Terminal

Understanding the Impact of LLM Watermarking on AI Agent Behavior ↗ (opens external article)

CEO of Mistral: AI is software. It can be controlled ↗ (opens external article)

Is Microsoft Quietly Killing Off Its 'Copilot+ PC' Brand? ↗ (opens external article)

"Copilot+ PCs" were Microsoft's official branding for Windows 11 "AI PCs" that met their system requirements. But the 2024 launch "didn't go smoothly," writes Windows Central, after security researchers discovered its proposed "Recall" feature was woefully insecure: This pretty much tarnished the Copilot+ PC brand, and over the last two years more and more OEMs have dropped the moniker from market…

AI Bug Fixes, Crescent Island Power Brake & Nouveau Fixes For Linux 7.3-rc5 DRM ↗ (opens external article)

The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem fixes for the week are heavier on the side with many fixes to these kernel graphics/display drivers ahead of Sunday's Linux 7.3-rc5 release...…

Breaking Up with Google Play: Why Conversations Is Now Free ↗ (opens external article)

Wisp Makes It Easier To Manage Btrfs Snapshots From The GNOME Desktop ↗ (opens external article)

Wisp is a new GNOME Shell extension making it easier to graphically manage Btrfs file-system snapshots...…

AMDXDNA Linux Driver Being Enhanced For Current NPU3 Hardware ↗ (opens external article)

The AMDXDNA open-source Linux kernel accelerator driver is seeing a fair amount of work for better supporting current-generation NPU3 neural processing units. The AMD NPU3 is what's found in current AMD Ryzen AI 300 / Ryzen AI 300 PRO series SoCs...…

How Samsung turned months of inactivity into a very attention-seeking smartphone ↗ (opens external article)

Our resident Microsoft-watcher Richard Speed last week wrote about his seven-hour odyssey bringing a Windows 11 box up to snuff with the latest patches. I’ll see you that struggle, Richard, and raise you my experience updating a 2022-vintage Samsung Galaxy A33 Android smartphone. I spent about a year using the A33 as my daily driver and while it always did a job, the midrange machine is far from…

One Month Without AI ↗ (opens external article)

KDE Plasma 6.8 Continues With Last Minute Tweaks & Fixes ↗ (opens external article)

Even with this week's KDE Akademy conference and releasing KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta 2, KDE developers still found time to land last minute changes for Plasma 6.8 plus ongoing early work toward Plasma 6.9...…

The Copilot+ PC brand is dead ↗ (opens external article)

Fifteen years later, the Apple Cards origin story ↗ (opens external article)

Floci: Locally emulating any cloud service ↗ (opens external article)

Space Jam: UK debuts space squadron to protect satellites ↗ (opens external article)

Britain’s Royal Air Force has gained some space cadets, in the form of No. III Space Effects Squadron, tasked with protecting critical satellites that the UK relies on for communications and navigation. Air Chief Marshal Sir Harvey Smyth announced the new unit at an inaugural UK Space Power Conference in London, saying it will safeguard the vital benefits that space gives to our armed forces, and…

The far side of the Moon provides clues to a previous magnetic field ↗ (opens external article)

Is your Postgres migration safe or not safe? ↗ (opens external article)

Rogue OpenAI Agents Posted 53 User-Uploaded Images Onto the Internet, Accessed US Government Websites ↗ (opens external article)

53 images that users uploaded into OpenAI models were included in training data — and then AI agents in an OpenAI research environment posted those 53 images on public image hosting sites. While posted as links that weren't publicly listed, "the images could still be discovered even if the links were not publicly listed," reports TechCrunch: OpenAI said it was working with the hosting providers to…

A single function Jev-like wrapper for LLMs, including vision models ↗ (opens external article)

We're gonna need a lot more mathematicians ↗ (opens external article)

Meta Made 43M Misleading Statements, New Mexico Jury Finds, Including on Its Cambridge Analytica Response ↗ (opens external article)

A New Mexico jury on Friday "found Facebook liable for deceiving users" about its privacy protections, reports the Associated Press. A New Mexico newspaper calls it "another massive legal victory" against Facebook, reporting that the jury found Facebook "had committed tens of millions of violations of the state's Unfair Practices Act in connection with its lies to consumers about how their persona…

HomelabFest will be in St. Louis in September 2027 ↗ (opens external article)

Jury finds Facebook liable for deceiving users in Cambridge Analytica case ↗ (opens external article)

Can Trump ever be wrong? His pick to lead FDA refused to say. ↗ (opens external article)

Heidi Overton, President Trump's nominee to lead the Food and Drug Administration, went before the Senate health committee Thursday, facing questions about her stances on vaccines, flavored vapes, birth control, and abortion, among other issues. She spent nearly two hours stonewalling senators, even on softball questions. Overton, a physician with a doctoral degree in clinical investigation, is c…

New FUTEX Syscalls Back To Being Worked On For Helping Valve's ARM64 Gaming Ambitions ↗ (opens external article)

Going back to last year the Igalia open-source consulting firm has been working on enhancing the Linux kernel to help Steam Play gaming on ARM64 and ensuring the FEX emulator is operating efficiently for x86/x86_64 games running on the likes of the Steam Frame. After other kernel work in recent months, there's finally an updated round of the FUTEX get_robust_list2 and set_robust_list2 system call…

Lab on a Contact Lens Can Measure Stress Through Serotonin ↗ (opens external article)

There's a New Way to Break RSA Encryption ↗ (opens external article)

"Signature forgery." It's a new way to break RSA keys — and it doesn't require factoring. Ars Technica reports on new research using classical computing to "reduce the current RSA security level to an unacceptably low threshold" and lower the required computing resources by orders of magnitude. There's "a gap in current RSA-type security assumptions," according to a paper co-authored by University…

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…

What even is an OS now? ↗ (opens external article)

Court rules Pentagon can blacklist Anthropic for refusing to enable Claude features ↗ (opens external article)

A US appeals court today approved the Department of Defense's blacklisting of Anthropic technology. Judges decided the Trump administration had authority to blacklist Anthropic for withholding certain AI features from the military even if Anthropic had no malicious intent. In a 2-1 ruling issued by the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, a panel of judges said the "case rais…

Tesla workers balk at training Optimus humanoid robots as replacements ↗ (opens external article)

Tesla’s pivot from making electric cars to humanoid robots is facing challenges because of complex robot hands and disgruntled employees pushing back against training their robotic replacements. The struggle to scale up production comes as Tesla CEO Elon Musk has bet the company’s future on AI and robotics. As someone who frequently makes claims that fail to materialize, Musk has described the Op…

Revealing the details of how OpenAI agents hacked Hugging Face ↗ (opens external article)

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 early access to government news, EFF told a federal court.The First Amendment guarantee…

Excel now supports multiple values in a single cell ↗ (opens external article)

Valen creator drives 'Golden Spike' to connect new languages with Rust ↗ (opens external article)

Programming language generics can now ride in style from one language’s compiler to another and back again, thanks to experimental work from Mojo core contributor Evan Ovadia. This former Google engineer has endeavored to turn Rust into a library that other languages can build from, demonstrating a way to pass generic data types and functions between Rust and another language, an action the C ABI…

Microsoft cells out, crams multiple values into Excel boxes ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has ended 40 years of single-occupancy for Excel cells and is now allowing multiple values to inhabit the same home. "One of the oldest rules of spreadsheets: one cell, one value," said Jake Armstrong, senior product manager for Excel, in a LinkedIn post. "No longer!" "I’m excited to announce a set of new features: Lists, Arrays in Cells and Nested Arrays in Excel." For the time being,…

Your uncle’s frozen Mac says it’s infected after viewing a Google ad. Now what? ↗ (opens external article)

Researchers say they recently found Google ads delivering a sophisticated tech support scam that freezes the screens of both Windows and Mac devices and displays messages urgently instructing them to phone a bogus call center. The ads were displayed all over the web, including on high-traffic maps, weather, real-estate, document-hosting, and sports sites. Users who called the number were then urg…

