Terminal

Mesa 26.2.1 Released With Dozens Of Fixes

For those preferring the tradition of waiting for the first point release of a new Mesa feature release before upgrading, Mesa 26.2.1 is available today with a healthy round of bug fixing...…

Linux 7.3 Cleans Up The Code For Disabling Of Legacy 32-bit Time Support

The Linux kernel has supported the CONFIG_COMPAT_32BIT_TIME Kconfig build time option for optionally disabling of legacy 32-bit time system call support. This is intended to disable the code that uses a 32-bit integer for time that is thus not Year 2038 safe, but at the cost of breaking compatibility for legacy 32-bit applications. Even if building without Linux 32-bit time support, it turns out s…

Software development and tech services in the cross-hairs as AI marches on

Business transformation, software development, and technology implementation are among the tech job categories likely to be hit hardest by AI, according to new research from Forrester. The global IT analyst company has researched how AI will disrupt various activities within the tech market, both among end users and vendors. It concluded that labor-intensive knowledge-work industries would face t…

AliExpress runs silent WebAudio fingerprinting that breaks Bluetooth multipoint

KDE Gear 26.08 Delivers The Latest KDE App Experience

KDE Gear 26.08 was released today to deliver the latest collection of KDE application updates...…

No lift for Swift as NASA abandons orbital rescue

NASA and Katalyst Space have abandoned an ambitious attempt to boost the Swift observatory into a higher orbit and postpone its fiery return to Earth. Katalyst Space's LINK spacecraft will still attempt to rendezvous with and maneuver near Swift, but plans to grapple the observatory and raise its orbit are dead. The problem, according to NASA and Katalyst Space, is an "ongoing commercial spacecra…

SparkyLinux 8.4 rekindles support for 32-bit PCs

Almost exactly a year after SparkyLinux 8.0 abandoned installation images for 32-bit PCs, version 8.4 has brought them back. The distro remains based on Debian 13 and retains the codename "the Seven Sisters." The Register first checked out SparkyLinux back in 2015, and this vulture took a look at version 7 a couple of years ago. Beyond the changes inherited from the move from Debian 12 to Debian…

Don't Paste the AI, please

Rescue Mission Is Called Off For NASA's Aging Swift Space Telescope

NASA has called off a $30 million mission to rescue its aging Swift space telescope after Katalyst Space's Link spacecraft developed persistent control and positioning problems. The Associated Press reports: Katalyst said Link will not attempt to capture Swift and boost it to a higher orbit because of problems with controlling the spacecraft. NASA said this means the telescope will plunge through…

AI agent suggested installing a malware package. Engineer almost took its advice

PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the column where we make fun of those who are security self-owned, so hopefully you don’t do the same. This week, we have a story that’s hot off the presses about a company almost sabotaging its security by using AI for programming. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon requ…

China marches towards re-usable rockets with successful first-stage landing

Chinese space startup LandSpace has landed a first-stage booster on land, the first time a Middle Kingdom company has achieved the feat. LandSpace flies rockets called Zhuque and has built three generations of the craft. Zhuque-1 only flew once, in 2018. Zhuque-2 became the first liquid oxygen-methane vehicle to reach orbit when it first flew in 2022. It can can carry 6,000 kilograms to a 200km l…

Windows brings out the Rorschach test in everyone

IBM says super-chill boxes that connect through 'cryogenic tunnels' will get quantum computers scaling

IBM has shown off designs for cooling hardware it says will allow quantum computers to scale. Quantum computers rely on qubits – atoms or circuits put into a state of probability that means they can simultaneously store a value of zero and one – and which computer scientists make using complex circuitry or by suspending an atom with lasers. IBM produces qubits with chips that can only run at temp…

Whistleblower Arturo Bejar Leads Testimony In Landmark Trial Against Meta

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Meta was infused with a culture in which employees obsessed over user numbers and consistently pushed safety to the side, according to Arturo Bejar, a former employee turned whistleblower, who testified today in the landmark child safety trial against the social media company. Only one man had the ability to change that, Bejar said: CEO Mark Zuckerberg…

X.Org Server 26.1 RC1 Prepares For First Feature Release In Five Years

Following today's release of XWayland 26.1 RC1, X.Org Server 26.1 RC1 was tagged. This xorg-server 26.1 release is aiming to become the first major feature release in five years, succeeding the xorg-server 21.1 series...…

Microsoft ends one of the last ways to buy VMware without big bundles

Microsoft has signalled it will end one of the last remaining ways to acquire VMware products outside of a big bundle. Redmond’s main offer for Virtzillains is the Azure VMware Solution (AVS), a cloudy affair that includes vCenter, vSAN, vSphere, and NSX and licenses for them all – but not the Software-Defined Datacenter Manager tool that Broadcom uses to package its wares into a centrally-manage…

Turns are Better than Radians (2022)

EXT4 Preps More Performance Improvements For Linux 7.3

In addition to the IOmap improvements helping EXT4 performance in Linux 7.3, the main EXT4 feature pull request has now been submitted for this next kernel version. That pull is set to land yet more performance optimizations for EXT4...…

NASA calls off mission to rescue Swift gamma-ray observatory

NASA and Katalyst Space Technologies announced Wednesday they are giving up on a robotic mission to rescue the Swift gamma-ray telescope before it falls out of orbit. The rescue satellite, named Link, launched July 3 on a journey to fly up to NASA's Neil Gehrels Swift Observatory, capture it with three robotic arms, and boost its orbit high enough to escape a looming reentry. Link is about the si…

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 20, 2026

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Debian AI GR; Python pathlib; bootstrappable builds; Fedora and AF_ALG; Arm 128-bit PTEs; BPF CI; 7.2 statistics. Briefs: Brief news items from throughout the community. Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.…

AMD inches closer to its goal of making AI suck less ... energy

AI’s thirst for power remains an ongoing concern, but fear not: AMD says it’s making steady progress towards its goal of boosting rack efficiency 20x by the end of the decade. In a blog post published this week, the House of Zen estimates that, as of 2026, its systems are already 4x more efficient than they were in 2024. Certainly, a lot has changed since then. As you may recall, AMD began volume…

