NETWORKING

ZDNET’s key takeaways The H2O Audio RIPT Ultra headphones are available on the H2O Audio page for $249 With outstanding battery life, 100% sweatproof, and smooth sound, the RIPT Ultra headphones are a great buy To get the best sound from these headphones, you really need to have ANC turned on. ANC stands for Active Noise Cancellation and is used mostly to keep you focused on your music (or other audio/video content) by blocking external…

ZDNET Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about pulling away from the cloud. The idea of a third party having all my information, data, content, images, and just about anything digital makes my spine shrink. There’s no way of knowing if or when one of those third parties might share my information with the wrong person or have it stolen from under their eyes. Something has to give. Also: The best cloud storage services That something…

Sabrina Ortiz/ZDNET Apple Sports is making it easier to catch your favorite team on television. Also: How to watch Super Bowl LIX for free online – and is Tubi legit? The free sports app, which debuted last spring, offers a simple way to keep track of your favorite teams. The main screen shows daily matchups and results, and you can swipe to see box scores, upcoming games, play-by-play results, and more. Last fall, it even added the…

David Gewirtz/ZDNET DeepSeek exploded into the world’s consciousness this past weekend. It stands out for three powerful reasons: It’s an AI chatbot from China, rather than the US It’s open source. It uses vastly less infrastructure than the big AI tools we’ve been looking at. Given the US government’s concerns over TikTok and possible Chinese government involvement in that code, a new AI emerging from China is bound to generate attention. ZDNET’s Radhika Rajkumar did…

The 3rd generation Amazon Echo Show is a great smart display and speaker combination for most smart home users, whether experienced or just getting started. Amazon’s newest Echo Show 8 boasts a sleeker design with edge-to-edge glass, a centrally placed camera for video calls, and spatial audio from the smaller speaker enclosure. I’ve been using the Echo Show 8 daily for almost a year, and this generation’s improved processor delivers faster performance than older models….

Since its debut in 2014, Amazon’s Alexa has become America’s leading voice assistant and smart home automation system. Alexa is built into millions of smart home devices, aiding users with everything from locking doors, dimming lights, playing songs, and even calling for help, all with a simple voice command.  Also: I used Amazon’s Echo Show 21 as my smart home hub – and it’s almost perfect Alexa is integrated into smart home devices like smart hubs,…

If a customer has an existing model or LLM, synthetic data provides additional data that is rich, labeled, and diverse to fine-tune the AI model. If a client does not have a model, the Synthetic Data Sets are designed to offer quick and privacy-compliant training data to create models from scratch, the vendor stated. Customers can deploy models on IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE with AI Toolkit for IBM Z and IBM LinuxONE, Cloud Pak for…

ZDNET In the name of beefing up Android security, Google has added a new feature called Identity Check that automatically locks sensitive settings behind biometric authentication.  How Identity Check works The feature works when you carry your phone beyond trusted locations. Once Identity Check kicks in, you’ll need to use biometric authentication to access saved passwords and passkeys, autofill passwords in apps, change screen lock and biometrics, factory reset your device, turn off Find My…

ZDNET The web is filled with resources, which makes it possible to find all the answers you need in one place, but this can also make finding exactly what you need a long and overwhelming process. Google’s Deep Research offering aims to help you manage that process — and it’s now rolling out on Android.  In December, Google announced several AI advancements and releases. One of the biggest standouts for everyday users is Deep Research,…

Vicki Jauron, Babylon and Beyond Photography/Getty Images Whether for developer needs or mundane tasks, the artificial intelligence (AI) tide appears to be turning in favor of open-source solutions.  On Tuesday, Block — the Jack Dorsey-founded company behind Square, Cash App, Tidal, and Afterpay — released a total rewrite of codename goose, its open-source AI developer agent previously available in beta. Released under the Apache License 2.0 (ASL2), codename goose offers “interoperability between user interfaces, language models, and…