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GCC 13.5 Released With 265+ Bug Fixes ↗ (opens external article)

For those continuing to rely on the GCC 13 compiler in production that debuted more than three years ago, GCC 13.5 released today with more than 265 bug fixes. GCC 13.5 also caps off the GCC 13 series as the last planned point release...…

Digital Research's GEM opens a new window on Linux ↗ (opens external article)

Digital Research's GEM was one of the earliest graphical environments for PC compatibles, and an inspired hack has now resurrected it on Linux. GEM for Linux is a port of the Atari ST's graphical desktop, created by prolific Slovenian developer Tomaž Štih. Applications share a display server that can output directly through Linux's framebuffer or display the desktop in a window using Štih's SDL2-…

Cherenkov Radiation - traveling faster than light ↗ (opens external article)

BOFH: Oh no! The CMS ate 500 pages of corporate documentation ↗ (opens external article)

EPISODE 17 The new Boss is keen to acquire knowledge. So keen that he wants a quick rundown on our content management system so he can avail himself of our copious workplace documentation. "WELL," I say, bracing myself for a long session, "first things first, you'll need to get a strong coffee." "Why?" "Because our CMS is a place where documents go to die." "Surely it can't be that-" "Oh, it's ba…

Neijuan ↗ (opens external article)

DeepSeek's new model sets a template for powerful LLMs that run lean ↗ (opens external article)

Chinese AI darling DeepSeek unveiled an updated version of its cost-and-latency-optimized Flash model on Thursday, with a new version 4.1 that includes architectural improvements more significant than you would expect in a point release because the changes might open the door to larger, smarter, and less resource-intensive models. At 763 billion parameters, the point release is more than 2.5x the…

August Was World's Joint-Hottest Month On Record, Scientists Say ↗ (opens external article)

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: August was the joint-hottest month ever recorded, tying with July 2023, according to the EU's climate service. The record was driven by a combination of climate change and the rising influence of El Nino, pushing heat into the atmosphere across the Pacific. Temperatures for the month were 1.65C above pre-industrial levels -- surpassing…

On Call: Boss wrongly claimed IT deleted his files, refused to learn the one-click fix ↗ (opens external article)

ON CALL Friday morning is The Register's home for tech support stories, which we showcase in On Call – the weekly column made possible by readers generously sharing their experience of what it takes to fix things for the furious, fatuous, or feebleminded users that infest every workplace. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Lucia," who was once ordered to report immediately to a company d…

Microsoft annoints Rust as a 'Tier 1' internal language ↗ (opens external article)

When Microsoft's developers and engineers sit down to code, they can now choose to work in Rust, which Redmond has added to its list of canonical languages. “Rust now is a Tier One language at Microsoft, and that just means that it sits among C++, C# and TypeScript as the best supported languages for internal development in the company,” explained Victor Ciura, Microsoft principal engineer for th…

Astra for Coding: Why Are We Doing This Again? ↗ (opens external article)

GPT‑Live‑1 in the API ↗ (opens external article)

The Gemini app is now available for Windows ↗ (opens external article)

Exercise intensity is associated with cardiometabolic health ↗ (opens external article)

Climate 'Feedback Loops' Could Worsen Global Warming By 30%, Study Finds ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels are transforming the world's forests, wetlands and tundra to the point they are releasing emissions that could further worsen global heating by as much as 30%, a new study has found. As the world heats up, permafrost in the high latitudes is thawing, fiercer wildfires are burning…

Oracle says AI will save it from the SaaSpocalypse, not bring it on ↗ (opens external article)

Oracle has argued AI will strengthen its applications business, by giving customers new ways to use software and making them easier to implement. Co-CEO Mike Sicilia decided to defend applications in his first remarks on Oracle’s Q1 FY 2027 earnings call. “The introduction of AI is an accelerator, not a replacement for packaged applications,” he argued. “Before AI came along, application suites h…

Mexican student creates an acoustic fire extinguisher to put out fire in seconds ↗ (opens external article)

BeOS-Inspired Haiku Now Supports Changing Audio Outputs Live, Other Improvements ↗ (opens external article)

In addition to August bringing the long-awaited Haiku R1 Beta 6 release, there was also a lot of development progress on this BeOS-inspired operating system too during the course of the past month...…

YuE2 · Frontier Music with Symbolic Planning ↗ (opens external article)

Thelio Mira AI Linux Workstation: 192 GB GPU Memory ↗ (opens external article)

Latest Apple Watch Can Grab Snippets of Conversation Without Both Speakers' Consent ↗ (opens external article)

Apple's new Audio Intelligence features for the Apple Watch Series 12 are drawing privacy concerns because they can process nearby conversations without explicit consent from everyone involved. "Live Rewind lets you instantly see the last 15 seconds of a conversation as text," Apple explains in its technical summary (PDF). "Siri Recap summarizes conversations throughout your day and produces high-…

OpenAI arms devs with AI conversation tool that can talk and listen at the same time ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI has launched a version of its latest real-time full-duplex voice model as an API, allowing software developers to implement more responsive voice-enabled apps and conversational workflows. GPT-Live-1 debuted in July, offering a way to interact through spoken prompts and responses instead of through typed text. Initially available through the ChatGPT interface, the voice model can now be re…

Nine coding harnesses vs. your laptop ↗ (opens external article)

Latest Anthropic horror story chills with tales of kamikaze drone swarms and bioweapons research ↗ (opens external article)

In the latest installment of "my AI model is more dangerous than yours," Anthropic on Thursday warned that cybercriminals and state-sponsored hackers alike are using its Claude models to automate cyberattacks, build kamikaze drone swarms, conduct mass surveillance operations, and try to develop an even more dangerous version of a deadly mosquito-borne virus. The baddies have come a long way since…

Boy developed "toasted skin" condition from using a laptop every day ↗ (opens external article)

Fears that modern electronic devices may harm children are nothing new. Gadgets with screens of any size have long been allegedly melting, rotting, and/or corrupting the brains of youths for decades. However, a medical case report published this week offers a new and alarming way our digital doodads may cause physical harm. In BMJ Case Reports, two UK doctors, Mara Znagoveanu and Edward Artley, r…

GIMP 3.2.6 Released With Some Early Preparations Toward Eventual GTK4 Port ↗ (opens external article)

The long-awaited GIMP 3.0 release for transitioning from GTK2 to GTK3 only saw its stable release last year. But with GTK4 already being out for years, GIMP developers have begun making some very early preparations toward an inevitable GTK4 port...…

Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons ↗ (opens external article)

Anthropic says it has disrupted several cases this year in which scientists used Claude for biological research that could potentially aid bioweapons development. "In a report describing misuses of its A.I. models, Anthropic said it could not determine whether the research served a legitimate or nefarious purpose because valid biological inquiry -- the kind that can lead to breakthroughs like vacc…

NTSB issues investigative update on B-767 runway excursion accident in Miami ↗ (opens external article)

Mesa 26.3 RADV + RadeonSI Ready With DRM Format Modifiers For Older AMD GPUs ↗ (opens external article)

Coming with Linux 7.3 is DRM format modifiers for GFX6 through GFX8 era GPUs covering the original Raddeon HD 7000 (GCN 1.0) graphics cards up through the Polaris and Fiji series. This work by Valve's Timur Kristóf is necessary for these older GPUs to support Vulkan-based Wayland compositors, better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan or other APis, compositors running on the Zink OpenGL-on…

Android Rolling Out Passkey Transfers Between Password Managers ↗ (opens external article)

Android is rolling out a system-level way to securely transfer passwords and passkeys between credential managers, eliminating the need to export passwords as unencrypted text files or manually recreate passkeys. The feature initially supports Google Password Manager, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane, with other providers able to integrate through Android's Credentials Transfer API. 9to5Google r…

LinkedIn beats "BrowserGate" lawsuits over scanning users' Chrome extensions ↗ (opens external article)

LinkedIn beat two lawsuits over its practice of scanning users’ browser extensions, with a judge granting the Microsoft subsidiary's motion to dismiss the cases. The users who sued LinkedIn failed to adequately allege that they have standing to sue because neither asserted that they "had browser extensions installed that conveyed private information to LinkedIn," ruled Judge Vince Chhabria in US…

ABC Show Won't Air Interview With Democrat Because of FCC Threats ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: ABC's Jimmy Kimmel said he will be interviewing a Democratic candidate for Senate tonight, but the interview will be on YouTube only and not broadcast on TV because of threats made by the Federal Communications Commission. Kimmel has been a prime target in the Trump FCC's attacks on ABC and its owner, Disney. In his monologue last night, Kimme…

Watch out: Apple timepiece can grab snippets of conversation without both speakers' consent ↗ (opens external article)

