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Sony says it will proceed with ending PlayStation disc sales in January 2028 despite petitions, boycott threats, and concerns about digital ownership and the disappearance of the secondhand market. PCMag reports: After Sony's recent earnings call, an investor Q&A session saw analysts ask about its controversial decision to end disc production across all of its consoles. The company hadn't publicly commented since its announcement and had reduced activity on social accounts and other marketing channels. Sony's chief financial officer, Lin Tao, broke that silence during the Q&A. "There are various reasons we made this decision," she said through an interpreter. "The biggest being that the digitalization of content overall has been progressing. That's the big factor. It's not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of content, digitalization is progressing. "And so when we think about the future, and we put in a lot of thought and time, and we cautiously considered this, and we came to this conclusion, and we're going to cautiously move this forward," Tao said. "We have received various opinions, and people have strong views, and we understand that the community has put forth those views to us," said Tao. [...] Tao says Sony wants to "consider" the emotions of disgruntled customers, especially as titles are "connected to people's fond memories in many cases." Tao also alluded to the possibility of future measures to lessen the blow for anyone unhappy with the decision, but it appears Sony hasn't yet finalized what those may be. "In the future digital ecosystem, how do we engage the gamers is something that we would like to continue to explore," she said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Jul 2026 9:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Cyberattacks targeting municipal water systems have been reported in at least seven states this week, prompting the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency to warn utilities nationwide that hackers are trying to disrupt critical water infrastructure. In a public service announcement Thursday, the agencies said water and wastewater utilities have reported incidents to the FBI, with some malicious activity degrading water operations. The announcement does not name the states. The warning comes after hackers targeted more than 30 municipal water facilities in Minnesota in an attack that had hallmarks of Iranian meddling, according to a law enforcement official. It is still under investigation. A spokesperson for Minnesota's information technology services agency said Thursday there was no indication the breaches contaminated any municipal water supplies. The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a separate alert that some larger attacks on water infrastructure had "resulted in boil water notices and sustained manual operations," though it did not say where. [...] The federal advisory said the malicious cyber actors, or MCAs, targeted specific brands of control systems used by municipal water utilities, though the FBI and the EPA urged operators of all systems to take precautions. [...] The agencies said the hackers remotely accessed internet-facing devices, changed IP addresses and passwords, and caused utilities to lose monitoring and control capabilities. The federal advisory calls on system operators to remove programmable logical controllers, or PLCs, from direct internet exposure by putting them behind secure gateways and firewalls; use strong passwords; and limit communications between authorized control system devices through access control lists.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Jul 2026 8:10pm GMT

Google has integrated its Nano Banana 2 image generator into Google Earth, allowing users to place AI-generated events and objects onto real satellite imagery. The company says its AI-generated images contain invisible watermarks detectable through Gemini or Lens, but the BBC found those safeguards and some third-party detection tools can be fooled into labeling manipulated Google Earth images as real. From the report: A collapsed Eiffel Tower, a sinkhole swallowing the Great Pyramid of Giza and Russian tanks in Ukraine's capital were among the images BBC Verify was able to create when testing the feature, which was rolled out on Thursday. Google has not yet responded to questions based on BBC Verify's tests, but in a social media post the company said they "take misinformation seriously" and that "we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections." AI and misinformation expert Henk van Ess has highlighted the risks this feature poses, creating fake images of a non-existent nuclear power plant in Iran, a refugee camp on the US-Mexico border and a fake hospital in Gaza with a bomb crater next to it. He said Google was allowing "invented" imagery to be "welded to genuine coordinates, drawn on genuine imagery." "The forgery does not have to look convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on," van Ess added. UPDATE 7/31/26 10:54 AM: Google is rolling back the image generation inside of Google Earth: "We know that people uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world. We've seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we've also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we're rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails. It's important to note that generated images didn't appear in the main Google Earth experience for others to see and were watermarked as AI generated."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Jul 2026 7:00pm GMT

When I had to use Windows 11 for a month because you people paid me to do so, the one seemingly small thing that really ground my gears were Windows 11's terrible right-click (context) menus. They were full of stuff I didn't put there, slow to open, and in some places, a modern Windows 11 context menu would have its own old Win32 context menu with even more stuff. It seems Microsoft is finally going to fix all of this. This new compact menu will be much faster and more reliable, as it foregoes needing to load in all the third-party actions that slow it down currently. Additionally, at the Windows Insider Meetup in London, Microsoft showed me a new context menu customization feature coming soon that will let users configure what apps and actions appear in the right-click menu. ↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central Look, I know to us non-Windows users this seem like an incredibly small and dumb thing to focus on, but when your operating system is as much of a trashfire as Windows has become, improved context menus are massive improvements that make a meaningful difference. Of course, Microsoft makes these types of promises all the time, so I'll believe it when I see it.

30 Jul 2026 11:06pm GMT

We may all have a disdain for Chrome - OSNews users probably use Chrome a lot less than the average public - but that doesn't mean the browser doesn't sometimes do interesting things other browsers should copy. Chrome is in the the process of increasing its release cadence, but getting users to restart their browser more often than they already do to apply these higher number of updates is going to be a problem. As such, Google is working on something that seems quite obvious now that they've talking about it: Investing in "dynamic patching" that will eliminate the need for a full browser restart in most cases. By leveraging Chrome's multi-process architecture, dynamic patching sequentially replaces background child processes (like the Renderer and GPU) with updated binaries on the fly. Stay tuned to learn more as we research and develop this feature. ↫ Chrome Security Team Chrome was the first browser to use multiple processes, isolating tabs from one another so that if one website or tab went haywire, your other tabs would be unaffected. It makes perfect sense to have the browser use new, updated binaries for new tabs you open as soon as they become available, in a sort of ship-of-Theseus kind of approach to updating. Of course, you can't postpone the inevitable forever, but this should provide real-world benefits to users. Neat. The linked blog post goes into much more detail about other things too, like various low-level mitigations to prevent bugs and security issues from causing too much harm.

30 Jul 2026 10:53pm GMT

Plus, a new deprecation policy ensures features aren't removed suddenly.

30 Jul 2026 2:53pm GMT

HAWK withstood years of testing that had yet to uncover a fatal weakness found through Mythos.

29 Jul 2026 10:07pm GMT

Advertisers agreed to "reset" relationship with X.

29 Jul 2026 8:57pm GMT

It's that time of the week again, I guess. The year is 2026, and I'm still amazed when I find a new entry in my Start menu's All apps list for an app I don't remember installing. This time, it's Microsoft again, and the product is OneDrive Photos, which appears to be yet another photo viewer and editor for Windows 11 that nobody asked to have installed automatically. While searching for Microsoft Photos, a new app called "OneDrive Photos" showed up in my results out of nowhere. It appears to have arrived either via Windows Update or an update for the OneDrive sync client on Windows. ↫ Mayank Parmar at Windows Latest Just don't use Windows. You people paid me to use it and it was not a fun experience.

29 Jul 2026 12:48pm GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Just trying to answer one simple question: What if the terminal was 3D?

11 May 2026 12:00am GMT

Break the pattern today or the loop will repeat tomorrow.

18 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT