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Fire TV sticks have one advantage over every other streaming stick: They’re owned by Amazon, which means they’re more likely to get discounted. Right now, for instance, you can get Amazon’s best streaming stick, the Fire TV Stick 4K Max, for $39.99 (originally $59.99).
Two of the biggest competitors in the streaming stick market are Roku and Fire TV Sticks, and committing to one or the other comes with pros and cons, so make sure to know what they are before making your decision. Fire TV Sticks excel at their voice assistance, which makes sense since they use Alexa to execute your commands. If you already have Amazon’s Alexa devices in your house, you can take full advantage of this since you won’t even need to click on your remote to boot it up. If you have a soundbar hooked up, the Fire TV Stick will let you control it using the same remote.
It comes with a new 2.0 GHz quad-core processor, Dolby Vision support, DHR10+ support, 16GB storage, and more. One of the advantages of using a Fire TV Stick is that you can install Kodi on it, which essentially gives you free access to virtually anything you can stream. If you’re an Xbox gamer (or want to be one), you only need to get an Xbox remote to play their games over the cloud through the Xbox app (no console needed).
The Fire TV Stick 4K Max has the most storage with 16GB, the best wifi support with Wi-Fi 6E, and the best voice assistant with Alexa Voice Remote Enhanced. At its current price, it’s cheaper than the more budget alternatives.
The Tour de France Femmes avec Zwift will cover a total of 1,175km, with 18,795m of climbing over nine stages, its longest distance ever. It starts off with three stages in Switzerland along the shores of Lake Geneva, before heading to France for a fourth-stage individual time trial around Dijon.
It’s Stage 7 that’s the queen stage, though, with a summit finish on Mont Ventoux. The eighth stage takes the race to Nice, with the final stage taking in four loops through the city and over the famous Col d’Èze.
Here’s a stage-by-stage guide to the route and what to expect.
The first stage of the 2026 Tour de France Femmes looks finely balanced between puncheurs and sprinters. But Marion Rousse, who heads up the Tour de France Femmes, reckons the steep 2.5km finale through the city roads away from Lake Geneva could favour the former.
Stage 2: Aigle to Geneva
Sunday 2 August
149km
There are plenty of ups and downs on the Stage 2 route, which climbs out of Aigle, home of the UCI, before a series of short, sharp climbs in the mid-section. Rousse thinks the peloton will likely regroup for a sprint finish on the banks of the lake on the Quai du Mont-Blanc.
Stage 3: Geneva to Poligny
Monday 3 August
157km
As the race heads into France, there’s plenty of climbing from the start, with the 11.4km Col de la Faucille averaging 6.3%. More cols follow before the flat run-in to Poligny. One for a breakaway or will the sprinters triumph? With 2,400m of total climbing, there’s plenty to play for.
Stage 4: Gevrey-Chambertin to Dijon
Tuesday 4 August
21km ITT
The only time trial in the race covers 21km through the vineyards of the Côte d’Or. There’s a 1.8km climb in the middle, with a 6.9% average gradient, plus a kicker to the apex at Corcelles-les-Monts, before a rolling downhill to the finish in Dijon. This is a time trial that favours riders who can climb, rather than the flat time trial specialists.
Stage 5: Macon to Belleville-en-Beaujolais
Wednesday 5 August
140km
There’s 2,850m of elevation gain on this lumpy stage into the Beaujolais wine region. The final 3km, 7.7% climb of Mont Brouilly is only 10km from the finish line and likely to split the field or force a solo winner from a breakaway.
Stage 6: Montbrison to Tournon-sur-Rhone
Thursday 6 August
153km
There are more lumps on Stage 6, with Rousse highlighting the 8.6km, 5% climb of the Col de Lalouvesc as a point where a breakaway might go clear along the narrow descent.
