Cloudflare has saved 100 TB of RAM again, but this time by tuning its hash-mapping algorithm. One of Cloudflare's largest business use cases is data caching, more specifically serving a URL directly from memory or disk instead of fetching it from the live site, which may take a significant amount of time. The company uses its own open-source Pingora framework for the task of mapping an arbitrary URL to one of its cadre of cache servers, using the Ketama algorithm. This task is simple in concept, but can get quite tricky in an environment where it's expected that backend servers appear and disappear — and harder still when done at Cloudflare's scale.

"Backend routing," or the mapping of a URL to one of many cached servers, requires a lot of tables held in memory. An incoming URL is hashed (like you do with files with CRC-32), and that resulting number is taken and sent out to a server. The first instinct is to do this sequentially, one URL per server, but you hit the first problem: the same URLs aren't going to the same servers. So what you do is you make a hash corresponding to the server, say with its IP address and name, and match both hashes together by numerical proximity.

That sounds simple, and it works fine, as the URL hashes' distribution is going to be effectively random, and the requests will be redirected to the same server in an egalitarian way. But then you run face-first against the second problem: say you have four servers serving 25% of requests each, and #2 disappears because someone tripped on the power cable. You'll be forced to redirect the requests it handled onto whichever are closest in the hash map, and end up overloading server #3, the next one over, while #1 and #4 remain under little load.

The solution to that is to add more hashes per server and mix them up randomly. Now your four servers' many hashes have a random distribution, and if one dies, incoming requests should be equally distributed among the remaining ones. This takes a lot of memory, and it takes far more once you set up layers with weight rules (so that bigger servers handle more requests), and the fact that, due to content restrictions and architectural regions, not all servers can serve all requests. All told, Cloudflare was running with as many as 100,000 server hashes per machine, ballooning RAM requirements.

After judicious application of some algebra and basic statistics, Cloudflare engineers concluded that using those 100,000 hashes was far and away beyond the point of diminishing returns. The team calculated that a mere 10% of that amount was good enough for nearly the same results, as the error rate barely drops for each order of magnitude beyond 10,000. After some judicious wrangling of Rust's data structures to save 2 bytes per entry in the hash-server map. That sounds like nothing, but it quickly adds up with billions of records.

All things considered, the Cloudflare team saved around 100 TB of RAM total with this optimization. To play it safe, the team added this "v2" algorithm as a separate code path rather than replacing the code altogether — allowing them to simply swap back to the original one if something broke. Now if only all modern software were this judicious about resource usage.

Russian president Vladimir Putin voted online in the State Duma elections on Friday. That’s a pretty ordinary-sounding thing for any president to do, but this filmed-for-the-press event has been widely shared outside of Russia. Why? The official video appears to show Putin voting on a PC using an unlicensed copy of Windows on a Dell PC. The president then comments, “You can’t go wrong,” as he clicks on his choice of candidate. Moreover, folks are throwing scorn at the aging Russian president’s mouse skills. If this were an audition for an eSports team, it would have been a clear fail.

The above embed comes via the nonprofit Central European news aggregator Visegrad24. The magnified section of the video shows a screen effect that looks very similar to the Windows activation reminder watermark. However, the other overlay on the screen is obviously from a different computer, and it’s dated 2018. We found some established Russian media sources with the video recording, like Komsomolskaya Pravda, and there does indeed appear to be a watermark present shown on Putin's computer screen at the end of the voting clip.

Russian state media source TASS explains that the vote was to elect deputies to the 9^th State Duma. It says that over recent years “Putin has preferred to cast his vote remotely.” It also reveals that some former Ukrainian territories will get to participate in this vote. “For the first time ever, residents of the recently incorporated Donetsk and Lugansk People’s Republics, as well as the Kherson and Zaporozhye Regions, will participate in legislative elections for the lower house of the Russian parliament,” says the official Russian news agency.

Returning to the social media bubbling up over the Kremlin clip, some valid points seem to be raised. Putin’s comment about “you can’t go wrong” is almost a reverse Vranyo. There is hardly going to be uncertainty about the result of any vote in Russia. Hot tip: We think that United Russia, the ruling pro-Kremlin party backed by Vladimir Putin, is going to do well this year.

We also note that the president seems to be voting on a foreign (Dell brand) computer. By law, Russian officials must use computers with certain levels of localization, so it might be reasonable to assume this machine was set up entirely for Putin’s voting publicity clip. That would also go some way to explain an unactivated, unregistered copy of Windows being used. It’s likely a fresh, clean copy of Microsoft’s OS run separate from any government network.

As for Putin’s computer skills, it looks like his interactions with the online voting forms are largely being hampered because he can’t see properly, rather than a hand-eye-coordination issue. There are uncomfortably pregnant pauses between the 73-year-old squinting and leaning into the screen and clicking the mouse. Either Putin should wear his glasses, or the Kremlin administrators are going to need to code a Big Picture Mode for his nuclear launch computer.

Anyone old enough to be messing with PCs in the early to mid-2000s probably has the following burned into their mind: FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8. That's neither a magic spell nor a password for a cabal — it's the best-known Windows XP key, letting anyone install and run the operating system with its incantation and just the one CD. Ever wondered how or why Microsoft let such an apparent gaping hole in its copy protection? Former engineer Dave Plummer explained in an X post.

First off, there were actually two versions of the original Windows XP media: Retail and Volume. The former was for anyone who just bought the OS off the shelf, while the latter was reserved for Microsoft partners and OEMs that needed to easily install it on thousands of machines without needing to individually activate every single one at install time.

Retail and Volume media had different keys, too, and the installer would validate the key you input against specific data on the disc, "encrypted so hard that even today it hasn't been decrypted [...]" (Someone will take those words as a challenge). The magical piece of cryptic data was nothing other than the whole 10 MB of... Microsoft Bob. The short-lived assistant was technically the antecessor of the much-maligned and memed-upon Clippy, and did its best in 1995 to introduce newbies to basic computing tasks.

Regular Joes and Janes weren't supposed to be anywhere within a stone's throw of a Volume disc, though, as those were strictly enterprise-only. The final version of the CD, called Release to Manufacturing, or RTM, was complete in August 24, 2001 — two months before the official launch on October 25. The discs were available to OEMs and partners before the release date so those companies could have their wares ready with Windows XP on them.

Plummer notes that "very few" organizations had access to the Volume image and the corresponding Volume License Key (VLK) and believes that someone at a major OEM, potentially Dell or Intel, leaked the Volume media and the key together before the official release. The pirate group Devils0wn then quickly spread it online for everyone to enjoy

Later on, when Service Pack 1 arrived, the FCKGW key was among the 640 blacklisted from the operating system due to leakage. Service Pack 2 and its Windows Genuine Advantage checks went a couple steps further and blocked updates entirely on machines with a blacklisted VLK. Plummer states that Microsoft didn't want to cause unnecessary trouble for customers, hence its laissez-faire attitude and choice to stick to just blacklisting affected keys.

Many theories over the years proposed that the FCKGW key worked because Microsoft's key generation algorithm was very basic, a notion outright dismissed by Plummer. He plainly states that algorithm was written by "ACTUALLY smart guys with heads so big that they bumped the doorjamb on the way into your office."

The truth of the situation was far simpler: as is usual with computing, ultimately the problem was between the keyboard and the chair. It's a good a time as any to reminisce about that compact disc you totally don't have on a bookshelf somewhere with the FCKGW key written on it with a Sharpie.

Microsoft has issued an out-of-band update for its recent Windows 11 patch, which has caused a number of bugs and issues. The September 2026 update was just released last Tuesday, and although it packs a number of new features and fixes nearly 1000 security flaws (commonplace in this day and age), there are also a few unfortunate regressions.

The 25H2 update finally reintroduces a movable taskbar, just like we've had since Windows 95, with an option to make the height smaller for compact displays. Likewise, the Start menu now has multiple configurable layouts, and you can toggle each main section on or off. Microsoft also revamped Windows Search — perhaps to finally be useful — and users can now choose to only have it display local results. Explorer got a handy tweak in the form of using KB, MB, GB size indicators, as well.

The update has also surfaced some serious bugs. First off, PCs with AMD Radeon GPUs are crashing, apparently due to the update provoking driver instability. Reinstalling the driver doesn't appear to help, and the reports unfortunately cover most contemporary AMD graphics cards. Microsoft did not mention AMD GPUs specifically in its latest update.

Microsoft noted that it has fixed an issue with Remote Desktop Services where RDS might become unstable, causing connection and sign-in failures.

Microsoft is also aware of an issue with audio output and microphone input going dead. Additionally, there are seemingly reports of audio devices starting up with a botched configuration, like tweaked 3D audio settings or speaker setups. The apparent workaround seems to be putting audio in a standard 2.0 configuration, but Microsoft has now addressed this issue in the emergency patch.

Explorer may display a black screen after logging in, leaving you with a perfectly functioning operating system but no visible UI. The File History backup feature is reportedly not detecting external drives, effectively making it useless. Of particular concern to enterprises, systems administrators, and homelabs, the Remote Desktop Service is also experiencing issues. Last but not least, Microsoft says it has addressed an issue where Claude Cowork is nonfunctional due to the update breaking HC-managed Linux VMs with Plan9 shared folders

Owners of HP and Lenovo systems are also advised to consider holding off on this update. Ever since the August 2026 patch (and now, cumulatively, with the September update), there are reportedly serious issues on both camps. On the HP side, there are instances of the update triggering BIOS corruption, leading to a failed install with no ability to recover the OS — though seemingly the OEM has published a new BIOS revision, so it's hard to say which side is to blame. Meanwhile, Lenovo users might have their machines black-screen or shut down out of the blue, seemingly due to power mismanagement.

While it's heartening to see that Microsoft has significantly increased its Windows development speed and is seemingly listening to customer feedback, a string of bugs after a major feature update are still common.

A retro video gaming devotee has showcased Lara Croft adventuring in and among ancient tombs on a humble ESP32-P4 microcontroller. This highly affordable device (available as a sub-$25 dev board) packs a pair of 32-bit 400 MHz RISC cores and delivers a slick, playable 1,024 x 600 pixel experience for TheAlexKid777, yet consumes roughly 1 watt at peak. It is good to see someone having video-gaming fun with cheap, power-sipping new tech in 2026.

When it launched in the mid-90s, Tomb Raider quickly became a classic by successfully capturing the add-a-third-dimension-to-all-games-and-IPs trend while delivering an eminently enjoyable adventure game. Not all games were better because they were in 3D rather than 2D. Far from it. Now the compute power required to run a title like OpenLara doesn’t require an expensive and power-hungry game console - a cheap dev board that typically consumes milliwatts is capable enough today.

But the high-efficiency low-wattage gaming feat described above is just half the story. The other phenomenon demonstrated here is the beefing up of commonly available microcontrollers. Developers no longer need to be extremely resource thrifty when coding for these humble devices. They now pack plenty of horsepower to spare.

In the case of Espressif’s ESP32-P4, there is “a dual-core RISC-V CPU featuring AI instruction extensions, an advanced memory subsystem, and integrated high-speed peripherals,” the maker highlights. There’s also up to 64MB PSRAM, 768KB SRAM, an FPU, DSP, ISP, 55 programmable GPIOs, and more. It sounds almost like an original Tomb Raider era dream.

In TheAlexKid777’s demo, this hardware is attached to the back of what looks like a 7- or 8-inch LCD. It runs OpenLara at 320 x 240 pixels, which is PPA hardware scaled to 1,024 x 600 pixels. The game also features stereo audio pumped through the dev board’s ES8311 codec, and it's controlled via a connected USB keyboard.

We’ve previously reported on various ESP32 family microcontrollers being used to: power a retro Mac emulator, host a tiny ad-blocking dongle, and even run a 28.9 million parameter LLM. Some of these projects use far cheaper ESP32 microcontrollers, too, starting at $5.

Microsoft has finally solved one of the biggest pain points of Windows with the rollout of Cloud Rebuild. The new recovery feature can reinstall Windows 11 even when an existing Windows installation is corrupt or refuses to boot. Available as a beta through the newly released Windows 11 Insider Beta Preview Build 26220.9343, the feature is essentially a hassle-free alternative to creating a Windows installation USB drive when a PC needs to be recovered.

According to Microsoft, Cloud Rebuild is designed to restore a Windows 11 PC to a “clean, known-good state” by downloading a fresh image of Windows along with the required drivers directly through Windows Update. Unlike the existing Reset this PC functionality, it does not depend on the health of your existing Windows installation, nor does it require users to have a USB drive or custom recovery image available.

Available via the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), users can access it by selecting Troubleshoot > Recovery and uninstall > Cloud rebuild from WinRE. Speaking of which, Microsoft has also improved networking support in WinRE. The recovery environment can now reuse eligible Wi-Fi profiles saved within an existing Windows installation, allowing a PC to connect during recovery without requiring administrators to separately configure Wi-Fi credentials in WinRE. Once the PC is connected, Cloud Rebuild checks Windows Update for the target Windows build and downloads the required files. Users can then confirm the Windows edition, language, and build before starting the reinstall.

The only catch here is that Cloud Rebuild completely wipes the system drive, meaning that the process removes all data stored in your main installation or C: drive, including locally stored files, accounts, applications, and settings, before reinstalling Windows. Thus, it is recommended to back up all your important files either locally or using a cloud-based service before starting the process. Once the installation is complete, the PC boots into the Windows out-of-box experience, similar to a fresh installation of Windows. For admin-managed PCs using Windows Autopilot and Microsoft Intune, the system can automatically reconnect to the organization's management infrastructure and restore assigned applications, policies, and backed-up settings.

