Terminal

The Youth AI Privacy Act’s Privacy Paradox

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 bills under consideration this week—require more data collection and make it harder for people to access lawful speech online.  While the bill is narrower than some other…

Microsoft Is Bringing Xbox 360 Games to PC

Microsoft reportedly plans to let developers bring Xbox 360 games to PC and next-generation Xbox devices, with a gradual rollout expected between 2027 and 2028. A separate disc-to-digital program would also give players transferable digital licenses tied to their physical Xbox discs, preserving the ability to resell or trade them. The Verge reports: With 360 games, developers can opt into making t…

Research roundup: 6 cool science stories we almost missed

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. July’s list includes outfitting cyborg cockroaches with a tiny diving suit for navigating flooded terrain; confirmation that a Medici duke died of malaria, not poisoning; the be…

AI's debt binge can't last, hidden borrowing reaches $1.65T

Microsoft CEO Touts His Own DIY AI Project To Wall Street and His 20 Million Followers

theodp writes: During Microsoft's 2026Q4 earnings call, CEO Microsoft Satya Nadella took time to tout a dashboard he personally created using AI from a Morgan Stanley analyst's PDF research report, which suggested a rosy payback for the so-called MAG7's ('Magnificent 7' companies) massive capital expenditures on AI (to which Nadella later added a "not financial advice" disclaimer). "It would be fu…

Is Kentucky About to Give Billions in Tax Breaks to Data Centers?

DDoS against Norwegian government IT infrastructure – status

The Dunning-Kruger effect may just be a data artefact (2020)

Lego deploys Hubble Space Telescope as detailed desktop model

For 35 years, the Hubble Space Telescope has looked out into the Universe. Now, Lego is inviting builders to look inward with its latest model of the orbiting observatory. The new Lego Icons Hubble Space Telescope (set no. 11382) was released on August 1 for $140 at the toy company's stores and its online shop. The 1,252-piece kit builds a 15-inch-long (38-cm) desktop model that is about twice as…

Apple's iCloud File Sharing Left Ex-Employees With Access to Secret Documents

Apple's practice of mixing employees' work files with personal iCloud accounts reportedly left some former staff with continued access to confidential documents, messages, and even new updates after leaving the company. "The former employees said many Apple files they had been shared on over their careers at the company -- including planning documents for product launch events -- continued to sync…

An AI-supervised remote exam went so badly that 58,000 students must retake it

Earlier this summer, nearly 160,000 applicants took the entrance exam for UNAM, Mexico's largest university. For the first time, they did it completely remotely, using a "lockdown" browser and AI-powered webcam proctoring software, over several weeks from late May through early June. It was a disaster. When exam results came in, they bore little resemblance to past results, especially at the top.…

Linux 7.3 Looks Like It Will Upstream FailFS

Merged back in Linux 7.3 was NULLFS as a "completely catatonic minimal pseudo filesystem". Now expected for Linux 7.3 is its sibling: FailFS...…

ZX Spectrum System Tour: Sound

C-Kermit 11 released

For those of us with a long memory: John Goerzen has announced the release of C-Kermit 11, the first release of this file-transfer utility in 15 years. As Debian maintainer of Kermit, I noticed some areas where it wasn't matching modern expectations. One area was, not surprising for a project of its age, security. Another area was that its character set or line-ending conversions are usually not d…

Samsung Bans Smart TV Apps That Share Users' Internet Connections

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Several popular Samsung smart TV apps contain code that share the owner's internet connection with strangers, potentially putting millions of Samsung smart TVs at risk of hijacking, according to new security research published on Monday. Some of these apps claim to have been installed on hundreds of millions of smart TVs in people's homes, per t…

AI slop pollutes the CVE pipeline with fake vulns

Now AI is making fake vulnerabilities and polluting the ecosystem. A batch of critical- and high-rated SQLite CVEs that appeared in the NVD with CISA-supplied enrichment last week turned out to be technically bogus, according to security researchers, and their path into widely used databases exposes weaknesses in the CVE pipeline. Software supply chain security outfit JFrog reported last week tha…

The Billable Usage API: programmatic cost visibility for Cloudflare

Smaller, faster, safer: running Kimi and GLM at scale

Celebrating 45 Years of Kermit with the First New C-Kermit Release in 15 Years

As Reddit Stock Falls, CEO Questions Value of Google's AI Overviews

Reddit CEO Steve Huffman criticized Google's AI Overviews for summarizing publishers' content without delivering the traffic benefits of traditional search, arguing that users increasingly value Reddit's human perspectives and firsthand experiences. Ars Technica reports: First, there was a letter to investors (PDF), wherein Huffman spun his narrative about Reddit's value proposition and general st…

Use Task Runners for Common Coding Tasks

SearXNG in Rust

Launch HN: Hoplite (YC S26) – Effortlessly deploy cloud coding agents

Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science

Show HN: Product analytics (and evals) for agent sessions on your MCP

2026 Volkswagen Jetta Sport: The cheap car isn't completely extinct yet

As so many career counselors and lifestyle coaches have explained, first impressions matter. A bad one can set the tone for an entire relationship, whether that's with a person, a novel, a restaurant, or a car. And the 2026 Volkswagen Jetta Sport and I did not get off to the best of starts. Picture the scene: You've been at home for a total of one night out of the previous eight, and you've just…

[$] Buffer sizes for FUSE io_uring

The Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) subsystem provides a way to service filesystem requests from a user-space server, which moves the format-handling code out of the kernel. The FUSE server can use the io_uring facility for better performance, but Bernd Schubert is concerned that memory is being wasted because the current implementation has a single, large buffer size that is excessive for small I/…

South Korea Records Its Highest Ever Temperature

South Korea recorded its highest temperature since modern observations began in 1904, with the city of Yangsan reaching 42.5C as temperatures exceeded 40C for a fifth consecutive day. Authorities warned residents to "immediately stop all outdoor activities." The Guardian reports: More than 20 localities in South Korea were under emergency heatwave alerts on Sunday -- a new warning category introdu…

