Blogroll

One of Google Maps' best features is not recent at all. In fact, it was introduced almost eight years ago, bringing with it the convenience that helped daily public transit commuters and drivers handle their trips with confidence.

Now that summer is here, my mom has once again started spending most of her free time in her backyard—and with that came the annual complaints about the terrible Wi-Fi coverage. It's a bigger problem than it sounds because she doesn't have a mobile data plan, so stepping outside means losing her internet connection entirely.

A French court ordered upstream internet intermediaries like Google and Cloudflare to actively block access to prominent pirating and illegal streaming sites at the request of sports rights holders. But Google is pushing back against this judgment, and its reasoning is surprisingly sound. 

The landmark decision places direct responsibility on upstream internet providers rather than on illegal streaming services, which are notoriously difficult to bring to justice in a local court, especially when they exploit loopholes in international law or employ backup domains and servers that go online when their main platforms are blocked.

To effectively block access to these sites, which operate across multiple domains, servers, and web addresses, Google would have to use a combination of DNS filtering and IP- and VPN-blocking, but these catch-all approaches are guaranteed to impact law-abiding users and web hosts as well. To analogize, it's a bit like trying to catch a minnow with a giant trawling net. At the end of the day, you may have all the minnows in the sea, but you're also going to harm the dolphins, whales, and other fish species.

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Worse still, savvy internet pirates have multiple ways to circumvent these actions, meaning the minnows might still escape while the larger fish (ordinary internet users) get caught up in the filtering. 

Google said as much in their submission to the EU court:

"Blocking DNS resolvers, IPs, VPNs, is ineffective, as it does not remove content at all and is easily circumvented by using alternative DNS resolvers. It is disproportionate, catching lawful services, raising extra-territoriality concerns and blocking entire domains. Similarly, blocking IP addresses neither removes the content nor achieves proportionate outcomes, as many lawful services may be using the same IP address."

Google's report goes on to cite real-world harms caused by these blanket bans, including inadvertently blocking Google Drive access and restricting access to websites such as Amnesty International, the ACLU, UNICEF, UNHCR, the Australian Senate, and Stanford Law Review.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation has echoed Google's criticisms, arguing that the EU's attempts to legislate the internet "keep EU users locked up behind big tech's gates." The EFF also took a strong stand against the automated filtering mandates argued for in Article 13 of the EU Copyright Directive. 

It's also looking like these concerns are coming to the United States, as a House IP Subcommittee met on June 30 to discuss exactly the kind of upstream content bans enforced by the EU. California Representative Darrell Issa has already pledged to introduce exactly such a bill. 

Not coincidentally, these legislative efforts are ramping up right as illegal streaming and downloading experiences a resurgence in popularity (a "Piracy Renaissance," according to one publication), perhaps not in spite of a massive spike in online streaming platforms but because of these platforms and their ongoing efforts to raise prices, introduce advertising, and fragment their content offerings. 

Expect this debate to heat up as more and more tech companies are pulled into the argument, and as the interests of internet giants like Google are pitted against the copyright claims of giant media broadcasters.

Spotify's recommendation system helps you discover new songs and revisit forgotten ones: right from your app's home page, you can find tracks that will find a permanent spot in your library. But this algorithm can also make it easy to end up in a boring loop of the same type of music.

Most smart home sensors are designed for use inside the house, which is where their presence is most useful. But there’s no reason the data they gather and triggers they enable can’t have utility outside, too. Here are a few all-weather examples of outdoor sensors that you might have overlooked.

Nearly 80% of respondents in an April 2026 survey from restaurant tech company Popmenu believe tipping practices have become ridiculous, with another 44% saying they tip less than they did a year ago. While pushback from consumers around tipping may have started in restaurants, bars, and coffee shops, Popmenu's data shows it has spread to grocery delivery, hotels, hair salons, and even auto repair.

While some still yearn for physical keyboards to make a comeback, I think it’s almost impossible to compete with the flexibility of virtual keyboards. Gboard is the one I always come back to, and I recently discovered a new feature that makes it even better.

Your router provides a basic list of connected devices, a speed test, and maybe a few port forwarding rules, but consumer routers are notoriously bad about giving you real control of what the devices on your network are doing. You can't usually spot a device phoning home when it is supposed to be off, or a device sending way more queries than it could possibly need.

For years, GitHub was the default place to host code. If you were starting a new project, contributing to open source, or just needed somewhere to keep a repository, GitHub was usually the obvious choice. It had an enormous community, the strongest network effect, and most of the tools developers expected were already built around it.

