Trump defends decision to waive some sanctions on Russia; Lithuania foils attack on Starlink site; Kyiv hits another oil terminal. What we know on day 1,699
Donald Trump has defended his decision to waive some sanctions on Russia, while once again accusing Volodymyr Zelenskyy of not wanting to end the war. “My decision on Russia is a very simple one. I am in the process of negotiating Peace in the war between Russia and Ukraine, and don’t want to do anything that will drive, foolishly, Russia away from the bargaining table,” the US president wrote on Truth Social. “Zelenskyy doesn’t care, and frankly, with all of the money that Europe is famously giving him … he doesn’t want to end this war, and probably never did,” he added. Trump’s remarks come after he signed an executive order on Friday putting on hold a sweeping new sanctions package targeting the Russian economy.
Lithuania said Russia was likely behind an attempted arson attack on a company hosting communication hardware for Starlink satellites. Prime minister Mindaugas Sinkevicius made the claim on broadcaster LRT after authorities discovered flammable liquids at the company in question. Sinkevicius said the firm, whose location he did not mention, houses “nine satellite antennas to guarantee the Starlink connection, which of course supports and assists Ukraine”. He added: “It is obvious this is part of the hybrid war being waged by Russia, involving acts of sabotage.”
In September, a satellite station belonging to the network located in central Poland was set ablaze with Warsaw claiming sabotage. In Bulgaria, an investigation is under way amid claims that antennas linked to the Starlink satellite network were set on fire.
Shipping Russian diesel to the US market will take 15 to 20 days once contracts are signed, a senior Russian official said on Sunday, though a date for signing has yet to be announced. Trump announced the controversial agreement with Moscow last week, seen as a way to try to lower fuel prices for American consumers ahead of crucial midterm elections. “Negotiations are currently under way regarding the commercial terms – that is, on finalisation of the contracts,” Russian deputy prime minister for energy Alexander Novak said in an interview with state media. “Once the contracts are signed, the fuel will reach the markets – in this case, the US markets – within 15 to 20 days.”
Ukrainian strikes set an oil export terminal and a depot ablaze in St Petersburg on Sunday as Kyiv launched more than 1,000 drones at Russia in one of its largest aerial attacks of the war. One person was killed and five others were wounded in the attack, which sparked fires at the Petersburg oil terminal and the city’s Ruchi oil depot, officials said. A logistics centre belonging to Russian retailer Ozon and a datacentre operated by Russian tech company VK were also targeted, the companies confirmed. Russia’s defence ministry said Sunday that its forces had destroyed 1,015 Ukrainian drones over 15 Russian regions, the annexed Ukrainian peninsula of Crimea and the Black Sea.
A Russian air strike killed one person and injured two in Kyiv overnight, mayor Vitali Klitschko said on Telegram early on Monday. A medical facility and a non-residential building were damaged in the attack, he said.
A suspected drone exploded over Lithuania after triggering an alert that forced residents in northern and central areas to seek shelter for an hour on Sunday, officials said. Ukraine’s foreign ministry said later it regretted the incident in Lithuania’s airspace, adding that it may have resulted from Russian electronic warfare diverting drones off course. The object flew into Lithuania’s airspace from Poland, Lithuanian defence minister Robertas Kaunas told reporters.
Development by UK firm Nscale heralded by ministers as largest of its kind in country loses anchor tenant
The development of a huge AI datacentre hailed by the UK government has received a fresh setback after Microsoft pulled out of the project over concerns about power supplies.
The development by the British company Nscale, heralded by ministers as the country’s largest AI datacentre when it was announced in 2025, was planned to open at Loughton in Essex next year.
Also recommend HCR's post yesterday, which opens with this banger paragraph:
There is an old saying about rats and sinking ships. There's also an old saying about how a democratic system taken over by a single party quickly becomes corrupt because the ruling party lacks oversight. Then, as corruption becomes the party's driving force, the only people willing to work for it are either corrupt themselves or so unqualified they support the corrupt leadership to gain power, knowing that in a merit-based system it would be entirely out of their reach.
OK, that second old saying is shared mostly among political scientists, but it's accurate, and it's right up there with the rats and the ships to describe what's happening in Trump's orbit now.
No Kings 4 is happening today, Saturday, October 17th.
Volodymyr Zelenskyy has said the Ukrainian military’s access to the Starlink satellite internet service has not yet been fully restored, as media reports suggested the order to throttle the service had come from within the White House.
Zelenskyy met European leaders on Friday in Brussels, where he asked the EU for another €70bn (£60bn) next year to fund Ukraine’s defence against Russia.
Welcome to Edition 9.15 of the Rocket Report! The launch I'm most looking forward to in the next few weeks is that of Japan's Martian Moons Exploration (MMX) mission. MMX is one of the marquee space science missions launching this year, and it's set to leave Earth as soon as Monday (US time) aboard a Japanese H3 rocket. The spacecraft will visit Phobos and Deimos, the two asteroid-like moons of Mars, deploying a rover and collecting specimens for return to Earth in 2031. Exploration at its finest.
As always, we welcome reader submissions, and if you don't want to miss an issue, please subscribe using the box below (the form will not appear on AMP-enabled versions of the site). Each report will include information on small-, medium-, and heavy-lift rockets as well as a quick look ahead at the next three launches on the calendar.
Reflect Orbital looks to India for launch capacity. California-based Reflect Orbital, the startup attempting to offer sunlight on-demand with in-space mirrors, announced the purchase of two launches Wednesday from Indian launcher Skyroot Aerospace, Payload Space reports. One of the launches will use Skyroot's Vikram-1 rocket, which became the first privately developed Indian rocket to reach orbit in July. The other will fly on an upgraded rocket called the Vikram-1U.
The Tesla Roadster 2 drove up a curved ramp before using SpaceX rocket thrusters to fly, flip and land
Elon Musk has revealed Tesla’s latest model, which he claims will be the world’s first flying car, using technology from his aerospace company SpaceX to “basically fly like a rocket”.
The billionaire, who hosted a demonstration of the Tesla Roadster 2 at the SpaceX rocket development and testing facility in Texas, said the sports car could go from 0 to 60mph in a record time of less than a second and had thrusters.
The lore of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, once bought by Martin Shkreli, is explored in a rambling film produced by RZA
For every reason except one, Once Upon a Time in Shaolin, the seventh album by the Wu-Tang Clan, should’ve been a commercial hit. The 31-track double album, recorded in secret between 2007 and 2013, reunited all of the remaining members of the hallowed Staten Island rap crew and featured eye-catching collaborators from the standard (Redman, offshoot group Wu-Tang Killa Bees) to the unexpected (Cher, Game of Thrones actor Carice van Houten). The sound, at least according to those involved, harkened back to the glory days of the group’s beginnings in the 90s.
