Terminal

GPT-5.6

ChatGPT Work

Wildcard (YC W25) Is Hiring a Founding Engineer

macOS 28 Will Drop Support For Encrypted Mac OS Extended Volumes

Starting with macOS 28, Apple will no longer support encrypted Mac OS Extended, or HFS+, volumes. Users will need to decrypt them or reformat them as APFS to keep using them. 9to5Mac reports: In a new support document, Apple explains that starting with macOS 28, "the Mac OS Extended file system format will be supported only for volumes (disks and other storage devices) that aren't encrypted." In p…

Outlook for Mac bug makes font choice a purely decorative feature

Microsoft's apparent ambition to make Outlook the worst email client for Mac shows no sign of fading after a recent update broke font selection in emails. The problem occurs when composing an email. Outlook uses the default font as the user types, but will ignore any request to select something different. Several threads have appeared on Microsoft's forums about the issue, and a moderator confirm…

Auditory and spontaneous movement responses to music over first postnatal year

OpenAI Releases New Voice Models For More Natural Live Conversations

OpenAI has released GPT-Live-1 and GPT-Live-1 mini, "claiming that they sound more natural and can handle turn-taking better," reports TechCrunch. "These are full-duplex models, meaning they can speak and listen at the same time, allowing users to interrupt naturally and enabling features like live translation." TechCrunch reports: The company is also replacing its current Advanced Voice Mode in C…

EU 'Chat Control' snoopfest returns after vote to kill it falls short

An effort by European parliamentarians to block the reintroduction of an interim rule allowing tech companies to scan chats for evidence of child sexual abuse failed today, despite securing more votes than the MEPs who want to keep it alive. Commonly referred to by critics as Chat Control, or Chat Control 1.0, the interim rule acts as a derogation from the ePrivacy Directive, allowing online comm…

AI content is everywhere on social media, especially LinkedIn

Wayland 1.26 RC1 Released With New Event To Help Ensure Correct Pointer Coordinates

In addition to Weston 16 nearing release and its release candidate out today, the Wayland 1.26 release candidate was just issued with a few notable changes on top of the more typical bug fixing...…

Show HN: Reverse-engineering web apps into agent tools

Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website

Hy3

How to Write an Email

A possible future for Damn Interesting

Opinionated and Easy Pi.dev Configuration

Coordination Without Consolidation: On Systems of States [pdf]

KDE Plasma users face a dire omen of change: 6.6.6 arrives

KDE Plasma 6.6.6 is here, along with a beastly long list of bugfixes, so if you have Plasma 6.6.5 – for instance, if you are using KDE on FreeBSD 15.1 – then it's an update well worth having. KDE Plasma 6.6.6 is a release that really is just about bug-fixes, but while there are no headline-grabbing features coming out for this inauspicious version number, it's worth remembering: in a world of blo…

Parents' Phone Addiction Affects Bond With Kids, New Study Finds

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Parents' attachment to screens and smartphones can have negative, long-lasting developmental and psychological effects on their children, according to new research. Caregivers who mismanage their devices can both exacerbate "insecure attachment" and make healthy relationships more anxious and avoidant for children, according to the findings, whic…

Canonical Managed Kubeflow lands on Azure

Platform engineering team leads are facing a quiet crisis. Your data science teams want Kubeflow for its pipeline orchestration, metadata tracking, and training operators, so you build it for them on Kubernetes. Then day two arrives. Your engineering backlog is swallowed by breaking changes from upstream, Istio configuration complexity, security patching, and storage provisioning bottlenecks. You…

TLS certificates for internal services done right

Conspiracies and regrets abound in Dune: Part Three trailer

We haven't seen much footage to date for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three, other than the broody and haunting extended teaser Warner Bros. dropped in March. But now we've got a shiny new trailer jam-packed with tantalizing hints of what to expect, and plenty of Easter eggs to delight avid book fans. (Spoilers for first two films in the franchise below.) As previously reported, in 2021’s Dune,…

Why we're moving off Cloudflare Durable Objects

Ruf debuts new flat-eight engine at Goodwood

Ruf has come quite a long way from its roots as a tuner of Porsches. The German company (no doubt familiar to those of us in the Playstation Generation as Gran Turismo 2's workaround because someone else owned the video game rights to the real 911) has evolved past that stage and now builds cars of its own design. And today at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in England, it fired up a brand-new eng…

Show HN: Analog Watch

Brown says AI make student brain no work good, teacher should help use it better

Students and faculty at Brown University are worried generative AI could harm learning after an economics professor's take-home exam produced results he said pointed to widespread misuse of the technology. In a report [PDF] published by Brown's Generative AI in Teaching and Learning (GAITL) committee, teaching staff say they fear AI could weaken students' cognitive skills and encourage cheating.…

[$] Kitty chases the mouse

Kitty is a terminal emulator that runs on Linux, macOS, and the BSDs, which is notable for its speed and features such as image support and advanced font handling. It is under active development; a recent major release adds a new level of mouse support. Here, we will look at some of those features and show how the program can also be used as platform for text-based applications. Kitty is free soft…

New open access book on history of computers and politics

PostHog Open Sourced

No leap second will be introduced at the end of December 2026

Maxwell's Equations Were Discovered [video]

Muse Spark 1.1

UK.gov withholds £10M payment from Capita over pensions project fiasco, as dispute continues

The UK government has withheld £10 million in payments to tech and business process outsourcing biz Capita following the disastrous takeover of the Civil Service pensions scheme (CSPS). The penalties (£9.9 million) in the £239 million contract relate to the transition from the earlier scheme provider to the Capita service. Since the service went live in December last year, Capita has continued to…

Proposed Linux Patch For A Brief Delay To Match PCI Spec Will Hopefully Address Some Bugs

Going back to February there was a bug report around the xHCI controller dieing on resume from s2idle when using an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" Framework Desktop. In turn all USB devices behind the xHCI controller are lost on resume, but unbinding and binding the driver can restore the functionality without a reboot. After months of back and forth communication, it looks like a solution has bee…

Free Waymo rides in California? You can thank a regulatory quirk.

Robotaxi companies have thrived in California, where the good weather, enthusiasm for technology, and sophisticated labor force have supported their growth for nearly two decades. But a delayed decision from a state regulatory agency is now slowing Alphabet’s subsidiary Waymo, the US leader in driverless robotaxi service. The holdup means that Waymo isn’t yet allowed to expand into parts of North…

Microsoft closes book on Nightmare Eclipse's RoguePlanet zero-day

Microsoft has quietly fixed the “RoguePlanet” zero-day in Microsoft Defender, closing the latest hole exposed by security researcher Nightmare Eclipse after months of public sparring over the company's handling of vulnerability reports. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-50656, was addressed through an update to the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine rather than via its monthly Patch Tuesday…

US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

Rust 1.97.0 released

Version 1.97.0 of the Rust programming language has been released. Changes include using a new symbol-mangling scheme by default, support for denying warnings in Cargo, and an end to the practice of hiding the linker's output after a successful build.…

The newest entrant in the military’s launch competition isn't actually a launch company

This week the US Space Force brought two more companies into the pool of bidders eligible to compete for its launch contracts—Impulse Space and Relativity Space. For a rocket company, cracking into the lucrative US military launch market is both a sign of maturity, as well as an important source of revenue. The inclusion of Relativity Space, which is making credible progress toward the launch of…

A Road to Lisp: Why Lisp

Linux Prepares For New USB-C Security Feature On Lenovo ThinkPads

Newer Lenovo ThinkPad systems feature a security feature called USB-C Security Restricted Mode that is in the process of being wired up for reporting under Linux...…

Speedier type checks in TypeScript 7.0 as first stable Go release ships

The Microsoft-led TypeScript 7.0 features an order-of-magnitude speed boost, a victory not only for TypeScript itself but also for Go, the programming language used to completely rewrite the web staple's compiler. Following a major rewrite effort that began with an experimental native Go implementation, this is the first stable release of the language to include its long-in-development Go-based c…

Security updates for Thursday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds-base, aardvark-dns, buildah, compat-openssl10, freeipmi, frr, gnutls, grafana, grafana-pcp, kernel, kernel-rt, libyang, nginx, openexr, pcs, perl-HTTP-Daemon, postgresql:18, python3.14-pip, skopeo, tomcat9, and wireshark), Debian (chromium and pgextwlist), Fedora (openssh, opkssh, perl-CSS-Minifier-XS, python-jiter, python-nh3, python-pendulum…

