Microsoft has issued an out-of-band update for its recent Windows 11 patch, which has caused a number of bugs and issues. The September 2026 update was just released last Tuesday, and although it packs a number of new features and fixes nearly 1000 security flaws (commonplace in this day and age), there are also a few unfortunate regressions.

The 25H2 update finally reintroduces a movable taskbar, just like we've had since Windows 95, with an option to make the height smaller for compact displays. Likewise, the Start menu now has multiple configurable layouts, and you can toggle each main section on or off. Microsoft also revamped Windows Search — perhaps to finally be useful — and users can now choose to only have it display local results. Explorer got a handy tweak in the form of using KB, MB, GB size indicators, as well.

The update has also surfaced some serious bugs. First off, PCs with AMD Radeon GPUs are crashing, apparently due to the update provoking driver instability. Reinstalling the driver doesn't appear to help, and the reports unfortunately cover most contemporary AMD graphics cards. Microsoft did not mention AMD GPUs specifically in its latest update.

Microsoft noted that it has fixed an issue with Remote Desktop Services where RDS might become unstable, causing connection and sign-in failures.

Microsoft is also aware of an issue with audio output and microphone input going dead. Additionally, there are seemingly reports of audio devices starting up with a botched configuration, like tweaked 3D audio settings or speaker setups. The apparent workaround seems to be putting audio in a standard 2.0 configuration, but Microsoft has now addressed this issue in the emergency patch.

Explorer may display a black screen after logging in, leaving you with a perfectly functioning operating system but no visible UI. The File History backup feature is reportedly not detecting external drives, effectively making it useless. Of particular concern to enterprises, systems administrators, and homelabs, the Remote Desktop Service is also experiencing issues. Last but not least, Microsoft says it has addressed an issue where Claude Cowork is nonfunctional due to the update breaking HC-managed Linux VMs with Plan9 shared folders

Owners of HP and Lenovo systems are also advised to consider holding off on this update. Ever since the August 2026 patch (and now, cumulatively, with the September update), there are reportedly serious issues on both camps. On the HP side, there are instances of the update triggering BIOS corruption, leading to a failed install with no ability to recover the OS — though seemingly the OEM has published a new BIOS revision, so it's hard to say which side is to blame. Meanwhile, Lenovo users might have their machines black-screen or shut down out of the blue, seemingly due to power mismanagement.

While it's heartening to see that Microsoft has significantly increased its Windows development speed and is seemingly listening to customer feedback, a string of bugs after a major feature update are still common.

A retro video gaming devotee has showcased Lara Croft adventuring in and among ancient tombs on a humble ESP32-P4 microcontroller. This highly affordable device (available as a sub-$25 dev board) packs a pair of 32-bit 400 MHz RISC cores and delivers a slick, playable 1,024 x 600 pixel experience for TheAlexKid777, yet consumes roughly 1 watt at peak. It is good to see someone having video-gaming fun with cheap, power-sipping new tech in 2026.

When it launched in the mid-90s, Tomb Raider quickly became a classic by successfully capturing the add-a-third-dimension-to-all-games-and-IPs trend while delivering an eminently enjoyable adventure game. Not all games were better because they were in 3D rather than 2D. Far from it. Now the compute power required to run a title like OpenLara doesn’t require an expensive and power-hungry game console - a cheap dev board that typically consumes milliwatts is capable enough today.

But the high-efficiency low-wattage gaming feat described above is just half the story. The other phenomenon demonstrated here is the beefing up of commonly available microcontrollers. Developers no longer need to be extremely resource thrifty when coding for these humble devices. They now pack plenty of horsepower to spare.

In the case of Espressif’s ESP32-P4, there is “a dual-core RISC-V CPU featuring AI instruction extensions, an advanced memory subsystem, and integrated high-speed peripherals,” the maker highlights. There’s also up to 64MB PSRAM, 768KB SRAM, an FPU, DSP, ISP, 55 programmable GPIOs, and more. It sounds almost like an original Tomb Raider era dream.

In TheAlexKid777’s demo, this hardware is attached to the back of what looks like a 7- or 8-inch LCD. It runs OpenLara at 320 x 240 pixels, which is PPA hardware scaled to 1,024 x 600 pixels. The game also features stereo audio pumped through the dev board’s ES8311 codec, and it's controlled via a connected USB keyboard.

We’ve previously reported on various ESP32 family microcontrollers being used to: power a retro Mac emulator, host a tiny ad-blocking dongle, and even run a 28.9 million parameter LLM. Some of these projects use far cheaper ESP32 microcontrollers, too, starting at $5.

Microsoft has finally solved one of the biggest pain points of Windows with the rollout of Cloud Rebuild. The new recovery feature can reinstall Windows 11 even when an existing Windows installation is corrupt or refuses to boot. Available as a beta through the newly released Windows 11 Insider Beta Preview Build 26220.9343, the feature is essentially a hassle-free alternative to creating a Windows installation USB drive when a PC needs to be recovered.

According to Microsoft, Cloud Rebuild is designed to restore a Windows 11 PC to a “clean, known-good state” by downloading a fresh image of Windows along with the required drivers directly through Windows Update. Unlike the existing Reset this PC functionality, it does not depend on the health of your existing Windows installation, nor does it require users to have a USB drive or custom recovery image available.

Available via the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE), users can access it by selecting Troubleshoot > Recovery and uninstall > Cloud rebuild from WinRE. Speaking of which, Microsoft has also improved networking support in WinRE. The recovery environment can now reuse eligible Wi-Fi profiles saved within an existing Windows installation, allowing a PC to connect during recovery without requiring administrators to separately configure Wi-Fi credentials in WinRE. Once the PC is connected, Cloud Rebuild checks Windows Update for the target Windows build and downloads the required files. Users can then confirm the Windows edition, language, and build before starting the reinstall.

The only catch here is that Cloud Rebuild completely wipes the system drive, meaning that the process removes all data stored in your main installation or C: drive, including locally stored files, accounts, applications, and settings, before reinstalling Windows. Thus, it is recommended to back up all your important files either locally or using a cloud-based service before starting the process. Once the installation is complete, the PC boots into the Windows out-of-box experience, similar to a fresh installation of Windows. For admin-managed PCs using Windows Autopilot and Microsoft Intune, the system can automatically reconnect to the organization's management infrastructure and restore assigned applications, policies, and backed-up settings.

