There are some premium apps for MacOS that offer more of an iTunes-like experience, but nothing that I vouch for.

Backing Up to Your Chromebook

Here is how to back up files from your Android phone on a Chromebook:

1. Plug your phone into a USB port on your Chromebook.
2. Drag down the notification shade and look for a notification from Android System that says something like Charging this device via USB, Tap for more options and tap it.
3. Look for an option that says File transfer and select it.
4. The Files app will open on your Chromebook, and you can drag any files you want to copy over.

Backing Up to Another Cloud Service

Maybe you have run out of Google storage, or you prefer another cloud service. There are Android apps for Dropbox, Microsoft’s OneDrive, MEGA, Box, and others. Most of them offer some cloud storage for free, but what you can back up and how you do it differs from app to app.

We looked at how to back up mobile photos on a few of these before, and you can usually set up the process to be automatic, though other files often have to be backed up manually. If you want to automatically sync photos and other files across devices using one of these services, then check out the Autosync app. There are specific versions for Dropbox, OneDrive, MEGA, and Box.

Whatever service you choose, make sure to keep your cloud storage safe and secure.

Backing Up Locally

Maybe you’d prefer not to use the cloud or Google’s services for your backup. You can always use the methods listed above for Windows or Mac to download files, then manually move them onto a portable hard drive or USB flash drive, but that’s quite a lot of work.

If you have network-attached storage (NAS), there’s likely an app that can automatically back up some of your files when you are connected to home Wi-Fi. You might also consider Syncthing (though it’s best for syncing rather than backing up) or something like Swift Backup, though you may need to pay and/or root your phone to get the best from them.

Backing Up Within Apps

Messaging apps, and a handful of other apps, have their own backup systems built in. I’ll give you a couple of examples here, but check up on your favorites.

WhatsApp via Simon Hill

Elon Musk recently outlined ambitious plans for a chip-building collaboration between his companies Tesla and SpaceX.

Bloomberg reports that Musk shared his plans on Saturday night at an event in downtown Austin, Texas, with a photo suggesting that what Musk is calling the “Terafab” facility will be built near Tesla’s Austin headquarters and “gigafactory.”

Musk said he’s pursuing this project because semiconductor manufacturers aren’t making chips quickly enough for his companies’ artificial intelligence and robotics needs: “We either build the Terafab or we don’t have the chips, and we need the chips, so we build the Terafab.”

The goal is to manufacture chips that can support 100 to 200 gigawatts of computing power per year on Earth, along with a terawatt in space, Musk said. He did not offer a timeline for these plans.

As Bloomberg noted, Musk does not have a background in semiconductor manufacturing, but he does have a history of overpromising on goals and timelines. 

Overly autonomous cooking tools and kitchen appliances have largely whiffed in the US market. While culinary robots like the Thermomix have made inroads in Europe and elsewhere, adoption in the US has been slow. Super smart ovens, including the June, Suvie and Brava, have likewise struggled to connect with consumers here.

Nosh Robotics, a smart home robotics company based in Bengaluru, India, is giving it a go with the launch of Nosh One It’s a $1,499 AI-powered cooking robot seven years in the making and the company says “it can handle the entire cooking process autonomously: ingredient selection, sautéing, plating and self-cleaning.” 

Advertisement

Read more: I Tried a Scan-to-Cook Meal Delivery Service. I’m Completely Obsessed

The Nosh does a few things that a slow cooker or Instant Pot doesn’t, namely, add the right amount of ingredients, cooking oils and spices from small chambers. But you still have to load the right ingredients for a given recipe into cartridges every time you cook. 

Advertisement

The cooking functionality is also limited. While the Nosh can portion, chop (roughly — no mincing or dicing), cook and stir food in its built-in pot using highly programmed recipes so you can walk away while the recipe completes, it can’t bake, roast, boil, sear or steam, making it limited in what it can effectively make. 

I saw it in a non-demo preview at CES earlier this year and spoke with reps about the Nosh One. CEO Mira Patel calls it “the first consumer robot that truly cooks for you,” though I was less certain of its potential and remain skeptical. Up close, and even with a deep explanation from the on-site reps, the pricey machine doesn’t seem worth the cost or the space it takes up on your counter, at least for most home cooks. 

Advertisement

If your dinner menu consists mostly of stews, soups, stir-fries and curries, the Nosh should be able to shoulder a good deal of cooking. Most other foods will have to be cooked the old-fashioned way. 

It’s also big and bulky. Weighing 57 pounds with a 21-by-17-inch frame, it’ll command a good deal of counter space, much more than an Instant Pot or a slow cooker, both of which execute the same basic cooking tasks, albeit with far fewer automated functions.

