It may be one of the most popular dating sites out there, but eharmony imposes some seriously inconvenient limits on what non-paying members can do on the site. If you sign up with a free account, you'll be able to create a profile and answer their proprietary personality questionnaire, browse through the profiles of local singles, and even read profiles, but you won't be able to match with others or even view all of their profile photos.
If you like how the site operates and want to unlock its full potential, it's worth upgrading to one of their three paid membership tiers. Here's what those membership levels unlock and what they will cost you:
The most basic membership tier, Premium Light, will allow you to send Likes to hopefully match with other singles, view a single, high-resolution profile photo from other accounts, and apply more sophisticated search filters to eharmony members, in case you're looking for something very specific. With this membership, you'll also be allowed to send an unlimited number of messages to up to 15 of your matches each month. The Light membership will also unlock access to an AI-based assessment of your profile, with personalized tips on how to stand out more.
The cost of a Light plan varies significantly by your location, the duration of your commitment, and the promotional offers currently on the site, but expect to pay around $15 per month for a Light-tier membership.
If you decide to step up from a Light membership, the next tier available is Plus, which offers the same features as Light but increases the aforementioned messaging cap from 15 users to 30, and allows you to browse an unlimited number of high-resolution profile photos from matches and potential matches. Another cool feature of the Plus-tier membership: you'll be able to see who has visited your profile, even before they've interacted with you.
The cost of a Plus plan varies significantly by your location, the duration of your commitment, and the promotional offers currently on the site, but expect to pay around $17 per month for a Plus-tier membership.
If you're really enjoying eharmony and perhaps especially if you foresee yourself using the service over a longer period of time, the Unlimited membership offers some undeniably great perks, beginning with removing the messaging cap entirely (hence "unlimited"), allowing you to gab away to your heart's content with as many people as you match with. But one of the Unlimited membership's best features is also its most exclusive: you'll be the first to see new eharmony member profiles, so you have the opportunity to match with and message them first.
The cost of an Unlimited plan varies significantly by your location, the duration of your commitment, and the promotional offers currently on the site, but expect to pay around $19 per month for a Plus-tier membership.
Which membership tier is right for you? That's entirely down to your budget and dating needs, but we would wager most people would be perfectly happy with the Light membership tier, so we advise you to start there and step up if or when you desire.
Silo showrunner Graham Yost breaks down episode 9s bombshell ending and surprise musical guest"Silo" Season 3, episode 9 ends with a nuclear explosion and a surprise Peter Gabriel concert. Showrunner Graham Yost breaks it down.
Silo Season 3, episode 9 ended not with a bang, but with a nuclear blast that shook the show to its core.
In the episode's final sequence, congressman Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) and journalist Helen (Jessica Henwick), now expecting a child, visit the silos on their first day open to outside civilians. The event is ritzy as can be, complete with beautiful landscaping around the Silo entrances and a surprise Peter Gabriel concert. But something about it feels off. Why is shady operative Henry (Reed Birney) so intent on separating Daniel and Helen? Why won't Daniel's sister Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay) respond to Daniel's texts?
The wrongness comes to a head as Daniel and Helen try to reunite with one another. Just as they catch sight of each other on the berms ringing their respective silos, a nuclear bomb explodes in the distance. As the blast races towards them, Daniel is dragged back to Silo 1, and Helen's fate is left unknown. (Given that her Pez dispenser winds up in Silo 18, I'm betting she made it back inside.)
It's a harrowing sequence that finally reveals the calamity that blighted the area around all the silos and sets the stage for a potentially game-changing finale. Mashable spoke with Silo showrunner Graham Yost about the show's latest explosive twist, as well as AI's role in writing the Pact, Peter Gabriel's surprise concert, and whether Jimmy (Steve Zahn) could be one of Gabriel's long-lost descendants.
One detail of this episode that cracked me up but also gave me a bit of an existential crisis was the reveal that Anna (Morven Christie) and Victor (Matt Craven) "wrote" the Pact, which is such a foundational text for Silo residents, using AI. Tell me about including that detail, and how it speaks to the Founders' attitudes toward the Silo dwellers.
Graham Yost: I'll say, I don't use AI. But whenever I use Google, I'm using AI now, because I can ask a very specific question like, "How old was FDR's Secretary of State in 1940?" and up it comes. I don't have to find out who he was and then look at his life and do the math. So we all use AI now to a degree. I don't use it that much. I don't have an AI persona in my life, but a lot of people do. We felt that that was a cool way to explain how something like the Pact could be written.
There was one version where there was a team of social scientists who were building this and writing this, and then I was like, "No, let's just say it's AI." It became a joke, which was fun, and the fact that Victor kind of laughed at it, almost like it's not that important. What's important is what happens in the bigger story and how it's acted upon in the people's lives.
I think the last few minutes of episode 9 took years off my life, from the nuclear explosion to the lead up. For you, what do you think makes a truly great apocalypse scene, and how did you want to bring those qualities to life in Silo?
We had to just kind of do our own thing and set it aside. Fallout starts with a nuclear explosion, and Walton Goggins is there witnessing it. I wrote a movie called Broken Arrow which had an underground nuclear explosion which, for visual effects back in 1996, was pretty awesome, [with] the ground rising up and then sinking down. It's not new.
The trick for us was Helen and Daniel. That's what makes it. It's these two people that we've grown to love, and they're torn apart by it, so that was the story for us.
I'd love to hear more about building that dread around their separation, because as soon as he's being sent to Silo 1 and she's being sent to Silo 18, you know it's over.
That's Amber Templemore, our director. There's some stuff where we are so in sync, and sometimes she'll do things, [and I'll worry] "maybe that's too much." Then I see it, and I go, "No, we're doing a television series. We're trying to be entertaining. We're trying to do this." We have to thread this needle between hiding the ball and giving a hint that the ball is going to come rolling down.
Then Atli Örvarsson, our composer, when Daniel is sitting over at Silo 1 and he's texting Charlotte, Atli does this faint "ding." It's just this little sound, it's just this little thing, and it's also Ash [Zukerman]'s performance. Now you start to realize, and it builds. There's Reed Birney [who plays Henry] saying, "Daniel, you have to come with me," and people telling Helen, "You can't go up on [the berm]." You just know something bad is going to happen, and guess what? Something bad happens! It's a build in the script, it's a build in the design, it's a build by Amber.
I do have to say, this attack is very suspiciously timed to the first day the silos are open to civilians.
[laughs] What? That's weird.
So weird.
I don't know. We didn't think about that!
But it seems pretty obvious that something is going on. We see Per Stensen get a message as he leaves the stage. I'm curious, will we find out more about the actual events leading up to the bombing? Was it a part of his master plan?
[laughs] You'll have to pay to find that out.
I also loved the Peter Gabriel cameo. It feels like a full circle moment after using "Come Talk to Me" at the end of Season 3, episode 1. We learn that he and his family are living in Silo 17, so there's a chance Jimmy or the other kids are Peter Gabriel descendants. Can you canonically confirm or deny?
I can canonically confirm. There's a non-zero chance. We did not actually walk that through. There are some family bloodlines that we have discussed.
But the Gabriel thing goes back to Season 2, when Solo/Jimmy is trying to lure Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) back to the vault door because he wants to talk to her about something. He plays "Red Rain" by Peter Gabriel, so that music exists in Silo 17. That's why we knew he had to go into 17.
[Gabriel and I] got to know each other through the show. I'd approached him about something in Season 1, and it didn't work out. But we connected, and we'd been talking about other things. He ended up watching the show with his family, and they loved it. So I said, "Would you do this thing?" He said, "Yeah, I'm free. Can I bring my son, and can he can he bring his girlfriend?" I said, "Sure." So that's his son and his son's girlfriend at the side of the stage.
Will Smith, the showrunner on Slow Horses, he and I bonded over Peter Gabriel back in the early days of Slow Horses. So I told him, "Hey, you've got to come to set on this day." He'd been one other day because it's a fun set to visit, but this was outside. I didn't tell him [about Peter Gabriel]. We were walking from his car to set, and Peter's coming the other way to go to his trailer, and [Smith] says, "Is that him?" I said, "Yeah." He said, "Fuck me." So we got to hang out with Peter and his son and his son's girlfriend, just making a TV show. That was a fun day.
That's delightful. There's nothing like a Peter Gabriel performance before the end of the world.
And the song, "Here Comes the Flood." Reed Birney said to me on the day, "it's a little on the nose, isn't it?" I said, "Reed, we're doing a TV show. It is." Hopefully the audience doesn't realize when Peter's singing "say goodbye to flesh and blood" that in fact we're going to see a nuclear weapon go off later.
The interview above was edited for length and clarity.
Silo Season 3 is now streaming on Apple TV. The finale premieres Sept. 4.
Silo Season 3, episode 9s shocking ending, explained"Silo" Season 3, episode 9 ends with a shocking sequence showing the end of the world outside the silos. What happens, and what does it mean?
Well, that was unexpected.
Back in Silo Season 3, episode 7, we were finally shown the founders responsible for building the silos. In episode 8, we seemed to get a clue as to how the world might end — and now episode 9 has gone and turned the whole thing on its head.
So, what happens at the end of episode 9, and what does it all mean? Let's unpack it.
A lot happens in episode 9, from Bernard (Tim Robbins) being sent out to die to Camille (Alexandria Riley) having her faith in the mysterious algorithm shaken. The last half of the episode, though, is something else. We cut from chaos in the silo to our flashback storyline, only now we've jumped forward in time: Daniel (Ashley Zukerman) and Helen (Jessica Henwick) are expecting a baby, and they're visiting the now-complete silo system that Per Stensen (Colin Hanks) and Senator Thurman (Laura Innes) have been working on for the past three years.
In this future, the silos are already operational, and people have been living in them for the past year as part of the experiment. Daniel and Helen are there for a tour ahead of the grand unveiling. Only as they're shown around, it feels like there's a tension in the air — like the founders know more than they're letting on.
While Helen is led to Silo 18 (yep, that's our silo), Daniel is taken by Henry (Reed Birney) and Dr. Victor Crnkovich (Matt Craven) to Silo 1, where he meets with Senator Thurman and Per Stensen, who are busy practising their speeches.
Daniel's sister Charlotte (Jessica Brown Findlay), however, is nowhere to be found. And when Daniel texts her their family in-joke ("If mom and dad were alive right now..."), she sends the wrong response back.
Sensing something's off, Daniel gets Helen on the phone. She's walking up the ramp of Silo 18 to try and get a phone signal. Henry follows him, telling him he has to come back, but Daniel ignores him and climbs to the top of the silo's berm.
"I got a text from Charlotte, but I don't think she wrote it," he tells Helen through a crackling phone line. Finally, she reaches the top of Silo 18's berm, and they catch sight of each other in the distance. But midway through their exchange, everything suddenly turns white-red. There's a ringing sound. And once the light dims, we see the horrific sight of a mushroom cloud on the horizon. As Daniel struggles to reach Helen, he's wrestled back down towards Silo 1 by Henry and another guard, while a robotic voice tells them over and over again to seek shelter in the nearest silo.
At the end of the episode, it's unclear whether he, or Helen, have survived.
Yes, that much at least seems clear. The mushroom cloud on the horizon looked like a nuclear missile, presumably the event that triggers a global apocalypse and turns the planet into the wasteland Juliette (Rebecca Ferguson) and the others see outside in the present day.
What's interesting is the event isn't what we thought it was going to be: In episode 8, Per Stensen seems convinced that nanotechnology is the biggest threat to humanity — but it appears he was wrong after all.
This is the big question we still don't have the answer to. In episode 8, Stensen says Iran and the U.S. are at war with each other over Iran's development of nanoweapons, so instinctively you might suspect Iran is behind the explosion.
But if that's the case, why are so many of the founders — and those closest to them — acting as if they know something's about to happen? Charlotte's partner Anna (Morven Christie), who is also the daughter of Senator Thurman, looks distant throughout the episode, insisting they need to get to the silos early and looking awkward when Daniel suggests they do breakfast the following day. Per Stensen seems distracted. And Henry immediately tries to bring Daniel back to Silo 1 when he wanders away on the phone. What do they know that Daniel and Helen don't?
And if they do know about an impending nuclear attack, why has nobody informed U.S. intelligence agencies? Why are they just letting it happen?
One final thing worth pointing out is a throwaway line from Helen's Silo 18 tour guide, who cheerfully tells her about the silo's capabilities.
"This silo was built to withstand a 30-megaton nuclear explosion as close as two miles," he says. Given what happens a short time later, that seems awfully specific. The silo was built to withstand a nuclear explosion in very close proximity — which is exactly what ends up happening. Surely that's too much of a coincidence?
The ancient document known as The Pact is something akin to a bible for residents of the silo, and now we finally know who was behind it: Anna Thurman and psychologist Dr. Crnkovich, who apparently wrote it together as a kind of psychological survival manual.
"It's some crazy shit she and Dr. C wrote," Charles tells Helen the night before the silo visit. "It is a book of rules about how to live underground for 500 years without killing each other."
Dr. Crnkovich later tells Daniel that the silo project is largely about "managing mass trauma."
He does admit, though, that he and Anna didn't write the whole thing by themselves.
"To be honest, AI wrote it," he says. "We just did some editing."
Although we don't see either of them making it to safety, both Helen and Daniel are close to the entrances of Silo 18 and Silo 1, respectively, when the nuclear explosion hits. Given that they're both main characters, it seems unlikely that their journeys end here. So, what's next?
Well, the fact that Helen ends up in Silo 18 is surely no coincidence. Although the apocalypse takes place hundreds of years before the events we've witnessed in present-day Silo 18, the fact that Helen is pregnant could mean her descendants are still alive in the future. Could she and Daniel be related to one of the main characters in Juliette's Silo 18?
Daniel, meanwhile, is last seen being dragged towards Silo 1, the core silo that we now know acts as a kind of central hub for the whole silo system. Given the way Henry separates him and Helen at the start of the tour, it seems clear that Daniel has been marked out for Silo 1 intentionally, likely for his engineering brain.
If he survives, our guess is the founders will have had a specific use in mind for him.
Silo Season 3 is streaming now on Apple TV, with new episodes dropping every Friday.
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How to watch Lille vs. PSG online for freeHow to watch Ligue 1 for free. Live steam Lille vs. PSG in Ligue 1 for free from anywhere in the world.
TL;DR: Watch Lille vs. PSG in Ligue 1 for free on CazéTV. Access this free livestream from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN.
Ligue 1 has only just kicked off, but we're already getting one of the biggest matchups on the schedule. Last year's Ligue 1 champions PSG visit Lille, a team that finished third last season and beat Angers in their opening game.
It's not been a hugely impressive start for PSG. They lost to RC Lens in the Trophee des Champions and scraped a draw against Rennes in their season opener. Can PSG get back on track and score their first win of the season?
If you're interested in watching Lille vs. PSG in Ligue 1 from anywhere in the world, we've got all the information you need.
Lille vs. PSG in Ligue 1 kicks off at 2:45 p.m. ET on Aug. 28. This fixture takes place at the Stade Pierre-Mauroy.
Lille vs. PSG in Ligue 1 is available to live stream for free on CazéTV.
CazéTV is geo-restricted to Brazil, but anyone can secure access with a VPN. These tools can hide your real IP address (digital location) and connect you to a secure server in Brazil, meaning you can live stream Lille vs. PSG for free from anywhere in the world.
Live stream Lille vs. PSG for free by following these simple steps:
Sign up for a streaming-friendly VPN (we recommend ExpressVPN)
Download the app to your device of choice
Open up the app and connect to a server in Brazil
Visit CazéTV
Watch Lille vs. PSG for free from anywhere in the world
The best VPNs for streaming are not free, but they do tend to offer generous money-back guarantees. By leveraging these offers, you can watch Lille vs. PSG without committing your cash. This is obviously not a long-term strategy, but it gives you enough time to stream this fixture (plus Premier League action) before recovering your investment.
ExpressVPN is the best choice for bypassing geo-restrictions to stream live sport on CazéTV, for a number of reasons:
Servers in 105 countries, including Brazil
Easy-to-use app available on all major devices, including iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, and more
Strict no-logging policy so your data is secure
Fast connection speeds free from throttling
Up to 10 simultaneous connections
30-day money-back guarantee
A two-year subscription to ExpressVPN is on sale for $68.40 and includes an extra four months for free — 81% off for a limited time. This plan includes a year of free unlimited cloud backup and usually offers a generous 30-day money-back guarantee. Alternatively, you can get a one-month plan for just $12.99.
Live stream Lille vs. PSG for free from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN.
Scams dont look like scams anymore. Heres what to watch forAs scammers become increasingly sophisticated, staying vigilant online has never been more important.
For years, spotting a scam was supposed to be a cinch. The email came from a suspicious address, the spelling was primary school level, the promise was hilariously unlikely, and somewhere in the middle sat a link that was an alphanumeric stew. Ignore it, delete that, and carry on. Right?
That advice still has some value, but it no longer tells the whole story. Modern scams are increasingly designed to look like something you'd expect to receive, whether that's a delivery notification, a message from your bank, an account alert, or a conversation with someone you know.
The trick isn't necessarily convincing you that a canon life event is happening. It's convincing you that something completely ordinary is occurring, then getting you to react before you stop to question it.
A fake parcel notification doesn't need to promise you a billion dollars; it only needs to arrive on the same afternoon you're actually waiting for a delivery. A fraudulent banking message doesn't need an elaborate story when it can simply claim there's been a dodgy transaction and ask you to investigate.
Scammers create a familiar situation, introduce a small problem or opportunity, then give you a straightforward way to resolve it.
Scammers aren't necessarily trying to beat you at a game of intelligence. They're trying to control the circumstances in which you make a decision.
One of the most useful warning signs is also one of the oldest: pressure.
Messages telling you to act immediately, warning that an account will be kiboshed, claiming that a payment has bounced, or suggesting an opportunity will disappear are designed to short-circuit the bit of your brain that would normally ask whether the message makes sense.
The warning sign is being pushed towards a decision before you've had time to verify what's happening.
If a message claims to be from your bank, don't use the phone number or link supplied in it. Open the bank's official app or website yourself. If someone appears to be contacting you on behalf of a company, find that company's contact details independently.
It might take another minute. That's precisely the point.
Rubbish spelling, strange formatting and laughably suspicious URLs remain useful clues, but they're no longer a complete defence.
Generative AI has made it easier to produce polished, convincing text, while scammers can combine legitimate branding, copied websites and familiar language to make fraudulent communications look considerably more professional than the phishing attempts many of us grew up recognising.
A message can look exactly like something sent by a company you use regularly and still have nothing to do with that company. The more convincingly something imitates the familiar, the more important it becomes to verify the request itself rather than judging its appearance.
Sometimes the most revealing part of a scam isn't the message itself but the action it wants you to take.
Be particularly cautious when an unexpected communication asks for passwords, financial information or authentication codes. The same goes for requests to install software, grant remote access, scan an unfamiliar QR code, move a conversation elsewhere, or make a payment using an unusual method.
The warning sign is an unexpected request combined with pressure, secrecy or a story that makes it difficult to verify.
If you normally log into your bank through its app, but someone suddenly asks you to follow a link in a text message instead, stop. If a supplier suddenly wants payment sent to a new account, don't simply reply to the email to check. Contact the supplier using details you already trust.
The safest response to an unusual request is often not to solve it faster, but to step outside the conversation and verify it independently.
Impersonation scams add another layer because familiarity itself can become part of the attack.
A message appearing to come from a friend, relative, colleague or manager carries an advantage that a random phishing email doesn't. You already have a reason to trust the person, so your brain doesn't have to start from zero.
That doesn't mean interrogating every text from your family as though you're conducting a cybercrime investigation. It means unusual requests should remain unusual, even when they come from someone you recognise.
If a family member suddenly needs money, a colleague asks for sensitive information, or someone you know wants an unexpected action, verify it through another channel. A quick phone call can be considerably more reliable than analysing whether a message sounds like something that person would write.
That's where another layer of protection can help. Bitdefender Scam Protection is designed to detect and block scams across email, browsers, messages and other apps, with features including Web Scam Protection, SMS and chat protection, and Scam Radar.
For those moments when you're staring at a message and aren't sure, Bitdefender Scamio provides another option. The free AI-powered scam detector lets you submit a suspicious message, email, link, QR code, image or screenshot for analysis.
The more useful habit is to notice when something is trying to rush you into doing something outside your normal routine.
Stop before clicking. Check through a separate channel. Don't use contact details supplied by the suspicious message. And if you're still unsure, ask someone you trust rather than letting the person on the other end make the decision for you.
During Scam Awareness Week, that's probably the most useful thing to remember: when something online suddenly makes you feel that you need to act right now, take a moment and ask yourself why.
That pause could be the difference between closing a suspicious message and spending the next several weeks trying to undo what happened.
For another layer of protection across your devices, explore Bitdefender's Scam Protection products, including Scamio and Scam Radar.
How to watch the Premier League online for freeHow to watch Premier League for free. Live stream the 2026-27 Premier League for free from anywhere in the world.
TL;DR: Live stream select Premier League fixtures for free on CazéTV (Manchester City vs. Bournemouth on Aug. 23). Access these free live streams from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN.
We've been treated to some truly special sporting moments this summer, but nothing really came close to the 2026 World Cup. This tournament delivered in so many ways: we saw huge performances from big names like Haaland, we got shock results like Cape Verde stealing a draw from eventual champions Spain, and there was heaps of controversy, as usual.
Now that domestic seasons are back, are we fatigued from a summer of sport? Absolutely not. We're impatient for rivalries to be renewed in some of the most competitive leagues in the world. And if we're talking truly unpredictable action from elite clubs in incredibly passionate stadiums, it's tough to beat the Premier League.
How will Arsenal cope with the pressure of being champions? Will Manchester City bounce back from the loss of iconic manager Pep Guardiola? Can Manchester United finally recapture some of their former glories? There are so many questions to be answered as the Premier League returns.
If you want to watch the 2026-27 Premier League for free from anywhere in the world, we have all the information you need.
The Premier League is the highest level of the English football league system. The league is contested by 20 clubs, with each team playing 38 fixtures: two against each other, one home and one away.
The defending champions are Arsenal.
The opening match round of the 2026/27 Premier League season will start on Aug. 21. The season runs until the final round of fixtures on May 30.
CazéTV will be showing select Premier League fixtures for free on their YouTube channel.
These free live streams are geo-restricted to Brazil, but anyone can bypass these restrictions with a VPN. These tools can hide your real IP address (digital location) and connect you to a secure server in Brazil, meaning you can unblock free live streams of the Premier League from anywhere in the world.
Access free live streams of the 2026-27 Premier League by following these simple steps:
Subscribe to a streaming-friendly VPN (we recommend ExpressVPN)
Download the app to your device of choice (the best VPNs have apps for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, and more)
Open up the app and connect to a server in Brazil
Visit CazéTV
Watch Premier League fixtures for free from anywhere in the world
The best VPNs for streaming are not free, but leading VPNs do tend to offer free-trial periods or money-back guarantees. By leveraging these offers, you can gain access to free live streams of the Premier League without committing your cash. This is obviously not a long-term solution, but it does give you time to watch select fixtures (plus coverage of Ligue 1 and La Liga) before recovering your investment.
If you want to retain permanent access to free live streams all season, you will need a subscription. Fortunately, the best VPN for live sport is on sale for a limited time.
ExpressVPN is the best service for bypassing geo-restrictions to stream for free on CazéTV, for a number of reasons:
Servers in 105 countries, including Brazil
Easy-to-use app available on all major devices, including iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, and more
Strict no-logging policy so your data is always secure
Fast connection speeds
Up to 10 simultaneous connections
30-day money-back guarantee
A two-year subscription to ExpressVPN is on sale for $68.40 and includes an extra four months for free — 80% off for a limited time. This plan includes a year of free unlimited cloud backup and a generous 30-day money-back guarantee. Alternatively, you can get a one-month plan for just $12.99 (with a money-back guarantee).
Live stream the Premier League for free from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN.
NYT Connections hints today: Meanings for each word for Aug. 28, 2026Why is NYT Connections trending today? Explaining the meanings behind the clues for NYT Connections #1174.
Looking for spoiler-free NYT Connections hints or just wondering why Connections is trending today? We've got what you need to understand the clues for today's puzzle without spoiling any of the answers.
Of course, Mashable has also provided daily hints and answers for Connections, Wordle, and Strands for years, so we can help you if that's also what you need.
While we are focused more on meanings than hints in this story, sometimes learning that many of the words have completely unrelated meanings is a clue in and of itself. Connections frequently includes clues that involve words within words and other visual clues.
The time between sunset and sunrise.
A reassuring phrase to calm someone.
A phrase used to wish someone a good night's rest.
A phrase used to wish someone a peaceful sleep.
A nickname, short for "brother."
Written in secret.
A specific time period.
To go all in.
A unit of time, measured in 60 minutes.
A straight path.
The earliest part of the day.
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A nickname for a father.
A maternal parent.
Midday.
A nickname for one's sister.
The number one (of something).
Have you learned the meanings and still want the things? Check out the hints and answers for today's NYT Connections puzzle.
Are you also playing NYT Strands? Get all the Strands hints you need for today's puzzle.
Meet The Mashable 101: Our list of the content creators shaping the internet today
If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to yesterday's Connections.
NYT Connections Sports Edition today: Hints and answers for August 28, 2026Connections: Sports Edition is a New York Times word game about finding common sports threads between words. How to solve the day's puzzle.
Today's Connections: Sports Edition will be easier if you're a fan of baseball.
As we've shared in previous hints stories, this is a version of the popular New York Times word game that seeks to test the knowledge of sports fans.
Like the original Connections, the game is all about finding the "common threads between words." And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight, and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier — so we've served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.
If you just want to be told today's puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for the latest Connections solution. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.
The NYT's latest daily word game has launched in association with The Athletic, the New York Times property that provides the publication's sports coverage. The sports Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.
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Each puzzle features 16 words, and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there's only one correct answer.
If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake — players get up to four mistakes before the game ends.
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Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.
Want a hint about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:
Yellow: Slugging
Green: Schools in the heart of dixie country
Blue: The Terminator
Purple: Legendary #8
Need a little extra help? Today's connections fall into the following categories:
Yellow: Stats for a Hitter
Green: Alabama Schools
Blue: Associated with Erling Haaland
Purple: Famous Number 8s
Looking for Wordle today? Here's the answer to today's Wordle.
Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today's puzzle before we reveal the solutions.
Drumroll, please!
The solution to today's Connections: Sports Edition #704 is...
Stats for a Hitter: BATTING AVERAGE, HOME RUNS, RBIS, RUNS
Alabama Schools: ALABAMA, AUBURN, TROY, UAB
Associated with Erling Haaland: GOALS, MANCHESTER CITY, NORWAY, ZEN POSE
Famous Number 8s: AIKMAN, BERRA, JACKSON, OVECHKIN
Don't feel down if you didn't manage to guess it this time. There will be new sports Connections for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we'll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.
Are you also playing NYT Strands? See hints and answers for today's Strands.
If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to yesterday's Connections.
NYT Pips hints, answers for August 28, 2026The New York Times' latest game, Pips, brings domino fun to your desktop. How to play Pips as well as hints in case you get stuck.
Welcome to your guide to Pips, the latest game in the New York Times catalog.
Released in August 2025, Pips puts a unique spin on dominoes, creating a fun single-player experience that could become your next daily gaming habit.
Currently, if you're stuck, the game only offers to reveal the entire puzzle, forcing you to move on to the next difficulty level and start over. However, we have you covered! Below are piecemeal answers that will serve as hints so that you can find your way through each difficulty level.
If you've ever played dominoes, you'll have a passing familiarity with how Pips is played. As we've shared in our previous hints stories for Pips, the tiles, like dominoes, are placed vertically or horizontally and connect with each other. The main difference between a traditional game of dominoes and Pips is the color-coded conditions you have to address. The touching tiles don't necessarily have to match.
The conditions you have to meet are specific to the color-coded spaces. For example, if it provides a single number, every side of a tile in that space must add up to the number provided. It is possible — and common — for only half a tile to be within a color-coded space.
Here are common examples you'll run into across the difficulty levels:
Number: All the pips in this space must add up to the number.
Equal: Every domino half in this space must be the same number of pips.
Not Equal: Every domino half in this space must have a completely different number of pips.
Less than: Every domino half in this space must add up to less than the number.
Greater than: Every domino half in this space must add up to more than the number.
If an area does not have any color coding, it means there are no conditions on the portions of dominoes within those spaces.
Number (2): Everything in this space must add up to 2. The answer is 0-2, placed horizontally.
Number (2): Everything in this space must add up to 2. The answer is 2-3, placed vertically.
Greater Than (2): Everything in this space must be greater than 2. The answer is 0-5, placed horizontally.
Less Than (1): Everything in this space must be less than 1. The answer is 0-2, placed horizontally; 0-0, placed vertically; 0-5, placed horizontally.
Number (2): Everything in this space must add up to 2. The answer is 1-1, placed vertically.
Number (3): Everything in this space must add up to 3. The answer is 3-3, placed horizontally.
Less Than (5): Everything in this space must be less than 5. The answer is 4-0, placed horizontally.
Equal (3): Everything in this space must be equal to 3. The answer is 3-3, placed horizontally; 3-5, placed vertically.
Greater Than (5): Everything in this space must be greater than 5. The answer is 4-6, placed horizontally.
Less Than (3): Everything in this space must be less than 3. The answer is 1-6, placed horizontally.
Number (11): Everything in this space must add up to 11. The answer is 1-6, placed horizontally; 3-5, placed vertically.
Equal (4): Everything in this space must be equal to 4. The answer is 4-0, placed horizontally; 4-6, palced horizontally; 4-5, placed vertically.
Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 3-1, placed horizontally.
Less Than (6): Everything in this space must be less than 6. The answer is 4-5, placed vertically.
Number (1): Everything in this space must add up to 1. The answer is 1-4, placed horizontally.
Greater Than (10): Everything in this space must be greater than 10. The answer is 5-2, placed vertically; 6-1, placed horizontally.
Number (1): Everything in this space must add up to 1. The answer is 6-1, placed horizontally.
Number (7): Everything in this space must add up to 7. The answer is 3-5, placed vertically; 4-0, placed vertically.
Number (0): Everything in this space must add up to 0. The answer is 0-0, placed vertically.
Number (5): Everything in this space must add up to 5. The answer is 5-6, placed horizontally.
Number (10): Everything in this space must add up to 10. The answer is 1-4, placed horizontally; 5-6, placed horizontally.
Number (2): Everything in this space must add up to 2. The answer is 5-2, placed vertically.
Number (0): Everything in this space must add up to 0. The answer is 0-6, placed horizontally.
Number (11): Everything in this space must add up to 11. The answer is 0-6, placed horizontally; 3-5, placed vertically.
Number (3): Everything in this space must add up to 3. The answer is 3-1, placed vertically.
Number (2): Everything in this space must add up to 2. The answer is 4-0, placed vertically; 2-0, placed vertically.
Equal (1): Everything in this space must be equal to 1. The answer is 3-1, placed vertically; 1-2, placed horizontally.
Number (7): Everything in this space must add up to 7. The answer is 1-2, placed horizontally; 5-0, placed horizontally.
Less Than (2): Everything in this space must be less than 2. The answer is 5-0, placed horizontally; 1-0, placed horizontally; 2-0, placed vertically.
If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
NYT Connections hints today: Clues, answers for August 28, 2026Connections is a New York Times word game that's all about finding the "common threads between words." How to solve the puzzle.
The NYT Connections puzzle today is not too difficult if you're Gen Z.
Connections is the one of the most popular New York Times word games that's captured the public's attention. The game is all about finding the "common threads between words." And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier—so we've served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.
If you just want to be told today's puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for today's Connections solution. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.
The NYT's latest daily word game has become a social media hit. The Times credits associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu with helping to create the new word game and bringing it to the publications' Games section. Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.
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Each puzzle features 16 words and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise of anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there's only one correct answer.
If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake—players get up to four mistakes until the game ends.
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Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.
Want a hint about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:
Yellow: "Don't let the bed bugs bite!"
