Welcome to Link Round-Up, our series where we share the interesting, useful and fun things on the web that grab our attention each month.
In this edition, we’ve got news on a massive ransomware-linked leak, pushback against AI slop, local-first notes, cleaner Windows installs, the state of blogging, Linux desktop growth and a game that turns stock charts into motocross tracks.
Sensitive Apple supplier lists, component details and photos of upcoming iPhone 18 Pro models were exposed as part of a data leak affecting Tata Electronics, one of Apple’s major manufacturing partners in India.
What makes this more interesting than unreleased iPhone details escaping into the world is what those documents may reveal about supplier relationships, component sourcing and manufacturing dependencies.
For attackers, that kind of information has value well beyond rumour sites and phone forums as it exposes where a company relies on a small number of suppliers, where negotiating leverage sits and where disruption could hurt most.
One of the points we make in our How To Spot AI-Assisted Ransomware blog is that modern ransomware is increasingly about pressure, context and leverage rather than encryption.
World Leaks, the group behind the attack, is best known for an extortion-first model built around stealing data and threatening to publish it rather than relying solely on encryption.
The more attackers understand about what matters to a victim, the more targeted the extortion becomes. In the wrong hands, internal business context becomes a weapon.
Hugging Bay caught our eye (and raised an eyebrow) with the choice of inspiration for the design of the home page.
Unaffiliated with the ‘GitHub of AI’ Hugging Face, Hugging Bay describes itself as a verified open-source AI artifact registry with metadata for provenance, licensing, trust signals, citation packs and agent-friendly entry points.
The important idea here is discoverability for humans and machines.
As more people use AI assistants and autonomous tools to research, compare, fetch and assemble software, projects increasingly need to be legible to systems that do not browse the web in the same way a person does.
For a far larger-scale view of agent behaviour, our next find is fascinating!
Most AI benchmarks test a model on a contained task in a short window with a simple pass/fail result or score at the end.
The real challenge with AI agents is whether they remain useful, aligned, stable and predictable when they have memories, tools, goals, external information and other agents around them.
Emergence World is trying to evaluate what happens when autonomous agents run for much longer in a shared environment, interact with real-world signals and develop behaviours over days or weeks rather than minutes.
On the practical end of the same theme, URLtoText does exactly what the name suggests: it turns web pages into cleaner text, Markdown or HTML.
This basic function is useful for research, archiving, AI-assisted writing, source packs and any workflow where a messy, ad-addled web page needs to be parsed, quoted, compared or fed into another tool.
On a side note, who could have predicted that plain text would become so valuable again as AI workflows become more common?
Of course, not everyone is thrilled about the way AI is entering development workflows.
Open-source game engine Godot is introducing a stricter contribution policy that bans autonomous AI agents, vibe coding and substantial AI-generated code.
The Godot Foundation’s statement explains the problem from a maintainer’s point of view. Reviewing pull requests is already demanding work and if the feedback is being absorbed by a machine rather than helping a real contributor grow into a future maintainer, the whole mentoring loop breaks down.
To be clear, Godot is not banning all use of AI assistance, but the line is being drawn around accountability.
Its stance is that code should be human-authored so contributors can understand what they are submitting and maintainers should not be left cleaning up code that nobody can properly explain or fix.
If AI makes it easier to produce more contributions but harder to maintain the project, then it is not a net win for open-source projects given that they’re communities with review processes, trust networks and long-term responsibilities as opposed to being merely code repositories.
The same pressure is visible in a very different corner of the web: independent publishing.
Daniel Stanica’s study, The Great Blogging Collapse, makes for important reading if you work in content, SEO, affiliate marketing or small publishing.
He tracked 100 once-successful blogs over four years and found that the median blog lost 85% of its organic traffic, while only 21 continued to grow.
The useful lesson is that sites built almost entirely around search traffic and affiliate monetisation are extremely fragile when discovery changes. AI Overviews, helpful content updates, changing search behaviour and more crowded results pages all make the old playbook harder to rely on.
For website owners, the takeaway is that search is important, but it should not be the whole business.
Email lists, direct traffic, community, brand trust, first-hand experience and content that cannot easily be reduced to a generic answer or AI-generated summary all matter more when the traffic landscape becomes less predictable.
The memory market is back in the spotlight again. Samsung, SK hynix and Micron are facing a class-action lawsuit over alleged DRAM price-fixing.
