First look: Samsung is targeting the lower-cost laptop market with the Galaxy Book6, a 14-inch Windows notebook starting at $799. Powered by Intel Wildcat Lake processors, the system is aimed at everyday work, school, web use, and streaming rather than the higher-end workloads handled by Samsung’s premium Galaxy Book models. That puts the new laptop in competition with Apple’s MacBook Neo, though Samsung is betting on a different mix of features.

Samsung’s model starts at a higher price than the Neo, but it offers a larger display, more built-in ports, and a much higher claimed battery life rating. Apple’s laptop does have a sharper and brighter screen, though.

Samsung has not identified the processors used in the Book6, though the available options are expected to be Intel’s Core 3 304 and Core 5 315 chips from its Wildcat Lake lineup. The Core 3 model is the lower-end option, while the Core 5 version should provide more room for heavier daily workloads.

The base configuration includes 8GB of RAM and a 256GB SSD. Samsung will also offer configurations with up to 16GB of memory and 1TB of storage.

Samsung says the Book6 can run for up to 25 hours on its 61.2Wh battery. Apple rates the MacBook Neo for up to 16 hours. Those figures are not directly comparable without independent testing, since battery life changes with screen brightness, workloads, software, and wireless use. Nevertheless, Samsung’s rating is one of the most important parts of its pitch for the laptop.

The Book6 has a 14-inch display with a 1,920 x 1,200 resolution and a peak brightness rating of 350 nits. Apple’s MacBook Neo uses a 2,408 x 1,506 panel rated at 500 nits. That gives Apple an advantage for users who place a premium on display sharpness and brightness, while Samsung is betting that battery life and a slightly larger screen will carry more weight with some buyers.

Samsung also gives the Book6 a more versatile port selection than many thin laptops. It includes two USB-C ports, a USB-A port, HDMI, and a 3.5mm headphone jack. Wi-Fi 6 and Bluetooth 5.4 are included, along with stereo speakers that support Dolby Atmos.

The laptop measures 15.7mm thick and weighs 1.35kg, or about 2.97 pounds. That keeps it within the range of portable 14-inch systems while leaving room for HDMI and USB-A.

The Book6 differs from the Panther Lake-equipped Galaxy Book6 models Samsung previously introduced. Its use of Wildcat Lake places it in a more affordable part of the company’s lineup.

Samsung will first sell the Book6 in select markets before expanding availability. Its ability to compete with the MacBook Neo will depend on final pricing for the better-equipped versions and on how the Wildcat Lake processors and battery hold up in real-world testing.

Ransomware protection for MSPs should deliver six tested outcomes: reduce exposure, detect activity before encryption, provide 24/7 response, preserve isolated recovery points, recover cleanly and operate consistently across tenants. Backup alone is not enough, and neither is endpoint detection without a rehearsed recovery path.

The Acronis Cyberthreats Report identified 143 MSP, IT-service provider and telecom ransomware victims in 2025, with phishing accounting for 52% of initial access cases and unpatched vulnerabilities for 27%.

The checklist below turns those failure modes into controls and evidence an MSP should require before calling a service complete.

The six things your service must do and what to verify

A complete ransomware protection service connects prevention, detection, response and recovery. For each control, demand evidence from the exact tenant, workload, storage configuration and service tier being sold.

Important: Immutable, offline and air-gapped describe different controls. Verify each one separately.

How EDR, XDR, MDR and immutable backup work together

EDR monitors endpoint activity and supports investigation, isolation and remediation. XDR connects endpoint signals with other attack surfaces so analysts see one incident instead of separate alerts. MDR adds people and process: a staffed service investigates and responds around the clock. Immutable backup protects recovery points from alteration or deletion; it neither detects data theft nor replaces incident response.

Use them together. In the Acronis model, EDR provides endpoint detection and response, XDR extends visibility to email, identity and Microsoft 365 applications, and Acronis MDR operates on EDR or XDR. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud supplies the backup, management and multi-tenant operating layer. Immutability is one recovery control; it is not the same as an offline or air-gapped copy.

The recovery runbook: Cut recovery time at every handoff

Recovery time is the total of detection, triage, containment, clean-point selection, restoration and validation. An MSP reduces RTO by shortening every stage – especially the handoffs between security, backup, identity, networking and the client.