But for years, almost no one heard it. The group only issued a single copy of Once Upon a Time in Shaolin – on CD, ensconced within layers of filigreed silver – with the stipulation, in legalese, that it could not be used for any commercial purposes for 88 years. The decree, either a stunt or a bold artistic statement on streaming’s devaluation of music, depending on your generosity and perhaps your net worth, succeeded in drumming up plenty of hype. And if you were anywhere around the blogosphere or cable news in 2015, you may recall that the beneficiary of that hype – the purchaser and thus single intended listener of this $2m musical treasure – was one Martin Shkreli, the “pharma bro” widely despised for gleefully hiking the costs of prescription drugs for profit.
In his latest Notes on the Crises, Nathan Tankus reflects on the lives and deaths of three great lights of heterodox economics: Robert Skidelsky, Anwar Shaikh and Perry Mehrling. "I keep having whiplash between how reflecting on these three giants highlights how fortunate I've been and the sadness their deaths bring me. How generous people have been with me; how extraordinary my opportunities and life has already been."
Plex, which made a name for itself by letting users share movies they own, is now helping sell movie theater tickets. The company is looking to monetize its content-discovery capabilities and expand its business beyond its media server software.
Plex partnered with Fandango, which has sold movie tickets since 2000, to drive ticket sales from people searching for movies to stream. Per the announcement:
Starting today, Plex users in the US will see a Fandango ticketing option on title pages for movies currently playing in theaters, allowing them to click through to Fandango to find showtimes and purchase tickets. The integration also enables direct attribution through Kochava, giving studios and advertisers greater visibility into how campaigns and audience engagement translate into ticket sales.
Fandango says it sells tickets for 31,000 movie theater screens in the US. The Plex deal allows it to leverage data from Plex’s streaming service (Plex claims users of the service “make more than 100 million streaming decisions each month”), including "ratings and cross-platform viewing" to gain “insight into audience intent," the announcement said.
Some reservoirs in south at critical levels as water companies call for extended restrictions that would affect golf clubs, private schools and car washes
A severe drought has been declared in six areas of England, with some reservoirs at critically low levels, threatening public supplies.
Parts of Devon, Cornwall, Dorset, Somerset, East Sussex and West Sussex have moved into severe drought, and urgent measures are being taken to secure public supplies of water after the UK experienced its hottest summer on record.
A text message about an unpaid traffic challan could cost Android users in India far more than a fine. GhostBat RAT, an Android malware strain first identified by cybersecurity firm Cyble in October 2025, has evolved to capture PINs from 60 banking, UPI apps, wallet and fintech applications, according to new research published by Cyble.
The firm's investigation into fake mParivahan and eChallan apps also exposed a wider operator-controlled ecosystem it tracks as GhostX, linking phishing pages, backend control systems and malware distribution.
How GhostBat RAT Reaches Victims
The malware spreads mainly through smishing, or SMS phishing. Victims receive messages with malicious links that lead to pages impersonating the official Parivahan service or a Google Play-style download page. These pages push users to install a fraudulent mParivahan APK. Researchers also found GitHub repositories being repeatedly used to host the malicious files.
Many of these apps are only first-stage loaders. The real payload stays hidden in encrypted files or is downloaded later, which makes the app look harmless during an initial scan.
[caption id="attachment_114830" align="aligncenter" width="600"] GhostBat-RAT-Infection-Chain-1536x595[/caption]
GhostBat RAT's Ghost Overlay Trick
The most significant change in the latest variant is its abuse of Android's Accessibility Service, a technique commonly linked to modern Android banking trojan families. Earlier variants analyzed by Cyble did not have this capability.
Its standout feature, called Ghost Overlay, targets Google Pay and MobiKwik. Instead of showing a fake login screen, the malware places an invisible 12-key grid over the real PIN keypad. When a user taps a digit, the overlay records it and then replays the same tap into the genuine app. The payment goes through normally, so the victim has no visible reason to suspect anything, while the PIN is quietly sent to the attackers' server.
GhostBat RAT Watches 60 Financial Apps
Beyond Google Pay and MobiKwik, a broader keylogging feature monitors 60 financial apps. Cyble's list includes PhonePe, Paytm, BHIM, SBI UPI, Axis Pay, BharatPe, CRED, Freecharge, PayZapp, Groww, Navi, Jupiter, OneCard, JioFinance and Samsung Pay. The malware checks which app is open and the screen context before treating numeric input as a possible PIN.
This builds on older capabilities that remain in play, including reading SMS messages and OTPs, manipulating call forwarding, collecting call logs and sending SMS messages through the victim's SIM card, which could be used to spread further smishing campaigns.
Inside the GhostX Network Behind GhostBat RAT
A key finding came from an exposed Firebase backend named "ghostx-panel." It contained administrator records, user roles, login logs with device fingerprints and bot-user mappings. Cyble says these separate roles point to a multi-operator setup and raise the possibility of a Malware-as-a-Service model.
While monitoring the backend, researchers saw SMS lure text, phishing links, vehicle registration numbers and recipient phone numbers changing repeatedly, indicating an active campaign. Matching eChallan messages were also reported by users on social media.
Why GhostBat RAT Is Hard to Detect
Cyble identified at least six different loader designs. The newest, built around a native library called libnetbridge.so, passes the payload through several layers of encryption, compression and custom packaging before the final app appears. Security tools that scan only the outer APK are unlikely to catch it consistently.
The malware also uses Firebase Remote Config, which lets operators switch command servers and turn features on or off remotely without pushing a new app to victims.
Staying Safe From GhostBat RAT
Cyble advises users to install apps only from official stores such as Google Play and to avoid APK links received by SMS, social media or email. Users should be cautious about granting app permissions, especially Accessibility access, verify website addresses before entering sensitive details, enable multi-factor authentication on financial apps and keep their phones updated. Anyone who suspects infection should contact their bank and local authorities immediately.
The studio is swapping the Mushroom Kingdom’s vivid palette for the blood-soaked grit of military action series
Where do you go after Mario? It’s a question the team at Ubisoft Paris found itself pondering three years ago after wrapping up work on the charming turn-based tactics adventure, Mario + Rabbids: Sparks of Hope, sequel to its unexpected crossover hit, Mario + Rabbids: Kingdom Battle. By melding a rather specialist genre with video gaming’s biggest household name, the developer introduced chin-stroking strategic play to a whole new audience. “Having the opportunity to work with the Mario franchise was a privilege, and it’s still something I’m very proud of,” says level designer director, Julien Vial. “I still remember seeing the first prototype and being blown away by all the possibilities.”