Cloud Rebuild could particularly be useful when Windows becomes too corrupted to boot normally. Instead of finding another PC, creating installation media, and manually reinstalling Windows, users can potentially perform the entire recovery process directly from WinRE. The feature is still in preview; however, we can expect a wider release later this year.

If you are yearning for a quick-shot retro Windows experience on your modern Windows 11 or macOS system, then there’s a new vibe-coded clone of the Windows 3.1 Program Manager that may interest you. Developer Mayuki has released a neat little nostalgia project dubbed ReProgman – named after the ancient Windows 3.1 ‘progman.exe ’, which was the primary shell of the era – until Windows 95 swept it away three decades ago.

ReProgman looks pretty authentic to my eyes, and it brought back memories of why I wasn’t sad to see it shrivel away from Windows machines. In a social media post about the release of ReProgman, Mayuki seems to agree with my sentiments. “I asked Claude to create a clone of the Windows 3.1 Program Manager,” wrote the developer (machine translation). “I think you'll enjoy reminiscing with it for about 30 seconds.”

Claude Code worked pretty swiftly to churn out this clone of the Windows 3.1 shell. The first version that was precipitated in about an hour was “pretty decent” but needed some effort to iron out the wrinkles. Then Mayuki complains again that actually using ReProgman induced boredom after about half a minute of usage.

The end-user-ready releases of ReProgman weigh in at between 12 and 16MB, so they are quite a trivial download and don’t need installing. Thus, it isn’t very taxing to give them a try for a spot of nostalgia-tinted navigation around your present system’s programs and files. Mayuki says that building and running this application needs the .NET SDK 10.0+. The code has been released on GitHub under the MIT license.

In conclusion, Miyuki’s ReProgman provides an easy trip down personal computing's memory lane, specifically to the Windows 3.X era of the early to mid-1990s. However, some will prefer to get their retro computing kicks by running the actual MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 combo on real hardware. As we discovered recently, that doesn’t limit users to dusting off an old i486 or similar. Back in April, an enthusiast demoed Windows 3.1X on ultra-modern bare metal with a system using a Ryzen 9 9900X and RTX 5060 Ti.

Late last week, Google announced that scientists had, for the first time, “mapped the complete brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly.” On Monday, software engineers were already demonstrating the full MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome being trained to play Doom, as well as Super Mario 64. In light of these developments, perhaps it is time to amend Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law. We suggest something similar to ‘Any sufficiently advanced new technology will immediately be forced to play Doom.’

Let’s look at this story in its natural chronological order. Scientists have been using fruit flies for research for over a century. The winged insects have a strong history in the avenues of genetic research. The humble fruit fly is still relevant in the 2020s in genetics, neuroscience, and more.

Now, for the first time, the complete brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly have been fully mapped. Google Research scientists worked alongside HHMI Janelia Research Campus and the scientific community to achieve this milestone. In the social media post outlining the achievement, Google claimed that AI was used “to combine millions of 2D images into 3D neural shapes, reconstructing a record-breaking 166,000+ neurons.” That’s somewhat below the estimated 86 billion neurons in the human brain. AI data centers are going to need more RAM, folks.

This scientific breakthrough is going to “accelerate our understanding of the brain, and is a major milestone in neuroscience,” noted Google last Thursday. By Tuesday, it was already being trained to play classic video games.

We’ve seen software engineer Alex Wormuth and ‘C++ ragebaiteur’ Jessica Paquette already demonstrate fly-brain video game training. Their fly-brain tinkering focuses on Doom and Mario 64, respectively.

Of their Doom training efforts, Wormuth says that “Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons. Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement.” The dev closes their tweet with the question “Will the fly learn to survive?” The code is fully open source, and you can also watch the training progress of the 166,700 neurons live.

Paquette’s short video clip shows Mario repeatedly taking off and bumping into a wall. If it were bumping into a window, it would be exhibiting the pinnacle of fly-brain intelligence. We also have the code to this fly-brain video gaming project, which was “literally 100% vibe coded with GPT Astra… just for fun.” Hopefully non-coders/tinkerers will get updates on the success of this training via Paquette’s socials.

Microsoft just released another version of Windows 11 designed for developers, dubbed Project Zenith. According to the Windows Blogs, this operating system is optimized for developer workflows and will first become available on the AMD Ryzen AI Halo, Team Red’s direct answer to the Nvidia DGX Spark, although it will also arrive on more devices from Microsoft’s OEM and other silicon partners soon. Redmond calls Project Zenith “a ready-to-code distraction-free Windows experience on developer-class devices with 64 GB+ unified memory and 250+ GB/s memory bandwidth,” claiming that “developers can jump right in.”

It comes with pre-installed tools like Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, PowerToys, WinAppCLI, Windows Dev Skills, Intelligent Terminal, PowerShell 7, Git, GitHub CLI, AzureCLI, Core Utils, Oh My Posh, Python 3.14+, uv, NVM, Node 24+, WSL 2+ Ubuntu, and .NET 10. Aside from that, Microsoft said it pre-configures Windows 11 so developers don’t have to dig through the settings menus of various apps to configure them for their needs.

It’s primarily designed for AI developers, especially since the devices it’s installed on are designed to run 30B+ parameter models locally and without meters. The company also made it more secure for developing and running agents, deploying features such as OS-enforced identity, containment through Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), and enterprise-grade manageability for agents.

Project Zenith is Microsoft’s response to the AI token crisis, which has caused costs to spiral out of control, especially as agents use 1000x more tokens compared to standard AI. While frontier models would still be available on the cloud, AI developers could run everything else locally through devices like this, powered by this version of Windows 11. This should help AI developers keep using their agents without feeling the bite of tokenized billing, which is especially crucial for those working in smaller organizations or experimenting at home.

One big tradeoff with Project Zenith, though, is that it’s only available on expensive devices, at least for the moment. The AMD Ryzen AI Halo, with its AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor, 128GB LPDDR5x-8000 RAM, 2TB SSD, and integrated Radeon 8060S graphics, costs $3,999.99 on Micro Center. Even if Microsoft eventually makes Project Zenith available for separate purchase and installable on other mini-PCs, the 64 GB+ unified memory requirement will be a major roadblock, especially with skyrocketing RAM prices driven by the AI boom.

Microsoft will begin automatically enabling its Memory Integrity security feature on a broader range of eligible Windows PCs through quality updates starting in October 2026, extending the kernel-level protection to more existing devices by default. In a September 1 blog post, Microsoft said the rollout will provide stronger protection for more devices against attacks targeting the Windows kernel, while PCs that already have Memory Integrity deliberately disabled will retain their existing configuration.

“Windows quality updates will begin enabling memory integrity protection on eligible devices,” Microsoft said. The updates will also enable Virtualization-based Security (VBS) where required, which provides the isolated environment underlying Memory Integrity. Before making the change, Windows will automatically assess each device using what Microsoft describes as readiness signals covering its hardware capabilities, compatibility, and performance.

The October rollout is basically an expansion of Microsoft’s existing default-enablement policy. Memory Integrity is already switched on by default on clean Windows 11 installations that meet Microsoft’s hardware requirements, as well as on Secured-core PCs. Current requirements include an 8th Gen or newer Intel processor for Windows 11 22H2, an AMD Zen 2 or newer processor, at least 8GB of RAM on x64 systems, an SSD of at least 64GB, compatible drivers, and enabled hardware virtualization. Automatic activation under that policy applies to clean installations and not upgrades of existing devices.

Memory Integrity — also known as Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity (HVCI) — has existed since the Windows 10 era and was originally released as part of Microsoft’s Device Guard security technology. It uses VBS and the Windows hypervisor to move kernel-mode code-integrity checks into an isolated environment, helping prevent malicious or untrusted code and drivers from executing in the Windows kernel. Windows 10 generally left the protection optional outside configurations such as S mode, while Windows 11 made it more of a default security feature on compatible new installations.

The feature comes with a performance wrinkle familiar to PC gamers, leading many gamers to disable it. Microsoft acknowledged in 2022 that Memory Integrity and Virtual Machine Platform could affect gaming performance on some Windows 11 configurations, and advised gamers prioritizing performance that they could temporarily disable these protections while playing, warning that doing so reduces security. The company’s own gaming guidance subsequently continued to recommend temporarily disabling Memory Integrity and VMP where they interfere with gaming performance.

The security feature’s impact on performance depends on the hardware. Microsoft says Memory Integrity performs better on newer processors with hardware features designed to accelerate the required isolation, while older CPUs relying on software emulation can experience a larger performance hit. Driver compatibility can also prevent activation, with Microsoft documenting issues ranging from malfunctioning software to incompatible gaming anti-cheat solutions.

For most users, the October change requires no action. Eligible PCs will be evaluated and updated automatically, while administrator policies and previous user choices remain in place. Microsoft specifically says systems where Memory Integrity has already been disabled “won’t be automatically changed by this rollout,” leaving gamers and other users who previously opted out in control of the setting.

The Linux kernel is approaching a staggering 2,000 CVEs fixed per release, up from roughly 500 through much of the Linux 6.x era, as AI and large language models increasingly scour the operating system’s enormous codebase for vulnerabilities. According to an August 28 Phoronix report, Linux stable maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman revealed the trend in a slide teasing an upcoming presentation at Kernel Recipes 2026, showing CVE counts jumping above 1,000 with Linux 7.0 and exceeding 1,500 with Linux 7.2. If the current trajectory continues, Linux 7.3 could push the figure beyond 2,000.

Rather than a change in Linux’s security or a rise in vulnerabilities, the spike is mainly due to “detectives” using AI tools to scour the Linux kernel source tree, which has grown to over 40 million lines over 35 years of Linux’s existence. These tools can examine countless obscure sections humans may rarely revisit, occasionally finding genuine defects; Linux CVE records this year already explicitly credit AI-assisted static analysis with finding vulnerabilities subsequently confirmed by Intel Product Security. However, many of the findings have been low-priority vulnerabilities — often within obscure driver code — questionable patches, and outright hallucinations, leaving human maintainers to separate useful work from noise.

This problem already constitutes a nuisance for kernel teams that have to fix these issues. In the Linux 7.3 networking pull request, maintainer Jakub Kicinski estimated that between one-third and one-half of the 648 net-next patches handled during the cycle appeared to be low-priority fixes, clean-ups, or clarifications driven by AI. "We are completely overwhelmed,” Kicinski wrote.

The issue has also led Linux maintainers to question whether decades-old drivers are worth keeping alive. In April, developer Andrew Lunn proposed removing nearly 28,000 lines of legacy networking code covering old ISA and PCMCIA-era hardware. While these drivers historically required little attention because they barely had any users, the AI and fuzzing tools started finding defects that maintainers were obligated to investigate and fix, regardless of whether anyone actually runs the hardware.

Linux 7.3 is removing old SGI and IBM driver code, while other ancient components have also been retired as maintainers reassess whether their compatibility value justifies their new maintenance cost. The FreeVxFS filesystem driver, for example, was removed after its maintainer said the decades-old compatibility code now largely served as fodder for automated bug checkers.

Now, the kernel community is not simply rejecting AI; Kroah-Hartman himself has successfully used locally-running AI-assisted fuzzing tools to uncover kernel bugs. The bone of contention is unverified AI output dumped onto humans for validation. Kroah-Hartman recently barred LLM-generated patches from the kernel’s staging subsystem except for legitimate security fixes, while updated kernel guidance warns that AI-generated reports submitted without human verification can waste maintainer time.

The team has also increasingly had to fight AI with AI. It has now secured access to multiple frontier models to help review patches and filter out hallucinated results, and is considering pushing more routine administrative work onto LLMs in subsequent development cycles. Kroah-Hartman is expected to discuss the trend further at Kernel Recipes, which is slated to run from September 21 to 23 in Paris. Linux 7.3 itself has already entered testing, with Linus Torvalds releasing Linux 7.3-rc1 on August 30 after closing its two-week merge window.

California’s legislature has passed Assembly Bill 1856, exempting open-source operating systems from the State’s Digital Age Assurance Act months before the law is due to take effect on January 1, 2027. The Senate amended the Bill on August 21 before passing it on the 26th in a 39-0 vote, with the Assembly then accepting these changes in a concurrence vote the following day. The amendment ends almost a year of uncertainty surrounding whether Linux distributions and SteamOS would be forced to collect user age data during account setup alongside Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. AB 1856 has now been sent to Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed the original act into law last October.

These amendments redefine the term “operating system provider” to exclude any person or entity that distributes an OS or application “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.” Any software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses satisfies that test, which removes the likes of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family from AB 1856’s scope.

A second exclusion removes software components that aren’t “offered to consumers as a stand-alone executable application through a covered application store” from the law’s definition of an application, covering libraries and dependencies distributed through package managers like apt and pacman. AB 1856 doesn’t explicitly say that repos aren’t app stores, but a store’s main obligation under the law is to request an age signal from the user’s OS provider and pass it to developers; an exempt open-source OS produces no signal. A third carve-out excludes storefronts distributing extensions or add-ons that run exclusively inside a host application, which takes browser extension stores out of scope.

