Terminal

Reddit Bans 11-Year Account for GPL Game Post, Testing the EU's DSA

Longtime Slashdot reader DF5JT writes: On July 26, I posted a single announcement in r/backgammon: GNU Backgammon for Android, GPLv3, the first standalone backgammon engine on F-Droid. Reddit's spam filter removed the post and permanently banned my 11-year, 30,000-karma account -- the result is publicly visible at reddit.com/user/OE1FEU. To this day, Reddit has given no reason whatsoever, although…

Building up the US power grid won't be wasted, even if the AI bubble bursts

US power companies must decide how much capacity to build for soaring datacenter demand, knowing that some planned facilities may never materialize and the AI bubble could deflate. Consulting firm McKinsey & Company says the greater near-term risk is building too little. Driven by the AI craze, a boom in datacenter building is expected to see the energy consumed by these facilities grow by 26 per…

FastFlowLM 1.0 Released Now As Part Of The AMD ROCm Umbrella

FastFlowLM is the open-source software for getting vision, audio, embedding, and MoE large language models up and running on AMD Ryzen AI NPUs. FastFlowLM 1.0 released today and is also now part of the AMD ROCm software umbrella...…

Rusticl Now Supports cl_ext_float_atomics

With the recent release of Mesa 26.2 the Rusticl OpenCL driver now supports OpenCL 3.1 on RadeonSI, LLVMpipe, Zink, Intel Iris, and Apple Asahi. But the work is not over and more improvements to this Rust-based, modern OpenCL driver continue to land...…

Claude Opus Helped Debug & Fix Lack Of Audio On Linux For HP OmniBook X Flip 14

The HP OmniBook X Flip 14-kc0xxx is an AMD Ryzen AI 300 "Strix Point" powered laptop. While most AMD Strix Point laptops work fine on modern Linux distributions, with this particular HP OmniBook X there is no working audio with current mainline Linux kernel builds. With Claude Opus 5 acting as a debugging assistant and coding agent, patches are now pending to correct the audio support for this HP…

London Underground begins scanning passengers' faces

Malicious SIMs can shut down phones, steal files, and drag 5G back to 2G

Researchers have found that a malicious SIM card can tell some phones and cellular-connected devices to leak data, drop to 2G, shut themselves down, or even execute code, all thanks to functionality that's supposed to be there. The research [PDF], presented at the USENIX WOOT conference in Baltimore this week, examines proactive SIM functionality, which allows a SIM to issue commands to the devic…

Closing Canario Terminal source code

France to ban unsolicited telemarketing calls

The Roboguard Revolution Is Short-Circuiting

alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: Robotics companies promise that video-camera-toting security robots can deter and detect crime. But many companies are rethinking the approach after a trail of canceled contracts and questions about whether the artificial intelligence-powered bots are meeting the needs of businesses and local governments. Proof News found evidence of at least 21 se…

Why hybrid clouds break and what to do about it

Hybrid cloud breaks down when every environment has its own provisioning process, security model, monitoring stack, and cost structure. In practice, many hybrid strategies were built around where infrastructure happened to live, not around each workload’s latency, data governance, resilience, performance, and cost requirements. Why has hybrid cloud become so hard to run? Most enterprises didn't c…

The Water Footprint of AI

OVH Cloud warns of 87% price hikes to help it cover RAMpocalypse costs

Octave Klaba, the CEO of France-based cloud operator OVH has warned that it will soon hike the price of server rental by up to 87 percent. Klaba said the price OVH pays for memory rose 6x in the year to June 2026, will rise to 9x by September, and hit 12x next year. He has also seen a 7x price increase for NVMe drives, hard disk prices rise 3.5x, and the cost of CPUs, motherboards, and network ca…

Show HN: Mcptoon – Token-efficient MCP CLI client

Taxi Drivers Rarely Die of Alzheimer's

An anonymous reader shares a report from The Conversation, written by Hatim Sharif, a civil and environmental engineer who has "spent more than two decades staring at maps" and spatial data. Sharif finds one connection especially fascinating: the link between spatial reasoning and why taxi drivers seem to have lower rates of Alzheimer's. From the report: Taxi and ambulance drivers are less likely…

Japan kind-of completes its sovereign satnav constellation

Japan has successfully launched the last of the current generation of the satellite navigation orbiters it will use to operate a sovereign positioning system. The satellite, known as “Michibiki No. 7”, aka QZS-7, made it into orbit early on Tuesday, local time, aboard an H3 rocket. The H3 is the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency’s (JAXA’s) latest mid-range launcher and has flown nine times. Two…

Recycle – Floppydisks

H3-metal – Native MiniMax-H3 inference for Apple Silicon

Open-Source NVIDIA "Nova" Driver Sees More Functionality For Linux 7.3

Sent to DRM-Next this week was the DRM Rust core and driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window. There continues to be a lot of DRM core infrastructure work happening for Rust integration plus two leading Rust DRM drivers of Nova for open-source NVIDIA GPU support as the successor to Nouveau and then Tyr as the in-development Arm Mali driver...…

Alibaba Cloud is using AI to help it use less AI

Alibaba is one of the world’s leading sources of large language models, yet its cloudy arm is proudly showing off its own technology that finds ways to avoid using them. Alibaba Cloud has built a system to analyze its customers’ tech support queries that often avoids using large language models to solve the problem, an approach it says has proven faster, cheaper, and more accurate. China’s top cl…

Anthropic pledges to embed watermarks to help discern AI slop in sop to EU

Anthropic will embed watermarks in the text and files generated by future models it launches in the EU, as part of its effort to comply with content and transparency rules in the bloc's AI Act. "Generated text will carry embedded watermarks, and generated files will include digitally signed provenance metadata where supported," the company said in a help document published on Monday. The AI biz i…

Chicken Scheme 6.0

Dismiss Church’s Trademark Lawsuit Against “Mormon Stories” Podcast, EFF Urges Court

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…

The UK's war on anonymity has come to America

Show HN: Scroll through all 43252003274489856000 Rubik's Cube states

Cyber Vulnerability Sweep Picks Up Royal Navy Drones Sending Data To China

A routine security assessment found that cameras aboard Royal Navy Kraken unmanned surface vessels were sending "heartbeat" signals to an IP address in China. "A thorough investigation found no evidence of MoD data or systems being accessed, compromised or transmitted externally," said a Ministry of Defense spokesperson. "Our assurance and testing processes are designed to identify and address pot…

