Nvidia is working with Wall Street heavyweights on a potential $500 billion financing package for AI infrastructure (source paywalled; alternative source). The consortium includes BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR. The Financial Times reports: The partnership underscores Nvidia's growing efforts to raise capital for itself and its clients to continue assembling the chips, power production and data centres at the heart of the AI boom. The $5.25 trillion company has positioned itself at the centre of the AI boom, providing chips, infrastructure and software to a wide array of partners developing the technology. Nvidia's graphics processing units, or GPUs, underpin most of the leading US AI models available today.

[...] The biggest cloud-computing companies, including Meta, Oracle, Microsoft, Alphabet and Amazon, have dramatically increased their spending on AI infrastructure as they look to win the race to dominate the emerging technology. Morgan Stanley projects so-called hyperscalers will spend $3.5 trillion between 2026 and 2028. That need for capital has forced technology groups to tap every source of cash they can find, including public equity, investment-grade and high-yield bonds, securitized debt, private credit and project finance markets. "[The] sheer size of the AI infrastructure build-out is unprecedented," Jim Zelter, president of Apollo, said on an earnings call earlier this month. "More than $8 trillion of capital is expected to be invested, a staggering sum. We see an enormous opportunity for private capital to finance a portion of this along with public capital."

Even as Hollywood performers protest and Hollywood studios sue "in their war on AI," reports the Los Angeles Times, "the entertainment industry is deepening its dependence on it." Among hundreds of job postings in late June, more than one in 10 was likely connected to AI. The top studios' public postings suggest they have been recruiting people to build AI tools. They are also recruiting teams to defend their intellectual property against unauthorized AI use. "There are plenty of studios that are hiring [for AI] but never talk about it in public," said Yoland Yan, a co-founder of ComfyUI, a company that helps studios juggle different AI tools. Companies have been hesitant to detail how they use generative AI in film production — partly because they are concerned about consumer and union backlash. Some in Hollywood described AI use as the new cosmetic surgery, where everyone knows it is happening, but few will admit to it...

Although some companies may be shy about sharing their AI plans, big stars who don't have to answer to others have been more open about their embrace of the new technology for storytelling. Rejecting AI is like picking a horse and buggy over a car, said "Star Wars" creator George Lucas. "Artificial intelligence means it's much easier for us to make movies," he told a trade magazine earlier this year. "There's nothing you can do about it. That's progress. It's the future." Some in Hollywood have a softer stance on artificial intelligence, with studios cutting deals with AI companies, and filmmakers like Martin Scorsese backing AI companies. Ben Affleck launched an AI film tech company then sold it to Netflix for half a billion dollars. When launching InterPositive, Affleck said he wanted to keep "storytelling human" by building AI tools that could fix lighting, generate missing shots and other things while "keeping creative decisions in the hands of artists...."

Disney, Netflix and Amazon had job postings that were about using AI on the creative side of the business. Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Sony had job ads suggesting they were also using AI but for marketing, distribution and audience analytics. The postings suggest the Disney, Netflix and Amazon studios are building repeatable AI workflows for visual effects, animation, sound and dubbing. The companies also seem to be building in-house teams to develop custom generative-AI models, while also using third-party software.

None of the jobs advertised were to create AI that wrote scripts or created AI actors.
Ironically, the Times used Claude Code to build a scraper to identify the job postings, their article acknowledges.

• Three Disney jobs were for "content security," assessing AI tools and guarding against piracy, watermarking and rights-protection work. But Disney is also hiring PhD-level talent "to study 'computer graphics and AI' for Pixar and Disney films," according to the article, and "people to 'bridge the gap between research and practical studio application.'"

• Disney-owned visual effects shops Industrial Light & Magic "was searching for supervisors to 'explore emerging technologies (including AI/Machine Learning)' to develop new production workflows."

• Audio post-production unit Skywalker Sound "seemed to be recruiting to build proprietary AI models for soundtracks, voice separation, and voice transfer, the process of taking a speaker's tone and pitch, and applying it to new content."

• Amazon "was hiring a principal AI executive to drive AI-tool adoption across production, plus roles in operations automation and LLM content classification."

