Blogroll

My husband and I can’t even agree on what should play in the car, so you can imagine how our Android Auto vs. Apple CarPlay debate goes. He’s a CarPlay fan, while I’m firmly on the Android Auto side. We both think our preferred platform does things better, and neither of us likes admitting the other has a point.

When Girls premiered in 2012, I was a twentysomething living in New York City, fresh out of college and making my own questionable decisions. So were Hannah (series creator and co-writer Lena Dunham), Marnie (Allison Williams), Jessa (Jemima Kirke), and Shoshanna (Zosia Mamet). I spent six seasons watching them make terrible choices, occasionally recognizing myself in their worst impulses, and even recapping their misadventures for a living.

Nearly 15 years later, HBO is bringing Girls back for a limited, five-episode run with Lena Dunham at the helm. All four titular girls are reprising their roles. I'm older, presumably wiser, and still deeply invested in whether Patrick Wilson's hot doctor is single.

View this post on Instagram

A post shared by HBO Max (@hbomax)

The original series captured a very specific moment in millennial adulthood, when your career was perpetually on the verge of taking off, and every bad decision could be rationalized as a formative experience. Hannah famously declared that she might be "the voice of a generation," or at least a voice of a generation. At the time, the line was both ridiculous and painfully recognizable.

But a lot has changed since we last saw these women in 2017. Our friendships look different. Some of the people who once seemed destined to be in our lives forever are now complete strangers. And the internet, which was already shaping how we lived and understood ourselves, has become an even more inescapable part of everyday life.

SEE ALSO: Did HBO's 'Girls' grow up? We predict where they'll be after the finale

Which raises some very important questions. Is Jessa an anti-vaxxer? Does Marnie have a podcast? Has Hannah been publicly shamed on TikTok? Is Shoshanna the terrifyingly successful girlboss she was always destined to become? And do any of them even talk to each other anymore?

I don't necessarily need these women to have figured everything out. In fact, I hope they haven't. Part of what made Girls so compelling was how spectacularly messy, selfish, and insufferable its characters could be. I just want to know what that particular brand of chaos looks like with another decade of life experience.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

So, as someone who grew up alongside the girls (and spent an embarrassing amount of time thinking about their lives), here's a list of very specific things I want to see in the Girls revival.

1. The return of Joshua (Patrick Wilson), the hot doctor. Is he still single? Does he still live in that gorgeous Brooklyn brownstone? Because I, for one, have never forgotten that kitchen.

2. Jessa as an anti-vaxxer and wellness grifter. She's drinking raw milk, selling overpriced tinctures, and scamming women with healing retreats in the Hudson Valley. She calls herself a certified trauma healer, but nobody knows who certified her.

3. Marnie as a divorced mommy influencer with a podcast. Her Instagram is full of beige interiors, inspirational captions, and sponsored posts about gut health. Her podcast is called Becoming Marnie, and she still occasionally releases music.

4. Shoshanna as a successful startup founder. She's built a multimillion-dollar wellness empire, has a Forbes profile, and uses phrases like "circle back" in casual conversation. She's also the only one who actually knows how to use LinkedIn.

5. Hannah accidentally becoming a viral TikTok villain. She publishes a deeply personal essay about her son, only to discover that the internet thinks she's a terrible mother. Her Notes app apology somehow makes everything worse.

6. An update on Caroline (Gaby Hoffmann), Laird (Jon Glaser), and their daughter, Sample. Is Sample being raised in a Brooklyn commune? Is Caroline a homeschooling influencer? And is Laird still wearing that beanie?

7. Elijah (Andrew Rannells) as a gay elder on Fire Island. He's a moderately successful Broadway actor who complains that young gay men don't know their history. He also has a 26-year-old boyfriend and an extremely active Instagram Close Friends story.

8. Ray (Alex Karpovsky) is running for local office. His campaign platform includes protecting independent coffee shops, fighting corporate landlords, and banning TikTokkers from filming in public.

9. Marnie discovers her mother has become more successful on social media than she is. Evie (Rita Wilson) has a thriving TikTok account where she gives dating advice to divorced women. Marnie is horrified to discover that her mother's followers think she's the emotionally stable one.

10. A humiliating encounter with Gen Z twentysomethings. Hannah tries to bond with a group of younger women at a Williamsburg bar, only to discover they think millennials are cringe. One of them calls her "mother," and she takes it literally.

11. Desi (Ebon Moss-Bachrach) as a men's spirituality influencer. He hosts a podcast about divine masculinity, sells expensive breathwork courses, and has definitely participated in an ayahuasca retreat. His Instagram bio includes the word "consciousness."

12. A reckoning with getting older in New York City. Their favorite bars have closed, their old apartments cost three times as much, and the neighborhoods they once called home are barely recognizable. Nothing makes you feel older than realizing you're no longer the target demographic of Williamsburg.

13. Mimi-Rose Howard (Gillian Jacobs) becoming a successful AI artist. Of course she's embraced generative AI as the next frontier of conceptual art. Hannah finds this morally reprehensible, mostly because Mimi-Rose is getting profiled in The New Yorker.

14. Marnie's wedding makeup tutorial resurfacing as a TikTok meme. A new generation discovers her disastrous wedding look and turns it into a viral trend. Marnie tries to reclaim the moment with a sponsored GRWM video.

15. Hannah getting an adult ADHD diagnosis. She immediately writes a 5,000-word essay about how it explains every decision she's ever made. She also starts a Substack about neurodivergence, which she abandons after three posts.

