Life is busy enough without wasting time on spammers, scammers, and telemarketers. Whether you are suffering insistent injury lawyers, fraudulent car warranty representatives, or a drunk-dialing ex, there is a way to stop the endless calls and messages. The major carriers and phone manufacturers have upped their game against unwanted calls and messages in recent years, so let’s look at how you can effectively block them.

We also have guides on how to avoid spam with disposable contact info, guard against smishing attacks, and avoid phishing scams. Frustrated by the whole situation and curious why no one’s been able to stop the barrage of spam calls? Check out WIRED senior writer Lily Hay Newman’s article on our perpetual robocall hell.

What to Keep in Mind

Before we dive into blocking options, there are a few things to know:

• If possible, don’t answer any calls from numbers you don’t recognize. Callers with anything important to say will likely leave a message anyway. Sadly, this won’t work for people with businesses or interests that involve a lot of calls from unknown numbers.
• Never click on a link or attachment in a spam text message because it could trigger malware. If possible, avoid opening them altogether.
• Never respond to a spam text message, as it will confirm that your number is valid.
• If you are concerned that the call or message might be from a legitimate company, try typing the number into your preferred search engine. While it can be tricky to confirm a scammer’s number, it is easy to verify a legitimate one. If you can’t find anything on the number, be cautious and ignore it. We will explain how to block numbers, but it’s also important to report unwanted calls and messages. If it’s telemarketing, scam, or spam, you can report it to the FTC here. You can also add your number to the Do Not Call Registry, though it only works for sales calls from reputable companies. Sadly, many organizations and scammers ignore it. We will go into how to report numbers to manufacturers, carriers, and third parties below. The more people do this, the easier it is to identify and preemptively block or label nuisance numbers.

How to Block Calls and Texts on an iPhone

Apple via Simon Hill

It’s easy to block individual numbers on your iPhone. Here’s how:

A memory shortage that isn’t expected to ease before the end of 2027 will drive global PC shipments down 11.3% in 2026, even as Apple’s MacBook Neo puts new pressure on PC rivals.

Market research firm IDC expects conditions to worsen through the year, with PC shipments projected to fall 20% year over year in the fourth quarter. Rising memory costs are limiting product availability and making it harder for manufacturers to maintain broad product lineups.

PC shipments still grew 3% during the first quarter of 2026, but that came from buyers accelerating purchases ahead of expected price increases and shortages. Much of that demand was pulled forward from later in the year, masking a market facing tighter supplies and a weaker outlook.

MacBook Neo dodges a weakening market

Apple’s MacBook Neo is helping defy a bigger slowdown in the PC market. Stronger-than-expected demand for the lower-cost notebook led IDC to raise its notebook forecast.

The device is also increasing competitive pressure across the industry. Research manager Jitesh Ubrani said PC makers are likely to respond with new chips, operating system improvements, and more aggressive promotions.

Strong demand for the MacBook Neo is helping support notebook sales. Image credit: IDC

Strong demand for the MacBook Neo is helping support notebook sales as higher costs and supply constraints weigh on the broader market. IDC also said the notebook is helping keep some lower-cost options available, easing part of the price pressure affecting the industry.

Higher PC prices are likely to persist

IDC expects average PC selling prices to climb 17% in 2026 as memory shortages continue to push costs higher. The firm also expects prices to remain above 2025 levels even after memory production expands over the next two years.

Buyers considering new hardware may face fewer opportunities to avoid those increases. PC makers are dealing with tighter component supplies, rising costs, and weaker demand across much of the market.

Those pressures are colliding with broader economic challenges and increased competition across the PC industry. Apple’s MacBook Neo is generating enough demand to influence notebook forecasts and increase competitive pressure throughout the market.

Smart locks are a highly visible part of your home that you’ll use just about every day, so it’s important to find a reliable pick that meshes well with your smart home. Here are the factors you should be thinking about as you shop.

Full deadbolt or retrofit

Most smart locks will replace your existing lock, including the interior thumbturn, the exterior keyhole and the deadbolt in the middle. Locks like those will also come with their keys, replacing the ones you use now.

Others, like the August Smart Lock, and the Lockly fingerprint model, are designed instead to work with at least some of your existing lock hardware. With a retrofit lock like that, you probably won’t need new keys and might not even need to swap out the deadbolt. Locks like those can sometimes be a better fit for apartments, where the building owners might not allow you to replace the entire lock.

Modes of access

Different smart locks will take different approaches to letting you in. On a basic level, most smart locks will let you lock and unlock the door wirelessly from your phone, using an app. Others add in keypads for coded entry, which can help you rely on your keys a little less while also making it easier to share access with others. Some lock add fingerprint or palm scanning to let you inside with biometrics. There are also keypad and NFC options, even face scanning in some cases.

Apple has also added a Home Key feature in iOS15 that lets you store a digital house key in your Apple Wallet, which lets you open compatible smart locks using the NFC radio in your iPhone or Apple Watch. Many other brands have followed suit with digital passes that guests can download on their phones with the right apps.

