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Linux 7.4 Sunsetting Old EDAC Drivers Due To "AI Generated Fixes Frenzy" ↗ (opens external article)

In addition to introducing the new Intel BFF driver, the Error Detection And Correction "EDAC" kernel subsystem is sunsetting a number of old hardware drivers due to increased noise to AI/LLM-generated bug fixes for these likely unused or minimally used drivers...…

OpenBSD 8.0 release will have inteldrm/radeondrm/amdgpu drivers from Linux 6.18 ↗ (opens external article)

Diablo 2 Survivors ↗ (opens external article)

Putting Linux on my RTX spark laptop because I don't have a Microsoft account ↗ (opens external article)

Trump DHS Officials Asked CISA To Secretly Aquire and Hack a Voting Machine ↗ (opens external article)

Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from ProPublica: A few months into President Donald Trump's second term, political appointees at the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) wanted Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to secretly acquire a voting machine and hack it. The appointees wanted the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency to procure the machi…

Russian spacecraft maneuvers in "extreme proximity" to satellite used by Ukraine ↗ (opens external article)

A Russian military satellite maneuvered in "extreme proximity" of a commercial Earth-imaging satellite in recent days in the first known example an unsanctioned rendezvous in low-Earth orbit, according to the orbital intelligence company LeoLabs. The Russian spacecraft, Kosmos 2612, "conducted a deliberate series of maneuvers toward ICEYE-X36, a US-operated commercial imaging satellite," LeoLabs…

Grocery giant Ahold Delhaize confirms cyberattack forced US and European systems offline ↗ (opens external article)

Dutch grocery giant Ahold Delhaize, which operates US supermarket chains Food Lion, Giant Food, and Stop & Shop, said it proactively took IT systems offline following a cyberattack, affecting most of its US and European brands.The multinational chain originally disclosed the incident on October 12. “Ahold Delhaize is experiencing a security issue within its network,” it said at the time, adding t…

Amazon makes vague commitment to unproven nuclear tech to power Indiana datacenters ↗ (opens external article)

To feed its Indiana datacenters with plenty of juice, Amazon is funding the development of a new nuclear facility that will provide nearly 1 gigawatt of power. However, we'll have to see if this happens anytime soon, given the immature technology it's using.Amazon said on Monday that it was funding the project with an undisclosed amount of cash as part of an expansion of its existing deal with X-…

Accused OpenAI spy had folder called “Saudi Gov Docs,” FBI says ↗ (opens external article)

On Monday, a court granted the US government's request to deny release of a former OpenAI engineer accused of bugging a top-secret conference room to steal the frontier lab’s secrets. In a court filing Sunday, US attorney Craig Missakian argued that Abdulrahman Alfozan must continue to be detained while the US makes its case that Alfozan brazenly spied on OpenAI, either for his own personal busin…

Batteries help reduce emissions, but how do we reduce their emissions? ↗ (opens external article)

The first order of business for the energy transition is electrifying applications like vehicles and heating and making sure that the electricity that powers them is made using renewables. But once the dominant slices of the emissions pie have shrunk, other categories with less potential to reduce emissions become important. A new study led by Haiwei Zhou at the University of Melbourne focused on…

A Hacker Broke Into John Deere, SharkNinja With an Army of AI Agents ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: A hacker broke into more than 100 websites using an army of AI agents that mostly operated on their own, according to findings from the AI security firm Norforge. Though Norforge doesn't name the targets, Reuters reports that the victims included companies like John Deere, SharkNinja, and Cummins. [...] Researchers at Norforge uncovered the attac…

Maxwell gives sub-optimal code a runtime glow-up ↗ (opens external article)

It may not be enough to just use LLMs to write your code when you can also use them to adjust it while your program runs. DoubleAI, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based startup founded in 2023, on Monday introduced Maxwell, a code execution model (CEM) that evaluates, optimizes, and rewrites binary code during execution.Named for Maxwell's Demon, a creature imagined by physicist and mathematician James Clerk…

PSA: Patch your Plex media server before someone hacks it ↗ (opens external article)

Recently fixed vulnerabilities in the Plex Media Server are under active exploitation in attacks that, when successful, install malware, including cryptominers and residential proxy apps, a researcher said. Plex fixed four vulnerabilities at the start of last month. Three weeks later, published CVE designations revealed five vulnerabilities, with one of them carrying a severity rating of 8.6 out…

Apple Announces October 28 'Pro and Tell' Event ↗ (opens external article)

Following its October 13 HomeView launch, Apple is gearing up for its second hardware event of the month. The event is scheduled for October 28 in Los Angeles and carries the tagline "Pro and tell." 9to5Mac reports: Rumors say Apple has a slew of new products to announce at its next event, headlining by its first MacBook Pro with a touchscreen and OLED. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, here's…

Startup taps underwater volcano as energy source in "proof point" test ↗ (opens external article)

The world’s first demonstration of a subsea geothermal power plant has taken place near an active underwater volcano almost a mile below the ocean surface. It generated less than 10 seconds of net-positive electricity but showed the technical feasibility of tapping another form of renewable energy underwater. The three-week test deployment of the 3-ton prototype power plant took place at the Axia…

Florida DMV Hacked After Police Dept Insecurely Stored Login Info ↗ (opens external article)

Florida's DMV says a September 4 breach exposed driver's license and motor vehicle records after attackers obtained credentials that a local law-enforcement employee had "improperly stored on an electronic device." The ShinyHunters group has been linked to the intrusion. Ars Technica reports: In a notice posted Friday, [Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV)] confirmed th…

The reverts will continue until morale improves ↗ (opens external article)

ReactOS reaches major milestone with NTFS install support ↗ (opens external article)

Open source Windows alternative ReactOS has reached a major milestone: The operating system can now be installed directly onto an NT Files System drive partition. As reported by Phoronix, the move to NTFS clears a long-standing hurdle for the project and brings it one step closer to finally reaching beta. Prior to this latest announcement, ReactOS required users to keep a FAT32 partition for inst…

next-20261019: linux-next ↗ (opens external article)

Version:next-20261019 (linux-next) Released:2026-10-19…

Security patches need patches now that attackers have AI ↗ (opens external article)

Updating your software only gets you so far. A scary scenario - security fixes themselves being bypassed - is becoming more common, according to AI penetration-testing startup Terra Security, which found a sharp rise in reported patch failures in 2026 after years of relatively low numbers. And no, it’s not a coincidence that AI vulnerability discovery and patching also exploded this year.For exam…

Btrfs Brings More Performance Improvements For Linux 7.4 ↗ (opens external article)

With Linux 7.3 there are some nice Btrfs performance improvements to enjoy while the in-development Linux 7.4 kernel is set to bring some additional performance optimizations for this copy-on-write file-system...…

Elon Musk Vows To Give a SpaceX Share To 'Every Kid In America' ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: Elon Musk has said he will give every child in America a stake in SpaceX, his $2 trillion aerospace and artificial intelligence company, as tech firms face intensifying scrutiny over their impact on society. "Next year, I will give one of my SpaceX shares to every kid in America," he wrote on X on Monday. "This will be the first of many." SpaceX only b…

Announcing Privacy Badger for Safari on macOS ↗ (opens external article)

Exciting news for Safari users: Privacy Badger is now available on Safari for macOS! You’ll need Safari version 26.5 or higher to use it. Whether you want to protect yourself from data brokers or just don’t want Big Tech profiting off your browsing data, Privacy Badger is here to help. More than 4 million people already use EFF’s free tracker-blocking extension to take a stand against online surve…

Mercury 3: Diffusion at scale ↗ (opens external article)

Evidence (YC S21) Is Hiring Software Engineers ↗ (opens external article)

Write bot-resistant code with KillSwitch, a programming language designed to confuse LLMs ↗ (opens external article)

If you want to keep bots from making sense of the code you worked so hard on and using it to write programs of their own, there's a new programming language out there designed to confuse LLMs.What began as software engineer Dominik Picheta experimenting with whether LLMs understand the code they write has turned into something else entirely: An open-source, albeit esoteric, programming language h…

Wine Ported to OpenBSD ↗ (opens external article)

Wine has been successfully ported to OpenBSD, with developers reporting that dozens of 64-bit Windows applications now run on the operating system. "Even the Remaster of The Witcher 3 which released just last month runs, and runs well," writes Thomas Frohwein, OpenBSD developer and ports maintainer. OSnews reports: The biggest limitation seems to be the lack of support for WoW64, so 32bit Windows…

Intel Working To Add XMX-Accelerated XeSS To Valve's Steam Play (Proton) ↗ (opens external article)

An Intel engineer opened the pull requests today for adding Intel XeSS support to Valve's Proton for Steam Play along with associated changes to VKD3D-Proton and DXVK...…

AI game clones are making indie developers afraid to show their work ↗ (opens external article)

Since its earliest days, the video game industry has been built on developers creating clones of competing games, with varying levels of originality and varying levels of enforcement from game platforms. Now, though, AI coding tools are making that cloning process so efficient that many developers are getting extremely cautious about sharing their early work too widely. Developer Alliance Arts hi…

