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9 Aug 2025

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Comedian accused of indecent assault in BBC studio
Details of six sex charges facing the comedian emerged during a hearing at Glasgow Sheriff Court.

Intel defined the PC’s past. I’m sad that might be over
Welcome to The Full Nerd newsletter—your weekly dose of hardcore hardware talk from the enthusiasts at PCWorld. Missed the fierce debates on our YouTube show or the hot news across the web? You’re in the right place. Want this newsletter to come directly to your inbox? Sign up on our website! Last month, I wondered what the future of the desktop PC would be—if perhaps mini-PCs would eventually replace the image in everyone’s mind as the default. Intel is the reason I could sit and ponder such a world. The launch of the company’s Next Unit of Computing line sparked today’s proliferation of affordable competitors from other vendors. In 2013, no one thought much of small PCs. I fell in love when Gordon first introduced me to a NUC in 2014, but I was most definitely not part of the norm. Nowadays, though? Consumers are increasingly just as in on the idea as corporations have been. Intel also is behind other technologies that have proliferated widely—many have been topics of discussion on The Full Nerd episodes. Some, like USB 1.0, tied into joint projects. Others sprang fully from within, like RealSense. I’m personally still a fan of Team Blue’s contributions to Wi-Fi and Bluetooth module development; their efforts made rock-solid dependability the norm. Will and Brad nominated Unison, Optane, and Thunderbolt as standouts, as well. For decades, Intel approached the industry as if its champion. It strove to further PCs overall—it wasn’t content merely to pioneer new processor innovations. We the public gave them grief when they slowed down on the CPU side, content to keep pushing out four-core, eight-thread processors with minimal clock speed bumps. Criticism of their divided attention flowed freely. But now, looking at how rapidly Intel has shrunk in recent years, I feel regret and sorrow. Its NUC division is gone, sold to Asus. Other divisions and projects are outright dead, part of the company’s streamlining and downsizing. And in a recent earnings call, CEO Lip-Bu Tan was quoted as saying, “I do not subscribe to the belief that if you build it, they will come. Under my leadership, we will build what customers need, when they need it.” Nobody asked for these SFF-sized gaming NUCs. But they existed to show what simplified SFF building could look like—and I still love that.Alaina Yee / IDG Tan’s statement referred to a willingness to commit to the 14A node—chip making. The exact business the noisy masses have demanded attention to. But this level of contraction cuts so deep that I now wonder about what we’re losing, with this new austere approach. People don’t always know what they need. Sometimes, an investment in the unproven and unknown fills in gaps we always assumed were normal. When I talked about Intel’s best technologies with Will, we debated briefly about his pick of Thunderbolt. I wasn’t convinced Thunderbolt was ready to be named as such. He countered that its very existence mattered most. Will’s right. If no one takes a chance to experiment, to bring things into existence that may not be perfect, we don’t know what could be. Intel shaped much of what the PC is today. To know that it has set down the mantle of champion, even if temporarily, makes me quietly mourn all the technology we’ll never get to know. In this episode of The Full Nerd… Willis Lai / Foundry In this episode of The Full Nerd, Adam Patrick Murray, Brad Chacos, Alaina Yee, and Will Smith lock horns over nominations to our PC Hardware Hall of Fame. We may be dressed nicely, but our debate gets ugly at times. I also may have once again appealed to chat to help break a deadlocked vote in my favor. (I adore you all.) Plus, Will showed us his home-brew cufflinks, made from case thumbscrews. What I expected: Alliances to form and break around me. What I did not expect (but should have): Betrayal after being coaxed into an alliance for the greater good. As I said during the show, Clementine will remember that. (I call up on you, my people, to help me wreak such chaos next year that the episode will go down in infamy. I’ve already begun my notes and planning. I have screenshots from this year. I plan to be ready.) Getting ready for next year’s fight. Uh, debate. Luis Ibarra / Adam Patrick Murray Missed our live show? Subscribe now to The Full Nerd YouTube channel, and activate notifications. We also answer viewer questions in real time! And if you need more hardware talk during the rest of the week, come join our Discord community—it’s full of cool, laid-back nerds. This week’s surprising nerd news I pretty much adore Framework’s modular approach to PCs—so I read my colleague Mark Hachman’s review of their new desktop PC with delight. I don’t get quite the same excitement as from Intel’s Ghost Canyon or Beast Canyon, but I like where future releases could go. Also, I found out someone in the world—a pretty famous someone at that—still uses an RX 580. I don’t believe that negates my nomination of Polaris into the Hardware Hall of Fame, but just emphasizes its relevance and importance. AHEM. It’s so little!Alex Esteves / Foundry Framework’s teeny desktop PC is cute: A spiritual successor to Intel’s pandemic-era gaming NUC models? In many ways yes, but I am giving side-eye to that soldered memory. (Interested in its performance? Check out Mark’s review, too.) That’s a big oops, Proton: I’m betting you know of ProtonMail—and more likely trust Proton to keep data safe. But the company’s new Authenticator app isn’t immune from bugs, as it turns out. Saved 2FA seeds were stored as plain text in log files. Yikes. So many hertz: AOC’s upcoming native 600Hz display is impressive, yes…for its slide-out headphone holder. (Only half-joking here; I now want that feature on my next monitor.) Windows Recall still captures sensitive data: Continue filing this feature under “I’m not surprised” and also “Forever a hard no.” I like this PC Gamer quiz: I evaded the quiz-taking crazes of the late ’00s and early 2010s, but this one asking me to identify games from their crates? Fun. (Also that pun in the strapline? Chef’s kiss.) Valve should have kept surprising us: Keeping my backlog (fractionally more) manageable is easier when I don’t know upcoming sale periods. I can truthfully tell myself I didn’t budget for a bajillion random buys. A champion for the masses, still trucking along in some quarters of the world. Just like the GTX 1080 Ti, Brad. Boss. Sir.Brad Chacos / IDG Linus Torvalds still uses an AMD RX 580: I never thought I’d say I found myself in perfect alignment with Linux users, but part of personal growth is flexibility. (One day, I’ll get Polaris into the Hardware Hall of Fame.) PCIe 8 goes zoom: Before PCIe 7 launches, we already know for sure its successor will be trailing right behind it. We love to see it, but meanwhile, PCIe 6 SSDs haven’t reached us lowly consumers yet. :[ How times have changed for AMD: Windows users keep embracing AMD’s CPUs for gaming—Team Red’s market share just crossed over 40 percent in the latest Steam hardware survey. What a comeback. I want this ‘impractical’ display: What happens when you combine engineering with Wheel of Fortune mechanics? This really fun 1,000-pixel wood “display” panel. More hertz please: I’m a big fan of E-Ink displays. I also stare at a screen all day. If we can get refresh rates to a point where writing and editing is feasible on this kind of panel, my wallet is very ready. I now know I enjoy learning about fan blade design: Leave it to Steve Burke over at Gamers Nexus to make 30 minutes feel too short for discussions about engineering and fan blade angles. Castle Crashers got new DLC: What. Catch you all next week, when Brad is off on vacation—which means Adam, Will, and I can discuss rumors to our hearts’ content. If we want. :] Alaina This newsletter is dedicated to the memory of Gordon Mah Ung, founder and host of The Full Nerd, and executive editor of hardware at PCWorld.