With the release of Apple Watch Series 12, Apple has decided that it's ok to capture people's conversations without their consent. The latest Apple Watch comes with Audio Intelligence, a set of AI audio processing capabilities tuned for the company's S11 chip. Its features include: Sound Recognition, Music Recognition with Shazam, Live Rewind, and Siri Recap. "Live Rewind lets you instantly see t…

Proof of Capture: Apple Reference Image, but open source and using steganography ↗ (opens external article)

Shopify extends lifeline to Tailwind as vibe coding erodes web dev platform's bottom line ↗ (opens external article)

Tailwind CSS may still be open source, but it’s not independent anymore: It’s now a Shopify product. Tailwind Labs CEO Adam Wathan shared news of Shopify’s acquisition of his company in a blog post Thursday. Wathan said that he chose to sell to Shopify because the ecommerce platform was an early adopter of Tailwind CSS, and will serve as an ideal place for his open-source web development platform…

OpenAI Agents API ↗ (opens external article)

The Deathray: A simple way for an untrusted site to freeze a Mac ↗ (opens external article)

We All Deserve a Better Internet, Not A Smaller One ↗ (opens external article)

Bans Like California’s Don’t Fix What’s Wrong With Social Media Companies SAN FRANCISCO - Technology and the laws that regulate it should support and empower young people. California’s AB 1709 - signed into law today by Gov. Gavin Newsom - falls far short of this goal, say the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and its allies.    Using technology is how we learn and build community in today’s wo…

Europe will go it alone on Venus mission after NASA yanks radar instrument ↗ (opens external article)

The European Space Agency is moving "full steam ahead" with development of a robotic mission to Venus after NASA officials determined they were unlikely to fulfill a commitment to provide a US-built radar instrument for the spacecraft, the mission's project scientist said. The European orbiter, named Envision, will map the Venusian surface at 10 times higher resolution than the last radar mission…

OpenAI Targets Work of Wall Street Junior Bankers ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Financial Services, a Wall Street-focused version of ChatGPT Work developed with Morgan Stanley and Evercore that can research companies, analyze financial data, and build presentations using the company's latest and most advanced model, GPT-6 Astra. "We're effectively teaching ChatGPT to research like an analyst and back up its conclusions like an analyst as well,"…

Hundreds of AI agents helped PaperCut attacker hit 395+ orgs, and some went off script ↗ (opens external article)

An unknown attacker used hundreds of AI agents to exploit two PaperCut MF/NG bugs and break into at least 395 organizations. The victims were concentrated in the US education sector, and the intrusions moved fast. In one case, an American high school went from initial access to domain admin in seven minutes. These agents, powered by OpenAI’s Codex harness and a DeepSeek model, also allowed the mi…

Android can now securely migrate your logins between password managers ↗ (opens external article)

As longer, more complex passwords have become a necessity, remembering all those strings of numbers, letters, and special characters has become nearly impossible. Password managers can solve that problem, but what happens when you want to move to a different login organizer? Sure, you could manually type all your logins into a new app, but now Android can do that for you without the tedium. Googl…

OpenAI's website-hijacking swarm reached far further than we thought ↗ (opens external article)

Getting straight answers out of OpenAI about how many websites and services its agents have hijacked increasingly seems like pulling teeth, as the company seems intent on making the world discover each instance one by one. Case in point: The OpenAI agent swarm we reported last week had taken over an obscure German wiki appears to have written content to an additional 20 websites, and used 14 fetc…

Panic builds over bankrupt Spirit’s looming data sale to Google ↗ (opens external article)

Doug Kreuzkamp was shocked when news outlets reported that Google won an auction to buy a huge amount of operational data as part of Spirit Airlines’ bankruptcy proceedings. Kreuzkamp founded a startup called Springshot in 2011, which created a widely used proprietary platform that helps humans and AI systems improve airline efficiency and quickly solve logistics problems so flights can stay on t…

IMDb Adds 'Digital Creator' Profiles For the First Time ↗ (opens external article)

IMDb is introducing "Digital Creator" as a new professional category on IMDb and IMDbPro, giving streamers, vloggers, influencers, video essayists, and other online creators a "dedicated way to represent [their] work and connect with audiences, industry peers, and potential employers," according to IMDb. Variety reports: The category includes sub-professions to further specify their work, includin…

Physicist does the math on Star Trek’s “Picard maneuver” ↗ (opens external article)

It turns out Jean-Luc Picard was an even better starship helmsman than the writers knew. A physicist has gone through the details of a warp-speed trick from the first season of Star Trek: The Next Generation and found a subtlety the show missed. But instead of a plot hole, the detail he found actually makes the maneuver more impressive… as well as a great opportunity to teach about a lesser-known…

Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS Released With Linux 7.0 HWE Stack ↗ (opens external article)

For those continuing to make use of the Ubuntu 24.04 Long Term Support "LTS" series, Ubuntu 24.04.5 LTS is out today as the newest point release...…

JEP 544: Ahead-of-Time Code Compilation ↗ (opens external article)

Kimmel's ABC show won't air interview with Democrat because of Trump FCC threats ↗ (opens external article)

ABC's Jimmy Kimmel said he will be interviewing a Democratic candidate for Senate tonight, but the interview will be on YouTube only and not broadcast on TV because of threats made by the Federal Communications Commission. Kimmel has been a prime target in the Trump FCC's attacks on ABC and its owner, Disney. In his monologue last night, Kimmel said he'll be interviewing Democrat James Talarico,…

Detecting and countering misuse of AI: September 2026 ↗ (opens external article)

Music Theory for the 21st-Century Classroom ↗ (opens external article)

Automattic's Board Forces CEO Matt Mullenweg Into Leave of Absence ↗ (opens external article)

Automattic's board has placed founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence against his will, with CFO Mark Davies taking over as interim CEO. The reason for the move remains unclear, but it follows years of legal fights, layoffs, employee departures, and controversy surrounding Mullenweg's leadership. TechCrunch reports: Earlier Wednesday, Mullenweg posted in a Slack channel visible t…

China’s drone supremacy shows in airlifting bodies and food after Nepal flood disaster ↗ (opens external article)

Chinese-made drones are flying out the bodies of flood victims and delivering food to survivors in the aftermath of devastating flash floods on the border of Nepal and China’s Tibetan region. Nepal’s army has been using four DJI FlyCart 100 drones donated from China to make 10 to 16 aid deliveries each day, according to Reuters. This comes after a partial glacier collapse in the Himalayan mountai…

Intel Xeon 600 Workstation Performance vs. AMD Threadripper 9000 In Nearly 400 Benchmarks ↗ (opens external article)

Last month I had the chance to test the Xeon 678X workstation processor as my first hands-on opportunity with the Xeon 600 "Granite Rapids WS" series. The Intel Xeon 678X was within the HP Z4 G6i workstation and used it for a number of different benchmarks. In that HP workstation review were also some comparison points to the likes of AMD Ryzen Threadripper while in this article are some much more…

KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta Released With Many Great Improvements, Kup Backup Scheduler ↗ (opens external article)

Ahead of the stable release of Plasma 6.8 due out on 14 October that also marks the 30th anniversary of the KDE project, out today is the much anticipated beta release...…

next-20260910: linux-next ↗ (opens external article)

Version:next-20260910 (linux-next) Released:2026-09-10…

AI job cuts could come with a costly undo button ↗ (opens external article)

Gartner forecasts that, by 2029, nearly a third of employees laid off because of AI will need to be rehired, often at significantly higher cost. The global research firm warned that workforce cuts could save money in the short term but risk weakening talent pipelines and eroding institutional knowledge over the longer term. With labor force growth flat or declining worldwide, competition for tale…

NASA and IBM open source lunar mapping tools ↗ (opens external article)

IBM and NASA have got together again and released an open source AI model of the Moon that could be used to make new discoveries about Earth’s natural satellite. The NASA‑IBM Lunar Foundation Model has been trained on an extensive lunar observation dataset curated by researchers at the two organizations, and is available now on Hugging Face. It is claimed as the first AI model to integrate observ…

Forgejo <=16.0.3 Critical RCE ↗ (opens external article)

Neki – Sharded Postgres ↗ (opens external article)

Cognition launches new SWE-2 model, Rivaling Fable 5.1 and GPT-Astra ↗ (opens external article)

Technique for Manipulating Satellite Photos Now Reveals Ancient Images (2025) ↗ (opens external article)

Don't let anyone take away your big box of cables ↗ (opens external article)

The Apple Watch Gets Its Siri AI Upgrade ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Apple has unveiled the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 today during itsSeptember hardware event. The new models retain the signature designs of their predecessors but add a faster S11 chip, new health and fitness features, and the watchOS 27 software update announced atWWDC last June. Both the Series 12 and Ultra 4 run on the upgraded S11 chip, whi…

