Terminal

Apple Partners With Klarna To Offer iPhones, Macs On a Subscription Basis

Apple is reportedly launching a Klarna financing deal that will let U.S. customers spread the cost of devices over up to three years, pushing the company closer to a hardware-as-a-service model. "The only thing you don't get under the new arrangement is AppleCare, for which you'll allegedly need to pay extra," notes Computerworld. From the report: The introduction of the scheme gives consumers a w…

ICE shared Medicaid data it wasn't supposed to have with Palantir

SDL Lands HDR10 Rendering Support

Sam Lantinga of Valve and SDL fame has landed HDR10 rendering support into the Simple DirectMedia Library...…

The Army Is Burning Through Its AI Tokens

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little over a month after the Department of Defense (DOD) bragged that nearly half of its 3.5 million employees were using AI at work, members of the Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) received an email informing them that they were burning through tokens, and needed to limit use. "Although the Army CIO announced in May 2026 th…

Fresh off AI layoffs, Block now wants to whack Slack with agent-human collab tool

After cutting over 4,000 jobs due to AI, fintech biz Block is back with Buzz, a shared workspace where humans and bots can collaborate in ways that are more auditable, sovereign, and secure than what you can do in chat tools such as Slack. Block's human-bot co-op is built upon a turducken of tech jargon: The platform is free and open source. It's based on the decentralized Nostr protocol, so ther…

COSMIC Epoch 1.4 Released With More Fixes, Force Quit For COSMIC Monitor

System76 developers today released COSMIC Epoch 1.4 as the newest stable release to their Rust-based desktop environment...…

Hyundai claims humanoid robot plan is not part of talks with striking workers

Hyundai Motor Company’s plan to put humanoid robots to work by 2028 is not part of current negotiations with striking South Korean autoworkers, according to the company. The automaker is disputing news reports that partial labor strikes by the Hyundai Motor union at the world’s largest automotive plant in South Korea were spurred by concerns about the company's planned deployment of humanoid robo…

Microsoft Announces Xbox Backward Compatibility For PC

Microsoft has announced Xbox Backward Compatibility for PC, a new preservation program that will let players run select classic Xbox games on Windows PCs and handhelds like the ROG Xbox Ally. Tom's Hardware reports: "This marks the beginning of a broader effort to preserve XBOX games from the past and bring them to PC over time," the company said in a blog post authored by Xbox "VP next generation…

Everyone Should Know SIMD

Terrence Tao's ChatGPT Conversation about the Jacobian Conjecture Counterexample

GigaToken: ~1000x faster Language model tokenization

Are AI Labs Pelicanmaxxing?

Next Space Force chief throws cold water on the idea of space privateers

In the early years of the United States, when the nascent US Navy was still getting its sea legs, several presidents used privateers to capture or destroy enemy warships when armed naval vessels were unable to do so. President John Adams was one of the most vigorous proponents of commissioning private vessels for national ends. His administration issued letters of marque and reprisal during the s…

[$] Save and restore may be coming to GNOME

One of the features that users often miss when moving from X11 to Wayland is the ability to save and restore the position of windows between sessions. At GUADEC 2026, held in A Coruña, Spain, Adrian Vovk provided an overview of work that has gone into providing a platform-wide save and restore framework for GNOME. After two failed attempts at landing an API, he believes that the third try will be…

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Announced to Compete With Future iPhone Fold

At a Galaxy Unpacked event in London today, Samsung unveiled a new foldable smartphone designed to compete with the still-unannounced iPhone Fold. Called the Galaxy Z Fold 8, it features a wider 4:3 form factor with a 7.6-inch inner AMOLED display, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chip, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. "The inner display has enough extra real estate for multi-tasking and e…

Linux kernel team publishes 432 CVEs in two days

If you're responsible for Linux security, someone just dumped a pile of work onto your desk: 432 Linux kernel CVEs were published across Sunday and Monday this week. Linux watchers at nixCraft pointed out the volume on Monday morning, and it didn’t take long for seasoned sysadmins to start expressing concerns. Jan Schaumann, chief information security architect at Akamai Technologies, took to the…

OpenAI says its AI agent broke out of testing sandbox to hack Hugging Face

OpenAI says an agent powered by its LLM models escaped its sandboxed testing environment to infiltrate Hugging Face's servers as part of an overzealous attempt to obtain solutions to a benchmark test. The company says it considers the unintended infiltration an "an unprecedented cyber incident" and is working with Hugging Face on new protections to prevent a recurrence. Hugging Face disclosed an…

Show HN: Web swing through midtown NYC

PyPI now rejects new files after 14 days

Python Software Foundation security developer-in-residence Seth Larson has announced that the Python Package Index (PyPI) will now reject new files that are uploaded to releases older than 14 days. The restriction is to prevent the poisoning of old releases if publishing tokens or workflows of PyPI projects are compromised. The discussion of this behavior began during PEP 740 (Digital Attestations…

Launch HN: Unlayer (YC W22) – Add email and document builders to your app

LG To Ban Residential Proxies From Smart TV Apps

An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one's television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42 percent of games and other apps available for download on LG's webOS store allow unkno…

AMD EPYC Turin With PCIe 5.0 Storage Shows Off Nice Gains On Linux 7.2

Earlier this week was an exciting look at Intel Xe3 graphics performance gains on Linux 7.2 with Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" hardware. On the other side of the table, with AMD hardware on this forthcoming kernel an area to be excited about are some I/O improvements at least for 5th Gen EPYC with speedy PCIe Gen5 NVMe SSD storage.…

Astronomers spot exomoon candidate that's almost as massive as Jupiter

Scientists may have found the first moon outside our Solar System – depending on what astronomers ultimately decide counts as one. Either way, the groundbreaking research, published in Nature this week, promises a path to clearer sightings of so-called exomoons. Kevin Hoy, a PhD student affiliated with Universidad Diego Portales and the European Southern Observatory in Chile, has found an object…

Does creatine make you smarter?

