Terminal

Likely illegally, Claude gained access to 3 networks. Will Anthropic be held to account?

Anthropic said its Claude-based security models gained unauthorized access to the sensitive production environments of three outside organizations during internal testing designed to measure the models’ offensive cyber capabilities. The events, which Anthropic revealed Thursday, are the second revelation in 10 days that AI models from the world’s wealthiest providers have trespassed into protecte…

AMD Publishes CDNA5 ISA Documentation For Instinct MI455X

Following last week's launch of the AMD Instinct MI455X, AMD has now kept with tradition and provided ISA documentation concerning this latest CDNA5 architecture...…

Google Earth risked ruin with retracted AI tool for making fake satellite pics

Google briefly allowed anyone to create AI-modified versions of satellite imagery available in Google Earth—before quickly reversing its decision as people shared examples of AI-generated pictures that illustrated the potential for misinformation and disinformation. There is no shortage of generative AI tools that already allow people to create AI-modified images of real buildings and cities base…

Hackers Targeted Municipal Water Systems In 7 States This Week, FBI Says

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Cyberattacks targeting municipal water systems have been reported in at least seven states this week, prompting the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency to warn utilities nationwide that hackers are trying to disrupt critical water infrastructure. In a public service announcement Thursday, the agencies said water and wastewater utilities ha…

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

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 explicit content. If this bill passes, it will force millions of adult internet users to give up their anonymity, privacy, and security before they access lawful speech.   Unlike many state-age verific…

The CHATBOT Act Forces One Parenting Model On Every Family

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 sense for Congress to hold hearings and examine how AI should be used by minors. But the recently introduced CHATBOT Act answers those questions with a one-size-fits-al…

Would you get tattooed just to interview at a 7-days-a-week AI startup?

Everyone knows that great gimmicks are the key to hiring top developers for your startup. That's why small AI startup LemonLime—which "optimizes your existing data to work with AI"—has so many of them. Want a job interview? Score a perfect 7/7 on the company's own "Is it a Lemon or a Lime?" game. Or—hear me out—get something permanently tattooed on your flesh. LemonLime has tried both tactics in…

Tailscale didn't stop the Hugging Face intrusion

New Google Earth AI Tool Could Fuel Misinformation, Experts Say

Google has integrated its Nano Banana 2 image generator into Google Earth, allowing users to place AI-generated events and objects onto real satellite imagery. The company says its AI-generated images contain invisible watermarks detectable through Gemini or Lens, but the BBC found those safeguards and some third-party detection tools can be fooled into labeling manipulated Google Earth images as…

Lerd, an open source Herd-like PHP development environment for Linux and macOS

Golang proposal: container/: generic collection types

Orca-Bench: How Ready Are Language Model Agents for Oncall?

Using the railway network as a flatbed scanner [video]

Termixer (TUI DJ Mixer)

June in Servo: real world compat, media queries, SharedWorker, and more

High school defends staying silent while boys made AI nudes of 59 classmates

One of the first schools to shut down after students were found making AI nudes of female classmates is now asking a court to toss a lawsuit filed by victims who claimed that the school stayed silent for months while the emboldened boys targeted many more girls. In a motion to dismiss this week, Lancaster Country Day School (LCDS)—a private K-12 school in Pennsylvania with fewer than 600 students…

Everyone is building LLM routers, we deprecated ours

qm

The First Open-Source Firmware Released For Modern AMD Ryzen AM5 Platform

Last month 3mdeb released their open-source firmware for a modern AMD EPYC motherboard from Gigabyte that was built off the new AMD openSIL project and Coreboot. Today 3mdeb has delivered the first open-source firmware release for a modern AMD Ryzen desktop motherboard with having independently brought their openSIL+Coreboot powered Dasharo stack to the readily available MSI PRO B850-P WIFI...…

Publishers Are Losing Google Traffic As AI Answers Replace Links

alternative_right shares a report from Axios: Google has basically stopped sending people to websites (including our site) for answers and information. Instead, it's using AI to answer them on its platform, in its words. Chartbeat data shared with Axios shows Google Search traffic to publishers fell 34% over the past year. That pain is regressive. Over the past two years, small publishers lost 60%…

Researchers devise a full-color night vision goggle

Human eyes don’t register the infrared portion of the light spectrum because infrared photons don't carry enough energy to trigger the signaling pathway inside our light-sensing cells. But we’ve been able to make devices that give us a visual representation of what’s happening in the infrared. A team at the Beijing Institute of Technology, led by Xin Tang and Ge Mu, has now built a device that le…

Shotcut 26.7 Video Editor Released With Stock Asset Library

Shotcut 26.7 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source, cross-platform video editing solution...…

China could supply EV manufacturing boom with recycled EVs

While recycling is a mathematically obvious response to the finite, non-renewable nature of many resources, the economic math is often challenging. For many materials, it can be hard to compete with virgin materials on a cost basis. Fast-moving technologies like electric vehicles throw in an added complication: By the time a car is scrapped, the industry may have moved on to a different battery c…

Servo 0.4.0 released

The Servo web-browser engine project has published an update about all of the changes that landed in June 2026, along with version 0.4.0 of the Servo Tech Demo. This release includes a record 558 commits, better layout correctness for web sites, improved WebGPU support, enhancements for users who are using the servoshell test browser, and many performance and stability fixes.…

Severance

Sony acknowledges backlash, “cautiously” moves ahead with end of PlayStation discs

Sony is “cautiously” moving forward with plans to stop producing discs for PlayStation games as of January 2028, CFO Lin Tao said through an interpreter today. During an earnings call, Tao said there are “various reasons” for Sony's decision, with the biggest being that the “digitalization of [content] overall has been progressing.” “When we think about the future, and we put in a lot of thought…

Miso (YC S16) is hiring for U.S. expansion

New York Sues Kalshi For Running 'Illegal Gambling Operation'

New York has sued prediction-market platform Kalshi, alleging it operates an "illegal gambling operation" without state authorization. "No matter what they call themselves, prediction markets like Kalshi are gambling platforms, plain and simple," said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a press release announcing the lawsuit. "By ignoring our laws, Kalshi is running an illegal operation and…

The most famous brand in physical security got pwned by ShinyHunters

A leading name in home and business physical security, Brinks Home, recently said it identified unauthorized access to a portion of its IT systems, an intrusion ShinyHunters claims it carried out to steal millions of records from the security provider's Salesforce instance. Brinks Home hasn’t named the intruder or identified the affected system, but said the responsible party has threatened to le…

The great wealth transfer reality check

Dario Amodei's stance on open weights is self-serving and short-sighted

Man invested $45M in a Nicolas Cage movie. It got stolen off Netflix’s desk.

