privacy by design

California, Colorado and New York have pushed a radical idea into lawmaking: move age checks out of websites and apps and into the operating system itself, forcing device vendors and OS maintainers to collect users’ ages at setup and broadcast a persistent “age signal” to apps and stores — a...

California’s new Digital Age Assurance Act has quietly remapped where responsibility for minors’ online safety starts: not just with apps and platforms, but on the very device — and that shift will ripple through ecosystems, developer contracts, and the practical realities of every operating...

Sometimes the quickest, safest way to get a job done is to open your browser, use an app that runs entirely in that tab, save your work locally, and close the tab — no installers, no accounts, and no invisible uploads to the cloud. The MakeUseOf round-up of five open‑source browser apps that...

Microsoft’s abrupt retreat from “AI everywhere” inside Windows 11 is both a course correction and a confession: after years of quietly embedding Copilot buttons into core system apps and testing ambitious features such as Windows Recall, the company is publicly dialing back visible AI surfaces...

Lenovo’s Qira arrives as a new kind of personal AI: not a standalone chatbot but a system-level, cross-device “personal ambient intelligence” that follows you from phone to PC to future wearables, promises to reduce the costly friction of context switching, and orchestrates when and where AI...