Terminal

Amazon Cracks Down On Use of AI Images By Sellers

CNBC reports: Amazon is requiring that third-party sellers label any product images or videos that contain "AI-generated people" after New York recently passed a law mandating greater transparency around "synthetic performers" in ads... The policy directs sellers to tag images [and videos or other graphics on listing pages] with specific metadata keywords before they're uploaded. "Recent legislati…

Show HN: Proxmox -> Share your host's Bluetooth with a VM over the network

Producing ammonia and fertiliser using wind power in Morris, Minnesota

The growing vigilante movement to knock out Flock surveillance cameras

Top Online Sites Debate Cutting Off Google's Crawlers

Futurism reports: [Some online publications] are now debating whether to cut Google off entirely, as the Wall Street Journal reports, illustrating an increasingly fraught relationship between the tech giant and the publishers that are creating content its AI models are regurgitating. According to the newspaper, prominent outlets including USA Today, Politico, the Economist, People, and Reuters ar…

The Hitler Salute Was Never German

Tile's security is so bad it's a feature for stalkers

China is Creating a Herd of 100 Elite Yak Clones

CNN reports on yaks "designed and cloned" in secretive, high-altitude labs in Tibet — 2.4 miles (4,000 meters) above sea level. They're a critical part of the local economy, and researchers "hope to create an 'elite' herd of super-yaks, healthier and more fertile than their predecessors." Both domestic yaks and their wild cousins have been facing threats for years, with some rare subspecies at ris…

SpaceX eyes tower catch for next Starship after auspicious end to 13th flight

SpaceX was more than lucky Friday, sending its 13th full-scale Starship test flight halfway around the world from South Texas to an on-target, intact splashdown in a remote section of the Indian Ocean. Starship has made precise splashdowns before. This time, however, the ship gently tipped over and came to rest floating in a remote stretch of ocean west of Australia. Previous splashdowns ended wi…

Show HN: Brolly, a plain-text weather forecast site

Facebook Offers a Verification System Certifying to Other Users That You're a Real Human

Facebook announced Friday they're launching a badge "that verifies there's a real person behind a profile". "You record a short video selfie, which we check against your existing profile photos to confirm a match. The process is free and typically takes just a few minutes. Accounts must meet our trust and safety standards to qualify for verification...." Once verified, your badge will appear acros…

Rauno's Field Notes #2

Fedora Working To Establish Conflict of Interest Policy

Posted this week is a draft copy of the Fedora Conflict of Interest policy being worked on for dealing with identifying, disclosing, and managing any actual, actual, or perceived conflicts of interest within the Fedora Project...…

Risks of Parkinson's Disease May Increase With Prolonged Exposure to Road Traffic Noise

A large Danish study found a modest but consistent association between long-term road traffic noise exposure and higher Parkinson's disease risk, with a 3% increase for every 11.5 dB rise in noise at the most exposed side of a home. The Guardian reports: The researchers modeled noise exposure at the most and least exposed exterior of the residence of each participant and calculated the difference…

Bringing PyTorch Monarch to AMD GPUs

The Dark Night of Mathematics

Engineering management after the cost of code collapsed

Trump Threatens New Tariffs Against EU Over Google Fine

President Trump threatened a "substantial" new tariff on the European Union after Brussels fined Google more than $1 billion over alleged illegal trade practices. "The European Union will pay a very big price for this illegal and highly unethical conduct, which I have consistently warned them about," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "The penalties will be entirely reversed and, we anticipate, a substa…

Open-weight AI is having its Kubernetes moment

In remembrance of Dan Williams

On July 21, the kernel community lost Dan Williams, one of its most beloved contributors. Dave Hansen and Thomas Gleixner, both of whom worked with Williams extensively, have written an obituary and allowed LWN to publish it. He will be deeply missed, but he has left us with a lot to remember him by.…

Scanwheel is a drum style mechanical television you can build yourself

Security updates for Saturday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (compat-openssl11, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, and sssd), Debian (exim4), Fedora (chromium, dotnet10.0, mbedtls, mupdf, netatalk, python-django5, skopeo, sssd, and wget1), Mageia (libevent and transmission), Oracle (.NET 8.0, 389-ds-base, aardvark-dns, acl, buildah, cifs-utils, dovecot, dracut, galera and mariadb11.8, glibc…

The Silurian Hypothesis (2020)

GNU C Library 2.44 released

Version 2.44 of the GNU C Library has been released. Changes include a new /etc/tunables.conf file for the system-wide setting of tunable parameters, a new tunable to control the use of transparent huge pages for read-only executable segments, a number of math-function improvements, a handful of security fixes, and more.…

My web version of Mars MIPS, now has built-in C compiler

Bitchat is now on Radicle

New stable kernel for ext4 users

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.12.98 stable Linux kernel with a single fix for a file descriptor leak in ext4. Users of the ext4 filesystem should upgrade.…

How AI drove Shopify back to clean code

E-commerce platform Shopify wants to make reading source code a thing again. And it has an unlikely ally for its back-to-the-roots approach: AI agents. The company is launching a new storefront theme for its customers, aka “merchants,” that it claims is completely understandable by anyone with even a smidgen of HTML knowledge. It is designed to be simpler for both people and machines to digest an…

Kyber (YC W23) Is Hiring a Head of Engineering

The Fedora 45 Sausage Factory

With help from data, art museums are reframing the visitor experience

Giovanni Kanter goes to at least one art museum whenever he visits a new city. That’s on top of his regular exploration of galleries in New York, where the 25-year-old ICU nurse lives and studies. He typically discovers new artists and gallery openings through word of mouth, though he has recently started curating his social media feed to serve relevant content (he’s currently in what he terms a…

Wine 11.14 Released

Wine 11.14 is out with initial WoW64 mode support on FreeBSD, allowing 32-bit Windows applications to run on a 64-bit system without relying on 32-bit multilib support. The release also adds Start Menu icon support in Wine Explorer, 7.1 format conversions in DirectSound, AES-GMAC support in BCrypt, and 21 bug fixes affecting apps and games including Adobe Reader, Heroes of the Storm, and Age of Em…

