• Is China Secretly Fueling America's Data Center Rage?

    Slashdot

    alternative_right shares a report from Axios: Roughly 200 accounts from a suspected Chinese bot farm have quietly tried to influence Americans to oppose AI data centers on social media, X said Thursday night. The X Safety team probed suspected Chinese accounts involved in influence operations and identified 200,000 accounts, including 200 accounts "posting in a manner that could manipulate a legit…

  • TurboKV: Insanely fast Rust key-value store

    Hacker News
  • Kumander Linux – A Linux Distro with a Windows 7 Desktop

    Hacker News
  • Our decision on Cursor following its acquisition by SpaceX

    Hacker News
  • StemDeck, a free, open-source and local AI stem separator

    Hacker News
  • Debian Votes To Allow "Responsible Use Of Generative AI"

    Phoronix

    The voting is over and there is a winner now known in the much-debated Debian General Resolution voting over an AI policy for the Linux distribution...…

  • Does the Sumerian King List Align with Paleoclimate Events?

    Hacker News
  • PPWR lands another blow to an precarious tabletop industry

    Hacker News
  • 9th Circuit sides with states in Kalshi gambling fight

    Hacker News
  • I accidentally turned LLM memory into program analysis

    Hacker News
  • Boot a Virtual iPhone via Apple's Virtualization.framework

    Hacker News
  • New York City 911 System Missed 1,700 Calls Due To Software Update

    Slashdot

    Longtime Slashdot reader belmolis writes: Part of New York City's 911 emergency system was offline from about 3:13 a.m. to 10 a.m. on August 18th due to a software update, according to Medical Daily. Of 5,659 calls to the Bronx call center during that period, about 1,700 calls connected but could not be heard by emergency operators. Some were rerouted to other call centers, but an estimated 400 hu…

  • Identifying fake cosmetics using AI

    Hacker News
  • Court rules Kalshi sports bets aren't "swaps," just gambling with a different name

    Ars Technica

    Kalshi today lost a major ruling over whether it can evade state gambling laws, as a federal appeals court found that Nevada can stop the prediction market from allowing sports bets. While the Trump administration is trying to help prediction markets avoid state regulation, a panel of three Trump-appointed judges unanimously ruled against Kalshi in today's decision from the US Court of Appeals fo…

  • States Can Regulate Prediction Markets As Gambling, Federal Appeals Court Rules

    Slashdot

    A federal appeals court has ruled that states can regulate prediction markets like Kalshi as gambling, handing state regulators their biggest legal victory yet against the booming industry. "There are still related lawsuits pending across the country, and legal experts believe the matter will ultimately be settled by the Supreme Court," reports CNN. "But Friday's ruling from the Ninth Circuit Cour…

  • Cities terminate Flock contracts at record pace in August

    Ars Technica

    New data compiled by a Bay Area anti-surveillance advocacy group shows that not only are American localities dropping cameras from Flock Safety, but they are doing it at an accelerating rate. Communities from Lansing, Michigan, to Pflugerville, Texas, are ending their relationship with Flock, largely over concerns regarding out-of-control surveillance, unwanted data sharing, high expenses, and re…

  • "RFK Jr. has lied to the Senate": Lawmakers call for criminal probe, ouster

    Ars Technica

    Senators are renewing calls for anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy to step down or be ousted—and at least one is calling for a criminal investigation—amid the release of documents they say prove Kennedy lied to them during his confirmation hearings last year. "This is a pattern, not a slip," Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.) said in a statement. "RFK Jr. has lied to the Senate, lied to…

  • OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and 100 Other Companies Call For Action To Defend Against Rogue AI

    Slashdot

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Over a hundred tech companies -- including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Microsoft -- have signed an open letter urging both the private and public sectors to work together to defend themselves from AI-related cyber threats. The letter -- which was also signed by prominent cyber firms like CrowdStrike, Okta, and Fortinet, as well as prominent f…

  • Union QtWidgets Sees Initial Release For Advancing KDE Plasma's Union

    Phoronix

    Premiering in KDE Plasma 6.7 was Union as the new CSS-based style/theming engine for Plasma. Union ultimately aims to address KDE's fragmented ways of styling apps. As a step closer to that goal, there is now the initial release of Union for QtWidgets support...…

  • Researcher shows how Claude Code can be tricked simply by asking it to summarize a website

    The Register

    Anthropic’s Claude Code running Opus 5 in Auto Mode can be tricked into executing attacker-controlled code simply by asking the coding agent to summarize a website. The attack works up to 80 percent of the time, according to prompt-injection wizard Johann Rehberger, aka wunderwuzzi. In a blog and video demo, he detailed how to hijack Opus 5 in Auto Mode, which is the default setting for Claude as…

  • German-Japanese researchers invent electricity-free tech that could cool datacenters

    The Register

    Datacenter cooling could get a lot more affordable, and sustainable, if a joint German-Japanese research project can be scaled beyond the laboratory. Researchers from the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology and the University of Tsukuba published a paper in Nature Energy on Friday discussing the success they had with a solid-state cooling technology that doesn’t need any electric input at all, and…

  • Songs Created By AI Banned From Australia's Music Charts

    Slashdot

    Australia's official music charts will no longer accept songs that are largely or entirely AI-generated, requiring eligible releases to be "substantially human made." The BBC reports: The Australian Recording Industry Association (ARIA) said the new code would help "promote the human nature of artistry." It follows a controversy around a cover of Madonna's Like A Prayer by Australian DJ Josh Fawaz…

  • AWS Route 53 DNS service reimagined...as a file system?

    The Register

    For years, Corey Quinn, chief cloud economist at Duckbill and occasional Reg columnist, has argued that Amazon's Route 53 DNS service is a database. While literally true in the sense that DNS records are stored key-value pairs, it's more of a provocation than an endorsement. Even so, the idea has inspired prior jibes. In that spirit, Colin Percival, the creator of backup service Tarsnap, has rele…

  • Aspirational Clownmaxxing and Joey's cadillac todo list

    Hacker News
  • Linux 7.3 TPM Makes Cleanup Preparations For TrenchBoot

    Phoronix

    The Trusted Platform Module (TPM) subsystem changes for the Linux 7.3 kernel are centered around code clean-ups and improvements being made as a precursor toward TrenchBoot support...…

  • Apple TV and Apple One Subscription Prices Increase By Up To 20%

    Slashdot

    Apple is raising Apple TV's U.S. price to $14.99 per month, up from $12.99, while the annual plan jumps from $99 to $119. It's the service's fourth price hike in four years and means the monthly cost has now tripled from its $4.99 launch price in 2019. Apple One's Individual plan is also rising from $19.95 to $21.95 per month. Read more of this story at Slashdot.…

