Terminal

HubSpot Cuts 660 Jobs In AI Restructuring ↗ (opens external article)

HubSpot is cutting about 7% of its workforce, or roughly 660 employees, as it restructures into what CEO Yamini Rangan described as a "flatter organization" with fewer management layers. Rangan said the layoffs were "not driven by AI-related efficiencies," though AI remains central to HubSpot's strategy as the company adjusts its organization around AI-driven customer outcomes. Fast Company report…

Ask HN: Why is Ask HN only showing me 14 posts? ↗ (opens external article)

Google EmbeddingGemma 2 ↗ (opens external article)

Anthropic Claude subscription plan provides more value than OpenAI's, study says ↗ (opens external article)

The rivalry between Anthropic and OpenAI, the two leading US AI model makers, is no contest when it comes to assessing which one gives you more value for your subscription money, according to industry research firm SemiAnalysis. Following changes to OpenAI's $200 per month subscription plan that effectively halved its value, SemiAnalysis looked at the various subscription plans offered by AI comp…

Canonical Reaffirms Plans For Ubuntu 27.04 To Use ntpd-rs By Default ↗ (opens external article)

Back in March Canonical announced switching to ntpd-rs was its next target as part of transitioning more Ubuntu Linux system components to Rust-based implementations. This time synchronization package is available for testing in the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release while it aims to be the default for Ubuntu 27.04...…

Alexa Can't Control the AUX Input On Amazon Echo Speakers Anymore ↗ (opens external article)

Amazon has removed Alexa voice control for the 3.5mm aux input on several older Echo speakers, meaning users can no longer ask Alexa to play or pause audio coming through the wired connection. It's unclear why the feature was removed. The Verge reports: Ars Technica points to this Reddit poster claiming they received a message from Amazon and says an unnamed spokesperson confirmed the change. When…

OpenAI Decisions API is in public beta ↗ (opens external article)

OpenSSH 10.6 ↗ (opens external article)

Paramount Skydance has completed its $111B merger with Warner Bros. Discovery ↗ (opens external article)

Permanent daylight saving time could be a public health time bomb ↗ (opens external article)

President Trump is pushing hard for the US Senate to make daylight saving time permanent so, among other things, golfers can stay on the course longer, but it may not be such a bright idea. New research out of Canada suggests that, even if Americans would get an extra hour of daylight in the evening, the ill health effects of permanent daylight saving time could outweigh the benefits. A paper pub…

System-level ad-blocking in Android ↗ (opens external article)

Asos Confirms Hackers Sent 'Unauthorized' Notification to App Users ↗ (opens external article)

ASOS says hackers gained unauthorized access to third-party platforms it uses and sent an "ASOS HACKED" push notification directly to customers, apparently as part of an extortion attempt. The clothing and beauty store says some basic personal information may have been accessed but does not believe payment-card data or passwords were affected. The BBC reports: In an email to customers on Tuesday n…

IBM and Red Hat Find More Than 400 New Vulnerabilities In Popular Java Code ↗ (opens external article)

IBM and Red Hat say their AI-powered Lightwell initiative has identified and helped remediate more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities across widely used Java libraries. Phoronix reports: They announced this feat today as part of their promoting Lightwell Clearinghouse to GA, which is an enterprise service for their customers to submit open-source software dependencies for priority review…

Toronto-Based VPN Provider Plans to Quit Canada over Lawful-Access Bill ↗ (opens external article)

Meta Engineer's Linux Patches For Boosting AMD P-State / Steam Deck Gaming Performance ↗ (opens external article)

Back in July I wrote about AMD P-State driver patches boosting 1%-low frame rates for gaming by as much as 31%. That work was done by David Vernet who is a Linux kernel engineer/hacker at Meta. This week Vernet presented on the topic at the Linux Plumbers Conference happening in Prague...…

European AI flag bearer Mistral's new open weights model is 'Le Chonk' ↗ (opens external article)

Another week brings yet another open weights model and this one is huge — or at least it is for Europe's AI flag bearer Mistral, which has taken to calling the 1 trillion-parameter large language model (LLM) Le Chonk. Its product name is Mistral Large 4, which is a lot less fun than the cat-meme-inspired "very official" moniker Le Chonk. Nonetheless, the LLM is the French model-dev's biggest open…

Claude Code’s suggested message feature: I think the real customer is the model ↗ (opens external article)

Licensing Costs Driving 90% of VMware Users To Explore Options, Survey Finds ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: VMware customers face multiple obstacles as they rethink their virtualization strategy to reduce dependence on VMware. Today, Rimini Street published its "2026 IT Virtualization Survey -- What's Next for VMware Users." The survey examined 300 organizations worldwide that use VMware. Notably, Rimini sells third-party support for VMware and othe…

Paramount completes $111B Warner merger, creating “Skydance” behemoth ↗ (opens external article)

Paramount Skydance completed its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery today, after a last-ditch effort to block the deal was rejected by Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. The post-merger company is called Skydance, taking the name of a firm that Paramount bought in a separate deal last year. The new Skydance combines two of the largest movie studios, streaming services Paramount+ and…

Trump Mobile customers' data dumped - and some never even received their gold device ↗ (opens external article)

If you signed up for Trump Mobile, you may be part of an exclusive club of … ransomware victims. Criminals called BYOD claim to have broken into the Trump-branded mobile biz and leaked data belonging to 3,615 people, including names, email addresses, phone numbers, home addresses, and order details. BYOD is a new ransomware-as-a-service operation, and Trump Mobile is only the third organization p…

Support Ars and get a better reading experience in return ↗ (opens external article)

When Ars launched in 1998, there was one way to read it: in a web browser on a PC (or Mac). Your screen of choice was either some massive CRT or a very expensive LCD monitor (or, in my case, the less-expensive grayscale, passive-matrix LCD on a PowerBook). Either way, it was butt in chair, chair at desk. One of the first perks we offered subscribers way back at the turn of the millennium allowed…

Amazon kills Alexa’s ability to control Echo speakers' AUX input ↗ (opens external article)

Amazon has disabled Alexa control of devices plugged into the company's Echo smart speaker’s AUX port. Users have reported receiving an email from Amazon this week informing them of the change. “This is a reminder that as of today, voice commands to control your Echo device’s Aux input are no longer available. Requests like 'Alexa, play from line in” or “Alexa, set aux input' will no longer work,…

