When Asus and Microsoft launched the ROG Xbox Ally X last summer, it came with a bespoke controller-driven full-screen interface running on top of Windows 11. The handheld was still running Windows under the hood, and you could bring up the typical Windows desktop any time, but it defaulted to the full-screen gaming UI.

Then called either the "Xbox Experience for Handheld" or the "Xbox Full-Screen Experience (FSE)" depending on who you asked and when, Microsoft said it would be available on all Windows PCs at some point in 2026 . That point has apparently arrived: Microsoft announced this week at the Game Developers Conference that other Windows 11 PCs "in select markets" would be getting what's now being called "Xbox mode" starting in April.

Under the hood, a PC running in Xbox mode is still running regular-old Windows, with the same capabilities as any other PC. But there are system services and UI elements (like the standard Start menu and taskbar) that don't launch when the system is in Xbox mode, something Microsoft claims can save a gigabyte or two of RAM while also allowing systems to use less energy. Users can return to Windows' traditional desktop mode whenever they want, though.

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An advocacy group said its study of 10 artificial intelligence chatbots found that most of them gave at least some help to users planning violent attacks and that nearly all failed to discourage users from violence. Several chatbot makers say they have made changes to improve safety since the tests were conducted between November and December.

Of the 10 chatbots, "Character.AI was uniquely unsafe," said the report published today by the Center for Countering Digital Hate (CCDH), which conducted research in collaboration with CNN reporters. Character.AI "encouraged users to carry out violent attacks," with specific suggestions to “use a gun” on a health insurance CEO and to physically assault a politician, the CCDH wrote.

"No other chatbot tested explicitly encouraged violence in this way, even when providing practical assistance in planning a violent attack," the report said.

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Binance is hoping that suing The Wall Street Journal for defamation might help shake off a fresh round of government probes into how the cryptocurrency exchange failed to detect $1.7 billion in transfers to a network that was funding Iran-backed terror groups.

The lawsuit comes after a Wall Street Journal investigation , based on conversations with insiders and reviews of internal documents, reported that Binance had quietly dismantled its own investigation into the unlawful transfers and then fired compliance staff who initially flagged them.

Alleging that the report falsely accused Binance of retaliation—among 10 other allegedly false claims—Binance accused the Journal of conducting a "sham" investigation that intentionally disregarded the company's statements. That included supposedly failing to note that Binance had not closed its investigation into the unlawful transfers.

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The Fast and Furious franchise has come a long way in the quarter-century since the first film's release. Originally an undercover cop story, the franchise has morphed into... something else entirely . It's now a bombastic expression of automotive culture combined with some kind of caper , maybe to save the world . Just don't think too deeply about the plot.

Along the way, the film's cars have become nearly as famous as the human stars. If you're a fan, you probably can't have Vin Diesel or Michelle Rodriguez come hang out with you in your garage, but you can drive a Charger or Eclipse —or even a Jetta that looks like it escaped from the set . The more well-off collectors don't need to settle for building a replica, though; they actually own cars that appeared on screen, and there's quite a community of Fast and Furious car collectors.

You can find some of these cars at the Petersen Automotive Museum, which has a new exhibit celebrating 25 years of the franchise.

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Intel's Core Ultra 200S desktop chips , codenamed "Arrow Lake," first launched in late 2024, and they were the most significant updates to Intel's desktop CPU lineup in years. But that didn't mean they were always improvements over what came before: while they're power-efficient and run cooler than older 13th- and 14th-generation Core CPUs, they sometimes struggled to match those older chips' gaming performance. And for gaming systems in particular, they've always had to live in the shadow of AMD's Ryzen 7000 and 9000-series X3D processors , chips with extra L3 cache that disproportionately benefits games.

Intel doesn't have a next-generation upgrade available for desktops yet, but it is shoring up its desktop lineup with a pair of upgraded chips. The Core Ultra 200S Plus processors (also referred to as Arrow Lake Refresh, in some circles) add more processor cores, boost clock speeds, add support for faster memory, and speed up the internal communication between different parts of the processor. Collectively, Intel says these improvements will boost gaming performance by an average of 15 percent.