Cloud Rebuild could particularly be useful when Windows becomes too corrupted to boot normally. Instead of finding another PC, creating installation media, and manually reinstalling Windows, users can potentially perform the entire recovery process directly from WinRE. The feature is still in preview; however, we can expect a wider release later this year.

If you are yearning for a quick-shot retro Windows experience on your modern Windows 11 or macOS system, then there’s a new vibe-coded clone of the Windows 3.1 Program Manager that may interest you. Developer Mayuki has released a neat little nostalgia project dubbed ReProgman – named after the ancient Windows 3.1 ‘progman.exe ’, which was the primary shell of the era – until Windows 95 swept it away three decades ago.

ReProgman looks pretty authentic to my eyes, and it brought back memories of why I wasn’t sad to see it shrivel away from Windows machines. In a social media post about the release of ReProgman, Mayuki seems to agree with my sentiments. “I asked Claude to create a clone of the Windows 3.1 Program Manager,” wrote the developer (machine translation). “I think you'll enjoy reminiscing with it for about 30 seconds.”

Claude Code worked pretty swiftly to churn out this clone of the Windows 3.1 shell. The first version that was precipitated in about an hour was “pretty decent” but needed some effort to iron out the wrinkles. Then Mayuki complains again that actually using ReProgman induced boredom after about half a minute of usage.

The end-user-ready releases of ReProgman weigh in at between 12 and 16MB, so they are quite a trivial download and don’t need installing. Thus, it isn’t very taxing to give them a try for a spot of nostalgia-tinted navigation around your present system’s programs and files. Mayuki says that building and running this application needs the .NET SDK 10.0+. The code has been released on GitHub under the MIT license.

In conclusion, Miyuki’s ReProgman provides an easy trip down personal computing's memory lane, specifically to the Windows 3.X era of the early to mid-1990s. However, some will prefer to get their retro computing kicks by running the actual MS-DOS/Windows 3.1 combo on real hardware. As we discovered recently, that doesn’t limit users to dusting off an old i486 or similar. Back in April, an enthusiast demoed Windows 3.1X on ultra-modern bare metal with a system using a Ryzen 9 9900X and RTX 5060 Ti.

Late last week, Google announced that scientists had, for the first time, “mapped the complete brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly.” On Monday, software engineers were already demonstrating the full MaleCNS v1.0 fruit fly connectome being trained to play Doom, as well as Super Mario 64. In light of these developments, perhaps it is time to amend Arthur C. Clarke’s Third Law. We suggest something similar to ‘Any sufficiently advanced new technology will immediately be forced to play Doom.’

Let’s look at this story in its natural chronological order. Scientists have been using fruit flies for research for over a century. The winged insects have a strong history in the avenues of genetic research. The humble fruit fly is still relevant in the 2020s in genetics, neuroscience, and more.

Now, for the first time, the complete brain and central nervous system of an adult male fruit fly have been fully mapped. Google Research scientists worked alongside HHMI Janelia Research Campus and the scientific community to achieve this milestone. In the social media post outlining the achievement, Google claimed that AI was used “to combine millions of 2D images into 3D neural shapes, reconstructing a record-breaking 166,000+ neurons.” That’s somewhat below the estimated 86 billion neurons in the human brain. AI data centers are going to need more RAM, folks.

This scientific breakthrough is going to “accelerate our understanding of the brain, and is a major milestone in neuroscience,” noted Google last Thursday. By Tuesday, it was already being trained to play classic video games.

We’ve seen software engineer Alex Wormuth and ‘C++ ragebaiteur’ Jessica Paquette already demonstrate fly-brain video game training. Their fly-brain tinkering focuses on Doom and Mario 64, respectively.

Of their Doom training efforts, Wormuth says that “Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons. Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimulus to two PPL101 dopamine cells as reinforcement.” The dev closes their tweet with the question “Will the fly learn to survive?” The code is fully open source, and you can also watch the training progress of the 166,700 neurons live.

Paquette’s short video clip shows Mario repeatedly taking off and bumping into a wall. If it were bumping into a window, it would be exhibiting the pinnacle of fly-brain intelligence. We also have the code to this fly-brain video gaming project, which was “literally 100% vibe coded with GPT Astra… just for fun.” Hopefully non-coders/tinkerers will get updates on the success of this training via Paquette’s socials.

Microsoft just released another version of Windows 11 designed for developers, dubbed Project Zenith. According to the Windows Blogs, this operating system is optimized for developer workflows and will first become available on the AMD Ryzen AI Halo, Team Red’s direct answer to the Nvidia DGX Spark, although it will also arrive on more devices from Microsoft’s OEM and other silicon partners soon. Redmond calls Project Zenith “a ready-to-code distraction-free Windows experience on developer-class devices with 64 GB+ unified memory and 250+ GB/s memory bandwidth,” claiming that “developers can jump right in.”

It comes with pre-installed tools like Visual Studio Code, GitHub Copilot, PowerToys, WinAppCLI, Windows Dev Skills, Intelligent Terminal, PowerShell 7, Git, GitHub CLI, AzureCLI, Core Utils, Oh My Posh, Python 3.14+, uv, NVM, Node 24+, WSL 2+ Ubuntu, and .NET 10. Aside from that, Microsoft said it pre-configures Windows 11 so developers don’t have to dig through the settings menus of various apps to configure them for their needs.

It’s primarily designed for AI developers, especially since the devices it’s installed on are designed to run 30B+ parameter models locally and without meters. The company also made it more secure for developing and running agents, deploying features such as OS-enforced identity, containment through Microsoft Execution Containers (MXC), and enterprise-grade manageability for agents.

Project Zenith is Microsoft’s response to the AI token crisis, which has caused costs to spiral out of control, especially as agents use 1000x more tokens compared to standard AI. While frontier models would still be available on the cloud, AI developers could run everything else locally through devices like this, powered by this version of Windows 11. This should help AI developers keep using their agents without feeling the bite of tokenized billing, which is especially crucial for those working in smaller organizations or experimenting at home.

One big tradeoff with Project Zenith, though, is that it’s only available on expensive devices, at least for the moment. The AMD Ryzen AI Halo, with its AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 processor, 128GB LPDDR5x-8000 RAM, 2TB SSD, and integrated Radeon 8060S graphics, costs $3,999.99 on Micro Center. Even if Microsoft eventually makes Project Zenith available for separate purchase and installable on other mini-PCs, the 64 GB+ unified memory requirement will be a major roadblock, especially with skyrocketing RAM prices driven by the AI boom.

