Riot Games has reduced cheating in Valorant to under 1% of ranked games through its controversial kernel-level anti-cheat system Vanguard, according to the company's anti-cheat director Phillip Koskinas. The system enforces Windows security features like Trusted Platform Module and Secure Boot while preventing code execution in kernel memory.

Beyond technical measures, Riot deploys undercover operatives who have infiltrated cheat development communities for years. "We've even gone as far as giving anti-cheat information to establish credibility," Koskinas told TechCrunch, describing how they target even "premium" cheats costing thousands of dollars.

Riot faces increasingly sophisticated threats, including direct memory access attacks using specialized PCI Express hardware and screen reader cheats that use separate computers to analyze gameplay and control mouse movements. To combat repeat offenders, Vanguard fingerprints cheaters' hardware. Koskinas admits to deliberately slowing some enforcement: "To keep cheating dumb, we ban slower." The team also employs psychological warfare, publicly discrediting cheat developers and trolling known cheaters to undermine their credibility in gaming communities.

Microsoft officially shuttered Skype on May 5, ending the pioneering video chat service's 22-year run. The closure, announced in February, completes Skype's absorption into Microsoft Teams, the company's Slack competitor. Users opening Skype apps will now be redirected to Teams. The only surviving component is the Skype Dial Pad, which remains available within Microsoft Teams Free for subscribers to make calls to traditional phone numbers.

The once-dominant video calling platform was purchased by Microsoft for $8.5 billion in 2011, replacing the company's Windows Live Messenger. Created in 2003 by developers behind Kazaa file-sharing software, Skype became synonymous with video calling during broadband internet's expansion. Skype's decline accelerated after Microsoft's acquisition, with unpopular redesigns and competition from Zoom, which captured market share during the COVID-19 pandemic. Microsoft began phasing out Skype in 2017, starting with Skype for Business, while bundling Teams with Office applications until regulatory intervention forced their separation.

Long-time Slashdot reader piojo writes: Tim Friede, Wisconsin man, has been injecting himself with snake venom for 18 years to gain protection from his pet snakes. The antibodies he developed have formed two components of a three-part antivenom, which gives partial or total protection against 18 of 19 species of venomous snakes that were tested. Notably, the antivenom is ineffective against vipers.
From Australia's public broadcaster ABC: The team's results have been published today in the journal Cell... The new antivenom described in the study is very different to traditional antivenoms, according to Peter Kwong, a biochemist at Columbia University and one of the study's authors.
The scientists call their new antivenom "unparallel," according to the BBC, though the snake enthusiast (a former truck mechanic) had "initially wanted to build up his immunity to protect himself when handling snakes, documenting his exploits on YouTube." The team is trying to refine the antibodies further and see if adding a fourth component could lead to total protection against elapid snake venom... "Tim's antibodies are really quite extraordinary — he taught his immune system to get this very, very broad recognition," said Professor Peter Kwong [one of the researchers at Columbia University].
In a video interview, CNN shows footage of the man inducing snake bites (calling it "a classic do-not-try-this-at-home moment"). "I have a lot of notes in Excel files," he tells CNN, "where I hit these particular windows to where I know I can boost up before a bite."

"I don't just take the bite, because that can kill you. I properly boost up, and methodically take notes, and weigh the venomes out very specifically..."

Microsoft has taken its most significant step yet toward eliminating passwords by making new Microsoft accounts "passwordless by default." The change means new users will never need to create a password, instead using more secure authentication methods like biometrics, PINs, or security keys.

The move builds on Microsoft's decade-long push toward passwordless authentication that began with Windows Hello in 2015. According to company data, passkey sign-ins are eight times faster than password and multi-factor authentication combinations, with users achieving a 98% success rate compared to just 32% for password users. Microsoft also said it now registers nearly one million passkeys daily across its consumer services.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCWorld: Windows 7 came onto the market in 2009 and put Microsoft back on the road to success after Windows Vista's annoying failures. But Windows 7 was not without its faults, as this curious story proves. Some users apparently encountered a vexing problem at the time: if they set a single-color image as the background, their Windows 7 PC always took 30 seconds to start the operating system and switch from the welcome screen to the desktop.

In a recent blog post, Microsoft veteran Raymond Chen explains the exact reason for this. According to him, a simple programming error meant that users had to wait longer for the system to boot. After logging in, Windows 7 first set up the desktop piece by piece, i.e. the taskbar, the desktop window, icons for applications, and even the background image. The system waited patiently for all components to finish loading and received feedback from each individual component. Or, it switched from the welcome screen to the desktop after 30 seconds if it didn't receive any feedback.