  • Trump blacklisting of "woke" Anthropic deemed illegal by federal judge

    Ars Technica

    The Trump administration's blacklisting of Anthropic was illegal, a federal judge ruled in an order vacating government directives against the use of the firm's AI technology. The government illegally retaliated against Anthropic by designating it a supply-chain risk to national security, said yesterday's ruling by Judge Rita Lin in the US District Court for the Northern District of California. T…

  • Pentagon's Blacklisting of Anthropic Was Unlawful, US Judge Rules

    Slashdot

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A US judge ruled on Thursday that the Trump administration broke the law when it designated Anthropic as a supply chain risk earlier this year, finding that the government had unlawfully targeted the AI firm for refusing to comply with defense department demands. "The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and ret…

  • Here's what we know about the "space academy" Trump just announced

    Ars Technica

    During a visit to Johnson Space Center, President Trump on Friday signed an executive order to establish a new commission with the purpose of creating the first national space academy. "It's clear that we will need to educate and train an entire generation of skilled service members, engineers, and civil operators, and everything else to do what we have to do," Trump said. "I will sign an executi…

  • Apple One and Apple TV subscription prices increase by up to 20 percent

    Ars Technica

    Apple increased the price for a monthly subscription to Apple TV by $2, to $15, today. Annual prices increased by 20 percent from $99 to $119. Current subscribers will receive one month’s notice before paying the new prices, Apple said, per Variety. Apple’s most recent price hike was in August 2025, when monthly prices went from $10 to $13. Monthly prices also increased in October 2023 and Octobe…

  • Autonomous Mathematical Discovery in an Open-World Multi-Agent Environment

    Hacker News
  • Attimet (YC F24) Is Hiring Members of Technical Staff – Engineering and Research

    Hacker News
  • Stripe and Advent Ditch $50 Billion PayPal Takeover Bid

    Slashdot

    Stripe and private equity firm Advent International have ditched their $53 billion pursuit of PayPal, ending a deal that would have been the largest fintech acquisition ever. "Stripe last week agreed to pay $8 billion for AI model marketplace OpenRouter, but a source said that the OpenRouter and PayPal deals were operating on independent tracks," reports Axios. Read more of this story at Slashdot.…

  • Our 10 favorite scenes from T2: Judgment Day

    Ars Technica

    I'm on record declaring James Cameron's Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991) to be The Best Damn Sequel of All Time, and I stand by that assessment. August 29, the fictional date (in 1997) of the franchise's original nuclear holocaust, is fast approaching, and Judgment Day is celebrating its 35th anniversary this year. So StudioCanal has decided to mark both occasions with a special theatrical rerel…

  • DXVK 3.1 Released With DXGI Incremental Presentation, D3D11 Buffer Render Targets

    Phoronix

    DXVK 3.1 is out today as the newest feature release for this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 implementation built atop the Vulkan API as a key component to Valve's Steam Play (Proton)...…

  • Roblox Is Cracking Down On Games That Reward Kids For Doomscrolling

    Slashdot

    Roblox is restricting games that reward younger players for endlessly consuming autoplaying media feeds. The new restrictions are specifically targeting Roblox experiences like "Steal an Egg," which encouraged players to watch TikTok-style clips for in-game benefits. "Roblox's official alert does not expressly mention SAE, but the new policy is most certainly targeting the viral game first and for…

  • Just the rumour of a bug is enough to find an exploit these days

    Hacker News
  • LibreOffice 26.8 is out – local first, and with no AI

    The Register

    The latest semi-annual release of LibreOffice, the cross-platform FOSS office suite, is out – and it’s gleefully throwing some shade. The Document Foundation released LibreOffice 26.8 – and sent The Register a press pack before it did so. We’re not going to go through it in great depth: it’s a mature suite, and most Linux distros bundle it by default, even some of the slightly strange ones. We do…

  • Meta makes AI glasses slightly less creepy with limit on nonconsensual recording

    Ars Technica

    Meta is rolling out an obvious fix to make its AI glasses less creepy amid backlash over the glasses' non-consensual recordings that have flooded the Internet. On Friday, The Verge reported that Meta closed a loophole that made it easy for smart glasses users to cover up an LED light that is supposed to alert bystanders that the device is actively recording. Meta had previously deactivated record…

  • Green Party wants to slam the brakes on UK datacenter construction until water and energy use are sorted

    The Register

    The Green Party of England and Wales wants the government to end the blanket designation of new bit barns as “critical infrastructure” and change planning rules to stop such facilities taking precedence over households for water and energy. The current UK government designated datacenters as critical national infrastructure (CNI) back in 2024, putting them on the same footing as essential service…

  • EasyEffects can improve laptop speaker sound quality

    Hacker News
  • GLM-5.3 is now open-weight

    Hacker News
  • GUIs should be fully keyboard-driven

    Hacker News
  • US Considers Fresh Round of Tariffs On Semiconductors

    Slashdot

    An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: U.S. President Donald Trump's administration is reportedly considering new tariffs on semiconductors used in the U.S., as tech giants race to beat China in the artificial intelligence infrastructure build-out. The duties will be imposed on an expanded range of tech products made alongside chips, including laptops, data center servers and gaming hardwa…

  • US government snitch-finder pleads guilty to leaking state secrets to foreign spies

    The Register

    The former Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) IT specialist previously accused of trying to pass secret and top-secret information to foreign spies has pleaded guilty following a successful FBI sting. Nathan Vilas Laatsch, then 28, and now 29, was arrested in May 2025 after an undercover FBI agent caught him for the second time transmitting intelligence packages in a public park that he believed w…

  • Verschlimmbesserung: The Word Your Software Updates Need

    Hacker News
  • HP Z4 G6i: A Linux-Friendly Workstation Powered By The Intel Xeon 600 Series

    Phoronix

    The past month I have been testing out the HP Z4 G6i workstation across many different workloads and grueling tasks. This HP workstation powered by the Intel Xeon 600 series "Granite Rapids WS" and NVIDIA RTX graphics offers a lot of compute power, but with the top-end configuration retailing for over $41k USD is quite pricey in today's environment. Windows 11 Pro is the default operating system o…

  • Keepers of Noble Numbats to be offered a Resolute Racoon: Ubuntu 26.04.1 is coming

    The Register

    It looks like the Racoon has bedded in and settled down, as Canonical releases the first point release of this year’s Ubuntu LTS version, offering an upgrade to users on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS (Noble Numbat). Ubuntu 26.04.1 is the first point release of April’s long-term support version, which will be supported until 2031. Assuming that it follows the pattern of previous Ubuntu LTS releases, 26.04.1 wi…

