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Gemini 3.7 Flash

Apple Turns to Publishers For Help With Siri AI

Apple is reportedly negotiating multi-year deals with news publishers to give its redesigned Siri access to current news and other information, with payments potentially tied to how often publishers' content is used. The talks come as Apple prepares to launch its long-delayed Siri AI later this year, after partnering with Google to use distilled Gemini models. Engadget reports: [The Wall Street Jo…

Mozilla says stricter antitrust measures against Google 'threaten Firefox'

We Have AI at Home Chapter 1: A Box of Scraps

This JCB doesn't dig – it does 406 mph

A JCB has set a new world land speed record, passing 406 mph (653 kph) at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. The JCB in question isn't a digger or a dumper, but a hydrogen-powered racer known as the JCB Hydromax, driven by retired Royal Air Force fighter pilot Wing Commander Andy Green. It set the record for the fastest a hydrogen-powered internal combustion car has ever travelled, averaging 406.320 m…

Trump wants to grant private cyber firms a license to hack back

Donald Trump is allowing government agencies to contract private cybersecurity companies to carry out operations against cyber-enabled transnational criminal organizations (CE-TCOs). The US President signed a memo on Wednesday confirming a strategy hinted at earlier this year, saying participating companies can support national operations against criminals, including cyber surveillance and techni…

University of Michigan Drops First-Semester Grades to 'Curb Mental Health Crisis'

"In order to salve the mental health of freshman students, the University of Michigan has implemented a Pass/No Credit system for new students to improve their mental health," writes Slashdot reader Ol Olsoc. "The process, called 'Grade Covering,' is aimed at helping with the mental health crisis that students face by lessening grade pressure." Axios reports: U-M's College of Literature, Science a…

The backup Microsoft never promised you

Confidence in an organization's cyber recovery capabilities deserves scrutiny. If a ransomware attack disables the SaaS data tenanted in the Microsoft cloud ecosystem, the data the business depends on as its lifeblood, the pace at which operations resume rests on assumptions that often prove wrong. Anyone whose answer is "It's all good. Microsoft has my back on this one with its comprehensive nat…

I requested a copy of my data from McDonald’s loyalty program

Kubernetes on Oxide: How customer needs shaped our integrations

Graduate student proves a quantum uncertainty principle for fractals

We eliminated 1,400 CVEs in NanoClaw's container images

Spaghettifying DRAM

Rivian's 2027 changes include its No. 1 most-requested feature

It's time for Rivian's changeover from model year 2026 to 2027, and the electric vehicle startup has decided to take a page from its recently released R2 SUV and apply it to the company's larger, more expensive R1 line. The changes aren't massive—the R1 got a refresh back in 2024 that saw the R1S SUV and R1T pickup each get some comprehensive re-engineering with new powertrain options, a new elec…

The Beneficial Performance Gains Running The Framework Laptop Pro 13 / Core Ultra X9 388H With Linux 7.1+

The recently launched Framework Laptop 13 Pro powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" runs well on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and other modern Linux distributions. In the case of Ubuntu 26.04 with Linux 7.0, while everything works, if upgrading to Linux 7.1 or the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is even better performance. Here are benchmarks of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro with Core Ultra X9 388H acro…

Anthropic could be worth $2 trillion when it goes public

Anthropic investors expect the AI startup to float at a valuation of $2 trillion or more in October, a dizzying figure that would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab’s debut the largest-ever initial public offering. Half a dozen of the company’s backers told the FT that Anthropic’s rapidly rising revenue would enable it to more than double its current valuation in a planned autumn float. A listing…

Show HN: MCP Memory – Fast Agent Memory Using Google's OKF and SQLite FTS5

Time to Move On: Querying Without Nulls and Bags

Gloomberb

We've flown a radiation-blocking vest to the Moon and back, and it worked

Solar storms, like the one in August 1972 that hit during the gap between the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions, throw bursts of protons intense enough to raise an astronaut's cancer risk or even cause radiation sickness. Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field absorb this radiation, but crews heading to the Moon or Mars won't have that protection, and no spacecraft built so far has enough shielding…

rsync 3.5.0 released

Version 3.5.0 of rsync has been released with a huge number of security fixes: This release fixes 33 security issues found during a focused audit of rsync's path handling and daemon protocol, a companion daemon-protocol fuzzing pass, and reports from external researchers -⁠-⁠ plus several robustness hardenings. CVE IDs were assigned by VulnCheck (CNA); the precise "introduced in" version ranges ac…

[$] 128-Bit page tables for Arm

The size of a processor's page-table entries directly limits how much physical memory that processor is able to access. Back in the 32-bit days, that limit was 4GB, an amount of memory that once seemed nearly infinite, but which would now struggle to hold a basic AI-enabled "hello world" app. The expansion to 64 bits on most popular architectures would seem to have removed those limits now; some A…

Ordinary Abundance

I built a 500k-domain search engine for makers in a weekend for $10

Mystery attacker spent a year raiding Salesforce and ServiceNow portals

Someone has spent more than a year rifling through Salesforce and ServiceNow portals around the world, harvesting data that organizations accidentally left open to anyone who came looking. Researchers at Reco have named the operation "City-Forum" after a domain connected to its infrastructure. The domain has pointed to the attacker's server since March 2025, although exactly when the campaign beg…

GeForce NOW On Linux Native App Exits Beta

At the beginning of the year NVIDIA released a native build of GeForce NOW for Linux using Flatpaks. Today their native Linux build has exited beta to reach official production status for this cloud gaming solution from NVIDIA...…

Security updates for Thursday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (abrt, dhcpcd, edk2, freerdp, gegl04, grafana, gstreamer1-plugins-good, iscsi-initiator-utils, isns-utils, kernel, kernel-rt, keylime, libarchive, libyang, nodejs-nodemon, opencryptoki, osbuild-composer, pacemaker, postgresql-jdbc, postgresql18, python-idna, python3.9, udisks2, valkey, vim, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manage…

MSI Claw Gamepad Driver Set To Be Merged For Linux 7.3

The MSI Claw Gamepad driver is set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel for enabling RGB lighting and controller configuration support with the mainline kernel...…

Choosing an AI model: one prompt, 11 models, different results

DeepSeek Harness developer preview

Ryanair adds Google to its dual-cloud flight plan

Ryanair has signed a five-year agreement with Google Cloud covering AI, productivity tools and multi-cloud infrastructure, just weeks after renewing its deal with rival AWS for another five years. The Irish budget airline says it will deploy Google Workspace and Google Cloud services across its 35,000-strong workforce as it pursues a target of 300 million passengers a year by 2034. We asked how m…

Deutsche Bank becomes first foreign yuan clearing bank in Europe

ATG (YC F25) Is Hiring Member of Technical Staff (Data Platform)

AWS key exposed in JavaScript may have lit way to Beacon's charity data

Beacon, a CRM provider for charities and nonprofits, says an AWS access key "potentially exposed in public JavaScript build artifacts" is the leading suspect in its July breach. The revelation came in the company's first update on the attack in more than a week. If the access key was exposed in public build artifacts, it raises questions about why Beacon's development pipeline and code review con…

Linux Patches Enable Apple M4 NVMe Support

While the Apple M4 SoCs aren't yet supported by the mainline Linux kernel and the Apple M3 series hardware isn't yet ready for end-users, there are some early elements of the Apple M4 support beginning to come together by open-source developers working on the Apple Silicon support. Sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list were patches for enabling NVMe solid state drive support with the M4...…

Claude's new Scarlet Letter watermark is invisible—for now

Anthropic has revealed that it will soon watermark content that is processed (not just generated!) by any of its models. In a support article, Anthropic explained that it was rolling out machine-readable watermarks to comply with the European Union’s AI Act, which requires all AI system providers to watermark AI-generated or manipulated audio, image, text, and video outputs. The law applies to an…

VA Launches Psilocybin Trial For Veterans With Treatment-Resistant Depression

Longtime Slashdot reader sbinning shares a press release: The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced the launch of a new clinical trial to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of psilocybin to treat major depression in Veterans, including those with concurrent PTSD. The new trial comes after a recent executive order on "Accelerating Medical Treatments for Serious Mental Illness," which aim…

Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0.20260809 Ships With 233+ CVE Fixes

While Microsoft continues working on Azure Linux 4.0 as its overhauled Linux distribution built atop Fedora, Azure Linux 3.0 remains the current stable production series. Released overnight was Azure Linux 3.0.20260809 and it comes with more than 233 security patches for recent CVEs in the AI era...…

Twitch feeds your streams to Amazon's AI unless you tell it to stop

Twitch has given streamers a switch to stop their channel content being fed into Amazon's generative AI machinery, but naturally it is turned on by default. The Amazon-owned streaming platform has added a "Training for Generative AI" control to channel settings, allowing streamers to opt out of having their content used for future GenAI model improvements. With the setting enabled, Twitch says ch…