Microsoft will begin automatically enabling its Memory Integrity security feature on a broader range of eligible Windows PCs through quality updates starting in October 2026, extending the kernel-level protection to more existing devices by default. In a September 1 blog post, Microsoft said the rollout will provide stronger protection for more devices against attacks targeting the Windows kernel, while PCs that already have Memory Integrity deliberately disabled will retain their existing configuration.

“Windows quality updates will begin enabling memory integrity protection on eligible devices,” Microsoft said. The updates will also enable Virtualization-based Security (VBS) where required, which provides the isolated environment underlying Memory Integrity. Before making the change, Windows will automatically assess each device using what Microsoft describes as readiness signals covering its hardware capabilities, compatibility, and performance.

The October rollout is basically an expansion of Microsoft’s existing default-enablement policy. Memory Integrity is already switched on by default on clean Windows 11 installations that meet Microsoft’s hardware requirements, as well as on Secured-core PCs. Current requirements include an 8th Gen or newer Intel processor for Windows 11 22H2, an AMD Zen 2 or newer processor, at least 8GB of RAM on x64 systems, an SSD of at least 64GB, compatible drivers, and enabled hardware virtualization. Automatic activation under that policy applies to clean installations and not upgrades of existing devices.

Memory Integrity — also known as Hypervisor-Protected Code Integrity (HVCI) — has existed since the Windows 10 era and was originally released as part of Microsoft’s Device Guard security technology. It uses VBS and the Windows hypervisor to move kernel-mode code-integrity checks into an isolated environment, helping prevent malicious or untrusted code and drivers from executing in the Windows kernel. Windows 10 generally left the protection optional outside configurations such as S mode, while Windows 11 made it more of a default security feature on compatible new installations.

The feature comes with a performance wrinkle familiar to PC gamers, leading many gamers to disable it. Microsoft acknowledged in 2022 that Memory Integrity and Virtual Machine Platform could affect gaming performance on some Windows 11 configurations, and advised gamers prioritizing performance that they could temporarily disable these protections while playing, warning that doing so reduces security. The company’s own gaming guidance subsequently continued to recommend temporarily disabling Memory Integrity and VMP where they interfere with gaming performance.

The security feature’s impact on performance depends on the hardware. Microsoft says Memory Integrity performs better on newer processors with hardware features designed to accelerate the required isolation, while older CPUs relying on software emulation can experience a larger performance hit. Driver compatibility can also prevent activation, with Microsoft documenting issues ranging from malfunctioning software to incompatible gaming anti-cheat solutions.

For most users, the October change requires no action. Eligible PCs will be evaluated and updated automatically, while administrator policies and previous user choices remain in place. Microsoft specifically says systems where Memory Integrity has already been disabled “won’t be automatically changed by this rollout,” leaving gamers and other users who previously opted out in control of the setting.

The Linux kernel is approaching a staggering 2,000 CVEs fixed per release, up from roughly 500 through much of the Linux 6.x era, as AI and large language models increasingly scour the operating system’s enormous codebase for vulnerabilities. According to an August 28 Phoronix report, Linux stable maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman revealed the trend in a slide teasing an upcoming presentation at Kernel Recipes 2026, showing CVE counts jumping above 1,000 with Linux 7.0 and exceeding 1,500 with Linux 7.2. If the current trajectory continues, Linux 7.3 could push the figure beyond 2,000.

Rather than a change in Linux’s security or a rise in vulnerabilities, the spike is mainly due to “detectives” using AI tools to scour the Linux kernel source tree, which has grown to over 40 million lines over 35 years of Linux’s existence. These tools can examine countless obscure sections humans may rarely revisit, occasionally finding genuine defects; Linux CVE records this year already explicitly credit AI-assisted static analysis with finding vulnerabilities subsequently confirmed by Intel Product Security. However, many of the findings have been low-priority vulnerabilities — often within obscure driver code — questionable patches, and outright hallucinations, leaving human maintainers to separate useful work from noise.

This problem already constitutes a nuisance for kernel teams that have to fix these issues. In the Linux 7.3 networking pull request, maintainer Jakub Kicinski estimated that between one-third and one-half of the 648 net-next patches handled during the cycle appeared to be low-priority fixes, clean-ups, or clarifications driven by AI. "We are completely overwhelmed,” Kicinski wrote.

The issue has also led Linux maintainers to question whether decades-old drivers are worth keeping alive. In April, developer Andrew Lunn proposed removing nearly 28,000 lines of legacy networking code covering old ISA and PCMCIA-era hardware. While these drivers historically required little attention because they barely had any users, the AI and fuzzing tools started finding defects that maintainers were obligated to investigate and fix, regardless of whether anyone actually runs the hardware.

Linux 7.3 is removing old SGI and IBM driver code, while other ancient components have also been retired as maintainers reassess whether their compatibility value justifies their new maintenance cost. The FreeVxFS filesystem driver, for example, was removed after its maintainer said the decades-old compatibility code now largely served as fodder for automated bug checkers.

Now, the kernel community is not simply rejecting AI; Kroah-Hartman himself has successfully used locally-running AI-assisted fuzzing tools to uncover kernel bugs. The bone of contention is unverified AI output dumped onto humans for validation. Kroah-Hartman recently barred LLM-generated patches from the kernel’s staging subsystem except for legitimate security fixes, while updated kernel guidance warns that AI-generated reports submitted without human verification can waste maintainer time.

The team has also increasingly had to fight AI with AI. It has now secured access to multiple frontier models to help review patches and filter out hallucinated results, and is considering pushing more routine administrative work onto LLMs in subsequent development cycles. Kroah-Hartman is expected to discuss the trend further at Kernel Recipes, which is slated to run from September 21 to 23 in Paris. Linux 7.3 itself has already entered testing, with Linus Torvalds releasing Linux 7.3-rc1 on August 30 after closing its two-week merge window.

California’s legislature has passed Assembly Bill 1856, exempting open-source operating systems from the State’s Digital Age Assurance Act months before the law is due to take effect on January 1, 2027. The Senate amended the Bill on August 21 before passing it on the 26th in a 39-0 vote, with the Assembly then accepting these changes in a concurrence vote the following day. The amendment ends almost a year of uncertainty surrounding whether Linux distributions and SteamOS would be forced to collect user age data during account setup alongside Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android. AB 1856 has now been sent to Governor Gavin Newsom, who signed the original act into law last October.

