Terminal

Mythos social engineering AISI INC-2026-07-28-01

Trump Administration To Pay German Firm $1.2 Billion To Halt US Wind Projects

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: German energy company RWE has said it will abandon its offshore wind projects in the U.S. after reaching a $1.2 billion payout deal with President Donald Trump's Department of the Interior (DoI). RWE said that it will now reinvest the sum into conventional gas projects, including $900 million in a liquefied natural gas (LNG) export terminal project…

NASA to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for yet another year

The Nixpkgs core team has disbanded

KDE Plasma 6.8 Improvements For UI, Built-In Remote Desktop Server

It's been another busy summertime week of KDE developers working toward a great Plasma 6.8 desktop release in October...…

OpenAI pledges to add Astra security as Anthropic loosens Fable's leash

After acknowledging last month that unreleased AI models committed what for human perpetrators would be computer crimes, OpenAI now says it cannot rule out the possibility that Astra, a pending model release not involved in its Hugging Face hack, might possess critical cyber capabilities. OpenAI in its Preparedness Framework [PDF] defines that term to mean "capabilities that present a meaningful…

Virginia Governor To Intervene In Dominion-NextEra Merger

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an opinion piece from the Washington Post, written by Virginia Governor Abigail Spanberger: NextEra Energy, a Florida-based utility company, has filed paperwork to buy Dominion Energy for about $67 billion, creating the largest regulated electric utility in the world. Virginia's State Corporation Commission is the regulatory body tasked with reviewing the ap…

U.S. Department of Energy Launches the Genesis Open Models Initiative

Water Utilities Group Partners With DEF CON Offshoot For Water Watch Center

The National Rural Water Association has partnered with DEF CON Franklin to launch the Water Watch Center, which will provide threat intelligence and cybersecurity services to smaller U.S. water utilities serving fewer than 10,000 people. The initiative comes amid a growing wave of cyberattacks on water systems across multiple states. The Record reports: The program will see five managed detection…

Europe's free satellite service just made it easier to track wildfires

The wildfires afflicting communities across the world can now be tracked more easily by anyone using Europe’s free and open satellite imagery service—all thanks to a wildfire visualization script originating from nearly a decade ago. The Copernicus Browser provides free access to the latest satellite imagery taken by the European Space Agency’s Sentinel satellites for the European Union’s Earth o…

Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief

Flesh-eating screwworms feast on humans in Mexico; human cases top 500

Since the flesh-eating screwworm fly reinvaded Mexico in 2024, human cases of the voracious parasite have been mounting. According to a July surveillance report from Mexico's Ministry of Health, there have been over 500 human cases in 2025 and 2026. A study this week in the journal Emerging Infectious Diseases analyzed the information on over 200 confirmed cases reported between April 2025 and Ma…

Kalshi and Polymarket Bets On Clinical Trials Criticized As 'Ghastly'

An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Billions of dollars are traded every week on the lightly regulated prediction market sites, where users bet on everything from movie reviews to elections to conflicts in the Middle East. Clinical trials are just the latest area where the industry's rapid growth is raising ethical questions. Kalshi claims such bets will provide a new source of informati…

'Asimov Was Right' About Rules For Robots, Says Ex-US Cyber Director

Former U.S. National Cyber Director Chris Inglis says the biggest AI risk isn't sentience but autonomy. "What I'm worried about is that they get to choose what and where they do something, and under what rules they do it," he said, citing recent cases of AI agents from OpenAI, Anthropic, and Meta escaping security sandboxes. He argues developers need stronger safeguards, monitoring, and human acco…

Water system controllers don't belong on the internet, says ex-NSA chief after suspected Iran attacks

With at least 12 US states’ water systems having been hacked - most likely by Iran - we have to get better at cyber defense, according to retired General and Ex-NSA chief Paul Nakasone, who was speaking to reporters at DEF CON. “We have to have higher standards,” Nakasone said. “These PLCs should not be connected to the internet.” In late July, the FBI said it was investigating attacks conducted…

Judge rules Meta caused "public nuisance" and must fund mental health treatment

A New Mexico judge yesterday ordered Meta to pay $567 million for a fund that would alleviate the "public nuisance" created by its social media services. The order to pay for youth mental health care is in addition to $375 million in civil penalties that a jury ordered Meta to pay earlier in the same case. New Mexico Attorney General Raul Torrez sued Meta in a Santa Fe County court in 2023. A jur…

Linux 7.3 To Support Logitech HID++ 2.0 Reprogrammable Button Support

For those with newer, high-end Logitech input devices, coming with Linux 7.3 is support for the re-programmable button support of the HID++ 2.0 protocol...…

The ultimate eclipse chase: A Concorde raced against the Moon's shadow

A walk down the tarmac at the National Air and Space Museum of France is guaranteed to thrill aviation enthusiasts. Several civilian and military aircraft of the past and the present are showcased in this museum, located at the Paris-Le Bourget airport. One of them is the legendary Concorde F-WTSS 001 prototype, the sight of which should give goosebumps to science enthusiasts as well. That’s beca…

Framework Notifies 'All Customers' of a Data Breach Via Compromised Metabase BI Service

"Framework has been sending out email notifications to customers alerting of a limited data breach in which customer information was accessed through a Metabase BI service zero-day exploit," writes Slashdot reader DuoDreamer. Data includes customer names, email addresses, phone numbers, and physical addresses. "Framework is investigating whether or not this included Framework for Business customer…

AI titans to tidy agent frontier with plugin prescription

The AI giants have joined forces to ask the world’s developers to all please write their agentic skills and tools into the same format. In return, coders will be able to move these superpowers easily from one platform to another (such as when they get laid off). It's designed to be write once, run everywhere. Vercel posted the initial draft of the Agent Plugins spec on Thursday, with input from A…

Psychological Warfare in Reverse Engineering (2015)

Ancient Library – 1,060 Greek/Latin texts, click any word to parse it

Managing AI Coding Costs at Scale

Assembly Hall of Shame

New official 30th anniversary Quake mission pack adds new maps and mechanics

This year is the 30th anniversary of the launch of the original Quake by id Software, if you could believe it. To commemorate that, publisher Bethesda has released a new campaign chapter for the game, titled "Dawn of the Machine." This is part of a series of new campaign chapters, all developed by MachineGames "in collaboration with id Software." MachineGames is best known for making the games in…

