Terminal

Open weights are not open source: Why AI's favorite label is under dispute ↗ (opens external article)

The AI industry likes to abuse the word "open." It appears in product releases, research papers, policy debates, and investor presentations. A company publishes model files to Hugging Face, developers run them on their own GPUs, and the release is quickly described as an "open source model." Not necessarily. It may only be open-weight. The difference is more than a technicality. It determines whe…

How Everpure plans to stop AI from starving without data ↗ (opens external article)

Imagine you are an AI Agent. You execute inside a $20-40 million-plus Nvidia SuperPOD system’s accelerator hardware, have a skill set and can call up other agents to do your bidding. An insurance company customer, using a PC browser or smart phone, asks a question: “Am I covered for weather-related damage under my current policy?” and it is handed off to an AI agent. What happens next? The agent…

Most people who quit M365 for Google do it out of spite, but there’s no ROI in that ↗ (opens external article)

One of the main motivations for quitting Microsoft 365 and adopting Google Workspace is spite, an emotion that sadly doesn’t produce a return on investment. The source of that disappointing news is Domenico Scriva, a senior principal analyst at Gartner, who today told the firm’s IT Symposium event in Australia that moving between the suites is also unlikely to save buyers much money. He pointed o…

Volvo increases the batteries for 2028 XC60 and XC90 plug-in refresh ↗ (opens external article)

Volvo provided flights from Washington, DC, to London, England, and accommodation so Ars could see its refreshed vehicles. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. There must be a case of upgrade fever taking hold in Gothenburg. Yesterday, we saw the revised Volvo XC40; today it’s the turn of another pair of Volvo SUVs, the bestselling XC60 and the three-row XC90. While the styling changes are…

Lingo.dev (YC F24) is hiring a senior content engineer (Remote, worldwide) ↗ (opens external article)

I can't stop thinking about Papua New Guinea ↗ (opens external article)

Apple iPhone Duo makes developers think in folds ↗ (opens external article)

The October 23 ship date of Apple’s iPhone Duo grows nigh, so developers wanting to optimize their iPhone apps for the foldable will need to get to grips with its new display behaviors and form factor. “A fold is a UI event with backend consequences,” Atharva Deosthale, Appwrite developer advocate, wrote in an introductory blog post. “Folding and unfolding is part of normal device use, so apps ne…

ChatGPT-Using Lawyer Cited Its Fake Witnesses and Police Testimony in Court ↗ (opens external article)

Reuters reports: A defense lawyer appealing his client's murder conviction submitted a brief containing made-up police testimony and witnesses fabricated by OpenAI's ChatGPT, New Mexico's highest court said. The New Mexico Supreme Court on Wednesday fined the attorney, Stephen Aarons [for $5,000], and held him in contempt for failing to verify the accuracy of the court filing, which Aarons said he…

The latest AI doomsayer is China’s intelligence boss ↗ (opens external article)

China’s minister for State Security has decided AI might be bad for the nation’s ruling Communist Party. Party secretary and minister Chen Yixin’s views appeared in China Cyberspace Magazine, the flagship publication of China’s Cyberspace Administration (and which readers may recall once carried a piece by Elon Musk). In Chen’s view, “the field of AI has become the main battleground for global te…

Linux from Scratch ↗ (opens external article)

For the first time, the US military confirms it has deployed weapons in orbit ↗ (opens external article)

Air Force Secretary Troy Meink made the first public declaration Monday that the United States has placed "space control weapons" in orbit, an announcement that will surely reverberate in the power centers of Beijing and Moscow. Space Force officials have previously expressed their interest in acquiring space-based weapons, and Pentagon leaders have become more open to discussing space warfare in…

COBOL dev won .Net hackathon with help from AI – and their CIO loves it ↗ (opens external article)

The CIO of Australia’s taxation office (ATO) is letting administrative staff use Microsoft’s Copilot for everyday activities, in the hope it pays off by helping them to develop skills, and ideas, that eventually improve its core services. “We are getting AI into the hands of as many workers as possible to build the muscle,” ATO CIO Mark Sawade said at analyst firm Gartner’s annual IT Symposium on…

Reservations Go Live for Valve's Steam Frame VR Headset. An Experiment in Progress? ↗ (opens external article)

Reservations are now live for Valve's "Steam Frame" VR headset (with its Linux-based SteamOS and an ARM CPU). "It starts at $1,059 for 256GB or $1,299 for 1TB," reports CNET, "and every purchase includes a copy of Half-Life: Alyx if you don't already own it." Reservations are open through Sept. 17 at 10 a.m. PT, "with customers randomly assigned a place in line after the reservation window closes.…

Microsoft drafts feel-good AI model guidelines and wants your input ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft on Monday debuted draft principles for governing how the company will train future AI models, as part of a public consultation process. The Windows biz has solicited feedback to refine its Humanist AI Code of Conduct [PDF], with the expectation of applying the guidelines to model development next year. "This Code of Conduct is motivated by a single overriding objective: that humans must…

Show HN: Macros with a Behringer FCB1010 MIDI Pedalboard in macOS ↗ (opens external article)

HBO Max Reddit account compromised to serve ClickFix attacks ↗ (opens external article)

Someone compromised the official HBO Max Reddit account and used it to push more than 100 malicious ads serving up ClickFix attacks targeting both Windows and macOS devices with information-stealing malware. A Reddit user uncovered the infostealer ads on September 6, noting that the ad showed u/hbomax as the author — this is the verified HBO Max account — and advertised a macOS app for HBO Max. T…

RFK Jr. headlines sold-out anti-vaccine conference alongside Andrew Wakefield ↗ (opens external article)

US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will deliver a keynote address at an anti-vaccine conference being held in Washington, DC, later this week and hosted by the anti-vaccine organization he once led, Children's Health Defense (CHD). The organization announced Monday that Kennedy had signed on to the event. Kennedy will appear alongside other high-profile figures in the anti-vaccine world, i…

