Epic Rewards gives you 20% back when using Epic’s own payment system
Late last week, Epic Games launched a new rewards program that encourages users to use the company’s own payment system instead of the one offered through Apple’s App Store or otherwise.
The new Epic Rewards program permanently gives users 20 percent back on purchases in Fortnite, Rocket League, and Fall Guys when they use Epic’s own payment system. The company is also raising Epic Rewards from 5 percent to 20 percent on all other Epic Games Store purchases using the Epic payment system until August 31st.
The offer is valid on all platforms where Epic has a presence, including iOS, Android, PC, and the web. Note that when buying games on the Epic Games Store, you aren’t buying the game itself but rather a license to access and play the game. This is true of other digital gaming platforms as well, including market leader Steam.
The initiative comes in the wake of a legal ruling in the US, which prohibits Apple from preventing apps from linking to external payment solutions. A similar regulatory framework—the Digital Markets Act—was previously introduced in the EU in 2024, requiring large tech companies like Apple to allow alternative app stores and payment systems. 
© 2025 PC World 3:55am  
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YouTube hates AI movie trailers as much as I do
Bullshit trailers are a blight on YouTube. And they have been for a long time. Just throw together clips of older movies and actors, title it “The Dark Knight Rises 2: Robin’s First Flight,” and sit back and watch the clicks (and the ad revenue) roll in. But with generative “AI” videos now just a few clicks away, they’ve become an infestation, clogging up every relevant search. YouTube has finally had enough.
AI-generated trailers have created a huge crop of videos that do nothing but lie to viewers by stealing a movie studio’s IP and then regurgitating it back at you, all delivered with a tiny “concept” disclaimer somewhere in the description text (and often not even that). It is genuinely horrible stuff, all the more detestable because it takes about three minutes of human work and hours upon hours of datacenter computation, boiling the planet and benefiting no one and nothing in the process. I have half a mind to
[Editor’s note: At this point Michael ranted for approximately 1500 words on the evils of the AI industry and those who use its products. Terms like “perfidious” and “blatherskite” were used, along with some shorter ones that we won’t repeat. Suffice it to say, he is rather upset.]
After letting them run rampant for a couple of years, it looks like YouTube is finally cracking down on these slop factories. Deadline reports that YouTube has suspended a total of four separate channels dedicated to AI-generated trailers for fake movies (or real, upcoming movies that don’t have trailers yet). Two were suspended back in March, and their alternate channels have now been smacked with the same banhammer.
The channels, allegedly created by just two individual users, are not actually removed from the platform. But they cannot monetize their videos, and are presumably suffering some pretty big losses in search visibility as well. Combined, the initial two channels had more than two million subscribers.
Deadline doesn’t have specific statements from YouTube on what policies the channels violated, but speculates that YouTube finally decided to enforce its misinformation policy, basic original material policies that mirror US copyright and fair use rules, and guidelines that deter uploaders from creating videos with the “sole purpose of getting views.”
It didn’t take long to find an example of this slop. A search for “star wars trailer 2026” shows two blatantly fake AI trailers, complete with Disney logos on the thumbnails, popping up in search ahead of the first results from the official Star Wars channel itself. The latest one was generated less than a week ago, splicing in clips from the real movies with AI-generated video clips and narration trained on the actors’ voices. Awkward and unconvincing shifts between short splices of video show the current limitations of the technology, even after it has progressed rapidly.
A Deadline report in March brought broader attention to the AI trailer problem, highlighting that some Hollywood studios have chosen to use YouTube’s content flagging system to simply claim the ad revenue from the fake trailer rather than getting them removed. After all, if someone else is doing all the “work” and getting paid, why try to protect your intellectual property and artistic integrity, when you can just grab the money instead? Turning off the monetization faucet for these channels might get the studios to finally enforce their own copyright, now that the money well is gone.
YouTube continues to suffer from an absolute flood of AI slop from every direction. AI-generated video, narration, and even scripts are becoming a larger presence on the platform as a whole, particularly in YouTube Shorts, mirroring pretty much every social network on the web. This extremely basic enforcement of YouTube’s policies aside, the platform doesn’t seem all that interested in stemming the tide…and perhaps that has something to do with parent company Google selling its own generative AI products, and integrating them into YouTube itself.
© 2025 PC World 3:35am 
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Security flaw found in GIMP! Avoid opening this file type until it’s fixed
The current edition of GIMP (version 3.0.2) has a security vulnerability that could be exploited to inject malicious code. The developers released GIMP 3.0 back in March, then followed it up a week later with version 3.0.2. A more recent update is not yet available.
Security researchers from the Trend Micro Zero Day Initiative (ZDI) have discovered a security vulnerability in GIMP 3.0.2, which they’ve labeled ZDI-CAN-26752. (A CVE ID is not yet known.) It involves a potential buffer overflow due to insufficient validation.
More specifically, the vulnerability occurs when an ICO file is much larger than its stated image size. The creator of an ICO file can specify any dimensions for the image, but the actual dimensions may be larger, which results in a calculated buffer size that’s too small. When the buffer overflows, malicious code cleverly placed in memory can be executed.
The faulty code in the ICO parser has already been corrected in the publicly available source code of the image editing app. However, a new version of GIMP hasn’t been made available yet. The developers warn that malicious actors can analyze GIMP’s public source code to find and exploit vulnerabilities like this one, so you should be aware and stay vigilant while the corrected version of the app is worked on. Since the next planned edition (version 3.0.4) will include many more changes, the devs can’t just push a half-finished update out the door.
Until then, it’s best that you don’t open any ICO files using GIMP. This is true whether you’re on the newer 3.x version of GIMP or the older 2.x version. If you are still using GIMP 2.x, you should also note that ZDI researchers have also discovered security vulnerabilities in it, including one vulnerability that works in a very similar way to the one mentioned above but has been fixed in GIMP 3.x.
GIMP stands for GNU Image Manipulation Program. The free-to-use open-source image editing software is available on Windows, macOS, and Linux, among others. GIMP 1.0 was released in 1998 and since then GIMP has developed into a capable image and photo editing app.
© 2025 PC World 3:35am 
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