Flipper Devices says development of the Flipper Zero firmware will continue, albeit with a smaller internal team and greater reliance on community contributions.

The announcement comes as the gadget maker decided to focus on building new devices, like the Flipper One open Linux platform, for which the company turned to the community’s help to complete development.

There is also the newly launched Busy Bar device, designed to help people with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) reduce distractions, slated for open sale on July 14 in the U.S., U.K., Europe, and Canada.

Flipper Devices stated that the official firmware for the Flipper Zero portable pen-testing device will still be maintained, but full-time feature development is now over.

Flipper Zero Firmware 1.0, the first major stable release, was announced in September 2024, following three years of development. The latest official stable release is version 1.4.3, available since December 2025.

At that point, the team felt the firmware had reached maturity, with a stable SDK and APIs and all promised features properly implemented.

In recent interviews and online discussions, the Flipper Devices team gave the impression that firmware development had stopped, triggering a strong backlash from the community.

To appease users, the team has developed a new approach for the project that relies on closer interaction with contributors to keep firmware development moving.

As such, the project will be maintained with limited resources and a new approach to interacting with the community and its contributions:

• Flipper Zero requests will be evaluated on a weekly basis
• Communication with the team will occur only through GitHub Discussions, where new requests will also be voted
• Community pull requests will be accepted, but with stricter review requirements
• Firmware changes will require mandatory integration and regression testing, which will be open to the community

The development team will maintain oversight of the development and will pay particular attention to AI-generated code that touches low-level functions and is hard to verify, as well as to changes that affect the user interface or require documentation changes.

According to the gadget maker, there are now more than one million Flipper Zero users who generate a volume of communication that the company’s small team can’t manage, which is why they disabled direct messages on all social media channels.

All requests will now be submitted to GitHub Discussions and prioritized based on the votes they receive from the community. This will give users the power to choose what comes next on Flipper Zero.

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Compare 7 Top Wi-Fi Routers

Other Wi-Fi 7 Routers I Tested and Liked

I have tested many other models and have several more in the queue. These aren’t as great as the picks above, but they are worth considering.

Photograph: Simon Hill

TP-Link Archer BE6500 (GE400) for $200: This dual-band Wi-Fi 7 gaming router is a solid performer. At close range on the 5-GHz band, it can go toe-to-toe with most of the devices on this list. It also offers dedicated gaming features, though some of them require subscriptions. I was disappointed by the limited range, and the comparable TP-Link BE6500 (BE400) is currently on sale for a lot less. You also don’t have to spend much more to get the far superior, tri-band Archer BE9700 (BE600) listed above, giving you the full 6-GHz Wi-Fi 7 experience. For gamers who live alone in apartments or small homes, this router could still be a decent buy.

TP-Link Roam 7 (BE3600) for $130: This dual-band, Wi-Fi 7 travel router was my pick, but the Asus RT-BE58 Go above is a slightly better performer for around the same money. This is still a good, portable device, capable of keeping you online in your hotel room or modest apartment. It also supports mobile tethering, VPN, and can serve as a Wi-Fi range extender. There’s a USB-C for power that works with portable chargers, and a USB-A for file sharing or backup.

TP-Link Archer BE5000 (BE260) for $110: This dual-band (2.4 GHz and 5 GHz) Wi-Fi 7 router runs close to our top pick on performance and is a solid alternative. This router offers a slight upgrade over the BE230 (BE3600) below, with improved 5-GHz performance, an extra antenna, and a coverage boost up to 2,400 square feet. It also sports a 2.5-Gbps WAN, a 2.5-Gbps LAN, three Gigabit LAN, and a USB 3.0 port. Throw in EasyMesh support and a relatively low price, and the BE260 is a tempting option. But if you want enhanced security and parental controls, you have to subscribe, which takes the shine off the value.

