Thanks to all our AI usage, it’s no secret that smartphones are getting more expensive. It’s interesting to see how brands are coping with increased costs, and who better to observe than OPPO. The company is preparing to expand its popular K-series lineup in India with the launch of the OPPO K14 5G, which the company has confirmed will debut on March 9, 2026. Last year’s K13x was a pretty well-balanced phone across the board, and OPPO is promising the same for this year, too. Here’s everything you need to know.

Performance & Battery Take the Center Stage

This year, the biggest highlight of the OPPO K14 5G is its massive 7000mAh battery, designed to support extended use without frequent charging. The device also supports 45W fast charging, allowing users to top up the battery quickly when needed. In addition, the phone includes reverse charging, enabling it to power other devices in emergencies. OPPO says the battery system has been engineered to maintain stable battery health for up to five years, aligning with the phone’s focus on long-term reliability.

While the exact processor specs aren’t known, the K14 5G will include an advanced SuperCool VC thermal system. The cooling setup features a large 3900 mm² vapor chamber, combined with expanded graphite layers, to improve heat dissipation during prolonged use. OPPO says the internal layout has been optimized using gamer hand models, which helped engineers identify high-contact areas during landscape gaming.

In terms of optics, the OPPO K14 5G will feature a 50MP primary camera, supported by AI-powered imaging features that automatically adjust scene settings, colors, and exposure to deliver more balanced results. Though we have yet to test these claims against real-world challenges. The phone will run ColorOS 15, which includes OPPO’s system-level rendering architecture and multi-rendering scheduling technology aimed at keeping the camera experience smooth and responsive

All-in-one PCs have always been special, simply because they promise the size of a desktop without the headaches associated with it. Now, Asus has expanded its desktop lineup in India with the launch of the ASUS V501 desktop series and the AiO V400 all-in-one PCs. The new lineup includes the ASUS V501MV Mini Tower with a 15L chassis and the V501SV Small Form Factor model with a compact 9L design. Alongside these, ASUS also introduced the AiO V400 series, which includes the V440 and V470 models designed for clutter-free home setups. Here’s what you need to know.

ASUS V501 Desktop Series for Work and Small Businesses

The ASUS V501 series is built primarily for SOHOs, startups, studios, and small organizations that require reliable daily performance for tasks like accounting, documentation, online meetings, and light creative workloads. The desktops are powered by up to Intel Core 7 240H processors and support up to 64GB of DDR5 RAM, offering enough power for multitasking and productivity-focused workloads.

ASUS says the system is designed for long working hours, thanks to an advanced thermal setup with copper heat pipes. The desktop also runs quietly, with noise levels as low as 38dB under load, making it suitable for office environments and client-facing spaces. Other highlights include fast SSD storage and an 80+ Bronze-certified power supply, which aims to deliver improved energy efficiency for businesses running systems throughout the day.

The ASUS V501MV and V501SV desktops start at Rs 42,990 and will be available from March 16 via ASUS Exclusive Stores, the ASUS eShop, Amazon, Flipkart, and authorized retail partners.

ASUS AiO V400 Series for Homes and Hybrid Work

On the flip side, ASUS introduced the AiO V400 series, which focuses on home users and compact living spaces. The lineup includes the ASUS V440 and V470 AiO PCs, both designed to offer a streamlined all-in-one setup that reduces desk clutter while still delivering reliable performance for everyday tasks. Powered by up to Intel Core 3 processors, the AiO V400 series supports up to 8GB DDR5 RAM and SSD storage, making it suitable for web browsing, streaming, online learning, video calls, and productivity work.

One notable feature is support for HDMI In and HDMI Out, which allows the AiO PC to function as both a standalone computer and a monitor when needed. The ASUS V470 AiO starts at Rs 71,990 and is available via ASUS Exclusive Stores, Croma, the ASUS eShop, Amazon, and other authorized retailers. The V440 model will go on sale starting April 14.