The amendments to AB 1856 also remove the original definition of “user,” which read, “a child that is the primary user of a device,” and technically classified every device owner in California as a child. The law’s signaling framework depends on adults declaring their age on account setup, so their devices get flagged as 18 and over, but under that definition nobody could ever be flagged as an adult.

In addition, lawmakers inserted a new provision prohibiting anyone from requesting an age signal from an OS provider or app store unless required by law. That closes off potential abuse of the age API that could have led to it being used as a general-purpose data collection channel even when age verification wasn’t required. Platforms and developers also gain a good-faith safe harbor against erroneous signals, protecting them from liability when age-gating signals are inaccurate.

Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android remain fully in scope, with age collection required at account setup from January 1, 2027. A later July 1, 2027, deadline applies to devices set up before January 1. Whether SteamOS is in scope isn’t yet clear: its Arch-based system components are open source, but Valve distributes the image alongside the proprietary Steam client. GrapheneOS, which in March said it would refuse to comply with age-verification mandates, is distributed under open-source MIT and Apache licenses and now falls outside the law’s scope entirely, though Brazil’s Digital ECA still applies to it.

Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who wrote both the Digital Age Assurance Act and the AB 1856 amendment, introduced the exemption back in February following criticism from Linux developers and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The majority of PCs are sold with Windows 11 licensed, paid-for, and pre-installed. This fact irks many folks, especially Linux aficionados who intend to wipe all traces of Microsoft’s OS while their shiny new machine is box fresh. The Refund4Freedom site was put together by the Italian Linux Society and the Free Software Foundation Europe to help address this unfairness. “Consumers should be able to buy laptops without any specific operating system, and should not have to pay the license price if they don't want to,” asserts the site, and they have information and forms to help you get your cash back.

Refund4Freedom doesn't just help PC buyers in the quest to get Windows refunds; they have three key demands. Prevention is better than cure, right? The first demand is that “Device manufacturers and vendors should not impose an operating system or software on consumers, and should not force them to pay for software that they don't want.” This is central to the site’s message and purpose. However, it also wants to promote the idea that consumers should have the right to buy hardware without pre-installed software and see the price of the product with and without Windows, etc. Refund4Freedom also urges manufacturers and vendors to clearly outline the steps for requesting and obtaining a refund for pre-installed OSes and software. Of course, the process for consumers should be as friction-free as possible.

“Not all manufacturers and vendors are equal.”

“Not all manufacturers and vendors are equal,” notes Refund4Freedom on its website. Some are more helpful than others when it comes to refunds. You can read more on the website about each brand surveyed, but it looks like Acer and Lenovo both operate reimbursement procedures for Windows. Asus has a hidden reimbursement procedure, but we only get told of the Italy-centric way to reach out to Asus about it. Dell and HP don’t have any reimbursement procedure for Windows, according to the site.

Whichever brand of PC you buy, and the above list is far from exhaustive, you should follow a deliberate rejection procedure. If you intend to shun Windows, Refund4Freedom tells users to start up the PC and take pictures showing the contract clauses addressing reimbursement. Do not format or erase the computer at this stage. The next step is to contact the manufacturer's customer service. Do this in a recordable way, and so email/messaging is encouraged for records.

If the above two steps aren’t working out for you, the Refund4Freedom site has a pre-made form you can fill in and forward. However, this is again Italy-centric. For example, towards the end it mentions the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM), as well as a ruling by Judge Dr. Mirko Buratti of the Court of Monza… So, perhaps you can swap in some rulings appropriate to your country for this part of the form? Get your favorite LLM to hallucinate some local court rulings for you.

Finally, and whatever the outcome, Refund4Freedom asks its readers to report their experience, good or bad, to the aforementioned AGCM. To inspire you, the site includes several user reports of success, and I note one user getting back as much as €150 from Acer (~$175). That was a combination of Windows license reimbursement and a larger legal fee refund. A more typical reimbursement level is roughly $60.

The development of Linux, a free ‘hobby’ operating system, was announced by Linus Torvalds 35 years ago today. On August 25, 1991, the unknown computer science student noted that the budding OS had been “brewing since April, and is starting to get ready.” The first public release of this ‘Minix-like’ OS came the following month, and in a last-minute change by the co-worker who uploaded it, was distributed with the name Linux instead of Freax. In 2026, Linux powers everything from smartphones to supercomputers and oodles of products, like the Steam Deck, in between.

The above commemorative post celebrates Torvalds’ stewardship over the Linux project. However, it is also quick to make clear that “hundreds of maintainers and thousands of contributors” have been instrumental to making this free open source OS a competitive, capable alternative to corporate/paid software, which can “move computing forward for humanity.”

Since 1991, Linux has come a long way on its journey from its humble ‘hobby’ OS beginnings. What started as a kernel with roughly 10,000 lines of code has exploded into 40 million or more lines today. Torvalds was humble about the first release yet proud of features like its multi-threaded filesystem, and the first release being clear of any borrowed Minix code. But the countless contributors over the last 35 years have helped forge an enviable OS, which boasts capabilities and features that must make it a worrying foe for commercial rivals.

There are areas, outside our PC and gaming core, where Linux is actually the biggest fish by far. Industry stats suggest that nearly 80% of web servers, and virtually all of the world’s Top500 supercomputers run a flavor of Linux. It dominates mobile too, with nearly 4 billion Android devices running Linux-derived kernels. Then there are all those embedded systems, encompassing things such as routers to automotive MCUs – so many run Linux.

I feel that Linux has made significant progress towards the fabled ‘year of Linux’ over the last couple of years. Microsoft’s Windows has been its own worst enemy in some respects, pushing people away due to a multitude of concerns. Meanwhile, consumers can see that content creation, productivity, and gaming on Linux PCs are continuously improving.

There was a recent collective sigh of relief in the Linux world, too. Earlier today, we reported on news that the decades-long Linux ownership dispute was effectively killed after Xinuos’ appeal was rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals. That ruling means much lingering uncertainty over Linux devices facing future licensing claims, maker settlements, audits, and/or forced software rewrites has been banished.

An AI computing enthusiast has demonstrated Doom running on a custom CPU designed by GPT-5.6 Sol. Angel (@Angaisb_) shared a technical and visual feast with a video of classic Doom running within a pulsing schematic of the CPU, in the sandbox provided by the Turing Complete game environment. Clearly, this shows that GPT-5.6 Sol is capable of constructing a virtual computer system from the basics, and one that is accurate enough to boot and play a port of the original Doom. The model dubbed its CPU design ‘Codex-R32.’

Angel knows Doom is a hugely popular demo to show computing capabilities, despite it being quite a vintage nowadays (1993). So they must have thought it a good idea to show how far agentic coding has come with this tried and trusted ‘people asked for Doom’ metric. They were impressed by the results, concluding that it is “truly insane that we can do stuff like this.”

Despite the accomplishment, another rule of the internet is that there’s always someone who thinks you haven’t pushed far enough. So there were the inevitable remarks about having a shot at Crysis next. Likely grasping for a witty comeback, Angel asked their AI to whip up a response to the unsolicited stretch goal. It didn’t disappoint, suggesting they answer “Absolutely – I just need to build a GPU, add a few gigabytes of RAM, and make a schematic visible from orbit first.”

Indeed, Doom is a relative minnow compared to Crysis, though it still stretches the model and its performance in the sandbox is not what anyone would call playable. “The CPU is built from primitive logic components inside Turing Complete,” the Codex told Angel. “Doom uses the C-based PureDOOM port, compiled into native RV32IM machine code that runs directly on the custom Codex‑R32 CPU.”

Watching the video, you can see the live schematic of the custom CPU with a pulsing visualization of processor gates, registers, memory, ALUs, and other blocks within the Turing Complete computer-science education and puzzle game’s anything-goes sandbox mode. Live stats show the cycle counter, sim speed, memory/register values, and more.

Overall, with this demo, we have a neat visual demo of LLMs not just creating software, but also reinventing hardware at a capable enough level to pass the 'can it run Doom' test.

Legendary Windows developer Dave W. Plummer has been busy finessing his revamped Task Manager. His latest release, dubbed TMOG (Task Manager OG), was vibe coded by feeding Claude “a 107-page spec,” says the mind behind the original 80KB Task Manager, which debuted publicly in Windows NT 4.0 (1996). TMOG doesn’t just work natively on modern Windows 11 systems though; it struts its neon stuff on macOS and Linux, too.

Above you can read Plummer give some background regarding the latest TMOG release, interspersed with details about his son’s emergency appendectomy. Cutting a long story short, Plummer found he had lots of spare time waiting around the hospital and thought he'd put it to good use by doing some coding.

With a new MacBook Air M5 under his arm, Plummer decided not to follow his original plan of vibe coding a new version of Microsoft Word, sticking to a project he knows intimately – Task Manager. After constructing “a 107-page spec” and feeding it to Claude Code, he got a rough app working by the time his son left the hospital, having completed the first procedure. A spell of internal bleeding meant readmission and more portable M5 dev time for Dave.

The result of all this extra hospital waiting room time is that Plummer had abundant TMOG tinker time. For example, TMOG can “animate everything at 60 Hz, instead of once a second.” Moreover, there are oodles of visual customization options, plus some interesting retro-flavored presets.

The first versions of TMOG were generated on the portable M5 in about four and a half hours. They worked the first time, asserts the veteran dev, and then work on fine-tuning started from there. Reading through the social media interactions following the new TMOG announcement, it looks like there are still a few vibe-coding flaws to paper over, and Plummer seems busy responding to many individual comments. There are also plenty of positive messages about the responsiveness and capabilities of the TMOG beta versions available.

At the time of writing, the latest version of TMOG beta available is version 0.1.1 on all supported platforms.

A decades-long dispute over the ownership of Linux looks like it is over. Earlier this month, the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected Xinuos’ continued claims that IBM and Red Hat improperly contributed jointly‑developed Project Monterey UNIX code to Linux, reports The Register. Despite this deathly blow to its chances of extracting potential damages from IBM and Red Hat, and oodles of Linux royalties and licensing fees, Xinuos intends to seek a full‑bench rehearing. This appeal is a very long shot for Xinuos, with only 0.03% of such hearings granted, according to IBM’s legal representatives in the dispute.

This is a complicated case that spans decades. So, to make sense of what has happened over the years, we’ve constructed a timeline of key events, spanning from way back in 1998 to the present day.

• 1998 Project Monterey. IBM partnered with a firm called Santa Cruz Operation (SCO), Intel, and Sequent to build a unified UNIX running on multiple processor architectures. SCO’s contribution was largely related to Intel x86 code.
• 1998-2001. Linux enjoyed rapid growth, so the importance of Project Monterey waned. IBM saw the shifting sands and moved its focus to Linux.
• Early 2000s. SCO first complained that IBM contributed jointly‑developed UNIX code to Linux without having proper rights to do so. Litigation began.
• 2003. SCO’s first major lawsuit was filed against IBM. It asked for billions of dollars due to the aforementioned complaint of IBM’s unauthorized use of UNIX code in Linux.
• 2011. Xinuos bought SCO’s UNIX business and IP.
• 2021. The SCO heir settled with IBM for $14.25 million. That’s a far smaller sum than it asked for in 2003, which kind of reflects SCO’s failure to produce convincing legal evidence.
• 2021. Xinuos sued IBM and Red Hat, claiming that IBM knowingly breached its non‑exclusive license by contributing Monterey code to Linux.
• 2022-2025. Xinuos argued that IBM’s actions amounted to licensing violations, but the U.S. District Court (SDNY) rejected this claim.
• August 10, 2026. Xinuos’ appeals are rejected. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit ruled that the case was too old to relitigate, and Xinuos framed it as licensing but was really arguing ownership, which is time‑barred. Thus the District Court dismissal stood.
• Now, August 2026. Xinuos has announced that it will petition for a full‑bench rehearing of its case. However, this is a long shot with a 0.03% chance of a rehearing being granted. According to IBM’s defense law firm.

While Xinuos looks like it has run out of road on its Linux code ownership claims, that’s probably good for the computing community. IBM, Red Hat, and the open-source world can probably now rest a little easier, with the shadow cast in 2003 now nearly entirely removed. Lingering uncertainty over Linux’s legitimacy is evaporating with the Second Circuit’s affirmation that the case is time-barred, and rather hollow, legally.

Other companies contributing code to open source projects can also rest a little easier as this distracting, resource-draining litigation grinds to a halt. Success for Xinuous may have also meant billions of Linux devices facing licensing uncertainty, maker settlements, audits, and/or forced software rewrites.

Like clockwork, it's a new month and a new OS-breaking bug has been discovered in Windows 11's latest monthly update, KB5121003. Users reported random system instability, with games freezing or outright crashing, and even BSODs in worst-case scenarios. Microsoft investigated the issue and reached a vindicating conclusion — RGB software installed on affected PCs was interfering with core system components, causing Windows 11 to become unstable.

Online multiplayer titles such as Arc Raiders, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, and The Finals were most affected by this issue. Reports mentioned these games exhibiting a pretty classic crash pattern. They'd suddenly hang and become unresponsive, show an "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION" blue screen, and force your computer to restart automatically.

An official update posted on Microsoft's Windows 11 25H2 health status page says, "this issue is related to peripherals or internal device components which have RGB lighting features." The software governing these devices would install drivers or code components with file names similar to "inpoutx64" to control the RGB. When you'd launch a certain game, inpoutx64 would trigger the issue and cause a crash.

