The End of the Disc: Sony Gets Serious, Microsoft Apparently Plans to Follow Suit

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Up until today, gaming consoles were designed to play physical media. From the cartridges-days to CD, Blu-Ray and Flash cards. While newer consoles added virtual stores to buy digital versions of games and content, gamers up until now had always the choice between the two options.

Both offer advantages. Digital means that you can start playing immediately, download always the latest version without any 0-day patching marathons, and do not have to find the Blu-Ray or cartridge first before playing the game.

Physical media comes with its own set of advantages, at least those that still come with a disc and not just a download code (virtual in disguise). The main advantage is that you can lend or sell the game at any time. Buy it, play it, and sell it once you are done. With digital, there is a chance that games are taken away from you at one point in time, because you buy only licenses.

Sony plans to end the Disc

Sony announced this week that it is ending the production of physical discs in January 2028 for new games releasing on PlayStation consoles. Sony claims that the change is a response to shifting consumer preferences.

All new games releasing January 2028 or later will only come in digital format. They can be purchased on the PlayStation Store or at retailers, but also only in digital format. Think of the code in a box releases that are out already or will come out in the future.

Microsoft might follow

While Microsoft has not yet officially buried physical releases, The Verge reports that Microsoft is working on a system to turn physical game discs into virtual copies in preparation for the move.

The idea is simple: When you buy a physical copy, it is added automatically to your game library on installation. However, unlike on PlayStation, where you can’t lend or sell it, lending or selling remains an option, reportedly.

When you sell the game and the new buyer installs it, it is removed from your library and added to the buyer’s.

The end is near

While digital-only gamers could say that this does not really matter to them, it is shortsighted. For the companies, Sony especially, it is a way to dry out the second hand market. If you can’t buy used games anymore, then you may be inclined to pay full price online. More money in Sony’s pockets and less options and rights for gamers.

There is another aspect to this. Some gamers prefer physical boxes and content. While these have deteriorated in quality since the good old days, where games used to come with big manuals and extras at no extra charge, it could seriously dampen the collector’s edition market as well.

I have made up my mind a long time ago. I prefer physical, as it gives me full ownership of the copy. I can sell or lend the game at any time, or put it on a shelf to look at its glorious artwork.

I won’t buy digital games on consoles and if this really hits in 2028, Sony won’t squeeze any more money out of my pockets. Will focus my efforts on retro gaming then. Lots of great games out there that need to be replayed or played for the first time.

What about you? Are you a gamer? Do you prefer physical or digital?

Sony gives us another example why you shouldn’t “buy” digital movies

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Imagine the following scenario: you browse the digital video store of a company, find a great movie or TV show, hit the buy button, only to find out later that the company that sold you the digital item has removed it from your library again. Money gone, movie gone, and seemingly no option to do anything about it.

This scenario is not one of those extreme unlikely events that never happens. Sony started to remove StudioCanal movies from its PlayStation Store some time ago. The company stopped the integrated movie store back in 2021 and has been at work since to remove content from user libraries.

This September, it is hitting British PlayStation users who bought Studio Canal titles. Sony lists hundreds of movies on a support page.

The reason? Sony says that “content licensing agreements” are to blame. The effect is simple: Starting September 1, 2026, customers will no longer be able to access “previously purchased content from Studio Canal” as it will be removed from the video library of the PlayStation system.

Sony is not the only major company that pulled content that customers purchased digitally before. Google, for instance, closed its Stadia cloud gaming service back in 2023 and cut access to purchased games. Google did refund software and hardware purchases though.

Microsoft shut down its ebooks store in 2019 and that also meant that customers could no longer access ebooks they bought in the store. Microsoft did issue full refunds as well.

The main takeaway is this: while companies use “buy” buttons when it comes to digital media, customers purchase licenses only. The license gives them the right to play, read or stream the content, but only as long as the license is not revoked. Revoking is rare, but it can happen at any time.