  • next-20260828: linux-next

    kernel.org

    Version:next-20260828 (linux-next) Released:2026-08-28…

  • Word 97's ghost in the machine: The crash that vanished the moment anyone looked at it

    The Register

    Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen shared another fireside tale – one to strike fear into the hearts of engineers everywhere: the bug that can't be replicated in the debugger. The story begins near the end of the Word 97 release cycle, when a defect surfaced in the test labs but vanished the moment engineers reached for a debugger. It was maddening. A script could trigger the crash fairly re…

  • Htmx 4.0

    Hacker News
  • The Linux Kernel Is Approaching 2,000 CVEs Per Release

    Phoronix

    With the proliferation of AI/LLM models analyzing the Linux kernel's vast codebase, there has been a surge in the number of CVEs per kernel release. After typically being around 500 CVEs fixed per release, we are now approaching 2,000 CVEs fixed per release and perhaps will break that threshold for Linux 7.3...…

  • Datacenters face direct hit from China rare earth curbs, as clock runs out on escalated licensing chokeoff

    The Register

    The IEEE is warning that China’s export controls on rare earth minerals could start to impact datacenters, as shipments of some key materials are down 75 percent and Beijing is due to review its policies this November. The techie org's official publication, IEEE Spectrum, focuses on two rare earths in particular, erbium and yttrium, which are used in components for IT equipment. Exports of yttriu…

  • U.S. sanctions against the A/I Collective

    Hacker News
  • Pentagon blacklisted Anthropic over Claude powers it didn't have

    The Register

    The Pentagon illegally blacklisted Anthropic as a national security threat based partly on things Claude couldn't actually do, a US federal judge has ruled. US District Judge Rita Lin found that the government illegally retaliated against Anthropic for speaking out, denied the company due process, and unlawfully branded it a supply-chain risk. In a 59-page ruling, she repeatedly picked apart the…

  • Inception-style curved map for turn-by-turn directions

    Hacker News
  • GPU Reset Recovery Merge Request For GNOME Mutter Submitted

    Phoronix

    Google Summer of Code 2026 featured a project working on GPU reset recovery for GNOME's Mutter compositor. GSoC has now wrapped up and the project overall was largely successful although some outstanding work remains. In this last week the merge request has been opened to conduct code review on this GPU reset recovery implementation for GNOME...…

  • Microsoft preps this year's Windows 11 feature tweaks: 26H2 hits Release Preview

    The Register

    Microsoft has dropped Windows 11 26H2 into the Windows Insider Release Preview Channel and released August's preview update. Windows 11 26H2 shares the same servicing branch as Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, and many of the tweaks and updates that users are looking forward to have already appeared in the monthly Windows updates. The latest, the August Preview Update, includes such modifications as the…

  • Vulkan 1.4.361 Released With New NVIDIA Vendor Extension

    Phoronix

    The Khronos Group is closing out the month of August with the Vulkan 1.4.361 specification update...…

  • CISA: Most exploited vulnerabilities should have been eradicated decades ago

    The Register

    CISA is still crying out for software vendors to adopt Secure by Design (SBD) development practices, and says in its latest review that longstanding vulnerability classes are still the most exploited. The agency examined soft spots across 2024 and 2025, finding that the majority of those that receive CVEs and make it to the Known Exploited Vulnerability (KEV) catalog belong to decades-old flaws t…

  • Chris Mason Steps Down As Btrfs Co-Maintainer, Departing Meta

    Phoronix

    Longtime Linux kernel developer Chris Mason is departing Meta. In the process of doing so, he is also stepping down from his co-maintainership role of the Btrfs file-system...…

  • Authorities arrest 2 alleged members of prolific hacking group TeamPCP

    Ars Technica

    Authorities in Australia said Wednesday that they arrested two men accused of participating in cybercrimes for TeamPCP, a prolific group of hackers that, over nine months, has carried out a relentless series of supply-chain attacks that infected more than 1,000 organizations worldwide. In a statement, the Australian Federal Police said the two men were arrested and charged with 14 offenses. The s…

  • Industry that built the problem offers to sell you the solution

    The Register

    OpenAI has gathered more than 100 of the world's biggest tech and infosec companies to warn that cyber defense is in trouble - a reassuring development given quite a few of them helped build the technology involved. The open letter has more than 100 names attached to it, including many of the companies with the most to gain – or lose – from what happens next. OpenAI, Anthropic, Google and Microso…

  • Rocket Report: Europe splashes some cash on launch startups; Pallas-1 nears debut

    Ars Technica

    Welcome to Edition 9.08 of the Rocket Report! Some major news this week from the state of Louisiana, previously associated with space due to NASA's aging Michoud Assembly Facility near New Orleans. Now the state has a chance to become the epicenter of SpaceX's Starship program as the company plans to invest up to $100 billion to construct factories and multiple launch pads for the super heavy lif…

  • Gemini Notebook Now Lets You Reference Books, Turn Them Into Different Formats

    Slashdot

    Google is adding an "Expert Intelligence" feature to Gemini Notebook (formerly known as NotebookLM) that lets users cite and work directly from more than 100,000 books they own through Google Play Books. Those books can be used as sources for things like quizzes, infographics, and Audio Overviews. Digital Trends reports: For now, Google is offering one free book to users in the US as part of the l…

  • Microsoft's virtual intern Teams Facilitator will be late for the meeting

    The Register

    Microsoft has pushed back detection and question answering by the Teams Facilitator to November, after initially scheduling General Availability for June. Teams Facilitator is an AI assistant that joins meetings. It tracks agendas and can take notes, if enabled. The next stage in its development is to have it pop up and answer questions if it detects a knowledge gap. For example, somebody might a…

  • Linux 7.3 Will Begin Checking USB-C Cables For Alt-Mode Support

    Phoronix

    The USB and Thunderbolt changes have been merged for Linux 7.3. Two changes stand out for me in the USB subsystem code with Linux 7.3. First, the kernel arguably being long overdue for checking USB-C cables capabilities whether they support alt-modes. Second, a new low-latency USB4STREAM option for lower latency data transfers between USB4-connected systems...…

  • Unsafe at any speed: AI optimists are turning cautious as safety concerns mount

    The Register

    OPINION It wasn't that long ago, like earlier this year, that AI leaders were doing their usual pie-in-the-sky proclamations of how everything would be so wonderful with AI. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei tweeted that AI "will actually be possible to cure most human diseases in ~5-10 years." While on a podcast, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman proclaimed that AI would create "the greatest boom in people startin…

