OS News' managing editor calls Firefox "the single most important desktop Linux application," shipping in most distros (with some users later opting for a post-installation download of Chrome).

But "I'm genuinely worried about the state of browsers on Linux, and the future of Firefox on Linux in particular..." While both GNOME and KDE nominally invest in their own two browsers, GNOME Web and Falkon, their uptake is limited and releases few and far between. For instance, none of the major Linux distributions ship GNOME Web as their default browser, and it lacks many of the features users come to expect from a browser. Falkon, meanwhile, is updated only sporadically, often going years between releases. Worse yet, Falkon uses Chromium through QtWebEngine, and GNOME Web uses WebKit (which are updated separately from the browser, so browser releases are not always a solid metric!), so both are dependent on the goodwill of two of the most ruthless corporations in the world, Google and Apple respectively.

Even Firefox itself, even though it's clearly the browser of choice of distributions and Linux users alike, does not consider Linux a first-tier platform. Firefox is first and foremost a Windows browser, followed by macOS second, and Linux third. The love the Linux world has for Firefox is not reciprocated by Mozilla in the same way, and this shows in various places where issues fixed and addressed on the Windows side are ignored on the Linux side for years or longer. The best and most visible example of that is hardware video acceleration. This feature has been a default part of the Windows version since forever, but it wasn't enabled by default for Linux until Firefox 115, released only in early July 2023. Even then, the feature is only enabled by default for users of Intel graphics — AMD and Nvidia users need not apply. This lack of video acceleration was — and for AMD and Nvidia users, still is — a major contributing factor to Linux battery life on laptops taking a serious hit compared to their Windows counterparts... It's not just hardware accelerated video decoding. Gesture support has taken much longer to arrive on the Linux version than it did on the Windows version — things like using swipes to go back and forward, or pinch to zoom on images...

I don't see anyone talking about this problem, or planning for the eventual possible demise of Firefox, what that would mean for the Linux desktop, and how it can be avoided or mitigated. In an ideal world, the major stakeholders of the Linux desktop — KDE, GNOME, the various major distributions — would get together and seriously consider a plan of action. The best possible solution, in my view, would be to fork one of the major browser engines (or pick one and significantly invest in it), and modify this engine and tailor it specifically for the Linux desktop. Stop living off the scraps and leftovers thrown across the fence from Windows and macOS browser makers, and focus entirely on making a browser engine that is optimised fully for Linux, its graphics stack, and its desktops. Have the major stakeholders work together on a Linux-first — or even Linux-only — browser engine, leaving the graphical front-end to the various toolkits and desktop environments....

I think it's highly irresponsible of the various prominent players in the desktop Linux community, from GNOME to KDE, from Ubuntu to Fedora, to seemingly have absolutely zero contingency plans for when Firefox enshittifies or dies...

Microsoft is rolling out a new update for Windows 11 that disables the digital assistant Cortana. The Verge reports: If you attempt to launch Cortana on Windows 11 you'll now be met with a notice about how the app is deprecated and a link to a support article on the change. Microsoft is now planning to end support for Cortana in Teams mobile, Microsoft Teams Display, and Microsoft Teams Rooms "in the fall of 2023." Surprisingly, Cortana inside Outlook mobile "will continue to be available," according to Microsoft.

Microsoft is now working on Windows Copilot, a new sidebar for Windows 11 that is powered by Bing Chat and can control Windows settings, answer questions, and lots more. Windows Copilot is expected to be available this fall as part of a Windows 11 update that will also include native RAR and 7-Zip support.

Anthropic, the AI startup co-founded by ex-OpenAI execs, has released an updated version of its faster, cheaper, text-generating model available through an API, Claude Instant. TechCrunch reports: The updated Claude Instant, Claude Instant 1.2, incorporates the strengths of Anthropic's recently announced flagship model, Claude 2, showing "significant" gains in areas such as math, coding, reasoning and safety, according to Anthropic. In internal testing, Claude Instant 1.2 scored 58.7% on a coding benchmark compared to Claude Instant 1.1, which scored 52.8%, and 86.7% on a set of math questions versus 80.9% for Claude Instant 1.1. "Claude Instant generates longer, more structured responses and follows formatting instructions better," Anthropic writes in a blog post. "Instant 1.2 also shows improvements in quote extraction, multilingual capabilities and question answering."

