FIRST LOOK Dell’s UltraSharp 52 display is a joyously enormous head-turner, but probably too much monitor for most users.

Dell debuted the display at the CES show earlier this year. It’s now on sale for $3,000.

Sadly, I lack a PC capable of driving the screen at its full 6144 x 2560 resolution and 120 Hz refresh rate. Even at a miserly 3840 x 2160, however, I often marveled at how much it could display. Consider the screenshot below, which shows 50 columns and 89 rows of a single Excel spreadsheet – 4,450 cells in total.

Here’s another look at the monitor in full flight: a screen grab of Zwift, the virtual cycling metaverse I visit regularly as part of my exercise routine. At that size, Zwift felt more immersive and enjoyable than it does on a smaller screen. The display also handled motion smoothly during Zwift. other games, and streamed video.

Getting used to it

It took me a while to appreciate the monitor. When I first plugged it in, my occasionally-stiff middle-aged neck strained as I swiveled to view content at the edges and corners, while wielding my mouse to move its pointer between the screen’s extremities felt like flapping my arms.

My eyes didn’t enjoy the experience at first either. I wear mild reading glasses while working, and found myself repeatedly refocusing as I looked across the curved display.

For the first few days I spent with the screen, I therefore practiced “pillarboxing” – running the display at 3840 x 2160 and only using the center of the monitor while pixels on the edges remained dark. That didn’t feel odd or distracting, perhaps because I often use “letterboxing” while watching video on my TV or tablet – leaving pixels at the top and bottom of the screen unused.

As I grew accustomed to the enormo-monitor, I began using its entire area. Getting there was not straightforward: each of the three PCs I used with the monitor (one at a time, not together) required manual adjustment before I found a resolution that did not distort text and images.

Dell’s companion app was no help. It was slow to install, ran as if stuck in digital treacle, and is little more than a glorified front end for the Windows System/Display control panel.

The HDMI connection to my desktop – an Acemagic mini-PC – repeatedly dropped out, forcing me to reseat the cable every day. The same PC and cable work reliably with my everyday monitor. I tried another cable and the problem persisted. I reached out to Dell, who suggested my two different cables were to blame.

I connected my laptop – a Dell Inspiron Plus 7441 – over Thunderbolt and experienced some flickering that went away without needing to reseat the cable. A ten-year-old ThinkPad Carbon X1 connected fine over HDMI, but had even more trouble finding appropriate settings.

But once I got the machine going and got used to its colossal size, my initial fatigue vanished. I realized I was squinting a little less than I do with my everyday display, a seven-year-old 32-inch Samsung that lacks the HDR feature the Dell machine includes.

I sometimes use my lunch breaks to watch some rugby highlights, and the display handled those with ease. The easily observable nuances of small ads on team shirts would doubtless please sponsors.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the display’s speakers, which rendered my favorite tunes brightly and crisply. My current high rotation tunes include guitar feedback legends The Jesus and Mary Chain, spiky garage pop from Welsh outfit The Bug Club, and mumbly “power disco” by Getdown Services.  JAMC’s trademark fuzz was warm and deep, I felt like I could hear new strings on The Bug Club’s guitars, and Getdown Services’ beats thumped meatily.

The speakers’ location at the rear of the monitor led to a few “Where’s that sound coming from?” moments, but those quickly became tolerable.

Weighty issues

I was impressed by Dell’s packaging, which places the cables and included stand in clearly marked cardboard compartments within the shell protecting the screen. That matters because the box is a whopper that would be difficult to lug out of an IKEA and into a small car. Easy access to the assembly parts means a little less wrestling.

At 12.95 kg (28.5 lbs), the monitor isn’t problematically heavy – but is maybe too weighty for Dell’s stand, as it never sat perfectly level, and I could find no way to straighten it. The screen is also unwieldy: I recommend connecting any cables you plan to use in advance, because shifting and lifting it to access its ports is not easy, especially in constricted spaces behind a desk.

Tucked under the monitor’s bottom-left edge is a forward-facing USB hub with two USB-C ports and one USB-A port. Making one of them a Thunderbolt port would have made it easier to connect a laptop without rummaging behind the beast.