So, what’s right for you? Going into an app for door access isn’t ideal unless you are controlling it remotely. That’s why we like Bluetooth and NFC passes that can work with a wave of your phone, as well as fingerprint sensors and similar options that are keyed to individuals and work at a touch at any time. But a keypad has its advantages as well, since it allows for temporary code handouts or limited-time access without someone needing their phone or a specific app to use.

Platform compatibility and Matter

If your household includes multiple types of smart home devices, then your best bet is to control them all from a single smart home platform. That way, you won’t need to juggle multiple apps to keep everything automated. The most popular picks are Amazon Alexa, the Google Home app and the Google Assistant voice controls that come with it, and Apple HomeKit, which brings Siri into play. Samsung SmartThings is another option for a hub-centric smart home.

That brings us to Matter. Matter (and its tagalong communication protocol Thread) is an important smart home protocol designed in coordination with major brands, including Google, Amazon, Apple, and many others. It helps guarantee compatibility across different platforms and adds extra security and data transfer benefits, which buyers should definitely be watching for.

Currently, smart lock companies are still adopting the Matter standard. Our top pick uses it and is one of the best options we’ve found. Schlage has begun to adopt the standard for locks like its upcoming Schlage Sense Pro, but it hasn’t made its way to our Schlage Smart Lever pick quite yet, and the same goes for Yale Assure. Brands like Aqara are now including built-in Matter support with their latest locks. August has also announced it’s working to bring Matter to its smart locks, so in some cases, it just be a “matter” of waiting for the right firmware update.

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Security and privacy

Smart locks aren’t quite as data-sensitive as devices with built-in cameras and microphones, but you’ll still want to make sure that you’re keeping things secure. Most, if not all of your options will use some form of encryption to keep the wireless transmissions between your lock and your phone or home network secure. You should also look for locks that use two-factor authentication to keep your account safe from malicious logins. As with any connected device in your home, you’ll want to be sure to keep your lock updated to the latest firmware and to set a strong password in the app.

As for lockpicking and other physical concerns, you can look for the lock’s ANSI grade to get a sense of its durability, and how well it might stand up against a brute-force entry attack. ANSI grade 3 is the most basic rating, but a growing number of smart locks offer ANSI grade 2 or grade 1 ratings, which tell you that they’re built with commercial-grade durability. If you’re concerned about forced entries, a lock like that might be a good investment.

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Design considerations

Your smart lock is going to sit right on the front of your home’s exterior, so it’s worth aiming for something you won’t hate looking at. Some smart locks go out of their way to show off their gadgety features with light-up touchscreens, color-coded LED indicator lights and tech-minded designs. Others take the opposite approach, doing their best to blend in and look just like a standard lock, from the outside at least. Picking a preference between the two approaches will help you narrow your options.

You’ll also want to consider how the lock stays powered. Most smart locks will run off four AA batteries, but some take a different approach. The minimalistic Level Lock +, for instance, runs off two AA batteries that sits inside of the deadbolt itself to keep things extra compact. Meanwhile, Eufy’s touchscreen smart lock runs off of a rechargeable battery pack.

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi support has now become common for smart locks, but it’s important to look at the details. Some locks don’t have built-in Wi-Fi, but only support it if you buy an additional hub.

Fusion startup Xcimer Energy on Wednesday flipped the switch on its Phoenix laser system, which the company says is the largest privately owned example in the world.

Xcimer’s approach to fusion power is modeled after the National Ignition Facility (NIF), which proved in December 2022 that a controlled fusion reaction could release more power than required to ignite it.

The NIF trained 192 laser beams on a fuel target smaller than a pencil eraser. The energy from the lasers hit the gold target. As the lasers obliterate the gold target, their energy is converted into X-rays, which are focused on the fuel pellet inside, compressing it until atoms in the fuel fuse and release energy.

The company is betting that more powerful, less complex lasers will help turn NIF’s concept for fusion power into something more profitable.

Xcimer’s plans for a fusion power plant call for two lasers capable of firing in microsecond-long pulses. Light from those pulses will be fed through a compression system, of sorts, which will delivers the lasers’ energy to the fuel target in nanoseconds. The quicker the fuel is compressed, the more likely it is to generate usable fusion reactions.

Phoenix is a step toward an eventual power plant. The system uses excimer amplification, similar to those used in semiconductor manufacturing but significantly more powerful. At full strength, the krypton-fluoride laser generates over 1 kilojoule of energy, Xcimer told TechCrunch, and its core is 38 meters long. 

While that may be the most powerful privately owned laser, it’s still a fraction of what the company says it will need for a commercial power plant, which could exceed 12 megajoules.

Xcimer hopes to complete a prototype in 2028 before working on a larger system that it hopes will produce at least as much power as it consumes. Sometime in the mid-2030s, it is planning to build its first commercial scale power plant. 

After objecting to turn over relevant emails during discovery in a lawsuit brought on by Elon Musk, the judge is forcing the matter. Musk’s email accounts must be submitted for review.

Apple and OpenAI were sued by Elon Musk’s xAI, now owned by SpaceX, due to alleged anticompetitive practices. The trial hasn’t been going well for Musk so far, as it was accused of destroying and withholding evidence previously.