AVM FRITZ!Box 5690 Pro

Photograph: Simon Hill

AVM FRITZ!Box 5690 Pro for £447: While AVM has dominated the German router market for years and still has around a 50 percent market share, it’s now expanding across Europe and the UK, so I tested the FRITZ!Box 5690 Pro. AVM’s range is distinctive in white and red plastic, but there’s a focus on functionality. This tri-band Wi-Fi 7 router boasts a 2.5-Gbps WAN/LAN, four gigabit LAN, and a USB 3.1 port. It’s fast, scoring mid- to high-table results in my tests, and it proved reliable. It also has DSL or fiber-optic modems, an integrated DECT base station for cordless phones, built-in storage (NAS), and support for Zigbee to connect smart home devices. You don’t need an account to set it up or configure it. There’s a firewall and guest network option in the straightforward web interface (you can use the mobile app if you prefer). AVM’s routers are developed and manufactured in Europe, making them an interesting, privacy-focused alternative to routers from China or the US. The company also has a strong track record of supporting its products for years after release. Folks in the UK and Europe looking to upgrade to Wi-Fi 7 should consider this router. My fingers are crossed that AVM expands into the US next.

Asus RT-BE86U for $230: The new Wi-Fi 7 version of the Asus RT-AX86U, this dual-band (2.4- and 5-GHz) router is similar to the Asus RT-BE88U below. It lacks the 6-GHz band but brings all the other improvements that Wi-Fi 7 offers. The RT-BE86U proved reliable in my tests and performed extremely well on the 5-GHz band, matching the slightly more expensive RT-BE88U. It is slightly smaller but still has one 10-Gbps and four 2.5-Gbps Ethernet ports, alongside a USB 2.0 and a USB 3.0 port.

Netgear Nighthawk RS300

Photograph: Simon Hill

Netgear Nighthawk RS300 for $300: This classy, tri-band, Wi-Fi 7 tower router is understated with a fanless design. Setup was a breeze, and the simplified app is designed to be hands-off. This was our middle pick, but was unseated by TP-Link’s Archer BE9700. Speed and stability on the 5-GHz and 6-GHz bands were excellent, though the range on the 6-GHz band is limited. Performance on the 2.4-GHz band was slightly below par, but that will likely only be an issue if you have loads of older devices. The RS300 has one 2.5 Gbps WAN/LAN, two 2.5 Gbps, two Gigabit LAN ports, and one USB 3.0 port. The RS300 is one of the best experiences I have had with a Netgear router, with fast speeds on the 5- and 6-GHz bands, lightning-quick file transfer times, and no issues over two weeks of testing.

Asus RT-BE92U for $198: After a simple setup and a trouble-free week of speedy, stable internet across the 2.4-, 5-, and 6-GHz bands, I can recommend this router. It has Wi-Fi 7 benefits like MLO and 320-MHz channels, support for a guest network, VPN services, free security software, and parental controls. It also boasts a 10-Gbps WAN/LAN, a 2.5-Gbps WAN/LAN, three 2.5-Gbps LANs, and a USB 3.2 port. This tri-band Wi-Fi 7 device came perilously close to claiming the midrange spot above held by the TP-Link Archer BE9700, but was a smidge slower on the 5-GHz and 6-GHz bands and had a considerably shorter range. However, if your home is around 1,500 square feet and you’d rather avoid a subscription, the RT-BE92U is an excellent alternative. Customer reviews suggest some folks have had trouble with this router, but the latest firmware was rock solid for me.

Asus RT-BE88U for $340: This dual-band Wi-Fi 7 router is an odd prospect because it does not offer the 6-GHz band at all, just 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz. But you can still combine those bands with MLO and enjoy features like 4K QAM, and this router will be fast enough for the average home. It has ports galore (two 10 Gbps, four 2.5 Gbps, four Gigabit, and one USB 3.0). It outperformed several more expensive routers on the 5-GHz band, and that’s likely what most of your devices are using most of the time right now. Asus also offers free security software and parental controls with its routers, so there’s no need for subscriptions. But when I consider that you can snag the Netgear Nighthawk RS300 listed above for less, I find it tough to recommend this router to folks in the US. If the 6-GHz band is unavailable or nerfed in your country, the RT-BE88U is for you.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Netgear Nighthawk RS700 for $550: Although I had setup issues that required a factory reset, there’s no hiding the top-notch performance of this router. It’s a Wi-Fi 7 tri-band router with two 10-Gbps Ethernet ports, four gigabit ports, and a USB 3.2. The tower design is new for the Nighthawk line, and it looks great. This router will blend in far better than our bulky Wi-Fi 7 pick above from Asus, and it was slightly faster on the 6-GHz band, though not the 5-GHz or 2.4-GHz bands. It mainly misses out on a recommendation because it is more expensive. We’re already seeing discounts on the RT-BE96U, and Asus offers free security software and parental controls. If you get the Nighthawk RS700S, the “S” at the end denotes a free year of Netgear Armor, which costs $100 a year thereafter. If you need parental controls, that’s another $70 a year.

