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Google Photos could soon let you save video frames as images more easily than ever before.

The option to save a video frame as photo will show up when you pause a video.

Currently, the option is buried deep inside Google Photos’ editing screen.

Google Photos has had the ability to export a video frame as an individual photo for several years. However, it isn’t the easiest tool to find and use, and most people (like me) just take a screenshot of their videos to save a still image from their clips. Now, it seems Google is working on making the tool more readily available.

While digging into the latest version of Google Photos (v7.83.0.943371825), we found a new, easier way to export a video frame as a picture. With some tinkering, we were able to get it working, and it’s a much better experience than what the app offers right now.

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id Software co-founder John Carmack has reacted to the massive layoffs under Microsoft , which have reportedly led to the majority of the studio losing their jobs.

"I have been trying to find something meaningful to say about the Id Software layoffs." Carmack says in a thread on Twitter . "My 'Microsoft will probably be a good steward of the brand' statement isn't aging well," he says, adding "this is certainly going to dampen the mood of the founder reunion at QuakeCon next month."

Carmack explains: "I'm saddened, but I can't muster anger or outrage over it. I don't have access to the books, but I suspect that Id Software was a marginal business from Microsoft's perspective." He says, "I believe the reports that Minecraft revenues have been carrying several other studios," in reference to a Bloomberg report (via PC Gamer ) that claims that profits from Minecraft had been used to prop up less successful studios under the Xbox banner.

However, Carmack is taking a bit more pragmatic approach when it comes to the layoffs, even if they are coming from a company that made $281.7 billion in 2025. "To continue being produced long term, games need to succeed, not just be beloved," Carmack adds, saying, "You can't rule out the possibility that executives are idiots, but that shouldn't be your default belief. I don't think there is any obvious path that would have doubled the revenue from id games."

Carmack then speculates on different approaches that could've been taken like different pricing or marketing – and one could argue giving away Doom: The Dark Ages, a $70 game, for the price of a subscription fee probably didn't help it sell.

Former principal VFX artist at id Software, Derek Best said earlier this week that Microsoft has nuked "a team into the dirt" and relegated them "to support studio size." But despite this, Carmack believes, "The game isn't over yet, and I hope the studio rallies through." Fellow id co-founder John Romero also commented on the layoffs, calling them "devastating" while praising the developers who carried on id's legacy after the founders left, saying: "The last few games showed real care, skill and respect for what those worlds mean to people."

Pitches for a co-op Doom, a new Perfect Dark, and a John Wick-inspired cyberpunk game were cooking at id Software before Microsoft layoffs reportedly led to 136 job cuts.

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JK Simmons might have been in two MCU movies as J Jonah Jameson, but he's actually never met Spider-Man himself, Tom Holland.

On an appearance on the Happy Sad Confused podcast , Simmons admitted "I've not met Tom Holland," and added: "Delightful guy, I'm told."

Simmons first appeared in the MCU in Spider-Man: Far From Home, then returned again in Spider-Man: No Way Home. Of course, he also played the same character in the Sam Raimi Spider-Man films, though this is a different version of him thanks to the multiverse. And, since Peter Parker doesn't work for this Jonah, they've never crossed paths.

"In the third iteration, when that came along, to do a little sort of cameo reprise, that was a complete shock and a very last minute decision," Simmons explained in the same interview. "Which I still think is why JJJ doesn't have hair in the Tom Holland Spider-Man universe, because they literally called my agent, we had a meeting the next day, and it was like a day or two later I was shooting in somebody's office, some executive's office on the lot because there was no set. They were well into editing the film when they went, 'What if we stuck a little JJJ in here?'"

Spider-Man: Brand New Day picks up in the aftermath of No Way Home, which saw the entire multiverse forget Peter Parker. This time, Peter is going up against an unknown foe , with the help of Jon Bernthal's Punisher and Mark Ruffalo's Hulk.

Brand New Day arrives this July 31. In the meantime, check out our guide to all the upcoming Marvel movies and shows .

