Valve raises the price of Steam Deck
Some time ago, the Steam Deck OLED models were out of stock. Now, Valve has announced a huge price increase For handheld consoles. The Steam Deck 512GB OLED, which launched in 2023 for $550, now costs $790. This is a price increase of $240, or approximately 43.64%. it gets worse. The Steam Deck 1TB OLED model, which started at $650, has seen a price increase of $300. That’s right, an increase of 46.15%, it is now priced at $950. The price changes are global, so in Europe the price of the 512 GB Steam Deck has increased to 779 €, while the 1 TB version is priced at 919 €. In the UK, the 512GB Steam Deck costs £779, and the 1TB variant is available for £649.
That is madness. But you know why this happened, it is because of the ongoing memory and storage crisis. The prices of RAM and SSD have skyrocketed in the last few months. The fact that Valve discontinued the Steam Deck LCD model in December 2025 leaves the OLED version as the only option for those looking to purchase the handheld.
But, the strange thing is that despite the huge price increase, the Steam Deck OLED has managed to sell out rapidly. Did Valve have a short list? Or were buyers afraid of further price increases? It’s not clear, but things look disappointing for the launch of the Steam Machine. Could Valve actually cancel this? Only time can tell. The Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 have all seen price hikes in recent days. Gaming is fast becoming a luxury that very few can afford.
DuckDuckGo usage increases after Google’s recent “AI improvements”
Last week, Google announced some changes to search, focusing more on AI-powered results. Google may have over 1 billion users per month who use AI Mode, but that doesn’t mean everyone will like the changes the company is making. According to a statement made by DuckDuckGo CEO Gabriel Weinberg techcrunchGoogle is imposing AI on users without giving them the option to opt-out. As a result, DuckDuckGo usage has increased after users began switching to privacy-friendly search engines. In the US, DuckDuckGo’s app installs increased by 18.1% over the past week, and continued to rise, eventually reaching 30.5%. The company recorded even higher numbers on iOS, with a 33% average and a peak of nearly 70%.
DuckDuckGo also says its AI-free search pages saw a 22.7% increase last week, with a peak rate of 27.7%. Although these numbers may seem modest compared to Google’s millions of users, the message is clear. Adding AI features to everything is not a good idea.
YouTube will automatically detect and label AI-generated videos
Youtube has it announced It will display AI badges on videos that contain AI-generated footage. This is being done to prevent photo-realistic content from being shown as real content.
YouTube will automatically detect AI content in videos, and mark it as AI if it finds significant use of AI in the video. Content creators have the option to disclose whether they used AI to create their videos, and will be able to manually update the video’s description if the video was incorrectly identified as AI-generated. But, this won’t work if the video was created using Google’s own AI tools like Veo or Dream Screen, or contains metadata that proves the video was AI-generated. in such cases, AI label will remainEven if the uploader tries to deny using AI tools.
YouTube will display an AI label in an overlay to shorts that were created using AI tools. A similar label will be shown below the video player for long-form videos that contain AI generated content. This is a good start, but YouTube should provide viewers the option to filter AI videos from results.
Firefox’s big VPN change makes users happy
Mozilla released the Firefox 151.0.2 update this week to fix some bugs. Users were amazed at the change that occurred after accidentally sliding a giant VPN button. Firefox’s built-in VPN feature, which is still in beta, is available to users around the world. Looks like the latest update has broken the VPN button. It’s huge, and inconsistent with the rest of the UI. Firefox fans joked that this was a deliberate change to promote the feature.
A bug report A case has been filed regarding this issue, and it was not only acknowledged by Mozilla engineers, but it was also immediately fixed. Mozilla will fix this issue in a future update soon.
Researchers have exposed an exploit that lets websites monitor SSD activity and spy on users
Websites have always been able to track user activity using a variety of methods, such as fingerprinting the browser and/or device, accessing browsing history, or monitoring mouse cursor movements, key strokes, etc. Ars Technica Reports that a new technology called FROST could allow websites to spy on SSD activity. FROST stands for Remote Fingerprinting using OPFS-based SSD Timing.
Malicious websites that implement this JavaScript may be able to track what a user is viewing on their web page, and may also take a look at which apps the user has open on their device. This is essentially an attack that exploits a side channel, making it possible to run scripts in the browser itself.
The script targets OPFS (Original Private File System), which is a storage space used by websites to run code for a specific task. An attacker can continuously measure SSD contention by making random reads from the OPFS file, provided it is very large. Then a convolutional neural network that has been trained on these traces can fingerprint user activity based on the data. A white paper It has been published by security researchers at the Graz University of Technology in Austria which details the attack.
When the researchers shared their findings with Google, the Mountain View company responded that it did not consider fingerprinting a security vulnerability. Meanwhile, Apple has declared it out of scope. Mozilla acknowledged the issue, but has not implemented any solutions to prevent such attacks. But in all seriousness, given the limitations of the technology, this doesn’t seem like a serious threat.