TP-Link Archer BE800 for $500: With a fresh design that’s more desktop PC than router, the BE800 tri-band beast came out high up in my tests on the 2.4-GHz, 5-GHz, and 6-GHz bands, proving impressively swift for file transfers and downloads. It also boasts speedy ports galore, a cool but kind of pointless customizable dot-matrix LED screen, and the Tether app offers a guest network, IoT network, VPN server or client, EasyMesh, QoS for device prioritization, and remote management.

Netgear M3 for £450: I was very impressed by this mobile 5G router. Slip a SIM in there, and it connects to 4G or 5G networks to deliver Wi-Fi to your devices. It’s a dual-band Wi-Fi 6 model that’s speedy on the 5-GHz band. The M3 had no trouble handling multiple connected devices (up to 32) and served a stable internet connection for around 10 hours. You can charge via the USB-C port, and there’s a 2.4-inch LCD color screen for configuration. It’s a solid hot spot for business or personal travel. Sadly, the M3 doesn’t seem to be available in the US, but folks in the UK can save some money and snag this instead of the M7 above (it’s frequently discounted).

Firewalla Gold SE for $499: This quirky portable device is perfect for people who worry about security and privacy. It offers comprehensive tools for monitoring all traffic in and out of your house, robust and detailed parental controls, ad-blocking, and enhanced security with a built-in firewall and VPN option. It serves as a router, but you will want to pair another router in access point mode for Wi-Fi in your home. It’s expensive and may prove intimidating for inexperienced folks, but it offers deep insight into your network and an impressive depth of security features without an additional subscription. The Gold SE has two 2.5-Gbps ports and two gigabit ports and is suitable for folks with up to 2-gigabit connections. If your internet is only one gigabit, try the more affordable but slightly less capable Firewalla Purple ($409).

Routers I Don’t Recommend

These are the internet routers we had issues with or can’t recommend for one reason or another.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Acer Connect X6E 5G: This is an interesting Wi-Fi 6E model with a 5G SIM card slot capable of keeping you online using a mobile network should your main broadband connection fail. It has two Gigabit Ethernet ports, a WAN/LAN, LAN, and an RJ-11 port for a phone line. It’s easy to set up and offers an NFC connection option, so you can just wave your phone over it to connect. This unusual blend of features could be good for business travelers. Performance was solid when it worked, and you can get a very fast connection at close range on both the 6-GHz and 5-GHz bands. Sadly, the range was limited, and the Connect X6E 5G was intermittently unstable during my testing, dropping devices randomly and cutting out repeatedly.

TP-Link Archer BE3600 (BE230): This is the lowest price I’ve seen for a Wi-Fi 7 router. The basic design sports four antennas, a 2.5-Gbps WAN, a 2.5-Gbps LAN, and three gigabit LAN ports. It is dual-band (2.4-GHz and 5-GHz), so there’s no 6-GHz option, and it’s only 2 x 2 MIMO, so the maximum bandwidth is 688 Mbps and 2,882 Mbps, respectively. Sadly, I found the range on the 5-GHz band to be limited, and the band steering was disappointing, often dropping my phone onto the much slower 2.4-GHz band. Throughput was so-so, and file transfers were mid-table in my results. The BE230 finished below our top pick in every test. It was impressively speedy at close range on both bands, but dropped off quickly with distance, making it tough to recommend for larger properties. The subscription required for enhanced security and parental controls is also a hard sell on a router this cheap.

Photograph: Simon Hill

D-Link AX3000 DBR-330: This lightweight, rectangular travel router from D-Link is aimed at business professionals who travel for work. It’s a dual-band, Wi-Fi 6 router that can also serve as a hot spot, with a connection via USB. There’s even a potentially handy microSD/TF card slot for up to 2 TB of storage for file sharing or backup. Setup via the browser is easy, and there’s built-in VPN support. It proved nice and fast at close range, but it dropped off quickly, and I couldn’t get a signal two rooms away. It will work fine for a hotel room, though. The problem is, you can get our TP-Link travel router pick above or the Asus RT-AX57 Go for similar money, and I prefer both of them.

