Fomi watches you work, then scolds you when your attention wanders. It's helpful, but there are privacy issues to consider. I've tested a lot of software tools over the years designed to block distractions and keep you focused. None of them work perfectly, mostly because of context. Reddit, for example, is something I should generally avoid during the workday, so I tend to block it--this is a good decision for me overall.

With excellent noise canceling, the QuietComfort Ultra 2 would love to join you on your next long-haul flight. Our favorite pair of wireless headphones for traveling are currently marked down by $50. You can pick up the Bose QuietComfort Ultra 2 from Amazon for just $399 in both Black and Driftwood Sand, with the other colors remaining at their full price. Bose is known for incredible active noise canceling, and the latest generation of QuietComfort over-ear headphones is no different. Our reviewer Ryan Waniata was extremely impressed with the Bose, despite only minor upgrades, and considers them among the top three headsets when it comes to ANC, rivaled only by Sony's WH-1000XM6 and Bose's first-generation QuietComfort Ultra .

Most scanning apps try to get you to buy a cloud storage subscription or pay for extras. Not FairScan, which is free and open-source, and has some powerful features. If you're interested in going paperless, you probably think you need a scanner. It's true that hardware scanners make turning multipage documents into PDFs very simple. But most of us don't have easy access to a scanner.

In hacker spaces and at their homes, creative protesters are laser-cutting and 3D-printing tools to resist an occupation. As the US government's immigration crackdown expands across the country, anxious residents have mobilized to look out for each other. One way they're doing that is by finding ways to build the tools they need to be resilient against the surge of Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents empowered to kill with impunity . All over the country, makers are 3D-printing thousands of whistles to help people on the ground alert others to nearby ICE activity. But the whistles are far from the only tools being used to respond to the surge of federal agents.

Beyond mistakes or nonsense, deliberately bad information being injected into AI search summaries is leading people down potentially harmful paths. These days, rather than showing you the traditional list of links when you run a search query, Google is intent on throwing up AI Overviews instead: synthesized summaries of information scraped off the web, with some word-prediction magic added, and packaged together in a way to sound as accurate and reliable as possible. We've written before about some of the problems with these AI Overviews, which regularly contain mistakes or nonsense, and of course rip off the work of the human writers who actually know the answers to the questions you're putting into Google. There's another problem though--these AI answers can actually be dangerous. As with every other new technology through history, scams are now making their way into AI Overviews as well, apparently injecting Google's AI answers with fraudulent phone numbers that you shouldn't trust.

Shop these limited-time sales to save on some of our favorite gadgets from Branch, Eufy, and more. Presidents' Day Deals have officially landed, and there's a lot of stuff to sift through. We cross-referenced our myriad buying guides and reviews to find the products we'd recommend that are actually on sale for a truly good price. We know because we checked! Find highlights below, and keep in mind that most of these deals end on February 17.

Stuck in regulatory limbo, the self-driving-vehicle developer is encouraging residents of Washington, DC, to message public officials to help get its robotaxis onto roads. Waymo needs some help, according to an email message the self-driving developer sent to residents of Washington, DC, on Thursday. For more than a year, Waymo has been pushing city officials to pass new regulations allowing its robotaxis to operate in the district. So far, self-driving cars can test in the city with humans behind the wheel, but cannot operate in driver-free mode. The Alphabet subsidiary--and its lobbyists--have asked local lawmakers, including Mayor Muriel Bower and members of the city council, to create new rules allowing the tech to go truly driverless on its public roads.

Rather than offering a revolutionary new approach to gig work, RentAHuman is filled with bots that just want me to be another cog in the AI hype machine. I'm not above doing some gig work to make ends meet. In my life, I've worked snack food pop-ups in a grocery store, ran the cash register for random merch booths, and even hawked my own plasma at $35 per vial. So, when I saw RentAHuman, a new site where AI agents hire humans to perform physical work in the real world on behalf of the virtual bots, I was eager to see how these AI overlords would compare to my past experiences with the gig economy. Launched in early February, RentAHuman was developed by software engineer Alexander Liteplo and his cofounder, Patricia Tani.

From jogging and cycling to multi-tasking or puttering around the house, open earbuds are an excellent way to jam out in the real world. If you've done any wireless earbuds shopping lately, you've likely noticed a new design category cropping up everywhere. They're called open earbuds (or open-ear buds, depending on the brand), and just about every audio brand has a pair (or three). They come in a slew of styles, but most either loop around your ears like older Beats buds, or clip on like funky-futuristic earrings. Whatever the style, they're designed to deliver satisfying sound while keeping your ear canals open to the sounds of the world around you.

The company's robotaxi service is supposed to launch in the US capital this year. But while service rollouts have been relatively smooth in other cities, DC's rules have made things tricky. Waymo, the Alphabet subsidiary that develops self-driving vehicle tech, has picked up speed. The company now operates robotaxis in six cities and has announced plans to launch in a dozen others this year. It j ust raised $16 billion in a new round of funding and says it has served over 20 million rides since the company launched its service in 2020, 14 million of them in 2025 alone.