Sling upgrades DVR, damages usability
If you watch TV over the internet these days -- and lots of people do -- you’ve got a plethora of choices like YouTube, Hulu, Fubo, and Sling. The last one is my personal pick. It’s generally been pretty good. The firm offered 200 hours of cloud DVR service, which was always fine, at least for me.
Recently, Sling upgraded that amount from 200 hours to unlimited, which sounded great -- on the surface. Unfortunately, it came with a bunch of problems.
Stylish Windows 11 replacement Nitrux is about to solve a big app headache for users
Nitrux, which is one of our favorite Linux-based Windows 11 alternatives, is rolling out a major upgrade to how users manage software on the system. The move, which is aimed at improving reliability and user control, replaces two aging tools -- the NX Software Center and the zap CLI -- with a new, purpose-built system called NX AppHub.
For those unfamiliar, Nitrux doesn’t use a traditional package manager like apt or rpm. Instead, it focuses on AppImages, which are self-contained applications that run independently of system libraries. Although this approach avoids dependency issues, it previously came with a rather major downside -- apps were often outdated or pulled from unreliable sources. That’s where NX AppHub comes in.
Microsoft vulnerabilities hit a record high in 2024
The latest annual Microsoft Vulnerabilities Report from BeyondTrust, reveals a record-breaking number of reported vulnerabilities last year.
Total vulnerabilities reached an all-time high of 1,360 in 2024, an 11 percent increase from the previous record of 1,292 in 2022. Elevation of Privilege (EoP) vulnerabilities comprised 40 percent of all those reported.
Browser extensions leave enterprises open to attack
Despite being present on virtually every employee's browser, extensions and plug-ins are rarely monitored by security teams or controlled by IT and a new report shows that could be leaving enterprises at risk.
The study from LayerX Security combines statistics from real-life usage data from enterprise users, with data available from public extension stores to reveal how organizations and employees interact with extensions, the associated risks and security blind spots.
Less than a third of companies consistently meet compliance standards
New research shows that only 29 percent of all organizations say their compliance programs consistently meet internal and external standards.
The report from Swimlane reveals that fragmented workflows, manual evidence gathering and poor collaboration between security and governance, risk and compliance (GRC) teams are leaving organizations vulnerable to audit failures, regulatory penalties and security gaps.
Manjaro Linux 25 now available for download
Great news, folks -- the developers of Manjaro have officially launched version 25 of the popular Linux distribution. Codenamed “Zetar,” this release delivers updated desktop environments, new features aimed at improving performance and usability, and expanded hardware support through the latest Linux kernel.
The GNOME edition now ships with version 48 of the desktop environment, a release first introduced in March 2025. One of the key features is notification stacking, which organizes alerts from the same app into expandable groups. GNOME 48 also includes dynamic triple buffering, a technology aimed at delivering smoother animations and reducing skipped frames.
Microsoft says that Windows 11 24H2 now plays nicely with wallpaper customization applications
Microsoft is starting the process of lifting a compatibility hold that was preventing some Windows 11 users from updating to Windows 11 24H2.
The block has been in place since September, stopping users with certain unnamed wallpaper customization applications from installing the latest version of the operating system. Microsoft has still not provided a list of the apps that it has, until now, considered troublesome, but says that it will “gradually remove this safeguard hold”.
AI makes bots easier to deploy and harder to detect
Automated bot traffic surpassed human-generated traffic for the first time in a decade last year, making up 51 percent of all web traffic. This shift is largely attributed to the rise of AI and Large Language Models (LLMs), which have simplified the creation and scaling of bots for malicious purposes.
The latest Imperva Bad Bot Report from Thales shows cybercriminals are increasingly leveraging these technologies to create and deploy malicious bots which now account for 37 percent of all internet traffic -- a significant increase from 32 percent in 2023.
Those scary-looking 0x80070643 -- ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE messages? Just ignore them, says Microsoft
Oh, look! It’s another update from Microsoft with weird or unwanted side effects. This time around it is the KB5057588 update, which is an update to the Windows Recovery Environment (WinRE).
