AI-powered software cloning is quite the hot topic. Software companies are likely unhappy with the notion of vibe coders ganging up to try and copy their software. Simultaneously, users tired of subscription models, price hikes, and drops in software quality are more than happy to rebel, as proven by the buzz around the Adobe-replacement ArtCraft. Now, OccupySaaS is the latest user-led revolt against the software system, aiming to create clean-room, open-source reimplementations of common services using AI tools.

The initiatives already underway in the project look to replace Auth0 and Salesforce with minty fresh alternatives called ZeroAuthy and SalesCompel, respectively. Given that these services all run on their companies' servers, there are no binaries to examine and decompile — the reimplementations are done referencing available documentation, APIs, development kit behaviors, and any applicable open standards. Judging from the project website, it seemingly wants new software to acts as a API-compatible drop-in replacement where applicable.

The project puts a sharp pin on its development ethics and requirements: all work must be a fully clean-room reimplementation, with no decompiled code, no confidential information (including source code) taken from any previous employers, and no copying of UI assets or any other trademarks.

Creating software in this manner is both easier and harder than usual. On the one hand, the only thing that matters is that whichever user inputs are processed and produce the same outputs as the original software, and those behaviors are largely defined by the aforementioned specifications.

At the same time, hosted software is effectively a black box with internal behaviors and "gotchas" that aren't immediately obvious. Just as with console emulators, any drop-in replacement needs to reproduce extant API bugs to be fully compatible — looking at you, Jira.

Besides the aforementioned services, OccupySaaS intends to find replacements for services offering document-and-wiki management, issue tracking, software feature flagging, software/server observability, and customer support. Our guesses for the targeted replacements in each of those categories are Confluence, Jira, LaunchDarkly, Datadog, and Zendesk.

The language of choice is Go, picked over Rust simply because it allows for easily compiling and linking all its dependencies into the one binary that doesn't need an installer and can just be copied to a target system and executed. According to OccupySaaS, that characteristic makes it ideal for packaging into a Docker container or other forms of self-hosting.

Some people may quickly point out that the entire point of renting a SaaS to begin with is that any snafu with the code or the infrastructure is always Someone Else's Problem, and that running your own instance is backwards. However, since OccupySaaS's software is Apache 2.0-licensed, there's nothing stopping anyone from providing a service for it. Examples include Red Hat Enterprise Linux, GitLab, and of course, Wordpress.

The project appears to be the brainchild of Thomas Meadows, a software engineer with two decades of experience. In his personal homepage, he claims is strong suit is project management, which is a good skill to have in this day and age of directing AI agents towards a goal. The website reads like a manifesto, pointing out that per-seat licensing taxes growth, and that the same people who created the software are now being fired — "the software built by the 99% belongs to the 99%."

Edit 11/1/2026 4:25am PT: Clarified title to state the bill still has to pass the Senate after being added to the budget.

France has approved a proposed tax that aims to tax the amount of internet data per gigabyte sent to French users in the country, with major companies like Google, Netflix, TikTok, and Meta now in the crosshairs. According to minutes released by the National Assembly, members voted 11-10 in support of the motion on October 30 — which now means the new law has been added to the country’s next budget, despite major opposition from the government side and the finance committee rapporteur. The law still has to pass through the Senate for final approval. The latest amendment, introduced by socialist lawmaker Laurent Lhardit, could see content providers pay €0.055 (roughly $0.06) to the government for every gigabyte of content distributed to French users.

With approximately 154 million users and counting in France, the proposal’s authors say such a tax could generate around €10 billion ($11.2 billion) in annual revenue for the government. “This amendment proposes a tax on digital data flows emitted by content providers, to be borne by the providers themselves. Its revenue is estimated at €10 billion.” Said Laurent Lhardit. The said proposal, though yet to be passed as it must survive further parliamentary scrutiny, aims at companies that generate substantial internet traffic as opposed to taxing their advertising revenue, profits and subscriptions. Its explanatory notes particularly mention Google, Meta, Netflix, Amazon, and content delivery network Akamai as major potential contributors. Notably, TikTok and other similar platforms could fall under this broader scope depending on how these rules are applied.

Internet service providers, including Orange Free and Liad, would be required to measure the volume of data and identify the companies responsible for sending it to French users. The Data will then be collected and submitted quarterly to France’s tax administration under the supervision of telecommunications watchdog Arcep. Aside from the €0.055 per gigabyte levy, the proposal also includes a cap of 15% of a company’s French revenue or 2% of its worldwide revenue. It also accounts for content delivery networks (CDNs), which store copies of online content closer to users to reduce loading times and network congestion.

Approximately 200 billion GB of data pass through French internet providers annually, with about five major companies identified in the amendment accounting for about half of that traffic. Lhardit argued that tax would primarily affect global technology companies because they generate most of the data traffic reaching French subscribers. He also disputed that those platforms would merely push additional costs to users, using Facebook, Instagram, and TikTok, which provide free access, as examples. “The rapporteur keeps arguing that the taxes will be passed on to consumers. However, I fail to see how a tax can be passed on to users of Facebook, Instagram, or TikTok since these services are free,” He stated.

How much money are you willing to spend during the Black Friday sales?

Lawmakers opposed to the proposal, however, argue that it is likely to endanger user privacy. Government Minister David Amiel questioned whether the internet traffic could be measured and attributed to content providers without introducing complicated monitoring requirements. Those concerns extend to potential consequences for French business. Lhardit, however, noted that businesses would pay relatively modest costs, citing TF1 as an example, which requires broadcasters to contribute between €200,000 and €300,000.

Several European countries already impose digital service taxes, generally based on revenue from Ads, marketplaces and other digital activities. In March, Meta announced it would introduce location-based fees of between 2% and 55 for advertisers to offset digital services taxes and other government levies in several countries, including France, Italy, and Spain, from July 1, 2026 . Previously, the European Commission has rolled out major enforcement actions against major technology companies, including a €5 billion fine against Google over Android antitrust violations, Facebook’s €100 million fine for misleading European regulators, and the EU’s investigation into Facebook’s ability to link WhatsApp accounts.

Last year, Apple and Meta were also fined €500 million and €200 million, respectively, a move that strained the relationship between Brussels and Washington, with the U.S. calling the penalties ‘a novel form of economic extortion’ that it will not tolerate. That said, the amendments' adoption in parliament is only the first step. If it can clear the remaining stages of France’s 2027 budget process, it can become law, with parliament scheduled to vote on the budget’s first section in early November.

11/4/2026 update: A representative of Collabora Office reached out, stating that the trial did not "collapse," but was put on hold due to Danish elections and a subsequent restructuring of the government ministry that was conducting the trial. Collabora Office's s full response can be found here. We have tweaked our headline; our original article is below.

Denmark’s Ministry of Digitization, which has since been merged with other ministries and is now called the Ministry for Research, Education, and Digitization, has reportedly ended its experiment to replace Microsoft Office with an open-source alternative. According to Danish publication Computerworld [machine translated], the pilot project was launched in 2025 and involved 38 employees, all of whom would start using the British open-source Collabora office suite instead of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel.

The experiment was initiated by the then Digitization Minister Caroline Stage, who wanted to reduce the country’s dependence on American technology. Denmark isn’t alone in moving away from U.S. software, with France and the Netherlands both taking steps to replace Microsoft Windows. However, it seemed that the experiment fizzled out less than six months after it started. It had reportedly ended by the time the Danish government called for an early election in February 2026, with some employees complaining about issues with style, paragraph formatting, blank pages, and challenges with tracking changes.

But even though it’s been months since the experiment reportedly ended, Prof. Mikkel Flyberbom of the Copenhagen Business School complains that the project hasn’t been properly evaluated. “It’s a good idea to test alternatives in a pilot project,” the professor said in an email. “However, I wish that the ministry would take the opportunity to learn from the pilot project and share those experiences with other parts of the public sector.”

The Microsoft Office alternative had to work with the then Ministry of Digitization’s central case management system called F2, but it’s unclear why it only chose Collabora for the project. While Collabora is based on LibreOffice, which is one of the most popular and mature open-source alternatives to Microsoft’s office suite, there are also several other alternatives it could have tested, like OnlyOffice, OpenOffice, and Calligra. There have also been recent attempts to use AI to create open-source versions of subscription-based software like Microsoft 365 and the Adobe Creative Suite, but governments would likely want to choose a reliable and stable build instead of these experimental AI-built apps.

It’s still a mystery why the Danish government chose to work with only open-source Microsoft Office alternatives in its testing. It probably would’ve been better if different teams used three alternatives and then the project proponents conducted a review after the testing period to determine the best solution. Nevertheless, the question is moot with the apparent failure of the open-source experiment.

Proton AG, which provides privacy-focused services like Proton Mail and Proton VPN, has decided to host the Flock camera map that security researcher Joshua Michael built from leaked Flock data. While the original Flock Surveillance Map is still available online, its creator is facing legal threats from the company, especially after Flock sent the researcher a cease-and-desist letter. In addition, Michael’s website is accessible only from within the U.S., requiring users outside the country to use a VPN to access it.

By contrast, Proton’s Flock camera map is easily accessible worldwide. Its location in Switzerland also makes it a little more complicated for the surveillance company to take legal action. Its move to preserve Michael’s work also follows the company’s privacy ethos.

“You have a right to know who’s recording you when you leave home, especially when a private company controls the data and it’s unclear how law enforcement uses that information,” the company said. “This map lets you search by ZIP code to see where Flock’s license plate readers are located. Use it [to] make informed decisions about how you move through your own area and whether you need to reach out to your municipal leaders.”

Flock and other automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras are at the center of the privacy debate between law enforcement and citizens. While the former argues these machines help make communities safer, many of the latter worry about the technology's potential misuse. Their fears aren’t unfounded, either — there have already been multiple cases of police officers misusing Flock cameras to stalk romantic partners and even one case of mistaken identity due to a lapse in police procedure.

However, Proton’s map is based on data from November 2025. This makes it more of a snapshot of the company’s network at that time, rather than a live map of Flock’s ALPR cameras. For a more up-to-date map, consider downloading MapQuest, which recently released an update showing the locations of ALPR cameras from Flock and other companies. This could help you plan your trip if you have privacy concerns and want to avoid getting picked up by an ALPR camera.

MapQuest, a long-time online mapping and navigation service that predates Google Maps, just released an app update that added a new Surveillance Layer. The company said on Bluesky that it plots the locations of known license plate readers on the map and that it covers devices from Flock, as well as other companies like Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and other brands.

The Roads Have Eyes! 👁️Turn on the Surveillance Layer in Map Options to see known license plate readers from Flock Safety, Motorola Solutions (Vigilant), Genetec, Axis Communications, Axon, Leonardo (ELSAG), Neology, Rekor, PlateSmart, Ubicquia, Verkada, and other outdoor surveillance cameras.

— @mapquest.com (@mapquest.com.bsky.social) 2026-10-18T02:31:11.890Z

It’s unclear how the app developers found all this data, but it is similar to the Flock Surveillance Map that one security researcher built using Flock’s own data. Beyond showing each camera's location, it also indicates the direction it faces, allowing anyone who doesn't want to be captured by an automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) system to avoid known cameras, if possible.

While cities and police forces argue that systems like these help keep people safe by making it easier to track potential criminals, many people say that they’re a massive invasion of privacy, citing multiple incidents of police officers abusing the system and administrative mistakes, like one resulting in the detention of an innocent car reviewer. This is why some cities whose constituents have complained have started removing them.

A Canadian YouTuber built a “Flock-like” camera that tracked police vehicles and was visited by officers who, in an ironic twist, raised privacy concerns. These are the exact concerns critics have about ALPRs, especially when they connect to a wider federal or national system that lets police officers from another city or state track vehicles without a warrant. It’s unclear how police would react to this functionality, but many police departments have previously complained when Waze released a 2015 update that let users report officers' locations.

This new MapQuest feature can help you get around known ALPR camera locations. But if your destination has heavy camera coverage, you’ll have no choice but to pass through one and be detected, unless someone in the neighborhood has put a “Flock Sock” on one of them.

We’ve been sharing our passion for technology with you for 30 years, and today we’re introducing a faster, easier way to access all of our content while on the go. The official Tom’s Hardware app is live now, available for free on Android and iOS devices, bringing all of our content to your pocket in a clean, responsive application that is optimized for smartphones and tablets. Whether you’re hunting for parts for your latest PC build, evaluating prebuilt PCs, tuning your system, or just want to know the latest breaking industry news, the Tom’s Hardware app has the features you need.

The smart search feature allows you to quickly search through the thousands of deep-dive articles in our library to easily find what you are looking for, while push notifications allow you to keep your finger on the pulse of the latest breaking tech news. You can also personalize your feed based on your interests, honing in on the topics that matter to you most, as well as bookmark articles for later reading.

We’ve also brought the functionality of Bench, our benchmark analyzer tool that allows you to quickly compare our internal lab-tested benchmarks of CPUs, GPUs, SSDs, and laptops to refine your purchasing decision. This database not only holds tens of thousands of benchmark data points, but it also has detailed product pages with specs and pricing information. The app offers limited free access to Bench, but you can unlock unlimited use with a subscription to our Tom’s Hardware Premium service.

You can also access our Tom’s Hardware Premium service on the app. This subscription-based service provides our readers with longer-form news, analysis, testing, and features for those who want to dig even deeper into our core coverage areas.

The Tom’s Hardware app is now available, free of charge, at the Google Play Store and Apple App Store.

Brandon Thomas, developer of ArtCraft, a suite of open-source creative tools meant to replicate Adobe applications for free, has now announced apps to replace Microsoft Office tools such as Excel, PowerPoint, and Word, respectively, named GridCraft, DeckCraft, and WordCraft, that are created with Claude. Thomas has shared his new clones to ArtCraft GitHub, making them free for all to download.

After our previous story covering ArtCraft, we have since discovered that u/ai_art_is_art is Brandon Thomas, a highly talented software engineer with 15 years of experience under his belt. After his ArtCraft project became popular, many criticisms followed about vibecoded software and AI slop, to which Brandon responded on his X account, saying that he does know how to code.