How it works

Advertisement

At the core of the device is NoshOS, a proprietary culinary AI trained on thousands of cooking techniques and cuisines from around the world. Multiple sensors monitor texture, moisture, aroma compounds and browning levels in real time, dynamically adjusting heat, timing and seasoning as a dish cooks. Built-in machine vision identifies produce, proteins and pantry items, allowing the system to suggest meals based on ingredients already on hand.

Ingredient cartridges, which are reusable and dishwasher-safe, store fresh items and dispense them with “millimeter-level precision.” After each meal, a closed-loop wash cycle automatically cleans the cooking chamber, utensils and internal surfaces.

Pricing and availability

The Nosh One is available to preorder on Kickstarter until March 25, starting at $1,499, with shipments expected in early summer 2026. Early backers receive a complimentary set of ingredient cartridges and access to the Nosh Founders Recipe Library, featuring dishes from award-winning chefs. According to the company, additional attachments, specialty cooking modules and premium recipe packs are planned for later in 2026.

As always, before contributing to any campaign, read the crowdfunding site’s policies — in this case, Kickstarter — to find out your rights (and refund policies, or the lack thereof) before and after a campaign ends.

from the no-service,-no-protection dept

Black Lives Matter. All Cops Are Bastards.

These are not temporary catchphrases. These are universal and forever.

And leave it to a cop to ensure we never forget either of these concepts. A foot pursuit that ended in the shooting of Connecticut resident Dyshan Best would otherwise just be a footnote in cop history if some cops hadn’t decided to be the bastards they wanted to see in the world and make it extremely clear they felt a Black life didn’t matter.

The internal investigation of the shooting of a Black man by Bridgeport PD officers delivered unsurprising results:

Dyshan Best, 39, was shot in the back last year as he fled from officers in Bridgeport, Connecticut. A report released Tuesday by the state’s inspector general found that the shooting was justified because Best had a gun in his hand and the officer pursuing him had reasons to fear for his own safety.

All the stuff we expect to see in these reports is here, beginning with the assumption that a gun is a threat even if it’s not pointed at officers to the de rigueur “fear for my safety” justification for shooting a fleeing person.

What’s somewhat expected — but still somehow surprising — is what happened after the apparently justified shooting:

The first ambulance called to take Best to the hospital arrived at the scene at 6:02 p.m., about 14 minutes after the shooting. However, at the urging of other officers, that ambulance was used to take away a white police officer, Erin Perrotta, who had been involved in the foot chase, the report said.

Paramedics reported that Perrotta declined treatment in the ambulance.

“I am fine, I just needed to get out of here,” she said, according to the report. Another officer described Perrotta at the time as “visibly hysterical (crying and breathing rapidly) and had blood all over her uniform,” the report said.

Advertisement

That’s right. The ambulance sent to pick up the person police officers had just shot was instead handed over to Officer Erin Perrotta, who — as the Inspector General’s report notes — was enduring the relative hardship of a “mild anxiety attack.”

The second ambulance didn’t show up for another ten minutes. The person with actual bullet holes in him didn’t hit the ER until 14 minutes after Officer “Anxiety Attack” Perrotta arrived at the hospital. The officer who was never in any danger of dying got nearly a 15-minute head start on her medical treatment.

The person they’d shot didn’t make it.

Best died at 7:41 p.m. as he was undergoing treatment for the gunshot wound, which damaged his liver and right kidney.

Meanwhile, Officer Perrotta’s employer only seems interested in outlasting this news cycle:

A spokesperson for Bridgeport police, Shawnna White, declined to comment Wednesday when asked about Perrotta taking the first ambulance. She said in an email that the police department’s Internal Affairs Division would conduct its own investigation.

Sometimes the lack of direct response says more than a direct response would. Perrotta is apparently currently on administrative leave “due to an unrelated matter.” That either means Perrotta does bad stuff often enough she’s already given the department another reason to sideline her or that the department has found other stuff to add to this headline-generating “#mefirst” effort by the officer to grease the wheels for the inevitable firing.

Whatever happens now won’t budge the needle for US law enforcement agencies. But for the rest of us not standing on the inside of the Thin Blue Line, this incident says the quiet part loud: Black lives don’t matter… not when it’s a cop claiming they can’t breathe.

Filed Under: black lives matter, bridgeport police, connecticut, dyshan best, police oversight, police shooting

An information stealer called VoidStealer uses a new approach to bypass Chrome’s Application-Bound Encryption (ABE) and extract the master key for decrypting sensitive data stored in the browser.