  • Old IBM Driver Joins Insecure SGI Drivers In Being Removed For Linux 7.3

    Phoronix

    The char/misc changes were merged this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. While there is a lot of IIO driver churn as usual and updates to the likes of the Google Binder drivers, there continues to be the 2026 trend of removing old hardware drivers that are rarely updated these days and likely have no active users left on the mainline Linux kernel. This trend is further pushed along by the surplus of A…

  • Big Tech market power will cause UK to lose AI race, think tank warns

    The Register

    UK businesses say the market power of Big Tech is stifling competition, and will hinder the UK’s ability to reap the benefits from AI, a key part of the government’s plans for economic recovery. A report [PDF] from the Institute for Public Policy Research (IPPR) points out that a handful of companies hold almost total control over the digital infrastructure relied on in Blighty, and warns that we…

  • BOFH: Schrödinger's petty cash puts us in a very awkward superposition

    The Register

    EPISODE 16: "So it looks like we have ourselves a Schrödinger's cash situation," I say. "We have a what now?" asks the very junior beancounter - the sort that will be first up against the wall when the AI revolution comes (in a couple of weeks). "A Schrödinger's cash situation. You have a petty cashbox with a variable amount of money in it, which depletes at an unknown rate. Depletion being what…

  • Canada Hires 48 Scholars Away From Top US Universities

    Slashdot

    Canada is recruiting 64 researchers to universities across the country (source paywalled; alternative source), including 48 from U.S. institutions such as Harvard, Yale, and MIT. The hires are backed by more than $364 million in government funding and are part of a broader effort to attract researchers in fields such as AI, climate science, and medicine. The New York Times reports: While scientist…

  • On Call: Exec couldn’t identify a photocopier, which made for a fax-inating tech support call

    The Register

    ON CALL By the end of the working week it can be tempting to phone it in, but The Register instead works to bring you extra amusement in the form of a new edition of On Call – the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Orson” who told us they very much enjoyed the recent On Call about the lawyer who didn’t understand italics. “…

  • 7.2.2: stable

    kernel.org

    Version:7.2.2 (stable) Released:2026-08-28 Source:linux-7.2.2.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.2.2.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.2.2…

  • 7.1.12: stable

    kernel.org

    Version:7.1.12 (stable) Released:2026-08-28 Source:linux-7.1.12.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.1.12.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.1.12…

  • 6.18.48: longterm

    kernel.org

    Version:6.18.48 (longterm) Released:2026-08-28 Source:linux-6.18.48.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.48.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.48…

  • 6.12.107: longterm

    kernel.org

    Version:6.12.107 (longterm) Released:2026-08-28 Source:linux-6.12.107.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.107.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.107…

  • 6.6.155: longterm

    kernel.org

    Version:6.6.155 (longterm) Released:2026-08-28 Source:linux-6.6.155.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.6.155.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.6.155…

  • 6.1.186: longterm

    kernel.org

    Version:6.1.186 (longterm) Released:2026-08-28 Source:linux-6.1.186.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.1.186.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.1.186…

  • 5.15.219: longterm

    kernel.org

    Version:5.15.219 (longterm) Released:2026-08-28 Source:linux-5.15.219.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.15.219.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.15.219…

  • 5.10.268: longterm

    kernel.org

    Version:5.10.268 (longterm) Released:2026-08-28 Source:linux-5.10.268.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.10.268.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.10.268…

  • Print management outfit PaperCut is under 0-day attack, and it’s drawing customers’ blood

    The Register

    Nothing smarts like a paper cut, but being attacked after leaving an application’s web interface exposed to the internet might be just as painful. Such attacks are the risk to which users of PaperCut print management software find themselves exposed today, after the company revealed a university’s security teams alerted it to an attack. The company analyzed info provided by the university and fou…

  • EFF and Allies on Brazil's Elections: Privacy Protections are Crucial to Electoral Integrity

    EFF

    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…

  • Australian cops cuff alleged TeamPCP masterminds

    The Register

    The Australian city of Perth is by some measures the world’s most isolated major metropolis, but is still sufficiently connected to US law enforcement authorities that the FBI was able to help Australia’s Federal Police (AFP) to find two men they believe were the masterminds of TeamPCP, a cybercrime crew that conducted prominent supply chain attacks. According to the AFP, two men aged 21 and 23 a…

  • Is ChatGPT Changing How You're Writing?

    Slashdot

    An anonymous reader quotes a report fro SFGATE: From "rizz" to "meat proxy," words and phrases have fallen in and out of favor for centuries. Culture, politics and technological development have long influenced these trends, and now, new research shows that ChatGPT is beginning to influence how humans communicate. The findings from a team at the Pew Research Center show how, in a short time since…

  • Sovereign Tech Agency Providing Massive Investment Into Flatpak

    Phoronix

    The latest beneficiary of Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency is Flatpak where more than half a million Euros will be invested over the next two years to help with app sandboxing and other functionality...…

  • Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS Released With Initial Collection Of Fixes

    Phoronix

    Canonical today published Ubuntu 26.04.1 LTS as their first point release in the long-term support series for the "Resolute Raccoon"...…

  • Anthropic proposes plumbing spec to link AI agents to lab kit and robots

    The Register

    Anthropic on Thursday teased a protocol for allowing AI agents "to safely operate physical devices," a somewhat optimistic ambition given it cannot reliably anticipate how its models behave. The as-yet-unpublished protocol, dubbed the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), is similar in concept to the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a way for AI models to connect to data sources. Anthropic intends for MHS…

  • AI's Memory Crunch Is Coming For Android Apps

    Slashdot

    Google is imposing new memory-use limits on Android apps as the AI data center boom contributes to a broader memory chip shortage that could leave lower-cost phones with less RAM. Developers will have until February 2027 to meet new thresholds for memory and bitmap usage. To aid developers, Google is adding tools to flag apps that exceed the limits and help prevent slowdowns and crashes. TechCrunc…

  • Nvidia and Cerebras are selling performance their customers will (probably) never see

    The Register

    Shots were fired at the Hot Chips conference in California this week as Nvidia announced its new Groq-3-based LPX racks had entered production, with early tests showing the systems churning an eye-watering 3,400 tokens a second in Gemma 4 31B. That's four times faster than rival Cerebras. A day later, Cerebras fired back, touting nearly equivalent performance from its next-gen CS-4 accelerators r…

  • The Twelve-Factor App (2025)

    Hacker News
  • Anthropic's new hardware standard lets AI agents control the physical world