These amendments redefine the term “operating system provider” to exclude any person or entity that distributes an OS or application “under license terms that permit a recipient to copy, redistribute, and modify the software.” Any software distributed under the GPL, MIT, BSD, and Apache licenses satisfies that test, which removes the likes of Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu, Arch, and the BSD family from AB 1856’s scope.

A second exclusion removes software components that aren’t “offered to consumers as a stand-alone executable application through a covered application store” from the law’s definition of an application, covering libraries and dependencies distributed through package managers like apt and pacman. AB 1856 doesn’t explicitly say that repos aren’t app stores, but a store’s main obligation under the law is to request an age signal from the user’s OS provider and pass it to developers; an exempt open-source OS produces no signal. A third carve-out excludes storefronts distributing extensions or add-ons that run exclusively inside a host application, which takes browser extension stores out of scope.

The amendments to AB 1856 also remove the original definition of “user,” which read, “a child that is the primary user of a device,” and technically classified every device owner in California as a child. The law’s signaling framework depends on adults declaring their age on account setup, so their devices get flagged as 18 and over, but under that definition nobody could ever be flagged as an adult.

In addition, lawmakers inserted a new provision prohibiting anyone from requesting an age signal from an OS provider or app store unless required by law. That closes off potential abuse of the age API that could have led to it being used as a general-purpose data collection channel even when age verification wasn’t required. Platforms and developers also gain a good-faith safe harbor against erroneous signals, protecting them from liability when age-gating signals are inaccurate.

Windows, macOS, iOS, and Android remain fully in scope, with age collection required at account setup from January 1, 2027. A later July 1, 2027, deadline applies to devices set up before January 1. Whether SteamOS is in scope isn’t yet clear: its Arch-based system components are open source, but Valve distributes the image alongside the proprietary Steam client. GrapheneOS, which in March said it would refuse to comply with age-verification mandates, is distributed under open-source MIT and Apache licenses and now falls outside the law’s scope entirely, though Brazil’s Digital ECA still applies to it.

Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, who wrote both the Digital Age Assurance Act and the AB 1856 amendment, introduced the exemption back in February following criticism from Linux developers and the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

The majority of PCs are sold with Windows 11 licensed, paid-for, and pre-installed. This fact irks many folks, especially Linux aficionados who intend to wipe all traces of Microsoft’s OS while their shiny new machine is box fresh. The Refund4Freedom site was put together by the Italian Linux Society and the Free Software Foundation Europe to help address this unfairness. “Consumers should be able to buy laptops without any specific operating system, and should not have to pay the license price if they don't want to,” asserts the site, and they have information and forms to help you get your cash back.

Refund4Freedom doesn't just help PC buyers in the quest to get Windows refunds; they have three key demands. Prevention is better than cure, right? The first demand is that “Device manufacturers and vendors should not impose an operating system or software on consumers, and should not force them to pay for software that they don't want.” This is central to the site’s message and purpose. However, it also wants to promote the idea that consumers should have the right to buy hardware without pre-installed software and see the price of the product with and without Windows, etc. Refund4Freedom also urges manufacturers and vendors to clearly outline the steps for requesting and obtaining a refund for pre-installed OSes and software. Of course, the process for consumers should be as friction-free as possible.

“Not all manufacturers and vendors are equal.”

“Not all manufacturers and vendors are equal,” notes Refund4Freedom on its website. Some are more helpful than others when it comes to refunds. You can read more on the website about each brand surveyed, but it looks like Acer and Lenovo both operate reimbursement procedures for Windows. Asus has a hidden reimbursement procedure, but we only get told of the Italy-centric way to reach out to Asus about it. Dell and HP don’t have any reimbursement procedure for Windows, according to the site.

Whichever brand of PC you buy, and the above list is far from exhaustive, you should follow a deliberate rejection procedure. If you intend to shun Windows, Refund4Freedom tells users to start up the PC and take pictures showing the contract clauses addressing reimbursement. Do not format or erase the computer at this stage. The next step is to contact the manufacturer's customer service. Do this in a recordable way, and so email/messaging is encouraged for records.

If the above two steps aren’t working out for you, the Refund4Freedom site has a pre-made form you can fill in and forward. However, this is again Italy-centric. For example, towards the end it mentions the Autorità Garante della Concorrenza e del Mercato (AGCM), as well as a ruling by Judge Dr. Mirko Buratti of the Court of Monza… So, perhaps you can swap in some rulings appropriate to your country for this part of the form? Get your favorite LLM to hallucinate some local court rulings for you.

Finally, and whatever the outcome, Refund4Freedom asks its readers to report their experience, good or bad, to the aforementioned AGCM. To inspire you, the site includes several user reports of success, and I note one user getting back as much as €150 from Acer (~$175). That was a combination of Windows license reimbursement and a larger legal fee refund. A more typical reimbursement level is roughly $60.

The development of Linux, a free ‘hobby’ operating system, was announced by Linus Torvalds 35 years ago today. On August 25, 1991, the unknown computer science student noted that the budding OS had been “brewing since April, and is starting to get ready.” The first public release of this ‘Minix-like’ OS came the following month, and in a last-minute change by the co-worker who uploaded it, was distributed with the name Linux instead of Freax. In 2026, Linux powers everything from smartphones to supercomputers and oodles of products, like the Steam Deck, in between.

The above commemorative post celebrates Torvalds’ stewardship over the Linux project. However, it is also quick to make clear that “hundreds of maintainers and thousands of contributors” have been instrumental to making this free open source OS a competitive, capable alternative to corporate/paid software, which can “move computing forward for humanity.”

Since 1991, Linux has come a long way on its journey from its humble ‘hobby’ OS beginnings. What started as a kernel with roughly 10,000 lines of code has exploded into 40 million or more lines today. Torvalds was humble about the first release yet proud of features like its multi-threaded filesystem, and the first release being clear of any borrowed Minix code. But the countless contributors over the last 35 years have helped forge an enviable OS, which boasts capabilities and features that must make it a worrying foe for commercial rivals.

There are areas, outside our PC and gaming core, where Linux is actually the biggest fish by far. Industry stats suggest that nearly 80% of web servers, and virtually all of the world’s Top500 supercomputers run a flavor of Linux. It dominates mobile too, with nearly 4 billion Android devices running Linux-derived kernels. Then there are all those embedded systems, encompassing things such as routers to automotive MCUs – so many run Linux.

