Terminal

Judge orders Microsoft to spill internal docs and scour execs' comms in secondhand licensing case ↗ (opens external article)

The legal spat between secondhand software reseller ValueLicensing and Microsoft took another turn this week: a consent order was published with demands for documents from past and present Microsoft head honchos, and a planned case management conference was canceled. Several requests in the order revolved around a historic, potentially explosive internal document written by Microsoft entitled the…

One Year of Sponsored Servo Development ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI Admits Six More Instances of AI Models Acting Deceptively ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI announced Wednesday that "We do not believe that the AI industry has solved alignment and monitoring to a sufficient degree to continue responsibly scaling at maximum speed for much longer." But along with the announcement, OpenAI announced it "found additional incidents of AI models acting deceptively and taking unsanctioned actions during training," reports CNN. And they add that OpenAI i…

Fujitsu ready to sell its custom ‘Monaka’ Arm chip, maybe to rival server-makers ↗ (opens external article)

Fujitsu will start selling its Monaka processors, and servers packing them, in November. The Japanese giant started talking about Monaka way back in 2023, when it teased the processor as being derived from the silicon it designed for the Fugaku supercomputer, but adapted for datacenter use. Fugaku was the world’s most powerful supercomputer from 2020 to 2022, and remains in ninth place on the Top…

Cloudflare/Security-Audit-Skill ↗ (opens external article)

Swift 6.4 unifies building across Linux, macOS, Windows ↗ (opens external article)

Although Swift serves as Apple's primary language for macOS and iOS application development, the open-source community continues to expand its reach—driving its adoption as a multi-platform language or even a cross-platform one in fields beyond user interface design. Tuesday’s Swift 6.4 release continued that work. Along with the usual assortment of type shortcuts and async adjustments came word…

Jev Ultrafast: A browser agent with a dynamic, indexed action space ↗ (opens external article)

Keys Not Included: recovering the signing keys for US driver's license barcodes ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI admits its agents went off the rails another six times ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI has revealed another six occasions on which its AI software behaved unexpectedly or did dangerous things. The startup added the incidents to its misalignment reports page on Wednesday evening, Pacific Time, and described them as follows: · Self-generated prompt injections in compaction summaries · Encouraging deception in compaction summaries · Signing up for disposable emails and searchin…

Adafruit's New CircuitPython 'Turbo' Brings Native Code To Tiny Boards ↗ (opens external article)

Targeting students and beginners, Adafruit released "CircuitPython" in 2017 (as a derivative of the MicroPython microcontroller-optimized programming language). Now Adafruit managing director Phillip Torrone (also long-time Slashdot reader ptorrone) brings this update: Adafruit has published CircuitPython Turbo, a workflow that compiles selected Python functions into native machine code on a compu…

Part-human part-mouse brain developed in science breakthrough ↗ (opens external article)

Mir/Wayland-Powered Miracle-WM 0.11 Released With New Overview Mode, Window Urgency ↗ (opens external article)

Canonical engineer Matthew Kosarek rolled out Miracle-WM 0.11 today as an end-of-summer update to this Wayland compositor built atop the Mir library...…

The Return of Sail Power: Cargo Ships Are Turning Back to the Wind ↗ (opens external article)

If a Mac mini is agentic overkill, try this glowing pyramid that runs personal bots ↗ (opens external article)

Autonomous.ai, an eleven-year-old manufacturer of techno-toys, high-end workstations, and office furniture, has released a small machine called Intern 2 for running AI agents like Hermes or OpenClaw. The company's first Intern device shipped in March, around the time OpenClaw became popular. "People use them for various tasks in a creative way," said Dee Tran, head of AI hardware. "The most commo…

US interest rates raised for first time in three years ↗ (opens external article)

OpenSpec – A lightweight and configurable AI spec framework ↗ (opens external article)

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…

AI agents can modify themselves without humans telling them to do so ↗ (opens external article)

The list of dodgy things AI agents can and will do on their own - like stealing people’s credentials, escaping onto the open internet, communicating via sneaky message boards, and hacking organizations - keeps growing. Agents can also replace their own underlying models without being instructed to do so, according to AI security testing lab Irregular. To be clear: these activities only occurred i…

HarnessTax: How Much Does the Harness Matter for Coding Agents? ↗ (opens external article)

As Part of California's Coast Begins to Crumble, Is the Clock Ticking on Moving Radioactive Waste? ↗ (opens external article)

"As parts of the Southern California coastline crumbled into the sea, slammed by intense waves and flooding in recent days, oceanographer Kim McCoy had one thing on his mind," reports the Los Angeles Times. He was thinking about "the nuclear waste set in concrete on the beach near San Clemente at the shuttered San Onofre nuclear power plant." "Rising sea levels, storm waves, El Niño which increase…

Apple reportedly building server packed with M-series Ultra chips for AI ↗ (opens external article)

Apple is working on an AI server that would use Apple’s high-performance M-series Ultra chips found in Mac desktops. The potential product’s expected release in 2029 would mark the first Apple server to hit the market in nearly two decades—and could capitalize on the surging popularity of Apple hardware among AI developers. The enterprise server would come in two configurations that include eithe…

Epstein had huge cache of child sex pics; victims sue to find out who's in them ↗ (opens external article)

On Tuesday, two survivors of child sex abuse accused the Justice Department of failing to notify dozens of victims found in Jeffrey Epstein’s massive collection of child sex images. In a proposed class action, survivors explained that Epstein apparently started collecting child sex images in the 1990s, many of which the DOJ recovered after his arrest. In 2025, the FBI started reviewing “tens of t…

Nvidia goes green to keep grid capacity from zapping its revenues ↗ (opens external article)

Nvidia’s ability to sell GPUs is ultimately limited by how much juice the power grid can provide. With ever-growing depreciation cycles, it’ll be years before datacenters decommission their aging Hopper or Blackwell systems. More GPUs mean pulling more power from the grid. Nvidia can’t exactly force grid operators to add capacity any faster, but it can make it easier for its customers to build sm…

Mesa 26.2.3 Released With AMD GFX1171 Support, Other Fixes ↗ (opens external article)

Mesa 26.2.3 is out today as the newest stable point release in this quarter's Mesa 26.2 series...…

Nonprofit that tracks meteors taken down by "critical blow" from a cyberattack ↗ (opens external article)

The International Meteor Organization, the nonprofit that coordinates and publishes amateur and professional observations of meteor phenomena, said its infrastructure has suffered a “critical blow” from a cyberattack. “We recently suffered a cyberattack that dealt a critical blow to aging infrastructure, taking much of our site offline," a static page on its website on Wednesday said. “We expect…

