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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A technology enthusiast claims that the oldest GUI application that still runs on Windows 11 is CDPLAYER.EXE from November 1992. The app had to run on Microsoft’s newest consumer OS without modifications or emulation involved to be chosen as the ‘winner’ of their experiment. Blogger Enlyth expected something from the early NT era, as Windows 11 doesn’t support 16-bit apps, despite its strong backward compatibility. Finding an app that is almost 34 years old that still works with a simple double-click is a remarkable result.

At the beginning of their journey to find the oldest Windows UI app that just works on Microsoft’s newest OS, Enlyth confirmed FREECELL.EXE from February 1993 would still run without issues. This game was distributed alongside the Win32s environment, designed to allow some 32-bit applications to run on the 16-bit operating systems like Windows 3.1 and 3.11. Win32s was made available in beta in October 1992, but went mainstream in July 1993.

A tip Enlyth received via a tech forum suggested that FREECELL.EXE was a candidate for the oldest GUI app remaining compatible with Windows 11. However, the blogger wasn’t satisfied with this easy win and dug through “some early NT 3.1 pre-release versions that seemed promising.” Build 347 caught the detective’s eye, specifically CDPLAYER.EXE, linked on Nov 16, 1992. That indeed seems to be the earliest GUI app that works without modification or emulation on Windows 11. But this knowledge almost defied Enlyth’s eye as their system is, like many modern systems, optical-drive-less. Luckily, adding a small DLL (cdemu.dll) allowed Enlyth to emulate a CD drive and demonstrate that the 1992-era application still functions as intended.

I wanted to verify that CDPLAYER.EXE was still usable on the latest Windows 11 release. Unfortunately, the multi-part.ARJ archive of Windows NT 3.1 that I found on Archive.org threw up errors when I tried to pick through its contents. I have a USB-attached optical drive that plays CD audio in Windows 11, so I thought I could get CDPLAYER.EXE to run without any extra DLL.

Lastly, Enlyth wanted to push the envelope a little and see what even more ancient Windows apps might work if they got some help from the Winevdm project on 64-bit Windows. “Using otvdm does feel like cheating,” admitted the digital sleuth, and we’d agree. However, being able to run 16-bit apps in Windows 11 ratcheted back the wheels of time. The result was that Enlyth managed to enjoy “a fully playable version of REVERSI.EXE dated 15-Nov-1985.” That’s a GUI-driven game distributed as part of Windows 1.01 and is roughly 41 years old.

Is most programming code now made by AI? That's not hard to believe given the number of testimonies, but we now have exact figures behind that statement. GitHub, the world's largest code repository, says that over the course of this year, it added 4 million CPU cores, 160PB of storage, and 50 Tb/s of networking capacity to keep up with the influx of AI-generated code.

Raw repository activity saw a massive year-over-year increase, as per GitHub's technical report. Code commits (adding/removing code) grew sixfold, while merged pull requests (finalizing a feature or bugfix) jumped 4x.

The multipliers sound impressive enough, but the exponential growth pattern is even more so: half a year ago in April, there were already 1.4 billion commits per month — a figure that rose to 2.9 billion in August, and now sits at 7.4 billion for September. GitHub saw 17.9 billion code pushes in the past 12 months, which is more than all of 2024 and 2025 put together.

Predictably, the company says that agentic AI is behind the dizzying rise in the amount of code, and the need for it to both upgrade and rethink its technological infrastructure. By last September, over 40% of pull requests were started by an agent, up from 17% in March 2026. Moreover, repositories that kick off using AI generally see eight times the activity compared to handcrafted operations.

All this code activity puts disproportionate strain on CI/CD pipelines. In modern development, whenever someone commits code or merges a pending pull request, many actions are triggered: for example, checking for leftover "to-do" items, visually arranging code for consistency (linting), and running code and integration tests to check that the new code doesn't break existing functionality within the application and works correctly with associated programs, services, and APIs.

Triggering all of the above for each commit and/or pull request means that GitHub's hardware requirements have ballooned, now requiring massive amounts of computing power and I/O. The rise was so intense that the firm even had to reengineer its backend to try to decouple storage from compute as much as possible. Given how quickly demand is rising, GitHub is likely to have to upgrade sooner rather than later.

A new "Advanced Performance Extensions (APX)" option has been spotted in a version of Windows 11 made available to Windows Insiders on October 23, with the feature set to enable a boost in application performance on compatible chips. At the moment, those chips don't exist. But when they do, this feature is the one that you'll want to flick on if you're using one of them. The new toggle was reported by Neowin after it was first spotted by a poster on the X social network. The feature debuted in build 29295 as an Experimental build, so it's unlikely that it will make its way to the version of publicly available Windows 11 anytime soon.

Intel announced APX back in 2023, confirming that it features 16 additional general-purpose registers and three-operand instruction formats with a new data destination register for many integer instructions. Doubling the number of general-purpose registers from 16 to 32 will allow code compiled with APX to run with 10% fewer loads and 20% fewer stores than Intel 64's baseline, says Intel. APX has been available in the GCC compiler since version 14, with subsequent versions up to GCC 17, which is targeting a 2027 code freeze, adding additional support. LLVM and MSVC have preliminary support, as well. Although enablement has been going steady for the past two years, developers will still need to recompile their applications with the proper flags for APX-capable CPUs to leverage those instructions.