Now, Ubisoft Paris has returned with a new project, but this time the studio is swapping the Mushroom Kingdom’s vivid palette for the blood-soaked grit of military action series Rainbow Six. Where Mario and Rabbids saw squishy creatures bounce harmlessly across levels as Mario encased foes in honey, Rainbow Six Tactics, a turn-based tactical spin-off from Rainbow Six Siege, sees balaclava-clad insurgents take shrapnel rounds to the chest. A seamless tonal shift, then.
The development – and its dire consequences for Ukraine – has put the spotlight on Starlink -SpaceX’s commercial satellite internet service – and Starshield, a powerful military version developed by Elon Musk’s company for the Pentagon.
Expanding plume of fuel exhaust crystalized in the sky and reflected sunlight off frozen particles after Florida launch
A SpaceX rocket provided a stunning pre-dawn display over Florida as a egiant, luminescent “jellyfish cloud” spread for miles, caused by an expanding plume of fuel exhaust crystalizing in the sky and reflecting sunlight off the frozen particles.
The phenomenon occurred shortly after Tuesday’s 6.33am ET launch of the Falcon 9 rocket carrying cargo to the International Space Station.
Director Greta Gerwig could have made pretty much any movie she wanted after 2023's Barbie racked up nearly $1.5 billion at the box office. She chose to make Narnia: The Magician's Nephew for Netflix, an adaptation of C.S. Lewis' sixth novel in The Chronicles of Narnia series. Gerwig has said little publicly about the film, other than that she was inspired by 1960s-era David Bowie, although she said it would not be a musical. Netflix just released the trailer, set to "Stairway to Heaven," and it's quite the psychedelic ride.
The first book in the series, The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, was published in 1950, and Lewis did not initially intend to write any more Narnia adventures. But then an acquaintance asked how the London lamppost ended up in the middle of Narnia's woodland, and Lewis was intrigued enough by the question to start a prequel, The Magician's Nephew, in order to find an answer. Lewis found it difficult to finish the book, however, writing four other Narnia books first before completing TheMagician's Nephew in 1955.
There have been several adaptations, in various media, of The Chronicles of Narnia, most recently the early 2000s film franchise adapting the first three novels in the series. Those films showed diminishing returns, however, and by 2011 the film rights had expired. There were initial plans to adapt the fourth novel, The Silver Chair.
David Redshaw and Fernando Quintana respond to reports of a billionaire exodus from Britain
The idea that the departure of the super-rich is a problem ignores a historical fact (Apparent exodus of super-rich suggests UK is no longer billionaires’ playground, 7 October). Capitalism works better without them. The most successful countries today are states where redistributive taxation has empowered the working masses and provided a better and more stable market for business people.
How do today’s complaining uber-rich explain the postwar decades, when the top rate of income tax was commonly 80% or 90%, and yet the period is known as a golden age of capitalism? Then Margaret Thatcher lowered the top rate to 60% and the country tilted into a massive recession. The rich get to a point where they simply become wealth extractors, using their money to buy assets and raising the cost of them for the rest of us – housing being a good example today.
Outage of terminals managed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX comes as Russia launches ballistic missiles at Ukraine without any advance warning from US
Ukraine’s military has suddenly had its access to Starlink satellite internet terminals restricted as the Trump administration has increased pressure on Ukraine to halt long-range strikes on Russia’s oil industry immediately.
The terminals, which are distributed and managed by Elon Musk’s SpaceX, are a key component of Ukraine’s military operations and the sudden restrictions on the terminals travelling at high speeds on Tuesday evening led to the failure of several combat missions, said an adviser on military technology to Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Jean-Noël Barrot criticises X owner in speech attacking foreign efforts to destabilise France before 2027 election
France’s foreign minister has accused Elon Musk of using his social media platform to orchestrate “massive online harassment campaigns” against European leaders as he took aim at foreign efforts to destabilise the country before next year’s presidential election.
Speaking at an Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development conference on Tuesday, Jean-Noël Barrot pointed to the role that social media had come to play in the global battle over democracy. “The forces seeking to undermine democracy now dominate the information landscape, where they employ tactics designed to polarise public debate,” he said.
The once heroic boxer showcases a frankness in this compelling new series but also an unwillingness to take accountability for his darkest moments
Mike Tyson never envisioned old age. And yet here he still is, having outlived his parents, Brooklynites of ill repute who died when he was a teenager, and the Brownsville tough guys who teased him for being scrawny and having a lisp. Here he is after doing hard time for rape in his prime, winning and losing great fortunes and battling addiction to drink, drugs and fame. Here he still is, 60 years old and a grandfather now, mixing it up with Jake Paul in the ring, opening up to manosphere-adjacent podcasters, bobbing into an impromptu White House press briefing – Māori face-tattoo unmistakably in the frame – while on a DC visit to buck up his old pal as his party faces a bleak midterm forecast. “I don’t have to exist,” the champ says in Tyson, the latest four-part vanity project on his turbulent life and times. “Some reason, something allowed me to exist.”
In his heyday, Tyson was a mesmerizing sporting event unto himself – the ruthless knockout machine who struck fear into opponents at first sight, felled them in seconds and looked back on the carnage with cool nonchalance. His darkest episodes – the combustive relationship with actor Robin Givens, the six-year prison sentence for rape, biting off Evander Holyfield’s ear – only deepened the public fascination with him, adding to the lore of boxing’s baddest man. In the winter of his life, Tyson’s self-reflection, so deep it tips into self-parody, is the enthralling spectacle now. And if generations of Black comedians have proved anything, it’s that the appetite for Mike Tyson impersonations is inexhaustible.
The fantasy epic based on CS Lewis’s classic stars Daniel Craig, Carey Mulligan and Meryl Streep
The first look at Greta Gerwig’s vision for Narnia has been revealed.
Today, Netflix is giving a first look at her vision for CS Lewis’s magical world in the trailer for The Magician’s Nephew, the first chronological book in the beloved series.
She appears not to see that her preference for a lesser-regulated capitalist market economy, with lower public expenditure, taxes and national debt, coupled with “tough love” welfare policies, is itself harking back to arguments that have circulated for centuries.
Evil Empire/Konami; PC, PS5, Switch, Xbox There are buzzsaws and blood pits, bats burst into blood and demons burn to cinders. The series’ new emphasis on twitch-based action may annoy purists but you can’t call it dull
A gorgeously gothic Paris swarming with demons should be a perfect setting for Konami’s long-running vampiric adventure series. Unfortunately, while the sights and sounds of this vivid and haunting world leave a bold impression, developer Evil Empire doesn’t always provide an enjoyable experience to go with them. It takes far too long for the most imaginative elements of the game to be revealed.