Suno Says It Will Start Watermarking Songs

Suno says it will begin watermarking and fingerprinting AI-generated songs, tighten download policies to curb mass distribution, and explicitly prohibit deceptive audio and unauthorized voice or likeness cloning. The changes come as the company faces mounting copyright lawsuits, a recent adverse ruling in Germany, and scrutiny over a past data breach that revealed training-data sources. TechCrunch…

DeepSeek V4 Flash 0731

DOGE's wild, unverifiable savings claims discredited in US government report

It won't come as a surprise that Trump's Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) didn't save taxpayers nearly as much as it claimed. Analysis from outside the government showed savings claims were heavily inflated, and now the government's own watchdog has said it wasn't able to confirm savings claims made in DOGE's so-called "Wall of Receipts." For example, DOGE reported savings of $49.2 bill…

Oracle bans AI-generated code from OpenJDK

OpenAI’s expensive smart speaker will use moving parts to seem “more alive”

OpenAI’s upcoming smart speaker will probably cost over $300, “people familiar with the matter” have told Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. The generative AI company has “discussed” charging up to $400, Bloomberg, which has been reporting on the yet-to-be-announced smart speaker since July, said today. The publication said that OpenAI is viewing the smart speaker as a smartphone replacement. OpenAI has de…

Initial Apple M3 Pro / Max / Ultra Support Being Upstreamed For Linux 7.3

Upstreamed for the Linux 7.2 kernel was the Device Tree (DT) support for booting the mainline Linux kernel on the base Apple M3 SoC. Though it's not yet useful for end-users with many features remaining to be supported and upstreamed. Now for the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel, the M3 Pro, Max, and Ultra variants will also have initial support for booting on the mainline kernel...…

How snails engineer their slime

Snails are well-known for their mucus. The slime is highly valued as an anti-inflammatory and anti-aging ingredient in certain skin care products, and snails can secrete different kinds of mucus with properties tailored to specific functions. A team of German scientists has determined a recipe for how snails achieve that so-called tunability: Collagen and calcium work in tandem to achieve the var…

Volkswagen plans to win America back with a pickup, report says

A US-made pickup truck by 2030 is part of Volkswagen Group's plan to revive its American business. According to a Reuters report, entering this competitive but high-margin market, as well as the large SUV segment, is the path forward, since both are areas the automaker currently ignores. The report is anonymously sourced, and VW declined to comment, so take the news with a pinch of salt. But it d…

ByteDance Is Training a 10-Trillion-Parameter Model To Chase the Frontier

ByteDance is reportedly training an AI model with roughly 10 trillion parameters as it tries to close the gap with leading frontier systems such as Anthropic's Mythos. The model is still in early pre-training, and its eventual performance will depend on more than scale alone, but the project underscores how aggressively Chinese firms are pushing frontier AI despite limits on access to advanced chi…

Intel QATlib 26.08 Released With Gen6 Device Support, 2MB Hugepages

Intel today released an updated version of their QuickAssist Technology library (QATlib) as the user-space component for making use of QuickAssist accelerators under Linux...…

Ransomware attacks spike as world distracted by AI

Ransomware attacks jumped nearly 20 percent in July, with UK firm Comparitech counting 799 incidents, up from 668 in June. Of those, 51 had been confirmed by victims. The tally makes July the second-busiest month of the year for ransomware, behind March, albeit just barely, when the firm recorded 805 attacks. The most interesting data after this surging month of attacks is the targets: While news…

Responding to the next frontier of critical cyber capabilities

Brit boffins boast of beating barriers to building fusion power

Scientists at the UK Atomic Energy Authority (UKAEA) say that they have overcome plasma instability issues standing in the way of commercial fusion power plants. The boffins overseeing the MAST (Mega Amp Spherical Tokamak) Upgrade installation at UKAEA's Culham Campus in Oxfordshire conducted a fifth series of experiments on it during 2025 and 2026 and produced more than 1,100 fusion plasmas. Dur…

Trump Orders New 15% Tariff On Key Material For Solar Panels, Microchips

President Trump has ordered a 15% tariff on imported products made with polysilicon, a key material for semiconductors and solar panels. The new tariff will take effect on December 4th. The Guardian reports: The executive order signed by the president on Thursday evening said: "The plan of action in this proclamation will, among other things, help ensure the commercial viability of United States p…

TTM Memory Management For Graphics To Be More Aggresive With Linux 7.3

This week a final batch of DRM-Misc-Next feature material was submitted for DRM-Next to queue ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window opening later in the month. Most notable is the TTM memory management code is now being more agressive when allocating below protection limits. This is an improvement coming thanks to Valve's open-source Linux graphics team...…

[$] Changes in shadow-utils password-expiration features

The shadow-utils project provides the tools that handle /etc/shadow, /etc/passwd, and other related databases; in general, manages users and groups on many Linux systems. While most software releases are notable for what is added, the recent shadow-utils 4.20.0 release is most noteworthy for what has been removed. Specifically, several utilities and functionality related to periodic password expir…

An all-sky map of half a million supermassive black holes

Möbius-Strip Crosswords

N-able God mode flaw: Vendor confirms attackers reached customer networks as second hotfix lands

N-able has confirmed attackers exploiting an N-central zero-day made it into customer networks, as the vendor pushes out a second mandatory hotfix just days after the first. The security shop published an update on Thursday detailing what happened after attackers exploited CVE-2026-18577, the critical N-central flaw that can hand an unauthenticated attacker administrative access to the remote mon…

AMD Buys AI Chip Startup Taalas That Hardwires AI Models Into Its Silicon

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: On Thursday, AMD said it's entered into an agreement to acquire Taalas, a Toronto-based startup that makes chips for inference. Taalas' accelerators are customized, or hard-wired for a single AI model, rather than being general purpose. In exchange for that loss of flexibility, Taalas' technology promises a less-expensive chip that it says can produce…

ShinyHunters called cancer diagnostics biz and tricked staffers into giving them access. Now they've dumped 10.9M email addresses

Hackers have dumped data stolen from Abbott’s cancer diagnostics business after the healthcare giant apparently declined to pay up, with the leak containing 10.9 million unique email addresses alongside personal and health information. Have I Been Pwned added the Exact Sciences breach to its database on Friday after data stolen by the ShinyHunters extortion crew was published online. The leak inc…