Good News: Microsoft extends Windows 10 support by another year

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

If you are a home user running Windows 10 on a PC, you may know that support for the operating system is coming to an official end. While Microsoft ended support back in October 2025 officially, it introduced an Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for home users for the first time.

Once joined, Windows 10 would get another year of security updates until October 2026. Now, with the deadline looming over the heads of millions, Microsoft announced an extension of support.

In short: Windows 10 machines that joined ESU will receive security updates until October 2027 now. That is valid for Home and Pro editions only, as Enterprise customers get other, mostly paid, options to extend support by up to three years.

If the Windows 10 PC receives security updates via ESU already, then it will continue to receive updates after October 2026.

Microsoft confirmed the extension on the official Windows blog. It updated the original article about Windows 10’s future with the information:

This post has been updated to reflect that the Windows 10 Extended Security Updates (ESU) program for personal use devices is being provided for an additional year, with coverage now available through Oct. 12, 2027. This extension provides customers with more time to transition to a new Windows 11 PC while continuing to receive critical security updates.

The decision makes sense on several levels. While Microsoft claims that this is done to give Windows 10 customers more time to migrate, which it does, it is likely that other reasons have played a role.

For one, Microsoft has received some regulatory pressure to extend support for Windows 10, as millions of customers continue to use the operating system. Some, millions as well, can’t upgrade to Windows 11, which leaves them stranded on the older version of Windows.

While Microsoft hopes that these users will buy new PCs or components, the reality is that some won’t. They may continue to use Windows 10, even at the risk of running a system that has known security issues, or make the switch to Linux to continue using the PC and its components, which in many cases work just fine.

LastPass Hit by Third-Party Data Breach: What You Need to Know About the Klue Incident

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Anyone still using LastPass? If so, you need to be aware about a new security incident that has been confirmed by the company this week.

In the modern SaaS ecosystem, a digital fortress is only as secure as the side door left open for third-party vendors. Password management firm LastPass has disclosed a new data breach that involved the intelligence platform Klue.

According to an official incident report published on the LastPass blog, threat actors recently compromised Klue’s systems to steal OAuth tokens, granting them unauthorized access to LastPass’s Salesforce environment.

What the Attackers Obtained

The threat actors compromised Klue’s systems to steal OAuth tokens, which they then used to access LastPass’s Salesforce environment. The exposed data was limited to standard CRM and business contact information:

  • Customer names
  • Email addresses
  • Phone numbers
  • Physical addresses
  • Support case data
  • Sales-related data

What They Did NOT Obtain

The core architecture of LastPass remained unbreached. The attackers did not gain access to:

  • Customer Vaults: All stored passwords, secure notes, and saved data remained encrypted and secure
  • Master Passwords: Because of LastPass’s zero-knowledge architecture, master passwords are never known or stored by the company, and they were not exposed here.
  • Core Systems: LastPass products, services, and primary infrastructure were entirely unaffected

LastPass reveals that the information can be used for phishing attacks and other social engineering attempts. It recommends that “customers remain vigilant” and “exercise caution regarding unsolicited communications, including emails, phone calls, or requests for sensitive information.”.

For LastPass users suffering from breach fatigue, this latest headline likely induces a familiar sense of dread. However, when put into perspective, the Klue incident is a far cry from the devastating, back-to-back breaches of 2022, where threat actors successfully made off with encrypted customer vault backups and proprietary source code.

Still, while this is fundamentally a story about a third-party CRM leak rather than a critical product failure, the stolen contact information arms hackers with exactly what they need to launch highly convincing phishing campaigns.

System Restore Evolved: Windows 11 Point-in-Time Restore Hits General Availability

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Imagine if a bad driver update or a bad update completely trashed your PC setup, but you could instantly roll the entire machine back to exactly how it was yesterday—local user files and all—in just a few minutes.

That scenario required use of third-party backup solutions until now. On June 23, 2026, Microsoft announced the general availability of its new, built-in Point-in-Time Restore feature for Windows 11 PCs (versions 24H2 and later).

