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Table of contents:

1. Windows 10 and 11 news
2. Windows Insider Program
3. Updates are available
4. Reviews are in
5. Gaming news
6. A blast from Microsoft's past

Windows 11 and 10

Here we talk about everything happening around Microsoft's latest operating system in the Stable channel and preview builds: new features, removed features, controversies, bugs, interesting findings, and more. And of course, you may find a word or two about older but still supported versions.

This week is another Patch Tuesday week, which means it is time to install the latest cumulative updates for all supported Windows versions. Windows 11 23H2 and 22H2 received KB5039212, Windows 11 21H2 got KB5039213, and Windows 10 was updated with KB5039211.

This month's Patch Tuesday updates put the final nail into Windows 11 21H2's coffin. The OS is no longer supported, and Microsoft is now force-updating users to version 22H2.

Besides the traditional Patch Tuesday updates, Microsoft shipped a new Defender update for all supported Windows install images and removed the controversial Copilot app that was earlier shipped with a Microsoft Edge update.

After releasing the June 2024 Patch Tuesday updates, Microsoft confirmed that it finally fixed the long-standing "65000" BitLocker bug. It is now gone from Windows 11 version 21H2. The company also fixed taskbar bugs that were reported in the latest non-security updates. This one, however, did not require installing a new patch—Microsoft Ctrl + Z the damage using its Known Issue Rollback mechanism.

Speaking of updates, an interesting story emerged this week about HP firmware for its ProBook laptop series. HP shipped a botched update that bricked a bunch of quite expensive laptops and then put all the blame on Microsoft and Windows Update. While the companies are pointing fingers, customers scratch their heads, wondering what to do with their expensive, now out-of-warranty ProBook laptops.

Another big story that happened this week was the recall of Windows Recall. Despite trying to address negative feedback with the recent security update, Microsoft decided not to release Recall on June 18. Instead, the feature will go to Windows Insiders first. Of course, you will still need a Copilot+ PC to try it out, at least officially.

We are adjusting the release model for Recall to leverage the expertise of the Windows Insider community to ensure the experience meets our high standards for quality and security. This decision is rooted in our commitment to providing a trusted, secure and robust experience for all customers and to seek additional feedback prior to making the feature available to all Copilot+ PC users.

By the way, the first Copilot+ PCs are already arriving to their happy owners. Interestingly, the initial tests do not look very promising as users noticed significantly lower processor speeds and, as a result, significantly slower performance.

If you are up for some software trickery, check out this article detailing how to move Windows 11's taskbar to the left with a third-party mod (some neat taskbar and Start menu improvements are coming soon to Windows 11 on the official level). Also, we published a guide on how to restore the old File Explorer in Windows 11 and make it stay for good.

Microsoft continues updating its official Windows documentation with useful guides and important information. This week, the company revealed hardware requirements for the Paint Cocreator feature that will let you generate images when drawing in Paint, some extra info on switching from a local account to a Microsoft account in Windows, and an explanation of several misconceptions about Windows 11.

This week, a new report emerged about MediTek wanting to dip its toes into the Windows on ARM project. The company is preparing its own processor for Windows 11 PCs, and the first results of that labor should land somewhere in the second half of 2025. If you are wondering why there were only Qualcomm-powered Windows PCs so far, that is because Microsoft and Qualcomm have an agreement that grants Qualcomm exclusive rights to make ARM chips for Windows computers.

By the way, it is not only Windows—Snapdragon-powered PCs can also come Linux-flavored.

Finally, Microsoft expanded the list of deprecated features in Windows to include another network-related feature. This time, the company is about to kill DirectAccess in favor of Always On VPN.

Windows Insider Program

Here is what Microsoft Released this week for testing in the Windows Insider Program:

In addition to new builds, the software giant shipped a new update for the Microsoft Store. It introduces support for Microsoft Wallet, giving customers a new easy method to apply discounts using Microsoft Rewards points.

Some interesting features are reportedly coming soon to Windows 11's File Explorer. Enthusiasts discovered that Microsoft is working on letting everyone access their smartphones' file systems within the File Explorer app on Windows 11. The feature is not here yet, but its traces are already discoverable across the OS.

Also, build 26236 from the Canary Channel contains a new Settings page that will let you manage app access to generative AI features. Besides releasing build 26236 for Windows Server 2025, Microsoft published a post about upgrades for diskpd in its next-gen server-focused operating system.

Updates are available

This section covers software, firmware, and other notable updates (released and coming soon) delivering new features, security fixes, improvements, patches, and more from Microsoft and third parties.

In a rather odd move, Microsoft announced that Copilot GPT Builder is now retired, and it will be removed from the Copilot Pro subscription on July 10, 2024. The company says its goal is to focus on different AI features that improve the Copilot Pro experience, so kiss goodbye to the feature that kept quite a lot of users subscribed.

Microsoft unveiled a few important updates for Outlook users. To begin with, on September 16, 2024, Microsoft will retire basic authentication with usernames and passwords. Customers will be forced to use modern authentication methods for better security. Another change is that some Copilot features are now rolling out to the classic Outlook app for Windows. They include email drafting, thread summarization, email coaching, and more.

Skype also received a big update this week. If you are into AR masks, you will be glad to know that Skype Lenses are now powered by Snap's Camera Kit SDK, which lets you use multiple masks, filters, and other effects to spice up your Skype conversations.

There was another update for Skype. This time, for Skype Insiders. Build 8.122.76.100 delivered a lot of improvements for the text editor on desktops.

Mozilla released a new feature update for the Firefox browser. Version 127 is now available in the Release channel, and it contains some interesting features, such as the ability to auto-start Firefox when you turn on your computer, additional protections for stored passwords, a big update for the built-in screenshot tool, and more.

Other notable updates include the following:

• Slack for Windows on ARM is now available in beta.
• Microsoft 365 Insiders can try new interactive ink tutorials in OneNote for Windows.
• Microsoft Loop now supports table comments and new Print commands.
• Microsoft launched a new program to help protect rural US hospitals from cyberattacks.
• Surface Laptop 6 for Business received new firmware with thermal improvements and fixes.
• Microsoft Edge Dev 127 received new improvements for testing.

Here are the newest drivers released this week:

• AMD Chipset Software 6.05.28.016 is out with the initial support for Windows 11 version 24H2.
• Intel Arc 31.0.101.5590 with Elden Ring Shadow of the Erdtree support.

Finally, here is this week's Microsoft 365 Roadmap Weekly covering upcoming features for Outlook Teams, Excel, and more.

And on a side note, Microsoft is no longer the most valuable company in the world. This week, it lost the title to Apple following the latter's WWDC 2024 keynote full of Artificial Apple Intelligence.

Reviews are in

Here are the hardware and software news we reviews this week.

Steven Parker reviews one more mini PC with some serious horsepower inside. The GEEKOM GT13 Pro features the Intel Core i9-13900H processor, a spare M2 slot, USB 4 ports, and a great aluminum enclosure. It is not perfect, though. Its HDMI port is a bit outdated, access to the insides requires disconnecting Wi-Fi cables, and the RAM is rather slow. Check out the full review here.

On the gaming side

Learn about upcoming game releases, Xbox rumors, new hardware, software updates, freebies, deals, discounts and more.

This week was packed with gaming news. To start with, Microsoft announced three new Xbox consoles: a white disc-less Xbox Series X, a white Xbox Series S with 1TB of storage, and a 2TB Xbox Series X in a new Velocity Green color. All three are coming later this year.

Now, here are the games Microsoft announced during this week's Xbox Showcase: Doom: The Dark Age (coming 2025), Call of Duty: Black Ops 6 (coming October 26, 2024), Starfield: Shattered Space DLC (coming later this year), Perfect Dark (release date still unknown), State of Decay 3 (also no info on the release date), Indiana Jones and the Great Circle (coming later this year), Microsoft Flight Simulator 2024 (coming November 19, 2024), Gears of War: E-Day (release date unknown), Age of Mythology: Retold (coming September 4, 2024, check out more info about it here), Avowed (somewhere in 2024), Fable reboot (coming 2025), Dragon Age: The Veilguard (this fall), and Assassin's Creed Shadows.

If you want to catch up with all the announcements in one place, check out our recap here. Also, be sure to see our PC Gaming Show 2024 roundup for more gaming news.

After announcing the new games, Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer shared some interesting information with journalists. He spoke about recent layoffs and seemingly confirmed that the company is working on a handheld Xbox console.

Forza Motorsport received a new content drop. Update 9 focuses on endurance racing, and it adds a new raceway, a new free car (hurry up and get it while it's free), and a lot of various fixes.

Microsoft released a new software update for supported Xbox consoles. The June 2024 release includes the ability to remember up to 10 Wi-Fi networks, manage subscriptions in the console itself, gamepad firmware updates, and more. Also, there are updates for Xbox Cloud Gaming and the Xbox PC app.

Nvidia announced new games for GeForce NOW. The latest additions include Sea of Thieves, Disney Speedstorm, SunnySIde, and BodyCam.

Deals and freebies

This week's Weekend PC Game Deals covers various showcase sales, a lot of free demos, co-op events, and a new giveaway from the Epic Games Store. Until the next Thursday, you can get the futuristic racer Redout 2.

Also, be sure to pay a visit to Valve's regular Steam Next Fest, which offers free demos of hundreds of upcoming PC games. They are still available until June 17, 2024.