One of the biggest pain points for these software programs is OS compatibility, while Adobe runs on MacOS and Windows, Linux requires additional compatibility layers and Windows emulation to work. One of ArtCraft’s biggest selling points is being able to run all the software across all three platforms while still giving an identical user experience regardless of OS — this is also part of the parity that ArtCraft wants to achieve. While Google provides these tools for free with Google Sheets, Docs, and Slides available on all platforms through a browser, the online-only model takes away the ownership aspect of the software, fearing that one day the tools would suddenly require a subscription and users would not have any say in it.

Microsoft sits among the most criticized companies for its business practices, similar to Adobe. What was once a one-time purchase now comes as a subscription package with various tools that many don’t need; many even have overlapping features and uses, essentially wasting some of the subscription value. It seems that Brandon Thomas is not only creating open-source alternatives, but is also creating a targeted protest against these practices.

ArtCraft’s Discord community is also growing very quickly, with constant recommendations of other software they would like to see, with CADcraft being commonly discussed among 3D printing and engineering enthusiasts who don’t like Autodesk, similar to Microsoft and Adobe. As many free alternatives as there were before the rampant vibecoding, it seems that this growing collection of tools is not only functional, but a message to the large companies as well. Most of these apps are still far from what they intend to replace, however, so we'll have to see how deep this message cuts.

Microsoft just made a major change to its storage policy affecting Microsoft 365 subscribers with shared accounts. According to the company, the Microsoft 365 Family, Premium, and Pro plans will move from an assigned 1TB of cloud storage for each user to a shared 2TB for all users. This means that a subscription shared across six users will have its total cloud storage capacity slashed by 66.6%. This change will take effect on subscription renewals after May 2, 2027, unless the subscribers change their plan earlier. Some affected subscribers might also receive bonus storage when their account switches to the share limit model, although the company did not mention its eligibility requirements.

The company said it made this change so that the cloud storage allocation for Microsoft 365 subscribers will automatically go where it’s needed, and that individual users are less likely to hit individual storage limits. Aside from that, it also said that unused storage can benefit the entire family, and that any additional storage that the main subscriber purchases will benefit everyone.

This new setup is indeed advantageous for subscribers who only have one power user that uses up the majority of the cloud storage capacity, while all the rest take up a fraction. It would also be cheaper for an individual who intends to use more than 1TB of cloud storage to just switch to the Microsoft 365 Family plan (which costs $129.99 annually) instead of getting the Microsoft 365 Personal plan ($99.99 annually) and paying an extra $9.99 per month or $119.88 per year to bring their total cloud storage capacity to 2TB. However, if you have four users under one account using 500GB each, you will be forced to purchase additional capacity, starting at $1.99 per month for 200GB.

While Microsoft hasn’t increased the prices of its subscription, this move simultaneously reduces the burden on its storage servers while forcing accounts with multiple large users to purchase storage separately. This seems like a reaction to the storage shortage hitting the industry, with hard drive prices surging by 46% from September 2025 to January 2026. Enterprise SSDs have been hit hard, too, with 30TB drives now costing $22,600 while supply remains sold out until 2027.

Affected users could change their cloud storage providers, but even Google has been affected, with the company cutting the free cloud storage limit from 15GB to 5GB pending extra security measures. Even Backblaze, which offers “unlimited” backups, updated its terms of service to potentially throttle or terminate accounts that exceed “typical usage patterns” or “places an undue burden.” Users who have grown tired of paying monthly to secure their data could alternatively set up a NAS and populate it with the best hard drives — although this might be pricey in the short term and requires some setup, it could potentially save you hundreds, if not thousands, of dollars in the long run.

It's a reasonable assessment that everyone and their dog is tired of Electron-based desktop apps that pack a full web browser and waste gobs of RAM. Spotify lovers now have a reprieve from the memory blues in the form of the Spotifast client.

Spotifast is an OS-native application written in Rust, with an emphasis on lowering memory consumption and CPU utilization. The author claims that the app ought to use 150-200 MB of RAM, compared to the usual 600 MB to 1 GB that the official application chews through.

By default, Spotifast offers a reasonable facsimile of the standard Spotify UI, though with additional features including an EQ-like visualizer on the play bar, and dozens of keyboard shortcuts and playlist management features.

The alternative client also packs a bevy of add-ons, including dark, light, and custom themes, Milkdrop visualization support, and a Winamp mode that turns Spotifast's UI into the much-beloved player.

There's even support for Winamp skins in the .wsz format, too. Those features may be tugging at nostalgia, but they're also a breath of fresh air in this age of excessive minimalism.

To use Spotifast, you'll need to have a Spotify Premium account, as presumably the ad delivery of the free version is tied to the official client. Once installed, you'll configure Spotifast as a connected device and grant it permissions to your account.

For now, there's no support for lossless audio, but that's subject to change — the librespot library underpinning Spotifast's playback doesn't yet support DRM'd lossless files, but might add the feature at some point, as popular demand seems quite high.

You can download Spotifast for Windows, macOS, and Linux and let your machine enjoy some additional free RAM. Since the client is quite new, you might run into some turbulence — but development is active and going at a fast clip. Predictably, Spotify even extended a job offer to the author, who said they'd prefer to remain independent.

Controversially named Reddit user u/ai_art_is_art posted on r/creativecloud about their suite of alternatives for the most-used Adobe products recreated using Claude. Their post has since been removed, but their comment with links to their GitHub page remains. PhotoCraft, LightCraft, ImageCraft, FilmCraft, and more are equivalents to multiple Adobe products and are available for download, but commenters warn of safety concerns and actual functionality.

Adobe’s dominance in creative tools is nothing new; it has been the industry standard for decades, with entire workflows depending on it. The Redditor wanted to create an open-source version with all the familiar layouts and functions for each product, planning to reach 100% parity within a month. The projects were all built in Rust, as the creator emphasizes multiple times in their GitHub repositories.

There is no shortage of free alternatives to Adobe products; however, the alternatives often have largely different layouts and workflows. Affinity does its best to compete with Photoshop, and it doesn’t fall short; however, Affinity still has a learning curve, and it doesn’t offer an integrated suite of products like Adobe. It seems that the developer’s goal with this is to unify the experience, unlike having multiple free creative products all built by different developers. The developer is also focused on AI integration and has also made it so that the creative software is agent-native, allowing AI to easily use the tools and menus over a JSON control channel and an MCP server, essentially intending for users to let the AI create art directly using the software.

This project has had mixed reactions, with some saying it is stealing from Adobe and warning the developer of a lawsuit; responses to those warnings state that it is a clean-room reimplementation and no Adobe source code was used or copied in the creation of the software. One commenter sarcastically responded to a post on X sharing the developer’s Reddit comment: ‘“Something really cool is happening:” Piracy,’ while others are in support, saying Adobe deserves this due to its shady buisness practices.

Skeptics also warn of safety concerns with vibecoded software; a single person has generated potentially hundreds of thousands of lines of code for multiple pieces of software very quickly, and verification of the code becomes a mountain of a task for a developer without a team; a 2026 State of Code Developer Survey of 1,100 professionals by Sonar indicates that 96% of developers do not fully trust AI-generated code. Privacy problems, malicious code, unsafe file handling, and more are among the list of concerns.

Excited testers say this could be a legitimate Adobe alternative, but others claim it may just be more vibecoded AI slop. It remains to be seen how many will collaborate to improve upon this project and fill in the missing features that it plans to replicate.

CPU-Z has rolled into its version 3 release, representing one of, if not the largest, updates the app has seen since its release in 2001. V3 introduces a host of updates, focusing primarily on an overhauled validation system with a new advanced mode.

CPU-Z's validation system now consists of three modes: standard, advanced, and XOC. The standard validation system can now display the current health of a PC in less than 10 seconds, and will check over 100 detection points including drivers, CPU temperature, bloatware, and more.

The team behind CPU-Z also worked with major support services to add "meaningful" labels detailing how healthy parts of the system are. These labels include "Critical," "Warning," and "Informational".

The advanced validation portion is entirely new for CPU-Z and features a far more in-depth validation process, including checking for potential hardware issues under heavy load. Using the advanced validation tool can take anywhere between several minutes and several hours to complete due to the stress testing and error detection functionality targeted at the CPU, RAM, and GPU. Additionally, the advanced validator also features a "significantly extended benchmarking" tool that measures CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage performance. Advanced sensors based on HWMonitor have also been incorporated to monitor temperatures, frequencies, fan speeds, and more.

The XOC validator, aimed at extreme overlockers as its name suggests, has been updated to better measure the CPU frequency of modern processors as well as properly handle memory overclocking to prevent accidental validation rejections. V3's XOC validator better handles the complex, always-changing clock speeds of modern CPUs by calculating the effective CPU clock and the "input" frequency. "If the effective frequency is lower than the input frequency, the dump will still be validated, but the real, effective frequency will be used as the final validated frequency."

By contrast, the XOC validator in CPU-Z V2 validated CPU frequencies with a five-second load, with a "one-shot measurement." Additionally, V2 also removed all load and most internal checks, which increased the risk of a validation not validating properly.

The new V3 update is designed to improve CPU-Z's usefulness for mainstream users, enthusiasts, and overclockers with its new health checks and diagnostics. CPU-Z V3 is available to download now from cpuid.com; however, many of the app's features will be disabled until enough validations arrive on the V3 database to process statistics efficiently. The V2 database will still accept validations until October 20th, when the database will be switched to read-only mode.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel for Nine PBS. We reported last week that the station lost access to 50TB of data representing 70 years of TV history. The issue was that its cloud storage provider went out of business and access to this important set of backups was abruptly cut off. In the meantime, a judge has cleared the way for Nine PBS to retrieve its archival data and programming from Iron Mountain Data Centers.

Let us refresh your memories of this case by sketching out a timeline of how we got here, before discussing the latest ruling.

• 2019: Nine PBS began using Open Source Storage (OSS) as its cloud storage provider.
• 2019-2025: Annual cloud storage contract renewals occur without incident.
• February 2026: Nine PBS wanted to meet with OSS about contract renewal but couldn’t get in touch.
• March 6, 2026: Without any new agreement inked, the existing contract expired on March 6, with the terms allowing 30 days for the customer to retrieve their data. However, OSS seemed to cut off access to Nine PBS cloud data without any warning or any grace period.
• March 13, 2026: Nine PBS learned that OSS saved its cloud data at physical servers housed in Iron Mountain, Colorado. So it wrote to request that Iron Mountain preserve and return the data. However, Iron Mountain doesn’t confirm or deny that it holds this data.
• April 16, 2026: Nine PBS filed suit against OSS, and new OSS owner James Tramel confirms the data is secured at Iron Mountain.
• May 2026: Tramel stops responding, later claiming he was defrauded into buying OSS.
• June 2026: Nine PBS obtains a default judgment stating it owns the data in question and has the right to possess it. Later the same month, Iron Mountain admits it possesses the data. However, Iron Mountain decides to block any access as it says OSS owns the physical servers.
• July 28, 2026: Nine PBS files a lawsuit against Iron Mountain, the data center provider for OSS, seeking protection against data deletion or modification.

Nine PBS - "70 years of our organization’s history" in danger

The latest development in this twisting and turning case of Nine PBS’s lost data seems like good news for the station. On August 12, 2026, a Denver judge established a process that would allow Nine PBS to retrieve its 50TB of archival data from Iron Mountain’s Denver data center.

The outlined framework includes appointing a third-party vendor, such as a former OSS employee, to assist in the retrieval of the data from the hardware in Iron Mountain. This must be done within 30 days. Moreover, Nine PBS must pay the current and overdue storage fees that OSS missed, and any physical devices the third party takes off the premises must be returned to Iron Mountain after data retrieval. Lastly, Nine PBS must verify no other ex-OSS client data is accessed, and indemnify Iron Mountain against any corruption of data owned by others.

Both Nine PBS and Iron Mountain are requested to provide progress updates on the data retrieval process by September 14. Hopefully this will be a lesson learned by Nine PBS, and it will swiftly implement a proper 3-2-1 backup of its irreplaceable data, so any cloud provider error doesn’t cause such a calamity in the future.

Are you perturbed by the hectic pace of modern life and the attention-seeking immediacy of instant messaging (IM) platforms? Do you even find email a bit too high-octane? Developer Noah Larrobino may have the solution you seek with the new Carrier Pidge app for iOS, an app that sends messages at the speed a carrier pigeon would travel.

As outlined by the dev, the key feature of Carrier Pidge is that it slows down electronic communications to a more natural speed. Specifically, any messages you send to other app users will arrive at pigeon speed, based on your respective GPS locations. According to the app store page for Carrier Pidge, that means your messages travel at 110 mph. Not slow, but if one is messaging a contact on the other side of the continent, from LA to NYC, for example, the recipient won’t see the message until 22 hours after it was dispatched.

The carrier pigeon analog is stretched further by some other features of the app’s messaging engine. As your message flies through the ether attached to your virtual bird’s virtual ankle, some birds will get distracted, slowing their progress by as much as 25%.

There’s a real-time flight tracker in the app. In Noah’s tweet, you can see they are tracking a message sent from NYC to somewhere in the UK. The on-screen text suggests the pigeon is still 1 day and 2 hours away from its destination.

Your virtual bird can get lost or die

More hazardous to your messaging hopes is the fact that anytime you send a communication via Carrier Pidge, there’s a 0.2% chance the virtual bird will get lost. So you can’t guarantee your chosen recipient will get the message.

On the other side of the flight path, there are no read receipts generated. This might give Carrier Pidge app users some graceful leeway to ignore messages they’d rather not deal with, while shielded by a little plausible deniability – a much better outcome than seemingly, rudely, ignoring a friend. However, if the dev is serious about extending such comfort to users, they should make sure the real-time flight tracker also has some built-in inaccuracies or foggy areas.

Lastly, Noah says that the virtual pigeon will sometimes just die en route to its destination. That’s another level of realism that elevates this app against its peers, as long as the dev has properly researched and implemented pigeon fatality chances across the routes, environments, and weather systems they would encounter.

While Carrier Pidge has debuted on Apple’s App Store for iOS, Noah says it will “come to Android eventually.” This new messaging app is monetized by allowing users to expand their aviary with as many as 10 extra pigeons.

Nine PBS is afraid that it will lose over 70 years of archival materials and programming after its contracted cloud storage vendor has apparently gone out of business. According to Current, the channel used Open Source Storage, or OSS, for storing over 50TB of data — but it suddenly lost access to its data earlier this year. Nine PBS has been working with OSS and its predecessor since 2019 and intended to renew its contract on March 6 of this year. The company never responded and abruptly cut off the station’s data access even though it still had 30 days to retrieve its data after the contract ended.

