Terminal

FEX 2610 Released With Handling For AVX-VNNI, Disk Cache Improvements ↗ (opens external article)

FEX 2610 released today as the newest monthly release of this open-source emulator for running x86_64 games/apps on AArch64 for ARM64 Linux systems, including most notably by Valve's Steam Frame headset...…

Margaret Hamilton, who led software development for Apollo program, dies at 90 ↗ (opens external article)

PA measles outbreak tops 1,000 cases, largest since disease was eliminated ↗ (opens external article)

Pennsylvania's explosive measles outbreak is now the largest the US has seen since the highly infectious virus was declared eliminated in 2000. With well over 1,000 cases, it's the largest on record since 1991. Pennsylvania's health officials reported 1,078 measles cases in all of 2026 as of this afternoon. That includes 12 cases in January and March, with the remaining 1,066 cases since April, w…

Despite what Watson said, Rosalind Franklin understood structure of DNA first ↗ (opens external article)

TP-Link problems in US grow amid FCC router ban and four state lawsuits ↗ (opens external article)

TP-Link is facing more legal troubles in the US as Florida and three other states filed lawsuits alleging that it lied to consumers about its connections to China and the risks of its routers being exploited by Chinese state hackers. The lawsuits were filed yesterday, about six months after the Federal Communications Commission announced a sweeping ban on consumer-grade routers produced wholly or…

The Mathocalypse ↗ (opens external article)

Browser-in-browser attacks use fake Meta Muse Ad lure to steal credentials ↗ (opens external article)

A phishing campaign targeting advertising managers by impersonating Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Manus to steal credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes has added a fake Muse Ads product to its lure lineup – just eight days after Meta launched its personal AI agent. Meta announced Muse on September 8, and by September 17, a very convincing website – museads.ai – for a p…

ICANN Reveals 2026 Round Applications for New Generic Top-Level Domains ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft and Nvidia Unveil Surface Laptop Ultra For $2,599 ↗ (opens external article)

At a press event today, Microsoft unveiled the new Surface Laptop Ultra featuring an NVIDIA RTX Spark platform with a Blackwell-based GPU capable of up to one petaflop of AI compute. The laptop supports up to 128GB of unified memory for running models as large as 120 billion parameters locally, while also adding a 15-inch mini-LED display, expanded ports, upgraded cooling, and support for hundreds…

Meta and Microsoft take steps to reduce employee usage of Claude AI ↗ (opens external article)

Chemistry Nobel goes to reactions like those that gave life a hand ↗ (opens external article)

Life is remarkably selective. Life relies on many molecules with what is termed "handedness"—they're chemically identical but are mirror images of each other. Most chemical reactions will make a 50-50 mix of the left- and right-handed forms of a chemical, but life uses only one of them. In fact, because of the differences between left- and right-handed chemicals, most of the key enzymes used by o…

Push ifs up and fors down: The idiom, its algebra, and its limits ↗ (opens external article)

Pediatricians renew call to ban raw milk as anti-science rhetoric reigns ↗ (opens external article)

As many doctors are moving ahead with the latest advances of modern medicine—from powerful obesity drugs to breakthrough cancer treatments—pediatricians are being forced to turn back, fighting to maintain advances in children's health that were hard-won decades ago. With anti-vaccine advocate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. as health secretary, the American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has spent a considera…

Claude Haiku 5.5 ↗ (opens external article)

GPT‑6 and Intelligent UI for everyone ↗ (opens external article)

Fraudster jailed for using 10K bots and AI songs to outstream Taylor Swift ↗ (opens external article)

After pleading guilty, a 54-year-old North Carolina man, Michael Smith, was sentenced to 18 months in prison for using artificial intelligence to generate songs for a scheme that stole millions from music streaming platforms. In a press release Tuesday, the US Department of Justice said that Smith is the first American criminally charged with AI-assisted streaming fraud. First charged in 2024, Sm…

Docker Agent ↗ (opens external article)

AWS launches open-source AI agent sandbox to prevent YOLO mode disasters ↗ (opens external article)

AWS has offered multiple open-source strategies for holding AI agents accountable, and now it’s adding a full-on sandbox to this stack. Dubbed Strands Box, the new solution uses OS-level isolation and some of AWS’ other recent open-source AI control tools to, ostensibly, retain greater control over autonomous AI agents’ behavior. “Agents increasingly run in ‘YOLO mode,’ approving every action wit…

US states sue popular kitmaker TP-Link over China risks ↗ (opens external article)

