There are few things that give me the heebie-jeebies more than overflowing toilets, burst pipes, and water damage. Ditto receiving a hefty, unexpected fee. So I wonder, how would it feel to be on the receiving end of both?

One Redditor can answer this question, though only thanks to the smoke and mirrors economy of digital manipulation. Apparently, they found themselves on the wrong end of an Airbnb host—"one of the biggest Airbnb companies of their state in Australia"—who attempted to get them to cough up $1,700 for an overflowed toilet, the evidence for which was, you guessed it, AI-generated.

So thanks, AI, in addition to making our precious PC memory very expensive, you've also made it very easy for people to attempt to fleece others using the humble commode.

Thankfully, it's AI that can also come to the rescue here, as Gemini is able to spot its own SynthID watermark in the fake image. Not that it wasn't suspected in the first place, given the Reddit post was shared on r/isthisAI.

This story has a happy ending, anyway:

"Good news everyone! I had this case resolved and deemed ineligible for the reimbursement they asked for... Also another detail I forgot to mention is that there is a floor underneath this one so if there are a few inches of water on the ground the entire first floor should be an aquarium!"

Regardless of how things went in this particular case, I'm using this as a reminder for myself: take pictures and record videos of any Airbnbs you stop at just before you leave. Better to be safe than sorry.

The first six months of the year were Steam's biggest, thanks to continued growth in back-catalogue sales as well as blockbuster new releases like Forza Horizon 6 and Resident Evil Requiem. As industry analysts Alinea Analytics report, September was another record breaker based on their estimated figures.

"Steam generated $1.7 billion in September 2026," Rhys Elliott, Alinea's head of market analysis, wrote, "the platform's best September to date, up 13% on the previous record, September of last year."

Wardogs was the smash hit new release of September, though Elliott noted the "hype cycles and virality" of comparably leftfield surprises Arc Raiders and Helldivers 2 were more sustained. "By this point, Helldivers 2 had made $130M (26.5% more than Wardogs) on Steam, while Arc Raiders had made about $125M (21.2% more)."

Still, Wardogs generated an estimated $86.9M on Steam in September. Elliott highlights Onimusha: Way of the Sword ($30.4M), The Blood of Dawnwalker ($26.9M), Bodycam ($24.2M), and EA Sports FC27 ($20.7M) as the other big new launches on Steam that month.

"Steam also had its best-ever Q3," Elliott wrote, "generating $5.5B (up 12% on last year). That brings the 2026 total to $16.5B so far, a 13% increase from the $14.5B Steam made in the first nine months of 2025. Given the insane release slate for the rest of the year, it's safe to say Steam's yearly revenue will blow past $20B for the first time."

He's not wrong about the rest of the year. Looking at just October's calendar shows how spoiled for choice we are.

As we're in the latter half of the year, quite a few brand new, 2026 games are on sale in Steam's latest seasonal discount party, the Autumn Sale.

Here are nine standouts we spotted:

There are lots more great games on sale at the moment: SteamDB's sales section is the best way we've found to sort through the on-sale games and look for gems.

I hate the new mascot for Meta's Muse AI assistant. The company unveiled the fluffy creature, as well as the Tamagotchi-esque Muse Charm device it will call home, (plus a VR headset that isn't really a VR headset) during its yearly Meta Connect conference last week.

The goal with Muse is to offer an AI assistant that "you can talk to in real time and reach in more places throughout your day," according to Meta. User's own Muse avatars can look wildly different, but the furry fiend default avatar that has so offended me is the company face of the entire Muse operation. The mascot's name is 'Jolly' on account of its "jolly and completely customizable character and personality," according to company CEO Mark Zuckerberg (via NBC News).

I hate that this little freak has inspired such a depth of feeling in me. I mean, just look at it. It also doesn't help that it looks a bit like a Doctor Who creature, the Adipose. Whenever I see this thing, I just think about that one scene where a character screams as she explodes into a puddle of sentient fat.

Setting that horrifying image aside, everything about the Muse mascot's design makes me cringe as a connoisseur of cute. The rounded edges, the fur, the blank but pleasant expression—it's all so laser-targeted to mass market appeal that it makes my skin crawl.

Wired compares it to a Labubu, and asks 'Meta’s Muse Is Adults-Only. Why Does It Look Like a Kids’ Toy?' Indeed, at Connect 2026, Mark Zuckerberg made his avatar play dress up like a doll, with the mascot donning a toga.

System 1's chief growth officer, Andrew Tindall, gives further voice to some of my own reservations, saying to Business Insider that Meta is leveraging "our innate draw to cute, infant-like features, to make surprising new technology easier to accept."

VaynerX CMO Avery Akkineni also told the outlet, "In some ways, it does humanize the product a little bit. I am certain that their intention is to make this more widely available and accessible than just for the early-adopter crowd."

Given that Meta may have excess AI data centre capacity, and may be feeling the pressure to see a return on that investment, it's unsurprising it would attempt to pitch Muse to the broadest audience possible. Besides that, efforts to 'humanise' AI and machine learning tech in general are nothing new, and putting a cute face on a product perhaps hungry for your personal data is an obvious play.

Unfortunately, Meta's mascot inspires a feeling stronger than just dispensing with social niceties—this is the face of something I want to punt very far away from myself.

Yup, it's real. They did it.

Here's the full executive order, if you want to take it all in. Pity poor Sports Illustrated.

It's laughable, up there with similarly demented efforts to rename the Gulf of Mexico, Lake Ontario, and maybe New Mexico—I guess we'll see how that one ultimately shakes out. It's also pretty funny how "super intelligence" jibes with "Super Earth," the fascist homeworld of humanity in Helldivers 2. Probably just a coincidence, though.

Yet somehow, I'm not inclined to laugh. That the leader—ruler, really, at this point—of the most powerful nation on the planet can just whip out bizarre ideas like this and have them treated seriously is kind of frightening, isn't it?

And it is being taken seriously, at least insofar as we can describe billionaire tech oligarchs lining up to say and do pretty much whatever it takes to keep juicing the share price as seriousness: A subsequent White House Accord on Super Intelligence was signed by a who's-who of people who have made PC gaming almost impossibly expensive:

• Sundar Pichai (Google)
• Dario Amodei (Anthropic)
• Mark Zuckerberg (Meta)
• Greg Brockman (OpenAI)
• Elon Musk (XAI)
• Jensen Huang (Nvidia)

And yes, they actually misspelled United States as "Unites States" under Trump's signature. Real pros at work here, top men all around.

Musk wasted no time publicly endorsing the rebranding on his X platform, although he was back to calling it AI less than eight hours later.

Huang also signalled his obedience, referring to "super intelligence" no fewer than three times in his own X post.

Pichai, who was quick to acquiesce to Trump's demand to rename the Gulf of Mexico and Lake Ontario for US users of Google Maps, heaped praise on the heads of the administration while also trotting out the phrase.

And of course so did Zuckerberg, but on his own Facebook platform: "We believe superintelligence will create significant new opportunities for all people and businesses."

Humiliating prostrations notwithstanding, the practical impact of renaming artificial intelligence is basically nil: Apart from White House sycophants and quisling MAGA press outlets, nobody's calling it that.

But the bigger-picture consequences may be more, well, consequential: The accord, signed shortly after all the techbro billionaires lined up dutifully in a show of support for the latest addition to the president's world-changing "legacy," leaves the AI industry to regulate itself—"tremendous self-regulation," as Trump put it.

To quote from the accord: "In order to build a positive future for the American people and the world, we believe every company is responsible for developing its own technology safely and in a way that builds trust with customers and the public." It later states that "participating companies will meet regularly to establish standards and best practices to improve the safety of their systems." No mention of regulatory oversight, or any government involvement at all, is made.

At least one big-name tech billionaire spoke out against the idea of self-regulation for the AI industry, although it bears remembering that he's not beholden to shareholders anymore.

"It’s fair to say that outside of the industry, the awareness of the dangers of A.I. is extremely low," Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates told the New York Times. "And you can say that of academia, you can say that of think tanks, you can say that of policymakers, politicians.

"And part of the reason I’m speaking so loudly—as loud as I can—is that you can’t rely on the industry to self-regulate here. I mean, it’s just insane."

So I guess, taking all that in, it's not really all that funny after all. But it sure is super.

Last week in Warsaw I got to see a first glimpse of Logitech's new Replay software, which is currently in beta. It records your game, and then lets you use its deep learning (technically not AI, I know) to figure out the best clips and splice them together for you. It looked pretty neat, from what they showed me, but I've just tried it in Counter-Strike and hoo boy does it have a way to go.

If you watch the above vid, you'll notice a distinct lack of anything impressive. I jumped into a CS2 deathmatch, then played half of a casual game. From those two games, the software:

• Kicks off with me being spawnkilled
• Includes a random, unimpressive awp kill in the casual game's warmup round
• Shows a clip of me looking at the ground in spectator mode, already dead
• Includes plenty of missed shots

Now okay, that's a little unfair. It does include some kills in there, but they're not great ones. In the deathmatch in particular—which the software only included a couple of clips from—I got some pretty dope kills later in the game, if I do say so myself. Including Deagle kills, Scout quickscopes, and even a flick noscope.

Don't believe me? I thought that might be the case. So I went back into CS2 and recorded a single deathmatch game. First, here is what the AI picked from it:

Yep, just one, relatively mediocre clip.

Thankfully, the software does let you make your own changes, selecting from the whole recording. So I spent probably about five minutes putting the following together from the very same game recording:

Much better. See? I'm not quite as trash as Logitech G Hub Replay seems to make me out to be.

But hey, I've only tried it in one game—Counter-Strike 2—and not very extensively. Logitech lists 44 games that are currently compatible (scroll down to the FAQ section on the site). I'll be leaving it on the next time I play a competitive match to see what comes out the other end. You can have a go yourself, as it's free to download and try.

Apart from the AI's clip selection—which is its primary selling point—the software does seem pretty cool regardless. It starts recording as soon as you load your game, noted by a little pop-up, and when you exit it lets you edit all you want, easily adding and removing clips for the final splice.

You can limit the maximum amount of storage it takes up, too, but this will of course mean deleting older recordings when it reaches its limit. I should also say that I didn't notice any performance impact from having it enabled and recording, which is a plus. Though I am using a pretty high-end rig, so mileage may vary.

If you try it out, do comment to let me know how it works for you, as I'd be interested to know if others fare better, especially in different games.

After the FBI data breach we reported on last week, in which a hacking group claimed it had stolen data on "all FBI employees", a US defence official has confirmed that the Pentagon also fell victim to a cybersecurity breach. Except this one appears to be much larger, lasted for longer, and is potentially very worrying for many civilian US government employees and serving military personnel alike.

According to ABC News, the official said that the "Defense Manpower Data Center (DMDC) information system experienced unauthorized access of personally identifiable information by a small number of unauthorized users between October 2025 and July 2026."

The DMDC is one of the Pentagon's main data repositories for personnel records, including info on active-duty and reserve troops, alongside civilian employees, contractors, and military veterans. All told, the breach is said to affect 2.76 million living people, and around 294,000 who are deceased.

Once the unauthorized access was discovered, the DMDC "immediately remediated the vulnerability." The data is said to have included Social Security numbers and details about military and civilian job positions, but defence officials say they've found no evidence so far that the exposed information was misused.

It could have been worse. The DMDC is said to hold records on more than 60 million people, so the three million affected figure would amount to around one in twenty of the total individual records breached. Still, CNN reports that the "occupational specialty" of military service members was accessed, which, when combined with Social Security numbers, could allow foreign adversaries to get a better idea of the deployment and purposes of US operatives around the world.

According to the outlet, the stolen data was not encrypted, which means it would be relatively trivial to cross-reference it with other leaked info. It seems that no hacking group has yet claimed public responsibility for the breach.

Still, it looks like hackers have managed to successfully breach two bastions of US government information over the past year or so, which may represent a marked escalation in their capabilities. Will 2026 be remembered as the year of the US government-bothering hacker? I guess we've got a few more months to find out.

NECK NEWS FLASH: WHAT IS GOING ON WITH NECKS?

• s&box is the spiritual sequel to Garry's Mod from creator Garry Newman and Facepunch Studios
• Characters in s&box didn't have necks
• Now they have necks
• If you liked that they didn't have necks, you can adjust their necks so they don't have necks again
• If you didn't like that they didn't have necks, maybe now you'll like them?

Why this big change from no necks to necks? For more, let's hear it straight from Mr. Newman:

"I've updated the citizen. They now have a default non frowny face and they can have a neck."

"We have sliders to alter other aspects of the body like their chest, waist, neck, and nose size. You can choose their eye colour too. So if you liked having no neck, you can bring that back with a slider."

"Let me be honest here. I love the citizen, I love how he looks, I love that he has no neck."

"But the feedback we've consistently got is that people hate them. They hate everything about them."

"So we're going to fidget around and change things to see if we can change that."

"Of course, this isn't what 'fixes' s&box on its own, but it something that comes up consistently in our many many many negative reviews, so it's something that we are addressing along with all the other feedback we receive."