Claude Instant 1.2 is also less likely to hallucinate and more resistant to jailbreaking attempts, Anthropic claims. In the context of large language models like Claude, "hallucination" is where a model generates text that's incorrect or nonsensical, while jailbreaking is a technique that uses cleverly-written prompts to bypass the safety features placed on large language models by their creators. And Claude Instant 1.2 features a context window that's the same size of Claude 2's -- 100,000 tokens. Context window refers to the text the model considers before generating additional text, while tokens represent raw text (e.g. the word "fantastic" would be split into the tokens "fan," "tas" and "tic"). Claude Instant 1.2 and Claude 2 can analyze roughly 75,000 words, about the length of "The Great Gatsby." Generally speaking, models with large context windows are less likely to "forget" the content of recent conversations.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Virgin Galactic's VSS Unity, the reusable rocket-powered space plane carrying the company's first crew of tourists to space, successfully launched and landed on Thursday. The mission, known as Galactic 02, took off shortly after 11am ET from Spaceport America in New Mexico. Aboard the spacecraft were six individuals total -- the space plane's commander and former Nasa astronaut CJ Sturckow, the pilot Kelly Latimer, as well as Beth Moses, Virgin Galactic's chief astronaut instructor who trained the crew before to the flight. The spacecraft also carried three private passengers, including the health and wellness coach Keisha Schahaff and her 18-year-old daughter, Anastasia Mayers, both of whom are Antiguan. [...]

Galactic 02 is a suborbital flight. However, despite VSS Unity not reaching orbit, the trajectory allows passengers to experience several minutes of weightlessness at an altitude high enough for them to see the Earth's curvature, Space.com explains. Following liftoff, Virgin Galactic's carrier plane VMS Eve transported VSS Unity to an altitude of about 44,300ft. Eve then dropped Unity which then fired its own rocket motor and ascended to suborbital space. Passengers aboard experienced approximately 3Gs. Live footage inside the spacecraft showed the passengers unstrapping themselves from their seats and peering out down to earth through the windows as they floated throughout the spacecraft.

Despite Galactic 02 being Virgin Galactic's second commercial spaceflight mission, it is the first flight to carry private customers. In June, Galactic 01 carried three crew members from the Italian air force and the National Research Council of Italy. According to Virgin Galactic, the company has already booked a backlog of about 800 customers. Tickets have ranged from $250,000 to $450,000. Galactic 03, the company's third commercial spaceflight, is planned for September.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Imagine being able to sit behind a hacker and observe them take control of a computer and play around with it. That's pretty much what two security researchers did thanks to a large network of computers set up as a honeypot for hackers. The researchers deployed several Windows servers deliberately exposed on the internet, set up with Remote Desktop Protocol, or RDP, meaning that hackers could remotely control the compromised servers as if they were regular users, being able to type and click around. Thanks to these honeypots, the researchers were able to record 190 million events and 100 hours of video footage of hackers taking control of the servers and performing a series of actions on them, including reconnaissance, installing malware that mines cryptocurrencies, using Android emulators to conduct click fraud, brute-forcing passwords for other computers, hiding the hackers' identities by using the honeypot as a starting point for another attack, and even watching porn. The researchers said a hacker successfully logging into its honeypot can generate "tens of events" alone.

The "Rangers," according to the two, carefully explored the hacked computers, doing reconnaissance, sometimes changing passwords, and mostly leaving it at that. "Our hypothesis is that they are evaluating the system they compromised so that another profile of attacker can come back later," the researchers wrote in a blog post published on Wednesday to accompany their talk. The "Barbarians" use the compromised honeypot computers to try and bruteforce into other computers using known lists of hacked usernames and passwords, sometimes using tools such as Masscan, a legitimate tool that allows users to port-scan the whole internet, according to the researchers. The "Wizards" use the honeypot as a platform to connect to other computers in an attempt to hide their trails and the actual origin of their attacks. According to what Bergeron and Bilodeau wrote in their blog post, defensive teams can gather threat intelligence on these hackers, and "reach deeper into compromised infrastructure."