Valve is funding Collabora's experimental effort to port the open-source RADV Vulkan driver from Linux to Windows. The team has already demonstrated Counter-Strike 2 running with RADV, but a stable interface or compatibility shim will be needed to handle undocumented driver changes. Phoronix reports: Louis-Francis Ratte-Boulianne put out a blog post highlighting their initial work on porting RADV to Windows. Besides working on Windows WDDM2 integration for Windows, a big challenge with porting RADV to Windows is on relying on the AMD Radeon Software Windows kernel driver.

It's out-of-scope of this current work for trying to port the AMDGPU Linux kernel graphics driver to Windows, so they are working on bringing RADV to Windows while relying on AMD's official Windows kernel driver. That in turn has led to reverse engineering and other steps for figuring out the proprietary kernel driver's data structures and other elements so RADV can be adapted to use it.

Arizona State University has launched a 120-credit bachelor's degree in content creation that teaches video, podcasting, branding, analytics, media law, and social strategy. For their capstone, students are "expected to build a real social media account and demonstrate audience growth during the program," reports Dexerto. From the report: The Content Creation BA is housed within ASU's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication and appears in the university's 2026-2027 course catalog. The 120-credit-hour degree prepares students to become "an influencer and strategic storyteller" by teaching video production, podcasting, personal branding, audience analytics and social media strategy. The program was approved by the ASU University Senate in March 2026. Its proposal said graduates would be prepared to work independently as influencers and content creators across livestreaming, videography, writing, podcasting, graphics and emerging media.

[...] For the program's final project, students will choose a social media platform, such as TikTok, create a content and growth strategy, and attempt to gain real followers throughout the semester. "They will have demonstrable audience growth," [explained Jessica Pucci, senior associate dean at the Cronkite School]. "They will have a platform of their choice with real content and real followers and a real audience behind them." The curriculum includes courses titled How to Become an Influencer, On-Camera Presence, Introduction to Editing, Videography, Podcasting and Audio Storytelling, Social Media Foundations and The Digital Audience.

CNBC reports: Amazon is requiring that third-party sellers label any product images or videos that contain "AI-generated people" after New York recently passed a law mandating greater transparency around "synthetic performers" in ads... The policy directs sellers to tag images [and videos or other graphics on listing pages] with specific metadata keywords before they're uploaded. "Recent legislation requires disclosure when images or videos in advertisements contain photorealistic AI-generated people," Amazon wrote in the announcement [clarifying that the requirement doesn't apply to content featuring TV/video game/movie characters or content including real people, even if they've been altered using AI]. The company said it will "add an indicator" to listings on its website, informing consumers that images or other content feature AI-generated people, "where applicable." It's unclear what criteria Amazon will apply when deciding when to display the label to shoppers...

Amazon has embraced AI internally and it's increasingly infusing the technology across its portfolio. The company has optimized listing titles and details so they're more likely to be spotted by AI systems, invested in a recently rebranded assistant called Alexa for Shopping, and launched a feature that injects AI-generated [images of] products into its search bar in real time based on user queries. More Amazon third-party sellers are using AI to generate text, images and other content for their listings, partly by using the company's tools.
Outside sellers account for more than 60% of goods sold on Amazon, the article points out. It adds that there's currently no nationwide U.S. law requiring companies to disclose AI-generated advertising content, it adds — but YouTube, Meta, Pinterest, and TikTok have already added labels for AI-generated content.

And a new California law also requires large AI providers to embed watermarks in AI-generated images, video and other content...

Microsoft has announced Xbox Backward Compatibility for PC, a new preservation program that will let players run select classic Xbox games on Windows PCs and handhelds like the ROG Xbox Ally. Tom's Hardware reports: "This marks the beginning of a broader effort to preserve XBOX games from the past and bring them to PC over time," the company said in a blog post authored by Xbox "VP next generation" Jason Ronald. Alongside backward compatibility, the company says games will also include new features. The four titles in the announcement are: BLiNX: The Time Sweeper; Conker: Live and Reloaded; Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge; and Fuzion Frenzy.