Intel XPU Manager 2.1 Released For Monitoring Arc Pro Graphics On Windows/Linux

Intel XPU Manager 2.1 is now available as the latest version of this open-source tool for Linux and Windows systems for the monitoring and management of Arc Pro graphics cards. The Intel XPU Manager helps in keeping an eye on device utilization and other metrics via the xpu-smi command and other components...…

Everything is better with pickles... except Windows

BORK!BORK!BORK! "Everything is better with pickles," trumpets a Wendy's sign. Everything is also better with a helping of bork, if the screen is to be believed. Spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader in Vancouver, the display shows something amiss with Windows Phone Link – although why a PC encouraging customers to drop dollars on a Dill Pickle Chicken Sandwich needs the app is anyone's guess.…

Launch HN: Bullet (YC S26) – A Faster Coding Agent

Scientists Create Largest 2D Map of the Universe

After 13 years of observations and data processing, astronomers have released the largest two-dimensional map of the universe ever assembled, "offering a sweeping new view of nearly 4 billion celestial objects across roughly three-quarters of the sky," reports Space.com. From the report: The new map, created by the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (DESI) Legacy Imaging Surveys team, contains a…

Passwords stored in public Google Doc then showed up in search results

PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly column where we highlight others’ security failures. Hopefully, there’s a lesson in all this, but it could just be “stop shooting yourself in the foot.” Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our story today comes courtesy of Siim Kostabi, co-found…

Cisco thinks Mythos means instant death for unsupported networking kit

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins says “The Mythos Effect” will see customers scour their networks for unsupported devices and replace them ASAP. Mythos is Anthropic’s bug-finding model and has proven so effective that vendors and open source projects are now finding more security flaws and pushing more patches. Speaking on Cisco’s Q4 earnings call yesterday, Robbins said customers he speaks to are aware o…

Codex in ChatGPT desktop app for Linux is now in preview

Tencent says it could make instant profits on $53B hardware splurge by renting it for AI workloads

Chinese tech giant Tencent has turned its back on instant profits, betting that a new business unit that creates its own AI and embeds that in its products will pay off to a greater extent than cashing in on demand for computing resources. During the company’s Q2 earnings call yesterday, Bernstein analyst Robin Zhu asked when Tencent expects to see a return on investment from the $53 billion capi…

How Social Media Spurred a Refugee Crisis Between Spain and Morocco

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Two days before tens of thousands of migrants surged into Ceuta, one of Spain's enclaves on Morocco's northern coast, a newspaper there posted a video on TikTok and Instagram showing two young women walking in the city in wet suits, their hair still damp. The posts didn't say so explicitly, but the implication was clear: The women had ju…

Chinese Loongson processors have leaky caches, researchers find

Researchers from Germany’s Helmholtz Center for Information Security have found processors made by China’s Loongson have leaky caches that attackers could use to seek specific data. Loongson has developed its own LoongArch instruction set architecture (ISA) that blends approaches used by MIPS and RISC-V. On a site called LoongLeakAttack.com, the researchers explain that they found the leaky cache…

Rsync 3.5 Released As "Extraordinary" Update To Fix 33 Security Issues

Rsync as the widely-used, open-source remote sync software for synchronizing files and directories across networks is out today with a very important update...…

Trump Administration Enlists Private Companies To Hack Foreign Cybercrime Groups

The Trump administration today unveiled a new program that will allow vetted U.S. companies to conduct cyber surveillance and offensive cyber operations against foreign transnational criminal organizations. A presidential memorandum signed August 12 directs the National Coordination Center to establish and manage the program, expanding the government's fight against cybercrime by tapping the techn…

Comma.ai Launches A PCIe Gen4 x4 To USB4 Dock With Open-Source Firmware

George Hotz of Comma.ai and Tinygrad today announced the Tiny Chestnut eGPU Dock and the "Chestnut" Dock complete with an AMD Radeon RX 9060 8GB GPU too. Making this Chestnut / Tiny Chestnut Dock interesting is that it runs on open-source firmware...…

OpenAI ad service can bill customers for up to one day after they pause campaigns

OpenAI appears to be serving ads after buyers have halted their campaigns, and charging them for the privilege. OpenAI began testing ad sales in ChatGPT in the US back in February and has been gradually expanding the service in other regions, including the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea as of Tuesday. Given that a substantial minority of ChatGPT's user base pays for the se…

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 13, 2026

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: BPF and binfmt_misc; CrossPoint ebook firmware; KVM planes; BPF formal verification; shadow-utils; new storage-code testing features. Briefs: Django releases; GNOME shell; LightDM 1.33.0; QEMU 11.1; uutils 0.10; Software Stewardship Lab; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.…

Big Tech Wants to Harvest Your Thoughts

Wired reports that consumer neurotechnology is rapidly moving from the lab into workplaces and homes, with companies including Apple, Meta, and Snap developing products that can monitor or interpret brain activity. Researchers warn that as these systems improve, neural data could become the next major privacy battleground. Some neuroscientists are already calling for a series of core rights, coine…

Rent-a-GPU outfit Nebius promises rapid 1 GW powerup plan isn't nebulous

Rent-a-GPU cloud Nebius plans to bring online over a gigawatt of datacenter capacity every year starting in 2027, but doing so will require playing the margins and juggling a mountain of debt. “Our future capacity pipeline effectively makes Nebius one of just a few companies in the world able to build more than a gigawatt of new capacity a year and we plan to do so in 2027,” CEO Arkady Volozh boa…

How art invented humanity

The Indo-European Family Tree

Toddler's tragic death from brain-destroying amoeba offers lessons for doctors

A healthy toddler in Washington state fell ill abruptly. It began with vomiting, lethargy, and weakness on his right side. Then it progressed to a headache, fever, and trouble swallowing. At one point, he briefly became unresponsive, and he had episodes where he stopped breathing. Doctors admitted him to the hospital, but his condition only deteriorated. The boy was infected with an ultra-rare am…

The web’s newest weapon against AI scrapers is a font

AI companies' penchant for scraping through large swaths of the public web in search of valuable training data has already led to lawsuits and technical fixes aimed at stopping the practice. Now, a pair of designers is hoping to stymie these scrapers with a new font designed to offer people a perfectly readable webpage while serving scrapers a subtly edited, nonsensical version in the underlying…

'Godmother of AI' Says Biggest AI Risk In Schools Is Students Losing the Desire to Learn

Fei-Fei Li, aka The Godmother of AI, says the biggest AI risk in education may be students losing the motivation and agency to learn, rather than simply using the technology to cheat. She argues against banning AI outright, saying it can be valuable when used to support engaged students instead of replacing the thinking and struggle that learning requires. Techspot reports: Speaking on an episode…

'Near-autonomous' AI agents attack Taiwan's nuclear safety agency

Suspected Chinese cyber operatives used publicly available AI tools to compromise Taiwanese government systems before expanding the attack to its nuclear safety agency, supply-chain vendors, and at least seven energy companies in what security researchers called a "near-autonomous attack." Over the first four days of July, AI agents compromised 85 government user accounts and extracted more than…

Terabytes of credentials leaked in massive supply-chain attack

Terabytes worth of credentials, many belonging to the world’s biggest and most sensitive organizations, have been exposed in a supply-chain attack on LiteLLM, an open source tool that streamlines AI-driven software development. Microsoft, Amazon, Cisco, Samsung, and Salesforce are only a handful of the entities whose access secrets were exposed. The revelation was posted on Tuesday and Wednesday…

Deeply buried 16-year-old SQLite bug caused last year's Tailscale outages

Users of peer-to-peer networking outfit Tailscale might have struggled through some surprising outages beginning late last year. After a six-month investigation, the team finally knows why: A bug in SQLite’s write-ahead log that had remained hidden for 16 years. The Tailscale team announced in a Wednesday blog post that it had finally addressed the issue with the help of SQLite maintainers, who e…

Have physicists finally discovered glueballs? New evidence points to yes.