According to Bergeron and Bilodeau, the "Thieves" have the clear goal of monetizing their access to these honeypots. They may do that by installing crypto miners, programs to perform click fraud or generate fake traffic to websites they control, and selling access to the honeypot itself to other hackers. Finally, the "Bards" are hackers with very little or almost no skills. These hackers used the honeypots to use Google to search for malware, and even watch porn. These hackers sometimes used cell phones instead of desktop or laptop computers to connect to the honeypots. Bergeron and Bilodeau said they believe this type of hacker sometimes uses the compromised computers to download porn, something that may be banned or censored in their country of origin. In one case, a hacker "was downloading the porn and sending it to himself via Telegram. So basically circumventing a country-level ban on porn," Bilodeau told TechCrunch. "What I think [the hacker] does with this then is download it in an internet cafe, using Telegram, and then he can put it on USB keys, and he can sell it." These types of honeypots could be useful for law enforcement or cybersecurity defensive teams. "Law enforcement could lawfully intercept the RDP environments used by ransomware groups and collect intelligence in recorded sessions for use in investigations," the researchers wrote in the blog post. "Blue teams for their part can consume the [Indicators of Compromise] and roll out their own traps in order to further protect their organization, as this will give them extensive documentation of opportunistic attackers' tradecraft."

Moreover, if hackers start to suspect that the servers they compromise may be honeypots, they will have to change strategies and decide whether the risks of being caught are worth it, "leading to a slow down which will ultimately benefit everyone," according to the researchers.

Amazon is the most successful manufacturer of Arm server chips, accounting for just over half of Arm-based server CPUs currently deployed, while some chipmakers are also now betting on Arm-based Windows PCs. From a report: This information comes from a report issued by Bernstein Research which estimates that nearly 10 percent of servers across the world contain Arm processors, and 40 percent of those are located in China, as we reported earlier. But that total is beaten by just one company -- Amazon -- which has slightly above 50 percent of all Arm server CPUs in the world deployed in its Amazon Web Services (AWS) datacenters, said the analyst.

Amazon currently uses its own Graviton family of chips, designed by the Annapurna Labs division of Amazon Web Services and introduced to the world back in 2018, which are for its own internal use only. The latest iteration is the Graviton3E for high-performance computing applications, introduced towards the end of 2022. According to Bernstein, because these chips were optimized for the specific needs of AWS, the company is able to fit in more cores per socket or per rack and the chips consume less power, translating to lower spending on space and cooling.

Factories across Asia are struggling to attract young workers, which is bad news for Western consumers accustomed to inexpensive goods. From a report: The workplace features floor-to-ceiling windows and a cafe serving matcha tea, as well as free yoga and dance classes. Every month, workers gather at team-building sessions to drink beer, drive go-karts and go bowling. This isn't Google. It's a garment factory in Vietnam. Asia, the world's factory floor and the source of much of the stuff Americans buy, is running into a big problem: Its young people, by and large, don't want to work in factories.

That's why the garment factory is trying to make its manufacturing floor more enticing, and why alarm bells are ringing at Western companies that rely on the region's inexpensive labor to churn out affordable consumer goods. The twilight of ultracheap Asian factory labor is emerging as the latest test of the globalized manufacturing model, which over the past three decades has delivered a vast array of inexpensively produced goods to consumers around the world. Americans accustomed to bargain-rate fashion and flat-screen TVs might soon be reckoning with higher prices. "There's nowhere left on the planet that's going to be able to give you what you want," said Paul Norriss, the British co-founder of the Vietnam garment factory, UnAvailable, based in Ho Chi Minh City. "People are going to have to change their consumer habits, and so are brands."

