The company behind the disk space analyzer TreeSize has irked some users by no longer offering support or updates for perpetual licenses beyond their maintenance period unless customers subscribe. Further frustration has come from JAM Software's long-standing policy of not providing license keys or installers to TreeSize perpetual license holders after that support period ends.
Since 2025, JAM Software has been transitioning most TreeSize editions to subscription models. Today, it sells perpetual licenses only for personal use, which include 12 months of updates, support, and “downloads of older versions, and your license,” plus the option to extend the support period. TreeSize currently has "no plans to discontinue the sale of perpetual licenses for TreeSize Personal," product manager Hendrik Christ told Ars Technica.
As perpetual-license maintenance periods expire, customers are discovering that extending support now generally requires subscribing to software they already own the right to use.
© TreeSize
Healthcare software vendor Craneware confirmed attackers stole data during a cyberattack, underscoring growing cybersecurity risks facing healthcare suppliers.
The post Craneware Confirms Data Theft After Cyberattack, Investigations Underway appeared first on TechRepublic.
A recent examination of hundreds of mobile apps marketed toward US military personnel found more than one in eight contained software built by companies in China, Russia, or other foreign nations, raising fresh concerns that adversary governments could harvest data revealing where service members live, work, and deploy.
According to researchers at Purdue University, the US Military Academy at West Point, and Florida International University, one popular app used by service members to rate living conditions on their own bases include code from Huawei, the Chinese telecom that US regulators flagged as a national security threat in 2020. Two others were built by Russian companies and incorporate the Russian ad service Yandex.
The largely unregulated advertising industry that tracks Americans online treats civilians and service members mostly the same—unless there is profit in telling them apart—despite evidence that exposure can reveal troop deployments, unit movements, and the routines of personnel within intelligence facilities and hardened shelters where nuclear weapons are believed to be stored.
© Tomas Ragina/Getty
Jimothy, the short-spined Seattle raccoon, has become a global sensation whose likeness has been immortalized in artwork, clothing, songs and tattoos — and now a video game created in the creature’s hometown.
Tech enthusiast and entrepreneur Chris Pirillo launched an 8-bit NES-style video game called “Jimothy” this weekend in which players can control the movements of the critter as he raids trash cans, crosses streets to the park, sneaks past the paparazzi, and climbs to the safety of a big tree.
Pirillo says the missions are pulled straight from Jimothy’s real life. No doubt the animal is busy these days trying to dodge curious onlookers who are hoping to capture the next photo or video that feeds the masses on social media.
The viral Jimothy sensation took off last week when Kiana Hall spotted the raccoon in Seattle’s Ballard neighborhood and posted a video on Instagram — viewed by millions since — asking the question heard around the world: “What am I looking at?”
An earlier video of Jimothy, captured by a home security camera and posted on Reddit, ignited further curiosity and adoration, and now Reddit is flooded with sightings, memes, artwork, food, crafts, poetry and more. The Mariners put a Jimothy mascot in the Salmon Run. There’s even a Lego Jimothy.
Pirillo told GeekWire the game idea came to him on Saturday afternoon after seeing so many creatives flood his feeds with their own Jimothy fan art. He started to build a not-so-live tracker and realized it was a not-so-great idea. He hopes internet creativity is enough of a fix for the Jimothy-curious.
“This game is as close as any of us should ever get to him,” the game site states. “If you find yourself in his neighborhood: don’t go looking for him, don’t feed him, don’t try to touch him, and don’t crowd him for a photo.”
The game is easy enough to play, with challenges that are reminiscent of classic 1980s games “Frogger” and “Donkey Kong.”
Pirillo’s “Vibe Arcade” is loaded with other games he’s created. Earlier this year he vibe-coded a Resume Analyzer app and a pre-rejection letter generator called Dear Applicant to channel his frustrations with searching for a job.
Pirillo credits AI with changing the speed and ease with which a moment can go viral and be captured in new and creative ways.
“I remember when every big moment had a video game. But by the time a studio could create a video game around a meme pre-AI, the meme’s energy would have dissipated,” he said. “We are now at a day and age (certainly with AI as a tool) where almost literally anybody of any age or tech experience level can bring full-fledged experiences to life in just a few hours. We can simply talk our solutions into existence. It’s astounding.”
Pirillo built the game as a single HTML page, pitting OpenAI GPT 5.6 against Anthropic’s Claude Fable 5. One of the bigger challenges was getting the look of Jimothy right, as multiple AI models kept returning regular-looking raccoons.
Pirillo said he looks forward to sharing more about it all during a free vibe-coding community workshop in Seattle this Saturday.
His final takeaway for anyone looking to get in on the Jimothy hype — or whatever creature emerges next — is to not wait for the moment to pass.
“While it’s never been easier to make something, it’s also never been more challenging to get attention,” he said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Apple faces a proposed class action alleging a Hide My Email flaw could expose users’ real addresses despite the company’s privacy claims.
The post Apple Sued Over Hide My Email Privacy Claims appeared first on TechRepublic.
The Indian government has fined HP India and its partners a total of 1.4 billion rupees (about $14.4 million) for working with reseller partners in the “cartelization” of computers, ink cartridges, and toner.
The Competition Commission of India (CCI) said this week that it found HP India had colluded with some channel partners to drive up the cost of bids for government contracts for computers, as well as for selling ink cartridges, toner, and other printing supplies, including graphic and digital manufacturing supplies.
It said that HP was aiming to outcompete other OEMs and discourage resellers from selling “counterfeit” ink and toner.