Stage 7: La Voulte-sur-Rhone to Mont Ventoux
Friday 7 August
144km
Don’t let the size of the final climb fool you, there’s plenty of climbing before the riders even get to the foot of Mont Ventoux in this queen stage of the 2026 race. Once they hit the giant of Provence, there’s another 15.7km to go from Bédoin at an average 8.8%. Will it be one for the pure climbers, or will a GC rider triumph? This is also the stage chosen for the Etape du Tour de France Femmes.
Stage 8: Sisteron to Nice
Saturday 8 August
175km
The longest stage of the 2026 Tour de France Femmes tops the Col de Toutes Aures before it follows the river Var into Nice. To spice things up, there are two nasty little climbs before the finish, with the Côte de la Ginestière hitting 13.6% only 6km from the finish on the Promenade des Anglais. Is this another stage that will favour a lone puncheur holding off a sprint finish?
Stage 9: Nice to Nice
Sunday 9 August
99km
The final stage is a showcase for Nice, taking in four loops through the city and out to the famous Col d’Èze. But, rather than a smooth descent into the city, the final lap takes in a detour of 6km at 7.6%, which includes a kilometre-plus section at 12%. Another finish that favours a puncheur coming in alone?
Fujitsu has released a new laptop in Japan with a built-in Blu-ray drive. The FMV Note A A77-K3 includes a BDXL-compatible optical drive that can read and burn discs. Most laptop manufacturers globally stopped including optical drives in the second half of the 2010s. The Japanese market has refused to follow that trend.
Shops in Tokyo’s Akihabara district recently experienced a spike in demand for optical drives and systems capable of reading Blu-ray discs, Tom’s Hardware reports. Fujitsu sells two additional models in the FMV Note A line using Intel thirteenth-generation chips. Those systems include DVD drives instead of Blu-ray capability. Some other Japanese manufacturers also released optical-drive-equipped laptops earlier in 2025.
Wizardtag is a spellcasting version of the frictionless colocated multiplayer Quest 3 mixed reality shooter Lasertag.
We reported on Julian Triveri’s Lasertag back in May, noting his unique innovation of implementing continuous scene meshing, on Quest 3 & 3S, eliminating the need for Meta’s room scanning process, and thus avoiding its problems of requiring setup for each room and only reflecting the state of furniture as it was at the time of the scan.
Triveri made his solution open source, and since then the game Hauntify implemented it too, just in time for Halloween.
Now, Triveri is showcasing footage of Wizardtag, a fork of Lasertag that swaps out the laserguns for voice-activated spellcasting wands.
In Wizardtag, players shout out one of three spells: Fireball, Lightning, or Shield, with the spell emitted from the wand that their handheld Touch Plus controller becomes. The spells are detected by the on-device speech recognition model Vosk, which Triveri says offers low latency for casting to feel responsive.
Oh, and as you can see in the video, everyone gets a wizard hat attached to their head, reflecting their networked tracked position.
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Wizardtag played at Purdue University.
Triveri built Wizardtag as his entry for the BGR Entertainment Challenge of Purdue University, at which he is a full-time tech artist at the Envision Center as well as a part-time undergrad, for freshman orientation, hosting an event for new students to play the game.
His friends, he says, themed the event as “a magic dueling class in a fictional Harry-Potter-esque wizarding school version of Purdue”, with one playing the role of a wizard professor giving the game tutorial as a “lecture”.
The poster that Triveri’s friend made for the Wizardtag event at Perdue University.
The regular Lasertag uses Meta’s built-in Shared Spatial Anchors feature to colocate headsets within a shared coordinate space, offering automatic shared-space multiplayer with no need for physical markers. For the Wizardtag sessions at Purdue, Triveri, though, attached AprilTags to the walls, and leveraged the passthrough camera access capability Meta added for developers earlier this year to track them using computer vision.
Triveri says he used AprilTags because Meta’s Shared Spatial Anchors “occasionally fail to localize and are prone to drift over time”.
Wizardtag is currently not publicly available, but Triveri tells UploadVR he eventually plans to bring it to the Meta Horizon Store build of Lasertag as a new game mode.