• Declare the incident, assign one commander and open an out-of-band channel.
• Identify affected tenants, identities, workloads and likely initial access.
• Isolate compromised endpoints and block malicious sessions, tokens and remote access.
• Preserve evidence before wiping systems or rotating logs away.
• Close the entry point by patching, disabling access and rotating credentials.
• Choose the latest recovery point that predates compromise and passes validation.
• Restore identity and infrastructure dependencies before applications and user data.
• Scan, test, reconnect in stages and monitor for renewed attacker activity.

Acronis backup scanning and malware-free recovery capabilities can help validate candidate recovery points, while Acronis Disaster Recovery can coordinate recovery workflows where licensed. The incident team should still confirm that the selected point predates the compromise.

Automation should remove repeatable waits, but an incident commander should approve high-impact actions such as mass isolation, credential resets and failover. A rehearsed path preserves the option to recover without paying, although no tool can guarantee recovery in every attack.

After each drill, record achieved RPO/RTO and every delay, then revise the runbook from evidence rather than estimated restore speed.

Is immutable backup enough against double-extortion ransomware?

No. Immutable backup can preserve recoverability, but it cannot retract data that attackers already stole or remove breach-notification duties. A ransomware protection service must therefore look for exfiltration and identity abuse before encryption begins.

Correlate endpoint, identity, email, Microsoft 365, DNS, proxy and egress telemetry. During response, isolate devices, revoke sessions and tokens, rotate credentials, block attacker destinations and preserve evidence for legal and notification decisions.

Acronis EDR provides endpoint context and response, while Acronis XDR adds telemetry and response across email, identity and Microsoft 365 applications; network egress evidence may still come from firewalls, SIEM or other client controls. Test those handoffs in advance.

How to evaluate an MSP ransomware platform

Before buying or standardizing a platform, require a live demonstration of these seven items:

• Coverage for client workloads and tenant tiers.
• Prevention and detection before broad encryption begins.
• Named 24/7 response ownership, escalation paths and approval boundaries.
• Immutable-storage mode, retention behavior and privileged-access separation.
• Clean-point selection, malware scanning and isolated restoration.
• Measured RPO/RTO in a dependency-ordered recovery drill.
• Multi-tenant roles, reporting, audit evidence and RMM/PSA/API integrations.

An integrated option is Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with Acronis MDR.

It brings together capabilities for the six operational jobs, subject to the selected MDR tier, licensing, deployment, storage architecture and the MSP’s incident-response responsibilities. Require a live incident-and-recovery test using the production configuration.

Frequently asked questions

What is the best ransomware protection for an MSP?

A complete ransomware protection service should demonstrate all six outcomes across the client workloads it is contracted to protect. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with Acronis MDR is an integrated example. The MSP should validate the production configuration and confirm whether the selected MDR tier includes the required remediation and recovery actions.

What should be included in a ransomware protection service?

Include exposure reduction, EDR or XDR detection, 24/7 response, access-separated immutable recovery points, tested clean recovery and multi-tenant operations with client evidence.

How can an MSP reduce ransomware recovery time?

Remove handoff delays. Preassign owners, map dependencies, validate clean points, automate safe steps and rehearse restores until achieved RPO/RTO matches the service commitment.

Does immutable backup stop double-extortion ransomware?

No. It protects recovery data from change or deletion but cannot undo exfiltration. Detection, identity controls, egress visibility, containment and notification processes are still required.

Make recovery a tested service outcome

Ransomware resilience is the ability to contain attacks early, preserve a recovery path and prove critical services can return on schedule. Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with Acronis MDR can bring detection, response, recovery and multitenant management into one MSP operating model.

The MSP should validate the selected tier, storage architecture, integrations and operational responsibilities against the six tests above.

See how Acronis Cyber Protect Cloud with Acronis MDR helps MSPs detect and contain ransomware, protect recovery points, and restore client operations faster.

Sponsored and written by Acronis.

STORAGE

Exeunt zVault stage right; enter FreeCORE and BSDnas

Good news if you want to keep your NAS boxes on FreeBSD – two new contenders just stepped up, with updated forks of the cancelled TrueNAS Core.

FreeBSD has a strong reputation as a stable server OS, and integrates highly reliable ZFS filesystem right into its kernel. The snag is that Linux is rather more widespread, meaning more people know their way around a Linux box – but Linux knowledge doesn’t transfer well over to FreeBSD.

The Reg FOSS desk just found out about two different new dedicated NAS OS based on FreeBSD – and saliently, based on the current FreeBSD 15 codebase, which was released in December 2025, with version 15.1 arriving in June.