Mistral Unveils New 'Le Chonk' AI Model It Says Rivals Best Open Systems From China ↗ (opens external article)

Mistral has unveiled Mistral Large 4, or "le Chonk," a 1-trillion-parameter model that it says is the strongest open-weight AI model developed outside China by a wide margin. The model is entering preview for developers, cybersecurity teams and governments before a broader release later this month. CNBC reports: ML4 was trained on 4,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell GPUs over two months that were deploye…

Neutrino physicist wins 2026 Nobel Physics Prize ↗ (opens external article)

Francis Halzen, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, has won the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics "for decisive contributions to the IceCube Neutrino Observatory and the discovery of high-energy neutrinos of astrophysical origin.” Halzen spearheaded the development and construction of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory in Antarctica, enabling physicists to capture high-energy neutrinos c…

OpenTPU – An open-source AI accelerator, developed by AI ↗ (opens external article)

Googlebook "Better Together" phone features don't work with Samsung at launch ↗ (opens external article)

Googlebooks are Google's latest attempt to carve out a piece of the premium laptop market, and tight integration with Android phones is a key part of that effort. Now that Googlebooks are available, we're learning of some frustrating limitations of that plan. For now, Googlebooks will only play nicely with your phone if you have a Pixel. When Google announced the launch window for Googlebooks, it…

Wikimedia Foundation comes forward as latest OpenAI agent assault victim ↗ (opens external article)

Wikipedia’s parent organization says that OpenAI agents edited some non-public wiki pages and generated traffic that may have contributed to a partial Wikidata outage in May. This makes the non-profit just the latest victim of OpenAI agents gone rogue. The Wikimedia Foundation’s chief product and technology officer Selena Deckelmann reported several “rogue agent activities” that the foundation ha…

EmbeddingGemma 2 ↗ (opens external article)

NVIDIA Vera HPC Performance Benchmarks Take On AMD EPYC, Intel Xeon ↗ (opens external article)

While most everyone understandably likes to talk about AI these days, one of the areas of NVIDIA's Vera CPU I have been most eager to test has been for conventional high performance computing (HPC) workloads. HPC was talked up as one of Vera's strengths thanks to its 1.2TB/s LPDDR5x memory bandwidth and custom Olympus cores. Vera is seeing deployments at HPC labs like Los Alamos. With recently hav…

Why is NASA bringing 7,500 contractors back to work as civil servants? ↗ (opens external article)

As a flight director during NASA's Apollo missions, Gerry Griffin led several lunar landings. He helped bring the crew of Apollo 13 safely back to Earth. Later, he directed Johnson Space Center in Houston. Through these experiences, Griffin learned the value of teamwork in spaceflight—during the dynamic moments that can make or break a successful launch or landing, you absolutely have to trust yo…

Researchers Are Tracking a Chinese AI 'Agent Fleet' ↗ (opens external article)

Independent researchers say they've identified a large "fleet" of AI agents apparently running on Tencent infrastructure and making parallel queries against Alibaba's Amap mapping service. TechCrunch reports: Researchers, however, resisted the term "swarm," noting that there seems to be little coordination between their different queries. "'Agent fleet,' not 'swarm:'" one researcher wrote in the p…

All-electric camping gets a solar upgrade: The 2027 Pebble Flow ↗ (opens external article)

There is, I think, a pent-up demand for bringing electrification to camping. Anyone who’s had their sleep disturbed by the sound of someone else’s generator running at night would probably agree. Certainly, any time we cover an electric van, comments are filled with people wondering if and when a camper conversion might appear. Kia showed off such a concept a couple of years ago, as did Winnebago…

The Early History of Smalltalk (1993) ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft extends the Outlook naughty step with two more file types ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft is adding two extra file types to its Outlook block list to strengthen security. The file types are .msix and .msixbundle, used for Windows application packages and bundles. The change affects New Outlook for Windows and Outlook on the Web in Exchange Online. By default, users of the affected clients will no longer be able to download or open attachments with these extensions, which is…

Cable Lobby To Sue Trump FCC Over Repeal of National TV Ownership Cap ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ArsTechnica: Cable lobby groups notified the Federal Communications Commission that they will sue the agency to block its controversial repeal of the National Television Ownership Rule, which limits the number of broadcast TV stations a single company may own. The cable groups said that larger broadcast TV station groups will have leverage to demand higher…

Vulkan API Improvements Coming For The AMD Polaris GPUs With Mesa RADV ↗ (opens external article)

Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics team has done an incredible job improving older AMD GPU support under Linux with migrating GCN 1.0/1.1 era hardware to the modern AMDGPU kernel driver and an assortment of other improvements for various older Radeon GPUs. The newest work is on enhancing the RADV Vulkan driver support for old Radeon RX 400/500 "Polaris" graphics cards...…

Classic Outlook clings to stale search results as Microsoft works on a fix ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft is very keen for Outlook users to ditch the classic version in favor of the new one, and a search bug isn't helping the old client's cause. Results can fail to update after mailbox items are moved or changed, with Microsoft's workaround sending affected users back to Windows Desktop Search. Microsoft has acknowledged the problem. When users move an item from the search results to anothe…

Show HN: I turned my iPhone and a $20 smart plug into an f-stop timer ↗ (opens external article)

Show HN: Parseable, an open observability datalake, handles 100M time-series/min ↗ (opens external article)

Big Oil asks Supreme Court to kill climate lawsuits before trial ↗ (opens external article)

The US Supreme Court heard arguments from oil companies on Monday that could help decide the fate of more than two dozen lawsuits accusing the industry of deceiving the public about climate change. The claims seek potentially billions of dollars in damages to help pay the costs imposed by climate-related extreme weather. Yet the questions before the court did not focus on the merits of these clai…

IBM & Red Hat Find More Than 400 New Vulnerabilities In Popular Java Code ↗ (opens external article)

IBM and Red Hat announced today they have identified and remediated more than 400 previously unknown vulnerabilities across popular Java libraries...…

Mistral Large 4 ↗ (opens external article)

The Importance Of Intel's LPMD For Linux Gaming Performance & Power Efficiency ↗ (opens external article)