I finished my time with this giant display convinced that it is a lovely machine, but not one I need, as my work consists mostly of writing and editing text and browsing the web. Those who work with visual material may adore its size and the immersion created by its gentle curve. Many of Dell’s promotional images show the device displaying multiple financial data feeds. The company pitches it as a replacement for four smaller monitors, requiring only one power cable and dispensing with a complex collection of stands.

That seems like a more sensible use of the screen than everyday knowledge work.

To finish, here’s one more photo. I started working from home in 2002 but had no room to dedicate to an office. I therefore splurged about $700 – big bucks at the time – on a 15-inch, 1024 x 768 Dell 1503FP LCD monitor so that a CRT did not dominate my lounge room.

It still works, although when the time came to take this snap, I couldn’t find the HDMI-to-VGA adapter I use to fire it up.

Here it is anyway, posed in front of its giant descendant to offer some historical perspective on how monitors have grown. ®

On Wednesday, investigative reporter Daniel Boguslaw detailed how security officials at Anthropic, the creator of Claude AI, are engaging in monitoring and surveillance, including reporting AI activists to police for potential future crimes.

The report, published in The American Prospect, comes amid the well-known Anthropic-Pentagon standoff, in which the AI company has feuded over how the military deploys mass-surveillance tools and fully autonomous weapons. Anthropic lost several lucrative government contracts in the process. Last week, after US Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick said Anthropic is “back on the right side,” a Pentagon official disputed the claim and said the company remains a “supply chain risk.”

Anthropic told CNET via email that it disagreed with Boguslaw’s piece, saying the headline and framing were inaccurate. “Anthropic is not — and has never said it is — ‘building a predictive surveillance system to monitor activists.’ This is a physical-security function focused on keeping our employees safe, the same as any large company with a global workforce.”

Drawing from postings and interviews with senior security officials at Anthropic, Boguslaw’s report lays out how the AI company is tracking activists who oppose the rapid development of AI near “physical Anthropic assets.” In July, the AI company also told The Wall Street Journal that it made routine reports to police departments about threats against employees, and monitored behavior in an effort to “catch escalation patterns early.”

It all ties together with a recent Anthropic job posting for an “enterprise intelligence specialist,” which describes the role as identifying, tracking and investigating “global threats including geopolitical instability, terrorism, crime, activism, nation-state targeting of the AI sector, and emerging security trends.”

Anthropic did not dispute the wording of the job posting, but said the inclusion of “activism” in the list was just “one of many threat categories a security team monitors for employee-safety purposes.”

As the backlash over AI ramps up — especially around data centers and automated license plate readers like Flock — the trend of predictive policing also continues to grow. Dubbed “precrime” in sci-fi movies like Minority Report, this kind of crime forecasting has become increasingly integrated into police departments. Algorithmic software and AI tools analyze historical crime data, arrest records and individual “risk scores” to preemptively target criminal activity.

In Anthropic’s case, the company has access to vast amounts of data through its Claude AI chatbot and other intelligence-gathering tools, leading it to report individuals to the police while refusing to share proof of threats or wrongdoing, according to The San Francisco Standard. Also, as Reddit users quickly noticed, Anthropic updated its privacy policy this summer to make it easier to share conversation data with police on its own determination, rather than waiting for a court order.

These reports allege that Anthropic could be bypassing standard legal protocols, not only by reporting “precrimes” without due process but also by withholding evidence from law enforcement.

‘Precogs are never wrong, but occasionally they do disagree’

While today’s AI companies don’t have telepaths in a vat (we don’t think), they do have something similar to rely on — powerful AI agents that can glean personal details in the blink of an eye. Because artificial intelligence models process vast streams of user inputs, it’s virtually impossible for us to know how much of our personal data is harvested. And that’s not the only worrying part. Once that information enters the system, we lose control over where it ends up and who ultimately consumes it.

Anthropic has ways of tracking content in the various versions of Claude AI, sometimes to disastrous results, like broadcasting shared chatbot conversations on Google. Claude was reported to have been secretly monitoring Chinese users this summer, and its agents have also gained unauthorized access to the system data of various private organizations.

