Google is sharpening its focus on mental health safety with a key update to its Gemini platform, introducing a “one-touch” crisis support feature designed to connect users with real-world help faster. The move is part of a broader push to ensure AI tools act responsibly in sensitive situations, especially when users may be experiencing distress.

At the core of this update is a redesigned safety mechanism that activates when Gemini detects signals of potential mental health crises, including self-harm or suicidal thoughts. Instead of continuing a standard AI conversation, the system shifts toward immediate intervention. Users are presented with a simplified interface that allows them to instantly reach out to professional support through calls, texts, live chat, or official crisis hotline websites.

What makes this approach notable is its persistence

Once the one-touch interface is triggered, access to crisis support remains visible throughout the conversation, ensuring users are continually encouraged to seek human help rather than relying solely on AI-generated responses. The design prioritizes urgency and ease of access, reducing friction at moments when quick action can be critical.

This update reflects a growing recognition that AI must do more than provide information – it must actively guide users toward safe outcomes. Google says the system has been developed in collaboration with clinical experts, ensuring that responses are structured to encourage help-seeking behavior without reinforcing harmful thoughts or actions.

Importantly, Gemini is also being trained to avoid validating dangerous beliefs or behaviors

Instead, it aims to gently redirect users, distinguish between subjective feelings and objective reality, and prioritize connections to real-world resources. This balance between responsiveness and restraint is central to the platform’s evolving safety framework.

The significance of this feature lies in its potential real-world impact. With over one billion people globally affected by mental health challenges, digital tools like Gemini are increasingly becoming the first points of contact during vulnerable moments. By embedding a one-touch pathway to professional support, Google is attempting to bridge the gap between online interaction and offline care.

For users, this means faster, more direct access to help when it matters most. The update reduces the burden of searching for resources and ensures that support options are presented clearly and immediately.

Looking ahead, Google plans to continue refining these guardrails through ongoing research, testing, and collaboration with mental health professionals. As AI becomes more integrated into everyday life, features like one-touch crisis support could play a crucial role in shaping how technology responds to human vulnerability – prioritizing safety, accountability, and real-world connection over convenience alone.

What we think

Google’s AI mental health features feel like a step in the right direction, especially with tools that quickly guide users toward real-world help. The one-touch crisis support and improved responses show a clear intent to prioritize safety over engagement.

But there’s an inherent limitation here – AI can assist, but it cannot replace human empathy, clinical judgment, or long-term care. For someone in distress, a well-timed prompt helps, but it’s not a solution. These tools work best as bridges, not endpoints. The real challenge is ensuring users don’t stop at AI interaction and actually reach professional support when it truly matters.

An international operation from law enforcement authorities in partnership with private companies has disrupted FrostArmada, an APT28 campaign hijacking local traffic from MikroTik and TP-Link routers to steal Microsoft account credentials.

The Russian threat group APT28, also tracked as Fancy Bear, Sofacy, Forest Blizzard, Strontium, Storm-2754, and Sednit, has been linked to Russia’s General Staff Main Intelligence Directorate (GRU) 85th Main Special Service Center (GTsSS) military unit 26165.

In the FrostArmada attacks, the hackers compromised mainly small office/home office (SOHO) routers and altered the domain name system (DNS) settings to point to virtual private servers (VPS) under their control, which acted as DNS resolvers.

This allowed APT28 to intercept authentication traffic to targeted domains and steal Microsoft logins and OAuth tokens.

At its peak in December 2025, FrostArmada infected 18,000 devices across 120 countries, primarily targeting government agencies, law enforcement, IT and hosting providers, and organizations operating their own servers.

Microsoft, whose services were targeted by this campaign, worked together with Black Lotus Labs (BLL), Lumen’s threat research and operations division, to map the malicious activity and identify victims.

With support from the FBI, the U.S. Department of Justice, and the Polish government, the offending infrastructure has been taken offline.

FrostArmada activity

The attackers targeted internet-exposed routers, primarily MikroTik and TP-Link, as well as some firewall products from Nethesis and older Fortinet models.

Once compromised, the devices communicated with the attackers’ infrastructure and received DNS configuration changes that redirected traffic to malicious VPS nodes.

The new DNS settings were automatically pushed to internal devices via the Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP).

When clients queried authentication-related domains the threat actor targeted, the DNS server returned the attacker’s IP instead of the real one, redirecting victims to an adversary-in-the-middle (AitM) proxy.