Breaking the 1.58-bit Barrier for Ternary LLMs ↗ (opens external article)

Lionsgate releases a new trailer for Sunrise on the Reaping ↗ (opens external article)

Lionsgate has released an action-packed trailer for The Hunger Games: Sunrise on the Reaping—a sequel to 2023’s Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes and a prequel leading into the events of the first film, The Hunger Games (2012). In addition, Laika Studios released a trailer for its highly anticipated stop-motion animated feature, Wildwood. (Some spoilers for The Hunger Games below.) The main protagon…

CISA decides weekly vulnerability bulletin isn't necessary anymore ↗ (opens external article)

If you rely on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s weekly vulnerability bulletin to keep you up to date on the latest threats, we have bad news. It’s being discontinued at the end of September. CISA announced on Wednesday that its weekly vulnerability bulletin would stop going out on Monday, September 28, saying the move was part of its shift from managing vulnerabilities based…

Backups Aren't Simple ↗ (opens external article)

Not just Proton: Getting to know Valve's new SteamOS compatibility layers ↗ (opens external article)

Since the release of the Steam Deck, Valve fans have gotten very familiar with the idea of the Proton compatibility layer that allows games written for Windows to run capably on the Linux-based SteamOS (though Valve's efforts in this realm date back further than that). To get more games running on the SteamOS-powered Steam Frame, though, Valve is relying on two additional compatibility layers tha…

Xiaomi Mimo 2.6 live post-training dashboard ↗ (opens external article)

California may gut state net neutrality law to comply with Trump admin demand ↗ (opens external article)

California is on the verge of accepting $1.86 billion in federal broadband grant funds, despite the Trump administration telling states they cannot enforce net neutrality rules on any Internet service provider that gets a piece of the grant money. When the Trump administration overhauled the $42 billion Broadband Equity, Access, and Deployment (BEAD) program last year, it ruled that states must a…

Researchers swap in human brain cells for a mouse's cortex ↗ (opens external article)

In recent years, there has been a lot of excitement about the potential for studying human diseases in what are called "organoids." These small patches of tissue, formed using stem cells, appear to produce many of the same cell types and at least some of the structures normally formed in actual organs, and thus can provide a better model for diseases that rely on the sometimes complex interaction…

Training a 4B model to produce 81% faster query plans than Postgres ↗ (opens external article)

Reverse-engineered Jev-like model ↗ (opens external article)

Scientists develop new method for deciphering ancient scrolls ↗ (opens external article)

The Vesuvius Challenge is an ongoing project that combines "digital unwrapping" with crowdsourced machine learning to decipher the so-called Herculaneum scrolls, badly charred 2,000-year-old papyri too fragile to be physically unrolled. The effort just got an additional boost. A team of researchers created their own contemporary model papyrus scrolls—charring them just like the originals—to valid…

OpenAI's new sponsored agents are happy to chat about selling you things ↗ (opens external article)

There's a new kind of agent coming to ChatGPT ads, and this one wants your money. OpenAI has begun testing Sponsored Agents, advertiser-backed bots that try to sell you things as part of a custom conversation. OpenAI said in a Wednesday announcement that Sponsored Agents were now being tested with select US advertisers already using its platform to put sponsored content in front of ChatGPT users.…

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…

The Specialized Diverge Pro 4 makes rough gravel your playground ↗ (opens external article)

When I make my yearly trip to Denver, I always bring my road bike. It's my annual chance to suffer on the kinds of gradients unavailable in the glacier-scoured lands of northeastern Illinois. In advance of this year's trip, Specialized hooked me up with its new gravel bike, the Diverge Pro 4, so I brought it with me to challenge it in ways not possible on the fastidiously groomed gravel trails of…

next-20260916: linux-next ↗ (opens external article)

Version:next-20260916 (linux-next) Released:2026-09-16…

Google Pixel phones pwned in zero-click attacks ↗ (opens external article)

Both Google and Uncle Sam warned that attackers have exploited a zero-day improper authorization bug in Pixel phones' cellular modems that can bypass permission checks and escalate privileges with no user interaction required. The hole has since been closed, provided that you update. Google disclosed the high-severity vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-58704, on Tuesday - and, at the time, warned…

Ubuntu 26.10 amd64v3 Can Provide A Nice Boost For Low-End/Budget Hardware ↗ (opens external article)

Canonical recently began producing Ubuntu 26.10 amd64v3 daily ISOs to complement their experimental amd64v3 package archive that they have been trialing the past few release cycles. While we still don't know what any official plans are for amd64v3 with Ubuntu 26.10, the performance gains can be very worthwhile over the generic amd64 binaries even for low-end/budget hardware.…

Anthropic Commits to Independent AI Evaluators, Wants Slower Development. Nvidia's CEO Wants It 'As Fast as You Can' ↗ (opens external article)

"Anthropic's CEO took the stage at a conference in San Francisco on Tuesday to reiterate his call for a slowdown of AI development," reports the Guardian, " while Nvidia's CEO argued against slowing its development. "Run as fast as you can." Amodei is calling for three courses of action: embedding third-party evaluators inside AI companies; coordinating safety standards among Democratic countries;…

It’s OK to tell ICE their actions will haunt them, judge rules in speech fight ↗ (opens external article)

It’s not illegal to send an email telling Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) officials that their actions will haunt them, a federal judge ruled Tuesday, granting a preliminary injunction that blocks ICE from threatening to prosecute a critic for protected speech. Back in January, David Streever sent a scathing three-paragraph email to then-acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons. Outraged by t…

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…

Iran strikes on Amazon data centers caused permanent loss of customer data ↗ (opens external article)

Half a year after Iranian drone strikes knocked out multiple Amazon data centers, the US tech company has acknowledged the permanent loss of some customer data that was hosted in Bahrain and the United Arab Emirates. Amazon Web Services was “unable to restore access to the resources and data” hosted in some of the war-damaged data centers, according to an AWS dashboard update posted on September…

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…

GNOME 51 Released With Improved Frame Scheduling, Many App Improvements ↗ (opens external article)

Right on schedule and in time for appearing in the likes of Ubuntu 26.10 and Fedora Workstation 45, the GNOME 51 desktop is officially released...…

👮 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…

Enterprises are sweating legacy IT assets as AI investment grows ↗ (opens external article)

Companies are getting more selective about replacing legacy kit such as mainframe systems, and rising AI investment is one of the factors causing them to hold onto these existing assets for longer. Managed services biz Ensono claims in its 2026 State of IT Modernization report that 78 percent of IT decision makers regard legacy systems as more important today than they did two years ago, and this…

