Getting a phone serviced can be a headache, as nobody likes to stand in long queues. To help with this exact situation, OPPO has announced Service Center 3.0 Pro. It’s the next-generation after-sales service format aimed at improving the overall ownership experience for customers. The company says 29 Service Center 3.0 Pro locations are already operational, with plans to open 110 new centres across India in 2026.

So, what is it? According to OPPO, the upgraded service centres are designed to go beyond standard repair support by offering faster service, greater transparency, and a more comfortable in-store experience. The new format introduces digital check-in, real-time queue updates, and dynamic digital signage to reduce waiting times and keep customers informed throughout their visit. OPPO has also added face-to-face repair and servicing, enabling users to interact directly with technicians for greater clarity and trust.

Redesigned Interiors

The new centers feature a refreshed visual identity, clearly defined service zones, and improved seating areas. OPPO says the redesigned layout helps customers navigate the space more easily while allowing staff to work more efficiently. The centres also include dedicated product experience zones where users can try out devices, as well as gaming areas designed to make waiting periods more comfortable.

Goldee Patnaik, Head of Communications at OPPO India, said, “These next-generation centers are built for modern-day users who value efficiency, clarity, and a consistent premium experience across touchpoints. As we scale this upgraded format across the country, our focus remains the same—every improvement starts with what our customers tell us.”

If you own a Find or Reno series phone, OPPO offers priority service through Premium Queue registration. The privileges include a six-hour email response time, a two-hour social media response time, and high call and chat response rates.

A fresh wave of spam is hitting inboxes worldwide, with users reporting that they are once again being bombarded by automated emails generated through companies’ unsecured Zendesk support systems.

Some recipients say they are receiving hundreds of messages with strange or alarming subject lines.

Users flooded with bogus ‘Activate account’ emails

Since yesterday, numerous social media users say they have begun receiving large bursts of emails with subject lines such as “Activate your account” and similar support-style notifications appearing to originate from different companies.

Recipients say the messages arrive in rapid succession and look like legitimate automated replies from customer support portals, despite never signing up or submitting a ticket.

“Anyone else getting a slew of failed account & support sign-up emails?” posted security researcher Jonathan Leitschuh on LinkedIn.

“Someone is DDoSing Zendesk support ticketing systems and other account creation processes across the internet with my email right now. Anyone know what the attacker is hoping to achieve here?”

Several users took to social media [1, 2, 3] to report their inboxes overflowing with similar messages:

Similar to the previous incident, the emails appear to be sent from real companies’ Zendesk instances, allowing them to bypass spam filters and land directly in inboxes.

The activity strongly suggests attackers are once again abusing Zendesk ticket submission forms to trigger confirmation emails to large lists of addresses.

What happened in January

In January, a massive global spam wave was traced to attackers abusing Zendesk’s ability to let unverified users submit support tickets.

Each ticket automatically generates a confirmation email to the email address entered, enabling threat actors to turn exposed support portals into large-scale spam relays.

The earlier campaign began around January 18 and affected several companies, with some recipients receiving hundreds of messages with bizarre or alarming subject lines.

Multiple companies had confirmed they were affected by the spam wave, including Dropbox and 2K, who responded to tickets to tell recipients not be concerned and to ignore the emails.

Zendesk had earlier told BleepingComputer that it had introduced new safety features on their end to detect and stop this type of spam in the future.

“We’ve introduced new safety features to address relay spam, including enhanced monitoring and limits designed to detect unusual activity and stop it more quickly,” Zendesk said at the time.

“We want to assure everyone that we are actively taking steps – and continuously improving – to protect our platform and users.”

In a December 2025 advisory, Zendesk had also warned customers about this type of abuse, explaining that attackers were sending what it called “relay spam” by abusing Zendesk instances.

The company said earlier that organizations could prevent this type of abuse by restricting ticket creation to only verified users and removing placeholders that allow any email addresses or ticket subject to be used.

The renewed activity suggests attackers may still be able to abuse exposed Zendesk ticket portals despite the safeguards introduced earlier this year.

BleepingComputer has contacted Zendesk for comment and will update this story if we receive a response.

Modern IT infrastructure moves faster than manual workflows can handle.

In this new Tines guide, learn how your team can reduce hidden manual delays, improve reliability through automated response, and build and scale intelligent workflows on top of tools you already use.