16. Booth Jonathan (Jorma Taccone) as a bankrupt NFT guy. His latest art installation involves blockchain technology, a members-only Discord, and a collection of digital assets that have lost 98 percent of their value. He still insists he's a visionary, but he's really just a fraud.

17. Dan Levy as Hannah's increasingly exasperated literary agent. He's spent the last decade trying to get Hannah to finish her book, which she insists is actually three different books. He keeps suggesting she write a commercial memoir about motherhood, but Hannah considers that beneath her. She's also convinced he's giving all his attention to a 24-year-old BookTok sensation.

18. Andrew Scott as Hannah's literary rival-turned-lover. He's an acclaimed Irish novelist teaching at Hannah's university. His books are universally praised for their emotional honesty, which Hannah finds infuriating because she believes she invented writing about herself.

Ukrainian drones struck data centers belonging to Russian tech giant Yandex over the past week. Following the strikes, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claimed that there was a sudden drop in Russian bot activity and political disinformation campaigns on platforms like X. Social media users took the story — Ukraine had taken out a massive Russian bot operation — and ran with it.

However, a new report from Cloudflare, which monitors internet traffic, tells a more complicated story.

Cloudflare found that while there was some bot interruption, bot operators were able to quickly migrate their systems to alternative cloud operators and continue running undeterred. Furthermore, Cloudflare could not determine if this disruption in bot activity had any effect on social media campaigns specifically.

How did the Yandex strikes affect social media bots?

A lot of the confusion stems from the fact that people are using the word "bot" to refer to distinct types of activity.

"'Bot traffic' refers to automated requests to websites on Cloudflare's network, such as crawlers and scripts, not necessarily activity on social media platforms," said Lai Yi Ohlsen, Head of Radar, a Cloudflare monitoring tool.

So, while social commentators have used Cloudflare's data to state that the strikes had a major effect on social media bots, that's not quite right. Ohlsen told Mashable that "Radar does not have visibility into HTTP traffic reaching any specific customer, including X or Reddit," and that "Radar does not have any visibility into where accounts posting on those platforms are hosted."

In short, Cloudflare data can't substantiate the claims that the strikes affected social media disinformation campaigns, but the company didn't rule out the possibility entirely.

"Based on our assessment, the data does not appear to support the claims that the strikes crippled social media manipulation, though without further analysis with data outside of Cloudflare, we cannot conclusively say there is no connection," the company said in its report.

Want to learn more about getting the best out of your tech? Sign up for Mashable's Top Stories and Deals newsletters today.

How the Yandex drone strikes affected Russian bots

After Ukraine's attack on the Yandex data centers, Cloudflare's Radar service picked up a massive outage, as traffic from Yandex Search and Yandex.Cloud dropped off. Traffic from Yandex Search and Yandex.Cloud fell 99 percent and 90 percent, respectively, below the pre-attack baseline. In addition, bot activity on Yandex.Cloud dropped by 40 percent, with traffic from "attack-like categories" in particular dropping 90 percent or more.

These are big drops in traffic, but remember that a lot of that activity comes from innocuous bots, such as search crawlers. 

Yandex Search and Yandex.Cloud are two very different services run by the Russian company. As Cloudflare explains, Yandex Search traffic would come mostly from "verified search crawlers indexing web pages, images, and site resources." This is normal traffic to find from a search engine operator. Yandex.Cloud is the company's cloud computing service, and this is where Cloudflare says it sometimes finds malicious bot traffic.

Again, Cloudflare says the drone strikes did disrupt malicious bot activity. However, the operators behind these bots merely migrated their automated systems to different cloud service providers, minimizing the disruption.

In one notable example, Cloudflare showed how the strikes impacted malicious bot activity in the gambling sector.

"Nearly all of Yandex.Cloud’s bot requests were targeted at one gambling customer account, with traffic shifting among its hostnames. Immediately following the October 8 disruption, bot requests from Yandex.Cloud to this account dropped to zero. Simultaneously, identical requests began appearing from other Russian hosting [autonomous system numbers]," the report says.

Chance Townsend contributed additional reporting to this story.

Keyboards are a remarkable invention. I’ve been fascinated by them (along with typewriters). Aside from the eternal struggle between QWERTY and Dvorak, Human Interface Devices (HID) like keyboards and mice are just interesting in design and function. But what strikes me as most interesting is how a USB drive, a banana, or just about anything can be an HID. And while some of them are pretty fun and safe, there’s actually a bit of a darker side to the story.

There are charging stations, and then there is the Smartlinx Thunderbolt 4 21-in-1 Docking Station. Charging hubs and docking stations minimize the hassle of unplugging all of your components every time you decide to take your laptop somewhere. With its 21-port design, this Smartlinx model gives those accessories (keyboard, monitor, mouse, external drive) a more permanent home and lets you connect your computer with a single cable. Even better news? It's now $40 off on Amazon.

If you've noticed people dropping the fries emoji in TikTok comments lately, they're probably not hungry.

The French fries emoji (🍟), sometimes accompanied by a peace sign (✌️), has become a way for Gen Alpha to tell someone they're being corny, embarrassing, or simply talking too much. Think of it as the emoji equivalent of telling someone to wrap it up.

And like so much of Gen Alpha's internet slang, the joke isn't entirely new. It's the latest evolution of a meme that's been circulating online for years.

What does the fries emoji mean?

Depending on the context, the fries emoji can have a few different meanings, none of which have much to do with fast food.

On its own, 🍟 can be used to call someone or something "corny" or "cringe." It's a dismissive reaction to a joke that doesn't land, an embarrassing comment, or someone who's trying a little too hard.