As AI eats the web, the internet’s collective memory is disappearing

Ars Live: Ross Scott discusses the Stop Killing Games movement

By now, any serious gamer is familiar with a favorite title becoming unplayable after a centralized online server gets shut down, or being unable to purchase and download a digitally delisted, critically acclaimed title from yesteryear. Can anything be done about this video game preservation problem? To help answer that question, we'll be hosting a live conversation with Ross Scott, the founder o…

With new open models, Meta pitches another reboot of its struggling AI strategy

Meta has announced its intention to focus on open-weight large language models. Additionally, the company announced the release of an open model called Muse Glimmer and a promise to open the weights for Muse Spark 1.2, its more powerful model, in the next few weeks. Alongside these announcements, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg published a more than 6,000-word essay outlining the company's philosophy ab…

A Data Breach At Shipping Giant Ceva Logistics Is Rippling Across Banks, Retailers, Steam Gamers, and Beyond

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Ceva Logistics, one of the world's largest shipping and logistics giants, has been hacked. Several companies that rely on Ceva for shipping their products to their customers say that their personal information was also stolen in the breach. The cyberattack on Ceva is affecting at least eight warehouses across Europe used for shipping goods acros…

Trump signs bonkers order that cuts vaccines, promotes ones that don't exist

President Trump signed an executive order Monday that makes sweeping, unilateral changes to federal vaccine recommendations. The order aims to reduce the number of lifesaving vaccines all children are recommended to get—from 18 to 11—while also splitting them up and spacing them out over more time and more medical visits. The vaccine changes are not backed by evidence or spurred by new findings.…

How Claude marks AI-generated content

Developer Cold Iron Studios shuts down cloud version of $60 game with no refunds

Following its announcement in March, game developer Cold Iron Studios has shut down the servers for the cloud version of Aliens: Fireteam Elite on the Nintendo Switch. The game originally cost $30 (or $60 for an “Ultimate” version with additional content). Cold Iron Studios hasn't offered customers refunds. TheGamer reported that affected players are entitled to a discount for the Nintendo Switch…

Hey, big spender – OpenAI has a new SKU just for you

Not getting enough out of that ChatGPT Business subscription? OpenAI is hoping you’ll take it up on a new “premium” Business tier seat that’s up to $100 more a month for some added capacity and higher usage limits. Sam Altman’s AI outfit announced ChatGPT Business Premium seats on Monday, describing the new offering as an option for Business-tier customers who feel they’re chafing under the old B…

DEF CON hackers add new muscle to water utility protection

DEF CON hackers expanded their efforts to provide free cyber-defenses to rural water systems in the US to include managed detection and response providers, digital twins, and AI agents. On Friday, at the annual hacker’s conference, DEF CON Franklin and the National Rural Water Association (NRWA) announced a new program called the Water Watch Center. It will initially fund five providers - Defendi…

Valve Slowly Expands SteamOS Support On Non-Valve Hardware

Valve is continuing to broaden SteamOS support beyond its own hardware, with the latest beta adding "initial gamepad support" for a few recent gaming handhelds and improving compatibility for a few others. Ars Technica reports: Those newly supported handhelds include MSI's Claw 8 EX AI+, the extremely expensive, extremely powerful handheld built around Intel's Arc G3 processor that launched this s…

Confessions of a Long-Distance Sailor

The future is for billionaires – the rest of us will get open weight AI models, maybe

OPINION In a public post titled "The Future is for Everyone," Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg declares, "We are fortunate to live at an incredible moment in history." For Zuck to posit that "The Future is for Everyone" is at once facile for being so vague it could mean anything – are there people now living who are excluded from the future? – and foolish for its failure to address real issues that actua…

Amazon backs power plant that may become top source of US climate pollution

Amazon’s artificial intelligence ambitions will soon be partly fueled by a natural gas-burning power plant in Texas that “could become the largest single source of climate pollution in the United States,” The New York Times reported. These gas-burning plants are increasingly lumped into data center projects. They produce harmful pollutants, which can accelerate climate change impacts and harm pub…

Zuck rekindles open weights Llama drama with Muse Glimmer

After seemingly abandoning its open source AI roots this spring, Meta offered enterprises a glimmer of hope on Monday with the launch of its first open weights model in more than a year. Unveiled on Monday, Muse Glimmer is a 30 billion-parameter LLM distilled from the Social network's larger, and for now proprietary, Muse Spark model. Glimmer arrives as American tech companies grapple with a cris…

Zuckerberg’s superyacht ignored emergency channel, failed to aid stranded boat

Social media scuttlebutt about Mark Zuckerberg’s $300 million superyacht failing to assist stranded boaters off the coast of Alaska was partly corroborated by ship-tracking data—and eventually prompted responses from both the US Coast Guard and a spokesperson for Zuckerberg. The incident was made public when Michael Love, a passenger aboard the replica steamship Wilderness Legacy during an Alaska…

First Rival Android App Store Arrives In the US Play Store

Aptoide has become the first third-party Android app store available directly through Google Play in the U.S. "The change is a direct result of Google's litigation with Epic, which saw a judge rule in 2024 that the Play Store would have to open up to third-party stores," notes The Verge. The change makes rival storefronts far easier to discover and install, potentially opening the door for Epic, A…

Fedora CoreOS To Enable systemd-oomd & zRAM Swap By Default

Fedora's CoreOS as their container-optimized operating system will be moving to enable systemd-oomd by default with Fedora CoreOS 45. Additionally, swap on zRAM will be enabled by default too...…

Wall Street Giants Partner With Nvidia On $500 Billion AI Financing Deal

Nvidia is working with Wall Street heavyweights on a potential $500 billion financing package for AI infrastructure (source paywalled; alternative source). The consortium includes BlackRock's Global Infrastructure Partners, Brookfield Asset Management, Goldman Sachs and KKR. The Financial Times reports: The partnership underscores Nvidia's growing efforts to raise capital for itself and its client…

Five More Lenovo Laptops To Report Fan Sensors With Linux 7.3

In addition to more ASUS motherboards having working sensors with Linux 7.3, this next kernel version will also get several more Lenovo laptop models to be reporting their fan sensor information under Linux...…

Rust SIMD on the GPU

Meta's 'Open' Muse Glimmer Model Can Run On a Single Computer

Meta has released Muse Glimmer, a slimmed-down open-weight AI model designed to run locally on a single GPU for agent tasks such as scheduling, file management, coding, and tool use. The release is based on Meta's closed Muse Spark 1.2 model and appears to be aimed at attracting developers who want capable AI agents without relying entirely on cloud-hosted services. Engadget reports: Facebook said…

Linux 7.3 Bringing A KCFI Optimization To Benefit Older Intel CPUs

Expected to be merged during the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window is a Kernel Control Flow Integrity (KCFI) improvement intended to benefit older Intel processors...…

North Korean spies are running local LLMs to cause AI mischief

North Korean government snoops are operating LLMs locally and collecting technology to weave AI into their attack operations, according to South Korean security firm Genians. The researchers said they observed Kimsuky setting up and operating local LLM environments using Ollama, GPT4All, and Msty, experimenting with other AI tools such as Cursor, and using retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) for…

Show HN: Needle2: 14MB agentic LLM for phones, wearables, smart home and robots

Meta Must Stop Silencing Reproductive Health Information

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…

Has Ford got cheap car fever? A $25K crossover is supposedly on the way.

