Terminal

The University of Washington Is Moving a Graduate Program to Microsoft's Campus ↗ (opens external article)

Longtime Slashdot submitter theodp writes: GeekWire reports that the University of Washington has moved its Global Innovation Exchange {GIX) program to Microsoft's campus in a rent-free deal (UW News release). GIX, an institute supporting tech leaders that offers an MS in Technology Innovation, is the first UW program to set up full-time operations at Microsoft, whose headquarters are just across…

Open-sourcing AstaBrief, the fast report-generation model in Asta ↗ (opens external article)

The Harness Is the Company ↗ (opens external article)

Apple Tightens macOS 'Full Disk Access' Controls As AI Agents 'Substantially' Increase Risk ↗ (opens external article)

Apple says it will tighten macOS Full Disk Access controls as increasingly capable AI agents raise the risks of apps gaining broad access to users' files, messages, mail, and browsing history. TechCrunch reports: Days after a journalist claimed that Meta's Muse app on Mac read their private messages -- a claim that Meta disputed -- Apple announced that it's introducing additional controls around a…

Zig v0.17.0 ↗ (opens external article)

Linux 7.4 To Introduce Initial Device Trees For Apple M4, A18 Pro For MacBook Neo ↗ (opens external article)

Asahi Linux developer Sven Peter today sent out the pull requests of the Apple SoC Device Tree changes they are ready to upstream for the Linux 7.4 merge window happening later this month. Most notable is the initial Device Tree for Apple systems using the base M4 SoC model as well as for the MacBook Neo with the A18 Pro SoC...…

Amazon’s $1B plan to combat data center backlash draws more backlash ↗ (opens external article)

On Friday, Amazon committed to donating more than $1 billion over the next five years to communities neighboring data centers. In a press release, Amazon Web Services’ CEO Matt Garman said that communities would decide how to prioritize funds across “education, job training, energy affordability, water, and energy preservation, and local priorities.” Laying out other community commitments, Amazon…

Everyone's Packing Up ↗ (opens external article)

Patient-zero drill put health facilities to the test—40% of them failed ↗ (opens external article)

COVID-19 made the weaknesses in our pandemic preparedness at national and global levels painfully clear. But a new study highlights that even at the first, local steps of an outbreak with pandemic-potential, we are worryingly underprepared. Health officials in New York set up a regional test of healthcare facilities to identify and respond to a patient with a mystery infection that could pose a p…

Show HN: Made an open-source Lego AI generator ↗ (opens external article)

Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery to Become Skydance ↗ (opens external article)

Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery will operate under the Skydance name once their roughly $110 billion merger closes, which is expected on October 6. The combined company will bring together Paramount+, HBO Max, CBS, CNN, MTV and other networks, along with major franchises including The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, DC and Yellowstone. Ellison said the Paramount and Warner Bros. brands wi…

Google hearts Apple's Swift so much it's pumping out server-side support ↗ (opens external article)

After evolving from an Apple-made, client-side language and years of false starts, Swift could finally make it on the server. Google has taken note and has just rolled out Google Cloud API Client Libraries for Swift, evidently convinced Swift has a backend role thanks to its performance and ease of use. The GCP Swift libraries target Swift 6.2+ and take advantage of SwiftNIO's asynchronous event…

GrapheneOS has fixed the Android 17 QPR1 kernel performance regression ↗ (opens external article)

Shut up and take our money: Amazon plows $1B into quashing datacenter dissent ↗ (opens external article)

Faced with growing opposition to datacenters from residents who don't want the bit barns in their backyards, Amazon plans to invest $1 billion over the next five years to indoctrinate the public. The company announced the investment in a whataboutism-packed blog post aimed at convincing readers datacenters are not as bad as they've been led to believe, and that if the common folk don't get in lin…

Muse Gadgets ↗ (opens external article)

"The only intuitive interface is the nipple" (2012) ↗ (opens external article)