PINE64 Halts Linux Device Production Amid DRAM and EMMC Shortages

BrianFagioli writes: PINE64 has some very bad news for Linux hardware fans. PINE64 says it has no plans to produce additional Linux devices in the near future because of the ongoing DRAM and eMMC shortage. Future production will depend on component pricing after mid 2027, while existing PineNote and PineTab2 inventory could run out in roughly three months. The company says PineTime, PineVoice, and…

'Not a theoretical risk,' feds warn as attackers use AI-made code to hack critical infrastructure controllers

Attackers are using AI-generated exploitation scripts to break into internet-exposed Siemens S7 Series programmable logic controllers (PLCs) at water, manufacturing, energy, and other critical facilities, in what five US federal agencies on Wednesday called an “active threat.” In this latest round of intrusions against American critical infrastructure, the attackers use open source industrial aut…

Amazon aims for delivery drones to reach 500 US neighborhoods by end of 2026

Amazon wants to grow its Prime Air delivery drone service sixfold to reach nearly 500 cities and towns across the United States by the end of 2026. The planned expansions from Amazon and its rivals could make the convenience of delivery drone services available to tens of millions more people in the coming months—but will also test more communities’ tolerance for increased noise from daily drone…

Stripe Buys AI Startup OpenRouter For $7.5 Billion

Stripe is acquiring AI model marketplace OpenRouter as it pushes beyond payments into the infrastructure behind AI applications. According to The New York Times, the deal is reportedly valued at about $7.5 billion, with $1.5 billion allocated to OpenRouter's founders. Less than three months ago the company was valued at about $1.3 billion. CNBC reports: OpenRouter has become popular with developer…

Feature Request: Support AGENTS.md

Os8088.com: IBM XT OS now has a Browser, CP/M 2.2 with Z80 core and MS Word 1.1a

Amazon's Drones Will Soon Deliver to Nearly 500 US Cities and Towns

Amazon says its Prime Air drone delivery service will expand sixfold to nearly 500 U.S. cities and towns by the end of 2026, including metro areas around Chicago, Syracuse, Cleveland, Atlanta, and Boise. According to Amazon Prime Air vice president David Carbon, the service has already delivered "hundreds of thousands of packages to customers" this year, typically within about an hour. The Verge r…

Two Very Exciting Memory Management Optimizations Going Into Linux 7.3

Andrew Morton on Tuesday sent out all of the memory management "MM" updates for the Linux 7.3 merge window. The MM pull was particularly heavy as he noted 1,250 "added-to-MM" emails were sent out this cycle compared to 920 the prior cycle. With a lot of patch churn, he also turned to Google's Gemini AI for writing his patch summaries. In going through the very verbose AI-generated summary, there a…

Framework responds to complaints that BIOS update bricks Ryzen 7040 laptops

A BIOS update for the Framework Laptop 13 with AMD Ryzen 7040-series processors is bricking the systems, multiple users have reported online. Framework started shipping pre-built Ryzen 7040-based Framework Laptop 13 computers and compatible motherboards in 2023. In June 2026, Framework released BIOS 3.20 for the devices. The update adds mainboard support for features, including a haptic touchpad…

Flight attendants freaked out that Google is buying tons of Spirit employee data

Last Friday, Google won an auction to acquire a huge amount of Spirit Airlines data. The data doesn’t include personal information or customer data, but instead nearly covers the airline's entire employment and workplace record. To ensure that no individual can be identified in the dataset, Google agreed to use a court-appointed ombudsman to oversee a process to strip any personally identifying i…

SvelteKit 3 puts heat on Next.js with radical approach to RPCs

In today's sprawling JavaScript ecosystem, Svelte was designed to be a simpler alternative to the React.js front-end framework, and SvelteKit follows the same path, setting out to be a backend framework like Next.js but with fewer headaches and even better support for dynamic content. The new-ish SvelteKit 3.0 release candidate includes an experimental feature called remote functions that rethink…

Music Publisher Round Hill Files $1 Billion Copyright Infringement Suits Against Suno, Anthropic

Independent music publisher Round Hill is suing Suno and Anthropic for allegedly using hundreds of copyrighted songs without permission to train their AI systems. The company says potential damages could exceed $1 billion, arguing there is "nothing fair" about building multibillion-dollar AI businesses on copyrighted material while rights holders receive nothing. From The Hollywood Reporter: Round…

FCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to slower technologies

The Federal Communications Commission last week eliminated the gigabit speed goal established during the Biden administration and declared that current levels of broadband deployment in the US are acceptable. Though fiber networks have routinely offered such speeds for years, the FCC said the gigabit speed goal is not "technologically neutral," suggesting that it isn't fair to other, slower techn…

Pixel 11 Pro Fold feels like the end of an era

Google pits Marvell against Broadcom as it chases AI crown

It's an open secret that the major cloud providers don’t actually design their custom silicon from scratch. There's not much value in reinventing the wheel, so they often outsource big and undifferentiated chunks of chip design to IP houses like Broadcom, Marvell, Arm, and others. Google's partner of choice for its Tensor Processing Units (TPUs) has largely been Broadcom — though the chip giant's…

Dev taps Claude Code to craft custom printer driver for macOS

There's a new and very helpful use case for AI coding agents: designing drivers for devices, such as old printers, that were never meant to work with a particular operating system. Kuber Mehta, a New Delhi, India-based developer and founder of PolyThink, has published an account of how he coaxed Anthropic's Claude Code into creating a macOS driver for his HP Laser 1008a, for which HP offers only…

Unlocking a locked/deactivated e-waste Cricut Maker

CISA: Medusa Ransomware Hit Over 500 Critical Infrastructure Orgs

CISA says the Medusa ransomware operation has breached more than 500 U.S. critical infrastructure organizations since 2021, up from more than 300 reported last year. The group has targeted healthcare, government, defense, manufacturing, IT and financial organizations, evolving into a ransomware-as-a-service operation that recruits initial-access brokers and uses stolen data to pressure victims int…

The floodgates are open after another Chinese company lands a reusable rocket

It has been a little more than a month since China recovered an orbital-class rocket booster for the first time. A second launch operator accomplished a similar feat Tuesday in another sign of China's growing launch capability. It took 10 years for a second US launch company, Blue Origin, to propulsively land an orbital-class booster after SpaceX did it with the Falcon 9 rocket in 2015. SpaceX ha…