Most of you already know that the AI boom, for better or worse, puts a heavy strain on existing power grids. As companies race to build massive data centers to train the next generation of generative AI models, they’ve discovered that the local electricity supply often can’t keep pace with the insatiable demand. The solution? Repurposing retired
Apple’s iPhone Air was the company’s most interesting new iPhone this year, at least insofar as it was the one most different from previous iPhones. We came away impressed by its size and weight in our review. But early reports suggest that its novelty might not be translating into sales success.
A note from analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, whose supply chain sources are often accurate about Apple’s future plans, said yesterday that demand for the iPhone Air “has fallen short of expectations” and that “both shipments and production capacity” were being scaled back to account for the lower-than-expected demand.
Kuo’s note is backed up by reports from other analysts at Mizuho Securities (via MacRumors) and Nikkei Asia. Both of these reports say that demand for the iPhone 17 and 17 Pro models remains strong, indicating that this is just a problem for the iPhone Air and not a wider slowdown caused by tariffs or other external factors.
The last 12 months have been pretty depressing for anyone invested in the long-term future of Xbox and the general health of the games industry. Back in May, Microsoft laid off 3 percent of its global workforce, with the company’s gaming division being one of the big casualties, and a number of upcoming titles were subsequently canceled. It painted a picture of a brand in crisis, but according to a new report, Microsoft has been setting its gaming division unrealistic profit targets for several years.
Sources told Bloomberg that in 2023, Microsoft implemented an “across-the-board goal” of 30 percent profit margins, which the report says Microsoft calls “accountability margins” internally. As Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier reports, this target, which was set by Microsoft’s Chief Financial Officer Amy Hood in fall 2023, is well above the recent industry average of 17-22 percent quoted by S&P Global Market Intelligence. Schreier adds that Xbox’s own average in the last six years is between 10 and 20 percent.
S&P Global analyst Neil Barbour told Bloomberg that Microsoft’s 30 percent target is the kind of margin “usually reserved for a publisher that is really nailing it.” This is despite its gaming division only landing at 12 percent in the first nine months of 2022, as quoted in the report.
A Microsoft spokesperson told Bloomberg that it views individual games and projects differently with regards to what constitutes success, adding that it sometimes has to making tough decisions, including ending development on games, so it can shift its resources toward the projects that are “more aligned with our direction and priorities.”
The new profit targets were introduced in the same year that Microsoft finally completed its $68.7 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard, landing it hugely popular franchises such as Call of Duty and Diablo. Back in 2020 it acquired ZeniMax, the parent company of Bethesda, which means that long-running series like The Elder Scrolls and Fallout also now sit under the umbrella of Xbox’s gaming division.
Since 2018, Microsoft has been putting all of its first-party releases on Game Pass from day one, but this model has contributed to games failing to hit their 30 percent profit margin targets, according to Bloomberg’s sources. Xbox does offer developers a credit it calls “member-weighted value,” which takes into consideration factors such as the collective number of hours Game Pass subscribers have spent in a game, although this formula tends to benefit multiplayer titles the most. Going forward, Bloomberg’s sources said Microsoft is likely to favor funding games with cheap development costs and proven revenue-generators over riskier projects.
Xbox has been successful in bringing some of its first-party games to other platforms, including its primary rival in Sony’s PS5, with major titles such as Forza Horizon 5and Indiana Jones and the Great Circlemaking the jump in the last 12 months. In the wake of Microsoft raising the price of Xbox consoles in the US last month, the second time it has done so in 2025, it also slapped Game Pass Ultimate with a 50 percent subscription fee hike at the start of October. This week the company increased the cost of Xbox dev kits by $500.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/gaming/xbox/microsoft-reportedly-ordered-its-xbox-division-to-boost-profits-to-an-unrealistic-level-150210398.html?src=rss
Breaches are an unfortunate reality of the digital era. Chances are, some of the companies you trust your data to are going to get hacked, and sensitive information stored on those servers is going to leak. If you’ve been online for a long time, that means quite a bit of your data is floating around various corners of the internet.