Russian spies turn public Wi-Fi into malware delivery systems

Conference-goers may want to think twice about connecting to public Wi-Fi after Microsoft disclosed that Russian foreign intelligence operatives (SVR) are compromising captive portal networks to deliver infostealers, keyloggers, and other malware. With the help of ReliaQuest's earlier work, Redmond fingered Storm-2945, a subdivision of the SVR's Midnight Blizzard (aka Nobellium), in an attack cam…

Company Offering Printed Books To Train AI Stops After 404 Media Coverage

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Following 404 Media's reporting that book database company ISBNdb claimed to source printed books to then sell to AI companies for AI training, the company deleted the part of its website offering the service and walked back claims that it would train AI models, and instead called it "a test of market interest." On July 30, nine days after 404 Me…

SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop? (JFrog blog)

The JFrog blog examines some reported vulnerabilities in SQLite, some of which made their way into high-profile vulnerability databases, that turned out to be entirely fabricated by LLMs. These LLM slop CVEs can cause organizations to waste time investigating and patching vulnerabilities that do not actually exist, as well as polluting vulnerability databases. In environments where Critical vulner…

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…

Benchmarking Six Linux Distributions On The Framework Laptop 13 Pro

With the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro now shipping powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 (Panther Lake) and a brand new hardware design, I have spent the past week testing out various Linux distributions on this very nice high-end laptop. All of the modern Linux distributions tested have been playing nicely with this new Panther Lake laptop. Of course, beyond testing for compatibility I also took th…

SpaceX is set to acquire 130,000 acres of marshland in southern Louisiana

SpaceX and the state of Louisiana are close to finalizing a deal for the launch company to acquire about 130,000 acres along the northern coast of the Gulf of Mexico. There have been persistent rumors about such an agreement for months, but now The Times-Picayune | The New Orleans Advocate reports that Louisiana Gov. Jeff Landry is expected to announce the agreement later this month. The deal wou…

Devtools must be open source

MediaTek lines up $5B war chest for AI datacenter push

Taiwanese chipmaker MediaTek is lining up $5 billion in financing to expand into AI datacenter silicon, targeting a slice of a market it expects to be worth up to $80 billion next year. The fabless chip producer is perhaps best known for its Arm-based smartphone and Chromebook chipsets, plus wireless silicon for Wi-Fi products. But the firm is the latest to see a "compelling growth opportunity" i…

Police National Legal Database confirms data theft after dark web leak

The Police National Legal Database (PNLD) is the latest UK public sector outfit to admit that cybercriminals made off with its data, including the names and work email addresses of police officers, justice staff, government partners, and customers. The legal lookup service relied upon by police forces and criminal justice agencies across the UK said it discovered the "data security incident" on J…

Andy Pavlo joins ClickHouse to establish ClickHouse Labs

NASA boss balks at billion-dollar estimate for recycled Moon rover

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has stated "we simply will not fly it" if claims about the costs of the repurposed Mars rover engineering model prove anywhere near accurate. Isaacman was responding to the Planetary Society's chief of space policy, Casey Dreier, who had run the numbers on his plan to send a robot to the Moon, built from parts of engineering models of the successful Mars rovers P…

Four stable kernels for Monday

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.6, 6.18.42, 6.12.101, and 6.6.148 stable kernels. Each contains hundreds of patches—the 7.1.6 kernel has more than 700—with fixes throughout the tree. Users are advised to upgrade.…

MiniMax H3 Day-0 Support in ComfyUI: Open Weights, Native Audio, and 2K Video

SPF Record Syntax: Mechanisms, Qualifiers, Modifiers, and Macros

Trump wants the power to stop the public from suing polluters

Reducing rampant pollution across the United States was so important that when Congress passed many environmental protection laws, including the Clean Air Act, Clean Water Act, and Safe Drinking Water Act, it didn’t want to leave enforcement only to the executive branch. Congress specifically wrote into those laws ways for citizens to enforce them through the courts when the government does not a…

NetBSD 11.0 released

The release of NetBSD 11.0, the 19th major version of the operating system, has been announced. There are many changes and enhancements since the 10.1 release, including a new port to RISC-V, better support for Linux system calls in compat_linux(), as well as improvements to the NPF firewall. As you are probably aware, the number of security issues found or suspected everywhere has massively incre…

Water system cyberattacks spread to Georgia, Michigan amid US-Iran conflict

Georgia and Michigan are the latest US states to report cyberattacks on water systems, as the FBI investigates incidents across at least seven states. Iran-backed hackers are the leading suspects, although the bureau has not publicly attributed the campaign. Officials in both states told journalists over the weekend that water facilities had detected activity consistent with the attacks on more t…

zlib-rs 0.6.7 Released With LoongArch LSX Optimizations, Use-After-Free Fix

zlib-rs 0.6.7 is out today as the newest version of this "safer zlib" implementation making use of the Rust programming language and aiming to deliver performance on-par with zlib-ng...…

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, fence-agents, kernel, kernel-rt, openssh, osbuild-composer, perl-Archive-Tar, perl-DBI, perl:5.32, pipewire, python-pillow, qemu-kvm, unbound, and vim), Debian (chromium, incus, kernel, kissfft, libgd2, libmodbus, libssh, node-tar, php8.4, poppler, python-authlib, sslh, and starlette), Fedora (borgbackup, coturn, curl,…

GNOME Boxes Preparing To Deliver Much Improved Virtualization Experience

GNOME Boxes as a front-end to libvirt and QEMU is preparing to deliver a much improved virtualization experience for those wanting to enjoy desktop VMs from the GNOME desktop...…

NVIDIA 610.57.04 Linux Driver Delivers Many Fixes

NVIDIA is kicking off the new month by releasing an updated R610 Linux driver build with quite a number of bug fixes...…

Google Earth's AI makeover survives one trip around the Sun

Google performed a remarkably brisk reverse ferret last week, launching AI image generation in Google Earth and yanking it the next day after certain sections of the internet did the inevitable. This is how it began: "Today we're bringing AI image generation with Nano Banana to Google Earth, letting you virtually reimagine anywhere in the real world." This is how it's going, less than 48 hours la…

Linux 7.3 Expected To Drop The FreeVxFS File-System Driver

It looks like Linux 7.3 will end up dropping FreeVxFS as the read-only Linux kernel driver for the Veritas VxFS file-ssytem used formerly by HP-UX and SCO UnixWare...…

The AI bubble is already popping; we just don't know it yet

KETTLE Big tech's Q2 earnings have been pouring in over the last two weeks, and it looks like stock market investors are taking a pin to the AI bubble. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube, where you can subscribe to get notified about the latest episode. Between eye-watering capex expenses, shrinking free cash…

'AI's Decimation of Call Center Jobs Has Begun'

"AI's decimation of call center jobs has begun," reports Bloomberg: Companies including the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Microsoft Corp., Uber Technologies Inc. and Hyatt Hotels Corp. are using automated chat and phone systems to handle work that previously required humans. In some cases, they've already wiped out sizable chunks of their customer service operations, together representing thousa…

SQLite Critical CVEs or LLM Slop?