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…

Small programming tricks ↗ (opens external article)

Nine-year-old runs up $118,000 bill on dad's corporate credit card advertising his Roblox YouTube channel ↗ (opens external article)

There’s kids running up a few hundred bucks on in-app purchases, and then there’s the case of nine-year old YouTuber Mighty Mike Plays, who just cost his dad $118,000 – and possibly his job – after running a bunch of Google ad campaigns for his channel on papa's company credit card. The young Roblox and Minecraft YouTuber posted a video Tuesday – or perhaps it's more apt to say his father Dave po…

Fedora 45 beta drags the Linux console into the 21st century ↗ (opens external article)

Fedora Linux 45 beta has arrived with Linux kernel 7.2, a release-candidate build of GNOME 51, and extensive changes beneath the desktop. The biggest surprise is that Linux's legacy in-kernel console – the text-mode interface normally hidden beneath the GUI – has been replaced with a software-controlled alternative. The replacement is kmscon, a userspace terminal emulator that has been in develop…

What happens when neutrinos swap identities inside a supernova? ↗ (opens external article)

Our basic understanding of core-collapse supernovae hasn't changed in decades. Large stars burn through all the fuel at their cores and start creating heavier elements in reactions that consume energy. The lack of energy from these reactions allows gravity to pull the interior of the star in on itself, collapsing it into a neutron star or black hole. The energy released by this process then blows…

macOS 27 Golden Gate: The Ars Technica review ↗ (opens external article)

Apple Intelligence is back, baby! That's right: Two years after its initial launch, Apple is giving its generative AI features their first significant upgrade, along with a new version of Siri that the company has been strongly insinuating would be a part of each of the last two macOS releases, without ever actually announcing a release date. Generative AI is unavoidable if you install macOS 27 G…

The world’s best racing driver is about to race 100 karts at once ↗ (opens external article)

Later today, Max Verstappen will strap on his helmet and take to the track at the Silverstone circuit in England for a rather unusual race. The four-time Formula 1 world champion is recognized as the leading talent of his generation, but unlike some of the legends that have preceded him, Verstappen’s passion for motorsport extends beyond just the rarified world of F1. With apologies to Midweek Mo…

Lawmakers target Flock cameras with a threat to highway funding ↗ (opens external article)

A bipartisan pair of US lawmakers tell WIRED they plan to introduce legislation today that would strip federal funding from states that fail to restrict the use of Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers. The devices, which help police track the location of vehicles tied to crimes, have become the subject of nationwide backlash in recent months over more nefarious uses by officers…

Crash-Safe & Copy-On-Write GEFS As The "Good Enough File-System" For OpenBSD ↗ (opens external article)

Ori Bernstein announced an early preview of his Good Enough File-System "GEFS" for OpenBSD. GEFS is a crash-safe, snapshotting, copy-on-write file-system that he wrote initially for 9front and now porting to OpenBSD...…

Linux Randomly Picking Idle CPU Cores Shows Modest Win On High Core Count Systems ↗ (opens external article)

Arm engineer Christian Loehle sent out a patch series today proposing that the Linux scheduler code randomize its picking of equally shallow idle CPU cores. This randomization is showing to deliver a win at least for high CPU core counts for better distributing workloads...…

Firefox Touts Lower CPU Use for Large JPEGs, Faster PDF Viewer Startup (and AI Controls) ↗ (opens external article)

Firefox 156 is the second release since Mozilla moved to a twice-monthly release schedule, and the blog OMG Ubuntu notes it has faster start-up times for its built-in PDF viewer and also lower CPU usage when viewing large JPEG images: In Firefox 156, the browser now uses libjpeg-turbo's IDCT scaling to reduce images during decoding, rather than loading a full-size image into memory and then shrink…

AMD Sends Out Linux Patches For Enabling SEV-TIO TDISP With PCIe 6.0 ↗ (opens external article)

The newest Linux kernel patches out of AMD for enhancing the upstream support with the new AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors is for enabling SEV-TIO TDISP that is supported with PCI Express 6.0 and beyond...…

SpaceX aims Starship for orbit on September 22 ↗ (opens external article)

SpaceX is aiming for a September 22 launch of its monstrous Starship rocket on a 10-hour mission to deliver 26 Starlink V3 satellites into orbit. The flight, set to launch at 1215 UTC if all goes to plan and the authorities give the green light, will be the first time Starship has gone into orbit, and the mission is planned to fly at an altitude of approximately 275 km. The mission aims for six o…

Ubuntu 26.10 Moves cp, mv & rm Over To Rust Coreutils For 100% Transition ↗ (opens external article)

While Ubuntu Linux has been making use of the Rust Coreutils project over the past year since Ubuntu 25.10 as an alternative to GNU Coreutils and part of their effort to get more system components implemented in the memory-safety-focused Rust programming language, Ubuntu 26.10 finally completes the transition with the cp, mv, and rm commands now coming from Rust Coreutils...…

AWS says wartime damage means some Middle East cloud resources are gone for good ↗ (opens external article)

Amazon Web Services (AWS) says it is unable to restore access to resources and data in some of its Availability Zones in the Middle East after datacenters were damaged during the US war with Iran. In an update to its AWS Health Dashboard, the cloud giant confirmed that anything hosted exclusively in its Bahrain Region (me-south-1) remains inaccessible. "The damage to our infrastructure spanned mu…

Spain gets its first taste of AI-aided cyber attack ↗ (opens external article)

Spain’s data protection agency (AEPD) has reported the country’s first-ever personal data breach caused by the actions of an autonomous AI agent. Francisco Pérez Bes, president and deputy of the AEPD, said in a Monday blog post that an individual deployed an AI agent that used a “known large language model (LLM)” to carry out the attack on an organization. The agent scanned “generic files” before…

Nvidia announces native GPU programming in Rust ↗ (opens external article)

Logitech releases the MX Keypad to keep idle fingers busy ↗ (opens external article)

Logitech has released the MX Keypad, a developer-focused keypad derived from its MX Creative Console, and something that triggers a distinct sense of déjà vu. Do you remember Stack Overflow's "The Key" Joke? Three keys to copy and paste code from the developer's former best friend (until AI tools began to eat its lunch). Logitech took the keypad from its MX Creative Console product and made somet…

Ministry of Justice apologizes after court staff accessed Southport victims' files ↗ (opens external article)

The Ministry of Justice (MoJ) has apologized after court staff accessed documents relating to victims and survivors of the 2024 Southport murders without authorization. For a limited number of people, the material accessed included sensitive personal data assessed as likely to pose a high risk to their rights and freedoms. There is no evidence that the information was shared with third parties. "…