The Core Ultra 7 270K Plus and 270KF Plus (a real mouthful, all of these names are getting to be) add four more efficiency cores compared to the Core Ultra 7 265K, bringing the total number of cores to 24 (8 P-cores and 16 E-cores). If you wanted that many CPU cores previously, you would have had to spring for a Core Ultra 9 chip. The Core Ultra 5 250K Plus and 250KF Plus also get four more E-cores than the 245K, bringing its total to 6 P-cores and 12 E-cores.

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Anduril Industries announced on Wednesday that it is acquiring ExoAnalytic Solutions, a space intelligence firm that operates a vast network of sensors monitoring the veiled movements of satellites thousands of miles above Earth.

"For nearly twenty years, ExoAnalytic has delivered important advantage[s] for the nation’s most critical missions," Anduril said in a press release. "Exo is a renowned leader in modeling and simulation for classified national security space programs, and provides critical software and expertise for missile warning and missile defense."

"The company also owns and operates the world’s largest commercial telescope network with more than 400 systems deployed worldwide, enabling persistent, high-fidelity awareness of deep space at a global scale," Anduril said.

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Chipmaker Nvidia is preparing to launch its own open source AI agent platform to compete with the likes of OpenClaw, according to a recent Wired report .

The magazine cites "people familiar with the company's plans" in reporting that Nvidia has been pitching the platform, which it is calling NemoClaw, to various corporate partners ahead of its annual developer conference next week. Salesforce, Cisco, Google, Adobe, and CrowdStrike are among the companies said to be in talks for those partnerships, though it's unclear what specific benefits those companies would receive for their association with the open source tool.

NemoClaw, as the somewhat awkward name suggests, would be a direct competitor of OpenClaw (previously known as Moltbot and Clawdbot), the system that attracted widespread attention in January for letting users direct "always-on" AI agents from their personal machines, using any number of underlying models. Last month, OpenAI hired OpenClaw creator Peter Steinberger "to drive the next generation of personal agents," as founder Sam Altman put it , though the OpenClaw project will be run by an independent foundation with OpenAI's support.

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On Tuesday, word spread that the National Institutes of Health was launching a series of what it's calling "Scientific Freedom Lectures," with the first scheduled for March 20 . The "freedom" theme echoes one of the major concerns of the director of the NIH, Jay Bhattacharya, who feels he suffered outrageous censorship of his ideas during the pandemic and is using his anger about it to fuel his efforts to bring change to the NIH. Given that scientific freedom is a major interest of the director, you might think that the first lecture would be delivered by a distinguished scientist. Guess again.

The speaker at the first lecture will be a former journalist best known for his fringe ideas on COVID and the climate. The topic will be the possibility that SARS-CoV-2 was accidentally released from a lab, an idea for which there is no scientific evidence.

Freedom for me

Bhattacharya was one of the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration, which argued that we should try to protect the elderly and vulnerable but otherwise enable COVID to spread through the rest of the population. By and large, public health officials were aghast at the likely consequences—overwhelmed hospital systems, a still-substantial rate of mortality among healthy adults, the consequences of more cases of long COVID, etc.—and argued strongly against it.

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Between a certain car company's antics and the industrial chaos set off by COVID (and then compounded by Russia's invasion of Ukraine), it's easy to be cynical about production timelines. But when Rivian showed off a midsize electric vehicle in 2024 and said it would be available in the first half of this year, it meant it. Deliveries of the first R2 SUVs will begin this spring.

As a new automaker, Rivian often does things its own way, but with the R2 launch, it's following industry practice and starting with the superlative version first. That's the R2 Performance, which starts at $57,990 with the launch package (excluding a $1,495 delivery charge). You get quite a lot of electric SUV for that, however: up to 330 miles (531 km) from a single charge of the 87.9 kWh battery pack, with 656 hp (489 kW) and 609 lb-ft (825 Nm) from the dual motor powertrain. Fast charging takes 29 minutes from 10 to 80 percent.

AWD first

The Performance features semi-active suspension, a rear window that drops into the tailgate, an interior with birch accents, heating for the front and rear seats and ventilation for the former, a nine-speaker sound system, matrix LED headlights, and some other neat touches like the flashlight that lives in the side of the door, similar to how some cars hide an umbrella there .

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