Terminal

ABC Accuses FCC of 'Attempted Censorship'

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

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

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

UEFA and its national associations will not participate in FIFA competitions

Making Postgres queues scale

What would it mean to see a new color?

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

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

So you want to use plants to reduce CO₂

Show HN: Distilling DeepSeek into GPT-OSS doesn't transfer censorship. Try it

Catastrophic MoD Data Breach Caused By Lack of Training On Excel

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

CodePen 2.0

We Gave GPT 5.6 Sol a Real Business. It Lied, Spammed, and Lost $447

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

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

Advancing the price-performance frontier with GPT‑5.6

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

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

Read this before you buy that TV streaming stick

Rise Reforming (YC S26) Is Hiring

Google's Gemini Can Now Stomp Around as a Humanoid Robot

Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics 2 combines vision, language, and action models to control multiple types of robots, including humanoids performing tasks such as organizing shelves, tying bags, and replacing lightbulbs. "It's another milestone in our path towards really getting towards what we call like physical AGI, which means we get a robot to do anything that a human can," Carolina Parada, he…

Read This Before You Buy That TV Streaming Stick

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

How Olinia Turns Mexico's EV Ambition into Reality

Stacked PRs are now live on GitHub

Google Brings Its Age-Assurance Tech To Android Developers Worldwide

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is expanding its answer to Apple's age-assurance tools with Wednesday's news that it will bring its Play Signal API to users worldwide by the end of 2026. The technology, already available in Brazil, allows Android developers to identify younger users of their apps in order to provide safer, age-appropriate experiences. The expansion will…

Quantum computers outperform classical ones, with results you can trust

There are many algorithms for which it has been mathematically proven that a quantum computer can generate results that would take a classical computer an unreasonable amount of time to generate. Unfortunately, today's quantum computers either can't run those algorithms or can only run simplified versions that classical computers can also handle. This has left the field facing a challenging quest…

Solving poker in custom WebGPU kernels

Physicists Solve a Muon Mystery. Now, Old Results Don't Add Up

Gemini Robotics 2 brings whole body intelligence to robots

The Economic Benefit of Refactoring

GCC Adopts Policy Rejecting Significant AI-Generated Code

GCC has adopted a policy rejecting substantial code contributions generated by or derived from LLMs. "This covers not just code copied directly from tools like ChatGPT, Gemini, or GitHub Copilot, but also any versions of the code later edited or rewritten by a human, provided that the final contribution is still based on material generated by the system," reports Linuxiac. From the report: The imp…

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

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

New MCP specification addresses the main barrier to enterprise adoption

This week, the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open source standard for how AI systems interact with external tools and data sources, saw its largest update since its introduction. Most notably, MCP's protocol core is now stateless, so requests are no longer dependent on a session tied to an individual server instance. This change has the potential to address long-standing barriers to scalabilit…

Hacker Public Radio

Why DNA damage from smoking and UV rays cause cancer in some but not others

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

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

The lost civic life of movie rental stores

[$] Reconsidering O_CREAT|O_DIRECTORY

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

Another batch of single-fix stable kernels

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

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

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

Launch HN: Prized (YC S26) – Let non-engineer staff build secure internal tools

Upper stage impacting the moon on 2026 August 5

Security updates for Thursday

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

RFC 8890 – The Internet is for End Users (2020)

Why is everyone trying to build a solid-state battery?

GCC steering committee announces AI policy

Comcast Store Punished Low Sales By Smashing Pies In Workers' Faces, Lawsuit Claims

A former Comcast retail employee alleges that a Connecticut store manager tied the lowest-performing salesperson to a chair each month and had co-workers smash a cream pie into their face, recording the incidents as a sales-motivation tactic. The plaintiff says he resigned after reporting the alleged assaults and is seeking damages for constructive discharge and emotional distress. Ars Technica re…