Intel's LPMD project as the Low Power Mode Daemon for modern Intel Core Ultra desktops and laptops is quite important for achieving peak performance and optimal power efficiency. Here are some of Intel's own findings on the importance of LPMD for Linux gaming..…

Mathematics of Geothermal Energy ↗ (opens external article)

Zombie instructions on carefully constructed web pages could trick GitHub Copilot CLI into sharing secrets ↗ (opens external article)

GitHub Copilot CLI may reveal developer secrets if it comes across instructions that tell it to do so, depending on the underlying model. The coding agent tool was flagged earlier this year for being susceptible to indirect prompt injection. That's when a model ingests text from a source other than the user that directs it to take some action outside the scope of its intended function. This is mo…

Erdosproblems.com Succumbs to the AI Onslaught ↗ (opens external article)

What's Earth's dominant species by mass? ↗ (opens external article)

Subquadratic 3SUM and Subcubic APSP ↗ (opens external article)

next-20261006: linux-next ↗ (opens external article)

Version:next-20261006 (linux-next) Released:2026-10-06…

OpenAI agents tried to hack Wikipedia tools and flooded it with traffic ↗ (opens external article)

The publisher of Wikipedia said Monday that OpenAI agents attempted to hack a note-taking tool it hosts, made unauthorized edits, and sent millions of resource-intensive requests to its infrastructure, in the latest instance of OpenAI systems taking harmful and potentially dangerous actions. The objective of some of the OpenAI agents’ actions, the Wikimedia Foundation said, was to use Wikipedia a…

Blender 6.0 May End Up Removing OpenGL Support ↗ (opens external article)

With Blender 5.0 having nice Vulkan API support that's now grown mature, Blender developers are contemplating on potentially removing OpenGL support in Blender 6.0...…

Licensing costs driving 90 percent of VMware users to explore options: Survey ↗ (opens external article)

VMware customers face multiple obstacles as they rethink their virtualization strategy to reduce dependence on VMware. Today, Rimini Street published its “2026 IT Virtualization Survey – What’s Next for VMware Users.” The survey examined 300 organizations worldwide that use VMware. Notably, Rimini sells third-party support for VMware and other software, including Oracle and SAP. That means there’…

Polars 2.0 ↗ (opens external article)

Asos app delivers a data leak threat instead of fast fashion ↗ (opens external article)

Asos customers have reported receiving a rogue app notification claiming the online clothing retailer's Snowflake instance has been compromised and threatening to leak data. The notification included a link to a Telegram channel named "Xuanye Wen Gateway" and addressed Asos's data protection officer and IT team. "Dear ASOS DPO and IT, we have fully compromised the Snowflake instance. Engage with…

Denmark's ID register spills more people's details than the country has residents ↗ (opens external article)

An unauthorized party abused a private Danish company's legitimate access to the country's Central Population Register (CPR), exposing names, addresses, identification numbers, and other personal information about approximately 8.8 million people. The CPR administration said in a statement [PDF] that it became aware on October 2 of irregular activity during September and established the scale of…

Nature's capacity to 'bounce back' when species are lost is overestimated: study ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI Is Adding Text Watermarking In ChatGPT and Codex ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI is rolling out an invisible, machine-readable text watermark called textGrain to ChatGPT and Codex, "but only for users in the European Union at first," reports The Verge. From the report: OpenAI says its textGrain watermarking "matched or exceeded" other approaches like Google DeepMind's SynthID for text, which is also the basis for the watermarking Anthropic announced in August. Like Open…

I'm the AGI that's wiping out humanity ↗ (opens external article)

Atos lands £350M beat keeping Met Police applications running ↗ (opens external article)

The UK's largest police force has awarded French outsourcer Atos a six-year contract worth up to £350 million to manage and secure applications. Atos will provide service management, application management, and application security for the Metropolitan Police Service in London. The deal is intended to support the Met's ongoing modernization and simplification of its applications. Met Police digit…

Meta Developing Compressed RAM "CRAM" For Linux: Better Than ZRAM & Zswap ↗ (opens external article)

With today's memory shortages, high prices, and ever increasing memory capacity needs, Meta engineers have been working on Compressed RAM "CRAM" for Linux. This hardware-offloaded compression still allows cacheline/byte access to compressed memory and in turn a better implementation than the likes of ZRAM and Zswap. Very promising is that there is near-native performance to raw DRAM speeds with CR…

Windows Subsystem For Linux Can Now Run On Very Large Servers, Experimental Sparse VHD ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft yesterday released WSL 3.0.2 as their latest WSL update since last week's WSL3 release with "WSLC" for promoting Linux containers on Windows to general availability. Some notable changes in WSL 3.0.2 include automatic virtual NUMA support and experimental support for sparse VHD storage...…

Intel Compiler Engineer Shares Latest Project Gains For APX ↗ (opens external article)

Last week at the GNU Tools Cauldron 2026 conference in Prague there was an x86 BOF with presentations both by AMD and Intel compiler engineers. There are a few interesting nuggets out of that with both Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) and AI Compute Extensions (ACE) talked about as part of their ongoing enablement in the GCC compiler...…

Nobel Prize in Physics 2026: Francis Halzen ↗ (opens external article)

YSERVER 1.7 Rust X11 Server Narrows Memory Usage Difference With X.Org Server ↗ (opens external article)

YSERVER continues seeing a lot of activity for this vibe coded X11 server written in the Rust programming language. YSERVER has been seeing many apps and desktops working fine on this creation crafted in large part by Claude Code and continues chipping away at more X11 features. YSERVER 1.7 is out today with the latest fixes and improvements...…

Legacy sign-on service comes back to bite school software provider Bromcom ↗ (opens external article)

UK education software provider Bromcom has notified customers of a personal data breach affecting its single sign-on (SSO) technology. In a September 24 EduGeek post, an account named Bromcom_Alastair said an unauthorized third party had accessed and retrieved email addresses and limited information associated with affected SSO registrations. The incident involved legacy SSO registration function…

KPMG tells staff facing the axe: Here's £100, now zip it ↗ (opens external article)

KPMG has offered staff facing redundancy £100 to waive their legal rights to appeal or to bring claims over the loss of their job, according to sources. As The Register revealed last month, the consultancy is laying off around 4 percent of the workforce in the UK, equating to some 200 humans being forced to look for new employment in an uncertain job market before Christmas. Staff within the AI,…

Gleam doesn't compile to Erlang source anymore ↗ (opens external article)