The question is over how much access Anthropic’s AI has to social media, forums and similar platforms. Current versions of Claude appear unable to gather data from private accounts, though they can from publicly available social profiles. Likewise, if an email account is directly connected to Claude with opt-in permissions, Anthropic could scrape that data for training and other purposes. Couldn’t that info theoretically be used to track activists and dissidents?

Anthropic’s latest September 2026 threat intelligence report shows how it monitors Claude to detect “malicious activity” like “influence operations, surveillance, scams and fraud.” The company says it has an obligation to disclose such risks to make AI models safer.

But the company’s interactions with law enforcement and the findings in Boguslaw’s report raise questions about where Anthropic, a private company, will draw the line between malicious activity and mere anti-AI activism.

Tyler Lacoma

Editor / Home Security and Smart Home

Tyler has worked on, lived with and tested all types of smart home and security technology for over a dozen years, explaining the latest features, privacy tricks, and top recommendations.

With degrees in Business Management, Literature and Technical Writing, Tyler takes every opportunity to play with the latest AI technology, push smart devices to their limits and occasionally throw cameras off his roof, all to find the best devices to trust in your life. He always checks with the renters (and pets) in his life to see what smart products can work for everyone, in every living situation.

Living in beautiful Bend, Oregon gives Tyler plenty of opportunities to test the latest tech in every kind of weather and temperature. But when not at work, he can be found hiking the trails, trying out a new food recipe for his loved ones, keeping up on his favorite reading, or gaming with good friends.

See full bio

OFFBEAT

Information is not forthcoming from this screen

BORK!BORK!BORK! We still don’t know what caused the air traffic control mayhem in the UK in early September, but one information board at Luton Airport appears to have gone out in sympathy.

Spotted by Register reader Mark, the digital sign usually shows passenger information. Today, however, it looks like either the system clock is wrong or someone has forgotten to renew a server certificate.

It’s not the usual “DNS. It’s always DNS,” but not far off.

For those blissfully unaware, the UK’s air traffic control system has had a bad week. A glitch in National Air Traffic Services (NATS) resulted in thousands of flight cancellations and travel disruption for around 330,000 passengers. And it appears whoever is running this information board at Luton has done the computing equivalent of “anything you can do I can do better.”

Luton Airport is a base for the likes of Ryanair and easyJet. Its logo looks like someone was playing Tetris when they were asked to dream up the branding, and it celebrated 5.5 million passengers passing through over the summer.

The airport was not spared the chaos, along with many others, but the good news is that our reader’s flight departed on time, and a delicious, cold adult beverage was waiting at the destination.

For others wondering what has become of their flight, it’s good to see that the information boards are already in another time zone, or whoever is responsible for keeping the server certificate valid has taken a well-earned vacation.

Nobody really needed that information anyhow, did they? ®

The education technology company will rebrand to Eduvolve as part of a major investment of €2.5m and an acquisition by Grafton Education.

PC Peripherals, an Irish technology company that works with schools and businesses to provide technology services and solutions, will create up to 20 new jobs in Galway and Dublin “over the coming years” across technical services, engineering, operations, customer experience, sales and education technology. 

The company is also undergoing a rebrand to Eduvolve as part of an investment of €2.5m and acquisition by Grafton Education. 

The acquisition, investment and jobs creation are accompanied by a change in leadership; Ian Gaughran has been appointed CEO and Fintan Costello is stepping into the role of technical director. 

“I’m honoured to take on the role of CEO at such an exciting time for the business,” said Gaughran. “This investment allows us to build on three decades of trusted relationships with schools and businesses across Ireland, while accelerating our vision for the future. 

“We’re proud of where we’ve come from as PC Peripherals, and excited about where Eduvolve is headed. My relationship with PC Peripherals goes back more than a decade, so I know first-hand the quality of the people behind this business and the trust it has built with schools and customers across Ireland.”

Erik Jentetics, the founder of Grafton Education, added, “This is much more than an acquisition or a change of name. We are investing approximately €2.5m into the acquisition, capitalisation and growth of the business because we believe there is an opportunity to build something genuinely different in Irish education.

“Technology had a significant impact on my own education and ultimately on my decision to build a career and businesses in technology. That experience has stayed with me. I believe schools should be able to access great technology without having to navigate a fragmented network of different suppliers and support providers.”