Lyft settles landmark driver misclassification lawsuit for $272.5M ↗ (opens external article)

California’s attorney general and three city attorneys announced a $272.5 million settlement with Lyft after allegations that the company “committed wage theft by misclassifying drivers as independent contractors rather than employees” between 2016 and 2020, according to a Thursday statement. The case dates back to May 2020, when then-Attorney General Xavier Becerra, who is now the Democratic can…

Apple Pass Designer ↗ (opens external article)

Used Processor Leads To Game Ban ↗ (opens external article)

AmiMoJo shares a report from heise online: Anyone buying used hardware for a gaming PC needs to be careful: not just whether the components are still in order but also what the previous owner did with them. A case on Reddit shows this. Someone installed a used AMD processor, a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, in their PC. Because the previous owner was caught cheating, the new owner cannot start several online ga…

Site-Blocking Will Not Defend IP, No Matter the Bill’s Name ↗ (opens external article)

There has been a raft of site-blocking bills in the latest Congress, and the latest is called the “Deterring Extraterritorial Foreign Exploitation of Networks Damaging Intellectual Property” aka the “DEFEND IP Act.” The problem is that instead of “defending IP,” this bill will incentivize censorship, overblocking, and bad faith attempts to block access to a website. DEFEND IP Act, and all of these…

The 2008 economic crisis changed the US's relationship with energy ↗ (opens external article)

One argument that often comes up about climate change is that fossil fuels are good because they powered economic growth that has left most people better off overall. And, to an extent, that has been true, but it's also an extremely limited perspective. It's pretty obvious now that the growth they powered has come with very high costs that we've only recently started to pay, in the form of damage…

US arrests tech CEO accused of smuggling $300M in Nvidia chips into China ↗ (opens external article)

The US has arrested another suspect accused of smuggling high-end computer servers containing export-controlled Nvidia chips into China. In a press release on Thursday, the Department of Justice accused 38-year-old Greg Lui of using false paperwork to mask shipments of servers worth more than $300 million that he allegedly knew were ultimately destined for China. As the CEO of Earthmade Computer,…

Intel Ready With A Big Improvement For Battlemage With Linux 7.4 ↗ (opens external article)

Sent out on Thursday was the last round of planned Intel Xe kernel driver improvements targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle. There is one big improvement that is set to benefit Intel discrete GPUs with at least Battlemage benefiting nicely...…

Research roundup: 6 cool science stories we almost missed ↗ (opens external article)

It’s a regrettable reality that there is never enough time to cover all the interesting scientific stories we come across. So every month, we highlight a handful of the best stories that nearly slipped through the cracks. September’s list includes a tantalizing hint of the elusive dark matter at the LUX-ZEPLIN detector; entangled Z bosons at the Large Hadron Collider; possible use of psychoactive…

Ubuntu Working On SHA3 For Debian's APT For If/When SHA2 Is Broken ↗ (opens external article)

Ubuntu developer Gianpiero Carpinelli at Canonical has been working on introducing SHA3-256 and SHA3-384 support for Debian's APT packaging tool in preparing for if/when that SHA2 is broken...…

arXiv imposes rate limit on paper submissions to stem the AI slop tide ↗ (opens external article)

arXiv, the preprint paper repository, is seeing so many low-quality submissions, with AI tools helping drive the surge, that it has imposed a hard limit of two new submissions per month per submitter, regardless of whether they were produced solely by humans or with help from AI tools. After becoming an independent nonprofit over the summer following 25 years under Cornell University’s stewardshi…

From the creator of Redis; run LLM locally with ds4 ↗ (opens external article)

EU's Microsoft Teams Alternative Draws Bad Reviews From Officials ↗ (opens external article)

The European Commission has rolled out Element Pro as a self-hosted "sovereign back-up" to Microsoft Teams and the reviews aren't great. Politico reported that several officials questioned its usefulness and usability, with one calling it "absolute shit." Politico reports: "I don't understand the added value here," one official wrote on an internal staff message board, seen by POLITICO. Another de…

