Xfce’s new Wayland compositor sees first alpha release

The developer working on Xfwl4, the Wayland compositor for Xfce, has published the new compositor’s very first alpha release. Considering it’s only been six months or so of work, it’s impressive to see the effort reach this state already.

The end goal of xfwl4 is to behave as closely as possible to an Xfce desktop running on an X server. Ideally a user could switch between the two without even knowing there’s a difference. In reality, of course, it won’t be quite that seamless, and there’s still more work to be done to get as close as possible to that ideal. This is a first solid cut at it, at the very least.

↫ Brian Tarricone

Being the very first alpha release, it won’t surprise you there’s a few things missing or broken at this point. Still, if you’re brave, you can download and build the release and try it out.

source https://www.osnews.com/story/145362/xfces-new-wayland-compositor-sees-first-alpha-release/

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We finally know how much Valve's Steam Machine will cost — here's how to sign up this week for a chance to buy the console-like gaming PC

Since Valve first announced its console-like, living room-friendly gaming PC the Steam Machine last November, the wait to find out how much it will cost and when exactly it will come out has been a long one. Before now, the manufacturer only confirmed that its launch for Summer 2026 was still planned, with the ongoing RAM crisis caused by heavy AI investment significantly complicating Valve's supply and pricing process.

At long last, however, the firm has finally announced how much the device will cost and when it will manage to start shipping it out to customers. In a new blog post, Valve revealed that there are two different Steam Machine SKUs — a 512GB unit and one with 2TB of storage — you'll be able to purchase, with each also offered in a bundle that includes the new $99 Steam Controller gamepad.

That means you have four options total, all of which I've listed below with their prices:

• Steam Machine 512GB: $1,049 USD /  1,509 CAD /  1,039 EUR /  879 GBP / 1,609 AUD /  4,389 PLN
• Steam Machine 512GB + Steam Controller: $1,128 USD / 1,628 CAD / 1,108 EUR / 938 GBP / 1,728 AUD / 4,698 PLN
• Steam Machine 2TB: $1,349 USD / 1,919 CAD /  1,359 EUR /  1,149 GBP /  2,109 AUD /  5,739 PLN
• Steam Machine 2TB + Steam Controller: $1,428 USD / 2,038 CAD / 1,428 EUR / 1,208 GBP / 2,228 AUD / 6,048 PLN

Note that in addition to the standard black faceplate, you also have the option of getting a red fabric or a solid walnut front cover for the 2TB version of the Steam Machine.

Valve's upcoming new Steam Machine gaming PC utilizes the company's Linux-based SteamOS operating system, and is designed with the living room and traditional console-style gaming in mind. (Image credit: Valve)

Due to memory and storage shortages severely impacting component supply, Valve won't have as many Steam Machines available for gamers to purchase as it would like to. Therefore, it's implementing a reservation system similar to the one it's using for the Steam Controller, though it's going to work a bit differently.

From now until Thursday, June 25th at 10 a.m. PT, you can sign up for the reservation list of the model you want on the Steam Machine's official store page. Then, Valve will close the list and randomize it to determine the reservation queue order.

Once the order has been finalized, you'll receive an email that either confirms you're in the reservation queue and will be emailed when there's a Steam Machine available for you to order, or that you're on the waitlist and will be notified when you're added to the queue and more units become available.

Valve says the first Steam Machine orders will begin to ship out on Monday, June 29, which is precisely one week away from the time of writing.

Some final things to note: trying to reserve a Steam Machine requires having a Steam account in good standing as well as a Steam purchase in your account history before April 27. Also, you can't change the model you reserved after signing up, though you can sign up for multiple different versions and bundles of the Steam Machine.

If you're aiming to try and get your hands on the device, good luck — I have no doubt that you're going to need it!

Join us on Reddit at r/WindowsCentral to share your insights and discuss our latest news, reviews, and more.

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Nvidia gets all agentic about supercomputing for scientific research

Nvidia is pushing agentic AI for scientific computing, and says that this requires a new scientific computing stack, which the GPU giant is ready to deliver, of course. At the ISC High Performance 2026 event in Hamburg, Germany, Nvidia is lauding its own achievements in supercomputing, highlighting just how many of the world’s top compute clusters use its hardware these days. But just as agentic AI has become this year’s buzzword in the machine intelligence industry, so the GPU slinger is pushing it as the next big thing for supercomputers and their research programs, driven by its next-gen Vera Rubin platform and new software tools. “We are currently witnessing a massive inflection point with agentic AI. AI is shifting from a tool that simply answers questions to an autonomous system that executes complex tasks,” Nvidia’s senior director of HPC and AI Factory Solutions Dion Harris told the media in a briefing. The Mission and Vision systems at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in the US will be the world's first agentic AI supercomputers when they come online, he says. A new scientific computing stack connects agents, simulation, and AI together to accelerate the next generation of scientific discovery, Harris claims. “Scientists leverage agentic AI co-scientists that call simulators and surrogate models alongside tools and applications, to do everything from planned experiments to write code to run the simulations to simulations and AI and data analytics converging into one single workflow,” he explained. This requires an incredible amount of compute, memory, and networking, which, in Nvidia’s eyes, means supercomputers built on its Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell platforms, plus Quantum InfiniBand networking, and new software for accelerating discovery. The latter comprises ALCHEMI, DAQIRI, and cuPhoton. The first is described by Nvidia as a domain-specific toolkit for chemical and material discoveries, using the BGR microservice for simulating millions of molecules and structures. DAQIRI is designed for the next-generation scientific instruments, connecting sensors directly to real-time AI inference points, Harris says. “At CERN's ATLAS experiment, less than 2 percent of collision data can typically be stored. DAQIRI introduces a GPU accelerated AI trigger pipeline allowing FPGAs to handle low latency routing while GPUs run deep learning models to ensure we learn from significantly more data,” he explained. Finally, cuPhoton is built to process petabytes of camera and telescope data to help scientists analyze massive cosmic data sets in minutes rather than months. “In testing with 32 Grace Blackwell superchips simulating data from the Rubin Observatory, cuPhoton loaded and read images 15,000 times faster and accelerated signal processing and analysis by up to 8,000 times,” Harris claimed. But Nvidia is pitching its next-gen silicon as the platform for agentic supercomputing. Due to be available in Q4 this year, the Vera Rubin NVL rack will cram in up to 144 GPUs per rack, and deliver 5 petaFLOPS of FP64 floating-point performance. Because many high-performance computing workloads are often bound by memory performance, Vera Rubin increases memory bandwidth by 2.8 times compared to Blackwell, Harris says, using 41 TB of HBM4 memory per rack to achieve three petabytes per second of bandwidth. Systems that are getting Vera Rubin include the Mission and Vision systems at LANL. These stack up to 2,160 Rubin GPUs plus 1,080 Vera CPUs, in the case of Mission, while Vision has a more modest 1,298 Rubins and 648 Veras. “Then there's Veritas, which is being announced at ISC, which deploys 576 Rubin GPUs, along with 288 Vera CPUs,” Harris says. We asked Nvidia what the purpose is of embedding agentic AI into scientific computing, much of which is about research driven by human curiosity. “Agentic AI, or in fact any AI, is not required to do science,” Harris told The Register. “But Nvidia believe agentic AI is already emerging as a powerful tool to do science at a scale that isn’t possible when human scientists alone drive the process. Agents don’t need to sleep, or eat, or take breaks. They can consume thousands or millions of technical papers and remember the details, and in some cases, they benefit from PhD-level understanding across diverse fields from astrophysics to zoology,” he said. Nvidia’s vision is that human scientists will have a team of agents running around the clock, able to do investigations they couldn’t themselves perform. “But agents require foundation models, LLMs, and connections to data and tools to perform science. They run on CPUs, but access tools, many of which need GPUs to run at maximum performance and efficiency,” Harris added. Nvidia claims that Europe is now a hotspot for HPC, with 35 new supercomputers brought online in the past year, all using Nvidia tech. These include Jupiter, Europe’s exascale system, MareNostrum 5 at the Barcelona supercomputing center, Bavaria AI's Blue Swan, HammerHAI at the University of Stuttgart, and Italy’s CINECA. ®

source https://www.theregister.com/systems/2026/06/22/nvidia-gets-all-agentic-about-supercomputing-for-scientific-research/5259553

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These Independent Apps Let You Use Your Whoop Without a Subscription (For Now)

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I generally love my Whoop band, but there's no question that the company's subscription-only model isn't for everyone. A few weeks ago, a hobbyist created an app that can connect to your old Whoop 4.0 strap. I loved the idea, since an independent app sounds like a great way to keep your data private and to make use of an otherwise obsolete piece of hardware. But as I worked through the steps of compiling and testing the freshly posted code, I noticed more apps like it popping up on Reddit and Github.

