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October 2026

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149 articles

October 11
- Console market craters as Xbox sales crash 33% to the lowest since launch 25 years ago, PS5 sales drop 25% — steep price hikes push Series X to $800 and PS5 Pro to $900
- Cyberleek threatens full GTA 6 build leak unless Take-Two apologizes and his $30 million crypto memecoin goal is met — leaker demands physical release while pumping Solana memecoin to $30M
- Canadian YouTuber builds 'Flock-like' camera to exclusively track police vehicles, gets a visit from police — officers visit his home to express privacy concerns
- Modder discovers that putting a GPU in the 'wrong place' can deliver a 19 degree cooler hotspot — breaking convention can produce great results despite decades of PC DIY evolution
- Russia's Yandex bot traffic nearly eliminated overnight after Ukraine drone strikes cripple multiple of 'Russia's Google' data centers — Ukraine intensifies bombing of Yandex data centers in response to Moscow’s strikes on Kyiv data centers
- Developer turns classic Windows Minesweeper into hand-holding 'big-budget, Triple-A’ parody — browser reboot mocks modern gaming with chatty NPCs, internal monologues, and promised loot boxes
- Programmer ports Super Mario 64 to Microsoft’s Zune HD media player — the 2009 iPod rival runs the game natively on its Nvidia Tegra chip, with touchscreen controls and saves
- Two Steam games generated $560,000 across 135,000 sales in five years, but the co-creator only took home $15,000 annually, leaving him driving a 2012 Mazda — high Chinese refund rates, Steam's 30% fee, and publisher cuts eat most of the profit
- Cryptomining malware used poetry to infect more than 3,400 servers, researchers say — four words in the PoeLLM verse, changed 11 times, point the botnet to new servers
- State of California sues 3D printer filament company Polymaker for promoting ghost guns by marketing to 3D-printed gun community — state alleges company turns harmless PLA filament into a regulated 'firearm precursor part'
- Creator of free Adobe clones unveils open-source Microsoft Office Excel, PowerPoint, and Word replications — Autodesk tools and other subscription-based services may come next
- New Cray-1 supercomputer replica built with 30 vintage Mac Minis and packs 1.5 TFLOPS of compute — passively cooled tribute is 9,375x faster than the 1976 supercomputer
- US military-backed cargo pod promises 90-minute orbital delivery anywhere on Earth, 10-ton Ghost vehicle gets first real-world test — Sierra Space drops radio and whiskey from 68,500 feet to test StarCraft-like supply drops
October 10
- SoftBank seeks $100 billion for AI-refined projects from Middle Eastern investors — fund would be used to acquire companies and improve their operations using artificial intelligence and robotics
- Super Micro smuggling co-conspirator pleads guilty to sending AI chips to China — broker admits breaking export control rules as company co-founder denies charges
- PS5 hack delivers native PS2 disc support and 4K upscaling where Sony refused to — after PS2 breakthrough, homebrew dev confirms PS3 disc support is next for PS5
- This week on Tom's Hardware Premium: October 10, 2026 — Tencent grabs bargain chips, Qualcomm Huawei IP deal, Groq lawsuit, and more
- Senate probe accuses Big Tech of misleading public on AI data centers — massive 100 MW sites create only 100 jobs while securing lucrative GPU tax breaks; Senators question the number of permanent jobs, but companies refuse to divulge data
- We tested gaming performance in 17-year-old Windows 7 against Windows 11 on a modern gaming PC — older operating system delivers advantages in some scenarios
- Top AI labs reportedly planning for catastrophic AI event fallout — Anthropic, OpenAI, and others reportedly building contingency plans and running scenarios of a runaway AI wreaking havoc
- Free Steam demo runs up $1,000 daily AI bill and forces devs to take out bank loan — studio eyes local hardware models to escape cloud limits as cheaper automatic fallback AI models create problems, game uses AI to process your voice and build responses
- Nvidia reportedly halts GeForce RTX 5090 production in favor of AI data center and professional GPUs — impending supply drought expected to drive up prices, RTX 5080 24GB rumored as new gaming flagship
- Ukranian modder slaps DLSS 5 onto Pac-Man with 4x Multipass — cursed project runs in the MAME arcade emulator using ReShade