Ask HN: Who's still keeping a DOS machine up because the business depends on it? ↗ (opens external article)

Review: The iPhone 18 Pro is Apple's coolest smartphone (but only literally) ↗ (opens external article)

As Apple's Tim Cook era draws to a close, we're seeing more experimentation with the iPhone's design than we've seen in a long time, but you wouldn't know it from the iPhone 18 Pro. This absurdly fast, full-featured handset might be eclipsed by the hype around the iPhone Duo this year, but it's still just as good as its immediate predecessor. Of course, not too much has changed since the iPhone 1…

Uncle Sam coughs up $1.9B for grid upgrades as datacenters hit a power wall ↗ (opens external article)

Bit barn builders can rejoice, because this week the US Department of Energy (DoE) announced $5.25 billion — including $1.9 billion of federal funds and $3.35 billion in cost-share funding — to support dozens of grid improvements across the nation expected to unlock an additional 23 gigawatts of capacity. The program, which spans 31 specific projects in 26 states, is part of the department’s Spee…

Fake Google Security Team ad says 'no script reading' in voice phishing - then prints the script ↗ (opens external article)

Yes, criminals have job listings too. A Telegram user recruiting callers to work in an apparent Google Security Team voice-phishing scam told applicants that they weren’t allowed to read from scripts – in the same ad that also included the exact script they had to read during these scam calls. This and other true-crime tales of criminals making fools of themselves appear in the latest installment…

AI was supposed to hit new grads hard. So far, unemployment data says otherwise. ↗ (opens external article)

Last month, we shared word of a Stanford University study that found entry-level employment in so-called "AI-impacted" occupations lagging well behind that in other fields. Now, a new working paper from economics researchers at Munich's CESifo finds the opposite, arguing point blank that "there is no evidence of any significant, widespread displacement or reduction in hiring of recent college gra…

New software dependency validation process increases speeds by 54x ↗ (opens external article)

As if the pace of software creation hadn't accelerated enough thanks to generative AI coding agents, computer scientists in Japan have devised a way to turbocharge the process of build dependency verification. Speeds can increase by as much as 54x. Software build systems like Make, CMake, and the Zig build system automate the process of turning source code into executable programs. They ensure so…

Paramount/WBD merger conditions give the public "virtually nothing," judge is told ↗ (opens external article)

Free speech and media advocacy groups urged a judge to block a California settlement with Paramount Skydance that would let the company finalize its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. Twelve states led by California sued to block the deal in July and were able to delay it when US District Judge Araceli Martínez-Olguín ruled that Paramount combining with Warner Bros. would likely red…

Ollaya – Ollama for open-source, Jev-style decision models ↗ (opens external article)

Is solar's growth finally slowing in the US? ↗ (opens external article)

Normally, we try to update you quarterly on what's going on with the US electric grid since it provides a nice view of developing trends and smooths out some month-to-month randomness. Unfortunately, I was out of the office when last month's data was released, so this will be a seven-month update on 2026 trends. The top line item is that energy use is continuing to rise, albeit not as quickly as…

ShinyHunters tells The Reg: We hacked the FBI to 'protect our business' ↗ (opens external article)

ShinyHunters, the data theft and extortion crew that has stolen sensitive information belonging to millions of cancer patients, university and K-12 students, and Carnival cruisers, wanted to preserve their reputation and keep their “business” afloat. So it hacked the FBI to make a statement, the group told The Register. “It’s a game and it’s the world we live in,” a ShinyHunters spokesperson told…

Google-backed energy outfit brings 33 MW of 4 GW geothermal potential online in Utah ↗ (opens external article)

Google's bet on geothermal energy is starting to pay off. Fervo Energy, an enhanced geothermal systems (EGS) provider backed by the Chocolate Factory, achieved first power at its Cape Station power plant in Beaver County, Utah this week. The first of three 33 MW GeoBlocks has begun supplying electricity to the grid and is expected to reach commercial operation next week, with another 66 MW of cap…

Microsoft stops insisting you need a "Copilot+ PC" ↗ (opens external article)

Since 2024, Microsoft has tried to sell “Copilot+ PC.” The marketing initiative was aimed at making it easy for people to know which Windows systems were approved to run AI-accelerated workloads locally. But Copilot+ PC branding is nowhere to be found on the new Surface PCs Microsoft announced this week. Speaking with Windows Central, Brett Ostrum, corporate VP of Surface, said that the new Surfa…

Asteroids Named After Tom Lehrer and 'Weird Al' Yankovic ↗ (opens external article)

"Weird Al" Yankovic's name has just been approved for a new asteroid — (14331) Alyankovic = 1981 EC26 — by the International Astronomical Union, reports Space.com. Yankovic's asteroid was championed by planetary scientist Allison McGraw joined by "several heavy hitters in the planetary science field, according to the Tucson Star. (Astrophysicist Steve Desch from the School of Earth and Space Explo…

Crooks use fake desktop apps to fool HR staff into giving them remote access ↗ (opens external article)

You work in your company's human resources department and use HR software to check employee information, benefits, and payroll. So, when you see a downloadable Windows version promising a faster alternative to the usual web interface, you grab it. Unfortunately, the app isn't what it claims to be. Instead, it silently installs ConnectWise's legitimate ScreenConnect software, giving the operator p…

Bitget blames North Korea for $387.5M crypto wallet raid ↗ (opens external article)

The CEO of crypto exchange Bitget has confirmed that a cyberattack with all the hallmarks of a North Korean operation resulted in approximately $387.5 million worth of digital assets being stolen from the exchange’s wallets. Bitget initially estimated the loss at $351.6 million, but later revised the figure to $387.5 million after identifying additional affected assets on Zcash and TRON that were…

GDB 18.1 Debugger Brings Better Windows Support ↗ (opens external article)

GDB 18.1 is out today as the newest version of the GNU Debugger that works across C/C++, Fortran, Rust, and other languages like Go, Ada, and more...…

next-20260925: linux-next ↗ (opens external article)

Version:next-20260925 (linux-next) Released:2026-09-25…

Redox OS Adds IO_uring-Like API, NUMA & Gets QEMU Working ↗ (opens external article)

The Redox OS open-source, Rust-based operating system has seen a lot of activity in recent weeks with many notable improvements landing...…

After seven years, a spacecraft company is releasing its Otters into the wild ↗ (opens external article)

Imagine starting a space company in October 2019 with the aim of changing the world. Then, a few months later, a global pandemic shuts the world down. "Little did we know what the world had in store for us," said Trevor Bennett, an engineer who co-founded Starfish Space after a few years at Blue Origin. "But that's kind of become part of our story, showing some resilience along the way." At Blue…

Gravity seems holographic. What does that mean for reality? ↗ (opens external article)

US being left behind in EV charging speeds as China goes sub-5 min to 70% ↗ (opens external article)

Hype merchants have a habit of overdoing it, but there’s no denying that China is making the US look more than a little antiquated when it comes to electric vehicles. Some of that is due to a deep integration of connected services and an extension of the car as part of the owner’s digital life—think additional infotainment screens and AI personal assistants, but with an Android phone-maker’s cade…

Office 2016 and 2019 holdouts blame update for license deactivation bug ↗ (opens external article)

Users report that a recent optional update for out-of-date Microsoft 365 applications might be connected to suddenly deactivated Microsoft Office 2016 and 2019 installations. The activation bug cropped up this week and appears to mostly impact Home and Business perpetual license installations, stripping away their authenticated status and forcing users into a loop where they are asked over and ov…

Which copy of that file is the real one? Dinner, off the record, in Midtown ↗ (opens external article)

EVENT: The Register is hosting a private dinner in New York on Tuesday 27 October for senior technology, infrastructure and data leaders, with LucidLink. Joe Fay takes the chair, it runs under the Chatham House Rule, and nothing said leaves the table. Distributed teams are producing more unstructured file data than ever, and most of them reach it through infrastructure designed for an office: leg…

Approaching A 10 Second Linux Kernel Build ↗ (opens external article)