The station dug a little bit deeper when it discovered that the OSS website no longer existed and was listed as delinquent under the Colorado Secretary of State. It also discovered that OSS utilized Iron Mountain’s services, so it sent a demand letter to the latter to preserve its data and to "pay any reasonable costs associated with its demand." At the time, Iron Mountain did not confirm or deny that it possessed Nine PBS’ data.

At the same time, the channel also sued OSS and its leadership, which it paused after someone who claimed to be a "managing partner of the group that officially acquired" the company reached out. The person, named James Tramel, initially communicated with Nine PBS for about a month. However, this also ended abruptly, with the channel eventually receiving an automated reply from Tramel stating he is no longer connected with OSS. The channel was able to get in touch with him, and he said that he had "been defrauded" into acquiring the cloud storage company and that ownership and operations have now reverted to the previous owners.

This left the channel at a loss, so it continued its case against OSS, and the court ruled that Nine PBS had all the rights to access its data stored with OSS and that the latter should "facilitate its transfer to a new vendor." The channel’s attorney also reached out to Iron Mountain to inform the company of the pending case in Colorado; Iron Mountain finally admitted to holding the data. Iron Mountain initially agreed to turn over Nine PBS’ data, but it eventually backtracked and claimed that OSS owned the data it stored. Because of this, Nine PBS now has no choice but to sue Iron Mountain, too, to ensure the data is not deleted.

The entire thing is a nightmare scenario for Nine PBS, especially as it’s still unclear what will happen to its data. The channel can only assume that its former cloud storage provider is no longer paying data center bills, so it’s rightfully concerned that its data might end up lost forever. And even if Iron Mountain is willing to give Nine PBS its data, it risks getting sued by OSS — it is simply protecting itself by refusing to turn over the said stored data.

It seems that the safest legal way to resolve this issue is for Nine PBS to get a court order requiring Iron Mountain to turn over its data. But the channel must act quickly to ensure that its data, which Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman said to Current represented "70 years of our organization’s history," stays safe.

It's not clear if the channel has backups of its data, but based on its determination, we suspect not. This is strange, though, especially for a major organization, as one can easily purchase a six-bay NAS on Amazon and populate it with the best HDDs. This also goes against the 3-2-1 backup rule, which says you should keep three copies of your files stored in two different mediums, with one of them running offsite. Hopefully Nine PBS will implement a better backup system once it regains access to its data. And at least there's still a chance — it's not like the fire that the South Korean government experienced last year, which saw 858TB of data go up in smoke.

A Redditor shared their vibe-coded project, which added a 3D frontend to your Jellyfin HTPC. The app, called Halcyon Video and available on GitHub, is designed to bring back childhood memories when you spend weekend afternoons browsing video rental stores so the family has something to watch before going to bed. It’s open-source and self-hosted, so you can easily install it on your HTPC, and it also works with RomM if you have your own collection of retro video games.

“Wander the aisles, flip boxes over, rent at the counter, and the movie plays in your room (if you choose hardcore rental mode). TV series come shrink-wrapped as season box-sets,” u/halcyon-video said on Reddit. “‘Recently Added’ becomes ‘New Releases’ on the back wall. Everything has a purpose. There is too much to explain and you have to download and run it to find it all.” They also added, “Go use it, star it if you like it. This project has only just begun, and I will not rest until my childhood has been fully resurrected.” Aside from the GitHub repo, they also created a 45-second tour of the project on YouTube, as well as a demo so you can see how it works.

To complete the nostalgia, the box cover and plastic case pop up when you select a movie or TV series. You can even read warnings and tips at the back of the plastic case like “Please rewind after viewing,” and “If the picture rolls or has a lot of ‘interference,’ adjust the tracking device on your VCR.” Once you’ve chosen what you want to watch, you’ll have to walk out to the front counter to check it out, where the cashier will place it in a plastic bag so you can head back “home” to start watching. There are also several customizations that you can do, like picking a period from 1990, 1993, 2000, and 2010, setting different times like day, sunset, and night, and even choosing between VHS or DVD. We also can’t forget about the tape/disc return box that sits right by the entrance if you’re picking out another movie for tonight.

This isn’t just a random store where you pick out the movie or game that you like, and you’re instantly teleported back to your 4K TV. Instead, it’s a whole experience that you need to see for yourself to understand just how deep and immersive it is. To navigate inside the store, you can use the classic WASD and arrow keys on your keyboard, although Halcyon Video also supports controllers and HTPC remote controls, too. But, most importantly, this front end is all locally supported — it only uses the metadata from your library and does not make any outside calls to some external server.

So, if you’re tired of not owning your video library and are looking to build your own media server from leftover PC parts, consider adding this front end to make movie selection a little bit more exciting. That way, instead of spending hours scrolling through Netflix, you’ll spend a lot of time walking around this store from your childhood.

A developer has ported Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a to x64 so it can now run natively on Windows 11 PC systems. JMarshall23 on GitHub stresses that this is a fully working native Windows x64 port using “original Word source and resources together with modern replacements for the 16-bit assembly, segmented-memory, and Win16 platform boundaries.” It also includes some extra features for “research purposes.” Microsoft Word for Windows 1.1a was originally released over a quarter of a century ago.

This release of Word marked a milestone in the word processing market, as it pioneered genuinely useful feature additions like WYSIWYG editing, graphics, and table insertion on Windows. It would spearhead the momentum in shifting users from DOS productivity monsters like WordPerfect to complete dominance in Windows-land. Word for Windows 1.1a added all its frills while remaining very efficient, running on systems with CPUs that ran in single-figure MHz speeds, and with as little as 1MB of RAM.

Another notable feature of this version of Word for Windows is that Microsoft permitted its source code to be released in full. You can still grab that code via the Computer History Museum (CHM). There you will find a 7MB bundle of C source, x86 assembly, build tools, and documentation. These 1,021 files in 33 folders are what JMarshall23 started with.

GitHub doesn’t have Windows x64 binaries ready for the casually curious on the lookout for a free, lightweight word processor to download and use. Instead, you’ll need access to Visual Studio 2022 with Desktop development with C++, a Windows 10 or Windows 11 SDK installed through Visual Studio, CMake 3.25 or newer, and PowerShell, notes Marshall. Then simply follow the GitHub instructions to build and run Word1.

It will be interesting to see if more comes from this x64 port, but Microsoft’s Word for Windows 1.1a code release carries a license that “permits only non-commercial use and does not give you the right to license it to third parties by posting copies elsewhere on the web,” says the CHM.

A new and unique ASCII video streaming solution has been released under the MIT license. ASCILINE Engine by YusufB5 is pitched as a “high-performance, real-time ASCII video rendering engine” that can be used to broadcast “an unblockable video stream.” Examples of its capabilities are provided in the linked GitHub repository and social media posts by the dev, like the one embedded below. It's also stoked a bit of controversy due to fears of it potentially enabling unblockable ads.

From our perusal of the examples, ASCILINE does indeed look like it is capable of better fidelity than prior video to ASCII streamers, some of which have a surprisingly long history dating back to the 90s. The software does a pretty decent job of making color text-based videos from a source. The dev notes that this technique uses Mode 3, using a palette of 32K colors, and can output at 30 FPS. Though classic mono ASCII is also a render option.

Most impressive is the so-called real-time pixel streaming. The GitHub explains that this technique uses Mode 5 and “replaces characters with colored blocks, approaching 360p video quality.” Indeed, in the small embedded video on the page, it looks indistinguishable from the source MP4. We think the innate blockiness would become apparent quickly if it were rendered in a larger window, though.

In a mission statement of sorts, YusufB5 says that ASCILINE’s “core objective is to transform the web into a highly dynamic and interactive typographic canvas. By mapping pixels to text-based representations, we unlock new possibilities for web media delivery.” On social media, the dev simplifies this highfalutin vision by heralding ASCILINE Engine as a tool that can build “an unblockable video stream. It renders 360p at 30 FPS using pure text.”

The ‘unblockable’ claim gets plenty of pushback across various social media channels. For example, an adblocker put in element zapper mode can quickly remove the HTML5 Canvas that the ASCII video renders in. That’s just one option.

However, most commenters are fearful of those wanting to serve more ads to the public using this ‘unblockable’ tech. YusufB5 points to their “strict anti-ad clause to the MIT License to ensure this isn't abused to force unskippable ads on people.” That might work with registered companies, but malicious users won’t care about such a rule.

Beyond the unblockability and ad misuse controversies, ASCILINE has some more interesting frills and features to set it apart from the old guard of ASCII video. The ability to apply real-time CSS filters to the video stream sounds like it may be appealing in some instances. Also, the ASCII video generated is thought to “act as a perfect bridge for AI.” Thus, you can use lightweight LLMs to process semantic video summaries. The engine’s “ultra-low bandwidth & IoT compatibility” may also be attractive to some, with its ability to stream at only a few kilobytes per frame. Sending only the characters that change (delta frames) and applying GZIP compression both help in this regard.

Google is reportedly testing a new storage policy that restricts new users to an initial 5GB of free cloud storage rather than its previous 15GB allowance. The change was first spotted by a Reddit user who was notified while setting up a new Google account that they would only get 5GB of free storage. The notice also mentioned that once the user linked and verified a phone number with their account, they would gain access to the full 15GB. Interestingly, Google’s support page does not mention this change and states that new accounts receive up to 15GB of free storage.

Google is yet to make a public announcement regarding the change in free cloud storage, however, it has given an official statement to Android Authority. As per a Google spokesperson, “We’re testing a new storage policy for new accounts created in select regions that will help us continue to provide a high-quality storage service to our users, while encouraging users to improve their account security and data recovery.”

A crucial point to consider is that the test is limited to select regions. This may imply that the company is experimenting in certain markets where fake accounts and spam abuse are particularly high before deciding and rolling out the new storage policy globally. In all fairness, the phone number verification requirement does make sense, as it can help Google reduce fake or disposable accounts.

By requiring a verified phone number, users can be restricted from creating multiple free accounts for extra storage or potentially using them for malicious activities. Since verified accounts are tied to a recovery method, it also improves account security and recovery, which Google mentions in its official explanation.

Another possible reason for this change could simply be a tactic by Google to push more users into paying for cloud storage plans under Google One. While 15GB has remained unchanged for years, almost every smartphone user has far more photos, videos, and backups than they did a few years ago. Initially offering new users just 5GB of storage could make limitations much more noticeable, potentially encouraging more people to subscribe to paid plans for additional cloud space.

About two weeks ago, Backblaze sent out an email to its subscribers letting them know about the latest changes to its Terms of Service, and therein lies a paragraph that says that if your usage of the service exceeds "typical usage patterns" or "places an undue burden," the company may throttle or terminate your account, this despite the company's pledge of unlimited backups. There is no definition of what constitutes typical usage, so your guess is as good as ours. The company has also stopped uploading local data synced to other cloud storage suppliers. The changes come as the company has experienced a 40X year-over-year increase in AI data stored on its servers and has increased focus on its accelerating AI business.

Backblaze is perhaps the most popular home computer backup service, offering unlimited storage for a low monthly price and a simplified interface that backs up entire computers and external drives in one fell swoop. That's the sales pitch on the website, except the exact definitions of "unlimited," "computers," and "external drives" are all up for discussion thanks to the company's repeated ToS changes and possibly its market repositioning — and can lead to instances of data loss, as some users found out the worst way.

The new data limit might be lower than most would think. Data posted in 2021 purportedly by Backblaze's then-CTO Brian Wilson shows that storing just 2 TB would put you in the top 1% of users. It's been 5 years on now, and that figure has certainly changed, but even 4 TB isn't that many bytes in the era of affordable 20 TB external drives. Predictably, tech-minded users do not appreciate the change, especially given a price hike to B2, the company's business-oriented cloud storage, which is sometimes recommended as an alternative.

Knowing that you might be kicked off a service is bad enough, but it doesn't impose any losses on you beyond inconvenience. However, roughly six months ago, Backblaze enacted a silent change that made its backup app stop uploading local data synced to "OneDrive, Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, iDrive, and others."

The alteration was only published in the software's release notes, meaning that most everyone was unaware of it. Some users were caught by surprise by tangible data loss — quite the irony for a backup service, especially one that extolls the virtues of an actual backup versus a file sync in its own blog posts.

Developer Robert Reese found out about the changes in the worst way when he needed to recover data from his Git folders that had been silently added to Backblaze's file exclusions list. He then dug further and, along with other users, found that Backblaze never told anyone about its exclusions of file sync services or Git, and that it's hard to trust a backup service that can at any point unilaterally decide to stop backing up important data.

At face value, one might think that not backing up Dropbox, OneDrive, etc., is not a problem since you'll have copies of the files in those services, but then the difference between a sync and a backup rears its ugly head. First, most of those services only keep deleted data for 30 days, so if you only notice something is gone more than a month, you can't fetch it from Backblaze as expected.

Second, changes to files might fall into a similar trap, as most sync services have limits on age, number of versions, or both, particularly in the free tiers. Third, syncing files back to your PC might overwrite recent changes, and you won't be able to fetch the original copy.

Rubbing salt on the wound, although Backblaze is only meant to back up internal and external drives and not network shares, the client can trip you up in unexpected ways, as external encrypted drives are caught in the crossfire and likewise not backed up.

Other than "it's just business," all these changes might have to do with the fact that Backblaze apparently no longer sees home backups as a business priority. The homepage first and foremost touts cloud and AI storage, with the home backup service tucked away under two menu options.

Back in 2025, the company saw its backup revenue flatten as cloud storage grew and subsequently underwent a restructuring. The firm's latest quarterly results show that AI customers are making Backblaze a lot of money, so it's not hard to imagine the home backup service might be dropped altogether at some point.

An artificial intelligence (AI) aficionado has put together a chart featuring all the Copilot things that Microsoft has released since AI became the next big thing. At the latest count, Ty Bannerman notes that there are 80 different, separately marketed Copilot products and tools. Charting these Copilot things wasn’t a trivial task; even Microsoft doesn’t appear to maintain a definitive list. When I first noticed this story, there were 78 Copilots in Bannerman’s charts, but now it has expanded to 80.

