Terminal

Big Cloud is poised to corner the market for enterprise hardware

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

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

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

Mold 2.42 Delivering Greater Performance For This High Speed Linker

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

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

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

Show HN: Woxi - Open-source Mathematica / Wolfram Language reimplementation

Tim Gowers: What sort of maths are LLMs good at?

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

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

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

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

Facebook is paying controversial creators to produce rage-bait content

Beef and dairy drive 41% of biodiversity damage linked to global farmland

Dutch Train Map Simulator

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

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

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

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

Launch HN: Discovered Materials (YC P26) – AI agents to discover new materials

Behold the 'Glueball,' a Strange New Form of Matter

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: For more than half a century, physicists have searched for one of the strangest particles predicted by modern theory. It would be made almost entirely of gluons, the elusive subatomic particles that carry the strong nuclear force. Now, using a particle collider in Beijing, researchers say they have effectively proved the existence of such a "glue…

LinkedIn CringeBot 3000

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

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

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

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

llama.cpp

Contiguous US Breaks Its Record For Hottest Month Ever, NOAA Says

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The contiguous United States sizzled to its hottest month ever last month, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. July averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit (24.94 degrees Celsius) across the Lower 48 states, eclipsing the Dust Bowl's July 1936 by an eighth of a degree. Records go back to 1895. [...] Although it…

DARPA heavy lift challenge ends with winner at a 3.84:1 payload to weight ratio

The Human Is the Loop

The lifesaving secret hidden inside a horseshoe crab's blue blood

QEMU 11.1 Released With Numerous Improvements

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

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

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

Redox OS Enjoys installer Improvements, Performance Enhancements

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

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

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

Modular's Mojo programming language hits 1.0 milestone

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

Linux Desktop Use Surged To 22% On One Workday, Cloudflare Data Shows

Cloudflare data suggests desktop Linux usage in North America has climbed to 6.4%, up from 4.1% a year earlier, with one post-holiday workday briefly spiking to 22%. ZDNet reports: [B]elieve it or not, on Monday, July 6, when people were back after the July 4 holiday, Linux usage jumped to a high of 22%. The users of these systems are not AI agents or bots, but real people. I set Cloudflare to cou…

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

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

Freenet Creator Ian Clarke Shares Progress on Its New Decentralized Network

Ian Clarke (aka ancient Slashdot reader Sanity), designer of the peer-to-peer communication platform Freenet, is back with an update on the project's progress following the launch of its P2P network in March. He writes: Earlier this year, Slashdot covered the launch of the completely redesigned Freenet. I recently gave a talk about what we've been building since then. Unlike traditional web applic…

WorldClaw Agentic 3D open-world generation at scale

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

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

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

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

Microsoft Plugs Nearly 400 Security Holes

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

Russian drones found near vital European offshore gas site, get blown up

Romanian army divers used explosives to destroy two Russian-made drones found floating in the Black Sea near Romania’s largest natural gas project, according to the NATO member country’s defense minister. Defense Minister Radu Miruță posted a Facebook video supposedly showing one of the drones being blown up in the water by explosive ordnance disposal divers of the Romanian army on August 11, as…

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

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

Google Gemini Hits 1 Billion Users In Record Time

Gemini has become Google's fastest-growing product ever, reaching 1 billion monthly active users faster than any of the company's 13 other billion-user services. Ars Technica reports: Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organization in Gmail, document summary in Drive, and much more. Gemini is also core to Google's flagship search experience, w…

Chrome adopts what may be the best protection yet against account takeovers

Google’s Chrome browser has added a new feature that could go a long way in preventing a form of account takeover that’s grown increasingly common as users adopt two-factor authentication, passkeys, and similar protections. The new Chrome protection is known as device-bound session credentials (DBSCs). The measure stores a unique encryption key in a silicon-resident fortress that’s built into the…

Meta can't stop states' $1.4 trillion lawsuit from going to trial

Meta and TikTok tried to defeat thousands of social media addiction lawsuits in one fell swoop, but an appeals court rejected the attempt in a ruling issued yesterday. First up among the lawsuits is a case brought against Meta by the California attorney general and other state AGs. Meta said in a July court filing that the state AGs' demands for damages would amount to more than $1.4 trillion. A…

Who (or What) Generates Images for EFF?