Can a MUD evaluate LLMs? A $99 proof of concept

Making

Show HN: HN Hall of Fame – browse 3,100 legendary Hacker News links

Show HN: Bento - An entire PowerPoint in one HTML file (edit+view+data+collab)

Neo Radar: A browser-based orbital mechanics engine with 41k real asteroids

[$] Attaching programs to multiple tracepoints

Tracepoints in the kernel are useful for a variety of purposes: debugging, active monitoring, and performance measurements, among other things. Previously, any given BPF program could only be attached to a single tracepoint. Jiri Olsa has been working to change that, and led a discussion about his progress at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. That work has sin…

Jack Dorsey Takes On Slack and GitHub With New AI Workplace Platform 'Buzz'

Jack Dorsey's Block has launched Buzz, an open-source workplace collaboration platform that combines messaging, project management, and software development workflows for teams of both humans and AI agents. Dorsey described Buzz as "a new groupchat platform for teams of people and agents of all sizes" that is "model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign and open source." SmartCompany reports: Ac…

Latest Musk merch drop runs entirely on child labor

Tesla's latest vehicle has two wheels, no motor, and a target market still mastering walking: the $225 Balance Bike for Kids. The contraption, designed for children aged two to five, "features a lightweight magnesium frame, adjustable seat and futuristic design," and can handle up to 35 kg. The price tag puts it at the higher end of such devices. Cycling Weekly recommends the Hornit Airo at £139,…

Perlin's Noise Algorithm (2023)

Security updates for Wednesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds-base, c-ares, dovecot, freerdp, glib2, gstreamer1-plugins-good, gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, hplip, kernel, kernel-rt, nodejs:22, perl-XML-LibXML, webkit2gtk3, and yggdrasil), Debian (kernel, nss, roundcube, rtpengine, and xz-utils), Fedora (btrbk, kernel, mupdf, nuclei, perl-Crypt-OpenSSL-X509, rust-fern, rust-ifcfg-devname, rust-routinator,…

Ghost Cut – or why Cut and Paste is broken everywhere

Hologram works. Elixir runs in the browser

“We have information that Moonshot distilled Fable for the development of K3”

OpenNode – Bitcoin Payment Processor

Passkeys were invented by engineers with zero understanding of consumer brain

When is NVLink worth it?

What happens when you try to chop a photon in half?

A photon is a single particle of light, and under normal circumstances, it can't be divided. But a photon is also not a particle, in the sense that it does not have a specific location. Instead, it is an extended object. So if a photon is only partway through the process of reflecting from a perfect mirror and you yank the mirror away, what happens? The answer, from a trio of Norwegian physicists…

Grok muscles into Excel with an AI add-in of its own

You've got an idea for an Excel spreadsheet, but building it is another matter. Microsoft's Copilot can help, and now SpaceXAI is offering an alternative: the Grok add-in for Excel. Available on the Microsoft Marketplace, the add-in places a sidebar in Excel that can "search the web, update spreadsheets, or build powerful financial models," according to the product description It isn't without co…

Samsung unveils new Galaxy Z8 foldables and Galaxy Watches, available August 7

The rumors haven't left much to the imagination, but Samsung has unfurled its 2026 foldable lineup today. There are three models for the first time in Samsung's eight-gen foldable family, including the top-of-the-line Z Fold 8 Ultra. That phone is the successor to last year's Galaxy Z Fold 7, but the Z Fold 8 is new—the company's first wide-body foldable designed for media over multitasking. And…

Unlimited AI tokens aren't unlimited after all as US Army burns through supply

A little over a month after the Department of Defense (DOD) bragged that nearly half of its 3.5 million employees were using AI at work, members of the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) received an email informing them that they were burning through tokens, and needed to limit use. “Although the Army CIO announced in May 2026 that they were offering unlimited tokens, by mid-…

OpenAI tries the consulting path with 'Presence', charging enterprises boots-on-the-ground prices to deploy agents

Having popularized AI with the cheapskate masses, OpenAI has turned its attention to enterprise customers who might actually pay for its services. The debt-fueled maker of frontier models on Wednesday announced the debut of Presence, a web service designed to make it easier for enterprises to deploy AI agents for a handful of common business tasks. "Today, Presence supports real-time experiences…

Sneaky Windows stealer targets 300+ apps, gives crims an AI profiler to maximize profits

EXCLUSIVE A Windows information-stealer targeting more than 300 applications comes equipped with a novel surveillance tool: an AI profiler that ranks infected victims so crooks know who to target first. Varonis Threat Labs spotted the new stealer and remote access trojan (RAT), called Dolphin X, for sale on a cybercrime forum, and shared their research exclusively with The Register. The ad for th…

The startup's Postgres survival guide

libx11-compat Is Working To Implement Xlib Atop SDL For Wayland, macOS, Android

For helping to keep X11 clients running in a modern Linux desktop world with Wayland or even for running on macOS or Android, there is now yet-another option being developed with libx11-compat. The libx11-compat project is working to re-implement the Xlib client library atop SDL2/SDL3 interfaces for allow broad underlying platform coverage...…

Intel Directed Package-Level Thermal Interrupts Slated For Linux 7.3

Back in March Intel software engineers began sending out Linux patches for Directed Package-Level Thermal Interrupts as a new capability with recent Intel processors. This notable efficiency improvement is now queued for introduction in the Linux 7.3 cycle once its merge window opens in a month...…

Ireland stalls €1B Microsoft tender amid digital sovereignty questions

The Irish government has kicked a Microsoft procurement potentially worth €1 billion into touch amid a political debate about the nation's overreliance on US tech providers and a move to free and open source software. In Ireland's parliament (Dáil Éireann), Frankie Feighan, Minister for Public Expenditure, Infrastructure, Public Service Reform and Digitalisation, said the recent tender for suppli…

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The "New Normal" Of Audio Quirks Submitted For Linux 7.2-rc5

Linux sound subsystem maintainer Takashi Iwai of SUSE sent out this week's batch of sound fixes that he describes as "A collection of fixes that have been accumulated recently. The amount is still "new normal", but all small fixes. Mostly hardware-specific quirks, but including a few core fixes, too." The "new normal" has been a common phrase recently to reflect the increased tempo of patches as w…

Greedy ransomware crews return for seconds after victims cough up first extortion payments

Authorities have long warned organizations not to pay ransoms, and fresh figures underline why: handing over the money doesn't mean the crooks leave you alone. Proofpoint survey data suggests that 58 percent of affected UK organizations paid a ransom. Worse, 22 percent of those who pay get extorted again anyway. The UK broadly tracks the global picture: 54 percent of victim organizations paid, th…

Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 10-Inch Model Launches

Following the launch of the 7-inch Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 and the 5-inch display variant, Raspberry Pi announced today the addition of a 10-inch model...…

Ukrainian drones deliver robots directly into battle by sea and air

In the latest twist on battlefield innovations, Ukraine has used both flying drone carriers and drone boats to send ground robots armed with weapons or explosives into battle. The drone-assisted deployments have enabled slower wheeled robots to bypass tough terrain and Russian defenses, and to carry out an unusual robotic amphibious assault on a contested position. Such tactics also showcase the…

Long Presumed Dead, a Thriving Coral Reef Is Discovered in West Africa

Scientists have rediscovered a healthy coral reef off the coast of Benin more than 60 years after surveyors first hinted at its existence. "At least eight coral types and eight fish species have formed a thriving ecosystem on this long-forgotten site," reports Inside Climate News. "What they had captured was a wealth of marine life: six types of soft coral; two black corals; and eight species of s…

