Rust, a modern and notably more memory-safe language than C, once seemed like it was on a steady, calm, and gradual approach into the Linux kernel.

In 2021, Linux kernel leaders, like founder and leader Linus Torvalds himself, were impressed with the language but had a "wait and see" approach. Rust for Linux gained supporters and momentum, and in October 2022, Torvalds approved a pull request adding support for Rust code in the kernel.

By late 2024, however, Rust enthusiasts were frustrated with stalls and blocks on their efforts, with the Rust for Linux lead quitting over "nontechnical nonsense." Torvalds said at the time that he understood it was slow, but that "old-time kernel developers are used to C" and "not exactly excited about having to learn a new language." Still, this could be considered a normal amount of open source debate.

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If you know how OLED displays work, you know about one of their greatest strengths: Individual pixels can be shut off, offering deeper blacks and power savings. Dark modes, now available on most operating systems, aim to save power by making most backgrounds very dark or black, while also gratifying those who just prefer the look.

But what about on the older but still dominant screen technology, LCDs? The BBC is out with a small, interesting study comparing the light and dark modes of one of its website pages on an older laptop. Faced with a dark mode version, most people turned up the brightness a notable amount, sometimes drawing more power than on light mode.

It's not a surprise that dark modes don't do anything to reduce LCD power draw. However, the study—not peer-reviewed but published as part of the International Workshop on Low Carbon Computing—suggests that claims about dark mode's efficiency may be overstated in real-world scenarios, with non-cutting-edge hardware and humans at the controls.

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Signal, as an encrypted messaging app and protocol, remains relatively secure. But Signal's growing popularity as a tool to circumvent surveillance has led agents affiliated with Russia to try to manipulate the app's users into surreptitiously linking their devices, according to Google's Threat Intelligence Group.

While Russia's continued invasion of Ukraine is likely driving the country's desire to work around Signal's encryption, "We anticipate the tactics and methods used to target Signal will grow in prevalence in the near-term and proliferate to additional threat actors and regions outside the Ukrainian theater of war," writes Dan Black at Google's Threat Intelligence blog.

There was no mention of a Signal vulnerability in the report. Nearly all secure platforms can be overcome by some form of social engineering. Microsoft 365 accounts were recently revealed to be the target of "device code flow" OAuth phishing by Russia-related threat actors. Google notes that the latest versions of Signal include features designed to protect against these phishing campaigns.

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Valve's updates to its classic games evoke Hemingway's two kinds of going bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. Nothing is heard, little is seen, and then, one day, Half-Life 2: Deathmatch, Day of Defeat, and other Source-engine-based games get a bevy of modern upgrades. Now, the entirety of Team Fortress 2 (TF2) client and server game code, a boon for modders and fixers, is also being released.

That source code allows for more ambitious projects than have been possible thus far, Valve wrote in a blog post. "Unlike the Steam Workshop or local content mods, this SDK gives mod makers the ability to change, extend, or rewrite TF2, making anything from small tweaks to complete conversions possible." The SDK license restricts any resulting projects to "a non-commercial basis," but they can be published on Steam's store as their own entities.

Since it had the tools out, Valve also poked around the games based on that more open source engine and spiffed them up as well. Most games got 64-bit binary support, scalable HUD graphics, borderless window options, and the like. Many of these upgrades come from the big 25-year anniversary update made to Half-Life 2, which included "overbright lighting," gamepad configurations, Steam networking support, and the like.

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Most PC games that you can play on a modern PC would run faster on an Nvidia RTX 5080 or 5090 than, say, a GTX 1070. But some games, from a particular phase of enthusiasm for particles, destructible environments, and smooth-moving hair, will take a notable hit if their owners upgrade to the latest Nvidia cards.

That's because PhysX, once a dedicated physics simulation tool and card that became a selling point for Nvidia's gear, has been largely deprecated on Nvidia 50-series cards. The transition was announced in January, but it seems to have taken some time for someone to notice the impact on 32-bit, PhysX-enabled games (as seen by PCGamesN). The most recent of these affected games, Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag, came out in 2013.

What follows is a brief primer on PhysX: what it was, what it did, and why it's left out of Nvidia's road map.

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I really like Asus’ ROG Flow Z13 for what it is: a convertible tablet with way more gaming power than you would think. Looking at this thing, you might expect to see it propped up at an airport bar, in front of somebody talking into wireless headphones about Tim in Product. But there’s a lot of frame-rendering and multicore processing power inside this glass-fronted slab with a keyboard cover. It's an impressive showcase for AMD's leap forward in integrated power.

