Dimanche 12 octobre à 16 h heure française, pas moins de 41 666 455 joueurs étaient connectés à Steam. Début 2020, il était question de 20 millions de joueurs environ. Ce n’est pas la première fois que la barre des 40 millions est dépassée selon SteamDB, c’était aussi le cas en mars, avril et juin 2025.

Il y a une semaine, Battlefield 6 sortait officiellement, avec un record à 747 440 joueurs pour le moment. Sur les 24 dernières heures, il est à la quatrième place des titres les plus populaires de la plateforme, derrière Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2 et PUBG. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 arrive dans un mois, à voir s’il fera bouger les choses.

Steam propose aussi une autre statistique bien moins réjouissante. 95,40 % des joueurs qui envoient des statistiques à la plateforme sont sur Windows, mais ils étaient encore plus de 32 % à être sous Windows 10 en septembre 2025, en baisse de 2,90 % sur un mois. Le nombre de machines que cela représente n’est pas précisé. Nous avons aussi une pensée pour les 0,07 % sous Windows 7. Linux est à 2,68 % de part de marché.

Microsoft propose pour rappel un an de support technique supplémentaire gratuit en Europe. Nous avons déjà détaillé comment en profiter.

• Windows 10 : comment bénéficier d’un an de support technique supplémentaire ?

Basculer automatiquement du thème clair au sombre (et vice-versa) en fonction de l’heure de la journée est une fonction basique, mais que Windows n’a jamais eue. Des alternatives existent avec notamment Auto Dark Mode.

Microsoft se réveille enfin. La fonction n’est pas directement intégrée dans Windows, mais l’application officielle PowerToys dans sa version 0.95 propose Light Switch (ou Interrupteur en français). Elle permet de « définir des heures de début et de fin, ou de laisser Light Switch s’en charger automatiquement avec les heures de lever et de coucher du soleil de votre localisation », avec la possibilité de décaler les périodes si besoin.

La bascule entre le mode sombre et clair peut se faire pour le système (barre des tâches, Démarrer et les autres interfaces de Windows), les applications prenant en charge le mode sombre, ou les deux. Une fonction élémentaire, dont on se demande bien pourquoi elle a mis autant de temps à arriver. Contrairement à Auto Dark Mode, il n’y a aucune fonction supplémentaire.

De nombreuses améliorations sont présentes dans le reste des PowerToys. Par exemple, Peek peut désormais s’activer avec la barre d’espace. Il s’agit pour rappel d’un outil permettant « d’afficher un aperçu du contenu de fichier sans ouvrir plusieurs applications ou interrompre votre flux de travail ». Le niveau de transparence est ajustable dans l’utilitaire permettant de retrouver la souris, etc. Les notes de version se trouvent par ici.

Dimanche 12 octobre à 16 h heure française, pas moins de 41 666 455 joueurs étaient connectés à Steam. Début 2020, il était question de 20 millions de joueurs environ. Ce n’est pas la première fois que la barre des 40 millions est dépassée selon SteamDB, c’était aussi le cas en mars, avril et juin 2025.

Il y a une semaine, Battlefield 6 sortait officiellement, avec un record à 747 440 joueurs pour le moment. Sur les 24 dernières heures, il est à la quatrième place des titres les plus populaires de la plateforme, derrière Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2 et PUBG. Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 arrive dans un mois, à voir s’il fera bouger les choses.

Steam propose aussi une autre statistique bien moins réjouissante. 95,40 % des joueurs qui envoient des statistiques à la plateforme sont sur Windows, mais ils étaient encore plus de 32 % à être sous Windows 10 en septembre 2025, en baisse de 2,90 % sur un mois. Le nombre de machines que cela représente n’est pas précisé. Nous avons aussi une pensée pour les 0,07 % sous Windows 7. Linux est à 2,68 % de part de marché.

Microsoft propose pour rappel un an de support technique supplémentaire gratuit en Europe. Nous avons déjà détaillé comment en profiter.

• Windows 10 : comment bénéficier d’un an de support technique supplémentaire ?

Basculer automatiquement du thème clair au sombre (et vice-versa) en fonction de l’heure de la journée est une fonction basique, mais que Windows n’a jamais eue. Des alternatives existent avec notamment Auto Dark Mode.

Microsoft se réveille enfin. La fonction n’est pas directement intégrée dans Windows, mais l’application officielle PowerToys dans sa version 0.95 propose Light Switch (ou Interrupteur en français). Elle permet de « définir des heures de début et de fin, ou de laisser Light Switch s’en charger automatiquement avec les heures de lever et de coucher du soleil de votre localisation », avec la possibilité de décaler les périodes si besoin.

La bascule entre le mode sombre et clair peut se faire pour le système (barre des tâches, Démarrer et les autres interfaces de Windows), les applications prenant en charge le mode sombre, ou les deux. Une fonction élémentaire, dont on se demande bien pourquoi elle a mis autant de temps à arriver. Contrairement à Auto Dark Mode, il n’y a aucune fonction supplémentaire.

De nombreuses améliorations sont présentes dans le reste des PowerToys. Par exemple, Peek peut désormais s’activer avec la barre d’espace. Il s’agit pour rappel d’un outil permettant « d’afficher un aperçu du contenu de fichier sans ouvrir plusieurs applications ou interrompre votre flux de travail ». Le niveau de transparence est ajustable dans l’utilitaire permettant de retrouver la souris, etc. Les notes de version se trouvent par ici.

Scientists from Spain and China have successfully repaired the blood-brain barrier in Alzheimer's-model mice, enabling the brain to naturally clear amyloid-beta plaques and reverse cognitive decline. "After just three drug injections, mice with certain genes that mimic Alzheimer's showed a reversal of several key pathological features," adds ScienceAlert. From the report: Within hours of the first injection, the animal brains showed a nearly 45 percent reduction in clumps of amyloid-beta plaques, a hallmark of Alzheimer's disease. The mice had previously shown signs of cognitive decline, but after all three doses, the animals performed on par with their healthy peers in spatial learning and memory tasks. The benefits lasted at least six months. These preclinical results don't guarantee success in humans, but they're an encouraging start, which the authors say "heralds a new era" in drug research. "The therapeutic implications are profound," claim the international team of researchers, co-led by scientists at the Institute for Bioengineering of Catalonia (IBEC) and the West China Hospital Sichuan University (WCHSU). The findings have been published in Signal Transduction and Targeted Therapy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Conversation: Sound waves at frequencies above the threshold for human hearing are routinely used in medical care. Also known as ultrasound, these sound waves can help clinicians diagnose and monitor disease, and can also provide first glimpses of your newest family members. And now, patients with conditions ranging from cancer to neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's may soon benefit from recent advances in this technology. I am a biomedical engineer who studies how focused ultrasound -- the concentration of sound energy into a specific volume -- can be fine-tuned to treat various conditions. Over the past few years, this technology has seen significant growth and use in the clinic. And researchers continue to discover new ways to use focused ultrasound to treat disease. [...] Research on focused ultrasound has primarily focused on the most devastating and prevalent diseases, such as cancer and Alzheimer's disease. However, I believe that further developments in, and increased use of, focused ultrasound in the clinic will eventually benefit patients with rare diseases. One rare disease of particular interest for my lab is cerebral cavernous malformation, or CCM. CCMs are lesions in the brain that occur when the cells that make up blood vessels undergo uncontrolled growth. While uncommon, when these lesions grow and hemorrhage, they can cause debilitating neurological symptoms. The most common treatment for CCM is surgical removal of the brain lesions; however, some CCMs are located in brain areas that are difficult to access, creating a risk of side effects. Radiation is another treatment option, but it, too, can lead to serious adverse effects. We found that using focused ultrasound to open the blood-brain barrier can improve drug delivery to CCMs. Additionally, we also observed that focused ultrasound treatment itself could stop CCMs from growing in mice, even without administering a drug. While we don't yet understand how focused ultrasound is stabilizing CCMs, abundant research on the safety of using this technique in patients treated for other conditions has allowed neurosurgeons to begin designing clinical trials testing the use of this technique on people with CCM. With further research and advancements, I am hopeful that focused ultrasound can become a viable treatment option for many devastating rare diseases.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

