Other Smart Shades to Consider

We have tested a few other smart shades and retrofit devices. Here are a few that narrowly missed out on a place above.

Photograph: Simon Hill

Kincmo Motorized Blinds With Remote for $116: A reasonable alternative to our top pick, Kincmo’s choice of styles and finishes, motor functionality, and smart home connectivity was virtually identical, though you must opt for the Matter over Thread motor or hub if you want scheduling and voice-command support. I tried a long blackout shade for a doorway, and it worked very well. It is slow to open and close but also quiet, never breaking 40 decibels.

Weffort Motorized Roller Shade for $120: Another brand that offers smart shades very much like our top pick, Smartwings. The Weffort shade I tried for my office window worked in exactly the same way, with a simple remote and a Matter over Thread motor that enabled me to add it to Google Home and control and schedule through the app. The operating noise level is around 40 decibels.

Bringnox Motorized Blinds with Remote for $118: With a very similar range of options to SmartWings and some of the other brands above, I found Bringnox shades to be on par. You’ll need the Matter over Thread motor if you want smart home control and scheduling (or a separate hub), but you get a wee remote with every shade. I regret not opting for a better valance and bottom bar, because the shade I tested looks very blocky, and the top section covers part of the window. One interesting option Bringnox offers is no-drill shades with a kind of adjustable and lockable spring section at one end that could be very handy for installing a shade inside the frame of a window where drilling holes is a problem.

Courtesy of Ryse

Ryse SmartCurtain for $150: Another retrofit device for your window coverings, the Ryse SmartCurtain is super easy to fit. It works fine with rod rail curtains and is reasonably quiet at around 36 decibels, but you will need two if you have a pair of curtains, and it’s relatively expensive. Consider also that you need the Ryse SmartBridge ($50) hub to schedule, connect smart home devices for voice control, or even control multiple devices. Without the hub, you can only connect via Bluetooth to one curtain at a time. The two rechargeable 18,650 Li-Po batteries are supposed to last up to eight months. There’s no charger in the box, though you can apparently request one for free. While it’s a decent product, it’s also more expensive, less versatile, and generally inferior to the SwitchBot Curtain 3.

Aqara Curtain Driver E1 for $80: With separate models for rod or track curtains, this is very much like the SwitchBot Curtain 3 above, but not quite as good. It is bigger, which leaves more room for a larger battery, so you can expect up to a year of battery life. Unfortunately, it is also louder (over 50 decibels), more expensive, and requires an Aqara hub to unlock voice commands and smart home automation.

Don’t Bother

Courtesy of Ryse

Ryse SmartShade for $200: This is a retrofit gadget to convert any roller shade with a beaded chain into a smart shade. It’s easy to fit, but you will need a roller shade with an uninterrupted chain because a plastic spacer joining the two ends of a chain can cause problems (my chain came apart), and it’s noisy in operation. The removable battery pack is a smart idea, but if you want to remote control the shade from your phone, you must be in Bluetooth range. To get scheduling and voice controls, you need to buy the Ryse SmartBridge ($50), and I had issues with connectivity dropping in and out. After testing a couple of these retrofit designs for the beaded chain roller blinds (I also tested the Aqara E1) and having problems both times, I can’t recommend them. This one is also way too expensive.

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The OPPO F-series has always focused on the durability side of things, with some of the toughest phones I’ve ever tested. With the new F33 series, the Chinese smartphone maker is bringing a new type of durability-focused smartphone to India. Based on details shared ahead of launch, the company is positioning the lineup as a solution to everyday smartphone problems like cracked screens, water damage, and battery anxiety.

Built for Indian Conditions

Durability seems to be the core focus here. The OPPO F33 series is said to come with IP69K certification, which is a step above the usual IP67 or IP68 ratings seen in most mid-range phones. In practical terms, this means the device can handle high-pressure, high-temperature water jets and provide complete dust protection. It’s designed to survive not just accidental splashes, but harsher environments like heavy rain, kitchens, or dusty outdoor conditions.

Beyond certifications, OPPO says the F33 series has undergone military-grade durability testing. This includes extreme temperature tests ranging from freezing cold to high heat, salt exposure for coastal conditions, and even simulations of strong winds and heavy rainfall. The devices are also tested for drops, with thousands of simulated falls and immersion tests to ensure real-world reliability.

Structurally, the phones feature a 360-degree armor body, built using an aerospace-grade aluminium frame, reinforced internals, and thicker protective materials for both the display and back panel. There’s also an internal cushioning system designed to absorb shocks during impact.

Long-Term Battery Health

Battery life is another major highlight of the F33 series. OPPO is introducing a 7,000mAh battery that’s designed to retain up to 80% of its capacity even after five years of usage.

