Forward-looking: Valve’s Steam Machine signals the company’s willingness to push Steam beyond software and into a proper hardware platform. But hardware is only half the story. Alongside gaming devices, Valve has been quietly laying the groundwork for something potentially more significant: a version of SteamOS that runs on just about any PC you care to throw at it.

SteamOS has spent most of its life as a closed ecosystem, optimized almost exclusively for Valve’s own devices. That’s beginning to change. The company recently updated its Arch Linux-based OS to broaden hardware compatibility, and the move is backed by active collaboration with some of the biggest names in the PC industry.

The SteamOS 3.8.10 release is where the signals start to add up. The update adds initial support for upcoming Steam Machine hardware and meaningfully improves compatibility with Intel-based handhelds, along with better support for recent Intel and AMD processor platforms more broadly. On paper, it reads like a routine maintenance release. In practice, it looks like Valve is quietly building out the foundation for a much wider platform.

In a recent interview with The Verge, Valve confirmed the Intel relationship goes deeper than a few driver patches. The company is working closely with Intel’s engineers to optimize SteamOS at the graphics stack level, ensuring the OS runs properly on Panther Lake – Intel’s latest computing platform, and the architecture behind the Arc G3 Extreme SoC powering upcoming handhelds like the MSI Claw 8 EX AI+.

The Claw 8 EX AI+ ships with Windows, but Intel has acknowledged real user demand for a Linux alternative. No firm timeline for official SteamOS support has been given.

That device, like the new Steam Machines, carries a price tag that reflects the moment we’re in. The MSI Claw 8 EX AI+ retails for a hefty $1,799 – a figure that would have seemed implausible for a handheld a few years ago. It remains to be seen if the halo device sells in any meaningful quantities at that price level, too.

MSI’s product marketing lead Andy Chu has been straightforward about why: memory and storage costs have surged, largely on the back of AI industry demand, and OEMs have run out of room to absorb them. Chu says MSI exhausted every option trying to bring the price down and still landed here. He’s also warned the situation could get worse before it gets better.

Against that backdrop: expensive hardware, a fragmented ecosystem, and a Windows-centric status quo – Valve’s SteamOS ambitions start to look more strategic than incidental. Valve engineer Pierre-Loup Griffais has said that starting with the 3.8 release, users can now build their own Steam Machines using whatever PC hardware they have on hand. The experience, Griffais says, will closely resemble a docked Steam Deck, with some caveats.

Nvidia support is the most notable gap. Valve is actively collaborating with Nvidia on driver support, but Griffais was measured about the timeline. Most reporting puts realistic availability at 2027 at the earliest. SteamOS is an immutable OS with a read-only filesystem, which makes bundling Nvidia’s proprietary drivers a fundamentally different problem than the open-source AMD and Intel drivers already baked in.

Previous attempts to install SteamOS outside of Valve hardware meant navigating the Steam Deck recovery image, a process that made most mainstream Linux installs look effortless by comparison. What’s happening now is that the OS is being deliberately expanded to meet the broader PC ecosystem, rather than waiting for the ecosystem to come to it.

A high-severity SSRF vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-20230, in Cisco Unified Communications Manager Server is now being exploited in attacks.

Cisco released security updates for the CVE-2026-20230 flaw on June 3, warning that exploitation could give attackers root privileges on the device.

“A vulnerability in Cisco Unified Communications Manager (Unified CM) and Cisco Unified Communications Manager Session Management Edition (Unified CM SME) could allow an unauthenticated, remote attacker to conduct server-side request forgery (SSRF) attacks through an affected device,” warned Cisco.

“This vulnerability is due to improper input validation for specific HTTP requests. An attacker could exploit this vulnerability by sending a crafted HTTP request to an affected device. A successful exploit could allow the attacker to write files to the underlying operating system that could be used later to elevate to root.”

The flaw was disclosed to Cisco by SSD Secure, who did not share any technical details at the time.

Today, threat intelligence firm Defused warned that the flaw is now being actively exploited in attacks.

“Over the weekend we observed exploitation of CVE-2026-20230 – Cisco Unified CM (CUCM) WebDialer SSRF → root file-write (CVSS 8.6) No previously recorded exploitation, and not yet listed in CISA KEV,” Defused warned on X.

Defused says the attacks are originating from a single IP address and use properly constructed file:// payloads to create files on the device.

While the flaw can be exploited in attacks to drop webshells and gain root privileges, the PoC observed by Defused appears designed to identify vulnerable devices by attempting to write a text file named ‘/tmp/cve-2026-20230-test.txt’ to them.

After the exploitation was disclosed, SSD Secure published a technical write-up of the flaw explaining how the vulnerability works and sharing a proof-of-concept exploit.

The researchers found that an unauthenticated attacker could abuse the Webdialer component’s handling of user-supplied URLs to force the application to write arbitrary files to the operating system using file:// URIs.

