An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Spotify and several major record labels, including UMG, Sony, and Warner, have taken legal action against the unknown operators of Anna's Archive. The action follows the shadow library's announcement that it would release hundreds of terabytes of scraped Spotify data. Unsealed documents reveal that the court already issued a broad preliminary injunction, ordering hosting companies, Cloudflare, and domain name services, to take action. [...] All these documents were filed under seal, as the shadow library might otherwise be tipped off and take countermeasures. These documents were filed ex-parte and kept away from Anna's Archive. According to Spotify and the labels, this is needed "so that Anna's Archive cannot pre-emptively frustrate" the countermeasures they seek.

The lawsuit (PDF), which was unsealed recently, explains directly why Anna's Archive lost several of its domain names over the past weeks. The .ORG domain was suspended by the U.S.-based Public Interest Registry (PIR) in early January, while a domain registrar took the .SE variant offline a few days later. "We don't believe this has to do with our Spotify backup," AnnaArchivist said at the time, but court records prove them wrong. The unsealed paperwork shows that the court granted a temporary restraining order (TRO) on January 2, which aimed to target Anna's Archive hosting and domain names. The sealed nature of this order also explains why the .ORG registry informed us that it could not comment on the suspension last week. While the .ORG and the .SE domains are suspended now, other domains remain operational. This suggests that the responsible registrars and registries do not automatically comply with U.S. court orders.

[...] While the unsealed documents resolve the domain suspension mystery, it is only the start of the legal battle in court. It is expected that Spotify and the music companies will do everything in their power to take further action, if needed. Interestingly, however, it appears that the music industry lawsuit may have already reached its goal. A few days ago, the dedicated Spotify download section was removed by Anna's Archive. Whether this removal is linked to the legal troubles is unknown. However, it appears that Anna's Archive stopped the specific distribution of Spotify content alleged in the complaint, seemingly in partial compliance with the injunction's ban on 'making available' the scraped files.

The Irish government is planning to bolster its police's ability to intercept communications, including encrypted messages, and provide a legal basis for spyware use. From a report: The Communications (Interception and Lawful Access) Bill is being framed as a replacement for the current legislation that governs digital communication interception. The Department of Justice, Home Affairs, and Migration said in an announcement this week the existing Postal Packets and Telecommunications Messages (Regulation) Act 1993 "predates the telecoms revolution of the last 20 years."

As well as updating laws passed more than two decades ago, the government was keen to emphasize that a key ambition for the bill is to empower law enforcement to intercept of all forms of communications. The Bill will bring communications from IoT devices, email services, and electronic messaging platforms into scope, "whether encrypted or not."

In a similar way to how certain other governments want to compel encrypted messaging services to unscramble packets of interest, Ireland's announcement also failed to explain exactly how it plans to do this. However, it promised to implement a robust legal framework, alongside all necessary privacy and security safeguards, if these proposals do ultimately become law. It also vowed to establish structures to ensure "the maximum possible degree of technical cooperation between state agencies and communication service providers."/i

Porsche made an announcement Friday. In Europe they sold more electrified Porsches last year than pure combustion-engined models, reports Electrek: in Europe, a majority (57.9%) of Porsche's deliveries were plug-ins, with 1/3 of its European sales being fully electric. For models that have no fully electric version but do have a PHEV (Cayenne and Panamera), the plug-in hybrid version dominated sales.

Of particular note, the Macan sold better with an electric powertrain than it did with a gas one, and was the company's strongest-selling model line and the line with the largest sales growth. The Macan sold 84,328 units globally (up 2% from last year), with 45,367 (53.8%) of those being electric. That 53.8% may seem like a slim majority, but when compared to EV sales globally, it's incredibly high. About a quarter of new cars sold globally were electric in 2025, so Porsche is beating that number with the one model where direct comparisons are available.