Talk of the affordability crisis may be penetrating corporate boardrooms. Hot on the heels of the name and starting price for Ford's new affordable electric truck, news leaked today that the sub-$30,000 Fathom isn't the only cheap Ford in the works. According to a report at Automotive News, the automaker is working on a new entry-level crossover that will start at around $25,000, although don't e…

Taiwan 'Throttles' Mobile Internet For First Time During Annual War Games

Taiwan deliberately throttled mobile internet across the Taichung area during its annual Han Kuang war games, "simulating communication disruption in the event of a Chinese attack or natural disaster," reports Reuters. The drill accompanied air-raid exercises and military rehearsals aimed at defending strategically important areas such as the Penghu Islands. From the report: Democratically governe…

Gym rat asks AI agent to book him a class, it hacks a waitlist API to bump him up the list

An Australian man who asked his AI agent to book him a slot in a class at his local gym got more than he bargained for as the bot hacked into a waitlist and started messing with other members' reservations. Australian broadcaster ABC identified the gym-goer only as “Andrew.” The report says Andrew was using the OpenClaw agent with Anthropic’s Claude AI service. Per ABC, Andrew asked his AI agent…

Taylor Farms recalls jalapeño products for Salmonella amid Cyclospora outbreak

Amid a massive Cyclospora outbreak linked to its iceberg lettuce, Taylor Farms is now recalling products containing jalapeños, which were linked last week to a large, multi-state Salmonella outbreak. On Sunday, August 9, Taylor Farms recalled jalapeño-containing products, including diced jalapeños, dips, salsas, pico de gallo, guacamole, and pre-made salads, burritos, and sandwiches. The foods, w…

What's the best programming language for coding agents?

LexisNexis pulls three services offline after suspicious server activity

LexisNexis took its Diligence, Metabase API, and Newsdesk services offline last week after detecting "unusual activity on servers that are hosted and managed by a third-party vendor." Non-public customer communications penned by Todd Larsen, president of Nexis Solutions, and seen by The Register, said the company took the decision to protect customers by "containing the issue at its source" and "…

Valve slowly expands SteamOS support on non-Valve hardware

SteamOS is continuing its slow march to fuller support on a wider variety of non-Valve hardware. This weekend's release of the SteamOS 3.8.25 Beta includes "initial gamepad support" for a few recent gaming handhelds and improved support for a few others. Those newly supported handhelds include MSI's Claw 8 EX AI+, the extremely expensive, extremely powerful handheld built around Intel's Arc G3 pr…

AI Assistant Hacks Gym Website In First Known Australian Autonomous Cyber Attack

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ABC News & Headlines: Andrew asked his personal assistant to book him a spot in one of his gym's coveted morning classes. It was a task he thought was well suited to this particular assistant because the booking form was online and because his assistant was not a person -- it was artificial intelligence (AI). But Andrew was shocked by what happened next. Hi…

Following Epic loss, Google has started hosting rival app stores in the Play Store

A new day has dawned in the Play Store, and it's one that Google tried very hard to avoid. The first third-party app store has arrived in Google Play as a result of the long-running antitrust lawsuit with Epic. Those in the US can now head into Google Play and download Aptoide, a game-focused store that has been available as a sideloaded client since the early days of Android. Forcing Google to d…

Qt Toolkit To Introduce Edge AI Submodule, Initially For Vision AI With Qt

The Qt Group has been working on various AI integrations for the Qt toolkit in recent times like a QML profiler skill for agentic development to help with performance profiling. They have also worked on Qt AI coding assistants and AI agents in the Qt Creator integrated development environment. Their latest AI use is now preparing to introduce a new module in the Qt toolkit itself for edge AI infer…

One of China's workhorse rockets just exploded in flight

One of China's most used rockets, the Long March 7A, exploded a little more than a minute after lifting off on Monday evening, local time. The medium-lift rocket's payload was classified, but it was believed to be a military communications satellite. The rocket's liftoff from Wenchang Space Launch Site appeared to be nominal, but publicly captured videos (such as this one) showed that the rocket'…

Dogs can tell if you're scared or sad

Any dog owner would tell you that their canine companions are attuned to their humans' emotional state and respond accordingly. Scientists have performed fMRI scans on dogs and identified a specific brain region that processes happy human facial expresses, like a smile, according to a new paper published in the journal iScience. They also found that dogs can tell the difference between negative f…

Paramount Promises 30 Film-A-Year Contracts After WBD Acquisition

Paramount is making commitments to major theater chains to release 30 films annually for three years if its Warner Bros. deal goes through. According to Deadline, the written commitment was sent to "at least one of the top two circuits" (specifically Regal but AMC may have also received a written commitment) and includes "an exclusive 45-day theatrical window and a 90-day window to streaming." Fro…

2026 Subaru Outback review: Great interior, refined drive, divisive looks

When station wagons headed for the same retirement home as the vinyl roof and the opera window, Subaru looked at its sensible Legacy wagon and had a different idea. Raise it a few inches, wrap the lower body in plastic cladding, name it for the Australian bush, and suburban families would drive to soccer practice while imagining themselves fording streams and climbing sand dunes. In giving birth…

Intel Xeon 678X Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 Performance With The HP Z4 G6i

HP recently launched their Z4 G6i workstation that I have been testing out the past few weeks. The HP Z4 G6i is powered by Granite Rapids WS with the review unit specifically being powered by the Intel Xeon 678X. As the unit shipped with Microsoft Windows 11 Pro and this being the first time I've had my hands on Granite Rapids WS, I took the opportunity to run some Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS…

A researcher bought noreply.net. Companies started sending him secrets.