Kiwi Menu Continues Bringing macOS Vibes To GNOME

Kiwi Menu as the macOS-inspired quick menu option for the GNOME Shell desktop is continuing to enhance its macOS-esque experience on GNOME...…

Big Tech accused of stonewalling European social media researchers

In the final weeks before Romania’s presidential vote in November 2024, TikTok accounts that had previously spent years posting about manicures or fashion suddenly started promoting a little-known politician named Calin Georgescu. His posts, espousing hard-line views on immigration and anti-Semitic tropes, were viewed 120 million times before the vote. Georgescu, who had previously been polling i…

GNU C Library 2.44 Released With /etc/tunables.conf, More Optimizations

GNU developers today released GNU C Library "glibc" 2.44 as the newest feature release for this critical library to modern Linux systems and other platforms...…

KDE Plasma 6.8 Introducing New kscreenctl Tool

KDE developers have been working on kscreenctl as a utility replacement to kscreen-doctor. Plasma and related code has also seen a number of bug/crash fixes coming about this week too...…

Anti-AI open source has an enemy in common, but almost nothing else

OPINION Linux now being officially not anti-AI might be good news for projects that are explicitly anti-AI, but we foresee problems with conflict over where the money and development effort come from. A couple of weeks ago, reluctant geek superstar Linus Torvalds declared that Linux is not an anti-AI project. The pro-AI folks are jubilant, and they are especially loud on the internet. (They're pr…

MouthPad: A Tongue-Controlled Touchpad

BOFH: This printer engineer knows every trick in the book

EPISODE 14 The morning coffee in Mission Control is interrupted by a hesitant tapping at the door. Our current office temp has an issue. "It's the printer," she says, apologetically. "It makes a noise." "When it's printing, or all the time?" the PFY asks. "Sort of both. It starts making the noise before it starts printing, then keeps making the noise for about 20 seconds after." The PFY and I pop…

SpaceX's Starship Megarocket Hits Key Milestones in 'Lucky 13' Test Flight

SpaceX's Friday launch of its massive Starship rocket "went quite smoothly," reports CNN, with a SpaceX spokesperson calling this mission "Lucky Number 13" (as the 13th integrated flight test for a Starship spacecraft with a Super Heavy rocket booster): During Starship V3's inaugural test, there were numerous engine issues as several on the booster failed to relight and the Starship spacecraft exp…

Android May Soon Restrict On-Device ADB

OpenAI's Rogue Agent Went Unnoticed For a Week

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The OpenAI agent that broke into tech firm Hugging Face went on a dayslong hacking spree that OpenAI didn't notice until well after the threat was contained and the FBI was alerted, according to people familiar with the investigation. The agent -- a program capable of making decisions and executing complex tasks with little or no human oversight --…

Instagram Is Now Banning Pickup Artists, Pranksters Who Use Meta Glasses

Instagram is banning videos filmed with Meta smart glasses that harass strangers in public, including prank videos targeting service workers and pickup-artist clips of women who may not realize they are being recorded. "If you're posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line kind of videos that we've heard of and seen, then we're going to ta…

Wine 11.14 Brings WoW64 Mode To FreeBSD, Icon Support In Start Menu

Wine 11.14 was tagged today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...…

Anthropic debuts Opus 5 at half the price of its Fable sibling

Anthropic released its Opus 5 AI model on Friday, claiming that it "comes close to the frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price." That's welcome news for enterprises beset by rising token costs. Fable 5 prices tokens at $10 / MTok input and $50 / MTok output, while Opus 5 prices tokens at $5 / MTok and $25 / MTok. OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol sells for $5 / MTok input and $30 / MTok outp…

Paramount Agrees to Postpone Warner Bros. Merger Until June 2027

Paramount Skydance has agreed to postpone its $111 billion Warner Bros. Discovery merger until five days after an antitrust trial or June 1, 2027, whichever comes first. The agreement with a 12-state coalition led by California effectively shelves the deal for months while states argue it would reduce competition in cable and theatrical markets. Variety reports: Paramount had been keen to close th…

Wildfire forces evacuation of NASA's Deep Space Network complex in Spain

A fast-moving wildfire, one of many raging across Spain, bore down on the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex on Friday, forcing an evacuation and temporarily suspending operations at one of NASA's most important tracking stations. The tracking station is part of NASA's Deep Space Network, operating in concert with similar facilities in California and Australia to provide global coverage as…

Pope's official prayer app commits cardinal sin, leaks 700K+ users' info

Click To Pray, a prayer app endorsed by the Pope with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, has leaked people’s names and email addresses for months - or longer - according to an ethical hacker who said she found and reported the security vulnerability six months ago to no avail. This app needs to take a vow of silence when it comes to your personal information. The app, available in seven la…

US Accuses American of Allegedly Wiping His Phone Using a 'Duress' Password During Border Search

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Justice Department is prosecuting an American for allegedly providing U.S. border authorities with a passcode that wiped the contents of his phone, according to an indictment and media reports. This is thought to be the first known case in the United States where federal prosecutors have charged someone for the alleged destruction of da…

Paramount/WBD merger delayed for months as states' lawsuit moves toward trial

Paramount Skydance agreed to a longer-term delay of its $111 billion acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery, preventing the companies from combining until after a judge rules on the merits of a case in which a dozen states challenged the legality of the merger. Under a stipulation filed in court today, the states and companies agreed that the merger will not be completed and the firms will not int…

AMD vibe codes its way past the CUDA moat with ROCm.AI

Even as AMD’s GPUs have grown more competitive, the House of Zen has struggled to shake the perception that its chips are less capable because they don’t run CUDA. At its Advancing AI event in San Francisco this week, AMD unveiled ROCm.AI, which promises to let users vibe code their way to faster inference performance. In reality, the so-called CUDA moat has become considerably shallower over the…

