Cheap to run, comfortable to wrap yourself in and easily big enough for two, the Morphy Richards EverCosy Large Luxury Striped Fleece Electric Heated Throw is a cheap way to keep warm.
Brilliant value
Cheap to run
Comfortable to use
Flexible heat and timer settings
Washable
Remote’s lights are bright
Key Features
Review Price: £99.99
Nine heat settings
From a gentle heat to a more intense warmth.
Timer
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From one to nine hours.
Washable
Machine washable.
Introduction
Large enough for two, the Morphy Richards EverCosy Large Luxury Striped Fleece Electric Heated Throw is a great way to stay warm without having to crank up the heating.
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It’s a touch slow to heat up and doesn’t reach the top temperatures as some rivals, but it’s cheap to run and has very flexible control.
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Design and features
As comfortable as a regular blanket
Available in three sizes
Flexible controls
At 200 x 180cm, the EverCosy Large Luxury Striped Fleece Electric Heated Throw is large enough to cover a King-sized bed, big enough to wrap around yourself or large enough to easily cover two people sat on a sofa.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
If you prefer, there’s a small version available (160 x 130cm), which is better for one person. Both versions are available in green, blue or the mocha that I have on review.
The EverCosy Large Luxury Striped Fleece Electric Heated Throw is thick enough to use as a regular blanket, but folds up neatly when not in use. Just be careful not to put anything heavy on top, as this can damage the heating wires.
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Criss-crossing between the inner and outer layers are the heating wires that heat up the blanket. These wires are quite thin and it takes a bit of hunting to find one with a hand. That’s good in terms of comfort, as the thin wires make the throw more flexible than some rivals, and this throw is comfortable to use as a throw, heated or not.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
Heating controls are provided by the plug-in remote. Ideally, on a throw this size, I’d want dual controls for two people, but there’s a single control that manages the entire throw. The plug is quite chunky, but given the size of the throw, it’s easy to move the connector where you won’t feel it. And, as the connector is on the outside, the inner part of the throw has just a small plastic disc.
There are nine heating levels and a timer that operates in hourly increments up to nine hours. I like the flexibility on offer, but would prefer the remote’s screen to turn off once set, as it’s quite bright. That’s more of an issue if you want to use this throw at night, as I found the remote lit up my bedroom a little too much.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
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Overheat protection is built-in, and the throw will shut off if it gets too hot. As with other heated throws, the EverCosy Large Luxury Striped Fleece Electric Heated Throw isn’t designed to be sat on.
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You can wash the throw at 40°C, once the remote has been detached, but you can’t tumble dry this model.
Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
Performance
Cheap to run
Heats evenly
Can be a bit slow to warm up
I found the EverCosy Large Luxury Striped Fleece Electric Heated Throw relatively slow to heat up, even when set to setting nine. A gentle heat starts to come through, and then it takes a good ten minutes or so to hit the maximum temperature. In comparison, the Dreamland Hygge Days Luxury Faux Fur Warming Throw warms much faster, I’m guessing because its thicker heating wires can pump out more heat.
The flip side is that the EverCosy Large Luxury Striped Fleece Electric Heated Throw can be used on any of its heating settings for extended periods, whereas the Dreamland throw’s higher settings are for heat-up, with the lower settings designed for longer use.
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Using a thermal camera, you can see how the heating wires are arranged in loops, with a small gap at the top.
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Image Credit (Trusted Reviews)
While the EverCosy Large Luxury Striped Fleece Electric Heated Throw might be slow(ish) to warm, the wide range of heating options make it very flexible. Sat in a cold, draughty Victorian living room that was a chilly 13.5°C, the EverCosy Large Luxury Striped Fleece Electric Heated Throw kept me warm on setting nine, taking around 15 minutes of time to get to its maximum temperature.
I would say that the higher heat settings (say, seven to nine) can feel too hot after prolonged use of an hour or more, so on a cold night, I tend to turn the power setting down to five after 15 to 20 minutes.
On its maximum power setting, the blanket peaked at just below 160W, although the blanket then modulates power to maintain its temperature. After 15 minutes, the blanket had used 0.03kWh of power, which is just over 1p at the current price cap of 28p per kWh.
Turning the blanket down to five, I found that it used 0.04kWh in an hour, which is just over 1p at the current price cap. That’s decent for a way to heat yourself, and cheaper than whole-room heating alternatives.