Cory Solovewicz receives more unwanted emails than you. Seriously—it’s a lot more. Since December 2024, one of the domains at which the security researcher receives email has registered 401,796 messages—by his calculations that’s an average of 699.99 pings per day. This deluge isn’t the regular flood of spam, newsletters, and unwanted deals that fill many people’s inboxes. Instead, companies and…

As datacenters expand, so does public opposition to them

Anti-datacenter sentiment appears to be hardening in the US and UK, with more American jurisdictions blocking new builds and protesters marching against a planned facility in London's historic Brick Lane. A burst of new projects on both sides of the Atlantic has brought concerns about electricity bills, water supplies, and massive warehouse-like structures looming over nearby homes. More than 200…

Mark Zuckerberg attacks 'closed' AI rivals as Meta returns to open models

[$] Even more formal verification for BPF

BPF offers useful safety guarantees, but Kumar Kartikeya Dwivedi wants BPF programs to be even safer. At the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, he led a session (slides) discussing the possibility of adding domain-specific invariants to BPF programs. It was not a discussion intended to lead to the implementation of any particular kernel feature, but rather an overv…

Attackers pick Levi's pockets in social engineering attack

Levi Strauss is investigating a data breach after attackers used social engineering to access three employees' work computers. In a regulatory filing, the jeans maker said the intruders accessed and exfiltrated what it described only as "certain corporate information." Levi's said it spotted the intrusion, kicked off its incident response procedures, brought in outside cybersecurity experts, and…

Django moves to an annual release cycle

The Django Python web-framework project has announced that it has accepted an annual release cycle proposal. This means that the project is moving from a somewhat complicated schedule that interspersed short-lived feature releases and long-term-support (LTS) releases to a simpler annual cycle where each release is supported for three years. Every feature release gets three years of support: one ye…

Wetherspoons bars smart glasses from filming customers

Wetherspoons has stopped short of banning Meta-style smart glasses from its pubs, but told The Register that customers should switch off their cameras and refrain from filming. "Like many hospitality companies, Wetherspoon has CCTV cameras for security reasons, but their use is strictly controlled by data legislation," a spokesperson said. "Apart from that, the general code that applies in our pu…

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (firefox, gpsd-minimal, kernel, libarchive, libgcrypt, and LibRaw), Debian (bind9, ca-certificates, chromium, dnsdist, icinga2, kitty, libheif, openjdk-21, pdns, pdns-recursor, thunderbird, and xen), Fedora (bird, erlang, kernel, mingw-glib2, nghttp2, p11-kit, perl, perl-Devel-Cover, perl-PAR-Packer, pgadmin4, polymake, python-nh3, python-wsgidav, pyt…

Linux Mint Improves Kernel Management & Setting System-Wide Environment Variables

Linux Mint is out today with their July 2026 status update that highlights all the improvements made to their distribution over the past month...…

Cyber vulnerability sweep picks up Royal Navy drones sending data to China

Cameras aboard Royal Navy drone boats were found phoning home to an IP address in China during a routine cyber vulnerability assessment. The UK Ministry of Defence confirmed the discovery, describing it as "an issue affecting a Kraken Unmanned Surface Vessel sub-system used by the Royal Navy." The Register understands that the data consisted of a "heartbeat" signalling that the camera was online…

Squeak 6.1

Tail-call optimization in C is relatively recent (2025)

Toxic Underground Fires Are Spreading at California Landfills

Three years ago environmental regulators discovered garbage burning deep inside California's Chiquita Canyon Landfill, reports the Los Angeles Times. [Alternate URL here.] "Few imagined the calamity that would follow. "Somehow the landfill's pollution control system introduced oxygen below, causing decades-old waste to rapidly decompose, generating intense heat and eventually widespread smoldering…

Framework loses customer data in Metabase zero-day attack

Modular laptop maker Framework has warned customers that an attacker exploited a zero-day at analytics provider Metabase to access names, email addresses, phone numbers, physical addresses, and login IP addresses, according to an email shared on Reddit. For business customers, the exposed information may also include company names, phone numbers, VAT or Employer Identification Numbers (EINs), and…

Meta Publishes Muse Glimmer As 30B Open Agentic Model

The Meta Superintelligence Labs announced this morning they have released Muse Glimmer as their next large language model featuring 30 billion parameters for always-on local agent workflows. Muse Glimmer features open-source model weights under an Apache 2.0 license...…

Peer review is overwhelmed—can it survive in the AI era?

Jason Semprini was excited about his research on policies mandating that elementary school students receive the human papillomavirus vaccine. HPV causes most cases of cervical cancer, but counterintuitively, Semprini found that mandates don’t do that much to reduce the overall rate of cervical cancer in a population. That’s odd, but it's also not completely surprising—we know that mandating a vac…

Claude Code puts auto mode in the driver's seat

Anthropic is making auto mode the default in Claude Code from August 14, claiming its classifier is "as safe or safer than an average user clicking through prompts." Users with a different default already set might receive a one-time prompt asking whether they want to switch. It applies to new sessions on Pro, Max, and Team plans. It will remain opt-in for now on Claude Enterprise, the Claude API…

Minor Optimization Coming For AMD Athlon XP Era Systems Running Linux

A minor performance optimization is on the way to the Linux kernel for roughly two decade old CPUs that have SSE but lack SSE2. Among those CPUs to benefit are the AMD Athlon XP series, some early Sempron models, and some Intel Celeron and Pentium III models...…

Apple M1 Series SoCs To See ~1 Watt Power Savings With Linux 7.3

In addition to Linux 7.3 slated to receive initial Apple M3 Pro / Max / Ultra SoC support, this next version of the Linux kernel is also set to bring some minor power savings for the Apple M1 series that remains the best supported Apple Silicon on Linux...…

Muse Glimmer: 30B-parameter model optimized for always-on local agent workflows

Old SGI Drivers Being Removed In Linux 7.3 Over Security Concerns

On top of various other Linux drivers for old hardware being removed due to noise generated by AI/LLM coding agents, there are more examples coming with Linux 7.3 as some old Silicon Graphics (SGI) drivers are being removed from the mainline Linux kernel over security concerns...…

London still dominates Britain's datacenter map, but the regions are powering up

A snapshot of Britain's datacenter estate puts nearly 40 percent of its facilities in London, along with about two-thirds of its estimated colocation capacity, although development is spreading beyond the capital. The analysis counts 555 UK server farms, matching Statista's latest figure. It puts their combined IT capacity at about 1.6 GW. By facility count, that would put Blighty second only to…

Smart glasses are only smart if we train them to be good. Then they'll be fantastic

The most sobering observation in tech is not how much AI is taking on the appearance of the human mind. It's how much the human mind increasingly resembles Windows – not in functionality, although we all know that person, but in the way it crufts up and loses compatibility after years without an upgrade or reboot. We start shiny and new, with everything around us equally exciting, yet end up curs…

How Accurate Are Flock's AI-Powered License-Reading Cameras?