Paired with the peace sign, 🍟✌️ generally means "wrap it up" or "just put the fries in the bag, bro." In other words, stop talking. (And if that sounds familiar, then keep reading.) The peace sign adds a little extra attitude, like waving goodbye to someone after deciding you've heard enough.

Of course, emoji slang isn't an exact science. Meanings can shift depending on who's using them and where they appear. But the underlying message is pretty consistent: Bro, just stop.

Where did the fries emoji meme come from?

To understand why Gen Alpha is using the fries emoji, you have to go back to the phrase "just put the fries in the bag, bro."

According to the internet anthropologists over at Know Your Meme, the meme became popular on TikTok in 2024 as a way to mock someone for talking too much, oversharing, or acting as if their opinion were more important than it actually was. Imagine someone delivering an unsolicited monologue when all you wanted was your fast-food order. Just put the fries in the bag, bro.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed. This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

The joke has roots in an earlier variation, "just put the ketchup in my bag, bro," which started on Facebook and circulated online in 2022 before the fries version took off.

This Tweet is currently unavailable. It might be loading or has been removed.

Over time, the phrase became a recognizable internet put-down. And now, instead of typing out an entire sentence, younger social media users are communicating the same sentiment with a couple of emoji.

It's a pretty efficient evolution of internet slang. A phrase becomes a meme, the meme becomes an inside joke, and eventually the joke gets reduced to a symbol that only makes sense if you're already in on it.

But there's also a more uncomfortable implication behind the original meme. "Just put the fries in the bag, bro" isn't simply telling someone to stop talking. It's telling them to know their place, using fast-food work as the punchline. The joke relies on the idea that someone working a service job isn't worth listening to, or that their job somehow makes their opinions less valuable.

That context is easy to lose when the entire phrase gets reduced to 🍟✌️. For younger Gen Z and Gen Alpha, the emoji combination might simply mean "wrap it up," but its origins reveal how quickly an internet joke can become detached from the attitudes that made it funny in the first place.

So the next time someone responds to your TikTok with 🍟✌️, consider it a sign that your audience thinks you've said enough.

It might not be widely known, but Netflix has a wealth of great science fiction movies (and TV shows) for those who like to take their imaginations off-planet or into the depths of Earth-based coolness. And with Ben Affleck dominating the Top 10 with his kidnapping thriller, Animals, you might be looking for something a little more out there.

SAVE $150: As of Oct. 15, the 2025 Apple Watch Ultra 3 is on sale for $649 at Best Buy. That's 19% off its $799 MSRP and its lowest price ever.

Opens in a new window Credit: Apple Apple Watch Ultra 3 (GPS + Cellular, 49mm) $649 at Best Buy
$799 Save $150   Get Deal at Best Buy

Don't look now, but the last-gen Apple Watch Ultra 3 is still in stock at Best Buy — and on sale for a record-low price.

Apple's rugged smartwatch from fall 2025 is currently marked down to $649 on the electronics retailer's website, which is $150 off its usual sticker price of $799 (a 19% savings). According to the price-tracking site camelcamelcamel, the only other time it's been this cheap on Amazon was during its huge Prime Day sale in June.

The Apple Watch Ultra 3 is harder to find in stock these days. Apple discontinued it after launching the new Ultra 4 last month, and third-party retailers' inventories are dwindling. In fact, I spotted the same $649 Ultra 3 deal on Amazon earlier this morning, but it sold out as I was writing this. (It's now only available in used condition there.) Hustle if you're still trying to nab it from Best Buy.

The Apple Watch Ultra 3's titanium case comes in natural (pictured) and black finishes. Credit: Apple

The Ultra 3 has the same rugged design as its successor, which also starts at $799, complete with a mega-bright, always-on OLED display, a 49mm titanium case, and a water-resistance rating of up to 100 meters. The Ultra 4 has better heart rate sensors, a slightly longer battery life, and a faster chip that supports a new Readiness app and Audio Intelligence tools. But otherwise, the two wearables' core feature sets are identical. To name a few, there's sleep tracking (including sleep apnea alerts), hypertension notifications, and Emergency SOS via satellite.

Mashable's Stan Schroeder recommends the new Ultra 4 "if you're an athlete, especially an endurance athlete," and the Ultra 3 for those who just want "a cool watch on your wrist that you sometimes use for workouts." With a $150 difference now separating them thanks to Best Buy's deal, the Ultra 3 is also the cost-effective choice for the time being.

Don't pay full price for your new power tools when you can get them at huge markdowns at Home Depot. You'll find plenty of great deals, and the massive savings on the DeWalt 20V Max Cut-Off Tool are almost enough to cover the cost of the Cordless Impact Driver and Circular Saw combo.

Google is one of the biggest software companies out there, best known for Google Search, Android, and its internet ad business. But engineers at Google didn’t only create a bunch of products. They also created tools used to build some of those products in the form of full-fledged programming languages. The company has at least 10 programming languages under its belt, with the three below leading the pack in importance.

Amazon acquired Bee over a year ago to get into AI devices, and now it's showing the first results of that deal. Bee is releasing the Frontier wearable and Eclipse phone add-on that provide "personal AI," both of which unsurprisingly tie into Amazon's universe.

For almost 90 years, the mystery of what happened to Amelia Earhart has endured. She and her plane disappeared somewhere over the central Pacific Ocean on July 2, 1937. Since then, it seems like every few years, an expedition sets out to find her plane.

The boats and recovery teams have always been armed with the latest equipment, historical diaries, and maps. I’m old enough to remember the 1989 TIGHAR expedition, the first modern civilian search to focus heavily on the "castaway hypothesis."

