May 30 Tech news roundup: Steam Deck gets a massive price hike, Users are flocking to DuckDuckGo, Firefox’s big VPN button amuses users

Valve hikes the price of Steam Deck

A while ago, the Steam Deck OLED models went out of stock. Now, Valve has announced a massive price increase for the handheld consoles. The Steam Deck 512GB OLED, which launched for $550 in 2023, now costs $790. That’s a price increase of $240, i.e. about 43.64%. It gets worse. The Steam Deck 1TB OLED model, which debuted for $650, has been hit with a $300 price hike. That’s right, a 46.15% increase, it now costs $950. The price changes are global, so 512 GB Steam Deck price in Europe has shot up to 779 €, while the 1TB version costs 919 €. In the UK, the 512GB Steam Deck costs £779, and the 1TB variant is available for £649.

That’s insane. But you know why this happened, it’s due to the ongoing memory and storage crisis. RAM and SSD prices have gone through the roof over the past few months. The fact that Valve discontinued the Steam Deck LCD models in December 2025, made the OLED versions the only options for those looking to buy the handheld.

But, the odd thing is that, despite the massive price hike, the Steam Deck OLED has managed to sell out quickly. Did Valve have a small inventory? Or were buyers afraid of further price hikes? It’s unclear, but things seem bleak for the launch of the Steam Machine. Could Valve actually cancel it? Only time can tell. Prices of the Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, Xbox Series X/S, PlayStation 5 have all been hiked in recent times. Gaming is quickly becoming a luxury that few can afford.

DuckDuckGo usage rises after Google’s recent “AI improvements”

Last week, Google announced some changes to Search, focusing heavily on AI-powered results. Google may have over 1 billion users per month who use AI mode, but that doesn’t mean everyone is going to like the changes the company makes. According to a statement given by DuckDuckGo’s CEO Gabriel Weinberg to TechCrunch, Google is forcing AI on users without giving them an option to opt-out. As a result of this, DuckDuckGo’s usage seems to have gone up, after users began switching over to the privacy-friendly search engine. In the US, DuckDuckGo’s app installs increased by 18.1% compared to the previous week, and this growth continued, eventually peaking at 30.5%. The company reported greater numbers on iOS, with a 33% average and a peak of nearly 70%.

DuckDuckGo also says that its AI-free search page, saw a growth of 22.7% with a peak rate at 27.7% last week. While these numbers may seem trivial compared to Google’s millions of users, the message is clear. Adding AI features to everything is not a good idea.

YouTube to automatically detect and label AI-generated videos

YouTube has announced that it will display an AI badge on videos that contain AI-generated footage. This is being done in order to prevent photo-realistic content from being shown as real content.

YouTube will automatically detect AI content in videos, and mark them as AI, if it finds significant use of AI in the video. Content creators have an option to disclose whether they used AI to create their videos, and will be able to manually update a video’s description if it was incorrectly identified as AI-generated. But, this won’t work if the video was created using Google’s own AI tools such as Veo or Dream Screen, or contains metadata that proves the video was AI-generated. In such cases, the AI label will stay, even if the uploader tries to deny using AI tools.

YouTube will display an AI label in the overlay in Shorts that were created using AI tools. A similar label will be shown below the video player for long-form videos that contain AI generated content. This is a good start, but YouTube should offers viewers an option to filter AI videos from the results.

Firefox’s big VPN change amuses users

Mozilla released the Firefox 151.0.2 update this week to fix some bugs. Users were rather bemused by a change that inadvertently slipped in, a massive VPN button. Firefox’s built-in VPN feature, which is still in beta, is rolling out to users worldwide. The latest update seems to have broken the VPN button. It’s huge, and disproportionate to the rest of the UI. Firefox fans joked that this was a deliberate change to promote the feature.

A bug report related to the issue has been filed, and was not only acknowledged by Mozilla’s engineers, but was also quickly fixed. Mozilla will patch the issue in a future update soon.

Researchers reveal an exploit which lets websites to monitor SSD activity and spy on users

Websites have always been able to track user activity using various methods from fingerprinting the browser and/or device, accessing the browsing history, or by monitoring the mouse cursor’s movement, key strokes, etc. Ars Technica reports that a new technique called FROST could allow websites to spy on SSD activity. FROST stands for fingerprinting remotely using OPFS-based SSD timing.

Malicious websites that implement this JavaScript could be able to track what a user is viewing on their web page, and also sneak a peek at the apps that the user has open on their device. It is essentially an attack that exploits a side channel, that makes it possible for the script to run in the browser itself.

The script targets the OPFS (origin private file system), which is a storage space used by websites to run code for a specific task. An attacker could measure SSD contention continuously by performing random reads from an OPFS file, providing that it is very large. Then a convolutional neural network that has been trained on these traces could fingerprint user activity based on the data. A white paper that has been published by security researchers at Graz University of Technology in Austria goes into the details of the attack.

When the researchers shared their findings with Google, the Mountain View company responded that it does not consider fingerprinting as a security vulnerability. Apple meanwhile termed it as out of scope. Mozilla acknowledged the matter, but has not implement any fix to prevent such an attack. But in all seriousness, this does not seem like a serious threat, given the limitations of the technique.