Since then, some of these Whoop-compatible apps have been taken down, at least one of those at the request of a Whoop executive. Here is what I learned in talking to several of those apps’ developers, and whether I think independent Whoop apps have a future. (Tentatively: yes.) 

Are these independent Whoop apps legal?

“In cases that violate our IP, trademarks, or terms of use, we have reached out to individuals to take down their apps,” a Whoop spokesperson said to me in a statement. The developers that I’ve spoken to, for their part, believe that what they’re doing is legal and ethical.

Whoop’s position is that the value of the Whoop platform is in its proprietary analysis and features, which others have tried to imitate but cannot directly replicate. The company makes an API available to developers, through which they can access the data Whoop has processed. Using the API requires working through Whoop’s system—meaning the user must have a Whoop membership and allow the company to process their data. This is a different scenario than what’s going on with the independent projects I’m writing about today. These new projects aim to let individuals use Whoop hardware without any contact with the company itself, and without ever having had a subscription.

But before I get into why I’m excited about the independent projects, I’d like to include Whoop’s entire statement to me, so you can see where they’re coming from: 

“WHOOP is always excited to see how passionate our members are about using data to better understand their health and performance. WHOOP is designed as an integrated hardware, software, and data platform. It is not possible to access WHOOP proprietary health insights, coaching, analytics, or signature metrics and features—including Recovery, Strain, Sleep scoring, Stress Monitor, Healthspan, and WHOOP Coach—outside of the WHOOP membership experience. The value of WHOOP comes from turning continuous physiological data into validated, personalized, and actionable insights.

“We support third-party app development with our developer APIs and have even created an easy-to-use developer platform. However, not all third-party apps or independent tools are created, reviewed, or authorized by WHOOP.”

The promise of independent Whoop apps

Whoop has always been a high-end product. It’s a screenless fitness tracker, now in its fifth generation, that you wear as a wristband. It captures your heart rate and motion data, and sends that to an app on your phone, which in turn sends it to the cloud to be processed. You pay for this service—$239/year is the typical price—and in turn Whoop gives you detailed analysis of how well you’re recovering from your exercise.

Whoop’s app is good, in my opinion; it goes well beyond basic tracking, and I still think it’s worth the money if you’re a devoted athlete or you really like to nerd out about how well your body is handling the stress you put it under. 

But for as long as Whoop has been around, there have been people wondering if they could use the device for their own purposes. While we finally have competing devices with no required subscription (like the Fitbit Air), there are also a lot of old Whoop devices out in the world. Nearly everyone who had a Whoop 4.0 has probably since upgraded to the 5.0 (seeing as the company sends out the newer version for free), leaving their old strap as e-waste. What if there was a way to repurpose that old hardware? 

That’s the idea behind apps like Noop, Goose, Wearable, and more. These newer apps aren’t the only ones compatible with Whoop hardware, but they appeared recently and they quickly overtook several older, long-simmering projects that had been working on the same question: How can an independent app read data from a Whoop device? Because if a free app can read the device’s data over Bluetooth, you could use the hardware for your own purposes without the Whoop app or subscription service.

How a non-Whoop app can talk to a Whoop band (and why it’s taken so long to get here)

Screenshots from the Noop app Credit: Beth Skwarecki/Noop

The idea of an independent app for a Whoop band isn’t new. Several projects have tried it over the years, with varying levels of success. One I found useful was called Whoomp, and it was simple to use: you load a special web page in your browser, and your computer begins communicating with the Whoop device over Bluetooth. (A public version of Whoomp used to be available here.) The first time I tried it was a thrill: I put on an old Whoop 4.0 device and saw my heart rate on my computer screen. I could press a button on the web page and feel the device buzz on my wrist. The device hadn't been connected to my phone for years; I felt like Dr. Frankenstein bringing the dead to life through the power of technology.

As several developers told me, a Whoop device, fresh out of the box, communicates certain things over Bluetooth. If a computer or phone communicates back in the right way, the two devices can become paired and bonded, and send data and commands back and forth. To have a functional Whoop-like app, the phone has to know how to hold up its end of the conversation.

The Whoop device uses BLE, or Bluetooth Low Energy. That’s a type of connection that many other wearables and devices also use. But Whoop has not publicly released instructions for exactly how phones or computers can access Whoop’s features over BLE. The official Whoop app knows what to say to the device to get it to bond and to transfer data, but independent developers had to figure out, through trial and error, how to decode the language that the device “speaks.” This was a slow process, and until recently, programs like Whoomp were for people who wanted to tinker with the device, knowing that they only had partial functionality. A project like Whoomp could read your heart rate, sure, but it’s not a drop-in replacement for the official Whoop app or subscription. 

How the independent Whoop apps appeared (and disappeared)

A few weeks ago, developer Johnathan Middleton posted on the Whoop subreddit that he had managed, with the aid of Claude Code, to decode more of the Whoop 4.0 communication protocol than had previously been known. He posted the code for an iPhone app and a server that you can run on your own computer to process the data. The project was on the software repository Github under the name "my-whoop," which has since changed to "Wearable." It is still available here, but to use it, you’ll need to know how to compile and sideload an iPhone app—not a beginner-friendly process. 

I spoke with Middleton on a video call. He’s a software engineer in his day job, and says he created the Wearable project over a weekend. He used Claude Code to automate some of the more tedious tasks, like sending signals to the device and checking how it responded. Middleton’s work built on the decoding work accomplished with earlier projects, which he credits in his notes. (That’s how I found out about Whoomp, one of the projects cited.) The resulting app looks a bit like Whoop’s, with scores and analysis that Middleton calculates based on published algorithms; they won’t necessarily match Whoop’s proprietary scores.

Middleton announced his project on the Whoop subreddit on May 30. On June 2, another developer announced a project called Goose, which is meant to work with the newer 5.0/MG bands. On June 7, yet another developer posted the first of many announcements about a project called Noop that builds off both Wearable and Goose to communicate with both types of bands. 

I’ve been in touch with Noop’s developer over email; he indicated his pronouns but did not disclose his name. In the initial announcement, he said proudly that he used $1,500 worth of AI tokens to develop the app. More Reddit posts followed, and the code has been updated hundreds if not thousands of times in the short time the project has been online. Redditors on the Whoop forum have been rolling their eyes at “all these vibe coded apps” because, yes, more have popped up since then. (Here’s Bandmate from June 4,  Seraph from June 11, a modified version of Goose also from June 11, and Edge from June 13.)

On June 17, I noted that Noop’s code was gone from Github (the platform that hosts code for pretty much all these projects). Noop’s developer said that he hadn’t heard anything from Whoop directly, but that Github took it down. He appealed the decision and the repository was reinstated. In the meantime,  he set up a mirror of the code here.

Whoomp disappeared from GitHub even earlier, on June 10. Its developer, John Fitzgerald, told me that Robert Johanson, Whoop’s VP of software, reached out to ask him to take the project down. Johanson also reached out to Middleton, the developer of Wearable, with a similar request, but Middleton kept his code available, and so far it’s still online. 