Yes, some people thought she might still be alive, but most thought it was a big waste of time. That '89 castaway trek, like all the searches before and since, returned empty-handed. Around eight years ago, there was a glimmer of hope that bones discovered in the Pacific were Earhart’s, but that study has been heavily disputed.

Well, here we are again. There’s renewed hope of finding Amelia and determining where she actually perished. A fresh team of researchers from Purdue University has arrived on the remote island of Nikumaroro.

The crew was featured on Wednesday’s Good Morning America. The segment noted that the island where they’ve set up their HQ is home to flesh-eating crabs whose claw power rivals the bite of a lion. This is a trip I would decline, even in the almost-impossible instance that I was invited.

Crabs aside, they are there to investigate a mysterious underwater shape in the island’s lagoon known as the "Taraia Object." Once again, some are on pins and needles over whether the Earhart conundrum will finally be resolved so she can rest in peace.

There’s a twist this time, because AI was deployed. So, obviously, if the plane is found, those AI agents who banded together to hack Hugging Face will most certainly come together again and try to take credit for the discovery. But I digress.

In all seriousness, generative AI models like ChatGPT were prompted to analyze historical theories and place a digital pin where Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10-E might be resting. Ironically, the algorithm pointed to the same visual anomaly that human scientists had spotted on satellite imagery years earlier.

SEE ALSO: When it comes to election advice, maybe AI isn't so bad after all?

At first glance, this all looks impressive, but ChatGPT didn’t analyze the ocean floor, for example. Instead, AI synthesized decades of human speculation. And there’s been a helluva lot of speculation over the last nearly 90 years.

Yet while the Earhart-AI connection makes for some flashy pop-culture and scientific headlines, it also represents something happening beneath the surface — literally, beneath the world’s oceans. Artificial intelligence is stepping out of science-fiction and becoming the ultimate tool for modern treasure hunters and maritime archaeologists.

We’re currently swimming in a golden age of deep-sea exploration, but, like everything else, it’s drowning in too much data and missing things, as The Conversation noted in March. For example, the ocean floor is estimated to hold up to 3 million undiscovered shipwrecks and downed aircraft.

So, you’re saying to yourself right now, "Well, it’s impossible that 3 million things can’t be found in the ocean." But what if I told you that well over 70 percent of the Earth’s ocean floor remains unmapped in high-resolution detail?

What does this mean? I live in NYC, so I asked AI for a metaphor to visualize it. It explained that if New York City sat in one of those unmapped regions, the resolution would be so low that you’d see only a single, blurry shape where Manhattan used to be, while every skyscraper, neighborhood, street, and subway entrance would remain invisible.

Now you understand why 3 million ships and aircraft remain undiscovered.

When modern underwater drones dive into the deep ocean, they return with mountains of sonar data and millions of hours of murky video. For decades, human researchers had to painstakingly review every second of footage by hand. That’s a brutally boring process that took months, sometimes even years, and is ripe for errors.

That’s where AI comes in and says something like, "Years?"

Instead of waiting for a chatbot to guess a location, institutions like NOAA and the University of Michigan are using specialized AI built for one job: spotting anomalies directly on the ocean floor. Scientists feed these models thousands of hours of footage so the AI learns what the normal ocean floor looks like; reefs, sand ripples, cliffs, and more.

Once it knows the natural layout, AI can spot the telltale right angles of man-made metal and rotting wood. To someone like me, who has had a lifelong fascination with the ocean, this is incredible.

And so are the results! The U.S. Navy and NOAA recently tested a predictive model across the coastlines of the U.S. and Puerto Rico. The AI scanned the data and correctly flagged known shipwreck sites with 92 percent accuracy, showing how quickly it can shrink massive search areas.

What the Earhart experiment really shows is that intelligent machines are learning to see through the darkness of the deep, helping make the abyss more transparent. Amelia Earhart may have been lost to the limitations of 1937 technology, but if she’s ever found, it could be because tomorrow’s technology finally caught up with her. 

This article represents the opinions of its writer.

John Casey is a columnist at Raw Story, the Advocate, Daily Beast, and Outsports. He's also the author of Love: The Heroic Stories of Marriage Equality.

One of the worst feelings for me while driving is using maps or an app and seeing something missing that would have helped. Car infotainment setups run on firmware that's set at the factory and only gets refreshed occasionally, whether at a dealer, by USB, or through an over-the-air update. Android Auto works differently. It's basically a phone app that beams onto your car's display, and you don't get warned when changes come.

College can be the best years of your life, but also some of the most stressful. It’s hard enough to stay academically prepared while still making ends meet and enjoying a scholarly lifestyle that will change after graduation.

Street Fighter returns to theaters this week with a live-action movie stuffed with stars like Noah Centineo, Andrew Koji, Callina Liang, Joe "Roman Reigns" Anoa'i, David Dastmalchian, Cody Rhodes, Eric André, Andrew Schulz, Vidyut Jammwal, Curtis "50 Cent" Jackson, and Jason Momoa.

Directed by Kitao Sakurai, this video game adaptation explores several story threads. M. Bison is on a quest for power as he mounts the World Warrior Tournament II. Chun-Li is on a quest for vengeance. Ryu and Ken are estranged, but could they reunite during the tournament to battle together for good? Does all that plot mean the movie will include a post-credit scene that provides a bit more context for what comes next?

We've got the spoiler-free answer below.

SEE ALSO: 'Street Fighter' review: What if it's giving Super Mario Bros. live-action, but I love that? Credit: PARAMOUNT PICTURES, CAPCOM AND LEGENDARY Does Street Fighter have a mid-credit scene?

