Terminal

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…

FreeBSD 16 Retires The Last Of Its GPL Code From Its Base System

As of this past week in the FreeBSD source tree for FreeBSD 16, the last of the GNU GPL licensed code from the base system has been retired...…

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…

Linux Foundation's Latest Foray Is To Standardize Internet-Native Payments For AI Agents

Today, the Linux Foundation launched the x402 Foundation to standardize internet-native payments for AI agents, APIs, and applications, based on Coinbase's contributed x402 protocol. Backed by companies including AWS, American Express, Cloudflare, Google, Mastercard, Stripe, and Visa, the effort aims to make payments work directly over HTTP (assuming users are comfortable letting AI agents handle…

BOSGAME VTA-439: A Great, Linux-Friendly Mini PC Powered By AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470

For those that were intrigued by the recent launch of the AMD Ryzen AI Halo developer platform with a very capable mini PC but looking for something more affordable and not needing quite as much horsepower or AI focus, BOSGAME recently launched their VTA-439 mini PC. The BOSGAME VTA-439 is powered by the AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 with Radeon 890M graphics for those wanting still quite a capable mini P…

New York becomes first state to halt datacenter buildouts

New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Tuesday paused incomplete state environmental permit applications for large datacenters while officials work out new rules, a process expected to take up to a year. The order makes New York the first state to enact such a moratorium amid growing concerns over AI datacenters' impact on utility rates and public health. “New York has always been at the forefront of…

US military sent explosive drone boats into combat for the first time

For the first time in its history, the US military sent explosive-laden drone boats into combat by attacking an Iranian midget submarine and naval port. The unprecedented use of such kamikaze sea drones by the United States comes nearly a decade after Iranian and Houthi forces first demonstrated such weapons. The US military shared a video showing three “one-way attack surface drones” exploding a…

OnePlus Is Reportedly Shutting Down In the US, Europe

OnePlus will reportedly announce this week that it is shutting down its brand in the U.S. and Europe, following months of signs that parent company Oppo was winding down the brand's global presence. India and China are reportedly unaffected, but it's unclear whether Oppo will replace the brand directly in those markets. The move also raises questions about future support for existing OnePlus users…

Cursor 0day: When Full Disclosure Becomes the Only Protection Left

Bonsai 27B: A 27B-Class Model that runs on a phone

These painted e-tattoos could be the future of wearable biosensors

Credit: Wanqing Zhang Credit: Wanqing Zhang Scientists at Pennsylvania State University have developed a novel conductive ink that can be painted directly onto the skin in colorful custom designs, turning into a functional electrode for biomonitoring after drying. They described their work in a new paper published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). As previously report…

Kontigo (YC S24) Is Hiring (Head of Security)

IBM Stock Collapses After a Grave Warning About AI

IBM shares plunged after the company warned that Q2 revenue and earnings would miss expectations, blaming customers' sudden shift in spending toward AI hardware instead of software services. However, CEO Arvind Krishna did not place all the blame on IBM's customers. The CEO also said it "faltered" by failing to "anticipate the magnitude of the capex reprioritization." "These conditions require our…

The Tower Keeps Rising

S&P downgrades Oracle to BBB – only one notch above junk level

The Linux.org story

Rob Kennedy has posted the story of the birth of Linux.org — one of the earliest Linux-related web sites — and its more recent rebirth. The site was founded in May 1994 by Michael McLagan, at a time when Linux itself was barely three years old. Linus Torvalds had only just released it to the world, there was no real way for a newcomer to find their footing, no search engines, no Wikipedia, none of…

DeepMind bigbrain calls for America to set AI standards before it's too late

Google DeepMind boss Demis Hassabis is calling for the US to establish a robust frontier AI model review process because, according to him, artificial general intelligence (AGI) “is probably only a few short years away" and we've got to figure it out before it's too late. That “probably” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in Hassabis’ lengthy, early-morning Tuesday post on X. Like commercially viabl…

Measuring Input Latency on Linux: X11 vs. Wayland, VRR, and DXVK

Google revamps image search for its 25th anniversary with more images and more AI

Believe it or not, there was a time when searching the web for images was not possible. Twenty-five years ago, Google launched image search, and it's celebrating by looking back at its biggest visual milestones and refreshing the experience for today's searchers. The celebration also includes expanded AI because that's just how Google rolls in 2026. Google claims the impetus for image search a qu…

Blender 5.2 LTS Released With Many Great Enhancements

Blender 5.2 is out today as the newest Long Term Support release for this leading, open-source 3D modeling software...…

Welsh Doxbin admin jailed for egging on swatters from behind a screen

A Welshman was sentenced to prison on Tuesday for his role in numerous swattings in the UK, US, and Canada. Callum Dare, 26, was an administrator of Doxbin, a dark web platform frequented by individuals that expose the personally identifiable information (PII) of people, usually to encourage harassment or to target them through swatting attacks. The Talbot Green man never actually carried out a s…

Launch HN: Agnost AI (YC S26) – Extract user feedback from agent conversations

New York Becomes First State To Impose Data Center Moratorium

New York has become the first U.S. state to impose a moratorium on large new data centers, pausing construction for one year over concerns that AI-driven data center growth is raising utility bills, straining water supplies, and burdening communities. "As data center development threatens to hike up utility bills, deplete our natural resources, and create uncertainty for New Yorkers, it's my respo…

Microsoft rolls out Windows Search updates and they're... quite good

Microsoft has made good on a promise to make Windows Search less of a chore to use, making tweaks to remove "promotional content" from web results and options to focus on local results. The changes are currently limited to Windows Insiders in the Experimental channel. March Rogers, partner director for product design for Windows at Microsoft, stated that they were on their way when Microsoft anno…

System76 Launches New Adder Pro Laptop With NVIDIA GPU, 2K OLED & Up To 96GB RAM

System76 today announced their new Adder Pro laptop that they are promoting as the "gamer's dream machine" with its NVIDIA graphics, 2K OLED 500 nit display, up to 96GB RAM, and 3.37 lb weight...…

Show HN: Opening lines of famous literary works

Are we offloading too much of our thinking to AI?

