Tangle Tech

A new leak claims to show images of the Beats Solo 4, the next generation of Apple's very old headphones: the Beats Solo 3 have been around since 2016 with only a few minor color changes since.  At the time, we liked the Beats Solo 3 a lot, but an awful lot has changed in the world of the best wireless headphones since they were launched in the same year as the first-generation AirPods. We've had two more generations of AirPods, two lots of AirPods Pro, and the AirPods Max since then, and AirPods 4 and AirPods Max 2 are expected to arrive soon. So it's fair to say that this Beats Solo upgrade is somewhat overdue. Although full specifications haven't emerged yet, one feature we hope to see in the new version is the same high battery life as the Beats Solo 3: up to 40 hours. Beats Solo 4: what to expect According to code in the latest iOS release candidate and reported by MacRumors , the new Beats Solo 4 will have a nearly identical design to the current model bu

iOS 18 tipped to be compatible with the same models as iOS 17 That would mean support for iPhones from the XR onwards Major software update expected to be announced in June With iOS 18 expected to be one of the biggest updates in iPhone history , the obvious follow-up question is – which models will support it? Well, we now have a good idea thanks to a new rumor from a credible source. A now-deleted post on X (formerly Twitter) from MacRumors contributor Aaron Perris says that iOS 18 will be compatible with models from the iPhone XR onwards. The XR was released in 2018 and has an A12 bionic chip, which means the rumor suggests that the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max will also be compatible. If true, that means the iOS 18 compatibility list would match the one for last year's iOS 17 update. And that'd be good news, as Apple usually drops support for older devices with each new iteration of iOS. For example, iOS 17 dropped support for the  iPhone 8 ,  iPhone 8 Plus  a

The iconic Canadian national police force, also known as the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP), suffered a recent data breach which temporarily knocked its website offline - but its operations, as well as citizens, should not be affected by the incident, it said. CBC says the RCMP sent a breach notification letter to its employees following the attack, explaining what had happened, with a spokesperson for the law enforcement organization confirming the news to media shortly afterwards. "The situation is evolving quickly but at this time, there is no impact on RCMP operations and no known threat to the safety and security of Canadians," the RCMP spokesperson said. Missing details "While a breach of this magnitude is alarming, the quick work and mitigation strategies put in place demonstrate the significant steps the RCMP has taken to detect and prevent these types of threats." The Office of the Privacy Commissioner (OPC) was reportedly notified of the attac

It's time for your daily dose of Quordle hints, plus the answers for both the main game and the Daily Sequence spin off.  Quordle is the only one of the many Wordle clones that I'm still playing now, around two years after the daily-word-game craze hit the internet, and with good reason: it's fun, but also difficult. What's more, its makers (now the online dictionary Merriam-Webster) are also keeping it fresh in the form of a variant called the Daily Sequence, which sees you complete four puzzles consecutively, rather than concurrently.  But Quordle is tough, so if you already find yourself searching for today's Wordle answer , you'll probably need some hints for this game too.  I'm a Quordle and Wordle fanatic who's been playing since December 2021, so I can definitely help you solve Quordle today and improve your game for tomorrow. Read on for my Quordle hints to game #763 and the answers to the main game and Daily Sequence. SPOILER WARNING: Inf

Lenovo's Project Crystal may be the world's first transparent laptop, and I could not stop looking at it. Unveiled at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, Project Crystal is not entirely transparent like Wonder Woman's airplane, but the large ThinkBook does feature a transparent screen and transparent or glass-top keyboard. Where there would normally be a dark Lenovo ThinkPad-like frame, is just this vast expanse of glass that comes to life when you flip open the laptop. Lenovo explained that it's actually a transparent micro-LED screen sandwiched between two panes of Gorilla Glass, and all of it is held together with some transparent adhesive. The tech reminded me of the transparent microLED display Samsung showed me at CES 2024 . Despite being 55% transparent, the 720p visuals appeared quite sharp and color-rich on the Windows 11 system. I was particularly impressed with the looping video of a goldfish. The large, see-through display sits above a nano-opti