I feel that Linux has made significant progress towards the fabled ‘year of Linux’ over the last couple of years. Microsoft’s Windows has been its own worst enemy in some respects, pushing people away due to a multitude of concerns. Meanwhile, consumers can see that content creation, productivity, and gaming on Linux PCs are continuously improving.

There was a recent collective sigh of relief in the Linux world, too. Earlier today, we reported on news that the decades-long Linux ownership dispute was effectively killed after Xinuos’ appeal was rejected by the U.S. Court of Appeals. That ruling means much lingering uncertainty over Linux devices facing future licensing claims, maker settlements, audits, and/or forced software rewrites has been banished.

Like clockwork, it's a new month and a new OS-breaking bug has been discovered in Windows 11's latest monthly update, KB5121003. Users reported random system instability, with games freezing or outright crashing, and even BSODs in worst-case scenarios. Microsoft investigated the issue and reached a vindicating conclusion — RGB software installed on affected PCs was interfering with core system components, causing Windows 11 to become unstable.

Online multiplayer titles such as Arc Raiders, Marvel Tokon: Fighting Souls, and The Finals were most affected by this issue. Reports mentioned these games exhibiting a pretty classic crash pattern. They'd suddenly hang and become unresponsive, show an "EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION" blue screen, and force your computer to restart automatically.

An official update posted on Microsoft's Windows 11 25H2 health status page says, "this issue is related to peripherals or internal device components which have RGB lighting features." The software governing these devices would install drivers or code components with file names similar to "inpoutx64" to control the RGB. When you'd launch a certain game, inpoutx64 would trigger the issue and cause a crash.

Microsoft didn't explain the underlying cause, but it's likely tied to anti-cheat not appreciating a kernel-mode driver in user space. RGB software, like other apps, should be limited to user space, but the driver it uses to interface with peripheral controllers runs in kernel space. For anti-cheat software, this is essentially an exploit waiting to happen, so it tries to block the driver to make sure it doesn't inject malicious code.

If the driver is blocked upon startup and the RGB software unknowingly tries to push a lighting change or monitor a temp sensor, for instance, it hits a wall, and Windows throws up the EXCEPTION_ACCESS_VIOLATION error. If the driver is terminated mid-use while executing assembly instructions at the Ring 0 level, it causes a critical kernel fault. Kernel space typically can't recover from unhandled errors like these, so Windows triggers a blue screen as a precaution to protect your hardware.

Microsoft says it's "presently working to understand the relationship between these RGB components and the games which trigger this issue." The company will provide more info later, but for now, you can use the Registry Editor to manually disable the driver as a temporary solution. Embark Studios, developers of Arc Raiders and The Finals, also shared this method to fix crashes for now.

This could break some RGB software functionality, but you can use universal programs like SignalRGB or OpenRGB to control your devices as long as they're supported. Their specialized drivers have strictly defined whitelists that don't scare anti-cheat software. Still, if you're facing this issue, Microsoft suggests reporting it via Feedback Hub—that's how issues like this get prioritized in the first place.

Linux kernel 7.3 is set to bring an oddly nostalgic update for 3dfx's Voodoo 3, one of the most recognizable graphics cards of the late 1990s. Don't get too excited; the venerable PCI-and-AGP accelerator isn't suddenly getting a modern Linux graphics stack, but the kernel's existing tdfxfb framebuffer driver is being updated so that it can initialize a Voodoo 3 itself rather than relying on the system firmware to have already run the card's video BIOS. It's a small change with a surprisingly specific purpose, and one that illustrates why ancient hardware occasionally gets attention in contemporary Linux.

The problem is that the tdfxfb driver historically assumed that the Voodoo card had already been initialized by the PC's firmware. That's because, at the time it was written, that was a reasonable assumption on a conventional x86 PC. The system firmware would execute the card's video BIOS during boot, configure the hardware, and then hand Linux something that is already capable of displaying an image. That assumption breaks down on newer and unusual platforms where the firmware cannot or does not execute the VGABIOS. The creator's patch description specifically calls out non-x86 computers, systems where another graphics card is primary, and newer BIOSes that can't run the old video BIOS.

The developer behind the patches, Daniel Palmer, was using a Voodoo 3 in an Amiga 4000 equipped with a PCI bridge when the problem cropped up. Linux could detect the card, but the Voodoo was still completely uninitialized, leaving him staring at "no signal detected." The new code uses configuration information from the card's own video BIOS to perform the initialization from Linux instead, allowing the driver to bring the VGA core up and establish a working display without depending on the system firmware. For now, the new manual initialization code is specifically aimed at the Voodoo 3; he had initially noted support for the VSA-100-based Voodoo 4 and 5 cards, but their BIOS layouts are different, so that support was removed from the current patch series. The code has been tested on both a modern x86-64 system and an Amiga 4000 with a Mediator PCI bridge.

On a conventional modern-ish x86-64 PC with a Voodoo 3 installed, the practical result is fairly modest. Load tdfxfb and you can get a working Linux framebuffer device, typically exposed as /dev/fb0, with the Voodoo driving a display that can host the Linux virtual console. In other words, this is enough to turn the Voodoo from "a PCI device that Linux can identify" into an actual display adapter capable of putting pixels on the screen even when firmware didn't initialize it first. Applications that know how to use the Linux framebuffer interface can also draw to it, just as they could with other old framebuffer devices.

The thing is, that's also where the limits of this work become apparent. Linux fbdev is a legacy graphics interface and has long been superseded by Linux's DRM/KMS graphics infrastructure, so this ain't a resurrection of the Voodoo 3 as a contemporary Linux GPU. Loading tdfxfb does not give you a Mesa stack, modern OpenGL, Wayland acceleration, or the sort of 3D functionality you would expect. It is essentially a very old-fashioned "squirt pixels at the display" arrangement, but that's useful enough for a Linux console, embedded-style framebuffer applications, and, apparently, people putting exotic PCI graphics cards into even more exotic old computers, but it's not exactly a compelling reason to install a Voodoo 3 in a modern desktop.

The more interesting part is that Palmer is working on a separate 3D path for the Voodoo 3, and that effort is already much further along than the framebuffer work alone might suggest. The experimental interface exposes the Voodoo's register space to userspace through a new /dev/tdfx3d misc device, whose mmap() interface allows software to program the card's 3D hardware directly. On top of that sits smoltdfx, a tiny userspace library for driving the Voodoo 3, and smolminigl, a small OpenGL 1.x implementation built on top of it. Palmer says he has tested the project on real Voodoo 3 hardware and that it can render directly through the card's registers without X, Mesa, or Glide.