Netgear Nighthawk RS200: The RS200 is Netgear’s dual-band (2.4- and 5-GHz) router and the cheapest in its Wi-Fi 7 lineup. After the tri-band RS300 won a recommendation, I expected this router to perform decently, but I encountered several issues, including random drops and poor range. After turning the router off and on again, many devices, including my Pixel and iPhone, struggled to reconnect. Perhaps I have too many devices in my home for it, though Netgear suggests it can handle up to 80. It has two 2.5 Gbps ports, three gigabit Ethernet ports, and a USB 3.0 port. Test results were OK, but significantly slower than the RT-BE86U.

TP-Link Archer AX5400 Pro: This dual-band Wi-Fi 6 model is almost identical to the Archer AX73, except for the 2.5-Gbps WAN port. It delivers relatively fast speeds on the 2.4-GHz and 5-GHz bands and boasts a 160-MHz channel width on 5 GHz. The range is good, easily covering my home and garden, but the performance was inconsistent. It was also relatively slow at moving files locally. There’s support for TP-Link OneMesh, VPN, and QoS, but you only get basic parental controls and network security unless you subscribe.

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personal tech

Maybe they were looking for Private Data

ON CALL Fronting up to work on Friday morning can feel like a mistake, but The Register tries to make it worthwhile by bringing you a new installment of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories.

This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Lee” who told us about his time as sysadmin at the headquarters of a retail company.

“It was about the year 2000 and I was a newly minted Certified NetWare Engineer administering Novell servers,” Lee reminisced. Before long, Lee was running the teams that managed email servers and provided desktop support for over a thousand users.

“I got to know just about everybody in the HQ and became known as the go-to guy for all things technical,” he proudly told On Call.

One Friday afternoon, a vice president called to complain he couldn’t access any files from his PC because someone else was using them.

Lee found this a little odd, so he asked if the veep was seeing a “file in use” dialog in Word or Excel.

The veep replied that he was indeed seeing an error that read “General failure is reading Drive C” – but that was obviously someone using the handle “General Failure” to mask their identity.

Lee’s next question was very precise.

“I asked if the error message read ‘General failure is reading Drive C:’” he told On Call.

The VP re-read the dialog and corrected himself, telling Lee the exact text was “General failure reading Drive C:”

At this point, Lee had good news and bad news.

The bad news was that the error meant the VP’s disk had died.

The good news was that nobody was using the handle “General Failure,” so the company didn’t have a miscreant rummaging around on the network.

Lee arranged a support call and advised the veep that he would be getting a new disk and might even be in line for a whole new PC.

Have your users misinterpreted an error message? If so, click here to send On Call an email. We can’t be clearer than that – or more sincere in our desire to share your story with your fellow Reg readers. ®

My multimedia situation was a mess. After decades of taking photos and videos, I had stuff in five clouds — Google, Apple, Flickr, Dropbox, OneDrive — and also in offline locations like flash drives, jump drives, hard drives…

I’m not a professional photographer, just a guy who’s taken his share of photos and videos over the years. You know how it is. You’re on a road trip, you take a bunch of nature shots, but after a few years, they don’t seem as amazing as they did from the car. Or my cats. Why did I take so many shots of them sleeping? Cats are cute, we get it, but did I need tons of pics to prove it?

Another issue was that I’ve used phones with different operating systems — Blackberry, Samsung, Motorola (Android), Nokia (Windows) and now iPhone (iOS) — and different backup systems. I was going against the norm; the vast majority of people don’t deviate from one type of OS.

It was like throwing stuff into a garage or storage closet. It gets messier and messier. You tell yourself one day you’ll clean it up, but that day never comes.

And that overstuffed procrastination comes with a price. The more cloud storage locations you have, the more you pay, and as the megabytes and gigabytes pile up, you often have to pay more each month for higher storage limits.

It was time to suck it up and clean it up. After checking out various recommendations on how to go about it, I crafted my plan. My steps would be: gather, declutter and consolidate.

Gather it all up

First, I identified which cloud storage platforms I had photos and videos in. Then I located photos and videos I had on various jump drives, flash drives, SSDs and hard drives. I even revved up a couple of old desktops and laptops to see if I had anything there. I then uploaded the multimedia from external drives onto my laptop.