While there isn’t one centralized database for all the stolen credentials on the web, one researcher has compiled quite a large database, that you can check to see if your email address is affected.
183 million email addresses
Cybersecurity researcher Synthient has compiled a massive database of stolen credentials from sources across the internet, amounting to 3.5 terabytes of data. (That’s 3,584 gigabytes). The vast majority of this data—91% of it—has been noted by other researchers already. But because the database is so huge, the 9% that’s new represents a large pool of credentials we haven’t seen before.
The database itself contains 183 million unique email addresses, along with both the websites they were attached to, as well as the passwords used to log into them. According to security researcher and blogger Troy Hunt, 9% of that figure represents 16.47 million credentials that have never been reported in any previous data breach. Hunt reached out to “a bunch” of his subscribers to see whether any of them could find their credentials in this database. One subscriber verified that the database contained a password that they did previously use with their Gmail account, while another confirmed the database contained websites they frequently visited.
At this time, there’s no reason to believe the database isn’t legitimate. These 183 million email addresses—and their associated websites and passwords—are just floating around the internet, while over 16 million of them have never been seen before. Yours could be among them.
How to check if your credentials are in this database
The entire database of 183 million email addresses has been uploaded to Have I Been Pwned. The site catalogues websites that have experienced data breaches, as well as the accounts that were involved. All you need to do is enter your email address in the provided field, and Have I Been Pwned will check it against its database to see whether the address has been involved in any known breaches.
As such, if your email address is included in this latest database, it’ll show up here. It doesn’t look like any of my personal email addresses are in this database, but they’ve been included in plenty of other breaches.
Apple is all about its iPhone 17 lineup these days (and iPhone Air), but if you’re willing to jump back a couple of generations, you can score a still-capable iOS handset for a comparatively affordable price. The phone in question is the iPhone 15, and it’s up for grabs for just under $500 right now, provided you’re fine with a few caveats.
New version includes multithreaded TCP/IP and Raspberry Pi 5 supportThe 59th version of the OpenBSD operating system is here, six months after 7.7, with multiple improvements in various areas.…
Besides the early fallout of switching to Rust Coreutils on Ubuntu 25.10 causing some breakage, a more pressing issue has been discovered: Ubuntu 25.10’s unattended upgrades functionality for automatic security updates is currently broken due to a Rust Coreutils bug…
If you’re in the market for a budget-friendly home security camera (or even several), the Blink Mini 2 may be worth considering. A two-pack of the cameras is on sale at Amazon as the bundle has dropped from $70 to $28.
That’s a discount of 60 percent, which is certainly nothing to shake at. This is also a better price than the $35 we saw for the cameras during Prime Day. Amazon recently revealed a newer version of the Blink Mini that records 2K footage, but the 1080p Blink Mini 2 can still get the job done.
The Blink Mini 2 is our pick for the best budget security camera. It’s easy to set up and it integrates neatly into the Alexa smart home ecosystem. While you need a Blink Subscription for cloud storage ($3 for one camera, $10 for as many as you like), you can pick up a Sync Module 2 or Sync Module XR to store Blink Mini 2 footage locally. A Blink Subscription also enables specialized detection and alerts (e.g. for people and pets) and features like periodic photo captures.
The Blink Mini 2 is weather resistant, though you’ll need an adapter to use it outdoors. Additionally, you can use the Mini 2 as a plug-in chime that sounds when someone presses a Blink Video Doorbell.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/deals/a-two-pack-of-blink-mini-2-cameras-is-60-percent-off-right-now-144258368.html?src=rss
For the first time since 1971, the Tour de France will start with a team time trial, this time of 19km in Barcelona. It will cover 3,333km with 54,450m of climbing before finishing in Paris.
