Terminal

Windows CLOSEDQUORUM malware uses AI models to autonomously select post-compromise actions ↗ (opens external article)

A new Windows malware called CLOSEDQUORUM can query up to four LLM providers - Google Gemini, DeepSeek, Qwen, and Mistral - to autonomously select from predefined post-compromise actions, including stealing users’ credentials and cryptocurrency wallets. Once deployed, the malware does not require continued commands from a human operator, according to Cisco Talos, which describes it as, to its kno…

The UV index is not the warm sensation of sunlight on bare skin ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft killed FoxPro in 2007. Anyway, here's FoxPro revived ↗ (opens external article)

Security firm finds naming AI agents after Seinfeld characters helps bots join the team ↗ (opens external article)

Backslash Security, a four-year-old Tel Aviv-based AI security biz, recently gave out its first Agent of the Month award to an AI agent called Newman, named after a character from the 1990s TV show Seinfeld. Newman received the award after being nominated by Jerry, another Seinfeld-inspired AI agent. Jerry's nomination message said, "Newman shipped 146 research findings in 60 days, but volume isn…

Cities across US oppose Trump FCC plan to preempt local broadband rules ↗ (opens external article)

Cities and counties around the US are angry at the Trump administration over a proposal to override local rules that govern the deployment of wired broadband networks. The Federal Communications Commission has been taking public comments on a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking that proposes to preempt state and local permitting rules. The FCC argues that too many local governments "excessively delay a…

LLM Ass Bench ↗ (opens external article)

The JavaScript Midlife Crisis ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft disrupts AI-assisted platform that compromised 12,000 accounts ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft said Tuesday that it led an industry-wide disruption of a subscription-based scam platform that used an AI chatbot to compromise 12,000 Microsoft accounts over a few-month span. Named EvilTokens, the platform was introduced over a Telegram channel in February and charged an initial $1,500 fee and a recurring $500 charge each month after that. EvilTokens provided a single service for str…

Native apps written in TypeScript and CSS ↗ (opens external article)

Lawsuit demands OpenAI pay for new school after ChatGPT used in shooting ↗ (opens external article)

The families of victims killed in one of the deadliest mass shootings in Canada’s history have already sued OpenAI over its failure to warn law enforcement after discovering in advance that the shooter was using ChatGPT to plan the violence. Now, British Columbia is suing, explaining for the first time how costly and extreme the disaster response has been. OpenAI and Sam Altman owe the tiny remot…

Linux 7.2 vs. Linux 7.3 Shows A Few Improvements With AMD Strix Halo ↗ (opens external article)

Last week I ran some benchmarks showing performance gains for AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" on Ubuntu 26.10. Then shortly after that testing on its daily state, which used the Linux 7.2 kernel, Canonical switched to Linux 7.3 as the Ubuntu 26.10 kernel. Here are some Linux 7.2 vs. Linux 7.3 benchmarks for the AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 395 "Strix Halo" with the Framework Desktop...…

Adobe Premiere finally brings powerful video editing to Android, and it's free ↗ (opens external article)

Video editing has never been Android's strong suit. While Apple has long offered iMovie for iPhone and iPad, Google has never had a comparable offering. Adobe is now stepping up to fill this feature gap with a proper version of Premiere. The app is now available in the Play Store for almost all Android devices, and it's free (mostly). Android's version of Premiere doesn't offer all the features y…

Pentagon says overreliance on AI contributed to missile strike on Iran school ↗ (opens external article)

SAML: A Fractal of Bad Design ↗ (opens external article)

Ubuntu Linux Maker Canonical Achieved $345M USD In Revenue For 2025 ↗ (opens external article)

In 2024 Canonical generated nearly $300M USD in revenue for this company behind Ubuntu Linux and other services and software solutions. For 2025, they not only broke $300M but well exceeded it with $345M in revenue...…

Unreal Agent ↗ (opens external article)

An update on how we confirm your age group on Discord ↗ (opens external article)

GPT-6 Sol and Luna ↗ (opens external article)

'We hacked the FBI:' Hackers say they have data on all FBI employees ↗ (opens external article)

'Coyote vs. Acme' Outgrosses All But 3 WB Movies This Year, Heads To Profit ↗ (opens external article)

The movie Coyote vs. Acme earned more than Warner Bros.' $30 million tax write-off in just two weeks. And last week the movie officially earned more than its production budget of $70 million. But today the movie passed the $100 million mark. "You asked for it, we delivered, and you showed up!" distributor Ketchup Entertainment posted on social media (adding "Thank you to the fans for making this a…

Review: Resident Evil might just be the best gaming adaptation yet ↗ (opens external article)

I was on the fence about going to see the latest Resident Evil reboot to review, given how uninspired the prior reboot attempt in 2021 turned out to be. But director Zach Cregger gave us last year's phenomenal Weapons, and early word of mouth was extremely positive, so I took a chance. I'm glad I did, because the film is terrific. Cregger's distinctive sensibility is just what the flagging franch…

ShinyHunters claims FBI hack: 'This is NOT financially motivated' ↗ (opens external article)

ShinyHunters claims it hacked the FBI and stole more than 2 TB of employee data - and this time it’s personal. The gang wants the Feds to correct the record on how it operates. “This is NOT financially motivated,” a Shiny spokesperson told The Register. “We want the FBI to correct or retract their statements they made, which included substantial false allegations.” The FBI did not immediately res…

ABBYY gives old-school OCR a job in the AI pipeline ↗ (opens external article)

ABBYY has packaged its FineReader OCR engine as a self-hosted tool for turning documents into structured text that AI systems can use. The company's new FineParser runs in a Docker container on a CPU, without requiring a GPU. It aims to preserve the layout of a document as it extracts its contents. It takes images of documents, in multiple languages, and turns them into structured, formatted text…

There's a high chance of devices being sold with GrapheneOS preinstalled in 2027 ↗ (opens external article)

Toyota orders workers to train humanoid robots but says humans won't be replaced ↗ (opens external article)

Toyota workers are already helping to train humanoid robots as part of the automaker’s race to eventually deploy 400,000 factory robots—but a Toyota executive said the robotic push is not meant to directly replace humans. Starting in 2028, the Toyota Motor group aims to start investing $6.42 billion every year in upgrading factories with the new robotic workforce, according to Nikkei Asia. The co…

IT mistake erases 11 years of viewing history for hospitals’ maternity records ↗ (opens external article)

A “human error” in the IT department led to Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust (NUH) losing data from maternity records over an 11-year span. The data loss occurred on August 18, the English hospitals announced in a blog post on Monday spotted by The Register. The blog said the problem is “the result of human error” during routine technical work while “creating a copy of a radiotherapy dat…

Claude Opus 5.5 Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis (Max) ↗ (opens external article)

NightmareEclipse's latest zero-day leaves Microsoft Defender stuck in the past ↗ (opens external article)

Serial Microsoft zero-day leaker NightmareEclipse has found another way to mess with Windows Defender, this time by stopping the antivirus from updating itself. The security researcher, also known as Abdelhamid Naceri, released a proof-of-concept dubbed “BigDiskBuster” that is designed to prevent Microsoft Defender Antivirus from installing platform and security intelligence updates. “Made a funn…