Players take the role of Rose Belmont, daughter of vampire hunter (and Castlevania regular) Trevor Belmont and the witch Sypha Belnades, and her quest is to free Paris from demonic occupation. This murderous noctural journey feels best when you’re fighting monsters; combat is frenetic, sometimes to the point of being overwhelming, while boss fights require considerable focus and skill. Combat is the game’s strongest component and what sets it apart from previous entries. Minimising the series’ role-playing elements (levelling up has never felt more perfunctory) in favour of twitch-based action will annoy purists, but they’d be hard pressed to call battles dull.
Firefox 158 is now available with JPEG XL image support enabled by default, making .jxl images a standard part of the browser rather than an experimental feature. The release also adds JPEG XL to Firefox's default image Accept header, improves Smart Window form filling, and brings new CSS typed-arithmetic support for developers. Phoronix reports: At long last, Firefox 158 is ready to go with JPEG-XL image support as an alternative to the likes of WebP, JPEG, PNG, and GIF. The default HTTP Accept header for image requests also now supports "image/jxl" for the JPEG-XL image format. Prior releases of Firefox had JPEG-XL gated by an experimental option.
Firefox 158 also now supports filling forms faster in Smart Window when clicking into a form field or selecting Fill from sources. On the developer side, CSS typed arithmetic are now supported to use functions like calc() to divide two values of the same data type even if of different units. Developer changes and release binaries can be found at their respective links.
Many of us are interested in retrocomputing. There’s such a rich history of eras and machines to choose from, and countless niches and nuances to get lost in. Some people make it easy for themselves and are into old computers that are readily available at low prices, like the Commodore 64 or mid-’90s Macs, while others make it a bit harder on themselves by focusing on, say, computers from the former Soviet Union or NEC machines from Japan, which are harder to find and probably require a bigger purse, too.
And then there’s people like me. I’m making things incredibly hard on myself, because I am obsessed with a very specific set of computers – just five machines, to be exact. “Surely,” I hear you think, “collecting a mere five specific machines can’t be that hard, no? That’s how many spare Pismos I have in a box in case my primary one needs spare parts!” Sadly for me, the five computers I want to own more than any other are not particularly easy to find, and even when you do find one of them, pricing can easily reach the level of a decent used car.
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Regular OSNews readers will know: I am infatuated with UNIX workstations, or more specifically, UNIX workstations of the early 2000, and even more specifically, the final five models built by the last commercial UNIX vendors. So far, I’ve managed to get my hands on a mere two of them, but before my time on this earth come to an end, I intend to complete my Holy Quinity of UNIX Workstations. Let’s go down the list, roughly ordered by attainability.
HP c8000: PA-RISC/HP-UX
The HP c8000 is the absolute pinnacle of HP’s long-running line of workstations based on the PA-RISC architecture. The first PA-RISC workstation was launched in 1986, and HP would continue to improve the architecture and release new workstations all the way up until 2004, when the c8000 would be their last model. For the c8000, HP actually went all-out: it came with two dual-core PA-RISC processors running between 900MHz and 1.1GHz (depending on configuration), a maximum of 24GB of RAM, and a variety of graphics cards to choose from. It was a veritable swan song for the architecture.
HP’s commercial UNIX operating system, HP-UX, is even older than PA-RISC, with the first version being released in 1982, and its final version, HP-UX 11i v3 (or 11.31) released in 2007. This final version of HP-UX was updated and supported all the way up until 31 December 2025, but things are actually a bit more complicated than that. The last workstation release of HP-UX for PA-RISC was 11i v1 (released in 2000), while the last workstation release for Itanium workstations was 11i v2 (released in 2005). Do note that HP would provide updates, fixes, and patches to these versions long after the mentioned release dates.
Speaking of Itanium, HP’s final Itanium workstation was the zx6000, released in 2002, which can pack up to two single-core 1.5Ghz Itanium 2 processors. There’s a very real case to be made that the zx6000 should also be part of this list, since it’s both a little faster than the c8000 (in its dual 1.5GHz configuration) and runs a newer version of HP-UX. However, since Itanium workstations never really had much of an impact in the market (even HP only ever released two models), and since it lacks the decades of pedigree that comes with PA-RISC, I consider them a mere curiosity. A very cool curiosity that I’d love to own, but a curiosity nonetheless.1
Anyway, this is one of the two machines I already own. I have a new-in-box (when I bought it a few years ago) HP c8000 with two dual-core 1.0Ghz PA-RISC processors, 8 GB of RAM, and an ATI FireGL X3 AGP graphics card with 256 MB, the fastest the c8000 will take. It’s also got two SCSCI 74 GB hard drives in a striped RAID for better performance, and I added an LTO 4 tape drive so I could create bootable backups that will restore the machine if anything ever goes wrong.
It’s running HP-UX 11i v1, with as many of the updates, patches, and fixes I could find – which is one of the major roadblocks for anyone trying to get into HP-UX. Installation media are relatively easy to come by if you know where to look (assuming you know which specific version you need), but any updates, patches, and fixes from roughly later than 2005 are almost impossible to find. Some can be discovered through My HPE Software Center, if you have the patience of an angel and the perseverance of a honey badger (it’s a really terrible website), but most things are all locked away behind expensive support contracts or just gone entirely.
I’ve contacted HPE several times in several different ways about the preservation of HP-UX, but they never replied – clearly, they just don’t care about the preservation of their legendary UNIX platform or the enthusiast community buying PA-RISC hardware on eBay for personal use and experimentation. Sad, but par for the course.
The c8000 is quite easy to find on eBay, but do be aware that the “cheap” offerings of around €800 are the versions with just one processor. To get the version with two processors, expect to shell out twice as much. Spare parts and upgrades are readily available, too.
Sun Ultra 45: SPARC/Solaris
The Sun Ultra 45 needs no introduction here on OSNews, as I published an in-depth article about this machine and all the cool things you can do with it late last year. My Ultra 45 was an incredibly generous gift by Adriaan de Groot, who owned this machine as part of his work on porting KDE to Solaris way back in the day. I then ordered various upgrades to the machine to max it out with two UltraSPARC IIIi processors running at 1.6GHz, 8 GB of RAM, and the Sun XVR-2500 with 256MB, the fastest GPU it supports. I also bought the SunPCI IIIpro (an entire x86 PC on a PCI-X card) and a flash accelerator card.