Once again, the final stage in Paris will include the climb to Montmartre to spice up the final laps of the Champs-Elysees.
But the highlight must be the two ascents to summit finishes on the iconic Alpe d’Huez on Stage 19 and Stage 20, with the latter throwing in the Col de la Croix de Fer, Col de la Télégraphe and the Col du Galibier for good measure in a stage with 5,600m of climbing.
In the interim, the Tour will visit the Pyrenees, the Massif Central, the Vosges and the Alps, with new climbs in all four French mountain ranges. There’s a 26km individual time trial along the shores of Lake Geneva on Stage 16, too.
Here’s a stage-by-stage guide to how the 2026 Tour de France route will unfold.
The opening team time trial won’t be easy, with the climbs up to the Olympic stadium testing the teams’ ability to stay together on the climbs. Individual finish times will be taken, so riders will want to stay with their teammates.
Stage 2: Tarragona to Barcelona
Sunday 5 July
182km
The second-stage start in Tarragona marks the furthest south that the Tour has ever travelled, while the stage finish is one for the puncheurs.
Tour boss Christian Prudhomme points out that the last three winners on the final climb of Montjuic in Barcelona, when it has featured in the Tour of Catalonia, were Primož Roglič (2025), Tadej Pogačar (2024) and Remco Evenepoel (2023). However, the Tour’s GC contenders may want to lay low this time for what’s in store.
Stage 3: Granollers to Les Angles
Monday 6 July
196km
With Barcelona’s proximity to the Pyrenees, it’s no surprise that the Tour has headed straight there. There’s 3,950m of elevation gain, although Prudhomme reckons this is more a stage for a breakaway, with GC hopefuls again keeping their powder dry.
Stage 4: Carcassonne to Foix
Tuesday 7 July
182km
This could be another day for a breakaway, according to Prudhomme, although he reckons it could be chased down by the sprinters who have survived the hills on the approach to the finish.
Stage 5: Lannemezan to Pau
Wednesday 8 July
158km
Prudhomme thinks this is the first stage marked out for a bunch sprint. It comes unusually late, with most Tours offering something for the sprinters earlier on the parcours.
Stage 6: Pau to Gavarnie-Gedre
Thursday 9 July
186km
The last stage in the Pyrenees is also the most demanding, with the Col d’Aspin and Col du Tourmalet both featuring. Prudhomme reckons this could provide the first big GC battle or, if they again decide to hold their fire with 40km still to ride after the Tourmalet, a climbers’ breakaway.
Stage 7: Hagetmau to Bordeaux
Friday 10 July
175km
Another stage for a breakaway/sprint battle, as it passes through the forests of the Landes. It’s most likely to end in a sprint finale on the banks of the Garonne river, though.
Stage 8: Périgueux to Bergerac
Saturday 11 July
182km
It’s two potential sprint stages in a row, with only 1,150m of elevation gain today as the Tour passes along the Dordogne river.
Stage 9: Malemort to Ussel
Sunday 12 July
185km
The sprinters will have to return to the autobus on this stage, with its two major climbs in 3,300m of elevation gain. Prudhomme marks out the climb of the Suc au May as the point at which a selection might be made.
Rest day
Monday 13 July
Stage 10: Aurillac to Le Lioran
Tuesday 14 July
167km
Bastille Day is another climbers’ day, with the Col de la Griffoul, the Pas de Peyrol, the Col de Pertus and the final climb to the ski station at Le Lioran. It may be one for a breakaway, rather than a GC battle, though.
Stage 11: Vichy to Nevers
15 July
161km
Prudhomme reckons this is another sprinters’ day, with the odds not in favour of a breakaway surviving. It’s the first visit by the Tour to the home of Look bikes since 2003.
Stage 12: Circuit Magny-Cours to Chalon-sur-Saône
Thursday 16 July
181km
Helping to assuage the sprinters after their meagre start to the race, this looks like another bunch finish, as the race heads into the vineyards. Chalon-sur-Saône was also the site of Great Britain’s first Tour stage win, when the late Brian Robinson took the stage solo back in 1959.