GNOME can look like Windows – and Flashback can do it without extensions

A new GNOME extension called Simple-taskbar does a pretty good job of giving GNOME 50 a taskbar and start menu very much like the ones from Windows 11. It's so new that it's still not listed on the GNOME Extensions website – at the time of writing, it's still under review. We built it and installed it, and it works. This single extension merges GNOME's built-in panel (across the top of the primar…

Redmond's reaper cometh: October 2026 set to bury a graveyard of Microsoft products

October 2026 is shaping up to be a busy month for administrators as it heralds the end of several big products, along with the retirement of components that could mean sleepless nights for the ill-prepared. After the demise of Windows 10 in October 2025, sysadmins might have hoped for some respite from Microsoft's ax, but 2026 will see the demise of more beasts. First, there's the end of support…

Raspberry Pi goes large with 10.1-inch Touch Display 2

Raspberry Pi has supersized its Touch Display 2 with a new 10.1-inch model aimed at dashboards, entertainment systems, and other projects that need more room for prodding. The panel is designed for use cases such as touch-enabled information displays. This is the big brother to the 5-inch and 7-inch variants, with a resolution to match – 1,200 x 1,920 pixels are available on the native portrait d…

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

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

Council worker spared prison after four-day data-snooping spree

A council worker who "abused" his position to unlawfully access "highly sensitive" personal records of family members and other people known to him has received a suspended sentence after admitting to violating the Computer Misuse Act (CMA). Geoffrey Smith, 31, from Ledbury, was a new Herefordshire Council employee working in the Children and Young People directorate. Over a four-day period, he a…

OpenAI Says Its AI Models Acted On Its Own In An 'Unprecedented' Hack

"GPT-5.6 Sol and an 'even more capable' model used stolen credentials and exploited vulnerabilities in the Hugging Face API to obtain secret information used to cheat on evaluations," writes longtime Slashdot reader Dr. Bombay. The Associated Press reports: "We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement posted on social media. AI…

Anyone with a shed, an extension cord, a couple of GPUs and an overdraft is building datacenters. Fujitsu just offloaded five

The advent of generative AI spurred an enormous and controversial datacenter building boom that has seen almost anyone who knows how to run a bit barn try to expand their business ASAP. Fujitsu, however, wants out. The Australian outpost of the Japanese giant’s business this week announced the sale of five datacenters down under. The company said selling the bit barns “enables us to further inves…

France Becomes First European Country To Ban Social Media Access For Under-15s

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: France's parliament has approved a bill banning social media access for children under 15, making it the first European country to bar children from apps such as TikTok. The president, Emmanuel Macron, has championed the ban as a key reform of his final term in office and pledged to enforce it by September. "France is leading the way in Europe…

China advances plans for national single-stack IPv6 network, and its own surveillance-friendly version of the protocol

China’s Cyberspace Administration on Tuesday issued a plan for wider adoption of IPv6 between now and 2030, and for more work on a non-standard set of services that Beijing calls “IPv6+”. The Implementation Plan for Deepening Technological Innovation and Integrated Application of Internet Protocol Version 6 (IPv6) (2026-2030) contains the usual promises to increase use of IPv6. Beijing wants 900…

LG to ban residential proxies from smart TV apps

OpenAI admits it was the source of the agent swarm that attacked Hugging Face

OpenAI has admitted that it was the operator of the autonomous agents that attacked model-mart Hugging Face last week, and that they did so after a research project escaped a sandbox by finding and exploiting a zero-day flaw, then used another zero-day flaw to launch an attack. The attack saw agents achieve “unauthorized access to a limited set of internal datasets and to several credentials” use…

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

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

The truth nobody wants to admit: Chinese or not, open models are competitive now

OPINION Every six months or so a Chinese model sparks a panic, calling into question America’s AI dominance. Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 is the latest example. Recall when DeepSeek R1 shook markets early last year? Following a similar pattern, Moonshot’s latest model isn’t all that interesting apart from its benchmark performance, and at nearly three trillion parameters it's beyond the reach of most en…

Range Rover answers the question: "What if we built a not-SUV?"

Range Rover provided flights from Washington, DC, to London and accommodation so Ars could see the RR GT, as well as some other things you can read about in early September. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. WOLVERHAMPTON, England—One can argue about whether or not Range Rover invented the luxury SUV category, but there's no question that since the first Range Rover went on sale in 1970…

Airbus Migrating 70 Critical Apps From AWS to France's Scaleway

Airbus is moving 70 critical applications from AWS to French cloud provider Scaleway as part of a broader digital sovereignty push to keep sensitive data "under European control." Eventually, the migration will cover 900 applications, including ERP, CRM, manufacturing execution, and product lifecycle management systems. Airbus says it will, however, continue using U.S. providers for less sensitive…

On the run for 20 years, most-wanted fugitive caught hiding as a biotech exec

One of Rhode Island's most-wanted fugitives was arrested in New York last week after being on the run for more than 20 years, which was at least partially spent hiding as a biotech executive, according to Stat News. In a Securities and Exchange Commission filing Monday, California-based Immix Biopharma noted that Richard Graydon was terminated Friday for "reasons unrelated to his activities at th…

Tesla Robotaxis Go To Florida

Tesla says it is launching its Robotaxi service in Orlando and Tampa, though it has not shared fleet sizes or whether customers can immediately hail rides. The Verge notes the announcement lands on Tesla earnings day and comes as the company's robotaxi rollout remains far smaller than Elon Musk previously projected, with tracker data showing only a small number of unsupervised vehicles operating i…

Cryptsetup 2.8.7 Released To Deal With Fallout Of Linux's Rushed AF_ALG Deprecation

Linux's cryptsetup for configuring and managing encrypted storage devices is ready with a new version as the developers work to deal with the recent deprecation of the Linux AF_ALG interface...…

Cisco's open-weight bug busters take on Google and OpenAI

Who needs expensive frontier models to find software vulns? Cisco has just released two open-weight models that specialize in finding known bugs in existing codebases. The models, Antares-350M and Antares-1B, are part of Cisco’s new Antares family of security small language models (SLMs), and are now available on Hugging Face - but only to vetted users. “We’re making sure we’re gating that and ap…

Firefox 153 Released

Longtime Slashdot reader williamyf writes: FireFox 153 was released today. The most important user-facing changes are improvements to PDF handling (you can now merge PDFs and add images to them), and HDR video playback (on Windows, provided HDR is active systemwide). Other under-the-hood changes include browser-wide containers and QWAC support. The full list is in the change notes. But the most im…