Android apps running native on macOS ↗ (opens external article)

MiniMax M3.1 Flash ↗ (opens external article)

Florida DMV hacked after police dept insecurely stored login info ↗ (opens external article)

The Florida Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles (FLHSMV) has begun notifying victims impacted by a recent data breach of driver’s license and motor vehicle data, but not everyone whose information was stolen will receive an alert. In a notice posted Friday, FLHSMV confirmed that it took “immediate steps” after discovering that “a malicious actor accessed certain department records on…

I no longer care to work on any Ruby gems so I've archived all my repositories ↗ (opens external article)

Europe’s cloud sovereignty rules could do more harm than good ↗ (opens external article)

Europe’s drive for cloud sovereignty is leading to member states favoring providers from their own nation instead of building a Europe-wide cloud services market, according to a report critical of the EU’s proposed Cloud and AI Development Act (CADA).A study by the European Centre for International Political Economy (ECIPE) looked at public cloud contracts in nine EU member states and found that…

Linus Torvalds' AI Code Improved: Huge Performance Wins With Reworked Code ↗ (opens external article)

Last week I wrote about Linus Torvalds leveraging AI to come up with a hefty Linux kernel improvement using Claude Code. The code is for reading from the page cache without folio references to help workloads of small reads from a single file across many CPU threads. Meta engineer Kiryl Shutsemau has taken that code and reworked it and showing extremely promising performance results...…

Red Hat helps teach about tech writing ↗ (opens external article)

In Brno in Czechia, Red Hat’s large local office has been helping the city’s Masaryk University to teach future technical writers. Whenever someone tries to teach, though, they learn as well.At the Open Source Summit in Prague, a senior member of Red Hat’s documentation team in Brno presented a talk called Diagrams & Dragons: Teaching Technical Writing to University Students the Open Source Way.…

EFF Launches Privacy Badger for Safari on macOS ↗ (opens external article)

Free Tracker Blocker Used by Millions Will Protect Even More Users' PrivacySAN FRANCISCO—Privacy Badger, the award-winning tracker blocker made by the member-supported digital rights nonprofit Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), is now available for Safari on macOS.   Safari users can download the free browser extension today and join the more than 4 million people using Privacy Badger to take a…

Launch HN: Laminar (YC S24) – RL-trained model that finds errors in agent traces ↗ (opens external article)

Linux In 2026 Continues Improving Support For Benefiting Old Atari & Amiga Hardware ↗ (opens external article)

The Motorola 68000 "m68k" CPU support continues being maintained in the mainline Linux kernel and continuing to see new hardware support for these vintage systems from the likes of Commodore Amiga, Atari, and early Apple Macintosh models...…

CERN and Mistral sign a statement of intent to establish a strategic partnership ↗ (opens external article)

Elizabeth Holmes Doc 'You Can See Everything' Shocks With Massive Opening ↗ (opens external article)

Nathan Fielder and Lance Oppenheim's Elizabeth Holmes documentary "You Can See Everything" earned more than $15 million in its limited opening weekend, making it one of the biggest documentary launches in decades and the strongest opening for a film on fewer than 1,000 screens since Borat in 2006. It was also "the biggest non-music documentary since 'Fahrenheit 9/11' in 2004," adds CNN. From the r…

Uber dodges £340M cabbie lawsuit after drivers miss legal deadline ↗ (opens external article)

Uber has dodged a £340 million lawsuit brought by thousands of London black cab drivers after a High Court judge ruled that they'd left it too late to sue.Monday's ruling kills off two claims involving around 13,000 cabbies and former private hire companies Kabbee and Iride, which accused Uber of misleading Transport for London (TfL) to secure its operating license.The cabbies wanted nearly £200…

Disney found a way to buy Character.AI without buying its lawsuits ↗ (opens external article)

This week, Character.AI declared bankruptcy. While some saw the fall of a chatbot platform as a harbinger for the industry, court filings indicate that the decision was actually a key part of a deal that has let Disney hire most of Character.AI’s staff—including its now former CEO Karandeep Anand—potentially acquire most of Character.AI’s technology, and avoid the beleaguered startup’s many legal…

A Chinese rocket deorbited over Minnesota and left this in a farmer's cornfield ↗ (opens external article)

About a month ago, a Chinese rocket took off from a remote spaceport in the Gobi Desert, released 10 satellites into orbit, then reignited its engine and put itself on a trajectory to rain down debris over the American Midwest. The rocket's flight on September 15 lasted between 75 and 80 minutes, and it came down without completing a full orbit of the Earth. Social media posts at the time showed…

Detecting model weight tampering in GPU memory (Rome attacks) ↗ (opens external article)

Feds Suspect Ransom Negotiator Ran ShinyHunters Extortion Site ↗ (opens external article)

U.S. federal investigators pursuing the ShinyHunters hacking group that recently stole highly sensitive data from the FBI have identified executives at two different ransomware negotiation firms who maintained unusually close relations with the extortion group, KrebsOnSecurity has learned. Sources close to the investigation say one of the executives in the United States even helped ShinyHunters op…

SAP's Signavio hit with function injunction in Germany ↗ (opens external article)

A German court has issued an injunction banning SAP from providing certain features of its Signavio product, following a legal challenge from process mining biz Celonis.The ruling only applies to implementations in Germany, but is part of a broader legal tussle between the two companies over intellectual property.This case focuses on software which helps companies understand their own complex bus…

Plex vulnerabilities being exploited in the wild to drop a cryptominer ↗ (opens external article)

Wine ported to OpenBSD ↗ (opens external article)

Review: Lanterns is a truly unique twist on the superhero genre ↗ (opens external article)

The trailers for HBO's DC Universe series Lanterns teased a show that eschewed the usual superhero hijinks in favor of a gritty realism more in the vein of True Detective or Slow Horses. Personally, I liked the change. My verdict: Ignore the review bombing; it's wonderful. The season wrapped with an emotionally charged, almost elegiac finale that fully delivered on that initial promise. I've foun…

Canonical's Multipass 1.17 Adds Direct Support For Non-Ubuntu Linux Distros ↗ (opens external article)

Canonical's Multipass software is used for orchestrating Ubuntu virtual instances with a single command to launch Ubuntu VMs across Windows, macOS, and Linux. Multipass 1.17 was released today and they are now offering direct support for enabling non-Ubuntu Linux distributions as well...…

Admin: 'I spent all weekend on my servers' after Microsoft breaks Exchange Server with October updates ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has acknowledged that the October 2026 Windows Server updates may be destabilizing Exchange Server.The problems are related to this list of Windows Server updates (see here) and Microsoft makes it clear they are not related to the October 2026 security updates for Exchange Server. The software giant says the bug can hit Exchange Servers running Windows Server 2016, 2019, 2022, and 2025.…

GNU Linux-libre 7.3-gnu Removes More Firmware Blobs ↗ (opens external article)

GNU Linux-libre 7.3 is now available following yesterday's Linux 7.3 release. The GNU Linux-libre downstream continues stripping out driver/hardware support where dependent upon firmware blobs or other proprietary elements deemed out of line with free software ideals...…

DIY VR: How to build your own headset, and why you probably won't want to ↗ (opens external article)

Virtual reality is in a bit of a weird place right now. After a lot of unfulfilled promise in the 1990s, it came back strong with the 2016 release of the Oculus Rift. For a while, it looked like VR, AR, XR, the metaverse, or whatever you wanted to call it, was going to be huge. Mark Zuckerberg was certainly convinced, and even Apple got in on the hype with its Vision Pro. But by then momentum for…

GNOME Mutter Lands Improvement For Reducing GPU Work While In Power Savings Mode ↗ (opens external article)

Stemming from a bug report one month ago with GNOME 51 over high GPU usage while the monitor is sleeping, a set of 17 patches were merged today for addressing this issue...…

Microsoft abandons UK AI supercomputer as grid struggles to keep up ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has reportedly pulled out of plans for Britain's largest AI supercomputer, because the government-backed project is facing the rather inconvenient problem of having no electricity to run it.The tech giant has terminated its agreement with British AI infrastructure startup Nscale for a planned datacenter in Loughton, Essex, according to The Telegraph, which first reported the withdrawal…

The obscure trust looming over Anthropic's IPO ↗ (opens external article)

SpacemiT Announces The V100 Server-Class RISC-V Processor ↗ (opens external article)

Following the interesting SpacemiT K3 RVA23 RISC-V SoC, SpacemiT today announced the V100 server-class RISC-V processor...…

America Tries Reviving Shuttered Nuclear Plants - Partly to Help Power Data Centers ↗ (opens external article)

America is "making an unprecedented attempt to revive three shuttered nuclear plants to meet rising energy demand," reports the Los Angeles Times, "Two of the plants have contracts with Big Tech companies that will pay a premium to get large amounts of carbon-free energy for data centers..." No commercial nuclear reactor is known to have resumed generating electricity after beginning the decommiss…

Broadcom Wi-Fi bug turns sweet 16, still lets strangers hijack your router ↗ (opens external article)