Microsoft didn't explain the underlying cause, but it's likely tied to anti-cheat not appreciating a kernel-mode driver in user space. RGB software, like other apps, should be limited to user space, but the driver it uses to interface with peripheral controllers runs in kernel space. For anti-cheat software, this is essentially an exploit waiting to happen, so it tries to block the driver to make sure it doesn't inject malicious code.

If the driver is blocked upon startup and the RGB software unknowingly tries to push a lighting change or monitor a temp sensor, for instance, it hits a wall, and Windows throws up the EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION error. If the driver is terminated mid-use while executing assembly instructions at the Ring 0 level, it causes a critical kernel fault. Kernel space typically can't recover from unhandled errors like these, so Windows triggers a blue screen as a precaution to protect your hardware.

Microsoft says it's "presently working to understand the relationship between these RGB components and the games which trigger this issue." The company will provide more info later, but for now, you can use the Registry Editor to manually disable the driver as a temporary solution. Embark Studios, developers of Arc Raiders and The Finals, also shared this method to fix crashes for now.

This could break some RGB software functionality, but you can use universal programs like SignalRGB or OpenRGB to control your devices as long as they're supported. Their specialized drivers have strictly defined whitelists that don't scare anti-cheat software. Still, if you're facing this issue, Microsoft suggests reporting it via Feedback Hub—that's how issues like this get prioritized in the first place.

Linux kernel 7.3 is set to bring an oddly nostalgic update for 3dfx's Voodoo 3, one of the most recognizable graphics cards of the late 1990s. Don't get too excited; the venerable PCI-and-AGP accelerator isn't suddenly getting a modern Linux graphics stack, but the kernel's existing tdfxfb framebuffer driver is being updated so that it can initialize a Voodoo 3 itself rather than relying on the system firmware to have already run the card's video BIOS. It's a small change with a surprisingly specific purpose, and one that illustrates why ancient hardware occasionally gets attention in contemporary Linux.

The problem is that the tdfxfb driver historically assumed that the Voodoo card had already been initialized by the PC's firmware. That's because, at the time it was written, that was a reasonable assumption on a conventional x86 PC. The system firmware would execute the card's video BIOS during boot, configure the hardware, and then hand Linux something that is already capable of displaying an image. That assumption breaks down on newer and unusual platforms where the firmware cannot or does not execute the VGABIOS. The creator's patch description specifically calls out non-x86 computers, systems where another graphics card is primary, and newer BIOSes that can't run the old video BIOS.

The developer behind the patches, Daniel Palmer, was using a Voodoo 3 in an Amiga 4000 equipped with a PCI bridge when the problem cropped up. Linux could detect the card, but the Voodoo was still completely uninitialized, leaving him staring at "no signal detected." The new code uses configuration information from the card's own video BIOS to perform the initialization from Linux instead, allowing the driver to bring the VGA core up and establish a working display without depending on the system firmware. For now, the new manual initialization code is specifically aimed at the Voodoo 3; he had initially noted support for the VSA-100-based Voodoo 4 and 5 cards, but their BIOS layouts are different, so that support was removed from the current patch series. The code has been tested on both a modern x86-64 system and an Amiga 4000 with a Mediator PCI bridge.

On a conventional modern-ish x86-64 PC with a Voodoo 3 installed, the practical result is fairly modest. Load tdfxfb and you can get a working Linux framebuffer device, typically exposed as /dev/fb0, with the Voodoo driving a display that can host the Linux virtual console. In other words, this is enough to turn the Voodoo from "a PCI device that Linux can identify" into an actual display adapter capable of putting pixels on the screen even when firmware didn't initialize it first. Applications that know how to use the Linux framebuffer interface can also draw to it, just as they could with other old framebuffer devices.

The thing is, that's also where the limits of this work become apparent. Linux fbdev is a legacy graphics interface and has long been superseded by Linux's DRM/KMS graphics infrastructure, so this ain't a resurrection of the Voodoo 3 as a contemporary Linux GPU. Loading tdfxfb does not give you a Mesa stack, modern OpenGL, Wayland acceleration, or the sort of 3D functionality you would expect. It is essentially a very old-fashioned "squirt pixels at the display" arrangement, but that's useful enough for a Linux console, embedded-style framebuffer applications, and, apparently, people putting exotic PCI graphics cards into even more exotic old computers, but it's not exactly a compelling reason to install a Voodoo 3 in a modern desktop.

The more interesting part is that Palmer is working on a separate 3D path for the Voodoo 3, and that effort is already much further along than the framebuffer work alone might suggest. The experimental interface exposes the Voodoo's register space to userspace through a new /dev/tdfx3d misc device, whose mmap() interface allows software to program the card's 3D hardware directly. On top of that sits smoltdfx, a tiny userspace library for driving the Voodoo 3, and smolminigl, a small OpenGL 1.x implementation built on top of it. Palmer says he has tested the project on real Voodoo 3 hardware and that it can render directly through the card's registers without X, Mesa, or Glide.

Palmer is developing that work alongside a QEMU emulation of the Voodoo 3. The developer says Claude helped build the emulator in the first place to debug the issue of getting the card working on his Amiga. Now, test programs can be run against both the emulated card and the real hardware, with differences fed back into the emulator until the behavior matches. The smoltdfx project now uses the same rendering tests against QEMU and physical Voodoo 3 hardware, comparing frame digests to catch differences. According to Palmer, the resulting MiniGL implementation can already run Quake on the real card, although performance isn't great, and some issues with the Voodoo 3's multitexturing capabilities remain to be worked out.

Obviously, that's a lot more interesting than simply putting a Linux console on a Voodoo 3. The sum total is a highly experimental 3dfx graphics stack built from the bottom up: Linux provides the framebuffer and low-level device access, userspace programs the Voodoo directly, and a lightweight OpenGL implementation sits above that to provide enough functionality for classic 3D software to command the card.

Indeed, things could get particularly fun for retro-computing and virtualization. A PCI Voodoo 3 is the sort of device that, at least conceptually, could be assigned to a virtual machine using PCI passthrough, letting a guest operating system talk directly to the real accelerator with its period-accurate 3dfx driver. In the fantasy version of that setup, you could have a modern Linux host hand an actual Voodoo 3 to a Windows 98 or DOS-era guest and then let the guest use the very same hardware that the old software expected. The engineering details are much nastier than the concept suggests (particularly around resetting and exposing such old hardware cleanly), but the new ability to initialize an otherwise-dormant Voodoo from Linux is at least a useful piece of that puzzle.

For now, though, the headline is more significant than the immediate feature set. Linux 7.3 isn't suddenly turning a 25-year-old Voodoo 3 into a usable GPU; it's making an existing framebuffer driver capable of bringing the card to life on systems where firmware cannot do the job, which is a very small but very real hole in hardware support. More remarkably, the same effort has already spilled into experimental 3D acceleration on real hardware, with a userspace Voodoo 3 library and an OpenGL implementation capable of running Quake. Voodoo 3 may be over 25 years old by now, but somebody is still teaching Linux new tricks with it in 2026.

Solo developer Grow Now! Games has put a playable browser build of its walkable ASCII cyberpunk city online, running on a 283KB Rust WebAssembly engine feeding a WebGL renderer. The build went live this week alongside a second YouTube video, ASCII City Update: Interiors, Elevation & Skyscrapers, following the original video, which has passed a million views and 9,000 comments.

The page fetches ascii-city-engine_bg-DqjAhqbp.wasm, a 283KB module that reserves 1,152KB of linear memory at startup and reports an engine version of 0.1.0 when instantiated outside the browser. Its exports include initialise_native_game, step_native_game, and generate_native_local_map. Debug paths left in the binary name the Rust source modules behind those calls: city.rs, world.rs, population.rs, interiors.rs, and rendering.rs. World generation runs in Rust, which hands JavaScript base64-packed byte arrays covering building heights, tile kinds, surfaces, hues, saturations, window styles, lit flags, and floor plan IDs.

The renderer requests a WebGL context and compiles a vertex and fragment shader pair, the fragment stage consisting of a single texture2D lookup. Characters are drawn once each into an atlas canvas with fillText, cached per character-and-color combination, uploaded to the GPU with one texImage2D call, and then drawn as textured quads with six vertices apiece.

Atlas cells measure 11 pixels tall by the monospace advance width plus two. Every visible cell goes into one buffer upload, and one drawArrays call per frame. Two fallbacks sit beneath this, a Canvas 2D drawImage path when WebGL is unavailable, and a per-cell fillText path reachable through a ?direct URL parameter.

Desktop sessions render 180 columns by 80 rows, or 14,400 character cells, in 10px Consolas at nine pixels per row. Touch devices drop to 48 rows and between 96 and 168 columns, and the Rust engine uses a separate 160 by 112 profile. The vertex buffer preallocates 2.76MB and doubles when a frame overruns it.

Grow Now! Games described the original demo to PC Gamer as having "no Unity, there's no Unreal, there's no 3D models, textures, or shaders." A first-person Backrooms game for the 1994 Sega 32X runs on a raycasting engine written from scratch in C and SH-2 assembly. A multiplayer Doom tribute implements raycasting and sprite projection as a stack of SQL views, reaching roughly 30 FPS at 128 x 64. Thunder Lizard, an ASCII roguelike, has had its character grid redrawn by image models into full-motion visuals at around 10 FPS.

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.

China's Ministry of State Security has told some state-linked organizations to remove a customized version of Windows 10 from their machines, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter. The order reportedly accelerates a planned retirement that the software's developer had scheduled for February 2027, and it sent Chinese OS vendors' shares surging, with Hunan Kylinsec and Archermind both hitting Shanghai's 20% daily limit and China National Software climbing 10%. Bloomberg's sources attributed the directive to data security concerns but didn't specify what vulnerabilities Beijing is worried about.

The affected software is the government edition developed by C&M Information Technologies (CMIT), a joint venture set up in 2016 between Microsoft and state-owned China Electronics Technology Group, with the Chinese side holding the majority stake. The build is based on Windows 10 Enterprise but strips out OneDrive and other consumer-facing components, disables certain native functions, keeps updates and activation inside China, and lets government users substitute Chinese encryption algorithms for Microsoft's standard cryptography. China Customs and Shanghai's Commission of Economy and Informatization were among the first pilot customers when the edition launched in 2017.

Microsoft ended mainstream Windows 10 support globally in October 2025, which left CMIT's edition as the only Windows still officially sanctioned for Chinese government use. "Microsoft is not aware of a security incident affecting this product," a company spokesperson told Bloomberg, adding that it continues to receive regular security updates.

Beijing banned Windows 8 from government procurement in 2014, ordered a three-year replacement of foreign PCs in government offices starting in 2019, and in 2022 told central agencies and state firms to scrap foreign-branded computers entirely. The domestic stack built to absorb that demand now includes Kylin V10, UnionTech's UOS, and Huawei's HarmonyOS 5 laptops, and it reaches down to the silicon in systems like Huawei's Qingyun desktops running the homegrown Kirin 9000X.

StatCounter's traffic data shows how little of that campaign has reached the consumer market. Windows accounted for 87.64% of Chinese desktop web traffic in July 2026, and Windows 10 alone still made up 43.56% of Chinese Windows usage, compared with 50.01% for Windows 11, ten months after mainstream support ended. Roughly two in five Chinese desktops are currently running an unsupported Microsoft OS, the gap that CMIT's edition was meant to close for government users.

It's not clear what the scope of the new directive is, with Bloomberg's reporting covering “some” state-linked entities. CMIT didn't respond to the outlet's request for comment.

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.

Popular open-source media player VLC has run into an unusual issue on Windows 11 that causes it to take as long as 33 seconds to start playing a simple MP3 file, the side effect of a recent unexplained change to Windows. The issue was publicized after game developer Jonathan Blow said he had stopped using VLC in favor of Microsoft's Media Player because of the delay. He also used the incident to criticize the state of open-source software running on Windows.

Responding to Blow's complaint, the developers behind VLC player fired back and claimed that the media player itself was not responsible. According to the VLC team, the bug is primarily due to a Microsoft Defender issue introduced through a Windows 11 update that conflicts with VLC's plugin cache.

"This is because of a « bug » from Microsoft Defender in one update of Windows 11, who magically made VLC plugins cache quarantined by Windows. Reinstalling VLC or regeneration of the plugin cache will fix this. Calling open source software embarrassing when it is a Windows update that broke it is quite disrespectful," the account responded.

The cache is an important part of how the media player works, as it relies on plugins for codecs, demuxers, and input/output modules. Instead of putting everything into a single executable, VLC loads these components as and when required and uses a cache to avoid having to scan the entire plugin directory every time it loads. The issue seems to occur when Microsoft Defender quarantines or blocks VLC's plugins.dat cache file. As a result, VLC can take a noticeable amount of time to process its plugin system before finally beginning playback. We also tried to replicate the issue on a Windows 11 machine; however, VLC launched normally, and we did not experience any noticeable delay when playing an MP3 file.

The easiest way to fix this is to reinstall VLC or regenerate the plugin cache. The VLC Windows installer includes a dedicated executable file to reset the cache files. This can be accessed by either heading to the VLC installation folder and running vlc-cache-gen.exe or its shortcut within the Start menu called "VLC media player - reset preferences and cache files." Do note that this also removes any customized preferences, such as audio settings like equalizers, keyboard shortcuts, subtitles, etc.