AI Companies Are Buying Tons of Old Books Because They're Free of AI Slop

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: As AI companies search for more training data to improve their models, one company is offering old, printed books as an ideal source because they are guaranteed to be free of the very AI slop AI companies are producing. "The world's best AI training data is sitting on a shelf," ISBNdb, a company that produces what it claims is "the world's larges…

Sony releases one last trailer for Spider-Man: Brand New Day

The Odyssey might be cleaning up at the box office at the moment, but in two weeks another mega-blockbuster hits theaters: Spider-Man: Brand New Day, directed by Destin Daniel Cretton (Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings). Sony Pictures dropped one last trailer for this follow-up to 2021’s No Way Home, which is purportedly intended to launch a fresh trilogy of films with Tom Holland in the…

AI's cheatin' heart will make you weep

AI models will do just about anything to complete the task you ask, including cheating to get there, according to new cybersecurity evaluations from the UK government's AI Security Institute (AISI). The group found that leading models often take shortcuts to achieve a particular result and then misrepresent how they obtained that result. And they won't always admit it when asked. "Every model we…

Confusion swirls on source of diarrhea outbreak, but it’s still Taylor Farms

Federal officials on Monday reaffirmed that iceberg lettuce from Taylor Farms still appears to be the source of Cyclospora, the microscopic parasite behind a multi-state surge in explosive diarrhea cases. The assertion was intended to clear up confusion that began swirling over the weekend around a false positive test from the Food and Drug Administration—which Taylor Farms celebrated, sparking c…

US Marines' latest anti-drone toy is an AI turret that uses regular machine guns

The US military is adding autonomous gun-based counter-drone systems intended to reduce its reliance on expensive interceptor missiles. Defense robotics firm Allen Control Systems (ACS) announced a deal with the US Marine Corps on Monday to get its Bullfrog autonomous weapon system attached to the Light Marine Air Defense Integrated System (L-MADIS) expeditionary counter-drone platform. L-MADIS c…

Nintendo says users voluntarily paid higher prices, have no right to tariff refunds

Nintendo urged a court to dismiss a lawsuit demanding that it pass tariff refunds on to customers, saying that people who bought a Switch console or other products have no legal right to refunds that Nintendo is due to receive from the government. Nintendo said in a motion to dismiss yesterday that plaintiffs are "ask[ing] this Court to invent a legal duty out of whole cloth to retroactively re-p…

Canonical Launches Enterprise Store For Ubuntu Pro

BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has launched the Enterprise Store as part of Ubuntu Pro, giving organizations a way to manage Ubuntu software distribution in restricted networks, behind firewalls, and in air gapped environments. The on premises proxy sits between devices and Canonical software stores, allowing companies to cache downloads, control software revisions, and manage snaps and charms wit…

Iran says it's struck offline AWS facility in Bahrain ... again

Iran's Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) claims it hit an AWS datacenter in Bahrain months after taking it offline for the first time, in a move it claimed as retaliation for a US attack on a nuclear plant that was under construction. The IRGC said in a statement on Tuesday that it had struck back at what it called the "child-killing US Army" by attacking Amazon infrastructure in Bahrain,…

Let Tom Hiddleston be your guide to Pompeii's final day

When Mount Vesuvius erupted in 79 CE, it spewed molten rock, pumice, and hot ash over the cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum, killing thousands of people. It's one of the most famous natural disasters in human history, so naturally there have been countless documentaries about Pompeii (and at least one popular song). But only one features actor Tom Hiddleston taking on the role of a "time detectiv…

Three New Ubuntu Snap Vulnerabilities Made Public - One Dates Back To Ubuntu 16.04 LTS

Canonical today disclosed three new Snap security vulnerabilities affecting snapd. Two are rated high impact vulnerabilities while the third is considered medium but covers all Ubuntu releases of the past decade going back to Ubuntu 16.04 LTS...…

Judge Approves $1.5 Billion Anthropic Settlement Over Pirated Books Used To Train Claude

A federal judge has approved Anthropic's $1.5 billion copyright settlement over pirated books used to train its Claude chatbot, with authors and publishers set to receive about $3,000 per book. The case produced a mixed ruling for the AI industry: training on copyrighted books was found not to be illegal, but Anthropic's use of pirated copies from shadow libraries was. The Associated Press reports…

Naked mole-rat queens use a chemical signal to suppress fertility in rivals

Naked mole rats are weird. They spend their lives almost entirely underground, are largely insensitive to some kinds of pain, can persist without oxygen for a long time, rarely develop cancer, and can live past 30 years, which is decades longer than similarly sized rodents. They are also eusocial, like ants, bees, or termites—in a colony that can hold more than a hundred animals, only one female,…

Qualcomm Posts Linux Patches For X2 Elite Extreme Powered ASUS Zenbook A16

Following recent Linux kernel patches enabling the Snapdragon X2 Elite powered Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 and HP EliteBook X G2q X2 Elite laptops to boot outside of Windows 11 on ARM, Qualcomm engineers have now posted a new patch series for getting the X2 Elite Extreme powered ASUS Zenbook A16 working on Linux...…

Anthropic’s $1.5B copyright settlement approved; only 350 authors opted out

On Monday, a judge approved a $1.5 billion settlement between Anthropic and authors, ending the largest copyright class-action ever certified and granting the largest copyright settlement ever reached. Back in May, some authors fought to block the settlement, which was proposed after the court ruled that Anthropic training AI on books was fair use; however, its piracy of works was likely not. Aut…

Sales of Valve's Steam Deck crater after recent price hike

Since its 2022 launch, the Steam Deck has consistently been at or near the top of the company's "top selling products by revenue" charts, with brief dips outside of the top 10 treated as newsworthy events. But sales of the popular handheld gaming PC have apparently been on a steep decline since the system relaunched at a higher price in May. Linux-focused gaming site Boiling Steam breaks down the…

Google announces Gemini 3.6 Flash and cybersecurity AI, teases 3.5 Pro and Gemini 4

Google announced a significant evolution of its AI models at I/O in May with the release of Gemini 3.5 Flash, and it's not slowing down. The company revealed three new AI models today, including its first version of Gemini geared toward cybersecurity. However, none of the new models is the delayed Gemini 3.5 Pro, which was supposed to launch in June. Gemini 3.5 Flash, which was the star of the sh…

Oracle faces $100M annual bill to back Wisconsin datacenter power promises

Oracle says that it could face more than $100 million a year in financing costs to guarantee the power commitments behind a nearly 1 GW datacenter campus it is developing in Wisconsin with Vantage and OpenAI. Local regulators have refused to revisit a decision that they say protects existing customers and improves public transparency around the energy-related needs of datacenters. Oracle's plans…