And even in the US, about a third of Macans sold were electric. That's notable given the tough year EVs had in the US, with it being the only major car-buying region that experienced a tick down in EV sales... And again, while 1/3 is a minority of Macan sales in the US, it's also well over the US' average ~10% EV sales. So it's clear the EV Macan isn't just performing like an average EV, but well beyond it.
The article adds that "we're quite excited about the Cayenne EV, which will be the most powerful Porsche ever."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Nearly five million social media accounts belonging to Australian teenagers have been deactivated or removed, a month after a landmark law barring those younger than 16 from using the services took effect, the government said on Thursday. The announcement was the first reported metric reflecting the rollout of the law, which is being closely watched by several other countries weighing whether the regulation can be a blueprint for protecting children from the harms of social media, or a cautionary tale highlighting the challenges of such attempts.

The law required 10 social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Snapchat and Reddit, to prevent users under 16 from accessing their services. Under the law, which came into force in December, failure by the companies to take "reasonable steps" to remove underage users could lead to fines of up to 49.5 million Australian dollars, about $33 million. [...] The number of removed accounts offered only a limited picture of the ban's impact. Many teenagers have said in the weeks since the law took effect that they were able to get around the ban by lying about their age, or that they could easily bypass verification systems.

The regulator tasked with enforcing and tracking the law, the eSafety Commissioner, did not release a detailed breakdown beyond announcing that the companies had "removed access" to about 4.7 million accounts belonging to children under 16. Meta, the parent company of Instagram and Facebook, said this week that it had removed almost 550,000 accounts of users younger than 16 before the ban came into effect. "Change doesn't happen overnight," said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. "But these early signs show it's important we've acted to make this change."

Wikipedia turns 25 today, and the online encyclopedia is celebrating that with an announcement that it has signed new licensing deals with a slate of major AI companies -- Amazon, Microsoft, Meta Platforms, Perplexity and Mistral AI. The deals allow these companies to access Wikipedia content "at a volume and speed designed specifically for their needs." The Wikimedia Foundation did not disclose financial terms.

Google had already signed on as one of the first enterprise customers back in 2022. The agreements follow the Wikimedia Foundation's push last year for AI developers to pay for access through its enterprise platform. The foundation said human traffic had fallen 8% while bot visits -- sometimes disguised to evade detection -- were heavily taxing its servers.

Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales said he welcomes AI training on the site's human-curated content but that companies "should probably chip in and pay for your fair share of the cost that you're putting on us." The site remains the ninth most visited on the internet, hosting more than 65 million articles in 300 languages maintained by some 250,000 volunteer editors.

The UK government has abandoned its controversial plan to require workers to sign up for a mandatory digital ID system to prove their eligibility to work in the country, opting instead to move existing document-based checks -- such as biometric passports -- fully online by 2029.

The reversal follows a dramatic collapse in public support; polling showed approval falling from just over half the population in June to less than a third after Prime Minister Keir Starmer's announcement. Nearly 3 million people signed a parliamentary petition opposing the scheme. The government says it remains committed to mandatory digital right-to-work checks but will no longer require enrollment in a new ID system.

Microsoft announced Tuesday what it calls a "community first" initiative for its AI data centers, pledging to pay full electricity costs and reject local property tax breaks following months of growing opposition from residents facing higher power bills. The announcement in Washington, D.C. marks a clear departure from past practices; Microsoft has previously accepted tax abatements for data centers in Ohio and Iowa.

Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said the company has been developing the initiative since September. Residential power prices in data center hubs like Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio jumped 12-16% over the past year, faster than the U.S. average. Three Democratic senators launched an investigation last month into whether tech giants are raising residential bills. Microsoft also pledged a 40% improvement in water efficiency by 2030 and committed to replenishing more water than it uses in each district where it operates.

