There is a new driver available for Nvidia GeForce hardware owners, and it's carrying a whole lot of bug fixes. The WHQL-certified 610.62 Game Ready driver is also adding support for Empulse.

Empulse lands from 1047 Games. That may be familiar to first-person shooter fans, as this is the studio that has been behind Splitgate and the Splitgate: Arena Reloaded sequel. This latest FPS entry will land into early access on June 24, and it will have support for DLSS 4.5 with dynamic multi-frame generation and Nvidia Reflex on day one.

• FIXED World of Warcraft: Gaming stability improvements [5563205]
• FIXED Apex Legends: Occasional visual corruption after extended gameplay [6239327]
• FIXED Users may observe DLSS settings being grayed out in certain games after updating to display driver 610.47 [6262805]
• FIXED Improved gaming stability in multi-monitor configurations when using V-SYNC with DLSS Frame Generation [6158481]
• FIXED Resolved an issue that could cause jittering or ghosting in some DirectX 11 games when Smooth Motion is enabled [5937897]
• FIXED Resolved an issue that could cause some games to crash when launched with Smooth Motion enabled [5466398]
• FIXED [Ada] Resolves a frame pacing issue on certain monitors when G-SYNC is enabled [6226972]
• FIXED Resolved an issue that prevented the EDID from being read on certain monitors causing them to be identified as "NVIDIA NV-Failsafe” [6005508]
• FIXED Resolved an issue where certain monitors would not wake from sleep mode [5806798/5635230]
• FIXED General stability improvements when the system fails to create a new allocation [5449920]

Nvidia has only listed a single open issue for this release:

• “Prefer Maximum Performance” Power Management Mode may not be applied correctly [6007998]

The NVIDIA 610.62 driver is now available for download from the NVIDIA app. For those who want to download it directly, standalone links are here. Here are the official release notes (PDF).

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Posted Wednesday 17 June 2026 at 6:24 am AEST (my time).

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Microsoft's new Surface Laptop Ultra generated a lot of buzz earlier this month, but in addition to its most powerful laptop with an NVIDIA chip, Microsoft also has a more affordable laptop lineup, which has been waiting for an update for quite a while. Today, Microsoft announced the eighth-generation Surface Laptop.

The new Surface Laptop is powered by the Snapdragon X2 Plus and X2 Elite processors. These chips offer faster CPU performance, up to 58% faster graphics, and 80 TOPS Neural Processing Units (NPUs) for on-device AI processing. Like the previous models, these chips retain their great energy efficiency, and Microsoft says that buyers can expect up to 20 hours of work on a single charge.

The laptop is available in two sizes: 13.8-inch and 15-inch. You will have a hard time finding visual differences between the new and previous models, as Microsoft is not taking any major design leaps, except for the new Jade color, which may look familiar to Surface Laptop 5 owners. Other colors include Platinum, Black, and Dune.

The 15-inch variant got a higher-resolution display. It is a 3,270 x 2,180 resolution screen with a pixel density of 262 ppi (the 13-inch model has a 201 ppi density) and a maximum brightness of 600 nits SDR and HDR. Unlike the Surface Pro 12th-gen, which is available with optional OLED displays, the Surface Laptop sticks with IPS, a 1,300:1 contrast ratio, a 120Hz refresh rate, and a 3:2 aspect ratio.

Another notable change in the Surface Laptop 8 is its trackpad. It now provides haptic feedback when you perform various actions in apps and the operating system. It is a relatively new feature that Microsoft brought to Windows 11 in recent updates, and it is only available on certain devices, such as the Logitech MX Master 4, Surface Slim Pen 2, the upcoming Surface Laptop Ultra, and now the Surface Laptop 8.

Like its tablet-shaped sibling, the new Surface Laptop is notably more expensive. It starts at a $1,599 for a 13.8-inch configuration with a 256GB SSD and 16GB of RAM. However, in the US, the base model has double the storage while keeping the same price. Available configurations include up to 64GB of memory and up to 2TB SSD (user-removable PCIe Gen4). The Surface Laptop 8 is now available for purchase on the official Microsoft website.

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Posted Wednesday 17 June 2026 at 6:23 am AEST (my time).

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So far, 2026 has been rich in Surface announcements. Microsoft started with a fresh lineup of Surface for Business devices powered by Intel's new Core Ultra 300 processors. Then the company revealed the Surface Laptop Ultra, its most powerful laptop with NVIDIA's RTX Spark processor. Now, it is time for new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop models with Qualcomm processors.

Microsoft's original Copilot+ PCs with Snapdragon X1 chips debuted in late May 2024. Two years later, Microsoft is finally updating the lineup with new models featuring Snapdragon X2 processors.

The 12th-gen Surface Pro continues the well-established formula of Microsoft's flagship tablet, and Microsoft is not even changing colors, as the tablet will be available in three colors: Dune, Black, and Platinum. The most important changes are mostly hidden inside. Microsoft switched from the Snapdragon X1 to the new Snapdragon X2, which promises up to 53% faster graphics performance than the previous generation and up to 15.5 hours of battery life. The built-in NPU is also much more powerful, and it can run at up to 80 TOPS for on-device AI processing.

Like before, the new Surface Pro is available with a 13-inch IPS display, and Microsoft is still offering OLED as a separate, more expensive configuration.

Speaking of configurations, the Surface Pro will be available with a 10-core Snapdragon X2 Plus or a 12-core Snapdragon X2 Elite. Microsoft expanded the available RAM configurations to 64GB (previously 32GB was the maximum), while storage remains unchanged at 256GB, 512GB, or 1TB of user-replaceable PCIe Gen4 SSDs.

Other specs remain mostly unchanged. The computer has the same 1440p Windows Hello webcam, two USB4 ports for charging, data, and display output, Wi-Fi 7 and Bluetooth 5.4 support, dual speakers, and compatibility with Surface Pro Signature and Flex keyboards. With that said, there is one very important aspect of the Surface Pro that changed significantly, and it is the price.

While the previous-gen Surface Pro launched at $999 for the base configuration, in 2026, the entry-level Surface Pro with Snapdragon X2, 16GB of memory, and 256GB will set you back an eye-watering $1,499. To sweeten the pill, Microsoft is running a limited-time promotion where Surface Pro buyers can get a free Surface Pro 13-inch Keyboard. The promo runs from June 16 through June 30.

The new Surface Pro is available now on the official Microsoft Store website.

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Posted Wednesday 17 June 2026 at 6:22 am AEST (my time).

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Stream-ripping services allow users to convert streaming audio and video into downloadable files.

That’s a useful feature for those who want offline copies of YouTube videos, but it also comes with copyright concerns.

Music labels have repeatedly taken legal action against stream rippers, both directly in court, and through site blocking actions. The latter have been effective throughout Europe, and in the UK, Brazil, Australia and elsewhere.