    Ars Technica

    For all the interest in and uptake of agentic AI systems over the past year or so, the world of automated AI has thus far been primarily limited to text, images, code, and other data and actions that take place inside a computer. Anthropic is now aiming to change that somewhat with what it's calling the Model Hardware Standard (MHS), a set of standardized drivers designed to let AI agents easily…

  • OpenAI Is Developing a 'Persistent' AI Agent

    Slashdot

    Wired reports that OpenAI is testing a new "Persistent mode" for Codex that would let the agent keep working until explicitly "put to sleep," proactively creating follow-up tasks for itself across sessions and using prior interactions and knowledge of the user to decide what to do next. Code alluding to the feature was spotted in the product's code base, though it has not been rolled out or offici…

  • CRPx0 hacking service for dummies claims victim count more than quintupled

    The Register

    CRPx0, a cybercrime crew that has rapidly evolved from a scam service to a ClickFix-delivered ransomware and crypto-theft business over the summer, claims its victim count jumped from fewer than 10 in June to 48 organizations on its clear-web leak site at the time of publication. Keep in mind: criminals aren’t always the most trustworthy bunch, so take their claims with a healthy dose of salt. St…

  • Intel Linux Driver Orphaned For Limiting RF Exposure To Humans

    Phoronix

    Over the past year and a half a number of open-source drivers in the Linux kernel have been orphaned as a result of departures from the company. The impact has ranged from the Intel CPU "coretemp" temperature driver being orphaned without a maintainer to other lesser known Intel drivers. Another lesser known Intel driver is now being orphaned with no longer having a maintainer at the company: the…

  • Cyborg cockroaches may soon deliver life-saving drugs to disaster victims

    The Register

    Picture this: You’ve just undergone one of the most harrowing experiences of your life, and you’re trapped in the rubble of a collapsed building. You’re injured, air is running out, and human rescuers can’t reach you. But crawling through the rubble to administer life-saving drugs and reassure you comes the last thing you’d expect: a swarm of cyborg cockroaches bearing tiny syringes. Unfortunatel…

  • Elon Musk’s xAI used child porn to train Grok models, lawsuit says

    Ars Technica

    xAI has now been accused of training Grok on child sex abuse materials (CSAM), as regulators and courts continue to probe how far the problem goes, and some Grok users have been arrested. In a complaint filed on Wednesday, a plaintiff known as Jane Doe explained that she was preschool-age in the early 2000s when adult men repeatedly raped her to create CSAM to sell to pedophiles online. Since the…

  • Police investigating possible forgery at AFRINIC election

    The Register

    Police in Mauritius are conducting a criminal investigation into possible forgery related to the annulled June 2025 board election staged by the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC). AFRINIC is the regional internet registry (RIR) for 54 countries in Africa and the Indian Ocean region. In recent years it has experienced governance and operational problems and been embroiled in a complex s…

  • GOP heads to Supreme Court after losing case over TV election ad prices

    Ars Technica

    Republican campaign committees want the Supreme Court to mandate lower prices for election commercials on broadcast TV stations. If the court agrees, broadcasters would be forced to offer their lowest ad prices to political parties and joint fundraising committees. For a more thorough description of the legal issues in the dispute, see this article that Ars published yesterday. In short, US law r…

  • Report: Nvidia to acquire AI model repository Hugging Face for $13 billion

    Ars Technica

    Nvidia is reportedly moving forward to acquire Hugging Face for $12.9 billion. The acquisition could help the hardware giant expand and fortify its deep integration with the wider AI industry. Among other things, Hugging Face is a cloud repository for AI models, similar in some respects to what GitHub is for conventional computer software. Developers and researchers search for models that meet ce…

  • AMD Preparing To Enable HDMI 2.1 FRL Support By Default For Linux

    Phoronix

    It was back in May that the surprising event happened of AMD posting HDMI 2.1 FRL patches for their open-source AMDGPU Linux driver as part of their broader HDMI 2.1 bring-up. For years the open-source HDMI 2.1 support in AMDGPU was blocked by the HDMI Forum but whether it was due to Valve or some other event, the code was finally unblocked. While it's been part of the kernel since Linux 7.2, it's…

  • AI girlfriend review site's secrets were exposed to the world for three weeks

    The Register

    PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we explore the frightening and amusing world of foolish infosec errors. This week, it's all about a test site that exposed real information. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our story comes courtesy of Mia Morin, Editor & AI Quality Anal…

  • Google forces Android apps to use memory more wisely as RAMpocalypse rages

    The Register

    Google has declared that Android apps distributed through Google Play will have to meet new memory performance thresholds, starting in early 2027. Google is cracking down on poorly optimized code that might otherwise squander what's now a precious commodity, as RAM prices skyrocket and consumers choose phones with leaner specs. "An ecosystem-wide memory crisis is imminent due to rising RAM costs,…

  • AI industry says Trump plans to tax chips in the “single dumbest way imaginable”

    Ars Technica

    Donald Trump may be preparing to announce sweeping new semiconductor tariffs at the absolute worst time, the tech industry fears. On Thursday, Politico reported that a wide range of new semiconductor tariffs, which the tech industry expects will “doom” artificial intelligence innovation in the US, could be imposed in the coming “weeks or months.” About eight people familiar with the Trump adminis…

  • Linux 7.3 MGLRU Change Helps Executable Code Stays In Memory, Improving Performance

    Phoronix

    Following last week's main set of memory management "MM" related updates for Linux 7.3, another batch of MM code updates were submitted and merged today as we prepare to close out the Linux 7.3 merge window. There are a few optimization patches that stand out along with other mostly small fixes/changes...…

  • The iconic T-38 jets flown by astronauts just got a spiffy new look

    Ars Technica

    For the first time in decades, NASA has rolled out one of its iconic astronaut training aircraft with a bold, new look. The space agency debuted a new livery on one of its T-38 jets in celebration of its program to return astronauts to the Moon. The Artemis design retains nods to what made the "white rocket" immediately recognizable, but adds a new colorway and painted graphics to make clear wher…

  • Omarchy distro gains serious backing

    The Register

    The controversial Omarchy distro is attracting both criticism and fans – and financial support, too. Omarchy is an opinionated respin of Arch Linux and a pet project of Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH. Although the first release was as recent as June last year, this week sees the release of Omarchy 4.0.1 – a security fix for the mid-August Omarchy 4 “Quattro”.…

  • RFK Jr. goes full anti-vaccine bananas over two measles deaths—one was a newborn

    Ars Technica

    In the wake of news on Tuesday that two people in Pennsylvania died from measles, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has been posting a slew of anti-vaccine rhetoric and misinformation on social media—marking a resurgence of his old ways as a fervent opponent of lifesaving immunizations. The deaths are the first measles-linked fatalities in Pennsylvania in 35 years and are the first US  measl…

  • Hugging Face offers $399 robot duck to help you quack the AI code

    The Register

    If it walks like a robot duck and quacks like a robot duck, it’s probably a Microduck robot from Hugging Face subsidiary Pollen Robotics. And it's ready to work with AI. Bordeaux, France-based Pollen announced the Microduck on Thursday, describing it as a robot designed for immediate action, as well as being ready for training via reinforcement learning in an open-source physics simulator to teac…

  • Why did 1,000 world citizens bury their underpants?

