REIDEN, Germany—There is a lot to be said for testing a car on the roads it was developed on. A Kei car , for example, makes more sense in downtown Tokyo than on one of Nashville's arterial highways , surrounded by construction trucks. Likewise the German supersedans. For decades, an arms race has been conducted between rival engineers in Munich, Ingolstadt, Stuttgart, and Zuffenhausen, each trying to best the others and build the ultimate four-door, four-wheel Autobahn crusher, fit for the fattest fat-cat captains of industry. The Panamera Turbo S E-Hybrid is Porsche's entry into this heavyweight bout.

In most of the world, the horsepower war has little relevance. Huge engine outputs, short acceleration times, and ridiculous top speeds that result from a casual indifference to fitting a speed limiter are at best of interest to the bench racers and are otherwise academic. Not so in Germany. After inventing the motorway in 1932, the country declined to impose speed limits on some sections, a practice it maintains as long as there's daylight and the weather is good. And drivers there make use of that privilege—in the fast lane, at least.

Seen in this context, the $239,000 Panamera Turbo S starts making more sense. It's the most powerful Panamera to date, combining a (fruity-sounding) 591 hp (441 kW) 4.0 L V8 that has been reworked compared to the version you might find under the hood of the last version . New monoscroll turbochargers and a higher peak combustion chamber pressure help warm up the catalytic converters quicker, and instead of cylinder deactivation at low load, the engine can change how much and how long it opens its intake valves, shortening the travel and duration under those conditions.

Read full article

Comments

During what's supposed to be a year of redemption, Sonos has announced that its gadgets will become more expensive this year, complicating the company's comeback plans.

Tariffs that US President Donald Trump announced last week take effect today, including a 19 percent tariff on goods imported from Malaysia (the levy is said not to apply to semiconductors and was cut down from a 25 percent tariff that Trump threatened in July.) Among other countries affected is Vietnam, which now sees a 20 percent tariff (down from the 46 percent rate announced in April).

Sonos makes all its audio products in the US, “short of a few accessories and our passive speaker partnership with Sonance," which entails in-wall and in-ceiling speakers , in Malaysia and Vietnam, Sonos CEO Tom Conrad said yesterday, per a transcript of Sonos’ Q3 2025 earnings call. The new CEO explained:

Read full article

Comments

It's now clear that Apple plans to survive Donald Trump's trade war by playing to the president's ego.

On Wednesday, Trump announced that Apple would be exempt from a threatened 100 percent tariff on semiconductors that could have driven up the cost of iPhones globally, Reuters reported . In an apparent effort to secure this exemption, Apple promised to increase its total investment commitment in the US by $100 billion, while also gifting Trump a one-of-a-kind statue that Apple CEO Tim Cook had engraved with Trump's name.

It serves as a bizarre love letter to Trump's push to bring tech manufacturing into the US, despite Apple resisting that push for its most popular product.

Read full article

Comments

Framework’s main claim to fame is its commitment to modular, upgradeable, repairable laptops. The jury’s still out on early 2024’s Framework Laptop 16 and mid-2025’s Framework Laptop 12, neither of which has seen a hardware refresh, but so far, the company has released half a dozen iterations of its flagship Framework Laptop 13 in less than five years. If you bought one of the originals right when it first launched, you could go to Framework’s site, buy an all-new motherboard and RAM, and get a substantial upgrade in performance and other capabilities without having to change anything else about your laptop.

Framework’s laptops haven’t been adopted as industry-wide standards, but in many ways, they seem built to reflect the flexibility and modularity that has drawn me to desktop PCs for more than two decades.

That's what makes the Framework Desktop so weird. Not only is Framework navigating into a product category where its main innovation and claim to fame is totally unnecessary. But it’s actually doing that with a desktop that’s less upgradeable and modular than any given self-built desktop PC.

Read full article

Comments

The Subaru WRX has always been the equivalent of an automotive shrug. Not because it lacks character but because it simply doesn't care what others think. It's a punk rock band with enough talent to fill stadiums but band members who don't seem to care about chasing fame. And the STI versions of yesteryear proved so talented that fame chased them.