The only visible sign of fraud for the victim would have been a warning for an invalid TLS certificate, which could have easily been dismissed. However, ignoring the alert gave the threat actor access to the victim’s unencrypted internet communication.

“The actor essentially ran a proxy service as the AitM that the end user was directed to via DNS,” Lumen’s Black Lotus Labs researchers explain.

“The only sign of this attack would be a pop-up warning about connecting to an untrusted source because of the ‘break and inspect’ configuration.”

“If warnings were present and ignored or clicked through, the actor proxied requests to the legitimate services, collecting the data at the midpoint and collecting data associated with the targeted account by passing the valid OAuth token.”

In some cases, though, the hackers spoofed DNS responses for certain domains, thus forcing affected endpoints to connect to the attack infrastructures, Microsoft says in a report today.

Lumen reports that FrostArmada operated in two distinct clusters, one called the ‘Expansion team’ dedicated to device compromise and botnet growth, and the second handling the AiTM and credential collection operations.

The researchers report that FrostArmada activity increased sharply following an August 2025 report from the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) in the UK describing a Forest Blizzard toolset that targeted Microsoft account credentials and tokens.

Microsoft confirmed that APT28 carried out AitM attacks against domains associated with the Microsoft 365 service, as subdomains for Microsoft Outlook on the web have also been targeted.

Additionally, the company observed this activity on servers belonging to three government organizations in Africa that were not hosted on Microsoft infrastructure. In those attacks, “Forest Blizzard intercepted DNS requests and conducted follow-on collection.”

Black Lotus Labs also observed the threat actor targeting entities with on-premise email servers and “a small number of government organizations” in North Africa, Central America, and Southeast Asia.

The researchers note that “there was also a connection to a national identity platform in one European country.”

In a report today, the UK agency says that the AitM activity impacted both browser sessions and desktop applications, and the DNS hijacking is believed to have been opportunistic in nature to build a large pool of potential targets and then filtering those of interest.

Black Lotus Labs has published a small set of indicators of compromise for the VPS servers used during the FrostArmada campaign:

The researchers note that defenders should implement certificate pinning for corporate devices (laptops, mobile phones) controlled via an MDM solution, which would generate an error when the attacker tries to intercept and analyze traffic on their VPS infrastructure.

Another recommendation is to minimize the attack surface through patching, limiting exposure on the public web, and removing all end-of-life equipment.

Microsoft and the NCSC also provide a list of IoCs and protection guidance to help defenders identify and prevent DNS hijacking attacks.

Automated pentesting proves the path exists. BAS proves whether your controls stop it. Most teams run one without the other.

This whitepaper maps six validation surfaces, shows where coverage ends, and provides practitioners with three diagnostic questions for any tool evaluation.

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Cloud services like Google Drive and iCloud are fantastic – they let me access my most important files from any device, anywhere – but the free storage is never enough. 

Google offers 15GB while Apple offers an even more paltry 5GB of storage – but even the biggest ‘free’ tier isn’t enough for the vast majority of users with thousands of photos and videos, countless files and more to keep safe. 

So what do you do? You start paying, of course. It starts off cheap with the lowest tier paid option – £1.59/$1.99 for 100GB, in the case of Google’s cloud storage – and that’s enough to tide you over. For a while, anyway. 

As sure as day follows night, over time, you’ll begin to fill all that storage space back up – even if you delete files you no longer need. Slowly, all those holiday snaps, videos of nights out, and even work documents, all add up.

And with both Google and Apple, it also includes storage linked to associated services like Gmail or iCloud, so any large files you receive in your inbox further add to your quota.

Again, you have no choice but to upgrade to the next tier of storage, which for Google, is 200GB for £2.49/$2.99 per month. That’s not bad, but go above that limit and you’ll face a massive jump not only in storage but also in monthly cost, at a whopping £7.99/$9.99 per month for 2TB. 

Like our growing storage needs, it adds up over time. That’s just under £96/$120 per year if you pay for the 2TB option monthly, just to store your files.

And so on, and so on. It’s a never-ending loop of filling up storage and paying for more. It’s either that or say goodbye to years of precious memories. 

Pay up, or lose access

The worst part about Google and Apple’s monopoly on the cloud storage market is that they don’t just handle storage – they’re central to the digital experience for many of us. Google, for example, handles not just Drive but Gmail, Docs, Sheets and more, while Apple similarly handles iCloud email, iMessage and the like.

