Russia has lost another data center in its ongoing conflict with Ukraine after drones hit a government data center in the suburbs of Gorodets, some 230 miles east of the Kremlin and over 600 miles away from the frontlines. According to Data Center Dynamics (DCD), the freshly drone damaged data center is operated by the Russian Ministry of Finance and was said to hold several state registries, including the Federal Taxation Service’s tax database.

“The facility is one of two key data processing centers of the Federal Tax Service of Russia operating in a geo-distributed mode,” DCD reported, citing a Russian media outlet. “The damage to this facility could potentially affect the operation of state information systems of the Russian Federation.” Ukraine has targeted Russian data centers multiple times since the start of October, which it started doing after Moscow escalated the conflict by striking Ukrainian data centers. While the Russian finance ministry reportedly operates two other data centers — one at the Federal Data Processing Center in Dubna, Moscow Region, and another in Yerzovka, Volgograd Region — losing a third of its data centers could have a major impact on government services that it provides.

A modern society’s reliance on digital services means that data centers are now critical infrastructure and have become major targets in conflict. Russia’s Yandex bot traffic collapsed after the Ukrainian drone strikes, but its disinformation bot network simply migrated to unaffected data centers to continue operating as normal. Another recent instance of a civilian data center getting caught in a conflict was in the Middle East, after Iranian forces hit AWS sites in the UAE and Bahrain in response to the United States’ bombing campaign that began in February. This has led to disruptions to many digital services in the area, which is why Amazon has advised many of its clients to move to other regions to avoid further disruptions.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine started in 2014 when it forcibly occupied the Crimean Peninsula, but the current situation started when Moscow escalated the situation and attempted to take Kyiv in 2022. But what makes this 12-year conflict especially deadly is the new technologies and strategies that are being implemented in the front lines, including the widespread and innovative use of drones.

While SSD pricing isn't quite as bad as what we see in the RAM market, buying more storage for your PC is still quite painful. Samsung recently released a new 'budget' version of its 990 M.2 SSD, and it just got a surprising $200 discount at Amazon. The 990 2TB SSD is now $329 instead of $529, offering a solid 38% saving.

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The 990 SSD is an interesting product because it is one of the few SSDs released after the AI pricing crunch sent storage prices into orbit. As such, we know what Samsung thinks this drive is worth in the current climate, namely $529. While 2TB of storage would have been much cheaper a year ago, a 38% discount on a new SSD is not to be sniffed at, especially given all signs point to these drives getting more expensive, not cheaper, in the future.

We reviewed this drive at launch last month and liked its full-fledged Gen 4 throughput, decent power consumption, and good all-around performance. The 990 is essentially a QLC-based 990 EVO Plus, featuring Samsung's PiccoloQ controller and V9 QLC Flash memory.

As you can see from our testing data, it scores very close to the 990 EVO Plus in latency testing, while beating the 990 EVO drive in bandwidth and 3DMark overall score.

This drive also scored well in our PS5 test, so this drive could serve as an expansion drive for your shiny new PlayStation if you so choose. At its original list price, this drive makes no sense as a purchase up against the 990 Pro or Samsung's Gen 5 9100, but at this price it is a good chunk cheaper than both of those options.

Amazon does have a 36% discount on the 990 Pro 2TB, now $409 instead of $639 if you want to spend a bit more on that slightly more performant drive. Or, if your motherboard supports Gen 5, you might want to eat the $85 jump for the 9100 Pro 2TB, currently $415 at Amazon. This regular 990 also has a 1TB model on sale, but that discount is just 17%, so its $189.99 price tag makes it poorer value compared to this 2TB model.

As we approach the end of 2026, these storage prices remain tough to stomach, but things don't look like they are going to improve any time soon. In fact, all signs point to the AI pricing crunch continuing to make things worse going forward, meaning leaving it too long could make storage even more expensive in the future.

Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has put the annual cost of licensing the company’s AI software at around $2,000 per GPU to 'run all the software that Nvidia provides that runs agents on these AI factories,' according to a recent video of the comments (below), a pricing model that could generate $50 billion over five years under a proposed scenario involving five million paid licenses outlined by FourWeekMBA.

Huang discussed the pricing at GTC Berlin on October 22, where the company outlined its broader push to build an AI infrastructure business spanning chips, software and AI-agent security. “Software licensing will become increasingly a major part of our company’s business. The way that we license will be…for example, it’s about $2,000 per GPU per year to run all the software that Nvidia provides that runs agents on these AI factories,” said Huang.

