Author: Brett Venter

It’s not a good time to be a website operator who isn’t all that keen on being replaced by AI. Google’s AI Overviews ‘feature’, which throws up summaries from websites, is powered by the same section of the company that includes websites in Google’s search results. According to Bloomberg, opting out of the ‘AI’ side of the equation will also opt sites out of the actually useful function provided by the search giant. In other words, if websites are unwilling to let their sites be crawled for AI purposes they’ll also be left out of Google’s search results. It might…

If you’ve been to London in Britain (there are plenty of others) lately, you can feel secure in the knowledge that you were in one of the most surveilled cities outside of Asia (and Moscow). The British city, as of 2021, had around 700,000 cameras and the number might be as high as a solid million. That’s still nothing on Chinese cities but the Brits might have a way around that — flying cameras. The country’s Civil Aviation Authority has announced several trial projects that will introduce drones to the skies above London and other cities in Britain. Planned to…

If you’re paying attention to more than the company’s hardware news, you’ll know that Google is in for a bumpy ride in the next few months. The search giant was recently convicted of being… well, a search giant. But illegally. A judge in the States ruled that Google has illegally monopolised the search market, in a similar manner to what happened to Microsoft and its monopoly on desktop operating systems back in the early 2000s. In fact, the recent Google ruling holds that the company violated the Sherman Antitrust Act, the same one that Microsoft was stung with some two…

We go over this every year and it’s almost boring now. Yes, the Galaxy Fold 6 is the best folding smartphone Samsung has made to date. The tricky bit of this statement is pointing out that there wasn’t all that much to do to get there. Samsung’s newest foldable doesn’t take chances because it doesn’t have to. It might not have the capability. We’re not sure that it’s possible to improve folding smartphones or even flagship smartphones without some radical change in what they do. Everything that could be added to these devices would only complicate what is already a…

Well, well, would you look at the time? We’re… late? How are we late? Bugger. Well, rather than quoting a famous wizard we’ll just get on with it, yeah? This is the August-September 2024 issue of Stuff Magazine. It’s on shelves and in online stores all over the place, including right here on Stuff. But it’s not about availability so much as it is about what’s inside this issue that you should look out for.  As ever, there are loads of products in the August-September 2024 of South Africa’s best technology magazine to drool over. So many of them, in…

Remember back in the pandemic when the only way to see your coworkers was to force them to turn their cameras on in the Zoom meeting? Those circumstances made the online meeting app one of the most profitable of that whole stupid time but since we’ve been allowed outside again its fortunes have altered somewhat. This is at least partly what prompted the development of Zoom Docs, a feature that integrates AI into the online meeting app. It’s also the sort of productivity suite we’ve come to expect from everyone from Microsoft to Google, so there’s far more competition for…

You might think of Samsung as a consumer electronics company but the tech maker is also well known as a components manufacturer. It’s particularly noted for its memory chips but there’s something new on the horizon — EV batteries. Samsung has reportedly debuted its take on an electric vehicle battery at the SNE Battery Day 2024 Expo, an event so exclusive that Stuff wasn’t able to find an official website online. Perhaps it’s a Korean website or maybe Google really sucks now. It’s probably both. Samsung does batteries better Despite the lack of official communication — Samsung’s own website is…

Mention Delta Force to a certain sort of gamer (an old one) and you’ll find almost universal acclaim for the various titles in the series’ back catalogue. It’s been a while since the last game in the series graced the PC screen — fifteen years is a long time — but the wait is about to be over. The first game in a decade and a half is Delta Force: Hawk Ops and it will bring players a combination of retro and modern gameplay. Presumably, the free-to-play title hopes to capture both the olds and the youngsters when it officially…

Alternative power is important but we didn’t think we’d progressed to the point where wearable solar panels were a thing. Yet… EcoFlow has announced (and put on sale) its strangest product yet — the Power Hat. Which is exactly what it claims to be. It’s a hat. That you wear. That can power your tech. If that sounds like something you want to don on your dome, it’s currently available for pre-order. Go with the EcoFlow? What can you expect to pay for an EcoFlow solar hat? It’ll usually set you back almost R2,500 ($130) but pre-orders peg the price…

Paid-for TV providers have fiercely resisted putting sports, particularly live-action sports, onto streaming services. Venu, an upcoming American service that bundles most of the sporting events the Yanks are inexplicably ‘world champions’ at (and some regular competitions too), could be the catalyst to change all that. Venu is a collaboration between several American platforms, namely ESPN (which is owned by Disney), Fox, and Warner Bros. Discovery. The upcoming platform was first announced in February this year and now there’s an approximate launch — Fall. Or, as we like to call it in the Southern Hemisphere, Spring. Quite the Venu Historically,…