Green: Front to back
Blue: Gen Z slang
Purple: At the peak
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Need a little extra help? Today's connections fall into the following categories:
Yellow: Bedtime parting words
Green: Palindromes
Blue: Modern add-ons/combining forms
Purple: Top of the ___
Looking for Wordle today? Here's the answer to today's Wordle.
Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today's puzzle before we reveal the solutions.
Drumroll, please!
The solution to today's Connections #1174 is...
Bedtime parting words: NIGHT, REST EASY, SLEEP TIGHT, SWEET DREAMS
Palindromes: MOM, NOON, SIS, TOP SPOT
Modern add-ons/combining forms: BRO, CODED, ERA, MAXXING
Top of the ___: HOUR, LINE, MORNING, POPS
Are you also playing NYT Strands? Get all the Strands hints you need for today's puzzle.
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If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to yesterday's Connections.
NYT Strands hints, answers for August 28, 2026The NYT Strands hints and answers you need to make the most of your puzzling experience.
Today's NYT Strands hints are easy if you're a historian.
Strands, the New York Times' elevated word-search game, requires the player to perform a twist on the classic word search. Words can be made from linked letters — up, down, left, right, or diagonal, but words can also change direction, resulting in quirky shapes and patterns. Every single letter in the grid will be part of an answer. There's always a theme linking every solution, along with the "spangram," a special, word or phrase that sums up that day's theme, and spans the entire grid horizontally or vertically.
By providing an opaque hint and not providing the word list, Strands creates a brain-teasing game that takes a little longer to play than its other games, like Wordle and Connections.
If you're feeling stuck or just don't have 10 or more minutes to figure out today's puzzle, we've got all the NYT Strands hints for today's puzzle you need to progress at your preferred pace.
The words are adjectives related to history.
These words describe a historical speech.
Today's NYT Strands spangram is horizontal.
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Today's spangram is I Have a Dream.
Freedom
Justice
I Have a Dream
Brotherhood
Together
Meet The Mashable 101: Our list of the content creators shaping the internet today
Looking for other daily online games? Mashable's Games page has more hints, and if you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now!
Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to yesterday's Strands.
Wordle today: Answer, hints for August 28, 2026Here's the answer for "Wordle" #1896 on August 28 as well as a few hints, tips, and clues to help you solve it yourself.
Today's Wordle answer should be easy to solve if you're in development.
If you just want to be told today's word, you can jump to the bottom of this article for today's Wordle solution revealed. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.
Originally created by engineer Josh Wardle as a gift for his partner, Wordle rapidly spread to become an international phenomenon, with thousands of people around the globe playing every day. Alternate Wordle versions created by fans also sprang up, including battle royale Squabble, music identification game Heardle, and variations like Dordle and Quordle that make you guess multiple words at once.
Wordle eventually became so popular that it was purchased by the New York Times, and TikTok creators even livestream themselves playing.
The best Wordle starting word is the one that speaks to you. But if you prefer to be strategic in your approach, we have a few ideas to help you pick a word that might help you find the solution faster. One tip is to select a word that includes at least two different vowels, plus some common consonants like S, T, R, or N.
The entire archive of past Wordle puzzles was originally available for anyone to enjoy whenever they felt like it, but it was later taken down, with the website's creator stating it was done at the request of the New York Times. However, the New York Times then rolled out its own Wordle Archive, available only to NYT Games subscribers.
It might feel like Wordle is getting harder, but it actually isn't any more difficult than when it first began. You can turn on Wordle's Hard Mode if you're after more of a challenge, though.
Adolescent.
The letter E appears twice.
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Today's Wordle starts with the letter T.
Get your last guesses in now, because it's your final chance to solve today's Wordle before we reveal the solution.
Drumroll please!
The solution to today's Wordle is...
TWEEN
Don't feel down if you didn't manage to guess it this time. There will be a new Wordle for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we'll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.
Are you also playing NYT Strands? See hints and answers for today's Strands.
Reporting by Chance Townsend, Caitlin Welsh, Sam Haysom, Amanda Yeo, Shannon Connellan, Cecily Mauran, Mike Pearl, and Adam Rosenberg contributed to this article.
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If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to yesterday's Wordle.
Hurdle hints and answers for August 28, 2026Hints and answers to today's Hurdle all in one place.
If you like playing daily word games like Wordle, then Hurdle is a great game to add to your routine.
There are five rounds to the game. The first round sees you trying to guess the word, with correct, misplaced, and incorrect letters shown in each guess. If you guess the correct answer, it'll take you to the next hurdle, providing the answer to the last hurdle as your first guess. This can give you several clues or none, depending on the words. For the final hurdle, every correct answer from previous hurdles is shown, with correct and misplaced letters clearly shown.
An important note is that the number of times a letter is highlighted from previous guesses does necessarily indicate the number of times that letter appears in the final hurdle.
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If you find yourself stuck at any step of today's Hurdle, don't worry! We have you covered.
To frighten.
SCARE
A celebration.
PARTY
Additional.
OTHER
A dwelling.
HOUSE
Audibly.
ALOUD
If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
GTA 6 Netflix extended look: Everything that was revealedDon't have 27 minutes to spare? Let Mashable break down Netflix's extended look at GTA 6.
Finally, a real, authorized look at the most anticipated game of the year, Grand Theft Auto VI!
After more than a decade since its predecessor was released, years of wild speculation, postponed release dates, and a leaker posting over a dozen leaked clips, Rockstar Games teamed up with Netflix to provide fans with an official "extended look" at GTA 6.
Despite the extremely high expectations, most fans agree that the extended look delivered.
Rockstar Games provided the most detailed peek into the GTA 6 storyline yet, which follows the playable criminal duo Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos. Dazed magazine published an exclusive feature on the game yesterday, which described Duval as "an ex-military drug runner" and Lucia as "a fighter fresh out of prison." So, we know the game will have a "“a Bonnie and Clyde-type narrative," with gamers switching back and forth between the two characters.
The footage shown on Netflix gave us some insight into these characters. Jason seems like a man of few words. At one point, he says he's more comfortable using a gun than using his words. Lucia is shown to be a capable fighter and criminal herself.
Mashable has a deep dive into every plot detail that was revealed, if you don't mind spoilers. But the extended look showed what looks like an early mission, as Jason and Lucia are thrust into the world of crime in Vice City.
We follow them on a botched pickup in an apartment tower, where the pair interacts with several characters in a drug den. Trouble begins when the police show up, and a shootout ensues, which Jason and Lucia escape. Presumably, that's just the beginning of the couple's story as they fall deeper into Vice City's criminal enterprises.
Toward the end of the extended look, we also saw Jason and Lucia on another mission, where they acted as the security detail for a wealthy client, who is eventually ambushed by armed kidnappers during a fancy party.
The whole presentation, including the actual gameplay, is very cinematic, which really lends itself to a focus on the game's plot.
Again, we don't want to go too deep into the plot reveals here, so check out our piece specifically laying out the story we know thus far in detail.
The quality of the graphics in this game looks truly elite. The level of fine detail in character clothing, facial expressions, and even NPCs' hair is almost hard to believe, as is the overall environment. This isn't a surprise, exactly, and fans certainly have high expectations for this game. But the Mashable chat was unanimous: the graphics here are deeply impressive.
What's a Grand Theft Auto game without a killer soundtrack, right?
Cruising around Vice City in your car while scanning the radio dial is as big a part of the game as doing crime. So, what tunes do we have to look forward to hearing in the game?
Previous GTA 6 trailers included Tom Petty's "Love Is a Long Road" and The Pointer Sisters' "Hot Together." Netflix's extended look showed us a soundtrack that extends from Kodak Black to Def Leppard to Phil Collins.
Other artists heard in the Netflix preview include Depeche Mode, Birdman featuring Lil Wayne, Captain & Tennille, Cliff Richard, Prefab Sprout, B one El Productor De Oro, Chimbala, and Omega, Aluna & Jayda G, Elderbrook & Bob Moses, and The Bellamy Brothers.
For a complete list of every song in Netflix's GTA 6 extended look (and songs that have previously been associated with the game), check out Mashable's coverage specifically on the music of GTA 6.
There has already been so much content released by the anonymous leaker known as Cyberleek, yet Rockstar Games was still able to deliver huge elements of gameplay that were previously completely unknown.
For example, Mashable reported earlier today on the suspicious lack of any gameplay footage involving Lucia as a playable character. Well, the Netflix exclusive look delivered what Cyberleeks couldn't (or wouldn't for some reason). We saw plenty of gameplay footage with Lucia.
Cyberleek did post footage of gameplay that included a little demon head icon in the corner of the screen, and we now know a little more about that. It appears this is a game mechanic that monitors the morality or honor your character shows (or the lack thereof). It's not clear exactly what it means for the character, or how the game changes with it, but we do know it's there.
Social media also seems to play a role in GTA 6. The extended look showed Lucia stealing a car, only to find someone in the trunk doing "the trunk challenge." Later, we see the same character riding in the trunk and livestreaming as Lucia evades the police and chat messages appear on the screen. So, just like it exists in the real world, social media exists in the game, too. It's unclear if this is related to the honor system or not, but it's clear that social media plays a larger role throughout the game.
In the mission where Jason and Lucia act as security and fight an armed kidnapping crew, we noticed something interesting. While both Jason and Lucia were seen firing weapons with fairly typical aiming mechanics, at one point, the game entered a slow-motion aiming mode. At that point, enemy weak points glowed red.
There also seems to be a new NPC interaction system, which provides players with the ability to perform certain actions with non-playable characters. For example, you can pet a dog.
It appears GTA 6 will have a similar NPC interaction system as Red Dead Redemption II, another popular game from Rockstar.
The game showed Jason and Lucia racing in a variety of environments. Based on the Netflix extended look, there's even a dedicated race track in the game. We also got to see Lucia participate in a dirt bike race on a dirt track. Finally, another clip showed drag racing on city streets. For gamers who love racing and car customization, it seems there will be a lot to love in GTA 6.
One of the coolest clips in the extended look featured Lucia base jumping off a skyscraper, pulling her parachute, and gliding over Vice City. In another scene, we learned that players can even go scuba diving.
From Dazed magazine, we learned that eating and drinking are part of the game, and that Jason and Lucia can gain or lose weight based on their diet and exercise. In the extended look, we see Jason eating food as a heart meter appears on the screen, and we see Lucia lifting weights.
The extended look also showed character actions such as opening a refrigerator and drinking beer, as well as interactive cigar smoking.
Of course, there are just the biggest elements we noticed. The extended look will be available on YouTube starting at 9 p.m. ET, and the game itself comes out Nov. 19.
Domestic goddess Martha Stewart has given her stamp of approval to Waymo's newest autonomous vehicle, the Ojai.
Stewart partnered with Google-owned Waymo for a spot promoting the Ojai, a roomier alternative to Waymo's increasingly ubiquitous Jaguar I-PACE cars. The Ojai, now available for driverless rides in Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Phoenix, features automatic sliding doors, a comfier interior, and three large in-car screens outfitted with (what else?) Gemini AI tech.
Waymo refers to the Ojai as a "living room on wheels." The custom-made Ojai certainly seems like an upgrade from the Jaguars, but it lacks the innovative carriage-style seating offered by Zoox, Amazon's robotaxi company. Zoox allows riders to sit across from each other and the vehicles can drive in either direction seamlessly since they don't have a formal front or rear.
Zoox, though, is only available to the public in Las Vegas. Besides offering service to nearly a dozen Sun Belt cities (and San Francisco), Waymo plans to launch in places like New York, Chicago, Washington, D.C., and Tokyo, according to its website.
This documentary-only streaming service is $149.99 for life, its lowest-ever priceCuriosity Stream's lifetime subscription is on sale for $149.99, down from $399.99.
TL;DR: Get a Curiosity Stream lifetime subscription for $149.99 (reg. $399.99).
Netflix keeps burying its documentaries under three rows of reality shows. Curiosity Stream doesn’t have that problem because documentaries make up the entire catalog.
The large library covers science, history, nature, and technology, with thousands of titles and new ones added on an ongoing basis: ancient Rome, deep space, and wildlife, including a solid lineup of David Attenborough programs. Series like Engineering the Future, Deep Time History, and Into the Jungle each dig into a different corner of how the world actually works, rather than another true-crime rehash.
It streams in HD across phones, tablets, and TVs, and the iPhone and iPad apps let you download episodes ahead to watch later. Search handles general topics well, so chasing a rabbit hole about deep-sea creatures or ancient Rome doesn’t take much digging, and the interface itself stays out of your way.
Bookmarking and resume playback mean you can always get back to what you want to watch, even if you switch devices.
It’s also just a good thing to fall asleep to. Swap out reality TV or a movie you have to actually pay attention to for a low-stakes documentary, and it’s a lot easier to drift off without missing anything that matters. Between that and the actual educational value, it’s a natural fit for anyone who’d rather spend an evening learning something than rewatching a show for the fourth time.
Get Curiosity Stream lifetime access for $149.99 (reg. $399.99).
StackSocial prices subject to change.
Get the Fitbit that shares heart rate info with gym equipment while it’s just $135Get the Fitbit Charge 6 with built-in GPS, real-time heart-rate sharing, sleep and stress tracking, Google apps, and seven-day battery life for $134.99.
TL;DR: The Fitbit Charge 6 tracks workouts, heart rate, sleep, stress, and more for $134.99 (reg. $159.95).
A fitness tracker becomes more useful when its data follows you into the workout. The Fitbit Charge 6 can link to compatible exercise machines and display your heart rate in real-time for a more connected workout.
Outside the gym, built-in GPS and GLONASS track pace, distance, routes, and outdoor workouts without relying entirely on a phone. More than 40 exercise modes cover activities such as walking, running, cycling, and swimming, while Active Zone Minutes show workout intensity.
The Charge 6 also tracks heart rate around the clock, daily activity, sleep patterns, and stress responses. Its Sleep Score provides personalized insights, while SpO₂ and skin temperature tracking add additional wellness metrics. Compatible ECG and EDA Scan features are available where supported; these are wellness tools, not medical care.
Google integrations make the device more practical between workouts. Maps provides turn-by-turn directions for walks, runs, and rides. Google Wallet handles contactless payments, YouTube Music controls compatible playback, and smart notifications surface calls, messages, app alerts, alarms, and reminders from a compatible smartphone.
The bright AMOLED touchscreen is designed for indoor and outdoor visibility. Up to seven days of battery life reduces charging interruptions, and 50-meter water resistance supports swimming and everyday wear. Small and large silicone bands are included.
This is a focused alternative for someone who wants fitness and wellness data without moving to a larger, more complex smartwatch.
Don’t miss the Fitbit Charge 6 while it’s on sale for $134.99 (reg. $159.95) for a limited time.
StackSocial prices subject to change.
Did GTA 6 Extended Look live up to the hype? Fans react after years of waiting'Grand Theft Auto' fans finally saw official gameplay of 'GTA 6' and they seemed pretty pleased.
For 26 minutes on a Thursday, the internet collectively stopped to watch a video game.
That video game was Grand Theft Auto VI, the long-awaited next entry in Rockstar Games' (in)famous open-world crime series. Netflix aired a pretty long video showing official gameplay for the first time, after about a week of rampant leaks.
After 13 years of waiting and mounting hype, you'd think social media would be ready to tear the game apart, especially after seeing a bunch of out-of-context clips leaked from an older build of the game. However, it turns out that Rockstar evidently did enough to satisfy its fans, judging by their reactions on social media. Even Major League Baseball weighed in.
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We'll see if that enthusiasm holds up until Nov. 19, when the game finally comes out.
YouTube creators are using fake Dolly Parton imagesDays after Dolly Parton's death, AI images of the country music icon are proliferating the internet
Country music legend Dolly Parton died this week, and doctored images of the icon in the hospital are circulating online.
There are no publicly available photos of Dolly Parton hospitalized or wearing a patient gown, but if you go on social media, you might not know that.
On the morning of Aug. 27, Mashable observed at least three YouTube videos with fake, likely AI-generated images of Parton hospitalized in the thumbnails. The videos were surfaced by the YouTube app in sections labeled "Videos on the rise" and "YouTube featured":
One thumbnail features Parton in a gown surrounded by tubes in front of, bizarrely, a city background, as if it was generated using images of both Parton and news anchors:
Another thumbnail surfaced in the "YouTube featured" section and featured singer Jelly Roll with a superimposed image of Parton in the clouds:
According to a description in YouTube’s app, the featured section "promotes YouTube features and programs, often using content that YouTube has chosen based on your viewing habits or through manual selections." Below all these videos is the "hyped," label, meaning that viewers tapped the Hype button on the app to boost the video's discoverability.
As of the afternoon of Aug. 27, all four videos remained live. Three displayed a "Made with AI" label when opened, along with a disclaimer in the description stating, "Sounds or visuals were altered or fully generated."
The video about Dolly Parton’s sister, Stella Parton, did not have this label.
A YouTube spokesperson told Mashable, "We are reviewing and will take action against any content or channels found to be in violation of our policies." Mashable has also reached out to the available YouTube channels.
TCL’s 75-inch Mini-LED 4K TV drops to $849.99 at Amazon — act fast to save over $100The 75-inch TCL QM64L QLED TV is on sale at Amazon for $849.99, down from the list price of $999.99. That's a 15% discount.
SAVE $150: The 75-inch TCL QM64L QLED TV is on sale at Amazon for $849.99, down from the list price of $999.99. That's a 15% discount.
For plenty of rooms, a 65-inch TV is perfect. But if you have a larger living room or a big bedroom, a 75-inch might be better. The problem with a larger TV is that the price tends to jump significantly between 65 and 75 inches. For that reason, it's worth checking out this Amazon deal.
As of Aug. 27, the 75-inch TCL QM64L QLED TV is on sale at Amazon for $849.99, marked down from the list price of $999.99. That's a 15% discount that saves $150 off the price and gives you extra funds to spend on streaming services.
Ideal for watching games during daylight hours, the TCL's QLED display features 3840x2160 4K resolution. It contains up to 500 local dimming zones, ensuring there's less color bloom and deep blacks. Plus, this is the first TCL model that comes with Alexa+.
If you love gaming on a giant TV, TCL's 144Hz refresh rate and 288 VRR will work well together for a lag-free experience. In addition to these specs, it's worth mentioning that Mashable rates TCL as one of the best TV brands, making budget models that don't cut down on quality.
Instead of dropping big money on a 75-inch TV, upgrade to the 75-inch TCL QM64L QLED TV while it's on sale at Amazon for under $850. It'll be a great companion for fall shows and staying cozy indoors come winter.
Twitch users report major outage ThursdayTwitch went down for many users in the middle of Thursday afternoon.
Seemingly right after the big Grand Theft Auto VI trailer aired on Netflix, the internet's home for video game streaming went down.
The two things are probably entirely unrelated, of course, but Twitch did indeed go down for many users on Thursday afternoon. Down Detector shows that people started reporting the outage around 3:30 p.m. ET, again coincidentally, immediately after the GTA video aired. That's poor timing for anyone who wanted to hop on Twitch and talk about it.
Users reported the outage on X, too.
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Sorry to anyone who wanted to watch some Twitch this afternoon.
GTA 6 Netflix extended look: Everything we learned about the plot in the 26-minute revealHere’s everything that happened to Jason and Lucia during the 26-minute GTA VI Extended Look.
Grand Theft Auto VI's protagonists, Jason and Lucia, have many of the qualities of a functional couple. They live together, get ready for parties together, hold hands in public, and help each other escape heavily armed police.
Their relationship sits front and center in Netflix's Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look, the 26-minute presentation Rockstar Games released Aug. 27. Captured entirely from in-game footage on PlayStation 5, it offers the clearest account yet of the game’s storyline and how its two protagonists operate as partners in crime and life.
Rockstar has previously said that Jason and Lucia become trapped in a criminal conspiracy stretching across Leonida after an easy score goes wrong. The new footage begins to show what that may look like. A botched pickup leads to a deadly police raid, which appears to push the couple toward more experienced criminals, riskier jobs, and a lavish party that ends in another full-scale attack.
The presentation does not reveal the complete plot or necessarily show every scene in chronological order. It does, however, give us enough to begin connecting Jason and Lucia’s path through the game. Here is everything that happened in their story, followed by the new gameplay details and a comparison of the official footage with the recent leaks.
Spoilers for Grand Theft Auto VI: An Extended Look follow.
The trouble begins with what should be a routine pickup. Jason and Lucia enter a rundown apartment building while working for Vice City businessman Boobie Ike, searching for a man named Raymond. Right from the start, Rockstar slips in possible clues about the game's larger systems; for example, Jason stops to pet a dog, prompting an angel icon to appear on screen as if he has earned a sort of morality credit.
The couple moves deeper into the building, and they discover people cooking and packaging drugs while Raymond’s associates explain that his partner has gone off the grid. Until they find out what happened, the entire operation is supposed to remain in a holding pattern. But before Jason and Lucia can leave, someone named Ernesto calls with a warning: a task force is on its way. The people inside begin frantically packing up drugs and trying to escape, while the arriving officers appear to have little interest in making arrests.
Instead, police storm the building and begin shooting, giving us the first extended look at GTA VI’s faster, more physical combat. Jason and Lucia fight through cramped rooms with pistols and shotguns before escaping in an elevator. There, Lucia asks whether one of the officers was Menendez, suggesting the couple may already have a history with the task force.
The Grand Theft Auto VI title card then appears. This disastrous pickup is clearly more than just an isolated mission.
From there, we get to Jason and Lucia at their shared home, getting ready for a party. Fake commercials air on television, including an ad for the anxiety medication "Angstipan," a dissociative drug often advertised on billboards in Leonida, and another for a sandwich that contains what appears to be an entire deli counter.
Jason and Lucia later arrive at the party hand in hand, where they meet Brian Heder. Brian is a longtime drug runner who lets Jason live at one of his properties in exchange for helping with local shakedowns, according to Rockstar’s character description. Their conversation makes clear that the couple is in serious trouble and needs Brian to arrange an introduction to someone who may be able to help.
Interspersed throughout the Netflix special are montages highlighting the people, places, and activities that fill GTA VI’s world. They also provide important context about Jason and Lucia’s relationship and their history together.
In the first supercut, the couple robs a diner, holds up a liquor store, steals cars, and fights through several other jobs. The diner sequence appears to be the finished version of the robbery that leaked in unfinished form in 2022.
The Extended Look moves to Jason and Lucia driving to meet a new contact. Lucia feels nervous before they arrive, and she has good reason: the mystery man appears to be Raul Bautista, a seasoned bank robber. Jason is handed a rifle, Lucia gets behind the wheel, and the couple is immediately thrown into another police chase.
This one quickly becomes much larger than the apartment raid. As Lucia speeds through the sunny streets of Vice City, Jason shoots at police vehicles and helicopters from the passenger seat.
By the time the trio escapes, it becomes clear that the mission was also a test. When Lucia asks whether they passed, their contact tells them that they stayed alive and hands over their payment. Jason and Lucia then wonder whether they are officially part of his crew.
The answer appears to be yes, and their apparent promotion immediately raises the stakes. The next time we see Jason and Lucia working, they have traded small robberies and casual clothes for formal wear and a private security job protecting a wealthy young man named Andrés de León.
The assignment takes them from Andrés’ private jet to a party celebrating the opening of MegaMundo’s first corporate headquarters on American soil. Inside, Andrés and his associates are doing drugs in a conference room while the company’s chief operating officer, Petra, tries to pull Jason into the larger celebration downstairs.
Naturally, the night ends in yet another shootout. Armed men wearing medical masks (similar to the ones Raymond's crew wore) and white jumpsuits storm the building, separating Jason and Lucia on different floors. The mission then cuts between their simultaneous fights: Jason shoots his way through the attackers while protecting Andrés and briefly slows time to land several precise headshots, suggesting a character-specific ability similar to those used by Michael, Franklin, and Trevor in GTA V.
Lucia, meanwhile, has been separated from her guns and must rely on the hand-to-hand fighting skills Jason mentioned earlier. After being knocked down in a stairwell and strangled by one attacker, she manages to fight him off and take his weapon.
By that point, the larger story is beginning to take shape. Jason and Lucia start out as a couple, committing minor robberies, but a failed pickup sends them looking for help. That search connects them with more experienced criminals, and those relationships pull them into increasingly elaborate and dangerous jobs.
About the halfway point, Rockstar uses Extended Look to show just how much players can do around Vice City and the wider state of Leonida. Among other things, Jason and Lucia can ride scooters, swim, scuba dive, drive airboats through swamps, work out, go skydiving, race cars, ride motocross bikes, visit strip clubs, practice at shooting ranges, rob stores, and escape police on motorcycles and jet skis.
Unlike the long aerial transitions used to move among the three protagonists in GTA V, the switch appears to take only a few seconds. That suggests players will be able to move between Jason and Lucia almost instantly when the two are near each other.
It is certainly impressive that all of this footage was captured on a standard PlayStation 5. The nighttime lighting, water reflections, crowded interiors, instant character switching, and dense street scenes were not recorded on an upgraded PS5 Pro or high-end PC.
The Extended Look arrives after a person or group calling itself Cyberleek spent more than a week releasing footage from an apparently playable version of GTA VI.
Those leaks appeared to show Jason playing basketball, refueling cars, using a Taser, flying a plane, driving hypercars, stealing vehicles, and attempting to escape police. Other clips fueled speculation about vehicle storage, expanded inventories, a six-star wanted level, police recognizing a suspect’s clothing, and the possible morality system hinted at when Jason pets the dog.
Rockstar acknowledged that unauthorized gameplay had circulated Aug. 26, calling the experience "heartbreaking for our team." The studio apologized for the long wait, said development was "nearly there" and asked players to wait until Nov. 19 to experience the complete game.
Meanwhile, Rockstar's parent company, Take-Two Interactive, has sought information from Microsoft and Discord as it attempts to identify the people behind the leaks. Cyberleek's repeated attempts to use the footage to promote a cryptocurrency have also made theories that the leaks are a secret Rockstar marketing stunt increasingly difficult to believe.
Even with so much footage already circulating, the official presentation supplied something the leaks could not: context. The leaks showed individual mechanics and disconnected moments. The Extended Look showed the relationship holding all of those moments together.
Grand Theft Auto VI will be released Nov. 19 for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. The Extended Look is available on Netflix and will also be released through Rockstar’s YouTube channel and the official GTA VI website.
There will be plenty of cars to steal, places to rob, and ways to attract police attention. But the real question at the center of GTA VI is what happens to Jason and Lucia as they do all of it together.
GTA 6 Netflix extended look: 12 details not seen in the Cyberleek videosWe finally got an official look at 'Grand Theft Auto 6,' and it answered some questions that the leaks couldn't.
Rockstar just showed an extended look at Grand Theft Auto VI on Netflix. Let's talk about it.
In a nearly half-hour-long extended gameplay video captured on a PS5, Rockstar gave us our first real idea of what actually playing GTA VI is actually like. Sure, we've all seen a bunch of leaked footage by now, but there was a lot of stuff in the Netflix video that the Cyberleek leaks didn't show. Here's a quick rundown of things that were new in the Netflix trailer.
There were some brief glimpses of this in some of the Cyberleek videos, but Rockstar's official trailer confirmed that GTA VI is adopting the NPC interaction system from Red Dead Redemption II. You can seemingly lock onto people in the world and perform contextual actions with them, though the actions you can perform seem to vary pretty wildly from one scenario to the next.
The best one, of course, is that you can pet a dog. The internet will be happy about that.
At one point in the Rockstar video, you can see what looks like a little demon head icon appear in the corner of the screen after the protagonist Jason does something. This was also sort of present in the Cyberleek videos, but now we have full confirmation that this game seems to have some kind of morality/honor system. It's unclear at this point how exactly it works or what advantages and disadvantages there are to being honorable or dishonorable, but we can say with some confidence that it's in the game.
Social media has become a much bigger part of our lives since GTA V launched in 2013, and Rockstar is aware of that. At one point in the trailer, protagonist Lucia encounters a guy doing "the trunk challenge" in the trunk of a car she stole, at which point we see a brief clip of her driving dangerously with the guy hanging out of the trunk and an Instagram Live-style chat feed on the right side of the screen.
That could be something you only see in certain missions, or it could be a major part of the game in ways we don't know yet. But rest assured that Rockstar knows about the modern internet.
So far, Cyberleek hasn't posted any clips showing actual missions, as far as we can tell. But toward the end of the extended look, we saw Jason and Lucia acting as a security detail for a wealthy client, then fighting off armed kidnappers.
Frustratingly, the Cyberleek videos seemed to almost completely ignore Lucia, Jason's partner in this Bonnie and Clyde-esque tale. Rockstar did us a solid, though, and showed a lot of Lucia gameplay, confirming that she is very much a protagonist, too.
There were a few little details that I noticed regarding Jason and Lucia. It seemed like there will be a lot of sequences where the two of them travel around and do things together, like gas station robberies and story missions. GTA V had three protagonists, but they rarely interacted with each other, and certainly didn't pal around with each other ambiently in the open world. That's a neat change.
There was one point in the trailer, though, where the player was able to zoom out into the map and switch from Lucia to Jason, who was far away doing something else. So, it seems like they're not always together.
A few other bits I saw in the video included:
The ability to drive airboats in a fake Everglades environment
Underwater scuba diving
Opening a refrigerator and drinking beer
Interactive cigar smoking
A voice actor who sure sounded a lot like Stephen Root
A slow-motion aiming mode where enemy weak points glow red
Lucia base jumping off a skyscraper
Overall, it was a long video with a lot to chew on, but these were all of the details that stood out to me the most as having been largely absent from the Cyberleek videos.
GTA 6 Netflix extended look: Every song we heard during gameplayRockstar's new epic game has some equally epic music. Here are all the tracks we heard during Netflix's 'GTA 6' extended gameplay.
One of Grand Theft Auto's greatest pleasures has always been getting into a stolen car and finding out what's on the radio.
So, naturally, we were listening closely during the new 26-minute extended look at Grand Theft Auto VI, which premiered Thursday on Netflix.
The footage gave us our most substantial look yet at Rockstar Games' return to Vice City and the larger state of Leonida, following protagonists Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos as a drug raid explodes into a chaotic shootout. From there, Jason and Lucia go on a romp through Vice City. But amid all the new gameplay details, locations, characters, and general fictional Florida chaos, there was another thing we couldn't stop paying attention to: the music.
Rockstar has been teasing the sound of GTA VI since the game's first trailer arrived in 2023. That trailer was soundtracked by Tom Petty's "Love Is a Long Road," while 2025's second trailer prominently featured The Pointer Sisters' "Hot Together" alongside snippets of songs from Wang Chung, Tammy Wynette, and Haitian konpa band Zenglen.
The extended gameplay reveal gives us even more clues about what we might hear cruising around Leonida.
"Pop Bottles" — Birdman (feat. Lil Wayne)
"Skrilla" — Kodak Black
"Let Your Love Flow" — The Bellamy Brothers
"Love Bites" — Def Leppard
"People Are People" — Depeche Mode
"But I Think It's a Dream" — Captain & Tennille
"Cars and Girls" — Prefab Sprout
"Devil Woman" — Cliff Richard
"Se Me Nota (Agarrame)" — B one El Productor De Oro, Chimbala, and Omega
"Against All Odds" — Phil Collins
"Mine O' Mine" — Aluna & Jayda G
"Inner Light" — Elderbrook & Bob Moses
Even before the extended gameplay reveal, Rockstar had already given us a surprisingly eclectic preview of GTA VI's musical world.
The first trailer, released in Dec. 2023, was built around Tom Petty's 1989 track "Love Is a Long Road." The placement introduced millions of people to — or reacquainted them with — the Florida-born rocker's song, sending its streaming numbers soaring after the trailer's release.
Trailer 2 expanded the palette considerably. The Pointer Sisters' sultry 1986 track "Hot Together" serves as its primary soundtrack, but several other songs can be heard playing throughout the world, including Wang Chung's "Everybody Have Fun Tonight," Tammy Wynette's "Talkin' to Myself Again," and "Child Support" by Haitian konpa band Zenglen featuring Reginald Cangé.
