Curated Tech Briefing — August 2, 2026
The ten tech stories that matter right now — hand-picked from CNET's newsroom and ranked for you. AI, gaming, streaming and the gadgets in your pocket.
#1 · Top Story
Gaming
Sony's push away from physical media has lit a fire under the PlayStation community — players are organizing a "PSBlackout" boycott for the week of August 23 to defend game ownership and disc drives.
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#2
AI
Google Earth's new AI image generator could drop a dream home into Central Park — and fabricate satellite views convincing enough that Google pulled the feature almost immediately.
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#3
AI
Apple is already raising prices across products and services. Now Tim Cook is signaling that power users of the new AI-supercharged Siri might see it show up on their bill.
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#4
AI
CNET pitted AI cheating apps against AI detectors to answer one question: can any tool actually tell human work from machine output — or is detection a losing game?
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#5
Mobile
Signed up for an AT&T wireless plan in the second half of 2025? Your monthly bill is about to climb as the carrier extends price hikes to more legacy plans.
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#6
Gaming
A class-action settlement means PlayStation players could get store credit dropped straight into their PSN wallet after the final approval hearing. Here's who qualifies.
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#7
Streaming
Disney has settled a lawsuit alleging it forced up prices for live TV streaming subscriptions — and money could be headed back to affected subscribers.
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#8
Gaming
Wizards of the Coast is sending dice rolls to Azeroth and a galaxy far, far away — official D&D crossover sets with two giant franchises land starting this year.
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#9
AI
Security experts share a practical checklist for protecting your privacy and data while using ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude, Perplexity and Gemini.
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#10
Apps
Unicode's next emoji batch is official — led by a pickle — and the new icons will roll out to your keyboard across devices next year.
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