Terminal

Snails' Teeth Beats Spider Silk as Nature's Strongest Material

Orbital datacenter gold rush needs an environmental review, FCC told

Environmental groups want the FCC to slam the brakes on orbital datacenters, arguing the agency shouldn't approve constellations they say would total more than a million satellites before taking a hard look at their environmental impact. Earthjustice, acting on behalf of DarkSky International, Environment America, and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), filed a petition this…

SAP Makes It Easier For Customers To Shop For Legacy Product Support, Ending EU Antitrust Probe

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: The European Commission has ended an investigation into possible anticompetitive practices after SAP agreed to abolish reinstatement fees and reduce back-maintenance fees. The move could reduce barriers for customers considering third-party support for products nearing the end of their vendor support terms, including thousands of large busines…

QuadRF can spot drones and see WiFi through my wall

Disable auto-play and infinite scroll or risk massive fines, EU tells Meta

The European Union is ramping up pressure on Meta to make big changes to Facebook and Instagram after the European Commission preliminarily found that features like auto-play, infinite scroll, and highly personalized content recommendations were addictive. On Thursday, the EC said its investigation indicated that “Meta did not adequately assess the risks of its addictive design on the physical an…

KDE Plasma 6.7 X11 vs. Wayland Session Gaming Performance For NVIDIA On CachyOS

With KDE Plasma 6.7 now having seen a few point releases to further polish this last version with X11 support ahead of Plasma 6.8 going Wayland-only, here are some NVIDIA Linux gaming benchmarks between the X11 and Wayland sessions on Plasma 6.7.2 using the popular Arch Linux based CachyOS.…

A Love Letter to Flashcards

Computation as a Universal and Fundamental Concept

[$] An update on the scraper situation

Our article "Fighting the AI scraper bot scourge", published in early 2025, discussed the problem of widespread scraping of web sites in search of training data for large language models and related projects. This activity overwhelms sites with traffic. Over a year after that article is published, the problem is still growing. The hammering of sites by shadowy actors has reached new heights, and t…

NASA sure seems to be asking an awful lot of private space stations

NASA this week released a much-anticipated document, known as a "draft Request for Proposals," that provides some clarity about what it expects from US companies attempting to build privately operated space stations in low-Earth orbit. The stakes are high with this document, known as a draft RFP. The space agency, publicly, has set an end date for the International Space Station of 2030. Although…

Building Our Future Together

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

OpenAI's CEO of AGI Deployment, Fidji Simo, Is Stepping Down

OpenAI's CEO of AGI deployment, Fidji Simo, is stepping down from her full-time role and becoming a part-time adviser after taking extended medical leave for a chronic neuroimmune condition. "Three months ago, I had to go on medical leave after a severe exacerbation of a chronic illness I've lived with for seven years," Simo wrote in a post Thursday on X. "During that time, it became clear that th…

OpenAI's Atlas browser doesn't make it to its first birthday

OpenAI has decided its AI browser experiment has run its course, pulling the plug on ChatGPT Atlas less than a year after launch and moving its browser-based agent features into ChatGPT and Codex. The company said Atlas will stop working on August 9 as it rolls out the newly unveiled ChatGPT Work platform. Atlas arrived last October with no shortage of ambition. Rather than trying to out-Chrome C…

AI-driven datacenter builds drive Microsoft's emissions up a quarter in one year

Microsoft says it matched its entire electricity consumption with renewable energy last year. The bad news is it also increased greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by 25 percent due to datacenter construction. The cloud and software biz has released a 2026 Environmental Sustainability Report [PDF], claiming its environmental sustainability work is entering a new phase due to rapid technological change…

Volkswagen Group tells its board how to fix it, unions disagree

Volkswagen Group is doing well with electric vehicle sales in its home region, but costly tariffs and eroding market share in China and North America have been hurting it badly. Europe's largest automaker, which also owns brands including Audi, Porsche, Skoda, and Lamborghini, has seen its profit margins evaporate, and yesterday the company's supervisory board was presented with a plan to amelior…

[$] QBE 1.3: metaprogramming, performance, and cross-platform support

QBE, a compact compiler backend developed by Quentin Carbonneaux, is a lightweight alternative to larger compiler backends such as LLVM and GCC. Designed to be small enough for a single developer to understand, QBE uses a static single-assignment (SSA) intermediate representation (IR), supports the C ABI, and serves as the backend for projects such as Hare and the cproc C11 compiler. Frontends em…

The Annotated JEPA

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (aardvark-dns, cups, edk2, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, gstreamer1-plugins-good, gstreamer1-plugins-ugly-free, kernel, libsolv, libtasn1, libxml2, nginx:1.24, nginx:1.26, oci-seccomp-bpf-hook, python-urllib3, and tomcat), Debian (rlottie), Fedora (c-ares, k9s, kind, libXfont2, nmap, pam, perl-DBI, php, python-pendulum, tmux, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayla…

ActivityPub over ATProto

Write code like a human will maintain it

Linux 7.3 Enabling Second Graphics Pipe For Modern AMD APUs

AMD on Thursday sent out another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver updates to DRM-Next of new feature material ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window...…

Successful Companies Go Blind

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay—Accountability Must Keep Pace

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

Show HN: Runloom – Go-style coroutines for Python free-threaded

EU puts 'addictive' design of Facebook, Instagram under the DSA microscope

Meta may have breached the European Union's Digital Services Act by designing Facebook and Instagram to keep users glued to their screens, with Brussels saying that features such as infinite scroll and autoplay should be switched off by default. The European Commission on Friday published preliminary findings accusing the social media giant of failing to properly assess or mitigate the risks pose…

Capita hears demand for pension scheme cleanup 'loud and clear' – but won't say yes

Capita has yet to agree to reimburse the UK government for the full cost of recovering the failing Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) it administers. In a testy Parliamentary hearing in which Capita was called to account for its performance since taking over the CSPS, Adolfo Hernandez, group chief executive, refused to be drawn on whether the company would pay the full amount that the government…

Fashion mart Miinto unzips breach details, warns shoppers to watch for phisherfolk

Danish ecommerce company Miinto admitted an intruder has been looking at its order data, according to emails it sent to customers this week. The emails, seen by The Register, do not comment on the scale of the data accessed by the perp or how exactly the breach occurred, although UK-based customers of the Copenhagen-HQ'd biz have received them. “We are writing to let you know about a security inc…

Laylo (YC S20) Is Hiring a Head of Finance

Microsoft to Retire OWA Light Client In Exchange Server

Microsoft plans to disable and remove OWA Light, the lightweight Outlook Web Access client for Exchange Server, in an upcoming update expected in August 2026. The company says retiring the two-decade-old legacy interface will reduce attack surface and engineering complexity, pushing users to the modern Outlook on the web experience instead. BleepingComputer reports: "OWA Light was an important com…

Late Bronze Age Collapse

Wally Funk, last of Mercury 13 and oldest woman in space, dies at 87

Wally Funk, who in 2021 became the oldest woman to fly into space—60 years after she and 12 other women sought the same opportunity as NASA's original astronauts—died on Wednesday at 87 years old. Funk was the last living member of the First Lady Astronaut Trainees (FLATs, or as they were later dubbed by the media, the Mercury 13), a group of women pilots who volunteered to go through the same ph…

Is an air-conditioning revolution coming to Europe?