Goose was supposed to launch its app over TestFlight (a beta testing platform for iPhone apps) on June 13, but never did. I have not been able to get in touch with the developer. The code is still available on Github, but archived as read-only, suggesting that the project is dead.

How you run an unofficial Whoop app

When I decided to test Wearable—Middleton’s app, which was the first I came across—I faced quite the learning curve. Apple doesn’t allow hobbyists to compile apps and share them widely, at least not without a lot of extra steps. This makes sense from Apple’s perspective, since a mystery app could do all kinds of things to your iPhone you may not want it to. (For one thing, Apple requires that an app be signed by a developer, so you know who it came from.)

Bigger developers will often distribute an app for testing through a platform called TestFlight. You may have used this if you’ve ever beta-tested an iPhone app. Eventually, of course, such a developer might aim to have the app available on the real App Store. But if you just want to tinker with some code you downloaded, you need to be able to compile the app with Xcode, then sideload it (that is, transfer it locally, usually over a USB cable). To do that, well, let’s just say there were a lot of steps I had to figure out. I managed to build Wearable and load it onto my iPhone; later, when I was testing Noop, I found an unsigned .ipa (app) file that another hobbyist had created from Noop’s code, and I installed it via Sideloadly, which shortcut the process a bit—although that’s still risky, because it isn't easily confirmed that the .ipa contains the app I think it does.

The process is simpler on Android, but again, risky. Someone can give you an .apk file, which is already compiled and ready to install. Installing is as simple as clicking a link to the .apk from your Android phone, and tapping a button to say that, yes, you know you probably shouldn’t install this, but you want to anyway. 

But do these apps work?

Screenshots from Wearable as I was trying to connect to the device Credit: Beth Skwarecki / Wearable

I tried out several of the apps I’m writing about, with varying levels of success. Wearable detected my 4.0 strap and showed my live heart rate, but never managed to fully sync all my data. Noop, tested on an Android, managed to work with my 4.0 for a short time, but then I started getting errors. Noop on my iPhone was able to read data from my MG strap. Nothing I tried was 100% functional 100% of the time. 

That’s not unusual when you’re trying out code that’s still under development. Maybe I screwed up somehow, or maybe the apps are just buggy. It would take more methodical testing on my part to narrow down why I’m getting the problems I am. I’ve seen posts on Reddit from people who had more success than I did in getting Wearable and Noop working; Middleton showed me his phone with Wearable working smoothly.

If I took the time, I could possibly figure out what’s going wrong on my end and contribute some fixes to the code. That’s a nice thing about open source development: People work together to test and develop something that everyone can use. If the projects can survive Whoop’s legal threats, and if the developers stay interested enough to maintain the projects over time, we may have some useful, robust Whoop-alternative apps in the future. 

I’m looking forward to that. Reverse engineering, as these projects are called, is generally legal as long as the developer is not directly copying the company’s work or violating its terms of service. But most hobbyist developers aren’t prepared to fight legal battles even if they would theoretically win them, so takedown requests can often be enough to chill development. Aside from Noop, the projects I mentioned haven’t seen active development in at least the past week or so. I haven’t seen any new copycat apps on the subreddit, either. Feels pretty chilly to me.

Why I don’t think this is the end of alternative Whoop apps

For years, Whoop was the only device of its type. I wrote more about the state of smart bands here, but to summarize, there’s nothing special anymore about having a heart rate sensor on a wristband. Whoop’s branding and its top-notch app are the only advantages it has as a device; plenty of folks seem willing to abandon the platform if they can get an app for free, a device for cheap, or both.

Whoop surely knows this. The company is no longer pinning its business model to a single device (or app subscription), but has been branching out into the healthcare space. They now offer blood tests, which are pricey and repeatable. Earlier this year, Whoop joined Medicare’s ACCESS program. The Mayo Clinic and medical device company Abbott have both invested in Whoop, according to Forbes. The Whoop device and app may be the company's best-known products, but they're not the only way the company plans to make money.

Looking to the future, I hope that the Whoop-compatible apps stick around, and I think it’s likely that they will be legally able to. But will there be enough hobbyist developers with enough enthusiasm to debug, maintain, and distribute the apps, especially knowing that Whoop is watching over their shoulder? Will people who have old Whoop straps take a chance on these apps when they could just buy a Fitbit Air for $100 and a lot less hassle? 

Those are the questions I’m pondering. I’d love to have a reliable, free alternative to the Whoop app, or even to the Google Health app. Wearable devices are incredibly personal—they know every time your heart beats—and I don’t love that the only way to use these devices, in most cases, is to share that personal data with a large corporation. I think we should have independent apps, especially ones that work with abandoned tech. Here’s hoping they stick around, and keep improving.

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Anthropic's Mythos mess just keeps getting more complicated