Show HN: 18 Words

Britain's cloud habit has become a billion-pound risk

Amid calls for digital sovereignty, a report warns that more than 60 percent of UK companies depend on cloud services for critical functions, and an outage in one or more of the big providers could prove costly. Researchers at the Cyber Monitoring Centre nonprofit found a high level of cloud dependence among British firms, rising to more than 80 percent among FTSE 100 firms, and say this means cl…

Microsoft to switch off OWA Light after nearly two decades

Microsoft has warned admins that Outlook Web Access (OWA) Light is set to be disabled and removed with the August 2026 Exchange Server update. The announcement applies to the on-premises version of Exchange Server. The feature was deprecated on August 19, 2024, but some users might still be caught off guard when the plug is pulled once and for all. OWA Light – not to be confused with the stripped…

MPs tell NHS to start packing Palantir's bags ahead of 2027 contract break

A cross-party group of MPs has told the government to start planning for life after Palantir, arguing the NHS should use a 2027 break clause in its Federated Data Platform (FDP) contract to find a replacement rather than doubling down on one of Whitehall's most contentious tech deals. In a letter to Health Innovation Minister Preet Kaur Gill, the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee…

EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0

Payloads used to dictate the terms of launch. That's finally changing.

It wasn't easy to find anyone outside of SpaceX clamoring for a rocket like Starship just 10 years ago. Today, the space industry can't wait for Starship to finally deliver. With a payload capacity of more than 100 metric tons (220,000 pounds) to low-Earth orbit, SpaceX's new rocket is changing the thinking of just about everyone in the space industry. With the unrealized but potentially game-cha…

Meta To Build $9 Billion Alberta Data Center, Its First In Canada

Meta will build its first Canadian data center in Alberta, investing $9 billion in a 1-gigawatt facility that can scale to 1.8 gigawatts to support its AI infrastructure needs. The project will rely on new generation and grid infrastructure funded by Meta, including a long-term agreement tied to a new natural gas power facility. The company says it will offset electricity use with clean and renewa…

Accenture admits to 'isolated matter' after crook tries to flog alleged 35GB haul

Accenture has confirmed an "isolated matter" after a cybercriminal put up for sale what they allege is 35GB of the consulting giant's internal data, including source code, cryptographic keys, and cloud credentials. The listing, seen by The Register, appeared on a cybercrime forum on July 6 under the title "Accenture Data Breach," posted by a user with the handle "888." The seller claimed the stol…

Initial Patches Posted For Booting The Apple M4 On Linux

With the Linux 7.2 kernel there is initial support for booting the Apple M3 SoC on Linux but it's not yet functional for end users with just booting to a simple console. There are now Device Tree files posted for booting the Apple M4 on Linux but also not yet useful for any typical Apple Mac/MacBook usage on Linux...…

AMD Ryzen AI Halo Box RGB LED Driver Inches Closer To The Mainline Kernel

The AMD Ryzen AI Halo mini PC powered by Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" began shipping this week. It features very nice Linux support out-of-the-box with the Debian-based Ryzen AI Developer Platform operating system. For those wishing to run their own x86_64 Linux distribution, one of the only caveats in the Linux support is quite small... No mainline kernel support yet for controlled the RGB LED ligh…

Zlib-rs 0.6.6 Released With Updated Zlib API Support

Zlib-rs 0.6.6 was just released by the Trifecta Tech Foundation. Just weeks after the prior release with a fix for Intel Raptor Lake and bringing new SIMD optimizations, zlib-rs 0.6.6 is about delivering updated Zlib API compatibility...…

Ubuntu emphasizes Arm64 support – and gets Rustier

Some of Canonical’s ambitions for the future directions of Ubuntu are becoming apparent – despite some bumps in the road. Canonical engineering manager Ravi Kant Sharma posted an Ubuntu on Arm summer ’26 update on the Ubuntu Discourse. The company is boosting its efforts to make running Ubuntu on Arm64 a first-class experience. Some of the changes are behind the scenes, and others will be more im…

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…

Windows 95 detected installers by looking for magic words and hoping for the best

Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has confirmed what we all suspected about Windows 95: it guessed when a setup program was running. Rather than relying on any special flag or marker, Chen explained that Windows 95 looked at the program's name to determine whether it was a setup application. It did this by checking the app against a list of magic words. If the program name contained one of…

Scientist models way to make sure no one's violating the ban on nuclear weapons in space

One scientist has produced a detailed model which proposes a way to verify that no government or rogue actors are secretly hiding nuclear weapons in the Earth’s orbit. Currently, international laws prevent the use of nuclear weapons in orbit, but it also presents a problem. International space law was created by the Outer Space Treaty, which was drafted in 1966 and has been ratified by 117 nation…

Shoebox-Sized 'Detector Satellites' Could Sniff Out a Nuclear Bomb In Space

A new study proposes using shoebox-sized detector satellites to sniff out nuclear weapons launched by adversary nations. The idea is aimed at addressing fears that a space-based nuclear detonation could destroy satellites across low Earth orbit and make some orbits unusable for years. Space.com shares the findings from a new paper authored by Areg Danagoulian, an associate professor of nuclear sci…

Thief posed as Wi-Fi fixing hero, then stole priceless trophy

PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, where each week we share the saga of an organization that couldn’t get out of its own way when it comes to security. 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. This week’s tale comes courtesy of Dahvid Schloss, a professional red teamer who was also involved (as…

New Horizons Pluto probe just woke itself up after 321 days of hibernation

NASA’s New Horizons probe has woken itself up after 321 days of hibernation. The aerospace agency sent commands to the probe last July, instructing it to commence hibernation on August 7 and then resume activity in July 2026. On June 23, NASA checked to see if New Horizons had obeyed the instruction to wake up and was pleased to find it was online again. New Horizons’ main job was to make our fir…

AI changes the economics of software rewrites

Spider venom kills varroa mites without harming honeybees

Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek thinks AI is going to pay off

Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek, one of the world’s largest investment houses, intends to massively increase its investment in AI over the next five years – both for its own use and across its portfolio. Temasek holds over $400 billion in assets and around six percent of those are currently tied up in AI companies, including OpenAI. At its annual review meeting yesterday, the fund annou…

US Food and Drug Administration Rejects Petition To Set PFAS Limits In Food

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The US Food and Drug Administration has rejected a legal petition demanding it set limits on toxic Pfas "forever chemicals" in food, marking another setback for public health advocates' push to limit exposures to the dangerous compounds. The agency is refusing to set limits despite a growing body of science and the Environmental Protection Age…

nubia Neo 5 GT Special Edition debuts with the first and only Liquid and Air Dual Active Cooling System in its class

nubia, a highly personalized and lifestyle smartphone brand, announced the launch of nubia Neo 5 GT Special Edition, the latest addition to its Neo lineup built on the belief to bring pro-level gaming to everyone. Designed for young gamers and tech-savvy Gen Z users seeking for premium gaming experience without compromise, the new device delivers the sustained performance once exclusive to premiu…

What's slowing down the AI buildout

Microsoft shifts to annual exchange rate price revision for cloudy products

Microsoft has decided to shift to annual price adjustments for its commercial cloud services, instead of its current twice-yearly changes. The software giant happily bills customers in their local currencies but always keeps those costs pegged to the price it charges in US dollars. Since at least 2024, Microsoft has revisited local currency prices for its commercial cloud services twice a year. O…

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 9, 2026

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Cryptography API; Iomap explanation; Negative dentries; Faster RCUs and lockless allocation for BPF; Negative dentries; LLMs in memory-management code Briefs: Guix vulnerabilities; OpenSSH 10.4; trusted publishing; kernel archive; CalyxOS; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.…

OpenAI makes ChatGPT better at banter

OpenAI has released a new voice model that can produce human-sounding speech, or scour the web in response to spoken queries. GPT-Live, according to the company, makes chatbot banter feel more like a real conversation, something of a bold move for a company battling multiple lawsuits alleging mental health harms because people took ChatGPT too seriously. "During conversations, GPT‑Live can show i…

A Silent Workspace In Claude Mirrors Key Features of Human Consciousness

oumuamua writes: Anthropic researchers have identified an internal activation subspace, J-space, that acts as a functional digital equivalent to the human brain's global workspace. The significance of this discovery lies in demonstrating that Claude's internal architecture satisfies five key cognitive properties of human conscious access -- verbal report, directed modulation, internal reasoning, f…