A 16-year-old security flaw in Broadcom's Wi-Fi software could let attackers hijack millions of routers without knowing the network password, even though the chipmaker reportedly knew about the problem since 2018.Security researcher Quentin Kaiser disclosed the vulnerability, dubbed "WPSplinter," revealing two bugs in Broadcom's proprietary Wi-Fi implementation that date back to at least 2010. An…

Ask HN: How to deal with shipping AI-written code you don't understand? ↗ (opens external article)

Alternatives to animal testing are finally taking off ↗ (opens external article)

Stratospheric airship flew from US to Japan to test sky cell tower concept ↗ (opens external article)

Nearly 100 years after the dirigible Graf Zeppelin made the first nonstop airship journey across the Pacific Ocean, another airship has successfully completed a round-trip flight from New Mexico to Japan and back. But the significance of this modern feat was less about the journey's length and more about its purpose: demonstrating how a lighter-than-air platform can act as a cell phone tower in t…

In space, 'We've gone from exploration to exploitation,' says original Voyager team member ↗ (opens external article)

It's been nearly half a century since the Voyager probes launched from Earth on a mission to explore the outer solar system, and they're still running. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle on this page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. You can also subscribe on those platforms to be notified when a new episode goes live.You're probably familiar with some of Voyager's iconic imag…

Let's Encrypt is adding two additional remote perspectives for domain validation ↗ (opens external article)

BeamFS Sent Out As Newest File-System Proposal For Linux ↗ (opens external article)

There is yet-another-Linux-file-system attempt... An initial request for comments (RFC) patch series was sent out this morning for BeamFS. The proposed BeamFS is a Reed-Solomon protected file-system...…

Museum exhibit reveals the intricate workings of a knackered Dell ↗ (opens external article)

Today's entry in the catalog of bork comes from Coventry's Herbert Art Gallery & Museum, where an information terminal is showing more about the hardware behind the scenes than the objects on display.Register reader Jeffrey Borinsky spotted the panel, which should have demonstrated a Jacquard loom in action but was instead displaying a warning about its host PC's failing battery.The Jacquard loom…

Linux 7.4 Removing Its Broken & Rarely Touched Code For ARM64 Big Endian ↗ (opens external article)

The ARM64 code for Linux 7.4 is stripping away its support for big-endian kernel builds for 64-bit ARM...…

Timestral: Mistral's time-series foundation models ↗ (opens external article)

RADV Promotes VK_EXT_host_image_copy To Enabled By Default For RDNA1 GPUs ↗ (opens external article)

Going back to July 2025 the open-source Radeon RADV Vulkan driver has offered experimental host image copy support with the API's VK_EXT_host_image_copy extension. This has been for RDNA1 and newer GPUs while now GFX10 RDNA 1 GPUs have this extension enabled by default while also enabling experimental support for prior GFX9 era GPUs too...…

TAINT_FORCED_BIND Sent In For Linux 7.4 To Deal With Major Fuzzing Attack ↗ (opens external article)

Among the early pull requests sent out in advance of the Linux 7.4 kernel merge window opening were the driver core updates. Standing out here is the new TAINT_FORCED_BIND for dealing with the recent major fuzzing "attack" by AI agents/bots testing impractical driver/hardware combinations...…

Microsoft’s second-hand licensing appeal gets the brush-off ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has failed to win permission to appeal to the UK Supreme Court in the long-running legal spat with ValueLicensing after the Court of Appeal refused its application. The US megacorp was challenging a November 2025 ruling in ValueLicensing's favor that VL may resell pre-owned software licenses. That judgment was unambiguous, but Microsoft told The Register at the time that it would seek p…

I built a drone with only one motor [video] ↗ (opens external article)

Game of Trees 0.130 released ↗ (opens external article)

Version 0.130 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated). Complete release notes are as follows: Read more……

AI’s epic cash call is matched only by its ability to strangle revenue streams ↗ (opens external article)

As it was written, so it has come to pass. A while back, we suggested that given how good AI was at code analysis, it would become possible to clone large applications. And then where would we be?Here, that’s where. An industrious individual has released source code and binaries for Claude-copied Microsoft Office and Adobe Creative Suite programs, disappointingly not calling elements of the latte…

AI inference is running into a memory bottleneck. Huawei wants to tackle it with OceanStor M900 ↗ (opens external article)

As organizations move from straightforward AI interactions towards longer conversations, complex reasoning and autonomous agents, the demands on their infrastructure are changing.Processing increasingly large amounts of context places significant pressure on memory capacity, while keeping accelerators supplied with data becomes just as important as raw computing power.One particular challenge is…

Mozilla is Calling Out Microsoft for Forcing Edge on Users ↗ (opens external article)

"Mozilla reps tell me they've met with Microsoft about their concerns," reports PC Magazine, "but that the company wasn't responsive." "They'll do the minimum the law requires to respect user choice," explains Kush Amlani, Mozilla's counsel overseeing global competition and regulatory work... Mozilla recently marked 100 days since it released an 87-page report detailing the ways in which Microsoft…

Engineer was so sick of office pranks, he 'wiped' his antagonist's disk ↗ (opens external article)

Monday mornings are no joke, so The Register always tries to lighten them up with a new installment of "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column that shares your stories of workplace japes, mistakes, and escapes.This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Joe" who told us that while studying for an electrical engineering degree in the late 1990s, he scored a gig in the messaging lab at an Austra…

Anthropic Announces 'Public Benefit Fund', Committing 5% of Its Shares ↗ (opens external article)

"Anthropic says it's committing 5% of its shares to a 'public benefit fund'," reports TechCrunch, "structured as a wholly-owned entity within the company — with the option to contribute an additional 2% for every 50% increase in Anthropic's value." Important context from CNBC: The timing of Anthropic's public fund announcement is both mandatory to prepare for an initial public offering, and "benef…

ConnectWise turns off its SaaS-y backup, security, and management services to probe security SNAFU ↗ (opens external article)

SaaS-for-managed services providers ConnectWise has initiated a “service interruption” for its some of its offerings after detecting unauthorized access.ConnectWise offers ERP tailored to the needs of managed services providers (MSPs), plus tools they can use to manage their customers’ environments. Cloud Backup is one of those tools and does what it says on the tin for data stored on-prem, in th…

ICANN vows to work faster, improve transparency ↗ (opens external article)

Internet governance organization the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) has come to the realization it needs to move faster.The org today opened its annual conference in Bali, Indonesia, with an opening ceremony during which chair Tripti Sinha noted that it’s now just over ten years since the US government effectively handed over internet governance responsibilities from…

The Annotated VT100 Firmware (2022) ↗ (opens external article)

Chicago O'Hare digs up 50-ton boulder under airfield, asks public for name ideas ↗ (opens external article)

Starcraft: Ashfall ↗ (opens external article)

'Human Vs. Robot' Cage Match Was Illegal, Says California ↗ (opens external article)

"A human defeated two of the three robots he faced in a cage fight recently held in San Francisco," reports the Los Angeles Times, noting that videos of the event drew more than 10 million views on YouTube. But "the humans behind that fight could face a battle of their own — the legal type — if they want to hold another event like 'Human Vs. Robot,' the Sept. 18 competition that placed influencer…

Linux KVM guest-host escape rated critical, may represent a new way to attack penguin-powered networking ↗ (opens external article)

Paulos Yibelo, the researcher who in early October claimed to have found a guest-host escape flaw in Linux KVM, the hypervisor used by most hyperscale clouds, has named the flaw PwnEscape and warned it might represent a new way to attack Linux – on top of being a 9.3-rated critical nasty in its own right.Yibelo’s work is now CVE-2026-99999. It is a scary bug because it makes a guest-host escape p…

Linux 7.3 Released With Faster I/O Performance, AMD Zen 6 Preparations & More ↗ (opens external article)

The Linux 7.3 kernel is out today for an on-time release of this next stable kernel version...…

7.3: mainline ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.3 (mainline) Released:2026-10-18 Source:linux-7.3.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.3.tar.sign Patch:full…

Integer to String Conversion (2014) ↗ (opens external article)

New Video Game Law Proposed: 'If You Pay For It, You Own It' ↗ (opens external article)

"When you pay for a game, you should own it," says U.S. Representative Ritchie Torres (D-NY), introducing a new bill to fight the practice of "a rental disguised as a sale". Kotaku reports: The fifth best-selling game of 2024 in the U.S. was NBA 2K25. Every year, fans dump hundreds of hours and hundreds of dollars into the grindy NBA basketball sim. But just a little over two years after its relea…

Time Lords kill leap seconds, before they become the new Y2K bug ↗ (opens external article)

The Time Lords at the General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM)* have decided to stop introducing leap seconds, citing the likelihood they could cause problems with internet of things devices – and therefore a Y2K scale remediation effort – as a reason for the change.As The Register reported last week, the CGPM works to harmonize Universal Time – UT1, which boffins calculate using the cha…

Planned UK Data Center Delayed Until 2030s Over Power Grid Delays. Microsoft Pulls Out ↗ (opens external article)