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Looking for the most recent Strands answer? Click here for our daily Strands hints, as well as our daily answers and hints for The New York Times Mini Crossword, Wordle, Connections and Connections: Sports Edition puzzles.

Today’s NYT Strands puzzle is a fun one, once you clue in on the theme. Some of the answers are difficult to unscramble, so if you need hints and answers, read on.

I go into depth about the rules for Strands in this story. 

If you’re looking for today’s Wordle, Connections and Mini Crossword answers, you can visit CNET’s NYT puzzle hints page.

Read more: NYT Connections Turns 1: These Are the 5 Toughest Puzzles So Far

Hint for today’s Strands puzzle

Today’s Strands theme is: Quint-essential.

If that doesn’t help you, here’s a clue: Not four, or six.

Clue words to unlock in-game hints

Your goal is to find hidden words that fit the puzzle’s theme. If you’re stuck, find any words you can. Every time you find three words of four letters or more, Strands will reveal one of the theme words. These are the words I used to get those hints but any words of four or more letters that you find will work:

• DAYS, GIVE, WOVE, DOVE, LOVE, DOGS, SCONE, STOLE, GEEK, LODE, SIEGE, SLEW, HENS

Answers for today’s Strands puzzle

These are the answers that tie into the theme. The goal of the puzzle is to find them all, including the spangram, a theme word that reaches from one side of the puzzle to the other. When you have all of them (I originally thought there were always eight but learned that the number can vary), every letter on the board will be used. Here are the nonspangram answers:

• TOES, OCEANS, SENSES, VOWELS, BOROUGHS, WEEKDAYS

Today’s Strands spangram

Today’s Strands spangram is GIVEMEFIVE. To find it, start with the G that’s three letters to the right on the top row, and wind down.

Don’t miss any of our unbiased tech content and lab-based reviews. Add CNET as a preferred Google source.

Hackers stole email addresses and other personal information from 1.4 million accounts after breaching the systems of automated investment platform Betterment in January.

Betterment provides a mix of automated investment tools and financial advisory services and is considered a pioneer in the U.S. “robo-advisory” sector. In total, the fintech firm manages $65 billion in assets for more than one million customers.

While Betterment has not disclosed the total number of affected individuals, data breach notification service Have I Been Pwned analyzed the stolen data and said the breach exposed 1,435,174 accounts, including email addresses, names, and geographic location data.

The compromised information also includes dates of birth, physical addresses, phone numbers, device information, employers’ geographic locations, and job titles.

Betterment disclosed on January 10 that the threat actors also sent fraudulent emails disguised as a company promotion after gaining access to some of its systems in a social engineering attack, attempting to lure targeted customers into a reward scam that claimed to triple the amount of cryptocurrency sent to attacker-controlled Bitcoin and Ethereum wallets.

“This is not a real offer and should be disregarded. If you clicked on the offer notification, it did not compromise the security of your Betterment account,” Betterment warned. “The unauthorized access has been removed, and at this time we have no indication that the unauthorized individual had any access to Betterment customer accounts.”

After BleepingComputer reported on January 13 that Betterment was under a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack and was being extorted, the company confirmed that intermittent website and mobile app outages were due to a DDoS attack, but has yet to share any information on the extortion attempt.

Earlier this week, Betterment issued another statement saying that a follow-up forensic investigation, conducted in collaboration with the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, found that no customer accounts were compromised in the breach.

“Our forensic investigation, supported by the cybersecurity firm, CrowdStrike, has confirmed that no customer accounts, passwords, or login information were compromised as part of the January 9 incident,” the company said.

“Our analysis continues to indicate that the primary privacy impact involved certain customer contact information, including names and emails. In a subset of cases, contact information was coupled with other customer information, such as physical addresses, phone numbers, or birthdates.”

A Betterment spokesperson has yet to reply after BleepingComputer reached out with questions after the incident.

Modern IT infrastructure moves faster than manual workflows can handle.

In this new Tines guide, learn how your team can reduce hidden manual delays, improve reliability through automated response, and build and scale intelligent workflows on top of tools you already use.

Get the guide

The 10 Best 4K UHD Blu-ray Discs of 2025 arrive at a moment when I keep hearing the same weary refrain: physical media is dead. And yet, it refuses to lie down. 2025 was a genuinely stellar year for 4K discs, one that challenged me and plenty of other disc mavens just to keep up, let alone narrow things down to a definitive decade. As always, the criteria are unapologetically strict: highly watchable and rewatchable films with reference-level picture and sound, extras that add real value instead of padding a press release, and, when studios bothered to try, packaging with some genuine shelf appeal. To keep the playing field level, only 4K discs I personally reviewed made the cut, and multi-movie boxed sets were left out entirely.