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In her classic memoir of Soviet state terror in the 1930s, Hope Against Hope , Nadezhda Mandelstam recounts the last years of her marriage to the poet Osip Mandelstam as they flee from city to village to town, dependent on handouts from a few brave friends and strangers, exiled from their Moscow home as enemies of the state. Osip’s chief crime had been to recite a poem at a dinner party that he never wrote down, let alone published, mocking Stalin and exposing his brutal regime.

The final couplet: “And every killing is a treat / For the broad-chested Ossete.” (Stalin was rumored to be of North Georgian, or Ossetian descent, not an ethnic Russian.) Osip is finally arrested and deported in 1937, the year of the “Great Purge,” which took his life along with those of almost a million other Soviet citizens deemed disloyal or simply “not needed.”

Writing from a perspective of relative safety in the 1960s, Mandelstam looks back on the early years of widespread belief in a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” to which she and her husband initially subscribed, and traces the gradual erosion and then swift abandonment in Soviet society under Stalin of “humanist” values—respect for “the fate of every individual.” “There is a moment of truth,” she writes, “when you are overcome by sheer astonishment: ‘So that’s where I’m living, and the sort of people I’m living with! So this is what they’re capable of! So this is the world I live in!’”

This astonishment, or “stupefaction,” she writes, “and the consequent loss of all criteria, standards and values,” were the frequent—and surely intended—results of the imprisonment and torture her husband and so many others endured. The psychic numbing spread to families, friends, and neighbors of those arrested, as well as to the survivors of the many millions killed in Soviet prisons and labor camps by execution or starvation during the decades of the 1930s and 40s: “[I]t looked as though time had stopped, the world had come to an end and everything was lost forever. The collapse of all familiar notions, is, after all, the end of the world.”

The collapse of all familiar notions is the end of the world . I’ve pondered that sentence during the past year as, under the Trump administration’s unrelenting siege on virtually every presumed governmental safeguard or safeguarded institution, I’ve felt my familiar world fall away. There are the evident signs in my neighborhood, not far from Harvard Square, where posh hotel restaurants are often empty, the babble of many languages spoken by visiting scholars has dwindled, and I see mostly white faces on the street. A neighbor who used to enjoy renting an apartment in her two-family home to foreign students and faculty is selling the place as a condo.

During the past year as, under the Trump administration’s unrelenting siege on virtually every presumed governmental safeguard or safeguarded institution, I’ve felt my familiar world fall away.

But even on trips to still-bustling, definitionally diverse New York City, or simply waking up in my own apartment to the same bedroom furniture, framed pictures on the wall, and paper-strewn desk I knew before January 20, 2025, I’m unnerved.

The neurologist Pria Anand writes in The Mind Electric that the feeling of familiarity originates in the limbic system, a region of the brain where “memory and emotion are intimately intertwined.” It takes very little sensory input—a scent, a glimpse—to kindle the “inkling of recognition” that reaches us as familiarity “in the moment before explicit memory kicks in.” Arriving on a street in your old hometown, you’ll feel familiarity before you lay eyes on your childhood home and know you’re there. Indeed, “familiarity can exist without recognition,” Anand writes, as déja vu .

I don’t know if there’s a term for feeling unfamiliar in a familiar place, a French phrase that sums up what it’s like to recognize the landmarks of one’s daily life, one’s home country, and feel unmoored. Whatever you call it, that’s what Donald Trump has done to us.

*

The Trump administration is not Stalin’s overtly murderous regime, but Trump’s policies have cost and will cost many lives: the hundreds of thousands, eventually millions, worldwide no longer served by USAID; the ICE raid-induced deaths in Minneapolis; the war dead in the Middle East, in abandoned Ukraine; mounting losses to measles, COVID, and influenza due to federally sanctioned anti-vaccine propaganda. There will be more lives lost to scaled back state-sponsored health insurance programs and Medicaid, shuttered clinics that once offered prenatal care, terminated medical research, unchecked climate change. This is only the beginning of a lengthening list.

To lose one’s job—one’s livelihood and professional identity—is another kind of death. During his years in exile, Osip Mandelstam was denied the right to work for any publication or publishing house; translation jobs were canceled, his writing went unpublished. Isolation, malnutrition, and untreated illness left him vulnerable to harsh prison conditions after his arrest, hastening his death at age 47.

