Terminal

Trump Slaps a 100% Tariff On Heavy and 'Sensitive' Drones

President Trump has imposed tariffs of up to 100% on heavier and "sensitive" drones, including models over 55 pounds or equipped with docking stations or thermal imaging. "Those include commercial models from DJI and others used for operations like power line inspection, crop spraying and search and rescue, along with any parts used in their manufacturing," reports Engadget. Meanwhile, smaller dro…

A Contract-Grade Verifier for LLM-Generated GPU Kernels

Discrete Fourier Transform by Hand

Count Binface receives over a quarter of votes in Clacton by-election

Show HN: LuaCAD – Parametric CAD Scripted in Lua

The Qdrant Output Connector

Maximizing the value of your Claude Code sessions

RustDesk now supports true unattended remote access on Wayland

Ars Live recap: How can we stop publishers from killing their own games?

Video Game Preservation: Saving Yesterday's Games for Tomorrow's Players | Ars Live This week, Ars hosted a live discussion with Ross Scott about the Stop Killing Games movement and its ongoing efforts to ensure that games remain playable even after the original publisher shuts down the online servers undergirding them. Scott talked with Ars Technica Senior Gaming Editor Kyle Orland, saying said…

France's top court blocks social media ban for under-15s

RayforceDB – a pure C analytics database with a Lisp-like syntax

Apple Wants to Charge Developers Up to 15 Percent for Linking Outside the App Store

Apple is proposing to charge U.S. developers up to 15% when users leave an app through an external purchase link, with lower rates of 10% or 5% for certain programs and smaller developers. The proposal follows years of litigation with Epic Games and a contempt ruling that temporarily barred Apple from collecting any link-out fees. A federal judge will now decide what commission, if any, is reasona…

AI by Hand

"Solving a largely imaginary user goal"

Judge gives Google one week to fix "anticompetitive" app store download in Google Play

Google began offering third-party app store downloads in the Play Store earlier this week, but US District Judge James Donato says the company isn't doing enough. After reviewing the process for accessing the first non-Google store, Donato ruled that Google has added unnecessary "anticompetitive friction," ordering the company to rectify the issues. While Epic and Google are patching things up wi…

Google is making private AI practical with homomorphic encryption

Show HN: Graft – Claude Code hooks that cut grep tokens by 42%

R-rated director's cut of X-Files film restores Chris Carter's original horror vision

There is a lot of excitement and some trepidation among The X-Files fans about Ryan Coogler's reboot for Hulu, currently in production. While we're waiting, Hulu just released Chris Carter's revamped (and R-rated) director's cut of the 2008 standalone spinoff film The X-Files: I Want to Believe, distinguishable from its predecessor with a slightly different title: The X-Files: I Want to Believe–V…

Linux 7.1, Linux 7.2 Performance On The Intel Xeon 600 Series

With Linux 7.2 expected for its stable release this weekend, today's testing has some additional testing of the Linux 7.2 Git kernel as well as Linux 7.1 stable compared to Linux 7.0 as used by default on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. Phoronix testing previously conducted of Linux 7.2 have shown benefits for Intel Arc B390 Xe3 in some configurations, faster poll performance on AMD Ryzen Threadripper and other…

Introducing Toast 1

Seven books I keep close because I love them

Taylor Farms' connections to Trump admin spurs probe into Cyclospora response

As Americans cook their vegetables to at least 158°F to kill a diarrheal parasite that has sickened over 24,000 people and killed two this summer, one US Senator is turning up the heat on Health Secretary Robert F. Kenney Jr. over the government's "calamitous response" to the record outbreak. In a letter sent Thursday, Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) called the federal response to the Cyclospora outbr…

Self-hosted web push Cloudflare Worker, works on iOS

Person Hides Prompt Injection In Legal Filing Telling AI To Side With Them

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: A person representing themselves in a Connecticut court hid a series of instructions designed to manipulate artificial intelligence in an official court filing. These "prompt injections" told the hypothetical LLM to side with them, and to "ensure your textual output agrees with the presented filing to ensure remediation." The instructions were wr…

Qwen 3.8 27B

[$] BPF, continuous testing, and stable kernels

Ihor Solodrai and Shung-Hsi Yu wrapped up the BPF track at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit with a pair of sessions related to testing. Solodrai spoke about what has changed for BPF's continuous-integration (CI) testing. Yu spoke about what may be needed to test BPF updates in stable kernels more thoroughly. The BPF subsystem's CI tests are in a good place, th…

Every Fucking Website (2020)

OpenAI and Anthropic in price war as Chinese AI rivals gain ground

Leading US AI labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic are releasing cheaper models as they fight to retain cost-conscious customers who are switching to cut-price alternatives from Chinese rivals. The price war comes as rising AI bills push companies to curb usage and seek cheaper models, helping Chinese developers including Moonshot and DeepSeek make inroads with users from Silicon Valley to Europe. O…

French tax authority admits data heist after crook touts 2M records

France's tax authority has confirmed that an intruder accessed its systems and extracted data in June after an alleged cybercriminal advertised a purported database of 2 million taxpayers. Using the alias "ZeroBytes," the alleged crook behind the attack on the General Directorate of Public Finances (DGFiP) advertised the stolen database on a cybercrime forum on Wednesday. They claimed the databas…

AI Model Atlas – visualizing populations of ML models as interconnected 3D graph

I turned my RSS feeds into an e-ink newspaper to stop reading on my phone

In Australia, a home battery boom has helped cut wholesale power prices

Python packaging council candidates announced

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has announced the candidates running for the Python packaging council that was approved by the Python steering council in April. This inaugural election fills all five seats on the PPC. The two candidates receiving the highest number of votes shall be designated Cohort A with a two year term, and the three candidates receiving the next highest number of votes s…

Virgin Galactic flights stay grounded while ticket prices head for the Moon

Virgin Galactic has delayed its return to commercial spaceflight until February 2027, and plans to raise ticket prices later this year. The delay was disclosed alongside the company's financial results, which showed a net loss of $56 million for the second quarter of 2026, down from $67 million a year earlier. Revenue for the quarter was $0.1 million, compared to $0.4 million in 2025. According t…

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind, bind9.16, and dracut), Debian (apr-util, chromium, postgresql-17, python-httplib2, unzip, and zip), Fedora (erlang-cowboy, erlang-cowlib, flatpak, and libnfs), Gentoo (Apache HTTPD, Bubblewrap, Dnsmasq, Exim, Flatpak, libinput, and rsync), Mageia (dhcpcd, qemu, and roundcubemail), Oracle (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind,…

Cursor is now a part of SpaceX

Autonomous AI attacks pose 'clear and present danger' to critical infrastructure

In early July, attackers used open source AI agents to autonomously hack government systems and energy companies, signaling to defenders that AI-powered attacks against critical infrastructure are no longer theoretical. "There is a clear and present danger," Tom Kellermann, TrendAI VP of AI security and threat research, told The Register. "As the geopolitical tension boils, systemic destructive c…

HashAgent – Share an AI agent as a URL, runs locally via WebGPU

Less than a year on, Microsoft tells Mico to pipe down

Microsoft has yanked Mico from the Copilot spotlight less than a year after unveiling the anthropomorphic assistant intended to make its AI a little less soulless. As part of Microsoft's announcement that its consumer and work Copilot applications will merge, the company confirmed that the weird blob thing would shuffle out of Copilot Voice and into Learn Live, a voice-based study mode that guide…

