I’ve written about a lot of different video game hardware over the years, from new consoles to retro gadgets to whatever you want to call the Playdate. But I can’t remember ever being perpetually sore from testing a device; such are the joys of the Virtual Boy. Nintendo has turned its biggest flop into an accessory for the Switch, but the costs involved — to your wallet, eyes, and neck — make it a tough sell. Much like the original, this is a novelty for Nintendo sickos only.
Technology
Kaspersky security software is banned in America: What you need to know
What is malware?
Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson discusses how to protect yourself from malware and ransomware.
Kaspersky is a multinational cybersecurity company that makes antivirus software, but it’s now banned in the U.S. The Biden administration recently announced plans to stop the sale of antivirus software from Russia’s Kaspersky Lab in the States, saying the company’s ties with Russia pose a risk to national security. It’s also believed that Kaspersky’s software lets bad actors install malicious software and withhold critical updates.
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Kaspersky conference room (Kaspersky)
Why is the US banning Kaspersky?
Kaspersky is getting banned in the U.S. after the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) conducted a review of the company’s cybersecurity and anti-virus transactions. BIS notes that the company poses “unacceptable risks to the United States’ national security and the security and safety of its people.” The main concerns are Kaspersky’s connections to Russia, the potential security weaknesses in Kaspersky’s products, and the chance that Russia could exploit these weaknesses.
In an announcement, BIS specifically listed five risks Kaspersky poses to national security. Kaspersky’s ties to Russia are a major concern. BIS states that Russia is a foreign adversary that poses ongoing threats to the United States. According to the agency, Kaspersky is under the jurisdiction and control of the Russian government, allowing it access to sensitive information from U.S. customers.
Other reasons given for the Kaspersky ban include the software’s ability to install malware. “Kaspersky software allows for the capability and opportunity to install malicious software and withhold critical updates,” says BIS. “The manipulation of Kaspersky software, including in U.S. critical infrastructure, can result in data theft, espionage, and system malfunctions. The products also threaten economic security and public health in the U.S., potentially resulting in injuries or loss of life.”
Kaspersky’s ban in the U.S. shouldn’t come as a surprise since the firm has been on the government’s radar for quite some time. In 2017, the U.S. banned the use of the Moscow-based cybersecurity firm’s products across all government agencies.
Illustration of a bad actor on a computer (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
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Kaspersky’s response to the ban
Kaspersky denied Friday that it is a security threat, saying the government had based its decision on the “geopolitical climate and theoretical concerns” rather than independently verifying if there was a risk. The company says it cannot obtain sensitive data on Americans and that its operations and employees in Russia can only access aggregate or statistical data not attributable to a specific person.
Below is part of the company’s official statement. The full statement can be read on Kaspersky’s website.
“For over 26 years, Kaspersky has succeeded in its mission of building a safer future by protecting over a billion devices. Kaspersky provides industry-leading products and services to customers around the world to protect them from all types of cyber threats, and has repeatedly demonstrated its independence from any government. Additionally, Kaspersky has implemented significant transparency measures that are unmatched by any of its cybersecurity industry peers to demonstrate its enduring commitment to integrity and trustworthiness. The Department of Commerce’s decision unfairly ignores the evidence.”
A child working on a computer (Kurt “CyberGuy” Knutsson)
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What does this ban mean for you?
The Kaspersky ban essentially means you will not be able to purchase its software products, and if you already have one, it will stop working soon. Starting July 20, Kaspersky and any of its partners will not be able to sell or license cybersecurity or antivirus software in the U.S. Resellers who already have the products in stock will be able to sell them, but only until Sept. 29.
It’s worth noting that while BIS has banned most Kaspersky products, some have been exempted. These include Kaspersky Threat Intelligence products and services, Kaspersky Security Training products and services, and Kaspersky consulting and advisory services.
Existing Kaspersky customers have until Sept. 29 to find an alternative, as the company will no longer be able to provide antivirus signature updates after this date.
Which antivirus should you choose now that Kaspersky is banned?
Kaspersky’s antivirus was widely used, but now that it has been banned, it’s important to look for alternatives. An antivirus is the best way to protect yourself from clicking malicious links that install malware, which may gain access to your private information. It can also alert you to phishing emails or ransomware scams. Get my picks for the best 2024 antivirus protection winners for your Windows, Mac, Android & iOS devices.