Not that there's any real need to rush just yet. The fact that no APX-capable chips are on sale yet means that enabling the feature in Windows 11 build 29295 does nothing currently. But it's clear that Microsoft is getting its ducks in a row ahead of time. Intel's Nova Lake Core Ultra 400-series chips are expected to be the first to feature APX support, but they won't break cover until early 2027. Even then, it's likely that the 28-core version will debut first, with the 52-core model made to wait until later in the year. These are consumer chips, of course, with Intel's Xeon 7 'Diamond Rapids' bringing APX support and up to 256 cores to the data center, also in 2027.

The good news is that you might not have to buy a new chip to enjoy improved Windows 11 performance. Five years after Windows 11's debut, Microsoft has already said that it's working to make its operating system play more nicely with machines with just 8GB of RAM. But what Microsoft gives with one hand, it soon takes away: an expansion of the Windows 11 Memory Integrity feature will reduce gaming performance on some systems.

Professional Windows crusher NTDEV has showcased their next-generation tool for compressing Windows 11 into the tiniest of tiny installs. Based on their newest and unreleased Pico11, they managed to create a “proof of concept I put together to see how small I could make a Windows 11 ISO while keeping a working desktop and a few familiar apps.” Moreover, it’s a perfect installer to shove on a 700MB CD-ROM without wasting space, with this demo version weighing in at 699,811,840 bytes.

The test system (a VM with 4GB allocated) used around 883MB of RAM.

In the above video, NTDEV demos a freshly installed Windows 11 ISO that had been processed with Pico11. The desktop looks familiar to anyone currently using Windows 11. “Calculator and Settings still open, Notepad saves files, and Paint still lets me draw questionable logos,” highlights the dev. However, it is also pointed out that “Task Manager might look a little older than you remember.” The older Task Manager seems to be a lightweight legacy version. It may have been possibly swiped from Windows 7, but its exact origin isn’t divulged by NTDEV.

At this time, NTDEV admits what you see is “an experiment, not a replacement for a normal Windows installation,” and that’s mainly because Windows Update and general servicing have been removed to fit inside the constraints of CDR capacity. If you are interested in creating Windows installs like this, the good news is that NTDEV says they are working on adding what they describe as Pico11 capabilities to the Tiny11 builder tool, which you can find on GitHub.

Tiny11 has already demonstrated impressive Windows 11 ISO building capabilities with its Tiny11 mode, Tiny11 Core mode, and Custom mode. Pico11 sounds most closely related to Tiny11 Core as it eschews servicing and recovery support. However, there appears to be some more under-the-hood tweaking, which may have been evidenced in this new showcase by the presence of the older version of Task Manager.

Tiny11 has historically been responsible for even smaller Windows 11 installs, but the extreme 100MB distillation of the OS, for example, came without any Windows 11 UI. Builds could also be remarkable for using tiny amounts of RAM – as little as 176MB. More typical and useful were custom builds powered by Tiny11 where 'bloatware' was removed and that weighed in at around the 2GB mark.

Hopefully we will learn more about Pico11 and get greater insight into its capabilities soon.

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

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

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

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

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

Gamers can now experiment with playing their favorite Steam titles on a jailbroken PlayStation 5. The game launcher is actually based on the Playden launcher designed for macOS and adapted for the PlayStation, allowing you to sign in with your Steam account and install games from your library directly to the console. Playden for PS5 is a GitHub project that lets you run Steam games on the console, notes VideoCardz. When you launch a game on Playden for PS5, it sets a private Windows environment and is run through prospero-win, which is a PS5 port of Wine.

Note that the launcher itself does not run the game — instead it builds a separate PS5 app created for the game that you installed, allowing the Steam title to appear as a separate tile on the console’s home screen. Aside from that, its files, settings, and crashes are isolated from the launcher and other games. There’s also a separate runtime kit that handles Wine for PS5, the required graphics drivers, the Windows environment, and a template app shell for your games.

While Playden for PS5 successfully launches Steam games, it does not necessarily mean a smooth start-to-end experience for every title. The creator notes that it’s still in the Alpha stage of development, with X user v7dt1 saying that even though they were able to launch a game, it eventually crashed. On the other hand, u/Cevap shared on the r/PS5_Jailbreak subreddit that they were able to play Portal through the launcher with no issues, except for the lack of a mouse cursor and the inability to hit ESC to open the options menu. Still, the developer of the launcher lists several compatible games, including American Truck Simulator, Cyberpunk 2077, Doom Eternal, GTA: Vice City, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, and more.

Of course, users need a jailbroken PlayStation 5 if they want to use this launcher. But aside from that, the creator said that using it poses several risks, including the fact that it’s an unofficial Steam client. While there haven’t been any problems with third-party Steam clients, the app notes that Valve does not officially support it and any risk that comes with the use of the launcher “is yours to accept.”

Sony announced that it will cease physical game disc production by January 2028, which did not sit well among many fans. In fact, a petition against the move has nearly hit 200,000 signatures just a week after the announcement. Alongside that announcement, we started seeing a number of jailbreaks and emulators for the PS5, allowing users to take back control of their hardware, likely to the chagrin of Sony executives.