If you're reading this while the blinds are drawn against yet another heat wave and wondering whether it’s finally time to buy an air conditioner, you're far from alone. At the end of June, as temperatures climbed well above 40° Celsius across Europe, shoppers in France literally forced their way into stores to snatch up portable fans and ACs before they sold out. Such scenes are likely to become…

Rocket Report: "Panic" over Transporter availability; Isar to launch from Canada

Welcome to Edition 9.02 of the Rocket Report! Our attention in the coming days turns to Asia, where there are a couple of notable rocket debuts. Up first is the Long March 10B on Friday, a medium-lift rocket with a reusable first stage. After launch this stage will attempt a landing on a recovery ship. Then, as early as Sunday, the private Indian company Skyroot may attempt to launch its first ro…

Like a cheat code for your car: We investigate ECU tuning

Anyone who has followed the aftermarket automotive performance industry for long enough can tell you just how dramatically it has changed over the past few decades. What once required mechanical tinkering and a lot of know-how can now be done in mere minutes via an electric control unit (ECU), which can extract significant boosts in horsepower and torque from naturally aspirated, turbocharged, or…

EU Commission: addictive design Instagram and Facebook in breach of the DSA

Unified Memory, Explained: Why Mini PCs Can Run 70B Models a Big GPU Can't

Good Tools Are Invisible

Linux DT Patches Provide Very Basic Support For Apple M3 Pro / Max / Ultra

Upstreamed for the Linux 7.2 kernel was initial support for booting Linux on the Apple M3 SoC devices. But just the barebones suppport for booting with not yet any accelerated graphics or other typical function needed for daily use of M3 Apple devices on Linux, just booting to a console. Now this work is complemented by additional Device Tree patches for also booting M3 Pro / Max / Ultra devices o…

HiZ Plane Optimization Merged For Intel Vulkan Linux Driver For Some Performance Benefit

After two years being on the TODO list for a possible performance optimization, the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver has now merged an HiZ plane optimization that can yield up to a few percent frame-rate improvement for Linux gaming/graphics on newer Intel integrated and discrete graphics hardware...…

Cinnamon 6.8 will support Wayland – if you want it

The latest Linux Mint blog says that its Wayland support is about ready for primetime – but X11 isn’t going away. Linux Mint lead developer Clement Lefebvre has published the Linux Mint blog for June 2026, announcing that as of the next version of the Cinnamon desktop, it will officially drop “experimental” status for Wayland: this will be a fully supported way to use the Cinnamon desktop environ…

LLVM Clang Merges Initial Support For NVIDIA Rigel Core With Next-Gen Rosa CPU

Earlier this week NVIDIA confirmed some basic details around their next-gen Rosa CPU that succeeds Vera. Among the public confirmation was that it will feature a "Rigel" Armv9.2-A core iterating on their Olympus core design. With the basic details published, NVIDIA immediately introduced Rigel core support into the GCC compiler. Now they have also upstreamed their initial Rigel core enablement int…

Intel-Scaler-vLLM 0.21.0-b1 Delivers Latest Features For vLLM On Intel GPUs

Released this morning was Intel's newest version of Intel-Scaler-vLLM as their Docker-based solution providing an optimized vLLM stack for execution on Intel Arc (Pro) graphics hardware...…

Scot NHS Trust probes email stuffup involving maternity patients' data

A staff member sent the personal details of around 150 women who were in contact with a Scottish NHS Trust’s maternity services to their own personal email account, the Trust has revealed. NHS Forth Valley, the health board that oversees NHS services in the region between Edinburgh and Glasgow, said it is investigating the matter and has contacted the women affected. “An internal investigation is…

Nobel-Winning US Chemist Will Move to China to Lead AI Institute

Nobel-winning chemist Omar Yaghi is leaving UC Berkeley for China's Tsinghua University, where he will lead a new AI institute focused on accelerating the discovery of advanced materials. "Last week, Tsinghua University in Beijing welcomed Dr. Yaghi in an appointment ceremony, calling him one of the world's foremost chemists," reports The New York Times. "The university said he saw his new post as…

BOFH: Cross-department AI pitches are easier to swallow with a pint in hand

EPISODE 13 "It's just a quick pitch session. You won't have to stay long," the Boss wheedles. "Thanks, but..." I reply. "Come on, you'll meet some new people." "Boring people," the PFY interjects. "... and hear some stories..." "Boring stories..." "You might even learn something!" the Boss pleads. "Something boring," the PFY says. And he's not wrong. Cross-department pitch sessions are drier than…

In Emacs, Everything Looks Like a Service

AI-generated videos to maximally drive a target brain region

Datacenter MacGyver saved the biggest football match of the year

ON CALL The 2026 FIFA World Cup continues and at the time of writing, The Register's home nation – England – remains in with a chance to bring home the trophy! We therefore devote this week's edition of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed tale of tech support, to the beautiful game. We're able to do so thanks to a reader we'll Regomize as "George" who once pulled off a great save when, decades…

Red Hat offers RHEL support ‘forever’ for those who need to lock in to legacy tech

Red Hat has created a new support offering for its flagship Enterprise Linux that it characterizes as “RHEL forever” and has “no pre-determined end date.” The IBM business unit says the offering, formally known as “The Long-Life Add-On,” will “keep older minor or major versions of RHEL secure and stable” by providing critical patches, urgent bug fixes, and 24x7 tech support for as long as custome…

Phoronix Premium 2026 Summer Support Special Ends Tonight

For those that enjoy the daily flow of original open-source/Linux news on Phoronix along with all of the original Linux hardware reviews and performance benchmarking, but haven't yet subscribed to Phoronix Premium to help keep the site going after 22 years, the summer sale ends tonight...…

Humanoid Robots Controlled By Surgeons Did World-First Operation On Live Pigs

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Humanoid robots have surgically removed the gallbladders from living animals in an unprecedented medical experiment -- but not as autonomous machines capable of replacing human doctors. Instead, skilled human surgeons remotely controlled the robots' movements in a new example of human-robot teamups. The teleoperated humanoid robots completed t…

Microsoft warns customers AI will mean busier Patch Tuesdays

Microsoft has warned customers to expect more security patches for the foreseeable future, thanks to AI. “As AI helps defenders discover more issues, customers will see a higher volume of security updates included in each security release,” the company’s executive veep for Windows + Devices, Pavan Davuluri, wrote in a Thursday post that describes how Microsoft is changing its internal processes t…

AMD Enabling CACP Feature On Linux For Greater OLED Power Savings

Today's batch of AMDGPU Display Code "DC" updates bring a few noteworthy items for benefiting modern hardware under Linux...…

Lawmakers Probe Growing Use of Chinese AI Models In US Companies

U.S. lawmakers are probing the growing use of Chinese AI models by American companies, citing concerns over censorship, security risks, and whether U.S. firms are turning to cheaper foreign models because domestic alternatives are too costly or restricted. The investigation is specifically looking at companies such as Cursor and Airbnb. "The growing use of Chinese AI models by U.S. companies raise…

An unnamed US county – perhaps in Ohio – paid $1M extortion demand to cybercriminals