Canada can now be added to the growing list. A Federal Court in Ottawa, Ontario, issued the first ever stream-ripper blocking order in the country. This is also the first Canadian blocking order requested by music companies.

Labels Target Y2Mate, YTMP3 and SaveFrom

The case, filed last November by Sony, Universal, Warner Music and other labels, targets the unidentified “John Doe” operators of three well-known stream-ripping brands: Y2Mate, YTMP3, and SaveFrom.

After reviewing the paperwork, Justice Fothergill found that the operators infringed copyright. Among other things, the stream-rippers are liable for copyright infringement as they provide services with the ‘sole function’ to enable unauthorized reproduction, violating the Copyright Act.

From the permanent injunction
 

The permanent injunction issued by Justice Fothergill requires the operators to stop their infringing activities. In addition, they must deactivate the domains. This includes Y2mate.ws, YTmp3.lat, Savefrom.space and Spowload.cc, but also any other infringing domains that provide similar stream-ripping services.

Blocking Order

In addition to the permanent injunction, Justice Fothergill issued a companion blocking order. This order requires nine major Canadian ISPs, including Bell, Rogers and Teksavvy, to block the four domain names.

The order follows the same structure established by the GoldTV precedent, and the more recent Soap2Day blocking order. To implement the order, the ISPs must use DNS blocking, DNS rerouting, or equivalent technical means.

The order also requires ISPs to put up a notification for visitors of the domains, explaining why it is blocked. As with previous orders, it remains valid for two years.

Copycats of Copycats

While the blocked domain names use familiar brands, they are not the original sites that operated under these names. For example, Savefrom.space has nothing to do with the much more popular Savefrom.net, which has millions of visitors instead of hundreds.

The fact that the more popular site is not targeted makes sense, as Savefrom.net decided to proactively block Canadian visitors after pressure from rightsholders a few years ago.

Savefrom.net started blocking Canadians years ago
 

The court order also acknowledges that the targeted domains are copycats, which gained popularity when the original sites became inaccessible.

Additionally, the order stresses that it targets “other similar platforms” operated by the defendants, which “appear” or “increase in popularity” once access to stream-rippers is blocked.

“(i)ndeed, the John Doe Respondents operate platforms that are themselves ‘copycats’ of similarly branded stream ripping services that were previously deactivated, and additional copycat platforms have already begun to appear on the Internet.”

Copycats
 

While the current order only lists four domain names, Justice Fothergill clarifies that it can be expanded with new copycats or “similar platforms” in the future.

Preemptive Strike

The platforms named in the order are not particularly high-traffic targets today. According to Similarweb, Y2mate.ws has just shy of a million worldwide visits last month, while Spowload.cc had little over 130k.

Savefrom.space did not have any meaningful traffic, with Similarweb estimating a few dozen visits per day, globally. Ytmp3.lat, meanwhile, has no registered traffic at all and appears to be unreachable.

However, the record labels might partly use the blocking framework proactively rather than reactively. Since similar platforms and brands can be targeted going forward, it can use the current order to target sites that gain traction in the future.

To do so, rightsholders can file an affidavit identifying the new domain and confirming it meets the order’s conditions. If none of the nine ISPs object within ten business days, the court can expand the blocklist without further proceedings. A full hearing is only required if an ISP pushes back.

For now, however, this blocking order kicks off with four domain names.

—

A copy of the permanent injunction is available here (pdf) and the site-blocking order, also issued by Justice Fothergill, can be found here (pdf).

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Posted Wednesday 17 June 2026 at 6:21 am AEST (my time).

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Android 17 has been in testing since early this year, with the final beta hitting devices just a couple of weeks ago. Insofar as a mature operating system like Android still has big days, this is one of them. The official Android 17 build is starting its rollout on Pixel phones, adding a small set of new features and laying the groundwork for the future. This release also coincides with a Pixel Drop and a new version of Wear OS (based on Android 17) on Pixel Watches.

Google no longer uses an unmodified version of Android on its phones—the Pixel build includes numerous features that are distinct from Android 17 itself. Other device makers will include versions of some of these features when they eventually update their phones, but for now, Google’s Pixel phones are the only way to experience Android 17.

The multitasking Bubbles system in Android 17 expands on a similar (but underutilized) messaging feature. In Android 17 on Pixels, you can long-press on any app icon to open that app as a floating window. When minimized, these bubbles stay on top of other apps. On foldable phones, the bubbles dock into a “bubble bar” for easy multitasking.

Google says this interface is ideal for quick multitasking or chatting with Gemini while looking at other content. We may see Bubbles appear on other smartphones as Android 17 rolls out more widely, but Google isn’t the first to implement such a system. Samsung has had a floating app framework for years and may not want to change how it works, but Motorola could benefit, as it makes fewer tweaks to Android.

Foldable phones are also getting a new gaming interface in Android 17. Stretching phone-optimized games to a more square foldable screen can often cause distortion and awkward control placement. The updated OS offers a new approach, or at least it will eventually. Version 17 introduces a 50-50 split interface that displays the game on top and a touchscreen controller at the bottom. If you leave the phone’s hinge at an angle, it makes the device look a bit like a real handheld game machine.

Credit: Google

However, Google notes that foldable gaming mode will take a few more months to arrive on Android 17 devices. This isn’t the only feature the company is holding back. The anti-doomscrolling Pause Point that Google revealed a few weeks ago is also slated for release later in 2026.

The initial Android 17 release includes native screen reaction video support. You’ve probably seen these vertical clips on (or reposted from) TikTok or Instagram featuring a talking head overlaid on another video. This style of content has become so popular that Google is supporting it natively in Android 17. It’s built into screen recordings, so you can add yourself as an overlay to whatever is being displayed—no green screen required.

While many parts of Android 17 will be ignored or obscured when the OS expands beyond Google phones, the new security and safety features will be nearly universal. Android 17 keeps your personal data more private when apps request access. You can grant temporary location access to apps that request it, and software that needs to read your contacts can be limited to specific entries instead of the entire address book.

Credit: Google

You’ll also have new protections in Android 17 if your phone grows legs and walks off. The improved “Mark as lost” feature in Find Hub can lock a missing phone with biometrics in addition to a passcode, so even a thief who can guess the code won’t get access. Android 17 reduces the number of allowed passcode guesses, too. There’s also a longer wait between failed attempts.

More Pixel things

The updates that begin rolling out today include new Pixel Drop features. These are exclusive to Google’s devices, and they (mostly) are not tied to Android 17. For instance, the Gemini Omni model announced at I/O last month is coming to the Gemini app on Pixels. For now, it will be used only for video generation, but Google hopes to expand Omni to more content types later. It currently requires a Gemini Pro or Ultra subscription. Similarly, Lyria 3 music generation will be available on Pixels in the app, but this one won’t require a premium subscription.