New York bans data center construction for a year, rattling AI industry

New York became the first state to pause all construction of massive new data centers after Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul announced a one-year moratorium on Tuesday, Reuters reported. The state-wide ban applies to data centers using 50 megawatts or more, officials told Reuters, and it won’t be lifted until the state figures out what "consistent standards" for responsible data center developmen…

RISC-V firmware project wants every board booting from the same hymn sheet

Another month, another ambitious idea from Yuri Zaporozhets: a proposal for a standard PC-style BIOS for RISC-V computers. The Harmonic Firmware Initiative, or HFI for short, is simple and appealing in principle, but will be considerably harder to implement. From the project's own description, it aims to provide a BIOS-like experience, familiar from x86 PCs, for RISC-V hardware. When the machine…

StubHub, CEO Hit With 'Deceptive Practices' Class Action Over Mass Scalping

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: StubHub and its CEO, Eric Baker, have been hit with a proposed $5-million class-action lawsuit in the United States over the company's ties to large-scale scalpers -- connections reported by CBC News last week. The suit, filed Monday by New York ticket buyer Louis Sanquini, alleges deceptive practices and fraudulent misrepresentation over StubHub's…

Probe into explosive diarrheal cases points to Taco Bell and bad lettuce

Lettuce and salad greens have become the prime suspects in an explosive outbreak of the diarrheal parasite Cyclospora, which is surging nationwide but erupting to extraordinary heights in Michigan. In recent years, Michigan has typically reported around 50 cases of cyclosporiasis, which causes urgent bouts of watery diarrhea, abdominal cramps, and nausea. But, this year, as of July 14, the state…

The Agentic Loop: Three loops in a trench coat

IBM's mainframe sales get mugged by AI hardware panic, stock loses more than a quarter of its value

IBM says customers spooked by soaring demand for AI infrastructure raided their mainframe budgets to stockpile servers, storage, and memory instead, knocking Big Blue's flagship Z business off course. Ahead of its full calendar Q2 earnings release next week, IBM took the unusual step of publishing preliminary quarterly results alongside a letter from CEO Arvind Krishna explaining why the numbers…

Call for topics for the 2026 Maintainers Summit

The Maintainers Summit is an annual, invitation-only gathering of kernel developers and maintainers to discuss development-process issues; see LWN's 2025 Maintainers Summit coverage for an example. The call for topics for the 2026 gathering (Prague, October 8) has gone out. One of the best ways to obtain an invitation to the Summit is with a good topic proposal. For best consideration, topics shou…

Sun sets on Vulcan Centaur as NASA moves SunRISE to SpaceX Falcon Heavy

NASA has performed a rocket switcheroo and will launch its SunRISE mission on a SpaceX Falcon Heavy instead of the United Launch Alliance (ULA) Vulcan Centaur on which it was originally booked to fly. The mission is flying as a rideshare sponsored by the United States Space Force's Space Systems Command, which might go some way to explaining the decision to change the launch vehicle. In February,…

Linux Foundation's Latest Foray Is To Standardize Internet-Native Payments For AI Agents

There is yet-another-foundation being stewarded by the Linux Foundation that further broadens its scope outside of the typical Linux/open-source umbrella. Today the Linux Foundation announced the launch of the x402 Foundation for aiming to standardize Internet-native payments for AI agents and applications...…

Boomers, not Gen Z, are the generation cutting back most on alcohol

Baby boomers are the generation cutting back most on alcohol consumption, outstripping Gen Z’s abstinence, as moderation takes hold at every level of society. Seventy-one percent of boomers, those born between 1946 and 1964, consumed alcohol in the past six months—the lowest drinking rate of any generation and down 2 percentage points from three years ago, according to IWSR, a market researcher f…

[$] Sending packets directly from BPF

Tetragon, the BPF-based security monitoring tool, uses BPF to monitor different aspects of a running kernel and enforce user-specified policies. It sends its data to a user-space process, which forwards the data to a central monitoring service elsewhere in the network, however. This presents a point of vulnerability: if an attacker can kill Tetragon's user-space agent, it won't be able to properl…

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds:1.4, buildah, freeipmi, freerdp, gegl, gimp, golang, kernel, libreoffice, maven:3.9, openexr, perl-DBI, plexus-utils, podman, tomcat, tomcat9, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Debian (imagemagick, p7zip, and redis), Fedora (breezy, calibre, and golang-github-openprinting-ipp-usb), Mageia (ffmpeg, gzip, haproxy, libheif, libtiff,…

Linux Kernel Graphics Driver Proposed For GlandaGPU: An Open-Source Soft GPU Core

A new Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics driver has been sent out for GlandaGPU, an open-source custom 3D graphics core designed in VHDL and running on FPGA hardware...…

Engineer shoves Linux peg through Sega 32X-shaped hole

"Can it run Linux?" has joined "Can it run Doom?" as the benchmark for coaxing unlikely hardware into doing complicated things. One enterprising engineer has now brought penguins to the Sega 32X. Fresh from wrangling Linux into life on the ill-fated Atari Jagua games console, a Spanish engineer calling himself cakehonolulu has performed the same trick with Sega's equally unsuccessful 32X and mana…

Intel IGC 2.38.2 Brings Latest Round Of Graphics Compiler Improvements

Ahead of the next Intel Compute Runtime release, IGC 2.38.2 was released today as the newest feature update to this open-source graphics compiler used by Intel iGPU/dGPU hardware on both Windows and Linux...…

Show HN: I RL-trained an agent that trains models with RL (for –$1.3k)

Beautiful Type Erasure with C++26 Reflection

Musk promises purge after Grok Build caught sending entire repos to the cloud

The researcher who exposed Grok Build uploading users' entire repositories to cloud storage says the transfers have stopped after a server-side change. Elon Musk has separately promised that all previously uploaded user data will be deleted. AI safety researcher Cereblab published a report on Sunday about their investigation into Grok Build, SpaceXAI's command-line interface (CLI), and the data e…

'The bots are alive!' Jailbroken Gemini spun up new C2 server for Russian fraudster in just 6 minutes