Unsloth Dynamic 3.0 GGUFs

Go 1.27

Go 1.27 released

Go 1.27, the most recent version of the Go programming language, has been released with a number of new tools, the addition of support for the ML-DSA post-quantum algorithm, new JSON-processing packages, language updates, and more.…

Go Language 1.27 Adds Generic Methods, Struct Improvement & More SIMD

Go 1.27 was released today as the newest version of this programming language from Google's Go team...…

ICE boss to agents: Leave the Meta spy glasses at home

Some ICE employees seemingly needed a reminder not to wear their Meta pervert glasses to work. Because only ICE can spy on ICE. Meta smart glasses are essentially “body-worn cameras,” as they can covertly record video and audio, David Venturella, Immigration and Customs Enforcement acting director, reportedly reminded agency employees on Tuesday. “The use of Meta Glasses or similar devices could…

Seven stable kernels for Wednesday

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.9, 6.18.45, 6.12.104, 6.6.152, 6.1.183, 5.15.216, and 5.10.265 stable kernels. Each contains important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised to upgrade.…

Moderna, Merck Say mRNA Vaccine Prevents Melanoma From Returning

Moderna and Merck say their personalized mRNA melanoma vaccine significantly reduced both cancer recurrence and spread in a late-stage trial. The treatment could reach patients as soon as next year if regulators approve it. Reuters reports: Moderna developed the vaccine with Merck and tested it together with immunotherapy drug Keytruda, a widely used treatment for melanoma. [...] This is the first…

Btrfs Ready With More Performance Improvements For Linux 7.3: Some ~3x To ~5x Wins

David Sterba of SUSE sent in the Btrfs file-system feature updates today that target the Linux 7.3 merge window. Among other changes are more performance improvements for this next version of the Linux kernel...…

Google has stopped pushing Git tags for some Android source code

[$] Debian weighs eight options in vote on LLM usage

The Debian Project is voting on the usage of large language models (LLMs) to make contributions to the project. The first proposal, sent in late July by Matthias Geiger, would expressly forbid any contributions to Debian that are created by or with the assistance of LLMs. That kicked off a firestorm of discussion and a flood of alternate proposals. Debian developers are now voting on eight proposa…

OpenRouter is joining Stripe

A fantastical journey unfolds in gorgeous Wildwood trailer

In June, we highlighted a behind-the-scenes featurette on the making of Wildwood, director Travis Knight’s forthcoming stop-motion animated fantasy film. Laika Studios released an extended teaser in May, which racked up over 90 million views. And now we've got the gorgeous full trailer, set to a haunting cover of Avicii's "Wake Me Up." The film is an adaptation of the 2011 novel by Colin Meloy—fr…

X's Algorithm Feeds Off Ragebait and Impacts Democrats More, Study Finds

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: X's algorithm learns what you hate and shows you more of it, according to a new study just published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The paper, titled Value misalignment of X's feed algorithm is a reflection of value tensions in engagement, found that the site's algorithm prioritized engagement above all else when i…

mRNA cancer vaccine succeeded in Phase 3 melanoma trial, Moderna and Merck say

Pharmaceutical partners Moderna and Merck announced on Wednesday that their novel mRNA-based vaccine—individually tailored to target a patient's unique cancer mutations—was effective in a late-stage clinical trial of patients with melanoma, one of the deadliest forms of skin cancer. The announcement was scant on details, but if the success holds, it stands to realize the high aspirations for both…

📍 The Sneaky Code Tracking App Users | EFFector 38.15

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

Launch HN: OneCLI (YC S26) – OSS sandboxed agent harness for teams

Epic Games dismisses Apple's simplified EU App Store fees as 'junk'

Apple's latest attempt to settle its App Store dispute with the European Commission has drawn criticism from Epic Games and a cautious response from a consumer group, which warned that "the devil is in the detail." Announced on August 18, the changes introduce new business terms for applications distributed in the European Union. Apple says the changes "reduce complexity by moving every developer…

Army Unit Offers 4-Day Pass to Play GTA VI As Reenlistment Incentive

A U.S. Army battalion at Fort Stewart is offering soldiers a four-day pass timed to the release of Grand Theft Auto VI if they reenlist for at least two years. The program is limited to one unit for now, but it fits the Army's broader effort to appeal to gamers as a recruiting and retention pool. CBS News reports: Twenty soldiers at Fort Stewart in Georgia in the Army's 9th Brigade Engineering Bat…

Google Pixel 11 series review: Is the magic fading?

Google's approach to making smartphones has changed a lot over the years. It started with Nexus phones aimed at the tinkerer and enthusiast niche back when there were countless companies making smartphones. Today, there are far fewer, and Google's hyper-polished Pixel lineup is seeing less competition and higher sales. So maybe Google thinks it can just keep doing what works. The new Pixel 11 ser…

Flock surveillance backlash mounts as fiendish Halloween plans circulate

Surveillance tech company Flock has struggled with its public image for years, but the problem has become particularly acute in recent weeks. Its network of ALPRs has long attracted criticism over mass surveillance and the retention of location data belonging to motorists who are not suspected of any offense. Days after its CEO apologized for documented abuses of the company's system, The Registe…

Tuba 0.11 released

Version 0.11 of the Tuba fediverse client has been released. Notable changes in this release include support for Mastodon collections and quotes, ability to create custom thumbnails for attachments, a new emoji picker, a build for Android, as well as many other enhancements.…

Scientists find closest star to the Milky Way's central black hole

Sgr A* is the name we've given to the supermassive black hole that sits at the center of the Milky Way. We've known about its presence since the 1970s but only managed to image it within the past few years. In the intervening time, most of our understanding of the object was obtained by watching a group of stars that orbit the black hole, helping us get a good estimate of its mass and size. In es…

Meta ran ads for an app promising to nudify female politicians

Meta platforms recently ran ads for an AI porn-generation tool that seemingly encouraged users to create deepfaked videos resembling female US politicians, despite the company’s policies against ads containing sexual material. It’s the latest in a series of failures by Meta to keep advertisements for tools that produce nonconsensual intimate imagery off its platforms. The tool, which is called Kr…

Casio F-B100W-1A

More than half of Americans now view AI negatively

Attitudes towards AI are shifting in America. More than half of adults now say that they are more concerned than excited about the technology, and that includes those under 30 for the first time. This comes from a survey conducted by the Pew Research Center, which says that concerns over potential job losses caused by AI are the main factor influencing opinion. It found that 71 percent of US adul…