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On slightly warmer days and evenings, a setting of three, four or five only does the trick to the take the chill off.
Having such a large throw is also a boon. With just one person, I found it easy to wrap the throw around me for overall warmth; with two people, there’s still enough excess fabric that each person can position the throw how they want, without pulling fabric off their partner.
Should you buy it?
You want a large heated throw
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If you want something you can use on the bed, on the sofa or wrapped around you, this throw is great value.
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You want something more permanent
If you want something you can’t see or that has dual controls, a regular heated underblanket might be better.
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Final Thoughts
Soft to the touch and as comfortable to wrap around yourself as a regular blanket, the Morphy Richards EverCosy Large Luxury Striped Fleece Electric Heated Throw has the added benefit that it’s powered and keeps you warm for under 1p per minute.
It’s not the fastest to heat up, but once it gets going, it produces everything from a gentle heat to a more intense burst. With plenty of material to cover a king-sized bed or two people on a sofa, it’s super flexible.
Prefer something to go under your bed? Check out the guide to the best electric blankets.
How We Test
We test every electric blanket we review thoroughly over an extended period of time. We use standard tests to compare features properly. We’ll always tell you what we find. We never, ever, accept money to review a product.
Instagram is one of the most used social media apps today. People share photos, videos, and Reels every day. If you noticed your post getting more attention, you might be curious to know who shared it. While there is no direct list of usernames available, Instagram does offer some helpful information.
Can You See Who Shared Your Instagram Post?
No, Instagram does not allow you to see who shared your post. It keeps this information private. However, if you change to a professional account, you will be able to see how many times your post has been shared.
Switch to a Professional Account
To see how many times your post was shared, you need a professional account. Personal accounts do not show shared insights. You can switch to either a Creator or Business account in your settings. Once you switch, you will get access to Instagram Insights. Follow these steps:
Go to your profile.
Tap the menu icon (the three lines) in the top corner.
Open Settings and Privacy.
Tap Account type and tools.
Select Switch to professional account.
Select Creator or Business.
Check Shares Using Insights
Insights will show you how your posts are performing. To check the share count:
Open your Instagram profile.
Choose the post you want to check.
Tap View Insights below the post.
This section displays likes, comments, saves, and the share count indicated by a paper airplane icon. Instagram keeps the names private, but it shows the total number of shares.
Furthermore, if you are using a personal account, you cannot see post insights. Instagram does not show share numbers for personal profiles. If you want to track shares and other data, you will need to switch to a professional account.
What About Story Shares?
If someone shares your post to their Story and tags you, you will receive a notification. You can then tap it and view their Story. But if they don’t tag you, Instagram won’t notify you. Also, you can only see the Story for 24 hours.
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Moreover, the same rules apply to Reels as regular posts. If you’re using a professional account, you can check Reel shares through the Insights section. Just open the Reel and tap View Insights to view the share count. Instagram keeps the names private and only shows the total number.
Xflow, an Indian fintech startup, has secured backing from both Stripe and PayPal Ventures in a $16.6 million funding round. The investment comes as the company works to carve out a position in cross-border B2B payments, a market still dominated by banks and manual processes.
The Series A round was led by General Catalyst, with participation from existing investors Square Peg, Stripe, Lightspeed, and Moore Capital, while PayPal Ventures joined as a new backer. The all-equity round values the Bengaluru-based startup at $85 million post-investment and brings its total funding to more than $32 million to date.
Despite rapid digitization in domestic payments, cross-border B2B transfers for Indian exporters remain heavily reliant on banks, often with limited visibility into fees, settlement timelines, and the final amount received in rupees. The friction is particularly acute for larger exporters moving millions of dollars into India to fund salaries and local operations, creating an opening for fintech infrastructure players such as Xflow that promise greater transparency and speed in international money movement.
Founded in 2021, Xflow provides cross-border payment infrastructure for businesses ranging from exporters and SaaS firms to platforms and freelancers, enabling them to collect international payments, manage foreign exchange, and settle funds in India.
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“Cross-border B2B payments were stuck in a different age compared to UPI,” co-founder Anand Balaji (pictured above, center) said in an interview, referring to India’s widely used instant domestic payments network, the Unified Payments Interface.