A US county reportedly paid $1 million to Kairos, an extortion gang that claimed to have stolen more than 2 TB of data, but the county never received independently verifiable proof that the stolen files had been deleted - just the criminals' promise. This means the county’s stolen files may turn up for sale on a dark web forum, and the same (or another) crime crew could again demand an extortion…

Flores Hobbits' eating habits offer clues about their evolutionary past

Until about 60,000 years ago, diminutive hominin cousins, Homo floresiensis (affectionately nicknamed Hobbits for obvious reasons), shared the island of Flores with Komodo dragons, pygmy elephants, and giant rats. Based on the presence of hominin and pygmy elephant bones in the same layers of cave sediment, it originally looked like the Hobbits had hunted and butchered dwarf elephants—an impressi…

Google Search Hits All-Time Usage Record

Google says the World Cup drove Search to its highest usage in history, with queries per second peaking right after Argentina's winning goal against Egypt. CNBC reports: The milestone comes as the company tries to prove its traditional search engine can keep its relevance in the age of AI, where chatbots have become more prevalent. Google still controls 90% of the search market, its stock price ha…

Michigan's explosive outbreak of diarrheal parasite jumps to over 1,200 cases

Cases of an explosive diarrheal parasite continue to skyrocket in Michigan, which is reporting 1,251 cases as of July 9. Of those, 44 were hospitalized. Meanwhile, across the border in Ohio, cases are also quickly rising, with news reports of a case total over 500. The outbreak in Michigan began with two cases reported on June 22 and rose steeply at the start of July. The Michigan Department of H…

OpenAI wants its new tool to do your work for you and with you

Last year, when we tested out the "Agent Mode" in OpenAI's Atlas web browser, we complained that any automated tasks tended to stop after a few minutes, limiting its usefulness for ongoing or complex tasks. With today's release of ChatGPT Work, OpenAI says it has solved that problem with a new tool that can "stay with a project for hours if needed, and turn a goal into finished work." The company…

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

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

AI slop writing has taken over the internet, particularly LinkedIn and X

No surprise here. A study from AI detection platform Pangram suggests that social media posts are teeming with AI-generated slop, particularly if the posts are long and especially if they live on LinkedIn or X. If you’re sick of reading non-human prose, we’d recommend getting off the platforms altogether. Along with offering your typical AI-content detection services, Pangram released a Chrome ex…

Meta Patents AI Device That Tracks Your Emotions, Watches You Take Your Meds

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Meta has filed a patent for a system that records your voice and surroundings all day, then uses an AI to analyse your mood. The patent's stated, theoretical goal is for Meta, a company that makes billions of dollars targeting ads at its users based on their data, is to sell users a wearable that tailors workouts for them based on whether they're…

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

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

Patch for Windows Defender 0-day could allow attackers to fill hard disk

A patch Microsoft released on Wednesday to fix a zero-day vulnerability in its Defender security engine may cause Windows machines to write files large enough to completely consume available disk space, the researcher who discovered the flaw said. RoguePlanet, tracked as CVE-2026-50656, came to public notice in June when NightmareEclipse, the pseudonymous name used by a researcher, disclosed it a…

How RCA Victor sold Sound Service to classrooms in 1939

Allstate accuses Broadcom of auditing it because it quit VMware, CA

Allstate Insurance Company has accused Broadcom of haphazardly issuing audits against it because the insurance firm decided not to renew its contracts with VMware and CA Technologies. The allegations were made in relation to a lawsuit that VMware filed against Allstate in December 2025, according to The Register. In the complaint, Broadcom alleges that Allstate failed to comply with license audit…

Humanoid robots controlled by surgeons did world-first operation on live pigs

Humanoid robots have surgically removed the gallbladders from living animals in an unprecedented medical experiment—but not as autonomous machines capable of replacing human doctors. Instead, skilled human surgeons remotely controlled the robots’ movements in a new example of human-robot teamups. The teleoperated humanoid robots completed two minimally invasive surgeries by removing gallbladders…

OpenAI Rolls Out GPT-5.6 After Government Greenlight, Announces 'ChatGPT Work'

OpenAI has received approval from the Trump administration to publicly roll out GPT-5.6 after an earlier limited preview restricted access to government-approved organizations. The company also launched ChatGPT Work, a new GPT-5.6-powered agent that combines ChatGPT and Codex-style capabilities. "It can gather context from the apps, files, and workflows you choose and create finished materials suc…

Judge doesn't like Elon Musk settlement with SEC, but says court can't block it

A federal judge reluctantly approved a $1.5 million settlement between Elon Musk and the Trump administration despite raising numerous concerns about a deal that lets Musk get off lightly for a rule violation that allegedly harmed Twitter investors. In an order approving the deal, US District Judge Sparkle Sooknanan said she "has significant misgivings about the settlement" between Musk and the S…

Google Hands Open Health Stack To the Linux Foundation

BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Foundation intends to launch the Open Health Stack Software Foundation, a new vendor-neutral home for the Google Open Health Stack project. Google is contributing the project code and assets while Google.org is providing a $3 million grant. The initiative is also backed by Microsoft, Anthropic, and the World Health Organization, with the goal of building open source,…

OpenAI may have made a fatal misstep in copyright fight with news orgs

OpenAI is facing calls for "serious sanctions" after fighting to keep news organizations from snooping through millions of logs to find evidence of users skirting their paywalls by prompting ChatGPT to regurgitate their articles. This evidence is considered among the most important to both sides, potentially either dooming OpenAI as an infringer or exonerating its chatbot technology as a transfor…

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

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

San Francisco Moves To Build Private Luxury Airport Terminal

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The [San Francisco international airport] is hoping to build a brand-new terminal exclusively for passengers who pay a premium, gaining access to a luxurious airport experience complete with private security lines and valet service from terminal to tarmac. It will service commercial flights, not business or corporate jets, and the terminal wil…

Graviton5 CPU Benchmarks: 30% Geo Mean Improvement Over Graviton4

After originally announcing Graviton5 last December, recently AWS finally made the M9g and M9gd instances generally available as the first featuring these new in-house ARM server processors for the EC2 cloud. Graviton5 makes use of Arm Neoverse-V3 cores compared to Neoverse-V2 with Graviton4, support up to 192 cores, and feature a higher 3.3GHz clock speed compared to 2.8GHz on the prior-generatio…

AI tool scours the web for job openings, preps your resume and cover letter

Combing through job postings and company help wanted pages for a position that matches your resume is the very definition of drudge work. Now, there's an AI designed to suck up information from the web, do the search for you, and even help you apply. Software developer Tarun Gupta created just such a tool in the form of Autopilot-Jobhunt. When configured with a profile of the user and their desir…

Interview with Mitchell Hashimoto about Ghostty and Zig

OpenMandriva claims disgruntled admin trashed repos after community bust-up

OpenMandriva has accused a former contributor of using his trusted admin access to trash repositories and push a package that could have broken desktop installations after a community dispute spilled over into the project's infrastructure. The Linux distribution disclosed the incident in a forum post this week, describing what it called an attempted act of "distribution sabotage" allegedly involv…