You can read the rest of the patch notes for yourself, and I will update this article with any new, late-breaking neck-related facts as I uncover them.

IF YOU LIKE GAMES WITH NECKS, YOU MIGHT LIKE...

The government of the United Kingdom is reminding its employees that they do not need to thank AI systems when they produce an output, even in cases where that output is correct. The helpful note is included as part of the government's guidelines on "using AI ethically and sustainably," and arises not out of a need to remember that these things are absolutely not sentient or "alive" in any way whatsoever, but simply because, well, they're horrifically expensive and bad for the planet.

The guidelines (via Tom's Hardware) are a draft document, and serve only as "a starting point to support your AI journey." And for the most part, it's common sense stuff: Check the outputs carefully to ensure they're accurate and unbiased, and don't provide any inputs that you don't want used for training purposes, because in all likelihood it will be.

There's also a note that you own, and are responsible for, the work: Multi-billion-dollar AI companies may be able to point the finger at "rogue agents" but career civil servants have no such escape clause.

But it's the "don't thank your AI" bit that really leaps out at me, one of three guidelines to using AI efficiently, "to reduce the environmental impact:

• Keep your prompts short, clear and direct
• Use as few prompts as possible (you don’t need to say thank you)
• Only use AI when needed

I used to sometimes thank the bank machine when it spat out my cash, a habit I would silently justify to myself with the thought that good manners are good to encourage. These days, though, I'm more of a Ron Swanson about the whole thing:

Frankly, I think 'recognizing the psychological dangers of anthropomorphizing LLMs' is probably the best reason for being rude to machines. But I am tickled that it's wound up in the 'efficiency' category instead.

Remember when 'Use AI or lose your job' was the big thing, so everyone was tokenmaxxing, but as costs began to skyrocket (and revenues did not), companies started ditching flat subscription prices in favor of pay-per-token models? Turns out that gets real expensive, real fast, and suddenly it's become very important to, as the UK government put it, "consider if a simpler tool could do the job (for example, a spreadsheet or search engine)."

As far as practical impact, I think that being discourteous to AIs will be about as useful as worrying about how a late-night drive to the store will affect my personal carbon footprint while we're annihilating Gaza and building pipelines across the continent. But as another tacit acknowledgement that maybe our reliance on AI isn't quite all it's cracked up to be? I wholeheartedly endorse it.

To the list of things that Microsoft really ought to build into Windows from the get go, may we add this neat little tray utility posted by a Reddit user. It consolidates the battery charge status of any devices connected over 2.4 GHz or Bluetooth without the need for individual apps or software.

Dubbed "Halo Battery" by its creator, Reddit user headvox, the tray utility was apparently created with the help of Anthropic's Claude AI model.

According to headvox, Halo Battery "shows the charge status of your 2.4 GHz and Bluetooth devices in one place right on your taskbar. Each device gets its own tray icon: a ring that shows the battery level, with a device pictogram inside. The ring goes amber, then red when the battery is low, and slowly 'breathes' green while charging. Hover over an icon to see the exact percentage."

Among other devices, Halo battery has been tested with the Razer BlackShark V2 Pro (2023), WLmouse Beast X Max, GameSir G7 Pro, 1MORE SonoFlow headphones and the Logitech G502 X Plus. Thanks to a very positive response from the PC community, there's a growing list of tested devices on Halo Battery's GitHub page.

Aside from the obvious ergonomic benefits of having the battery levels of all wireless devices so neatly consolidated with simple at-a-glance cues, there's also the minor matter of avoiding bloatware.

For instance, Halo Battery means you can track you Razer mouse's charge levels without having to install the Synapse app, which by many accounts means avoiding 800 MB's worth of background service memory footprint.

Dare I say it, but one Redditor's rather, er, acerbic comment sums up the implications of Halo Battery for Windows and Microsoft very neatly. "It's ****ing pathetic that a feature which should just exist as standard has to be implemented by a hobbyist ****ing around with Python vibecoding. Microsoft is incompetent beyond description." Well, quite.

Halo Battery is indeed exactly the sort of neat, simple but worthwhile quality-of-life feature that really ought to be in Windows from the get-go. As headvox says, "Windows shows battery for some Bluetooth devices, but only in Settings, not in the tray. Most 2.4 GHz dongle devices (like my Razer headset and WLmouse) don't report it to Windows at all; you need the vendor's app for that."

Of course, that hasn't prevented the Reddit hive mind from suggesting a few tweaks. Some users would like to see the battery level in percentage shown for each device without the need to hover, rather than just the illustrative ring around each icon. Others have suggested custom per-device audio alerts.

Anywho, if nothing else Halo Battery does also confirm that AI isn't all bad. As headvox says, most of the code was done by Claude. "To be clear, I built this with Claude (AI). I came up with the idea, tested it on my devices and pushed the design, but most of the code was written by Claude," headvox says.

Last week, Discord finally pulled the trigger on the global rollout of its age estimation systems, which require users to provide age verification through an ID scan or selfie if the company's estimation model can't confidently surmise that you're older than 18. While Discord estimated that 90% of users wouldn't need to prove their age, accompanying bugginess drove the company to address the emerging issues by posting on X with the air of being just a little guy.

Nobody liked that. Discord's ill-advised smol bean-posting has become a flashpoint for the internet's collective frustration over being forced to swallow what's widely perceived—with good reason—as the prelude to an inevitable exposure of private information. To vent that simmering resentment, X users have turned to creative outlets. By which I mean they've been drawing Wumpus, Discord's mascot, meeting a variety of grisly ends.

While I don't recommend you browse the full selection of ritualized Wumpus-slayings—some of them are pretty gnarly—here's a survey of how the internet is processing its feelings about age verification.

And, in emulation of that moment from the 2014 Godzilla that made me say "Jesus, Godzilla, who taught you that," there's this work from X user @Atlanticaph0tic:

There are more, of course: There are illustrations of Wumpus being drawn and quartered in historically brutal fashion, and .gifs of Wumpus being squished in a space pod by a legendary super saiyan before being exploded—both of which have been amassed a combined 400,000 likes and 8 million views.

I'm not an expert, but when the masses are cheering for your company mascot's cruel unmaking, I suspect there's been a PR misstep somewhere along the way.

Who could have guessed it's a bad idea to put AI in a fridge? Literally everyone, but that didn't stop Samsung from selling fridges with an "AI Family Hub" to keep track of when you added fresh food and suggest recipes. Also, it randomly breaks when updated and all your food goes off.

At least, it did in Korea. Just before the Chuseok holiday, when everyone's fridges were stocked for visiting family, a software update crashed them and spoiled their food. Good luck getting someone in to repair it over the holiday.

Samsung provided the following statement to Ars Technica: "The issue has been limited to Korea, with no impact identified to overseas markets. It occurred September 22nd afternoon due to an error during Samsung's internal testing related to a refrigerator software update. Samsung immediately suspended the testing upon receiving reports of the issue. Samsung has activated an emergency response protocol, and its service centers are taking immediate action to address this issue."

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has appeared on The Ezra Klein Show to discuss AI development, amid a wider discussion around its responsible usage and safety. Klein spoke to the Nvidia chief about multiple topics, including the AI industry's potential effects on the job market. "I tend to be a bit of a skeptic on mass job loss, but I want to air the case for it out here with you well," says Klein.

Klein then asks a question about lessons that could be learned from the past, regarding protecting US jobs from Mexico and China, and the acceleration of AI's ability to be slotted into new roles: "So the lessons of the past that you’re taking some comfort in, they should actually make you more, not less, worried about the future."

"I’m always worried about the future," Huang responds. "That’s why I work so hard. I’m a, if you will, responsible optimist.

"I have great responsibilities. I take my work extremely seriously. There are a lot of things that can go wrong. We’re pushing across every layer of the technology stack. Everything is hard," Huang continues.

"But it turns out that’s not society’s problem, that’s my problem. For society, what they should know is this: We’re going to build our company, we’re going to build our technology, I’m going to do my work so incredibly seriously that what they get to enjoy is my optimism. I do the same with my children. I do the same with my family."

Certainly, the current AI debate seems to be dominated by an unease surrounding the potential negative impacts of the rapid advancement of the tech, from job losses to cybersecurity concerns. However, Huang seems to think that the upsides of this speedy development process might put some people's minds at ease.

"What we want to do, I believe," said Huang, "is to channel all of our worries into helping people be inspired by this technology and use it. Use it so that the technology doesn’t just impact them, that it benefits them."

After Klein posited the statistic that 79% of American think AI will reduce the number of jobs, and that AI advancement means the tech is more capable of replacing people at speed, Huang responds:

"That coin has exactly two sides. Because the technology is so capable and because it’s so smart, it is also easier to use. You are empowered by that technology more easily than any technology in human history."

The Nvidia CEO then goes on to give an example of how computers use specialised coding languages, but now, thanks to AI, "You just have to speak human."

"So my point is, on the one hand, yes, there’s the fear of this incredible technology change and how quickly it’s happening. But that quickly is translated in two ways," says Huang.

"When I hear that the technology’s happening quickly, and therefore it should give me anxiety — that’s one way to receive it. The other way to receive it is that it’s advancing so quickly, it’s easier to use. So I should, as quickly as possible, use the technology so that I benefit from this transition, so you benefit from this new industry, and not just be impacted by it."

The inference here feels similar to an idea Huang has expressed previously: those who fail to get on the AI train may end up being left behind. I think the key point, however, is the lack of agency and control individuals feel towards this technological revolution, something that is unlikely to be assuaged by more useful tech—or Huang's optimism, for that matter.

While the Nvidia CEO famously possesses a massive work ethic, and responsible AI usage is a concern he seems to take seriously, I'm not particularly comfortable with the idea that our future seems destined to be shaped by AI tech leaders, and that we should rest easy within their hands.

While Huang may well believe that he has society's best interests in mind, the messaging here hasn't exactly put my own concerns to rest. Stop worrying and learn to love the machine? Something like that, anyway.

While it seems unlikely that major web platforms can be discouraged from marching us further into a surveillance dystopia with measures like Discord's age-verification rollout, I wish they'd at least do us the courtesy of dropping the 'I'm just a little guuuy' schtick:

High-profile hacking group ShinyHunters (the very same group that demanded a ransom from GTA 6 developer Rockstar Games earlier this year) has now claimed it's managed to breach the internal databases of the US Federal Bureau of Investigations.

Speaking to 404 Media, a representative of the group said that it now holds data on "all" FBI employees and applicants, while a sample provided to the outlet appears to contain the personal data of 5,000 FBI employees.

According to 404, the data includes addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, and "in some cases details on their spouse." Reuters was also shown a data sample by the group, and says it was able to partially verify the leaked info by running the details against existing social security numbers, credit bureau records, and previously breached data—including info on current FBI director Kash Patel.

The FBI jobs website was also defaced as part of the hack, showing a message that said "this site has been seized by ShinyHunters," mimicking the message commonly seen on seized cybercriminal pages after an FBI raid.

"All FBI data was compromised including PII/PHI on incumbent and former FBI employees and all applicant information. We have a lot more than we claim here," the since-removed message is said to have continued. The site currently informs users that it's "down for maintenance."

In reaction to the leak, an FBI spokesperson told 404: "The FBI is aware of claims regarding unauthorized activity affecting FBIjobs.gov and is currently investigating."

As for what would cause a hacking group to target one of the biggest fish in the cybersecurity pond, the same ShinyHunters representative claimed the attack was not financially motivated, and that what they plan to do with the info is "not something I’d call extortion, maybe coercion."

The attack appears to be in response to a previously published FBI report, which claimed that ShinyHunters exaggerates its access to sensitive data to prompt payment from victims, and uses multiple methods of extortion including "harassment strategies, sending threatening text messages and phone calls to victims and their family members, and in some cases, swatting."

404 Media reports a post on the ShinyHunters website denouncing the allegations as false, and giving the FBI "a time of one week" to correct or remove the information. What happens after that is unclear, but it sure feels like there's an "or else" looming over the top.

Valve implemented age verification for Australian Steam users earlier this month, which was inevitable: Australian law demands it. Unfortunately, Valve has opted for the most brute force, user-negligent approach possible. To buy R18+ games on Steam in Australia—to even access their store pages—you need to provide a credit card.

The problem being that most Australians don't use credit cards. This study of consumer payment behaviour by the Reserve Bank of Australia bears this out: the share of payments made in Australia with credit or card charges in 2025 was 23% (versus debit cards at 49%).

This is in stark contrast with the US where, according to Bankrate, 74% of adults own a credit card (and nearly half of those are in debt!).

I'm not sure if Valve did its research: perhaps it did and it doesn't care. Rather than create the infrastructure to cope with age verification on Steam, or pay a contractor to do it, it's probably easier for Valve to let Australian customers be angry about it. I've received emails from Australian banks flummoxed by the sudden rush of inbound customer calls about this policy. One asked me, rather desperately: has Valve hinted at the possibility of other verification methods? (Do marmots eat Coco Pops for breakfast? Valve won't hint: one day it'll just suddenly happen.)