Windows XP became available at retailers for the first time on this day back in 2001. It was ushered in with Microsoft's largest and glitziest launch event since Windows 95, but the bigger news was its delivery of an OS with modern underpinnings and features. Thankfully, it lived up to the hype and would ensure nearly 13 years of favor among enthusiasts, but that might be partly due to the failure of the unloved Vista.

The NYC launch event for Windows XP in 2001 was the centerpiece of a lavish $500 million campaign Microsoft had planned for the new OS. However, celebrations were somewhat muted due to the aftermath of 9/11. Microsoft actually dumped its intended ‘Prepare to Fly’ launch slogan for ‘Yes You Can’ for this obvious reason.

Nevertheless, the launch was still a significant event and featured NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani joining Bill Gates on stage. Gates framed the big launch as evidence that “New York is back and open for business.” There was also a free lunchtime concert in Bryant Park featuring Sting, followed by a Times Square NYC takeover. Meanwhile, retail stores like CompUSA, Circuit City, and Best Buy opened at midnight for eager tech beavers to grab a copy of Windows XP at its freshest.

At the launch presentation, Gates said that the debut of Windows XP represented the end of the era of MS-DOS, which had underpinned a UI or shell known as Windows for many years. For consumers, that stretched all the way up to the much maligned Windows Me.

As we mentioned in our 40-year retrospective of Windows last year, Windows XP was the real ‘Start Me Up’ moment. That’s because it brought the Windows NT core to consumer PCs – replacing the archaic DOS and its restrictions and drivers. Thus, Windows XP would become well regarded for reliability, performance, and security (after a few teething troubles), and its new UI was claimed to make tasks 25% easier to complete, too.

Some of the technical features that would be widely welcomed in XP included USB plug-and-play support that worked, built-in CD burning software, and ClearType support as new LCDs started to usurp bulky CRTs on desks.

During Windows XP’s supported life (October 2001 to April 2014), there would be three major Service Pack (SP) releases. It also saw DirectX 8.1 to 9.0c arrive for gamers. In the meantime, Windows Vista made something of an unwanted splash, launched to consumers in January 2007. Windows XP’s lengthy extended support meant that folks could skip Vista entirely and move straight to Windows 7 when it hit retail and new-build systems in October 2009.

Overall, it is interesting to observe that Windows XP’s lifespan was actually over two years longer than Windows 10, which was (in)famously launched as “the last version of Windows.”

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

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

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

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

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

While Windows overclockers have spent years lazily sliding UI controls to adjust frequency curves and tweak voltages inside Ryzen Master, Linux users have largely had to treat their CPU tuning like an archaeological dig into the opaque veil of UEFI/BIOS firmware. Well, rejoice, Linux users, as AMD has officially published a fresh set of patches for the Linux kernel introducing AOD (AMD Overclocking Driver) support for Ryzen processors, Phoronix reports.

Instead of forcing developers to reverse-engineer closed-source firmware hooks or rely on messy, machine-specific ACPI workarounds, this new kernel driver is a direct pipeline to AMD's platform adjustments. By exposing core tuning capabilities straight through the standard sysfs interface, AMD is laying down an official, upstreamed foundation for software-level CPU management.

Right out of the gate, the driver handles platform-level SMT toggling, memory clock visibility, and power tunables. That's right: you can now toggle Simultaneous Multithreading (SMT) dynamically through this driver interface. That works through the CPU hotplugging mechanism and acts as a clean alternative to passing the old 'nosmt' boot parameter to the kernel. The new driver also allows real-time monitoring of memory clocks, and initial power controls are being wired up, too.

Now, if you're expecting a polished, one-click official AMD application equivalent to Ryzen Master for Linux, just pump the brakes. AMD is following its open-source amdgpu graphics driver playbook here, building the kernel plumbing and then leaving the user-space presentation layer entirely up to the community. That means you're going to have to wait for utilities like CoreCtrl to build out interfaces for this new driver, but it shouldn't be long now before that work gets underway in earnest.

This approach is arguably a better fit for the Linux philosophy anyway. Because the controls are being exposed via clean kernel sysfs nodes, it won't be long before independent developers integrate these knobs into powerhouse open-source monitoring and tuning suites, or even write dedicated desktop environment extensions specifically for the purpose of tweaking Ryzen processors.

The new patches are currently winding their way through review on the mailing lists, meaning mainstream kernel integration is on the horizon. For a DIY enthusiast who loves squeezing every last MHz out of silicon while maintaining a fully open-source software stack, this is easily the most exciting hardware-enablement milestone I've seen in a long time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After a few revisions of his position on AI-assisted contributions to the Linux kernel, Linus Torvalds has posted his own first LLM-assisted patch. The development branch purports to fix an old issue with massive cache contention when many CPUs are reading the same file — a scenario potentially encountered when using shared libraries, databases, and web servers. Several developers had already made attempts over the years at fixing the issue, all with varied results, none quite ideal as an all-encompassing solution.

Torvalds posted his own draft for solving the problem in early 2024, and has used it on his own laptop since that time. However, he recently took the plunge and decided to "try to actually solve this thing using an LLM." He's now posted his solution in a development branch, and claims that he's seen a 23x performance improvement in a dedicated synthetic benchmark, though he notes that actual real-world impact will be far less significant, as "no real load" will witness those figures. If we had to guess, this improvement would benefit server workloads far more than desktop machines.