The AI strategy, design, and implementation expert says that the idea of charting the expanse of the Copilot universe came to him when someone asked what Microsoft Copilot is. He knew it meant at least 75 different things, in so many contexts, at the time. “Apps, features, platforms, a keyboard key, an entire category of laptops - and a tool for building more Copilots,” tallied Bannerman in his blog. “All named ‘Copilot’.” His chart contends this is "What happens when you name everything Copilot."

Last week, the AI aficionado charted the number of Copilots as 78. However, since yesterday, I note the number has increased to a nice round 80. Thanks to the power of the internet / social media, Bannerman had learned of the existence of Gaming Copilot and Microsoft Dragon Copilot. The latter of those isn’t designed for residents of Westeros, but an AI clinical assistant.

Copilot says there are ~95 to 120+ Copilots

So, we have a chart of 80 Copilots, and who knows what the final figure may be, and how many more Bannerman can uncover?

Since I’m typing on a laptop with a Copilot key, I prodded it and asked the thing itself. Who better to ask? The answer was that “the ecosystem is well north of 100,” if you include things like every app-embedded Copilot, enterprise, and Azure-adjacent tools, etc. I then asked it to add them all up, and it concluded there were “~95 to 120+ Copilots.”

Is that too many? Well, even on this PC, I was surprised to find two Copilot apps in my system tray a few weeks ago. One pops up the usual chatbot box, the other was actually Copilot 365, which, when clicked, asked me to sign in with my (non-existent) Microsoft 365 credentials before I could use it. It has been eliminated.

The corporation's promise of major improvements to Windows 11 performance, reliability, and fewer Copilot interactions can't come soon enough.

Space watchers enthralled by the live stream from NASA’s Artemis II Orion spacecraft have noticed that even astronauts can have trouble with Microsoft software. BlueSkyer Niki Grayson clipped an amusing segment of the live stream, where a puzzled astronaut asks for support from Mission Control because they “have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working.”

right now the astronauts are calling houston because the computer on the spaceship is running two instances of microsoft outlook and they can't figure out why. nasa is about to remote into the computer

— @nikigrayson.com (@nikigrayson.com.bsky.social) 2026-04-02T19:03:37.132Z

Grayson was agog at NASA inflicting Outlook on astronauts. “I'm so sorry we've sent these souls to the moon and they're using Outlook?” they quipped.

The clipped NASA Artemis II stream shared above is currently still live, and you can watch it in full here. As it is live, there is no transcript provided on the video page. So I asked Google's Gemini to find the portion of the livestream where Outlook bugs were discussed.

Google confirmed the quote from Grayson’s clip. It credited Commander Reid Wiseman talking to Mission Control in Houston at this time. “I also see that I have two Microsoft Outlooks, and neither one of those are working if you want to remote in,” said Wiseman at around 13 and a quarter hours into the livestream. Houston agreed to remote in to take a look at the issue.

About an hour later, the astronauts received the welcome news that Outlook was back online. However, it would appear offline... Nice piece of software. “For Outlook, we were able to get it open. It will show 'offline,' which is expected,” said the Capsule Communicator at Mission Control, at around 14 hours 20 minutes into the stream.

Microsoft Outlook anomaly in space

To some readers, even choosing Outlook as a part of a spacecraft’s communications portfolio would seem to be an anomaly. However, it is a standard part of the "Commercial Off-The-Shelf" (COTS) software astronauts use for their day-to-day operations.

To be clear, the spacecraft and primary flight systems will run on specialized radiation-hardened hardware and rigorously maintained software. COTS just complements this with a friendly layer, like Windows and Outlook, so astronauts can check schedules, indulge in personal communications, and so on, in a familiar way.

Toilet troubles in space

While skipping through the live stream to locate the Outlook conversations, I also heard a discussion between Artemis II Orion and Mission Control about the spacecraft's toilets.

Reports suggest that a blinking fault light on the toilet signaled that a mechanical failure occurred about two hours into the mission. Specifically, we understand that a urine extraction fan jammed.

The fan’s purpose is to pull the urine away into a collection container, avoiding urine microgravity issues. Thankfully, one of the astronauts managed to clear the jam and get the fan spinning. NASA has confirmed the toilet is back online, although we’d like to know what brand of fans the space agency uses…

For years, Google has enforced a restriction on changing the @gmail addresses it hands out when signing up for a new account. Apart from email, that's the address you use to log into any Google service, like YouTube, so many of us have been stuck with old identities we'd like to move on from. Fortunately, this convenience appears to be within reach, as the Google Pixel Hub Telegram group has spotted an official Google support document outlining the feature.

The support page is only in Hindi, suggesting that the rollout is limited to India for now. Even then, Google clearly states that users will gradually begin to see this option, indicating that global adoption is still some way off. Still, we're looking at official info here, not a leaked excerpt, so Gmail truthers can rejoice.

For context, competing providers, such as Microsoft Outlook, allow you to change your email address and offer "aliases," which are commonplace today. You can add alternate email addresses under a Google Workspace account, but that's a different thing entirely, as it's a managed service.

To clarify further, Google lets you change your Google Account name, but you can't edit the @gmail.com address. In the document, Google states that you'll retain and have access to your old email address after you switch to a new one — essentially, you'll have two @gmail addresses for one account, which in and of itself could be a game changer for many. Previously, you'd have to create a new Google Account to access a secondary email address, which you could then use to set up a faux alias.

With this, you'll receive emails in both inboxes, and none of your existing data, such as Drive or Photos, will be affected. That said, you cannot register another email address for the same Google Account for the next 12 months after switching to a new one. Keep in mind that Google hasn't officially announced this feature yet, so all of this is potentially subject to change with the global rollout.

Still, to check whether you can get a new @gmail address right now, go to my.account.google.com/google-account-email on a phone or computer. There, tap/click on "Personal Information," and under "Email," you should see the option to "Change email address for your Google Account." It will look like the screenshot above if you're not part of the rollout yet.

The 2025 Microsoft Excel World Championships final in Las Vegas has been won by Irishman Diarmuid Early. Bestowed with the nickname ‘the LeBron James of Excel spreadsheets,’ it might not therefore be the most surprising victory. However, Early had to beat 256 other eager and dedicated spreadsheet heads to win the trophy, and secure the prize pot of $60,000.

From quiet home office to cacophonous Las Vegas arena

Early contrasted the initial knockout rounds of the Championships, played from a quiet home office, to the eSports arena with enthusiastic crowds and commentators in America’s live entertainment capital.

It’s a wonder that the stark difference in atmosphere doesn’t put some people off. Perhaps handling the distractions of the HyperX Arena was one of Early’s strengths – or others were more affected by the roaring crowds and hectic atmosphere.

Given his ‘stage name’ you would be correct to assume that this wasn’t Early’s first rodeo. Indeed, the Irishman, originally from Galway and Waterford and now living in New York, has been a finalist three times. However, he admits he has a record of choking as the competition reaches its climax.

Has Early got a secret behind his success? He says that having his own business helped, and it’s a financial business, so spreadsheets are a constant daily work feature.

Timed eliminations build excitement

Chatting with BBC News, Early conveyed the pressure and excitement of spreadsheet-based eSports. Notably, the stress of competing dramatically ramps up with the timed eliminations of the final rounds. Every five minutes, those in last place get knocked out, explained Early, “You're constantly watching your back.”

Triple world champion Andrew Ngai was held to second place this year, with an award of $5,000.

Excel eSports?

Perhaps one of the most eyebrow-raising eSports tournament hits is the enthusiasm for playing and watching people face spreadsheet challenges. The source report notes that Excel as an eSport is more than 20 years old.

Microsoft’s Excel has grown to be a remarkably capable and complex application over the years. Earlier in 2025 we even highlighted that a dev had managed to get Linux running inside the app, just for fun.

Children in Russia have raised their voices, demanding to be heard, saying the government has gone too far. A state representative admitted that 63,000 complaint letters were received in a single week, with half of the irate youngsters threatening to leave Russia. What’s the fuss? Is it something to do with the ongoing war or sanctions? No, it is a backlash against the banning of the Roblox gaming platform, reports The Moscow Times.

The ban is "for their own protection"

Official Russian media say that the Roblox ban was put in place to prevent the platform from distributing extremist materials and promoting “LGBT propaganda.” The game from the California company is full of “inappropriate content that can negatively impact the spiritual and moral development of children,” asserted Russian media watchdog Roskomnadzor, according to a statement viewed by The Moscow Times.

Probably more specific and worrying, for parents everywhere, were the assertions by the Russian watchdog that kids playing Roblox may be sexually harassed, tricked into intimate photos, or even be “coerced into committing depraved acts and violence.”

Indeed, this is a worry for the parents of all open online platforms frequented by youngsters. Thus, the Roblox corporation asserts it implements “moderators and automated systems to proactively identify behaviors that may violate our policies.”

Leaving Russia for the love of Roblox

Two figures pretty high up in the Russian administration have admitted that the children of the country have been vociferous in their complaints about the Roblox ban. Putin’s well known press secretary, Dmitry Peskov, confirmed that the Kremlin received “many” letters from children about the ban imposed on December 3.

Pro-Kremlin censorship advocate Yekaterina Mizulina also told her Telegram followers that she had received 63,000 letters from kids aged between eight and 16 on this ban. Half of them said they wished to leave Russia due to the Roblox blockade, according to Mizulina.

Roblox was the most downloaded game in Russia as recently as 2023. It is extremely popular with kids, with 111.8 million daily users, according to the latest monthly metrics we have seen. Around 40% of Roblox gamers are 13 or under.

The blocked in Russia club

Perhaps it is no surprise that Roblox, the latest Western-owned platform with social media elements, is being blocked in Russia. You also can’t use Facebook, Instagram, Threads, Twitter/X, or LinkedIn there, for example.

Meanwhile, YouTube is throttled and disrupted in favor of the state-backed RuTube. (Is there going to be a RuBlox soon?) Russia’s domestic VK social network is most widely used there, and is heavily moderated, and features automatic content filtering according to Roskomnadzor’s blacklist.

If you would like to rehome thousands of old VHS videotapes, there’s an incredible hoard of these nostalgic artifacts from the days of analog TV, stored carefully in McDonald's boxes, being given away for free. However, you’ll need a convincing story, as it already looks like a representative from the Internet Archive is a hot favorite to claim this truckload of tapes and digitize them. Redditor whatdoyouthinkisreal shared images of this gargantuan collection of tapes a few days ago.

The OP notes that the collection of tapes has already shrunk by around 18 boxes.

The general goal of whatdoyouthinkisreal’s giveaway is to “give them to someone who is going to save and digitize the tapes.” Bonus – the donor will get a lot of garage space back.

So, what TV and cinematic gems should the new owner expect to find in this massive collection, recorded at an Ann Arbor area home between 2004 and 2009? Apparently, it is wall-to-wall news coverage from that era, featuring channels like CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News.

That content might be of some interest to someone, we guess. The Redditor suggests that “I think the commercials might be even more valuable than the news, but there is Hurricane Katrina Coverage here too.”

Other notable round-the-clock news coverage events during that time may have included:

• Janet Jackson had a ‘wardrobe malfunction’ at the Super Bowl in 2004
• Two presidential elections, 2004 (Dubya won) and 2008 (Obama won)
• The 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami
• The 2005 London bombings (7/7)
• Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston divorced in 2005
• The Execution of Saddam Hussein in 2006
• Release of the first iPhone in 2007
• 'Keeping Up with the Kardashians' premiered in 2007
• 2007 U.S. troop 'surge' in Iraq
• The 2008 Beijing Olympics
• The 2008 Financial crisis
• Russia–Georgia war in 2008 (they're still at it)
• Michael Jackson died, and Lady Gaga rose to fame in 2009
• The 2009 Colorado Balloon Boy hoax earned 24/7 coverage

In case anyone finds the McDonald's franchise cardboard carton packaging questionable, the OP explains, “They're in McDonald's food boxes because the woman who recorded these worked at McDonald's at one time.”

As we mentioned in the intro, any potential suitor for this titanic collection better have a good story. One of the first Redditors to throw their hat in the ring and claim this incredible prize was Jason Scott of the Internet Archive. Many other Redditors upvoted this suggestion, understandably. However, there were a few grumbles about the IA currently sitting on tons and tons of content without getting around to digitizing it and sharing it online.

Microsoft has announced that it will automatically install the Microsoft 365 Copilot AI app for users who have a desktop version of Microsoft 365 suite apps installed on their system, such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. According to BleepingComputer, the rollout will begin next month and is expected to be completed halfway through November, affecting all Windows PCs worldwide, except those in the European Economic Area (EEA).

“Starting in October 2025, Microsoft will begin automatically installing the Microsoft 365 Copilot app on Windows devices that have Microsoft 365 desktop client apps,” the company said on the Microsoft 365 message center. “This app provides a centralized entry point for accessing Copilot experiences and AI-powered capabilities across Microsoft 365. This change simplifies access to Copilot and ensures users can easily discover and engage with productivity-enhancing features.”

Unfortunately, it seems that most personal users will have no way of opting out of this feature. But if you’re a system administrator, you can opt your organization out of this by disabling the automatic installation of Microsoft 365 Copilot in the Microsoft 365 Apps admin center.

This update is part of Redmond’s push for the wider adoption of its Copilot AI app. Just this July, the Microsoft Edge browser introduced a Copilot Mode that can interact with your open tabs and find information you’re looking for. Furthermore, Microsoft bundled Copilot with the Microsoft 365 subscription, resulting in a 43% price hike.

And while this might be a welcome development for those who use AI tools, it will most likely be seen as an annoyance by those who don’t use Copilot or AI in general. After all, if you use AI apps and even subscribe to one, you likely already have it installed on your computer. But for those who aren’t interested, they will likely just see this as another piece of bloatware that Microsoft is forcing down their throats.

The software giant is spending billions of dollars on AI investments, and it likely wants users to start paying for services to recoup some of the cash it spent. However, statistics say that the AI adoption rate isn’t going as planned, with large companies reducing their reliance on these tools. It has even gotten to the point that an economist warned of an AI bubble that will be worse than the dot-com crash of 2000 when it bursts.