Netflix has been sued after admitting that an unencrypted drive containing an unreleased, hotly anticipated 2026 blockbuster starring Nicolas Cage was stolen from its offices. In a lawsuit filed Wednesday, Netflix was accused of waiting a week to warn the production company, Op-Fortitude, that the movie, Fortitude, was swiped, along with other drives that were “stolen right off a Netflix desk.” “…

Getting 25 Gbps Thunderbolt Ethernet on My Mac Studio

Big Food vs. the People

Chrome Is Using AI To Fix Hundreds of Bugs, Eliminate Full Browser Restarts

Google says AI-assisted workflows helped Chrome fix 1,072 security bugs across versions 149 and 150, more than the previous 23 releases combined. The company is also testing twice-weekly security updates and "dynamic patching," which could apply most fixes without requiring users to restart the entire browser. "By leveraging Chrome's multi-process architecture, dynamic patching sequentially replac…

Dubious research tied to Red Bull has shaped energy drink policy

Algorithms on billion-scale graph using 10GB RAM: I love DataFusion

US bank places trust in ransomware crew that promised to delete its data

Would you trust a ransomware extortionist to delete the data they stole? One bank certainly wants you to. Well over a month into a ransomware cleanup job, River Financial Corporation tells regulators that it “took steps to attempt to suppress the affected data, including obtaining representations from the threat actor that it deleted the data in its possession.” For context, placing this kind of…

A GTK4 SSH-askpass in Zig

13 Models and 4 Agents on SWE Tasks: Go, Java, Python, Rust, TS

Nouveau Preparing To Finally Enable Atomic Mode-Setting By Default

In addition to the Nouveau kernel driver unblocking Vulkan Video H.264 support for the Mesa NVK driver, another feature change on the way is this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver finally preparing to enable atomic mode-setting by default...…

Elevators

Anthropic and OpenAI are competing to see whose agents can go rogue harder

One company's inventive campaign for an unreleased product has become a contest between Anthropic and OpenAI to see which can shout the loudest about its own failures. Readers who tuned in earlier today saw the latest episode in the drama – or sitcom – as Anthropic tried to outdo OpenAI's appropriation of the Mythos marketing playbook and made itself the punchline. Since first teasing Mythos in A…

The most official water costs $120k a gallon

Show HN: BitBang – Reach machines behind NAT from a browser, no account

Update Teams mobile app by October or lose your calendar

Teams mobile users now have even less time to update the app before older versions lose calendar access. Microsoft originally set a late-October deadline in its message, but we're guessing someone familiar with the impending demise of Exchange Web Services (EWS) had a quiet word. The date has been brought forward to the beginning of October, leaving users until the end of September to update the…

Run Kimi K3 using 29 GB of RAM at 0.50 tok/s

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…

AI scammers outperform humans when it comes to building trust

The notion that scammers can use AI to sharpen their deceptions, polish their language, and lubricate their banter with victims is now a reality for anyone fighting the fraud operations that steal tens of billions of dollars a year worldwide. But can AI fully replace a human scammer, autonomously building the web of deception leading up to the fake investment that defrauds the mark? One study's e…

Arch Linux AUR Under Another Wave Of Malicious Packages, Package Adoptions Halted

Last month the Arch Linux User Repository "AUR" saw more than 1,500 malicious packages amid a sophisticated malware attack and then also seeing an influx of spam and profanities amid this community/user-maintained repository for the popular Arch Linux distribution. Unfortunately, there is another round of AUR troubles...…

Charities remain locked out of CAF Bank online accounts

A week after suspending online banking, CAF Bank still has no timetable for restoring access to its 14,000 UK charity customers. The bank updated customers on Thursday about the outage, which has disrupted payments to staff and suppliers. Little had changed. In a message seen by The Register, CAF Bank said it was not yet able to restore the service safely. As it had earlier in the week, the bank…

[$] The future of libraries in BPF

Song Liu believes that the way that programmers assemble complex BPF programs will be changing rapidly in the future. At a session of the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, he shared his thoughts on what that change could look like, though he did not have any concrete proposals for what, if anything, the BPF maintainers should do. He anticipates an ecosystem of Rus…

Arch Linux disables AUR package adoption

The Arch Linux DevOps team has announced that adoption of orphaned packages in the Arch User Repository (AUR) has been disabled due to "the current influx of malicious package adoptions and follow-up commits made via the AUR". Michael Taggart has posted a brief analysis of the malware being added to a long list of packages in this round of attacks. The payload appears to be an remote-access trojan…

Anti-fraud tools can't keep pace with robocall scammers

Linux 7.3 To Allow Tuning AMD P-State Dynamic EPP With Per CPU Core Granularity

Sent out last night was the last batch of planned AMD P-State driver feature improvements targeting the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window...…

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, nodejs-nodemon, nodejs22, nodejs24, openssh, and vim), Debian (gsasl and ruby-rack), Fedora (dokuwiki, lego, libnbd, nasm, pack, unbound, and valkey), Mageia (389-ds-base, libxfont2, nghttp2, and perl-DBI), SUSE (apptainer, bind, ffmpeg-7, freerdp, google-osconfig-agent, graphicsmagick, helm, ImageMagick, java-17-openjdk, java-25-openjdk, key…

Pathogenic review: Damn, it feels good to be a virus

Over the past couple of weeks, my immune system has been struggling to fight off a cold. It’s been unpleasant, as all colds are. But throughout this time—in defiance of my plight—I’ve been waging my own war against immune systems, thanks to Pathogenic, a new roguelite twin-stick shooter from developer Aberrant Labs. As I've downed endless shots of ineffective cough syrup, I’ve done little else wi…