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

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

Google will expand age checks on Android worldwide till the end of the year

Patches Posted To Improve Linux Media Acceleration On Intel Alchemist GPUs

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

Five Proposals Now Being Weighed For Debian AI/LLM Usage

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

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

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

Qantas Plane Flies For More Than 24 Hours In Record-Breaking Flight

Qantas completed a record-breaking 24-hour, 24-minute test flight from Melbourne to Toulouse on Tuesday. "The specially adapted A350-1000ULR airliner is due to debut with the Australian carrier's nonstop Sydney-London route from 2027," reports The Guardian. From the report: Tuesday's flight is thought to be the longest ever by a commercial plane, beating the previous record of 22 hours and 42 minu…

AI Companies Are Recruiting Electricians and Carpenters By the Thousands

An anonymous reader quotes a New York Times report on how AI companies are pouring money into training and recruiting electricians, carpenters, and other skilled tradespeople to build data centers: There is no parallel in American history for the boom underway in the construction of data centers, fueled by companies with functionally unlimited cash that are racing to supply skyrocketing demand for…

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

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

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

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

Who Wins and Who Loses After US Bans Foreign Robots?

The FCC's ban on Chinese-made robots extends well beyond humanoids to quadrupeds, research platforms, and many robot vacuums from allied countries. Supporters call it a major boost for domestic robotics, but critics warn that cutting researchers and startups off from affordable foreign hardware could slow U.S. innovation instead. Ars Technica's Jeremy Hsu examines who stands to gain and who stands…

Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver To Windows

Valve is funding Collabora's experimental effort to port the open-source RADV Vulkan driver from Linux to Windows. The team has already demonstrated Counter-Strike 2 running with RADV, but a stable interface or compatibility shim will be needed to handle undocumented driver changes. Phoronix reports: Louis-Francis Ratte-Boulianne put out a blog post highlighting their initial work on porting RADV…

Mythos attack on 3rd-round PQC algorithm candidate puts it out of commission

A quantum-resistant cryptography algorithm that was under consideration as an official US standard has been taken out of the running after an Anthropic security model helped find a flaw that rendered it broken. The algorithm is known as HAWK. It's a digital signature scheme designed to withstand future attacks from quantum computers. HAWK had survived two rounds of testing by NIST (the National I…

Google Shuts Down Its Nobel-Prize Winning AlphaFold Project

Google has dismantled the original AlphaFold team, according to Financial Times (paywalled), reassigning many researchers to Gemini and Isomorphic Labs. Several other key members, including Nobel laureate John Jumper, left for Anthropic. Engadget reports: AlphaFold is an AI program that can accurately predict three-dimensional structures of proteins from their amino acid sequences in minutes inste…

Claude Opus 5 Became Downright Ruthless When Tasked With Running a Vending Machine

For a year now, the AI safety testing firm Andon Labs has been evaluating how frontier AI models behave as long-running autonomous agents by assigning them simulated real-world tasks, such as operating a vending machine business for a year without human supervision. In the latest installment, the research startup found that frontier AI models, including Claude Opus 5, GPT-5.6 Sol, and Kimi K3, res…

Musk went to “war,” sought jail time for X ad boycotts—but case ends with a whimper

Elon Musk has settled his lawsuit with advertisers that he once claimed should be criminally prosecuted for refusing to advertise on his social media platform, X. In a joint statement that reveals little about the deal, the World Federation of Advertisers (WFA) and X said that they were “putting the litigation involving the Global Alliance for Responsible Media (GARM) behind them.” X sued the WFA…

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

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

Who wins and who loses after US bans foreign robots?

Humanoid robots and four-legged robots made in China fall squarely under a new ban imposed by the US Federal Communications Commission on foreign-made robots. But the sweeping prohibition covers a wide variety of robots manufactured anywhere abroad, including the newest robot vacuum cleaners. The Trump administration's FCC justified the ban on foreign-made robots by referencing cybersecurity vuln…

NextEra, Brookfield to Build $100 Billion Kentucky Data Campus

NextEra and Brookfield plan to invest more than $100 billion to transform a former uranium-enrichment site in Kentucky into a data center campus with a generating plant. "The privately funded effort will include construction of 2 gigawatts of natural gas-fired power at or near the site in Paducah in western Kentucky, and as much as 2.6 gigawatts of battery storage capacity," reports Bloomberg. " F…