Also this week, Irish cybersecurity and compliance company ZeroRisk raised $10m in a Series A funding round led by MiddleGame Ventures with participation from existing investor Elkstone.

The new funding will be used to support expansion globally, further product development and increase operational capacity to deploy the platform across large merchant portfolios of major payment providers.

Don’t miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic’s digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

AMD has added two new six-core processors to its desktop lineup. The Ryzen 5 5500F brings six Zen 3 cores and 12 threads to the older AM4 platform for around $99, while the Ryzen 5 7500 moves to Zen 4 and AM5 for around $189, complete with integrated Radeon graphics.

The Ryzen 5 5500F arrives at an interesting time for budget PC builders. Putting together a current-generation system, or moving an existing PC to one, can get expensive quickly. An AM5 build requires a compatible motherboard and DDR5 memory, and RAM prices have risen sharply. For someone already running an AM4 system, the 5500F offers an inexpensive processor option without requiring a platform-wide replacement.

The Ryzen 5 5500F keeps the cost of AM4 builds down

The Ryzen 5 5500F has a 3GHz base clock and can boost up to 4.4GHz. It also gets 16MB of L3 cache, PCIe 4.0 support, DDR4-3200 memory support, and a 65W TDP. AMD includes a Wraith Stealth cooler in the box, though a discrete graphics card is required because the processor has no integrated GPU.

AMD has previously explained why it continues to support AM4 so long after the arrival of AM5. In an interview with Digital Trends, AMD product management lead Sourabh Dhir said AM4 still serves lower price bands and gives value-conscious users the option to improve a PC without replacing the motherboard and memory at the same time.

The Ryzen 5 7500 has a useful graphics fallback

The Ryzen 5 7500 uses six Zen 4 cores and 12 threads, with a 3.7GHz base clock and boost speeds up to 5GHz. It also comes with 32MB of L3 cache, PCIe 5.0 support, DDR5-5200 memory support, and a 65W TDP.

Its integrated Radeon graphics could be particularly useful for builders who have not settled on a graphics card yet. The two graphics cores run at up to 2.2GHz, which is not enough to replace a proper gaming GPU, but the PC can still output a display and remain usable without one. The same fallback can also prove useful if a discrete graphics card fails or needs troubleshooting.

This story originally appeared on Mother Jones and is part of the Climate Desk collaboration.

On Friday, the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals affirmed the dismissal of a lawsuit against the city of Jackson, Mississippi, which alleged the city knowingly let residents drink lead-contaminated water.

The lawsuit, first filed in 2022, says the contamination violated Jacksonians’ constitutional right to bodily integrity. Donald Trump–appointed judge Kurt Engelhardt disagreed. “The Constitution does not provide redress for every governmental wrongdoing,” Engelhardt said. “Defendants’ actions allegedly deprived Plaintiffs of clean water and guileless information. These deprivations, while grievous, do not infringe upon any deeply rooted constitutional right.”

That may be true in Mississippi—but on the state level in at least nine US states, and in more than a dozen other countries, clean drinking water is in fact a protected right. In countries including Uruguay and South Africa, a right to clean water is enshrined in the constitution. New York’s state constitution, as of a 2021 amendment, states that “each person shall have a right to clean air and water, and a healthful environment.” So too in Massachusetts, where “the right to clean air and water” has been constitutionally protected since 1972.

But according to the Fifth Circuit ruling, the US constitution is too narrow for such a claim. The Jackson plaintiffs alleged that their city government deliberately withheld information about the water’s toxicity and exacerbated the problem through a series of boil-water notices—a practice that can eliminate some bacterial contamination, but also concentrates lead in water. Engelhardt stated there is no “constitutional right to truthful information from officials during a public health crisis.”

Jackson is more than 80 percent Black and has a poverty rate that is more than double the national average. The city’s water system has long been in dire need of upgrades. In 2015, officials from the Mississippi State Department of Health found elevated lead levels in the water supply. Instead of immediately informing citizens, they remained silent about the issue for six months, according to reporting from Grist, while residents continued drinking toxic water.

EPA officials ran a series of tests in 2020 and found “persistent and concerning violations” of water safety policy, including leaks, corrosion, and high lead levels throughout the system.