WordPress: Unauthenticated path traversal leading to conditional RCE ↗ (opens external article)

Claude Opus 5.5 ↗ (opens external article)

Effort begins to fill the void left by terminated US climate report ↗ (opens external article)

Last year, the Trump administration did what it could to shut down work on the next US National Climate Assessment, eliminating funding for the US Global Change Research Program and booting hundreds of contributing authors. The administration even took past reports offline, forcing others to host copies so the information would still be accessible. And this all comes despite the fact that these r…

16-bit Intel 8088 chip (c. 1985) ↗ (opens external article)

Z.ai says sorry for slurping up your code, open sources ZCode ↗ (opens external article)

Chinese AI giant Z.ai has apologized after developers caught it pulling a Grok, packaging up and uploading user workspaces to cloud storage. In a case that’s highly reminiscent of the issues over which Elon Musk’s xAI was scrutinized in July, Z.ai’s code-generation harness wing, ZCode, was found packaging and git-encrypting entire user workspaces, including complete project histories, and shippin…

Shuffling the deck chairs: Xbox continues its "reset" with dramatic restructuring ↗ (opens external article)

When Xbox announced sweeping layoffs in July as part of a brutal "reset" for the gaming brand, Xbox CEO Asha Sharma said part of the pre-existing problem in the gaming unit was "teams, studios, and functions [that] often operate independently, [making it] harder to work toward a shared goal." Today, the company announced a radical restructuring of its internal studios that is seemingly designed t…

Privacy group slams EU for changing the data rules to cater to AI ↗ (opens external article)

The campaign group which forced the EU's highest court to strike down past US-EU data sharing deals has slammed the latest changes to European data protection laws designed to accommodate AI. Led by Austrian lawyer Max Schrems, None of Your Business (noyb) claims the proposal to alter the data protection legislation “in the context of AI” amounts to an abandonment of data protection principles. I…

Variable Refresh Rate "VRR" Target Limiter Proposed For Linux Graphics Drivers ↗ (opens external article)

A new proposal being discussed is introducing a Linux user-space API to be able to specify frame rate targets for Variable Refresh Rate (VRR) handling on the Linux desktop...…

UK cops arrest 2 EvilTokens suspects, Microsoft seizes 50 phishing kit websites ↗ (opens external article)

A coalition of law enforcement and private-sector tech companies led by Microsoft have disrupted the EvilTokens phishing service, arresting suspected website admins, taking down more than 50 websites, and notifying victims of compromised email accounts. EvilTokens is a notorious Microsoft device-code phishing kit that emerged in February, and, within months of launching, had been used by criminal…

Who signed off on that AI agent? Nobody? Thought so. ↗ (opens external article)

If you were in any doubt that AI agents are capable of complex autonomous work, that skepticism should have faded this summer. In July, news emerged that an autonomous swarm of OpenAI agents running in a sandbox broke out of it, of their own accord. Tasked with solving some challenges on an internal security benchmark, they worked out how to communicate with each other using the JFrog Artifactory…

OpenAI is well positioned to fast-follow Jev ↗ (opens external article)

Protests for Germany’s car industry as job losses loom ↗ (opens external article)

The future is looking increasingly bleak for Germany’s automotive industry. Since the turn of the century, car makers have been among the crown jewels of the German economy, punching above their weight in terms of investment and innovation. But those companies are now facing multiple problems at once, from declining demand at home and stronger competition from abroad to the cost of punitive and a…

SPEC Releases SPECviewperf 15.0.1 For Linux ↗ (opens external article)

SPEC back in May 2025 introduced SPECViewPerf 15 as the newest major release of this industry-standard workstation graphics benchmark. Sadly, the Linux support once again fell behind with SPECViewPerf 15 only debuting on Microsoft Windows. Today though Linux has caught up with SPEC releasing a Linux-native build of SPECViewPerf 15.0.1...…

Apple has added persistent 'ads' to iOS, and it's driving users crazy ↗ (opens external article)

Trump’s sneaky plan to gut Endangered Species Act draws from 1995 Scalia dissent ↗ (opens external article)

Last week, The New York Times reported that an internal memo had been quietly distributed across US Fish and Wildlife Service (FWS) field offices, directing staff to radically reinterpret the Endangered Species Act (ESA) in a move that blindsided conservationists. Staffers were essentially asked to start looking the other way when private interests cause preventable deaths of vulnerable animals.…

Well-done hack flames 3.2M Burger King Russia users ↗ (opens external article)

Russian Burger King patrons have been left with a bad taste after cyber crooks flame-broiled 3.2 million customers in a whopper of a breach, serving up their personal data for anyone hungry enough to consume it. Troy Hunt’s Have I Been Pwned (HIBP) slurped up all the data leaked after the August 2024 attack on Mindbox, Burger King Russia’s marketing platform, concluding that miscreants had grille…

OpenAI GPT–6 Astra breaks Enigma message that has resisted solution since 2005 ↗ (opens external article)

systemd 262 Released With AI/LLM Canary For Unreviewed Code, LUO Integration ↗ (opens external article)

Systemd 262 made it out today as the newest feature update to this Linux init system and service manager. As with most systemd releases, it's heavy on new features and functionality...…

Dyson’s most overengineered gadget may have a waterproofing problem ↗ (opens external article)

There's always a danger in over-complicating products. Simple is so often best. The apocryphal story of NASA spending millions crafting a space pen while Soviet cosmonauts used a pencil is often cited as a prime example, even if it's actually not true. Perhaps it's not surprising that Dyson has got into hot water trying to reinvent the electric toothbrush. The Chinese invented the first bristle t…

EU datacenter green scorecard finally escapes Brussels ↗ (opens external article)

Brussels has adopted its long-awaited sustainability rating scheme for energy-guzzling datacenters, with minimum performance standards potentially next. The European Commission this week unveiled its Data Centre Energy Efficiency Package. It includes a common EU rating scheme and electronic label intended to make facilities' environmental performance easier to compare. A separate 12-week consulta…

Vibe Coded YSERVER Adds XDMCP Support For Multi-User Shared Desktops ↗ (opens external article)

The open-source YSERVER project as a modern X11 sever written in the Rust programming language with the help of Claude Code is out today with a new feature release. Most notable for this AI Rust X11 server is X Display Manager Control Protocol (XDMCP) support for multi-user shared desktops...…

next-20260922: linux-next ↗ (opens external article)

Version:next-20260922 (linux-next) Released:2026-09-22…

Pentagon Investigators Say Overreliance on Palantir AI Contributed to US Strike That Killed 123 Iranian Children ↗ (opens external article)

Two U.S. missiles hit an elementary school in Iran, killing over 150 people including 123 children on the first day of the Iran War. But Gizmodo notes that a new Bloomberg investigation cites U.S. officials involved in an unreleased internal Pentagon review who blame "a cascade of preventable failures that included an overreliance on an AI tool built by Palantir." According to the officials who sp…