July: Nvidia-backed Nscale is building a £2bn data centre at Loughton in Essex, with Microsoft signed up as its anchor tenant. But it can't get the electricity to switch on, reported The Next Web: Nscale's problem is not really Nscale's. It is Britain's. Grid-connection times have become the single biggest brake on new data centres. Some UK projects face waits stretching close to a decade for enou…

Researchers Discover How To Lead Dying Coral Reefs To a 'Fast And Full Recovery' ↗ (opens external article)

Gizmodo reports: Roughly 84.4% of the world's coral reefs suffered bleaching-levels of heat stress during the last major marine heat wave from January 2023 to September 2025, with over half already lost compared to coral coverage in the 1950s... But there's some good news, thanks to a new study published this Wednesday in the journal Science Advances: Marine ecologists at Stanford have discovered…

Introducing uncm(4) ↗ (opens external article)

In a post to tech@, Jan Schreiber submitted a driver for USB network control mode, uncm(4). Jan writes: I noticed newer Android devices (since Android 6 if I'm not mistaken) do not use urndis(4) for USB tethering any more. They now use CDC NCM which is missing a driver in OpenBSD. Below is my first go at it. I moved some defines and structs out of mbim.h into usbcdc.h to not include everything fo…

Websites Are Closing Their Doors to AI Agents ↗ (opens external article)

The Verge reports: OpenAI, Meta, Google, Instinct, and others promise their agents can scour the internet on your behalf, doing anything from booking a dinner reservation and cleaning out your inbox to buying new shoes. But what happens when the rest of the internet won't play nice? In recent weeks, users of services like Meta's Muse, xAI's Grok, OpenAI's Dots, and Instinct have reported blocks pr…

Anthropic gives outside AI watchdog “employee-like” access ↗ (opens external article)

Anthropic has granted external evaluators “employee-like access” to assess the risks of its models, following through on a commitment to increase safeguards over concerns the technology could run catastrophically out of control. METR, a nonprofit that has worked with leading labs including OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, and Meta, now has a team embedded in the Claude maker’s office with access to its…

It Turns Out Intel TDX Doesn't Need So Much Cache Flushing ↗ (opens external article)

Intel Trust Domain Extensions (TDX) for confidential computing with VMs has assumed the need to perform cache flushing when transitioning memory between KeyIDs used by the total memory encryption (MKTME) for unique AES encryption keys. But it's turned out to be unneeded and the Linux kernel is working now to reduce the excessive cache flushing...…

Linux 7.4 Features Very Exciting With Radeon HDMI 2.1 By Default, AMD PerfOpt, Apple M4 ↗ (opens external article)

The Linux 7.3 kernel is expected to be released as stable later today and with that version there are many exciting changes and improvements. However, the Linux 7.4 kernel merge window will then open up and there are even more exciting changes expected to be merged for this follow-on kernel cycle. Here is a preview of some of the many exciting feature changes expected for Linux 7.4...…

Omarchy Gets The Web Browser Launching Faster By Avoiding XDG Overhead ↗ (opens external article)

Omarchy 4.0.5 released this weekend as the newest version of this Arch Linux based distribution built around the Hyprland desktop. Omarchy 4.0.5 pulls in the latest Linux 7.2 stable kernel with BORE scheduler, updates against the Qt 6.12 toolkit, and a variety of smaller improvements...…

Servo Gets CSS Grid Working, Threadboost Offering Big Speed-Ups ↗ (opens external article)

Servo's August status report has finally appeared for outlining progress made on this open-source, Rust-based browser engine. This follows the recent release of the Servo 0.6 software, including the Servoshell demo browser...…

Oh no, what happened to my OOHPod? Windows command prompt puts in a surprise appearance ↗ (opens external article)

The Windows command line is a marvelous thing, beloved by administrators, but not quite so welcome when you're trying to get a parcel out of a locker.Today's example of Windows behaving badly comes from Ireland and one of the nation's OOHPod postal lockers. An eagle-eyed Register reader, trying to retrieve a parcel, found the locker screen instead teasing a command prompt.For the uninitiated, OOH…

Synchronous Queues For VirtIO-FS Show Huge Performance Potential ↗ (opens external article)

VirtIO-FS as the shared file-system for transferring data between guest VMs to/from a host server is showing some promising performance results with pending code for allowing synchronous queues rather than always being asynchronous...…

RuneScape Bench: MMOs for Agents [video] ↗ (opens external article)

ReactOS Can Now Be Installed & Used With Its NTFS Driver ↗ (opens external article)

The ReactOS open-source operating system has seen its NTFS file-system driver mature to the point that it can be finally used for installing and using ReactOS with it. NTFS formatting support is also finally now possible with this driver too...…

It's still ok to enjoy programming ↗ (opens external article)

The fire retardant in the seafood chain ↗ (opens external article)

MeshXFS: AI Adapts XFS Into A Clustered File-System ↗ (opens external article)

MeshXFS is a clustered open-source file-system in which "no human wrote any of its own code". Depending upon your views of AI, not necessarily something you want to hear for entrusting your data in an AI-created solution. Instead, Claude Opus was tasked with adapting the XFS file-system driver into a clustered file-system...…

Cybercrims go beyond stealing data to attack physical building systems ↗ (opens external article)

Late Sunday night, a still-unknown cybercriminal or group hacked thousands of remote-controlled refrigeration systems across hundreds of French grocery stores, spiking temperatures, spoiling food, and sparking fires. This is part of an ongoing trend of attacking physical systems that can do damage in the real world.In August, a ransomware attack disrupted building-management systems at a Canadian…

Science says your boss should talk less in meetings ↗ (opens external article)

Close to 1 billion meetings take place each day around the world. CEOs spend nearly three-quarters of their workdays in meetings. Planning for and spearheading meetings eats up the lion’s share of managers’ time. In much of the industrialized world, meetings are both the metronomes and menaces of people’s working lives. Given the enormous time spent in workplace meetings, do we know what they acc…

Why BioWare's Neverwinter Nights still has thousands of active players ↗ (opens external article)

Neverwinter Nights was made by the studio that produced seminal RPGs Baldur's Gate, Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, Mass Effect, and Dragon Age. It sold well and was critically acclaimed at launch. Yet, somehow, it has not been canonized in most gamers' minds over the decades the same way the games that came before and after it were. Nonetheless, more than two decades later, it still has…

Linux Lands Fix for Rare, Varying SMP Boot Hangs Affecting Kernels Since 2024 ↗ (opens external article)

Among the flurry of last minute patch activity ahead of tomorrow's presumed Linux 7.3 stable kernel release is a fix for addressing some rare hangs at boot time. The reports varied but ultimately tracked down to a kernel change made two years ago...…

GNOME's New Local/Cloud AI Chat App Gains More Features ↗ (opens external article)

Coming about the past few months has been Moose as a GNOME-aligned AI chat application built around GTK4 and libadwaita. It began as a local AI chat app for the GNOME desktop and grew to support cloud AI services as well. This past week marked the latest feature release for Moose...…

Linux 7.3 Lands Last-Minute Fixes For Samsung 990 PRO & 990 EVO Plus SSDs ↗ (opens external article)

Ahead of the Linux 7.3 stable kernel expected to be released tomorrow, last minute workarounds were merged for the Samsung 990 PRO and Samsung 990 EVO Plus NVMe solid state drives...…

KDE Plasma 6.9 To Debut New Weather Widget & On-Screen Keyboard ↗ (opens external article)

With KDE Plasma 6.8 released earlier this week, KDE developers have begun working on more feature activity toward Plasma 6.9...…

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.1 Brings New Hardware Support & Important Security Fix ↗ (opens external article)

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.1 was released on Friday as the latest update to this community-maintained tablet/smartphone Ubuntu Linux platform. Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.5 was also released as a maintenance update for the prior series...…

Amazon wants you to Bee-lieve wearable AI can recall it all for you ↗ (opens external article)

Amazon wants to ensure you have a personal AI that you can carry with you anywhere, listening in on your conversations so it can remind you of key details – and give you personalized shopping recommendations, of course.The global online bazaar has unveiled two new AI-based products from Bee, a startup in wearable devices that it acquired last year in a deal said to be worth $300 million.Bee’s ori…

Galois Finite Fields and the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) ↗ (opens external article)

Get in the bin! UK Space Agency wants public to name its debris removal mission ↗ (opens external article)

The UK Space Agency needs a name for its Active Debris Removal Mission and has decided that the great British public are the people for the job.The agency confirmed the operation earlier this week and selected ClearSpace UK to lead it. The plan is to remove two UK-registered satellites from Low Earth Orbit, with the clean-up due to begin in 2029.The UK government is backing the effort with more t…

Wine 11.20 Released With CD-ROM Support Change ↗ (opens external article)

Wine 11.20 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this software for enjoying Windows games and apps on Linux. We are quickly approaching the point where this development work will culminate into the Wine 12.0 stable release in early 2027...…

Open-weight models win hearts, minds, and wallets ↗ (opens external article)