Donald Trump, as Terminator in Chief, has brought the misery of job loss to hundreds of thousands of civil servants whose employment was meant to be secure, whose jobs held profound meaning for them and whose daily efforts, often for modest wages, supported the well-being of the country. These are deaths too; they shatter our fundamental expectation that government functions for the public good. They tell us we can’t rely on our government to safeguard its workers, or its citizens.

During his years in exile, Osip Mandelstam was denied the right to work for any publication or publishing house; translation jobs were cancelled, his writing went unpublished.

When Nathaniel Hawthorne lost his federal appointment as Surveyor of Salem’s Custom House in 1849, after the election of a Whig president, Zachary Taylor, he referred to his firing as a decapitation. Although many readers today skip over the “Custom-House” preface to The Scarlet Letter , it was Hawthorne’s bitterly satirical account of his ejection from office that sold the book when it was first published in 1850. The writer considered himself “an inoffensive man of letters”; Hawthorne performed the job of surveyor with such diligence he never found the spare time to write that his friends in the Democratic party had promised when he accepted the position. After Taylor’s election, he was told that “qualified men wouldn’t be removed from office for purely partisan reasons,” Hawthorne’s biographer James Mellow writes. The promise wasn’t honored.

Hawthorne’s firing became a cause célèbre . Boston and New York newspapers issued editorials in his support; Harvard’s president, the former Massachusetts governor Edward Everett, rose to his defense. Nothing helped. Hawthorne’s wife, the artist Sophia Peabody, began peddling hand-painted lampshades and fire screens to support the family of four while her husband took to his desk to see what his pen could earn. The Scarlet Letter , an otherwise parochial tale of sexual transgression in colonial Boston, sold out its first printing in ten days thanks to readers nationwide, who warmed to the tell-all send-up of the spoils system Hawthorne attached in hopes of capitalizing on the controversy. Critics today agree that the novel itself—Hawthorne’s scathing portrayal of the Puritans’ newly founded “city upon a hill”—was fueled by the writer’s resentment over his own unfair treatment two centuries later, at the dawn of the American experiment in democracy.

The battle over protections for federal employees raged for another three decades until Congress passed the Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act of 1883, which required most federal jobs to be filled based on merit and made it illegal to fire such employees for partisan reasons. Nearly a century later in 1978, in the wake of the Watergate scandal, a second Civil Service Reform Act was passed providing further protections, including for whistle blowers.

The CSRA has been in Donald Trump’s sights since his first term in office; from the start of his second term he’s acted as if the legislation were already repealed. The Supreme Court’s June 2026 decision in Trump v. Slaughter, giving the president power to fire independent agency chiefs, suggests that future cases filed on behalf of fired federal workers will not fare well in the highest court. Already, with a July 2025 emergency order in McMahon v. New York , SCOTUS overturned a lower court’s ruling that had blocked Department of Education Secretary McMahon’s mass firings of DOE employees in obedience to Trump’s order that she dismantle the department. (Along with eviscerating the DOE, established in 1979 to combat bias in public schools, the Trump administration has put the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in a stranglehold, according to a July 6 New York Times report, by issuing an executive order to “deprioritize” cases defending minority applicants.)

With a population well over three hundred million—fifteen times that in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s time—can the United States function without the skilled civil servants Trump has long vilified as operatives of a “deep state”? A February 2026 Boston Globe study found that, during Donald Trump’s first year in office, the federal workforce shrank by ten percent; firings extended to 489 federal agencies. Employees who had served the government for twenty years or more were targeted for job termination or pressured to resign. Texas A&M law professor Nicholas Handler commented on the crippling effects of the “rapid brain drain”: the government’s “ability to do sophisticated things is badly diminished because you can’t convince good people to come. And even if you do convince good people to come, if they can be fired every four or eight years, you just don’t build up the institutional capacity and the institutional knowledge to do the kinds of things that we expect a twenty-first century government to do.” Former Office of Personnel Management acting director Rob Shriver observed, “You’re looking at like four million years of experience that walked out the door.”