But no city, state, or federal agency fixed the problem. Meanwhile, people, including Jackson plaintiff Priscilla Sterling, continued drinking water with unsafe levels of lead. According to the 2022 lawsuit, several of Sterling’s children have since been diagnosed with lead poisoning, which can cause permanent brain damage. A quarter of Jackson’s residents are children, who are particularly vulnerable to the lifelong effects of lead poisoning.

The Fifth Circuit ruling comes as the Trump administration moves to weaken clean-water-related protections. Also on Friday, Trump’s EPA released a supplemental rule to further dilute the Clean Water Act, quickly condemned by environmental watchdogs.

“The administration is clearly struggling to craft a rule that will hold up in court while satisfying their donors’ desire to effectively scrap these protections wherever possible,” said Jim Murphy of the National Wildlife Federation. “One thing is clear: If we don’t protect our streams and wetlands, the cost of dirtier drinking water and increased flooding will flow downstream to households at a time when most Americans are living paycheck to paycheck.”

From drafting documents to exploring creative ideas, Gemini is always just a shortcut away-ready to help right where you are so you never break your flow. Built for how you actually work on desktop. Explore how Gemini helps you tackle everyday projects across Windows and macOS.

With our new native desktop experience, you can share anything on your screen with Gemini to get help with exactly what you’re looking at, including local files. If you’re reviewing a complex chart, you can share your window and ask, ‘What are the three biggest takeaways here?’ to get an instant summary. This brings powerful context to your creative work as well.

Help right where you need it. Gemini can jump in when you need a hand. Share your window to get instant contextual help based on what you’re looking at.

Features

One shortcut to answers

Press Alt + Space on Windows or Option + Space on Mac to summon Gemini over your active work. Ask questions, verify facts, or draft text, then jump right back into what you were doing.

Your most complex to-dos, done

Hand off multi-step research, planning, and synthesis to Gemini Spark, your 24/7 personal AI agent. It operates autonomously, but always under your direction

Connected to your everyday Google apps

Pull information across Gmail, Google Drive, Docs, and Calendar directly into your desktop workflow. Ask Gemini to find details buried in email threads, summarize shared documents, or cross-reference meeting notes

Creativity for your desktop

Bring creative concepts to life in a dedicated desktop workspace. Generate custom images with Nano Banana and direct high-quality video creation with Gemini Omni, ready whenever inspiration strikes

Helpful tips for your busiest days

Discover new ways to get things done on desktop. Explore additional features available today on macOS, with more coming to Windows over time.

What is Gemini?

Gemini is an interface to a multimodal LLM (handling text, audio, images and more). Gemini is based on Google’s cutting-edge research in LLMs, which began with the Word2Vec paper in 2013 that proposed novel model architectures that mapped words as mathematical concepts, followed by the introduction of a neural conversational model in 2015. This framework demonstrated how models could predict the next sentence in a conversation based on the previous sentence or sentences, leading to more natural conversational experiences. This was followed by our breakthrough work on Transformer in 2017 and multi-turn chat capabilities in 2020, which demonstrated even more compelling generative language progress.

We initially launched Gemini (then called Bard) as an experiment in March 2023 in accordance with our AI Principles. Since then, users have turned to Gemini to write compelling emails, debug tricky coding problems, brainstorm ideas for upcoming events, get help learning difficult concepts, and so much more. Today, Gemini is a versatile AI tool that can help you in many ways. We already see Gemini helping people be more productive, more creative, and more curious and we add new functionality and innovations regularly.

Is Gemini available for my country?

The Gemini desktop app is available in all languages and countries where Gemini app is supported.

• Windows: Runs on Windows 10 or later (x64 and Arm64).
• macOS: Runs on Apple Silicon MacBooks and requires macOS Sequoia (15.0) or later.

Feature availability varies.

How can I access the Gemini app for Mac?

There are several quick ways to access Gemini on your desktop:

Windows:

• Customizable shortcut: Press Alt + Space to summon Gemini instantly from anywhere.
• Taskbar & System Tray: Launch the app from the Windows Taskbar or click the Gemini icon located in your system tray.

macOS:

• Customizable shortcuts: Press Option + Space to open the mini chat, or Option + Shift + Space for the full chat experience.
• Menu bar & Dock: Select the Gemini icon located in the menu bar at the top of your screen, or click its icon in the Mac Dock.