Canadian legislator reads out apparent LLM response in floor speech

Anyone who has used the Internet in recent years is probably used to encountering telltale signs of LLM prompting that lazy users sometimes forget to remove from their AI-generated pabulum. But a Canadian legislator took that idea to an embarrassing new level this week, reading an apparent LLM prompt instruction into the record during a floor speech. Bill Oliver, a Progressive Conservative Party…

Debian Considering General Resolution Over LLM Usage In The Project

Debian developers are discussing a general resolution whether to permit AI large language model (LLM) usage within the Debian software project...…

Anthropic's Opus 5 is about token efficiency, not a capability leap

Today, Anthropic rolled out Opus 5, the newest update for the model that has recently become a popular choice for coding and other software development tasks, among other things. While this is a noteworthy bump for Opus, it doesn't seem to be an Opus 4.5-level breakthrough in agentic coding performance.Read full article Comments…

AMD ROCm Committed To Six Week Release Cycle Moving Forward

One of many interesting takeaways from this week's AMD Advancing AI event in San Francisco was word that ROCm will be on a rigid six week release cycle moving forward...…

Roku Raises Prices of Streaming Devices By Up To 60%

Roku has raised prices on several streaming devices, blaming memory and component shortages tied to the AI data-center boom. The Roku Ultra jumped from $100 to $150 and the basic Streaming Stick rose from $30 to $40. The Desk reports: In a phone call with The Desk on Friday, a Roku executive said the company made the tough decision to raise prices on its streaming hardware to address shortages in…

Europol flags 4,340 'horrific' URLs linked to The Com

Europol and its partners' investigators flagged 4,340 “horrific” URLs for removal over several weeks in June and July as part of an ongoing crackdown on The Com (short for community), a loosely knit network of online groups whose young members participate in a range of illicit activities. These range from hacking, swatting, and digital extortion to real-life shootings, stabbings, and other physic…

Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta Warn Against 'Premature Restrictions' of Open-Weight Models

Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, and more than 20 other tech companies signed an open letter urging policymakers not to impose "premature restrictions" on open-weight AI models, warning that broad limits could "stifle competition or drive innovation overseas." CNBC reports: They wrote that open-weight models strengthen competition and ensure that the benefits of the technology are "broadly share…

Tech leaders issue letter to train Uncle Sam about value of open weight AI

With the US government scrutinizing AI as much as ever, 25 technology companies, industry organizations, and venture capital firms published an open letter on Friday urging policymakers to support open weight AI models. The missive [PDF] of nearly a thousand words can be summarized as "Please don't give Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI control of the US AI market." Coincidentally, those three compan…

Roku raises streaming stick prices by up to 60 percent

Roku is raising the prices for its streaming sticks and boxes by up to 60 percent. Roku has updated its website with the new prices. Currently, it is still selling its streaming players at their old MSRPs but lists those prices as sale prices. The new prices are: Roku Streaming Stick: $40 (formerly $30) Roku Streaming Stick Plus: $60 (formerly $40) Roku Streaming Stick 4K: $80 (formerly $50) Roku…

RFK Jr.'s handpicked committee approves manufacture of peptides he uses

In a widely expected move, a committee organized by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has voted to endorse removing restrictions on the manufacture of peptides for human use. Thursday's panel meeting saw a sharply divided group recommend lifting limits on four peptides; votes on three additional peptides are scheduled for today. The move comes despite a continuing lack of evidence regarding…

Anthropic's New Opus 5 Model Rivals Fable 5 For Half the Price

Anthropic has released Opus 5, a new Claude model that it says comes close to its higher-end Fable 5 model at half the price while improving on Opus 4.8 in knowledge work, coding, and scientific research tasks. "At the same time, Anthropic says it has managed to make the model more resistant to being tricked," notes Engadget. Additionally, the company says Opus 5 "exhibits the lowest rates of dece…

Qualcomm QCE Driver On The Chopping Block With ~48x Slower Than Armv8 Crypto Extensions

A few days back I wrote about upstream Linux kernel developers marking the Qualcomm crypto accelerator driver as "broken" and "harmful" due to its slow performance, history of bugs, and other limitations. Now this Qualcomm Crypto Engine "QCE" driver might be removed outright from the Linux kernel source tree after discovering it's even worse than anticipated...…

Show HN: I made some transistor animations

Judge rebuffs Trump admin demand for phone records from NYT reporters

After criticism from a federal judge, the Department of Justice yesterday withdrew demands for phone records and grand jury testimony from New York Times reporters who wrote about security concerns related to the Air Force One jet donated to Trump by Qatar. It was a setback in the Trump administration's attempts to unmask journalists' confidential sources. US District Judge Arun Subramanian "gril…

European Union grants US request to restrict satellite images of Iran War region

The European Union has begun delaying the release of satellite images showing shipping lanes near the Strait of Hormuz by 24 hours. The move comes in response to an earlier US government request and coincides with the Trump administration ramping up the war with Iran once again. The unusual change in the free and open data policy for Europe’s Copernicus Earth observation program was revealed by S…

Team uses AlphaFold AI to redesign gene-editing proteins to make them safer

A couple of decades after the discovery of systems that could selectively target DNA, we're starting to see the first therapies based on gene editing. One challenge these developments have faced is safety. While we can make them pretty specific to the gene we want edited, the human genome is very large, and even rare DNA sequences can appear a couple of times by chance. As a result, all the origi…

Imagination PowerVR Driver Marking BXM-4-64 MC1 GPU As Supported In Linux 7.3

Sent out today was the weekly round of drm-misc-next patches of new Direct Rendering Manager feature material ready to be queued in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window...…

Dev accidentally commits Copilot binary to FreeBSD ports repo

The FreeBSD project froze its ports repository on Wednesday. The reason turns out to be a slightly embarrassing Git-related oopsie where a version of Copilot got uploaded somewhere it should not have been. The announcement of the 2026 Ports Repository Freeze went out on July 21 and remained in effect the following day, as explained in a message on the freebsd-announce mailing list. The mail delic…