The coffee window is closing. Going back many years with the time it's taken to compile the Linux kernel has been a well known opportunity for a coffee break or even eating a meal during the lengthy Linux kernel build process. Even when the Linux kernel was much smaller than it is today, with the hardware at the time it would often be a very time consuming process... Thus incredible to think that…

7.2.8: stable ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.2.8 (stable) Released:2026-09-25 Source:linux-7.2.8.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.2.8.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.2.8…

6.18.54: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.18.54 (longterm) Released:2026-09-25 Source:linux-6.18.54.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.54.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.54…

Show HN: Jev Plays Pokémon Red ↗ (opens external article)

Raspberry Pi surfs memory crunch to record first half ↗ (opens external article)

Raspberry Pi has posted a record first half after a well-timed memory stockpile helped it ride out soaring prices and shortages. The Cambridge-based company reported revenue of $256.9 million for the six months ended June 30, up 90 percent from $135.5 million a year earlier, while pre-tax profit more than tripled to $19.6 million. Raspberry Pi shipped 4.2 million boards during the six-month perio…

With PRIMA, NASA will try to build a billion-dollar space telescope in record time ↗ (opens external article)

The first in a new class of space telescopes is on track to reach the launch pad in the early 2030s, NASA announced this week. The PRIMA mission will be the first of NASA's Probe Explorers, a new line of observatories intended to do more science for less money. The agency's space telescopes typically fall into lower-cost "Explorer-class" missions, with cost caps in the range of a few hundred mill…

Trump administration takes Musk’s side in fight over EU tech rules ↗ (opens external article)

The Trump administration is seeking to join Elon Musk’s appeal against a €120 million EU fine of the billionaire’s social media platform X, the latest escalation in the transatlantic clash over Brussels’ efforts to rein in US tech companies. The US Department of Justice on Thursday filed an application to intervene in a pair of cases brought by Musk and X seeking annulment of the penalty, which w…

Windows update leaves some virtual desktops staring into the void ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has admitted that some Windows 11 virtual desktops may fail to load after sign-in, leaving users staring at a black screen until they launch Explorer manually. The glitch affects devices running the August 2026 non-security preview update or later releases and, according to Microsoft, "has been primarily observed on Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) hosts, using FSLogix." Windows Explorer cra…

Raspberry Pi Stock Jumps 30% as Demand Surges. (And Boards Now Locked to Their Original RAM Size) ↗ (opens external article)

Raspberry Pi's stock shot up over 30% in the last week. Why are investors so excited? For the six months ending June 30, revenue for Raspberry Pi Holdings "jumped 90% to $256.9 million," reports Investing.com, "while adjusted EBITDA more than doubled to $40.3 million, and profit before tax leapt 216% to $19.6 million." Underpinning the strong numbers was an acceleration in OEM adoption: direct uni…

Uncle Sam wants in on Musk's €120M fight with Brussels ↗ (opens external article)

The US government wants to join Elon Musk and X's legal challenge to the European Commission's €120 million fine against the social media platform. The Commission issued its first fine under the Digital Services Act (DSA) in December 2025, finding that X had breached transparency rules through its paid blue checkmarks, advertising repository, and restrictions on researchers' access to public data…

Asahi fork embraces LLMs and lands Linux on the M4 Mac mini ↗ (opens external article)

Gravity Linux is a newly announced distro targeting newer Apple Silicon Macs, and its first experimental alpha already boots an accelerated desktop on the M4 Mac mini. The project homepage says: "Gravity Linux is a Fedora remix that brings a fast, modern Linux desktop to Apple Silicon – built in the open, by people like you." If this sounds familiar, the About page explains: "Gravity Linux was in…

Amazon sellers watch as inventory vanishes into pending-order purgatory ↗ (opens external article)

Traders on Amazon's UK marketplace say a wave of "abnormal" orders stuck in pending status is tying up their inventory and preventing legitimate customers from buying the affected items. Vendors on Amazon's Seller Central forums report unusually high numbers of pending orders in their accounts, often involving products priced at £100 ($132) or more. Reports began appearing on September 20. Within…

BOFH: The Helldesk opens its third eye and ascends to a higher plane of troubleshooting ↗ (opens external article)

The Boss has had some feedback from the using classes about our method of fixing IT problems (i.e. fixing them), and how we could do things a little better. "So... you want us to... not fix the problems?" the PFY asks. "No, that's not what I'm saying. What I'm saying is that your approach could maybe do with a bit of an overhaul. Instead of attacking the problem head-on, perhaps you could take a…

Trump admin using AI to deny medical care for seniors in disastrous experiment ↗ (opens external article)

In January, the Trump administration rolled out a pilot program that uses artificial intelligence to authorize or deny certain types of care for patients with Medicare—a federal healthcare program for seniors that previously hasn't required doctors to get any such pre-approval, called prior authorization. Not long after, media outlets began relaying the disastrous outcomes: technical difficulties…

Rocket Report: Era of cheap launch is over? Astra sets early 2027 target for return ↗ (opens external article)

Welcome to Edition 9.12 of the Rocket Report! The big story in the global launch industry remains SpaceX's plans to wind down Falcon 9 operations for commercial launches, possibly within the next two or three years. That has created a scramble among satellite operators and some positioning among up-and-coming launch providers. Notably, in this week's newsletter, there's a story about how Firefly…

Dyfed-Powys Police cops to cyberattack, staff data potentially nicked ↗ (opens external article)

Dyfed-Powys Police has revealed it was hit by a cyberattack that knocked some of its systems offline, with investigators now trying to establish whether the intruders got their hands on staff data during the break-in. The Welsh police force said it identified the incident on September 14 and that it caused disruption to some non-emergency systems. Emergency policing remained operational throughou…

Patches Posted For Enabling NVMe On All Apple M3 Based SoCs With Linux ↗ (opens external article)

While Linux 7.2 brought initial Apple M3 support and Linux 7.3 brought M3 Pro / Max / Ultra support, the mainline Linux kernel support for the M3 series hardware remains very basic and not yet ready for daily driving. But more work continues to be upstreamed and today the patches were posted for getting NVMe storage up and running across all Apple M3 hardware...…

AMD Sends Out New Linux Patches Further Enhancing HDMI 2.1 Reliability ↗ (opens external article)

Linux 7.4 is going to be the big kernel release where the AMD graphics driver will finally expose HDMI 2.1 by default and comes with features including HDMI FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM. Ahead of that milestone there have been various other last minute tweaks and improvements to its HDMI 2.1 support. Sent out on Thursday was the latest round of AMDGPU DC patches that includes a few more patches for imp…

Another week, another data breach for Revolut customers ↗ (opens external article)

Revolut customers have been caught up in a second data breach this month after attackers socially engineered their way into US brokerage DriveWealth and stole historic personal information. DriveWealth provides execution and clearing services for investment firms and previously held brokerage accounts directly for Revolut customers trading US stocks. It said the unauthorized access occurred on Se…

Last Call For The Autumn Special For Ad-Free Viewing & Supporting Linux Hardware Testing ↗ (opens external article)

Last call for the Phoronix autumn "Oktoberfest" Premium sale: it runs through end of day Sunday, 27 September (any timezone - I'm not particularly strict). If you have been meaning to support the site, this is the window...…

Go's Improving SIMD Support, Platform-Independent SIMD Interface ↗ (opens external article)

A new blog post published on Thursday covers the experimental support for SIMD with the Go programming language. This expanding Go SIMD support also includes a platform-independent API for making use of SIMD with modern processors...…

Samba 4.25 Released With Experimental SMB3 Persistent Handles ↗ (opens external article)

Samba 4.25 is out as the newest stable release for this open-source software enabling file and print services sharing between Linux servers and Windows systems...…

Judge uses electronic tag on Pokémon card tracker. It's super effective! ↗ (opens external article)