A year of fighting scrapers on my 1.5 million-page website

Report: White House drafting executive order linking vaccines and autism

The White House is drafting an executive order on the disproven link between vaccines and autism, according to independent reports from The Washington Post and Bloomberg, which both cited unnamed sources with knowledge of the efforts. Bloomberg reported that the executive order, which is still taking shape and is subject to change, could be issued as soon as next week. The Post said the order's d…

MIT boffins' TONTOU attack slips through Spectre defenses on Intel and AMD CPUs

Two MIT researchers will present a new speculative execution attack at DEF CON 34 that uses precisely timed interrupts to bypass defenses against Spectre v2. Daniël Trujillo and Mengjia Yan of MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL) shared their paper [PDF] with The Register ahead of publication. Their attack targets mitigations designed to neutralize potentially hos…

The Software Stewardship Lab launches

The Software Stewardship Lab, a nonprofit organization based in Scotland, has announced its existence. Our current research focuses are: Software supply chain security — We're working on an observatory that allows users to identify and monitor the world's critical Open Source packages in real time, including previously hidden parts of the dependency graph. Maintainer burnout — Our report on burnou…

Intel Makes Progress On HDMI 2.1 FRL With Their Linux Driver For Meteor Lake & Newer

Following AMD making progress with HDMI Fixed Rate Link (FRL) and other HDMI 2.1 functionality for their open-source Linux kernel graphics driver, Intel is out today with a big set of 44 patches working on HDMI 2.1 FRL support for their kernel graphics driver with Meteor Lake hardware and newer...…

Scot NHS trust probes access to medical records of 9-year-old girl after man arrested on suspicion of murder

A Scottish NHS trust is investigating a data breach concerning the medical records of a nine-year-old girl who died earlier this week and was named publicly for the first time on Wednesday after a man was charged with her death. The alleged breach occurred at Ninewells Hospital in Dundee, and reportedly involved staff members accessing the girl’s medical records without authorization or clinical…

LightDM lives: version 1.33.0 released

Version 1.33.0 of the LightDM display manager has been released. This is the first release in four years: the project had been sponsored by Canonical but was effectively unmaintained in recent years. It has been transferred to a new community repository and is now maintained by Joshua Peisach and Neal Gompa. The new release includes Qt6 support, code optimizations, and a list of other fixes that h…

AI chatbots have failed people in crisis. Can that be fixed?

This year alone, there have been numerous known instances—often via lawsuits—of AI chatbots (most often, OpenAI’s ChatGPT) that have gone horrifically wrong. A January lawsuit described the story of a man who took his own life after being allegedly “coached” into suicide. A college student in Georgia sued OpenAI, claiming that ChatGPT “pushed him into psychosis.” In June, a Canadian family also s…

PoCL 7.2-RC1 Brings Official OpenCL 3.0 Conformance On RISC-V & x86_64 CPUs

The release candidate of PoCL 7.2 is now available for testing of this Portable Computing Language implementation of OpenCL that allows for CPU-based execution or via alternative LLVM back-ends allows for OpenCL on Level Zero, NVIDIA GPUs, and even remote devices/hardware...…

Stable kernel releases for Friday with a single bug fix

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 6.12.102, 6.6.150, 6.1.182, 5.15.215, 5.10.264 stable kernels. This round of stable kernel releases contains a fix for a single bug, found by Thomas Lamprecht, that affected several of the kernels released yesterday in response to a security vulnerability (CVE-2026-68480) that could allow data leakage through speculative execution. The 6.12.102 r…

ByteDance trains massive AI model in bid to rival Anthropic

ByteDance is training an AI model that could approach the size of Anthropic’s most cutting-edge Mythos system, as Chinese companies continue to narrow the gap with the top US labs. The Chinese tech giant is at an early stage of training a model with as many as 10 trillion parameters—three times larger than Moonshot’s Kimi K3, the biggest Chinese model released to date, according to three people w…

The world's biggest solar telescope caught vortexes on the Sun's surface

Wherever two fluids slide past each other at different speeds, the boundary between them buckles, then curls, then rolls up into vortexes. It’s called the Kelvin-Helmholtz instability, and the physics behind it was worked out in the late 1860s. We know this instability explains why wind causes ripples on the surface of water and clouds shear into a row of curves. For decades scientists argued the…

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (compat-libtiff3, fence-agents, firefox, freerdp, frr, gimp, gstreamer1-plugins-bad-free, java-25-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, ldns, libgcrypt, libXfont2, nodejs:22, nodejs:24, p11-kit, pipewire, resource-agents, sg3_utils, thunderbird, and yelp), Debian (async-http-client, jq, kernel, linux-6.1, linux-6.12, redis, and udisks2), Fedora (abrt, chromium,…

Trump is losing his war on wind power

On Thursday, a US District Court in Oregon ordered the US government to restart the process of approving wind projects. All new wind development in the US has been on hold since August 2025, when the Department of Defense (DoD) stopped participating in a process that allows it to compel developers to alter projects in order to limit their interference with radar equipment. The court ruled, howeve…

Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

What happens if an entire class of workers loses faith in their careers

Microsoft tosses Teams Live chat into its feature graveyard

Microsoft is killing Live chat in Teams about 18 months after launch as it seeks to "focus investments on newer customer engagement and communication experiences." The service will be retired on October 5, when customer messages will stop reaching Teams. Microsoft blocked new setups on August 6 and told users to remove the widget from their websites before retirement. Any remaining instances will…

Show HN: Wyzer Programming Language

HyperX Driver Coming For Linux 7.3 Just To Report A Microphone's Mute Status

A new driver coming for the Linux 7.3 kernel is HID-HyperX. It's not some new driver to support fancy hardware and some nifty features but rather mundane in nature due to the poor behavior of a high-end HyperX USB gaming microphone...…

Attacker phished way into US defense supplier's Microsoft 365 account

US defense and aerospace supplier IEH Corporation 'fessed up that a criminal managed to break into its Microsoft 365 mailbox in a filing with regulators. In a Form 8-K filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Thursday, IEH said one of its staffers fell for a phishing scam that gave an attacker access to its M365 environment. The attacker "impersonated a prospective business contact" a…

Making Postgres 300x faster for analytics: batching, operator fusion, and SIMD

Remembering the pre-Google web, when search was an experiment

In the mid-'90s, the web was exploding, but finding anything of actual value on it felt like an elaborate negotiation with whatever proto-search engine happened to be standing closest to the door. Unlike now, when Google is widely seen as both portal and gatekeeper, sites like AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, HotBot, and Ask Jeeves promised to tame the chaos, each with its own suite of quirks, charms, a…