GPT-5.6

macOS 28 Will Drop Support For Encrypted Mac OS Extended Volumes

Starting with macOS 28, Apple will no longer support encrypted Mac OS Extended, or HFS+, volumes. Users will need to decrypt them or reformat them as APFS to keep using them. 9to5Mac reports: In a new support document, Apple explains that starting with macOS 28, "the Mac OS Extended file system format will be supported only for volumes (disks and other storage devices) that aren't encrypted." In p…

SAP makes it easier for customers to shop for legacy product support, ending EU antitrust probe

The European Commission has ended an investigation into possible anticompetitive practices after SAP agreed to abolish reinstatement fees and reduce back-maintenance fees. The move could reduce barriers for customers considering third-party support for products nearing the end of their vendor support terms, including thousands of large businesses that rely on SAP ERP Central Component (ECC) to ru…

Outlook for Mac bug makes font choice a purely decorative feature

Microsoft's apparent ambition to make Outlook the worst email client for Mac shows no sign of fading after a recent update broke font selection in emails. The problem occurs when composing an email. Outlook uses the default font as the user types, but will ignore any request to select something different. Several threads have appeared on Microsoft's forums about the issue, and a moderator confirm…

OpenAI Releases New Voice Models For More Natural Live Conversations

OpenAI has released GPT-Live-1 and GPT-Live-1 mini, "claiming that they sound more natural and can handle turn-taking better," reports TechCrunch. "These are full-duplex models, meaning they can speak and listen at the same time, allowing users to interrupt naturally and enabling features like live translation." TechCrunch reports: The company is also replacing its current Advanced Voice Mode in C…

EU 'Chat Control' snoopfest returns after vote to kill it falls short

An effort by European parliamentarians to block the reintroduction of an interim rule allowing tech companies to scan chats for evidence of child sexual abuse failed today, despite securing more votes than the MEPs who want to keep it alive. Commonly referred to by critics as Chat Control, or Chat Control 1.0, the interim rule acts as a derogation from the ePrivacy Directive, allowing online comm…

Wayland 1.26 RC1 Released With New Event To Help Ensure Correct Pointer Coordinates

In addition to Weston 16 nearing release and its release candidate out today, the Wayland 1.26 release candidate was just issued with a few notable changes on top of the more typical bug fixing...…

Surprised doctors find 10-inch worm in man's groin during elective surgery

When surgeons dug into a man's groin to repair a painless bulge, they made the unexpected discovery of a living, 10-inch-long (26 cm) worm snug in his abdomen. Adding to the oddity, the man told the surgeons that this had actually happened to him before, according to a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine. The 71-year-old man had opted to have surgery to repair the bulge, which was…

Hy3

KDE Plasma users face a dire omen of change: 6.6.6 arrives

KDE Plasma 6.6.6 is here, along with a beastly long list of bugfixes, so if you have Plasma 6.6.5 – for instance, if you are using KDE on FreeBSD 15.1 – then it's an update well worth having. KDE Plasma 6.6.6 is a release that really is just about bug-fixes, but while there are no headline-grabbing features coming out for this inauspicious version number, it's worth remembering: in a world of blo…

Parents' Phone Addiction Affects Bond With Kids, New Study Finds

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Parents' attachment to screens and smartphones can have negative, long-lasting developmental and psychological effects on their children, according to new research. Caregivers who mismanage their devices can both exacerbate "insecure attachment" and make healthy relationships more anxious and avoidant for children, according to the findings, whic…

Canonical Managed Kubeflow lands on Azure

Platform engineering team leads are facing a quiet crisis. Your data science teams want Kubeflow for its pipeline orchestration, metadata tracking, and training operators, so you build it for them on Kubernetes. Then day two arrives. Your engineering backlog is swallowed by breaking changes from upstream, Istio configuration complexity, security patching, and storage provisioning bottlenecks. You…

Conspiracies and regrets abound in Dune: Part Three trailer

We haven't seen much footage to date for Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part Three, other than the broody and haunting extended teaser Warner Bros. dropped in March. But now we've got a shiny new trailer jam-packed with tantalizing hints of what to expect, and plenty of Easter eggs to delight avid book fans. (Spoilers for first two films in the franchise below.) As previously reported, in 2021’s Dune,…

Ruf debuts new flat-eight engine at Goodwood

Ruf has come quite a long way from its roots as a tuner of Porsches. The German company (no doubt familiar to those of us in the PlayStation generation as Gran Turismo 2's workaround because someone else owned the video game rights to the real 911) has evolved past that stage and now builds cars of its own design. And today at the Goodwood Festival of Speed in England, it fired up a brand-new eng…

Brown says AI make student brain no work good, teacher should help use it better

Students and faculty at Brown University are worried generative AI could harm learning after an economics professor's take-home exam produced results he said pointed to widespread misuse of the technology. In a report [PDF] published by Brown's Generative AI in Teaching and Learning (GAITL) committee, teaching staff say they fear AI could weaken students' cognitive skills and encourage cheating.…

[$] Kitty chases the mouse

Kitty is a terminal emulator that runs on Linux, macOS, and the BSDs, which is notable for its speed and features such as image support and advanced font handling. It is under active development; a recent major release adds a new level of mouse support. Here, we will look at some of those features and show how the program can also be used as platform for text-based applications. Kitty is free soft…

UK.gov withholds £10M payment from Capita over pensions project fiasco, as dispute continues

The UK government has withheld £10 million in payments to tech and business process outsourcing biz Capita following the disastrous takeover of the Civil Service pensions scheme (CSPS). The penalties (£9.9 million) in the £239 million contract relate to the transition from the earlier scheme provider to the Capita service. Since the service went live in December last year, Capita has continued to…

Proposed Linux Patch For A Brief Delay To Match PCI Spec Will Hopefully Address Some Bugs

Going back to February there was a bug report around the xHCI controller dieing on resume from s2idle when using an AMD Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" Framework Desktop. In turn all USB devices behind the xHCI controller are lost on resume, but unbinding and binding the driver can restore the functionality without a reboot. After months of back and forth communication, it looks like a solution has bee…

Free Waymo rides in California? You can thank a regulatory quirk.

Robotaxi companies have thrived in California, where the good weather, enthusiasm for technology, and sophisticated labor force have supported their growth for nearly two decades. But a delayed decision from a state regulatory agency is now slowing Alphabet’s subsidiary Waymo, the US leader in driverless robotaxi service. The holdup means that Waymo isn’t yet allowed to expand into parts of North…

Microsoft closes book on Nightmare Eclipse's RoguePlanet zero-day

Microsoft has quietly fixed the “RoguePlanet” zero-day in Microsoft Defender, closing the latest hole exposed by security researcher Nightmare Eclipse after months of public sparring over the company's handling of vulnerability reports. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-50656, was addressed through an update to the Microsoft Malware Protection Engine rather than via its monthly Patch Tuesday…

The glass backbone: Why the Army's logistics will break in the next war

Rust 1.97.0 released

Version 1.97.0 of the Rust programming language has been released. Changes include using a new symbol-mangling scheme by default, support for denying warnings in Cargo, and an end to the practice of hiding the linker's output after a successful build.…

The newest entrant in the military’s launch competition isn't actually a launch company