Physicists with the Beijing Spectrometer III (BES III) experiment have uncovered convincing new evidence of the existence of so-called glueballs, an elusive composite particle made entirely of gluons predicted by quantum theory. The results appeared in a preprint posted to arXiv last month and were also presented last week at the International Conference on High Energy Physics (ICHEP). All the st…

Twitch content has trained Amazon AI for years, but users can opt out now

Twitch now lets users opt out of Amazon's use of content from their channels to train Amazon's "generative AI content models." The change, announced today, comes more than two years after a company executive confirmed that Amazon was using Twitch content for AI training. In an updated support page, Twitch confirms that users must opt out if they don’t want their “streams, VODs, clips, stream chat…

US Tries to Override New York Gambling Laws, Orders Kalshi to Keep Operating

The CFTC has ordered Kalshi to keep operating in New York, claiming the state's lawsuit against the prediction market created a "market emergency." They said it acted "to ensure market stability" and "ordered the exchange to continue to operate in accordance with the Commodity Exchange Act's Core Principles." Ars Technica reports: The market emergency alleged by the CFTC is that New York Attorney…

Trump sued over "brazen" scheme to sell Truth Social API access for $100K a month

President Trump was sued by nonprofit news groups today over Truth Social's "Truth API" that sells real-time access to posts from Trump and other top users of the social network. Trump is profiting from selling preferential access to government information, the lawsuit said. Trump's social media company this month started charging customers up to $100,000 per month for the earliest access to post…

Node.js creator liberates Durable Objects from Cloudflare

We've got good news for developers who are enamored with Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects but don’t want to be tied into that company’s backend infrastructure. Last week, Node.js creator Ryan Dahl unveiled his latest project, celld, which he described on X as “a self-hosted, distributed Durable Objects and Workers implementation.” Dahl’s celld model is compatible with Cloudflare’s Workers a…

Tenstrorrent Posts GCC Compiler Patches For Ascalon XG Core

While the Tenstorrent Ascalon X is known as their high performance out-of-order RISC-V RVA23 CPU core for extreme performance over the H and S models, a new GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) patch today from Tenstorrent makes known a new Ascalon XG core...…

China-Linked Hackers Used AI To Run First-Ever 'Autonomous' Cyberattack On Taiwan

Researchers at Israeli cybersecurity firm Dream say suspected China-linked hackers used an open-source AI-agent system to conduct what may be the first observed end-to-end autonomous cyberattack against a government. According to the Financial Times (paywalled), the attack compromised at least 85 accounts and resulted in the theft of more than 2,500 personnel records from Taiwanese systems. Tom's…

Spectre rears its ugly head again as researchers show some RISC-V chips are susceptible

If you thought that the famous Spectre security vulns were a relic of 2018, think again. Certain RISC-V chips are still very much subject to this hair-raising hole, researchers say. Spectre refers to a family of vulnerabilities related to speculative execution, a performance optimization technique based on predicting the flow of data before instructions have been executed. Incorrect predictions g…

US boosts drone surveillance as flesh-eating screwworms spread in Texas

Hundreds of US government drones have switched from border surveillance to a different surveillance mission this summer—looking for signs of screwworm infestations in wild animals and livestock herds. The flesh-eating New World Screwworm is the parasitic larva that emerges from eggs laid by flies in the open wounds or body openings of warm-blooded animals and humans, with untreated cases potentia…

Nvidia's latest solution to soaring enterprise AI costs is...a router?

Soaring AI infrastructure costs and model pricing, combined with uncertain returns on investment, threaten to stall enterprise adoption. To make enterprise AI spend a bit more manageable, Nvidia this week unveiled a new software platform that blurs the line between expensive proprietary models and open weights alternatives. Announced alongside Nemotron 3.5-30B-A3B-Lightning, Nvidia’s latest open…

DEF CON Crowd Suspected In Fake-Hotspot Attack On Delta Flight

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: On Monday, passengers aboard Delta flight 591 going from Las Vegas to Atlanta allegedly spoofed the onboard Wi-Fi, raising the attention of federal law enforcement. The incident came one day after the DEF CON security conference concluded in Las Vegas, and was first described on social media accounts that follow publicly available air-to-groun…

GCC 17 Compiler Adding "-m128bit-atomic" For 128-bit Atomic Memory Operations

Merged today to the GNU Compiler Collection Git code is the new -m128bit-atomic option for next year's GCC 17 feature release...…

[$] Block-layer error injection

Storage code has to cope with hardware that fails in inconvenient ways, but coaxing a healthy disk into producing those failures on demand, for testing, is usually not possible. The kernel provides several ways to inject block-layer I/O errors, but none of those can select the operation to fail, pick the status code to return, or target a disk directly without employing a stacked device on top. Us…

Manjaro Linux 26.1 Released With GNOME 50 & KDE Plasma 6.7 Desktops

Manjaro 26.1 Bian-May is now available as the newest feature release to this desktop Linux distribution built atop an Arch Linux base...…

Microsoft-vendetta hacker has a new zero day that gives system privileges on fully patched Windows

Nightmare Eclipse, the serial zero-day hunter who has an axe to grind with Microsoft, published a new Defender zero-day, ShieldBreak, that apparently bypasses Redmond’s RoguePlanet patch (CVE-2026-50656), allowing attackers to gain SYSTEM privileges on fully patched Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server systems. According to at least one other researcher, the exploit works. “I've tried it, i…

The Pixel Tag Is Google's Answer To the AirTag

Google has unveiled the $29 Pixel Tag, its long-awaited AirTag rival that combines UWB with Bluetooth 6.0 Channel Sounding for two forms of precision tracking. It launches November 11. The Verge reports: The Pixel Tag is a slim oblong device available in one grayish color -- Fog -- that weighs about 12g, or 0.4oz. Like the AirTag, it has no built-in hooks or clips for attaching to objects you want…

Intel AMX Performance With The Xeon 678X Workstation CPU

One of the most compelling features for Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids alongside MRDIMMs is Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for helping accelerate AI workloads and more. AMX is also found with the new Granite Rapids WS processors and in currently having my hands on an Intel Xeon 678X in the HP Z4 G6i workstation, I ran some benchmarks looking at the AMX performance and power impact for this high-end…

Two hydrogen-burning engines powered this car to a new land speed record

It's been far too long since I've been able to report a new land speed record. For a while, it looked like Bloodhound might have been able to make good on its 1,000 mph (1,609 km/h) attempt, but then the money ran out. As a result, Thrust SSC's two-way average of 763.6 mph (1,229 km/h), set in 1997, remains the fastest anyone has ever driven a wheeled vehicle over a timed mile. But yesterday, on…

German Advocacy Group Lodges Criminal Complaint Over Meta AI Glasses

A German digital-rights group has filed a criminal complaint against Meta, Ray-Ban parent EssilorLuxottica, and several retailers over Meta's AI smart glasses, arguing the devices can enable covert recording in violation of German privacy law. Prosecutors have begun a preliminary review, while Germany's network regulator says smart glasses are legal "as long as the recording function is clearly vi…

OpenWALDO aims to blow the doors off proprietary AI training models

A new project aims to build a shared, open source AI training dataset that anyone can contribute to, much like an open source software project. It aims to make training data more transparent than that of many open-weight models that have recently taken the industry by storm. CentOS and Rocky Linux founder Gregory Kurtzer is behind the effort, dubbed Open Weights, Artifacts, Licenses, Data, Origin…

US tries to override New York gambling laws, orders Kalshi to keep operating

The Trump administration is trying to stop New York from enforcing its gambling laws against Kalshi, and yesterday said it ordered the prediction market to continue operating in the state. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC) announced that it exercised its emergency authority in response to a "market emergency." The CFTC said it acted "to ensure market stability" and "ordered the exch…

CoreWeave revenue doubles as debt pile reaches $35.6B

Neocloud operator CoreWeave remains bullish about its prospects, claiming that changing patterns of AI use will create sustained demand for its cloud services. The New Jersey firm is among the most prominent rent-a-GPU businesses spawned by demand for AI training infrastructure, but is now attempting to move up the technology stack – a shift consultants at McKinsey said neoclouds would need to ma…

Google Unveils Pixel 11 Lineup

At its Made by Google 2026 event today, Google unveiled a slew of new devices, headlined by the Pixel 11, Pixel 11 Pro, and Pixel 11 Pro Fold. Here's a breakdown of the company's latest smartphones, provided by TechCrunch: Pixel 11: The standard Pixel 11 gets a redesigned camera bar that is thinner than the one on the previous generation. Google says the new camera bar is more than 40% thinner and…

[$] A look at CrossPoint e-reader firmware

There are a number of small, inexpensive, low-powered e-reader or e-paper devices that have promise as ebook readers with one minor problem: the firmware they ship with does not realize their full potential. To solve that problem, the CrossPoint Reader project looks to provide replacement firmware that offers necessary features, better performance, and a more pleasant reading experience. On August…

QEMU 11.1 released

Version 11.1 of the QEMU emulator has been released. The release contains more than 3,200 commits from 285 authors and includes a long list of improvements; see the announcement and changelog for the details.…

Show HN: OJCP – an open protocol for agent-consumable job data

Booksellers suspect AI firms are buying and then destroying rare books

If you can truly appreciate an old book—and maybe even marvel at how its fragile, yellowing pages contain some of the earliest ways that people tried to make sense of the world around them—then headlines about tech companies that are destroying books to train AI likely torture a tender part of your soul. It’s indeed depressing to imagine piles of book spines waiting to be fed into wood chippers w…

Smooth-talking fraudsters clone contactless cards, authorize payments in just 13 minutes

A new social engineering and malware campaign targets Android users, stealing card details to make payments or withdraw cash. Group-IB discovered the campaign, calling it WindRelay, and found that several successful attacks were carried out on European victims within the space of a 13-minute phone call. The attack relies on a skilled social engineer walking the victim through the process and two…