"China recently placed a supercritical carbon dioxide power generator into commercial operation," writes CleanTechnica, "and the announcement was widely framed as a technological breakthrough." The system, referred to as Chaotan One, is installed at a steel plant in Guizhou province in mountainous southwest China and is designed to recover industrial waste heat and convert it into electricity. Each unit is reported to be rated at roughly 15 MW, with public statements describing configurations totaling around 30 MW. Claimed efficiency improvements range from 20% to more than 30% higher heat to power conversion compared with conventional steam based waste heat recovery systems. These are big numbers, typical of claims for this type of generator, and they deserve serious attention.

China doing something first, however, has never been a reliable indicator that the thing will prove durable, economic, or widely replicable. China is large enough to try almost everything. It routinely builds first of a kind systems precisely because it can afford to learn by doing, discarding what does not work and scaling what does. This approach is often described inside China as crossing the river by feeling for stones. It produces valuable learning, but it also produces many dead ends. The question raised by the supercritical CO2 deployment is not whether China is capable of building it, but whether the technology is likely to hold up under real operating conditions for long enough to justify broad adoption.

A more skeptical reading is warranted because Western advocates of specific technologies routinely point to China's limited deployments as evidence that their preferred technologies are viable, when the scale of those deployments actually argues the opposite. China has built a single small modular reactor and a single experimental molten salt reactor, not fleets of them, despite having the capital, supply chains, and regulatory capacity to do so if they made economic sense... If small modular reactors or hydrogen transportation actually worked at scale and cost, China would already be building many more of them, and the fact that it is not should be taken seriously rather than pointing to very small numbers of trials compared to China's very large denominators...

What is notably absent from publicly available information is detailed disclosure of materials, operating margins, impurity controls, and maintenance assumptions. This is not unusual for early commercial deployments in China. It does mean that external observers cannot independently assess long term durability claims.
The article notes America's Energy Department funded a carbon dioxide turbine in Texas rated at roughly 10 MW electric that "reached initial power generation in 2024 after several years of construction and commissioning." But for both these efforts, the article warns that "early efficiency claims should be treated as provisional. A system that starts at 15 MW and delivers 13 MW after several years with rising maintenance costs is not a breakthrough. It is an expensive way to recover waste heat compared with mature steam based alternatives that already operate for decades with predictable degradation..."

"If both the Chinese and U.S. installations run for five years without significant reductions in performance and without high maintenance costs, I will be surprised. In that case, it would be worth revisiting this assessment and potentially changing my mind."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader cusco for sharing the article.

For a quarter century, the TIOBE Index has attempted to rank the popularity of programming languages by the number of search engine results they bring up — and this week they had an announcement.

Over the last year the language showing the largest increase in its share of TIOBE's results was C#.

TIOBE founder/CEO Paul Jansen looks back at how C++ evolved: From a language-design perspective, C# has often been an early adopter of new trends among mainstream languages. At the same time, it successfully made two major paradigm shifts: from Windows-only to cross-platform, and from Microsoft-owned to open source. C# has consistently evolved at the right moment.

For many years now, there has been a direct battle between Java and C# for dominance in the business software market. I always assumed Java would eventually prevail, but after all this time the contest remains undecided. It is an open question whether Java — with its verbose, boilerplate-heavy style and Oracle ownership — can continue to keep C# at bay.
While C# remains stuck in the same #5 position it was in a year ago, its share of TIOBE's results rose 2.94% — the largest increase of the 100 languages in their rankngs.

But TIOBE's CEO notes that his rankings for the top 10 highest-scoring languages delivered "some interesting movements" in 2025: C and C++ swapped positions. [C rose to the #2 position — behind Python — while C++ dropped from #2 to the #4 rank that C held in January of 2025]. Although C++ is evolving faster than ever, some of its more radical changes — such as the modules concept — have yet to see widespread industry adoption. Meanwhile, C remains simple, fast, and extremely well suited to the ever-growing market of small embedded systems. Even Rust has struggled to penetrate this space, despite reaching an all-time high of position #13 this month.