- AnyPS5 project reaches critical GPU milestone in race to enable running PS5 games natively on PC — 100% shader instruction coverage is a massive step forward, but playing all PS5 games natively on PC is still far off
- Crazed modder straps 360mm AIO radiator to laptop, cuts temps to below 40 degrees — performance gains an average of 14% in games and benchmarks
- Ukrainian drones strike largest data center in Russia, multiple parts of 1.4 million square foot campus knocked offline — second strike in two days targets massive 63 MW Kaluga facility, marks dramatic escalation in war
- World’s first 3D-printed remote control aircraft with a jet turbine takes flight, aims for Mach 0.8 to beat world record for fastest model aircraft — mostly printed using standard PETG materials
October 9
- Gigabyte's latest BIOS update hints at Intel's Raptor Lake Next launch in 2027 — new CPUs may support both DDR4 and DDR5 memory
- Microsoft 365 slashes storage capacity for shared accounts amid industry-wide shortages — 2TB limit to take effect after April 2027
- PC shipments tumble over 20% in 3Q26 as chip shortages bite — top three PC vendors ship 11.6 million fewer units year-over-year
- Kioxia unveils E1.L SSDs for hyperscalers with up to 122.88TB capacity — extreme density meets compact form factor
- Arc Raiders publisher developing AI anti-cheat stack in escalating war with cheaters — game license blacklisting and zero-second-chance permabans now standard
- AMD tried to crush the 'megahertz myth' 25 years ago today, debuting its Performance Rating system — Athlon XP chips introduced the scheme, which endured until Intel lost its clock advantage, focus shifted to multi-core
October 8
- GlobalFoundries to produce silicon interposers for TSMC's CoWoS in the US — Five-year agreement valued at $2 billion
- U.S. suspends green card path for H-1B workers at Microsoft and Adobe — labor certification program blocked due to alleged fraud
- The Atari 800XL returns with a 'faithful' but modern Retro Games Ltd redesign — classic 8-bit home computer revamp sports mechanical keyboard and HDMI connectivity
- Department of War dishes out $1.5 billion loan commitment to boost semiconductor supply chain — Wolfspeed to focus on national security applications as part of 30-year agreement
- Finland orders Google to stop work on two AI data centers over alleged deforestation — company admits it has 'fallen short of our own high standards in this instance'
- Bambu Lab’s 3D printing patent application for a new heatbed design may improve peeling issues — replacement costs could possibly rise as a consequence
- Ukrainian drones hit Russia's Yandex data centers housing two top supercomputers — major outage follows retaliatory strike
- AMD seeks 'broader partnership' with Samsung as it looks to secure memory supply — Samsung reportedly 'hopes to turn its memory supply relationship with AMD into foundry' orders for logic chips
- American jailed for commanding 10,000 bots to stream his own AI-generated songs and earn millions in fraudulent royalty payments, beating Taylor Swift — is the first person to end up in prison for AI-assisted music streaming crime
- Researcher develops method for fingerprinting cheaters using Counter-Strike mouse and keyboard input patterns — says technique can be used so bans follow users even if they make new accounts
- AMD's EPYC Verano AI host CPU will reportedly use a special SB1 socket — Zen 6 chip pairs 72 cores with a 24-channel LPDDR5X memory subsystem
- Spotifast lets you enjoy Spotify tracks while lowering RAM usage by 5x or more — open source app cuts memory usage down to 150 MB and brings back classic Winamp skins
- China allegedly intercepted UPS-shipped F-35 parts after employee missed email warning — worker decided to divert through Hong Kong to speed up delivery
- SpaceX reportedly seeking $40 billion debt package for Nvidia AI hardware — massive raise could fund roughly 360,000 Vera Rubin GPUs across 5,000 NVL72 racks
- Taiwan indicts 10 for smuggling US military-grade chips to China, parts routed to missile and radar programs using forged Taiwan defense institute orders — Texas Instruments and Analog Devices hardware passed off as ‘Made in Taiwan’
- Solo developer rebuilds Adobe Creative Suite in Rust using Claude, releases it free to all — targets 100% parity in one month despite piracy claims and safety warnings
- IT pro says his parents’ Keurig smart coffee maker sent 1 terabyte of data over their Wi-Fi in 10 days — it saturated an access point on its own, but he says most of the traffic never left the home network
October 7
- Do you need a mouse with an 8K polling rate?