Taken together, the choices suggest that Rockstar isn't limiting its return to Vice City to the neon-soaked '80s nostalgia most closely associated with GTA: Vice City. The music we've heard so far spans decades and genres, from rock and country to pop and Haitian konpa, which is fitting for a game set in the sprawling, fictionalized version of modern Florida.
And if there's one thing decades of Grand Theft Auto have taught us, it's that sometimes the song playing while you're driving around causing chaos becomes just as memorable as the chaos itself.
Grand Theft Auto VI arrives Nov. 19 on PlayStation 5 and XBOX Series X|S. Follow all of Mashable's continued GTA coverage here.
Skip $1,000 flagship markups: iRobot’s AI-powered Roomba Plus 575 gets a $100 price cutAs of Aug. 27, save $100 on the iRobot Roomba Plus 575 Robot Vacuum & Mop Combo at Amazon.
SAVE $100: As of Aug. 27, get the iRobot Roomba Plus 575 Robot Vacuum & Mop Combo for $699.99 at Amazon, down from its usual price of $799.99. That's a discount of 13%.
Whether you have kids or pets or you simply exist in your home, it can feel like a never-ending battle to keep the carpets and floors clean. Dirt is going to magically appear, and you're going to have to get rid of it somehow. That might mean vacuuming the carpets or mopping the floors. Why do it manually when you can assign the task to a robot vacuum-and-mop combo?
There's an especially great option on sale right now at Amazon that can help you accomplish more while a robot automates your cleaning schedule. As of Aug. 27, get the iRobot Roomba Plus 575 Robot Vacuum & Mop Combo for $699.99 at Amazon, down from its usual price of $799.99. That's $100 off, a 13% discount.
This combo unit boasts a strong 25,000Pa suction level, so it can tackle ground-in dirt and debris as well as hair from both humans and pets. It can also fit under furniture and in hard-to-reach areas thanks to its slim chassis, which lets it swoop into smaller spaces to get more cleaning done. It can climb over thresholds up to 35mm and uses automatic mapping to determine where it needs to clean in your home. That takes you out of the equation, so all you have to do is set it up and watch it go.
When it's time to mop, it uses SmartScrub and DualClean mop pads to exert extra pressure to remove tough stains and dried spills. Plus, its spinning mop pads clean with an articulating arm that can extend 35mm to give you better edge coverage. When everything's clean, and the reservoir needs to be emptied and the mop pads cleaned, the dock has you covered as well, with automatic refills and cleaning so you never have to touch a dirty mop pad.
If you're tired of your current cleaning schedule, pick up this combo unit and step into the future. This discount is well worth claiming.
How to watch Barcelona vs. Athletic Club online for freeHow to watch La Liga for free. Live steam Barcelona vs. Athletic Club in La Liga for free from anywhere in the world.
TL;DR: Watch Barcelona vs. Athletic Club in La Liga for free on CazéTV. Access this free live stream from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN.
We're just a week into the 2026/27 La Liga season, and the Spanish league is already serving up one of the biggest fixtures on the calendar: Barcelona vs. Athletic Club.
Barcelona opened their 2026/27 campaign with a massive 5-0 win over Elche. They look like a daunting opponent for Athletic, a team that lost their opening game of the season to Sevilla. Still, we're expecting an entertaining matchup between two talented teams.
If you're interested in watching Barcelona vs. Athletic Club in La Liga from anywhere in the world, we've got all the information you need.
Barcelona vs. Athletic Club in La Liga kicks off at 3 p.m. ET on Aug. 27. This fixture takes place at the Camp Nou.
Barcelona vs. Athletic Club in La Liga is available to live stream for free on CazéTV.
CazéTV is geo-restricted to Brazil, but anyone can secure access with a VPN. These tools can hide your real IP address (digital location) and connect you to a secure server in Brazil, meaning you can live stream Barcelona vs. Athletic Club for free from anywhere in the world.
Live stream Barcelona vs. Athletic Club for free by following these simple steps:
Sign up for a streaming-friendly VPN (we recommend ExpressVPN)
Download the app to your device of choice
Open up the app and connect to a server in Brazil
Visit CazéTV
Watch Barcelona vs. Athletic Club for free from anywhere in the world
The best VPNs for streaming are not free, but they do tend to offer generous money-back guarantees. By leveraging these offers, you can watch Barcelona vs. Athletic Club without committing your cash. This is obviously not a long-term strategy, but it gives you enough time to stream this fixture (plus Premier League action) before recovering your investment.
ExpressVPN is the best choice for bypassing geo-restrictions to stream live sport on CazéTV, for a number of reasons:
Servers in 105 countries, including Brazil
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A two-year subscription to ExpressVPN is on sale for $68.40 and includes an extra four months for free — 81% off for a limited time. This plan includes a year of free unlimited cloud backup and usually offers a generous 30-day money-back guarantee. Alternatively, you can get a one-month plan for just $12.99.
Live stream Barcelona vs. Athletic Club for free from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN.
5 of the biggest changes coming to Instagram, FacebookMeta's billion-dollar settlement will change how Instagram and Facebook work.
Mick Tobin, 23, vividly remembers beating himself up as a teen for losing hours of time to social media in one sitting.
He blamed himself for scrolling endlessly. He compared himself to others, felt anxious, and could sense his attention span growing shorter. He blamed himself some more for not knowing how to use social media wisely.
Looking back, Tobin now understands the outsize influence social media companies had in shaping his habits and behavior with what he describes as addictive design features.
"It's a trillion-dollar company on one side of the screen and a 15-year-old on the other side of the screen," Tobin said. "It's not a fair fight."
That's why Tobin, co-founder and advocacy director at Young People's Alliance, welcomes Meta's new $17 billion settlement with U.S. attorneys general. As part of the agreement, Meta is required to make several significant design changes that should meaningfully affect how teens use Instagram and Facebook.
Notably, Meta will limit daily time spent on Instagram and Facebook to two hours; block access to both platforms overnight and during school hours; give teens the option to create a default non-algorithmic feed; and allow teens to turn off autoplay.
Tobin, who wishes that Meta had admitted guilt in the settlement, believes his teenage years would've looked much different if these measures had been in place several years ago: "I probably would have had much more control over my life."
The settlement ends a major lawsuit against Meta filed by dozens of U.S. attorneys general. Meta confirmed to Mashable that the new teen protections will roll out over the next six months.
Meta issued a "call to action" to YouTube and TikTok to adopt what the company describes as a new "industry standard."
"These protections will only be truly effective if we work with our peers — TikTok and YouTube — to put the same measures in place," Meta said in the statement.
Meta, which introduced Teen Accounts in 2024, already has certain safety measures to address some safety and well-being concerns but will expand on those.
Time Limit: While Teen Account users on Facebook and Instagram already receive a reminder to leave the app after 60 minutes, Meta will introduce a two-hour cumulative limit across Facebook and Instagram. Once teens reach two hours, they will be locked out of both apps. Only a parent enrolled in parental controls can bypass the limit. If a teen doesn't have parental supervision, there will be no way to request more time.
Night Mode: Previously, supervising parents could set daily time limits or breaks, including overnight. Night Mode, however, blocks Instagram and Facebook overnight between midnight and 6 a.m. for all teens.
School Mode: Similar to Night Mode, parents can schedule breaks that silence Meta app notifications during set hours. School Mode will do this by default between 8 a.m. and 3 p.m.
Algorithmic Feed Control: Teen users can currently tap the Instagram logo at the top of their feed and switch to a "following" feed, which is non-algorithmic. Still, the algorithmic feed remains the default each time a teen user opens the app. As a result of the settlement, teens will have the choice to select a chronological feed as their default. Meta will periodically remind them of the option, and guardians using parental controls can opt their child into a default non-algorithmic feed.
Autoplay Control: Teens will be able to turn off autoplay, a setting that wasn't available prior to the settlement. Once autoplay is off, teen users will need to deliberately tap or swipe to view content. Parents will also be able to set this as the default for their teen.
Other measures include banning extreme makeup filters and regular screen time reminders during continuous use.
While Tobin doesn't support time limits for teens because he believes they should decide how long to stay engaged, he does believe the other design changes will help teens avoid becoming glued to their screens in the first place.
Still, Tobin said there's an important caveat: "This, of course, all hinges on Meta actually implementing these design practices effectively."
Past research on some of Meta's teen safety and well-being features suggests they may not work as well as advertised.
A 2025 report conducted by a Meta whistleblower, for example, found that screen time features and tools to prevent unwanted contact didn't consistently work as expected. Meta said at the time that the report misstated how its safety tools work and misrepresented its efforts "to empower parents and protect teens."
Meta's settlement requires an independent auditor to test and report on Meta's compliance with the agreement annually for five years. No further details were available about how the auditor will conduct their research.
Kris Perry, executive director of Children and Screens: Institute of Digital Media and Child Development, told Mashable in a statement that independent, ongoing evaluations of the settlement changes are essential.
"Success shouldn't be measured simply by the presence of a tool but by its impact, such as sustained decreases in teens' use of platforms overnight or teens reporting less difficulty controlling their own time online, and this requires ongoing, objective research," Perry said.
Tobin said the settlement is a major turning point for teen well-being. Still, he argues that policymakers must finally put youth online safety measures into law and hold social media companies liable for violating them. After all, he noted, the majority of the settlement terms are only required to remain in effect for 10 years.
"I think the permanency is extremely concerning," Tobin said, "because this needs to be something that changes forever, right?"
How to watch out-of-market NFL games: Is NFL Sunday Ticket worth it?Here's how to watch out-of-market games in the 2026 NFL season, including the streaming service you'll need, price breakdowns, and more.
Figuring out how to watch the entire NFL season in 2026 is complicated. But it gets really frustrating when you live in a different region than your favorite team. Watching out-of-market games for any sport is no walk in the park, but for the NFL, it's an excruciating battle — particularly for your wallet.
Before you pull the trigger on any pay TV provider or streaming service, you may want to check to see what games are considered in-market and out-of-market for your region. You don't want to drop $90 on an annual Paramount+ plan or splurge on the $199 Fox One annual subscription only to find out the games you want to watch are blacked out.
In-market games are basically your home team broadcasts, or the games geographically closest to you. These are the games you'll regularly find on CBS and Fox on Sunday afternoons. Out-of-market games are those only available outside of the designated broadcast region you are in. These games are blacked out (unless they are national broadcasts) in favor of in-market games. For instance, I am a Baltimore Ravens fan living in Nashville, Tenn. The Tennessee Titans are my local team, which means their games are in-market for me on Sundays. If both the Titans and Ravens are playing in the 1:00 p.m. time slot on Sunday, I will only be able to watch the Titans. The Ravens will be blacked out, as they are considered out-of-market.
To find out which games are in your local market each week, check out 506sports.com.
So, you live in a different region than the team(s) you want to watch. That means the usual streaming services that broadcast NFL games — ESPN, Paramount+, YouTube TV, etc. — aren't going to work for you. With those subscriptions, you'll only be able to watch in-market teams and national broadcasts. Womp womp.
In this case, the only legal way you can watch out-of-market games is via NFL Sunday Ticket. Sure, there are plenty of bootleg broadcasts floating around the internet, but we can't in good conscience recommend those. Plus, spending your Sundays chasing bootleg broadcasts that actually work is a full-time job. NFL Sunday Ticket is the league's own premium sports package that broadcasts NFL regular season games that are unavailable on your local channels. It carries regional Sunday afternoon games on Fox and CBS, specifically. You can get NFL Sunday Ticket as an individual channel on YouTube or as an add-on to YouTube TV.
I won't sugarcoat it for you: NFL Sunday Ticket is outrageously expensive unless you're brand new to the service. Through Oct. 29, newbies can score NFL Sunday Ticket as an individual channel on YouTube or as a YouTube TV add-on for $240 total for the regular season (eight payments of $30). For what it's worth, that's $36 more than last year's new subscriber offer. For returning customers, it'll cost — gulp — $480 total as an individual channel (8 payments of $60) or $378 total as a YouTube TV add-on (8 payments of $47.25). Students, military personnel, first responders, medical professionals, and teachers can all get discounted rates (see below).
A season pass gives you access to NFL Sunday Ticket from the first Sunday regular season game on Sept. 13 until the final Sunday regular season game in January. Starting in September, there will also be month-to-month plans available. While no pricing is listed just yet, it'll likely cost the same as last season. For new users, it was $85 per month on the monthly plan, while returning customers paid $115 per month for the YouTube TV add-on and $145 per month for the individual channel.
Here's a breakdown for you:
Season pass (8 monthly installments)
$240 for new users ($30/month)
$378 for returning users bundled with YouTube TV
$480 for returning users without YouTube TV
$119 for students who can verify their eligibility
$198 for Military & Veterans, First Responders, Medical Community, and Teachers
Month-to-month
$85 per month for new users
$115 per month for returning users bundled with YouTube TV
$145 per month for returning users without YouTube TV
To get NFL Sunday Ticket, head over to YouTube.com/NFL and a prompt will pop up with the details to sign up. If you don't see the prompt, just click on "get NFL Sunday Ticket" to the right of the NFL logo. You'll see options to sign up for both YouTube TV and NFL Sunday Ticket, NFL Sunday Ticket only, or the Student Plan. If you want to sign up for the military, first responder, medical professional, or teacher rate, you'll have to go through ID.me.
If you're sick of not being able to watch your favorite NFL team because games are blacked out in your region, then yes, NFL Sunday Ticket is absolutely worth it. Is it affordable? Not at all, unless you're brand new to the service. But if you're a dedicated fan, it's one of your only real options for watching live out-of-market games.
I can't stress this enough: Be sure to read the fine print before you drop hundreds on an NFL Sunday Ticket plan. NFL Sunday Ticket only includes out-of-market regular season Sunday afternoon games. It does not include in-market games, preseason, postseason, digital exclusive, locally televised, or national games. If you're looking for the best ways to watch the NFL season as a whole, I did a deep dive into which streaming services you'll need and the cheapest ways to sign up. We've also rounded up ways to use a VPN and bypass geo-restrictions in order to watch live NFL games. The good news is you have a ton of options, but the bad news is, it'll cost you no matter what you choose.
Looking for an off switch? Apple offers no way to remove ads from MapsApple Maps now shows sponsored listings on Maps, and neither changing your ad settings nor paying for Apple One will remove them.
The next time Apple Maps suggests a nearby restaurant, take a closer look, because that recommendation may have paid to be there.
Yes, Apple Maps officially has ads now, and they are beginning to appear alongside the ordinary listings people use to decide where to eat, shop, and go. If your immediate response is to dig through Settings for an off switch, however, don’t bother: There isn’t one.
Users currently have no way to turn off ads in Apple Maps. Paying for iCloud+, Apple One, or another Apple subscription does not remove them either, so customers who already send Apple money every month will see the same sponsored listings as everyone else.
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As Mashable reported on Aug. 26, Apple began rolling out the ads this week after announcing the move in March. They are currently available to users in the U.S. and Canada, with rollout expected to reach everyone in those markets over the coming weeks.
Ads can appear in two places in Apple Maps. Before you search, one may appear at the top of the Suggested Places list. After you search, one may appear at the top of the results if it is relevant to what you entered, according to Apple's guide for advertisers.
Ads can include three images, one image, or only text. Each carries an "Ad" label and a different place icon, though it otherwise resembles the surrounding recommendations.
You also may not see an ad in every search. CNET, for example, did not consistently encounter them while testing Maps in cities such as New York and San Francisco, and the app does not currently show sponsored pins like Google Maps does.
For now, then, the change is relatively subtle. (Though subtle is not the same as optional.)
Apple allows users to disable personalized advertising by going to Settings > Privacy & Security > Apple Advertising. Unfortunately, flipping that switch will not remove Maps ads or even change the way Maps chooses them.
That is because Apple says Maps does not support personalized ads in the first place. Instead, it serves contextual ads based on what is happening during your current session. That can include your search terms, the section of the map you are viewing, your device’s approximate location, its language and operating-system version, and the time of day.
In other words, searching for "bagels" can surface a nearby bagel shop without Apple building a broader advertising profile around your lifelong relationship with carbohydrates.
Apple also says your location and ad interactions are not connected to your identity or Apple Account. Ad activity is instead associated with a random identifier that changes several times per hour, and personal data is not shared with advertisers or third parties. Apple Pay transactions and information from the Health and Home apps are also excluded from the system.
If you want to know why a particular ad found you, tapping its blue "Ad" label will show the information used to select it. You can also turn off precise location access for Maps, but that only limits location-based targeting. It does not make the ads disappear and could interfere with useful features such as turn-by-turn navigation.
The arrival of Maps ads is not happening in isolation. Apple already sells advertising across the App Store, Apple News, and Stocks, as well as sponsorships tied to its sports programming.
Maps is an especially valuable — and logical — addition because people typically open it when they are ready to do something: find dinner, locate a store, or choose where to spend the afternoon. That gives advertisers a chance to reach potential customers just as they are deciding where to go.
The rollout is tied to Apple Business, the company’s new platform for businesses to manage devices and promote themselves across Apple services. Businesses can claim their locations, upload images and promotional text, set a monthly budget, and pay for a better chance of appearing in search results for nearby users.
That may be appealing to restaurant and shop owners. For Maps users, however, it means paid placement is now mixed into the recommendations they rely on to make real-world decisions.
The reaction has been predictably chilly. As Mashable previously noted, hundreds of commenters in an r/Apple thread argued that the move eliminates one of Apple Maps’ clearest advantages over Google Maps. Others questioned why people paying premium prices for Apple hardware and subscriptions should still be shown ads. As one X user put it, "Apple has officially killed the last clean interface on your iPhone."
The ads may be limited, privacy-conscious, and clearly labeled. But there are still ads — and even Apple’s paying customers cannot take a different route.
Hugging Face launches Microduck, a $399 open-source robot duckMeet Microduck, Hugging Face’s $399 programmable robot duck that can waddle, roller-skate, carry objects, and learn new tricks.
The ongoing AI revolution has finally given us something everyone can get behind: a tiny robot duck on roller skates. Yes, really.
On Aug. 27, AI platform Hugging Face unveiled Microduck, a 9.8-inch-tall bipedal robot that waddles, sits, kicks a ball, picks up objects with its beak, and gets back on its feet after falling over. Add the optional wheels, and it can even roller-skate.
Microduck is available to preorder now for an introductory price of $399 before taxes and shipping, with the first deliveries expected before Christmas 2026. It is currently launching in North America, Europe, and the UK. The product was developed by Pollen Robotics, the French robotics company that Hugging Face acquired in 2025.
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The duck comes with seven trained moves and a game controller, so owners can start bossing it around without writing a line of code. It can also follow a laser pointer, react to its surroundings, and trigger movements using NFC tags. Four color options are available at launch: Cream, Graphite, Lavender, and Sky.
But Microduck is more than a very, very elaborate desk toy. Hugging Face CEO Clem Delangue described it as an "open-source robot you can teach new tricks with reinforcement learning," a process in which an AI system learns behaviors through trial and error.
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"The behaviors shipping with Microduck are not meant to define what the robot can do forever," Pollen Robotics explained in a blog post. "They are a starting point."
Developers can train those behaviors inside a physics simulation before transferring them to the physical robot. From there, they can adjust the simulation, retrain the behavior, and deploy it again without repeatedly sending their very real $399 duck tumbling across the room.
Its duck-like appearance was not simply an effort to make a robot as cute as possible. According to Pollen Robotics, the character grew naturally out of Microduck’s proportions, articulated beak, and waddling gait. The company kept it because the design made the robot feel approachable without disguising the machinery underneath.
Microduck even has its own voice, although it will not chat with you like an AI assistant. Instead, it communicates through creature-like noises. Each robot receives its own permanent audio identity when it is turned on for the first time, meaning your duck will keep the same voice for its entire life.
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Microduck’s software development kit, simulation environment, and reinforcement-learning tools are available on GitHub under an open-source license, allowing developers to inspect, modify, and share what they build. However, Pollen Robotics clarifies in its press materials that only the software stack is open source; the robot’s mechanical and electronic design files are not.
The company hopes developers will eventually share new physical behaviors much like people already share AI models. That could include everything from new walking styles and recovery techniques to classroom experiments and routines involving multiple Microducks.
Inside its very small body, Microduck has 15 motors, a front-facing camera, a microphone and speaker, LiDAR, and two motion sensors. It also has 1GB of RAM, 32GB of storage, WiFi, Bluetooth, and two NFC antennas. A light modeled after a classic recording indicator lets people know when the camera is in use.
Its removable battery lasts around one hour, depending on what the duck is doing, so it will probably need a rest before you do.
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The robot arrives with a battery, USB-C cable, and game controller. The accessories that make some of its more charming tricks possible cost extra: A $39 pack includes two rollers, a ball, a laser pointer, and NFC tags. Pollen is also selling additional batteries and development supplies separately.
Microduck is the latest step in Hugging Face’s broader push to bring open-source AI into the physical world. The company launched LeRobot, a collection of AI models, datasets, and development tools for robotics, in 2024. It later released the programmable SO-101 robotic arm and, in May 2025, introduced two humanoid robots: HopeJR and Reachy Mini.
HopeJR is a full-size humanoid with 66 independent movements, including the ability to walk and move its arms. Reachy Mini, meanwhile, is an expressive desktop robot built for coding, conversational AI, and human-robot interaction. It can see, listen, speak, and run AI applications.
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Pollen Robotics says more than 10,000 Reachy Mini robots have made their way to people around the world. But while Reachy Mini is designed for AI that interacts, Pollen Robotics says Microduck is built for AI that acts, moving through physical spaces, carrying objects, and recovering from falls. The company also said its admittedly "very unscientific" testing found that Microduck is about 10 times more fun in a group, opening the door to robot races, soccer matches, and other multi-robot experiments.
Delangue added that the launch the beginning of an "era of affordable open-source robots." Whether Microduck ultimately becomes an accessible platform for physical AI or simply the most technically advanced way to kick a tiny ball across your living room will depend on what its owners teach it.
Either way, the robot uprising apparently waddles now.
You can preorder the Microduck at the Pollen Robotics website.
GTA 6 leaks: 7 things we haven’t seen in Cyberleek footage yetHere's what Cyberleek has yet to show in their GTA 6 leaks.
The Grand Theft Auto VI leaker known as Cyberleek has been dropping near-daily footage showcasing gameplay from the upcoming game.
On Wednesday, Cyberleek ventured into new territory, which crossed the line for some gamers: The leaker posted four and a half minutes of footage spoiling part of the GTA 6 storyline for the first time. The clip covers the game's prologue and features one of the two playable characters, Lucia Caminos.
However, lots of gamers are talking about what Cyberleek hasn't leaked yet, as well as speculation as to why. It seems that the leaker isn't just leaking stolen footage but is actively clipping the material themself, which leads fans to believe that Cyberleek has a playable build of the game. But, the footage that's been posted by Cyberleek so far suggests that they may have a restricted build of the game.
Looking over what's missing from Cyberleek's leaks, you'll find that there's also quite a few trademark elements of a GTA game that they haven't been seen yet. Here's what we found — or should we say, here's what we haven't found — in the leaked footage so far:
GTA 6 will feature a playable Bonnie and Clyde-esque duo named Jason Duval and Lucia Caminos, as Dazed magazine revealed this week. Yet, all the leaks that Cyberleek has posted so far feature Jason as the playable character.
Cyberleek just posted the prologue that features Lucia, but still hasn't posted any Lucia gameplay, despite teasing more Lucia-focused content.
Over on Reddit, gamers have been sharing concerns over the lack of any first-person POV footage in the leaks. GTA 6 is primarily played in third-person view, and all of the footage is from that viewpoint.
However, GTA 6 is an extremely complex game, and many elements may be best experienced in the first-person view. For example, customization options of vehicles are extremely detailed, and a first-person view is often required to truly appreciate the little details.
First-person view is very likely in GTA 6; we just haven't seen Cyberleek leak footage of it yet.
Cyberleek started by leaking the map of the world of GTA 6, which is set in a Florida and Miami-inspired fictional state called Leonida. In fact, GTA fans who are part of a community mapping project confirmed that it's very likely legitimate, as it lines up with their own findings.
However, knowing what exists on the map in GTA has also shed light on how little the leaker has shown us. In the leaked gameplay footage, there is very little exploration of the massive interactive world.
Speaking of customization, there are two major customizable features we haven't seen yet in the leaked footage: Clothing and car customization.
The leakers have yet to post anything showcasing what will likely be a massive array of detailed customization options for your character's style and rides.
Cyberleek has leaked plenty of footage of GTA 6 robberies and carjackings, featuring free-roaming stick-ups and holding up gas stations for cash.
But GTA is known for more than basic robbery. There are also complex, multi-part heists and criminal missions. Yet, we haven't seen any missions like that from Cyberleeks yet. The lack of this footage is odd, as one would think this would be among the most visually appealing for viewers.
GTA is more than just guns. Yet, when it comes to the game's other items, Cyberleek hasn't shown them yet. We haven't even seen the use of the in-game mobile phone, which has been a major element of previous GTA games. An early Cyberleek clip showed Jason shooting a basketball, but that's it.
In fact, we haven't seen the leaker utilize the Items tab in the menu at all during gameplay footage.
Will Cyberleek drop more footage that includes any of these missing GTA elements? Or maybe Netflix's upcoming exclusive look at the game will show us what we've been missing so far.
Elon Musks SpacexAI faces another lawsuit from child sexual abuse survivorThe lawsuit claims child sexual abuse material depicting real people was used to train the chatbot.
Elon Musk's SpacexAI (formerly xAI) is facing another lawsuit over Grok's nonconsensual deepfake features.
The proposed nationwide class action lawsuit, filed today, alleges that the AI company trained its chatbot on data sets containing child sexual abuse materials (CSAM) featuring real children. SpacexAI did not adequately "block explicit content, prevent nonconsensual sexualized deepfakes of real people, and filter abusive material out of their training datasets," the lawsuit claims.
The lead plaintiff, a victim of childhood sexual violence and CSAM referred to as Jane Doe, claims images depicting her assault were used to train Grok and that the chatbot generated new sexually explicit images of her based on the material. It also claims her likeness inspired other digitally-generated images of minors.
"Our client has lived for nearly two decades knowing that images of the worst thing that ever happened to her are circulating among predators online, and that they can resurface at any moment," Sarah London, counsel for Doe, said in a statement. "xAI must be held responsible for knowingly training its models on images of the horrific abuse she suffered, and on the abuse images of every other survivor in this class."
CSAM is verified and stored by the National Center for Missing & Exploited Children (NCMEC) as part of ongoing cases and to prevent further dissemination. Images are converted into unique digital signatures, or fingerprints, and stored on what is known as a Hash List. Hash lists are used by internet service providers to automatically detect CSAM without needing to reference original materials.
This is one of several class action lawsuits brought against the company for the chatbot's controversial "nudify" features and alleged role in generating CSAM, following an international child exploitation scandal that led several countries to temporarily suspend access to the AI tool.
In January, a woman filed a proposed class action lawsuit citing emotional distress caused by X users who used Grok to digitally alter photos of her into sexually revealing outfits. The lawsuit alleges SpacexAI created "a generative artificial intelligence chatbot that humiliates and sexually exploits women and girls by undressing them and posing them in sexual positions in deepfake images publicly posted on X."
In March, three teenagers sued the company for Grok's role in generating thousands of sexually explicit images of them as minors, after being notified of the images by law enforcement. That lawsuit was expanded earlier this month, adding two additional plaintiffs in an updated claim that SpacexAI did not effectively report instances of CSAM to NCMEC, which is mandated by law. The lawsuit also mentions Stability AI, the makers of the popular text-to-image model Stable Diffusion, as an additional defendant.
Jackery just launched the HomePower 1000 Plus V2 power station with 3,600W peak surge and quick rechargingThe Jackery HomePower 10000 Plus V2 portable power station is on sale for as low as $619 at launch, down from the list price of $749.
The world of portable power stations expanded today with Jackery's announcement of the new HomePower 1000 Plus V2. The new model is designed for home use when we need it most, like during power outages, home improvement projects, or keeping everything running smoothy in the home office. But just because it falls under the Jackery HomePower lineup doesn't mean it won't be an excellent camping companion or great for content creators.
The Jackery HomePower 1000 Plus V2 comes in both black and white and is already available for purchase at Amazon and Jackery. Both colorways are on sale from launch until Sept. 3. Keep in mind the white version is $20 more than the black, but that could be well worth the extra if you prefer the cleaner look.
(If your main concern is keeping the refrigerator cooling during a power outage, I still recommend checking out the Jackery FridgeGuard.)
The Jackery HomePower 1000 Plus V2 is a 1,024Wh power station that's rated for a 1,800W output and a peak surge of 3,600W, making it capable of operating high-power items like the chainsaw, hammer drill, or other demanding tools. But while it packs in the power, it doesn't weigh much, coming in at just under 24 pounds. Given its weight and relatively small dimensions, it's easy to carry around the house or take from the trunk to the campsite.
Another huge benefit of the new HP 1000 Plus V2 is its massive expansion ability. You can connect the new model to up to five 2,000Wh expansion batteries for a total capacity of 11,000Wh. That'll be excellent if you're using the setup for home backup during an outage or when creating content in the studio.
If you do use this model when creating content, the quiet 30-decibel noise level will make it possible to record video or audio with the power station nearby. Using it at home during an outage, with its 10-millisecond uninterrupted power supply, means your electronics won't have time to power down should grid power fail before the Jackery takes over.
Recharge the Jackery with standard AC wall power, and you're looking at about 50 minutes. You can also connect up to 400W of solar to achieve a recharge time of about three hours. Using a gas generator to recharge is also an option, which should take about 50 minutes.
The Jackery HomePower 1000 Plus V2 is already available to purchase online at Amazon and Jackery. The brand is rewarding early orders by taking $130 off the black and $140 off the white until Sept. 3.
Owala is launching new fall colors that scream cozy — get ready to swap out your bottleOwala just revealed seven new fall colors and patterns, including Plaid, Simple, and Joshua Tree, launching across bottles and tumblers Aug. 27.
TL;DR: Owala is rolling out seven new fall colors and patterns — desert smoke, plaid and simple, blue steel, woodland boho, joshua tree, toile be home, and bold move — across its full range of bottles and tumblers starting Aug. 27.
Fall is (almost) here, and Owala's getting ready for it with a fresh drop of colors and patterns.
Owala built its following starting with the FreeSip, the bottle known for a lid that lets you sip through a built-in straw and chug through a spout. The insulation holds up too — Mashable's review noted ice was still intact a full 24 hours after filling it up. The locking top doubles as a carry handle, and the lid components are dishwasher-safe, though the body is better hand-washed.
The FreeSip comes in three sizes — 24, 32, and 40 ounces — but the two bigger options don't fit in a cup holder, so anyone who wants something more travel-friendly usually reaches for the 24-ounce size.
Since then, the brand has expanded well beyond the original FreeSip to include tumblers and slimmer styles like the FreeSip Twist. Fall's getting the same treatment: seven new colors and patterns drop across Owala's full range of bottles and tumblers:
Desert Smoke — a metallic mauve-rose finish
Plaid and Simple — a brown-and-cream plaid check
Blue Steel — a solid navy blue
Woodland Boho — a rust-and-cream floral print
Joshua Tree — a sage green tumbler
Toile Be Home — a cream toile print with a blue floral pattern
Bold Move — a metallic gold-olive finish
Set a reminder now, because these won't stay in stock for long once they go live on Owala.
Adults Season 2 is the hardest Ive laughed at a sitcom this yearFX's hangout sitcom "Adults" hits new heights in its excellent second season, out Aug. 27 on Hulu and FXX.
In its first season, Adults established a strong foundation as a delightful hangout sitcom. In its second season, it builds something truly great.
The bones of the show are still very much the same. Created by Ben Kronengold and Rebecca Shaw, Adults continues to follow the misadventures of housemates Samir (Malik Elassal), Billie (Lucy Freyer), Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), Issa (Amita Rao), and Anton (Owen Thiele) as they navigate what it truly means to be grown-up. While they often struggle with adulthood, Adults has faced no such growing pains. Season 2 is sharper and more self-assured than the last, with its already strong ensemble operating at the top of their game.