You can now buy all of these games on PC, and they're also included in all Xbox Game Pass plans. Anyone who already owns these titles digitally on console can also now play them on PC or handheld, with support for Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Crucially, this appears to be a digital-only preservation effort, so it won't help anyone who only owns physical copies of these games. Xbox has reportedly been testing a way to digitize physical games as far back as Xbox One, but that hasn't yet materialized yet.

Alongside the preserved original gameplay, Xbox claims these games will let users customize graphics settings, with up to 4x resolution scaling, VSync support, Fullscreen and Windowed modes, anisotropic filtering, and enhanced anti-aliasing, with more features to come in the future. Notably, Xbox will add achievements to select original Xbox games on console and PC.

BrianFagioli writes: Valve has released Proton 11.0-1, a major update to its Windows compatibility layer for Linux that makes more games playable while fixing a long list of bugs affecting existing titles. The release restores compatibility for many EA games after a recent EA App update, moves classics like Resident Evil (1996), Resident Evil 2 (1998), Dino Crisis, and SHOGUN: Total War from Proton Experimental into the stable release, and adds support for games including Gothic 1 Classic, X-Plane 12, Breath of Fire IV, and Deadly Premonition. Valve also fixed crashes in HELLDIVERS 2, restored No Man's Sky VR support, improved Steam Overlay compatibility with EA games, addressed KDE and GNOME desktop issues, and rebased Proton on Wine 11.0 with updated graphics components. The full list of changes can be found here.

With the price of the new Steam Machine starting at $1,049, you might want to consider making your own Steam Machine instead. An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Valve says that "starting with the SteamOS 3.8 release, you can put together your own Steam Machine using whatever PC parts you want." SteamOS 3.8.10 launched last week with a slew of updates, including "improved compatibility with recent Intel and AMD platforms." Alongside that improved compatibility, Valve is giving gamers the green light to install SteamOS on their own desktops. In an interview with The Verge, Valve's Pierre-Loup Griffais said Valve has been "rolling out improvements to [SteamOS] so it's more compatible with desktop hardware," including eventual support for Nvidia graphics. Griffais says Valve has "a growing team" working on Nvidia driver support for SteamOS, adding, "We're collaborating with Nvidia very closely." While he mentioned that Nvidia support might not come this year, Griffais emphasized that "it's certainly something that we're working on in the background."

It's technically been possible to run SteamOS on your own hardware for a while now, but compatibility has been mostly limited to AMD systems. So far installing it has also required using a Steam Deck recovery image, a process that, speaking from experience, is much less straightforward than the installation process for most other Linux distributions. Trying to run SteamOS on Intel or Nvidia hardware has not been easy so far. According to Griffais, Valve is working to change that, which could mean that down the line, you'll be able to run SteamOS on just about any gaming PC hardware you want, including Nvidia.

For the more immediate future, Griffais says SteamOS in its current state should offer a "good experience" on console-like PC setups: "If you have something that is similar to the use case of a Steam Machine, where you have a PC that's gonna be plugged into a TV, and has a single hard drive that you're not going to try and dual boot [] you can put SteamOS on there, and you'll have an experience that is very similar to a Steam Deck docked or a Steam Machine, with some caveats, of course," like a lack of HDMI-CEC support. But "the core bits of the experience are there. The SteamOS graphics driver, the shader precompilation [...] you can get at all of that with the SteamOS." Griffais says SteamOS does not yet offer an easy way to dual-boot alongside Windows or another operating system, but envisions "a time where it's a better experience to install on your desktop and have it coexist with a different operating system."

Phoronix reports: The AMD R600 Gallium3D driver saw 59 commits [last] Sunday to Mesa 26.2. Making this code restructuring and code cleaning all the more notable is that the improvements to this old AMD Radeon graphics driver was done in part by GitHub Copilot.

Gert Wollny has been among the few open-source developers left working on the AMD R600g driver that covers from the Radeon HD 2000 series through Radeon HD 6000 series graphics cards... [T]he old open-source GPU driver support is being assisted by AI long after the upstream vendor has stopped working on this driver — the Radeon HD 2000 "R600" series launched in 2007.