There is. It's brief and wordless. But it does give a hint on where a could-be sequel might go.

Does Street Fighter have a post-credit scene?

When Street Fighter screened for critics, it did not have a post-credit scene. However, we'd recommend sitting through the credits to take in the full scope of the artists who collaborated to bring this film to life.

Plus, you might want to note those soundtrack songs to make a real banger of a workout playlist.

Street Fighter is now in theaters.

There's something mildly rewarding about downloading an app for one reason and discovering it's useful for several others. I initially installed PowerToys after reading about FancyZones, the tool that lets you create custom grid layouts for snapping and organizing app windows. But the more I explored, the more features I found myself using every day.

Just as the weather turns, EcoFlow is launching new whole-home power backup solutions in the U.S. The Titan series consists of three models that technically could qualify as portable power stations, although you probably don't want to lug one of these on a camping trip. Instead, they're a great solution for keeping your home powered up when grid power fails.

All new EcoFlow Titan models are available to order. Below, you'll find detailed specs on all models to help you decide which is best for your home.

Credit: EcoFlow Specs on the Titan 5000 Plus, Titan 5000, and Titan 5000 Classic

The Titan series from EcoFlow differs from your average portable power station in that each model packs in a ton of power. Instead of using it to recharge your phone and keep a lamp on, the Titan models can power up large appliances like your washer and dryer or your home's HVAC system. Of course, it can also keep your phone topped up and the lights on, too.

The smallest and most affordable model is the EcoFlow Titan 5000 Classic with 5,000Wh capacity and 4kWh output. It includes AC ports, USB-A, USB-C, and a TT-30R with 120V configuration.

The upgraded EcoFlow Titan 5000 comes with higher performance compared to the Classic model. It can handle both 120V and 240V.

The movable EcoFlow Titan models come with the ability to add expansion batteries. Credit: EcoFlow

The largest in the lineup, the EcoFlow Titan 5000 Plus is rated for 7.2kWH from the 5,000Wh battery. EcoFlow mentions that it is powerful enough to keep a 3-ton central AC unit running, along with a TV, refrigerator, and lights, all at the same time. Keep in mind that the EcoFlow Smart Home Panel 10 connects your home's power system to the Titan models.

The Titan 5000 Plus and the Titan 5000 can connect to your home's existing rooftop solar system when combined with the EcoFlow Smart Home Panel 10. That means you can rely on the Titan system to power your home and lower your power bills, not just in emergency scenarios.

All Titan models can expand with up to five EcoFlow Titan Battery units for up to 30kWh. Most homes find it best to start with the base unit and add expansion batteries as you find out the exact power needs.

How to order the EcoFlow Titan models

The most affordable option is the Titan 5000 Classic with a list price of $2,499. The Titan 5000 comes in at $3,199. Add on installation and the EcoFlow Smart Home Panel 10, and you'll be looking in the $5,000 range.

The more advanced Titan 5000 Plus will land at $3,699 for a single unit. The Titan 5000 Plus with the Smart Home Panel 10 costs $4,799. Adding two Titan expansion batteries to that bundle will bring the total to $8,699.

Add your email address to the preorder page at EcoFlow, and you'll be in for an early-bird discount that can take as much as $2,999 off the above prices. Reserving your unit for $50 will earn you a 5% off coupon and two free 220W solar panels.

Opens in a new window Credit: EcoFlow EcoFlow Titan Series   Preorder at EcoFlow

Many of us plug a Fire TV Stick into our TV, install the necessary streaming apps, and then never think about it again. If you use Home Assistant, your Fire TV Stick could become a useful part of your smart home.

In terms of quality, 2026 has been a bleak year for big-budget video game adaptations. Yes, yes, The Super Mario Galaxy Movie made over a billion dollars, and Mortal Kombat II turned a lean profit. But they were also two of the very worst movies I've seen all year. The former made me all too aware of what a short span of time we have in this life, and how much of it I was obliged to sacrifice for a relentless Nintendo ad. The latter urged me to ask, "The bar is in hell for video game movies, huh?"

SEE ALSO: 'The Super Mario Galaxy Movie' review: Death is coming for us all

So, my expectations were admittedly very low for Street Fighter, the latest movie adaptation of the Capcom video game series known for badass characters and eye-popping special moves. I'm more surprised than anyone to confess that I had an absolute blast at this movie.

Directed by Kitao Sakurai, Street Fighter leans hard into a '90s aesthetic of glorious neon lighting, hard-hitting pop music, unhinged action, and a general lustiness that's been bled out of mainstream American cinema. Plus, Sakurai and co-writer T.J. Fixman understand that the best way to have fun in this franchise is not to take it too seriously.

Street Fighter (2026) has a lot of spinning plates in terms of plot.

One might well argue too many! First off, you've got egomaniacal tyrant M. Bison (a sneering David Dastmalchian) hosting the World Warrior Tournament II to set a trap for the first tournament's winner, Ryu (Andrew Koji). See, Bison is so power-hungry that he wants to milk all the "psycho power" from Ryu's body to fuel his own. There's just one problem: Ryu has gone missing after the death of his sensei, Gouken, and the subsequent estrangement from his best friend, Ken Masters (Noah Centineo).

Meanwhile, Ken emerges from Ryu's shadow to become a stunt fighter who battles panda bears and parked cars to line his own pockets and those of his manager, Dan (Andrew Schulz). Tasked with finding the best street fighters in the world, Bison's emissary Chun-Li (Callina Liang) invites Ken not because of his bad reputation, but to lure in his estranged brother-in-arms. Determined to prove himself, Ken enters the tournament, ready to face off against fighters like Guile (Cody Rhodes), Dhalsim (Vidyut Jammwal), Balrog (Curtis "50 Sent" Jackson), Zangief (Olivier Richters), E. Honda (Hirooki Goto), and Vega (Orville Peck, who is, of course, masked).