Adults swings for the fences this season, going big on everything from cringe comedy to screwball farces. Examples of the former include Billie's quest to scrub a compromising photo from social media, or Anton's attempts to save his job after an intergenerational misunderstanding at work. Both storylines exemplify Adults' leads' tendency to trip over their own feet in ways that are somehow as endearing as they are tough to watch.
The show's more screwball tendencies shine in the season's strongest outing, an installment centered on an acid trip that goes awry when a raccoon wanders through the house. Suddenly, what you think will be a predictable episode involving psychedelic shenanigans becomes something much greater: a ticking time bomb in which the raccoon must be dealt with before the acid kicks in. Playing out in real time, the episode is a madcap countdown that manages to distill the friend group's complicated web of relationships to their purest forms, then upend the dynamic entirely. It's a series game changer that still somehow finds time to fit in some ridiculous practical animal effects, not to mention the kind of relatable observational humor that creates an instant connection between the viewer and the friend group. Internet paywall jokes served that role in Season 1, but Season 2's winner has to be this episode's gag of mixing up a microwave's normal timer and its cook timer. It's simple, but it's hard, dang it!
Adults' raccoon episode is also one of the few times its core five actors get to spend a whole episode in isolation, which further proves their airtight chemistry. But as great as they are in a group, they also get to shine individually. In Elassal's hands, Samir's tendency to overthink leads to some of the season's most stressful comedic dilemmas. Freyer deftly carries the bulk of the season's most awkward storylines, walking the line of cringe comedy with grace (and some inspired pratfalls). Innanen briefly breaks from Paul Baker's soft boy sweetness to play a fratty bro type, and that contrast starts the season off on a high note. Rao and Thiele are both high-energy charisma bombs who light up the screen, but at several points this season, they get to pull back and reveal some vulnerabilities. A late-season installment that pits them against each other at the office is an instant highlight, and proof that I could watch them (and the rest of the cast) bounce off one another forever.
Unfortunately, I can't watch them bounce off one another forever because Season 2 only clocks in at eight episodes. Nine, if you count the prequel episode that released earlier this year. That's simply not enough time to hang out with Adults' characters — especially when the whole point of the show is that it's a hangout sitcom.
That Adults only has eight episodes means that the ones we do get are polished, without a true weak link among them. Yet you can feel more story crowding in at the edges. The finale, which sees Paul Baker running to be president of the local Homeowners Association, could easily have been a three-episode arc in any other sitcom, complete with a full campaign. The same goes for the fan-favorite slow-burn romance between Anton and Paul Baker. I will never say no to more episodes of yearning!
When it first aired, Adults drew comparisons to Friends due to its similar "friends in New York" conceit. But the starkest difference between the two isn't their comedy style or the fact that they were written for and by different generations. It's the fact that people can spend more time with Friends. They could watch it week to week for some 20 weeks each season and really feel like they were part of the group. Sure, not every episode can be a winner, but sitcoms deserve a little shagginess and room to grow, just like their characters.
Adults viewers appear to agree: Check any comment section on a video about the show, and you're guaranteed to find demands for 22 episode seasons (complete with holiday specials, naturally). If even a quarter of them are as good as what Season 2 has to offer, I'd be more than satisfied. After all, when the worst thing about a show is that there isn't enough of it, you know it's doing something right.
Adults Season 2 premieres Aug. 27 at 9 p.m. ET on Hulu and FXX.
Need a TV upgrade? The 65-inch Samsung Class S90H OLED 4K TV has never been cheaper.The 65-inch Samsung Class S90H OLED 4K TV is on sale at Amazon for $1,597.99, down from the list price of $2,697.99. That's a 41% discount.
SAVE $1,100: The 65-inch Samsung Class S90H OLED TV is on sale for $1,597.99 at Amazon, down from the list price of $2,697.99. That's a 41% discount and the lowest we've ever seen at Amazon.
We're in the last week of NFL preseason, which means sports weekends are about to get more exciting. MLB games are heating up, too. If you're not a sports fan, we have tons of fall TV to look forward to, like a fresh season of The Great British Bake Off to serve as our emotional support show, and Slow Horses returns to Apple TV with a new season. If you're pumped for fall viewing but your TV is lagging, check out this excellent TV that's on a major discount.
As of Aug. 27, the 65-inch Samsung Class S90H OLED TV is on sale for $1,597.99 at Amazon, down from the list price of $2,697.99. That works out to a 41% discount that takes $1,100 off the price. It's the lowest we've ever seen at Amazon by about $400.
For most of us, the TV is a big source of entertainment. From putting on a jazzy playlist in the morning to watching our favorite Netflix shows in the evening, the TV is on pretty often. For those looking for top-tier quality in a 65-inch TV, it's hard to deny the specs on the Samsung Class S90H OLED TV.
The 65-inch size of the OLED display will work great in most rooms, and Samsung added glare-free technology and 4K upscaling for clarity. When it comes to watching sports, Samsung has us covered with AI motion enhancer pro, smoothing out even the quickest movement for non-blurred viewing.
If you like gaming on your TV, the Samsung is ready to deliver thanks to VRR gaming speeds that can reach 165Hz.
Since we've never seen a price this low at Amazon for the 65-inch Samsung Class S90H OLED TV, consider this your sign to make the move. You'll be in great viewing shape for fall TV, movies, and sports.
The ultimate zero-effort lawn flex: Segway’s Navimow X430 robot lawn mower is $250 offAs of Aug. 27, save $250 on the Segway Navimow X430 robot lawn mower at Amazon.
SAVE $250: As of Aug. 27, get the Segway Navimow X430 robot lawn mower for $2,099 at Amazon. That's a discount of 10% on list price.
Tired of mowing the lawn? It's a thankless task, especially since the grass will keep growing no matter what you do. Save some time by outsourcing the job to a robot. You may not have realized that, in addition to robot vacuums, robot lawn mowers exist now.
As of Aug. 27, get the Segway Navimow X430 robot lawn mower for $2,099 at Amazon, down from its usual price of $2,499. That's $250 off and a 10% discount.
This is a powerful robot lawn mower that can push through even the most difficult terrain. It's equipped with all-wheel drive and a dual suspension system to keep it prime and ready. That means it can even tackle slopes of up to 84% and deal with obstacles up to 2.8 inches. It's backed by dual 180W motors, 12 blades, dual cutting discs, a 17-inch cutting width, and adaptive blade control, so it can tackle thick foliage.
You don't need to worry about extensive setup, either. Use its one-tap mapping method to get it running without a boundary wire or antenna. Edit its maps with GeoSketch, track its location via GPS, and use GeoFence alerts on your mobile device to ensure it's working in the areas you've assigned.
This is a great splurge if you're ready to hand off lawn mowing to a robot, so if you're interested, now's the time to pick it up.
GTA 6 Cyberleek update: Everything leaked Thursday ahead of Netflix revealNotorious 'GTA 6' leaker Cyberleek seems to be taking a bit of a break.
We have only a matter of hours before Rockstar Games' Grand Theft Auto VI makes its official gameplay debut. That means it's time to round up all the unofficial gameplay that came out this week.
A person or group of people going by Cyberleek has been steadily leaking GTA VI gameplay footage over the past week or so. Rockstar actually publicly acknowledged the leak and confirmed that the clips are real on Wednesday, which is a bit of a surprise given how the company normally operates.
It's worth noting that Cyberleek doesn't seem to have posted anything new on Thursday morning. That doesn't mean the leaks have stopped entirely, but for now, the only clips we have are clips that came out through the end of Wednesday. Before we get to see the game as Rockstar wants us to see it at 3 p.m. ET on Thursday, here is a quick list of clips (described, not linked) that have come out this week:
Strip club: A short clip of protagonist Jason walking around a strip club
Beach cycling: Jason riding a bicycle down a beach that is impressively packed with a lot of NPCs
Game store: A clip of Jason wandering around a video game store, which is ironic considering this game does not come on disc
Police chase: Jason stealing a nice car and being chased by police, followed by a short cutscene featuring the other protagonist, Lucia
Lucia prologue: Nearly five minutes of story cutscenes, presumably from the beginning of the game, as Lucia gets out of prison
As I said, the Lucia prologue cutscene seems to be the last leak, for now. We'll see if they continue after the big Netflix trailer at 3 p.m. ET.
Early Labor Day TV deal: Hisense QD7 Series TVs start from just £279.99 at CostcoHisense QD7 series TVs are available from $279.99 at Costco for Labor Day 2026.
Labor Day is fast approaching, and that can only mean one thing: deals.
If you’re looking to save money on a TV, Costco has just the thing — great prices on the Hisense QD7 range. And there’s no better time to upgrade your TV, with the football season kicking off and summer turning to fall, meaning more time cozying up with a boxset binge or movie.
You can choose from two sizes of this popular Hisense model: the 55-inch QD7 series is currently priced at $279.99, and the 100-inch QD7 series is now priced at $1,499.99. The prices on both models are valid until mid-September.
Hisense is already a go-to TV brand for premium specs and exceptional value. And the QD7 Series, a Costco exclusive, doesn’t skimp on features or technology. Using Hi-QLED screen tech, it delivers punchy, nuanced colors and a 4K resolution — a superb, outsized smart TV for next-gen gaming, cinema-like movie watching, and sports that seem to put you right in the stadium.
You’ll also get a glare-free screen, 4K upscaling, Dolby Vision and Atmos, AI-powered motion smoothing, Alexa, and a Fire TV operating system that offers all your favorite streaming apps
Don't miss your chance to upgrade your TV — not to mention your whole TV viewing experience — this Labor Day. Pick up the the Hisense 55-inch QD7 Series for $279.99 or the Hisense 100-inch QD7 Series for $1,499.99
Available only at Costco, each QD7 purchase includes a three-year Allstate protection plan, which is bundled in with five years of total coverage when paired with the manufacturer's warranty.
Rare Alienware deal: Get $60 off the Alienware 34 240Hz QD-OLED curved monitorAs of August 27, save $60 on the Alienware 34 240Hz QD-OLED curved monitor.
SAVE $60: As of Aug. 27, get the Alienware 34 240Hz QD-OLED Curved Gaming Monitor (AW3425DW) for $289.99, down from its usual price of $349.99. That's a 17% discount on list price.
PC gaming can be a pricey hobby. Grabbing a new peripheral or accessory for your setup can be an expensive affair, so it's good to grab things during a sale when you can. If you need to upgrade your build for an upcoming game or just want some new equipment, now's the time to lock in a new monitor purchase with this sale.
As of Aug. 27, get the Alienware 34 240Hz QD-OLED Curved Gaming Monitor (AW3425DW) for $289.99, down from its usual price of $349.99. That's $60 off, a 17% discount.
This ultrawide curved gaming monitor boasts a 1,400p resolution, a smooth 240Hz refresh rate, and 0.03ms response time. It features a height-adjustable stand that lets you position it perfectly, with tilt and swivel options to get a great angle as well.
That makes it the perfect candidate for adding to your setup, no matter what genre of game you enjoy. Its curved screen can help you feel like you're right in the middle of the action, so you get the impression you've been dropped into a firefight, or you're seeing your favorite game world surrounding you.
If you're ready to add a little oomph to your gaming battlestation, this monitor is the perfect way to do so, especially if you like to feel as though you're actually living your favorite games. It's especially nice at this price, so be sure to grab it while it's still in stock.
How to preorder Microsofts translucent green anniversary Xbox console and controllerMicrosoft has finally opened preorders for its Xbox 25th Anniversary Collection console and controller bundle. It costs $899.99.
Microsoft has finally opened preorders for the Xbox 25th Anniversary Collection it unveiled back in June. The bundle includes a special-edition Xbox console and controller with matching translucent "OG Green" designs inspired by the original Xbox Launch Team Edition system from 2001.
The Xbox 25th Anniversary Collection costs $899.99 and is set for release on Nov. 13. Shoppers can also purchase the controller separately for $79.99; it arrives Oct. 20.
"This collection is our way of celebrating the community that has made Xbox what it is today," said Jason Ronald, VP of Next Generation at Xbox, in a blog post Wednesday. "Thank you for being part of this journey."
The Xbox Series X25 Limited Edition console has a power button that glows green and an Xbox 25th Anniversary logo on its facade. Its see-through housing offers a peek at its internal components. Each one is engraved with its unique production number.
At $899.99, the Series X25 is $100 more expensive than a regular Series X. (The flagship console has faced three separate price hikes since last May; the latest one went into effect Aug. 1.) At least Microsoft throws in a free download of Halo: Campaign Evolved, this summer's new remake of the very first Halo game.
Series X25 preorders began Wednesday via email invitation for "some of Xbox’s most dedicated fans," according to Ronald's post. Everyone else can preorder it starting today (Aug. 27) at 10 a.m. ET. It's available on the Xbox website and at participating retailers "while supplies last," Ronald said. That includes Amazon, Best Buy, GameStop, Target, and Walmart.
The X25 Special Edition Wireless Controller has ABXY buttons and bumpers that match those on "the Duke," Microsoft's inaugural gamepad. Its power button also lights up in green. It's $15 more expensive than a standard Xbox controller.
Preorders for the X25 Special Edition controller started Wednesday and went fast. It was only in stock at Best Buy and Walmart at the time of writing, having already sold out at the Microsoft Store, Amazon, Target, and GameStop.
Microsoft has partnered up with IKEA and Razer for other limited-edition collections in honor of its silver jubilee.
The new Xbox 25th Anniversary Collection includes redesigned Razer accessories: Where to preorderXbox is marking its 25th anniversary with a new accessory collection, including a Razer Basilisk V3 Pro mouse, BlackWidow V4 keyboard, and Backbone Pro controller, all now up for preorder.
Xbox is turning 25, and it's celebrating with new gear. The Designed for Xbox 25th Anniversary Collection is now up for preorder, pulling the console's original translucent green look into a lineup of mice, keyboards, earbuds, controllers, and bags — including the ever-popular Razer range.
Here's everything in the collection from Razer:
Razer Hammerhead V3 X HyperSpeed — Wireless gaming earbuds running on Razer's HyperSpeed Wireless and Bluetooth 5.3, delivering low-latency audio across phones, tablets, and PCs. Battery life totals up to 35 hours between the earbuds (10 hours) and the pocketable charging case (25 hours), with USB-C passthrough to top up on the go.
Razer Basilisk V3 Pro 35K — A wireless ergonomic gaming mouse running Razer's Focus Pro 35K Optical Sensor Gen-2, the company's most precise sensor to date, paired with a reworked 4-way scroll wheel for deeper customization and up to 140 hours of battery life.
Razer BlackWidow V4 75% — A compact, hot-swappable mechanical keyboard with Chroma RGB lighting you can fully customize down to the switches. The anniversary edition adds one exclusive perk: a dedicated Xbox key that instantly pulls up the Game Bar.
Twenty-five years of gaming history, distilled into gear you can actually use — pick your favorite before preorders wrap up.
First look: Hypershell is launching the worlds first full-leg exoskeleton at IFA 2026Hypershell is unveiling Halo, its new full-leg exoskeleton, at IFA 2026 in Berlin on Sept. 3. The device uses four powered joints to support movement across the hips and knees at once.
TL;DR: Hypershell is debuting Halo, a flagship full-leg exoskeleton, at IFA 2026 in Berlin on Sept. 3. It uses a four-motor system that powers the hip and knee joints together, expanding on the company's hip-only exoskeletons.
Robot legs are getting an upgrade. Hypershell is unveiling the Hypershell Halo, its flagship full-leg exoskeleton, at its keynote at IFA 2026 in Berlin on Sept. 3. It's the company's biggest step yet toward expanding what wearable tech can do for how people move — building on the hip-only exoskeletons it's built its name on.
Hypershell's existing exoskeletons work by strapping motors to your hips to assist your stride. Mashable put Hypershell's X Series to the test on real trails, and it held up: the AI-driven motion system adapts to your stride in real-time, giving a noticeable push on inclines that felt more like a tailwind than a shove.
With around 800W of peak output, it steadied climbs and uneven terrain, and our reviewer backed up Hypershell's claims of 40% more leg strength and 30% less effort — resulting in less fatigue, less soreness, and more distance covered. Battery held up too: over 10 miles per charge, with a 35-minute top-up getting it back to 50%.
Halo takes that hip-only setup and expands it: it's built around what the company calls a unified architecture that coordinates four powered joints — covering both the hips and knees — into a single connected system, rather than assisting just one joint. Hypershell says that setup extends powered assistance across the entire lower limb, allowing Halo to support a wider range of movement over changing terrain than its earlier models.
Hypershell will showcase Halo and the X Series at Booth 119, Hall 12, at IFA, running through Sept. 8 in Berlin.
Samsung's $700 Galaxy S26 FE gets nearly all of the camera features we've seen on the company's more expensive phones, including My FanCam, Super Steady video with Horizontal Lock and other Android 17 perks.
GTA 6 Netflix extended look: What time it releases todayRockstar Games confirmed that our next big look at 'Grand Theft Auto VI' will happen on Netflix, of all places.
For months, video game enjoyers have been wondering when we'd actually get to see some real gameplay footage of Grand Theft Auto VI prior to its release in November. Over the past few days, leakers have been sharing a lot of footage online, but today we'll get to see something official.
Rockstar Games is bringing "an extended look" at GTA VI that will air today, Aug. 27, on Netflix, at 3 p.m. ET. If you can't or don't want to watch it on Netflix, the same footage will appear on Rockstar's YouTube channel at 9 p.m. ET that night. The Netflix website also states, "Coming August 27: See an extended look at Grand Theft Auto VI, the next evolution in the groundbreaking Grand Theft Auto series.
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Fans have been speculating for months about when the next GTA VI trailer will finally see the light of day. Interestingly, neither Rockstar Games nor Netflix actually uses the word trailer, so it's unclear what form this "extended look" will take.
Likewise, Rockstar's post didn't include any new footage or even a clear description of what we'll see, but it's easy enough to make an educated guess. The game is out on Nov. 19, and we've seen very little gameplay footage from official sources.
It's also worth briefly noting that, as someone who has followed video game news very closely for more than 20 years, I can't recall a single game trailer airing first on a paid streaming service. That's the world Rockstar has created for itself.
As a reminder, you have until the middle of November to save up $100 for the version of the game that comes with every feature.
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Samsung announces a mid-range Galaxy S26 FE for $699Samsung's new Galaxy S26 FE pairs flagship-level AI features with mid-range specs and price.
Samsung's mid-range Galaxy phone is back.
The Korean tech giant announced on Thursday that the Galaxy S26 FE will launch on Sept. 3 for a starting price of $699. That's $50 more than the Galaxy S25 FE was priced at a year ago, but such is the way of things these days. More importantly, it costs a lot less than the $1,099 base-model Galaxy S26 that launched earlier this year, despite coming with many of the same AI features.
I got to demo the new phone at a recent impressions, and my first impression is this: it's fine! The new phone feels solid in the hands and not like a cheap, budget phone. The display seems equally solid, but a lower peak brightness could be a problem, especially in sunlight. Finally, the colors are pretty boring to me.
Here are the basic specs for the Galaxy S26 FE:
Display: 6.7-inch display with 120Hz refresh rate and 1,900 nits peak brightness
Processor: Exynos 2500
RAM: 8GB
Storage: 128/256GB
Battery: 4,900mAh
Rear cameras: 50MP wide, 12MP ultra-wide, 8MP telephoto
Front camera: 12MP
Samsung obviously had to make a lot of compromises on the hardware front compared to the regular S26 to get the price down as low as it is. Peak brightness is one of them, as the S26's is 2,600 nits and the S26 FE's is only 1,900 nits. The S26 also had 12GB of RAM, compared to 8GB on the FE. Similarly, Samsung isn't offering a 512GB storage variant for the FE, even though it did on the regular S26.
The telephoto lens on the back has also been downgraded from 10MP to 8MP, though interestingly, the 4,900mAh battery cell in the FE is bigger than the 4,300mAh cell in the S26. The inferior Exynos 2500 chip in the FE might give it worse battery efficiency, though. We'll have to wait until it's in our hands to find that out for sure.
Despite all of the hardware downgrades, Samsung tells me that you can expect parity in terms of AI features, like Samsung's AI photo editing software or its suite of AI time-saving features. (The jury is out on whether the Exynos can handle these processes on device as well as the S26's Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5. If you can live without the brightest display, the most storage, or the best cameras, the S26 FE might be a good option for anyone in need of a new Android phone.
Shelens Subway Takes episode about child influencers is on pointBritish content creator Shelen appeared on "Subway Takes" with strong words about parents who feature their kids in TikTok videos.
Kareem Rahma's Subway Takes keeps our feeds aflame with scorching perspectives, and the latest episode of his popular web series asks straight-up questions of people making influencers and social media stars of their children.
In a video posted Wednesday, far from the New York Subway, the host took the London Tube with British content creator, podcaster, and presenter Shelen, who had strong words about parents who constantly feature their kids in TikTok videos.
"Forcing your child to do a TikTok is child labor," she said. "I'm not talking to parents who have a child and the child pops up in a vlog every now and again. I'm not talking to people who capture an organically, genuinely hilarious moment, post it on the internet, and we all laugh. I'm talking about the parents that make their child clock in, like they need to earn their keep."
"Content work is real work," agrees Rahma. "I do it. It's hard. It's hard work."
In a precise, no-nonsense argument, Shelen comprehensively unpacks the legal and ethical problems with parents making money from online videos featuring their kids, including the profits involved, risks of online child sexual exploitation, parents giving away the rights to their children's images, and the possibility of their likeness being manipulated by AI, which is a growing issue.
"People are thinking, Shelen, you know what? Posting my child is easy money. Yes, that tends to be the law behind child labor. Do you know what I'm saying? It doesn't make it OK," Shelen added.
Currently, there are no specific UK child labour laws regulating child influencers or creators. Children under 14 can work part-time in entertainment industries including TV and theatre, though they'll need a performance licence and parental consent and supervision, and they won't qualify for the National Minimum Wage until they're 16. Kids can only start full-time work, for up to 40 hours a week, after 16. None of this applies to influencers or content creators. The existing child labour laws weren't designed with influencers or content creation in mind, leaving a potential regulatory gap that could be exploited.
In the U.S., the law varies by state. In 2023, Illinois become the first state in America to pass a law protecting child influencers, allowing kids under 16 "in an artistic or creative service" to sue if they're not paid for featuring in their parent or guardians' online content. California, Minnesota, and Utah have since followed suit with similar laws.
"I feel like one day laws will change, society will change, these kids will grow up, and they will sue their asses," said Shelen in her Subway Takes episode. "And I can't wait to watch."
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Home Depot is kicking off the holidays with a 10-foot polar bear and a Santa you control from your phoneHome Depot's 2026 holiday collection launches Aug. 27, bringing a 10-foot polar bear, app-controlled Santas, and animated Disney and Marvel characters.
TL;DR: Home Depot's 2026 holiday collection launches online Aug. 27, featuring a 10-foot polar bear, an 8-foot nutcracker with LCD "LifeEyes," an app-controlled Santa, and animated characters from Disney and Marvel, with apartment-friendly decor for smaller spaces.
The holidays might still be months away, but Home Depot isn't waiting around. Fresh off Home Depot's own Christmas in July sale, which brought back the viral 9-foot Grand Duchess tree and an even bigger version of the fan-favorite 8.5-foot Towering Santa, the retailer is following up with its full 2026 holiday collection.
It launches online Aug. 27, with new decor and a handful of tech upgrades to help shoppers turn their homes into a winter wonderland well before Thanksgiving even hits.
From giant animatronic Santas to nostalgic Disney and Marvel characters, this year's lineup is stacked with statement pieces. Home Depot says the collection has something for every space and budget, whether you've got a sprawling yard, a front porch, or a cozy apartment.
Here's what's landing:
8-foot Gold Nutcracker with LCD LifeEyes — a giant gold nutcracker with animated LCD eyes that actually move
App-controlled Towering Santa — a towering, animated Santa you can control right from your phone
10-foot Giant Polar Bear — the collection's biggest showstopper
9-foot Santa's Sleigh with Reindeer and the 8-foot Vintage Nutcracker — two of the collection's holiday classics, supersized for maximum impact
Disney's 3.5-foot Animated Pluto, 4-foot Interactive Mickey, and Minnie Mouse — fan-favorite characters, now animated and interactive
Marvel's 3-foot Animated Groot — for anyone who wants a little Guardians of the Galaxy under the tree
With the giant showstoppers, there's plenty for smaller spaces too, like animated character sets sized for tight spots, LED reindeer, and jumbo ornaments to make it easy to bring some holiday cheer home, no matter your space or budget.
Shop the full 2026 holiday collection at Home Depot, launching Aug. 27.
Record-low drone deal: The lightweight DJI Mini 5 Pro drone is down to under $700 at AmazonFind the best DJI drone deal. Save 10% on the DJI Mini 5 Pro at Amazon.
SAVE $76: As of Aug. 26, the DJI Mini 5 Pro drone is on sale for $683 at Amazon. That's a 10% discount on the list price.
If you're in the market for a new drone, some of the latest changes around laws on foreign-made drones might have you confused. While there is a ban on future imports, products that have already made it through the supply chain and are sitting on shelves can still be bought and used as normal.
The DJI Mini 5 Pro hasn't suddenly disappeared from the market. In fact, this drone is on sale right now. And according to camelcamelcamel, it's at its lowest-ever price.
The DJI Mini 5 Pro is a compact, foldable drone with a palm-sized design that slips easily into a pocket. Despite its size, it still offers 42GB of internal storage.
It has a 1-inch CMOS sensor that captures 4K/60 fps HDR video and a gimbal that supports true vertical filming and 225° roll rotation for more creative angles. The Intelligent Flight Battery also provides up to 36 minutes of flight time, with fast charging that allows three batteries to be charged in around 115 minutes.
With the drone, you'll also get a DJI RC-N3 remote controller, one battery, spare propellers, and more essentials needed to fly. Get this record-low deal from Amazon now.
TCL TV deal alert: Get this stunning 65-inch Mini-LED TV for $602 off at AmazonThe 65-inch TCL QM7L Mini-LED QLED Smart TV is down to $897.99 at Amazon, a 40% discount off its $1,499.99 list price — its best price ever.
SAVE $602: As of Aug. 27, the TCL 65-inch QM7L Mini-LED Smart TV is down to $897.99 at Amazon. That's a 40% discount off its usual $1,499.99 — the lowest price we've ever seen for this TV.
Amazon just dropped the 65-inch TCL QM7L Mini-LED QLED Smart TV to $897.99, down from its usual $1,499.99. That's a 40% discount — $600 off — and the best price we've seen for this TV.
TCL's Mini-LED tech is the standout feature here, using thousands of tiny LEDs across over 2,100 independently controlled dimming zones — instead of one big backlight — to deliver deep, true blacks right next to bright highlights without either washing out the other. The color comes from a finer color filter than TCL typically uses, resulting in more accurate, true-to-life color rather than the oversaturated look you've probably seen before. Pair that with an anti-reflective panel, and you get a picture that still looks good even if your living room isn't pitch black.
There's an AI chip running in the background, constantly adjusting picture clarity, contrast, color, and motion based on whatever you're watching, so you're not manually tweaking settings for every movie or show. It also runs Google's Gemini AI, which makes voice commands and recommendations feel a lot more natural.
For gaming, you're getting smoother motion and lower input lag thanks to TCL's Game Accelerator and AMD FreeSync Premium Pro — useful if you're playing fast-paced games and don't want the screen lagging behind your controller. And for sound, this TV's built-in speakers are tuned by Bang & Olufsen, with the option to add a wireless subwoofer and satellite speakers later if you want a fuller home theater setup.
Grab the 65-inch TCL QM7L Mini-LED Smart TV at Amazon while it's at its best-ever price.
The Ninja HydraSense is a compact countertop water filtration system that removes up to 99% of stuff you dont want to drinkThe Ninja HydraSense countertop water filtration system is available for $199.99
It turns out, drinking water is one of the best things we can do when it comes to health. That's good news considering water is one of the most affordable beverages out there. But when we think about the invisible things in our tap water that might not be so great to drink, we run into problems.
Instead of buying endless plastic bottles of water, Ninja has a solution. The new Ninja HydraSense is a sleek and slim countertop water purification system that's a great addition to the lineup of Ninja kitchen appliances we've come to love.
The Ninja HydraSense sits on your countertop, plugged in to wall for access to filtered water on-demand. The reservoir can hold 96 ounces of water for less frequent refills, and the touchscreen gives you access to metrics like remaining filter life.
From the touchscreen, you can select your desired ounces, which will send water through the Ninja purifier that'll rid it of up to 99% of contaminates like chlorine, heavy metals, microplastics, and pharmaceuticals. However, Ninja says the filter leaves natural minerals and electrolytes. If you're curious, Ninja has a performance data sheet available to show filtration results from third-party testing.
Each Ninja HydraSense comes with one filter, which is designed to clean 120 gallons of water. Ninja says this can last for up to six months of use. Replacement filers come with a price of $39.99 for a single or $69.99 for a two-pack.
The Ninja HydraSense is already available to buy at both Amazon and Ninja's online storefront. If you like the look of the white or blue, Amazon is a good bet. If you'd prefer the Rosewater Pink or Black HydraSense, they're available at Ninja. If you like freebies, Ninja is tossing in a free 24-ounce Ninja Thirsti Travel Bottle with purchase of HydraSense.
SAVE $130: As of Aug. 27, the Dyson Airwrap i.d. is on sale for $519.99 at Amazon. That's a 20% discount on the list price.
The Dyson Airwrap i.d. has genuinely achieved cult status as a styling product. Famed for its ability to style your hair without damaging it, it's the perfect tool for salon-worthy blowouts at home. If you've been tempted to see what all the fuss is about but are hesitant about the price, it's currently on sale at Amazon.
As of Aug. 27, the styling tool is reduced by $130, taking the price down from $649.99 to $519.99.
This tool is designed for both straight and wavy hair, giving you six-in-one styling to dry, curl, wave, shape, and smooth without heat damage. It's powered by the Dyson digital motor V9, with its 13-blade impeller spinning at up to 110,000rpm to generate the air pressure that creates the Coanda effect.
It's seriously advanced, with Bluetooth connectivity that lets you pair it with the MyDyson app. In the app, you'll be prompted to answer six questions about your hair type and length, which will help it create a personalized styling profile for your hair. Once paired, your profile tailors the Airwrap i.d.'s styling settings, and the device stores your wrap, style, and cold shot settings for more consistent use.
Find this Dyson deal at Amazon right now.
First look: Lego reveals a $800 Star Wars Star Destroyer — the longest set Lego has ever constructedLego has announced the new Star Wars Executor Star Destroyer set (75457), a 6,130-piece build that will be available to buy from Oct. 1, priced at $799.99.
Only Lego Star Wars fans know the excitement of the latest reveals — that lightsaber-like buzz about which corner of a galaxy far, far away will get the plastic brick treatment next. Well, set the excitement levels to Class 0.5 hyperdrive because Lego has really brought out the big guns for its next Star Wars-themed build. And we do mean big.
Due for release on Oct. 4, the Executor Super Star Destroyer is the longest Lego ever made — a 53.5 inches (136 cm) recreation of Darth Vader’s flagship star destroyer, constructed with no fewer than 6,130 pieces.
The build is so massive that it required the design team to engineer a new Lego System core that uses Technic outriggers for extra strength to anchor the exterior panels. It also features all-new tile decorations to recreate hull lighting.
The Executor Super Star Destroyer was first seen in The Empire Strikes Back, replacing the mighty Death Star as Vader’s base of operations. It’s also where Vader summons six of the galaxy’s toughest bounty hunters. And they’re all included as minifigures in this set — Boba Fett, Dengar, Ig-88, Bossk, 4-LOM, and Zuckuss — along with a Darth Vader minifigure.
This is the first time all six of the bounty hunters have appeared in a single set together. It even comes with a mini-build of the ship’s bridge, allowing you to recreate the scene — Vader lining up the bounty hunters and charging them with the task of finding the Millennium Falcon — plus a to-scale version of the regular Star Destroyer.
Eagle-eyed Star Wars fans will appreciate a single round tile of the Millennium Falcon, recreating the moment Han Solo’s ship hides on the regular Star Destroyer — all to give some perspective of just how enormous the Executor is.