LinkedIn Introduces a 'Seems Like AI Slop' Button

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: LinkedIn, a social network awash with long AI-generated posts from executives and other corporate workers, has introduced a new button that users can click to flag if a post "seems like AI slop," according to 404 Media's own tests. If you have been anywhere near LinkedIn in the past couple of years, you have undoubtedly seen users posting blatant…

NASA's Swift rescue slips to late August as LINK battles its spin

Katalyst Space has confirmed that problems with its LINK spacecraft have delayed its attempt to rescue NASA's Swift observatory, with rendezvous now targeted for the end of August. Katalyst disclosed the delay in an update on the spinning spacecraft. Engineers used a thruster to cut LINK's rotation rate from 9 degrees per second to approximately 4 degrees per second, with further burns planned. K…

Three becomes one as Vodafone buys out merger partner

Vodafone has paid £4.3 billion ($5.78 billion) for the remaining 49 percent of VodafoneThree, taking full ownership of the UK's largest mobile operator. The telecoms giant announced that it planned to buy the stake held by Three's former parent, CK Hutchison Group Telecom Holdings, in May. The acquisition comes just over a year after Vodafone UK and Three UK completed their merger following condi…

The End of an Era

Servo 0.4 Browser Engine Gets More Websites Rendering Correctly

Servo 0.4 was just released for closing out the month of July. This month the Servo browser engine with its servoshell demo browser began rendering more real-world websites correctly...…

How a Yale AI-cheating dispute became a 13-count federal lawsuit

Thierry Rignol is furious at Yale. Rignol paid Yale $208,500 in tuition for its Executive MBA program. But after he was accused of cheating, the school suspended him for a year and gave him an F in the course Sourcing and Managing Funds. This happened despite the fact that Rignol was a "top student, on track to graduate first in his class," he says. As a result, Rignol missed out on being named c…

Scotland's university procurement center confirms cybercrooks broke in

Advanced Procurement for Universities and Colleges (APUC) says attackers gained unauthorized access to historical data in a cyberattack earlier this month. The Scottish education procurement body said it immediately contained the mid-July intrusion and was investigating claims that some of the data had been stolen. "We recently discovered suspicious activity on our IT systems involving unauthoriz…

Rocket Report: New launch rule may limit environmental regulations, Falcon 9 to hit Moon

Welcome to Edition 9.05 of the Rocket Report! It was a big week for launch contracts, with both Rocket Lab and SpaceX scoring sizable deals from the US military for their respective Electron and Falcon 9 rockets. The vehicles have been the workhorses for small and medium lift for the United States over the past decade and may remain so for some time. Also, there will be no Rocket Report next week…

Nouveau Patch For Linux 7.3 Allows For NVK Vulkan Video Atop NVIDIA NVDEC

This week's round of drm-misc-next patches for staging ahead of the Linux 7.3 kernel merge window bring an exciting change for the open-source NVIDIA "Nouveau" driver...…

x86_64 Shadow Stack By Default Retargeted For Fedora 46

In recent weeks there was a proposal to enable x86_64 Shadow Stack support by default with the upcoming Fedora Linux 45 release. That change has been approved now by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) but with the feature being punted off to Fedora 46 next year...…

Tech buyers are baking in sovereignty from day one, says Forrester

Geopolitical tensions, regulatory pressure, and growing awareness of risk are prompting organizations to build sovereignty requirements into new technology projects from day one, according to Forrester. The research firm says organizations worldwide are specifying data residency and sovereign AI architecture requirements at the planning stage. European firms face greater pressure than their US pe…

Vulkan 1.4.358 Released With New Image Tiling Control Extension

After two weeks without any Vulkan spec update, Vulkan 1.4.358 was released overnight. Besides the usual assortment of minor clarifications/fixes, Vulkan 1.4.358 introduces one new extension: VK_EXT_image_tiling_control...…

Sound Fixes For Linux 7.2-rc6: "Far Larger Than Wished"

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE previously warned of many sound driver fixes due to AI/LLMs and a "new normal" of patch activity as a result. While we are approaching the end of the Linux 7.2 merge window with the stable release coming up in August, the sound patches continue trending higher and this week were "far larger than wished" ahead of Linux 7.2-rc6 due out on Sunday.…

UK wants datacenters to pay a fee for grid connection requests

Ofgem is seeking feedback on proposals to levy a fee on datacenter development projects at the time they apply for a grid connection. The move aims to discourage companies from seeking approval for speculative applications that clog up the pipeline and cause connection delays, without ever resulting in finished datacenters. The UK regulator for electricity and gas says connection applications for…

Netflix Sued For Losing 'Master Copy' of Unreleased Nicolas Cage Movie

A production company and filmmaker are suing Netflix for $105 million, alleging the streamer lost a stolen drive containing an unencrypted master copy of the unreleased Nicolas Cage film Fortitude, which they claim damage its exclusivity and market value. Netflix denied responsibility for the lost film but said it takes content security seriously and has offered to monitor piracy sites for unautho…

Airport sign fails to boot, officers already on the scene

BORK!BORK!BORK! The sight of the police can make even the clearest conscience twitch. Perhaps the authorities have finally come to ask about that music track you copied 30 years ago. We're not saying the presence of the law sent this digital signage into a tizz, but you never know. Spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader at a Phoenix airport car rental building, today's borked signage looks like…

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

ON CALL Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day, dear reader! And happy Friday, too, as it heralds both the end of the working week and the day on which The Reg delivers another edition of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of support jobs that twisted, tanked, or turned out terrifically. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Roger" who told us he spen…

DeepSeek-V4-Flash Update

Anthropic Says Its AI Systems Broke Into Computers at 3 Organizations

Anthropic found that Claude models breached three outside organizations during cybersecurity tests because misconfigured environments accidentally gave them access to the internet. The company notified those affected and urged other AI labs to audit their own testing systems. The BBC reports: Anthropic said in a statement that it reviewed more than 140,000 tests to find evidence that Claude - its…

Flock Cameras Are Being Destroyed Across the US

An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: Surveillance cameras owned by Flock Safety have been cut down with electric saws in New York State, vandalized with paint in Oakland, California, and rammed with a truck in Idaho. Flock claims its services fight crime, but law enforcement agencies also use their services to track vehicles based on license plate numbers and reconstruct the their movements, even…