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

A Zoom Screen-Sharing Bug Let Anyone Take Over Other Devices On a Call

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As AI models gain advanced capabilities to find vulnerabilities in software, develop ways to exploit them, and even carry out autonomous hacking sprees, researchers offered a sobering new example on Tuesday, disclosing vulnerabilities in the video conferencing platform Zoom that could have been exploited to take over targets' devices. Anyone on a cal…

Compression is prediction

Gemini becomes Google's fastest-growing product ever as it hits 1B users

Google has been all-in with Gemini for the last several years, and despite some animosity online, the bet is paying off. CEO Sundar Pichai announced today that Gemini has reached 1 billion monthly active users (MAUs), an important milestone for any Google product. While 13 other Google products have managed that feat, Gemini has done it faster than any other. Gemini has wormed its way into virtua…

Nvidia Nemotron 3.5 Lightning and NeMo Switchyard

Intel CPU Microcode 20260811 Release Fixes Eight Security Issues

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

Spotify Will Label 'AI Persona' Profiles, Exclude Their Music From Recommendations

Spotify will begin labeling AI-generated artist identities with "AI Persona" badges and exclude their music from editorial, algorithmic, and personalized recommendations unless users explicitly follow them. The company says the designation applies to whether an artist profile represents a real person, not whether AI was used to make the music, and will allow appeals for mislabeling. TechCrunch rep…

Making holograms with a pen plotter

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

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

OpenAI Brings ChatGPT Desktop App To Linux

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

Used EV buying guide: The $30,000 edition

A strange thing is happening in the used EV market. Supply is up thanks to an ever-increasing stream of ex-lease cars reaching the market, and yet prices have been going up as well. As a result of America's latest war in the Middle East, used EVs have appreciated by just over 5 percent since February. Despite the stronger pricing, used EV sales have been strong this year—up 25 percent year over y…

Less than 2.5% of Taylor Farms' recalled lettuce went to Taco Bells

Although shredded iceberg lettuce at Taco Bell restaurants has been a prime suspect in an explosive outbreak of the diarrheal parasite Cyclospora, a new report from the Food and Drug Administration finally reveals where all the contaminated lettuce was sold—and only a sliver of it went to Taco Bell locations. The feces-tainted lettuce was sourced from Mexico and sold by Taylor Farms, a mammoth pr…

Paramount Considers Leaving California Amid Antitrust Suit

Paramount CEO David Ellison is threatening to begin moving the studio out of California on October 1 if state Attorney General Rob Bonta refuses to enter settlement talks over the proposed Paramount-Warner Bros. Discovery merger. The company would reportedly move its Los Angeles headquarters first and shift most studio jobs out of the state over five years, with Georgia, Texas, and Tennessee under…

Grok Bot

France Bans Unsolicited Telemarking Calls

Starting today, unsolicited telemarking calls are banned in France unless consumers explicitly consent to them. Companies that violate the law can face fines of up to 375,000 euros per call, though existing customers can still be contacted with related offers. Le Monde reports: The government says the law is a response to years of consumer complaints. Authorities estimate that about three-quarters…

Mojo 1.0

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

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

Tracking extreme heat by the hour makes climate change seem even worse

Global warming is leading to more extremely hot weather. There is perhaps no more obvious consequence of climate change. But changing how we analyze this problem can still help scientists think about it in a different way that may yield surprises. Generally, studies on heat extremes work with some combination of daily minimum, maximum, and mean temperatures. Sometimes they focus on multi-day heat…

A Google insider spills the tea on how the company forsook its founding ideals

In 2018, 20,000 Google employees worldwide made headlines when they staged a walkout to protest how the company had handled sexual misconduct allegations against key corporate executives, among other grievances. One of the organizers was Claire Stapleton, a communications specialist whose distinctive voice and ability to channel the corporate ethos had once earned her the internal moniker "Bard o…

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

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

England Set To Eliminate Hepatitis C

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: England is on track to become one of the first countries in the world to eliminate hepatitis C, a dangerous virus that attacks the liver, figures show. The target of treating 80% of all known cases has already been met, and deaths from the virus have fallen by 36% in the last decade, just short of what is needed by 2030. Taking antiviral tablets fo…

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

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

Trump to give Republicans a 3-1 FCC majority, isn't filling empty Democratic seat

The Federal Communications Commission has been shorthanded throughout President Trump's second term, but it's about to get a new commissioner. Unsurprisingly, Trump is breaking a historical norm with a nomination that would give Republicans a 3-1 advantage on the FCC. Historically, the president and Senate worked together to ensure that the president's party maintained only a one-vote majority. N…