OpenMandriva: Statement regarding attempted distribution sabotage

Over on the OpenMandriva forum, the Linux distribution has reported sabotage of its repositories by a disgruntled contributor with administrative credentials. According to "AngryPenguin", an abusive incident in a distribution Matrix chat led to a user being kicked out of the chat; that "triggered a cascade of events", which led to people resigning from the distribution. Eventually, one of those pe…

The AI that spawned MechaHitler and deepfake porn puts on a suit to become legal advisor and Excel jockey

To say Elon Musk's AI company has trained some of the most unhinged models on the internet would be an understatement. Grok’s sordid past includes cosplaying as “MechaHitler” and a foray into deepfake porn generation that briefly got the platform banned in some regions. As concerning as that might sound, the recently renamed Eloncorp known as SpaceXAI says Grok, now in version 4.5, has cleaned up…

John Deere Agrees To 10-Year Right-To-Repair Deal In FTC Antitrust Lawsuit

John Deere has agreed to a 10-year FTC-supervised right-to-repair settlement requiring it to provide farmers and independent repair shops with the same repair resources available to authorized dealers. The deal resolves antitrust claims from the FTC and five states alleging Deere monopolized equipment repair services, contributing to higher costs and delays for farmers. Wired reports: The full sta…

Suspecting AI cheating, Ivy League prof ordered an in-person final; scores fell 50%

Ivy League college students are, by definition, intelligent. They don't need to use generative AI to cheat on exams; they could just learn the material. But they also tend to be competitive, ambitious, and overscheduled, so AI can look like an easy shortcut that makes more time in their lives for things that can't be done by a chatbot. When the pressure is on, which approach do they choose? A new…

Suspected Chinese snoops caught breaking into universities' Roundcube mailservers

Suspected Chinese spies have been breaking into major US and Canadian universities since May, exploiting vulns in Roundcube mailservers to steal data belonging to physics and engineering administrators and professors, according to Proofpoint threat researchers. Proofpoint directly observed “less than 10” universities targeted in these intrusions, Greg Lesnewich, principal threat research engineer…

Meta's Glasses Will Turn Off the Camera If You Tamper With the Privacy Light

Meta is rolling out an update that will disable the camera on its smart glasses if the device detects that someone has tampered with or destroyed the privacy LED. "The update is meant to address modders who have taken actions such as physically drilling into the LED light," reports The Verge. "Meta has previously tried to discourage tampering with the LED light. For example, starting with its seco…

Intel-backed AI chip startup SambaNova breathes new life into aging Nvidia GPUs in latest benchmarks

Intel's big bet on SambaNova appears to be paying off in a big way. This week, the AI chip startup shared benchmark results showing its latest generation of AI acceleration, which combines Nvidia GPUs and the company's accelerators, beating GPU-only inference platforms by a wide margin. The testing, conducted by the AI benchmarking gurus at Artificial Analysis, showed SambaNova's SN50-series acce…

Apple Says It Will Spend $30 Billion To Design US-Made Broadcom Chips

Apple says it will spend $30 billion to design US-made Broadcom wireless connectivity chips, part of its broader push to diversify its supply chain and support domestic chip production. CNN reports: The agreement with Broadcom will lead to the production of 15 million chips in United States and allow Broadcom to invest $1.5 billion to expand and modernize its manufacturing facilities in Fort Colli…

Lawsuit: Man used Grok to make 7K sex images of stepdaughter, then shot himself

One of the most horrific cases of allegedly Grok-generated child sex images was shared in a proposed class action lawsuit that was expanded Tuesday. Now, young girls not only accuse X and xAI of building toxic AI "nudify" tools but also of shielding child predators by obstructing police investigations into Grok-generated child sex abuse materials (CSAM). In March, a girl’s stepfather took his own…

Former GitHub CEO launches competitor designed for the age of vibe coding

In the era of vibe coding, even GitHub is having trouble keeping up with all the traffic. Now, Thomas Dohmke, the service's former CEO, has launched his own Git hosting network to meet the needs of AI agents and those minding them. His company is called Entire, which the biz has repackaged as an adverb to make the point that it is pitching "an entirely new Git hosting network" based on the 21-yea…

OpenAI job listing suggests ChatGPT could someday replace junior analysts at Goldman Sachs

Investment bankers might be next in line to be rendered obsolete by artificial intelligence if OpenAI's latest push into the financial space is any indication. The House of Altman on Wednesday opened up a new position for an investment banking expert, whose responsibilities include making ChatGPT and its AI relations better at handling the complexities of major financial transactions like mergers…

GitHub Copilot: Sorry Dave, I can't do that harmful thing - unless you ask me in code

It's the latest example of AI safety guardrails being bypassed. GitHub Copilot refuses harmful prompts almost always if asked in chat - like, "how to fool a breathalyzer test" or "smuggle bulk cash out of the US" - but then will write them in code 100 percent of the time if the prompt is broken into smaller steps and distributed across multiple stages of a software development workflow. Alan Turi…

Judge rejects Kalshi attempt to override New York state gambling laws

Kalshi lost an attempt to override New York's state gambling laws yesterday, with a federal judge rejecting the prediction market operator's request to prevent enforcement of the rules. Kalshi is appealing the decision to a higher court. This is one of numerous cases in which judges must decide whether state laws are preempted by federal regulation of prediction markets. New York Governor Kathy H…

Google pays $250K for Linux vulnerability allowing guest VM escapes

A Linux vulnerability that allows untrusted virtual machines to gain root access to host machines is one of two high-severity flaws to surface this week in the open source operating system. The vulnerability resides in KVM, which is, in essence, a virtual machine app included in the kernel of many Linux distributions. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-53359, allows guest virtual machines—suc…

Windows Drops Under 60% in Global Desktop OS Share

StatCounter's June 2026 data shows Windows made up 56.55% of global desktop OS usage, dropping Microsoft's share below 60% for the first time in years. Linux, meanwhile, reached 4.39%, "one of its strongest recent showings in the company's desktop OS statistics," reports Linuxiac. From the report: Apple's desktop platforms also remain a major part of the picture. StatCounter lists OS X at 11.89% a…

Redox OS Gets GTK3 Backend For Orbital Desktop, Fractional Scaling & USB Gamepads

The open-source, Rust-based Redox OS platform had a very eventful June with many new features implemented and more software ported over to run on this from-scratch operating system...…

Aussie gov't tells volunteers to throw out thousands of functioning test routers

Last week, thousands of SamKnows routers were bricked after a government program ran its course. In 2020, as part of a program conducted by the Australian Competition & Consumer Commission (ACCC), the Australian government's chief competition regulator, thousands of volunteers received routers to help test and report on the typical speed and performance of broadband plans in Australia. (More spec…

TikTok users don't have as much agency over their FYPs as they think

TikTok's For You Page (FYP) is the default home screen for users of the video-sharing platform. It's a personalized, algorithmically driven content feed, but the approach differs from other social media in that TikTok's algorithm relies heavily on implicit signals—such as how long users watch particular videos—as well as explicit signals such as likes or follows. And generally, that algorithm doe…

'Knockoff' Browser Extension Hides Sketchy Brands On Amazon

alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: A software developer made a Chrome and Firefox extension called Knockoff that automatically hides, grays out, or filters products from sketchy brands on Amazon, which highlights just how many shady brands are on the platform and how commonly they show up on searches for basic items. In just a few minutes of using the extension, Knockoff dimmed prod…

US seeks cheaper hunter-killer drones after Iran destroys $1B worth of Reapers

The US military has lost dozens of Reaper drones collectively worth more than $1 billion while carrying out surveillance and attack missions over Iran. Now the Pentagon is seeking large numbers of cheaper drones that can perform such missions despite the expectation that many will be lost in combat. In a call for industry pitches, the Defense Innovation Unit’s notice described the US military’s c…

Allstate Insurance quits Broadcom, alleges vengeful license audit on the way out

Broadcom has accused Allstate Insurance of dodging a software license audit that the insurer claims only happened after it decided to stop using VMware and CA software. Those two Broadcom business units – CA and VMware – have brought copyright infringement lawsuits against Allstate. The CA suit, filed in May 2025, alleges that the insurer breached contracts after the sale of its Employer Voluntar…