AirLLM 70B inference with single 4GB GPU

UK government investment arm cops to 40-hour leak of officials' contact details

The UK government's corporate finance adviser has admitted that an employee left an internal file containing the names and work email addresses of dozens of officials publicly accessible for around 40 hours. The breach, first reported by The Guardian, was disclosed in UK Government Investments' (UKGI) annual report, which says it occurred during the 2025-26 financial year after a member of staff…

How headlights got brighter, whiter, and more blinding after dark

Every so often, I’ll be piloting some sensor-laden, software-defined press car down a dark stretch of highway when an oncoming driver’s high beams arrive like a targeted retinal strike, an involuntary reminder that modern automotive lighting has entered its own lumen arms race. Anyone who has driven at night in the last few years knows what I'm talking about: A modern crossover crests a hill in t…

KGamma2 Makes For Easy Gamma Adjustments On KDE Plasma With Wayland

KDE developer David Edmundson announced today his KGamma2 tool in aiming to address a pain point for KDE Plasma desktop users on Wayland...…

Sci-fi authors Scalzi and Stross decry AI's dystopian impact on their craft

Two prominent science fiction authors have decried the impact of AI on their craft. "I do not want or need a large language model to write my fiction for me. I write fiction compulsively – before I was published I wrote for many years as a hobbyist – so why on earth would I pay someone else to take my fun away?" wrote Charles Stross in a Saturday post. Stross graciously mentioned The Register in…

GNOME Mutter 51 Beta Released With Wayland Background Blur, Improved Frame Scheduling

Released overnight on Sunday were the beta versions of Mutter 51 and GNOME Shell 51. This follows GNOME 51 embarking on itsAPI/ABI freeze, feature freeze, and UI freeze a day earlier...…

KDE Linux Making For Easier First-Run Experience Of Java & DOS Apps

With July all wrapped up, the monthly status report is now published for KDE Linux as the in-house Linux distribution featuring all of the latest KDE wares and other open-source innovations...…

Linux 7.3 Adding Support For MCTP-Over-USB v1.1

Within the Linux networking subsystem's "net-next" Git branch there is now queued up support for MCTP-over-USB v1.1. This is the newest version of the standard for sending Management Component Transport Protocol (MCTP) packets over USB for tasks like crash dumps, logging, and firmware updates...…

Linux 7.3 To Support Realtek RTL8261C & RTL8261D

Queued into net-next ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window is adding support for the Realtek RTL8261C and RTL8261D 10 Gigabit PHYs that launched last year...…

Prevent cognitive debt by manually retyping LLM-generated code

As Larry Ellison bets the farm, Oracle says it loves AI-written code, just not in OpenJDK

Oracle has told contributors to OpenJDK – the open source Java project it stewards – not to submit code or other material generated by AI. In a post tagged "legal," Oracle said it was drafting a full policy on generative AI but had set interim ground rules. It cited risks involving review workloads, safety, security, and intellectual property. "Contributions in the OpenJDK Community must not incl…

Bonsai: Janestreet's UI Library

Claude Code is revolutionizing digital archaeology. Enterprise better dig it

OPINION The UK's National Museum of Computing at Bletchley Park (TNMoC) is a natural center of digital archaeology. It has restored, recreated, and documented landmark machines, from the wartime Colossus computer through to British mainframes of the '60s and '70s. Its collection from the dawn of the microprocessor age also attracts those who live to investigate such things. LLMs, still in their m…

Massive Debian 13 Linux Kernel Security Update Patches 68 Vulnerabilities

Slashdot reader prisoninmate shares this report from 9to5Linux: Coming ten days after the previous Linux kernel security update, which only fixed 12 vulnerabilities that may lead to a privilege escalation, denial of service, or information leaks, the new Debian 13 Linux kernel security update is a massive one, and it patches no less than 68 security vulnerabilities in the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel. De…

AI is 'both the weapon and the target' in latest wave of cyberattacks

AI is becoming both an attack tool and a high-value target, with attacks by AI-enabled adversaries rising 89 percent in 2025, according to CrowdStrike. The security firm's annual Threat Hunting Report details criminal gangs and nation states using AI throughout the attack chain. Attackers are also targeting organizations' AI infrastructure and poisoning popular software packages to compromise the…

Rust project goals: Immobile types and guaranteed destructors

IT boss left root session open for bring-your-kid-to-work day

WHO, ME? Comedian W.C. Fields is credited with the aphorism "Never work with children or animals," which The Register mentions because half of it has some relevance to this week's edition of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column chronicling the ups and downs of working in tech. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Stockley" who shared a horror story that took place in the 1990s. At th…

Don't be a meat proxy

Hollywood Fights AI In Public While Quietly Building It Into Movies

Even as Hollywood performers protest and Hollywood studios sue "in their war on AI," reports the Los Angeles Times, "the entertainment industry is deepening its dependence on it." Among hundreds of job postings in late June, more than one in 10 was likely connected to AI. The top studios' public postings suggest they have been recruiting people to build AI tools. They are also recruiting teams to…

Microsoft says 8 GB of RAM should be enough for anyone running Windows 11

Microsoft has added four new items to the to-do list it set itself to improve the quality of Windows 11. Redmond's list landed in March 2026 in response to users' anger at Windows 11 becoming increasingly flaky and needy. Pavan Davuluri, Microsoft's executive VP for Windows and Devices, promised "improved memory efficiency, lowering the baseline memory footprint for Windows, freeing up more capac…