Google began adding support for Apple AirDrop in Quick Share a few months back, but only for select Pixel phones. The feature later expanded to Samsung flagships and a few other devices. Unfortunately, hardware variation means AirDrop can’t currently be implemented as a universal feature, so it’s still piecemeal. AirDrop support is expanding to the Pixel 8a and 9a in the Pixel Drop. It’s still not available on the Pixel 8 or 8 Pro, although those are actually a bit older than the 8a.

And then there’s Magic Cue, the AI-powered feature that debuted on the Pixel 10 family. Magic Cue is supposed to use Gemini Nano on-device intelligence to proactively offer suggested links, actions, and content while you use your phone. In practice, Magic Cue doesn’t appear that often, but you may see it a little more following this Drop. Google says Magic Cue suggestions will expand beyond Google’s messaging app to Snapchat, Telegram, and Instagram. More apps may come later.

Android for your wrist is getting an upgrade today, assuming you have a Pixel Watch. Google says Wear OS 7 is a major update that brings Gemini Intelligence to the latest models. It’s not all AI, though. For starters, Google claims Pixel Watch users can expect a 10 percent battery life boost after the update.

Credit: Google

The new software, based on Android 17, ports several notable phone features to wearables, including live notifications. You can now track your DoorDash orders or check sports scores at a glance. The audio source picker from phones is also coming over to the Pixel Watch. For developers, Wear OS will make it easier to adapt phone-optimized widgets for the smaller wearable screen.

The initial rollout won’t include Gemini Intelligence (with the new Neural Expressive interface), but Google says that’s slated for the coming months. When it arrives, you’ll have features like the AI-powered Create My Widget and multi-step app automation. The idea that you’ll be able to hand Gemini a complex task like booking concert tickets from a watch screen is suspect, though. That doesn’t even work very well on phones where you can keep an eye on the robot’s meandering.

Ready, set, wait

It usually takes a few weeks for new Android versions to reach all eligible Pixel devices. This time around, the new OS is available for all Tensor-powered Pixels, starting with the Pixel 6 series and running through the current Pixel 10. You can’t force the OTA update, but you can sideload the new OS via a full system image or an OTA file from Google’s developer pages. Even if you do that, some of the more interesting features, like foldable gaming controls and Pause Point, won’t be available yet.

For anyone with a non-Pixel Android phone, the wait will be much longer. Samsung will probably begin updating its latest phones in a couple of months, followed by other OEMs like Motorola and OnePlus. Current-gen phones are likely to be first in line for updates, but given the relative lack of Android 17-specific features, you’re not missing much. Google will continue to release most new Android features via apps, Play Services, and OEM partnerships.

We also expect another major Android 17 release in late 2026, focused on API and developer changes.

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Posted Wednesday 17 June 2026 at 6:19 am AEST (my time).

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The data for our weekly download chart is estimated by TorrentFreak, and is for informational and educational reference only.

Downloading content without permission is copyright infringement. These torrent download statistics are only meant to provide further insight into piracy trends. All data are gathered from public resources.

This week we have two newcomers on the list.

“Michael” is the most shared title.

The most torrented movies for the week ending on June 15 are:

Note: We also publish an updating archive of all the list of weekly most torrented movies lists.

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Posted Tuesday 16 June 2026 at 8:01 am AEST (my time).

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As part of the Windows Insider Program, Microsoft made available several preview builds of Windows 11 in early June 2026. Although these preview builds didn't introduce many new features, the company dedicated most of its work to improving existing ones.

In the first two weeks of June, the company unveiled a new Beta channel for version 26H1, and in the different channels, we've also seen a number of features and improvements. For example, we've seen new features like Screen Tint and Low Latency Profile.

In addition, a new version of Widgets with fewer distracting settings has rolled out, an updated Magnifier with new settings has also rolled out, and there are improvements for File Explorer.

Furthermore, Microsoft continues improving the Windows Update experience, Windows Search, and more.

In the Experimental track, we've seen builds 28120.2242, 26300.8687, 29610, and 28120.2302, and builds 26220.8575, 28020.2236, 26220.8680, and 28020.2298 have been released in the Beta channel.

In this recap, I'll highlight the latest and most noteworthy changes available through the Windows Insider Program.

Biggest improvements from the Windows Insider Program in June 2026

These are the most significant changes Microsoft has unveiled since the last roundup.

Screen tint new feature

On Windows 11 build 28020.2298, in the new Beta channel for version 26H1, Microsoft introduced a new accessibility feature called "Screen tint." It's a system-wide color overlay designed to reduce eye strain and soften overly bright or saturated displays.

Unlike the Night Light feature, which primarily reduces blue light for nighttime use, Screen tint changes the overall intensity and color tone of the display during the day. The software giant notes that the two features solve different problems and can work together.

Today, Playground Games released a big Forza Horizon 6 update with a long list of fixes, patches, and balancing tweaks that the studio promised earlier. Version 375.327 is now available on Steam, Microsoft Store, and Xbox, offering users improvements for AI, audio, design, performance, road discovery, upgrades, visuals, online play, and more.

Some of the most notable changes in the Series 2 update include rebalanced drivatars, particularly their difficulty and race start behavior. As such, the game should be more balanced on higher difficulty levels, and AI cars should not shoot out when the race starts as if they have rocket boosters. Speaking of difficulty, developers nerfed Drag Tires physics for a more expected and realistic behavior. They are no longer the go-to option for record-breaking times in road racing, and all leaderboard entries with drag tires will be removed.

Completionists will also be glad to get a new feature that lets you see road discovery percentage in each region, which should make discovering all roads easier while keeping it quite challenging and interesting (I spent quite a long time finding the last road).

Festival Playlist is also getting some much-needed fixes, including patches for bugs that allowed completing Seasonal Jobs ahead of time or where weekly challenges would not unlock for some players. Developers will retroactively give reward points to all who could not complete all challenges due to these bugs.

Other changes include changes to Horizon Play progression so that it is easier to reach Level 100, audio improvements on lower-spec devices, fixes for visual glitches, including pixelated smoke, and more. Developers also addressed the currently non-working Eliminator, an online mode gamers used to farm credits with a Hummer EV exploit. Playground Games plans to re-enable it soon. As a gesture of goodwill, players will get a free McLaren Sabre. Those who used the exploit will not be banned, but developers plan to roll back credits to a maximum of 10M for all who farmed credits using the exploit.

You can find the complete changelog for the latest Forza Horizon 6 update here.

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Posted Tuesday 16 June 2026 at 8:00 am AEST (my time).

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The release of macOS 27 later this fall won’t quite close the book on the Intel Mac. The last handful of models that could run macOS 26 Tahoe will be eligible for security and Safari updates for two more years, and elements of the Rosetta compatibility layer for running Intel code on Apple Silicon Macs will be with us in some form for some indeterminate amount of time after that.