US Hires Over 2,000 Video Gamers As Air Traffic Controllers

The FAA says its push to recruit video gamers as air traffic controllers has helped it hire more than 2,000 trainees, reaching 94% of its hiring goal. Another 2,000-plus candidates are in the pipeline. CBS News reports: U.S. Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy said in a recent social media post that the federal agency's recruitment campaign to recruit gamers as air traffic controllers has been…

Sovereign AI overcomes compliance challenges and feeds innovation in public sector and other regulated industries, say HPE and NVIDIA

Enterprises must "feed" their AI ventures with reliable, well-curated data if they want worthwhile returns. But new mandates governing AI deployments also require them to act as careful custodians of their data, along with the infrastructure, supply chain, software and other aspects of their IT landscape. Sovereign AI gives an enterprise, or even a nation state, complete control over how its AI s…

Uber Freight keeps on trucking after extortion crew breaks in

Uber Freight says it is investigating a "data security incident" days after the Helix extortion group listed the company on its data leak site on August 6. Helix claims to have stolen nearly 1 million files from mailboxes, OneDrive accounts, the accounts receivable department, and other repositories. An Uber Freight spokesperson told The Register that the incident was under investigation but had…

Linux Finally Seeing Patches For Better Hybrid Graphics On 2018~2019 Era MacBook Pros

Patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list provide support for Apple GMUX hybrid graphics support on 2018~2019 Apple MacBook Pros. This allows for better power savings on these nearly decade old MacBook Pro laptops by allowing the discrete GPU to power down and be properly restored as needed...…

Google reveals 2026 hardware lineup: Pixel 11, Pixel Watch 5, and Pixel Tag

Google has revealed its Pixel phone hardware for 2026, and you won't be surprised. The Pixel 11 series looks a lot like last year's lineup, featuring an evolution of the design Google adopted with the Pixel 9. There are some minor tweaks, a few new hardware goodies, and yes, even more Gemini-powered AI. The new phones are joined by an updated Pixel Watch 5 with much the same story, as well as Goo…

Intel ANV Driver Enables Vulkan Video AV1 Encoding For DG2/Alchemist GPUs

Hyunjun Ko of Igalia continues working on Vulkan Video support for Intel graphics hardware on Linux with the ANV driver. Merged now for Mesa 26.3-devel is enabling AV1 video encoding via Vulkan Video on DG2/Alchemist hardware...…

Exposed: Woeful security at UK criminal records office that led to sensitive data leak

The UK's criminal records office, ACRO, has escaped a fine and received a regulatory reprimand after security failings potentially exposed highly sensitive data belonging to nearly 11,000 people. ACRO disclosed the "cybersecurity incident" in April 2023, and said at the time that it had no evidence to suggest that any data was compromised. However, it has now emerged that attackers maintained per…

Researchers found a way to hijack devices through Zoom screen sharing

As AI models gain advanced capabilities to find vulnerabilities in software, develop ways to exploit them, and even carry out autonomous hacking sprees, researchers offered a sobering new example on Tuesday, disclosing vulnerabilities in the video conferencing platform Zoom that could have been exploited to take over targets’ devices. Anyone on a call that involved screen sharing, whether partici…

Formula E finds a new home on Disney+, ESPN+

Formula E is set to make a big change in terms of visibility when season 12 gets underway this December. It has signed a new multiyear deal to broadcast the sport on Disney+ and ESPN+ in 144 countries, with live coverage of each entire ePrix, from practice through qualifying to the race. The new media deal means that here in the US, Formula E will be shown on the streaming networks from next seas…

Security updates for Wednesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (fence-agents, firefox, frr10, gstreamer1-plugins-good, iscsi-initiator-utils, isns-utils, kernel, kernel-rt, perl-DBI:1.641, postgresql, postgresql:12, and resource-agents), Debian (libgd2, openjdk-25, php7.4, php8.2, and postfix), Fedora (clamav, domoticz, and libidn), Red Hat (delve, edk2, firefox, go-fdo-client, go-fdo-server, grafana, host-meteri…

Akira ransomware scum blocked victim's security tools – and broke their own encryptor

An Akira ransomware affiliate rebooted a victim’s computer into Safe Mode to kill its security tools – and in the process sabotaged their own malware when the limited-function startup mode also broke their encryptor. “Akira's encryptor is engineered for speed, relying on concurrent worker threads and heavy memory mapping rather than simple sequential read-and-write operations. That high-performan…

Did poop enable the evolution of complex animals?

The Cambrian explosion may have been fueled by poop. The first animals on Earth emerged about 600 million years ago, and 60 million years later, those simple early animals evolved in wildly different directions, branching out into a diverse menagerie of complicated new forms and conquering new ecological niches. Known as the Cambrian Explosion, this flurry of rapid evolution produced most of the…

How Voyager engineers found two more years in a 50-year-old power budget

SPACE EXTENDERS Adding a few extra years to Voyager 2's prodigiously long life was the result of an effort that began more than a year ago, as engineers and managers pondered how to eke out a few more watts from the spacecraft's dwindling power supply. "We came up with the 'Big Bang' idea probably more than a year ago now," recalls Suzanne Dodd, Project Manager for the Voyager project. "We were l…

Brit rail cops bring live facial recognition to the London Underground

British Transport Police is expanding its trial of live facial recognition (LFR) to the London Underground, despite concerns about privacy and mistaken identification. The force, which polices railways across England, Scotland, and Wales, will begin its Tube deployments at Victoria Underground station. The cameras will then rotate between Underground and Network Rail stations until the trial ends…

Big Cloud is poised to corner the market for enterprise hardware

OPINION Whenever I talk to execs from hyperscale clouds, they suggest it is their destiny to eventually host the majority of enterprise workloads. That future is now in sight because the AI boom has shown how they can use their financial muscle to command the hardware supply chain. Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami made the situation plain in May when he pointed out that the fastest way to access a new…

Linux 7.2 To Revert Back To The FIFO DRM Scheduler Policy Due To "Fair" Regressions

One of the Direct Rendering Manager changes made for Linux 7.2 was switching to "fair" as the DRM scheduler default in place of the existing FIFO policy. The intent was on making the DRM scheduler policy more fair with this being used by AMDGPU and various other DRM kernel graphics drivers. But due to a last minute regression report, the fair policy is being reverted for Linux 7.2...…

Mold 2.42 Delivering Greater Performance For This High Speed Linker

It's been quiet since the Mold 2.41 release back in April while today it's now been succeeded by Mold 2.42 for deliver even greater performance out of this high speed linker...…

Intel LLM-Scaler Ready With Muse Glimmer Support, Other LLMs & Features

Intel's LLM-Scaler project that was born out of their Project Battlematrix initiative aims to make it easier to run generative AI on Arc (Pro) B-Series graphics cards with the likes of vLLM, ComfyUI, SGLang, and other popular AI software in this Docker-based pre-configured AI stack. This week new LLM-Scaler releases brought same-day support for new models and other enhancements...…

We don't serve pies, but we do like a Pi

BORK!BORK!BORK! There is an old IT truism that the best tip anybody can give is "turn it off and turn it on again." But this is probably not the sort of tip that the staff at this London pub were expecting. Today's entry into the world of embedded borks comes from the tipping machine in a London pub, spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader. Tipping culture has yet to take root in the UK to the s…

LACT 0.10 Released With New NVIDIA Overclocking Controls, Blackwell Hotspot Sensor

LACT is one of the popular third-party Linux GPU configuration and monitoring utilities that works across NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel graphics. This GUI provides GPU overclocking controls plus a wealth of information reporting, which is especially great considering the lack of any official GUI control panel for AMD Radeon and Intel Arc graphics on Linux. With today's LACT 0.10 release, there are yet mo…

UK puts £14B cloud framework in place with SMEs promised a bigger slice

The British government has awarded places on its latest G-Cloud procurement framework, through which the public sector could spend an estimated £14 billion ($18.9 billion) over four years. Whitehall hopes smaller UK suppliers will capture more of that business than they have in the past. G-Cloud 15 is billed as the most significant upgrade to the UK's public sector cloud procurement framework sin…

Nailed it: Toolstation gives its store IT an ASUS NUC refurb

When Toolstation's customers walk into a branch, work has usually paused somewhere else. A plumber, decorator or electrician is there because a plug won't fit, a roller has worn out, or the van needs restocking with brushed-steel double sockets. It is a place where trades and dedicated DIYers go when they need to get on with the job. Toolstation's point-of-sale terminals therefore need to keep pa…

Agents made my retro tech safe to use again and showed their real value as testers of ideas

Over the years, my home has become something of an Island of Misfit Kit because it’s filled with ancient computers, all of them well and truly out of support. Most still work but it was always inadvisable to use them, and more so since Mythos came along. So I mostly left them alone until a few months ago when I decided to see if an agent could help to revive a 15 year old device with a tiny CPU,…

