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Tech News
Microsoft announced the Surface Laptop Ultra, featuring an Nvidia AI chip, with a starting price of $2,599 and scheduled to ship on October 16. The device includes the world's first magnetic USB-C port and supports running various AI models locally. The company also revealed plans for Meta's Muse AI agent to be available on Windows, aiming to enhance AI capabilities on consumer devices.
Independent researcher Radium Wang has built software that runs Doom on Hasselblad's $8,000 X2D camera, publishing the work on GitHub as part of a broader project exploring the camera's firmware. The repository, called Hasselblad-X-System-CIM-Firmware-Research-Feature-Extensions, contains source code, offline tools and research findings rather than a ready-to-install upgrade for the camera.
Microsoft has confirmed that the Surface Laptop Ultra will launch on October 16th, with starting prices at $2,599 for the base model. The device features a 15-inch HDR touchscreen, Nvidia RTX Spark chip, and a range of ports, targeting high-end users in creative, gaming, and AI fields. Higher configurations are available, with the most expensive reaching nearly $6,000.
Developer Jason Kopp (ArcadeJason) has built a Doom demo for the 1982 Vectrex vector-graphics console, giving the shooter a Tron-like line-drawn look derived from the console's electron-beam display. The game runs via Kopp's Ultimate Vectrex Multicart 2 cartridge, which acts as a plug-in PC handling processing while the Vectrex's CRT renders the image and the cartridge outputs audio separately; the project also uses an SDK built by Daniel Ferrer Guerrero.
Amazon has confirmed it has discontinued the ability to use Alexa voice commands to play or pause audio through the 3.5mm aux input on older Echo devices, including the Echo Plus (2nd gen), Echo (3rd gen), Echo (4th gen), and Echo Studio (1st gen). The physical aux connection itself still works, and users can still control playback manually through the Alexa app or use Bluetooth pairing instead.
A Reddit user known as Clean-Market5761 built a rough PC port of Marvel's Wolverine using source code stolen in the December 2023 Rhysida ransomware attack on Sony and Insomniac. The port is unfinished, with missing textures and Wolverine's head disabled because its PS5 shader library hasn't been ported over, and the developer says AI helped write scripts and automate asset conversion while manual trial and error handled the rest.
Lukas Vogel, creator of DoomQL, has built SQLDoom, a project that runs Doom's game logic inside the CedarDB database using 5,900 lines of SQL code. A Python frontend only handles graphics, sound and input, while all game calculations and state updates happen through SQL statements against database tables converted from Doom's original WAD files.
Android Authority writer Robert Triggs describes how dust and lint trapped inside USB-C ports caused loose, angled cable connections and failed fast-charging on his phone and tablet. He says cleaning the ports himself restored normal charging on both devices, avoiding a repair.
Developer Mitchell Hynes has built a browser-playable version of Halo: Combat Evolved that includes the full single-player campaign and a multiplayer mode supporting up to 128 players. The port maps the original Xbox controller scheme to mouse and keyboard, and early testers say it runs well in Google Chrome, closely matching the original Xbox release. The project follows the recent decompilation of the 2001 game's source code.
Take-Two Interactive issued a cease-and-desist to developer Paralympics Productions, forcing the team to shut down its unofficial native ARM port of GTA V for Android by October 3, 2026. The project, led by a developer known as Mojso, also covered a native Nintendo Switch build, both of which will now be discontinued without any code release. The developer acknowledged the legal notice and confirmed the shutdown in a message on X.
Chinese company Zinwa Technologies plans to open pre-orders on October 3 for a fully assembled BlackBerry Passport revival called the P26, running Android inside the original Passport body. The device will pack a new chipset, USB-C port, and 12GB of RAM, with shipments expected by late October. Zinwa currently sells a DIY version of the kit for $620 excluding shipping, though pricing for the assembled unit hasn't been announced.
ThreatDown researchers identified a botnet called Carbonato that targets Docker servers with exposed, unauthenticated daemons on port 2375. After gaining access, attackers launch a privileged container, install a persistent SSH backdoor, and embed an AI agent built on the open-source Hermes Agent framework that receives commands via Telegram and harvests stolen credentials. The infrastructure, exposed since May, was also linked to a separate operation distributing trojanized cryptocurrency wallet apps.