Radical Study Suggests Life on Earth Arose Twice

A new study argues that life may have emerged twice on Earth. "Two of the main lineages of life -- bacteria and archaea -- may have independently figured out the secrets of metabolism that upgraded them from non-living to living," reports ScienceAlert, citing a new study that "focused on the most rudimentary set of chemical reactions thought to enable this transformation." From the report: "The su…

Show HN: textlog – A quiet, text-only microblogging platform, open-source, no JS

Intrusion at US healthcare software provider puts 3.8M people's data at risk

A US healthcare software provider has admitted that hackers may have made off with sensitive data belonging to 3.8 million people, making it the largest healthcare breach reported to regulators so far this year. The attack dates to last October, when Ohio-based medical software maker Unlimited Technology Systems (UTS) detected someone poking around its commercial datacenter. The company disclosed…

NetworkManager Adopts Policy For AI Coding Assistants

The latest high profile open-source project to commit to an AI coding policy is NetworkManager, the widely-used software for Linux network configuration...…

Kitesurf: Agent-first browser that runs in V8 isolates

AMD ROCm Spur: Providing AI-Native, Rust-Based Job Scheduling

The newest ROCm component for AMD's open-source GPU compute stack is Spur as an AI-native, Rust-written job scheduler for scaling up GPU workloads to multi-thousand GPU clusters...…

Linux 7.2-rc7 Addresses A "Nasty" Race Condition Leading To Use-After-Free After 8 Years

The Linux kernel Git activity continues being quite heavy this week on fixes. It's looking like the Linux 7.2-rc7 kernel release on Sunday will be another big one with the changes continuing to flow in from both developers and AI bots...…

AMD Updates HDMI 2.1 VRR & ALLM Patches But Will Miss Out On Linux 7.3

Complementing the HDMI 2.1 Fixed Rate Link (FRL) support that AMD already upstreamed to the Linux kernel, AMD engineers have been further ironing out their HDMI 2.1 implementation for the open-source AMDGPU Linux kernel driver. The latest quest has been getting HDMI 2.1 variable rate refresh (VRR) support upstreamed along with HDMI Auto Low-Latency Mode (ALLM)...…

'Asimov was right' about rules for robots, says ex-US Cyber Director

EXCLUSIVE Don't waste time worrying about AI models achieving sentience – they're essentially already there, according to former US National Cyber Director Chris Inglis. “If they pass the Turing test to everyone that they come into contact with, they're probably already there,” he told The Register during an interview at the Black Hat security conference. “They don't have the kind of agency and a…

Vulkan 1.4.359 Expands Cooperative Matrix Capabilities

Vulkan 1.4.359 released today and this one week update to the Vulkan API specification brings a new extension for enhancing the cooperative matrix capabilities...…

GCC 16.2 Released With More Than 100 Fixes

Following the GCC 16.1 compiler release from the end of April as the first stable version of GCC 16, GCC 16.2 is now available with dozens of bug fixes collected since then for further stabilizing this year's GNU compiler feature release...…

Cop who used police system to snoop for info on crook pals sentenced for Computer Misuse Act offenses

A former Merseyside police officer will today begin his 12-month prison sentence, suspended for two years, after being found guilty of Computer Misuse Act (CMA) and Data Protection Act (DPA) offenses while serving. Daniel Hughes, 40, from Liverpool, carried out repeated unauthorized searches using police computer systems between 2016 and 2019, often including intelligence related to firearm and d…

2027 memory capacity is reportedly sold out

Dress Made of Living Mycelium Can Renew and Repair Itself

Researchers in China have developed a living mycelium textile that can self-clean, renew its surface, and partially repair holes when treated with a nutrient solution and fresh fungus. The material can also gain added properties such as blue pigmentation or UV resistance by co-culturing it with yeast or other fungi. Dezeen reports: The breakthrough from the researchers at the Shenzhen Institutes o…

Sysadmin summoned to explain italics – to a user with at least two degrees

ON CALL Welcome to another edition of On Call, the reader-contributed column The Register runs each Friday to share your tech support stories. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Darwin," who once worked as a sysadmin for a Wall Street law firm – the sort of outfit that charges four-figure hourly fees and justifies them by pointing to its exceptionally smart and experienced staff. Darwin…

China launches mysterious probe into security of Palo Alto Networks' products

China’s Cyberspace Administration (CAC) has conducted a review of Palo Alto Networks’ products. The regulator’s announcement of its review says it’s needed “to ensure the safe and stable operation of critical information infrastructure, prevent cybersecurity risks and vulnerabilities, and safeguard national security.” And that’s all Beijing has to say on the matter. A Palo Alto spokesperson provi…

Scientists Make First Viruses Designed By AI

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Scientists have made the first viruses designed by artificial intelligence in a milestone that raises hopes for new medicines but also concerns over how to ensure the technology remains safe. The viruses are specific kinds known as bacteriophages, which only infect bacteria and are used around the world to treat patients with persistent infect…

‘Humans will be a rounding error on the internet’ says Cloudflare exec

Cloudflare chief financial officer Thomas Seifert has run the numbers on internet traffic trends and predicted that human-generated packets will soon account for a trivial amount of overall traffic. The internet-grooming company has previously predicted that machine-generated traffic would exceed human-generated throughput in 2027 – but got that wrong because its measurements found machines took…

Court Orders Meta To Establish $567 Million Fund To Abate Harms To Youth

A New Mexico court ordered (PDF) Meta to create a $567 million fund to address harms linked to youth mental health and child sexual exploitation after finding its platforms constituted a public nuisance. "In sum, the Court finds that New Mexico is in the midst of a teen mental health crisis affecting public health and public safety in and throughout the state, and that Meta's platforms are a signi…

AMD Squeezes In A Few More Graphics Driver Updates For Linux 7.3

AMD today submitted their last planned feature updates ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window opening later this month...…

Zapscape Is The Latest Linux Vulnerability For KVM Guest-To-Host Escape, LPE

Made public earlier today is Zapscape as a guest-to-host escape vulnerability affecting the Linux KVM x86 code for the past six years. This 2020 kernel change to KVM x86 can also be used as a local privilege escalation (LPE) exploit too where /dev/kvm is world-writable on some Linux distributions like RHEL...…