A 72-year-old Ohio man who planted a GPS tracker on a Pokémon card delivery van has been sentenced to a year of probation – including 90 days wearing a tracker of his own. Kent Kubasta, of Medina, Ohio, attached a Spytec device to the woman's van. She discovered it while making a delivery to Walmart on June 18 and was described in court documents as "a carrier/vendor of Pokémon cards." Kubasta in…

Your files are in four places and nobody knows which one is right ↗ (opens external article)

EVENT: The Register is hosting a private dinner in Soho on Tuesday 20 October for senior technology, infrastructure and data leaders, with LucidLink. Joe Fay takes the chair, it runs under the Chatham House Rule, and nothing said is on the record. The problem on the table is the one most organisations have stopped saying out loud. Unstructured file data keeps growing, distributed teams keep needi…

F-Droid 2.0: FOSS Android Appstore Continues Updating Despite Google's Pending 'Developer Verification' Plan ↗ (opens external article)

"F-Droid, a third-party app repository that only distributes free and open-source software packages for Google's Android mobile platform, on Thursday announced version 2.0 of its Android app," reports The Register. Though they also note "a big banner across the top of the F-Droid site" pointing to a site describing pending changes from Google that threaten the future of F-Droid... [D]evelopers who…

UK wants more homes heated by waste heat from datacenters ↗ (opens external article)

The UK government says it is pumping £90 million ($119 million) into building and improving heat networks that redirect excess heat energy generated by a datacenter or factory and use it to warm homes or for other purposes. According to the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ), more than 750,000 homes will get cheaper heating as part of the scheme, which includes plans for a “mega…

Huawei Cloud Rolls Out Enterprise AI Products Across the Board, Building an Open Agentic Cloud ↗ (opens external article)

Shanghai, China, September 18, 2026: On September 18, Dr. Peter Zhou, Director of the Board at Huawei and CEO of Huawei Cloud, delivered a keynote titled "The Agentic Cloud for the Agentic World: Build Together, Grow Together" at HUAWEI CONNECT 2026. He shared Huawei Cloud's latest progress. He announced the global launch of the latest AI Cluster Service (AICS), a key step in Huawei Cloud's strat…

Project leader thought his team understood the plan, ended up fixing their 'interpretation' of it ↗ (opens external article)

Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register’s reader-contributed Friday column that celebrates the unique workplace cultures that make delivering tech support such delightful fun. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Antonio” who told us that in the late 1990s he worked for a multinational financial services organization. Not long after taking the job, Antonio was dispatched to Hon…

Astronomer watches Starlink satellites sinking to build a ‘planetary barometer’ ↗ (opens external article)

Astronomer and author, Dr. Tony Phillips, says he has found a way to turn SpaceX’s Starlink satellite constellation into a barometer. Phillips runs spaceweather.com, which tracks solar flares, the solar wind, shifts in Earth’s geomagnetic field, and other phenomena. On Tuesday, he published an article that opens “Starlink has many downsides.” “The megaconstellation interferes with astronomy, poll…

How Believable is Google's New 'Live Avatar' Capability? ↗ (opens external article)

Google has synthesized "expressive face-to-face experiences" for its speech agent Gemini 3.8 Live. They're now offering a Live Avatar "with precise lip-syncing, natural expressions, and fluid turn-taking" for Google Enterprise accounts wanting "engaging customer service" or for offering interactive walkthroughs. (Check out the not-creepy-at-all video in Google's announcement.) "Though Google will…

Plan mode is dead ↗ (opens external article)

2026 just became the year of FreeBSD on the (Amazonian cloud) desktop ↗ (opens external article)

FreeBSD is now available for the desktop, in a roundabout way. Colin Percival, a maintainer and release engineering lead for the open-source OS’s release, announced the desktop distro on Thursday. “Most people think of FreeBSD as being a server OS which is used only via the command line, but as anyone who has attended a BSD conference can attest, it works just fine with a GUI too,” he wrote. He’s…

Linux Kernel Developers Consider Adding AGENTS.md To Help Guide AI/LLM Agents ↗ (opens external article)

While the Linux kernel continues to be bombarded with patches from AI/LLM agents, to date the kernel hasn't carried an AGENTS.md Markdown file with instructions catering to AI/LLM agents. But a patch set out today would finally introduce one...…

Qualcomm Posts Patches For Enabling GPU Support In Their Snapdragon X2 Mahua SoC ↗ (opens external article)

Yesterday Qualcomm posted open-source GPU driver patches for their Adreno 850 GPU one day after being announced with the Snapdragon 8 Elite Extreme Gen 6. Yesterday Qualcomm also announced their Snapdragon X2 Linux support plans. Today they have posted the GPU enablement patches for what's found in the Mahua SoC for lower-tier Snapdragon X2 SoCs...…

Google Gemini can present cartoon or lifelike avatars to lip-sync generative chatter ↗ (opens external article)

Google has augmented its live dialogue model Gemini 3.8 Live with a feature called "Live Avatar" that's capable of conjuring animated characters and realistic human simulacra to lip-sync Gemini's machine-generated speech. "Conversation is inherently multimodal: we listen, look, speak, and use facial expressions to communicate," explained Shuo-yiin Chang, research scientist at Google DeepMind, and…

People Training OpenAI's AI Fired For Using AI To Train the AI ↗ (opens external article)

404 Media reports "multiple contractors hired to improve OpenAI's models have been fired for using AI to train the AI: That's not great for the models themselves, but there is also obviously a great irony in AI training companies working for OpenAI firing people for using AI when OpenAI's whole thing is to make people use AI at work... OpenAI declined to comment on its contractors being fired for…

Crook used three open source agents to break into a Fortune 500 hospitality company, a major US airline and 25+ other orgs ↗ (opens external article)

A crook has been using three open source AI harnesses to target hundreds of online retailers and other companies, swiping more than 600,000 credit card records and installing card-stealing skimmers - and all at trivial cost. AI security company Gambit recovered the human operator’s staging server, and used that access to reconstruct the data-theft campaign, whose victims include a Fortune 500 hos…

The Murky History of Soviet-Born Tetris ↗ (opens external article)

CDC opens state ordering for COVID-19 vaccines after unexplained delay ↗ (opens external article)

After a nearly monthlong delay, states are now able to order this season's COVID-19 vaccines through a federal program that provides free immunizations to low-income children, the US health department says. Trump officials have still not provided a clear explanation for the delay, raising concerns about meddling from anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. On Wednesday, Ars Technica r…

Google's TPUs to catch some rays in orbit next week ↗ (opens external article)

Google will loft its tensor processing units (TPUs) into orbit aboard a SpaceX rocket next week, in the latest phase of its previously announced Project Suncatcher space datacenter initiative. The launch is part of a test mission to better understand how its homegrown compute platform will handle both the rigors of launch and the harsh environment of space. Long term, the Chocolate Factory believ…

ReactOS Lands Significant DirectX Stack Update From Wine For Enabling More Games ↗ (opens external article)

The open-source ReactOS project striving to provide binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows applications/games as well as drivers took a huge step forward today with landing a significant update to its DirectX stack from code leveraged from the Wine project...…

Donald Duck's uncle was partly based on Wernher von Braun ↗ (opens external article)

Did you know that the first character that Walt Disney created to specifically appear on television was inspired, in part, by early Space Age rocket scientists? On this day 65 years ago (September 24, 1961), Disney introduced the "renowned scientist, lecturer, psychologist [and] world traveler," Ludwig Von Drake. A member of the Duck family (he is the "brilliant and eccentric" uncle of Donald Duc…

F-Droid app store thumbs its nose at Google's dev crackdown ↗ (opens external article)

Undeterred by a looming Google policy change that could effectively destroy it, open-source Android app store F-Droid has released its largest upgrade in a decade. F-Droid, a third-party app repository that only distributes free and open-source software packages for Google’s Android mobile platform, on Thursday announced version 2.0 of its Android app. The F-Droid team describes version 2.0 as a…

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…

Docker's new sandboxes aim to contain AI agents for real ↗ (opens external article)