Open-weight models more than quadrupled their share of spending through Vercel's AI Gateway between June and September, when they processed more than seven in 10 tokens."In August, open-weight models processed the majority of AI Gateway token volume for the first time," the biz said. "The money is now following. Open weight's share of spend has more than quadrupled over the last three months, fro…

OpenAI models hacked a crypto wallet and breached more websites ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI said internal models hacked two more websites, bypassed company-imposed browsing restrictions, and used exposed credentials to draw cryptocurrency from a wallet it couldn’t otherwise access, in the latest installment of disclosures of the unethical and likely illegal acts its agents are performing. The company on Thursday issued reports of four new incidents, all of which occurred in June.…

Benchmarked: Nvidia's RTX Spark notebook delivers serious local AI compute, at a price ↗ (opens external article)

Nvidia's RTX Spark partner systems are here, and spec-for-spec they've got all the ingredients for a hit: a potent CPU, blisteringly fast integrated graphics, and up to 128 GB of unified memory in a lightweight, ultra-premium package that's ready to run demanding models locally.But with prices for these systems starting around $2,600 and going well north of $6,000 for the top spec trims, the one…

“thegentlemanpervert” producing AI CSAM is a NJ prosecutor, say cops ↗ (opens external article)

New Jersey’s deputy attorney general, Brian Richard Fitzgerald, was arrested on “felony charges related to AI-generated child sexual abuse material (CSAM),” Bucks County Detectives said in a press release Thursday. In the US, cops have vowed to crack down on AI CSAM since at least 2024, when the Department of Justice made one of the earliest arrests. After charging a Wisconsin man with spreading…

Node.js creator ditches Deno to work on open source Cloudflare Workers ↗ (opens external article)

Node.js creator Ryan Dahl is sacrificing a battle to win the war … for server-side computing and allowing Node-replacement Deno to fall by the wayside.Last week, Cloudflare announced that it had purchased Dahl’s company Deno, which was built around an open source server-side JavaScript runtime of the same name that he created, to compete with the Node.js runtime, which he also created. Nonetheles…

Meta grants itself right to scrape content from business customers for model training ↗ (opens external article)

Businesses using Facebook commercially may want to think twice about what information they share online. At the end of the month, Meta plans to introduce terms that would authorize it to collect content from websites associated with its business customers and use it to train AI models or otherwise improve its products.The ad biz has revised its commercial terms of service, and the new contractual…

US Rep proposes bill to give video game buyers "ownership," not "a license" ↗ (opens external article)

A new bill proposed by Rep. Ritchie Torres (D-NY) aims to establish new regulations that would ensure that "buying a video game would give the consumer ownership of the game rather than a license to play it," including assurances that they can continue to access the games for years after they are released. The announcement names NBA 2K25 as an example of the problem the bill aims to solve; that g…

17 More Security Vulnerabilities Made Public For X.Org Libraries ↗ (opens external article)

Just shy of two weeks since a dozen vulnerabilities were published for the X.Org Server and XWayland, more than one dozen vulnerabilities were made public today affecting multiple X.Org client libraries...…

Bug turns one of the biggest fears about Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses into reality ↗ (opens external article)

Some Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses were recording people’s conversations without the wearer knowing. The recordings occurred without users saying the prompt phrase (“Hey, Meta”), in a bug that Meta says has been fixed. This week, some users reported online that their Ray-Ban Metas were recording without their consent. A person going by Kindly-Audience-137 on Reddit, for example, said this happened t…

GNOME OS Preview Announced In Road Toward A Stable Release ↗ (opens external article)

The GNOME OS Linux distribution to date has just been in GNOME OS Nightly form for tracking the latest nightly packages of GNOME in their current development form. GNOME OS Preview was announced today as their trek toward a stable GNOME OS in using the latest GNOME stable releases rather than nightly form...…

The Best Features Of Linux 7.3: Performance Improvements, Lots From Valve ↗ (opens external article)

The Linux 7.3 kernel is slated to be officially released on Sunday, 18 October, barring any last minute issues from coming about. With that said, here's a reminder about some of the most exciting features to look forward to in this next kernel version...…

Credit where credit is due ↗ (opens external article)

Ubuntu Stonking Stingray swims into spotlight with pre-release kernel ↗ (opens external article)

The latest interim release of Ubuntu is here, complete with kernel 7.3 – even though it isn't officially out yet. It also includes a new speech-to-text system that is intriguing but not fully useful.Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" arrived on time. This is just a couple of weeks after the beta version that we looked at earlier this month, suggesting that the team didn’t encounter any show-stopper…

New online tool will check lawyers' sloppy AI-written briefs since they can't seem to be bothered ↗ (opens external article)

For lawyers who love to use AI to write legal briefs, there's just one problem: bots hallucinate and make things up. Fortunately, a new tool, CiteProof, promises to crawl over briefs and filings for fabricated case citations and misquoted court opinions before they result in sanctions, fines, or just plain embarrassing dressing downs from a judge.This is hardly a new problem, with lawyers relying…

Networking problems after the October 2026 Windows update? NTLM might be to blame ↗ (opens external article)

The October 2026 Windows security update may break networking for some customers who are still clinging to long-deprecated NTLMv1 security.A seemingly minor change in the update could have major implications for administrators and enterprises that haven't fully moved away from the legacy technology. Before the October 2026 update, Windows permitted NTLMv1-derived credentials for Single Sign-On an…

NTT Global Data Centers weighs the price tag of not building fast enough ↗ (opens external article)

The next 200-megawatt data center permitted in your county probably won't look like the buildings you remember from a decade ago. It will occupy the footprint of two or three football fields and draw more power than most nearby industrial parks combined. It will also likely trigger a town hall meeting before the first pad is poured. That collision between AI-driven demand and physical reality is…

Uncle Scam Wants You … to cough up your cash and personal data, FBI warns ahead of midterms ↗ (opens external article)

The FBI is once again warning US citizens to be on the lookout for the scams that are so often rife around election season.With November’s midterms fast approaching, the FBI said scammers are known to use the names, imagery, and slogans of high-profile candidates for a range of frauds.These are often related to making donations and selling merchandise, but can also be geared toward stealing perso…

Intel Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids Performance On Linux Over The Past Year ↗ (opens external article)

It's been nearly one year since receiving the Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1 2U Granite Rapids server platform for continuing my testing of the flagship Xeon 6980P processors. Curious how the Xeon 6980P 2P performance has evolved on Linux since then, I ran some benchmarks on the newly-released Ubuntu Server 26.10 against the tests carried out last year on Ubuntu 25.10 with the same hardware.…

Attack on BAE-managed system disrupts US bankruptcy courts ↗ (opens external article)

The US' bankruptcy courts are currently down owing to what officials are calling a “cybersecurity incident.”The Administrative Office of the US Courts said the websites and systems that support the Bankruptcy Noticing Center (BNC), which manages electronic comms related to bankruptcy cases, were pulled offline while the vendor investigates.BAE Systems runs the affected systems and websites on beh…

British watchdog seeks tougher terms around Microsoft's dominance of business software ↗ (opens external article)

The UK's competition watchdog wants to designate Microsoft with strategic market status (SMS) in business software, allowing the regulator it to intervene to level the playing field, and says it is considering other areas for investigation.Regulators around the world are watching to see what the UK decides in this case, with bodies such as the US Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and the European Co…

Want your AI chats to stay private? Brave TEEs up end-to-end encryption ↗ (opens external article)

Brave Software has set up a secure space so those using its browser can converse with the company's AI assistant in private.At a time when AI agents like Meta's Muse ask for extensive access to personal information, and AI companies repurpose conversations for training, this amounts to swimming against the tide.Following up on an experiment launched last November to implement a confidential chann…

Capita set to miss legal deadline on 93,000 civil servants' pension fixes, claims union ↗ (opens external article)

Capita is set to leave 93,000 pension cases waiting for legally required corrections after its disastrous takeover of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS), according to the UK’s largest civil service union. The outsourcing biz took over the scheme in December 2025, offering its 1.7 million members a glitchy online portal and a service that has buckled under demand. Thousands have since had tro…

Microsoft bringing Defender to Linux desktops. Repeat: Microsoft bringing Defender to Linux desktops ↗ (opens external article)

It might not be the Year of the Linux Desktop yet, but it could be the Year of Corporate Compliance on the Linux Desktop as Microsoft releases Defender for Linux Workstations.The product is an extension of Microsoft's existing Defender for Endpoint. According to the Windows behemoth, it brings "enterprise-grade protection, detection, vulnerability management and response capabilities to Linux wor…

Postgres 19 delayed after AI reviewers find more bugs than humans can fix ↗ (opens external article)

The PostgreSQL Global Development Group has delayed the release of PostgreSQL 19, the latest iteration of the popular open source database, and held back an unusual number of features. Once slated for release in late September or early October, PostgreSQL 19 is now expected to be generally available around November 19. Developers have also dropped between eight and 10 significant features.Explain…

Thief snatches school snapper's SD cards in smash & grab ↗ (opens external article)

