We’re used to updating Windows, macOS, and Linux systems at least once a month (and usually more), but people with ancient DOS-based PCs still get to join in the fun every once in a while. Over the weekend, the team that maintains FreeDOS officially released version 1.4 of the operating system, containing a list of fixes and updates that have been in the works since the last time a stable…

On Saturday, Meta released its newest Llama 4 multimodal AI models in a surprise weekend move that caught some AI experts off guard. The announcement touted Llama 4 Scout and Llama 4 Maverick as major advancements, with Meta claiming top performance in their categories and an enormous 10 million token context window for Scout. But so far the open-weights models have received an initial mixed-to-negative reception from the AI community,…

A technique that hostile nation-states and financially motivated ransomware groups are using to hide their operations poses a threat to critical infrastructure and national security, the National Security Agency has warned. The technique is known as fast flux. It allows decentralized networks operated by threat actors to hide their infrastructure and survive takedown attempts that would otherwise succeed. Fast flux works by cycling through a range of IP addresses and…

On this day in 1975, Bill Gates and Paul Allen founded a company called Micro-Soft in Albuquerque, New Mexico. The two men had worked together before, as members of the Lakeside Programming group in the early 70s and as co-founders of a road traffic analysis company called Traf-O-Data. But Micro-Soft, later renamed to drop the hyphen and relocated to its current headquarters in Redmond, Washington, would be the company that…

When Google announced Tuesday that end-to-end encrypted messages were coming to Gmail for business users, some people balked, noting it wasn’t true E2EE as the term is known in privacy and security circles. Others wondered precisely how it works under the hood. Here’s a description of what the new service does and doesn’t do, as well as some of the basic security that underpins it. When Google uses the term…

In the wake of the Switch 2 reveal, neither Nintendo nor Nvidia has gone into any detail at all about the exact chip inside the upcoming handheld—technically, we are still not sure what Arm CPU architecture or what GPU architecture it uses, how much RAM we can expect it to have, how fast that memory will be, or exactly how many graphics cores we’re looking at. But interviews with Nintendo…

Among the changes mentioned in yesterday’s Nintendo Switch 2 presentation was a note that the new console doesn’t just support MicroSD Express cards for augmenting the device’s 256GB of internal storage, but it requires MicroSD Express. Whatever plentiful, cheap microSD card you’re using in your current Switch, including Sandisk’s Nintendo-branded ones, can’t migrate over to your Switch 2 alongside all your Switch 1 games. MicroSD Express, explained Why is regular-old MicroSD…

On the heels of releasing its most capable AI model yet, Google is making some changes to the Gemini team. A new report from Semafor reveals that longtime Googler Sissie Hsiao will step down from her role leading the Gemini team effective immediately. In her place, Google is appointing Josh Woodward, who currently leads Google Labs. According to a memo from DeepMind CEO Demis Hassabis, this change is designed to…

On Tuesday, the Wikimedia Foundation announced that relentless AI scraping is putting strain on Wikipedia’s servers. Automated bots seeking AI model training data for LLMs have been vacuuming up terabytes of data, growing the foundation’s bandwidth used for downloading multimedia content by 50 percent since January 2024. It’s a scenario familiar across the free and open source software (FOSS) community, as we’ve previously detailed. The Foundation hosts not only Wikipedia…

We’ve known for a few months now that the Nintendo Switch 2 will support backward compatibility for older Nintendo Switch games, and as of today’s presentation, we also know that some Switch games will get special Switch 2 Editions that add new features and support higher resolutions and other features. Nintendo’s product pages for the Switch add more details, including the status of backward-compatibility testing for original Switch games and…