After a hurricane hit Florida, 484 buildings just at the Tyndall Air Force base were destroyed or damaged beyond repair. Five years later, it's part of a $5 billion, nine-year rebuilding effort the Washington Post describes as rare "blank slate." The plan is "not merely to rebuild it, but to construct what the U.S. military calls 'the installation of the future,' which will be able to withstand rising seas, stronger storms and other threats..." The rebuild at Tyndall, which is expected to continue into 2027, marks the largest military construction project undertaken by the Pentagon. "Think of it as the Air Force throwing its Costco card down on the table and buying buildings in bulk," said Michael Dwyer, deputy chief of the Natural Disaster Recovery Division. A dizzying array of new technologies and approaches have been incorporated into the effort, from semiautonomous robot dogs patrolling the grounds to artificial intelligence software designed to detect and deter any armed person who enters the base.

But the most robust funding is aimed at making Tyndall more efficient, connected and resilient in the face of a warming world. Structures under construction — from dormitory complexes to a child care center to hangars that will house three new squadrons of the F-35A Lightning II later this year — are being built to withstand winds in excess of 165 mph. Steel frames, high-impact windows, concrete facades and roofing with additional bracing are among the features meant to weather the stronger storms to come.

At nearby Panama City, sea level rise has accelerated in recent years, with federal data showing seas have risen there more than 4 inches since 2010. Planners factored in the potential for as much as 7 feet of sea level rise by the end of the century, and as a result placed the "vast majority" of new buildings at elevations that should be safe from storm surges for decades, Dwyer said. In addition, sensors placed near the low spots of buildings will send alerts the moment a flood threatens. The Air Force also has created a "digital twin" of Tyndall — essentially, a virtual duplicate of the base that allows officials to simulate how roads, buildings and other infrastructure would hold up in different scenarios, such as a hurricane or historic rainfall events.
Other efforts include restoring the beach's 10-foot sand dunes and its rocky shoreline, along with "the installation of submerged oyster reef breakwater that can reduce wave energy and erosion."

But the article points out that the Air Force also has a second hope for their base: "that the lessons unfolding here can be replicated at other bases around the world that will face — or already are facing — similar threats...

For storing passwords, Slashdot reader eggegick has a simple, easy solution: "I use Vim to keep my passwords in an encrypted file."

But what's the easiest solution for people who don't use Vim? My wife is not a Linux geek like I am, so she's using [free and open-source] KeePass. It's relatively simple to install and use, but I seem to recall it used to be even much simpler... Does anybody know of a really simple password manager or encrypting notepad?

I've looked at a number of them, and they use Java or Javascript, or they involve an external web site, or they have way too many features, or they use an installation program. Or Windows Defender objects to them.
Share your own suggestions and thoughts in the comments.

What's the best (encrypted) password manager?

Filipe Esposito, writing for Apple-focused news site 9to5Mac: As reported by Windows Latest, the Cortana app has received an update via the Microsoft Store after two years without getting a single new feature. But instead of new features, the update pretty much kills Cortana and now shows a message saying that "Cortana in Windows as a standalone app is deprecated." [...] Earlier this week, during a call with investors, Apple CEO Tim Cook reinforced that Apple has been conducting research with a "wide range of AI technologies," including "generative AI" for years. Multiple rumors have pointed to Apple internally developing a technology to compete with ChatGPT. However, while Microsoft and Google have already made their new tools available to the public, Apple is still a long way off.

In the meantime, Siri is still Siri. Even Apple employees complain about "organizational dysfunction and a lack of ambition" when it comes to the development of Apple's virtual assistant. Some employees point out that Siri is still based on a very legacy technology and that improving it would require a lot of efforts. Seeing what other companies are achieving with generative AI, I do think it's time for Apple to give up on Siri and focus its efforts on new technologies. What about you? What are your thoughts on Apple, Siri, and AI?

An anonymous reader shares a report: When Microsoft releases new test builds of Windows, there are usually a handful of features that are announced but only actually enabled for a small subset of testers. Sometimes it's because the company is A/B testing a couple of different versions of the same thing or because Microsoft wants to roll out major changes to a few users before rolling them out to everyone. Users normally have little control over whether new features actually appear in their Windows beta installs, but Microsoft has internal software called StagingTool that its own developers can use to switch things on and off themselves.