My situation was a bit of a jumble. It’s a lot easier for folks who have their multimedia stored in only one or two cloud services.

Read more: From Photo Backups to My Own Cloud Server: My Trip Into Home Data Storage

Then I moved on to decluttering, which is likely the most time-consuming and grueling step. I went into each of my cloud storage accounts and weeded out photos that were blurry or otherwise of bad quality, duplicates or redundant, and photos that — now, years later — I can’t even remember why I took them in the first place.

Duplicates are a major problem. This can happen for several reasons. If you automatically back up from different devices — perhaps an iPhone, tablet and digital camera — the same photo could literally be backed up three times. Or, it could be that you back up a photo that is shared with you on WhatsApp, but you already have that photo synced into your cloud storage.

There are at least a couple of ways to remove duplicates. There are services that scan your cloud storage and locate them, and services that can scan your photos and videos after you’ve downloaded them onto your hard drive.

Cloud Duplicate Finder ($40 for 3 months, $70 for 1 year, $96 for 2 years) scans multiple cloud storage services (Google Drive, OneDrive, Dropbox, Box, Amazon S3) simultaneously to find duplicates. DeDuplicate can do the same thing with Google, OneDrive, Dropbox and others (not iCloud). It costs $8 on the App Store.

Google also has a built-in tool that can find blurry photos and screenshots and delete them; it’s in the Manage Storage section. 

You can also remove duplicates by syncing your Google, OneDrive and Dropbox cloud to your local desktop, then using Duplicate Photo Cleaner to find duplicates. The app can scan the synced photos and find duplicates and also versions that have been edited, cropped or resized. You can then delete those and sync the changes back to the cloud, thereby removing dupes.

The CCleaner app’s free version can scan your photo library and find identical duplicate images, but not images that are merely similar or edited. CCleaner’s premium version ($90 per year) can find images that are blurry, have poor lighting or are otherwise of bad quality.

There are some free duplicate-finders too. DupeGuru scans for duplicates and similar photos on Windows, Mac and Linux. Awesome Duplicate Photo Finder is a Windows program that identifies duplicates and photos that have been cropped or saved with color filters. Remo Duplicate Photos Remover can scan iPhone and Android camera rolls for exact matches and similar images, such as those shot with burst mode.

I also went through all my videos and deleted those that I didn’t want or need anymore. This is key — on an iPhone, the size of a 30-second video can range from 40MB (standard HD) to more than 200MB (4K resolution), compared to 2-5MB for a typical photo. Reducing videos can greatly reduce your storage load in the cloud.

You could also decide to skip decluttering if you don’t have the time or want to do it later, after you’ve consolidated all your photos into one spot.

Use the 3-2-1 backup rule

After I weeded out all unwanted photos and videos, I decided to use Google Photos as my main cloud storage location. I use Google a lot for document creation, and it’s an easy backup from my iPhone, so it seems like a natural cloud solution.

Apple lets Google transfer photo and video copies from its servers to Google’s. But to transfer multimedia from OneDrive, Dropbox, Flickr and external drives, I needed to download copies onto my hard drive and then upload them to Google.

If you only use iPhones and iPads for your multimedia creation, you could just use Apple’s iCloud for your storage needs.

Prices differ for each of the major cloud services. Apple charges $1 per month for 50GB, $3 for 200GB and $10 for 2TB. Google charges $2 for 100GB, $3 for 200GB and $10 for 2TB. Microsoft’s OneDrive bundles the cloud storage with Microsoft 365’s Office apps, which results in a $10 per month charge for 1TB of storage.

Amazon Prime members get unlimited photo storage and 5GB for videos and documents. If you need more storage for videos, you can pay $2 for 100GB and $7 per month for 1TB.

Whichever way you go, understand the 3-2-1 backup rule: 3 copies of all data; 2 copies on 2 different storage media, such as a cloud service and a local drive; and 1 copy located a few miles away from the others.

Basically, it’s a way to ensure you don’t lose all your precious photos and videos by relying on only one location for your data.

I went with one of the most common strategies for implementing the 3-2-1 backup rule. I downloaded all of my photos and videos to my computer (No. 1), then backed all of that onto an external hard drive (No. 2), and finally backed up all of it to the Google cloud (No. 3). 3-2-1 achieved!