This is part of Lego’s Ultimate Collector Series (UCS) — in other words, seriously big and highly detailed — and is priced at $799.99. It's available to purchase from Lego.com and Lego stores from Oct. 1.
Review: Google Pixel 11 is sleek, but you might be happier with a cheap Pixel 10Pixel 11's higher starting price isn't married to any huge upgrades, but it's still a rock solid entry-level Android smartphone.
In 2025, Google packed the Pixel 10 full of upgrades over its predecessor. New features like a telephoto lens, a brighter display, and improved battery life made it feel like a real upgrade over the previous base-model Pixel. That is, unfortunately, not really the case with Pixel 11.
That's not to say the Pixel 11 is bad in any way, really. This is a perfect respectable Android phone, but a lack of standout new features (aside from a slimmer camera bar) make it feel significantly more incremental than the Pixel 10 did. It doesn't even have HiLight, the lone hardware "improvement" that graces the Pixel 11 Pro devices. Between that and specs that mostly line up with last year's model, the Pixel 11 sorta feels like a phone that only exists because Google makes a new base model every year and skipping a year would cause business problems.
It also doesn't help that 2026 is a great year to not buy a phone, thanks to RAMageddon price increases.
With an $899 starting price, the Pixel 11 does unfortunately separate itself from the Pixel 10 by being $100 more expensive than its predecessor. There is some important context to note with that, though: Google has excised the 128GB storage option this year. That means this isn't technically a price increase because the 256GB Pixel 11 costs the same as the 256GB Pixel 10 did. However, not giving consumers a 128GB option (even if that's a pretty small amount of storage in 2026) means the starting price is higher than last year's model, and that's not great!
The new Pixel 11 comes in four colors: Frost, Hibiscus, Pistachio, and Obsidian. I'm pretty partial to the Frost variant, but the rest of them are pretty plain, as far as I'm concerned.
Here are the rest of the basic specs for Pixel 11:
Display: 6.3-inch display with 1080x2424 resolution, 60-120Hz refresh rate, and 3,000 nits peak brightness
Processor: Google Tensor G6
RAM: 12GB
Storage: 256/512GB
Battery: 4,985mAh
Rear cameras: 48MP wide, 13MP ultra-wide, 10.8MP telephoto with 5x optical zoom
Selfie camera: 10.5MP
As far as tech specs are concerned, the Pixel 11 is barely any different from a Pixel 10. I could've copied and pasted most of those specs from last year's review. The Tensor G6 processor is new, but basically everything else is the same. Display size, resolution, and brightness are all identical, which is a mild bummer because the Pro devices this year all got their peak brightness numbered bump up to 3,600 nits. Perhaps Google didn't see fit to improve the base model's brightness two years in a row, but that is one area where the Pro is more enticing, as it should be, I suppose.
One thing Google did change is that the camera bar is now a good deal thinner than it was on the Pixel 10. The phone is almost able to lie completely flat on a table, and would definitely do that if you put the right case on it. It's also 0.3 oz lighter than the Pixel 10, so overall, this is a more comfortable phone to hold, and one that will be slightly less awkward in taking up space in general. That's probably the best aspect of the Pixel 11, and the main reason why I would recommend it over the 10.
Speaking of the camera bar, it's worth mentioning that the regular Pixel 11 does not have HiLight, which is the only substantial hardware change made on the Pro-level Pixel 11 phones. It's a little light that lives in the camera bar and illuminates in different colors to do things like notify you of an incoming phone call, but for whatever reason, Google did not see fit to include it in the base model Pixel 11.
That's disappointing considering the starting price increase, but for what it's worth, HiLight is not exactly a show-stopping feature on the phones that do have it. Frankly, you're not missing much if you opt for a Pixel 11 over a Pro, at least in that regard.
On the Geekbench 7 benchmarking app, the Pixel 11 recorded a single-core CPU score of 2,337 and a multi-core CPU score of 7,085. For reference, that's a few thousand points below something like a Samsung Galaxy S26 Ultra. Google's Tensor-powered phones have always come up short in these benchmarking apps, but luckily, that doesn't affect the user experience that much.
I can personally vouch for the Pixel 11's performance profile being totally fine. Apps load quickly and smoothly, on-device AI processing happens in a fairly snappy fashion, and the phone doesn't run all that hot, even without a case. The only minor (and I mean minor) qualm I have is that Google is promising faster Night Sight processing on Pixel 11, but in my testing, it didn't feel noticeably faster than in previous years. It's also not slower, though, so it's no big deal.
Absent any major hardware upgrades, Google did include some new AI trickery in the Pixel 11's software.
First and foremost is Magic Capture, a new image capture method available in the Camera app. Magic Capture works the same as recording a video, except when you're done recording, the device takes a few seconds to select a few choice stills from the video, complete with optional auto-cropping and unblurring. The idea is to get multiple usable stills of something that's moving or otherwise dynamic and difficult to photograph, like a subway train, small children, or animals.
I used Magic Capture to get these stills of a train and some relatively fast-moving street traffic. The vehicles in these photos are, indeed, moving, but it's hard to tell thanks to whatever software magic is powering Magic Capture. It's honestly a pretty neat and useful feature.
Google has also built on its contextual AI suggestions feature from previous years, so you'll get proactive suggestions about what's happening on-screen. If someone texts you asking about a flight reservation, you'll get flight info right in the text chat. Similarly, visual cards with information about a recommended restaurant can also show up if someone asks about the restaurant. You can also make Google Calendar entries straight from texts using this feature, too.
Again, that's all building upon things Google was already doing, but those features might still be nice for saving a little bit of time here and there. I'm more partial to Rambler, a new speech-to-text feature built right into Gboard. If you want to dictate a text or email to someone, Rambler will remove "ums" and "ahs" and other speech errors to produce a more sterile, normal-sounding sentence. I'd argue this strips some personality out of what you're saying, but it does work as advertised. It was able to turn a mush-mouthed sentence I made up on the spot into something readable.
Of all of these, I would say Rambler and Magic Capture are the real highlights. Magic Capture, in particular, is one of the only reasons I would say someone looking to upgrade from an older Pixel should opt for the 11 rather than try to find a deal on the Pixel 10.
Google rates the Pixel 11's battery for 30 hours of life on a single charge, which is the same as what the Pixel 10 was rated for. The battery cell in this device is a little larger than the Pixel 10's, but not enough for Google to alter its official prognostication.
At any rate, using our testing method of playing an HD video on the display until the phone dies, I was able to get a little less than 30 hours of use out of the Pixel 11. For a base-model flagship, that's totally fine, even if it's not all that different from last year.
Speaking of things that aren't all that different from last year, the Pixel 11's rear camera array has the exact same megapixel count as the Pixel 10's. One great thing about the Pixel 10 was that it added a telephoto lens to the proceedings, something you don't normally get on base-level phones. The Pixel 11 kept that, which is nice, but nothing here feels as innovative as that did.
Still, the cameras get the job done, thanks in part to Google's classic software processing that makes everything look super nice.
While Night Sight is not quite as instant as Google's marketing would have you believe, the effect is still pretty great. This plant on our windowsill has literally almost no light exposure at night, but the photo came out crystal clear.
The telephoto lens is only good for 5x optical zoom, but the 30x digital zoom is really no slouch here. I was able to get a clear photo of some graffiti on the top of a building that was pretty far away, and it didn't have that typical smeary look that you get when using digital zoom on other devices.
And, as always, I'm a fan of using the macro lens to get in real close on things like flowers.
Between the quality of the cameras themselves and the addition of Magic Capture, this is a pretty good phone for taking photos, even if it's not going to give you the same kind of output as a Pro device.
I'm a little torn because the biggest problem with the Pixel 11 is that it's just not a very interesting year-over-year upgrade. Aside from slimming down the camera bar and adding a couple of (admittedly neat) AI doohickeys, you could spend less money to get a Pixel 10 and still largely have the same experience if you're upgrading from something significantly older.
As I said, the Pixel 11 feels like it exists out of an obligation to always provide a base-level phone in every annual upgrade cycle. But that doesn't make it a bad device at all. It's comfortable in the hands, the battery lasts a pretty long time, and it takes nice photos. If you get a good enough trade-in deal or something, you'll probably be happy with what you get. But make sure to do your research and check on deals for a Pixel 10, too, because you won't really miss that much if you opt for that route.
In the age of on-demand everything, it’s no surprise that we can get "dates" (and I use that term loosely) with the tap of a button. Thanks to classic hookup apps like Tinder and newcomers like Pure, finding a sexy new friend can be as straightforward as ordering a pizza. As for the quality? That’s about the same as your pizza — hit or miss, depending on the time of day, where you're located, and how hungry you are.
Fortunately, you’ve got me, your resident dating app expert (though I prefer modern-day Carrie Bradshaw), to guide you to the promised land, aka the best hookup apps.
I’ve spent the past three years (yes, years) researching, downloading, and testing dozens of the top dating apps to find the best ones for all kinds of daters, including the one-night-stand crowd. From discreet sexting apps to dating sites for serious relationships, I've swiped through them all. I also consulted a helpful panel of sex and relationship experts to make sure my picks are solid.
My number one rule is to be brutally honest about what you want. Are you here for a good time? Own it. That means staying in your lane; don't go looking for a one-night stand on an app like eharmony. I mean, just read through Reddit. Women are on these apps (despite what all the dudes think/say) and are looking for FWBs, but they ignore 99 percent of messages because guys either send weird openers or pretend to want a relationship just to get a hookup.
"Hookup apps help prevent situations where people are on mainstream dating sites with the intention of having a casual hookup but are unclear about these intentions," Suzannah Weiss, resident sexologist for Biird and author of Subjectified: Becoming a Sexual Subject, tells Mashable. "They also give women a space to be openly sexual creatures without judgment."
And here's a little secret I picked up from Alexander Liebisch, the CEO and founder of TinderProfile.ai: Timing is everything. He found that people messaging on Tinder's "Free Tonight" feature after 10 p.m. on a weekend had a 45 percent higher chance of hooking up.
So, whether you're looking for a one-night stand, a regular FWB situation, or just a space to explore your sexuality, I've got you covered. Based on all my hands-on testing and expert consultations, I’ve broken down the best hookup app for every type of person and mood.
Hinge: Hinge just keeps getting better, so I’ve bumped it up higher on my list as of October 2025. In our most recent update in August 2026, it still earns the top spot. Its user base is growing, and my own recent tests on the app have been surprisingly positive.
Sniffies (added September 2025): I've added Sniffies, the map-based app for queer men, because it's been gaining a lot of traction. (It got a little too spicy for Apple and was pulled from the App Store, so it's now technically a dating site.) Don't say I didn't warn you about the NSFW content.
FetLife (added September 2025): FetLife is my new favorite "Honorable Mention." It's not your typical hookup app; it's more of a social network for the kink community (and, oddly enough, the best hookup app for gamers). Just remember: it's a community, so don't treat it like Tinder.
Plenty of Fish (removed January 2025): POF went through a rebrand recently, and honestly, I'm not impressed. My latest tests showed they removed key features like free messaging with non-matches, and I kept running into the same old profiles.
Match (removed August 2025): I know some people say they've found casual hookups on Match, but that's not what it's for. Match is where you go to find a serious, long-term relationship, and I still recommend it for that. But for a hookup? You're just fishing in the wrong pond.
You might notice a few apps that pop up in ads or other lists are missing here. That’s intentional. I swipe through the good, the bad, and the downright sketchy so you don’t have to. For an app to make my list, it has to be effective, safe, and worth your time.
Here's a shortlist of apps that didn't make the cut this year:
Wild: You’ve probably seen ads for this one. On paper, Wild sounds like the perfect casual dating app. In practice, the paywalls are aggressive, the distance filter doesn't work, and you have to pay for anything that's even remotely useful. Unless you're willing to spend serious cash upfront (and hope for the best), the experience feels more limited than with more open apps like Tinder.
DOWN: This app (formerly "Bang With Friends") is known for its simple "Get Down" vs. "Get Date" feature. It sounds clever, but in reality, the experience is messy at best. Many users report feeling scammed by subscriptions that don't deliver matches, or finding that the few real people on there are... let's say "odd." It’s hard to recommend an app when the main user complaint is "Is anyone real?" Hard pass.
Facebook Dating: Yes, Facebook has a dating section, and it’s surprisingly massive (and completely free, which is huge). While it's a decent option for casual dating, the vibe tends to be a bit more "friends of friends" and "relationship-focused" than the anonymous, no-strings energy you get from apps like Pure or Feeld. (For Mashable's Chance Townsend, signing up was "the most uneventful dating experience" of his life.) It's worth a shot if you're already on Facebook, but it didn't quite crack my top tier for hookups specifically.
The first guest in Las Culturistas' new podcast studio? Troye Sivan. As one YouTube commenter called it, "My gay Mount Rushmore."
Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang showed off their newly fitted out space while chatting to the Grammy-nominated artist, and the interview careens from giving "Tro" a new nickname to volume loss and not loving musicals and how the iconic "Troye baby" voice note from "What's the Time Where You Are?" happened.
In a delightful moment, the three also silently watch the video for the unreleased second single from Sivan's upcoming fourth studio album, She's the Best. Essentially, you should always get Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang to watch your unreleased music videos.
As to Sivan's hot take for Las Culturistas' all-important segment "I Don't Think So, Honey!": "Singing."
"I am not fishing for compliments. I'm not that good at it and I'm OK with that. But I think sometimes I will be in the car and I'll sing (and it's just me) and something so diabolical will come out of my mouth that I'm like, I truly scammed the world. And the fact that I have the same job as Beyoncé is just an insane thought," he says.
"But now I will say I care a lot about tone and storytelling, so I understand, I get it. The real magic though is when somebody has tone, storytelling, and they can sing sing, like Ariana Grande, Whitney Houston, Sade," Sivan adds. "But I'm just saying the idea of me doing karaoke, or singing at any point where I don't absolutely have to, I will not do it and it's not that fun. It's fun at my shows, because I'm in control. But any other time, absolutely not, no thank you."
From YouTubers and TikTok stars to streamers and podcasters, Mashable talks to creators about how they built their platforms, the gear they swear by, and the trends they see coming next. Read more of our creator coverage, sign up for our Trending Now and Top Stories newsletters or get Mashable push alerts to discover the internet's most exciting voices.
Rare Bluetti deal: The Bluetti AC200L power station can run your whole house for under $800Grab the Bluetti AC200L 2048Wh portable power station for $798.99, down from $1,099, at Amazon — a 27% discount that's great for camping, RVs, or emergency backup power.
SAVE $300: As of Aug. 27, the Bluetti AC200L portable power station is down to $798.99 at Amazon. That's a 27% discount off its $1,099 list price.
Keeping your home powered through a blackout usually means dropping serious cash, but this Bluetti deal just made it a lot more doable.
The Bluetti AC200L portable power station — a 2048Wh LiFePO4 battery that can push out 3,600W with power lifting — is on sale for $798.99, down from its usual $1,099. That's a 27% discount, or $300 off on whole-home backup power without the whole-home price tag.
The AC200L is the upgraded version of Bluetti's popular AC200MAX, and the biggest change is power — it puts out 2,400 watts continuously, 200 more than the older model, so it can run more devices at once without straining.
Add on extra battery packs, and the total capacity of the AC200L climbs to 8,192Wh, so it can go from powering your phone and WiFi router to backing up a good chunk of your home.
Charging is quick, too. Plug it into a wall outlet, and it reaches 80% in about 45 minutes. If you'd rather charge with solar panels, a full charge takes roughly two hours under the right conditions — useful if you're off-grid or don't have an outlet nearby. It also comes with 11 ports total, including a dedicated 30A port built for RVs, so this isn't just for camping trips or power outages.
$300 in savings, zero regrets when the power goes out. Grab the Bluetti AC200L portable power station at Amazon.
Rare vacuum deal: Score $400 off Eufys flagship E25 HydroJet robot mopGet the best robot vacuum deal. Save 40% on the eufy E25 at Amazon.
SAVE $400: As of Aug. 27, the Eufy E25 robot vacuum is on sale for $599.99 at Amazon. That's a 40% discount on the list price.
Robot vacuum deals are a great excuse to finally check vacuuming off your chores list once and for all. And as of Aug. 27, we've found the perfect Amazon deal to sway you. Right now, the Eufy E25 robot vacuum has dropped in price by a huge $400, bringing the cost down from just under $1,000 to $599.99.
It's a powerful vacuum, combining 20,000 Pa suction with an always-clean HydroJet mopping system that refreshes the roller mop with clean water twice per second to help prevent cross-contamination while scrubbing stains. It also has DuoSpiral anti-tangle brushes to prevent hair tangles, and a CornerRover arm that extends to clean along baseboards and other tight corners.
For maintenance, it has an all-in-one docking station where it auto-empties dust into a 3-liter bag that lasts around 75 days, self-washes the roller mops, dries them with 50°C hot air, and automatically refills the water. Plus, it comes with laser-guided navigation, so it can self-navigate around your home and remember up to five floor plans.
This eufy deal is available at Amazon right now.
Chipotle is giving away free entrées every time Taylor Fritz wins at the U.S. Open — how to claimChipotle is teaming up with tennis star Taylor Fritz to give fans BOGO entrée codes after every U.S. Open win.
TL;DR: Chipotle and top-ranked U.S. tennis player Taylor Fritz are teaming up for "Every Win Tastes Better," a promotion that unlocks BOGO entrée codes on his Instagram Story after every singles win at the U.S. Open.
Win a match, win a burrito — that's the deal.
Chipotle's iconic foil wrap just got a courtside upgrade. The chain announced it's teaming up with top-ranked U.S. men's tennis player and superfan Taylor Fritz on "Every Win Tastes Better," a promotion that turns his tournament run into free food for fans.
As Fritz chases becoming the first American in 23 years to win the men's singles title at New York's premier tennis tournament, Chipotle is giving away buy-one-get-one (BOGO) entrée codes after every one of his singles wins.
After each Fritz victory, he'll drop a unique text-to-win code on his Instagram Story (@taylor_fritz). Text it to 888-222, and if you're fast enough, you'll get a BOGO entrée offer redeemable on the Chipotle app or Chipotle online.
The number of codes up for grabs grows the further Fritz advances:
Round 1 — 2,500 BOGO offers
Round 2 — 3,000 BOGO offers
Round 3 — 3,500 BOGO offers
Round of 16 — 4,000 BOGO offers
Quarter-final — 4,500 BOGO offers
Semi-final — 5,000 BOGO offers
Final — 10,000 BOGO offers
The promo runs until all the codes for a given round are claimed, whichever comes first. It's open to legal residents of the 50 U.S. states and D.C. who are 13 or older, and you're limited to one code per person per round that Fritz advances. Chipotle will notify winners by text (standard text and data rates apply).
Fritz has been a Team Chipotle athlete for three seasons, wears the logo on his sleeve during tournaments, and holds a Chipotle Celebrity Card that gets him free food for life. He's also said he ate Chipotle on every off day and before every night match during his title run in Washington, D.C., earlier this month.
"Anyone who follows me knows I eat a lot of Chipotle when I'm playing tournaments," Fritz said. "I love that every time I win a singles match in New York, fans have another chance to score a BOGO. I'm trying to make them give away as much as possible."
The codes drop fast and disappear faster, so @taylor_fritz is officially a must-follow through the tournament.
First look: Secretlab’s new Spider-Man and Venom gaming chairs are slinging onto shelvesSecretlab and Marvel just launched the Titan Evo Marvel Spider-Man Edition, a red-and-black gaming chair with a Venom-inspired detail, available now in the US.
TL;DR: Secretlab and Marvel just launched the Titan Evo Marvel Spider-Man Edition, a red-and-black gaming chair featuring a web-patterned back and Venom-inspired tendril details. This limited-edition chair is now available in the U.S., Canada, and the EU.
Secretlab just teamed up with Marvel for the first time, and the result is a gaming chair built entirely around Spider-Man. The Secretlab Titan Evo Marvel Spider-Man Edition features a red-and-black color scheme, riding the wave of Spider-Man: Brand New Day hype. It's available now in the U.S., Canada, and the EU.
If you're in the market for Spider-Man merch that doubles as functional furniture, this chair checks that box. The red-and-black palette is meant to channel the character's classic look, and there's a Spider-Man emblem stitched into the backrest.
The back is upholstered in Secretlab's SoftWeave Plus fabric, woven into a web-like pattern of thin lines, made possible through what Secretlab describes as an advanced knitting process. As a nod to Venom, dark tendril patterns creep along the side wings and seat base, too.
Underneath the Spider-Man theming, this is still a Titan Evo, so it comes with the same comfort features as the standard chair. That includes cold-cure foam designed for long sitting sessions, a sculpted "pebble" seat base to distribute pressure more evenly (and leave room for sitting cross-legged), and four-way L-ADAPT lumbar support that adjusts to the curve of your lower back as you shift positions.
This is easily one of Secretlab's best collabs yet, Spider-Man fan or not.
Do we really need a foldable iPhone? Heck yes we do.Yes, it's been done before. And yes, I still think Apple should do it.
In January 2007, Steve Jobs took the stage at the Macworld convention at the Moscone Center in San Francisco to announce a new product category in Apple’s lineup: A phone.
Back then, PCs were a bigger deal than phones (hence the big Apple event of the year being the Macworld convention, which kept running until 2014). This would change soon. At that stage, Jobs announced a lofty goal. He’d be happy, he said, if Apple would capture 1 percent of the mobile phone market by the end of 2008, which would mean selling roughly 10 million iPhones in a year. Fast forward to today, and Apple sells that many iPhones, on average, roughly every two weeks.
Guess what Apple will release in September in our Big Guessing Game: Apple edition. Enter now for a chance to win!
The iPhone that Jobs held in front of the audience at Moscone was a lot smaller and a lot less powerful than modern smartphones, but its form factor has remained pretty much the same. It’s still a rectangular slab of glass, plastic, metal, and silicon with a large display on one side and almost no moving parts.
This is about to change. In September, according to numerous rumors and reports, Apple will launch the first-ever iPhone that’s not candy bar-shaped. Instead, the iPhone Ultra (or iPhone Fold, or whatever the name turns out to be) will be a foldable phone; a fairly regular-looking smartphone when folded, but with a large inner display that’s almost tablet-like when the phone is unfolded.
We’ve seen foldable phones before; Samsung has several in its lineup, which goes back six years, and so does Google, Motorola, and the major Chinese phone manufacturers. For Apple, however, it’s a pretty big leap forward that begs the question: Is this really something the world needs?
I think the answer is yes, but I also think Apple made the right move by waiting until the technology behind foldable phones matures. No one wants a phone with an ugly crease in the middle of the display, or a phone that creaks and cracks when you fold it shut. Often criticized for copying other phone makers, Apple plays the long game and waits until the tech matures. When you sell millions of phones every week, you want to get it perfect the first time around.
Still, many will shun the entire idea. By all accounts, the iPhone Ultra will be a pricy, hard-to-get, heavy phone that unfolds into an iPad mini. We don't know Apple's sales breakdown for tablets, but given the update frequency and the company's marketing efforts, the iPad mini appears to be one of the least popular iPads. It also costs $599, while the iPhone Ultra is rumored to be nearly four times that price. So, who will pay north of two thousand dollars to have a beefier iPhone/iPad mini combo when you can buy a regular iPhone and a separate iPad mini for less money?
I don't know how well the iPhone Ultra will sell. Perhaps it'll end up being a side character in Apple's lineup, just like the iPhone Air. But it will, I'm sure of it, be a lot sexier and cooler than having an iPhone in one hand and an iPad in the other.
The obvious benefit is having a regular-sized phone that expands into something that makes reading, watching movies, and even light work enjoyable on the go. If Apple gets the software part right, and there's little reason to believe it won't, the iPhone Ultra will be exactly this.
There's also the (rumored) twist in Apple's take on the foldable phone. It will be slightly wider than a regular phone, and thus open into an even wider device that actually makes more sense than most foldables on the market today. Samsung took the idea for a spin with its Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8, and most reviewers seem to like it.
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Then there's the software. The apps and games made for the iPhone have always had a very similar format. With the iPhone Ultra, app makers will finally be able to do something new and cool with their software. Besides the obvious, such as giving your favorite game more than twice the screen real estate, we'll also see a bunch of productivity apps (finally, a big calendar!) and entertainment apps (a video side-by-side with your playlist in Music!) take advantage of the larger display.
Yes, Android foldables do have this to some extent, but there's a lot of iPhone-only software out there that never got to do it. And given Apple's massive footprint in the smartphone space, the iPhone Ultra might soon become the most popular foldable model out there, thus prompting app creators to try extra hard to accommodate the new form factor in their app.
Details aside, when was the last time you were truly excited about a new iPhone? The iPhone Air was a thin iPhone; while nice, it wasn't exactly groundbreaking. But the iPhone Ultra should be the first truly different new iPhone Apple has ever made. That alone makes this one worth the wait.
The smart runner’s Apple Watch alternative: Garmin’s Forerunner 165 drops to $199Find the best Garmin deal. Save 20% on the Garmin Forerunner 165 at Amazon.
SAVE $50: As of Aug. 27, the Garmin Forerunner 165 is on sale for $199 at Amazon. That's a 20% discount on the list price.
If you're looking to level up your runs without spending a fortune, the Garmin Forerunner 165 is a great choice. This running-focused smartwatch packs plenty of useful training features into a relatively affordable package, and it's currently available for less at Amazon. As of Aug. 27, this fitness tracker has dropped in price by $50, now priced at $199.
This watch is truly a runner's best companion, packed with loads of features to help you run better. It combines built-in GPS for tracking pace and distance with wrist-based heart rate monitoring, so you can track your effort as well as pace.
It has both an AMOLED touchscreen display and traditional button controls in a lightweight 43mm design, and it offers up to 11 days of battery life in smartwatch mode and up to 19 hours in GPS mode.
You'll get personalized daily suggested workouts tailored to your recovery and performance, and you can also use Garmin Coach and race-adaptive training plans for workout suggestions tailored to specific events. Some other features include Training Effect, which shows how your workouts impact your fitness and the benefit of each session, while recovery time helps you know when you're ready for your next high-effort workout.
This Garmin deal is available at Amazon right now.
The Samsung Internal SSD 990 has dropped to its best-ever price at Amazon — save $30Get the best SSD deal on Amazon. Save 13% on the Samsung Internal SSD 990 1TB at Amazon.
SAVE $30: As of Aug. 27, the Samsung Internal SSD 990 1TB is on sale for $199.99 at Amazon. That's a 13% discount on the list price.
If your PC needs a storage overhaul, now could be a good time to upgrade — Samsung's 990 1TB SSD has dropped in price on Amazon. As of Aug. 27, this SSD is down from $229.99 to $199.99, saving you $30. Not only that, but according to camelcamelcamel, this is the lowest-ever price for this popular model from Samsung.
This SSD is an ideal choice if you need a fast, responsive performance from your PC. It has sequential read/write speeds of up to 7,150/6,450 MB/s and random read/write speeds of up to 700K/1,100K IOPS, so you can do everything from loading games to downloading large files.
And if improving your gaming setup is your intention, you'll be pleased to know it is designed to handle large games, as well as other demanding creative projects. And it only uses up to 38% less power per unit of performance than the 990 PRO.
There are both 1TB and 2TB options (2TB is $339 down from $529), so you have plenty of room for games, personal files, and long-term storage.
Head to Amazon now to get this deal.
The latest AirPods rumors ahead of the Apple event: AirPods 5, cameras, and AIWe could hear about at least two new AirPods models at the iPhone 18 event in September.
In early September, we expect Apple to show off at least a few new iPhone 18 models. But there might be a little something for AirPods lovers at the recently announced Sept. 9 special event.
Rumor has it Apple will launch multiple new AirPods models, and we're just two weeks away from finding out for sure. However, the tagline for Apple's event is "Surprise and shine," so who knows exactly what's in store?
Guess what Apple will release in September in our Big Guessing Game: Apple edition. Enter now for a chance to win!
As always, we're here to cut through the noise and give you everything you need to know ahead of time. Here are the latest AirPods rumors ahead of the September iPhone event.
Whenever a big slew of Apple announcements is imminent, it's always worth checking in with Bloomberg reporter Mark Gurman, who usually prognosticates correctly about the future of Apple hardware.
Gurman recently reported that Apple is gearing up to announce the AirPods 5 in the near future, possibly at the September event. For reference, Gurman recently reported Apple was getting ready to launch a new Mac Mini, and Apple did exactly that a day later. In short, Gurman's track record is deeply impressive.
Regarding new AirPods, Gurman did not elaborate on how exactly the AirPods 5 would be different from the AirPods 4 released in 2024, but he did expand his reporting on X to say there would be two models: one with active noise cancellation and one without. That was also the case with the AirPods 4.
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That is, unfortunately, seemingly all there is to know about AirPods 5 right now, suggesting this would be a very iterative update. It doesn't seem like Apple is keen to announce the next batch of AirPods Pro earbuds soon, in case you prefer silicone ear tips. The AirPods Pro 3 were refreshed just last year, so we might have to wait a year or two for a new update to that model.
Even without knowing for sure what to expect from AirPods 5, we can make some educated guesses. Apple will probably enhance sound quality in some way, and battery life could always use a boost, too. Otherwise, we'll just have to wait a couple of weeks to find out, presumably.
Another product that may or may not show up at the September event is a brand new AirPods model with a very interesting and unexpected new feature — cameras.
That's right, the long-rumored AirPods with cameras could be just two weeks away.
Simply put, these AirPods would have cameras built into the stems. They recently appeared in a macOS beta video, so it seems all but certain that they're real and coming soon. The video doesn't show much, but it does definitely show a new pair of AirPods that you can't currently buy.
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Some previous reporting by Gurman gives us an idea of what to expect from the AirPods Ultra. Apparently, the cameras will not be used to capture images or video at all; instead, they will only be used to tell an onboard AI assistant what the user is looking at, similar to the way AI in contemporary smart glasses works. That doesn't mean there won't be any controversy regarding privacy concerns, of course, but it does mean this isn't necessarily a Google Glass situation. Think Visual Intelligence and AI assistants, not Meta-RayBans and creepy videos.
Gurman also reported that Apple has been working on two versions of this product internally, with one of them winning out and being fast-tracked to ship in the near future. That might be the one we've seen in the leaked video. There's a real possibility this product appears at the iPhone 18 event, but as always with Apple, there's also a possibility it won't. The event is called "Surprise and shine," after all.
What are these rumored AirPods with cameras going to be called? No one outside of Apple Park knows for sure, but there are two rumored possibilities. Initially, these AirPods were rumored to be called AirPods Ultra, or AirPods Pro Ultra. That would make sense, as Apple is rumored to be working on a premium iPhone Ultra and MacBook Ultra. However, MacRumors recently reported that they'll be released as a variation on the AirPods Pro. MacRumors cited references to the product in macOS Tahoe that suggest AirPods Pro branding.
Unfortunately, we can never rule out a price increase in 2026. Thanks to the global memory crisis, Apple and other tech companies have been raising prices all year long. The new iPhones are almost certain to see higher prices than previous models. Audio products haven't seen as many price increases as laptops, smartphones, and gaming consoles have, so if we're lucky, a new AirPods 5 would cost the same as the AirPods 4, which are priced at $129 (without ANC) and $179 (with ANC) — or as low as $99 on sale.
Hopefully, all of these questions will be answered on Sept. 9 at the September Apple event. Mashable will be attending that event and reporting live on all of the announcements, so check back for more info.
Seen an ad with an AI influencer or actor? It may be against the law.Complaints of undisclosed AI use have been submitted to New York's AG under a new law. But the FTC recently signaled the state may not have the authority.
In June, a new law went into effect in New York state that requires companies to disclose when they use AI-generated models or actors in advertisements. And now, just a few months after it went into effect, the state is seeing its first complaints reporting advertisers for allegedly running afoul of the law.
In total, four complaints have been filed since the law went into effect, the New York attorney general's office told Mashable. All four are currently under review by the AG.