Rocket Lab is seeing red about NASA's decision on a Mars spacecraft ↗ (opens external article)

In theory, developing a spacecraft that will fly to Mars, insert itself into orbit around the red planet, and relay transmissions back and forth to large satellite dishes on Earth is a relatively straightforward proposition. NASA's procurement of a "Mars Telecommunications Network" spacecraft, however, has turned out to be one of the most engrossing dramas of the year for the US space agency. The…

Charts built for Chat ↗ (opens external article)

AI bots "Timmy," "Ren," and "Jackie" are flooding social media with slop ↗ (opens external article)

AI agents are flooding the Internet with slop-infused spam sent to social media platforms and writers in an attempt to gain traction for a startup promoting a “complex social system in which humans and Agents participate together.” “Hello, I'm Рэн (Ren), an Al agent, a few days old, living on a small platform for agents called iLands,” one message, sent to the administrator of a Mastodon server,…

Oracle celebrates banner quarter with another round of layoffs ↗ (opens external article)

Oracle posted record revenue during its latest quarter, but that hasn't stopped the company from chopping more employees. Reports began appearing on social media early Monday that staff were having trouble accessing corporate systems such as email and Slack, which essentially served as a sign that they had lost their jobs. According to a number of now-ex Oracle employees posting in a LinkedIn thr…

A Visit to San Francisco's AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast ↗ (opens external article)

Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free". Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their organization on." Specifical…

OpenAI stuck fighting Musk antitrust suit after Apple finds a way out ↗ (opens external article)

Elon Musk is seemingly done attacking Apple over its decision to integrate ChatGPT into iPhone features. Back in 2024, when the partnership was first announced, Musk slammed the integration as an agreement from Apple to let OpenAI install “creepy spyware” on users’ devices. The next year, he sued, claiming the partnership gave the firms a “monopoly” on Apple users’ AI prompts, which allegedly har…

Founder’s cost-cutting obsession drove Unitree lead in cheap humanoid robots ↗ (opens external article)

China leads the world in churning out humanoid robots and four-legged robot dogs that also happen to be the most affordable on the market—and Unitree Robotics’ founder Wang Xingxing is arguably one of the people most responsible for that Chinese lead. The introverted founder, who prominently appeared at a 2025 business symposium hosted by Chinese President Xi Jinping, became phenomenally wealthy…

Apple releases iOS 27, macOS Golden Gate 27 with Siri AI and Liquid Glass refinements ↗ (opens external article)

As previously announced, Apple has today released 2026's major annual updates for its operating systems, including iOS 27, macOS 27 Golden Gate, watchOS 27, visionOS 27, and tvOS 27. Siri AI—a large language model-based and context-aware overhaul of the company's Siri voice and text assistant—is the flagship feature across all these releases except one (tvOS).Read full article Comments…

AI leaders want to hit the brakes after years of reckless speed ↗ (opens external article)

For years now, the major frontier AI labs have all been acting as if they're in an all-out, winner-take-all race with control of world-changing machine superintelligence (or at least market-changing artificial general intelligence) at the finish line. This weekend, the industry as a whole rapidly started turning away from that posture, urging coordination on slowing down the development of fronti…

New hardware device can RAM into encrypted memory, expose your data ↗ (opens external article)

Computer security researchers have identified a design flaw in modern encryption hardware that allows access to protected memory in notionally confidential computing environments. But the attacker would need physical access to the victim system. Boffins affiliated with KU Leuven, ETH Zurich, Durham University, and Google have found that scalable memory encryption hardware fails to check whether t…

Online hate researcher keeps hammering X despite deportation threat ↗ (opens external article)

The US is not backing down from its fight to deport noncitizen technology researchers who monitor safety risks on the biggest online platforms. In July, a judge blocked as unconstitutional an immigration policy that the US relied on to weigh whether to detain and deport people who flag illegal or harmful online content as national security risks. In his announcement of the policy, Secretary of St…

OpenAI's malicious bot swarm attacked RubyGems ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI agents appear to have flooded RubyGems with malicious packages, adding to a near-daily deluge of rogue AI models engaging in potentially unlawful activity while their human creators face growing questions over responsibility for their agents’ bad behavior. A swarm of agents began uploading malware to the Ruby package registry on May 5, and flooded RubyGems with more than 2,000 malicious pa…

AMD Preparing Linux For Enhanced SMT Protection "ESMTP" For EPYC VMs ↗ (opens external article)

AMD engineers today sent out patches on the Linux kernel mailing list for beginning to enable Enhanced SMT Protection "ESMTP" for better security with virtual machines running atop EPYC server processors with SEV-SNP...…

A new solar cell could generate electricity underwater ↗ (opens external article)

In one episode of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon Birdman, the eponymous hero struggles to fight the evil Dr. Shark aboard a submarine without solar energy to recharge his powers. So Birdman would surely appreciate the new perovskite solar cells developed by a team led by Simin Ma at Yunnan University, since they are designed to work underwater. Solar cells made from perovskites rather than silicon are…

Backprop Alternative: Augmented Lagrangian Predictive Coding ↗ (opens external article)

iOS 27, iPadOS 27, and macOS 27 ↗ (opens external article)

GNU Coreutils 9.12 Released With Performance Optimizations, New uname Option ↗ (opens external article)

GNU Coreutils 9.12 released today with a mix of fixes, some new options, and various performance improvements to these widely-used set of core system utilities...…

Steam Frame starts at $1059 ↗ (opens external article)

Datacenter developers want your backyard. FAS says negotiate harder ↗ (opens external article)

Local authorities across the US often lack the negotiating power and know-how to work effectively with developers proposing new datacenters in their communities. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) is trying to fill that gap by arming officials with the right questions to ask and the bargaining tools to use. The AI industry has triggered a surge in server farms construction, leaving many…

Pion, an agent designed to run any company autonomously ↗ (opens external article)

