In context: Sony's decision to abandon physical releases for the next PlayStation console is encouraging a heated debate within the game industry. Some think optical discs have no place in the market anymore, while others - including this writer - vow to cling to their internal Blu-ray burners until the End Times. A few notable releases should still come on disc, including the new Tomb Raider remake that Amazon will publish next

TL;DR: An investigation has revealed a growing number of police officers using license-plate reader systems to track women they knew personally, turning a tool sold for crime fighting into one that could also enable stalking and surveillance. The problem is not limited to one department or one state. It is showing up wherever these systems are widely deployed and lightly checked.

The main tool being misused is Flock Safety, a network

Connecting the dots: There are usually few better ways of attracting new users than dropping prices. OpenAI has just slashed what it charges for two GPT-5.6 models, a move announced one day before the company revealed that its models now reach more than one billion active users.

On July 30, OpenAI cut the price of GPT-5.6 Luna by 80%. It now costs $0

The big picture: A growing fight over data center development is pulling in an unexpected group of critics: country music stars. In the past few weeks, artists including Brad Paisley, Tanya Tucker, Gavin Adcock, and Willie Nelson have all spoken out against new projects. While their politics vary, their concerns overlap. They are pushing back on how these facilities are being placed in or near rural communities.

Paisley was among

WTF?! It's long been established that Doom can be made to run on pretty much anything with a screen, but this ability goes beyond mere devices. The latest example of the classic FPS's legendary portability involves Microsoft Paint essentially being used as a monitor that displays the original shareware version

Why it matters: A hardware wallet is supposed to solve one problem: keep your Bitcoin keys somewhere no attacker can reach them. This week showed what happens when the flaw sits inside the wallet itself. A firmware bug that's been shipping in Coldcard devices since 2021 let an attacker guess supposedly random seed phrases from the outside, no physical access, no phishing, no malware required, and drain funds

Crystal ball: Some pieces of PC building advice have circulated so long that nobody bothers checking them anymore. One is the chimney effect: the claim that a case works like a flue, and that pointing your top fans outward gives hot air a natural boost on the way up. German overclocker der8auer decided the best way to test it was to actually build one.

Building one meant understanding what a chimney actually does

What we know so far: AMD is taking a different approach with its upcoming Zen 6 processors, introducing a new type of low-power core built from pieces of several earlier Zen designs rather than a single architecture. The change surfaced in a recent Linux kernel patch, which shows how the system identifies and manages these cores. The patch makes clear that the low-power cores are distinct enough to warrant their own classification

Linux is Game: The Steam Deck was built around AMD APUs and the Linux-based SteamOS platform. APUs have to work within tight power constraints, which is why some developers are pushing the software side as far as it'll go to make games run faster.

David Vernet, a Linux kernel hacker at Meta, recently unveiled a series of new patches for the open source kernel. He explained that the code is