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Kurt’s key takeaway
The U.S. government raised serious national security concerns regarding Kaspersky’s ties to the Russian government. If true, a ban is absolutely necessary. However, Kaspersky maintains it’s a private company with no ties to Moscow. It remains unclear whether these claims are credible. One thing’s for sure: Kaspersky’s absence would leave a significant gap in the cybersecurity market, creating a prime opportunity for competitors to step up.
Do you believe the concerns about Kaspersky’s ties to Russia and potential threats to national security are justified? Let us know by writing us at Cyberguy.com/Contact
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Right now, in several American cities, you can open an app, and a car with no driver pulls up and takes you wherever you want to go. No small talk. No wrong turns. No tip. No perfume covering up the cigarette smells.
A driverless Waymo ride in San Francisco averages $8.17. A human Uber in the same city? $17.25. The robotaxi price war is here.
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I live in Phoenix most of the time, and I see Waymos everywhere. At the grocery store. On the freeway. Sitting at red lights with nobody behind the wheel, just vibing. I still haven’t gotten in one. But I’m giving myself two weeks.
If I survive, I’ll share the ride. Mostly kidding.
A Waymo drives across Congress Avenue on 8th Street in front of the Capitol Building as rain arrives in the Austin area on Friday, Jan. 23, 2025 ahead of anticipated drops in temperature and freezing rain over the weekend. (Sara Diggins/The Austin American-Statesman via Getty Images)
Who’s on the road?
Waymo (owned by Google’s parent Alphabet) is the clear leader. It gave 15 million driverless rides in 2025, and today, it’s about 400,000 per week. Valued at $126 billion. Available in Phoenix, San Francisco Bay Area, Los Angeles, Austin, Atlanta and Miami. Coming in 2026: Dallas, Denver, DC, London, Tokyo and more.
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Tesla launched in Austin last June but is way behind. Roughly 31 cars. One tester took 42 trips, and every single one still had a safety monitor on board. So supervised.
Zoox (owned by Amazon) is the wild card. Their pod has no steering wheel and drives in both directions. Rides are free in Vegas and San Francisco while they wait for approval to charge.
A Cruise vehicle in San Francisco, California, U.S., on Wednesday Feb. 2, 2022. Cruise LLC, the self-driving car startup that is majority owned by General Motors Co., said its offering free rides to non-employees in San Francisco for the first time, a move that triggers another $1.35 billion from investor SoftBank Vision Fund. Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg via Getty Images
How do these things ‘see’?
Waymo uses cameras, lidar (laser radar that builds a 3D map around the car) and traditional radar. It works in total darkness and heavy rain. Tesla uses cameras only. Eight of them, no lidar. Cheaper, which is how they offer rides at $1.99 per kilometer.
Now, are they safe?
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Tesla has reported seven crash incidents to regulators since launching. Waymo says it has 80% fewer injury crashes than human drivers. But NHTSA has logged 1,429 Waymo incidents since 2021, 117 injuries, two fatalities. Three software recalls, including one last December for passing stopped school buses.
A friend of mine took a Waymo, and it dropped her off a full mile from where she was going. No way to change it. No human to flag down. Just a robot car that said, “You have arrived.”
She had not. So yeah. I’m curious. But I’m also cautious.
A Tesla Inc. robotaxi on Oltorf Street in Austin, Texas, on Sunday, June 22, 2025. The launch of Tesla Inc.’s driverless taxi service Sunday is set to begin modestly, with a handful of vehicles in limited areas of the city. (Tim Goessman/Bloomberg via Getty Images)
Here’s where it gets spicy
When a robotaxi gets confused, a human in a remote center sees through the car’s cameras and draws a path for it. At a Senate hearing on Wednesday, Feb. 4, Waymo admitted some of those helpers are in the Philippines. Senators were not amused. I wasn’t either.
Your car sits parked 95% of the time. Robotaxis run 15+ hours a day. When a driverless ride costs less than gas and insurance, owning a car feels like a gym membership you never use.
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The future of driving is nobody driving. Steering us in a whole new direction.
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First released in 1995, the original Virtual Boy looked like a VR headset but wasn’t actually VR or a headset. Instead, the console offered stereoscopic 3D games that you viewed through a pair of bulky goggles that were propped up on a stand. It also rendered games in eye-searing red and black, making for an experience that had some potential but was ultimately ugly and uncomfortable. It was a flop and was discontinued after just a year, amassing a library of less than two dozen games.