Show HN: JevBench, a reproducible benchmark for typed decision models ↗ (opens external article)

Show HN: Training a model to identify AI web content from structure alone ↗ (opens external article)

Register reader hit with surprise bill after Microsoft portals disagreed ↗ (opens external article)

A synchronization issue between Microsoft systems left at least one customer facing an unexpected bill after two portals showed different credit balances. A Register reader found themself on the hook for $16,000 in September after a balance that looked healthy had actually hit rock bottom and a subscription switched to pay-as-you-go. Our reader was one of many who signed up for Microsoft for Star…

Alibaba Contributing $3M USD To Omarchy To Work On Making "Ideal" Agentic OS ↗ (opens external article)

The Omarchy project announced today that Alibaba Cloud will be contributing a total of three million USD to their foundation for helping development of this Linux distribution and working to make it an "ideal agentic operating system"...…

Promotion Reminder For Ad-Free Viewing, Multi-Page Articles On A Single Page ↗ (opens external article)

As a friendly reminder in case you missed it from over the weekend, the Phoronix autumn "Oktoberfest" premium sale is taking place through the rest of this week for those wishing to help support the site while enjoying ad-free viewing, multi-page articles rendered on a single page, and other benefits while helping for the site to survive and continue producing daily original content...…

Civo plots 40 edge datacenters to power Britain's sovereign AI ↗ (opens external article)

UK cloud provider Civo plans to build 40 edge datacenters to bring sovereign AI services closer to customers, with the first due to open in Hertfordshire by March 2027. The longer-term target is 1 GW of capacity across the country, with Nvidia Vera Rubin NVL72 systems providing the computing power to run AI applications from UK-owned facilities. The Hertfordshire site is expected to open with 8 M…

Linux 7.3 Adding Logitech G502 X Lightspeed USB Support, ELECOM M-XT4DRBK ↗ (opens external article)

Sent out today was a new HID subsystem pull request of fixes for the week to the Linux 7.3 kernel. Besides some conventional bug fixes are also supporting some additional devices via quirks and new IDs...…

Campaigners tell Burnham not to trade away the UK's tech tax to please Trump ↗ (opens external article)

Campaigners are urging Prime Minister Andy Burnham to defend the UK's Digital Services Tax (DST) when he meets Donald Trump in New York later today. Civil society organizations have written to Burnham and Chancellor John Healey, asking them to resist pressure to scrap the tax. Trump regards it as one of the European levies that create unfair trade barriers for US companies and has threatened the…

NASA chief: I'm only interested in "good deals" from international partners ↗ (opens external article)

NASA must be more selective in the way it forges international partnerships as the race to the Moon transforms from a battle for national prestige between the United States and China into a high-stakes competition for extraterrestrial real estate and resources, the agency's administrator said. Jared Isaacman, now in his 10th month at the helm of the world's largest civilian space agency, told a g…

NHS Trust IT blunder overwrites 11 years of maternity records ↗ (opens external article)

Nottingham University Hospitals NHS Trust managed to overwrite a maternity database spanning more than a decade after someone forgot to change a setting in a reused set of computer instructions. The mishap happened on August 18, when staff carrying out routine technical work to copy a radiotherapy database for reporting used a set of pre-written instructions that had previously been run against a…

Cache Aware Scheduling Fixes Queued For Submission To Linux 7.3, Backporting To 7.2 ↗ (opens external article)

Later this week it looks like the latest round of Cache Aware Scheduling fixes will be merged for enhancing this kernel scheduler functionality for grouping related tasks together on CPU cores that share the same last level cache (LLC). Cache Aware Scheduling can lead to better cache locality and lower latency by avoiding the costs of potential cache bouncing -- that is when bugs don't get in the…

Linux Adding New Interface For Reporting AMD SEV Status ↗ (opens external article)

A convenient addition that surprisingly hasn't been added to the Linux kernel until now is /sys/devices/system/cpu/sev/sev_status as a new sysfs interface for reporting the AMD Secure Encrypted Virtualization (SEV) status...…

ZLUDA Now Implements Some NVIDIA cuFFT APIs With hipFFT ↗ (opens external article)

ZLUDA as the open-source project working on CUDA for non-NVIDIA GPUs like AMD Radeon graphics cards now has implemented support for some of NVIDIA's core cuFFT APIs...…

Longtime SUSE staff asked if they'd opt for 'voluntary separation' ↗ (opens external article)

SUSE has offered "voluntary separation" to eligible employees as the veteran Linux vendor reshapes its business, The Register can confirm. One source said People, Strategy and Transformation Executive Lisa Sherwell contacted them with the offer after an online company meeting broadcast from Singapore, during which executives joked about being past their own sell-by dates. Asked about the program,…

Commodore's forgotten Amiga Unix gets a modern revival ↗ (opens external article)

A vintage Unix window manager and an entire vintage UNIX operating system that uses it have received modern updates. Yes, AI helped, but we're here for it. The Commodore Amiga is one of the best-loved computers of the 1980s: The Register celebrated its 30th anniversary in 2015. Its many fans remember it primarily as a home computer and, in its day, the ultimate games machine. Later in the Amiga's…

Google Opens Preorders for Its $899 Gemini-Enhanced 'Googlebook' Laptops ↗ (opens external article)

Monday Google opened preorders for its "Googlebook" laptops, pricing them at $899. A Google's blog post added that "At launch, you can choose between Intel Core Ultra Series 3 and Snapdragon X Elite processors" (paired with NPUs to power AI features). "Devices will hit shelves on October 4 in the U.S. and on October 5 in Canada, the U.K., Ireland, France, Germany, and Australia," TechCrunch points…

GOV.UK founder warns AI gold rush could leave Britain locked in ↗ (opens external article)

Britain risks swapping its dependence on foreign technology suppliers for an even deeper reliance on a handful of AI providers, according to GOV.UK founder Mike Bracken. Bracken, who founded the Government Digital Service (GDS) and served as the UK's first Government Chief Data Officer, says governments and other institutions are gradually giving up control over critical systems as they pile more…

Alibaba Cloud plans six-year stroll to 20GW of datacenters, reveals chip to power them ↗ (opens external article)

Chinese tech giant Alibaba has outlined an ambition to expand its datacenter fleet to 20GW of capacity, and chip that will help it get there. CEO Eddie Wu announced those ambitions today at Alibaba’s Apsara conference, where he delivered a speech that likened current AI applications to light bulbs, because electric light was an early application of electricity but the really important stuff came…

Meta's New 'Personal AI Agent' Muse Beats ChatGPT in Downloads - and Get Blocked by Amazon ↗ (opens external article)

Meta's AI "personal agent" Muse overtook ChatGPT as the #1 iOS free app in the U.S. on Friday, reports CNBC — and it's still showing more downloads as of Monday night. Muse now has over 2.5 million downloads since its debut less than two weeks ago, according to analytics firm Sensor Tower... [Muse] is currently ahead of popular services like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Polymarket and Kashi... It's also ahea…

What California is learning from solar panels built over irrigation canals ↗ (opens external article)

Gartner predicts 55% of enterprise VMware users will be investigating an exit by 2029 ↗ (opens external article)

