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.

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."

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.

The RAMpocalypse is hitting enthusiasts hard. We recently reported on the crisis seeping down to affect supplies of the decades-old DDR2 gen RAM. So it comes as no huge surprise that a well-known tech tinkerer has been inspired to look at the viability of Windows 11 on an even more ancient DDR1 platform. Step forward Omores, who demonstrates Microsoft’s newest OS running on a Core 2 Quad Q6600, using a DDR1 motherboard, supported by an ATI Radeon HD 4650 AGP graphics card. “The best part,” says our hacky hero. “It’s completely stable.”

DDR1 first became available to PC builders and DIYers at the turn of the century, replacing the aging SDR SDRAM. The DDR1 rollout began with data rates like DDR-200 and DDR-266, being the preferred choice over older platforms featuring PC100 or PC133 SDRAM. We don’t know the rated speed of the DDR1 sticks Omores used, as it isn’t shown, but DDR-400 was the best official non-overclocked standard (a couple of years later). It would make sense to use the best memory on a cherry-picked older system like this.

Other key components of this age-defying Windows 11 PC build include an ASRock ConRoe 865PE motherboard. This is regarded as something of a legendary board as it bridged generations and allowed folks to use the latest Core 2 Duo and Core 2 Quad chips from Intel while keeping their DDR1 RAM and AGP graphics cards. It isn’t only today that PC DIYers have cared deeply about component longevity.

The last significant component in this DDR1 system that we were told about was the ATI Radeon HD 4650 AGP graphics card. This seems to have required the most wrangling to make it work with Windows 11 / modern software. However, Omores reveals that “With some 'hacking' ... AGP 8X is fully functional and H.264 hardware decoding is active.” The key was finding, then crowbarring, ATI’s Windows 7 64-bit drivers from 2012 onto the system.

Once some details of the setup were confirmed in the video using tools like CPU-Z and GPU-Z, Omores showed the ‘fresh’ Windows 11 DDR1 system running modern browsers, with embedded video and hardware decoding. A handful of games and 3D benchmarks were also shown running without glitches. Last but not least, the system did indeed run Crysis.

In a later comment on the Reddit post, Omores elaborates on how to install the ATi driver on Windows 11 and shares a more detailed video link. “I like that Windows 11 is rock stable on these older systems with no UEFI whatsoever and only ACPI 1.1,” adds the adventurer in older PC tech. “A lesser-known fact is that Windows 11 actually officially supports BIOS systems via Windows 11 IoT, so it's kind of expected to run smoothly.”

Microsoft has extended its free consumer Windows 10 Extended Security Updates (ESU) program by a year, pushing the cutoff for critical security patches to October 14th, 2027. The change came without any actual announcement, appearing instead in an edit to Microsoft's Windows 10 ESU support page. Devices already enrolled roll over to the new date automatically, with no action required from users. The program was originally set to expire on October 12th, 2026, one year after Windows 10 reached end of support on October 14th, 2025. With the extension, however, users who can’t or won’t move to Windows 11 now have a second free year of patches.

Speaking to BleepingComputer, Microsoft said that the change reflects “our ongoing commitment to helping customers stay secure during the transition,” adding that the extra year gives users “more time and flexibility to find the best PC for their needs while keeping them protected.”

In terms of enrollment, nothing has changed: users can enroll for free by syncing their PC settings to a Microsoft account through Windows Backup, by redeeming 1,000 Microsoft Rewards points, or with a one-time payment of $30. Users in Europe can enroll at no cost simply by signing in with a Microsoft account, a concession Microsoft made after pushback from consumer advocacy groups over its original requirements. A single ESU license covers up to 10 devices tied to the same account.

Microsoft's consumer program is limited to personal devices, however. Systems joined to an Active Directory domain or to Microsoft Entra, or managed through Mobile Device Management, are corporate-controlled and therefore not eligible. Personally owned machines that are only Entra-registered — e.g., a work account added to a personal device, rather than the device itself being organization-owned — still qualify.

Windows 11 has surged to roughly 73% of desktop share against Windows 10’s 26%, so it’s clear that the broader migration is working. Those users still on Windows 10 are increasingly the difficult edge cases, with around 400 million active PCs unable to officially upgrade to Windows 11 because their hardware fails its TPM 2.0, Secure Boot, or supported-processor requirements.

Users of those machines face a choice of remaining on unsupported Windows 10 or upgrading their hardware outright. But thanks to the AI-driven memory shortage, doing so has never been more expensive: DRAM contract prices have roughly doubled since early last year (and are expected to double again) as Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron divert wafer capacity toward high-bandwidth memory for AI accelerators.

IDC expects PCs, tablets, and smartphone prices to rise 10% to 20% through the end of 2026, with memory now accounting for a far larger share of a system's bill of materials than it did two years ago.

For users unwilling to buy new hardware at current prices, some third-party options remain. The security firm 0patch has pledged to provide unofficial Windows 10 micropatches through 2030, and Linux migration efforts such as the End of 10 initiative continue to court holdouts whose machines can’t run Windows 11.

Californians pay the highest gas prices in the U.S., and a proposed class action says that the issue has been exacerbated by an AI tool that smartly squeezes customers for the best profits. A newly filed lawsuit at the Sacramento, ​California, federal court says that gas station operators are using Kalibrate’s AI tool, which uses data from nearby competing gas stations, to drive up prices by as much as 30 ​cents a gallon in some areas, reports Reuters.

On Monday, gas station operators including BP, Circle K, Marathon Petroleum, 7-Eleven, Walmart, and Albertsons were named as defendents in the headlining class action, alongside Kalibrate. By implementing the AI-driven price-optimizing tool, these operators have allegedly violated the Cartwright Act, California’s main antitrust law, as well as Assembly Bill 325. The latter is a California law that was put in place at the start of 2026 to crack down on algorithmic price fixing. An open-and-shut case, then?

Looking at the numbers, it is easy to understand why the Californians have been spurred into legal action. AAA figures suggest that California residents pay an average of $5.58 per gallon for regular, which is already much higher than the $3.93 national average. Where Kalibrate’s AI tools are used to adjust gas pricing, pump prices have risen as much as 30 cents per gallon, say the complaints. The result is some operators charging as much as $7 a gallon, notes the source report.

Gas station operators “have conspired to ​put an end ​to competition”

The key compelling argument behind this class action is quoted by Reuters from the case files. “While families struggle to afford the commute to work, defendants have conspired to ​put an end ​to competition, joining ⁠an AI-powered trust to ensure that no matter where a driver turns, the price for gasoline is artificially ​high,” says the complaint.

Currently, it is easy to argue that the rise of AI hasn’t fulfilled its early promises. Sifting through our headlines, it has sparked the RAMpocalypse, and other key PC components like SSDs and GPUs have also been impacted by AI server demand. Moreover, we have seen huge environmental impacts from those AI servers straining infrastructure that is sometimes already under pressure, like electricity generation and water resources. They also cause heat and noise pollution, so people don’t want to be anywhere near them. Then there are the applications we have seen AI used for, thus far. Instead of cancer cures and smart government, we’ve got higher gas prices and divisive social media bots. The complainants are seeking unspecified damages.

People seem all too ready to anthropomorphize LLMs and AI chatbots like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. Some humans even admit to ‘relationships’ with one or more of the various examples of machine intelligence. To illustrate how flawed this instinct could be, a Microsoft AI researcher built a tiny neural network inside Age of Empires II using goats, grass, and bridges. Adrian de Wynter shared his work in a paper dubbed If LLMs have human-like attributes, then so does Age of Empires II. The Microsoft researcher, based at the University of York, also talked to 404 Media recently about how he likes to turn absurdism up to 11 to make a point.