Firefox has merged initial support for Vulkan Video decoding, giving the browser a more cross-platform path for GPU-accelerated video playback beyond Linux's long-running reliance on VA-API. Phoronix reports: Firefox on Linux has long been focused on the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) that isn't universally supported by Linux graphics drivers. This has left to efforts like NVIDIA-VAAPI-Driver to layer VA-API atop NVIDIA NVDEC interfaces to enjoy GPU-accelerated video playback in Firefox. Smaller Arm/embedded graphics drivers also have been largely left out of the game in the VA-API space. But with Vulkan Video we are beginning to see more adoption and in a cross-platform manner.

[...] The Firefox 153 release due out in July will have Vulkan Video decoding support available. The Vulkan Video activity in Firefox Git culminated this week with the work of NVIDIA engineer Tymur Boiko and Red Hat's Martin Stransky. Firefox 153.0 is expected for release on 21 July with this Vulkan Video support assuming no last minute issues.

Valve says its long-awaited Steam Machine and Steam Frame are both "shipping this summer." The company is also expanding its Verified program beyond Steam Deck to cover the new hardware. "Steam Verified is a developer-focused program where game makers ensure that their titles are capable of running on the Deck (meaning they'll run fine under Linux), that the UI elements and text are readable at standard resolutions, and that sensible default graphics settings are used," notes Tom's Hardware. From the report: The news should ease the worries of many an expecting gamer, given today's constant worries about AI servers slurping every RAM and NAND chip on the face of the earth, as well as Valve's own statements about component scarcity delaying the release. Plus, the company always works on its own schedule, so much so that Valve Time is a term.

The release of the Machine has been taking flak, given that while Valve was initially hoping for an estimated $600 to $800 price -- in the ballpark of the higher-end consoles -- the rumored pricing is climbing around or over $1000. This fact is somewhat corroborated by a February statement from a Valve executive who, like most anyone in the world, stated the price revision was due to the AI-driven component shortage.

"The company best known for powering the AI boom is coming for the PC," reports Axios.

Nvidia's CEO unveiled a new ARM-based "N1X processor made alongside Microsoft," reports CNBC, that "will be incorporated into a new RTX Spark superchip, debuting in the fall on a fresh line of Windows PCs from Microsoft, Dell, HP, ASUS, Lenovo and MSI."

More details from Engadget: It was only a matter of time before NVIDIA released a powerful system-on-a-chip (SOC) to take on AMD's Ryzen AI Max and Qualcomm's latest Snapdragon X2 chips. At Computex today, NVIDIA unveiled the RTX Spark, a "superchip" meant to give both laptops and small desktops fast AI and graphics performance...

The company says it offers 1 petaflop of AI computing power, and that it has 6,144 Blackwell RTX cores and 20 Mediatek Arm CPU cores. NVIDIA claims it's similar to the RTX 5070 laptop GPU but with much lower power draw. RTX Spark also has an NPU that's fast enough to be part of Microsoft's Copilot+ initiative, which requires a 40 TOPS NPU, but NVIDIA says it's mainly touting the tensor cores as part of the chip's Blackwell GPU for AI performance. RTX Spark's GPU can directly draw on the chip's large pool of unified memory, which can span from 16GB to 128GB, and the chip itself can use anywhere from single-digit wattage up to 80W...

NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang positions RTX Spark as a complete reinvention of the PC, eventually turning them more into devices meant for AI agents than manual human input... NVIDIA has been working together with Microsoft for "several years" while designing the RTX Spark, according to NVIDIA representatives... In a blog post provided to media, Microsoft head of Windows and devices, Pavan Davuluri, noted that the company optimized Windows 11's workload profile scheduling for the RTX Spark. "Whether you're checking your email or running an agent locally to debug code, the Windows scheduler on RTX Spark will ensure you get the best performance and efficiency out of your CPU," he wrote.

Dell's stock skyrocketed 32.76% on Friday, "its best day ever," reports CNBC, after Dell "reported its fastest pace for revenue growth for any period since returning to the public market in 2018..."

"Shares are now up 234% in 2026." Dell, which reported first-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday, saw a flood of artificial intelligence-related demand for its servers, which contain graphics processing units from companies like Nvidia. Quarterly revenue soared nearly 88% year over year, with AI server revenue alone increasing 757% from a year earlier to $16.1 billion...

