Earlier this week, Club 8-bit, one of Ukraine’s largest privately-owned computer museums, was destroyed during the siege of Mariupol. Kotaku spotted news of the event after its owner, Dmitry Cherepanov, took to Facebook to share the fate of Club 8-bit.

“That’s it, the Mariupol computer museum is no longer there,” he said on March 21st. “All that is left from the collection that I have been collecting for 15 years are just fragments of memories on the FB page, website and radio station of the museum.”

Club 8-bit’s collection included more than 500 pieces of computer history, with items dating from as far back as the 1950s. Gizmodo visited the museum in 2018, describing it at the time as “one of the largest and coolest collections” of Soviet-era computers to be found anywhere in the world. It took Cherepanov more than a decade to collect and restore many of the PCs on display at Club 8-bit. What makes the museum’s destruction even more poignant is that it documented a shared history between the Ukrainian and Russian people.

Thankfully, Cherepanov is alive, but like many residents of Mariupol, he has lost his home. If you want to support Cherepanov, he has opened a PayPal account accepting donations to help him and other Ukrainians affected by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Since the start of the war, nearly 10 million people have been displaced by the conflict, making it the fastest-growing refugee crisis since the second world war.

The dust on Valve’s spring Steam Next Fest may have only recently settled, but the company is already turning its attention to the next iteration of the event. On Friday, Valve announced its latest Next Fest would take place between June 13th and June 20th, with the showcase scheduled to get underway at 1PM ET.

As with past versions of Next Fest, Valve is promising that there will be “hundreds” of game demos for people to check out, as well as developer livestreams featuring some of the teams working on the titles the company plans to highlight. Valve hasn’t shared a list of demos that will be available in June, but past versions of the event have featured some excellent games, including Sable, Toem and, one of my recent personal favorites, The Wandering Village. The timing of the event means it will likely overlap with this year’s E3. While the Entertainment Software Association has yet to set a date for the annual conference, it has historically taken place in early to mid-June.

Instagram recently introduced private likes as an additional way to interact with Stories. And it looks like the company could add soon add yet another way to respond to ephemeral clips and images from your friends. According to developer Alessandro Paluzzi, who’s known for reverse engineering apps to find evidence of new features, Instagram is working on allowing people to send voice messages in response to Stories. On Saturday, Paluzzi shared a screenshot of the new interface feature.

We’ve reached out to Instagram for comment. We’ll note here not every feature the company works on behind the scenes ends up in a public release. When Instagram introduced private Story likes, it said its motivation was to reduce inbox clutter. Adding the option to send voice messages would run counter to that philosophy, but it would make it easier to do something you can already do within the app.

On Friday, the Federal Communications Commission added Russia’s Kaspersky Lab to its “Covered List,” labeling the cybersecurity firm an “unacceptable” national security risk to the US. The move marks the first time the agency has blacklisted a Russian company. 

With the decision, US companies can’t use subsidies from the FCC’s $8 billion Universal Service Fund for supporting telecom deployments in rural and underserved communities to purchase products and services from Kaspersky. All seven other organizations on the list hail from China, with among the most notable being Huawei and ZTE.

FCC Commissioner Brendan Car said the designation would help the US secure its networks from “threats posed by Chinese and Russian state-backed entities seeking to engage in espionage and otherwise harm America’s interests." The two other companies the FCC added to the list on Friday were China Telecom and China Mobile, both of which were already subject to previous restrictions.

“This decision is not based on any technical assessment of Kaspersky products – that the company continuously advocates for – but instead is being made on political grounds,” Kaspersky said following the announcement. The company noted it was ready to work with the FCC and other US government agencies to address any regulatory concerns.

The move is partly symbolic. Before Friday’s announcement, a 2017 order by former President Donald Trump had already banned the federal government from using Kaspersky software. The FCC did not cite Russia’s recent invasion of Ukraine for this most recent move.

Back in January, the Netherlands ordered Apple to allow locally available dating apps to use third-party systems to collect payments. The company had until January 15th to comply with the ruling or face fines. According to Reuters, the company has yet to adhere to the order in a way that satisfies the country’s Authority for Consumers and Markets regulator.

Last week, Apple reportedly submitted a new proposal that the ACM rejected. No details about the offer, including information on how it differed from the company’s current approach, were shared by Reuters. When Apple announced it would comply with the ACM’s order in January, it said it would take a 27 percent commission from third-party transactions. To date, the regulator has fined Apple to the tune of €45 million (approximately $49 million). According to Reuters, the ACM will fine Apple again next week. At that point, the company could face even higher monetary penalties.

The fines come as Apple and other app store operators face increasing pressure to open their marketplaces to third-party payment systems. Last August, South Korea passed a law requiring all major app stores to offer alternate payment methods. In the last week, that pressure and the increasing likelihood of the US and EU passing similar legislation translated to Google announcing it would work with Spotify to test alternatives to its Play Store billing system. Apple has so far resisted those efforts, arguing they would force new security and privacy risks upon its customers.

Following a years-long dispute with the city’s transit regulator, Uber has earned a 30-month license to continue operating in London, Transport for London (TfL) said on Saturday. “Uber has been granted a London private hire vehicle operator’s license for a period of two and a half years,” a TfL spokesperson told CNBC.

Uber’s dispute with TfL dates back to 2017 when the agency said the company wasn’t “fit and proper” to operate in the city and went on to revoke its taxi license. Among other issues, TfL said Uber had failed to properly conduct driver background checks and report serious criminal offenses. Uber appealed that decision. And while a court went on to grant it 15 months to clean up its act, TfL eventually revoked the company’s license again in 2019, noting at the time it had shown a “pattern of failures” in the past. Subsequently, Uber won another court decision in 2020 that gave it a new 18-month license that came with conditions designed to monitor its adherence to local regulations.