And now StagingTool has leaked to the public, thanks to a "bug bash" the company is running this week to find and fix problems before the next big batch of new Windows features releases this fall. As reported by The Verge, some bug bash participants were sent on "quests" that explicitly mentioned using the StagingTool to turn on specific features. Those quests and the tool itself have since been removed from Microsoft's servers, but StagingTool is already being freely distributed among Windows enthusiasts who want more control over the features they see.

The Steam Survey results for July 2023 were just published and it points to a large and unexpected jump in the Linux gaming marketshare. Phoronix reports; According to these new numbers from Valve, the Linux customer base is up to 1.96%, or a 0.52% jump over June! That's a huge jump with normally just moving 0.1% or so in either direction most months... It's also near an all-time high on a percentage basis going back to the early days of Steam on Linux when it had around a 2% marketshare but at that time the Steam customer size in absolute numbers was much smaller a decade ago than it is now. So if the percentage numbers are accurate, this is likely the largest in absolute terms that the Linux gaming marketshare has ever been.

When looking at the Steam Linux breakdown, the SteamOS Holo that powers the Steam Deck is now accounting for around 42% of all Linux gamers on Steam. Meanwhile, AMD CPU marketshare among Linux gamers has reached 69%. The Steam Survey results for July show Windows 10 64-bit losing 1.56% marketshare and Linux gaining the healthy 0.52% of that. This is also the first time the Linux gaming marketshare outpasses Apple macOS on Steam!

According to Windows Central, Lenovo is working on a handheld gaming PC dubbed "Legion Go," featuring Windows 11 and Ryzen chips. From the report: While details are scant right now, we understand this will sport AMD's new Phoenix processors, which the chip firm describes as ultra-thin, focused on gaming, AI, and graphics for ultrabooks. The fact the Legion Go will sport Ryzen chips pretty much guarantees that this is a Windows PC gaming handheld, as part of Lenovo's popular gaming "Legion" brand. As of writing, there's no information on exactly when this device could become available, or if, indeed, it'll become available at all.

According to our information, the Legion Go could sport an 8-inch screen, making it larger than the ASUS ROG Ally or the Steam Deck, both of which have a 7-inch display. PC and console games ported to PC are often designed for larger monitors or even TVs, and on smaller screens, UI elements can be difficult to see, especially if the game doesn't have a UI scaling option. A larger display could give the Legion Go a decent advantage over its competitors if it remains lightweight and balanced, which of course remains to be seen. The AMD Phoenix 7040 series chips are described by the firm as "ultra-thin" for powerful, but elegant ultrabook-style devices. They should lend themselves well to a device like the Legion Go, supporting 15W low-power states for lightweight games and maximized battery life, similar to the Steam Deck and ROG Ally. The Z1 Extreme in the ASUS ROG Ally can perform with a TDP below 15W, however, which could give the ROG Ally some advantages there. There's every chance the Legion Go could have other configurations we're unaware of yet, though, we'll just have to wait and see.

Microsoft is making it a lot more convenient to use multiple high refresh rate monitors with Windows 11. From a report: The software giant has started testing a Windows 11 update that automatically adjusts refresh rates on multiple monitors depending on what content is being displayed, which should improve power usage and could even result in some GPUs spinning up their fans less often. "We have improved refresh rate logic to allow different refresh rates on different monitors, depending on the refresh rate for each monitor and content shown on the screen," explains Microsoft in a Windows Insider blog from last week. "This will help most with refresh rate-dependent multitasking, like playing a game and watching a video at the same time." If you have multiple monitors that support high refresh rates then running them at their full potential often increases the power draw of your GPU. Nvidia RTX 30- and 40-series Founders Edition cards also have a zero RPM mode, which will keep the fans at zero even when you're watching video content on a single monitor. If you add a second high refresh rate display, this often disables the zero RPM mode and means the GPU keeps its fans spinning if you have both monitors at high refresh rates.

Managing windows — "even after 50 years, nobody's fully cracked it yet," writes GNOME developer Tobias Bernard: Most of the time you don't care about exact window sizes and positions and just want to see the windows that you need for your current task. Often that's just a single, maximized window. Sometimes it's two or three windows next to each other. It's incredibly rare that you need a dozen different overlapping windows. Yet this is what you end up with by default today, when you simply use the computer, opening apps as you need them. Messy is the default, and it's up to you to clean it up...