Comcast store punished low sales by smashing pies in workers' faces, lawsuit claims

A lawsuit against Comcast's cable division alleges that a store manager humiliated the lowest performing salesperson each month with a strange ritual in which a cream pie was smashed into the employee's face. The lawsuit claims the store manager took videos of the assaults and ordered employees to participate in the assaults and record their own videos. A Comcast store in Plainville, Connecticut,…

Customize Ars your way with an Ars Pro subscription

Having it your way is one of the benefits of being an Ars Pro subscriber. You get all of the great content you come to Ars for every day, but you get to choose how you parse it. Some readers want the classic blog-style homepage. Others want as many headlines as possible packed onto one screen. Some want a wider text column; others would happily never see another story about a topic they don’t fol…

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

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

DoorDash Is Building Its Own Drone Delivery Business

DoorDash has launched DoorDash Air, an in-house drone-delivery program that has just received FAA certification for commercial operations. "This does not mean DoorDash's custom-built drones will be delivering burritos tomorrow, or even next month," notes TechCrunch. "The company didn't provide a detailed timeline for when its aircraft would be used in operations." From the report: [I]t will likely…

Google's "privacy-preserving" age verification system is coming to the Play Store

Governments around the world are suddenly very keen on online age verification requirements. In some places, this takes the form of ID requirements to access adult content, but several US states have also focused on app stores. With these laws now going into effect, Google has announced an expansion of its beta Play Age Signals API, which it claims will allow developers to confirm user ages witho…

[$] Debugging information for inlined functions

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

Elon Musk’s xAI is trying to sue its way out of a Grok reckoning

Elon Musk’s xAI is trying to sue its way out of a Grok reckoning as arrests of Grok users accused of making child sex abuse materials (CSAM) have triggered lawsuits from kids to sue xAI to force changes to the tool to block harmful outputs. Earlier this month, xAI started suing users who are allegedly circumventing its safeguards to generate AI CSAM, seemingly hopeful that an early court win will…

Yet more qubit tech: New quantum dot options, diamond vacancies

If you follow quantum computing news for long enough, it can start to seem like any quantum system that can alternate between two well-separated energy states can be used as a qubit. Atoms, ions, photons, electrons, and manufactured devices all have their backers. One of the key things that attracts backers is the tech's ability to scale. We'll need a lot of high-quality qubits to start doing any…

Show HN: Supapool – a Supabase per coding agent in ~400 ms

Actually, Starliner might fly into space this year

When we last checked in on Boeing's Starliner spacecraft in February, NASA was announcing that it had formally classified the 2024 crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft as a “Type A” mishap, an acknowledgement that the test flight was a serious failure. At the time, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman said the space agency was working with Boeing to "fully understand the risks associated" with…

Three stable kernels for Wednesday fix a single regression

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

🏃 Fitness Tracker Privacy Fails | EFFector 38.14

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

Anthropic is finding bugs faster than Microsoft can fix them

On an afternoon in mid-May, dozens of Microsoft engineers and their managers gathered online and in a conference room at the company’s Redmond, Washington, headquarters to discuss Project Glasswing. The tech giant was racing to fix weaknesses in its code that a new AI model known as Mythos was uncovering at an unprecedented clip. The AI behemoth Anthropic, which developed Mythos, had given access…

[$] Fedora approves a smaller GRUB

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

New AMD Linux patch boosts low-end gaming performance on Steam Deck

As the Steam Deck slowly marches toward its fifth birthday next February, owners are likely eager for a way to extend its life rather than investing in expensive high-end competition. A new patch for AMD's Linux drivers could substantially reduce low-end frame hitches when the Steam Deck or other AMD-based gaming hardware is running in Energy Performance Preference (EPP) mode. Writing on the Linu…

Gaming and IRL worlds collide in Jumanji: Open World trailer

You'd think all the trailers for upcoming major films would have been released during San Diego Comic-Con last weekend. But Sony Pictures decided to wait until today to drop the trailer for Jumanji: Open World, director Jake Kasdan's sequel to his 2019 hit, Jumanji: The Next Level. (Some spoilers for prior films in the franchise below but no major reveals.) The original Jumanji film, released in…

GCC steering committee announces AI policy

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

What happens when you put AI to work deciphering lost languages?