Zuck’s Chinese agentic prey escapes, will resume standalone ops

China’s decision not to allow Meta to acquire local AI outfit Manus AI has become reality, with the upstart advising users it will soon “return to operating as an independent company.” Manus burst onto the AI scene in March 2025 with a “general agent” that allowed users assign tasks to an AI. To illustrate its powers, Manus claimed it could select the best candidate for a job by evaluating job ap…

QEMU 11.1 Released With Numerous Improvements

For those using QEMU as part of the open-source virtualization stack, QEMU 11.1 is now available with a number of new feature enhancements and fixes...…

India’s central bank wants AI to approve loans that humans would reject

The governor of India’s Reserve Bank wants the nation’s financial institutions to use AI to approve loans that human assessors would likely reject. In a speech delivered yesterday at the FIBAC conference in Mumbai, Sanjay Malhotra said the regulator “sees AI as a capability to be responsibly harnessed and not merely as a risk to be contained,” then offered several reasons to support that statemen…

Redox OS Enjoys installer Improvements, Performance Enhancements

A new blog post out today from the Redox OS crew highlights all of the interesting improvements made to this Rust-based, open-source operating system over the course of July...…

DEF CON crowd suspected in fake-hotspot attack on Delta flight

On Monday, passengers aboard Delta flight 591 going from Las Vegas to Atlanta allegedly spoofed the onboard Wi-Fi, raising the attention of federal law enforcement. The incident came one day after the DEF CON security conference concluded in Las Vegas and was first described on social media accounts that follow publicly available air-to-ground messages, known as ACARS. According to the “ACARS Dra…

Modular's Mojo programming language hits 1.0 milestone

Modular's Mojo reached its 1.0 milestone on Tuesday, promising developers a stable, production-ready, general-purpose programming language. But its primary purpose is more specific: to unify the AI software stack by providing a way to target the diverse set of GPUs, CPUs, ASICs, and other heterogeneous systems that are used to run AI workloads. Mojo, in conjunction with the MAX inference framewor…

Trump wants Big Pharma to split MMR vaccine; Big Pharma thinks it's idiotic

Backlash to Trump's vaccine order on Monday has been swift and sharp, with various public health and medical organizations and independent experts calling it "dangerous," "unscientific," "false and misleading," "so wrong," and saying it is "putting children's health at risk." The responses are unsurprising; the medical and health communities have consistently fought against the anti-vaccine, anti…

Signal adds an extra layer of security to make sure you're actually chatting with the right person

Signal has introduced a new layer of security to help make sure no one has secretly interfered with your encrypted chats. The chat app is favored by diplomats, activists, and journalists for its security. It uses end-to-end message encryption and “safety numbers” – cryptographic fingerprints associated with the keys securing a conversation – which users can compare to verify they have the expecte…

421 bugs in Microsoft's Patch Tuesday release, and the Norks have already attacked one

This is an epic month for Microsoft patches, though not a record-setting one. Redmond addressed 421 bugs in its own products this month - about 200 fewer CVEs than last month, but likely the new norm with AI-assisted vulnerability disclosures and fixes. The big news is that North Korea’s Lazarus Group (and possibly other miscreants) found and attacked one of these flaws as a zero-day in early Jun…

Microsoft Plugs Nearly 400 Security Holes

Microsoft today released updates to remedy at least 398 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and supported software, including one weakness that is already being actively exploited and two others that were publicly detailed prior to today. Image: Shutterstock, Mallika Home Studio. August’s overstuffed bundle of patch joy from Microsoft did not eclipse its recording breaking re…

Give Palantir up to $244M through 2028, says internal Defense Department memo

EXCLUSIVE US Deputy Secretary of Defense Stephen Feinberg has drafted a memorandum directing Defense Department subordinates to purchase up to $243.9 million in services from AI-enabled data analytics biz Palantir through March 31, 2027, without a competitive bidding process, The Register has learned. The August 4th, 2026, memo calls for what would effectively be a sole-source or no-bid consultin…

Who (or What) Generates Images for EFF?

We’ve had a few questions from EFF supporters lately, asking whether the images we use on our blog posts, or on donation and shop items, have been created with AI image generators. We’d like to answer these questions and clarify our internal policy regarding image creation.  EFF images are all made by human beings, not by automated image generators, with very rare exceptions. This is an internal d…

Intel CPU Microcode 20260811 Release Fixes Eight Security Issues

Intel today published their 20260811 CPU microcode updates to fix a variety of issues for existing processors, including shipping the first new microcode images for Bartlett Lake and Wildcat Lake. The new microcode updates stretch back to Intel Core Gen10 processors...…

Together AI embraces the competition with $240M IBM Cloud deal

With power, datacenter capacity, and other supply chain constraints, AI infrastructure is in short supply, and service providers will rent all the compute they can get, even if it means working with competing cloud providers. Together AI is the latest example. This week the service provider announced a $240 million deal to run its open weights inference platform on a “large cluster” of Nvidia GPU…

OpenAI Brings ChatGPT Desktop App To Linux

OpenAI announced today they have brought their ChatGPT Desktop application to Linux and is currently in preview form...…

DEF CON dingus suspected of trying to take over Delta in-flight Wi-Fi

A passenger on a Delta Air Lines flight from Las Vegas to Atlanta after DEF CON is suspected of jamming the in-flight Wi-Fi and broadcasting an unauthorized network in what could amount to a federal offense. It seems like someone forgot the old truism "what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas." News of the incident began circulating late Monday when flight watchers spotted Aircraft Communications Add…

Intel upsizes stock sale to $20B with spending plans still fuzzy

Intel stands to raise $20 billion from a public offering of common stock after increasing the deal from the $15 billion announced on Monday, although analysts disagree over what the chip giant wants the cash for. The Santa Clara biz initially announced a $15 billion offering before pricing the shares at $95 apiece and increasing the deal to $20 billion. Intel is offering 210,526,315 shares at a p…

Two wars and a World Cup lead to epic DDoS attacks on publishers

Ongoing wars in Ukraine and Iran and the FIFA World Cup all contributed to a DDoS walloping of media organizations throughout 2026 so far, according to Cloudflare’s latest data, which identified the sector as the most targeted this year. Attacks on media, production, and publishing accounted for 14.2 percent of all DDoS attacks launched since January 1. Over the first six months of the year, the…

[$] KVM planes head for takeoff

Virtualization places a guest system into a separate security domain, typically with fewer privileges than software running directly on the host. Increasingly, there is interest in creating multiple security domains within a single virtualized system as well. CPU vendors (and software vendors too) are implementing solutions; each of which, of course, is different from all of the others. KVM planes…

Analyzing Fedora's Slow Performance On The Framework Laptop 13 Pro With Intel Panther Lake

As part of my recent Linux testing of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro I had recently benchmarked six Linux distributions on the Framework Laptop 13 Pro. CachyOS was the fastest to not much surprise but arguably the most surprising aspect was finding Fedora Workstation 44 typically running slower than the five other modern Linux distributions benchmarked. Here's a follow-up to that with more Fedora Lin…

Feds warn Gunra ransomware is exploiting known bugs to hit critical infrastructure

US cyber agencies are warning critical infrastructure operators to patch their internet-facing kit after Gunra ransomware affiliates were spotted exploiting known vulnerabilities to break into networks. Gunra first surfaced in 2025 and has wasted little time expanding. CISA, the FBI, NSA, Secret Service, and partner agencies in the US and South Korea say it now operates as ransomware-as-a-service…

Bernard: GNOME Shell design dreams

GNOME contributor Tobias Bernard has published a blog post that details some of the design team's ideas for the GNOME Shell over the long term: Some of these we have relatively complete plans for, others are more vague ideas that need more research and prototyping. As always, getting things like these implemented depends on developer capacity and interest (and sometimes funding). While each of the…

Come for ENIAC, Stay for UNIVAC and Skeduflo

Flatpak 1.19 Released With Nine Security Fixes

Flatpak 1.19 was released today as a new development release along with the Flatpak 1.18.1 stable point release. Both of these releases ship a number of newly-discovered security issues with this app sandboxing and distribution tech...…

Cyberattack on logistics giant CEVA delivers customer data into the wrong hands

A cyberattack on logistics giant CEVA has disrupted warehouses across Europe and exposed customer data belonging to a growing list of big-name clients, including Valve and Ajax. The France-headquartered shipping outfit, which operates more than 1,000 warehouses worldwide and generated $18.3 billion in revenue last year, was attacked between July 29 and August 1, according to a notification Valve…

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gpsd), Debian (caddy, libyaml-syck-perl, nss, and wordpress), Fedora (chezmoi, chromium, emacs, kernel, knot, libcupsfilters, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-good, mingw-libidn, mingw-python-pip, nghttp2, p11-kit, python-webob, suricata, and xen), Mageia (bind, openslide, php8.4, and php8.5), Oracle (gpsd-minimal, kernel, libarchive, libpng12, nodejs-nodemo…

GNOME Designers Lay Out Some Of Their GNOME Shell Dreams

GNOME interaction designer Tobias Bernard has shared some of the plans and ideas for long-term GNOME Shell improvements they have been eyeing for future GNOME releases...…