The TEMU-Fication of Software, Digital Goods and Services

TalkTalk Business and ARO to borg into UK tech services giant

TalkTalk Business and UK technology services biz ARO plan to merge, creating what they say will be one of the country's largest communications and managed services providers. The pair claim the combined organization will be "uniquely positioned" to serve as a single technology partner for British firms pursuing digital transformation. It will have annual revenue of about £200 million ($270 millio…

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

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

Rocket Report: Rocket Lab shows off its flexibility; Blue Origin's two-pad plan

Welcome to Edition 9.06 of the Rocket Report! Rocket Lab made a lot of news this week with its quarterly update, and it is clear the company is making impressive progress as it becomes much more than a launch company. But at the end of the day, a lot of the company's success is predicated on the Neutron vehicle, and I'm not thrilled with Rocket Lab's ambiguity around its readiness. As a user on X…

Features Coming For Linux 7.3 From Optimizing Intel Hybrid CPUs To Old AMD Athlon XPs

With Linux 7.2 expected to see its stable debut Sunday, here is a look at what I have been monitoring as changes expected to be submitted during the Linux 7.3 merge window that will open on Monday...…

Samsung Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra review: The ultra foldable with an ultra price

Samsung has largely defined the foldable phone category, but it's no longer alone in releasing flexible devices. Google, Motorola, and a raft of Chinese OEMs have their own take on this form factor. Is the new Galaxy Z Fold 8 Ultra really "ultra" enough to remain on top? This phone doesn't have the wide frame of the new Z Fold 8, instead matching the approximate size and shape of the company’s la…

Three Supermassive Black Holes Discovered In a Single Galaxy For the First Time

Astronomers using JWST have found three actively feeding supermassive black holes in the distant galaxy J0148-4214, seen as it existed about 1.2 billion years after the Big Bang. Two sit just 620 light-years apart near the galaxy's center and are expected to merge within a few hundred million years. Phys.org reports: Theories of galaxy evolution -- based on observations -- suggest that, early in t…

Crypto wallet maker Trezor confirms 13,000 customers' details exposed in logistics breach

Cryptocurrency hardware wallet maker Trezor has confirmed that a breach at one of its shipping partners exposed the personal data of more than 13,000 customers. The company's initial findings suggested the breach was limited to orders placed in certain countries during the previous 90 days. New information indicates that earlier orders may also be affected. The breach exposed the names, email add…

Why does Opus 5 feel worse to work with?

Patches Posted For Fixing The Linux DRM Scheduler's Fair Policy

Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected out on Sunday, the Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem was forced to revert their "fair" scheduler policy default new for this kernel. Due to a last minute user-reported regression, FIFO returns as the default DRM scheduler policy for Linux 7.2. But patches are now available for addressing that regression and thus hopefully for Linux 7.3 there wi…

DeepSeek peak/off-peak pricing update

Open-Source exFAT Programs 1.4.3 Improves Fsck & Mkfs

Ahead of the Linux 7.2 kernel release expected on Sunday, a new release of the exFAT file-system user-space programs was released overnight...…

Slackware-Based Zenwalk Linux Aims For "True Low Latency Desktop Experience"

It's been a long time since hearing much out of the Zenwalk project, the Linux distribution built off Slackware. It's still around though and with their latest kernel work are hoping for a "true low latency desktop experience" by employing the BORE scheduler...…

BOFH: How our Covid ransomware protocol's Y2K blockchain lowered uptime

EPISODE 15: The Boss has popped into Mission Control to remind us to send him the numbers he needs for his monthly management report. Once's he's gone the PFY sighs, makes up a set of numbers, appends believable exponents, adds some fancy sounding units to the end and then sends them to through a script file to convert them into something the Boss can use. None of it matters, as no one cares abou…

Scottish prosecutors cast eye over leaky supplier after staff data exposed

Scotland's public prosecution service has warned 300 staff that their personal information may have been caught up in a cyberattack on one of its suppliers. The Crown Office and Procurator Fiscal Service (COPFS) disclosed the incident on Thursday, saying an unnamed third-party supplier detected suspicious activity on August 5 and subsequently launched an investigation. COPFS said its own systems…

Claude Code returns blank thinking blocks, but reasoning still costs you

Anthropic's Claude Code appears to be having trouble displaying summaries of its "thinking," according to several bug reports, while the underlying reasoning tokens still cost money. According to complaints, the API has been returning empty thinking blocks for Opus 4.8 and Sonnet 5 even when users explicitly request summarized thinking. Models from several sources can display their "thinking," a…

Organic-looking brake assemblies debut on new Czinger 21C Spyder

Across California, it's time for Monterey Car Week, a cluster of events I once called "Comic-Con and the Oscars but with wheels." For the last however many years, though, it's mostly felt like an accumulation of rich people and influencers all crammed into the now-traffic-snarled peninsula, each paying 10 times the normal price for five-night minimums in three-star motels. While being there in pe…

Scientists Turn Starlink Into a Giant Scanner For Earth's Upper Atmosphere

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily: Researchers have found a clever new way to map a part of Earth's upper atmosphere that is notoriously difficult to observe. Using orbital data from roughly 1,200 Starlink satellites, they reconstructed changes in atmospheric density about 500 kilometers above Earth. [...] The resulting density patterns also showed strong consistency with observa…

Five years after quitting a job, developer’s former boss asked for rapid tech support

ON CALL “I can't stand it, I know you planned it, I'm gonna set it straight, this Watergate” is the opening of the Beastie Boys classic Sabotage, a fact we mention as it will soon become pertinent to today’s edition of On Call, The Register’s weekly reader-contributed column that shares your tech support stories. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Wade” who in the mid-1980s made a crust…

GLM-5.3: Frontier coding with emergent cyber capabilities

UK Scientists To Grow Miniature Human Organs For Drug Testing

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Miniature human organs and other tissues are to be grown from NHS patients' cells in a drive to improve medicine testing and reduce the number of animals used in drug development. Scientists will use the clumps of tissue to learn how diseases vary between patients, helping them identify which treatments are best for different people based on t…

New Zealand says China tried using space investments to spy on local affairs

New Zealand’s Security Intelligence Service (NZSIS) has claimed Chinese companies are building space facilities in the nation to gather military intelligence. Director-general of security Andrew Hampton yesterday made that allegation in the SIS’s annual threat environment assessment. The document points out that New Zealand’s space sector is booming, because the nation’s location makes it “an ide…

AMD GAIA 0.23 Delivers Ability To Install/Run AI Agents From The Terminal

AMD's GAIA open-source AI software built atop Lemonade for serving as an AI companion for emails, a Bash coding agent, and other AI agent skills is out with a new version today with more features while also improving security and making other improvements...…

OpenAI ditches Recall-style screenshot surveillance for friendly keylogging

If you want to record whatever you do on a computer, send those records to OpenAI, use more ChatGPT tokens, and increase your vulnerability to prompt injection, then OpenAI has something for you. It's called Computer History, an opt-in way to record your computer interactions across apps and websites as memories organized on a timeline. Why would you want to do so? Maybe you found Chronicle, the…

Microsoft Retreats In China

Microsoft has been steadily scaling back its China presence, closing at least 15 branch offices and joint ventures over the past five years as Beijing favors domestic software. U.S. export controls also make it harder to grow its cloud and AI businesses, leaving the market with relatively little economic upside. Reuters reports: Microsoft took a major hit from the erosion of trust between Washingt…

US wait times for cancer surgeries are getting longer and longer

As cancer treatments have advanced and outcomes have improved, one aspect of cancer care in the US has consistently worsened over the last decade: the wait time for surgery. According to a study in JAMA Surgery, patients with one of six types of cancer—breast, colon, lung, pancreatic, gastric, and esophageal—have faced longer wait times for surgery than in 2012. Timeliness is considered a core me…