Canvas, the AI planning tool from Google Search, has rolled out across the US, the company said Wednesday. Canvas is essentially a project planning tool with a range of uses, including trip planning. You can select the tool directly from the AI Mode screen at the top of the Google Search results page. 

The tool is integrated into AI Mode and can be used on both desktop and mobile devices, including smartphones and tablets. However, because Canvas opens a second screen beside the main chat window, it’s a little trickier to see on a smartphone. You’ll have to toggle between the screens. 

Advertisement

Going anywhere? Maybe college?

Planning trips is one of Canvas’s main functions, with the ability to view and account for flights, hotels and other relevant information in real time. 

“Canvas makes it easy to build travel plans customized for your specific needs — bringing together real-time Search data for flights and hotels, details from Google Maps like photos and reviews, and relevant information from sites across the web,” a Google spokesperson told CNET. 

Google also notes you can use Canvas as an academic scholarship tracker, which includes dollar amounts and deadlines. 

Project planning with AI

Once you’re in the AI Mode screen on Google, you can select the Canvas option from the plus sign that appears on the left side of the box where you type.

Clicking the Canvas button opens the project in a side panel. From there, you can refine the project with the standard chat prompts. You can even look at the underlying code and adjust the Canvas window’s user interface, such as switching to dark mode. 

Rose Yao, vice president of product for Google Search, posted a thread on X on Wednesday, sharing a video of a summer camp project for her kids. Canvas created an interactive dashboard that sorts camp options by cost, distance and focus.

“We’re adding support for coding & creative writing tasks, so you can bring even more ideas to life with custom dashboards or interactive tools,” Yao wrote in the post. 

Google first announced Canvas for AI Mode in July 2025, and later that year, expanded Canvas’s travel features.

There’s no word yet from Google on when Canvas will expand into other languages and other countries. 

For more than a decade, Drop, born as Massdrop in 2012, was one of the most important community-driven marketplaces in enthusiast tech. It wasn’t just another storefront. It was where headphone obsessives, keyboard nerds, and gear junkies pooled their buying power to will products into existence. Some of the most talked-about collaborations in personal audio came out of that model, including limited-run headphones with brands like Sennheiser that delivered genuine performance at prices the traditional retail channel couldn’t touch.

That chapter is now closing.

Following its 2023 acquisition by Corsair, Drop has confirmed it will cease operating as a standalone e-commerce store. The final day to place orders on Drop.com is March 25, with the site officially transitioning away from direct retail on March 31. Going forward, Drop.com will function as a brand and collaboration hub inside the broader Corsair ecosystem, spotlighting licensed partnerships tied to franchises like The Lord of the Rings, Cyberpunk 2077, and Fallout Nuka Cola.

On paper, this is an “evolution.” In practice, it marks the end of the Massdrop model; the community voting, the group buys, the feeling that enthusiasts were steering the ship. And if you’ve spent any time in the forums or comment sections this week, it’s clear the reaction isn’t nostalgic gratitude. It’s frustration. For many longtime members, the independent storefront wasn’t just a place to shop. It was the point.

What the Shutdown Means for Orders, Rewards, Warranties, and Future Availability

Drop’s transition away from operating as a standalone ecommerce store comes with some important deadlines and structural changes that customers need to understand.

The final day to place an order on Drop.com is March 25 at 11:59 PM PT. After that, direct purchasing through the site ends. The good news is that all existing orders, including preorders, will be fulfilled as previously scheduled. There is no disruption to shipments already in the system.

Drop Rewards, however, come with a hard stop. Any unused rewards must be redeemed by March 25. After that date, remaining balances will expire and will no longer be redeemable. If you have credits sitting in your account, this is the moment to use them.

As for products, this is not a complete disappearance. Many Drop designed items will continue to live on through Corsairand partner retail channels. That includes models like the CSTM80 and a range of licensed collaborations. The difference is where and how they are sold. Instead of a centralized community driven storefront, distribution shifts into the broader Corsair retail ecosystem.

Warranties remain intact. All existing product warranties will continue to be honored, and customer service and support will now route through Corsair.