Ben Reitzes, head of technology research at [research/investment firm] Melius, said he'd "never seen anything like" Dell's latest quarter. "They beat every line in the model, so this wasn't just AI, it was great execution," Reitzes told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." "They beat whatever we would've thought...."

Morgan Stanley wrote that while they expected a clean beat and raise this quarter, they're "eating our humble pie" off the back of Dell's results. "We got this one wrong, and our model/PT are under review," the analysts wrote. "This was — across the board — one of the most impressive quarters we've seen in our time covering Hardware, especially in the context of what is happening across the component universe."

Nvidia is retiring its classic Control Panel for GeForce Game Ready and Studio Driver users after 20 years, as it pushes users to a newer, more unified "NVIDIA" app. Longtime Slashdot reader BrendaEM first shared the news, commenting: "Nvidia seems to no long want you to have control over your own video card that you paid your hard-earned money for? WTF!?" VideoCardz.com reports: Existing Control Panel installs will remain on users' systems. NVIDIA says the old panel will only disappear after a clean driver installation. Users who still need it can continue to download it from the Microsoft Store, but NVIDIA will no longer add new features, fixes, or other changes.

The retirement currently applies to Game Ready and Studio Drivers. NVIDIA RTX PRO users will continue to receive Control Panel support until the company moves professional features to the NVIDIA app. For GeForce users, NVIDIA says the app now includes the modern functionality previously available through Control Panel. [...] The classic panel is therefore not being removed from every system overnight. It is being moved into maintenance mode for GeForce users...

Google is giving its iconic search box its first major redesign since 2001. The new design incorporates, you guessed it, artificial intelligence, "getting bigger and more interactive so that people can ask even longer questions and upload photographs and videos into queries," reports the New York Times. "In addition, people can ask follow-up questions with a chatbot on Google's main search page." From the report: The company will also offer digital assistants, known as agents, to automate searches so that someone who may be apartment hunting can be notified of a new listing without opening a real estate site like Zillow. The search features will be powered by a new artificial intelligence model, Gemini 3.5 Flash. Google said the model had improved on creating software code and performing autonomous tasks, worked faster and was less expensive to run than comparable models.

[...] Google is also bringing one of A.I.'s biggest breakthroughs -- software coding -- to search. When people research complex topics like astrophysics, Gemini can build interactive graphics and simulations behind the scenes to provide a deeper answer than its previous listing of websites. Google said it was introducing an alternative to the agents powered by Anthropic's Claude Code and OpenAI's Codex. Called Gemini Spark, the service is embedded in Gmail, Docs and other Google products, where it can turn meeting notes spread across emails and chats into a single document. It can also read and draft emails. "The open web is on its way out," says Richard Kramer, a financial analyst with Arete Research. "With A.I., Google is reducing everyone to raw data providers."

AMD says FSR 4.1 will finally bring its newer hardware-accelerated upscaling technology to older Radeon GPUs. "The rollout will begin in July with RDNA3- and 3.5-based GPUs, which include the Radeon RX 7000 series, as well as integrated GPUs like the Radeon 890M and Radeon 8060S," reports Ars Technica. "In 'early 2027,' support will also be extended to the RDNA2 architecture, which includes the Radeon RX 6000 series, integrated GPUs like the Radeon 680M, and the Steam Deck's GPU. This would also open the door to supporting FSR 4 on the PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X and S, all of which also use RDNA2-based GPUs." From the report: [AMD Computing and Graphics SVP Jack Huynh's] short video presentation didn't get into performance comparisons, but did mention that AMD had to work to get FSR 4's superior hardware-backed upscaling working on its older graphics architectures. RDNA4 includes AI accelerators that support the FP8 data format in the hardware, and porting FSR 4 to older GPUs meant getting it running on the integer-based INT8 hardware in the RDNA3 and RDNA2-based GPUs.