Mathematics in the age of AI

[$] Representing Python paths using pathlib

At the outset of his PyCon US 2026 talk, Trey Hunner said that his goal was for attendees to stop representing filesystem paths as strings and to use pathlib instead. That's kind of a tall order, at least for longtime Python users, since string-based paths have been pervasive—and mostly work. It is that "mostly" part that makes Hunner want to see things change, of course, so he set out to describe…

Chinese Robotics Giant Unitree Soars In Stock Market Debut

Chinese robotics giant Unitree surged more than 600% in its Shanghai stock market debut, marking the first mainland Chinese listing by a humanoid robot maker and a major milestone for Beijing's robotics ambitions. The BBC reports: Unitree, officially known as Yushu Technology Co Ltd, was founded in 2016 and now plays a key role in Beijing's ambitions to develop advanced technology. It has become a…

Manabu Kosaka's Handmade Paper Sculptures

AMD EPYC 9005 Series Memory Scaling Performance From 4 To 24 DDR5 RDIMMs

With today's memory prices, a frequent question at Phoronix and throughout many organizations is about reducing cost by not necessarily populating all memory channels. Especially with modern servers going up to 12 memory channels per socket or even 16 memory channels with upcoming EPYC Venice, you may be curious about the performance impact of populating less memory channels to see if the trade-of…

XWayland 26.1 RC1 Released With Many New Features

Olivier Fourdan of Red Hat announced today the first release candidate of XWayland 26.1. This is the first new tagged feature release since XWayland 24.1 back in 2024! As such there are many new features in tow...…

ISS spacewalkers discover there's no such thing as a quick antenna job

Stubborn electrical connections and bolts thwarted an attempt to replace an antenna on the International Space Station (ISS) yesterday, forcing spacewalkers to leave the new unit for another day. We've all been there. That "quick job" expected to take a few minutes stretches into hours as bolts refuse to budge and unforeseen problems eat into time better spent enjoying a cookie and tasty beverage…

Trump expected to pick conservative policy wonk Heidi Overton to lead FDA

President Trump is expected to nominate Heidi Overton, a top conservative policy aide, as the next commissioner of the Food and Drug Administration, according to multiple media reports. Overton is currently the deputy director of the White House Domestic Policy Council and has played a key role in shaping a variety of health policies during Trump's second term. At times, she has notably angered m…

PostgreSQL for Everything

Comcast gives its Wi-Fi motion detector a security makeover

Comcast has folded its Wi-Fi-based intruder detection feature into Xfinity Shield, a repackaged bundle of physical and cybersecurity offerings. The US telco launched WiFi Motion in 2025. Xfinity Shield also includes cybersecurity protections built into the Xfinity Gateway router. The Wi-Fi sensing technology harnesses the radio waves beamed around a user's home to detect motion and potential intr…

Security updates for Wednesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 9.0, 389-ds-base, attr, curl, glib2, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free and gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, gstreamer1-plugins-good, gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, haproxy, kernel, libssh, libXfont2, nodejs22, pam, php, php8.4, sg3_utils, and unbound), Debian (librabbitmq, ruby-grape, spip, srt, and swift), Fedora (…

Postgres pioneer credits Oracle with helping his database take over the world

INTERVIEW Oracle inadvertently helped turn PostgreSQL into the database technology now backed by Microsoft, AWS, and Google, according to Postgres creator Michael Stonebraker. Speaking to The Register earlier this month, UC Berkeley professor emeritus Stonebraker said Oracle's decision to retain MySQL after buying Sun Microsystems helped propel PostgreSQL toward dominance, at least among systems…

Geolocating a random island using geometry and CUDA programming

Linux 7.3 Deprecates Many Older 32-bit ARM Platforms, Orphans Hundreds Of Drivers

All of the SoC updates have been merged for the Linux 7.3 kernel that include adding some new SoCs as well as deprecating several older 32-bit ARM platforms. In turn with those platforms deprecated, "hundreds" of drivers are now orphaned in the process...…

GitHub blames 8-hour outage on autoscaling fail and VS Code retry storm

GitHub has published its account of this week's nearly eight-hour outage, tracing the developer pain to saturated load balancers, a faulty autoscaling policy, and a "latent retry bug in Visual Studio Code." According to GitHub, problems began at 1328 UTC on August 17 and weren't fully resolved until 2115 UTC – a 7-hour, 47-minute incident that produced elevated errors across Issues, Pull Requests…

A joke domain purchase turned in geopolitical warfare

Scotland's AI Growth Zone gets a wee £300M power-up

Datacenter operator DataVita has secured £300 million ($406 million) to expand its campus in Scotland's Lanarkshire AI Growth Zone, while Dell is moving into the area – albeit only into a regional office. The AI Growth Zone, unveiled earlier this year, centers on DataVita's server farm campus in Airdrie. The operator has secured financing to expand its existing facility and build another nearby,…

Babies Born Under Sugar Rationing Grew Into Adults With Lower Cancer Risk

A study of more than 64,000 people born around the end of Britain's postwar sugar rationing found that those exposed to less sugar during their first 1,000 days had lower rates of five cancers decades later, including roughly 69% lower liver cancer risk and 36% lower breast cancer risk. They also "showed signs of slower biological aging" and "continued to consume less sugar and had healthier diets…

PHP 7.4 To PHP 8.6 Benchmarks, PHP 8.6 JIT Performance

A Phoronix Premium supporter recently relayed a request to see some fresh PHP performance benchmarks. So here are some fresh numbers of PHP 7.4 through the latest PHP 8.5 code plus the current Git state of PHP 8.6 ahead of the official PHP 8.6.0 release later in the year. With PHP 8.6 is also a fresh look at the JIT performance enabled too...…

Linux 7.3 Scheduler Improvements: Help For Gaming, Hybrid CPUs, Lower Scheduler Latency

The exciting set of scheduler updates have been merged for the Linux 7.3 merge window...…

Air Theremin – A browser theremin you play by waving at your webcam

SAP consultant job ads overshoot final offers by up to 12%, recruiter claims

SAP consultant job ads across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland typically quote salaries 10 to 12 percent above the eventual offer, according to a recruitment firm specializing in the market. Employers seeking SAP consultants include IT services firms, management consultancies, and large companies overhauling their technology estates. Research into hiring across the ERP vendor's European heartlan…