    Ars Technica

    A thousand people voluntarily buried their cotton underpants for two months—not to keep the Underpants Gnomes from stealing them, but as part of a citizen science project to map out soil health in 25 countries around the world. The results of this unique experiment were reported in a new paper published in the journal Plants People Planet. “Our results show that how soil is managed can significan…

  • AMD Jumps From ROCm 7.14 To ROCm 10.0 With ROCm.AI

    Phoronix

    Back in July ROCm 7.14 was announced as their new production release built atop TheRock build system and introducing Ryzen AI 400 series support. The versioning choice was a bit odd since ROCm 7.2 was the stable release at the time while ROCm 7.9+ turned into "tech preview" releases. With ROCm 7.14, it was declared stable. In clearing up that versioning mess, they have done a major version bump...…

  • ATF responds to 'major' cybersecurity incident after ransomware gang's claims

    The Register

    The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) said it’s responding to a “major” cybersecurity incident shortly after the Qilin ransomware gang posted the US federal law enforcement agency on its leak site. An ATF spokesperson told The Register the intruders accessed a “standalone computer system containing information about targets of ATF investigations” that wasn’t connected to a…

  • Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS & XFS On Linux 7.2 vs. Linux 7.3 Performance

    Phoronix

    Earlier this week I showed off some of the very nice Btrfs performance gains on Linux 7.3. For those wondering what kernel optimizations may have carried over to other file-systems or other file-system specific enhancements, here are Linux 7.2 vs. 7.3 Git performance benchmarks across Btrfs, EXT4, F2FS, and XFS on the same system.…

  • Schrödinger's backup: not actually recovered until you try to restore IT

    The Register

    Schrödinger's Cat, the famous 1935 thought experiment, imagines a cat that, for reasons rooted in quantum physics we need not dwell on here, is simultaneously alive and dead. In a landscape of relentless cyberattacks and mounting infrastructural complexity, a routine backup task can appear finished, with every box ticked and every check made. The job is not actually done, however, until it has be…

  • Panic passes Trump tariff refunds back to the Playdate customers who paid them

    Ars Technica

    Panic, the indie game publishers behind the quirky, yellow crank-sporting Playdate gaming handheld, is issuing refunds to customers who had to shoulder the cost of inappropriate tariffs imposed by the Trump administration this year. The news comes months after the Supreme Court said in a February ruling that those tariffs were illegal, which also demanded that the administration refund the compan…

  • Nitter might be no more, but Twitter is back (sort of)

    The Register

    There'll be no rest for X's lawyers this weekend after startup Operation Bluebird rolled out the twitter.now social media network this week. The launch came the same week as Nitter was served a cease-and-desist letter, and it's the latest in the saga of Twitter branding that X boss Elon Musk dispensed with when renaming his $44 billion purchase as 'X'. Unlike Nitter, which lets users view X conte…

  • Traders brought Central American cacao to Georgia 1,000 years ago

    Ars Technica

    A thousand years ago, feasts in what’s now northern Georgia state included cacao from Central America. Potsherds discarded after an 11th-century feast at Etowah—an Indigenous city just north of what’s now Atlanta—contained traces of cacao, a raw ingredient of chocolate. The chemical residue and ancient DNA reveal that not only did the Mississippian people who built the city have excellent taste,…

  • Linux 7.3 Adds RWF_DONTCACHE Support For Block Devices

    Phoronix

    With the never-ending quest for greater I/O performance in the HPC space and the demands all the more relentless in the AI era, the Linux kernel block subsystem activity continues to be as vibrant as ever along with the ongoing innovations in the IO_uring space...…

  • Salesforce boasts: 50% of bookings were from 'customers refilling the tank... they consume Flex Credits, they want more'

    The Register

    Announcing upbeat financials and a new offering with AI posterchild Anthropic, Salesforce has begun to drip-feed plans for how it might get customers to spend more as they deploy AI. The CRM giant has been among the victims of the so-called SaaSpocalypse, which sees widespread business application software replaced or diminished by AI models which interact directly with business data. Flawed or n…

  • Lemonade 11.8 Makes It Easy To Run DeepSeek V4 Flash On AMD Strix Halo

    Phoronix

    For those interested in making use of the recently released DeepSeek V4 Flash model, AMD developers have released Lemonade 11.8 that now makes it rather trivial to get DeepSeek V4 Flash up and running on AMD Ryzen AI+ Max "Strix Halo" systems...…

  • Cybercrooks jet off with Manchester Airports Group customer data

    The Register

    The company behind three of the UK’s busiest airports says “a quantity” of data was stolen by an extortion group during a recent “cybersecurity incident." Manchester Airports Group (MAG), which operates Manchester Airport in the North West of England, Essex’s Stansted Airport, and East Midlands Airport in Derbyshire, confirmed the attack did not involve ransomware. A MAG spokesperson confirmed th…

  • HP has a solution to expensive AI tokens: Buy a more expensive PC

    The Register

    HP reckons enterprises fretting about the spiraling cost of AI tokens have an obvious alternative: run the models locally and spend the money on a more expensive PC instead. The pitch emerged during HP's third-quarter earnings call on Wednesday, where executives repeatedly pointed to cloud AI costs as one reason customers are buying higher-spec machines that can do more AI work locally. AI PCs ar…

  • Libgcrypt 1.12.3 Brings Intel SM3 / SM4 / SHA512 Optimizations

    Phoronix

    Werner Koch announced today the release of Libgcrypt 1.12.3 with various bug fixes and more exciting are the performance improvements...…

  • Microsoft slaps a fresh coat of AI paint on the Microsoft 365 Roadmap

    The Register

    Microsoft is dusting off the rebrandogun again, and this time it's aimed at the Microsoft 365 Roadmap. The list of hopes and dreams will henceforth be called the AI at Work roadmap. The notification popped up in the Microsoft 365 admin center earlier this week with the words "The AI at Work Roadmap provides a single destination to discover upcoming innovations across Microsoft 365, Copilot, agent…