Palmer is developing that work alongside a QEMU emulation of the Voodoo 3. The developer says Claude helped build the emulator in the first place to debug the issue of getting the card working on his Amiga. Now, test programs can be run against both the emulated card and the real hardware, with differences fed back into the emulator until the behavior matches. The smoltdfx project now uses the same rendering tests against QEMU and physical Voodoo 3 hardware, comparing frame digests to catch differences. According to Palmer, the resulting MiniGL implementation can already run Quake on the real card, although performance isn't great, and some issues with the Voodoo 3's multitexturing capabilities remain to be worked out.

Obviously, that's a lot more interesting than simply putting a Linux console on a Voodoo 3. The sum total is a highly experimental 3dfx graphics stack built from the bottom up: Linux provides the framebuffer and low-level device access, userspace programs the Voodoo directly, and a lightweight OpenGL implementation sits above that to provide enough functionality for classic 3D software to command the card.

Indeed, things could get particularly fun for retro-computing and virtualization. A PCI Voodoo 3 is the sort of device that, at least conceptually, could be assigned to a virtual machine using PCI passthrough, letting a guest operating system talk directly to the real accelerator with its period-accurate 3dfx driver. In the fantasy version of that setup, you could have a modern Linux host hand an actual Voodoo 3 to a Windows 98 or DOS-era guest and then let the guest use the very same hardware that the old software expected. The engineering details are much nastier than the concept suggests (particularly around resetting and exposing such old hardware cleanly), but the new ability to initialize an otherwise-dormant Voodoo from Linux is at least a useful piece of that puzzle.

For now, though, the headline is more significant than the immediate feature set. Linux 7.3 isn't suddenly turning a 25-year-old Voodoo 3 into a usable GPU; it's making an existing framebuffer driver capable of bringing the card to life on systems where firmware cannot do the job, which is a very small but very real hole in hardware support. More remarkably, the same effort has already spilled into experimental 3D acceleration on real hardware, with a userspace Voodoo 3 library and an OpenGL implementation capable of running Quake. Voodoo 3 may be over 25 years old by now, but somebody is still teaching Linux new tricks with it in 2026.

Solo developer Grow Now! Games has put a playable browser build of its walkable ASCII cyberpunk city online, running on a 283KB Rust WebAssembly engine feeding a WebGL renderer. The build went live this week alongside a second YouTube video, ASCII City Update: Interiors, Elevation & Skyscrapers, following the original video, which has passed a million views and 9,000 comments.

The page fetches ascii-city-engine_bg-DqjAhqbp.wasm, a 283KB module that reserves 1,152KB of linear memory at startup and reports an engine version of 0.1.0 when instantiated outside the browser. Its exports include initialise_native_game, step_native_game, and generate_native_local_map. Debug paths left in the binary name the Rust source modules behind those calls: city.rs, world.rs, population.rs, interiors.rs, and rendering.rs. World generation runs in Rust, which hands JavaScript base64-packed byte arrays covering building heights, tile kinds, surfaces, hues, saturations, window styles, lit flags, and floor plan IDs.

The renderer requests a WebGL context and compiles a vertex and fragment shader pair, the fragment stage consisting of a single texture2D lookup. Characters are drawn once each into an atlas canvas with fillText, cached per character-and-color combination, uploaded to the GPU with one texImage2D call, and then drawn as textured quads with six vertices apiece.

Atlas cells measure 11 pixels tall by the monospace advance width plus two. Every visible cell goes into one buffer upload, and one drawArrays call per frame. Two fallbacks sit beneath this, a Canvas 2D drawImage path when WebGL is unavailable, and a per-cell fillText path reachable through a ?direct URL parameter.

Desktop sessions render 180 columns by 80 rows, or 14,400 character cells, in 10px Consolas at nine pixels per row. Touch devices drop to 48 rows and between 96 and 168 columns, and the Rust engine uses a separate 160 by 112 profile. The vertex buffer preallocates 2.76MB and doubles when a frame overruns it.

Grow Now! Games described the original demo to PC Gamer as having "no Unity, there's no Unreal, there's no 3D models, textures, or shaders." A first-person Backrooms game for the 1994 Sega 32X runs on a raycasting engine written from scratch in C and SH-2 assembly. A multiplayer Doom tribute implements raycasting and sprite projection as a stack of SQL views, reaching roughly 30 FPS at 128 x 64. Thunder Lizard, an ASCII roguelike, has had its character grid redrawn by image models into full-motion visuals at around 10 FPS.

CPU-Z has rolled into its version 3 release, representing one of, if not the largest, updates the app has seen since its release in 2001. V3 introduces a host of updates, focusing primarily on an overhauled validation system with a new advanced mode.

CPU-Z's validation system now consists of three modes: standard, advanced, and XOC. The standard validation system can now display the current health of a PC in less than 10 seconds, and will check over 100 detection points including drivers, CPU temperature, bloatware, and more.

The team behind CPU-Z also worked with major support services to add "meaningful" labels detailing how healthy parts of the system are. These labels include "Critical," "Warning," and "Informational".

The advanced validation portion is entirely new for CPU-Z and features a far more in-depth validation process, including checking for potential hardware issues under heavy load. Using the advanced validation tool can take anywhere between several minutes and several hours to complete due to the stress testing and error detection functionality targeted at the CPU, RAM, and GPU. Additionally, the advanced validator also features a "significantly extended benchmarking" tool that measures CPU, GPU, RAM, and storage performance. Advanced sensors based on HWMonitor have also been incorporated to monitor temperatures, frequencies, fan speeds, and more.

The XOC validator, aimed at extreme overlockers as its name suggests, has been updated to better measure the CPU frequency of modern processors as well as properly handle memory overclocking to prevent accidental validation rejections. V3's XOC validator better handles the complex, always-changing clock speeds of modern CPUs by calculating the effective CPU clock and the "input" frequency. "If the effective frequency is lower than the input frequency, the dump will still be validated, but the real, effective frequency will be used as the final validated frequency."

By contrast, the XOC validator in CPU-Z V2 validated CPU frequencies with a five-second load, with a "one-shot measurement." Additionally, V2 also removed all load and most internal checks, which increased the risk of a validation not validating properly.