Unless you have an administrator who manages your Microsoft 365 subscription (which isn’t true for most personal users), it seems that the only way to avoid getting Microsoft 365 Copilot automatically installed on your computer is to not use Microsoft 365. Otherwise, you’ll just have to ignore it and add the app to the list of disabled apps in Windows’ Startup.

Software giant Microsoft has offered a free one-year Microsoft 365 subscription to college students in the U.S., provided they sign up using their college email address. According to the company, eligible users will get a further 50% discount on the monthly subscription for Microsoft 365 Personal, saving them $5 a month. The subscription will provide students with access to desktop versions of Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote, as well as a terabyte of cloud storage on OneDrive. More importantly, it will give them free access to Copilot, the company’s AI tool.

“AI is the defining technology of our time, and how we empower people to use it will shape our country’s future,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella. He also added, “At Microsoft, we believe that delivering on the real promise of AI depends on how broadly it’s diffused…And that’s why, today, we are making new commitments. For students, we are announcing today that they are making Microsoft 365 Personal, including Copilot, free for 12 months to every college student in the United States. This includes our community colleges.” Nadella also promised that K-12 students, teachers, and staff will get access to Microsoft 365 Copilot later.

This move is part of Redmond’s commitment to the White House’s efforts to increase AI education in the U.S., in support of President Donald Trump’s executive order, Advancing Artificial Intelligence Education for American Youth. The program is designed to train both teachers and students in artificial intelligence, helping to develop an American workforce that’s ready to address the rising threat of this technology.

An accident report has revealed that a U.S. Air Force pilot spent 50 minutes on a conference call with Lockheed Martin engineers ahead of his plane plummeting to the ground and exploding in a fireball. Thankfully, the unnamed pilot ejected safely with just minor injuries, reports CNN, but the $200 million F-35 fighter jet was destroyed.

This incident took place on January 28, near Eielson Air Force Base, Fairbanks, Alaska. Investigations point towards the presence of water in hydraulic lines as the root cause of this military jet crash. But the investigator’s report also suggests the pilot and engineering team’s handling of the landing gear issue could have been better.

Incident timeline: problems became apparent with landing gear

Shortly after take-off, the pilot ran into an issue with the F-35. The landing gear wouldn’t retract correctly, so he sought to lower it again, but it then became locked at an angle, neither retracted nor correctly lowered… Running through operational check lists didn’t remedy the situation.

Sensing the need for assistance, the pilot then decided to consult the experts. He managed to get a group of five Lockheed Martin engineers (the F-35’s makers) to participate in a conference call. According to CNN’s viewing of the incident report, five engineers were on the call: “a senior software engineer, a flight safety engineer, and three specialists in landing gear systems.”

We can’t be sure of the advice given, but next in the chain of dramatic events was the pilot attempting two ‘touch and go’ landings. During these procedures, the idea was to try and straighten out the landing gear. However, the nose wheel still couldn’t be straightened.

Things actually got worse after the two dummy landing attempts. CNN notes that the left and right main landing gears also froze along with the nose wheel.

Now, flying the plane with multiple system errors was bad enough, but the plane then became “uncontrollable” as it started to operate in “automated ground-operation mode.”

Without proper flying mode power or controls, the pilot thus made the decision to eject. The pilot suffered a few minor injuries, but the $200m plane ended up in a fireball.

Post-crash analysis

Starbucks has issued a countrywide crackdown in its Korean locations, demanding that customers stop turning its cafés into quasi-WeWork spaces, after a spate of incidents involving people bringing desktop PCs, printers, and even office partitions into its stores in the country.

Seeing people pecking at their laptop keyboard while they cradle a latte will be a common enough sight at your local Starbucks in the U.S. However, some South Korean folk have managed to outstretch the limits of the coffee chain’s hospitality. The Korea Herald reports that “every branch” of Starbucks in the nation has put up signs telling customers that bringing in their desktop PCs, printers, power strips, and even putting up office partitioning, is no longer permitted.

Local news reports suggest that the Starbucks customers with a penchant for bringing their home offices into the café are “a small but persistent group of clients.” The signs urge people to make room for their fellow coffee drinkers, and not to abandon their tech clutter at shared tables for long periods.

Are you a cagongjok?

A software engineer and developer, who previously accused Amazon Web Services (AWS) of a “digital execution,” has shared the good news that his data has now been restored. What made this impossible task possible was “one human being inside AWS [who] decided to give a damn,” according to data deficit disaster victim Abdelkader Boudih. The same insider source shared some interesting but worrisome insights about what went on behind the scenes during the days when robotic AWS reps insisted Boudih’s precious 10 years of data had been “terminated.”

‘Human’ contact made at AWS

In the earlier episode, we heard about an unnamed insider at AWS reaching out to Boudih. That character was never verified, though they apparently knew too much about this particular case to be a common prankster. Around the same time as we reported on the original debacle, an AWS employee had reached out via official channels to give hope that there would be some way to recover the precious data.

Tarus Balog was basically the first ‘human’ level contact from AWS, according to Boudih. Previous AWS-sourced responses were, in comparison, of a very scripted nature. However, Balog showed empathy and seemed to speak as someone with authority, telling the already long-suffering software engineer that leaders at AWS were aware of his data deletion blog, and were looking to make sure such cases were prevented, going forward.

Balog initially refrained from promising to recover the lost data, but cogs were definitely whirring at AWS at this point (August 5). The case was escalated to the top-level severity ticket available to ‘mortals’, and apparently the AWS CEO actually became aware of this particular incident at this time.

Account restored but tainted by 'deception'

The next morning (August 6), Boudih woke to the news – officially from Amazon – that his account had been restored. Though this was extremely welcome news, it was tainted with “AWS support’s incompetence - or deception,” according to the blog update.

What stuck in Boudih’s craw was the prior insistence of AWS staffers that all his data had been terminated. “The instances were stopped. Not terminated. Stopped.” Stressed the engineer, obviously angry about what he called “gaslighting” by previous AWS contacts. Moreover, his RDS instanced had been backed up as recently as July 19 – several days after support had insisted that everything was “terminated.”

Nevertheless, Boudih refrained from insisting AWS reps were outright lying. There was also the possibility that there was an “undocumented ability to restore ‘terminated’ instances - which would make sense as a safeguard against internal sabotage or mistakes.” There is also the excuse of AWS employee incompetence to consider, but Boudih seems to favor the theory that that prior support contacts “gaslit me about infrastructure.”

Story not unique – the shared payer problem

According to Reddit threads that spawned in the wake of Boudih’s dizzying initial post, this alarming case was far from unique. The shared payer model has inherent flaws, other social media users appeared to confirm, especially if one party defaults on payments due. This appears to be what caused the software engineer's AWS account and data to be suspended, then terminated.

Account suspension is "part of AWS’s standard security protocols for accounts that fail the required verification," AWS stated in an email to Tom's Hardware. But it didn't explain the apparent subsequent and rapid termination.

In the previous story, Boudih mused whether an account suspension could be escalated to termination, due to some billing issue with a previous shared payment party. That looks quite likely in retrospect.

'Terraforming, not destruction'

A software engineer has warned against trusting cloud data storage services in a painstakingly detailed blog post detailing their own “complete digital annihilation” at the hands of AWS admins. Developer Abdelkader Boudih, pen name Seuros, says they had been a fee-paying AWS subscriber for a decade, with the cloud service becoming a firm part of their workflow. Suffice to say, the developer’s long-standing relationship with AWS has now ended acrimoniously.

Boudih says lots of important data has been lost, including a complete programming book, electronics tutorials, and years of unpublished code. Boudih admits that “AWS wasn’t just my backup—it was my clean room for open source development.” In other words, it was a tidy repository away from the “chaos” of the desktop. The dev reckons AWS’s multi-region replication and architecture should have been his backup…

Interestingly, Boudih claims they subsequently got a tip from an ‘AWS insider’ indicating that all their data was wiped due to a simple syntax error during a customer account audit, and all the correspondence Boudih had received about account verification was just a smokescreen.

It started with an innocuous verification request

On Thursday, July 10, Boudih received a verification request with a 5-day response deadline (countdown time included the weekend). Then follows a tale as old as time, where there are delays and escalations, verification ID requests, canned responses from the service provider not addressing actual queries, and so on. By July 23, Boudih was rocked as he received an “account terminated” notification.

Over the next few days of template-driven dialog with an AWS service team rep, Boudih was starting to worry that their data had also been rendered into “digital ashes.” Indeed, Boudih found out it had been wiped, and in the interim, reasonable requests for read-only access had been ignored. “Because the account verification wasn’t completed by this date, the resources on the account were terminated,” wrote an AWS rep or bot. Then they asked for a 5-star review…

Boudih highlights that this “20 day support nightmare” doesn’t seem to tally with AWS’s public policy of putting closed accounts on ice for 90 days, during which they “can be reopened and data is retained,” according to service provider documentation. However, Boudih’s account wasn’t voluntarily closed, but suspended by AWS for ‘verification failure,’ a procedure without public documentation.

'AWS insider' hints at a cover-up

We’ve already established that Boudih is a software engineer, but ironically, some of the open-source code segments Boudih has shared “probably run in AWS’s own infrastructure, making their systems more reliable.” Underlining the implications, the disgruntled dev added, “And they deleted the very environment that created them.”

Due to Boudih's status in the open-source community, Boudih says an AWS insider reached out with a fascinating backstory about what really happened in the AWS offices on or around July 20. According to this source, the initial verification request and suspension of the account were simply a smokescreen, as all Boudih’s data had already been wiped by accident.

Data extinction event

If you haven’t checked out the rewards section of the Nvidia app in a while, you might want to do that, especially if you’ve been wanting to try the whole Adobe tool stack without spending a penny. As part of Nvidia’s collaboration with Adobe, the company is giving specific RTX GPU owners access to Adobe Creative Cloud for free, which includes popular photo and video editing tools like Photoshop, Premiere Pro, After Effects, and more.

The offer is currently live in the Nvidia App Rewards section, and to be eligible, you must have an RTX series GPU from any of the last three generations. However, there’s a difference: with a GeForce RTX 30 or 40 series card, you’ll get one free month of Adobe Creative Cloud. Meanwhile, if you own an RTX 50 GPU, Nvidia will treat you to two free months instead.

On top of that, one benefit exclusive to RTX 50 series GPUs is the Substance 3D reward, which gives you access to five different Adobe apps along with a massive asset library for your games, including tools like 3D Sampler, 3D Designer, and 3D Painter. It’s a fairly solid deal overall, even if you consider Adobe Creative Cloud alone, which normally costs $69 per month.

Don’t forget to cancel on time

A Microsoft OneDrive user has taken to Reddit with a cautionary tale about their precious personal data in the cloud becoming inaccessible. Redditor deus03690 says that they have lost “30 years worth of irreplaceable photos” due to their misplaced trust in Microsoft’s cloud storage service.

In the discussion thread, the Redditor admits they may have made “a bad move” with their eggs-in-one-basket plan. However, to give the decision context they explain that they were moving house, faced space and relocation constraints, and were hemmed in by limited resources.

As a paying user of OneDrive, deus03690 has also been incredibly disappointed in Microsoft’s locking of their account without warning, and subsequent dead-end automated responses to questions regarding what happened. So, what did happen?

Consolidating before a major move

Deus03690 seems to have come face to face with a data preservation problem as a major move loomed. With a modicum of experience in OneDrive, and also having swallowed the Redmond “coolaide” [sic] at work, they thought they could get past a sticky data and life move situation by parking their precious data on some freshly paid for expansive cloud server space.

It is easy to criticize this plan, which resulted in a single point of failure, and is far from adhering to a 3-2-1 backup policy. But, life sometimes makes the rational difficult. Deus03690 later explains that they would be basically living from a suitcase for a time, had limited funds for physical backups, and they planned to restore the data to new physical data later. That would be, we assume, after settling down again.

“Kafkaesque black hole of corporate negligence”

With the “30 years worth of irreplaceable photos and work” literally vanished into thin air, deus03690 naturally expected to be able to get in touch with Microsoft to iron out issues and get the suspended account reactivated. So many corporations make real-human contact an impossible task, and taking this Redditor’s experience at face value, you might include Microsoft in that number.

To start with, deus03690 says they never even received a warning about any potential break of T&Cs, which might have resulted in the OneDrive account suspension. No light has been cast upon the situation since, with “No human contact. No actual help. Just canned emails and radio silence” – and 18 compliance form submissions, so far.

The Redditor then goes on to contrast the ownership / access rights to physical property with that of digital property. But they say they faced “a Kafkaesque black hole of corporate negligence,” so seem to hold little hope of retrieving their 30 years of precious data.

Indeed, when you pay for a service and are met with a brick wall the first time you want to iron out anything that isn’t on script, having no recourse to talk to a real human can be extremely frustrating.

Automated ban hammer mis-strike?

Following the announcement in late February, Microsoft is finally closing the chapter on Skype. Existing users have been asked to switch to Microsoft Teams, and a data migration window will remain open until January 2026. Microsoft says this decision aligns with its strategy to streamline its communication services and focus primarily on Microsoft Teams.

Genesis

The first public beta for Skype went live in August 2003 and enabled users to call from one PC to another, which was revolutionary at the time. The service further evolved in the following years, with the launch of SkypeOut for traditional landline calls and the introduction of video chatting. This helped grow the platform to 40 million registered users by late 2005. After it was acquired by eBay, which strategically envisaged integrating Skype and its online marketplace, Skype boasted over 405 million registered users by 2008.

Ultimately, these plans didn't unfold as anticipated, and eBay divested Skype to a group of investors for $1.9 billion in 2009, citing miscalculated consumer demand for the service. During this phase, Skype began breaking into the mobile ecosystem, launching its first client for iOS and Android in 2009. It eventually reached a milestone of 27 million simultaneous online users across mobile and desktop. By 2010, Skype was teeming with 660 million registered users globally.

Microsoft Acquisition and Downfall

In 2011, Microsoft acquired Skype for $8.5 billion and integrated it into its core Windows, Xbox, and Outlook services. This propelled Skype to acquire 40% of the international call market share by 2014, yet this peak was fleeting. The following years brought in a surge of competition by the likes of WhatsApp, Telegram, Discord, Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams. After the pandemic-driven boom subsided, Skype's daily active user count hovered around 36 million, while Teams was able to grab almost 300 million, and that difference is quite telling. It only got worse as Microsoft poured most of its resources into Teams, overshadowing the once-eminent Skype, which had already been losing ground in the market, leading to its eventual retirement today, on May 5th, 2025.