The company is using a self-repairing electrolyte technology, which is said to help maintain battery health over time. Combined with 80W fast charging, reverse charging, and bypass charging support, the F33 series aims to reduce both charging time and long-term battery degradation.

The nonprofit organisation will remain active on other social media platforms.

The prominent digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) will no longer use social media platform X, primarily due to diminishing engagement from its posts there.

In a blogpost explaining its decision, the EFF said that “an X post today receives less than 3pc of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago”.

Earlier this week, the Harvard-based NiemanLab published an “analysis of thousands of tweets from 18 publishers” suggesting that linked posts on X are not driving significant traffic to their sites.

The social media network formerly known as Twitter was acquired by Elon Musk in October 2022 before setting about removing restrictions, oversight and moderation of content.

The EFF said that at the time of the takeover, its priorities for improvement of the platform were transparent content moderation, tangible security improvements and greater user control.

The EFF said it will remain active on other platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok, despite its grievances and concerns around various aspects of their operations, to assist people who have no choice but to be present “in the walled gardens of the mainstream platforms”.

“We stay because the people on those platforms deserve access to information, too. We stay because some of our most-read posts are the ones criticising the very platform we’re posting on,” the nonprofit said in its blogpost, noting that its continued presence on these services “is not an endorsement”.

It added: “X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly ‘de minimis’.”

The EFF, founded in 1990, describes itself as “the leading nonprofit organisation defending civil liberties in the digital world”, with a stated mission “to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice and innovation for all people of the world”.

The donor-funded US nonprofit claims to use “the unique expertise of leading technologists, activists and attorneys in our efforts to defend free speech online, fight illegal surveillance, advocate for users and innovators, and support freedom-enhancing technologies”.

In the media and publishing landscape, many organisations have left X since the Musk takeover, for a variety of reasons. They include the UK’s Guardian, France’s Le Monde, and NPR and PBS in the US.

Silicon Republic decided to stop using X in November 2024.

X was acquired by xAI, another Musk company, in March 2025; xAI was in turn acquired by Musk’s SpaceX in February 2026.

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The plans are early-stage and Anthropic may still decide to only buy chips rather than design them. The exploration comes days after the company signed a long-term deal with Google and Broadcom for 3.5 gigawatts of TPU compute starting in 2027. A company spokesperson declined to comment.

Anthropic is exploring the possibility of designing its own AI chips, Reuters reported on Thursday, citing three sources familiar with the matter. The effort is at an early stage: the company has not committed to a specific design and has not assembled a dedicated team for the project.

It may still decide to continue purchasing chips from third parties rather than building its own. A spokesperson for the San Francisco-based company declined to comment on the report.

The exploration comes as Anthropic’s revenue has accelerated sharply. The company disclosed earlier this week that its annualised revenue run rate has surpassed $30 billion, up from approximately $9 billion at the end of 2025.

That trajectory has created a scale of compute demand that makes the economics of custom silicon increasingly worth examining. Anthropic currently runs Claude across a mix of chips: tensor processing units designed by Alphabet’s Google, in partnership with Broadcom, alongside Amazon’s custom chips and Nvidia hardware.

The company said it matches workloads to whichever chips are best suited for them.

Just days before the Reuters report, Anthropic signed a long-term deal with Google and Broadcom that will give it access to approximately 3.5 gigawatts of TPU-based compute capacity from 2027, roughly three times the roughly one gigawatt it was consuming earlier in 2026, according to Broadcom’s SEC filing.

The filing flagged that the expanded deployment is contingent on Anthropic’s continued commercial success, an unusual hedge for a regulatory document. The deal builds on Anthropic’s November 2025 commitment to invest $50 billion in US computing infrastructure.

Broadcom is also already a chip design partner for OpenAI, and has a fifth undisclosed XPU customer, placing it at the centre of the custom AI silicon market that is emerging as an alternative to Nvidia’s general-purpose GPUs.

The possibility of Anthropic developing proprietary silicon mirrors moves already underway elsewhere in the industry. Meta has been building its own AI training chips, and OpenAI has been working on custom silicon as well.

Industry sources cited by Reuters put the development cost of an advanced AI chip at roughly $500 million, reflecting the need to hire specialised engineers and validate the manufacturing process.

That figure is not trivial for a company that remains, for now, unprofitable, but it is more manageable against a run-rate revenue base that has more than tripled in four months.

from the they-can’t-kill-us-all dept

Forgive me for this digression. I know it’s usually left to Mike Masnick to lift us up from our collective doldrums when things seem even more hopeless than they did last year. His New Year’s posts are never wrong. There are always silver linings, even if the filigree is more difficult to detect with each passing year.