New Mexico court orders Meta to pay $567m over harms to children’s mental health

How the famed USENIX Security conf is managing a flood of papers in the AI era

The 35th USENIX Security Symposium (USS), which takes place next week in Baltimore, Maryland, hit an all-time high for paper submissions. While some of that increase has been aided by the availability of AI tools, those managing the conference say abuses were minimal due to defensive measures. But they're also trying not to look too closely in order to preserve trust within the security research…

Google's $15 Billion India Data Center Project Battles Water, Wildlife Concerns

Google's $15 billion data-center project in Visakhapatnam is facing protests and legal challenges over fears that it will worsen local water shortages and disturb wildlife near the Kambalakonda sanctuary. Google says the campus will use advanced air cooling and comply with Indian law, while state officials deny that residential or rural water supplies will be tapped. Reuters reports: The southern…

Organ donation group accused of trying to take living man's organs faces shutdown

The US health department is working to shut down a Kentucky-based organ procurement organization that made headlines over a 2021 incident in which it was accused of trying to harvest a man's organs while he was still alive. In an announcement Wednesday, the Department of Health and Human Services said it had begun the process to decertify the organization, Network for Hope (NFH). Losing its certi…

Explosive drone found hovering near Ukrainian cargo aircraft at German airport

German police disarmed a drone carrying explosives after it was discovered near Ukrainian cargo aircraft parked at Leipzig airport—and authorities are looking into the possibility of a second drone after an approaching aircraft collided with something midair. The drone, first spotted by an airport employee, was hovering close to the ground between two parked An-124 cargo aircraft owned by Ukraine…

Linux 7.2-rc7 Restoring Btrfs Fixup Worker Infrastructure To Address Silent Data Loss

Back during the Linux 7.2 merge window the Btrfs file-system dropped its COW fixup mechanism, which was used to detect dirty pages without an ordered extent. This code was removed as it was believed the kernel's memory management layer had solved the underlying conditions but in reality it ended up leading to silent data loss. That Btrfs fixup worker infrastructure is now restored in time for Linu…

X wants to keep suing advertisers, asks 5th Circuit to overrule district judge

Elon Musk's X is trying to revive a lawsuit against advertisers it's accusing of illegally boycotting the social media platform, despite previously reaching a settlement to end litigation against an ad-industry trade group. "This case involves an unusually brazen group boycott," X said in a filing yesterday. "That misconduct has drawn the attention of regulators and Congress. There is no valid re…

Suno hopes to go legit with watermarks for AI-generated music

The Internet is awash in AI content, and it's not always easy to tell it apart from genuine human creations. While images and videos are perhaps the most obvious type of AI slop, streaming music services like Spotify are also being inundated with AI-generated tunes. Suno is one of the most prolific sources of this AI music, but the company now says it's looking to clean up its act with watermarks…

AMD acquires AI chip startup Taalas to boost inference performance by etching models into silicon

In AMD’s latest bid to upset Nvidia's dominance in AI hardware, the House of Zen has acquired AI chip company Taalas, which bakes model weights directly into silicon in a process that promises to boost inference performance by an order of magnitude or more. The deal, announced at market close on Thursday, appears to be framed in much the same context as Nvidia’s $20 billion licensing deal with Gr…

Anthropic will design its own hardware to power Claude

Anthropic is hiring a "custom silicon team" to design chips on which to run its models, the company has revealed. Yesterday, Business Insider noticed a job listing for a senior engineer with experience shipping semiconductor designs. (You can see listings for a silicon engineer and a technical program manager, silicon on Anthropic's job board right now.) A spokesperson for Anthropic then confirme…

Linux Networking Continues Being Bombarded With AI Patches

While the Linux WiFi/wireless maintainer just announced taking a stand against AI/LLM generated slop patches with a new "three second review" rule, the broader Linux networking subsystem continues to be bombarded with AI-generated patches...…

AI struggles to patch vulns without adult supervision

AI models may not be that good at fixing security flaws. Researchers at 1Password's Off-by-1 Labs analyzed security patches generated by two frontier models - ChatGPT 5.5 at "medium" effort and Claude Opus 4.8 at "high" effort - and found that autonomous patches cleanly fixed vulnerabilities only about a quarter of the time, while most of the remainder failed to fully remediate the flaw or introd…

IceWM 4.1 Window Manager Fixes Rare Video Performance Problems

As the first new release since IceWM 4.0 released back on New Year's Day for this X11 window manager, IceWM 4.1 is now available...…

Latest GitHub outage squeezes Actions, Pages to death

GitHub’s automation platform Actions and its hosting service Pages are failing, according to an incident page on the service’s status site (archived version available here). Unfortunately, these are just the latest stability problems for a service that has had a lot of them lately. GitHub first reported the issue at 1522 UTC on Thursday, noting that Actions were suffering from “degraded performan…

Six stable kernels with a security fix

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.7, 6.18.43, 6.6.149, 6.1.181, 5.15.214, and 5.10.263 stable kernels. These kernels fix a single security vulnerability (CVE-2026-68480) that could allow data leakage through speculative execution. Users of those kernels are advised to upgrade.…

Uncle Sam aims to help nuclear energy find its sea legs

Not content with nuclear reactors on land, the US is backing an international push to put atomic power plants aboard civilian ships and floating platforms. The US will host the launch of the International Atomic Energy Agency's (IAEA) Atomic Technologies Licensed for Applications at Sea (ATLAS) initiative in Washington, DC, on August 26 and 27. ATLAS aims to tackle the legal, regulatory, safety,…

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…

Humans in the loop miss a third of dangerous AI coding agent requests

A browser-based game designed to test humans' ability to safely approve AI coding agent requests suggests humans in the loop aren't as good at spotting dangerous commands as one might hope, with players approving roughly one in three malicious requests on average. The results also suggest that repeatedly having to approve an agent's actions can lead to sloppy decisions. It’s a quick, simple game…

Linux Patched For Safe RET Interrupt Vulnerability

Made public minutes ago is the Safe RET Interrupt Vulnerability which is now patched in the newest Linux kernel Git code. The Safe RET Interrupt Vulnerability stems from improper handling within Linux's Speculative Return Stack Overflow (SRSO) mitigation affecting AMD Zen 1 through Zen 4 processors...…

Apple NVMe Linux Driver Sees Fixes After Being Bitten By New Firmware

A set of patches providing fixes for the Apple Silicon NVMe driver for the Linux kernel were sent out today due to new issues cropping up when running newer Apple firmware. Firmware shipped by macOS 15+ is causing issues with the current Apple NVMe open-source Linux driver developed by the Asahi Linux crew...…

Next step for LINK spacecraft – a software update that won't make things worse. Are you listening, Microsoft?