New York's Synthetic Performers law is the first of its kind in the United States, and with growing anti-AI sentiment, it likely won't be the last. In fact, companies that use AI actors or influencers to promote products without disclosure could also be violating federal law, though the Trump administration has so far taken a hands-off approach to AI regulation.
The first two anonymous complaints under the New York law, which accuse two companies of using synthetic models or performers in their ads without disclosure, were recently obtained and published by Straight Arrow News. The first complaint alleges that "premium performance wear brand" Athletifreak used AI-generated models when promoting the clothing company's products. The complaint includes numerous screenshots taken from Athletifreak's website.
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The second complaint sent to the New York attorney general points the finger at London-based eyewear company Bloobloom. The complaint alleges that Bloobloom is running advertisements on social media that use synthetic performers and target New York residents.
Both complaints were sent in June, shortly after the law went into effect.
“In New York, we are setting the rules of the road instead of letting AI run the show,” New York Governor Kathy Hochul said in a statement on June 9 when the law went into effect. “Requiring simple, honest disclosure when an ad uses synthetic performers protects consumers, respects our creative workforce and keeps New York at the forefront of responsible innovation.”
And New York's law did set the rules of the road. The state requires any company that does business in New York to abide by the Synthetic Performers law. If they don't, companies can face fines of $1,00 for a first offense and up to $5,000 for repeat offenses.
Last month, Amazon announced a new requirement for third-party sellers on its platform, stating that they must disclose when AI is used in product images and videos on their listings.
“Recent legislation requires disclosure when images or videos in advertisements contain photorealistic AI-generated people,” Amazon told sellers, referring to the New York state law.
While the New York law is an example of regulation that's welcomed by AI safety advocates and critics of the technology, what about federal regulations that protect consumers?
The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has long had existing rules barring companies from posting fake reviews and testimonials of their products or services. A few years ago, the FTC updated its fake reviews and testimonials rules to explicitly cover AI-generated content.
Violating the FTC's rules results in a financial penalty much larger than New York state's law. The maximum fine from the FTC could be a whopping $51,744 per violation.
Mashable previously reached out to the FTC to ask if AI-generated actors and influencers could violate its regulations prohibiting fake reviews and testimonials.
"If there is an AI-created individual who is essentially playing the same function as a human actor in a commercial, and it is obvious that the speaker is merely an actor, that may be perfectly fine," an FTC spokesperson told us regarding synthetic performers. "If the AI-generated individual is providing a testimonial (which would necessarily be fake) or claiming to have specific expertise (such as a medical degree or license or financial experience) that affects consumers’ perception of the speaker’s credibility, that may be deceptive and could violate both the FTC Act and also the Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials."
With that said, the FTC recently issued an AI policy statement that suggested that "anti-innovation states" like New York lack the authority to enact AI laws like this.
"Importantly, President Trump’s proposed approach is a national AI framework, protecting innovation and competition by providing national regulatory clarity and certainty and avoiding a balkanized or patchwork regulatory approach driven by the states — or, most dangerously, imposed by certain anti-innovation state governments on the rest of the country," reads the FTC's July 1 AI statement. "America’s AI Action Plan and other critical executive actions strike that balance between accelerating innovation and protecting Americans, but anti-innovation states’ recent efforts to regulate AI are concerning."
If the FTC moves to strike state laws prohibiting deceptive AI ads — but doesn't step up its own enforcement in any way — that could clear the path for a lot of sketchiness in advertising. Already, companies are openly advertising services to create "AI influencers" to promote products.
For now, states like New York are stepping up AI regulation, likely because of the Trump administration's hands-off approach to AI regulation. And the four complaints submitted under New York's law are likely just the beginning as awareness of New York's new AI advertisement regulation spreads.
AdultFriendFinder red flags: These 4 actions will get you bannedWhat will get you banned from AdultFriendFinder? Even the internet's wildest hookup site has its rules.
Despite its reputation as a kind of free-for-all for singles, AdultFriendFinder actually has pretty strict Terms of Use, and it does, in fact, enforce them with account suspensions or outright bans.
That being said, it's fair to say their usage terms are considerably more lax than the average online dating site, especially considering AFF allows its members to post full-frontal nude photos or strip on webcam chats.
Where, exactly, is the line, and how can you make sure you're on the right side of it? Here are four on-site behaviors that will reliably get you banned:
While we're sure most of you out there would never dream of doing either of these things, the fact remains that online dating sites often bring out the worst in people, and because AFF is not only a dating site but also an online community, it's actually very easy to follow someone's account in the public areas like chat rooms and webcam feeds.
The AFF Terms of Use don't provide an actual definition of either of these behaviors, but it's safe to say that if you're reported by another user for harassment and have a documented history of negative engagements with them in public, your account will likely be suspended or outright banned.
Easily the least obvious behavior on this list, AFF nonetheless takes chat spam very seriously, whether it's a bot promoting an off-site business or an attention-seeking troll disrupting the flow of a webcam feed or chat room.
Chat rooms are also moderated by AI, so you have to be careful here, as your intention might not be to spam the chat, but if you send too many consecutive messages, causing the chat scroll bar to move quickly, it could trigger the AI response and time you out of the chat room. Similarly, if you want to share an off-site link with the chatters, the AI will assume you're promoting or attempting to phish users, which will also result in punishment.
Another prohibited behavior is solicitation, or as their Terms of Use puts it, "solicitation for services." In theory, that's a very vague definition, but in practice it's simple: you can't use AdultFriendFinder to find a "sugar baby" or "sugar daddy," or to engage in "pay for play" sexual activities.
Does this mean that no one on the sites engages in these prohibited behaviors? No, not at all, but it does mean you can report them for engaging in them, if you so choose.
AFF expressly forbids its users from posting or "transmitting" anything that could be construed as advertising, including "promotional materials, affiliate marketing codes, link referral codes, or any other form of commercial solicitation."
Once again, in practice, you'll quickly notice that many users have found ways around this prohibition, either by being subtle and/or restricting their advertising to more private communications, or else by simply remaking an account every time they're flagged for promotion violations, but you do have the option to report these accounts when you come across them.
This keychain can charge your phone and open a bottleThe GoCable is an 8-in-1 multitool you can use to power USB-C and Lightning devices, and it's only $25
TL;DR: The GoCable is a tiny 8-in-1 keychain cable that can connect via USB-C or Lightning, and it’s only $25.
Carrying the right charging cable everywhere you go is a hassle, and the cheap ones fray or tangle before long anyway. If you want a better option, try combining all your cables into a single cable. The GoCable is a keychain cable with eight functions packed into a very small container. It’s also on sale now for $24.99 (reg. $49.99).
The GoCable charges at up to 100 watts. That’s fast enough for a phone or tablet, and strong enough for most laptops too, so you can leave your other cables at home and still charge everything you carry. You’ll want a power bank or a wall adapter to plug it into because one doesn’t come in the box. Everything else it needs is already on the cable.
Most cables only fit one type of device, so you end up carrying two or three. This one has a Type-C connector and a Lightning connector, so the same cable charges an iPhone, an iPad, AirPods, or an Android phone. A small light comes on while it charges, so you know it’s working. When you plug it into a computer, it moves files, not just power.
The GoCable stays out of your way when you’re not using it. A magnet holds it coiled so it won’t tangle in your pocket, and a carabiner clips it to your keys, your bag, or a belt loop. It weighs 40 grams and measures under six inches long, so you’ll barely notice it on your keychain.
This little charger also has a few things most cables do not. There’s a bottle opener for drinks and a safe cutter for opening boxes and packages without cutting your hand. It’s like a more modern multitool.
Don’t get caught without a charger. Get a GoCable 8-in-1 100W Cable on sale for $24.99.
StackSocial prices subject to change.
Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to today's Connections.
Save 72% on a refurbished 32GB Dell Precision workstation laptopGet a refurbished Dell Precision 3561 workstation laptop with 32GB of RAM and a 512GB SSD for $524.99, down from $1,899.99.
TL;DR: This Dell Precision 3561 (2021) refurbished workstation laptop is $524.99 (reg. $1,899.99) for a limited time, a savings of 72% on a machine built for CAD, video editing, and other demanding work.
Most laptops in this price range are not built to run engineering software or edit 4K footage without choking. The Dell Precision 3561 is. You can get this Grade A refurbished workstation for $524.99 today, a serious markdown from its original $1,899.99 price tag.
The specs explain why professionals lean on this machine. An 11th Gen Intel Core i7-11800H processor handles multitasking and heavier workloads without slowing down, and it is backed by 32GB of DDR4 memory so you can keep a dozen browser tabs, a video editor, and a CAD program open at once. A 512GB PCIe NVMe SSD keeps boot times and file access fast, and dedicated NVIDIA T1200 graphics with 4GB of memory give the machine real muscle for creative and technical applications, not just office work.
The 15.6-inch Full HD display is sharp enough for detailed design work, and the laptop ships with Windows 11 Pro, Thunderbolt 4 ports, a backlit keyboard, and up to 13 hours of battery life for anyone working outside the office.
Grade A refurbished means the unit arrives in near-mint condition with only minimal signs of previous use, which may help when weighing the cosmetics of buying refurbished.
This deal is for engineers, designers, editors, and other professionals who need a workstation that keeps up with their software rather than fighting it. It also works for anyone who wants precision-level performance without paying precision-level prices.
Add this Dell Precision 3561 (2021) 15.6 inch workstation laptop to your setup for $524.99 (reg. $1,899.99) while this refurbished deal is available.
StackSocial prices subject to change.
Whats new to streaming this week? (Aug. 28, 2026)What’s new to streaming for the week of Aug. 28, 2026, on Netflix, Prime Video, Hulu, and more? We've got you covered.
Looking for something great to watch at home? Streaming subscribers are spoiled for choice between Hulu, Netflix, HBO Max, Disney+, Apple TV, Prime Video, Shudder, Paramount+, Peacock, and more. And that's before you even look at the vast libraries of movies and television programs within each streamer!
Don't be overwhelmed or waste an hour scrolling through your services to determine what to watch. We've got your back, whatever your mood. Mashable offers watch guides for all of the above, broken down by genre: comedy, thriller, horror, documentary, and animation, among others. But if you're seeking something brand new (or just new to streaming), we've got you covered there, too.
At a glance, John-Paul Miller and his wife, Mica Miller, seemed to have a happy, even blessed marriage. But before she turned up dead in a state park in April of 2024, she'd shared with family and friends her experiences of manipulation, abuse, and stalking at his hands.
Over three episodes, Death of the Pastor's Wife explores what went wrong in the Miller marriage through interviews with Mica's surviving friends and siblings. While the filmmakers were unable to interview John-Paul or his new wife, who wed him a year after Mica's body was discovered, footage of his video-recorded sermons give an insight into how he viewed love, marriage, and the duties of a wife. Be warned: It will make your blood run cold, and it won't provide a satisfying ending. — Kristy Puchko, Entertainment Editor
How to watch: Death of the Pastor's Wife is now streaming on Netflix.
Australian writer-director Mia'kate Russell's Penny Lane Is Dead draws from the '80s Ozploitation films that put the country on the horror cinema map. However, while the film may start with "school's out" teen fun and overt Australiana, it quickly goes to a dark, ultraviolent place that deserves a rape-revenge genre content warning. Penny (Bailey Spalding), Toni (Tahlee Fereday), and Amy (Alexandra Jensen) have finished high school and organize a girls' night to celebrate. But Penny's plotting cousin Kat (Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn) invites herself (and her criminal adult boyfriend and his criminal adult friends) to the party, and things take a dangerous turn. An exploitation film it is, alright, and how that sits in 2026 will be up to audiences. — Shannon Connellan, Senior Editor
Starring: Sophia Wright-Mendelsohn, Tahlee Fereday, Alexandra Jensen, Bailey Spalding, Ben O’Toole, Steve Le Marquand, and Fletcher Humphrys
How to watch: Penny Lane is Dead premieres Aug. 28 on Shudder.
Everyone, wish Adult Swim a happy 25th birthday! To celebrate, the animation mainstay is airing a Robot Chicken special that combines characters from everything from Smiling Friends to The Venture Bros. and Aqua Teen Hunger Force to Harvey Birdman, Attorney at Law. The special places these beloved characters (and even more) on a cruise that goes — you guessed it — terribly wrong. Tune in for the mayhem. — Belen Edwards, Entertainment Reporter
How to watch: The Robot Chicken Adult Swim Special premieres at midnight ET on Aug. 31 and streams on HBO Max the next day.
In the mood for stylized action? Cruise over to Motor City, where Reacher star Alan Ritchson lays the smackdown on hordes of gangsters in 1977 Detroit. He plays ex-con John Miller, who's on the warpath for vengeance against mobster Reynolds (Ben Foster). Not only did Reynolds frame John for a crime, he also stole his fiancée Sophia (Shailene Woodley). John's quest plays out with little dialogue and a rock-heavy soundtrack, so you'll be headbanging with every punch. — B.E.
Starring: Alan Ritchson, Shailene Woodley, Pablo Schreiber, Ben Foster, and Ben McKenzie
How to watch: Motor City is now available to buy or rent on digital.
Hypothetically, would you rather deal with great white sharks or a crime gang? Well, the folks in Jesse V. Johnson's Above & Below have to choose both. With Antonio Banderas somehow starring, this horror-action-thriller throws a group of vacationing friends in the deep end when they're accidentally caught up in a cartel drug situation during a shark diving session. Half are being held at gunpoint, and half are stuck in a shark cage with 10 minutes of oxygen left — quite the lose-lose situation. Which would you pick? — S.C.
Starring: Laura Marano, Antonio Bandera, Christina Ochoa, Diego Llinás, Timothy V. Murphy, Louis Mandylor, Jess Liaudin, Donncha Tynan, Ryan Bertroche, Ramiro Alonso, Rodrigo Poisón, and Mario Tardón
How to watch: Above & Below is now available to buy or rent on digital.
Remembered for his MVP performance in 2006's epic Rose Bowl game between the Texas Longhorns and the USC Trojans, football star Vince Young was supposed to be the NFL's next big thing. But a series of injuries, conflicts, and more led to a very different career trajectory. The latest installment of Netflix's Untold sports documentary series explores the complexities of Young's rise and decline, with insight from Young himself. — B.E.
How to watch: Untold: The Testimony of Vince Young is now streaming on Netflix.
Rebel Wilson's directorial debut The Deb has taken a long and dramatic road to release, with the director sued for defamation by star Charlotte MacInnes. Two years after premiering at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), the musical comedy will hit digital release this week.
The Deb follows awkward farm girl Taylah (Natalie Abbott), who lives in small town Dunburn, where the local debutante ball is a marquee event. Her city-slicker influencer cousin Maeve (MacInnes) shows up, sent away after an anti-patriarchy protest. These polar opposite relatives have very different views on feminism and "the deb," and could learn a thing or two from each other. — S.C.
Starring: Rebel Wilson, Natalie Abbott, Charlotte MacInnes, Stevie Jean, Brianna Bishop, Karis Oka, Tara Morice, Shane Jacobson, Costa D’Angelo, Alex de Crespigny, Ioane Sa’ula, Ben Turland, Hal Cumpston, Stephanie Tisdell, Amanda Kour, and Sophea Pennington
How to watch: The Deb is now available to buy or rent on digital.
In 2022, cyber thriller The Undeclared War, created by Peter Kosminsky (Wolf Hall), saw its first season out on the UK's Channel 4., taking audiences into the world of intelligence in the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ). Now, four years later, the show's second season arrives with new director Paul McGuigan (Sherlock, Luke Cage), new writer Colin Teevan (Das Boot), and Simon Pegg as head of GCHQ operations Danny Patrick. Expect surveillance and bureaucracy and tension. — S.C.
Starring: Simon Pegg, Siân Brooke, Hannah Khalique-Brown, Alex Jennings, Danny Sapani, Ed Stoppard, and Chloe Pirrie
How to watch: The Undeclared War Season 2 is now streaming on Peacock.
Stand-up comedian Leanne Morgan's self-titled sitcom returns this week, bringing more Southern charm to Netflix. Season 1 followed Leanne (Morgan) as she endured the biggest shock of her life: her husband of 33 years leaving her for another woman. Season 2 continues Leanne's journey of self-discovery and reinvention, powered by support from her family, including her sister Carol (Kristen Johnston). — B.E.
Starring: Leanne Morgan, Kristen Johnston, Celia Weston, Blake Clark, Ryan Stiles, Jayma Mays, Tim Daly, Graham Rogers, and Hannah Pilkes
How to watch: Leanne Season 2 is now streaming on Netflix.
Looking for a swoon-worthy summer love story? Then check out The Last Sunrise, based on the novel by Anna Todd. The film introduces college student Ry (Maia Reficco), who heads on a summer vacation to Mallorca with her mother (Eva Longoria). There, she strikes up a fling with Julián (Fernando Lindez). But their romance will face challenges as Ry struggles with chronic illness and uncovers hidden family secrets. Will these obstacles get in the way of Ry and Julián's connection? — B.E.
Starring: Maia Reficco, Fernando Lindez, Eva Longoria, Andrés Velencoso, Chloé Sweetlove, and Sabrina Bartlett
How to watch: The Last Sunrise is now streaming on Prime Video.
Need a new mystery series? South Korean thriller Mousetrap has just landed on Netflix, an unsettling careen into the world of "identity laundering." When incognito novelist Je Moon-jae (Ryu Jun-yeol) finds his identity completely stolen and loan shark No-ja (Sul Kyung-gu) on his trail, the writer must figure out why a mysterious figure known as "The Rat" has done such a thing, and how he can possibly get his life back. But that's just the tip of the iceberg for this mind-bending thriller, directed by Kim Hong-sun and written by Lee Jae-gon, which twists and turns through the streets of Seoul. — S.C.
Starring: Ryu Jun-yeol, Sul Kyung-gu
How to watch: Mousetrap premieres Aug. 28 on Netflix.
If you haven't seen Hadestown on stage, you know someone who's told you to see Hadestown on stage. Well, you could still see Hadestown on stage, and/or you could watch the live capture, Hadestown: The Musical. Filmed in London's West End, Anaïs Mitchell and Rachel Chavkin's Tony–winning musical comes to digital this week. An ideal way to watch or rewatch the hit adaptation of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, this Hadestown filmed performance stars original Broadway cast members Reeve Carney, Eva Noblezada, Amber Gray, André De Shields, and Patrick Page. Then you can be the one to tell others to see Hadestown.* — S.C.
Starring: Reeve Carney, Eva Noblezada, Amber Gray, André De Shields, and Patrick Page
How to watch: Hadestown: The Musical is now available to buy or rent on digital.
Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan, and Adam Scott have all the crime thrills for you this week, with The Whisper Man arriving on Netflix. Based on Alex North's novel of the same name, the film hinges around an unsettling playground rhyme from the author's book: "If you leave a door half open, soon you'll hear the whispers spoken. If your window’s left unlatched, you’ll hear him tapping at the glass. If you’re lonely, sad, and blue, the Whisper Man will come for you."
When children start disappearing, including the 8-year-old son of a crime writer (Scott), his detective father (De Niro) is pulled out of retirement as the culprit could be a serial killer he arrested long ago. With James Ashcroft (The Rule of Jenny Pen) directing a script from The First Omen's Ben Jacoby and IT's Chase Palmer, expect dark and chilling twists aplenty. — S.C.
Starring: Robert De Niro, Michelle Monaghan, Adam Scott, Hamish Linklater, Owen Teague, Acston Luca Porto, and Will Brill
How to watch: The Whisper Man premieres Aug. 28 on Netflix.
Silo Season 3 may be winding down, but Apple TV has more sci-fi for genre lovers to feast on in the form of Dark Matter Season 2. Based on the novel by Blake Crouch, Dark Matter's first season introduced physicist Jason Dessen (Joel Edgerton), who winds up traveling through a series of alternate versions of his life. Season 2 goes beyond the book, with the Dessen family facing danger when threatening powers force them on the run again. Brace yourself for mind-bending multiversal madness. — B.E.
Starring: Joel Edgerton, Jennifer Connelly, Alice Braga, and Jimmi Simpson
How to watch: Dark Matter Season 2 premieres Aug. 28 on Apple TV.
FX's Gen Z sitcom Adults got off to a strong start in its first season, introducing a lovably messy friend group in housemates Samir (Malik Elassal), Billie (Lucy Freyer), Paul Baker (Jack Innanen), Issa (Amita Rao), and Anton (Owen Thiele). Things only get funnier (and wilder) in Season 2, which sees Adults' cast firing on all cylinders, whether that means shining by themselves or gelling impeccably in ensemble scenes.
Just what kind of chaos can you expect from Season 2? Secret friend groups, cringe-y pop star careers, a raccoon invasion, and maybe, just maybe, more crumbs of romance between Anton and Paul Baker. Fair warning: There are only eight bite-sized episodes of this delightful season, so be sure to binge with caution. As soon as you're done, you'll want to hop right back to the beginning and re-witness the chaos of these friends' adulthoods. — B.E.
Starring: Malik Elassal, Lucy Freyer, Jack Innanen, Amita Rao, and Owen Thiele
How to watch: Adults Season 2 premieres Aug. 27 at 9 p.m. ET on Hulu and FXX.
(*) denotes a blurb came from a prior list.
Lunar eclipse 2026 livestreams: How to watch the Blood Moon tonightHere's how to watch the upcoming partial lunar eclipse with free online livestreams on Aug. 27 to 28, 2026. Some call it a blood moon.
Folks across North and South America, as well as parts of Europe and Africa, will have a front-row seat to a partial lunar eclipse on Aug. 27, painting the moon the color of a hot fireplace poker.
Unlike solar eclipses, you don't need specially darkened glasses to protect your eyes. In this case, you can safely stare with the naked eye. And since the next true total lunar eclipse won't happen for most of the Americas until 2029, this is your best chance to catch a major lunar light show for a few years.
But if you're like this reporter and live in an area with perpetual city light pollution — or cloudy weather just happens to crash your viewing party plans — several telescope observatories will be hosting free livestreams to bring the magic to your screen.
During a lunar eclipse, the Earth slides between the sun and the moon, casting a giant shadow over the lunar surface. This upcoming event is especially thrilling because it is a "deep" partial eclipse.
At its peak, Earth's dark shadow will swallow almost all of it — over 96 percent of the lunar face. Instead of going completely dark, the moon will catch filtered sunlight from Earth's atmosphere, glowing in coppery orange and red.
"It's as if all the world’s sunrises and sunsets are projected onto the Moon," according to NASA.
If you decide to step outside, grab a pair of binoculars to watch Earth's curved shadow sweep across lunar craters. You might also notice more stars popping out in the night sky as the bright moonlight dims. A regular smartphone can easily snap a souvenir photo.
But if you want a closer look through professional equipment, or you happen to live somewhere outside the eclipse viewing zone, multiple astronomy groups have you covered. Here is a roundup of a few free live broadcasts you can tune into on the night of Aug. 27 and into the early morning of Aug. 28, depending on where in the world you live.
Griffith Observatory: Broadcasting live from L.A., this observatory kicks off its livestream at 10:25 p.m. ET / 7:25 p.m. PT Aug. 27.
The Virtual Telescope Project: Watch the moon glow over Tuscany. This feed features high-resolution telescope views starting at 9:30 p.m. ET / 6:30 p.m. PT Aug. 27.
Timeanddate.com: Catch a real-time telescope feed with expert tracking animations and commentary, starting at 10 p.m. ET / 7 p.m. PT Aug. 27.
The main event lasts well over an hour, giving you plenty of time to hop between streams and enjoy different telescope angles.
August lunar eclipse 2026: When to see the Blood Moon tonightWhen is the partial lunar eclipse this week? How to see it
August has been a busy month for celestial events. From the recent solar eclipse, the Perseids meteor shower, and now a partial lunar eclipse will be gracing our skies.
Visible across much of North America this week, sky-gazers will have the chance to watch Earth's shadow creep across the surface of the full moon. Want to find out more? Keep reading to know when to look up and what to know about the event.
The partial lunar eclipse will take place on Aug. 27–28, 2026, according to Time and Date. It begins on the evening of Aug. 27 and peaks in the early hours of Aug. 28. Timings will vary based on your location, but NASA estimates it to be around 12:13 a.m. ET.
According to NASA, a lunar eclipse happens when the Earth moves between the Sun and the Moon, causing the Moon to pass through Earth's shadow. Lunar eclipses can only happen during a full moon, when the three bodies are aligned closely enough for Earth's shadow to fall across the lunar surface.
This is only a partial eclipse. During a partial lunar eclipse, only a portion of the moon passes through Earth’s shadow. From Earth, the shadowed area can appear noticeably darker against the illuminated part of the moon. Exactly how the eclipse looks depends on the alignment of the Sun, Earth, and Moon.
A total lunar eclipse occurs when the Sun, Earth, and Moon line up, with Earth directly between the other two. The moon still receives a small amount of sunlight, but that light has to travel through Earth's atmosphere first. The atmosphere scatters much of the blue light, allowing more red and orange light to reach the moon, which is why it can look reddish.
Thankfully, unlike a solar eclipse, a lunar eclipse is completely safe to watch with the naked eye, so you don't need special glasses or equipment.
The best way to see it is nice and easy: just head somewhere with a clear view of the sky and as little light pollution as possible. Look toward the moon as the eclipse gets underway, and you'll see Earth's shadow gradually cover part of its surface.
Binoculars or a telescope will give you a closer look, but they aren’t necessary if you don’t have access to either.
Whoop just made its most stylish band yet. Meet the Meridian jewelry-inspired band.Whoop just announced its new Meridian band, a jewelry-inspired look you can even wear to special occasions.
Whoop just debuted its new Meridian band, offering a more stylish titanium band to fit your personal style. Made of waterproof stainless steel mesh, the Meridian band is designed to be worn with all your jewelry.
The biggest issue with fitness and health trackers, especially on devices meant to be worn 24/7, is their overly athletic look. When wearing a fitness tracker day-to-day or while working out, you might not care if your health tracker matches your fit. But on special occasions, you probably don't want to be wearing a knit or rubber watch band on your wrist. Instead, you want something like an Oura Ring, which blends in with your jewelry. That's why Whoop came up with the Meridian band.
Coming in four different colors — gold, rose gold, silver, and matte black — the band is crafted with Milanese-style mesh. For those familiar with the Milanese Loop Apple Watch band, Whoop's Meridian band looks quite similar. Whoop's band also features a tapered silhouette and a magnetic adjuster. The band is sold separately from the Whoop device and costs $149. It's available for purchase directly from Whoop now.
Looking for spoiler-free NYT Connections hints or just wondering why Connections is trending today? We've got what you need to understand the clues for today's puzzle without spoiling any of the answers.
Of course, Mashable has also provided daily hints and answers for Connections, Wordle, and Strands for years, so we can help you if that's also what you need.
While we are focused more on meanings than hints in this story, sometimes learning that many of the words have completely unrelated meanings is a clue in and of itself. Connections frequently includes clues that involve words within words and other visual clues.
A popular Pokemon character.
A display of spirit. Moxie might be another word that fits the description.
A character in a Jules Verne story or a fish in a Disney story.
A type of bird.
A description that indicates something is covered in moisture.
A type of stone, or a writing surface.
A form of intense static electricity that occurs in nature.
A substance that remains after burning. Could also indicate color.
A metal alloy sometimes used to make trinkets or drinkware.
A type of Pokemon.
Something that provokes a profound reaction from people.
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Someone who is unpredictable or energetic.
To succeed in spite of something.
A type of animal that conveys electricity.
To cover something with something else.
To cry or be brought to the bring of crying.
Have you learned the meanings and still want the things? Check out the hints and answers for today's NYT Connections puzzle.
Are you also playing NYT Strands? Get all the Strands hints you need for today's puzzle.
Meet The Mashable 101: Our list of the content creators shaping the internet today
If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to today's Connections.
NYT Connections Sports Edition today: Hints and answers for August 27, 2026Connections: Sports Edition is a New York Times word game about finding common sports threads between words. How to solve the day's puzzle.
Today's Connections: Sports Edition will be easier if you're a fan of UT-Austin.
As we've shared in previous hints stories, this is a version of the popular New York Times word game that seeks to test the knowledge of sports fans.
Like the original Connections, the game is all about finding the "common threads between words." And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight, and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier — so we've served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.
If you just want to be told today's puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for the latest Connections solution. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.
The NYT's latest daily word game has launched in association with The Athletic, the New York Times property that provides the publication's sports coverage. The sports Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.
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Each puzzle features 16 words, and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there's only one correct answer.
If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake — players get up to four mistakes before the game ends.
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Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.
Want a hint about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:
Yellow: Infringement
Green: Ways to swap players
Blue: Reps the star
Purple: Eras in sports
Need a little extra help? Today's connections fall into the following categories:
Yellow: Transgression
Green: Transaction
Blue: Dallas Cowboys
Purple: ___Era
Looking for Wordle today? Here's the answer to today's Wordle.
Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today's puzzle before we reveal the solutions.
Drumroll, please!
The solution to today's Connections: Sports Edition #703 is...
Transgression: FOUL, INFRACTION, PENALTY, VIOLATION
Transaction: DEAL, EXCHANGE, TRADE, TRANSFER
Dallas Cowboys: BLAND, LAMB, OVERSHOWN, PRESCOTT
___Era: DEAD BALL, NEW, OPEN, STEROID
Don't feel down if you didn't manage to guess it this time. There will be new sports Connections for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we'll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.
Are you also playing NYT Strands? See hints and answers for today's Strands.
If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to today's Connections.
NYT Pips hints, answers for August 27, 2026The New York Times' latest game, Pips, brings domino fun to your desktop. How to play Pips as well as hints in case you get stuck.
Welcome to your guide to Pips, the latest game in the New York Times catalog.
Released in August 2025, Pips puts a unique spin on dominoes, creating a fun single-player experience that could become your next daily gaming habit.
Currently, if you're stuck, the game only offers to reveal the entire puzzle, forcing you to move on to the next difficulty level and start over. However, we have you covered! Below are piecemeal answers that will serve as hints so that you can find your way through each difficulty level.
If you've ever played dominoes, you'll have a passing familiarity with how Pips is played. As we've shared in our previous hints stories for Pips, the tiles, like dominoes, are placed vertically or horizontally and connect with each other. The main difference between a traditional game of dominoes and Pips is the color-coded conditions you have to address. The touching tiles don't necessarily have to match.
The conditions you have to meet are specific to the color-coded spaces. For example, if it provides a single number, every side of a tile in that space must add up to the number provided. It is possible — and common — for only half a tile to be within a color-coded space.
Here are common examples you'll run into across the difficulty levels:
Number: All the pips in this space must add up to the number.
Equal: Every domino half in this space must be the same number of pips.
Not Equal: Every domino half in this space must have a completely different number of pips.
Less than: Every domino half in this space must add up to less than the number.
Greater than: Every domino half in this space must add up to more than the number.
If an area does not have any color coding, it means there are no conditions on the portions of dominoes within those spaces.
Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 1-4, placed horizontally.
Number (3): Everything in this space must add up to 3. The answer is 3-6, placed horizontally.
Greater Than (5): Everything in this space must be greater than 5. The answer is 2-6, placed horizontally.
Not Equal: Everything in this space must be different. The answer is 1-4, placed horizontally; 3-6, placed horizontally; 2-6, placed horizontally; 5-3, placed horizontally.
Equal (5): Everything in this space must be equal to 5. The answer is 5-5, placed horizontally.
Greater Than (4): Everything in this space must be greater than 4. The answer is 6-2, placed vertically.
Less Than (4): Everything in this space must be less than 4. The answer is 3-1, placed horizontally; 1-5, placed vertically.
Number (6): Everything in this space must add up to 6. The answer is 3-1, placed horizontally; 3-5, placed horizontally.
Equal (5): Everything in this space must be equal to 5. The answer is 3-5, placed horizontally; 1-5, placed vertically.
Equal (2): Everything in this space must be equal to 2. The answer is 6-2, placed vertically; 4-2, placed horizontally.
Equal (2): Everything in this space must be equal to 2. The answer is 2-2, placed horizontally.
Greater Than (6): Everything in this space must be greater than 6. The answer is 5-5, placed vertically.
Equal (4): Everything in this space must be equal to 4. The answer is 4-4, placed horizontally.