The Ultra 45 is not supported by Solaris 11, so the most recent version you can run is Solaris 10, and more specifically, Solaris 10 1/13 (from January 2013). Solaris 10 is still receiving patch sets to this day, but like HPE, Oracle hides them behind expensive, unobtainable support contracts. My attempts at contacting Oracle have been more lacklustre than my attempts at contacting HPE, but either way, no response from Oracle either. They, too, do not care about the enthusiast community.
The Ultra 45 also tends to be readily available on eBay, and you can expect to pay about €1000 or so for a single-processor model, and anything between €1500-2000 for a dual-processor one. Spare parts and upgrades abound, but do note that Ultra 45 processor coolers are weirdly expensive.
SGI Tezro: MIPS/IRIX
SGI and IRIX are well-loved in the retro computing community, and there’s no shortage of hardware to choose from if you want to get into IRIX. However, if you’re obsessed with the final models of UNIX workstation lines like I am, you’re going to be in a bit of trouble – you’re going to want an SGI Tezro, the final MIPS workstation SGI made. The company launched this top-of-the-line model in 2003, and kept updating and selling it until 2007. In its most powerful configuration, you’re looking at four MIPS processors running at 1GHz each, with a maximum of 8GB of RAM, and a V12 VPro GPU with 128MB of RAM (with a DVI port instead of the more cumbersome 13W3 connector).
The Tezro can run IRIX all the way up until the operating system’s final version, 6.5.30, released in August of 2006. The operating system discs and patches are readily available all over the web, which is quite nice. Out of all the commercial UNIX platforms mentioned in this article, the SGI and IRIX community is definitely the most active and lively, with people developing and maintaining software for IRIX to this very day. There are also people working on maintaining modern Linux kernels for SGI machines, and there’s a ton of forum activity out there.
The Tezro is an incredibly rare beast, and they rarely come up for sale. I’ve only ever seen one Tezro’s final price, and I think it was sold for well in excess of €6000. I have never owned or even seen a single SGI machine, let alone a Tezro,
IBM IntelliStation POWER 285: POWER/AIX
Out of all the architectures mentioned in this article, IBM’s POWER is the only one still under active development; all the others were phased out and cancelled long ago. However, even though IBM is still developing POWER and releasing new generations every few years, the company hasn’t built a POWER workstation in a long time. The last one built by IBM2 was the IntelliStation POWER 285, released in October of 2005, and sold up until 2009. It packed a single-core or dual-core POWER5+ processor running at 1.9 or 2.1GHz, supported a maximum of 32GB of RAM, and there were three graphics cards to choose from, with the GXT6500P with 128MB being the most powerful option (a card from 2002!).
At roughly the same time as the POWER 285, IBM also sold the IntelliStation POWER 185. This was a very different beast, though, as instead of using a POWER5+ processor, it used one or two PowerPC 970 processors, which was a slightly beefed-up POWER4 design, making it a generation behind the 285. It also had a much stricter maximum RAM limit (8GB), but could run the same outdated GPUs as the 285. Regardless, the 285 is clearly the more powerful machine.
By the way, if the “970” moniker sounds familiar, it’s because Apple used these very same processors under the marketing name “PowerPC G5” for their various G5 Macs. My pet conspiracy theory about the origins of the POWER 185 is that with Apple switching to Intel, IBM was left with a pallet of unused 970s, and thus created the 185 to get rid of at least some of them. The timeline adds up, as Apple announced the switch to Intel in June 2005, and the POWER 185 was announced in February 2006. I don’t actually believe this, but it’s a funny theory nonetheless.
The IntelliStation POWER 285 can run AIX up to version 7.1 TL5, released in 2017, which is remarkably modern. Do note that AIX 7.1 was originally released in 2010, and the number of changes and patches released for 7.1 probably dropped off sharply after its first few years on the market. AIX installation discs, patches, and documentation is easy to find, and I’ve heard from enthusiasts who play with older POWER servers that IBM is remarkably friendly to the hobbyist community, and will gladly answer any emails and provide help when they can. Of course, that’s just what I’ve heard through the grapevine, and I can’t vouch for any of it.
These machines seem to be quite rare. I have never seen an IntelliStation POWER 285 (or 185, for that matter) come up for sale, so I have no clue what people would be charging for these. My uneducated prediction is that a reasonably configured 285 will probably go well north of €2000, maybe even €3000.
HP AlphaStation ES47: Alpha/Tru64
Through various acquisitions (Compact acquired DEC; HP acquired Compaq), Alpha ended up at HP3. It was under their brand that the final Alpha workstation was let loose onto the world in 2002/2003 (I’m not 100% sure): the AlphaStation ES47. It contained one or two Alpha EV7 processors running at 1Ghz (also known as the Alpha 21364 or Marvel and the last Alpha processor ever made), a maximum of 16GB of RAM, and an optional ATI Radeon 7500 graphics card with an unspecified amount of video memory. From what I’ve read online, this machine is an absolute monster, weighing in at close to 60kg, with noise levels that aren’t exactly office-friendly.
Alpha-based workstations and servers ran Tru64 UNIX, which was initially known as OSF/1 AXP and then as Digital UNIX, before Compaq renamed it to Tru64. The AlphaStation ES47 supports the final release of the operating system from 2010, version 5.1B-6, and its installation media, patches, and even its multitude of license files are readily available online. An interesting bonus is that like most Alpha machines, the ES47 can also run OpenVMS, up to the final Alpha release of OpenVMS from 2017, V8.4-2L2.
This machine, too, I have never seen come up for sale. Seeing the absolutely insane prices people are asking for Alpha hardware, though, I’m not sure I even want to know what an ES47 would go for. An AlphaStation 500 from 1997, with a 400MHz processor, goes for €2500. A DS15 from the same era as the ES47, a desktop form-factor with a single 1GHz processor, already has an asking price of almost €6000. It wouldn’t surprise me if an ES47 would hit close to €10000.
Why these machines?
Why not just settle for lower-end, older, more readily available machines? This is a valid question, with answers that are probably not satisfactory to everyone. Of course, there’s the simple monkey brain “bigger number better” feeling, where I want the fastest, “newest” hardware to get the best experience out of these commercial UNIX machines. Another important point is that these machines will all be able to run the latest workstation versions of their various UNIX flavours, which also helps in realising the best possible experience and potentially makes compiling modern software easier.
Since they’re newer, they also tend to be easier to work with in a more practical sense; you won’t need special monitors or keyboards or whatever, since they’re all compatible with standard PC monitors, keyboards, and mice. Having just one dedicated desk with a monitor, keyboard, and mouse that work on both my c8000 and Ultra 45 saves a ton of space and time, since I just need to move a few cables from one machine to the other if I want to change machines.