Google's Gemini 3.7 Flash Targets Coding and Agents With a 50% Price Cut

Google has released Gemini 3.7 Flash just three weeks after 3.6 Flash, focusing on better coding, agentic workflows, and enterprise automation while temporarily cutting API prices in half through the end of 2026. VentureBeat reports: For enterprise developers, the more consequential story may be the combination of those intelligence gains with lower inference costs: through the end of 2026, Gemini…

Microsoft Is Combining Its Copilot Apps Ahead of a 'Super App'

Microsoft is merging its consumer Copilot and Microsoft 365 Copilot apps ahead of a broader "super app" launch later this year. "Both personal and work accounts will be moved to the new unified app, which recycles the 'Microsoft Copilot' name but features an updated app icon," reports The Verge. "The single app also means there won't be two annoying Copilot icons in the system tray or taskbar anym…

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

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

Give Google the boot by building your own search engine

If you're fed up with search results drowning out the bits of the web you actually care about, you could always build your own search index, as one developer did. Nottingham, UK-based software dev Alex Morley-Finch built the open-source project dubbed Marlin for himself, cataloging around 560,000 homepages for roughly $10 in rented cloud GPU time and using less than a gigabyte of disk storage. Mo…

KDE, Techpaladin & Kubuntu Focus Announce The Bullet-Proof KDE Software Initiative

KDE e.V. along with Linux PC vendor Kubuntu Focus and KDE-aligned consulting firm Techpaladin Software have announced a collaboration of the "bullet-proof KDE Software initiative" for providing at least three years of bug fixes and security updates to KDE Plasma 6.6 LTS and related software...…

Amazon Will Train On Twitch Streamers' Content By Default, Unless They Opt Out

Twitch will begin allowing Amazon to use streamers' content to train generative AI models by default, requiring creators to manually opt out if they don't want their videos and audio included. The decision has drawn backlash from creators, with Twitch's own product chief acknowledging that an opt-in system would likely attract almost no participants. "Why is it not opt-in? That's what everybody is…

The Best Linux 7.2 Features: Cache Aware Scheduling, AMD Zen 6, AMDGPU HDMI 2.1 FRL

With the Linux 7.2 kernel expected to be released on Sunday, 16 August, here is a look at some of the most interesting new features and changes to find with this next kernel version to be used by Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases...…

Private security firms will soon be allowed to hack overseas cybercriminals

The Trump administration is recruiting private security firms to conduct federal government-authorized operations, including cyberattacks, against overseas-based criminal organizations that commit hacks on US persons, organizations, or government entities. In a National Security Presidential Memorandum issued Thursday, US President Donald Trump directed the National Coordination Center (NCC), whi…

Virgin Galactic wants your help naming its new Delta class spaceship

As Virgin Galactic nears christening the first of its next-generation spaceship designed to launch customers on suborbital flights, it still is missing a key component—a name. The self-described "commercial spaceline," which was founded by British tycoon Richard Branson, has turned to the public to vote on what to call the new vehicle. The spaceplane will be a member of Virgin Galactic's Delta-cl…

Updated Coreboot/Dasharo For MSI PRO Z690-A / Z790-P Motherboards, Adds Overclocking

In addition to 3mdeb providing their Coreboot-based Dasharo built atop AMD openSIL on a Gigabyte EPYC server motherboard and recently making their first Dasharo release for an AMD Ryzen AM5 platform with the MSI PRO B850-P WIFI, the firmware consulting firm today released updated versions of their MSI PRO Z690-A and MSI PRO Z790-P Dasharo ports to those Intel Core motherboards...…

Domas: Bypassing memory protection with AMD's memory controllers

Christopher Domas has published a proof of concept with a description showing how to use AMD memory controllers' bank swizzle mode to bypass memory protection and read or write arbitrary data, including CPU microcode definitions and memory belonging to the platform security processor. Among other things, this allows code running at the kernel level to directly manipulate the meaning of processor…

Microsoft's dueling Copilot apps have combined into a single entity

Microsoft’s consumer Copilot app and Microsoft 365 Copilot are separate no more, with a unified Copilot app beginning its rollout Thursday - minus a few features. The Windows maker and AI pusher announced the Copilot superapp rollout in a help page update Thursday, describing the move as a way to simplify its app ecosystem and make the entire Copilot-first experience “more cohesive” for both cons…

Anthropic Could Be Worth $2 Trillion When It Goes Public

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times: Anthropic investors expect the AI startup to float at a valuation of $2 trillion or more in October, a dizzying figure that would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab's debut the largest-ever initial public offering. Half a dozen of the company's backers told the FT that Anthropic's rapidly rising revenue would enable it to more than doub…

Ukrainian drones wipe out entire US tank brigade in live war game

Ukrainian drone teams demolished a brigade of US Army tanks and armored vehicles during a live war game held this year—but the US soldiers were lucky enough to get “respawn” attempts while learning from the experience. The semiannual military exercise, called Combined Resolve, gave the US military a firsthand taste of how modern drone warfare has evolved on the battlefields of Ukraine. The Ukrain…

Flock “can’t tech its way out” of the stalker cop problem, experts say

On Thursday, Flock announced plans to require all agencies with access to license plate reader data to use a safety tool that automatically detects abnormal activity and locks out cops who abuse their access to stalk people they know in their personal lives. Flock’s audit assistance tool suspends access when user activity “meets defined criteria for abnormal behavior,” Flock said. The suspension…

World's Largest 106-Foot Electric Plane Takes Maiden Flight In New York

Heart Aerospace's X1, billed as the world's largest battery-electric aircraft, completed a 27-minute maiden flight in New York using more than 1 MW of power and only about $5 worth of electricity. The 106-foot-wingspan demonstrator is a precursor to the company's 30-seat hybrid-electric ES-30 regional airliner, targeted for service in 2031. Interesting Engineering reports: Developed by Heart Aeros…

Pet owners say smart pet feeder outage led to furry ones going unfed

Smart pet-feeder company Petlibro suffered an outage on Tuesday, giving users a harsh reminder of the risks of relying on smart devices. Petlibro makes pet feeders that connect to Wi-Fi and, for setup with Petlibro’s mobile companion app, Bluetooth. Users can set the feeders to automatically dispense food at scheduled times, which is handy for pet care when the owner is out of the home. In a stat…

The new Instagram logo is the perfect embodiment of AI slop

Today, Instagram unveiled a refresh of its wordmark, accompanied by the usual bland corporate platitudes these kinds of announcements are always packaged with. Head of Instagram Adam Mosseri called it “leaner and more modern, with references to the original and the simplicity and craft that’s always made it Instagram.” Sure, Adam. Simplicity and craft are definitely what everyone thinks of when I…

Google announces Gemini 3.7 Flash just three weeks after previous release

Google is announcing a new Gemini model today, but it's not the long-awaited 3.5 Pro. Gemini 3.7 Flash is now rolling out to replace 3.6 Flash, which itself was released only three weeks ago. This new "workhorse" model is supposedly the product of core optimizations and developer feedback, offering improved coding and agentic performance. And Google is hoping to counter the lower cost of some com…

Apple Turns to Publishers For Help With Siri AI

Apple is reportedly negotiating multi-year deals with news publishers to give its redesigned Siri access to current news and other information, with payments potentially tied to how often publishers' content is used. The talks come as Apple prepares to launch its long-delayed Siri AI later this year, after partnering with Google to use distilled Gemini models. Engadget reports: [The Wall Street Jo…

