

I've used Android since almost the beginning, and the control and customization it offered were among the features that attracted me most. But over the years, that openness has been reduced. I’m not especially paranoid about privacy, but I was curious about how much of Android I could use without relying on Google’s apps and services. It turns out that it is entirely possible.

CNET Editor at Large Andrew Lanxon hosts a panel discussion about the latest generative AI demos we saw at Google I/O 2026. Who is this for and why does Google think it's so important?

Google unveiled its Android XR intelligent eyewear at I/O 2026, but major details remain unknown. CNET’s Andrew Lanxon leads a discussion on what Google revealed, what’s still missing, and what consumers can realistically expect from the upcoming glasses.

Spotify recently released a new feature that is not surprising, given its recent string of updates, but it is still something overdue since last year. With the Spotify-Claude integration, Spotify may be setting up for a better overall listening and discovery experience for users.

Sam Altman's OpenAI may be losing money to the tune of $1 billion a month. It may be struggling to convert more than 5% of ChatGPT users to paid customers. And it may be losing ground to rivals like Anthropic (makers of the highly-teased Claude Mythos) and Google (makers of the freshly updated Gemini).

But OpenAI investors still believe they can cash in — perhaps to the tune of $1 trillion — if the company launches on the stock market soon.

And now that Elon Musk's lawsuit (which claimed OpenAI defrauded him during its conversion to a for-profit company) has been dismissed at trial on a technicality, the launch window appears to be opening.

Sources at Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley told reporters at the Wall Street Journal that the OpenAI IPO would be filed with regulators as early as this Friday. And though plans remain "fluid," the Journal warned, that would mean you'll likely see OpenAI shares debut on the NYSE as soon as September.

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SEE ALSO: 'The AI Doc' director says ‘F*ck you’ to AI companies stealing artists’ IP

Musk, meanwhile, says he plans to appeal the trial verdict; a bonanza IPO for a company still nominally governed by a nonprofit board may help bolster his case. Ironically, Musk is currently distracted by his own pending IPO bonanza; SpaceX, fresh off its acquisition of xAI, is also reportedly ready to file paperwork with regulators this week.

So, Altman, increasingly Musk's AI nemesis, may be taking a little of his rival's thunder here. But exactly how much Altman will take home from an OpenAI IPO remains a mystery.

The CEO confirmed in the courtroom what has been an open secret for some time — that Altman does have investments in the company, via a fund at the Silicon Valley incubator he used to run, YCombinator.

In 2023, Altman told the U.S. Senate he had no financial stake in the company, per The Atlantic. He's now the target of a probe led by GOP members of the House Oversight Committee, which is looking into OpenAI's habit of making deals with other companies Altman has investments in.

In other words, Altman's long-documented reputation for telling people what they want to hear may be catching up with him, while the wheels are wobbling a bit on the OpenAI bandwagon. And yet, at the same time, a payday of unknown magnitude approaches.

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Disclosure: Ziff Davis, Mashable’s parent company, in April 2025 filed a lawsuit against OpenAI, alleging it infringed Ziff Davis copyrights in training and operating its AI systems.

Google I/O 2026 gave us plenty to talk about, but what about the things Google didn't say? Join CNET Editor at Large Andrew Lanxon and a panel of top tech experts as they dig into the biggest missing pieces, delayed features and skipped announcements from this year's keynote.

I have used Docker for over half a decade now, and the vast majority of that time I've used Docker Run commands. I recently switched to Docker Compose, and it made my homelab so much easier to manage.

Kickstarter is walking back recent changes to its content guidelines, which users lambasted as blanket censorship.

Kickstarter announced the new adult-oriented content guidelines last week, prohibiting pornographic imagery, projects and reward tiers tied to sexual pleasure or gratification, and marketing of products designed for "insertion and penetration."

SEE ALSO: Child safety organizations accuse Roblox of violating FTC rules

The changes were made to better reflect policies set by Stripe, the platform's payment processor.

Kickstarter had previously come under fire for similar restrictions on sex toy companies, which were later amended. But as of last week, those policies were back on the table. Indie companies and artists who rely on the crowdfunding site decried the move, arguing that the new guidelines limited creative expression and impacted their businesses. Many suggested moving to competitor sites like Patreon.

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"Honestly? We botched it. The rules didn't land the way we intended, and the response from our community let us know loud and clear that we got it wrong," wrote Kickstarter COO Sean Leow in a May 19 blog post. "The decision we made was an abandonment of the core counterculture, f*ck the establishment spirit of Kickstarter, and it left our community vulnerable."

According to Leow, the new guidelines — which merged existing Kickstarter rules and Stripe prohibitions — were intended to provide a more streamlined experience for users who may eventually face roadblocks in their campaigns due to Stripe's e-commerce constraints. "Over the past several months, we've seen a growing number of campaigns that had already been approved by Kickstarter get suspended by Stripe mid-funding," he wrote.

