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Open source Windows alternative ReactOS has reached a major milestone: The operating system can now be installed directly onto an NTFS drive partition. As reported by Phoronix, the move to NTFS clears a long-standing hurdle for the project and brings it one step closer to finally reaching beta.
Prior to this latest announcement, ReactOS required users to keep a FAT32 partition for installations. A proprietary Microsoft-developed filesystem, NTFS can trace its roots back through the Windows NT family lineage starting in 1993 with Windows NT 3.1. The variant introduced with Windows XP in 2001 remains the standard used by most Windows systems today. With ReactOS's stated goal of reaching binary compatibility with Windows Server 2003, being confined to FAT32 partitions was a practical barrier to clear on the way to reproducing the Windows environment.
However, users looking to hop off the Windows train shouldn't be grabbing their bags just yet. ReactOS wrote that the new driver still "lacks caching (which causes inferior performance), journaling and security support." So while the new driver is here, even the most intrepid of OS tinkerers should tread carefully. The ReactOS team warned in its announcement on X that there are still "potentially undiscovered bugs."
For a while, those hoping to avoid the difficulty and expense of dealing with Adobe's Creative Suite have been able to use several free and/or open source alternatives that replicate some or all of those capabilities. Now, one developer is using AI-powered reverse engineering to mimic the look, feel, and functionality of Adobe's well-known software with what he hopes will soon be perfect fidelity.
Artcraft got its start last year as a "controllable AI for artists" that allows for precise post-generation editing of AI-crafted images and videos. Over the weekend, though, the brand debuted its pivot to a suite of seven open source apps recreating the user interface and tools found in Adobe's Photoshop, Illustrator, Premiere, Lightroom, After Effects, InDesign, and Acrobat Pro.
In announcing those new apps on Reddit earlier this week, software developer Brandon Thomas said he used Anthropic's Claude Opus 5.5 to create "clean-room replacements" for Adobe's closed source software in Rust (with WebAssembly versions available for use in a browser). And while commenters on Hacker News and elsewhere have taken pains to point out the new software's many current shortcomings, Thomas makes the grandiose promise that the current "super early alpha" state will soon lead to something just as functional as anything Adobe has ever put out.
For a long time, PC gamers could access many PlayStation 5 games only if the publisher invested in a bespoke port (something Sony has recently said it will be scaling back). Now, though, rapid advancements in PS5 emulators and other tools are making recent PlayStation titles increasingly playable on generic PCs.
SharpEmu was the first of these emulators, advancing from a "very early alpha stage" in May to a current state that can "load the eboot.bin of real games, execute native CPU instructions, and partially handle GPU-related functionality." The most recent release boasts 10 tested games that reach a "playable" state, including six that developer CursedIfElse says are "fully playable at 60 fps." That includes simple 2D games like Tetris Forever but also 3D titles like Astro Bot and the PS5 Demon's Souls remaster running at playable frame rates.
"SharpEmu has prioritized hardware accuracy from the very beginning, and we’re finally starting to see that investment pay off," CursedIfElse wrote on social media this week. "It was built completely from scratch, and this is how far we’ve come."
A so-called software supply chain attack, in which hackers corrupt a legitimate piece of software to hide their own malicious code, was once a relatively rare event but one that haunted the cybersecurity world with its insidious threat of turning any innocent application into a dangerous foothold in a victim’s network. Now one group of cybercriminals has turned that occasional nightmare into a near-weekly episode, corrupting hundreds of open source tools, extorting victims for profit, and sowing a new level of distrust in an entire ecosystem used to create the world’s software.
On Tuesday night, open source code platform GitHub announced that it had been breached by hackers in one such software supply chain attack: A GitHub developer had installed a “poisoned” extension for VSCode, a plug-in for a commonly used code editor that, like GitHub itself, is owned by Microsoft. As a result, the hackers behind the breach, an increasingly notorious group called TeamPCP, claim to have accessed around 4,000 of GitHub’s code repositories. GitHub’s statement confirmed that it had found at least 3,800 compromised repositories while noting that, based on its findings so far, they all contained GitHub’s own code, not that of customers.
“We are here today to advertise GitHub’s source code and internal orgs for sale,” TeamPCP wrote on BreachForums, a forum and marketplace for cybercriminals. “Everything for the main platform is there and I very am happy to send samples to interested buyers to verify absolute authenticity.”