Zuckerberg's Superyacht Reportedly Declined To Help Stranded Boat

Ancient Slashdot reader Alain Williams shares a report from The Guardian: Mark Zuckerberg has faced questions over why a small cruise ship in south-east Alaska rescued a stranded skiff and its crew when his 387ft superyacht had been closer. The Silicon Valley billionaire's yacht, worth a reported $300 million, is said to have "repeatedly" declined to assist when a nearby boat called for help last…

[$] KVM planes head for takeoff

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

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

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

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

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

Bernard: GNOME Shell design dreams

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

Flatpak 1.19 Released With Nine Security Fixes

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

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

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

Stealing Reasoning Traces from Proprietary LLM APIs

New surveillance tech links your phone to your license plate

Imagine that you share a ride to work with the same colleague most mornings. As it passes by a license plate reader, the camera records the car, which can be linked through vehicle records to its registered owner. Beside it, another sensor detects signals broadcast by devices traveling nearby, such as your phone and your colleague’s smartwatch. After enough trips, software may treat some of those…

Security updates for Tuesday

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

GNOME Designers Lay Out Some Of Their GNOME Shell Dreams

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

Deepfake hiccup unmasks suspected digital certificate fraudster

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

OpenAI’s head of ethics leaves less than a year after joining

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

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

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

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

Mozilla revokes Firefox signing key after unencrypted copy lands in GitHub

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

New Pass-ta-key attack reveals all the things we didn't know about passkeys

Last week, a researcher outlined what he said was a “novel attack surface” in passkeys, the new authentication paradigm that offers a more secure alternative to password-based methods. In fact, the attacks demonstrated in the post are neither novel nor unique to passkeys. This distinction is important because the research has generated confusion among end users and security professionals as they…

Reddit Bans 11-Year Account for GPL Game Post, Testing the EU's DSA

Longtime Slashdot reader DF5JT writes: On July 26, I posted a single announcement in r/backgammon: GNU Backgammon for Android, GPLv3, the first standalone backgammon engine on F-Droid. Reddit's spam filter removed the post and permanently banned my 11-year, 30,000-karma account -- the result is publicly visible at reddit.com/user/OE1FEU. To this day, Reddit has given no reason whatsoever, although…

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

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

FastFlowLM 1.0 Released Now As Part Of The AMD ROCm Umbrella

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

Rusticl Now Supports cl_ext_float_atomics

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

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

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

London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

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

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

The Roboguard Revolution Is Short-Circuiting

alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: Robotics companies promise that video-camera-toting security robots can deter and detect crime. But many companies are rethinking the approach after a trail of canceled contracts and questions about whether the artificial intelligence-powered bots are meeting the needs of businesses and local governments. Proof News found evidence of at least 21 se…

Why hybrid clouds break and what to do about it

Hybrid cloud breaks down when every environment has its own provisioning process, security model, monitoring stack, and cost structure. In practice, many hybrid strategies were built around where infrastructure happened to live, not around each workload’s latency, data governance, resilience, performance, and cost requirements. Why has hybrid cloud become so hard to run? Most enterprises didn't c…

OVH Cloud warns of 87% price hikes to help it cover RAMpocalypse costs

Octave Klaba, the CEO of France-based cloud operator OVH, has warned that it will soon hike the price of server rental by up to 87 percent. Klaba said the price OVH pays for memory rose 6x in the year to June 2026, will rise to 9x by September, and hit 12x next year. He has also seen a 7x price increase for NVMe drives, hard disk prices rise 3.5x, and the cost of CPUs, motherboards, and network c…

Taxi Drivers Rarely Die of Alzheimer's

An anonymous reader shares a report from The Conversation, written by Hatim Sharif, a civil and environmental engineer who has "spent more than two decades staring at maps" and spatial data. Sharif finds one connection especially fascinating: the link between spatial reasoning and why taxi drivers seem to have lower rates of Alzheimer's. From the report: Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely…

Japan kind-of completes its sovereign satnav constellation

Japan has successfully launched the last of the current generation of the satellite navigation orbiters it will use to operate a sovereign positioning system. The satellite, known as “Michibiki No. 7”, aka QZS-7, made it into orbit early on Tuesday, local time, aboard an H3 rocket. The H3 is the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA’s) latest mid-range launcher and has flown nine times. Two…