Four years after Hawthorne’s novel was published, Henry David Thoreau delivered a lecture on the meaning of work, later published as “Life Without Principle,” one of his best-known works after Walden and “Civil Disobedience.” Thoreau was thinking on the village level, but his insight speaks to our moment:

It would be economy for a town to pay its laborers so well they would not feel that they were working for low ends, as for a livelihood merely, but for scientific, or even moral ends. Do not hire a man who does your work for money, but him who does it for love of it.

*

I wake unnerved. Fearful. I open the morning paper, rush through the grim headlines, and locate the crossword puzzle. For the past two decades, since I’d endured a painful divorce, the New York Times daily puzzle has been my source of comfort. No more. Governmental acronyms are the meat and potatoes of crossword constructors:

54 A: Fair-hiring inits. since 1964 [EEO] April 10, 2025

30 A: Vaccine-approving org. [FDA] June 16, 2025

28 A: Law with “individual mandate” provision, for short [ACA] March 20, 2026

82 A: Org. founded to fund foreign projects [USAID] April 12, 2026

15 A: Defense grp. since 1949 [NATO] April 14, 2026,

8 D: Fuel economy org. [EPA] May 13, 2026

30 A: Flu-fighting org. [CDC] June 11, 2026

Each time I fill in a correct answer, I think of jobs lost, faith lost, lives lost. The collapse of the familiar sure feels like the beginning of the end of our world:

40 A: Part of the government that includes the presidency [Executive branch] March 23, 2026

17 A: Classic flowering locale adjacent to the White House [Rose Garden] Jan. 26, 2026

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The IoT and AI are a likely partnership: IoT generates and captures data, often in large volume, AI is ideally placed to analyze it.

Combined, AIoT presents new opportunities, so much so that Transforma Insights forecasts no fewer than 9.1 billion AIoT connections at the end of 2033, a more than six-fold increase in 10 years.

The potential for AI in the IoT is far-reaching, and one standout application is enhanced security.

The security risk to the IoT

All connected devices are under growing levels of threat, but the IoT is particularly targeted. According to Beaming’s cyberthreat report into UK businesses, IoT devices were most frequently attacked in 2024. They are attractive targets for the data they exchange and their potential to be compromised.

The devices are often unmanned and generally sit outside corporate security perimeters. They may be in remote spots, where they could be subject to unauthorized physical access attempts, and often remain in place for long periods of time. Many, such as the IoT devices used in energy, transport, utilities and retail, transfer sensitive data of high value.

Businesses need confidence that data collected through the IoT—both real-time and historical—comes from secure and trusted sources, not least when it comes to developing and training AI models. In this, the IoT works with digital twins, which are digital representations of physical objects or systems.

The IoT enables the seamless flow of real-world data between the physical and the digital, while the digital twin’s attributes provide the features for AI modelling. Historical data collected through IoT is then used to train and refine the AI model.

How AI is helping secure the IoT

AI applies its automation and analytical capabilities to many tasks and priorities. It is making inroads into cybersecurity, something that has not gone unnoticed. Last year, the IEEE revealed almost half of the global technology leaders it surveyed (47%) expect vulnerability identification and attack prevention to be a top use of AI in 2026.

That may be some comfort to enterprises and connectivity and solutions providers grappling with the problem of protecting IoT devices and applications. This challenge is compounded by the fact that attackers are increasingly using AI themselves to automate phishing, accelerate reconnaissance and develop adaptive malware that evades traditional detection. However, it is more comforting still, that AI is already making a difference in the IoT, redefining how organizations protect their devices.

AI-powered anomaly and threat detection (ATD) is helping security teams identify threats like suspicious network traffic and botnet activity faster and improving resilience across large-scale IoT environments, something enterprises must strive for.

In the recent past, the focus on the IoT was arguably getting devices online. That is no longer the challenge; the test now is keeping them operational: compliance readiness and the flexibility to adapt to ever-evolving commercial and technological changes. It also means maintaining resilience.

IoT security must follow a clear defend against, detect and react approach to swiftly counter attacks. No one or two of these three measures are enough without the others.

How AI improves IoT visibility and incident response

AI-powered ATD detects anomalous behavior, such as remote code execution, abnormal port connection or a suspicious IP. These could indicate the beginnings of a cyberattack on an IoT device. It analyses the anomaly and can identify the attack type, be it distributed denial of service ( DDoS ), man-in-the-middle (MiTM) or an attempted device takeover.

