Microsoft will bet you a new laptop that it can upgrade your (compatible) PC to Windows 10 Time is running out to upgrade to Windows 10 for free. After July 29th, Windows 7 and 8.1 users will have to pay to get Microsoft's latest operating system. Microsoft has rather infamously been urging PC owners to take advantage of the free offer. However, so far over 350 million people have decided to take the plunge to the latest version of Windows. Winbeta

U.S. to allow foreigners to serve warrants on U.S. internet firms The Obama administration is working on a series of agreements with foreign governments that would allow them for the first time to serve U.S. technology companies with warrants for email searches and wiretaps – a move that is already stirring debates over privacy, security, crime and terrorism. Brad Wiegmann, a senior official at the Justice Department, discussed the administration's efforts during a public forum on Friday at a congressional office building in Washington, D.C. The first such agreement is being assembled with the U.K., he said. The WSJ

VR is a revolution in control more than immersion Holopoint is a VR archery game, and it's almost impossible to explain why it's so good without sounding like a wanker. It doesn't look like much. You're in a dojo, and some blue cubes straight out of My First Unity Project hang in the air around you. You shoot arrows at those, holding your bow in one hand and drawing back the arrow with the other. Sometimes they shoot at you. Eventually some holographic samurai show up and wade slowly toward you from all sides, feet sliding across the floor in a mismatched animation. You shoot these also. Eurogamer

Lepton image compression: saving 22% losslessly from images at 15MB/s We are pleased to announce the open source release of Lepton, our new streaming image compression format, under the Apache license. Lepton achieves a 22% savings reduction for existing JPEG images, by predicting coefficients in JPEG blocks and feeding those predictions as context into an arithmetic coder. Lepton preserves the original file bit-for-bit perfectly. Dropbox

Forget Iron Man: skintight suits are the future of robotic exoskeletons Children with a rare neurological disease were recently given the chance to walk for the first time thanks to a new robotic exoskeleton. These devices – which are essentially robotic suits that give artificial movement to a user's limbs – are set to become an increasingly common way of helping people who've lost the use of their legs to walk. Robohub

Sandia storing information securely in DNA Experiments at CERN's Large Hadron Collider generate 15 million gigabytes of data per year. That is a lot of digital data to inscribe on hard drives or beam up to the "cloud." George Bachand, a Sandia National Laboratories bioengineer at the Center for Integrated Nanotechnologies, is exploring a better, more permanent method for encrypting and storing sensitive data: DNA. Sandia

Google had an Oculus competitor in the works – but it nixed the project Google recently shut down an internal project to create a high-end standalone virtual reality headset akin to devices from Facebook's Oculus and HTC, according to sources familiar with the plans. The decision likely stems from Google's effort to streamline its more ambitious projects, an ongoing slog at the company. In this instance, Google is shifting more resources behind mobile VR... Recode

Samsung in talks with BYD to buy stake in electric-car maker Samsung Electronics Co., the world's largest maker of phones and memory chips, said it's in talks with BYD Co. about investing in the Chinese electric-car manufacturer. Details including the size of the investment will be disclosed when they're confirmed, Samsung said Friday in an e-mailed statement. The investment in BYD, backed by Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway Inc., would bolster Samsung's semiconductor business for cars, the South Korean company said. Bloomberg

A smaller version of Raspberry Pi 3 is coming soon A smaller version of the popular Raspberry Pi 3 will go on sale in a few months. Raspberry Pi is developing a new version of its Compute Module, a single-board computer that plugs into specific on-board memory slots. The new Pi will be more like a mini-computer inside a computer, and it won't come with a power supply. PCWorld

Inside the playlist factory When he's choosing your music for you, Carl Chery, 37, is in Culver City, California, sitting at his desk in an office with no signage, trying to decide whether Drake and Future's "Jumpman" (jumpman, jumpman, jumpman) has jumped the shark. Or sometimes he's at home in his one-bedroom apartment on the border of West Hollywood and Beverly Hills, walking around in his living room with new Gucci Mane blasting from a Beats Pill. BuzzFeed

Tearing apart the Nintendo Playstation The mid 90s were a weird time for video game hardware. There were devices that could play videos from compact disks. Those never caught on. Virtual reality was the next big thing. That never caught on. The Sony PlayStation was originally an add-on for the Super Nintendo. That never caught on, but a few prototype units were produced. One of these prototype 'Nintendo Playstations' was shipped to a company that went into bankruptcy. Hackaday

TR's VR journals, part one: setting the stage Over the past couple months, I've been places. I've dangled from the side of a rock wall hundreds of feet above crashing waves. I've set foot on a shipwreck deep beneath the ocean and hung out with a humpback whale. I've laid waste to pallets of unsuspecting fruit with a pair of katanas. I've led a research mission on an alien world full of exotic life forms. I've been to Taipei to look at a bunch of new PC hardware. (OK, that last one actually happened.) The Tech Report

Crossover for Android runs on Chromebooks! Sometimes, you find yourself staring at something you could never have imagined being possible based on its humble beginnings. The Wright Brothers pilot the airplane for 12 seconds; then, Neil Armstrong lands on the moon. The first microcomputer kit is made available in 1975; then, 120 million computers are sold in the world so far this year! Codeweavers

HTTPS is not a magic bullet for Web security We're in the midst of a major change sweeping the Web: the familiar HTTP prefix is rapidly being replaced by HTTPS. That extra "S" in an HTTPS URL means your connection is secure and that it's much harder for anyone else to see what you're doing. And on today's Web, everyone wants to see what you're doing. Ars Technica

'Pokémon Go' isn't very good but it will be huge anyway The thing no one warns you about when you decide to become a Pokémon trainer is the humidity. It's hot and muggy on my first day hunting down Pikachus and Geodudes in Brooklyn, and my already clammy hands are getting even sweatier from the heat of my phone – Pokémon Go runs hot. Vice