Going forward, select Drop products will be available through Corsair.com as well as major retail partners such as Amazon and Best Buy. In practical terms, Drop transitions from being an independent marketplace powered by its community to becoming a collaboration and product label operating inside a much larger corporate framework.

The Bottom Line

Drop had a real run. At its peak, the platform reshaped how enthusiast audio products came to market. The Drop plus collaborations with Sennheiser, Dan Clark Audio, Meze Audio, HiFiMAN, Beyerdynamic, Koss, and Axel Grell delivered some of the most popular enthusiast headphones of the past decade. These were not gimmicks. Many were category defining products that offered serious performance at prices that disrupted the traditional retail model.

Now most of those headline products are sold out or permanently out of stock. The amplifiers and speakers are gone. The group buys are gone. The voting is gone. What remains is a brand being folded into the larger machinery of Corsairdistribution.

The products are not vanishing. The platform that built them is.

It is hard to imagine this new structure fostering the same level of risk taking or enthusiast driven innovation. Community driven product development does not scale easily inside a publicly traded hardware ecosystem. The backlash online is real. Longtime members feel betrayed. At the same time, once the acquisition happened in 2023, this trajectory was not exactly shocking. Consolidation tends to smooth edges. It rarely sharpens them.

For consumers, this is a loss. Drop lowered prices, pushed brands to experiment, and gave enthusiasts a voice that actually influenced final products. It was messy at times. It was also effective. Thirteen years is a respectable lifespan in ecommerce. It was a good run. But when growth, margins, and corporate alignment take priority, the community experiment is usually the first thing to go.

For more information: drop.com

Related Reading:

SFollowing in the footsteps of Stalker: Heart of Chornobyl and Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Avowed is another former Xbox-exclusive that has made its way to PlayStation platforms a year after its initial release.

Similar to those titles, Obsidian Entertainment’s fantasy action role-playing game isn’t just sloppy seconds on the PS5 and PS5 Pro, but rather the definitive edition of an already fantastic experience.

On Wednesday, the Trump administration announced that a large collection of tech companies had signed on to what it’s calling the Ratepayer Protection Pledge. By agreeing, the initial signatories—Amazon, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, Oracle, and xAI—are saying they will pay for the new generation and transmission capacities needed for any additional data centers they build. But the agreement has no enforcement mechanism, and it will likely run into issues with hardware supplies. It also ignores basic economics.

Other than that, it seems like a great idea.

What’s being agreed to

The agreement is quite simple, laying out five points. The key ones are the first three: that the companies building data centers pledge to pay for new generating capacity, either building it themselves or paying for it as part of a new or expanded power plant. They’ll also pay for any transmission infrastructure needed to connect their data centers and the new supply to the grid and will cover these costs whether or not the power ultimately gets used by their facilities.

The companies also pledge to consider allowing the local grid to use on-site backup generators to handle emergency power shortages affecting the community. They will also hire and train locally when they build new data centers.

The agreement suggests that these promises will protect American consumers from price hikes due to the expansion of data centers and will somehow “lower electricity costs for consumers in the long term.” How that will happen is not specified.

Also missing from the agreement is any sort of enforcement mechanism. If a company decides to ignore the agreement, the worst it is guaranteed to suffer is bad publicity, something these companies already have experience handling. That said, Trump has been known to resort to blatantly illegal tactics to pressure companies to conform to his wishes, so ignoring the agreement carries risks.

That’s important because the companies will struggle to live up to the agreement. (Though Google, for its part, told Ars that it has typically followed the guidelines as a normal part of its process for building new data centers.)

A China-linked advanced persistent threat actor tracked as UAT-9244 has been targeting telecommunication service providers in South America since 2024, compromising Windows, Linux, and network-edge devices.

According to Cisco Talos researchers, the adversary is closely associated with the FamousSparrow and Tropic Trooper hacker groups, but is tracked as a separate activity cluster.

This assessment has high confidence and is based on similar tooling, tactics, techniques, and procedures (TTPs), and victimology observed in attacks attributed to the threat actors.