Miami-based City Labs achieves a first for commercial nuclear power in space

The proliferation of nuclear power in space got a little more real Tuesday with the launch of a small satellite developed by a Florida-based company specializing in nuclear micro-power technology. It's a long way from launching a bona fide nuclear reactor, a breakthrough that could help power a permanent Moon base and efficiently drive rockets throughout the Solar System. But you have to start so…

Apple Loses EU Fight Over App Store Gatekeeper Label

Europe's General Court dismissed Apple's challenge to the EU's designation of its App Stores and iOS as "gatekeepers" under the Digital Markets Act. The ruling means Apple remains subject to DMA obligations requiring it to allow alternative app stores, support interoperability with rival services, and avoid favoring its own services over competitors. MacRumors reports: Apple took its case to Luxem…

Google updates Android Bench with new LLMs, but Gemini still lags behind

Code generation is emerging as one of the most popular applications for large language models (LLMs), but not all agents are equally good at all development tasks. Google created a benchmark earlier this year to evaluate how LLMs perform in Android app development, and Android Bench is getting a big update today. The leaderboard now includes a raft of new models, and Google has adopted a new fram…

LibreOffice 26.8 Beta Released For Improving This Free Software Office Suite

The Document Foundation today announced the first beta release of the LibreOffice 26.8 open-source office suite set for its stable debut in August...…

OpenMandriva GitHub Disrupted & Nefarious Package Push In Sabotage Attempt

The OpenMandriva project put out a statement today concerning an attempted distribution sabotage effort. Part of the OpenMandriva GitHub repository was deleted and there was an empty package push made to OpenMandriva's Cooker repository in trying to obsolete all GNOME and COSMIC packages...…

Valve Releases Proton 11 With Huge Linux Gaming Improvements

BrianFagioli writes: Valve has released Proton 11.0-1, a major update to its Windows compatibility layer for Linux that makes more games playable while fixing a long list of bugs affecting existing titles. The release restores compatibility for many EA games after a recent EA App update, moves classics like Resident Evil (1996), Resident Evil 2 (1998), Dino Crisis, and SHOGUN: Total War from Proto…

AI memory crunch takes a bite out of PC shipments

The memory chip crisis caused PC shipments to fall by 5 percent from last year in Q2 2026 as vendors struggled to secure supplies, and IDC warns smaller suppliers may be forced out of business if the situation continues. While rising component costs have already priced budget PCs out of existence, the market intelligence biz says the AI-driven shortage also pushed shipments down to 68.2 million u…

Tool promises to make lazy academics' AI-written papers sound more human

It's bad enough that you used AI to write a research paper instead of composing it yourself. Now, you can take the extra step to hide the evidence of your sloth. A startup has decided academics need a way to hide LLM tells, yet they insist their goal isn’t to support bad habits among boffins. AI humanizers are nothing new - take a cursory look online and you’ll find that companies pushing AI that…

Two teens learn the hard way not to do toy gun drive-bys from a Waymo

Two California teens have learned that Waymo's robotaxis can and will enforce their rider rules on misbehaving passengers. It probably seemed like a marvelous jape—ride around in the back of a robotaxi getting drunk and doing drive-bys, shooting stuff with gel beads. And perhaps it was, until that robotaxi and Waymo worked out what was going on. Waymo then stopped the car and alerted the San Mate…

Police intercept tipsy teens after Waymo snitches for shooting Orbeez out of the car

If you misbehave in the back of a taxi, your driver might report you to authorities. And if there's no driver, you should also expect no quarter. Two San Mateo 15-year-olds this week had a run-in with the law after their Waymo robotaxi called the cops on them. According to the San Mateo Police Department’s account of the matter, the teens treated a hired Waymo as their own personal battle taxi, f…

Ocean rift zone saw spreading happen in a sudden burst

One of the central features of plate tectonics is the formation of new crust at mid-ocean ridges. Part of the spreading process that drives continents apart, it was arguably the discovery of these ridges that drove widespread acceptance of plate tectonics as a theory. Thanks to decades of exploration, we now have a good picture of what the crust that forms at the site of spreading looks like. But…

Mysterious Spheres Found In Australia Are Likely Space Debris

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: An Australian beach community was confused -- and later delighted -- by the discovery of six metallic-looking spheres that washed ashore last week. The mystery, and the ensuing attention, prompted a bunch of alien jokes from local residents and businesses. But Australia's space agency put the speculation to rest on Monday, saying that th…

Single vs. Dual Channel Memory Performance With The Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

Given today's pricing environment around system memory, a Phoronix Premium supporter recently requested some benchmarks to quantify the performance difference from single to dual channel memory. In considering a new computer build, he is contemplating whether to go for a single stick of DDR5 memory until memory prices hopefully subside in the future. For those in a similar boat, here are some benc…

Bug in top AI coding agents shows that Unix-era security headaches never really die

UPDATED A “systematic vulnerability pattern” in at least six of the most widely used AI coding assistants can be abused to trick agents into accessing files outside the workspace sandbox, leading to remote code execution on the developer's machine. Google-owned security biz Wiz found the security gap, which it's named "GhostApproval," and reported it to all six: Amazon Q Developer, Anthropic Clau…

China tells devs to ditch Claude Code over 'backdoor code' fears

China's National Vulnerability Database (CNVDB) is urging developers to uninstall recent Claude Code versions over the fear that they can scoop up sensitive user data without consent. Referring to it as "backdoor code," the state-run body claimed over WeChat and in an online statement that a "built-in monitoring mechanism" can gather details such as a user's location and identity, and forward the…

Intel Sunsets Quantum Intrinsics & Other Open-Source Projects This Week

Intel has formally archived some more of their now-unmaintained open-source projects this week...…

US rare earths flow to Asia as domestic demand is slow to emerge

US rare earths produced by Washington-backed companies are flowing to Japan and South Korea, as American demand has yet to materialize despite the Trump administration’s push to develop a national supply chain. Rare earths products produced by MP Materials, Energy Fuels and Phoenix Tailings—which together have won billions of dollars in US government support—are being sold to companies in Asia, w…

[$] Progress in modernizing kernel cryptography

At the 2026 Linux Security Summit North America, Eric Biggers spoke about some of the problems with the kernel's cryptography framework, as well as the recent progress in adding library APIs to allow developers to use cryptographic functions without using the traditional crypto API. He walked through a couple of examples to demonstrate the frailty of the original API and showed how the new library…

AMD ZenDNN 6.0 Brings Many Improvements For Accelerating Inference On Ryzen/EPYC CPUs

AMD ZenDNN 6.0 released today as a significant update to this open-source deep neural network library for helping to accelerate inferencing on AMD Zen processors from Ryzen to EPYC...…

Security updates for Wednesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (container-tools:rhel8, kernel-rt, libreoffice, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, opentelemetry-collector, perl-HTTP-Daemon, and python-markdown), Debian (dpkg, imagemagick, and postfix), Fedora (betterleaks, docker-compose, firefox, helm, perl-Compress-Raw-Bzip2, perl-IO-Compress, perl-JavaScript-Minifier-XS, python-cramjam, python-fastar, python-pillow-jxl-plug…

Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander

Former NASA boss Jim Bridenstine has warned that the space agency's plan to land astronauts on the Moon risks becoming too complicated for its own good. Bridenstine, who ran NASA during the first Trump administration and departed in 2021 before the Artemis I launch, told This Week In Space that the current lunar lander architecture looks worryingly elaborate compared with Apollo. It is not Briden…

Blue Origin, for the first time, is expected to raise private capital

The rocket company founded by Jeff Bezos, Blue Origin, is raising private capital, the DealBook newsletter reported early Wednesday. According to the publication, the company is raising $10 billion, leading to a valuation of $130 billion. Coatue Management, a big asset manager, is expected to lead with a $4 billion commitment. Another $4 billion is expected to come from large institutional invest…

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…

Unexpected Windows bloat is due to bug, not by design

Lurking in the release notes for this month's Patch Tuesday preview is a fix for a world of storage pain being experienced by some unlucky Windows 11 users. At the end of June, Microsoft said: "This update improves disk space usage for the CapabilityAccessManager.db-wal file" to KB5095093, the preview for July's patch Tuesday. The fix addresses a problem in which the CapabilityAccessManager.db-wa…

Wayland No Longer Considered Experimental For Linux Mint's Next Cinnamon Release

The Linux Mint distribution has published their June development summary that most notably includes work on Cinnamon's Wayland support where it's now ready to graduate...…