ATD can then trigger direct action, if business rules dictate an automated response. This could take the form of threat isolation or referring the incident for full review.

Anomaly and threat detection protects over one million devices

ATD runs entirely in the mobile core network infrastructure, rather than through software agents on a device, so it can be retrofitted to existing systems.

Enterprises that have identified IP backdoors and Mirai botnet infections within hours.

With IP backdoors, ATD detects unusual outbound connections, or traffic, to suspicious IPs. Such backdoors may allow remote control or data exfiltration, both of which leave identifiable behavioral traces.

In the case of Mirai, anomalous behavior typically exhibits as spikes in outbound traffic, uncommon ports use, or repetitive scanning of external IPs. ATD can flag these irregularities in real time and trigger corrective actions, such as blocking or quarantining the device, blocking or throttling traffic or patching firmware.

Automation and analytics can shape the next phase of IoT security

There is a clear shift in IoT implementation and management. It is insufficient to plan for device deployment, sit back and gather the data. Without a strategy that accounts for the stresses, threats and changes that beset IoT estates, enterprises risk costly surprises like unplanned site visits and service disruptions.

AI, through automation and analytics, can shape the next phase of IoT security. Enterprises that detect, analyze and even automatically address, anomalous activity reduce the risk of cyberattack-related outages and inconvenient site visits to access devices.

Sending field technicians to maintain or repair devices can add significantly to total cost of ownership. Each truck roll, which incurs expenses for labor, fuel, vehicle wear and often missed productivity opportunities, can add up to over $1000 per site visit.

IoT downtime, meanwhile disrupts operations and can have a catastrophic reputational, as well as financial, cost.

How to balance innovation, data privacy and operational control

Enterprises are, for the most part, keen to innovate through AI but have understandable questions about data privacy and operational control.

It is important to know what AI does, in all process integrations, to understand why it does it and to have control that prevents AI deviating from its purpose.

On data privacy, ATD isn’t installed on IoT devices. Only packet headers from device cloud communications are mirrored from the mobile core to the ATD engine, with threat levels and AI-driven insights relayed through a customer portal.

Operational control is maintained through the business rules that dictate how the ATD engine reacts. The option to refer an anomaly for review, for example, gives enterprises the flexibility to incorporate human oversight, under predetermined circumstances.

This is especially useful when you consider there can be genuine reasons why a SIM may increase or cease communication, that an incident reviewer will understand.

AI-powered IoT security

AI is making a difference to the speed, efficiency and depth of response to cyberthreats. Automation and advanced analytics within IoT solutions’ security measures also help enterprises manage costs, by minimizing labor-intensive manual tasks and site visits, and reducing the risk of expensive cyberattack reparations.

For CISOs, CIOs, product and operations managers seeking to maximize IoT value and protect their enterprise IT domains from external threats, AI-powered ATD offers visibility and actionable insights to take IoT security to the next level.

We've reviewed and ranked the best antivirus software .

This article was produced as part of TechRadar Pro Perspectives , our channel to feature the best and brightest minds in the technology industry today.

The views expressed here are those of the author and are not necessarily those of TechRadarPro or Future plc. If you are interested in contributing find out more here: https://www.techradar.com/pro/perspectives-how-to-submit

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Daniel Ahmad of Niko Partners says Sony ending physical disc production was inevitable

He says it would have happened if not for the PS6, then the PS7

Ahmad says Sony wants to create a "closed ecosystem with high margins"

Sony's decision to end the production of physical PlayStation discs in 2028 came as quite a shock to the community, but one analyst believes the move was inevitable given the rise in digital sales on consoles.

Sharing his thoughts in a long thread on X in a response to a fan likening the situation to Apple removing the headphone jack from its products, Daniel Ahmad of Niko Partners said, "It's more like Apple removing the CD Drive from its laptops starting in 2008."

He explained that while there were many complaints at the time, there's "not a single person is complaining about it today," and there were not many people complaining in the early 2010s either. Ahmad puts Sony's decision down to digital PlayStation software performing better now than it ever did before the PS4 launched.