The Z13 can rip through Hitman and Shadow of the Tomb Raider on their highest settings at its native 2560×1600 resolution. Turn the resolution down to a reasonable-for-this-size 1920×1080 and you can play Cyberpunk 2077 at its Ultra settings at 45–55 frames per second, depending on your power and upscaling preferences. On a device that is essentially a beefy Microsoft Surface, this is no small thing. The AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" inside the Z13, with the latest Ryzen 8060S GPU built into it, is not just capable—it's a step up from most of the gaming laptops out there.

The Asus ROG Flow Z13, opened up and ready to play some benchmark games. Credit: Kevin Purdy

As a Windows convertible, it has some interesting tech and notable upgrades from the 2022 product that was also called the ROG Flow Z13. Its webcam works with Windows Hello and logs you in 95 percent of the time. The keyboard has decent travel, the trackpad has a pleasant smoothness, and you can prop the thing up anywhere along the solid kickstand’s 170-degree range. It’s a Copilot+ PC if that matters to you, and when you’re not pushing ray-traced gaming frames, its battery life is no slouch.

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Remember the Lumia 1020? It's back—in iPhone SE form.

The Lumia 1020 was a lot of smartphone in July 2013. It debuted with a focus "almost entirely on the phone's massive camera," Ars wrote at the time. That big 41-megapixel sensor jutted forth from the phone body, and Nokia reps showed off its low-light, rapid-motion camera abilities by shooting pictures of breakdancers in a dark demonstration room. The company also offered an optional camera grip—one that made it feel a lot more like a point-and-shoot camera. In a more robust review, Ars suggested the Lumia 1020 might actually make the point-and-shoot obsolete.

The Lumia 1020 contained yet another cutting edge concept of the day: Windows Phone, Microsoft's color-coded, square-shaped companion to its mobile-forward Windows 8. The mobile OS never got over the users/apps, chicken/egg conundrum, and called it quits in October 2017. The end of that distant-third-place mobile OS would normally signal the end of the Lumia 1020 as a usable phone.

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X, the social platform formerly known as Twitter, is seemingly blocking links to Signal, the encrypted messaging platform, according to journalist Matt Binder and other firsthand accounts.

Binder wrote in his Disruptionist newsletter Sunday that links to Signal.me, a domain that offers a way to connect directly to Signal users, are blocked on public posts, direct messages, and profile pages. Error messages—including "Message not sent," "Something went wrong," and profiles tagged as "considered malware" or "potentially harmful"—give no direct suggestion of a block. But posts on X, reporting at The Verge, and other sources suggest that Signal.me links are broadly banned.

Signal.me links that were already posted on X prior to the recent change now show a "Warning: this link may be unsafe" interstitial page rather than opening the link directly. Links to Signal handles and the Signal homepage are still functioning on X.

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Working at the intersection of Apple's newest hardware and Linux kernel development, for the benefit of a free distribution, was never going to be easy. But it's been an especially hard couple of weeks for Hector Martin, project lead for Asahi Linux, capping off years of what he describes as burnout, user entitlement, and political battles within the Linux kernel community about Rust code.

In a post on his site, "Resigning as Asahi Linux project lead," Martin summarizes his history with hardware hacking projects, including his time with the Wii homebrew scene (Team Twiizers/fail0verflow), which had its share of insistent users desperate to play pirated games. Martin shifted his focus, and when Apple unveiled its own silicon with the M1 series, Martin writes, "I realized that making it run Linux was my dream project." This time, there was no jailbreaking and a relatively open, if tricky, platform.

Support and donations came quickly. The first two years saw rapid advancement of a platform built "from scratch, with zero vendor support or documentation." Upstreaming code to the Linux kernel, across "practically every Linux subsystem," was an "incredibly frustrating experience" (emphasis Martin's).

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Last night, Apple posted a new support document about migrating purchases between accounts, something that Apple users with long online histories have been waiting on for years, if not decades. If you have movies, music, or apps orphaned on various iTools/.Mac/MobileMe/iTunes accounts that preceded what you're using now, you can start the fairly involved process of moving them over.

"You can choose to migrate apps, music, and other content you’ve purchased from Apple on a secondary Apple Account to a primary Apple Account," the document reads, suggesting that people might have older accounts tied primarily to just certain movies, music, or other purchases that they can now bring forward to their primary, device-linked account. The process takes place on an iPhone or iPad inside the Settings app, in the "Media & Purchases" section in your named account section.