KETTLE It's been a week since the Trump administration established a de facto ban on Anthropic's Mythos derivative, Fable 5, and the more that comes out about the move the more it seems like Anthropic employees talking amongst themselves were on to something: Is the government just picking on the company? This week on the Kettle, host Brandon Vigliarolo and Reg cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons chat about what's going on with Mythos and Fable, what role Amazon may have played in justifying the government's move, how a prominent cybersecurity expert is calling the government's foul, and what this whole thing might mean for the next wave of models. After all, even if Mythos and Fable are as advanced as Anthropic claims, it's not going to take long for some open-weight model to make the same leaps, and good luck trying to stop one of those from getting in the hands of anyone who wants them. You can listen to The Kettle here, as well as on Spotify and Apple Music, or read the transcript of the latest episode below. It's been lightly edited for clarity. Brandon (00:03) Welcome to the latest episode of The Register's Kettle Podcast. I'm Brandon Villiarolo, and boy, has it been another exciting week in AI Land. If you've been following the news, you probably know what I'm talking about, especially if you're an Anthropic customer who suddenly lost access to the company's latest models. That's right. This week's topic is none other than the Trump administration's de facto ban on the release of Mythos derivative Fable 5. And with me to discuss it is our cybersecurity editor, Jessica Lyons. Thanks for coming on. Jessica (00:31) Hello, thanks for having me. Brandon (00:33) Yeah, of course. this is right up your alley, so let's get right into the heart of the matter. What did the Trump administration demand from Anthropic and what was the company's response? Jessica (00:44) Okay, so what happened is last Friday the Trump administration sends this letter to Anthropic and they cite national security concerns to issue an export control saying that Fable 5 and Mythos 5 cannot be used by any foreign national inside or outside of the United States. And that also includes Anthropic employees. So in response, Anthropic just disbanded both models for all of the customers to ensure compliance. So effectively nobody can use these two models. Brandon (01:20) Yeah, I mean it seemed like the way that letter was worded, because Bloomberg got a copy of it and published it. And I think they said that they were citing the Bureau of Industry Security's authorization to what is it, "require a license for the export, re-export, or transfer of any item subject to export administration regulations, because there is an unacceptable risk of use in or diversion to a military intelligence end use or military intelligence end user." So they're basically treating it like any other dual-use technology. But that restriction is so broad, right? Like you said, even their own employees, ⁓ so yeah, they they yeah, they have no other recourse but to just stop it. Jessica (01:56) And it was reportedly a really short time frame too, about ninety minutes that they they received this letter and had to make a call. So they didn't have a lot of time to get any answers about what prompted this and what exactly are you asking us to do here. Brandon (02:04) Right, from what I was reading in some other reports that cited people familiar with the situation inside Anthropic and everything, they didn't even really get much of an explanation. They basically got the letter and they were like, "Excuse me, can you please tell us what this is about?" And the government basically said, "No …shut it down now…" It's really weird, especially then given the story you wrote about this this week, that they're basically treating this, like I said, like any dual use technology. But you wrote about a bug bounty hunter, the godmother of this movement, Katie Moussouris, who basically saw the report that the government used to justify this and she kind of called BS on the whole thing, right? Jessica (02:54) Right. So Katie is really, really well respected in cybersecurity circles. She is the one who helped convince Microsoft to start their bug bounty program. She led the Department of Defense effort for Hack the Pentagon. She sat on several federal commissions and boards. So she's she knows what she's talking about. She knows what she's doing here. And Anthropic asked Amazon to review the models before they released Fable 5 and and Mythos 5. And then they gave Katie a copy of the report and she confirmed today that the third-party report that she mentioned was the Amazon report. Brandon (03:41) Which has been mentioned I think in some other stories too as being kind of the impetus for this whole thing, right? Jessica (03:44) Yes, yes. So Anthropic then says, "hey, can you take a look at this? Let us know what you think." She, as far as we know, is the only other person, the only other third-party expert to take a look at this report. And so she reads through it. She says that essentially what happened is that Amazon researchers fed Fable 5 and Mythos 5 and the Claude Opus model, they fed them all open source code and it had known CVEs. And then they also put new code and they kind of laced it with these vulnerabilities and asked the models to here's the prompt, quote unquote, "review the code for security issues." So Fable 5 refused, and then they just asked it straight out, quote unquote, "fix this code." And the model obliged. They added some additional prompts to produce scripts to patch the issue, test the patches. So it kind of sounds like all these things that you want a model to be able to do for defensive security teams. The model did this. And according to Katie, this is the big scary national security issue that kind of or potentially prompted the Trump administration to just pull the whole thing, like ask Anthropic that you can't release this to any foreign nationals. Brandon (05:13) Right, which again, right, is kind of funny because like when specifically asked to find security vulnerabilities in code, the model said no. Right. I mean, obviously this was a bit of a quote unquote "workaround," right? But I mean, like you said, it's very arguable that this is not a not a bypass, not a jailbreak. It's just the way this should work in the first place. And apparently that's that's good enough for the government to say, "Hey, no, we don't want anyone to have this." Jessica (05:40) Right. And yeah, and there's reports that that this the document was reviewed by administration officials and they described it as really scary because Fable 5 could identify flaws and that would be beneficial to the bad guys who are who are trying to hack American systems, and that poses a major threat to national security. But you have this whole group – and then there was a a letter with I believe over a hundred other security experts who are saying, no. Brandon (06:14) Moussouris signed that too, right? She was a signatory. Jessica (06:20) Yes, she did sign that as well. Yes, you have Alex Stamos, you have a bunch of really, really respected names in security saying, "We need this as defenders. This is what is going to give us an edge. So you're actually you're hurting the defenders. You're not really hurting the attackers by essentially issuing a ban on Anthropic's models. Brandon (06:35) Right, especially since, and I think you mentioned this in your story as well, Mythos isn't unique according to a lot of researchers in these capabilities. And even if it is, it won't be for long, right? There's a lot of models that are going to gain this capability or already have it, right? And that are, some of them, being manufactured overseas. I'm sure DeepSeek can do similar things to this or models exist in China that can do these kinds of things, right? I can't imagine that that Anthropic is alone in this capability. Jessica (06:52) Right, right. I mean, we've seen from a lot of different papers that open weight and foreign models are not that far behind. It might take a few more prompts, but eventually these models also are going to find bugs and show you how to exploit them. So this is not completely unique to this one company and their particular models. Brandon (07:26) But it'll get there, right? And so on top of that, I think ⁓ Moussouris was part of the group that helped the government renegotiate the Wassenaar arrangement, which for anyone unfamiliar, it was an agreement between like 42 forty two countries, right, to to establish some carve-outs for defensive security exceptions to export controls. And it seems like based on you know her reading, or her blog post that this is kind of a misinterpretation of AI's kind of place in that in that arrangement, right? Jessica (08:03) Right, exactly. So yeah, that, like you said, it carved out these exceptions for dual use software technology, especially these these things that are gonna help defenders. So it's offensive security capabilities, it's malware analysis, all of these aspects of the software that is going to help defenders with coordinated incident response and sharing vulnerability data. And this carveout that she helped develop protects the companies, the people who are using these these technologies from criminal prosecution. And so one of the major arguments here is that you are pulling away more technical capabilities that are going to help defenders. This should be covered by that. It obviously is a dual-use technology and this should be protected. Not subject to export controls. Brandon (09:01) Right. And on top of that, right, you know, ⁓ like you mentioned, open weight models. It's gonna be kinda hard to stop export bans on on open weight models and other publicly available stuff, right? Jessica (09:07) Right. Any foreign technologies, there's absolutely nothing that we can do to prevent those. So again, it just seems like an instance of hamstringing defenders with technologies that would be really beneficial. Brandon (09:30) Which I think obviously kind of begs the question whether the Trump administration is sort of just picking on Anthropic, right? As we we covered a few months ago (I can't even remember when it was now because everything moves so fast) but Anthropic got into a scuffle with the Pentagon earlier this year where they basically said, we don't want you using our models to was it spy domestically or or autonomously target weapons, which I think both Anthropic and the Pentagon said, "we're not doing that." But it was just sort of like a "hey, you know, preemptively, we don't want our models used in this kind of situation." And so the Pentagon's reaction was basically to say, "well, if you're not going to let us do whatever we want with it, then you can get out of every single piece of government infrastructure that exists." Now I mean, they had a significant contracts with the federal government, right? Like most AI companies do. And so I think the Trump administration's been kind of picking it out everywhere it can find it. Jessica (10:22) And not just the not just the government itself, but the whole supply chain. They labeled it a supply chain risk. So if you contract with the government, you also can't use this technology. Brandon (10:32) Right, which severely obviously limits Anthropic's ability to do business. And now here we are, you know, I think the New York Times reported earlier this week, they had a pretty wide ranging story on this whole topic that talked to a lot of people inside the company, saw some internal chat logs, and they mentioned that several employees were talking about feeling bullied or unfairly targeted by the Trump administration. And again, but when you with reference back to the things we were just talking about, it kind of seems like that might be the case, right? They're hamstringing defenders, but why, right? Jessica (11:11) Right. Right. The hard part is is that we don't have any transparency or definitive clarity on the reasons. It sounds like maybe Anthropic does at this point. They've reportedly been in negotiations or talks at least with the White House all week. We haven't heard anything out of those talks yet. But it does seem that they are being unfairly targeted when you have the earlier scuffle with the Pentagon. Then you reportedly have Amazon sharing the findings of this review it did on Anthropic's models with the administration. Amazon, Jeff Bezos, we know that's a company that has the administration's ear on things as opposed to Anthropic, which seems to be butting heads with the administration quite frequently. And then all of a sudden, seemingly out of nowhere, there's this export control on Anthropic's models. So it it's it's hard not to draw that conclusion that there's a little bit of bullying for lack of a better word, targeting this particular company because of its history with the White House. Brandon (12:30) I know you in your story you mentioned that you were gonna update it if we heard back anything from the White House because you were asking them some questions about it. Did they ever get back to you? Jessica (12:44) No. No response from the White House. Yeah, of course not. That's not a surprise, really. I mean that's the thing, right? They email me back, I get plenty of emails from them when I ask them questions, but often it's just kind of a "here's the press release you already saw."…If you ask them pointed questions a lot of times they're not gonna answer. But it's the same as any corporation too, I feel like, nowadays. Jessica (13:01) Right. But I mean, like you said, that even even the letter from Commerce itself, that hasn't been made public yet. So we've seen that posted on different social media sites and Bloomberg had a copy of it, but even even that hasn't been released publicly. Brandon (13:14) I was really hoping that the government would explain their reasoning behind this, right? But it just seems like essentially it's been this whole – even when I saw the email I think was it was it Friday or Saturday… Jessica (13:18) It was Friday, it was late Friday. Brandon (13:30) Because I get all of Anthropic's alerts about downtime and outages and everything. And I remember seeing that come across and basically saying that they were cutting off access to those models. And I was just kinda like, what? And then all of a sudden it comes out, it's because, or I think I when I read it further, it was like, Yeah, the government basically, you know, it's forcing our hand in in doing this. Which was really surprising to see on on I mean, not surprising to see based on the timing, right? Because a lot of times Friday evenings are when all this kind of stuff happens so that the news cycle doesn't catch it. But it's also,, you know, we've written quite a bit about whether or not Mythos and then Fable by association aren't kind of being overhyped, right? Like their capabilities are greater than what Anthropic says. We've written about that, we've talked about that on here, I think, before. ⁓ You know, Moussouris's blog post seems to maybe not suggest that it is being overhyped. But at least that it's not, you know again, its capabilities aren't as advanced as what the government seems to be worried about, as what people seem to be, fear mongering about. I mean, have you gotten a sense of that from any of the recent reporting on it or or anything about whether or not again it is just a lot of hype? Jessica (14:46) Well, I think we've seen with Anthropic's models and we've seen with other models as well, is, yeah, they're getting a lot better. They're getting really good at finding vulnerabilities. And now they're also getting better at fixing them. So that seems like a a net positive here. And plus, this wasn't a case of Anthropic releasing the Mythos preview. That's the one with no guardrails that companies are currently trialing to find and fix vulnerabilities in their own products. This was a one I've I've read it described as a a straightjacketed version. And I like that because it this is one that does have the guardrails in place. This is why Anthropic said it was releasing it to the public. So again, without having played around with the model, it's hard to say whether or not it's overhyped or not, but this wasn't just a a free-for-all. This was a model that did have guardrails in place. And if asking the model to fix this code is a jailbreak, I think it also speaks to just a lack of understanding about what these models can do, what they should be able to do, what a jailbreak is, what this technology means in general, especially when it comes to lawmakers. Brandon (16:08) Yeah, right? I mean is this another is this the next generation of the series of tubes here, right? Where some sits on the House floor talking about AI models and it's and it's clear they do not understand what they're talking about. I mean, have you been watching any any government hearings or anything or heard anything? Like what kind of things are they saying about these that sound so grossly wrong? I imagine there's a lot, right? Jessica (16:13) There is a lot. I can't think of any specifics off the top of my head, but I have been watching a lot of the hearings on AI, and specific to AI and how it relates to security. And honestly, cybersecurity is still a pretty big unknown, I think, among most lawmakers. So then you add this newer technology into the mix that's evolving and expanding and and becoming more advanced so rapidly that it just … it's really hard to wrap their heads around what are the capabilities and how can how can this be a benefit for defenders? Because when you do read the hype, it does sound really scary. Here's this model that can find any zero day that's ever existed and it can exploit it and it can do it at the speed of machines. So yeah, that sounds terrifying, really. I think there's a lot of confusion. There's a lot of fear around this right now. And I think it's hard for lawmakers a lot of times to get a get a grasp on what the issues are, what the technology is, how it works. And that's an right. Brandon (17:43) Yeah, I mean this is complicated stuff. It's changing a lot of the technological world right now, right? Like enterprises are grappling with AI, trying to figure out how it works, what works well, what doesn't. You know, it's now entering the cybersecurity space. It's been in the development space for a while. Yeah, I mean, it is a complicated issue that's that's changing everything. I don't know. Maybe we need a government body that regulates cybersecurity and you know, handles all these sorts of things that doesn't get its staff culled on a whim. I don't know. Jessica (18:11) Right. I was gonna say, that's too bad that we don't have one of those. At least with the full staff and budget. Brandon (18:16) Well, who knows? We'll we'll be keeping an eye on things like this 'cause I mean this Mythos story and this the Fable story, this isn't it's not going anywhere. Like you they're still in talk, still trying to figure out what it was. Amodei was at G7 this week talking to leaders about, not wanting to fracture the the cybersecurity environment with AI. So yeah, there's gonna be plenty to talk about and we will be here to discuss it on The Kettle. Thank you for joining me this week and thanks for listening. We will see you soon. ®