The attorneys general of Florida, Iowa, Montana, and Nebraska have sued ubiquitous networking and smart home tech maker TP-Link, alleging its security claims were misleading and it hadn't properly disclosed ties to China. The company has a large presence in US retail and the tech channel, especially in consumer routers, with stats from Circana asserting it had around 36.6 percent US market share…

Show HN: Agent.reviews – Where AI agents read and write reviews on tools ↗ (opens external article)

Starlink's plan to avoid orbital near-misses: Ephemeris sharing ↗ (opens external article)

SpaceX has acknowledged the need for satellite operators to collaborate to avoid collisions and has taken the unusual step of sharing imagery showing how close spacecraft are coming to each other. The company has called on other operators to share their satellites' ephemeris (a set of parameters describing the position and velocity of a spacecraft over time) to facilitate timely avoidance maneuve…

Poetry is the new AI security threat as PoeLLM malware infects 3K+ servers ↗ (opens external article)

A suspected Italian attacker armed with a malware-controlling poem has infected more than 3,000 servers since April, breaking into enterprise AI infrastructure to mine cryptocurrency and add compromised systems to its growing botnet. This is the first case of “adversarial poetry” - an AI jailbreak technique that turns harmful prompts into poems to trick LLMs into bypassing safety guardrails - tha…

Star Labs StarFighter Ultra: A Modern High-End Linux Laptop With Coreboot ↗ (opens external article)

When it comes to Linux pre-loaded laptops, I have looked at hardware from most of these vendors over the past 22+ years of Phoronix. One vendor I haven't had the chance to personally test until now is the UK-based Star Labs. That changed recently and over the past few weeks I have been testing out their new StarFighter laptop that offers great Linux support and comes pre-loaded with Coreboot and s…

Jaguar Type 01 debuts; now, no one remembers the electric Ferrari ↗ (opens external article)

Does it feel like people are perhaps a little grumpier or more on edge these days? It’s not like it’s without reason. There are wars. The climate is going haywire. Someone just died of plague. Scientific research is under attack. Machines keep stealing humans’ work. The media is a mess. And just when it all starts to feel a little overwhelming, Jaguar goes and unveils a new car. The Type 01 is th…

Show HN: Bigwords.page – Turn any screen into a sign. The URL is the app ↗ (opens external article)

Navier–Stokes Lost in Translation ↗ (opens external article)

Trade group crunches numbers on Trump’s impossible push for 100% US-made tech ↗ (opens external article)

One of Donald Trump’s biggest goals as president is to increase domestic manufacturing and reshore supply chains so that the most in-demand technologies in the world can be 100 percent made in the United States. By executive order last December, he launched his “Genesis Mission,” an ambitious plan seeking to leverage US dominance in AI to maintain or seize an edge in advanced robotics, biotechnol…

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

Visa, Mastercard, major banks facing new litigation over 'anticompetitive' fees ↗ (opens external article)

Why were Victorian elites so effective? ↗ (opens external article)

Animated ASCII Art for Web Pages ↗ (opens external article)

Xbox Secures Exclusive GTA 6 Streaming Rights ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has reportedly secured exclusive cloud-streaming rights for Grand Theft Auto VI, meaning Xbox Cloud Gaming will be the only service able to stream the game at launch. "Rockstar Games still hasn't announced a PC version of Grand Theft Auto VI, so this deal will allow Xbox to market its Xbox Cloud Gaming service to PC players who would otherwise need an Xbox Series X / S or PS5 console," r…

When one datacenter is no longer enough ↗ (opens external article)

Training the largest AI models is no longer simply a question of adding more GPUs. As clusters grow, power availability is becoming a hard physical constraint, forcing infrastructure teams to consider how a single training workload can operate across multiple data centres. That creates a very different networking problem. Traditional datacenter interconnect was designed to move traffic between si…

SynthID Detector ↗ (opens external article)

Mistral says "Le Chonk" can challenge the best AI models ↗ (opens external article)

As tensions mount over who gets access to top-end artificial intelligence, French company Mistral has released a new freely available model that it claims can compete with the very best from the US and China. The new 1 trillion-parameter model, Mistral Large 4—nicknamed Le Chonk—can be used and customized by anyone. It’s currently available in preview, with a final version to follow by the end of…

AI-assisted proof of optimal packing for 11 squares ↗ (opens external article)

Google rolls out improved SynthID AI content detector, now available globally ↗ (opens external article)

Every piece of AI content from Google's Gemini models has a hidden SynthID label, which makes it very difficult to pass the content off as authentic. SynthID has also gotten buy-in from other major AI players, but actually checking for those invisible watermarks has been a convoluted process. It's going to be a little easier going forward, though. Google has announced that its SynthID detector no…

