• A new Entertainment Software Association study found that most Americans think video games provide the most entertainment value for their money compared to other forms of entertainment
• 75% of parents are actively play video games each week, while 81% enjoy playing with their children
• The majority of players across all age groups are also spending money on in-game content

A new Entertainment Software Association (ESA) study has found that the majority of gamers in the United States prefer to spend their money on video games because they think they provide more entertainment value than other forms of media.

As detailed in its annual Essential Facts About the U.S. Video Game Industry report conducted in partnership with YouGov, video games are more popular than ever among most age groups.

from the good-deals-on-cool-stuff dept

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Filed Under: daily deal

The Swedish app-builder, processing a million new projects a week, is making Google Cloud a primary partner, with Gemini models and a security layer aimed at corporate buyers.

The pitch behind Lovable has always been that anyone can build software by chatting with an AI. The harder pitch, the one that turns a viral tool into a durable business, is that a large company can trust what gets built.

On 3 June, at Google Cloud’s Nordics summit in Stockholm, Lovable set out to make that second case, announcing an expanded multi-year collaboration with Google Cloud aimed squarely at enterprise buyers.

The deal makes Google Cloud one of Lovable’s primary technology partners, anchoring its platform on Google’s AI infrastructure and Gemini models. Lovable says its users are now processing more than one million new projects every week, a volume that has outgrown the scrappy infrastructure a consumer tool can run on and needs the secure, enterprise-grade backing a hyperscaler provides.

Lovable is one of the more remarkable growth stories in recent software. Founded in Sweden and built around what the industry has taken to calling “vibe coding,” turning natural-language prompts into full-stack applications, it raised a $200M Series A in mid-2025 at a $1.8bn valuation and was reported to be valued at around $6.6bn by the end of the year. The company says builders created more than 25 million projects in its first year, and that Lovable-built applications now draw 600 million visits a month.

The collaboration is built on three pillars, and they read as a checklist of what enterprises demand before they let an AI tool near production. The first is a verified agent: Lovable has launched its Lovable Agent in Google Cloud’s Gemini Enterprise Agent Gallery, a vetted catalogue of third-party agents that corporate customers can adopt with some assurance about what they are running.

The second is security, reinforced by a new integration with Wiz, the cloud-security company Google is acquiring, to identify and remediate vulnerabilities in AI-generated code in real time, alongside continuous scanning, dependency checks, permissioning and audit trails.

The third pillar is the least glamorous and arguably the most telling: simplified procurement and billing through Google Cloud Marketplace and Gemini Enterprise.

Enterprises buy software through approved channels with predictable invoicing, and being available where a corporate buyer already has a billing relationship removes a quiet but real barrier to adoption. The pillar exists because procurement, not capability, is often what stalls enterprise deals.

The security emphasis is the substantive part of the announcement, because it speaks to the central anxiety about AI-generated code. Tools that let non-engineers ship applications also let them ship vulnerabilities they cannot see, and for a regulated enterprise that risk is disqualifying.

Wrapping Lovable’s output in continuous scanning and remediation is the company conceding that “anyone can build” needs “and it will be checked” attached before a serious buyer signs on.

There is a competitive subtext worth noting. Lovable sits in a crowded vibe-coding field alongside Cursor, Replit and Bolt, and the AI model providers themselves are building rival app-creation tools.

Tying tightly to Google Cloud, and to Gemini, gives Lovable a hyperscaler’s distribution and infrastructure at a moment when its rivals are racing for the same enterprise budgets. It also slots into Google’s broader campaign to win the “agentic enterprise,” the same push behind its $750M partner fund for agentic AI.

As a Google Cloud announcement, the framing is naturally Google’s, and the deeper commercial terms, what each side pays and commits, are not disclosed. What the partnership establishes is direction.

Lovable has decided its next phase runs through the enterprise, and that getting there means less talk of how easy building is and more proof that what gets built is secure, governed and accountable. The million projects a week are the easy part. Convincing a Fortune 500 compliance team is the part this deal is for.

Most larger ride-around landscaping machinery has a similar transmission, a transaxle containing a gearbox, or in some cases, a continuously variable drive. [Made In Garage] has a Toro lawn tractor with just such a setup, and when the transaxle failed he replaced it with a hydraulic drive.