How does this impact existing users?

Microsoft has confirmed a bug in Outlook Classic, where users are experiencing CPU usage spikes, as high as 50%, when simply typing in the application. Notably, reports of this incident can be traced back to November last year, and even now, users have been asked to switch to the Microsoft 365 Apps update channel as a temporary workaround.

After around six months since the first sighting, Microsoft is finally addressing an issue in Outlook (Classic), which led to increased CPU usage, visible slowdowns, and even freezes whenever you'd sit down to compose an email or type a message. Microsoft quotes a figure ranging from a 30-50% hit to the CPU utilization, and that's sure to be noticeable, especially on aging hardware.

The developer team was able to reproduce this bug on updating to Microsoft 365 Apps Version 2406 Build 17726.20126+, which was released in June 2024, on the Current, Monthly Enterprise, and Insider Channels. As of writing, a concrete solution is not available, so users have been recommended to move to the Semi-Annual Channel release, where this issue has not been observed.

If you're running an organization with several devices, Microsoft offers a detailed guide for migrating your update channel with options like Group Policies, the Office Deployment Tool, Microsoft Configuration Manager, and Intune, just to name a few. For home users, a simpler way to achieve the same result is by just tweaking the registry as follows:

1. Open a Command Prompt (CMD) window with admin privileges.
2. Paste the following command and hit Enter: "reg add HKLM\Software\Policies\Microsoft\office\16.0\common\officeupdate /v updatebranch /t REG_SZ /d SemiAnnual"
3. In Outlook, navigate to File > Office Account > Update Options and select "Update Now" to switch to the Semi Annual Channel.

Affected users went through several troubleshooting hoops, like turning off graphics acceleration, disabling the spell-check utility, along with add-ins, but to no avail. It got so bad that a user with a beefy i9-14900HX reported CPU temperatures breaching 95 degrees Celsius just by having the 'New Message' window open, which is used to compose emails.

As the problem is still under investigation by the Outlook team, this is no more than a stopgap solution. The nature of this bug seems to be tied to how the software handles text fields, but it's quite puzzling how such an obvious issue slipped past the developers in the first place.

A robotics and machine learning engineer has developed a command-line interface tool that monitors power use from a smart plug and then tunes system performance based on electricity pricing. The simple program, called WattWise, came about when Naveen built a dual-socket EPYC workstation with plans to add four GPUs. It's a power-intensive setup, so he wanted a way to monitor its power consumption using a Kasa smart plug. The enthusiast has released the monitoring portion of the project to the public now, but the portion that manages clocks and power will be released later.

Unfortunately, the Kasa Smart app and the Home Assistant dashboard was inconvenient and couldn't do everything he desired. He already had a terminal window running monitoring tools like htop, nvtop, and nload, and decided to take matters into his own hands rather than dealing with yet another app.

Naveen built a terminal-based UI that shows power consumption data through Home Assistant and the TP-Link integration. The app monitors real-time power use, showing wattage and current, as well as providing historical consumption charts. More importantly, it is designed to automatically throttle CPU and GPU performance.

Naveen’s power provider uses Time-of-Use (ToU) pricing, so using a lot of power during peak hours can cost significantly more. The workstation can draw as much as 1400 watts at full load, but by reducing the CPU frequency from 3.7 GHz to 1.5 GHz, he's able to reduce consumption by about 225 watts. (No mention is made of GPU throttling, which could potentially allow for even higher power savings with a quad-GPU setup.)

Results will vary based on the hardware being used, naturally, and servers can pull far more power than a typical desktop — even one designed and used for gaming.

WattWise optimizes the system’s clock speed based on the current system load, power consumption as reported by the smart plug, and the time — with the latter factoring in peak pricing. From there, it uses a Proportional-Integral (PI) controller to manage the power and adapts system parameters based on the three variables.

At the moment, the app only supports one smart plug at a time and only works with the Kasa brand. However, Naveem says there are plans to add support for multiple plugs, more smart plug brands, integration with other power management tools, and other features. The app in its current form is a pretty simple tool, but sometimes simple is all you need to solve a problem.

Naveen made WattWise open source under the MIT license, and you can download it directly from GitHub. If you’re interested, you can leave feedback and contributions, or you can fork it and adapt it for other systems. Note that the current version only contains the dashboard, not the actual power optimizer, which still needs further work.

Adobe Photoshop has been around for many, many years and it has been the de facto standard used in the creative industries. Heck, when I was in college I learnt how to use Adobe Photoshop 1.0 and made my own magazine with Photoshop and Aldus Pagemaker. The problem with Photoshop has always been cost.

I have long spouted the idiom “the right tool for the job” to anyone who would listen to me, but I had to make a concession. Photoshop was just too expensive for me as a college student, and I didn’t need it enough to drop hundreds of dollars on a copy.

So I migrated to other alternatives. JASC Paint Shop Pro (before Corel) and Corel’s products did what I needed, but they didn’t meet all of my needs. I had to wait until GIMP arrived for something close to Photoshop.

Fast forward to today, and we have a myriad of Photoshop alternatives to choose from. Many are now cloud based, and either rely on advertisements or a subscription (just like Adobe Photoshop!)

I’ll admit, Adobe Photoshop is a powerful beast. It has effects, plugins and new AI features that make content creation and photography much easier. The free alternatives cannot compete with those features, but they do provide enough features for most users to get the job done.

Which Photoshop alternative is the best for you? I’ve tested five alternatives, some well known and a couple of curveballs that took me by surprise.

I tested the following alternatives.

1. GIMP
2. Krita
3. Pinta
4. PhotoDemon
5. Paint.NET

The goal was to test my image editing workflow in each editor. Which editors can be used with Photoshop’s native PSD file format, and can any handle RAW images from a DSLR? Can the editors work with layers? What effects are there? Can I crop and reframe images? How does it feel in use? Quick, sluggish? Can I move around the image, zoom in or select areas? Is the UI an approximation of Photoshop or does it have its own style? Let's find out!

1. GIMP

1. GIMP

The standard for free image editors

👍 Reasons to use

• Free
• Compatible with RAW and PSD files, along with many other formats
• Plugins extend the functionality

👎 Reasons to avoid

• User interface is daunting for newcomers
• A little slower than Photoshop

Open source image editing software and GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is at the top of many lists. The cross-platform editor is often seen as one of the posterchilds for open source software and it is typically pre-installed on a plethora of Linux distros.

I’ve used GIMP for well over 15 years and on a diverse range of machines (an original Asus eeePC being one) and it remains one of the most used applications in my workflow. I can do it all with GIMP, crop and reframe an image, add layers to alter the image / add elements. It just works, but it does take a little extra effort.

GIMP looks and feels like a Photoshop alternative. The interface is yours to customize; you can even make it look more like Photoshop. Sure it will take a little while to get used to, and that requires effort but once you do, you’ll be tweaking photos and creating content with ease, and without paying Adobe big bucks for the privilege.

Taking things further, GIMP has a plugin ecosystem that can automate many tasks. Batch processing or image manipulation: all can be achieved using a plugin written in languages like Python or C/C++. You can even call GIMP from the command line / terminal to batch edit images without pressing a button.

GIMP is what I have been using for a long time. It does feel a little “clunky” and slow when compared to Photoshop, but for zero cost, we get an extremely capable image editor that has plenty of power and features for most of us. Professional Photoshop users may find it difficult to transition over to GIMP, but it has all that you need.

2. Krita

2. Krita

For artists and photographers

👍 Reasons to use

• Excellent illustration tools
• Magnetic selection tool is awesome
• Plethora of tools on offer
• PSD and RAW support

👎 Reasons to avoid

• Slow to startup
• User interface is daunting for newcomers

This is more of an artist's tool for illustration than image editing, but don’t let that fool you as Krita has a similar depth of features to GIMP. Krita is geared to digital art, and it has been used in game development and illustration for many years.

The Krita user interface is just as daunting as GIMP. If you are proficient in Photoshop / GIMP then your muscle memory will need retraining for Krita. I got confused when trying to zoom into a section.

In GIMP we would use CTRL+ scrollwheel but this didn’t work in Krita. Instead I had to just use the scroll wheel. Moving around a zoomed area is achieved by pressing the spacebar and then holding left click, move around the image. Again, muscle memory kept tripping me up.

Krita’s overall speed is beautiful. I was able to move around, zoom and select brushes, filters and tweak layers as if I were gliding. The only friction I ever encountered was the aforementioned muscle memory. But, I am sure after using Krita for a while, that will melt away.

Krita has full support for opening and saving Photoshop PSD files. If you are working with RAW files, then you can open them, but you will obviously need to save the output as another filetype.

Krita’s strength is in drawing and illustration, but it can be used to tweak photos. There are filters and layers which can be used to alter images, but there are no exact tools for photo manipulation. There are filters for tweaking your images, much less than GIMP, but the core is there. Also, I loved the magnetic selection tool. It did a pretty decent job of selecting points around an object that I wanted to cut out. It wasn’t perfect, but I was able to tweak the points for a more precise selection.

Just like GIMP, Krita has plugins which can provide additional features such as finer control of brushes and automating processes like batch export of images. This means that we can tweak Krita to suit our workflow.

Artists and illustrators will love Krita’s tablet support. If you’ve got the kit, or have the money, then you can easily use Krita with a graphics tablet and get the best from its illustration and photo manipulation features.

Krita is great, but it leans more on illustration than photo manipulation, which isn’t a fault; that is its intended use case after all. It can do the job of Photoshop, but its strengths lie in illustration.

3. Pinta

3. Pinta

A jack of all trades editor

👍 Reasons to use

• Simple to use
• Lightweight
• Quick

👎 Reasons to avoid

• No RAW or PSD support
• Perhaps a little too simple for professional users

Feeling like a “beefed up “ MSPaint, Pinta offers features often found in more “powerful” image editors. The simple and clean interface is very “Microsoft” despite it having nothing to do with it. Pinta can be used to edit images, and has a basic suite of photo tools. It can also be used to illustrate and annotate images.

The user interface is simple, eschewing a myriad of buttons and tools in favor of providing just the essentials. There are no magnetic selection tools, not even a crop. Instead we have the standard rectangle, circle and lasso selectors. They get the job done, but I miss the crop tool.

We’ve got layers on which we can place content and / or manipulate the image. We also have an extensive history, accessible via the right hand side menu. Here we can see the actions taken on an image, and reverse them should an issue occur. This is quite a powerful tool for such a simple application.

There are add-ins, Pinta’s parlance for plugins, and installation is performed externally. There are add-ins for image uploading, night vision effects and dither effects. But there aren’t many add-ins so the choice is quite limited.

Pinta is a jack of all trades application. It does a lot of things well, but this isn’t a specialist application. It can’t open PSD or RAW files, so if you rely on those file formats, look elsewhere. But, if you need a simple editor that has most of the tools in an easy to use package, then Pinta is a great choice.

4. PhotoDemon

4. PhotoDemon

Good all-round Photoshop alternative

👍 Reasons to use

• Small application
• Lots of Photoshop features
• Open Photoshop, RAW and GIMP files
• Plethora of filters

👎 Reasons to avoid

• Muscle memory will be tested

This was the wildcard of the bunch. I’d never heard of PhotoDemon, but it turned out to be a solid performer. The application weighs in at under 10MB! But, in that small package, we get a lot of functionality. PhotoDemon can open and save PSD files, and it can open RAW image files. So photographers can tweak their images with relative ease. A nice feature is that PhotoDemon can also open GIMP XCF files, useful if you want to add PhotoDemon to your processing workflow.

PhotoDemon feels like a mash-up of Photoshop and GIMP and the user interface is clear and easy to use. The “Photo” part of its name indicates that it works more for photography than illustration. One issue I faced was the location of the color wheel.

I’m used to GIMP’s location on the left side, PhotoDemon has it in the top right corner. My muscle memory had a workout while testing PhotoDemon.

PhotoDemon has a plethora of filters under the Effects menu. Seriously there are a lot of effects that can be applied to your work. The usual suspects are there, blur, pixelate, render clouds. Also there are artistic styles and natural effects that make images look like they are underwater.

PhotoDemon has a selection of third-party libraries which offer extra functionality. They are managed in-app using a package manager of sorts. This is a nice touch and makes handling libraries really easy, I just wish there were more libraries!

If you need layers, you’ve got them! Layers work just like GIMP / Photoshop and enable images to be composed of multiple layers, like a portrait photo on a fancy background. Working with layers is easy, and the user interface is clean and easy to understand.

Could I use PhotoDemon on a day to day basis? Yes, but my one tripping point was an often overlooked feature. For annotating tutorials, I use Stroke Selection to put a colored border around an area that I wish to highlight. PhotoDemon has this feature, under Edit >> Stroke, but the dialog box used to configure it is a little clumsy for me. I just want to create a highlight using the selected color.

PhotoDemon is a good editor, once you learn its quirks. The tiny file size means that it loads in seconds, and it runs beautifully on my test system. All for zero cost!

5. Paint.net

5. Paint.net

Simple and great for annotations

👍 Reasons to use

• Simple to use
• Lots of effects
• Annotation tools are great
• Performs slick

👎 Reasons to avoid

• No Photoshop / RAW compatibility
• Layer properties takes an extra step

Don’t judge a book by its cover also applies to websites. The Paint.net site is a cacophony of adverts and “download” buttons that instantly put me off. But I persevered and I was pleasantly surprised.

The general look and feel of Paint.net is that of MS Paint but with Photoshop levels of tools and widgets. I got really “Paint Shop Pro 7” vibes from the UI (and yes, I used that back in the day too). The UI uses floating palettes that can be “clicked” into the perimeter of the screen, and I really like this. I can move the widgets and set up the interface how I like it.

Well, the Stroke Selection issue that I encountered with PhotoDemon is refreshingly solved by Paint.net. In the Tools palette, I found a shapes option and from there I could draw vector shapes on the image. This works beautifully and I can see this becoming part of my workflow for tutorials.

The color of the shape's perimeter uses the foreground color and by default does not have a fill color. This can be changed so that the shape is filled with color, and there are a multitude of shapes to choose from. Very handy for how to writers who want to point out a specific section in a screenshot.