Over time, Torvalds has broadly taken a pro-AI stance on LLM tooling, at least within the purview of the tightly controlled, review-heavy environment of the Linux kernel code. Last July, he stated he's "willing to absolutely put [his] foot down" on AI haters, pointing out that an automated code review tool the kernel team uses outperforms humans, and that it caught basic programming mistakes that shouldn't have been submitted in the first place.

The team is even changing its policy to no longer require that patch authors disclose they used an AI tool when generating their code. Torvalds once again took an assertive stance, reiterating that users should treat LLMs as yet another tool, likening it to compilers or editors. In his view, he simply expects that "people do their best and [...] understand what they are doing."

Some might say that few people in the world are better-suited to properly employ an LLM than Torvalds, and by extension, kernel maintainers. There's an entire universe of difference between a senior master programmer using the LLM to speed up the boring parts of his work, and some newbie with a credit card going "claude make linux faster plz no mistakes."

However, It's not all roses. Thanks to how adept AI agents have become at recognizing common security flaw patterns, the Linux security mailing list became "unmanageable" earlier in the year. Linux has been fixing CVEs at an astonishingly rapid pace of around 2,000 per release. Still, the team's hand is being forced into dropping older hardware drivers, as they're often the target of numerous security reports, despite their negligible install base.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

After the rough reception of Windows Vista, Windows 7 launched in 2009 to largely positive reviews. Even 17 years later, it remains one of the most beloved versions of Windows ever released. But how does this nearly two-decade-old operating system hold up on modern hardware? We managed to install Windows 7 on a modern PC and put it to the test across eight DirectX 11 games and two DirectX 9 titles to see how its gaming performance compares to Windows 11 today. Surprisingly, Windows 7 still carves out many notable wins over its successor.

At launch, Windows 7 was very similar to Windows Vista in many respects. Vista had introduced significant changes under the hood compared to Windows XP, including technologies such as SuperFetch, ReadyBoost, ReadyDrive, new asynchronous APIs, and other I/O improvements. It also introduced native processor power management and various memory-management enhancements. On the visual side, Vista was the first version of Windows to feature Windows Aero, with its distinctive glass-like window borders.

Windows 7 retained many of these underlying technologies while addressing several of Vista’s biggest criticisms. One notable improvement was greater control over User Account Control (UAC), allowing users to adjust how frequently they received UAC prompts. In Vista, these prompts could appear far too often, becoming a major source of frustration for many users.

Windows 7 also benefited from something that had nothing to do with the operating system itself: more powerful hardware. When Vista launched, many mid-range and budget PCs struggled to deliver smooth performance, particularly when using more demanding visual features such as Windows Aero. By 2009, however, PC hardware had advanced considerably, and the performance required to run these features smoothly was no longer a significant concern for most users.

The Challenge of Running Windows 7 on a Modern PC

Getting Windows 7 running on modern hardware is not as straightforward as installing a current version of Windows. At 17 years old, the operating system predates many of the technologies used by modern PCs, meaning driver support is extremely limited. For example, Windows 7 does not include native NVMe or USB 3.0 support, so the necessary drivers have to be slipstreamed into the installation ISO. Microsoft did eventually release patches that added NVMe support, but without injecting the appropriate drivers into the ISO, the Windows 7 installer will not recognize an NVMe drive.

Our system is based on AMD’s AM5 platform (with the full system specifications detailed later in the article), which presents another limitation: there are no official Windows 7 chipset drivers for the platform.

Fortunately, we are using an RDNA 2 GPU, which does have Windows 7 driver support, allowing us to use a relatively modern graphics card for our testing.

The motherboard is also an important consideration. Modern motherboards that have dropped CSM (Compatibility Support Module) and legacy boot support can make installing Windows 7 considerably more difficult, and in some cases may prevent the operating system from booting altogether. Fortunately, our motherboard still supports CSM, so this was not an issue for our setup.

Test System

Windows 7 system specs

• AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT
• Ryzen 7 9800X3D
• 64GB (2x32GB) G.SKILL Flare X5 DDR5 @6000 MHz CL30
• Seagate Lightsaber FireCuda (530) NVMe SSD
• ASUS ROG STRIX B850-F Gaming WiFi
• Corsair Nautilus 360 RS AIO Cooler
• HAGS not supported by driver
• Windows 7 Ultimate 64-bit Service Pack 1 (Build 7601)
• AMD Adrenalin 22.6.1 for Windows 7 (2022)

Windows 11 system specs

• AMD Radeon RX 6950 XT
• Ryzen 7 9800X3D
• 64GB (2x32GB) G.SKILL Flare X5 DDR5 @6000 MHz CL30
• Seagate Lightsaber FireCuda (530) NVMe SSD
• ASUS ROG STRIX B850-F Gaming WiFi
• Corsair Nautilus 360 RS AIO Cooler
• HAGS not supported by driver
• Windows 11 25H2 (Build 26200.9278)
• AMD Adrenalin 22.6.1 for Windows 11 (2022)

For Windows 7, we disabled Secure Boot, enabled CSM, and set Boot Device Control to Legacy OPROM Only. Enabling CSM means that we no longer have access to Resizable BAR (it's not supported anyway). For Windows 11, we disabled VBS (Virtualization-Based Security) and HVCI (Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity).