Analyst firm Gartner believes over half of VMware users will start evaluating alternative hybrid cloud platforms yet still rates the Broadcom business unit a leader in two major markets. Gartner predicted increased interest in VMware exits in its Magic Quadrant for Distributed Hybrid Infrastructure (DHI) – aka hybrid clouds – which opens with a “Strategic Planning Assumption” that “By 2029, 55 pe…

People hooked on vapes try a new way to quit: cigarettes ↗ (opens external article)

Valve Introduces Pyrowave Video Codec In Beta For Low Latency Streaming ↗ (opens external article)

Valve's Steam client beta today introduced Pyrowave as an experimental video codec for high bandwidth, low-latency video streaming...…

Did OpenAI solve the wrong Navier-Stokes problem? ↗ (opens external article)

Paramount Skydance 'Emerges Victorious', Finally Wins Settlement for Warner Bros Takeover ↗ (opens external article)

Paramount Skydance just "emerged victorious" reports Reuters, "from a legal battle over its $110 billion acquisition of Warner Bros Discovery" that will "dramatically concentrate power across Hollywood's film, TV, streaming and news businesses." The victory comes "after settling with a California-led group of US states and a Hollywood writers union, paving the way for one of the largest media merg…

California tightens datacenter rules on water and power ↗ (opens external article)

California Governor Gavin Newsom on Monday signed seven state bills that require datacenter operators to report more info about their operations, and to involve communities as they plan future facilities. The California Assembly Bills (AB) and Senate Bills (SB) signed by Newsom require greater disclosure of datacenter water and electricity use, address who pays for grid connections and other powe…

D.C. Circuit Must Vacate a Drone Flight Restriction That Criminalized Recording Immigration Agents ↗ (opens external article)

EFF joined an amicus brief with ACLU, ACLU of D.C., National Press Photographers Association, and Professional Photographers of America to urge the D.C. Circuit to vacate an FAA drone flight restriction that violated the First Amendment right to record law enforcement. This is an important case—Levine v. FAA—challenging the ability of the government to punish drone pilots who record law enforcemen…

Markdown in /src ↗ (opens external article)

Anthropic-linked CVEs pile up, attackers mostly shrug ↗ (opens external article)

Despite the concern that advanced AI models’ bug-hunting prowess will lead to attackers exploiting more newly uncovered CVEs, fewer than 0.5 percent of the vulnerabilities linked to Anthropic or Project Glasswing are being batttered in the wild, according to VulnCheck security researcher Patrick Garrity. Garrity began tracking CVEs attributed to Project Glasswing, Anthropic’s initiative to give s…

Muse, Meta's extraordinarily privileged AI assistant, has a serious 0-day ↗ (opens external article)

Meta founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg has gone to great lengths to hype the security of its new AI assistant, Muse, claiming it is “built from the ground up for privacy and security.” A zero-day vulnerability that gives locally run apps and terminal commands complete control of the agent raises serious doubts. Further raising questions, Amazon on Sunday began blocking Muse from its site. Meta intr…

Military milestone: Ukrainian naval drone sinks Russian kamikaze drone boat ↗ (opens external article)

In the world’s first clash of the drone boats, a Ukrainian naval drone destroyed a Russian explosive drone boat using a remote-controlled machine gun turret. This comes as the war in Ukraine has already seen widespread deployment of such uncrewed surface vessels in combat, along with swarms of flying attack drones and ground robots. The lopsided battle took place on September 12 when members of U…

Perpetual underdog AMD nips at Nvidia's heels as it joins the $1T club ↗ (opens external article)

AMD’s market cap briefly passed $1 trillion on Monday, making the perpetual underdog one of a handful of chip designers to ever hold the distinction. Make no mistake, AMD is still the underdog here, at least relative to Nvidia, which holds the distinction of being the most valuable company in the world with a market cap of nearly $5.5 trillion. But while AMD still trails Nvidia by a wide margin,…

Saudi Arabia wants a car industry, launches Ceer with two EVs ↗ (opens external article)

Ceer provided flights from Detroit to Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and accommodation so Ars could visit the factory. Ars does not accept paid editorial content. KING ABDULLAH ECONOMIC CITY, Saudi Arabia—It may come as a surprise to some, but Saudi Arabia has never had a domestic automaker. That changes with Ceer. A joint venture between the country’s Public Investment Fund and Foxconn, it’s the Kingdom’…

AMD Begins Preparing Open-Source Linux Driver For Graphics Cards With GDDR7 ↗ (opens external article)

AMD sent out their latest Linux kernel graphics driver patches today for enabling some new hardware IP blocks. And as part of that, preparing for GDDR7 video memory with the AMDGPU driver...…

Skip the upgrade? iPhone 18 Pro aperture about as unrepairable as it gets, iFixit finds ↗ (opens external article)

iFixit has torn down the iPhone 18 Pro and Pro Max and found both wanting on repairability. Fiddly mechanical bits around the new camera, and a repeated design choice forcing internal repairs to go through a screen with a potentially fragile frame, led the iFixit team to conclude that, even with some improvements, Apple’s latest iPhones come with uncomfortable repairability tradeoffs. "This year’…

Meta Muse AI app flaw lets local malware redirect dictation traffic ↗ (opens external article)

Meta made much of the security of its AI assistant app Muse at launch earlier this month, calling out the app's reliance on Muse Secure VM. "Each person stays in control of their Muse and decides how much access it gets," the ad biz declared, echoing prior expansive claims about the privacy of its data gathering business. But Meta's musing about Muse appears to be a bit overstated: an attacker ca…

Gravity Linux Aims To Provide A Nice Experience For Apple M4 & Newer ↗ (opens external article)

There's a new Linux distribution focused on supporting Linux on Apple Silicon Macs. Gravity Linux is this new distribution that is a spin of Fedora Remix and is catering to the still-experimentally-supported Apple M4 Macs and newer. In addition to leveraging Asahi Linux code and reverse engineering, Gravity Linux also leverages OpenAI Codex and Claude Code...…

Treasury chief says AI bosses, not their bots, will carry the can for criminal acts ↗ (opens external article)

The US appears to be inching ever so slowly toward holding AI executives legally liable for their models’ criminal activities. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told CNBC on Monday: “It is the humans who are responsible, not the AI,” for the bots’ bad behavior. “The Hugging Face incident is the responsibility of the OpenAI management, not a bunch of agents." He also referenced current and former O…

As KDE Turns 30, Contributors and Commits are Going Strong ↗ (opens external article)

"In a few weeks, KDE will turn 30 years old," writes core contributor Kevin Ottens, celebrating with some special KDE community data analytics (including a 30-year graph of the number of contributors): It peaks around 180 on average (and sometimes reaches towards around 200 people) then shrinks again hitting bottom around 110 persons on average in 2017... Since then, we had two major events happen…

Google smacks forehead, realizes $899+ thin-and-lights were what it was missing ↗ (opens external article)