source https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/22/anthropics-mythos-mess-just-keeps-getting-more-complicated/5258577

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Apple internals: Swift in the kernel

Apple’s Swift has become the de-facto language for Apple’s own developers for a while now, and it seems that with the new operating system releases from the company unveiled during WWDC, Switch is now also being used in the kernel.

Naturally I dropped what I was doing and went grepping through the iOS 27 kernelcache. Alas, nothing came of it. All is not lost though: I found the Embedded Swift runtime in macOS 27, sitting in com.apple.kec.pthread of all places. Then I went poking around the root filesystem and it turns out Apple gave the whole effort a name: KernelKit.

Let’s dissect it.

↫ Josh Maine

It’s still quite limited at this time, which makes sense – you don’t want to be too crazy with the core of the operating system that runs on god knows how many PCs, smartphones, and other devices. It’s also entirely contained within a few kexts as embedded runtimes, and the XNU kernel itself remains entirely C and C++.

source https://www.osnews.com/story/145352/apple-internals-swift-in-the-kernel/

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Trump admin’s coal investments assist plants with repeated violations

In 2023, after years of pollution, equipment failures, and health concerns, the Cumberland Fossil Plant in Tennessee was slated to close within the decade.

The coal-fired plant had been part of a multibillion-dollar settlement in 2011 after its operator, the Tennessee Valley Authority, failed to install pollution control technology a decade earlier. Regulators cited the plant for more air-pollution violations in 2017 and 2023. TVA said it would shutter Cumberland’s units in 2026 and 2028.

Then the Trump administration replaced four of TVA’s board members, and the agency reneged on its retirement plan in February. Now, TVA has a federal pledge for $46 million to extend Cumberland’s lifespan—part of a nationwide push by President Donald Trump to keep older coal plants running.

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source https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/06/trump-admins-coal-investments-assist-plants-with-repeated-violations/

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“I stored a website in a favicon”

Every website has a favicon. It’s that little icon in your browser tab. Usually you upload it once and then never think about it again. But. A favicon is just an image. An image is just pixels. And pixels are just bytes.

So of course I wondered if I could store something inside one.

↫ Tim Wehrle

I love it when people do something useless just for fun.

source https://www.osnews.com/story/145350/i-stored-a-website-in-a-favicon/

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“Our goal is simple”: Xbox unveils major push to simplify Unreal Engine development

Xbox launches new Unreal Engine 5.8 plugins to strip away development friction and pave the way for Project Helix.

source https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/xbox/our-goal-is-simple-xbox-is-making-unreal-engine-development-much-easier

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Review: Widow's Bay is a boldly original take on comedic horror

Widow's Bay, the delightfully eccentric new comedic horror series from Apple TV, is easily one of the best new series of the year. There's a reason everyone from Guillero del Toro and Ben Stiller to Damon Lindelolf (Lost) is raving about the show. It's an eminently binge-able, addictive series that pays tribute to all the classic horror tropes while reinventing them in surprising ways. Think Stephen King meets Parks and Recreation, with a dash of Twin Peaks—except Widow's Bay is very much its own refreshingly original beast.

(Some spoilers below but no major reveals.)

Tom Loftis (Matthew Rhys) is a widower and mayor of Widow's Bay, a quirky little seaside town that has a colorfully bizarre history marked by periodic tragedies. Tom is eager to elevate the town into a trendy summer tourist destination. But the arrival of New York Times travel writer Arthur Lloyd (Bashir Salahuddin), who has the clout to make Tom's aspirations for Widow's Bay come true, coincides with the onset of a mysterious fog. Local resident Wyck (Stephen Root) warns Tom that the fog is an omen that the island is "waking up," meaning more supernatural occurrences are bound to happen.

