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Vote for your favorite tech in the 2024 Digital Trends Reader’s Choice Awards

Digital Trends Readers' Choice Awards
Digital Trends

Maybe you’ve found the best budget TV nobody seems to have heard of. Maybe that new waterproof phone didn’t turn out to be so waterproof after all. Maybe your favorite brand’s customer service deserves some love.

Whatever your story or experience, we’re handing you the mic for Digital Trends’ 2024 Reader’s Choice Awards.

For the first time ever, we’re celebrating the brands and devices that  our audience loves by reaching out to you directly. Because as much as our product experts try to put every gadget through the wringer and share the results, there are 20 million other stories we can’t tell. Until now.

So speak up! Spend a few minutes participating in our survey, and you’ll not only get to help guide other buyers to the right purchases, you’ll be eligible to win one of five $100 Visa gift cards, or the grand prize of a $500 Visa gift card.

That can buy a lot of fun tech, we promise. And after checking out the results from other readers, you might even have a better idea where to spend it.

Vote Now

Digital Trends Staff
Digital Trends has a simple mission: to help readers easily understand how tech affects the way they live. We are your…
This Windows Update exploit is downright terrifying
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Windows Update may occasionally backfire with faulty patches, but for the most part, it's meant to keep us safe from the latest threats. Microsoft regularly pushes new patches that address potential vulnerabilities. But what if there were a tool that could undo every Windows Update and leave your PC exposed to all the threats Microsoft thought it had already fixed? Bad news: Such a tool now exists, and it's called Windows Downdate.

Don't worry, though. You're safe from Windows Downdate -- at least for now. The tool was developed as a proof-of-concept by SafeBreach researcher Alon Leviev, and although its potential is nothing short of terrifying, it was made in good faith as an example of something called "white-hat hacking," where researchers try to find vulnerabilities before malicious threat actors can do it first.

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You may be a victim in one of the worst data breaches in history
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Background check company National Public Data -- also known as Jerico Pictures -- suffered what is reportedly one of the most significant data breaches in history, affecting 2.9 billion personal records that leaked sensitive data such as Social Security numbers and more, as mentioned in a class-action lawsuit document and sourced by Bloomberg Law. What's even worse is that it's not known how the breach happened in the first place -- or who has been included in it.

Before getting into it, it's worth noting that National Public Data has not confirmed the breach yet, so there's a lot of information that's only coming from the lawsuit or the hacking group. That means some of the figures will need to be taken with a grain of salt. Still, it doesn't sound good.

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If you own one of AMD's latest processors, you're in luck. With the release of Ryzen 9000, AMD added a feature called Optimized Performance Profile (OPP), which lets you easily overclock your RAM.

There's more, though. If you have both a Ryzen 9000 CPU, such as the Ryzen 7 9700X, and an MSI motherboard, a new BIOS update can help you improve the gaming performance of your CPU by up to 21%. This is due to MSI's own stack of features, which now includes MSI Memory Try It and High-Efficiency Mode.

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