It’s not a one-time fix, however. If you go that route, you will need to regularly update your local and external drives with your latest photos and videos. For example, if you add, say, 200 photos to the Google cloud, you’ll need to download those to your local and external storage locations so that you maintain three copies of all data.

If you don’t yet have an external hard drive, CNET has a slew of recommended ones for various storage needs.

Great to get it done

Even though it took a fair amount of time to organize my multimedia, it was a great feeling to finally get it done. It inspired me to create a few hard-copy photo books and digital frames, and it was nice to be more intentional about all the photos and videos I had taken instead of just chucking them into basically a digital shoebox.

I also reduced my subscription costs. Before going slash and burn on my multimedia, I was paying nearly $300 per year for storage in four cloud systems for nearly 400 GB, which, compared to a lot of others, is not that much data. In any case, I cut that amount enough to get within Google’s 400 GB storage plan, which costs $3 per month for three months and then $5 per month after that.

My yearly subscription costs went from nearly $300 to less than $60.

Now, if I can just get to that storage closet…

For many people who grew up in the early 2000s, the Game Boy Advance was the handheld they carried everywhere. The Keyboy Advance is trying to bring some of that nostalgia to a modern desk, using the wide, landscape-style silhouette of Nintendo’s 2001 handheld as the basis for a compact mechanical keyboard kit. It is not an official Nintendo product, but the visual references are easy to spot.

How much Game Boy Advance is in the design?

The Keyboy Advance takes the general shape of the Game Boy Advance and rebuilds it around a 50% HHKB layout. The overall footprint of the keyboard is small while still including a number row. The side profile uses a color-separated section inspired by the GBA’s side palm rest, while the underside has been reworked to create a curved shape that resembles the handheld.

There are smaller visual callbacks across the body as well. The board has a power indicator LED, an asymmetric light strip, a speaker-like module on the lower right, and an incised line that appears to reference the old battery cover. It also includes functional shoulder buttons, which use micro-switches to recreate the feel of handheld console triggers. Both buttons can be customized through Vial, giving the retro-inspired design a practical use.

It is still an enthusiast keyboard kit

The Keyboy Advance is still a fairly serious custom keyboard kit. The spec pages list a 7-degree typing angle, 19mm front height, and top-mount construction with O-rings. Buyers also get different build options depending on how they want to use it. The kit is available in solder and wired hotswap versions, along with dual-mode and tri-mode hotswap options for those who want more flexible wireless support.

The spacebar also gets special attention. Smaller custom keyboards can sometimes have noisy or uneven spacebars, so this kit uses foam and internal support pieces to reduce unwanted sound and vibration while typing. It also supports multiple spacebar layouts, including a single 6U spacebar, dual 3U spacebars, and a split 2.25u plus 1u plus 2.75u setup.

The Keyboy Advance group buy is priced at £210.83 and runs until July 22, 2026. Shipping is expected in Q4 2026. You can find more details about the keyboard at Prototypist.net.

OPINION I write a weekly column called PWNED, about how poor security practices can lead to serious damage. Usually, there’s something funny in the malfeasance, like a CEO who kept every employee’s password in an Excel file on his desktop. 

However, I wasn’t laughing back in May when professional thieves invaded my 84-year-old mother’s entire financial life and managed to make off with $30,000 from her bank accounts alone. And they wouldn’t have gotten in if her financial institutions required multi-factor authentication (aka MFA or 2FA), a step too many institutions won’t take.

One day in May, Mom got a call from the institution that runs her retirement savings account, who had identified a suspicious transaction and asked her if it was legit. She said no and they immediately protected her account.

Then she checked her bank account at a different institution to see if it was compromised and found thousands of dollars transferred out of her checking and savings accounts. The thieves knew exactly how much they could withdraw each day, and used both withdrawals and transfers to a strange account. But the financial institution hadn’t flagged the fraudulent activity. 

The thieves were so slick that they broke into her Gmail account and created spam filters to filter any mail from her bank or retirement savings provider to the trash so she wouldn’t get alerts about the transfers or about the fake accounts they made in her name.

She spent hours on the phone reporting the theft to an unhelpful and incredulous fraud department who asked “Are you sure a relative didn’t do this?”

