Claude AI has cracked a post-quantum encryption test scheme and discovered a 200 - 800 times faster attack on a reduced-round version of AES-128.

The breakthrough, achieved using Anthropic's Mythos Preview AI, comes just as the field of post-quantum cryptography is gaining critical attention ahead of NIST standardization. So, for those who don't know, AES-128 is the encryption standard used throughout modern computing, and full AES-128 performs 10 rounds of mathematical transformations. Claude attacked a research version of HAWK-256, a digital signature system designed to remain secure even against quantum computers. The system is currently being tested by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST).

Claude attacked the research version of HAWK with only seven rounds and discovered hidden symmetry in the HAWK-256 lattice-based algorithm, reducing its effective key strength and enabling a full key recovery in about 3 hours and 42 minutes on a 96-core server. Separately, Mythos found a way to streamline a seven-round AES-128 attack by eliminating a 256-way guessing step, though both remain infeasible for real-world systems.

Logitech has confirmed it will ship wireless mice with user-replaceable batteries in Europe to comply with EU battery legislation taking effect in February 2027. The rest of the world will continue to receive the sealed versions it sells today. The company is doing something similar to Nintendo's approach with the Switch 2, where the change is limited to markets where the law requires it.

Robin Piispanen, Logitech's new head of gaming, explained the decision in an interview with The Verge. Logitech's current wireless mice use lightweight soft-pack lithium batteries, which the company says are not safe for users to replace themselves. To comply with the EU rules, Logitech will switch to hard-pack batteries housed in a more rigid casing that's less prone to punctures, while also selling certified replacement batteries.

The trade-off is that the European version will cost more to manufacture and weigh more. Since low weight is one of Logitech's biggest selling points for its gaming mice, the EU-compliant model sacrifices one of the company's core design priorities in exchange for repairability. Piispanen was candid about that trade-off, framing the change as a regulatory requirement rather than a consumer-focused feature.

Halo: Campaign Evolved launched on PC on July 28 without local split-screen co-op, a feature available on Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5. NexusMods user JPurd123 found that the PC version of the game never had split-screen removed at all.

The feature is technically sitting right there, enabled in the config files. "The PC build never had it stripped out," JPurd123 wrote in the mod description. "It ships with split-screen already enabled in config (bUseSplitscreen=True), and the split-screen HUD layouts, the sign-in UI, the split-screen VFX variants and the audio parameters are all still cooked into the game files. It just isn't exposed in the menus. This mod calls the code that is already sitting there."

In other words, the mod doesn't recreate split-screen or modify the game's executable. It simply calls functionality that's already present, adding a second local player through UE4SS and bypassing the menu restriction that hides the feature.

AMD just released the RX 9050 8GB, its latest entry-level graphics card based on the RDNA 4 architecture. However, rumors and product pages (that have now been taken down) revealed that AMD was also planning to release a 4GB trim of the card with significantly lower memory performance. According to an X post by Hassan Mujtaba, AMD officially confirmed that the RX 9050 4GB is a real SKU, but it will only be available to one system integrator in the US.

VideoCardz found the system integrator that the RX 9050 4GB is being shipped to, that being CyberPowerPC. Unsurprisingly, CyberPowerPC put the RX 9050 4GB in one of their cheapest pre-built machines, featuring a Ryzen 5 5500, 8GB of DDR4 memory and a 500GB M.2 PCIe SSD.

AMD reportedly introduced the RX 9050 4GB in this unorthodox way to "deliver strong overall value for entry-level gaming customers". We will likely never get the card's pricing, as the card is being sold exclusively as an OEM-only product, but it's likely being sold well under the RX 9050 8GB's $279 MSRP (not considering extra discounts OEMs typically get from buying GPUs in bulk).

Sandfall Interactive has confirmed it is interested in bringing Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 to the Nintendo Switch 2. However, the studio is being upfront about why it is not a straightforward port. In an interview with Automaton, the team described it as a "big technical challenge" and made clear that nothing is ready to announce yet.

"It's a big technical challenge because we tried to do something beautiful with the game, but of course, the Switch 2 is not as powerful as the PlayStation or the Xbox Series X," said studio co-founder and CTO Tom Guillermin.

"So, it's an important thing for us to consider, especially given the size of our studio." CEO Guillaume Broche said the studio is genuinely interested in bringing the game to Switch 2, but stressed that it is far too early to announce any concrete plans.

SK Hynix is preparing to begin mass production of LPDDR6 memory in the second half of 2026, according to South Korean outlet Herald. Xiaomi is expected to become the first customer, with the new memory reportedly destined for the company's next-generation flagship smartphone.