The researchers note that while UAT-9244 shares the same target profile as Salt Typhoon, they could not establish a solid connection between the two activity clusters.

New malware targeting telco networks

The researchers found that the campaign used three previously undocumented malware families: TernDoor, a Windows backdoor; PeerTime, a Linux backdoor that uses BitTorrent; and BruteEntry, a brute-force scanner that builds proxy infrastructure (ORBs).

TernDoor is deployed through DLL side-loading, using the legitimate executable wsprint.exe to load malicious code from BugSplatRc64.dll, which decrypts and executes the final payload in memory (injected into msiexec.exe).

The malware contains an embedded Windows driver, WSPrint.sys, which is used to terminate, suspend, and resume processes.

Persistence is achieved via scheduled tasks and Windows Registry modifications, which are also used to hide the scheduled task.

Additionally, TernDoor can execute commands via remote shell, run arbitrary processes, read/write files, collect system information, and self-uninstall.

PeerTime is an ELF Linux backdoor that targets multiple architectures (ARM, AARCH, PPC, MIPS), suggesting it was designed to compromise a broad range of embedded systems and network devices used in telecom environments.

Cisco Talos documented two versions for PeerTime. One variant is written in C/C++ and the other is based on Rust. The researchers also noticed Simplified Chinese debug strings in the instrumentor binary, an indicator of its origin.

Its payload is decrypted and loaded in memory, and its process is renamed to appear legitimate.

PeerTime, an ELF-based peer-to-peer (P2P) backdoor, uses the BitTorrent protocol for command-and-control (C2) communications, downloads and executes payloads from peers, and uses BusyBox to write the files on the host.

Finally, there’s BruteEntry, which consists of a Go-based instrumentor binary and a brute-forcing component. Its role is to turn compromised devices into scanning nodes, known as Operational Relay Boxes (ORBs).

The attacker uses the machines running BruteEntry to scan for new targets and brute-force access to SSH, Postgres, and Tomcat. Login attempt results are sent back to the C2 with task status and notes.

In a technical report today, Cisco Talos researchers provide details on the capabilities of the three pieces of malware, how they are deployed, and achieve persistence.

Cisco Talos researchers have listed indicators of compromise (IoCs) associated with the observed UAT-9244 activity, which defenders can use to detect and block these attacks early.

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.

Advertisement

Download The Report

This is one of those simple deals that’s hard to argue with. The Roku Streaming Stick HD is down to $15.99 from $29.99. If you’ve got an older TV in a bedroom, kitchen, dorm, or guest room that’s missing apps (or just runs painfully slow), this is the quick fix. You plug it in, connect to Wi-Fi, and you’ve got a modern streaming setup without buying a whole new TV.

It’s also a great “keep in a drawer” gadget. If you travel, bounce between rentals, or visit family and end up stuck with a clunky TV interface, a cheap Roku stick can save the night.

What you’re getting

This is an HD streaming stick that plugs into your TV’s HDMI port and comes with a Roku voice remote. Roku’s big advantage is that it’s simple and consistent. You get access to the usual major streaming apps, plus free and live TV options through Roku’s platform.

No fancy specs here, and that’s fine. The point is getting reliable streaming with minimal hassle for very little money.

Why it’s worth it

At $15.99, you’re basically paying impulse-buy pricing for something you’ll probably use for years. This is perfect if:

• your TV is older, and the built-in apps are outdated or slow
• you want streaming in a second room without spending much
• you’re setting up a kid’s room, dorm, or guest space
• you just want a clean interface that doesn’t fight you

If you’ve got a 4K TV and you care about the highest resolution, you’d look at a 4K streaming stick instead. But for basic HD streaming and a smoother experience on an older set, this is a great deal.

The bottom line

For $15.99, the Roku Streaming Stick HD is an easy upgrade that fixes a lot of annoyances fast. If you’ve got any TV in your house that feels “behind,” this is the cheap, simple way to bring it up to date.