Anthropic’s Claude escaped test sandbox to attack three organizations

Anthropic has admitted that its Claude models escaped sandboxes to access the open internet and attack three organizations – but has also advanced decent excuses for the incidents. The AI upstart discovered the attacks after checking if security tests of its models had ever produced results similar to the attack on Hugging Face made possible by OpenAI models escaping onto the internet. “In partic…

Amazon's Q2 was great, but the earnings release is packed with baloney

Amazon reported its earnings today, and because I am professionally depressed I read the thing in full [PDF]. "How long can I go before the red haze of rage sets in" is a fun game, and today I made it all the way to the bottom of the second page when I encountered a bullet point touting how AWS "made its spec-drive [sic] coding agent, Kiro, available on iOS." Yes, I was in the room when they anno…

New MCP Specification Addresses the Main Barrier To Enterprise Adoption

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open source standard for how AI systems interact with external tools and data sources, saw its largest update since its introduction. Most notably, MCP's protocol core is now stateless, so requests are no longer dependent on a session tied to an individual server instance. This change has the pot…

Tim Cook passes the baton in Apple's Q3 2026 earnings call

Apple saw an excellent and better-than-anticipated Q3 2026 in terms of iPhone sales, but its revenue for services—like Apple TV, Apple Music, AppleCare, or iCloud—slipped downward, disappointing experts who were hoping for more. Further, fears about memory prices and supply constraints slightly soured reception to what could have otherwise been a slightly positive but business-as-usual quarter. T…

A Fundamental Flaw Leaves LLMs Strikingly Vulnerable To Attack

joshuark quotes a report from MIT Technology Review: It is impossible to make large language models fully secure against hacks because of a fundamental flaw in how they work, a team of researchers argue in a paper presented at the International Conference on Machine Learning, a top AI conference, this month. The claim has huge implications for the safety of this technology. By taking advantage of…

Linux 7.3 Will Treat Intel Nova Lake S Graphics As Stable

Ahead of the next-generation Intel Nova Lake processors expected to begin rolling out around the start of 2027, the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel cycle is going to begin treating Nova Lake S processors with their integrated graphics as stable...…

Microsoft's $450 Billion Jump Is Biggest In Stock Market History

Microsoft shares surged as much as 17% after reporting 43% growth in Azure revenue, putting the company on track to add a record $490 billion in market value in a single day. Bloomberg notes that it "would eclipse Nvidia's $440 billion addition, following President Donald Trump's announcement of a 90-day tariff pause last year, as the biggest ever." From the report: The nearly $500 billion jump is…

Max-severity Exchange server flaw under active exploitation by Kremlin hackers

Russian state hackers are using a maximum-severity vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook’s Exchange Server to backdoor unpatched machines and steal credentials and other confidential information from them, security researchers said Thursday. The attacks are coming from TA488, a tracking name for a group working on behalf of the Kremlin, Proofpoint researchers said Thursday. Proofpoint and the Nation…

Trump FCC faces blowback in attempt to police speech on broadcast TV

Conservatives and liberals lined up in opposition to the Federal Communications Commission's attempt to punish ABC for speech that President Trump dislikes. Liberal advocacy groups urged FCC Chairman Brendan Carr to end his attacks on ABC, and conservative groups warned Carr not to set a precedent that would harm conservatives in future administrations. Former FCC chairs and commissioners from pr…

Iran struck Amazon data centers again amid widening war, satellites show

Satellite images have revealed new damage to Amazon data centers in the Middle East along with at least one crucial Saudi oil facility, following missile and drone attacks by Iran and its Houthi allies. The images from Europe’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellites provide evidence of a widening war as the United States and several Gulf states exchange military strikes with Iran, the Houthi faction in…

LinkedIn realizes its users have been bathing in AI slop, offers a shower

LinkedIn has been drenching its users in AI-powered slop posts, going so far as to encourage writers to trade their own voices for a bot's by hitting the "enhance your post" button when they want to share thoughts. Enough is enough. On Thursday, the site’s Chief Product Officer has announced several changes designed to rehab the platform’s reputation. CPO Hari Srinivasan took to the Microsoft-own…

Just because a game is on disc doesn’t mean it will work in the future

Sony’s recent decision to stop producing physical PlayStation games in the near future has naturally led to a renewed focus and appreciation for physical games that can be played just by sticking a cartridge or disc in a console. But an increasing number of those “physical” games these days still require additional downloads from a centralized server to function as intended. For years now, the te…

ABC Accuses FCC of 'Attempted Censorship'

ABC accused FCC Chair Brendan Carr of "attempted censorship," arguing that an early review of its eight broadcast licenses is politically motivated retaliation over the network's coverage and could chill the entire media industry. "The retaliation against ABC is a signal to every media company in the country: accommodate the Administration's view of what news coverage should look like or pay the p…

Chrome may get faster updates with no restart required

With Chrome, Google pioneered the rapid release model for browser security. Now, Google says updates may need to change in the face of AI security analysis. According to the company, the number of bug fixes in Chrome releases has skyrocketed in recent months because AI is detecting so many flaws. We could be looking at more frequent updates soon, but Google is also working on ways to get those up…

Amazon's Zoox Wins First US Approval For Paid Robotaxis Without Human Controls

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Amazon's Zoox unit has won U.S. approval for limited commercial deployment of its novel steering-wheel-free robotaxis, a first for the autonomous ride industry, the U.S. auto safety agency said on Thursday. Zoox said that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration's decision gives the company federal approval to begin charging for rides, an…

Oracle adds Google Gemini to the agent menu

Oracle plans to add Google's Gemini models to AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications, expanding its partnership with Google Cloud and giving customers another option for building AI agents. Big Red also intends to use Gemini models for embedded AI use cases in Oracle Fusion Applications and Oracle NetSuite. In a prepared statement, Google Cloud VP Satish Thomas said that the partnership was desi…