On Tuesday, Judge Mark Pittman responded to Elon Musk’s objections over his various email accounts. The objections were overturned, and business email accounts owned by Elon Musk for SpaceX and Tesla must be turned over for discovery.

Even though the case was brought on by X and xAI, the emails for Musk’s other companies were found to be relevant due to how he’s used them. The judge cites that business conducted for X and xAI occurred through various accounts, including several email addresses and Xchat accounts.

The case has been moving at a snail’s pace since it was brought on in August 2025. In May, SVP of Software Engineering Craig Federighi was brought in as a document custodian.

Current Apple CEO Tim Cook was also requested as a custodian, but that was denied.

Pointless lawsuits

It isn’t clear how long these proceedings might go, as the claims themselves are quite baseless. Musk has asserted that Apple and OpenAI worked together to prevent other AI solutions from being viable alternatives on Apple’s platforms.

ChatGPT does frequently chart in the top five free apps on the App Store, but other AI apps overtake it from time to time. xAI, X, and other Elon Musk properties never chart as high simply because they’re not as popular.

In fact, X is a shadow of what used to be Twitter due to the extremist views and sometimes illegal content that persist on the platform.

The claims are even more absurd given that OpenAI is reportedly unhappy with how its partnership with Apple turned out. Also, Apple is also now working with Google to use Gemini as the foundation of its future models.

It seems that Musk could have saved everyone a lot of time and money and focused on building more desirable platforms. Instead, we all have to watch the world’s richest man throw tantrums about perceived slights.

Operating systems are great things to have for general purpose computing, but sometimes they can just get in the way. There’s RAM overhead and processor cycles required for all that operating, after all. For something like a game system, it seems unnecessary. The NES certainly did well enough without an OS, as did its various successors for several console generations.

[Inkbox] wanted to get back to those heady days by programming bare-metal games for a Rasberry Pi 3 that had sat unused since 2016. Games are on cartridge, running bare metal, in assembly — as God and Masayuki Uemura intended. Also, the console is a dodecahedron, because the name GameCube was already taken.

The GitHub link above doesn’t exactly have documentation, at least as of this writing, so you’ll need to watch the video to get the full details. The dodecahedron form factor might not be ideal for packing away in a bag, but as a handheld we have to admit it does look comfortable to hold. Two faces of the dodecahedron get a half-dozen buttons each, which are wired to a GPIO pin on the Pi via a Schmitt trigger for hardware debounce. Like all good consoles, it uses cartridges, these ones being adapted from SD cards on large PCBs derived from a project we featured before.

That all sounds great, but it’s the assembly programming we’re really interested in — skip to around the seven-minute mark in the video for that. Ultimately it’s a build video, so not the ideal tutorial for ARM assembly programming, but it might not be a bad introduction for some. Unfortunately you don’t get line-by-line of the PacMan game he put together — but he does have it in the repository for you to examine. The repo also has STLs if you want to make a dodecahedron of your own.

Of course he’s got a RetroPi cartridge as well, loaded with emulators, and we suspect that’s mostly how this GameDodecahedron will get used. Still, we’ll always have a soft spot for assembly code and projects that use it — be it on ARM, good old 6502, the open-source RISC V architecture, or even the absolute monster of op codes that is x86.

Format: Would you prefer wearing a ring or a wrist-based device? If you want something understated that you can wear all the time and don’t mind not having a screen to glance at, then a ring would be ideal. If having a watch on your wrist is comfortable, then a smartwatch or wrist-based tracker may be the right choice. 

Compatibility: If you’re an Apple user, ensure your fitness tracker is compatible with iOS. The same goes if you’re an Android user.

Storage capacity: For those who don’t want their fitness tracker to be dependent on their phone, look at a device with its own storage capacity. 

Special features: Before purchasing a fitness tracker, consider the health metrics that are important to you for your favorite workouts. If you’d like your tracker to do more than monitor your fitness, you’ll be better off with a smartwatch like the Pixel Watch 4 or Apple Watch SE 3.

Wi-Fi or Bluetooth: If you’re the type of person who likes to leave their phone behind when working out but still needs internet access, ensure your fitness tracker has Wi-Fi. 

GPS? For those who run, hike or walk and want to keep track of metrics like distance and pace without their phone, choose a fitness tracker that has built-in GPS.

Screen size: Once you decide you want a fitness tracker with a screen, make sure it fits your personal preferences. A smaller screen may be better if you prefer for it to be less obvious that you’re wearing a fitness tracker on your wrist.

Battery life: How often do you want to be charging your fitness tracker? If frequently charging your devices is a pet peeve, ensure your fitness tracker of choice has a long battery life, especially for your preferred workouts. 

Water resistance: Individuals who work out by swimming or those who enjoy taking a dip in the pool after exercising will want a fitness tracker that is water-resistant. Confirm your device is rated for the depth you plan to swim at.

Subscription cost: It’s common for fitness trackers to come with the added cost of a subscription, particularly if you want to access all available features or require extra features for your workout or fitness goals. To guarantee that a fitness tracker is in your budget, check not only the price of the device, but also how much your subscription of choice will run you over the course of a year.