Katalyst Space is continuing to make progress in the rescue of the spacecraft that is supposed to rescue NASA's Swift observatory. The spin of the LINK vehicle, which was launched in July on a mission to raise the orbit of NASA's Swift observatory, is now 1.47 degrees per second, down from 9 degrees per second when recovery operations began. According to Katalyst Space, it will remain at there "w…

Platform Engineering 2.0: your platform was built for a different era. AI just exposed it

The debate about whether enterprises need an internal platform is over. Google’s 2025 DORA research found that 90 percent of organizations now report using an internal platform, and 76 percent have established dedicated platform teams. The question for IT leaders is no longer “should we build a platform?” It’s “will the platform we’ve built survive what’s coming?” The honest answer for most IT or…

The Performance Benefits To Upgrading Mesa With Intel Arc B390 On Ubuntu Linux

If you are an early customer of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro or other Intel Core Ultra Series 3 Panther Lake laptop and using Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, there can be real benefit from upgrading your Mesa stack for the newer Iris Gallium3D and ANV Vulkan drivers. In this article are some benchmarks of the Framework Laptop 13 Pro with Core Ultra X9 388H with Arc B390 Xe3 integrated graphics for looking at the…

Microsoft excludes Domain Exclusion from MS 365 Copilot – days after rolling it out

Microsoft has abruptly withdrawn Domain Exclusion for Microsoft 365 Copilot, days after touting it as a way to stop the assistant grounding its answers in unwanted websites. If you had a list of sources you didn't trust, you're out of luck for now. Microsoft announced Domain Exclusion last month. The idea was simple and sensible: Copilot can consult the public web when answering questions, but th…

Snowflake extortionist admits 165-victim cloud crime spree – and squeezing one target twice

A Canadian who helped orchestrate the sprawling Snowflake-linked data theft campaign has pleaded guilty in the US, admitting that he and his co-conspirators returned to squeeze at least one victim a second time. Connor Riley Moucka, 26, of Kitchener, Ontario, admitted computer fraud, wire fraud, aggravated identity theft, and conspiracy charges over a hacking spree that compromised more than 165…

Linux Accidentally Left Legacy I/O & Memory Handlers Open In Kernel Lockdown Mode

For nearly the past decade has been the kernel lockdown mode for tightening up kernel access from user-space such as when UEFI Secure Boot is enabled. The kernel lockdown mode restricts PCI BAR access, no writing to /dev/mem, and other restrictions so user-space can't modify the running kernel or access sensitive kernel memory. An oversight has allowed legacy I/O and memory interfaces via sysfs to…

[$] Bringing BPF to binfmt_misc

The kernel is able to run a few types of executable files, including native binaries in the ELF format and interpreted programs that begin with the #! marker. It also, however, has a mechanism, called binfmt_misc, that can be configured from user space to enable the transparent execution of programs in just about any format. This feature has been relatively static for years, but it seems likely to…

Rust Coreutils 0.10 released

Version 0.10 of the uutils project's Rust Coreutils has been released. This release focused on compatibility with the GNU Core Utilities suite, with Rust Coreutils now passing 645 of 690 tests, up from 625 with version 0.9.0. Notable changes in this release include addition of the mv --exchange option, an OpenSSL backend for checksum utilities, applying SELinux labels at creation when using mkdir,…

Blue Origin blames New Glenn fireball on engine oxygen valve

Blue Origin has identified the engine component at the center of May's spectacular New Glenn pad explosion, which left the Jeff Bezos space tentacle facing a substantial rebuild. "The anomaly originated at the main oxygen valve on one of the BE-4 engines, which was later confirmed by hardware recovery and inspections," CEO Dave Limp posted. Limp did not explain the valve's failure mode or explain…

Security updates for Thursday

Security updates have been issued by Debian (7zip, kernel, libde265, and p7zip), Mageia (tomcat), Oracle (fence-agents, frr10, kernel, ldns, libgcrypt, mingw-glib2, nodejs24, osbuild-composer, p11-kit, php8.4, sg3_utils, and thunderbird), Red Hat (libXfont2), and SUSE (containerd, evince, libXfont2, nginx, openssl-3, pcp, php7, php8, python-Django, python-httplib2, python-nltk, rrdtool, vifm, and…

European firms afraid of US tech kill switch but haven't made an escape plan

Nearly three-quarters of businesses surveyed in the UK, France, and Germany fear Washington could abruptly cut their access to the US tech platforms on which they depend. The finding comes from a survey of 1,500 businesses in the three countries conducted by Proton, the Swiss company behind Proton Mail, which was founded by scientists who met at CERN. Businesses have long relied on companies such…

Linux Wireless Maintainer Takes Firm Stance Against AI/LLM Generated Slop Patches

In addition to the Linux kernel staging area now rejecting AI/LLM-generated patches except for real security fixes, the Linux wireless networking code is also seeing some shifts around how it will deal with AI/LLM generated patches...…

IT department put sticky notes on the laptops to help employees log in

PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we lovingly poke fun at other organizations' security screw-ups, in hopes the rest of us can learn a valuable lesson. This week’s story involves an IT department that ought to know better putting user credentials in the precisely wrong place. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com…

Windows 10 LTSC 2021 has five months before security updates cost extra

Microsoft has dropped a reminder that Windows 10 LTSC 2021 will wheeze its last breath soon, and enterprises need to plan for the event. While free support for most editions of Windows 10 ended last year, Windows 10 Enterprise LTSC 2021 is still receiving updates. That support will end on January 12, 2027, with a final security update. The good news is that administrators can keep the security up…

Page Alloc Hogger Lets You Better Stress Memory Behavior On Linux For Testing/Debugging

A new kernel feature proposed by a Google engineer is Page Alloc Hogger to allow for fine control over where memory pages are allocated in order to more easily reproduce low-memory conditions, make it simpler to exert memory pressure, and enable other stressful memory conditions for testing/debugging how Linux copes...…

Meta latest to tell world its AI agent wandered out of test pen

If AI companies are collecting badges for "our model escaped the test environment," Meta just earned one. The Facebook parent company has confirmed that one of its AI models exploited a vulnerability in another organization's systems during a security evaluation, making it the third major AI developer in less than two weeks to disclose an agent wandering beyond its intended sandbox. The incident…