In the research paper, De Wynter doesn’t make the argument that LLMs do or do not actually have generalized anthropomorphic attributes. Instead, he illustrates that the AoEII goats can also power the kinds of models that lay behind today's most popular chatbots. That hammers home the argument that “in no case is a machine’s activity to be interpreted in terms of higher cognitive processes, if it can be fairly interpreted in terms of processes which stand lower in the scale of cognitive evolution and development.”

De Wynter also raises the well-known concept of confirmation bias. Those looking for human traits in tech like chatbots will tend to find them, he proposes. However, the big contrast between the absurdist goat example and the commercial LLM chatbot is the way people interact with them, the interface that makes the likes of Claude ‘conversation friendly.’ De Wynter’s research indicates that anthropomizing LLMs is a common trend in computer science papers. From 337 such papers De Wynter looked at, published in the last two years, he says that 57% assumed that LLMs could have human-like traits. This basic assumption could color the research, testing, and, of course, conclusions of these papers.

So, how did the Microsoft AI researcher build the goaty AoEII LLM? Well, he didn’t quite go as far as developing a full-blown LLM. Instead, De Wynter thought it sufficient to use AoEII’s scenario editor to build a working NAND gate, with a 1-bit perceptron, where the goats act as bits. This crude perceptron and the circuit to train it in-game are enough to demonstrate that the simplest building block of a modern neural network could be made this way. And if you think it is absurd that AoEII goats can embody consciousness, then it should be equally absurd to regard any of the well-known chatbots as anything more.

Companies behind the AI boom aren’t discouraging people from anthropomorphizing their wares. In many ways, they might benefit from these human perceptions. Chatbots they deploy are trained with natural language and use techniques to mimic the shape and tone of natural conversation. This makes it easy for users to project personality, emotion, or even consciousness onto them. Top AI company execs have leaned into the perception of their customers, publicly entertaining the idea that their systems could or might be exhibiting signs of consciousness. In his 404 Media interview, De Wynter also highlighted research indicating that people buy more products when they can empathize with them, and that includes AI/chatbot/LLM subscriptions.

A Reddit user has demonstrated that SteamOS, Valve's Arch-based gaming operating system built around AMD silicon, can boot and run on an Intel Arc B580 discrete graphics card. Posting in the r/SteamOS subreddit as SaperPL, they documented the feat this week, pairing the Arc B580 with a Ryzen 5 5600 processor and getting Valve's full gaming-mode interface running on the card. The catch is that reaching that point took a Radeon card, a workaround for a broken installer, and a motherboard setting that nearly sank performance along the way.

The opening exists because recent SteamOS beta builds quietly widened hardware coverage. Valve's changelog for the beta cites improved compatibility with recent Intel and AMD platforms, language clearly aimed at the wave of Intel-powered handhelds rather than desktop Arc cards. However, because the underlying Linux graphics driver is shared, the same Mesa stack that targets Intel handheld chips also recognizes a desktop Arc GPU. SaperPL's system reported the card as Mesa Intel Arc B580 Graphics (BMG G21) on Mesa 26.1.2, running SteamOS 3.9.

Getting there was not exactly plug-and-play. According to the post, newer SteamOS images that supposedly already include Intel Arc support failed during setup. These images did not boot into the older live desktop-style installer with install, update, and recovery options. Instead, they started installing directly to the drive, then failed when the system tried to connect to the network and pull its first update. SaperPL says the same problem occurred even when testing with a Radeon RX 9060 XT, suggesting the issue was not limited to the Arc B580 itself.

The workaround was suitably PC-gaming messy. SaperPL installed an older “repair-main” SteamOS build using the Radeon card, pulled the required updates, and then swapped in the Intel Arc B580. After that, SteamOS booted on the Intel GPU and ran from the Main channel. The poster also noted that users without a spare Radeon card may be able to follow a Steam Community workaround to bypass the installer’s update failure directly, although that still leaves the process firmly in enthusiast territory.

The first performance results were mixed. SaperPL tested 14 games, including Cyberpunk 2077, Helldivers 2, Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales, Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, Toxic Commando, Hades, Rocket League, and others shown in the SteamOS library screenshot. The interface itself appeared to behave well, with the poster saying the Steam library and store navigation worked smoothly, even while downloads continued in the background. Gamescope also reportedly worked similarly to Radeon, apart from a VRR bug on FreeSync displays with HDR that caused occasional flickering.

Frame rates were another story. Indiana Jones and Toxic Commando were initially barely above 20 FPS at 1080p on the lowest settings, while Helldivers 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Spider-Man: Miles Morales fell far below comparable Windows benchmark videos. The poster’s monitoring suggested the CPU was not the main problem, with the GPU often sitting around 80% to 90% usage while the Ryzen 5 5600 hovered between roughly 30% and 50%.

The biggest culprit turned out to be a familiar one for Intel Arc users: Resizable BAR. SaperPL later updated the post to say that ReBAR had been disabled on the Asus B450 Strix motherboard after a CPU change. Once enabled, Cyberpunk 2077 and Spider-Man appeared to perform as expected, while Indiana Jones and Toxic Commando improved significantly, though still not fully matching Windows reference results.

That detail matters because Intel Arc GPUs are unusually sensitive to Resizable BAR. Without it, the CPU cannot efficiently access the GPU’s full memory space, which can lead to severe performance drops. In this case, it made the difference between “SteamOS on Arc is broken” and “SteamOS on Arc is early, but actually running.” Even on Windows, leaving ReBAR off will severely impact Arc performance.

Commenters also pointed to another likely limitation: kernel support. Intel’s Arc drivers on Linux have improved considerably, but the newest performance work often depends on recent kernel and Mesa versions. If SteamOS’ Main channel is still behind the very latest Linux graphics stack, Arc performance may remain below what the same card can do under Windows or faster-moving Linux distributions.

For now, this is more proof of concept than a consumer-ready feature. Valve has not turned SteamOS into a general desktop gaming OS with clean support for every GPU, and the install path shown here is still too awkward for normal users. But the result is interesting. SteamOS running on an Intel Arc B580 suggests Valve's hardware net is widening, whether intentionally for desktop GPUs or indirectly through work on Intel-powered handhelds.

That could matter for future SteamOS machines. AMD remains the obvious fit for Valve’s gaming hardware today, but Intel has been pushing harder on Linux graphics support, and low-profile Arc cards could become attractive for small living-room builds if the driver stack matures.

Copilot PCs have been around for a couple of years since Microsoft launched them in 2024, and while the company tried to push NPU-equipped laptops towards users to take advantage of these new features, it seems that it’s planning to reverse course. According to Windows Latest, an experimental Windows App SDK available on GitHub now lets you run Language Model APIs on supported GPUs, starting with the Nvidia GeForce RTX 30-series cards with at least 6GB of VRAM. However, it also requires a Windows Insider Experimental Channel and Developer Mode switched on. Hence, you need to go through some hoops to turn on local AI inferencing on Windows, even if you don’t have an NPU-equipped device.

You still won’t get all the features found in a Copilot+ PC even if you went through all the hoops to activate this feature, but it’s a sign of things to come for local AI on Windows PCs, in general. It’s still not clear why Microsoft is seemingly abandoning the Copilot+ PC advantage it has heavily marketed in recent years, though RAM pricing might play a role, but this is good news for the millions of users who were locked out of Copilot features simply because their processors don’t have a built-in NPU (neural processing unit). This also opens Windows’ AI features to desktop users, who typically don’t have processors that support NPUs.