So who were the other winners of 2025, besides C#? Perl made a surprising comeback, jumping from position #32 to #11 and re-entering the top 20. Another language returning to the top 10 is R, driven largely by continued growth in data science and statistical computing.

Of course, where there are winners, there are also losers. Go appears to have permanently lost its place in the top 10 during 2025. The same seems true for Ruby, which fell out of the top 20 and is unlikely to return anytime soon.

What can we expect from 2026? I have a long history of making incorrect predictions, but I suspect that TypeScript will finally break into the top 20. Additionally, Zig, which climbed from position #61 to #42 in 2025, looks like a strong candidate to enter the TIOBE top 30.
Here's how TIOBE estimated the 10 most popularity programming languages at the end of 2025

1. Python
2. C
3. Java
4. C++
5. C#
6. JavaScript
7. Visual Basic
8. SQL
9. Delphi/Object Pascal
10. R

"We will make the new ð algorithm...open source in 7 days," Elon Musk posted Saturday on X.com. Musk says this is "including all code used to determine what organic and advertising posts are recommended to users," and "This will be repeated every 4 weeks, with comprehensive developer notes, to help you understand what changed."

Some context from Engadget: Musk has been making promises of open-sourcing the algorithm since his takeover of Twitter, and in 2023 published the code for the site's "For You" feed on GitHub. But the code wasn't all that revealing, leaving out key details, according to analyses at the time. And it hasn't been kept up to date.
Bloomberg also reported on Saturday's announcement: The billionaire didn't say why X was making its algorithm open source. He and the company have clashed several times with regulators over content being shown to users.

Some X users had previously complained that they were receiving fewer posts on the social media platform from people they follow. In October, Musk confirmed in a post on X that the company had found a "significant bug" in the platform's "For You" algorithm and pledged a fix. The company has also been working to incorporate more artificial intelligence into its recommendation algorithm for X, using Grok, Musk's artificial intelligence chatbot...

In September, Musk wrote that the goal was for X's recommendation engine to "be purely AI" and that the company would share its open source algorithm about every two weeks. "To the degree that people are seeing improvements in their feed, it is not due to the actions of specific individuals changing heuristics, but rather increasing use of Grok and other AI tools," Musk wrote in October. The company was working to have all of the more than 100 million daily posts published to X evaluated by Grok, which would then offer individual users the posts most likely to interest them, Musk wrote. "This will profoundly improve the quality of your feed." He added that the company was planning to roll out the new features by November.

An R&D lab under America's Energy Department annnounced this week that "Neuromorphic computers, inspired by the architecture of the human brain, are proving surprisingly adept at solving complex mathematical problems that underpin scientific and engineering challenges."

Phys.org publishes the announcement from Sandia National Lab: In a paper published in Nature Machine Intelligence, Sandia National Laboratories computational neuroscientists Brad Theilman and Brad Aimone describe a novel algorithm that enables neuromorphic hardware to tackle partial differential equations, or PDEs — the mathematical foundation for modeling phenomena such as fluid dynamics, electromagnetic fields and structural mechanics. The findings show that neuromorphic computing can not only handle these equations, but do so with remarkable efficiency. The work could pave the way for the world's first neuromorphic supercomputer, potentially revolutionizing energy-efficient computing for national security applications and beyond...

"We're just starting to have computational systems that can exhibit intelligent-like behavior. But they look nothing like the brain, and the amount of resources that they require is ridiculous, frankly," Theilman said.For decades, experts have believed that neuromorphic computers were best suited for tasks like recognizing patterns or accelerating artificial neural networks. These systems weren't expected to excel at solving rigorous mathematical problems like PDEs, which are typically tackled by traditional supercomputers. But for Aimone and Theilman, the results weren't surprising. The researchers believe the brain itself performs complex computations constantly, even if we don't consciously realize it. "Pick any sort of motor control task — like hitting a tennis ball or swinging a bat at a baseball," Aimone said. "These are very sophisticated computations. They are exascale-level problems that our brains are capable of doing very cheaply..."