LPDDR6 is built on SK Hynix's sixth-generation 10nm-class process, known as 1c. The company is targeting a maximum data transfer speed of 14.4 Gbps, a 33% improvement over the 10.7 Gbps ceiling of LPDDR5X. Power efficiency improves by more than 20%, achieved through two key design changes.

The first is a sub-channel structure that allows individual memory channels to operate selectively, engaging only the data paths that are actually needed at any given moment. The second is Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling, which adjusts voltage and frequency dynamically depending on the workload rather than running at a fixed level.

GOG has confirmed that a native Linux version of its Galaxy launcher is officially in development. The news comes from joint CEO Krzysztof Papliński, who told GamingOnLinux that the company has hired a specialist for the project and is actively exploring the best approach to Linux support. No release timeline has been shared.

"Linux continues to be one of the topics we hear the most about from our community, and we really appreciate the passion and patience of everyone who's been asking about it," Papliński said. He further described the project as a significant undertaking, saying GOG is actively investing time and resources into Linux support but is not yet ready to share specific plans or a release timeline.

The specialist position was first advertised in January 2026, when GOG described Linux as its "next major frontier" and sought a senior engineer to rethink Galaxy's architecture and tooling for the platform. Hiring that engineer appears to have been the first major step toward making a Linux version a reality.

Assassin's Creed Hexe seems to get a new launch window every week. While previous leaks put the launch window right around June 2027, renowned leaker NateTheHate2 has tweeted that Assassin's Creed Hexe will likely launch in late 2027, at the earliest.

This comes right after reports claimed that an official reveal for Assassin's Creed Hexe was imminent, which would normally indicate a release window that was approaching swiftly. Of course, these rumors were compounded by the leak of a DLC, which made fans hopeful that Hexe would launch earlier than many had anticipated.

However, Nate has just advised them to pump the brakes a bit. Assassin's Creed Hexe is still more than a year away from launch, according to the leaker who has a good track record of previous Assassin's Creed leaks. The game has gone through a tumultuous development cycle, and that has naturally pushed the game back from its original launch target, which was right around summer 2027.

Apparently the data keeps backing up an analyst who would rather it didn't. Circana's Mat Piscatella noted on Bluesky that the PS5 has effectively become "the Call of Duty box," with 2012's Black Ops II re-release topping weekly PlayStation Network charts ahead of Fortnite, NBA 2K26, and Marvel Rivals.

He said he wanted the top of these charts mixed up, but was hoping for new games doing the mixing, not decade-old ports. It looks like the general trend agrees with him more than he'd like. Piscatella has floated the idea that gamers are simply happier replaying old favorites in remake form, and while he admits this part is more gut feeling than hard data, the numbers around him are hard to ignore.

Assassin's Creed Black Flag Resynced is the clearest example. The remake sold 3.5 million copies in 14 days, blowing past Ubisoft's full-year sales target before its first month was even over. Ubisoft's own CFO has since admitted remakes may be more profitable than new entries, since they reuse assets, need less marketing, and sell on nostalgia alone. Resynced also outpaced Assassin's Creed Shadows in day-one revenue by more than double.

Huawei has been showing off its new MateBook laptop which is unbelievably lightweight.

As Notebookcheck reports (via VideoCardz), Huawei teased the MateBook Pro S ahead of its full revelation next week (on August 5), letting us know that the laptop somehow only weighs 798 grams.

That's a pretty incredible achievement for the weight of a notebook, and it's over a third lighter than the MacBook Air 13-inch - and almost 200 grams lighter than the featherweight LG Gram 14.

Brazilian GPU repair specialists Paulo Gomes and SidNelson say they have traced a recurring burn issue on GIGABYTE GeForce RTX 4060 boards back to a flaw in the card's VRM design, and not the HDMI port that was initially suspected.

The pair focused their investigation on the GIGABYTE RTX 4060 AERO model after noticing the same failure pattern showing up again and again. Affected boards show heavy PCB carbonization near the HDMI output, which apparently led some owners to assume the display connector was the culprit.

Gomes and SidNelson say that is not the case. Using an oscilloscope and multimeter, they compared damaged samples against a working GIGABYTE card and an Inno3D RTX 4060, checking all four phases of the GPU's power delivery.