New AMD Low-Power Core & Unified Intel/AMD CPU Core Type Handling In Linux 7.3

Covered first on Phoronix back in June was an AMD Linux patch for introducing a new "low power" CPU core type to complement their typical "performance" cores and their "efficiency" cores like with Zen 4C/5C. That low power core is presumed for some Zen 6 clients and that integration is now merged for Linux 7.3 as well as unifying the Intel/AMD CPU core type handling...…

Raspberry Pi gets jiggy with batch CM5 provisioning

Raspberry Pi has unveiled a $600 Programming Jig to take the faff out of preparing batches of Compute Module 5 (CM5) boards for deployment. The device combines the provisioning host and module interface in one box, eliminating the need for a separate IO board. The IO board is, of course, considerably cheaper, but serves a different purpose: it exposes a CM5's interfaces for development and protot…

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 Programming Jig Launches

The newest Raspberry Pi product to launch is the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 Programming Jig...…

UK taxman discovers low code doesn't mean low cost with £657M awards

The UK tax collector has awarded three contracts worth up to £657 million for low-code software development and support, dispelling any notion that empowering users with tech skills would necessarily mean low cost. HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), which collected £938.8 billion in tax during the latest reported financial year, has awarded French consultancy and outsourcer Atos a contract for "special…

Physicists Entangle Quantum Memories Across a Record-Breaking 420 Kilometers

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Optical fibers are already the backbone of global communication systems. Recently, however, physicists have started to explore how their functionality could be boosted further by conveying information via entangled quantum particles -- potentially enabling instantaneous exchanges of information across vast distances. Such a system could eventually b…

NASA estimates the size of the hole SpaceX made in the moon

NASA has used its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to capture more pics of the mess on the moon left by a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage. As The Register has previously reported, in 2025 private aerospace concerns Firefly and ispace hired a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for their respective Blue Ghost Mission 1 and RESILIENCE moonshots. RESILIENCE did not live up to its name. Blue Ghost did rather better…

Baidu says Chinese buyers want local AI chips due to ‘supply chain’ issues

Chinese web giant Baidu yesterday told investors it sees good days ahead for its Kunlunxin chip biz, because local buyers won’t have alternatives. Baidu has previously said it plans to spin out and float Kunlunxin, which makes CUDA-compliant inferencing chips that it uses for its own cloud services and has sold to the likes of Huawei and ZTE, who use them in kit they sell to Chinese telcos. Speak…

Top Album Releases Linked To Rise In Fatal Crashes

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The release of a new album by Taylor Swift might be a cause for celebration among her fans, but such events have also been linked to a more sombre phenomenon: an increase in fatal car crashes. The team behind a new study say it sheds light on the impact of distracted driving. Writing in the journal Jama Network Open, [Vishal Patel, first autho…

Australian hotel chain leaks guests’ PII after breach at third-party database operator

Australian aparthotel chain Quest has revealed it leaked customer data. A Reg reader kindly shared an email from the chain with the subject line “Important Security Update Regarding Your Quest Data.” That missive opens with unwelcome news that “I am writing to inform you of a recent data security incident involving some of your personal information.” “On Monday, 17 August 2026, we identified unau…

Modular's Mojo Language Now Open-Source Following Qualcomm Acquisition

Modular, the AI startup founded by Chris Lattner of LLVM and Swift fame, has open-sourced their Mojo systems programming language! This comes following the recent acquisition of Modular by Qualcomm...…

COSMIC Epoch 1.6 Released With Per-App Volume Control, Remote Desktop Preparations

COSMIC Epoch 1.6 was released this evening as the latest milestone for this open-source, Rust-based desktop environment led by System76 as part of the work on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...…

Cerebras CS-4 rack systems juice chips for every last drop of AI performance

If high-speed AI inference is what you’re after, memory bandwidth is the bottleneck to beat. At a mind-numbing 21.6 petabytes per second (PB/s) of memory bandwidth, Cerebras' dinner-plate-sized AI accelerators were already 1,000x faster than Nvidia's or AMD’s best GPUs. The chip newcomer unveiled its next-gen Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) and Nexus rack systems on Tuesday. Cerebras aims to extend that…

OpenAI's overhead will rise 20 percent for some workloads as it hardens security

OpenAI on Tuesday said its decision to suspend model training work, implemented after unreleased, unsupervised AI models hacked HuggingFace, remains in effect as the AI biz tries to implement stronger security measures. Some of those measures will increase compute overhead by 20 percent of the observed inference workload. An OpenAI spokesperson told The Register that those costs reflect internal…

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

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

Cursor Launches 'Origin' Code Hosting Platform As GitHub Alternative

Cursor has launched Origin, a GitHub-style code hosting platform built directly into its AI coding environment. The company is initially positioning Origin as a low-risk layer on top of GitHub, keeping GitHub as the "source of truth," but the launch landed just as a major GitHub outage highlighted growing concerns about reliability in the age of AI-generated code. VentureBeat reports: Cursor began…

Zero-Knowledge Proofs Aren’t Age Verification Silver Bullets

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

"Sabotage": Experts, lawmakers blast RFK Jr. for destroying healthcare research

The federal agency tasked with studying ways to improve America's outstandingly poor healthcare system is "on the brink," experts warn. The Trump administration has cut its staff by 75 percent, canceled its grants en masse, and is refusing to spend tens of millions of dollars appropriated by Congress. Whether the agency "will survive the second Trump administration is an open question," health po…

Ukrainian drones overwhelm Russian tanks’ new active protection system—for now

Russian tanks have entered battle for the first time with a new active protection system designed to shoot down incoming drones. But the technology’s recent combat debut in Ukraine met with only limited success—Ukrainian drones still destroyed the Russian armored vehicles by attacking in overwhelming numbers. The first documented battlefield appearance of the Arena-M active protection system took…

fx :Tiny, open, native coding agent.