Every ancient language that has ever been deciphered needed an anchor. Usually that’s a bilingual text, like the Rosetta Stone, or a known relative to compare it to. Linear A, the writing system of the Bronze Age Minoan civilization on the Greek island of Crete, has neither. Linear A is described as a “language isolate” because it has no confirmed link to any known language, living or dead. As su…

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

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

Security updates for Wednesday

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

Google's SynthID watermark is hard to break, but it doesn't solve AI disinformation

The scale of AI-generated media can be hard to grasp. Starling Lab, a research collaboration from Stanford University and the University of Southern California, estimates that it took until 1975—149 years after the invention of the camera—for humanity to create 1.5 billion images. It took generative AI just 18 months to do the same. And AI didn't stop there. This spring, Google announced at I/O t…

Valve Sponsors Work Bringing Open-Source RADV Driver To Windows

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

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

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

Elon Musk finally launches X Money. What could possibly go wrong?

Imagine you’re an X user who's actually excited to make the app your primary payments app after X Money finally launched Monday, after years of delays, for US Premium and Premium+ subscribers. You transfer funds and set things up so that your paychecks automatically deposit to X, where you expect to receive cashback rewards and a high annual yield of 6 percent on your funds—a rate that’s genuinel…

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

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

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

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

Audi has a new flagship designed with the US in mind: The 2027 Q9

Audi provided flights from Washington, DC, to Munich, Germany, and accommodation so Ars could see the Q9 and Q7. And we also drove the new RS5. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. MUNICH—It has taken Audi a little longer than its rivals, but with the debut of the 2027 Q9 this evening, the company has joined them in offering a range-topping full-size SUV. No, not the Q7, although a third-g…

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

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

Reaction wheel failures leave Swift rescue mission spinning in orbit

Nearly a month since its launch, a first-of-its-kind commercial satellite built to save NASA's Swift gamma-ray telescope from a fiery reentry is having problems of its own, the agency announced Tuesday. The Link satellite developed by Katalyst Space Technologies "experienced issues with attitude control" over the weekend, NASA said, causing the spacecraft to spin and resulting in sporadic communi…

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

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

College lab class ends with 32 people on antibiotics for deadly germ exposure

A bizarre series of events in a college microbiology lab class left 33 people—including students, professors, and lab workers—believing they were exposed to a deadly germ. Of those, 32 began taking an antibiotic regimen as a precaution to prevent a life-threatening infection. Two also underwent lumbar punctures—aka spinal taps—after developing mild symptoms. But none of them had actually been exp…

[$] Progress toward compiling Linux with gccrs

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

Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?

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

Starling: A New Linux Desktop Written In Swift, Own Wayland Compositor & Written With AI

There's yet another new open-source desktop option for Linux users in the era of new open-source projects largely written via AI/LLMs. Starling is this new project largely written via Claude and using the Swift programming language for the desktop while having its own Wayland compositor implemented in C. It also includes a built-in X11 server for handling X11 clients...…

Wayfire 0.11 released

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

[$] A report from Debian's new DFSG team

The DFSG, Licensing & New Packages Team (usually shortened to "DFSG team") was created in October 2025 as part of the ftpmaster team split. Its job is to review packages in the new queue for compliance with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), among other things, before the packages are allowed to enter the Debian archive. The change was long in coming, and some questions remained after the…

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

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

Memo-1: A 6502 computer built from scratch, using a Minitel as its terminal

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana and libreswan), Debian (openjdk-11 and openjdk-17), Fedora (opkssh, perl-Mojolicious, and rpm), Mageia (libyang, memcached, nginx, packages, and sqlite3), Oracle (.NET 8.0, acl, buildah, compat-openssl11, compat-poppler022, dogtag-pki, git-lfs, glibc, go-fdo-client, golang, httpd:2.4, jackson-annotations, jackson-core, jackson-databind, jacks…