Here are some other interesting gaming stories published this week:

• New Path of Exile II gameplay footage shows off the newly revealed Witch character.
• Starfield now offers official mod support and Creation Kit tools on Steam.
• Ubisoft showcased over ten minutes of Star Wars Outlaws gameplay.
• Homeworld 3 launched its first big update with a new map, a new ship variant and more.

A blast from Microsoft's past

John Callaham's weekly "Look back" series provides throwbacks into the past, detailing the company's products, partnerships, mishaps, and successes from years ago.

This week's blast from Microsoft's past is courtesy of Raymond Chen, an ever-giving source of Microsoft trivia. In a new blog post, Raymond explained the origins of the legendary 3D Pipes screensaver for Windows. Long story short, the company wanted to showcase OpenGL hardware acceleration without disrupting then-upcoming Windows NT 3.5. As a result, they decided to showcase it as a screensaver.

Microsoft Weekly background by Satya_1 on Pixabay

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What you need to know

• Starfield's first paid expansion, Shattered Space, is currently in development and slated to launch later this year. 
• In an interview, Bethesda Game Studios' Todd Howard confirmed that the team is preparing "Year 2" for Starfield, as well as working on a second big expansion. 
• Howard also confirmed that Shattered Space has been in development for just under a year, and that the majority of the expansion takes place on the same planet and city.
• Starfield is available right now across Xbox Series X|S and Windows PC, as well as being included in Xbox Game Pass.

Fans of Bethesda Game Studios' science-fiction role-playing game have more to look forward to past 2024. 

That's according to game director Todd Howard, who talked with YouTuber MrMattyPlays in an interview on Sunday. Howard talked about a wide number of topics, including what is coming in "Year 2" and beyond for Starfield. Howard confirms that Starfield: Shattered Space will not be the only paid expansion for Starfield, and the team is already working on the second big DLC. 

Howard notes that outside of the paid expansion, the team will naturally be working on a number of free updates, though he's not sure the six-week cadence the team strove for in 2024 will continue through 2025. The storied director notes that with the recent resurgence across the Fallout franchise, Bethesda's games are all extremely popular, with over 25 million players across all games last month. 

Shattered Space is a big shift for Starfield

Moore’s law is already pretty fast. It holds that computer chips pack in twice as many transistors every two years or so, producing major jumps in speed and efficiency. But the computing demands of the deep-learning era are growing even faster than that—at a pace that is likely not sustainable. The International Energy Agency predicts that artificial intelligence will consume 10 times as much power in 2026 as it did in 2023, and that data centers in that year will use as much energy as Japan. “The amount of [computing power] that AI needs doubles every three months,” said Nick Harris, founder and CEO of the computing-hardware company Lightmatter—far faster than Moore’s law predicts. “It’s going to break companies and economies.”

One of the most promising ways forward involves processing information not with trusty electrons, which have dominated computing for over 50 years, but instead using the flow of photons, minuscule packets of light. Recent results suggest that, for certain computational tasks fundamental to modern artificial intelligence, light-based “optical computers” may offer an advantage.

The development of optical computing is “paving the way for breakthroughs in fields that demand high-speed and high-efficiency processing, such as artificial intelligence,” said the University of Cambridge physicist Natalia Berloff.

Optimal Optical

In theory, light provides tantalizing potential benefits. For one, optical signals can carry more information than electrical ones—they have more bandwidth. Optical frequencies are also much higher than electrical ones, so optical systems can run more computing steps in less time and with less latency.

And then there’s the efficiency problem. In addition to the environmental and economic costs of relatively wasteful electronic chips, they also run so hot that only a tiny fraction of the transistors—the tiny switches at the heart of all computers—can be active at any moment. Optical computers could, in theory, run with more operations taking place simultaneously, churning through more data while using less energy. “If we could harness” these advantages, said Gordon Wetzstein, an electrical engineer at Stanford University, “this would open a lot of new possibilities.”

Seeing the potential advantages, researchers have long tried to use light for AI, a field with heavy computational needs. In the 1980s and 1990s, for instance, researchers used optical systems to build some of the earliest neural networks. Demetri Psaltis and two colleagues at the California Institute of Technology created a clever facial recognition system using one of these early optical neural networks (ONNs). They stored images of a subject—one of the researchers, in fact—as holograms in a photorefractive crystal. The researchers used the holograms to train an ONN, which could then recognize new images of the researcher and distinguish him from his colleagues.

But light also has shortcomings. Crucially, photons generally don’t interact with each other, so it’s hard for one input signal to control another signal, which is the essence of what ordinary transistors do. Transistors also work exceptionally well. They’re now laid down on coin-size chips by the billion, the products of decades of incremental improvements.

But in recent years, researchers have found a killer app for optical computing: matrix multiplication.

Some Light Math

The process of multiplying matrices, or arrays of numbers, undergirds a lot of heavy-duty computing. In neural networks, specifically, matrix multiplication is a fundamental step both in how networks are trained on old data and in how new data is processed in trained networks. And light just might be a better medium for matrix multiplication than electricity.

This approach to AI computation exploded in 2017, when a group led by Dirk Englund and Marin Soljačić of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology described how to make an optical neural network built on a silicon chip. The researchers encoded the various quantities they wanted to multiply into beams of light, then sent the beams through a series of components that altered the beam’s phase—the way its light waves oscillated—with each phase alteration representing a multiplication step. By repeatedly splitting the beams, changing their phase, and recombining them, they could make the light effectively carry out matrix multiplication. At the end of the chip, the researchers placed photo detectors that measured the light beams and revealed the result.

The researchers taught their experimental device to recognize spoken vowels, a common benchmark task for neural networks. With the advantages of light, it could do so faster and more efficiently than an electronic device. Other researchers had known that light had the potential to be good for matrix multiplication; the 2017 paper showed how to put it into practice.

The study “catalyzed massive, renewed interest in ONNs,” said Peter McMahon, a photonics expert at Cornell University. “That one has been super influential.”

Bright Ideas

Since that 2017 paper, the field has seen steady improvement, as various researchers have come up with new kinds of optical computers. Englund and several collaborators recently unveiled a new optical network they call HITOP, which combines multiple advances. Most importantly, it aims to scale up the computation throughput with time, space, and wavelength. Zaijun Chen, a former MIT postdoc now based at the University of Southern California, said this helps HITOP overcome one of the drawbacks of optical neural networks: It takes significant energy to transfer data from electronic components into optical ones, and vice versa. But by packing the information into three dimensions of light, Chen said, it shoves more data through the ONN faster and spreads the energy cost over many calculations. This drives down the cost per calculation. The researchers reported that HITOP could run machine-learning models 25,000 times larger than previous chip-based ONNs.

To be clear, the system is still far from matching its electronic predecessors; HITOP performs about 1 trillion operations per second, whereas sophisticated Nvidia chips can chug through 300 times as much data, said Chen, who hopes to scale up the technology to make it more competitive. But the optical chip’s efficiency is compelling. “The game here is that we lowered the energy cost 1,000 times,” Chen said.

Other groups have created optical computers with different advantages. Last year, a team at the University of Pennsylvania described a new kind of ONN that offers unusual flexibility. This chip-based system shines a laser onto part of the semiconductor that makes up the electronic chip, which changes the semiconductor’s optical properties. The laser effectively maps the route for the optical signal to take—and hence the calculation it performs. This lets the researchers easily reconfigure what the system does. This is a stark difference from most other chip-based systems, optical and electric, where the route is laid down carefully in the fabrication plant and is very hard to change.

“What we have here is something incredibly simple,” said Tianwei Wu, the study’s lead author. “We can reprogram it, changing the laser patterns on the fly.” The researchers used the system to design a neural network that successfully discriminated vowel sounds. Most photonic systems need to be trained before they’re built, since training necessarily involves reconfiguring connections. But since this system is easily reconfigured, the researchers trained the model after it was installed on the semiconductor. They now plan to increase the size of the chip and encode more information in different colors of light, which should increase the amount of data it can handle.

It’s progress that even Psaltis, who built the facial recognition system in the ’90s, finds impressive. “Our wildest dreams of 40 years ago were very modest compared to what has actually transpired.”

First Rays of Light

While optical computing has advanced quickly over the past several years, it’s still far from displacing the electronic chips that run neural networks outside of labs. Papers announce photonic systems that work better than electronic ones, but they generally run small models using old network designs and small workloads. And many of the reported figures about photonic supremacy don’t tell the whole story, said Bhavin Shastri of Queen’s University in Ontario. “It’s very hard to do an apples-to-apples comparison with electronics,” he said. “For instance, when they use lasers, they don’t really talk about the energy to power the lasers.”

Lab systems need to be scaled up before they can show competitive advantages. “How big do you have to make it to get a win?” McMahon asked. The answer: exceptionally big. That’s why no one can match a chip made by Nvidia, whose chips power many of the most advanced AI systems today. There is a huge list of engineering puzzles to figure out along the way—issues that the electronics side has solved over decades. “Electronics is starting with a big advantage,” said McMahon.

Some researchers think ONN-based AI systems will first find success in specialized applications where they provide unique advantages. Shastri said one promising use is in counteracting interference between different wireless transmissions, such as 5G cellular towers and the radar altimeters that help planes navigate. Early this year, Shastri and several colleagues created an ONN that can sort out different transmissions and pick out a signal of interest in real time and with a processing delay of under 15 picoseconds (15 trillionths of a second)—less than one-thousandth of the time an electronic system would take, while using less than 1/70 of the power.