Their research also raises intriguing questions about the nature of intelligence and computation. The algorithm developed by Theilman and Aimone retains strong similarities to the structure and dynamics of cortical networks in the brain. "We based our circuit on a relatively well-known model in the computational neuroscience world," Theilman said. "We've shown the model has a natural but non-obvious link to PDEs, and that link hasn't been made until now — 12 years after the model was introduced." The researchers believe that neuromorphic computing could help bridge the gap between neuroscience and applied mathematics, offering new insights into how the brain processes information. "Diseases of the brain could be diseases of computation," Aimone said. "But we don't have a solid grasp on how the brain performs computations yet." If their hunch is correct, neuromorphic computing could offer clues to better understand and treat neurological conditions like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.

It will be the first medical evacuation from the International space station in its 25-year history. The Guardian reports: An astronaut in the orbital laboratory reportedly fell ill with a "serious" but undisclosed issue. Nasa also had to cancel its first spacewalk of the year... The agency did not identify the astronaut or the medical problem, citing patient privacy. "Because the astronaut is absolutely stable, this is not an emergent evacuation," [chief health and medical officer Dr. James] Polk said. "We're not immediately disembarking and getting the astronaut down, but it leaves that lingering risk and lingering question as to what that diagnosis is, and that means there is some lingering risk for that astronaut onboard."
"SpaceX says it's Dragon spacecraft at the International Space Station is ready to return its four Crew-11 astronauts home in an unprecedented medical evacuation on Jan. 14 and 15," reports Space.com: The SpaceX statement came on the heels of NASA's announcement that the Crew-11 astronauts were scheduled to undock from the space station on Jan. 14 and splashdown off the coast of California early on Jan. 15. The Crew-11 Dragon spacecraft will return NASA astronauts Zena Cardman and Mike Fincke to Earth alongside Japanese astronaut Kimiya Yui and Russian cosmonaut Oleg Platanov... NASA officials opted for a "controlled medical evacuation" in order to provide the astronaut better treatment on the ground, NASA chief Jared Isaacman has said...

Dr. James Polk, NASA's chief medical officer, has said the medical issue is not an injury to the astronaut afflicted, but rather something related to the prolonged exposure to weighlessness by astronauts living and working on the International Space Station. "It's mostly having a medical issue in the difficult areas of microgravity and the suite of hardware that we operate in," Polk said.

LEGO has responded to concerns that its newly announced Smart Brick technology represents a departure from the company's foundation in physical, non-digital play, a day after the official reveal at CES drew criticism from child development advocates. Federico Begher, SVP of Product, New Business, told IGN the sensor-packed bricks are "an addition, a complementary evolution" and emphasized that the company would "still very much nurture and innovate and keep doing our core experience."

A BBC News report on the CES announcement noted "unease" among "play experts" at the unveiling. Josh Golin, executive director of children's wellbeing group Fairplay, said he believed Smart Bricks could "undermine what was once great about Lego" and curtail imagination during play. Begher compared the rollout to the Minifigure's gradual introduction decades ago. The Smart Brick launches in March in Star Wars sets including an X-Wing that produces engine sounds based on movement. The technology is screen-free and physical, Begher said, drawing on learnings from previous projects like Super Mario figures where "some of the levels were very prescriptive."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: SteamOS's slow march across the Windows-dominated PC gaming landscape is continuing to creep along. At CES this week, Lenovo announced it will launch a version of last year's high-priced, high-powered Legion Go 2 handheld with Valve's gaming-focused, Linux-based OS pre-installed starting in June. And there are some intriguing signs from Valve that SteamOS could come to non-AMD devices in the not-too-distant future as well. [...] Valve has also been working behind the scenes to expand SteamOS's footprint beyond its own hardware. After rolling out the SteamOS Compatible software label last May, SteamOS version 3.7 offered support for manual installation on AMD-powered handhelds like the ROG Ally and the original Legion Go.

