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Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Online shopping has never been perfect. If I’m online scouting for a good deal on a pair of shoes, I have to sort through several options, sizes, colors, and price points to find what I want. That takes time. And if I want to buy the shoes at a discount, I have to wait several weeks or months and come back when the price drops. Also: Everything announced at Google I/O…

In late 2024 and early 2025, several important data connections across the Baltic Sea were broken, including between Sweden and Lithuania. The cable breaks received a lot of attention and raised questions about the resiliency of undersea cables. Marija Furdek Prekratic, associate professor at Chalmers and researcher in optical networks, says that it is difficult to overestimate how important submarine cables are for the internet. “They provide strategically important connections between different continents and carry…

Google / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Google’s high-powered research assistant is getting its own app, and Android users are getting a first look. NotebookLM, which debuted last year, is a free AI research assistant (running on Gemini 2.0’s multimodal understanding capabilities) that helps you better understand any topic. You can give it a number of data sources, including PDF files, links to articles, YouTube video links, and Google Docs or Slides. Also: Google’s viral…

Dean McCarron, president of Mercury, said it’s not AMD stealing Intel business but mostly a case of AMD growing faster than Intel. “AMD’s growth rate in the quarter was multiples of Intel’s, resulting in significant server share gains,” he said in a research note. “Server processor shipments were definitively the stand-out segment in the first quarter results, growing sequentially in a seasonally down quarter and seeing substantial growth — nearly 20 percent — on an…

Allison Murray/ZDNET The Samsung Freestyle 2 is currently $200 off when you buy it at Amazon, making it cost just under $600.  Also: The best Memorial Day deals you can shop now ZDNET’s key takeaways The Samsung Freestyle 2 is a solid projector available for $800.  Sharp image quality, an internal battery, and the ability to play games without a console make this projector ultraportable.  The second-generation feature upgrades are geared toward gaming, which may not…

Adam Breeden/ZDNET OLED TVs are known for their unparalleled contrast and incredibly sharp and detailed images. LG’s OLED Evo C4 Series Smart TV, which we tested last year, is a perfect example. In some ways, it’s an even better value display than its more premium sibling, the LG G4 OLED. And right now, you can snag one for one of its lowest prices yet. The C4 series brings crisp 4K UHD resolution (3840 x 2160),…

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET The Amazon Rainforest is a dazzlingly vast and complex ecosystem, a six-million-square-kilometer world unto itself. Despite its central role in countless indigenous origin stories and traditions stretching back millennia, it’s largely been ignored by mainstream archaeology. Conventional thinking held that such an apparently raw and dynamic expanse of wilderness couldn’t possibly have played any important role in the cultural evolution of human beings. Also: OpenAI upgrades ChatGPT with Codex – and…

Another problem for enterprises deploying edge devices is that there’s usually a lack of IT expertise in these locations, Chow says. The Red Hat Edge Manager will address that skills gap with a user-friendly, simplified management environment, the company announced. The tool also supports onboarding, updates and decommissioning and is optimized for container-centric workflows on Podman, Docker, and Kubernetes. But while the Edge Manager might have wide application for many enterprises, it’s Red Hat’s release…