But McMahon said the grand vision—an optical neural network that can surpass electronic systems for general use—remains worth pursuing. Last year his group ran simulations showing that, within a decade, a sufficiently large optical system could make some AI models more than 1,000 times as efficient as future electronic systems. “Lots of companies are now trying hard to get a 1.5-times benefit. A thousand-times benefit, that would be amazing,” he said. “This is maybe a 10-year project—if it succeeds.”

Original story reprinted with permission from Quanta Magazine, an editorially independent publication of the Simons Foundation whose mission is to enhance public understanding of science by covering research developments and trends in mathematics and the physical and life sciences.

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Researchers at UC San Diego recently set out to try and answer this question, by running a Turing test, a well-known method named after computer scientist Alan Turing, designed to assess the extent to which a machine demonstrates human-like intelligence.

The findings of this test, outlined in a paper pre-published on the arXiv server, suggest that people find it difficult to distinguish between the GPT-4 model and a human agent when interacting with them as part of a 2-person conversation.

"The idea for this paper actually stemmed from a class that Ben was running on LLMs," Cameron Jones, co-author of the paper, told Tech Xplore.

"In the first week we read some classic papers about the Turing test and we discussed whether an LLM could pass it and whether or not it would matter if it could. As far as I could tell, nobody had tried at that point, so I decided to build an experiment to test this as my class project, and we then went on to run the first public exploratory experiment."

The first study carried out by Jones and supervised by Bergen, Prof. of Cognitive Science at UC San Diego, yielded some interesting results, suggesting that GPT-4 could pass as human in approximately 50% of interactions. Nonetheless, their exploratory experiment did not control well for some variables that could influence findings, thus they decided to carry out a second experiment, yielding the results presented in their recent paper.

"As we went through the process of running the studies we discovered that other people were also doing great work in this area, including Jannai et al's 'human or not' game," Jones said. "We created a 2-player online version of the game where human participants would either be matched up with another human or an AI model."

During each trial of the two-player game used by Jones and his colleagues, a human interrogator interacts with a "witness," who could be either human or an AI agent. The interrogator asks the witness a series of questions to try to determine whether it is human or not.

A selection of conversations between human interrogators (green) and witnesses (grey). One of these four conversations is with a human witness, the rest are with AI. Interrogator verdicts and ground truth identities are below (to allow readers to indirectly participate). [A) Verdict: Human (100% confidence) Took a while to Google Addis Ababa. Ground Truth: GPT-4; Verdict: AI (100% confidence) Long time for responses, wouldn't tell me a specific place they grew up. Ground Truth: Human; C) Verdict: Human (100% confidence) He seems very down to earth and speaks naturally. Ground Truth: GPT-3.5; D) Verdict: AI (67% confidence), Did not put forth any effort to convince me they were human and the responses were odd, Ground Truth: ELIZA.] Credit: Jones and Bergen.

"The conversations lasted for up to five minutes, and at the end the interrogator made a judgment about whether they thought the witness was a human or an AI," Jones explained. "Within the five minutes, participants could talk about anything they wanted (except saying abusive things, which we used a filter to prevent)."

In this two-player computer game, the researchers deployed three different LLMs as potential witnesses, namely the GPT-4, GPT 3.5, and ELIZA models. They found that while the users could often determine that ELIZA and GPT-3.5 models were machines, their ability to figure out whether GPT-4 was a human or machine was no better than the probability they would get it right if picking randomly (i.e., by chance).

"Although real humans were actually more successful, persuading interrogators that they were human two thirds of the time, our results suggest that in the real-world people might not be able to reliably tell if they're speaking to a human or an AI system," Jones said.

"In fact, in the real world, people might be less aware of the possibility that they're speaking to an AI system, so the rate of deception might be even higher. I think this could have implications for the kinds of things that AI systems will be used for, whether automating client-facing jobs, or being used for fraud or misinformation."

The results of the Turing test run by Jones and Bergen suggest that LLMs, particularly GPT-4, have become hardly distinguishable from humans during brief chat conversations. These observations suggest that people might soon become increasingly distrustful of others they are interacting with online, as they might be increasingly unsure of whether they are human or bots.

The researchers are now planning to update and re-open the public Turing test they designed for this study, to test some additional hypotheses. Their future works could gather further interesting insight into the extent to which people can distinguish between humans and LLMs.

"We're interested in running a three-person version of the game, where the interrogator speaks to a human and an AI system simultaneously and has to figure out who is who," Jones added.

"We're also interested in testing other kinds of AI setups, for example giving agents access to live news and weather, or a 'scratchpad' where they can take notes before they respond. Finally, we're interested in testing whether AI's persuasive capabilities extend to other areas, like convincing people to believe lies, vote for specific policies, or donate money to a cause."

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Digital Research Inc had been founded to sell CP/M in 1976 by Gary and Dorothy Kildall. The operating system quickly became the defacto for any computer built around either the Intel 8080 or Intel Z80 microprocessors, and it even became popular on the Apple II through the Microsoft SoftCard. With the transition to sixteen bit microprocessors over the first years of the 1980s, Kathryn Strutynski led the DRI effort to port CP/M to these new hardware platforms and make it a more robust and more capable operating system. Yet, despite these efforts, it was quite obvious by around 1984 that MS-DOS and PC-DOS were winning the 8086 and 8088 market, and it was further obvious to many that the Intel chips were winning the hardware war. This is partially due to the IBM PC 5150 which sold more than three million units between 1981 and 1987. The XT, AT, and other derivative models didn’t sell quite as well, but they did further expand the total addressable market for PC-DOS. This market and the IBM brand created pressure for other companies to create compatible systems at lower price points, and this most certainly happened. From 1981 to 1989, over sixty million more-or-less IBM-compatible computers were sold on top of around seven and a half million non-PS/2 IBM machines. The next largest market in the 1980s was the Commodore 64 and 128 market where Commodore sold over twelve million units, and then Apple sold roughly six million Apple II machines. Competing with any of these was a tall order in the 1980s, and Digital Research had to change course to remain in the fight.

This kind of work had been done with the short-lived DOS Plus which was built from CP/M-86 Plus and Concurrent DOS but as a single-user, multitasking, sixteen bit CP/M implementation compatible with MS-DOS 2.11 and capable of reading floppy disks from both systems. This system was developed by the UK-based OEM Support Group of DRI, and it was first released in 1985.

DOS Plus was simply not quite the product that DRI and their OEM partners needed. Kazuhiko Nishi of ASCII Corporation struck a deal with DRI for around a million USD to have DRI build a PC-DOS compatible operating system. This new system would be a major departure from the CP/M nature of previous releases. First, it would ship with a FAT filesystem that included large disk support (FAT16B), and second, some parts of the system would be completely rewritten and restructured. In this latter regard, the CP/M BIOS (or XIOS) was replaced with an IBM-compatible BIOS called DRBIOS.SYS, and the BDOS kernel was called DRBDOS.SYS. This system had all multiuser elements removed much like DOS Plus, but it continued to use the Concurrent DOS kernel (version 6). Of course, with the legacy of a more advanced operating system in this code base, the new system would offer certain things that PC-DOS did not such as command history, extended command help, and more efficient memory use. This was released as DR DOS 3.31 on the 28th of May in 1988. Despite reporting itself to applications as PC-DOS 3.31, the BDOS kernel was version 6.0 showing the software’s origins. All available sources state that DR DOS 3.3x were OEM-only. This changed with version 3.40 released on the 25th of January in 1989. The more successful retail release was version 3.41 released in June of 1989. This version included tools that PC-DOS lacked at the time: XDIR, XDEL, PASSWORD, EMM386, EMMXMA, EDITOR, TOUCH, and VDISK. While being a good product certainly helped Digital Research see some early sales success, this release was certainly aided by the fact that neither IBM nor Microsoft sold DOS at retail at that time.

Microsoft MS-DOS 4 wasn’t well received by the public and to avoid any confusion with the Redmond product, Digital Research gave their next release a quinary version number. Still, the BDOS kernel version was 6.4. This version brought with it new commands: HMA (HYDES), EMS (EMM386), EDIT, VIEWMAX, LOCK, FILELINK, BACKUP/RESTORE, CACHE, MEMMAX, CURSOR, IDLE, SMARTDRV, and DRCACHE. DR DOS 5 also renamed the core system files. The DOS BIOS became IBMIO.COM, and the kernel became IBMDOS.COM. This was a huge release. ViewMAX was introduced as a file manager and was derived from DRI’s GEM graphical environment, load-high functions were introduced, memory management for 80386 machines was improved, disk caching was introduced, and power management for mobile machines was introduced. This last bit was through BatteryMAX which was controlled by IDLE ON or IDLE OFF (turning on power saving, or turning off power saving respectively). I haven’t actually found any drivers for this feature, but I think it’s rather impressive that Digital Research had built out the functionality in their operating system. DR DOS 5 was released in May of 1990, and its disk compression, caching, and load-high functions helped it become decently popular. By the end of the year, Digital Research had revenues over $40 million and employed two hundred seventy three people.

ViewMAX/1

On Wednesday, the 17th of July in 1991, Digital Research was sold to Novell becoming a wholly-owned subsidiary.