Congress Has Another Site-Blocking Bill, And This One Targets VPNs ↗ (opens external article)

Congress is taking another run at site-blocking, a deeply flawed concept that would undermine basic internet infrastructure. Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA) has introduced the American Copyright Protection Act (ACPA), H.R. 10364, a bill that would give copyright owners a new legal tool to block Americans’ access to foreign websites accused of copyright infringement.  The basic idea is all too familiar, a…

OpenAI alerts 100+ orgs that its 'misaligned models' attempted to break in - or worse ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI's agents have repeatedly strayed beyond their intended scope. Two separate reports detail the activity, including one from Sam Altman’s company saying it has notified more than 100 organizations about potentially problematic model activity. OpenAI, in a late Wednesday update to its ongoing Hugging Face investigation, said it has notified more than 100 organizations that “misaligned models”…

US military ends long-running program to spot nuclear missile launches ↗ (opens external article)

In late 1970, a Titan IIIC rocket launched from Space Launch Complex 40 at what was then called Cape Canaveral Air Force Station. It carried a top-secret payload for the US military. Much has changed in spaceflight since then. The Titan IIIC would bow out in 1982 after dozens of launches. Various Titans continued launching from Space Launch Complex 40 until 2005, at which point the US Air Force—i…

How I kept cool with NYC's free battery program for window AC units ↗ (opens external article)

My family has spent four summers participating in demand response programs whereby utility companies pay customers to reduce energy use on the hottest summer days. Most summers have involved carefully precooling our New York City apartment before switching off the air conditioners and sweating it out during the designated demand response periods. But this year, we kept our window air conditioners…

Judge Dismisses Chegg and Penske Antitrust Lawsuits Targeting Google AI Search ↗ (opens external article)

A federal judge has dismissed antitrust lawsuits from Chegg and Penske Media accusing Google of harming publishers by using their content in AI Overviews and other AI search features without compensating them or providing a meaningful opt-out. Ars Technica reports: The lawsuits were filed in 2025, and Google requested a dismissal earlier this year. Chegg, an education and learning platform, claime…

STS-51-F Abort-to-Orbit (1985) ↗ (opens external article)

Cybertruck sales in free fall as Tesla reports mediocre sales for Q3 ↗ (opens external article)

Tesla sold 486,532 electric vehicles during the third quarter of 2026. That’s a 2.1 percent decrease on the same quarter in 2025, when the company found homes for 497,099 EVs, and one might think that would be bad news for a company valued on the premise of near-constant growth. But Tesla stock is up this morning; the year-over-year numbers might look bad, but the company still exceeded analysts’…

Social Media Harms Democracy By Spreading Rumors, Survey Shows ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A growing number of people think social media manipulates and divides people and harms democracy, Pew Research Center said on Thursday, echoing rising concern and tighter scrutiny across the world. Companies running popular social platforms, including Meta, Snap, and TikTok, have faced thousands of lawsuits and paid large sums to settle claims that…

Victory! Court Rejects Government Effort to Dismiss Social Media Surveillance Lawsuit ↗ (opens external article)

Judge Allows Social Media Surveillance Lawsuit Against Trump Administration to Move ForwardNEW YORK — A lawsuit filed by three labor unions against the Departments of State and Homeland Security for their viewpoint-based surveillance and suppression of protected expression online can move forward, a federal judge ruled yesterday. On October 1, 2026, Judge Alvin K. Hellerstein of the U.S. District…

One month coding with GLM 5.3 Flash ↗ (opens external article)

Californian accused of shipping $300M worth of Nvidia chips to China without Uncle Sam’s approval ↗ (opens external article)

A California business owner was arrested on Thursday after being charged with allegedly smuggling Nvidia hardware to China without the proper export licenses. Keeping the highest-end GPUs out of Chinese hands has been a priority for the US government. Greg Lui, 38, allegedly tried to export around $300 million worth of Nvidia kit - typically used for artificial intelligence (AI) development - via…