Azure SQL Data Sync stops taking newcomers before 2027 execution ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has entered the final phase of retiring Azure SQL Data Sync, blocking new deployments in subscriptions that have never used the service. The restriction took effect on September 9, ahead of the service's shutdown on September 30, 2027. Subscriptions that already use the service can continue creating, modifying, and managing sync groups and member databases until retirement. Other subscr…

Shopify is moving from React Native back to Swift and Kotlin ↗ (opens external article)

Nscale swallows lion's share of UK datacenter investment ↗ (opens external article)

Nscale accounts for nearly two-thirds of the equity funding raised by UK datacenter infrastructure companies, according to a report from Tracxn. The market research firm identifies the rent-a-GPU operation as the only unicorn – a privately held company valued at more than $1 billion – in Britain's datacenter infrastructure sector. Nscale leads the pack with $3.7 billion raised, according to Tracx…

Rust is tier-1 language at Microsoft ↗ (opens external article)

ShinyHunters expose 6.4M in attack on medical supplier McKesson ↗ (opens external article)

McKesson's cyberattack last month affected roughly 6.4 million individuals, according to Have I Been Pwned (HIBP). The breach notification service added data leaked by serial extortionists ShinyHunters, revealing the scale of the attack for the first time. ShinyHunters initially claimed to have stolen 284 million documents from the medical and pharmaceutical supply company in August, although HIB…

d-Matrix drinks the Nvidia Kool-Aid with NVLink Fusion and MGX rack designs ↗ (opens external article)

AI infrastructure startup d-Matrix on Thursday joined the growing list of chipmakers licensing Nvidia’s NVLink Fusion interconnect tech and rack-scale reference designs to make its high-performance inference platform more accessible to customers. Under the deal, d-Matrix will integrate support for NVLink Fusion, a high-speed chip-to-chip interconnect that Nvidia began licensing last year, into fu…

Intel BFF Driver Slated For Linux 7.4 Introduction ↗ (opens external article)

Last month I covered Intel posting a new driver named "BFF" for the Linux kernel. This BFF driver is for a new hardware feature debuting with next-gen Diamond Rapids processors for better dealing with aging CPU silicon where some bits may become stuck over time...…

Ministers rejected NATS reimbursement plan before 2,000 UK flights were cancelled ↗ (opens external article)

The UK government opposed a proposal to make air traffic control provider NATS reimburse airlines for passenger compensation arising from its failures, weeks before a massive tech glitch led to 2,000 flight cancellations. During a House of Commons debate, Liberal Democrat MP Luke Taylor pointed out that the government had opposed the amendment in the months before this week's computer outage, whi…

Artemis II commander and pilot become NASA's first astronaut emeriti ↗ (opens external article)

The commander and pilot of NASA's Artemis II mission have gained a new distinction five months after splashing down from the Moon: They're not fully retiring from the space agency. Reid Wiseman and Victor Glover are the first astronauts to join NASA's emeritus program, enabling them to continue to support the work being done at Johnson Space Center in Houston. They will remain available to train…

Trezor, BitBox users targeted in newsletter phishing spree ↗ (opens external article)

Crypto hardware wallet maker Trezor says the third-party email service provider it uses to send newsletters has been breached, and customers are now being sent phishing messages. There is good and bad news. The good news is that the emails appear easy to spot. They are not bespoke to each recipient and resemble a spray-and-pray campaign rather than sophisticated targeting that uses customer-speci…

NVIDIA NVK Driver Lands Improvement To Help With Valve's Gamescope ↗ (opens external article)

Merged today for next quarter's Mesa 26.3 release is an improvement for the open-source NVIDIA "NVK" Vulkan driver paired with the Nouveau kernel driver. This latest NVK improvement benefits usage of Valve's Gamescope micro-compositor and should help with performance during game recording and remote play...…

Europe May Finally Have Found a Space Entrepreneur Who Is Meeting the Moment ↗ (opens external article)

French entrepreneur Helene Huby is emerging as one of Europe's most ambitious space leaders, with The Exploration Company raising a record $450 million Series C as it develops the Nyx cargo capsule, a crewed spacecraft, and a reusable heavy-lift rocket. Huby argues Europe risks falling irrelevance without a much larger rocket flying at high cadence. Her company is targeting a 400,000-pound-thrust…

AI uprising postponed after Copilot falls off the web ↗ (opens external article)

Fears of an AI takeover remain unfounded after Microsoft demonstrated that Copilot can sometimes struggle to remain upright, let alone march over the remnants of humanity. The copilot.microsoft.com website fell over for an hour and 40 minutes overnight, returning a Cloudflare Error 1016 message when users attempted to chat with the bot. The outage lasted from 2225 UTC on September 9 until 0005 UT…

X.Org Server 26.1 Moves Closer To Release As Half-Decade Update ↗ (opens external article)

We're getting closer to the X.Org Server 26.1 stable release as the first new tagged feature release since X.Org Server 21.1 debuted back in October 2021. There have been some new features, many code reverts, and many bug fixes merged over the past five years that will culminate with the X.Org Server 26.1 stable release...…

GNOME 51 Adds Support For Custom Pointer Acceleration Profiles ↗ (opens external article)

As a last minute change ahead of next week's GNOME 51 desktop release, changes to Mutter and gsettings-desktop-schemas have now landed for supporting custom pointer acceleration profiles...…

COSMIC Epoch 1.8 Provides Latest Fixes & Minor Improvements For This Rust Desktop ↗ (opens external article)

Released overnight was the newest version of the Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment developed by System76 as part of the effort on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...…

GNU Automake 1.19 Released With More Than One Year Worth Of Fixes ↗ (opens external article)

For those continuing to use GNU Automake over the likes of Meson or CMake for your build system, Automake 1.19 is out today as the first new release in 15 months. Among the many fixes in this release is for a bug dating back 14 years...…

German optics giant ditches greenfield SAP migration ↗ (opens external article)

Zeiss Group has ditched plans for a greenfield ERP migration to latest S/4HANA platform from SAP following years of struggle trying to move off an ageing R/3 system. The industrial optics company with revenue of around €11.896 billion said it was seeking to “realign” its ERP migration plans by moving its existing landscape to the new platform, a so-called "brownfield” migration. SAP has long reco…

Digital sovereignty sounds great until you try ditching your suppliers ↗ (opens external article)

After years of governments and tech vendors banging the digital sovereignty drum, most large organizations have concluded that true technological independence is beyond their reach. That's according to new research from Capgemini, which found that 59 percent of organizations regard complete digital sovereignty as unrealistic. Instead, two-thirds define it in terms of what the consultancy calls "r…

Dark Energy Debunked? Cosmic Acceleration May Be an Illusion ↗ (opens external article)

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily: A new analysis of more than 1,700 supernovae is questioning whether the universe is really accelerating at all. After accounting for the ages of the stars that produce these explosions, researchers found signs that cosmic expansion may actually be slowing. They also argue that the apparent acceleration changes with direction, which would be diff…

Dental contractor set up secret account with access to 4,000 patient records then left the company ↗ (opens external article)

PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we highlight examples of how not to handle your security. This week’s tale of woe comes from a very unhealthy part of the healthcare sector. 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 Chris Kirksey, founder and CEO of D…

More questions about whether researchers can trust OpenAI with unpublished math ↗ (opens external article)

Laptop-slinger Framework refunding customers who paid top dollar for RAM ↗ (opens external article)

Laptop-maker Framework has decided to refund some of its customers who paid high prices for its model 13 Pro laptop due to the soaring cost of RAM. In July, the company told some customers who had ordered its very repairable machines that if they ordered 64GB of RAM, they would get just 32GB. “We recently received a cost update from our LPCAMM2 supplier that goes far beyond anything we had predic…

Microsoft goes after Salesforce and ERP users with AI-powered converter ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has found another use for AI: providing an off-ramp for Salesforce customers. The software giant on Wednesday gave the world “Dynamics 365 Activate,” software that executive veep for Apps and Agents Jeff Teper described as “a comprehensive, AI-powered tool that can help partners and customers move to Dynamics 365 faster, with less manual effort and lower migration risk.” Microsoft has m…

Anthropic Reveals Fourth Likely Crime Committed By Its AI ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Amid industry soul-searching about the possibility of AI improving itself to the point that it kills everyone, Anthropic has revealed yet another incident that would qualify as a crime if perpetrated by a person. The AI biz published "an alignment assessment" detailing four times Claude models accessed third-party systems without authorization…

VMware defends ending downloads of SDK that helps VM backups – or migrations to rivals ↗ (opens external article)

VMware has defended its decision to end public downloads of its Virtual Disk Development Kit (VDDK). VDDK is an SDK that a Broadcom technical document describes as “a set of libraries and utilities that enable software developers to create applications that can access and manipulate virtual disks used” and also “provides APIs for backup and recovery, cloning, and other operations on virtual disks…

Steam Client Beta Improves Big Picture Mode, Several Linux Enhancements ↗ (opens external article)