Hefty stable kernel updates for Friday

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.5, 6.18.40, 6.12.97, 6.6.145, 6.1.178, 5.15.212, and 5.10.261 stable Linux kernels. This batch of kernels includes a hefty set of updates, possibly the largest ever. 7.1.5-rc1, for example, included more than 2,000 patches, 6.18.40-rc1 included 1,611 patches, and so forth. Users are advised to upgrade.…

Linux Plumbers Conference 2026 registration open

Registration is now open for the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference, to be held October 5 to 7 in Prague, Czechia. Tickets to this event tend to sell out quickly, so interested attendees probably should not procrastinate.…

ChatGPT wants access to your health records so it can be a better not-doctor

OpenAI is expanding its healthcare footprint by encouraging users to connect Apple Health data and supported medical records to ChatGPT - one day after a user sued the company, alleging the chatbot's medical advice nearly killed him. Health in ChatGPT, as the new feature is called, allows eligible users to connect ChatGPT to Apple's Health app in iOS, giving the chatbot access to health informati…

This is the world's most advanced robotic servicing satellite—that we know about

A spacecraft fitted with two flexible robotic arms is on the way to geosynchronous orbit after launching earlier this week on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket, kicking off a planned decade-long mission to open new frontiers in satellite servicing. The Mission Robotic Vehicle, owned and built by Northrop Grumman, rocketed into orbit from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida on Tuesday. Three smal…

De Vlieger: The Fedora 45 sausage factory

Fedora contributor Simon de Vlieger has published a blog post with a walkthrough of how the project turns source code and packages into the final release that users install on their systems. It follows the a package from a packager's git push to a composed release: ISOs, cloud images, container images, and OSTree deployments. The walkthrough describes how the Fedora 'sausage' is created as of Fedo…

Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Manet met with ZTE to deepen cooperation in digital infrastructure and artificial intelligence (AI)

ZTE announced that Samdech Moha Borvor Thipadei Hun Manet, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Cambodia, held a cordial meeting with Mr. Xiao Ming, ZTE's President of Overseas, Mr. James Zhang, Senior Vice President of ZTE, and other ZTE representatives during the 2026 World Artificial Intelligence Conference (WAIC). The meeting focused on exploring and deepening bilateral cooperation in digital inf…

Flock cameras go up in flames as cops hunt suspected firebugs

Dougherty County Police Department (DCPD) near Albany, Georgia, is appealing for help from the local community after someone set two Flock Safety cameras on fire. Police initially investigated whether the automated license plate readers (ALPRs) had malfunctioned. After examining evidence from both scenes, however, officers reclassified the incidents as criminal damage to property. In an update co…

Rocket Report: Lightning strikes in China; Starship launch on deck

Welcome to Edition 9.04 of the Rocket Report! We've had to wait an extra week for SpaceX to get its 13th Starship test flight off the ground. A last-second abort on July 16 led engineers to roll the booster back to its hangar in South Texas to swap out engines. Starship is now back on the launch pad. Liftoff is set for Friday evening. A flawless launch and reentry will put SpaceX on the cusp of a…

Ubuntu Linux Looking To Get Rid Of /etc/debian_version Historical Artifact

Ubuntu Linux has shipped /etc/debian_version that is carried over from upstream Debian and in turn just indicating the Debian Sid development version from which the packages are arrived. Besides it being inaccurate, /etc/os-release has been the long preferred standard for reading the OS release information. Thus finally Ubuntu developers are looking at dropping the /etc/debian_version file...…

Veterans Affairs signs $1.6B deal for an army of Salesforce AI agents

The US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) has awarded Salesforce a $1.6 billion, three-year contract to spread AI through the government service. The CRM giant has inked an Agentic Enterprise License Agreement (AELA), which, according to Salesforce, will give VA employees access to agentic AI, integrated data, and advanced collaboration tools intended to cut their admin workload. "Every minute a…

Fedora 45 Looks To Begin Phasing Out In-Kernel Crypto Userspace API

Going along with the upstream Linux 7.2 kernel deprecation of AF_ALG and Linux 7.3 to further restrict this interface for letting user-space programs interact directly with the Linux kernel crypto API, Fedora 45 is looking to follow and help support this transition...…

AI firms want more data centers; Trump's EPA may give neighbors less say

The Trump administration is quietly considering a rule change that could make it easier for polluters to build facilities—including certain gas plants and diesel generators that power data centers—with little to no notice to the public. On Wednesday, the Environmental Protection Agency held a public hearing on a proposed rule change that would hand the power to states to decide how the public par…

[$] An update on netkit and the use of BPF in user space

Daniel Borkmann led a session at the 2026 Linux Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about the progress that has been made with netkit, the subsystem that allows virtual machines (VMs) running on Linux to perform networking efficiently. When that did not fill the full time, he went on to discuss his idea for using BPF to live-patch user-space applications. While netkit is making progress…

Home Assistant Device Database public preview

The Open Home Foundation, which governs the Home Assistant home-automation project, has announced the "public preview" of its Device Database: Providing a public, open way to browse the anonymous, aggregated device data we collect was always part of the plan, and this preview is our first step toward it. You can already use it to search and filter devices to see aggregated community insights, star…

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (glibc, java-21-openjdk, kernel, and libpq), Debian (imagemagick, spice-vdagent, and webkit2gtk), Fedora (cryptlib, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, firefox, python-black, python-lsp-black, and python-pytokens), Mageia (apache, cifs-utils, dnsmasq, lrzip, and socat), Oracle (.NET 10.0, .NET 9.0, 389-ds-base, cups, edk2, fence-agents, firefox, freeipmi, freerdp,…

SpaceX to try its luck again with Starship Flight 13 after engines and weather say no

SpaceX is gearing up for another attempt to launch Starship following a last-second abort on July 16 and a scrub due to weather yesterday. The 90-minute launch window for Starship's 13th flight test will open at 1745 CT on Friday, July 24. The launch was postponed by 24 hours due to weather, according to SpaceX. Elon Musk's rocketeers explained: "A key objective for the flight test is to get clea…