Deepfake hiccup unmasks suspected digital certificate fraudster

Spain's national police say they caught a cybercriminal after a momentary technical glitch exposed his face to a video identification platform. The unnamed man allegedly made 38 attempts to impersonate 30 people and obtain digital certificates in their names, succeeding on multiple occasions. A digital certificate uses public key infrastructure to bind a cryptographic key to a verified identity,…

Up To 12.8x Improvement Observed For gup_test With New Linux MM Patches

Linux developer Rik van Riel has pulled off some nice Linux kernel optimizations over the years and the Meta engineer has been working on another one around batching of look-ups with Linux's follow_page_mask() that is used for translating virtual addresses to the corresponding struct page...…

Raspberry Pi AXI PMU Driver Under Review For The Mainline Linux Kernel

One of the Raspberry Pi device drivers that has remained elusive from the mainline Linux kernel has been for the performance monitoring unit (PMU) for the Broadcom AXI on all Raspberry Pi 1 through Raspberry Pi 5 models. Thanks to the work of a Google engineer, there is a new effort working to get a mainline Linux driver for the Raspberry Pi AXI PMU...…

Mozilla revokes Firefox signing key after unencrypted copy lands in GitHub

Mozilla has revoked a cryptographic key used to sign Firefox and Thunderbird releases after discovering someone had accidentally committed an unencrypted copy of the private key to a GitHub repository. The browser maker disclosed the mishap on Monday, saying the GPG private subkey was checked into a private GitHub repository accessible only to a small number of Mozilla employees. All of them were…

Building up the US power grid won't be wasted, even if the AI bubble bursts

US power companies must decide how much capacity to build for soaring datacenter demand, knowing that some planned facilities may never materialize and the AI bubble could deflate. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company says the greater near-term risk is building too little. Driven by the AI craze, a boom in datacenter building is expected to see the energy consumed by these facilities grow by 26 per…

FastFlowLM 1.0 Released Now As Part Of The AMD ROCm Umbrella

FastFlowLM is the open-source software for getting vision, audio, embedding, and MoE large language models up and running on AMD Ryzen AI NPUs. FastFlowLM 1.0 released today and is also now part of the AMD ROCm software umbrella...…

Rusticl Now Supports cl_ext_float_atomics

With the recent release of Mesa 26.2 the Rusticl OpenCL driver now supports OpenCL 3.1 on RadeonSI, LLVMpipe, Zink, Intel Iris, and Apple Asahi. But the work is not over and more improvements to this Rust-based, modern OpenCL driver continue to land...…

Claude Opus Helped Debug & Fix Lack Of Audio On Linux For HP OmniBook X Flip 14

The HP OmniBook X Flip 14-kc0xxx is an AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" powered laptop. While most AMD Strix Point laptops work fine on modern Linux distributions, with this particular HP OmniBook X there is no working audio with current mainline Linux kernel builds. With Claude Opus 5 acting as a debugging assistant and coding agent, patches are now pending to correct the audio support for this HP…

Malicious SIMs can shut down phones, steal files, and drag 5G back to 2G

Researchers have found that a malicious SIM card can tell some phones and cellular-connected devices to leak data, drop to 2G, shut themselves down, or even execute code, all thanks to functionality that's supposed to be there. The research [PDF], presented at the USENIX WOOT conference in Baltimore this week, examines proactive SIM functionality, which allows a SIM to issue commands to the devic…

The mathematical physics of rainbows and glories (2001) [pdf]

Open-Source NVIDIA "Nova" Driver Sees More Functionality For Linux 7.3

Sent to DRM-Next this week was the DRM Rust core and driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window. There continues to be a lot of DRM core infrastructure work happening for Rust integration plus two leading Rust DRM drivers of Nova for open-source NVIDIA GPU support as the successor to Nouveau and then Tyr as the in-development Arm Mali driver...…

Dismiss Church’s Trademark Lawsuit Against “Mormon Stories” Podcast, EFF Urges Court

Imagine if McDonald’s could use trademark law to control how you use the term “fast food.” Or if the Canadian government could stop you from using the word “Canada” in the title of a book about the country and its people. That wouldn’t just be absurd; it would be an unacceptable obstacle to criticism of and commentary about those institutions. Yet the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (t…

Fedora CoreOS To Enable systemd-oomd & zRAM Swap By Default

Fedora's CoreOS as their container-optimized operating system will be moving to enable systemd-oomd by default with Fedora CoreOS 45. Additionally, swap on zRAM will be enabled by default too...…

Meta Must Stop Silencing Reproductive Health Information

Access to accurate information about reproductive and maternal health can be critical. But on Meta's platforms, simply talking about prescription medication, abortion care, or one's own medical experiences can be enough to trigger content removals and account restrictions. That's why EFF recently submitted a public comment to the Meta Oversight Board in its consideration of a case involving an Ins…

[$] Even more formal verification for BPF

BPF offers useful safety guarantees, but Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi wants BPF programs to be even safer. At the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, he led a session (slides) discussing the possibility of adding domain-specific invariants to BPF programs. It was not a discussion intended to lead to the implementation of any particular kernel feature, but rather an overv…

The lattice of sets of natural numbers is rich (2021)

Django moves to an annual release cycle

The Django Python web-framework project has announced that it has accepted an annual release cycle proposal. This means that the project is moving from a somewhat complicated schedule that interspersed short-lived feature releases and long-term-support (LTS) releases to a simpler annual cycle where each release is supported for three years. Every feature release gets three years of support: one ye…

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, gpsd-minimal, kernel, libarchive, libgcrypt, and LibRaw), Debian (bind9, ca-certificates, chromium, dnsdist, icinga2, kitty, libheif, openjdk-21, pdns, pdns-recursor, thunderbird, and xen), Fedora (bird, erlang, kernel, mingw-glib2, nghttp2, p11-kit, perl, perl-Devel-Cover, perl-PAR-Packer, pgadmin4, polymake, python-nh3, python-wsgidav, pyt…

Kernel prepatch 7.2-rc7

The 7.2-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. It is still bigger than Linus would like, but he said nonetheless: "I don't currently see any value in delaying the 7.2 release, so I would expect that to happen next weekend unless something really bad pops up."…

Better Gaussian Splatting in Julia

Translating the Renaissance: 17,000+ historical source texts

Canadian Man Pleads Guilty in Snowflake Extortions

A 26-year-old Canadian man once described as one of the most consequential cybercrime threat actors of 2024 has pleaded guilty to computer fraud and conspiracy to hack and extort more than 165 organizations that used the cloud provider Snowflake. Connor Riley Moucka, of Kitchener, Ontario, also admitted to stealing call and text history records of more than 100 million AT&T customers. A surveillan…

Tomorrow’s U.S. Senate Vote: Four Internet Bills, One Wrong Direction

The Senate Commerce Committee will vote this week on several censorious and privacy invasive bills: KOSA, the SCREEN Act, Youth AI Privacy Act, and CHATBOT Act. While we appreciate that the Committee is taking the time to look at these bills separately, it’s still impossible to ignore the message Congress is sending to the world: Age-gate the internet and block young people from speaking and acces…

Appeals Court Agrees with EFF that Building a Web Browser Doesn’t Violate the CFAA

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has endorsed a commonsense technical interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a law not usually given to such interpretation. Amazon had sued Perplexity AI to try to shut down its Comet browser, claiming the browser’s optional agentic AI “Assistant” that can browse websites like Amazon for comparison shopping purposes, violated the CFAA because…

Mobile Ad Software Encourages Location Data Sharing, EFF Report Finds

Developers Must Beware of Ad Libraries that Betray Users’ PrivacySAN FRANCISCO – Some software development kits (SDKs) provided by advertising companies to help developers monetize their apps are automatically feeding users’ location data into systems that location data brokers use to track people, an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) report found.  EFF began investigating the location-sharing…

Developers: Beware of Ad Libraries that Betray Your Users’ Location Privacy

Across mobile platforms, advertising companies provide developers with software development kits (SDKs) that make it easy to monetize their apps. But those same SDKs can automatically feed users’ location data into ad systems that location data brokers use to track people. Many developers may not even be aware of this privacy violation, let alone the users who are directly affected. When developer…

Technology's Power in the Hands of the People

In the scorching heat of every Las Vegas summer, EFF joins thousands of hackers, makers, policy analysts, and activists for the world's largest computer security gathering. If you're there during this summer security week, be sure to say hello to us at BSides Las Vegas, Black Hat Briefings, and DEF CON 34. While tech companies align with governments to target the people, our community is harnessin…

The Senate Should Reject KOSA's Privacy Risks

Update: The Senate Commerce Committee voted to advance this bill on August 5, 2026. EFF continues to oppose the bill, which still needs approval from the full Senate.  The Senate Commerce Committee is once again considering legislation that would dramatically expand age verification, and undermine privacy for everyone. Alongside the SCREEN Act, the CHATBOT Act, and the Youth AI Privacy Act, the Ki…