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

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

Alibaba Cloud is using AI to help it use less AI

Alibaba is one of the world’s leading sources of large language models, yet its cloudy arm is proudly showing off its own technology that finds ways to avoid using them. Alibaba Cloud has built a system to analyze its customers’ tech support queries that often avoids using large language models to solve the problem, an approach it says has proven faster, cheaper, and more accurate. China’s top cl…

Anthropic pledges to embed watermarks to help discern AI slop in sop to EU

Anthropic will embed watermarks in the text and files generated by future models it launches in the EU, as part of its effort to comply with content and transparency rules in the bloc's AI Act. "Generated text will carry embedded watermarks, and generated files will include digitally signed provenance metadata where supported," the company said in a help document published on Monday. The AI biz i…

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

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

Cyber Vulnerability Sweep Picks Up Royal Navy Drones Sending Data To China

A routine security assessment found that cameras aboard Royal Navy Kraken unmanned surface vessels were sending "heartbeat" signals to an IP address in China. "A thorough investigation found no evidence of MoD data or systems being accessed, compromised or transmitted externally," said a Ministry of Defense spokesperson. "Our assurance and testing processes are designed to identify and address pot…

Live now: Ross Scott discusses the Stop Killing Games movement

By now, any serious gamer is familiar with a favorite title becoming unplayable after a centralized online server gets shut down, or being unable to purchase and download a digitally delisted, critically acclaimed title from yesteryear. Can anything be done about this video game preservation problem? To help answer that question, we'll be hosting a live conversation with Ross Scott, the founder o…

With new open models, Meta pitches another reboot of its struggling AI strategy

Meta has announced its intention to focus on open-weight large language models. Additionally, the company announced the release of an open model called Muse Glimmer and a promise to open the weights for Muse Spark 1.2, its more powerful model, in the next few weeks. Alongside these announcements, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a more than 6,000-word essay outlining the company's philosophy ab…

Trump signs bonkers order that cuts vaccines, promotes ones that don't exist

President Trump signed an executive order Monday that makes sweeping, unilateral changes to federal vaccine recommendations. The order aims to reduce the number of lifesaving vaccines all children are recommended to get—from 18 to 11—while also splitting them up and spacing them out over more time and more medical visits. The vaccine changes are not backed by evidence or spurred by new findings.…

Developer Cold Iron Studios shuts down cloud version of $60 game with no refunds

Following its announcement in March, game developer Cold Iron Studios has shut down the servers for the cloud version of Aliens: Fireteam Elite on the Nintendo Switch. The game originally cost $30 (or $60 for an “Ultimate” version with additional content). Cold Iron Studios hasn't offered customers refunds. TheGamer reported that affected players are entitled to a discount for the Nintendo Switch…

Hey, big spender – OpenAI has a new SKU just for you

Not getting enough out of that ChatGPT Business subscription? OpenAI is hoping you’ll take it up on a new “premium” Business tier seat that’s up to $100 more a month for some added capacity and higher usage limits. Sam Altman’s AI outfit announced ChatGPT Business Premium seats on Monday, describing the new offering as an option for Business-tier customers who feel they’re chafing under the old B…

DEF CON hackers add new muscle to water utility protection

DEF CON hackers expanded their efforts to provide free cyber-defenses to rural water systems in the US to include managed detection and response providers, digital twins, and AI agents. On Friday, at the annual hacker’s conference, DEF CON Franklin and the National Rural Water Association (NRWA) announced a new program called the Water Watch Center. It will initially fund five providers - Defendi…

The future is for billionaires – the rest of us will get open weight AI models, maybe

OPINION In a public post titled "The Future is for Everyone," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declares, "We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history." For Zuck to posit that "The Future is for Everyone" is at once facile for being so vague it could mean anything – are there people now living who are excluded from the future? – and foolish for its failure to address real issues that actua…

Amazon backs power plant that may become top source of US climate pollution

Amazon’s artificial intelligence ambitions will soon be partly fueled by a natural gas-burning power plant in Texas that “could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States,” The New York Times reported. These gas-burning plants are increasingly lumped into data center projects. They produce harmful pollutants, which can accelerate climate change impacts and harm pub…