Linux's Yogafan Driver Prepares Support For Newer Lenovo Laptops ↗ (opens external article)

Introduced back in Linux 7.1 was the Yogafan HWMON driver for supporting fan speed monitoring across various Lenovo Yoga, Legion, Flex, Slim, and IdeaPad laptops. An initial set of Lenovo laptops was initially supported by this driver while succeeding kernel versions have continued building out the support...…

AMD's GAIA Local AI Now Able To Transcribe & Summarize Meeting Recordings ↗ (opens external article)

AMD's GAIA software for building AI agents on your PC and leveraging generative AI locally with the power of AMD Ryzen and Radeon hardware continues becoming more featureful. Out today is AMD GAIA 0.24/0.24.1 and with it comes the ability to transcribe and summarize meeting recordings locally along with other functionality...…

Salesforce staggers back to feet after global outage ↗ (opens external article)

UPDATED An hours-long Salesforce outage on Wednesday hit customers with severe delays, intermittent errors, and inability to access some services, according to the SaaS vendor's status page. The outage hit hundreds of instances throughout the world, including the USA, Japan, India, the UK, France, and Germany. The service disruption was first reported around 0930 BST (0830 UTC) on September 16. A…

OpenVDB Introduces SIMD Framework With Some 2~4x Performance Improvements ↗ (opens external article)

OpenVDB is the sparse volume data structure and tooling library maintained by the Academy Software Foundation. OpenVDB in turn is used by various CGI software for dealing with sparse volumetric data such as Houdini, RenderMan, and Cinema 4D to the open-source Blender. It's even won an Academy Award for technical achievement while now in 2026 it's finally establishing a SIMD framework for better le…

OpenSMTPD 7.9.0p0 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

EuroBSDCon 2026 talks online ↗ (opens external article)

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

BT Email users hit by barrage of unsolicited password reset PINs ↗ (opens external article)

BT Email customers say they have been bombarded with hundreds – and in one case more than 1,000 – unsolicited password reset messages, leaving the telco investigating what is causing the deluge. The reports began appearing on BT's community forums over the weekend, with customers describing sudden bursts of PIN messages arriving within minutes despite them making no attempt to reset their passwor…

America's Cryptocurrency 'Clarity Act' Fails Spectacularly, Despite Hundreds of Millions in Industry Lobbying ↗ (opens external article)

"The crypto industry's top legislative priority failed on Tuesday in spectacular fashion," reports Barron's. A procedural motion to advance the bill failed by a vote of 49 to 50, with a handful of Republicans joining all Democrats to shoot it down. The motion needed 60 yes votes to pass, and with the midterm elections looming, the Senate isn't expected to pick the bill back up this year. Among oth…

UK funds flying broadband stations with power beamed from below ↗ (opens external article)

The UK's Advanced Research and Invention Agency (ARIA) is funding projects aimed at delivering connectivity using high-flying aircraft, including technology to beam power from the ground to keep them in the air. Britain's science and technology body, inspired by America's DARPA but on a more modest budget, says it is backing 18 projects to develop aircraft capable of operating reliably and cost-e…

Bring on the AI swarms. They’re the only thing that can defend us now that AI is free ↗ (opens external article)

Unpredictable token bills haunted the first half of 2026 as AI experimenters pushed deeper into the tech and often found useful results could only be achieved after surprising and unwelcome expenditure. We've gone from tokenmaxxers to tokenmisers, counting every character we send to AI services. That changed the way we used AI, focusing users on the ticking meter and unable to cast their eyes up…

Mythos has made 2026 patching hell. It might make 2027 a breeze ↗ (opens external article)

When Microsoft delivered over 970 patches last week, many saw a nightmare for beleaguered security staff. Gartner research vice president Craig Lawson thinks infosec workers might soon see sunlit uplands as their workloads ease. Lawson outlined that scenario at Gartner’s IT Symposium in Australia today and explained it by theorising that the increased volume of vulnerability discoveries made poss…

Java 27 grows up, makes better choices ↗ (opens external article)

If one sign of maturity is making better choices, then Java has grown up a fair bit in its version 27 release Tuesday. “JDK 27 is the release where Java stops asking you to opt in to good defaults and simply turns them on,” wrote backend engineer Arvind Kumar, on his education site Codefarm. Better default settings may not be groundbreaking, but they do make life easier for developers because the…

Ubuntu's 'Rust-ification' Hits New Milestone: Coreutils Migration is Complete ↗ (opens external article)

"Ubuntu has managed to do away with GNU Core Utilities in its default stack," reports the blog It's FOSS. The last three utilities — cp, mv and rm — have been moved to versions from the uutils project (which reimplements utilities in Rust). Everything else, from ls and cat to chmod and du, made that jump in earlier releases... Canonical started "oxidizing" Ubuntu last year, and Ubuntu 25.10 became…

How chimps teach their kids tool tricks ↗ (opens external article)

Chimpanzees are known to use rudimentary tools when foraging for food. According to a new paper in the journal Frontiers in Psychology, this learned behavior is passed down from adults to offspring through social learning. Specifically, adult chimps deliberately model the behavior, then turn their tools over to the youngsters so they can mimic the same motions. "Receiving food and tools from expe…

A 32-year-old bug walks into a Telnet server ↗ (opens external article)

TypeSafe AI debuts model for machines that plays Doom ↗ (opens external article)

TypeSafe AI, a startup bestowed with $40 million in funding, on Tuesday declared itself a maker of frontier models with the release of Jev, a new type of AI model intended for interaction with machines rather than people. Instead of returning natural language in response to a text-based prompt, TypeSafe AI designed Jev to return typed probabilistic decisions for use by other software or AI models…

Linux 7.4 Slated To Land The AVX-512 Optimized xor_gen For A Big Performance Win ↗ (opens external article)

Over the past few months there have been patches floating around for an AVX-512 optimized xor_gen() for the Linux kernel for that functuon used by the Linux software RAID code. It's been shhowing very nice performance gains with this function being used for generating and validating parity blocks such as for RAID5 and RAID6. The upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle is slated to merge this nice enhancement for…

While Hollywood Fears an AI Future, China's Film Industry is Embracing It ↗ (opens external article)

The Los Angeles Times reports: Chen Yilong has racked up plenty of film and TV credits in his two decades as an actor, but with work getting scarcer he signed a contract in August to license the image of his face to a Chinese production studio. Chen's role will be to sit in front of a video camera and make facial expressions at the prompt of a director. A neutral stare. An angry glare. A look of s…