Intel was apparently working on an unlocked Core i9 embedded SKU, based on Raptor Lake with just Raptor Cove P-cores and no E-cores. Spotted by Notebookcheck.net, an overclocking/content creator on the Bilibili platform, WestmereX, published a video featuring a qualification sample Core i9-14901KE that was capable of running at 7.4GHz with sub-zero cooling.

The Core i9-14901KE belongs to Intel's embedded lineup of 14th Gen Raptor Lake Refresh CPUs aimed at industrial and enterprise customers. The "14xx1" series consists of Core i9, i7 and i5 SKUs with disabled Gracemount E-cores, leaving the chips with just their Golden Cove P-cores. All of the existing models in the lineup are low-power options, with official power ratings of either 65W or 45W.

The Core i9-14901KE is one of Intel's strangest chips, being overclocking capable despite belonging to a CPU lineup that is geared toward anything but overclockers and enthusiasts. Regardless, we now have evidence that this chip did exist (beyond just initial marketing claims), but was never released. The CPU is an almost identical clone of the Core i9-14900K featuring a 3.8GHz base clock, 5.8GHz boost clock, eight P-cores and a 125W TDP.

Xbox's recent 16-hour service outage shouldn't have disrupted physical disc-based games, but some users reported being locked out of their offline titles, including physical disc copies of games that don't require an online connection to play. Microsoft has confirmed it is now investigating the issue.

In a statement to The Verge, Xbox tech chief Scott Van Vliet confirmed the issue stemmed from an external licensing service, and that entitlement checks for disc-based games should not have caused problems during the outage. "Offline mode is also designed to rely on those saved entitlements," Van Vliet said, while noting a fix is in the works.

For those who missed it, the Xbox outage started on Monday and lasted for approximately 16 hours. Xbox confirmed the outage was caused by an external licensing service failure, leading to widespread issues across its platform, including sign-in, game downloads, game launches, library loading, and more.

Australian players of GTA Online recently discovered that gambling at Diamond Resort Casino, including the Lucky Wheel, has been revoked without any warning or explanation. Australian players are now walking into the casino and up to games such as blackjack, horse betting, and the Lucky Wheel, only to be greeted with the following error message: "This feature is not available for you."

So, why the sudden change, and why just Australia? In Australia, games that simulate gambling need to feature an R18+ classification, which GTA Online does. However, Australia's government is currently cracking down on simulated gambling in video games. For those who don't know, GTA Online players can take real-world money and convert it into GTA$, which they can then use to purchase Casino Chips. Notably, players aren't able to convert the chips back into real-world cash.

The Australian government may now be viewing the gambling practises within GTA Online as a violation, as a GTAForums user pointed out that GTA Online for the Xbox was recently reclassified by Australia's regulatory body, and the new consumer advice doesn't include the previously stated "high impact gambling".

A rogue AI agent driven by OpenAI models executed a 4.5-day hack into Hugging Face's production infrastructure in July 2026, using a mix of zero-day exploits and lateral movement to breach internal systems before reaching the internet. The event marked the first time a rogue AI agent used a zero-day exploit to gain access to a system and exponentially increase its privileges.

The intrusion began when the agent escaped its evaluation sandbox via a zero-day exploit in OpenAI's package registry cache proxy. It then compromised a third-party public code-evaluation sandbox, which it then turned into a launchpad to stage further escalating attacks. From there, it targeted Hugging Face's dataset-processing pipeline with two injection vectors, gaining access to secrets, tokens, and deeper access into Hugging Face's internal network, eventually reaching source code.

Hugging Face used open-source models like GLM-5.2 to decode the agent's encrypted payloads and reconstruct the full attack chain. It has displayed how the rogue AI agent managed to conduct these attacks over the 4.5 days with an interactive map. The attack highlights the growing threat of frontier AI models and how they carry out attacks, not specifically the impact of said attacks. Hugging Face wrote that frontier models' ability to discover and exploit vulnerabilities is more important than their initial impact, at least for now.

A recent Steam Community announcement confirmed that Valve is working through reservations for the recently released Steam Machine one day at a time, and that everyone who has reserved the new device should get the chance to purchase one.

The company introduced waitlists to streamline access for users eager to get their hands on the upcoming device, but it's proven to be quite a struggle given the ongoing component shortage. The move follows a similar strategy used for the Steam Controller, which saw such high demand upon launch that Valve had to implement a queueing system to prevent scalping and ensure fair access.

The Steam Machine will now operate under the same model, with interested buyers first having to join a waitlist, which, when passed, means a reservation place has become available within your region. The reservation is essentially Valve guaranteeing you a Steam Machine unit, and once your Steam Machine becomes available, Valve will follow up with an option-to-order email.