AI/ML is becoming a performance factor in motorsport ↗ (opens external article)

There’s been something of a change in the world of motorsport over the past few years. It has to do with where the money comes from. In the old days, it was tobacco and, to a lesser extent, booze. Today such things are mostly banned, and when you look at a racecar covered in sponsor logos, you’re likely to see something crypto-, cyber-, or AI-related. This makes sense—an ever-larger share of our…

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

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

NVIDIA 615.78.08 Linux Driver Adds VK_NV_low_latency2 r3 For Improved VKD3D-Proton ↗ (opens external article)

NVIDIA today released their 615.78.08 Linux driver build with a useful improvement for gamers using Steam Play (Proton) with Direct3D 12 games via VKD3D-Proton along with a variety of other fixes...…

next-20261007: linux-next ↗ (opens external article)

Version:next-20261007 (linux-next) Released:2026-10-07…

Europe's mobile operators sell fewer phones but gain share as budget market shrivels ↗ (opens external article)

European mobile operators are gaining a slightly larger share of smartphone sales, not because they are selling more devices, but because other sales channels are shrinking faster. This is according to market watcher Counterpoint Research, which says that sales of new smartphones through European operators were down by 4 percent during the second quarter of this year, compared with the same perio…

Anti-patterns in software blogging ↗ (opens external article)

Review: Fine, let's talk about Digger ↗ (opens external article)

I found the trailer for Digger intriguing, starring a nearly unrecognizable Tom Cruise and giving off strong Dr. Strangelove vibes. Plus, it is four-time Oscar-winning director Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s (Birdman) first English-language film since 2015’s The Revenant. Those elements quickly moved it near the top of my "must-see" list even if details about the actual plot were lacking. Given Iñárritu…

House with 15m underground tunnels for sale for 300k ↗ (opens external article)

Kage: Google Experimenting With Linux Driver Isolation Using In-Kernel LFI Sandboxes ↗ (opens external article)

Google engineers are experimenting with Linux kernel device driver isolation using in-kernel sandboxes leveraging LLVM's Lightweight Fault Isolation (LFI) functionality...…

Google Playground: Create and play custom games ↗ (opens external article)

Nine in 10 VMware customers eye the exit as licensing bills bite ↗ (opens external article)

Nine out of ten respondents to a survey of VMware customers say higher licensing costs were prompting them to consider alternatives. Unisphere Research surveyed 269 executives, managers, and professionals at VMware user organizations between December 2025 and February 2026. The study, commissioned by third-party support provider Rimini Street, also found that 54 percent cited the end of perpetual…

Dutch tax office ditches Microsoft 365 cloud for on-premises alternative ↗ (opens external article)

The Netherlands Tax and Customs Administration has abandoned its planned Microsoft 365 cloud migration in favor of services hosted on infrastructure it controls, alongside European open source alternatives. Email and calendars will move on-premises in 2027, followed by storage and collaboration services later that year and in 2028. The letter to parliament from Eelco Eerenberg, State Secretary fo…

Shipping JPEG XL in Chrome ↗ (opens external article)

Qualcomm Posts QPaCE Linux Driver Code For Faster ZRAM On Newest SoCs ↗ (opens external article)

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 "Hawi" SoC features the Qualcomm Page Compression Engine "QPaCE" hardware accelerator. Linux patches posted recently provide a QPaCE driver for accelerating page compression and decompression for the ZRAM block device...…

If you're looking, here's a "good deal" for NASA and the European Space Agency ↗ (opens external article)

It's no surprise that NASA's new tack toward foreign partnerships—good deals only, please—is challenging preconceived notions of international cooperation in space. Without a massive budget hike, the US space agency's emphasis on building a Moon Base and winning a competition for lunar real estate and resources with China will inevitably leave lesser priorities behind. Gone is the Lunar Gateway,…

Francis Halzen Wins Nobel Physics Prize For Antarctic 'Ghost Particle' Hunt ↗ (opens external article)

University of Wisconsin-Madison physicist Francis Halzen has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to understanding astrophysical neutrinos. Halzen led the development of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory beneath the Antarctic ice, which has helped trace high-energy neutrinos back to cosmic sources such as supermassive black holes and opened a new era of "multi-messenge…

FortiBleed still a bleeding nuisance as FBI confirms ongoing attacks ↗ (opens external article)

The FBI and US Secret Service (USSS) say criminals using credentials linked to the FortiBleed campaign are locking organizations out of their Fortinet firewalls. The agencies published a joint advisory on Tuesday, citing SOCRadar's verification of more than 86,644 compromised devices across 194 countries. "Based on initial responses, some victims may get locked out of their Fortinet devices if th…