This week the US Space Force brought two more companies into the pool of bidders eligible to compete for its launch contracts—Impulse Space and Relativity Space. For a rocket company, cracking into the lucrative US military launch market is both a sign of maturity, as well as an important source of revenue. The inclusion of Relativity Space, which is making credible progress toward the launch of…

Linux Prepares For New USB-C Security Feature On Lenovo ThinkPads

Newer Lenovo ThinkPad systems feature a security feature called USB-C Security Restricted Mode that is in the process of being wired up for reporting under Linux...…

Speedier type checks in TypeScript 7.0 as first stable Go release ships

The Microsoft-led TypeScript 7.0 features an order-of-magnitude speed boost, a victory not only for TypeScript itself but also for Go, the programming language used to completely rewrite the web staple's compiler. Following a major rewrite effort that began with an experimental native Go implementation, this is the first stable release of the language to include its long-in-development Go-based c…

Security updates for Thursday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds-base, aardvark-dns, buildah, compat-openssl10, freeipmi, frr, gnutls, grafana, grafana-pcp, kernel, kernel-rt, libyang, nginx, openexr, pcs, perl-HTTP-Daemon, postgresql:18, python3.14-pip, skopeo, tomcat9, and wireshark), Debian (chromium and pgextwlist), Fedora (openssh, opkssh, perl-CSS-Minifier-XS, python-jiter, python-nh3, python-pendulum…

Britain's cloud habit has become a billion-pound risk

Amid calls for digital sovereignty, a report warns that more than 60 percent of UK companies depend on cloud services for critical functions, and an outage in one or more of the big providers could prove costly. Researchers at the Cyber Monitoring Centre nonprofit found a high level of cloud dependence among British firms, rising to more than 80 percent among FTSE 100 firms, and say this means cl…

Microsoft to switch off OWA Light after nearly two decades

Microsoft has warned admins that Outlook Web Access (OWA) Light is set to be disabled and removed with the August 2026 Exchange Server update. The announcement applies to the on-premises version of Exchange Server. The feature was deprecated on August 19, 2024, but some users might still be caught off guard when the plug is pulled once and for all. OWA Light – not to be confused with the stripped…

MPs tell NHS to start packing Palantir's bags ahead of 2027 contract break

A cross-party group of MPs has told the government to start planning for life after Palantir, arguing the NHS should use a 2027 break clause in its Federated Data Platform (FDP) contract to find a replacement rather than doubling down on one of Whitehall's most contentious tech deals. In a letter to Health Innovation Minister Preet Kaur Gill, the House of Commons Health and Social Care Committee…

EU Parliament greenlights Chat Control 1.0

Meta To Build $9 Billion Alberta Data Center, Its First In Canada

Meta will build its first Canadian data center in Alberta, investing $9 billion in a 1-gigawatt facility that can scale to 1.8 gigawatts to support its AI infrastructure needs. The project will rely on new generation and grid infrastructure funded by Meta, including a long-term agreement tied to a new natural gas power facility. The company says it will offset electricity use with clean and renewa…

Accenture admits to 'isolated matter' after crook tries to flog alleged 35GB haul

Accenture has confirmed an "isolated matter" after a cybercriminal put up for sale what they allege is 35GB of the consulting giant's internal data, including source code, cryptographic keys, and cloud credentials. The listing, seen by The Register, appeared on a cybercrime forum on July 6 under the title "Accenture Data Breach," posted by a user with the handle "888." The seller claimed the stol…

Initial Patches Posted For Booting The Apple M4 On Linux

With the Linux 7.2 kernel there is initial support for booting the Apple M3 SoC on Linux but it's not yet functional for end users with just booting to a simple console. There are now Device Tree files posted for booting the Apple M4 on Linux but also not yet useful for any typical Apple Mac/MacBook usage on Linux...…

AMD Ryzen AI Halo Box RGB LED Driver Inches Closer To The Mainline Kernel

The AMD Ryzen AI Halo mini PC powered by Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" began shipping this week. It features very nice Linux support out-of-the-box with the Debian-based Ryzen AI Developer Platform operating system. For those wishing to run their own x86_64 Linux distribution, one of the only caveats in the Linux support is quite small... No mainline kernel support yet for controlled the RGB LED ligh…

Zlib-rs 0.6.6 Released With Updated Zlib API Support

Zlib-rs 0.6.6 was just released by the Trifecta Tech Foundation. Just weeks after the prior release with a fix for Intel Raptor Lake and bringing new SIMD optimizations, zlib-rs 0.6.6 is about delivering updated Zlib API compatibility...…

Ubuntu emphasizes Arm64 support – and gets Rustier

Some of Canonical’s ambitions for the future directions of Ubuntu are becoming apparent – despite some bumps in the road. Canonical engineering manager Ravi Kant Sharma posted an Ubuntu on Arm summer ’26 update on the Ubuntu Discourse. The company is boosting its efforts to make running Ubuntu on Arm64 a first-class experience. Some of the changes are behind the scenes, and others will be more im…

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

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

Windows 95 detected installers by looking for magic words and hoping for the best

Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has confirmed what we all suspected about Windows 95: it guessed when a setup program was running. Rather than relying on any special flag or marker, Chen explained that Windows 95 looked at the program's name to determine whether it was a setup application. It did this by checking the app against a list of magic words. If the program name contained one of…

Scientist models way to make sure no one's violating the ban on nuclear weapons in space

One scientist has produced a detailed model which proposes a way to verify that no government or rogue actors are secretly hiding nuclear weapons in the Earth’s orbit. Currently, international laws prevent the use of nuclear weapons in orbit, but it also presents a problem. International space law was created by the Outer Space Treaty, which was drafted in 1966 and has been ratified by 117 nation…

Show HN: Getting GLM 5.2 running on my slow computer

Thief posed as Wi-Fi fixing hero, then stole priceless trophy

PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, where each week we share the saga of an organization that couldn’t get out of its own way when it comes to security. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. This week’s tale comes courtesy of Dahvid Schloss, a professional red teamer who was also involved (as…

New Horizons Pluto probe just woke itself up after 321 days of hibernation

NASA’s New Horizons probe has woken itself up after 321 days of hibernation. The aerospace agency sent commands to the probe last July, instructing it to commence hibernation on August 7 and then resume activity in July 2026. On June 23, NASA checked to see if New Horizons had obeyed the instruction to wake up and was pleased to find it was online again. New Horizons’ main job was to make our fir…

Singaporean sovereign wealth fund Temasek thinks AI is going to pay off

Singapore’s sovereign wealth fund Temasek, one of the world’s largest investment houses, intends to massively increase its investment in AI over the next five years – both for its own use and across its portfolio. Temasek holds over $400 billion in assets and around six percent of those are currently tied up in AI companies, including OpenAI. At its annual review meeting yesterday, the fund annou…

Microsoft shifts to annual exchange rate price revision for cloudy products

Microsoft has decided to shift to annual price adjustments for its commercial cloud services, instead of its current twice-yearly changes. The software giant happily bills customers in their local currencies but always keeps those costs pegged to the price it charges in US dollars. Since at least 2024, Microsoft has revisited local currency prices for its commercial cloud services twice a year. O…

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 9, 2026

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Cryptography API; Iomap explanation; Negative dentries; Faster RCUs and lockless allocation for BPF; Negative dentries; LLMs in memory-management code Briefs: Guix vulnerabilities; OpenSSH 10.4; trusted publishing; kernel archive; CalyxOS; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.…