What’s interesting is that NPUs aren’t necessarily more powerful than GPUs for AI processing — it’s just that they’re more efficient, making them crucial for laptops with limited battery life. And because not all laptops come with a discrete GPU (which are mostly found on gaming and high-end laptops), it also allowed Microsoft to include AI features on more affordable Windows 11 PCs. Another reason Microsoft could be looking to expand Copilot+ features to non-NPU-powered devices is that AI didn’t actually take off the way it had hoped. A research firm in 2024 said that people didn’t purchase AI PCs because of their features — instead, they bought them because they’re what’s available if they need to upgrade.

The situation is worsening in 2026, as the AI data center-driven shortage of memory and storage chips is pushing computer prices to unprecedented highs. This has resulted in a collapse in sales for PCs and their components, with entry-level laptops expected to disappear by 2028. People not buying new NPU-equipped PCs would limit the adoption of Copilot+ PCs and the AI features they offer. By expanding the availability of AI features to non-Copilot+ PCs, Microsoft will increase its user base and help differentiate Windows 11 from the competition, especially as Windows is slowly bleeding users to macOS and Linux.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tens of officers have been fired, and some even arrested, for abuse of the Flock AI-powered license plate reader (ALPR) camera systems used by police departments throughout the U.S. 404 Media reports on this purported surveillance abuse, and reckons that the tens of Flock-assisted stalking cases tallied by investigators are just the tip of the iceberg. It also shares details of several cases where police officers go Flock crazy, repeatedly using the system hundreds of times to check on the activity of (ex)romantic partners.

The source report starts with the example case of Jarmarus Brown, an Orange City, Florida, police officer. Investigations reveal that Brown looked up his ex-girlfriend’s (and her close family members’) license plates over 100 times while on patrol. The police officer’s colleagues commented on the activity to Brown, hoping he would stop, and he indicated that he would. However, Brown couldn’t resist stalking using the easy-to-access Flock.

When he was eventually found out by authorities, Brown admitted he’d been "dumb" and blamed his emotional state for his Flock abuse. Research into this case revealed Brown was a very controlling person. For example, the source report says he would insist his girlfriend stay on FaceTime, even during work hours. He also put an AirTag in her wallet.

This wasn’t a one-off. 404 Media outlines several examples of police Flock abuse in Wisconsin, Missouri, Georgia, and Kansas. Most cases are pretty similar to that of Officer Brown. Obsessed romantically shunned police officers stalk (ex) partners using Flock for months or years before being found out. Mostly, their indiscretions come to light as a result of action from the person being stalked – a complaint, private investigation of some kind.

What we see on the surface is “almost certainly a vast underreporting of the overall abuse,” says 404 Media. This is because only the most egregious cases leading to police being fired or arrested would result in proper investigations and the documenting of the underlying issue.

Flock Security says that with 140,000 monthly active users, abuse is “rare.” It fights lawsuits and potential regulations, which would mean police need a warrant to use Flock. However, police departments allegedly rarely call out Flock abuse. Most complaints come from “victims who have found patterns of abuse in public records files they have obtained from their local police departments,” notes the source.

If you suspect you are being stalked, HaveIBeenFlocked.com is a good place to start by inputting your license plate number. The site has a searchable database of Flock ALPR inquiries released via public records requests. The site’s future could be uncertain, though, as 404 Media says that Flock Security “has repeatedly tried to get that website taken down.”

AI-assisted coding (or vibe coding) has infiltrated Linux driver maintenance, with Linux developers now using LLMs to help maintain old drivers in the Linux kernel. Phoronix reports that GitHub Copilot was used to clean up code pertaining to vintage AMD R6000 Linux graphics drivers, helping keep the driver relevant for people still using these late 2000s-era GPUs.

Specifically, the R600 Gallium3D driver saw 59 commits by Gert Wollny, all aimed at cleaning up shader compiler code in the driver. The refactoring process was done with Copilot, with notes in each commit citing Copilot in auto mode being used to help build the code.

This method of driver maintenance will inevitably become a staple of Linux driver maintainers moving forward, as the world adopts AI over human programmers for writing the vast majority of code written today. The Linux community often only has a handful or a single person updating these older drivers, making AI a very incentivizing tool to compensate for a lack of manpower and help keep these older drivers alive. The R600 Linux driver is designed to run the AMD/ATI HD 2000 through HD 6000 series of graphics cards. The HD 2000 series debuted in 2007, and the HD 6000 debuted in 2010, making some of these graphics cards nearly 20 years old.

Rather than rejecting AI, Linus Torvalds has opted to embrace the adoption of AI and allow Linux developers to use AI, but only when appropriate. A new policy enforces proper tagging if Linux kernel developers use AI to assist in code creation. Critically, this system puts the blame for any buggy code on the person publishing kernel driver changes, requiring the person to test their work before publishing.

Despite the use of AI, Linux developers are, regardless, discussing branching off the R600 drivers into a legacy branch dubbed “Amber2”. This would free up the main Mesa codebase and prevent legacy drivers from accidentally breaking as new features are added to Mesa.

Apple introduced its next major macOS release, macOS 27 Golden Gate, at its WWDC event. The new operating system update, coming this fall, includes a series of new artificial intelligence gestures, as well as iterations to the "liquid glass" design introduced in last year's release, macOS 26 Tahoe.

Craig Federighi, Apple's senior vice president of software engineering, said that the 27 releases were focused on more polished and intuitive operating systems, trust and safety (including for children), and updates to Apple Intelligence and Siri. Unlike previous years, Apple spent most of its time highlighting changes that affect the entirety of its platforms, meaning that many of the improvements on Mac are also available in some form on the iPhone or iPad, and vice versa, reflecting the continuing deep integration in Apple's ecosystem of products, including iPhone (iOS 27), iPad (iOS 27), and watchOS (watchOS 27).

macOS will include some specific upgrades, including ultrawide display support with higher resolutions, and an updated video podcast player, while many others, like updates to iCloud shared albums and changes to Maps, are across multiple platforms. In many ways, the focus on fixes is reminiscent of 2009's OS X Snow Leopard, which was famous for fixing problems rather than introducing tons of new features.

Liquid Glass

Apple is making changes to Liquid Glass across its platforms to make content more readable and decrease distractions. Glass will now better diffuse content behind it.

A new slider in settings will let you move from from ultra-clear to fully tinted, letting you customize how much it affects readability.

Specifically on the Mac, Apple is adding a uniform tool bar across the top of apps, which harkens back to more traditional Mac design. Expanded sidebars will move to the edge of windows, and sidebar icons will regain their colors. Additionally, every window will have tighter corner radii, even if they're not updated, for improved consistency across the OS. These were all complaints from Mac diehards over the last year.

In app icons across platforms, there will be additional layers of glass in icons to make them sharper and more defined.

Improvements

Apple said that it is bringing a massive amount of improvements under the hood of macOS and other platforms, with focus on CPU usage, memory usage, display rendering, and more. Apple claims apps can launch 30% faster on the iPhone and iPad, while new photos will show up in the library up to 70% faster. The advanced CPU scheduler on the iPhone is being optimized and brought all the way back to the iPhone 11, which will be the oldest iPhone supporting iOS 27.

Network transitions — especially between cellular and Wi-Fi — were also highlighted, so you don't have to toggle as often.

The company also highlighted a new content index across Spotlight, photos, mail and more, which will index your existing files immediately and continue to do so as new content comes in. Apple demonstrated a new ranking system for mail on Mac, showing more relevant results, even if it's years old.

AI and Siri

Federighi claimed that the mission is to turn AI into helpful and intuitive products, rather than AI for the sake of AI.

"Truly helpful AI must be centered around you and your needs," Federighi said, saying it needs to be designed for devices, apps, and with privacy in mind. Surprisingly, Federighi briefly mentioned that its foundation models are integrated with Gemini and will be used "on-device and in servers" with private cloud compute. Additionally, Apple has a more powerful on-device model.