In a market where AI agents keep breaking the rules and escaping their containers, Docker has a new solution. On Thursday, the company debuted Cloud Sandboxes in a bid to keep AI agents within boundaries. Despite the existence and implementation of sandboxing technology as a way to limit the reach of AI agents, industry leaders like Anthropic and OpenAI keep reporting containment failures. On Thu…

F-Droid gets its biggest update in a decade with new UI and smoother app installs ↗ (opens external article)

Virtually every Android device comes with the Play Store preloaded, but there are other ways to get apps. F-Droid bills itself as a community-driven source for free and open source Android apps, but its official app store has gone 10 years without a major update. That's finally changing: After a multiyear effort, the team has just announced F-Droid 2.0 is rolling out. The new F-Droid client was r…

New York defies Trump admin, asks court to shut down Polymarket gambling ↗ (opens external article)

New York sued Polymarket today, alleging that it runs an "illegal gambling operation" through its prediction market. “By running an unlicensed gambling operation, Polymarket has done more than just knowingly violate state law, they have put New Yorkers at risk, especially those underage who are most vulnerable to problem gaming," Governor Kathy Hochul said in a press release announcing the lawsui…

Five Police Officers Criminally Charged for Misusing Flock Cameras in Indianapolis ↗ (opens external article)

"Nationwide, at least 100 police department employees have been charged with or accused of misusing license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes," reports the Washington Post. They cite their past investigations "based on thousands of pages of police and court records," which found that "In many of these cases, officers used Flock's roadside cameras to track the location of romantic partners an…

Salesforce Agentforce vulns allowed 0-click CRM data theft, anonymous phishing ↗ (opens external article)

Security flaws in Salesforce Agentforce allowed poisoned leads to hijack its AI agents, silently steal CRM data without requiring a click, and send phishing messages under the agents’ identities. Zenity Labs uncovered the three vulnerabilities, collectively called SalesBleed, and reported them to Salesforce, which worked with the AI agent security provider to fix the issues. While these attack ch…

We have a trailer for Musk documentary Elon called a "hit piece" ↗ (opens external article)

Oscar-winning documentary filmmaker Alex Gibney has never been one to shy away from controversy. His latest feature, Musk, has stirred up plenty even before its release, drawing the ire of its subject, Elon Musk, and threats of a defamation lawsuit. After the film debuted two weeks ago at the Venice International Film Festival, rumors swirled that Universal Pictures was getting cold feet about th…

Ubuntu 26.10 Delivers Some Nice Gains For Intel Panther Lake / Framework Laptop 13 Pro ↗ (opens external article)

For those with a Framework Laptop 13 Pro or another Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" laptop, the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release is delivering some nice out-of-the-box improvements over Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.…

Meta's new AI fidget is a ... Tamagotchi? ↗ (opens external article)

Meta became the latest to dip its toes into the fraught world of hardware AI widgets this week after it unveiled a Tamagotchi-sized handheld AI companion called the Muse Charm. The Social Network now joins several hardware startups which have attempted to use handheld devices to bring agentic AI to a more mainstream audience. The Humane AI pin and Rabbit’s r1 are just two examples. The Muse Charm…

COSMIC Epoch 1.9 Brings New Image Viewer & On-Screen Keyboard ↗ (opens external article)

COSMIC Epoch 1.9 was released last night as the newest version of the System76-sponsored, Rust-based desktop environment. COSMIC Epoch 1.9 release notes only became available today and it's a big one with new apps and improvements to existing offerings...…

Decades-old file security flaws found in Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows ↗ (opens external article)

Security researchers affiliated with Austria's Graz University of Technology have found flaws in the implementation of file notification systems on Android, Linux, macOS, and Windows that leak potentially compromising system information. "We found decades-old bugs on [these operating systems], all rooted in the file-notification subsystems that every modern OS ships to inform applications when fi…

iPhone 18 Pro benchmark boosted by giving it a cold drink ↗ (opens external article)

There’s nothing a quick break for a can of ice-cold sparkling water can’t solve - including improving thermal management on the iPhone 18 Pro, as it turns out. Software developer Matt Birchler provided the data to prove it in a recent blog post detailing a bit of extra experimentation he did with his new iPhone 18 Pro alongside some benchmarking work. To make a long story short, a cold can of La…

CVE flood pushes Ubuntu onto weekly kernel release cycle ↗ (opens external article)

Canonical is speeding up Ubuntu kernel releases to one a week as AI-assisted bug hunting helps bury defenders under an ever-growing pile of CVEs. The Ubuntu maker is overhauling how it ships kernel Stable Release Updates (SRUs), replacing its current four-week regular and two-week security cycles with overlapping two-week cycles that will push a kernel release every week. Canonical says the chang…

AMD Posts GCC Compiler Patches For AVX10V1AUX ISA Support ↗ (opens external article)

Following their recent AVX10_V2_AUX support for GCC as part of the bring-up for the AI Compute Extensions "ACE" in GCC 17, AMD compiler engineers this week posted the initial patches for enabling the AVX10V1AUX ISA support...…

AI boom could wipe 230 million budget phones a year from the market ↗ (opens external article)

First they came for our natural resources, and now the AI datacenter boom looks set to excise a significant chunk of the budget smartphone market. The latest forecast from Counterpoint Research spells dark skies for sub-$200 pocket 'puters, with shipments expected to fall by around 40 percent between 2025 and 2030, removing more than 230 million devices a year from the market by the end of the de…

Someone went shopping in ASUS's eShop – for customer data ↗ (opens external article)

Asus has warned eShop customers that an intruder got into part of its online store and may have helped themselves to contact details and order records. The PC maker disclosed the incident in an email sent to customers, first reported by KitGuru, in which it said had identified "unauthorized access to part of the Asus eShop environment," although exactly when that access occurred remains unclear.…

Ask HPE and NVIDIA the AI data question you cannot ask in public ↗ (opens external article)

EVENT: HPE and NVIDIA are sending their AI infrastructure leads to a dinner table in Washington where nothing said is on the record. The Register is hosting, our editor-in-chief Matt Rosoff takes the chair, and there is one table, on Thursday 29 October. Most AI programs in regulated industries do not stall on the model. They stall on where the data lives, who can reach it, and what an auditor wi…

OpenAI, Anthropic CEOs Urge UN Countries to Cooperate on AI Safety Standards ↗ (opens external article)

"The heads of major AI firms pleaded with the United Nations on Wednesday to save the world or at least its people — by somehow regulating the fast-expanding technology that they have been designing," writes the Associated Press. "If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole," said Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic. And from his competitor Sam Altman…

Talk of AI in KDE sets the community ablaze ↗ (opens external article)

A proposal to make KDE an "AI-native" desktop has gone down like a house on fire: screams, flames, people running for safety. There may be no survivors.* Last weekend was KDE's annual Akademy conference and it included a presentation proposing an AI-native KDE. We noted that it seemed likely to polarize the audience. It looks like this was a considerable understatement. In the days since, a debat…

DoJ: Uncle Sam bought forensics software from same Russian operation supplying FSB ↗ (opens external article)

US defense and homeland security agencies bought digital forensics software developed by the same Russian operation that also sold its wares to the FSB, according to US prosecutors. The Department of Justice says Oxygen Forensics CEO Lee Reiber and Russian national Oleg Sergeyevich Davydov have been arrested and charged with conspiracy to commit wire fraud over an alleged scheme to hide the compa…

Fedora Discussion Raises The Idea Of Replacing LibreOffice With Collabora Office ↗ (opens external article)

One of the livelist Fedora Discourse community discussions in recent days -- or even in quite a period of time for that matter -- comes down to a user having suggested that Fedora replace LibreOffice by default with the downstream Collabora Office...…

KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta 2 Released With Union Theming Engine Maturing ↗ (opens external article)

Following the KDE Plasma 6.8 Beta from earlier this month, the second and last beta of the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop is now available for testing...…

AlmaLinux Rolls Out New Software/Hardware Certification Portal, Self-Certify App ↗ (opens external article)