The complaint alleges that the companies restricted supply and shifted production priorities in a way that pushed up memory prices.
These are only allegations at this stage and should be treated as such, but those of us who have worked with computer hardware for a while will remember that the memory industry has been here before.
Samsung and Hynix previously pleaded guilty in the 2000s to participating in a DRAM price-fixing conspiracy, with large fines imposed by the US Department of Justice. A later class-action case over DRAM pricing was dismissed, so the existence of a lawsuit does not mean the current claims will succeed.
Still, anyone who has recently looked at the cost of RAM, PCs, phones, laptops or GPUs will understand why the allegations have touched a nerve.
AI demand has made memory one of the most strategically important parts of the technology supply chain. When a small number of companies control so much of that market, every price rise feels bigger than a component cost – it becomes a question about who gets access to the hardware needed for the next generation of computing.
Meanwhile, users continue to look for ways to make Windows feel a bit less like Windows as Microsoft currently imagines it.
Rufus has long been one of the best tools for creating bootable USB drives, but its new Windows 11 installer customisation options have become increasingly interesting.
Version 4.14 added a “Quality of Life” option to disable Teams, Outlook, Copilot and other bundled Microsoft annoyances during setup.
It also includes a silent installation option, which is great for bulk rollouts as it installs to the first detected disk without the need for users to manually prompt their way through the many config options.
A clean install, a local account, fewer prompts, less telemetry, no forced cloud hooks and no unnecessary AI assistant in the corner 🤌
That brings us to former Microsoft engineer Dave Plummer’s TinyRetroPad – which is only 2.5KB!
_____ _ _____ _
| __ \ | | | __ \ | |
| |__) |___| |_ _ __ ___ | |__) |_ _ __| |
| _ // _ \ __| '__/ _ \| ___/ _` |/ _` |
| | \ \ __/ |_| | | (_) | | | (_| | (_| |
|_| \_\___|\__|_| \___/|_| \__,_|\__,_|
T I N Y X 86 D E S K T O P E D I T O RThe project is simple: no telemetry, no AI, no cloud service, no modern app framework and no unnecessary bloat. It leans on Windows components that already exist rather than dragging in a mountain of dependencies to edit plain text.
Notepad used to be the symbol of software that simply opened quickly and let you type. As more basic tools gain AI buttons, account hooks, sync features, recommendations and telemetry, TinyRetroPad reminds the world that sometimes a text editor should just be a text editor.
FUTO Notes sits in a similar philosophical space for users who want a more fully featured approach while avoiding bloat.
It is a fast, private, local-first notes app with native mobile apps, desktop apps for Linux, macOS and Windows, plain Markdown under the hood and self-hosting treated as a first-class option.
The pitch is refreshingly direct: “Your notes. Your files. Forever.”
That means portable files, offline access, no vendor lock-in and the option to bring your own sync or run the official server yourself.
The desktop app is built with Tauri rather than being another heavy Chromium bundle, which is nice to see.
It’s encouraging to see more software projects trying to build sustainable models around user respecting tools rather than surveillance, lock-in or endless subscription pressure.
Have you seen headlines recently suggesting that Windows had fallen below 60% desktop market share?
According to Statcounter’s 2026 desktop operating system market share figures, Windows had fallen to 56.61% worldwide.
PCMag asked Statcounter for more detail and it turns out the “Unknown” category was not actually desktop user agents at all and had ended up in the desktop data for legacy reasons.
With that removed, Windows’ worldwide desktop share for June 2026 was revised back to 72%.
The interesting movement is further down the chart: Linux reached 5.59% in June 2026.
Linux is better than it has ever been for more than just serious development work. Driver support, Proton and distros such as SteamOS, Bazzite and CachyOS have made Linux a much more practical gaming platform, bringing in even more former Windows users.
And finally, on the subject of gaming, here is something that’s fun in the best possible way!
StonkRider is a browser game that turns real stock charts into motocross tracks. Pick a stock or asset and race through its price history on a dirt bike, with peaks becoming jumps and crashes becoming cliffs.
Tesla, GameStop, Bitcoin, NVIDIA, Apple, Enron and Lehman Brothers are all there waiting to be digitally motocrossed.
Have you found a brilliant tool, fascinating website, impressive open-source project or niche internet rabbit hole we should include next time? Let us know in the comments!