Futurism reports: 404 Media revealed that a July 10 audit by the Los Angeles Police Department Office of the Inspector General caught the department's ALPR cameras generating 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in just two months — each one ending with officers pulling over an innocent driver. Factoring in 337 alerts which "resulted in the recovery of stolen vehicles," the LAPD's cameras carry an err…

Demoralized developer's desperate hack came back to haunt him on LinkedIn

WHO, ME? The past may be a foreign country, but it's one The Register likes to explore each Friday in "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column that shares your tales of workplace mistakes and great escapes. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Walter," who once worked for one half of a duopoly competing in the intertwined markets for bad poetry celebrating memorable life moments and ques…

Linus Torvalds says AI has made 'huge' Linux kernel updates the new normal

Linux kernel boss Linus Torvalds thinks the project has reached a new normal of supersized updates, thanks to AI. Torvalds posts a weekly state of the kernel update, and last week’s message opened with his observation that “This rc is huge.” “Even by the ‘new normal’ standards this is a big rc, and I think it's the biggest rc6 we've had in years at least by commit count,” he wrote on August 2. Fa…

Microsoft Responds to Outcry After Quietly Installing Beta 'Photos' App on Enterprise Machines

Microsoft's cloud storage app OneDrive got a new Photos app in the worst possible way, reports the blog Neowin . "The app is reportedly showing up even on Windows 11 Enterprise machines, despite apparently being a beta application aimed at consumer functionality." One admin questioned why a beta app was appearing on an Enterprise SKU in the first place, while another described the situation as yet…

Advertisers are trying to influence AI bots with secret ads

KETTLE OpenAI's invasion of Hugging Face keeps getting worse somehow, Chinese open-weight models are nigh on to reaching parity with their closed-off American cousins, and AI crawlers are getting their own LLM-poisoning ads. Were there anything world-shaking events in AI land we missed this week? You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Ap…

NEC tests parking tech that only starts charging once you exit your car

ASIA IN BRIEF Japan’s NEC has started tests of parking technology that will start charging once a driver leaves their car. Most car parks record the time a driver enters the facility and start charging, or depleting a free parking period, at that moment. That means drivers pay for time spent driving around looking for a spot and for the time it takes to exit a car park. NEC, in concert with anoth…

Kernel prepatch 7.2-rc7

The 7.2-rc7 kernel prepatch is out for testing. It is still bigger than Linus would like, but he said nonetheless: "I don't currently see any value in delaying the 7.2 release, so I would expect that to happen next weekend unless something really bad pops up."…

Linux 7.2-rc7 Released Following Another Exhausting AI-Driven Week

Linux 7.2-rc7 is now available for testing as we close in on the official Linux 7.2 release hopefully next weekend...…

Four weekend stable kernel updates

The 7.1.8, 6.18.44, 6.12.103, and 6.6.151 stable kernels have been released; each contains a fair number of important fixes.…

CachyOS August 2026 Release Preps For Upcoming Server Edition

CachyOS is out with its latest media refresh of the year. Beyond the usual desktop improvements for the performance-optimized CachyOS, they continue working toward the upcoming CachyOS Server Edition...…

Qualcomm Posts Linux Patches For Kuno SoC Support: Cortex-A7 Platform In 2026

Qualcomm engineers posted a set of 15 patches today for the Linux kernel to enable the Qualcomm Kuno SoC support and their reference development platform...…

I've gone from writing about SD-WAN to depending on it

This spring, my wife and I moved from the Denver suburbs into the Colorado Rockies. The high-altitude retreat presented a welcome reprieve from our otherwise tech-dominated lives. As remote workers, however, we faced certain challenges, and technology was the only reason our move was possible in the first place. Prior to my time at El Reg, I, among other things, breathlessly covered a subset of t…

Mesa 26.3 Intel Driver Code Enables Large GRF Mode For Newer GPUs

The Intel graphics compiler code in Mesa 26.3-devel has now enabled the Large GRF mode for Alchemist/DG2 and Battlemage/Xe2 graphics and VRT for Xe3 graphics...…

Mount Toba eruption doesn't seem like it could nearly kill our species

Mount Toba was the biggest volcanic eruption in the last 2.6 million years, and some have suggested it nearly wiped out humanity. Around 74,000 years ago, a caldera on what is now Sumatra emptied thousands of cubic kilometers of magma in about two weeks, roughly a thousand times more than Mount Pinatubo spewed out in 1991. “People thought it might have caused massive cooling of the planet, and he…

Dell Latitude 7320 2-in-1 Seeing Web Camera Support On Linux After Five Years

Launched back in 2021 was the Dell Latitude 7320 2-in-1 business laptop/tablet powered by the at-the-time impressive Intel 11th Gen Core "Tiger Lake" processors. Remaining elusive until now has been the web cameras actually working on Linux, but patches posted this weekend finally are cracking that mystery at least for the user-facing web cam...…

FreeBSD 14.5 Beta 1 Released With Various Backports, Security Fixes

For those still on the FreeBSD 14 N-1 stable series rather than the latest FreeBSD 15 series, FreeBSD 14.5 is working toward release to deliver various security fixes and backports...…

Ransomware gangs skip the CEO, head straight for the 40-something IT manager

Turns out the fastest way to get a company to consider paying a ransom isn't calling the CEO – it's targeting the 46-year-old IT manager. That's according to Zscaler, whose ThreatLabz researchers tracked 351 victims across 334 organizations caught up in a single ransomware campaign over the course of a month. The data suggests today's ransomware crews have become oddly specific about their prefer…

New Linux Patches Enable ASUS ROG Ryujin III Monitoring Support

For those with an ASUS ROG Ryujin III all-in-one CPU liquid cooling setup catering to gamers, there are now patches pending to enable this AIO liquid cooling setup to work under Linux for monitoring...…

Linux 7.3 To Better Handle Cluster Load Balancing On Intel Hybrid CPUs

A set of patches from Intel are set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window to enhance the cluster-aware scheduling code so it better handles load balancing on modern Intel Core (Ultra) hybrid CPUs with a mix of P and E/LPE cores...…

Polychromatic 0.9.8 Released With Razer Blade 16 2023 Support

For those looking to manage the RGB lighting and other features of their Razer devices on Linux, Polychromatic 0.9.8 is now available for that UI front-end that interacts with the OpenRazer kernel drivers for providing a decent albeit unofficial Linux configuration experience...…

Wine 11.15 Released With Wayland Fixes, Fix For A 20 Year Old MSXML3 Bug

Making its debut this Saturday rather than the usual bi-weekly Friday release regiment, Wine 11.15 is out today as the newest development release for this open-source software enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux...…