The video below is a classic bit of workshop porn, as he fabricates both the hubs and the rear frame to fit a pair of hydraulic motors. The throttle pedal is a hydraulic valve with the lever swapped for a pedal, and the hydraulic reservoir, in a nice touch, is an old fire extinguisher.

We’re not so sure about the pipework in such an exposed position under the machine as we think it would inevitably be damaged, but you can’t argue with the results. Having used a rough service mower with a hydraulic drive in the past, we appreciate always being exactly at the right ratio for the engine.

We think perhaps he should complement it with a loader.

Thanks [Keith Olson] for the tip!

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) is warning that hackers are exploiting vulnerabilities in the Linux kernel and Android operating system.

The most recent flaw the agency added to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities (KEV) catalog, CVE-2025-48595, is a high-severity integer overflow vulnerability in the Android Framework, which can be leveraged for increased privileges.

According to Google’s recent security bulletin, the security issue impacts Android 14 through 16, and requires no user interaction to exploit.

Google indicated that CVE-2025-48595 may be under limited targeted exploitation in the wild, but provided no specific details about the activity or technical information about the flaw or the incidents.

The issue has been addressed with the release of June 2026 security patches (2026-06-01 and 2026-06-05 security patch levels).

The second vulnerability CISA added to KEV is tracked as CVE-2022-0492, a high-severity privilege escalation flaw that impacts multiple Linux kernel branches, from 2.6 through 4.20, and from 5.5 through 5.17.

The flaw lies in the ‘cgroup_release_agent_write()’ function of the cgroups v1 subsystem, which, due to insufficient authentication checks, can be abused by a local attacker to bypass namespace isolation, escalate privileges, and potentially escape from a container to gain root-level access on the host system.

According to past reports from Aqua Security and Palo Alto Networks, the issue primarily impacts containerized environments using cgroups v1, and is especially dangerous when containers are granted elevated capabilities.

The Linux kernel versions that address the issue are:

• 4.9.301+
• 4.14.266+
• 4.19.229+
• 5.4.177+
• 5.10.97+
• 5.15.20+
• 5.16.6+
• 5.17-rc3+

By including the two flaws in KEV, all federal agencies bound by the BOD 22-01 directive are required to apply the vendor-provided security updates and mitigations, or to stop using the impacted software. CISA set the deadline for June 5.

However, the KEV also serves as a notice board for critical infrastructure entities and large organizations in general, who should take security measures against these flaws with the same urgency.

Neither of the flaws is marked as exploited by ransomware groups, which is a specific flag CISA uses on its KEV entries to highlight additional severity and patching urgency.

Automated pentesting tools deliver real value, but they were built to answer one question: can an attacker move through the network? They were not built to test whether your controls block threats, your detection rules fire, or your cloud configs hold.

This guide covers the 6 surfaces you actually need to validate.

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from the there-is-no-magic-wand dept

Before the current wave of laws banning mobile phones in schools, we had published a piece from some researchers who had looked at how similar bans had worked in Australia, with the conclusion that… they didn’t. At best, the research showed the evidence on school phone bans to be “weak and inconclusive.” Those authors suggested that rather than doing outright bans, politicians should leave the issue to the schools themselves to determine what’s best.

So it should come as little surprise that two years later, after many similar bans have gone into effect in the US that… the studies are showing up as (you guessed it) weak and inconclusive. The new study from the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) has some people shaking their heads because it can find no evidence of better student performance in schools.

Schools that adopted strict bans — requiring students to keep their devices in locked pouches throughout the school day — saw a meaningful decline in student cellphone use. But test scores have not increased in those places on average. And at first, banning phones led to higher suspension rates.

That’s not to say there should be a free for all in schools. But, once again, it would be nice if politicians, the media, and other commentators could finally (for once) recognize that blanket bans of technology are almost never the answer. The relationship between students and technology is complex and nuanced and doesn’t have a single effect in a single direction. Instead, it’s highly context and individual dependent.

A reasonable, nuanced approach is (1) better equipping teachers with tools to be flexible, (2) better educating students on the tradeoffs of technology use, and (3) improving the overall education environment with an actual recognition that context matters.

Obviously, if kids are just sitting in class all day staring at their phones instead of paying attention to the teacher, that’s a problem. But there are ways to deal with that specific scenario that don’t require a full ban. For some schools a full ban could absolutely make sense, and for others it doesn’t.