However, in the face of widespread criticism, Leow said the platform would reverse course, reinstating former policies that simply prohibit pornography and illegal content — but this also means campaigns can once again face suspension at any point in time, Leow explained.

While Kickstarter goes back to the drawing board, users can consult the platform's mature content review guide, which includes an explanation of common suspension triggers and ways to request an exception.

At last year's Google I/O event, we (and most outlets) modestly declared that the Google Search we had known for the past 20 years was dead. Fast forward a year, and it's still really, really dead. Not to beat on a dead horse or anything, but with I/O 2026, Google firmly established that Search is and will be built on Gemini and artificial intelligence.

SEE ALSO: Google’s Project Aura is a wild pair of supercharged Xreal glasses

Search is no longer a place you go to find a link. It's becoming a place you go to have an AI handle the whole thing for you. Based on everything Google announced at I/O 2026, the way people find information on the internet is about to look fundamentally different. Whether any of this is actually useful depends on the person being asked, but Google wants to fundamentally change how we navigate the internet.

Publishers are in trouble

AI Overviews have been chipping away at web traffic since they launched, and everything Google announced this week accelerates that trend. When Search agents are scanning the web 24/7 on your behalf, when AI Mode is handling your follow-up questions, when the search box is expanding to accept entire paragraphs of context — the implicit promise is that you won't need to click through to anyone's website to get what you need.

Google gets the query, Google surfaces the answer, and the publisher who wrote the piece that informed that answer gets nothing.

This fight between online content publishers and Google has been raging since last year, when the whole thing was dubbed the "traffic apocalypse." Google, of course, has pushed back on the framing that publishers are getting the short end of the stick, arguing that users who do click links after seeing AI Overviews engage more deeply with those sites. That may be true in a narrow sense, but it sidesteps the larger issue — fewer people are clicking at all.

SEE ALSO: Common Crawl accused of feeding paywalled content to AI companies

That pushback comes from a Wall Street Journal report from June 2025. In it, Neil Vogel, CEO of Dotdash Meredith — the company behind People and Southern Living — told the Journal that Google search went from driving roughly 60 percent of their traffic at the time of their 2021 merger down to about a third. The floor, based on everything announced at I/O this week, hasn't been found yet.

Publishers are responding by pivoting toward direct relationships with readers — newsletters, events, apps, subscriptions — anything that doesn't depend on Google as a middleman. That's a reasonable long-term strategy, but a fundamental restructuring of how digital media works.

A new search box

The AI Search Box — the first redesign of Google's search bar in over 25 years — is built for conversations now. You can drop in images, files, videos, and Chrome tabs alongside a long-form prompt and let Google figure out what you're actually asking.

Obviously, this is a massive shift in how we search on the internet. Google searching used to be about compression. To ask our questions in the fewest possible words. The entire discipline of SEO was built around the assumption that people type short, imprecise fragments into a box, and that it's Google's job to interpret them. "Flights NYC to LA." "Best running shoes 2026." "Symptoms of strep throat."

Now Google is actively dismantling that habit. With the expanded search box, Google wants you to stop translating your thoughts into keyword-ese and just talk to it. Tell it you're planning a trip, attach your calendar, upload a photo of the hotel you're considering, and let Gemini piece it all together. The idea being that the more context you give it, the more helpful the AI is.

And that's true to an extent, but it's more information you're giving Google, and more data for them to collect. The company spent $68 million earlier this year settling a lawsuit after it was alleged that Google's Google Assistant recorded "private conversations without permission."

Whether users are ready to hand over that level of context — and whether Google has earned that trust — is a question the keynote didn't really address.

The hallucination problem isn't going away

For all the polish Google put on its AI features at I/O, one thing conspicuously absent from the keynote was any serious reckoning with accuracy. AI Overviews have a documented history of surfacing confidently wrong information, and the new conversational follow-up feature essentially lets you go deeper into an AI-generated summary without necessarily verifying the foundation it's built on.

Gmail VP Blake Barnes touched on this in his conversation with Mashable's Haley Henschel, noting that Gmail Live is being built with sourcing so users can check which emails informed the AI's response. That's a reasonable approach for a personal inbox tool. But for a broader search across the entire web, the bar for scrutiny needs to be higher due to the risk of misinformation and disinformation. As Google hands over more of the search experience to AI, the burden of fact-checking shifts more squarely onto users. That's worth keeping in mind every time an AI Overview tells you something with complete confidence.

The agentic push across everything Google announced this week, like Spark running your life in the background, Search agents monitoring the web on your behalf, and AI that can call businesses, make purchases, and book reservations, is the early infrastructure of something that looks a lot like what the AI research community means when it talks about AGI-adjacent systems.

Google DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis described Gemini Omni at I/O as a meaningful step toward AGI — artificial general intelligence, the theoretical point at which an AI system can perform any intellectual task a human can. That framing was almost a throwaway line in the context of a video generation demo, which is exactly what makes it worth paying attention to.