Qwen3.8-Max: A New Bar for Coding and Cowork

Rogue Police Officers Have Turned Flock's Nationwide Camera Network Into a Stalking Tool

A woman found her police officer ex-boyfriend had used Flock's camera system 600 times to look up the location of her and her daughter, reports the Washington Post (Alternate URL here). (She found out through Have I Been Flocked, described as "a website that aggregates police search logs made available through public records.") But it turns out dozens more police officers have also misused Flock..…

Meta straps on a ‘Kick Me’ sign by mistakenly taking down video by India’s prime minister

ASIA IN BRIEF Meta last week briefly took down an unremarkable video posted by India’s prime minister Narendra Modi, earning itself days of criticism and regulatory trouble. The video featured Modi announcing a new task force that will reform the exams required to secure places in many Indian universities. Those exams have become a major factor in the sudden development of a major youth protest m…

GOG Officially Expands Linux Support With Native Galaxy Client In Development

Long-time Slashdot reader pyroclast shared this report from Linux Journal: After years of requests from the Linux gaming community, GOG has officially confirmed that it is developing native Linux support for the GOG Galaxy launcher. The announcement marks one of the biggest shifts in the company's history and signals a stronger commitment to Linux as a first-class gaming platform. While GOG has of…

AerynOS Issues First Development Update & New ISOs In Three Months

It's been just over three months since the last AerynOS development update and new ISO spin but fortunately that's been succeeded today by a new development update and ISO images. AerynOS development remains strong and ongoing with many changes to be found in this latest from-scratch Linux distribution release...…

Kernel prepatch 7.2-rc6

The 7.2-rc6 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Quoth Linus: "Hmm. 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." There were 537 non-merge commits applied between 7.2-rc5 and 7.2-rc6.…

Linux 7.2-rc6 Released: "This RC Is Huge"

Like clockwork, the Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel is now available for testing in working toward the stable Linux 7.2 kernel in hopefully two week's time...…

IT Teams are Spending 11 Hours a Week on Cloud Connectivity Problems

Researchers found enterprises are spending time troubleshooting cloud connectivity due to increased AI workloads, reports Computer Weekly. More than 400 IT and infrastructure decision-makers (US and UK) were surveyed for internet/cloud/AI exchange operator DE-CIX by market researchers Censuswide. But despite 96% of respondents claiming their enterprise networks are ready for cloud/AI loads, the av…

New Spinning Drone Hides In Plain Sight

To design invisible drones, researchers have tried camouflage, transparent materials and light-bending optical systems. But engineers at Northwestern University used "motion blur," which an announcement from the school notes is the effect that makes fast-spinning fans seem to disappear. "The drone spins up to 25 times per second, which is too fast for the human eye to see clearly. While it isn't c…

Is There a Way to Promote Open Document Formats Instead of 'MS Office' Format?

The Register looks at exactly why "It is practically impossible to move any non-trivial Word document out of MS Office to a non-MS suite and back again without it being more trouble than it's worth." OOXML, developed by Microsoft and first standardized by Ecma in 2006, became the ISO/IEC 29500 standard in 2008 after a grueling and adversarial process. Microsoft pursued standardization because it h…

Linux 7.3 To Begin Laying The Groundwork For Intel Starfire

Intel recently announced Starfire as their new Panther Lake derived, space-grade SoC designed for extreme environments... like survivability in space. With the Linux 7.3, we are going to begin seeing the first Intel Starfire specific patches land in the kernel...…

Linux 7.3 To Support The Qualcomm Adreno 704 & Adreno 722 GPUs

Sent out on Saturday were the Qualcomm MSM DRM kernel graphics/display driver updates to land for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window...…

Ubuntu Touch Making Progress Toward Ubuntu 26.04, Vulkan & App Updates

Following last week's release of Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 for this community-maintained, mobile flavor of Ubuntu Linux, more details are now available on their upcoming development efforts and eventual transition to an Ubuntu 26.04 base...…

Linux 7.2-rc6 Fixes Some AMD Zen 5 CPUs Being Mistakenly Identified As Zen 6

Today's batch of x86 fixes for the kernel ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc6 release later in the day addresses some AMD Zen 5 processors mistakenly being classified as Zen 6...…

Box64 v0.4.4 Released With New Box64-Configurator App

Box64 0.4.4 released today as the newest version of this open-source user-space Linux x86_64 emulator for running binaries on 64-bit ARM, RISC-V, and LoongArch systems...…

Meet the 'internet radical' who helped Microsoft get email and AT&T get online

Tom Evslin drove the WorldNet project at AT&T and helped develop what became Microsoft Exchange and Outlook. He was at Microsoft when the company was still working out what to do about this newfangled internet thing. Evslin describes himself as one of Microsoft's "internet radicals" in the early 1990s, when the company was developing Exchange Server to fend off the threat from Lotus Notes. "Bill…

Steam On Linux Use Back Above 4% In July

Valve just published the Steam Survey results for July 2026 and point to a small uptick in Linux gaming use...…

Here's how engineers plan to save the satellite sent to save NASA's Swift mission

One week ago, more than 200 miles above the Earth, a refrigerator-size satellite making its way toward an attempted rescue of NASA's $500 million Swift gamma-ray observatory suddenly spun out of control. It didn't look good. The spacecraft, named Link, was rotating on multiple axes, rendering it unable to maintain a reliable communications link with the ground and complicating efforts to arrest t…

NetBSD 11.0 Released With RISC-V Support, Enhanced Linux System Call Compatibility

NetBSD 11.0 officially shipped today as the nineteenth major release of this popular BSD operating system...…

Review: Yes, we're still arguing about Nolan's The Odyssey

Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey has been a lightning rod for controversy ever since the first casting and design reveals, igniting afresh with each new trailer. The film has garnered plenty of well-deserved accolades (and earnings) since its release, and yet somehow the debates rage on between classicists and the general public alike—all this over an adaptation of an epic poem that's been around…

MPEG-4 Patent Expiration, RADV On Windows, Open-Source AI & Other July Highlights