By controlling the file path and the content written to disk, an attacker could exploit the bug to achieve remote code execution and ultimately gain root privileges on vulnerable devices.

SSD Secure noted that exploitation requires the attacker to first obtain the target system’s hostname before carrying out the file-write attack. However, the researchers demonstrated how that information can be retrieved from the device before exploitation.

While the current exploitation appears to be reconnaissance in nature, now that the flaw has been fully disclosed, we will likely see more threat actors target these servers.

BleepingComputer contacted Cisco to ask if they, too, are seeing the flaw exploited in attacks and if any IOCs can be shared with defenders, and will update the article if we receive a response.

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A good power bank isn’t exciting until your phone drops to 5% during a flight, a commute, or a long day away from an outlet. That’s when having a reliable backup battery suddenly feels essential. Prime Day is packed with portable charger deals, but many of them are generic products that look good on paper and disappoint in daily use. For this shortlist, I focused on trusted brands, practical features, portability, and unique use cases. Whether you want a dependable everyday charger, a MagSafe companion, or an emergency battery for outdoor adventures, these are the power banks I’d consider buying during Prime Day.

Anker PowerCore 10K – My everyday favorite power bank

If someone asks me to recommend a portable charger without any qualifications, Anker is usually where I start. The PowerCore 10K strikes an ideal balance between capacity, portability, and reliability. With enough power to recharge most smartphones nearly twice, it’s compact enough to slip into a backpack, jacket pocket, or carry-on without adding noticeable weight. Anker has also built a reputation for dependable charging technology and strong safety features, making this one of the safest recommendations on this list. For travelers, students, and commuters, it’s difficult to find a more practical all-around option.

Ridge Magnetic Power Bank – Best deal for iPhone users

Magnetic charging accessories have become incredibly popular among iPhone users, and the Ridge Magnetic Power Bank embraces that convenience. Instead of carrying cables everywhere, you can simply attach the battery to the back of a compatible device and continue using your phone while it charges. The slim design makes it particularly appealing for travel and daily commuting, while the premium construction aligns with Ridge’s reputation for durable everyday-carry products. If convenience matters more than maximum capacity, this is one of the more attractive Prime Day options available.

BLAVOR Solar Power Bank – Best one for outdoor adventures

Most power banks are designed for urban life, but the BLAVOR Solar Power Bank takes a different approach. Built with outdoor use in mind, it combines a 10,000mAh battery with solar charging support, a flashlight, and a rugged design. While solar charging isn’t fast enough to replace traditional charging methods, it can provide valuable backup power during camping trips, hikes, or emergencies. If you’re building an emergency preparedness kit or spending time away from conventional power sources, this is one of the most versatile products in the category.

Aaoyun Portable Charger – Extremely convenient for everyday use

The biggest annoyance with portable chargers is often remembering to carry a cable. That’s what makes the Aaoyun Portable Charger interesting. Its compact design and integrated charging solution reduce the number of accessories you need to carry, making it particularly convenient for people who prioritize portability. It won’t replace a high-capacity travel charger, but it serves as a useful everyday backup for keeping a smartphone alive through long workdays, concerts, festivals, and travel delays.

Belkin USB-C Power Bank – Wins the reliability game

Belkin has spent years building accessories for major technology brands, and that experience shows in its portable charging products. The company’s USB-C power bank focuses on reliability, compatibility, and straightforward performance rather than flashy features. It’s an excellent choice for professionals, frequent travelers, and anyone who values dependable charging from a well-established brand. While it may not offer solar charging or magnetic attachments, it delivers exactly what most users need: consistent power when their devices run low.

Prime Day is full of portable charger deals, but these five products stand out because each serves a different need. The Anker PowerCore 10K is the safest overall recommendation, the Ridge Magnetic Power Bank is ideal for iPhone users, the BLAVOR Solar Power Bank is built for outdoor adventures, the Aaoyun Portable Charger prioritizes convenience, and the Belkin USB-C Power Bank focuses on reliability. If you’re planning to pick up a backup battery this Prime Day, these are the models I’d shortlist first.

Look, I get it. I was a holdout on bidets. Like most Americans, I didn’t grow up with one. I hadn’t tried it, but didn’t like the idea of jets of water pointed at my keister.

And then I moved into a house that already had one installed, and became a convert in less than a week. Turns out that the French, the Japanese, and the self-righteous citizens of South Park were correct, and I was wrong. I now feel extra-clean, all the time. But here’s the problem: A large percentage of American bathrooms don’t have a power outlet easily accessible from the toilet. This includes my new front bathroom. Which means a lot of the best bidet models, the ones with heat and lights and fans and fancy doo-dads, are inaccessible to me.