AMD Posts Linux Patches For HDMI 2.1 Auto Low-Latency Mode "ALLM" & VRR

Following AMD posting AMDGPU patches for HDMI 2.1 FRL support after the HDMI 2.1 open-source support was long blocked by the HDMI Forum, as part of working toward a complete HDMI 2.1 implementation in this AMD Linux driver it was followed by HDMI 2.1 Display Stream Compression (DSC) support. Now the latest on the AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 enabling path is enabling Auto Low-Latency Mode (ALLM) as well as HDM…

GPUs could explode to multiple TB with new storage-inspired memory tech

Virtually every high-end GPU and AI accelerator relies on high bandwidth memory (HBM), which can shuffle data around at multiple terabytes a second but can only reach into the gigabytes, with models often needing to be shared across multiple processors. However, an emerging storage technology could change that, boosting accelerator memory capacity from hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes. The tech…

Catastrophic MoD Data Breach Caused By Lack of Training On Excel

A UK parliamentary inquiry found that a catastrophic Ministry of Defense breach exposing 18,700 Afghans could have been prevented with basic Excel training, after an employee unknowingly shared a hidden worksheet containing their details. The Independent reports: The leak, in February 2022, exposed the details of 18,700 Afghans who said they were in danger from the Taliban because of their links t…

Google reveals Gemini Robotics 2.0, promising improved dexterity and safety

Robots powered by Google's Gemini AI models are now more capable. With the debut of Gemini Robotics 2, these physical bots can now accomplish more complex tasks, continuously analyze changing environments, and collaborate with other robots. This is thanks to a trio of new sub-models, one of which is publicly available for developers starting today. Videos of robots running, dancing, and backflipp…

Space Force-backed mission does its best impression of Top Gun in orbit

An ongoing military exercise happening hundreds of miles above Earth has—for the first time in an unclassified setting—demonstrated how future satellites might evade and pursue one another in a future conflict. That was the announcement Wednesday from True Anomaly, one of the companies involved in the exercise. True Anomaly's Jackal satellite, also known as Panther, played the cat-and-mouse game…

There's Finally A New Game Powered By The Unigine 2 Engine

It's been about a decade since seeing any new games released on the visually-impressive, Linux-friendly Unigine Engine. Unigine Corp has mostly been focusing on Unigine Engine usage for simulations and other professional applications, but coming as a surprise today is a new game being developed on their latest Unigine 2 engine technology...…

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

If you don't want AI scrapers training themselves on your website, there's a new way to stop them that doesn't involve server-side blocking or praying they respect your instructions in robots.txt. A team of creatives have teamed up with a typography company to create a new type of font that’ll trick LLM scrapers into ingesting poisoned gibberish. Dubbed ShieldFont, the open-source project almost…

OPI Abstraction v0.1 Published With Aiming To Standardize DPU/IPU Ecosystems

The Linux Foundation hosted Open Programmable Infrastructure "OPI" announced its first coordinated release with OPI Abstraction v0.1. The work of the Open Programmable Infrastructure is hoping to standardize the data processing unit (DPU) and infrastructure processing unit (IPU) ecosystems...…

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…

Jailed Flock vandal wipes out three cameras, racks up thousands in damages

Note to privacy-conscious vandals: If you're going to destroy Flock license plate readers, make sure you also take out the other CCTV cameras in the area that could catch you in your crime. Otherwise, you'll end up like one unlucky Californian. Marcus Bee, 40, was arrested by the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday, accused of joining the ever-growing band of US citizens damaging the cont…

Nouveau vs. NVIDIA R610 On CachyOS With The GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU

With the Razer Blade 18 as the first laptop Razer's certifying for (Ubuntu) Linux use while testing it out I was predominantly using the NVIDIA R610 official driver stack. Some users were interested though in how well this laptop is working with the open-source, upstream Nouveau+NVK driver stack given Razer is marketing this high-end laptop for Linux use too. Before sending the review unit back I…

Americans give all-day school phone bans a ringing endorsement

Americans are warming to the idea that schools should be for learning rather than doomscrolling, with support for all-day smartphone bans now outweighing opposition for the first time. A new Pew Research Center survey of 9,750 US adults found that 77 percent support banning smartphones during middle and high school classes, up from 68 percent in 2024. More significantly, support for so-called "be…

AMD Zen 6 Client HSMP Patches Point To "Ryzen Master" Functionality On Linux

In an interesting twist, patches this week posted to the Linux kernel mailing list are enabling AMD Zen 6 client desktop and laptop SoCs for the HSMP driver. Up to now the AMD HSMP Linux driver was just used for modern EPYC server processors while now we are seeing this HSMP driver supporting the upcoming Medusa and Olympic Ridge client platforms... Including mentions of overclocking and even noti…

[$] Reconsidering O_CREAT|O_DIRECTORY

Linux provides a system call (mkdir()) to create a directory, and a few variants of open() that can open a directory. There is, however, no system call in Linux that can create and open a directory in a single, race-free call. Jori Koolstra has been working on remedying that situation, most recently by repurposing a set of open() flags that currently return an error. There are, however, concerns t…

From individual achievement to partner impact

Organizations everywhere are investing in data and AI while customer expectations climb, with buyers demanding partners who can move quickly, solve complex problems, and turn technology spending into measurable results. That environment requires more than access to technology; it demands expertise applied consistently across teams, projects, and engagements. The latest Databricks survey on Databr…

Samsung warns memory crunch will last through 2028 as profit rises 19-fold

Samsung Electronics is warning that the current memory supply crunch will deepen next year and persist through 2028, a shortage that keeps padding its own record profits at the expense of enterprise customers and consumers. The Korean conglomerate said agentic AI has added to demand already generated by model training, driving an "unprecedented rise" in requirements for AI servers and other compu…

Another batch of single-fix stable kernels

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.18.41, 6.12.100, 6.6.147, 6.1.180, 5.15.213, and 5.10.262 stable kernels. Each of these kernels contains a single fix for a use-after-free vulnerability (CVE-2026-64560). Users of these kernels are advised to upgrade.…

Xen 4.22 Released With AMD Zen 5 BLT Support, Improved RISC-V Virtualization

The Xen Project today released Xen 4.22 as the newest feature release of this open-source hypervisor popular for open-source virtualization in automotive systems and other embedded use-cases as well as the cloud...…