That may not sound like a big problem – one subscription covers multiple apps, after all – but it is once you start running out of storage. 

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No matter whether you’re in camp Apple or Google, if you run out of storage or miss a monthly payment, you don’t just lose the ability to upload new files to your cloud storage – it also locks you out of other services. 

That means no access to Gmail or iMessage if you don’t pay up, and those are pretty central to the online experience for many. 

That’s too much power for my liking – but what was I supposed to do? I have over 30,000 photos and 5,000 videos tied to my Google Drive account, as well as thousands of emails linked to my Gmail over the years. The answer was simple in the end; get a NAS drive.   

UGreen’s latest NAS is the perfect remedy

NAS drives were all the rage in computing before the days of cloud storage, offering oodles of local storage accessible via your home network. But despite a lull in interest over the past few years, the hardware is more capable than ever. 

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That’s certainly the case with the UGreen NASync DH4300 Plus, which was released at the tail-end of 2025. 

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The bigger brother to the DH2300, the DH4300 Plus is a four-bay SATA NAS drive that supports up to 120TB of storage – 30TB per drive – for frankly massive amounts of storage. It’s powered by an 8-core processor and sports 8GB of RAM to keep things running smoothly, and its 2.5GbE LAN port boasts transfer speeds of up to 312.5MB/s depending on your home setup. Safe to say, it’s a bit of a beast. 

But despite its intimidating spec sheet, it was an absolute breeze to set up; all I had to do was insert the HDDs, plug it into my router via the provided high-speed Ethernet cable and power it on. From there, everything else was handled via the UGreen NAS companion app, and setup took no more than a couple of minutes – a far cry from the early days of NAS drive networking setup. 

That’s when I could start, what I affectionately called Operation Get Away From Google Drive As Soon As Possible, or OGAFGDASAP. Catchy, I know.

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Getting out from Google’s clutches

This part was surprisingly easy; thanks to EU rules (gotta love the Europeans), cloud storage providers like Google and Apple have to make it easy to either download all your data or transfer it to another (ideally cheaper) service. 

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For me, that meant going to Google Takeout, selecting the data I wanted to download – my Google Photos library and my Drive contents – and requesting a download link. Once I had the link, I downloaded the (frankly massive) nearly 300GB of data on my PC, and extracted the ZIP files to my NAS drive via my home network. 

But why stop at Google? I also pay for iCloud storage for when I’m testing the best iPhones, and that isn’t all that often, so I repeated the process, this time with iCloud. 

Now, that did introduce a few issues – the biggest being duplicate photos where the images were backed up on both Apple and Google cloud servers – but UGreen likely anticipated this issue. There’s baked-in AI accessible via the companion app on both PC and mobile that lets you easily identify and delete duplicate photos. It cleared nearly 10,000 duplicate images for me in the space of a few minutes. 

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Now, all I have to do is open the UGreen companion app on my phone, and all my photos and videos are there waiting for me, complete with features like custom folders and facial recognition we’ve come to expect from the big platforms. 

And despite being linked to my home network, I can access my files from anywhere with an internet connection via UGreen’s cloud service network. It doesn’t actually store your files in the cloud; rather, it just provides cloud-based access to the drive, which means you don’t need to faff around with port forwarding as you do with more basic drives. 

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Not just for network storage either

Now the beauty of the UGreen NASync DH4300 Plus is that it’s not just for network storage. With a fairly powerful spec under the hood, the NAS drive can also run full apps that can massively expand what it can do.

It meant that, rather than splashing out £112 for a Home Assistant Green to get more advanced control over my smart home tech, I could install and run it directly from my NAS drive – with great results, might I add.

It’s not the only app either; there’s actually an app store accessible via the app that gives you access to a range of apps including a Google Docs, Sheets and Slides alternative called Online Office that you can access via browser from any PC, further reducing my reliance on Google’s cloud-based services. 

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There’s also Docker support, so depending on your level of tech knowledge, you can run other custom apps directly from the NAS.

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Yes, it’s an expensive upfront cost, but it’ll save you a lot in the long run, and with the UGreen DH4300 Plus specifically, there’s much more to it than simply acting as a way to back up your photos and videos. Goodbye, Google Drive. I definitely won’t miss you.

The Dome is big. It’s not portable, practical, or inexpensive. It accepts the romance of wood, or the brute power of propane or natural gas. Its height makes it versatile enough for steaks, fish, or other skillet meals. This pizza oven is designed to be a fixture in your life and backyard, bolstered by an ever-expanding accessory set. And it also more than earns its place there, once you buy a snap-on Neapolitan arch accessory ($60) to bolster its insulation.