Balaji, who previously helped build out Stripe’s India business, founded Xflow with former Stripe colleagues Ashwin Bhatnagar (pictured above, right) and Abhijit Chandrasekaran (pictured above, left).
Last year, Xflow said it enabled Indian businesses to collect payments from more than 100 countries in over 25 currencies. It processed close to $1 billion in annualized cross-border payment volume last year, marking roughly 10-fold growth from the same period in 2024, Balaji told TechCrunch.
Techcrunch event
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Boston, MA | June 9, 2026
According to the company, its customer base has expanded to about 15,000 businesses spanning SaaS firms, global capability centers (which are offshore units that multinationals operate in India), IT services exporters, freelancers, and fintech platforms.
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Transaction sizes vary widely by segment, with global capability centers averaging about $1 million to $2 million per transaction, goods exporters around $30,000 to $40,000, and freelancers roughly $3,000, according to Balaji.
Xflow is positioning itself as a payments infrastructure provider rather than a direct payments application, offering APIs that allow platforms and exporters to embed cross-border money movement into their own products.
“We didn’t want to build the next Wise — we want to power the next thousand Wises,” Balaji said.
The startup has also introduced an AI-based foreign exchange tool to help finance teams optimize the timing of currency conversions. Xflow says the feature has generated incremental gains for some customers through data-driven foreign exchange decisions.
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The tool allows businesses to set target conversion rates rather than accepting prevailing bank quotes. Balaji likened the feature to limit orders in trading — instructions to buy or sell only at a specified price.
“What we’ve added is the prediction layer and the ability to actually set a limit order,” he said. The model currently provides a three-day forecast with about 92% confidence, Balaji said, though TechCrunch could not independently verify that figure.
Xflow faces competition from banks that still dominate large cross-border B2B transfers, as well as fintech players such as Wise, Payoneer, and Skydo at the lower end of the market. But Balaji said the startup’s focus on high-value transactions and API-led infrastructure differentiates it from many rivals.
The startup plans to deploy the new capital toward building additional products on top of its core payments infrastructure and securing regulatory licenses in new markets, Balaji said. Xflow is preparing to roll out import capabilities in the coming months and is pursuing licenses in markets including Singapore, while already holding a payments license in Canada, even as it remains focused on India as its primary market.
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Xflow said it has also received final authorization from the Reserve Bank of India for a Payment Aggregator–Cross Border (PA-CB) license covering both exports and imports. The startup has signed platform partnerships with Easebuzz and Drip Capital to embed its cross-border capabilities into their offerings.
Backing from Stripe and PayPal Ventures, Balaji said, has helped strengthen the startup’s credibility with banking and regulatory partners, even as it continues to work with multiple payment providers commercially.
The startup currently has about 65 employees as it scales its cross-border infrastructure business.
Finally, it has my two favorite things: drop-bar handlebars and a dropper seat post. I guess I should disclose here that my everyday analog ride is also a gravel bike, and that personally, I like to tool around on a long, relaxed frame with my hands sloppily splayed this way and that on comfortable padded drop bars. I’m on dirt and gravel a lot, but I’m just not a fan of super technical riding.
Also, everyone should have a dropper seat post. I took the bike out for multiple 15- to 20-mile rides over a few weeks. OK, it’s not that hard, physically, to ride for an hour with electric assist while listening to podcasts, but I appreciate being able to move my seat around quickly at stop lights when my butt and quads decide to stop working that well.
Even with these additions and the full MTB front and rear suspension, the bike weighs a surprisingly little 40 pounds for the large frame. From riding a lot of electric bikes, I’d estimate a bike with these specs to weigh around 60 or 65 pounds. (I estimated my XS frame to be around 35 pounds, but that’s just by feel.)
Everywhere at Once
Photograph: Adrienne So
There are a couple of mixed-surface routes I ride regularly that I’m somewhat reluctant to reveal because I worry some of you might see me there. One is a loop that travels around the northernmost point of Portland, Oregon, and goes through a couple sloughs; I also like Leif Erikson Trail, a 20-mile gravel trail in Forest Park, Mount Tabor, and the loop around Pier Park, which was one of the first places where anyone ever raced cyclocross and which is primarily now used by elementary schoolers on teeny mountain bikes.