The new V3 update is designed to improve CPU-Z's usefulness for mainstream users, enthusiasts, and overclockers with its new health checks and diagnostics. CPU-Z V3 is available to download now from cpuid.com; however, many of the app's features will be disabled until enough validations arrive on the V3 database to process statistics efficiently. The V2 database will still accept validations until October 20th, when the database will be switched to read-only mode.

China's Ministry of State Security has told some state-linked organizations to remove a customized version of Windows 10 from their machines, Bloomberg reports, citing people familiar with the matter. The order reportedly accelerates a planned retirement that the software's developer had scheduled for February 2027, and it sent Chinese OS vendors' shares surging, with Hunan Kylinsec and Archermind both hitting Shanghai's 20% daily limit and China National Software climbing 10%. Bloomberg's sources attributed the directive to data security concerns but didn't specify what vulnerabilities Beijing is worried about.

The affected software is the government edition developed by C&M Information Technologies (CMIT), a joint venture set up in 2016 between Microsoft and state-owned China Electronics Technology Group, with the Chinese side holding the majority stake. The build is based on Windows 10 Enterprise but strips out OneDrive and other consumer-facing components, disables certain native functions, keeps updates and activation inside China, and lets government users substitute Chinese encryption algorithms for Microsoft's standard cryptography. China Customs and Shanghai's Commission of Economy and Informatization were among the first pilot customers when the edition launched in 2017.

Microsoft ended mainstream Windows 10 support globally in October 2025, which left CMIT's edition as the only Windows still officially sanctioned for Chinese government use. "Microsoft is not aware of a security incident affecting this product," a company spokesperson told Bloomberg, adding that it continues to receive regular security updates.

Beijing banned Windows 8 from government procurement in 2014, ordered a three-year replacement of foreign PCs in government offices starting in 2019, and in 2022 told central agencies and state firms to scrap foreign-branded computers entirely. The domestic stack built to absorb that demand now includes Kylin V10, UnionTech's UOS, and Huawei's HarmonyOS 5 laptops, and it reaches down to the silicon in systems like Huawei's Qingyun desktops running the homegrown Kirin 9000X.

StatCounter's traffic data shows how little of that campaign has reached the consumer market. Windows accounted for 87.64% of Chinese desktop web traffic in July 2026, and Windows 10 alone still made up 43.56% of Chinese Windows usage, compared with 50.01% for Windows 11, ten months after mainstream support ended. Roughly two in five Chinese desktops are currently running an unsupported Microsoft OS, the gap that CMIT's edition was meant to close for government users.

It's not clear what the scope of the new directive is, with Bloomberg's reporting covering “some” state-linked entities. CMIT didn't respond to the outlet's request for comment.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel for Nine PBS. We reported last week that the station lost access to 50TB of data representing 70 years of TV history. The issue was that its cloud storage provider went out of business and access to this important set of backups was abruptly cut off. In the meantime, a judge has cleared the way for Nine PBS to retrieve its archival data and programming from Iron Mountain Data Centers.

Let us refresh your memories of this case by sketching out a timeline of how we got here, before discussing the latest ruling.

• 2019: Nine PBS began using Open Source Storage (OSS) as its cloud storage provider.
• 2019-2025: Annual cloud storage contract renewals occur without incident.
• February 2026: Nine PBS wanted to meet with OSS about contract renewal but couldn’t get in touch.
• March 6, 2026: Without any new agreement inked, the existing contract expired on March 6, with the terms allowing 30 days for the customer to retrieve their data. However, OSS seemed to cut off access to Nine PBS cloud data without any warning or any grace period.
• March 13, 2026: Nine PBS learned that OSS saved its cloud data at physical servers housed in Iron Mountain, Colorado. So it wrote to request that Iron Mountain preserve and return the data. However, Iron Mountain doesn’t confirm or deny that it holds this data.
• April 16, 2026: Nine PBS filed suit against OSS, and new OSS owner James Tramel confirms the data is secured at Iron Mountain.
• May 2026: Tramel stops responding, later claiming he was defrauded into buying OSS.
• June 2026: Nine PBS obtains a default judgment stating it owns the data in question and has the right to possess it. Later the same month, Iron Mountain admits it possesses the data. However, Iron Mountain decides to block any access as it says OSS owns the physical servers.
• July 28, 2026: Nine PBS files a lawsuit against Iron Mountain, the data center provider for OSS, seeking protection against data deletion or modification.

Nine PBS - "70 years of our organization’s history" in danger

The latest development in this twisting and turning case of Nine PBS’s lost data seems like good news for the station. On August 12, 2026, a Denver judge established a process that would allow Nine PBS to retrieve its 50TB of archival data from Iron Mountain’s Denver data center.

The outlined framework includes appointing a third-party vendor, such as a former OSS employee, to assist in the retrieval of the data from the hardware in Iron Mountain. This must be done within 30 days. Moreover, Nine PBS must pay the current and overdue storage fees that OSS missed, and any physical devices the third party takes off the premises must be returned to Iron Mountain after data retrieval. Lastly, Nine PBS must verify no other ex-OSS client data is accessed, and indemnify Iron Mountain against any corruption of data owned by others.

Both Nine PBS and Iron Mountain are requested to provide progress updates on the data retrieval process by September 14. Hopefully this will be a lesson learned by Nine PBS, and it will swiftly implement a proper 3-2-1 backup of its irreplaceable data, so any cloud provider error doesn’t cause such a calamity in the future.

Are you perturbed by the hectic pace of modern life and the attention-seeking immediacy of instant messaging (IM) platforms? Do you even find email a bit too high-octane? Developer Noah Larrobino may have the solution you seek with the new Carrier Pidge app for iOS, an app that sends messages at the speed a carrier pigeon would travel.

As outlined by the dev, the key feature of Carrier Pidge is that it slows down electronic communications to a more natural speed. Specifically, any messages you send to other app users will arrive at pigeon speed, based on your respective GPS locations. According to the app store page for Carrier Pidge, that means your messages travel at 110 mph. Not slow, but if one is messaging a contact on the other side of the continent, from LA to NYC, for example, the recipient won’t see the message until 22 hours after it was dispatched.

The carrier pigeon analog is stretched further by some other features of the app’s messaging engine. As your message flies through the ether attached to your virtual bird’s virtual ankle, some birds will get distracted, slowing their progress by as much as 25%.