Zuck rekindles open weights Llama drama with Muse Glimmer

After seemingly abandoning its open source AI roots this spring, Meta offered enterprises a glimmer of hope on Monday with the launch of its first open weights model in more than a year. Unveiled on Monday, Muse Glimmer is a 30 billion-parameter LLM distilled from the Social network's larger, and for now proprietary, Muse Spark model. Glimmer arrives as American tech companies grapple with a cris…

Zuckerberg’s superyacht ignored emergency channel, failed to aid stranded boat

Social media scuttlebutt about Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million superyacht failing to assist stranded boaters off the coast of Alaska was partly corroborated by ship-tracking data—and eventually prompted responses from both the US Coast Guard and a spokesperson for Zuckerberg. The incident was made public when Michael Love, a passenger aboard the replica steamship Wilderness Legacy during an Alaska…

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

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

Five More Lenovo Laptops To Report Fan Sensors With Linux 7.3

In addition to more ASUS motherboards having working sensors with Linux 7.3, this next kernel version will also get several more Lenovo laptop models to be reporting their fan sensor information under Linux...…

Linux 7.3 Bringing A KCFI Optimization To Benefit Older Intel CPUs

Expected to be merged during the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window is a Kernel Control Flow Integrity (KCFI) improvement intended to benefit older Intel processors...…

North Korean spies are running local LLMs to cause AI mischief

North Korean government snoops are operating LLMs locally and collecting technology to weave AI into their attack operations, according to South Korean security firm Genians. The researchers said they observed Kimsuky setting up and operating local LLM environments using Ollama, GPT4All, and Msty, experimenting with other AI tools such as Cursor, and using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for…

Meta Must Stop Silencing Reproductive Health Information

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

Has Ford got cheap car fever? A $25K crossover is supposedly on the way.

Talk of the affordability crisis may be penetrating corporate boardrooms. Hot on the heels of the name and starting price for Ford's new affordable electric truck, news leaked today that the sub-$30,000 Fathom isn't the only cheap Ford in the works. According to a report at Automotive News, the automaker is working on a new entry-level crossover that will start at around $25,000, although don't e…

Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list

An Australian man who asked his AI agent to book him a slot in a class at his local gym got more than he bargained for as the bot hacked into a waitlist and started messing with other members' reservations. Australian broadcaster ABC identified the gym-goer only as “Andrew.” The report says Andrew was using the OpenClaw agent with Anthropic’s Claude AI service. Per ABC, Andrew asked his AI agent…

LexisNexis pulls three services offline after suspicious server activity

LexisNexis took its Diligence, Metabase API, and Newsdesk services offline last week after detecting "unusual activity on servers that are hosted and managed by a third-party vendor." Non-public customer communications penned by Todd Larsen, president of Nexis Solutions, and seen by The Register, said the company took the decision to protect customers by "containing the issue at its source" and "…

Qt Toolkit To Introduce Edge AI Submodule, Initially For Vision AI With Qt

The Qt Group has been working on various AI integrations for the Qt toolkit in recent times like a QML profiler skill for agentic development to help with performance profiling. They have also worked on Qt AI coding assistants and AI agents in the Qt Creator integrated development environment. Their latest AI use is now preparing to introduce a new module in the Qt toolkit itself for edge AI infer…

Intel Xeon 678X Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 Performance With The HP Z4 G6i

HP recently launched their Z4 G6i workstation that I have been testing out the past few weeks. The HP Z4 G6i is powered by Granite Rapids WS with the review unit specifically being powered by the Intel Xeon 678X. As the unit shipped with Microsoft Windows 11 Pro and this being the first time I've had my hands on Granite Rapids WS, I took the opportunity to run some Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS…

As datacenters expand, so does public opposition to them

Anti-datacenter sentiment appears to be hardening in the US and UK, with more American jurisdictions blocking new builds and protesters marching against a planned facility in London's historic Brick Lane. A burst of new projects on both sides of the Atlantic has brought concerns about electricity bills, water supplies, and massive warehouse-like structures looming over nearby homes. More than 200…

[$] Even more formal verification for BPF

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

Attackers pick Levi's pockets in social engineering attack

Levi Strauss is investigating a data breach after attackers used social engineering to access three employees' work computers. In a regulatory filing, the jeans maker said the intruders accessed and exfiltrated what it described only as "certain corporate information." Levi's said it spotted the intrusion, kicked off its incident response procedures, brought in outside cybersecurity experts, and…