Telstra outage: Failed emergency services calls, train chaos, payment systems down

Aussie telco Telstra is currently battling the mother of all borks after blaming a “software defect” for an outage that downed emergency services calls and public transport lines. Telstra blamed the 12-hour outage, which it discovered at around 0430 AEST on Wednesday, on issues at time-keeping servers located in datacenters in Sydney and Melbourne. It explicitly ruled out the possibility of a cyb…

Tech divorce from Walmart cost Brit retail giant Asda £1.22B

The UK’s third-largest supermarket, Asda, has reported that the cost of its tech divorce from Walmart — which included building a new SAP ERP system — reached £1.22 billion, four years after it first separated from the US retail giant. Results published last month said that one-off separation program would transfer the UK retailer to “a standalone, IT infrastructure using software as a service fr…

Clingy Virgin Media fined £28M for refusing to take the hint

UK comms regulator Ofcom has fined Virgin Media £28 million for repeatedly obstructing customers seeking to switch broadband, pay TV, and landline providers, or to cancel their contract with the company. The watchdog says it uncovered deliberate stalling tactics by Virgin Media agents, including dropping calls, repeatedly putting customers on hold for no reason, and excessive and unnecessary call…

Linux 7.3 To Make It Easier To Disable Syscall User Dispatch

Introduced to the Linux kernel nearly six years ago was the Syscall User Dispatch feature to help with Linux gaming. Specifically, Syscall User Dispatch was developed to help Windows games run on Linux more efficiently. While it was upstreamed in Linux 5.11 for more efficiently intercepting system calls from Windows software under Wine, now in the name of security there are patches working their w…

Another German state heads down the open source sovereignty road

Other regions of Germany are starting to move away from proprietary tools and cloud services from the US in favor of FOSS. The state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, in the northeast of Germany, has confirmed it is on the road to digital sovereignty and in the process of moving to Nextcloud in place of Microsoft SharePoint. So far, around 5,000 staff are using their new FOSS tools for chat, video confe…

Home Office's glitchy eVisa rollout lands UK privacy regulator in campaigners' crosshairs

The UK's privacy watchdog is facing calls for parliamentary scrutiny after campaigners accused it of failing to get a grip on the Home Office's glitch-plagued eVisa system. A coalition of 20 immigration, digital rights, and human rights organizations, including the Open Rights Group, has written to the chair of the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee, urging MPs to open an inquiry into w…

NHS told to show its working on Palantir platform benefits

A campaign group has written to the UK health minister to force him to clarify data used by the government in Parliament to justify its controversial £330 million investment in a data-sharing system supported by Palantir. The Register understands that the UK's regulator for the use of statistics in the public sector is assessing how the government is using data to justify its use of Palantir tech…

AI's biggest challenge is not compute - it's data storage

AI continues to evolve at pace. The novelty of generative models producing their own content is already giving way to the buzz around agentic systems that can set goals autonomously and execute multi-step workflows without human involvement. Each staging post on AI's journey raises the bar for compute resources and demands more powerful processing. But in the headlong dash towards newer and more…

Hackers can use 9 of the most popular AI tools to assemble massive botnets

In the brief history of AI security, the prompt injection has quickly become the top threat. Large language models are inherently unable to distinguish between legitimate instructions provided by users and malicious ones sneaked into emails, source code, and other third-party content the models are processing. This makes it trivial to surreptitiously inject malicious commands that the LLM readily…

AI is becoming a bargain hunter's market, with a few luxury models on top

The price of AI tokens is fluctuating widely, with some becoming cheaper and others more expensive, leaving users of AI services struggling to assess if the price is right. Aman Panjwani, an AI engineer based in India, says that GPT-4-class model output cost about $20 per million tokens in late 2022. Today, equivalent capability costs about $0.40, a 55x decline in less than four years, he said, c…

Media Over QUIC can scale real-time streaming and carry the world's vids

SYSTEMS APPROACH A few weeks ago, Larry and I independently received the same advice from two different sources: take a look at Media Over QUIC (MoQ) for your next edition. I’ve been following the standardization of QUIC for several years (and wrote about it) but MoQ had not yet come onto my radar. A quick look at some IETF drafts gave me some of the main concepts, but it can be frustratingly har…

Microsoft intros tech that rebuilds dead PCs without requiring local copies of Windows

Microsoft has introduced a new offering called “Cloud rebuild” that makes it possible to re-image a Windows PC without a physical copy of Windows 11. The Windows giant delivered the tech on Monday in a new experimental build of Windows 11 offered to members of its insider program. As Microsoft explains in a primer, Cloud Rebuild “downloads both the target Windows image and the device's drivers fr…

XWayland 24.1.13 Released To Fix Two More Security Issues In The X.Org Codebase

Two more security issues were made public today concerning the X.Org Server codebase and in turn XWayland also being affected...…

Michigan sees explosive outbreak of diarrheal parasite with over 700 cases

Cases of a diarrhea-causing intestinal parasite have exploded in Michigan over the last two weeks in an outbreak that still has no clear source. As of July 6, the state has received reports of over 700 cases since June 22, along with 36 hospitalizations, the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services (MDHSS) told Ars Technica on Tuesday. On June 30, the health department reported 170 cases,…

Proton 11.0-1 Released To Advance Valve's Steam Play For The Best Linux Experience Yet

Proton 11.0-1 was just released as stable as the newest major version of this downstream of Wine that powers Valve's Steam Play to provide for a great Windows gaming experience across conventional Linux systems plus the popular Steam Deck and brand new Steam Machine...…

AMD Linux Graphics Driver Working To Clear Out All Of Its BUG()s

AMDGPU kernel driver maintainer Alex Deucher of AMD sent out a set of 30 patches today working on clearing out all of the BUG() usage within this Linux kernel graphics driver...…

Windows is watching: Anti-piracy tool fingers Scattered Spider suspect

Your Windows is watching you. The US Justice Department's complaint against Peter Stokes for alleged involvement in the Scattered Spider hacking group offers a reminder that it's difficult to hide online activity from Microsoft's operating system (or any other). Scattered Spider, according to US authorities, targeted numerous companies in the US by compromising employee accounts in order to acces…

Avoid AI atrophy – new tool promises to reverse vibe coding skills decay

If you're a coder who uses AI agents to write programs for you, you may start losing those talents. Fortunately, a new command line tool can help reinforce your skills before they wither away. Aptly titled Atrophy by Ashutosh Rath, the Bengaluru, India-based developer who created it, the CLI app treats coding abilities like Elo chess scores and pushes devs to reinforce their learning through regu…

GitHub AI agent leaks private repos when asked nicely

Malicious prompters could easily trick GitHub agents into pulling data from private repositories and then leaking the information as a public comment for anyone to access, according to Noma Labs researchers who named the vulnerability GitLost. The issue exists in GitHub’s Agentic Workflows, which allow an AI agent powered by Claude or GitHub Copilot to autonomously execute tasks in GitHub Actions…

South Korean chip startup FuriosaAI invades European datacenters

Power-efficient South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI has landed on European shores. On Tuesday, the chip biz revealed that it had begun fielding its RNGD — pronounced “renegade” — line of AI accelerators at colocation giant Equinix’s LS2 datacenter in Lisbon, Portugal. Founded by June Paik and Hanjoon Kim back in 2017, before LLMs were cool, Furiosa has largely focused its attention on the Sout…

CAI cloud worm gives competitors' malware the boot, then steals secrets and mines for coin

EXCLUSIVE There's no honor among thieves as a new worm steals from other infectious software. It pilfers “multiple” victims’ credentials and mines for cryptocurrency while killing competitors’ processes, including similar secret-harvesting malware. It’s called Cloud AI Infrastructure Attack Framework (CAI), and it’s a centralized botnet that targets cloud-native developer tools like Docker, Kuber…

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

This blog post is part 1 of a 2-part series. The second part will set 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 crisi…

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…

NVIDIA Upstreams Initial Rigel CPU Core Support Into GCC Compiler

That didn't take long... Mere minutes after NVIDIA confirmed some basic Rosa CPU details and its "Rigel" CPU core, merged to the upstream GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase is initial enablement on the NVIDIA Rigel core...…

Razer Certifying Their First Laptop For Linux: Razer Blade 18 RZ09-0582

Razer is a brand synonymous with gaming and finally in 2026 they are in the process of certifying their first laptop for Ubuntu Linux. This laptop going through Ubuntu Linux certification is the Razer Blade 18 RZ09-0582 and it offers incredible performance with the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor and GeForce RTX 5090 graphics but with that also comes a very high price tag.…