"The first thing to note about Sony's decision is that it would inevitably happen at some point for consoles. If not PS6 , then PS7," Ahmad continued. "Full game digital sales on PlayStation have gone from less than 10% prior to the release of the PS4 to around 80% today."

He added, "On Xbox it's already over 90%, and if anything I'm surprised they weren't the ones to do it first. Yes, these numbers include digital only games, reflecting the current market environment, but they don't include DLC, microtransactions or subscriptions / free games."

Ahmad shared a bit more data to support his claims, saying that about 50% of the PS5 user base is subscribed to PS Plus and has built up a large library and/or has access to numerous digital games.

"The truth is that the console ecosystem is nearly entirely digital at this point," he said, pointing to how Sony also earns revenue through digital add-on content, like microtransactions and other in-game purchases, more than it does "from the sale of physical and digital full game sales combined."

Games like Fortnite , Grand Theft A 5 , Minecraft, Call of Duty , Apex Legends, Marvel Rivals , Battlefield 6 , and Arc Raiders , Ahmad pointed out, had the highest number of players on PS5 in May, and half of them don't ship on a physical disc.

"Over 30% of PS5s sold to date do not have a disc drive (Meaning that 70% do, however)," the analyst added. "More importantly though, the current sell through rate of digital only PS5s is above 50%."

(Image credit: Embark) Ahmad also said Insomnia Games' sales figures, which have been presented as evidence that physical sales represent a good chunk of PS5 sales, are "out of date" and "people are looking at the sell in number rather than the sell through number."

He explained that one of the reasons retail is high for certain physical games is "because Sony counts bundles as retail sales, even if it's a digital code with the console."

A reason he believes Sony is going forward with an all-digital future is simple: "The economic argument." Because of the profit margins between physical and digital games, Sony can retain 100% of first-party games sold on the PlayStation Store, but it earns $21 (30%) from a $70 third-party title.

"When it [Sony] sells a third party game at retail, it earns around half that amount, even if the player spends the same $70," he said. "The difference isn't as stark for third party publishers, but they'd prefer to sell all games digitally if they could for the higher margins. That's why physical game revenue makes up just 5% of Sony's total game software sales revenue (incl. DLC / MTX), despite accounting a higher % share for units sold. When Sony said it would stop publishing games on PC, no one pointed out that it essentially earned the same from PC sales that it earns from physical disc sales, and the former was considered too little."

Ahmad said another reason is the market we're currently in, where console prices seem to be increasing regularly. Sony knows that the PS6 could enter a market where other hardware is over $1000, and players will think twice about upgrading on day one.

"While part of it is cutting costs, it's also a realization that consoles are no longer going to be $199 mass market devices and they will need to focus on hardcore gamers who are willing to spend more than ever," he said.

A third reason would be Sony wanting to create a "closed ecosystem with high margins."

"The retreat from PC is partly about this, the end of disc production is also about this, as is the exploration of different form factors. Right now you can resell, gift, or even refund physical games. With digital games, you don't have the same rights currently," Ahmad said. "As Sony looks to maximize spend per user, it is essentially ending the used market for PS6 software and ensuring all software sold is high margin and they capture a %. In other words, Sony controls the license in its entirety and access is dependent on them."

Ahmad concluded, calling Sony's lack of announcement around what will happen to PS4 and PS5 discs "a mistake," and had it "talked about a disc to digital program, or confirmed a disc add on for the PS6, the backlash wouldn't have been as strong."

The analyst also said it's "unlikely" that Sony will reverse the decision, but "wouldn't be surprised if they do end up clarifying certain aspects." However, Ahmad thinks it could support physical games for a few more years, perhaps through limited-run hardware or a more expensive PS6 compared to the digital version.

"I'm also of the belief that even if the PS6 costs $1k, used physical games helps increase overall affordability," he said.

Ahmad ended by saying the conversation needs to shift to "consumer rights" and what digital game ownership really means.

"Regardless of whether we're talking about bringing physical back, or embracing digital, the conversation needs to shift to consumer rights and what a license should enable. Stop Killing Games was one part of it, but gifting, family sharing, refunds, and other aspects are just as important," he said.