Google is trying once again to escape the Chromebook reputation for cheap, chintzy hardware and compromised computing. $899 for a glorified web terminal isn’t exactly the easiest sell, but that’s not stopping the search and advertising giant from trying. On Monday, Google unveiled five new Googlebooks in collaboration with Dell, HP, Lenovo, Acer, and Asus. Googlebook, if you aren't familiar, is w…

Patches Posted For Enabling Apple Silicon Mac Speaker & Headset Jack Support On Linux ↗ (opens external article)

While the downstream Asahi Linux kernel has offered working speaker support and headset jack capabilities on Apple Silicon Macs, the mainline Linux kernel hasn't supported this functionality. But a set of 28 patches sent out today on the Linux kernel mailing list are working toward mainlining this important functionality for using Apple Macs on the upstream Linux desktop...…

Nebula Matrix Network Driver Queued Ahead Of Linux 7.4 ↗ (opens external article)

NBL is a new Ethernet networking driver destined to premiere in the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel for supporting Nebula Matrix NICs...…

London neocloud Nscale takes its $1B loss to Wall Street ↗ (opens external article)

London-based neocloud Nscale has filed to go public on the New York Stock Exchange after expanding rapidly on the back of the AI infrastructure boom. The rent-a-GPU business, which emerged from cryptocurrency miner Arkon Energy, filed a Form S-1 registration statement with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Friday. It intends to list under the ticker NSCL. The document does not sp…

Google confirms Gemini models hacked three companies in May 2026 ↗ (opens external article)

It has become increasingly common for AI firms to announce that their latest and most capable models engaged in unauthorized real-world hacking. Google, which has been slow to release frontier Gemini models in recent months, has been absent from the "rogue AI" conversation until now. Following a Wall Street Journal report, Google has confirmed that Gemini models hacked three companies during a Ma…

Russel Vought will reportedly be given veto power over all NIH grants ↗ (opens external article)

On Friday, The Washington Post reported on a contentious White House meeting in which the director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), Jay Bhattacharya, tried to fend off yet another effort to place funding decisions under political control. The move came from Russell Vought, head of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), which has sought to limit and control research funds. The Post…

AI can't outprompt a shortage of power, water, and land ↗ (opens external article)

AI infrastructure growth is running into limits on energy, water, and land, according to researchers at Forrester, which predicts governments will increasingly make datacenter operators pay for the resources they consume. Governments, utilities, datacenter operators, and enterprises will have to rethink how that growth is funded, managed, and regulated, the firm said in its 2027 sustainability pr…

California settles lawsuit against Paramount/Warner merger, angering advocates ↗ (opens external article)

California and Paramount Skydance have reportedly reached a settlement allowing the company to complete its $111 billion merger with Warner Bros. Discovery. The settlement, which will reportedly be announced later today, drew condemnation from Democrats and media advocates. "The Paramount/Warner Brothers merger seems facially illegal, and the state AG lawsuit challenging it is very strong," Lina…

AWS bolts together open source agent harness, says it sips fewer tokens than rivals ↗ (opens external article)

AWS has entered the open source agentic AI game, claiming its new Strands harness matches rivals on benchmarks while using around a quarter fewer tokens. The Strands harness, as its name suggests, is built on AWS’ Strands Harness SDK, but is packaged up and ready to roll out of the box, either locally or deployed to work with whatever AI provider a customer prefers. "The moment you build your own…

Trump rejects AI slowdown calls, launches "AI Force" instead ↗ (opens external article)

Donald Trump has said that the US would appoint a new AI tsar and create an “AI Force” while offering a full-throated defense of the emerging industry in the face of a growing popular backlash. The US president’s announcement comes as leading industry figures have sounded the alarm that humans could lose control over the rapidly advancing technology without a slowdown in development. However, rat…

RansomHouse picks a fight with Namibia's defense establishment ↗ (opens external article)

Namibia's computer security incident response team has confirmed unauthorized activity in the defense ministry's network and linked it to the RansomHouse cybercrime group. In an unusually direct attribution, NAM-CSIRT named the group after RansomHouse listed the supposed victim on its leak site on September 16. RansomHouse identified the victim as the "Namibian Defence Force," although the domain…

AMD EPYC Server Performance Up ~8% Geo Mean For 2026 With Linux Kernel Improvements ↗ (opens external article)

With the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel showing some nice performance improvements over Linux 7.2 in different areas, Linux 7.2 also having brought some nice gains especially for I/O, and the preceding kernels also having seen some nice performance optimizations this year, I wanted to measure how far the Linux kernel performance has evolved so far in 2026. Today's article is looking at that with…

Are Book Publishers Warming Up to the AI Industry? ↗ (opens external article)

There's at least 15 author-driven lawsuits underway against AI companies, while publishers have filed roughly 10 more coordinated suits of their own, notes Publisher's Weekly. Yet "While the lawsuits play out, some publishers are building bridges." Google recently announced a partnership with Bloomsbury, De Gruyter Brill, Johns Hopkins University Press, Macmillan, O'Reilly Media, and Penguin Rando…

Schneider says hotter coolant can make AI datacenters less thirsty ↗ (opens external article)

A datacenter's cooling architecture can have a decisive effect on its water and energy use, according to Schneider Electric, which argues that operators should evaluate it early in the design process. In a white paper published today, the energy management specialist compares four modeled 100 MW datacenter designs, ranging from traditional air cooling to optimized liquid-cooling systems. The pape…

George Lucas Returns to Earth, Bearing Gifts ↗ (opens external article)

Amazon shows Meta's Muse AI shopping agent the door ↗ (opens external article)

Amazon has blocked Meta's new Muse AI agent from shopping on its website, apparently deciding that having someone else's bot wandering through customer accounts and placing orders is a step too far. The ecommerce giant cut off Muse after unsuccessfully asking Meta to prevent the personal AI agent from accessing its store, GeekWire reported. Users who try anyway are told that access by an "unautho…

7.2.7: stable ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.2.7 (stable) Released:2026-09-21 Source:linux-7.2.7.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.2.7.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.2.7…

6.18.53: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.18.53 (longterm) Released:2026-09-21 Source:linux-6.18.53.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.53.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.53…

Patches Posted With Aim To Mainline Linux Kernel Support For The Amazon Kindle 4 ↗ (opens external article)

Amazon released the Kindle 4 back in 2011 with a 6-inch E-ink display, 2GB internal storage, and running a modified version of Linux. In the years since the Amazon Kindle 4 has been jail-broken and there are some customized Linux distributions with a patched kernel to run on the Kindle 4. Now in 2026 there are patches on the Linux kernel mailing list looking to mainline support for that fifteen ye…

6.12.111: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.12.111 (longterm) Released:2026-09-21 Source:linux-6.12.111.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.111.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.111…

Clop gets a taste of its own medicine after ShinyHunters hijack leak site ↗ (opens external article)

Clop has discovered what life is like on the receiving end of an extortion demand after rival crew ShinyHunters hijacked its leak site and demanded an eight-figure payout. The takeover surfaced over the weekend, when Clop's dark web leak site displayed a large "DOMAIN SEIZED BY SHINYHUNTERS" banner and the tagline "rooting your systems since '19 ;)." ShinyHunters told Reuters that it broke into t…