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As someone who regularly rides a gravel bike, it is cool and freaky to ride a bike that is, to all appearances, a gravel bike, but then feels like a very cushy, premium electric mountain bike once you’re on it. It’s like nibbling what looks like a bit of bitter dark chocolate, and finding it full of puffy, sweet marshmallow. Here I am, braced to roll over some rocks, but … these tires are huge! This suspension is soft! What is this strange sensation? Is it comfort?
The ShinyHunters extortion gang has claimed responsibility for breaching Dutch telecommunications provider Odido and stealing millions of user records from its compromised systems.
Odido is one of the largest telecommunications companies in the Netherlands and offers mobile, broadband, and television services to millions of customers nationwide.
The company disclosed the breach on February 12, revealing that attackers downloaded the personal data of many of its users after gaining access to its customer contact system on February 7. However, Odido added that no Mijn Odido passwords, call details, location, data, billing data, or scans of identity documents were exposed during the incident.
According to the telecom firm, the exposed information varies per customer and may include a combination of full name, address and city of residence, mobile number, customer number, email address, IBAN (bank account number), date of birth, and some identification details (passport or driver’s license number and validity).
It also told local media at the time that the data breach affected 6.2 million customers and that the threat actors reached out to say they had stolen millions of user records.
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After discovering the incident, Odido has reported the breach to the Dutch Data Protection Authority, blocked the attackers’ access to its systems, and hired external cybersecurity experts to assist with incident response and mitigation.
An Odido spokesperson didn’t provide further information on the incident when asked about which threat group was behind the attack and whether they demanded a ransom “due to the ongoing investigations.”
While Odido has yet to attribute the attack, the ShinyHunters extortion gang has now added the company to its dark web leak site, claiming they’ve stolen nearly 21 million records containing data the company already revealed as exposed in the breach.
Odido on ShinyHunters leak site (BleepingComputer)
ShinyHunters also told BleepingComputer on Monday that the stolen data also contains internal corporate data and plaintext passwords.
“This is a final warning to come back to our chat and finish what we set out to do before we leak along with several annoying (digital) problems that’ll come your way,” the extortion gang says on the leak site. “Make the right decision, don’t be the next headline. You know where to find us.”
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However, an Odido spokesperson denied their claims in a statement to BleepingComputer, reiterating that “no passwords, call details, social security numbers, or billing data are involved.”
Some of their victims had their systems compromised in voice phishing (vishing) attacks targeting single sign-on (SSO) accounts at Google, Microsoft, and Okta, where the threat actors call employees while impersonating IT support staff and trick them into entering credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes on phishing sites that mimic their companies’ login portals.
As BleepingComputer first reported, the ShinyHunters group has also recently adopted device code vishing, abusing the OAuth 2.0 device authorization grant flow to obtain Microsoft Entra authentication tokens.
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After stealing their targets’ credentials and auth codes, the threat actors hijack the victims’ SSO accounts to breach connected enterprise services like Salesforce, Microsoft 365, Google Workspace, SAP, Slack, Adobe, Atlassian, Zendesk, Dropbox, and many others.
Modern IT infrastructure moves faster than manual workflows can handle.
In this new Tines guide, learn how your team can reduce hidden manual delays, improve reliability through automated response, and build and scale intelligent workflows on top of tools you already use.
King of Meat‘s reign is ending. The game will end service on April 9, less than a year after its October 2025 debut. The Amazon Games-published title will be playable until that date, but will then be taken entirely offline.
“Despite the creativity and innovation Glowmade brought to King of Meat, the game has unfortunately not found the audience we hoped for,” the announcement read.
Developer Glowmade had high hopes for King of Meat, its debut game, but it fell starkly short of expectations. The developer wanted a concurrent player count of at least 100,000, but peaked at 320, according to Insider Gaming. The game had a multi-million dollar marketing budget that included a video on MrBeast’s YouTube channel and custom-wrapped London buses. The company even made a pilot for an animated TV show. Here at Engadget, we were so-so on a preview version of the game.
December brought voluntary redundancies to Glowmade after previous assurances to staff. Anyone who has purchased King of Meat will be able to get a refund through their purchase platform and, in most cases, these refunds should process automatically by April 9.