The problem here: The code for the message that the background image is ready was located within the background image bitmap code, which means that the message never appeared if you did not have a real background image bitmap. And a single color is not such a bitmap. The result: the logon system waited in vain for the message that the background has finished loading, so Windows 7 never started until the 30 second fallback activated and sent users to the desktop. The problem could also occur if users had activated the "Hide desktop icons" group policy. This was due to the fact that such policies were only added after the main code had been written and called by an If statement. However, Windows 7 was also unable to recognize this at first and therefore took longer to load.

Microsoft Copilot "isn't doing as well as the company would like," reports XDA-Developers.com (citing a report from startup/VC industry site Newcomer). The Redmond giant has invested billions of dollars and a lot of manpower into making it happen, but as a recent report claims, people just don't care. In fact, if the report is to be believed, Microsoft's rise in the AI scene has already come to a screeching halt:

At Microsoft's annual executive huddle last month, the company's chief financial officer, Amy Hood, put up a slide that charted the number of users for its Copilot consumer AI tool over the past year. It was essentially a flat line, showing around 20 million weekly users. On the same slide was another line showing ChatGPT's growth over the same period, arching ever upward toward 400 million weekly users. OpenAI's iconic chatbot was soaring, while Microsoft's best hope for a mass-adoption AI tool was idling. It was a sobering chart for Microsoft's consumer AI team...

That's right; Microsoft Copilot's weekly user base is only 5% of the number of people who use ChatGPT, and it's not increasing. It's also worth noting that there are approximately 1.5 billion Windows users worldwide, which means just over 1% of them are using Copilot, a tool that's now a Windows default app....

It's not a huge surprise that Copilot is faltering. Despite Microsoft's CEO claiming that Copilot will become "the next Start button", the company has had to backtrack on the Copilot key and allow people to customise it to do something else, including giving back its original feature of the Menu key.
They also note earlier reports that Intel's AI PC chips aren't selling well.

"The U.S. and Canadian websites for Lenovo offered U.S. $140 and CAD $211 off on the same ThinkPad X1 Carbon model when choosing any one of the Linux-based alternatives," reports It's FOSS News: This was brought to my attention thanks to a Reddit post... Others then chimed in, saying that Lenovo has been doing this since at least 2020 and that the big price difference shows how ridiculous Windows' pricing is...

Not all models from their laptop lineup, like ThinkPad, Yoga, Legion, LOQ, etc., feature an option to get Linux pre-installed during the checkout process. Luckily, there is an easy way to filter through the numerous laptops. Just go to the laptops section (U.S.) on the Lenovo website and turn on the "Operating System" filter under the Filter by specs sidebar menu.
The article end with an embedded YouTube video showing a VCR playing a videotape of a 1999 local TV news report... about the legendary "Windows Refund Day" protests.

Slashdot ran numerous stories about the event — including one by Jon Katz...

ZDNet's reviewer says "I tested this affordable E Ink phone for two weeks, and it rewired my brain (for the better)." It's Mudita's new Kompakt smartphone with a two-color E Ink display — which ZDNet calls "an affordable choice" for those "considering investing in a so-called 'dumbphone'..." Compared to modern smartphones, the Mudita Kompakt is a bit chunky at half an inch thick and five inches long. It's still rather light, though, weighing just 164 grams and covered in soft touch material, so it feels good in the hand. The bezels around the 4.3-inch display are rather large, with three touch-sensitive buttons for back, home, and quick settings, so navigating to key elements is intuitive, whether you're coming from Android or iOS.

The phone features a fingerprint sensor to lock and unlock, and it's housed on the power button in the middle of the right side. I'm a huge fan of consolidating these two purposes to the same button, and it works flawlessly.... You can charge via the USB-C, but surprisingly, it also supports wireless charging. All in all, the battery is quite good. Mudita says it can last for up to six days on standby, with around two days of standard use. In my testing, I found this to be about accurate.