The Tushy Classic 3.0 is a great option for that problem in particular. I didn’t really need all that to begin with, to have a clean bottom. For a lot less money, a company called Tushy specializes in bidet attachments that don’t require electricity. They instead hook in easily to the room-temperature water hose that connects to your toilet tank. Analog knobs control the water jets.It slips under your existing toilet seat for extra-easy installation, and right now, it’s also on sale for less than $100.

My colleague Nena Farrell tested this model for well over a year, and said that while she noted a few cracks on some of the rotating flanges inside of the housing (which you have to remove to even see), hers is still going strong. Note also that the Classic comes in a few colors, but there’s a chance it won’t exactly match your existing toilet.

The Classic is not the model I’ve tested, however. I have an updated model of the Wave, whose O.G. model is also on sale for a hefty discount on Prime Day, just $141. The Wave actually replaces your existing toilet seat, with a couple different shapes depending on the shape of your toilet bowl. (Make sure to check whether your toilet is “round” or “elongated” for proper fit.)

ByteDance unveiled Seedance 2.5 on Tuesday at its Volcano Engine FORCE conference in Beijing, a video generation model that produces 30-second clips at native 4K resolution from a single prompt. The company skipped four intermediate versions entirely, jumping straight from its predecessor to signal what it described as a generational leap.

An enterprise beta is already live, with public launch targeted for early July. CEO Liang Rubo told the conference that climbing the AI summit is the company’s top priority, with its model-as-a-service business evolving into a foundational operation backed by long-term investment.

The headline upgrade is reference capacity: the model accepts up to 50 multimodal inputs, including images, audio clips, 3D white models, and style references, up from 12 in its predecessor. Those inputs give Seedance 2.5 far more granular control over style, motion, and composition than a text prompt alone.

The model generates at 4K natively rather than upscaling from a lower resolution, a distinction that matters for professional production pipelines. It supports 10-bit colour depth for smoother gradients and more room for post-production colour grading. ByteDance also claims 20 percent better prompt adherence, meaning fewer generations before a usable result.

Audio is now co-processed within the same latent space as visual signals, producing native synchronisation between onscreen actions and their corresponding sound effects. A new 3D white-box preview function lets creators generate low-fidelity animations before committing to a full-quality render. Together, the features position the model as a production tool rather than a novelty generator.

The announcement comes three months after ByteDance was forced to add watermarking and IP guardrails to Seedance 2.0 following cease-and-desist letters from Disney, Warner Bros Discovery, Paramount, and Netflix. A viral deepfake of Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt on a rooftop drew a formal complaint from the Motion Picture Association and a rebuke from SAG-AFTRA.

ByteDance paused the global rollout in mid-March and did not resume it through CapCut until late March, with face-blocking filters, C2PA watermarks, and copyrighted character detection in place. No timeline has been offered for making the new model available in the United States.

The competitive context has shifted dramatically since February. OpenAI shut down Sora in March after the video tool peaked at roughly one million users and reportedly cost about a million dollars a day to operate, generating just over two million dollars in total revenue.

Google’s Veo 3.1 has filled much of the vacuum, offering native 4K output, audio generation, and up to three reference images for style control. But the new ByteDance model substantially exceeds Veo’s reference input capacity, accepting 50 inputs to Veo’s three, a gap that matters for professional workflows.

The AI video generation market has fragmented rapidly, with Chinese models moving faster on production tooling than Western competitors. Third-party platforms like Reallusion’s AI Studio have already built professional pipelines around the predecessor model, and Runway’s fourth-generation tool has dropped out of the Artificial Analysis top 10.

Whether the new model can reach global markets without reigniting the copyright battles that stalled its predecessor remains the central question. ByteDance has the model, the distribution through CapCut’s 400 million monthly active users, and the vertical integration from generation to editing to sharing. What it does not yet have is a settlement with Hollywood, and every feature that makes the model more capable also raises the stakes of that unresolved conflict.

The White House is drastically shortening the deadline for government agencies and organizations to adopt new quantum-resistant encryption systems that will withstand attacks that use quantum computers, as the federal government seeks to protect decades’ worth of secrets belonging to militaries, banks, governments, and most individuals on Earth.

The executive order, titled Securing the Nation against Advanced Cryptographic Attacks, requires computing systems for “high-value assets” and “high-impact systems” to transition to post-quantum cryptographic key establishment schemes by December 31, 2030, and to quantum-safe digital signature schemes by December 31, 2031.

Heading off a significant threat

The new deadline, which for many organizations is about five years sooner than the previous one, comes on the heels of recent research showing that the resources and cost for building a cryptographically relevant quantum computer are far less than previous consensus estimates. In response, Google, Cloudflare, and other companies recently tightened their timelines for moving off vulnerable systems to 2029.

“The advent of large-scale quantum computers, particularly in the hands of adversaries, will pose a significant threat to widely used cryptographic security systems,” Monday’s executive order stated. “Ongoing cyber activity against our Nation also presents the risk of adversaries collecting United States information now, and decrypting it later once large-scale quantum computers are operational.”