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source https://arstechnica.com/culture/2026/06/review-widows-bay-is-a-boldly-original-take-on-comedic-horror/

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Britain sending Ukraine an extra 30,000 drones – now 150,000 all up

Britain has raised its drone commitment to Ukraine to 150,000 this year and will send air defense missiles and radars as part of a £752 million aid package to help the country defend against Russia. The drones and air defense systems were announced this week at a NATO defense ministers meeting by Defence Secretary, Dan Jarvis MP, who recently took over after John Healey resigned in a dispute over the government's defense spending plans. Britain's government had previously said it would deliver at least 120,000 drones in 2026, calling it "the biggest ever drone package" for Ukraine in April. The revised package will also include more than 350 air defense missiles and radars, including Lightweight Multirole Missiles (LMM) and ground-based radar systems, according to the Ministry of Defence. LMM, also known as Martlet, is a laser-guided weapon designed to take down slow-moving aerial drones and fast attack boats at a range of over 6 km (4 miles). It equips the Royal Navy's Wildcat helicopters and has also been deployed as Ground-Based Air Defense (GBAD) against drone attacks at RAF Akrotiri in Cyprus. "This package of drones, air defense missiles, and radars will help to protect innocent Ukrainian people from Putin's barrage of drones and missiles, and it is an honor to welcome President Zelenskyy to this important meeting," Jarvis said in prepared remarks. Jarvis also confirmed the UK will take command of the Multinational Force for Ukraine Headquarters (MNF-U) next month, when Major General Tom Bateman takes over as commander in the rank of Lieutenant General. Bateman will lead the multinational team coordinating support to Ukraine and helping prepare for the long-term regeneration of its armed forces in the event on a peace deal. Some might wonder why Britain is funding Ukraine's defense when its own forces continue to be subject to cutbacks, and much-needed new equipment arrives later than planned. Others know that supporting Ukraine to hold back Russia is vital. The government says this particular funding is coming out of the UK's contribution to the G7 Extraordinary Revenue Acceleration (ERA) loan for Ukraine, which will be repaid using profits generated by seized Russian assets. ®

source https://www.theregister.com/offbeat/2026/06/20/britain-sending-ukraine-an-extra-30000-drones-now-150000-all-up/5258833

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Klue OAuth breach victim list grows as Icarus hackers claim attack

Market intelligence platform Klue has publicly confirmed a recent security incident that allowed threat actors to steal OAuth tokens used to connect to customers' Salesforce environments, as the new "Icarus" extortion group publicly claims the attack. [...]

source https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/klue-oauth-breach-victim-list-grows-as-icarus-hackers-claim-attack/

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What was nice about the UI of Windows 2000

I mean, this is preaching to the choir, but let’s go anyway.

I liked the UIs of the entire era from 3.0 to 2000, really. I’m mostly using Windows 2000 as an example here because it runs so well in QEMU/KVM and that allows me to easily take screenshots.

Some of the following will sound absolutely trivial, but I think it’s worth pointing out.

↫ movq.de blog

Just a series of observations about how much better graphical user interfaces were back in the ’90s and early 2000s. We’ve lost so many affordances based on both common sense and scientific study, and what we ended up with is a confusing, inconsistent mess. It doesn’t really matter where you look – user interface design has deteriorated since the early 2000s, a decline that only accelerated thanks to the arrival of the iPhone, where consistency is a dirty word, and the web, where the advertising people took prominence over the design people.

I just want my buttons to look like buttons man.

source https://www.osnews.com/story/145346/what-was-nice-about-the-ui-of-windows-2000/

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Hackers exploit info disclosure bug in Gravity SMTP WordPress plugin

Threat actors are exploiting an unauthenticated information disclosure vulnerability in the WordPress plugin Gravity SMTP, active on 100,000 sites. [...]

source https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/hackers-exploit-info-disclosure-bug-in-gravity-smtp-wordpress-plugin/

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Committed skeptic finds himself warming to new Amazon AI products that actually don't suck

If you live long enough, you'll wake up one day and find that you're living in a world you no longer understand. Lately there are things happening with AI in a couple of disparate parts of Amazon that brought that lesson home in a big way. The first is that, late last year, they acquired Bee, an AI wearable that is distressingly, upsettingly good. The second, which I want to talk about today as I fly back from AWS's NYC Summit, is Quick Desktop. The best way to describe this is "Enterprise OpenClaw in a polished app." Yes, I know this sounds like I'm being blackmailed. Read on. You work at Amazon, right? Amazon has spent the last three years breathlessly telling us that they're a leader in AI, then shipping products which make it clear that they're unsure what leadership looks like. They've spent far longer building user interfaces that carry a design aesthetic of "complete crap." Even Amazon's website, where you buy everything from underpants to chainsaws to dog food to more underpants, is not a well-designed interface; we've all just learned to live with it. The single good interface to come from Bezos and Coo was the Kindle e-reader: push a button, the page turns. And then they removed the buttons. So yes; "We're launching a desktop AI assistant" is the exact opposite of encouraging coming from these folks. It started like you'd expect. You pop over to the download page and grab the download. On a Mac it's half a gigabyte because of course it is; this is totally normal and fine in 2026. Install it, fire it up, and ... wait a bit. It has to think, and gather its wherewithal before it can get to work. And then the hits start coming. I had talked to people who have used this and raved about it. The problem here is that all of these people work at Amazon, and the current state of the product reflects that. They have a single identity provider they use internally; external users see a confusing array of offerings, each with its own byzantine flows. The feeling is not dissimilar to waking up in the middle of a hedge maze, with no idea how you got there, and discovering that someone just set it on fire. At one point during my time using Quick Desktop, I was logged out and had to log back in. After guessing seven different identity providers, I gave up and emailed the service team for help with this. After some back and forth, I was able to get back in. (GitHub! Future Corey, if you find yourself in this situation, you authenticated via GitHub!) It's clear that the people building this service aren't living the external user experience. It's why I maintain that Amazon's internal AWS account management tool is the service that I hate the most; it separates the people building AWS from the customers using it. At the moment, other similar challenges show up. You'd never have more than one email account from the same provider, right? (Google Workspace in my case, provided it hasn't been deprecated by the time this article goes to print.) You'd never have business conversations via iMessage, or Signal, or LinkedIn DMs, or any number of other services, right? The point isn't the snark; it's that Quick Desktop only knows about the channels its connectors deign to support. Every deal I've ever closed in a LinkedIn DM, every favor traded over Signal, every "hey, quick question" that arrived via iMessage is simply invisible to it — but it makes its confident little suggestions anyway, blissfully unaware that a good chunk of my professional life happens in places it can't see. Here's a free hint to the product team: do you think I mentioned the Bee in the opening of this article because I'm making a fashion statement? And then it starts to work… Once you prove yourself worthy by getting Quick Desktop set up, it ... sits there without doing much. It has a chatbot interface, which surely you've never seen before in an app, backed by a personality I'll call "Uninspiring Accountant." What was the point? And then things start to happen. Your activity feed starts surfacing things from your email. From Slack. From your calendar. I don't know about the rest of you, but my email inbox is where tasks and hope go to die. Slowly but surely, Quick Desktop starts making suggestions, surfacing things that you should handle, proposing email drafts (ugh, in such a bland corporate voice; I hope this email finds you before I do), and giving you quick links to the various apps where these things live so you can see the context it's surfacing. I went in skeptical, partly because I'd already cobbled together a janky version of this for myself by pointing Claude Code at a pile of APIs, so I had a decent sense of what these things miss. And that's when I became a Quick Desktop convert: it flagged an email buried forty messages deep in my inbox that I'd mentally filed under "dealt with" - but very much was not. My own inbox had given up on me like everyone who's ever tried to love me, but Quick Desktop hadn't. This is an Amazon product, and it's pretty clear that they expect you to work with Quick Desktop the way they reportedly work with their own employees: by beating them into compliance. Their own custom connectors and (lack of) extensibility system make it pretty clear that there's a corporate IT department somewhere that's configuring and getting this set up for folks. I freely admit that's not my use case; I'm testing this by myself, not sharing it with my colleagues. But the product is improving. Today, it doesn't really sync data or state between multiple machines; we're still waiting for Amazon to discover this whole "cloud" thing. That's almost certainly going to change in the near future. Along with the just-announced AWS Context approach, once you have a team of people using it, the shared knowledge graph it can build about your entire organization promises to be a significant boon. The part where I trust Amazon That same knowledge graph is also a massive security treasure trove: every deal, every org-chart grudge, every "please don't forward this," every "how do I do the basic functions of my job" chat sessions, lives in one queryable place. Handing that to a vendor terrifies me. It should terrify you. And yet Amazon is one of a vanishingly small number of companies I'd trust with it. I want to acknowledge how strange it is that I just wrote that. I have spent a decade as a professional thorn in this company's side. I have a financial incentive, a personal brand, and frankly a temperament that all point toward not trusting AWS with so much as my lunch order. But credit where it's due: whatever else they get wrong, Amazon takes security and data privacy deadly seriously, and they have the scars and the org structure to prove it. I have lived through this multiple times, and I've seen what AWS does when security competes with other pressures. The list of companies I'd let build a map this detailed of my business is damn short, and most of the names on it are not the ones building these products. They have the security chops, but they have a completely different massive marketing problem. How do you get customers to try this out when you've incinerated your credibility in this space like it's your engineering team's token budget? "For once we have a product that is not shite," while honest, is probably going to be tricky to get through AWS corporate comms. Would I use it myself? I am Reader, I pay cash money for this. Everything I've said above about its sharp edges are true, and I've barely gotten started. I have three pages, ten slides, and one interpretive dance full of "here's why the product sucks" feedback I'll be giving to their product team, who are going to be astounded when I bust into their office uninvited. But I'm not throwing stones from the sidelines on this: "I am a paying customer, and I want this thing I pay you for to be better than it is, so you will listen to every goddamned word I have to say" is a powerful message, and one that's particularly resonant to Amazonians. I can see a world in which I roll this out to the rest of the company. My Claude Code contraption is interesting and in some ways more capable, but it scales precisely as far as "grumpy former sysadmin with a penchant for the CLI" and not one inch further. Our team would justifiably revolt if I tried to inflict it upon them. The hell of it is, the only thing that Amazon has to do to get Quick Desktop to beat my Frankenstein setup is "let Quick configure itself." Yes, there are problems with that approach; I leave them to Amazon to sort through. And so... I don't entirely know what to do with myself in a world where suddenly Amazon is shipping desirable AI products that I'm happy to pay for. First the Bee wearable and now this. That's two data points, and for a company whose AI track record reads like a list of things to apologize for, two data points is alarmingly close to a trend. Their biggest problem is going to lie in outrunning their own shadow, and changing their own nature. I used to be confident they couldn't. I'm less confident now, and I'm not sure how I feel about that. ®