Sadly there is no compatibility with Photoshop or RAW files, so if you need those features, this isn’t the image editor for you. But you do get a plethora of other file formats at your disposal.

Using filers / effects is a joy. I marvelled at the realtime response when previewing an effect, it felt right that I should see exactly how it would apply without a long pause as the PC does the math.

The app does not support installation of plugins directly, but you can install plugins externally.

Layers work just like the other editors tested, but accessing the layer properties (for the blend mode) is a two step process, unlike GIMP which has the layer properties front and center.

I really enjoyed Paint.net and for most of my workflow it is perfect. If I need to work with RAW, PSD or XCF files then I am out of luck, but I mostly work in PNG, JPG, GIF and WebP. If you just need a simple, yet feature packed editor then Paint.net is for you.

Update 2/28 06:51 PT

Its official, Microsoft are shuttering Skype. You've got until May 5 to migrate your chats and contacts over to Microsoft Teams.

Original Article:

Yesterday, a hidden string was discovered in the code for the latest Skype for Windows 11 preview that states "Starting in May, Skype will no longer be available. Continue your calls and chats in Teams.", precluding the imminent retiring of 22 year-old messenger Skype — this information being discovered over at XDA Developers. Since Microsoft Teams is already built over the Skype infrastructure that Microsoft first bought back in 2011, this should be a seamless transition in the long run— but it still marks the death of a classic staple in online messaging platforms.

Skype has its origins back in August of 2003, and in the 22 years since its launch, it has seen a myriad of ports, official and unofficial, to countless devices and operating systems. Skype has appeared on Nokia's Symbian phones, Sony's PlayStation Portable and even HoloLens!

To the say the least, the final death of Skype marks a key turning point in the history of online messengers. The recent pandemic proved that services including Skype were essential during such a dark time. One could argue that the end of Skype is moot, as it continues to exist in a different form through Microsoft Teams.

Once upon a time, Skype was regarded as one of the best messaging apps out there— but its reputation began to sour when it received in-app advertisements in September 2011, after the Microsoft acquisition. While Microsoft would phase out its other communication apps to make Skype a focus, the unwanted addition of advertisements and waves of spam bot slowly but steadily pushed Skype out of the limelight.

As sad as it is to give a post mortem on Skype, we think it's fair to say that this application has long served its purpose in the grand scheme of things. Remote workers have Teams and other messaging applications to make the most of video conferencing and productivity-centered communications. Gamers now have the free-but-intensive Discord, alongside the always-reliable lightweight VoIP clients like Mumble and Teamspeak, to rely on instead of Skype.

Skype and its era of competing messengers including MSN Messenger finally seems to be over. As the industry moves past Skype in the coming months, it will become a footnote in the ongoing history of computing.

Earlier this week, Microsoft broke from a long tradition of only offering paid versions of the native Microsoft Office app (web having been free for some time) and silently introduced a free, ad-supported version of Microsoft Office exclusively for Windows 11 users. This was first spotted by Beebom, which tested it on Windows 11 machines and VMs (My testing on Windows 10 quickly revealed it to be business as usual on older versions of Windows. Go figure.)

Even so, it's nifty and arguably even intelligent of Microsoft to build in a "Skip for now" button leading into a free version of Microsoft Office allowing Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to be used for free. The ads that support this use come in the form of the combination of a persistent ad banner onscreen, as well as a muted 15-second video ad playing every few hours.

However, there are still lots of caveats to your use of Word, Excel, and PowerPoint here. The greatest immediate caveat is that you can't save files locally and must instead save them to OneDrive, which means you don't have any support to edit local files. It's 2025, Microsoft — LibreOffice and Google Docs have existed way too long for you to be inconveniencing your free users like this.

A number of other problems also exist, though, greatly limiting the formatting and decorative options available to Microsoft's free users. Beebom painstakingly listed over 30 missing features in its original coverage. So, while I complimented Microsoft's prudence in having a free tier of its local Office applications available...there are some real glaring issues with the omissions here.

Even locking in just on Microsoft Word, the removal of key formatting options like line spacing, text wrapping, headers, footers, bookmarks, and even proper date & time fields is truly egregious. You can't even hyphenate anymore! While Beebom observes that the applications are still able to be used, their phrasing here is "most of the basic and some of the key features are available", but that honestly might be an understatement.

Because let's be very realistic about this. If you are willing to go through the trouble of using a free version of Microsoft Office instead of any number of truly-free alternatives that have been widely available to you for the past decade or more, you're doing it because maintaining compatibility with existing workflows and spaces reliant on Office is your priority. But with so many key formatting options locked behind a paywall, you really might as well not be using Microsoft Office at all at this point, and instead be hedging your bets with exporting files from LibreOffice or Google Drive.

If Microsoft is already insistent on monetizing its free users via advertisements, the least they could do is provide a usable version of Microsoft Office in exchange. The extensive list of cut features doesn't make Microsoft look any less stingy to the users of Windows 11, which already has plenty of ads.

According to a new blog post from Microsoft, Microsoft 365's Personal and Family plans have been bundled with Copilot and priced up to roughly $3 a month. The latest monthly cost is $9.99, up from $6.99, and the new annual fee is $99.99, up from $69.99.

In addition to the basic plans getting Copilot rolled in, there are now additional "Basic," "Personal Classic," and "Family Classic" tiers without Copilot and "other advanced features" added for users who do not use AI in their workflows.

For those who remain on the Personal and Family plans, a monthly allotment of 15 AI credits to use Copilot with Office 365 applications and Designer, Paint, Photos, and Notepad on Windows 11 will be given. Copilot Pro is still a separate upgrade for those who want unlimited use.

Microsoft's original blog post states, "Our plan has always been to make Copilot in the Microsoft 365 apps more accessible to a wider audience at a great price. We planned several steps in our Copilot journey to listen, learn, and improve usability and performance. [...] We’re delighted to empower millions of our customers with an AI assistant that supercharges the productivity apps they already know and love. We’ll continue offering Copilot Pro for consumers with extensive usage needs, along with Microsoft 365 Copilot, our commercial offering, for organizations of all sizes"

Past the details we discussed above, the rest of the original Microsoft blog post showcases existing Copilot features and how they're integrated into different aspects of the Microsoft 365 suite. Microsoft also claims that using these features will not surrender your prompts, responses, or even file content for use while training its Copilot AI model. Of course, Microsoft claims that using your data is a temporary input only when prompted.

Existing Microsoft 365 Personal and Family plan subscribers need only update their apps to receive their new Copilot benefits. For existing customers, the price hike won't be kicking in until plan renewal, and there are options to downgrade the plan. Those who want to avoid using AI can downgrade the plan to the "Classic" or "Basic" Microsoft 365 plans.

While this may have been a more controversial move from Microsoft— basically forcing AI use and a price hike on a large existing customer base— adding tiers without AI below the main Personal and Family plans is welcome. However, some contradictory language does leave some questions in the air. Apparently, the "Classic" plans are available "for a limited time". However, this may just refer to the ability for existing customers to downgrade since the following sentence immediately claims, "These plans (having just listed Basic and the two Classic plans) will continue to be maintained as they exist today."

In the ongoing quest to do strange, and seemingly impossible things with Microsoft Excel, Redditor u/awesomegraczgie21 posted a demonstration of a functioning, playable raycaster in the form of a first-person maze game running entirely through Microsoft Excel using its Visual Basic for Applications (VBA) programming language.

Specifically, this maze tech demo is seen utilizing raycasting to support transparency and per-column texture mapping. Transparency is noted as being done from the player's view outward (close-to-far rendering), and a simple collision system is used to keep the game functioning within the constraints of its walled maze. The maze is, of course, explored entirely in first-person, navigated pretty much one frame at a time via the included 4 movement and 2 strafe buttons.

Compared to past attempts at rendering graphics in Microsoft Excel, like the "Fallout for Excel" game, this is far more ambitious, though similarly limited in scope and playability. While there is sped-up video footage (10 FPS!) of navigation through the maze being spread online from the original posting, the actual gameplay is more like a "interactive slideshow" . With its creator stating that the FPS ranges between "2FPS up to 5 SPF (0.2 FPS). Rendering multiple overlapping transparent walls kills the performance, but it's worth it." The entire demo is coded in just 400 lines of VBA.

Back in January, another Excel hobbyist went and proved that it was possible to build an entire functioning 16-bit CPU complete with 128 KB of RAM, a 128x128 pixel display, and a custom assembly language (dubbed Excel-ASM16) within the constraints of Microsoft Excel. Like with Excel-ASM16 and "Fallout for Excel", it's likely that this playable Excel raycaster demo simply won't work outside of Microsoft Excel, i.e. in alternatives such as OpenOffice or LibreOffice.

Like most of these Excel projects, then, it would seem that this project was done almost purely for fun and/or amusement, though it's also noted by the creator that it was made as a project for a "Programming in VBA" university course, "because why not". The creator had wanted to build a raycaster from scratch since they were 16, but lacked the knowledge to make it happen. Now in their second year of university, AwesomeGraczGie21 has done it, but will they stop there? As far as university assignments go, breaking the assumed boundaries of Microsoft Excel with just "~400 lines of code" is something that one would hope would facilitate a passing grade.

Microsoft issued a warning about a bug affecting Microsoft 365's Office Word app where saving a document using a specific file name would end up deleting it instead of saving it. The combination might be odd as it involves the hashtag character in the file name and capitalization of the file's extension- but it exists and needs to be addressed regardless.

According to Microsoft, this bug gets triggered when the .docx extension is capitalized with the hashtag symbol in its file name. Microsoft further adds a finding that the issue occurs after saving the file when prompted to click X to close the Word app. However, manually saving the file with '.DOCX' and a hashtag character in the file name does not reproduce the automatic deletion.

Thankfully, the deletion is not permanent, as the Recycle Bin can restore the file. Besides restoring it, Microsoft suggested two workarounds- save the file manually before closing Word, and another is to enable the option "Don't show the Backstage when opening or saving files with keyboard shortcuts" in Word.

The bug is specifically present with Microsoft 365 version 2409, as confirmed by Microsoft. It is peculiar that the bug only eats the Word document using .docx in all caps with a hashtag character in the file name. Microsoft didn't explain the cause of this bug specifically with this build, as it is still under investigation. No other combination has been discovered that reproduces auto-deletion yet.

Having a document deleted automatically is a nightmare, mainly when the application is used for many important work. It wouldn't be surprising to see users have a hashtag in the file name by someone whose profession is associated with social media, as the character is used for tagging in leading social media apps like Instagram and X, formerly Twitter. Users are likely unaware of this even if it goes to the Recycle Bin.

Therefore, no matter how odd or seemingly rare, it is always best to kill the bug before it eats your homework.

After a dozen years of court hearings in New Zealand, the country’s justice minister has announced Kim Dotcom will be extradited to the United States. Once brought to the U.S., Dotcom faces numerous criminal charges related to the now-defunct file-sharing website Megaupload. Justice Minister Paul Goldsmith signed the extradition order on Aug. 15, according to a statement from the New Zealand Minister of Justice. Goldsmith said he “considered all the information carefully” before agreeing to the extradition. Dotcom will be allowed a short period to prepare for his extradition.

Dotcom is German-born but lives in New Zealand. He and three executives from the Megaupload site were arrested in 2012 after a raid on Dotcom’s mansion in Auckland. These included the company’s chief marketing officer, Finn Batato, and chief technical officer and co-founder, Mathias Ortman, both from Germany. Also arrested was a third executive, Dutch national Bram van Der Kolk.

U.S. authorities say Megaupload cost film studios and record companies more than $500 million by encouraging paying users to store and share copyrighted movies, T.V. shows, and music files. These files reportedly generated over $175 million in revenue for the website.

The website was also apparently used to share files among members of the U.S. military and other government workers. Investigators found 15,634 registered users with email addresses belonging to various branches of the U.S. military services.

After Dotcom’s arrest in January 2012, he lost access to 1,103 servers with around 25PB of data. A year later, he showed off “one of many racks with many servers” about to be launched for the still-struggling website. Each rack, he said, would be able to store 720TB of data.

Dotcom can still appeal the court’s decision. In a thread on X (formerly Twitter), he lambasted that “the obedient U.S. colony in the South Pacific just decided to extradite me for what users uploaded to Megaupload” and confirmed his battle wasn’t yet over. Dotcom expressed hope that he would still avoid extradition. “By the time the appeals are done, if ever, the world will be a very different place,” he wrote.

Ortman and van Der Kolk agreed to plea deals in 2023 that allowed them to serve jail time in New Zealand while avoiding extradition to the U.S. Batato, on the other hand, died in New Zealand in 2022.

Layers are a clever and easy-to-use way to introduce elements to an image without destroying the source or main image. It works similarly to placing sheets of paper on top of each other. Each piece is a separate element of the composition, but when put together, they become the image you want the world to see.

In this how-to we will use GIMP’s layers to take a stock image, remove the subject from the image, and apply effects just to the subject, leaving the background untouched. We’ll learn how to create new layers, manage layers, and apply effects to certain parts of an image using alpha selection.

All you’ll need for this how-to is a copy of the free GIMP image editor, and this stock image of a car. Use this as a basis for experimenting with the image and the tools on hand.

Working with layers

At the bottom right of the GIMP interface, we find the layers tab. By default there is just one layer, our background. Many users will just paint / work directly to this layer, but if we need additional layers we need to do the following.

Creating a new layer

1. Click on the + icon at the bottom of the interface.

2. Give the layer a name, fill the layer with transparency, and click OK to create. Give your layers meaningful names, once you are using multiple layers it can quickly become confusing.

3. Ensure that the new layer is active. By default, GIMP will select the new layer as the active layer and any work will be done on that layer. Clicking on a layer will switch to that layer.

Another way to create a new layer is to import an image as a new layer.

1. Click on File >> Open as Layers.

2. Select your file and click open. This will open the image a new layer, on top of the currently selected layer. The image can be manipulated on the layer, so we can resize / edit the image to match the other layers.

Using layers in a composition

Our goal here is to take a stock image from pexels.com, remove the subject from the background and then create a new layer to superimpose the subject over itself. There we will create a border effect to make the subject stand out.

Removing the subject from the image can be done via a number of online services such as remove.bg, or you can use Python to remove the background.

We’ve chosen a stock car image and run the image through remove.bg to cut the car from the background. Now we have two images. The original image, and just the car.