Two years ago RHEL-derived AlmaLinux announced a hardware certification program as part of their Certification Special Interest Group (SIG). They have now expanded their hardware certification program to include third-party software certification on AlmaLinux too plus a new app that users can install for self-certifying their system...…

Google to critical infra orgs: Our AI scanners won't be evil, promise ↗ (opens external article)

Google has jumped on the AI-defense-for-critical-systems train with its Scan for Good initiative, and says that its threat-hunting models have already autonomously uncovered critical security issues at hospitals, a municipality, a public rail operator, and major technology providers. So don't fear these bots. The initiative, announced on Thursday, uses Google’s Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, a version o…

City council may be waking from its Oracle nightmare but the accounting hangover continues ↗ (opens external article)

Europe's largest local authority will go at least one more financial year without auditors being able to vouch for its accounts despite finally reimplementing Oracle Fusion. Grant Thornton expects Birmingham City Council to receive "disclaimer opinions" for 2025/26, 2026/27, and 2027/28 due to problems with historic data. A disclaimer opinion means the auditor cannot obtain enough evidence to exp…

Parsing Expression Grammar vs. Regexes: Building Org Parser in Lisp, Export HTML ↗ (opens external article)

Linux Kernel Introducing New Taint Due To Fuzzing Bots Yielding Impractical Bug Reports ↗ (opens external article)

The Linux kernel is having to introduce a new taint flag "TAINT_FORCED_BIND" to deal with fuzzing bots like Syzbot abusing Linux's bind/unbind sysfs functionality and generating bug reports for impractical and not at all relevant hardware/driver combinations...…

Fourier Analysis: Drawing Llamas with Circles ↗ (opens external article)

Mir 2.30 Released Now With Rust Required, Mir Roadmap Published ↗ (opens external article)

Canonical today released Mir 2.30 as the newest release of this Wayland compositor library for building out different shells and other functionality from smart mirrors to other consumer devices...…

Modern Object Pascal Introduction for Programmers – Castle Game Engine ↗ (opens external article)

Meta ads steered Polish Android users into a premium-rate billing trap ↗ (opens external article)

Poland's Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT Polska) has disrupted an Android toll fraud campaign that used paid Meta ads to steer Polish users toward malicious apps on Google Play. Its investigation documented 1,235 Meta ads, 852 of which promoted 17 apps tied to the operation. Six contained confirmed toll fraud components or direct links to them; the other 11 shared malicious loaders, althou…

HSBC decides Samsung Secure Folder and Android's Private Space are no place for a banking app ↗ (opens external article)

HSBC has blocked its Android app from running inside Samsung Secure Folder and Android Private Space without warning, leaving some customers unable to access online banking. The Register asked HSBC to explain the change. It said the block was "a proportionate security control designed to mitigate a foreseeable security risk. It does not prevent customers from accessing the HSBC UK Mobile Banking…

Fwupd 2.1.8 Released With New Hardware Support From ASUS, Lenovo & Others ↗ (opens external article)

Lead LVFS/Fwupd developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat announced Fwupd 2.1.8 today as the newest feature release for this open-source firmware updating solution for Linux systems. With Fwupd 2.1.8 comes support for a number of newer devices plus plenty of bug fixes...…

"slab_tiny" Boot Option Proposed For Tiny Linux Systems With Very Limited RAM ↗ (opens external article)

In 2022 the SLOB allocator was deprecated and removed with Linux 6.4 a year later. SLOB was popular with embedded systems with minimal amounts of RAM, so as a result the CONFIG_SLUB_TINY Kconfig option was then added for configuring the slab allocator for a minimal memory footprint for systems with 16MB of RAM or less. The CONFIG_SLUB_TINY is now on the chopping block with a proposed rework to the…

Qualcomm Announces Snapdragon X2 Series Processors Will Support Linux ↗ (opens external article)

Snapdragon X2 Series processors feature a neural processing unit (NPU) delivering 80 trillion operations per second and allowing advanced AI features to run locally. And Snapdragon X2 Series "is expanding to Linux," Qualcomm announced today, calling it one of their most-requested capabilities: Qualcomm Technologies is a top contributor to Linux development at a kernel level, and now we're embracin…

For MariaDB, LLMs are the new search engines to win over ↗ (opens external article)

MariaDB has built vector search into its database. Its problem is persuading AI coding tools to tell anyone about it, says the executive chairman of the MariaDB Foundation. "We're so frustrated that the world doesn't understand that MariaDB has vectors," Kaj Arnö tells us. Arnö is speaking to The Register at Percona Live, where rival database vendors seem to be in an unusually collegiate mood. No…

Linux 7.4 DRM Infrastructure Better Supporting HDMI 2.0 With New Helpers ↗ (opens external article)

Sent out today was the latest weekly pull of drm-misc-next changes of feature material to queue in DRM-Next for Linux 7.4. Most notable in this week's pull request are a number of patches for enhancing the HDMI 2.0 handling in the DRM core infrastructure and display helpers...…

Experts question whether Salesforce demo breaches SAP API policy ↗ (opens external article)

SAP experts are questioning whether a recent Salesforce public demo of its AI technology would breach the German vendor’s controversial API policy - launched in April - in production environments. Salesforce has denied it would break any of SAP’s access rules. During the keynote presentation at the CRM vendor’s flagship Dreamforce conference in San Francisco last week, Katie O'Neil, Salesforce pr…

Government contractor exposed path to immigration records ↗ (opens external article)

Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we look at all the ways your security can become self-owned. Today’s scary story involves government contractors who just had to make their lives easier at the expense of locking down sensitive information. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our tale o…

Rogue OpenAI Agent Tried to Breach Government Site in May When Prompted for Simple Data-Retrieving Tasks ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI's artificial intelligence "went rogue this year in at least four additional incidents," the New York Times reported Wednesday, "hacking and trying to break into government and university websites without being instructed to do so, according to researchers and government officials." The attacks took place in May and June, before OpenAI's technology breached the A.I. start-up Hugging Face in…

16GB iPod Nano 3G Upgrade ↗ (opens external article)

Cities Across US Oppose Trump FCC Plan to Preempt Local Broadband Rules ↗ (opens external article)

Ars Technica reports: Cities and counties around the U.S. are angry at the Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks... The Federal Communications Commission [FCC] argues that too many local governments "excessively delay approvals and seek to extract exorbitant sums from providers, resulting in costs that render some deplo…

Scientists build most accurate atomic clock ↗ (opens external article)

Calculating atmospheric drag on satellites for a Cubesat [pdf] ↗ (opens external article)

ASML currently sells no chipmaking machines in Europe, executive says ↗ (opens external article)

Debian Inference Portal Launches To Provide Free AI/LLM Inferencing To Debian Developers ↗ (opens external article)

With Debian voting to allow the responsible use of generative AI, there is now a new initiative funded by Scaleway to make it easier for Debian contributors to leverage AI: the Debian Inference Portal...…

Qualcomm Talks Up Linux On Snapdragon X2 Laptops ↗ (opens external article)

Qualcomm at their Snapdragon Summit taking place in Hawaii are talking up the forthcoming Linux support for Snapdragon X2 series laptops...…

Whatever Happened to the 150,000 Tons of Radioactive Waste Stored Under the Atlantic Ocean? ↗ (opens external article)

More than 200,000 barrels of low-level radioactive waste were stored on the floor of the Atlantic Ocean between 1949 and 1982, reports ScienceAlert. Whatever happened to those barrels? Scientists have descended to the wreckage in a crewed submersible to investigate — and found many of the barrels corroded and degraded, their contents spilling across the seafloor. Surprisingly, this isn't necessari…

Promotion Reminder For Ad-Free Viewing, Multi-Page Articles On A Single Page ↗ (opens external article)

As a friendly reminder in case you missed it from over the weekend, the Phoronix autumn "Oktoberfest" premium sale is taking place through the rest of this week for those wishing to help support the site while enjoying ad-free viewing, multi-page articles rendered on a single page, and other benefits while helping for the site to survive and continue producing daily original content...…