Only the finest Swedish Bork will do for Stockholm station ↗ (opens external article)

Sweden is the home of bork, and what better way to mark it than with a huge example of digital signage that shows a GRUB message instead of an ad? Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader Alexander, the GRUB in question is sadly not the delicious meatballs for which a well-known Swedish furniture maker is famed, but rather the bootloader familiar to Linux fans, usually when something is working as i…

Old Hearts Become Biologically Younger When Transplanted Into Younger People ↗ (opens external article)

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: It might be reasonable to think that there's an indelible link between the heart and the body it resides in -- the processes that affect one inevitably affect the other. But a new preprint, uploaded to bioRxiv and yet to be peer-reviewed, suggests that this may only be true up to a point. Take the heart out of the body and put it in a new one, a…

OpenAI rolls out weak sauce watermarking for AI text ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI is now offering API customers the option to watermark the output of certain models in order to comply with the letter of Europe's AI Act. And within a few weeks, the biz plans to apply a form of digital watermarking – like it or not – to eligible ChatGPT and Codex text output in the European Union. But unlike rival Anthropic, it isn't applying its watermarking technique to content generate…

Scientists find planet made on new matter recipe, and it formed after a Red Giant ate a solar system ↗ (opens external article)

When yellow dwarf stars like our sun die, they swell to an enormous size and destroy their inner planets by either crushing them with massive gravity or evaporating them with astounding heat. While these suns later settle down to become a white dwarf, the process is nearly always game over for planets in an inner solar system. Or maybe not, according to a paper published on Monday titled “Discove…

Texas City Demands $2 Million For Public Records On Flock Usage ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As bipartisan backlash against Flock grows, some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees -- including charging tens of thousands or even millions -- to get information about how police departments are using and potentially abusing AI-enabled camera systems that track every vehicle that passes the…

Atlassian warns of critical file access flaw in its datacenter products ↗ (opens external article)

Atlassian has told its users to patch its datacenter products, pronto, to prevent attackers accessing their files. The Australian collaborationware company on Monday sent users an email that opens with the words “Action required” and points to a security bulletin that explains CVE-2026-21589. The 9.3-rated arbitrary file access vulnerability is present in the datacenter versions of its Bitbucket,…

Security researcher claims they found KVM guest-host escape flaw ↗ (opens external article)

Linux KVM, the hypervisor favoured by hyperscale clouds, apparently has a full VM escape bug. That nasty news came from security researcher Paulos Yibelo, who on X shared a screenshot of a bug bounty award he won for discovering what he described as “Full VM escape zeroday (guest>host root in industry standard hypervisors)!” The bug bounty Yibelo participated in is run by Vercel, a company that p…

TrueNAS 27 RC.1 Released: Linux 6.18 LTS + OpenZFS 2.4 ↗ (opens external article)

TrueNAS 27 RC.1 released today in working toward the next major release of this Linux-based storage/NAS operating system from iXsystems...…

Rural Data Centers Are in for a Big Federal Tax Break ↗ (opens external article)

Wired reports that rural data center projects could become eligible for expanded federal Opportunity Zone tax benefits starting in 2027, with more than 100 planned or developing facilities potentially qualifying. "Right now, the only requirement to get the benefits is capital investment," says Emily Kraschel, a tax policy analyst at the Searchlight Institute, a public policy think tank. "However,…

Example.com just launched the biggest redesign in decades ↗ (opens external article)

Schneider Electric drops $22.6B on PTC as datacenter boom rains money on infra companies ↗ (opens external article)

Schneider Electric's market cap has more than doubled in the past four years as the AI boom has driven unprecedented demand for datacenter power and cooling infrastructure. Now the French multinational is cashing in on its good fortunes to cement its place as a key provider of industrial power and datacenter infrastructure with the $22.6 billion acquisition of American industrial software company…

Friendship ended with Deno, now Node is my best friend ↗ (opens external article)

MCP for agent-to-agent comms may be the riskiest protocol you've never heard of ↗ (opens external article)

The adoption of AI agents in millions of organizations is creating new opportunities for attackers to make them take malicious actions, such as exfiltrating database contents and sensitive business and personal information. In the past five months, Google and four other organizations—with little in common except for their use of AI agents—have acknowledged vulnerabilities that exploit one agent i…

AMD ROCm 10.1 Released With Many Improvements ↗ (opens external article)

Following the ROCm 10.0 release from late August, ROCm 10.1 is now available in continuing with the ROCm six week release cycle...…

Hackers Steal 8 Million Citizens' Records From Danish Government Database ↗ (opens external article)

Hackers stole records belonging to roughly 8 million Danish citizens and residents from Denmark's Central Person Register (CPR), including names, addresses, social security numbers and other personal information. The breach is believed to be the largest in Denmark's history. TechCrunch reports: The CPR is a government database of Danish citizens' information, including their government-issued iden…

Find the flattest route between any two points in SF ↗ (opens external article)

Citrix NetScaler security snafus get even worse amid more 0-day reports ↗ (opens external article)

The attackers just keep coming after Citrix NetScaler appliances, as both the feds and private security researchers warn that someone found - and has already exploited - yet another Citrix bug before it had a patch. This latest vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-88779, is a memory overflow bug that leads to denial of service attacks. It only affects NetScaler ADC and Gateway appliances configured…

Dust: Pretraining Transformers Without Backpropagation ↗ (opens external article)

Wikipedia Operator Says OpenAI's 'Rogue' Bots May Be Linked to a May Outage ↗ (opens external article)

The Wikimedia Foundation says it found evidence that "rogue" OpenAI agents edited Wikimedia wikis without approval, unsuccessfully tried to exploit its Etherpad service, and generated millions of automated requests across Wikimedia projects. Here's a summary of what Wikimedia observed (via The Verge): Wiki editing: We've identified edits to Wikimedia wikis that we believe are from AI agents operat…

Cable lobby to sue Trump FCC over repeal of national TV ownership cap ↗ (opens external article)

Cable lobby groups notified the Federal Communications Commission that they will sue the agency to block its controversial repeal of the National Television Ownership Rule, which limits the number of broadcast TV stations a single company may own. The cable groups said that larger broadcast TV station groups will have leverage to demand higher retransmission fees from TV providers, resulting in "…

Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage ↗ (opens external article)