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While it seems that King of Meat struggled to reach its audience, Amazon has a history of pulling games that are popular. Last fall, Amazon Games announced it would wind down support for New World: Aeternum, which first debuted in 2021. The news came as the division faced layoffs, but just that week the game had reached almost 50,000 concurrent players on Steam.
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: A team of researchers working at Quantinuum in the United Kingdom and QuSoft in the Netherlands has now developed a quantum algorithm that solves a specific sampling task — known as complement sampling — dramatically more efficiently than any classical algorithm. Their paper, published in Physical Review Letters, establishes a provable and verifiable quantum advantage in sample complexity: the number of samples required to solve a problem.
“We stumbled upon the core result of this work by chance while working on a different project,” Harry Buhrman, co-author of the paper, told Phys.org. “We had a set of items and two quantum states: one formed from half of the items, the other formed from the remaining half. Even though the two states are fundamentally distinct, we showed that a quantum computer may find it hard to tell which one it is given. Surprisingly, however, we then realized that transforming one state into the other is always easy, because a simple operation can swap between them.”
Asha Sharma, the new CEO of Microsoft Gaming, at Microsoft Ignite 2025. (Dan DeLong Photo for Microsoft)
“And the thing about games is, if you get good at one game, you can be good at any game. … They’re all hand-eye coordination and observing patterns.”
That’s a line from Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, Gabrielle Zevin’s 2022 novel about two friends who build a video game company from nothing — struggling with the tension between art and commerce, and ultimately with the challenges of operating a business at scale.
This describes almost perfectly what Asha Sharma will be attempting to do in her new role leading Microsoft’s Xbox and video-game business: She’ll need to take all the patterns she’s observed as an executive with Facebook, Instacart, Seattle startup Porch, and Microsoft’s AI platform, and apply them to a world she hasn’t played in before.
And get this: it’s one of her favorite books.
Speaking last year on Lenny Rachitsky’s podcast, Sharma mentioned she had read the novel every year for the past three years. “I love it so much,” she said, calling it a “beautiful story.”
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She didn’t mention on the podcast speed round that it’s a story about video games. It wasn’t really relevant at the time. But it is now, given the news Friday that Sharma will succeed 38-year Microsoft veteran Phil Spencer as CEO of Microsoft Gaming, in a shakeup that also saw Xbox President Sarah Bond — previously seen as Spencer’s likely successor — decide to leave.
Sharma was a surprise pick, in part because she has no prior video-game industry leadership experience, and limited background as a gamer, which is creating skepticism in gaming circles already. However, she has experience running large tech platforms, the clear trust of Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and a belief in the potential of AI to reshape every business.
On that last point, she quickly offered some reassurance to Microsoft employees and the broader universe of Xbox gamers in her introductory memo last week.
“As monetization and AI evolve and influence this future, we will not chase short-term efficiency or flood our ecosystem with soulless AI slop,” she wrote. “Games are and always will be art, crafted by humans, and created with the most innovative technology provided by us.”
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Sharma laid out three priorities in the memo: great games above all else, a recommitment to Xbox’s core console fans, and what she called the “future of play” — new business models and a shared platform where developers and players can create together.
She vowed not to treat the company’s iconic franchises as “static IP to milk and monetize,” and said she wants to return to “the renegade spirit that built Xbox in the first place.”
Her first act was promoting longtime studio chief Matt Booty to executive vice president and chief content officer, pairing her platform background with his decades of gaming credibility.
“My first job is simple,” she wrote. “Understand what makes this work and protect it.”
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The challenge ahead
There’s a lot to protect, and plenty of work to do.
Microsoft has been in gaming for decades, from early PC titles like Flight Simulator to the launch of the original Xbox console in 2001.
Under Spencer, the company made massive bets on expansion, acquiring ZeniMax Media and its family of studios — including Bethesda — for $7.5 billion in 2021, and then closing the $69 billion acquisition of Activision Blizzard in 2023, the largest gaming deal in history. That brought Call of Duty, World of Warcraft, Candy Crush, Diablo, and Overwatch under Microsoft’s roof, making it the third-largest gaming company in the world by revenue.
Spencer also expanded Xbox’s reach across PC, mobile, and cloud gaming, and built Game Pass into a major subscription service, transforming the division’s business model.
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But the financial picture has been rough. Microsoft’s gaming revenue fell 9% in the most recent quarter, with hardware revenue down 32%. The division represents about 7% of the company’s total revenue, and has faced pressure in recent years to meet aggressive profit targets.
