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Gamers are accusing NVIDIA’s new drivers of spying on you, collecting more data with new telemetry services. But NVIDIA isn’t spying on you—or, at least, NVIDIA isn’t gathering more data than it already was, and most of that data is required for it to work properly. Those New Telemetry Processes Do Nothing (at the Moment) This whole subject started to take on a life of its own when people noticed the latest NVIDIA drivers add an “NVIDIA telemetry monitor”, or NvTmMon....

You can use your Mac’s Terminal to download files, test your internet speed, convert images, or even listen to Pandora. All this and more is just a couple of Homebrew installations away. We’ve shown you a bunch of terminal tricks in macOS, all based on software that comes with the operating system itself. But you can do even more with the right free software, and thankfully, there’s a great package manager called Homebrew that lets you install loads of useful command line utilities....

You can tweak a lot of settings from macOS’ System Preferences, but if you really want to dig deep and customize your system, the Terminal has a lot of hidden little tricks. Here are ten of our favorites in macOS. Add Blank Spaces to the Dock Your Dock is full of app icons and has become an unruly mess. How, then, do you organize it? By adding blank spaces, of course....

Which iPhones Have 5G? All iPhone 12 models support 5G. The iPhone 12 mini, iPhone 12, iPhone 12 Pro, and iPhone 12 Max all include 5G support. Future iPhones will all likely support 5G, too. However, older iPhones like the iPhone 11, iPhone XS, iPhone XR, and iPhone X do not support 5G. This feature requires new hardware inside the iPhone and cannot be added via a software update. Note that only US models of the iPhone 12 will have millimeter wave (mmWave) hardware support....

Who Owns AI-Generated Art? First, let’s talk about who actually owns art generated by AI. This is a very complicated topic that we don’t really have a good answer to yet. You come up with the prompts and commands that result in the end product, but you’re not directly creating the actual art on the screen/page. So who was the artist in that situation? Both parties are integral in the creation of the art....

If you read any tech news, you’ve probably seen “the Internet of Things” mentioned over and over. It’s supposedly one of the next big things — but what exactly does it mean? Isn’t the Internet already made up of things? In a nutshell, the Internet of things involves bringing more devices and sensors onto the network, connecting them to the Internet and allowing them to communicate without human interaction....

The Chromecast has been out long enough to have several generations of hardware. But what’s the difference between them, and should you upgrade to the newer versions? RELATED: How to Set Up Your New Chromecast Originally released in 2013, the original $35 Chromecast flew off the shelves thanks to its ease of use, excellent app support, and the dead simple way it allowed people to sling YouTube, Netflix, and other popular video sources to their HDTV....

Multiple user accounts were once impractical to use on Windows, but they aren’t anymore. If multiple people use your computer – particularly children or guests – you should give each person a separate user account. This article focuses on details specific to Windows, but the same broad reasons apply on Mac OS X, Linux, and even Android tablets with their new multiple user accounts feature. Why Not Just Use One Account?...

Free, ad-supported apps have two hidden costs: They use your phone’s data connection and battery power to download and display ads. In the long run, using a free app may be more expensive than buying the paid version. If you have a phone with a huge battery and an unlimited data connection, you may not be too concerned about this. But if you’re like most people, you may just want to pay the 99 cents for the app rather than paying for the app in additional data and electricity use....

It’s been over four years since Microsoft first released the PC Settings interface with Windows 8, but the Control Panel and Settings app are still a confusing, split experience. There still isn’t a single interface, as there is on other operating systems, and Microsoft is seriously dragging their feet on consolidating them. Microsoft told us that Windows 10 would continue to include the Control Panel “until the Settings app is developed with the complete settings options needed to support all Windows devices....

Buying a company as massive as Activision Blizzard is giant on its own—now, the company’s enormous library of games like Call of Duty, Diablo, World of Warcraft, and all the others are first-party Microsoft games. When you consider Game Pass, which offers Microsoft’s first-party games on release day for a monthly fee, this could be a true game-changer for the industry. Instead of paying $60 for the Call of Duty, it could be included in your $15 per month subscription....

The modern Atari VCS, also known as the Ataribox, is a console that was revealed all the way back in 2017. It received over $3 million on the Indiegogo crowdfunding platform in June 2018, but like many crowdfunded projects, it slipped far past its original shipment date — backers didn’t actually get theirs until December 2020. Following several hardware and software revisions, the final product looked like the original Atari 2600, but ran a customized version of Debian Linux with an AMD Raven Ridge APU....

Image sharpening might just be the most underutilized digital photography trick this side of studying the histogram. Read on as we explain what image sharpening is, why we need it, what it does, and why you should be liberally applying it to your own images to banish fuzzy edges and make your images pop. Why Exactly Are Images Fuzzy in the First Place? Before we dig into how to sharpen your images it is important to understand exactly why digital images even require sharpening in the first place....

Hitting the Jackpot It is more than ten years since the late hacker and cybersecurity researcher Barnaby Michael Douglas Jack demonstrated to an enraptured audience how he could compromise automatic teller machines. Jack’s presentation took place on July 28, 2010, at the Black Hat USA conference in Las Vegas. Unlike the famous slot machines of Las Vegas, the two ATMs on stage with Jack could be made to dispense cash until they were empty—every time....

The Great Firewall of China, officially known the Golden Shield project, employs a variety of tricks to censor China’s Internet and block access to various foreign websites. We’ll be looking at some of the technical tricks the firewall uses to censor China’s Internet. When SOPA was being discussed, CEO of the MPAA Chris Dodd held China’s website-blocking up as a model of how the US could implement its own Internet censorship:...

In the past, if you wanted to add your Gmail to macOS Mail and your Google Calendar to macOS Calendar, you’d enter your Google credentials separately into both applications. It didn’t make sense: it’s the same account, so why do you need to sign in separately? Apple fixed that a few years ago by adding Internet Accounts to the System Preferences panel. There, you can log into several of your online accounts, giving the operating system and Apple-provided applications access to them....

Modern operating systems offer weather information out-of-the-box. There’s Windows 10’s weather app, and the Notification Center on macOS. But Ubuntu doesn’t come with anything like this. No matter: you can install something yourself fairly quickly. We’ve found two applications that add the current temperature to Ubuntu’s top panel: My Weather Indicator, which a lot of weather detail, and Simple Weather Indicator, which as you might imagine offers only the basics....

If you use Apple Watch for your runs, then you know it’s a nice way to keep track of your distance, time, pace, and heart rate. Sometimes however, you might have to stop briefly, forgetting to pause your Watch, giving you inaccurate results. It’s okay, because now you can automatically set your Watch to pause your workout when you stop moving, and resume it when you start again. To do this, first open the Watch app on your iPhone, scroll down to and tap “Workout”....

Call it petty, but there’s just something about eliminating the “turn on the TV” portion of firing up your PlayStation 4 that makes the whole process seem faster. And the good news is that getting this action on your setup is as easy and ticking a box. RELATED: How to Enable HDMI-CEC on Your TV, and Why You Should Of course, this is also a feature that has to be supported on the TV....

Buying a camera has never been more complicated: there are so many good options available, but picking between them can feel like a nightmare, especially if you’re just starting out with photography. It’s hard to buy a bad camera, but it’s not always easy to buy the right camera for you. Here’s what you should be thinking about. DSLR vs Mirrorless Digital Single Lens Reflex (DSLR) cameras have been the main “good” camera for the past decade....