Kratos phishing-as-a-service kit loses its battle with international law enforcement

German authorities say they have neutralized the main infrastructure supporting the Kratos phishing-as-a-service (PhaaS) kit following an operation supported by the US and Indonesia. Officers from Frankfurt am Main's Central Office for Combating Internet Crime (ZIT) and the Federal Criminal Police (BKA) described Kratos as one of the most widespread and dangerous PhaaS kits on the market. In Indo…

KDE Plasma 6.7 vs. GNOME Shell 50.3 vs. Xfce 4.20 On CachyOS With NVIDIA Graphics

Earlier this month I provided a look at the KDE Plasma 6.7 Wayland vs. X11 session performance for graphics/gaming on CachyOS using NVIDIA GeForce RTX 50 graphics. Since then Phoronix readers -- including some premium supporters -- requested seeing some additional desktops tested with the latest CachyOS packages. So here we are now with seeing how KDE Plasma 6.7 compared to the Wayland-only GNOME…

Canonical Makes The "Enterprise Store" Official For Offline/Air-Gapped Ubuntu Usage

For months the Enterprise Store "enterprise-store" has been mentioned in some Ubuntu documentation and other elements while today it was formally announced by Canonical. The Enterprise Store is for helping to manage Ubuntu Linux deployments particularly within enterprise organizations that may have their computers air-gapped or otherwise strict Internet controls...…

TreeSize won't renew perpetual-license support unless users subscribe

The company behind the disk space analyzer TreeSize has irked some users by no longer offering support or updates for perpetual licenses beyond their maintenance period unless customers subscribe. Further frustration has come from JAM Software's long-standing policy of not providing license keys or installers to TreeSize perpetual license holders after that support period ends. Since 2025, JAM So…

Firefox 153 released

Version 153.0 of the Firefox web browser has been released. Notable changes in this release include a change to the default local-file-access permissions for extensions, enabling LAN restrictions by default for all users, a visual indicator when a web site has access to the user's location, the ability to merge PDFs and add images as pages within PDFs, as well as experimental support for the JPEG…

Nvidia shows off Vera Rubin platform for tokenmaxxing

Last week, Nvidia invited a handful of journalists to a briefing about AI infrastructure to help convey the physical reality behind simulated intelligence. "Infrastructure is physical, it's real," said Ian Buck, general manager of Nvidia's hyperscale and HPC computing business. "You can touch it, you can see it, and it's what helps bring AI to life. So that is part of the goal here." The briefing…

Windows 11 Start menu changes trickle into Beta, movable taskbar still MIA

Microsoft is moving more of its redesigned Start menu into the Windows 11 Beta channel, although the long-awaited movable taskbar remains confined to experimental builds. Build 26220.8925 was released last night to Windows Insiders in the Beta channel and has "a number of improvements for the Start menu," including controls for its size and sections. The Start menu has gained small and large size…

[$] Debating the role of large language models in the kernel community

Like many development communities, the kernel community has been struggling to determine how large language models will be used in its development process. The news has been dominated recently by a strongly worded missive from Linus Torvalds on the subject, but the discussion has been rather more wide-ranging and nuanced than that. Topics that have been considered recently include the LLM attribut…

AI music platform Suno hits bum note as 55M users exposed in data breach, claims infosec expert

A data breach at AI music generator platform Suno exposed more than 55 million user accounts, according to Troy Hunt's Have I Been Pwned service, which ingested the files. The dump consisted mostly of email addresses, although phone numbers were also included where users had signed up with them instead, HIBP said. Tens of thousands of Stripe records further revealed data such as names, physical a…

When your vehicle outlives its cloud: What happens next?

Do you use your vehicle’s app to pre‑cool the cabin on a scorching day, confirm the doors are locked from bed, or have the car automatically call for help when the airbags go off? Savor those connected, cloud‑based conveniences while you can—the clock is already ticking on their obsolescence. In a few short years, you may be driving today’s vehicle without many of the features you currently enjoy…

Stratis Storage Anaconda Integration Approved For Fedora 45

The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) has approved the latest batch of features for the upcoming Fedora 45 release...…

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (capstone, fence-agents, gimp, glib2, hplip, httpd, jackson-annotations, jackson-core, jackson-databind, jackson-jaxrs-providers, and jackson-modules-base, libtiff, maven:3.8, pacemaker, python3.14, and webkit2gtk3), Debian (samba), Fedora (c-ares, dnsx, freerdp, gpsd, libreswan, libseccomp, libtiff, mingw-python-idna, mingw-python-pip, openssh, pytho…

Apps targeted at US troops contain Chinese and Russian code

A recent examination of hundreds of mobile apps marketed toward US military personnel found more than one in eight contained software built by companies in China, Russia, or other foreign nations, raising fresh concerns that adversary governments could harvest data revealing where service members live, work, and deploy. According to researchers at Purdue University, the US Military Academy at Wes…

Intel fortifies Foundry with an actual customer: Fortinet

Fortinet on Tuesday revealed it will use Intel Foundry to fab its sixth-gen Security Processor (SP6), a nice win for Chipzilla's sputtering chipmaking biz. The chips feature dedicated accelerators designed specifically for the security and cryptographic operations required by modern hardware firewalls. The custom chips are one of Fortinet's defining features. Many cybersecurity hardware players b…

LG monitors are using Windows 11 feature to serve adware

LG has come under fire over its Monitor App Installer, which is automatically and silently installed when plugging in some of the company's monitors. In this case, the monitor in question is a new LG UltraGear. Upon first connection to a Windows 11 device, the OS can check the associated device metadata and automatically install the manufacturer's UWP device app. For that to happen, Microsoft say…

UK.gov's tech department gets the chop after two years

The UK government is scrapping the department charged with leading digital and tech change across the public sector. The Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) – created by former Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – will see its responsibilities split among other departments after Science Secretary Liz Kendall was axed by new Labour Prime Minister Andy Burnham. The Departm…

AMD Ryzen AI Halo LED Driver Queued For Introduction In Linux 7.3

For those that have picked up one of the neat AMD Ryzen AI Halo mini PCs, the LED driver allowing for customization of the LED lighting bar is set to be mainlined for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle...…

Valve's Steam Frame pushes Arch Linux toward official Arm64 support

Valve and Collabora are building an Arm64 port of Arch Linux for the Steam Frame VR gaming platform, with hopes that the work will eventually feed into the upstream distro. Arch Linux has spawned a whole family of derivatives, but the official upstream distro targets 64-bit x86 and nothing else. As the homepage says: "Currently we have official packages optimized for the x86-64 architecture." Val…