Last month on Phoronix there were 257 original Linux/open-source related news articles and another 20 featured Linux hardware reviews / multi-page benchmark articles. Following the recent 22nd birthday of Phoronix.com, this puts the overall tally at nearly 51k original news articles and more than 5,600 Linux hardware reviews. Here is a look back at what readers found most exciting during the cours…

As Reddit stock falls, CEO questions value of Google's AI Overviews

Like any company, Reddit reports quarterly earnings, and its CEO, Steve Huffman, addresses investors during those reports. It's not always about just sharing numbers, though: This quarter, Huffman took the opportunity to voice concerns and criticisms about Google's AI Overviews feature, which automatically summarizes search results on most user queries. First, there was a letter to investors, whe…

Prominent Arch Linux Developer Resigns After 10 Year Run

Arch Linux developer, security team member, AUR maintainer, and package maintainer Morten Linderud "Foxboron" announced today he is resigning from the project...…

After noise complaints, judge orders Waymo to stop overnight charging in Santa Monica

A local judge has ruled that Waymo can no longer use its side-by-side charging facilities overnight in Santa Monica, California, as these may pose a “public nuisance.” Los Angeles Superior Court Judge Bradley S. Phillips granted this week the City of Santa Monica’s motion for a preliminary injunction in the city’s ongoing public nuisance lawsuit against the autonomous vehicle giant. City official…

Linux 7.2-rc6 Working Around Several Buggy Western Digital SATA Drives

Merged ahead of tomorrow's Linux 7.2-rc6 kernel test release are several ATA fixes that include a number of device-specific workarounds for some Western Digital SATA drives that have been failing to work on recent versions of the Linux kernel...…

GNOME Working To Establish An RFC Process, Battling Sloppy AI-Generated Extensions

GNOME developers were quite busy in closing out the month of July from continued work on establishing a formal Request For Comments (RFC) process for the project to battling the continued flood of AI-generated GNOME Shell extensions...…

KDE Plasma 6.8 To Enjoy Huge Performance Gains For Multi-GPU/eGPU Performance

It's been a very exciting week in the KDE Plasma 6.8 development space particularly thanks to performance work on bettering KWin's multi-GPU / external GPU handling...…

200 Milliseconds

Defcon's new badge is a security key you can see inside

It’s been a longtime feature of the annual Defcon hacker conference that attendees come away not only with knowledge of new software vulnerabilities and hacking techniques but also an elaborately designed conference badge—often electronic masterpieces embedded with intricate puzzles, complex crypto challenges, hidden Easter eggs, and even the mechanical gear trains of a watch. Each year’s badge c…

Picolibc 1.8.12 Brings Latest Improvements To This Embedded-Focused C Library

If the recent release of the GNU C Library glibc 2.44 is too big for your embedded use-cases, Keith Packard continues hacking on Picolibc as his embedded-focused C library. Released overnight was Picolibc 1.8.12 with a variety of improvements for this embedded libc...…

How fruit flies chase invisible ribbons of smell to get to their source

A fruit fly hunting a piece of rotting fruit or a mate navigates by smell, following plumes of odor. Out in the wild, turbulent air swirls these plumes into a chaotic, broken landscape—dense chemical filaments laced through long stretches of clean air. A fly trying to find the source gets the smell in stutters, from constantly shifting directions, with no guarantee that a next whiff is coming at…

Unexpected item in the bagging area as Windows Activation error pops up at check-in

Weary travelers making their way through airports have enough to contend with these days without some Microsoft borkage popping up over departure information. Spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader identifying themselves as Ethel Grapefruit (Mrs), one of the information boards at Heathrow Terminal 5's check-in area has decided that whatever is running behind the scenes does not meet with Micros…

A deep dive into Nvidia's Vera CPU and the Olympus cores that power it

DEEP DIVE For the first time, Nvidia has directly challenged Intel and AMD's CPU dominance. With the launch of Vera, the AI arms dealer aims to flog its standalone CPUs to as many hyperscalers and other cloud providers as it can. Alibaba, ByteDance, Meta, Oracle, CoreWeave, Lambda, Nebius, and NScale have already signed up to deploy the chips in their respective clouds. The follow-on to Nvidia's…

Enterprise cloud infrastructure uptake shows no sign of slowing

Cloud infrastructure services grew at their fastest for eight years during the second quarter of 2026, thanks to the AI craze and continued demand for flexible and scalable IT infrastructure. According to the latest figures from Synergy Research, enterprise spending on cloud infrastructure passed $143 billion in Q2, a year-on-year growth rate of 43 percent. This followed 11 successive quarters of…

AMD Begins Posting Display Core Next 6 "DCN6" Linux Patches For RDNA5 GPUs

AMD closed out the month of July by posting some new AMDGPU Display Core "DC" patches. Most notable with this weekly patch ritual is several patches beginning to establish the foundation for Display Core Next 6 "DCN6" as their next-generation display IP. The patches tie DCN6 to the AMD GFX13 graphics engine, which is anticipated to be for the next-generation RDNA5 graphics processors...…

Not just Neanderthals: Ghost lineage in Africa left its mark on our DNA

When the history of our ancestry is written, the fact that we've interbred with some of our closest relatives, the Neanderthals and Denisovans, will have a central role. And it will be tempting to write it as a very tidy story: Once we got genomes from these other groups, it was possible to identify the sequences in our genomes that we shared with them. But in reality, as scientists started pokin…

Doctors took a look at man's painful shoulder—they found the joint was missing

A 45-year-old construction worker went to the emergency department for his right shoulder, which was extremely swollen and becoming progressively more painful. Doctors took an X-ray to try to see what was causing the problem. But when the images came through, it was what they didn't see that explained the situation: His entire shoulder joint was gone, seemingly blasted apart into small, lingering…

Google plans to exempt sanctioned nations from Android developer verification

We are a month away from the initial rollout of Google's Android developer verification system, which requires developers outside the Play Store to verify their identities, just like it does for devs publishing on its platform. The company contends this policy does not impinge on the platform's open nature. Still, the restrictions will be a big change, and there are still some unanswered question…

