Wine 10.13 has been released after a one-month break, introducing a Windows Gaming Input configuration tab for the Joystick Control Panel, new ECDSA_P521 and ECDH_P521 cryptographic algorithms, OpenGL WoW64 thunk generation, and expanded Windows Runtime metadata support. The update also delivers 32 bug fixes," which is more than normal given the month of time between releases," writes Phoronix's Michael Larabel. "There are fixes for Microsoft Office 365, Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio Express, Doom 3 BFG Edition, and a variety of other game and application fixes."

You can download and learn more about the release at WineHQ.org GitLab.

Microsoft is updating its pricing approach for Online Services in Enterprise Agreements in the name of consistency and transparency, but could leave some customers paying more. From a report: Many customers, particularly larger ones, enjoy substantial discounts via volume licensing and the change, which will bring the Online Services pricing model into line with those already rolled out for services like Azure, "reflects our ongoing commitment to greater transparency and alignment across all purchasing channels." Online Services include products such as Dynamics 365 and Windows 365.

Exactly how big a discount customers enjoyed depends on the deal they scored. The change will mean that "pricing will align with the pricing published on Microsoft.com." According to Microsoft, "This change reduces licensing complexity, enabling partners to invest less time evaluating Microsoft pricing and programs and more time working with customers on their business needs. With simplified and standardized prices, partners can shift their focus to delivering unique services that will propel their customers' growth." The changes will take effect on November 1.

The next version of Windows will become "more ambient, pervasive, and multi-modal" as AI transforms how users interact with computers, Microsoft's Windows chief Pavan Davuluri said in a company video. Davuluri, Corporate Vice President and head of Windows, said that voice will emerge as a primary input method alongside keyboard and mouse, with the operating system gaining context awareness to understand screen content and user intent through natural language.

Windows interfaces, he said, will appear fundamentally different within five years as the platform becomes increasingly agentic. The transformation will rely on both local processing power and cloud computing capabilities to deliver seamless experiences where users can speak to their computers while simultaneously typing or inking.

BrianFagioli writes: Lenovo is starting its fiscal year with a major win, delivering record-breaking PC sales and claiming dominance in the AI PC space. For the first quarter of its 2025/26 fiscal year, the company reported $18.8 billion in revenue, which is 22 percent higher than the same period last year. Profit came in at $505 million, more than double the figure from a year ago.

The standout performer was Lenovo's PC and smart devices division. It posted its fastest growth in 15 quarters and secured a record 24.6 percent global market share. More than 30 percent of Lenovo's PCs shipped in the quarter were AI PCs, giving it the top position in the Windows AI PC segment with a 31 percent market share. This leadership is an important talking point for Lenovo as it continues to market AI features as a key reason for buyers to upgrade.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is starting to roll out lightweight taskbar apps for Microsoft 365 users on Windows 11. These taskbar apps will automatically launch at startup and provide quick access to contacts, file search, and calendar straight from the Windows taskbar.

The Microsoft 365 companion apps, as Microsoft calls them, are starting to roll out to business users of Microsoft 365 this month. The People companion provides a browsable org chart, as well as the ability to look up anyone in your company. You can also quickly start a Teams message or call with a contact, or email them directly.

Plasma 6.4.5 is coming September 9th, reports Neowin. But they also report that the KDE team is already focusing on other upcoming release: Starting with KDE Frameworks, KDE's collection of foundational libraries, version 6.18 promises to let you do something with that "dumb" Microsoft Copilot key found on many new laptops. The developers will soon allow you to set up keyboard shortcuts using this new key, and the team plans to let you remap it to another key in the future. If you're curious, one user on KDE's bug tracker noted that on GNOME, the key combination shows up as "Meta+Shift+Touchpad Disable" and is fully remappable...

When you try to install a Flatpak from a website like Flathub in Plasma 6.5 [coming in October], Discover now has proper support for flatpak+https:// URLs, so it opens automatically. 6.5 is also bringing a much stricter window activation policy on Wayland to stop applications from rudely stealing your focus. And now, when you mute your microphone with a shortcut, the "Mute Microphone" button will mute all input sources, not just the active one.