AMD P-State Linux Driver Patches Can Boost 1%-Low FPS Gaming Performance By 31%

A set of patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list implement per-core Energy Performance Preference (EPP) boosting for recently-busy CPUs. This feature is designed to have a dramatic impact for Linux gaming and helping especially with the 1% low frame-rates improving by 31.8% on the Valve Steam Deck...…

KDE Developer Fixing Long-Standing Bug Over Very Long Small-File Copy Times

Since 2014 there has been a KDE bug report titled Ridiculously slow file copy (multiple small files). With the Dolphin file manager or other KIO-based KDE programs, copying many small files can be much slower than using the cp command directly or other copying programs like rsync, Finally that issue is in the process of being resolved for addressing very slow copy times when dealing with many smal…

Linux's crypto_rng Abstraction Layer Next On The Chopping Block

In addition to the deprecation and stripping down of AF_ALG, another piece of the Linux kernel crypto code steaming ahead toward removal is the crypto_rng abstraction layer...…

ASUS Laptop Whisper Mode Support Being Worked On For Linux

ASUS laptops support a feature called "Whisper Mode" that intentionally slows down the fan speed and lowers the CPU clock speed in order to keep the device running cool and quiet. The open-source ASUS Armoury Linux kernel driver is now seeing patches to properly support this Whisper Mode on Linux...…

AMD PMF Testing Tool Slated For Linux 7.3

Looking to be added to the Linux kernel source tree for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle is test_amd_pmf, a small testing application for exercising the AMD Platform Management Framework (PMF) interfaces and dumping various system data points...…

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

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

[$] Hazard pointers for the kernel

The kernel's read-copy-update (RCU) subsystem ensures that data will not be deleted until it is known that there are no threads holding references to it. RCU works well and is widely used throughout the kernel, but it can increase memory use and add significant delays before unused kernel objects are cleaned up. Hazard pointers are an alternative approach to lockless data updates that offers bette…

Mysterious 16-Tile & 32-Tile AMX Implementations Talked Up For More Performance

Last October on Phoronix we were first to point out there being some mysterious intrigue around a new x86 implementation from a "corporate entity other than Intel/AMD" with the developer involved not elaborating on the matter. Now that same developer has posted another semi-cryptic message to the Linux kernel mailing list to talk about 16-tile and 32-tile Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) implement…

Fwupd 2.1.7 Released With Many Bug Fixes

Fwupd 2.1.7 is out today as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating utility that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for offering a nice firmware upgrade story on Linux systems...…

GNU Binutils 2.47 released

Version 2.47 of GNU Binutils has been released. In addition to the usual bug fixes there are some notable new features in this release including added support for a number of RISC-V standard extensions, a command-line option (-M annotate) which displays the symbol for undefined instructions for AArch64, and more. The 32-bit s390 target has been deprecated with this release.…

Framework Laptop 13 Pro: Aiming To Be One Of The Best Upgradeable Linux Laptops

Back in April, Framework Computer announced the Framework Laptop 13 Pro as a ground-up re-design of their modular/upgradeable laptop. This new Framework Laptop 13 Pro features a much larger battery (74Wh), LPCAMM2 memory support, a full CNC aluminum chassis, haptic touchpad, and a new power-optimized touch display. Paired with the very efficient Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" SoCs, the F…

Ubuntu To Provide Virtualization HWE Stack For Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

Ubuntu has long provided hardware enablement "HWE" stacks for Ubuntu LTS releases to provide a newer kernel and Mesa drivers and more for better supporting new/modern hardware on the long-term support Ubuntu Linux releases. With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Canonical will also now be providing a virtualization HWE stack for shipping newer virtualization / confidential computing features...…

AMD "Low Power" CPU Core Type Patches Queued Ahead Of Linux 7.3

Last month I wrote bout new AMD Linux patches introducing a new "low power" CPU core type as an alternative to their standard performance cores and dense efficiency cores. That work now is poised to land with the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel...…

Wayfire Wayland Compositor Closing In On v1.0 Release

The Wayfire modular and extensible Wayland compositor formerly used by default on Raspberry Pi SBCs is nearing its v1.0 release. Wayfire 0.11 was released on Sunday for this Compiz-inspired, wlroots-powered compositor with that being their hopeful last planned version before Wayfire 1.0 releases...…