There are hundreds of open-source apps out there, especially now in the era of vibe coding—it is actually becoming a bit of a problem.

Alexa is the voice assistant that changed the game. Amazon made controlling your smart home with your voice accessible to everyone, but that convenience comes with a cost. Things you say to Alexa get sent to Amazon's servers and may be listened to by Amazon contractors, but Home Assistant lets you set up truly local voice control.

Gamestop has been marking up their Pokémon card decks by multiples of three and even four over their retail pricing from the Pokémon Center, the official primary retailer for Pokémon merchandise, according to reporting by Engadget.

Engadget reporter Sam Rutherford noticed that the price of an Ascended Heroes Booster Bundle at Gamestop was a whopping $90, more than three times the $27 charged for the same item by the Pokémon Center, while more rare or collectible items, such as the 30th Anniversary Ultra-Premium Collection, were marked up by as much as 400%, retailing for $600 at Gamestop compared to its usual $120 MSRP.

This phenomenon is a small part of a larger trend driven by a mismatch between an item's original cost and its value on the second-hand market. Other obvious examples include coveted sneakers, concert tickets, and high-end luxury items like Swiss-made watches and luxury handbags by Chanel or Hermès.

Everyone is fighting for a share of the aftermarket value of these high-demand luxury items. So, any time this mismatch exceeds 200 percent of the item's original cost, there's a strong financial incentive for third-party retailers to step in. Which is why fights keep breaking out at Costco stores when new Pokémon cards are released.

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Gamestop can plausibly argue that it's just engaging in what economists call pricing equilibrium, raising the cost of the cards to better reflect their true market value, but as Rutherford points out, this also puts the cards financially out of reach for a huge chunk of the intended Pokémon card consumer market, who aren't in fact collectors flush with cash but children and teenagers eager to play a card game. 

For its part, Nintendo is aware of these problems. At its most recent annual shareholders meeting, Nintendo President Shuntaro Furukawa spoke of a commitment to allowing fans to purchase Pokémon cards with "peace of mind," and vowed to "take measures to respond to this [price gouging] issue," though he was notably reticent to list specific steps.

Take a step back from Pokémon cards and Gamestop's actions start to look like part of a much broader trend. Earlier this year, Rockstar Games made the controversial decision not to sell physical copies of its upcoming Grand Theft Auto 6 game, instead offering in-store fans a box with a digital code inside it, effectively killing the resale market for what will surely be the best-selling game of the year and probably the decade, while Sony announced it will no longer support disc drives after January 2028. 

From this wide-angle perspective, these attempts to eat into the aftermarket seem distinctly anti-consumer and likely to provoke a significant backlash. 

Before cloud storage became a thing, before anyone ever thought of keeping a NAS at home (much less an all-SSD NAS), and before many of us turned into bona fide data hoarders, plenty of businesses kept their data on cassettes small enough to disappear in a desk drawer.

Most people who buy 3D printers, myself included, mainly print models that other people make. Talented sculptors and designers who make things that are beautiful, useful, or both.

Even after years of clicking through the same menus, Photoshop still has tricks hiding in plain sight. These three features changed how I work, and I had no idea they existed.

Ryobi makes all sorts of power tools in various sizes, but did you know the brand has an entire line of small USB-C rechargeable tools for around the house? Whether you're short on space or don't want to buy huge tools, here are some tiny Ryobi tools that are still good enough for big jobs.

Passengers who refuse to wear headphones on a flight normally just get a scolding or mean glare from fellow flyers, and that's their only punishment. But now, those traveling with United Airlines may face harsher punishments than just peer judgment if you try and play audio without headphones.

Did you know that your router can function as a presence-detection sensor for your Home Assistant smart home? It’s easy enough to set up, perfect for some things, and terrible for others.Your router can detect when you leave home, but there's a catch

Most families end up scattered across three or four different cloud services without ever deciding where to be. Photos go to iCloud, documents pile up in Google Drive, the shared calendar lives somewhere else entirely, and at some point, everyone stops trusting that anything is actually backed up. I spent longer than I'd like to admit in that situation before I moved everything to a self-hosted Nextcloud server.

Tinkercad is an easy-to-use computer-aided design (CAD) app that runs in a browser, but it’s not without its limitations. That’s why I was excited to hear about SketchForge, a completely open-source alternative with a few nice extra features and a lot of promise for the future.