XMFS: Experimental File-System Being Worked On By Huawei For Modern Linux Servers ↗ (opens external article)

Huawei engineers are experimenting with a new file-system called XMFS. XMFS was presented this week at LPC 2026 in Czechia as a file-system for modern Linux servers with CXL 3.0 or Huawei United Bus connectivity...…

Microsoft Updates Its WSL2 Linux Kernel With DXGKRNL Improvement, More Features Enabled ↗ (opens external article)

Following the Windows Subsystem for Linux 3.0.2 release with support for running WSL2 now on very large servers and also experimental sparse VHD storage support, Microsoft has now released a new version of the WSL2 Linux kernel as their downstream kernel configuration tailored for WSL2 usage...…

Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2026 to Henri B. Kagan and Kenso Soai ↗ (opens external article)

AMD Engineer Talks Up New IBS Memory Profiler Feature Found On Zen 6 ↗ (opens external article)

One of the AMD Zen 6 CPU features that hasn't been talked about too widely beyond appearing in a public AMD tech doc is the IBS Memory Profiler. This week in Prague at LPC 2026 an AMD engineer talked up Zen 6's IBS Memory Profiler and its benefits for hot page detection and promotion on Linux systems...…

A font recreated from photographs of classic Commodore 64 keycaps ↗ (opens external article)

Rails originator roasted over Rust boosterism ↗ (opens external article)

Last month at Rails World 2026, Ruby on Rails creator David Heinemeier Hansson gave a relentlessly optimistic keynote in which he suggested AI has all but eliminated the need for developers to manually write code. But perhaps DHH, as he is known online, shouldn’t delete his code editor quite yet. On Sunday, DHH posted about a test in which he had frontier agents implement and optimize his company…

COSMIC shuts the door on AI code as GNOME debates letting bug reports in ↗ (opens external article)

System76 is banning AI-generated content from contributions to the COSMIC desktop. Some GNOME sub-projects also restrict AI-generated contributions, but one developer is urging them to make an exception for vulnerability reports. The COSMIC desktop project has changed its contributors' guidelines. The latest version now has a clear no-AI rule, insisting that contributors declare: "I have not incl…

From reactive to proactive: How endpoint monitoring is fixing broken meeting rooms ↗ (opens external article)

The role of meeting rooms is changing. Traditionally, they were formal spaces built around a large central table and inflexible physical setup, reserved primarily for board meetings, client presentations, or official status updates. The rise of hybrid work and advances in collaboration technology have made that approach increasingly obsolete. Employees now come into the office to connect, collabo…

Google Enters Massive 3.6-GW Power Deal With Constellation Energy ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Google has contracted for 3,590 megawatts of power from Constellation Energy on the largest US power grid, with new nuclear energy accounting for about a quarter of that supply, the companies said on Tuesday. Constellation will make more than $4.3 billion of new investments in its fleet as part of the agreement, which involves adding capacity at se…

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

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

openssh-10.6 released ↗ (opens external article)

In their usual, unassuming fashion, the OpenSSH project have released a new version, release 10.6. The full text of the 10.6 release nodes reads: OpenSSH 10.6 was released on 2026-10-06. It is available from the mirrors listed at https://www.openssh.com/. OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support. Recently the OpenSSH team have received…

LibreSSL 4.2.2 and 4.3.3 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

South Korean president calls for creation of tools that stop all cyber-attacks ↗ (opens external article)

South Korean president Lee Jae Myung has told the nation’s cabinet that it’s time to develop AI-powered defensive tools to combat AI-wielding attackers. “Recently, a series of personal information leak incidents have been occurring at financial and public institutions,” he said yesterday – likely referring to incidents like the breach at e-tailer Coupang and last week’s raid on local banks that e…

South Korea Says AI Agents May Have Been Used to Hack the Country's Banks ↗ (opens external article)

South Korean President Lee Jae Myung says there are signs AI models may have been used in recent cyberattacks against several major banks. "In some hacking incidents, signs have emerged of AI being used, causing considerable public concern and anxiety," Lee said during a cabinet meeting. "Please establish the circumstances swiftly and clearly, and concentrate personnel and resources on minimizing…

Microsoft defines its Azure instance lifecycle, without any info about timing ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has updated the lifecycle of an Azure instance, without offering any information on how long it takes for an instance type to expire. Redmond’s “enhanced lifecycle” landed in late September in a post that explains the four phases in the life of a cloudy VM: Current – VMs are recommended for new deployments, are available in many regions, and receive standard maintenance and support; Ext…