But macOS 26 is definitely the last chapter of the Intel Mac story. Anything that happens after this is a coda or an epilogue.

Most of our WWDC coverage has been forward-looking, so indulge us if you will in a look backward at the full history of the Intel Mac, a partnership between two companies that made Macs dramatically better, until it started making them worse.

“Project Marklar”

An early 2000s-era titanium PowerBook G4 running Mac OS X Leopard. Apple was never able to squeeze the

PowerPC G5 into a laptop.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The Mac’s history with Intel didn’t start with version 10.4.4, the first Mac OS X version to ship on a commercially available Intel Mac. But we won’t go as far back as the x86-compatible versions of NeXTSTEP or Apple’s abortive ’90s efforts to make a version of classic Mac OS that could be licensed for third-party x86-based systems.

Let’s begin with JK Scheinberg, an Apple engineer in June of 2000, who was looking for a solo project to help him transition to working from home. His pitch? A version of the then-still-in-progress Mac OS X that could run on Intel processors.

“I’ve been working on the Intel platform for the last week getting continuations working,” Scheinberg wrote to his boss in an email shared by his wife. “I’ve found it interesting and enjoyable, and, if this (an Intel version) is something that could be important to us I’d like to discuss working on it full-time.”

At the time, all Macs still used PowerPC processors co-developed by Apple, IBM, and Motorola, as they had since 1994. Early Mac OS X versions ran on G3 and G4 chips, and the 64-bit G5 processor was launched in mid-2003. A version of Mac OS X that ran on Intel’s chips wasn’t strictly necessary, and for around a year and a half, it existed only as a sort of hobbyist side project codenamed “Marklar.”

By early 2002, Marklar had attracted more attention within Apple, and then-CEO Steve Jobs briefly flirted with the idea of allowing Mac OS X to run on Sony’s Vaio laptops. By that August, a dozen or so engineers had been added to the project as it grew from “proof-of-concept” to “contingency plan.”

That’s because Apple was having problems with PowerPC chips. Jobs promised that the desktop version of the G5 would climb in clock speed from 2 GHz to 3 GHz within a year, a promise that never came to pass. And Apple was never able to squeeze the hot, power-hungry processor into a laptop—iBooks and PowerBooks were stuck with revised versions of the G4. Future CEO Tim Cook called a G5-based laptop “the mother of all thermal challenges.”

Jobs had been fuming about PowerPC chips for a while; Walter Isaacson’s Jobs biography describes a heated call between Jobs and Motorola CEO Chris Galvin in 1997, in which Jobs declared that PowerPC chips “sucked.” And he may have harbored other bad feelings; Geoffrey Cain’s Steve Jobs in Exile says that Apple’s PowerPC switch doomed further development of the Motorola m68k chips that NeXT’s computers relied on, helping to kill NeXT’s already-struggling hardware business.

And IBM, for its part, didn’t want to devote its resources to developing a bunch of chips that would be used exclusively in the low-volume Mac lineup (in 2003, Apple shipped roughly 3 million Macs; the company no longer reports unit sales in its earnings reports, but analysts peg that number at just under 26 million Macs in 2025).

Intel’s Paul Otellini helped convince Jobs to jump to Intel’s chips, and Apple didn’t need to start the software switch from scratch because of its existing work on Marklar. In June of 2005, Apple publicly demonstrated Mac OS X 10.4 running on Intel hardware for the first time. His presentation obliquely mentioned Marklar, though not by name.

“And so today for the first time, I can confirm the rumors that every release of Mac OS X has been compiled for both PowerPC and Intel,” announced Jobs. “This has been going on for the last five years. Just in case.”

The transition

The “first” Intel Mac was a Developer Transition Kit (DTK) made available to software developers after WWDC 2005. It was essentially a Pentium 4-based PC inside a Power Mac G5 case, and it was available strictly as a loan to developers who could pay $499 per year for a developer account and another $999 for the kit. Few, if any, of these DTK kits survived; Apple required developers to return the systems by the end of 2006 and offered to trade them for a real retail Intel Mac to seal the deal.

The WWDC keynote laid out the timeline, in addition to the tools Apple would use to help developers and users navigate the transition. The next version of Mac OS X, version 10.5 Leopard, would be compatible with both PowerPC and Intel Macs. A compatibility layer called Rosetta would run most PowerPC apps tolerably well while developers worked on Intel-native versions, which could be distributed as universal binaries that supported both CPU architectures. This transition worked well enough that Apple essentially handled the Intel-to-Apple-Silicon switch the exact same way.

Apple would also take advantage of the fact that its computers would use the same hardware as other PCs. Right from the start, Apple officially supported running Windows directly on Intel Macs via Boot Camp; a Mac OS X app would handle partitioning the Mac’s disk and downloading Windows drivers for the Mac you were using, and a Windows-side app supported rebooting back into Mac OS (and eventually provided some other nice-to-haves like read-only access to HFS+ formatted volumes).

By January of 2006, Apple started shipping the first Intel Macs, starting with a new iMac and a renamed MacBook Pro to replace the outgoing PowerBook series. These first systems were externally almost indistinguishable from the PowerPC models they replaced, another strategy Apple recycled for the first Apple Silicon Macs—the implied message was “maybe these machines were different on the inside, but they’re still the Macs you know and love.”

A 2010-era white plastic MacBook. The first-generation version of this design was Apple’s signature consumer

laptop during the early Intel era.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

The first new design of the Intel Mac era came later that year, when Apple launched the MacBook to replace the old iBook. Like the iBook, this laptop was made mostly of white plastic (a black version, inexplicably several hundred dollars more expensive, was also available eventually), and it used slower processors with Intel’s integrated graphics rather than the MacBook Pro’s dedicated graphics chips. But it was a popular machine—I was a college student at the time, and it was definitely the laptop you’d see the most often when you were out and about on campus (or maybe the second-most-often, if you added up every single permutation of “something cheap from Dell”).

During the WWDC 2005 presentation, Jobs predicted that the Intel transition would be mostly complete by the end of 2007. Unlike the 3GHz G5 prediction, this one actually wasn’t optimistic enough: Apple completed its switch from PowerPC to Intel chips with the announcement of a new Mac Pro and Intel-based Xserve in August of 2006.

A productive partnership

“As we look ahead, we can envision some amazing products we want to build for you, and we don’t know how to build them with the future PowerPC roadmap,” said Jobs while explaining the rationale for the switch. (It’s funny to think of now, but some of the Mac’s staunchest loyalists did react to the switch with disproportionate dismay.)

For the first few years of the Intel era, updates came fast and often. The first wave of Intel Macs briefly reverted to 32-bit chips, a retreat from the 64-bit architecture of the G5; this was fixed the next year with a switch to 64-bit Intel Core 2 Duo processors. A flashy new aluminum-and-glass iMac overhaul came in 2007, defining an aesthetic that is still recognizable in today’s Apple products. By the early 2010s, Intel’s rapidly improving integrated GPUs enabled the Mac’s first high-resolution “Retina” displays.