A new ‘always-on’ intelligent SIM card has been launched in partnership with global operators Deutsche Telekom IoT and Tele2 IoT. The world's first resilient SIM card, rSIM, is designed to check its own network connectivity and switch providers automatically when disruptions occur, minimizing the chances of the SIM and the device becoming disconnected during outages. rSIM effectively upgrades a single SIM device to a dual SIM one, by storing two independent mobile operator profiles. In addition to providing seamless roaming outside of a device’s home country, rSIM can be a useful solution for uninterrupted internet access. Always checking for outages The new SIM works by verifying the device's internet connection every 60 seconds. Should it begin to receive a series of failed tests it will wait five minutes to see if the problem is real and if it determines that it is, it will seamlessly switch to the second network. When the outage is over, it will switch back to the prim

The design elements in iOS don't often change – and when they do, it's not usually by much – but the upcoming iOS 18 software could indeed have a significantly updated look, according to one well-placed source. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman (via 9to5Mac ), Apple "is indeed working to update the design of iOS as early as this year". That doesn't give us much detail to work with, but it does suggest there will be noticeably different visuals. Gurman – usually reliable when it comes to predicting Apple's moves – was in part responding to rumors that iOS 18 would borrow some design inspiration from visionOS on the Apple Vision Pro. That "total overhaul" isn't happening, says Gurman, though it sounds as though Apple may get part of the way there in 2024. New versions of iOS are usually unveiled at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in June, so we don't have too long to wait to see what Apple's been working on

If you're a fan of high-end laptops no doubt you've heard that Dell has just released a new line of gorgeous 14-inch and 16-inch XPS models. With a design that's reminiscent of last year's Dell XPS 13 Plus, these models are shaping up to be a fantastic option for those who want a lightweight and stylish Windows machine. They are pricey, however, with the 14-inch model starting at a hefty $1,499 for the baseline Core Ultra i7 / 512GB SSD configuration. Our hands-on Dell XPS 14 review has been positive so far, but those looking for a cheaper alternative should definitely check out this week's deals at Dell on the older XPS models. Right now, for example, you can get up to $500 off these exceptional machines with Black Friday-level deals. Sure, they may lack the shiny new trackpad-less design, but some of these models boast some serious specs for the money. The Core i7 Dell XPS 13 sits at just $799 (was $999) currently, and you can even pick up the baseline Core i

It's hard to imagine the notch on the iPhone 14 or the Dynamic Island on the iPhone 15 looking any different than they currently do, but of course there will have been a full design and review process behind them – and some unused ideas just leaked out. According to information obtained by MacRumors , a variety of different designs were explored before the ones that we now have got finalized. Some mockup images have also been put together to show how the rejected ideas would've looked. One of the ideas apparently under consideration was a pop-up sidebar down the right of the screen, to go alongside the notch – a sidebar that would be used to show the time, signal strength, battery level, and other bits of key information. Apple also reportedly thought about extending the notch all the way across the top of the screen – so less a notch, more an Android-style status bar – which may have had the added benefit of giving users a little bit more battery life. A design for life

You might not be too familiar with Loongson, but it has been developing computer processors since 2000, and in China the company is widely viewed as the grandfather of domestic CPUs. The launch of Loongson 1 in 2002 was China's first independently developed general-purpose CPU, using the MIPS III instruction set. in 2020 Loongson transitioned from the MIPS instruction set to its independent instruction set, LoongArch (which is widely viewed as being a clone of MIPS). The first LoongArch-supported processor, the 3A5000, debuted in 2021, marking the beginning of the Loongson ecosystem's Dragon architecture era. The 3A6000, a follow-up product of the 3A5000, is the second-generation processor using the LoongArch instruction set. Fabricated on a 12nm process it has four cores and eight threads capable of boosting to 2.5GHz under a 50 watt TDP. It has an L2 cache of 256KB and an L3 cache of 16MB, and is compatible with DDR4-3200 RAM. Hit and miss performance In a recent video r

I started casually learning Hindi and Arabic on Duolingo - and I mean very casually - almost a year ago. 316 days ago, to be exact, if you go off my Duolingo streak. As I was learning, I found myself getting a bit bored with the repetitive lessons, and was only really doing one lesson a day for a while purely to keep my streak going, hoping it would get a bit more interesting the further in I got. I almost abandoned the whole app - until Duolingo Music was announced. Late last year, Duolingo launched its music learning program , initially geared toward piano. The lessons focus on basic music theory, learning note placement on a keyboard, and building and improving your ability to sight-read music notes. This was incredibly lucky for me, because I had started taking piano lessons just a few months earlier! It’s been a dream of mine to learn how to play the piano, and while I felt a bit intimidated by the idea of learning an instrument as an adult, I had been thoroughly enjoying myse