We don’t know for certain how the crims got into my mom’s accounts, but we know she used the same or similar passwords on all of her accounts, and at least one of her accounts was part of a data breach a few years ago, so that info was probably available somewhere online. The miscreants then could have used this info to get into her retirement account, her bank, and her Gmail. 

None of this would have been possible if she had MFA enabled on those accounts, but neither Google nor her financial institutions require it.

“Many consumers assume every bank requires 2FA, but that’s not the reality,” said Gregory Shein, CEO of Nomadic Soft, a SaaS company that serves fintech clients. “Some financial institutions still treat it as an optional feature because they’re balancing security against friction. Every extra login step can reduce conversions, increase support tickets, and frustrate less technical customers.”

Indeed, while some banks such as PNC require MFA, others such as Bank of America, Chase, Capital One, and Citibank leave it as optional. Google’s accounts are also MFA-optional.

Fortunately, after they spent hours telling my mom that someone in her family could have done the deed, and repeatedly putting her on hold, then forcing her to navigate a labyrinthine phone tree, the bank eventually agreed to investigate.

A few weeks later, they restored the stolen funds. 

A not entirely happy ending

My mother was lucky, because if money is stolen from your bank account, there is no guarantee that you will get it back, at least in the US.

According to the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, you have 60 days from the date of a bank statement to dispute any transactions. The bank also has 45 days to investigate, unless your bank account was just opened in the last 30 days or the fraudulent transactions took place outside the US. 

But the bank could very well decide that those fraudulent transactions look legitimate and refuse to reimburse you. If the bank doesn’t agree to reimburse you, your next step is to get a lawyer and attempt to sue. A quick search revealed dozens of lawyers in my area who specialize in dealing with this problem.

It would be easy to blame my mom for being robbed. Using the same password in multiple places left her wide open for exploitation. However, her bank’s lack of a required second authentication factor also contributed. The bank doesn’t let you transact without a password, and it doesn’t issue you an ATM card without a PIN, because it knows that there has to be a required minimum level of security.

Banks and other financial institutions know better. Google knows better. But they’re all putting convenience ahead of security when it’s your money that’s on the line.

“Different segments of the population adopt technology faster or slower. If I’m a bank, I have to consider that very closely because I don’t want to lose any banking relationships.” Andrew Shikiar, CEO of the FIDO Alliance, an industry association that advocates for stronger login security, told me in an interview.  “So I think there’s some concerns around friction that have held some banks and other service providers back from really pushing this more aggressively.”

How effective is MFA?

According to a 2019 article from Microsoft, MFA prevents 99.9 percent of attacks on your accounts. However, other experts say this number is exaggerated, as there are many ways to get past MFA if you’re a criminal, including social engineering and interception.

One of the most common types of MFA, issuing a one-time passcode via an SMS message or an email, is inherently flawed. A determined thief can use social engineering to get a SIM card with your phone number on it, then get to your texts. And if your email itself isn’t perfectly secure and it is receiving an OTP, they can get to that too. Phishers can also trick you into giving up your OTPs by creating a fake website that looks like your bank’s login page. 

The right way to do MFA today is with a passkey. Passkeys are cryptographic key pairs where there’s a private key on the user’s device and a public key on the server. To access the key on the device, the user must either enter a PIN, touch a physical security key like a Yubikey, or enter a biometric login such as their face or fingerprint.  Passkeys cannot be phished or intercepted, which is why they are known as “phishing-resistant MFA.”

Unfortunately, a lot of banks are sticking with their OTPs. For example, when I went to set up MFA for a family member’s account with US bank Chase, using its website.

Chase offered the chance to receive an OTP via email, SMS, or a phone call. The bank is rolling out passkeys, according to the FIDO Alliance. So are Wells Fargo, US Bank, and Bank of America. 

Some banks may be using better MFA only within their mobile apps. Chase’s app, for example, asks users to use a fingerprint or facial recognition at login, even though the website does not. However, if a thief wants to log in at Chase’s website, there will be no biometric challenge. And if a user doesn’t have MFA enabled at all, it’s even easier for thieves to get in.

“OTP is just another password. So it’s a shorter-lived one, but it really is just another password,” Shikiar said. “And there’s also usability issues. You’re juggling between your mobile and your desktop. It’s insecure, inefficient, and a really inadequate user experience.”