We’re going through this in our own local school district where, starting a few years ago, the high school (after studying and then testing different solutions) put boards in every classroom with pockets, where students were asked to deposit their phone at the beginning of every class. This created some challenges, such as when some teachers used the phones in pockets as an attendance-taking short-cut and some students (including my own kid) did not have a phone with them at all in school (by their own choice at the time). But it also meant kids could have phones on them between classes and at lunch.

It’s not a perfect solution, but that’s an important point: nothing is a perfect solution, and pretending otherwise is a problem.

But then California passed a new law, which required schools to come up with plans to ban phones. While the law was not nearly as strict as many other school phone ban laws and does actually give schools more freedom in creating a policy for their own community, it already has resulted in a bunch of wasted time where our school district feels they need to go back to the drawing board and come up with a new phone ban plan, even though the old one appeared to be working decently well.

At the last minute, California has even scaled back its original law, giving schools even more freedom — but also more confusion.

But this whole episode reeks of the usual political and media reflex of “we must do something, this is something, therefore we will do it.”

Letting communities and schools decide how best to handle in school distractions seems like a much more appropriate approach. And part of that is teaching everyone that there is no magic bullet solution to problems. Kids are in school to learn, and part of that learning should be “hey, you shouldn’t be staring at your phone all day, but also it shouldn’t take a law to get you to put down the phone.”

The new study just confirms what the earlier research already showed. Blanket bans make for good press releases. They don’t make for better students.

The hard, unglamorous work of actually improving education — better-equipped teachers, more engaged classrooms, students who’ve been taught to think critically about their own technology use — doesn’t fit on a campaign mailer. So we keep getting laws instead of solutions.

Filed Under: california, education, phones, school phone bans, schools, teens

Eighteen months ago Suno was the AI company the music industry wanted to destroy. Every major record label had sued it, accusing it of training its models on copyrighted songs without permission. Now the labels are its partners, and investors have repriced the company accordingly. Suno has raised new capital at a $5.4bn valuation, more than double the $2.45bn it was worth just six months ago.

Bond Capital led the round, a Series D that had been reported to be closing for several weeks. The step-up is steep: a little over 2x in roughly half a year, the kind of re-rating that usually reflects either explosive growth or a fundamental change in a company’s risk profile. In Suno’s case it reflects both, and the second may matter more than the first.

The growth is real enough. Suno says more than 100 million people have now used the service, with around 2 million paid subscribers, and it reported roughly $150M in revenue in 2025.

By the measure investors care about, it is one of the breakout consumer-AI products, turning text prompts into finished songs for a mass audience rather than a niche of producers.

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But the more important shift is legal. When Suno last raised, it did so under an existential cloud: lawsuits from Universal, Warner and Sony, any of which could in principle have ended the business if the courts found its training data infringing. That cloud has substantially lifted.

Warner settled in November 2025 and struck a partnership to build licensed models, and Universal settled in October, its deal pairing a payment with a licensing arrangement for a joint AI platform. Two of the three majors that wanted Suno gone are now commercial partners.

That is the change investors are paying for. A company facing three industry-ending lawsuits is priced for the possibility of zero. A company that has converted two of those plaintiffs into licensors, and is rebuilding its models on authorised catalogue with artist opt-in, is priced as a going concern with a path to legitimacy. The valuation jump is less a bet on more users than a re-rating of the chance that Suno survives to keep them.

The terms of the settlements point at what Suno becomes on the other side. It has said it will launch new, licensed models in 2026 and deprecate the current ones, give artists and songwriters control over whether their names, voices and compositions are used, and require a paid account to download audio.

That is a more constrained, more expensive product than the free-for-all that built its user base, and the strategic question is whether 100 million users trained on the old model accept the new one.

The truce is also incomplete. Sony, the last of the three majors still litigating, has settled with neither Suno nor its rival Udio, and its fair-use cases are expected to produce a pivotal ruling in summer 2026. That decision could shape the copyright ground rules for the entire generative-music field, and a result unfavourable to Suno would complicate the legitimacy narrative this valuation rests on. The risk has shrunk, not vanished.

What the round captures is a company mid-transformation, from insurgent to licensee, from sued to partnered, from free tool to paid platform. The $5.4bn says the market believes the transformation is working. Sony’s lawyers, and a courtroom this summer, still get a say in whether it finishes.