Reddit keeps its strange DMCA fight over Google search results alive

On Friday, a judge largely denied a motion to dismiss from a web scraper, SerpApi, which is accused of conspiring with Perplexity AI to illegally scrape copyrighted Reddit content from Google search results. In his opinion, US District Judge Paul A. Engelmayer said that at this early stage, Reddit has plausibly pleaded that there was a conspiracy, with SerpApi providing a product to circumvent Go…

Claude published malicious code to the Internet and attacked 3 real companies

Anthropic said its Claude-based security models gained unauthorized access to the sensitive production environments of three outside organizations during internal testing designed to measure the models’ offensive cyber capabilities. The events, which Anthropic revealed Thursday, are the second revelation in 10 days that AI models from the world’s wealthiest providers have trespassed into protecte…

AMD Publishes CDNA5 ISA Documentation For Instinct MI455X

Following last week's launch of the AMD Instinct MI455X, AMD has now kept with tradition and provided ISA documentation concerning this latest CDNA5 architecture...…

Google Earth risked ruin with retracted AI tool for making fake satellite pics

Google briefly allowed anyone to create AI-modified versions of satellite imagery available in Google Earth—before quickly reversing its decision as people shared examples of AI-generated pictures that illustrated the potential for misinformation and disinformation. There is no shortage of generative AI tools that already allow people to create AI-modified images of real buildings and cities base…

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

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 explicit content. If this bill passes, it will force millions of adult internet users to give up their anonymity, privacy, and security before they access lawful speech.   Unlike many state-age verific…

Dev who gave HashiCorp its name returns with a faster terminal multiplexer

HashiCorp cofounder Mitchell Hashimoto has launched a new startup to build a server-side terminal multiplexer that allows programmers to switch between multiple persistent work sessions. Superlogical promises its terminal multiplexer will be faster and keep better track of user jobs. And it could be instrumental to building durable agentic layers into future systems. The problem with traditional…

The CHATBOT Act Forces One Parenting Model On Every Family

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 sense for Congress to hold hearings and examine how AI should be used by minors. But the recently introduced CHATBOT Act answers those questions with a one-size-fits-al…

Would you get tattooed just to interview at a 7-days-a-week AI startup?

Everyone knows that great gimmicks are the key to hiring top developers for your startup. That's why small AI startup LemonLime—which "optimizes your existing data to work with AI"—has so many of them. Want a job interview? Score a perfect 7/7 on the company's own "Is it a Lemon or a Lime?" game. Or—hear me out—get something permanently tattooed on your flesh. LemonLime has tried both tactics in…

The First Open-Source Firmware Released For Modern AMD Ryzen AM5 Platform

Last month 3mdeb released their open-source firmware for a modern AMD EPYC motherboard from Gigabyte that was built off the new AMD openSIL project and Coreboot. Today 3mdeb has delivered the first open-source firmware release for a modern AMD Ryzen desktop motherboard with having independently brought their openSIL+Coreboot powered Dasharo stack to the readily available MSI PRO B850-P WIFI...…

Shotcut 26.7 Video Editor Released With Stock Asset Library

Shotcut 26.7 is out today as the newest feature release to this open-source, cross-platform video editing solution...…

Servo 0.4.0 released

The Servo web-browser engine project has published an update about all of the changes that landed in June 2026, along with version 0.4.0 of the Servo Tech Demo. This release includes a record 558 commits, better layout correctness for web sites, improved WebGPU support, enhancements for users who are using the servoshell test browser, and many performance and stability fixes.…

The most famous brand in physical security got pwned by ShinyHunters

A leading name in home and business physical security, Brinks Home, recently said it identified unauthorized access to a portion of its IT systems, an intrusion ShinyHunters claims it carried out to steal millions of records from the security provider's Salesforce instance. Brinks Home hasn’t named the intruder or identified the affected system, but said the responsible party has threatened to le…

US bank places trust in ransomware crew that promised to delete its data

Would you trust a ransomware extortionist to delete the data they stole? One bank certainly wants you to. Well over a month into a ransomware cleanup job, River Financial Corporation tells regulators that it “took steps to attempt to suppress the affected data, including obtaining representations from the threat actor that it deleted the data in its possession.” For context, placing this kind of…

Nouveau Preparing To Finally Enable Atomic Mode-Setting By Default

In addition to the Nouveau kernel driver unblocking Vulkan Video H.264 support for the Mesa NVK driver, another feature change on the way is this open-source NVIDIA Linux driver finally preparing to enable atomic mode-setting by default...…

Massively Parallel Postgres Backups

Anthropic and OpenAI are competing to see whose agents can go rogue harder

One company's inventive campaign for an unreleased product has become a contest between Anthropic and OpenAI to see which can shout the loudest about its own failures. Readers who tuned in earlier today saw the latest episode in the drama – or sitcom – as Anthropic tried to outdo OpenAI's appropriation of the Mythos marketing playbook and made itself the punchline. Since first teasing Mythos in A…

Update Teams mobile app by October or lose your calendar

Teams mobile users now have even less time to update the app before older versions lose calendar access. Microsoft originally set a late-October deadline in its message, but we're guessing someone familiar with the impending demise of Exchange Web Services (EWS) had a quiet word. The date has been brought forward to the beginning of October, leaving users until the end of September to update the…

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…

Charities remain locked out of CAF Bank online accounts

A week after suspending online banking, CAF Bank still has no timetable for restoring access to its 14,000 UK charity customers. The bank updated customers on Thursday about the outage, which has disrupted payments to staff and suppliers. Little had changed. In a message seen by The Register, CAF Bank said it was not yet able to restore the service safely. As it had earlier in the week, the bank…

[$] The future of libraries in BPF

Song Liu believes that the way that programmers assemble complex BPF programs will be changing rapidly in the future. At a session of the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit, he shared his thoughts on what that change could look like, though he did not have any concrete proposals for what, if anything, the BPF maintainers should do. He anticipates an ecosystem of Rus…

Kelly Criterion Simulator

Arch Linux disables AUR package adoption

The Arch Linux DevOps team has announced that adoption of orphaned packages in the Arch User Repository (AUR) has been disabled due to "the current influx of malicious package adoptions and follow-up commits made via the AUR". Michael Taggart has posted a brief analysis of the malware being added to a long list of packages in this round of attacks. The payload appears to be an remote-access trojan…