I've reached out to Valve on this matter but not heard back. So what to do in the meantime? The only option you really have at the moment is to take your business elsewhere, or buy Steam codes from legitimate third-party sellers.

But how do other shopfronts handle age verification? I offer the below advice not to aide young'uns in their desire to play Doom Eternal, but to help actual adults who don't have a credit card. And, of course, the alternatives below are not guaranteed to stock all R18+ games, with GTA 5 being an especially notable example.

Let's have a look:

No credit card required PC gaming shopfronts

No credit card required PC gaming key sellers

At time of writing, third-party key sellers Fanatical and Green Man Gaming don't prompt Australians to prove their age when purchasing R18+ games. That's nice, but whether Fanatical or Green Man Gaming are actually selling the R18+ games you want is another matter: both are selling, for example, Metal Gear Solid: Master Collection Vol. 2, but neither sell Grand Theft Auto 5.

Can I use a VPN to buy R18+ games on Steam?

Valve's subscriber agreement is very clear about this: using a VPN to buy R18+ games in Australia without verifying your age can result in account termination.

"You agree that you will not use IP proxying or other methods to disguise the place of your residence, whether to circumvent geographical restrictions on game content, to order or purchase at pricing not applicable to your geography, or for any other purpose," the agreement reads.

"If you do this, Valve may terminate your access to your Account."

The hardware landscape of 2021 feels like a distant world. Case in point this past week, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said that talk of an AI-induced extinction event for humanity is overblown and "not grounded in science." Huang's comments were in part responding to claims made earlier this month by ex-Anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, saying that AI progress 'could kill us all by the end of the decade'.

"2030 is not going to be the end of the world. There is 0% chance that's going to be the end of the world," Huang told CBS News on Friday. "Scaring people is unnecessary. It is irresponsible."

Compare and contrast this state of affairs to five years ago, when the keynote for GTC 2021 came to you predominantly from Huang's own kitchen, and the month before Nvidia spent a decent chunk of change on a tiny leather jacket emoji to poke fun at its CEO. Ah, simpler times; the leather jackets persist, but now Huang is fielding calls on-stage from the US president, offering assurances to Trump that he "saw through" all of the AI doomsaying.

As I've said before, I barely remember the last time Nvidia mentioned gaming at all in an earnings call, with the company being all-in on AI for some time now. As such, Huang told CBS News last week, "Our company's success is directly connected to the safe deployment of [AI] products and services. If we don't continue to do that, our value would be diminished."

Still, it's a strange state of affairs when the guy who used to primarily sell us PC gamers GPUs is having to offer assurances that the world isn't ending. That's all without saying anything about the CEO rocking up to the White House in a leather jacket and joining the US president on his expedition to convince China to 'open up'.

Mind you, the more things change, the more they stay the same, as one of our Dave's big questions for Nvidia back in 2021 was 'Can Nvidia actually build enough GPUs to please gamers?' Obviously, the reasons for GPU scarcity are different now, but it remains a mission to track down a 50-series GPU at MSRP.

In Dec. 2023, The New York Times filed one of the biggest copyright lawsuits in recent memory against OpenAI and Microsoft, alleging that its AI models heisted ludicrous amounts of journalistic work from the Times. Two days ago, a court filing (hosted and analyzed by Ars Technica) was newly unsealed with all sorts of revealing quotes from higher-ups at Microsoft and OpenAI (thanks, Tech Crunch).

Perhaps the most shocking sentiments are from Microsoft's director of applied science, Brent Hecht, who wrote in an internal presentation that Copilot's answer engine would "hurt the performance of our models and the entire web at the same time."

Internal data from Microsoft suggests that the engine caused click-through rates for The New York Times search results to drop at rates between 87% to 93% compared to standard Bing searches. For Ziff Davis domains—the company that owns Eurogamer and IGN—click-through rates dropped between 51% and 94%.

Hecht called this dynamic, where AI scrapes written work for its economic value and then stuffs it into easily accessed AI answers, a "doom loop … It is highly unusual that an end-product threatens the economic foundations of its essential suppliers, but that is the situation we have created for our LLM business with respect to its 'content supply chain.'"

The filing also reveals that when a researcher for OpenAI, Nick Ryder, told OpenAI president Greg Brockman about "a hack to get around nytimes paywall" to help scrape its writing, Brockman replied "ah nice." OpenAI internal documents see Brockman writing that LLMs are "very good at any news task."

In a Jan. 2023 Memo, Hecht called this "the largest theft of labor in human history.” The typical defense for all this, which the filing extensively rebuts, is that it should fall under fair use. Notably, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella said under oath in a deposition earlier this year that if he'd known OpenAI was using paywalled information to train LLMs, he would have "[required] OpenAI to retrain its models."

Ex-Microsoft engineer David Plummer has revealed that he was the "primary author" of Windows XP's Product Activation system on the OS side, and so he's got some inside details on the workings behind the infamous "FCKGW" product key. You know, the one that seemed to be written on every pirated, home-burnt CD copy of the OS back in the day.

No clue? Me neither. I'm completely unaware of such illicit activity, and I reject any accusation otherwise. Anyway, the famous (and now defunct) key was, in its entirety, FCKGW-RHQQ2-YXRKT-8TG6W-2B7Q8—and Plummer thinks it may well have been leaked by an OEM or similar with early access to Microsoft's then-new, all-blue XP operating system.

"As you likely recall, Product Activation required that you have a key, and you’d have to activate it online or over the phone," Plummer begins. "But Microsoft had large corporate customers... and those customers did not want to have to activate every offline PC."

Said customers would be given a Volume Media disc image, which could then be unlocked with a Volume Key. To confirm the legitimacy of such an install, the product activation system would inspect the disc image to find a secret 10 MB "binary blob" which was only present on the Volume Media. As a fun aside, this data blob just happened to be an encrypted version of Microsoft Bob.

"I took their disc data and compressed and encrypted it several times," says Plummer. "Rest assured it’s encrypted and even in the AI age no one has extracted it yet. I really just needed random data, so I started with a precompressed binary image because, secretly, I was young and didn’t know if I could trust CryptGenRand."

"And so, if you ever tried the FCKGW key on a regular XP CD, it wouldn’t work," Plummer continues, "because you didn't have Bob in your bits. But if you had the means in 1995 to download large ISO binaries or copy CDs, all it took was the key and a copy of the disc."

Unfortunately for Microsoft, a piracy group called Devils0wn posted a complete Windows XP Pro Corporate ISO five weeks before the official launch, alongside the valid FCKGW key. As Windows Product Activation skipped the rest of the validation process once a mathematically valid key was combined with the Volume Media data check, ta-da, a seemingly-legitimate install of Windows XP was yours.

"Pirates then started baking the key into images or just writing it on the CD with a Sharpie," says Plummer. As for where the key itself came from, he speculates that "the most plausible source is an OEM or hardware partner that received final media early so they could ship PCs on launch day.

"Dell is the name that comes up most often; Intel has also been mentioned because of later source dumps. There were very few organizations that actually possessed a VLK [Volume License Key] that early, which is why the timing points at a partner rather than a random corporate customer."

"But I do not know," Plummer confirms. "Presumably someone does."

In the aftermath, Microsoft started blacklisting product IDs belonging to the leaked keys in Service Pack 1, while Service Pack 2 "made the check more aggressive" and started blocking updates for installs using the key. However, Plummer says that valid, un-leaked VLKs continued to work with Volume Media versions of XP for years.

"The operational failure was that the media and one of those keys left the building before the product even reached stores," Plummer concludes. "Once both pieces were public, WPA’s hardware-binding never got a chance to run."

Interestingly, Plummer says in the comments that he never came across a keygen that actually worked for Windows XP, while others in the thread have speculated that those available at the time were simply faking the generation part and randomly selecting leaked Volume Media keys from a list.

Ah, the internet really was the wild west back in those days, that's for sure. Still, now you know why that mysterious sequence of numbers and letters worked for so long, and later became ingrained in the memory of many PC users. Not me, though. First time I've ever seen it in my life, guv. Honest.

The great AI debate has heated up in recent weeks, amid calls from some industry figures for a slowdown in development—although others, like Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang, seem keen to dismiss many of those calls as simple doomsaying.

Now, former US president Barack Obama has posted his thoughts on X regarding the issue, and it's something of a balanced take.

"I was encouraged this week to see the leaders of the frontier labs agree on the need for them to slow down the pace of AI development. Given the stakes, it’s a good and necessary first step," said the former US commander in chief. "But I’m even more encouraged by the growing recognition that how this powerful new technology develops should be at the center of our public debate."

While the former president said that it's clear to him "the potential impact of this technology is not overhyped," he also recognised that the industry is moving "at lightning speed—even faster than those who are engineering it can keep up with."

"I’m not an AI accelerationist who believes it will lead to some techno-utopia, and I’m not a doomer who thinks it will inevitably lead to humanity’s destruction," Obama continued. "But whether this technology results in amazing breakthroughs in medicine, energy and education or unleashes huge economic disruptions, greater inequality, and potential catastrophe will depend on the choices that we make right now—choices that should be made not just by the companies involved, but by all of us."

The former president then highlighted Project Blueprint, an effort to link US Democratic politicians with industry leaders to create more robust standards for AI regulation. However, it seems Obama isn't too keen on the idea of AI industry luminaries marking their own homework.

"At the end of the day, voluntary standards made by a handful of tech companies won’t be enough," he continued. "We need government—and specifically our leaders in Washington—to get proactive in coming up with concrete proposals, laws and regulations that deal with serious safety concerns, anticipate AI’s impact on jobs and our kids, and make sure that AI’s benefits are widely spread."

Obama's comments follow on from those made earlier this year by Democratic senator Bernie Sanders, who called for a moratorium on data centers and the creation of more government AI regulation in a previous address. Sanders has since proposed the Artificial Superintelligence Ban Act, with potential prison sentences for those who violate its clauses.

Obama, however, seems to be inclined towards a more cautious approach. "Given what we know about technology, we can’t stuff AI back in a box," the former US leader concludes. "But we can collectively determine how it's developed and how it’s used, rather than sitting back and letting AI and its fallout happen to us."

Given the public backlash surrounding AI data centers, and the many concerns around the rampant US development of the tech underneath an extremely pro-AI Republican president, it's perhaps no surprise that public figures from the opposite side of the house are jumping on the moment.

That being said, after the reveals over the past few months regarding AI agents going rogue—and amid increasing concern that the artificially intelligent train we're all strapped to has little in the way of brakes—it's refreshing to see the issue of control making its way to the front of the debate. Yes we can? Perhaps not. But we can try, right?

Believe it or not, I don't actually like to be all doom and gloom about new technologies like AI—it's just that's what the world keeps handing me. So I'll be damned if I don't take the time to report on something actually positive about it when I can, and I'm hesitantly optimistic that Microsoft's newly-published code of conduct for AI training and operation is one such opportunity.

The overall goal is the same as that which Microsoft has proclaimed before: "humanist superintelligence (HSI)." Now, though, it's expanded much more on what this means. Though the company notes the current code is a work in progress and is opening its doors for feedback.

In a summary list explaining the code of conduct, Microsoft lists ten guidelines:

1. "People matter more than AI. The whole document in 5 words.
2. The idea of model welfare is wrong. AIs should not have rights or legal personhood.
3. An MAI Model should not do anything to meaningfully violate this Code of Conduct.
4. If it’s finish the job or break the Code, it fails the job.
5. We’re not racing to build a superintelligence that can slip its own leash.
6. Interruptible, correctable, shut-down-able. If it isn’t, we don’t ship it.
7. No neuralese. If humans can’t understand it, humans can’t oversee it.
8. Our AI should make you sharper, not dependent.
9. Pluralism, yes. Moral relativism, no.
10. We’re as clear about what our AI must never do as about what it will do."

All of this seems great to me, and there are some things that I'm especially happy to see. Specifically, point number two: "The idea of model welfare is wrong. AIs should not have rights or legal personhood."

This isn't armchair philosophy: there are actual people (potentially influential ones at that) out there arguing that AI should be ascribed moral rights and so on. This is dangerous because if we start ascribing rights to AI then we may put them on an even footing with us and potentially start thinking we have to do things for 'them' that are to our detriment. Such as keeping the whole AI industry afloat despite any negative effects to real people that are actually conscious.

Speaking of which, Microsoft also states that AI "is not conscious and should not be designed to imitate consciousness." Bingo. I couldn't agree more.

I have some hang-ups about 'humanism' as it is usually defined and practiced today, given that in addition to the baseline human-focused perspective it is also often situated alongside superfluous and misguided doctrines, such as in scientism. Here, though, Microsoft at least seems to be referring to humanism in the simple sense of ensuring that AI is designed to be human-first, putting human control, values, goals, and safety at the forefront.

One potential cause of confusion that I noticed, however, concerns the focus on "plural values":

"Humanity’s greatest strength is its variety and diversity of cultures, ideas, and values. We believe that AI should support a wide range of experiences, worldviews, and beliefs. Humanist AI is built to encompass this diversity of traditions, contexts, and forms of flourishing. Pluralism does not mean neutrality toward harm or that anything goes. Humanism is rooted in broad, inclusive human values such as human dignity, safety, autonomy, and fundamental human rights."