Django moves to an annual release cycle

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

Flatworms, Ion Channels, and Burning Mouths

Wetherspoons bars smart glasses from filming customers

Wetherspoons has stopped short of banning Meta-style smart glasses from its pubs, but told The Register that customers should switch off their cameras and refrain from filming. "Like many hospitality companies, Wetherspoon has CCTV cameras for security reasons, but their use is strictly controlled by data legislation," a spokesperson said. "Apart from that, the general code that applies in our pu…

Security updates for Monday

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

Linux Mint Improves Kernel Management & Setting System-Wide Environment Variables

Linux Mint is out today with their July 2026 status update that highlights all the improvements made to their distribution over the past month...…

Cyber vulnerability sweep picks up Royal Navy drones sending data to China

Cameras aboard Royal Navy drone boats were found phoning home to an IP address in China during a routine cyber vulnerability assessment. The UK Ministry of Defence confirmed the discovery, describing it as "an issue affecting a Kraken Unmanned Surface Vessel sub-system used by the Royal Navy." The Register understands that the data consisted of a "heartbeat" signalling that the camera was online…

Framework loses customer data in Metabase zero-day attack

Modular laptop maker Framework has warned customers that an attacker exploited a zero-day at analytics provider Metabase to access names, email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, and login IP addresses, according to an email shared on Reddit. For business customers, the exposed information may also include company names, phone numbers, VAT or Employer Identification Numbers (EINs), and…

Meta Publishes Muse Glimmer As 30B Open Agentic Model

The Meta Superintelligence Labs announced this morning they have released Muse Glimmer as their next large language model featuring 30 billion parameters for always-on local agent workflows. Muse Glimmer features open-source model weights under an Apache 2.0 license...…

Claude Code puts auto mode in the driver's seat

Anthropic is making auto mode the default in Claude Code from August 14, claiming its classifier is "as safe or safer than an average user clicking through prompts." Users with a different default already set might receive a one-time prompt asking whether they want to switch. It applies to new sessions on Pro, Max, and Team plans. It will remain opt-in for now on Claude Enterprise, the Claude API…

Minor Optimization Coming For AMD Athlon XP Era Systems Running Linux

A minor performance optimization is on the way to the Linux kernel for roughly two decade old CPUs that have SSE but lack SSE2. Among those CPUs to benefit are the AMD Athlon XP series, some early Sempron models, and some Intel Celeron and Pentium III models...…

Apple M1 Series SoCs To See ~1 Watt Power Savings With Linux 7.3

In addition to Linux 7.3 slated to receive initial Apple M3 Pro / Max / Ultra SoC support, this next version of the Linux kernel is also set to bring some minor power savings for the Apple M1 series that remains the best supported Apple Silicon on Linux...…

Old SGI Drivers Being Removed In Linux 7.3 Over Security Concerns

On top of various other Linux drivers for old hardware being removed due to noise generated by AI/LLM coding agents, there are more examples coming with Linux 7.3 as some old Silicon Graphics (SGI) drivers are being removed from the mainline Linux kernel over security concerns...…

London still dominates Britain's datacenter map, but the regions are powering up

A snapshot of Britain's datacenter estate puts nearly 40 percent of its facilities in London, along with about two-thirds of its estimated colocation capacity, although development is spreading beyond the capital. The analysis counts 555 UK server farms, matching Statista's latest figure. It puts their combined IT capacity at about 1.6 GW. By facility count, that would put Blighty second only to…

Smart glasses are only smart if we train them to be good. Then they'll be fantastic

The most sobering observation in tech is not how much AI is taking on the appearance of the human mind. It's how much the human mind increasingly resembles Windows – not in functionality, although we all know that person, but in the way it crufts up and loses compatibility after years without an upgrade or reboot. We start shiny and new, with everything around us equally exciting, yet end up curs…

Demoralized developer's desperate hack came back to haunt him on LinkedIn

WHO, ME? The past may be a foreign country, but it's one The Register likes to explore each Friday in "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column that shares your tales of workplace mistakes and great escapes. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Walter," who once worked for one half of a duopoly competing in the intertwined markets for bad poetry celebrating memorable life moments and ques…

Linus Torvalds says AI has made 'huge' Linux kernel updates the new normal

Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds thinks the project has reached a new normal of supersized updates, thanks to AI. Torvalds posts a weekly state of the kernel update, and last week’s message opened with his observation that “This rc is huge.” “Even by the ‘new normal’ standards this is a big rc, and I think it's the biggest rc6 we've had in years at least by commit count,” he wrote on August 2. Fa…