Now Nintendo has brought that same experience to the Switch. Virtual Boy games have been added to the Nintendo Classics collection of retro games available to Switch Online subscribers this week, but the twist is, because of the unique nature of the original hardware, you need to buy an accessory to actually play them. There’s a plastic re-creation of the Virtual Boy that’ll run you $100, which is what I’ve been using, as well as a cheaper cardboard headset that’s a much more reasonable $25. Either way, you’ll need both a subscription and an accessory to play these games.
Technically the games will run in portable mode without one of the accessories connected, but without the magnifying goggles, they’re displayed so small that they’re essentially unplayable. It looks something like this:
The plastic Virtual Boy looks like the original hardware, complete with a fake controller port and volume dial. But really it’s an elaborate Switch (or Switch 2) case that turns it into something resembling a Virtual Boy. It works like this: The top of the Virtual Boy opens up, letting you slot in a Switch, sans Joy-Con controllers, inside. When you close it up, the Switch becomes the console powering the Virtual Boy-like experience. Look through the goggles, and you’re awash in pixelated reds and blacks (though other colors will be available post-launch).
Since you don’t wear it strapped to your face, the Virtual Boy doesn’t have the same problems as a typical VR headset, where you’re supporting a bunch of weight on your head. But it’s still far from comfortable in my experience. The stand is adjustable so you can change the angle of the goggles, but I had a hard time finding an optimal viewing angle, despite trying to play it lots of different ways. And man, those red graphics; they were hard to look at in the ’90s, and things haven’t improved much. The Virtual Boy is a system where you need to take frequent breaks to save your eyes and neck. Don’t make the same mistakes I did.
All that said, the Virtual Boy’s lineup is surprisingly interesting to play in 2026. There are seven titles available at launch, and while there are a few duds — I just can’t seem to wrap my head around the first-person robot fighter Teleroboxer — I’ve really been enjoying playing 3D Tetris, Galactic Pinball, and the space shooter Red Alarm. The standout might be Wario Land, a fairly straightforward and occasionally clunky platformer but with 3D elements like enemies that jump out right in front of you, making things feel more tense. It’s not a huge lineup by any stretch, but it gives you a good sense of what the Virtual Boy is all about. Which is to say, there are some solid games with neat 3D gimmicks that are fun in short doses. (Why the tentpole Mario’s Tennis isn’t available at launch, especially given the recent release of Mario Tennis Fever, is a mystery to me.)
Nintendo tends to have a complicated relationship with its own history, often glossing over its failures and doing a poor job of celebrating what makes its games so important. So on one hand, the existence of this Virtual Boy seems like something of a miracle. Few people had a chance to play the original, and here it is available through Nintendo’s most successful platform ever. But it’s also a product that requires jumping through a lot of hoops for a small amount of payoff. And since it’s tied to NSO, you’re spending $100 to play games only for as long as you have a subscription or the service is active. After that, you have a costly paperweight.
The Switch version of the Virtual Boy is a device that’s weird, awkward, and of limited appeal — which, now that I think about it, perfectly re-creates the experience of the original.
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If you have ever searched for a home online, you know the routine. Set a price range. Click a few filters. Run the search. Start over. Again and again.
Now imagine skipping all of that and simply saying, “I want a home near good schools with high ceilings, a short commute and a kitchen that feels modern.” Then the platform responds like it already understands what matters most to you. Well, that future tech is here.
Homes.com, powered by Microsoft Azure OpenAI, has launched Homes AI, a fully integrated conversational home search experience. Instead of clicking through a bunch of filters, you talk or type your way to the right home. And this is more than just a new feature. It could completely change how people search for and ultimately buy houses.
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Instead of guessing which filters to use, buyers can ask detailed questions about schools, commute times or neighborhood trends and get instant answers in one place. (David Cooper/Toronto Star via Getty Images)
Why AI home search fixes the old filter problem
For years, homebuyers had to search like they were programming a database. That meant checking boxes, toggling filters and running multiple searches just to piece together what they actually wanted.