Devs to Anthropic, OpenAI, Cursor, and friends: Make security and privacy the default

Despite the popularity of Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, and OpenAI Codex, developers have plenty of complaints about AI coding tools. So researchers affiliated with York University and the University of Calgary in Canada decided to sift through developers' concerns about LLM-based integrated development environments (LIDEs) by analyzing Reddit discussions for common themes. Their findings…

The first self-driving vehicle on Mars has proven to be a smashing success

Sometime next week, NASA's newest rover on Mars, Perseverance, will set a record for the most distance driven by any vehicle on another world. The automobile-sized rover, which landed on Mars in February 2021, will traverse beyond 45.16 km (28.06 miles) across the Martian surface. In doing so it will break the previous distance record held by the long-lived Opportunity rover, which ceased communi…

GNOME Receiving Additional Design Help Thanks To Sovereign Tech Agency Fellowship

Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency announced earlier this year a new fellowship program and now as part of that, for the next two years GNOME has a fellow dedicated to working on design and community management...…

DeepMind’s hurricane breakthrough has surprised weather scientists

In October 2025, a storm brewed over the Caribbean Sea. Weather models differed on its trajectory. Would it remain weak and end up in Haiti, or would it intensify and head to Jamaica? Artificial intelligence model WeatherNext, developed by Google’s DeepMind and Google Research, went with the latter. Five days before landfall, it predicted with 80 percent confidence that the storm system would hit…

HWMON Fixes For Linux 7.2-rc7: "Most Of Them Fixing Critical Or High Severity Bugs"

It's been another busy week in the Linux kernel camp with increased patch activity continuing due to AI/LLM coding agents / bots continuing to uncover different defects in the open-source codebase. The hardware monitoring (HWMON) subsystem saw many fixes this week for issues mostly raised by the Sashiko AI bot with the issues being described as mostly critical or high severity bugs...…

AI Helped Create A DirectX 11 Driver For QEMU VMs

Thanks in part to the power of Claude Opus 5 and Claude Fable 5, a new Windows DirectX 11 driver for QEMU has been created to help improve graphics acceleration for Microsoft Windows guests running under QEMU virtual machines...…

Linux 7.2-rc7 Adding Support For The Most Unique Or Very Funky Gaming Controller

The input subsystem fixes for the week include a number of AI-driven patches to address various information leaks, out-of-bounds accesses, validation fixes, and other coding issues that have turned up recently. Plus some device quirks and also adding support for a rather funky gaming controller to the common XPad Linux driver used by many different gaming controllers...…

South Korean satellite spots SpaceX lunar impact

The race for the first before-and-after images of the spent SpaceX rocket on the Moon has been won by the South Korean space agency. The Korean Aerospace Administration (KASA) posted imagery from its Danuri lunar orbiter showing the impact site on the Moon on August 6. The impact was predicted to occur on August 5, and marked a landing on the Moon for SpaceX several years ahead of schedule, just…

To Save C, We Must Save ABI

KDE Plasma 6.8 Improvements For UI, Built-In Remote Desktop Server

It's been another busy summertime week of KDE developers working toward a great Plasma 6.8 desktop release in October...…

OpenAI pledges to add Astra security as Anthropic loosens Fable's leash

After acknowledging last month that unreleased AI models committed what for human perpetrators would be computer crimes, OpenAI now says it cannot rule out the possibility that Astra, a pending model release not involved in its Hugging Face hack, might possess critical cyber capabilities. OpenAI in its Preparedness Framework [PDF] defines that term to mean "capabilities that present a meaningful…

Europe's free satellite service just made it easier to track wildfires

The wildfires afflicting communities across the world can now be tracked more easily by anyone using Europe’s free and open satellite imagery service—all thanks to a wildfire visualization script originating from nearly a decade ago. The Copernicus Browser provides free access to the latest satellite imagery taken by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellites for the European Union’s Earth o…

Flesh-eating screwworms feast on humans in Mexico; human cases top 500

Since the flesh-eating screwworm fly reinvaded Mexico in 2024, human cases of the voracious parasite have been mounting. According to a July surveillance report from Mexico's Ministry of Health, there have been over 500 human cases in 2025 and 2026. A study this week in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases analyzed the information on over 200 confirmed cases reported between April 2025 and Ma…

Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief after suspected Iran attacks

With at least 12 US states’ water systems having been hacked - most likely by Iran - we have to get better at cyber defense, according to retired General and Ex-NSA chief Paul Nakasone, who was speaking to reporters at DEF CON. “We have to have higher standards,” Nakasone said. “These PLCs should not be connected to the internet.” In late July, the FBI said it was investigating attacks conducted…

Linux 7.3 To Support Logitech HID++ 2.0 Reprogrammable Button Support

For those with newer, high-end Logitech input devices, coming with Linux 7.3 is support for the re-programmable button support of the HID++ 2.0 protocol...…

AI titans to tidy agent frontier with plugin prescription

The AI giants have joined forces to ask the world’s developers to all please write their agentic skills and tools into the same format. In return, coders will be able to move these superpowers easily from one platform to another (such as when they get laid off). It's designed to be write once, run everywhere. Vercel posted the initial draft of the Agent Plugins spec on Thursday, with input from A…

Initial Apple M3 Pro / Max / Ultra Support Being Upstreamed For Linux 7.3

Upstreamed for the Linux 7.2 kernel was the Device Tree (DT) support for booting the mainline Linux kernel on the base Apple M3 SoC. Though it's not yet useful for end-users with many features remaining to be supported and upstreamed. Now for the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel, the M3 Pro, Max, and Ultra variants will also have initial support for booting on the mainline kernel...…

Ransomware attacks spike as world distracted by AI

Ransomware attacks jumped nearly 20 percent in July, with UK firm Comparitech counting 799 incidents, up from 668 in June. Of those, 51 had been confirmed by victims. The tally makes July the second-busiest month of the year for ransomware, behind March, albeit just barely, when the firm recorded 805 attacks. The most interesting data after this surging month of attacks is the targets: While news…

Brit boffins boast of beating barriers to building fusion power

Scientists at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) say that they have overcome plasma instability issues standing in the way of commercial fusion power plants. The boffins overseeing the MAST (Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) Upgrade installation at UKAEA's Culham Campus in Oxfordshire conducted a fifth series of experiments on it during 2025 and 2026 and produced more than 1,100 fusion plasmas. Dur…