It is important to note that while we used Adrenalin 22.6.1 for both Windows 11 and Windows 7 testing, the two packages contain different internal driver versions. Although both packages were released in June 2022, the Windows 11 driver is based on a more advanced codebase than the Windows 7 driver.

In both cases, we performed a clean install of each operating system and filled the SSD to about 50-60%.

Performance Testing

We tested ten games in total: eight using DirectX 11 and two using DirectX 9. The DirectX 11 titles are the primary focus, as both systems support them natively. By comparison, our Windows 11 system will run DirectX 9 games through the D3D9On12 mapping layer, while our Windows 7 system will run them natively. There are ways to get around the use of D3D9On12 on Windows 11, but we want to evaluate the out-of-the-box experience that most gamers would encounter. As a result, we expect Windows 7 to have an advantage in the DirectX 9 titles.

It will become apparent in the results below that the advantages of each operating system will vary depending on whether we are CPU-limited or GPU-limited.

Metro 2033 Redux (DX11)

Metro 2033 Redux was released in 2014 and features a new lighting engine, higher visual fidelity, and new locations for certain levels. The game is predominantly GPU-bound, but there are moments when GPU utilization drops sharply as you traverse the game world. At these points, the CPU becomes the limiting factor, resulting in a corresponding drop in performance.

Although Windows 11 delivers a higher average frame rate, Windows 7 handles the CPU-related performance drops much better, resulting in significantly stronger 1% lows. Installing the AMD chipset drivers and enabling Resizable BAR improves 1% lows on Windows 11 slightly, but it still falls well behind Windows 7.

Windows 11’s more advanced graphics driver appears to provide an advantage in GPU-limited scenarios, while Windows 7’s lower CPU overhead offers more consistent frame pacing, though with lower peak performance.

Batman: Arkham Origins (DX11)

Batman: Arkham Origins runs on a modified version of Unreal Engine 3 and uses several DX11 enhancements such as Tessellation, Ambient Occlusion HBAO+, Percentage Closer Soft Shadows (PCSS), and Depth of Field (DoF).

When CPU-limited at 1080p, Windows 7 once again puts in a strong showing, outperforming Windows 11 in both average frame rate and 1% lows. Surprisingly, Windows 7 also comes out ahead at 4K in Origins, though with a far smaller advantage. As we will see throughout the remainder of our testing, however, this is a rare occurrence. Even so, Windows 7 maintains a slight performance advantage over Windows 11 at 4K in this title.

Batman: Arkham Knight (DX11)

Batman: Arkham Knight was both a critical and commercial success, despite a notoriously troubled PC launch plagued by severe bugs and major performance issues. Visually, however, the game still holds up remarkably well, and modern hardware is more than capable of brute-forcing this demanding PC port.

Windows 7 again delivers higher performance at 1080p when we are CPU-limited. Windows 11 jumps ahead when we become GPU-limited at 1440p and 4K.

Batman: Arkham City (DX11)

Batman: Arkham City was the second entry in the series, following Arkham Asylum, and the first to support DirectX 11. This introduced features such as tessellation, which adds greater geometric detail to characters and environments.

In Arkham City, our system is GPU-bound at every resolution tested, giving Windows 11 the advantage across the board.

The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (DX11)

The Witcher 3 faced some controversy at launch over reductions in image quality compared to its initial reveal. CD Projekt Red quickly released a patch addressing these concerns and improving the game’s visuals. From a performance perspective, however, the game was extremely demanding at launch.

While the game is very GPU bound in general, at 1080p we did encounter a slight CPU bottleneck, which gave Windows 7 an advantage in 1% lows. At 1440p and 4K, Windows 11 takes a slight lead.

Control (DX11)

Control is the newest title we tested for this comparison, having launched in 2019. While the game introduced several ray tracing features, these were exclusive to the DirectX 12 API. Since Windows 7 does not support DirectX 12, we tested Control using DirectX 11 on both operating systems. Even without ray tracing, Control remains the most graphically advanced title in our Windows 11 vs Windows 7 comparison.

Windows 11 wins across the board. This is not a surprise, as we are GPU-limited across all resolutions tested.

Hitman: Absolution (DX11)

Hitman: Absolution was released in 2012 and was the first game to use the Glacier 2 engine. The updated engine could handle crowds of up to 1200 characters, which was unprecedented at the time. The game also featured several DirectX 11 enhancements, including global illumination and tessellation.

This is another game that pushes the GPU hard, regardless of resolution. Our test system was GPU-limited even at 1080p.

Hitman 2 (DX11)

Hitman 2 was released in 2018, making it the second-newest game in our operating system comparison. It features detailed environments, dense crowds, and full reflections across many surfaces, making it an impressive-looking title overall.

Hitman 2 is another example where our test system is GPU-limited at every resolution, giving Windows 11 a clean sweep across the board.

Batman: Arkham Asylum (DX9)

We now move to our first DirectX 9 game. As previously mentioned, Windows 7 should have an advantage here because our Windows 11 system must use the D3D9On12 mapping layer for DirectX 11 games. But just how much of an advantage?

Significant advantages for Windows 7 in average frame rate and 1% lows, especially at 1080p and 1440p. The advantage is reduced at 4K, but the performance is still smoother overall in Windows 7. Another translation layer, such as DXVK, may close the gap.