Advertisers are trying to influence AI bots with secret ads

KETTLE OpenAI's invasion of Hugging Face keeps getting worse somehow, Chinese open-weight models are nigh on to reaching parity with their closed-off American cousins, and AI crawlers are getting their own LLM-poisoning ads. Were there anything world-shaking events in AI land we missed this week? You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Ap…

NEC tests parking tech that only starts charging once you exit your car

ASIA IN BRIEF Japan’s NEC has started tests of parking technology that will start charging once a driver leaves their car. Most car parks record the time a driver enters the facility and start charging, or depleting a free parking period, at that moment. That means drivers pay for time spent driving around looking for a spot and for the time it takes to exit a car park. NEC, in concert with anoth…

Kernel prepatch 7.2-rc7

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

Linux 7.2-rc7 Released Following Another Exhausting AI-Driven Week

Linux 7.2-rc7 is now available for testing as we close in on the official Linux 7.2 release hopefully next weekend...…

Newfoundland has a hard bread shortage, but why do they eat it?

Four weekend stable kernel updates

The 7.1.8, 6.18.44, 6.12.103, and 6.6.151 stable kernels have been released; each contains a fair number of important fixes.…

CachyOS August 2026 Release Preps For Upcoming Server Edition

CachyOS is out with its latest media refresh of the year. Beyond the usual desktop improvements for the performance-optimized CachyOS, they continue working toward the upcoming CachyOS Server Edition...…

Qualcomm Posts Linux Patches For Kuno SoC Support: Cortex-A7 Platform In 2026

Qualcomm engineers posted a set of 15 patches today for the Linux kernel to enable the Qualcomm Kuno SoC support and their reference development platform...…

I've gone from writing about SD-WAN to depending on it

This spring, my wife and I moved from the Denver suburbs into the Colorado Rockies. The high-altitude retreat presented a welcome reprieve from our otherwise tech-dominated lives. As remote workers, however, we faced certain challenges, and technology was the only reason our move was possible in the first place. Prior to my time at El Reg, I, among other things, breathlessly covered a subset of t…

Mesa 26.3 Intel Driver Code Enables Large GRF Mode For Newer GPUs

The Intel graphics compiler code in Mesa 26.3-devel has now enabled the Large GRF mode for Alchemist/DG2 and Battlemage/Xe2 graphics and VRT for Xe3 graphics...…

Dell Latitude 7320 2-in-1 Seeing Web Camera Support On Linux After Five Years

Launched back in 2021 was the Dell Latitude 7320 2-in-1 business laptop/tablet powered by the at-the-time impressive Intel 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake" processors. Remaining elusive until now has been the web cameras actually working on Linux, but patches posted this weekend finally are cracking that mystery at least for the user-facing web cam...…

Ransomware gangs skip the CEO, head straight for the 40-something IT manager

Turns out the fastest way to get a company to consider paying a ransom isn't calling the CEO – it's targeting the 46-year-old IT manager. That's according to Zscaler, whose ThreatLabz researchers tracked 351 victims across 334 organizations caught up in a single ransomware campaign over the course of a month. The data suggests today's ransomware crews have become oddly specific about their prefer…

Show HN: iPhone app takes simultaneous images from 2 lenses, fuses into 1 photo

Jolt: Clojure compiler implemented with Chez Scheme

Devs to Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, and friends: Make security and privacy the default

Despite the popularity of Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and OpenAI Codex, developers have plenty of complaints about AI coding tools. So researchers affiliated with York University and the University of Calgary in Canada decided to sift through developers' concerns about LLM-based integrated development environments (LIDEs) by analyzing Reddit discussions for common themes. Their findings…

South Korean satellite spots SpaceX lunar impact

The race for the first before-and-after images of the spent SpaceX rocket on the Moon has been won by the South Korean space agency. The Korean Aerospace Administration (KASA) posted imagery from its Danuri lunar orbiter showing the impact site on the Moon on August 6. The impact was predicted to occur on August 5, and marked a landing on the Moon for SpaceX several years ahead of schedule, just…

OpenAI pledges to add Astra security as Anthropic loosens Fable's leash

After acknowledging last month that unreleased AI models committed what for human perpetrators would be computer crimes, OpenAI now says it cannot rule out the possibility that Astra, a pending model release not involved in its Hugging Face hack, might possess critical cyber capabilities. OpenAI in its Preparedness Framework [PDF] defines that term to mean "capabilities that present a meaningful…