Publishing Schematics Before “Open Source” Was a Word

[$] Changes in shadow-utils password-expiration features

The shadow-utils project provides the tools that handle /etc/shadow, /etc/passwd, and other related databases; in general, it manages users and groups on many Linux systems. While most software releases are notable for what is added, the recent shadow-utils 4.20.0 release is most noteworthy for what has been removed. Specifically, several utilities and functionality related to periodic password ex…

N-able God mode flaw: Vendor confirms attackers reached customer networks as second hotfix lands

N-able has confirmed attackers exploiting an N-central zero-day made it into customer networks, as the vendor pushes out a second mandatory hotfix just days after the first. The security shop published an update on Thursday detailing what happened after attackers exploited CVE-2026-18577, the critical N-central flaw that can hand an unauthenticated attacker administrative access to the remote mon…

ShinyHunters called cancer diagnostics biz and tricked staffers into giving them access. Now they've dumped 10.9M email addresses

Hackers have dumped data stolen from Abbott’s cancer diagnostics business after the healthcare giant apparently declined to pay up, with the leak containing 10.9 million unique email addresses alongside personal and health information. Have I Been Pwned added the Exact Sciences breach to its database on Friday after data stolen by the ShinyHunters extortion crew was published online. The leak inc…

MIT boffins' TONTOU attack slips through Spectre defenses on Intel and AMD CPUs

Two MIT researchers will present a new speculative execution attack at DEF CON 34 that uses precisely timed interrupts to bypass defenses against Spectre v2. Daniël Trujillo and Mengjia Yan of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) shared their paper [PDF] with The Register ahead of publication. Their attack targets mitigations designed to neutralize potentially hos…

The Software Stewardship Lab launches

The Software Stewardship Lab, a nonprofit organization based in Scotland, has announced its existence. Our current research focuses are: Software supply chain security — We're working on an observatory that allows users to identify and monitor the world's critical Open Source packages in real time, including previously hidden parts of the dependency graph. Maintainer burnout — Our report on burnou…

Scot NHS trust probes access to medical records of 9-year-old girl after man arrested on suspicion of murder

A Scottish NHS trust is investigating a data breach concerning the medical records of a nine-year-old girl who died earlier this week and was named publicly for the first time on Wednesday after a man was charged with her death. The alleged breach occurred at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, and reportedly involved staff members accessing the girl’s medical records without authorization or clinical…

LightDM lives: version 1.33.0 released

Version 1.33.0 of the LightDM display manager has been released. This is the first release in four years: the project had been sponsored by Canonical but was effectively unmaintained in recent years. It has been transferred to a new community repository and is now maintained by Joshua Peisach and Neal Gompa. The new release includes Qt6 support, code optimizations, and a list of other fixes that h…

Stable kernel releases for Friday with a single bug fix

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.12.102, 6.6.150, 6.1.182, 5.15.215, 5.10.264 stable kernels. This round of stable kernel releases contains a fix for a single bug, found by Thomas Lamprecht, that affected several of the kernels released yesterday in response to a security vulnerability (CVE-2026-68480) that could allow data leakage through speculative execution. The 6.12.102 r…

Stowaway – Take the window seat on any plane or satellite overhead

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (compat-libtiff3, fence-agents, firefox, freerdp, frr, gimp, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, java-25-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, ldns, libgcrypt, libXfont2, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, p11-kit, pipewire, resource-agents, sg3_utils, thunderbird, and yelp), Debian (async-http-client, jq, kernel, linux-6.1, linux-6.12, redis, and udisks2), Fedora (abrt, chromium,…

Microsoft tosses Teams Live chat into its feature graveyard

Microsoft is killing Live chat in Teams about 18 months after launch as it seeks to "focus investments on newer customer engagement and communication experiences." The service will be retired on October 5, when customer messages will stop reaching Teams. Microsoft blocked new setups on August 6 and told users to remove the widget from their websites before retirement. Any remaining instances will…

Attacker phished way into US defense supplier's Microsoft 365 account

US defense and aerospace supplier IEH Corporation 'fessed up that a criminal managed to break into its Microsoft 365 mailbox in a filing with regulators. In a Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, IEH said one of its staffers fell for a phishing scam that gave an attacker access to its M365 environment. The attacker "impersonated a prospective business contact" a…

Intrusion at US healthcare software provider puts 3.8M people's data at risk

A US healthcare software provider has admitted that hackers may have made off with sensitive data belonging to 3.8 million people, making it the largest healthcare breach reported to regulators so far this year. The attack dates to last October, when Ohio-based medical software maker Unlimited Technology Systems (UTS) detected someone poking around its commercial datacenter. The company disclosed…

Sonic Pi v5

'Asimov was right' about rules for robots, says ex-US Cyber Director

EXCLUSIVE Don't waste time worrying about AI models achieving sentience – they're essentially already there, according to former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis. “If they pass the Turing test to everyone that they come into contact with, they're probably already there,” he told The Register during an interview at the Black Hat security conference. “They don't have the kind of agency and a…

Cop who used police system to snoop for info on crook pals sentenced for Computer Misuse Act offenses

A former Merseyside police officer will today begin his 12-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, after being found guilty of Computer Misuse Act (CMA) and Data Protection Act (DPA) offenses while serving. Daniel Hughes, 40, from Liverpool, carried out repeated unauthorized searches using police computer systems between 2016 and 2019, often including intelligence related to firearm and d…

Programming the Gigatron

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

ON CALL Welcome to another edition of On Call, the reader-contributed column The Register runs each Friday to share your tech support stories. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Darwin," who once worked as a sysadmin for a Wall Street law firm – the sort of outfit that charges four-figure hourly fees and justifies them by pointing to its exceptionally smart and experienced staff. Darwin…

China launches mysterious probe into security of Palo Alto Networks' products

China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has conducted a review of Palo Alto Networks’ products. The regulator’s announcement of its review says it’s needed “to ensure the safe and stable operation of critical information infrastructure, prevent cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities, and safeguard national security.” And that’s all Beijing has to say on the matter. A Palo Alto spokesperson provi…

About Rx Kids

‘Humans will be a rounding error on the internet’ says Cloudflare exec

Cloudflare chief financial officer Thomas Seifert has run the numbers on internet traffic trends and predicted that human-generated packets will soon account for a trivial amount of overall traffic. The internet-grooming company has previously predicted that machine-generated traffic would exceed human-generated throughput in 2027 – but got that wrong because its measurements found machines took…

How the famed USENIX Security conf is managing a flood of papers in the AI era

The 35th USENIX Security Symposium (USS), which takes place next week in Baltimore, Maryland, hit an all-time high for paper submissions. While some of that increase has been aided by the availability of AI tools, those managing the conference say abuses were minimal due to defensive measures. But they're also trying not to look too closely in order to preserve trust within the security research…