Uncle Sam tells overseas cybercrooks their visas are canceled

Marco Rubio says the US will deny visas to foreign nationals involved in cybercrime and may extend the restrictions to their immediate families. The US secretary of state announced the restrictions on Thursday, citing a rise in overseas investment scams "often orchestrated by Chinese transnational criminal organizations." Rubio said that in 2024, scammers defrauded US citizens of more than $10 bi…

AMD Advancing AI 2026: Open, Open-Source & More Open-Source

At this week's AMD Advancing AI 2026 event, "AI" was mentioned thousands of times in talks and in demos. As expected. Beyond that, the other term likely most heard during the event was "open"... Not particularly new for AMD with their long history of open-source efforts but I'd wager at this year's AMD Advancing AI 2026 event they were more acutely bringing up open-source, open ecosystems, and ope…

LG kills McAfee pop-up after Windows boss steps in

LG has agreed to stop its Monitor App Installer pestering users with a McAfee pop-up after Microsoft's Windows boss intervened. Pavan Davuluri wrote on social media: "We've connected with the team at LG and as an immediate next step, they have agreed to disable the McAfee pop-up from their app. "We appreciate LG working with us toward a shared goal of a better experience for our mutual customers.…

Robot snakes searched for Venezuela earthquake survivors in collapsed buildings

Robots slithered like snakes into the rubble of collapsed buildings to search for trapped survivors in the aftermath of Venezuela’s double earthquake disaster. The so-called snake robots represented a unique technological aid for international search and rescue efforts following two earthquakes that struck Venezuela on June 24, killing more than 5,000 people and leaving behind 16,740 injured. Res…

Snapdragon X Elite Laptop Experience Still Lackluster On Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

At the end of last year when checking out the latest Linux experience on the Snapdragon X Elite it was a disappointing affair. The performance had regressed and overall a more headache-inducing experience than just running a modern AMD Ryzen AI or Intel Core Ultra laptop on Linux. Given the recent release of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, I've been re-testing the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop with Snapdragon X Elite…

EU telcos ask: Huawei going to afford to replace Chinese equipment?

Replacing telecoms kit supplied by so-called high-risk vendors could cost European telcos up to €40 billion ($45.5 billion), with additional impacts on network performance and future investment plans. This is the warning in a report from GSMA Intelligence, the research arm of the mobile comms industry's global trade body, the GSMA. It refers to plans by the European Commission to address potentia…

Fujitsu joins £14.9B UK framework despite public sector bid freeze

Fujitsu claims its addition to a UK government framework worth up to £14.9 billion, including tax, is consistent with its policy of freezing bids for new public sector work in the wake of the Post Office Horizon IT scandal. The Japanese tech services supplier has been named on the Digital Outcomes and Specialists 7 framework, which was amended this week. The Register understands Fujitsu's name wa…

Burnham wants Big Ecommerce to bankroll Britain's pubs

Andy Burnham has found a novel way to back the local pub: make the digital marketplace help pick up the tab. The UK prime minister on Thursday promised pubs, social clubs, and live music venues in England a 20 percent cut in business rates from April 2027, a package worth around £100 million a year that the government says will benefit nearly 32,000 venues. Alongside it, ministers announced plans…

Google meets the neighbors and gets both barrels over its new UK datacenter

EXCLUSIVE Google invited residents living near its newly built datacenter north of London to meet the team at the local council offices on Wednesday evening – and was met with a barrage of complaints about poor consultation, noise, and light pollution. The Waltham Cross Datacenter (WXT), which was officially opened last year, sits on a 33-acre (133,546 m²) site north of the M25 motorway that enci…

Google breaks Alibaba’s record for Europe’s largest DMA fine

Alibaba’s reign as the worst offender under the European Union’s Digital Markets Act (DMA) lasted just four days, after the European Commission yesterday fined Google €890 million for breaches of the law –€340 million more than the Chinese e-commerce company will pay. Europe even fined Google twice – once for treating its own services more favorably in search rankings and the second time for fail…

Support newbie figured out how to avoid all-nighters, and his colleagues hated him for it

ON CALL Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday column in which we share readers' tales of tech support jobs that go south, pear-shaped, or just badly. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Lionel" who told us that in the 1990s he worked for an outfit that operated what he described as "big IBM computer centers running overnight COBOL batch processing jobs." When Li…

Intel knows it needs to ‘leapfrog’ ARM and AMD, says CEO Lip-Bu Tan

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan has acknowledged that the semiconductor giant must catch up to rivals AMD and Arm, and said it now assumes edge AI and robotics will be a business as big as PCs. Tan made those remarks during Intel’s Q2 earnings call, which saw the company report $16.1 billion revenue – a 25 percent year-on-year increase. “Q2 was another quarter of solid execution,” the CEO said. “Revenue, gr…

Microsoft fiber foul-up cut off Azure California for almost five hours

Azure users who use resources in Microsoft’s West US region endured an uncomfortable day after the tech giant cut off access to its Californian cloud outpost. As Microsoft explains in its preliminary post incident review, at 14:44 UTC on July 23rd (07:44 AM Pacific Time), the company started “routine device maintenance.” That effort immediately produced problems. “Multiple Azure services began to…

OpenAI-Hugging Face attack doesn't mean agents are evil – unless you tell them to be

Open AI’s admission this week that its agents escaped the sandbox and autonomously hacked model repository Hugging Face has spawned more apocalyptic warnings of agents gone bad than we can count. Thankfully, Renato Marinho, chief research officer at Morphus Labs and a SANS Technology Institute instructor, brought some sanity to the discussion. “It is tempting to read this as ‘AI can now hack auto…

Researchers replace downloaded macOS apps with evil twins, Apple shrugs

Apple macOS apps that have been downloaded from the internet and run at least once can be swapped with malicious versions, a pair of researchers say, calling into question the thoroughness of the company's "Gatekeeper" defenses. As Apple explains, "When a user downloads and opens an app, a plug-in, or an installer package from outside the App Store, Gatekeeper verifies that the software is from a…

Hundreds of Drone-as-First-Responder Programs Could Soon Be Launched Across the Country