Amazon links four poisoned npm packages to one North Korean crew

Amazon has linked the compromises of four npm packages over the past 18 months, saying they were all the work of the same North Korean crew. In research published this week, AWS attributed the activity with medium confidence to the North Korea-linked group tracked as Sapphire Sleet, which is widely regarded as a Lazarus Group offshoot. Rather than exploiting zero-days or hacking npm itself, the c…

Security updates for Thursday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, libtiff, libXfont2, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, and rest), Debian (expat and nss), Fedora (libssh, nginx, nginx-mod-brotli, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-headers-more, nginx-mod-modsecurity, nginx-mod-naxsi, nginx-mod-vts, nodejs24, perl-HTTP-Date, proftpd, squid, unbound, and wordpress), Oracle (c-ares, edk2, freerdp, go-fdo…

Microsoft makes Copilot harder to miss in Classic Outlook

Microsoft had some news for Classic Outlook users this week, though it wasn't an extension of support or an admission that new Outlook has failed to win over the holdouts. Instead, Copilot is getting a redesigned entry point above the ribbon. The rest of the Microsoft 365 has been has liberally daubed with Copilot, and venerable Classic Outlook is no exception. In a message posted to its administ…

Hims & Hers accused of sharing health secrets and hiding the cancel button

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is suing Telehealth company Hims & Hers over allegations that it shared customers' sensitive health data with advertising platforms and misled them about billing and cancellations. Hims & Hers (H&H), which offers online treatments for conditions including male pattern baldness, erectile dysfunction, obesity, and mental health disorders, shared "sensitive health…

MariaDB again faces questions over Galera's open source future

With support for MySQL Galera Cluster ending in two months, open source observers are again questioning how much of the technology's future MariaDB plc intends to keep in the community edition. The company says Galera remains a core, open source component of MariaDB while it develops separate replication capabilities for enterprise customers. In March, MariaDB, the company behind the database for…

Russian spies take their half-click email attack from Zimbra to Outlook

The Russian espionage crew that turned simply reading an email into a security risk has expanded beyond Zimbra, with Proofpoint saying it's now pulling the same half-click trick against Microsoft Outlook Web Access. Proofpoint says the cyber group it tracks as TA488, or "Laundry Bear," began exploiting CVE-2026-42897, a cross-site scripting flaw in the Outlook Web Access (OWA) component of on-pre…

Huawei Considers Open-Sourcing A Half-Hearted Mesa Vulkan Driver

A Huawei engineer posted to the Mesa mailing list today over potentially upstreaming a Vulkan driver they have developed for an in-house GPU. However, at least in current form, this new in-house GPU Vulkan driver is likely dead in the water from being upstreamed into Mesa...…

Patches Posted To Improve Linux Media Acceleration On Intel Alchemist GPUs

The Intel Arc A-Series graphics (DG2) remains in a bit of an awkward state on Linux due to the transition period moving from the i915 kernel driver to more modern and feature capable Xe kernel driver. It's only post-Alchemist where the Intel Xe driver is officially supported and used by default while those opting for the Xe driver with the A-Series can often enjoy better performance and functional…

The majority of corporate IT is now off premises for the first time

IT is going remote while sucking up more power. Most corporate IT is now off-premises for the first time, according to Uptime Institute, while the average rack power density has crested above 11 kW for the first time as server fleets are gradually replaced with more powerful hardware. Uptime’s Global Data Center Survey 2026 reveals how the industry is managing to adapt to challenging circumstance…

Five Proposals Now Being Weighed For Debian AI/LLM Usage

Last week Debian developers began considering a general resolution over AI large language model (LLM) usage within the Debian project. They are now up to weighing five different proposals for how to permit or block AI/LLM usage in the Debian space...…

Intel Media Driver & VPL GPU Runtime 2026Q2 Updates Continue Prepping For Nova Lake

Over the past few Intel VA-API Media Driver releases we have seen preparations made for Nova Lake video acceleration. That has continued today with the Intel Media Driver and Intel oneVPL GPU Runtime releases today with their new quarterly feature releases...…

30 years ago, AT&T gave Internet Explorer the default advantage

It is 30 years since AT&T handed Microsoft a valuable foothold in the browser wars by making Internet Explorer 3 the default for its WorldNet service. Windows 95 was barely a year old when AT&T set out to challenge CompuServe and America Online with its WorldNet service in 1996. The telecommunications giant needed a browser. Netscape Navigator dominated the market, but Microsoft was keen to make…

Brighton gig screen goes One Step Beyond with an update pop-up

BORK!BORK!BORK! An update message made an unscheduled appearance on a big screen during July's On The Beach event in Brighton, England. Partially obscured by speakers capable of deafening those at the back of the audience, the pop-up still managed to compete with the performers for attention. Thanks to modern technology, something unexpected appearing behind the performer is now high on the list…

Headteacher had the most guessable username-password combo you could imagine

PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly column where we show you how not to use your computer or your network. In this week’s fable of fecklessness, we talk about a teacher who had a lot to learn about 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. Our story comes courtesy of Kevin Wal…

Excuses like 'AI did it' don't exist in the eyes of the law

The OpenAI rogue agent behind the Hugging Face hack accessed four accounts on four services, according to updated company disclosures about the intrusion. One of those four accounts belonged to a Modal customer that had published an unauthenticated endpoint for running arbitrary code in a sandbox on the AI infrastructure provider, Hugging Face noted in its technical timeline and Modal later confi…

Veeam adds support for six more hypervisors in case you are up for a new one

Data protection vendor Veeam has decided the time is right to support half a dozen more hypervisors in case you are thinking of adopting a new one. Hypervisor migrations are currently a distinct possibility for VMware user who relies on vSphere for basic server virtualization, as Broadcom now focuses on its Cloud Foundation private cloud suite. That product is powerful and comprehensive, but Broa…

Curiosity rover spots field of giant honeycomb on Mars – but no giant space bees

NASA has shared new snaps captured by its Curiosity rover that show a large “field of honeycomb textures” on Mars. Here’s the best of the images Curiosity captured. It shows the honeycomb field, each element of which is four to eight centimeters across. NASA doesn’t know how the honeycomb formed, but The Register is willing to rule out space bees because Curiosity has seen this sort of thing befo…