But the tastiest fruit of the early Apple-Intel partnership, a machine that wouldn’t have been possible with PowerPC chips, was the MacBook Air. For that first model, Intel had even made a special version of its Core 2 Duo CPU with 60 percent smaller packaging, something that helped Apple cram an entire laptop into something that could fit in a manila envelope.

That first Air was a bit too ahead of its time; its 4,200 RPM spinning hard drive in particular helped bog it down, and the things it was missing felt like bigger compromises in 2008 than they would have just a few years later. But fast solid-state storage soon became a standard feature, and within just a few years, the MacBook Air was what virtually all laptops looked like. This was something Intel both enabled and encouraged.

Signs of trouble

A 6th-generation Intel Core CPU, codenamed Skylake. This architecture and the 14 nm manufacturing process

were where Intel’s problems started.

Credit: Orestis Bastounis

Apple began making its own Apple-branded processors in 2010, using technology it acquired when it bought P.A. Semi in 2008. But while early chips like the Apple A4 and A5 were energy-efficient and felt snappy in iPhones and iPads, it was extremely difficult to imagine their performance scaling all the way up to what Apple would need to replace the Intel chips in a MacBook, to say nothing of an iMac or a Mac Pro.

But these chips steadily improved, year after year, often by huge leaps and bounds. And there was trouble brewing at Intel.

By the mid-2010s, Intel’s “Tick-Tock” model for improving its products was beginning to falter. The company had more trouble than expected getting its 14 nm manufacturing process up and running, and its manufacturing improvements stalled for years. Intel’s next-generation 10 nm process wasn’t shipping in any volume until late 2019, and for years, it was stuck shipping warmed-over iterations of 2015’s 14 nm Skylake architecture.

And it wasn’t just the slowed rate of improvement that was a problem. Former Intel engineer François Piednoël claimed that the Skylake architecture was inordinately buggy and that Apple was the one finding a lot of the bugs.

“Basically our buddies at Apple became the number one filer of problems in the architecture. And that went really, really bad,” said Piednoël. “When your customer starts finding almost as much bugs as you found yourself, you’re not leading into the right place.”

The PowerPC-to-Intel switch came because Apple was unhappy with its current chips and because a better, more viable option was readily available. By the late 2010s, both of those things were true again.

Bridge over troubled water

The MacBook Pro Touch Bar was a flawed idea that nevertheless showed how Apple was outgrowing Intel.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

In retrospect, the first “Apple Silicon Mac” was not the M1 MacBook Air or Mac mini that came out in late 2020 but the redesigned butterfly-keyboard MacBook Pros that released in late 2016.

Those models shipped with a now-abandoned piece of technology called the Touch Bar, a narrow strip of touchscreen above the keyboard that attempted to replace the function row with other buttons and sliders that could change dynamically based on what the user was doing.

To make the Touch Bar work, those Macs included a chip called the Apple T1. The T1 wasn’t much—it was essentially a repurposed Apple Watch processor that existed to drive the Touch Bar display and provide Macs with a Secure Enclave that could be used for Touch ID and Apple Pay. But it was a sign that Intel’s chips were no longer serving all of Apple’s needs. As in the PowerPC days, Apple was envisioning products that its chip supplier couldn’t help it build.

The T1 was followed by the T2, a relative of the Apple A10 chip that handled the same things as the T1 plus additional security features, an SSD controller, and video encoding and decoding. Both the T1 and T2 ran their own operating system called “bridgeOS”—in one sense, the “bridge” referred to communication between those Macs’ Intel processors and the Apple coprocessors. But in retrospect, you could also read it as a reference to those Macs’ status as a bridge between the height of the Intel Mac era and the looming Apple Silicon era.

Apple inside

The powerful, compact, power-efficient Mac Studio is the kind of machine Apple couldn’t have made with Intel’s chips.

Credit: Andrew Cunningham

“When we make bold changes, it’s for one simple yet powerful reason,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. “So we can make much better products. When we look ahead, we envision some amazing new products, and transitioning to our own custom silicon is what will enable us to bring them to life.”

Cook formally announced the long-rumored Apple Silicon transition in the company’s 2020 WWDC keynote, which was delivered fully virtually during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. (There’s something faintly strange about watching this video now, even though basically all of Apple’s major announcements are delivered as fully pre-recorded videos these days—it’s full of weird cuts, and it feels like none of the presenters are sure what they should be doing with their hands.)

The first Apple Silicon Macs and the Apple M1 chip were announced in November of that year, and from then on, Intel Macs were living on borrowed time. The Apple Silicon transition took quite a bit longer than the PowerPC-to-Intel switch had, but the company finally completed the transition in mid-2023.

Apple promised that Intel Macs would be supported for “years to come,” and it did make good on that promise, though later Intel Macs received fewer operating system updates than earlier ones. From 2020’s macOS 11 Big Sur to last year’s macOS 26 Tahoe, Apple released a total of six macOS releases that supported both architectures, though Tahoe’s support list included just a bare handful of Intel models. Those Macs will get security and Safari updates until the fall of 2028. And then the Intel Mac era will be fully in the rearview.

What’s striking about the Intel Mac era is that Apple switched to and away from Intel chips for basically the same reason: It was looking for a more compelling processor roadmap and the best possible performance-per-Watt for its chips. When Intel was executing well—and during the decade between the mid-00s and mid-2010s, Intel was executing exceptionally well—Apple wanted in. It was only after years of watching Intel struggle that Apple wanted out.

The big difference? When Apple stopped shipping PowerPC chips, consumer-focused PowerPC chips essentially disappeared. But Intel is still making and shipping processors, meaning that we (and Apple) can still see what could have been if the switch had never happened.

Some of Intel’s updates this decade have been pretty good. The current Core Ultra Series 3 chips, in particular, are its most competitive in years, based on their CPU performance, graphics performance, and power efficiency. But I’d take Apple’s steady, consistent drumbeat of generation-over-generation improvement any day over Intel’s herky-jerky rollercoaster of refreshes, rebadges, and architectural overhauls.

Ditching Intel was a big risk for Apple, but so far, it’s been the right decision.

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Posted Tuesday 16 June 2026 at 7:57 am AEST (my time).

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Last summer, adult content producers Strike 3 Holdings and Counterlife Media filed a copyright infringement lawsuit against Meta.

The complaint accused the tech company of using adult films to assist its AI model training. Similar claims have been made by other rightsholders, including many book authors.

This latest case specifically focuses on Meta’s BitTorrent activity. That’s no surprise, as plaintiff Strike 3 is the most active copyright litigant in the United States, known for targeting thousands of alleged BitTorrent pirates.