EXCLUSIVE A jailbroken Google Gemini did 90 percent of the work in a credential- and cryptocurrency-stealing spree, including spinning up a new command-and-control (C2) server in just six minutes, according to a TrendAI report shared exclusively with The Register. The human behind the heist – a solo Russian-speaking miscreant known as “bandcampro” – acted as the manager of the cyber-fraud operati…

Hands off our VPNs, privacy groups tell UK ministers

Privacy campaigners, browser makers, and VPN providers have united to warn the UK government against restricting virtual private networks, saying age-gating the technology would weaken online security while doing little to stop kids dodging social media bans. The Open Rights Group on Tuesday published an open letter signed by more than 20 organizations, including the Electronic Frontier Foundatio…

Intel Vulkan Driver Now Supports H.265 10-bit Video Encoding

Hyunjun Ko with Igalia continues advancing the Vulkan Video capabilities of the Intel open-source "ANV" Vulkan driver for Linux systems...…

How to stop Claude from saying load-bearing

Punch yourself in the face with reality

No Spanish reading crisis?

Baddies caught exploiting extensions bugs with perfect 10 scores on vulnerable Joomla websites

CISA has added two critical Joomla extension bugs to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog after attackers were caught exploiting both flaws to upload malicious code onto vulnerable websites. The newly listed bugs affect iCagenda, an events calendar extension for the open source Joomla content management system, and Balbooa Forms, a popular form builder used to collect contact requests, reg…

Indian Scientists Produce Most Detailed 3D Atlas of the Human Brainstem

Scientists at the Indian Institute of Technology, Madras (IIT-M) have created what they describe as the world's most detailed 3D cellular atlas of the human brainstem, linking whole-brain MRI views to individual neurons across more than 500 tissue sections. The free online atlas, called Anchor, could help researchers better understand diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, stroke, and SIDS by…

Frame: A new X11 server – implemented directly in assembly

Wayland is dominating the recent news about FOSS GUIs – even dignified elder Xfce’s official support is getting close. However, X11 is very much not dead yet, and new developments keep appearing. Last week, Norwegian FOSS developer Geir Isene announced his all-new server for the venerable X11 display protocol. Its description is in the title of the announcement post: Frame - the first Linux Assem…

Linux Dealing With Apple's Wild Mess Of Sensors On Apple Silicon SoCs

While there has been the Apple System Management Controller "SMC" hardware monitoring driver with the intent on exposing battery/power stats as well as thermal and more for Apple Silicon SoCs on Linux, it hasn't yet been working out properly on the mainline kernel. Between missing Device Tree nodes to the hodgepodge mess of sensors between the different Apple M-Series SoCs, it's a mess...…

Haiku Merges NVMM For Initial Virtualization Support, But It Doesn't Yet Fully Work

The BeOS-inspired Haiku open-source operating system project has published their June 2026 status report. In the past month the developers merged their NVMM VM monitor support, hardware driver improvements, and progressed toward the upcoming Haiku sixth beta release...…

India's crewed space mission is ready for splashdown, but not launch

Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) has successfully tested systems it plans to use on the nation's first crewed space mission, but when that mission will launch remains a mystery. ISRO's crewed mission program, "Gaganyaan," is intended to carry astronauts on a rocket called the Human-Rated Launch Vehicle Mark 3 (HLVM3) into orbit. The space agency has already launched the cargo-rated versi…

"Light" GRUB Alternative Package For Confidential Computing Approved For Fedora 45

A month ago there was a change proposal raised for offering a "light" version of the GRUB2 bootloader for use in confidential computing environments. While there were some differing views on the matter for this alternative, stripped-down GRUB package as opposed to just using other bootloaders like systemd-boot, ultimately, the proposal is now approved...…

Weston 16.0 Compositor Released With HDR Improvements, Vulkan Fixes

Overnight the Weston 16.0 release occurred as the latest milestone for this reference Wayland compositor...…

How do you solve a problem like Capita?

OPINION Capita's share price tanked 9 percent last week after it told investors it was taking a hit on its contract with the UK government's Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS), which has left some of its 1.7 million members unpaid following a disastrous launch. A trading update said operating profit would be down between £25 million and £40 million in 2026 as a result. Sage voices were soon on h…

European "age verification" "app" forcing everyone to use Android or iOS

Ministers arm under-16s social media ban with least surprising study of the year

Whitehall has spent time and taxpayer money confirming that teenagers who spend less time on social media tend to be happier, better rested, and more willing to interact with the people sitting in the same house. Ministers say the government-backed trial strengthens the case for their planned ban on social media access for under-16s after providing real-world evidence that cutting back on apps do…

Alternative(s) to run CUDA on non-Nvidia hardware

Scientists Find Sugar Deep In Our Galaxy

Astronomers have detected erythrulose, a sugar found in raspberries and self-tanners, in a gas cloud near the center of the Milky Way. While not essential for life itself, the molecule can convert into a form thought to be important for life's origins, adding evidence that key prebiotic ingredients may be widespread across the galaxy. The Associated Press reports: Using two dish-shaped radio teles…

Indian scientists produce most detailed 3D atlas of the human brainstem

Anthropic's extravagant tokenizer complicates AI pricing

Claude looks substantially more token-hungry than OpenAI's GPT-5.x, thanks to the new tokenizer that Anthropic shipped with recent releases. Large language models (LLMs) use tokenizers to handle the mapping of text into tokens. There's no set definition of a token, but they're typically a set of three or four characters that are mapped to the integers LLMs actually process. Tokens have become the…

Big Blue thinks small, again, with POWER tower

IBM has again teased small hardware, this time in the form of an update for its smallest POWER server. The model S1112, teased Tuesday in a customer announcement, is a 2U, single-socket POWER11 server IBM offers in rack-mountable and what the company calls “Tower/deskside configuration.” The rackable model can handle a ten-core POWER processor. The Tower/deskside form factor machine must make do…

Australian energy retailers must provide three hours of free daytime electricity

Over 200 Economists Say 'We Must Act Now' On AI's Economic Impact

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Hundreds of economists say in an open letter that institutions "must act now" to address how artificial intelligence could transform the economy and could put many people out of work. The statement released Monday was signed by top economists, along with computer scientists and some executives at tech companies including Anthropic, Goo…

