It runs locally, a free/open source home automation platform connecting all your devices together, regardless of brand. And GitHub's senior developer calls it "one of the most active, culturally important, and technically demanding open source ecosystems on the planet," with tens of thousands of contributors and millions of installations. That's confirmed by this year's "Octoverse" developer survey... Home Assistant was one of the fastest-growing open source projects by contributors, ranking alongside AI infrastructure giants like vLLM, Ollama, and Transformers. It also appeared in the top projects attracting first-time contributors, sitting beside massive developer platforms such as VS Code... Home Assistant is now running in more than 2 million households, orchestrating everything from thermostats and door locks to motion sensors and lighting. All on users' own hardware, not the cloud. The contributor base behind that growth is just as remarkable: 21,000 contributors in a single year... At its core, Home Assistant's problem is combinatorial explosion. The platform supports "hundreds, thousands of devices... over 3,000 brands," as [maintainer Franck Nijhof] notes. Each one behaves differently, and the only way to normalize them is to build a general-purpose abstraction layer that can survive vendor churn, bad APIs, and inconsistent firmware. Instead of treating devices as isolated objects behind cloud accounts, everything is represented locally as entities with states and events. A garage door is not just a vendor-specific API; it's a structured device that exposes capabilities to the automation engine. A thermostat is not a cloud endpoint; it's a sensor/actuator pair with metadata that can be reasoned about. That consistency is why people can build wildly advanced automations. Frenck describes one particularly inventive example: "Some people install weight sensors into their couches so they actually know if you're sitting down or standing up again. You're watching a movie, you stand up, and it will pause and then turn on the lights a bit brighter so you can actually see when you get your drink. You get back, sit down, the lights dim, and the movie continues." A system that can orchestrate these interactions is fundamentally a distributed event-driven runtime for physical spaces. Home Assistant may look like a dashboard, but under the hood it behaves more like a real-time OS for the home... The local-first architecture means Home Assistant can run on hardware as small as a Raspberry Pi but must handle workloads that commercial systems offload to the cloud: device discovery, event dispatch, state persistence, automation scheduling, voice pipeline inference (if local), real-time sensor reading, integration updates, and security constraints. This architecture forces optimizations few consumer systems attempt. "If any of this were offloaded to a vendor cloud, the system would be easier to build," the article points out. "But Home Assistant's philosophy reverses the paradigm: the home is the data center..." As Nijhof says of other vendor solutions, "It's crazy that we need the internet nowadays to change your thermostat."

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Micron is shutting down its Crucial consumer RAM business in 2026 after nearly three decades, citing heavy demand from AI data centers. "The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage," Sumit Sadana, EVP and chief business officer at Micron Technology, said in a statement. "Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments." Ars Technica reports: Micron said it will continue shipping Crucial consumer products through the end of its fiscal second quarter in February 2026 and will honor warranties on existing products. The company will continue selling Micron-branded enterprise products to commercial customers and plans to redeploy affected employees to other positions within the company. Crucial launched in 1996 during the Pentium era as Micron's consumer brand for RAM and storage upgrades. Over the years, the brand expanded to encompass other memory-related products such as SSDs, flash memory cards, and portable storage drives. Micron Technology has been manufacturing RAM since 1981.

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This story was reported with support from the MuckRock foundation.

As prices for streaming subscriptions continue to soar and finding movies to watch, new and old, is becoming harder as the number of streaming services continues to grow, people are turning to the unexpected last stronghold of physical media: the public library. Some libraries are now intentionally using iconic Blockbuster branding to recall the hours visitors once spent looking for something to rent on Friday and Saturday nights. 

John Scalzo, audiovisual collection librarian with a public library in western New York, says that despite an observed drop-off in DVD, Blu-ray, and 4K Ultra disc circulation in 2019, interest in physical media is coming back around. 

“People really seem to want physical media,” Scalzo told 404 Media.

Part of it has to do with consumer awareness: People know they’re paying more for monthly subscriptions to streaming services and getting less. The same has been true for gaming.

As the audiovisual selector with the Free Library of Philadelphia since 2024, Kris Langlais has been focused on building the library’s video game collections to meet comparable interest in demand. Now that every branch library has a prominent video game collection, Langlais says that patrons who come for the games are reportedly expressing interest in more of what the library has to offer. 

“Librarians out in our branches are seeing a lot of young people who are really excited by these collections,” Langlais told 404 Media. “Folks who are coming in just for the games are picking up program flyers and coming back for something like that.” 

