Technology

Fake SD cards and SSDs have been a problem for a long time, especially on online storefronts like Amazon, eBay, or AliExpress. The issue has only gotten worse since memory shortages have driven the price of storage sky-high, with little hope of relief any time soon.

Most Excel tutorials hand you a sales spreadsheet from a fictional company and tell you to practice pivot tables on data you don't care about. That method of learning or coming back to Excel doesn't work for everyone. The trick to actually retaining this stuff is working with data that means something to you. If you grew up playing Pokémon, you'll know how structured the games are and how well they'd translate into real excel spreadsheet problems.

Large airports are a potential security nightmare. There are random, unfamiliar Wi-Fi networks everywhere, charging ports that could be compromised, and more people than you could ever hope to count. I'm also basically always in a rush when I'm in an airport.

Running old CD-ROM games on modern Windows isn't too hard if you know how to manage Windows' compatibility software. But what if you have a Linux desktop and don't want to leave your old Windows games behind?

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope will downlink about 1.4 terabytes of data — on par with an entire gaming system hard drive — every single day. 

When Kristen McQuinn thinks about that deluge and how to get it in the hands of researchers, she likens it to another technological evolution. 

"Back in the day, we would rent movies from Blockbuster to take home," said McQuinn, who will lead science operations at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. "Later, we had DVDs mailed to us by Netflix, and today we have streaming services that bring the content right into our home."

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Because of Roman's firehose of huge, detailed space images, scientists won't be able to just pull them down to their laptops as they have in the past. Instead, Roman will be the first telescope to push astronomy fully into the cloud. A shared online workspace will allow people to log in from around the world. Mission leaders say this monumental shift in how observations are disseminated could also change who gets a real shot at making discoveries.

SEE ALSO: NASA's Roman telescope is built to find what Hubble and Webb miss

Roman's main camera is what makes this possible. It will see the sky with Hubble-like sharpness but with a field of view more than 100 times larger. The spacecraft will also move, settle, and start exposing pictures very quickly, so it can tile the sky about 1,000 times faster.

That speed turns into staggering numbers. In about a month, Roman could scan the plane of the Milky Way and pick out up to 20 billion stars. A single image from its largest planned survey would be so vast that you would need more than 500,000 4K televisions to show it at full resolution. Laid out on the ground, those screens would cover 45 Manhattan city blocks.

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Across its main surveys, Roman is expected to record more than 2 billion galaxies. It will repeatedly watch the crowded center of the galaxy every few minutes, looking for tiny changes in brightness that reveal planets around distant stars. And it will capture tens of thousands of stellar explosions called supernovas and track how they brighten and fade, a key way to measure how fast the universe expands.

During test campaigns alone, the Roman team has already handled more data than the Hubble and James Webb telescopes have produced combined, said Julie McEnery, Roman's senior project scientist. Once Roman begins regular operations, it will send down thousands of fresh images daily, building a trove measured in tens of thousands of terabytes.

At that scale, the old approach breaks. A typical research group can't keep up by copying everything to local servers and running its own private software stack. 

So the mission team flipped the script. The Space Telescope Science Institute, which already supports Hubble and Webb, will receive Roman's raw signals and turn them into cleaned-up images and measurements. 

Technicians at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center install the Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope's solar array sunshield. Credit: NASA / Sydney Rohde

That data will live on a secure website backed by remote computers — what most people refer to as "the cloud" — called the Roman Research Nexus. Anyone with an account and an internet connection can log in via a browser. Once inside, users can sift through Roman's giant images, zoom from the full field of view to tiny patches, and pull out particular kinds of targets — planets, galaxies, and star clusters — for closer scrutiny.

Roman's panoramic portraits of the sky will work like a cosmic version of a navigation or map app. You can see the whole scene, then scroll and zoom to a neighborhood of interest. Instead of typing "Starbucks near me," a researcher might search for "young stars here" or "galaxies at this distance," then draw a box around that part of the sky to dig in.

The system is built for teams, allowing groups to log in, share folders and notebooks, and run analyses side by side, even if members sit on opposite sides of the world. A graduate student in Chile, a professor in Baltimore, and a collaborator in India could all be able to inspect the same Roman field in real-time and test ideas together.

That design is what will lead a democratization of astronomy research, mission leaders say. Roman's data is simply too big for any one person or institute to fully mine. 

The Roman Space Telescope's torrent of data will force a new way of doing astronomy and distributing images. Credit: NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center

"A high school class in Kentucky can access new Roman data at the same time as a professor in Princeton," McEnery said. 