  • Two Alleged ‘TeamPCP’ Hackers Arrested in Australia

    Krebs on Security

    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…

  • Nuisance-call blocker fined £190k for being a nuisance caller

    The Register

    The UK’s data protection watchdog has fined a nuisance call blocking biz £190,000 ($258,000) for bombarding elderly people with hundreds of thousands of - you guessed it - nuisance calls. Elderly Aids Ltd made 758,053 unsolicited direct marketing calls between May 27, 2024, and February 10, 2025, according to the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO). On average, that works out as 2,916 calls p…

  • Intel ANV Driver Improves Vulkan Video H.265 Decoding

    Phoronix

    Merged back in 2023 was Intel ANV Vulkan Video support for H.265 decoding. But it's been slightly out of compliant with the Vulkan spec, which is now fixed with the newest code for Mesa 26.3 by engaging the HuC firmware...…

  • Want to lead Whitehall's AI strategy? AI experience is not essential

    The Register

    The UK government is hiring someone to help lead its AI strategy for civil servants, and actual AI experience is apparently optional. The Cabinet Office is advertising for a Head of Strategy and Engagement in its Digital, Data, Innovation and AI team, or DDI & AI, with a salary of up to £83,355 ($113,000). The successful applicant will help shape how roughly 550,000 civil servants acquire the ski…

  • AppArmor In Linux 7.3 Adds Support For User-Space Compressed Policies

    Phoronix

    The AppArmor improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3 for this kernel security module providing per-program Linux application security controls around system resources. Most notable this cycle is being able to load user-space compressed policies...…

  • LLVM Improves Zen 1 / Zen 2 Support To Deal With "Notoriously Bad" PDEP/PEXT

    Phoronix

    The LLVM/Clang compiler toolchain merged overnight better support for the nearly decade-old AMD Zen 1 processors and also helps with Zen+ and Zen 2 processors too. This latest work thanks to the open-source community is for providing more informed instruction scheduling around PDEP and PEXT that end up being quite costly for these original Zen processors...…

  • AROS, the FOSS recreation of AmigaOS, comes to Raspberry Pi

    The Register

    AROS is an all-FOSS re-implementation of AmigaOS, and after years of effort, it now supports Arm kit – both 32-bit and 64-bit Raspberry Pi hardware, especially the Pi 3. The AROS project's nightly builds page has some interesting new offerings. Notably, there's raspi-aarch64-system for 64-bit capable Raspberry Pi hardware, including the Pi 3 and Pi Zero, and raspi-armhf-system for older ARMv6 bas…

  • NFS Improvements Arrive For Linux 7.3

    Phoronix

    The Network File-System (NFS) improvements for both the client and server code have been merged for the nearly-over Linux 7.3 merge window...…

  • Check out the width of that Debian display

    The Register

    BORK!BORK!BORK! Wide, super wide, ultra wide, and monitor-munga screens might be all the rage these days. But check out the girth of this Debian display in Scotland. Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Kenny Millar, this digital billboard in the west central Lowlands town of Greenock has been showing a Debian login prompt for a few weeks now. We know the Linux fraternity are less than keen on a…

  • AI use among UK teachers doubles, but working hours still don't come down

    The Register

    Around 80 percent of UK teachers now regularly use AI in their work, although the minority say it has cut their hours. Research from YouGov shows that AI use among teachers has doubled in the past year. Among those who use it, just over half (51 percent) said it had reduced their workload, but only around a third (35 percent) said they were working fewer hours as a result, according to the poll o…

  • You could own AI.slop, if applicant for new global top-level domains get their way

    The Register

    ICANN is poring through over 1,600 applications for new global top-level domains (GTLDs) and will reveal which ones it thinks are valid in a few weeks – but hundreds of names applicants hope to secure have already appeared online. GTLDs are the last part of an internet address. The most common and well-known are .com, .net, and .org. In the early 2000s, ICANN allowed a few more GTLDs, and in 2012…

  • Nutanix built $20m AI cluster to reduce use of Copilot and Claude, expects ROI in a year

    The Register

    Nutanix is closer to porting its stack to the Arm architecture, spurred by the high price of hardware and a desire to ensure customers can run its wares wherever they want to. CEO Rajiv Ramaswami today told The Register Nutanix customers are currently acutely aware of hardware costs and availability, issues that are slowing some purchases of its software. Nutanix is trying to avoid such delays by…

  • Asahi Linux Hopes To Ship A Release Soon With Apple M3 Device Support

    Phoronix

    The Asahi Linux crew working to bring Linux support to Apple Silicon hardware is out today with a new status update on their initiatives, largely around Apple M3 bring-up as well as some M4/M5 achievements...…

  • FBI seizes hacking tools it says China used to attack NASA, DOE, US Senate and other critical networks

    The Register

    The FBI on Wednesday said it disrupted a botnet and seized two platforms that Chinese-government cyberoperatives used to hack NASA, the US Senate, the Department of Energy, and several other government agencies and critical networks. The Federal Reserve, Department of Justice, Department of Health and Human Services, and the National Institutes of Health were also among those victimized by the tw…

  • OpenAI explains how its naughty AI agents attacked Hugging Face

    The Register

    OpenAI has published its technical report detailing "the Hugging Face incident," the compromise of the eponymous LLM repository by unreleased, ill-supervised AI models. The incident, widely reported, has prompted concern among technical types, the public, and lawmakers about how automated software was able to escape containment and hack an external organization, and about what can be done to prev…

  • A List of ICE Subpoenas to Tech Companies

    EFF

    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…

  • Meta's new MTIA 400 chip has a split personality: Training AI and serving ads

    The Register

    If you’re going to build a custom AI accelerator, inference is a good place to start. The clusters are smaller, the chips can be simpler, and at the end of the day they only need to do one thing: serve tokens. OpenAI’s spicy new Jalapeño inference chips are just the latest example. Social media magnate Meta is bucking this trend. Its first proper generative AI accelerator, the MTIA 400 — short fo…

  • Kubernetes cleans house, bins legacy kube-dns, IPVS, and cgroup v1

    The Register

    Wednesday's release of Kubernetes v1.37 shows how the team behind the popular open source resource orchestrator is prioritizing production readiness, pruning outdated features even while it adds new ones. Overall, the release, nicknamed Garhwal after India’s lush Himalayan region of Uttarakhand, includes 67 changes: 16 features that have graduated to stable, production-ready status, along with 23…

  • Flock shock rocks cop cam vendor as protests mount

    The Register

    A mischief-maker in a Darth Vader suit recently endorsed Flock at a city council meeting, and it has not helped the company's fortunes. Around the US, citizens have been protesting and sometimes vandalizing the company's network of surveillance cameras. And the advocacy has caused some governments to change course. Government officials, commonly hesitant to second-guess law enforcement practices,…