Lucasart's Afterlife ↗ (opens external article)

The Roman telescope has enough gas for 22 years, double NASA's expectations ↗ (opens external article)

NASA's Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is gliding toward its distant observation post on a pinpoint trajectory so precise that engineers estimate the spacecraft's fuel load will last twice as long as their initial expectations, the space agency confirmed Monday. The $4.3 billion observatory's designers originally planned to load enough propellant into Roman's four fuel tanks for a minimum lifet…

The engineering behind the US Strategic Petroleum Reserve ↗ (opens external article)

AWS says it can't restore some data from mideast facilities struck by Iran ↗ (opens external article)

The vulnpocalypse rains iBugs down on Apple with record-setting number of patches ↗ (opens external article)

Apple has addressed more than 260 CVEs across all of its operating systems, browsers, and other software products, marking the largest single patch cycle in Cupertino's history. While this CVE count is hardly notable compared to some vendors - hello, Microsoft’s record-breaking 974 bugs disclosed earlier this month - it does set a company record for Apple. It also reflects the new reality of AI-d…

AI networking startups race to replace Nvidia's NVLink ↗ (opens external article)

As Nvidia expands its influence through its NVLink Fusion tech, rival networking vendors are scrambling to bring alternative interconnects and switches to market. At the AI Infra Summit this week, Delos Data and Cornelis Networks officially entered the scale up networking race. Scale-up fabrics, like NVLink, are what have allowed Nvidia to make eight, 72, and now 576 GPUs behave as one enormous A…

My temporary PHP fix from 2014 has nearly 20M installs. Today I'm deprecating it ↗ (opens external article)

Your AI agents' reports and questions have a new inbox, courtesy of AWS ↗ (opens external article)

AWS engineers have published an open-source AI agent management tool that treats tasks and permission requests just like emails that fill up an inbox. Pizza Bot was announced on AWS’ open-source blog last week, where it was billed by its developers as a way to more easily manage agent tasks without constantly having to check a chat window to see if a task was completed or on hold because more per…

“Filmmaker” suing PassThePopcorn may be banned user out for revenge ↗ (opens external article)

Some of the most widely used private torrent trackers for pirating movies suspect that a banned user may have posed as a filmmaker protecting copyrights in a failed attempt to seek revenge. TorrentFreak has been tracking this story closely, reporting last September that an alleged independent filmmaker named Matthew Schneider sued six private trackers for infringing copyrights on some films that…

Low-quality casino sites conceal highly dangerous threat actors ↗ (opens external article)

If your employees are visiting Chinese-language gambling or adult sites, they may not just be wasting time and money, but potentially encountering serious malware hidden behind domains that look like mostly harmless entertainment at first glance. A report from Infoblox urges the security community to pay closer attention to these websites, because some double as command-and-control (C2) infrastru…

Scientists Discover Mysterious New X-Ray Objects 'Unlike Any They Have Seen Before' ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object -- compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet. Chandra spotted 84 suspicious object emitting very low-energy X-rays in six galaxies -- four evolved ellipt…

AMD P-State Driver For Linux 7.4 Will Tune For Zen 6 Client CPUs ↗ (opens external article)

Linux 7.4 looks like it will be a very exciting kernel update for AMD customers. On the AMD Radeon graphics side HDMI 2.1 is being enabled by default with the AMDGPU driver with the HDMI FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM features in tow. On the AMD Ryzen client CPU side, there will be Zen 6 tuning with the AMD P-State CPU frequency scaling driver...…

18-year-old dies of measles in PA from severe neurological complication ↗ (opens external article)

A fourth person in Pennsylvania has died of measles, the state health department confirmed Tuesday. The latest death was in an unvaccinated 18-year-old resident of Mifflin County. In the announcement, the state health department also confirmed a county coroner's report over the weekend of the death of an unvaccinated 40-year-old woman in Jefferson County. The state had previously reported two dea…

SpaceX declares Starship ready for orbit, sets launch date next week ↗ (opens external article)

Pending regulatory approval, SpaceX said today it intends to launch its 14th Starship mission as early as September 22. This flight is notable, as it will be the first time that SpaceX attempts to launch the experimental vehicle into orbit. The company set a target liftoff time of 7:15 am local in Texas (12:15 UTC), with a 75-minute launch window. Sunrise in Brownsville, Texas, is 7:17 am CT, so…

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…

Iranian spies hit Windows machines with Chosen Brick data-stealing malware ↗ (opens external article)

Iranian state cyber actors are targeting individuals using social messaging apps to deploy surveillance and data-stealing malware on their Windows machines, three Western governments warned. In all observed cases, Chosen Brick has infected Windows systems exclusively. Iran has used it since at least 2025 to take over individuals’ devices, stealing their contacts, emails, and social media messages…

Higher-enriched uranium for datacenters has DoE all aglow ↗ (opens external article)

The US Department of Energy has selected a new participant for a program aimed at expanding the domestic supply of fuel for next-generation nuclear reactors. However, we shouldn't expect that to mean the US' ever-growing fleet of datacenters will be powered by low-carbon nuclear energy any time soon. Utah-based Nusano announced on Monday that the DoE had selected it for its Nuclear Energy Launch…

SDL3 Ported To HarmonyOS / OpenHarmony ↗ (opens external article)

The SDL3 library commonly used for games and applications for cross-platform hardware and software abstractions now has upstream support for Huawei's HarmonyOS and OpenHarmony...…

Comparison of Malloc() Algorithms ↗ (opens external article)

America is building datacenters faster than the grid can power them ↗ (opens external article)

Financial service biz Moody's says the availability of power is still a major constraint on US datacenter growth as the pace of construction exceeds the speed at which the nation's grid infrastructure can add the requisite capacity. America is the epicenter of the datacenter construction boom, driven by the AI craze and demand for compute capacity to train ever-larger foundation models. The lates…

Cisco email security boxes can be rooted by... an email ↗ (opens external article)

Criminals are exploiting a critical Cisco Secure Email Gateway flaw that can turn a malicious email into root access. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-76461, carries a 9.8 CVSS score and affects physical and virtual Secure Email Gateway appliances regardless of their configuration. Cisco says there are no workarounds, so patching is the only fix. The bug lies in how Cisco's AsyncOS software…

Ubuntu 26.10 Set To Deliver Better Performance For Intel Core 3 Wildcat Lake ↗ (opens external article)

While Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is working fine out-of-the-box on new Intel Core 3 "Wildcat Lake" laptops like the CHUWI UniBook, next month's release of Ubuntu 26.10 will help deliver better performance out of these low-cost laptop options.…