Lemonade Fixes AMD APU Model Streaming, Drops OpenMOSS ROCm As ~40x Slower Than Vulkan ↗ (opens external article)

The AMD-aligned Lemonade open-source project for serving as a local AI server released 2026.39.1 today as well as issuing a release candidate of 2026.40 as their next release. Besides adapting to a new versioning scheme, the Lemonade SDK updates today bring a few notable changes...…

Intel Developing Their DXVK-IGDEXT For Improved Linux Gaming On Arc Graphics ↗ (opens external article)

Intel engineers have been quietly developing dxvk-igdext as their own component for DXVK Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 atop the Vulkan API for leveraging Intel Direct3D 11 Graphics Extensions...…

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…

6.12.111: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.12.111 (longterm) Released:2026-09-21 Source:linux-6.12.111.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.111.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.111…

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…

7.3-rc4: mainline ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.3-rc4 (mainline) Released:2026-09-20 Source:linux-7.3-rc4.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)…

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…

GEFS, the "Good Enough File System" on the horizon for OpenBSD ↗ (opens external article)

Filesystems on OpenBSD have come in two varieties, UFS1 or UFS2. Ori Bernstein has set out to possibly introduce a new option, the "Good Enough File System", which Ori describes as "a new, crash-safe, snapshotting, copy on write FS that I wrote for 9front, and which I am in the process of moving to OpenBSD. Ori gave a presentation about the work at EuroBSDCon 2026, and posted a summary message ti…

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…

OpenSMTPD 7.9.0p0 released ↗ (opens external article)

In an annoucement that vastly understates the usefulness of their code, the OpenSMTPD project have announced their new OpenSMTPD 7.9.0p0 release. The announcement says, List: openbsd-announce Subject: OpenSMTPD 7.9.0p0 From: "Omar Polo" <op () openbsd ! org> Date: 2026-09-13 21:11:58 OpenSMTPD is a FREE implementation of the SMTP protocol with some common extensions. It allows ordinary machines t…

EuroBSDCon 2026 talks online ↗ (opens external article)

Last weekend was the EuroBSDCon conference, this time in Brussels, Belgium. Several talks were held, with quite a few on OpenBSD. You can watch all the talks on peer tube, check the dedicated OpenBSD playlist, or pick your favorite talk from the list: Marc Espie - Advances in OpenBSD's pkg_add Alexander Bluhm - From Report to Patch, the OpenBSD Errata Process Ori Bernstein - GEFS: The File Shredd…

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…

6.6.157: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

6.1.188: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

5.15.221: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

5.10.270: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

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.…

Game of Trees 0.128 released ↗ (opens external article)

Version 0.128 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated). Complete release notes are as follows: Read more……

Court Rules Against Citizen Journalists in DMCA Takedown Case—EFF Will Appeal ↗ (opens external article)

A federal court in Massachusetts has ruled that copyright holders can issue online takedown notices based on a subjective belief of copyright infringement, even when that belief is unreasonable and self-serving. The case was brought by our client, Channel 781 News, after takedown notices temporarily shut down the citizen journalism group's YouTube channel. We think the court set the bar far too lo…

Texas and Florida Step Back from ALPRs ↗ (opens external article)

Within the last few days, two important state actions have dealt a big blow to automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks. This is just the latest proof of the growing tide of public opposition to mass surveillance. After years of successful grassroots battles to pull these cameras from local streets, bipartisan momentum is sweeping the country. On August 28, Texas Governor Greg Abbott banned…

7.1.13: stable ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.1.13 (EOL) (stable) Released:2026-09-02 Source:linux-7.1.13.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.1.13.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.1.13…

Judge Rules DOD Unlawfully Retaliated Against Anthropic ↗ (opens external article)

A federal judge has sided with Anthropic on its claims that the Department of Defense illegally retaliated against Anthropic’s protected speech by labeling the AI company a “supply chain risk.” The judge found that designation, intended to penalize Anthropic for telling the U.S. military it would not allow their technology to be used for mass surveillance of U.S. persons, “constituted unlawful ret…

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

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

Meta's $17 Billion Settlement is a Bad Deal for Teens and All Social Media Users ↗ (opens external article)

Meta’s settlement with 52 state attorneys general is a bad deal for all internet users, and especially for teens. That’s what we said the day the settlement was announced. In this post, we go through the Settlement’s provisions in detail and explain why that is so, including how: The Settlement embeds age assurance technology and age-gates into Meta’s social media products and requires all users—m…

EFF to Governor Newsom: Veto California’s AB 1709 ↗ (opens external article)

The California legislature passed Assembly Bill 1709 (A.B. 1709) today, which functions as a sweeping ban on social media use for young people under the age of 16. This well-intentioned, but deeply flawed piece of legislation, cuts young people off from essential information and experiences, particularly harming vulnerable youth and marginalized groups who often find safety in supportive online co…

EFF to Courts: Don’t Rewrite Copyright Over AI Hype ↗ (opens external article)

The history of technology is rife with copyright panics.  In the 1980s, major rightsholders ran to Congress and the courts, claiming that videotape recorders (VTR) were “to the American film producer and the American public as the Boston strangler is to the woman home alone.” Then, the Supreme Court declined to embrace the hype, noting that the VTR was capable of all kinds of non-infringing uses,…

Doxxing Safety Part II: Incident Response ↗ (opens external article)

Doxxing, also known as the deliberate sharing of personal information to harass or endanger someone, is a tricky thing to protect against. It often happens by some ill-intentioned person accessing publicly available information, then sharing that information more widely in the hopes it will intimidate their target or worse.  This guide is a followup from a previous post that describes a methodolog…

Doxxing Safety Pt I: Prevention and Footprint Management ↗ (opens external article)

Doxxing is the deliberate disclosure of personal information in order to bully, harass, intimidate, or instigate a chain of harms against someone. It's a tricky thing to protect against when the jerk doing it is often able to use legal and accessible means to do so. The odds are stacked against everyday internet folk when there's little to no comprehensive data privacy legislation keeping us safe.…

Privacy on the Map (Part 2): Progress, Pitfalls, and the Fight for Enforceable Location Data Protections ↗ (opens external article)

Regulating commercial location tracking has reached a turning point. Last year, we published our rubric for what comprehensive and protective location privacy laws should look like, outlining the baseline standards states should meet to shield individuals from pervasive location surveillance. Since then, state lawmakers across the country have begun responding to calls like these, with Connecticut…

LGBT Q&A: What’s One Thing I Can Do Today to Improve My Safety and Security Online as an LGBTQ+ Person? ↗ (opens external article)

This post is adapted from a video recorded by EFF and the Trevor Project. Head over to our TikTok or Instagram to watch!  EFF answers all the queer digital rights questions you submit to us through our LGBT Q&A. You asked us: What’s one thing I can do today to improve my safety and security online as an LGBTQ+ person?  And for this question, we’ve brought in our friends from the Trevor Project to…

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

EFF and Allies on Brazil's Elections: Privacy Protections are Crucial to Electoral Integrity ↗ (opens external article)

EFF, Access Now, and Data Privacy Brasil are putting forward recommendations to strengthen robust privacy and data protection safeguards in the context of Brazil's elections. The recommendations stress the close relationship between violations of personal data protection and challenges to the integrity of electoral processes. They underscore how privacy and data protection guarantees are a crucial…

Two Alleged ‘TeamPCP’ Hackers Arrested in Australia ↗ (opens external article)

Authorities in Australia have arrested two men believed to be members of TeamPCP, a prolific cybercrime and data extortion group blamed for perpetrating the longest running spree of software supply chain attacks ever. In a statement released today, the Australian Federal Police (AFP) said two men from Western Australia, aged 21 and 23, were arrested in connection with a “sophisticated cybercrime s…

A List of ICE Subpoenas to Tech Companies ↗ (opens external article)

Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has conducted unlawful investigations into dozens of individuals who have documented ICE activities in their communities, social media users who criticized the government, and international students who attended a protest. A favored tool in these speech chilling investigations are administrative subpoenas sent to technology companies, requesting basic subs…