What banks don’t seem to understand is that you’re only as secure as your weakest entry point. If security controls only exist on mobile apps, it doesn’t help with web-based attacks. If a level of security is optional, the majority of people won’t enable it. Thieves will take the path of least resistance, so service operators need to lock down all entry paths equally by default.

Unfortunately, an approach that favors convenience over security will lead to a lot more people losing their money. And, ultimately, banks will lose money when they have to reimburse people for those fraudulent transactions.

“I don’t expect banks to be mandating passkeys and only passkeys for some time, but the more they push them, the more comfort there is,” Shikiar told us. “The sooner we’ll get to that point where it becomes a de facto default and then becomes really something that’s either required or essentially required.”

That time should be now. ®

We’re big fans of NotebookLM around here, so much so that it received our Editor’s Choice Award. But it’s not the only AI tool out there that can synthesize your data to better understand it. In fact, there are a lot of options out there, it’s just that none are quite as approachable as NotebookLM. 

Maybe you need a more specific type of output, or just don’t want Google handling your data. Not all of the following tools have nifty features like the Audio or Video Overviews that helped give NotebookLM its reputation today. Instead, they may offer a more tailored set of capabilities, whether you’re a student, an analyst or someone who simply prefers more privacy.

Below, we’ll detail a few other AI learning tools that have similar features but might be better suited for you depending on what you’re trying to do, your profession or your workflow.

Atlas.org launched in 2024, and its team consists of current students, recent graduates and former educators. Its sole purpose is to help you with your schoolwork, and it’s organized as such. 

When you first sign up and log in, you’ll be presented with a series of options, each tailored to the learning experience. The three primary sections are for studying, homework and taking notes, and each of those subsections has different options to dig in deeper. 

For studying, you can create a study guide, a quiz or flash cards. You can automatically create lecture notes from recorded audio or help get detailed answers to questions on your homework. 

The information you upload to Atlas.org is retained forever, so you’ll have a continuously growing knowledge base about your schoolwork, and you can create dedicated spaces for different topics. Like NotebookLM, it also has a mobile app for iOS and Android that allows you to learn on the go. 

Atlas is free to try out, but the free tier comes with some fairly steep limits. You can upgrade to the Pro version for $18 per month. 

Yes, another tool with Atlas in its name, but Atlas Workspace is pretty specific with its functions. It specializes in knowledge and semantic mapping and is aimed towards scientists and research analysts. It essentially allows you to create a full knowledge base on its servers and map out exactly what you want to see when you want to see it. The more sources you upload, the more you’ll get out of it, and since it’s a collective database of your sources, you don’t need to remember where you saved a specific piece of information. This is in contrast to NotebookLM’s Notebooks, where the sources remain isolated as individual projects. 

When you upload a source such as a PDF, Atlas Workspace will automatically begin building a knowledge map, breaking down the core components of your source — and you can start asking specific questions from there. You can also view a semantic map to get a more visual representation of your sources and how you’ve interacted with the tool.

Atlas isn’t going to be for everyone, and that’s because not everyone needs this type of tool. To get the most out of it, you’ll need to spend a lot of time working with it, and there’s a fairly steep learning curve to it. However, the Atlas Workspace blog has several in-depth comparisons between its competitors that might be helpful for people still on the fence. 

The free version of Atlas Workspace allows for 10 total sources and five lifetime AI chats, but you’ll have access to unlimited projects, which are similar to NotebookLM’s Notebooks, but Projects can connect concepts across projects, keeping up with the compounding knowledge aspect. If you opt for the $20 per month Pro plan, your source count gets boosted to 1,000 and you’ll have unlimited AI chats. 

OpenNotebook

We’ve covered OpenNotebook in depth before, and it’s fairly close to a lot of the functionality NotebookLM carries with it. However, you’ll need to know what you’re doing to set it up, which can feel incredibly involved if you don’t consider yourself a “tech” person. However, once it’s set up, there’s a lot it can do. 

As you’d expect, you can upload your sources to OpenNotebook and chat with AI about it, but what makes this tool special is that you can pretty much choose whatever AI model you want. This will require more work and, depending on the model, may require a paid API key. You can even use a local LLM if you so choose. 

Something standout about OpenNotebook is that it’s very privacy-friendly. Your data stays with you, and you decide what you share. OpenNotebook is also free and open-source.