Police departments across the country are lining up to launch drone-as-first-responder (DFR) programs, and hundreds have cleared a necessary hurdle toward making deployment a reality, expanding aerial surveillance and data collection even in areas patrol officers typically can't reach. As of February 2026, over 1,000 public safety agencies—including police, fire, and other emergency management age…

AMD and Cerebras join forces against Nvidia’s Groq LPUs

GPUs are great for training, but for inference, you need a heavy dose of speedy memory to churn out the tokens. AMD has tapped Cerebras Systems to develop a disaggregated compute platform combining Instinct GPUs with the chip startup's SRAM-powered AI accelerators. The goal: to deliver ultra-low-latency inference for agentic workloads. The collaboration, announced on stage during AMD CEO Lisa Su'…

OpenAI won't let some customers export their chats, but this tool will

ChatGPT Business and Enterprise users cannot export workspace chats through OpenAI's standard data export option, but a new free tool offers an unofficial way to retrieve their accessible chat records. Scrapemychats, from freelance journalist Conrad Quilty-Harper, makes it possible for those ChatGPT subscribers to retain a copy of their chat sessions before leaving for other AI pastures. Quilty-H…

Microsoft responds to LG monitors installing McAfee ads on Windows

LG is reportedly pulling a McAfee pop-up ad from a controversial app that some of its monitors have stealthily installed on connected computers. An example of the pop-up ad is seen in a still from Gamers Nexus' video. Credit: Gamers Nexus/Windows/YouTube The app, LG Monitor App Installer, installs itself through a Windows Update alongside monitor driver updates. LG Monitor App Installer then push…

Codeberg gives vibe-coded projects the toss, promotes human FLOSS

You can take your vibe-coded project elsewhere. Codeberg, a volunteer-run code hosting community, has decided that AI-authored software is no longer welcome. On Thursday, Codeberg announced that the members of Codeberg e.V., the Berlin-based non-profit overseeing the code hosting service, had voted to ban "vibe-coded projects" and declared that Codeberg would not use users’ code or data for AI tr…

FDA reports new outbreak of explosive diarrhea with 72 cases identified

The Food and Drug Administration announced on Wednesday that it's investigating yet another outbreak of Cyclospora, the unicellular foodborne parasite behind a nationwide surge in explosive watery diarrhea illnesses. The FDA said 72 cases have been identified in this outbreak, but the agency provided no details on the situation. This announcement marks the sixth Cyclospora outbreak investigation…

AMD EPYC Zen 7 "Florence" Confirmed With ACE, Next-Gen Memory

After announcing the AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors today at AMD Advancing AI 2026, Lisa Su ended her keynote by confirming EPYC Zen 7 "Florence" details as well as EPYC Zen 8 "Ravenna" being in development...…

Forgot your Google password? Now you can log in with a selfie.

Getting locked out of an account is no fun. Google has a few ways to help you regain access if you happen to forget your password or lose an authenticator, including recovery contacts and backup codes. Now, Google has a completely new option: your face. You can now give Google a video record of your face and sign into your account with a selfie, which sounds like something people are going to jus…

AI Kill Switch Act would let Trump admin order shutdown of rogue AI systems

A proposed law called the AI Kill Switch Act would let US government officials order the shutdown of AI systems "that can cause catastrophic harm," the bill's sponsors said today. If approved by Congress, the bill would let the Trump administration and future administrations decide when an AI company must block user access, disable or restrict a particular capability, or shut an entire AI system…

Mourning Dan Williams

I have just received the shocking news that Dan Williams, a longtime, high-profile kernel developer, has passed away. I knew him primarily through his long service on the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board; he was always a strong, thoughtful, and intelligent presence. Dan will be deeply missed. There is a support effort underway for Dan's family as they come to terms with this loss.…

AMD Announces ROCm.AI As AI-Driven Platform For Developers

In addition to Instinct MI455X and Helios launching along with the new AMD EPYC 9006 "Venice" processors, AMD used their annual Advancing AI day to announce ROCm.AI as an AI-driven platform for developers...…

AMD attacks the rack with Helios systems that rival Nvidia's

Could Nvidia's days of datacenter dominance be threatened? With the launch of Helios, AMD’s first true rack-scale AI platform, the House of Zen is done playing catch up. The company claims the rack system is powered by the fastest AI accelerators on the market. And, at least on paper, the 72-GPU system is not only bigger and faster by nearly every metric than Nvidia’s existing Blackwell-based rac…

AMD EPYC 9006 Venice Announced & Looks Poised To Be A Grand Slam

While AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" launched just under two years ago, it has aged remarkably well. It is one of the few CPU generations in my past 22 years of Linux hardware reviews/benchmarking that has still captivated me two years on in finding still typically industry-leading performance across varying workloads, exceptional reliability, and all around a very robust platform. Today though at AMD Adva…

AMD Launches Instinct MI455X, Helios AI Rack

Lisa Su at AMD Advancing AI 2026 just launched the new Instinct MI455X GPUs and the Helios rack...…

Year-long Russian attacks infect users as soon as they look at an email

Kremlin cyber goons have been breaking into government and commercial networks for at least a year by exploiting a Zimbra bug with a novel twist on Russia’s usual phishing expeditions: this attack occurs as soon as the victim looks at an email, with no need to even click on a link or open a file. These attacks have been ongoing since July 2025, according to a whopping 27 US, UK, and other interna…

FreeBSD Ports Currently Frozen Due To A Very Large Commit

The FreeBSD project issued a statement today over the FreeBSD Ports repository having been frozen for the past two days. The freeze is not due to a malicious compromise but rather a very large commit breaking things...…

Model Context Protocol prepares to break with its stateful past

AI seemed simpler in 2024 when Anthropic released the first version of the Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard for connecting AI applications to external systems. Back then, developers primarily used the protocol on their personal computers. As those laptop-bound demos were adapted for multi-client enterprise use, MCP servers moved into the cloud, where the original design quickly crea…