Borderlands 2 (DX9)

Borderlands 2 is our second DirectX 9 game and the final overall game tested.

Once again, another massive win for Windows 7 at the lower resolutions. The performance at 4K is virtually identical.

Bottom Line

Windows 11 is optimized for GPU-hungry games

The results are interesting, but perhaps not entirely surprising. The DirectX 9 results are largely in line with our expectations, given that Windows 11 must run these games through the D3D9On12 mapping layer, yielding substantial advantages for Windows 7.

The DirectX 11 results are more nuanced, but a clear trend emerges: Windows 7 has the advantage when we are CPU-limited, while Windows 11 performs better when we are GPU-limited. This makes sense given that Windows 11 uses graphics drivers built on a more advanced codebase, while Windows 7 is a leaner operating system with fewer background processes and, consequently, lower CPU overhead.

Microsoft has recently detailed its K2 plan, which aims to improve the performance and reliability of Windows 11. We hope these continued efforts to improve Windows 11 pay off.

The lower CPU performance we observed in Windows 11 cannot be attributed to its most notable security features, such as VBS (Virtualization-Based Security) and HVCI (Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity), as we disabled both during testing. Notably, Windows 7 does not support VBS or HVCI at the software level, while Windows 11 supports hardware virtualization extensions (such as Intel VT-x or AMD-V) and Second Level Address Translation (SLAT). Additionally, fixed-function hardware can reduce the impact of virtualization to varying degrees, based on the CPU architecture's capabilities. However, additional telemetry and other background services still pop up and use precious CPU cycles.

Using the latest chipset drivers and enabling features such as Resizable BAR does not help Windows 11 close the gap in CPU-limited scenarios by any significant margin. Ultimately, we would like to see Windows 11 become leaner and more efficient, as our results suggest there is still some performance left on the table, particularly on the CPU side.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A new compression model, called CRAM, offers a different path to compression that avoids swap entirely by keeping the compressed data in memory, and it offers up to 452x the performance of ZRAM. I was a kid in the 1990s when the idea seemed so simple to me: I can use PKZIP to compress my files, so why can't we do that with RAM? Indeed, I am not a singular genius, and many other people had the same idea, so memory compression has been a feature of most operating systems for a long time. In Linux, the most popular options are zswap and ZRAM, but both of these options are fundamentally swap-layer features. CRAM is a new take that claims to boost performance tremendously.

CRAM was conceptualized by Gregory Price and his team at Meta. The central realization that seems to have spurred the development of CRAM is that the largest portion of the performance hit from compressed memory isn't the compression; that's tiny. No, the largest hit apparently stems mostly from the fault itself and the swap behavior. So the thinking seems to have been "what if we just do zram, but completely in memory instead of as swap?"

That's a gross simplification of an enormously complex project, but what CRAM seems to be doing is making use of mechanisms Linux already has to enable radically higher-performance compressed memory, particularly on reads. It uses a private NUMA node (essentially, a ghost CPU) instead of pretending to be a block device, and this lets Linux continue using all of its memory semantics, including migration and ballooning, to manage CRAM.

A critical part is the "Chicken Bit," which tells Linux that it has to stop trying to use CRAM while it is busy managing allocations. See, compressed memory seems straightforward until you start actually thinking about it. Compressibility of data varies tremendously based on what you're compressing, all the way from big piles of zeroes (perfectly compressible) up to already-compressed data (non-compressible). Given that, how do you know how much "logical" RAM you have when some of it is compressed? And how do you know when you're going to run out?

CRAM hasn't actually solved that problem yet, it seems; the slides I'm working from seem to establish this as an unsolved problem and an area of ongoing research. But the Chicken Bit is one way it can at least stop cascading failures (colorfully called a "poison storm" in the presentation) from happening when writes outpace CRAM's ability to allocate them.

Because CRAM is stored in RAM and treated as RAM, with full cacheline/byte access, it can be accessed in a read-only fashion with little delay; just the cost of hardware-offloaded compression. As a result, CRAM "runs at DRAM speed," as the creator says in the slide above. While the graph already looks impressive, it's a logarithmic scale; CRAM, in the worst case, is doing 489 million operations per second versus ZRAM's 1.1 million. It's barely comparable.

Even when you enable writes, CRAM is still much faster than ZRAM; 5.4x in the worst tested case of 20% writes. That's a huge drop from the 452x read-only case, but keep your context; a 5.4x speedup is still titanic. The massive performance cliff when writes are involved comes down to the need to page fault and migrate folios back to the original NUMA domain, as you can't write directly to compressed data; you'd corrupt everything.

My explanation of CRAM might not be completely correct; I wasn't at the Linux Plumbers' Conference in Prague to hear the presentation directly, so I'm working off of the slides available from the session information site (h/t to Phoronix for the spot) I think I've managed to grasp the gist of what Price is getting at, though.

While the obvious target of the work here (given its origin at Meta Platforms) is big Linux servers, ZRAM and Zswap are used all over the Linux ecosystem, even on machines as constrained as the Steam Deck. Many distributions enable one or the other by default. CRAM seems like it could offer a considerable speed-up for some of these machines, so hopefully it finds its way into the kernel once the remaining implementation questions are answered.