Meta Wants Case Dismissed

In October 2025, Meta responded to the allegations by filing a motion to dismiss at a California federal court. Taking a page from the BitTorrent piracy defense playbook, Meta argues that the IP address evidence presented by the plaintiffs is meaningless without context.

The porn producers had linked numerous Meta IP addresses to unauthorized sharing activity. According to Meta, however, there is no evidence that the alleged activity on its corporate network was centrally orchestrated by the company. In fact, it countered that many alleged downloads predate Meta’s AI training activity.

In addition to denying the allegations, the tech company offered an alternative explanation. Meta suggested that employees or visitors may have downloaded the pirated videos for personal use.

Court: Torrenting is the Infringement

In an order released last week, U.S. District Judge Eumi K. Lee refused to throw the case out. In a 16-page order, she denied Meta’s motion and let all three of Strike 3’s direct, vicarious, and contributory copyright infringement claims proceed.

Motion denied
 

One of Meta’s lead arguments was that, in order to prove direct infringement, Strike 3 had to show its films were actually used to train a model. However, Judge Lee explained that this is not needed, as Meta’s alleged copying of the films via BitTorrent is copyright infringement.

“Because Plaintiffs have adequately pleaded that their exclusive rights under the Copyright Act were violated when their films were torrented, they have satisfied the second element, regardless of whether their films were used to train specific AI models,” the order reads.

Coordinated, Not Coincidental

Another key question was whether the torrenting activity can be attributed to Meta, or if the downloads came from employees, who downloaded content for personal use.

Strike 3 argued that the actions were coordinated by Meta, showing similar download patterns across 47 corporate IP addresses and seven hidden ranges. This includes files with the same keywords downloaded on the same day.

Judge Lee found the coincidence theory implausible and pointed at a spreadsheet of addresses grabbing files with “teen” in the title, from “Teen Titans” and “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” through to explicit adult releases.

“The word “teen” appears in every file name. Similar patterns are shown repeatedly across the identified IP addresses. It strains credulity to suggest that these correlations are mere coincidence and the product of individual human selections,” Judge Lee noted.

“Instead, the many commonalities across files permit a reasonable inference that the downloads were operated by an algorithm using key terms, which accounts for why pornography was downloaded alongside children’s cartoons and sitcoms.”

Teen

Other download patterns also appeared to be illogical. For example, multiple IP-addresses from various ranges torrented eight episodes of Ted Lasso out of order, on a single day. Meta suggested that this could be coincidental download activity by several people, but Judge Lee believes this to be unlikely.

“But the odds that multiple people using the Corporate IP Addresses and the IP Ranges coincidentally torrented the same show, rather than simply streaming it, on the exact same day strains belief…”, Judge Lee writes.

Cox Doesn’t Save Meta

The contributory copyright infringement claim also survives. While the motion to dismiss was pending, the Supreme Court handed down Cox Communications v. Sony, raising the bar for contributory infringement. However, that wasn’t enough to help Meta at this stage.

Judge Lee recognized that, if Meta merely offered its infrastructure to copyright infringers, this would not be sufficient to trigger liability.

“Standing alone, Plaintiffs’ allegation that Defendant ‘provid[ed] access to its servers, data centers, IP addresses, computers, networks, [and] accounts’ would be insufficient under Cox Communications,” she wrote.

However, Strike 3’s allegation went further, alleging that Meta encouraged copyright infringement by offering specific tools and services for it.

“Plaintiffs plausibly allege that Defendant took active steps to encourage torrenting by implementing an algorithm and establishing VPCs – tools tailored to infringe copyrighted works using BitTorrent.”

The Cox Standard
 

The vicarious copyright infringement also survived the motion to dismiss. According to Judge Lee, Meta has a direct financial interest in amassing high-quality training data for its commercial AI products.

The Case Continues

While Meta’s motion to dismiss failed on all claims, the company’s defenses could still succeed further down the line, when the evidence is reviewed in detail.

For example, Meta argued that testimony in a related case shows that its torrenting servers went live in 2024, not 2018, so they cannot be the same infrastructure behind ranges active for years.

Additionally, Meta said much of the infringing activity in this case took place years before the company started training its video models. Those and other points will be contested in detail as the case proceeds.

For now, the case heads into discovery. Meta must answer the complaint, the parties are due to attempt mediation by early August, and a jury trial is set for February 2028.

—

A copy of Judge Eumi K. Lee’s order denying Meta’s motion to dismiss is available here (pdf).

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Posted Tuesday 16 June 2026 at 7:56 am AEST (my time).

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It’s a bit worrying when a scientific paper begins, “How long will life on Earth survive?” But in this case—a study by Jacob Haqq‐Misra of Blue Marble Space and Eric Wolf at the University of Colorado Boulder—the billion-plus-year timeline under consideration shouldn’t cause you too much existential panic.

The context for this question is that we understand the Sun will brighten as it eventually matures into a red giant that swallows the Earth in a solar furnace. So, where along that 5 billion-year path will life on Earth, in fact, be cooked?

Weathering and the weather

This isn’t just a question of incoming radiation. Among the thermostat-like stabilizing feedback loops in Earth’s climate, the cycling of CO₂ through the solid Earth is a major factor over timescales this long. The weathering of silicate rocks at the surface converts atmospheric CO₂ into carbonate that ends up on the seafloor, where it can be subducted into the mantle with tectonic plates. (And eventually, it can cycle back out to the atmosphere through volcanoes.)

The weathering of bedrock depends, in part, on temperature. Warmer temperatures and a more active hydrologic cycle mean an increased rate of weathering, which pulls more CO₂ out of the atmosphere. That slows rising temperatures. But in this scenario, it could also lead CO₂ to fall to extremely low levels—and photosynthesis requires CO₂.

This far-future puzzle has been the focus of many model simulations over the past few decades. With a steadily brightening Sun, when does the Earth either get too hot or too CO₂-starved for the base of the food chain to survive?

Some of those models have been relatively simple equations. Others have been more complex one-dimensional layer models, representing an ocean and an atmosphere separately in the math, for example. This new study brings a 3D model to the party and uses a pair of scenarios that mark opposite ends of a spectrum.

The difference between the scenarios is based on extreme views of the temperature/carbon relationship described above. That was done in part because the idea that CO₂ would eventually fall to very low levels has been challenged recently, based on some evidence of a much weaker relationship between bedrock weathering and global temperature. So in one scenario, the researchers held the planet’s temperature constant (equal to today’s) and let CO₂ drop to compensate exactly for the brighter Sun. This is a world where strong weathering acts as a perfect thermostat. In the other scenario, CO₂ is instead held constant at a modern value while temperature increases, representing a very weak weathering thermostat.

Too hot to handle

With weak weathering, the world is around 21° C (38° F) warmer 1.5 billion years from now, and it jumps an additional 40° C (72° F) between then and 2 billion years. Even with CO₂ remaining at 400 parts per million, those temperatures would wipe out land plants on Earth.