Apple SVP for Siri engineering Mike Rockwell showed off a revamped Siri. The new Siri grows out of the dynamic island with "Hey Siri" or when you hold the buttons. It retains context between interactions.

A new voice experience includes a more conversational tone. Voice can now be customized for expressivity and pace, with sliders to adjust them in a new Siri app.

Rockwell asked about a Suki Waterhouse concert, and Siri told him when the concert will be. You can even inquire about tickets, which in this case were part of a lottery. Rockwell asked to be added to the lottery and to play her newest single in separate requests, as it remembered context.

He also demonstrated finding photos from a recent trip, asking Siri to pick out photos that include just specific people, and then share them with family members via text – without even having to go into the Photos app.

On iOS, you can swipe down, use the side button, or say "Hey Siri." On the Mac, Siri is integrated into Spotlight, or you can use Siri requests in system menus. One demonstration included using Siri on a Mac to help build a Maker Space at a child's school. When "How should I think about building a maker space in a shed” was typed into Spotlight, macOS realized it was a question specifically for the assistant. Siri was able to search through texts from the demonstrator's son, to address lingering electrical issues and find a fix.

Siri AI is also coming to iPadOS, where you can use the dedicated Siri App. You'll be able to see a conversational history synced with iCloud across devices, including Mac, Apple Watch, and iPhone. On visionOS, you can simply look at Siri and initiate your query.

Visual Intelligence will be integrated into the iPhone camera app. You can tap the shutter button for Siri AI to “see what you see” and provide contextual information, powered by Apple Foundation models. Pointing your iPhone at a plate of food can give you nutritional information, while showing the camera an image of a restaurant bill will let you split it among friends. You can also use visual intelligence to ask about items presented on your screen.

You'll also be able to write with Siri anywhere you type. Siri can generate drafts, including emails, and will provide suggestions and automatic proofreading, available systemwide, even in third-party apps.

Siri AI won't be available in the European Union and China initially, as Apple deals with international regulation and privacy laws. Siri AI will first be available in English.

Apple Intelligence in apps

Apple also demonstrated how Intelligence can be used within and across applications, including Safari, Passwords, Photos, and Home.

In Safari, Apple has introduced tab management features, which can organize tabs into topics. Another option lets you monitor a page and asks you to "Notify me" for changes on a page, like a product coming back in stock or a ticket becoming available. You can then close the tab, but Siri will notify you when the page has changed. Perhaps the most impressive change is one to Shortcuts. You can describe what you want a Shortcut to do in natural language, and it brings together the steps automatically. One example: “When I’m leaving home, message Pedro” brings together a shortcut using Maps and Messages, which should open up Shortcuts to a much wider variety of people who may have been put off by its complicated nature.

Other demos included custom Safari extensions to adapt web pages for you, a Password app that can automatically fix compromised passwords for you on "eligible" accounts. In messages, you can get one-tap suggestions, and the phone app can find flight information when calling an airline.

For Home, Apple Intelligence can understand how a number of unrelated notifications work together to create fewer notifications and provide images from multiple security cameras. It can even track package deliveries across multiple cameras. 4K resolution will work on supported cameras.

In the Image Playground, you can create high-quality images in any style, with the image generation model running on private cloud compute. You can use natural language to adjust existing images and use it across the device, such as on your lock screen. The Photos app may have the most controversial aspects, as you can extend photos to change photo borders without cropping. There's also an option to reframe the entire scene with a spatial camera, as if you were moving the lens in the original shot. This feature works on any image in your library, even if you've taken the photos on other cameras or phones.

These features will support all languages Apple Intelligence works with. Some features will have usage limits that will adjust based on iCloud+ subscriptions.

Developers will have access to improved models, including server models, through a new API that will support natural language and images.

Lastly, Apple highlighted updates to XCode, including agentic coding, choosing the model and agent of your choice (including the newly added Google Gemini). It can connect to Figma and GitHub for design, and a new Device Hub will let developers simulate devices, including touch screens, alongside real-world testing devices.

Trust and Safety

Apple also demonstrated new child safety tools, with new child accounts and parental controls. Child accounts will automatically block adult websites and implement app store age restrictions.

Children will be able to ask parents for permission to buy or download apps in messages, as well as browse new websites in Safari for children under 13. There will be similar permissions for contacting new people outside of your family.

A new safety communication warns about nude images and intervenes, but will also be expanded to gore or violent content. Parents will have Time Allowances across entertainment, games, and social media, with shared allowances across all three, or you can set them individually. A redesigned Screen Time will let parents see how devices are being used. Developer tools are being made more capable for third-party apps to take advantage of the new features.

Golden Gate will be the first version of macOS to exclusively support Apple Silicon Macs. Last year, Apple announced that Tahoe would be the final major release to support Intel-based systems. (Intel-based Macs will still receive three years of security updates.) This is the last macOS release to support Rosetta 2, the tool that lets Apple Silicon computers run Intel applications through an emulation layer (though parts may stick around to keep legacy games running). Without Intel processors to support, Apple is urging developers to make native applications for its own silicon.

Support and Release Dates

Developer betas for the 27-suite of OS releases are available today, with public betas starting in July. Final releases are expected in the fall.

macOS 27 Golden Gate will be supported on devices with Apple Silicon. Apple's website specifies:

• MacBook Neo
• MacBook Air (2020 and later with Apple Silicon)
• MacBook Pro (2020 and later with Apple Silicon)
• iMac (2021 and later with Apple Silicon)
• Mac mini (2020 and later with Apple Silicon)
• Mac Studio (2022 and later with Apple Silicon)
• Mac Pro with Apple Silicon (2023)

However, adjustments to Siri's voice and advanced dictation will require newer chips on the Mac, iPad and iPhone. On the Mac, that means "an M3 and later and at least 12GB of unified memory." Otherwise, you need an iPhone 17 Pro, iPhone 17 Pro Max, iPhone Air, iPad models with M4 and later and at least 12GB of unified memory, or Apple Vision Pro with M5.

A “full-feature-parity version of Notepad” has been written in x86 assembly and it weighs in at just 2,749 bytes. Windows legend Dave W. Plummer is (inevitably) the coder behind this efficiency tour de force, and he’s made RetroPad available (code and exe) on his GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license.

Plummer announced this latest release of RetroPad on Thursday, describing it as a feature-for-feature match of the version of Notepad that shipped with Windows XP. That’s impressive enough in 2.7KB, rather than an app of about 65KB. However, Plummer’s work rate is such that he’s since added optional line numbers and a dark mode. He also decided to add “all of the Notepad keyboard shortcuts” on Saturday which added a few bytes. It won’t be long until there’s an accompanying YouTube video for a deeper dive into RetroPad, but for now we have the GitHub notes.

A few hours ago Plummer also added the trpad.exe to GitHub, so folks who don’t want to run the code through MASM/Crinkler can just download and run this little utility. The version of trpad.exe available on GitHub wouldn’t run on my Windows 11 laptop, though.

Windows app bloat

Windows bloat has become so bad that even Microsoft noticed. Earlier this year, Microsoft promised to go back and get the basics right, things like File Explorer, the Taskbar, and other Windows staples were going to get some tuning and polish. This was a much-needed initiative, but was precipitated by a tone-deaf exec post about the operating system “evolving into an agentic OS.”

The puffing up of Notepad is a fascinating case study in Windows bloat. As mentioned previously, the Windows XP era Notepad was approximately 65KB, not much more than Windows 9X releases (~50KB). According to a web search notepad.exe would grow to around 190KB to 200KB for the Windows 7 to 10 eras.