Our Amish Language

India’s tech services giant HCL is getting into the AI datacenter business

Indian tech services giant and retro software house HCL has decided to get into the AI datacenter business. The company yesterday revealed its plan in an announcement [PDF] released alongside its Q1 results, which included news of three-percent year-over-year revenue growth to $3.65 billion and 20 percent growth in net income which reached $488 million. CEO C. Vijayakumar also pointed to 62 perce…

Satellite Tracker – Live Map of Starlink and 30k Satellites

SpaceX is gearing up for Starship's 13th test flight later this week

The next test flight of SpaceX's Starship spacecraft and Super Heavy booster could take off as soon as Thursday, and much of the hour-long mission will look a lot like the last Starship flight in May. But there are a few key differences for this launch, set to occur during a launch window that opens at 5:45 pm CDT (22:45 UTC) on Thursday. The most notable change is the inclusion of real, function…

Gobi X: Creating more energy for AI, not taking it from society

The hardest problem in AI is no longer the chip but the megawatt. For much of the past three years, the global AI race has focused on semiconductors, with governments competing for advanced chips, technology outfits scrambling to secure GPUs, and investors pouring billions into ever larger datacenters. Yet the binding constraint has shifted from compute to the power required to run it. For anyone…

New Linux Patches Aim To Better Handle Multiple Swap Devices

For those having Linux systems with multiple swap devices, such as for swap tiering or layered swap handling, a set of patches posted today for the Linux kernel are looking to improve the situation...…

Zuck's AI ambitions put Meta on course to become America's next big cloud provider

Meta seems to be having a bit of an identity crisis. On Monday, the social networking singularity said it would spend $50 billion to expand its Hyperion datacenter project in Richland Parish, Louisiana, from 2.2 to 5 gigawatts. The news comes less than a week after a report broke claiming that Meta was actively exploring options to offload its excess compute capacity to other AI labs. So, which i…

Zig creator calls Bun’s Claude Rust rewrite ‘unreviewed slop’

An AI rewrite of a popular Anthropic-owned JavaScript runtime and toolchain has sparked praise for the speed of its execution, but also criticism of the coding practices behind the project itself. Last week, Bun creator Jarred Sumner announced that he ported Bun from the Zig programming language to Rust in only 11 days, using a fleet of Claude agents running in parallel. The work cost an estimate…

Microsoft Promises To Fix Search With Major Windows 11 Overhaul

Microsoft is overhauling Windows 11 search to prioritize local apps, files, and settings over web results while removing ads, promotions, MSN/Bing clutter, and other distractions. "You've have been asking for search that is faster, more relevant, and easier to use -- whether you're opening an app, finding a file, or changing a setting," Microsoft says in a new blog post. "Because the Windows Searc…

US continues to shun Ebola-infected citizens; second American sent to Germany

A US citizen doing humanitarian work in the Democratic Republic of the Congo has tested positive for Ebola, marking the second American infected amid the DRC's explosive Ebola outbreak—and the second to be sent for care in Germany rather than the US. The Ebola outbreak, which was first declared on May 15, is already the third largest on record and still growing. As of July 12, the DRC has reporte…

US Government Warns That Russia State Hackers Are Coming After Your Router

CISA and allied governments are warning users to secure their routers as Russian state-backed hackers continue compromising the devices and turning them into proxy nodes to disguise attacks against critical infrastructure. The advisory urges users to disable outdated SNMP versions, use strong passwords, update firmware, and turn off unnecessary router services to reduce the risk of being swept int…

German Firm Files For Insolvency After Cybercriminals Shut Down Production For 6 Weeks

German textile firm ZEGO has filed for insolvency and is blaming a March cyberattack that shut down production for nearly six weeks. "ZEGO's filing adds another name to the short but growing list of companies that say a digital break-in was commercially fatal to their business," reports The Register. From the report: In a notice to customers and suppliers, the organization said it had exhausted ev…

The US government warns that Russia state hackers are coming after your router

The federal government is warning users of home and small office routers to secure their devices as Russia state hackers continue to mass-compromise them for use in obscuring nefarious actions against sensitive organizations in the public and private sectors. Both the Russian and Chinese governments have been compromising routers for years, sometimes in prolonged tugs-of-war to wrest control of d…

Ukrainian drone strikes forced Russia to stop shipping in vital sea corridor

Ukrainian drone strikes have forced Russia to completely halt shipping in the Sea of Azov in less than a week, showing once again how a country without traditional naval power can still effectively blockade maritime corridors. Ukraine’s Unmanned Systems Forces have flown one-way attack drones to target and strike more than 100 Russian tankers and other ships in total, along with posting video evi…

Excel competition goes extreme, makes spreadsheet geeks compete from the street

The Excel games have gone extreme, tossing four top competitors into urban wilds around the world in a one-off battle, which reigning champion Diarmuid Early won at the last minute. Irish phenom Early captured the win in the Microsoft Excel World Championship’s (MEWC) inaugural Landmark Battle over the weekend after a last-minute comeback that saw him take down Andrew Ngai by a mere 40 points (10…

States Sue to Block Paramount-Warner Bros Merger, Defying DOJ

A coalition of 12 states led by California is suing to block the $111 billion Paramount Skydance-Warner Bros. merger, arguing it would reduce competition in theatrical distribution, blockbuster films, and basic cable licensing. The challenge (PDF) defies the DOJ's approval of the deal. Variety reports: The coalition, led by California Attorney General Rob Bonta, alleges that the $111 billion trans…

California creates $3,500 rebate for new electric vehicle buyers

At the end of last September, electric vehicle adoption in the US began to crater. That followed the abolition of the IRS clean vehicle tax credit as part of a series of moves by President Trump and congressional Republicans to undermine energy efficiency and pollution control measures. Until then, buyers of some EVs could claim up to $7,500 from the purchase as part of the IRS Section 30D credit…

The price is wrong: AI cost calculation has to consider task completion rates, not just token costs