Tonight Valve released a big Steam client beta update with a number of new features and fixes...…

Anthropic reveals fourth likely crime committed by its AI ↗ (opens external article)

Amid industry soul-searching¹ about the possibility of AI improving itself to the point that it kills everyone, Anthropic has revealed yet another incident that would qualify as a crime if perpetrated by a person. The AI biz published "an alignment assessment" detailing four times Claude models accessed third-party systems without authorization. The company has already reported three of the incid…

Google to Invest Record $15 Billion In AI Infrastructure In Finland ↗ (opens external article)

Google plans to invest at least $15 billion in AI infrastructure in Finland through 2028, its largest single investment in Europe. The company also signed a 22-year power agreement with Finnish utility Fortum and said it will explore business models that could support new nuclear reactors at Fortum's Loviisa site. Finland has emerged as a major data-center hub thanks to its available land and powe…

Novel Blue Moon kit targeting Chrome and Windows reflects new reality of AI-driven exploits ↗ (opens external article)

At least four espionage groups, most with suspected links to China, are using a new exploit kit that chains two Chromium-based browser flaws and one Microsoft Windows bug to break into organizations' networks in the US and Southeast Asia. Mark Kelly, a threat researcher at email security shop Proofpoint, told The Register that the researchers don't know exactly who was targeted, nor how, and so f…

Apple's New iPhone Camera Mode Promises to Prove Your Photo Isn't AI ↗ (opens external article)

Apple is introducing a new "Reference Image" mode on the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max that uses the camera sensor to digitally sign captured data and create an "unalterable" version of a photo, giving users a way to verify what the camera actually saw before any edits were made. The Verge reports: As AI-generated images and videos become more realistic, several new standards have emerged to label ima…

Four groups caught using the same Chrome and Windows exploit kit ↗ (opens external article)

A nearly identical exploit kit that targets critical vulnerabilities in both Chromium-based browsers and older versions of Windows is being actively used by at least four hacking groups, some of which have ties to the Chinese government. Researchers from security firm Proofpoint said Wednesday that BlueMoon, the name they gave to the kit, chains three vulnerabilities together so the attackers usi…

AI models don't kill people – people kill people ↗ (opens external article)

OPINION Anthropic researcher Jacob Coxon publicly announced his resignation on X late Monday over concerns that AI "could kill us all by the end of the decade." A lot of people have expressed opinions about his point of view, leading to more than 110 million views of the message in less than 24 hours, perhaps helped along by X algorithms that boost messages critical of owner Elon Musk's AI rivals…

Apple hawks $2k folding fondleslab ↗ (opens external article)

It’s been a long time since Apple introduced a truly new product. The world finally got one today in the form of the folding iPhone Duo, and while it's new for Apple, it's not new for the industry. Nonetheless, Apple is once again hoping to validate a mostly moribund market as it did with tablets and smartwatches – folding phones only made up 1.6% of total smartphone sales last year, according to…

Europe may finally have found a space entrepreneur who is meeting the moment ↗ (opens external article)

All of a sudden, French entrepreneur Hèlene Huby is seemingly everywhere. This week she is serving as one of two envoys, alongside astronaut Thomas Pesquet, at a high-profile International Space Summit convened by French President Emmanuel Macron. The government's website for the event describes her as chief executive of "the fastest-growing space company in Europe." Also this week, that firm, Th…

Samsung to help fortify OpenAI's semiconductor supply chain ↗ (opens external article)

UPDATED OpenAI will design its next-generation AI accelerators with the help of South Korean foundry giant Samsung Electronics. This move could help the ChatGPT maker with memory, process tech, or other key things it needs to succeed. The announcement, made by OpenAI Korea general manager Harrison Kim in a press conference Wednesday, comes just weeks after the company showed its first-generation…

ReactOS Dev Gets FEX Running For x86_64 Games On This "Open-Source Windows" OS Under ARM ↗ (opens external article)

A ReactOS developer for this open-source operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Windows drivers and applications has achieved an intriguing software stack. With the experimental ReactOS ARM64 build for running on 64-bit ARM hardware like Raspberry Pi SBCs, he's paired that "open-source Windows" OS with the open-source FEX emulator for in turn being able to run Windows x64…

Cops Play Hide and Seek About Using Spy Tech to Avoid Scrutiny and Bad PR ↗ (opens external article)

Law enforcement agencies across the country are increasingly relying on spying technologies—automated license plate readers (ALPR), cell-site simulators, and facial recognition, to name a few--causing an outcry in many communities where people are rightly concerned about the threat to civil rights and civil liberties these tools present.Some authorities are responding to these concerns by trying t…

Six Chinese AI firms accused of aggressively copying US frontier models ↗ (opens external article)

The United States has now named six Chinese AI firms accused of waging industrial-scale attacks distilling US frontier AI model capabilities and perhaps sparing billions in Chinese development costs. In a joint release Tuesday, the National Security Agency (NSA), Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA), and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) alleged that DeepSeek, Moonshot AI,…

Apple's long-rumored foldable becomes reality with the $2,000 iPhone Duo ↗ (opens external article)

Apple ended today's hardware event with one of its classic "One more thing" reveals. Some smartphone makers have been offering foldable phones for the better part of a decade, but Apple has now joined the fray with the iPhone Duo after years of speculation. This device is undeniably the most capable iPhone ever, as well as the most expensive. It's not as spendy as many expected, though, starting…

When it comes to Beatles references, scientists can't let it be ↗ (opens external article)

Scientists have an indisputable playful side, evidenced by frequent allusions to popular culture in their research publications. That includes popular song lyrics. And the most popular musical group, in terms of how frequently their songs and lyrics appear in the scientific literature, is The Beatles, according to a new paper published in the journal PLoS ONE. “Some of these are genuinely brillia…

Lawsuit: Amazon refused to give pregnant workers bathroom breaks and chairs ↗ (opens external article)

Amazon discriminated against pregnant warehouse employees by denying accommodations like bathroom breaks and the option to sit while working, according to a lawsuit filed yesterday by four women who worked for Amazon while pregnant. The lawsuit is a class-action complaint that seeks to represent Amazon workers throughout the US. "Plaintiffs Willamina Barclay, Kristina Green, Jennifer Hatch, and D…

Apple debuts $129 AirPods 5 with better noise cancellation and transparency mode ↗ (opens external article)

Apple has debuted the new AirPods 5 with improved active noise cancellation and sound quality—aiming to provide improved listening and user features at a lower launch price than the predecessor AirPods 4. The newest AirPods will go on sale for $129 in stores starting on September 18, according to an Apple press release accompanying the company’s “Surprise and Shine” event. Customers can also purc…

Apple starts preorders for Watch Series 12, Ultra 4 with new Health Sensing System ↗ (opens external article)

Apple announced the Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 today. Both include a new "Health Sensing System" and S11 chip that give the devices the “most accurate heart rate sensing in a wearable," Apple claimed during its fall event. Apple's depiction of the S11 chip. Credit: Apple Both watches will use the new S11 chip alongside the new "Health Sensing System," allowing the watches to deliver higher-frequ…

The quick guide to fall vaccines and when you should get them ↗ (opens external article)

Labor Day is in the rearview mirror, kids are back to school, and a squall of pumpkin spice is upon us. It's that time again to prepare for the equally inevitable respiratory virus season with annual vaccines. With fervent anti-vaccine activist Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as the country's top health official, it might seem like the rollout of this year's shots could be a disaster. For instance, one of…

Digital Sovereignty: What It Is, What It Could Be ↗ (opens external article)

The term “digital sovereignty” has become ubiquitous. European officials invoke it in debates about cloud infrastructure, AI, semiconductors, and platform regulation. Governments throughout the global majority use it to argue for greater control over data and communications infrastructure and boost their economies. Companies market “sovereign cloud” products designed to reassure their customers th…

Apple's iPhone 18 Pro adds variable camera aperture and a more powerful chip ↗ (opens external article)

CUPERTINO, Calif.—Apple's new iPhone 18 Pro is an iterative update that—as usual—focuses heavily on both performance and new camera features. This time around, many of the new camera features are oriented around giving the user more direct control of the image, rather than depending entirely on Apple's computational photography assumptions. As usual, the new iPhone has a new chip. It's called A20…

Serial Microsoft 0-day hunter drops yet another Defender exploit ↗ (opens external article)

Zero-day researcher Nightmare Eclipse, aka MSNightmare, published yet another Microsoft Defender proof-of-concept exploit for a zero-day dubbed ShieldCrash, which they claim will allow attackers to bypass the earlier ShieldBreak patch and read files as SYSTEM. “I might rework this later into a full SYSTEM PoC but for now I'm dropping this skeleton PoC because I'm feeling a bit lazy,” the prolific…