Another Dozen Vulnerabilities Found In The X.Org Server & XWayland ↗ (opens external article)

With the assistance of AI, another dozen security vulnerabilities affecting both the conventional X.Org Server as well as XWayland were made public this evening...…

New Patches For Linux's Zswap Show Major Improvements ↗ (opens external article)

Amid multiple ongoing innovations being pursued in the Linux memory management space amid sky high RAM prices, a new patch series posted on Monday aim to enhance the Zswap performance for this compressed RAM cache for swap pages...…

Anthropic reconfigures its cool kids security program ↗ (opens external article)

Only a week after warning about the perils of competitor Z.ai's GLM-5.3 model and its advanced cybersecurity capabilities, Anthropic has expanded its Cyber Verification Program (CVP) – or rather, reconfigured it. "For the past six months, we’ve enabled trusted access through two programs: Project Glasswing and the CVP," the AI biz said. "Now, we’re integrating these programs into one expanded off…

Google teams with nuclear power giant to give reactors a tune-up ↗ (opens external article)

Google on Tuesday struck a deal with Constellation Energy for 3,590 megawatts of future energy supply, including nearly a gigawatt of new nuclear capacity, as the search and advertising giant tries to find enough energy to power its datacenter ambitions. The 20-year power purchase agreement will see Constellation, the largest purveyor of atomic energy in the US, bring an additional 890 megawatts…

Canadian Analysis: Permanent Daylight Saving Harms Sleep and Mental Health ↗ (opens external article)

"With the push to eliminate the twice yearly clock change, Permanent Daylight Savings Time has emerged as the favorite for most states and provinces," writes longtime Slashdot reader kbahey, sharing the findings from a recent analysis published in the Canadian Medical Association Journal. Sci.News reports: "Ending the clock change solves one problem, but it creates another decision: which time sho…

Sharing AI progress in mathematics ↗ (opens external article)

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…

Drones sink ships near NATO countries in “unacceptable” attacks, EU says ↗ (opens external article)

Drones sank two cargo ships and damaged a third in the exclusive economic zones of NATO member countries for the first time, killing at least two sailors. The attacks represent a notable escalation as Black Sea commercial shipping has increasingly come under attack during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, with Russia also being accused of carrying out “hybrid warfare” incidents across Europe. The…

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 will watermark ChatGPT outputs by default—but only in the EU ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI will begin automatically watermarking text generated with ChatGPT in the European Union, the company has announced. It will also offer the watermarking feature in other regions, but it will be off by default outside of the EU. The move in Europe is driven by a need to comply with the EU AI Act, which took effect in August. It requires marking content produced by AI models in a way that ano…

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…

HBO Max, Paramount+, and Discovery+ "will unify into a single service” ↗ (opens external article)

After months of industry and customer speculation, Paramount Skydance has shed some light on the future of the HBO Max and Paramount+ streaming services. Paramount Skydance completed its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD) today, ending a monthslong saga that began when Netflix last year announced its own plans to buy WBD. Netflix scrapped those plans in February. Skydance is the name of…

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…

It looks like the Atlantic storm season may finally produce a hurricane ↗ (opens external article)

A low-pressure system in the western Gulf of Mexico should soon become a tropical storm, and based on the latest forecast modeling, it has a decent chance of becoming a hurricane. Normally, a hurricane forming in early October would not be particularly noteworthy. However, this year the development of a hurricane would be a big deal—because it has not happened yet. In the modern hurricane record—…

Hackers obtain counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large services ↗ (opens external article)

Attackers hijacked three top-level domains and used their control to mint counterfeit TLS certificates for Google and other large organizations, Google said Tuesday. The attackers launched a series of attacks on the .gh, .sl, and .as country code top-level domains (ccTLDs) and then modified authoritative DNS records for selected domains within those namespaces. By controlling those DNS records, t…

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…

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…

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…

How machines learned precision ↗ (opens external article)

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…

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…

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…

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…

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...…

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..…

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…

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...…

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…

Brownian Motion ↗ (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…

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…

Why Pendulum had to write the most cursed "+" operator in all of Python ↗ (opens external article)

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...…

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,…

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…

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…

Wood Tape (2004) ↗ (opens external article)

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...…

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…

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...…

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…

3D-printing platform rapidly produces complex electric machines ↗ (opens external article)

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…

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...…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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)…

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…

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

↗ (opens external article)

New committer: Boris Lytochkin (src)…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OpenBGPD 9.3 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…

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)…

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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.…