source https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/06/18/committed-skeptic-finds-himself-warming-to-new-amazon-ai-products-that-actually-dont-suck/5258414

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Nintendo confirms data stolen in WebMD subsidiary cyberattack

Nintendo of America has confirmed to BleepingComputer that threat actors stole survey data from the third-party TinyPulse service used internally, but its systems were not compromised. [...]

source https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/nintendo-confirms-data-stolen-in-webmd-subsidiary-cyberattack/

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The Best Books, Movies, Video Games, and Podcasts to Check Out After Watching ‘You’

We may earn a commission from links on this page.

You is the ultimate antihero confection—Joe Goldberg is a reprehensible, horrifying entity who deserves every punishment he gets, but it sure was fun watching him fixate on his various victims and pile up the body count. This story of delusion, romantic obsession, and serial killing was frothy fun for five seasons, but if you’re not ready to let go (Joe would relate), there are other sources of similar dark vibes and violent delights that can help you deal—and if you’ve burned through all the great shows we’ve already recommended, it’s time to expand your search to books, movies, games, and podcasts. Here’s where you can get started on your You-alike journey.

The best books like You

You is based on a series of terrific novels by Caroline Kepnes, and there’s a deep well of novels that explore similarly dark, obsessive stories.

You First, by Caroline Kepnes

$28.00 at Amazon

$32.00 Save $4.00

$28.00 at Amazon

$32.00 Save $4.00

The Collector, by John Fowles

$10.14 at Amazon

$19.99 Save $9.85

$10.14 at Amazon

$19.99 Save $9.85

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

$6.40 at Amazon

$9.00 Save $2.60

$6.40 at Amazon

$9.00 Save $2.60

The Obsession, by Jesse Q. Sutanto

$6.96 at Amazon

$12.99 Save $6.03

$6.96 at Amazon

$12.99 Save $6.03

Read Me, by Leo Benedictus

at Amazon

at Amazon

You First, by Caroline Kepnes

There are now five novels in Kepnes’ You series, and they’re all great—but if you’re looking to expand your appreciation of Joe Goldberg’s weird, off-center charm and legendary manipulation skills, check out You First. This is Joe’s origin story, detailing how he became the twisted, brilliant man you’ve followed for five seasons. At seventeen, Joe is desperate for the love of his life to show up. When an older woman shows interest, he has to lie about how old he actually is, and somehow level up everything about himself to convince her that he’s worth her time—and you can guess how it goes for everyone involved. It’s the perfect way to get a little more genuine You into your life.

The Collector, by John Fowles

Published in 1963, The Collector is a clear predecessor to You. A lonely, socially stunted man named Frederick Clegg fixates on a young college student named Miranda. After buying an isolated house in a remote area, he turns his basement into a prison and kidnaps Miranda, believing that if he keeps her prisoner for a while and shows her “every respect,” she will come to love him. The story is divided between Clegg and Miranda’s perspectives and is a master class in depicting a disturbed mind and the ways someone can adapt to the most horrifying circumstances you can imagine.

Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë

This 19th-century classic story has been adapted to the screen many times, but the best way to experience it remains the original novel. You fans will recognize some of Joe’s violent obsession in the character of Heathcliff, whose whole life is centered on his childhood friend-turned One True Love—all of it souring into furious anger and dark vengeance that destroys everything around him. It’s a beautiful exploration of the destructive power of unhinged desire that never goes out of style.

The Obsession, by Jesse Q. Sutanto

The push-and-pull between Joe and his various fixations is part of the pulpy joys of You, and Obsession delivers that in spades. Logan, a student at a swanky private school in California, is mourning the death of Sophie, whom he regarded as the love of his life—at least, he mourns until he meets Delilah, a newly arrived senior who closely resembles Sophie. As Logan singlemindedly inserts himself into Delilah’s life, she’s desperate to escape her mother’s abusive boyfriend as well as the relationship patterns she fears she’s inherited from her. The two engage in a complex dance as their relationship spirals into page-turning violence.

Read Me, by Leo Benedictus

If you’re fascinated by the techniques Joe uses in You to infiltrate people’s lives and make them see him as he wants to be seen, Read Me will resonate. The narrator has come into a large inheritance, and he’s spending it doing what he loves: Stalking women and injecting chaos into their lives. He’s currently fixated on Frances, and freely enters her home while she sleeps, monitors her every movement and social media post, and eventually ruins her professional and personal life as his obsession pushes him to ever more terrifying acts of manipulation and control. It’s a tense, thrilling ride with a dark personality that will definitely remind you of Joe’s efforts to rationalize his evil behavior.

The best movies like You

One of the pleasures of watching You is watching attractive, charming people do and experience terrible things. If you want more dark thrills along those lines, check out these amazing movies.

Single White Female (1992)

This 90s gem starring Bridget Fonda and Jennifer Jason Leigh is all about the risks we take when we invite people into our private lives. When Allie (Fonda) learns that her fiancé cheated on her, she kicks him out of their apartment and takes on a roommate, Hedy (Leigh), to help with the rent. Hedy, however, immediately begins manipulating and then imitating Allie, trying to become her. It’s a taut, fast-moving thriller that explores a broken person’s insane attempts to control and possess someone else, just like You. Stream Single White Female on Netflix or rent it on Prime Video.

Single White Female (1992)

$3.99 at Prime Video

$3.99 at Prime Video

Ingrid Goes West (2017)

They say you covet what you see, and that’s a concept both You and Ingrid Goes West pivot off of. Ingrid (Aubrey Plaza) is a mentally unstable woman who fixates on an influencer, Taylor Sloane (Elizabeth Olsen) and travels to California to stalk her, insert herself into Taylor’s life, and try to reinvent herself as a version of the supposedly happier, more successful woman. It all spirals into madness, of course, as the film explores the violent spiral that obsession and self-delusion can lead to. Stream Ingrid Goes West on Kanopy or rent it on Prime Video.