mspohr shares a report from Futurism: Western automotive and green energy executives who visit China are returning humbled -- and even terrified. As The Telegraph reports, the executives are warning that the country's heavily automated manufacturing industry could quickly leave Western nations behind, especially when it comes to electric vehicles. "We are in a global competition with China, and it's not just EVs," Ford CEO Jim Farley told The Verge last month. "And if we lose this, we do not have a future at Ford." Some companies are giving up on new initiatives altogether, with the founder of mining company Fortescue, Andrew Forrest, claiming that his recent trip to China led to him abandoning attempts to produce EV powertrains in-house. "There are no people -- everything is robotic," he told The Telegraph. Other executives recalled touring "dark factories" that don't even need to keep the lights on, as most work is being done around the clock by robots. "You get this sense of a change, where China's competitiveness has gone from being about government subsidies and low wages to a tremendous number of highly skilled, educated engineers who are innovating like mad," British energy supplier Octopus CEO Greg Jackson told the newspaper. According to recent figures by the International Federation of Robotics, China has deployed orders of magnitude more industrial robots than Germany, the US, and the UK.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Norway has effectively achieved its 2025 goal of 100% electric new car sales, prompting the government to declare "mission accomplished" and propose scaling back EV tax exemptions to reflect a mature market. "We have had a goal that all new passenger cars should be electric by 2025, and ... we can say that the goal has been achieved," announced Finance Minister Jens Stoltenberg. Electrek reports: With the finish line in sight, the Norwegian government is now fine-tuning its approach. The current incentive program maintains the crucial VAT exemption for EVs, but only up to a purchase price of 500,000 Norwegian kroner (approximately $49,000 USD). This move is designed to target more expensive, luxury EVs, ensuring that the incentive benefits a broader range of consumers. However, the latest budget proposal aims to reduce the EV tax exemption to vehicles costing 300,000 Norwegian kroner (~30,000 USD). This would apply for 2026, and then the tax exemption would completely end in 2027. Additionally, the government plans to increase taxes on new gasoline and diesel cars, further widening the cost gap between polluting and zero-emission vehicles. However, the proposal still needs to be adopted by Norway's government, and there is some opposition. EV associations are advocating for a more extended phase-out period to ensure that the adoption rate doesn't decline.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arm has been working on an open-source Linux kernel accelerator "accel" driver for their Ethos NPUs. That kernel driver continues being revised and under review for inclusion into a future mainline Linux kernel release. Already though a Gallium3D driver for Mesa has been merged for leveraging the Ethos NPU...

The ollama 0.12.6-rc0 software released this evening and with it comes experimental Vulkan API support...