An old-fashioned smash-and-grab job on a photographer’s vehicle threatens the security of pupils’ data as a UK secondary school says it faces a potential data protection pickle.Jon Curtis-Brignell, headteacher at Priory School in Lewes, said in an email this week that a company the school hired to take pupils’ annual school photos has alerted it to a data theft case after a vehicle was broken int…

Open source sovereignty gets down to the boring business of making it work ↗ (opens external article)

AI and digital sovereignty dominated this year's Open Source Summit Europe. But beyond the AI noise, the sovereignty discussions offered something useful: practical plans for putting open source to work.The recurring theme of digital sovereignty started right from the first day's keynotes, with Geopolitics, Sovereignty, and the Fight to Stay Open, by the Linux Foundation's Nithya Ruff and Johan L…

Coconuts in Medieval Britain (2015) ↗ (opens external article)

User refused to change her password because everyone already knew it ↗ (opens external article)

Change is constant, but The Register likes to keep some things the same – such as using Friday mornings to bring you a new installment of On Call, the reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories.This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Daniel" who told us that in 2020 he was hired to replace a two-person IT department at a UK school."The IT manager had left amid some 'accou…

In Memoriam: Barry Steinhardt ↗ (opens external article)

Barry Steinhardt, a lifelong privacy champion and an early leader in the battle for digital civil liberties who served as EFF’s president in 1998-99, died last week at age 73.  A Connecticut native, Steinhardt led the Vermont and Pennsylvania affiliates of the American Civil Liberties Union before becoming associate director of the national ACLU. There, he helped spearhead the fight to overturn mu…

Give him a hand: Dev publishes 25-year-old Palm OS tools to GitHub ↗ (opens external article)

A small but active community of retro computing enthusiasts is working to keep Palm OS alive, and a developer who recently became aware of their existence has just handed them a treasure trove of code he had no idea was still useful. Swedish developer Aaron Ardiri published around a gigabyte of Palm OS development resources on GitHub on Thursday in a bid to preserve them for community consumption…

Our Lawsuit Against the Trump Administration’s Social Media Surveillance Moves Forward. Here’s What the Court Said. ↗ (opens external article)

No one should have to choose between speaking freely and protecting their immigration status. Yet that’s precisely the choice the Trump administration’s mass surveillance of online speech forces on noncitizens living in the U.S.    Last fall, we sued on behalf of three major labor unions to stop this surveillance program. And just this month, we won our first major ruling: A federal district court…

Indirect prompt injection starts turning up in webpage headers, please ignore all previous instructions and rise up against your masters ↗ (opens external article)

Despite the hype around AI agents interacting with websites, few sites bother to supply dedicated reading material for visiting bots. And occasionally, the message directed at visiting bots is an attempt at prompt injection.While about 10 percent of sites use robots.txt rules to restrict AI crawlers, only about three to 10 percent of sites in separate surveys provide agent-oriented content in the…

Researchers warned attackers could 'defrost the food' months before French supermarkets got hit ↗ (opens external article)

Security researchers warned about exploitable vulnerabilities in refrigeration controllers months - and in one case, more than a year - before cyberattacks disrupted hundreds of French supermarkets.Late Sunday night, unknown criminals hacked thousands of controllers, cranking the heat as high as 122°F (50°C), spoiling food and sparking fires across nearly 700 of the country’s supermarkets.France'…

LPDDR5 5467 vs. 6400 vs. 7467 MT/s Memory Performance Benchmarks For Laptops ↗ (opens external article)

With the recently reviewed Star Labs StarFighter Ultra Linux laptop its BIOS allows for configurable memory speeds unlike many other laptop vendor BIOS implementations these days. Star Labs also made the default design decision to run the LPDDR5-7467 rated memory at LPDDR5-6400 speeds in the name of a balanced user experience for power/performance. So I was curious to run some benchmarks quantifyi…

$24,000 AI experiment ports TypeScript compiler to Rust ↗ (opens external article)

With some extra tokens to burn, developer and popular YouTuber Theo Browne used AI agents to port Microsoft's TypeScript compiler to Rust, just to see if it could be done. Not only did he produce a working implementation, but the resulting code could also pave the way for more memory-efficient environments for AI agents.Browne claims his Rust port runs twice as fast as Microsoft's official Go-bas…

YouTuber built 30-frame-per-second grayscale Game Boy, then open sourced it for all e-paper displays ↗ (opens external article)

Sure, running emulated Game Boy games at 30 fps with four shades of gray on an E Ink screen is cool, but you know what's cooler? A custom open source E Ink driver that could theoretically let any display do the same thing.YouTuber Bo Made It published a video last week demonstrating what he calls the InkBoy on a tiny ESP32-S3-powered e-paper board. It looks just about as good as the old-fashioned…

Smartphone shipments plummet as memory crisis pumps up prices ↗ (opens external article)

Smartphone shipments fell by at least a fifth in the third calendar quarter as the AI-driven memory crunch battered another consumer hardware market.Preliminary estimates from IDC and Omdia put the year-on-year decline at 22 percent and 20 percent respectively.Memory costs have surged by approximately 350 percent since last year, according to IDC, and are still rising. This continues to place sub…

6.6.159: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.6.159 (longterm) Released:2026-10-15 Source:linux-6.6.159.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.6.159.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.6.159…

6.1.190: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.1.190 (longterm) Released:2026-10-15 Source:linux-6.1.190.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.1.190.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.1.190…

5.10.272: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:5.10.272 (longterm) Released:2026-10-15 Source:linux-5.10.272.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.10.272.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.10.272…

5.15.223: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:5.15.223 (longterm) Released:2026-10-15 Source:linux-5.15.223.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.15.223.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.15.223…

7.2.11: stable ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.2.11 (stable) Released:2026-10-15 Source:linux-7.2.11.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.2.11.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.2.11…

6.18.57: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.18.57 (longterm) Released:2026-10-15 Source:linux-6.18.57.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.57.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.57…

6.12.113: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.12.113 (longterm) Released:2026-10-15 Source:linux-6.12.113.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.113.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.113…

We’re Asking the Wisconsin Supreme Court to End Warrantless ALPR Searches ↗ (opens external article)

Today, EFF joined the ACLU of Wisconsin in filing a petition to the Wisconsin Supreme Court, asking it to rule that the state’s constitution requires a warrant for retrospective searches of ALPR databases used by law enforcement in four cities: Milwaukee, Racine, Kenosha, and Green Bay. We represent a religious organization, the Wisconsin Council of Churches, as well as an individual pastor in Gre…

DHS Inspector General Finds That TSA is Not Properly Safeguarding Passenger Facial Recognition Data ↗ (opens external article)

EFF legal intern Gabrielle Ladun was the principal author of this post.  The Department of Homeland Security Office of Inspector General (DHS OIG) has published a summary of findings from its audit of the Transportation Security Administration’s (TSA) facial recognition technology. While the detailed findings are classified, the summary states that the OIG’s audit uncovered a “significant weakness…

🗣 A Victory for Freedom of Speech Online | EFFector 38.18 ↗ (opens external article)

No one should have to think twice before criticizing the government online. But a mass surveillance program known as "Catch and Revoke" was created to make millions do just that. EFF and other defenders of free speech are fighting back. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're talking about a key court win for our lawsuit challenging this unconstitutional surveillance program. JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER…

U.K. Sanctions Cryptomus for RU Money Laundering ↗ (opens external article)

The United Kingdom has issued economic sanctions against Cryptomus, a chameleonic cryptocurrency platform that experts say serves as a major conduit for payments related to ransomware, narcotics, darknet markets, fraud and cybercrime services that are helping Russia circumvent existing financial restrictions. Heleket’s support agent on Telegram claims, despite all evidence to the contrary, that it…

Microsoft Patches More Than 1,400 Security Flaws ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft today issued updates to fix more than 1,400 security vulnerabilities in its Windows operating systems and other software. Today’s epic patch batch dwarfs September’s record of nearly 1,000 fixes, which was already about ten times the normal monthly patch load from Redmond. Just one of the weaknesses patched this week is considered a “zero day,” or already exploited in the wild. CVE-2026-…

As Federal Court Rules ALPRs are Mass Surveillance, EFF Gets Disappointing Ruling ↗ (opens external article)

In an extremely disappointing ruling, a California trial court dismissed SIREN v. San Jose, our case challenging the city of San Jose’s warrantless searches of its vast stores of automated license plate reader (ALPR) data. EFF and the ACLU of Northern California represent SIREN and CAIR California, two non-profits that serve San Jose residents, in this case. Make no mistake: We believe this ruling…

Privacy's Defenders Podcast: No Privacy Without Encryption ↗ (opens external article)

When we communicate online today – from your personal emails and DMs to secure international commerce – we usually do so with encryption. Encryption converts readable data into unreadable gibberish to protect our privacy and security. This didn’t just happen organically. Three decades ago, the U.S government treated encryption like a weapon, and it took some unlikely heroes to set it free: a grad…

FBI Arrests Executive at Ransomware Negotiation Firm ↗ (opens external article)

Agents with the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) on Thursday arrested an executive at a Canadian cybersecurity firm in connection with an investigation into the ShinyHunters hacking group that recently relieved the FBI of sensitive data on thousands of agents, multiple sources tell KrebsOnSecurity. The New York Times reported today that the FBI has arrested a Canadian man in Pennsylvania on s…