EFF Joins 18 Civil Rights Organizations Calling on Governor Hochul to Reject the Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act

EFF joined a group of 18 civil society organizations to send a letter encouraging New York Governor Kathy Hochul to veto Senate Bill 9934A, the New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act. The letter states: While framed as a measure to protect local journalism, this legislation harms free expression and establishes a dangerous precedent by effectively deanonymizing and criminalizing automated access…

EFF Joins Call for FTC to Drop Its Disastrous AI Policy Proposal

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in July issued a proposed policy statement “concerning the suppression of accuracy in artificial intelligence systems.” We urge the FTC to withdraw this misguided proposal and instead focus on its core strengths and mission to protect consumers.  The new proposed policy builds on, and directly references, the Trump administration’s  “Preventing Woke AI in the Fed…

The Youth AI Privacy Act’s Privacy Paradox

Update: The Senate Commerce Committee voted to advance this bill on August 5, 2026. EFF continues to oppose the bill, which still needs approval from the full Senate.  The Senate Commerce Committee is poised to consider the Youth AI Privacy Act, a bill that would require AI companies to create kids-only privacy rules and implement so-called “safe design features,” which would—like three other bill…

EFF at BSidesLV, Black Hat, and DEF CON 👨‍💻

It's time. Time for tinkerers, security researchers, hackers, and fellow nerds to gather together in signature black hoodies and utilikilts to beat the heat in Las Vegas for the summer security conferences: BSidesLV, Black Hat USA, and DEF CON. EFF's lawyers, activists, and technologists are excited, as always, to support this community of folks that push computer security forward. If you're atten…

Amending AB 1709 Doesn’t Fix It: California’s Social Media Ban Still Threatens Free Speech and Privacy

California lawmakers have amended A.B. 1709, but the core problem remains: the bill is still a ban on social media access for youth under 16, and it still threatens the privacy and First Amendment rights of all Californians. Proponents of the bill may argue that the recent amendments represent a compromise, but a close look at the text shows no major changes. As the bill moves forward in the Senat…

The SCREEN Act Threatens Privacy Far Beyond Adult Websites

Update: On August 5, 2026, The Senate Commerce Committee voted 15-13 to advance this bill, but the bill did not advance because of a lack of Senators in attendance. EFF continues to oppose the bill.  The Senate Commerce Committee is set to consider S. 737, the SCREEN Act, a sweeping age-verification bill that would require online services to verify users’ ages before they can access any sexually e…

The CHATBOT Act Forces One Parenting Model On Every Family

Update: The Senate Commerce Committee voted to advance this bill on August 5, 2026. EFF continues to oppose the bill, which still needs approval from the full Senate.  Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing education, and the way people search for information. Parents, teenagers, teachers, and schools are struggling with tough questions about when AI should, and should not, be used. It makes…

EFF Guide to Recording Law Enforcement

This post is available as a printable one page handout in English and Spanish. Recordings of law enforcement, whether by bystanders or by those directly encountering officers, can be powerful tools of government accountability and can support movements for social change. But recording officers can come with risks. Below are important legal and practical considerations related to recording the poli…

Read This Before You Buy That TV Streaming Stick

Security experts have been sounding the alarm for years about the risks of using generic TV boxes that promise unlimited content streaming for a one-time fee, warning that they secretly rent the user’s Internet connection out to strangers. But a groundbreaking new analysis finds these devices also routinely spoof themselves as mobile phones clicking ads on AI-generated websites as part of a sprawl…

🏃 Fitness Tracker Privacy Fails | EFFector 38.14

Watches, bands, and rings—if you want to digitally monitor your fitness, more companies than ever are selling devices to do it. And more Americans than ever now own at least one wearable health device. But what are the companies that make fitness trackers doing to protect our sensitive data from prying eyes? A lot less than they could be, it turns out. We're explaining what companies can do to pro…

San Francisco: Don’t Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

The concept of “surveillance pricing” is just one part of a much larger problem and business model: corporations maximizing their profits by invading our privacy. The all-too-common business model is to systematically harvest, collate, and store as much of our personal data as possible, and then monetize it through use and sale. When it comes to surveillance pricing, that looks like corporations o…

Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?

Update 8/10/2026: Two San Francisco bars that used Patronscan have said they will stop using the system after listening to customers’ privacy concerns. EFF applauds this change and we hope other bars follow suit by returning to ID-checking systems that respect their customers’ rights. ———————————————————— Recent reports have raised alarm about the use of PatronScan, an ID-checking and face-scannin…

Missed EFF's Livestream with Adam Savage and iFixit? Listen Here!

EFF’s first EFFecting Change livestream was all the way back in July of 2024. Maybe you've caught each stream, or maybe you’ve only caught a few. Or maybe you’re like me and prefer to listen to conversations like these on your daily commute! Either way, if you want to stay on top of these monthly conversations, you can now subscribe to our new podcast feed for EFFecting Change—starting with our co…

Farmers Are Getting Control Of Their Equipment Back

For years, John Deere had actively made repairing their tractors near-impossible for anyone but itself and the few "authorized" repair shops—regardless of the ability of its customers to actually visit such shops. Now, in a major win for farmers and right to repair advocates, John Deere must soon provide farmers with not just the tools and resources to finally repair their own John Deere equipment…

Hundreds of Drone-as-First-Responder Programs Could Soon Be Launched Across the Country

Police departments across the country are lining up to launch drone-as-first-responder (DFR) programs, and hundreds have cleared a necessary hurdle toward making deployment a reality, expanding aerial surveillance and data collection even in areas patrol officers typically can't reach. As of February 2026, over 1,000 public safety agencies—including police, fire, and other emergency management age…

The Fourth Circuit Says Border Agents Can Search Your Phone By Hand, No Suspicion Required

Legal intern Suzanne Castillo was the principal author of this post. The Fourth Circuit issued a disappointing opinion in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, a case in which EFF filed an amicus brief, alongside the national ACLU, its Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia affiliates, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). We argued that electronic device searches a…

New EU Court of Justice Ruling on Platform Liability Could Cause Collateral Damage to Freedom of Expression

Intermediary liability laws around the world recognize that social media platforms, search engines, and other online service providers have become an integral part of our lives: they shape how we access information, communicate with others and participate in public debate, and foster innovation online. These laws generally shield platforms, to varying degrees, from legal liability for user content…

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one’s television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42 percent of games and other apps available for download on LG’s webOS store allow unknown third-parties to route their Internet traffic through a…

Protect Your Privacy with California's DROP Tool

Are you a California resident? Then we've got exciting news for you: there's a tool just for you that lets you take a single, relatively easy step to protect your privacy.  It's called a DROP request. (That's Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, if you're fancy). This one bit of paperwork lets you tell every data broker registered in the state of California that you'd like them to delete your info…

An Explosion of Surveillance Towers is Coming to U.S. Borders, Costing Over $1 Billion

A new report from the Government Accounting Office reveals that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to nearly triple the number of surveillance towers along U.S. borders, from the current 830 to 2,300 by 2034. DHS expects to expend $1 billion in taxpayer dollars for this dangerous expansion of a surveillance network indiscriminately trained on towns, school playgrounds, backyards, and…

“Stealth Crawlers” Are Not a Threat to the Open Web. Bills Targeting Them Would Be.

There’s a new boogeyman in the battles over AI: so-called “stealth crawlers.” We’ll admit it—the term “stealth crawlers” sounds quite nefarious. In reality, they’re anything but. “Stealth crawlers” are simply automated tools to access and collect public web data—without disclosing the user’s identity. Private crawlers like these facilitate all kinds of important work that benefits the public, incl…

Victory! Flock Ends Rollout of Audio “Distress Detection” of Human Voices

Reversing course, Flock Safety—the surveillance technology vendor most known for its extensive network of automated license plate readers—has announced that it will end a pilot for its acoustic gunshot detection devices to identify signs of “human distress.” ...public pressure can sometimes work to influence both companies and lawmakers that control a city’s purse strings to discontinue or divest…

Your Vision. Your Legacy. Your Future.