Firefox 154.0 released

Version 154.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include extending local network access protections to WebSocket connections, more flexible, per-site configuration of cookie and data clearing, and more.…

Expired credit cards revived by researchers to make unauthorized payments

Researchers affiliated with the University of Massachusetts Amherst have found that you can get payments out of certain expired contactless credit cards, a process detailed at the recent USENIX Security 2026 conference. Raja Hasnain Anwar, Gerard DeCunha, and Muhammad Taqi Raza describe their findings in a paper titled "Zombie Cards Back Online: Reviving Expired Credit Cards for Contactless Payme…

Linux 7.3 Adds New "bpf_sock_read_xattr" Feature For systemd, BPF Programs

Merged earlier this year for Linux 7.1 was extended attributes on sockets support as a feature sought after by the likes of GNOME and systemd for helping with Varlink IPC usage and other purposes. A limitation though of the functionality has been no efficient means for a BPF program to read those user extended attribute labels back. But with Linux 7.3 that's being addressed with the new bpf_sock_r…

Against all odds, SpaceX finally tugs Starship into port after 24 days at sea

SpaceX's most recent Starship test flight may have ended July 24, but its mission isn't over yet. The spacecraft splashed down in the Indian Ocean intact after flying halfway around the world from SpaceX's launch base in South Texas. Engineers expected the ship's life to end with a fiery disintegration after toppling over, just as past Starships have done following splashdown. Numerous onboard se…

Pacing model development in an era of cyber-critical capabilities

Disney sues FCC and its chair, escalating fight against Trump's chief censor

Disney today sued the Federal Communications Commission and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in a lawsuit that aims to stop what it called a "campaign of censorship" waged by the Trump administration against ABC. Disney, ABC, and the eight broadcast stations they own filed a complaint in US District Court for the District of Columbia. They also submitted a motion for a temporary restraining order and pr…

IOmap Improvement For Linux 7.3 Takes EXT4 & XFS Performance Further

As part of the VFS pull requests now merged to the Linux 7.3 development kernel was an improvement to the IOmap framework used by various file-systems for mapping logical file byte offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage. With the now-merged code, this modern block mapping framework is allowing better performance at least for the EXT4 file-system...…

Peacock raises prices by 18 percent after becoming profitable

For the fourth time in four years, Peacock has raised its prices. The Select plan, which has ads and doesn’t include sports, movies, or Peacock originals, went from $8/month to $9/month. The monthly fee for the standard ad plan (Premium) went from $11/month to $13/month, and the ad-free plan (Premium Plus) went from $17/month to $20/month. Annual pricing, as previously, offers 12 months for the p…

The United States is about to wake up to the threat from China's space program

There are generally two schools of thought in the Western space community when it comes to the prospect of China landing humans on the Moon in the next few years and very possibly beating NASA and the United States in its efforts to return astronauts there. Many people will ask what the big deal is. After all, NASA won the space race to the Moon nearly six decades ago, when Apollo 11 landed there…

Sol loves to cheat

Framework Laptop 12 Updated For Intel Wildcat Lake, Shipping Starts In October

Last year Framework Computer launched the Framework Laptop 12 as an upgrade-friendly and Linux-compatible 2-in-1 laptop. The Framework Laptop 12 was originally powered by Intel Core 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" low-end processor while now Framework is adding Core Series 3 "Wildcat Lake" as an upgrade or for new Laptop 12 orders...…

Fairphone's latest repairable phone is finally available in the US for $650

As smartphone designs have become more refined, they've also become less repairable. Fairphone bucks that trend, offering devices that can be fully disassembled and serviced using a single screwdriver. But its devices were a pain to get in the US until now. The Dutch company has launched the Fairphone Gen 6+ in the US, offering not only the phone but a full line of accessories and replacement par…

Study finds Meta and Google mobile apps gorge on user data

A study of mobile apps claims that Meta collects three times as much user data on average as tools published by Apple or Microsoft. Google is also one of the worst data-scavenging offenders. The research was conducted by the reassuringly named Surfshark, a VPN and security tools provider. It found that Meta's apps were the most "data-hungry," declaring an average of 25 out of 35 possible data typ…

Ford hopes this Hypercar will be its next Le Mans winner

The car that Ford hopes will return it to overall victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans made its unofficial debut this week. Ford sent us some pictures of the still-unnamed car conducting its first track test at the colorful Paul Ricard circuit in Provence, France, where drivers Matt Campbell and Logan Sargeant started the hard work of making the car both fast and reliable. Ford already has four ove…

CISA gives feds 3 days to fix actively exploited Ray RCE bug

CISA says attackers are exploiting a critical 2025 vulnerability in Ray, the widely used open source framework for scaling Python and machine-learning workloads. Tracked as CVE-2025-62593 and rated 9.4 under CVSS v4, the bug was first disclosed in November 2025. It allows an attacker to use Firefox or Safari to achieve remote code execution (RCE) on a vulnerable Ray system. The open source distri…

Apple plugs image-processing hole ripe for spyware abuse

Apple has released a batch of vulnerability fixes for iPhones, iPads, and Macs, including an image-processing flaw that experts say has the hallmarks of a spyware delivery vector. The most notable patch is for CVE-2026-65346, a defect in the ImageIO framework Apple uses to parse image files. Discovered and reported by Nik Tsytsarkin of Meta's Red Team X, CVE-2026-65346 is an integer-overflow bug…

The CachyOS Performance vs. Other Linux Operating Systems On A $46k USD Workstation

Recently I looked at the performance of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS vs. Windows 11 on the Intel Xeon 678X running within the HP Z4 G6i workstation. Linux performed admirably as one would expect. With this Intel Xeon Granite Rapids WS workstation from HP though commanding a retail price more than $46,000 USD, you likely want nothing but the utmost performance out of it. So for those looking to maximize the OS…

Tim King, AmigaDOS royalty, dies aged 70

OBIT Dr Timothy James King, the programmer behind the 68000 version of TRIPOS that became AmigaDOS, has died aged 70. According to an AmigaNews report, King's family said he passed at the end of July. King was a superb programmer – although he accomplished rather more than that. His most widely experienced work was a key component of the original Commodore Amiga's operating system. His port of Ca…

[$] Fedora prepares for the end of AF_ALG

The Linux kernel's user-space interface (AF_ALG) to the Crypto API has been linked to a number of recent high-profile security problems, including Copy Fail and successor vulnerabilities. It was deprecated earlier this year. Eric Biggers, and other kernel developers, have been working to remove it from the kernel. With that in mind, the Fedora Project is planning to restrict use of AF_ALG in the n…