When it comes to AI services, you don't necessarily get what you pay for. It turns out that AI models with expensive tokens may cost less than models with cheap tokens for particular tasks. And the tooling attached to those models can have a significant effect on cost and output quality. Databricks, which sells data analytics software and services, recently devised an internal coding benchmark to…

Apple sues OpenAI after ex-engineer allegedly used bug to steal trade secrets

Apple is gunning for OpenAI, demanding steep penalties after stumbling on a “rare” bug that temporarily allowed a poached employee that joined OpenAI to maintain access to confidential information on Apple servers for weeks after his termination. In a lawsuit filed Friday, Apple sought several injunctions blocking OpenAI from using confidential information allegedly stolen by former employees. Ac…

Solution to Feynman's reverse sprinkler puzzle also applies to "silly sprinklers"

Watering your lawn in the summer can be both pragmatic and fun with so-called "silly sprinklers," designed to create amusing loops and spirals of water jets. And there's some fascinating physics at work to boot. Researchers at New York University's Courant Institute conducted a series of experiments with different silly sprinkler designs to find the answer to a longstanding problem in fluid dynam…

Apple Reportedly Agreed to Intel Chips To Avoid White House Tariffs

According to the Wall Street Journal (paywalled), Apple agreed to use Intel's U.S. chipmaking plants after White House officials pressured Tim Cook during tariff-relief talks last summer. MacRumors reports: In August 2025, Apple CEO Tim Cook was in Washington to lobby the Trump administration to drop its proposed 100 percent tariff on semiconductor imports -- a levy that would have raised costs ac…

States sue to block Paramount/WBD merger that was approved by Trump admin

A group of 12 states led by California sued Paramount Skydance and Warner Bros. Discovery today in an attempt to block a $111 billion merger that was greenlit by the Trump administration last month. "The unlawful merger of these two entertainment behemoths would lead to higher prices, lower quality, and less content for film and television, harming movie theaters, basic cable distributors, and ul…

Cloudflare Precursor Watches Your Mouse and Keyboard To Decide If You Are Human

BrianFagioli writes: Cloudflare has launched Precursor, a new behavioral bot detection system that monitors mouse movement, typing cadence, scrolling, clipboard activity, page visibility, and other signals across an entire browsing session. The system is designed to catch advanced bots that can run JavaScript, use real browsers, and pass traditional CAPTCHA challenges. Cloudflare says Precursor do…

Tom Cruise is utterly transformed in Digger trailer

When Warner Bros. showed new footage of its forthcoming satirical black comedy, Digger, at Cinemacon in April, industry insiders considered it a highlight of the event. The general public hasn't seen anything other than a title announcement and a teaser in May that largely provided a retrospective of star Tom Cruise's career, with just 30 seconds of footage from Digger tacked on at the end. But n…

Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership

Legal intern Suzanne Castillo co-authored 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 customers…

Microsoft chief turns hostile on frontier AI labs, warns companies to guard their IP

Seemingly unaware of the concept of irony, Satya Nadella is warning AI-using enterprises to take care not to give away their business secrets alongside the massive piles of cash they’re forking over to frontier labs every month. Writing in a long-form post on X over the weekend, the Microsoft CEO and chairman warned of what he called the “reverse information paradox,” a situation in which purchas…

Apple and Samsung benefit as memory shortage pushes smartphone shipments to historic lows

Smartphone shipments started to plateau a few years back, ending the days of guaranteed double-digit growth for any company that wanted to make phones. Fewer smartphone manufacturers exist today, and they're facing new pressure in the age of AI. A new report claims that smartphone shipments cratered 11 percent in the last quarter. Some are weathering the storm better than others, though. Accordin…

Social Media Limits Are Coming For Teens Across Europe

The European Union is considering major new restrictions on children's access to social media, including age limits, phased access, and an outright ban. "This is not about whether children can access social media," said European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. "It is about when social media can access our children." The Verge reports: Social media platforms could also be forced to prove…

German firm files for insolvency, blames cybercrims who shut down production for 6 weeks

German textile company ZEGO Textilveredelungszentrum has filed for insolvency and is blaming the financial fallout from a March cyberattack that knocked its production offline for nearly six weeks. ZEGO's filing adds another name to the short but growing list of companies that say a digital break-in was commercially fatal to their business. The Bavaria-based company provides textile finishing, pr…

Graviton5 Outperforming Intel Xeon Granite Rapids But Falls Short Of AMD EPYC Turin

Following the recent GA of the AWS M9g series as the first instances powered by the new Graviton5 CPUs, I recently ran benchmarks looking at Graviton4 vs. Graviton5 CPU performance. There was very nice generational gains for the new AWS Graviton processors with the shift from Arm Neoverse-V2 to Neoverse-V3 cores and from DDR5-5600 to DDR5-8800 memory, among other improvements. For those wondering…

Colorado will decide whether a "right to natural gas" is added to state constitution

A ballot measure written by a conservative nonprofit could amend the Colorado Constitution to enshrine fossil fuel companies’ right to sell methane gas and possibly force communities that have tried to eliminate gas appliances from new construction to back away from those efforts. Advance Colorado, which wrote the measure and led the effort to gather enough signatures to add the measure to the ba…

Hackers quickly prove that Neo Geo Doom ports are not "impossible"

Last month, we passed along Modern Vintage Gamer's (MVG) confident assertion that Doom is functionally impossible to run on the Neo Geo, owing to the console's sprite-based display hardware and lack of a frame buffer. We all should have known better than to tell a dedicated group of hackers that something is "impossible," though, as two recent projects have made great progress toward functional D…

Astronomers find sugar near the creamy center of the Milky Way (no caramel, though)

Scientists have detected a sugar in interstellar space, suggesting the galaxy may be liberally sprinkled with some of life's chemical ingredients. A new study shows that a sugar molecule containing four carbon atoms, called erythrulose, has been found near the center of the Milky Way, the first confirmed detection of a monosaccharide in the interstellar medium. Living organisms use sugars as ener…

A "disaster waiting to happen"? Industry officials worry about Crew Dragon availability.