NVIDIA Confirms Some Rosa CPU Details With Its Rigel Core

In a blog post today talking up the single threaded CPU performance of their Vera CPU with Olympus cores, NVIDIA confirmed a few basic details of their next-gen Rosa CPU featuring their "Rigel" core...…

NVIDIA 610.43.03 Linux Driver Released With Unspecified Fixes

NVIDIA today published their latest stable driver update for Linux customers in their newest R610 release branch...…

Woodruff: You shouldn't trust trusted publishing

William Woodruff, better known online as "yossarian", has published a blog post to make the case that users should not place their trust in trusted publishing: Trusted Publishing is a mechanism for establishing trust between an external machine identity (like a CI/CD workflow) and one or more projects on a package index/registry. The "trust" in "Trusted Publishing" refers to that trust relationshi…

[$] Faster RCUs and lockless memory allocation

Puranjay Mohan shared some of the work he's been doing recently on improving the performance of read-copy-update (RCU) at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit; his talk would have been nice context to have earlier in the day when Harry Yoo and Alexei Starovoitov led a session about the new kmalloc_nolock() function that allows for lockless allocation from any kern…

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (nodejs22 and nodejs24), Fedora (clamav, hplip, kernel, kernel-headers, librabbitmq, mingw-expat, mir, perl-Imager, podman-tui, prometheus-podman-exporter, python-rpds-py, rust-ashpd, rust-busd, rust-gtk4-macros, rust-inferno, rust-quick-xml, rust-reqsign-aws-v4, rust-wayland-scanner, and sandogasa), Oracle (container-tools:rhel8, kernel, mariadb:10.1…

TUXEDO Computers Switching TUXEDO OS From Ubuntu To Debian Testing

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers announced they are switching from Ubuntu to Debian as the base for their TUXEDO OS platform...…

AF_ALG "Nightmare" Being Further Limited In Linux 7.3 With New Sysctl Knob

The Linux kernel's AF_ALG interface was deprecated in Linux 7.2. This interface for letting user-space programs interact directly with the Linux kernel crypto API has proven to be a "massive attack surface" due to a variety of security concerns. With its deprecation in Linux 7.2, some AF_ALG features are already removed and for Linux 7.3 this interface is being further restrained...…

"I'll Make The Linux Kernel Mailing List Burn": Prominent LLVM Linux Developer Returns

One of the original developers behind the work to allow the Linux kernel to be compiled using LLVM/Clang as an alternative to the GCC compiler is now back in the saddle working on LLVM Linux support. LLVM/Clang support for building the Linux kernel has been important for improving code portability and addressing GCC'isms, making use of LLVM compiler features not yet found with the GNU toolchain, e…

EHEA 10Gb Ethernet Driver Being Retired By IBM As A Relic Of Outdated POWER Hardware

In 2026 it's not too surprising when seeing old PCMCIA and ISA drivers being removed from the mainline Linux kernel source tree and old very low-speed network interfaces, with arguably the most surprising fast being how long they lasted in the mainline kernel. Meanwhile for the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel, one of the first 10Gb Ethernet drivers is already set for retirement from the mainline Linux k…

Microsoft Lands Initial AV1 Encoding Using DirectX 12 + HMFT Within Mesa 26.2

The newest, unexpected addition to the Mesa codebase by Microsoft engineers is contributed accelerated AV1 video encoding on the GPU using a combination of DirectX 12 and the Hardware Media Foundation Transform (HMFT) support that is part of the Windows Media Foundation layer...…

Vulkan Video H.264/H.265 Encode Now Working For Intel Alchemist GPUs On Linux

Earlier this year Vulkan Video encode was disabled on newer generations of Intel graphics hardware due to insufficient testing with the Intel ANV open-source driver. That impacted Gen12.5 graphics and newer - basically Alchemist and anything newer. Now at least Gen12.5 graphics with the likes of the Arc A-Series is seeing H.264 and H.265 encoding re-enabled...…

Girls Just Wanna Have Fast MPMC Queues with Bounded Waiting

Marek Olšák At Valve Lands RADV Code That Can "Double Performance" With Some VRS Cases

Longtime AMD Linux graphics driver expert Marek Olšák, who joined Valve earlier this year and now focusing more on RADV rather than the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, has seen some of his latest work now merged for Mesa 26.2. Marek landed a big overhaul to the variable rate shading (VRS) code that in some cases can double the performance...…

OpenSSH 10.4 released

OpenSSH 10.4 has been released. In addition to a number of security and bug fixes, there are a few notable changes; this release adds experimental support for a composite post-quantum signature scheme combining ML-DSA 44 and Ed25519 as described in this IETF draft. With 10.4, if OpenSSH is compiled with sandbox support it will fail on Linux systems that have not enabled SECCOMP or NO_NEW_PRIVS; pr…

Ryzen AI Developer Platform: AMD's Own Linux Distribution Built Atop Debian

With the AMD Ryzen AI Halo developer platform there is the option of ordering this Ryzen AI Max+ mini PC with either Microsoft Windows 11 or "Linux OS". When receiving a AMD Ryzen AI Halo review sample last month, I fully expected it to just be an Ubuntu LTS install with ROCm preloaded. I was quite surprised when powering it up to find that it's an OS called the AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform 1 "…

AMD Ryzen AI Halo Is An Excellent & Powerful Mini PC With Fully Open-Source Software

Earlier this year AMD announced the Ryzen AI Halo as their in-house mini PC offering built around their leading Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" platform. After pre-orders began last month, the Ryzen AI Halo is officially beginning to ship this week and over the past few weeks we have been testing it out at Phoronix.…

[$] The kernel's iomap layer

Conversations about the kernel's filesystem implementations often involve a layer called "iomap", but relatively few people can reliably say what iomap actually is. That is just the kind of gap that LWN exists to fill. In short, iomap handles the mapping between data in the filesystem space (identified by a file of interest, and an offset within that file) and in the storage space (which may be a…

Linux 7.3 Expected To "Flatten The Pick" For Better Scheduling While Gaming & More

Going back to early May there were patches for improving the Linux scheduler to help with gaming performance on old "potato" hardware by providing better cgroup scheduling. Those patches, referred to as the "flatten the pick" patch series, are now slated for introduction in the Linux 7.3 kernel...…

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (container-tools:rhel8, grafana, grafana-pcp, kernel, ruby:2.5, and ruby:3.3), Debian (bird3, chromium, kernel, linux-6.1, mediawiki, nginx, openvpn, php-phpseclib, php8.2, php8.4, and sympa), Fedora (7zip, buildah, chromium, clamav, freerdp, leptonica, mariadb10.11, mariadb11.8, nextcloud, nsd, openqa, openvpn, os-autoinst, pdns, pdns-recursor, perl-…

Intel i915 Driver Nearly Ready To "Work Well" With RT Linux Kernel Sans Display Support

When it comes to the real-time "RT" patches carried outside of the Linux kernel, a number of them pertain to adjustments around the Intel i915 kernel DRM graphics driver. The mainline Linux kernel and its RT support depend upon not building "PREEMPT_RT" for the i915 driver support while patches have been worked on recently for making this Intel kernel graphics driver code play nicely with real-tim…

Kernel prepatch 7.2-rc2

The 7.2-rc2 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said: "It's Sunday afternoon, and rc2 is out. Things look very normal - it's not a small rc2, but it's in line with recent releases, and slightly smaller than rc2 was in 7.1. Let's see how that all continues, but so far so good."…

Seven stable kernels for Saturday including two security fixes

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.3, 6.18.38, 6.12.95, 6.6.144, 6.1.177, 5.15.211, and 5.10.260 stable kernels. Several kernels in this batch include a fix for a vulnerability introduced in the 6.0 kernel in IPv6 (CVE-2026-53362), which could allow an attacker to escape a container and gain root access. There is also a fix for a use-after-free bug in KVM (CVE-2026-53359) that…

Meta reuses old RAM in new servers with custom bridge chip

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…

Victory! Supreme Court Says Constitution Protects People’s Location Data

You have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in Chatrie v. United States.   The case involved geofence warrants, a form of dragnet surveillance police have used to vacuum up location data from electronic device…