On Twitter, Uber said it was “delighted” by TfL’s decision, noting the agency “rightly holds our industry to the highest regulatory and safety standards,” and that it was “pleased to have met their high bar.” But not everyone is happy about the decision.

“This is yet another tragically missed opportunity for [London Mayor] Sadiq Khan to make worker rights a condition of license for Uber to finally bring an end to the abuse of 100,000 gig workers licensed by Transport for London,” the App Drivers and Couriers Union said following the announcement. The group accused the company of failing to comply with a UK Supreme Court ruling from law year that said the company should treat its drivers as workers.

Apple’s third-generation AirPods may only be a few months old, but you can purchase them right now for 16 percent off their suggested retail price. Amazon has discounted the company's latest earbuds to $149.98. That’s only $10 more than their all-time low of $140.

While you could buy Apple’s second-generation AirPods for less money, we think the new model is a better purchase for most people. We gave Apple’s latest earbuds a score of 88, noting they were “better in nearly every way” from their predecessor. They feature a new design that we found a lot more comfortable. Sound quality is likewise improved with the third-generation AirPods capable of delivering rich bass. Battery life was another highlight, with the included charging case providing up to 30 hours of listening time. Apple’s H1 chip enables a handful of handy features, including hands-free Siri, support for spatial audio with head tracking and seamless pairing with Apple devices.

Of course, they’re not perfect. Their one-size-fits-all design won’t be for everyone, and they don’t come with active noise cancellation, a feature that would make them ideal for commuting. Still, if you own an iPhone, it’s hard to go wrong with the third-generation AirPods.

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It’s a refresh those with an eye on Dell’s XPS 15 and XPS 17 laptops have waiting to get their hands on for a while, and it’s now available. Starting today, you can configure both computers with Intel’s latest 12th-generation Core H-series CPUs. Announced at the start of this year, the company’s new processors combine performance and low-power efficiency cores onto a single chip.

In theory, the design promises to deliver better performance and battery life thanks to a CPU that can better juggle the demands of modern computing. Among other highlights, Intel’s new H-series processors feature DDR5 support and built-in WiFi 6E connectivity, allowing you to take advantage of the new 6GHz band that comes standard on recent 6E routers.

The XPS 15 starts at $1,449 and features a 12-core i5-12500H with one 8GB DIMM of 4,800MHz DDR5 RAM and 512GB of NVMe storage. You can configure it with up to a GeForce RTX 3050 Ti with 4GB of VRAM and a 40W power draw. The XPS 15 comes standard with a 15.6-inch FHD display that features a panel with 500-nits of brightness. Unique to the XPS 15 is an OLED display option with a 100,000:1 contrast ratio, DisplayHDR 500 certification and 400 nits of brightness.

The XPS 17, meanwhile, starts at $1,849. It comes standard with a 17-inch FHD display, but you can configure it with a 4K panel with 100 percent Adobe RGB coverage, 500 nits of brightness and a 1,600:1 contrast ratio. The roomier chassis also allows for an RTX 3060 with 6GB of VRAM and a 60W power draw. But if you want that model, Dell notes it won’t be available until sometime in April.

As part of a program that could have far-reaching consequences for the tech industry, Google is launching a pilot to test third-party billing systems in Android and across its wider ecosystem. The company announced on Wednesday it plans to conduct the pilot with a handful of participating developers, starting most notably with Spotify.

Beginning later this year, Spotify users who have downloaded the company’s app through the Play Store will have the option to pay for a Premium subscription through either one of Google or Spotify’s billing systems. “For the first time, these two options will live side by side in the app,” the company said. “This will give everyone the freedom to subscribe and make purchases using the payment option of their choice directly in the Spotify app.”

Spotify said it would begin collaborating with Google on that functionality within the coming months, with the work involving product and engineering teams across both companies. “This pilot will help us to increase our understanding of whether and how user choice billing works for users in different countries and for developers of different sizes and categories,” said Sameer Samat, Google’s vice president of product management.

For Spotify, today’s announcement is nothing short of a breakthrough victory. The company has spent years campaigning against app store monopolies, its efforts culminating in 2020 when it formed, alongside Epic Games, The Coalition for App Fairness to pressure Apple and Google to change their policies. 

For Google, meanwhile, the pilot is very much a defensive move on the company’s part. Like Apple, the company has spent significant time and resources lobbying against legislation like the Open App Markets Act, which was recently advanced by the Senate Judiciary Committee. Should the bill become law as it stands, it would prevent app marketplace owners with more than 50 million users in the US from locking third-party developers into their payment systems.

Since launching in 2020, Apple’s digital car key feature has only been available on a handful of BMW models. In January, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman claimed the feature would expand to include select vehicles from Hyundai brands like Genesis “by the summer.” It now looks like those plans may be ahead of schedule. In a change spotted by MacRumors, Apple has updated its CarPlay website to indicate that the 2022 Genesis GV60, 2022 G90 and 2022 Kia Niro now support the feature.

It’s unclear if CarKey functionality is already widely available on those models or if Hyundai is only now in the process of rolling it out. A spokesperson for Kia told the outlet it would “have more information about Digital Key availability in the coming weeks." 

While car manufacturers have offered remote lock controls through smartphones for a while, CarKey is different in that it treats your iPhone and Apple Watch like a physical key. To use the feature, you simply bring your phone or wearable up to your car’s door handle to unlock it. Some vehicles also allow you to start them by placing your device near the ignition button. With more recent iPhones that come with Apple’s U1 chip, you don’t even need to remove your phone from your pocket to access your car.