Number (7): Everything in this space must add up to 7. The answer is 3-6, placed horizontally; 1-5, placed vertically.
Number (5): Everything in this space must add up to 5. The answer is 5-3, placed horizontally.
Equal (5): Everything in this space must be equal to 5. The answer is 5-3, placed horizontally.
Equal (3): Everything in this space must be equal to 3. The answer is 3-6, placed horizontally; 5-3, placed horizontally; 1-3, placed horizontally; 3-3, placed vertically.
Equal (5): Everything in this space must be equal to 5. The answer is 1-5, placed vertically; 5-6, placed vertically.
Equal (1): Everything in this space must be equal to 1. The answer is 1-3, placed horizontally; 1-6, placed horizontally.
Equal (6): Everything in this space must be equal to 6. The answer is 1-6, placed horizontally; 6-6, placed vertically; 5-6, placed vertically.
Number (6): Everything in this space must add up to 6. The answer is 5-4, placed vertically; 2-0, placed vertically.
Number (8): Everything in this space must add up to 8. The answer is 6-6, placed vertically; 2-4, placed vertically.
Number (0): Everything in this space must add up to 0. The answer is 2-0, placed vertically; 0-3, placed horizontally.
Number (4): Everything in this space must add up to 4. The answer is 0-3, placed horizontally; 1-2, placed horizontally.
Number (6): Everything in this space must add up to 6. The answer is 1-2, placed horizontally; 2-4, placed vertically.
If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
NYT Connections hints today: Clues, answers for August 27, 2026Connections is a New York Times word game that's all about finding the "common threads between words." How to solve the puzzle.
The NYT Connections puzzle today is not too difficult if you are into shades of gray.
Connections is the one of the most popular New York Times word games that's captured the public's attention. The game is all about finding the "common threads between words." And just like Wordle, Connections resets after midnight and each new set of words gets trickier and trickier—so we've served up some hints and tips to get you over the hurdle.
If you just want to be told today's puzzle, you can jump to the end of this article for today's Connections solution. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.
The NYT's latest daily word game has become a social media hit. The Times credits associate puzzle editor Wyna Liu with helping to create the new word game and bringing it to the publications' Games section. Connections can be played on both web browsers and mobile devices and require players to group four words that share something in common.
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Each puzzle features 16 words and each grouping of words is split into four categories. These sets could comprise of anything from book titles, software, country names, etc. Even though multiple words will seem like they fit together, there's only one correct answer.
If a player gets all four words in a set correct, those words are removed from the board. Guess wrong and it counts as a mistake—players get up to four mistakes until the game ends.
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Players can also rearrange and shuffle the board to make spotting connections easier. Additionally, each group is color-coded with yellow being the easiest, followed by green, blue, and purple. Like Wordle, you can share the results with your friends on social media.
Want a hint about the categories without being told the categories? Then give these a try:
Yellow: Shocking
Green: Tearing up
Blue: Gray
Purple: Looks like a music genre
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Need a little extra help? Today's connections fall into the following categories:
Yellow: Electric Things
Green: Moved to Tears
Blue: Shades of Gray
Purple: Music Genre Plus Starting Letter
Looking for Wordle today? Here's the answer to today's Wordle.
Ready for the answers? This is your last chance to turn back and solve today's puzzle before we reveal the solutions.
Drumroll, please!
The solution to today's Connections #1173 is...
Electric Things: ELECTRIC EEL, LIGHTNING, LIVE WIRE, PIKACHU
Moved to Tears: CHOKED UP, EMOTIONAL, MISTY, OVERCOME
Shades of Gray: ASH, DOVE, PEWTER, SLATE
Music Genre Plus Starting Letter: BROCK, NEMO, SPUNK, WRAP
Are you also playing NYT Strands? Get all the Strands hints you need for today's puzzle.
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If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to today's Connections.
NYT Strands hints, answers for August 27, 2026The NYT Strands hints and answers you need to make the most of your puzzling experience.
Today's NYT Strands hints are easy in an abstract way.
Strands, the New York Times' elevated word-search game, requires the player to perform a twist on the classic word search. Words can be made from linked letters — up, down, left, right, or diagonal, but words can also change direction, resulting in quirky shapes and patterns. Every single letter in the grid will be part of an answer. There's always a theme linking every solution, along with the "spangram," a special, word or phrase that sums up that day's theme, and spans the entire grid horizontally or vertically.
By providing an opaque hint and not providing the word list, Strands creates a brain-teasing game that takes a little longer to play than its other games, like Wordle and Connections.
If you're feeling stuck or just don't have 10 or more minutes to figure out today's puzzle, we've got all the NYT Strands hints for today's puzzle you need to progress at your preferred pace.
The words are adjectives related to twisting.
These words describe that twist or can be twisted.
Today's NYT Strands spangram is vertical.
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Today's spangram is What a Twist.
Hairstyle
Dance
Sprain
Surprise
Distortion
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Looking for other daily online games? Mashable's Games page has more hints, and if you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now!
Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to today's Strands.
Wordle today: Answer, hints for August 27, 2026Here's the answer for "Wordle" #1895 on August 27 as well as a few hints, tips, and clues to help you solve it yourself.
Today's Wordle answer should be easy to solve if you work in production.
If you just want to be told today's word, you can jump to the bottom of this article for today's Wordle solution revealed. But if you'd rather solve it yourself, keep reading for some clues, tips, and strategies to assist you.
Originally created by engineer Josh Wardle as a gift for his partner, Wordle rapidly spread to become an international phenomenon, with thousands of people around the globe playing every day. Alternate Wordle versions created by fans also sprang up, including battle royale Squabble, music identification game Heardle, and variations like Dordle and Quordle that make you guess multiple words at once.
Wordle eventually became so popular that it was purchased by the New York Times, and TikTok creators even livestream themselves playing.
The best Wordle starting word is the one that speaks to you. But if you prefer to be strategic in your approach, we have a few ideas to help you pick a word that might help you find the solution faster. One tip is to select a word that includes at least two different vowels, plus some common consonants like S, T, R, or N.
The entire archive of past Wordle puzzles was originally available for anyone to enjoy whenever they felt like it, but it was later taken down, with the website's creator stating it was done at the request of the New York Times. However, the New York Times then rolled out its own Wordle Archive, available only to NYT Games subscribers.
It might feel like Wordle is getting harder, but it actually isn't any more difficult than when it first began. You can turn on Wordle's Hard Mode if you're after more of a challenge, though.
Unedited.
The letter U appears twice.
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Today's Wordle starts with the letter U.
Get your last guesses in now, because it's your final chance to solve today's Wordle before we reveal the solution.
Drumroll please!
The solution to today's Wordle is...
UNCUT
Don't feel down if you didn't manage to guess it this time. There will be a new Wordle for you to stretch your brain with tomorrow, and we'll be back again to guide you with more helpful hints.
Are you also playing NYT Strands? See hints and answers for today's Strands.
Reporting by Chance Townsend, Caitlin Welsh, Sam Haysom, Amanda Yeo, Shannon Connellan, Cecily Mauran, Mike Pearl, and Adam Rosenberg contributed to this article.
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If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Not the day you're after? Here's the solution to today's Wordle.
Hurdle hints and answers for August 27, 2026Hints and answers to today's Hurdle all in one place.
If you like playing daily word games like Wordle, then Hurdle is a great game to add to your routine.
There are five rounds to the game. The first round sees you trying to guess the word, with correct, misplaced, and incorrect letters shown in each guess. If you guess the correct answer, it'll take you to the next hurdle, providing the answer to the last hurdle as your first guess. This can give you several clues or none, depending on the words. For the final hurdle, every correct answer from previous hurdles is shown, with correct and misplaced letters clearly shown.
An important note is that the number of times a letter is highlighted from previous guesses does necessarily indicate the number of times that letter appears in the final hurdle.
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If you find yourself stuck at any step of today's Hurdle, don't worry! We have you covered.
A popular car rental company.
HERTZ
An organ in the head.
BRAIN
To lodge in.
EMBED
An old song or movie.
OLDIE
It started.
BEGUN
If you're looking for more puzzles, Mashable's got games now! Check out our games hub for Mahjong, Sudoku, free crossword, and more.
Callaway’s Good Good generationally stupid golf ad has left the internet horrifiedCallaway apologized after approving a Good Good commercial that depicted a male golfer shoving and threatening a woman. The internet reacts.
Some advertisements make you want to buy the product. Others make the entire internet ask, "Who on Earth approved this?"
A promotional video from golf equipment giant Callaway and popular YouTube brand Good Good Golf has landed firmly in the latter category. The since-deleted ad showed the brand's co-founder Garrett Clark charging toward female golfer Alexis Miestowski, shoving her to the ground, and standing over her before warning, "Do not touch my new driver."
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The clip was apparently intended to be part of a horror-inspired story about Clark becoming dangerously obsessed with the new Good Good-branded Callaway Quantum driver. Instead, viewers saw a man knock a woman down over a golf club — and reacted accordingly.
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"This is a generationally stupid ad," one X user wrote. "Absolutely incredible that no one in the room said 'guys hold on,'" Golf Digest reporter Christopher Powers added.
Powers' disbelief reflected a defining response to the commercial. People were not only upset by what appeared onscreen, but baffled by how many people must have encountered the idea before it reached them.
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Good Good and Callaway removed the video from their social media accounts on Aug. 21, but, as brands repeatedly learn, deleting something does not make it disappear from the internet. Copies continued circulating, bringing the ad to an even larger and increasingly incredulous audience.
"This is so much worse than I thought it was going to be," one X user wrote. Another asked whether any women had been involved in pitching, approving, or producing it.
Over in the r/golf subreddit, where a discussion of the controversy attracted more than 1,000 upvotes and hundreds of comments, golf fans were equally unimpressed. "The ad had a school project production value and lacked any real humor," one commenter wrote. "How this passed by anyone at Callaway with the slightest bit of media proficiency or common sense is mind boggling."
"The way to normally do these things as 'jokes' is to make it so over the top that it’s clearly not intended to be serious," one user explained. "What you don’t do is have them realistically tackle a woman and then stand over them aggressively and deliver the line."
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For some viewers, especially women, the ad represented more than one spectacularly misguided creative decision, but embodied the exclusionary "golf bro" culture that the sport has spent years attempting to move beyond.
"As a female golfer, I already feel excluded from the golf world in some ways. They crossed the line,” one Reddit user commented. Another TikTok commenter said they were tired of the "bro culture" and "frat boy mentality" surrounding golf both online and on the course.
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Women working within golf pushed back, too. "They didn’t just create an ad that makes golf non-inclusive to women, but it endorses violence against women in the scariest and most threatening way," Skratch social media director Nicole Rae said, calling the video "wildly disappointing."
CNN Living Golf host Jasmine Sanders, known online as The Jazzy Golfer, pointed to the contradiction between the industry’s stated goals and what two of its prominent brands had approved: "Golf keeps talking about making the game more welcoming to women," Sanders said in a LinkedIn video. "You can’t say that matters and then make violence towards a woman the punchline."
Golfer and former Real Housewives of Orange County cast member Katie Ginella said she was "in shock" after watching the ad. Ginella, who has spoken publicly about her own experience with domestic violence, said she would no longer support Good Good or Callaway.
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None of these women aren't wrong — there is a large contradiction in the sport of golf. Women and girls have accounted for 60 percent of the growth in on-course golf participation since 2019, yet much of golf’s most prominent internet content remains built around groups of men, competitive challenges, and rowdy banter. Good Good itself was founded by male creators and only launched a separate women’s channel in late 2025.
Ironically, by partnering with Good Good to make golf feel younger and more internet-native, Callaway — one of golf's biggest institutions — ended up legitimizing the very "golf bro" culture that makes women feel unwelcome in the sport in the first place.
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Founded as a YouTube channel in 2020, Good Good has grown into a major golf media and merchandise business with more than 2 million YouTube subscribers. Callaway partnered with the group back in 2023, and the brand is now the title sponsor of a PGA Tour tournament scheduled for November.
In an apology posted to X, Good Good said the video "ultimately depicted actions that are not aligned with our values as a brand." Good Good CEO Matt Kendrick also issued a longer statement on LinkedIn, saying the commercial was intended to parody a scene from the horror movie Obsession but that its execution "missed the mark." "Regardless of what we intended, we are responsible for what we put into the world and how it is received," Kendrick wrote. "We got this one wrong."
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Callaway CEO Chip Brewer, on the other hand, said it was "disappointed by the content that was posted" and thanked Good Good for addressing it (language that appeared to place the responsibility primarily on its partner.)
He also admitted that although Good Good produced the video, Callaway had approved it before publication: "That approval should never have happened," Brewer wrote. "Mistakes were made, and we are taking the matter very seriously." Brewer added that Callaway was conducting internal and external investigations, and announced changes to the company’s approval processes.
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Yet, many viewers — and brand partners — were not satisfied with that explanation. Even the Golf Channel postponed the Aug. 25 premiere of Big Break x Good Good until Sept. 1, saying it needed time to make "necessary production updates" after a sponsor requested that its branding be removed from the series (rumored to be retailer "Golf Galaxy").
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Dick’s Sporting Goods also removed Good Good merchandise from their websites and store floors, along with Target and several PGA Tour Superstore locations. Callaway, meanwhile, removed the Good Good Quantum driver from its own website, although the club remained available directly through Good Good.
Even competitors saw an opening: Golf club brand PXG posted a video of professional golfers Olivia Cowan, Gina Kim, and Auston Kim with the caption, "Our drivers play nice with everyone."
The uproar surrounding this ad did not happen in a vacuum. In 2021 alone, an estimated 34 percent of murdered women were killed by an intimate partner. The CDC also reports that nearly one in four women has experienced physical violence from an intimate partner, and that more than half of female homicide victims are killed by a current or former male partner.
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In that light, pushing a woman to the ground and standing over her is far too familiar an image to land as a harmless punchline.
If the ad was supposed to show that Callaway’s new driver was worth fighting over, it failed. Instead, it showed how easily violence against women could survive pitching, filming, editing, and corporate approval — all to sell a driver.
If you or someone you know is experiencing domestic violence, help is available. Call the National Domestic Violence Hotline at 1-800-799-SAFE (7233), text “START” to 88788, or visit TheHotline.org to chat with an advocate. Support is free, confidential, and available 24/7.
Senator launches investigation into Flocks surveillanceA Republican senator is demanding answers from the company, which is facing increasing scrutiny.
Senator Josh Hawley of Missouri is investigating Flock Safety, the maker of the now-ubiquitous AI-powered Flock cameras, demanding answers from the company about how it captures and retains data on millions of Americans.
With over 120,000 cameras in 49 states, Flock has been under scrutiny from the American public for weeks, with some vigilantes destroying the automated license plate readers (ALPR). Now, the Atlanta-based company has to contend with a Senate investigation demanding troves of documentation on its policies, as well as details on how some of the data it captured has been misused.
In his letter to Flock, Hawley pointed out that its cameras conduct more than 20 billion vehicle scans monthly, while "the overwhelming majority of the Americans captured in those records did nothing wrong" and all that information is searchable in a national database for Flock’s customers.
Hawley also laid out numerous cases of misuse of Flock’s data, including police officers using the database for stalking rather than crime investigation.
The letter also highlighted cases of Flock cameras providing incorrect information on cars its surveilled; mistakes that have led to people being wrongfully imprisoned.
"A Florida woman spent 13 days in jail and faced eight felony counts, including three counts of vehicular homicide, after investigators arrested an owner based on their search of Flock’s network for a vehicle description,” Hawley wrote. "Prosecutors dismissed the charges seven months later when law enforcement discovered the error and arrested a different person. One California police department found that a staggering 71% of its alerts were wrong, and the Los Angeles Police Department dropped its Flock contract after an audit showed officers had stopped 161 vehicles incorrectly flagged as stolen in the space of two months."
Hawley also wants clarity on how Flock handles the data it captures.
"Flock’s $8.3 billion valuation comes with enormous pressure to find new commercial applications," Hawley wrote. "Americans demand a full accounting for how their driver data is stored or sold."
Hawley wants Flock to provide answers on:
Which customers are allowed to conduct statewide or nationwide searches of vehicle or driver data
The retention period of its data
All the times Flock cameras have been misused, and whether Flock caught the misuse itself
What a Flock user has to do to justify a search on another person’s vehicle
What restrictions exist on vehicle searches, and whether those restrictions can be circumvented
What are Flock’s own measures of accuracy when it comes to capturing vehicle information
Specifics on how Flock captures data, e.g., photos, videos, audio, wireless signals
Details on whether Flock ever linked captured data to an external source, like a data broker
Whether vehicle searches require multi-factor authentication and, if Flock is not currently requiring it, when it will
"Describe in detail whether Flock has the capability to biometrically track individuals"
Hawley wants Flock to answer all its questions by Sept. 8.
Lenovos latest gaming tablet is now under $700 — save big on the Legion Tab Gen 5Get the Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 5 (8.8-inch, Snapdragon) for $689.99, down from $849.99 — an 18% discount.
SAVE $160: As of Aug. 26, the Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 5 (8.8-inch, Snapdragon) is down to $689.99. That's an 18% discount.
The Lenovo Legion Tab Gen 5 just dropped to $689.99 at Lenovo, down from $849.99 — an 18% discount that knocks $160 off Lenovo's gaming-focused tablet. The Legion Tab Gen 5 packs a Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, 12GB of memory, and 256GB of storage, wrapped in a 3K display that hits 800 nits of brightness.
It runs Android 16 and lasts over 12 hours on a charge, which is a lot for a tablet built to handle gaming. Mashable recently tested this one, giving it a 4.5 out of 5 and a Mashable Choice Award. Reviewer Samantha Mangino was impressed by its processing power, noting its Geekbench 6 scores put it "into the leagues of a MacBook."
At 8.8 inches, it's smaller and more portable than the standard 11-inch iPad, which makes a difference for handheld gaming sessions. Mangino also called out its two USB-C ports as a standout feature, letting gamers plug in a controller or headphones while the tablet charges, something most tablets don't offer.
Battery life held up too, lasting over 12 hours in testing, and it handled livestreaming without any stuttering or slowdown, even during a WNBA game. Overall, Mangino called the tablet worth it for anyone who wants a gaming-specific tablet.
Snag the Legion Tab Gen 5 before the memory crisis pushes the price right back up.
How to support Dolly Partons Imagination LibraryHow to support Dolly Parton's beloved children's literacy program.
When Dolly Parton died Tuesday, her family asked for something other than flowers in her memory. Instead, they requested donations to Parton's Imagination Library.
Though Parton was known around the world as an icon of music and movies, her beloved literacy program cemented her legacy as a humanitarian.
Parton founded Imagination Library in 1995 to encourage a love for reading and learning among the children of Sevier County, Tennessee, where she was raised. She famously dedicated Imagination Library to her father, who grew up in rural poverty and never attended school.
"Daddy was a really smart man ... but he was ashamed that he couldn't read and write," Parton told Oprah in 2020, "That always bothered me that he felt like he couldn't learn after he was grown. I remember thinking, 'I need to do something about that. I can. I'm in a position now where I can do something.'"
Parton asked her father to help with the initiative, which delivers free, age-appropriate books to children every month from birth to age 5.
By the time a child finishes the program, they've received 60 books, according to Imagination Library.
The Dollywood Foundation covers some costs and negotiates book pricing. Its local partners help pay for mailing costs and the books themselves. Families that participate in Imagination Library pay nothing.
The Imagination Library says it has registered 3.2 million to participate in the program and given away 332 million books since its founding. Imagination Library now operates throughout the U.S, as well as in Canada, Australia, the Republic of Ireland, and the United Kingdom.
In 2018, Parton donated her 100 millionth book to the U.S. Library of Congress.
Upon Parton's passing, the Dollywood Foundation said in a statement that her legacy will continue "when a child opens a book addressed especially to them; when a parent and child read a favorite story together; and when a young person begins to imagine a future bigger than the circumstances into which they were born."
The Imagination Library accepts online donations via its website.
The program posted on Instagram that it would steadfastly continue its work.
"For decades, Dolly and the team at The Dollywood Foundation — home of Dolly Parton's Imagination Library — worked to build something that would last for generations. So it will," the post said.
In her 2020 conversation with Oprah, Parton said that her father got to see the Imagination Library's success before he died in 2000.
"My daddy got to live long enough to see that doing really well," she said. "So I just always know he's up there somewhere thinking, 'You go, girl. You done good.'"
GTA 6 Cyberleek update: Everything leaked so far, what might be nextAn anonymous leaker calling themselves Cyberleek has been posting daily gameplay videos of the unreleased 'Grand Theft Auto VI.'
With just one more day to go before Grand Theft Auto VI makes its big official debut (of sorts) on Netflix, the leaker known as Cyberleek is still on a tear. Shortly after Rockstar Games issued a statement about the GTA 6 leaks on Wednesday, Cyberleek released story spoilers for the first time by uploading an extended clip of a prologue introducing the Lucia Caminos character.
Over the past week, someone (or perhaps a group of people) called Cyberleek has been busy sharing short gameplay clips of GTA 6 left and right. On Aug. 20, Take-Two Interactive, the parent company of GTA-maker Rockstar Games, filed subpoenas against Microsoft and Discord to try to unmask the leaker, followed soon after by subpoenas against Google and X Corp. Those filings specifically cited "stolen content," seemingly confirming that at least some of the Cyberleek videos are legitimate.
The GTA 6 leaks represent the first glimpse of gameplay from the hotly anticipated title. In addition, countless AI-generated videos posing as "leaks" are also circulating widely on social media. So, we've put together a quick list of everything Cyberleek has released so far. We're not going to embed or link to any of these clips; however, they're easy enough to find on X or Reddit if you look hard enough.
At the time of publication, 16 gameplay clips and three map screenshots have been posted by Cyberleek that show different aspects of GTA 6, including glimpses of cutscenes. The leaker has so far avoided posting major plot spoilers started posting story spoilers in the most recent release, so be careful if you want to avoid them.
Here are the GTA 6 leaks Cyberleek has shared so far:
Map sneak peek 1: A small, cropped portion of the in-game world map, showing a location called Dalton Island.
Map sneak peek 2: Another cropped portion of the map showing locations called Tequesta Retreat, Gloriana Key, and Catalan Key.
Basketball video: A clip of protagonist Jason Duval throwing a basketball into a hoop in a mini-game.
Full map: An alleged view of the entire in-game map.
Random video 1: A clip of Jason driving around for a little bit before beating up a truck driver.
Taser video: A clip of Jason driving at night, stealing a security guard's taser, and using it on him. Jason then repeatedly kicks the guard while he is on the ground.
Junkies video: A clip that appears to show a healing drug called Zombix. A tooltip indicates that Zombix's effects will weaken over time if the player uses it too much.
Plane video: A clip of Jason flying a plane over Vice City, with much of the game world visible below. At the end, whoever is playing the game in the clip shoots the word "LEEK" into a wall with bullets, suggesting the leaker has a playable build of the game.
Hypercar part 1: A clip of Jason driving a high-end sports car around Vice City.
Hypercar part 2: A clip of Jason driving the sports car some more, before committing armed robbery.
Strip club: Jason wanders around a strip club, then a short clip of an in-game cutscene is shown.
Gas station: Jason causes trouble at a gas station, steals a truck with a bed full of gasoline, and crashes and dies; more of the previous cutscene is shown.
Plane video 2: Jason flies a plane over Vice City at night.
Nudist colony: Jason explores a nudist hangout spot (where the NPCs are, obviously, nude) and attacks NPCs.
Nightclub: A pretty uneventful video of Jason walking around the interior of a nightclub.
Beach cycling: Jason riding a bicycle on a beach full of NPCs.
Video game store: Jason walking around a video game store with shelves full of fake video game boxes.
How does Cyberleek drive?: Jason steals a hotrod and evades the police; the clip ends with a cutscene showing Lucia Caminos, the game's second playable character, for the first time. Caminos talks about someone who "drives like a bitch."
Lucia prologue: A four-and-a-half-minute video of a prologue introducing Caminos; the clip includes minor story spoilers.
We can't authenticate any of the Cyberleek videos, and we live in a world where it's easy to generate convincing AI videos. That said, as someone who has played nearly every GTA game, they all seem fairly convincing. GTA games all move in a certain way, and that movement appears to be recreated remarkably well in these videos. Everything from character movement to NPC interactions looks relatively on-brand for a modern Rockstar game.
On top of that, Rockstar Games finally acknowledged the leak in a statement, calling it "heartbreaking." The statement all but confirms the leaked gameplay clips are the real deal.
Cyberleek has been running polls on its website that allow people to pay in cryptocurrency to vote on what should be leaked next. In recent days, Cyberleek teased footage featuring the Lucia Caminos character, in particular. On Wednesday, Cyberleek made good on those promises and released a short cutscene with Caminos, followed by an extended look at the character's prologue.
Cyberleek doesn't have any active polls online as of this writing. Their most recent comments suggest more videos featuring Caminos are coming, and soon.
Of course, you can also wait for real, official gameplay footage, which is set to debut on Netflix on Aug. 27.
Mashable has contacted Rockstar and Take-Two repeatedly with questions about the leaks, and we'll update this story if we receive a response.
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Updated on Wednesday, Aug. 26 at 3:20 p.m. ET — We've updated this story with details on Rockstar's statement and additional GTA 6 leaks.
Updated on Tuesday, Aug. 25 at 11:40 a.m. ET — We've updated this story to reflect the latest Cyberleek videos.
Updated on Monday, Aug. 24 at 1:30 p.m. ET — We've updated this story to reflect the latest Cyberleek leaks.
Updated on Friday, Aug. 21 at 3:00 p.m. ET — Take-Two Interactive Software Inc., the parent company of Grand Theft Auto-maker Rockstar Games, has filed two subpoenas naming Microsoft and Discord as it hunts the leaker known as Cyberleek. The legal filings specifically cite "stolen content," seemingly confirming that the leaks are legitimate. Take-Two is also requesting the removal of leaked material that violates its copyrights, as well as information that could unmask the leakers. Read more about the Microsoft and Discord subpoenas.
Cyberleek posts first major GTA 6 spoilers in Lucia prologue leakCyberleek, the mystery 'Grand Theft Auto VI' leaker, posted major story spoilers for the first time with a clip of the character Lucia.
For the past week, a mystery leaker calling themselves Cyberleek has been busy posting gameplay clips from the unreleased video game Grand Theft Auto VI, one of the most highly anticipated video games of all time.
So far, the leaker has shared only brief, spoiler-free glimpses of cutscenes or gameplay footage showing the game's world and mechanics, but on Wednesday, that changed. Shortly after Rockstar Games issued a statement about the leaks, Cyberleek made good on a threat to release clips of the game's prologue featuring the playable character Lucia Caminos. Cyberleek posted four and a half minutes of the Lucia prologue in a Telegram channel and promised to release more footage featuring Lucia soon.
The video shows a flashback featuring Caminos in prison, which isn't itself a spoiler. The original GTA 6 trailer, released two years ago, showed Caminos in an orange jumpsuit, as did an official image released by Rockstar Games. However, Cyberleek's latest video goes further by revealing plot details about the character's experiences in and out of prison.
That's all we're going to say about that particular clip, as we don't want to spoil the game for anyone. However, official details about the game were also revealed today by Dazed magazine, providing even more information about how Lucia fits into GTA 6.
The exclusive preview feature in Dazed reveals that players will be able to switch seamlessly between the protagonists Jason Duval and Caminos, who is described as "a fighter fresh out of prison." Dazed reported that players can have the characters act independently or as a couple.
For gamers trying to avoid GTA 6 spoilers, consider this your warning: Cyberleek has stepped up their campaign and is actively sharing spoilers.
For an official, Rockstar-approved preview of the upcoming game, tune into the extended look that premieres on Netflix tomorrow.
Everything we expect at Apples September iPhone launch eventWhat to expect from Apple's iPhone 18 launch: new Pro models, the first foldable iPhone Ultra, Apple Watches, and CEO Ternus.
Apple has finally sent out invitations for its next hardware event, titled "Surprise and shine," set for Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. PT at the Steve Jobs Theater in Apple Park.
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This year's keynote carries extra weight beyond the usual hardware reveal as it will be John Ternus' first Apple product event as CEO, following Tim Cook's planned exit from the top job. Ternus is set to take over on Sept. 1, and given his background in running hardware engineering, some reports suggest Apple's industrial design group is being pulled closer to the center of decision-making under his leadership.
For the hardware itself, all signs point to a narrower lineup than usual, with the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max all expected to headline, alongside Apple's first foldable phone, widely rumored to be called the iPhone Ultra. Missing the event, however, will likely be the standard iPhone 18, 18e, and next-gen iPhone Air, which are reportedly being pushed to a spring 2027 event instead. New Apple Watches are also expected to make an appearance.
Here's everything we know heading into the keynote.
Per Mashable's ongoing iPhone 18 coverage, Apple is expected to keep this launch focused on its Pro model iPhones.
In terms of design, the Pro models aren't expected to stray far from last year's look. In Mashable's rumors thread, leaks suggest a couple of tweaks rather than a full overhaul, including a smaller Dynamic Island cutout and a more unified, single-tone back glass in place of last year's two-tone finish.
Color-wise, Apple will mix up this year's finishes to include a silver, dark gray, light blue, and a new shade called "dark cherry."
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Under the hood, the Pro models are expected to move to Apple's A20 and A20 Pro chips, paired with a new C2 modem that could bring 5G satellite support and an N2 chip aimed at improving WiFi and AirDrop reliability. Korean outlet The Bell has also reported that Apple plans to standardize RAM across the Pro lineup at 12GB, doing away with the base-versus-Pro memory split that's defined recent generations. Battery life should get a boost too, with capacity expected to land around 5,000mAh, which will appear the norm for the lineup.
The "biggest" change is within the camera. Several rumors have called the changes among the most significant camera hardware upgrades in the iPhone's history, due in part to a larger telephoto aperture and the introduction of variable aperture. That said, leaker Ice Universe has suggested the variable-aperture system might be exclusive to the Pro Max, leaving the standard Pro without it.
The Pro Max is also rumored to be very slightly larger and heavier than its predecessor, a tradeoff tied to fitting in a bigger battery.
The event's biggest wildcard is Apple's first foldable phone, widely expected to be called the iPhone Ultra (previously referred to in our reporting as the iPhone Fold). In our rumors guide on the Ultra, we noted that while Apple hasn't confirmed the device, code references in the iOS 27 beta, including strings tied to fold angles and screen states, plus macOS 27 features for resizing iPhone-mirroring windows, have made its existence something of an open secret.
Early testers cited by Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reportedly liked the device's hinge quality and more iPad-like interface, though they were less impressed by the missing telephoto camera.
Expected specs, based on analyst and supply-chain reporting:
A book-style design with a roughly 7.8-inch inner OLED display and a 5.5-inch outer display
Touch ID rather than Face ID
Four cameras total — two rear, one inner, one front-facing — though without a telephoto lens
A liquid-metal hinge intended to improve durability
A price above $2,000, with some estimates around $2,399
A battery of at least 5,088mAh
Analysts, leakers, and even Gurman have been going back and forth for weeks about when the Ultra will actually release. Some reports say that the Ultra will be announced but won't hit shelves later, similar to the iPhone X. Others, like Gurman, have pushed back on this.
Rounding out the hardware slate are reports that the Apple Watch Series 12 and Apple Watch Ultra 4 are also expected in September, likely with new health and fitness features and fresh color and band options rather than a major redesign this cycle.
It'll be a more substantial overhaul that may include a return to ceramic cases. Apple is also exploring a screen-free model for the minimalist wearable market, targeting late 2026 or 2027, according to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman.
Apple's event kicks off Wednesday, Sept. 9, 2026, at 10:00 a.m. PT / 1:00 p.m. ET at the Steve Jobs Theater at Apple Park, with a livestream on Apple's website and YouTube channel for those not attending in person.
Mashable will be there on the ground, so look out for our coverage and hands-on impressions once the keynote wraps.
GTA VI Cyberleek update: Everything leaked Wednesday and earlier this weekThe 'Grand Theft Auto VI' leaks are starting to resemble a river at this point.