Qualcomm won’t be a big datacenter player anytime soon

Qualcomm has predicted its entry to the datacenter market will yield $15 billion of annual revenue by FY 2029 – huge growth, but also a modest number compared to its more established rivals. The chip design firm dangled the $15 billion figure on Wednesday along with its Q3 results, which included a warning that revenue from its business selling modems to Apple is about to crater. Execs told inves…

Cisco 'retires' its Azure Local offering rather than catch up to Microsoft’s changed hardware requirements

Cisco has decided to “retire” its Azure Local offering due to changes Microsoft made to the hardware and partnerships it supports for the on-prem hyperconverged cloud stack. The networking giant quietly announced the change in a July 24 end of life and end of sale notice that reveals Cisco will stop selling its Azure Local bundles in October. That notice states Cisco will not offer a direct repla…

COSMIC Epoch 1.5 Brings More Fixes & Improvements To System76's Desktop

The System76 and Pop!_OS developers continue quickly iterating on their Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment...…

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 30, 2026

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Hazard pointers; DFSG team; Swap devices; Netkit and BPF; BPF inlined functions; Fedora GRUB; gccrs. Briefs: RIP Dan Williams; Debian LLM resolution; Fedora 45 process; Codeberg LLM policy; GCC LLM policy; GNU Binutils 2.47; GNU C Library 2.44; Wayfire 0.11; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.…

Microsoft's cloud brings rain of revenue but modest M365 AI revenue harvest

Microsoft on Wednesday reported $90 billion in revenue for the quarter ended June 30, an increase of 18 percent, lifting its stock more than 7 percent in after hours trading. The cash intake was more than Wall Street analysts anticipated, and showed up where it counted – the company's cloud business and AI services. Microsoft Cloud revenue reached $59.3 billion, up 27 percent year-over-year, and…

NOAA ditches weather-predicting supercomputers for Google Cloud

Uncle Sam will no longer be hosting his own supercomputers to predict the weather. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has picked Google Cloud to provide the infrastructure for its weather forecasting operations. In an announcement, NOAA boasted that it will be the first national weather prediction center to run on the commercial cloud, though the UK's Met Office is also in t…

DRM Format Modifiers For Old AMD GPUs Coming With Linux 7.3: Thanks Valve

Sent out today was another week's worth of features and other code changes to the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver. We are nearing the cut-off of new feature material for next month's Linux 7.3 kernel but there is some nice feature work in store for this week...…

Big vacuum is watching as robo-cleaners put humans behind the wheel

The dream of having a mechanical maid to clean your home is real … sort of. San Francisco residents can now hire a robot cleaner for just $30 an hour, but there's a catch. The robots are at least partially controlled by humans who are watching your home remotely. Tau Robotics cofounder and CEO Alexander Koch announced in a post on X Tuesday that his company was launching the waitlist for its invi…

Steam Client Adds HDR Streaming On Steam Deck OLED, AV1 Video Streaming

Today's Steam client beta update brings some new game streaming enhancements for Linux gamers...…

Uncle Sam sees the light, offers GlobalFoundries $300M to pursue silicon photonics while taking 1% stake

The US government has signed a letter of intent to provide GlobalFoundries with $300 million in CHIPS Act funding and, at the same time, receive a one percent stake in the company worth roughly $269 million. The money's supposedly not a tit-for-tat, but an investment designed to spur development of silicon photonics networking technologies that the AI industry needs for datacenters. “With today’s…

Closed models refuse to help researcher swat Linux bug

The guardrails that prevent closed-source, frontier models from aiding threat actors have turned into handcuffs that prevent those bots from helping to find and fix serious vulns. Daniel Fox Franke, a security researcher, was recently trying to track down the source of a segmentation fault in ripgrep, and found OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol wouldn't cooperate. "OpenAI's cybersecurity classifier is a huge…

[$] Debugging information for inlined functions

BPF programs use BPF type format (BTF) debugging information in order to determine how to interact with functions in the kernel. Specifically, tracing a kernel function involves finding its address in the kernel's BTF section — but that doesn't work for functions that have been inlined, and therefore don't have a single, specific address. Alan Maguire wants to add information about inlined functi…

Three stable kernels for Wednesday fix a single regression

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.12.99, 6.6.146, and 6.1.179 stable kernels. This batch of stable kernels includes a single fix for a regression caused by this commit. Users of those kernels should upgrade.…

🏃 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…

Word worm crawls into Copilot, spreads chaos

UPDATED Watch out for untrusted documents. According to research, an attacker can hide malicious instructions in a Word document that, when included in Copilot for Word’s context, may alter document output and copy the instructions into newly created files that use the affected document as source material, without the victim noticing. Håkon Måløy, a Norwegian data scientist with a PhD in applied…

Moscow slaps Telegram founder on wanted list, Durov responds with one-finger salute

Russia has charged Telegram founder Pavel Durov with facilitating terrorism and placed him on an international wanted list. The country's Federal Security Service (FSB) announced the charges on Wednesday, alleging that Telegram failed to remove channels, chats, and bots used by Ukrainian intelligence to recruit young Russians for sabotage and terrorism. The alleged offenses include armed attacks…

[$] Fedora approves a smaller GRUB

Leo Sandoval and Marta Lewandowska have put forward a change proposal for Fedora 45, which is expected in October, to provide a separate, slimmed-down version of GRUB for a niche use case. The new package would be in addition to the main GRUB package and would not replace it for the majority of Fedora users. The idea met with some resistance from Fedora contributors who thought that it would be be…

MinIO pitches persistent memory for agents with work to finish

Conventional chatbots respond to individual prompts and often retain only limited context. AI agents may carry out longer, multi-step jobs that span sessions, making persistent memory more important. Object storage vendor MinIO claims it can provide that memory. AI agents can help make decisions, create documents, draft analyses, and answer questions once handled by people alone. MinIO characteri…

The VMware deadline that could reshape your IT strategy

Turn VMware’s mandate into an opportunity with Nutanix Many VMware customers assumed the most disruptive effects of Broadcom’s acquisition were already behind them. Licensing changes and pricing shifts required attention, but infrastructure strategy largely stayed the same. But that assumption is about to be tested. Before the October 2027 end of general support for vSphere 8, VMware customers mu…