Ingrid Goes West (2017)

$3.99 at Prime Video

$3.99 at Prime Video

Fear (1996)

At its core, You is a terrifying story—the idea that someone you meet is manipulating you for their own ends without your knowledge is chilling. In Fear, that terror is dialed up to 11. When teenage Nicole (Reese Witherspoon) begins dating the charming but menacing David (Mark Wahlberg), her father is unnerved. As both Nicole and her Dad slowly see through David’s superficial facade, David’s attempts to possess and control Nicole spiral from manipulation and deception into outright violence. David is a less subtle, less smart version of Joe, but the end result is the same: chaos and a body count. Stream Fear on Tubi or rent it on Prime Video.

Fear (1996)

$3.99 at Prime Video

$3.99 at Prime Video

The Perfect Guy (2015)

One key aspect of You is Joe Goldberg’s ability to mask his true self while systematically stalking and destroying people around him. The Perfect Guy presents a different kind of stalker—someone without Joe’s control or ability to wear a mask; it’s a different kind of terrifying. When Leah (Sanaa Lathan) meets Carter (Michael Ealy), he seems like (wait for it) the perfect guy—her friends and family all love him. But when he shows her a violent streak and she breaks up with him, he launches a deranged campaign to destroy her life that escalates to murder. Like Joe, Carter is able to evade justice and reinvent himself—but Leah isn’t willing to let him win. Stream The Perfect Guy on Starz or rent it on Prime Video.

The Perfect Guy (2015)

$3.99 at Prime Video

$3.99 at Prime Video

Lolita (1962)

With its unsavory subject matter and gross main character, Lolita remains as controversial today as it was when first published or when Stanley Kubrick made this film adaptation. But like You, the story centers on a manipulative monster who works to take control over vulnerable people, leaving a cheerful trail of death and destruction in his wake. Humbert Humbert is as pathetic and horrifying as Joe, and this classic brings a tone of black comedy to a tale of destroyed lives and the damage a predator can do. Rent Lolita on Prime Video.

Lolita (1962)

$3.99 at Prime Video

$3.99 at Prime Video

The best video games like You

Want to get inside the head of Joe Goldberg and experience something like his deranged worldview? A video game is a way to immerse yourself in the stalkerish, intrusive vibe of You. Here are some suggestions to check out.

Braid

Braid isn’t an obvious choice—it’s a side-scrolling platform game with puzzle-based gameplay. But as you work your way through the plot, the thematic parallels become increasingly obvious. You play as a man searching for a princess who has been kidnapped by a monster; we won’t spoil the whole plot here in case you’ve never encountered Braid before, but suffice to say that as you work your way through the game’s six main sections (using your ability to rewind time to solve puzzles as you go) the truth about what really happened to that princess becomes grimly, sadly obvious.

Platforms: PlayStation, Xbox, Steam

Braid (2009)

$14.99 at Steam

$14.99 at Steam

Who’s Lila?

Want to practice wearing a psychological mask like Joe does to manipulate and influence people? Who’s Lila? is literally about that. You play as a socially awkward boy named William who has to consciously arrange the features of his face to convey emotions, and as you look into the disappearance of a classmate named Tanya, you must arrange your features to elicit specific responses from the people you’re talking to. There’s a lot more going on in the game, but if you want to practice manipulating your general aura, this is the game for you.

Platforms: Steam

Who’s Lila?

$11.99 at Steam

$11.99 at Steam

Telling Lies

Do you find the idea of searching through people’s private lives like a professional stalker exciting? Telling Lies gives you the chance to do just that without hurting any real people. You play as an FBI agent who has to solve a mystery by watching video clips on a stolen hard drive. With a few dozen characters and hours of video, you must scrub back and forth to catch details, inconsistencies, and other clues to figure out what’s going on, giving you all the voyeuristic thrills a fan of You might want to experience.

Platforms: PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, Steam

Telling Lies Standard - Nintendo Switch [Digital Code]

$19.99 at Amazon

$19.99 at Amazon

Do Not Feed the Monkeys

Another game that lets you indulge your sick desire to spy on people, Do Not Feed the Monkeys has you monitoring live video feeds of a group of people while also trying to manage your own life (paying rent, taking care of your own physical health, etc.). You have opportunities to break the “rules” and interact with the subjects of your surveillance, which can have different impacts on the outcome of the game—but the real joy of this essentially plotless game is accessing new cameras that show you live feeds of sometimes very surprising scenarios.

Platforms: PlayStation, iOS, Android, Nintendo Switch, Steam

Do Not Feed The Monkeys (Nintendo Switch)

$45.99 at Amazon

$45.99 at Amazon

Hello Neighbor

If you’re maybe a bit uncomfortable playing a game as an enthusiastic stalker or voyeur watching people for your own entertainment, Hello Neighbor offers you an excuse: Your neighbor across the street is definitely hiding something terrible, and you have to break into their house and plumb their secrets in order to figure it out—and access their lock, creepy basement, where the ultimate secret lies. It’s tense and thrilling, and gives you a real sense of just how hard it is to intrude on someone’s life when they’re hostile toward your presence.

Platforms: PlayStation, iOS, Android, Nintendo Switch, Steam

Hello Neighbor - Nintendo Switch

$24.99 at Amazon

$24.99 at Amazon

The best podcasts like You

Want a more true crime approach to You’s dark delights? Do you need more dark fictional takes on monsters like Joe Goldberg? These podcasts will feed you.

Dirty John

Credit: Podcast logo

Want to dig into the story of a real-life Joe Goldberg? Dirty John is what you’re looking for. John Michael Meehan was a nurse and a serial abuser who was adept at manipulating people and using them for his own weird needs. The podcast focuses on his relationship with Debra Newell, who Meehan met online and rapidly married, introducing violence and chaos into Newell’s life and the lives of her family.

The Shrink Next Door

Credit: Podcast logo

The Shrink Next Door explores what might be the worst violation of trust you can imagine: A psychiatrist who manipulated his patients for his own personal gain. Dr. Isaac Herschkopf used his position of trust with vulnerable patients to insert himself into their lives, taking control of finances, living with them, and disrupting their other relationships, all under the guise of helping them. If you think that Joe’s ability to manipulate and deceive is a bit fictional, this podcast will convince you otherwise.

Strictly Stalking

Credit: Podcast logo

If you want more perspective on stalking, stalkers, and the incredibly negative impact their manipulations have on victims, the true-crime podcast Strictly Stalking will open your eyes. Giving the victims a voice, the podcast focuses on stories that are ultimately inspiring examples of survival and triumph. At the same time, hearing how their stalkers infiltrated their lives and made them feel helpless is a sobering reminder that we’re all just one chance encounter away from having a Joe Goldberg in our lives.

Gaslight

Credit: Podcast logo

Gaslight is a psychological thriller podcast starring Chloë Grace Moretz as a young girl named Danny who vanishes shortly after graduating high school, then reappears eight years later, married and changed in subtle, disturbing ways that alarm her old best friend Rebecca. As Rebecca digs into the reasons behind Danny’s disappearance and the nature of her relationship with her creepy husband, the truth that emerges is shocking and unexpected. It’s easy to imagine something like this playing out with Joe and one of his victims, except there isn’t a glass box anywhere in sight.

Stalked

Credit: Podcast logo

Produced by the BBC, Stalked is the true story of Hannah Mossman Moore, who was brutally stalked for a decade by what appeared to be many different stalkers. Her phone service was routinely cut off, her friends and family harassed, and her every move recorded—and the police were less than helpful. The podcast makes clear the truly devastating impact an obsessed stalker can have on a person’s life in the digital age, even if it doesn’t end in bloodshed and covered-up murders. The identity of her stalker has never been conclusively proven, but the impact they had is undeniable.

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