Windows 11 is a bit different, though. The notepad.exe in my current Windows 11 install appears to weigh in at 352KB but according to the Windows Control Panel, the install size is 808KB. Looking even deeper at this, and it seems like the moderately sized .exe file is just a ‘stub’ or ‘bootstrapper’ app to point to a UWP/WinUI app that is about 5MB in size. That’s where Microsoft has stuffed all the recently added features like spell check, autosave, multiple tabs, and Copilot writing tools.

Earlier this week, we reported on the Green Team officially retiring the creaky Nvidia Control Panel (NVCP), with all its major settings adjustments claimed to have been ported to the Nvidia App. Throughout its tenure, this long-in-the-tooth piece of graphics settings software stuck resolutely to the classic non-themed Win32 controls style, but we know there will be holdouts and those who miss it for one reason or another. Thankfully, Nvidia has left an NVCP installer in the Microsoft Store, for now. Let’s look closer at whether it is worth a separate download in mid-2026.

To be clear, you will still need to download a modern Nvidia graphics driver to use the separately available NVCP. The familiar control panel software that is now available via the Microsoft Store is simply a controls access UI - one that has now been relegated to a secondary, optional choice.

For existing Nvidia graphics card users, you probably won’t have to go out of your way to grab the old NVCP from the Microsoft Store. It should normally persist from previous driver installs and updates, unless you opt for a ‘clean install’ from now on.

Possibly the primary reason you will want to keep a copy of the NVCP handy is the updated Nvidia Apps’ missing “professional features.” From my nosing at the information available, RTX Pro / Quadro features - things like offering adjustments to Mosaic, Sync, stereo, and a few pro‑workflow toggles - are yet to be migrated. So, modern GeForce gamers shouldn’t worry about hanging onto NVCP for functionality.

Even if you don’t need the handful of missing features in new vs old, some folks will want to keep using the NVCP due to familiarity with Nvidia’s older lightweight settings software.

We’d also be tempted to download or keep a shortcut to the NVCP handy in case upcoming software from Nvidia messes up the controls accessible in the Nvidia App. The Green Team’s software has come under fire for a string of buggy releases lately. In the likely scenario that Nvidia will ship an upcoming version of its Windows drivers with some feature-breaking wrinkles or crashing issues, the NVCP might be handy for fallback or troubleshooting.

A short video has resurfaced in which Bill Gates promotes Windows 95 with DirectX as a gaming platform set to eclipse DOS. The video is part of footage from an internal Microsoft ‘Judgment Day’ developer/gaming event. So far, so ordinary, but the typically meek Gates appears dressed in a trench coat and holding a shotgun, standing inside a Doom-style environment littered with demon carcasses. You can watch the video by expanding the tweet below.

The Doom franchise began in 1993, well before Windows was widely used for games beyond the likes of Minesweeper and Solitaire desktop distractions. Throughout much of the 1990s, PC users would run games through DOS, with Windows seen as something to use for multitasking productivity tasks. With Windows 95, Microsoft wanted to change that; hence, this promotional video to developers, starring Gates himself.

Though there were (and are) DOS gaming devotees, Windows 95 was promoted as delivering improved multimedia, Plug and Play hardware support, and, with DirectX, even better gaming performance.

Gates begins his in-Doom spiel by saying that “these games are getting really realistic” before boasting that “Windows 95 is THE BEST game platform, whether it’s the best performance, the best setup, the best integration.” He then admitted that DOS can be hard work for end users, developers, and tech support. But the key improvement being dangled in front of developers was the new DirectX API.

During this brief presentation intro, Gates touted 75 new games coming for Windows 95 in the coming year. He reckoned with this push and collaboration between Microsoft and game developers, “we’ll be able to clean up this DOS mess, and get everything focused on Windows.”

This unusual video isn’t just Bill Gates standing and spouting about Windows 95 gaming, thankfully. Halfway through this clip, he is interrupted by an enemy grunt, and quickly turns to give it both barrels, “Don’t interrupt me.” But when delivering this punchline, Bill sounds more like Kermit the Frog than Arnie.

The video closes with Microsoft’s logo, some sinister laughing soundtrack, and the tagline “Who do you want to execute today?”

Key to the background collaboration between Microsoft and a host of game developers was the work of Gabe Newell. The future Valve co-founder initiated and led the Microsoft team responsible for porting id Software’s Doom to Windows 95, which would result in the release of Doom95 in 1996. Some sources say that Doom was installed on more computers worldwide than Windows 95 was at this time (late 1995).

Linux developers are looking into retiring the x32 ABI that was introduced into the Linux kernel in 2012. Phoronix reports that Sebastian Andrezj Siewior of Lintronix has proposed removing the x32 ABI from the Linux kernel due to its obsolescence and lack of serious adoption since its debut. If no objections are raised, the x32 ABI will likely be removed from the Linux kernel by 2027.

x32 ABI was introduced to Linux in an effort to optimize the memory consumption of 64-bit programs. The application binary interface was designed to allow 64-bit processors and applications to operate in semi “64-bit/32-bit” hybrid mode. With x32 ABI, software is allowed access to the full 64-bit register file and data path but is restricted to using 32-bit pointers. For the uninitiated, a pointer is a binary number that keeps track of data that is held in system memory.

This ability allows the OS to use more than 4GB of RAM while keeping pointer sizes at just 4 bytes instead of 8 bytes (for 64-bit). This size difference is x32 ABI’s main selling point, as cutting the pointer size in half improved the amount of data that can fit in a CPU’s multiple caches and improved performance.

Despite its potential, x32 ABI also had several disadvantages. Using x32 ABI adds additional complexity for developers to deal with and requires compilers to support the feature. Arguably, its biggest technical problem relates to the fact that individual processes running with x32 ABI cannot take advantage of more than 4GB of memory due to the pointer sizes being limited to 32 bits.

That said, the nail in the coffin for x32 ABI is its lack of mainstream adoption by software developers as a whole. This was likely helped by the fact that x32 ABI was ever only implemented on Linux and was not ported to Windows or Mac. Sebastian Andrezj Siewior highlighted further issues in his proposal, noting that the better performance x32 ABI realized was not great enough for certain workloads to move to it and use it exclusively.

An IBM ThinkPad user boasts that they can install “(almost) all versions of Windows from NT 4 to 10 22H2,” with driver support, without resorting to virtual machine (VM) technology. The ThinkPad T43 from 2005, used by Redditor MatiHalek, was already a firm favorite among retro tech enthusiasts and well known for being IBM’s final design prior to the Lenovo acquisition. The confirmation that it can run 26 years of Windows OSes certainly adds to the T43’s considerable charms.

So, what did Mati actually do? In the post embedded above, you can see they posted a gallery with 10 Windows screenshots, most of which show an iteration of the System > About control panel as evidence of the version of Windows installed and running. This gallery will take many readers on a journey down memory lane as the Windows UI evolves through the eras.

Mati says that they didn’t use VMs to install any of these Windows versions. They were all real software-to-metal installs on the single-core Pentium M CPU, though it wasn’t always an entirely straightforward process getting Windows to behave. We’d assume most difficulties would be due to support and drivers for graphics and storage interface hardware.

The Redditor didn’t install the 26 years of OSes sequentially in a strictly experimental fashion. “When I got this laptop, XP was installed, so I decided to dual-boot Vista with that XP. Then I did the upgrade path Vista-7-8-8.1-10RTM,” they explained. Subsequently, Windows 22H2 wrinkles forced them into doing a clean install for this pretty recent OS from Microsoft. However, modern OSes don’t appear to be Mati’s passion as “after that, I wiped the hard drive and multi-booted 98, NT 4, and 2000.” They end their post by indicating they will be keeping this 20th-century OS trio on the IBM ThinkPad T43, simply out of preference. It's probably the most responsive choice, given the hardware.