OpenAI makes ChatGPT better at banter

OpenAI has released a new voice model that can produce human-sounding speech, or scour the web in response to spoken queries. GPT-Live, according to the company, makes chatbot banter feel more like a real conversation, something of a bold move for a company battling multiple lawsuits alleging mental health harms because people took ChatGPT too seriously. "During conversations, GPT‑Live can show i…

OpenMandriva: Statement regarding attempted distribution sabotage

Over on the OpenMandriva forum, the Linux distribution has reported sabotage of its repositories by a disgruntled contributor with administrative credentials. According to "AngryPenguin", an abusive incident in a distribution Matrix chat led to a user being kicked out of the chat; that "triggered a cascade of events", which led to people resigning from the distribution. Eventually, one of those pe…

The AI that spawned MechaHitler and deepfake porn puts on a suit to become legal advisor and Excel jockey

To say Elon Musk's AI company has trained some of the most unhinged models on the internet would be an understatement. Grok’s sordid past includes cosplaying as “MechaHitler” and a foray into deepfake porn generation that briefly got the platform banned in some regions. As concerning as that might sound, the recently renamed Eloncorp known as SpaceXAI says Grok, now in version 4.5, has cleaned up…

Suspected Chinese snoops caught breaking into universities' Roundcube mailservers

Suspected Chinese spies have been breaking into major US and Canadian universities since May, exploiting vulns in Roundcube mailservers to steal data belonging to physics and engineering administrators and professors, according to Proofpoint threat researchers. Proofpoint directly observed “less than 10” universities targeted in these intrusions, Greg Lesnewich, principal threat research engineer…

Intel-backed AI chip startup SambaNova breathes new life into aging Nvidia GPUs in latest benchmarks

Intel's big bet on SambaNova appears to be paying off in a big way. This week, the AI chip startup shared benchmark results showing its latest generation of AI acceleration, which combines Nvidia GPUs and the company's accelerators, beating GPU-only inference platforms by a wide margin. The testing, conducted by the AI benchmarking gurus at Artificial Analysis, showed SambaNova's SN50-series acce…

Former GitHub CEO launches competitor designed for the age of vibe coding

In the era of vibe coding, even GitHub is having trouble keeping up with all the traffic. Now, Thomas Dohmke, the service's former CEO, has launched his own Git hosting network to meet the needs of AI agents and those minding them. His company is called Entire, which the biz has repackaged as an adverb to make the point that it is pitching "an entirely new Git hosting network" based on the 21-yea…

OpenAI job listing suggests ChatGPT could someday replace junior analysts at Goldman Sachs

Investment bankers might be next in line to be rendered obsolete by artificial intelligence if OpenAI's latest push into the financial space is any indication. The House of Altman on Wednesday opened up a new position for an investment banking expert, whose responsibilities include making ChatGPT and its AI relations better at handling the complexities of major financial transactions like mergers…

GitHub Copilot: Sorry Dave, I can't do that harmful thing - unless you ask me in code

It's the latest example of AI safety guardrails being bypassed. GitHub Copilot refuses harmful prompts almost always if asked in chat - like, "how to fool a breathalyzer test" or "smuggle bulk cash out of the US" - but then will write them in code 100 percent of the time if the prompt is broken into smaller steps and distributed across multiple stages of a software development workflow. Alan Turi…

Redox OS Gets GTK3 Backend For Orbital Desktop, Fractional Scaling & USB Gamepads

The open-source, Rust-based Redox OS platform had a very eventful June with many new features implemented and more software ported over to run on this from-scratch operating system...…

Allstate Insurance quits Broadcom, alleges vengeful license audit on the way out

Broadcom has accused Allstate Insurance of dodging a software license audit that the insurer claims only happened after it decided to stop using VMware and CA software. Those two Broadcom business units – CA and VMware – have brought copyright infringement lawsuits against Allstate. The CA suit, filed in May 2025, alleges that the insurer breached contracts after the sale of its Employer Voluntar…

LibreOffice 26.8 Beta Released For Improving This Free Software Office Suite

The Document Foundation today announced the first beta release of the LibreOffice 26.8 open-source office suite set for its stable debut in August...…

OpenMandriva GitHub Disrupted & Nefarious Package Push In Sabotage Attempt

The OpenMandriva project put out a statement today concerning an attempted distribution sabotage effort. Part of the OpenMandriva GitHub repository was deleted and there was an empty package push made to OpenMandriva's Cooker repository in trying to obsolete all GNOME and COSMIC packages...…

AI memory crunch takes a bite out of PC shipments

The memory chip crisis caused PC shipments to fall by 5 percent from last year in Q2 2026 as vendors struggled to secure supplies, and IDC warns smaller suppliers may be forced out of business if the situation continues. While rising component costs have already priced budget PCs out of existence, the market intelligence biz says the AI-driven shortage also pushed shipments down to 68.2 million u…

Tool promises to make lazy academics' AI-written papers sound more human

It's bad enough that you used AI to write a research paper instead of composing it yourself. Now, you can take the extra step to hide the evidence of your sloth. A startup has decided academics need a way to hide LLM tells, yet they insist their goal isn’t to support bad habits among boffins. AI humanizers are nothing new - take a cursory look online and you’ll find that companies pushing AI that…

Police intercept tipsy teens after Waymo snitches for shooting Orbeez out of the car

If you misbehave in the back of a taxi, your driver might report you to authorities. And if there's no driver, you should also expect no quarter. Two San Mateo 15-year-olds this week had a run-in with the law after their Waymo robotaxi called the cops on them. According to the San Mateo Police Department’s account of the matter, the teens treated a hired Waymo as their own personal battle taxi, f…

Single vs. Dual Channel Memory Performance With The Intel Core Ultra 7 270K Plus

Given today's pricing environment around system memory, a Phoronix Premium supporter recently requested some benchmarks to quantify the performance difference from single to dual channel memory. In considering a new computer build, he is contemplating whether to go for a single stick of DDR5 memory until memory prices hopefully subside in the future. For those in a similar boat, here are some benc…

Bug in top AI coding agents shows that Unix-era security headaches never really die

UPDATED A “systematic vulnerability pattern” in at least six of the most widely used AI coding assistants can be abused to trick agents into accessing files outside the workspace sandbox, leading to remote code execution on the developer's machine. Google-owned security biz Wiz found the security gap, which it's named "GhostApproval," and reported it to all six: Amazon Q Developer, Anthropic Clau…

China tells devs to ditch Claude Code over 'backdoor code' fears

China's National Vulnerability Database (CNVDB) is urging developers to uninstall recent Claude Code versions over the fear that they can scoop up sensitive user data without consent. Referring to it as "backdoor code," the state-run body claimed over WeChat and in an online statement that a "built-in monitoring mechanism" can gather details such as a user's location and identity, and forward the…

Intel Sunsets Quantum Intrinsics & Other Open-Source Projects This Week

Intel has formally archived some more of their now-unmaintained open-source projects this week...…