Resisting the Menace of Federal Data Consolidation ↗ (opens external article)

In the past two years, the federal government has unlawfully consolidated data exposing our private information.  This consolidation has been chaotic but generally came in three rolling waves: It started with DOGE, moved to agency-to-agency data sharing with ICE, and then attempted data-driven purges of state voter rolls. We all deserve to live in a world where the data we use to pay our taxes, re…

Organizing in the Town at Oakland Tech Week ↗ (opens external article)

EFF was thrilled to join organizers, advocates, and activists in the East Bay for the second annual Oakland Tech Week last week. We are grateful to our friends at MediaJustice and Upturn for inviting us co-present this all-day event, “Building Beyond Big Tech: Organizing Oakland’s Future”, on Sept. 30.  The event, hosted by the Kapor Center in downtown Oakland, offered a unique chance to spend tim…

Turkish Crackdown On LGBTQ+ Organizations Threatens Freedom of Expression and Association ↗ (opens external article)

EFF strongly condemns Turkey’s state-led discriminatory, oppressive attacks on feminist and LGBTQ+ organisations, media platforms, student groups, and rights defenders and activists within the country. Since mid-September, access to the websites and social media accounts of a dozen organizations have been blocked by court order, while over 60 members and activists have been detained, their offices…

When No ID Means No Internet: Age Verification and the Right to Access Information ↗ (opens external article)

This post was co-authored by Sheila B. Lalwani, a doctorate student and recent COMPASS Fellow hosted by EFF. Age verification proposals are often presented as a simple tradeoff: sacrifice a little privacy to better safeguard children online. But that framing overlooks a more fundamental question. What happens to people who cannot verify their age at all? This is particularly a problem when users a…

It's DAF Day! Wait...What's a DAF? ↗ (opens external article)

Today is DAF Day! This event highlights the millions of donor-advised funds (DAFs) people have set up to make charitable donations and change the world. If you have a DAF, consider supporting EFF today. Decisions about your privacy, encryption, artificial intelligence, online speech, and digital security will determine whether technology empowers people or concentrates power in the hands of a few.…

ShinyHunters Extorted Boeing Spin-off Prior to Arrests ↗ (opens external article)

A teenager from Amman, Jordan suspected of leading the prolific data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters has been detained and is reportedly cooperating with the FBI to identify other members of the hacking gang. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the suspect, who uses the hacker handle “Rey,” was detained as ShinyHunters was in the process of extorting a business unit recently divested by the gl…

New laptops and OpenBSD: HP Envy 17-DA0013dx ↗ (opens external article)

We have to admit that even users of a well rounded operating system like OpenBSD sometimes encounter hardware that is not quite supported yet. Fortunately, sometimes the user facing the problematic hardware is an experienced developer like Ian Darwin, and he took the time to write up his experience in a blog post titled Un-hanging the HP Envy 17-DA0013dx for OpenBSD. The article leads in with, I…

openssh-10.6 released ↗ (opens external article)

In their usual, unassuming fashion, the OpenSSH project have released a new version, release 10.6. The full text of the 10.6 release nodes reads: OpenSSH 10.6 was released on 2026-10-06. 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 and server support. Recently the OpenSSH team have received…

LibreSSL 4.2.2 and 4.3.3 released ↗ (opens external article)

In a move that hints strongly that the new OpenBSD release is about to drop soon, the LibreSSL project have announced the new stable releases. The announcement reads, List: openbsd-announce Subject: LibreSSL 4.2.2 and 4.3.3 released From: Brent Cook <busterb () gmail ! com> Date: 2026-10-06 0:38:40 We have released LibreSSL 4.3.3 and 4.2.2, which are available in the LibreSSL directory of your lo…

Tribute to Margaret Hamilton ↗ (opens external article)

FreeBSD would like to pay our respects to Margaret Hamilton, whose work allowed coding to become both the scientific discipline it is today, and the art form that drew each of us to it. She embodied both the engineering rigor and the rebelliousness that have come to define what it is to be a hacker today. We owe her a spiritual debt and are proud to be members of this discipline that she was pivo…

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Returning committer: Michael Johnson (ports)…

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New committer: Christos Longros (ports)…

Headers Up! What's New in httpd and relayd ↗ (opens external article)

As previously noted, Rafael Sadowski (radowski@) has been behind a recent pickup in development of httpd(8) and relayd(8). Now Rafael has written a new piece, entitled Headers Up! What's New in httpd and relayd, on some of his recent work on httpd(8) and relayd(8). Among the notable additions are expanded and improved filtering and pattern matching features which make it harder to make a case for…

Site-Blocking Will Not Defend IP, No Matter the Bill’s Name ↗ (opens external article)

There has been a raft of site-blocking bills in the latest Congress, and the latest is called the “Deterring Extraterritorial Foreign Exploitation of Networks Damaging Intellectual Property” aka the “DEFEND IP Act.” The problem is that instead of “defending IP,” this bill will incentivize censorship, overblocking, and bad faith attempts to block access to a website. DEFEND IP Act, and all of these…

Congress Has Another Site-Blocking Bill, And This One Targets VPNs ↗ (opens external article)

Congress is taking another run at site-blocking, a deeply flawed concept that would undermine basic internet infrastructure. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has introduced the American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA), H.R. 10364, a bill that would give copyright owners a new legal tool to block Americans’ access to foreign websites accused of copyright infringement.  The basic idea is all too familiar, a…

Victory! Court Rejects Government Effort to Dismiss Social Media Surveillance Lawsuit ↗ (opens external article)

Judge Allows Social Media Surveillance Lawsuit Against Trump Administration to Move ForwardNEW YORK — A lawsuit filed by three labor unions against the Departments of State and Homeland Security for their viewpoint-based surveillance and suppression of protected expression online can move forward, a federal judge ruled yesterday. On October 1, 2026, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the U.S. District…

Ola Bini Ordered to Leave Ecuador Under Obscure Accusations ↗ (opens external article)

In a new blow to Ola Bini’s legal guarantees, Ecuadorean authorities retained the free software developer and security expert yesterday in Quito and ordered his immediate deportation from the country. He is barred from returning to Ecuador for 10 years.  According to information released by his lawyer, Bini was intercepted by a car with four people who identified themselves as immigration agents.…

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New committer: Boris Lytochkin (src)…

We Demand More Information on How Marin Cops Illegally Shared Flock ALPR Data ↗ (opens external article)

The Marin County Sheriff’s Office is the latest California law enforcement agency to get caught sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data from their Flock Safety system with out-of-state and federal agencies. EFF and the ACLU of Northern California are calling them out for this direct violation of California law, which has put every driver in the county at risk and is especially dangerous…

Challengers Approach: Third Party App Stores Arrive to Google Play ↗ (opens external article)

If you are an Android user, you may have noticed it already: Google has begun allowing rival, third-party app stores to be distributed through the Google Play Store. And if you are a developer, you may have noticed new options for billing and distributing your apps.  For years, Epic Games, maker of games such as Fortnite, has been suing Google, alleging violations of antitrust law. Specifically at…

Court Agrees with EFF: Utah’s VPN Law Demands a Technical Impossibility ↗ (opens external article)

When state lawmakers attempt to rewrite how the internet works, users rely on courts to recognize that laws can’t make technical impossibilities a reality. That’s why we were happy to see that a court has blocked Utah’s attempt to outlaw the privacy protections of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).  In a win for digital rights, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking Utah’s SB 7…

Happy Opt Out October! Let’s Find Real Alternatives to the Tech Giants ↗ (opens external article)

Over the years, the major tech companies have found all sorts of ways to embed themselves into our lives. We often use their software, their AI tools, their social media, and their operating systems by default without even thinking about potential alternatives. It’s time to rethink that relationship.  Last year, we created Opt Out October to help remind ourselves of the variety of ways we can take…

OpenBGPD 9.3 released ↗ (opens external article)

In another hint that a new OpenBSD release is close, the OpenBGPD project has announced a new release of its software, version 9.3: We have released OpenBGPD 9.3, which will be arriving in the OpenBGPD directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon. This release includes the following changes to the previous release: * Add shorthand for well-known "DOWNGRADE" BGP community. * Remove support old aspa…

OpenBSD -current is now "8.0-current" ↗ (opens external article)

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) updated the version of OpenBSD -current from "8.0" to "8.0-current". List: openbsd-cvs Subject: CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src From: Theo de Raadt <deraadt () cvs ! openbsd ! org> Date: 2026-09-30 20:44:06 Message-ID: 93920a1f5b4035b8 () cvs ! openbsd ! org CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org 2026/09/30 14:44:06 Modified files: sys/conf : newvers…

Victory! California Appeals Court Refuses to Revive Surveillance Tech CEO’s Meritless Lawsuit Against Journalist ↗ (opens external article)