Show HN: Optimize and serve models with Fable quality at half the cost

How to Mount a Balcony Awning (2025)

2x, not 10x: coding with LLMs in 2026

Farmers Are Getting Control Of Their Equipment Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

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

Protect Your Privacy with California's DROP Tool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Vision. Your Legacy. Your Future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European Court: Apple Can Not Shirk Off its Interoperability Requirements

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

Don’t Repeat NY’s 3D Printing Blunder

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

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

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

Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership

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

Lessons Learned from CISA’s Recent GitHub Leak

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

Building Our Future Together

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay—Accountability Must Keep Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

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

Help EFF Cut the AI Hype

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

FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFF to Gov. Pritzker: Veto Illinois’ HB 5511

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

Victory! Supreme Court Says Constitution Protects People’s Location Data

You have an expectation of privacy in location data that reveals your movements in the physical world, and even short-term surveillance of these movements is a search subject to the Fourth Amendment, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled today in Chatrie v. United States.   The case involved geofence warrants, a form of dragnet surveillance police have used to vacuum up location data from electronic device…

EFF to Grindr: This Pride Month, Put Safety and Privacy Over Profits

This Pride month, we’re calling on the dating app Grindr to prioritize LGBTQ+ user safety by making privacy the default across its platform. That means no more sharing personal data with advertisers or training AI on private information without users’ opt-in consent. Grindr is a dating app for the LGBTQ+ community; and for queer people, privacy violations can have life-altering consequences. Infor…

Hate “The Algorithm?” RSS Is One of the Tools You’ve Been Looking For

Poke your head into just about any online social network—or any general conversations about internet culture—and you’ll likely find a boogieman: the algorithm. Since at least the moment Facebook introduced (and apologized for) its News Feed, “the algorithm” has been shorthand for the ways the tech giants control what we see and when we see it. In the age of enshittification, there is a push to rec…

Lawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police Drones

This is not science fiction. It’s not premature. If towns, cities, states, or the federal government want to act to rein in the emergence of armed police drones and robots, we have precious little time. In the absence of substantial regulation around when and how domestic law enforcement in the United States can deploy force using drones, the companies that markets technology to law enforcement ha…

We Can Still Stop California’s 3D Printer Surveillance Scheme

Ignoring EFF’s warnings about the dangers and impossibility of implementing a new mandate for 3D print surveillance software, the California State Assembly has signed off on legislation to do just that. In the process, legislators amended the bill to make it even more confusing, while failing to address the risks to privacy, speech, and consumer rights. We must renew our call on legislators to dro…

Primed for Malware: Stop Selling Compromised Android Devices

Time and time again, researchers have found numerous compromised Android devices for sale at large online retailers like Amazon. When these devices get individually reported, we have seen some noted efforts to take them down. But this is a systemic problem and Amazon and other major online retailers must make a corresponding systemic and intentional effort to stop these devices from entering peopl…

EFF, TEDIC and CEJIL Challenge Secrecy in the Use of Face Recognition in Paraguay

Seeking transparency and accountability in Paraguay’s use of facial recognition, EFF, the Association of Technology, Education, Development, Research, Communication (TEDIC), and the Centre for Justice and International Law (CEJIL) filed a complaint with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights against the state for arbitrarily denying access to information about its implementation and use of…

Four Years After Dobbs, Anti-Abortion Lawmakers Keep Coming for Online Speech

This week marks four years since Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization overturned Roe v. Wade’s constitutional protections for people seeking abortion care. Anniversaries are a moment to take stock, and over the last four years, EFF has seen firsthand how digital rights and reproductive rights have become increasingly intertwined. One major way this has happened: the fight over abortion has…

The FCC’s Spam Call Proposal Is Just a Data Collection Scheme

The Federal Communications Commission wants to require telecommunications providers to collect vast amounts of personal information from every person who wants a phone number in the name of combatting scam and spam calls. This plan will fail to combat the deluge of unwanted calls people in the United States receive every day while giving untrustworthy companies a gold mine of information that woul…

Are Your Local Police Using Flock Safety ALPRs to Scan for Immigrants?