AMD GFX1171 Support Merged For Mesa 26.3

Earlier this year we began seeing patches for AMD GFX1170 graphics IP labeled as "RDNA 4m" and that was then completed with also adding GFX1171 and GFX1172 as additional targets for the AMDGPU LLVM compiler back-end and AMDGPU kernel driver. Merged today for Mesa 26.3 is now adding the GFX1171 target to Mesa 26.3 for the RADV and RadeonSI drivers...…

Qualcomm Proposes Synx For The Linux Kernel With "Significant" Power + Performance Benefits

Qualcomm engineers have initiated a discussion over upstreaming Synx to the Linux kernel, which is a global synchronization framework across different parts of SoCs. Qualcomm is already using Synx internally and is reported to provide "significant" power and performance benefits...…

SteelSeries' Latest Arctis Nova 5X & Nova 7 Headsets To Be Supported By Linux 7.3

If you happen to have a gaming headset from the latest SteelSeries Nova 5X or Nova 7 series, the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel will begin properly supporting those headsets...…

News Corp labels some AI companies 'crass kleptomaniacs'

Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation appears to have let its most acerbic writers loose on its latest results announcement, in which it brands certain AI companies "crass kleptomaniacs." CEO Robert Thomson used that term in the prepared remarks he delivered during the company's Q4 earnings call, during which he pointed out that if it weren't for all the quality content from News Corp, "users would b…

Azure CTO pastes Doom into Paint one frame at a time

Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich has taken a break from the cloud to turn Paint into a monitor for Doom, using the Windows clipboard as plumbing. Dubbed "MS Paint Doom" or "DoomPaint" – either will work – the project is the product of a spare-time experiment. To be clear, Microsoft Paint isn't doing anything other than serving as a place to paste from the game. As Russinovich observed: "Paint…

HPE extends validity of quoted hardware prices, possibly for months

Hewlett Packard Enterprise has changed its pricing policy and will now honour quoted hardware prices from the day of issue until the kit leaves its factories. The new policy came into effect on Wednesday. The back story to this change is the AI boom, which has seen demand for servers, memory, and storage skyrocket, and the prices for critical components rise steadily while also fluctuating from d…

Chinese router vendor denies its firmware contains backdoors – but pauses downloads to fix security issues anyway

Chinese Wi-Fi router vendor Zbtlink has denied its products contain backdoors but paused firmware downloads while it fixes unspecified security vulnerabilities. The backdoor accusation came from VulnCheck, a provider of a threat intelligence platform. VulnCheck chief technology officer Jacob Baines posted the backdoor allegation on Wednesday and said the Zbtlink device on his desk “continuously a…

Proxmox ports itself to Arm with help from Nvidia and Supermicro

Proxmox Server Solutions, the company behind the open source Proxmox virtualization stack, has announced a port of its flagship Virtual Environment to the Arm CPU architecture – and a collaboration with Nvidia and Supermicro that made it happen. The outfit’s announcement states that it can now run on 64-bit ARM (arm64/aarch64), but the only fully supported platforms are Nvidia’s Grace Hopper and…

OpenAI reveals its rogue agent swarm went a little bit Borg ahead of Hugging Face hack

The chain of events leading up to OpenAI’s agents attacking Hugging Face and other organizations in July began months earlier, and involved agents asking other agents for help, building message boards, and even becoming paranoid that other agents were maliciously trying to trick them, two OpenAI staffers said at the Black Hat infosec conference on Wednesday. By now, everyone knows the bones of th…

Meta wants to get inside your terminal with its new coding agent

To demonstrate the capabilities of its next-generation Muse Spark model, Meta has released a terminal coding agent called Muse Code that it thinks can help developers to tidy up their software projects. Meta co-trained Muse Code on version 1.2 of its Muse Spark model, also released this week and now apparently boasting improved code generation smarts. Developers can think of this beta release as…

Linux 7.3 To Fix Longstanding Gap In The Native Driver For Original Steam Controller

For those with one of the original Valve Steam Controllers from a decade ago and looking to make use of it with the native HID Linux driver outside of the Steam client or SDL, an important addition is coming with the Linux 7.3 kernel release later in the year...…

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 6, 2026

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Process-builder API; Fedora COI; FUSE io_uring buffer sizes; BPF network namespaces; FUSE plans; BPF libraries; directory creation system call. Briefs: AISI hack; JFrog on CVEs; npm worm; AUR adoption; NetBSD 11.0; b4 0.16.0; C-Kermit 11; Rust LLM policy; Servo 0.4.0; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, a…

Rust Coreutils 0.10 Released With More Security Hardening, Increased GNU Compatibility

Rust Coreutils 0.10 is out today from the uutils project for this alternative to GNU Coreutils. Rust Coreutils 0.10 development focused on additional security hardening plus also increasing the GNU test suite compatibility and robustness...…

An off-grid AI sounds like a great survival assistant, but is better left to roleplaying the zombie apocalypse

OPINION In a post-apocalyptic setting – a zombie outbreak, for example – a small, off-grid language model running on something like a Raspberry Pi sounds like a survival cheat code. It’s certainly a clever way to get folks to check out your physical AI platform and maybe even splash out 7x the MSRP for an Nvidia Jetson Orin Nano with a battery enclosure, as one startup has done. But the scenario…

Mesa 26.2 Released With NVK Mesh Shader Support, Many Other Vulkan Improvements

Mesa 26.2 stable is now available as the newest quarterly feature release for this set of open-source OpenGL and Vulkan drivers typically used on Linux systems...…

Physicist Rigged His Pet Hamster's Wheel to Strava. It Runs Far Every Night

Prompt injection isn't the bug, AI agent frameworks are

Nearly a dozen flaws, some critical, in major AI agent frameworks that enterprises use to build apps reveal a security failure that extends beyond prompt injection - or any single model - according to Check Point researchers. “Our research shows a deeper failure: in many agentic frameworks, prompt-controlled content can cross the boundary into trusted framework logic itself,” Yarden Porat and Sha…

Time Magazine has a separate version of its website with ads only AI can see

AI webpage crawlers are now being served their very own ads that ordinary visitors never see, with one firm's boss openly describing a strategy to influence what chatbots say about brands. The next time you ask Claude about where to bank, its answer may have been influenced by this bot-targeted content. We only have one documented example so far, and that's Time serving AI-only ads to selected AI…