Rust For Linux 7.3 Begins Seeing Fixes To Prepare For Rust's GCC Backend

In addition to the POWER/PowerPC code adding Rust kernel support, the main set of Rust programming language updates for the Linux 7.3 kernel have now been submitted. Most notable are early fixes toward eventually allowing the experimental Rust GCC back-end to be used as an alternative to the official rustc compiler with LLVM code generation...…

Microsoft finally fixing File Explorer and the Context Menu

Microsoft's making some major changes to File Explorer and the context menu in order to resolve quality issues and offer more user flexibility when you right click. "Windows" and "quality" are rarely used positively together, something Microsoft admitted this year. Even the company's boss, Satya Nadella, noted that the company needed to "win back" its fans. For many Windows users, the face of the…

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, 389-ds:1.4, bind, haproxy, kernel, kernel-rt, libXfont2, nghttp2, and unbound), Debian (calibre, expat, ironic, and linux-6.12), Fedora (coturn, linux-firmware, php-phpseclib, and sqlite), Red Hat (fence-agents, osbuild-composer, pam, resource-agents, and sg3_utils), SUSE (ffmpeg, jetty-minimal, open-iscsi, python, python313-h2, python313-p…

Copilot tricked into telling reseachers how to hack itself

Researchers manipulated Microsoft Copilot Personal into telling them how to hack the AI assistant – eventually tricking it into sending sensitive data to an external server and poisoning its persistent memory, by repeatedly asking Copilot why an attack wouldn’t work. Varonis Threat Labs uncovered the vulnerability, which they named "CoSnitch" and reported to Microsoft in December 2025. Redmond, w…

Linux 7.3 Corrects Faulty Behavior Of FAT File-System Driver For Filenames Too Fat

It's not too often that the Linux FAT driver for FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 format support receives updates worth mentioning. For Linux 7.3 there is one patch though and it's due to the driver until now lacking an upper-bounds check on the length of the filename, which could lead to some unexpected situations with extremely long filenames...…

Government Teams users face another ******* month of filtered captions

Microsoft Teams will continue censoring profanity in captions by default for some government users until the end of August, a month later than planned. In 2023, Microsoft introduced a toggle controlling the profanity filter in Teams Live Captions. Enabled by default, the filter replaced naughty words with asterisks. It was a user-level preference rather than something controlled by the meeting or…

Passport out-of-control at French airport

BORK!BORK!BORK! Europe's airports can be a minefield for the unwary traveler, especially when that traveler inserts a passport into a waiting kiosk and finds Windows staring back. An eagle-eyed Register reader (they said we could use their name, but we will keep them anonymous for fear of them being added to some sort of list) encountered the Windows desktop where it probably didn't belong this m…

Sponsor gives KDE Plasma 6.6 the LTS treatment

The new "bullet-proof" KDE Software Initiative brings long-term fixes to Kubuntu – and other distros can take advantage of them too. Announced late last week, the effort aims to provide "at least" three years of backported fixes for KDE Plasma 6.6 and the associated KDE Frameworks and KDE Gear apps. It is aimed at Kubuntu 26.04, the latest LTS release of Ubuntu's official KDE Plasma flavor, but o…

Fedora x86-64-v3 Optimized Packages Pushed Back To At Least Fedora 46

There was a proposal under discussion the past few months on building x86-64-v3 packages for Fedora 45 while retaining x86-64-v1 packages. The hope was building the Fedora packages with x86-64-v3 where AVX/AVX2, FMA, BMI2, and other newer ISA features can be assumed in the name of better performance. Unfortunately, the x86-64-v3 plans are now delayed but may be reconsidered next year with Fedora 4…

Lenovo Lands New Watchdog Driver In Linux 7.3 For Their SE30G2 + SE60 Edge AI Computers

When it comes to the watchdog driver changes for Linux 7.3, standing out is the new Lenovo driver for their upcoming ThinkEdge AI edge computing systems...…

Intel Enables Buffer Compression For Better Gaming Performance With DXVK

Merged today to Mesa 26.3-devel is a nice performance boost for Intel graphics with Valve's Steam Play when using DXVK for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over the Vulkan API. The open-source Intel ANV driver is seeing up to 5% better performance with DXVK...…

UK puts Google AI on the flight path to fewer contrails

Britain is putting Google AI in the flight-planning loop to see whether airliners can dodge the patches of sky where their vapor trails are most likely to stick around and warm the planet. The UK government is backing a trial to predict where persistent contrails will form over the North Atlantic and help participating aircraft avoid those areas by adjusting their routes or altitude. The Departme…

XFS Lands FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES For Efficiency Improvement In Linux 7.3

The XFS file-system improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3. For end-users the only notable change for this file-system on the new kernel is adding support for FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES...…

AI models get convenient amnesia about source material as they grow, MIT boffins find

The process of training an AI model becomes a paradox at scale – the more it remembers, the less it remembers about the source of its memories. MIT computer scientists went looking for a way to attribute AI model output to specific training data, in the hope that understanding could inform AI regulation. What they found, described in a paper titled, "Outputs of Generative Diffusion Models are Oft…

UK's tech talent pipeline shrinks as overseas worker visa applications fall 7%

Fewer skilled overseas workers are applying for UK tech visas, with numbers down for the third year running even as ministers talk up Britain's chances in the global technology race. The tally fell 7 percent, from 37,376 applications in 2024 to 34,936 last year, according to UK Visas and Immigration figures obtained by accounting company RSM UK and shared with The Register. That's a long way from…

Google buys crashed airline Spirit’s data at auction, because AI

Google has acquired some data of failed US airline Spirit. Spirit hit financial turbulence when COVID-19 blew in during 2020 and started making losses. Its balance sheet never climbed back to a safe altitude and in May 2026 the airline grounded itself permanently. The low-cost carrier entered liquidation to wind itself up and is now auctioning assets to raise cash and settle at least some of its…

Microsoft MVP creates site to remind you of all the brands Redmond replaced

If you’re struggling to stay up to date with Redmond’s regular product re-branding exercises, here’s the site for you: The Microsoft Rebrand Registry. Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Loryan Strant created the site because he thinks it’s a valuable resource, and also in the hope it makes visitors “chuckle.” Readers may remember that Strant has also created the site Let Me Correct That F…