On the left side of the device is a button that houses one of its key features: offline mode. Switching to this mode disables all wireless connectivity and support for the camera, so it truly becomes distraction-free.. [T]here is undoubtedly some lag in certain apps — such as the camera — due to the E Ink display technology and processor/RAM specifications. You will also likely notice some lag in text messaging if you tap quickly on the keyboard, often resulting in getting ahead of the spell-checking feature. As far as apps go, in addition to phone calls and text messages, the Kompakt includes an alarm, calculator, chess game, maps, meditation, weather, and a voice recorder.
Phone calls "sounded great on both ends," according to the review. (And text messaging "works well if you don't tap too quickly on the keyboard.") But the 8MP camera produced photos "that look like they were taken over ten years ago." (And accessing the internal storage "requires connecting to a Windows PC and launching File Explorer," although "you can also just share photos via text messaging, as it's much faster than using a computer.") But ZDNet calls it an "attractive — if very simplified — E Ink display."

Mudita is asking $369 now for preorder customers, according to the article, while the phone will be available in May for $439.

It's a pickup truck "that can change into whatever you need it to be — even an SUV," according to the manufacturer's web site.

Selling in America for just $20,000 (after federal incentives), the new electric truck is "affordable, deeply customizable, and very analog," says TechCrunch. "It has manual windows and it doesn't come with a main infotainment screen. Heck, it isn't even painted..." Slate Auto is instead playing up the idea of wrapping its vehicles, something executives said they will sell in kits. Buyers can either have Slate do that work for them, or put the wraps on themselves. This not only adds to the idea of a buyer being able to personalize their vehicle, but it also cuts out a huge cost center for the company. It means Slate won't need a paint shop at its factory, allowing it to spend less to get to market, while also avoiding one of the most heavily regulated parts of vehicle manufacturing.

Slate is telling customers that they can name the car whatever they want, offering the ability to purchase an embossed wrap for the tailgate. Otherwise, the truck is just referred to as the "Blank Slate...." It's billing the add-ons as "easy DIY" that "non-gearheads" can tackle, and says it will launch a suite of how-to resources under the billing of Slate University... The early library of customizations on Slate's website range from functional to cosmetic. Buyers can add infotainment screens, speakers, roof racks, light covers, and much more.... All that said, Slate's truck comes standard with some federally mandated safety features such as automatic emergency braking, airbags, and a backup camera.
"The specs show a maximum range of 150 miles on a single charge, with the option for a longer-range battery pack that could offer up to 240 miles," reports NBC News (adding that the vehicles "aren't expected to be delivered to customers until late 2026, but can be reserved for a refundable $50 fee.") Earlier this month, TechCrunch broke the news that Bezos, along with the controlling owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Mark Walter; and a third investor, Thomas Tull, had helped Slate raise $111 million for the project. A document filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission listed Melinda Lewison, the head of Bezos' family office, as a Slate Auto director.
Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

Microsoft has finally released Windows Recall to the general public, nearly a year after first announcing the controversial feature. Available exclusively on Copilot+ PCs, Recall continuously captures screenshots of user activity, storing them in a searchable database with extracted text. The feature's original launch was derailed by significant security concerns, as critics noted anyone with access to a Recall database could potentially view nearly everything done on the device.

Microsoft's revamped version addresses these issues with improved security protections, better content filtering for sensitive information, and crucially, making Recall opt-in rather than opt-out. The rollout includes two additional Copilot+ features: an improved Search function with natural language understanding, and "Click to Do," which enables text copying from images and quick summarization of on-screen content.

Microsoft will remove its Maps app from the Microsoft Store in July 2025, delivering an "update" that renders the application completely nonfunctional. Following the cutoff, users won't be able to reinstall the app even if previously downloaded, according to a Microsoft support document. While the app will retain personal data like saved navigation routes and map URLs, this information will become unusable after the deprecation.

The Maps application, a remnant from the Windows Phone and Windows 10 Mobile era, will disappear completely while Bing Maps will continue functioning as a web service through bing.com/maps. Microsoft hasn't provided specific reasoning for the decision to sunset the desktop application, which has existed as an increasingly anachronistic holdover from Microsoft's abandoned mobile platform efforts.

Microsoft has announced native PyTorch support for Windows on Arm devices with the release of PyTorch 2.7, making it significantly easier for developers to build and run machine learning models directly on Arm-powered Windows machines. This eliminates the need for manual compilation and opens up performance gains for AI tasks like image classification, NLP, and generative AI. Neowin reports: With the release of PyTorch 2.7, native Arm builds for Windows on Arm are now readily available for Python 3.12. This means developers can simply install PyTorch using a standard package manager like pip.

According to Microsoft: "This unlocks the potential to leverage the full performance of Arm64 architecture on Windows devices, like Copilot+ PCs, for machine learning experimentation, providing a robust platform for developers and researchers to innovate and refine their models."