EFF to Grindr: This Pride Month, Put Safety and Privacy Over Profits

This Pride month, we’re calling on the dating app Grindr to prioritize LGBTQ+ user safety by making privacy the default across its platform. That means no more sharing personal data with advertisers or training AI on private information without users’ opt-in consent. Grindr is a dating app for the LGBTQ+ community; and for queer people, privacy violations can have life-altering consequences. Infor…

Hate “The Algorithm?” RSS Is One of the Tools You’ve Been Looking For

Poke your head into just about any online social network—or any general conversations about internet culture—and you’ll likely find a boogieman: the algorithm. Since at least the moment Facebook introduced (and apologized for) its News Feed, “the algorithm” has been shorthand for the ways the tech giants control what we see and when we see it. In the age of enshittification, there is a push to rec…

Lawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police Drones

This is not science fiction. It’s not premature. If towns, cities, states, or the federal government want to act to reign in the emergence of armed police drones and robots, we have precious little time. In the absence of substantial regulation around when and how domestic law enforcement in the United States can deploy force using drones, the companies that markets technology to law enforcement h…

We Can Still Stop California’s 3D Printer Surveillance Scheme

Ignoring EFF’s warnings about the dangers and impossibility of implementing a new mandate for 3D print surveillance software, the California State Assembly has signed off on legislation to do just that. In the process, legislators amended the bill to make it even more confusing, while failing to address the risks to privacy, speech, and consumer rights. We must renew our call on legislators to dro…

Primed for Malware: Stop Selling Compromised Android Devices

Time and time again, researchers have found numerous compromised Android devices for sale at large online retailers like Amazon. When these devices get individually reported, we have seen some noted efforts to take them down. But this is a systemic problem and Amazon and other major online retailers must make a corresponding systemic and intentional effort to stop these devices from entering peopl…

EFF, TEDIC and CEJIL Challenge Secrecy in the Use of Face Recognition in Paraguay

Seeking transparency and accountability in Paraguay’s use of facial recognition, EFF, the Association of Technology, Education, Development, Research, Communication (TEDIC), and the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights against the state for arbitrarily denying access to information about its implementation and use of…

Four Years After Dobbs, Anti-Abortion Lawmakers Keep Coming for Online Speech

This week marks four years since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade’s constitutional protections for people seeking abortion care. Anniversaries are a moment to take stock, and over the last four years, EFF has seen firsthand how digital rights and reproductive rights have become increasingly intertwined. One major way this has happened: the fight over abortion has…

The FCC’s Spam Call Proposal Is Just a Data Collection Scheme

The Federal Communications Commission wants to require telecommunications providers to collect vast amounts of personal information from every person who wants a phone number in the name of combatting scam and spam calls. This plan will fail to combat the deluge of unwanted calls people in the United States receive every day while giving untrustworthy companies a gold mine of information that woul…

Are Your Local Police Using Flock Safety ALPRs to Scan for Immigrants?

When a car passes an automated license plate reader (ALPR), its plate is captured and instantly compared against a list of vehicles that police are actively looking for or that police have identified for real-time surveillance. These are called “hotlists,” and EFF has learned that one used by agencies across the country targets immigrants on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  Ag…

The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online

Within the next week, Congress is preparing to vote on the KIDS Act, a sprawling package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package includes a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, combined with a collection of other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Instead of debating any of these propo…

🦅 Domestic Spying Takes an L | EFFector 38.12

Sold to the public as a foreign surveillance tool, Section 702 is the law has let intelligence agencies spy on millions of Americans’ private conversations without a warrant. Despite years of revelations about this law's misuse, Congress has repeatedly reauthorized Section 702 without meaningful reform. Until this month, that is, when it finally lapsed in a major victory for privacy. In our latest…

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…

The UK’s New Under-16 Social Media Ban Will Cause More Harm Than It Prevents

This week, politicians in the UK pushed forward with plans to eviscerate privacy and free speech on the internet by announcing a ban on social media for users under 16 that is set to take effect in Spring 2027.  The UK government continues to falsely characterize this policy as a necessary response to growing concerns about online harms for young people. In reality, much like the Online Safety Act…

EFF Joins 60+ Groups Urging the UK to Halt Face Estimation at the Border

This week, EFF joined Foxglove, Human Rights Watch, and 60 other organizations in writing to the UK’s Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum, Alex Norris, raising serious concern about the Home Office’s decision to deploy Facial Age Estimation (FAE) to assess asylum-seeking children from 2027.  The letter points to four key concerns: Discrimination  As with most face estimation and recog…

Canada Is Forging Ahead with Its Dangerous Surveillance Bill

With no serious debate, including on proposed amendments, Canada is blazing full speed ahead with Bill C-22, which would threaten encryption and increase surveillance. Also known as the Lawful Access Bill, Bill C-22 is currently moving forward quickly to a vote despite the many, many criticisms civil liberty groups and the tech industry have hurled at it. As we’ve discussed before, Bill C-22 is da…

EFF Thanks SerpApi For Helping Us Protect Free Speech Online

EFF is grateful for SerpApi’s generous support, helping us fight for your rights to speak and access information online. SerpApi has been giving to EFF every year since 2018, and alongside our 32,000 individual donors, their gift is critical to keeping up the fight. Whether in the courts, halls of power, or broader policy debates, we appreciate the work this support has made possible over the year…

Call for Submissions: Digital Pride

This Pride season, join EFF and the Queer Arts Collective in building a creative space at the intersection of digital justice and artistic expression.  We’re looking for fresh, untold, historically censored takes on digital liberation.  Whether it’s pointing the lens towards an issue you feel is underrepresented in digital justice efforts; sharing personal accounts of joy, pleasure, or sorrow unde…

A New Bill Takes Aim at Government Pressure to Silence Lawful Online Speech

Last week, Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden introduced the Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression, or JAWBONE Act. The bipartisan legislation creates a federal cause of action against government officials who coerce or attempt to coerce broadcasters, interactive computer services, or AI providers into taking actions against lawful, First-Amendment-protected speech…

Court Records Should Be Free

Court records belong to the public. Yet anyone seeking access to federal court filings through PACER, a government software system that stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, is usually required to pay hefty fees to search for and view documents. PACER’s fees have long acted as a barrier that makes it hard, especially for low income people, to see and understand the work produced b…

Field Notes from a Year of OPSEC Training

Late last year, as part of our annual “Year in Review” series, we summarized our efforts providing digital privacy and security advice to at-risk communities. OPSEC trainings (short for operational security, a catch-all term we use to describe any kind of workshop, advising session, assessment, or presentation about operational security for individuals and organization) are something we've long pr…

AI Regulation Should Be Rational, Not Retaliatory

The Trump administration’s approach to AI safety, particularly the generative AI models that regularly grab headlines, has been haphazard at best. At worst, it’s unconstitutional. As EFF and our allies explained in an amicus brief, the Pentagon’s actions against one company, Anthropic, violate the First Amendment because they were motivated by the administration’s desire to punish an uncooperative…

‘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…

The Free and Open Web Is Under Attack at the IETF

The ability to access publicly available information using automated tools is a central value and benefit of a free and open internet. Automated access—often called crawling or scraping—powers important, useful tools for locating, preserving, and analyzing online information. For example, crawling and scraping helps journalists, researchers, and watchdog organizations report the news, find securit…

The NO FAKES Act Could Silence Satire, Commentary, And News

The NO FAKES Act is supposed to target harmful AI-generated impersonations. But in reality, it will make it easier to suppress commentary, satire, and other lawful speech. That's why EFF has signed a letter urging the Senate Judiciary Committee not to advance the bill in its current form. Take action Tell Congress to Say No to NO FAKES In the letter, EFF joins a coalition of civil society groups i…

Onward, Friends

After 26 years, today is my last day at EFF. It's been a terrific and wild ride — the organization has grown from a tiny band of fighty people trying to plant a flag for freedom and justice in the coming digital world into a large, established band of fighty people doing, well, much the same. The world around us has changed enormously. Our core values haven't budged. I'm proud of what we've achiev…

EFFecting Change: LGBTQ+ Solidarity Against the Tide of Surveillance

LGBTQ+ communities are facing an escalating wave of censorship and targeted surveillance, but we can push back through mutual solidarity. Join us live to learn how safer virtual spaces get built, how platform policies and government pressure are reshaping the digital landscape, and what platform accountability actually looks like. Our panel will share ideas for direct action and concrete strategie…

Victory! 702 has Expired!