Agree? Disagree? Any must-owns that I somehow missed? Drop me a comment down below. 

Outland Limited Edition (Arrow)

Peter Hyams’ Outland was, for me, the top of the crop in a year filled with truly outstanding releases. Props to Arrow for rescuing this largely forgotten sci-fi classic, a thrilling High Noon in space that helped Sean Connery turn the corner on his Bondian past. Though the image is intentionally dim and gritty; full of claustrophobic interiors and airless exteriors on the third moon of Jupiter, realized with the help of then-cutting-edge analog visual effects; the disc surrenders sublime shadow detail and punchy colors from beginning to end. I opted for the DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 soundtrack–the disc defaults to the original Oscar-nominated LPCM stereo mix that reintroduces us to yet another propulsive Jerry Goldsmith score. New interviews, new featurettes and a new commentary join the 2012 archival Hyams track for a near-perfect evening in the home theater.

Where to buy: $29.99 at Amazon

Kingdom of Heaven (Fox/Disney/Sony)

While 2025 brought us three of cinephiles’ most-requested 4K upgrades; Tombstone, Kingdom of Heaven and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World; all in SteelBook-exclusive drops from Disney/Sony, Kingdom rose above. The new Dolby Atmos audio dutifully provides exactly what the epic adventure demands from scene to scene, from subtle atmospheric cues to a mighty, sprawling mix for the grand battle scenes. Video quality is more natural and more detailed than even the excellent HD Blu-ray, here with the restored director’s cut and roadshow versions on both 4K and 1080p discs (Scott was closely involved in this release and the theatrical cut is nowhere to be found, so what does that tell us?). This set does an admirable job porting most if not all of the unholy amount of bonus content that has supplemented this title since its earliest editions, with an introduction, three commentaries and an augmented viewing mode, plus a third platter loaded with days’ worth of bonus content—yes, mostly SD, but you’re still watching it anyway.

Where to buy: $59.99 at Amazon

Dark City Limited Edition (Arrow)

A fast sellout, Arrow’s slipcased hardbox of Alex Proyas’ trippy Dark City was the only way to get the theatrical and director’s cuts (quantifiably different and both excellent) together in DP-approved 4K restorations in Dolby Vision, just the thing for all those shadows–each with new Dolby Atmos remixes. The two-disc set is loaded with new and old bonuses, now including five (!) audio commentaries on Proyas’ preferred, longer cut, as well as some of the wonderful physical goodies for which Arrow’s limited editions are so well-known: reversible cover art, a two-sided poster, artcards and more.

(The well-adorned 4K director’s cut is currently available in a single-disc edition.)

Where to buy: Check Amazon

This Is Spinal Tap (Criterion)

This is Rob Reiner’s first theatrical feature, the beloved “mockumentary” that set the standard for decades of comedies since. Criterion’s 4K preserves its deliciously grainy 16mm origins, although you might want to click over from the subdued vintage LPCM stereo to the 5.1 for a more dramatic jump from the low-key interviews to the heavy-duty rock-and-roll. The three-disc set is packed with goodies, notably all three legacy audio commentaries together for the first time, in addition to over an hour-and-a-half of outtakes, a new featurette and a cleverly designed companion booklet.

Where to buy: $49.99 at Amazon

Wicked (Universal)

Everything we could have hoped for from a recent, big-budget movie, Wicked boasts a spectacularly colorful Dolby Vision image and thrilling Dolby Atmos audio, the flying characters conspicuously present in the overhead channels. It’s the extras here that really pushed it over the top, though: In an age where new filmmaker commentaries are becoming all too rare, Universal gives us two separate tracks, the first with director Jon M. Chu and the other with stars Cynthia Erivo and Ariana Grande. These are in addition to deleted scenes, featurettes, a 45-minute “making of” plus a surprisingly well-produced Sing-Along mode.