Offices nationwide are ditching harsh fluorescent lighting in favor of advanced systems designed to improve cognitive function and entice remote workers back to physical workplaces. Companies are investing in circadian-tuned lighting that adjusts intensity and color temperature throughout the day to mimic natural light patterns, syncing with employees' biological rhythms, according to WSJ.

The technology arsenal includes faux skylights displaying virtual suns and moons, AI-controlled self-tinting windows, and customizable lighting zones that can be adjusted via remote control. Research suggests these innovations may improve brain function during tasks requiring sustained attention. "We've known for a long time that natural light is better and makes people feel better," says Peter Cappelli, professor at Wharton School. The innovations stem from discoveries in the early 2000s of photosensitive retinal cells that affect biology independent of vision. Industry specialists report a "huge uptick in requests," though implementation adds 20-30% to project costs, potentially slowing mainstream adoption.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Whisky, a gaming-focused front-end for Wine's Windows compatibility tools on macOS, is no longer receiving updates. As one of the most useful and well-regarded tools in a Mac gamer's toolkit, it could be seen as a great loss, but its developer hopes you'll move on with what he considers a better option: supporting CodeWeavers' CrossOver product.

Also, Whisky's creator is an 18-year-old college student, and he could use a break. "I am 18, yes, and attending Northeastern University, so it's always a balancing act between my school work and dev work," Isaac Marovitz wrote to Ars. The Whisky project has "been more or less in this state for a few months, I posted the notice mostly to clarify and formally announce it," Marovitz said, having received "a lot of questions" about the project status. [...] "Whisky, in my opinion, has not been a positive on the Wine community as a whole," Marovitz wrote on the Whisky site.

He advised that Whisky users buy a CrossOver license, and noted that while CodeWeavers and Valve's work on Proton have had a big impact on the Wine project, "the amount that Whisky as a whole contributes to Wine is practically zero." Fixes for Wine running Mac games "have to come from people who are not only incredibly knowledgeable on C, Wine, Windows, but also macOS," Marovitz wrote, and "the pool of developers with those skills is very limited." While Marovitz told Ars that he's had "some contact with CodeWeavers" in making Whisky, "they were always curious and never told me what I should or should not do." It became clear to him, though, "from what [CodeWeavers] could tell me as well as observing the attitude of the wider community that Whisky could seriously threaten CrossOver's viability." "Whisky may have been a CrossOver competitor, but that's not how we feel today," wrote CodeWeavers CEO James B. Ramey in a statement. "Our response is simply one of empathy, understanding, and acknowledgement for Isaac's situation."

Canonical today released Ubuntu 25.04 "Plucky Puffin," bringing significant upgrades to the non-LTS distribution including Linux kernel 6.14, GNOME 48 with triple buffering, and expanded hardware support.

For the first time, Ubuntu ships an official generic ARM64 desktop ISO targeting virtual machines and Snapdragon-based devices, with initial enablement for the Snapdragon X Elite platform. The release also adds full support for Intel Core Ultra Xe2 integrated graphics and "Battlemage" discrete GPUs, delivering improved ray tracing performance and hardware-accelerated video encoding.

Networking improvements include wpa-psk-sha256 Wi-Fi support and enhanced DNS resolution detection. The installer now better handles BitLocker-protected Windows partitions for dual-boot scenarios. Other notable changes include JPEG XL support by default, NVIDIA Dynamic Boost enabled on supported laptops, Papers replacing Evince as the default document viewer, and APT 3.0 becoming the standard package manager. Ubuntu 25.04 will receive nine months of support until January 2026.

Microsoft has acknowledged that Classic Outlook can mysteriously transform into a system resource hog, causing CPU usage spikes between 30-50% and significantly increasing power consumption on both Windows 10 and 11 systems.

Users first reported the issue in November 2024, but Microsoft only confirmed the problem this week, offering little resolution beyond stating that "the Outlook Team is investigating this issue." The company's sole workaround involves forcing a switch to the Semi-Annual Channel update through registry edits -- an approach many enterprise environments will likely avoid. Microsoft hasn't announced a definitive end date for Classic Outlook, but the company continues pushing users toward its New Outlook client despite its incomplete feature set.

OpenAI unveiled its GPT-4.1 model family on Monday, prioritizing coding capabilities and instruction following while expanding context windows to 1 million tokens -- approximately 750,000 words. The lineup includes standard GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano variants, all available via API but not ChatGPT.