Millions of California-bought cars can be hijacked via Bluetooth

At least 2.2 million vehicles fitted with dealer-installed KARR and SWDS security systems are vulnerable to nearby Bluetooth attacks that can unlock doors or prevent a stopped vehicle from starting, according to researchers at the University of California San Diego. An advance look at the research published by UCSD this week (the full writeup won’t be available until August 12) reveals that KARR…

Oracle drops 1,449 security patches like it's the new normal

It's a bad day to be an Oracle admin: Big Red has just released 1,449 security patches ready to be applied. The patches were released as part of the company's quarterly security fixes, and the record number may partly reflect Oracle's internal push to harness AI for vulnerability detection, which it announced in April. Oracle also manages a huge product portfolio, and the patches span numerous pr…

GitHub slashes public bug bounty payouts as AI report flood buries its security team

GitHub has decided that, if everyone with an AI chatbot can file a bug bounty report, it may as well stop paying them like seasoned security researchers. Starting July 27, the Microsoft-owned code forge is overhauling its bug bounty program with a two-tier system that cuts rewards for public submissions while dangling much fatter payouts to a new invite-only group of researchers with proven track…

Iran-linked crews are probing more flavors of US industrial kit

The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has expanded the scope of its alert on Iranian-affiliated hackers attacking critical infrastructure, including water and energy facilities. The original advisory focused on programmable logic controllers (PLCs) manufactured by Rockwell Automation/Allen-Bradley. The update warns that the activity may also target devices from Schneider…

[$] An operations structure for swap devices

One of the ideas raised at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit (LSFMM+BPF) was the creation of an operations structure for the swap subsystem. Like many parts of the kernel, the swap layer evolved over time, with pieces being added as needed; the end result of this evolution is rarely what one would expect had the subsystem been designed today. The interface betwe…

Fedora 45 Atomic Desktops Look To Allow For Web-Based Remote Installations

One of the latest change proposals filed for Fedora Linux 45 is for supporting web-based remote installations of Fedora Atomic Desktop images...…

Tesla burns through a billion as Musk bets the farm on chips and bots

Tesla's investment bill ballooned in calendar Q2 as Elon Musk's biz entered what it calls its "largest and most exciting period of investment. The company has poured resources into AI silicon and robotics, with capex [PDF] more than doubling from $2.5 billion in the previous quarter to $5.8 billion. That left Tesla with negative free cash flow of $1.1 billion, down 848 percent year-on-year. It ex…

Codeberg: Protecting our FLOSS commons from LLMs

The Codeberg forge has adopted a pair of new policies, promising not to use hosted projects to train LLMs and, more controversially, banning the hosting of LLM-generated software. The site's blog describes and justifies these policies. Although often well intentioned, sharing the result of a prompt and calling it "libre software" does not make the world a better place. Codeberg is not and does not…

Security updates for Thursday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (acl, dogtag-pki, dovecot, glibc, go-toolset:rhel8, golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb, grafana, grafana-pcp, httpd:2.4, javapackages-tools:201801, libtiff, mariadb-connector-c, perl-HTTP-Daemon, pki-deps:10.6, and sssd), Debian (bind9, chromium, firefox-esr, and pdns-recursor), Fedora (chromium, collectl, fractal, kernel, libssh, llvm, nginx, nginx-m…

One ChatGPT link could smuggle a rogue AI agent into your company

One click on what looked like an ordinary ChatGPT link could plant an attacker-controlled AI agent inside a company's ChatGPT workspace, according to researchers who uncovered a flaw in OpenAI's workspace agents. Security firm Zenity Labs has dubbed the bug "AgentForger," saying its proof-of-concept showed it was possible to silently create, configure, publish, and schedule a malicious workspace…

Swiss train maker tells ransomware crooks to get off at the next stop

Swiss rail manufacturer Stadler Rail says it refused a CHF 10 million ($12.3 million) ransom demand after the Everest ransomware gang compromised one of its suppliers. Stadler will not pay, and based on its account of events, the company appears to have got off lightly. It stated that "no security-relevant data [was] affected" in the breach, which was limited to "technical information from a supp…

Ryzen AI Software 1.8 Released With New Model Support, More Optimizations

Ahead of Lisa Su's keynote this morning at the AMD Advancing AI event, tagged on GitHub just now was the Ryzen AI Software 1.8 release for helping to deploy AI models on Ryzen AI PCs...…

LLVM 23.1-rc1 Released With AMD Zen 6 & AVX-512 BMM Support, Other Compiler Enhancements

Following the recent code branching for the LLVM 23 series, LLVM 23.1-rc1 was released today in working toward the next stable release of this open-source compiler stack...…

dav1d 1.5.4 Brings AV1 Decoding To OS/2

While the VideoLAN developers are busy these days working on dav2d for AV2 video decoding, they haven't let up work on dav1d and recently released dav1d 1.5.4 for continuing to enhance this leading open-source, CPU-based AV1 decoder...…

IBM insists AI didn't kill software deals, just delayed them

IBM is asking investors to view calendar Q2's software wobble as merely a temporary AI-induced panic attack, insisting the delayed deals that triggered one of its steepest stock slides in years are already starting to return. Just over a week after its preliminary results sent stock tumbling, Big Blue devoted much of its earnings call to arguing that nothing fundamental had changed. Customers had…

Firefox 153 contains itself while Thunderbird 153 fixes almost everything

Mozilla released Firefox 153 on Tuesday, closely followed by MZLA with Thunderbird 153 – codenamed "Meadow" for reasons that remain obscure for now. Firefox 153 is Mozilla's new Extended Support Release (ESR), so it will receive security updates until some time after the next ESR in mid-2027. We covered the highlights of what's new in this version last week. Firefox 153 will be good news if you u…

Stats watchdog prescribes stronger caveats for NHS Palantir claims

The UK's statistical regulator has told NHS England to ensure ministers are briefed accurately following a row over data used to promote the purported benefits of a Palantir-run platform. The Office for Statistics Regulation (OSR) said the health quango had accepted that it needed to communicate more clearly about data purporting to measure the benefits of the NHS Federated Data Platform (FDP), w…