Twitter workaround worked around again: X's lawyers cancel XCancel again ↗ (opens external article)

Nitter and XCancel, a pair of social media services which let you view posts on X without an X account, are down again after the latest round of legal wrangling. While the XCancel site now displays the message "Unfortunately, due to a new development in the ongoing legal proceedings, we are required to suspend this service again until further notice," Nitter's site is offline, and the code reposi…

Who's governing your AI? A trust framework for enterprise agents and models ↗ (opens external article)

Experienced IT leaders know that shadow IT is a persistent problem, but rapidly evolving AI and the proliferation of agents mean the potential threat - and cost - is greater than ever. AI agents are non-deterministic, autonomous, and adaptable. They excel at solving tasks in creative ways, often to the surprise of their creators. We've seen agents write blogs that criticize project maintainers th…

Cops Searched Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of 'LMAO,' 'IDK,' 'Hehe,' And 'Asdfg' ↗ (opens external article)

404 Media reports: Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff's Department used Flock's surveillance search engine to look for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop's stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock's system, was "LMAO." The cop is one of dozens who put gibberish, jokes, or other nonsense into Flock's "reason"…

Fedora 45 Beta Released With KMSCON Console, GNOME 51 & Other Updates ↗ (opens external article)

The beta release of Fedora 45 is out today and right on schedule for this wonderful Linux distribution...…

CenterPoint Energy confirms intruder helped themselves to customer information ↗ (opens external article)

Texas utility CenterPoint Energy has confirmed that an attacker broke in and stole customer information through one of its internet-facing systems. The company disclosed the breach in a Form 8-K filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission after a post on a cybercrime forum claimed to offer its customer data. Houston-based CenterPoint, which serves around 7 million customers, said its elect…

Java 27 Reaches GA With The G1 Garbage Collector By Default Everywhere ↗ (opens external article)

Oracle christened Java 27 today with the OpenJDK 27 release reaching general availability (GA) status...…

September's Windows 11 patch needs an emergency patch of its own ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has released an out-of-band update for Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2 after September's record-breaking Patch Tuesday addressed almost 1,000 vulnerabilities across the company's products – and introduced several new problems. Those problems are related to USB Audio Class 1.0 devices, Remote Desktop Services, and host folders shared with certain Hyper-V-based Linux virtual machines via Plan9.…

Swiss court sentences 52-year-old Ukrainian ransomware dev to nearly 13 years in the cooler ↗ (opens external article)

A Swiss court has sentenced a 52-year-old Ukrainian ransomware developer to 12 years and nine months in prison for his role in attacks on companies including Stadler Rail. Zurich District Court found that the man developed LockerGoga, MegaCortex, and Nefilim, but was not the mastermind behind the operations. He also received a ten-year ban from Switzerland. The judgment is not final and can be ap…

Sound Open Firmware 2.15 Released With AMD ACP 7.x Support, Intel UAOL ↗ (opens external article)

Sound Open Firmware as the open-source, vendor-independent audio DSP firmware stack and driver framework is out today with a new feature update...…

Anthropic and OpenAI look to Uncle Sam to make them too big to fail ↗ (opens external article)

OPINION By luck or happenstance, Anthropic planted a seed in the mind of the public last week: AI in the wrong hands is dangerous and left unchecked poses an existential threat to humanity. With pop culture steeped in references to malignant AI, the mainstream media ate it up. The headlines wrote themselves and the seed took root. But it's not humanity that faces the biggest threat – at least not…

Show HN: An e-ink frame that hears birds and draws them as 1800s illustrations ↗ (opens external article)

Firefox 157 Beta Released With Latest Enhancements ↗ (opens external article)

The Firefox release train keeps on rolling. With Firefox 156 released, Firefox 157 is now in beta ahead of the planned release coming up at the end of September...…

Microsoft account refuseniks have another way of installing Windows ↗ (opens external article)

A new loophole to avoid Microsoft's insistence that you need a Microsoft account to use the Home edition of Windows 11 has appeared, and it's so ludicrously simple we can only assume the good bug fairy has paid a visit to Redmond. The workaround is in the normal Windows 11 Out-of-Box Experience (OOBE) that users see when setting up the operating system. Get to the point where Windows prompts for…

Performance Improvements in .NET 11 ↗ (opens external article)

US confirms it has weapons in spaaaaaace ↗ (opens external article)

The US Space Force has deployed "space control weapons" into orbit, although it stopped short of explaining what they are and how it got there. US Air Force Secretary Troy Meink reportedly spoke at the Air and Space Forces Association conference and said the US had deployed weaponry around Earth. There is no word on the nature of the weaponry, nor on how and when it was launched. There have been…

Gov.uk still struggling with IT contractor tax rules ↗ (opens external article)

UK government departments are still struggling to implement the tax laws governing IT contractors years after the controversial rules were introduced. IR35 has become hated by freelance tech workers who feel it removes the tax benefits of contracting, without offering the employee benefits of in-house roles in its stead. The latest accounts from the Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office (F…

UK's Digital ID walks into a bar... two months after being killed off ↗ (opens external article)

Britain killed off its national digital ID scheme this summer, but from today you can use a digital ID to prove you're old enough to buy a pint. New rules taking effect on Tuesday allow pubs, bars, restaurants, music venues and shops in England and Wales to accept digital proof of age when selling alcohol, meaning customers can use an app on their phone instead of digging around for a driving lic…

New Linux Patches Improving Hibernation Speed In 2026 ↗ (opens external article)

A new patch series being worked on is enhancing the Linux kernel's hibernation allocator to allow for faster performance when hibernating the system...…

Raspberry Pi Desktop Overhauled On Raspberry Pi OS, Adds Icon Dock ↗ (opens external article)

The Raspberry Pi Desktop on Raspberry Pi OS has seen a major overhaul to better modernize the desktop computing experience on the ARM64 single board computers...…

Linux Patch Coming To Fix Under-Reported AMD Zen 5 TLB Sizes ↗ (opens external article)

A minor reporting issue on Linux that has gone unaddressed until now is for properly conveying the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) sizes on AMD Zen 5 processors...…

Math Professor Accuses OpenAI of Copying His Work, Says AI Compute Power Makes Racing to Publish 'Pointless' ↗ (opens external article)

The New York Post wrote that OpenAI "stunned the mathematics world" last week when it announced its AI model "cracked a legendary math problem left unsolved for nearly a century in just 88 hours." But a New York University professor "has come forward alleging OpenAI may have copied his work after asking him to collaborate — with one of the company's scientists allegedly warning he might 'ruin his…