Boris Johnson's former adviser claims that China infiltrated a key UK government data-transfer network for years, compromising highly classified materials and prompting a Whitehall cover-up that prioritized Chinese investment over national security. The Times reports: Dominic Cummings, who served as a senior adviser to Boris Johnson, said that he and the then prime minister were informed about the breach in 2020 but that there had subsequently been a cover-up. He said he was warned at the time that disclosing some specific details of the breach would be a criminal offence. He claimed that the breach included some "Strap" material, which is the government term for the highest level of classified information. The breach, which was confirmed by two other senior Whitehall sources, was said to have been connected to a Chinese-owned company involved in Britain's critical national infrastructure. Tom Tugendhat, a former Tory security minister, supported Cummings's account. Cummings said that he and Johnson were informed of the breach in the "bunker" of No 10 -- a reference to the secure room in Downing Street. He told The Times: "The cabinet secretary said, 'We have to explain something; there's been a serious problem', and he talked through what this was. "And it was so bizarre that, not just Boris, a few people in the room were looking around like this -- 'Am I somehow misunderstanding what he's saying? Because it sounds f***ing crazy.'" He added: "What I'm saying is that some Strap stuff was compromised and vast amounts of data classified as extremely secret and extremely dangerous for any foreign entity to control was compromised. "Material from intelligence services. Material from the National Security Secretariat in the Cabinet Office. Things the government has to keep secret. If they're not secret, then there are very, very serious implications for it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: People in London could be hiring driverless taxis from Waymo next year, after the US autonomous vehicle company announced plans to launch its services there. The UK capital will become the first European city to have an autonomous taxi service of the kind now familiar in San Francisco and four other US cities using Waymo's technology. The launch pits an innovation sometimes dubbed the "robotaxi" against London's famous black cabs, which can trace their history back to the first horse-drawn hackney coaches of the Tudor era. But a representative of the capital's cab drivers said they were not concerned by the arrival of a "fairground ride" and questioned the reliability of driverless vehicles. Waymo said its cars were now on their way to London and would start driving on the capital's streets in the coming weeks with "trained human specialists," or safety drivers, behind the wheel. The company, originally formed as a spin-off from Google's self-driving car program, said it would scale up operations and work closely with Transport for London and the Department for Transportto obtain the permits needed to offer fully autonomous rides in 2026. Uber and the UK tech company Wayve have also announced their own plans to trial their driverless taxis in the capital next year, after the British government said it would accelerate rules allowing public trials to take place before legislation enabling self-driving vehicles passes in full.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Mozilla is testing a free, built-in VPN for Firefox that routes traffic through Mozilla-managed servers directly in the browser. The Register reports: According to a staff post on Mozilla Connect, the company's idea-sharing platform, Firefox VPN is still an experimental feature in the early stages of development, but users will be selected at random to test it "over the next few months." Moz describes the feature as one that will sit beside the search bar on Firefox, routing web traffic through a Mozilla-managed VPN server, concealing the user's real IP address while adding a layer of encryption to their communications. Firefox VPN is a different project entirely from Mozilla VPN, a separate, paid-for product. The Firefox version will be free to use and confined to the browser itself, while Mozilla VPN can be used by up to five devices at a time. The Moz staffer on the product team who announced the feature said of the upcoming beta test: "We'll start simple, then gradually add new capabilities while learning how it impacts browsing, usage, and overall satisfaction. "Our long-term vision is ambitious: to build the best VPN-integrated browser on the market." In response to feedback, the staffer noted that while it will be a desktop browser feature first, "mobile is definitely a natural next step."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Anthropic is projecting its annualized revenue run rate to soar from roughly $7 billion today to as much as $26 billion in 2026, driven by rapid enterprise adoption of its Claude AI models. Reuters reports: Anthropic debuted a new version of its cheapest AI model, Haiku, on Wednesday, as part of a broader effort to appeal to companies that are looking for capable AI systems that are dramatically cheaper than its more advanced models. The Haiku 4.5 model sells for about one-third the price of Sonnet 4, one of its medium-sized models. The revenue projections underscore continued strong demand for generative AI tools among businesses and help explain investor enthusiasm, even as AI spending, especially in infrastructure buildout, comes under scrutiny. Some people worry the level of investment might be unsustainable. Fueling the expansion is the uptake of enterprise products, which are built for organizations. Anthropic has more than 300,000 business and enterprise customers, which account for about 80% of its revenue.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: U.S. cybersecurity company F5 disclosed that nation-state hackers breached its systems and stole undisclosed BIG-IP security vulnerabilities and source code. The company states that it first became aware of the breach on August 9, 2025, with its investigations revealing that the attackers had gained long-term access to its system, including the company's BIG-IP product development environment and engineering knowledge management platform. F5 is a Fortune 500 tech giant specializing in cybersecurity, cloud management, and application delivery networking (ADN) applications. The company has 23,000 customers in 170 countries, and 48 of the Fortune 50 entities use its products. BIG-IP is the firm's flagship product used for application delivery and traffic management by many large enterprises worldwide. [...] F5 is still reviewing which customers had their configuration or implementation details stolen and will contact them with guidance. To help customers secure their F5 environments against risks stemming from the breach, the company released updates for BIG-IP, F5OS, BIG-IP Next for Kubernetes, BIG-IQ, and APM clients. Despite any evidence "of undisclosed critical or remote code execution vulnerabilities," the company urges customers to prioritize installing the new BIG-IP software updates.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is introducing new recovery tools that aim to make it less frustrating to regain access when you're locked out of your account. The Verge: Instead of answering security questions or entering a recovery email address, Google's new security features allow account holders to verify their identity using a linked mobile number, or trusted friends or family members. The Recovery Contacts feature enables users to designate people to confirm their identity in order to regain access to accounts after getting hacked or losing their password or passkey. Google didn't specify how the verification process works, but says the feature provides "a simple and secure way to regain access when standard recovery methods fail." Recovery Contacts is available for eligible personal Google accounts, and can be found under the Security option in the account settings.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Valve's open-source Linux graphics team continues carrying out great feats from getting NVIDIA DLSS working on the open-source NVK driver to enhancing Linux GPU driver support for hardware long forgotten about by the hardware vendors. The latest improvement from Valve's stellar group of open-source contributors are some fixes that benefit old Radeon Rx 200 series graphics cards that are more than one decade old...

Alexis Ohanian, who helped build Reddit, says much of the internet has become dominated by bots and AI. Speaking on the podcast TBPN, he described the internet as increasingly "quasi-AI" and filled with what he called "LinkedIn slop." Ohanian referenced dead internet theory, the assertion that bot activity exceeds human activity on the web. In September, Sam Altman, OpenAI's CEO, posted that while he had not taken the theory seriously, he now sees "a lot of LLM-run twitter accounts."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

PyTorch 2.9 is out today ahead of the PyTorch Conference happening next week in San Francisco. Notable with PyTorch 2.9 is better AMD ROCm and Intel XPU installation support via expanded wheel variant support...

The U.S. passport has fallen out of the top 10 most powerful passports globally for the first time in 20 years in the latest edition of the Henley Passport Index, which ranks nations based on the number of destinations a traveler can visit without needing a visa. From a report: The U.S. ranking is on a steep downward trend, with the U.S. passport now in 12th spot, tied with Malaysia, having already fallen from seventh place last year to 10th place in July. A decade ago, the U.S. passport topped the index. Christian H. Kaelin, chairman of Henley & Partners and creator of the index, said in a news release on Tuesday that the declining strength of the U.S. passport signaled a "fundamental shift in global mobility and soft power dynamics." Kaelin added: "Nations that embrace openness and cooperation are surging ahead, while those resting on past privilege are being left behind."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.