Specifically, the physiological limits of most land plants are crossed by 1.68 billion years, and the rest are toast at 1.87 billion. (Boiling off the oceans and losing our water to space wouldn’t be far behind.)

In the strong weathering scenario, the temperature doesn’t change. But after 1 billion years, CO₂ drops to about 34 parts per million, and after 2 billion years it falls to less than 1 part per million. The limit for most land plants is around 150 parts per million, while the much less common C4 plants could survive down to 3–10 parts per million. The latter limit gets hit between 1.35 and 1.64 billion years in.

A few plants, like cacti as well as some marine life, can cheat by using bicarbonate in the water if dissolved CO₂ is low. They can probably make it down to 1 part per million. That would buy them a little more time, and they’d make it to about 1.84 billion years.

Model timelines for the weak and strong weathering scenarios. Temperature in the top plot is in kelvins—a change of 1 kelvin is equivalent to 1 °C. Carbon dioxide in the bottom plot is on a logarithmic scale. (10¹ is 10 parts per million, 10² is 100 parts per million, etc.)

Credit: Haqq-Misra and Wolf/JGR Atmospheres

That’s optimistic?

The, uh, good news about these estimates for the demise of complex life on Earth is that they’re actually a bit more optimistic than most previous studies. That’s down to the 3D model producing a little less warming for a brighter Sun, the expectation that CO₂ declines more slowly over time, and a slight expansion of the CO₂ range believed to be survivable by plants. Many previous estimates had put life’s expiration date at less than 1 billion years from now.

Obviously, there are a bunch of additional considerations that could significantly alter this story, and the researchers mention a few. If civilization persists long enough to see some of these changes, geoengineering would certainly be an option—like spreading aerosols in the stratosphere to reflect sunlight, for example.

There are even some wilder suggestions out there, like moving Earth’s orbit farther from the Sun or removing some of the Sun’s mass to tame the red giant. (We have a billion years to work on the logistics, after all.)

Less speculatively, evolution could have a say in the physiological limits of Earth’s plants. Any adaptations that expand the range of survivability would extend the timeline.

Ultimately, the point of modeling this kind of thing is not to make a confident prediction. Apart from the simple natural curiosity about what will happen to our world, this is also relevant to wondering about the potential for life on other worlds. The window of time during which life on Earth is possible tells us something about where to look outside our Solar System.

Land plants have been present on Earth for almost 500 million years, and if this new estimate is right, they could stick around for almost 1.9 billion more. As was the case for a few billion years early on, microbial life might again have the place to themselves for a while after that.

JGR Atmospheres, 2026. DOI: 10.1029/2025JD045586 (About DOIs).

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Posted Tuesday 16 June 2026 at 7:55 am AEST (my time).

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Formula 1 raced in Spain this past weekend. The Barcelona-Catalunya circuit is one of F1’s purpose-built race tracks, with a number of fast corners and a track surface that’s more abrasive than usual. That means downforce is the name of the game. Catalunya has always required good aerodynamics, but it’s doubly important now. The more speed you can carry through a corner, the less energy you have to add on the following straight, and energy management is now as important in F1 as it is at Le Mans or in Formula E or even IndyCar. And the more downforce you have, the less the car slides, and the less the car slides, the less the tires get eaten up.

It’s the tire wear that suggested the strategies. So far, all the races this season have been one-stop affairs as drivers make their required change from one tire compound to another. But 66 laps of Catalunya would require at least three sets of Pirelli tires to get to the end. Maybe even four. As the tires wear, they become slower, to the tune of 0.2–0.3 seconds per lap. And one way to exploit that is with an “undercut”—pit early, change onto fresh rubber, and make use of the tire offset against your rivals to put in fast laps while they’re losing time. Do it right, and when they make their next pit stop, you should be in front.

Splitting the race into four stints means one more pit stop, and it costs about 22 seconds to drive through the pit lane, stop in the box, and then exit the pit lane again, assuming a tire change in less than three seconds. But since each set of tires is needed for fewer laps, they can be worked hard enough to offset that 22-second pit stop and more.

Kimi Antonelli makes a pit stop in the Spanish Grand Prix.

Credit: Jakub Porzycki/NurPhoto via Getty Images

Bold strategies like that don’t always work; the two-stop plan that most teams opted for was the safe, sensible option. But Ferrari didn’t play it safe. It arrived in Spain with a massively upgraded car—new front wing, new floor, new sidepods, and so on. It probably already had the best chassis on the grid, and unlike a couple of years ago, the upgrade it brought to Spain worked well, particularly when driven by a newly resurgent Lewis Hamilton.

Still got it?

The seven-time World Champion suffered a serious loss of form with the introduction of ground effect cars in 2022. Those cars generated downforce mostly from the shape of their underfloor (rather than their wings and diffuser) and had very limited suspension setups. It’s fair to say that Hamilton never gelled with them. The previous year, he had won eight races, taking his career tally to 103. He didn’t win a race at all in 2022 or 2023, although he did take victory at the British Grand Prix in 2024, then inherited the win in Belgium two races later when George Russell was disqualified after the fact.

In 2025, Hamilton left Mercedes, where he’d won six of his seven championships, for the challenge of racing for Ferrari. But his results in the ground effect Ferrari were even worse than they were in the ground effect Mercedes, and by the end of the season, plenty of critics were asking if it was time for the driver to retire.

The 2026 car is much more to Hamilton’s liking. It’s smaller, lighter, and more nimble, and the ground effect-generating floors are gone. It’s much more compatible with his driving style, which involves late, heavy braking before rotating the car at the corner apex. Even more so since he was able to persuade team management that it was worth upsetting long-term partner Brembo—a relationship that stretches over 50 years—to switch to his preferred brake pad supplier, Carbon Industrie.

Lews Hamilton put on a clinical performance in Spain.

Credit: Jay Hirano/SOPA Images/LightRocket via Getty Images

Buoyed by second places in both Canada and Monaco, Hamilton appeared a little lost during the second of Friday’s two practice sessions, having given up his car during the first for Ferrari junior Dino Beganovich. But on Saturday, Hamilton was much more at home in the car and missed out on pole to his former Mercedes teammate Russell by less than a tenth of a second.

Despite Hamilton’s qualifying performance, conventional wisdom still had the silver Mercedes cars as favorites. Kimi Antonelli qualified third, fresh off yet another win at Monaco, but Leclerc’s Ferrari was in 10th after a crash, unable to support his teammate—or challenge for the lead himself—at the start of the race. Mercedes looks to have negated Ferrari’s starting advantage; in Canada, Monaco, and now Spain, its cars were plenty quick when the lights went out.