1. Open GIMP and click on File >> Open as Layers.

2. Open the original image and it will be set as the active layer.

3. Repeat the File >> Open as Layers process and open the cut-out image of the car. The cut-out image will be loaded on top of the original image, and because they are the same subject, we cannot see a big difference.

4. Click on the eye icon next to each layer to set its visibility. Click on the bottom layer to remove the background, leaving just the subject on the top layer. Set both layers as visible before moving on to the next step.

5. Double click on the layer name and edit to reflect what that layer refers to. It is important to name layers so that we can quickly understand the many layers that make the composition.

6. Select the subject layer, and right click on the subject layer (the top layer in this example) and select Alpha to Selection. This will automatically select the subject as it is the only thing on that layer.

7. From the main menu click Select >> Border.

8. Set the border to 10 pixels around the subject, and click OK. The subject now has a 10px border around its perimeter.

9. Create a new layer and call it “border”. Click OK to activate. The active layer will now shift to “border”, and it is on top of all other layers.

10. Move the “border” layer so that it is between the subject and the background.

11. Click on the Bucket icon, and hold the button down. Select the Gradient tool from the drop down.

12. Select the saturation fill from the menu.

13. Ensuring that the border layer is selected, click and drag across the image to create a colorful gradient border around the subject. Press Enter to set the gradient. The start and end points can be tweaked to change the color effect.

14, Select the subject layer and click on the Mode drop down just above the layers. Here we can alter the properties of a layer so that the contents of the layer can be used for artistic effects.

15. Try out a few different modes to see what suits your vision of the composition. For this step there is no right or wrong, it is an artistic choice. Multiply makes the image darker, Screen bright, and exclusion produces a negative image.

16. With the subject layer still selected, click on Filters >> Artistic >> Cartoon (Legacy). Each layer can have its own filters / effects.

17. Set the mask radius to 30.5 and the percent black to 0.8 and click on Ok to apply. This will transform just the subject (car) into a cartoon image against a real background.

<>

For now we are done. We’ve taken a stock image, added some layers, effects and played with how the composition works. To take it further, explore how the different layer modes and effects work with each other to create different styles. As Bob Ross would say, ““There are no mistakes, just happy accidents.”

More GIMP Tutorials

• How To Remove Image Backgrounds Using GIMP
• How To Resize Images in GIMP
• How To Make GIMP Look and Feel Like Photoshop

Once popular messaging service ICQ (short for I Seek You) will finally shut its operations on June 26, almost 28 years since its launch in 1996. The messaging platform peaked at nine million users and had 2.5 million daily active users. The number of users it was able to have globally was remarkable at the time, given that most users were on dial-up connections and DSL internet was brand new and limited to a handful of countries.

AOL acquired ICQ from Mirabilis in 1998 for $407 million. In 2010, Mail.Ru, later renamed VK, acquired the platform because it was trendy in Russia. The company intended to modernize the app while making it cross-platform-compatible.

ICQ now recommends its existing users migrate towards a Russian-based social media service, VK, which acquired this messaging system from AOL. VK did try to modernize ICQ by developing apps for Android and iOS but eventually gave up. Despite this announcement, ICQ's X account hinted at a return. Apart from feeling nostalgic, many would doubt if ICQ could retain its once-dominant position in a time with many such apps. The migration process differs from when MSN Messenger and its chat rooms were closed, transferring users to Skype.

The silent demise of ICQ, in a way, reflects the current state of communication through the internet as people use WhatsApp and other mobile-based communication while using social media services like Facebook, X, and others. Russia has its social media platform, VK, much like China's platforms. There is a saturation of social media and cross-platform messaging platforms with the ability to integrate voice and camera conversations and make online payments. To its credit, ICQ was able to exist in some form, outlasting services offered by MSN, AOL, Yahoo, and social media sites like MySpace, Orkut, and Google.

Irrespective of ICQ's cryptic post about its comeback, ICQ's legacy since the 90s is respectable, along with its influence on its users during the pre-social media days. ICQ will always live on in users' minds, such as those who have made long-lasting friendships and relationships thanks to the messaging platform. Apps and social media services may shut down eventually, but the memories made on these platforms will always live on.

Earlier this week Spectra Logic announced the Spectra Cube, a modern tape storage library focused on ease of use and maintenance while delivering up to 75PB of data capacity. The Cube is meant to have little or no downtime and allows the installation of new tape cartridge drives without powering off. The Spectra Cube supports Amazon S3 and Amazon S3 Glacier API access, and is stated to be ideal for "storage services by managed service providers and cloud service providers", more generally speaking. 

In terms of maximum tape storage capacity, the Spectra Cube leverages Spectra's own TeraPack tape cartridges with support for LTO-6 through LTO-9 and a maximum storage capacity of up to 30 Petabytes uncompressed. With compression, that's up to 75 Petabytes. The library also supports up to 16 partitions, intended for use in shared or "multi-tenant" environments.

Spectra Logic is set to demonstrate the Cube at the 2024 NAB Show, which begins today at the Las Vegas Convention Center. There will be an additional demonstration at the ISC High Performance 2024, which spans May 13-15 at the Congress Center in Hamburg, Germany.

"Compared to typical public cloud options," claims Matt Ninesling, Spectra's Senior Director of Tape Portfolio Management, "Spectra Cube solutions can cut the costs of cold storage by half or more, while providing better data control and protection from existential threats like ransomware."

This statement is provided alongside information regarding Spectra's lifetime guarantee on its Spectra Certified media (like the aforementioned Spectra TeraPack cartridges). Spectra claims more than 40 metrics are monitored and recorded for each tape in a library to enable data error assessment, to apply prevention measures, and fixes. Integrity verification checks should also protect data from being corrupted or lost, in theory.

Overall, the Spectra Cube seems like a quite modern choice for the old classic tape storage medium— but not without merit, if its pricing and capacity are actually to scale with the needs of you or your business. The official Spectra Cube product page seems to require you to contact them for an exact quote, which we don't advise non-enterprise consumers to do.

Microsoft has a new subscription tier for its Copilot AI companion that will bring it across more devices and into more applications than before. Dubbed Copilot Pro, the $20 per month (and per user) subscription will get you a cohesive AI that follows you across your Windows PCs, the web, apps, and "soon on your phone."

The paid tier will also add Copilot to Word, Excel, Powerpoint, Outlook, and OneNote on  Windows PCs, Macs, and iPads, as long as you're also a subscriber to Microsoft 365 Personal or Family.

Those who sign on for Copilot Pro will also be the first to get the latest models from OpenAI. Starting today, that means those who subscribe will get access to GPT-4 Turbo "during peak times for faster performance," Microsoft executive vice president and consumer chief marketing Officer wrote in a blog post. It appears the new model will also get access to the newer model, but that you'll need Copilot Pro to use newer models when usage is high, as well as to switch between models.

Mehdi also wrote that image creation with Image Creator from Designer (formerly known as Bing Image Creator) will be faster "with 100 boosts per day while bringing you more detailed image quality as well as landscape image format." Copilot Pro will also let you create a custom Copilot GPT specialized for certain topics with just a few prompts. That last feature, which sounds similar to custom GPTs that OpenAI just launched, will come "soon" in a Copilot GPT Builder.  For free customers, Copilot GPTs will be broadly available. These will be specialized to certain topics, and Microsoft says they will be tailored to interests like travel, cooking, and fitness. 

Mehdi says that Copilot Pro is designed to provide "more options for power users, creators, and anyone looking to take their Copilot experience to the next level."

Microsoft's subscription isn't terribly surprising. The company has made a huge investment in OpenAI and adding features to Windows, Microsoft 365, Edge and other products, and is among the most valuable companies in the world partially due to its refocusing on AI.  it's unsurprising that a subscription is here; it lets Microsoft monetize Copilot.

And the $20 per month, per user price has a precedent: OpenAI itself. ChatGPT Plus is also $20 per month and promises faster response times, access during peak times, and the ability to get the newest models and features first.

Beyond Copilot Pro, Microsoft is making Copilot for Microsoft 365 available to small businesses (one to 299 seats), for $30 per person per month, and is removing 300-seat purchase minimums for many enterprise customers. Microsoft 365 for education faculty and staff will also see access to Copilot.

That $30 subscription for Microsoft 365 provides even further details.Including Copilot in teams and a "Semantic Index" that works with Copilot and the Microsoft Graph to "create a sophisticated map of all the data and content in your organization," which Microsoft wrote in a different blog will make Copilot more relevant to companies and provide more actionable responses.

Copilot is now available on Android and iOS, and will roll out to the Microsoft 365 app for both platforms in the next month.

At CES, we saw a number of Windows laptops with dedicated Copilot keys — the biggest change to the Windows keyboard layout in decades. Now we'll see if this new subscription program, plus broader access to businesses and schools, gets people tapping those keys.

Google's cloud storage Drive platform is losing serious amounts of customer files without warning, the Register reports Several user reports have come up on the Google support page, complaining about lost files, with one user in particular losing data as far back as May 2023. Google has confirmed that it is tracking the problem but did not provide a schedule for a possible fix.

Complaints started rolling in exactly six days ago when user Yeonjoong posted a complaint on the Google support forums reporting six months of lost data inside his/her Google Drive account. A few days later, numerous user responses came in on the same post detailing similar situations. Many reported the loss of critical work-related files, while the worst reports involved years or thousands of documents going missing from their respective Google Drive accounts.

To make matters worse, users are also reporting lost files with Google Drive's desktop application, which makes a duplicate copy of a user's cloud storage on his/her location machine.

Data loss can be dire, especially for businesses or for files that are important to individuals, like family photos, resumes, or anything else you thought might be safe in a cloud backup. Google is monitoring the situation, but it is looking like data restoration for affected customers might not be possible depending on how things go. 

Problems like this are always a good reminder to back up your important data no matter what, even if it's stored in the cloud. Just because data is stored in the cloud doesn't mean it is completely safe. There have been multiple cases of data loss over the past years from reputable cloud storage providers, leading to thousands of dollars in downtime and lost work.

A poster claiming they heard from Google's support claims the company is monitoring the situation and is investigating the problem with its project engineers. In a best-case scenario, everyone affected will get their files back, but in a worst-case scenario, Google won't be able to recover any lost files at all.

Microsoft has provided an update on its Project Silica storage research. According to a recent blog post and video, the software and devices giant is now positioning Project Silica as a sustainable storage solution to address the cloud storage server market. Using Project Silica technology, it is possible to store approximately 1.75 million songs or around 3,500 movies on a palm-sized slice of glass. Moreover, Microsoft asserts that the 7 TB storage per glass sheet maintains data integrity for 10,000 years.

Several refinements have been made to Project Silica since our last report in June 2022. At that time, the media seemed identical in dimensions, but the writing process has since been refined for speed and durability. Also, we note the focus seems to have changed from music archiving purposes to cloud server data storage.

In the new video, Ant Rowstron, a deputy lab director at Microsoft Research Cambridge, outlines the great appeal of Project Silica in addressing the ever-increasing amount of data being generated by humans and in cloud storage.

Sketching out the limitations of magnetic storage, a traditional cloud server data medium, Rowstron highlights the need to refresh the data every five years when using HDDs and up to ten years “if you are brave” with tape storage. Refreshing media can be arduous, wastes energy, and introduces the potential for data corruption.

In contrast, data stored in glass, with its natural resistance to water, electromagnetic pulses, extreme temperatures, and surface scratching, can be stable for thousands of years.

The video also takes us through the four steps to silicon storage heaven. There are four ‘labs’ involved in Project Silica data storage and retrieval, as follows:

1. Write Lab: short laser pulses record data inside the glass as voxels (3D pixels)
2. Read Lab: a computer controlled microscope reads data
3. Decode Lab: here the data read is decoded back into standard computer readable formats using Azure AI
4. Library lab: when data is requested for recall, a robot in the library goes to fetch the appropriate piece, and inserts it into a reader.

It is emphasized that the library is immutable and passive. All the complexity and power in the system is in the robot. We wondered what would happen if a robot fell or dropped a slice of glass, but Microsoft’s blog doesn’t discuss this possibility.

Last but not least, it is interesting to note Microsoft’s change of direction and some quite incredible claims for Project Silica. The firm admits it still isn’t ready for commercial use, though. It envisions glass storage as “a mainstay in Azure data centers across the globe” that needs another three of four developmental stages to secure its place and live up to its durable, sustainable, and cost-effective potential.

Adobe PDF files are one of the leading file types for documents around. These proprietary file types work mainly with Adobe software but can be easily converted to other file types, as well, like Word Docs or JPGs. And sometimes you’ll find yourself needing to edit a PDF. If you’ve already got access to Adobe Acrobat, this is easy to do. However, those without Acrobat may be wondering how they can edit a PDF. Thankfully, Adobe provides a free tool that anyone can use to edit PDFs online for free. The only caveat is that you will need to make an account with Adobe to use it.

 How to Edit a PDF in Acrobat 

If you’ve got a copy of Adobe Acrobat, editing a PDF is fairly easy. But if you’re not sure how to enable editing mode, here’s what you have to do.

1.  Open the PDF you want to edit in Adobe Acrobat.

2. Go to the Tools tab in the upper left-hand corner. 

3. Click `Edit PDF`.

4. Edit the PDF using the tools provided.

Don't forget to save your changes when you are done.

How to Edit a PDF for Free

If you don’t have Adobe Acrobat, it’s still possible to edit PDFs. Adobe provides a free online tool that has plenty of features to enable basic changes to most PDF documents. You can change the order of pages, add or remove elements, and even digitally sign documents.

1. Go to https://acrobat.adobe.com/link/acrobat/add-comment. 

2. Create an Adobe account if you don’t already have one. Even though you’re prompted to create an account, it’s free to use the online editing tool.

3. Drag and drop the PDF into the window.

4. Click ‘Edit’ in the upper left corner.

5. Edit the PDF using the tools provided.

These steps should work for anyone whether they’ve got access to Adobe Acrobat or not. The online tool is free for anyone to use but an account with Adobe is required to gain access to it. 

TIP: Even if you’ve got a copy of Acrobat, it’s handy to keep the free online editing tool on hand in case you’re at a machine that doesn’t have access to the full Acrobat suite.

4. Edit the PDF using the tools provided. Save when done.