Error-Prone AI Nearly Sparked World War Three Last Month ↗ (opens external article)

In an op-ed for The Guardian, authors Timnit Gebru and Emily M. Bender argue that policymakers are focusing too heavily on hypothetical "superintelligence" while overlooking the more immediate danger of deploying unreliable AI in high-stakes settings. They point to an as-yet independently unverified CNN report claiming U.S. officials nearly intercepted a Chinese vessel after an AI-assisted intelli…

The 7-year-old Nvidia Shield TV is now $100 more expensive due to AI ↗ (opens external article)

The era of generative AI has upended technology supply chains, and there is one ironclad rule in 2026: If it has memory or storage, it's getting more expensive. Even devices with years-old tech inside are still apparently subject to that unwritten rule. Nvidia has just announced that the Shield TV Pro is getting $100 more expensive, effective immediately. The most recent version of the Shield str…

The VMware exit is a protection upgrade ↗ (opens external article)

Leaving VMware forces a fresh look at every layer of the datacenter, and data protection belongs near the top of that list. Most teams plan to move the backup design across as it stands and rebuild it on the new hypervisor. The better plan uses the exit to raise resiliency and recovery speed, keeps the backup application, and gives each layer the work it does best. What the migration touches Back…

OpenAI's wandering AI agents earn it a California subpoena ↗ (opens external article)

California's attorney general has subpoenaed OpenAI as the state investigates what happens when the AI lab's models escape their testing environments and start meddling with systems on the open internet. Attorney General Rob Bonta said his office served OpenAI with an investigative subpoena this week as part of a broader California Department of Justice probe into cybersecurity incidents and risk…

AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform OS Updated With ROCm 10.0, Linux 7.2 ↗ (opens external article)

With the AMD Ryzen AI Halo mini PC that launched this summer that focused on local AI, one of the biggest surprises for me when reviewing the unit was finding that the Linux preload wasn't just a stock Ubuntu/Debian OS but rather a customized AMD Linux distribution known as AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform. Yesterday the newest version of AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform was released with some nice…

With most information hidden, the game Stratego had stumped AI until now ↗ (opens external article)

Rocket Report: SpaceX completes launch triple-header; Rocket Lab nets big contract ↗ (opens external article)

Welcome to Edition 9.13 of the Rocket Report! This week, SpaceX celebrated the first orbital launch of its new Starship rocket. I'm not sure many people, at least those outside of SpaceX, expected it to take 14 flights of Starship before it technically reached low-Earth orbit, but Monday morning's launch finally added that to SpaceX's list of accomplishments with its new super-heavy rocket. Stars…

Power approval set to delay Oracle's Wisconsin AI datacenter ↗ (opens external article)

Oracle's Wisconsin AI datacenter could miss its planned 2027 start date because the transmission infrastructure needed to power it is awaiting regulatory approval. Research company Aterio warns that Project Lighthouse, being developed by Vantage in Port Washington with Oracle as tenant, faces a real risk of slipping beyond Big Red's target of delivering capacity to customers in the second half of…

Ola Bini Ordered to Leave Ecuador Under Obscure Accusations ↗ (opens external article)

In a new blow to Ola Bini’s legal guarantees, Ecuadorean authorities retained the free software developer and security expert yesterday in Quito and ordered his immediate deportation from the country. He is barred from returning to Ecuador for 10 years.  According to information released by his lawyer, Bini was intercepted by a car with four people who identified themselves as immigration agents.…

systemd-appd Out For Review To Centralize Tracking Of User's Apps ↗ (opens external article)

The newest systemd component being worked on and drafted for an initial pull request is systemd-appd as a new mechanism to centralizing the tracking of user's apps...…

The Legend of von Neumann (1973) [pdf] ↗ (opens external article)