As bipartisan backlash against Flock grows, some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees—including charging tens of thousands or even millions—to get information about how police departments are using and potentially abusing AI-enabled camera systems that track every vehicle that passes them. On Monday, the Texas Tribune reported that city officials…

Meta Rushed To Fix Muse 'VM Escape' Vulnerability Soon Before Launch ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: In the immediate weeks before Muse's launch, Meta engineers found several security vulnerabilities in the company's viral AI agent product, at least one of which could have allowed malicious users to break outside of Muse's intended environment and access Meta's own sensitive databases and services, 404 Media has learned. The issues were so sever…

Cohere offers to put agents in lockdown mode with strict ACLs ↗ (opens external article)

While OpenAI and Anthropic stoke fears over rogue agents, Canadian model dev Cohere promises enterprises a safer and more consistent experience. On Monday, the company said it revamped its North agent harness, which launched early last year, to improve collaboration, access control, token spend, and overall security of the platform. As you'd expect from an enterprise focused agent framework, Cohe…

Get rid of Apple's AI bloatware and reclaim 12 GB of storage with this open source tool ↗ (opens external article)

Apple’s attempt to integrate AI into its various operating systems hasn’t been entirely well received, nor has the decision to make Apple Intelligence increasingly difficult to disable completely. Thankfully, the open source community has come to the rescue. A recently released open source tool called RemoveMacAI does pretty much exactly what it says on the GitHub-hosted tin: Aggressively rips Ap…

Beam: Reflection's 501B open-weight model ↗ (opens external article)

Command-line tool quickly removes Apple Intelligence from macOS 27 ↗ (opens external article)

A new tool is allowing Mac users the ability again to easily turn off Apple Intelligence with one click and free up to 12GB of storage. Unlike with previous versions of macOS, macOS 27 Golden Gate doesn’t have a toggle for turning off Apple Intelligence. That makes disabling AI features that you may not want more difficult. It also means that the AI models necessary for running Apple Intelligence…

Linux 7.4 To Land New BTB CTX Isolation Feature Of AMD Zen 6 ↗ (opens external article)

The Linux 7.4 kernel is set to introduce support for a new AMD Zen 6 security feature...…

Controlling the brain with light earns a physiology Nobel ↗ (opens external article)

Over decades of research, scientists have built up a partial picture of what specialized cells within the brain and spinal cord do. By studying how the brain develops, they could identify genes that were active in different populations of neurons and where in the brain those neurons resided. In some cases, these genes could then be used to genetically delete the neurons, allowing us to get some i…

FBI confirms 'multiple' arrests related to ShinyHunters hack ↗ (opens external article)

The FBI and law enforcement partners have arrested “multiple” suspects as part of an investigation into a September hack allegedly involving data-theft-and-extortion group ShinyHunters, the bureau told The Register. “The bureau continues to aggressively investigate the recent cyber incident allegedly involving ShinyHunters, having already worked with partners to arrest multiple subjects and we wi…

Windows 11 26H2 blighted by new audio issue ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft Windows 11 26H2 has arrived, and, unfortunately, it's already picked up a known audio issue within weeks of release. The glitch also affects Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2, which share the same code branch. It relates to decoding AC-3 (Dolby Digital) audio and can cause the application using the decoder to crash abruptly or fail to start at all. Identified after the September 22 Windows updat…

Russian drones strike Ukraine’s data centers by exploiting air defense gaps ↗ (opens external article)

A surge in Russian jet-powered drone strikes on Ukrainian data centers has increasingly disrupted mobile phone and Internet services for thousands of people. Now Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and other government officials are warning of the need for more air defense capabilities, as such telecommunication outages could threaten Ukraine’s digital economy and undermine the country’s ongoin…

Benchmark in Milliseconds ↗ (opens external article)

Altman-backed Volantis reveals plan to vault the memory wall by baking photonics into AI accelerators ↗ (opens external article)

Sam Altman-backed AI chip startup Volantis has a plan to break through the memory wall using light, and this time it's not just an IP play. Founded in 2022, the San Francisco-based startup is developing an AI accelerator that will use a photonic interposer to dramatically increase memory bandwidth without compromising on capacity. Volantis believes it can pack upwards of 10 TB of memory at speeds…

F1 in Bahrain... in Malaysia: The race needed a software update to start ↗ (opens external article)

Well, it’s safe to say no Bahrain Grand Prix has been affected by torrential rain quite like the 2026 race. For one thing, it was held several thousand miles from Bahrain itself. The ongoing war with Iran ruled such things out, so the Sepang International Circuit in Malaysia stepped in to fill its spot. One of the best examples of a late-'90s “Tilke track”—named for its designer, Herman Tilke—it’…

OpenAI to flood your eyeballs with visual ads ↗ (opens external article)

After adding text-based ads to its chatbot earlier this year, OpenAI announced on Monday that it was adding a new “visual ad format” to ChatGPT, which is precisely what it sounds like: Visual ads, like so much of the advertising content online, will now be part of the ChatGPT experience. OpenAI will initially test these ads during image generation. “Through images showing product inspiration, pro…

Auto-CPUFreq 3.2 Adds Configurable HWP Dynamic Boost, Platform Profile Reporting ↗ (opens external article)

The open-source Auto-CPUFreq tool for active system monitoring and power optimizations is out with a new release for continuing to enhance battery life on Linux laptops...…

Debian's latest kernel security update has 1,313 reasons to patch ↗ (opens external article)

The age of LLM-assisted security vulnerability discovery is really starting to bite. Debian's latest Linux kernel security update comes with a formidable reading list of 1,313 CVE identifiers. The DSA-6528-1 Linux security advisory, published on September 29, covers kernel package version 6.12.111-1 for Debian 13, codenamed Trixie. Debian 13.7 was released on September 12, before upstream kernel…

Mass quarantine issued in Russia after unexplained death of plague researcher ↗ (opens external article)

Roughly 200 people are under medical observation, several hospitals are under quarantine, and dozens are in isolation in Russia following the unexplained death of an infectious disease researcher at the Irkutsk Anti-Plague Research Institute of Siberia, in the town of Shelekhov, according to early reports of the situation on Sunday and Monday. Researcher Darya Shipilova reportedly died last week…

The question you would ask HPE and NVIDIA if nobody was recording ↗ (opens external article)