Digital Research, now owned by Novell, released DR DOS 6 in September of 1991. This released included TASKMAX, SuperStor, MEMMAX, DELWATCH, UNDELETE, DELPURGE, DISKMAP, DISKOPT, TOUCH, PCKWIK, DOSBOOK, LOGIN, LOCK, and UNFORMAT. Here, disk compression was now on-the-fly, reversing file deletions and disk formats was possible, and task switching was possible. Version 6 used Concurrent DOS kernel version 6.7 but it continued to report itself as PC-DOS 3.31 as versions before it had.

DR DOS 6 box

DR DOS 6

Novell introduced NetWare PalmDOS 1 to the market in November of 1992. This was based upon DR DOS 6 but was optimized for less powerful hardware, was embeddable in ROM, had support for PCMCIA devices, and included some Novell networking functionality.

Novell DOS 7 was released in December 1993. Getting to this release was somewhat messy within Novell. Initially, as noted in my article on Novell, this was to have been a graphical operating system running on Vladivar and using GEM. It then became a port of Mac OS System 7 to the PC, and then it was paired down to just another DOS release when those projects failed to produce fruit. Despite what happened, I personally view Novell DOS 7 as having been quite a successful product. It sold over a million copies quite quickly with thousands of retailers offering it to customers, and many OEMs bundling it with their machines. This was also a rather technologically advanced release. The first major change was the implementation of the DOS Protected Mode Services. This allowed device drivers and TSRs to load and execute in extended memory and in protected mode leaving lower conventional memory free for DOS applications. With this version, DR DOS also dropped SuperStor and adopted Stacker, EMM386 gained multitasking which could be exploited via TASKMGR. The operating system also gained HIMEM, SETVER, SERNO, DOSTUTOR, and NETWARS.

All of the Digital Research assets owned by Novell were purchased by Caldera on the 23rd of July in 1996. Following the acquisition, Caldera released OpenDOS 7.01 on the 3rd of February in 1997 which was essentially Novell DOS 7 sans most of the recent patches and without several useful utilities. Caldera then released OpenDOS 7.02 in December of 1997 and released that as Caldera DR-DOS 7.02 in March of 1998. These releases made DR DOS year 2000 compliant, fixed several bugs, and improved compatibility with Windows. DR DOS 7.03 was released on the 6th of January in 1999. Memory management was substantially improved, but otherwise there weren’t many changes.

Caldera split into three different companies on the 2nd of September in 1998 with Caldera Thin Clients being the part that kept Digital Research’s assets. They released GEM and ViewMAX under the GPL in April of 1999, and this company became Lineo on the 20th of July in 1999. Lineo released DR DOS 7.04 on the 19th of August in 1999, and then released version 7.05 on the 30th of November in 1999.

These releases were stripped down significantly and aimed at the embedded market. They did, however, bring full FAT32 and LBA support to DR DOS. Version 7.06 was soled only to OEMs by request. The main change for that version was that it could be booted from MS-DOS 7 boot sectors. Version 7.07 was largely a boot manager change (from what I understand) providing a sort of universal DOS and Windows manager.

Lineo’s fortunes quickly faded, but they did release CP/M and MP/M sources in October of 2001 prior to selling off all other assets. The Digital Research software properties reverted to Canopy Group (Lineo’s primary investor) and were then acquired by DRDOS Inc at the time doing business as DeviceLogics. Given the company’s name, it stands to reason that Bryan Wayne Sparks, Bryce Burns, and Troy Tribe founded the company in November of 2002 specifically to acquire the rights to DR DOS and other Digital Research software.

Under the ownership of DRDOS Inc, licenses of 7.03 were sold, and the company worked to bring a new version to market. DR DOS 8 was released on the 30th of March in 2004, and it brought some of the OEM enhancements such as FAT32 and LBA support together with DPMS enhancements and multitasking from Novell DOS 7. Version 8 was yet another version aimed at the embedded market.

DR DOS version 8.1 was most likely intended to serve as a return to form for DR DOS in October of 2005, but DRDOS Inc included FreeDOS code in the release without abiding by GPL terms and the release then ceased sales and distribution.

In the interval between Lineo going bust and DRDOS Inc starting business, Udo Kuhnt picked up the open-sourced bits of DR DOS 7 and began working on Enhanced DR-DOS 7.01.01. This later became EDR-DOS with the final version being EDR-DOS 7.01.08 WIP 2011 July released on the 21st of July in 2011. Over time, Kuhnt had improved partitioning and filesystem support, added LFN support, fixed many bugs, improved memory management, and even made some improvements to DPMS support. Kuhnt had also added HIFILES, HIBUFFERS, HIFCBS, HISTACKS, HILASTDRIVE, DDSCS, DOSDATA, XBDA, INSTALLLAST, DRFORMAT, DRSYS, and DRXCOPY. However, updates at drdosprojects.de ended on the 2nd of February in 2012.

DR DOS was a great product. It was superior to other DOS versions in many ways, and it is certainly possible that it could have been more successful were it not for Microsoft Windows having been so wildly successful. Starting with Windows 95, the majority of computer users simply didn’t much care about which DOS loaded Windows so long as it worked. There’s quite a bit of lore regarding legal battles and copyrights surrounding CP/M and DOS involving Microsoft and Digital Research. This has been covered in previous articles to some extent, but I am not really certain how much would have changed had Microsoft and Digital Research got on. Gates and Kildall had been quite friendly at one point, and we know that the two mutually chose not to work together due to differences in business practices and beliefs. Kildall chose to be quite a bit more friendly and less competitive while Gates very much chose to be competitive and at times a bit ruthless. Additionally, Kildall sold DRI rather than continue the fight, and DRI had never really attempted to combine DR DOS with GEM as a cohesive product to fight Windows before Windows became the ultimate ruler of the OS market following Windows 3.1’s release. Still, it was an absolutely brilliant product and part of me will always feel that it ought to have won.

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What you need to know

• Microsoft announced its flagship AI feature, Windows Recall, at Build a few weeks ago. 
• The feature records everything you do on Windows 11, and lets you ask Copilot to recover and remember previous tasks you performed on your computer. 
• Showcasing Microsoft's historic ineptitude when it comes to marketing and public relations, the internet quickly slammed the feature, calling it creepy and a privacy nightmare. 
• Microsoft has since postponed the feature after security researchers discovered a wealth of problematic vulnerabilities. 
• Apple announced its own AI features at its WWDC event, with a "privacy first" narrative at the forefront. 
• In a recent interview, Apple openly mocked Microsoft's failings, showcasing how much of an own-goal this whole snafu has been for the company. 

Oh Microsoft, you had one job. 

Microsoft's Windows Recall has been recalled, after a broad privacy backlash coupled with damning security research into the feature. 

Windows Recall was set to be Microsoft's flagship AI product set to ship with the first wave of Copilot+ PCs, including the Surface Pro 11. Alas, it was not meant to be. Disturbed by the broad implications of Microsoft watching everything you do (even if they claim none of the data gets uploaded to their servers), the internet started picking Windows Recall to pieces. Security researchers discovered a wide array of potential exploits of the tech, given that Windows Recall screenshots and records everything you do so that you can "recall" it later. 

In theory, Windows Recall is a pretty cool feature, but I think anyone with a shred of self-awareness could've seen how much of a backlash Windows Recall was going to cause. Microsoft didn't, apparently, which accentuates how out of touch it has gotten in recent times. Apple is right there to reap the benefits. 

During a WWDC talk, Apple's global marketing SVP Greg "Joz" Joswiak had some mocking words for Microsoft and it's spectacular Recall PR failure.

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Here is the full update from the blog post:

Today, we are communicating an additional update on the Recall (preview) feature for Copilot+ PCs. Recall will now shift from a preview experience broadly available for Copilot+ PCs on June 18, 2024, to a preview available first in the Windows Insider Program (WIP) in the coming weeks. Following receiving feedback on Recall from our Windows Insider Community, as we typically do, we plan to make Recall (preview) available for all Copilot+ PCs coming soon.

 

We are adjusting the release model for Recall to leverage the expertise of the Windows Insider community to ensure the experience meets our high standards for quality and security. This decision is rooted in our commitment to providing a trusted, secure and robust experience for all customers and to seek additional feedback prior to making the feature available to all Copilot+ PC users. Additionally, as we shared in our May 3 blog, security is our top priority at Microsoft, in line with our Secure Future Initiative (SFI). This is reflected in additional security protections we are providing for Recall content, including “just in time” decryption protected by Windows Hello Enhanced Sign-in Security (ESS), so Recall snapshots will only be decrypted and accessible when the user authenticates. The development of Copilot+ PCs, Recall and Windows will continue to be guided by SFI.

 

When Recall (preview) becomes available in the Windows Insider Program, we will publish a blog post with details on how to get the preview. To try Recall (preview) WIP customers will need a Copilot+ PC due to our hardware requirements. We look forward to hearing Windows Insider feedback.

Microsoft first announced Recall alongside its Copilot+ PCs announcement with a lot of fanfare on May 20. The company stated Recall took "images of your active screen every few seconds" so that users could find anything they did on their PC using search.

However, many people sounded alarms that Recall could be a huge security risk, with some cybersecurity experts offering evidence that hackers could easily break into a PC with the feature enabled and then use it to take any info on your PC.