This isn’t about Mike or silver linings or the as of yet unfulfilled promise of the New Year. This is a post written by a die hard defeatist and cynic who generally views each passing moment with increasing levels of defeatism.

But I’m wrong. Mike is actually right, even if my spirits often pretend they’re anchored to the ground like so many pre-oh-the-humanity German-built dirigibles.

I will tell you why I’m wrong. And it’s embarrassing. I have plenty to say about lots of stuff but I rarely convert my words into action. Recently, however, I did. And it has made all the difference.

At the request of my oldest kid, we attended the recent “No Kings” rally in Sioux Falls. I was clad in my finest Da Share Zone anti-ICE gear:

He was wearing my protest alternate, a Black Sabbath-inspired bit of rhetoric sure to piss off white Christian nationalists:

Suitably suited, we headed to the protest with a friend of mine and his wife.

Long story short, it was life-affirming. It was exactly what anyone who feels they are losing hope needs. I feel I’m pretty good with word stuff, but I think Will Bunch absolutely nailed it in his post-No Kings column for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Quoting Marlon Brando’s mantra in The Wild One (“What are you rebelling against? Whaddya got?”), Bunch moves on to quote real people engaged in protests against something both nebulous and evil… and finding solace in being around people just like them.

“You feel less isolated when you see everybody here, and then they feel less isolated,” Nancy Harris, a 62-year-old retired mental-health crisis counselor from Prospect Park, told me over the steady car honks from supportive motorists. “And I think it just motivates people in general…just putting good vibes out into the universe.”

There’s more. Here’s a 75-year-old protester who not only knows what’s at stake, but knows why you should never give up:

“I’ve been going up against the establishment my whole life,” said [John] Coia, speaking for a generation that grew up exercising its all-American right of free speech and, now in old age, is determined to keep using it while they still can. I asked him what was the last straw with Trump that convinced him to join “No Kings.”

“There is no last straw,” he said over the car honks. “It just keeps going. There’s a new straw every day.”

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Both of these things can be true.

You can find hope in being with people who share your beliefs. You can also feel the fight is never-ending because the current administration just won’t stop being abjectly evil.

But the first thing is what matters: the government may never stop being evil, no matter who’s currently sitting behind the Resolute Desk. And people who want the government to serve the people and be less evil will always exist. The ebb and flow of these constants may shift the prevailing narrative, but it can’t undermine the actual truth — something Mike highlighted in a recent post about the horrors perpetrated by the administration in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Here’s the quote from the Atlantic’s Adam Serwer that Mike highlighted in a long, must-read post that pointed out everything that’s right about America, even when everything seems to be going wrong:

The secret fear of the morally depraved is that virtue is actually common, and that they’re the ones who are alone.

This is where we come together. Until recently, I believed that “coming together” was just a meeting of the minds. But that’s just preaching to the converted, which doesn’t really do much, even if my “converted” are objectively better people than the MAGA “converted.”

What really matters is that people are resisting in increasingly large numbers. We often consider the word “community” to be a cliche because that’s how the government uses it (for example, “Intelligence Community”). We view it with the same (healthy!) suspicion as we would statements delivered by company officials claiming they treat employees like “family.”

It never means anything until you’ve actually experienced (firsthand) a good one. “Family” isn’t a compliment if yours sucks. The same can be said for any “community.”

Unlike families, you can choose your community. You don’t have to align yourselves with empty mouths spewing even emptier platitudes. You just need to go out and see for yourself. Sure, I’m my own anecdata in this post. But trust me, if things feel hopeless, all you really need is the company of people who do this day in and day out, despite the table being stacked against them.

I’m sure many (if not nearly all) of you have already had this experience. My greatest regret is that I put it off for so long. No one who truly believes in the cause will care one way or another about your day-to-day devotion. They’ll welcome you and stand beside you. Participation can be its own reward. And you’ll leave feeling more inspired to be the change we need in this world.

I just wish I had done this sooner. The world is ours. Let’s go take it.

Filed Under: corruption, evil, no kings, trump administration

Email apps have spent years trying to make inbox management feel faster, smarter, and less soul-crushing. But Avec seems to have looked at all that and decided the real answer was right in front of us. Just make the emails behave like a dating app.

Avec is a new mobile email app that presents your inbox to you as a stack of swipeable cards instead of the usual list view. While it may sound like a big change, the idea is pretty simple in terms of functionality. Swipe left to deal with an email later, swipe right to mark it done or archive it, and swipe down to throw less important messages into an “unimportant” pile that the app can later group together for easier cleanup.