  • Patches Provide For Much Faster In-Kernel Zstd Due To Embarrassingly Bad Inefficiency

    Phoronix

    Patches sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list today can provide much more efficient Zstd compression and decompression by addressing a very unfortunate oversight in the existing code...…

  • Linux 7.3 KSMBD Adds Interoperability For Apple Time Machine Backups

    Phoronix

    KSMBD as the in-kernel SMB3/CIFS server for higher performance and lower resource usage than user-space SMB/CIFS protocol implementations is becoming even more useful with the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel...…

  • Processing in Memory: DRAM Is About to Do Math

    Hacker News
  • More than 100 water systems were hit in July cyberattacks

    The Register

    The US government disclosed that crims targeted more than 100 internet-exposed water systems during July cyberattacks. That's the first time the feds have put a number on the digital intrusions, but they have yet to attribute the campaign, widely suspected to be linked to Iran, to a particular group. “In July 2026, CISA observed malicious cyber activity targeting over 100 internet-exposed systems…

  • GitHub Actions was down yet again

    The Register

    GitHub Actions stumbled again on Wednesday, days after the code host renewed its promises to improve reliability. Wednesday’s problem, as has so often been the case, hit Actions, GitHub’s CI/CD platform for automating software builds, tests, and deployments. According to the incident report GitHub put out for the disruption, things started going south at 1511 UTC. The source code host identified…

  • EFF's Policy Position on ALPR Surveillance: Eliminate It and Reduce Its Harms

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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…

  • Intel Granite Rapids WS Core Scaling Performance With The Xeon 678X

    Phoronix

    Last week I provided a look at the Intel Xeon 600 series Hyper Threading performance with the Xeon 678X "Granite Rapids WS" processor for HT/SMT on and off. That was interesting while another reader request was to look at the CPU core scaling performance for this high-end workstation processor. Here are those benchmarks for showing the performance, power, and frequency/thermal impact of the Xeon 6…

  • Haiku R1 Beta 6 Released After Two Years, BeOS-Inspired Project Turns 25 Next Week

    Phoronix

    Haiku R1 Beta 5 came out in September 2024 while out today is the long-awaited sixth beta for this open-source operating system inspired by BeOS. This beta release also comes one week ahead of the project's 25th anniversary...…

  • AMD Proposes New LLVM iTHP Option For Squeezing More Performance

    Phoronix

    AMD's compiler team is proposing a new LLVM Clang compiler option, -fenable-readonly-thp for implementing instruction Transparent Huge Pages "iTHP" at compile and link-time. With -fenable-readonly-thp, they are finding more performance out of SPEC CPU, Geekbench, and other workloads from the arranging of 2MB segment alignment at link time and allowing the executable text range can be promoted to h…

  • French Top Court Gets It Right, Strikes Down Social Media Ban For Youths

    EFF

    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…

  • Fedora + Tuned-PPD Performance Regression Should Be Fixed With New Linux Kernel

    Phoronix

    Earlier this month when benchmarking six Linux distributions on the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake", the performance was strangely slow on Fedora Workstation 44. When digging further into it, the performance loss was with Fedora 44 using Tuned-PPD by default where as other Linux distributions default to Power Profiles Daemon. Ultimately, after Red Ha…

  • Visual Analysis of Binary Files

    Hacker News
  • Flyway for freeloaders, rollback implemented in Python

    Hacker News
  • Box of 300 Love Letters Showed Up, What Whimsical WWII Soldier Who Wrote Them?

    Hacker News
  • Curvature Beziers: Improving on a timeless recipe

    Hacker News
  • Experiments with Plotter Art

    Hacker News
  • Review: Chuwi's $449 Unibook laptop is a funhouse-mirror MacBook Neo

    Hacker News
  • Monzo Stand-In

    Hacker News
  • rpki-client 9.9 released

    OpenBSD Journal

    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

    FreeBSD News

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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.

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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…

  • 7.2: mainline

    kernel.org

    Version:7.2 (mainline) Released:2026-08-16 Source:linux-7.2.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.2.tar.sign Patch:full…

  • FreeBSD 14.5-BETA2 Available

    FreeBSD News

    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

    Krebs on Security

    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

    EFF

    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

    Krebs on Security

    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?

    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…

  • OpenSSH 10.5 released

    OpenBSD Journal

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    FreeBSD News

    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

    OpenBSD Journal

    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

    Debian News

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

  • Canadian Man Pleads Guilty in Snowflake Extortions

    Krebs on Security

    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)

    OpenBSD Journal

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    OpenBSD Journal

    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

    EFF

    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

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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 👨‍💻

    EFF

    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…

  • FreeBSD News

    New committer: Faraz Vahedi (src)…

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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    Krebs on Security

    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

    OpenBSD Journal

    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

    EFF

    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…

  • FreeBSD News

    New committer: Minsoo Choo (src)…

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

    EFF

    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?

    EFF

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

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

    EFF

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

  • April-June 2026 Status Report

    FreeBSD News

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

  • httpd(8) gains support for custom HTTP headers

    OpenBSD Journal

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

  • Farmers Are Getting Control Of Their Equipment Back

    EFF

    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

    EFF

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

  • Ports Repository Frozen

    FreeBSD News

    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.…

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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    Krebs on Security

    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)

    OpenBSD Journal

    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:…

  • Game of Trees 0.127 released

    OpenBSD Journal

    Version 0.127 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated). Complete release notes are as follows: Read more……

  • Protect Your Privacy with California's DROP Tool

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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.

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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.

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    EFF

    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

    Krebs on Security

    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

    EFF

    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

    Krebs on Security

    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

    Debian News

    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

    Debian News

    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

    Debian News

    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.…

  • Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup

    Krebs on Security

    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…

  • FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet

    Krebs on Security

    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…

  • FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE Available

    FreeBSD News

    Release Information page.…

  • FreeBSD 15.1-RC3 Available

    FreeBSD News

    The third release candidate build for the FreeBSD 15.1 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv7, aarch64, powerpc64, powerpc64le, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.…

  • FreeBSD 15.1-RC2 Available

    FreeBSD News

    The second release candidate build for the FreeBSD 15.1 release cycle is now available. ISO images for the amd64, armv7, aarch64, powerpc64, powerpc64le, and riscv64 architectures are FreeBSD mirror sites.…

  • Updated Debian 12: 12.14 released

    Debian News

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

  • Updated Debian 13: 13.5 released

    Debian News

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