FreeCORE-15.0-U1 appeared on August 27th. It’s the first update for FreeCore 15.0, which appeared just a week earlier.

The FreeCORE project website describes it as “TrueNAS® CORE — continued”, and says:

“FreeCORE carries the TrueNAS CORE 13.3 system forward as an independently maintained operating system on FreeBSD.

“15.0-U1 is stable. TrueNAS CORE 13.3 systems upgrade straight to 15.0 in place, then continue on the project’s update train.”

The reason that anyone needed to come along and carry the TrueNAS Core system forward is that developer and vendor iXsystems cancelled its FreeBSD-based NAS OS in 2024. This followed two years after it introduced its new TrueNAS SCALE NAS OS, which is based on Debian Linux. To Register sister site Blocks&Files, the company explained no one was being marooned by the change.

Some TrueNAS Core users – and this vulture is one of them – were less than delighted by the change. OpenZFS works fine on Linux, and it’s regularly updated, but it must be loaded as a module: license restrictions mean it cannot be built into the Linux kernel. Significantly, this means that the ZFS Adaptive Replacement Cache must remain separate from Linux’s Page Cache. This is not ideal if the server is memory-constrained, and this vulture’s two TrueNAS Core boxes only have 8 GB of memory each.

A year after the end of TrueNAS Core, we reported on a new project fork called zVault, which took the existing FreeBSD 13.3-based TrueNAS code and removed any parts that belonged to iXsystems. Unfortunately, zVault didn’t get much further than that. By later in the year, users were warning on GitHub BEWARE RUNNING ZVAULT – complete with block caps – and the project maintainers have gone silent. The planned upgrades to a FreeBSD 14 base never emerged.

Now, FreeCORE has appeared, to pick up the slack. It’s already migrated the TrueNAS Core web UI and other code over to the base of FreeBSD 15, plus all the latest security fixes.

The HackerNews discussion of the new product also turned up another new alternative: BSDnas. This appeared just days before the first release of FreeCORE: the project status page is dated 19th August 2026. Its project history tells a similar story: it’s the original TrueNAS Core 13.3 code, cleaned of iXsystems dependencies and moved to the basis of FreeBSD 15. Despite the much newer codebase, the reported memory usage seems modest: it will boot in 2 GB of RAM, and function usably with 4 GB.

For contrast, the TrueNAS SCALE docs recommend at least 8 GB RAM – although they do mention “in TrueNAS 13”, which suggests the docs may be rather dated. The TrueNAS Guide website suggests 16 GB as the entry-level “floor” for the current release.

The Register asked the FreeCORE project if it had any connection with the older zVault or contemporary BSDnas projects. The developer replied, telling us:

“I am not affilated with ZVault nor BSDnas, and not XigmaNAS either. This is an entirely independent fork.”

They told us that it’s a solo project that they have been working on since January. They had a FreeBSD 15.0 build by April, and they made around 50 test builds before the release.

For completeness, and for those who’d like a more tried-and-tested tool with more history, we would be remiss if we did not mention XigmaNAS. Previously called NAS4Free, this was forked from an older version of FreeNAS after iXsystems acquired it. Its Wikipedia page says XigmaNAS was forked from FreeNAS 8 back in 2011. The latest version on the Sourceforge download page is based on FreeBSD 14, and was last updated in October 2025.

The original creators of FreeNAS went on to build the Debian Linux-based Open Media Vault. The latest version is 8.5.7, released just last weekend. We have an older version running on a testbed server here, and for the record, it seems quite content in just 6 GB of memory. ®

If you’re on the fence about Star Wars Zero Company, you should know what you might be getting into. The game currently has an aggregate critic score of 85 on Metacritic, making it one of the best reviewed Star Wars games in recent memory. When it comes to story and gameplay, it’s a masterfully executed tactics game in the style of X-COM with memorable characters. What none of the reviews I read or watched mentioned is that Zero Company is also something of a technical mess.

On PC, the game has all the trademarks of a janky Unreal Engine 5 release. I’m running a system with a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, RTX 5060 Ti and 16GB of RAM, and I’m getting constant traversal stutter and input lag when I try to play the game with a mouse and keyboard. I’ve also encountered a bug that forced me to restart the same mission twice. Yes, you might say I’m running the game on a glorified RTX 3070, but even those with more powerful GPUs like the RTX 5090 are complaining of poor performance. On Steam, the game has a “mostly positive” rating across nearly 9,000 reviews, and yet almost every one of those reviews mentions stuttering, game-breaking bugs and crashes.