Meanwhile, Chun-Li has her own secret mission, with a tragic backstory fleshed out in gorgeous anime flashbacks. And on top of all that, Ryu's secret struggle is to resist the darkness within him that surfaces in battle. Should he give in to it, he could become evil, like his master's fiercest foe, Akuma (Joe "Roman Reigns" Anoa'i).

Simply put, it's a lot for one movie. Maybe too much? For better or worse, Sakurai's approach to Street Fighter is more is more.

Street Fighter is too much, but I'm not mad about it.

This movie begins with a flashback to the first World Warrior Tournament in 1986, and, like the Chun-Li flashbacks, it's presented in an anime style. This presumably allows Sakurai to save some money on effects, allude to Street Fighter's various incarnations, including animation, and bring nostalgia out of the gate for longtime fans of the franchise.

As the movie leaps ahead to 1993, it will not address the mixed-media use of live action and animation. And that same unapologetic attitude is applied to the film's design. The cinematography of Ken Seng leans into neon lighting that swaths these iconic characters in brazen purples, pinks, reds, and blues to a thrilling effect.

The score by composers Leo Birenberg and Zach Robinson leans on electric guitar and synth keyboards that throw back to '90s action-movie sensibilities. And the soundtrack boasts bangers like 4 Non Blondes' "What's Up?," White Zombie's "More Human Than Human," Soundgarden's "Black Hole Sun," and Montell Jordan's "This is How We Do It." (Yes, several of these songs are anachronisms, as they came out after 1993. But this is a movie where people can levitate, stretch like rubber, and shoot electricity from their bodies. Let's not get hung up on petty things like historical accuracy!)

This '90s aesthetic is echoed in slyly leering shots that revel in a bit of flesh, an exposed six-pack here, a flash of sideboob there, and a bit of bum. This kind of PG-13 horniness made me unexpectedly nostalgic for an age where Hollywood movies casually recognized that humans are sexual beings.

Fans of the franchise will be glad to know the costumes by Kym Barrett draw heavily from the games, while allowing a sense of self-aware winks. This is reflected in a screenplay that not only loops in tons of catchphrases from the game but also a cheeky sensibility that brings some irreverent humor and some wonderfully dumb jokes into the mix.

Noah Centineo is the MVP of Street Fighter.

To the credit of the ensemble as a whole, they're all game.

Koji is compelling as the tortured warrior Ryu. Liang brings a terrific ferocity to Chun-Li, whether delivering exposition or performing the Hundred Lightning Kicks. Mel Jarnson is surly fun as Cammy, while Peck revels in the fluid fighting style of Vega. Richters, Jammwal, 50 Cent, and Goto all step into their roles well, brandishing confidence, power, and attitude swiftly.

Dastmalchian has arguably the toughest role here, as Raul Julia created a truly iconic movie villain with M. Bison in 1994's live-action Street Fighter. Even people who barely remember that movie remember Julia's impeccably scathing delivery of "It was a Tuesday." Wisely, Dastmalchian takes a different angle to Bison, making him less suave and more of a power-hungry, sadistic weirdo. He sneers out commands to his Dolls, ruthlessly throttles those who fail him, and sniffs things — like the feet of a wounded Ryu or the burning flesh of Chun-Li. He's making weird choices, but they are entertaining.

Bringing laughs to Street Fighter is Schulz as Dan Hibiki, an unpopular character from the games who's a mouthy sidekick here. Schulz gives spirited silliness in the role, especially when he faces off against Rhodes, who, as Guile, seems to be channeling the homoerotic masculinity that Val Kilmer brought to Top Gun. Rhodes, best known as a pro wrestler, has sharp comedic timing and a fearlessness in playing the fool that's well utilized here.

Jason Momoa, who also produces, brings some signature spunk to Blanka. He's wild and playful in the part, but his performance is marred by some deeply clunky CG that turns the big green brute into an eyesore. Comedian Eric André also appears in this movie as garish ring announcer Don Sauvage. And, well, he's certainly in this movie a lot, while being loud.

The funniest and most entertaining fighter is Noah Centineo. In montage scenes of Ken's downward spiral into D-list celebrity, Centineo playfully parodies tabloid clichés, such as public meltdowns, embarrassing TV commercials, and publicity stunts gone wrong. But it's when he unexpectedly reunites with Ryu that Centineo's Ken really comes alive. Look, later, in the arena, Ken will show what he's truly capable of. But in this first fight, where Ken is hurt, and Ryu is trying to give space for his big feels without physically injuring him, Centineo masters a style I'll call clown-fu.

The stakes aren't life or death, but they are big, affecting the future of this fractured brotherhood. Slipping in gym socks, misfiring high kicks, all while mugging comically and slinging insults, Centineo is a force of action and comedy. Throughout the film, he's hitting punchlines with the force of hadoken.

While the ensemble as a whole brings a lot of attitude and flavors to Street Fighter, Centineo becomes its heart. Where Ryu hides his feelings under a facade of stoicism, and Chun-Li channels hers into action, Centineo's Ken is practically bursting at the seams with emotion. While the movie leaps from one location and battle to another, sometimes to a dizzying effect, it's Centineo's earnest, stupid, handsome tough guy that pulls it all together.

Still...

The fighting and the funny in Street Fighter could be stronger.