The Gozney makes truly excellent high-temperature pizza. Most backyard ovens, even our other favorites on this list, tend to struggle to reach and maintain the 900-degree temps needed for proper Neapolitan crust. The Dome Gen 2 gets there in 20 minutes, it heats admirably evenly, and it’s responsible for the best pizzas that my colleague Kat Merck says she’s made in her entire life. This is worth noting, given that she was editor and recipe tester for pizzaiolo Ken Forkish’s iconic pizza book The Elements of Pizza. (For what it’s worth, Forkish also uses a Dome Gen 2 at home, while enjoying his retirement. He likes using dough at 67 percent hydration, while cooking at 900 degrees in the Dome.)

A couple caveats, however: Gozney often markets the Dome as being able to cook two pizzas at the same time. This is a silly thing to do at the temperatures you’re cooking at. Cook one pizza. If you use the Neapolitan Arch, it’ll make the oven’s aperture narrow enough that you’ll need to limit yourself to a 12-inch peel anyway. The price of a Gozney Dome also rises considerably once you start delving into the accessories. With the stand, cover, Neapolitan arch, wood fire control kit, turning peel, and 15 pounds of Gozney-brand kiln-dried hardwood, the final price for the Dome Gen 2 can rack up as high as $3,270.

Best Big Pizza Oven for Families: Ooni Koda Max

Ooni’s large oven is for everyone who is sick of feeding their families with multiple teeny-tiny 12-inch pies and just wants to make a massive 20-inch cheese pizza for all the kids at once. You can either attach a propane tank or hook it to your natural gas line. If this is a possibility for you, then I recommend the latter. Ooni has a new gas management technology that keeps the temperature consistent across the huge surface. But big, powerful ovens use a lot of fuel: Its 35,000 BTUs put this Koda Max nearly on par with a 3-burner Traeger griddle. That heat will also come pouring out the open front of the oven, which means the Max is not ideal for small patios.

Photo credit: RW Genting
The First World Hotel, located in the Genting Highlands, some 50 kilometers north of Kuala Lumpur, stands out against the backdrop of the greenery. Its two main buildings and annex include a remarkable 7,351 rooms, which kept the Guinness World Record for world’s largest hotel under lock and key since 2015. People come via cable car or by making their way up the mountain roads, and then find themselves in a realm of continual motion, as you can’t help but keep going forward to the next surprise.

Construction began in the early 2000s, and the first major section opened in 2006, with over 6,000 rooms. Then, for a brief period in 2008, a Las Vegas property knocked it off the top rank, but the Malaysian crew returned in 2015 and added 1,233 additional rooms to restore the record permanently. Today, the hotel sprawls across three connected buildings, with dramatic horizontal streaks of color that stand out against the verdant hills. The design is deceptively basic but effective, transforming the entire structure into a landmark visible from miles away.

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Room sizes vary to accommodate every type of visitor, with standard and deluxe options measuring 180 square feet. While compact, they are spotless and have everything you need for a short stay. Triple rooms include three beds, making family visits or group excursions possible without wasting space. The superior deluxes and World Club rooms offer a decent 320 or 430 square feet, ideal for couples or business travelers who desire a separate living area and a little extra comfort. Every one of them looks out onto vistas of the forest or the resort below, and the mountain air keeps the temperature a little cooler than in the city.

The truth is that tourists rarely stay in their rooms for extended periods of time. A skybridge and walkways go directly into First World Plaza, which is essentially a mini-city for shopping and entertainment. Inside, the Skytropolis Funland has indoor rides, bumper cars, and arcade games that will keep the kids entertained for hours. Snow World then provides a wonderful contrast with its artificial snow and ice slides, which are ideal for escaping the hot heat outside. The plaza also has a bowling alley, a video game park, and a variety of dining options, from casual food courts to quick ice cream kiosks.

Next door to all of this, the resort continues to expand. Families who still have energy to burn can visit Genting SkyWorlds, a large outdoor theme park with roller coasters, cinema and adventure zones. A quick cable car trip brings everything together, allowing you to enjoy the huge thrill attractions in the morning, shop in the afternoon, and return to your room without ever leaving the site. The only legal casino in the country is also right on your doorstep, and it always draws large groups that fill the hotel nightly.
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