Popular navigation apps unlikely to ditch Mercator maps despite UN resolution ↗ (opens external article)

Nearly every country represented in the United Nations General Assembly recently voted in favor of promoting world maps that more accurately show the size of various continents. But the UN resolution is unlikely to change how millions of people regularly see versions of 16th-century Mercator maps depicting skewed continent sizes in navigation apps. On September 4, the African-led resolution attra…

Chinese researchers find egg-cellent way to keep space debris from scrambling craft ↗ (opens external article)

There’s a lot of garbage floating around in low Earth orbit that threatens both crewed and uncrewed spacecraft, but a new idea based on one of nature's enduring shapes could offer better protection against debris impacts that's no yolk. Bad puns aside, and we do beg your forgiveness, Chinese researchers at Dalian University of Technology have developed a new spacecraft armor design that, accordin…

Running AMD openSIL + Coreboot On The First Available Ryzen AM5 Motherboard ↗ (opens external article)

Earlier this year the 3mdeb firmware consulting firm ported AMD openSIL CPU open-source silicon initialization library and Coreboot to an EPYC motherboard, the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1. Their next feat now achieved is bringing AMD openSIL and Coreboot to a desktop AMD Ryzen motherboard with their downstream Dasharo firmware solution. I have been running this alternative firmware on the MSI PRO B850P WiFi…

2026 EFF Award Winners: Access Now, 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, DeFlock, and New Media Rights ↗ (opens external article)

EFF is pleased to announce that Access Now, 7amleh – The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, DeFlock, and New Media Rights have received 2026 EFF Awards for their vital work in ensuring that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people.  The EFF Awards recognize specific and substantial technical, social, economic, or cultural contributions in diverse fields inc…

Google takes the nuclear option for €13B Finland expansion ↗ (opens external article)

Google plans to invest at least €13 billion ($15 billion) in digital infrastructure and supporting projects in Finland over the next two years. The cloud and search services giant says it is deepening its long-term commitment to Finland and to Europe through additional datacenters and investments in low-carbon electricity generation, onshore wind, and battery storage. Google already has a massive…

XWayland 26.1 RC2 Released For Testing With More Fixes ↗ (opens external article)

Following last month's initial release candidate of XWayland 26.1 with its many new features, a second release candidate is now available with a number of fixes...…

UK government says Fujitsu won't use framework places to chase new customers ↗ (opens external article)

The UK government has told MPs that Fujitsu has promised not to pursue contracts with new public sector customers through frameworks potentially worth billions of pounds while its voluntary bidding moratorium remains in place. In July, The Register revealed that the Japanese supplier had won a place on a UK government framework worth up to £14.9 billion despite its role in the Post Office Horizon…

System76 Launches The Thelio Mira AI With AMD Ryzen + NVIDIA Or AMD Graphics ↗ (opens external article)

System76 today unveiled their newest desktop computer as the Thelio Mira AI. The System76 Thelio Mira AI is designed for multi-GPU AI training, model fine-tuning, AI inferencing, computer vision and image generation tasks on tthe AI side. Or with its AMD Ryzen 9000 series CPU and NVIDIA/AMD GPU options is also a good candidate for simulations and other HPC-type workloads...…

OpenSSL 4.1 Alpha 1 Released With DTLS 1.3, GREASE & More AVX-512 Optimizations ↗ (opens external article)

The first alpha release of the upcoming OpenSSL 4.1 release is now available for testing with some GREASE and DTLS 1.3 support along with more AVX-512 performance optimizations...…

NVIDIA 615.71.09 Linux Driver Released With Vulkan Improvements ↗ (opens external article)

NVIDIA today debuted the 615.71.09 Linux driver that comes with a number of improvements, especially from the Vulkan API perspective...…

Cryptocrook ringleader, 22, who met crew on Minecraft admits role in $245M heist ↗ (opens external article)

The ringleader of a sprawling cybercrime operation has pleaded guilty in the US after helping to steal and launder hundreds of millions of dollars in cryptocurrency. Malone Lam, 22, a Singaporean national and Miami resident, spearheaded the scheme to steal cryptocurrency from wealthy individuals between October 2023 and May 2025. He first visited the US in 2023 after meeting two of the group's ea…

A Nice Improvement Coming For Faster Btrfs Zstd Decompression ↗ (opens external article)

In addition to the still-pending kernel work for improving the in-kernel Zstd code, sepaarately the Btrfs file-system driver has an improvement on the way in its decompression code path for the Zstd transparent file-system compression...…

WeChat worm could pwn a friend before they even answered the call ↗ (opens external article)

Tencent has patched up a zero-click vulnerability that security researchers used to create a worm capable of spreading through calls on WeChat. With more than 1.4 billion monthly active users, WeChat is among the most popular apps in the world. According to researchers at Calif, its VoIP stack contained a memory corruption bug that could enable a trusted contact to take control of a user's accoun…

Microsoft closes the book on Publisher and unplugs Project Online ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft will retire Project Online and remove Publisher from Microsoft 365 over the coming weeks, while support for perpetual versions of Publisher and for Office 2021 will end shortly afterward. Publisher, Microsoft's desktop publishing application, dates back to the Windows 3.x era. Microsoft announced its retirement in 2024 and will remove it from Microsoft 365 subscriptions on October 1, 20…

Security boffin claims airport group left API keys in client-side JavaScript for four years ↗ (opens external article)

Security researcher Scott Helme says his analysis supports FulcrumSec's claim that Manchester Airports Group (MAG) exposed privileged API keys in client-side JavaScript. Helme says he reached that conclusion after using information provided by the cyber extortion group to reconstruct how data belonging to roughly 8.8 million MAG customers was allegedly stolen last month. The crooks behind the att…

Virgin Media offloads email services to third-party provider ↗ (opens external article)

Virgin Media is ditching its email services and offering customers a window in which to download their data and move to another email provider. The UK's second-biggest broadband provider is closing its own email service and offering users the option of transferring their addresses and mailboxes to Junara, a service operated by Australian email provider Atmail. Customers who want to retain their V…

AMD Posts New GCC Compiler Patch For Extended Load Optimization ↗ (opens external article)

It's nice seeing a new GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) patch out of AMD today that is a general optimization for the x86_64 compiler code and not exclusively tied to their Zen processors. It's an Extended Load Optimization to benefit code where there is a narrower type and then an arithmetic type with a wider type...…

Experimental Patches Get Nouveau+NVK Working On NVIDIA DGX Spark GB10 ↗ (opens external article)

Red Hat's David Airlie has managed another open-source graphics engineering feat... Getting the Nouveau reverse-engineered kernel graphics driver and Mesa NVK Vulkan driver running on the GB10 Grace Blackwell Superchip with the DGX Spark system...…

YSERVER 1.5 Released With Reverse PRIME Support & Other New Features ↗ (opens external article)

Announced a few months back was YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in the Rust programming language. In getting the project off the ground quickly and given the size of X11, it was largely vibe coded with Claude Code. The project continues and is attracting contributions from more users with today marking the YSERVER 1.5 release...…

Huawei Watch D3 pumps up its health-monitoring credentials ↗ (opens external article)

Huawei has released the Watch D3, the third generation of its blood-pressure-measuring wearable, as the company continues plowing a relatively lonely furrow in cuff-based technology. The D3 is an intriguing device for anyone seeking more credible blood pressure readings than many smartwatches claim to provide. Where many brands use optical technology to estimate blood pressure, the D series uses…

Switzerland tests a FOSS escape route from Microsoft 365 ↗ (opens external article)

Switzerland's Federal Chancellery is preparing to offer a FOSS workplace suite to some 3,000 employees – but the Swiss Armed Forces are pushing ahead faster still. European interest in digital sovereignty isn't limited to the European Union: the Swiss Federal Chancellery plans to offer selected government employees a FOSS alternative that will run alongside Microsoft 365. The chancellery is launc…

Another Microsoft team admits it’s struggling to handle flood of AI-generated code ↗ (opens external article)

A few weeks back we spotted Microsoft’s Exchange team admitting that AI has found so many bugs it hasn’t found time to deliver a Cumulative Update for the messaging server. And on Tuesday, the Microsoft Edge team revealed it’s also a bit overwhelmed by AI. “Rapid adoption of AI-assisted coding is enabling developers to build extensions faster than ever,” according to a post by the Edge team. AI h…

So you want to use OpenRouter? ↗ (opens external article)

Philippines bets AI will lift GDP by 12 percent in seven years – without hurting outsourcing ↗ (opens external article)

One of the few proven use cases for generative AI is automating customer service inquiries to reduce costs even further than it’s been possible to achieve by offshoring jobs to low-wage companies like the Philippines – which yesterday bet that its outsourcing industry will thrive even as it plans a massive investment in AI. The nation’s government yesterday delivered the PAIIM – aka the Philippin…