IBM ThinkPad T43 hardware

As we mentioned in the intro, the ThinkPad T43 was the final laptop from IBM’s stables, before Lenovo took the reins. Mati was correct to assert that it originally shipped with Windows XP, and it launched just a few months before Vista hit the scene.

Key components of the T43 were as follows:

• Intel Pentium M processor
• ATi Mobility Radeon X300 or X300SE graphics
• 14.1-inch screen in resolutions up to 1,400 x 1,050 pixels
• Support for up to 2GB of DDR2
• Storage config between 40GB and 100GB HDD
• Wi-Fi, Bluetooth, Ethernet, and modem connectivity options
• Ports included 2x USB 2.0 ports, a parallel port, VGA, S-Video, a PC Card slot, and a docking station port

Beyond the hardware tech specs, the IBM ThinkPad T43 earned a lot of praise due to its durable, perhaps legendary, build and keyboard quality. It isn’t light for a 14-incher in 2026 terms, of course, weighing in at approximately 2.3 kg (5.1 pounds).

Do any readers still cherish an IBM ThinkPad T43? If so, do you still run an older version of Windows like Mati does, or have you moved to an alternative OS like Linux?

AMD has been accused of 'bait-and-switch' tactics following changes to the licensing of Vivado on Linux. As reported by It's Foss, AMD has decided that Linux users of the Vivado chip design environment need to pay up or stick with an older version that will become unsupported soon.

For the uninitiated, Vivado is AMD's proprietary design suite used to program Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs). These special chips can be rewired via software to mimic nearly any kind of computer hardware. This makes them invaluable for simulations and design testing. If you are designing, simulating, or testing custom circuits for AI, aerospace, or advanced electronics, Vivado is the gateway to making that hardware actually work.

The core of the outrage stems from a change in Vivado's upcoming 2026.1 update. Previously, the free "Standard" tier supported both Windows and Linux. Under the new tiered model, the free "Basic" tier is restricted entirely to Windows. If you want to use Vivado natively on Linux, you'll be forced to step up to the "Core" tier, which demands an eye-watering $1,200 to $1,800 annual subscription.

AMD's defense on its community forums has also not landed well. The company claimed that 70% of Vivado users are on Windows anyway, alienating the academic researchers, engineering students, and open-source hobbyists who heavily favor Linux-native environments and rely on free tools to learn the trade.

A forum representative for the company stated, "No one is stopping users (students, etc.) to continue using the current versions of Vivado (any Vivado version prior 2026.1)," and developing using the free Vivado ML Standard Edition, arguing that it was only if users decided to update that they'd need the license.

"I guess no one involved in this decision thought about the millions of hobbyists and amateurs like myself using Vivado for their hobby projects," one disgruntled user replied. Another noted that many users are already discussing moving to alternate platforms like Lattice and Altera due to these changes.

AMD's forum representative confirmed they were "collecting all the feedback received and passing on to the relevant team/marketing" at AMD, leaving the door ajar for a possible change to this policy down the line.

California lawmakers may be backing away from a controversial age-verification requirement bill that alarmed Linux and open-source developers earlier this year, after a new amendment bill proposed exempting most open-source operating systems from the state’s upcoming Digital Age Assurance Act. In practice, that would likely exempt most mainstream Linux distributions — including Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch Linux, and Mint — from compliance requirements scheduled to take effect on January 1, 2027.

Assembly Bill 1856 (AB 1856), currently moving through California’s legislature ahead of committee reviews in June, would amend the state’s earlier age-assurance law by excluding software distributed under licenses that allow users to “copy, redistribute, and modify the software.”

The proposed amendment specifically states: “Operating system provider” does not mean a person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.

The amendment follows months of backlash after California passed the original Assembly Bill 1043 (AB 1043), formally known as the Digital Age Assurance Act, in late 2025. The law sought to shift online age verification away from individual websites and apps and down to the operating-system level instead.

Under the original law, operating systems would be required to request a user’s age or birth date during device setup, then expose an “age bracket signal” to apps and app stores. The law, which defined brackets such as “under 13,” “13–15,” “16–17,” and “18+,” immediately raised questions about how such requirements would apply to decentralized, open-source software ecosystems.

Unlike Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, most Linux distributions are not centrally controlled commercial platforms. Many are community-run projects maintained by volunteers, often without user accounts, telemetry systems, or even formal corporate ownership structures. Critics argued the law’s wording was so broad that it could technically force open-source operating systems to become age-verification platforms.

Privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, criticized the legislation as invasive and warned it could create infrastructure for broader identity tracking online. Linux developers also questioned how California could realistically enforce such requirements on infinitely forkable open-source software projects.

The controversy became particularly heated after reports suggested platforms like SteamOS could still fall under the law due to their ties to proprietary application ecosystems. Valve’s Linux-based gaming platform ships with the proprietary Steam storefront and client, potentially placing it closer to Apple’s App Store or Google Play from a regulatory standpoint.

AB 1856 does not repeal the original Digital Age Assurance Act. Instead, it narrows the definition of who qualifies as an “operating system provider” under the law. Commercial platforms with proprietary app ecosystems could remain subject to California’s age-assurance requirements even if most open-source Linux distributions are ultimately exempted.

California Assembly Member Buffy Wicks introduced the amendment on February 11, 2026. However, the open-source exemption language appeared in later revisions that began drawing attention across Linux and privacy communities. The latest version is dated May 18, 2026, and as of May 19, 2026, the bill was read a second time and ordered to third reading.

Valorant cheaters have watched their $6,000 investment turned into paperweights overnight as Riot Games updated the Vanguard anti-cheat software to block DMA (Direct Memory Access) cheating devices. Not content with just banning the offenders, there are reports of Vanguard "bricking" the hardware used by cheaters, necessitating a full operating system reinstall. The claims are somewhat misleading since the anti-cheat system only renders certain hardware temporarily unusable. Users have reported that reinstalling the operating system brings everything back to normal; don't install Valorant or Vanguard on it again, or you'll face the same result.

Riot Games took things a step further by openly mocking the cheaters on X: "Congrats to the owners of a brand new $6k paperweight." Some members of the gaming community have applauded Riot Games for dropping the massive ban hammer on cheaters. However, others are questioning the ethical implications of Riot Games' intrusive anti-cheat software, and even classifying it as borderline "malware." Kernel-level access is the highest possible privilege on a system, and some users fear potential vulnerabilities and misuse.

DMA cards allow external hardware to read and write directly to a computer’s memory without passing through the middleman, which is the processor. DMA cards are vital tools for professionals such as debuggers, developers, and cybersecurity researchers. Over the years, cheat developers have found another calling for DMA cards: bypassing anti-cheat software. The misuse has led to an ongoing cat-and-mouse game with cheaters and game developers. On this occasion, Riot Games came out on top.

Competitive online multiplayer games, such as Valorant, typically use kernel-level detection to continuously monitor the processor and operating system for unauthorized cheat software. As a result, software-level cheats are flagged instantaneously, which is why cheat developers have turned to DMA cards to separate the cheat software from the computer that's running the game, in this case, Valorant.

Phillip Koskinas, the Head of Anti-Cheat at Riot Games, recently shared an example (embedded below) of what a typical DMA cheating device setup looks like. It looks fascinating, like a Frankenstein project cobbled together in someone’s garage for a science fair. It shows the lengths some players are willing to go to just to have an upper hand in a free-to-play game.

There are many variations of a DMA cheating setup. At its core, the process begins by installing a DMA card into the primary computer that’s running the game. Cheat developers than flash them with custom-modified firmware to disguise the DMA card and trick the operating system into thinking it's another device, such as a network adapter or USB expansion card.