There’s also a more intangible reason, one that I value a great deal. All of these machines were developed and introduced well past the point where everybody knew full well the dedicated UNIX workstation market was basically dead. The x86 platform was improving at an incredible pace, and offered better performance at far lower prices than any of the architectures in this article ever could. Meanwhile, the kind of software these workstations were designed for had long been ported to Windows, negating the need for commercial UNIX on workstations even more.
In fact, all of these five machines were developed and introduced after their respective companies had already announced they would be leaving the UNIX workstation market (with the sole exception of possibly IBM). All of them represent the final hurrahs of platforms that for decades had been the envy of computer enthusiasts the world over, designed by people who already knew this would be the last UNIX workstation they’d ever make. This gives these machines a certain melancholy that I personally really enjoy, even if I can’t fully explain why.
Even before you turn these machines on, simply by looking at their specifications, feeling the build quality, and weighing the component choices, you can tell exactly just how much of their heart and soul its creators were allowed to put into it. The Ultra 45 and c8000 are great examples of this. As I detailed in my Ultra 45 article, the Ultra 45 is not materially different from the two machines that came before it, making it an already outdated machine by the time it came out. Hell, the processors in the Ultra 45 were three generations behind the state-of-the-art in SPARC at the time. The c8000, on the other hand, got brand new processors that were substantially faster than what had come before (the first dual-core PA-RISC processors!), a brand new chipset, and even brand new GPU options, and thus delivered a true upgrade over its predecessors.
For whatever reason, it seems that HP decided to put considerably more effort into its final UNIX workstation than Sun did, and I find that fascinating. I desperately want to experience these other three machines, so I can get an even better understanding of where these companies put their priorities. Each of these computers were developed and built under the same somber assumption – the last one we’ll ever make – but each company put their own unique spin on it through the people and means they assigned to the project, all in a time-frame of only a few years.
It’s the same story told in five different ways.
What’s stopping you?
There’s countless reasons why trying to collect these five machines is such an incredibly difficult endeavour. First and foremost, it’s obviously a money issue – I’m not even remotely wealthy enough to casually spend decent-used-car-money on what is essentially a hobby. Second, availability is a huge problem, as the three machines I do not yet have simply rarely, if ever, come up for sale. Even if I had the money to burn on this rather silly hobby, I couldn’t.
Availability is further hindered by the fact that I’m European and live in the Swedish Arctic. From experience, I know that rare hardware like these UNIX workstations seem to have been more common in the United States than in Europe. Furthermore, even if someone is trying to sell one of these in Europe and they choose to do so on one of the local, country-specific classifieds platforms, I’m going to be locked out. Importing any of these machines from the US is basically a non-starter, since shipping machines that easily weigh in excess of 30kg across the Atlantic is not only expensive, but often also simply not an option since US sellers don’t want to do so. The EU import duty lottery isn’t exactly helping either.
I am absolutely green with envy whenever I watch YouTube videos of people visiting the various Vintage Computer Festival events in the US, where I often spot countless of these machines in the background, sometimes for sale at very reasonable prices, just sitting there like it’s no big deal. Similar events in Europe seem to be much smaller in scope and more locally-oriented, making it much harder to build up a network of like-minded friends who might let you know of great finds in other parts of the continent.
Basically everything is working against me.
With the possible exception of certain computer museums, I don’t think there is anyone in the world who owns all five of these machines, and I definitely will not be the first. Sadly.
Fun fact: the HP zx2000/zx6000 Itanium workstations and the c8000 PA-RISC workstation shared the same chipset and general architecture. They’re far more alike than it seems at first sight. ↩︎
While IBM didn’t, Raptor Computing Systems did. I reviewed their small Blackbird POWER9 desktop, but also have their big, dual-processor POWER9 workstation. These machines cannot run any commercial UNIX, though, so they’re not UNIX workstations by my own, admittedly arbitrary, definition. ↩︎
It’s kind of wild that out of these five platforms, three are currently owned by HPE (which split off from HP in 2015). Not only do they own HP-UX and Tru64, but also IRIX, since they acquired SGI in 2016. ↩︎
Amos B. Batto has published an incredibly detailed look at the state of Linux on smartphones. It’s an excellent read you really shouldn’t skip.
Five years ago, Linux phones looked like they were poised to become a viable alternative to the Android/iOS duopoly that has an iron grip on the mobile phone industry. Sadly, after a brief flash of activity and community engagement with the release of the Purism Librem 5 and the PINE64 PinePhone in 2020, the Linux phone market has generally stagnated. This stagnation occurred partly because of the problems at Purism and PINE64, but also because the available Linux SoC’s weren’t up to the task of running a modern smartphone, and the hardware industry wasn’t providing any good alternatives with good free/open source drivers. In addition, Plasma Mobile and Phosh were still inchoate mobile interfaces at the time, and there wasn’t a good distro option to run these interfaces on Android kernels with a normal integrated mobile SoC. The poor performance of the PinePhone and Librem 5 and the problems with the PinePhone Pro and the Librem 5 refunds sapped people’s enthusiasm and willingness to take a chance on the next Linux phone.
Fortunately, all of these conditions are changing, and I believe that there is now the possibility that Linux could finally become a viable alternative to Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS in the mobile space, just like desktop Linux has become a viable alternative to Windows and Mac OSX on the PC over the last three decades. This isn’t to say that mobile Linux will fundamentally challenge the business of Google or Apple, but the conditions are ripe for a small market to arise for Linux phones, similar to the way that people can currently buy Linux PCs from a number of small companies, such as TUXEDO, System76, Purism, Slimbook, ThinkPenguin, Ubuntushop.biz, Entroware, Star Labs, Juno, Laptop with Linux, Linux Certified, ArkPC, etc.
I’m not quite as optimistic as Batto, and that’s almost exclusively down to how running Android applications through compatibility layers will remain an absolute necessity for anyone trying to use one of these Linux smartphones today. As long as crucial applications and services required to function in a modern society, like banking, messaging, government services, and so on, require the use of an Android application when using a Linux smartphone, I just don’t think any significant number of people will be switching over.
What’s needed is something that will force these crucial services to become available on platforms other than Android and iOS, since I don’t think any of them will do so of their own volition. The only way I can see this happening is if the European Union, spurred on by our desire to reduce our dependence on adversarial US companies, mandates that several services marked as crucial must make themselves available on platforms other than Android and iOS.
I doubt that will happen, but I honestly don’t see Linux smartphones becoming anything more than a mere curiosity you fiddle with at home, while carrying an Android phone or iPhone as your actual phone.