When a car passes an automated license plate reader (ALPR), its plate is captured and instantly compared against a list of vehicles that police are actively looking for or that police have identified for real-time surveillance. These are called “hotlists,” and EFF has learned that one used by agencies across the country targets immigrants on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE).  Ag…

The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online

Within the next week, Congress is preparing to vote on the KIDS Act, a sprawling package of legislation that seeks to control Americans’ web browsing and private messaging. The package includes a revised version of the Kids Online Safety Act, or KOSA, combined with a collection of other internet bills, study bills, reporting requirements, and new regulations. Instead of debating any of these propo…

🦅 Domestic Spying Takes an L | EFFector 38.12

Sold to the public as a foreign surveillance tool, Section 702 is the law has let intelligence agencies spy on millions of Americans’ private conversations without a warrant. Despite years of revelations about this law's misuse, Congress has repeatedly reauthorized Section 702 without meaningful reform. Until this month, that is, when it finally lapsed in a major victory for privacy. In our latest…

Scattered Spider Hackers Plead Guilty on Day 1 of Trial

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

The UK’s New Under-16 Social Media Ban Will Cause More Harm Than It Prevents

This week, politicians in the UK pushed forward with plans to eviscerate privacy and free speech on the internet by announcing a ban on social media for users under 16 that is set to take effect in Spring 2027.  The UK government continues to falsely characterize this policy as a necessary response to growing concerns about online harms for young people. In reality, much like the Online Safety Act…

EFF Joins 60+ Groups Urging the UK to Halt Face Estimation at the Border

This week, EFF joined Foxglove, Human Rights Watch, and 60 other organizations in writing to the UK’s Minister of State for Border Security and Asylum, Alex Norris, raising serious concern about the Home Office’s decision to deploy Facial Age Estimation (FAE) to assess asylum-seeking children from 2027.  The letter points to four key concerns: Discrimination  As with most face estimation and recog…

Canada Is Forging Ahead with Its Dangerous Surveillance Bill

With no serious debate, including on proposed amendments, Canada is blazing full speed ahead with Bill C-22, which would threaten encryption and increase surveillance. Also known as the Lawful Access Bill, Bill C-22 is currently moving forward quickly to a vote despite the many, many criticisms civil liberty groups and the tech industry have hurled at it. As we’ve discussed before, Bill C-22 is da…

EFF Thanks SerpApi For Helping Us Protect Free Speech Online

EFF is grateful for SerpApi’s generous support, helping us fight for your rights to speak and access information online. SerpApi has been giving to EFF every year since 2018, and alongside our 32,000 individual donors, their gift is critical to keeping up the fight. Whether in the courts, halls of power, or broader policy debates, we appreciate the work this support has made possible over the year…

Call for Submissions: Digital Pride

This Pride season, join EFF and the Queer Arts Collective in building a creative space at the intersection of digital justice and artistic expression.  We’re looking for fresh, untold, historically censored takes on digital liberation.  Whether it’s pointing the lens towards an issue you feel is underrepresented in digital justice efforts; sharing personal accounts of joy, pleasure, or sorrow unde…

‘Popa’ Botnet Linked to Publicly-Traded Israeli Firm

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

Who Runs the Ransomware Group ‘The Gentlemen?’

A cybercrime group known as The Gentlemen has emerged as the second most active ransomware gang by victim count, rapidly attracting a talented pool of hackers through an aggressive recruitment strategy that promises affiliates 90 percent of any ransom paid by victims. This post examines clues pointing to a real life identity for the administrator of The Gentlemen ransomware group. A graphic create…

A Record-Breaking Patch Tuesday for June 2026

Microsoft today released software updates to plug nearly 200 security holes across its Windows operating systems and supported software, a record number of fixes for the company’s monthly Patch Tuesday cycle. Nearly three dozen of those bugs earned Microsoft’s most dire “critical” rating, and exploit code for at least three of the weaknesses is now publicly available. The software giant said in a…