[$] Changes in shadow-utils password-expiration features

The shadow-utils project provides the tools that handle /etc/shadow, /etc/passwd, and other related databases; in general, it manages users and groups on many Linux systems. While most software releases are notable for what is added, the recent shadow-utils 4.20.0 release is most noteworthy for what has been removed. Specifically, several utilities and functionality related to periodic password ex…

The Software Stewardship Lab launches

The Software Stewardship Lab, a nonprofit organization based in Scotland, has announced its existence. Our current research focuses are: Software supply chain security — We're working on an observatory that allows users to identify and monitor the world's critical Open Source packages in real time, including previously hidden parts of the dependency graph. Maintainer burnout — Our report on burnou…

LightDM lives: version 1.33.0 released

Version 1.33.0 of the LightDM display manager has been released. This is the first release in four years: the project had been sponsored by Canonical but was effectively unmaintained in recent years. It has been transferred to a new community repository and is now maintained by Joshua Peisach and Neal Gompa. The new release includes Qt6 support, code optimizations, and a list of other fixes that h…

Show HN: Tamron Lens Utility Alternative on Linux

Stable kernel releases for Friday with a single bug fix

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.12.102, 6.6.150, 6.1.182, 5.15.215, 5.10.264 stable kernels. This round of stable kernel releases contains a fix for a single bug, found by Thomas Lamprecht, that affected several of the kernels released yesterday in response to a security vulnerability (CVE-2026-68480) that could allow data leakage through speculative execution. The 6.12.102 r…

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (compat-libtiff3, fence-agents, firefox, freerdp, frr, gimp, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, java-25-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, ldns, libgcrypt, libXfont2, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, p11-kit, pipewire, resource-agents, sg3_utils, thunderbird, and yelp), Debian (async-http-client, jq, kernel, linux-6.1, linux-6.12, redis, and udisks2), Fedora (abrt, chromium,…

Worms: The Future of Yesterday's Worms Today

The hardest working font in Manhattan (2025)

Six stable kernels with a security fix

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.7, 6.18.43, 6.6.149, 6.1.181, 5.15.214, and 5.10.263 stable kernels. These kernels fix a single security vulnerability (CVE-2026-68480) that could allow data leakage through speculative execution. Users of those kernels are advised to upgrade.…

Canadian Man Pleads Guilty in Snowflake Extortions

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

A shell exclamation mark is not for yelling. Be lazy

[$] Bringing BPF to binfmt_misc

The kernel is able to run a few types of executable files, including native binaries in the ELF format and interpreted programs that begin with the #! marker. It also, however, has a mechanism, called binfmt_misc, that can be configured from user space to enable the transparent execution of programs in just about any format. This feature has been relatively static for years, but it seems likely to…

High-Res Photo Shows Sand-Capped Butte Rising from Mars Plain of Polygons

Retire the Abstractions

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

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

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

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

Mobile Ad Software Encourages Location Data Sharing, EFF Report Finds

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

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

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

Technology's Power in the Hands of the People

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

The Senate Should Reject KOSA's Privacy Risks

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

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

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

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

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

The Youth AI Privacy Act’s Privacy Paradox

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

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

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

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

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

The SCREEN Act Threatens Privacy Far Beyond Adult Websites

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

The CHATBOT Act Forces One Parenting Model On Every Family

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

EFF Guide to Recording Law Enforcement

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

Read This Before You Buy That TV Streaming Stick

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

🏃 Fitness Tracker Privacy Fails | EFFector 38.14

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

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

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

Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?

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

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

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

Farmers Are Getting Control Of Their Equipment Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

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

Protect Your Privacy with California's DROP Tool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Vision. Your Legacy. Your Future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European Court: Apple Can Not Shirk Off its Interoperability Requirements

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

Don’t Repeat NY’s 3D Printing Blunder

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

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

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

Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership

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

Lessons Learned from CISA’s Recent GitHub Leak

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

Building Our Future Together

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay—Accountability Must Keep Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

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

Help EFF Cut the AI Hype

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

FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFF to Gov. Pritzker: Veto Illinois’ HB 5511

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

Scattered Spider Hackers Plead Guilty on Day 1 of Trial

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

‘Popa’ Botnet Linked to Publicly-Traded Israeli Firm

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