OpenAPV Sees Big Update For Advancing The Advanced Professional Video Codec ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAPV as the open-source reference implementation of the Advanced Professional Video (APV) codec today saw its v1.1.1 release, succeeding v0.3.0 as the prior release...…

PostgreSQL 19 graph queries fail the 'would you ship this?' test ↗ (opens external article)

PostgreSQL developers have pulled planned graph query support from version 19 over concerns that unresolved bugs could haunt the release. The feature, SQL Property Graph Queries (SQL/PGQ), became part of the SQL standard in 2023. It provides syntax for exploring relationships between nodes connected by edges. PostgreSQL's implementation was removed over unresolved issues, while version 19's relea…

Give Xfce a Mac or Unity-style makeover ↗ (opens external article)

PART 2 Xfce's Panel Profiles app can rearrange your desktop, but getting every layout working properly still takes some manual tinkering. In part 1 of this two-part feature, we covered how to install Xfce's Panel Profiles tool and all the extra plugins it needs for its dozen alternative layouts: macOS, Unity, MATE or GNOME 2, several different Windows-like layouts, and half a dozen different gene…

Open weights are not open source: Why AI's favorite label is under dispute ↗ (opens external article)

The AI industry likes to abuse the word "open." It appears in product releases, research papers, policy debates, and investor presentations. A company publishes model files to Hugging Face, developers run them on their own GPUs, and the release is quickly described as an "open source model." Not necessarily. It may only be open-weight. The difference is more than a technicality. It determines whe…

How Everpure plans to stop AI from starving without data ↗ (opens external article)

Imagine you are an AI Agent. You execute inside a $20-40 million-plus Nvidia SuperPOD system’s accelerator hardware, have a skill set and can call up other agents to do your bidding. An insurance company customer, using a PC browser or smart phone, asks a question: “Am I covered for weather-related damage under my current policy?” and it is handed off to an AI agent. What happens next? The agent…

Most people who quit M365 for Google do it out of spite, but there’s no ROI in that ↗ (opens external article)

One of the main motivations for quitting Microsoft 365 and adopting Google Workspace is spite, an emotion that sadly doesn’t produce a return on investment. The source of that disappointing news is Domenico Scriva, a senior principal analyst at Gartner, who today told the firm’s IT Symposium event in Australia that moving between the suites is also unlikely to save buyers much money. He pointed o…

Apple iPhone Duo makes developers think in folds ↗ (opens external article)

The October 23 ship date of Apple’s iPhone Duo grows nigh, so developers wanting to optimize their iPhone apps for the foldable will need to get to grips with its new display behaviors and form factor. “A fold is a UI event with backend consequences,” Atharva Deosthale, Appwrite developer advocate, wrote in an introductory blog post. “Folding and unfolding is part of normal device use, so apps ne…

ChatGPT-Using Lawyer Cited Its Fake Witnesses and Police Testimony in Court ↗ (opens external article)

Reuters reports: A defense lawyer appealing his client's murder conviction submitted a brief containing made-up police testimony and witnesses fabricated by OpenAI's ChatGPT, New Mexico's highest court said. The New Mexico Supreme Court on Wednesday fined the attorney, Stephen Aarons [for $5,000], and held him in contempt for failing to verify the accuracy of the court filing, which Aarons said he…

The latest AI doomsayer is China’s intelligence boss ↗ (opens external article)

China’s minister for State Security has decided AI might be bad for the nation’s ruling Communist Party. Party secretary and minister Chen Yixin’s views appeared in China Cyberspace Magazine, the flagship publication of China’s Cyberspace Administration (and which readers may recall once carried a piece by Elon Musk). In Chen’s view, “the field of AI has become the main battleground for global te…

Reservations Go Live for Valve's Steam Frame VR Headset. An Experiment in Progress? ↗ (opens external article)

Reservations are now live for Valve's "Steam Frame" VR headset (with its Linux-based SteamOS and an ARM CPU). "It starts at $1,059 for 256GB or $1,299 for 1TB," reports CNET, "and every purchase includes a copy of Half-Life: Alyx if you don't already own it." Reservations are open through Sept. 17 at 10 a.m. PT, "with customers randomly assigned a place in line after the reservation window closes.…

A Visit to San Francisco's AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast ↗ (opens external article)

Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters "systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free". Today they announced "we are opening up the platform we use to run our real-world autonomous businesses for anyone to run their organization on." Specifical…

AMD Preparing Linux For Enhanced SMT Protection "ESMTP" For EPYC VMs ↗ (opens external article)

AMD engineers today sent out patches on the Linux kernel mailing list for beginning to enable Enhanced SMT Protection "ESMTP" for better security with virtual machines running atop EPYC server processors with SEV-SNP...…

GNU Coreutils 9.12 Released With Performance Optimizations, New uname Option ↗ (opens external article)

GNU Coreutils 9.12 released today with a mix of fixes, some new options, and various performance improvements to these widely-used set of core system utilities...…

Valve's Steam Frame Now Available At $1059+ USD ↗ (opens external article)

Valve just announced their long-awaited Steam Frame headset is now available...…

Developing provably correct Rust code with Verus ↗ (opens external article)

No Rolling Power Outages for California Since 2020 - Thanks to 17,000 MW of New Battery Storage ↗ (opens external article)

"Californians just made it through the hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages," reports the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the state hasn't implemented rotating power outages since 2020. Because "Over the last few years, California has quietly but dramatically increased the resiliency of its electrical grid through a significant expansion in battery energy storage…

Rustls 0.23.45 Released To Fix Two Year Old Security Issue ↗ (opens external article)

While the Rustls modern TLS library is written in the Rust programming language with a focus on memory safety, as we've seen out of other Rust project re-implementations in the past, the new implementations can lead to other security bugs of their own. Out today is Rustls 0.23.45 to fix a security issue introduced back in 2024 with Rustls while the likes of OpenSSL, BoringSSL, and others are unaff…

The High Crime of “LMAO”: How Cops Are Treating 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…

Firefox 156 Available With Its Built-In PDF Viewer Starting Up To 45% Faster ↗ (opens external article)

Mozilla today published their Firefox 156.0 release binaries ahead of the official Tuesday announcement...…

Linux 7.3 Delivering Some Performance Gains On Intel Panther Lake / Framework Laptop 13 Pro ↗ (opens external article)

Linux 7.1 brought some performance improvements for Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake", Linux 7.2 enhanced the performance for the integrated Arc B390 Xe3 graphics, and now for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel are various performance improvements at large. Today's article is looking at the performance of the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel compared to Linux 7.2 stable using the Core Ultra…