The flagship model scores 54.6% on SWE-bench Verified, lagging behind Google's Gemini 2.5 Pro (63.8%) and Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet (62.3%) on the same software engineering benchmark, according to TechCrunch. However, it achieves 72% accuracy on Video-MME's long video comprehension tests -- a significant improvement over GPT-4o's 65.3%.

OpenAI simultaneously announced plans to retire GPT-4.5 -- their largest model released just two months ago -- from API access by July 14. The company claims GPT-4.1 delivers "similar or improved performance" at substantially lower costs. Pricing follows a tiered structure: GPT-4.1 costs $2 per million input tokens and $8 per million output tokens, while GPT-4.1 nano -- OpenAI's "cheapest and fastest model ever" -- runs at just $0.10 per million input tokens.

All models feature a June 2024 knowledge cutoff, providing more current contextual understanding than previous iterations.

Microsoft is starting to gradually roll out a preview of Recall, its feature that captures screenshots of what you do on a Copilot Plus PC to find again later, to Windows Insiders. From a report: This new rollout could indicate that Microsoft is finally getting close to launching Recall more widely. Microsoft originally intended to launch Recall alongside Copilot Plus PCs last June, but the feature was delayed following concerns raised by security experts. The company then planned to launch it in October, but that got pushed as well so that the company could deliver "a secure and trusted experience."

BrianFagioli writes: In a move that is sure to make longtime PC users do a double take, the Library of Congress has added two very unexpected sounds to its National Recording Registry. No, it's not another classic rock album or jazz staple. Believe it or not, it's actually the "Reboot Chime" from Windows 95 (that played when the operating system started) and the soundtrack from Minecraft!

Microsoft has created a real-time AI-generated rendition of Quake II gameplay (playable on the web).

Friday Xbox's general manager of gaming AI posted the startling link to "an AI-generated gaming experience" at Copilot.Microsoft.com "Move, shoot, explore — and every frame is created on the fly by an AI world model, responding to player inputs in real-time. Try it here."

They started with their "Muse" videogame world models, adding "a real-time playable extension" that players can interact with through keyboard/controller actions, "essentially allowing you to play inside the model," according to a Microsoft blog post. A concerted effort by the team resulted in both planning out what data to collect (what game, how should the testers play said game, what kind of behaviours might we need to train a world model, etc), and the actual collection, preparation, and cleaning of the data required for model training. Much to our initial delight we were able to play inside the world that the model was simulating. We could wander around, move the camera, jump, crouch, shoot, and even blow-up barrels similar to the original game. Additionally, since it features in our data, we can also discover some of the secrets hidden in this level of Quake II. We can also insert images into the models' context and have those modifications persist in the scene...

We do not intend for this to fully replicate the actual experience of playing the original Quake II game. This is intended to be a research exploration of what we are able to build using current ML approaches. Think of this as playing the model as opposed to playing the game... The interactions with enemy characters is a big area for improvement in our current WHAMM model. Often, they will appear fuzzy in the images and combat with them (damage being dealt to both the enemy/player) can be incorrect.
They warn that the model "can and will forget about objects that go out of view" for longer than 0.9 seconds. "This can also be a source of fun, whereby you can defeat or spawn enemies by looking at the floor for a second and then looking back up. Or it can let you teleport around the map by looking up at the sky and then back down. These are some examples of playing the model."

This generative AI model was trained on Quake II "with just over a week of data," reports Tom's Hardware — a dramatic reduction from the seven years required for the original model launched in February.

Some context from The Verge: "You could imagine a world where from gameplay data and video that a model could learn old games and really make them portable to any platform where these models could run," said Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer in February. "We've talked about game preservation as an activity for us, and these models and their ability to learn completely how a game plays without the necessity of the original engine running on the original hardware opens up a ton of opportunity."
"Is porting a game like Gameday 98 more feasible through AI or a small team?" asks the blog Windows Central. "What costs less or even takes less time? These are questions we'll be asking and answering over the coming decade as AI continues to grow. We're in year two of the AI boom; I'm terrified of what we'll see in year 10."

"It's clear that Microsoft is now training Muse on more games than just Bleeding Edge," notes The Verge, "and it's likely we'll see more short interactive AI game experiences in Copilot Labs soon." Microsoft is also working on turning Copilot into a coach for games, allowing the AI assistant to see what you're playing and help with tips and guides. Part of that experience will be available to Windows Insiders through Copilot Vision soon.