There are a few hitches to note. You can't migrate purchases from or into a child's account that exists inside Family Sharing. You can only migrate purchases to an account once a year. There are some complications if you have music libraries on both accounts and also if you have never used the primary account for purchases or downloads. And migration is not available in the EU, UK, or India.

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Google's Chrome browser might soon get a useful security upgrade: detecting passwords used in data breaches and then generating and storing a better replacement. Google's preliminary copy suggests it's an "AI innovation," though exactly how is unclear.

Noted software digger Leopeva64 on X found a new offering in the AI settings of a very early build of Chrome. The option, "Automated password Change" (so, early stages—as to not yet get a copyedit), is described as, "When Chrome finds one of your passwords in a data breach, it can offer to change your password for you when you sign in."

Chrome already has a feature that warns users if the passwords they enter have been identified in a breach and will prompt them to change it. As noted by Windows Report, the change is that now Google will offer to change it for you on the spot rather than simply prompting you to handle that elsewhere. The password is automatically saved in Google's Password Manager and "is encrypted and never seen by anyone," the settings page claims.

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There are only two licensed professional sports games included in Wikipedia's "List of video games notable for negative reception." Do not be fooled, however: WWE 2K20 and eFootball 2022 are just the outliers, arriving so poorly crafted as to cause notable outcry and an actual change to development plans. Most licensed professional sports games come out yearly, whether fully baked, notably improved, or not, and fans who have few other options to play with their favorite intellectual property learn to make do with them.

Not so with fans of Football Manager, a series that can be traced back in some form to 1992 that has released a game almost every year, minus one ownership shift in the early 2000s. Sports Interactive, the company behind the franchise, released a statement on Thursday (in British time) that says that "following extensive internal discussions and careful consideration," Football Manager 25 is canceled. The game was "too far away from the standards you deserve," so they are focusing on the 2026 version.

Trying not to make “the same bloody game every year”

Credit: Sports Interactive

Football Manager 2025 was already delayed twice and is now quite late—as we are now midway into the European football (or what Americans call soccer) season. The game was intended to be a major overhaul.

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Let's Encrypt has been providing free "wildcard" certificates for websites for nearly seven years, enabling HTTPS connections for millions of domains and doing the whole Internet a real solid.

Now the nonprofit is ending a useful service, but in an exceedingly rare happenstance, it's probably a good thing for everyone. Starting June 4, 2025, Let's Encrypt will no longer notify its subscribers that their certification is about to expire and needs renewal. Some hosting providers automatically obtain and manage certificates from Let's Encrypt, so there's not much for them to do. Everyone else will have to do something, and likely it will still be free and automated.

Let's Encrypt is ending automated emails for four stated reasons, and all of them are pretty sensible. For one thing, lots of customers have been able to automate their certificate renewal. For another, providing the expiration notices costs "tens of thousands of dollars per year" and adds complexity to the nonprofit's infrastructure as they are looking to add new and more useful services.

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The Buffalo Bicycle Utility S2 has won an award from Eurobike and earned a German Design Award. With components designed by cycling industry giant SRAM and made from heavy steel, the bike has rim brakes, two gears, two chainrings, and two separate chains. And that makes total sense.

The S2 is the second bike developed by World Bicycle Relief, which aims to bring bicycle-based mobility to the nearly 1 billion people who otherwise must walk long distances for basic needs. YouTube channel Berm Peak recently featured (and rode) an S2 (as first seen at Hackaday) and explains why a bike with two chains makes sense. Short answer: redundancy, reliable shifting, and far more simple repair.

Buffalo bicycles are meant to take people a long way over tough terrain, hauling whatever they need to haul. Given that the rear rack is rated for 200 pounds, that "whatever" can range from cargo to humans. The original Buffalo bike had a single gear and coaster brakes, which as both kids and minimalist bike fans can attest, make it simple to stop and go. Buffalo bikes can generally be fixed with the single included wrench, but World Bicycle Relief has also been training mechanics (over 3,300 now) and setting up some 200 Buffalo-focused bike shops.

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In what is becoming a sadly regular occurrence, two popular free software projects, X.org/Freedesktop.org and Alpine Linux, need to rally some of their millions of users so that they can continue operating.