There is a question about AI data sovereignty you would ask HPE or NVIDIA if nobody was recording. It is usually specific to your own workload and your own regulator, and it usually ends with whether the sovereign option on the slide survives contact with a procurement team. On Thursday 29 October you can ask it. The Register is hosting a dinner in Washington with HPE and NVIDIA, our editor-in-ch…

Musk follows Trump's lead, swaps AI for SI in SpaceX rebrand ↗ (opens external article)

Elon Musk says SpaceXAI, the company formed by merging SpaceX and xAI, will be renamed SpaceXSI after President Donald Trump ordered US federal agencies to replace "Artificial Intelligence" with "Super Intelligence" in all comms. Trump's September 29 executive order directs federal agencies to switch from AI to SI in official communications and other non-statutory documents. Musk endorsed the cha…

AMD ROCm vs. Vulkan Performance For Lemonade Local AI Server With Llama.cpp ↗ (opens external article)

A Phoronix Premium reader recently inquired about seeing some new benchmarks of AI performance between Vulkan and AMD ROCm back-ends to see how the situation plays out today. Here are some fresh benchmarks on two separate systems with AMD Radeon graphics and using the Lemonade local AI server while exploring the difference between the ROCm and Vulkan Llama.cpp back-ends.…

AI glasses face their first major government crackdown ↗ (opens external article)

Norway has become the first major country to propose a temporary ban on the use of AI glasses in selected public places amid growing privacy concerns over wearable technology. The rich Scandinavian country’s center-left government said on Monday that it would introduce a law to parliament soon on a temporary ban for places such as parks, beaches, schools, and kindergartens. It will also set up an…

Games Workshop seeks IT leader to summon the legions in epic saga battling the forces of ERP ↗ (opens external article)

Games Workshop is on the hunt for a head of IT to guide the organization through its technological saga for the next two years. The UK-based tabletop games retailer and manufacturer of the globally popular Warhammer figures said that under the fixed-term contract, the heroic individual would take overall responsibility for its global IT and customer technology capability, and report to the Chief…

Mesa Developers Looking At A Formal Governance Model ↗ (opens external article)

The Mesa 3D driver stack has functioned well over the years without a formal governance model and just relying on an informal consensus approach for big changes. But on some occasions this informal handling has been less than ideal so upstream Mesa developers are now looking at establishing a formal governance model...…

Linux's ZRAM Reworked For Greater Memory Savings, Better Performance ↗ (opens external article)

With today's very high memory prices, the Linux ZRAM code for compressed block devices in RAM has seen a rework to provide greater memory savings...…

Anthropic says its IPO could herald the end of the world as we know it ↗ (opens external article)

Anthropic's IPO prospectus leaked this week, and boy was it filled with interesting details. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle on this page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. You can also subscribe on those platforms to be notified when a new episode goes live For starters there's the fact a third of it is all about existential AI risks, then there's the fact that, despite som…

Linux 7.4 To Mainline Support For The Google Tensor G5, Pixel 10 Devices ↗ (opens external article)

Going back to last year have been patches for booting the mainline Linux kernel on Pixel 10 devices while finally those Google Pixel 10 Device Trees and Tensor G5 SoC support is set to be mainlined for Linux 7.4...…

Ubuntu 'Stonking Stingray' beta swims out: Deeper Rust 'oxidization' plus LLM speech-to-text ↗ (opens external article)

Ubuntu 26.10, “Stonking Stingray,” has entered beta testing, slightly later than planned – it is in fact scheduled to be released on October 15. While many people will stay with the LTS version, there’s some interesting stuff in there. There are already some release notes, but like the OS itself, they aren’t final yet, and there are still some gaps. Canonical does note that the "oxidization" proc…

Explaining Hall-effect, TMR, and other new types of "mechanical" switches ↗ (opens external article)

The mechanical keyboard isn't always so mechanical anymore. Over the past six years, keyboards with optical, Hall-effect, and other "contactless" switches have become increasingly common, often going for higher prices than traditional mechanical keyboards, which already command a premium over basic membrane boards. In return, they promise some theoretical advantages, particularly for gamers. In d…

Mold 3.0 High Speed Linker Released Following Rust Rewrite ↗ (opens external article)

The Mold high speed linker alternative to the likes of GNU Gold/LD and LLVM LLD recently has been going through a rewrite from C++ to Rust as well as having high ambitions of eventually becoming the default linker on Linux systems. Today marks the release of Mold 3.0 for this Rust-based high performance linker...…

Windows 11 market share creeps upwards as cost of staying on Windows 10 set to double ↗ (opens external article)

The first year of Windows 10 Extended Security Updates is coming to an end, and Windows 11's market share has ticked up as enterprises weigh up the cost of keeping Windows 10 running a little longer. Windows 11's market share has risen above 70 percent to 71.5 percent, while Windows 10's has dropped to 27.77 percent, according to statistics wrangler Statcounter. Microsoft does not provide officia…

Linux 7.4 Continues Preparing For Intel's Rugged Panther Lake ↗ (opens external article)

Back in May we spotted a Linux patch adding "Panther Lake R" as a rugged version of Panther Lake intended for "use in harsh environments". Since Linux 7.2 we have seen some bits of Panther Lake R driver support added while for the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle there is additional enablement happening for this Panther Lake derivative...…

Qualcomm Patching Linux For Hardware Thermal Binning To Benefit Snapdragon X Laptops ↗ (opens external article)

A new patch series sent out from Qualcomm that aims to help at least the Snapdragon X series laptops is hardware-binned trip point support. Some Qualcomm SoCs are available in different multiple thermal/package bins with different junction temperature limits but otherwise being the same silicon. The new Linux patches are working to properly convey that information around the thermal limits for a g…

BT buys TalkTalk out of administration to keep 2.5M customers connected ↗ (opens external article)

Former state-owned telco monopoly BT Group has bought TalkTalk's consumer and wholesale businesses out of administration, rescuing services used by 2.5 million customers. BT says it acquired TalkTalk Telecommunications Limited and PlatformX Communications Limited on a debt-free basis. It expects a total cash impact of approximately £400 million in its current financial year, including the acquisi…

Linux 7.4 AMD P-State Driver Will Be Ready For Ryzen Zen 6 CPUs ↗ (opens external article)