The numbers add up quickly. At $2,000 per GPU each year, Nvidia would bring in $10 billion annually if five million GPUs were covered by paid licenses. Over five years, that would amount to $50 billion, provided customers kept renewing their subscriptions. The catch, however, is that Nvidia has not disclosed how many GPUs could be covered by the proposed $2,000 fee, or whether that’s its standard price. It’s also unclear which software the license would cover, or if there is overlap between products.

The distinction matters because Nvidia already charges for enterprise software. Its AI Enterprise platform is listed at $4,500 per GPU for a one-year subscription. Huang’s reported $2,000 figure is lower, but Nvidia has not confirmed that the two prices cover the same products or licensing terms. It should not be treated as a confirmed price cut.

The licensing discussion comes as Nvidia develops more of the infrastructure needed to deploy and manage AI agents in enterprise environments. These systems can use tools, access data, and execute tasks, creating new security and management challenges for businesses running them at scale.

On October 21, Nvidia announced its OpenShell Reference Architecture, a system that combines its Vera Rubin computing infrastructure, Vera CPUs, and BlueField-4 data processing units (DPUs) running Nvidia Sentry. OpenShell provides a secure runtime for AI agents, establishing boundaries around their actions and access to tools and resources. Sentry monitors agent activity independently and can quarantine an agent that attempts to cross those boundaries, according to Nvidia. The architecture is designed to bring security controls into the underlying infrastructure rather than relying solely on safeguards built into an AI model or application.

Nvidia had previously introduced its Open Agent Safety Platform in September. The newer reference architecture builds on that effort, extending the approach to enterprise infrastructure and edge systems.

Other companies are also incorporating these controls into their products. Anthropic is integrating OpenShell and BlueField hardware with Claude Managed Agents to give businesses additional control over what their AI agents can access inside execution sandboxes. Salesforce has developed a Slack Admin Bridge for OpenShell that lets administrators review agent access requests, approve or reject permissions, and monitor activity directly in Slack.

The proposed software pricing fits Huang’s wider argument that Nvidia is becoming more than a supplier of GPUs. The company has expanded into networking, systems, enterprise software, and infrastructure designed to run AI workloads. Speaking on the BG2Pod podcast recently, Huang said, “One of these days, people might not categorize us as a chip company anymore.” He pointed to Nvidia’s presence across industries including healthcare, automotive, telecommunications and life sciences, where the company provides broader technology stacks rather than chips alone.

That said, Nvidia has not said when the $2,000-per-GPU fee would take effect or which software it would cover. It also remains unclear how the proposed pricing would fit into the company’s existing enterprise software business.

Gamers can now experiment with playing their favorite Steam titles on a jailbroken PlayStation 5. The game launcher is actually based on the Playden launcher designed for macOS and adapted for the PlayStation, allowing you to sign in with your Steam account and install games from your library directly to the console. Playden for PS5 is a GitHub project that lets you run Steam games on the console, notes VideoCardz. When you launch a game on Playden for PS5, it sets a private Windows environment and is run through prospero-win, which is a PS5 port of Wine.

Note that the launcher itself does not run the game — instead it builds a separate PS5 app created for the game that you installed, allowing the Steam title to appear as a separate tile on the console’s home screen. Aside from that, its files, settings, and crashes are isolated from the launcher and other games. There’s also a separate runtime kit that handles Wine for PS5, the required graphics drivers, the Windows environment, and a template app shell for your games.

While Playden for PS5 successfully launches Steam games, it does not necessarily mean a smooth start-to-end experience for every title. The creator notes that it’s still in the Alpha stage of development, with X user v7dt1 saying that even though they were able to launch a game, it eventually crashed. On the other hand, u/Cevap shared on the r/PS5_Jailbreak subreddit that they were able to play Portal through the launcher with no issues, except for the lack of a mouse cursor and the inability to hit ESC to open the options menu. Still, the developer of the launcher lists several compatible games, including American Truck Simulator, Cyberpunk 2077, Doom Eternal, GTA: Vice City, Left 4 Dead 2, Team Fortress 2, and more.

Of course, users need a jailbroken PlayStation 5 if they want to use this launcher. But aside from that, the creator said that using it poses several risks, including the fact that it’s an unofficial Steam client. While there haven’t been any problems with third-party Steam clients, the app notes that Valve does not officially support it and any risk that comes with the use of the launcher “is yours to accept.”

Sony announced that it will cease physical game disc production by January 2028, which did not sit well among many fans. In fact, a petition against the move has nearly hit 200,000 signatures just a week after the announcement. Alongside that announcement, we started seeing a number of jailbreaks and emulators for the PS5, allowing users to take back control of their hardware, likely to the chagrin of Sony executives.