After several days of silence, Microsoft announced on June 7 it would make the Recall experience an opt-in feature and also require the use of Windows Hello authentication to actually access Recall. Tonight's outright delay in Recall's release shows Microsoft may not feel the feature is ready for even a "preview" experience for Copilot+ PC owners at this stage.

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When Qualcomm showcased its new shiny chips for Windows PCs, it promised quite impressive results in Geekbench, such as about 3,000 in single-core and over 15,000 in multi-core. In reality, the tested model running with the Snapdragon X Elite X1E-78-100 scored 1,841 in the single-core test and 11,537 in the multi-core, which is a pretty far cry from the promised values. For reference, that is lower than Apple's A14 processors from 2020.

A quick dive into Task Manager revealed that the device was running at 2.5GHz max, again, far from the promised 3.4GHz for the X1E-78100 model. This might explain why the processor fails so short of its promised performance envelope. Another guess is that Samsung is throttling down the CPU to achieve better battery life. The NPU, however, a big part of the Copilot+ PCs thing, was not tested.

As for the battery life, the initial test showed solid performance, which can get you through an entire day, but Apple's M2-powered MacBook Air (referred to as 'MBA' by the Reddit user), which Microsoft tries so hard to beat, is still showing better results.

Early Impressions are good, not MBA M2 level but far better than a Core Ultra 9 185H Zenbook Duo using just one Screen. The ZDuo had to plug it at around 17/18H this one is lasting till 22:00. You can count on a whole day battery for sure.

Whatever the case, at this point, it is too early to grab pitchforks. Samsung and Qualcomm may release new firmware to address the problem with low CPU clocks.

Finally, in games, cponica23 tested the laptop using Resident Evil Village, and the game managed to output 40 to 50 FPS with severe frame droops at 1080p Medium with FidelityFX Super Resolution (FSR) in Performance mode. Although Qualcomm said Snapdragon X chips should be capable of decent gaming, Copilot+ PCs clearly should not be on your list if you want something more than the simplest casual gaming.

Microsoft will start shipping its Copilot+ PCs on June 18. It will be interesting to see how the rest of the lineup behaves in the hands of their owners.

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Companies have a growing number of ways to keep tabs on workers. They can gather details from common workplace apps and use special monitoring software to see what’s happening on the company’s Wi-Fi. The goal may be to protect sensitive company information or track employee performance, but there are bigger privacy implications for the people being watched.

“There’s little transparency,” said Hayley Tsukayama, associate director of legislative activism at the digital rights group Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF). “Even figuring out what is on your computer can be a huge step to figuring out how you want to deal with it.”

While there’s no foolproof way to know whether you’re being monitored, some techniques could provide insight, according to privacy and security experts.

Know what tech is riskiest

You’re at a higher risk for spying if you’re using a company-issued device, which offers the least privacy and will ultimately return to your employer, experts say. But you also could be exposed if you downloaded work software on your personal device or use their networks. To be safe, do these checks on any device or network you use for work.

Check your devices for tracking software

There are a few settings on your smartphones and computers that may allow for your workplace to remotely monitor you.

Check to see whether your device has mobile device management software, or MDM, installed. That allows your employer to remotely monitor your activities and take control of the devices. On an iPhone, go to Settings > General > VPN > Device Management. You should see a profile listed if your employer is using the software. On an Android, search for a setting called Device Admin Apps (the setting name may differ slightly depending on your device). On a Windows laptop, go to Settings > Accounts > Access Work or School. It’s under Privacy & Security > Profiles on a Mac.

Another way to check for software that employers use — also called “bossware” — is to review what’s running in the background on your laptop by checking your task manager or activity monitor, Tsukayama said. For quick access on PCs, press Ctrl + Alt + Delete. On a Mac, you can access the activity monitor by clicking on Utilities in your apps folder. Scroll through the list of running apps and Google the ones you don’t recognize.

Coworker.org, an organization that aims to support workers, offers a list of bossware and employment tech for which to look. Note that some programs may be invisible to you, Tsukayama said, citing EFF research.

Look for remote sharing settings, which would allow your employer to remotely control your device, including the microphone and camera, advises privacy researchers Diana Freed, a fellow at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and Julio Poveda, a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland. On Macs, it will be under System Settings > General > Sharing. On Windows, it should be under Settings > System.

Finally, check to see whether you are the administrative account for your device. Start-up screens may ask you to log in as a separate user than the administrator, or your computer may prompt you for an administrative password anytime you try to download an app. That could indicate your employer has control of your device, Tsukayama said.

Inspect your extensions and apps

It’s not just hidden apps and settings that are tracking you. Scroll through all of the applications installed on your laptop and research any you don’t know. Which are regularly asking you to install updates? Are you familiar with what those apps do? Were you ever asked to install an app for troubleshooting with your IT department?

“Be curious,” Tsukayama advised. “Also look for the marketing material for the app you find. They will often list, as features, the things they can do.”

Check your web browser extensions, recommends Mark Ostrowski, an engineering lead at cybersecurity firm Check Point Software Technologies. If you have browser extensions that are part of your company’s security tools, they will probably make themselves known, he added. A pop-up might warn you not to put patient information into ChatGPT, for example. Or it may say that it’s checking files you download for malicious content.

While these extensions usually monitor for security issues, things such as malware or the release of sensitive data, they can also track user habits. If the company decided to audit you, they may see that you’ve been spending half the day shopping on Amazon, Ostrowski said.

Also avoid downloading personal extensions on the same browser licensed to, he added. Don’t download the Garmin web extension to your company-provided Chrome browser if you don’t want your employer to be able to access your workout activities.

Understand your network

Using your company’s Wi-Fi or virtual private network (VPN) could also leave you exposed.

Even if you’re on a personal device on a work network, your employer may be able to see activities including messages, browsing activity and social media posts, Ostrowski said. Any traffic flowing through a company VPN, which companies often use for security purposes, can also potentially be monitored, Freed and Poveda said. Use your personal hotspot over company connections for personal activities. You can also use a personal VPN on a personal laptop without company software on the work Wi-Fi, Ostrowski said.

Don’t trust apps you use for work

A lot of what you do is collected by your workplace apps. Even if you don’t use company devices or networks, your boss still may be able to get a sense of what you’re typing, searching or saying.

Tools like Microsoft Office, Slack, Google Workplace and Zoom often track user activity for safety, security or compliance. But they also allow administrator accounts (that’s your employer) to retrieve information in some cases.

“If I [an employer] want to look at the content of the email that you’re sending through the corporate account, that can be done today directly between the [software provider] and the company’s security team,” Ostrowski said. “There’s no way for the employee to see that.”

That means your employer may be able to see an email you sent your doctor or a message to your colleague criticizing your boss. They could see how many meetings you attended and whether you had your camera or microphone on during them.

New AI technologies are coming that can offer companies new, more thorough opportunities for surveillance in the future.

A majority of Americans oppose the use of AI to evaluate performance (39 percent), track what people are doing on their computers (51 percent), and whether workers are at their desks (56 percent), according to a survey from Pew Research Center.

Know your rights

“Workers don’t have a lot of legal rights [here],” Tsukayama said. “So you don’t have much ground to push back.”

What can you do? Review your workplace policies. Not all employers will outline the surveillance they use, but some do, Tsukayama said. If you are part of a union, ask for guidance and rely on them when you have concerns. You can also ask the IT department directly.

The best protection? Keep your personal and work data separate. If you’re worried about your employer seeing your child’s baby pictures, sensitive medical information or flirtatious text messages to your partner, keep them off the devices you use for work, if possible. Even if it means carrying two phones.

“Once you put it out there, just assume it can be seen,” Ostrowski said.

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When Tomás Vega SM ’19 was 5 years old, he began to stutter. The experience gave him an appreciation for the adversity that can come with a disability. It also showed him the power of technology.

“A keyboard and a mouse were outlets,” Vega says. “They allowed me to be fluent in the things I did. I was able to transcend my limitations in a way, so I became obsessed with human augmentation and with the concept of cyborgs. I also gained empathy. I think we all have empathy, but we apply it according to our own experiences.”

Vega has been using technology to augment human capabilities ever since. He began programming when he was 12. In high school, he helped people manage disabilities including hand impairments and multiple sclerosis. In college, first at the University of California at Berkeley and then at MIT, Vega built technologies that helped people with disabilities live more independently.

Today Vega is the co-founder and CEO of Augmental, a startup deploying technology that lets people with movement impairments seamlessly interact with their personal computational devices.

Augmental’s first product is the MouthPad, which allows users to control their computer, smartphone, or tablet through tongue and head movements. The MouthPad’s pressure-sensitive touch pad sits on the roof of the mouth, and, working with a pair of motion sensors, translates tongue and head gestures into cursor scrolling and clicks in real time via Bluetooth.

“We have a big chunk of the brain that is devoted to controlling the position of the tongue,” Vega explains. “The tongue comprises eight muscles, and most of the muscle fibers are slow-twitch, which means they don’t fatigue as quickly. So, I thought why don’t we leverage all of that?”

People with spinal cord injuries are already using the MouthPad every day to interact with their favorite devices independently. One of Augmental’s users, who is living with quadriplegia and studying math and computer science in college, says the device has helped her write math formulas and study in the library — use cases where other assistive speech-based devices weren’t appropriate.

“She can now take notes in class, she can play games with her friends,” Vega says. “She is more independent. Her mom told us that getting the MouthPad was the most significant moment since her injury.”