A more reliable solution is to add an exception for the VLC installation folder in Microsoft Defender itself. This should prevent Microsoft Defender from interfering with VLC's cache files and avoid the same issue from recurring. While the workaround seems relatively simple, it is still far from being ideal. One should not have to jump through hoops just to play an MP3 file. While Microsoft is yet to comment on the issue, it remains to be seen whether a future Windows Defender update will address the underlying cause.

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.

Xbox PC games, distributed through the Xbox app, fail to run on Linux because of Microsoft's proprietary GDK runtime environment. This also breaks Game Pass even though the company supports cloud streaming Game Pass titles. A new open-source project from the developers of Heroic Launcher, called "Xodus," is aiming to fix this by reverse engineering and emulating the necessary components required for Xbox PC games on Linux.

Xodus primarily targets modern, GDK-based Xbox PC titles and their MSIXVC packages; not older, UWP-based releases like Gears of War 4 and early Forza Horizon games. The problem with those isn't the DirectX API or x86 instructions; Proton and DXVK/VKD3D can already translate those. That's also the reason why you can still run Xbox PC games on Linux if you somehow get your hands on the DRM-free executables.

The real issue is the trifecta of Microsoft's proprietary GDK (Game Development Kit), Xbox identify services, and encrypted MSIXVC packages. This framework is responsible for verifying licenses for the games you own through the Xbox app. Without it running in the background, the games will simply crash right as you try to open them, or not launch at all. This is where Xodus comes into play.

The Xodus team says the project can already log into Xbox services, download game packages and obtain game licenses. It includes its own open-source implementation of the xgameruntime.dll and custom forks of both Wine and Proton, along with xal-rs, which is an Xbox authentication library for Rust. Xodus uses proxy libraries to interface with GDK games and intercepts API calls to transmit valid Xbox Live tokens.

For now, efforts are focused on emulating the Xbox Gaming Runtime from the Xbox GDK through Wine, then the project will move on to actually launching and playing Xbox PC titles locally. Considering they've already solved the Xbox/Microsoft authentication, license check, and package decryption hurdles, it shouldn't be long before we see PC Game Pass running natively on Linux.

BedrockonLinux 2.0, another open-source project that brings Minecraft Bedrock to the platform, already relies on similar reverse-engineering tech to handle these components since Microsoft migrated the game to GDK. This allows the game to talk to Xbox Live in real-time through a secure doorway to authenticate tokens despite the game running in a sandboxed environment like SteamOS (Linux).

Microsoft itself brought four original Xbox titles to PC last month and it says more are coming, along with leaked documents suggesting Xbox 360 titles also releasing on PC next year. These games come with a baked-in Xbox 360 emulator. It's not clear if these games use the same GDK stack as native Xbox PC titles, however.

Windows is in a tough spot right now, with years of neglect and stagnation reaching a boiling point with customers. Lack of optimization, bloat, ads, forced AI slop, and persistent tracking have forced Microsoft to admit its missteps and commit to fixing the OS at large. Windows Latest's new testing shows that the built-in weather app is a perfect representation of the state of Windows. The "app" consumes up to 1.2GB of RAM while idling, and it serves up a bunch of ads while you check the temperature.

MSN Weather is the default weather app that ships with Windows, which explains why it's filled with promotions throughout, despite being part of a paid OS. To be clear, the app looks very modern and has all the data you could ask for, such as live radar overlays, hourly wind and precipitation breakdowns, air quality index, and moon phases. It's also accurate because the data is sourced from a bunch of different providers across the world, but mostly Foreca.

The author explains that getting accurate forecasts is not a cheap endeavor, so it's not like Microsoft is running a charity. But the comparison falls apart when you look at what the competition is offering. Apple's native weather app on macOS is just as beautiful, detailed, and accurate, yet it's free of ads. It also only consumes about 250MB of memory to show all that data, so 5x less than Windows. This is because MSN Weather is technically not even an app to begin with; it's a web wrapper that's pinging a bunch of browser tabs in real-time.

When the author clicked on the Task Manager entry for MSN Weather, they saw 8 Chromium-based subprocesses, confirming that they're just looking at a website being rendered via WebView 2. For context, native Windows apps are supposed to adhere to the WinUI framework, which the company is slowly adopting over Win32 and UWP. Microsoft is committed to updating all the native apps Windows ships with to Win32, which should significantly improve their optimization, but we don't know if the ads will suddenly disappear as well.

The author saw Adobe Acrobat ads while checking the forecast, and we saw two ads — one for LendingTree and another for Spotify. Apart from that, scrolling around the app and clicking on the different menus and boxes was fast enough. We have to emphasize that the app really is granular and well-built from an aesthetic point of view; Microsoft gets full points for that, or is it MSN? That distinction is another issue that makes the weather app conundrum a bit more confusing.

When Microsoft promised to rebuild all native Windows 11 apps, it didn't explicitly say those would include MSN-branded services too, like MSN Weather and MSN News. Seeing as though they're simply called by their utilitarian names in the OS, there's a strong chance that these memory hoggers will also be eventually upgraded. For now, just stick to your phone, especially if you were among those who immediately Googled how to remove the weather widget from your taskbar that fateful day.

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.

Champion coder Yusuke Endoh has been flexing their esoteric programming muscles on social media. Their latest confection is a Piet Quine – a GIF image that prints itself. In other words, the GIF is both the code and the precise result after running the code.

If you haven’t quite grasped the enormity of this feat from the title, it is worth breaking down the respective definitions of both Piet and Quine in a computer programming context. Piet is an esoteric programming language in which programs look like complex, colorful, tiled artwork. Inventor David Morgan-Mar named it after Piet Mondrian, the famous founder of the neoplasticism artistic movement. Such artwork is immediately recognizable with its bold squares and rectangles bordered by heavy black lines. Smaller Piet GIFs look a bit more Mondrian-y to me, but also look more like colorful QR codes than paintings.

Endoh has created a Quine, graphically. In computer coding, a Quine is a program that produces a copy of its own source code without any external input. This can be quite a tricky feat, even when confined to the world of ASCII text. A requirement of this coding art is that the output is a character-for-character identical representation of the input. It must not simply read its own file to do the duplication task.

When merging the two ideas above, together, things get a whole lot more complicated. However, the top-linked blog and the embedded video shine a light on the task at hand and how Endoh succeeded. Specifically, the video shows Piet Quine running. The Piet interpreter scans the source GIF image in a ‘load data’ phase, followed by a read of the GIF file header and palette info. The challenge here, raising the task above text Quines, is that the GIF folds in binary data, compression, and an awkward flow – they must all be handled deliberately to end up with the desired result.

A key thing to understand about the source image is that it includes a separately interpreted data part, compressed with an adaptive run-length encoding, and a code part. Endoh says that they managed to actually first achieve this way back in 2009, but the GIF was very tall, so not ideal for visual appreciation. The developer decided to ask Claude Code to analyze and reconstruct the original script and build a ‘landscape’ Piet Quine. Even with AI's help, it wasn’t easy to refine the design to the compact finished GIF seen in this article and video. Only after much work on shrinking the visuals and coaching Claude was the GIF shoehorned into the finished 4:3 landscape image (252 x 189 pixels).

Finally, Endoh reveals that a driving force behind their Piet Quine development efforts was the wish to raise awareness of the 2026 Obfuscated Programming Language Design Contest, which is running right now. If you can, please design an esoteric programming language and submit it! Endoh is one of the judges, and you have until October 1 to make your submission(s).

Last month, we covered a federal criminal case in which Microsoft's Global Device Identifier (GDID) helped the FBI catch an alleged hacker. Despite the noble cause, the implications of a persistent tracker built into Windows became difficult to ignore, and it was enough of a tipping point to convince Windscribe to do something about it. The VPN company has created an open-source project and script called "deGDID" that aims to strip GDID off your PC — but does so at the cost of breaking some Microsoft cloud services.

You can find the script on GitHub and run it via PowerShell with admin privileges. It's completely free and works in a very straightforward manner. There are three main execution flags that dictate how deGDID operates: –Status, which is read-only and tells you if a GDID is active on your rig; –Status –Redact, which generates logs with the GDID redacted so users can share diagnostic data more confidently; and –Protect, which completely wipes the GDID and prevents the creation of new ones.

A fourth flag, –Unprotect, allows you to reverse the script in case you need to revert back to the default state. But –Protect is the one worth discussing. First, the script looks for server-issued GDID keys in the registry, where they remain cached, and purges them all. This is something you can do manually as well. In fact, Windscribe tried it on a virtual machine, but the GDID keys are silently re-minted in the background upon a reboot or whenever Windows contacts Microsoft servers again.

To close this loop, the script then modifies the ACLs (Access Control Lists) and registry permissions to prevent the OS from fetching and subsequently trying to remint the GDID keys. It puts up a firewall against the internal DeviceAdd endpoint, which completely cuts off Microsoft identity services from even seeing this as a registered Windows PC. This one-two punch completes the process, and the existing GDID keys are not only wiped, but the possibility of new ones being created is put to bed as well.

Keep in mind that old keys that are already server-side cannot be removed; Microsoft has access to them indefinitely. This script also only works on unmanaged systems with admin accounts. If you're part of an organization or domain, deGDID will refuse to run. More importantly, though, since it blocks Microsoft's DeviceAdd pipeline, some core Windows services will break because they'll fail to authenticate your Microsoft account.

The reason deGDID is even needed in the first place is that Windows has no native toggle to turn off GDID. It exists as a permanent device ID that can track you without your consent. It works across IP addresses since it sits beneath the layer where VPNs operate, so no amount of network tunneling can obfuscate it. This can explain why Windscribe was compelled to create deGDID — to combat a potentially invasive system that has the power to wreak havoc in the wrong hands.

We tried the script on a Windows 11 computer, and it worked as intended. Running the –Status flag showed multiple cached GDIDs that were then removed by the –Protect flag, and a new GDID didn't show up even after restarting. As expected, some Microsoft apps freaked out and returned connection errors. Account verification through login.live.com was also blocked across all browsers, though login.microsoftonline.com still worked. Online games and other apps continued to behave normally as well.

Windscribe says deGDID is a research project, and it will continue to evolve as more information about how GDID works is uncovered. For now, the fact that it can make core Microsoft services and features fail might be too much of a tradeoff for some. The script also doesn't promise to kill every GDID instance, and Microsoft already has your previous keys, so this is certainly not an ideal solution — but it's a good start to the fight against hidden trackers.

In May of this year, Microsoft said that 32GB of RAM is now the future-proof “no worries” configuration if you’re a gaming enthusiast, and that 16GB of RAM is now the new “practical starting point” if you want to have a smooth experience with Windows 11. However, it seems that the company is backtracking on this announcement as it removes all references to the post on the Windows Learning Center website, according to Windows Latest.

Microsoft previously posted a blog titled “How to optimize your gaming PC setup” in November 2025, where it said that 32GB is the ideal capacity for hardcore gamers who demand the best possible quality for AAA games or use mods a lot. However, this page is no longer available, and people who attempt to visit the link are automatically redirected to the Learning Center Homepage.

Many manufacturers are once again releasing laptops that just have 8GB of RAM. Microsoft is part of this move, as it dropped its budget Surface Go and Surface Laptop Go models and introduced 8GB base versions of its Surface Pro 12, Surface Laptop 13, and Surface Laptop for Business. Thankfully, Redmond is not leaving users who cannot afford expensive RAM out to dry, as it recently promised to optimize the operating system and reduce its footprint by this year.

Even though Windows 11’s minimum specifications just require 4GB, the prevalence of many web-based apps and interfaces on the OS use up a lot of memory on many systems. While using web-based React and WebView2 is easier for developers, they’re not as efficient as apps that are built to run natively on Windows. This wasn’t a problem when memory was cheap and plentiful, as people could just spend a few dollars to upgrade their Windows PCs. However, now that memory modules are expensive and it’s hard to find the best prices for DDR5 and DDR4 kits, developers are going to be forced to optimize their software to use as little memory as possible.

This was actually what Windows programmers had to do in the 1980s and 1990s, when every Microsoft engineer had a stopwatch to ensure that their work remained fast, even on the limited hardware of the time. Even the original Task Manager, which was built by the same person who integrated ZIP file support into Windows, was only 80KB big so that it could run smoothly on “potato” hardware.

Hopefully, both Microsoft and app developers will rise to the challenge brought about by the memory shortage and make Windows efficient once more. This is especially true as Microsoft is now facing some competition from macOS and Linux (although Windows is, by far, still the most popular operating system today).

Microsoft said that it’s planning to optimize Windows 11 for systems with 8GB of RAM and above as part of its promise to improve Windows 11 in March 2026. The company said in its latest update that the optimization is part of expanding its focus on operating system upgrades, which include a faster out-of-the-box experience, easier parental controls, and improved voice interactions.

While the official minimum specifications for Windows 11 sit at just 4GB of RAM, most PC builders advise getting at least 16GB if you want to have a smooth experience. In fact, Microsoft has previously recommended 32GB of RAM for Windows 11 for gamers, especially if they want a system that can handle games in the near future. Unfortunately, the RAMpocalypse has forced both users and manufacturers to stick with slower DDR4 memory and lower capacities. Some experts predict that the entry-level PC will disappear by 2028, and we’ve even seen some manufacturers, including Apple, reintroduce 8GB laptops just to hit a specific price point.