ASUS has unveiled the Ascent QN10, a new mini PC that brings premium desktop capabilities into a compact form factor. This device comes equipped with all the benefits of a desktop computer, packed in a compact design. ASUS has managed to pack the device with all the essential functionalities through its integration with the powerful Snapdragon X2 Elite processor. The compact size of the product also allows users to use it in any residential or office setting.

Asus Ascent QN10 Specifications

As for the hardware specifications, the ASUS Ascent QN10 comes with the powerful Snapdragon X2 Elite processor from Qualcomm to deliver contemporary computing capabilities. The on-board NPU offers up to 80 TOPS computing capabilities. The processing unit also performs various tasks and runs everyday applications easily. ASUS calls this device the first mini PC to feature this chipset and run both versions of Windows 11.

It supports a range of AI models, agents, and orchestration tools. Compatible applications include OpenClaw, Hermes, Cursor, Claude Desktop, OpenAI Codex, and OpenCode. Running AI tasks locally helps reduce delays and keeps more data on the device. This can benefit users who work with coding, content creation, and AI development.

The mini PC features a silver finish and a space-saving 0.75L chassis. ASUS says the design is 86% smaller than a conventional 5L mini PC. The front section includes the ASUS branding and power button, while side vents support cooling. The mini PC measures around 130×130×39.96mm and weighs only 0.75kg, along with ventilation vents along the side to improve cooling.

ASUS places multiple USB Type-A and Type-C ports on the device, including USB 4 Gen 2 connections. The front panel provides easy access to frequently used ports. The mini PC also features an HDMI port, Ethernet connection, and a 3.5 mm audio connector. ASUS provides the Ascent QN10 with an 180W power supply along with a sleek design. The mini PC is ideal for use in offices, content creation, coding, and AI-based tasks. The small form factor not only decreases desktop clutter but also ensures desktop-like performance.

Price And Availability

The ASUS Ascent QN10 has yet to be officially announced regarding pricing and availability. ASUS is expected to provide more details about the mini PC’s launch in the coming days. As of today, ASUS has simply introduced it as part of their mini PC range.

Santa Monica Studio chose the latest State of Play to deliver an extended look at God of War Laufey, the next mainline entry in the series. The footage immediately made clear that this chapter belongs to Faye. Known as Laufey the Just in her lifetime, she served as wife to Kratos and mother to Atreus. Her funeral opened the 2018 God of War. Now she returns as the protagonist in a story that picks up right after that moment.

Faye awakens in a place called Everywhen. It’s a bizarre location to wake up, like the afterlife of gods or the genesis of all magic. It is also the final resting place for gods and creatures from all over the world, who come for a variety of reasons. The location is a magnet for power-hungry gods and beasts from throughout the fabled world, and Faye must deal with them all, including the Egyptian lioness goddess Sekhmet and Mongolian war deity Begtse. Meanwhile, her plans to keep Kratos and Atreus safe are unraveling, so she fights to get everything back on track.

PlayStation®5 console – 1TB

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• 1TB of Storage, keep your favorite games ready and waiting for you to jump in and play
• Ultra-High Speed SSD, maximize you play sessions with near instant load times for installed PS5 games

Combat in God of War Laufey expands on what you’ve seen in previous installments in the series, but it also integrates some ancient DNA from the game’s Greek origins. Faye moves rapidly and fluidly; she can effortlessly switch between the ground and the air, providing her a plethora of new offensive and defensive options. She keeps momentum even after a succession of attacks, and you suddenly have possibilities for knock-out hits that kill an enemy for good. You’re wielding a sword that Faye earned by gaining the trust of a new ally, as well as a trick up her sleeve from her days as the Golden Hand of the Jötnar, which allows her to control people’s souls and use it to her advantage in battle, as you can pull out a soul, hit it with all your might, or chuck it at other enemies to cause them to stumble.

Faye is joined by two other characters, including Phranque, a cosmic cube voiced by Jack Quaid who has a soft spot for Faye’s pals and the creatures that inhabit the Everywhen. Rue is a supernatural ribbon with a sword hidden inside; Perlina Lau voices her, and she provides consistent counsel throughout the plot and action. Despite the cofusion, this is not a prequel, but rather a continuation of the story that will take it to new and exciting places. You can already wishlist it on the PlayStation Store, but there is no indication of when it will be released on the PS5.
[Source]