Langlais’ collection priorities have been focused on new releases, yet they remain keenly aware of the long, rich history of video game culture. The problem is older, classic games are often harder to find because they’ve gone out of print, making the chances of finding them cost-prohibitive. 

“Even with the consoles we’re collecting, it’s hard to go back and get games for them,” Langlais said. “I’m trying to go back and fill in old things as much as I can because people are interested in them.” 

Locating out-of-print physical media can be difficult. Scalzo knows this, which is why he keeps a running list of films known to be unavailable commercially at any given time, so that when a batch of films are donated to the library, Scalzo will set aside extra copies, just in case a rights dispute puts a piece of legacy cult media in licensing purgatory for a few years. 

“It’s what’s expected of us,” Scalzo added.

Tiffany Hudson, audiovisual materials selector with Salt Lake City Public Library has had a similar experience with out-of-print media. When a title goes out of print, it’s her job to hunt for a replacement copy. But lately, Hudson says more patrons are requesting physical copies of movies and TV shows that are exclusive to certain streaming platforms, noting that it can be hard to explain to patrons why the library can't get popular and award-winning films, especially when what patrons see available on Amazon tells a different story. 

“Someone will come up to me and ask for a copy of something that premiered at Sundance Film Festival because they found a bootleg copy from a region where the film was released sooner than it was here,” Hudson told 404 Media, who went onto explain that discs from different regions aren’t designed to be ready by incompatible players. 

But it’s not just that discs from different regions aren’t designed to play on devices not formatted for that specific region. Generally, it's also just that most films don't get a physical release anymore. In cases where films from streaming platforms do get slated for a physical release, it can take years. A notable example of this is the Apple+ film CODA, which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2022. The film only received a U.S. physical release this month. Hudson says films getting a physical release is becoming the exception, not the rule. 

“It’s frustrating because I understand the streaming services, they’re trying to drive people to their services and they want some money for that, but there are still a lot of people that just can’t afford all of those services,” Hudson told 404 Media. 

Films and TV shows on streaming also become more vulnerable when companies merge. A perfect example of this was in 2022 with the HBO Max-Discovery+ merger under Warner Bros Discovery. A bunch of content was removed from streaming, including roughly 200 episodes of classic Sesame Street for a tax write-off. That merger was short-lived, as the companies are splitting up again as of this year. Some streaming platforms just outright remove their own IP from their catalogs if the content is no longer deemed financially viable, well-performing or is no longer a strategic priority. 

The data-driven recommendation systems streaming platforms use tend to favor newer, more easily categorized content, and are starting to warp our perceptions of what classic media exists and matters. Older art house films that are more difficult to categorize as “comedy” or “horror” are less likely to be discoverable, which is likely how the oldest American movie available on Netflix currently is from 1968. 

It’s probably not a coincidence that, in many cases, the media that is least likely to get a more permanent release is the media that’s a high archival priority for libraries. AV librarians 404 Media spoke with for this story expressed a sense of urgency in purchasing a physical copy of “The People’s Joker” when they learned it would get a physical release after the film premiered and was pulled from the Toronto International Film Festival lineup in 2022 for a dispute with the Batman universe’s rightsholders.

“When I saw that it was getting published on DVD and that it was available through our vendor—I normally let my branches choose their DVDs to the extent possible, but I was like, ‘I don’t care, we’re getting like 10 copies of this,’” Langlais told 404 Media. “I just knew that people were going to want to see this.” 

So far, Langlais’ instinct has been spot on. The parody film has a devout cult following, both because it’s a coming-of-age story of a trans woman who uses comedy to cope with her transition, and because it puts the Fair Use Doctrine to use. One can argue the film has been banned for either or both of those reasons. The fact that media by, about and for the LGBTQ+ community has been a primary target of far-right censorship wasn’t lost on librarians.

“I just thought that it could vanish,” Langlais added. 

It’s not like physical media is inherently permanent. It’s susceptible to scratches, and can rot, crack, or warp over time. But currently, physical media offers another option, and it’s an entirely appropriate response to the nostalgia for-profit model that exists to recycle IP and seemingly not much else. However, as very smart people have observed, nostalgia is default conservative in that it’s frequently used to rewrite histories that may otherwise be remembered as unpalatable, while also keeping us culturally stuck in place. 

Might as well go rent some films or games from the library, since we’re already culturally here. On the plus side, audiovisual librarians say their collections dwarf what was available at Blockbuster Video back in the day. Hudson knows, because she clerked at one in library school.

“Except we don’t have any late fees,” she added.

From indies like Blue Prince to big console exclusives like Donkey Kong Bananza, NPR staff members and contributors round up their favorite games of 2025.