© Getty
One of the Russian government’s most elite hacking groups has adopted an attack, known as Clickfix, to compromise devices belonging to sensitive organizations in Ukraine, the latter country’s CERT center is warning.
Clickfix has emerged as an effective attack technique that attackers, primarily financially motivated criminals, began using in the last year or so. Websites under the control of the attackers display a CAPTCHA that requires the visitor to copy a jumble of text and paste it into the terminal. The text contains scripts that, once entered, perform malicious actions, typically by installing malware or exfiltrating sensitive data. Ukraine’s CERT said Wednesday that Sandworm, an advanced hacking unit inside the GRU, Russia’s military intelligence arm, is now using the technique.
The Clickfix attacks began in the spring and have continued through the summer. The campaign has resulted in the network compromise of at least one organization when a connected device was found to be infected by FreakyPoll, the name of one of Sandworm’s custom malware packages. Ukrainian authorities discovered 10 compromised websites that displayed a PowerShell command as part of a fake CAPTCHA that said it had to be passed to ensure a real human was behind the visiting device’s keyboard.
© Getty Images
Energy companies are raising money at IPO at their fastest pace this century, taking advantage of investors’ hunt for new ways to bet on the boom in power-intensive AI data centers.
Initial public offerings for energy firms raised $12.6 billion in the first half of this year, according to data firm Dealogic. That marks the highest half-year level since the peak of the dotcom bubble in late 1999 and the highest first-half figure on record. It is well above 2025’s full-year total of $4.3 billion.
The surge in fundraising comes as access to the vast amounts of energy needed to run data centers emerges as a bottleneck in a multi-trillion-dollar AI investment boom.
© Michael Nagle/Bloomberg
New navigation satellites in low-Earth orbit could provide 100 times stronger signal strength compared to GPS and other global navigation satellite systems operating from higher orbital altitudes—enabling greater location accuracy within dense cities, under thick foliage, and even inside buildings. Such signals would also likely prove more resilient to interference at a time when commercial flights, maritime shipping, and even various smartphone apps face increasingly widespread disruption from GPS jamming.
That vision may start to take shape when the first six production satellites of California-based Xona Space Systems are scheduled to launch in October 2026, with early service starting in 2027. Once the full constellation of 258 Pulsar satellites has been launched in the following years, Xona claims that customers will be able to accurately pinpoint their locations anywhere on Earth to within several centimeters.
“That added power means that we can get into that indoor environment that GPS can't get to today,” Adrien Perkins, co-founder and VP of engineering at Xona Space Systems, told Ars. “Our higher power allows you to get into those jamming environments a lot further than you would with GPS by itself.”
© Xona Space Systems
Sheetz, a US convenience store chain, is moving its 838 locations off VMware.
Sheetz has used VMware virtualization across two Dell R440/R450-series servers at each of its locations since 2019. Now it’s migrating 12 to 14 virtual machines (VMs) in each of its stores from VMware vSphere to StorMagic’s SvHCI, “with an additional two VMs to be replaced over the coming months to transition from Windows 10 to Windows 11,” Scott Robertson, infrastructure team manager at Sheetz, told Ars Technica via email. Ultimately, Sheetz will move about 11,000 VMs from Broadcom's virtualization platform. Sheetz is still running the original Dell server hardware.
So far, Sheetz has finished migrating more than 600 stores, averaging 200 per month, according to a company announcement today. Sheetz should be finished with the migration in four months, the announcement said.
© Sheetz
Right on the heels of Microsoft releasing a record number of security patches, a researcher has published exploit code that can enable low-privilege Windows accounts to make sensitive changes to administrator accounts.
The exploit, which multiple researchers say works, is sending Microsoft scrambling, yet again, to patch a zero-day released by an anonymous researcher who has complained about the software maker’s handling of their bug reports. To date, the pseudonymous NightmareEclypse has published nine such exploits, including Tuesday’s HiveLegacy. The researcher said the proof-of-concept code included in the report was stripped down to prevent attackers from using it maliciously.
HiveLegacy is an elevation-of-privilege exploit that targets a vulnerability residing in the Windows User Profile Service. It allows users (and with more work likely processes) with limited system rights to compromise an admin user's account by modifying its classes registry hive, a resource that ensures the correct application opens when certain types of files are clicked on in Windows Explorer.
© Getty Images
Microsoft now recommends installing Windows 11 quality updates within three days, citing AI-driven cyberattacks that can exploit new vulnerabilities faster than ever.
The post Microsoft Urges Windows 11 Users to Install Updates Within Three Days appeared first on TechRepublic.
The Federal Communications Commission will vote to repeal the National Television Ownership Rule that is supposed to prevent a single broadcast station owner from reaching more than 39 percent of all TV households in the US. The proposed change sets up a likely court battle over the FCC claim that it has authority to repeal a limit set by Congress.
FCC Chairman Brendan Carr has already treated the rule as more of a suggestion. In March, the Carr FCC granted a waiver allowing Nexstar Media Group to buy Tegna in a deal that let it reach over half of TV households. The Carr FCC argued that Congress gave it authority to modify or waive the rule.
Carr now plans to repeal the 39 percent limit and replace it with a "case-by-case review" of each proposed merger, the chairman announced today in an op-ed published on Breitbart. The change would make it easier for the FCC to pick and choose which station groups get to surpass the limit. Under Carr, this would likely benefit news companies that provide favorable coverage for President Trump.
© Getty Images | Heather Diehl
Login