This may mean that FSR 4.1 running on an RDNA3 or RDNA2-based GPU may come with a larger performance hit relative to RDNA4 cards, or that image quality may differ slightly. Modders have already worked to get FSR4 working on INT8-supporting GPUs, and the older GPUs reportedly see a 10 to 20 percent performance hit relative to FSR 3.1 running on the same hardware. AMD's official implementation may or may not improve on these numbers.

[...] Any games that support FSR 4 should be able to support FSR 4.1 running on Radeon 7000-series cards; users will presumably be able to install a driver update in July that enables the new feature. Games that support the older FSR 3.1 can also be forced to use FSR 4 in the Radeon graphics driver.

Nvidia's real AI moat isn't "a piece of hardware," writes Wired's Sheon Han. It's CUDA: a mature, deeply optimized software ecosystem that keeps machine-learning workloads tied to Nvidia GPUs. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: What sounds like a chemical compound banned by the FDA may be the one true moat in AI. CUDA technically stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, but much like laser or scuba, no one bothers to expand the acronym; we just say "KOO-duh." So what is this all-important treasure good for? If forced to give a one-word answer: parallelization. Here's a simple example. Let's say we task a machine with filling out a 9x9 multiplication table. Using a computer with a single core, all 81 operations are executed dutifully one by one. But a GPU with nine cores can assign tasks so that each core takes a different column -- one from 1x1 to 1x9, another from 2x1 to 2x9, and so on -- for a ninefold speed gain. Modern GPUs can be even cleverer. For example, if programmed to recognize commutativity -- 7x9 = 9x7 -- they can avoid duplicate work, reducing 81 operations to 45, nearly halving the workload. When a single training run costs a hundred million dollars, every optimization counts.

Nvidia's GPUs were originally built to render graphics for video games. In the early 2000s, a Stanford PhD student named Ian Buck, who first got into GPUs as a gamer, realized their architecture could be repurposed for general high-performance computing. He created a programming language called Brook, was hired by Nvidia, and, with John Nickolls, led the development of CUDA. If AI ushers in the age of a permanent white-collar underclass and autonomous weapons, just know that it would all be because someone somewhere playing Doom thought a demon's scrotum should jiggle at 60 frames per second. CUDA is not a programming language in itself but a "platform." I use that weasel word because, not unlike how The New York Times is a newspaper that's also a gaming company, CUDA has, over the years, become a nested bundle of software libraries for AI. Each function shaves nanoseconds off single mathematical operations -- added up, they make GPUs, in industry parlance, go brrr.

A modern graphics card is not just a circuit board crammed with chips and memory and fans. It's an elaborate confection of cache hierarchies and specialized units called "tensor cores" and "streaming multiprocessors." In that sense, what chip companies sell is like a professional kitchen, and more cores are akin to more grilling stations. But even a kitchen with 30 grilling stations won't run any faster without a capable head chef deftly assigning tasks -- as CUDA does for GPU cores. To extend the metaphor, hand-tuned CUDA libraries optimized for one matrix operation are the equivalent of kitchen tools designed for a single job and nothing more -- a cherry pitter, a shrimp deveiner -- which are indulgences for home cooks but not if you have 10,000 shrimp guts to yank out. Which brings us back to DeepSeek. Its engineers went below this already deep layer of abstraction to work directly in PTX, a kind of assembly language for Nvidia GPUs. Let's say the task is peeling garlic. An unoptimized GPU would go: "Peel the skin with your fingernails." CUDA can instruct: "Smash the clove with the flat of a knife." PTX lets you dictate every sub-instruction: "Lift the blade 2.35 inches above the cutting board, make it parallel to the clove's equator, and strike downward with your palm at a force of 36.2 newtons." "You can begin to see why CUDA is so valuable to Nvidia -- and so hard for anyone else to touch," writes Han. "Tuning GPU performance is a gnarly problem. You can't just conscript some tender-footed undergrad on Market Street, hand them a Claude Max plan, and expect them to hack GPU kernels. Writing at this level is a grindsome enterprise -- unless you're a cracker-jack programmer at DeepSeek..."

Han goes on to argue that rivals like AMD and Intel offer competitive specs on paper, but their software stacks have struggled with bugs, compatibility issues, and weak adoption. As a result, Nvidia has built an Apple-like moat around AI computing, leaving the industry dependent on its expensive hardware.