Xen Project gets serious about safety in push to possibly partition robot brains

The Xen Project, home of the open-source hypervisor, has decided it’s time to get serious about formal safety. That’s not an admission of security woes, but a push to ensure the hypervisor complies with formal safety standards like IEC-61508, which defines the processes and practices used in software that runs in devices and settings that could conceivably harm humans. Xen has in recent years emp…

EFS & FreeVxFS File-Systems Get Booted While FailFS Merged For Linux 7.3

Among the early pull requests merged today by Linus Torvalds for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle were removal of some ancient file-systems while adding in a new pseudo file-system...…

Almost nobody pays attention to web standards anymore

Are web coders losing their respect for standards? A recent review of the world’s largest sites suggests so. ValidateHTML, a project by independent French developer Théo Ducreux, examined the contents of the 5,000 most widely used web domains, as estimated by the Tranco research project. They include the usual suspects (Google, YouTube, Akamai) plus those without public-facing components (Google’…

Linux 7.3 To Land Initial Code Improving vRAM Management, More Improvements Coming

Earlier this year Natalie Vock of Valve's Linux graphics team laid out some patches for improving the Linux gaming experience for systems with limited vRAM. The kernel work for improving that video memory management is set to be introduced in the Linux 7.3 kernel. While that's a celebration on its own, Vock is pursuing more improvements still for bettering the Linux GPU driver video memory managem…

FFmpeg Lands H.265 Vulkan Encode Performance Optimizations

The FFmpeg multimedia library can now enjoy faster H.265/HEVC video encoding with the Vulkan-powered encode path. With the optimizations merged today, the H.265 encode performance should be roughly at parity to the H.264 encode speed...…

Payments giant Stripe is about to drop over $7 billion to become a gateway to AI token sales

Payments biz Stripe has reportedly finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter for at least $7 billion, signaling a shift in focus for the AI industry. OpenRouter provides a way for customers to integrate multiple AI models into their workflow and infrastructure and is, by Ramp's measure, the most popular of the gateway companies that have sprung up to simplify model integration. By acquiring th…

Offloading Rust To GPUs Proves Capable Of High Performance With Memory Safety

A new research paper published on LLVM offloading to GPU accelerators using the Rust programming language is talking up the prospects of making use of safe Rust code for GPU kernels while retaining Rust's memory safety and other advantages over C++ / CUDA / HIP...…

Siemens and Reinhausen turn up the voltage for hungry AI racks

Siemens and fellow German engineering biz Reinhausen are developing a solid-state transformer (SST) to deliver 800-volt DC power directly to increasingly dense AI datacenter racks. As AI hardware grows hotter and hungrier, server farm operators are looking to overhaul how power moves through their data halls. One approach, favored by Nvidia and other industry heavyweights, is distribution at 800…

ARCTIC Fan Controller: The Best Fan Controller For Linux Desktops, Less Than $10 USD

Back in March were patches posted by ARCTIC Cooling for an ARCTIC fan controller driver for Linux. Typically we aren't used to seeing desktop/enthusiast focused vendors providing such Linux drivers for peripherals directly but the sad fact is most often it's left up to the open-source community to reverse engineer and create such drivers for Linux. Making it all the more surprising besides it comi…

[$] Development statistics for the 7.2 kernel

Linus Torvalds released the 7.2 kernel on August 17, after noting that the number of fixes coming in was still "bigger than I would have wished for". In fact, 7.2 was one of the busiest development cycles in the kernel's history, adding nearly 600,000 lines of code. It's time to look at some statistics to get a handle on how the kernel's development community is changing.…

[$] Bootstrappable builds: how and why

This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference, better known as "FOSSY", moved north to the beautiful (and enormous) campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada from its home for the three previous editions: Portland, Oregon, in the US. There were many different types of talks at FOSSY, from deeply technical kernel-track topics, through talks…

Mozilla adds ad blocking to Firefox for iOS

Firefox for iOS now includes an optional ad blocker, or it will soon. According to Mozilla, the experimental feature "is being introduced to the Firefox user base through a progressive rollout." As such, it might not have turned up for every user just yet. Off by default, the block uses a filter list based on EasyList to block ads before they load. According to the organization, this means that i…

GitHub has Issues as repo downloads hit 50% error rate

Microsoft's GitHub source shack is reporting a 50 percent error rate on repository content downloads. GitHub Copilot is also "experiencing degraded availability." The problems began at 1340 UTC, when the company's status page reported "impacted performance for some GitHub services." This rapidly escalated to degraded performance across numerous services, including Issues – which was, appropriatel…

GNU poke 5.0 released

Version 5.0 of GNU Poke, a binary-data editor, has been released. This release includes a number of improvements to the Poke compiler, additions to the Poke language, as well as runtime and standard library updates. See below for the full list of changes.…

Mark J. Wielaard receives Distinguished Service Award in Software Freedom

The Software Freedom Conservancy has announced that Mark J. Wielaard has been honored with the second annual Distinguished Service Award in Software Freedom for his many years of service to software freedom. Mark is one of many key FOSS developers who has designed his career so that his employers have funded much of his FOSS work. Nevertheless, Mark continues his volunteer work after hours as a ke…

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind, dracut, freerdp, gnome-remote-desktop, kernel, and nghttp2), Debian (apr-util, docker.io, ironic, neutron, postgresql-15, unzip, and util-linux), Fedora (chromium, jfrog-cli, jrnl, libgsasl, libsoup3, pdns, pdns-recursor, perl-Archive-Tar, php-pear-PHP-CodeSniffer, rust-bat, rust-git-delta, rust-git-interactive-rebase-tool,…

The Chauffeur Problem

A faster way to calculate the day of the week

Sectorforth is a 16-bit x86 Forth that fits in a 512-byte boot sector (2020)

RAPx: A static analysis tool for Rust programs

What's missing to have reproducible builds on PyPI

The little-known winstart.bat batch file

Xorshift Generators

Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out

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

Too Little, Too Late: Flock Admits Their Technology Needs Reforms

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

Microsoft Plugs Nearly 400 Security Holes

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

Who (or What) Generates Images for EFF?

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

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…

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…

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…

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…

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. Update 8/18/2026: A third SF bar has stopped using Patronscan.   ———————————————————— Recent reports have raised a…

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…

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…