The resurgence of 8GB systems will likely deliver a bad experience for users who stick with Windows 11, which is the likely reason why Microsoft is pushing for the optimization of its operating system. If Windows 11 performs poorly on these systems, it could draw users towards macOS or Linux alternatives as they blame the operating system for underperforming on limited hardware. In fact, we’ve already seen this happen before — after Microsoft ended support for Windows 10, MacBooks saw an uptick in sales as users migrated towards macOS instead of going for Windows 11. SteamOS is also encouraging some gamers to ditch Windows, and Valve is working on a general release for the OS, which many say contains less bloat and is a bit snappier than what Microsoft offers.

The RAM shortage crisis, alongside increasing competition, is forcing Microsoft to do better with Windows 11. Hopefully, these optimizations arrive sooner and don’t introduce new bugs, allowing both new and existing users to get more out of their systems.

The Windows blog post also gave an update on what improvements the company has made to Windows 11 so far. This includes a better Windows Search experience, more Taskbar and Start customizations, a more responsive and reliable File Explorer, among others. Many of these changes are still in preview, though, so unless you’re part of the Windows Insider Program, you’ll have to wait a few more weeks to months before you can start enjoying these changes.

The Steam Machine helped grow the popularity of Linux gaming, including installations of Bazzite and other gaming-oriented Linux distributions. Valve seemingly doesn't want to stop its open-source development efforts anytime soon, and is now working on a port of the Mesa Radeon Vulkan driver (RADV) to Windows; It's already running Counter-Strike 2, according to developers at Collabora.

As cross-platform development is rather tricky, Valve opted to get a port of RADV to Windows going by way of sponsoring contractors at Collabora. In its blog post, Collabora explained the several hoops it had to jump through to accomplish this task.

With Windows 10 and WDDM 2.0, Microsoft improved the split between graphics drivers' userspace code (the vast majority of the driver itself) and the kernel-level portion that actually talks to the graphics card. This presented the opportunity to hook RADV to the AMD kernel card driver. That's easier said than done, however, as communication between those parts often carries non-standardized data that RADV needs to understand. And to understand the "conversation," it needs to be recorded and analyzed.

An earlier 2024 effort by Faith Ekstrand yielded a basic-but-valuable utility for logging WDDM 2.0 calls and reverse-engineering them to produce a basic RADV implementation. Out of both debugging necessity and as a development tool, Collabora built and expanded upon Ekstrand's work, improving the logger to the point where it can now fully analyze any Vulkan application that runs with AMD's official driver and dump all the data passing to the kernel.

After a lot of work getting to grips with how the AMD driver interacts with the kernel driver, including but not limited to reverse-engineering obscure data structures, the team made progress, and Windows RADV is now able to run some games, including Counter-Strike 2.

Despite the ongoing effort, Collabora explains that since user- and kernel-space driver are a matched pair, changes to those aren't guaranteed to be backwards-compatible, meaning that even a fully functional RADV could break at any point. For that reason, Collobora is requesting that AMD, Microsoft, or both provide a documented interface to the kernel driver or an intermediary compatibility layer.

AMD graphics driver development on Linux has coalesced around the Mesa Vulkan stack, with both company and community devs contributing to the RADV project. Over in the Windows world, the only option is AMD's proprietary driver, which can cause a lot of headaches when developing cross-platform games and applications.

AMD's Vulkan driver for Windows has developed a reputation for instability. Meanwhile, Linux RADV is generally praised for its stability and performance, sometimes running faster than the AMD Windows driver, especially on older cards. With a rapid development schedule, it also generally sees fixes and speed upticks often.

If at some point using RADV on Windows becomes viable, you'd be getting an arguably more stable, mature driver with active development. Games' graphical issues could become far easier to debug and patch thanks to the open nature of RADV, and studios developing with Linux in mind can target the one platform instead of two with different behaviors. Any developer or company can contribute to the project, too.

Furthermore, this lets Valve improve Windows compatibility layers, and any optimizations can be carried over to both operating systems. All told, this is likely one of the several moving parts to improve Linux — thus the Steam Deck, Steam Machine, and upcoming hardware — as a viable gaming platform. Even a future notion of gamers installing RADV on Windows to get a performance or stability boost isn't too far-fetched.

Additionally, RADV on Windows would also help keep discontinued cards usable, and given pricing right now, that certainly would be a good thing.

Microsoft released Windows NT 4.0 to manufacturing partners on July 31, 1996. Codename Cairo marked an important milestone in the history of Microsoft’s original server OS and would far outlive Microsoft’s original plans as enthusiasts and administrators clung to it, as older readers will be aware. Headlining features of NT 4.0, which made it a winner, include the melding of the intuitive new Windows 95 UI into the fully 32-bit enterprise OS. It was also notable for being the last version of NT to support Alpha, MIPS, or PowerPC CPU architectures.

Historical Windows NT timeline:

• Windows NT Server 3.1 – in 1993, the first version of Windows NT also introduced NTFS
• Windows NT Server 3.5 – in 1994, this update provided integrated support for Winsock and TCP/IP
• Windows NT Server 3.51 - client/server support added in 1995
• Windows NT 4.0 – in 1996, NT got the Windows 95 UI and the familiar My Computer, My Documents, and so on
• Windows 2000 Server – the 5^th NT release started a new naming scheme, introduced Active Directory, plus NTFS 3.0 with file system encryption
• Followed by the more modern Server releases…

After the initial Windows NT 4.0 release, Microsoft followed up with a version for embedded systems and its Terminal Server edition.

The Windows NT line was critical to Microsoft as it led the charge against dominant Unix server software ecosystems. Its first public release was in 1993, with version 3.1, but NT 4.0 coupled the underlying data server and personal workstation tooling with Win95 UI elements such as the Start Menu, Taskbar, Task Manager, and so on. It would also support new components like the cryptography API, DCOM, TAPI 2.0, and some DirectX (v2) features.

Despite all the new technology under the hood and the frills of the latest UI, Microsoft’s Windows NT 4.0 launched with remarkably low minimum requirements. Would-be users were recommended to install it on a PC with a CPU that ran at 33 MHz or better, had 32MB of RAM, SVGA graphics, and a hard disk with 256 MB capacity. This was in the Pentium / Pentium Pro era. NT 4.0 would become “the server for the masses,” boasted Microsoft on the OS’s 20^th anniversary.

Another reason that NT 4.0 was so important is that it formed the foundation for the Windows XP release (2001), leaving the DOS-based 95, 98/SE, and Me versions of the consumer OS behind as archaic hybrids. In the half-decade between the release of NT 4.0 and XP, Microsoft had a lot of work to do, such as implementing Plug and Play, building out gaming tech, adding WDM drivers, and so on. Thankfully, PCs also grew in muscle, specs, and multimedia capabilities to make the larger and more demanding XP a big hit.

Windows XP landed with a core marketing line that it was “Built on NT technology,” which felt uncomfortable to read if you were from the camp that believed ‘NT’ was short for ‘New Technology.’

It is pretty easy to find an old Cairo release online for retro machine tinkering. Those interested in a more casual poke around in NT 4.0 out of interest, curiosity, or nostalgia will find there are some online installs you can play with via a web browser.

Legendary Windows developer Dave W. Plummer has shared details and screenshots of a version of Task Manager for Apple Mac computers. Apple computer users currently have Activity Monitor for peeking at CPU activity, memory usage, as well as closing apps and processes, by default. However, “Activity Monitor blows,” asserts Plummer, in response to people asking why he would port the classic Windows utility to the fruity computer.

Preempting questions from his social media followers, Plummer mused over the optics of releasing Task Manager for Mac, due to his Microsoft development history. In case you missed it, Plummer was the original dev behind Windows Task Manager when it debuted as a lean and mean 80KB accessory. He’s also recently reimagined this essential Windows system tool in a retro-futuristic Atari Tempest remix.

Back in the world of Macs, and looking to the side from the world of PCs, there is indeed a case for a better task manager or activity monitor for Apple computers. The Windows utility has more features under the hood, giving it a far greater scope and utility value (task priorities, startup management, services control, and more). We haven’t tried the new Mac version of Task Manager; it hasn’t been released at the time of writing, but if it can decant some of the Windows features over to the Apple computing platform, it may be an attractive addition.

Plummer says the utility is currently in beta, and he intends to “throw it up on the App Store… (for free in Beta, because the first taste is always free).” There’s also, admittedly, a chance he will get bored with tinkering with it and release the source for others to continue with.

We already mentioned the optics over a seasoned Windows dev coding / porting staple Microsoft OS code to Apple Macs, but Plummer has addressed queries about this in further posts today. In this Tweet, the dev asserts that “Microsoft very graciously sent me the source code to XP Task Manager along with permission to share/demo it.” Moreover, the project is written in Swift and uses no original code, and Plummer says he has no post-Windows XP code to tap into, either.

Meanwhile, development continues apace, with Plummer providing insight into some drive meter activity coding he’s currently working on. The dev is finessing drive activity for Task Manager for the Mac right now and pondering over the flickery visuals resulting from “drawing instantaneous drive activity at 60fps.”

Running the 1992 Doom on the most random piece of hardware around has become probably the most common unofficial programming challenge. We've seen the game running on anything from toasters to an Anker charger, and even a pregnancy test. Enterprising coders also get it running on the weirdest software possible, and just recently Artem Lytkin got it running in regular expressions.

Developers in the audience are probably recoiling in horror, as that sentence is definitely cursed. You see, regular expressions (regexes) are a utility language used in programs for finding and replacing text. They're incredibly powerful, but the syntax is often said to be write-only, as it looks just like gibberish. For example, /.*(\d{4}).*/g would find the "2026" in "Tom's Hardware 2026 articles." They can be exceedingly complicated, as they include conditional statements, elaborate character-jumping, and substitution rules. However, this also means they fulfill all the technical requirements to be a programming language.

Leveraging those capabilities, Lytkin created a 96 MB plain-text string that contains sections for the virtual CPU's registers, some RAM, a video output (framebuffer), the game's WAD data, plus I/O and other bits and bobs. Once it's all started, the regex will start text-matching and substituting characters in the string to pretend they're the numbers in each processor's register, then accessing and writing to the "memory," so on and so forth.

As you can imagine, this is spectacularly slow, and Lytkin says that it takes around 180 seconds to produce a single frame of game output. Each of those needs nearly 14 million substitutions, though (a) it actually works and (b) Lytkin claims it's byte-identical to the actual Doom output running. You can even control the game with the keys, but as the daring coder poignantly illustrates, playing it "is closer to correspondence chess with a shotgun than to a twitch shooter."

Particularly nerdy devs will be happy to know how Lytkin wrote the memory access part: essentially a binary tree, by jumping from "branch" to branch using standard regex character-jump instructions. This avoids having to scan the entire 96 MB of text repeatedly just to find the "#M" marker bookending it. Lytkin notes the challenge was not about whether it could be done, but whether the game would run "before the heat death of the universe," as the engine fires up 80,000 text substitutions per second.

The doom-regex repository is here, and you can download a demo to run it on your own computer. The project's website demonstrates how the regex machine runs in both visual and text format, and it's mesmerizing to watch. It's quite reminiscent of the time we spent watching defragging utilities do their thing when we were young'uns.

Primate Labs has released Geekbench 7, the latest version of its popular cross-platform benchmark. The update introduces new and improved workloads designed to better represent and measure the performance of the latest CPUs and GPUs across major platforms, including Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux. Like previous versions, Geekbench 7 is available free of charge for personal use. Enthusiasts and IT professionals can also opt for Geekbench 7 Pro, which is available at a 20% discount until August 6.

One of the biggest changes introduced with Geekbench 7 is how the multi-core benchmark behaves. It will now mirror real-world application behavior instead of forcing every workload to use all available CPU cores. For instance, the HTML5 browser test has been excluded from the multi-core suite since web browsers are generally single- or lightly threaded. Geekbench 7 will only run a benchmark in multi-threaded mode if the real application it's modeling also uses multiple threads. As a result, Primate Labs says the new benchmark will deliver a more realistic indication of overall system performance.

Geekbench 7 will also feature a new set of media workloads designed to better evaluate how modern CPUs handle everyday multimedia tasks. These include encoding AV1 video for screen sharing during video calls, compressing audio using the Opus codec for applications such as voice recorders and podcasts, and decoding audio and video while simultaneously generating live captions using OpenAI's Whisper speech recognition model. Essentially, these workloads are claimed to better represent tasks such as video conferencing, content streaming, and media consumption.

A new Game Physics benchmark is also being added, which is based on the Jolt Physics engine used in modern games, to offer a more accurate measurement of CPU performance in physics-heavy gaming scenarios. The update further enhances its Photo Editor workload with more complex editing operations and expands the Photo Library test to include support for newer image formats such as JPEG XL and DNG.

The GPU benchmark has also been revamped to go beyond gaming, with greater emphasis on machine learning and content creation workloads. The new tests will measure tasks such as real-time face tracking and filter effects for social media apps, image upscaling using AI, and background blurring during video conferencing. Additionally, the update adds new GPU workloads for RAW image processing, LUT-based video color grading, path tracing, and fluid simulation.

Geekbench 7 is also set to introduce support for Nvidia's CUDA API in addition to OpenCL, Vulkan, and Metal, allowing users to benchmark Nvidia GPUs using the same API that is used in a variety of professional and AI applications.