To the credit of its writers, this movie takes the battles to the streets and unexpected locations more than you might expect. Sure, there's a tournament. But Sakurai offers visual diversity by skipping a lot of the bracket battles in favor of off-site brawls at a posh hotel, a cool nightclub, a festering prison, M. Bison's lair, and, of course, some actual streets.

The cast and their stunt doubles throw themselves into the physical demands of the movie, and the fight choreography is carefully woven with familiar special moves that are pretty thrillingly recreated from the games. However, Seng often favors medium or close-ups, and editor Luke Lynch leans on quick cuts. While this makes for kinetic action, it also means the choreography that could wow us in a wide is rarely present. So, while Street Fighter is a blast, its actual fight scenes don't hit as hard as one might hope.

My other beef with this adaptation is that Sakurai doesn't know when to cut a joke. At 120 minutes, Street Fighter begins to drag, in part because of comedy bits that go nowhere. André, who previously worked with Sakurai on The Eric Andre Show and Bad Trip, is the biggest offender here. Dressed in tacky gold lame suits, Don Sauvage's dialogue occasionally drops helpful exposition. But mostly, André delivers lazy jokes or agog reactions that are blandly one-note.

Elsewhere, Saturday Night Live alum Kyle Mooney pops up as an unappealing Interpol employee, who exists solely to moon over Chun-Li. It's easy to imagine Sakurai and Fixman felt this might be a way to spoof fanboys' lusty love of the female fighter. But it's thin, unfunny, and takes up way too much screen time.

As the fighting could use more technical panache and the comedy comes with a few bits too many, Street Fighter may infuriate fans who feel Sakurai isn't taking the franchise seriously enough. However, I had a lot of fun in this goofy-ass video game movie.

It's chaotic. The plot is all over the place, so the themes about honor, power, loyalty, jealousy, and revenge are barely probed. But I won't deny that it gave me the feeling of being a kid again, sitting in the theater, giddy to be surprised by something familiar yet weird.

I suspect the people behind Street Fighter won't appreciate this comparison. But I mean it as a compliment. In a world of video game movies, Street Fighter is way less Super Mario Galaxy The Movie and way more the live-action Super Mario Bros. Movie. Which, yes, was a box office bomb that critics reviled. But where it succeeded was in being a wild watch that had me laughing, cheering, and giddy — even when I was utterly bewildered. Street Fighter is that kind of fun. It scratched the bit of my brain that loved button-mashing these games, and it tickled me to see a video game movie be proudly bonkers.

Street Fighter is now in theaters.

Want more film and TV news and reviews delivered straight to your inbox? Sign up for Mashable’s Top Stories newsletter or get Mashable push alerts today.

At a glance

• A new form of computing. Zero-knowledge proofs let you run a workload and receive, alongside the result, a short proof that the program ran correctly. Anyone can check the proof in milliseconds, without rerunning the program, without trusting whoever ran it, and without needing data on which the program was run.
• Three grand challenges have stood in the way of broad adoption: making proofs fast enough to produce, making them available to normal programs without cryptographic expertise, and resting them on cryptography that will still be trusted many decades from now.
• Magnetar makes major progress on all three challenges. It proves programs written in Rust, Go, or C, runs 10 to 39 times faster on average than the prior fastest comparable systems, and rests its security only on standard hash functions. It is the latest result of more than a decade of research at Microsoft Research on making zero-knowledge proofs practical.

A new form of computing

Every result a computer produces comes with an implicit question: did the program run as claimed and produce correct outputs? Today, answering that question often requires a degree of trust alongside verification. We trust the operator, the vendor, the counterparty, or the agent, and we rely on contracts, audits, and logs to establish that trust. 

Zero-knowledge proofs offer a fundamentally different approach to establishing trust. A program runs, and along with its output it produces a short proof, a cryptographic certificate that this program, on these inputs, produced this output. The proof is small and fast to check. Whoever receives it can confirm the result in milliseconds without rerunning the program, and can pass the proof on to anyone else who needs the same assurance. With the zero-knowledge property, the proof also reveals nothing about inputs that should stay private.

This changes what correctness means in the real world. A result no longer has to be trusted because of who produced it. It can be checked because of what accompanies it. An AI agent acting on someone’s behalf could attach a proof that each action complied with the policy it was given. Regulated financial institutions could prove that transactions were processed correctly without making their transactions public. These become possible once producing a proof is as routine as running the program.

Three grand challenges

Zero-knowledge proofs were invented in the 1980s, and the ideas behind proving program execution have been around nearly as long. What has kept them from becoming a general tool is three challenges that have resisted being solved at the same time.

Efficiency. Producing a proof has historically taken millions of times more computation than running the program itself. Years of research have brought that overhead down, but the fastest systems have achieved their speed by making compromises elsewhere.

Generality and usability. Many proof systems require developers to manually rewrite their program as a cryptographic circuit, which is a fixed arithmetic description of that exact computation. This takes months. Every change to the application means a new circuit, and the translation is itself a frequent source of security bugs. A general-purpose alternative is to prove the execution of an ordinary processor, so that any compiled program can be proven as written. Until recently, that generality came at a steep cost in speed or security. 

Security. A proof is only as strong as the cryptography beneath it. Many proof systems rest on elliptic curves, which can be broken by a sufficiently powerful quantum computer. Microsoft is addressing this problem with its Quantum Safe Program, which will move its products and services to post-quantum cryptography, a goal it recently accelerated to 2029. Post-quantum proof systems already exist, but some rest on lattice assumptions, and most rest on new cryptographic functions invented to reduce the cost of proving. These new cryptographic functions have not faced the decades of scrutiny given to the cryptography protecting today’s internet, and some rest on mathematical conjectures about error-correcting codes that have not been proven. They have bought their speed with strong assumptions. 