Windows XP became available at retailers for the first time on this day back in 2001. It was ushered in with Microsoft's largest and glitziest launch event since Windows 95, but the bigger news was its delivery of an OS with modern underpinnings and features. Thankfully, it lived up to the hype and would ensure nearly 13 years of favor among enthusiasts, but that might be partly due to the failure of the unloved Vista.

The NYC launch event for Windows XP in 2001 was the centerpiece of a lavish $500 million campaign Microsoft had planned for the new OS. However, celebrations were somewhat muted due to the aftermath of 9/11. Microsoft actually dumped its intended ‘Prepare to Fly’ launch slogan for ‘Yes You Can’ for this obvious reason.

Nevertheless, the launch was still a significant event and featured NYC Mayor Rudy Giuliani joining Bill Gates on stage. Gates framed the big launch as evidence that “New York is back and open for business.” There was also a free lunchtime concert in Bryant Park featuring Sting, followed by a Times Square NYC takeover. Meanwhile, retail stores like CompUSA, Circuit City, and Best Buy opened at midnight for eager tech beavers to grab a copy of Windows XP at its freshest.

At the launch presentation, Gates said that the debut of Windows XP represented the end of the era of MS-DOS, which had underpinned a UI or shell known as Windows for many years. For consumers, that stretched all the way up to the much maligned Windows Me.

As we mentioned in our 40-year retrospective of Windows last year, Windows XP was the real ‘Start Me Up’ moment. That’s because it brought the Windows NT core to consumer PCs – replacing the archaic DOS and its restrictions and drivers. Thus, Windows XP would become well regarded for reliability, performance, and security (after a few teething troubles), and its new UI was claimed to make tasks 25% easier to complete, too.

Some of the technical features that would be widely welcomed in XP included USB plug-and-play support that worked, built-in CD burning software, and ClearType support as new LCDs started to usurp bulky CRTs on desks.

During Windows XP’s supported life (October 2001 to April 2014), there would be three major Service Pack (SP) releases. It also saw DirectX 8.1 to 9.0c arrive for gamers. In the meantime, Windows Vista made something of an unwanted splash, launched to consumers in January 2007. Windows XP’s lengthy extended support meant that folks could skip Vista entirely and move straight to Windows 7 when it hit retail and new-build systems in October 2009.

Overall, it is interesting to observe that Windows XP’s lifespan was actually over two years longer than Windows 10, which was (in)famously launched as “the last version of Windows.”

Even as optical media sees a resurgence and new CD players hit the market, some optical drive and component manufacturers have ended production. As a result, PS Audio and Naim have halted production of their high-end CD players, raising questions about the maintenance and repairability of these new devices. Headphonesty says that of the eight new models, four are from Musical Fidelity, two from Marantz, and one each from Arcam and NAD.

Musical Fidelity reportedly sources its key components from SUOS-HiFi, with three of its new models using SUOS disc mechanisms. In contrast, the fourth uses a SUOS-sourced servo but a tray-loading mechanism from an unnamed manufacturer. On the other hand, Marantz reportedly develops its drives in-house, though it’s unclear whether it also outsources production to a third party. As for the two remaining manufacturers, they did not reveal who made their optical drives.

PS Audio had to end production of the PMG Super Audio CD Transport because D&M, Marantz’s parent company, has ceased external orders for its optical drives. Although the company bought D&M’s entire remaining stock, it wasn’t enough to keep production going. Naim faced the same issue with its Uniti Star—though it didn't name its optical drive supplier, it had to find an alternative when the manufacturer stopped production. Naim was evaluating a replacement manufacturer when it, too, stopped making the components the Uniti Star needed. While both companies retained some optical drives in inventory, they are only for repairs and replacements.

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These issues highlight the problem of relying on a single manufacturer for such a critical component. But even though these manufacturers would love to find alternative sources for the drives that they need, it’s likely that only a few companies are capable of making such a niche product, even if demand has grown substantially recently.

The best option for them would be to design these parts in-house, which is what Marantz is doing. That way, even if the current maker they rely on goes out of business, they could plausibly find another one to take over production (or even build it themselves). This is difficult to accomplish, though, with PS Audio CEO Paul McGowan saying that building its own optical disc reader is beyond the company’s capabilities.