This PC security guru fell for a scam. Here are 3 lessons from his mistake
Humans aren’t infallible, as much as we’d like to be. That includes security experts, as Troy Hunt revealed yesterday. Turns out, the legend behind HaveIBeenPwned (a site that lets you see which data breaches you’ve been in) got phished when trying to log into Mailchimp. In a post titled “A Sneaky Phish Just Grabbed my Mailchimp Mailing List,” Hunt runs down the situation, starting with how it began (jet lag and fatigue while traveling) and how it ended (the phisher capturing his credentials, logging in, and then exporting all 16,000 email addresses associated with his newsletter). If you’ve been affected, Hunt has already loaded those email addresses into the HaveIBeenPwned database. The list includes people who already unsubscribed from the newsletter—Mailchimp does not delete these email addresses from its databases. You can read the full details of what happened in the post, but I was most struck by the lessons to take away from Hunt’s clear account of the incident. Not just the things to watch out for, but how to set up your digital life so you’re still safe if you slip up. Let’s dig in: Don’t rely on warning signs Walking through Hunt’s tale, you can see that scams do signal what they are. In Hunt’s case, multiple small warning signs existed: False urgency in the email Sender of the email was fake Autofill from 1Password didn’t trigger on the illegitimate site A security expert of Hunt’s level normally would be sensitive to these details. But he was tired while traveling—a situation any of us could find ourselves in. A copy of the phishing email that tripped up Hunt.Troy Hunt / HaveIBeenPwned The lesson here: If you receive an urgent email or message, skip the link provided—instead, log into your accounts directly. (Similarly, return phone calls using official phone numbers from a bank statement or the back of your bank card—or at the very least, Google the provided number to verify its authenticity.) This strategy gives some cushion against having to be 100 percent sharp about spotting scams, 24/7. Passkeys are also the better method for logging in, as they’re phishing resistant. So are stronger methods of 2FA, like hardware keys (e.g., Yubikeys or a Google Titan Security Key). Leaving a service won’t protect you from data breaches As Hunt discovered while parsing his lost data, not all companies delete your data if you leave them. In fact, in the case of Mailchimp, they appear to purposely retain email addresses of unsubscribers so that they can’t be readded to a list. Most services have a way to delete you from their databases. (Various state and national governments have laws requiring an easy way to be deleted—also known as the right to be forgotten.) Unless you make that request, though, you could be part of any number massive troves of data, ripe for stealing by bad actors. And the more data that hackers have about you (what your interests are, where you shop, etc), the easier it is for them to target you. Masked emails keep your real address hidden from websites.Michael Ansaldo/Foundry The lesson here: To truly sever a relationship with a website, you have to request the deletion of your data. Such a step can be worthwhile for extremely sensitive data, like genetics testing. For everything else, consider using email masks instead. You’ll have a unique email alias for each service, so if anyone of them is breached, the data can’t be easily used to build a profile of you. It can happen to anyone Hunt’s experience is a reminder that scams can prey on just about anyone—and that if you do, it’s not because you’re stupid. Sometimes you’re just busy, stressed, or otherwise too preoccupied to realize what’s in front of you. But you shouldn’t stop being vigilant. A security guru falling for a phishing scam doesn’t mean we’re all doomed. On the contrary, you have just as much chance of successfully evading schemes as everyone else. When I write about security, it’s not from a place of authoritative expertise. I know I’m just as susceptible as everyone else—and so I share whatever useful info I have, so that we can all watch our tails.