Microsoft Research at BUILD 2026

Giving developers a hands-on look at some of the many AI-based models and tools they can use to accelerate innovation, enhance their capabilities, and quickly transform ideas into prototypes.

Learn more Opens in a new tab More than a decade of work

For more than a decade, Microsoft Research has worked on making zero-knowledge proofs and verifiable computing practical. Early research followed two approaches, both practical only for small programs. The first (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab)lets a verifier check a long computation through a short conversation with the prover using a technique called the sum-check protocol (opens in new tab), but this applied only to computations with a particular layered structure. The second (opens in new tab) (opens in new tab)used elliptic-curve cryptography to create very small proofs for almost any computation. But this requires a one-time trusted setup involving secret information which, if leaked, could allow anyone to forge proofs. This approach is also vulnerable to quantum computers.

In 2019, a new zero-knowledge proof system called Spartan returned to the sum-check approach and made it work for general-purpose programs without a trusted setup. Spartan can also be instantiated with different cryptographic building blocks. That flexibility is what later allowed the proof system to be built on hash functions alone. A sequence of results then filled in the remaining pieces: 

• Phalanx (opens in new tab), in 2021, showed how to exploit repetition, such as a processor running the same instruction cycle on every step, to prove computations an order of magnitude faster than Spartan. Magnetar’s processor description is built on this idea.  
• Nova (opens in new tab), HyperNova (opens in new tab), NeutronNova (opens in new tab), Neo and SuperNeo (opens in new tab) showed that stopping Spartan’s proving early, and folding the partial results together, makes it practical to prove computations of any size at far lower cost.
• Brakedown (opens in new tab), in 2021, introduced a fast hash-based commitment scheme and combined it with Spartan, giving the first Spartan variant whose security rests on standard hash functions. 
• Spice (opens in new tab), Lasso (opens in new tab), Nebula (opens in new tab), and then Twist and Shout (opens in new tab) made the memory operations at the heart of a general-purpose processor inexpensive to prove, and Jolt (opens in new tab) showed that combining them with Spartan can efficiently prove the execution of a complete processor.
• Earlier this year, Vega (opens in new tab) applied this line of work to digital identity, proving facts from a government credential in under a tenth of a second.
• More recently, BinarySpartan (opens in new tab) brought Spartan to binary fields, where a processor’s logic and standard hash functions can be efficiently expressed. BinarySpartan also relies on Ligerito (opens in new tab), a Brakedown-style commitment scheme with much shorter proofs, and on ring switching (opens in new tab), which makes it efficient to commit to vectors of bits. 

Each of these solved a piece of the problem. Magnetar is where the pieces come together.

Magnetar

Magnetar is a zero-knowledge virtual machine, or zkVM, and it makes major progress on all three challenges at once.

Figure 1. Magnetar proves a program’s execution and returns a small proof that anyone can check, with security resting only on standard hash functions.

It is general-purpose. Magnetar proves the execution of RISC-V, an open processor architecture with mature compilers for every mainstream language. A developer writes a program in Rust, Go, or C, compiles it as usual, and Magnetar proves it as written. Consider what this means in practice. A business policy, a data pipeline, or an interpreter for the Ethereum Virtual Machine (EVM) is just a program, and the engineers who already maintain it can prove their executions exactly as written. As a result, proving stops being a specialist activity. 

It is faster than prior systems in the same class. Magnetar proves 7.2 to 8.7 million processor instructions per second on a laptop. Across 15 benchmark programs, from cryptographic hashing to token transfers inside a small EVM interpreter, it is 10 to 39 times faster on average than the fastest existing zkVMs on the same machine, and more than 300 times faster than two others on a token-transfer benchmark. An optimized Magnetar proves 9.5–12.8 million cycles per second, which increases each speedup reported here by about 1.3×. Its proofs verify in about 12 milliseconds. 

Its security rests on standard cryptography. Magnetar depends on a standard hash function such as SHA-256 or SHA-3, the same primitives that already protect every organization’s systems. It requires no elliptic curves, no lattices, no special-purpose hash functions, no trusted setup, and no unproven conjecture about error-correcting codes. Hash functions are the most thoroughly studied primitives in the cryptographic toolkit, and they are the basis of the stateless hash-based signatures that NIST standardized as its own conservative post-quantum option. For a system that must still be trustworthy in many decades to come, relying only on standard hash functions removes a cryptographic migration from the roadmap. 

The same design decision pays a second dividend. Checking a Magnetar proof consists mostly of evaluating standard hash functions and binary-field arithmetic, which are exactly the operations Magnetar proves efficiently. Verifying a proof is therefore an ordinary workload for it. This is what allows Magnetar to prove computations of any size, by proving them in pieces and then combining the pieces. This also allows Magnetar to prove a long-running system such as a ledger or a blockchain.

The technical paper gives the full design, security analysis, and measurements.

Looking ahead

Magnetar advances zero-knowledge proofs and verifiable computing to a stage where they can be built on the cryptography that organizations already trust, at speeds that make it usable, by engineers who write normal code. Magnetar enables a future where cryptographic proofs are a routine output of computation. We expect that technology leaders will stop asking whether proofs of execution are practical and focus instead on which results would they prefer to verify rather than taking on trust.

If you’re interested in exploring how zero-knowledge proofs can support your use case, we’d love to hear from you (opens in new tab).

Opens in a new tab

The post Proof-based general-purpose computing with Magnetar appeared first on Microsoft Research.