According to the official release on the Microsoft Windows IT Pro Blog, this native recovery tool automatically captures full-system snapshots every 24 hours, giving Home, Pro, and Enterprise users a safety net to bypass hours of painful troubleshooting when something breaks the PC.

How Point-in-Time Restore works

Point-in-Time Restore acts as a comprehensive safety net for your operating system. Operating quietly in the background, the feature automatically captures full-system snapshots on a recurring schedule—defaulting to every 24 hours—and saves them directly to local storage.

Using it, you can roll back the PC to a previous state in minutes, according to Microsoft. That is excellent when a driver, Windows update or corrupted application affects the machine.

While it sounds similar to the classic “System Restore” tool windows users have known for decades, Microsoft built this version from scratch for modern PC management. The key upgrades include:

  • Inclusion of User Files: Legacy System Restore intentionally ignored personal data. Point-in-Time Restore captures the exact state of your machine, including the Windows OS, system configurations, settings, installed applications, and your local user files.
  • Smart Storage Management: To avoid eating up your hard drive, it integrates directly with Windows’ “reserved storage” (space set aside for updates). It enforces strict cleanup policies and caps its default disk footprint at just 2% of your drive.
  • Native Integration: The interface is cleanly built into the modern Settings app (System > Recovery), making it accessible without digging into the legacy Control Panel.

Here is a table that Microsoft provided to compare it to System Restore:

 Point-in-time restore System Restore 
Restore points Automatic, configurable cadence; user files are included in restore pointEvent-triggered or manual only; user files are excluded from restore point
Reliability Strict retention and cleanup policies No retention limits 
User experience Integrated in system settings Limited to control panel 
Storage impact Minimizes storage impact by integrating with reserved storage* Higher impact to storage space 
Management Will support robust remote management capabilities Limited remote management capabilities 

Default Availability and Rules

The feature is turned on by default on unmanaged Windows 11 Home and Pro devices, provided that the primary drive partition is 200 GB or larger.

If disaster strikes and your PC won’t boot into the main desktop, the recovery process is designed to work securely inside the Windows Recovery Environment (Windows RE).

The feature has its shortcomings though, especially when compared to third-party backup solutions. For one, restore points are kept for up to 72 hours only. That is a big problem in some cases, as issues may occur after the period. There is seemingly no option to store a restore point indefinitely, While Enterprise admins may change the retention period, 72 hours appears to be the longest.

Means: while Point-in-time restore is easier to use and in some cases better than System Restore, it won’t replace traditional backup options due to its 72 hour retention period.

Microsoft is migrating OneDrive and Sharepoint to cloud.microsoft

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Microsoft announced plans back in 2023 to unify its cloud services under a single domain. The reason was simple: enhance security, streamline the user experience and simplify administrative tasks.

The process is ongoing and Microsoft announced recently that the next phase of the transition begins in July 2026. The plan is to migrate the OneDrive and SharePoint services, including their domains, to the cloud.microsoft domain. Microsoft hopes to complete the migration by June 2027.

According to Microsoft, the process happens automatically in the background. Users will be redirected to the new domain automatically. It can happen, however, that some users, even in the same organization or network, are redirected earlier than others.

To understand this shift, it helps to realize how fragmented Microsoft’s web address ecosystem has been. For years, users have had to hop between a massive web of completely different domains like office.com, teams.microsoft.com, sharepoint.com, and outlook.office365.com.

The core of this update is a massive cleanup effort. Microsoft is progressively moving all of its core 365 web apps into a single, unified home: *.cloud.microsoft.

Why is Microsoft doing this?

This isn’t just a cosmetic makeover. Moving everything under a single domain solves three major architectural headaches for Microsoft:

  • Better Security: Because Microsoft owns and directly runs the top-level domain .microsoft (unlike .com, which anyone can buy a variation of), it creates an incredibly secure sandbox. It makes phishing, domain spoofing, and “lookalike” malicious websites virtually impossible to pull off for these services.
  • Smoother Performance & Fewer Logins: Right now, as your browser hops from outlook.office.com to sharepoint.com, it constantly has to pass security tokens back and forth across different domains to keep you signed in. Consolidating into one domain cuts down on redirect loops, reduces “sign-in fatigue,” and speeds up app switching.
  • Easier IT Management: Network admins used to have to manage massive, ever-evolving lists of dozens of domains to let Microsoft 365 traffic through company firewalls. Now, they can eventually just whitelist *.cloud.microsoft.