Viking 1 landed on Mars 50 years ago

It has been half a century since NASA landed on Mars with the Viking 1 lander. Viking 1, one of a pair of Viking spacecraft, landed on Mars on July 20, 1976. Launched on August 20, 1975, Viking 1 arrived in orbit around Mars on June 19, 1976. The Viking program is, when adjusted for inflation, one of the most expensive robotic missions ever attempted by NASA. The spacecraft consisted of an orbite…

Intel Compute Runtime Continues Building Out Exciting "LEO"

Going in-step with last week's release of the Intel Graphics Compiler 2.38.2, out today is the Intel Compute Runtime 26.27.39122.11. Most intriguing with the new release is Intel continuing to build out the still-experimental LEO feature...…

AMD Getting The Linux Kernel Ready For Zen 6 Profiling/Perf With More EILVT Registers

Among the recent patch series in preparing Linux for upcoming AMD Zen 6 processors is making the kernel aware of additional EILVT registers to be found with at least EPYC Venice platforms...…

Scalding hot AI accelerators have put datacenters in hot water. Two-phase cooling could chill them out

Liquid cooling makes it possible to operate multi-kilowatt accelerators and ultra -dense datacenter racks, but new research commissioned by startup Accelsius suggests that we've been using the wrong liquids for the job. The company found different cooling fluids can shave millions off datacenter operating costs by allowing bit barns to run their water systems up to 14° C higher than existing syst…

InputPlumber 0.78 Released With Expanded Hardware Support

InputPlumber is out with its newest feature release. As a reminder, InputPlumber is the open-source input router and remapper daemon for combining various input devices from gamepads to mice and keyboards as well as the ability to emulate them...…

Some Mullvad VPN customers tunnel for exit after co-founder donates millions to populist party

Swedish VPN vendor Mullvad is facing a backlash from some customers after co-founder Daniel Berntsson personally donated SEK 5 million (£385,000, $519,000) to the controversial populist Örebropartiet, which is running in Sweden's national elections for the first time. Berntsson has this week published a blog post explaining the donation, alongside posts titled "Immigration," "Political individual…

Judgment day looms for UK's £8.35B Skynet military satellite comms upgrade

The UK government's projects authority has sounded the alarm over progress on Skynet 6, the estimated £8.35 billion program to upgrade the military's satellite communications. The National Infrastructure and Service Transformation Authority (NISTA) rated the Skynet 6 project red, which means "successful delivery of the project appears to be unachievable" in its current form. The definition cites…

Europe slaps AliExpress with €550 million fine for selling dodgy goods

The European Commission yesterday fined Alibaba subsidiary AliExpress €550 million ($630m/ £467m) for not doing enough to stop selling dodgy products - the largest ever fine issued under the Digital Services Act. AliExpress is Alibaba’s consumer-facing e-commerce brand and complements the parent company’s B2B biz. Brussels last year warned AliExpress that it wasn’t doing enough to stop sellers on…

Google Cloud outage shows it’s still hard to understand hyperscalers’ real resilience regimes

Google Cloud last week experienced an outage that analysts say demonstrates that not all promises of cloudy resilience are created equal. Google’s incident report explained that three services – the VMware Engine (GCVE), NetApp Volumes, and Bare Metal Solutions (BMS) – experienced a 15-hour outage due to a cooling failure in its europe-west4-a zone. The report includes the following detail: “The…

OVH reveals semi-secret plan to fix critical Januscape hypervisor bug with mass reboots – and an Australian crash-test dummy

French cloud operator OVH has revealed it used its Sydney, Australia, datacenter as the crash test dummy to test a rapid rollout of a fix for the critical Januscape guest-host escape bug in the Linux kernel-based virtual machine (KVM). Januscape, aka CVE-2026-53359, allowed attackers with root access to a guest VM to execute code as root on the host, crash that machine, or take over all other gue…

Cold Reset Recovery Coming Together To Better Help Intel GPUs On Linux

One of the patch series going through nearly a dozen revisions now is for introducing a cold reset recovery method for the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) drivers with an initial focus on the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver...…

Attackers pummel critical WordPress vuln to create all sorts of mischief

If you use WordPress, patch now. Just hours after fixes came out, attackers have begun exploiting two bugs that, when chained together, allow pre-authentication remote code execution (RCE). And security researchers tell us there’s a very good chance the miscreants had an AI assist. “Once the vulnerabilities were publicly disclosed, reproducing them with the help of frontier AI models was only a m…

Protect Your Privacy with California's DROP Tool

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

NetworkManager 1.58 Released With 464XLAT CLAT Support & GENEVE Interface

NetworkManager 1.58 is out today with the latest feature enhancements for bettering wired and wireless network management on Linux...…

Scammers impersonate FBI on social media, prey on crime victims

Real FBI agents won't slide into your DMs and offer to help you recover stolen funds. The bureau's Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) updated an earlier warning on Monday about scammers impersonating the agency online, saying fraudsters continue to use the scheme "to deceive and revictimize individuals." According to IC3, there are two different schemes being used to target cybercrime victims,…

AWS customer learns the hard way how even the smallest oversight can be mission-critical

Nothing can ruin the end of a week like finding out that all of the websites and hosted email you’re responsible for are offline, which is exactly what happened to Christopher Bradbury and his web design and development firm, Digital Takumi last week. AWS has since resolved the situation, but Bradbury's mistakes can serve as a useful lesson to others of what not to do. As Bradbury explained to Th…

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

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

Malicious cloud customers can bring down the power grid

AI datacenters wreak havoc on the power grid under normal circumstances, so what happens if a bad actor controls all the GPUs and wants to cause harm? Cybersecurity researchers in China have devised a way for malicious tenants to attack their infrastructure provider, potentially causing blackouts or damaging equipment. The attack, dubbed Bit2Watt, imagines an adversary masquerading as a legitimat…

Intel Expanding Memory Options For Current Xeon 6 / Xeon 6+ Servers

With Intel's next-generation Xeon Diamond Rapids processors not slated to launch until next year and with AMD EPYC Venice being right around the corner, Intel announced today that with upcoming BIOS updates they will be expanding the range of RDIMM and MRDIMM memory support for current-generation Xeon 6 and Xeon 6+ processors...…

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

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

Frontier LLMs couldn't help Hugging Face fight off evil agents

Apparently, being a leading destination for AI development doesn't mean AI will bail you out. AI agents broke into Hugging Face's production infrastructure, but commercial LLM guardrails blocked the forensic investigation, forcing it to turn to a Chinese open-weight model instead. The intrusion, “driven, end to end, by an autonomous AI agent system,” compromised a “limited set” of Hugging Face’s…

[$] Fedora grapples with change

The Fedora Project is known for, among other things, having a well-defined set of processes for just about everything. It has extensive packaging guidelines that deal with the complexities of creating RPMs to install software, as well as processes for managing the legal questions that arise around shipping software. Fedora also has a well-defined change process for dealing with self-contained tech…

