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Only a point up in a year, but that’s a 50% leap for Linux gamers

The latest edition of Valve's monthly Steam Hardware & Software Survey is out, showing a rise in Steam usage on Linux. Penguin likes to play!…

Britain's National Centre for Gaming Disorders has treated 67 people over the age of 40 since opening in 2019. The oldest patient was a 72-year-old woman with a smartphone gaming obsession. Britons over 65 spent more than three hours a day online on smartphones, computers and tablets last year, according to Ofcom. They spent more than five and a half hours watching broadcast television. Over-65s are more likely than under-25s to own tablets, smart televisions, e-readers, and desktop and laptop computers, a seven-country survey by GWI found. Nearly a fifth of 55- to 64-year-olds own a games console. Ipsit Vahia, who heads the Technology and Ageing Laboratory at McLean Hospital, part of Harvard Medical School, said some older adults are increasingly living their lives through their phones the way teenagers or adolescents sometimes do. A 2022 study in South Korea estimated that 15% of those aged 60-69 were at risk of phone addiction. A meta-analysis published in April of studies on more than 400,000 older adults found that over-50s who regularly used digital devices had lower rates of cognitive decline than those who did not.

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PEP 810 approved following lengthy debate among developer community

Python programs are set to get faster startup times with PEP 810 "Explicit lazy imports," which allows scripts to defer loading imported libraries until they're actually needed rather than at startup.…

Trust me bro, says GitHub Copilot. And programmers just... do

Developers who "pair code" with an AI assistant stand to learn as much as they do in traditional human-human pairings, but also show a less critical attitude toward their silicon-based partner’s output, academics have found.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Before the potential of the internet was appreciated around the world, nations that understood its importance managed to scoop outsized allocations of IPv4 addresses, actions that today mean many users in the rest of the world are more likely to find their connections throttled or blocked. So says Cloudflare, which last week published research that recalls how once the world started to run out of IPv4 addresses, engineers devised network address translation (NAT) so that multiple devices can share a single IPv4 address. NAT can handle tens of thousands of devices, but carriers typically operate many more. Internetworking wonks therefore developed Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT), which can handle over 100 devices per IPv4 address and scale to serve millions of users. That's useful for carriers everywhere, but especially valuable for carriers in those countries that missed out on big allocations of IPv4 because their small pool of available number resources means they must employ CGNAT to handle more users and devices. Cloudflare's research suggests carriers in Africa and Asia use CGNAT more than those on other continents. Cloudflare worried that could be bad for individual netizens. "CGNATs also create significant operational fallout stemming from the fact that hundreds or even thousands of clients can appear to originate from a single IP address," wrote Cloudflare researchers Vasilis Giotsas and Marwan Fayed. "This means an IP-based security system may inadvertently block or throttle large groups of users as a result of a single user behind the CGNAT engaging in malicious activity. Blocking the shared IP therefore penalizes many innocent users along with the abuser."

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Norges Bank Investment Management votes against excessive award, automaker's share price skids

Norway's sovereign wealth fund has opposed Tesla CEO Elon Musk's proposed $1 trillion share award, which the carmaker's board says is necessary to retain him.…

AWS today announced Fastnet, a subsea fiber-optic cable that will link Maryland's Eastern Shore to County Cork, Ireland. The project marks Amazon's first wholly-owned subsea cable system after previously participating in similar ventures through consortiums. The cable will carry data at speeds exceeding 320 terabits per second. Amazon did not disclose construction costs but expects the system to begin operations in 2028. The company is burying the cable roughly one and a half meters deep across the ocean floor. Installers will bore a horizontal tunnel from shore to shore. Amazon has added protective steel wiring to guard against ship anchors and deliberate sabotage.

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Dick Cheney, who served four Republican presidents and became one of the most powerful and controversial vice presidents in American history as an architect of the post-9/11 war on terror, died at 84. His family said he died from complications of pneumonia and cardiac and vascular disease. Cheney served as vice president under George W. Bush for two terms beginning in 2001 and relentlessly advocated for the 2003 invasion of Iraq. Many Americans came to view the war as a strategic and humanitarian disaster. The conflict had far-reaching policy and political consequences that helped turn the public against intervention and upheaved Republican politics. Cheney continued to defend the invasion long after leaving office in 2009. He had heart disease for most of his life and underwent a transplant in 2012. That allowed him to live to see his daughter Liz Cheney follow in his political footsteps to become a House GOP leader. Before serving as vice president, Cheney was defense secretary under George H.W. Bush and chief of staff to Gerald Ford at age 34.

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Popular operating system much more sticky than Windows 7 was during its EOL

As the dust settles over the end of support for many versions of Windows 10, the operating system remains a significant presence in the Windows market.…

Amazon's data-center expansion turned Umatilla, Oregon into an unlikely nerve center for American infrastructure investment. The community of roughly 8,000 residents has seen home prices double and local government budgets surge from $7 million in 2011 to a hundred and $44 million in the past fiscal year. Yesenia Leon-Tejeda, a Realtor and daughter of Mexican-born farmhands who once worked 12-hour shifts at a distribution center, is now on pace to close 35 deals this year. Federal data shows investment in software and information-processing equipment drove most of America's GDP growth in the first half of 2025. Goldman Sachs estimated that roughly 72% of all server-farm capacity sat in just 1% of counties as of July. The region's hydroelectric dams and cheap power attracted Amazon Web Services more than a decade ago. Growth has brought rising costs for housing and child care. Political tensions over spending erupted this year when Mayor Caden Sipe sued the city manager and council members.