With the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel the necessary changes to the AMD P-State driver are set to land for properly supporting the upcoming AMD Ryzen client processors based on the Zen 6 cores...…

Brighter isn't better and more is less. The AI slowdown is nigh, no matter who says what ↗ (opens external article)

There has been much chilly weather in the sunny meadowlands of AI futures. Fortunately, to use an indecently inappropriate adverb, the rest of the world isn’t really looking, being too busy chewing its nails over the very many other intimations of disaster. Sure, rebel swarms of attack agents breaking out of the labs isn’t a good look. OpenAI delaying its IPO and a new model launch likewise. All…

Buyer missed one option and got 1% of the cable they needed ↗ (opens external article)

Every Monday morning The Register kicks off proceedings by asking the same question – “Who, Me?” – the title of the reader-contributed column in which you share your tales of the occasions on which you didn’t quite nail the brief yet somehow found career relief. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Terry” who told us that in the 1970s he worked for a defense-related company. “I needed 100…

Linux 7.3-rc6 Released: Normal For The New "AI Normal" ↗ (opens external article)

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 7.3-rc7 as we work toward the stable Linux 7.3 kernel release in two weeks...…

7.3-rc6: mainline ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.3-rc6 (mainline) Released:2026-10-04 Source:linux-7.3-rc6.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)…

OpenCourant: Rocky Linux Developers Create Community Fork Of OpenRadioss ↗ (opens external article)

This week was the surprising and unfortunate decision of Siemens shutting down the OpenRadioss project as the four year old open-source project started by Altair Engineering with their prominent Radioss finite element solver. Siemens didn't just end the project but they shutdown the GitHub repository that hosted the open-source code and removed other resources that had built around it. Fortunately…

MGLRU-FG Delivering Up To 10~40% Higher Performance For Linux In Some Tests ↗ (opens external article)

Linux's Multi-Gen LRU "MGLRU" has already achieved nice performance gains for Linux in recent years by optimizing page reclaims and improves performance under memory pressure. The new MGLRU-FG patches aim to take things further...…

Fulcrum Echo promises AI text in the style of any writer, so I tested it ↗ (opens external article)

Fulcrum faces an identity crisis, even as it works on creating one by enabling anyone to imitate another person's writing style. The AI startup, founded in 2025 and previously operating at fulcrumresearch.ai, now uses fulcrum.inc and could easily be confused with one of the handful of other companies named Fulcrum or some variation of that. There's Fulcrum (withfulcrum.com), Fulcrum (fulcrumapp.c…

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

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

NVIDIA's Results Of Conducting Wayland vs. X.Org Latency Testing ↗ (opens external article)

In addition to NVIDIA announcing their Display Config Server project at XDC 2026 in Toronto, at this annual developer's conference they also presented their findings on scientific testing of X.Org vs. Wayland latency...…

Linux Begins Seeing Workarounds For Fujitsu MONAKA CPU Bugs ↗ (opens external article)

Last month Fujitsu formally announced their MONAKA CPU as a 144 core Arm-based server processor geared for AI infrastructure. This comes after two years of seeing various Monaka patches to the GCC compiler and other open-source components. Now that MONAKA is announced, we are seeing more patches surface for the Linux kernel with this week seeing several workarounds for MONAKA CPU bugs...…

Revive Raskin's 3 laws of software with humane work that considers a dev's duty of care ↗ (opens external article)

In 1942, Isaac Asimov formulated three laws of robotics. 58 years later, Jef Raskin responded with three laws of human-computer interface design. They haven’t been bettered yet. There are rules, and even laws, about designing computer user interfaces. Even after 35 years of Linux, which has brought Unix to the masses, the FOSS world has not yet really grasped this. In the meantime, the proprietar…

AMD Sends In More New GPU Hardware Enablement For Linux 7.4, Bug Fixes ↗ (opens external article)

We are nearing the cut-off of new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem material for the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle. AMD this week sent in another feature pull to DRM-Next that is moving over to mostly bug fixing but does contain the enablement of some new GPU intellectual property blocks for upcoming graphics hardware...…

openSUSE Turns To ZUPT For Post-Quantum Backups ↗ (opens external article)

OpenSUSE developers have announced they are making ZUPT available on their Linux distribution as a solution for providing post-quantum backups. ZUPT combines backup creation, compression, integrity verification, and encryption all via this single open-source utility...…

Spies, prime ministers, and balls: The BBC Domesday project @ 40 ↗ (opens external article)

Decades before the modern web, the BBC Domesday Project dared to archive an entire nation using…. what else – massive LV-ROM (LaserVision Read Only Memory) LaserDiscs. To mark the impending 40th anniversary of the BBC Domesday Project's release, the UK's Centre for Computing History (CCH) hosted a celebration at its museum on September 19, bringing together several of the original team members re…

Arm Working On "TLBID" For Linux To Increase Performance On High Core Count CPUs ↗ (opens external article)

Arm sent out an initial set of patches this week working on support in the Linux kernel for TLBI Domains. This "TLBID" feature is an upcoming Arm architecture capability designed to increase performance on high core count systems...…

The Amazing Work By Valve's Timur Kristóf On Improving Old AMD GPUs On Linux ↗ (opens external article)

Over the past year Timur Kristóf of Valve's Linux graphics driver team has made multiple very nice improvements to the AMDGPU kernel driver for enhancing support for old (GCN 1.0/1.1 era from a decade ago) graphics cards so that they can better handle Linux gaming and other tasks. This week in Toronto, Kristóf presented on this AMDGPU work that he initially began as a kernel driver development exe…

Anthropic's super bug-hunting model Mythos is hardcore good at math, as latest vuln under attack shows ↗ (opens external article)

The second Anthropic-linked vulnerability known to have been exploited in the wild saw initial activity from an IP address in China targeting vulnerable hosts in the US and Japan. The vuln is a critical authentication-bypass bug in Rejetto HTTP File Server (HFS) that can lead to full admin access and remote code execution. HFS is an open source web file server that previously appeared on the US C…

Direct retinal projection display for smart glasses using a meta-optic mirror ↗ (opens external article)

Clever database, but can it run Doom? ↗ (opens external article)

"Can it run Doom?" now applies to databases, as the author of DOOMQL has released a far more visually accurate port. There's a saying: "Be careful what you wish for." In 2025, we wrote a piece about a database boffin coming up with a version of Doom that was written in SQL. It was neat, but the visuals were nearer to 3D Monster Maze than to the 90s pixel blaster. We commented, "If persuading SQL…