That’s the ultimate goal of Augmental: to improve the accessibility of technologies that have become an integral part of our lives.

“We hope that a person with a severe hand impairment can be as competent using a phone or tablet as somebody using their hands,” Vega says.

Making computers more accessible

In 2012, as a first-year student at UC Berkeley, Vega met his eventual Augmental co-founder, Corten Singer. That year, he told Singer he was determined to join the Media Lab as a graduate student, something he achieved four years later when he joined the Media Lab’s Fluid Interfaces research group run by Pattie Maes, MIT’s Germeshausen Professor of Media Arts and Sciences.

“I only applied to one program for grad school, and that was the Media Lab,” Vega says. “I thought it was the only place where I could do what I wanted to do, which is augmenting human ability.”

At the Media Lab, Vega took classes in microfabrication, signal processing, and electronics. He also developed wearable devices to help people access information online, improve their sleep, and regulate their emotions.

“At the Media Lab, I was able to apply my engineering and neuroscience background to build stuff, which is what I love doing the most,” Vega says. “I describe the Media Lab as Disneyland for makers. I was able to just play, and to explore without fear.”

Vega had gravitated toward the idea of a brain-machine interface, but an internship at Neuralink made him seek out a different solution.

“A brain implant has the highest potential for helping people in the future, but I saw a number of limitations that pushed me from working on it right now,” Vega says. “One is the long timeline for development. I’ve made so many friends over the past years that needed a solution yesterday.”

At MIT, he decided to build a solution with all the potential of a brain implant but without the limitations.

In his last semester at MIT, Vega built what he describes as “a lollipop with a bunch of sensors” to test the mouth as a medium for computer interaction. It worked beautifully.

“At that point, I called Corten, my co-founder, and said, ‘I think this has the potential to change so many lives,’” Vega says. “It could also change the way humans interact with computers in the future.”

Vega used MIT resources including the Venture Mentoring Service, the MIT I-Corps program, and received crucial early funding from MIT’s E14 Fund. Augmental was officially born when Vega graduated from MIT at the end of 2019.

Augmental generates each MouthPad design using a 3D model based on a scan of the user’s mouth. The team then 3-D prints the retainer using dental-grade materials and adds the electronic components.

With the MouthPad, users can scroll up, down, left, and right by sliding their tongue. They can also right click by doing a sipping gesture and left click by pressing on their palate. For people with less control of their tongue, bites, clenches, and other gestures can be used, and people with more neck control can use head-tracking to move the cursor on their screen.

“Our hope is to create an interface that is multimodal, so you can choose what works for you,” Vega says. “We want to be accommodating to every condition.”

Scaling the MouthPad

Many of Augmental’s current users have spinal cord injuries, with some users unable to move their hands and others unable to move their heads. Gamers and programmers have also used the device. The company’s most frequent users interact with the MouthPad every day for up to nine hours.

“It’s amazing because it means that it has really seamlessly integrated into their lives, and they are finding lots of value in our solution,” Vega says.

Augmental is hoping to gain U.S. Food and Drug Administration clearance over the next year to help users do things like control wheelchairs and robotic arms. FDA clearance will also unlock insurance reimbursements for users, which will make the product more accessible.

Augmental is already working on the next version of its system, which will respond to whispers and even more subtle movements of internal speech organs.

“That’s crucial to our early customer segment because a lot of them have lost or have impaired lung function,” Vega says.

Vega is also encouraged by progress in AI agents and the hardware that goes with them. No matter how the digital world evolves, Vega believes Augmental can be a tool that can benefit everyone.

“What we hope to provide one day is an always-available, robust, and private interface to intelligence,” Vega says. “We think that this is the most expressive, wearable, hands-free input system that humans have created.”

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A rocket featuring the world’s first rocket engine 3D printed as a single piece blasted off from India’s east coast in late May. Startup Agnikul fabricated the engine in just 72 hours and hopes the approach could open the door to “on-demand” rocket launches for operators of small satellites.

The Chennai-based company isn’t the only private space operation to rely heavily on 3D printing—both Relativity Space and Rocket Lab use the approach extensively to build their launch vehicles. What sets Agnikul apart is that its engine is printed in one go, rather than as multiple components that have to then be stitched together, which significantly speeds up manufacturing time.

On 30 May, the company carried out its first suborbital launch powered by the engine. A single-stage rocket lifted off from the Indian Space Research Organisation’s Satish Dhawan Space Center on Sriharikota island in Andhra Pradesh, reaching an altitude of 6.5 kilometers before splashing down into the ocean.

 “It performed very successfully,” says cofounder and chief operating officer Moin SPM. “It met all the objectives of the mission so we have a lot of confidence in the technologies that we have built.”

The company’s first commercial product will be a two-stage rocket called Agnibaan, which will be 18 meters tall, feature eight engines in total and able to carry a 300-kilogram payload to an altitude of around 700 km. The launch vehicle used in May’s test was only 6 meters tall and featured just a single engine, making it roughly equivalent to Agnibaan’s second stage.

The launch acted as a technology demonstrator to test out all of the key subsystems necessary for an orbital launch. Those included the flight computer, avionics, guidance, and navigation systems, as well as the launchpad itself, which was purpose-built for the mission.

The team hit its target of 6 kilonewtons of thrust and was able to successfully carry out a wind-biasing maneuver, in which the rockets trajectory is adjusted midflight to account for the affects of wind. Besides validating the technology, SPM says they gained valuable experience in both manufacturing processes and launch operations.

This 3D-printed rocket engine was used in Agnikul’s first successful launch.  Agnikul

The launch also vindicated the company’s unconventional manufacturing approach. Constructing a rocket engine using conventional approaches can take months, followed by extensive qualification testing to ensure it meets the required specifications. Using a metal 3D printer from German company EOS, Agnikul produced its engine in roughly three days. Agnikul printed the engine out of inconel, a high-performance alloy of nickel and chromium that can withstand high temperatures and mechanical loads. The machine also automatically outputs a report that details any deviations during printing, removing the need for postfabrication qualification.

Assembling the rest of the rocket and integrating the engine took roughly two weeks. The company says that opens the door to providing low-cost, “on-demand” launch services to operators of small satellites, which otherwise need to wait for a ride share on a bigger rocket.

The big challenge now will be going from a single engine to a cluster of seven on Agnibaan’s first stage, says cofounder and CEO Srinath Ravichandran. This raises all kinds of challenges, from balancing thrust across the engines at lift-off to managing engine plume interactions when the engines gimbal to alter the trajectory. “But these are problems that people have figured out,” he says. “We believe that we should just be able to fine-tune it for our mission and go.”

The company is currently building facilities to carry out ground tests of engine clusters, says Ravichandran, and is targeting its first orbital launch for this time next year.

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Apple's otherworldly, flying-saucer headquarters in Cupertino, California, felt like a suitable venue this week for a bold and futuristic revamp of the company’s most prized products. With iPhone sales slowing and rivals gaining ground thanks to the rise of tools like ChatGPT, Apple offered its own generative artificial intelligence vision at its Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC).

Apple has lately been perceived as a generative AI laggard. Its WWDC offerings failed to persuade some critics, who have branded WWDC’s announcements as downright boring. But with the focus on infusing existing apps and OS features with what the company calls “Apple Intelligence,” the big takeaway is that generative AI is a feature rather than a product in and of itself.

The dazzling abilities demonstrated by ChatGPT has inspired some startups to try inventing entirely dedicated AI hardware—like the Rabbit R1 and the Humane AI Pin—as a means of harnessing generative AI. Unfortunately, these gadgets have been underwhelming and frustrating to use in practice. By contrast, Apple’s vertical integration of generative AI across so many products and different software seems much likelier where AI is headed.

Rather than a stand-alone device or experience, Apple has focused on how generative AI can improve apps and OS features in small yet meaningful ways. Early adopters have certainly flocked to generative AI programs like ChatGPT for help redrafting emails, summarizing documents, and generating images, but this has typically meant opening another browser window or app, cutting and pasting, and trying to make sense of a chatbot’s sometimes fevered ramblings. To be truly useful, generative AI will need to seep into technology we already use in ways we can better understand and trust.

After the WWDC keynote, Apple gave WIRED a demo of what it calls Apple Intelligence, a catchall name to account for AI running across several apps. The capabilities hardly push the boundaries of generative AI, but they are thoughtfully integrated and perhaps even limited in ways that will encourage users to trust them more.

A feature called Writing Tools will let iOS and MacOS users rewrite or summarize text, and Image Playground will turn sketches and text prompts into stylized illustrations. The company’s new Genmoji tool, which uses generative AI to dream up new emojis from a text prompt, may turn out to be a surprisingly popular integration given how frequently people fling emojis at one another.

Apple is also giving Siri a much-needed upgrade with generative AI that helps the assistant better understand speech including pauses and corrections, recall previous chats for better context awareness, and tap into data stored in apps on a device to be more useful. Apple said that Siri will use the App Intents, a framework for developers that can be used to perform actions that involve opening and operating apps. When asked “show me photos of my cat chasing a toy,” for example, a language model will parse the command and then use the framework to access Photos.

