Data preservation for home computer users, covering cold media data retention, and required refresh actions, for hard drives, SSDs and flash drives, and optical media. Plus discussion of long-term cloud storage, and family storage audits.

For information on how to refresh data on long-term storage, I’ve a video here: • Data Refresh for Long-Term Storage

You may also find relevant the following content:

Cyber Security: Back-ups & Encryption: • Cyber Security: Backups & Encryption

VeraCrypt (for creating encrypted containers for cloud upload): • VeraCrypt Encrypted USB Drive Q

REFERENCES

Digital Preservation Handbook from the Digital Preservation Coalition: https://www.dpconline.org/handbook

Digital Preservation Guidance Note from UK National Archives (2008, historic): https://cdn.nationalarchives.gov.uk/documents/information-management/selecting-storage-media.pdf

LTO World Desktop Tape Drives: https://ltoworld.com/collections/desktop-lto-tape-drives

You can find all of the ExplainingComputers videos on security and backup on this page: https://explainingcomputers.com/security_videos.html

Proton 11.0-1 enables support for another batch of Windows games that up to now had only worked when using the recent Steam Experimental builds. The games newly working with Proton 11.0-1 include Universe Generator: The Golden Sword, DCS World Steam Edition, Resident Evil (1996), Resident Evil 2 (1998), Dino Crisis, Dino Crisis 2, From Dust, Blaite, Don’t Die Dateless, Dummy!, METAL GEAR SURVIVE, Warhammer: Vermintide 2, Metal Fatigue, and SHOGUN: Total War.

Games now working with Proton for the first time in this release include Unknown Faces, Gothic 1 Classic, X-Plane 12, Breath of Fire IV, and Deadly Premonition.

Proton 11.0-1 also brings a number of different game fixes, improved rendering of the Rockstar Launcher popups, fixes many EA games being unplayable after a recent EA Desktop update, fixing the Steam Overlay that was not working for many EA games, improved support for the Kodi media player, and a wide variety of other fixes.

Proton 11.0-1 also updates to Xalia 0.4.9, FEX 2605 for ARM64EC builds, VKD3D 1.19 Git, DXVK 2.7 Git, DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.1, Wine Mono 11.0, and VKD3D-Proton 20260410.

(…)

Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology are being sued by seventeen plaintiffs in the California Northern District Court, who allege that the three tech manufacturers are colluding to artificially increase the price of RAM.

Seventeen individual plaintiffs, including three small businesses, have launched a class action lawsuit in the Northern District of California against the three largest RAM and chip manufacturers in the world: Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology. The plaintiffs allege that the three tech companies are colluding to raise the prices of RAM by keeping supplies artificially low, blaming it all on an AI data center-driven “RAMpocalypse” rather than corporate policy.

The Garciaguirre et al v. Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. et al case was filed earlier this week, on June 25, in the California Northern District Court, and lists three small computer retailers, Troy’s Computers LLC, JB Tech Solutions LLC, and WNTD Fab LLC, among its seventeen plaintiffs.

The plaintiffs claim that Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron Technology are essentially part of a cartel that is collaborating to inflate DRAM and chip prices by controlling the overwhelming majority of the market. While proving that will obviously be a lot harder than alleging it, it’s no secret that the three companies own roughly 90 percent of the DRAM market.

And it’s no secret that Samsung and SK Hynix have been previously indicted for doing exactly what the plaintiffs are accusing them of doing now. In 2005, two Samsung executives and one Hynix America executive were indicted by a San Francisco jury for DRAM price-fixing and “bid-rigging.”

Bid-rigging can take many forms, but in this example, Samsung and Hynix America were accused of “issuing price quotations in accordance with the agreements reached” during private meetings, and “agreeing during those meetings and telephone conversations to charge prices of DRAM at certain levels to be sold to certain [original equipment manufacturers]” in the United States.

more links: https://wccftech.com/memory-trio-samsung-sk-hynix-micron-face-class-action-lawsuit/

Summary

• The Linux Foundation, joined by leading organizations, today announced Akrites, a coordinated effort to remediate and disclose vulnerabilities in critical open source software.
• Akrites establishes a shared Security Incident Response Team (SIRT) and a single, standardized Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure (CVD) process, built on confidentiality-first principles and industry-standard tooling.
• Founding members commit engineering talent, security expertise and funding to harden the shared open source software that banks, hospitals, power grids, telecoms, governments, and AI labs depend on.
• Organizations that contribute engineering resources or funding to the security of critical open source are invited to participate and can learn more at https://akrites.org/.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/993090/

Lossless Scaling Tutorial: Upscaling & Frame Generation - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xTgGAzip9X0