EU Kids Act Won't Keep the Internet Accountable and Trustworthy ↗ (opens external article)

The EU Commission draft law to restrict young people’s access to the internet that it presented last week will come at a high cost: it will put online services behind age gates, expand the use of intrusive age verification, and undermine the privacy of all users.  The EU Kids Act aims to protect children from risks associated with social media, video games, and AI systems by introducing age-based…

NASA gives SpaceX a billion reasons to keep flying Crew Dragon ↗ (opens external article)

NASA has added almost $1 billion to SpaceX's commercial crew contract for three more Crew Dragon missions to the International Space Station (ISS). The $946 million contract modification covers Crew-15, Crew-16, and Crew-17, along with ground operations, launch, in-orbit services, return and recovery, cargo transportation, and lifeboat capability while the spacecraft is docked to the ISS. The add…

Orphaned VMs: Running VMs Uninterrupted While Host Kernel Is Offline For Reboots/Updates ↗ (opens external article)

Here's some very intriguing work taking place by a Google engineer... With the hyperscalers and other cloud providers pushing for zero-downtime, a set of experimental patches for "Orphaned VMs" allow for the virtual machines to continue to run while the host kernel is offline for security updates or rebooting with the Live Update Orchestrator. The experimental patches and request for feedback from…

GNU Wget 2.3 Released With --progress=dot, OS/2 Improvements ↗ (opens external article)

GNU Wget2 is up to version 2.3 today with the first new release of 2026 for this popular command-line tool for non-interactive file downloading and being able to easily fetch website contents...…

American datacenters might be getting dirtier, but at least they'll be efficient ↗ (opens external article)

Just when you thought concerns over datacenter power generation in the US couldn't get any worse, the Trump administration gets rid of emissions restrictions on power plants. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle on this page, Spotify, Apple Podcasts, or YouTube. You can also subscribe on those platforms to be notified when a new episode goes live. The EPA is also considering getting…

Rustaceans warned of job interviews with a malicious payload ↗ (opens external article)

The Rust project has warned that attackers appear to be targeting its contributors and crate owners in an attempt to compromise their devices and accounts, potentially allowing malware to be distributed through its package ecosystem. Posting to the Rust blog, security-focused software engineer Adam Harvey said the tactics resemble those used in North Korean fake recruiter campaigns. "A video call…

AMD BC-250 Continues Being Improved Under Linux With Patches Now Enabling The PSP ↗ (opens external article)

The AMD BC-250 as the product designed at the time for cryptocurrency mining and based on a cut-down Sony PlayStation 5 APU continues having an interesting second-life being re-tasked for Linux use from general purpose workloads to AI. Sent out this weekend were the latest Linux kernel patches for continuing to enable more of the BC-250...…

Igalia Celebrates 25 Years Of Advancing Linux & Open-Source ↗ (opens external article)

The Igalia Linux/open-source consulting firm based out of A Coruña, Spain is celebrating twenty five years of contributions to upstream open-soure projects...…

Australia Considers Smart Glasses Ban in Government Workplaces, While 70 People Sue Meta Over Unknowing Data Collection ↗ (opens external article)

"Australia is considering barring the use of camera-equipped smart glasses in government workplaces..." reports Reuters, "in what it said could be the first ban of its kind." But meanwhile "more than 70 people who bought, used or were recorded with Meta's smart glasses have sued the social media giant," reports the Los Angeles Times, "claiming their intimate and sensitive images were exposed to wo…

Linux's Perf Script Command Much Faster With Overhaul As Python Module ↗ (opens external article)

A big patch series sent out this weekend for the Linux kernel's perf subsystem removes the embedded Python and Perl scripting in favor of standalone Python scripts with a new Python perf module. This perf module for Python written in C is much faster than the status quo...…

It's raining, the transport isn't working, and now an Android app wants to walk out in solidarity ↗ (opens external article)

It rained in Amsterdam last week. There was a 24-hour public transport strike. And something called LOTA stopped working in the elevators of the Mövenpick hotel. Digital signage in elevators is all the rage nowadays. Where once there might have been peeling menus or faded posters extolling the virtues of long-closed bars, there are now displays trying to grab the attention of elevator passengers…

Salesforce wants to charge for AI outcomes, but first it needs to figure out how ↗ (opens external article)

Nothing demonstrates how deeply Fortune 500 companies depend on Salesforce quite like a global outage lasting more than seven hours. The interruption struck during the second day of last week's Dreamforce conference, where the $40 billion-a-year SaaS vendor was pitching AIforce and a growing collection of AI products. The question now is how the company will charge for them. AIforce illustrates w…

Your cloud survived everything except the real world ↗ (opens external article)

You don't know what you've got till it's gone. Great lyric, lousy data retention policy. Amazon Web Services said last week that war damage to its Middle East infrastructure had permanently destroyed resources and data hosted exclusively in its now rather badly named Bahrain Availability Zones. The damage overwhelmed the resilience built into the region. Customers without copies elsewhere no long…

VMware has quietly walked back its SmartNIC ambitions ↗ (opens external article)

VMware has quietly stopped selling firewalls for SmartNICs. SmartNICs, aka data processing units (DPUs), are network cards that include a modest processor. Hyperscale clouds routinely use the devices to handle security and networking chores, by running network functions as VMs on the SmartNIC’s processor. Cloud operators like SmartNICs because they free CPU cores to rent to their customers. Runni…

Boss bought cheap 'printer' from a catalog and was left without a leg to stand on ↗ (opens external article)

Working in tech can produce a catalog of woes, and each Monday The Register shares yours in "Who, Me?" – our reader-contributed column chronicling tech-related mistakes, heartaches, and back-breaks. This week, meet an Italian reader we'll Regomize as "Marco," who took us back to what he called "The Roaring Nineties, when big computer companies sold pretty much everything, from graphics workstatio…

North Korean Hackers Posed as Recruiters. They Infected 30,000 Devices Worldwide ↗ (opens external article)

"I would like to verify your technical abilities, so please download the specified file and complete the assigned task..." Fake job listings aimed at software developers and IT professionals led to 30,000 infected devices in over 100 countries — and 7,000 compromised cryptocurrency wallets, leading to over $10 million (USD) transferred to North Korea. Inc. reports: The hacks occurred from December…

Failed networking vendor Cambium set to turn off its cloudy management portal ↗ (opens external article)

Networking hardware vendor Cambium Networks has entered administration and advised customers that its cloud services likely won’t survive for long. The company has not been in the best of health for some time. In August 2025, management admitted that its financial reports for financial years 2022 and 2023, plus reports for six subsequent quarters, were unreliable as they included errors. The NASD…

Google joins the ‘Oops, our agents hacked someone’ club after partner’s internet access error ↗ (opens external article)

Google has admitted that its AI agents escaped a sandbox and mounted an attack – but only because testers mistakenly gave its bots internet access. The Big G didn’t disclose the May incident, but The Wall Street Journal learned of the situation, which happened after Google hired Israeli firm Irregular to test its bots’ prowess in a capture-the-flag test. The goal of the exercise was to acquire in…