For users, the most important information is that bookmarks and links are safe, and that redirects will happen automatically.

Microsoft confirms Windows 11 version 26H2 officially

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Who would have guessed? The next major feature update for Windows 11 is, drum roll, version 26H2. It is a continuation of Microsoft’s current strategy of releasing one major update for its Windows 11 operating system each year.

But what about Windows 11 version 26H1 you may ask? Did not Microsoft release it this year already? Yes and no, actually. While it is true that Microsoft did indeed release Windows 11 version 26h1, it was neither a full-blown feature update nor a widespread release.

First released on February 10, 2026, it was designed specifically to support new hardware. Originally designed for the Qualcomm Snapdragon X2 chip, it will also support Nvidia RTX Spark silicon.

The update is pre-installed exclusively on devices that are powered by these chips. There is no direct upgrade path for existing Windows systems that use hardware from Intel or AMD.

Windows 11, version 26H2 release information

The next feature update for Windows 11 will install as quickly as any other update, as it is based on the same servicing model as Windows 11 versions 24H2 and 25H2. This means, that it will install fast on any device that runs these versions of Windows 11.

The same is not true for older Windows 11 versions or upgrades from Windows 10. These will take longer to install and will require multiple restarts.

Interestingly enough, devices that run Windows 11, version 26H1 won’t receive the feature update. Microsoft will likely release version 27H1 for them in the first half of 2027.

Regarding support, Windows 11, version 26H2 is supported for 24 or 36 months, depending on the version:

  • 24 months of support for Home, Pro, Pro EDU, and Pro for Workstations editions
  • 36 months of support for Enterprise, Education, IoT Enterprise, and Enterprise Multi-session editions

As always, it is a good idea to skip the update in the beginning. The main reason are undiscovered bugs and issues. All previous Windows 11 feature updates had bugs and some of them were discovered after release. So, to reduce the risk of problems while installing the new version or running it on PC, it is recommended to wait.

The Gog Summer Sale is here making it a great time to catch-up on classic games

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

PC gaming store Gog has started its Summer Sale a moment ago. It runs for the next 20 days and gives you access to more than 8,000 discounted games on the platform.

You may know that I prefer Gog over other digital games stores because of its stance on DRM, or more precisely, the lack of it. It is also not enforcing the use of its client and you can download all games for offline keeping and playing.

That is a refreshing stance in today’s connected world were most online stores try to hold your games hostage. If you lose your account or Internet, you are often not able to play the games until things are restored.

While Gog offers excellent games, some of the major publishers ignore it outright or push only classic games to the platform. Still, it is a great place, especially for classic computer games and independent games.

The best starting point for the sale is the main browser. While you can browse the 171 pages of games if you have a lot of time, I suggest you make use of the filters and options. Hiding DLC and extras may be a good start.

You can also set a price range, hide products that you own, or filter by genre, status, operating system, language and much more.

Gog says that games are discounted by up to 80 percent. If you sort by price, you find games starting as low as $0.29.

I list a few recommendations here usually. This time, I would like to list games that are on my list, that are likely very good, but that I have not played yet.

  • Deus Ex Bundle ($12.79) – Includes all four Deus Ex games. I have to admit that I never played the series, even though the early games were heralded as true masterpieces. The games are also available standalone.
  • The Zork Anthology ($3.89) – Never played the classic text-based adventure game series, but always wanted to give it a go. A refreshing contrast to the games of today.
  • Batsugun ($5.15) – I love shoot ’em up games. Batsugun is a classic Japanese that made waves on Sega’s Saturn console back in the days.
  • Metal Slug Tactics ($16.45) – A new game that is all about strategic decisions on small maps. Plays in the Metal Slug universe and you can pick between different characters and loadouts.

