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Music is connective, and this is something that Spotify is trying to use to its advantage. Aware that people love to talk about their musical tastes, the company has come up with Listening Activity, a new way to share what you are listening to with the people you are connected to.

Spotify itself already lets you share your listening stream, and there are various apps that can plug into Spotify to share the data as well. The new Listening Activity, as well as the new Request to Jam, are the latest addition to Messages.

It should surprise no one that Google is filling up just about all of its apps and services with a dose of AI. Now the company says that it is “bringing Gmail into the Gemini era” with new AI-powered features.

The aim is to transform Gmail into “your personal, proactive inbox assistant”, and Google has a smattering of new features that it believes will kickstart this process. Borrowing an idea from Google Search, Gmail’s new AI Overviews is very much what you would expect, but it is also just the start of the story.

Satechi has announced a new range of wireless input devices at CES 2026, adding two keyboards and a mouse to its Slim EX Wireless Series.

Designed for cross platform use, the new devices support macOS, Windows, Android, and iPadOS, letting users move between systems without swapping peripherals or adjusting to different shortcut layouts.

The Kodi Foundation has announced that scheduled maintenance will temporarily take its mirror servers offline, limiting access to official downloads for a set period. During the maintenance window, users won’t be able to download Kodi or official add-ons directly from mirrors hosted by the project.

The interruption only affects Kodi’s own mirror infrastructure. Copies of Kodi hosted via third-party repositories, such as app stores, will remain available while the maintenance is underway.

New research from StrongestLayer highlights a fundamental shift in attacker behavior, where adversaries increasingly hide behind business-critical platforms such as DocuSign, Microsoft, and Google Calendar -- services organizations can’t block without disrupting operations.

The research analyzed analyzing 2,042 advanced email attacks that successfully bypassed Microsoft Defender E3/E5 and market-leading secure email gateways before being detected by StrongestLayer.

Ashampoo has released Burning Studio 2026 for Windows. While most new PCs no longer include optical drives, many people still rely on discs for cars, stereos, DVD players, and older hardware that can’t use USB storage or cloud services.

The new program can burn, copy, rip, or back up data to CD, DVD, and Blu-ray, including higher-capacity formats like BDXL. While Burning Studio 2026 is priced at $30, you can grab it for free.

NordPass Authenticator is a feature that generates one-time passwords directly in a NordPass vault. It gives all the security of two-factor authentication without an extra app. However, until now it’s only been available to business users.

Today the company is also making Authenticator available for personal accounts. It uses time-based one-time password (TOTP) support which enables users to add an extra layer of security to their accounts with two-factor authentication, without the need to download or install additional applications.

AI is predicted to generate two-thirds of code by 2027, but 96 percent of developers do not trust that it’s functionally correct according to a new study from Sonar.

This lack of confidence means that developers are forced to spend more time on reviewing code. Developer work remains fixed at 10 hours per week, regardless of AI use, but there’s a significant shift to reviewing AI-generated code to ensure it is secure, reliable, and maintainable.

Windows 11 remains a familiar choice for many users, although complaints about hardware requirements, update behavior, and uneven performance continue to make large numbers of people wonder if it’s worth sticking with.

For those users, Linux is a viable alternative and one of the better, lesser-known OS choices is Nitrux, which has now reached version 5.1.

The financial services sector has now overtaken healthcare as the industry with the highest number of data compromises.

New research from Alta Technologies analyzed information from the Identity Theft Resource Center 2024 Data Breach Report to determine which industries experienced the highest number of data breaches in 2024. shows the industry, which includes jobs such as accountants, bankers, and financial analysts, experienced 737 data compromises throughout 2024. Since 2018, healthcare had previously been the most attacked industry.

AI-driven bot traffic has surged in the past year, often they scrape content to serve their operator’s needs only without sending new users or traffic to the targeted site. This is also creating an environment where automated abuse is a primary driver of fraud, infrastructure cost overruns, traffic volatility, and customer friction.

Real-time data platform company, Hydrolix, is launching a new Bot Insights solution that gives real-time visibility into every bot, crawler, and AI agent hitting a business.

Alongside a preview of new cases, cooling hardware, and peripherals planned for future systems, iBUYPOWER brought a concept gaming desktop to CES 2026 which takes a different approach to liquid cooling.

Custom loop cooling normally uses rigid tubes, a separate pump, and a reservoir to move liquid around the CPU and graphics card. This setup is common in enthusiast builds but rarely appears in prebuilts because it's difficult to assemble and maintain. The Trace X Custom Loop Concept Gaming PC shows how liquid cooling could be introduced into mass-produced systems.

Dell Technologies announced a number of new products at CES 2026, including new laptops, Alienware gaming systems, and larger, higher-resolution monitors aimed at professional users. Perhaps the biggest news is the return of the XPS brand that Dell retired this time last year.

Dell is launching redesigned 14-inch and 16-inch XPS laptops with a new chassis. Both the XPS 14 and XPS 16 use CNC-machined aluminum construction and adopt slimmer profiles than previous generations. For the first time, the XPS logo appears on the laptop lid.

In 2025, the number of known phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) kits doubled in number, increasing the pressure on security teams trying to defend against this ever-evolving threat.

A new report from Barracuda shows new players such as Whisper 2FA and GhostFrame introduced inventive and evasive tools and tactics, including a suite of techniques to prevent analysis of their malicious code, while established groups such as Mamba and Tycoon also continued to evolve and thrive.

Google has announced a significant change to the way in which it releases the source code for its Android operating system. The company has, until now, released source code several times a year as part of the Android Open Source Project (AOSP).

Moving forward, Google says that it is going to be using a twice-a-year schedule for source code release – once in Q2 and then in Q4. With the latest code drop having come in November, we won’t see the next one until some time near summer. But what does all of this mean?