Even as SteamOS slowly spreads across the AMD-powered hardware landscape, the OS continues to be limited by a lack of compatibility with the wide world of Arm devices. That could change in the near future, though, as Valve's upcoming Steam Frame VR headset will sport a new version of SteamOS designed specifically for the headset's Arm-based hardware. [...] It's an especially exciting prospect when you consider the wide range of Arm-based Android gaming handhelds that currently exist across the price and performance spectrum. While emulators like Fex can technically let players access Steam games on those kinds of handhelds, official Arm support for SteamOS could lead to a veritable Cambrian explosion of hardware options with native SteamOS support.

[...] That's great news for fans of PC-based gaming handhelds, just as the announcement of Valve's Steam Machine will provide a convenient option for SteamOS access on the living room TV. For desktop PC gamers, though, rigs sporting Nvidia GPUs might remain the final frontier for SteamOS in the foreseeable future. "With Nvidia, the integration of open-source drivers is still quite nascent," [Valve's Pierre-Louis Griffais] told Frandroid about a year ago. "There's still a lot of work to be done on that front So it's a bit complicated to say that we're going to release this version when most people wouldn't have a good experience."

Bose is end-of-lifing its SoundTouch smart speakers but softened the blow by open-sourcing the SoundTouch API and preserving limited local features, AirPlay, and Spotify Connect. Ars Technica reports: In October, Bose announced that its SoundTouch Wi-Fi speakers and soundbars would become dumb speakers on February 18. At the time, Bose said that the speakers would only work if a device was connected via AUX, HDMI, or Bluetooth (which has higher latency than Wi-Fi). After that date, the speakers would stop receiving security and software updates and lose cloud connectivity and their companion app, the Framingham, Massachusetts-based company said. Without the app, users would no longer be able to integrate the device with music services, such as Spotify, have multiple SoundTouch devices play the same audio simultaneously, or use or edit saved presets.

The announcement frustrated some of Bose's long-time customers, some of whom own multiple SoundTouch devices that still function properly. Many questioned companies' increasingly common practice of bricking expensive products to focus on new devices or to minimize costs, or because they've gone through acquisitions or bankruptcy. SoundTouch speakers released in 2013 and 2015 with prices ranging from $399 to $1,500.

Today, Bose had better news. In an email to customers, Bose announced that AirPlay and Spotify Connect will still work with SoundTouch speakers after EoL, expanding the wireless capabilities that people will still be able to access. Additionally, SoundTouch devices that support AirPlay 2 can play the same audio simultaneously. The SoundTouch app will also live on, albeit stripped of some functionality. "On May 6, 2026, the app will update to a version that supports the functions that can operate locally without the cloud. No action will be required on your part. Opening the app will apply the update automatically," Bose said. Bose also provided instructions (PDF) for a workaround for saving presets that uses the favorites options in music service apps.

The Lego Group today unveiled Smart Bricks, a tiny computer that fits entirely inside a classic 2x4 brick and which the company is calling the most significant evolution in its building system since the introduction of the minifigure in 1978. The Smart Brick contains a custom ASIC smaller than a single Lego stud and includes light and sound output, light sensors, inertial sensors for detecting movement and tilt, and a microphone that functions as a virtual button rather than a recording device.

The bricks detect NFC-equipped smart tags embedded in new tiles and minifigures, and they form a Bluetooth mesh network to sense each other's position and orientation. They charge wirelessly on a pad that can handle multiple bricks simultaneously. The first Smart Brick sets ship March 1 and are all Star Wars themed, ranging from a $70 Darth Vader's TIE Fighter at 473 pieces to a $160 Darth Vader's Throne Room Duel at 962 pieces.

Lego confirmed there is no AI or camera in the product. The company quietly piloted the technology in a 2024 Lego City set and says Smart Play will continue to expand through new updates and launches.