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Check Point lifts lid on a quartet of Teams vulns that made it possible to fake the boss, forge messages, and quietly rewrite history

Microsoft Teams, one of the world's most widely used collaboration tools, contained serious, now-patched vulnerabilities that could have let attackers impersonate executives, rewrite chat history, and fake notifications or calls – all without users suspecting a thing.…

Eaton and Vertiv splash cash as HPC infrastructure and AI factories run hot

Liquid cooling tech is hot. It's only Tuesday and already infrastructure specialists have forked out more than $10 billion on companies proffering tech that promises to help ease energy bills of datacenter operators.…

France-based victims hit especially hard, while UK named most-targeted country generally

Researchers are seeing a "dramatic" increase in cybercrime involving physical violence across Europe, with at least 18 cases reported since the start of the year.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: U.S. prosecutors have charged two rogue employees of a cybersecurity company that specializes in negotiating ransom payments to hackers on behalf of their victims with carrying out ransomware attacks of their own. Last month, the Department of Justice indicted Kevin Tyler Martin and another unnamed employee, who both worked as ransomware negotiators at DigitalMint, with three counts of computer hacking and extortion related to a series of attempted ransomware attacks against at least five U.S.-based companies. Prosecutors also charged a third individual, Ryan Clifford Goldberg, a former incident response manager at cybersecurity giant Sygnia, as part of the scheme. The three are accused of hacking into companies, stealing their sensitive data, and deploying ransomware developed by the ALPHV/BlackCat group. [...] According to an FBI affidavit filed in September, the rogue employees received more than $1.2 million in ransom payments from one victim, a medical device maker in Florida. They also targeted several other companies, including a Virginia-based drone maker and a Maryland-headquartered pharmaceutical company.

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Redmond uncovers SesameOp, a backdoor hiding its tracks by using OpenAI’s Assistants API as a command channel

Hackers have found a new use for OpenAI's Assistants API – not to write poems or code, but to secretly control malware.…

Plans for investing in AI and service transformation held up as treasury pulls plug, NAO finds

Police forces in England and Wales spend around 97 percent of their £2 billion ($2.6 billion) annual technology budget on maintaining legacy systems, an official report has found.…

Microsoft accidentally tells supported users that they aren't

Microsoft says a broken update left some Windows 10 users staring at an out-of-support message despite having an activated Extended Security Updates (ESU) license or a version of Windows 10 that is still officially supported.…

How to build a trillion-dollar industry: Step 1, invest in your customers. Step 2, sell them stuff

Feature In late 2025, a series of multi-billion-dollar deals in the artificial intelligence sector is causing déjà vu among industry veterans. Money, computer chips, and cloud credits are rotating in a closed loop among a handful of companies: Nvidia, OpenAI, Microsoft, Oracle, AMD, CoreWeave, xAI, and a few others. This has fueled a trillion-dollar AI boom or bubble built on intertwined investments and contracts.…

Longtime Slashdot reader sinij shares a report from Car and Driver: Sales of electric vehicles surged in September as shoppers rushed to take advantage of the $7500 federal EV tax credit before it disappeared at the end of the month. With the government subsidies now gone, EV sales were expected to take a hit in October. While only a few automakers still report sales on a monthly basis, the results we do have do not paint a rosy picture for EVs in a post-tax credit world. The Korean automakers were hit particularly hard by the loss of the tax credit. The Hyundai Ioniq 5, which was the fifth-best-selling EV through the third quarter of this year, experienced a 63 percent drop, moving 1642 units in October 2025, down from 4498 in 2024. Its platform-mates saw similar declines. The Kia EV6 moved just 508 units, down 71 percent versus the same month the year before, while the luxurious Genesis GV60 only found 93 buyers, a 54 percent slide year over year. Things were even worse at Honda. While the Acura ZDX was recently discontinued after just a single model year, the related Honda Prologue remains on sale but registered just 806 units, down 81 percent from 4130 sales in October 2024. [...] Obviously, this isn't the full picture, as several major players -- including General Motors, Toyota, Nissan, and Volkswagen -- only release sales reports on a quarterly basis, and others, such as Tesla and Rivian, don't break out individual sales at all. But with four of the top 10 bestselling EVs through Q3 all showing noteworthy declines in October, it spells trouble for the EV market at large. The end-of-year sales figures will provide a much clearer picture of whether October was just a blip or the start of a much more widespread problem for EV sales.

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Government spending watchdog eviscerates penny wise, pound foolish approach

Britain's Ministry of Defence (MoD) is being criticized for undermining its F-35 stealth fighter program through years of short-term budget decisions that have increased long-term costs and left the fleet understrength and undercapable.…