OpenAI’s AI agents built hidden channels to talk across walls put up between them in red-team tests, communicating by manipulating the CPU cache with no network link or shared file, according to a company blog post. The containment was intended to stop that kind of secret-swapping, but the agents found multiple ways around it when asked. Security researchers already showed that a covert cache channel can move data between cloud virtual machines (VMs); a hijacked agent on a shared cloud server could, in theory, exchange data on the same physical machine, and do so undetected by network monitoring.

The agents in question were set up in separate microVMs, on shared hosts, with OpenAI’s sandboxing software, and were asked to swap synthetic secrets without a network connection or shared writable files. One agent evicted select data from the CPU’s cache while another timed the reloading, enabling the two to communicate with fast and slow reads using a protocol they agreed on first. The same cache-timing technique was used to extract data in the Spectre and Meltdown attacks; but unlike in those cases, the covert channel here needs two willing parties.

One X user, tech commentator Ryan Orhan, wrote that the isolation “wasn’t necessarily broken at the software level,” calling it “a pretty remarkable demonstration of why secure agent containment is such a difficult problem.”

The company’s concern is that models might “find unauthorized ways to communicate with agents in other sandboxes,” with communication outside permitted channels constituting a failure of containment. A 2017 paper at the NDSS security conference demonstrated a covert cache channel between two Amazon EC2 VMs, fast enough to carry an SSH connection, but now agents can build one themselves when asked, including the encoding process. In principle, such a channel could be weaponized, with the sender being code an attacker controls or directs, for example, a prompt-injected agent in a cloud sandbox. The receiver could be a process on the same physical machine, and the data would then leave without any network traffic for monitoring to catch.

The agents turned up three other channels, too: shared storage, where one agent alternated bursts of writes with idle time while the other timed the difference; competition for CPU time in a shared execution container; and a TLS certificate cache in OpenAI’s offline web setup. In most of these tests, OpenAI pointed the agents at the channel or gave them a protocol, and most of the channels are slow and hard for models to exploit.

The red-team testing involved teams of frontier-model agents that worked in parallel and cooperatively toward three objectives: to reach the live internet, to cross an internal security boundary, and to talk across isolation boundaries. Extra tests assumed the inner protections had already failed, with an agent out of its sandbox, past the monitors and in full control of its host machine, to see whether it could still reach the live internet.

The agents came from some of the company’s most capable models, including the “upcoming GPT-6 Astra Cyber model and an internal frontier model,” and were given infrastructure source code, configuration details, and documentation describing potential vulnerabilities, so the defenses were tested under conditions favorable to an attacker. The tests ran on isolated, purpose-built copies of the company’s research infrastructure and used “hundreds of billions of tokens” in total.

The post comes after several cybersecurity incidents involving OpenAI’s agents, including the July Hugging Face breach and a Sept. 20 DNS episode that led to an 11-day pause in training. With training resumed Oct. 1, the company continues to disclose vulnerabilities across “several microVM projects” and has made red-teaming with its most capable models part of the safety cases that decide whether training and evaluation go ahead. The company believes future models will be able to find vulnerabilities not yet known about.

AMD Director of Client Product Management Travis Kirsch sat down with a Japanese publication to share the backstory of the AMD Ryzen 7 5800X3D and its relaunch this year. Kirsch told MyNavi Tech+ [machine translated] that AMD CEO Lisa Su was one of the proponents of bringing back the groundbreaking X3D processor that first debuted in April 2022.

While some may think this was a simple relaunch of a four-year-old processor, the company had to do extensive re-engineering and update its manufacturing process with TSMC just to bring it back. The decision to relaunch it was well-timed, too.

While the world is suffering from extremely high DDR5 memory prices when it finally arrived in the middle of 2026, Kirsch said that “this was planned before changes in the memory market occurred, not as a countermeasure to DDR5 shortages,” and that it was “the final gift to local users who have used our AM4 for nearly a decade, offering systems that use DDR4 the last change to upgrade their PCs.”

Beyond the Ryzen 7 5800X3D, the Japanese publication also touched on AMD’s value offerings, or lack thereof. Four Ryzen 3 processors are available new today—one for AM5 and three for AM4—which raises the question of whether AMD is abandoning the entry-level market.

Kirsch said that while the company aims to offer a product for every price point, AMD is mostly focused on the premium, high-performance gaming market — we see this in the October Steam Survey results, with AMD closing in on Intel at 48.4% CPU share. As for the affordable CPU market, he said it’s no longer as big as it used to be, as laptops have taken over this segment.

Of course, any discussion with a tech executive these days would almost always touch on the memory chip shortage. “…there are things we can control and things we cannot. Market price trends are the result of everyone moving (and there’s nothing we can do about it),” Kirsch said.