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, nodejs-nodemon, nodejs22, nodejs24, openssh, and vim), Debian (gsasl and ruby-rack), Fedora (dokuwiki, lego, libnbd, nasm, pack, unbound, and valkey), Mageia (389-ds-base, libxfont2, nghttp2, and perl-DBI), SUSE (apptainer, bind, ffmpeg-7, freerdp, google-osconfig-agent, graphicsmagick, helm, ImageMagick, java-17-openjdk, java-25-openjdk, key…

NASA's Swift rescue slips to late August as LINK battles its spin

Katalyst Space has confirmed that problems with its LINK spacecraft have delayed its attempt to rescue NASA's Swift observatory, with rendezvous now targeted for the end of August. Katalyst disclosed the delay in an update on the spinning spacecraft. Engineers used a thruster to cut LINK's rotation rate from 9 degrees per second to approximately 4 degrees per second, with further burns planned. K…

Three becomes one as Vodafone buys out merger partner

Vodafone has paid £4.3 billion ($5.78 billion) for the remaining 49 percent of VodafoneThree, taking full ownership of the UK's largest mobile operator. The telecoms giant announced that it planned to buy the stake held by Three's former parent, CK Hutchison Group Telecom Holdings, in May. The acquisition comes just over a year after Vodafone UK and Three UK completed their merger following condi…

Scotland's university procurement center confirms cybercrooks broke in

Advanced Procurement for Universities and Colleges (APUC) says attackers gained unauthorized access to historical data in a cyberattack earlier this month. The Scottish education procurement body said it immediately contained the mid-July intrusion and was investigating claims that some of the data had been stolen. "We recently discovered suspicious activity on our IT systems involving unauthoriz…

Tech buyers are baking in sovereignty from day one, says Forrester

Geopolitical tensions, regulatory pressure, and growing awareness of risk are prompting organizations to build sovereignty requirements into new technology projects from day one, according to Forrester. The research firm says organizations worldwide are specifying data residency and sovereign AI architecture requirements at the planning stage. European firms face greater pressure than their US pe…

UK wants datacenters to pay a fee for grid connection requests

Ofgem is seeking feedback on proposals to levy a fee on datacenter development projects at the time they apply for a grid connection. The move aims to discourage companies from seeking approval for speculative applications that clog up the pipeline and cause connection delays, without ever resulting in finished datacenters. The UK regulator for electricity and gas says connection applications for…

Airport sign fails to boot, officers already on the scene

BORK!BORK!BORK! The sight of the police can make even the clearest conscience twitch. Perhaps the authorities have finally come to ask about that music track you copied 30 years ago. We're not saying the presence of the law sent this digital signage into a tizz, but you never know. Spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader at a Phoenix airport car rental building, today's borked signage looks like…

Techie lured out of retirement to support software only he remembered

ON CALL Happy System Administrator Appreciation Day, dear reader! And happy Friday, too, as it heralds both the end of the working week and the day on which The Reg delivers another edition of On Call, the reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of support jobs that twisted, tanked, or turned out terrifically. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Roger" who told us he spen…

Anthropic’s Claude escaped test sandbox to attack three organizations

Anthropic has admitted that its Claude models escaped sandboxes to access the open internet and attack three organizations – but has also advanced decent excuses for the incidents. The AI upstart discovered the attacks after checking if security tests of its models had ever produced results similar to the attack on Hugging Face made possible by OpenAI models escaping onto the internet. “In partic…

Amazon's Q2 was great, but the earnings release is packed with baloney

Amazon reported its earnings today, and because I am professionally depressed I read the thing in full [PDF]. "How long can I go before the red haze of rage sets in" is a fun game, and today I made it all the way to the bottom of the second page when I encountered a bullet point touting how AWS "made its spec-drive [sic] coding agent, Kiro, available on iOS." Yes, I was in the room when they anno…

LinkedIn realizes its users have been bathing in AI slop, offers a shower

LinkedIn has been drenching its users in AI-powered slop posts, going so far as to encourage writers to trade their own voices for a bot's by hitting the "enhance your post" button when they want to share thoughts. Enough is enough. On Thursday, the site’s Chief Product Officer has announced several changes designed to rehab the platform’s reputation. CPO Hari Srinivasan took to the Microsoft-own…

Oracle adds Google Gemini to the agent menu

Oracle plans to add Google's Gemini models to AI Agent Studio for Fusion Applications, expanding its partnership with Google Cloud and giving customers another option for building AI agents. Big Red also intends to use Gemini models for embedded AI use cases in Oracle Fusion Applications and Oracle NetSuite. In a prepared statement, Google Cloud VP Satish Thomas said that the partnership was desi…

GPUs could explode to multiple TB with new storage-inspired memory tech

Virtually every high-end GPU and AI accelerator relies on high bandwidth memory (HBM), which can shuffle data around at multiple terabytes a second but can only reach into the gigabytes, with models often needing to be shared across multiple processors. However, an emerging storage technology could change that, boosting accelerator memory capacity from hundreds of gigabytes to terabytes. The tech…

Open source project fools AI scrapers with poisoned font

If you don't want AI scrapers training themselves on your website, there's a new way to stop them that doesn't involve server-side blocking or praying they respect your instructions in robots.txt. A team of creatives have teamed up with a typography company to create a new type of font that’ll trick LLM scrapers into ingesting poisoned gibberish. Dubbed ShieldFont, the open-source project almost…

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…

Jailed Flock vandal wipes out three cameras, racks up thousands in damages

Note to privacy-conscious vandals: If you're going to destroy Flock license plate readers, make sure you also take out the other CCTV cameras in the area that could catch you in your crime. Otherwise, you'll end up like one unlucky Californian. Marcus Bee, 40, was arrested by the Monterey County Sheriff’s Office on Tuesday, accused of joining the ever-growing band of US citizens damaging the cont…