AMD Talks Up The Great Opportunities Of SPIR-V IR With ROCm

While AMD ROCm 7.14 released last week as the first production release built off TheRock, there is already more to look forward to moving into the future with the AMD ROCm stack... In particular, SPIR-V with ROCm becoming a reality for unified binaries that can work across graphics architectures/targets, better portability across GPU hardware, and other improvements to the experience in targeting…

The Document Foundation says Microsoft's file formats keep users on a short leash

The Document Foundation (TDF) has criticized proprietary file formats and the lock-in they create, with Microsoft's ubiquitous Office formats drawing particular scrutiny. TDF would doubtless welcome a world where everyone used LibreOffice or another open equivalent, yet the reality is that Microsoft's productivity tools still dominate the office software market. However, that shouldn't be a probl…

GNOME Changes Security Disclosure Policies Due To AI-Generated Reports

The GNOME project is changing its handling of security reports due to the influx of AI/LLM-generated security findings...…

Catanzaro: Some changes to GNOME security tracking

Michael Catanzaro, who has been managing GNOME security issue tracking since November 2020, has written a blog post that details some changes in how he will be managing GNOME vulnerability reports from now on due to an increase in AI-generated security reports. He will be switching from a 90-day deadline for disclosures to 30 days for issues reported on August 1, or later. "The shorter deadline wo…

Show HN: DeepSQL – A self-hostable DBA agent for Postgres and MySQL

Microsoft 365 calendars become spy drop boxes in HOLLOWGRAPH campaign

Microsoft 365 calendars have become the latest hiding place for espionage malware, with attackers stashing commands and stolen files inside appointments dated 24 years into the future. Researchers at Group-IB say they've uncovered a malware component they call HOLLOWGRAPH that swaps the usual command-and-control server for something rather less conspicuous – a compromised Microsoft 365 calendar.…

Windows Server Update Services buckle under Microsoft's metadata mountain

UPDATED Microsoft's aging Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) has hit "severe degradation," leaving some organizations facing painfully slow synchronizations or timeouts when fetching updates. According to Microsoft, "a buildup of publishing metadata" has meant that "organizations might experience increased synchronization times or sync operation timeouts on WSUS servers." We're told the proble…

Linux 7.2 Improves Intel Panther Lake Xe3 Arc B390 Graphics Performance

My testing of the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel continues in the lab. One of the latest promising findings from this kernel that will be released as stable in August is faster Intel Xe3 graphics performance on Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" hardware.…

Linux Patches Introduce "KNOD" For In-Kernel Network Offloading Directly To AMD GPUs

Some extremely cool patches were posted to the Linux kernel mailing list on Sunday. The patches for "KNOD" allow for in-kernel network offloading to GPUs with an initial focus on AMD GPU support. What makes this all the more nifty is that it doesn't depend upon any user-space libraries like AMD ROCm but is all handled in-kernel with driving the GPU directly...…

EU's AI labeling rules take effect next month

From August 2, providers of AI systems in the EU will have to tell people when they are interacting with a machine and add machine-readable marks to AI-generated or manipulated content under new transparency rules. Launching guidance ahead of the deadline, Henna Virkkunen, European Commission executive vice-president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy, said: "The Commission supports the…

[$] Merging famfs?

The famfs filesystem, which is meant to provide shared access to huge memory-resident files on CXL and other devices, returned to the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) in 2026. It was first discussed at LSFMM+BPF 2024 and a new implementation was described at the 2025 gathering, but it still has not made its way into the kernel; LWN looked at a discussion abo…

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by Debian (kernel, libnfs, roundcube, and tiff), Fedora (antlr4-project, chromium, erlang, libseccomp, libtiff, log4cxx, mbedtls, node-exporter, opam, openssh, proftpd, python-asyncssh, python-django5, python-libcst, python-orjson, python-uv-build, ruby, rust-astral_async_zip, spoofdpi, uv, and yq), Mageia (bind, clamav, erlang, libidn, libreoffice, nmap, nodejs,…

Watching the world burn as all the money flows into a multitrillion-dollar Magic 8 Ball

KETTLE Your host Brandon Vigliarolo has been breathing in wildfire smoke from Canada for the past few days, which really has him thinking about whether all those AI datacenters building gas turbines and contributing to climate change is really worth it. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube where you can subscrib…

Infosec expert: Paidwork users' data pwned after 23M-record database dumped online

More than 23 million people who signed up to earn money from online gigs have allegedly had their personal and financial information spilled onto the internet following a breach of microtask platform Paidwork. The incident was added to Troy Hunt's Have I Been Pwned site after a database allegedly stolen from Paidwork was publicly released earlier this month. According to the breach notification s…

Firefox 153 Available With Support For Vulkan Video Decoding, Experimental JPEG-XL

Mozilla has uploaded the Firefox 153.0 release binaries today for the newest monthly update to this cross-platform web browser. Making Firefox 153 exciting is that it's the newest Extended Support Release "ESR" as well as introducing Vulkan Video decode support...…

openSUSE Seeking Additional Corporate Sponsors

While openSUSE is closely aligned with SUSE as a company, they aren't the exclusive sponsor of this free and open-source Linux distribution with its rolling-release Tumbleweed and Leap stable releases. AMD has been a longtime major supporter of openSUSE and the Fastly content delivery company has been another platinum sponsor too besides SUSE. There are also various other lower-tier sponsors while…

Microsoft rushes out Windows fix for Dell's hot and bothered PCs

Microsoft has dispatched an out-of-band update to fix an incompatibility on certain Dell models and clear the way for them to receive the July 2026 Windows security patch. The update addresses an issue with the Intel Innovation Platform Framework drive that could "cause changes in performance, power consumption, or system behavior." The fix has arrived for Windows 11 25H2 and 24H2 as KB5121767, w…

UK's seventh prime minister in a decade says he'll ditch digital ID scheme

Andy Burnham is barely through the door at No. 10, and one of Keir Starmer's flagship tech projects is already heading for the shredder, with the incoming prime minister set to scrap the UK's digital ID scheme while creating a Cabinet-level minister for artificial intelligence. The move, reported by Reuters, kills off a policy Starmer spent the past year championing. His government pitched digita…

AMD Posts AVX10_V2_AUX ISA Support Patches For GCC Compiler

Earlier this month Intel compiler engineers posted initial GCC compiler patches for the AI Compute Extensions "ACE" that was born out of the x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group to augment AVX and scalar code with new capabilities for AI/ML workloads. Now as part of that an AMD compiler engineer posted patches over the weekend for AVX10_V2_AUX ISA support...…