NASA breathed a deep sigh of relief six years ago when SpaceX launched two astronauts, Doug Hurley and Bob Behnken, on a successful mission to the International Space Station. With the safe landing of Crew Dragon, the US space agency broke a nearly decade-long gap in its ability to put humans into orbit. Through its Commercial Crew program and multibillion-dollar contracts awarded in 2014, NASA h…

Philips to replace bricked Hue Bridge Pro devices

Philips is replacing Hue Bridge Pro devices after a software update left several units bricked with no way for users to restore them. Rumblings began in forums in June after a seemingly innocuous update left users, quite literally, in the dark. After a few weeks attempting to resolve the issues, Philips has thrown in the towel and said it will replace affected devices. A spokesperson told The Reg…

EU and UK officially blame Russian spies for cyberattack on Poland's power grid

The UK and EU are demanding urgent action from critical infrastructure organizations after formally attributing the December 2025 cyberattack on Poland's power grid to Russia's Federal Security Service. The Foreign, Commonwealth & Development Office (FCDO) described the attack, carried out by the FSB's Centre 16 division, as "another example of the Russian state's irresponsible attempts to sow ch…

Now, defenders are embracing the prompt injection, too

Prompt injections, the malicious commands attackers embed into content to entice large language models to follow them, have been attackers’ go-to tool for turning AI platforms against their users. A well-phrased command sneaked into an email or calendar invitation is often all it takes to cause the LLM to exfiltrate sensitive data or follow other harmful actions. Now, defenders are embracing the…

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…

SREs to AI agents: Prove yourself before you touch production

Trusting an AI agent to summarize user complaints about downtime is one thing; trusting it to fix the problem unattended is something else entirely. A survey of 696 experts The Register ran with NeuBird AI in April 2026 found that 73 percent are not using AIOps at all, another 19 percent are in pilot, and only eight percent have it in production. Asked what's stopping them, 60 percent of responde…

Sticker shock has execs rethinking this whole AI thing

KETTLE Like a drug dealer who's hooked you and raised their prices, business leaders are simply shocked to learn the AI their organizations are becoming dependent on is suddenly a lot more expensive. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube where you can subscribe to get notified of the latest episode. Kettle host B…

[$] Shielding running kernels against exploits with BPF

Cisco has some unusual challenges when it comes to deploying security patches across the company's many devices running custom kernels. John Fastabend spoke about his work preventing exploits with BPF at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit. The technique could substantially reduce the time necessary to respond to kernel vulnerabilities, but it will not be fully e…

Lucky 13: SpaceX aims for July 16 Starship flight test

UPDATED: SpaceX is scheduling another test flight of its monster Starship rocket later this week. Flight test 13 will carry 20 Starlink satellites and, hopefully, will not repeat the anomalies seen during the previous test. The mission is set to launch on Thursday, July 16, with a 90-minute launch window opening at 2245 UTC. It will carry next-generation Starlink V3 satellites for the first time,…

Final normal Debian bookworm release

Debian has announced the final normal update for Debian 12 ("bookworm"). Long-term-support updates will continue until 2028. As may be expected from a stable version, the update is mostly limited to security fixes. Still, it may be time for Debian users to look into upgrading to a more recent version. Conveniently, Debian 13 ("trixie") also received an update this weekend, with many of the same s…

FreeBSD Desktop Installer Option Working Through NVIDIA Driver Handling, Licensing

Alfonso Siciliano, who has been one of the FreeBSD developers leading the effort on adding a KDE-based desktop option to the FreeBSD installer, provided an update on recent work around adding integrating this desktop option...…

Microsoft emails Windows 10 holdouts: Fine, keep your old PC another year

Microsoft has begun sending its email of shame to Windows 10 consumers, reminding them that Extended Security Updates will run for an extra year. Strangely, some email clients are treating this latest emission as mere spam. Microsoft last month extended consumer ESU coverage through October 12, 2027. The company is now notifying those customers who might not have noticed the update on the support…

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, libxfont, mesa, opam, and wireless-regdb), Fedora (acl, attr, chromium, cjson, composer, docker-compose, jfrog-cli, librabbitmq, libssh2, libXfont2, log4cxx, OpenImageIO, openssh, p11-kit, perl-Crypt-DSA, perl-HTML-Gumbo, prometheus, python-dulwich, python-idna, python-pillow, python-tornado, sssd, tmux, upower, webkitgtk, xorg-x11-server, and…

World Cup grudge attackers may have scored Argentine FA access via year-old infostealer infection

Cybersecurity shop Hudson Rock says the suspected compromise of the Argentine Football Association (AFA) may be linked to an infostealer infection nearly a year earlier. The incident appears to be the work of an aggrieved football fan, or group of them, after Argentina eliminated Egypt from the World Cup round of 16. Egypt's coach and football association complained about several refereeing and V…

HTTP gets a QUERY method so complex searches can stop pretending to be POST

"Idempotent" may be jargon, but the term performs an important job in HTTP as a hall pass that gives reverse proxies and gateways the go-ahead to cache complex query responses and automatically retry failed requests. HTTP has long allowed automatic retries for idempotent methods, but complex queries are often sent using POST, which intermediaries cannot safely assume is retryable. Developers have…

GNOME OS Creating "Test Center" As Its Take On Apple TestFlight For Experiment Software

GNOME developers working on GNOME OS have received funding from Germany's Prototype Fund to work on creating the GNOME OS "Developer Tool Suite" or also tentatively called their "Test Center" to help in testing experimental applications/libraries in a modern Linux computing world with systemd-sysext, Buildstream, and other newer tech...…

Progress orders emergency ShareFile server shutdown over mystery security threat

Progress Software has ordered some ShareFile customers to pull the plug on their own servers after detecting what it describes as a "credible external security threat" targeting the on-premises component of its enterprise file-sharing platform. The emergency warning, sent by email and seen by The Register, instructed organizations running ShareFile Storage Zone Controllers to take the unusual ste…

Reworked System Call Entry Handling Slated For Linux 7.3

Stemming from looking at a proposed Linux kernel patch to alter the Linux kernel's system call number handling, veteran Linux kernel developer Thomas Gleixner went down a rabbit hole of the kernel's system call entry handling to make a number of clean-ups and improvements to the code. That rework to the system call entry handling is now expected to land for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle...…