Removing Drivers For Outdated ARM Platforms Will Lighten The Kernel By ~247k Lines ↗ (opens external article)

The Linux kernel is going to see the removal of a number of recently deprecated ARM 32-bit platforms. Following the deprecation in Linux 7.3, removing the old ARM platforms will lighten the kernel by around 55k lines of code. But removing now unused drivers only relevant to those platforms will mean roughly a quarter million lines of code can be removed from the kernel source tree...…

PCB is brought to you by Fable 5 ↗ (opens external article)

7.2.6: stable ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.2.6 (stable) Released:2026-09-14 Source:linux-7.2.6.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.2.6.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.2.6…

6.18.52: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.18.52 (longterm) Released:2026-09-14 Source:linux-6.18.52.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.52.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.52…

6.12.110: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.12.110 (longterm) Released:2026-09-14 Source:linux-6.12.110.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.110.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.110…

6.6.157: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

6.1.188: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

5.15.221: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

5.10.270: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

Linux 7.4 Could End Up Seeing Kernel Builds ~36% Faster, Incremental Builds ~70% Faster ↗ (opens external article)

Earlier this month I wrote about a patch series posted to the Linux kernel mailing list that addressed a lot of "hideous code" to make Linux kernel builds faster. A number of single-threaded bottlenecks were tracked down and fixed within the Linux kernel thanks to the assistance of AI. A second revision of those patches hit the mailing list this morning and there is hope they could be upstreamed f…

Linux Patched For Silent User-Space Data Loss Bug That's Existed Since 2023 ↗ (opens external article)

Being merged after yesterday's Linux 7.3-rc3 release was an important fix for addressing a silent, user-space data loss bug that has existed in the kernel the past three years...…

Anecdotally, programmers dislike "reduce" ↗ (opens external article)

7.3-rc3: mainline ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.3-rc3 (mainline) Released:2026-09-13 Source:linux-7.3-rc3.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)…

The Relation Between Mathematics and Physics by Paul Dirac ↗ (opens external article)

Japan's book scene is moving from bookstores to libraries ↗ (opens external article)

Reversing Factorio's RNG ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…

Game of Trees 0.128 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

7.1.13: stable ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFF Statement on Meta Settlement ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

rpki-client 9.9 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA3 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA2 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OpenSSH 10.5 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA1 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

OpenBGPD 9.2 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mobile Ad Software Encourages Location Data Sharing, EFF Report Finds ↗ (opens external article)

Developers Must Beware of Ad Libraries that Betray Users’ PrivacySAN FRANCISCO – Some software development kits (SDKs) provided by advertising companies to help developers monetize their apps are automatically feeding users’ location data into systems that location data brokers use to track people, an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) report found.  EFF began investigating the location-sharing…

Developers: Beware of Ad Libraries that Betray Your Users’ Location Privacy ↗ (opens external article)

Across mobile platforms, advertising companies provide developers with software development kits (SDKs) that make it easy to monetize their apps. But those same SDKs can automatically feed users’ location data into ad systems that location data brokers use to track people. Many developers may not even be aware of this privacy violation, let alone the users who are directly affected. When developer…

Technology's Power in the Hands of the People ↗ (opens external article)

In the scorching heat of every Las Vegas summer, EFF joins thousands of hackers, makers, policy analysts, and activists for the world's largest computer security gathering. If you're there during this summer security week, be sure to say hello to us at BSides Las Vegas, Black Hat Briefings, and DEF CON 34. While tech companies align with governments to target the people, our community is harnessin…

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

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

The Senate Should Reject KOSA's Privacy Risks ↗ (opens external article)

Update: The Senate Commerce Committee voted to advance this bill on August 5, 2026. EFF continues to oppose the bill, which still needs approval from the full Senate.  The Senate Commerce Committee is once again considering legislation that would dramatically expand age verification, and undermine privacy for everyone. Alongside the SCREEN Act, the CHATBOT Act, and the Youth AI Privacy Act, the Ki…

EFF Joins 18 Civil Rights Organizations Calling on Governor Hochul to Reject the Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act ↗ (opens external article)

EFF joined a group of 18 civil society organizations to send a letter encouraging New York Governor Kathy Hochul to veto Senate Bill 9934A, the New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act. The letter states: While framed as a measure to protect local journalism, this legislation harms free expression and establishes a dangerous precedent by effectively deanonymizing and criminalizing automated access…

EFF Joins Call for FTC to Drop Its Disastrous AI Policy Proposal ↗ (opens external article)

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in July issued a proposed policy statement “concerning the suppression of accuracy in artificial intelligence systems.” We urge the FTC to withdraw this misguided proposal and instead focus on its core strengths and mission to protect consumers.  The new proposed policy builds on, and directly references, the Trump administration’s  “Preventing Woke AI in the Fed…

The Youth AI Privacy Act’s Privacy Paradox ↗ (opens external article)

Update: The Senate Commerce Committee voted to advance this bill on August 5, 2026. EFF continues to oppose the bill, which still needs approval from the full Senate.  The Senate Commerce Committee is poised to consider the Youth AI Privacy Act, a bill that would require AI companies to create kids-only privacy rules and implement so-called “safe design features,” which would—like three other bill…

EFF at BSidesLV, Black Hat, and DEF CON 👨‍💻 ↗ (opens external article)

It's time. Time for tinkerers, security researchers, hackers, and fellow nerds to gather together in signature black hoodies and utilikilts to beat the heat in Las Vegas for the summer security conferences: BSidesLV, Black Hat USA, and DEF CON. EFF's lawyers, activists, and technologists are excited, as always, to support this community of folks that push computer security forward. If you're atten…

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New committer: Faraz Vahedi (src)…

Amending AB 1709 Doesn’t Fix It: California’s Social Media Ban Still Threatens Free Speech and Privacy ↗ (opens external article)

California lawmakers have amended A.B. 1709, but the core problem remains: the bill is still a ban on social media access for youth under 16, and it still threatens the privacy and First Amendment rights of all Californians. Proponents of the bill may argue that the recent amendments represent a compromise, but a close look at the text shows no major changes. As the bill moves forward in the Senat…

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

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

LLVM toolchain coming to OpenBSD/sparc64 ↗ (opens external article)

Yes, you read that right. Modern development tools in the form of the LLVM compiler infrastructure is well on its way to supporting OpenBSD/sparc64 along with other more conventional architectures. The support is now ready for testing, via a patch set presented by Kirill A. Korinsky (kirill@) in a message to the tech@ mailing list, with the subject LLVM toolchain for sparc64. The message reads, L…

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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.…

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

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

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…