Both services have largely depended on free server resources provided by Equinix (formerly Packet.net) and its Metal division for the past few years. Equinix announced recently that it was sunsetting its bare-metal sales and services, or renting out physically distinct single computers rather than virtualized and shared hardware. As reported by the Phronix blog, both free software organizations have until the end of April to find and fund new hosting, with some fairly demanding bandwidth and development needs.

An issue ticket on Freedesktop.org's GitLab repository provides the story and the nitty-gritty needs of that project. Both the X.org foundation (home of the 40-year-old window system) and Freedesktop.org (a shared base of specifications and technology for free software desktops, including Wayland and many more) used Equinix's donated space.

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What exactly is wrong with the batteries in some of Google's Pixel 4a phones still out there? Google has not really said. Now that many Pixel 4a owners are experiencing drastically reduced battery life after an uncommon update for an end-of-life phone, they are facing a strange array of options with no path back to the phone they had.

Google's "Pixel 4a Battery Performance Program," announced in early January, told owners that an automatic update would, for some "Impacted Devices," reduce their battery's runtime and charging performance. "Impacted" customers could choose, within one year's time, between three "appeasement" options: sending in the phone for a battery replacement, getting $50 or the equivalent in their location, or receiving $100 in credit in the Google Store toward a new Pixel phone. No safety or hazard issue was mentioned in the support document.

Ars has reached out to Google about the Pixel 4a battery updates and appeasement options provided and will update this post with any response.

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A cloud security firm found a publicly accessible, fully controllable database belonging to DeepSeek, the Chinese firm that has recently shaken up the AI world, "within minutes" of examining DeepSeek's security, according to a blog post by Wiz.

An analytical ClickHouse database tied to DeepSeek, "completely open and unauthenticated," contained more than 1 million instances of "chat history, backend data, and sensitive information, including log streams, API secrets, and operational details," according to Wiz. An open web interface also allowed for full database control and privilege escalation, with internal API endpoints and keys available through the interface and common URL parameters.

"While much of the attention around AI security is focused on futuristic threats, the real dangers often come from basic risks—like accidental external exposure of databases," writes Gal Nagli at Wiz's blog. "As organizations rush to adopt AI tools and services from a growing number of startups and providers, it’s essential to remember that by doing so, we’re entrusting these companies with sensitive data. The rapid pace of adoption often leads to overlooking security, but protecting customer data must remain the top priority."

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PC game storefront GOG, which has recently pledged to focus on restoring and preserving Good Old Games, has now revamped its community wishlist for games to bring to its storefront. The GOG Dreamlist serves not only as a way to get notified when a game you loved is newly available for DRM-free purchase, but also for GOG to use as market pressure in its negotiations with rights-holders.

The games GOG members picked out on what used to be called the Community Wishlist still have their votes, and they have been useful. It was often "the fuel for our actions," Karol Ascot Obrzut writes on GOG's blog. "When talks with IP owners hit a wall, the Wishlist kept the conversation going." GOG attributes the newly available Dino Crisis and Dino Crisis 2 (and the bundle) in part to wishlist leverage. Those games had about 5,000 and 3,500 votes, respectively, which helped when, as GOG puts it, "two Polish dudes" approached Capcom to ask about making the games Windows 10/11 compatible and upscaling it.

The Dreamlist has received a complete design and interface overhaul, and it makes it easier to see what other people are demanding. At the top, with more than 57,000 votes at the time of publishing, is Black & White, the 2001 game from Peter Molyneaux's Lionhead Studios that was a true "god game," giving you an avatar creature that learned from your actions and treatment. Black & White 2 commands the third-place slot at the moment.

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Eight years after the original Pebble smartwatch fizzled, a new team is working on a modern reboot using open source software. The e-paper screen is coming back too.

"We're making new Pebble watches," writes original Pebble founder Eric Migicovsky on the "rePebble" launch page.

Eight years after Pebble's time as an upstart watchmaker came to an end, Migicovsky says that he's working with a small team on "a Pebble-like smartwatch that runs open source PebbleOS." There should be some new features, but new watches would stay "true to the core Pebble vision." With enough signups, the site claims, that watch gets built.

Pebble, launched in 2012, was one of the first smartphone-era smartwatches, selling 2 million models and serving as an early success story for hardware crowdfunding. After the relatively inexperienced hardware firm ran into funding gaps and stiff competition from the Apple Watch, Pebble stopped making its own watches after an IP-only sale to Fitbit in 2016. Google acquired Fitbit in 2021, gaining some original Pebble workers as well, who then helped the Rebble project launch replacement web services for the watch and kept the watch working on the newest Android phones.

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