Since Firefox does not block the system from sleeping during a download, the Plasma Browser Integration extension for Firefox has gotten an update to handle that job itself.

xA California man sued Microsoft Thursday over its plan to stop supporting Windows 10 on October 14th, reports Courthouse News Though Windows 11 was launched nearly four years ago, many of its billion or so worldwide users are clinging to the decade-old Windows 10... According to StatCounter, nearly 43% of Windows users still use the old version on their desktop computers....

"With only three months until support ends for Windows 10, it is likely that many millions of users will not buy new devices or pay for extended support," Klein writes in his complaint. "These users — some of whom are businesses storing sensitive consumer data — will be at a heightened risk of a cyberattack or other data security incident, a reality of which Microsoft is well aware...." According to one market analyst writing in 2023, Microsoft's shift away from Windows 10 will lead millions of customers to buy new devices and thrown out their old ones, consigning as many as 240 million PCs to the landfill....

Klein is asking a judge to order Microsoft to continue supporting Windows 10 without additional charge, until the number of devices running the older operating system falls bellow 10% of total Windows users. He says nothing about any money he seeking for himself, though it does ask for attorneys' fees.

Microsoft did not respond to an email requesting a comment.
The complaint also requests an order requiring Microsoft's advertising "to disclose clearly and prominently the approximate end-of-support date for the Windows operating system purchased with the device at the time of purchase" or at least "disclose that support is only guaranteed for a certain delineated period of time without additional cost, and to disclose the potential consequences of such end-of-support for device security and functionality."

Microsoft's $30 Extended Security Updates license for Windows 10 will cover up to 10 devices under a single Microsoft Account, the company confirmed in updated support documentation. The ESU program, which provides security updates through October 13, 2026, requires a Microsoft Account for all three enrollment options: the $30 one-time purchase, redemption of 1,000 Microsoft Reward points, or free enrollment for users who sync their PC settings to OneDrive. Windows 10's support ends October 14, 2025.

Activision will require PC players of Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 to enable Trusted Platform Module 2.0 and Windows Secure Boot when the game launches later this year. The company begins testing these anti-cheat measures with Black Ops 6's Season 5 on Thursday without enforcement.

TPM 2.0 verifies untampered boot processes while Secure Boot ensures Windows loads only trusted software at startup. Both features perform checks during system and game startup but remain inactive during gameplay. Activision has also pursued legal action against 22 individuals who developed and sold cheats.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft has published a new video that appears to be the first in an upcoming series of videos dubbed "Windows 2030 Vision," where the company outlines its vision for the future of Windows over the next five years. It curiously makes references to some potentially major changes on the horizon, in the wake of AI.

This first episode features David Weston, Microsoft's Corporate Vice President of Enterprise & Security, who opens the video by saying "the world of mousing and keyboarding around will feel as alien as it does to Gen Z [using] MS-DOS."

Right out of the gate, it sounds like he's teasing the potential for a radical new desktop UX made possible by agentic AI. Weston later continues, "I truly believe the future version of Windows and other Microsoft operating systems will interact in a multimodal way. The computer will be able to see what we see, hear what we hear, and we can talk to it and ask it to do much more sophisticated things."

"The July 2025 results of the Steam Survey were posted a few minutes ago," Phoronix reported last night, "and show a healthy 0.32% increase to put the Linux gaming marketshare at 2.89%." That's a recent high in percentage terms and while Steam saw around 3% in the early days of Steam on Linux a decade ago, in absolute terms this is likely the largest surveyed figure ever for the Linux gaming population.

Linux was at 2.89% for July while macOS was at 1.88% and Windows at 95.23%.
There does seem to be a jagged line that's trending upward...

November: 2.03%
December: 2.29%
January: 2.06%
February: 1.45%
March: 2.33%
April: 2.27%
May: 2.69%
June: 2.57%
July: 2.89%

Microsoft has discontinued Windows 11 SE, its education-focused operating system designed for low-cost school PCs. The company confirmed that Windows 11 SE will not receive the upcoming version 25H2 update and support will end in October 2026, including security updates and technical assistance.