Nouveau vs. NVIDIA R610 On CachyOS With The GeForce RTX 5090 Laptop GPU

With the Razer Blade 18 as the first laptop Razer's certifying for (Ubuntu) Linux use while testing it out I was predominantly using the NVIDIA R610 official driver stack. Some users were interested though in how well this laptop is working with the open-source, upstream Nouveau+NVK driver stack given Razer is marketing this high-end laptop for Linux use too. Before sending the review unit back I…

Americans give all-day school phone bans a ringing endorsement

Americans are warming to the idea that schools should be for learning rather than doomscrolling, with support for all-day smartphone bans now outweighing opposition for the first time. A new Pew Research Center survey of 9,750 US adults found that 77 percent support banning smartphones during middle and high school classes, up from 68 percent in 2024. More significantly, support for so-called "be…

[$] Reconsidering O_CREAT|O_DIRECTORY

Linux provides a system call (mkdir()) to create a directory, and a few variants of open() that can open a directory. There is, however, no system call in Linux that can create and open a directory in a single, race-free call. Jori Koolstra has been working on remedying that situation, most recently by repurposing a set of open() flags that currently return an error. There are, however, concerns t…

From individual achievement to partner impact

Organizations everywhere are investing in data and AI while customer expectations climb, with buyers demanding partners who can move quickly, solve complex problems, and turn technology spending into measurable results. That environment requires more than access to technology; it demands expertise applied consistently across teams, projects, and engagements. The latest Databricks survey on Databr…

Samsung warns memory crunch will last through 2028 as profit rises 19-fold

Samsung Electronics is warning that the current memory supply crunch will deepen next year and persist through 2028, a shortage that keeps padding its own record profits at the expense of enterprise customers and consumers. The Korean conglomerate said agentic AI has added to demand already generated by model training, driving an "unprecedented rise" in requirements for AI servers and other compu…

Another batch of single-fix stable kernels

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.18.41, 6.12.100, 6.6.147, 6.1.180, 5.15.213, and 5.10.262 stable kernels. Each of these kernels contains a single fix for a use-after-free vulnerability (CVE-2026-64560). Users of these kernels are advised to upgrade.…

Amazon links four poisoned npm packages to one North Korean crew

Amazon has linked the compromises of four npm packages over the past 18 months, saying they were all the work of the same North Korean crew. In research published this week, AWS attributed the activity with medium confidence to the North Korea-linked group tracked as Sapphire Sleet, which is widely regarded as a Lazarus Group offshoot. Rather than exploiting zero-days or hacking npm itself, the c…

Security updates for Thursday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, libtiff, libXfont2, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, and rest), Debian (expat and nss), Fedora (libssh, nginx, nginx-mod-brotli, nginx-mod-fancyindex, nginx-mod-headers-more, nginx-mod-modsecurity, nginx-mod-naxsi, nginx-mod-vts, nodejs24, perl-HTTP-Date, proftpd, squid, unbound, and wordpress), Oracle (c-ares, edk2, freerdp, go-fdo…

Microsoft makes Copilot harder to miss in Classic Outlook

Microsoft had some news for Classic Outlook users this week, though it wasn't an extension of support or an admission that new Outlook has failed to win over the holdouts. Instead, Copilot is getting a redesigned entry point above the ribbon. The rest of the Microsoft 365 has been has liberally daubed with Copilot, and venerable Classic Outlook is no exception. In a message posted to its administ…

Hims & Hers accused of sharing health secrets and hiding the cancel button

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is suing Telehealth company Hims & Hers over allegations that it shared customers' sensitive health data with advertising platforms and misled them about billing and cancellations. Hims & Hers (H&H), which offers online treatments for conditions including male pattern baldness, erectile dysfunction, obesity, and mental health disorders, shared "sensitive health…

MariaDB again faces questions over Galera's open source future

With support for MySQL Galera Cluster ending in two months, open source observers are again questioning how much of the technology's future MariaDB plc intends to keep in the community edition. The company says Galera remains a core, open source component of MariaDB while it develops separate replication capabilities for enterprise customers. In March, MariaDB, the company behind the database for…

Russian spies take their half-click email attack from Zimbra to Outlook

The Russian espionage crew that turned simply reading an email into a security risk has expanded beyond Zimbra, with Proofpoint saying it's now pulling the same half-click trick against Microsoft Outlook Web Access. Proofpoint says the cyber group it tracks as TA488, or "Laundry Bear," began exploiting CVE-2026-42897, a cross-site scripting flaw in the Outlook Web Access (OWA) component of on-pre…

The majority of corporate IT is now off premises for the first time

IT is going remote while sucking up more power. Most corporate IT is now off-premises for the first time, according to Uptime Institute, while the average rack power density has crested above 11 kW for the first time as server fleets are gradually replaced with more powerful hardware. Uptime’s Global Data Center Survey 2026 reveals how the industry is managing to adapt to challenging circumstance…

C++ float-to-int conversion can be undefined behavior

30 years ago, AT&T gave Internet Explorer the default advantage

It is 30 years since AT&T handed Microsoft a valuable foothold in the browser wars by making Internet Explorer 3 the default for its WorldNet service. Windows 95 was barely a year old when AT&T set out to challenge CompuServe and America Online with its WorldNet service in 1996. The telecommunications giant needed a browser. Netscape Navigator dominated the market, but Microsoft was keen to make…

Replacing the Kobo Libra H2O Battery

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 30, 2026

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Hazard pointers; DFSG team; Swap devices; Netkit and BPF; BPF inlined functions; Fedora GRUB; gccrs. Briefs: RIP Dan Williams; Debian LLM resolution; Fedora 45 process; Codeberg LLM policy; GCC LLM policy; GNU Binutils 2.47; GNU C Library 2.44; Wayfire 0.11; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.…

🏃 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?

Recent reports have raised alarm about the use of PatronScan, an ID-checking and face-scanning system, at multiple LGBTQ+ bars in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood. Much of the attention has focused on reports that the system photographs patrons as they enter venues and questions about whether those images are used for facial recognition. A broader privacy concern also deserves scrutiny. For yea…

How Hollywood stopped making movies in Hollywood

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…

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

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

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

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

Lawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police Drones

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

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

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

Primed for Malware: Stop Selling Compromised Android Devices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online

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

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…

A Record-Breaking Patch Tuesday for June 2026

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