AMD acquires AI chip startup Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models into silicon

In AMD’s latest bid to upset Nvidia's dominance in AI hardware, the House of Zen has acquired AI chip company Taalas, which bakes model weights directly into silicon in a process that promises to boost inference performance by an order of magnitude or more. The deal, announced at market close on Thursday, appears to be framed in much the same context as Nvidia’s $20 billion licensing deal with Gr…

AI struggles to patch vulns without adult supervision

AI models may not be that good at fixing security flaws. Researchers at 1Password's Off-by-1 Labs analyzed security patches generated by two frontier models - ChatGPT 5.5 at "medium" effort and Claude Opus 4.8 at "high" effort - and found that autonomous patches cleanly fixed vulnerabilities only about a quarter of the time, while most of the remainder failed to fully remediate the flaw or introd…

Six stable kernels with a security fix

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.7, 6.18.43, 6.6.149, 6.1.181, 5.15.214, and 5.10.263 stable kernels. These kernels fix a single security vulnerability (CVE-2026-68480) that could allow data leakage through speculative execution. Users of those kernels are advised to upgrade.…

Canadian Man Pleads Guilty in Snowflake Extortions

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…

The Performance Benefits To Upgrading Mesa With Intel Arc B390 On Ubuntu Linux

If you are an early customer of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro or other Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake laptop and using Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, there can be real benefit from upgrading your Mesa stack for the newer Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers. In this article are some benchmarks of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro with Core Ultra X9 388H with Arc B390 Xe3 integrated graphics for looking at the…

[$] Bringing BPF to binfmt_misc

The kernel is able to run a few types of executable files, including native binaries in the ELF format and interpreted programs that begin with the #! marker. It also, however, has a mechanism, called binfmt_misc, that can be configured from user space to enable the transparent execution of programs in just about any format. This feature has been relatively static for years, but it seems likely to…

Faster floating point math with Rust's new API

Rust Coreutils 0.10 released

Version 0.10 of the uutils project's Rust Coreutils has been released. This release focused on compatibility with the GNU Core Utilities suite, with Rust Coreutils now passing 645 of 690 tests, up from 625 with version 0.9.0. Notable changes in this release include addition of the mv --exchange option, an OpenSSL backend for checksum utilities, applying SELinux labels at creation when using mkdir,…

Security updates for Thursday

Security updates have been issued by Debian (7zip, kernel, libde265, and p7zip), Mageia (tomcat), Oracle (fence-agents, frr10, kernel, ldns, libgcrypt, mingw-glib2, nodejs24, osbuild-composer, p11-kit, php8.4, sg3_utils, and thunderbird), Red Hat (libXfont2), and SUSE (containerd, evince, libXfont2, nginx, openssl-3, pcp, php7, php8, python-Django, python-httplib2, python-nltk, rrdtool, vifm, and…

Telephones Caught in Between

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 6, 2026

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Process-builder API; Fedora COI; FUSE io_uring buffer sizes; BPF network namespaces; FUSE plans; BPF libraries; directory creation system call. Briefs: AISI hack; JFrog on CVEs; npm worm; AUR adoption; NetBSD 11.0; b4 0.16.0; C-Kermit 11; Rust LLM policy; Servo 0.4.0; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, a…

The “mechanical miracle” that ruined Mark Twain’s life

Tomorrow’s U.S. Senate Vote: Four Internet Bills, One Wrong Direction

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

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

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

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…

LFM2.5 2.6B model competitive with 4x larger models

Technology's Power in the Hands of the People

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…

The Senate Should Reject KOSA's Privacy Risks

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

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

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

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 👨‍💻

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…

Amending AB 1709 Doesn’t Fix It: California’s Social Media Ban Still Threatens Free Speech and Privacy

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…

The SCREEN Act Threatens Privacy Far Beyond Adult Websites

Update: On August 5, 2026, The Senate Commerce Committee voted 15-13 to advance this bill, but the bill did not advance because of a lack of Senators in attendance. EFF continues to oppose the bill.  The Senate Commerce Committee is set to consider S. 737, the SCREEN Act, a sweeping age-verification bill that would require online services to verify users’ ages before they can access any sexually e…

The CHATBOT Act Forces One Parenting Model On Every Family

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.  Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing education, and the way people search for information. Parents, teenagers, teachers, and schools are struggling with tough questions about when AI should, and should not, be used. It makes…

EFF Guide to Recording Law Enforcement

This post is available as a printable one page handout in English and Spanish. Recordings of law enforcement, whether by bystanders or by those directly encountering officers, can be powerful tools of government accountability and can support movements for social change. But recording officers can come with risks. Below are important legal and practical considerations related to recording the poli…

Read This Before You Buy That TV Streaming Stick

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…

🏃 Fitness Tracker Privacy Fails | EFFector 38.14

Watches, bands, and rings—if you want to digitally monitor your fitness, more companies than ever are selling devices to do it. And more Americans than ever now own at least one wearable health device. But what are the companies that make fitness trackers doing to protect our sensitive data from prying eyes? A lot less than they could be, it turns out. We're explaining what companies can do to pro…

San Francisco: Don’t Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

The concept of “surveillance pricing” is just one part of a much larger problem and business model: corporations maximizing their profits by invading our privacy. The all-too-common business model is to systematically harvest, collate, and store as much of our personal data as possible, and then monetize it through use and sale. When it comes to surveillance pricing, that looks like corporations o…

Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?

Update 8/10/2026: Two San Francisco bars that used Patronscan have said they will stop using the system after listening to customers’ privacy concerns. EFF applauds this change and we hope other bars follow suit by returning to ID-checking systems that respect their customers’ rights. Recent reports have raised alarm about the use of PatronScan, an ID-checking and face-scanning system, at multiple…

Missed EFF's Livestream with Adam Savage and iFixit? Listen Here!

EFF’s first EFFecting Change livestream was all the way back in July of 2024. Maybe you've caught each stream, or maybe you’ve only caught a few. Or maybe you’re like me and prefer to listen to conversations like these on your daily commute! Either way, if you want to stay on top of these monthly conversations, you can now subscribe to our new podcast feed for EFFecting Change—starting with our co…

Farmers Are Getting Control Of Their Equipment Back

For years, John Deere had actively made repairing their tractors near-impossible for anyone but itself and the few "authorized" repair shops—regardless of the ability of its customers to actually visit such shops. Now, in a major win for farmers and right to repair advocates, John Deere must soon provide farmers with not just the tools and resources to finally repair their own John Deere equipment…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

‘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…

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…