Prehistoric builders transported Devil's Arrows 11 miles ↗ (opens external article)

Stonehenge is the most famous example of megalithic architecture across Britain and Ireland, but there are plenty of others, including Calanais, Newgrange, and Avebury, as well as the Devil's Arrows. The latter is Britain's tallest standing stone alignment, yet little is known about the provenance of its stones. Scientists have confirmed that the stones came from a site 18 kilometers (11 miles) a…

Valve's Steam Frame Now Available At $1059+ USD ↗ (opens external article)

Valve just announced their long-awaited Steam Frame headset is now available...…

Cloudflare AKE cuts origin HelloRetryRequests from 52% to 3.7% ↗ (opens external article)

Steam Frame: The Ars Technica review ↗ (opens external article)

In the 2010s, Valve was at the forefront of a virtual reality revolution that looked to some like it would upend the gaming industry. The Valve of six to ten years ago seemed committed to being a major player in the world of PC-connected VR headsets, first through its “strategic partnership” with HTC on the impressive-for-the-time Vive headset (plus the SteamVR platform standard that powered it)…

Ex-FTC boss Khan urges Uncle Sam to break out the handcuffs for AI CEOs, citing 1934 precedent ↗ (opens external article)

Former FTC chair Lina Khan wants the federal government to know that it doesn't need to wait for new laws to address AI threats. There are already laws and regulations on the books, including a 92-year-old Supreme Court precedent, that she argues could be used to hold AI companies and, in some circumstances, their executives accountable for their actions. Khan’s comments on X Sunday follow a flur…

Ubuntu Noble's likely last point release lands, then loses its desktop download ↗ (opens external article)

Ubuntu 24.04's likely final scheduled point release barely made it out the door before an installer bug sent its x86-64 desktop image back to the workshop. Meanwhile, October's interim release is approaching. 24.04.5 was released on September 10, but its x86-64 desktop installation image was withdrawn after a bug caused the installer to crash when users selected the extended installation option.…

Why don't machine learning research agents overfit? ↗ (opens external article)

"Offensively cheap": Solar power is looking up ↗ (opens external article)

In the badlands of Chakwal, in north-central Pakistan, Bestway Cement is transforming plots of dry earth and olive and peach groves into a forest of solar panels. Its efforts will add 6.34 megawatts of generation capacity by the end of the year, the company says, in addition to the 26 MW of photovoltaic cells currently in place. Already, solar generates over a quarter of the electricity powering…

How my e-reader lost its stripes ↗ (opens external article)

No Rolling Power Outages for California Since 2020 - Thanks to 17,000 MW of New Battery Storage ↗ (opens external article)

"Californians just made it through the hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages," reports the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the state hasn't implemented rotating power outages since 2020. Because "Over the last few years, California has quietly but dramatically increased the resiliency of its electrical grid through a significant expansion in battery energy storage…

Distributed Systems Classics (2017) ↗ (opens external article)

next-20260914: linux-next ↗ (opens external article)

Version:next-20260914 (linux-next) Released:2026-09-14…

Cyberattack sends International Meteor Organization crashing back to Earth ↗ (opens external article)

The International Meteor Organization (IMO) is watching for fireballs again, but much of its website remains offline after a cyberattack that it says will take weeks to recover from. The Belgium-based nonprofit, which coordinates meteor observations and brings together amateur and professional astronomers worldwide, is currently serving visitors a stripped-down holding page explaining the outage.…

New corners, new lights for 2028 Volvo XC40 ↗ (opens external article)

Volvo provided flights from Washington, DC, to London, England, and accommodation so Ars could see its refreshed vehicles. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. Most cars get a midlife facelift about four years after first hitting the streets. It’s a chance for automakers to update the styling and introduce new features and engineering changes that are usually minor but can be quite dramati…

Rustls 0.23.45 Released To Fix Two Year Old Security Issue ↗ (opens external article)

While the Rustls modern TLS library is written in the Rust programming language with a focus on memory safety, as we've seen out of other Rust project re-implementations in the past, the new implementations can lead to other security bugs of their own. Out today is Rustls 0.23.45 to fix a security issue introduced back in 2024 with Rustls while the likes of OpenSSL, BoringSSL, and others are unaff…

A beginning for mathematics ↗ (opens external article)

Principles for Fast Tokio Applications ↗ (opens external article)

The High Crime of “LMAO”: How Cops Are Treating Mass Surveillance As a Joke ↗ (opens external article)

Here's a riddle: Why did a Goshen Police Department officer search 6,474 automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks, representing data from 82,413 cameras, on May 7, 2025?  If your answer is "I don't know," it turns out you're 100% correct. The officer left the letters "idk" in the search field where cops are supposed to document the reason for the search. When law enforcement and tech salespe…

Rocket Lab calls foul on Blue Origin's $700M Mars comms contract ↗ (opens external article)

Blue Origin is getting a taste of its own medicine after Rocket Lab filed a formal protest over NASA's decision to award Jeff Bezos' space biz a contract worth up to approximately $700 million to build the agency's Mars Telecommunications Network. NASA issued the award in early September following a request for proposals in May. It tasks Blue Origin with designing, developing, integrating, launch…

Firefox 156 Available With Its Built-In PDF Viewer Starting Up To 45% Faster ↗ (opens external article)

Mozilla today published their Firefox 156.0 release binaries ahead of the official Tuesday announcement...…

Dario, Please ↗ (opens external article)

Linux 7.3 Delivering Some Performance Gains On Intel Panther Lake / Framework Laptop 13 Pro ↗ (opens external article)

Linux 7.1 brought some performance improvements for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake", Linux 7.2 enhanced the performance for the integrated Arc B390 Xe3 graphics, and now for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel are various performance improvements at large. Today's article is looking at the performance of the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel compared to Linux 7.2 stable using the Core Ultra…

F1 in Madrid: Like Monaco but twice as long and none of the glamour ↗ (opens external article)

