News Report Tonight

You can now finally add your BPI Debit Mastercard to Google Pay. BPI just made the announcement, albeit many users shared that the feature has been available for months. You’ll be able to use Google Pay by adding your BPI Debit Mastercard to your Google Wallet. Bear in mind that the feature only works on select Android phones, particularly those with NFC capability. It will require a one-time verification for the card enrollment. Once enrolled, you can use your phone to pay for items in merchants that accept cashless transactions. Instead of pulling out your card, you simply have to pull out your phone, tap it on the terminal, and you’re good. Enrolling your BPI card will also make it available to your Android wearables like smartwatches. What makes each transaction safe is that it will require authentication, whether it’s your fingerprint, facial recognition, or PIN. The actual card details are also never shared with merchants during transa...

Plaud has introduced the Plaud One , a pair of earbuds designed specifically for capturing and processing conversations through artificial intelligence. The Plaud One follows a design similar to Apple’s AirPods, with 12mm drivers and active noise cancellation. The earbuds themselves provide six hours of recording for in-person meetings or three hours of call recording per charge. Combined with the charging case, total battery life reaches 25 hours. The case can pick up voices from up to five meters away and includes an eSIM , which Plaud says lets users interact with its AI assistant without needing a connected phone. Once conversations are transcribed, Plaud’s AI agent can connect to productivity platforms including Google Calendar, Gmail, Slack, and Notion. From there, it can draft messages, generate documents, or create presentations based on what was discussed. The concept mirrors services like Granola, Fathom, and Read AI, which have offered similar call transc...

At this year’s Gamescom, ASUS revealed three new gaming displays aimed at esports fans. The new lineup, part of the company’s Ace series, focuses on fast OLED screens that reduce blur and offer bright, accurate colors for quick-action games. The top-tier model, the ASUS ROG Swift OLED PG259QWS Ace , runs at 720Hz, making it the quickest of the bunch. It uses a 1080p WOLED panel with a peak brightness of 1,700 nits and works with Dolby Vision for sharper HDR visuals. A handy extra is the built-in Position Sensor, which tracks the screen’s angle and height. This info appears on the display, so gamers can easily reset their preferred viewing position after moving the monitor. The other two monitors use QD-OLED panels. The new ASUS ROG Strix OLED XG259QDPG Ace offers a 560Hz refresh rate and comes with a special coating that ASUS says boosts dark tones by up to 40 percent while also protecting the screen from scratches. The cheaper version, the ASUS ROG Strix...

The Philippine delegation delivered impressive performance during its participation in the International Olympiad in Artificial Intelligence (IOAI). Held last August in Astana, Kazakhstan, the competition saw the four-member Filipino team secure medals in every category, bringing home one silver and three bronze awards. They competed against a massive field of 466 high school students representing 108 different countries and territories. The silver medal was earned by Theo Lorenzo T. Bustamante from the Philippine Science High School–CALABARZON Region Campus, who managed to rank 80th overall. The bronze medals were claimed by three other students: Ellison Matthew S. Ang of Philippine Science High School–Main Campus, Jhareign S. Solidum of University of Mindanao Ilang High School), and Juan Mateo J. Desuasido of Brent International School Manila. This result placed the Philippines among a select group of nations that successfully secured silver medals during their first IOAI appea...

POCO took the wraps off its most powerful, feature-packed smartphone to date, the POCO F9 Ultra. The POCO F9 Ultra is powered by a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 processor, paired with an Adreno 840 GPU, up to 16GB of RAM, and up to 1TB of internal storage. The chipset is next to Xiaomi’s VisionBoost D8, which works with POCO’s Wildboost Engine, enabling 165fps and 185fps gaming on select titles, 1.5K super resolution, and Game HDR. Another big feature is the 8,050mAh battery, which should easily last you for up to 2 days of light to moderate use. That big battery is aptly paired with a fast 100W wired charger, and even has 50W wireless charging support. It also has fast reverse charging for both wired and wireless modes at 27W and 22.5W speeds, respectively. On the front, there’s a large 6.9-inch AMOLED display, complete with a sharp 1.5K resolution, up to a whopping 185Hz refresh rate, up to 4800Hz instant touch sampling, and support for...

A professor from National University Manila has built a free website where people can check if their text or chat messages are fraudulent. The platform is called “ Scam Ba ‘To? ” and it assigns risk levels of Red, Yellow, or Green after analyzing what the message tells the user to do, the web addresses it contains, and the overall situation around the transaction. The tool does not mark messages as scams simply because they include one-time passwords or push users to act quickly. People can copy and paste questionable messages into the system. It then returns a risk rating and gives a clear explanation behind its decision. When available, it also points users to legitimate official channels they can refer to. The tool works on various types of messages, such as billing notices, security alerts, shipping updates, official government announcements, and school communications. How to report a text scam to the NTC What is ‘quishing’ and how can we a...