Xbox’s challenge has not been a lack of talent or popular franchises. GeekWire gaming contributor Thomas Wilde observed that the biggest problem has been instability: waves of layoffs and studio closures that left even successful teams uncertain about their future.
In his memo about the transition, Nadella said Sharma brings “deep experience building and growing platforms, aligning business models to long-term value, and operating at global scale.”
The implication in the selection is clear: Xbox spans console, PC, mobile, and cloud platforms, requiring an operator who knows how to make all the pieces work together.
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That’s the job Sharma has done everywhere she’s been.
From Wisconsin to Redmond
Sharma’s career and biographical details have been widely scrutinized over the past few days, as the video game and business press have scrambled to figure out who this person is, who arrived seemingly out of the blue to lead one of Microsoft’s biggest consumer brands.
Now 37, she grew up in Wisconsin and started working at 17, with an early role at SC Johnson, according to a 2014 MarTech profile. She earned a bachelor’s degree in business from the University of Minnesota’s Carlson School of Management, and by the time she left college had worked at Cargill, Deloitte, and Microsoft, and lived abroad in Hungary.
As of last fall, she was a second-degree black belt in Taekwondo, explaining to Rachitsky on his podcast that the discipline is “more mental than it is physical.”
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She has been at Microsoft for two years, running the CoreAI product organization, the team behind Azure AI Studio, the company’s AI model catalog, and the developer tools for Microsoft Copilot. She was previously COO of Instacart, and before that VP of product at Meta, where she ran Messenger and Instagram Direct. She’s on the Home Depot and Coupang boards.
What’s lesser known is that she got her start at Microsoft, interning at the company and then working in marketing right out of college before leaving to help build Porch, the Seattle home services company, where she was COO during the company’s early years.
In a 2024 interview with GeekWire at Microsoft’s Build developer conference, not long after rejoining the company, Sharma talked about what brought her back. After years working across different types of organizations, she said, the lesson she drew from her career was the importance of working with great people on problems that matter.
She described feeling fortunate to be working on “some of the most important technology of our lifetime” at a critical juncture, with people embracing a growth mindset.
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Winning over the gamers
Part of what made Spencer so beloved among Xbox fans was that he was one of them — a lifelong gamer with a prolific achievement history and a habit of wearing gaming T-shirts under blazers at industry events.
Sharma knows she can’t replicate that overnight, but she’s clearly trying to close the gap.
Over the weekend, she began engaging directly with Xbox fans on social media, sharing her gamertag (AMRAHSAHSA, her name spelled backwards) and listing her top three games as “Halo, Valheim, Goldeneye” — Microsoft’s flagship franchise, a popular survival game, and classic title that first launched on the Nintendo 64 in 1997.
When one fan accused her account of being run by AI, she replied: “Beep Boop Beep Boop.”
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She’s also getting public support from inside Xbox. Longtime exec Aaron Greenberg, the division’s VP of marketing, wrote on X that after spending time with Sharma during the past week, he was “incredibly optimistic about the opportunity ahead under her leadership,” describing her as “exceptionally bright, eager to listen and learn from others, no ego.”
The activity history in Sharma’s Xbox profile, which IGN and Windows Central quickly dissected, shows she’s played about 30 titles since mid-January, gravitating toward narrative-driven indie games like Firewatch, Gone Home, and What Remains of Edith Finch — the kinds of games you’d play if you wanted to understand games as art, not just entertainment.
She unlocked her first achievement Jan. 15, about five weeks before the announcement of her new role. It was a Halo: Master Chief Collection milestone, fittingly titled “Your Journey Begins.”
It’s not even been a week since vivo introduced the new V70 series, which, btw, I reviewed for a month and loved, and the Chinese smartphone maker is already gearing up to introduce a third brother in the lineup. The vivo V70 FE. Speculations about the phone began a couple of days ago, when a tipster posted its specifications and said it could launch globally this month. Well, I have some bad news. The vivo V70 FE is not launching in February, not in India, at least. If it were, I’d already be using it. This means the launch is still a few weeks away, and we could see it by the end of March.
vivo V70 FE Specifications
Since vivo hasn’t confirmed any of the following specifications, take them with a grain of salt. Now that the disclaimer is out of the way, the V70 FE will reportedly come in three colors: Muse Purple, Ocean Blue, and Titanium Silver. The display will be a 6.83-inch 1.5K AMOLED panel that should support a 120Hz refresh rate. The design will take cues from the V70, featuring flat sides and panels, but it will differ by housing a vertical camera module similar to those on Samsung phones. Speaking of the cameras, there will be two of them, including a pretty sizeable 200-megapixel primary sensor with OIS, coupled with an 8MP ultrawide lens.