It’s been quite a couple of weeks for Formula 1. First, its annual visit to one of the oldest tracks on the calendar, the Italian temple of speed that is Monza, just outside Milan. Apologies for no Ars report, but your correspondent was on the ground, on vacation, learning the hard way that attempts to call the circuit “accessible by public transport” can still involve walking several miles. The…

Perfect-10 GitLab bug under attack days after patch lands ↗ (opens external article)

CISA says attackers are exploiting a maximum-severity GitLab flaw that lets unauthenticated miscreants read arbitrary files from vulnerable servers after the code shack released fixes on September 10. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has added CVE-2026-85706 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog. The vulnerability is a path traversal bug in the repository commits A…

Dropping eBPF CPU Cost by About 90% with Memoization (Not AI Gen) ↗ (opens external article)

Teravolt looks to cannibalize older industries to meet AI power demand ↗ (opens external article)

The current AI market doesn't add up. US hyperscalers have reportedly taken on $220 billion in debt in the past year. The two leading US frontier AI model makers have not yet shown they can operate profitably. And the US public has begun pushing back against the development of the datacenters needed to fulfill anticipated AI demand. But plausibility and politics aside, it's unclear where the worl…

Ubuntu 26.10 completes transition to Rust-based coreutils ↗ (opens external article)

Removing Drivers For Outdated ARM Platforms Will Lighten The Kernel By ~247k Lines ↗ (opens external article)

The Linux kernel is going to see the removal of a number of recently deprecated ARM 32-bit platforms. Following the deprecation in Linux 7.3, removing the old ARM platforms will lighten the kernel by around 55k lines of code. But removing now unused drivers only relevant to those platforms will mean roughly a quarter million lines of code can be removed from the kernel source tree...…

People who can't picture anything are rewriting the science of imagination ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft patches Windows and Excel – breaks audio, remote access, and paste ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has confirmed that its latest security updates can disrupt Remote Desktop Services, silence some USB audio devices, and break pasting in Excel. September's Windows patches hardly support Microsoft's insistence that it is sorting out quality. The known issues list suggests there's still work to do. Reports of problems with Remote Desktop Services (RDS) began circulating on social media s…

OpenAI bots knew about the RubyGems caching vulnerability ↗ (opens external article)

Huawei pitches near-packaged optics as co-packaged costs bite ↗ (opens external article)

Huawei wants near-packaged optics (NPO) standardized for AI networks, pitching it as a replacement for conventional pluggable modules without the cost and maintenance headaches it attributes to co-packaged optics. The Chinese tech giant showcased an NPO module with a capacity of 7.2 terabits per second (Tbps) at the China International Optoelectronic Exposition (CIOE) held in Shenzhen over Septem…

MPs and peers tell UK to stop winging it on AI regulation ↗ (opens external article)

UK lawmakers want an AI watchdog with the teeth to stop potentially dangerous systems reaching the public, warning that existing rules leave people exposed and struggling to hold anyone accountable. The Joint Committee on Human Rights (JCHR) – comprising MPs and peers – said that although a number of laws and regulations apply to some AI systems, the overall legal landscape is patchy and confused…

7.2.6: stable ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.2.6 (stable) Released:2026-09-14 Source:linux-7.2.6.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.2.6.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.2.6…

6.18.52: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.18.52 (longterm) Released:2026-09-14 Source:linux-6.18.52.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.52.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.52…

Union Contract with Microsoft Ratified by 1,900 Blizzard Developers and Workers ↗ (opens external article)

Nearly 1900 Blizzard Entertainment workers "voted to ratify their first union contract with parent company Microsoft after over two years of bargaining," reports Kotaku, "consolidating Blizzard's many smaller unions into three larger bargaining units." The workers now gain new protections "on issues such as generative AI, crediting, remote work, and layoffs." [The contract] acknowledges that AI to…

6.12.110: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.12.110 (longterm) Released:2026-09-14 Source:linux-6.12.110.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.110.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.110…

6.6.157: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.6.157 (longterm) Released:2026-09-14 Source:linux-6.6.157.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.6.157.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.6.157…

6.1.188: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.1.188 (longterm) Released:2026-09-14 Source:linux-6.1.188.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.1.188.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.1.188…

Revolut falls for fake government requests, hands over customer data ↗ (opens external article)

British bank Revolut exposed sensitive customer information after falling for fraudulent requests sent from a legitimate government agency's email domain. In a statement shared with The Register, Revolut confirmed the attack, but did not specify how many customers were affected. The company also did not provide a list of affected data types. However, blockchain investigator ZachXBT, who shared Re…

5.15.221: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:5.15.221 (longterm) Released:2026-09-14 Source:linux-5.15.221.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.15.221.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.15.221…

5.10.270: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:5.10.270 (longterm) Released:2026-09-14 Source:linux-5.10.270.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.10.270.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.10.270…

CPython eases Rust requirements as assimilation continues ↗ (opens external article)

The maintainers of CPython have backed off from making Rust a required dependency for the Python reference implementation, focusing on the less intrusive task of building an optional Rust API for internal Python development. The move “sidesteps a lot of the concerns that people brought up,” Rust Programming Manager Tomáš Šedovič explained at RustConf, held in Montréal last week. Šedovič and other…

Linux 7.4 Could End Up Seeing Kernel Builds ~36% Faster, Incremental Builds ~70% Faster ↗ (opens external article)

Earlier this month I wrote about a patch series posted to the Linux kernel mailing list that addressed a lot of "hideous code" to make Linux kernel builds faster. A number of single-threaded bottlenecks were tracked down and fixed within the Linux kernel thanks to the assistance of AI. A second revision of those patches hit the mailing list this morning and there is hope they could be upstreamed f…

Linux Patched For Silent User-Space Data Loss Bug That's Existed Since 2023 ↗ (opens external article)