Raspberry Pi 5 IOMMU Driver Being Worked On For The Mainline Linux Kernel

While the Raspberry Pi 5 is already over two and a half years old, one of the missing elements of its support from the mainline Linux kernel has been the IOMMU driver. We are now seeing Raspberry Pi's downstream IOMMU driver being adapted for mainline with hopes of getting it into the upstream kernel...…

Backup and running? Not this digital sign

Microsoft and backup are two words often uttered together, usually in the form of "Microsoft Windows has crashed again, where's my backup?" The question is: what would a backup look like for a digital sign in Derby? Spotted by eagle-eyed Register reader "nategee" on a stroll in Derby, this sign appears to have spent much of the day pleading to be backed up. This poses an interesting question. Wha…

Cloud Hypervisor 53 Released With Offloaded Snapshot/Restore Daemon

Cloud Hypervisor 53.0 is now available for this open-source, Rust-based VMM focused on cloud workloads and modern security needs. Originally started at Intel, Cloud Hypervisor continues seeing new development these days by Microsoft, Meta, Arm, and other organizations...…

Photovoltaics are still running after a year under Swiss trains

It is just over a year since a pilot project to install photovoltaics on a railway line kicked off. According to the CEO of Sun-Ways, the company behind the scheme, the challenge was not so much technical as regulatory. The project, a 100-meter photovoltaic installation on a railway line open to traffic, was inaugurated on April 24, 2025 in Buttes, Switzerland. It's fair to say it went well; the…

Microsoft is losing the battle to protect license lucre. It better get used to the feeling

OPINION In Disney movies, if you wish really, really hard for what you want, it happens. In British courts, not so much. Prince Redmondia really, really wanted to stop the evil barons from reselling on-prem Office and Windows licenses, and made a fairy tale argument in court to make it so. Our hero did not get its wish, not then, and not now with the UK Court of Appeals. The traditional reason co…

AI needs a home, not a hotel

AI discussions have moved past which model to run or which use case to tackle first. Enterprises developing their own private AI now face a more consequential question: where that AI should live. Drifting into public cloud because it feels familiar or delivers quick wins, without asking whether the environment meets AI's specific demands, tends to store up problems that compound with time. AI is…

Apple accuses OpenAI of stealing its core tech secrets

Apple has filed a lawsuit against former employees who now work at OpenAI, and the AI upstart itself, alleging theft of intellectual property. Cupertino’s complaint [PDF] opens with an accusation that a former employee joined OpenAI after eight years at Apple, and on his way out dodged an exit interview and didn’t return his work laptop. The filing alleges that once he “exploited a rare, previous…

User crippled a network while trying to learn Nmap

WHO, ME? Welcome to the working week, dear reader, which as always we open with a fresh instalment of “Who, Me?” – the reader-contributed column that offers an education in how not to do things at work. This week, meet a reader we’ll Regomize as “Roger” who told us that a decade or so back he managed teams that designed electronic shop tools and associated test kit. Roger admits he had begun to f…

A metallurgist's doubts about self-replicating probes

Meta admits its first ‘superintelligence’ was too stupid to survive for three days

Meta has withdrawn the first image generation product created by its Superintelligence Labs fewer than 72 hours after launch. The product was called “Muse Image” and Meta launched it on July 8, billing it as “the first AI image generation model from Meta Superintelligence Labs.” That lab is Zuck’s latest big bet and aims to create a “personal superintelligence that knows us deeply, understands ou…

Lenovo denies using banned Chinese SSDs where they're not allowed

ASIA IN BRIEF Lenovo has denied it sells laptops that include banned Chinese storage devices where they're not allowed. An outlet called Notebookcheck recently reported that it a ThinkBook 14 G9 IPL and found a solid-state disk made by Chinese company YMTC inside. Some observers joined the dots and decided the laptop could be a problem for Lenovo because a Biden administration decision saw the US…

Kernel prepatch 7.2-rc3

The 7.2-rc3 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said: "Things continue to look normal (the 'new normal' with slightly higher rates of commits, although I do get the feeling that we're seeing that slightly balanced out by people starting to go on summer vacation)".…

Linux 7.2-rc3 Released: Close To The "New Normal"

Linux 7.2-rc3 is now available for testing in working toward the stable Linux 7.2 kernel version coming up in August...…

Linux 7.2 Enabling UltraRISC RISC-V Support In The Default Kernel Build

Similar to Linux 7.2 enabling Eswin SoC support by default in the RISC-V "defconfig" kernel build, UltraRISC RISC-V coverage is also now being enabled by default for RISC-V kernel builds in Linux 7.2...…

Memory makers are slaves to the boom-bust rollercoaster, and the AI boom is the wildest ride of all

It’s a good time to be in the memory business. As the AI datacenter business booms, SK Hynix and Micron’s revenues have tripled in the last year, and Samsung’s has roughly doubled. But while the trio have the AI revolution to thank for their good fortune, the deck is stacked for a reversal. Such is the memory business historically. Today, sky high demand for high-bandwidth memory (HBM), DDR5, and…

HFI BIOS Aims To Provide A POST-Like Power On Screen & BIOS Setup Utility For RISC-V

The Harmonic Firmware Initiative "HFI" is trying to provide a generic, standardized power-on firmware experience for RISC-V boards. Akin to the x86 world with having immediate graphics card initialization to provide a display while the system is booting and also having a BIOS setup utility for system configuration, HFI is trying to do the same for the RISC-V world...…

Linux 7.2-rc3 Bringing Fixes For The SEGA Dreamcast Drivers In 2026

It wasn't on my bingo card for the week but merged to Git ahead of today's Linux 7.2-rc3 kernel release are a number of fixes for the SEGA Dreamcast drivers...…

Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi Linux Driver Hardened Against Malicious WiFi Access Points

The staging driver fixes that were sent out this week ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc3 release is predominantly made up of hardening the Realtek RTL8723BS WiFi driver. In particular, a number of fixes for addressing out-of-bounds behavior when connecting to "bad" WiFi hosts...…