Venice’s failed war against Constantinople led to the first bond market ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI shows three staff the door over alleged information misuse ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI has fired two safety researchers and a program manager for allegedly mishandling sensitive company information. The ChatGPT maker confirmed the dismissals to The Register, saying an internal investigation found the trio had violated company rules governing access to and handling of confidential information. "We have parted ways with three individuals for violating our policies on accessing…

Imagination Talks Up Their Open-Source Vulkan Driver, Volcanic Architecture Plans ↗ (opens external article)

Imagination Tech was at XDC 2026 Toronto this week to talk up their ongoing work around their PowerVR Mesa Vulkan driver (and PVR upstream DRM kernel driver) with this driver continuing to improve, plans for supporting their new Volcanic GPU architecture, and other improvements...…

Nvidia debuts $4,999 DGX Spark with half the RAM and storage, amid memory crunch ↗ (opens external article)

In an effort to provide a more affordable AI system, Nvidia is introducing a cut down version of the DGX Spark with half the memory and storage. The GB10-based systems will be offered exclusively through hardware partners including Acer, Asus, Dell, Gigabyte, HP, and MSI, and are expected to retail for around $4,999. The less-powerful SKUs are necessary after Nvidia jacked the price of its 128 GB…

The first packet sent via RFC1149 avian carrier is up for auction at Christie's ↗ (opens external article)

Excel Canvas offers to turn your workbook into the boss's next report ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft plans to roll out Excel Canvas through October, adding Copilot-generated reports to its veteran spreadsheet. Excel Canvas "transforms workbook data into a polished report containing visualizations, metrics, and insights," said Microsoft. The reports automatically refresh as the underlying data changes. Users need access to Copilot in Excel and can tweak reports through natural language…

Intel Iris Open-Source Driver Now Supports Efficient 64-bit Addressing Mode ↗ (opens external article)

As a follow-up to the news one month ago of Intel Nova Lake P's graphics introducing a new 64-bit GPU mode, the latest driver-side enablement has now landed for Intel's Iris Gallium3D OpenGL driver for supporting efficient 64-bit addressing...…

Teen suspected of running KillSec ransomware group as cops seize servers, arrest three ↗ (opens external article)

Police suspect a 16-year-old was the main operator of KillSec, a ransomware group linked to around 1,000 suspected attacks worldwide. Authorities announced on Thursday that an international operation had seized the group's infrastructure and made three provisional arrests. The German-led Operation KillSwitch replaced the crew's leak site with a police seizure notice. The available information is…

On social reality in China ↗ (opens external article)

Blogging with Gleam, Org-Mode and Pandoc ↗ (opens external article)

Once a $35 computer, the 2 GB Raspberry Pi 4 now costs $67.50 ↗ (opens external article)

Raspberry Pi has raised prices for the 2 GB Pi 4 and Pi 5, citing rapidly rising memory costs. Both models now cost $12.50 more, taking the 2 GB Pi 4 to $67.50 and the equivalent Pi 5 to $77.50. Readers with long memories may recall the $35 Pi 4. Its price "temporarily" rose to $45 during the pandemic and has since climbed further. The board maker reported a 90 percent increase in first-half reve…

Our Project Suncatcher prototype satellite is in orbit ↗ (opens external article)

A 12-year sequence of telescope images of a star and four planets orbiting ↗ (opens external article)

20% of Swiss Glaciers Lost In Five Years ↗ (opens external article)

Swiss glaciers lost 5.5% of their ice volume in the first eight months of 2026, bringing total losses since 2021 to 19.4%. Researchers say some glaciers are now collapsing from within as meltwater carves out large cavities. The Guardian reports: Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and lead author of the report, said many people do not realize how fast glaciers are retreating, or that just…

F.02 Decommission ↗ (opens external article)

Fortinet sounds the alarm over actively exploited FortiMail zero-day ↗ (opens external article)

Fortinet is warning customers to lock down FortiMail after attackers started exploiting a critical bug that lets them write files to vulnerable systems without logging in. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-104286, carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and affects multiple versions of Fortinet's email security platform. Fortinet describes the vulnerability as a combination of path traversal and improper handlin…