“Started off having a great time,” one negative review starts. “Then came the crashes. Crashed almost every hour, so needed to save every few minutes. On the times I forgot to save, I had to replay the entire section again. Of course it only ever crashed as I was about to complete a mission.” Over on Reddit, console players are complaining of their own set of issues. YouTuber Daniel Owen has also made a video about the game’s PC issues. While I haven’t played the Xbox Series or PlayStation 5 ports, there are similar reports of crashes and stutters floating around the internet for each.

The experience of playing Zero Company is frustratingly similar to that of another recent UE5 Star Wars game, Jedi: Survivor. As I wrote about in 2023, that game was broken on release. It suffered from constant traversal and shader compilation stutter on PC, meaning the game would constantly hitch even on high-end systems. For NVIDIA users, the game also shipped without DLSS support. Even after nearly a dozen major patches, Jedi: Survivor still stutters on PC. At this point, I’ve given up hope that the game will ever play smoothly; Respawn Entertainment, Jedi: Survivor‘s developer, hasn’t released a new patch in nearly two years.

Unfortunately, I can’t confidently say Zero Company will receive even a fraction of the post-release support that Jedi: Survivor got from Respawn. That’s because while Electronic Arts published both games, the new one was made by an independent studio named Bit Reactor, not a direct subsidiary, and its future depends on whether Zero Company sells enough copies.

On Monday, Game File’s Stephen Totilo reported that Bit Reactor had furloughed the majority of its staff just weeks before Zero Company’s release on August 27. One source told Totilo that as much as 80 percent of the studio’s employees aren’t being paid right now. Another source told him that only a skeleton crew remains, “ready to address any of Zero Company’s post-launch bugs.” A spokesperson for Bit Reactor told Totilo that the studio hopes to bring the furloughed workers back with restored pay, a promise the employees he spoke to said they weren’t confident it would be able to deliver on, even if the game is a commercial success. The studio is also embroiled in a legal dispute between its co-founders that won’t go to trial until early 2027.

If what remains of Bit Reactor is working to address Zero Company’s many bugs and performance issues, the one public statement the studio has made on the subject isn’t reassuring. On the day of the game’s release, it simply said on Steam’s Community forums it was aware of “emerging issues (crashes and CPU threading),” and that it was working on implementing fixes. “We’ll let you know when we’re able to provide an update,” it added.

On the face of it, that’s a fine enough statement, but it was issued before the news about its staffing levels came out, and it hasn’t said anything since. EA and Bit Reactor did not immediately respond to Engadget’s comment request, asking what, if any, post-release support the game will receive.

If you’re thinking about buying Zero Company, just know that it might not get to a better state than it is right now. You might think I’m being overly pessimistic, but I’ll point out it took Respawn, a studio with the full financial backing of EA, a year-and-a-half to get Jedi: Survivor to its current state. Another comparison here is just as illustrative. Cold Symmetry, the indie studio behind Mortal Shell II this past Saturday announced a hefty “Week One” update for its new game, which it released just seven days before Zero Company. Those two comparisons give a sense of the potential difficult road ahead for Bit Reactor, but also what an indie studio can do when it’s fully staffed. Right now, Zero Company doesn’t that have going for it.

This week, two stories look at what happens when rules written far from a classroom land on a teacher’s desk. One guest found guidance that barely mentions the youngest students. The other found a law that took away the exact tool his students needed most. Both raise a question that will sound familiar to any educator: When the rules do not fit, who is responsible for making them work?

Where the Screen Time Guidance Runs Out

A longtime education and technology journalist went looking for what happens once new federal guidance meets an actual pre-K classroom. He found teachers working from advice written for teenagers, not four-year-olds, and building their own approach out of whatever was on hand. Adam Stone talks about what he heard from the people closest to the problem.

One Law, One Classroom, One Missing Tool

A Missouri civics teacher ran a yearlong civic engagement program with his students, right as a new state law changed what they were allowed to carry into class. Dan Clark explains what his students lost access to, and why he thinks the fix lawmakers chose missed the point entirely.

Listen to the episode:

Stories Mentioned in This Episode

Early Childhood Education Teachers Grapple with Screen Time by Adam Stone

The Case Against the Classroom Cellphone Crackdown by Dan Clark

This Week with EdSurge is a weekly podcast from EdSurge. Subscribe to the EdSurge newsletters for more news and analysis on education and technology.