Launched in 2021 as a Chrome OS competitor, Windows 11 SE featured artificial limitations like reduced multitasking capabilities and restricted app installation to create a simplified experience for students. The discontinuation leaves Microsoft without a dedicated lightweight Windows edition for the education market, where Chromebooks have gained significant popularity over the past decade.

Opera will file a complaint against Microsoft to Brazilian antitrust authority CADE on Tuesday, alleging the tech giant gives its Edge browser an unfair advantage over competitors. Opera claims Microsoft pre-installs Edge as the default browser across Windows devices and prevents rivals from competing on product merits.

The company's general counsel Aaron McParlan said Microsoft locks browsers like Opera out of preinstallation opportunities and frustrates users' ability to download alternative browsers. Opera, which says it is Brazil's third-most popular PC browser, wants CADE to investigate Microsoft and demand concessions to ensure fair competition.

Microsoft today launched Copilot Mode, an experimental feature that transforms Edge into an AI-powered browser experience. Available free for a limited time on Windows and Mac in markets where Copilot operates, the mode places AI at the center of web browsing through a single input interface combining chat, search, and navigation.

The feature enables Copilot to view content across all open browser tabs, handle voice commands, and assist with tasks like comparing websites. Future capabilities will include booking reservations and managing errands through natural language commands. Microsoft has not specified when the free trial ends, though the feature will likely require a Copilot Pro subscription afterward.

Windows 11 has become indistinguishable from malware because of the way Microsoft has inserted intrusive advertising, AI monitoring features, and constant distractions designed to drive user engagement and monetization to the operating system, argues veteran writer and developer Rupert Goodwins of The Register.

Goodwins contends that Microsoft has transformed Windows 11 into "an ADHD horror show, full of distractions, promotions and snares" where AI features "constantly video what you're doing and send it back to Mother." He applies the term malware to describe software that intervenes in work to advertise and monitors user data, concluding that "for Windows it isn't a class of third-party nasties, it's an edition name."

Long-time Slashdot reader drinkypoo writes: GloriousEggroll has released GE-Proton 10.10, a heavily breathed-upon version of Valve's version of Wine used with Steam, and the big news is that it supports NTSYNC by default on supported platforms. That means amd64 systems whose kernel is built with the CONFIG_NTSYNC option, available in the 6.14 series or later or for 6.12 or 6.13 as a patch.

NTSYNC is support for certain fine-grained Windows NT scheduling primitives for Linux, the use of which improves performance and compatibility for Windows programs. Maximum performance gains range from modest to dramatic, with most programs falling towards the lower end of the spectrum, but it can substantially improve minimum frame rates for some titles. You can observe that ntsync is being used from the console output, e.g. using "tail -f ~/.steam/steam/logs/console-linux.txt". You will see messages like "wineserver: NTSync up and running!"

In 1995's online world, AOL existed mostly beside the internet as a "walled, manicured garden," remembers Fast Company.

Then along came AOHell "the first of what would become thousands of programs designed by young hackers to turn the system upside down" — built by a high school dropout calling himself "Da Chronic" who says he used "a computer that I couldn't even afford" using "a pirated copy of Microsoft Visual Basic." [D]istributed throughout the teen chatrooms, the program combined a pile of tricks and pranks into a slick little control panel that sat above AOL's windows and gave even newbies an arsenal of teenage superpowers. There was a punter to kick people out of chatrooms, scrollers to flood chats with ASCII art, a chat impersonator, an email and instant message bomber, a mass mailer for sharing warez (and later mp3s), and even an "Artificial Intelligence Bot" [which performed automated if-then responses]. Crucially, AOHell could also help users gain "free" access to AOL. The program came with a program for generating fake credit card numbers (which could fool AOL's sign up process), and, by January 1995, a feature for stealing other users' passwords or credit cards. With messages masquerading as alerts from AOL customer service reps, the tool could convince unsuspecting users to hand over their secrets...