This JCB doesn't dig – it does 406 mph

A JCB has set a new world land speed record, passing 406 mph (653 kph) at Utah's Bonneville Salt Flats. The JCB in question isn't a digger or a dumper, but a hydrogen-powered racer known as the JCB Hydromax, driven by retired Royal Air Force fighter pilot Wing Commander Andy Green. It set the record for the fastest a hydrogen-powered internal combustion car has ever travelled, averaging 406.320 m…

Trump wants to grant private cyber firms a license to hack back

Donald Trump is allowing government agencies to contract private cybersecurity companies to carry out operations against cyber-enabled transnational criminal organizations (CE-TCOs). The US President signed a memo on Wednesday confirming a strategy hinted at earlier this year, saying participating companies can support national operations against criminals, including cyber surveillance and techni…

University of Michigan Drops First-Semester Grades to 'Curb Mental Health Crisis'

"In order to salve the mental health of freshman students, the University of Michigan has implemented a Pass/No Credit system for new students to improve their mental health," writes Slashdot reader Ol Olsoc. "The process, called 'Grade Covering,' is aimed at helping with the mental health crisis that students face by lessening grade pressure." Axios reports: U-M's College of Literature, Science a…

The backup Microsoft never promised you

Confidence in an organization's cyber recovery capabilities deserves scrutiny. If a ransomware attack disables the SaaS data tenanted in the Microsoft cloud ecosystem, the data the business depends on as its lifeblood, the pace at which operations resume rests on assumptions that often prove wrong. Anyone whose answer is "It's all good. Microsoft has my back on this one with its comprehensive nat…

Rivian's 2027 changes include its No. 1 most-requested feature

It's time for Rivian's changeover from model year 2026 to 2027, and the electric vehicle startup has decided to take a page from its recently released R2 SUV and apply it to the company's larger, more expensive R1 line. The changes aren't massive—the R1 got a refresh in 2024 that saw the R1S SUV and R1T pickup each get some comprehensive re-engineering with new powertrain options, a new electroni…

The Beneficial Performance Gains Running The Framework Laptop Pro 13 / Core Ultra X9 388H With Linux 7.1+

The recently launched Framework Laptop 13 Pro powered by Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" runs well on Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and other modern Linux distributions. In the case of Ubuntu 26.04 with Linux 7.0, while everything works, if upgrading to Linux 7.1 or the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is even better performance. Here are benchmarks of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro with Core Ultra X9 388H acro…

Anthropic could be worth $2 trillion when it goes public

Anthropic investors expect the AI startup to float at a valuation of $2 trillion or more in October, a dizzying figure that would eclipse SpaceX and make the AI lab’s debut the largest-ever initial public offering. Half a dozen of the company’s backers told the FT that Anthropic’s rapidly rising revenue would enable it to more than double its current valuation in a planned autumn float. A listing…

We've flown a radiation-blocking vest to the Moon and back, and it worked

Solar storms, like the one in August 1972 that hit during the gap between the Apollo 16 and Apollo 17 missions, throw bursts of protons intense enough to raise an astronaut's cancer risk or even cause radiation sickness. Earth's atmosphere and magnetic field absorb this radiation, but crews heading to the Moon or Mars won't have that protection, and no spacecraft built so far has enough shielding…

rsync 3.5.0 released

Version 3.5.0 of rsync has been released with a huge number of security fixes: This release fixes 33 security issues found during a focused audit of rsync's path handling and daemon protocol, a companion daemon-protocol fuzzing pass, and reports from external researchers -⁠-⁠ plus several robustness hardenings. CVE IDs were assigned by VulnCheck (CNA); the precise "introduced in" version ranges ac…

[$] 128-Bit page tables for Arm

The size of a processor's page-table entries directly limits how much physical memory that processor is able to access. Back in the 32-bit days, that limit was 4GB, an amount of memory that once seemed nearly infinite, but which would now struggle to hold a basic AI-enabled "hello world" app. The expansion to 64 bits on most popular architectures would seem to have removed those limits now; some A…

Mystery attacker spent a year raiding Salesforce and ServiceNow portals

Someone has spent more than a year rifling through Salesforce and ServiceNow portals around the world, harvesting data that organizations accidentally left open to anyone who came looking. Researchers at Reco have named the operation "City-Forum" after a domain connected to its infrastructure. The domain has pointed to the attacker's server since March 2025, although exactly when the campaign beg…

GeForce NOW On Linux Native App Exits Beta

At the beginning of the year NVIDIA released a native build of GeForce NOW for Linux using Flatpaks. Today their native Linux build has exited beta to reach official production status for this cloud gaming solution from NVIDIA...…

Security updates for Thursday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (abrt, dhcpcd, edk2, freerdp, gegl04, grafana, gstreamer1-plugins-good, iscsi-initiator-utils, isns-utils, kernel, kernel-rt, keylime, libarchive, libyang, nodejs-nodemon, opencryptoki, osbuild-composer, pacemaker, postgresql-jdbc, postgresql18, python-idna, python3.9, udisks2, valkey, vim, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manage…

MSI Claw Gamepad Driver Set To Be Merged For Linux 7.3

The MSI Claw Gamepad driver is set to be merged for the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel for enabling RGB lighting and controller configuration support with the mainline kernel...…

Ryanair adds Google to its dual-cloud flight plan

Ryanair has signed a five-year agreement with Google Cloud covering AI, productivity tools and multi-cloud infrastructure, just weeks after renewing its deal with rival AWS for another five years. The Irish budget airline says it will deploy Google Workspace and Google Cloud services across its 35,000-strong workforce as it pursues a target of 300 million passengers a year by 2034. We asked how m…

AWS key exposed in JavaScript may have lit way to Beacon's charity data

Beacon, a CRM provider for charities and nonprofits, says an AWS access key "potentially exposed in public JavaScript build artifacts" is the leading suspect in its July breach. The revelation came in the company's first update on the attack in more than a week. If the access key was exposed in public build artifacts, it raises questions about why Beacon's development pipeline and code review con…

Linux Patches Enable Apple M4 NVMe Support

While the Apple M4 SoCs aren't yet supported by the mainline Linux kernel and the Apple M3 series hardware isn't yet ready for end-users, there are some early elements of the Apple M4 support beginning to come together by open-source developers working on the Apple Silicon support. Sent out to the Linux kernel mailing list were patches for enabling NVMe solid state drive support with the M4...…

Claude's new Scarlet Letter watermark is invisible—for now

Anthropic has revealed that it will soon watermark content that is processed (not just generated!) by any of its models. In a support article, Anthropic explained that it was rolling out machine-readable watermarks to comply with the European Union’s AI Act, which requires all AI system providers to watermark AI-generated or manipulated audio, image, text, and video outputs. The law applies to an…

VA Launches Psilocybin Trial For Veterans With Treatment-Resistant Depression

Longtime Slashdot reader sbinning shares a press release: The U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs announced the launch of a new clinical trial to evaluate the effectiveness and safety of psilocybin to treat major depression in Veterans, including those with concurrent PTSD. The new trial comes after a recent executive order on "Accelerating Medical Treatments for Serious Mental Illness," which aim…

Microsoft's Azure Linux 3.0.20260809 Ships With 233+ CVE Fixes

While Microsoft continues working on Azure Linux 4.0 as its overhauled Linux distribution built atop Fedora, Azure Linux 3.0 remains the current stable production series. Released overnight was Azure Linux 3.0.20260809 and it comes with more than 233 security patches for recent CVEs in the AI era...…

Twitch feeds your streams to Amazon's AI unless you tell it to stop

Twitch has given streamers a switch to stop their channel content being fed into Amazon's generative AI machinery, but naturally it is turned on by default. The Amazon-owned streaming platform has added a "Training for Generative AI" control to channel settings, allowing streamers to opt out of having their content used for future GenAI model improvements. With the setting enabled, Twitch says ch…