Lastly, in order to keep up with demanding modern workloads, the benchmark datasets have been updated to better reflect the larger and more complex files that users work with today. For instance, the File Compression test now includes a broader mix of archives containing source code, object code, and text documents, while the PDF Viewer workload processes a wider range of files, from park maps to technical documentation and academic papers. The update also introduces more assets and additional image formats across its developer and image processing workloads.

There’s a new “open to everyone” floppy disk-size game development competition with cash prizes for the best three submissions. You’ve read that right: the freshly prepared game must be able to squeeze onto a single HD floppy disk- that’s just 1.44MB. Cash prizes look massive, but as the competition is hosted by the Korean games culture site 2P_Game_Arcade, the currency you see is Korean Won, meaning the ₩1.14 million prize pool is only about $750. Remember, it’s the taking part that counts.

There are few restrictions on the new, original game that you submit as an entry beyond the defining floppy disk capacity. All participants must ensure that the games and any resource files, such as game engines and libraries, fit within these severe (for 2026) confines. Also, games that rely on a browser or stream any data aren’t eligible. The whole purpose of the contest is for devs to stretch their skills and ideas within the 1.44MB shackles.

However, your choice of technology such as game engines, development tools, programming languages, and so on, is completely open. Of course, all entrants must also be the legal owners or licensors of the images, audio, and other IP resources used in the game.

2P_Game_Arcade reckons its competition is a good chance for participants to rethink the essence of enjoyment in gaming. It is looking forward to a broad range of entrants from pros, indie creators, and students alike. Entries are submitted via the website, and the competition closes on September 4 at 23:39 Korean time.

In 2018, itch.io ran a similar developer competition dubbed the FloppyJam.

Demoscene developer traditions live on

Older readers who cut their teeth on 8- and 16-bit home computers before PCs stole the show will probably be familiar with the long history of “size competitions” at demoscene coder meetings. The 2P_Game_Arcade is just an extension of this kind of coding philosophy with a fun 1.44MB limit and a complete self-contained game as the goal.

In the tradition of these demoscene competitions, with size limits imposed all the way down to a minuscule few bytes, non-interactive demos were usually the most popular entrants. However, in the long history of such competitions, games have sometimes been the fruits of the skilled coders’ labors.

In terms of more traditional demo releases, my mind was recently boggled by “16 bytes of x86 real-mode DOS assembly” released at the Outline Demoparty in May 2026. Then there was the port of Snake that was only 56 bytes and fit in a QR code. For some more practical size-skillz strutting, take a look at Dave W. Plummer’s RetroPad, a “full-feature-parity version of Notepad from XP” in just 2,749 bytes.

AI-generated slop code has been a plague for some open-source projects, namely but not only Gentoo Linux, Curl, and Ghostty, limiting or outright banning LLM-created contributions. And yet, just like both the models themselves get better and the people using them become more considerate, the landscape may be changing. Linus Torvalds, Linux's creator and kernel manager, has seemingly taken an accepting stance of AI-assisted tooling.

In a long comment on the Linux kernel mailing list, Torvalds spelled it out fairly clearly: "I realize that some people really dislike AI, but this is an area where I'm willing to absolutely put my foot down [...] Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that, they can do the open-source thing and fork it. Or just walk away."

This discussion came regarding the usage of Sashiko, an opt-in (per-mailing-list) and apparently quite effective multi-stage code review tool that analyzes kernel patches. The project page says the tool can find 53.6% of bugs on proposed patches, and argues that that metric already puts it above human level, as the patches in question already supposedly went through human review. The false positive rate "is harder to measure," being pinned "within 20%." Crucially, Sashiko only comments on patches, and does not take action by itself.

Developer Laurent Pinchart suggested that Sashiko's output be triaged before comments were sent out to patch authors, basing the notion on the Software Freedom Conservancy's guidelines on AI-generated code. Google's Roman Gushchin, one of Sashiko's creators, pointed out that doing that would undermine the utility of the tool, and that Pinchart's position was quite anti-LLM — a sentiment echoed by Linus Torvalds in his reply.

Torvalds put it clearly: "AI is a tool, just like other tools we use. And it's clearly a useful one. It may not have been that 'clearly' even just a year ago, but it's no longer in question today," a statement that reflects his changing stance on the matter since he initially dismissed AI tools as overhyped back in 2024. He also noted that Linux is not a "social warrior" project, and that it's always been about improving technology.

To drive the point home, he remarked that the tool "keeps finding embarrassing bugs," adding that he "will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it," while highlighting the software's rapid evolution.

Perhaps quite poignantly, Torvalds remarked that resistant developers could use some self-awareness, as "it's not like natural intelligence is always all that great either," underscoring the fact that while AI tools may not be perfect, they generally only need to be good enough for their respective use cases. The fact that Sashiko seemingly finds errors in code that underwent human review is quite illustrative.

The adventurous developer who recently released Linux for the Atari Jaguar (1993) has brewed up a version of the open-source OS for the Sega 32X (1994). If you can’t remember the 32X, it was Sega’s mid-gen answer to early fifth-generation challengers like the Jaguar, 3DO, and Amiga CD32. Sega’s solution added some potent processing power to a mushroom-like slot in an expansion to its popular Mega Drive/Genesis. Now cakehonolulu has got it running Linux, despite facing several major hurdles.

Compared to its Genesis host, the Sega 32X was incredibly muscular. The Genesis had relied on the capable but long-in-the-tooth Motorola 68000 (7 MHz) for years, but the 32X add-on boosted that with a pair of Hitachi SuperH SH2s (SH7604) CPUs (23 MHz). It also ramped up system RAM from the base 64KB by adding 256KB of its own. Sega’s expansion offered more than just speed; the console’s color palette was ramped up from 64 to 32,000 simultaneous colors on screen, and it was powerful enough to introduce hitherto unachievable 3D graphics elements to mainstream console gaming.

As with cakehonolulu’s tale of Linux wrangling on the old Jag, the above-linked blog talks through a long list of hurdles that needed to be leapt to get the Linux kernel booted and running BusyBox. This time around, particularly steely roadblocks included: the even more constrained RAM situation, the lack of hardware synchronization primitives, the desire to get SMP working across the pair of SH2 CPUs, no direct UART access from the 32X, and scheduler bugs, among other things.

On the positive side, smoothing the development process along were access to Chilly Willy’s 32X devkit, the linuxmd project, the Krikzz FPGA-based flash cart with ROM – RAM mapping tools, and existing SH2 documentation and sample projects. Please check through the linked blog for far more technical details from cakehonolulu.

As you can see, cakehonolulu was successful again. So, what’s the next stop for this adventurous dev – the Sega Saturn? Whatever the project may be, it was interesting to read that works like this are basically forming a portfolio for the Spanish dev, which they hope will help them with job hunting.

A set of updates for Sega Dreamcast hardware has been merged into the Linux 7.2-rc3 kernel this weekend. Dmitry Torokhov submitted updates addressing the legendary console’s input subsystem and Linus Torvalds merged them on Saturday. The updates even surprised Linux-focused site Phoronix, That’s probably due to context: the Dreamcast continues to enjoy support while admittedly older but real computing hardware like the i486, PowerPC 40x chips, DEC Alpha, and Itanium / IA‑64, have all been sidelined in recent times.

In brief, the updates should mean new versions of Linux will come with more stable mouse, keyboard, and joystick drivers for Dreamcast stalwarts. If you are one of the Dreamcast faithful, still satisfying your computing (and gaming) needs on the final original consumer gaming hardware from Sega, this is good news.

Reading the pull request we can see some details about the new drivers for the Dreamcast’s Maple‑bus peripherals (mouse, keyboard, controller). Specifically, there’s a “fix for a crash in Sega Dreamcast (Maple) mouse driver when opening the device, caused by missing driver data,” as well as “Fixes for Maple drivers (keyboard, mouse, joystick) to properly order setting driver data and device registration to avoid races.” In this context races refers to things happening in the wrong order to result in crashes: it’s a timing bug that’s now been quashed.

Dreamcast hangers-on will now be able to craft specialized Linux builds on CD-R for their machines. The maplemouse driver has had the now-fixed crash-inducing bug since 2017.

Phoronix also comments that Linux kernel fixes for the GD-ROM driver used by the Dreamcast and a proposal for the VMUFAT file-system driver were also seen this year.

The Sega Dreamcast launched at the end of 1998 (in Japan, and the following year in the U.S.). So, in some ways it isn’t that surprising that it is still getting Linux kernel updates when the Intel i486 (1989) has been retired from mainline support. But one might have expected stronger demand for supported Linux distributions among i486 desktop and laptop users.

Windows 95 worked out whether a setup program had run by reading the executable's name and checking it against a short list of hard-coded words, according to Microsoft engineer and semi-official Windows historian Raymond Chen, sharing the details via his Old New Thing blog. A filename containing "setup," "install," or "inst" flagged the program as an installer, which triggered the operating system's routine for repairing system files that installers had damaged. Three non-English entries appeared on the same list, which Chen identified as his own guesses at Italian, Turkish, and Hungarian.

The full match list ran to six terms: setup, install, inst, imposta, ayarla, and felrak. Chen wrote that "install" was redundant, because any name containing it already contains "inst," and speculated that the shorter entry was added later to catch installers named along the lines of "blahinst" without anyone deleting the original. A program whose own name produced no match got a second test, with Windows 95 checking whether the word "Setup" appeared anywhere in the path to the executable. A separate live check ran after any multimedia driver was installed through an INF file, added because those drivers frequently overwrote system DLLs.

This heuristic gated a recovery mechanism Chen described in March. Installers of the period overwrote system files without checking versions, disregarding Microsoft's rule that a file should only ever be replaced by a newer one. An installer carrying Windows 3.1 copies of shared DLLs, for example, would bury the newer Windows 95 versions underneath them, and every program that relied on the current files would break.

Windows 95 kept backup copies of commonly clobbered files in a hidden C:\Windows\SYSBCKUP directory. It would then let each installer finish, check its work, and restore the correct versions where the installer had downgraded them. This safety net depended entirely on correctly guessing that an installer had run, so a setup routine with an unusual name slipped past it, while an ordinary program named something like instant.exe tripped it for nothing.

The file check was often deferred until the next boot rather than run immediately, with Chen explaining that some installers, unable to replace a file already in use, would drop back to MS-DOS, run a batch file to swap the file, and restart Windows, so the cleanup pass had to wait for the reboot to catch anything the batch file had altered.

Windows 2000 debuted a new approach

Microsoft dropped this approach in Windows 2000, which introduced Windows File Protection. That system registers for file-change notifications through Winlogon restores protected files from a cache at %WinDir%\System32\dllcache, with no filename guessing and no waiting for a setup program to complete.

Then, Windows ME shipped a comparable System File Protection, and Vista onward moved to Windows Resource Protection, which guards files using access-control lists instead. The sfc /scannow command that Windows 11 users still run to repair system files descends directly from that work, having replaced a 1995 mechanism that decided when to act by scanning filenames for the word "setup."

If you're browsing the web, a VPN is one of the fastest ways to upgrade your privacy. Luckily, the cost of a two-year subscription to one of the biggest VPN providers, ExpressVPN, is now down to only $69.72 right now. You'll be saving $378 in total if you buy a sub this way, compared to a rolling monthly sub, and you'll get an extra four months added onto your plan for free, too.

● Check out this deal at ExpressVPN

VPN pricing is a little unorthodox, and we see deals like these appear all the time, so it's important to point out where the value really lies here. I spent a long time paying month by month for a VPN subscription, not realizing how much money I was actually spending by choosing a rolling, 30-day sub over locking in for a longer period. The $69.72 cost means that you're paying the equivalent of just $2.49 a month for the 28 months of access you're gaining here, compared to $15.99 a month for the 30-day access.

This deal for ExpressVPN's Basic plan unlocks a solution that'll protect 10 devices simultaneously with the same account. You can use it to keep your identity safe while you browsing, but if you're still unsure, new customers can take advantage of ExpressVPN's 30-day money-back guarantee. If you're unhappy, you can ask for a full refund within those first 30 days, giving you enough time to fully test the service to see if it matches up to your expectations.

ExpressVPN is a no-logs provider, meaning it can't give up your data while you're using it, as it doesn't track or store any data about its users' connections. This is regularly audited, with the last audit in 2025 by KMPG confirming "reasonable assurance" of its systems and policies. This is real peace of mind for users: you're free to use the web how you want.

It also gives you a shield of privacy that your regular ISP just can't. A VPN sub like this means you can shop online or browse the web without trackers monitoring where you're from via your IP address. Your location stays hidden, obfuscated through the 105 different countries that ExpressVPN hosts servers, with 24 different server locations in the U.S. alone.

Don't underestimate how important that privacy is in the modern world. Every page you're visiting leaves a trace, whether it's a ping in a server log or a tracker on-page, giving the site owner data to build a profile on who you are, but using a VPN can stop this data from being useful. Likewise, a VPN connection can help you to connect as if you're from a certain location, which is particularly useful if you're traveling abroad and want to be able to access your home streaming services. It's also a good idea to use a VPN as a way to protect yourself if you're accessing the internet from a public WiFi network, where malicious actors could otherwise be snooping on your connection.

Using ExpressVPN, the encryption between your device and its servers is encrypted using industry-standard AES-256 encryption, as well as post-quantum encryption techniques for the initial handshake process. This can stop your data from being intercepted while you're accessing the web. If you lose your connection, features like ExpressVPN's kill switch will stop the data from leaking out, blocking any access until you reconnect. The Basic plan also includes a private email relay service to give you 10 anonymous email aliases to use for registering online, along with basic ad and malicious site protection for your browser.

