Without a doubt, the Bang & Olufsen Beosound Level is the prettiest and best-sounding wireless streaming speaker I've encountered that operates on both AC and battery power. It holds true to the aesthetic spirit that's long driven this legendary Danish electronics brand, ever striving for a magical fusion of design and technology. But be forewarned, buying into this functional work of art isn't for the financially faint of heart: A single Beosound Level costs either $1,499 or $1,799, depending on which model you choose. You might need to rationalize this luxury indulgence as a long-term investment; like the pitch proffered for a Rolex timekeeper, or an exotic Euro sports car. And like those rare goods, the Beosound Level has a sensitive nature that in some ways demands a bit of coddling (more on that in a bit). At the heart of this device (and a few of B&O's other Wi-Fi-enabled speakers) is a new, modular circuit core called Mozart, which the manufacturer says can be swapped out for another if the onboard upgradability ever reaches its limit.

Like most Internet-of-things devices these days, Amazon's Echo Dot gives users a way to perform a factory reset so that, as the corporate behemoth says, users can "remove any ... personal content from the applicable device(s)" before selling or discarding them. But researchers have recently found that the digital bits that remain on these reset devices can be reassembled to retrieve a wealth of sensitive data, including passwords, locations, authentication tokens, and other things. This story originally appeared on Ars Technica, a trusted source for technology news, tech policy analysis, reviews, and more. Ars is owned by WIRED's parent company, Condé Nast. Most IoT devices, the Echo Dot included, use NAND-based flash memory to store data.

I'm sitting on a grubby hotel carpet, eyes closed, hands extended in front of me, waiting to die. I'm playing an artificial intelligence in a live-action role-playing game (larp), and my human counterpart has the legal right to murder me if he wants. Or, looking at it another way, he can choose to scrub the code on a faulty experiment and start over. Within the game, he's participating in a commercial software trial for an AI -- me -- that's been developed to suit his emotional needs. If he doesn't think I'm serving those needs well enough, he can reset me to my factory defaults. With a casual tap on my outstretched hands, he can instruct me to forget all our previous interactions and become a friendly blank, eager to help him face his issues. That power imbalance between us, that feeling of being a sentient being entirely in another player's control, is at the core of a number of role-playing games that explore what it might be like to be an artificial intelligence.

It's the end of your phone's annual life cycle and you have decided to go in for an upgrade. You make your way into a local Sprint store where you are warmly greeted by Pepper, a four-foot-tall, humanoid service robot. Pepper welcomes you and asks how it can be of assistance. Suddenly, something goes terribly wrong. Before you can avert your gaze, hardcore porn starts streaming from Pepper's chest tablet.

If your Google Home device is not responding to your commands, then it's probably due to a dirty mic. Tech junkie and web developer Robby Payne shared his experience this week and advised other users who may encounter the same problem to try this nifty trick in making the Google Assistant-powered speaker receptive again. In Payne's story, which he shared on Chrome Unboxed, his Google Home device stopped responding to his questions and commands one day. The lights atop the speaker would spin upon hearing his daughter's questions, but the device would go out and not provide any response. Despite resetting the AI speaker, it still remained to be unresponsive.