The novel method is stealthier and relies on hardware breakpoints to extract the v20_master_key,  used for both encryption and decryption, directly from the browser’s memory, without requiring privilege escalation or code injection.

A report from Gen Digital, the parent company behind the Norton, Avast, AVG, and Avira brands, notes that this is the first case of an infostealer observed in the wild to use such a mechanism.

Google introduced ABE in Chrome 127, released in June 2024, as a new protection mechanism for cookies and other sensitive browser data. It ensures that the master key remains encrypted on disk and cannot be recovered through normal user-level access.

Decrypting the key requires the Google Chrome Elevation Service, which runs as SYSTEM, to validate the requesting process.

However, this system has been bypassed by multiple infostealer malware families and has even been demonstrated in open-source tools. Although Google implemented fixes and improvements to block these bypasses, new malware versions reportedly continued to succeed using other methods.

“VoidStealer is the first infostealer observed in the wild adopting a novel debugger-based Application-Bound Encryption (ABE) bypass technique that leverages hardware breakpoints to extract the v20_master_key directly from browser memory,” says Vojtěch Krejsa, threat researcher at Gen Digital.

VoidStealer is a malware-as-a-service (MaaS) platform advertised on dark web forums since at least mid-December 2025. The malware introduced the new ABE bypass mechanism in version 2.0.

Stealing the master key

VoidStealer’s trick to extract the master key is to target a short moment when Chrome’s v20_master_key is briefly present in memory in plaintext state during decryption operations.

Specifically, VoidStealer starts a suspended and hidden browser process, attaches it as a debugger, and waits for the target browser DLL (chrome.dll or msedge.dll) to load.

When loaded, it scans the DLL for a specific string and the LEA instruction that references it, using that instruction’s address as the hardware breakpoint target.

Next, it sets that breakpoint across existing and newly created browser threads, waits for it to trigger during startup while the browser is decrypting protected data, then reads the register holding a pointer to the plaintext v20_master_key and extracts it with ‘ReadProcessMemory.’

Gen Digital explains that the ideal time for the malware to do this is during browser startup, when the application loads ABE-protected cookies early, forcing the decryption of the master key.

The researchers explained that VoidStealer likely did not invent this technique but rather adopted it from the open-source project ‘ElevationKatz,’ part of the ChromeKatz cookie-dumping toolset that demonstrates weaknesses in Chrome.

Although there are some differences in the code, the implementation appears to be based on ElevationKatz, which has been available for  more than a year.

BleepingComputer has contacted Google with a request for a comment on this bypass method being used by threat actors, but a reply was not available by publishing time.

Malware is getting smarter. The Red Report 2026 reveals how new threats use math to detect sandboxes and hide in plain sight.

Download our analysis of 1.1 million malicious samples to uncover the top 10 techniques and see if your security stack is blinded.

Download The Report

Strands is the NYT’s latest word game after the likes of Wordle, Spelling Bee and Connections – and it’s great fun. It can be difficult, though, so read on for my Strands hints.

Want more word-based fun? Then check out my NYT Connections today and Quordle today pages for hints and answers for those games, and Marc’s Wordle today page for the original viral word game.

It doesn’t sound like Crimson Desert, the recently released prequel to Black Desert Online, will support Intel Arc GPUs anytime soon, if at all. On the game’s FAQ page, its developer Pearl Abyss advised players expecting Arc support to apply for a refund. “If you purchased the game expecting Intel Arc support, please refer to the refund policy of the platform where the game was purchased for available options,” the company wrote. Apparently, though, it’s not from lack of guidance from Intel. The chipmaker told Wccftech that it reached out to Pearl Abyss “many times” over the past several years.

The Intel spokesperson said that the company has tried to help the developer “test, validate, and optimize support for Intel graphics” for years. Intel also tried to provide the developer “early hardware, drivers, and engineering resources” across several generations of GPUs, “including Alchemist, Battlemage, Meteor Lake, and Lunar Lake.” The chipmaker said it’s “hugely disappointed that players using Intel graphics hardware” can’t play the game, but that it remains “ready to assist Pearl Abyss” however it can. It also advised players to reach out directly to the developer for “details on the choice not to enable Intel support at launch.”

Pearl Abyss, of course, doesn’t have the obligation to tweak the game so that it runs on PCs with Intel Arc GPUs. The good news is that since the title came out just a few days ago, it will still be easy to get a refund. Steam, where Crimson Desert is now one of the top-selling games, issues refunds within two weeks of purchase.