Devices

More than half of America watches TV with subtitles on. It’s not your hearing. Here’s the free 2-minute fix and the gadgets that finish the job.

Turn it up, now it’s blasting, turn it down, have to rewind, “what did she SAY?” A survey found over half of Americans keep subtitles on, mostly because the audio is muddled. The real culprits: razor-thin TVs with speakers firing at the wall, theater sound mixes crammed into your living room and streaming compression.

Researchers tested 17,000 apps for secret eavesdropping. What they found instead should change your settings tonight.

It’s America’s most-argued tech question. You mention dog food once, and the ad shows up an hour later. Scientists tested 17,000 apps and found zero secret recordings. But one media firm bragged about “Active Listening” tech, Apple paid $95 million over Siri misfires, and 2,230 companies are quietly feeding Facebook your shopping habits. The way ads REALLY find you is creepier than a hot mic. Plus the 5-minute settings fix.

The best meteor shower of 2026 peaks tonight, and this year, the sky cooperates. Here’s how to watch and how to catch one with your phone.

Tonight, Earth plows through a comet’s dust trail: the Perseid meteor shower, up to 100 shooting stars an hour, visible from every state. This year’s peak lands on a new moon, the darkest viewing in years. When to look, where to look and the phone camera settings that can catch a falling star.

Your smart TV is taking snapshots of everything you watch, then selling the data

Your smart TV has a setting called ACR that’s spying on everything you watch. It’s on by default, and every brand buries it somewhere different in settings. Turn it off and nothing changes except the ads get dumber.

The always-on gadgets quietly draining your power bill, and the $10 fix

Every blinking clock and standby light is on your electric bill. A $10 gadget stops it and doubles as a burglar deterrent while you travel.

The internet isn’t in a cloud. It’s 600 cables on the ocean floor, and a single one is about as thick as a garden hose.

An estimated $10 trillion crosses these cables every day, and roughly 60 ships on the entire planet keep them running. Ship anchors do more damage than sharks ever have, and Starlink’s whole fleet still can’t match one cable’s capacity.

Your parents’ phone problems aren’t about the phone. They’re about having no one to ask.

A 20-minute setup stops half the panicked calls. A carrier with a real human who answers stops the rest, for your folks and for you.

Your carrier deletes voicemails automatically. Save the ones that matter tonight.

Your carrier isn’t a filing cabinet. AT&T keeps basic voicemail 14 days, T-Mobile says deleted messages “cannot be retrieved” and Verizon won’t take the blame even for ones you saved. Here’s how to turn a loved one’s message into a file you own forever, in a minute or so.

Foldable phones are finally going mainstream. Here’s what they are and who should buy one.

Samsung unveils its new folding lineup July 22, and Apple’s first folding iPhone lands this fall for north of $2,000. Here’s the plain-English guide to what a foldable is, who it’s for and who should wait.

Your phone is a magic star map. Here’s how to use it tonight.

No telescope, no chart, no clue what you’re looking at? Doesn’t matter. The free app already in your pocket names every star you point it at, and one trick lets you see the stars beneath your feet. Plus, the farthest thing your eyes can ever reach.

Give your sick computer a free AI checkup (without handing over your files)

Before you pay the Geek Squad $100 or panic-buy a laptop you don’t need, let AI read your computer’s own health report. Works on Windows and Mac. And it never touches your files.

Medical devices in your home are quietly reporting on you to your insurer, which can cost you more.

That CPAP machine? It tells your insurance company whether you used it enough. And it’s not the only device in your house keeping score. Here’s what’s phoning home while you sleep and what you can do about it.

Every color laser printer in America secretly encodes your identity on every page you print. Here’s what those dots say.

The Secret Service asked printer companies to embed invisible tracking dots on every page, starting in the 1980s. The dots reveal your printer’s serial number, the date and exact time of printing. The program never stopped.

Is Facebook spying on you? The truth is way worse than a microphone

I was on a call with my son. Never searched a thing. By morning, my Feed was full of ads for exactly what we discussed. Here’s what’s going on.

Four companies control your printer. And your wallet.

HP just bricked another batch of printers with a firmware lock. Here’s the part nobody talks about: Four companies run the entire printer market, and they’ve been charging you perfume prices for a decade.

5 things making all your tech miserable right now (and how to fix every one)

Your phone, computer, Wi-Fi, battery and sanity all need the same thing: five minutes and this list.

Four humans flew around the moon. Here’s the technology that got them there.

Yesterday, four humans flew 252,757 miles from Earth, swinging around the lunar far side in a spacecraft the size of a minibus. They broke a record that had stood since 1970 when Apollo 13 limped past the moon, trying to get its crew home alive. The Artemis II voyagers woke up to Chappell Roan’s “Pink […]

Every movie you bought on Apple TV, Amazon and Google Play can vanish overnight

When you buy a digital movie, you’re not buying anything. You’re renting it. Until you’re not. Here’s how to protect what you’ve already paid for.

Your router has an expiration date, and you probably already missed it

Most Americans are running routers that stopped getting security updates years ago. The FCC just made it a national security issue. Here’s what to do.

Your phone has an expiration date. Here’s how to find yours.

Right now, over a billion phones are running without security updates, and hackers know it. Your phone is probably fine. But you should check. Takes 30 seconds.