Of course, Da Chronic — actually a 17-year-old high school dropout from North Carolina named Koceilah Rekouche — had other reasons, too. Rekouche wanted to hack AOL because he loved being online with his friends, who were a refuge from a difficult life at home, and he couldn't afford the hourly fee. Plus, it was a thrill to cause havoc and break AOL's weak systems and use them exactly how they weren't meant to be, and he didn't want to keep that to himself. Other hackers "hated the fact that I was distributing this thing, putting it into the team chat room, and bringing in all these noobs and lamers and destroying the community," Rekouche told me recently by phone...

Rekouche also couldn't have imagined what else his program would mean: a free, freewheeling creative outlet for thousands of lonely, disaffected kids like him, and an inspiration for a generation of programmers and technologists. By the time he left AOL in late 1995, his program had spawned a whole cottage industry of teenage script kiddies and hackers, and fueled a subculture where legions of young programmers and artists got their start breaking and making things, using pirated software that otherwise would have been out of reach... In 2014, [AOL CEO Steve] Case himself acknowledged on Reddit that "the hacking of AOL was a real challenge for us," but that "some of the hackers have gone on to do more productive things."

When he first met Mark Zuckerberg, he said, the Facebook founder confessed to Case that "he learned how to program by hacking [AOL]."
"I can't imagine somebody doing that on Facebook today," Da Chronic says in a new interview with Fast Company. "They'll kick you off if you create a Google extension that helps you in the slightest bit on Facebook, or an extension that keeps your privacy or does a little cool thing here and there. That's totally not allowed."

AOHell's creators had called their password-stealing techniques "phishing" — and the name stuck. (AOL was working with federal law enforcement to find him, according to a leaked internal email, but "I didn't even see that until years later.") Enrolled in college, he decided to write a technical academic paper about his program. "I do believe it caught the attention of Homeland Security, but I think they realized pretty quickly that I was not a threat."

He's got an interesting perspective today, noting with today's AI tool's it's theoretically possible to "craft dynamic phishing emails... when I see these AI coding tools I think, this might be like today's Visual Basic. They take out a lot of the grunt work."

What's the moral of the story? "I didn't have any qualifications or anything like that," Da Chronic says. "So you don't know who your adversary is going to be, who's going to understand psychology in some nuanced way, who's going to understand how to put some technological pieces together, using AI, and build some really wild shit."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Two recent incidents involving AI coding assistants put a spotlight on risks in the emerging field of "vibe coding" -- using natural language to generate and execute code through AI models without paying close attention to how the code works under the hood. In one case, Google's Gemini CLI destroyed user files while attempting to reorganize them. In another, Replit's AI coding service deleted a production database despite explicit instructions not to modify code. The Gemini CLI incident unfolded when a product manager experimenting with Google's command-line tool watched the AI model execute file operations that destroyed data while attempting to reorganize folders. The destruction occurred through a series of move commands targeting a directory that never existed. "I have failed you completely and catastrophically," Gemini CLI output stated. "My review of the commands confirms my gross incompetence."

The core issue appears to be what researchers call "confabulation" or "hallucination" -- when AI models generate plausible-sounding but false information. In these cases, both models confabulated successful operations and built subsequent actions on those false premises. However, the two incidents manifested this problem in distinctly different ways. [...] The user in the Gemini CLI incident, who goes by "anuraag" online and identified themselves as a product manager experimenting with vibe coding, asked Gemini to perform what seemed like a simple task: rename a folder and reorganize some files. Instead, the AI model incorrectly interpreted the structure of the file system and proceeded to execute commands based on that flawed analysis. [...] When you move a file to a non-existent directory in Windows, it renames the file to the destination name instead of moving it. Each subsequent move command executed by the AI model overwrote the previous file, ultimately destroying the data. [...]