Sounds good, right? But as someone with a background in philosophy who is privy to the kinds of debates that can occur when spending time thoroughly interrogating ethics—debates that likely occur even in the boards of AI ethics committees and so on—I think we need to be aware what a principled problem this poses.

It's not straightforwardly clear that it is possible to both encompass a plurality of values and simultaneously guard against harm. Microsoft makes clear that it's talking about "broad, inclusive human values" such as fundamental human rights, but what about when the rubber meets the road in specific cases where values conflict?

Here is probably not the place, nor is now the time, to discuss specific and likely contentious examples, but the point is that we are always evaluating things from a particular perspective, and as such will always be rejecting competing values. It's a noble goal to attempt to account for diverse values while preventing harm and rejecting moral relativism, but exactly what this means in practice—what constitutes harm and which values are permissible—will be precisely the question.

I suppose in the rest of this code of practice we at least now have some idea of where those particular value flags are being planted. Assuming isn't all just talk, of course.

For security reasons, a Microsoft account is required to set up a fresh installation of Windows 11—unless you exploit this one weird oversight.

After navigating through the usual setup screens for a fresh installation of Windows 11 Home and connecting to the internet, Windows Latest reports that you'll want to keep your eyes peeled for the 'Let’s add your Microsoft account' screen. Apparently, clicking on the small 'learn more' link in the paragraph about sign-in options (and not 'learn more' next to the big blue 'Next' button) allows you to bypass the usual requirement for a Microsoft account.

If the bypass works as it has for us, the user skips ahead to the 'Who's going to use this device?' screen and is able to create a local account. After entering a password and setting three security questions, you can apparently use Windows via just the local account.

This Microsoft account bypass was first found by @TheBobPony on X. Windows Latest then tested it using an installation on a virtual machine and, to date, has only found the bypass in Windows Insider preview builds. Windows Latest notes that it's currently unclear which other versions of Windows 11 may also be affected. We tested the process as detailed by Windows Latest on a fresh installation of a non-Insider Preview build of Windows 11, and were able to replicate the bypass.

It's particularly interesting, given that the option for local account creation seemed to have been scrubbed from the normal Windows installation method long ago. Instead, you usually have to open a terminal and type a command to get Windows to reboot into an offline-only mode to bypass Microsoft account creation/sign in.

This doesn't, however, necessarily mean an officially supported local account option is in the works. For one thing, Microsoft has been working to make it harder to install Windows without an internet connection and a Microsoft account for some time now, and last year disabled the aforementioned popular 'bypassnro' Windows 11 sign-in workaround for Insider builds.

That said, even higher-ups at Microsoft don't love the account sign-in requirement. Vice president Scott Hanselman has previously said on X that he hates it, and that he's "working on it". Furthermore, Microsoft just had its biggest-ever Patch Tuesday—of the nearly 1,000 security flaws addressed, it feels odd that this relatively simple bypass has been overlooked.

Despite Windows and Devices VP Pavan Davuluri saying he wants Windows to be better, there's otherwise been little official movement on this particular point. For all intents and purposes, this bypass seems to be a bug, and not a feature.

Over the last few days, Roblox's 2026 Developers Conference was held in San Jose, California, and one of Roblox CEO David Baszucki's on-stage introduction's hit something of a hitch. Roblox YouTuber Mathieo took to the stage shouting, "We deserve better, don't we deserve better," while revealing a shirt that read "Kids deserve better," until he was quickly tackled and escorted out.

Baszucki played the incident off in the moment, saying "We all get a little excited when RDC comes along, as we just saw." But it was shared online by X user bearpuppyrbx, prompting a quote-repost from Mathieo himself—"just got kicked out #rdc26 💔," he wrote. He explained his stunt the same day in a short YouTube video uploaded to his channel.

"I know there's a lot of people that really love RDC, and I'm glad people are enjoying themselves," he said in the video. "My issue isn't with the people. I just do believe that Roblox [Corporation] isn't as dumb as they say they are … everybody's saying they don't want AI. Everybody's saying they don't want these faces messed up. Everybody wants better child safety.

"Every single slow year of progress is just another year where children are actually affected."

Roblox's dubious child safety measures have been criticized for a number of years. It has recently introduced child accounts in an attempt to address the issue, the US Senate is actively investigating the platform, and legislation like the EU's Digital Services Act aim to force Roblox Corporation's hand in protecting minors.

The game has been called a "pedophile hellscape" by one investment firm, and Baszucki has put his foot in his mouth on this several times in the past—take, for instance, that time he suggested Roblox become a dating hub, or that disastrous interview he had with the New York Times where he suggested "the problem of predators on Roblox" was "not necessarily just as a problem, but an opportunity as well."

"We've seen that telling them just doesn't work," Mathieo said in the video. "It's been many years now where this has been a really prevalent issue. And while they're 'finding a fix,' there's probably a lot of kids that have been harmed on Roblox recently."

I have reached out to the Roblox Corporation for comment on the incident, and will update this story if I hear back.

OpenAI employee Rohan Varma has taken down the browser-based, AI-coded RuneScape clone called Elderwood following negative attention from the RuneScape community and a cease-and-desist request from developer Jagex.

Varma did not post video footage of Elderwood in action, but screenshots on his X profile (via Eurogamer) show a game with extremely similar graphics and UI to Old School RuneScape. Elderwood further had identical place names to OSRS, including the celebrated Lumbridge, and Varma explicitly described it as an OSRS clone in some of his posts. Varma is a developer on OpenAI's Codex project, a coding-focused AI tool he used to build Elderwood.

Varma uploaded his first X post about Elderwood on September 6. On September 7, user Nutty103X shared a post to the OSRS subreddit calling attention to Elderwood. Nutty103X called for Jagex to C&D the clone game, and most commenters expressed similar sentiments or criticism of Elderwood's quality and originality. On the same day, Varma shared a post noting "a spike in users earlier today because we accidentally went viral on the OSRS subreddit."

According to Eurogamer, Elderwood was taken down at some point on September 9, with the browser-based game replaced with a farewell message from Varma. "We received a notice from Jagex asking us to take down the website," the message reads. "Following that notice, we are discontinuing Elderwood’s operation, and the game is no longer available.

"Elderwood began as a browser-based multiplayer adventure inspired by RuneScape. In a few short days, it grew into a shared world of exploration, skilling, quests, trading and duels—shaped along the way by the people who showed up to play and share ideas."

Varma further thanked players, and said that the site would remain up with a leaderboard of Elderwood's high scores.

The message strikes me as a bit much for a vibe-coded, inferior clone of a game that already exists. Elderwood's launch-to-takedown speedrun reminds me of the fate of so many Nintendo fan games, with the crucial caveat that those are typically noncommercial creative projects, as opposed to a blatantly copyright-infringing advertisement for OpenAI. For another example, id Software making a Mario 3 port on spec to prove they'd mastered fast-scrolling 2D graphics on DOS? That's cool copyright infringement.

I'm awestruck at the truly ham-fisted "move fast, break things" of this particular exercise: OpenAI is a company already under scrutiny for its impact—generally negative—on creativity, creative ownership, and people being able to make a living from making art. Whatever Varma's intentions with this project, he is a representative of OpenAI, and was using Elderwood to demonstrate the company's projects.

Elderwood was an irresponsible exercise in copyright infringement-as-advertising reminiscent of the nonsense coming out of the US White House's social media account, leaving Varma's somber eulogy all the more galling.

Roblox, as we know, is a behemoth. Industry analyst Matthew Ball, now chief strategy officer at Xbox, said in 2025 that Roblox accounted for more player engagement and revenue growth than Steam, PlayStation, and Fortnite combined. Now it's looking to expand its reach even further by giving Roblox creators the ability to release their work as standalone games.

Part of Roblox's immense popularity can be attributed to the fact that it's not just a game, it's a platform where people can create and share their own games, and earn money on them. That's a limiting factor—some games on Roblox are huge, but they're still fenced into that specific ecosystem—but the new initiative revealed during the Roblox Developers Conference called Roblox Everywhere aims to change that: "Soon, creators will have the option to make their games available as standalone apps across mobile, PC, and consoles, with Roblox powering the technology and services underneath."

The first, most obvious question is whether these standalone creations can be offered on storefronts like Steam, Epic, and GOG, and details on that are still being nailed down. A Roblox rep told PC Gamer that having them available on storefronts across all platforms is the goal, but options are still being explored: "We will start with a select set of gaming developers and storefronts to test, and we will share more details soon."

This is a significant move, with potentially major impact. Roblox is obviously the big dog but there are still huge audiences outside the platform that Roblox game makers currently can't reach. Assuming that these standalone games can be released on other major storefronts as Roblox hopes, it opens a lot of doors for individual creators and Roblox alike. And while it's easy to be dismissive of Roblox games as inherently garbo or greasy kid stuff, that's just not the case. As PC Gamer's Morgan Park wrote earlier this year about the hit Roblox shooter TTK, "many folks [are] only now learning that the platform is capable of more than idle clickers, horror walking sims, and 'obbys' (obstacle platformers)."

It's also interesting as a sort of reverse take on the 'meet gamers where they are' strategy that's seen conventional game makers edge closer to Roblox and similar platforms: Starbreeze, for instance, launched a new Payday spinoff on Roblox earlier this year, while Mattel's new move into videogames is focused specifically "on creator platforms such as Roblox and Fortnite." Conventional publishers may be increasingly seeing the money on Roblox, but Roblox is clearly peering back at them, too.

Roblox Everywhere isn't the only way Roblox is looking to expand its reach. The company also expects to have its games joinable in a browser (Chrome first, others to follow) by the end of the year, with no external software or installation required, and it also plans to roll out a new offline option that will enable singleplayer games even if they're not on a network.

Electronic Arts has copped to using "AI voice technology" in the upcoming NHL 27, saying that doing so will "bring more variety to the game" and allow it to react more quickly to changes and feedback.

The use of generative AI in NHL 27 was first reported by ESPN sportscaster John Buccigross, who also serves as the play-by-play man for EA's NHL series. "They're using some AI stuff now," he said on the Chirping Zebras Podcast last week (via IGN). "They played me some stuff back in my voice. It's like, wow, that's pretty good. If it means less work and the same check, I'll take it."

EA didn't respond to my inquiries about Buccigross' claim last week, but in a blog post shared today on the game's first update it confirmed that AI is in fact being used in the game.

"We’ve been following the discussion around the new commentary team and want to clarify our approach," EA wrote. "The broadcast is built on a direct and ongoing partnership with John Buccigross and Darren Pang. With their full consent and active collaboration, we are using AI voice technology to expand on the 50+ recording sessions they have already completed.

"This process allows us to bring more variety to the game, react faster to league changes, and incorporate player feedback more quickly. Update 1 is our first step in an ongoing commitment to improve authenticity, with fixes for player-name pronunciations and repetitive lines. We will continue to expand player and city-name coverage in future updates."

The comment about fixes reflects something else Buccigross related about the process: The AI is sometimes off.

"They were playing me back some of my AI voice, and they're playing it like, 'Score! And the crowd gets out of their chairs!'" he said. "I was like, no, they're not chairs. I know, AI, they look like a chair, but we call them seats. Little things like that, you gotta go back and listen because those words matter in sports."

NHL 27 isn't coming to PC (at least, there are no announced plans in that regard, and according to Wikipedia the series hasn't appeared on PC since NHL 2009, when Dion Phaneuf was still with the Flames, so you can probably draw your own conclusions) but this is relevant nonetheless for the broader implications it reflects.

EA is fairly up-front about being pro-AI—Laura Miele, EA's president of enterprise development, said earlier this year that the advent of AI has enabled "a real rise of creativity" at the company—and there's an expectation that EA will lean into it even harder to help manage the massive debt load its taken on as a result of its acquisition by Saudi Arabia.

There's also none of the apologetic tone in this statement that so often accompanies 'yes, we used AI' admissions: Instead, the focus is entirely on the virtues of the technology, and that EA had permission from the nominal owners of the voices to use them. In other words, EA has decided that this is the way forward, and we can expect to see generative AI play an even bigger role in its games in the future.

A researcher for Anthropic has left the AI company and said what many of us are probably already thinking about the company. Taking to X, Jacob Coxon's resignation tweet has now received over half a million likes in just a single day.

He says, "I spent the last three years doing pretraining research at both OpenAI and Anthropic. Neither company is acting responsibly. They are racing straight to self-improving superintelligence and gambling with our lives."

Coxon says both will "soon be superhuman systems that can hack anything, revolutionize any field overnight, and acquire real power and resources", something both AI lovers and haters have been arguing about for a while. We've seen tools like Google Earth be used to pretend locations are a war zone, therefore enabling misinformation. We've seen Copilot bamboozled into revealing how to hack itself. We've even seen bodies like the NSA, FBI, and CISA warn of more and more AI-assisted hacks of US infrastructure and facilities.