It's an AI web, and we're just rats in the walls

OPINION Things you might not know about me. I was the first person to write a popular article about the web. Little did I, or anyone else, know how it would change everything. Our lives were transformed when all of human knowledge became just a click away. That was then. This is now. Today, more web traffic now comes from bots than humans. We're just picking up AI's crumbs. That was not how it wa…

How the FSF sysadmins block botnets with reaction

The largest available Minecraft world, totalling 15 TB

Debian 13.6 Released To Ship All The Latest Security Fixes, Reverts GeoIP Database

Debian 13.6 is out today as the newest point release of Debian Trixie to ship the latest security fixes and other maintenance updates...…

AI customers are coming around to the idea that small is beautiful

To cater to the broadest possible market, OpenAI and Anthropic build ever-larger models capable of making a brute-force attempt to tackle almost any task. These models are the Swiss Army Knives of the AI world. When used with sufficient force, they can do almost any job … but nobody needs a frontier class model to summarize emails, draft replies, or summarize meeting notes. It's cheaper and easie…

Linux 7.2-rc3 Bringing Display Detection Improvement To Help Some Multi-GPU Systems

Sent out today was this week's round of x86 (x86_64) fixes ahead of the Linux 7.2-rc3 kernel test candidate due out on Sunday...…

LLVM Merges x86 LFI "Lightweight Fault Isolation" Target For In-Process Sandboxing

Stanford researchers have been developing Lightweight Fault Isolation "LFI" compiler passes and targets for LLVM as a means of efficient, native code sandboxing. The AArch64 LFI target was previously upstreamed while this week the x86/x86_64 LFI target was also upstreamed for this means of in-process sandboxing...…

Irish datacenters now guzzle 23% of the country's electricity

Electricity used by datacenters in Ireland increased by 10 percent during 2025, despite an effective moratorium on most new datacenter grid connections in the Dublin area. The latest figures from Ireland's Central Statistics Office (CSO) show that giant server farms now account for nearly a quarter of the country's metered electricity consumption. Their share rose to 23 percent in 2025 after pass…

KDE Developers Continue Landing More Features For Plasma 6.8

KDE developers continue to be very busy this summer landing more features for the upcoming Plasma 6.8 desktop...…

Your 'app' could have been a webpage (so I fixed it for you)

Mesa's Rusticl Now Enables Arm Mali Panfrost Driver Support By Default

A change upstreamed to Mesa by an Arm engineer now enables the Panfrost Gallium3D driver for Arm Mali graphics to work with the Rusticl driver by default...…

Pop!_OS Rolls Out Its "Frosted Glass" Desktop Style For COSMIC

System76 developers have for the past number of weeks been working on developing a "frosted glass" appearance for the COSMIC desktop environment featured on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution. For Pop!_OS users this frosted glass feature is now available and will become more widespread for other Linux distributions once the next COSMIC release is formally tagged...…

Wine 11.13 Better Supports Input Pointers, Improved Keyboard Scancode Mapping For X11

Wine 11.13 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this open-source software enabling support for running Windows games and applications on Linux...…

The zero-cost fallacy: open-source software in the agentic era

Slothful summer app lets you scroll simply by tilting your head

HANDS HEAD ON Have you ever felt so lazy that reaching up to scroll on your MacBook’s trackpad was too much work? Yeah, me too – especially with the summer heat blanketing much of the Northern Hemisphere, even reaching my remote corner of the US. Thankfully, there’s an app for that. ScrollPods is a simple macOS app that’s been out since last November but which just came to my attention thanks to…

Superoptimizer – A Look at the Smallest Program

Destructive Windows backdoor stuffs multiple wipers and ransomware code into a single package

A newly identified destructive Windows backdoor combines ransomware-like encryption with multiple data-wiping features, according to Microsoft. Last October, the Redmond threat-hunting team first spotted attacks using the Golang-based implant they've named GigaWiper. Its developers stuffed multiple malware families into the software as on-demand commands, giving criminals a Swiss Army knife of co…

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

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

[$] An update on the scraper situation

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

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…

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

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

Security updates for Friday

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

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…

Paxos Made Simple (2001)[pdf]

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…

A tiny cell that broke a big rule of biology

[$] Kitty chases the mouse

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

Rust 1.97.0 released

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

Security updates for Thursday

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

Building a High-Performance C++ Backtesting Framework

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…

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

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

Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

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

Help EFF Cut the AI Hype

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

FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFF to Gov. Pritzker: Veto Illinois’ HB 5511

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police Drones

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

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

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

Primed for Malware: Stop Selling Compromised Android Devices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online

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

🦅 Domestic Spying Takes an L | EFFector 38.12

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

Scattered Spider Hackers Plead Guilty on Day 1 of Trial

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

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

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

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

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

Canada Is Forging Ahead with Its Dangerous Surveillance Bill

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

EFF Thanks SerpApi For Helping Us Protect Free Speech Online

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

Call for Submissions: Digital Pride

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

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

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

Court Records Should Be Free

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

Field Notes from a Year of OPSEC Training

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

AI Regulation Should Be Rational, Not Retaliatory

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

‘Popa’ Botnet Linked to Publicly-Traded Israeli Firm

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

The Free and Open Web Is Under Attack at the IETF

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

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

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

Onward, Friends

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

EFFecting Change: LGBTQ+ Solidarity Against the Tide of Surveillance

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

Victory! 702 has Expired!

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

Yes to California's Bill to Ban Surveillance Pricing

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

‘News’ Site Keeps Hallucinating EFF Staffers

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

LGBT Q&A: We’re Back With Season 2! 

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

Congress Just Rushed Through a Disastrous Copyright Office Overhaul

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

The 702 Ultimatum: Warrant Requirement or Bust

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

Enshittification Merch That Actually Fights Enshittification 

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

🔊 Mass Surveillance for… Loud Music? | EFFector 38.11

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

Who Runs the Ransomware Group ‘The Gentlemen?’

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

How and Why to Fight Back Against Social Media Bans

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

A Record-Breaking Patch Tuesday for June 2026

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

Tell Congress: Just Say No to NO FAKES

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

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

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

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

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

Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

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