Intel XPU Manager 2.1 Released For Monitoring Arc Pro Graphics On Windows/Linux

Intel XPU Manager 2.1 is now available as the latest version of this open-source tool for Linux and Windows systems for the monitoring and management of Arc Pro graphics cards. The Intel XPU Manager helps in keeping an eye on device utilization and other metrics via the xpu-smi command and other components...…

Everything is better with pickles... except Windows

BORK!BORK!BORK! "Everything is better with pickles," trumpets a Wendy's sign. Everything is also better with a helping of bork, if the screen is to be believed. Spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader in Vancouver, the display shows something amiss with Windows Phone Link – although why a PC encouraging customers to drop dollars on a Dill Pickle Chicken Sandwich needs the app is anyone's guess.…

Passwords stored in public Google Doc then showed up in search results

PWNED Welcome, once again, to PWNED, the weekly column where we highlight others’ security failures. Hopefully, there’s a lesson in all this, but it could just be “stop shooting yourself in the foot.” 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. Our story today comes courtesy of Siim Kostabi, co-found…

Cisco thinks Mythos means instant death for unsupported networking kit

Cisco CEO Chuck Robbins says “The Mythos Effect” will see customers scour their networks for unsupported devices and replace them ASAP. Mythos is Anthropic’s bug-finding model and has proven so effective that vendors and open source projects are now finding more security flaws and pushing more patches. Speaking on Cisco’s Q4 earnings call yesterday, Robbins said customers he speaks to are aware o…

Tencent says it could make instant profits on $53B hardware splurge by renting it for AI workloads

Chinese tech giant Tencent has turned its back on instant profits, betting that a new business unit that creates its own AI and embeds that in its products will pay off to a greater extent than cashing in on demand for computing resources. During the company’s Q2 earnings call yesterday, Bernstein analyst Robin Zhu asked when Tencent expects to see a return on investment from the $53 billion capi…

Chinese Loongson processors have leaky caches, researchers find

Researchers from Germany’s Helmholtz Center for Information Security have found processors made by China’s Loongson have leaky caches that attackers could use to seek specific data. Loongson has developed its own LoongArch instruction set architecture (ISA) that blends approaches used by MIPS and RISC-V. On a site called LoongLeakAttack.com, the researchers explain that they found the leaky cache…

Rsync 3.5 Released As "Extraordinary" Update To Fix 33 Security Issues

Rsync as the widely-used, open-source remote sync software for synchronizing files and directories across networks is out today with a very important update...…

Comma.ai Launches A PCIe Gen4 x4 To USB4 Dock With Open-Source Firmware

George Hotz of Comma.ai and Tinygrad today announced the Tiny Chestnut eGPU Dock and the "Chestnut" Dock complete with an AMD Radeon RX 9060 8GB GPU too. Making this Chestnut / Tiny Chestnut Dock interesting is that it runs on open-source firmware...…

OpenAI ad service can bill customers for up to one day after they pause campaigns

OpenAI appears to be serving ads after buyers have halted their campaigns, and charging them for the privilege. OpenAI began testing ad sales in ChatGPT in the US back in February and has been gradually expanding the service in other regions, including the United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil, Japan, and South Korea as of Tuesday. Given that a substantial minority of ChatGPT's user base pays for the se…

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 13, 2026

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: BPF and binfmt_misc; CrossPoint ebook firmware; KVM planes; BPF formal verification; shadow-utils; new storage-code testing features. Briefs: Django releases; GNOME shell; LightDM 1.33.0; QEMU 11.1; uutils 0.10; Software Stewardship Lab; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.…

Rent-a-GPU outfit Nebius promises rapid 1 GW powerup plan isn't nebulous

Rent-a-GPU cloud Nebius plans to bring online over a gigawatt of datacenter capacity every year starting in 2027, but doing so will require playing the margins and juggling a mountain of debt. “Our future capacity pipeline effectively makes Nebius one of just a few companies in the world able to build more than a gigawatt of new capacity a year and we plan to do so in 2027,” CEO Arkady Volozh boa…

'Near-autonomous' AI agents attack Taiwan's nuclear safety agency

Suspected Chinese cyber operatives used publicly available AI tools to compromise Taiwanese government systems before expanding the attack to its nuclear safety agency, supply-chain vendors, and at least seven energy companies in what security researchers called a "near-autonomous attack." Over the first four days of July, AI agents compromised 85 government user accounts and extracted more than…

Deeply buried 16-year-old SQLite bug caused last year's Tailscale outages

Users of peer-to-peer networking outfit Tailscale might have struggled through some surprising outages beginning late last year. After a six-month investigation, the team finally knows why: A bug in SQLite’s write-ahead log that had remained hidden for 16 years. The Tailscale team announced in a Wednesday blog post that it had finally addressed the issue with the help of SQLite maintainers, who e…

Node.js creator liberates Durable Objects from Cloudflare

We've got good news for developers who are enamored with Cloudflare Workers and Durable Objects but don’t want to be tied into that company’s backend infrastructure. Last week, Node.js creator Ryan Dahl unveiled his latest project, celld, which he described on X as “a self-hosted, distributed Durable Objects and Workers implementation.” Dahl’s celld model is compatible with Cloudflare’s Workers a…

Tenstrorrent Posts GCC Compiler Patches For Ascalon XG Core

While the Tenstorrent Ascalon X is known as their high performance out-of-order RISC-V RVA23 CPU core for extreme performance over the H and S models, a new GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) patch today from Tenstorrent makes known a new Ascalon XG core...…

Spectre rears its ugly head again as researchers show some RISC-V chips are susceptible

If you thought that the famous Spectre security vulns were a relic of 2018, think again. Certain RISC-V chips are still very much subject to this hair-raising hole, researchers say. Spectre refers to a family of vulnerabilities related to speculative execution, a performance optimization technique based on predicting the flow of data before instructions have been executed. Incorrect predictions g…

Nvidia's latest solution to soaring enterprise AI costs is...a router?

Soaring AI infrastructure costs and model pricing, combined with uncertain returns on investment, threaten to stall enterprise adoption. To make enterprise AI spend a bit more manageable, Nvidia this week unveiled a new software platform that blurs the line between expensive proprietary models and open weights alternatives. Announced alongside Nemotron 3.5-30B-A3B-Lightning, Nvidia’s latest open…

GCC 17 Compiler Adding "-m128bit-atomic" For 128-bit Atomic Memory Operations

Merged today to the GNU Compiler Collection Git code is the new -m128bit-atomic option for next year's GCC 17 feature release...…

[$] Block-layer error injection

Storage code has to cope with hardware that fails in inconvenient ways, but coaxing a healthy disk into producing those failures on demand, for testing, is usually not possible. The kernel provides several ways to inject block-layer I/O errors, but none of those can select the operation to fail, pick the status code to return, or target a disk directly without employing a stacked device on top. Us…

Manjaro Linux 26.1 Released With GNOME 50 & KDE Plasma 6.7 Desktops

Manjaro 26.1 Bian-May is now available as the newest feature release to this desktop Linux distribution built atop an Arch Linux base...…

Microsoft-vendetta hacker has a new zero day that gives system privileges on fully patched Windows

Nightmare Eclipse, the serial zero-day hunter who has an axe to grind with Microsoft, published a new Defender zero-day, ShieldBreak, that apparently bypasses Redmond’s RoguePlanet patch (CVE-2026-50656), allowing attackers to gain SYSTEM privileges on fully patched Windows 10, Windows 11, and Windows Server systems. According to at least one other researcher, the exploit works. “I've tried it, i…