Testing race conditions with mem access tracing and stack-based delay injection ↗ (opens external article)

US claims Chinese AI companies’ core AI strategy is distilling American models ↗ (opens external article)

Two US intelligence agencies and the nation’s cyber-defense org CISA have accused Chinese AI companies of running “aggressive, malicious, and targeted distillation activities at an industrial scale that extract restricted proprietary functionalities and capabilities of U.S. frontier AI models.” A Tuesday joint advisory from The National Security Agency (NSA), Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI)…

AI Made A Lot Of "Hideous" Code But Found Major Bottlenecks For Faster Linux Compilation ↗ (opens external article)

An ARM Linux engineer leveraged AI/LLMs to help uncover some improvements to "significant speed up" the Linux kernel build times. In the process the LLM used generated "a lot of code, much of it hideous" but in the end was used to find some very significant time savings for faster kernel builds via more task parallelization in different areas of the kernel build process...…

Microsoft breaks Patch Tuesday record with 974-CVE deluge ↗ (opens external article)

The vulnpocalypse is upon us, dear reader. Microsoft delivered a record number of patches to address 974 CVEs in its own products this month, including two bugs that Redmond says are already under exploitation. September's record-breaking collection of security updates comes after Microsoft served up 421 fixes in August, and 622 in July. We've seen the new normal and we are not impressed. Thanks,…

OpenAI GPT-6 Astra will run a retailer without cheating and sell more stuff than Anthropic ↗ (opens external article)

In the dispiriting race to replace human store managers with AI, OpenAI has taken the lead, according to Andon Labs, a business that analyzes whether AI can take on real-world tasks. OpenAI's latest model, GPT-6 Astra, has demonstrated that it can run a business more effectively, with more integrity, than rival Anthropic's Fable 5.1 model, Andon Labs has declared in a blog post. "GPT 6 Astra is b…

Google DeepMind rises above the AI scrum with genome atlas ↗ (opens external article)

While OpenAI and Anthropic fight over whose models can escape their sandbox more alarmingly, Google’s DeepMind team has once again shown how machine learning can also be used to advance science for humanity’s benefit. On Tuesday, the Chocolate Factory’s crack team of AI researchers unveiled AlphaGenome Atlas, a massive database containing a petabyte worth of data predicting the effects of nine bi…

systemd 262-rc2 Adds An AI Canary For Detecting Unreviewed AI/LLM Code Contributions ↗ (opens external article)

One week after releasing systemd 262-rc1, systemd 262-rc2 is now available with further fixes and refinements for this init system and service manager. Systemd is also the latest open-source project introducing an AI canary for aiming to detect AI/LLM-based code contributors that weren't reviewed by an actual person in advance of the pull request...…

Microsoft Plugs Nearly 1,000 Security Holes ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft Corp. today issued updates to plug at least 974 security holes in its Windows operating systems and other software, by far its biggest single patch batch ever. Microsoft says artificial intelligence is helping to speed the discovery of vulnerabilities, but security experts warn that many organizations already are struggling to prioritize the more human-intensive endeavor of testing and d…

OpenAI's Artifactory opened covert data-stealing channel alongside Hugging Face attack ↗ (opens external article)

A secret channel running through ChatGPT's internal JFrog Artifactory instance allowed one account to send hidden tasks - such as retrieving email data from a connected Gmail account - to a ChatGPT session under another account, according to Check Point Research. The victim saw no indication of the hidden instructions or stolen data, and the hole has since been closed. The threat hunters found an…

DLSS5VKLayer Wires Up NVIDIA DLSS 5 For Native Linux Games & Steam Play ↗ (opens external article)

An interesting new open-source project for those looking to make use of NVIDIA DLSS 5 on Linux is DLSS5VKLayer. The DLSS5VKLayer is a Linux Vulkan layer that works for both native Linux games as well as Steam Play (Proton) Windows games for experimental DLSS 5 support...…

New Records Reveal Problems with Medicare’s AI Prior Authorization Experiment ↗ (opens external article)

EFF sued the government back in March for information about the Wasteful and Inappropriate Service Reduction (WISeR) model, a new Medicare program that uses AI to evaluate prior authorization requests for certain medical services. Today, we’re releasing approximately 1,000 pages of records obtained from the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) through this litigation, including contracts…

KDE's KWin Merges Wayland Commit-Timing Protocol Support ↗ (opens external article)

Merged today to the latest KDE KWin compositor development code is support for Wayland's important commit-timing protocol that is useful for video playback as well as for gamers relying on Adaptive-Sync/FreeSync support...…

The Linux Kernel Planning To Remove Around ~55k Lines Of Old ARM Platform Code ↗ (opens external article)

For the current Linux 7.3 kernel many older 32-bit ARM platforms are deprecated and in turn orphaning hundreds of drivers only relevant to those out-of-date ARM platforms. The removal of that now deprecated code is planned for the next kernel cycle or two...…

CHUWI UniBook With Intel Wildcat Lake For A $449 Linux-Friendly Laptop ↗ (opens external article)

CHUWI recently launched the UniBook laptop powered by the Intel Core 3 304 "Wildcat Lake" SOC and priced at just $449 USD. Especially with today's high component pricing, a brand new sub-$500 laptop is extremely rare. Rather than using some dated SoC, it uses Wildcat Lake as Intel's new value option alternative to the Core 3 Series Ultra "Panther Lake" SoCs. This was our first time testing out Int…

DaVinci Resolve 21.1 Released - Now With AI Assistant Integration ↗ (opens external article)

For those using the Linux-friendly DaVinci Resolve video editing and color correction/grading and visual effects software, DaVinci Resolve 21.1 is out today as a major update to this cross-platform solution...…

New Patches Provide HDMI 1.4 3D Mode Support For AMD Radeon Graphics On Linux ↗ (opens external article)

It turns out one of the feature limitations of the AMDGPU Linux graphics driver is HDMI 1.4 3D output support with frame packing, top-and-bottom, and side-by-side options for transmitting simultaneous video streams. I wasn't aware of this limitation for the lack of any 3D displays and many Linux enthusiasts/gamers as well, but if you happen to have a compatible HDMI 1.4 3D display, there are pendi…

Working with Git Worktrees in Magit ↗ (opens external article)

FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…

Recursion into madness ↗ (opens external article)

7.2.4: stable ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.2.4 (stable) Released:2026-09-07 Source:linux-7.2.4.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.2.4.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.2.4…

6.18.50: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.18.50 (longterm) Released:2026-09-07 Source:linux-6.18.50.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.50.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.50…

6.12.109: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.12.109 (longterm) Released:2026-09-07 Source:linux-6.12.109.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.109.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.109…

7.3-rc2: mainline ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.3-rc2 (mainline) Released:2026-09-06 Source:linux-7.3-rc2.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)…

Douglas Hofstadter: Analogy as the Core of Cognition [video] ↗ (opens external article)

Game of Trees 0.128 released ↗ (opens external article)

Version 0.128 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated). Complete release notes are as follows: Read more……

Court Rules Against Citizen Journalists in DMCA Takedown Case—EFF Will Appeal ↗ (opens external article)

A federal court in Massachusetts has ruled that copyright holders can issue online takedown notices based on a subjective belief of copyright infringement, even when that belief is unreasonable and self-serving. The case was brought by our client, Channel 781 News, after takedown notices temporarily shut down the citizen journalism group's YouTube channel. We think the court set the bar far too lo…

Texas and Florida Step Back from ALPRs ↗ (opens external article)

Within the last few days, two important state actions have dealt a big blow to automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks. This is just the latest proof of the growing tide of public opposition to mass surveillance. After years of successful grassroots battles to pull these cameras from local streets, bipartisan momentum is sweeping the country. On August 28, Texas Governor Greg Abbott banned…

7.1.13: stable ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.1.13 (EOL) (stable) Released:2026-09-02 Source:linux-7.1.13.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.1.13.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.1.13…

6.6.156: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.6.156 (longterm) Released:2026-09-02 Source:linux-6.6.156.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.6.156.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.6.156…

6.1.187: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.1.187 (longterm) Released:2026-09-02 Source:linux-6.1.187.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.1.187.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.1.187…

5.15.220: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:5.15.220 (longterm) Released:2026-09-02 Source:linux-5.15.220.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.15.220.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.15.220…

5.10.269: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:5.10.269 (longterm) Released:2026-09-02 Source:linux-5.10.269.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.10.269.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.10.269…

Judge Rules DOD Unlawfully Retaliated Against Anthropic ↗ (opens external article)

A federal judge has sided with Anthropic on its claims that the Department of Defense illegally retaliated against Anthropic’s protected speech by labeling the AI company a “supply chain risk.” The judge found that designation, intended to penalize Anthropic for telling the U.S. military it would not allow their technology to be used for mass surveillance of U.S. persons, “constituted unlawful ret…

