Nvidia GeForce RTX 5090 costs as much as a whole gaming PC—but it sure is fast

Nvidia’s GeForce RTX 5090 starts at $1,999 before you factor in upsells from the company’s partners or price increases driven by scalpers and/or genuine demand. It costs more than my entire gaming PC. The new GPU is so expensive that you could build an entire well-specced gaming PC with Nvidia’s next-fastest GPU in it—the $999 RTX 5080, which we don’t have in hand yet—for the same money, or maybe even…

January 24, 2025
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Backdoor infecting VPNs used “magic packets” for stealth and security

When threat actors use backdoor malware to gain access to a network, they want to make sure all their hard work can’t be leveraged by competing groups or detected by defenders. One countermeasure is to equip the backdoor with a passive agent that remains dormant until it receives what’s known in the business as a “magic packet.” On Thursday, researchers revealed that a never-before-seen backdoor that quietly took hold of…

January 23, 2025
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Data breach hitting PowerSchool looks very, very bad

Parents, students, teachers, and administrators throughout North America are smarting from what could be the biggest data breach of 2025: an intrusion into the network of a cloud-based service storing detailed data of millions of pupils and school personnel. The hack, which came to light earlier this month, hit PowerSchool, a Folsom, California, firm that provides cloud-based software to some 16,000 K–12 schools worldwide. The schools serve 60 million students…

January 23, 2025
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Reddit won’t interfere with users revolting against X with subreddit bans

Reddit is staying out of the current revolt against social media website X and, to a lesser degree, Meta, on its platform. Since Tuesday, hundreds of subreddits have discussed and/or implemented bans against the site formerly called Twitter, as reported by 404 Media. Dozens of subreddits have already agreed to disallow the sharing of any links to X, with moderators (volunteer Reddit users) agreeing to enforce the bans. The trend…

January 22, 2025
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Wine 10.0 brings Arm Windows apps to Linux, still is not an emulator

The open source Wine project—sometimes stylized WINE, for Wine Is Not an Emulator—has become an important tool for companies and individuals who want to make Windows apps and games run on operating systems like Linux or even macOS. The CrossOver software for Mac and Windows, Apple’s Game Porting Toolkit, and the Proton project that powers Valve’s SteamOS and the Steam Deck are all rooted in Wine, and the attention and…

January 22, 2025
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The Internet is (once again) awash with IoT botnets delivering record DDoSes

We’re only three weeks into 2025, and it’s already shaping up to be the year of Internet of Things-driven DDoSes. Reports are rolling in of threat actors infecting thousands of home and office routers, web cameras, and other Internet-connected devices. Here is a sampling of research released since the first of the year. Lax security, ample bandwidth A post on Tuesday from content-delivery network Cloudflare reported on a recent distributed…

January 22, 2025
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Bambu Lab pushes a “control system” for 3D printers, and boy, did it not go well

January 21, 2025

Bambu Lab, a major maker of 3D printers for home users and commercial “farms,” is pushing an update to its devices that it claims will improve security while still offering third-party tools “authorized” access. Some in the user community—and 3D printing advocates broadly—are pushing back, suggesting the firm has other, more controlling motives. As is perhaps appropriate for 3D printing, this matter has many layers, some long-standing arguments about freedom…

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New year, same streaming headaches: Netflix raises prices by up to 16 percent

Today Netflix, the biggest streaming service based on subscriber count, announced that it will increase subscription prices by up to $2.50 per month. In a letter to investors [PDF], Netflix announced price changes starting today in the US, Canada, Argentina, and Portugal. People who subscribe to Netflix’s cheapest ad-free plan (Standard) will see the biggest increase in monthly costs. The subscription will go from $15.49/month to $17.99/month, representing a 16.14…

January 21, 2025
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Cutting-edge Chinese “reasoning” model rivals OpenAI o1—and it’s free to download

On Monday, Chinese AI lab DeepSeek released its new R1 model family under an open MIT license, with its largest version containing 671 billion parameters. The company claims the model performs at levels comparable to OpenAI’s o1 simulated reasoning (SR) model on several math and coding benchmarks. Alongside the release of the main DeepSeek-R1-Zero and DeepSeek-R1 models, DeepSeek published six smaller “DeepSeek-R1-Distill” versions ranging from 1.5 billion to 70 billion…

January 21, 2025
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Report: Apple Mail is getting automatic categories on iPadOS and macOS

A report from Mark Gurman in Bloomberg makes the very reasonable suggestion that automatic email categorization in Apple Mail, already present since iOS 18 arrived on the iPhone, is coming to Macs and iPads in a few months. The feature should arrive with macOS 15.4 and possibly iPadOS 18.4, both due in April. Similar to Google’s server-side Gmail sorting, which debuted in May 2013, Apple’s Mail app on iOS sorts…

January 20, 2025
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