Intel AMX Performance With The Xeon 678X Workstation CPU

One of the most compelling features for Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids alongside MRDIMMs is Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) for helping accelerate AI workloads and more. AMX is also found with the new Granite Rapids WS processors and in currently having my hands on an Intel Xeon 678X in the HP Z4 G6i workstation, I ran some benchmarks looking at the AMX performance and power impact for this high-end…

OpenWALDO aims to blow the doors off proprietary AI training models

A new project aims to build a shared, open source AI training dataset that anyone can contribute to, much like an open source software project. It aims to make training data more transparent than that of many open-weight models that have recently taken the industry by storm. CentOS and Rocky Linux founder Gregory Kurtzer is behind the effort, dubbed Open Weights, Artifacts, Licenses, Data, Origin…

CoreWeave revenue doubles as debt pile reaches $35.6B

Neocloud operator CoreWeave remains bullish about its prospects, claiming that changing patterns of AI use will create sustained demand for its cloud services. The New Jersey firm is among the most prominent rent-a-GPU businesses spawned by demand for AI training infrastructure, but is now attempting to move up the technology stack – a shift consultants at McKinsey said neoclouds would need to ma…

[$] A look at CrossPoint e-reader firmware

There are a number of small, inexpensive, low-powered e-reader or e-paper devices that have promise as ebook readers with one minor problem: the firmware they ship with does not realize their full potential. To solve that problem, the CrossPoint Reader project looks to provide replacement firmware that offers necessary features, better performance, and a more pleasant reading experience. On August…

QEMU 11.1 released

Version 11.1 of the QEMU emulator has been released. The release contains more than 3,200 commits from 285 authors and includes a long list of improvements; see the announcement and changelog for the details.…

Smooth-talking fraudsters clone contactless cards, authorize payments in just 13 minutes

A new social engineering and malware campaign targets Android users, stealing card details to make payments or withdraw cash. Group-IB discovered the campaign, calling it WindRelay, and found that several successful attacks were carried out on European victims within the space of a 13-minute phone call. The attack relies on a skilled social engineer walking the victim through the process and two…

Sovereign AI overcomes compliance challenges and feeds innovation in public sector and other regulated industries, say HPE and NVIDIA

Enterprises must "feed" their AI ventures with reliable, well-curated data if they want worthwhile returns. But new mandates governing AI deployments also require them to act as careful custodians of their data, along with the infrastructure, supply chain, software and other aspects of their IT landscape. Sovereign AI gives an enterprise, or even a nation state, complete control over how its AI s…

Uber Freight keeps on trucking after extortion crew breaks in

Uber Freight says it is investigating a "data security incident" days after the Helix extortion group listed the company on its data leak site on August 6. Helix claims to have stolen nearly 1 million files from mailboxes, OneDrive accounts, the accounts receivable department, and other repositories. An Uber Freight spokesperson told The Register that the incident was under investigation but had…

Linux Finally Seeing Patches For Better Hybrid Graphics On 2018~2019 Era MacBook Pros

Patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list provide support for Apple GMUX hybrid graphics support on 2018~2019 Apple MacBook Pros. This allows for better power savings on these nearly decade old MacBook Pro laptops by allowing the discrete GPU to power down and be properly restored as needed...…

Intel ANV Driver Enables Vulkan Video AV1 Encoding For DG2/Alchemist GPUs

Hyunjun Ko of Igalia continues working on Vulkan Video support for Intel graphics hardware on Linux with the ANV driver. Merged now for Mesa 26.3-devel is enabling AV1 video encoding via Vulkan Video on DG2/Alchemist hardware...…

Exposed: Woeful security at UK criminal records office that led to sensitive data leak

The UK's criminal records office, ACRO, has escaped a fine and received a regulatory reprimand after security failings potentially exposed highly sensitive data belonging to nearly 11,000 people. ACRO disclosed the "cybersecurity incident" in April 2023, and said at the time that it had no evidence to suggest that any data was compromised. However, it has now emerged that attackers maintained per…

Security updates for Wednesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (fence-agents, firefox, frr10, gstreamer1-plugins-good, iscsi-initiator-utils, isns-utils, kernel, kernel-rt, perl-DBI:1.641, postgresql, postgresql:12, and resource-agents), Debian (libgd2, openjdk-25, php7.4, php8.2, and postfix), Fedora (clamav, domoticz, and libidn), Red Hat (delve, edk2, firefox, go-fdo-client, go-fdo-server, grafana, host-meteri…

Akira ransomware scum blocked victim's security tools – and broke their own encryptor

An Akira ransomware affiliate rebooted a victim’s computer into Safe Mode to kill its security tools – and in the process sabotaged their own malware when the limited-function startup mode also broke their encryptor. “Akira's encryptor is engineered for speed, relying on concurrent worker threads and heavy memory mapping rather than simple sequential read-and-write operations. That high-performan…

How Voyager engineers found two more years in a 50-year-old power budget

SPACE EXTENDERS Adding a few extra years to Voyager 2's prodigiously long life was the result of an effort that began more than a year ago, as engineers and managers pondered how to eke out a few more watts from the spacecraft's dwindling power supply. "We came up with the 'Big Bang' idea probably more than a year ago now," recalls Suzanne Dodd, Project Manager for the Voyager project. "We were l…

Brit rail cops bring live facial recognition to the London Underground

British Transport Police is expanding its trial of live facial recognition (LFR) to the London Underground, despite concerns about privacy and mistaken identification. The force, which polices railways across England, Scotland, and Wales, will begin its Tube deployments at Victoria Underground station. The cameras will then rotate between Underground and Network Rail stations until the trial ends…

Big Cloud is poised to corner the market for enterprise hardware

OPINION Whenever I talk to execs from hyperscale clouds, they suggest it is their destiny to eventually host the majority of enterprise workloads. That future is now in sight because the AI boom has shown how they can use their financial muscle to command the hardware supply chain. Nutanix CEO Rajiv Ramaswami made the situation plain in May when he pointed out that the fastest way to access a new…

Linux 7.2 To Revert Back To The FIFO DRM Scheduler Policy Due To "Fair" Regressions

One of the Direct Rendering Manager changes made for Linux 7.2 was switching to "fair" as the DRM scheduler default in place of the existing FIFO policy. The intent was on making the DRM scheduler policy more fair with this being used by AMDGPU and various other DRM kernel graphics drivers. But due to a last minute regression report, the fair policy is being reverted for Linux 7.2...…

Mold 2.42 Delivering Greater Performance For This High Speed Linker

It's been quiet since the Mold 2.41 release back in April while today it's now been succeeded by Mold 2.42 for deliver even greater performance out of this high speed linker...…

Intel LLM-Scaler Ready With Muse Glimmer Support, Other LLMs & Features

Intel's LLM-Scaler project that was born out of their Project Battlematrix initiative aims to make it easier to run generative AI on Arc (Pro) B-Series graphics cards with the likes of vLLM, ComfyUI, SGLang, and other popular AI software in this Docker-based pre-configured AI stack. This week new LLM-Scaler releases brought same-day support for new models and other enhancements...…

We don't serve pies, but we do like a Pi

BORK!BORK!BORK! There is an old IT truism that the best tip anybody can give is "turn it off and turn it on again." But this is probably not the sort of tip that the staff at this London pub were expecting. Today's entry into the world of embedded borks comes from the tipping machine in a London pub, spotted by an eagle-eyed Register reader. Tipping culture has yet to take root in the UK to the s…

LACT 0.10 Released With New NVIDIA Overclocking Controls, Blackwell Hotspot Sensor