For 2025, Subaru updated the WRX to now include the tS, which at first glance appears to be the same flannel-wearing street fighter. But looks can be deceiving. The tS hides sharpened tools underneath, translating to better handling and responsiveness.

What does “tS” really mean?

Subaru positions the tS as being tuned by STI, but it's not an STI return. Sure, that's technically true; only Subaru can name something STI. And to be clear, there's no extra power here, no gigantic wing that takes out flocks of birds, and no pink STI badge on the trunk. But the tS is imbued with enough STI-ness to make a case.

Read full article

Comments

Donald Trump has called for the newly appointed chief executive of Intel, Lip-Bu Tan, to resign, alleging that the semiconductor industry veteran is “highly conflicted.”

“The CEO of INTEL is highly CONFLICTED and must resign, immediately,” Trump said in his post on his Truth Social website on Thursday. “There is no other solution to this problem.”

The US president’s post did not provide details of Tan’s alleged conflicts of interest. Trump’s broadside follows a letter from Republican Senator Tom Cotton to the US chipmaker’s board chair this week expressing “concern about the security and integrity of Intel’s operations” and Tan’s ties to China.

Read full article

Comments

If anyone needed a reminder that US health secretary and fervent anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has no background in science or medicine, look no further than the video he posted on social media Tuesday evening.

In the two-and-a-half-minute clip, Kennedy announced that he is canceling nearly $500 million in funding for the development of mRNA-based vaccines against diseases that pose pandemic threats. The funding will be clawed back from 22 now-defunct contracts awarded through the federal agency tasked with developing medical countermeasures to public health threats. The agency is the Biomedical Advanced Research and Development Authority (BARDA).

Kennedy is generally opposed to vaccines, but he is particularly hostile to mRNA-based vaccines. Since the remarkably successful debut of mRNA COVID-19 vaccines during the COVID-19 pandemic—which were developed and mass-produced with unprecedented speed—Kennedy has continually disparaged and spread misinformation about them.

Read full article

Comments

By now, you’ve likely heard of fraudulent calls that use AI to clone the voice of people the call recipient knows. Often, the result is what sounds like a grandchild, CEO, or work colleague you’ve known for years reporting an urgent matter requiring immediate action, saying wiring money, divulging login credentials, or visiting a malicious website.

Researchers and government officials have been warning of the threat for years, with the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency saying in 2023 that threats from deepfakes and other forms of synthetic media have increased “exponentially.” Last year, Google’s Mandiant security division reported that such attacks are being executed with “uncanny precision, creating for more realistic phishing schemes.”

Anatomy of a deepfake scam call

On Wednesday, security firm Group-IB outlined the basic steps involved in executing these sorts of attacks. The takeaway is that they’re easy to reproduce at scale and can be challenging to detect or repel.

Read full article

Comments

"Crypto mixers" exist because of a peculiar feature of cryptocurrencies—most are fully traceable using their public blockchain ledgers. To provide more privacy to crypto account owners, a mixer will let people toss their crypto into a large pool, where it is "mixed" with other people's crypto. At a later date, each crypto owner can choose to withdraw their money from the pool into a new, anonymous wallet, thus making the movement of the crypto harder to track.

Of course, the obfuscation doesn't work well if the blockchain shows 1,231.7 BTC entering a mixer and 1,231.7 BTC being withdrawn to a new wallet. So mixers will take steps to disguise the transactions. Tornado Cash, which operated on the Ethereum blockchain, mandated that users could only deposit money into its pools in 0.1, 1, 10, and 100 ETH increments, making it far harder to spot specific amounts entering and leaving the mixer.

Tornado Cash also used a complex system of "relayers" to pay the Ethereum "gas fees" charged for transactions on the network; without doing this, it would be clear which old account was paying to "mix" money into which new account. The whole process relied on the use of irrevocable "smart contracts," all of which sounds rather technically daunting, but Tornado put a nice user interface atop the details that made the service far easier to use than it might sound.

Read full article

Comments