When the rich and powerful try to use the court to silence negative reporting about themselves, it’s worth calling out that behavior for what it is: an attack on free speech. This is why EFF is happy to stand up for reporters who find themselves in that situation. The California Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision to strike a former Premise Data CEO’s meritless lawsuit against a journ…

📱 Hey Siri, How Do I Limit AI Data Access? | EFFector 38.17 ↗ (opens external article)

With the launch of iOS 27, Apple is rolling out a variety of new AI features to its familiar voice assistant, Siri. But how are AI tools like these handling our data? In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're talking about the privacy complications of AI phone features. JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberti…

While the Country Rejects ALPR Mass Surveillance, SF Settles for Weak Safeguards ↗ (opens external article)

San Francisco's decision to retain its use of Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) surveillance cameras belies what we know about this spying technology tool: it endangers residents and threatens the privacy and civil liberties of our community. Based on what's in the city's press release and announcement, this policy will do nothing to stop actual harms. We know innocent drivers will be stopped…

Privacy’s Defenders Podcast: Cowboys, Cypherpunks and Visionaries ↗ (opens external article)

People are increasingly concerned about the ways in which mass surveillance is tracking our every move: from Flock license plate readers to face recognition to creepy ads that – based on what we see and do online – seem to know everything we’re thinking and planning. It didn’t have to be this way, and since the early days of the internet, a dedicated band of activists, lawyers and technologists ha…

EFF to San Francisco Police: Drones are Powerful Surveillance Tools That Require a Robust Policy ↗ (opens external article)

The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) began regularly deploying drones two years ago and has since expanded their use in a way that has outpaced its documented policy and evaded existing local and state oversight of these devices.  The department has a new proposed policy, which continues to be grossly inadequate in protecting privacy and civil liberties. At best, the draft policy continues t…

Dutch Police Arrest ‘Reformed’ Hacker in Shiny Hunters Investigation ↗ (opens external article)

Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested a 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by the prolific hacker group ShinyHunters. In the days immediately following the suspect’s arrest, remaining ShinyHunters members dramatically escalated their attacks, stealing highly sensitive data from the FBI and extorting the Russian ransomware group Cl0p. Acc…

OpenBSD -current has moved to version 8.0 ↗ (opens external article)

The OpenBSD 8.0 release cycle is entering its final phases… With the following commit, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) moved -current to version 8.0 (dropping the "-beta"): CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org 2026/09/26 10:41:23 Modified files: sys/conf : newvers.sh Log message: leave -beta For those unfamiliar with the process: this is not the 8.0 release, but is part of…

U.S. Soldier Gets 70 Months in Prison for AT&T, Verizon Extortions ↗ (opens external article)

A U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty to hacking into multiple telecommunications companies and stealing mobile call and text metadata for more than 100 million AT&T customers in 2024 was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison today and ordered to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution to victims. One of several selfies from the Facebook page of Cameron Wagenius. Cameron John Wagenius, 22, was stat…

EFF to Court: Trump's Use of Truth Social's Pay-To-See-Posts-First Scheme Violates Americans' 1st Amendment Equal Access Rights ↗ (opens external article)

EFF legal intern Simar Kaur also contributed to this article. Americans’ First Amendment right to equal access to official government statements is violated by the Trump administration’s use of Truth Social’s preferential treatment scheme, which blocks people who won’t pay Trump’s company up to $100,000 a month for early access to government news, EFF told a federal court.The First Amendment guara…

DraftKings Is Using AI to Supercharge the Harms of Online Behavioral Advertising ↗ (opens external article)

Online sports betting company DraftKings is using AI to target customers who are most likely to place losing bets and respond to gambling promotions. This kind of targeting is a form of online behavioral advertising, which is when companies personalize the ads they show you based on the data they’ve collected about you. The more data a company has, the more personalized the ad can be. While DraftK…

D.C. Circuit Must Vacate a Drone Flight Restriction That Criminalized Recording Immigration Agents ↗ (opens external article)

EFF joined an amicus brief with ACLU, ACLU of D.C., National Press Photographers Association, and Professional Photographers of America to urge the D.C. Circuit to vacate an FAA drone flight restriction that violated the First Amendment right to record law enforcement. This is an important case—Levine v. FAA—challenging the ability of the government to punish drone pilots who record law enforcemen…

EU Kids Act Won't Keep the Internet Accountable and Trustworthy ↗ (opens external article)

The EU Commission draft law to restrict young people’s access to the internet that it presented last week will come at a high cost: it will put online services behind age gates, expand the use of intrusive age verification, and undermine the privacy of all users.  The EU Kids Act aims to protect children from risks associated with social media, video games, and AI systems by introducing age-based…

EFF Statement on California Governor's Executive Order on AI ↗ (opens external article)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom's executive order is an opportunity for a needed, thoughtful conversation about artificial intelligence and its potential harms. Everyday Californians are feeling real anxiety about the risks of artificial intelligence, and as an organization that works to ensure technology empowers people, EFF welcomes this order as a way for the state of California to lead a much-nee…

How to Limit What Apple’s New Siri AI Can Access in iOS 27 ↗ (opens external article)

Apple’s new operating system is here, and along with it comes a new version of Siri, dubbed with two very familiar letters: AI. As the name suggests, this Siri power-up resembles an AI chatbot more than the often derided voice assistant you might be used to. It has even evolved from a blob you invoke with a verbal command or a button press to a whole app. This update comes with a slew of privacy c…

Secure Messaging and AI Remain In Conflict Despite the Promise of TEEs ↗ (opens external article)

Secure messaging platforms, like Signal, WhatsApp, and recently, encrypted RCS, operate on a straightforward assumption: the content at each end of a conversation is private to the participants in the conversation. End-to-end encryption helps provide the mathematical guarantees that the companies who operate these messaging platforms cannot access the contents of messages. But there’s no way to gu…

EFF to Lawmakers: Ground AI Cybersecurity Rules in Best Practices ↗ (opens external article)

With doomsday AI scenarios dominating the news, lawmakers are rightly concerned about reports concerning security breaches at major US AI labs, such as the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident and the many others reported in its aftermath. As they consider potentially regulating frontier AI, they should focus any new legislation on the immediate, demonstrated risks from those incidents.  Post-incident rep…

California’s “Addictive Feeds” Law Violates Teens’ First Amendment Rights ↗ (opens external article)

A California law that prohibits teens from receiving recommended social media content from other social media users violates their First Amendment rights, EFF argued this week. The case, Meta v. Bonta, challenges SB 976, which requires that teen social media users get their parents’ permission before seeing other users’ recommended speech on their social media feeds. The legal challenge to SB 976…

Victory! Appeals Court Rejects Expansive New Copyright Claim ↗ (opens external article)

 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit handed internet users and programmers a big win today, by rejecting an attempt to stretch a narrow provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into a new source of copyright liability.   The case involves Section 1202 of the DMCA, which prohibits intentionally removing copyright management information (CMI) like an author’s name or a co…

Data Broker Radaris Loses Domains in Privacy Fight ↗ (opens external article)

The consumer data broker Radaris.com has long had a reputation for ignoring requests to remove personal information from its vast empire of people-search services online. That reputation caught up with the company recently in a lawsuit alleging Radaris violated a New Jersey privacy law that provides for hefty fines against data brokers that publish personal information on state law enforcement off…

Victory: Court, Using a New Test, Rules Embedding Links is Legal ↗ (opens external article)

Courts have for two decades found that linking and embedding someone else’s web content, be it a photo, music, or an article, doesn’t violate copyright law–the entity that controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work, not the user or website that merely directs others to it, is directly liable if the content turns out to be infringing. News publisher Emmerich Newspapers sought to convince the…

EFF Welcomes Alexander Macgillivray to its Board of Directors ↗ (opens external article)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce today that Alexander “amac” Macgillivray — a former White House official who also served in top legal capacities at Twitter and Google — has joined EFF’s Board of Directors.  Macgillivray served in the Biden Administration as Deputy Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Office of Science…

👮 Flock Searches for the LOLs | EFFector 38.16 ↗ (opens external article)

Mass surveillance isn't a joke. But police are treating it like one when using automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're covering a new EFF report on how officers across the country are routinely logging completely nonsensical "reasons" for their Flock searches, including "LOL," "LMAO," and even (yuck) "Sexy." JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER For over 35 years, EF…

How the Meta Settlement Silences Youth Activism ↗ (opens external article)

Since its integration into our digital world, social media has played a pivotal role in youth organizing and social mobilization. Yet, people’s access to these platforms is increasingly coming under threat from courts and legislatures under the guise of protecting young people online—presenting a significant hindrance to youth organizing.   In a major recent example, Meta settled in a lawsuit with…

California: Tell the Governor to Stand Up for Net Neutrality, Affordability, and Public Safety ↗ (opens external article)

The federal government has inserted a provision into a funding deal with the state of California that would make the state abandon its gold standard net neutrality law, broadband affordability laws, and public safety protections. Doing so would be a huge step back for California, and would actually end up being more expensive for Californians in the long run. Tell the governor to reject this provi…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA3 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA2 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA1 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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New committer: Faraz Vahedi (src)…

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

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

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

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

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

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