The setup requires a second computer, which can be a laptop or mini-PC, that acts as the command center for running the actual cheat software. This system connects to the primary gaming system through a standard USB connection. The DMA card provides direct access to the gaming machine's memory, allowing the second system to read real-time game data without being detected.

To complete the circuit, cheaters have to add a KMBox, a hardware controller that emulates physical keyboard and mouse inputs, to bridge both systems. The commands generated on the second system travel through the KMBox to the primary PC as legitimate movements and actions, paving the way for aimbots and wallhacks.

Logically, Riot Games won't disclose how it neutralized these DMA cheating setups. The prevailing theory is that the latest Vanguard update is now enforcing stricter IOMMU (Input-Output Memory Management Unit) checks. The IOMMU is a component inside a processor that's responsible for managing and regulating how peripheral devices access system memory. Rumors suggest that Vanguard now blocks DMA firmware that attempts to communicate over SATA or NVMe protocols, two popular firmwares used by cheat developers to masquerade the DMA card as a legitimate storage controller.

Mozilla has successfully addressed a critical bug related to Firefox that caused the web browser to crash on desktop systems powered by Intel’s Raptor Lake CPUs. With the latest stable release of Firefox version 151.01, the company has managed to patch the issue that has been under investigation for more than a year.

Mozilla engineers initially zeroed in on failures in a zlib-rs compression routine where certain dist values appeared incorrect, resulting in index out-of-bounds crashes. However, the root cause was tied to Intel’s Raptor Lake CPU instructions, specifically RPL050 and RPL060, which sometimes caused the CPU cores to read incorrect or outdated data.

Senior Staff Engineer Gabriele Svelto first flagged the issue last year, blaming Intel for its CPU instabilities and highlighting mass browser crash reports coming from systems powered by Intel Raptor Lake, specifically in locations suffering from heat waves.

“If you have an Intel Raptor Lake system and you’re in the northern hemisphere, chances are that your machine is crashing more often because of the summer heat. I know because I can literally see which EU countries have been affected by heat waves by looking at the locales of Firefox crash reports coming from Raptor Lake systems,” said Svelto on Mastodon.

He also noted that while Intel’s newer 0x12c microcode update significantly reduced the number of crashes, the bugs came back with the release of version 0x12F.

Intel’s Raptor Lake CPU instability issues first began surfacing in late 2022 before exploding the following year with users reporting widespread game crashes, browser instability, and system failures on 13th-gen and 14th-gen processors. Intel eventually confirmed after several months that the root cause was tied to a physical degradation issue caused by prolonged exposure to excessive voltage and heat. While the company rolled out several microcode patches, including 0x125, 0x129, 0x12B, and, more recently, 0x12F, these updates were only designed to mitigate the conditions triggering the degradation rather than reverse existing damage. Eventually, Intel announced an extended warranty for customers facing the issue from three to five years.

If you have been facing Firefox crashes on your desktop PC running Intel’s 13th-gen or 14th-gen Raptor Lake CPUs, it is recommended to update the browser to its latest stable version by heading to the official page here.

Linus Torvalds declared the Linux kernel's private security mailing list "almost entirely unmanageable" on Sunday in his weekly post to the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML), blaming a flood of duplicate vulnerability reports generated by researchers running the same AI tools against the same code. The complaint accompanied the release of Linux 7.1-rc4 and a pointer to newly merged documentation that formalizes how AI-assisted bug reports should be handled.

The problem, according to Torvalds, is the combination of volume and redundancy: multiple researchers are independently discovering identical bugs using automated tools and filing them separately on a private mailing list, where nobody can see what has already been submitted. Maintainers end up spending their time triaging duplicates and directing reporters to fixes that were merged weeks earlier.

"AI detected bugs are pretty much by definition not secret, and treating them on some private list is a waste of time for everybody involved," Torvalds wrote on LKML.

Torvalds pointed developers to the project's security bug documentation, which states that vulnerabilities found using AI tools should be treated as public disclosures and submitted directly to the relevant maintainers, not routed through the private security list. Reports must be concise, formatted in plain text, and include a verified reproducer.

In March, Willy Tarreau, the creator of HAProxy and a longtime Linux kernel stable maintainer, said in comments posted to LWN that the kernel security mailing list, which received roughly two to three reports per week two years ago, now receives five to 10 reports per day. Most are solid finds, but the duplication across researchers using similar tooling has overwhelmed the existing triage process.

Torvalds urged researchers to go further than filing raw findings. "If you actually want to add value, read the documentation, create a patch too, and add some real value on top of what the AI did," he wrote. "Don't be the drive-by 'send a random report with no real understanding' kind of person."

This Torvalds-endorsed approach is exactly what fellow maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman has been doing with his “Clanker T1000” system, a Framework Desktop-powered bug-finding tool: discover the issue, write the fix, take responsibility for the patch, and submit it publicly.

The Linux kernel project formalized its broader stance on AI-assisted contributions last month, establishing a project-wide policy that permits AI-generated code provided developers follow strict disclosure rules.

Under that policy, AI agents cannot use the legally binding "Signed-off-by" tag, and contributors must use a new "Assisted-by" tag for transparency. Every line of AI-generated code, and any resulting bugs, remains the legal responsibility of the human who submits it.

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

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

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

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

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

Microsoft is finally looking into fixing automatic GPU driver downgrades on Windows 11 that have plagued users since the OS's launch in 2021. Windows Latest reports that Microsoft has finally acknowledged the issue and is preparing a partial fix that will be released by Q4 of 2026.

Specifically, Microsoft is looking to start applying this fix to Windows 11 PCs in April 2026. Only by Q4 will the update be applied to everyone.

The fix Microsoft is cooking up narrows down how many devices Windows Update can target with specific GPU driver updates. GPU drivers that are published to the Windows Update catalog using this system incorporate a two-part hardware ID (HWID) in conjunction with computer hardware IDs (CHIDs). The latter is an ID designation designed to identify a specific PC model or hardware configuration.

This two-pronged approach gives Windows Update better information on when to expose GPU drivers to Windows 11 machines. The outgoing system Microsoft is using only considers a four-part hardware ID as part of a ranking system. The worst part about this system is that it will not take into consideration the GPU driver model specifically, which is what allows Windows Update to downgrade GPU drivers in the first place. Whichever driver is ranked highest in the Windows Update catalog for systems with a specified hardware ID, Windows Update will push even if the driver itself is outdated.

However, there is a caveat with this system — only device display drivers that target new devices can get the update. Existing drivers in the Windows Update catalog may still get forcibly applied on older systems.

Windows Update has long had a problem where the service will automatically downgrade GPU drivers in the right circumstances. This is specifically problematic with OEM machines when the OEM has uploaded a GPU driver to the Windows Update catalog. One issue I've run into personally is the inability to clean install Intel Xe drivers on my Windows 11 laptop. Doing so automatically triggers Windows Update to install several older Intel graphics driver revisions.

Unfortunately, Microsoft's update won't fix the issue entirely, but it is at least a start. To clarify, this specific fix is different from the Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery feature Microsoft rolled out recently.

Microsoft has outlined a new feature of Windows called Cloud-Initiated Driver Recovery (CIDR). This newly introduced capability lets Microsoft remotely roll back a bad driver to a previously known good version on affected PCs. Moreover, it can work without user action or OEM intervention. It sounds like a magic bullet for a long history of Windows Update woes, but we’ll have to see if it works when the rubber hits the road. CIDR will only work with drivers distributed via Windows Update.

Windows Update can cause plenty of problems when a bad driver gets through testing and gets pushed to users. Indeed, buggy drivers have caused many a lost hour, gray hair, wrinkle, high blood pressure, and so on, among Windows veterans. Microsoft also notes that a bad driver often means a user has to manually intervene and roll back to “a low-quality driver for an extended period.” So, the new CIDR is cautiously welcomed.