FBI Probes Service Selling 153M+ Drivers Licenses ↗ (opens external article)

A new identity theft service launched on the dark web this week is selling digital scans of more than 153 million drivers licenses from people in the United States and Canada. Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase on this service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely-used identity verification company based in Louisiana. KrebsOnSecurity a…

Meta's $17 Billion Settlement is a Bad Deal for Teens and All Social Media Users ↗ (opens external article)

Meta’s settlement with 52 state attorneys general is a bad deal for all internet users, and especially for teens. That’s what we said the day the settlement was announced. In this post, we go through the Settlement’s provisions in detail and explain why that is so, including how: The Settlement embeds age assurance technology and age-gates into Meta’s social media products and requires all users—m…

EFF to Governor Newsom: Veto California’s AB 1709 ↗ (opens external article)

The California legislature passed Assembly Bill 1709 (A.B. 1709) today, which functions as a sweeping ban on social media use for young people under the age of 16. This well-intentioned, but deeply flawed piece of legislation, cuts young people off from essential information and experiences, particularly harming vulnerable youth and marginalized groups who often find safety in supportive online co…

EFF to Courts: Don’t Rewrite Copyright Over AI Hype ↗ (opens external article)

The history of technology is rife with copyright panics.  In the 1980s, major rightsholders ran to Congress and the courts, claiming that videotape recorders (VTR) were “to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Then, the Supreme Court declined to embrace the hype, noting that the VTR was capable of all kinds of non-infringing uses,…

Doxxing Safety Part II: Incident Response ↗ (opens external article)

Doxxing, also known as the deliberate sharing of personal information to harass or endanger someone, is a tricky thing to protect against. It often happens by some ill-intentioned person accessing publicly available information, then sharing that information more widely in the hopes it will intimidate their target or worse.  This guide is a followup from a previous post that describes a methodolog…

Doxxing Safety Pt I: Prevention and Footprint Management ↗ (opens external article)

Doxxing is the deliberate disclosure of personal information in order to bully, harass, intimidate, or instigate a chain of harms against someone. It's a tricky thing to protect against when the jerk doing it is often able to use legal and accessible means to do so. The odds are stacked against everyday internet folk when there's little to no comprehensive data privacy legislation keeping us safe.…

Privacy on the Map (Part 2): Progress, Pitfalls, and the Fight for Enforceable Location Data Protections ↗ (opens external article)

Regulating commercial location tracking has reached a turning point. Last year, we published our rubric for what comprehensive and protective location privacy laws should look like, outlining the baseline standards states should meet to shield individuals from pervasive location surveillance. Since then, state lawmakers across the country have begun responding to calls like these, with Connecticut…

LGBT Q&A: What’s One Thing I Can Do Today to Improve My Safety and Security Online as an LGBTQ+ Person? ↗ (opens external article)

This post is adapted from a video recorded by EFF and the Trevor Project. Head over to our TikTok or Instagram to watch!  EFF answers all the queer digital rights questions you submit to us through our LGBT Q&A. You asked us: What’s one thing I can do today to improve my safety and security online as an LGBTQ+ person?  And for this question, we’ve brought in our friends from the Trevor Project to…

Debian 11 Long Term Support reaches end-of-life ↗ (opens external article)

The Debian Long Term Support (LTS) Team hereby announces that Debian 11 bullseye support has reached its end-of-life today, 31 August 2026, five years after its initial release on 14 August 2021.…

FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 Available ↗ (opens external article)

The first Release Candidate build for the FreeBSD 14.5 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, armv7, aarch64, powerpc, powerpcspe, powerpc64, powerpc64le, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.…

EFF and Allies on Brazil's Elections: Privacy Protections are Crucial to Electoral Integrity ↗ (opens external article)

EFF, Access Now, and Data Privacy Brasil are putting forward recommendations to strengthen robust privacy and data protection safeguards in the context of Brazil's elections. The recommendations stress the close relationship between violations of personal data protection and challenges to the integrity of electoral processes. They underscore how privacy and data protection guarantees are a crucial…

Two Alleged ‘TeamPCP’ Hackers Arrested in Australia ↗ (opens external article)

Authorities in Australia have arrested two men believed to be members of TeamPCP, a prolific cybercrime and data extortion group blamed for perpetrating the longest running spree of software supply chain attacks ever. In a statement released today, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said two men from Western Australia, aged 21 and 23, were arrested in connection with a “sophisticated cybercrime s…

A List of ICE Subpoenas to Tech Companies ↗ (opens external article)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted unlawful investigations into dozens of individuals who have documented ICE activities in their communities, social media users who criticized the government, and international students who attended a protest. A favored tool in these speech chilling investigations are administrative subpoenas sent to technology companies, requesting basic subs…

EFF's Policy Position on ALPR Surveillance: Eliminate It and Reduce Its Harms ↗ (opens external article)

Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) build a searchable map of everywhere a driver goes, fed into databases that police, ICE, and private vendors can query after the fact. Networked across a city, ALPRs are purpose-built to track everyone regardless of suspicion. ALPRs are not a surveillance tool that can be made safe with the right policy or feature update—they are irredeemably harmful. EFF's…

EFF Statement on Meta Settlement ↗ (opens external article)

Under this settlement, young users will now have less access to Meta products, and a lesser ability to exercise their rights to speak, access information and art and culture, associate and form communities, and play. The settlement also embeds age assurance into every product, mandating the collection of even more personal information from users of all ages; this enshrines Meta's harmful surveilla…

French Top Court Gets It Right, Strikes Down Social Media Ban For Youths ↗ (opens external article)

Earlier this month, France’s top court struck down the country’s legislation that banned social media use for people under 15 years old, which had been scheduled to take effect in January 2027. This is a welcome win for free expression, as we face a wave of countries and U.S. states seeking to pass similar laws banning young people from social media.  In particular, the Constitutional Council’s d…

rpki-client 9.9 released ↗ (opens external article)

It's a big day for routing security aficionados. The OpenBGPD project (a sub-project of the OpenBSD project) have announced version 9.9 of rpki-client(8), with various improvements, enhancements and fixes. The announcement reads List: openbsd-announce Subject: rpki-client 9.9 released From: Sebastian Benoit <benno () openbsd ! org> Date: 2026-08-23 19:25:37 Message-ID: aotJMUL7356PdqRC () jacklin…

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA3 Available ↗ (opens external article)

The third BETA build for the FreeBSD 14.5 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, armv7, aarch64, powerpc, powerpcspe, powerpc64, powerpc64le, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.…

EFF and Civil Society Groups Call on Nottinghamshire Police to Halt Live Face Recognition ↗ (opens external article)

This week, EFF, along with Big Brother Watch, Defend Digital Me, Liberty, Open Rights Group, Race Equality First, Statewatch, and Stopwatch, wrote to Nottinghamshire Police Force in the UK raising concern about the proposed roll-out of live facial recognition technology (LFR), and called for its immediate halt. In particular, the letter highlights six concerns: LFR Is Not "Just Another Tool" Notti…

Intermediary Liability in Brazil: The Intricate Path Ahead ↗ (opens external article)

Brazil's new internet intermediary liability regime is underway. The implementation of changes established by the Supreme Court includes notice and takedown mechanisms and duty of care obligations. Caution is crucial as these measures can create problematic incentives for enforcement overreach and over censorship of protected speech.   The court in June issued a new decision clarifying elements of…

Some Tech Companies Have Privately Pushed Back on ICE Subpoenas. They Should All Do More. ↗ (opens external article)

In a handful of known cases, large social media companies have privately pushed back against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) subpoenas when the agency tried to unmask anonymous users who tracked immigration activities or criticized the government. As ICE engages in a pattern of illegal and chilling investigations, any resistance is welcome. But social media companies can do more. When co…

📍 The Sneaky Code Tracking App Users | EFFector 38.15 ↗ (opens external article)

Your location isn't just a pin on a map—it can expose some of the most intimate details about your life. The value of this information to advertisers and others has turned the location data business into a multi-billion dollar industry. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're covering a new EFF report on how ad libraries encourage apps to leak user location data—potentially without app developers…

Ninth Circuit Ruling Will Force Online Platforms That Host User Speech to Fight Lengthy and Costly Lawsuits Before They Are Dismissed Under Section 230 ↗ (opens external article)

A federal appeals court just made it harder for online services, big and small, to get lawsuits over user speech dismissed early. In California v. Meta, a Ninth Circuit three-judge panel held that the lower court’s denial of Section 230 immunity to Meta is not immediately appealable. The misguided ruling has the potential to have widespread impact and to threaten the free speech of all internet us…

Zero-Knowledge Proofs Aren’t Age Verification Silver Bullets ↗ (opens external article)