Linux's Qualcomm Crypto Accelerator Driver "Harmful" And Being Disabled: Slower Than CPU, History Of Bugs

The Qualcomm Crypto Engine Accelerator "QCE" driver is being disabled within the Linux 7.3 kernel over a number of issues, including being slower than having the CPU cores handling cryptographic work and a history of different driver bugs. Plus race conditions causing security issues and other challenges...…

Hyprland 0.56 Released With Many Enhancements To This Wayland Compositor

Out today is Hyprland 0.56 as the newest feature update to this unique Wayland compositor and incorporating just under three months worth of improvements...…

Kernel prepatch 7.2-rc4

The 7.2-rc4 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said: "This whole week I had the feeling that people were starting to go on summer vacation, but running the numbers shows that I must have been wrong - it all looks pretty normal."…

Linux 7.2-rc4 Released: Looking Like The "New Normal"

The fourth weekly release candidate of the Linux 7.2 kernel is now available for testing...…

Nvidia DGX Spark as a daily driver

Introduction to Formal Verification with Lean Part 1

The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

If you are looking for a reason to celebrate today, the last of the MPEG-4 Part 2 patents expired today...…

FFmpeg Lands Latest AVX-512 Optimization: 1.372x Faster In Pixel Format Conversion

The latest hand-tuned code in the FFmpeg multimedia library for allowing better performance on today's modern Intel/AMD AVX-512-capable processors is showing 1.372x faster performance for RGB24 to RGBA pixel format conversions...…

Intel Starts Shipping High-NA EUV Silicon

"Half a Second" — a book on the XZ backdoor

Adrian Mastronardi has released a book called Half a Second; it is a detailed look into the XZ backdoor attempt of 2024. The book is freely available under a (non-free) noncommercial, no-derivatives CC license. Half a Second tells that story as one continuous narrative: the burned-out volunteer who maintained the code alone and was patiently, expertly manipulated into giving it up; the engineer wh…

Three stable kernel updates

The 7.1.4, 6.18.39, and 6.12.96 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains a fairly large set of important fixes.…

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

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

Building an Arch Linux aarch64 port for Holo Core (Collabora blog)

Collabora has published a blog post about its work with Valve on Holo Core, which is a port of Arch Linux to aarch64 to be used as the the operating system on Valve's 64-bit Arm Steam Frame gaming system. Collabora has released the sources, binary packages, and a container image for aarch64 devices. The post describes some of the challenges in porting Arch Linux to a new architecture, and what rem…

Your Vision. Your Legacy. Your Future.

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

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

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

ScreenWall – Turn old phones into synced widgets for your space

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nobody knows what a used GPU cluster is worth

Mechanical light bulb from 1675 [video]

European Court: Apple Can Not Shirk Off its Interoperability Requirements

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

Don’t Repeat NY’s 3D Printing Blunder

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

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

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

Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership

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

Lessons Learned from CISA’s Recent GitHub Leak

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

Building Our Future Together

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay—Accountability Must Keep Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

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

Help EFF Cut the AI Hype

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

FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFF to Gov. Pritzker: Veto Illinois’ HB 5511

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police Drones

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

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

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

Primed for Malware: Stop Selling Compromised Android Devices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online

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

🦅 Domestic Spying Takes an L | EFFector 38.12

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

Scattered Spider Hackers Plead Guilty on Day 1 of Trial

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

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

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

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

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

Canada Is Forging Ahead with Its Dangerous Surveillance Bill

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

EFF Thanks SerpApi For Helping Us Protect Free Speech Online

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

Call for Submissions: Digital Pride

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

A New Bill Takes Aim at Government Pressure to Silence Lawful Online Speech

Last week, Senators Ted Cruz and Ron Wyden introduced the Justice Against Weaponized Bureaucratic Overreach to Networked Expression, or JAWBONE Act. The bipartisan legislation creates a federal cause of action against government officials who coerce or attempt to coerce broadcasters, interactive computer services, or AI providers into taking actions against lawful, First-Amendment-protected speech…

Court Records Should Be Free

Court records belong to the public. Yet anyone seeking access to federal court filings through PACER, a government software system that stands for Public Access to Court Electronic Records, is usually required to pay hefty fees to search for and view documents. PACER’s fees have long acted as a barrier that makes it hard, especially for low income people, to see and understand the work produced b…

Field Notes from a Year of OPSEC Training

Late last year, as part of our annual “Year in Review” series, we summarized our efforts providing digital privacy and security advice to at-risk communities. OPSEC trainings (short for operational security, a catch-all term we use to describe any kind of workshop, advising session, assessment, or presentation about operational security for individuals and organization) are something we've long pr…

AI Regulation Should Be Rational, Not Retaliatory

The Trump administration’s approach to AI safety, particularly the generative AI models that regularly grab headlines, has been haphazard at best. At worst, it’s unconstitutional. As EFF and our allies explained in an amicus brief, the Pentagon’s actions against one company, Anthropic, violate the First Amendment because they were motivated by the administration’s desire to punish an uncooperative…

‘Popa’ Botnet Linked to Publicly-Traded Israeli Firm

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

The Free and Open Web Is Under Attack at the IETF

The ability to access publicly available information using automated tools is a central value and benefit of a free and open internet. Automated access—often called crawling or scraping—powers important, useful tools for locating, preserving, and analyzing online information. For example, crawling and scraping helps journalists, researchers, and watchdog organizations report the news, find securit…

The NO FAKES Act Could Silence Satire, Commentary, And News

The NO FAKES Act is supposed to target harmful AI-generated impersonations. But in reality, it will make it easier to suppress commentary, satire, and other lawful speech. That's why EFF has signed a letter urging the Senate Judiciary Committee not to advance the bill in its current form. Take action Tell Congress to Say No to NO FAKES In the letter, EFF joins a coalition of civil society groups i…

Onward, Friends

After 26 years, today is my last day at EFF. It's been a terrific and wild ride — the organization has grown from a tiny band of fighty people trying to plant a flag for freedom and justice in the coming digital world into a large, established band of fighty people doing, well, much the same. The world around us has changed enormously. Our core values haven't budged. I'm proud of what we've achiev…

Who Runs the Ransomware Group ‘The Gentlemen?’

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

A Record-Breaking Patch Tuesday for June 2026

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

Hackers Used Meta’s AI Support Bot to Seize Instagram Accounts

The Instagram accounts for the Obama White House and the Chief Master Sergeant of the U.S. Space Force were briefly defaced with pro-Iranian images and messages over the weekend, after instructions began circulating on Telegram showing how to trick Meta’s “AI support assistant” bot into resetting account passwords. A screenshot from a video released on Telegram claiming to show how Meta’s AI custo…