Google's answer to the obvious concern about that — what stops it from doing something you didn't want — is the Agent Payments Protocol and a set of configurable limits that give administrators ultimate control over the AI. Josh Woodward, VP of Google Labs, described the philosophy as being like handing a teenager their first debit card. That's a candid framing, and in some ways a reassuring one. But it also acknowledges that the trajectory is toward more autonomy, not less. The guardrails are explicitly described as temporary.

Right now, when Gemini gets something wrong in a search summary, the stakes are relatively low. As these systems take on more — scheduling, purchasing, monitoring, acting — the cost of a confident wrong answer goes up considerably. Google wasn't having that conversation on stage at I/O. That's the one worth having now.

The Mercedes-AMG GT line has been defined by monstrous gas engines, but that ends today. The 2027 Mercedes-AMG GT 4-Door Coupe has become an EV, and it's using next-gen motor and battery technology to rival the performance of Tesla's Model S Plaid and other top-tier electric sports cars.

If you want an e-reader but don't want anything to do with Amazon, the alternative is a Rakuten Kobo e-reader. Kobos are speedy, easy-to-use, and a great value, but now, they're teaming up with another bookish company for the ultimate reading integration. The Storygraph, a platform for tracking everything you read, is now coming to all Kobo devices in June.

The integration syncs Kobo e-readers and apps to a Storygraph account. That means your reading progress will automatically be captured in your Storygraph account, so when you finish a book, it's marked as read without any additional effort from you.

"Our mission is to make reading lives better, and removing the friction from tracking is one of the most direct ways we can do that," says Nadia Odunayo, Founder & CEO, StoryGraph. The new partnership between Rakuten Kobo and Storygraph further cements both brands as anti-Amazon alternatives.

So much of the book industry is dominated by Amazon. The mega-brand makes Kindles, the most popular e-readers, and is a major online bookseller of physical and e-books. Since 2013, Amazon has owned Goodreads, the original book tracking platform. Kindles and Goodreads are already integrated, offering features similar to those in the Kobo and Storygraph integration, including progress tracking.

But with plenty of readers feeling resistant to Amazon and the impact it has had on independent bookstores, there's a desire for alternatives, whether that be with e-readers or a place to track reading.

Kobo Clara Colour $179.99 at Amazon
  Shop Now at Amazon Shop Now at Rakuten Kobo eReader Store Kobo Libra Colour $259.99 at Amazon
  Shop Now at Amazon Shop Now at Rakuten Kobo eReader Store

Lincolns often get written off as just fancy Fords, but that really undersells what they’re trying to do. Sure, they share parts underneath, but Lincoln usually goes all-in on making things feel quieter, softer, and more premium inside.

For many years, Plex has been one of the go-to options for anyone looking to curate a server for all their downloaded media. Unfortunately, it's about to become much more expensive to guarantee lifetime access to its best features.

Plex announced in a blog post on Tuesday that its Lifetime Pass subscription (a one-time payment that locks you into its highest premium service tier for life) will increase from $249.99 to $749.99 on July 1. As Android Authority pointed out, this comes only about a year after Plex had previously more than doubled the price from $119.99 to $249.99. In a little over 12 months, the service has increased in price by 525 percent.

SEE ALSO: Nintendo Switch 2 officially gets a $50 price hike in the US

That's pretty staggering, but one tiny silver lining is that the change doesn't go into effect for several weeks, so you have some time to decide if you want to lock into a lifetime of Plex premium service for $250 or invest in an alternative. Plex is one of the most popular services for storing downloaded media like movies and TV shows, and the paid tier offers more flexibility for downloads, remote streaming for all users, and other bonuses that might make it worth $250, if not necessarily $750.

If that cost is too high for you, it might be worth looking into something like Jellyfin. I know my friends who care a lot about media server curation have some fondness for that one, and it definitely won't cost as much as a decent smartphone to set up.

Google I/O 2026 was all about improvements in AI. Gemini is getting smarter, faster and more customized. See what was presented at this year’s event, from a more intuitive Gemini Omni to the realization of Android XR with consumer products coming in the fall. We’ve got the highlights.

Google I/O 2026 just wrapped, and we're breaking down the absolute biggest announcements. Join our expert panel—featuring Andrew Lanxon (CNET), Andrew Gebhart (PCMag), and Timothy Beck Werth (Mashable)—as they analyze everything you need to know about the next generation of Google Gemini, the highly anticipated Android XR Glasses, and more.

If you own a NAS, you’ve probably noticed just how noisy those spinning platters in hard drives can be. Common online advice often suggests spinning them down when they’re not in use to eliminate the noise and save power. On paper, it makes a lot of sense, but real-world use tells a different story—for many people, keeping them spinning actually makes more sense.