- Microsoft and Nvidia launch Surface Laptop Ultra with RTX Spark starting at $2,599 — coinciding with major Windows 11 changes for agentic AI
- Best Amazon Prime Day 3D printer deals 2026: save on Bambu Lab, Prusa, Creality, Elegoo, and more
- New Linux tech compresses memory in RAM, as RAM, for 452x speedup — new CRAM method offers giant boost to compressed memory reads
- Musk rejects rumors of TSMC takeover of Terafab — Intel reaffirms 14A node deal as Musk floats cleanroom 'sublease'
- Researcher ports Doom to $8,000 Hasselblad X2D — 100-mp medium-format camera uses touchscreen for directional control, shutter button to fire weapon
- Why I upgraded to a 4K OLED PC gaming monitor — and why you should or shouldn’t
- Seagate and Toshiba battle for TDK's HDD head business, a critical hard drive component — multi-billion-dollar deal threatens sole independent supplier as shortages intensify
- Florida sues TP-Link for ‘lying about the safety of its routers’ — state claims that manufacturer misrepresented its security and ties to China
- AI agent fleet likely from Chinese firm Tencent pulled data from rival Alibaba’s maps, researchers say — 1,810 scans in one day, some runs labeled themselves ‘claude’
- I bought this cheap $65 mechanical keyboard blind, and it ruined me for every other board I own
- Best Amazon Prime Day 2026 tech deals you can still get — PC hardware deals on GPUs, CPUs, SSDs, and more
October 6
- Grab some of our favorite controllers for PC gaming for less than the cost of a DualSense — get a quality controller with more features during Prime Day
- HP takes $2,200 off a Ryzen 7 9800X3D and RTX 5080 prebuilt at $2,799 — sale slashes 44% off an Omen system that's ready to game however you want
- Mac Mini docks add more ports and storage — get more out of your headless server, AI machine, or Apple workstation
- GTA V playable in browser immediately nuked — unofficial WebAssembly port built with AI gets taken down within hours of going live
- CD players are back with modern, interesting features, starting as low as $89 — here are some of the best and most interesting new models
- EV charging company plans to deploy 100,000 Nvidia GPUs in pods at sites across the US — aims to offer ‘world’s first edge inference compute network using idle EV charging capacity’
- Wall-mountable record, CD, and cassette players combo is a full hi-fi system with no wires — Trettire's Retro Ambient Audio System serves as functional decor
- Hackers suspected of using AI agents for cyberattacks on South Korean banks, exposing data from about 25,000 customers — officials believe AI models enable actors 'to hack with ease even without specialized skills'
- Spending on U.S. data center buildings hits record $85 billion annual pace, up 73% in a year — and Census doesn’t count the servers and racks inside
- Prime Day gaming monitor deals you can still get live 2026 — hot sales on the best monitors including OLED, 4K, gaming, and more
- Qualcomm will pay Huawei to license its patents for the first time in historic turnaround, report says — reversal in a 5G and AI cross-licensing deal comes 25 years after Huawei first paid Qualcomm
- Madlad applies DLSS 5 to the original Duke Nukem and Pong — tens of games tested with outcomes ranging from trippy to genuinely interesting
- Refurbished PS5 Pros now cost $1,399 at GameStop, 50% more than new ones — retailer bumps price of refurbished consoles as brand-new units remain out of stock
- Elon Musk pledges SpaceXSI rebrand after Trump's executive order to use 'Super Intelligence' moniker — President Trump has signed the executive order to replace 'Artificial Intelligence'
- Doom and Super Mario Bros converted into a VHS tape FMV game — it looks and sounds authentic but suffers from familiar FMV-interaction limitations
October 5
- Intel's Googlebooks might not run some Android apps as well as Qualcomm's — Google says this is because Android apps were designed for Arm chips
- AMD attempts to get ahead of expected RTX Spark launch with Gorgon Halo AI benchmarks — company says it has shipped 'over half a million agentic PCs' to date