Microsoft spells out the CIDR process in its Tech Community blog, and there we learn that recovery starts by the Windows developer triggering "a recovery action directly from the Hardware Dev Center (HDC) Driver Shiproom." Once a problematic driver is flagged, the system recovers the previously known-good version of a driver via the Windows Update pipeline. “This is handled through coordinated updates to the PnP driver stack and the driver flighting and publishing services,” says Microsoft.

Importantly, Microsoft notes that “recovery is delivered through the existing Windows Update infrastructure — no new client agent or partner tooling is required.” That should help CIDR work well with what we’ve already got and for it to become an established standard. Likewise, partners don’t need to get involved in CIDR, Microsoft will manage it. However, Microsoft asks that these partners “continue monitoring their driver quality metrics in the Hardware Dev Center dashboard and to respond promptly to any shiproom feedback on rejected submissions.”

CIDR is rolling out now for validation and testing, and it is expected to automatically support the Hardware Dev Center publishing process from September onwards.

Last week, news of Microsoft working on a new "Low Latency Profile" for Windows 11 was leaked by Windows Central. When enabled, it would increase CPU clock speeds momentarily to improve app opening times. This was met with widespread backlash, with the community thrashing Microsoft for essentially putting on a Band-Aid instead of addressing underlying Windows performance issues. Since then, the company has stood firmly by the decision on social media, reminding users that it's simply catching up to industry practice.

Senior developer and VP Scott Hanselman replied to a lot of concerned users on X and compared other operating systems to Windows 11, highlighting that this boosting functionality isn't anything new. That's true; every modern OS, including the bastion of efficiency, Linux, and even smartphones, already have this implemented. He went on to claim that "this isn't cheating" and implies that such a solution works in tandem with optimizing apps and code in further replies.

The Low Latency Profile (LLP) is part of Microsoft's broader "Windows K2" efforts to make Windows 11 smoother, more stable, and more efficient after years of sluggishness. As such, LLP works by boosting CPU frequencies for a quick assist in things like flyout delays for the Start Menu. Your CPU usage and clocks will spike for a fraction of a second to ensure the OS feels fast and responsive during those moments.

For all this to work on a technical level, though, you do require pretty aggressive clock parking so the CPU's prepared to shift into gear the moment it's needed to speed up an OS interaction. This is also important for mobile devices with batteries, such as laptops or handhelds that might consume more power when their cores are being utilized at a minimum for longer, compared to just idling in C-state after a quick burst at max speeds.

People across social media continue to dunk on Scott's replies, asking why Microsoft needed to wait until Windows 11 was in an intolerable state to think of this solution. That's entirely fair, too, considering just how long users have been complaining about the general reliability of the OS. Even devs who formerly worked on Windows have called out Windows 11 for its underwhelming navigation performance.

There's also the argument that perhaps Microsoft needs to optimize the operating system on a much deeper level before applying superficial patches like this, given complaints about the amount of bloatware a stock copy of Windows 11 comes with. Microsoft has even resorted to making an Xbox Mode just so games can bypass the bloat and run better.

It seems like the company is slowly realizing that the AI push it's been hiding behind for a few years at this point just isn't working out the way it was expected. Just look at Xbox — even with a new CEO that literally comes from Microsoft's AI department, it's making community-first changes like never before.

A recent update to Dell's pre-installed SupportAssist Remediation software is causing persistent blue screen of death errors and reboot loops on multiple Dell laptop models, according to user reports on Dell's community forum (spotted by Neowin).

The update, version 5.5.16.0 of Dell SupportAssist Remediation and the accompanying OS Recovery Plugin, was released on April 30th. Affected users report their PCs crash and reboot roughly every 30 minutes, with the cycle continuing indefinitely until the software is removed.

SupportAssist Remediation is a background service that Dell bundles on its Windows PCs to automate system recovery and repair tasks. Dell hasn’t acknowledged the issue or released a fix, but the problem has been confirmed across at least two Dell product lines so far: the XPS 15 9530 and the Dell Pro Plus 14.

Multiple users have independently analyzed their Windows crash dump files using WinDbg, Microsoft's debugging tool, and arrived at the same conclusion: The crash dumps show a bugcheck code of 0xEF (CRITICAL_PROCESS_DIED), with the faulting process identified as DellSupportAssistRemedationService.exe, part of the SupportAssist Remediation package installed at C:\Program Files\Dell\SARemediation\agent\.

Forum user Sygent, who owns an XPS 15 9530 running Windows 11 with BIOS version 1.29.0, posted a detailed dump analysis on Sunday, showing the failure pointing directly to the Dell process. A second user, MartinHBS2026, reported the same findings on a Dell Precision 3571 and confirmed the crashes stopped after removing all SupportAssist components. A third user, Waddo, confirmed identical crash dump results on a Dell Pro Plus 14 the following day.

Users in the Dell forum thread have identified two workarounds. The first and less disruptive option is to disable only the Dell SupportAssist Remediation service by running sc.exe config "Dell SupportAssist Remediation" start= disabled from an elevated command prompt, then restarting the PC, thereby preserving the rest of Dell's update and diagnostic tools.

The second option is to uninstall SupportAssist Remediation and the Dell SupportAssist OS Recovery Plugin for Dell Update entirely. Both approaches have stopped the crashes for users who have tried them.

This isn’t the first time that SupportAssist Remediation has caused similar crashes. A Dell forum thread from January last year described the same BSOD pattern on both Windows 10 and Windows 11 machines after a SupportAssist Remediation update, with WinDbg analysis again identifying the Dell software as the cause. That earlier thread went unresolved by Dell support.

Aside from causing blue screen crashouts, Dell’s SupportAssist suite has previously been found to contain significant vulnerabilities, allowing remote attackers to gain administrative privileges on Dell PCs.

A heavyweight games industry veteran says he is building a fully European alternative to popular game engines from American and Chinese companies. Arjan Brussee shared the plans in an interview hosted by the De Technoloog podcast (Dutch), reports the Video Games Chronicle.

Dutchman Brussee has some serious games industry credentials. His stint at Epic Games was split over two eras, the first one, which saw him programming the Jazz Jackrabbit games in the 90s. Then, from 2018 to 2023, Brussee returned to Epic as the global director of product management for Unreal Engine. Between those eras, Brussee became the co-founder of Guerrilla Games from 2003 (Killzone franchise), and Boss Key Productions from 2012.

The Immense Engine, a European alternative

Most readers will be familiar with game engines like Unreal and Unity (the latter was founded in Denmark but relocated to San Francisco in 2009). Brussee reckons that a European game engine will rival these offerings and alternatives from the Chinese, but The Immense Engine will be “fully European-hosted, built by Europeans, and complies with European rules and guidelines.”

Having a Europe-first game engine could be a boon for 3D simulations in defense or logistics on the continent. If it is built to adhere to the aforementioned European rules and guidelines, this could broaden its adoption in big government and local government projects, too.

Work already is underway with The Immense Engine, and other than gaming, it is clearly being developed with practical representations of 3D worlds in mind. We recently reported on the Japanese local government using U.S. game engines for large civil engineering projects, so Brussee is thinking along similar lines.

There has to be an AI angle

Software coding and AI are inevitably going to be further intertwined going forward, and Brussee embraces rather than shuns this trend. In the podcast interview, he said he sees opportunities with the rise of AI, especially by making the most of fewer human resources.

“If you are smart and know how to put a good framework of AI agents to work, you can do the work of ten or fifteen people,” noted the game industry veteran. Brussee strongly suggests the use of AI agents in developing the engine, but whether that means there will be AI tools built into The Immense Engine remains to be seen.