Everything will be powered by the MediaTek Dimensity 7360 Turbo processor, which scores around 1 million in AnTuTu and should be a decent performer for the price. Storage variants could be three: 8GB+256GB, 12GB+256GB, and 8GB+512 GB. And OriginOS 6 will be running the show on top of Android 16. The leaks also suggest 6 years of Android updates, but that seems unlikely, since even vivo’s flagship phones don’t offer that level of support. Another highlight should be the 7,000 mAh battery with support for 90W fast wired charging. As for protection, the V70 FE will be IP68 and IP69 certified.
Considering the recent price hikes for many phones, launching the vivo V70 FE makes a lot of sense. It’ll be a pretty compelling option for people shopping in the 30K segment, and while vivo hasn’t confirmed the India launch yet, I’m pretty sure it’ll make its way here next month. So, if you’re planning to buy a new phone, maybe hold off a bit, as the 200MP main camera, coupled with a new design, does look interesting.
The US Department of Defense has reportedly reached a deal to use Elon Musk’s Grok in its classified systems, according to Axios. That follows news that the Pentagon is currently in a dispute with another AI company, Anthropic, over limits on its technology for things like mass surveillance.
Last year, the White ordered Grok, along with ChatGPT, Gemini and Anthropic’s Claude to be approved for government use. Up until now, though, only Anthropic’s model has been allowed for the military’s most sensitive tasks in intelligence, weapons development and battlefield operations. Claude was reportedly used in the Venezuelan raid in which the US military exfiltrated the country’s president, Nicolás Maduro, and his wife.
However, the Pentagon demanded that Anthropic make Claude available for “all lawful purposes” including mass surveillance and the development of fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic reportedly refused to offer its tech for those things, even with a “safety stack” built into that model.
xAI, by contrast, agreed to a standard that would allow the DoD to employ its AI for any purpose it deems “lawful.” However, the xAI model is not considered by officials to be as cutting-edge or reliable as Anthropic’s Claude, and they admit that replacing Claude with Grok would be a challenge. The Pentagon is reportedly also negotiating deals with OpenAI and Gemini, both of which it considers to be on par with Anthropic.
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xAI had announced a version of Grok for US government agencies in July 2025. Shortly before that, though, the chatbot started spouting fascist propaganda and antisemitic rhetoric while dubbing itself “MechaHitler.” All of that followed a public spat between Musk and Trump over the president’s spending bill, after which GSA approval of Grok seemed to stall. Earlier this week, Anthropic accused three Chinese AI labs of abusing Claude’s AI with “distillation attacks” to improve their own models.
If you’ve been to a wedding or a downtown coffee shop in the last 10 years, you’ve probably seen those little lightboxes that are so popular these days. They consist of letters placed on a plastic frame in front of a dim white light, and they became twee about five minutes after your hipster friend first got one. However, they can also make a neat basis for an LED display, as [Folkert van Heusden] demonstrates.
The build is straightforward enough, using daisy chains of 32×8 LED matrix modules, two each for the three rows of the lightbox. This provides for a 24 character textual display, or a total display resolution of 64 x 24 pixels. An ESP8266 is used to command the matrixes, which are run by MAX7219 display controllers. Thanks to the microcontroller’s onboard wireless hardware, the display can be addressed in a number of ways, such as using the LedFX DDP protocol or [Folkert’s] Pixel Yeeter python library. Files are on GitHub for the curious.
Quite a few of these exist out in the wild — [Folkert] has built a variety of modded lightboxes over the years with varying internals. The benefit of the lightbox is that it effectively acts as a handy housing for LED matrixes and supporting electronics, while also providing a neat diffuser effect. The lightboxes are also readily wall mountable and generally look more like an intentional piece of signage than most things we might homebrew in the lab.
