High above a barren California desert on Tuesday, a privately developed aircraft broke the sound barrier for the first time when Boom Supersonic’s XB-1 demonstrator reached Mach 1.122. Piloted by a former US Navy aviator, Tristan “Geppetto” Brandenburg, the XB-1 vehicle broke the supersonic barrier on three separate occasions before safely landing back at Mojave Air & Space Port, where it had taken off half an hour earlier. It marked…

“We’re making new Pebble watches,” writes original Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky on the “rePebble” launch page. Eight years after Pebble’s time as an upstart watchmaker came to an end, Migicovsky says that he’s working with a small team on “a Pebble-like smartwatch that runs open source PebbleOS.” There should be some new features, but new watches would stay “true to the core Pebble vision.” With enough signups, the site claims,…

Retro game enthusiasts may already be acquainted with Analogue, a company that designs and manufactures updated versions of classic consoles that can play original games but also be hooked up to modern televisions and monitors. The most recent of its announcements is the Analogue 3D, a console designed to play Nintendo 64 cartridges. Now, a company called Retro Remake is reigniting the console wars of the 1990s with its SuperStation…

Broadcom’s ownership of VMware has discouraged many of its customers, as companies are displeased with how the trillion-dollar firm has run the virtualization business since buying it in November 2023. Many have discussed reducing or eliminating ties with the company. Now, over a year after the acquisition, the pressure is on for customers to start committing to a VMware subscription, forego VMware support, or move on from VMware technologies. The…

Nvidia is launching the first volley of RTX 50-series GPUs based on its new Blackwell architecture, starting with the RTX 5090 and working downward from there. The company also appears to be winding down support for a few of its older GPU architectures, according to these CUDA release notes spotted by Tom’s Hardware. The release notes say that CUDA support for the Maxwell, Pascal, and Volta GPU architectures “is considered…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…