Why this is such an interesting solution

The card-based interface is the headline here, and yes, the Tinder comparison is doing a lot of the marketing work. But Avec is aiming to reduce in-box fatigue on mobile phones, where email usually feels cramped, tedious, and too easy to ignore. The app includes a regular list-based inbox for people who aren’t ready to fully make the jump to a swipe-card style.

But this design alone could’ve made Avec into just another quirky email client. Instead, it is also leaning into voice inputs and AI.

How does AI play into this?

Avec lets users hold a button to dictate an email reply by voice. And once you stop speaking, the app turns that recording into a draft that you can review, edit, and send. This, according to founder Jonathan Unikowski, gives Avec an edge over separate keyboard-based dictation tools because the app can see the full email context, understand names, and better match tone and writing styles.

But there’s a catch.

For now, Avec is only available in the US, and it is exclusive to the iPhone. Though it is free to use for Gmail users. Outlook support is reportedly in the works, and the company says paid tiers will come later. However, what these premium features will offer has yet to be finalized.

Google has removed popular psychological horror game Doki Doki Literature Club! from the Play Store. According to Dan Salvato, who led its development team, and publisher Serenity Forge, Google told them the visual novel was removed because it violated its Terms of Service in its depiction of sensitive themes. The game is “widely celebrated for portraying mental health in a way that meaningfully connects deeply with players around the world,” they said in their announcement. Its free version, which came out first, has been downloaded at least 30 million times, while the paid “Plus” version has had at least one million downloads. The visual novel has repeatedly made Engadget’s lists of favorite games over the years.

Doki Doki Literature Club! has the drawing style and the makings of a typical dating sim, but players find themselves confronted with serious themes, including depression and suicide, soon after starting. Its Play listing was appropriately marked as “Mature 17+,” which means that children won’t be able to download it if their devices have parental controls. In addition, the developers clearly communicate that the game tackles serious issues. “This game is not suitable for children or those who are easily disturbed” is the first line of the game. “In-game content warnings for such material can be enabled in the Settings menu at any time,” it also warns players. In settings, there’s link to a page that lists content warnings that apply to the visual novel.

We’ve asked Google for a statement on why the game was removed, and we’ll update this post when we hear back. Salvator and Serenity Forge said they’re doing everything they can to “find a path forward for getting DDLC reinstated on the Google Play Store.” They’re also looking at other methods of distribution for Android devices. At the moment, the game’s Play listing shows that it’s still not available, but it’s still out on Steam, PlayStation, Switch eshop and iOS.

Google has rolled out Device Bound Session Credentials (DBSC) protection in Chrome 146 for Windows, designed to block info-stealing malware from harvesting session cookies.

macOS users will benefit from this security feature in a future Chrome release that has yet to be announced.

The new protection has been announced in 2024, and it works by cryptographically linking a user’s session to their specific hardware, such as a computer’s security chip – the Trusted Platform Module (TPM) on Windows and the Secure Enclave on macOS.

Since the unique public/private keys for encrypting and decrypting sensitive data are generated by the security chip, they cannot be exported from the machine.

This prevents the attacker from using stolen session data because the unique private key protecting it cannot be exported from the machine.

“The issuance of new short-lived session cookies is contingent upon Chrome proving possession of the corresponding private key to the server,” Google says in an announcement today.

Without this key, any exfiltrated session cookie expires and becomes useless to an attacker almost immediately.

A session cookie acts as an authentication token, typically with a longer validity time, and is created server-side based on your username and password.

The server uses the session cookie for identification and sends it to the browser, which presents it when you access the online service.

Because they allow authenticating to a server without providing credentials, threat actors use specialized malware called infostealer to collect session cookies.

Google says that multiple infostealer malware families, like LummaC2, “have become increasingly sophisticated at harvesting these credentials,” allowing hackers to gain access to users’ accounts.

The DBSC protocol was built to be private by design, with each session being backed by a distinct key. This prevents websites from correlating user activity across multiple sessions or sites on the same device.

Additionally, the protocol enables minimal information exchange that requires only the per-session public key necessary to certify proof of possession, and does not leak device identifiers.

In a year of testing an early version of DBSC in partnership with multiple web platforms, including Okta, Google observed a notable decline in session theft events.

Google partnered with Microsoft for developing the DBSC protocol as an open web standard and received input “from many in the industry that are responsible for web security.”

Websites can upgrade to the more secure, hardware-bound sessions by adding a dedicated registration and refresh endpoints to their backends without sacrificing compatibility with the existing frontend.

Web developers can turn to Google’s guide for DBSC implementation details. Specifications are available on the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) website, while an explainer can be found on GitHub.

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