In honor of World Password Day, Kaspersky researchers revisited their study on the crackability of real-world passwords and found that 60% of MD5-hashed passwords could be cracked in under an hour with a single Nvidia RTX 5090, and 48% could be cracked in under a minute. "The bottom line is that passwords protected only by fast hashing algorithms such as MD5 are no longer safe if attackers obtain them in a data breach," reports The Register. From the report: Much of the reason password hashes have become so easy to crack is password predictability. Per Kaspersky, its analysis of more than 200 million exposed passwords revealed common patterns that attackers can use to optimize cracking algorithms, significantly reducing the time needed to guess the character combinations that grant access to target accounts.

In case you're wondering whether there's a trend to compare this to, Kaspersky ran a prior iteration of this study in 2024, and bad news: Passwords are actually a bit easier to crack in 2026 than they were a couple of years ago. Not by much, mind you -- only a few percent -- but it's still a move in the wrong direction. "Attackers owe this boost in speed to graphics processors, which grow more powerful every year," Kaspersky explained. "Unfortunately, passwords remain as weak as ever." "This World Password Day, the main message ought not to be to the users, who often have no choice but to use passwords anyway, but to the sites and providers that are requiring them to do so," said senior IEEE member and University of Nottingham cybersecurity professor Steven Furnell. His advice is that providers need to modernize their login systems and enforce stronger protections, because users are often stuck with whatever security options they're given.

jeditobe writes: Developers of ReactOS told Phoronix that the project has introduced a unified BootCD, replacing its previously separate installation media and LiveCD images. The new image combines the traditional text-mode installer with a LiveCD mode in a single medium. Within this unified BootCD, the updated LiveCD mode now includes an option to launch a first-stage GUI installer. The graphical interface is intended to make installation more approachable for new users compared to the long-standing text-based setup process.

In a separate development, the project has also merged a new ATA storage driver that has been in progress since early 2024. The plug-and-play aware storage stack supports SATA, PATA, ATAPI, AHCI, and even SCSI devices, potentially expanding the range of hardware on which ReactOS can successfully boot.

Following recent improvements to graphics driver support, the project continues to make incremental progress across core subsystems, though its long development timeline remains a point of discussion. Will these usability and hardware compatibility improvements be enough to broaden ReactOS adoption beyond its current niche?

Please note that all new features are not present in version 0.4.15 and are available for testing in the latest nightly test builds.

Intel has launched a new budget-focused Core Series 3 processor line for lower-cost laptops -- "Intel's response to budget CPUs that are appearing in laptops like the Apple MacBook Neo," writes PCWorld's Mark Hachman. From the report: Intel unexpectedly launched the Core Series 3, based on its excellent "Panther Lake" (Core Ultra Series 3) architecture and 18A manufacturing, for devices for home consumers and small business on Thursday. Intel announced that a number of partners will launch laptops based upon the chip, including Acer, Asus, HP, Lenovo, and others. Although those laptops will be available beginning today, a number of them will begin shipping later this year, the partners said.

All of it -- from the specifications down to the messaging -- feels extremely aimed at trimming the fat and delivering to users just what they'll want. Intel's new Core Series 3 family just includes two "Cougar Cove" performance cores and four low-power efficiency "Darkmont" cores, with two Xe graphics cores on top of it. Intel isn't really worrying about AI, with an NPU capable of just 17 TOPS, though the company claims the CPU, NPU, and GPU combined reach 40 TOPS of performance. Yes, laptops will use pricey DDR5 memory, but at the lower end: just DDR5-6400 speeds. Support for three external displays will be included, though, maximizing multiple screens for maximum productivity. Intel used the term "all day battery life" without elaboration.

[...] Intel Core Series 3 delivers up to 47 percent better single-thread performance, up to 41 percent better multi thread performance, and up to 2.8x better GPU AI performance, Intel said. Compared against Intel's older Core 7 150U, Intel is saying that the new chip will outperform it by 2.1 times in content-creation and 2.7 times the AI performance. [...] We still don't know what Intel will charge for the chip, nor do we know what you'll be able to buy a Core Series 3 laptop for.