There’s a real-time flight tracker in the app. In Noah’s tweet, you can see they are tracking a message sent from NYC to somewhere in the UK. The on-screen text suggests the pigeon is still 1 day and 2 hours away from its destination.

Your virtual bird can get lost or die

More hazardous to your messaging hopes is the fact that anytime you send a communication via Carrier Pidge, there’s a 0.2% chance the virtual bird will get lost. So you can’t guarantee your chosen recipient will get the message.

On the other side of the flight path, there are no read receipts generated. This might give Carrier Pidge app users some graceful leeway to ignore messages they’d rather not deal with, while shielded by a little plausible deniability – a much better outcome than seemingly, rudely, ignoring a friend. However, if the dev is serious about extending such comfort to users, they should make sure the real-time flight tracker also has some built-in inaccuracies or foggy areas.

Lastly, Noah says that the virtual pigeon will sometimes just die en route to its destination. That’s another level of realism that elevates this app against its peers, as long as the dev has properly researched and implemented pigeon fatality chances across the routes, environments, and weather systems they would encounter.

While Carrier Pidge has debuted on Apple’s App Store for iOS, Noah says it will “come to Android eventually.” This new messaging app is monetized by allowing users to expand their aviary with as many as 10 extra pigeons.

Popular open-source media player VLC has run into an unusual issue on Windows 11 that causes it to take as long as 33 seconds to start playing a simple MP3 file, the side effect of a recent unexplained change to Windows. The issue was publicized after game developer Jonathan Blow said he had stopped using VLC in favor of Microsoft's Media Player because of the delay. He also used the incident to criticize the state of open-source software running on Windows.

Responding to Blow's complaint, the developers behind VLC player fired back and claimed that the media player itself was not responsible. According to the VLC team, the bug is primarily due to a Microsoft Defender issue introduced through a Windows 11 update that conflicts with VLC's plugin cache.

"This is because of a « bug » from Microsoft Defender in one update of Windows 11, who magically made VLC plugins cache quarantined by Windows. Reinstalling VLC or regeneration of the plugin cache will fix this. Calling open source software embarrassing when it is a Windows update that broke it is quite disrespectful," the account responded.

The cache is an important part of how the media player works, as it relies on plugins for codecs, demuxers, and input/output modules. Instead of putting everything into a single executable, VLC loads these components as and when required and uses a cache to avoid having to scan the entire plugin directory every time it loads. The issue seems to occur when Microsoft Defender quarantines or blocks VLC's plugins.dat cache file. As a result, VLC can take a noticeable amount of time to process its plugin system before finally beginning playback. We also tried to replicate the issue on a Windows 11 machine; however, VLC launched normally, and we did not experience any noticeable delay when playing an MP3 file.

The easiest way to fix this is to reinstall VLC or regenerate the plugin cache. The VLC Windows installer includes a dedicated executable file to reset the cache files. This can be accessed by either heading to the VLC installation folder and running vlc-cache-gen.exe or its shortcut within the Start menu called "VLC media player - reset preferences and cache files." Do note that this also removes any customized preferences, such as audio settings like equalizers, keyboard shortcuts, subtitles, etc.

A more reliable solution is to add an exception for the VLC installation folder in Microsoft Defender itself. This should prevent Microsoft Defender from interfering with VLC's cache files and avoid the same issue from recurring. While the workaround seems relatively simple, it is still far from being ideal. One should not have to jump through hoops just to play an MP3 file. While Microsoft is yet to comment on the issue, it remains to be seen whether a future Windows Defender update will address the underlying cause.

Nine PBS is afraid that it will lose over 70 years of archival materials and programming after its contracted cloud storage vendor has apparently gone out of business. According to Current, the channel used Open Source Storage, or OSS, for storing over 50TB of data — but it suddenly lost access to its data earlier this year. Nine PBS has been working with OSS and its predecessor since 2019 and intended to renew its contract on March 6 of this year. The company never responded and abruptly cut off the station’s data access even though it still had 30 days to retrieve its data after the contract ended.

The station dug a little bit deeper when it discovered that the OSS website no longer existed and was listed as delinquent under the Colorado Secretary of State. It also discovered that OSS utilized Iron Mountain’s services, so it sent a demand letter to the latter to preserve its data and to "pay any reasonable costs associated with its demand." At the time, Iron Mountain did not confirm or deny that it possessed Nine PBS’ data.

At the same time, the channel also sued OSS and its leadership, which it paused after someone who claimed to be a "managing partner of the group that officially acquired" the company reached out. The person, named James Tramel, initially communicated with Nine PBS for about a month. However, this also ended abruptly, with the channel eventually receiving an automated reply from Tramel stating he is no longer connected with OSS. The channel was able to get in touch with him, and he said that he had "been defrauded" into acquiring the cloud storage company and that ownership and operations have now reverted to the previous owners.

This left the channel at a loss, so it continued its case against OSS, and the court ruled that Nine PBS had all the rights to access its data stored with OSS and that the latter should "facilitate its transfer to a new vendor." The channel’s attorney also reached out to Iron Mountain to inform the company of the pending case in Colorado; Iron Mountain finally admitted to holding the data. Iron Mountain initially agreed to turn over Nine PBS’ data, but it eventually backtracked and claimed that OSS owned the data it stored. Because of this, Nine PBS now has no choice but to sue Iron Mountain, too, to ensure the data is not deleted.

The entire thing is a nightmare scenario for Nine PBS, especially as it’s still unclear what will happen to its data. The channel can only assume that its former cloud storage provider is no longer paying data center bills, so it’s rightfully concerned that its data might end up lost forever. And even if Iron Mountain is willing to give Nine PBS its data, it risks getting sued by OSS — it is simply protecting itself by refusing to turn over the said stored data.

It seems that the safest legal way to resolve this issue is for Nine PBS to get a court order requiring Iron Mountain to turn over its data. But the channel must act quickly to ensure that its data, which Nine PBS VP and CCO Leah Freeman said to Current represented "70 years of our organization’s history," stays safe.

It's not clear if the channel has backups of its data, but based on its determination, we suspect not. This is strange, though, especially for a major organization, as one can easily purchase a six-bay NAS on Amazon and populate it with the best HDDs. This also goes against the 3-2-1 backup rule, which says you should keep three copies of your files stored in two different mediums, with one of them running offsite. Hopefully Nine PBS will implement a better backup system once it regains access to its data. And at least there's still a chance — it's not like the fire that the South Korean government experienced last year, which saw 858TB of data go up in smoke.