Stage 13: Dole to Belfort
Friday 17 July
205km
The longest stage of the 2026 Tour takes in the Ballon d’Alsace, before its downhill run to the finish in Belfort.
Stage 14: Mulhouse to Le Markstein Fellering
Saturday 18 July
155km
A double loop through the Vosges sees the Tour cross the Grand Ballon before the finish line at Le Markstein for the first time. The second loop includes the Col du Haag, an 11.2km-long bike path with an average gradient of 7.3%. Prudhomme picks it out as a highlight of the 2026 Tour route, where major gaps could emerge.
Stage 15: Champagnole to Plateau de Solaison
Sunday 19 July
184km
The Tour heads to the Alps to start its journey through its final mountain range, with this stage marked out by Prudhomme as likely to be the start of the final GC shake-out. With the final climb of 11.3km to the summit finish averaging 9.1%, it should draw out the gaps to the final winner.
Rest day
Monday 20 July
Stage 16: Evian-les-Bains to Thonon-les-Bains
Tuesday 21 July
26km ITT
The only individual time trial in the 2026 Tour offers a mix of climb, descent and flat roll-in to the finish along the shores of Lake Geneva.
Stage 17: Chambery to Voiron
Wednesday 22 July
175km
Prudhomme reckons the climbs on today’s route shouldn’t be enough to stop the sprinters from contesting the finish – if they’ve survived the climbing stages up until now.
Stage 18: Voiron to Orcieres-Merlette
Thursday 23 July
185km
With what’s to come on the final two days in the Alps, Prudhomme has marked this stage as one for a battle between the climbers, rather than the GC contenders, but don’t rule out Pogačar proving a point.
Stage 19: Gap to Alpe d’Huez
Friday 24 July
128km
Yep, we’re into the finale now, with the first of two days finishing on Alpe d’Huez. There are three climbs before the Alpe, though, which may again tempt the climbers to show their mettle.
Stage 20: Le Bourg d’Oisans to Alpe d’Huez
Saturday 25 July
171km
With 5,600m of elevation gain, the penultimate and queen stage of the 2026 Tour takes in three iconic Tour climbs before it has even reached the foot of Alpe d’Huez, which is taken via the Col de Sarenne, a route that has only ever been used in the 2013 Tour, and then as a descent.
Stage 21: Thoiry to Paris
Sunday 26 July
130km
It may have taken the 2024 Olympics to discover the Rue Lepic climb to Montmartre, but the Tour is back for a second time in 2026, taking on the climb three times. But whereas Wout van Aert had a short run from the climb to the finish line in 2025, in 2026 the last ascent is 15km from the line, which Prudhomme reckons will put the final stage in the balance between a puncheur and the sprinters.
Millions of tons of discarded electronics from the United States are being shipped overseas, much of it to developing countries in Southeast Asia unprepared to safely handle hazardous waste, according to a new report by an environmental watchdog. AP: The Seattle-based Basel Action Network, or BAN, said a two-year investigation found at least 10 U.S. companies exporting used electronics to Asia and the Middle East, in what it says is a “hidden tsunami” of electronic waste. “This new, almost invisible tsunami of e-waste, is taking place … padding already lucrative profit margins of the electronics recycling sector while allowing a major portion of the American public’s and corporate IT equipment to be surreptitiously exported to and processed under harmful conditions in Southeast Asia,” the report said.
Electronic waste, or e-waste, includes discarded devices like phones and computers containing both valuable materials and toxic metals like lead, cadmium and mercury. As gadgets are replaced faster, global e-waste is growing five times quicker than it’s formally recycled. The world produced a record 62 million metric tons in 2022. That’s expected to climb to 82 million by 2030, according to the United Nations’ International Telecommunication Union and its research arm, UNITAR.