How can I share my screen’s context with Gemini?

To give Gemini context about your current work:

• Click the Add files and tools in the Gemini app.
• Select Share window.
• Choose the specific window you want to share.

Gemini will use what’s visible on your screen to tailor its answers. To let it read full pages in the browser, go to your Mac’s System Settings > Privacy & Security and enable Accessibility for Gemini.

Can I use the same account across web, desktop and mobile?

Yes! As long as you are signed into the same Google account, your chat history and memory will sync across all devices.

What’s New

Today, we’re launching the Gemini app for Windows. Designed to work seamlessly alongside your favorite tools and daily applications, the new desktop app gives you instant assistance without breaking your flow.

Here are three ways you can use the Gemini app on your PC:

Access Gemini instantly with a keyboard shortcut.

Press Alt + Space on your PC at any time to open Gemini over your active work. Whether you need a quick fact-check on a document or a few catchy title ideas for a presentation, you can get the help you need and jump right back into your workflow.

Power through deep work in a dedicated workspace.

Inside the new app, you can access everything you use Gemini for already. Hand off multi-step tasks to Gemini Spark 1 , your 24/7 personal AI agent, or ask Gemini to draft a project summary by pulling information directly from your Google apps like Gmail and Google Drive.

Create images and videos.

Bring creative concepts to life directly from your desktop. You can generate custom images with Nano Banana for a presentation, direct a high-quality video with Gemini Omni 1 , and best of all you can do it all in one convenient place.

Lightweight and quiet, the app runs without slowing down your PC. This is just the beginning for the Gemini app on Windows, with more native desktop capabilities rolling out over time. The app is available today globally for Windows 10 and 11.

Previous Release Notes:

Today, we’re rolling out updates to Gemini Spark that make it even more helpful, from a new desktop experience to deeper connections with your favorite apps. Here’s a look at what’s new:

Bring Gemini Spark to your Mac

We’re bringing Spark to the Gemini macOS app to help you automate time-consuming tasks across your desktop.

Gemini Spark can now move beyond the chat window, and tackle the heavy lifting across your desktop files and apps. For example, you can turn hours of manual file sorting into an instant action by asking Gemini Spark to sort all the PDFs in your Downloads into specific folders. Gemini Spark also connects your desktop and Google Workspace, so you can simply ask it to create a budget spreadsheet using the latest invoices saved to your computer, and create a schedule to update it regularly. To keep your information secure, Gemini Spark only has access to the files you give it permission to use.

And coming soon, you’ll even be able to run tasks remotely. You can assign a multi-step task to Gemini Spark from your phone – like asking it to find a specific sales report on your Mac, pull the total revenue number, and email it to you – and let it execute the work on your computer while you’re away.

Gemini Spark for macOS is available in Beta to Google AI Ultra subscribers aged 18 and over, starting in the US.

Connect Gemini Spark to your favorite apps

We’ve expanded our connected apps so Spark can help you across more of the services you use. It now works with Google Tasks and Google Keep, meaning you can ask Spark to scan your scattered brain-dumps in Keep and turn them into action items in Tasks. We’re also launching integrations with Canva, Dropbox, Instacart, OpenTable and Zillow Rentals, so you can easily design custom flyers, access and share your files, reserve a table for date night, order your weekly groceries or reserve an apartment tour. These connected apps are rolling out over the next week on Gemini Spark on web and mobile and will be rolling out to the macOS app in the coming weeks.

We’re also rolling out support for custom Model Context Protocol (MCP), giving you the ability to connect your favorite apps directly into Spark to build a more tailored assistant.

Stay up to date on topics in real time

We’re also giving Gemini Spark the ability to intelligently track topics and react to events in real time. For example, if you want to stay up to speed on highlights and analysis after your favorite soccer team plays, Spark brings you the latest the moment the match ends. Or, you can ask Spark to send you a detailed financial report if a stock reaches a certain threshold. You can now ask Spark to keep an eye on blogs, news sites, social media, finance, shopping, weather and sports, in addition to your email, so you don’t have to constantly hit refresh.