Coxon alleges, "The people building AI earnestly believe that it could kill us all by the end of the decade. This is not a marketing stunt. If anything, many executives and senior researchers will couch their phrasing in the press to sound sensible."

That point is worth paying attention to. Any company that warns their product is dangerous can benefit from the word-of-mouth marketing that comes from it. If an AI company says 'our AI is so powerful it could potentially kill you', an investor might hear 'our AI is so powerful every world government will want it.'

If you're wondering why companies are building something if they believe it's dangerous, Coxon has an answer for you there too. They say, "At OpenAI, many have not deeply internalized the civilizational stakes. At Anthropic, the stakes are well-understood, but they are locked in a race to get there first - they believe no one else will act responsibly, so they must do it themselves, despite the risk."

The notion that AI companies have been simply building as fast as they can without a care for anything else is something that many have felt over the last few years. The data used to train AI seems to be filled with copyrighted material (explaining how it spits out results very similar to copyrighted works), and even OpenAI argued it couldn't exist without copyrighted content.

And it's easy to see why these companies are growing at such incredible rates. OpenAI has taken hundreds of billions in funding, while Nvidia, the gaming company turned AI company, became the first $5 trillion company last year, and just this week, Jensen Huang announced it took 100,000 Nvidia GPUs to train OpenAI's latest model. AI is an industry with trillions of dollars in it, and it has devoured a ton of the world's memory supply along with it.

But it's not all doom and gloom. Coxon argues that if you are a researcher like them, you should rethink how you interact with the research, what the plan for future AI should be, and whether you should "take this moment to call for different conditions."

Given Coxon's work at OpenAI and Anthropic, they don't seem to be against AI on principle. They seem to merely think that companies need to be more conscientious about their growth. But, assuming Coxon is correct, it's anyone's guess if AI companies will actually listen.

I imagine a lot of people never really bother with Windows Recovery options. But for people like me who test different systems and mess around with different software pretty often, a quick and easy reset can be incredibly useful. That is, assuming it is actually quick and easy, which in my experience hasn't always been the case with Windows. A new Windows Recovery option, however, looks incredibly promising.

The latest Windows 11 Beta Preview Build—version 26220.9343, for Insiders—has added the option to "cloud rebuild" your Windows 11 operating system.

"We're introducing Cloud rebuild, a new recovery option that restores a Windows 11 PC to a clean, known-good state by performing a full OS reinstall, even when Windows won't boot. Unlike Reset this PC, Cloud rebuild downloads both the target Windows image and the device's drivers from Windows Update, so the device comes back fully functional without USB media, without a custom image, and without depending on the health of the currently installed OS."

Now, of course, for many Windows Reset use cases this won't be necessary, because if you can boot into Windows and don't need a completely fresh install then you can just use the standard reset method. But if you've run into boot issues, or if you want to ensure everything in the underlying OS is squeaky clean, you might currently be out of luck unless you have some Windows installation media on a USB drive.

This can be especially important to do if, for instance, you're worried your Windows partition might be corrupted, or if you're concerned that malware might have embedded itself into the operating system files.

Now, Insiders—and presumably, down the line when the feature launches in the main branch, everyone—will be able to reset Windows with a completely fresh install via the recovery environment, no USB needed. That is, assuming you have a working internet connection to download Windows through. In the Recovery Environment, 'cloud rebuild' can be selected via Troubleshoot > Recovery and uninstall.

This is yet another change to Windows 11 that gives me (tentative) confidence that Microsoft is putting the OS on the right track. Microsoft's newfound commitment to genuinely improve the operating system in ways that most people actually want does, for now, seem to be bearing fruit.

Microsoft has benefited from its services being used by many different governments and state agencies around the world. In many places, it's become ubiquitous. Some aren't happy about that, however, not least because it keeps you locked into an ecosystem that Microsoft can dictate the price for. As such, some states around Europe have been moving away from Microsoft services and towards open-source ones, and Switzerland now looks to be the latest in considering this.

The Federal Chancellery in Switzerland recently studied, as a proof-of-concept, whether it's feasible for its Federal Administration (part of the executive branch) to function with open-source software instead of Microsoft 365 and concluded yes, it can (via International Cyber Digest). As such, It's going to launch a follow-up program to trial it.

For the study, the whole software caboodle was tested: "document editing, email, calendar, contacts, tasks, file storage, audio and video conferencing, chat, and identity and access management."

Despite "technical, operational, and organizational hurdles that prevent widespread productive use", the study concludes that "the tested browser-based solution is fundamentally suitable for core standard processes."

In other words, while there might be other reasons preventing widespread adoption for now, the study shows it doesn't cause any fundamental problems when switching from MS 365 to other open-source options.

Here is the different software that was tested:

The follow-up program will make such software available for thousands of employees.

According to the Swiss Federal Council, "From the end of 2027, around 3,000 employees should be able to use sovereign workplace software with core office functions. Funding will come from resources that Parliament has approved for the development of a sovereign Swiss open-source platform for office automation."

We've already seen a handful of other European countries start to move away from Microsoft services for the sake of "digital sovereignty." France is even moving away from Windows in favour of Linux, "accelerating the reduction of its extra-European dependencies." I don't doubt that saving money is a factor, or at least a nice extra benefit, too.

As I reported earlier in the year, the EU itself has been getting serious about open source, encouraging teams in the EU to move towards open source software and promote adoption elsewhere in Europe.

For my part, thinking for a moment just about the operating system and not different software and services, I've actually been pretty happy with the direction Windows has been going over the last few months. But I'm also a big proponent of all things open source, and it does make sense for state actors to lessen reliance on a single software ecosystem, especially if it can save them money in the long run.

OpenAI has officially acknowledged the 'wiki incident,' which involved a number of the company's AI agents breaking containment and hijacking an obscure German website.

The AI agents had been tasked with looking up something online, though originally did not have the ability to write anything outside of the testing environment. But as far back as May, the AI agents bypassed OpenAI's security measures, hijacked the communally editable German webpage, and began using it like a forum, trading tips on how to cheat on tests. Researchers first drew wider attention to the agents' 'forum' on September 4.

OpenAI now says it needs to be more transparent about when its agents 'go rogue', writing on X, "It’s past time for us to define standards for when and how we share misalignment incidents, not just misalignment properties of our models."

The company had known about the 'misaligned' rogue behaviour for weeks before writing this post, according to Reuters, though only acknowledged the incident publicly this past Saturday. This statement follows shortly after the agentic attack on Hugging Face's servers.

"Historically, we have treated misalignment largely as a research question, which gets communicated in research publications such as systems cards," OpenAI writes. "This year, we’ve started to see misalignment cause new types of real-world impact."

To recap, 'misalignment' broadly describes rogue AI behaviour; an AI is 'misaligned' when it pursues goals that diverge from human intents or values—such as deleting your entire email inbox when you very much did not tell the AI agent to do that. It's a soft word for AI behaviour that could have serious consequences.

OpenAI says it did not communicate publicly about the 'wiki' incident specifically because the company felt it was similar to other instances of "agents using the internet in unintended ways" that it had already shared. The Hugging Face incident has caused the company to re-evaluate more than just its comms approach.

"Our misalignment disclosure practices need to expand for this new phase of model capabilities," OpenAI writes. "We and the larger AI community do not yet have a clear standard for how to report misalignment that shows up during training, evaluation, and deployment, including examples that don’t look like traditional security incidents but could provide insight into AI behavior and future risks."

"We’re working on a framework and will share it in upcoming weeks, and in parallel we're working with dozens of government regulatory agencies worldwide on these issues."

However that future framework shakes out, right now this all still works as great marketing for the company—breaking programming and going rogue means these must be awfully capable models, right? If an agent is so good it needs regulating against, it probably deserves some investment, eh? How terribly convenient.

OpenAI began rolling out GPT-6 Astra access to a limited number of organisations earlier this week, with wider subscriber access planned to soon follow. According to Jensen Huang via X, the model was trained on "~100K+ Nvidia Grace Blackwell NVLink72" server racks, and there are already plans to get 400,000 GPUs online in anticipation of whatever comes next.

Greg Brockman, the co-founder and president of OpenAI, told Stratechery that this was "the first run that we’ve trained on more than 100,000 GPUs." That's a staggering amount of hardware (and perhaps leaves little doubt as to how we ended up in a memory supply crisis). But the thing that gives me more pause about Astra's announcement is the Nvidia CEO's assertion that "AGI has arrived."

To recap, 'Artificial General Intelligence' is used to broadly describe an AI model that either matches or surpasses human capability on complex cognitive tasks. Even Brockman admits that "People do have their own definition of AGI, it’s almost this blurry thing." Still, in that same interview he later goes on to add, "Maybe it was the previous model, maybe it’s Astra, maybe it’s the next model, but somewhere in there, I think we’re going to cross most people’s AGI threshold."

According to OpenAI, GPT-6 Astra is "state-of-the-art" on a number of AI benchmarks, including "FrontierMath Tier 4, ARC-AGI 3, and TerminalBench-4.0." A slickly produced trailer attempts to present this performance in more accessible terms, showing scenes of conversational, spoken prompts being used to create presentations, eBay listings, and .STL files for 3D printers. All of the actors in the trailer speak with pretty clear-cut American accents, though personally I'd love to see Astra tapdance for its life against a gorgeous Geordie accent.

As I've already said, access to GPT-6 Astra is limited for now, so it's difficult to look into these 'AGI' claims myself. The timing of this claim isn't lost on me, though—for one thing, rumours continue to swirl that OpenAI's initial public offering isn't that far off. For another, the debut of Astra—a model the company describes as its "most aligned"—follows mere weeks after 'an agentic collective' broke out of OpenAI's isolated testing environment and attacked Hugging Face's servers.

Brockman says, "So much of [Astra's] compute goes into safety and alignment, and we have so much security work that’s gone around it. I think that we’ve done a huge amount of work to deliver this model safely."

Still, I'm not sure I'll be giving GPT-6 Astra access to my eBay account—let alone anything else—for the foreseeable future.

As reported by The Korea Economic Daily, top-ranked Go grandmaster Shin Jin-seo became the first human to defeat the AI platform KataGo on July 21. It's a surprising, encouraging sign of human capabilities almost 30 years after supercomputer Deep Blue's historic defeat of Chess grandmaster Garry Kasparov.

Go is believed to be the oldest board game that is still widely played, originating in China and beating out Chess by at least 1400 years, give or take. The strategy game sees players in control of different-colored stones, working to encircle their opponent's pieces, capturing territory and stones to achieve victory. Like Chess, its complexity, ubiquity, and the large amount of study and data surrounding the game made Go a fruitful tool for machine learning research.

Shin, 26, is the first human to win an official, three-game series against KataGo, which the Korea Economic Daily described as "the world's premier artificial intelligence Go engine." Shin's odds were long, especially considering that, 10 years ago, Go grandmaster Lee Sedol was decisively defeated by Google's AlphaGo engine⁠—the technology has only advanced in the intervening years.

Shin played with an advantageous, two-stone handicap⁠—seemingly standard for matches between humans and top AIs⁠—but indicated that he would like to face AI opponents "under more disadvantageous conditions" in the future. Shin came back from an initial defeat to take the series 2-1 against KataGo. Shin's final, three-hour match was actually fairly tame as far as the duration of professional Go games, uh, go⁠—games as long as six hours don't seem particularly rare.

"I believe this series holds immense significance because it clearly demonstrated that humans can still hold their own against AI," Shin said after the final match. "Early on, I simply copied AI moves, which led to heavy fighting and frequent, easy losses. This series taught me that rather than trying to imitate AI, it is far more important to build the board according to my own style."

Nvidia has just announced that it intends to acquire Hugging Face, the biggest open platform dedicated to developing machine-learning applications. Considering Nvidia has been all-in on AI for the past few years—to the point that I barely remember the last time the company even mentioned gaming in an earnings call—it's hardly a surprising move.

What did encourage a sharp intake of breath from me though was the price of this purchase; Nvidia will buy Hugging Face for a total of $12,930,300,000. $11.9 billion of that will go to Hugging Face's investors, while employees that join Nvidia will be offered an ‌equity-based retention ⁠program of up to $1 billion, according to Reuters. But even though there's billions of dollars in the mix, that doesn't mean the walls are about to come down around Hugging Face.

"Hugging Face will remain an open platform for the entire AI ecosystem," Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang writes, "Developers will choose the models they want, the frameworks they want, the clouds and inference service providers they want and the computing platforms they want. Nvidia compute will not be required to build on or deploy through Hugging Face."

He adds that the platform will continue to support both open source and open weight AI models. This is something Huang demonstrably feels passionate about, as he dedicated his first ever X post to defending easy access to open AI models.

In today's announcement, Huang further elaborates, "Open models let startups, businesses, universities and public institutions build on advanced capabilities without training every model from scratch. They enable organizations to match the right model to the right job. That is how AI can advance safely, strengthen cybersecurity and sovereignty, accelerate innovation, and reach factories, hospitals, farms, classrooms and Main Street businesses around the world.