We've wanted more powerful tiling for years, but there has not been much progress due to the huge amount of work involved on the technical side and the lack of a clear design direction we were happy with. We now finally feel like the design is at a stage where we can take concrete next steps towards making it happen, which is very exciting! The key point we keep coming back to with this work is that, if we do add a new kind of window management to GNOME, it needs to be good enough to be the default. We don't want to add yet another manual opt-in tool that doesn't solve the problems the majority of people face.
The current concept imagines three possible layout states for windows:

- Floating, the classic stacked windows model
- Edge Tiling, i.e. windows splitting the screen edge-to-edge
- Mosaic, a new window management mode which combines the best parts of tiling and floating

Mosaic is the default — where "you open a window, it opens centered on the screen at a size that makes the most sense for the app." (Videos in the blog post show how this works.) "As you open more windows, the existing windows move aside to make room for the new ones. If a new window doesn't fit (e.g. because it wants to be maximized) it moves to its own workspace. If the window layout comes close to filling the screen, the windows are automatically tiled." You can also manually tile windows. If there's enough space, other windows are left in a mosaic layout. However, if there's not enough space for this mosaic layout, you're prompted to pick another window to tile alongside. You're not limited to tiling just two windows side by side. Any tile (or the remaining space) can be split by dragging another window over it, and freely resized as the window minimum sizes allow.
So what's next? Windows can already set a fixed size and they have an implicit minimum size, but to build a great tiling experience we need more... At the Brno hackfest in April we had an initial discussion with GNOME Shell developers about many of the technical details. There is tentative agreement that we want to move in the direction outlined in this post, but there's still a lot of work ahead... We'd like to do user research to validate some of our assumptions on different aspects of this, but it's the kind of project that's very difficult to test outside of an actual prototype that's usable day to day.
"There's another issue with GNOME's current windowing system," notes 9to5Linux. "If the stacking is interrupted, newly opened windows will be opened from the top, covering the first opened window." For this new windowing system to become a reality, the GNOME devs would have to do a lot of user research and test numerous scenarios so that everyone can be happy. As you can imagine, this could take months or even years, so if you want to get involved and help them do it faster, please reach out to the GNOME team here.

The world's largest community of 3D-printed homes, located in Texas, has unveiled its first completed house. CNN reports: With walls "printed" using a concrete-based material, the single-story structure is the first of 100 such homes set to welcome residents starting September. The community is part of a wider development in Georgetown, Texas called Wolf Ranch. It's located about 30 miles north of Austin, the state capital, and is a collaboration between Texas construction firm ICON, homebuilding company Lennar and Danish architecture practice Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG). On Saturday prospective buyers toured around the finished model home at the project's grand opening, and some of the units have already sold, ICON spokesperson Cara Caulkins told CNN via email.

Images of the newly completed building shared by the company show brightly lit interiors and curved gray walls. The walls are made from a concrete mix called Lavacrete, which is piped into place using 46-foot-wide robotic printers. After the walls are printed, the doors, windows and roofs -- all of which are equipped with solar panels -- are installed. ICON says more than a third of the homes' walls have now been printed, and the properties currently on offer are being sold at $475,000 to $599,000. The 3D-printed homes range in size from 1,500 to 2,100 square feet and have three to four bedrooms.

You now have a new way to connect your Windows PC to an Android device to share files: Nearby Share, an app Google released Wednesday and which will be bundled with upcoming PCs. From a report: As the name suggests, Nearby Share allows you to share files back and forth between Android devices and PCs. It's similar to Apple's AirDrop, with the key difference being that Nearby Share connects devices from two different companies, rather than iPhones and Macs. Google released the beta version of Nearby Share earlier this year.

Nearby Share connects your phone to your PC, but it can also be used for you to send files and photos to nearby Android phones that you don't use, as well as to nearby PCs. That makes it handy for simply sharing a photo at a concert, or dropping a file onto a friend's PC without hassle. You'll just need to be within about 16 feet to do so, Google says. Why use Nearby Share? Google's unspoken argument is that it's simpler to do so. There are already numerous ways to view and transfer files and photos from Android phones to PCs, from the tried-and-true sneakerware to uploading and downloading from the cloud, to more modern approaches like Microsoft's Your Phone, now called Phone Link. Device makers like Samsung also have released their own specific versions for Galaxy devices. Google, though, made its mark with Gmail and search, both functions that worked more simply and effectively than other solutions.