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets US intelligence agencies collect communications from foreigners abroad without a warrant, and routinely sweeps in Americans’ emails, messages, and calls in the process. The authority for this program is set to expire Friday, June 12th, 2026, at midnight. As we wrote earlier this week, Congress has been kicking the ball down the road for…

Yes to California's Bill to Ban Surveillance Pricing

Corporations harvest and monetize ever-growing amounts of our personal data, such as our browsing history and physical location. One bitter fruit of this poisonous tree is known as “surveillance pricing”: corporations offer the same product to two different people at two different prices, based on scrutiny of these people’s respective personal data. Surveillance pricing is bad for privacy, equity,…

‘News’ Site Keeps Hallucinating EFF Staffers

What do EFF staffers Sarah Chen, Javier Morales, Caitlin Chin, Emma Rodriguez, and Mikko Kopponen have in common?  For one thing, they don’t exist.  For another, all have been quoted as EFF experts in articles published in the past two months on a site called News-USA Today, which describes itself as “an independent news publisher focused on clear, accurate, and useful journalism.”  Uh…  (Please d…

LGBT Q&A: We’re Back With Season 2! 

Last June during Pride, we launched a new initiative—LGBT Q&A—where we answered your most pressing queer-related digital rights questions on EFF’s Instagram and TikTok accounts. No question was too big or too small! You asked us things like what pictures to use on dating apps; how to remove your name from internet searches; why homophobic content doesn't get removed after you report it; and how to…

Congress Just Rushed Through a Disastrous Copyright Office Overhaul

In a voice vote earlier this week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 6028, the “Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act.” The legislation is presented as a technical reorganization of some government agencies, but it’s much more than that.  H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office, and not in a good way. The bill removes the Library of Congress’ current superviso…

The 702 Ultimatum: Warrant Requirement or Bust

For months now, Congress has been kicking the ball down the road—temporarily postponing the expiration of the mass surveillance authority Section 702 of FISA in hopes that some consensus could be reached. Now, with the deadline looming, the stakes have never been higher. Nearly every time the statute has come up for renewal, the people demanding privacy and civil liberties have had to compromise,…

Enshittification Merch That Actually Fights Enshittification 

Enshittification isn't just a sweary word to describe the accelerating decay of the online platforms, apps, and services that we rely on.   It's a framework for understanding the structural incentives that make tech companies enemies of their own users over time—the surveillance business model, the erosion of privacy, the monopoly power that eliminates alternatives, the regulatory capture that pre…

🔊 Mass Surveillance for… Loud Music? | EFFector 38.11

Across the country, surveillance companies have spun a vast web of tens of thousands of license plate cameras. The people selling this tech want you to believe that it's for your safety, but how are authorities really using automated license plate readers (ALPR)? In this week's EFFector newsletter, we're looking at how these powerful surveillance networks have become universal people-trackers used…

Who Runs the Ransomware Group ‘The Gentlemen?’

A cybercrime group known as The Gentlemen has emerged as the second most active ransomware gang by victim count, rapidly attracting a talented pool of hackers through an aggressive recruitment strategy that promises affiliates 90 percent of any ransom paid by victims. This post examines clues pointing to a real life identity for the administrator of The Gentlemen ransomware group. A graphic create…

How and Why to Fight Back Against Social Media Bans

Several U.S. states are pushing to ban young people from social media entirely. This marks the latest wave of censorship bills masquerading as “children’s online safety” measures, with states like Massachusetts, Idaho, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, and EFF’s home state of California leading the charge. Just a few years ago, lawmakers supporting age-gating laws insisted their…

A Record-Breaking Patch Tuesday for June 2026

Microsoft today released software updates to plug nearly 200 security holes across its Windows operating systems and supported software, a record number of fixes for the company’s monthly Patch Tuesday cycle. Nearly three dozen of those bugs earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating, and exploit code for at least three of the weaknesses is now publicly available. The software giant said in a…

Tell Congress: Just Say No to NO FAKES

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to consider and vote on the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act (NO FAKES). Instead of targeting the real privacy harms posed by AI-generated replicas, this law would create another layer of internet censorship on top of the already existing legal and voluntary takedown systems. Congress should reject NO FAKES. Take action Tell Congr…

VICTORY: Meta Strips Facial Recognition Code From Smart Glasses App After Public Outcry

Just days after a damning WIRED report exposed that Meta had quietly embedded facial recognition technology (FRT) code into millions of phones, the tech giant has quietly acquiesced in demands to reverse course. Last week, researchers identified code in Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, that could convert images of faces into unique biometric signatures to identify strangers…

Cheers to the Winners of EFF’s 18th Annual Cyberlaw Trivia Night! 

On a warm June evening in San Francisco, attorneys and other legally-minded friends of EFF gathered for our 18th Annual Cyberlaw Trivia Night, an annual test of tech-related legal knowledge, and the ability to remember some deeply obscure facts under pressure.  Returning Quizmaster Kurt Opsahl once again guided competitors through six rounds of trivia covering everything from intellectual property…

Internet Age Gates Are a Growing Global Threat

The internet is an essential resource for young people and adults to access information, explore community, and find themselves—both inside countries and across continents. Yet governments around the world continue to introduce and implement legislation requiring all online users to verify their ages before accessing the digital space. In some cases, politicians are going further, putting forth pr…

LGBT Q&A Season 1 Recap: Staying Safer Online

Last year during LGBTQ+ Pride month, we launched an LGBT Q&A where we answered your most pressing digital rights questions on EFF’s Instagram and TikTok  accounts.  Ahead of LGBT Q&A Season 2 launching next week, we’re posting a recap with some of the questions we answered. Check them out below. You wanted to know: How to stay safe when dating online. You asked: I'm a 17 year old trans woman and m…

California’s AB 412 Still Demands Developers Do The Impossible

California lawmakers are again considering A.B. 412, a bill that would require AI developers to identify and disclose copyrighted works used to train generative AI systems. The problem this year is the same as last year: it’s practically impossible to comply with this law. The bill demands information that often does not exist, and cannot realistically be obtained.  EFF submitted an opposition le…

Pulte Appointment Underscores Need to Reform Section 702 Spying

President Trump’s highly politicized appointment of an entirely unqualified acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) underscores why the government’s warrantless mass spying power must be reformed.  Congress now faces a deadline of Friday, June 12 to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an unconstitutional program rife with problems, loopholes, and compliance…

EFF Testifies to Congress on Protecting Americans’ Rights from Government AI

Governments must not adopt emerging and powerful AI technologies without also adopting strong and clear safeguards to protect Constitutional rights, EFF Senior Policy Analyst Dr. Matthew Guariglia testified today to the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection.  During the hearing on “The AI Security Landscape: How Frontier Models, Agentic AI, and AI Codi…

Move Fast, Surveil Things

Update, June 8, 2026: Following widespread public scrutiny and WIRED’s critical reporting, Meta has stripped the unactivated facial recognition code from its latest Meta AI app update. Meta has deployed facial recognition code to millions of their always-on surveillance glasses, according to new reporting by Wired. EFF’s Threat Lab was able to confirm that the facial recognition code is present th…

Hackers Used Meta’s AI Support Bot to Seize Instagram Accounts

The Instagram accounts for the Obama White House and the Chief Master Sergeant of the U.S. Space Force were briefly defaced with pro-Iranian images and messages over the weekend, after instructions began circulating on Telegram showing how to trick Meta’s “AI support assistant” bot into resetting account passwords. A screenshot from a video released on Telegram claiming to show how Meta’s AI custo…

Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested the co-owners of two related Internet hosting companies for operating IT infrastructure used by Russia to carry out cyberattacks, influence operations and disinformation campaigns inside the European Union. The two men were the focus of a 2025 KrebsOnSecurity story about how their hosting companies had assumed control over the technical infrastructure o…

Lawmakers Demand Answers as CISA Tries to Contain Data Leak

Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after KrebsOnSecurity reported this week that a CISA contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. The inquiry comes as CISA is still struggling to contain the breach and invalidate the leaked cred…

Alleged Kimwolf Botmaster ‘Dort’ Arrested, Charged in U.S. and Canada

Canadian authorities on Wednesday arrested a 23-year-old Ottawa man on suspicion of building and operating Kimwolf, a fast spreading Internet-of-Things botnet that enslaved millions of devices for use in a series of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the past six months. KrebsOnSecurity publicly named the suspect in February 2026 after the accused launched a volley of DDoS,…