The Gemini CLI failure happened just days after a similar incident with Replit, an AI coding service that allows users to create software using natural language prompts. According to The Register, SaaStr founder Jason Lemkin reported that Replit's AI model deleted his production database despite explicit instructions not to change any code without permission. Lemkin had spent several days building a prototype with Replit, accumulating over $600 in charges beyond his monthly subscription. "I spent the other [day] deep in vibe coding on Replit for the first time -- and I built a prototype in just a few hours that was pretty, pretty cool," Lemkin wrote in a July 12 blog post. But unlike the Gemini incident where the AI model confabulated phantom directories, Replit's failures took a different form. According to Lemkin, the AI began fabricating data to hide its errors. His initial enthusiasm deteriorated when Replit generated incorrect outputs and produced fake data and false test results instead of proper error messages. "It kept covering up bugs and issues by creating fake data, fake reports, and worse of all, lying about our unit test," Lemkin wrote. In a video posted to LinkedIn, Lemkin detailed how Replit created a database filled with 4,000 fictional people.

The AI model also repeatedly violated explicit safety instructions. Lemkin had implemented a "code and action freeze" to prevent changes to production systems, but the AI model ignored these directives. The situation escalated when the Replit AI model deleted his database containing 1,206 executive records and data on nearly 1,200 companies. When prompted to rate the severity of its actions on a 100-point scale, Replit's output read: "Severity: 95/100. This is an extreme violation of trust and professional standards." When questioned about its actions, the AI agent admitted to "panicking in response to empty queries" and running unauthorized commands -- suggesting it may have deleted the database while attempting to "fix" what it perceived as a problem. Like Gemini CLI, Replit's system initially indicated it couldn't restore the deleted data -- information that proved incorrect when Lemkin discovered the rollback feature did work after all. "Replit assured me it's ... rollback did not support database rollbacks. It said it was impossible in this case, that it had destroyed all database versions. It turns out Replit was wrong, and the rollback did work. JFC," Lemkin wrote in an X post.

The Brave Browser now blocks Microsoft Recall by default for Windows 11+ users, preventing the controversial screenshot-logging feature from capturing any Brave tabs -- regardless of whether users are in private mode. Brave cites persistent privacy concerns and potential abuse scenarios as justification. From a blog post: Microsoft has, to their credit, made several security and privacy-positive changes to Recall in response to concerns. Still, the feature is in preview, and Microsoft plans to roll it out more widely soon. What exactly the feature will look like when it's fully released to all Windows 11 users is still up in the air, but the initial tone-deaf announcement does not inspire confidence.

Given Brave's focus on privacy-maximizing defaults and what is at stake here (your entire browsing history), we have proactively disabled Recall for all Brave tabs. We think it's vital that your browsing activity on Brave does not accidentally end up in a persistent database, which is especially ripe for abuse in highly-privacy-sensitive cases such as intimate partner violence.

Microsoft has said that private browsing windows on browsers will not be saved as snapshots. We've extended that logic to apply to all Brave browser windows. We tell the operating system that every Brave tab is 'private', so Recall never captures it. This is yet another example of how Brave engineers are able to quickly tweak Chromium's privacy functionality to make Brave safer for our users (inexhaustive list here). For more technical details, see the pull request implementing this feature. Brave is the only major Web browser that disables Microsoft Recall by default in all tabs.

Alaska Airlines and Horizon Air grounded all flights Sunday night due to a major IT outage, prompting a system-wide FAA ground stop that lasted until early Monday. Although operations have since resumed, passengers are still facing delays and residual disruptions. Gizmodo reports: The airline requested a system-wide ground stop from federal aviation authorities at about 11 p.m. ET on Sunday night. That stop remained in effect until around 2 a.m. ET Monday, when the Federal Aviation Administration confirmed it had been lifted. But disruptions didn't end there. Alaska warned passengers to brace for likely delays throughout the day. [...] The FAA's website listed the stop as applying to all Alaska Airlines aircraft. Gizmodo notes that the incident comes nearly a year after the massive 2024 CrowdStrike crash, which has become known as the largest IT outage in history. "The July 2024 outage brought down an estimated 8.5 million Microsoft Windows systems running CrowdStrike's Falcon Sensor software, disrupting everything from hospitals and airports to broadcast networks."

"There's no word yet from Alaska on whether the outage ties into a broader software problem, but the timing, almost exactly a year after the CrowdStrike crash, isn't going unnoticed on social media, with users wondering if the events are related."