NASA already hosts citizen science projects where volunteers browse telescope images to flag unusual objects: new exoplanets, merging galaxies, dusty disks around stars. Roman's torrent of sharp, wide images could supercharge that kind of work. 

For researchers in countries without easy access to giant telescopes, Roman's cloud-based system is also a boon. They won't need to build a billion-dollar observatory to participate in cutting-edge astronomy.

Bente Eegholm, an optical engineer, inspects the primary mirror on NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope. Credit: NASA / Chris Gunn

Roman's scientific goals target two of the biggest unknowns: how the universe evolved and how common other worlds might be. It will track how space has expanded over time and how structures have grown, from stars to galaxies to clusters. Those measurements test a standard theory that no longer quite fits. Astronomers can infer the conditions of the early cosmos from ancient light. But recent measurements of the nearby universe don't fully match those predictions, with gaps too large to dismiss as a mere rounding error.

Roman will also push the search for planets around other stars into new territory. By staring at crowded star fields toward the center of the Milky Way and watching for brief brightenings when one star passes in front of another, it will use a natural magnifying effect called microlensing to reveal planets orbiting the foreground stars, including many types of planets that other methods rarely detect. A second instrument, a high‑contrast camera called a coronagraph, will test technology that could one day enable a future mission to take direct images of Earth‑like planets. 

In earlier eras, advances like these often depended on a small number of people who controlled prized telescope time and the hardware to process the results. Roman, if it performs as its planners hope, will mark a deliberate move away from that pattern.

"It's really about making sure that the data are not only accessible from a technical standpoint," McQuinn said, "but that anyone that wants to can dig into the data and do the analysis right away. There is no hierarchy."

Sometimes you want to laugh, sometimes you want to cry, and sometimes you want a movie so intense that you grip the arm of your couch so hard you nearly rip the upholstery off. If the Umar Nurmagomedov vs. Song Yadong UFC fight on Saturday isn't the kind of thrill you're after, these three thriller movies on Paramount+ might do the trick.

DLSS 5 isn't due for an official release until sometime later this year, but an unfinished version that slipped out with NBA 2K27 has allowed the RenoDX modding community to get it running with dozens of games.

Gaming leaks have been having a moment lately, most notably the weeks-long saga between Rockstar Games and hacker Cyberleek surrounding Grand Theft Auto VI. But another notable leak flying under the radar is footage from EA Motive's long-dormant Iron Man game that has surfaced online.

SEE ALSO: GTA 6 Netflix extended look: Everything that was revealed

What makes this particular leak notable is how long the project has been MIA for. Motive's Iron Man game was first announced four years ago, and since then, it's largely been lumped in with a handful of other Marvel game projects from that era that appeared to stall out. For example, the Captain America and Black Panther-led Marvel 1943, and a separate, solo Black Panther game that was canceled outright.

The leaked footage runs about two minutes and shows off several gameplay areas, including flight-based combat and free-roam exploration. Interspersed throughout are unfinished cutscenes featuring familiar characters from the Iron Man universe, including Pepper Potts and Rhodey, along with a pair of villains, Madame Masque and Obadiah Stane.

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A watermark reading "AUG26" appears across the footage, suggesting a recent capture date — though it's unclear whether that refers to this August or the same date in a prior year during the project's four-year silence. Regardless of when it was recorded, Motive has confirmed the footage is authentic.

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The game's official X account acknowledged the leak in a post, writing, "Well, that didn't go as planned," while promising to share more on the project once the studio is ready.

EA Motive is best known for Star Wars: Squadrons and the critically well-received Dead Space remake.

Location access is one of those permissions that everyone should take seriously. Not every app that requests it truly needs it. You may not think a mobile payments app like Google Wallet needs location access, but it actually enables some helpful features.

If you've decided to try Linux, you might have trouble leaving Windows. Maybe your favorite game only runs on Windows, or you need a Windows program for your work. Maybe you think dual-booting Windows and Linux is too much trouble. There are ways to get started with the Linux terminal that can run within Windows.

Z-Wave has a reputation for reliability, which makes it a popular choice for critical smart home devices such as smart locks and alarm systems. The trouble is that if you make some common mistakes, your Z-Wave devices can respond far more slowly than they should.

I cut the cord pretty early in the streaming game. Back then, I got my first broadband connection (4Mbps!) and was still using satellite TV to watch movies and TV series. After subscribing to Netflix, I canceled that contract and enjoyed years of paying a fraction of that fee to access a massive library.