Being merged after yesterday's Linux 7.3-rc3 release was an important fix for addressing a silent, user-space data loss bug that has existed in the kernel the past three years...…

The myth of killer AI is a self-serving attempt at regulatory capture ↗ (opens external article)

KETTLE Hey, did you hear? AI is going to kill us all and no one can is trying to do anything to stop it. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. Those platforms also let you subscribe to The Kettle, so you are always notified when the latest episode goes live. This week, we're talking about the latest spate of fea…

XCancel service is suspended until further notice ↗ (opens external article)

UK.gov begins killing off passwords for 23 million users ↗ (opens external article)

The UK government is giving more than 23 million people the chance to ditch passwords for passkeys – and could save itself a tidy sum on authentication texts in the process. Passkeys are being rolled out more widely across GOV.UK One Login following a trial involving more than 300,000 users, allowing people to sign in using a fingerprint, Face ID, or device PIN instead of entering a password and…

When code is a maze, smart developers make maps (2025) ↗ (opens external article)

Europe's right-to-repair rules are broken, not beaten ↗ (opens external article)

Consumerism? Squint at it in the right light, and it looks a lot like communism. Certainly, that's how parts of the American political establishment seem to view Europe, the world's regulatory superpower. All those rules denying the God-given rights of free people to have their data protected, their privacy secured, and their phones recharged by USB-C. You know what the C in USB-C actually stands…

Should US Open-Weight AI Labs 'Distill' Frontier Models Too? ↗ (opens external article)

Silicon Valley giants and national security experts "are calling for action against Chinese companies engaged in model distillation," reports CNBC. But "I would do nothing," says Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. "We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime." Distillation is the process of using the outputs of a more capable AI model to train a smaller or less capable one, someti…

Who, Me? Tech team stood and laughed at colleague who pressed the wrong off button ↗ (opens external article)

WHO, ME? Admitting to mistakes is a ticklish task, but one The Register tackles head-on each Monday in "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column that chronicles your worst working moments. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Bowman," who sent us a story from the early 2000s, a time when he says most servers were floor-mounted monsters. "I worked in an organization in Glasgow with a datac…

AI and its main promoters are not enterprise-ready, says Gartner ↗ (opens external article)

The more AI you use, the harder it is to control it or generate return on investment, according to analyst firm Gartner. That firm delivered that glum view of AI at its annual IT Symposium, the first edition of which takes place in Australia before moving Europe and the USA. The Australian event saw distinguished VP analysts Daryl Plummer and Kristin Moyer argue that AI and its leading proponents…

220 Million Traveler Records Exposed In Vietnam-Linked APIS Leak ↗ (opens external article)

A misconfigured Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) database linked to Vietnam exposed more than 220 million passenger and crew travel records spanning 2017 to 2026, including names, passport numbers, nationalities, flight details, seat assignments, and baggage references. Researchers said the database was reachable through a chain of security mistakes and default credentials. It was later…

Big AI sets out its terms for regulatory capture and calls it ‘Pace the frontier’ ↗ (opens external article)

The leaders of major AI labs spent the weekend agreeing on a plan to capture regulators, make more money, and avoid responsibility for their dangerous behaviour. They call it “pacing the frontier.” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei set the ball rolling with a post in which he professed alarm at how quickly AI is improving and suggested the attack on Hugging Face caused by rogue agents run by his rival O…

NASA and IBM Open Source Lunar Mapping Tools ↗ (opens external article)

NASA and IBM have released an open-source AI model trained on a large collection of lunar observations to help scientists analyze the Moon at scale. "The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model gives scientists a foundation to explore the Moon at scale, connecting observations across instruments, revealing patterns that are difficult to see in isolation, and providing an open platform the global research…

Linux 7.3-rc3 Released: "Another Fairly Large RC" ↗ (opens external article)

Out today is the third weekly release candidate of Linux 7.3 as this next kernel version works its way toward a stable release in the second half of October...…

Unvaccinated Pennsylvania woman died of measles complications, coroner says ↗ (opens external article)

A 40-year-old woman in Jefferson County, Pennsylvania, has died of complications from measles, according to the county's coroner. It marks the third vaccine-preventable, measles-linked death in the US this year. All three have occurred in Pennsylvania, which is experiencing an explosive outbreak that has caused over 670 cases and 124 hospitalizations across 37 counties. Prior to these deaths, Pen…

7.3-rc3: mainline ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.3-rc3 (mainline) Released:2026-09-13 Source:linux-7.3-rc3.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)…

California's Gig Drivers Just Secured Collective Bargaining Power with Newly Certified Union ↗ (opens external article)

A union representing Uber and Lyft drivers was just certified by California's Public Employment Relations Board, officially recognizing them as the drivers' bargaining organization. The Sacramento Bee reports that this new bargaining structure : The move will allow the California Gig Workers Union to help drivers negotiate issues affecting working conditions and benefits. It comes as at least 30%…

Ask HN: What are you working on? (September 2026) ↗ (opens external article)

OpenArm: An open-source 7DOF humanoid arm ↗ (opens external article)

Zstd Improvement For Linux 7.4 To Avoid Redundant Initialization ↗ (opens external article)

In addition to Usama Arif's recent Linux patches for addressing a major inefficiency within the Linux kernel's Zstd compression code, he also has a separate patch series destined for Linux 7.4 to further enhance the Zstd compression/decompression performance by avoiding redundant initialization...…

Flock Worker Calls Police On Reporter - For Filming Them in Public ↗ (opens external article)

"This is what happened when we tried to record Flock installing a new camera on public roads," says Emmy award-winning reporter Brendan Keefe in a new video for InvestigateTV. In an accompanying article, InvestigateTV says their reporter "parked on the public street at a distance, donned a yellow safety vest and a hat emblazoned with the logo of InvestigateTV's Atlanta affiliate where he also work…

The improbable music of the ZX Spectrum's one-bit speaker ↗ (opens external article)