When an AI doesn't know history, you can't blame the AI. It always comes down to the data, programming, training, algorithms, and every other bit of built-by-humans technology. It's all that and our perceptions of the AI's "intentions" on the other side. When Google's recently rechristened Gemini (formerly Bard) started spitting out people of color to represent caucasian historical figures , people quickly assessed something was off. For Google's part, it noted the error and pulled all people generation capabilities off Gemini until it could work out a solution. It wasn't too hard to figure out what happened here. Since the early days of AI, and by that I mean 18 months ago, we've been talking about inherent and baked-in AI biases that, often unintentionally, come at the hand of programmers who train the large language and large image models on data that reflects their experiences and, perhaps, not the world's. Sure, you'll have a s

Back in 2022, Google Wallet pretty much replaced Google Pay as the main tap-and-go app for the tech giant – except in several countries including the US. But a recent announcement is finally putting an end to the payment app. Google Pay will be discontinued on June 4, 2024 in the US and in most other regions other than Singapore and India, according to the official Google blog . For those who still use Pay, Google asserts that Wallet offers the same features as well as new ones such as digital items like transit cards, driver’s licenses, state IDs, and more. Google states that Google Wallet is “used five times more than the Google Pay app in the U.S.,” meaning that most users seem to have made the transition already.  If you’re using the Google Pay app right now, however, you can still view and transfer your balance until the cutoff point, which includes transferring it over to your bank account. After the cutoff point, you can only transfer balances to bank accounts through the G

Japanese tech giant Dynabook has unveiled a new 14-inch notebook, the Dynabook R9 .  Available in a stylish Dark Tech Blue color, the new device is powered by a Core Ultra 7 155H CPU and Intel Arc Graphics GPU, and weighs only 1.04kg/2.29lbs, potentially making it the lightest laptop of its kind. The new R9 sports a 14-inch display (1920 x 1200) and comes with 32GB of LPDDR5X RAM, and a 512GB NVMe SSD. It features a range of ports, including two USB 3.2 (Gen1) Type-A, two Thunderbolt 4 (USB4) Type-C, HDMI, microSD card slot and audio input/output. Connectivity is provided in the form of Gigabit Ethernet, Wi-Fi 6E, and Bluetooth 5.3. Copilot ready There’s a 920,000-pixel (VGA) webcam with privacy slider and a fingerprint sensor. Plus the keyboard includes a dedicated Microsoft Copilot key so you can summon Microsoft's new AI assistant with a single tap. The R9 comes with four Dolby Atmos compatible speakers and, for a bit of variety, there are twin microphones at the top of th

Massively popular audio editing tool Audacity is getting a major upgrade thanks to Intel.  The tech giant has developed a suite of OpenVINO plugins for Audacity, bringing a number of AI-powered editing features to the software. These AI plugins, which run entirely on your PC, include noise suppression and transcription for spoken word content, and generation and separation plugins for music. Windows only... for now The noise suppression feature functions similarly to Audacity 's own built-in Noise Removal effect, suppressing background noise for a clearer sound. The transcription tool, powered by Whisper.cpp, can transcribe and translate words, outputting to a label track. Users can export these transcriptions through the software's export feature. For music, the AI tools offer music generation and remixing capabilities using Stable Diffusion. The music separation feature can split a song into its vocal and instrumental parts, or into vocals, drums, bass, and a combined

Many of the most popular laptops and smartphones in use today could be vulnerable to two major security flaws that could result in identity theft , data exfiltration, business email compromise (BEC) and other risks, experts have warned.  This is according to cybersecurity researchers  at Top10VPN and Mathy Vanhoef, who found two separate vulnerabilities - one tracked as CVE-2023-52160, and another tracked as CVE-2023-52161.  With the latter, a threat actor would be able to join an otherwise protected Wi-Fi network, and target other devices connected to it with malware or infostealers. The former, on the other hand, is found in the default software Android uses to handle logging into wireless networks and allows hackers to create a malicious clone of legitimate networks. If a victim gets tricked into joining this malicious clone, their traffic can be hijacked. Patches available While the vulnerabilities sound ominous, they’re not that easy to exploit. For the first one, the targe