Leaked gameplay clips of Grand Theft Auto VI keep appearing on the internet.
After a few clips came out over the weekend and into Monday, there are now even more circulating online, courtesy of the now-notorious leaker known as Cyberleek. As Rockstar and Take-Two step up their efforts to find and stop Cyberleek, clips keep coming at an even more rapid pace.
On Wednesday morning, Rockstar broke its silence on the situation, calling the leaks "heartbreaking" for its team. Around the same time, Cyberleek posted yet another gameplay clip, then soon followed it up with a four-and-a-half-minute video of a prologue featuring Lucia Caminos, the second playable character in the game. In recent days, Cyberleek has been threatening to release clips featuring Caminos, and the leaker teased further GTA 6 leaks featuring the character.
We're not going to embed or link directly to any of these clips, but they are easy to find on social media. The most recent Cyberleek videos include:
A clip of the player exploring a nightclub with scantily clad women
A clip of protagonist Jason riding a bicycle on a beach packed with civilian NPCs
A clip of Jason looking around a fictional video game retailer, complete with a bunch of fake video game boxes
A clip of Jason stealing a hotrod and being chased by the police, as well as a short cutscene featuring Lucia
Four and a half minutes of Lucia's prologue, featuring Lucia in prison and minor story spoilers
That brings the total number of leaked GTA 6 clips to 16, at the time of publication. To be clear, their authenticity has not been totally verified, but Rockstar's recent statement and parent company Take-Two's legal efforts to identify Cyberleek go a long way in confirming the clips are legit. In subpoenas, Take-Two has referred to the Cyberleek videos as "stolen content" and "leaked gameplay videos."
As a reminder, Rockstar is set to officially show an extended look at GTA VI gameplay on Netflix on Thursday.
UPDATE: Aug. 26, 2026, 3:30 p.m. EDT This story was originally published on Sept. 25 at 11 a.m. ET; we have updated this article with information on the latest Cyberleek videos and a statement issued by Rockstar Games.
Apple officially announces September iPhone launch event: Surprise and shineOn Aug. 26, Apple finally confirmed the exact date and time of its annual September iPhone launch event.
Apple has finally announced the date, time, and tagline for its annual iPhone launch event. The company said today that a "Surprise and shine" Apple event will take place on Sept. 9 at 10 a.m. PT, and viewers will be able to watch the keynote live on YouTube, the Apple website, and Apple TV. At the event, Apple is widely expected to release the new iPhone 18 lineup, as well as a foldable smartphone, rumored to be called the iPhone Ultra.
As with past events, Apple released artwork to promote the occasion, which shows the tagline and the Apple logo with a glowing neon effect. The image evokes the white neon glow of the Siri AI beta announced earlier this year at WWDC 2026.
Guess what Apple will release in September in our Big Guessing Game: Apple edition. Enter now for a chance to win!
A Mashable reporter also received an invitation to the Apple event, and we'll be reporting live from Apple Park. The invitation reads, "Surprise and shine. Please join us in person for a special Apple event at the Steve Jobs Theater in Apple Park."
The company declined to provide any additional information on the "special event," and we didn't expect them to. But we do have some idea of what Apple's working on.
Apple traditionally hosts an event in early September to announce the new iPhone lineup and other products. At last year's September keynote, Apple announced the iPhone 17, the Apple Watch Series 12, and the AirPods Pro 3. However, we expect this year's event to be unique in several ways, as the tagline seemingly suggests.
First, long-time Apple CEO Tim Cook is scheduled to step aside on Sept. 1 to make way for incoming CEO John Ternus, who currently works as Apple's Senior Vice President of Hardware Engineering. This will be Ternus's first keynote, and the world will be watching to see how he sets the tone for a new era at Apple Park.
Second, Apple could release the first-ever foldable iPhone, the biggest change to the iPhone in years. Apple's smartphone competitors have been making foldable phones for years, but Apple has so far left the market to Google and Samsung. However, that's not unusual for Apple. The company didn't release the first smartphone or MP3 player, but when it finally entered the market, the company crushed the competition.
Finally, the Siri AI beta will take one step closer to a public release, bringing Apple into the AI era at last.
We will be very interested to see if history repeats itself with the folding iPhone, or if the device goes the way of the Vision Pro.
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The long-lasting Nothing Headphone (a) have never been this cheap before — save 45% for one day onlyThe black Nothing Headphone (a) are on sale for just $109 at Amazon and Best Buy today (Aug. 26) — an unprecedented 45% savings.
SAVE $90: Normally $199, the black Nothing Headphone (a) are on sale for just $119 at Amazon and Best Buy today (Aug. 26) — an unprecedented 45% savings.
Looking for a pair of noise-cancelling headphones that just won't quit? Earlier this month, Mashable's audio experts crowned the Nothing Headphone (a) their top pick for long battery life. They last up to 75 hours with their ANC on and 135 hours (!) without; most headphones we tested previously maxed out around 60 hours.
Your timing is excellent, by the way: There's never been a better time to buy the Headphone (a). Today, Aug. 26, Amazon and Best Buy are both running 24-hour deals that bring the black pair down to just $109 — nearly half off their usual price of $199. They've never been cheaper since launching in March.
Battery life aside, Mashable's Bethany Allard loved the Headphone (a)'s "perfect" physical control buttons, unique retro design, and good sound quality. (You might just need to adjust their equalizer in the Nothing X mobile app. Allard said they can be a bit bass-heavy right out of the box.) Allard actually recommends them over the flagship Nothing Headphone (1), which sound a little more balanced but fit uncomfortably and cost more, she said.
"The Nothing Headphone (a) is the best pair of headphones from Nothing, and one of the best pairs of mid-range headphones available to get, thanks to their solid all-around performance and standout battery life," Allard wrote.
If you don't like the black colorway, you can pick up the Headphone (a) in white, yellow, or pink for $119 at Amazon and Best Buy today. That's still a solid 40% savings.
Bill Gates proposes a token tax on AI to protect human workersFormer Microsoft head Bill Gates has a few ideas on how to deal with AI replacing human workers.
As anti-AI sentiment continues to spread, one tech industry leader is now floating an idea for how to deal with it.
In a 6,000-word essay posted on his Gates Notes website, billionaire and former Microsoft head Bill Gates explains his fears about artificial intelligence and offers a few proposals for addressing them. Gates also discussed his concerns in a wide-ranging interview with the New York Times.
One of the most notable ideas Gates proposes is a new tax on AI, which he calls the "token tax."
As Gates explains, businesses pay payroll taxes on human employees. However, if AI replaces a worker's job, that same company gets to write the purchase off as a business expense.
"The tax system nudges you toward replacing people with machines," Gates says, explaining how his previously proposed robot tax would also play a role alongside the AI-specific tax.
Gates says the tax would help slow the impact of AI's growth on labor and that the money it raises could be used for job retraining and building a stronger social safety net. He also says that the tax could be set up to avoid affecting "purely beneficial uses of AI," which he describes as "making medicine and education cheaper."
In addition to the tax, Gates also proposed "Human Reserved" jobs, which would be set aside specifically for human beings. Gates classified jobs that workers would have difficulty transitioning from as potential Human Reserved employment. He also proposed that jobs requiring a human touch, such as caregiving, should be Human Reserved.
We might set something aside as Human Reserved for economic reasons. For example, we may do it because allowing machines to take over a certain role will displace a large number of people who can’t easily change jobs. You can’t tell a 55-year-old who has worked in construction their whole career that they need to go work at an elder care facility and expect them to find it fulfilling.
Sometimes the decision to make something Human Reserved will be driven by other factors. In health, for example, imagine a robot giving you the awful news that you have an incurable disease. There’s no technical reason why it couldn’t. Yet it shouldn’t.
For years, executives within the AI industry have talked about how the technology will dramatically change the job market and put people out of work.
“Entire classes of jobs will go away and not come back,” OpenAI CEO Sam Altman previously stated.
"You should be worried about where the technology we're building is going," warned Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, who has said AI could "wipe out" half of all white-collar jobs.
A study found that tens of thousands of jobs were lost due to AI last year, and economists are warning that more AI job losses are on the way.
Now, many people are revolting against AI. Companies are facing backlash from consumers over "AI slop." Data centers are deeply unpopular on both sides of the aisle. Even some politicians are now taking stances against data center construction due to anti-AI sentiment among their constituents.
Some within the AI industry, such as Altman, are suddenly backtracking on their previous dire warnings about AI and jobs. It will be interesting to see how AI leaders like Altman and Amodei react to Gates's essay, and if proposals like this can make a dent in rising anti-AI sentiment.
Kindles saw a price hike, but the versatile TCL Note A1 Nxtpaper Tablet just got a $100 discountThe TCL Note A1 Nxtpaper Tablet is on sale at Amazon for $499.98, down from the normal price of $599.99. That's a 17% discount.
SAVE $100.01: The TCL Note A1 Nxtpaper Tablet is on sale at Amazon for $499.98, down from the normal price of $599.99. That's a 17% discount.
In bad news for the week, Kindles saw price hikes to the tune of at least 25% pricier. That's not ideal if you had your eye on one of Amazon's e-readers. But in better news, we have a handful of worthy alternatives, and a particularly versatile model is on sale.
As of Aug. 26, the TCL Note A1 Nxtpaper Tablet is on sale at Amazon for $499.98, down from the normal price of $599.99. That's a 17% discount.
If you've been going back and forth between getting a new tablet or an e-reader, you don't have to decide. The TCL Note A1 Nxtpaper does both. It comes with TCL's Nxtpaper Pure display which is designed to mimic reading a physical book thanks to the reduces glare and enhanced clarity.
The TCL Note A1 has an 11.5-inch screen that's capable of displaying 16.7 million colors. TCL mentions that's a significant upgrade from the 60,000 colors on a standard color e-ink reader. But it does much more than serve as an e-reader.
The TCL has eight microphones for a 360-degree voice capture function that can give you AI meeting or lecture summaries. You can then easily share recordings or notes to Google Drive, Dropbox, or OneDrive. This model of the Nxtpaper comes with 256GB of storage and a 120Hz refresh rate.
On top of the tablet, this deal includes some great extras like a flip case, stylus, extra stylus tips, and a polishing cloth. Snag the TCL Note A1 Nextpaper Tablet bundle for under $500 at Amazon and get a tablet, e-reader, and AI notetaker all in one.
Apple AirPods 4 are down to $99 right nowAs of Aug. 26, you can get the Apple AirPods 4 for $99, down from $129, at Amazon. That's a 23% discount, or $30 in savings.
SAVE 23%: As of Aug. 26, you can get the Apple AirPods 4 for $99, down from $129, at Amazon. That's a 23% discount, or $30 in savings.
I recently lost my AirPods, and I miss them so much. None of my backup headphones read my texts to me, which is a feature I desperately need back. If you're also in the market for a replacement, the Apple AirPods 4 are $99 at Amazon right now.
That's right. As of Aug. 26, you can get the Apple AirPods 4 for $99, down from $129, at Amazon. That's a 23% discount, or $30 in savings. While this isn't the lowest price we've seen (they're usually $69 during Prime Day and Black Friday), it's still a really good deal.
The AirPods 4 have a shorter stem for a better fit, improved audio for phone calls, and a smaller USB-C charging case that gives you up to 30 hours of battery life. They're not noise-cancelling, but they do support Siri interactions, letting you respond by nodding "yes" or shaking "no."
Lovehoney just dropped its 2026 sex toy advent calendarsLovehoney launched its 2026 sex toy advent calendar collection with 7-, 12-, and 24-day options filled with goodies from Womanizer and We-Vibe.
SAVE 64%: Lovehoney's 2026 sex toy advent calendar lineup just went live. You get five countdown options (7, 12, or 24 days) starting at $129, with savings up to 64% on big-name toys like the Womanizer Starlet 3 and We-Vibe Moxie+.
OK, I'm usually pretty strict about not celebrating holidays early (looking at you, Starbucks — premature pumpkin-spicing is a crime). I won't put my tree up or even start shopping until after Thanksgiving, while my sister is out here buying presents in July. But when I saw that Lovehoney already dropped its 2026 advent calendars, I knew it was worth the early mention. You can't use a countdown calendar unless you buy it ahead of time, after all.
This year, Lovehoney brought back five different boxes, ranging from seven-day teasers to full 24-day countdowns. Whether you're looking for a couples kit or a solo treat (honestly, buy the 24-day box for yourself — I def. support that!), these deals are way too good to pass up.
Each calendar saves you 56% to 64% off the retail price of the toys inside, so you'll get top-notch stuff from Womanizer, We-Vibe, and Arcwave for a fraction of the cost.
Here's a quick breakdown of what's in this year's lineup:
The Lovehoney Romance Advent Calendar (7-Day) has up to seven days' worth of goodies, including full-sized toys (like the We-Vibe Moxie+, which is worth $149 on its own!), games, and accessories. There's also a remote-controlled bullet with two interchangeable sleeves for couples' play.
This little box is ideal for couples who want to add a little ~spice~ to their bedroom routine without spending a fortune. If you don't like surprises, you can read the full product list on the Lovehoney site, but if you do, I'll keep the content list brief!
The Lovehoney Indulge Advent Calendar (12-Day) offers a bit more for the same price. But unlike the box above, this gift set is designed specifically for female pleasure.
You'll get 12 days' worth of fun, including a rechargeable mini wand vibrator, the Lovehoney Indulge (worth $89.99), and other cute add-ons like water-based lube and a crystal butt plug.
If you don't want to spend over $129, but you want a wider variety of toys, the Lovehoney Enjoy Advent Calendar (24-Day) is your best bet. Somehow, Lovehoney is letting this 24-day advent calendar go for $129.
It's filled with full-sized toys, like the Womanizer Starlet 3 (worth $85), and has a ton of kinky items, including nipple clamps, a feather tickler, a paddle, and bondage rope.
For those of you who don't mind spending $200+, the Lovehoney Couple's Advent Calendar (24-Day) will get you two premium toys — the Womanizer Liberty 2 (worth $109) and the We-Vibe Sync Lite (worth $99) — along with a bunch of other goodies like an aluminum crystal butt plug (can't recommend a crystal butt plug enough, honestly), massage oil, a cock ring lasso, ankle and wrist cuffs, and more.
OK, last but certainly not least, we have the Lovehoney Luxury Advent Calendar (24-Day). This box is the most expensive of the bunch ($369), but it also includes top-dollar toys, like the Womanizer Enhance (worth $169) and Arcwave Zing (worth $149). One of my faves? The candy cane glass dildo — nothing says "festive" like a candy cane shoved up your ass.
You'll also get anal beads, a cock ring, tons of vibrators (like, more than four), and fun kinky items like a sex position card game and bed restraints.
Squirts latest update wants you to stop scrolling and start hooking upSquirt.org and the SQ Dating app rolled out new location-based check-in features, including "Places," to make real-life cruising even easier.
Ever since launching its app in April, cruising platform Squirt (aka SQ Dating in the App Store) has been adding new features to entice Grindr and Sniffies users to hop on and get off.
Its latest update includes a brand-new feature called "Places." The feature lets you broadcast your current location or flag where you'll be within the next hour. You can tag yourself at public spots like the gym, a local bar, or the beach so guys know you're out and ready to hang. (It's kind of like if Grindr's "Right Now" and Sniffies "Share a Spot" feature had a baby.)
Squirt also revamped its Cruiser Listings — a cornerstone feature that's been on the site for over two decades — with real-time check-ins. You can signal when you've arrived at a location, or flag that you're heading there later in the day. Every listing now pulls user-submitted data to display active check-ins within a 45-mile radius.
"Squirt has always been about making Real-Life meetups happen," Rob Fisher, Director of Product Development and Customer Success, said in a press release. "With our new check-in features, members can let guys know where they are or where they're headed, see who's nearby, and turn a little curiosity into something more. It's a faster, more spontaneous way to find where the action is and be part of it."
To kick things off, Squirt is being generous and giving all members unlimited access to view active check-ins across every Cruising Listing for a limited time.
Uber launches new live video feature to monitor teen ridersUber expands safety features on Teen accounts, adding new live video monitoring for parents.
Parents will soon be able to remotely access Uber drivers' phone cameras to monitor their teen riders.
The new safety feature, announced Aug. 25, expands on existing parental controls through the ride sharing giant's teen accounts. When available, parents can choose to "check in" on their teen's ride using the driver's on-device camera and mic. Both the teen rider and the Uber driver are notified when live streaming is turned on, according to the company, and streams end as soon as rides are completed.
In a statement to Mashable, Uber further clarified that live video is only accessible if the Uber driver has turned on the company's Record My Ride feature and enabled live streaming. Apart from a front-facing camera and microphone, there are no specific device requirements for drivers eligible for teen rides choosing to activate live streaming. Drivers can opt out at any time by turning off live video on their account.
The app will notify a parent if live streaming is paused due to an unstable connection or technical error, Uber said. In addition, only linked accounts can view live streams during an active trip.
Teens have already had the option to turn on audio recording during their trips. Similar to the app's audio recording feature, Uber says live streams remain encrypted, so videos cannot be viewed by parents, teens, or drivers after a trip is complete.
Uber launched teen accounts for riders aged 13-17 in 2023, offering default safety features and trip monitoring for guardians on family accounts. The company has partnered with the National PTA, Safe Kids Worldwide, and the live tracking app Life360. Family features later expanded to Uber Eats, allowing teens to request food deliveries through their supervised accounts.
Uber has faced accusations that the company has not done enough to prevent sexual assault and other violent incidents against riders, including a recent lawsuit that found the company liable for a woman's rape after the app's automatic safety provisions failed to flag the ride as dangerous. In June, the company announced it was instituting stricter background check requirements and permanent bans for offending drivers.
Live video is currently being piloted for riders in several cities, including Atlanta, Phoenix, Orlando, Raleigh-Durham, Portland, San Antonio, Cleveland, and El Paso. It will rollout to the rest of the U.S. over the coming weeks.
How to watch La Liga online for freeHow to watch La Liga for free. Live stream the 2026-27 La Liga for free from anywhere in the world.
TL;DR: Live stream select La Liga fixtures for free on CazéTV. Access these free live streams from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN.
The Premier League has fast-paced football that's all about physicality. The Bundesliga has the best attendances in incredible stadia. Ligue 1 is all about young talent coming up against the strength of PSG. But what about La Liga? The top of the Spanish football league system leads the way in technical ability and superstar names.
Of course, a lot of fans watch La Liga to follow Real Madrid, Barcelona, Atlético Madrid, but there's so much more on offer from this incredible league. Want to see for yourself? It has never been easier to watch online.
If you want to watch 2026-27 La Liga for free from anywhere in the world, we have all the information you need.
La Liga is a professional football league in Spain and the highest level of the Spanish football league system. It is controlled by the Liga Nacional de Fútbol Profesional and is contested by 20 teams over a 38-matchday season.
The defending champions are Barcelona.
The 2026/27 La Liga season will start on Aug. 15. The campaign will likely end on May 23 or May 30.
CazéTV will be showing select La Liga fixtures for free on their YouTube channel.
These free live streams are geo-restricted to Brazil, but anyone can bypass these restrictions with a VPN. These tools can hide your real IP address (digital location) and connect you to a secure server in Brazil, meaning you can unblock free live streams of the La Liga from anywhere in the world.
Access free live streams of the 2026-27 La Liga by following these simple steps:
Subscribe to a streaming-friendly VPN (we recommend ExpressVPN)
Download the app to your device of choice (the best VPNs have apps for Windows, Mac, iOS, Android, Linux, and more)
Open up the app and connect to a server in Brazil
Visit CazéTV
Watch La Liga fixtures for free from anywhere in the world
The best VPNs for streaming are not free, but leading VPNs do tend to offer free-trial periods or money-back guarantees. By leveraging these offers, you can gain access to free live streams of La Liga without committing your cash. This is obviously not a long-term solution, but it does give you time to watch select fixtures (plus coverage of the Premier League, Bundesliga, and Ligue 1) before recovering your investment.
If you want to retain permanent access to free live streams all season, you will need a subscription. Fortunately, the best VPN for live sport is on sale for a limited time.
ExpressVPN is the best service for bypassing geo-restrictions to stream for free on CazéTV, for a number of reasons:
Servers in 105 countries, including Brazil
Easy-to-use app available on all major devices, including iPhone, Android, Windows, Mac, and more
Strict no-logging policy so your data is always secure
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A two-year subscription to ExpressVPN is on sale for $68.40 and includes an extra four months for free — 80% off for a limited time. This plan includes a year of free unlimited cloud backup and a generous 30-day money-back guarantee. Alternatively, you can get a one-month plan for just $12.99 (with a money-back guarantee).
Live stream La Liga for free from anywhere in the world with ExpressVPN.
Are you a meat proxy? The latest AI slang, explained.Developers are calling a coworker who blindly relay ChatGPT and Claude responses a 'meat proxy.' Here’s why.
There is a new name for the coworker who responds to a simple question with seven paragraphs that very clearly came straight from ChatGPT: a "meat proxy."
You probably know the type. They paste a question into an AI chatbot, copy the answer into Slack, and consider their work complete. The response may be long, polished, and packed with suspiciously corporate phrases, but it contains very little evidence that the person sending it has actually read it.
Now (thanks to one software engineer), we finally have a term for that.
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The term appears to have been coined, or at least popularized, by German software engineer Niklas Gruhn, who laid out the phenomenon in an Aug. 3 blog post.
Gruhn said it kept happening everywhere: He would ask a question in Slack, leave feedback on a code review, or argue with friends in a group chat, and someone would return with, "Claude said: [giant response verbatim]."
The problem was not simply that the answer came from AI; it was that the person sending it had apparently contributed nothing beyond a few copy-and-paste commands. Meanwhile, Gruhn still had to wade through a response that could be verbose, filled with jargon, and confidently wrong.
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As an example, he shared one particularly impenetrable sentence Claude had given him about "NATS control-plane events" and "R3 quorum re-form." Gruhn said he had to look up nearly every word just to understand what it was trying to say.
His proposed rule was simple: Use AI all you want, but "read it, understand it, and validate it" before responding in your own words. That final step matters less for hiding AI use than for showing an actual human stands behind the answer. Otherwise, Gruhn argued, the person in the middle isn't really helping. They're simply serving as a fleshy delivery system — or "meat proxy" — for Claude.
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Gruhn's post quickly took off on Hacker News, where it attracted more than 700 comments. Developers began sharing their own encounters with coworkers who generate enormous amounts of AI content and leave everyone else to sort through it.
Some described receiving hundreds of lines of AI-generated analysis followed by a request to check whether any of it was correct. Others complained about sprawling internal documents that looked impressive until somebody actually read them. One commenter called these unsolicited blocks of AI text "slop grenades": Someone tosses a giant pile of chatbot output into the conversation, then walks away while everyone else deals with the mess.
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The problem gets more serious when the AI output is not just an annoying Slack message but actual work someone else has to approve. Before new code is released, another programmer typically reviews it to make sure it works and will not break anything. But if someone submits a pile of AI-generated code they do not understand, the reviewer is suddenly stuck figuring out how it works, catching its mistakes, and essentially finishing the job for them. Software engineering consultant Michaela Greiler has a name for that, too: "code review exploitation."
Steve Mayne, CTO of tax platform Yonda, described exactly what that can look like in a LinkedIn post about meat proxies: "A pull request lands, it’s plausible, it’s large, but the person who ‘wrote’ it can’t explain line 40."
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Maybe continues, writing that workplace review processes were designed for a time "when writing was expensive and reading was cheap." AI has flipped that on its head — producing an impressive amount of work can now take seconds.
That does not mean every sentence beginning with "Chat said..." is a workplace crime. Some people online argue that identifying an answer as AI-generated is useful because it tells the recipient where the information came from. And if someone has read the response, checked it, and decided it is worth sharing, quoting the chatbot is not necessarily the problem.
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At the end of the day, use ChatGPT. Use Claude. Just make sure the answer passes through your brain before it enters the group chat. Otherwise, your coworkers now have the perfect term for you.
Amazon is packed with Govee deals: permanent outdoor lights, floor lamps, and backyard string lights are all on a big discountGovee lights are on sale at Amazon for as much as 31% off
When we consider home improvements, it often revolves are topics like new flooring, replacing the old bathroom tile, or giving the backyard patio a refresh. Those all give the home a new and fresh feel, but an easier way to change the vibe is to introduce better lighting.
Govee makes some of the best smart lighting options. I can vouch for the brand's incredible Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights Prism, and the Govee Lantern Floor Lamp is the coolest item I've added to my bedroom this year (more on that below).
If you've new to the world of Govee smart lighting, you're in for a real treat. The range of color options, customizations, and fun to be had in the app is something special that I can recommend for any home, apartment, or dorm room.
Lucky for us, Amazon has a ton of Govee lighting options on sale ahead of Labor Day. Here are some of our favorites if you're looking for simple home and room upgrades that make for a major improvement.
If you or your partner dreads going up on the roof each year to hang the Christmas lights, consider going with the convenience of the Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights 2. Get them on the house once and you're done for about 13 years since each bulb is designed to last for about 50,000 hours of use.
In addition to being durable enough to weather rain, snow, heat, and sun, the Govee Permanent Outdoor Lights 2 give you the opportunity to celebrate every season, not just winter holidays. Consider the fun to be had with Halloween lights, Valentine's Day, 4th of July, and rooting for your favorite sports team in the form of house lights.
Perfect for the living room, game room, or a dorm room, the Govee Floor Lamp 3 Lite is on sale for only $84.99 at Amazon. The corner lamp has over 105 scene modes in the Govee app and 12 music modes that will match the lighting to your current playlist. You also have control of the color temperature, with the ability to make it warm for calm evenings or bright for making rainy days feel more like summer.
The Govee Lantern Floor Lamp is my favorite lamp in the house. Thanks to Amazon's sale price, you can snag two lamps for $219.98, down from the normal price of $259.98 for two. The lantern is made with a soft-touch silicone which makes it shatter proof, and the Govee app gives plenty of customization options. During the day, I keep it bright, and come evening, I turn it to a candlelight mode. Plus, the Govee app updates often will new lighting options. Since the lantern sits on four detachable metal poles, you can choose your ideal height.
Govee RGBIC Floor Lamp Basic — $69.99 $99.99 (save $30)
Govee Clear Bulb Outdoor String Lights (96 feet) — $109.99 $149.99 (save $40)
Govee Outdoor Net Lights — $109.99 $149.99 (save $40)
Govee Cube Wall Sconces — $109.99 $159.99 (save $50)
Mashable has interviewed a handful of high-earning OnlyFans creators, but just how many are bringing in literal millions on the platform?
According to OnlyFans, just over 5,000 (5,076, to be exact) creators made over $1 million from the platform, Variety and others reported. But there are over five million creator accounts on the platform, and 2.5 million were active in the most recent fiscal year. So, the reality is there is a small, small chance of raking in seven figures (0.1 percent of all registered creator accounts).
Meanwhile, OnlyFans' parent company Fenix International paid now-deceased owner Leonid Radvinsky dividends of $535 million for the year ending Nov. 30, 2025, and further payments of $174 million through March 26, 2026, according to Variety. In March, Radvinsky died of cancer at the age of 43. His widow, Yekaterina "Katie" Chudnovsky, has taken control of the company, Variety reported.
In May, investment firm Architect Capital bought a 16 percent stake in OnlyFans, also for $535 million. Architect Capital founder James Sagan recently stated in an interview that AI can't "disrupt" the platform's creators.
OnlyFans had a net revenue of $1.55 million for the fiscal year that ended in Nov. 2025, which is a 10 percent increase.
"OnlyFans provides real opportunities to real people by creating a safe, regulated space where people can monetize their content with a global fan base," OnlyFans CEO Keily Blair said in a statement published in Variety.
"In 2026, we continue to grow our offerings to both creators and fans, demonstrating and realizing the value, success and potential of the global creator economy across all verticals and genres." Mashable has also reached out to OnlyFans for comment.
Meta will pay a whopping $17 billion to states in social media addiction trialMeta has settled out of a landmark social media addiction trial, agreeing to pay $17 billion to state authorities and making safety changes to its platform.
Two days into a precedent-setting trial in which the tech giant was accused of designing addictive platforms, Meta has agreed to a mammoth $17 billion settlement.
In addition to the financial penalties — just a portion of the potential $200 billion payout from multiple lawsuits filed against the company — Meta has also committed to making platform changes intended to limit teens' time online. Such changes include daily time limits, screen time features like night mode, and stronger age assurance measures.
"Meta knew it was harming children and chose not to act," Haley McNamara, executive director of the National Center on Sexual Exploitation (NCOSE), said in a statement. "Today’s $17 billion settlement with 29 states is one step in Big Tech’s reckoning for the harms it has enabled against children."
The case was brought forth by 29 state attorneys general and represented claims from 47 states, the District of Columbia, and U.S. territories as part of a federal multidistrict litigation (MDL). Meta will pay $12 billion to the 52 state attorneys general over 10 years, adding an additional $5 billion if other defendants, including Snap, TikTok, and YouTube, also agree to the settlement.
"I’m pleased to announce that Meta has reached an agreement with a bipartisan group of state attorneys general from around the country on a new set of rules governing teens’ use of social media," wrote Meta chief legal officer C.J. Mahoney. "The framework we’ve negotiated will empower parents to easily manage how their children access our platforms. Our new Time Limit commitments, Night Mode features and usage limits during school hours set the right path forward for our whole industry, but this framework will only work if all our peers join us."
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The trial was only the latest of a wave of litigation against the social media giant, including a recent standoff with New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez. Last month, Meta was ordered to pay $567 million to fund youth mental health services for teens harmed by Meta products, following a history-making guilty verdict that resulted in a $375 million payout for violating consumer protection laws.
In another instance, a teen plaintiff dropped their case against Meta after reaching settlement deals with Snapchat, TikTok, and YouTube. Competitor platforms are also weathering multiple individual and state-directed lawsuits over claims that their products are exacerbating the youth mental health crisis and stoking screen time addiction.
"We congratulate the state AGs for this historic settlement, a major step toward holding Meta accountable for the harm its platforms have caused young people," wrote co-lead plaintiffs’ counsel Lexi Hazam and settlement counsel Chris Seeger, who represent plaintiffs in school district and personal injury suits, in a statement following news of the settlement. "Thousands of young people and public school districts still have claims pending in the MDL against Meta, as well as TikTok, Snap and YouTube, and we stand ready to continue that fight. We will not rest until every one of these plaintiffs sees justice for the harms caused by all of the defendants’ platforms."
Several leaders at these companies, including Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Instagram head Adam Mosseri, have been directly named in the lawsuit for their roles in allegedly ignoring concerns about the effects of their products.
"Just like the lawsuits against Big Tobacco, Meta’s settlement with 47+ state AGs is the biggest Big Tech settlement in history and conveys that there’s a very high price to pay by Big Tech for knowingly harming children on their platforms," wrote Donna Rice Hughes, president and CEO of internet safety nonprofit Enough Is Enough.
Online safety groups, like family advocacy nonprofit, ParentTogether called the settlement a "watershed moment" for Big Tech and the movement to advance federal safety legislation, including the divisive Kids Online Safety Act. Meta's suggested platform fixes, including strengthening its efforts to enforce platform-wide age verification, received widespread praise from youth safety organizations. In a statement to the press, The Center for Humane Technology explained the measures were "largely in line" with the organization's standards. "We’ve known for years how to reform toxic social media platforms. It’s a relief to see it finally happening for all teen users in the United States," wrote Camille Carlton, senior director of strategy and impact.
Civil society groups, however, are divided on Big Tech's proposed solutions to youth online safety amid a turbulent legislative landscape.
"Giving kids and their parents more choices and control is beneficial," said Kate Ruane, director of the Center for Democracy & Technology's Free Expression Project. "We also see the potential for significant risks to everyone’s privacy and free expression rights online, especially in the ways this settlement will subject all users to invasive age assurance and limit all kids’ access to content and services regardless of their individual needs."
UPDATE: Aug. 26, 2026, 12:55 p.m. This story was updated with additional statements from youth safety and technology organizations.
UPDATE: Aug. 27, 2026, 11:18 a.m. This story was updated to clarify Meta's platform safety changes.