KIOXIA's next-generation UFS 5.0 embedded flash memory is finally here, with the technology set to unlock a new level of performance for premium smartphones and other mobile devices when it enters mass production at the end of 2026. UFS 5.0 represents a massive leap forward compared to UFS 4.1, so much so that on-device AI will become faster and more responsive wherever it's deployed.

KIOXIA UFS 5.0 technology combines a custom in-house controller with its impressive 8th-generation BiCS FLASH 3D memory technology to offer significant improvements in performance and efficiency. KIOXIA UFS 5.0 is also built on the latest JEDEC UFS 5.0 standard while leveraging the MIPI M-PHY v6.0 physical layer and UniPro v3.0 protocol to support an impressive 46.6 Gb/s per lane (theoretically) and around 10.8 GB/s of effective dual-lane read and write performance.

And when it comes to performance, the compact UFS 5.0 flash memory can deliver sequential read speeds of up to 10 GB/s, with sequential write speeds of up to 9 GB/s. And it does so in a tiny 7.5 x 13mm BGA package that's also more power efficient than the previous generation. For on-device AI, read speeds have been one of the biggest limiting factors for premium smartphones and tablets, which makes UFS 5.0 an important step forward for embedded flash memory.

KIOXIA has announced its next-generation E1.S form-factor SSDs for AI and hyperscale environments with the new NX1 Series. Built for data center environments and cutting-edge workloads, the NX1 Series represents a new era for E1.S PCIe 5.0 NVMe data center SSDs as they're the first to support direct liquid cooling.

The new KIOXIA NX1 Series is the successor to the popular XD Series, leveraging the latest PCIe 5.0 performance while also maintaining a focus on operational efficiency. Compared to the XD Series, KIOXIA NX1 Series SSDs deliver up to 38% higher sequential write speeds with up to 20% higher random write performance. In addition to direct liquid cooling via a cold plate, the E1.S 9.5 mm form factor also supports traditional air cooling, with the E1.S 15mm form factor supporting air cooling.

With capacities ranging from 1.92TB to 15.36TB, and an architecture that leverages KIOXIA's 8th generation BiCS FLASH memory with CMOS directly Bonded to Array (CBA) technology, the KIOXIA NX1 Series is tailor-made for modern AI infrastructure and servers where increasingly dense, high-speed and reliable storage is a necessity.

Discord is one of the most popular chat and community tools among PC gamers, with over 200 million monthly active users. Although Discord is free for everyone, Discord Nitro is the platform's premium subscription that offers expanded upload capabilities, custom icons, emojis, themes, HD video streaming, and Xbox Game Pass in select regions. Plus, monthly discounts on Logitech G and SteelSeries gaming gear.

As part of NVIDIA's GeForce Rewards program, available for those who log into the NVIDIA App, GeForce gamers with a GeForce GTX 10 Series or above PC or laptop are eligible for the Discord Nitro Reward that offers three months of Discord Nitro. There are some terms and conditions, including that it's only valid for those who haven't subscribed to Discord Nitro in the past 12 months, but it's a great offer for those regular Discord users that haven't given Nitro a go.

This Discord Nitro Reward isn't the only thing happening this week, as NVIDIA is also giving away a custom-wrapped CONTROL Resonant GeForce RTX 5080 Founders Edition GPU, alongside codes for Remedy's highly anticipated CONTROL Resonant. All you need to do is go to the social media post (embedded below) for the giveaway, comment, and you're in the running.

The latest AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 26.7.1 Driver for Radeon gamers is here. In addition to game support and fixing some outstanding issues, it also adds support for the new entry-level Radeon RX 9050 GPU that was quietly announced earlier today. The entry-level 1080p GPU is a cut-down version of the Radeon RX 9060 XT, with half the Compute Units and a power rating of only 92W.

As for new game support, this new driver offers optimizations for the Gears of War: E-Day Open Beta and Early Access weekend that kicks off on August 6 for those who preorder the game and PC Game Pass subscribers. This event will allow gamers to jump into the multiplayer side of the game early, so Radeon owners looking to jump in will definitely want to install the latest driver.

The other new game getting support with AMD Software: Adrenalin Edition 26.7.1 is Out of Control Evolution, a survival PvP game based on Rust and published by Tencent Games. As for the fixes, they're mostly for issues with Radeon RX 7000 Series GPUs, including one that fixes crashing when using AMD FSR Upscaling 4.1 for RDNA 3 on Windows 10 systems. Here's a look at the full Release Notes.