“Searching for a home previously forced prospective buyers to think like a database — checking boxes, toggling filters and manually running multiple searches to piece together what they wanted,” Livia Sponseller, head of Homes.com Product at CoStar Group, told CyberGuy. “We understand that isn’t how people best operate, so conversational search removes the silos of data so that all information, whether it’s about neighborhood average home prices, schools or in-depth details about a specific home, allows buyers to easily and simply describe what they’re looking for in their own words.”
That line hits home. No one dreams about toggling filters. People dream about backyards, school districts and a kitchen where everyone gathers. With Homes AI, you can describe what matters to you in plain language. The system pulls from deep property data, 3D Matterport tours, neighborhood insights and proprietary school data to guide you.
“Direct conversations with our AI guide, Homes AI, capture nuances in buyer preferences that traditional filters do not,” Sponseller added. “These nuances are ultimately what lead a buyer to choose the right home for them, making it feel less like browsing listings and more like truly experiencing the home.”
In other words, this moves home search from mechanical to meaningful.
Why AI home search works right now
AI assistants are already part of everyday life. Millions of people already talk to generative AI tools every week. That comfort level matters. As Sponseller explained, “People have become very accustomed to interacting with AI assistants like ChatGPT. Hundreds of millions of people are using its generative AI tools each week, so people are beginning to tap into the power of these generative pre-trained transformers (GPT) and large language models (LLMs). The experience we built for Homes.com represents the natural next step — seamlessly integrating advanced AI into the existing site infrastructure and shifting the heavy lifting of filtering and refining search results from the homebuyer to the technology itself.”
That shift is huge. The burden moves from you to technology. Instead of refining results manually, the AI refines them for you in real time. And it does so inside the Homes.com ecosystem. Your data stays within the platform and is not used to train external models.
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Instead of guessing which filters to use, buyers can ask detailed questions about schools, commute times or neighborhood trends and get instant answers in one place. (Homes.com)
What surprises buyers about AI home search
The first time someone uses conversational artificial intelligence for home search, the biggest surprise may be how human it feels. Sponseller said, “I think users will be genuinely surprised by how closely it mirrors the experience of working with the most knowledgeable agent. Whether you’re looking for comparable sales, average home values in an area or the lifestyle of a specific neighborhood, buyers can ask virtually any home-related question and get an answer immediately, as opposed to referring to multiple sites for all that information.”
Instead of hopping between tabs, you stay in one seamless experience. You can ask about commute times, neighborhood trends or interior details without starting over. She also pointed out, “Homes AI is a transparent, fast, data-rich and ad-free tool, elevating the experience for consumers to another level.” That ad-free part matters. It keeps the focus on your goals, not on who paid for placement.
As the system learns your preferences, it refines recommendations over time, helping you narrow choices with more clarity and confidence. (Homes.com)
What AI home search means for the future of real estate
Sponseller believes this goes beyond one platform: “This is bigger than real estate. It’s only a matter of time until we see conversational experiences extend across industries, not just real estate portals. Why leave the heavy lifting to the searcher-consumer if ultimately this simplifies the process? Homes.com is simply the first to fully integrate this approach at scale, but I think it’s safe to say that shopping experiences across the board are entering a new era.”
And when we look back? “We have full confidence that people will look back at the current state of portals and have a laugh at how clunky, manual, and fragmented the process felt.”
She added, “The housing market has evolved to a point where applying filters and needing to run multiple consecutive searches to capture all the filters will feel as outdated as flipping through the Yellow Pages.” That comparison says it all.
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What this means for you
If you are thinking about buying a home in the next few years, this could make the process feel a lot less stressful. Instead of endlessly scrolling and tweaking filters, you can simply explain what matters to you. The system does the sorting. It narrows the list based on your real priorities, not just basic checkboxes. That means you may tour fewer homes that miss the mark. You could spot red flags earlier. You might even feel more prepared before you ever walk through the front door. In a market where every decision counts, having clearer information upfront can make a real difference.
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Kurt’s key takeaways
Buying a home is a big deal. It is emotional. It is expensive. And it can feel overwhelming fast. For years, online search tools helped, but they also made you do most of the work. You had to adjust filters, rerun searches and keep track of what mattered. AI home search changes that dynamic. You explain what you want. The technology handles the sorting. Over time, it even remembers your priorities. That could mean fewer wasted showings. Fewer surprises. More confidence before you ever step inside a house.
If this is where home search is headed, will you trust a system that learns your preferences, or will you still want full control of every filter yourself? Let us know by writing to us at Cyberguy.com.
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