LACT is one of the popular third-party Linux GPU configuration and monitoring utilities that works across NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel graphics. This GUI provides GPU overclocking controls plus a wealth of information reporting, which is especially great considering the lack of any official GUI control panel for AMD Radeon and Intel Arc graphics on Linux. With today's LACT 0.10 release, there are yet mo…

UK puts £14B cloud framework in place with SMEs promised a bigger slice

The British government has awarded places on its latest G-Cloud procurement framework, through which the public sector could spend an estimated £14 billion ($18.9 billion) over four years. Whitehall hopes smaller UK suppliers will capture more of that business than they have in the past. G-Cloud 15 is billed as the most significant upgrade to the UK's public sector cloud procurement framework sin…

Agents made my retro tech safe to use again and showed their real value as testers of ideas

Over the years, my home has become something of an Island of Misfit Kit because it’s filled with ancient computers, all of them well and truly out of support. Most still work but it was always inadvisable to use them, and more so since Mythos came along. So I mostly left them alone until a few months ago when I decided to see if an agent could help to revive a 15 year old device with a tiny CPU,…

Zuck’s Chinese agentic prey escapes, will resume standalone ops

China’s decision not to allow Meta to acquire local AI outfit Manus AI has become reality, with the upstart advising users it will soon “return to operating as an independent company.” Manus burst onto the AI scene in March 2025 with a “general agent” that allowed users assign tasks to an AI. To illustrate its powers, Manus claimed it could select the best candidate for a job by evaluating job ap…

QEMU 11.1 Released With Numerous Improvements

For those using QEMU as part of the open-source virtualization stack, QEMU 11.1 is now available with a number of new feature enhancements and fixes...…

India’s central bank wants AI to approve loans that humans would reject

The governor of India’s Reserve Bank wants the nation’s financial institutions to use AI to approve loans that human assessors would likely reject. In a speech delivered yesterday at the FIBAC conference in Mumbai, Sanjay Malhotra said the regulator “sees AI as a capability to be responsibly harnessed and not merely as a risk to be contained,” then offered several reasons to support that statemen…

Redox OS Enjoys installer Improvements, Performance Enhancements

A new blog post out today from the Redox OS crew highlights all of the interesting improvements made to this Rust-based, open-source operating system over the course of July...…

Modular's Mojo programming language hits 1.0 milestone

Modular's Mojo reached its 1.0 milestone on Tuesday, promising developers a stable, production-ready, general-purpose programming language. But its primary purpose is more specific: to unify the AI software stack by providing a way to target the diverse set of GPUs, CPUs, ASICs, and other heterogeneous systems that are used to run AI workloads. Mojo, in conjunction with the MAX inference framewor…

Microsoft Plugs Nearly 400 Security Holes

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

Who (or What) Generates Images for EFF?

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

Intel CPU Microcode 20260811 Release Fixes Eight Security Issues

Intel today published their 20260811 CPU microcode updates to fix a variety of issues for existing processors, including shipping the first new microcode images for Bartlett Lake and Wildcat Lake. The new microcode updates stretch back to Intel Core Gen10 processors...…

OpenAI Brings ChatGPT Desktop App To Linux

OpenAI announced today they have brought their ChatGPT Desktop application to Linux and is currently in preview form...…

[$] KVM planes head for takeoff

Virtualization places a guest system into a separate security domain, typically with fewer privileges than software running directly on the host. Increasingly, there is interest in creating multiple security domains within a single virtualized system as well. CPU vendors (and software vendors too) are implementing solutions; each of which, of course, is different from all of the others. KVM planes…

Analyzing Fedora's Slow Performance On The Framework Laptop 13 Pro With Intel Panther Lake

As part of my recent Linux testing of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro I had recently benchmarked six Linux distributions on the Framework Laptop 13 Pro. CachyOS was the fastest to not much surprise but arguably the most surprising aspect was finding Fedora Workstation 44 typically running slower than the five other modern Linux distributions benchmarked. Here's a follow-up to that with more Fedora Lin…

Bernard: GNOME Shell design dreams

GNOME contributor Tobias Bernard has published a blog post that details some of the design team's ideas for the GNOME Shell over the long term: Some of these we have relatively complete plans for, others are more vague ideas that need more research and prototyping. As always, getting things like these implemented depends on developer capacity and interest (and sometimes funding). While each of the…

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gpsd), Debian (caddy, libyaml-syck-perl, nss, and wordpress), Fedora (chezmoi, chromium, emacs, kernel, knot, libcupsfilters, mingw-gstreamer1-plugins-good, mingw-libidn, mingw-python-pip, nghttp2, p11-kit, python-webob, suricata, and xen), Mageia (bind, openslide, php8.4, and php8.5), Oracle (gpsd-minimal, kernel, libarchive, libpng12, nodejs-nodemo…

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

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

Don't classify, hallucinate

Meta Must Stop Silencing Reproductive Health Information

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

Ultraviolet Bird Photography

Canadian Man Pleads Guilty in Snowflake Extortions

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

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

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

Appeals Court Agrees with EFF that Building a Web Browser Doesn’t Violate the CFAA

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

Gödel, Escher, Elisp: The Beauty of Macros

Mobile Ad Software Encourages Location Data Sharing, EFF Report Finds

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

Developers: Beware of Ad Libraries that Betray Your Users’ Location Privacy

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

Technology's Power in the Hands of the People

In the scorching heat of every Las Vegas summer, EFF joins thousands of hackers, makers, policy analysts, and activists for the world's largest computer security gathering. If you're there during this summer security week, be sure to say hello to us at BSides Las Vegas, Black Hat Briefings, and DEF CON 34. While tech companies align with governments to target the people, our community is harnessin…

The Senate Should Reject KOSA's Privacy Risks

Update: The Senate Commerce Committee voted to advance this bill on August 5, 2026. EFF continues to oppose the bill, which still needs approval from the full Senate.  The Senate Commerce Committee is once again considering legislation that would dramatically expand age verification, and undermine privacy for everyone. Alongside the SCREEN Act, the CHATBOT Act, and the Youth AI Privacy Act, the Ki…

EFF Joins 18 Civil Rights Organizations Calling on Governor Hochul to Reject the Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act

EFF joined a group of 18 civil society organizations to send a letter encouraging New York Governor Kathy Hochul to veto Senate Bill 9934A, the New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act. The letter states: While framed as a measure to protect local journalism, this legislation harms free expression and establishes a dangerous precedent by effectively deanonymizing and criminalizing automated access…

EFF Joins Call for FTC to Drop Its Disastrous AI Policy Proposal

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in July issued a proposed policy statement “concerning the suppression of accuracy in artificial intelligence systems.” We urge the FTC to withdraw this misguided proposal and instead focus on its core strengths and mission to protect consumers.  The new proposed policy builds on, and directly references, the Trump administration’s  “Preventing Woke AI in the Fed…

The Youth AI Privacy Act’s Privacy Paradox

Update: The Senate Commerce Committee voted to advance this bill on August 5, 2026. EFF continues to oppose the bill, which still needs approval from the full Senate.  The Senate Commerce Committee is poised to consider the Youth AI Privacy Act, a bill that would require AI companies to create kids-only privacy rules and implement so-called “safe design features,” which would—like three other bill…

EFF at BSidesLV, Black Hat, and DEF CON 👨‍💻

It's time. Time for tinkerers, security researchers, hackers, and fellow nerds to gather together in signature black hoodies and utilikilts to beat the heat in Las Vegas for the summer security conferences: BSidesLV, Black Hat USA, and DEF CON. EFF's lawyers, activists, and technologists are excited, as always, to support this community of folks that push computer security forward. If you're atten…

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

California lawmakers have amended A.B. 1709, but the core problem remains: the bill is still a ban on social media access for youth under 16, and it still threatens the privacy and First Amendment rights of all Californians. Proponents of the bill may argue that the recent amendments represent a compromise, but a close look at the text shows no major changes. As the bill moves forward in the Senat…

The SCREEN Act Threatens Privacy Far Beyond Adult Websites

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

The CHATBOT Act Forces One Parenting Model On Every Family

Update: The Senate Commerce Committee voted to advance this bill on August 5, 2026. EFF continues to oppose the bill, which still needs approval from the full Senate.  Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing education, and the way people search for information. Parents, teenagers, teachers, and schools are struggling with tough questions about when AI should, and should not, be used. It makes…

EFF Guide to Recording Law Enforcement

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

Read This Before You Buy That TV Streaming Stick

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

🏃 Fitness Tracker Privacy Fails | EFFector 38.14

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

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

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

Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?