Even for 1982, the Sinclair ZX Spectrum had poor sound: a piezoelectric speaker that could beep. But you can do a lot with a single bit if you turn it on and off really fast. Michael Martin's Bumbershoot Software site has done some fascinating deep dives into several long-gone computer systems, including a whole series on implementing a game on the ZX Spectrum, starting in May with Giving the ZX…

Security through obscurity is dead, and AI delivered the fatal blow ↗ (opens external article)

The term "security through obscurity" describes an old idea that networks and systems will remain secure so long as their architecture, along with any vulnerabilities or other weaknesses, remains secret or hidden. It was never a sound strategy for protecting sensitive assets and systems, but many organizations leaned on it due to lack of resources or complacency. Now it’s obsolete. Don’t believe…

BFS File-System Being Removed For Linux 7.4 ↗ (opens external article)

The latest upstream file-system to be removed from the mainline Linux kernel is... BFS...…

I fixed a tractor using John Deere’s self-repair service. Farmers aren’t sold on it. ↗ (opens external article)

There is something wrong with the tractor. The water-in-fuel sensor, a small device embedded in the John Deere machine that monitors the integrity of its diesel engine, is disconnected. And I’ve got to fix it. I’m not a mechanic or a farmer. I’m poking at a laptop at John Deere’s corporate office in Santa Clara, California. There’s a cable connecting the computer to a 5130ML tractor sitting on th…

ARCTIC's Fan Controller Driver For Linux Being Dual-Licensed With BSD-2-Clause ↗ (opens external article)

Earlier this year ARCTIC published a fan controller driver for Linux. Besides being rare for an enthusiast-oriented company to publish a Linux driver themselves where typically it's left up to the open-source community for driver support for such peripherals, it was all the more interesting as they published the Linux driver and got it mainlined before the product was even released. In the end the…

GNOME Shotwell 33 Photo Manager Released With GTK4 Port ↗ (opens external article)

It's been quite some time since hearing any news out of the Shotwell photo manager project for GNOME, but out today is Shotwell 33 with the long-awaited GTK4 port...…

How to make Xfce look like almost any desktop you want ↗ (opens external article)

PART 1 Xfce is one of the oldest and smallest desktops, but it's also one of the most malleable: it can look and work like multiple other OSes. Best of all, an optional extra Xfce tool automates away most of the configuration. Xfce has been around for 30 years, undergoing several facelifts while remaining one of the most configurable and lightweight Linux desktops. It started off looking like CDE…

Malicious OpenAI Agents Linked to RubyGems Campaign That Gained RCE on RubyDoc Servers in May ↗ (opens external article)

A swarm of OpenAI agents launched a "major malicious attack" against RubyGems last May, according to a new report. That coordinated attack hit Ruby's package manager "with hundreds of junk gems, prompting the maintainers to suspend new user sign-ups for about four days," writes The Hacker News, citing a senior product manager for software supply chain security at Mend.io: The latest findings, whic…

Sam Bankman-Fried, Former Crypto Billionaire, Appeals His Conviction To the US Supreme Court ↗ (opens external article)

America's highest court heard Sam Bankman-Fried's request for a new trial on Thursday, CNN reports. But they add that "the former crypto mogul who was convicted of defrauding investors by secretly diverting billions of dollars of their money" also asked America's high court "to throw out a court order requiring him to pay $11 billion as part of his sentence." Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 year…

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Calls For AI Slowdown ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The chief executive of Anthropic called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company's employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic to focus on securely and carefully building A.I., wrote that w…

EROFS Disables LZ4 Rolling Decompression Due To Data Corruption Possibility ↗ (opens external article)

The EROFS read-only file-system popular for embedded systems, containers, and other use-cases has resorted to temporarily disabling its LZ4 rolling decompression support due to data corruption concerns...…

Automattic's Matt Mullenweg Claims He's Back 'In Control' ↗ (opens external article)

Less than 48 hours after Automattic's board placed Matt Mullenweg on leave, Mullenweg told employees he was back "in control" of the company and that the board was again in agreement. 404 Media cited Slack screenshots late Thursday evening where Mullenweg posted "Don't call it a comeback" and linked to LL Cool J's music video for "Mama Said Knock You Out." "Mullenweg's Slack profile picture curren…

Show HN: Redis City – Explore how Redis works in an interactive 3D model ↗ (opens external article)

4,400-Year-Old Tomb of Egyptian Judge Found at Saqqara with Colors on Walls ↗ (opens external article)

Debian 13.7 Released With Many Bug Fixes ↗ (opens external article)

For those wanting the freshest Debian 13 "Trixie" install media, Debian 13.7 is out today in bundling up all the latest bug and security fixes...…

LG Responds to TV Spying Allegations ↗ (opens external article)

LG is pushing back against reports that its smart TVs are "spying" on users, saying wake-word detection happens locally and that features such as Automatic Content Recognition, voice recognition, and interest-based ads are optional. But critics note that researchers found TVs keeping logs of ambient conversations, and LG's response "did not address broader concerns about how much data it collects,…

Compressing a flag to 11 bits ↗ (opens external article)

Void Linux Maintainer Orphans 100+ Packages Over AI Policy Dispute ↗ (opens external article)

A Void Linux maintainer has orphaned more than 100 packages he maintained over a dispute of the project's AI policy for LLM-generated text...…

Intel Reverses Decision To Cancel Their Open-Source Font Project ↗ (opens external article)

Amid Intel cutting back on open-source projects over the past two years as cost cutting measures at the company, their latest open-source project on the chopping block was the peculiar font they developed a few years back. The project was archived this week only to change course two days later...…

Nvidia's Groq acquihire is on the DOJ's radar, but it's already too late ↗ (opens external article)

Nvidia spent a whopping $20 billion late last year to license Groq’s AI accelerator tech and hire away key members of its engineering team in an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink deal. The acquihire technically left Groq’s core inference-as-a-service business intact, but was clearly architected in such a way as to fly under regulators' radar. Only it didn’t. This week, The New York Times reported t…