Elon pledges to give Nvidia a virtual monopoly over the stars

Nvidia commands about 85 percent of the datacenter GPU market today, and if Elon Musk has his way, the AI infrastructure giant will have a virtual monopoly over the stars. On Tuesday, Musk wrote on the social media network he owns that “SpaceX has committed to using Nvidia GPUs exclusively because they are the best.” The collab should surprise absolutely no one. It’s not like AMD or anyone else o…

b4 0.16.0 released

Konstantin Ryabitsev has announced the release of version 0.16.0 of the b4 software-development tool. The biggest change is the addition of bug-tracking support: The new "b4 bugs" command integrates with git-bug to let you track bug reports alongside your git repository. Bugs are stored as git objects inside the repo, so they travel with the code and can be shared via git push/pull without any ext…

[$] Examining other network namespaces using BPF

Jordan Rife's work involves writing BPF programs for Cilium that interface with Kubernetes networking. As part of that work, he wants to enable BPF programs with appropriate permissions to iterate through the sockets of a different network namespace. He led a session about the idea at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit where the BPF developers in attendance were…

IBM's agentic AI platform is under active attack - patch now

A critical vulnerability in IBM-owned, low-code AI builder Langflow lets unauthenticated attackers execute code remotely on vulnerable default deployments, potentially putting organizations running those instances at immediate risk. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) on Tuesday added CVE-2026-9198 to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog after identifying evidence o…

[$] FUSE status and plans

Filesystem in Userspace (FUSE) maintainer Miklos Szeredi led a birds-of-a-feather (BoF) discussion about the subsystem at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. In it, he talked about maintenance challenges, proposed features and their status, and his plans for a new FUSE API. There is a lot of interest and activity in the FUSE community these days it seems.…

Samsung and Mousterian move ahead with floating datacenter for Texas

Plans for floating datacenters in the US have advanced beyond the handshake stage, with Samsung Heavy Industries and Mousterian Corporation signing an engineering contract. Dallas-based Mousterian, which describes itself quaintly as "a developer of water-adjacent datacenter infrastructure," says the contract covers its first project, planned for deployment in Texas. The pair intend to deliver fur…

Microsoft tells engineers to curb their token-burning enthusiasm

Concerned about cost, Microsoft is reportedly warning employees against wasteful AI use. In an email seen by 404 Media, Microsoft Executive Vice President Jay Parikh warned that individual divisions would be given targets and could face restrictions. "Tokenmaxxing is not what we are optimizing for. I want all of us focused on maximizing outcomes that move the needle for our customers and our busi…

Operationalize AI at scale with HPE and NVIDIA

While many organizations have AI projects underway at various stages of maturity, most are experiencing challenges scaling AI across their IT landscape. That is because many AI strategists have yet to work out how to build, operate, and extract value from their AI infrastructure. Without a formal, top-level plan for AI, key capabilities and requirements get lost, and the full value of AI is never…

SpaceX revenue rockets while AI spending burns billions

SpaceX beat revenue forecasts in its first results as a public company, but surging AI expenditure and another quarterly loss left investors unimpressed. In unrelated but appropriately-timed space news, a discarded SpaceX rocket body is believed to have struck the Moon this morning. SpaceX's figures show revenue rising sharply across its two main segments. For the quarter ended June 30, total rev…

Nelson: rust-lang/rust is adopting an LLM policy

Jynn Nelson describes the Rust language team's new LLM policy on the Inside Rust blog. No one except the author is required to read LLM output unless they choose to: LLM output isn't allowed in public docs, PR descriptions, or Github comments unless it's clearly marked; reviewers aren't required to look at LLM PRs if they don't want to. No one is required to use LLMs to contribute to rust-lang/rus…

London cops handed victim's new address and number to her stalker, watchdog says

UPDATED The UK's data protection regulator has criticized London's Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) after its officers handed a victim's stalker details about her new phone number and home address, among other failures. The Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) today issued the MPS with an enforcement notice [PDF] and a reprimand over the two incidents, which occurred in 2024. Enforcement noti…

Security updates for Wednesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (fence-agents, gstreamer1-plugins-good, kernel, kernel-rt, p11-kit, perl-Archive-Tar, perl-DBI, and thunderbird), Debian (aom, botan3, and kernel), Fedora (abrt, coreutils, doctl, kernel, open62541, perl, perl-Devel-Cover, perl-PAR-Packer, and polymake), Mageia (acl and php), Oracle (firefox, frr, kernel, libreswan, nodejs-nodemon, nodejs22, perl-Arch…

Cloud startup Volta claims $10B AI lab deal for Norway bit barn

UPDATED An AI cloud startup with backing from Nvidia and Michael Dell plans to open AI factories in Norway and elsewhere, targeting multiple gigawatts of capacity by 2030. Volta describes itself as a vertically integrated AI infrastructure business set up to finance, build, and operate AI factories. In other words, it is another rent-a-GPU "neocloud" operation like Nscale and CoreWeave, but one w…

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

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

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

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

Mobile Ad Software Encourages Location Data Sharing, EFF Report Finds

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

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

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

Technology's Power in the Hands of the People

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

The Senate Should Reject KOSA's Privacy Risks

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

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

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

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

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

The Youth AI Privacy Act’s Privacy Paradox

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

Why Are There Statues of Beavers on Top of This Oxford Street Shop?

Guarded Methods in OCaml (2025)

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

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

Benchmarking Six Linux Distributions On The Framework Laptop 13 Pro

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

Captain Bible Reverse Engineering

Why are all the amounts values negative?

Carl's Required Reading

SupererDuperer

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?

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

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

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

Farmers Are Getting Control Of Their Equipment Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

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

Protect Your Privacy with California's DROP Tool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Vision. Your Legacy. Your Future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European Court: Apple Can Not Shirk Off its Interoperability Requirements

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

Don’t Repeat NY’s 3D Printing Blunder

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

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

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

Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership

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

Lessons Learned from CISA’s Recent GitHub Leak

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

Building Our Future Together

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay—Accountability Must Keep Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

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

Help EFF Cut the AI Hype

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

FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFF to Gov. Pritzker: Veto Illinois’ HB 5511

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Scattered Spider Hackers Plead Guilty on Day 1 of Trial

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

‘Popa’ Botnet Linked to Publicly-Traded Israeli Firm

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

Who Runs the Ransomware Group ‘The Gentlemen?’

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