As of this week, half of the states in the U.S. are under restrictive age verification laws that require adults to hand over their biometric and personal identification to access legal porn.

Missouri became the 25th state to enact its own age verification law on Sunday. As it’s done in multiple other states, Pornhub and its network of sister sites—some of the largest adult content platforms in the world—pulled service in Missouri, replacing their homepages with a video of performer Cherie DeVille speaking about the privacy risks and chilling effects of age verification. 

The other states include Louisiana, Utah, Mississippi, Virginia, Arkansas, Texas, Montana, North Carolina, Idaho, Kansas, Kentucky, Nebraska, Indiana, Alabama, Oklahoma, Florida, South Carolina, Tennessee, Georgia, Wyoming, South Dakota, North Dakota, Arizona, and Ohio.

“As you may know, your elected officials in Missouri are requiring us to verify your age before allowing you access to our website. While safety and compliance are at the forefront of our mission, giving your ID card every time you want to visit an adult platform is not the most effective solution for protecting our users, and in fact, will put children and your privacy at risk,” DeVille says in the video. On the blocked homepages there’s also a link to an explanation of the “Restricted to Adults,” or RTA label, which porn site administrators place on their sites to signal to device-based parental controls that the websites are inappropriate for minors.  

Like most of the other 24 laws across the country, Missouri’s age verification law requires websites containing more than one third of material that’s considered “harmful to minors,” or sexual content, to perform age verification checks. Similar or more restrictive laws have swept the country since Louisiana became the first state to enact age verification legislation in 2023.

Age Verification Laws Drag Us Back to the Dark Ages of the Internet

Invasive and ineffective age verification laws that require users show government-issued ID, like a driver’s license or passport, are passing like wildfire across the U.S.

404 MediaEmanuel Maiberg

Age verification laws reach beyond porn sites, however. In Wyoming, South Dakota, Mississippi and Ohio, where the laws are written broadly enough to cover social media sites and any platform hosting adult content, Bluesky users have to submit to a face scan by the third-party company Yoti or upload a photo of their credit card to verify they’re over 18 years of age. In July, Bluesky started requiring all UK users to verify their ages in response to the Online Safety Act. We’ve previously reported on the security risks in uploading sensitive personal data to identity verification services, including the potential for hackers to then get ahold of that information themselves. In October, after Discord started requiring UK users to verify ages, the platform announced hackers breached one of its third-party vendors that handles age-related appeals, and said it identified around 70,000 users who may have had their government ID photos exposed as part of the breach. 

Last week, Pornhub’s parent company Aylo sent letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft, urging them to support device-based age verification in their app stores and operating systems, WIRED reported. “Based on our real-world experience with existing age assurance laws, we strongly support the initiative to protect minors online,” Anthony Penhale, chief legal officer for Aylo, said in the letter. “However, we have found site-based age assurance approaches to be fundamentally flawed and counterproductive.” 

Instead of protecting minors, age verification laws spike usage of virtual private networks and send users—including, potentially, minors—to unregulated or unmoderated sites that don’t care about complying with U.S. or UK laws. In Missouri, searches for VPNs spiked following the law’s enactment. 

Missouri schools are not required to teach sex education, leaving it up to local school boards to decide what, if anything, children are taught about sexual health. School districts that do teach sex ed are required to promote abstinence, a modality long recognized as ineffective at protecting children from engaging in risky sexual behaviors. Even if a district offers sex ed, parents are allowed to pull their kids out of that class altogether. But despite research showing age verification laws don’t work either, Missouri Attorney General Catherine Hanaway believes forcing adults to undergo age verification protects the children in her state. “We are proud to stand on the side of parents, families and basic decency. Missouri will not apologize for protecting children,” Hanaway said in a press release. 

New York has become the first state in the nation to enact a law requiring retailers to disclose when AI and personal data are being used to set individualized prices [non-paywalled source] -- a measure that lawyers say will make algorithmic pricing "the next big battleground in A.I. regulation." The law, enacted through the state budget, requires online retailers using personalized pricing to post a specific notice: "THIS PRICE WAS SET BY AN ALGORITHM USING YOUR PERSONAL DATA." The National Retail Federation sued to block enforcement on First Amendment grounds, arguing the required disclosure was "misleading and ominous," but federal judge Jed S. Rakoff allowed the law to proceed last month. Uber has started displaying the notice to New York users. Spokesman Ryan Thornton called the law "poorly drafted and ambiguous" but maintained the company only considers geographic factors and demand in setting prices. At least 10 states have bills pending that would require similar disclosures or ban personalized pricing outright. California and federal lawmakers are considering complete bans.

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