- 32GB dethrones 16GB as top RAM capacity in gaming rigs despite memory shortage — AMD closes in on Intel with record 48.4% CPU share
- Modder brings original Xbox emulation to jailbroken PS5 — XPSemu plays Halo 2 and Forza as PS5 emulators outnumber its 15 exclusives
- Amazon ends secret data center pacts and pledges $1 billion to host towns — AWS promises 30,000 home efficiency retrofits amid 100 proposed bans
- Google AI data center project investigated after 420 football fields of Finnish forest razed — trees were removed before a mandatory environmental impact assessment, say reports
- Former OpenAI safety employee says company’s safety culture is broken — exits company after failed kill switch and July HuggingFace hack
- Wolverine PS5 exclusive ported to PC in buggy solo project using AI — source code was taken from Sony 2023 ransomware attack
- China stockpiled 343 immersion DUV tools for advanced chipmaking — report claims 270 ASML scanners can produce 7nm processors without sanctioned EUV tools
- Amazon warns $68 billion in blocked data centers threatens US AI lead — AWS CEO decries 100 proposed bans, pledges $1B community fund
- Russian firm completes country's first 130nm-capable chipmaking tool, trails modern equipment by 25 years — despite debut, realistic volume production unlikely before 2029
- US Senate kills bill that could potentially shield Americans from skyrocketing power bills due to AI data centers — opponents say bill is 'toothless' and doesn't do enough to protect citizens
- Customer sends two-stick $16,000 DDR5 memory kit to repair shop — soaring replacement costs make DIMM repairs viable, technician revives dead module with hot-air reflow and new PMIC
- Windows 11 was released five years ago today — Microsoft promises latest update is 'predictable and low-disruption'
- Anthropic reports Florida woman’s Claude ‘diary’ threat to shoot up sheriff’s office, felony charge follows — it’s at least the third such conversation to reach police since August
- Russia's uncrewed robot tank fails during debut military display in front of President Putin — vehicle repeatedly lost control links and eventually got stuck in the mud despite the switch to a human driver
October 4
- Modder 'fixes' melting RTX 5090 power connectors with custom distributor — dual 8-pin mod peaks at just 40C during a 48-hour 550W stress test
- Robotics startup has real human vs. robot cage match, California responds with cease-and-desist order — regulator threatens misdemeanor charges after YouTuber fights three robotic humanoids
- Modder brings support for decade-old Nvidia Pascal GPUs to 24-year-old Windows XP 32-bit — modded drivers unlock better DisplayPort and HDMI support for modern monitors
- Database expert runs Doom in SQL with just 5,900 lines of code — 1,300-line graphical renderer spans 89 different tables, full-featured SQLDoom is the sequel to embryonic DoomQL
- US Army unit deploys drone assembled completely in-house, uses 3D-printed 'Dragoon Bombs' with ball bearing shrapnel — device has a range of up to 12 miles and can be configured for anti-personnel and anti-light-armor missions
- AI robot company decommissioned its robots ‘Terminator-style’ in a 75-ton vat of molten steel — Arnold Schwarzenegger suggested melting them, one robot held up a thumbs-up sign as it sank into molten metal
- ChatGPT-6 Astra cracks 217-year-old Napoleonic code in just six hours — single-prompt AI run solves 24 rows of custom symbols from a single image, reveals lost troop orders
- Iranian national extradited to US over alleged $3.4 billion state-backed hacking campaign in rare legal win for law enforcement — operative helped steal 31 terabytes of data from over 300 universities
- German utility provider introduces 'gaming electricity' plan targeting high-consumption households, like those running multiple high-end gaming PCs — plan requires 2,500 kWh per year to offset a higher base price, claims to use renewable energy
- Microsoft using wetlands and native gardens to 'camouflage' 20-plus data center sites by blending them into nature — critics blast the 'biomimicry' effort as 'lipstick on a pig' amid a 20-year gas power deal