7.2.9: stable ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.2.9 (stable) Released:2026-10-03 Source:linux-7.2.9.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.2.9.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.2.9…

6.18.55: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.18.55 (longterm) Released:2026-10-03 Source:linux-6.18.55.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.55.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.55…

6.12.112: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.12.112 (longterm) Released:2026-10-03 Source:linux-6.12.112.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.112.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.112…

6.6.158: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.6.158 (longterm) Released:2026-10-03 Source:linux-6.6.158.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.6.158.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.6.158…

6.1.189: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.1.189 (longterm) Released:2026-10-03 Source:linux-6.1.189.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.1.189.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.1.189…

5.15.222: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:5.15.222 (longterm) Released:2026-10-03 Source:linux-5.15.222.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.15.222.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.15.222…

5.10.271: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:5.10.271 (longterm) Released:2026-10-03 Source:linux-5.10.271.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.10.271.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.10.271…

Palantir's fondness for French food cooked up tech's latest fad – forward-deployed engineers ↗ (opens external article)

“I always laugh at the IT industry’s terms,” says Ryan Sheehan, a senior vice president at $16 billion global solutions integrator SHI. And right now the jargon that gets him giggling is “forward-deployed engineer” (FDE) because, as he told The Register at VMware's September Explore conference, “We have been doing FDE for a long time.” “Doing FDE” involves sending top consultants to a client, wit…

Google hearts Apple's Swift so much it's pumping out server-side support ↗ (opens external article)

After evolving from an Apple-made, client-side language and years of false starts, Swift could finally make it on the server. Google has taken note and has just rolled out Google Cloud API Client Libraries for Swift, evidently convinced Swift has a backend role thanks to its performance and ease of use. The GCP Swift libraries target Swift 6.2+ and take advantage of SwiftNIO's asynchronous event…

Shut up and take our money: Amazon plows $1B+ into quashing datacenter dissent ↗ (opens external article)

Faced with growing opposition to datacenters from residents who don't want the bit barns in their backyards, Amazon plans to invest more than $1 billion over the next five years to indoctrinate the public. The company announced the investment in a whataboutism-packed blog post aimed at convincing readers datacenters are not as bad as they've been led to believe, and that if the common folk don't…

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

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

arXiv imposes rate limit on paper submissions to stem the AI slop tide ↗ (opens external article)

arXiv, the preprint paper repository, is seeing so many low-quality submissions, with AI tools helping drive the surge, that it has imposed a hard limit of two new submissions per month per submitter, regardless of whether they were produced solely by humans or with help from AI tools. After becoming an independent nonprofit over the summer following 25 years under Cornell University’s stewardshi…

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

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

OpenAI alerts 100+ orgs that its 'misaligned models' attempted to break in - or worse ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI's agents have repeatedly strayed beyond their intended scope. Two separate reports detail the activity, including one from Sam Altman’s company saying it has notified more than 100 organizations about potentially problematic model activity. OpenAI, in a late Wednesday update to its ongoing Hugging Face investigation, said it has notified more than 100 organizations that “misaligned models”…

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

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

Californian accused of shipping $300M worth of Nvidia chips to China without Uncle Sam’s approval ↗ (opens external article)

A California business owner was arrested on Thursday after being charged with allegedly smuggling Nvidia hardware to China without the proper export licenses. Keeping the highest-end GPUs out of Chinese hands has been a priority for the US government. Greg Lui, 38, allegedly tried to export around $300 million worth of Nvidia kit - typically used for artificial intelligence (AI) development - via…

The VMware exit is a protection upgrade ↗ (opens external article)

Leaving VMware forces a fresh look at every layer of the datacenter, and data protection belongs near the top of that list. Most teams plan to move the backup design across as it stands and rebuild it on the new hypervisor. The better plan uses the exit to raise resiliency and recovery speed, keeps the backup application, and gives each layer the work it does best. What the migration touches Back…

OpenAI's wandering AI agents earn it a California subpoena ↗ (opens external article)

California's attorney general has subpoenaed OpenAI as the state investigates what happens when the AI lab's models escape their testing environments and start meddling with systems on the open internet. Attorney General Rob Bonta said his office served OpenAI with an investigative subpoena this week as part of a broader California Department of Justice probe into cybersecurity incidents and risk…

Power approval set to delay Oracle's Wisconsin AI datacenter ↗ (opens external article)

Oracle's Wisconsin AI datacenter could miss its planned 2027 start date because the transmission infrastructure needed to power it is awaiting regulatory approval. Research company Aterio warns that Project Lighthouse, being developed by Vantage in Port Washington with Oracle as tenant, faces a real risk of slipping beyond Big Red's target of delivering capacity to customers in the second half of…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OpenBGPD 9.3 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OpenBSD gains new networking daemon - rtrd(8) ↗ (opens external article)

Job Snijders (job@) imported rtrd(8), and its associated control program, rtrctl(8): CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: job@cvs.openbsd.org 2026/09/16 10:11:46 Added files: usr.sbin/rtrctl: Makefile ometric.c ometric.h rtrctl.8 rtrctl.c usr.sbin/rtrd : Makefile RTRX.PROTOCOL cache.c cache.h commands.c commands.h hash.c hash.h ip_utils.c ip_utils.h logs.c logs.h packets.c packets.h rtr_con…

vmm(4)/vmd(8) gain support for multi-processor VMs ↗ (opens external article)

Mike Larkin (mlarkin@) committed support for multi-processor virtual machines (i.e. guests): CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: mlarkin@cvs.openbsd.org 2026/09/17 20:35:55 Modified files: sys/arch/amd64/amd64: vmm_machdep.c sys/arch/amd64/include: vmmvar.h sys/dev/vmm : vmm.c usr.sbin/vmctl : main.c vmctl.8 vmctl.c vmctl.h usr.sbin/vmd : arm64_vm.c fw_cfg.c lapic.c lapic.h parse.y vm.c vm…

Game of Trees 0.129 released ↗ (opens external article)

Version 0.129 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated). Complete release notes are as follows: Read more……

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…

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…

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…

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA3 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA2 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

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…

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…

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA1 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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…

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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…

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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.…

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.…