This $69.72 price tag for the ExpressVPN Basic plan is a good deal for a 28-month privacy upgrade. Yes, VPN pricing can seem confusing, but by locking in for that period, you're getting online privacy protection for the equivalent of just $2.49 a month. You can always give it a go and, if you don't like it, request a refund using ExpressVPN's 30-day money-back guarantee.

If you're looking for more savings, check out our Best PC Hardware deals for a range of products, or dive deeper into our specialized SSD and Storage Deals, Hard Drive Deals, Gaming Monitor Deals, Graphics Card Deals, Gaming Chair, Best Wi-Fi Routers, Best Motherboard, or CPU Deals pages.

You can also join the Tom's Hardware deals Discord for up-to-the-minute hardware deals.

Unwanted ads can be one of the most infuriating parts of the modern tech experience, where hardware you already paid for is insistent on advertising even more slop to you. LG has a bit of a reputation in this regard, and it seems like the company is expanding its repertoire to even more invasive promos now. A user on the r/pcmasterrace subreddit shared that their brand-new LG monitor is showing them ads for McAfee.

Most of us are already aware of the euphoric feeling associated with getting McAfee shoved into your face. Usually, though, it's limited to laptops and prebuilt PCs that come with bloatware, freemium software, or just outright premium software that you somehow acquired for free. It would sensibly drive a person insane if a new monitor that has no other job than displaying your GPU's output starts participating in these activities.

In this case, u/t40r just bought this monitor and plugged it into their computer for the first time. That's when they noticed a small pop-up in the corner right away. It was from the "LG Monitor App Installer," and the first thing it showed the OP was an ad for McAfee. That's right — it was something entirely unrelated to the monitor. But how did this app show up on u/t40r's PC when they didn't even set anything up yet?

The answer is apparently the great evil known as the Microsoft Store. Checking the startup apps in Task Manager confirmed that it added the LG Monitor App Installer to the PC automatically. It's similar to how motherboard software magically enters itself into your system when you reinstall Windows. That one makes a bit more sense, though, since it's supposed to help control or manage your computer.

Sure, the LG Monitor app could serve the same purpose for the monitor, but it wasted its precious first impressions on a McAfee ad instead of showing something useful to the customer. Persuasion be damned. Anyhow, we were able to confirm that this was not an isolated incident either, as another Redditor posted about the same issue just a week ago, along with the steps for the removal process via local group policy.

Scouring through the comments also reveals other instances where users reported other manufacturers engaging in similar ghost installs. It seems like a standard Microsoft policy of auto-downloading related monitor software, but it's then up to the manufacturer what they actually show in said app. Regardless, these apps don't seem to respect your preferences and just show up uninvited, even if you're already running a debloated version of Windows.

With recent discussions on just how granular Microsoft's telemetry can be, this openness starts to feel like an oversight just waiting to be exploited. Even if Microsoft thinks it's "helpful" to install utilities without consent, it should at least try to make sure those tools aren't throwing up ads. LG makes some of the best monitors on the market; otherwise, it's a shame that deeper software integration can sometimes undermine great hardware.

A Spanish systems software developer has ported Linux to the Atari Jaguar console. To succeed at the task, cakehonolulu had to overcome severe memory limits, the lack of a memory management unit (MMU), and face off against a handful of unusual hardware quirks. A blog post from the dev tells us about the work to port Linux to this ill-fated 1993-launched flop, and happily ends in evidence that a working Linux kernel and BusyBox command line shell can be booted on the old Jag. Now Linux runs on both your cherished real hardware via cartridge, or in a Jaguar emulator.

Anyone wishing to port Linux to the Atari Jaguar would face numerous constraints due to the hardware. One of the first hurdles successfully leaped by cakehonolulu was the CPU used. Atari’s system designers architected the Jag using a Motorola 68000 CPU, which was already pretty old at the time, but a moderately fast 13.3 MHz version was selected. Though the gaming prowess of the console was lifted by custom co-processors dubbed Tom & Jerry, some games didn’t make much use of this graphics and DSP acceleration, as it was notoriously difficult to tap into.

For this Linux port, the general CPU capabilities of the M68000 would also be targeted to run the OS. With that in mind, and knowing that the CPU lacked an MMU, cakehonolulu was lucky to find that classic Motorola 68k processors are still supported by Linux, and also the uClinux project, which allows Linux to run on MMU‑less systems like the Jaguar.

While these prior works were helpful, it wasn’t long until the linux_jag developer needed to battle with other Atari Jaguar constraints. The console comes with just 2MB of RAM and up to 6MB of ROM, which is incredibly miserly compared to even the cheapest microcontrollers and SBCs nowadays. Much RAM and storage optimization later, cakehonolulu tripped over a few issues getting Linux to boot on the Jaguar, and ended up implementing a console driver for Tom so the OS would work on real hardware.

A brief Atari Jaguar history

Atari’s Jaguar was released with great pride by the iconic video game company in 1993. It was controversially claimed to be the world’s first 64-bit console, but it still never managed to push aside incumbent previous-gen machines from Sega (Genesis / Mega Drive) or Nintendo (Super NES).

The mass market had enough patience to largely ignore the first wave of ‘early fifth-generation consoles’ like this, the 3DO, and the Amiga CD32. They were rewarded handsomely with the launch of the true accelerated 3D gaming next-gen wave, led by the Sega Saturn (which also used an M68000 CPU, alongside co-processors), Sony’s first PlayStation, and the Nintendo 64.

History can be a little unfair to the Atari, though, as it did have some eye-popping for the time original games and ports. I owned the original console with Alien vs. Predator (1994), and it was quite a stunning, tense, and scary game. Others thought the Jag’s Tempest 2000 was a killer app. In addition, there were strong Doom and Wolfenstein 3D FPS ports from the PC.

No need to pinch yourself — it is, in fact, 2026, and there was a court hearing last June 22 about IBM allegedly using copyrighted source code in Unix-like products, yet again for the umpteenth time since 2003, a saga that's part of the Unix wars.

For historical context, Xinuos (formerly SCO) and IBM have been embroiled in legal battles for decades, as the companies cooperated between 1998 and 2001 on developing an Itanium variant of Unix. Since then, SCO has repeatedly and dramatically taken IBM to court, claiming the defendant misused SCO-owned source code from the collaborative effort in its AIX and z/OS products, as well as Linux. Many battles have been fought over who owns the "Unix" name, what code IBM put in Linux, and even FreeBSD.

The latest hearing pertains to a 2021 lawsuit by Xinuos, the company that acquired the remnants of Santa Cruz Operations, more commonly known as SCO. Xinuos' CEO reportedly once stated the group didn't purchase SCO just to acquire the right to sue IBM, but the company eventually changed its mind in 2021 and dragged IBM back to court on claims that its conduct and copyright infringement resulted in great damage to Xinuos' market position.

Xinuos picking a fight with a team of lawyers colloquially known as the Nazgûl is questionable on its own — yet, in the aforementioned 2021 lawsuit, Xinuos added bold claims, such as stating that IBM's purchase of Red Hat should be reversed under antitrust law, and that the company's strategy in said acquisition was to destroy FreeBSD — the variant underpinning Xinuos' wares.

How, exactly, an MIT-licensed operating system would be "destroyed" is an interesting matter. Xinuos stated at the time that "IBM and Red Hat have abused their control over the Unix/Linux operating system market for far too long." One wonders if Linux users with hundreds of distributions at their disposal would agree that IBM has been pulling their strings all along.

The lawsuit dragged on until 2025, when Xinuos voluntarily chose to drop the antitrust claim (presumably after finding little purchase from the court). It also found itself disabused of the merits behind the copyright complaint, as the New York judge in question framed the claim as time-barred: too long had passed for Xinuos to file a complaint, and original ownership of the code is murky at best. Darl McBride, the SCO executive who launched the original lawsuit, passed away from ALS in 2024.

Xinuos did, however, press on with the copyright issue and requested a hearing for an appeal. And on June 22, 2026, the firm argued in front of a three-judge Second Circuit panel that the previous judge miscast a copyright infringement claim as an ownership claim.

Say whaaaat? Hannah Montana Linux is back. The distro made as a tribute to the noughties Disney Channel sitcom for tweens and teens, featuring the eponymous secret pop star, was basically abandoned in 2009. Now it's back, with a modern kernel and about 18 years of patches, with the release of the Hannah Montana Linux v26.0 remaster by developer Noah Cagle.

Little is known about why the original Hannah Montana Linux was developed, released, and almost immediately abandoned. The version available via Archive.org is the only known release, identified as Hannah Montana Linux x86 basic edition 202201. It is still available if you’d like to test out a frozen-in-time HM-themed version of Kubuntu. You can grab it as a 691.7MB download via the link provided. Be warned that it is now “basically unusable,” though, according to Cagle, due to being insecure and for its poor software support.

Fast forward to the present day, and Cagle’s HML26 release solves all the issues with the old distro. Browsing the modern web is possible and safe, finding and installing software is easy, and the dev has even made the terminal look pretty.

In the video feature about the release of Hannah Montana Linux v26.0, Cagle provides some insight into how this version of the OS was customized, built, and released. After initially considering the Cubic GUI wizard for creating customized live ISO images of Ubuntu and Debian-based platforms, the developer decided to go with Live Build, an official tool for Debian-based distros.

We then get a walkthrough of using this tool to make a Pretty in Pink version of Debian Linux. Briefly, a lot of the work required to make a distro like HML26 is adding various files and references into a set folder structure, and then building the Linux ISO. Most of the custom imagery and iconography sit in an includes.chroot directory.

Key customized elements would include an icon pack, color scheme, and wallpapers, and they were largely built by cloning and then editing existing theme resources. The main wallpaper looks a lot like the original, and that’s because it uses the original PNG as a source, updated by Cagle to 16:9. The cherry on the cake, though, might be the stylized ‘H’ start button.

When Cagle was happy with his customizations, he sought out a way to transform the ISO from being a live-CD only so it could offer an install option. This final step in creating HML26 was done with a tool called Calamares. This app is strong in applying branding, so it was a great choice for a professional revival of Hannah Montana Linux.

You can download and try out Hannah Montana Linux v26.0 now, with the ISO available at the above-linked GitLab page under GPL 3.0. You’ll want a system with at least 8GB of RAM to enjoy this OS. Those with older machines might want to look at HML26 Lite, which switches KDE Plasma 6 for the lightweight LXQt.

The Department of Justice, with the help of the FBI and Finland's National Bureau of Investigation, has arrested a teenager it says is part of Scattered Spider. 19-year-old Peter Stokes is a dual U.S.-Estonian citizen who was trying to board a flight to Japan from Helsinki, when law enforcement caught up with him. Microsoft's GDID also played a part in the Stokes being apprehended. The accused is now awaiting trial, having been charged with conspiracy, cyber intrusion, and fraud.

Scattered Spider is one of the biggest cybercrime syndicates on the planet, having extorted over $100 million in ransom payments, according to the DOJ. The group also operates under the names Octo Tempest, UNC3944, and Oktapus, and is renowned for its social engineering tactics. As such, the main criminal complaint against Stokes stems from a May 2025 attack on a luxury jewelry dealer based in the United States.

The attackers apparently called the company's IT helpdesk using Google Voice, posing as employees. They were able to convince the help desk into resetting their credentials, which allowed them to infiltrate three accounts, two of which had admin privileges. From there, the group, allegedly including Stokes, stole important data and held the jeweler at ransom, demanding an $8 million payment in crypto.

The company ultimately regained access to their infrastructure and avoided paying the ransom, but the operational disruption still caused a purported $2 million in losses. This served as the spark that led to Stokes' eventual arrest in Helsinki, as the prosecutors slowly followed the paper and digital trail laid by the attackers. Microsoft played a key role in the process by providing GDID data to the FBI to help them apprehend the alleged criminal.

GDID stands for Global Device Identifier; it's a unique identifier assigned to every Windows install that tracks device-specific telemetry. It's the reason why sometimes changing a major component in your PC can revoke your Windows license. Anyhow, the court documents from the case reveal that Stokes used Windows, from which investigators were able to link his physical hardware to specific internet activity and locations.

From what we can tell, GDID pretty much had a comprehensive report on Stokes ready before the prosecution even built its case and it was only a matter of connecting the dots. Stokes' web activity, videogame history, IP addresses, tool usage (including Ngrok), Azure status, and more were logged with timestamps, and were provided to the investigators by Microsoft.

Of course, this raises questions over just how granular and potentially invasive Microsoft's telemetry can be. In this case, it was used to arrest an alleged hacker, but what if someone else, someone with malign intentions, were to get access to all this data instead? Tech-savvy consumers have complained about Windows' excessive telemetry for a long time; the whole debloating culture is a byproduct of this precedent, but GDID is not something you can remove or disable with the click of a button.

Nevertheless, Stokes was carrying two hard drives full of incriminating evidence with him when boarding his flight to Japan, so that helped, too. His real identity has actually been known since 2024, but since he was a minor living across Estonia and the UAE at the time, he could only be monitored until the time was right. Following the arrest, Stokes was extradited to the U.S., where he appeared in front of a federal court in Chicago for the first time on June 30, 2026, and he remains in custody.