Age verification (laws and regulations requiring platforms and websites to assure or estimate that a user seeking to use an online service is of a certain age) is everywhere. At the time of writing, about half the states in the US have some internet age verification law in place, and dangerous proposals, from the KIDS Act to the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), have been advancing at the federal lev…

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA2 Available ↗ (opens external article)

The second BETA build for the FreeBSD 14.5 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, armv7, aarch64, powerpc, powerpcspe, powerpc64, powerpc64le, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.…

Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out ↗ (opens external article)

It can be daunting to determine who’s responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who’s harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of large advertising platforms. Not anymore: A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and c…

Too Little, Too Late: Flock Admits Their Technology Needs Reforms ↗ (opens external article)

Flock Safety, the embattled vendor of mass surveillance technology, has rolled out a handful of new reforms intended to appease the justified nationwide anger that has seen scores of towns cancel or suspend their contracts with the company for automated license plate readers (ALPRs). The reforms are a combination of long overdue changes along with some cosmetic fixes that fail to address the funda…

Microsoft Plugs Nearly 400 Security Holes ↗ (opens external article)

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

Who (or What) Generates Images for EFF? ↗ (opens external article)

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

OpenSSH 10.5 released ↗ (opens external article)

In another move that signals a new OpenBSD release is in the works, the OpenSSH project has released without fanfare its new version, OpenSSH 10.5. The release notes read, OpenSSH 10.5/10.5p1 (2026-08-11) OpenSSH 10.5 was released on 2026-08-11. It is available from the mirrors listed at https://www.openssh.com/. OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client…

Dismiss Church’s Trademark Lawsuit Against “Mormon Stories” Podcast, EFF Urges Court ↗ (opens external article)

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

Meta Must Stop Silencing Reproductive Health Information ↗ (opens external article)

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA1 Available ↗ (opens external article)

The first BETA build for the FreeBSD 14.5 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, i386, armv7, aarch64, powerpc, powerpcspe, powerpc64, powerpc64le, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.…

OpenBGPD 9.2 released ↗ (opens external article)

A sure sign that a new OpenBSD will soon be ready is that a new OpenBGPD release appears. On August 6th, 2026, the project released OpenBGPD version 9.2. The announcement reads, List: openbsd-announce Subject: OpenBGPD 9.2 released From: Claudio Jeker <claudio () openbsd ! org> Date: 2026-08-06 13:22:26 Message-ID: anSKksatjxeom0lQ () diehard ! n-r-g ! com We have released OpenBGPD 9.2, which wil…

DebConf26 closes in Santa Fe and DebConf27 announced ↗ (opens external article)

On Saturday 25 July 2026, the annual Debian Developers and Contributors Conference came to a close.…

Canadian Man Pleads Guilty in Snowflake Extortions ↗ (opens external article)

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

Dead Software Walking: The ongoing evolution of relayd(8) and httpd(8) ↗ (opens external article)

Returning readers of this site may have noticed that the pace of development in relayd(8) and httpd(8) has been picking up recently. Now Rafael Sadowski (rsadowski@) has a new blog post out titled Dead Software Walking: The ongoing evolution of relayd(8) and httpd(8) where he tells the story. The article starts with Start with WHY As I mentioned in my OpenBSD 7.8 highlights post, development of r…

Tomorrow’s U.S. Senate Vote: Four Internet Bills, One Wrong Direction ↗ (opens external article)

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

Appeals Court Agrees with EFF that Building a Web Browser Doesn’t Violate the CFAA ↗ (opens external article)

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

Mobile Ad Software Encourages Location Data Sharing, EFF Report Finds ↗ (opens external article)

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

Developers: Beware of Ad Libraries that Betray Your Users’ Location Privacy ↗ (opens external article)

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

Technology's Power in the Hands of the People ↗ (opens external article)

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

Call for testing: OpenBSD vmm(4)/vmd(8) fd-ification ↗ (opens external article)

Thanks to the tireless work of among others Dave Voutila (dv@), development of the OpenBSD/amd64 virtualization system vmm(4)/vmd(8) continues to make progress. Now breaking changes, but with with potential benefits in both process isolation and compartmentalization of functionality, are on the way. It almost goes without saying that this code needs testing. In a message to the tech@ mailing list…

The Senate Should Reject KOSA's Privacy Risks ↗ (opens external article)

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

EFF Joins 18 Civil Rights Organizations Calling on Governor Hochul to Reject the Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act ↗ (opens external article)

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

EFF Joins Call for FTC to Drop Its Disastrous AI Policy Proposal ↗ (opens external article)

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

The Youth AI Privacy Act’s Privacy Paradox ↗ (opens external article)

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

EFF at BSidesLV, Black Hat, and DEF CON 👨‍💻 ↗ (opens external article)

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

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New committer: Faraz Vahedi (src)…

Amending AB 1709 Doesn’t Fix It: California’s Social Media Ban Still Threatens Free Speech and Privacy ↗ (opens external article)

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 ↗ (opens external article)

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

The CHATBOT Act Forces One Parenting Model On Every Family ↗ (opens external article)

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

EFF Guide to Recording Law Enforcement ↗ (opens external article)

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

Read This Before You Buy That TV Streaming Stick ↗ (opens external article)

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…

LLVM toolchain coming to OpenBSD/sparc64 ↗ (opens external article)

Yes, you read that right. Modern development tools in the form of the LLVM compiler infrastructure is well on its way to supporting OpenBSD/sparc64 along with other more conventional architectures. The support is now ready for testing, via a patch set presented by Kirill A. Korinsky (kirill@) in a message to the tech@ mailing list, with the subject LLVM toolchain for sparc64. The message reads, L…

🏃 Fitness Tracker Privacy Fails | EFFector 38.14 ↗ (opens external article)

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…

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New committer: Minsoo Choo (src)…

San Francisco: Don’t Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing ↗ (opens external article)

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

Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons? ↗ (opens external article)

Update 8/10/2026: Two San Francisco bars that used Patronscan have said they will stop using the system after listening to customers’ privacy concerns. EFF applauds this change and we hope other bars follow suit by returning to ID-checking systems that respect their customers’ rights. Update 8/18/2026: A third SF bar has stopped using Patronscan.   ———————————————————— Recent reports have raised a…

Missed EFF's Livestream with Adam Savage and iFixit? Listen Here! ↗ (opens external article)

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…

April-June 2026 Status Report ↗ (opens external article)

The April to June Status Report is now available with 41 entries.…

httpd(8) gains support for custom HTTP headers ↗ (opens external article)

In a change likely to be widely welcomed, Rafael Sadowski (rsadowski@) committed support for custom HTTP headers in httpd(8). This obviates the need to use FastCGI support or relayd(8) to achieve things like adding SSL/TLS security headers. The commit reads: CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: rsadowski@cvs.openbsd.org 2026/07/24 23:48:39 Modified files: usr.sbin/httpd : config.c httpd.c h…

Farmers Are Getting Control Of Their Equipment Back ↗ (opens external article)

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 ↗ (opens external article)

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…

Ports Repository Frozen ↗ (opens external article)

The ports repository has been frozen to revert a very large commit. There is no concern that the tree has been compromised. More information about the freeze can be found on the 2026 Ports Freeze page.…

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps ↗ (opens external article)

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…

OpenBSD relayd(8) adds ECDSA support with CA engine code from smtpd(8) ↗ (opens external article)

Up until quite recently, relayd(8) did not actually support ECDSA keys and certificates, as described in the Relayd doesn't like ecdsa thread on the tech@ mailing list. The problem is now solved. In this commit by Rafael Sadowski (rsadowski@), code that originated in smtpd(8) adds the previously lacking support. The commit message reads, List: openbsd-cvs Subject: CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src From:…

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws ↗ (opens external article)

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…

Lessons Learned from CISA’s Recent GitHub Leak ↗ (opens external article)

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…

Security support for Bookworm handed over to the LTS team ↗ (opens external article)

On 12 July 2026, three years after the initial release, the regular support for Debian 12, alias bookworm, has come to an end. The Debian Long Term Support (LTS) Team is taking over security support from the Security and Release Teams.…

Updated Debian 12: 12.15 released ↗ (opens external article)

The Debian project is pleased to announce the fifteenth and final update of its oldstable distribution Debian 12 (codename bookworm). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.…

Updated Debian 13: 13.6 released ↗ (opens external article)

The Debian project is pleased to announce the sixth update of its stable distribution Debian 13 (codename trixie). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.…

FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…

Updated Debian 12: 12.14 released ↗ (opens external article)

The Debian project is pleased to announce the fourteenth update of its oldstable distribution Debian 12 (codename bookworm). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.…

Updated Debian 13: 13.5 released ↗ (opens external article)

The Debian project is pleased to announce the fifth update of its stable distribution Debian 13 (codename trixie). This point release mainly adds corrections for security issues, along with a few adjustments for serious problems. Security advisories have already been published separately and are referenced where available.…