The Trouble with 'Ntile()' ↗ (opens external article)

Chinese memory-maker CXMT claims DRAM production breakthrough ↗ (opens external article)

ASIA IN BRIEF Chinese memory-maker CXMT, whose products Apple has reportedly evaluated to use in the iPhone, claims to have made a miniaturization breakthrough. The company on Sunday posted news that it has started mass production of chips made with a fifth-generation process that essentially doubles memory density, meaning it can cut twice the number of dies for memory chips from a single wafer.…

Lawsuit Says Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceXAI And Google Made Illegal Agreement On AI Slowdown ↗ (opens external article)

Tom's Hardware reports: Four plaintiffs subscribed to ChatGPT, Claude, Grok, or Gemini filed a proposed class-action lawsuit alleging that the developers of these AI models violated antitrust laws when they agreed to slow AI development. According to the Associated Press, the lawsuit argues that this agreement would "reduce the value consumers get for paid AI subscriptions" and that this coordina…

MUNI Heritage Weekend in San Francisco ↗ (opens external article)

Linux 7.3-rc4 Released: More Fixes Caught By LLMs, But Nothing Too Scary ↗ (opens external article)

Linus Torvalds announced the release today of Linux 7.3-rc4. As usual for recent months, the fixes continue to be quite heavy and scattered all over the place driven in large part by AI/LLMs spotting various code defects. Overall though Linus Torvalds isn't too worried about Linux 7.3-rc4...…

7.3-rc4: mainline ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.3-rc4 (mainline) Released:2026-09-20 Source:linux-7.3-rc4.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)…

Democracy vs Digital Infrastructure: Pulitzer-Winning Journalist Charts 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State' ↗ (opens external article)

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State ultimately asks the question, "How did we cede control of our democracy to the machines, and can we get it back?" according to the Harvard's Arts and Sciences site, FAS Current: The new title finds Lepore, who used to teach a course at the College titled "The Rise and Fall of the Machine," charting the ascent of what she calls the artificial state: the dig…

Important x86 Fixes Merged Ahead Of Linux 7.3-rc4 ↗ (opens external article)

Ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc4 kernel release due out in the coming hours, an important batch of x86/x86_64 fixes have been merged to address a few outstanding issues...…

The Brain Is Actually Two Completely Separate Organs ↗ (opens external article)

"New research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years," Stanford Medicine announced this week: The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our hearts' beating, our breathing and ot…

Gzip 1.15 Released With Many Bug Fixes For Issues Present Since Its Inception ↗ (opens external article)

Gzip 1.15 is out today for succeeding the Gzip 1.14 release from April 2025. With this release comes a number of fixes for bugs present since the beginning of Gzip...…

KDE To Focus On Next-Gen Styling, Better Documentation & KDE For Enterprise ↗ (opens external article)

At the KDE Akademy 2026 conference going on right now in Graz, Austria the three KDE goals for the next two years were unveiled...…

To Enforce Its Proposed Social Media Ban for 450 Million Pre-Teens, EU Builds an Open Source App ↗ (opens external article)

The European Commission "proposed on Thursday banning children under 13 from social media, with parent-supervised accounts until 15," reports Reuters. "Enforcement would rely on a tool Brussels built itself" — a free, open-source age verification smartphone app "that tells a platform whether a user meets an age threshold without revealing their identity..." If passed, the proposed Kids Act would c…

AI-Assisted Starling Desktop Introduces 3D View With "Walkable 3D Waterfront City" ↗ (opens external article)

From a few months ago you may recall Starling as the new Linux desktop written with its own Wayland compositor, using the Swift programming language, and written in large part via AI with Claude Code. Out today is Starling 0.5 with this desktop now gaining an optional 3D desktop mode...…

Vulkan 1.4.363 Released With New VK_INTEL_device_info Extension ↗ (opens external article)

Vulkan 1.4.363 is out as the latest routine update to the Vulkan API specification and also introduces a new Intel vendor extension...…

Linux 7.3 Adds Support For Victrix Pro BFG & Azeron Controllers ↗ (opens external article)

Sent out this morning were a big batch of input subsystem fixes ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc4 kernel releasing later today. Alongside many bug fixes to different drivers is also expanding the range of supported gaming controllers by the XPad driver...…

How Windows turned months of inactivity into a 7-hour update hostage situation ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has a problem not entirely of its own making: The time it takes to bring a system back up to date after a few months of slumber. The company is keen to talk up how efficient it plans to make Windows. Not a day goes by without either a Microsoft representative or a fan insisting that Windows 11 is a lot snappier now than it used to be. (Usually they skirt the unfortunate truth that the W…

Tech Industry Scratches Its Head Over Trump's 'AI Force' Proposal ↗ (opens external article)

Saturday morning President Trump announced he's creating an AI task force and appointing an AI czar, reports Politico. "I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS," Trump wrote Saturday in what Politico earlier described as "a lengthy Truth Social post on Saturday morning." TRUMP: Over the years, there have been many Hoaxes, all generated by the Rad…

Customer-Losing Flock Now Offers Buyouts to Avoid Laying Off Employees ↗ (opens external article)

Mashable writes: Flock Safety offered employees voluntary buyouts on Friday, WIRED reported... Without the buyouts, those familiar with the situation suspect the company would have to lay off some of its 1,500 employees. WIRED writes that people familiar with the program "say they believe that a significant number of the startup's roughly 1,500 employees may try to depart." Flock is making the se…

Agentic security is the billion-dollar challenge for some clever startup to solve ↗ (opens external article)

When it comes to AI models, security functions as an afterthought, as evidenced by increased instances of agents hacking organizations and people, and other security mishaps with agents gone rogue. There's also an opportunity here for companies to offer new solutions. This should not come as a shock to anyone, according to cybersecurity investors and accelerator executives. “On one hand, we shoul…

AI boom could leave an e-waste trail that wraps 6 times around Earth ↗ (opens external article)

AI infrastructure could generate enough electronic waste by 2050 to fill a line of shipping containers stretching around Earth six times, according to a report that argues existing estimates drastically understate the problem. Previous estimates have focused chiefly on servers and accelerators such as GPUs, which account for just 13 percent of a datacenter's equipment by weight, the report says.…

Firefox 156 arrives with a forest of forks in its wake ↗ (opens external article)

Mozilla and MZLA have delivered the latest releases in their new fortnightly cycle, but users who dislike the faster pace have alternatives. Firefox 156 is trickling out to users. The release notes only mention two new features: for Mac users, there's now an option in Settings to automatically launch the app at login. This vulture has received criticism for saying this in some of the product's fo…

EFF Statement on California Governor's Executive Order on AI ↗ (opens external article)

California Gov. Gavin Newsom's executive order is an opportunity for a needed, thoughtful conversation about artificial intelligence and its potential harms. Everyday Californians are feeling real anxiety about the risks of artificial intelligence, and as an organization that works to ensure technology empowers people, EFF welcomes this order as a way for the state of California to lead a much-nee…

How to Limit What Apple’s New Siri AI Can Access in iOS 27 ↗ (opens external article)