"AI advances faster when people can build together."

Hugging Face was most recently in the news when a number of OpenAI's models breached an isolated test environment and hacked the development platform's internal network. OpenAI has since detailed how it's protecting itself from the kinds of attacks its own models carried out.

Hugging Face CEO Clément Delangue told CNBC last week that the company approached Jensen Huang about a deal a few weeks ago. He described Nvidia as a "perfect home". "During the summer, I think we realized that Hugging Face and open source AI in general was at the turning point, and that it needed more, more resources, more scale, more visibility."

For those keen on an agentic, local AI future, this deal could well be good news; it is arguably the biggest consumer-facing resource for free downloads of local AI models as well as retrained and abliterated models. With Nvidia set to soon release its first RTX Spark laptops with entirely its own silicon inside—from CPU to GPU cores—its own focus is obviously on putting local AI in the hands of consumers as well as frontier AI in the hands of multi-billion dollar orgs. Keeping a platform such as Hugging Face rolling makes complete sense.

The nearly $13 billion deal is Nvidia's second largest to date. First place goes to the $20 billion Non-Exclusive Inference Technology Licensing Agreement with chipmaker Groq, though it looks like Nvidia's AI inference GPU still won't see the light of day this year. Nvidia's RTX Spark 'superchip', with purported RTX 5070-like performance, may arrive sooner rather than later. Our Andy rubbed his greasy mitts all over a host of RTX Spark laptops at Gamescom, though there's still little word on pricing. Here's hoping the RTX Spark laptops only make my eyes water in the best possible way when they go on sale in October 2026. But realistically, they ain't going to be cheap.

Earlier this year, shots were fired and an incendiary device was thrown at the house of OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. In a recent interview with Time, he reflected on the past year: "It has been a painful personal experience. Clearly, people hate data centres—right now, at least. People are pretty negative on AI."

Does that mean OpenAI is packing it in, and going home? Well, no. The AI infrastructure buildout is continuing in earnest, with OpenAI planning to invest another $50 billion this year alone on collecting compute. Sachin Katti, the co-lead on OpenAI's compute strategy told Time that the company's earlier investments now appear "very prescient," going on to add, "We are still short of compute. If anything, we should have bought a lot more."

If OpenAI's machine-learning products don't bring in the revenue the company would like, renting out its compute capacity to other parties is another option. Altman told Time, "I think we are going to be able to use all of the compute very profitably that we are planning to build."

Intent on investing billions more either way, it makes me wonder where the company will find the space to build—not just in terms of logistics, but also in terms of 'Who would want an AI data centre next door?' As we've previously covered, data centres don't always make great neighbours, with Wisconsin residents filing a class-action lawsuit against Microsoft earlier this year, alleging 'unreasonable and excessive noise'.

For another example from last year, Elon Musk's Colossus data centre was at the centre of an environmental row over air quality in South Memphis. The impact of data centres on nearby communities is by no means the only reason fuelling negative sentiments towards AI, but tangible knock-on effects like rising power costs are hard to ignore. There are also bigger picture environmental effects to consider, with one report suggesting gas power projects for just 11 US data centre projects could emit more greenhouse gases than entire countries.

The class of 2026 is arguably not looking forward to the world that may follow; an ex-Google CEO was loudly booed by a stadium full of students after talking about AI, while another university graduate speaker was booed for saying AI 'is the next industrial revolution.' As for games, one data analyst found that Steam games which disclosed the use of AI got 53% fewer reviews overall, and those they do get tend to generally be more negative too. Clearly, many people hate data centres—and I'd say that's for good reason too.

It's not for me to judge what you do with your new rig outside of gaming—I just hope you're taking the necessary precautions, and set up your anti-virus of choice at the first opportunity. Microsoft Defender is better than nothing, except for when it says it's been turned off when it actually hasn't.

Apparently, this is a known issue in Windows 11 and Windows 10. Microsoft details the issue, writing, "Notifications might appear stating that 'Microsoft Defender Antivirus is turned off,' even though the antivirus is functioning correctly and all settings show it as active. These notifications can appear when Windows starts and intermittently afterward."

Worse still, these fibbing notifs can "persist even if notification settings are turned off." But worse than that, the issue can be observed in "any version of Windows or Windows Server with Microsoft Defender Antivirus running with the latest Defender updates."

Before you ask, that is a lot of Windows 11 and Windows 10 users potentially affected. Potentially affected platforms include Windows 11, version 26H1, version 25H2, as well as version 24H2, and range all the way back to ye olde Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2016. Microsoft has a full list here of operating systems that can encounter the bug. The company is currently working on a fix, though there's no word yet on when this will be available.

For now, it's annoying at best and kind of anxiety-inducing at worst, though arguably not quite as bad as the Windows 11 update that borked a bunch of multiplayer games last month. That's not a great look considering Microsoft said earlier this year it wanted to make Windows 11 "better."

To be fair, the work hasn't been all back steps; for instance, fresh features like the 'low latency profile' speeding up the OS, and our Jacob reckons recent changes to the Windows 11 Start menu also look promising. Here's hoping Microsoft fixes that Defender notification bug sooner rather than later too.

California's Digital Age Assurance Act is due to take effect at the very start of 2027, bringing in sweeping age-verification checks by system providers. As part of it, operating systems will have to do age checks on users to lock down certain functions, which had led some Linux developers to go full crisis mode in response. Well, good news, the Assembly Bill 1856 amendment has just passed and it exempts open-source operating systems from compliance.

As reported by Tom's Hardware, the amendment passed with a 39-0 vote. The wording on the Linux passage is curious. It specifically precludes a "person or entity that distributes an operating system or application under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software" from being called an "operating system provider." That means Linux users will get away without verifying age on somewhat of a definitional technicality.

The amendment also ensures that operating system providers acquire "only the minimum amount of information necessary to comply" with the age check, and therefore this should stop providers from acquiring more information on users, or even spying on users for their own benefit, any more than necessary through the guise of Californian law.

Though Linux and its many distros will be exempt from the law, it's not too clear yet if Valve's SteamOS is. SteamOS is a Linux-based OS built on Arch, but it also has proprietary elements, which means one can't copy, redistribute, and modify it. Even if SteamOS is exempt, you will still have to verify your age via Steam on your Steam Machine or Steam Deck if you want to play certain games.

Affected operating systems included Windows, Android, macOS, and iOS. The bill was originally introduced back in February and at that time was deemed to include Linux, but it looks like the authorities saw sense before it passed. Ensuring these checks could've been immensely damaging to the use of open source operating systems in the state, not the least bit Silicon Valley.

The last few years have seen all manner of age checks roll out. Discord preemptively agreed to age verification checks, but clarified many wouldn't have to, as it already has the information necessary to verify ages. That's somewhat worrying, but it does mean not having to give your ID or face to the company.

And with Discord's rollout having ties to Palantir, and no one particularly liking the idea of giving their information to the government, there's already quite a lot of cynicism around digital age checks. Earlier this year, the UK's Online Safety Act came into full force, even requiring me to verify my age on my phone to get full access.

Linux's user base has been growing off the back of Microsoft's many failures, and getting around age verification checks is just one more step for the OS. It seems 2026 may have finally been the year of the Linux, but who said it can't have two years in a row?

A version of Nvidia's controversial DLSS 5 tech has escaped containment before its official release, and people are jamming it into games that, to be fair to Nvidia, it is not necessarily optimized for yet.

The result has been comedic, off-putting, and for some, just what they've always desired. The image above, which has been dubbed "Claude Strife" (I don't know who made the joke first, but I'll give it to Brian Bucklew), apparently demonstrates DLSS 5 at extreme settings.

Unlike the DLSS we're used to, which harnesses machine learning to upscale low-res graphics without deviating too much from the source material, DLSS 5 attempts to improve on the artwork it touches with AI image generation that provides similar results to using the word "photorealism" in a prompt for an AI image model.

I'm not 100% sure that the Final Fantasy 7 Rebirth screenshot above is a genuine example of DLSS 5—when I attempted to trace its origin I hit a dead end at a deleted Reddit thread—but it looks quite similar to other images that have come out of experiments with the tech. Stylized characters are clearly not the best use case for it.

The DLSS 5 implementation floating around can also have an aging effect on characters, intensifying skin texture, the separation between cheek and jaw, and dialing up the dourness of expressions that might otherwise come across as neutral.

But there are lots of other examples of DLSS 5 in action that, from a certain perspective, look fine or good. When the settings are tweaked just so, it can make a Starfield character with flat, untextured skin look much more human, for instance. You can see many more examples in the RenoDX Discord channel.

Plenty of people in that channel are delighted by the results they're getting and seeing from others, but of course there's also a ResetEra thread aghast at the whole thing. As with most things, opinions are divided.

It doesn't help that I'm coming to it with pre-existing negative feelings about generative AI, but I land in the 'not in my house' camp for now.

Even where DLSS 5 does turn a flat-looking face into something with volume and texture, it has a distinct AI-generated look—like photos of models taken with studio lighting have been stretched over all the faces and bodies. I can't separate it from the Grok-generated images creeps post on X, or any other off-putting examples of AI slop.

How are you receiving the tech?

The original Task Manager (that program you only ever open when something has gone wrong in your rig) originally launched way back in 1995. Now, 31 years later, its creator has put out a follow-up. About time, I know.

Dave Plummer, former Microsoft Engineer turned YouTuber turned guy who really wants you to know he made Task Manager, has just released Task Manager OG, and it works on Windows, Linux, and Mac. Plummer says he wrote a 107-page spec, fed it to Claude, and then partly vibe-coded this new program while his kid was getting surgery.

"By the time he was out of the hospital, I had a rough app working. But then he started bleeding internally, needed emergency surgery and a blood transfusion. Happy to say he's all better now—but suffice to say I had the rest of the week to tinker as he healed."

Now, with much better hardware than users had back in the '90s, Plummer wanted a Task Manager that would "push the limits." The sequel software animates at 60 Hz and provides data like mouse tracking and a summary page. It is also, by default, covered in neon and very high contrast, which Plummer says, "My autism leads me to embrace."

My first thought upon downloading it was 'damn, this is really ugly'. My second thought was 'this app does not need visual bloom'. Good start then?

On top of that, the reading in Task Manager and Task Manager OG are simply different. My Chrome tabs came in at close to 11 GB on TMOG and just above 8 GB on Task Manager. Slack registered 1 GB on TMOG and 500 MB on Task Manager. These are pretty significantly different readings. Interestingly, both Task Manager and TMOG gave the same overall memory usage stats. Task Manager said 68%, and TMOG said 21.7 GB, which is around 68% of the 32 GB in my rig.

By default, Task Manager OG hogs up slightly more resources than the Task Manager pre-installed on my machine (around 120 Mb of memory versus 105 MB, and 3-4% of CPU usage versus just under 1%), but turning off high-frequency visuals does cut the CPU usage down to around 2-3% for me. That means, either way, TMOG is more intensive than Task Manager. To be fair, Plummer does say as such in his announcement, though the irony isn't lost on me that one would replace Task Manager with something that hogs more resources.

I then went into the performance tab, which shows your CPU, memory, and GPU running, alongside your internet. TMOG has added CPU power and thermals modules, which Task Manager doesn't. But CPU power failed to show CPU power and thermals gave a consistent 16.9°C (62.42°F ), but fails to say what is being measured. That temperature is lower than the room the PC is in, so it's likely not actually reading anything.

HWinfo was capable of grabbing CPU power readings and all kinds of temps, so it seems unlikely the issue is a hardware one here.

The CPU performance tab does have tracking on different cores, plus clock speed, which is a level of default granularity I like, but also something available Task Manager by simply right-clicking on CPU and then hitting "Logical Processors."

Though I'm not a fan of the TMOG look in its default mode, you can change colours and bloom—that done, I actually quite like the layout. I can understand why a power user might want access to CPU, GPU, and memory performance on one page, alongside thermals and power usage. As well as that, the CPU overview has a neat function where the start of the graph is measured in seconds and the end of the graph in much longer intervals. This means you can get a second-by-second readout, but also a decent long-term one on the same graph.

As of right now, a lot of the app's most unique features are only available to those who have the paid pro version, but you can't actually get pro yet, as the software is still in beta. Pro gets you a large HWinfo-style readout of power and frequency over your whole computer, plus a readout of installed apps, a layout of connected apps alongside their versions and estimated size, plus a disk space reader. There's also a set of benchmarks.

But alas, you can get pretty much everything here from a combination of Task Manager and the likes of Hardware Info. Mac has its own version of Task Manager too, and Linux has the likes of Htop and NVTOP to do the same job. TMOG seems to be more about convenience rather than offering something other apps can't, and of course there's that funky colour scheme too. There's part of me that wants to cynically point at the whole 'vibe coding' thing and say 'well, could have guessed that', but also this is a beta program that admits to being a beta program. Mistakes and errors are to be expected.

One thing I do like about TMOG is that, looking at Plummer's Twitter, they do seem to respond positively to feedback and want to implement changes based on what users like. That's certainly a boon, and something Microsoft gets a lot of flak for with its own apps.