Several times in the last couple of decades, Microsoft has released source code for the original MS-DOS operating system that kicked off its decades-long dominance of consumer PCs. This week, the company has reached further back than ever, releasing "the earliest DOS source code discovered to date" along with other documentation and notes from its developer.
Today's source release is so old that it predates the MS-DOS branding, and it includes "sources to the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, several development snapshots of the PC-DOS 1.00 kernel, and some well-known utilities such as CHKDSK," write Microsoft's Stacey Haffner and Scott Hanselman in their co-authored post about the release.
To understand the context, here's a very brief history of what would become MS-DOS: Programmer Tim Paterson originally created 86-DOS (previously known as QDOS, for "quick and dirty operating system") for an Intel 8086-based computer kit sold by Seattle Computer Products. Microsoft, on the hook to provide an operating system for the still-in-development IBM PC 5150, licensed 86-DOS and hired Paterson to continue developing it, later buying the rights to 86-DOS outright. Microsoft then licensed this operating system to IBM as PC-DOS while retaining the ability to sell the operating system to other companies. The version sold by Microsoft was called MS-DOS, and the proliferation of third-party IBM PC clones over the '80s and '90s made it the version of the operating system that most people ended up using.
Open source software with more than 1 million monthly downloads was compromised after a threat actor exploited a vulnerability in the developers’ account workflow that gave access to its signing keys and other sensitive information.
On Friday, unknown attackers exploited the vulnerability to push a new version of element-data, a command-line interface that helps users monitor performance and anomalies in machine-learning systems. When run, the malicious package scoured systems for sensitive data, including user profiles, warehouse credentials, cloud provider keys, API tokens, and SSH keys, developers said. The malicious version was tagged as 0.23.3 and was published to the developers’ Python Package Index and Docker image accounts. It was removed about 12 hours later, on Saturday. Elementary Cloud, the Elementary dbt package, and all other CLI versions weren't affected.
“Users who installed 0.23.3, or who pulled and ran the affected Docker image, should assume that any credentials accessible to the environment where it ran may have been exposed,” the developers wrote.
An Anthropic-backed DMCA effort to remove its recently leaked Claude Code client source code from GitHub this week resulted in the accidental removal of many legitimate forks of its official public code repository. While that overzealous takedown has now been reversed, Anthropic still faces an extreme uphill battle in limiting the spread of its recently leaked code.
The DMCA notice that GitHub received late Tuesday focuses on a repository containing the leaked source code originally posted by GitHub user nirholas (archived here) and nearly 100 specifically named forks of that repository. In a note appended to that request, though, GitHub said it had acted to take down a network of 8,100 similar forked repositories because "the submitter alleged that all or most of the forks were infringing to the same extent as the parent repository."
That expanded takedown affected many repositories that didn't contain leaked code but instead forked Anthropic's official public Claude Code repository, which the company shares to encourage public bug reports and fixes. Many coders took to social media to complain about being swept up in the DMCA dragnet despite not sharing any leaked code.
Mozilla developer Peter Wilson has taken to the Mozilla.ai blog to announce cq, which he describes as "Stack Overflow for agents." The nascent project hints at something genuinely useful, but it will have to address security, data poisoning, and accuracy to achieve significant adoption.
It's meant to solve a couple of problems. First, coding agents often use outdated information when making decisions, like attempting deprecated API calls. This stems from training cutoffs and the lack of reliable, structured access to up-to-date runtime context. They sometimes use techniques like RAG (Retrieval Augmented Generation) to get updated knowledge, but they don't always do that when they need to—"unknown unknowns," as the saying goes—and it's never comprehensive when they do.
Second, multiple agents often have to find ways around the same barriers, but there's no knowledge sharing after said training cutoff point. That means hundreds or thousands of individual agents end up using expensive tokens and consuming energy to solve already-solved problems all the time. Ideally, one would solve an issue once, and the others would draw from that experience.
OpenAI announced Thursday that it has entered into an agreement to acquire Astral, the company behind popular open source Python development tools such as uv, Ruff, and ty, and integrate the company into its Codex team.
The deal, whose financial terms were not publicly disclosed, will help OpenAI "accelerate our work on Codex and expand what AI can do across the software development lifecycle," the company said in an announcement post. Integrating Astral's tools more closely with Codex after the acquisition will "enable AI agents to work more directly with the tools developers already rely on every day," it continued.
Astral's most popular open source projects include:
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