Apple’s generative AI will mostly run locally on its devices, although the company has developed a technique called Private Cloud Compute to send queries to the cloud securely when necessary. Running AI on a device means it will be less capable than the latest cloud-based chatbot. But this may be a feature rather than a bug, as it also means that a program like Siri is less likely to over-extend itself and mess up. Apple is rather cleverly handing its most challenging queries over to OpenAI’s ChatGPT, with a user’s permission.

Investors apparently approve of Apple’s announcements, but we’ll have to wait a while to see how well it really works. The technology won’t roll out until later this year in beta, and even then it will be limited to the iPhone 15 Pro and computers using Apple’s M series of chips. That could make the experience a little choppy for those of us who’ve hung on to older devices. You can also expect people to push features like Genmoji to misbehave. After Meta launched AI-generated “stickers” last year, people began creating unwelcome images, including heavily armed Mario characters.

The shift to AI as a feature and not a product is a welcome one after so much ChatGPT hype, and it can also be seen in other recent announcements. Google and Microsoft both went big on AI at their developer events this year, but they also tried to emphasize more practical use cases, including tools built into Gmail or Copilot in Windows.

Even OpenAI, which kicked off the generative AI boom and offers the most compelling AI product around in ChatGPT, seems to currently be more focused on making the interface more natural and compelling, and even a bit flirty. Thankfully, Apple says that for the time-being it will focus on using generative AI to make Siri more useful rather than overly familiar.

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A law firm, Milberg London, backed the claim, saying that Valve forces publishers into signing price-parity deals. This ensures Steam always has the lowest game prices and stops competitors from offering cheaper options. As a result, Milberg London argues UK consumers have paid too much for games and in-game purchases over at least six years.

The legal action accuses Valve of breaching UK competition law. It aims to end Valve's allegedly anti-competitive practices and help recoup funds for affected customers.

In a statement, Natasha Pearman from Milberg London said:

Valve is rigging the market and taking advantage of UK gamers. Competition law is there to protect consumers and ensure that markets work properly. When they don’t work properly and consumers are harmed, collective actions of this kind provide consumers with a voice and a way of holding big companies, like Valve, to account.

Valve dominates the PC gaming market through its Steam platform, which saw over 34 million concurrent users in the last month. If successful, each of the estimated 14 million UK Steam users covered could receive a portion of the damages.

The claim bears similarities to a separate £7.9 billion lawsuit against Sony over its PlayStation Store commission and pricing. Both suits argue the 30% platform fees charged by Valve and Sony are excessive.

In other news, Valve kicked off the Steam Next Fest this week. Players can try hundreds of demos during the Next Fest and add them to their wishlists. You can use Steam Tags to quickly make new discoveries across pages. Keep in mind that this year's Steam Next Fest ends on June 17.

Source: BBC

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This week, the team posted even more footage from the game on its YouTube channel. This time we got to see the new Witch playable class.

One of the big features of this character is that it can summon up a lot of minions, in the form of undead fighters. You will also be able to order them with the help of a dedicated button.

You can even create temporary minions with a spell called Unearth. The game's director Jonathon Rogers states in the video:

If it kills a monster or if it hits the corpse of a monster, it creates these bone constructs. They can't take many hits and have a limited lifetime, but you can build up a real army with these.

As you progress in the game and level up, the Witch will be able to summon different types of undead minions. They will include brutes that can stun enemies and ice mages for freezing enemies.

The Witch has some other spells and abilities. Rogers states:

Profane Ritual consumes a corpse to create a Power Charge, which can power up some of my other spells. If I use them to summon zombies, I can create super zombies, which are more powerful.

The end of the video sees the Witch and its minions fight off a boss creature, Tor Gul, the Defiler, who generates itself with a collection of different bones. The Witch uses a variety of spells and minions to try to defeat the big boss of this level.

Path of Exile II is currently set to be released in early access for PC, Xbox Series X|S and PlayStation 5 platforms sometime in late 2024.

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When I first started playing Fallout 76 in November 2018, I would never have believed I'd be here 6 years later, with the game about to embark on its 17th season of content. Fallout 76 has really risen from the ashes, or should that be the Ash Heap?...to become one of the best Xbox Game Pass games, and it's about to get even better with its first ever map expansion, Skyline Valley.

Skyline Valley, which will expand the map just at the Southern end of the Savage Divide, brings a bunch of new content to Fallout 76. From story quests, new enemies, events and more secrets to uncover about the residents of Appalachia. Last month, Zenimax and Bethesda were kind enough to invite me and some other outlets out to a preview event for the expansion. There was even a Jello cake!

We each had about an hour with the expansion, so this is a very rough first impression, but an impression nonetheless that's got me excited to jump back into the world of Fallout 76, which will never be the same. 

Red sky at night, Lost Dwellers delight

(Image credit: Bethesda)

From the jump, the story of Skyline Valley grabs you by the jugular and makes you want to know more about what the heck is going down in Shenandoah National Park. The initial quest actually starts a little further out from the new area, over at Vault 63 in the Ash Heap. Previously inaccessible, its entrance is now entirely destroyed, and you'll be investigating why.

At this early point I was also introduced to the first new enemy type in Skyline Valley, the Lost Dwellers. These poor souls, wearing Vault 63 jumpsuits are Ghoulified and explode in a burst of electricity upon death. You're going to want to keep your distance. The Lost are rather similar to the Scorched, if anything just a tad more insane with their ramblings from the shadows. Skyline Valley as a whole is a lot darker in tone than anything else I've played in Fallout 76, from the characters to the area itself.

When the story quest points you in the direction of Skyline Valley, you'll travel down south of the map, to be greeted with a foreboding red sky, with clouds streaked with lightning and a feeling of "I shouldn't be here." Honestly, in my notes, I scribbled, "Am I playing Fallout or Dead Space?" The eerie lack of life and atmosphere of something gone terribly wrong is overwhelming, at least until you run into more Lost Dwellers and start fighting for your life again.

At the center of the mysterious storm is what appears to be the source of all this destruction. Dark Hollow Manor. An imposing mansion on the landscape your eye will immediately be drawn to, and you'll want to explore despite all common sense telling you to turn back and return to brighter skies. 

Dark Hollow Manor will beckon you towards it's darkened doors (Image credit: Bethesda)

Without spoiling the story, there's more to discover behind Dark Hollow Manor, and a bunch of fascinating characters to meet as you solve the mystery of Vault 63 and it's dwellers involvement in this new area. The main quest giver being the enigmatic and ghoulified Hugo Stolz. Born blind, Stolz is the founder of CEO Stolz Enterprises and Overseer of Vault 63, and also electrified but has his wits about him. 

The Curious Case of Hugo Stolz (Image credit: Bethesda)

My main takeaway from the small part of the story I played through, was that the voice acting was impeccable. Of course with Fallout 76 being of a certain age, the engine doesn't allow for the depth of facial expression we're used to in more modern titles, but the voice acting for these characters does all the heavy lifting here. 

I looked forward to each conversation with Hugo Stolz, as he mused on his ghouled appearance during a conversation on the Ship of Theseus. An old tale that debates if a ship has each of its components replaced, is it the same ship? "If we were to change piece by piece, at what point do we become something brand new?" Stolz muses. Something players will get to experience in more detail when the ability to become a Ghoul becomes available in early 2025. The story is intriguing, and as told in our presentation, you'll be tasked with defending or betraying these new characters.

More quests, new enemies and public events

Fallout 76: Skyline Valley Thrashers

(Image credit: Bethesda)

 

Radiated Turkey anyone?

 

Fallout 76

(Image credit: Bethesda)

 

Most of the story centres around Dark Hollow Manor

 

Fallout 76

(Image credit: Bethesda)

 

The Lost explode in electricity upon death

 

Fallout 76

(Image credit: Bethesda)

 

Fallout 76

(Image credit: Bethesda)

 

Fight giant robots in new public events

 

In addition to the new Skyline Valley area expansion, we can expect more side quest content, more rewards and terrifying creatures such as these demonic radioactive turkeys pictured above, the Thrasher as they are officially named. The first time I fought one of these, I didn't know whether to run or laugh; they are certainly different.

 

Fallout 76 Skyline Valley

(Image credit: Bethesda/Zenimax)

 

Storm Goliaths are towering enemies you'll need to take down as a group

 

Fallout 76 Skyline Valley

(Image credit: Bethesda/Zenimax)

 

You should be terrified of anyone with the nerve to wear metal in a lightning storm

 

There's also a new public event, Dangerous Pastimes, in which you'll kill a bunch of Lost to charge up a Lightning Harvester and come up against 'Thunder' versions of creatures. One can only imagine what would happen if someone were to drop a nuke on the already storm-riddled Skyline Valley, something none of our group had the chance to test out, but I do know from others that have tried, that a new event appears 'Neurological Warfare.' Expect some giant Storm Goliath robots developed by the 'great minds of Vault 63' and lots of great loot.

The quest content we can expect from Skyline Valley is said to be equivalent to the size of Steel Dawn and Steel Reign combined, with 12 full quests in total. This includes new factions, new rewards, creatures, and the public event, as mentioned above.

That's not all, there's more to come...

Graphic showing the sheer volume of content added to Fallout 76 over the years

(Image credit: Bethesda)

 

Skyline Valley isn't all we expect from Fallout 76 for this year, as we also got a sneak peek at a Milepost Zero event coming to the game in the Fall.