EFF's Policy Position on ALPR Surveillance: Eliminate It and Reduce Its Harms ↗ (opens external article)

Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) build a searchable map of everywhere a driver goes, fed into databases that police, ICE, and private vendors can query after the fact. Networked across a city, ALPRs are purpose-built to track everyone regardless of suspicion. ALPRs are not a surveillance tool that can be made safe with the right policy or feature update—they are irredeemably harmful. EFF's…

EFF Statement on Meta Settlement ↗ (opens external article)

Under this settlement, young users will now have less access to Meta products, and a lesser ability to exercise their rights to speak, access information and art and culture, associate and form communities, and play. The settlement also embeds age assurance into every product, mandating the collection of even more personal information from users of all ages; this enshrines Meta's harmful surveilla…

French Top Court Gets It Right, Strikes Down Social Media Ban For Youths ↗ (opens external article)

Earlier this month, France’s top court struck down the country’s legislation that banned social media use for people under 15 years old, which had been scheduled to take effect in January 2027. This is a welcome win for free expression, as we face a wave of countries and U.S. states seeking to pass similar laws banning young people from social media.  In particular, the Constitutional Council’s d…

rpki-client 9.9 released ↗ (opens external article)

It's a big day for routing security aficionados. The OpenBGPD project (a sub-project of the OpenBSD project) have announced version 9.9 of rpki-client(8), with various improvements, enhancements and fixes. The announcement reads List: openbsd-announce Subject: rpki-client 9.9 released From: Sebastian Benoit <benno () openbsd ! org> Date: 2026-08-23 19:25:37 Message-ID: aotJMUL7356PdqRC () jacklin…

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA3 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

EFF and Civil Society Groups Call on Nottinghamshire Police to Halt Live Face Recognition ↗ (opens external article)

This week, EFF, along with Big Brother Watch, Defend Digital Me, Liberty, Open Rights Group, Race Equality First, Statewatch, and Stopwatch, wrote to Nottinghamshire Police Force in the UK raising concern about the proposed roll-out of live facial recognition technology (LFR), and called for its immediate halt. In particular, the letter highlights six concerns: LFR Is Not "Just Another Tool" Notti…

Intermediary Liability in Brazil: The Intricate Path Ahead ↗ (opens external article)

Brazil's new internet intermediary liability regime is underway. The implementation of changes established by the Supreme Court includes notice and takedown mechanisms and duty of care obligations. Caution is crucial as these measures can create problematic incentives for enforcement overreach and over censorship of protected speech.   The court in June issued a new decision clarifying elements of…

Some Tech Companies Have Privately Pushed Back on ICE Subpoenas. They Should All Do More. ↗ (opens external article)

In a handful of known cases, large social media companies have privately pushed back against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) subpoenas when the agency tried to unmask anonymous users who tracked immigration activities or criticized the government. As ICE engages in a pattern of illegal and chilling investigations, any resistance is welcome. But social media companies can do more. When co…

📍 The Sneaky Code Tracking App Users | EFFector 38.15 ↗ (opens external article)

Your location isn't just a pin on a map—it can expose some of the most intimate details about your life. The value of this information to advertisers and others has turned the location data business into a multi-billion dollar industry. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're covering a new EFF report on how ad libraries encourage apps to leak user location data—potentially without app developers…

Ninth Circuit Ruling Will Force Online Platforms That Host User Speech to Fight Lengthy and Costly Lawsuits Before They Are Dismissed Under Section 230 ↗ (opens external article)

A federal appeals court just made it harder for online services, big and small, to get lawsuits over user speech dismissed early. In California v. Meta, a Ninth Circuit three-judge panel held that the lower court’s denial of Section 230 immunity to Meta is not immediately appealable. The misguided ruling has the potential to have widespread impact and to threaten the free speech of all internet us…

Zero-Knowledge Proofs Aren’t Age Verification Silver Bullets ↗ (opens external article)

Age verification (laws and regulations requiring platforms and websites to assure or estimate that a user seeking to use an online service is of a certain age) is everywhere. At the time of writing, about half the states in the US have some internet age verification law in place, and dangerous proposals, from the KIDS Act to the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), have been advancing at the federal lev…

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA2 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out ↗ (opens external article)

It can be daunting to determine who’s responsible for showing ads on the websites we visit, or who’s harvesting data from the mobile apps we use every day. That information is already semi-public, but it is not easily parsed and traditionally much of it has remained walled away in the hands of large advertising platforms. Not anymore: A powerful and free new service called DecryptAds scrapes and c…

Too Little, Too Late: Flock Admits Their Technology Needs Reforms ↗ (opens external article)

Flock Safety, the embattled vendor of mass surveillance technology, has rolled out a handful of new reforms intended to appease the justified nationwide anger that has seen scores of towns cancel or suspend their contracts with the company for automated license plate readers (ALPRs). The reforms are a combination of long overdue changes along with some cosmetic fixes that fail to address the funda…

Microsoft Plugs Nearly 400 Security Holes ↗ (opens external article)

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

Who (or What) Generates Images for EFF? ↗ (opens external article)

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

OpenSSH 10.5 released ↗ (opens external article)

In another move that signals a new OpenBSD release is in the works, the OpenSSH project has released without fanfare its new version, OpenSSH 10.5. The release notes read, OpenSSH 10.5/10.5p1 (2026-08-11) OpenSSH 10.5 was released on 2026-08-11. It is available from the mirrors listed at https://www.openssh.com/. OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client…

Dismiss Church’s Trademark Lawsuit Against “Mormon Stories” Podcast, EFF Urges Court ↗ (opens external article)

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

Meta Must Stop Silencing Reproductive Health Information ↗ (opens external article)

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA1 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

OpenBGPD 9.2 released ↗ (opens external article)

A sure sign that a new OpenBSD will soon be ready is that a new OpenBGPD release appears. On August 6th, 2026, the project released OpenBGPD version 9.2. The announcement reads, List: openbsd-announce Subject: OpenBGPD 9.2 released From: Claudio Jeker <claudio () openbsd ! org> Date: 2026-08-06 13:22:26 Message-ID: anSKksatjxeom0lQ () diehard ! n-r-g ! com We have released OpenBGPD 9.2, which wil…

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

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

Canadian Man Pleads Guilty in Snowflake Extortions ↗ (opens external article)

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

Dead Software Walking: The ongoing evolution of relayd(8) and httpd(8) ↗ (opens external article)

Returning readers of this site may have noticed that the pace of development in relayd(8) and httpd(8) has been picking up recently. Now Rafael Sadowski (rsadowski@) has a new blog post out titled Dead Software Walking: The ongoing evolution of relayd(8) and httpd(8) where he tells the story. The article starts with Start with WHY As I mentioned in my OpenBSD 7.8 highlights post, development of r…

Tomorrow’s U.S. Senate Vote: Four Internet Bills, One Wrong Direction ↗ (opens external article)

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

Appeals Court Agrees with EFF that Building a Web Browser Doesn’t Violate the CFAA ↗ (opens external article)

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

Call for testing: OpenBSD vmm(4)/vmd(8) fd-ification ↗ (opens external article)

Thanks to the tireless work of among others Dave Voutila (dv@), development of the OpenBSD/amd64 virtualization system vmm(4)/vmd(8) continues to make progress. Now breaking changes, but with with potential benefits in both process isolation and compartmentalization of functionality, are on the way. It almost goes without saying that this code needs testing. In a message to the tech@ mailing list…

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New committer: Faraz Vahedi (src)…

Read This Before You Buy That TV Streaming Stick ↗ (opens external article)

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

↗ (opens external article)

New committer: Minsoo Choo (src)…

April-June 2026 Status Report ↗ (opens external article)

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

Ports Repository Frozen ↗ (opens external article)

The ports repository has been frozen to revert a very large commit. There is no concern that the tree has been compromised. More information about the freeze can be found on the 2026 Ports Freeze page.…

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…