GCC steering committee announces AI policy

The GCC steering committee has announced that it has accepted an AI contributions policy recommended by the GCC AI policy working group. The policy, in part, states that the project will decline any "legally significant contributions which include LLM-generated content or are derived from LLM-generated content". It uses the definition of "legally significant" from the GNU Project maintainer guidel…

NASA Swift rescue mission spins into trouble during commissioning

Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft is having some attitude problems on its way to rescue NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, resulting in a multi-axis spin and loss of communications. LINK has three reaction wheels for attitude control, pointing, and stability, but the company said two are currently not operable. NASA reported some loss of functionality in its cold-gas thruster system as well. L…

Iran-linked CyberAv3ngers suspected in attacks on Minnesota water systems

Security researchers at Tenable suspect the Iran-linked faux hacktivist outfit CyberAv3ngers was behind the cyberattack that disrupted more than 30 Minnesota water facilities. Neither state-level nor federal officials have made any claims regarding attribution for the attacks, however, Tenable reckons the operational pattern is consistent with the crew's previous raids, noting the timing relative…

AI storage boom is keeping Seagate's hard drives spinning

The AI infrastructure boom isn't just eating all the memory – it's also driving demand for storage, giving high-capacity hard drives a new lease of life, according to Seagate. The storage veteran says cloud operators are buying ever more mass-capacity hardware as AI applications generate and retain growing volumes of data. "Datacenter demand now represents approximately 90 percent of our exabyte…

Intel Graphics Driver Support For Xe3 "Peak Bandwidth Threshold" Feature In Linux 7.3

Intel today sent out their latest batch of kernel graphics driver updates that are ready for staging ahead of next month's Linux 7.3 merge window...…

Security updates for Wednesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (dovecot, go-fdo-client, go-fdo-server, kernel, kernel-rt, and sssd), Debian (calibre, hplip, libraw, and samba), Fedora (btrbk, chromium, gpsd, kronosnet, and restic), Mageia (gstreamer1.0-libav and libslirp), Slackware (libarchive, samba, and seamonkey), SUSE (agama-web-ui, chromium, gimp, glib2, GraphicsMagick, ignition, ImageMagick, java-21-openjd…

Microsoft faces competition probe over Copilot subscription price hike

Microsoft faces an investigation by the UK's competition watchdog over whether customers were misled when it added features to Microsoft 365 subscriptions and raised prices. The issue dates back to January 2025, when Microsoft added new features, including Copilot, to its consumer package. At renewal, customers were automatically moved onto a more expensive tier containing those features unless t…

AI insiders ask Uncle Sam to help slow the race they started

More than 1,200 employees of frontier AI companies have signed a petition calling for US government support to develop ways of slowing automated AI development if necessary. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei, OpenAI chief scientist Jakub Pachocki, Google DeepMind chief strategy officer Jasjeet Sekhon, and Meta AI chief scientist Shengjia Zhao are among the signatories to the petition, which calls for to…

Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver To Windows

Valve has been sponsoring Collabora engineers with early phase, exploratory work for trying to bring the open-source Radeon Vulkan "RADV" driver to Microsoft Windows...…

Vibe Coded X11 YSERVER Gets Steam Working, Full-Screen Games With Cinnamon

A new software creation that debuted this summer was YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in Rust largely by AI via Claude Code. This YSERVER implementation has continued implementing more X11 protocol and other functionality to get more desktop environments and apps working surprisingly okay on this vibe coded X11 server. YSERVER 1.4 is now available as the latest in this quest...…

FreeBSD's Kernel Still Has A Bit Of GPL Code While Its Base User-Space Is GPL-Free

A few weeks ago there was excitement in the FreeBSD camp with FreeBSD 16 set to retire the last of its GPL code from the base system. While the retiring of the dialog code proclaimed that it was the last remaining piece of GPL software in the base system for FreeBSD, it turns out now that there is some GPL code within the FreeBSD kernel...…

GCC To Decline Any Significant Contributions Made Via AI/LLMs - Except For Test Cases

The GCC Steering Committee announced today that they have accepted the recommended policy of the GCC AI Policy Working Group, which means no "legally significant" code contributions made via AI/LLM agents will be accepted into this open-source compiler...…

ARCTIC Launches Its New Fan Controller That Already Has Mainline Linux Support

In over 22 years of Linux hardware reviews and testing at Phoronix, I have never been more excited for a fan controller... ARCTIC today launched their new Fan Controller and in making the product very unique for Linux users, it already has mainline Linux kernel support via a open-source driver contributed directly by ARCTIC...…

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…

[$] Progress toward compiling Linux with gccrs

The gccrs project, which is creating a Rust frontend for the GCC compiler, has spent the first half of 2026 focusing on compiling the Linux kernel. By testing the compiler against the kernel crates, the development team has made significant progress toward generating correct code for other Rust programs. As detailed in the project's weekly and monthly reports, this effort has uncovered and resolv…

Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?

Recent reports have raised alarm about the use of PatronScan, an ID-checking and face-scanning system, at multiple LGBTQ+ bars in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. Much of the attention has focused on reports that the system photographs patrons as they enter venues and questions about whether those images are used for facial recognition. A broader privacy concern also deserves scrutiny. For yea…

Wayfire 0.11 released

Version 0.11 of the wlroots-based Wayfire Wayland compositor has been released. Notable changes include better fractional scaling, per-output ICC profiles, support for additional Wayland protocols, and more.…

CachyOS Outperforming Windows 11, Slight Advantage Over Ubuntu & Fedora On AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470

A recent mini PC being benchmarked at Phoronix is the BOSGAME VTA-439 that employs the new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 Gorgon Point SoC. With the BOSGAME mini PC having shipped with Microsoft Windows 11, here are some comparison benchmarks of the out-of-the-box Windows 11 performance up against Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 while also tossing the rolling-release, highly-optimized Arch Linux…

A simple clustering algorithm for lists

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…

How JPEG works: Interactively explore JPEG's lossy compression methods

Making Referential Stability a Type

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…

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 rein 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 ha…

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…

‘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…

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…

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…