News archive (9 / 2026)

The legendary MP3 player Winamp is making a comeback. Once again.

This time, the arrangements have been completely revamped compared to before, and the new Winamp, set to be released in 2027, is a combination of the iconic MP3 player and a modern streaming service. This means that, in practice, Winamp can retain its late-90s look if desired, while simultaneously enjoying the ease of streaming - without forgetting MP3 file playback.

Winamp will not build its subscription-based streaming service from scratch; instead, the company has licensed the music catalog and streaming technology of French Deezer for its use.

To avoid scaring off current users of the original Winamp too much, Winamp promises in its press release that the original Winamp application, which operates without a streaming service, will also continue to exist, meaning there will be two separate versions of Winamp available in the future.

This move is likely quite smart, as, surprisingly, according to Winamp, the original MP3 player still has about 40 million active users. The new Winamp, set to be released next year and coexisting with the traditional version, is also promised to support MP3 file playback, internet radio playback, and Winamp's traditional playlists.

Google's researchers succeeded at the beginning of September in creating a complete 3D model of the brain of a common adult, male fruit fly.

It was the first time that the entire brain structure of a reasonably complex animal was digitized into a 3D model containing over 166,000 neurons. The achievement is considered a significant milestone for brain research and is hoped to help researchers understand brain function more precisely.

But because humans are, after all, humans, such a fine scientific achievement was also harnessed for a rather perplexing use.

A few days later, programmer Alex Wormuth announced on social media (link leads to X/Twitter) that he had taken the fruit fly brain model created by Google and taught it to play Doom.

Because why not.

Wormuth states that the teaching process was based on brain stimulation, where each game frame (frame) is sent to the fruit fly's brain neurons that process external stimuli. The subsequent brain activity is then returned to Doom for character control. Correspondingly, whenever enemies are successfully damaged in the game, a reward-indicating stimulus is fed to the brain, stimulating its dopamine-sensitive cells.

The world's largest so-called content delivery network, American Cloudflare, has set a deadline that is fast approaching.

On Tuesday, September 15, 2026, Cloudflare will by default start blocking all bots that use the data they collect for training or developing AI services.

Cloudflare itself may not mean anything to the average internet user, but about a third of all significant websites in the world use Cloudflare as a kind of doorman for their content, which lightens the load on the sites' own servers - and blocks unwanted bot traffic.

And starting September 15, bots that collect data for "mixed use" purposes will also be included in that group of "unwanted bot traffic".

This category includes advertising giant Google's own bot, Googlebot.

Google uses its data-collecting bot to create the index for its traditional search engine, but the same bot also collects data for Google's AI search.

As Cloudflare's rules change on September 15, Google's bots that collect and index website content will therefore be blocked by default, unless the site administrator has decided to specifically allow them. Cloudflare calls the upcoming change day Content Independence Day.

Korean giant LG is once again at the center of a privacy scandal, as it was revealed that the company's smart TVs collect a frightening amount of data.

A two-hour video from the Gamers Nexus channel goes through all the alarming revelations that emerged when LG's televisions were examined more closely.

Firstly, the company's smart TVs constantly scan the local network to which they are connected and gather information about other devices found on the same local network. This means, for example, data from home phones, printers, and computers is collected and stored by the TV.

In addition, the TV's WiFi constantly collects information about other nearby WiFi networks, even when WiFi has not been used to connect the TV to the home's local network. The TV also stores this information in its own storage with timestamps.

Another observation concerned the operation of smart TV voice control. After voice control is activated and a voice command is given to the TV about what it should do, the TV does not stop listening. Instead, it actively listens to conversations for an extended period and transcribes the speech into text format, which is stored in the TV's storage.

The Playstation 3 emulator for PC, RPCS3, has received a significant update, allowing PlayStation 3 games to now be played on PC directly from original PS3 game discs.

The new feature works on Windows, Linux, macOS, and FreeBSD, bringing the emulator closer to its original goal: preserving the entire PS3 game library for future generations, even in a future where PS3 consoles no longer exist.

Previously, PS3 games had to be transferred from the original game discs to the computer's hard drive, which often required tools classified as illegal in Europe, for example, that bypassed PS3 game disc copy protections. At the same time, the content of the game discs naturally consumed computer storage space, and the transfer itself took quite a lot of time. After the update, RPCS3 works on the same principle as the original PS3 console: disc in and game starts.

The process doesn't work effortlessly on every computer, as a Blu-Ray drive must, of course, be present. Additionally, PS3 games use their own disc format, which not all Blu-ray drives can read - the RPCS3 project website lists all compatible Blu-Ray drives separately that are known to work reliably with the emulator. According to the developers, this is a hardware-level limitation that developers simply cannot bypass programmatically.

Google has yielded to the fear of massive fines from the European Union and significantly changed its search engine's operations across the entire EU area.

The advertising giant, which owns by far the world's largest search engine, has been under investigation by EU competition authorities for a long time.

Criticism has focused on Google seizing a large share of the revenue from brokering hotels, flights, restaurants, and sports events by displaying its own price comparisons at the top of its search results when a user searches for, say, hotel nights.

For this reason, the company was slapped with a 460 million euro fine in July for violating the Digital Markets Act legislation. However, the company was given the opportunity to avoid paying the fine if it permanently changes its operating model.

According to information obtained by Reuters, Google has today changed its search engine's operations in these respects across the entire European Union.