So, those are my recommendations. Maybe you have some more? Let me know in the comment section below.

Firefox 152 is out with JPEG XL support, new Settings layout, and much more

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

Mozilla released Firefox 152 Stable a moment ago. The new version of the open source web browser includes security fixes as well as new features and changes. The two extended support versions, Firefox 140.12 ESR and 115.37.0 ESR for legacy systems have also been updated.

The big visual feature of Firefox 152 is the new Settings page. The goal of the redesign was to streamline the page, improve grouping and navigation. Mozilla says the change is visual only, meaning that user settings were not changed and that all settings remain available.

One effect that you may notice immediately is that the average number of preferences per page has been reduced. Means, less scrolling. You can still use the built-in search to find a preference quickly.

Here is an overview of other important features in the release:

  • Firefox supports JPEG XL now. The image format is not enabled by default, but you can enable it under Settings > Firefox Labs > Webpage Display > Media: JPEG XL: This adds support for the image format, so that the browser can render it.
  • Firefox Translations supports Basque and Galician now.
  • The languages Croatian, English (UK), Georgian, Persian, Slovenian, Tajik, Tamil, Tibetan, Turkish, Welsh, and Xhosa now come with a built-in dictionary for the Firefox spellchecker.
  • Context menu video controls are now available on sites like TikTok or Instagram. These were blocked on the sites previously.
  • Private browsing now supports temporarily disabling the protection on a specific site. The idea is to use this to display sites correctly in Firefox which would otherwise be broken because of the protective features. Whether that is indeed a good idea or giving sites an incentive to break functionality accidently remains to be seen.
  • Links can be copied via a right-click on a tab and the selection of Share > Copy Link on Linux and Windows now. This works, even when the site is not active. You can also copy multiple link paths when several sites are selected.

The official release notes list a few useful changes next to that:

  • Zooming in Firefox via the keyboard or mouse now offers “more zoom levels in smaller increments”.
  • Downloaded PDFs are opened in a background tab, if you close the original page or switched tabs.

Firefox 152 is a security update. Mozilla lists 40 fixed security issues on the security page. The severity is high, there is no critical fix and no 0-day issue that is already exploited in the wild. Still, it is highly recommended to upgrade as soon as possible to fix the security holes.

Most unmanaged Firefox installations will receive the new update automatically. You can download the update immediately either by opening Firefox and going to Menu > Help > About Firefox, or by downloading the latest version from the Mozilla website.

uBlock Origin extension bypasses no longer working in Chrome: your options

Posted on by Martin Brinkmann

We all knew that the time would eventually come. Google is removing bypasses in Chromium and Google Chrome that allowed users to run legacy extensions in the browser.

Google moved to a new extension rules system, called Manifest V3, which turned out to be a very controversial move. The company claimed that this was all for performance and security, but the change had the fortunate side effect that it would impact content blocker extensions more than any other extension type.

Google modified the rule set several times, which would have killed content blockers more or less in the beginning, and content blockers continue to be available.

However, Chrome users who have enabled bypasses to continue using these extensions will soon realize that they can’t anymore. The reason is simple: Google removed them.

This is not the end of content blocking in Chrome and other Chromium-based browsers. Here are the options that you have going forward:

  • Switch to a MV3 extension: Browser extensions such as uBlock Origin Lite are available. These continue to block ads in Chrome, but they lack some of the advanced features of the classic blocker.
  • Use a Chromium-based browser that continues to support MV3 extensions: Brave, Vivaldi and Opera all pledged to support MV2 extensions going forward. It remains to be seen whether this is going to be the case once the bypasses are removed.
  • Switch to Firefox: Firefox supports MV2 and MV3 extensions. You can install uBlock Origin in Firefox and get the best level of protection out of any version of the extension.
  • Use a browser with a built-in content blocker: Plenty of options, Brave, Opera or Vivaldi all come with the functionality.