Sysadmins are being freaked out by the appearance of an error message that reads 0x80070643 -- ERROR_INSTALL_FAILURE. Time to panic? Nope! Microsoft says to just ignore it.
TP-Link becomes a CVE Numbering Authority to improve cybersecurity
As someone who uses and loves TP-Link products (including its affordable routers and smart home devices) I’m truly elated to see the company taking cybersecurity more seriously. You see, the company has officially joined the CVE Numbering Authorities (CNAs), meaning it can now assign CVE IDs to security flaws found in its own products.
Here’s why it matters, folks: CVEs (Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures) are used to track publicly known cybersecurity issues. By becoming a CNA, TP-Link gains the power to document and disclose vulnerabilities faster and more transparently. That’s a win for both the company and the people who rely on its devices every day (such as yours truly).
Ubisoft makes Chroma colorblind tool open source for all developers
After years of internal use, Ubisoft has open-sourced Chroma -- a real-time colorblind simulation tool. This accessibility software is designed to help developers better serve the 300 million people around the world who live with color vision deficiencies.
Originally developed in 2021 by Ubisoft’s Quality Control team in India, Chroma allows developers to simulate how a game looks to people with various forms of colorblindness -- all without slowing down performance. It works on both single- and dual-screen setups, runs with customizable overlays, and responds to hotkeys for easy toggling during gameplay.
OpenAI releases GPT 4.1 models and Elon Musk should be terrified for Grok
OpenAI has just thrown a serious wrench into the AI landscape with the release of three new models: GPT-4.1, GPT-4.1 mini, and GPT-4.1 nano. They’re dramatic improvements over GPT-4o, raising the bar for what AI can actually do. If Elon Musk wasn’t already nervous about Grok falling behind, he probably should be now. In comparison, Grok is starting to look a bit… dusty.
At the top of the stack is GPT-4.1, which now dominates in critical areas like coding, long-context comprehension, and instruction following. This model scores 54.6 percent on SWE-bench Verified, a benchmark designed to measure real-world software development ability. That puts it well above GPT-4o and even higher than GPT-4.5, which it’s now set to replace. Developers relying on these models to generate accurate patches or edit large codebases are going to find GPT-4.1 a lot more practical.
Nvidia Blackwell chips and AI supercomputers to be built in the USA thanks to Trump's economic policy shift
Nvidia is moving a large portion of its AI supercomputer manufacturing to the United States, marking a pivotal change in how the company builds its high-end Blackwell processors and related infrastructure. The shift comes as American economic policy under President Donald Trump continues to influence corporate decisions, particularly in the tech sector, where domestic production is becoming more attractive due to tariffs, tax incentives, and a renewed push for supply chain independence.
In Arizona, Nvidia has begun Blackwell chip production at TSMC’s advanced facilities in Phoenix. These powerful chips will eventually find their way into a new generation of AI supercomputers, many of which will also be assembled within the U.S. For that, Nvidia is establishing partnerships with Foxconn in Houston and Wistron in Dallas, where full-scale manufacturing plants are being developed. These facilities are expected to ramp up to mass production levels within the next 12 to 15 months.
Debian 12-based MX Linux 23.6 is the Windows 11 alternative of your dreams
You know what, folks? Sometimes, the best updates are the ones that don’t try too hard. That’s exactly the case with MX Linux 23.6. There’s no nonsense to be found here -- just a strong Linux distribution that continues to get better.
While Microsoft continues to push AI distractions and questionable design changes in Windows 11, MX Linux sticks to what matters: speed, stability, and letting the user stay in control. In fact, MX Linux 23.6 could truly be the Linux distribution of your dreams!
Illumio uses security graphs to identify threats
The idea of security graphs was floated last year by Microsoft to make it easier to identify risks across networks.
Today Illumio is one of the first to make commercial use of this idea with the launch of Illumio Insights, the industry's first cloud detection and response (CDR) solution powered entirely by an AI security graph.
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