Under a timeline the National Security Agency published in 2022, “National Security Systems”—a class including only defense and intelligence systems under the authority of the agency—were under orders to be quantum-ready between 2030 and 2033. Most other organizations had until 2035 to complete the transition. Now, many of them will be required to transition much sooner.

“So, for any system that falls into this new bucket of high-value assets and high-impact systems, their transition timelines just got shortened by 4-5 years (from 2035 to 2030/2031),” Brian LaMacchia, a cryptography engineer who oversaw Microsoft’s post-quantum transition from 2015 to 2022 and now works at Farcaster Consulting Group, told Ars. “That is a significant shortening of the transition timeline for these systems, and it follows similar timeline revisions from Google and Cloudflare that we saw announced back in late March/early April.”

Across the United States, K-12 schools have spent the past decade building one-to-one device programs. These initiatives have established an essential baseline for digital access, making it easier for students to complete daily schoolwork across grade levels and subjects. By putting a device in the hands of every learner, districts have created a standard foundation for digital literacy, research and everyday classroom engagement.

As STEM programs continue to grow and mature, however, school leaders are beginning to encounter new questions about how well those devices support more advanced coursework. Pathways in fields like robotics, engineering, cybersecurity and data science increasingly rely on specialized professional applications that reach well beyond general-purpose classroom software.

In many cases, students can successfully complete introductory work on school-issued devices. But as instruction progresses, the tools required for STEM programs place different demands on student computing resources. As a result, educators and technology directors are taking a closer look at how hardware capacity can keep pace with shifting curricular needs.

STEM Tools and Computing Demands

While web-based applications work well for introductory coursework and daily assignments, many expanding STEM pathways introduce entirely different technical requirements. Courses in engineering, 3D modeling, cybersecurity and data science rely on industry-standard applications that demand substantial local computing capacity, robust memory and dedicated graphics processing.

A prime example is SolidWorks, a professional computer-aided design (CAD) platform used in both higher education and engineering industries. When students build detailed, multi-part models or run stress-test simulations, the performance of the device they’re using directly affects how efficiently they can work. Insufficient hardware can lead to severe rendering delays, software lag or sudden crashes that disrupt the entire classroom flow. 

This reality highlights a practical procurement consideration for districts: As STEM curricula mature beyond basic web-browsing activities, classroom devices must have sufficient local processing power to keep up.

A Robotics Program in Practice

To see how these hardware dynamics play out in a real classroom, consider the experience of the Firebots robotics team at Fremont High School in Sunnyvale, California. The team competes each year in the FIRST Robotics Competition, a global program where students design, build and program large robots to complete complex engineering challenges under tight, real-world constraints.

The work inside a competitive robotics program closely mirrors a commercial engineering environment, spanning mechanical design, fabrication, electrical systems and software development. Students use CAD tools to design components from scratch, test digital iterations and refine mechanisms on a tight competition timeline.

To support this technical workflow, the Firebots use ASUS TUF Gaming laptops. In robotics programs like this, student devices are not just tools for looking up information; they are central workbenches used across multiple stages of the design process. Students rely on them for modeling, code compilation, data logging, documentation and coordination among subteams.

Reliable on-device performance eliminates a common source of classroom friction. When software runs consistently and responsively, students can spend their limited class time troubleshooting their designs rather than troubleshooting their devices. Free from technical slowdowns and long file loads, they can focus on testing solutions and iterating on ideas. Ultimately, the Firebots’ systematic approach and focus on execution earned the company the FIRST Excellence in Engineering Award, which recognizes strong engineering design and system integration.

What This Means for STEM Instruction

The experience of programs like the Firebots raises a broader question for school leaders and instructional technology directors: How should district-wide device strategies evolve as STEM instruction becomes more technically demanding?

One-to-one computing programs continue to serve as the foundation for most day-to-day classroom learning, providing the baseline connectivity and performance needed for a modern education. At the same time, STEM courses can reveal distinct moments where standardized, general-purpose devices reach the limits of demanding software and workflow requirements.

In many districts, this variation is already being managed through a mix of approaches. Some schools rely on shared physical lab spaces equipped with higher-performance workstations dedicated to specialized software. Others use cloud-based streaming solutions where possible, while reserving more resource-intensive local applications for specific instructional settings.

The goal is not to dismantle existing one-to-one initiatives, but to recognize where a single hardware standard may limit technical pathways. As STEM education continues to expand and diversify, school leaders find themselves balancing the competing priorities of deployment consistency, procurement cost and instructional fit. In this changing landscape, device planning is no longer treated as a separate IT purchasing decision. Instead, it is increasingly part of a larger conversation about how schools design learning environments that accurately reflect the kinds of hands-on work students are being asked to do.