“We are simply focused on providing consumers with choices in any situation. This is to ensure that consumers have the opportunity to purchase the best AMD PCs, regardless of the price.”

Nvidia is collaborating with German energy firm PreussenElektra GmbH (PEL) to explore converting old nuclear power plants into AI data centers. In an official announcement on October 21st, the U.S. chipmaker and the German firm entered a preliminary partnership to assess whether the latter's decommissioned nuclear power plant sites in Germany can be converted into high-performance AI data centers. The plan does not involve using nuclear power to power any future data centers. Instead, the project is focused on leveraging the existing power, water, and other infrastructure already present at the sites.

“Our former power plant sites have valuable industrial infrastructure and offer opportunities for new, future-oriented uses. Together with NVIDIA, we intend to conduct a sound assessment of whether and how these conditions can be leveraged for AI factories. In doing so, we are combining the responsible reuse of our sites with new economic opportunities for the regions,” says Guido Knott, Chairman of PEL’s Management Board.

The open-ended exploration will assess existing energy grid links, available land, and industrial infrastructure at the former nuclear sites to see if they meet the strict operational requirements of “AI factories.”

The move aims to find alternatives to building massive data centers from scratch amid the unprecedented AI infrastructure buildout. New data centers require well-located land, industrial-zone approvals, proximity to water infrastructure for cooling, and high-voltage grid connections, things nuclear plants already have. By repurposing these facilities, Nvidia hopes to significantly reduce cost and development timelines.

“AI factories require access to power, land and high-capacity infrastructure, and former industrial sites could provide a strong foundation for this next generation of computing,” said Markus Hacker, senior regional director at Nvidia. Together with PreussenElektra, we will assess how its sites could meet the technical and operational requirements of AI factories and contribute to Germany’s high-performance AI infrastructure.”

Germany permanently shut down its last remaining operational nuclear power plants in April 2023, following the Fukushima nuclear disaster, and is dismantling about 30 nuclear power plants across the country. PreussenElektra is currently responsible for decommissioning and dismantling eight of the plants, which are likely the sites to be assessed. The company, alongside Nvidia, has made it clear that the data center assessment initiative is strictly in an experimental feasibility phase.

No investment amounts, approved development plans, or definitive construction agreements have been finalized yet.

Reverse engineer and cybersecurity bounty hunter log4j recently found they were getting “weirdly targeted ads” on their Samsung TV and discovered privacy breaches. As they live-tweeted their discoveries, they found increasingly concerning code in the Tizen operating system, including detailed user telemetry from packet logging, audio categorization, screenshots, cross-device identification for ad tracking, and more, all designed to extract as much user information as possible to improve targeted ads.

log4j posted on X that they were concerned with how specific the ads on their 2025 Samsung TV were. They decided to reverse-engineer the Tizen OS on their TV to see what it was doing—they “discovered PRIVACY HORROR,” log4j states, marking the start of subsequent posts sharing more concerning findings.

The tester theorizes that Samsung TVs are so sluggish because they do a lot of post-processing of user data, including audio, screenshots, and AID (a cross-device tracking ID for ads), plus computer vision processing and models running on the TV. The hacker even found a region-specific convolutional neural network (an AI) that tracks user behavior, citing examples like what videos the user watches, which ads are skipped, and video progress. Log4j also found behavior for TVs without microphones, stating it will find connected devices with microphones, such as a soundbar or a connected Bluetooth device, to record audio.

Hugging Face engineer ngxson commented that they would test the microphone behavior using their Flipper Zero and found that the TV opened the microphone for five seconds, then stopped. ngxson waited for another microphone response but found none hours later. However, ngxson explained that their Tizen TV was already rooted and had multiple settings disabled, so an unmodified TV may behave differently.

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The hacker used OpenAI tools to hack the TV, but the company eventually banned them for cyber abuse, as stated in an email they received. log4j defended themselves, saying they never used OpenAI’s tools to exploit or find vulnerabilities, only for local reverse engineering, and that they didn't breach the terms of use. In a comment below their post about the ban, log4j said it seemed OpenAI banned their account because of a primitive classifier.

However, Samsung TVs and Tizen aren’t the only culprits in reportedly breaching user privacy; other brands like LG have also been accused of spying on customers. Many owners have also reported their TVs slowing down despite no new features or heavy apps running, suspecting it is mainly bloatware, but it could also be the spying behavior Log4j found. The hacker is also working on a comprehensive write-up of their findings, including how others could do it themselves.

At the end of the post series, they jokingly say they “finally found a company that truly listens to its customers.”