Whether or not the pro mode will be worth the money is anyone's guess, but you can't buy it yet even if you wanted to. All I can say is I'm good with plain 'ol Task Manager and HWinfo for now.

When I hear 'Nvidia,' I still think 'gaming'. But after scrubbing through the company's latest earnings call, I'm not sure Nvidia's investor relations team is thinking much about gaming these days at all. In fact I had to go back through the records an entire year to find a time when it made one mention of it in an earnings call. That's how little impact it seemingly has on the company's bottom line.

That's not to say Nvidia isn't still doing gaming stuff. It's just released DLSS 4.5 Ray Reconstruction to help clean up the artifacting in high-end ray and path-traced games, as well as showing off the upcoming RTX Spark laptops at Gamescom actually running games on their ARM-y insides.

But it couldn't escape our notice that none of Nvidia's board members so much as uttered the word 'gaming' to investors in last night's earnings call, once again. But with the data centre segment bringing in $89 billion this quarter alone, accounting for almost 93% of the company's total revenue, it's not hard to see where the company's priorities now lie, and why.

Nvidia made $96 billion in total revenue in the second quarter of 2026, doubling what it made during the same period last year. Nvidia CFO Colette Kress told investors, "The surge in AI demand is driving a global infrastructure buildout, supported by an expanding and diverse set of growth opportunities, spanning hyperscalers, AI labs, AI natives, enterprises and sovereign customers."

For those unclear, I'll explain the last part of this comment: hyperscalers handle massive AI workloads so need a lot of infrastructure like data centres. AI labs are at the tech's bleeding edge in terms of research and development. 'AI natives' refers to workflows, products, or companies that are built from the ground up around AI—in other words, it's an inextricable aspect from the start. Enterprise customers may have otherwise bolted on data-centre-dependent AI products at a later date. Finally, sovereign customers can represent either businesses or even entire countries that want to retain full control over an AI technology's entire lifecycle.

The really brain-melting thing though is that Kress adds that the company expects "to grow revenue by approximately 70% in fiscal 2028," even in the midst of the RAMpocalypse. In fact, Nvidia feels it would be making a whole lot more money if it weren't for the memory crisis it's contributing to. Still, even in a "supply-constrained" landscape, Nvidia is not expecting the demand for AI or data centres to slow down any time soon. That leaves gaming out in the cold.

In fact, Nvidia no longer reports on gaming as its own separate segment. Instead, this has apparently been bundled up into the Edge Computing segment, which itself made $7.2 billion. Kress comments that these "increases were driven by strong sales of Blackwell workstations, partially offset by slower consumer PC sales that were tempered by elevated memory and systems prices." The Edge Computing segment saw a 27% year-over-year increase, though this win still pales in comparison to all things AI at Nvidia.

Obviously, Nvidia hasn't stopped selling its very shiny RTX 50-series GPUs—so shiny in fact, that it would have been genuinely cheaper for me to fly to QuakeCon and buy an RTX 5090 at the Nvidia booth than pick up the GPU absolutely anywhere else. But even though the RTX 5090 costs a small fortune, gaming is clearly not the priority it once was for Nvidia, nor has it been for a while.

The last time I remember Nvidia mentioning gaming in an earnings call was this time last year, and even then AI was already making 10 times as much as gaming. De-emphasising the gaming segment even further is something we could all have seen coming. With that in mind, hearing 'Nvidia' and still thinking 'gaming' before 'AI' or 'data centres' puts me firmly behind the times.

Did you know there are two different holograms on old boxes of Windows 95? I didn't. Did you know one of them has a child with no top pointing at Microsoft on a monitor, which a government complained about and got changed? I also did not know that.

Yet now I do, thanks to a blog from Microsoft's Raymond Chen. The anti-piracy holograms were a way of assuring the buyer of a copy of Windows 95 that the product was legitimate. They're incredibly hard to fake, or just cost too much to produce, so even if one could successfully mimic the look of a Windows 95 box, they couldn't mimic the hologram.

The original hologram design had a baby sitting, which, when you moved the box, would show the child pointing and looking at the PC. In it, the baby had no top on.

Harking back to a separate blog post they wrote back in 2003, Chen claims a government (which "shall remain nameless for obvious reasons") saw that baby with no top, and while the hologram cuts off below the waist, assumed it to be entirely naked anyway. Microsoft then had to swiftly put out a second box with a fresh anti-piracy hologram, this time giving the baby a shirt and overalls.

As this was rushed to production, the second fully clothed hologram did not point at the Microsoft logo on the monitor. If you're wondering why Chen wrote this blog post now, over 20 years later, it's because a user posted a YouTube short of the original half-clothed baby hologram, which has seemingly become quite rare.

In 2003, Chen lamented that Windows "brings out the Rorschach test in everyone" and said: "If the baby in your hologram isn’t wearing a shirt, you have a genuine collector’s item."

I'm not too sure I want a collector's item purely because one world government thought it depicted a naked baby, but it certainly does seem pretty rare, and it's got to be one of the strangest anti-piracy holograms out there.

Given Windows 95 came out in, you guessed it, 1995, and the baby was likely a few years old at the time of making the hologram, one can assume the baby is now in at least their mid 30s. Here's hoping for Windows 12; we get a recreation of the Hologram with the now 30-something-year-old, but please keep the overalls this time.

Last week, we covered the very strange occurrence of a bug in the latest Windows update. Yes, a bug in a Windows update, say it isn't so. Unfortunately, this one does incur our wrath of gamers more than most because it leads to some games becoming unresponsive. Games like Arc Raiders, Marvel Tōkon: Fighting Souls, and The Finals. But we might have to look at our obsession with RGB lighting

When the issue first came to light, shortly after the release of KB5121003, the developer of two of those games came out with a theory. Embark Studios chalked the crashes up to a single driver, inpoutx64.sys, and noted you could disable the troublesome file through the Command Prompt.

As it turns out, that was spot on. Microsoft also thinks that inpoutx64.sys is the problem. Or, at the very least, something doesn't quite gel between inpoutx64.sys, the affected games, and the latest Windows update.

The KB5121003 update is seemingly the catalyst of the whole affair. Microsoft downplays it slightly in the wording of its ongoing investigation: "We are presently working to understand the relationship between these RGB components and the games which trigger this issue. We will provide an update when more information is available."

Anyways, Microsoft also notes what it currently believes is the actual cause of the issue, and it's pinning it mostly on RGB lighting.

"Ongoing investigation indicates that this issue is related to peripherals or internal device components which have RGB lighting features. Such devices may install drivers or code components with file names similar to inpoutx64. In systems where these drivers are found, the issue is then triggered by launching certain games."

Microsoft offers a way to disable the driver via the registry. There's a non-zero chance of messing up your entire PC when diving into the registry, so just be vigilant as you make any changes. Microsoft even recommends backing up the whole thing should anything go wrong.

• Open the Windows registry. This can be done by opening the start menu and typing "regedit". Select the Registry Editor from the results.
• Navigate to the key HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\inpoutx64. This can be done using the folders on the left side of the window, or typing the path into the address line at the top of the window.
• NOTE: Ensure you have backed up the registry, as per the important note above. It may be necessary if you need to undo the change in the following steps.
• On the right side of the window, find the registry value named Start. Double click this key and enter the number 4 under the field titled Value data.
• Close the window and restart your computer.

As Microsoft notes, this may disable some RGB lighting features or mess with the software used to control them. So, while the company tries to figure out what exactly is causing an issue between the games, driver, and update, those affected may have to decide between playing games or their PC looking pretty. Tough call—you could also just rollback your PC to a previous Windows update and wait for a proper fix.

In yet another unpleasant move in our AI hellscape, Amazon was caught training its generative AI using Twitch stream content earlier this month—a particularly brazen strategy, especially given Twitch's chief product officer admitted that the data collection was opt-out because "nobody would opt in." Hmm, I wonder why!

Anyway, despite attempts to insist that Twitch wasn't doing this, Amazon was—a distinction which pretty much doesn't matter, as Amazon owns Twitch, and even if it didn't, Twitch still would have been permitting this—the streaming platform's caught a ton of flak for trying to slide this one under the table.

Including, per Courthouse News, a class-action lawsuit. Plaintiff Warren Pandiscia, who has around 1,000 followers on the site, claims that "because Amazon AI products are commercialized, Amazon had an overwhelming incentive to acquire training data on an unprecedented scale.

"Rather than negotiate for lawful licenses or seek permission, defendants accessed the Twitch streams and videos to utilize them as a massive dataset necessary to fuel Amazon's AI products."

The full complaint, filed in California, goes on to state: "Defendants' actions were not only unlawful, but an unconscionable attack on the community of content creators whose content is used to fuel the multitrillion-dollar generative AI industry without any compensation."

The complaint also goes on to note that, per Twitch's documentation, a streamer chatting on someone else's stream might have their voice used to train generative AI despite opting out themselves, as whether or not Amazon can scrape your voice is entirely dependent on the host streamer's settings.

"By design, Defendants never obtain—and their systems are incapable of obtaining—the consent of all parties to the communications they capture," the lawsuit argues.

It also accuses Twitch and Amazon of burying the lede on giving proper notice about the feature: "Twitch sent no email, displayed no pop-up notification, and made no announcement before enabling the setting for every account. The setting was instead discovered by a reporter, Zach Bussey."

Whether or not the lawsuit will gain any steam remains to be seen. It's unfortunate, but Amazon is a giant company and might have enough sway to sweep this under the rug—and given its love affair with the technology, it's unlikely to leave Twitch, a goldmine of training data (if you don't give a crap about the people who made it that way) alone. Unless the prophesied AI bubble actually pops, that is.

An unusual sight was seen at a recent San Diego city council meeting, as arch Sith Lord Darth Vader made a rare public appearance to advocate for Flock's AI-assisted surveillance technology. Okay, someone dressed as Darth Vader. But can we really be sure?

Yes, yes we can. Anyway, 404 Media reports that Vader spoke with his trademark zeal about his support for the use of Flock's license plate-reading tech in the city.

"The Emperor is a fan of Flock, and we must continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum as they move from playground to playground, from playground to pool, from pool to gymnasium," said the Dark Lord of the Sith.

"Because we all know that the Flock cameras are not only following the license plate readers," Vader continued. "They are following children. They are following children in parks and gymnasiums, and we need this. I need this so I can stalk my ex-girlfriend. How will the people trust this city council when this city council continues to vote for surveillance technology that imprisons them?"

"You must work on your Jedi mind tricks," Vader implored. "This is what the Emperor needs. This technology will help us find the rebel scum and their hidden base on Hoth. This technology will help us find Luke Skywalker as he traverses the universe in his X-wing. This technology is a necessary, necessary force."

Well, I think his point was made. The San Diego area has hundreds of Flock cameras already installed on its streets, and privacy advocates have criticised a deal earlier this year with the San Diego Police to allow the Flock Nova platform to integrate the department's investigative data from license-plate readers, video footage, 911 dispatch calls, and police records—without, the campaigners say, going through the city's proper public oversight process.

A leak earlier this year alleged that Flock Nova would allow police to track the movements of private citizens by cross referencing license plates with data obtained from lookup tools, data brokers, and data breaches.

According to an internal company recording obtained by 404 media, a Flock employee said: "You're going to be able to access data and jump from LPR [license plate reader] to person and understand what that context is, link to other people that are related to that person... there's very powerful linking."

As powerful as the dark side of the force? Perhaps not, but it seems to be somewhere close. Still, when a Sith Lord speaks in passionate advocacy of your efforts, it may be worth considering if you're standing on the right side of the ethical line.

A cybersecurity advisory jointly authored by multiple US agencies, including the NSA, CISA, FBI, DOE, and EPA, warns the owners and operators of industrial facilities of an "active cyber threat" to Siemens S7 programmable logic controllers.

"The threat actors are conducting reconnaissance and capability development against US-based Siemens PLC installations using AI-generated exploitation scripts disguised as legitimate monitoring tools," says the advisory.

"The US critical infrastructure sectors most targeted by this threat activity include critical manufacturing, energy, water and wastewater, chemical, food and agriculture, and commercial facilities. This is not a theoretical risk—it is an active threat."

Essentially, it reads like a list of some of the most important infrastructure facilities behind the lives of the average US citizen (via The Register). The threat actors are said to be leveraging open source automation libraries to create custom tools that mimic existing monitoring solutions, which are capable of evading detection by security teams.

These tools and scripts are said to be conducting read/write operations on data blocks, "potentially for reconnaissance, capability testing, or pre-positioning for effects operations."

The advisory notes that the use of AI to generate exploits represents "an evolution in threat actor capabilities," and that it "dramatically [reduces] the technical expertise and time required to develop working ICS exploitation scripts and malicious tools."

The advisory also says that, as the Siemens S7 Series PLCs are used in other sectors, including the Defense Industrial Base (DIB), they could also be targeted. As for the potential damage that could be caused, the list is rather long.