Sweet Pelor! MrEdders123 on Youtube has a review of the first reasonably-complete computer AD&D adventure, Pool of Radiance from 1989. the first of SSI's classic Gold Box D&D games. It's comprehensive in its discussion, enough so that it's almost ten hours long. But there is a long list of shortcut links in its description to get to whatever part of it you might find most interesting without having to go the long way around.
Calls for planned fuel duty rise to be scrapped as analysis finds average fuel bill could hit £1,965, up from £1,294
Millions of British van drivers face a combined £2.5bn cost to cover the rising price of diesel this year, according to figures, fuelling calls for the government to scrap its planned fuel duty rise.
The owners of diesel vans and pickups can expect to collectively spend almost £8.5bn at the pump this year, according to analysis for the Guardian, after diesel prices climbed to record highs due to a global fuel shortage caused by disruption to refineries in the Middle East and Russia.
Investigation launched after five broadcasters last month ceased presidential coverage after CNN, MS Now and Politico were barred from White House
The US Department of Justice is investigating whether the decision of the White House television press pool to halt coverage of the US president, Donald Trump, last month violated antitrust law, an agency spokesperson said Saturday.
A spokesperson for the department said group boycotts among business competitors might violate US law. “The Antitrust Division is simply investigating to determine whether these news organizations have violated the antitrust laws,” they said.
As streamers poach viral creators to appeal to children, digital whack-a-mole has become a new kind of family challenge
Exasperated dad Simon Hooper shakes his fist at the camera in a viral video. “We managed to get rid of YouTube in our household six months ago and the kids are finally OK with it,” he says – but Netflix is “now commissioning YouTubers to make their brain rot and putting it back in front of my kids’ faces”.
The precise “brain rot” he’s referring to is the arrival of a polarising show that’s lighting up parent chats around the globe. And while Salish and Jordan Matter might be new to Netflix Kids users, the father-daughter content creators are familiar to anyone who’s spent any time on the internet.
Social media ‘chefluencers’ and open restaurant kitchens have made chefs more visible and inspired aspirational gadget-buying
The Duchess of Sussex is no ordinary home cook, but when Meghan appeared on Instagram this week at a hob presided over by a special pot filler tap, it spoke to a shift in the everyday kitchen – the rise of “cheffy” kit.
Leonard Peltier was imprisoned for 49 years before his sentence was commuted. A new Netflix documentary exposes the ‘corrupt’ system that allowed it to happen
On 20 January 2025, with 14 minutes remaining in his term as president, Joe Biden commuted the life sentence of Leonard Peltier, after years of pressure to release a figure seen by many as the longest-serving political prisoner in the US. The Indigenous activist, a leader within the American Indian Movement (Aim) and an icon of Native American resistance, served nearly 50 years in prison for allegedly killing two FBI agents during a shootout on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, in 1975 – killings he has always denied, prosecuted in a railroaded trial widely seen as corrupt.
Outside the Florida prison where Peltier was being held that morning were several of the many activists and lawyers who fought for his release, as well as film-makers David France and Jesse Short Bull. The two directors’ long-gestating documentary on Peltier’s fight for justice was set to premiere just a week later at the Sundance film festival with a very different ending, the octogenarian still awaiting a chance to return home to the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa reservation in North Dakota. That morning, there was “a sinking feeling that it wasn’t going to happen”, France said.
Tom Watson, of Worcester, alleged to be behind Big Time Charlie X account that created so-called Traitorbase
The owner of a recruitment firm has been accused of being at the centre of a so-called “doxxing” campaign against the Royal National Lifeboat Institution (RNLI), anti-racism activists and business executives who recruit black, Asian and minority ethnic workers.
Tom Watson, from Worcester, is alleged to be behind an X account calling itself “Big Time Charlie”, which was deactivated shortly after he was named by the campaign group Hope Not Hate.
Ukrainian drone strikes have knocked out two of five data centers belonging to the Russian tech giant Yandex. The damage has left Yandex, known as “Russia’s Google” because it operates the country’s most popular search engine, struggling to maintain its AI chatbot and other online services.
The Ukrainian drones struck Yandex data centers in the Sasovo and Kaluga regions of Russia on October 8 and October 9, according to Reuters. Those actions came as a direct response to a Russian drone strike campaign targeting Ukraine’s data centers, which has disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of Ukrainians since late September.
“We continue to respond to Russia’s attacks on Ukraine, and we’re doing so with high precision,” said Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in a post on X. “Another data center was hit as well—our symmetrical response.”
New York film festival: the director has made a fascinating and troubling companion piece to her Netflix documentary 13th, which takes a fiery look at American injustice
It feels at once like the blink of an eye and an eternity since Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th arrived on Netflix, a month before the election of Donald Trump to his first term as president. The intervening decade has more or less borne out the film’s thesis on the enduring specter of white supremacy in American life: that a clause within the 13th amendment abolishing chattel slavery – that involuntary servitude could be used as punishment for a crime – was immediately and continually exploited to criminalize black people, mass incarceration thus being the modern incarnation of America’s original sin.
The Oscar-nominated film, which saw a surge in viewership during the protests of 2020, has remained both a time capsule of late Obama-era moral clarity and, arguably, the acclaimed director’s best picture. At least, until now – 14th, DuVernay’s sequel, of sorts, soon also to arrive on Netflix, is just as lucid and galvanizing as its predecessor, with an updated, more pressing urgency befitting a democracy in distress.
The Debian Linux project has opened a call for community artwork submissions ahead of the release of the upcoming Forky (Debian 14). If you think you've got the artistic chops, your art could appear on the boot screens, login prompts, and desktop wallpapers of millions of users. The submission deadline is November 26.
Continuing Debian's community-driven ethos, the artwork submission process mirrors that of previous releases. The artwork must feel distinctively "Debian," integrate cleanly without the need for core software patching, and remain visually appealing for the long term.
Elise Couper's "Ceratopsian" theme was chosen as the winning default for Debian 13 Trixie. For anyone who might not be up on the latest from the Toy Story franchise, the release names echo character names from the animated films. Trixie was a triceratops introduced in Toy Story 3, hence the "Ceratopsian" wink in the winning submission. It makes sense that the next version of Debian continues this trend with Forky, a character introduced in the franchise's fourth entry. The Debian team cautions against overly busy designs that may cause user fatigue, but if anyone can successfully incorporate Forky's googly eyes into the design somehow, know that you'd at least win the contest for my Debian desktop wallpaper.
SpaceX has a deal to purchase nationwide low-band spectrum licenses for a planned terrestrial mobile network that would complement the space-based Starlink cellular service.
SpaceX will buy up to 14 megahertz of spectrum in the 800 MHz band from investment firm Grain Management, which bought the spectrum rights from T-Mobile earlier this year. T-Mobile had obtained the spectrum when it bought Sprint in 2020 and was required to sell the licenses under a merger condition imposed by the US government.