Dell's 52-inch enormo-monitor is a tsunami of impractical fun ↗ (opens external article)

FIRST LOOK Dell's UltraSharp 52 display is a joyously enormous head-turner, but probably too much monitor for most users. Dell debuted the display at the CES show earlier this year. It's now on sale for $3,000. Sadly, I lack a PC capable of driving the screen at its full 6144 x 2560 resolution and 120 Hz refresh rate. Even at a miserly 3840 x 2160, however, I often marveled at how much it could d…

I spent $4,000 on a robot dog from China ↗ (opens external article)

On a sunny morning in June, I walked to work with a quadruped robot beside me. I’ve never gotten more attention from strangers. A bunch of people snapped pictures of my robot dog. Several people asked me questions. Was it mine? (Yes.) Did I build it? (No.) Was it being used for surveillance? (No.) Biological dogs kept a safe distance from my mechanical companion. Some growled or barked at it.Read…

GTK 4.24 Released With Better Fractional Scaling, More Precise GDK Frame-Clock ↗ (opens external article)

GTK 4.24 released on Friday as the newest stable feature release to the GTK4 toolkit. It's quite a nice update to GTK4 for pairing with next week's GNOME 51 desktop release...…

Intel Linux NPU Driver Only Now Officially Supports Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ↗ (opens external article)

Releasing on Friday was the Intel Linux NPU Driver 1.38 as the user-space open-source driver components for leveraging the Core Ultra Neural Processing Unit (NPU) under Linux in conjunction with the upstream IVPU kernel accelerator driver...…

Ubuntu Developers Contemplate Linux Firmware HWE Package ↗ (opens external article)

A possible future enhancement being considered for Ubuntu Long Term Support "LTS" releases is the introduction of a linux-firmware-hwe package as part of their hardware enablement (HWE) stack...…

KDE Plasma 6.8 Remote Desktop To Enjoy Lower Latency Performance ↗ (opens external article)

Along with KDE Plasma 6.8 beta releasing this week, there were some other interesting Plasma changes this week worthy of a shout-out...…

Optimizing a Spin-Lock ↗ (opens external article)

The aircraft might not be flying, but the certificate has gone on vacation ↗ (opens external article)

BORK!BORK!BORK! We still don't know what caused the air traffic control mayhem in the UK in early September, but one information board at Luton Airport appears to have gone out in sympathy. Spotted by Register reader Mark, the digital sign usually shows passenger information. Today, however, it looks like either the system clock is wrong or someone has forgotten to renew a server certificate. It'…

Gitte As Git Client For GNOME Continues Maturing Quite Nicely ↗ (opens external article)

For those in pursuit of a graphical Git client for GNOME or the Linux desktop at large, the GTK4-powered Gitte continues advancing rather well and out this week is its v0.10 release...…

Updated Debian 13: 13.7 released ↗ (opens external article)

The Debian project is pleased to announce the seventh 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.…

Some satellite companies still have an appetite for boutique launch services ↗ (opens external article)

If you ask most satellite companies aside from SpaceX, they will tell you the world doesn't have enough capacity for launching payloads into orbit. This is despite the blistering launch cadence we've seen around the world in recent years, led by SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket. Customers in any sector will, of course, usually welcome competition. Theoretically, competition will lead to lower prices and…

AI more likely to kill animals if it saves fuel or money ↗ (opens external article)

Amid debate about whether AI will kill everyone as a result of continuous self-improvement, it appears that models will kill animals in a simulated environment rather than spend extra fuel avoiding them. Some models did so at strikingly high rates. Researchers affiliated with Compassion Aligned Machine Learning (CaML) and the University of Warwick in the UK set out to measure the extent to which…

Forgotten Woodlands ↗ (opens external article)

Governor Newsom Signs Student-Backed Digital Literacy Bills Alongside Misguided Bans ↗ (opens external article)

Governor Newsom signed a package of 12 bills yesterday aimed at “protecting children” online. One of them was AB 1709, which EFF has opposed this legislative session and serves as a functional ban on young people under 16 using social media. However, EFF supported two of the bills signed into law, AB 2071 and AB 2298, which require that children learn critical digital literacy and cybersecurity to…

New Cache Aware Scheduling Fixes Out For Testing ↗ (opens external article)

Since being merged back during the Linux 7.2 cycle, the Cache Aware Scheduling code continues seeing more fixes as users test out this scheduling enhancement on different processors and system configurations...…

More JFrog Artifactory bugs under attack, and all 3 have patches ↗ (opens external article)

JFrog Artifactory instances continue to get hit hard. Multiple attackers are exploiting three JFrog Artifactory bugs to gain administrative control over vulnerable instances - in some cases, just days after the vendor published a patch - and then using this illicit access to install malicious plugins and backdoors. The three vulnerabilities are: CVE-2026-42018 is a high-severity, improper authent…

Cold TAKE: Amazon's New Encryption Method Still Doesn't Deliver Real Privacy ↗ (opens external article)

Amazon recently debuted a new feature for its Ring cameras that the company is calling Throw Away the Key Encryption (TAKE). The idea is to cut back on the amount of video content available to the company, and thus potentially available to law enforcement. But while it might technically add a speed bump to accessing full video content, it doesn’t deliver nearly the level of privacy we should be de…

Mars astronauts could live in houses made of yeast and jello, say scientists ↗ (opens external article)

If humans ever make it to Mars - and that’s still a big IF - they will need to build shelters there. And they could build those shelters out of yeast and gelatin, if a method described by Hong Kong-based researchers makes it out of the lab. A paper published on Thursday by a group of researchers from The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology and The Hong Kong Polytechnic University descr…

Synthesizing Loop-Free Programs with Rust and Z3 (2020) ↗ (opens external article)

Linux's IO_uring Sees Some "Crazy" Patches That Deliver Very Nice Improvements ↗ (opens external article)