In advance of the release of Netflix's new thriller The Whisper Man, Mashable executive producer Mark Stetson sat down with stars Robert De Niro, Adam Scott, director James Ashcroft, and author Alex North to discuss the film's theme of generational trauma, the complex dynamics between fathers and sons, and the process of adapting the highly anticipated novel for the screen.

Author of the book, Alex North discussed the book's themes that were most important to translate to film: "This is a book that I wanted to write because it was about fathers and sons, and grandfathers and fathers and sons. And different iterations of the way that plays out in terms of generational trauma. How we respond to things that have happened in our childhood, how we protect our children from things that have happened in our childhood, how we pass things down and how we don't."

Adam Scott was particularly drawn to North's themes. "I thought it was a really interesting part of the script, this horrifying trauma that they are both going through while simultaneously trying to repair their relationship."

De Niro added, "It was one of the things that attracted me to the script, that relationship."

At the close of the interview, Robert De Niro shares his candid advice for young actors who experience imposter syndrome when working with their heroes: "If it manifests in a such a way where it gets in the way of working on a scene, I'd say, 'It's ok, don't worry. In two days, it's all going to go away. It's just us."

The Whisper Man is now streaming on Netflix.

Ever wondered what happens when you wrap your phone in tinfoil? I decided to try it out to see if there’s any truth—or benefit—to the idea.

I've used both Windows and Linux for years now. To the disappointment of many of you, Windows mostly won the tie-breaker. It's not like I admire Windows a lot. Rather, fully switching means I have to give up a smooth desktop, a vast software collection, a no-headache gaming experience, and the comfort of "it just works."

You don't need expensive equipment, years of experience, or a shelf full of specialized gear to get into a new tech hobby. With a computer or phone and a little curiosity, you can start building things, exploring the world, or making something of your own this weekend.

I've always had a saying. The best Linux laptop is, as a matter of fact, a Windows laptop. Linux laptop projects such as System76 are lovely, but most people are better off just buying a regular Windows laptop and putting Linux on it. To that effect, a second-hand Surface Go might just be the best cheap, tiny Linux laptop you can get. Here's why.

OpenAI said Friday it will wind down its partnership with Cursor, the popular AI coding tool now owned by SpaceX, marking the latest escalation in the long-running dispute between OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Elon Musk.

In a company blog post, OpenAI said it notified SpaceX of its intent to end the contract, proposing a shutoff date of Nov. 12, 2026 — the maximum notice window allowed under the agreement.

OpenAI framed the decision as a matter of trust. The company said it could not be confident that SpaceX would use its technology in accordance with OpenAI's terms of service, citing what it described as a pattern of Musk's companies violating contracts. Specifically, OpenAI's post alleged that X breached the terms of its own contract with OpenAI after Musk's acquisition, and noted that Musk had admitted under oath earlier this year that xAI had also violated OpenAI's terms of service.

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OpenAI added that its custom agreement with Cursor only gave it a limited window to cancel following a change of ownership, and said it wanted to preserve as much access as possible for developers in the meantime, calling the choice "incredibly tough" given how widely it wants its models used.

SpaceX completed its acquisition of Anysphere, the startup behind Cursor, earlier this month, following a deal announced in June.

Responding on X, Musk wrote that he "couldn't care less," while calling Altman and OpenAI president Greg Brockman "untrustworthy" and repeating his long-standing claim that the pair "stole an open source nonprofit." Michael Truell, Cursor's co-founder and now a SpaceX executive, struck a more conciliatory tone, saying on X that the company was in talks with OpenAI's team to try to resolve the issue.

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Since the announcement, OpenAI competitor Anthropic — which has an ongoing partnership with SpaceX — said it would increase compute support for its Claude models within Cursor.

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This is only the latest chapter in a feud that has simmered for years. Musk sued OpenAI and Altman for $150 billion over the company's shift from its nonprofit roots; a federal jury ruled against him earlier this year, finding he'd filed too late.

The fight has also played out repeatedly on social media, as Mashable has reported. Altman reposted allegations that Musk's companies failed to preserve key documents during discovery, then turned Musk's own catchphrase back on him: "Concerning!" He later said he was "really excited" to depose Musk, calling it "Christmas in April."

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.

I've used Excel for decades, and I'm perfectly comfortable using it for things it wasn't really designed to do. But when my data started behaving like a database, I decided to see what would happen when I used a tool that's actually built for the job: Grist.

Needing subtitles to follow a conversation on screen feels so normal today. That's because it isn't a hearing problem for most people. It was built for a setup you likely don't have. However, you can increase the volume for just the dialogue; you just have to know what to press.