"This prime low-band spectrum addresses one of the key remaining technical gaps that will pave the way for Starlink Mobile to become a major mobile carrier in the US," SpaceX said yesterday. SpaceX this week also received US approval to launch 15,000 satellites for an upgraded version of its mobile service that it says will be far more powerful than the current offering.
Tax cuts for big banks have deprived the UK government of £6bn in revenues, according to campaigners, who are calling on the chancellor, John Healey, to increase taxes and force lenders to pay their “fair share” in the budget.
Calculations by the Trades Union Congress (TUC), which represents unions with more than 5.3 million members across England and Wales, shows that the public purse is billions of pounds worse off as a result of tax cuts introduced under the Tory chancellor Jeremy Hunt in 2023.
Space has plenty of room for more megaconstellations, but only if all operators are willing to share information about where their satellites are and where they're going, a top executive at SpaceX and its AI subsidiary said this week.
Michael Nicolls, SpaceX's vice president for Starlink and president of Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, used a presentation Tuesday at the International Astronautical Congress in Turkey as a clarion call for improved data-sharing among satellite operators.
SpaceX's Starlink constellation now has more than 11,000 satellites, about two-thirds of all active spacecraft in low-Earth orbit. Radars and telescopes routinely track thousands more pieces of space junk.
Actor-director’s listless LA-set crime thriller makes for a surprisingly anonymous effort and one that feels very similar to many other, better films
Ben Affleck has pushed through multiple Hollywood comebacks, at least one predicated on his facility behind the camera, directing Boston-based thrillers both artistically ambitious (Gone Baby Gone) and juicily crowd-pleasing (The Town). So now that his acting career seems particularly stable, as he works steadily and produces movies via the company he founded with longtime friend and collaborator Matt Damon, why does his directing career remain in what seems like post-Oscar doldrums? (Though he has never been nominated for a best director Oscar, his film Argo won best picture in 2013.) His new movie Animals appears perfectly situated within his wheelhouse: it’s a Los Angeles-based crime-and-politics thriller to match his earlier east coast work. The real surprise, however, is just how listless it can get.
Affleck himself plays Mark Kimball, a Angeleno running for mayor of his home town. His status as an independent non-party-affiliated candidate (and one who scarcely exhibits a trace of a platform in what little we see of his stump speeches and interviews) is only one element of his unlikely backstory, which also includes history as a teacher, a lawyer and a veteran of the first Gulf war. (Not sure the math on all that checks out, but let’s allow it as evidence of a fusion between Mark’s dedication to service and a rapacious ambition.) He’s leveraged his family’s wealth to take him through the home stretch of a close campaign, and tensions are medium-high with his wife, Abby, (Kerry Washington), who’s hiding some problems of her own. Things get considerably worse when, on Halloween, he receives a phone call: Kidnappers have taken his preteen son Denny (Christopher Woodley). They’re demanding $7m that Mark doesn’t have to get him back safely.
The world's largest retailer wants to sell you something else—Internet from space.
Amazon has been developing a constellation of satellites to deliver broadband Internet from low-Earth orbit for the better part of a decade, and the company is just about ready to pull back the curtain. It is entering a market that SpaceX, with its Starlink Internet, has dominated for the last half-decade. Amazon's debut into satellite Internet is being closely watched, not just by some consumers, but by businesses ranging from airlines to shipping companies to governments. Broadband Internet from orbit has proven broadly useful for a lot of purposes, from video games to commerce to warfighting.
But until now, most people had to buy it from Elon Musk and SpaceX. OneWeb has only offered limited services, leaving Amazon as the only real competitor to deliver high-speed Internet globally. Moreover, at the head of the company's broadband efforts is Rajeev Badyal, who led Starlink during its early years, but whom Musk fired eight years ago for moving too cautiously on Starlink.
Chimera Linux is a relatively new Linux distribution, and quite a unique on at that, as it combines the core tools from FreeBSD, the LLVM toolchain, and the Musl C library instead of the usual suspects. Despite being relatively new, it still has some serious pedigree as the project was started by Nina “q66”, who was part of the Void Linux team. At Void, she maintained the various PowerPC/POWER ports of the distribution until Chimera became her sole focus.
Nina published a detailed blog post today about how the Chimera team builds the tooling for their distribution, as well as the goals it’s trying to achieve. It covers everything from a bit of personal history, the rationale behind the project, who it’s catering to, how its tooling works and why, and the infrastructure they’ve built that underpins it all. There’s a lot to process here, with one of the most interesting little details – at least to me, as someone who has two POWER9 machines – the fact that Chimera started with the ppc64le target only.
The article is an incredibly interesting look at not just the how of Chimera, but also the why, which makes for some really fascinating reading.
In its first live event in two years, Microsoft today announced its newest Surface laptop, outlined a host of changes coming to Windows 11, and shared a vision of how local-AI and agentic workflows could reshape personal computing for those in the dev community as well as home enthusiasts.
Surface Laptop Ultra
Originally teased in May 2026, the new Surface Laptop Ultra will be Microsoft's first offering to take advantage of the new Nvidia RTX Spark SoC (system on a chip). The device has a starting price of $2,599 and comes in various SoC and memory configurations, with either a 5120-core or 6144-core Blackwell GPU and up to 128GB of LPDDR5x unified memory. It will begin shipping on October 16 and is available for preorder now.
While the new Ultra is clearly focused on the developer crowd, graphical performance was highlighted during the presentation to show off just how capable the laptop can be. By leaning on unified memory allocation rather than the physical VRAM limits of a traditional GPU, the laptop can assign its resources to handle modern gaming tasks as well as local AI development and deployment. The new Gears of War: E-Day was shown running on the system, meaning that even without a traditional gaming GPU, AAA titles are on the table.
Party hopes to win over affluent middle-class voters as leader rejects calls to ‘unite the right’ in conference speech
Kemi Badenoch has announced that the Conservatives would abolish inheritance tax on family homes if elected, prompting criticism that she is prioritising cutting taxes for the rich.
The Tory leader also said couples would be able to leave an additional tax-free sum of £1m to their families, as the party attempts to shore up its traditional base in southern England.
When the Sunday Times broke the news that David Reuben, one of the richest men in the UK, had apparently fled to the tax haven of Monaco, there was much pearl clutching. Reuben had moved from his Holland Park house in London to live full-time in the principality.
Labour’s tax regime was blamed and there were said to be fears there would be a cascading effect across the economy, with wealth draining from the UK. It was reported that he had probably left because of potential taxes on wealth in the upcoming budget.
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