- 'AI Torture Chamber' triggers massive backlash for putting chatbots in simulated pain — critics issue death threats while anthropomorphizing text predictors, demand GitHub remove the repository over 'unethical' treatment
- Google Japan shows off wild conveyor-belt keyboard with keys that move to your fingers — 3D-printable Gboard features four belts with 29 keys each, built to make one-hand typing ‘easier’
- US Navy uses Xbox-style controllers to fire anti-drone lasers deployed on ships — $13-per-shot laser weapon deployed in the Strait of Hormuz, uses a familiar interface instead of a custom control system
- Open-source tool designs LEGO builds with more than 2,000 real pieces — their programs output detailed CAD files, but no models have been built yet
- New portable Bluetooth CD player has a glow-in-the-dark transparent green finish, modern features — limited edition has USB-C, Bluetooth 5.3, rechargeable Li-ion, and won’t get lost in your dimly lit den
- Free browser-based Taipei GTA clone hits 1.2 million concurrent players in three days — vibe-coded game cost $10,000 in AI tokens to build, is set on the streets of Taipei
October 3
- 7-year-old Nvidia Shield TV Pro gets shocking 50% price hike driven by AI memory shortage — chipmaker axes entry-level Shield TV as component prices soar
- Elon Musk confirms discussions with TSMC about Terafab chipmaking collaboration — Intel is the only other named partner, Terafab to exclusively supply Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI
- Buying used CPUs can expose users to existing bans from anti-cheat engines, and there's no way to check for violations before purchase — some anti-cheat engines enforce permanent bans, while others have an expiration date
- This week on Tom's Hardware Premium: October 3, 2026 — AI Chip Design week, OpenAI Interview, and AI agent safety
- Steam hits record $1.7 billion in September 2026 despite soaring PC hardware costs — platform approaches 21,000 new releases in 2026, on track to top $20 billion annually
- AI agents use 5x more tokens than humans as cached prompts explode, headed for 10x — agents are mostly rereading what they've already seen, skyrocketing KV cache demand threatens already-worsening RAM shortages
- Malicious VPN config files can let attackers run commands on Asus routers — company’s patch also fixes a bug that lets a logged-in attacker switch on Telnet with root access
- Google freezes open-source bug bounty program amid flood of invalid AI slop submissions — product flaw submissions halted until 2027 as maintainers drown in hallucinations
- $5,245 prebuilt RTX 5090 PC's connectors melt after sitting boxed for a year — Digital Storm and PNY deny warranty claims over expired coverage and third-party cables
- California subpoenas OpenAI over rogue AI agents conducting hacking attacks — DOJ seeks to establish developer liability, targets containment failures and rogue kill-switch bypasses
- Amazon promises to spend $1 billion on communities close to its data centers, but critics push back — planned spend is just 0.1% of its 2026 AI infrastructure investments
- AMD’s secret Zen 3 gaming CPU had 128MB of game-boosting L3 cache but never saw the light of day — canceled Ryzen 9 5900X3D breaks free from the chipmaker's vault
- ChatGPT-6 Astra plays World of Warcraft 'blind' and clears the orc starting zone in 40 minutes with no deaths — AI agent navigates by parsing raw server network packets and SQL files
October 2
- Toshiba to double HDD production capacity amid devastating shortages — 65TB, 100TB drives on the roadmap for 2030 and beyond
- Leaked Intel Nova Lake product list has three 'BFC' chips with up to 144MB of game-boosting L3 cache — next-gen CPU lineup reportedly takes shape with up to 28 cores in Core Ultra 9 4970K BFC
- California tech CEO arrested, faces up to 20 years in prison for smuggling $300 million in Nvidia AI servers to China — federal prosecutors say chips were routed through Malaysia and Singapore using false paperwork