Blizzard Entertainment is bringing its PC games to Steam, starting with the release of Overwatch 2 on Valve's digital storefront on Aug. 10, Blizzard announced Wednesday. Polygon reports: The Windows PC version of Overwatch 2, like many of Blizzard's PC games, is currently only available through Battle.net. But with Microsoft's impending acquisition of Activision Blizzard and declining player engagement in the game, the maker of Diablo, Warcraft, and Overwatch appears to be changing its strategy. Blizzard says it will bring "a selection" of its games to Steam, but did not specify which titles beyond Overwatch 2 will make the jump from Battle.net. (A few classic Blizzard games, including the original Diablo and the first two Warcraft games, are available through GOG.com.)

The acceptance of Steam as a platform for Blizzard's games is part of the studio's evolution, the company said in a blog post. "[O]ne of the ideas pushing us forward is meeting players around the world where they are, and making our games as easy as possible to access and play," the company said. "We want to give everyone a chance to experience our universes with old friends while making new ones, no matter how they choose to play." In its announcement, Blizzard said it's not moving away from Battle.net. But, it explained, "as we've evolved, the industry has evolved too -- gaming is no longer just for specific communities as it was when Battle.net launched over two decades ago, gaming is for everyone -- and though we remain committed to continually investing in and supporting Battle.net, we want to break down the barriers to make it easier for players everywhere to find and enjoy our games."

Blizzard says that players on Steam will still need a Battle.net account connected to Overwatch 2 to play the game. The Steam version will support Steam achievements and friends lists, but Blizzard did not announce Steam Deck support. Overwatch 2 can now be wishlisted through Steam. As for Blizzard's future plans for other game releases on Steam, the company said it will be "sharing more about potential other games coming to the platform when the time is right."

At the Microsoft Inspire partner event today, the Windows maker announced pricing for its AI-infused Copilot for Microsoft 365. From a report: The suite of contextual artificial intelligence tools, the fruit of the company's OpenAI partnership, will cost $30 per user for business accounts each month. In addition, the company is launching Bing Chat Enterprise, a privacy-focused version of the AI chatbot with greater security and peace of mind for handling sensitive business data. Revealed in March, Microsoft 365 Copilot is the company's vision of the future of work. The GPT-4-powered suite of tools lets you generate Office content using natural-language text prompts.

An anonymous reader shared Thursday's report from eSecurity Planet: After Microsoft warned earlier this week that some drivers certified by the Windows Hardware Developer Program (MWHDP) are being leveraged maliciously, a Cisco Talos security researcher said the number of malicious drivers could number in the thousands.

Talos researcher Chris Neal discussed how the security problem evolved in a blog post. "Starting in Windows Vista 64-bit, to combat the threat of malicious drivers, Microsoft began to require kernel-mode drivers to be digitally signed with a certificate from a verified certificate authority," Neal wrote. "Without signature enforcement, malicious drivers would be extremely difficult to defend against as they can easily evade anti-malware software and endpoint detection." Beginning with Windows 10 version 1607, Neal said, Microsoft has required kernel-mode drivers to be signed by its Developer Portal. "This process is intended to ensure that drivers meet Microsoft's requirements and security standards," he wrote.

Still, there are exceptions — most notably, one for drivers signed with certificates that expired or were issued prior to July 29, 2015. If a newly compiled driver is signed with non-revoked certificates that were issued before that date, it won't be blocked. "As a result, multiple open source tools have been developed to exploit this loophole," Neal wrote. And while Sophos reported that it had uncovered more than 100 malicious drivers, Neal said Cisco Talos "has observed multiple threat actors taking advantage of the aforementioned Windows policy loophole to deploy thousands of malicious, signed drivers without submitting them to Microsoft for verification...."

"Microsoft, in response to our notification, has blocked all certificates discussed in this blog post," he noted.