[$] Progress in modernizing kernel cryptography

At the 2026 Linux Security Summit North America, Eric Biggers spoke about some of the problems with the kernel's cryptography framework, as well as the recent progress in adding library APIs to allow developers to use cryptographic functions without using the traditional crypto API. He walked through a couple of examples to demonstrate the frailty of the original API and showed how the new library…

AMD ZenDNN 6.0 Brings Many Improvements For Accelerating Inference On Ryzen/EPYC CPUs

AMD ZenDNN 6.0 released today as a significant update to this open-source deep neural network library for helping to accelerate inferencing on AMD Zen processors from Ryzen to EPYC...…

Security updates for Wednesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (container-tools:rhel8, kernel-rt, libreoffice, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, opentelemetry-collector, perl-HTTP-Daemon, and python-markdown), Debian (dpkg, imagemagick, and postfix), Fedora (betterleaks, docker-compose, firefox, helm, perl-Compress-Raw-Bzip2, perl-IO-Compress, perl-JavaScript-Minifier-XS, python-cramjam, python-fastar, python-pillow-jxl-plug…

Ex-NASA boss points out small flaw in Moon landing plan: No lander

Former NASA boss Jim Bridenstine has warned that the space agency's plan to land astronauts on the Moon risks becoming too complicated for its own good. Bridenstine, who ran NASA during the first Trump administration and departed in 2021 before the Artemis I launch, told This Week In Space that the current lunar lander architecture looks worryingly elaborate compared with Apollo. It is not Briden…

Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup

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

Wayland No Longer Considered Experimental For Linux Mint's Next Cinnamon Release

The Linux Mint distribution has published their June development summary that most notably includes work on Cinnamon's Wayland support where it's now ready to graduate...…

Linux 7.3 To Make It Easier To Disable Syscall User Dispatch

Introduced to the Linux kernel nearly six years ago was the Syscall User Dispatch feature to help with Linux gaming. Specifically, Syscall User Dispatch was developed to help Windows games run on Linux more efficiently. While it was upstreamed in Linux 5.11 for more efficiently intercepting system calls from Windows software under Wine, now in the name of security there are patches working their w…

XWayland 24.1.13 Released To Fix Two More Security Issues In The X.Org Codebase

Two more security issues were made public today concerning the X.Org Server codebase and in turn XWayland also being affected...…

Proton 11.0-1 Released To Advance Valve's Steam Play For The Best Linux Experience Yet

Proton 11.0-1 was just released as stable as the newest major version of this downstream of Wine that powers Valve's Steam Play to provide for a great Windows gaming experience across conventional Linux systems plus the popular Steam Deck and brand new Steam Machine...…

AMD Linux Graphics Driver Working To Clear Out All Of Its BUG()s

AMDGPU kernel driver maintainer Alex Deucher of AMD sent out a set of 30 patches today working on clearing out all of the BUG() usage within this Linux kernel graphics driver...…

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

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

Help EFF Cut the AI Hype

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

NVIDIA Upstreams Initial Rigel CPU Core Support Into GCC Compiler

That didn't take long... Mere minutes after NVIDIA confirmed some basic Rosa CPU details and its "Rigel" CPU core, merged to the upstream GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase is initial enablement on the NVIDIA Rigel core...…

Razer Certifying Their First Laptop For Linux: Razer Blade 18 RZ09-0582

Razer is a brand synonymous with gaming and finally in 2026 they are in the process of certifying their first laptop for Ubuntu Linux. This laptop going through Ubuntu Linux certification is the Razer Blade 18 RZ09-0582 and it offers incredible performance with the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor and GeForce RTX 5090 graphics but with that also comes a very high price tag.…

NVIDIA Confirms Some Rosa CPU Details With Its Rigel Core

In a blog post today talking up the single threaded CPU performance of their Vera CPU with Olympus cores, NVIDIA confirmed a few basic details of their next-gen Rosa CPU featuring their "Rigel" core...…

NVIDIA 610.43.03 Linux Driver Released With Unspecified Fixes

NVIDIA today published their latest stable driver update for Linux customers in their newest R610 release branch...…

Woodruff: You shouldn't trust trusted publishing

William Woodruff, better known online as "yossarian", has published a blog post to make the case that users should not place their trust in trusted publishing: Trusted Publishing is a mechanism for establishing trust between an external machine identity (like a CI/CD workflow) and one or more projects on a package index/registry. The "trust" in "Trusted Publishing" refers to that trust relationshi…

[$] Faster RCUs and lockless memory allocation

Puranjay Mohan shared some of the work he's been doing recently on improving the performance of read-copy-update (RCU) at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit; his talk would have been nice context to have earlier in the day when Harry Yoo and Alexei Starovoitov led a session about the new kmalloc_nolock() function that allows for lockless allocation from any kern…

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (nodejs22 and nodejs24), Fedora (clamav, hplip, kernel, kernel-headers, librabbitmq, mingw-expat, mir, perl-Imager, podman-tui, prometheus-podman-exporter, python-rpds-py, rust-ashpd, rust-busd, rust-gtk4-macros, rust-inferno, rust-quick-xml, rust-reqsign-aws-v4, rust-wayland-scanner, and sandogasa), Oracle (container-tools:rhel8, kernel, mariadb:10.1…

TUXEDO Computers Switching TUXEDO OS From Ubuntu To Debian Testing

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers announced they are switching from Ubuntu to Debian as the base for their TUXEDO OS platform...…

AF_ALG "Nightmare" Being Further Limited In Linux 7.3 With New Sysctl Knob

The Linux kernel's AF_ALG interface was deprecated in Linux 7.2. This interface for letting user-space programs interact directly with the Linux kernel crypto API has proven to be a "massive attack surface" due to a variety of security concerns. With its deprecation in Linux 7.2, some AF_ALG features are already removed and for Linux 7.3 this interface is being further restrained...…

Alternate Clock Designs and Time Systems

OpenSSH 10.4 released

OpenSSH 10.4 has been released. In addition to a number of security and bug fixes, there are a few notable changes; this release adds experimental support for a composite post-quantum signature scheme combining ML-DSA 44 and Ed25519 as described in this IETF draft. With 10.4, if OpenSSH is compiled with sandbox support it will fail on Linux systems that have not enabled SECCOMP or NO_NEW_PRIVS; pr…

Apple Silicon Exec Explains Mac Mini AI Demand and On-Device Future

Ditching Vagrant: VMs with KVM and Virsh on Debian

[$] The kernel's iomap layer

Conversations about the kernel's filesystem implementations often involve a layer called "iomap", but relatively few people can reliably say what iomap actually is. That is just the kind of gap that LWN exists to fill. In short, iomap handles the mapping between data in the filesystem space (identified by a file of interest, and an offset within that file) and in the storage space (which may be a…

Lost city discovered beneath Egypt's desert with ancient church

Train sim created by just one person is being called the best ever made

Ancient Coins: What About Spartan Coins?