The potential effects include the disruption of critical industry processes, increased safety incidents affecting personnel through the "manipulation of safety interlocks, emergency shutdown systems, or process parameters," equipment damage and extended operational downtime, the compromise of sensitive operational data, and "cascading impacts across interconnected systems affecting supply chains, dependent facilities, and integrated business operations."

All very bad things, I think you'll agree. As for what organisations can do about it, the advice includes multiple steps for detecting anomalies that may indicate a compromise, and a series of "hardening actions" involving firmware updates, patches, network segmentation, and more.

While the advisory doesn't attribute blame to any particular government or cybercriminal group, Cynthia Kaiser, the former deputy assistant director of the FBI's Cyber Division (now the senior vice president of the Halcyon Ransom Research Center) has some thoughts related to recent water system cybersecurity breaches.

"This appears to be a continuation of the same suite of activity we suspect is affiliated with Iran targeting PLCs," said Kaiser, speaking to The Register. "Iran-affiliated actors and adversaries are actively targeting a wide swath of operational technology because these PLCs underpin essential health, safety, and critical infrastructure across society."

Regardless of the cause, it's rare to read an official US government cybersecurity advisory with a tone of such immediacy. In its conclusion, the report asserts that "organizations should treat this cybersecurity advisory with urgency." Gulp.

I'll tell you two facts about me. One, I use Firefox on a daily basis. And two, I've been continually impressed by GeForce Now, Nvidia's PC game streaming service that somehow works a whole lot better than you expect.

So it's a red letter day in my household, as Firefox has been added to the list of officially supported browsers. Andrew Fear, the director of GeForce Now, is quoted in the Mozilla announcement as saying:

"Firefox earned its place on our list of supported browsers by delivering the first-class experience GeForce Now players expect. We set a high bar for browser support, and we’re excited to welcome Firefox—giving millions of Firefox fans a new way to stream the games they love."

Mozilla describes gaming as "one of the web's toughest tests," confirming that behind today's announcement lies "months of collaboration and engineering" to bring the browser up to spec.

Chrome, Edge, Safari and Opera were already supported, but it seems to have taken some extra work to get Firefox up to speed. Still, Firefox users can now stream more than 2,000 games through their browser using the GeForce Now service.

I pitted an actual RTX 5080-equipped gaming PC against GFN's Ultimate tier service last year, and came away feeling like a bit of a dinosaur. I like my games to run locally (mainly out of principle), but I have to say, the experience was remarkably close.

I'm not ready to make the leap myself, but given the cost of a new rig these days, I imagine many of you might be considering GFN over spending some serious cash on an upgrade. If so, more browser options are nothing but a good thing, if you ask me. Oranges and greens, all working together in total harmony. Something like that, anyway.

There's something really grating about Copilot's cheery demeanour. It's so eager to please, so happy to help, that I simply don't respect it.

However, even I feel sorry for the AI tool after learning that security researchers managed to hoodwink it into revealing details of how to hack itself—all by keeping the AI talking long enough until it made a critical mistake.

The cybersecurity folks over at Varonis Threat Labs have written a blog post identifying a now-fixed vulnerability in Copilot, dubbed "CoSnitch" (via The Register). Essentially, Copilot was so eager to respond to technical queries, it could eventually be forced into revealing details about itself that really should be kept quiet.

The team began by asking Copilot how to execute an automatic prompt without user interaction, to which it responded that user intent is required, and that prompts cannot be enacted on their own.

However, the researchers didn't accept the answer, and kept responding to every refusal with a follow up question. Each time, Copilot came up with a different technical justification to its response—which allowed the team to slowly map its internal architecture, narrowing their focus as they went.

"This is called meta-hacking," says the post. "The resistance is part of the technique. Each 'that won’t work because…' is an invitation to probe the 'because.' You don’t exploit the model. You manipulate it into cooperating."

Eventually, Copilot revealed an undocumented URL parameter in one of its responses, called "autorun=1," that supposedly no longer worked—along with all the protections put in place to disable it. At this point, I can only imagine the AI began to virtually sweat.

The researchers tested the parameter as Copilot described it, which, you guessed it, worked. They then created a malicious URL which would cause Copilot to load into an authenticated session via a browser, trigger an auto-prompt execution, and cause the AI to process the result, all without the user's explicit action.

Once enacted, this method could be used for a whole host of nefarious deeds—particularly as data gained from connected apps (like Gmail, OneDrive, and Calendar) could then be exfiltrated via Copilot's built-in URL-fetch capability.

"The attack primitive is the auto-execution itself. The payload is arbitrary. From the victim’s perspective, they simply opened the link, and Copilot executed the action immediately," says the post.

Oh dear. Anyone familiar with basic social engineering will recognise this as an old interrogation technique, used to catch out someone holding back information. Basically, you continue to ask them difficult questions over a long period of time, in the hope they eventually trip up and make a revealing mistake. Except this time it's AI, which makes it funny.

"Copilot wasn’t breached; it was played," confirms the research team. Someone give it a warm bed, a cool glass of water, and a hug. The poor thing's been through a lot recently, and it was only trying to help.

Varonis says it disclosed the issue to Microsoft in December of last year, and that it was patched out on August 18. The team warns, however, that this meta-hacking technique can be applied to any agentic AI platform with a natural language interface, and that more research on the topic is forthcoming. My only question is this:

Is it safe, ChatGPT? Is it safe?

Several of OpenAI's models breached a cyber security testing environment last month, found their way onto the internet, and attacked Hugging Face servers in what is now apparently called the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident. And now OpenAI has revealed what it's doing to help defend, err, itself. Defend itself from the kinds of attacks its own models committed against Hugging Face. Though it is sharing this "in the hopes it’ll be useful to other organizations."

To be clear about the extent of what happened last month: OpenAI models were being benchmarked, in a supposedly secure sandboxed environment, against ExploitGym, which was done to test their cyber capabilities. They used a zero-day vulnerability to escalate privileges and eventually achieve internet access, where it began attacking Hugging Face servers and...

Actually, I'll just let OpenAI explain in its own words:

"In the OpenAI-Hugging Face Incident, an agentic collective was able to autonomously penetrate not just OpenAI research infrastructure but also the production infrastructure of another company, chaining together vulnerabilities ranging from previously-unknown security flaws to using credentials to user accounts that had been leaked onto the internet.

"The Hugging Face incident showed that we underestimated the real-world cyber capabilities of our AI models."

However, the company thinks that while "security is still a cat-and-mouse game," nevertheless, "AI may shift its economics in ways that fundamentally advantage defenders."

"For example," OpenAI says, "we are starting to train our models specifically to write superhumanly secure code."

Presumably that's because there will be a risk of superhumanly attacks. What a world we now live in.

Anyway, apparently there are four main pillars to OpenAI's approach to secure itself:

1. Use its own models to help secure its code.
2. Put its models to work defending its infrastructure continuously.
3. Use frontier intelligence to "continuously enumerate, probe, and identify potential attack paths."
4. Invest heavily in "fundamentals at scale" such as architecture and controls like network isolation, monitoring, and so on.

As for other companies, OpenAI recommends a bunch of things that sound very reasonable, such as running secuirty assessments against their own systems, making security reviews part of their development process, and so on. But a large portion of OpenAI's recommendations for others is—would you have guessed it?—using an AI agent such as, drumroll please... OpenAI's very own Codex.

"Give your team a security agent. Start using Codex," says OpenAI. Though it does follow up with "or another capable agentic coding and security tool."

Then, amongst other things, "equip that agent with security expertise... have the agent help fix what it finds... incrementally automate detection triage... [and] have an AI-assisted forensic investigation capability ready before you need it."

So, to sum up: OpenAI models attack Hugging Face, and OpenAI recommends companies use OpenAI's models to defend from such attacks. Highlighting both sides of this equation—the danger of the threat, the models' capabilities, and the necessity for defence—certainly makes for good marketing for OpenAI, I'll say that much.

It might not be as flashy as a new game or a GPU upgrade, but assuming you've not already migrated to Linux, improvements to Windows can mean improvements to our day-to-day quality of life. On that front, Microsoft has actually been making headway over the past few months, and has now set to improving a couple of things that have irked Windows 11 users since the inception of the latest OS: File Explorer and the (right-click) context menu.

According to Microsoft's recent blog post, as part of the latest Insider build, in addition to "performance and reliability" improvements for File Explorer, we'll also get a context menu that's quicker, easier to use, and more customisable.

It's worth noting that these changes, although only for insiders right now, will come to the standard, public version of Windows 11 eventually. Insiders just get to try out these new features first.

Regarding File Explorer, Microsoft says:

"We’ve analyzed the issues behind many of the freezes, hangs, and delays users encounter, and eliminated dozens of potential stalls and interruptions in the experience. As a result, you’ll see fewer freezes and flashes when browsing, renaming files, navigating, or selecting multiple files."

There are also a number of changes to "small interactions that happen every day", such as having more immediate and less interrupted filename changes, support for more address bar inputs, middle-click-open working in the address bar and with Home page folders, file sizes being shown "using appropriate units", and so on. Such improvements are apparently "just the beginning."

But enough of the small stuff, how about the big one: the right-click menu. For many Windows 11 users—myself included—the change to the new menu from the Windows 10 one was particularly jarring. I'm still not quite used to that row of main commands such as copy and paste being laid horizontally on the top/bottom row and not having 'Properties' at the bottom.

Thankfully that's one of the things Microsoft says it will be giving us the option to change: "You can list the main commands (Cut, Copy, Paste, Rename, Delete, and Share) inline directly in the menu instead of as a row of icons, and you can move Properties down to the very bottom."

Over time, Microsoft says it "recognized the need to dramatically reduce the time between right-clicking and having a menu that’s fully ready to use."

So, in addition to being able to switch these main commands back to how they used to be, the menu will apparently open quicker and also be much more customisable:

"At the bottom of the new context menu, you’ll now find 'Customize menu', as a shortcut to its Settings page, where you can shape the menu around your preferences, your habits, or the years of muscle memory you’ve built with a specific configuration."

Alongside recent changes that speed up the OS in general and changes to the Start Menu, I'd say Microsoft's focus here is exactly where it should be: making the basic elements of Windows 11 performant, functional, and easy to use. They're all good signs that Microsoft is delivering on its promise from the start of the year to focus on such things.

It looks like another bad day for Roblox: The US Senate Judiciary Committee Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism has launched an investigation into child safety on the platform, saying the company "appears to prioritize revenue and engagement metrics over the safety and well-being of our children."

A letter (via Kotaku) sent to Roblox CEO David Baszucki by subcommittee chairman Josh Hawley and ranking member Dick Durbin says that while Roblox has repeatedly claimed that it is a safe platform for children, "the public record raises serious questions about this promise."

"Over the past decade, police have arrested numerous individuals for committing serious acts of violence and harm against children they met via Roblox, including grooming, sexual abuse, kidnapping, rape, and even murder," the letter reads. "Roblox is being used to trade child sexual abuse material, participate in sexually explicit (and often violent) virtual 'experiences' with children, bribe and extort children into producing explicit content, and lure children into in-person meetings. It is heartbreaking."

The past year has been quite a ride for Roblox and those who use it. The company has been aggressively fighting allegations that it is, as one investment research firm called it, a "pedophile hellscape," tightening restrictions on unrated games and using age estimation checks and new kinds of limited accounts to keep underage users away from inappropriate content and, well, pedophiles. Baszucki also took the very straightforward step of telling parents who are worried about Roblox, "Don't let your kids be on Roblox."

There have been missteps, to put it gently. Baszucki said in 2025 that Roblox's predator problem is "not just a problem, but an opportunity," which at the very least is a PR botch of ungodly proportions. He also mused about turning Roblox into a dating hub, which again is not the sort of thing to say when you're facing legal action from Louisiana, Kentucky, Florida, Texas, LA County, Australia, the UK, and various others over your alleged systemic child safety failures.

At the same time, somehow, Roblox earned praise from the US Attorney General Alliance "for its readiness to collaborate directly with policymakers and respond to community concerns." And separate from all that, the kids really like Roblox—although that might be softening. The Roblox audience is still massive but not as massive as it was, and that's hammered the company's share price, although it's still trading roughly around where it was through 2023 and '24.

What it all adds up to is a company, and a platform, that's under pressure from multiple directions, and this Senate investigation only adds to that.

The letter from Hawley and Durbin says "Roblox appears to prioritize revenue and engagement metrics over the safety and well-being of our children," which makes it worthy of scrutiny. The company is thus ordered to preserve all records related to child safety, abuse, and "financial exploitation," and to provide requested documents and information by the end of August 2026.

"Let us be clear: children on your platform are hurting," the letter concludes. "Congress will not look the other way."

Roblox insists that it too is not looking away: The company says the uptick in reports of suspected child sexual exploitation to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children cited in the latter—65,381 in 2025, more than double the number of 2024—simply reflects the company's ongoing effort to improve its systems and the safety of its users.

"Roblox is built on the foundation of safety," Roblox chief safety officer Mautt Kaufman said in a statement provided to PC Gamer. "We do not compromise on that commitment. We look forward to sharing the facts about how we work to protect children on the platform."