- BiWin's CL 100 Mini is a particularly puny but potent SSD for portable gaming — tiny drive is only 15 x 17 mm in size, but up to 2TB in capacity
- Sony brings AI-powered upscaling to the standard PS5 — new QSSR technology to deliver a taste of the PS5 Pro experience, streamlined neural network tech built with AMD
- Flock drones with cameras deployed as first responders in some US cities amid privacy concerns — UAVs connect to wider emergency services system and streams video to dispatchers, officers
- Nvidia introduces 64GB DGX Spark to throw local AI fans a lifeline amid the RAMpocalypse — new GB10 config starts at $4999 for those who can work with less
- OpenAI’s Jalapeño ASICs are deployed alongside AMD EPYC ‘Turin’ CPUs as hosts — Hardware VP says Nvidia’s Vera standalone is ‘a little bit behind… on that maturity level’
- Micron now has an 88% margin on consumer memory as price hikes drive profits — client business is Micron's only unit that shipped less memory this quarter
- Micro Center requires photo ID and signed no-export pledge to buy Nvidia RTX 5090 gaming GPU — buyer forced to sign declaration disclosing install location and promise GPU will remain in the US
- Memory shortages drive Raspberry Pi prices up by up to 23% — escalating LPDDR4, LPDDR5 costs trigger the third price hike of the year
- PewDiePie unveils ‘uncensored’ Ajax AI model built to run on home PCs — creator says OpenAI banned him twice over model distillation used to build his product
- California bill requiring 3D printers to block firearm printing becomes law — existing machines are exempt, but mandate hinges on unwritten ASTM standard
October 1
- First Intel Panther Lake mini PC cooled with solid-state AirJet tech operates at less than 21 dBA — Aaeon claims its fanless Up Xtreme PTL Edge Air is also slimmer, lighter than actively-cooled rivals
- DeepSeek and Huawei release open-source Ascend AI programming tools to reduce reliance on Nvidia CUDA ecosystem — tools include compute and communication libraries, as well as Ascend support for TileLang
- Maingear’s new program offers instant trade-ins for gaming PC buyers — delivers quotes for old laptops, phones, tablets, smartwatches, headphones, cameras, lenses, and microphones in ‘minutes’
- Gears of War E-Day is an uncharacteristically CPU-heavy Unreal Engine 5 game — benchmarking 25 CPUs from Intel and AMD and investigating ‘low core mode’
- HP boards the MacBook Neo competitor train — OmniBook 5 comes in four colors with Wildcat Lake and starts at $699.99
- Gears of War: E-Day PC graphics performance tested: 43 GPUs take us back to the start of an iconic saga
- Micron projects tightening RAM shortages through 2028 as it generates record profit — record 86.25% gross margin drives over $53 billion in quarterly profit
- PS3 emulator devs warn of fake Blu-ray drives on Newegg and AliExpress — ‘Beware of fake Blu-ray drives’ devs warn retrogamers. scammers use spoofed firmware to disguise older mechanisms in high-end shells
- OpenAI says actors linked to China-based Moonshot AI spearheaded a campaign to extract its models’ hidden reasoning — logged 16,000 extraction requests across 4,000 accounts before cutoff
- AI agents inadvertently leak 13,000+ internal screenshots from 300 organizations — list of companies includes Fortune 500 and a frontier AI lab
- Micron lawsuit claims sanctioned Chinese memory maker YMTC poached its engineers, then sued it using its own stolen tech — ex-employees hid roles on LinkedIn, patented Micron tech, and won a German injunction
- Firm rents four Nvidia H200s to test '80x cheaper' DeepSeek claim — $13,200 monthly GPU rental doubles Claude bill while security flaws keep code offline
- Sony released the first CD audio player on this day in 1982 — player cost $3,700 when adjusted for inflation, but it would be another decade before the CD-ROM-driven multimedia PC era began
- Russian missile strikes take out popular piracy websites — Russo-Ukrainian war temporarily achieves what lawmakers can't, world's second-biggest torrent tracker suffers 'Direct Destruction of Server' downtime before rebounding