The right call

Hamilton started on soft tires, unlike the medium-shod cars around him, and committed to the three-stop early, pitting on lap 11. Immediately, he started using the tire advantage to good effect, and, seeing his sector times, other teams called their drivers to the pits in response. Russell stopped on lap 12 and stayed ahead of Hamilton, who pitted again on lap 27. Russell kept the lead until he made his second stop on lap 36, battling with his own teammate Antonelli until then, with the pair losing time hand over fist to Hamilton. Antonelli stopped from the lead on lap 37, at which point Hamilton took first place and kept it until the end.

His third stop should have set up the prospect of watching him have to battle past Lando Norris’ McLaren and then both Mercedes, albeit with enough of a tire offset to most likely make his way back to the lead. But fate made things a little simpler. Fernando Alonso’s Aston Martin stopped on track, and the virtual safety car period lasted just long enough for Hamilton to get in and out of the pits without losing a position. Rather than slow down and cruise to a win, Hamilton maintained his pace, finishing almost 20 seconds ahead of Russell.

And like that, Mercedes’ and Antonelli’s winning streak comes to an end.

Manaure QUINTERO / POOL / AFP via Getty Images

 

Kym Illman/Getty Images

 

Michael Schumacher also won his first race for Ferrari in Spain, in 1996.

Pascal Rondeau/Allsport/Getty Images

 

Russell has been on the back foot of late after all of Antonelli’s wins, often due to reliability problems, but in Spain, it was his turn to benefit from what looks like an increasingly unreliable Mercedes power unit. Antonelli had actually just managed to pass Russell on track on lap 61 before grinding to a halt a lap later. Ferrari’s power unit is much more reliable, but this weekend, its hydraulics weren’t, costing Leclerc a race finish.

Antonelli’s DNF has shrunk his title lead to just 41 points ahead of Hamilton, with Russell in third. Given Ferrari’s speed at a track like Catalunya and better reliability, it might be time to start considering Hamilton as a proper contender.

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Posted Tuesday 16 June 2026 at 7:54 am AEST (my time).

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Microsoft released Windows 11 KB5094126 and KB5093998 last week as the latest Patch Tuesday updates. Following that the company also published the accompanying dynamic updates under KB5094149, KB5095971, and KB5094156.

While Microsoft has so far not acknowledged any major problems with the release, some users online are running into problems. These range from OneDrive and Dropbox access issues, BitLocker recovery lockouts, to blue screens and BSODs.

The most common one seems to be happening with HP systems wherein affected users say they hit 0xc0430001 BSOD (blue screen of death) error code after the KB5094126 update. We wonder if this could be related to the recent bug we covered on HP devices wherein the ongoing Secure Boot certificate updates are leading to similar issues.

While we are not certain, users affected by this issue likely need to ensure that the boot.stl file is included on the installation media (such as a USB installer or ISO), if the above-mentioned dynamic updates are deployed. If this file is missing, computers may fail to boot from the installation media and could display the error 0xc0430001. This STL file is used by Secure Boot to verify that the boot files are trusted, so it must match the same Windows version and system architecture.

To ensure the file is included, Microsoft recommends using the Update WinPE script, which automatically updates the image and handles the required files. Alternatively, you can manually copy the boot.stl file from the Windows\Boot\EFI folder on a Windows device and place it in the matching folder on your installation media before deploying the updated image.

Aside from blue screening some users also note their systems have been freezing following the update. This could be happening to Lenovo PCs specifically.

In the case of the OneDrive and Dropbox access issues, a user figured out that there could be a conflict with UAC. He explained: "Okay, so I did some digging, and in our environment KB5094126 breaks OneDrive and Dropbox in Explorer. I went through all our GPOs and found out that the combination of disabling UAC and having my user being a local admin breaks OneDrive in Explorer. ... If I enable UAC again, then it works, even with KB5094126 still installed."

Hopefully, Microsoft will look into these issues.

Source: Microsoft forum (link1, link2, link3, link4), Reddit (link1, link2, link3, link4)

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Posted Monday 15 June 2026 at 5:07 pm AEST (my time).

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The founder of the Linux kernel has just announced the availability of Linux 7.1. This is a stable version of the kernel that will now be tested by various Linux distributions before it is shipped to users through update managers. Some users, like those on Debian, for example, might not get it for a long time, if at all, while Fedora users can expect it in the near future.

With Linux 7.1 out on time, the merge window for Linux 7.2 is now open, giving contributors the opportunity to send in major new features that have been waiting for the last two months. Torvalds warned that he is currently travelling and will be in another timezone, so timing for the merge window may be irregular due to timezone differences and limited internet access.

Torvalds said that he has already fetched early pull requests to allow him to do some offline work, but the travel could still cause disruption. Right now, he is not planning to extend the release, but did consider it. He said he might later regret not extending, though.

In terms of this last week of development for Linux 7.1, Torvalds said there were no major or alarming changes. This week consisted mostly of smaller driver updates to GPU, networking, and sound, networking fixes, trace tooling fixes, and misc minor fixes. The shortlog this week lists fixes for driver bugs, memory leaks, I/O and USB fixes, networking and RDMA fixes, DRM/graphics fixes, and tooling and verification improvements.

Specific fixes include USB series heap-overflow and buffer overflow fixes, and multiple use-after-free, memory-leak, and refcount corrections across subsystems such as i2c, zram, gpio, and net. There are fixes for graphics drivers, including amdgpu, i915, and virtio, as well as hypervisor and virtualization tweaks affecting mshv, vmbus, and hyperv.

According to Phoronix, anyone running Linux 7.1 should look out for the new NTFS driver, Intel FRED for improved performance on Panther Lake and future CPUs, faster graphics with Intel Arc Battlemage, and improvements for older AMD Radeon GPUs.

If you are running Linux on your computer and everything is fine, then you don’t need to worry about updating to Linux 7.1 as a priority; just wait for it to be pushed to you. If you have tried Linux on hardware but it didn’t work properly, trying again with a distro that uses Linux 7.1 could cause Linux to work on your machine, thanks to the new hardware support.

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Posted Monday 15 June 2026 at 5:07 pm AEST (my time).

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Gamers Nexus (2.62m subscribers)

June 15, 2026

Video length: 39m 58s

In the news for the past few weeks, we finalize our Computex coverage, talk about memory manufacturers hitting 1 trillion dollar market caps, Bambu Lab's continual displacement by open source solutions, and the NVIDIA RTX Spark solution scaring some consumer PC DIY companies.

00:00 - Recap for the Week

02:23 - Computex Wrap and Engineering Discussions

05:15 - RTX Spark Scares Consumer Companies

11:17 - Memory Manufacturers Hit Trillions

14:54 - Bambu Software Slowly Getting Replaced

16:38 - Intel Computex Keynote Recap

20:55 - SilverStone's Cool Oddities

27:04 - Thermaltake's Balls and Modularly Modular Power Supply

36:02 - Arctic New Freezer 61 Cooler

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Posted Monday 15 June 2026 at 5:04 pm AEST (my time).

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