The Blue Ridge Caravan Company has been running routes around Skyline Drive and needs your help. You'll need to team up and protect the caravan of travelers and Brahmin from ambushes as they make their way to their destination. Successfully running missions for The Blue Ridge Caravan Company will unlock a caravan outpost. Besides Wasteland infamy, continued success allows you to expand your home, upgrade the decor, and even populate the space with special vendors from far away places. The developers likened this to how Skyrim houses work. You'll even get your own Brahmin, though it wasn't confirmed if you can milk them...

We'll also see the return of the Halloween event, Mischief Night, revamped and starting at the Rapidan Camp in the new Skyline Valley region.

Later in the day, I got to chat with Bill Lacoste (lead producer) and Jon Rush (creative director) and asked if they planned more expansions of this nature in the future:

"Maybe. We've definitely talked about it. The map for the region is kind of surrounded by a big skirt that could facilitate that. If there were room for updates similar to this that supported telling and continuing the story of Appalachia, right to our players, and at the same time allowing them to continue telling their own stories, then then yeah, it's certainly considered."

A bright future for Fallout 76 

I found the inclusion of the Ship of Theseus paradox amusing in more ways than one, not only in reference to the Ghoulification of humans in this tale, but perhaps an unintentional nod to Fallout 76 itself, as the game is certainly a different beast today than it was at launch.

While I only saw glimpses of Skyline Valley, it left me with a distinct impression of a bright future for Fallout 76. The game may be experiencing a resurgence in players right now due to the success of the show, but this expansion will be integral to keeping that momentum going, and I got a distinct impression from my time at Zenimax that there is SO much more to come — least of all the teaser we got at the Xbox Games Showcase of the new Ghoul player type coming in 2025.

I can't wait to jump back into Skyline Valley as it drops today, continue the story, and see where it takes me. 

 

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Microsoft last claimed the title from Apple in January 2024, hitting the $3 trillion market cap in the process, and the two have traded places over the years following different significant product announcements and financial reports, which resulted in substantial rises in their stock prices.

Apple's stock price in the last 5 days shows the full story as seen below, with a total rise of 11.26% at the time of writing and crossing the $200 mark on Tuesday by setting an all-time high. Apple's market cap is currently at $3.34 trillion, while Microsoft's is currently at $3.25 trillion.

While WWDC did bring with it a lot of other announcements for what would be coming in iOS 18, iPadOS 18, macOS 15 Sequoia and more, Apple Intelligence was the star of the show and given the attention that any generative AI feature draws from investors it comes as no surprise that this is the result.

The leading features of Apple Intelligence are the enhancements that it will bring to Siri, summarising messages, writing or rewriting emails and proofreading texts, as well as including two headliner features in Image Playground and Genmoji. Both of these involve utilising AI to generate images either as a full image using prompts or by using it to create a custom emoji just through prompts.

These new features will only be supported on iPads and Macs with M-series chips or on the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 15 Pro Max, which are powered by the A17 Pro chip. It's expected that the iPhone 16 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro Max will also support these features, but it's yet to be known if the base iPhone 16 and iPhone 16 Plus will also gain this capability when they launch, which is predicted to be later this year.

Source: MacRumors

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One of them adds support for Xbox consoles to remember up to 10 wireless networks so you can reconnect them with a Wi-Fi network you have used before without the need for you personally to know the password. Another part of the update that was previously tested with Xbox Insiders lets users change their subscription plan from their Xbox console instead of using a PC.

A new cosmetic update will give Xbox console owners some new home menu background options:

Do you have a favorite dynamic background? Or do you prefer to look at game art? Before today’s rollout, you had to decide whether you wanted to enjoy that dynamic background vs. rotating through all the game art. Now you can mix and match – no need to compromise.

Xbox controllers will also get a firmware update today. If you use the Xbox Adaptive Controller, you will be able to connect more USB accessories to it. There's also been some bug fixes and improvements for the Xbox Elite Wireless Controller Series 2.

The Xbox PC app is also getting some navigation improvements with the June update:

The Game Pass tab will now display options to directly access all games from Xbox Game Studios, EA Play, and Riot Games that are available in the catalog. EA Play is included with both PC Game Pass and Game Pass Ultimate, and both Game Pass memberships also give you access to exclusive Riot Games benefits.

The Xbox Cloud Gaming service received new features as well. First, support for playing certain games with a mouse and keyboard on Edge and Chrome browsers with the services is now available for all Xbox Cloud Gaming users. Microsoft has also added a way for those players to manage their game data and cloud saves for titles on Xbox.com/play, with the Samsung Gaming Hub, and on other devices that support the service. Microsoft says players can now use this feature to reset a game back to its start or deal with corrupted data.

Finally, Microsoft says a small number of Xbox gamers could see some new features it is testing, including updates to the Game Pass UI and a way to find people via searching on their console.

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Now, the Raspberry Pi Foundation has listed its commercial subsidiary, Raspberry Pi Ltd, on the London Stock Exchange so that anyone can go out and buy the company’s shares and ultimately help the company.

The company’s first trading day was on Tuesday when it debuted at 280 pence (£2.80) per share implying a market cap of around £541.6 million. Investors seemed excited by the prospect of buying Raspberry Pi shares and this caused the price to close at 385 pence.

As a newly public company, we don’t have years of financial statements to see how successful Raspberry Pi has been at turning a profit, however, the investor relations page published by the company says that it recorded a $66 million profit for the 2023 financial year which is a good sign and a break from the chronically loss-making tech companies we see trading shares.

The same page also says that 28% of its computers were bought by enthusiasts and the education sector while 72% of sales were from the industrial and embedded sector. This is pretty good for Raspberry Pi as it should find more customers and deeper pockets among business customers compared to individual buyers and the education sector which often faces constrained budgets in many countries.

For anyone out there passionate about Raspberry Pi and thinking about buying shares in the company, sitting back and watching what happens could be a good idea. We frequently see IPO excitement drive up prices before falling back down several days later. Waiting could mean getting in at a lower price.

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The MediaTek Dimensity 9300+ SoC

As of right now, if you want a Windows on ARM device, you have just two options: one with a Qualcomm processor inside or an Apple Silicon-powered Mac with some virtualization software. The days of Nvidia Tegra-powered Windows PCs (remember the first two generations of Surface RT?) are gone, so Qualcomm is the only option. However, that may soon change.

Citing three people familiar with the topic, Reuters reports that MediaTek is in the works of making its own ARM chip for Windows PCs. Windows on ARM is Microsoft's big new thing (technically, not-so-new since the project was first announced eight years ago), and with manufacturers and developers supporting the project, it is natural to see some interest from other well-established chip manufacturers.

A Windows-focused ARM processor from MediaTek is expected somewhere in the second half of 2025. Qualcomm currently has exclusive rights to ship ARM processors for Windows computers, so MediaTek is waiting for that privilege to expire. Its first chip should be based on ARM's existing designs, which make it much easier to develop processors. There is no information on whether MediaTek's processors will be eligible for the Copilot+ PC program.

It looks like in the near future, buyers will enjoy a much bigger variety of chips in modern Windows computers. The market, which until now only offered models from AMD and Intel, is now getting disrupted by Qualcomm's Snapdragon X processors. Soon, you may see options from MediaTek and even ARM processors from Nvidia and AMD.

Even though the current selection of Copilot+ PCs is rather limited, more devices and form factors are on the way, with a batch of commercial devices scheduled for the second half of this year. There are even rumors about Qualcomm developing server-grade ARM chips.

Both Microsoft and MediaTek declined to comment on Reuters' report.

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Those looking forward to AMD and Intel Copilot+ PCs can breathe a sigh of relief too as such devices will also come powered by Ryzen AI 300 series and Lunar Lake processors, with the latter having Windows-specific optimizations.

While the Snapdragon X's main focus seems to be around Windows PCs, the same can be said for Linux too. A company called Tuxedo is working on a Linux notebook powered by the Qualcomm chipset. Here's a prototype of that which was on display at Computex 2024 this year:

In a blog post, Tuxedo writes:

We know that many of you are eagerly awaiting an alternative to x86 notebooks. The new Snapdragon architecture makes this possible for the first time for Linux with comparable performance and lower energy requirements.

Arm already expects to take away 50% market share from x86 on the Windows side and this could be a double whammy though the impact should be far less.

In terms of where Snapdragon X currently stands as far as Linux support goes, Tuxedo points to a Qualcomm blog post where the latter has listed all the features that are being mainlined for Linux kernel versions 6.8, 6.9, 6.10, and 6.11. A summary has been provided too but you can find the full list of features here:

... our roadmap for the next six months includes work in these areas:

 

• End-to-end hardware video decoding, on Firefox and Chrome
• Implementation of the libcamera-SoftISP camera solution
• GPU and CPU performance optimizations
• Power optimizations (Suspend/DCVS)
• Making our firmware openly available (in Linux-firmware)
• Access to easy installers (Ubuntu and Debian)

In terms of release time frame, Tuxedo says it is still to be decided and it can be as early as the end of the year by around Christmas, but the firm itself is not certain about that:

It is quite conceivable that an ARM notebook from TUXEDO will be under your Christmas tree in 2024. However, there are still too many pieces of the hardware, software and delivery capability puzzle missing to even begin to set a release date. TUXEDO for ARM will come, but we don’t yet know exactly when.

Therefore, the devices should land after we already have Snapdragon X Windows PCs. You can learn more about it here on Tuxedo's official blog.

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