Apple’s new operating system is here, and along with it comes a new version of Siri, dubbed with two very familiar letters: AI. As the name suggests, this Siri power-up resembles an AI chatbot more than the often derided voice assistant you might be used to. It has even evolved from a blob you invoke with a verbal command or a button press to a whole app. This update comes with a slew of privacy c…

Secure Messaging and AI Remain In Conflict Despite the Promise of TEEs ↗ (opens external article)

Secure messaging platforms, like Signal, WhatsApp, and recently, encrypted RCS, operate on a straightforward assumption: the content at each end of a conversation is private to the participants in the conversation. End-to-end encryption helps provide the mathematical guarantees that the companies who operate these messaging platforms cannot access the contents of messages. But there’s no way to gu…

Anthropic decides to support OpenAI's markdown instructions spec ↗ (opens external article)

Anthropic on Friday surprised the developer community by supporting rival OpenAI's mechanism for passing marching orders to AI agents. This makes life easier for folks who use both platforms. "We're adding support for AGENTS.md to Claude Code," said Claude Code engineer Thariq Shihipar in a social media post. "Starting today in version 2.1.277, if there is no CLAUDE.md in a folder, Claude will ch…

How did AMD Ryzen get 50% faster in two years? ↗ (opens external article)

AMD Strix Halo Enjoys Some Performance Gains On Ubuntu 26.10, Especially With amd64v3 ↗ (opens external article)

Ahead of next week's Ubuntu 26.10 beta release I have been testing the "Stonking Stingray" on a variety of systems. Ubuntu 26.10 is performing well overall with some nice upgrades over Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, especially if opting to use the new snapshot/daily ISOs of Ubuntu 26.10 in amd64v3 form for x86_64-v3 packages. In today's tests are a look at the performance benefits of Ubuntu 26.10 on an AMD Ryz…

GEFS, the "Good Enough File System" on the horizon for OpenBSD ↗ (opens external article)

Filesystems on OpenBSD have come in two varieties, UFS1 or UFS2. Ori Bernstein has set out to possibly introduce a new option, the "Good Enough File System", which Ori describes as "a new, crash-safe, snapshotting, copy on write FS that I wrote for 9front, and which I am in the process of moving to OpenBSD. Ori gave a presentation about the work at EuroBSDCon 2026, and posted a summary message ti…

EFF to Lawmakers: Ground AI Cybersecurity Rules in Best Practices ↗ (opens external article)

With doomsday AI scenarios dominating the news, lawmakers are rightly concerned about reports concerning security breaches at major US AI labs, such as the OpenAI–Hugging Face incident and the many others reported in its aftermath. As they consider potentially regulating frontier AI, they should focus any new legislation on the immediate, demonstrated risks from those incidents.  Post-incident rep…

California’s “Addictive Feeds” Law Violates Teens’ First Amendment Rights ↗ (opens external article)

A California law that prohibits teens from receiving recommended social media content from other social media users violates their First Amendment rights, EFF argued this week. The case, Meta v. Bonta, challenges SB 976, which requires that teen social media users get their parents’ permission before seeing other users’ recommended speech on their social media feeds. The legal challenge to SB 976…

Rabbit Hole: Minimum L-seams ↗ (opens external article)

Victory! Appeals Court Rejects Expansive New Copyright Claim ↗ (opens external article)

 The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit handed internet users and programmers a big win today, by rejecting an attempt to stretch a narrow provision of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) into a new source of copyright liability.   The case involves Section 1202 of the DMCA, which prohibits intentionally removing copyright management information (CMI) like an author’s name or a co…

Data Broker Radaris Loses Domains in Privacy Fight ↗ (opens external article)

The consumer data broker Radaris.com has long had a reputation for ignoring requests to remove personal information from its vast empire of people-search services online. That reputation caught up with the company recently in a lawsuit alleging Radaris violated a New Jersey privacy law that provides for hefty fines against data brokers that publish personal information on state law enforcement off…

Victory: Court, Using a New Test, Rules Embedding Links is Legal ↗ (opens external article)

Courts have for two decades found that linking and embedding someone else’s web content, be it a photo, music, or an article, doesn’t violate copyright law–the entity that controls the server that hosts a copyrighted work, not the user or website that merely directs others to it, is directly liable if the content turns out to be infringing. News publisher Emmerich Newspapers sought to convince the…

EFF Welcomes Alexander Macgillivray to its Board of Directors ↗ (opens external article)

The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) is honored to announce today that Alexander “amac” Macgillivray — a former White House official who also served in top legal capacities at Twitter and Google — has joined EFF’s Board of Directors.  Macgillivray served in the Biden Administration as Deputy Assistant to the President and Principal Deputy U.S. Chief Technology Officer in the Office of Science…

👮 Flock Searches for the LOLs | EFFector 38.16 ↗ (opens external article)

Mass surveillance isn't a joke. But police are treating it like one when using automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're covering a new EFF report on how officers across the country are routinely logging completely nonsensical "reasons" for their Flock searches, including "LOL," "LMAO," and even (yuck) "Sexy." JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER For over 35 years, EF…

How the Meta Settlement Silences Youth Activism ↗ (opens external article)

Since its integration into our digital world, social media has played a pivotal role in youth organizing and social mobilization. Yet, people’s access to these platforms is increasingly coming under threat from courts and legislatures under the guise of protecting young people online—presenting a significant hindrance to youth organizing.   In a major recent example, Meta settled in a lawsuit with…

OpenSMTPD 7.9.0p0 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

EuroBSDCon 2026 talks online ↗ (opens external article)

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

California: Tell the Governor to Stand Up for Net Neutrality, Affordability, and Public Safety ↗ (opens external article)

The federal government has inserted a provision into a funding deal with the state of California that would make the state abandon its gold standard net neutrality law, broadband affordability laws, and public safety protections. Doing so would be a huge step back for California, and would actually end up being more expensive for Californians in the long run. Tell the governor to reject this provi…

The High Crime of “LMAO”: How Cops Are Treating Flock's Mass Surveillance As a Joke ↗ (opens external article)

Here's a riddle: Why did a Goshen Police Department officer search 6,474 automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks, representing data from 82,413 cameras, on May 7, 2025?  If your answer is "I don't know," it turns out you're 100% correct. The officer left the letters "idk" in the search field where cops are supposed to document the reason for the search. When law enforcement and tech salespe…

6.6.157: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

6.1.188: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

5.15.221: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

5.10.270: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…

Game of Trees 0.128 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

7.1.13: stable ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFF Statement on Meta Settlement ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

rpki-client 9.9 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA3 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA2 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OpenSSH 10.5 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA1 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

OpenBGPD 9.2 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

↗ (opens external article)

New committer: Faraz Vahedi (src)…

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

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

↗ (opens external article)

New committer: Minsoo Choo (src)…

April-June 2026 Status Report ↗ (opens external article)

The April to June Status Report is now available with 41 entries.…

Ports Repository Frozen ↗ (opens external article)

The ports repository has been frozen to revert a very large commit. There is no concern that the tree has been compromised. More information about the freeze can be found on the 2026 Ports Freeze page.…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…