Windows 11 was released five years ago, on October 5, 2021. It feels like it's been around longer, as Microsoft’s latest OS has generated numerous headlines, mostly concerning the pain it put users through. We’ve all aged with it. Things might be settling down, at last, though, as the 26H2 update started to roll out just a few days ago, and it is not promising a revolution, simply a “predictable and low-disruption” update.

After the crowd-pleasing Windows 10’s return to form, it was all too predictable that Windows 11 would misstep in some unexpected way, or actually in several ways. Microsoft is pretty creative with its misreading of the market. At release, the biggest issue with the new OS was that it sought to force lots of capable hardware into retirement. This issue churned for months, with folks wrangling system files to bypass minimum system requirements, and Microsoft seemingly shifting the goalposts around at the same time.

Another early controversy was Microsoft continuing to push users into setting up Windows using an online Microsoft account, and cutting off avenues of avoidance. Again, communities had to fight the OS to make it work the way they wanted, often with a simple local account. This struggle continues to this day. Microsoft paints the requirement as good for users, providing OneDrive backups, syncing across devices, and providing extra recovery and security features. However, forced online accounts are also a commercial vehicle for selling digital goods and services.

Things had settled down in Windows land by 2024, but Microsoft spoiled the broth again with the introduction of the Copilot+ PC era. In some ways, it showed some foresight in sensing that AI was going to be big. Nevertheless, this was another clear misstep, with gaffes/scares like the AI-centerpiece Windows Recall app.

Copilot+ PC’s failure was confirmed by Microsoft and its OEM partners when they quietly killed off all Copilot+ PC branding earlier this year. For now, built-in AI is being de-emphasized, and Microsoft is looking at a cross-platform agentic model.

A change of direction

This year has also seen Microsoft publicly realize that people need Windows 11 as a foundation for their productivity tasks and gaming fun. The OS isn’t the destination. Thus, in spring, execs promised to clean up and optimize Windows 11 for its basic everyday use. Going forward, Microsoft has dangled the carrot of faster built-in apps, lower memory/resource use, and other foundational OS optimizations.

Windows 11 26H2 was released to consumers last week. As a battle-scarred Windows veteran, I’ve not clicked the update button yet on any of my machines, but there are reasons to be optimistic that it doesn’t deliver new nightmares. Version 26H2 is being distributed with the promise to deliver a “predictable and low-disruption” update. Boring is good.

Despite the aforementioned controversies, as well as the usual collection of silly/scary bugs that needed ironing out, people are still using Windows 11. It is widely adopted and dominates the PC landscape. MacOS and Linux have made inroads in terms of users, but Windows still looks mostly unassailable on roughly 76% of all desktop/laptop computers. Among Windows versions, it holds nearly 72% of the market, with Windows 10 rapidly declining and dipping under 28% at the most recent count.

When the U.S. government imposed sanctions on the International Criminal Court (ICC) in The Hague, Netherlands, it also meant that its chief prosecutor lost access to Microsoft services, including email. It was then that the Dutch government decided that it was time to make plans that would reduce its reliance on software and services that were made or based in the United States. The result of that decision was DAWO, or Digitaal Autonome Werkomgeving Overheid (Digital Autonomous Work Environment for Government in English). And work is underway to bring it to fruition.

As Tweakers reports, via It's FOSS, the program was aimed at refreshing the technologies used by the Dutch government in such a way that it would no longer be in a situation where it could lose access to critical systems at the whim of a foreign country. From operating systems to office software and cloud services, a new system had to be devised and rolled out.

That system is built around NixOS, with three service providers tasked with the job. While SSC-ICT, DICTU, and DUO-ICT were the three chosen, the whole thing is overseen by the Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations.

From a technical point of view, the use of NixOS was a key one. Its use of the Nix package manager means that each package is installed in its own directory with immutable and signed contents. That alone means that the setup is incredibly easy to reproduce across multiple machines, something that is an obvious benefit when dealing with different facets of a government. It's been suggested that up to 90% of a configuration can be carried over from one deployment to another. And as a bonus, NixOS can also run on computers that Windows 11 would usually balk at.

While the switch from Microsoft software and services to brand-new alternatives is a long and complicated process, steps are very much being made in the right direction. Eight municipalities are running trial programs right now, with the first stable version of the platform expected to be ready by the end of 2027.

The Netherlands is far from the only European country to be concerned about the ability of the United States' government to cut off access to software and services. Germany has already jumped ship from Microsoft-based systems, while Denmark and France are also in the process of a similar rethinking of their tech stacks as the one carried out by the Dutch.

It won’t be long until Linux enthusiasts will be able to complete a clean kernel build in under 10 seconds. Linux expert and Phoronix head honcho Michael Larabel said that “the coffee window is closing” in recent commentary that weighs computer processor advances and human / AI optimizations of the Kbuild code. What once used to be a computer processing task that provided a decent excuse for a coffee break now only allows enough time for a measured sip.

The source site’s determined Linux focus has meant that OS kernel compilation times have become a signature benchmark over the last two decades. Larabel notes that this once time-consuming process “can be done in now roughly 15 seconds.” It isn’t just advances in hardware and core counts pushing the envelope; compiling a defconfig x86-64 Linux kernel build has had many bottlenecks removed thanks to the work of Linux MM developer Lorenzo Stoakes and the assistance of AI/LLMs recently. Even modest processors have seen their compile times cut dramatically thanks to this work.