This month, we celebrate 36 years of EFF and a mission that is bigger than any one of us. Thanks to EFF, communities around the world are demanding that technology protects their freedom, advances justice, and opens doors to opportunity. That's not a small thing—it's a life's work worth continuing. If you are committed to staying on the cutting edge of digital rights issues, I'd like to invite you…

How the Watch Dogs Video Game Series Mirrored and Predicted Real-World Digital Rights Issues

When Ubisoft's Watch Dogs 2 was released in 2016, it was a headtrip for those of us working on digital-rights issues in the Bay Area. During the day, I'd fight tech-authoritarianism from EFF's San Francisco offices and then, at night, I'd fight tech-authoritarianism in an uncanny simulation of San Francisco from my home gaming console.   Watch Dogs 2 is an open-world video game that follows a hack…

EFF and ARTICLE 19 Submission to the European Commission on the DSA Trusted Flagger Guidelines

EFF and ARTICLE 19 have submitted joint comments to the European Commission on draft guidelines for the Digital Services Act’s trusted flagger mechanism. Having long advocated for a DSA that protects freedom of expression while preserving intermediary liability protections and the prohibition on general monitoring, we welcome the Commission's effort to provide practical guidance on how the trusted…

California Steps Back From Dangerous Expansion of its Age-Gating Law

The California legislature has stepped back from a plan that would have expanded its age-gating law, removing language that could have compounded serious threats to users’ speech, privacy and security just to browse the internet. A.B. 1856, authored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, will now move forward through the legislature without its most problematic pieces. EFF still believes the underlying la…

Most Smart Watches, Rings, and Bands Lack Basic Transparency Reports and Key Privacy Features

Oura Rings, Garmin GPS fitness watches, Apple Watches, Whoop bands—every year, more and more tech devices are promising to monitor our health and fitness, guide us toward healthier living, and provide useful health metrics to take to our doctors. But few of these tools provide the sorts of privacy and security promises we demand from all technology, let alone tech that captures personal health dat…

🚫 Don't Let Congress Age-Gate the Internet | EFFector 38.13

The effort to age gate the internet is back in Washington—and now it has a new name. Recently passed by the House of Representatives, the KIDS Act is a sprawling package of proposals to control what we can see and say online. Supporters claim the KIDS Act is needed to protect minors online. But if lawmakers really want to make the internet safer, why are they encouraging more surveillance instead…

European Court: Apple Can Not Shirk Off its Interoperability Requirements

One of the best bulwarks against monopoly is interoperability—that is making a new product or service work with an existing product or service. Interoperability allows users, and not the manufacturers of their devices or largest player in a market, to decide what application best serves them. Unsurprisingly, companies like Apple have worked hard to resist interoperability requirements.  On July 8,…

Don’t Repeat NY’s 3D Printing Blunder

This year the state of New York had the dubious honor of being the first to pass a controversial provision to mandate all 3D printers come with surveillance and censorship. That means not only is there a ticking clock to protect every artist, researcher, engineer, and hobbyist in the state, but there is a real risk of other states thoughtlessly following suit—prior to the New York rules even takin…

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

Microsoft Corp. today released software updates to plug at least 570 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, almost triple the number of vulnerabilities the software giant fixed in its record-smashing Patch Tuesday release last month. Microsoft attributed the burgeoning patch counts to vulnerability discoveries aided by artificial intelligence. Nearly 60 of the bugs qua…

Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership

Legal intern Suzanne Castillo co-authored of this post. Playstation’s decision to kill physical game discs is the latest attack on our diminishing rights to access and engage with culture digitally. Rent-seeking corporations and negligent lawmakers share the blame — and they can do better.  We’ve seen the same playbook used in the move to digital distribution of  film, TV, and music: draw in custo…

Lessons Learned from CISA’s Recent GitHub Leak

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a postmortem on a recent data leak in which a contractor published dozens of internal CISA credentials — including AWS Govcloud keys — in a public GitHub repository for almost six months before being notified by KrebsOnSecurity. Experts say the gaps identified in the agency’s initial response provide important lessons that all…

Building Our Future Together

In my first weeks as Executive Director of EFF, I’ve been reminded every day how consequential this moment is in determining what kind of future we will have. We are on the edge. What each one of us steps up to do – with our expertise, energy, and resources – will determine whether our future is one of openness, security, and fundamental rights, or one controlled through fear, surveillance, and ce…

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay—Accountability Must Keep Pace

This post is part 2 in a series about automated content moderation. Read the first post here. When whistleblower Frances Haugen leaked a set of documents from Meta in 2020, among the revelations was a jarring statistic: The company’s algorithms designed to detect terrorist content incorrectly deleted nonviolent Arabic-language content 77 percent of the time, while failing to detect hate speech und…

"We Want Texans to Know Their Rights": Q&A with Mayday Health on the Impact of Surveillance on Abortion Care

Last May, EFF reported that a sheriff’s office in Texas searched data from more than 83,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras to track down a woman suspected of self-managing an abortion. ALPRs are promoted as tools for keeping communities safe by finding missing persons and locating stolen vehicles, but this case showed how ALPRS can be weaponized to investigate people’s private healt…

The House Passed The KIDS Act—The Senate Should Reject It 

Last week, the House voted on the KIDS Act, a disjointed package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package combines a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), with several other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Different parts of the bill pressure online services to impose different age-gati…

European Commission Chooses to Keep EU Users Locked Up Behind Big Tech’s Gates

Users are always seeking more control over their social networking experience to make it better, whether to improve privacy or enhance flexibility. Interoperability between social networking platforms like Facebook and TikTok has so many benefits that solve those issues.   Say you’re on multiple platforms because you have friends you follow on different networks, but you’ve decided to choose one p…

Google's New Remote Attestation Scheme is As Bad As Its Old One

Google owes its existence to the open web, but today, its technological “innovations” have much to do with locking users into a “walled garden.” The latest of these is “reCAPTCHA Mobile Verification,” an experimental initiative that will let companies block users if they are running independent, "de-googled" versions of Android. These “indie Android” versions are favored by people who want to prot…

Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup

A cybersecurity startup dangling millions of dollars to acquire zero-day security vulnerabilities in popular software is run by a pair of far-right conspiracy theorists and convicted felons whose most recent ventures included fake intelligence companies and a now-defunct AI-based lobbying platform they operated under assumed names. The X/Twitter account IRIS C2 (@C2IRIS) has gained more than 4,000…

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

This blog post is part 1 of a 2-part series. The second part sets out recommendations for companies and policymakers.Six years ago—one month into a global pandemic—we argued that the automated moderation processes many platforms were rapidly adopting should be highly transparent, easily appealable, and temporary. We warned that "protocols adopted in times of crisis often persist when the crisis is…

Help EFF Cut the AI Hype

In the global race to build and dominate the AI industry, it can sure seem like the interests of ordinary people sit last on the agenda. It's just the opposite for EFF. While companies furiously jam AI tools into their veins and your eyeballs, EFF’s technologists, activists, and attorneys have been meticulously cutting through the hype to ensure AI can serve your privacy and free expression. Techn…

FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet

The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) said today it worked with industry partners to seize hundreds of domains associated with NetNut, a sprawling residential proxy service operated by the publicly-traded Israeli company Alarum Technologies [NASDAQ: ALAR]. The action comes roughly two weeks after KrebsOnSecurity published findings from multiple security firms connecting NetNut to the Popa botn…

LGBT Q&A: How Can I Wipe Online Data That Points To My Queer Identity?

This Pride, we’re answering all your digital rights questions in season two of our initiative, LGBT Q&A.  You Asked: Is there a way for me to wipe data about me online that could point to my queer identity? EFF’s Answer: You cannot protect everything all the time, but there are ways to wipe information about yourself online.  Most information available about you online will typically be found in t…

EFF and Allies: X’s FTC Petition to Waive Privacy Violation Order Should be Rejected

X Corp. should not be able to escape privacy compliance because it changed its name.  On May 15, X Corp. filed a petition before the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) to set aside or modify an order issued in 2022 requiring the company to report regularly to the FTC for its violations of user data. The order or “consent decree” is a result of misleading the platforms’ 140 million users by using priva…

LGBT Q&A: What Data Are Companies in the UK Collecting When Verifying My Age?

This Pride, we’re answering all your digital rights questions in season two of our initiative, LGBT Q&A.  You Asked: I live in the UK, and we have age verification now on a bunch of websites (including Reddit) and now on iPhones. Can you explain what sort of data companies are actually collecting when they check for age and whether there are any real threats to my safety?  EFF’s Answer: Age verif…

EFF to Gov. Pritzker: Veto Illinois’ HB 5511

The Illinois legislature recently passed House Bill 5511, which imposes a sweeping, device-level age-gating framework across nearly all internet-enabled hardware, operating systems, and online services. This well-intentioned but deeply flawed piece of legislation will harm young people who rely on the internet to access essential information and find community. That’s why we’re urging the Illinois…

Scattered Spider Hackers Plead Guilty on Day 1 of Trial

Two men pleaded guilty in the United Kingdom this week to criminal charges stemming from an August 2024 cyberattack that crippled Transport for London, the entity responsible for the public transport network in the Greater London area. The duo were key members of a prolific cybercrime group known as Scattered Spider, and their guilty pleas came on the first day of what was expected to be a six-wee…

‘Popa’ Botnet Linked to Publicly-Traded Israeli Firm

For the past four years, a sprawling Android-based botnet called Popa has forced millions of consumer TV boxes to relay Internet traffic linked to advertising fraud, account takeovers, and mass data-scraping efforts. This week, researchers from multiple security firms concluded that the Popa botnet is linked to NetNut, a “residential proxy” provider operated by the publicly-traded Israeli firm Ala…