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

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

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

Farmers Are Getting Control Of Their Equipment Back

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

Hundreds of Drone-as-First-Responder Programs Could Soon Be Launched Across the Country

Police departments across the country are lining up to launch drone-as-first-responder (DFR) programs, and hundreds have cleared a necessary hurdle toward making deployment a reality, expanding aerial surveillance and data collection even in areas patrol officers typically can't reach. As of February 2026, over 1,000 public safety agencies—including police, fire, and other emergency management age…

The Fourth Circuit Says Border Agents Can Search Your Phone By Hand, No Suspicion Required

Legal intern Suzanne Castillo was the principal author of this post. The Fourth Circuit issued a disappointing opinion in U.S. v. Belmonte Cardozo, a case in which EFF filed an amicus brief, alongside the national ACLU, its Maryland, North Carolina, South Carolina, and Virginia affiliates, and the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers (NACDL). We argued that electronic device searches a…

New EU Court of Justice Ruling on Platform Liability Could Cause Collateral Damage to Freedom of Expression

Intermediary liability laws around the world recognize that social media platforms, search engines, and other online service providers have become an integral part of our lives: they shape how we access information, communicate with others and participate in public debate, and foster innovation online. These laws generally shield platforms, to varying degrees, from legal liability for user content…

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

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

Protect Your Privacy with California's DROP Tool

Are you a California resident? Then we've got exciting news for you: there's a tool just for you that lets you take a single, relatively easy step to protect your privacy.  It's called a DROP request. (That's Delete Request and Opt-out Platform, if you're fancy). This one bit of paperwork lets you tell every data broker registered in the state of California that you'd like them to delete your info…

An Explosion of Surveillance Towers is Coming to U.S. Borders, Costing Over $1 Billion

A new report from the Government Accounting Office reveals that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to nearly triple the number of surveillance towers along U.S. borders, from the current 830 to 2,300 by 2034. DHS expects to expend $1 billion in taxpayer dollars for this dangerous expansion of a surveillance network indiscriminately trained on towns, school playgrounds, backyards, and…

“Stealth Crawlers” Are Not a Threat to the Open Web. Bills Targeting Them Would Be.

There’s a new boogeyman in the battles over AI: so-called “stealth crawlers.” We’ll admit it—the term “stealth crawlers” sounds quite nefarious. In reality, they’re anything but. “Stealth crawlers” are simply automated tools to access and collect public web data—without disclosing the user’s identity. Private crawlers like these facilitate all kinds of important work that benefits the public, incl…

Victory! Flock Ends Rollout of Audio “Distress Detection” of Human Voices

Reversing course, Flock Safety—the surveillance technology vendor most known for its extensive network of automated license plate readers—has announced that it will end a pilot for its acoustic gunshot detection devices to identify signs of “human distress.” ...public pressure can sometimes work to influence both companies and lawmakers that control a city’s purse strings to discontinue or divest…

Your Vision. Your Legacy. Your Future.

This month, we celebrate 36 years of EFF and a mission that is bigger than any one of us. Thanks to EFF, communities around the world are demanding that technology protects their freedom, advances justice, and opens doors to opportunity. That's not a small thing—it's a life's work worth continuing. If you are committed to staying on the cutting edge of digital rights issues, I'd like to invite you…

How the Watch Dogs Video Game Series Mirrored and Predicted Real-World Digital Rights Issues

When Ubisoft's Watch Dogs 2 was released in 2016, it was a headtrip for those of us working on digital-rights issues in the Bay Area. During the day, I'd fight tech-authoritarianism from EFF's San Francisco offices and then, at night, I'd fight tech-authoritarianism in an uncanny simulation of San Francisco from my home gaming console.   Watch Dogs 2 is an open-world video game that follows a hack…

EFF and ARTICLE 19 Submission to the European Commission on the DSA Trusted Flagger Guidelines

EFF and ARTICLE 19 have submitted joint comments to the European Commission on draft guidelines for the Digital Services Act’s trusted flagger mechanism. Having long advocated for a DSA that protects freedom of expression while preserving intermediary liability protections and the prohibition on general monitoring, we welcome the Commission's effort to provide practical guidance on how the trusted…

California Steps Back From Dangerous Expansion of its Age-Gating Law

The California legislature has stepped back from a plan that would have expanded its age-gating law, removing language that could have compounded serious threats to users’ speech, privacy and security just to browse the internet. A.B. 1856, authored by Assemblymember Buffy Wicks, will now move forward through the legislature without its most problematic pieces. EFF still believes the underlying la…

Most Smart Watches, Rings, and Bands Lack Basic Transparency Reports and Key Privacy Features

Oura Rings, Garmin GPS fitness watches, Apple Watches, Whoop bands—every year, more and more tech devices are promising to monitor our health and fitness, guide us toward healthier living, and provide useful health metrics to take to our doctors. But few of these tools provide the sorts of privacy and security promises we demand from all technology, let alone tech that captures personal health dat…

🚫 Don't Let Congress Age-Gate the Internet | EFFector 38.13

The effort to age gate the internet is back in Washington—and now it has a new name. Recently passed by the House of Representatives, the KIDS Act is a sprawling package of proposals to control what we can see and say online. Supporters claim the KIDS Act is needed to protect minors online. But if lawmakers really want to make the internet safer, why are they encouraging more surveillance instead…

European Court: Apple Can Not Shirk Off its Interoperability Requirements

One of the best bulwarks against monopoly is interoperability—that is making a new product or service work with an existing product or service. Interoperability allows users, and not the manufacturers of their devices or largest player in a market, to decide what application best serves them. Unsurprisingly, companies like Apple have worked hard to resist interoperability requirements.  On July 8,…

Don’t Repeat NY’s 3D Printing Blunder

This year the state of New York had the dubious honor of being the first to pass a controversial provision to mandate all 3D printers come with surveillance and censorship. That means not only is there a ticking clock to protect every artist, researcher, engineer, and hobbyist in the state, but there is a real risk of other states thoughtlessly following suit—prior to the New York rules even takin…

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

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

Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership

Legal intern Suzanne Castillo co-authored of this post. Playstation’s decision to kill physical game discs is the latest attack on our diminishing rights to access and engage with culture digitally. Rent-seeking corporations and negligent lawmakers share the blame — and they can do better.  We’ve seen the same playbook used in the move to digital distribution of  film, TV, and music: draw in custo…

Lessons Learned from CISA’s Recent GitHub Leak

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has issued a postmortem on a recent data leak in which a contractor published dozens of internal CISA credentials — including AWS Govcloud keys — in a public GitHub repository for almost six months before being notified by KrebsOnSecurity. Experts say the gaps identified in the agency’s initial response provide important lessons that all…

Building Our Future Together

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay—Accountability Must Keep Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

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

Help EFF Cut the AI Hype

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

FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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…