Google is quietly killing Gmail's ability to fetch mail from third-party email accounts using POP3, a long-standing feature that has allowed users to consolidate multiple inboxes into a single Gmail interface. The change takes effect this month and also ends Gmailify, the companion feature that applied Gmail's spam filtering and inbox organization to linked third-party accounts.

Google buried the decision in a support note rather than making any formal announcement. The company's suggested workaround -- switching to IMAP -- doesn't work for all affected users. Users can still access third-party accounts through the Gmail mobile app, but the Gmail service itself will no longer retrieve messages from external providers.

Colossal Biosciences, the Texas-based startup now valued at more than $10 billion that has attracted investments from Paris Hilton, Peter Jackson and Tom Brady, claimed earlier this year to have resurrected the dire wolf -- an animal that disappeared at the end of the last ice age -- but a group of leading canid experts concluded the company had done no such thing.

The scientists found that Colossal had made 20 edits to the DNA of grey wolves and the resulting animals did not substantially differ from wolves currently roaming North America. Beth Shapiro, Colossal's own chief scientist, acknowledged to New Scientist: "It's not possible to bring something back that is identical to a species that used to be alive. Our animals are grey wolves with 20 edits that are cloned."

Nic Rawlence, director of the palaeogenetics laboratory at the University of Otago in New Zealand, added: "Rather than true de-extinction, Colossal's attempts are genetically engineered poor copies at best, passed off as the real deal."

The company has nevertheless pressed forward. It has launched projects to revive the Tasmanian tiger, the dodo, and the moa and plans to unveil its interpretation of the woolly mammoth -- a genetically modified Asian elephant adapted to survive at -40C -- in the coming years. The Trump administration cited the dire wolf announcement while making efforts to cut the US endangered species list, calling de-extinction technology a potential "bedrock for modern species conservation."

Israel has operationally deployed Iron Beam, a 100,000-watt laser air-defense system capable of shooting down drones, rockets, and mortars at negligible per-shot cost. According to Tom's Hardware, it marks the first real-world deployment of a high-energy laser as part of a modern, multi-layered missile defense network. From the report: The Iron Beam is a short-range line-of-sight laser interceptor that is extremely cheap to run and, therefore, perfectly suited for intercepting low-cost, high-volume threats. According to the official Israeli announcement, Iron Beam systems have "successfully intercepted rockets, mortars, and UAVs."

A complex mix of government, military, scientific, and commercial interests were responsible for the research and development of the Iron Beam laser system. Central to the Iron Beam are "an advanced laser source and a unique electro-optical targeting system, enabling the interception of a wide range of targets at an enhanced operational range, with maximum precision and superior efficiency," boasted the press release by Israel's MoD. Moreover, it works "at a negligible marginal cost, which constitutes the laser system's primary advantage."

We don't get much more by way of technical details, perhaps understandably. However, Rafael Advanced Defense Systems execs heralded the system's "unique adaptive optics technology," in what it calls "the world's most advanced laser-based system for intercepting aerial threats." Its operational debut "marks the beginning of the era of high-energy laser defense," they claimed.

Michal Kicinski, who co-founded both CD Projekt and the DRM-free digital games store GOG back in 2008, has acquired 100% ownership of GOG from CD Projekt, bringing the platform full circle to one of its original creators.

GOG was already operating as part of CD Projekt through its Sp.z.o.o. subsidiary, but Kicinski now takes complete control of the company. The platform will continue operating independently and maintain its commitment to DRM-free gaming. "The mission stays the same: Make Games Live Forever," GOG said in its announcement.

CD Projekt's joint CEO Michal Nowakowski said the parent company's focus on its development roadmap and franchise expansion made this the right time for the move. GOG has signed a distribution agreement ensuring all upcoming CD Projekt Red titles will release on the platform. Kicinski, describing himself as a "mature gamer" who plays classics, said he's personally involved in developing several retro-spirited games slated for GOG in 2026.