Where to buy: $21.99 at Amazon

Hard Boiled (Radial/Shout! Factory)

Regarded by many as the pinnacle of Hong Kong action, this final pairing of director John Woo and star Chow Yun-fat made a huge international splash, with Hollywood seeking to emulate its uniquely over-the-top violence and balletic “gun-fu” choreography. Shout! has long brought us special editions that are a cut above, but their Hong Kong Cinema Classics label has set a new standard, here with a 4K scan of the camera negative, presented in Dolby Vision with 1992-authentic Cantonese and English mono. A lavish three-disc set in a rigid library box with a fantastic companion book, Hard Boiled carries a brand-new Woo commentary, another from historian Frank Djeng, as well as a third track ported from the Criterion Collection laserdisc, further enhanced by a gallery of new talent and expert interviews.

Where to buy: $85.99 at Amazon

The Sound of Music (Fox/Disney/Sony)

Before you judge, remember that this was once the highest-grossing movie of all time and the winner of Best Picture and four more Academy Awards. A true story and a stage adaptation done right, Music was shot on location and de-cornified to give audiences the best-ever telling of a singing, dancing family’s defiance of the Nazis. For the 60th anniversary, Fox scanned the original 65mm film negative at 8K and performed extensive restoration with jaw-dropping results, especially impressive on larger screens. The purpose-built new Atmos track, sourced from the 70mm 6-track magnetic stereo master, is pure joy, for the enduring Rodgers & Hammerstein songs and so much more. All this, and some picture postcards, too!

Where to buy: $29.99 at Amazon

Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Sony)

Right from the SteelBook cover; with its vintage, oh-so-Python poster art; we know we’re in for a treat, as we journey back some 50 years to experience the lads’ timeless, side-splitting spin on King Arthur’s noble quest. This was a low-budget indie, so the quality of the Dolby Vision image here is a genuine revelation, and the accompanying Dolby Atmos sounds better than any comedy has a right to. The extras are an intriguing and quite generous mix of old and new, from the expected to the obscure.

Where to buy: Check Amazon

Sinners (Warner)

Go in spoiler-free and you might not even realize what you’re in for with Ryan Coogler’s utterly original and flawlessly executed genre-bending period piece. The entire movie was shot in large-format, a combination of IMAX and the recently resurrected Ultra Panavision 70, so the image shifts between 16:9 and 2.76:1 aspect ratios, each with remarkable depth, high contrast, and tight, organic grain. The events cross over into the supernatural, and the Atmos audio powerfully conveys the dark forces all around. The music is intrinsic to both the story and our greater cinematic odyssey, and by the time you read this, composer Ludwig Göransson might well have added another Oscar to his collection. Extras are solid, but might an awards sweep lead to a more substantive double-dip by Warner?

Where to buy: $34.98 at Amazon

Lilo & Stitch (2002 & 2025; Disney/Sony)

An unavoidable tie as both the original animated classic and its modern live-action remake shone as brightly as the Hawaiian sun. The 2002 starter flaunts its watercolor aesthetic in lush 4K, paired with a five-star Atmos remix brimming with mighty bass and inspired new surround moments. The 2025 redux succeeded in the unenviable task of recreating the sweet, charming story of a precocious youngster and her GMO “pet” in flesh and blood and CGI (with a few plot changes along the way), ultimately delivering a billion-dollar global hit. The gorgeous island scenery in this one could make it a 108-minute ad for tourism to our 50th state, and but for some stingy LFE, it too is reference-quality. Stay tuned after the ‘ohana-friendly frolics for a respectable assortment of extras in each set.

Where to buy: $40.99 at Amazon

Related Reading:

Regardless of your course type, having a decent laptop while you’re studying should be one of your top priorities. After all, you’ll be using it for everything from taking notes and revising, to streaming and maybe even the odd spot of gaming too. 

But with so many laptops on the market, all at varying prices, it can be difficult to work out which one to choose. That’s where we come in. 

Our team of experts have put countless laptops through a series of rigorous tests to determine just how well each one performs. We assess everything from power and battery life to the screen quality and how portable each laptop is for carrying across campus. From here, only the laptops that we deem are best for students have made it onto this list.

We understand that not every course is identical, so we’ve made sure to include a range of laptops to suit your needs. So whether you just need a simple laptop for typing up essays and coursework or you need a bit more oomph to support creative courses, there’s bound to be an option here for you.

In addition, we’ve also tried our best to keep budgets sensible as we know the last thing a student needs is to fork out on an overpriced device.

Keep reading to see our list of the best laptops for uni students. If, however, you can’t find a laptop that’s quite suitable for your needs then fear not, as our computing experts have put together a multitude of lists to help guide you in the right direction. Check out our lists of the best budget laptops and the best laptops overall, if you’re open to spending a bit more.

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