Larabel went hands-on with the latest v4 kernel patches from Lorenzo, and armed with his very powerful EPYC workstation, achieved “a 15-second kernel build!” Before the latest patches, the same system took over 22 seconds for the same compilation task.

The test system is extremely potent, though. Your home PC or laptop might still let you have enough time to go brew some coffee, as Larabel’s test rig features the following components:

• 2x AMD EPYC 9575F 64-core processors (so, 128 cores / 256 threads)
• 24 x 64GB DDR5-6400 memory modules
• Samsung PM1743 3.84TB PCIe Gen 5.0 NVMe SSD storage
• Stock Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

It is noted that the code compilation benchmarking didn’t employ a RAMdisk to aggressively tune the compile times

All the above timings mentioned are for the minimal default kernel compilation for x86-64 systems. The Phoronix chief also timed the compilation of a Linux kernel with ‘allmodconfig’ with thousands of drivers and subsystems enabled. This precipitates far longer compile times. On the above beefy system, though, the latest Lorenzo patches drove the time down from 169 seconds to 134 seconds. So, this other milestone is approaching the two-minute mark.

Phoronix is now taking bets on AMD (Zen 6) EPYC 9686F systems, with MRDIMMs and PCIe Gen6 storage pushing defconfig x86-64 Linux kernel compilation times under the 10-second mark.

A week and change ago, the U.S. Congress saw yet another anti-piracy bill introduced, H.R. 10364, or by its full name, the American Copyright Protection Act of 2026 (ACPA). It would require internet service providers, DNS resolving services, and virtual private networks, or VPNs, to block foreign websites or services hosting pirated content. The full text for the bill is now public, and it stands out due to its targeting of foreign services and affecting connections "from the United States." That gets complicated pretty quick when VPNs and content delivery networks (CDNs) are in play.

In ACPA, a standard blocking order needs to be court-issued, but would apply in 14 to 30 days. There's a special case seemingly targeted at live-streaming of sports events and shows, or "time-sensitive events" in legal parlance, which can shorten the blocking deadline as a judge sees fit, so long as the first leak of copyrighted material appears within 24 hours after going live.

Blocking at the ISP and DNS level is relatively straightforward. The vast majority of users utilize their ISP's DNS, so not resolving a given domain if it's in the blocklist for its customers is simple enough. Some people, like yours truly, rely on external DNS servers like Google DNS, Cloudflare's 1.1.1.1, OpenDNS, or NextDNS. These too could ignore specific DNS resolution requests from incoming users in the States, the accuracy of geolocation notwithstanding.

Small ISPs and services with less than 100,000 monthly users and public networks are exempted, as are root DNS and top-level domain (TLD) providers. However, the bill does not specify an exact means of blockage, and it's possible that service providers, out of fear of liability, may well take a heavy-handed approach. It also makes no mention of protecting or nullifying encryption.

When it comes to people using VPNs to bounce their connection through another location, things get tricky, as the bill does not clearly state what "from the United States" means, and even the definition of "foreign" can get fuzzy. Determining those might well be an exercise in quantum superposition, since any of the below scenarios can be argued to technically fulfill a criteria. We conjured up a handful of possibilities, though we're sure creative techies can come up with many more:

1. A connection to a VPN originates from the U.S.
2. A VPN's endpoint resides in the U.S.
3. A VPN's registered subscriber is a U.S. person, but they are currently outside the U.S.
4. The user uses a VPN to a foreign country, but connects to a website that's behind a CDN — does the CDN endpoint count as a destination?
5. Same, but the actual website is on U.S. soil despite being accessed from outside; is it "foreign" if the endpoint is?
6. For multi-hop VPNs, which hop or hops count towards determining a destination, especially if the traffic passes through the U.S. at some point?
7. A U.S. citizen in a boat in international waters using Starlink (a U.S. satellite ISP) counts as foreign?
8. A U.S. citizen goes abroad and uses roaming; are they considered foreign due to their physical location, or within the U.S. because they are using stateside infrastructure?

Additional legal questions can be raised with other technological factors. The use of shared IPs in hosting services, or CGNAT implementations, can create obfuscation of the concepts of "destination" and "origin." Is a DNS provider using Oblivious DoH, where the server responds to a request but doesn't know who made it and vice versa, liable? How does Apple's iCloud Private Relay feature, which hides a connection's source and destination from each other, sit within the legal framework? And with encrypted DNS, how much is the ISP liable, since they can't see which domain the user requested?

The neutrality of third-party service providers has come under fire in jurisdictions like France and Spain, where rulings mostly went against claims of neutrality. Some were forced to often enable large-scale blocking, an action likely to trigger more than a few false positives. A Spanish court ruled against Cloudflare and RootedCON for their part in providing CDNs, resulting in mass IP blockings. Over in France, a court found that VPNs do have to comply with blocking orders despite their job as "technical intermediaries."

For what it's worth, ACPA is only one of multiple bills sitting in Congress in the "introduced" state, and currently appears to have no sponsors, scheduled hearings, or even markup. If foreign activities are any indication, though, broad legislation like this may have substantial unintended consequences.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Not all manufacturers and vendors are equal.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your virtual bird can get lost or die

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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