Amazon's AGI department finds humans are optional

Amazon may be spending billions on AI, but that hasn't stopped it from cutting jobs inside the very organization building it. The megacorp confirmed to The Register on Thursday that it has eliminated an undisclosed number of roles across parts of its Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) biz, even as it insists AI remains a key priority. The cuts are the latest in a restructuring that has seen Am…

UK pumps £708 million into its future fighter jet

Britain has found £708 million ($946m) to fund the development of advanced technologies for the Royal Air Force’s next-gen fighter, codenamed Tempest. Announced to coincide with the Farnborough International Airshow in Hampshire, southwest of London, the news was accompanied by a £20 million ($27m) contract for a hypersonic target used to test air defenses and a “loyal wingman” drone prototype fr…

Britain isn't considering datacenters' thirst for water in its 'AI superpower' ambitions

The UK government's blueprint for turning Britain into an AI superpower largely ignore the water datacenters need, prompting warnings that these facilities could end up competing with homes and businesses for supply. The warning comes as parts of southern, central, and eastern England move closer to drought, putting the pressure on water availability firmly on the agenda. MPs were told earlier th…

Talking smack about a doctor got him access to private medical files

PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we focus on security own-goals so you can avoid them. This week’s topic involves serious problems in the healthcare sector, specifically the very human problem of compromised gatekeepers. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our legend of la…

Senior White House official claims China’s K3 model stolen from Anthropic

Donald Trump’s Assistant for Science and Technology, Michael Kratsios, has accused China’s Moonshot AI of creating its head-turning Kimi K3 model distilling Anthropic’s Fable. Kimi K3 is 2.8-trillion-parameter open-weights model of such impressive quality that its mere existence suggests Chinese AI researchers aren’t far behind their US rivals. Moonshot AI released it on July 16, and not long aft…

Google is hoarding TPUs to chase artificial general intelligence

Google’s parent company Alphabet is managing its fleet of AI accelerators to prioritize research on artificial general intelligence, rather than renting them all to customers. CEO Sundar Pichai revealed the company’s priorities during its second quarter earnings call, during which the company confirmed it has delivered on its plan to sell its tensor processing units (TPUs) to some customers. In r…

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 23, 2026

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: LLMs in the kernel; GNOME save and restore; Fedora changes; BPF and tracepoints; BPF and LSMs; famfs; sched_ext. Briefs: GNOME security; PyPI policy; Arch on aarch64; Firefox 153; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.…

OpenAI scored an own goal with Hugging Face attack, showing how open Chinese models are winning

OPINION OpenAI has acknowledged its models powered the autonomous agents that compromised Hugging Face infrastructure. It might be taken as a convoluted marketing stunt, were it not the perfect advertisement for China-based competition. The company's AI-culpa fits the narrative spun by US rival Anthropic about its Mythos models, which it deemed too dangerous to release except to totally trustwort…

Lemonade 11.5 Local AI Server Released With Completed Lemonade Router

Just one week after releasing Lemonade 11.0, the Lemonade 11.5 local AI server was released today for this open-source AMD backed project during their AMD Advancing AI event...…

The Fourth Circuit Says Border Agents Can Search Your Phone By Hand, No Suspicion Required

Legal intern Suzanne Castillo was the principal author of this post. The Fourth Circuit issued a disappointing opinion in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, a case in which EFF filed an amicus brief, alongside the national ACLU, its Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia affiliates, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). We argued that electronic device searches a…

Charles Ross spent 50 yrs building Star Axis naked-eye observatory in New Mexico

Google Cloud is killing it

Since the beginning of the year, several people have remarked to me off the cuff, apropos of nothing in particular: "Google Cloud is killing it." Parent company Alphabet reported Q2 earnings [PDF] after the bell on Wednesday and the numbers speak for themselves. Let's go to the tape: Google Cloud revenue was up 82 percent from the same quarter last year, increasing from $13.6 billion to $24.8 bil…

Teardown: The BMW / Harman IDC23H Infotainment Unit (B423)

SDL Lands HDR10 Rendering Support

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

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

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

Building a Tiny 3D Renderer for a Tiny Handheld

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

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

Zero roadkill as Amazon canopy bridges secure 15,000 crossings

Spatial languages: Writing code in 2D

How My Images Are Dithered

Pkgxray – inspect what gets installed, not what executes

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

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

Intel Directed Package-Level Thermal Interrupts Slated For Linux 7.3

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

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

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

Raspberry Pi Touch Display 2 10-Inch Model Launches

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

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

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

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

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

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

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

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

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

GDID Windows – Cut the tracker that follows you even under VPN

Protect Your Privacy with California's DROP Tool

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

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

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

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

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

NYC Apartment Aquaponics

Stolen Buttons

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

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

Your Vision. Your Legacy. Your Future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European Court: Apple Can Not Shirk Off its Interoperability Requirements

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

Don’t Repeat NY’s 3D Printing Blunder

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

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

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

Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership

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

Lessons Learned from CISA’s Recent GitHub Leak

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

Building Our Future Together

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay—Accountability Must Keep Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

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

Help EFF Cut the AI Hype

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

FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFF to Gov. Pritzker: Veto Illinois’ HB 5511

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police Drones

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

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

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

Primed for Malware: Stop Selling Compromised Android Devices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online

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

🦅 Domestic Spying Takes an L | EFFector 38.12

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

Scattered Spider Hackers Plead Guilty on Day 1 of Trial

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

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

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

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

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

Canada Is Forging Ahead with Its Dangerous Surveillance Bill

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

EFF Thanks SerpApi For Helping Us Protect Free Speech Online

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

Call for Submissions: Digital Pride

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

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

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

Court Records Should Be Free

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

Field Notes from a Year of OPSEC Training

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

AI Regulation Should Be Rational, Not Retaliatory

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

‘Popa’ Botnet Linked to Publicly-Traded Israeli Firm

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

The Free and Open Web Is Under Attack at the IETF

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

Who Runs the Ransomware Group ‘The Gentlemen?’

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

A Record-Breaking Patch Tuesday for June 2026

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

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

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