Our gifting experts are obsessively searching for holiday gifts that are unique, thoughtful and suitable for any budget. HomePod mini 2 is here, and there are four major upgrades that separate it from the first generation. Jada Jones is a journalist based outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Apple announced its new HomePod Mini 2 after a six-year hiatus. You can finally bring Siri AI into your home.

VPN auto-connect, kill switch and protocol settings help protect travelers switching between airport Wi-Fi, hotel Wi-Fi and cellular data on the go.

Don't let busted pipes or an overflowing washing machine dampen your day. Water plays an essential role in our homes, but it can also wreak havoc. Burst pipes, leaky toilets, and misbehaving appliances can stop your day in its tracks. Water leak detectors help reduce the risk by alerting you to problems quickly so you can act to prevent severe damage. Around one in 60 insured homeowners file a claim related to water damage or freezing every year, according to the Insurance Information Institute, and the average cost of the property damage is about $15,000. The longer a leak goes undetected, the more damage it does, destroying furniture and decorations, spawning mold and fungi, and even threatening structural integrity. I've tested many smart leak detectors over the past few years, and these are my favorites. Insurers love them, so before you go shopping, it's worth checking with yours to see what they offer or recommend, and whether installing a leak sensor can reduce your premiums. Shaped like a drop of water, this versatile standalone device alerts you within seconds of detecting a leak and offers compelling extras like temperature tracking at a reasonably affordable price.

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. What you need to know before buying and using an eSIM on your next trip. Landing in Japan without mobile data can make a long travel day much harder than it needs to be. The minute you arrive you'll likely rely on your phone for train routes, maps, translation, reservations, and messages, so it's best to sort out getting connected before your flight. I've lived in Japan for nearly a decade, both in cities and the countryside, and I've used several different ways to stay connected. These days, I've found an eSIM to be the easiest option. But there are a few things worth checking before you buy one.

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When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission. Who knew the peach emoji could be so powerful? In a past life there was a PCWorld print magazine, and I wrote a monthly column for it. The column was called "Privacy Watch" and it was all about tools and tips you could use to safeguard your PC against hackers and snoops. Every month I'd do my best to help readers with everything from building stronger passwords (or just adopting a good password manager) to securing their Wi-Fi network, and I had a blast doing it.

Public Wi-Fi at hotels and airports puts passwords and personal data at risk. A VPN and a few simple habits can keep travelers protected from hackers.

Civitai--an online marketplace for buying and selling AI-generated content, backed by the venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz--is letting users buy custom instruction files for generating celebrity deepfakes. Some of these files were specifically designed to make pornographic images banned by the site, a new analysis has found. The study, from researchers at Stanford and Indiana University, looked at people's requests for content on the site, called "bounties." The researchers found that between mid-2023 and the end of 2024, most bounties asked for animated content--but a significant portion were for deepfakes of real people, and 90% of these deepfake requests targeted women. Demand for electric vehicles and the batteries that power them has never been hotter. In 2025, EVs made up over a quarter of new vehicle sales globally, up from less than 5% in 2020.

Wi-Fi channel state information (CSI)-based sensing provides a non-invasive, device-free approach for tasks such as human activity recognition and crowd counting, but large-scale deployment is hindered by the need for extensive site-specific training data. Federated learning (FL) offers a way to avoid raw data sharing but is challenged by heterogeneous sensing data and device resources. This paper proposes FedAPA, a collaborative Wi-Fi CSI-based sensing algorithm that uses adaptive prototype aggregation (APA) strategy to assign similarity-based weights to peer prototypes, enabling adaptive client contributions and yielding a personalized global prototype for each client instead of a fixed-weight aggregation. During local training, we adopt a hybrid objective that combines classification learning with representation contrastive learning to align local and global knowledge. We provide a convergence analysis of FedAPA and evaluate it in a real-world distributed Wi-Fi crowd counting scenario with six environments and up to 20 people. The results show that our method outperform multiple baselines in terms of accuracy, F1 score, mean absolute error (MAE), and communication overhead, with FedAPA achieving at least a 9.65% increase in accuracy, a 9% gain in F1 score, a 0.29 reduction in MAE, and a 95.94% reduction in communication overhead.

A tech industry insider's guide to where to stay, eat, work, and play while visiting the tech scene's mothership, San Francisco. All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links. You've probably read plenty of recent news stories about how San Francisco is a failed city. Our infrastructure is crumbling, our streets are scary, our social fabric is torn and frayed. Most of that stuff is false. Yes, San Francisco has issues, but they're the same problems nearly all US cities are facing as they struggle to reorient themselves to our new, post-pandemic economic reality. The "doom loop" narrative that's often repeated in the national press is a gross exaggeration. The truth is that San Francisco is thriving.