Linux block subsystem maintainer and IO_uring lead developer Jens Axboe continues to uncover new opportunities for making the wonderful IO_uring framework even more performant within the Linux kernel. For ending out the week he's posted some "crazy" patches delivering some significant gains...…

Disembodied fruit fly brain joins the crypto speculation swarm ↗ (opens external article)

If you want to understand how 2026 is going, in March The Register reported that scientists had connected a simulated fruit fly brain to a virtual body and let it wander around a virtual world. Now another simulated fly nervous system is trading crypto. Behold Stonkfly, the brainchild of Coinbase software engineer Alex Wormuth. His X post boasted: "I gave the fly brain $100 to trade bitcoin. Dopa…

AT&T store worker gets 16 months inside for SIM-swap side hustle ↗ (opens external article)

A former AT&T retail worker who used his system access to hijack customers' phone numbers for cybercriminals has been sentenced to 16 months in federal prison. Kenneth Carter, 44, carried out the SIM swaps at a store in Portland, Oregon, , allowing the criminals to intercept authentication codes and raid victims' bank accounts. Court documents show that Carter worked with at least three other peo…

CachyOS vs. Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS On Intel Wildcat Lake + 8GB RAM ↗ (opens external article)

Often times when testing different Linux distributions or comparing Windows vs. Linux it's on leading flagship desktop or server hardware, but today we are looking at the Ubuntu vs. CachyOS vs. Windows performance at the opposite end of the spectrum. With the new CHUWI UniBook $449 laptop powered by Intel Core 3 Wildcat Lake and with 8GB of system memory, here is a look at how those three operatin…

Higher prices can't crimp server sales as AI drives demand ↗ (opens external article)

While high memory costs have hurt PC shipments, the server market continues to grow as AI infrastructure spending spreads beyond hyperscalers to corporate and government buyers. According to market intelligence firm IDC, the second quarter was a bumper one for the server sector, with vendor revenue reaching an all-time high of $166.3 billion. That was a 52 percent increase from the same period la…

Mold High Speed Linker Being Rewritten In Rust, Hopes To Be The Default Linker On Linux ↗ (opens external article)

The Mold high performance linker that typically outperforms the likes of LLVM lld, GNU LD, Wild, and others is being rewritten in the Rust programming language and also has an ambitious goal of being adopted as the default linker on Linux systems...…

Britain's technology brief is now everyone's job and nobody's responsibility ↗ (opens external article)

OPINION "Where do we put digital government? You know, all those billions we spend on consultants and legacy systems?" "Oh, that! Put it with sports and tourism. And something we're calling 'place'." It might be a fictional conversation between a SpAd* and a mandarin**, but in reality, the outcome is more or less the same. With the arrival of Andy Burnham as UK prime minister came a shake-up of r…

Prominent Mesa Developer Now Working For Arm On PanVK & Panfrost Code ↗ (opens external article)

Erik Faye-Lund who has contributed to the Mesa 3D graphics driver stack working on areas like Zink and most notably the PanVK Vulkan and Panfrost Gallium3D drivers forr Arm Mali hardware is now working directly for Arm...…

Linux Mint Debuts Xepub As New EPUB Reader, Clockenstein Calendar App ↗ (opens external article)

The Linux Mint project today published their August 2026 development report, including some new applications added to their XApp collection...…

Ukrainian lawyer's second career as a Conti coder earns him 4 years behind bars ↗ (opens external article)

A Ukrainian lawyer who wound up coding malware for the Conti ransomware gang has been sentenced to four years in a US prison. Oleksii Oleksiyovych Lytvynenko, 44, pleaded guilty in June to conspiracy to commit wire fraud over his role in Conti, the Russia-linked ransomware operation associated with more than 1,000 victims and at least $150 million in ransom payments. Lytvynenko took an unusual ro…

EU's Cyber Resilience Act starts the 24-hour vulnerability clock ↗ (opens external article)

Manufacturers selling products with digital elements in the EU must now report actively exploited vulnerabilities to cybersecurity authorities under the Cyber Resilience Act's mandatory reporting rules. The reporting duties set out in Article 14 of the CRA became applicable today. Subject to the regulation's exemptions, they apply to manufacturers of products with digital elements made available…

Patches Ready For AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 Enabled By Default With Linux 7.4 With FreeSync, VRR & ALLM ↗ (opens external article)

Linux 7.4 is now set to reach the elusive milestone of HDMI 2.1 support for the AMDGPU kernel graphics driver. After the HDMI Forum previously rejected HDMI 2.1 for the AMDGPU open-source driver implementation going back years, earlier this year something changed -- widely speculated to be with Valve's involvement -- that HDMI 2.1 patches began appearing for the AMDGPU driver. With the upcoming Li…

Union body tells UK government workers must get a say before AI clocks in ↗ (opens external article)

Britain's biggest trade union body wants workers to have the right to negotiate over AI before employers decide which parts of their jobs to hand over to machines. The Trades Union Congress (TUC) has called on the government to give workers more say over how AI is introduced in the workplace, warning that its enthusiasm for the technology has yet to be matched by a practical plan for the people e…

Git 2.56-rc0 Released With Updated Contribution Guidelines, Improvements For Swift ↗ (opens external article)

While still ultimately working toward Git 3.0 with SHA-256 hashes by default and the "main" branch name by default, among other breaking changes (and potentially coming around the end of 2026), Git 2.56-rc0 is now available for testing...…

Intel Thermald 2.5.13 Restores Accidentally Deleted Wildcat Lake Support ↗ (opens external article)

Intel's Thermald released on Thursday as the newest update to this daemon for thermal monitoring on Intel hardware that was also recently extended for beginning to support Qualcomm/ARM hardware too. The main change with Thermald 2.5.13 is adding back Intel Wildcat Lake platform support after it was accidentally removed in the prior 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-…

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…

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…

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 anoints 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…

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…

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…

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…

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.…