June 18, 2025

Puzzle Corner

Ready for a fresh set of puzzles? Click here for the July/August 2025 Puzzle Corner, brought to you by guest editor Ed Faulkner ’03. Send problems, solutions (by August 1), and comments to puzzlecorner@technologyreview.com. Editor emeritus Allan Gottlieb ’67 launched Puzzle Corner in 1966. Find back issues through 2022 at cs.nyu.edu/~gottlieb/tr and more recent back issues at technologyreview.com/puzzle-corner.

Google will stop supporting early Nest thermostats on October 25

April 26, 2025
Google announced this week that beginning on October 25, it will no longer support or release software updates for the first and second generation Nest Learning Thermostats. And it will completely stop launching new Nest products in Europe. That means owners of the Nest thermostats released in 2011 and 2012 (as well as the version […]

Week in Review: Cluely helps you cheat on everything

April 26, 2025
Welcome back to Week in Review! We’ve got tons of news for you this week: Slate EVs spotted in the wild; Airbnb pricing updates; a hack at Blue Shield; and much more. Let’s go! Get a clue: Cluely is an AI-based tool that helps people cheat on exams, sales calls, and even job interviews. Though […]

Amazon’s big book sale just happens to overlap with Independent Bookstore Day

April 26, 2025
Amazon is raising eyebrows with the timing of its big book sale for 2025, which runs from April 23 to 28 — which means it’s competing directly with Independent Bookstore Day. As writer Maris Kreisman explained in Lit Hub, Independent Bookstore Day is an annual event organized by the American Booksellers Association (ABA), with events, […]

Government officials are kind of bad at the internet

April 26, 2025
Perhaps no one in the world has made such catastrophic tech flubs this year as U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. The saga started when the editor-in-chief of The Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, reported that he had been mistakenly added to an unauthorized Signal group chat by U.S. National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, where numerous high-ranking […]

Lately’s new gamified app helps people arrive on time

April 26, 2025
A new app called Lately launched on the App Store a few weeks ago, targeting people with ADHD to help them arrive on time and rewarding them for doing so. The service is designed to help users manage their travel plans by notifying them when it’s time to leave for a trip, sending reminders 30 […]

The OpenAI mafia: 15 of the most notable startups founded by alumni

April 26, 2025
Move over, PayPal mafia: There’s a new tech mafia in Silicon Valley. As the startup behind ChatGPT, OpenAI is arguably the biggest AI player in town. Its meteoric rise to a $300 billion valuation has spurred many employees to leave the AI giant to create startups of their own. The hype around OpenAI is so […]

Instagram Edits topped 7M downloads in first week, a bigger launch than CapCut’s

April 26, 2025
Instagram Edits, Meta’s newly released video creation app, had a bigger debut than its direct competitor, ByteDance’s CapCut, once did. The new app, which today helps users craft videos for Instagram reels, stories, and other social posts, was downloaded an estimated 702,900 times on iOS devices during its first two days on the market. That’s […]