The mathematical secrets of Barcelona's Sagrada Familia

FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFF to Gov. Pritzker: Veto Illinois’ HB 5511

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police Drones

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

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

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

Primed for Malware: Stop Selling Compromised Android Devices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online

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

🦅 Domestic Spying Takes an L | EFFector 38.12

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

Scattered Spider Hackers Plead Guilty on Day 1 of Trial

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

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

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

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

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

Canada Is Forging Ahead with Its Dangerous Surveillance Bill

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

EFF Thanks SerpApi For Helping Us Protect Free Speech Online

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

Call for Submissions: Digital Pride

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

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

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

Court Records Should Be Free

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

Field Notes from a Year of OPSEC Training

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

AI Regulation Should Be Rational, Not Retaliatory

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

‘Popa’ Botnet Linked to Publicly-Traded Israeli Firm

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

The Free and Open Web Is Under Attack at the IETF

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

The NO FAKES Act Could Silence Satire, Commentary, And News

The NO FAKES Act is supposed to target harmful AI-generated impersonations. But in reality, it will make it easier to suppress commentary, satire, and other lawful speech. That's why EFF has signed a letter urging the Senate Judiciary Committee not to advance the bill in its current form. Take action Tell Congress to Say No to NO FAKES In the letter, EFF joins a coalition of civil society groups i…

Onward, Friends

After 26 years, today is my last day at EFF. It's been a terrific and wild ride — the organization has grown from a tiny band of fighty people trying to plant a flag for freedom and justice in the coming digital world into a large, established band of fighty people doing, well, much the same. The world around us has changed enormously. Our core values haven't budged. I'm proud of what we've achiev…

EFFecting Change: LGBTQ+ Solidarity Against the Tide of Surveillance

LGBTQ+ communities are facing an escalating wave of censorship and targeted surveillance, but we can push back through mutual solidarity. Join us live to learn how safer virtual spaces get built, how platform policies and government pressure are reshaping the digital landscape, and what platform accountability actually looks like. Our panel will share ideas for direct action and concrete strategie…

Victory! 702 has Expired!

Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act lets US intelligence agencies collect communications from foreigners abroad without a warrant, and routinely sweeps in Americans’ emails, messages, and calls in the process. The authority for this program is set to expire Friday, June 12th, 2026, at midnight. As we wrote earlier this week, Congress has been kicking the ball down the road for…

Yes to California's Bill to Ban Surveillance Pricing

Corporations harvest and monetize ever-growing amounts of our personal data, such as our browsing history and physical location. One bitter fruit of this poisonous tree is known as “surveillance pricing”: corporations offer the same product to two different people at two different prices, based on scrutiny of these people’s respective personal data. Surveillance pricing is bad for privacy, equity,…

‘News’ Site Keeps Hallucinating EFF Staffers

What do EFF staffers Sarah Chen, Javier Morales, Caitlin Chin, Emma Rodriguez, and Mikko Kopponen have in common?  For one thing, they don’t exist.  For another, all have been quoted as EFF experts in articles published in the past two months on a site called News-USA Today, which describes itself as “an independent news publisher focused on clear, accurate, and useful journalism.”  Uh…  (Please d…

LGBT Q&A: We’re Back With Season 2! 

Last June during Pride, we launched a new initiative—LGBT Q&A—where we answered your most pressing queer-related digital rights questions on EFF’s Instagram and TikTok accounts. No question was too big or too small! You asked us things like what pictures to use on dating apps; how to remove your name from internet searches; why homophobic content doesn't get removed after you report it; and how to…

Congress Just Rushed Through a Disastrous Copyright Office Overhaul

In a voice vote earlier this week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 6028, the “Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act.” The legislation is presented as a technical reorganization of some government agencies, but it’s much more than that.  H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office, and not in a good way. The bill removes the Library of Congress’ current superviso…

The 702 Ultimatum: Warrant Requirement or Bust

For months now, Congress has been kicking the ball down the road—temporarily postponing the expiration of the mass surveillance authority Section 702 of FISA in hopes that some consensus could be reached. Now, with the deadline looming, the stakes have never been higher. Nearly every time the statute has come up for renewal, the people demanding privacy and civil liberties have had to compromise,…

Enshittification Merch That Actually Fights Enshittification 

Enshittification isn't just a sweary word to describe the accelerating decay of the online platforms, apps, and services that we rely on.   It's a framework for understanding the structural incentives that make tech companies enemies of their own users over time—the surveillance business model, the erosion of privacy, the monopoly power that eliminates alternatives, the regulatory capture that pre…

🔊 Mass Surveillance for… Loud Music? | EFFector 38.11

Across the country, surveillance companies have spun a vast web of tens of thousands of license plate cameras. The people selling this tech want you to believe that it's for your safety, but how are authorities really using automated license plate readers (ALPR)? In this week's EFFector newsletter, we're looking at how these powerful surveillance networks have become universal people-trackers used…

Who Runs the Ransomware Group ‘The Gentlemen?’

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

How and Why to Fight Back Against Social Media Bans

Several U.S. states are pushing to ban young people from social media entirely. This marks the latest wave of censorship bills masquerading as “children’s online safety” measures, with states like Massachusetts, Idaho, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, and EFF’s home state of California leading the charge. Just a few years ago, lawmakers supporting age-gating laws insisted their…

A Record-Breaking Patch Tuesday for June 2026

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

Tell Congress: Just Say No to NO FAKES

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to consider and vote on the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act (NO FAKES). Instead of targeting the real privacy harms posed by AI-generated replicas, this law would create another layer of internet censorship on top of the already existing legal and voluntary takedown systems. Congress should reject NO FAKES. Take action Tell Congr…

VICTORY: Meta Strips Facial Recognition Code From Smart Glasses App After Public Outcry

Just days after a damning WIRED report exposed that Meta had quietly embedded facial recognition technology (FRT) code into millions of phones, the tech giant has quietly acquiesced in demands to reverse course. Last week, researchers identified code in Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, that could convert images of faces into unique biometric signatures to identify strangers…

Cheers to the Winners of EFF’s 18th Annual Cyberlaw Trivia Night! 

On a warm June evening in San Francisco, attorneys and other legally-minded friends of EFF gathered for our 18th Annual Cyberlaw Trivia Night, an annual test of tech-related legal knowledge, and the ability to remember some deeply obscure facts under pressure.  Returning Quizmaster Kurt Opsahl once again guided competitors through six rounds of trivia covering everything from intellectual property…

Internet Age Gates Are a Growing Global Threat

The internet is an essential resource for young people and adults to access information, explore community, and find themselves—both inside countries and across continents. Yet governments around the world continue to introduce and implement legislation requiring all online users to verify their ages before accessing the digital space. In some cases, politicians are going further, putting forth pr…

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

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

Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested the co-owners of two related Internet hosting companies for operating IT infrastructure used by Russia to carry out cyberattacks, influence operations and disinformation campaigns inside the European Union. The two men were the focus of a 2025 KrebsOnSecurity story about how their hosting companies had assumed control over the technical infrastructure o…

Lawmakers Demand Answers as CISA Tries to Contain Data Leak

Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after KrebsOnSecurity reported this week that a CISA contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. The inquiry comes as CISA is still struggling to contain the breach and invalidate the leaked cred…

Alleged Kimwolf Botmaster ‘Dort’ Arrested, Charged in U.S. and Canada

Canadian authorities on Wednesday arrested a 23-year-old Ottawa man on suspicion of building and operating Kimwolf, a fast spreading Internet-of-Things botnet that enslaved millions of devices for use in a series of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the past six months. KrebsOnSecurity publicly named the suspect in February 2026 after the accused launched a volley of DDoS,…