TCL is right to question Samsung’s use of the term “Mini LED” ↗ (opens external article)

What makes a display a Mini LED display? It's a question that sounds like it should have a simple answer. But it's now at the center of a lawsuit between two of the biggest names in TVs, with TCL accusing its longtime competitor Samsung of falsely advertising budget LCD-LED TVs as Mini LED sets. TCL may have a point. Samsung's M-series TVs, which range from $300 for a 43-inch model to $2,300 for…

Ubuntu's Next Rust Effort May See OpenPGP Replaced By Sequoia PGP ↗ (opens external article)

Canonical engineer Richard Scott McNew published a status update surrounding the Rust programming language efforts in the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release. Sequoia PGP is being rolled out to Ubuntu Linux and in a future release may end up replacing OpenPGP...…

Apex Compute Developing Open-Source Mesa Vulkan Driver For Their Hardware ↗ (opens external article)

Apex Compute is the company started in California in 2024 that aims to produce high-efficiency AI accelerators for real-time edge AI inferencing. So far they have an FPGA prototype for licensing and deployment and carries the bold claim of being "20x faster than the NVIDIA Jetson" and at under 10W and one fifth the cost. Making Apex Compute much more interesting to us now is that they are developi…

Coreboot 26.09 Released With Framework Laptop 12 Support, AI Review Comment Policy ↗ (opens external article)

Coreboot 26.09 released yesterday as the latest quarterly feature release to this open-source software for replacing proprietary BIOS and system firmware on a growing selection of devices...…

UK spending watchdog opens investigation into Capita's pension fiasco ↗ (opens external article)

The UK's public spending watchdog is investigating the troubled transfer of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) to Capita. In a notice, the National Audit Office (NAO) said problems had persisted since the outsourcer took over administration in December 2025. The Cabinet Office awarded Capita the seven-year £239 million contract in November 2023, allowing two years to prepare for the transiti…

KDE Nearing Decision Point On BuildStream-Based KDE Linux ↗ (opens external article)

KDE Linux developers have been experimenting with a build of their Linux distribution based on BuildStream to ship as an OS image rather than a set of Arch Linux packages. They are nearing a point soon where they will decide if they will officially ship this BuildStream-based KDE Linux image...…

Met Police suspends use of phone-hacking software over Russian links ↗ (opens external article)

The Metropolitan Police has stopped using digital forensics software from Oxygen Forensics while it investigates US allegations that the supposedly American outfit was secretly owned by Russians and developing its wares in Moscow. Scotland Yard confirmed it has paused use of the company's tools and launched a "full review," after US prosecutors last week accused Oxygen CEO Lee Reiber and Russian…

Flight delayed? So are these codec updates ↗ (opens external article)

Take this display at Alcantarí International Airport, which serves Sucre, Bolivia's constitutional and judicial capital. Eagle-eyed Register reader Phil Pearce spotted the Windows 11 desktop and its update prompt while waiting for a delayed Boliviana de Aviación (BoA) flight. The prompt comes from K-Lite Codec Pack, a collection of components that enables Windows to play various audio and video f…

Techie was stung by a wasp, held overnight by Chinese police, then trapped in a 13-hour meeting ↗ (opens external article)

Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday column that shares your tech support stories. This week we're taking a detour into tech sales, courtesy of a reader we'll Regomize as "Carson," whose employer sent him to China without first securing a visa. The adventure began when a colleague called with a fateful question: "Can you travel to China tomorrow to attend a sales meeti…

Pi coding agent pulls a 180 and adds MCP support ↗ (opens external article)

The Pi coding agent reached its 1.0 milestone on Thursday while being treated for whiplash. One of the core new inclusions is support for Model Context Protocol (MCP), which Pi creator Mario Zechner once dismissed as unnecessary. Earendil, the company formed by Armin Ronacher and Colin Daymond Hanna that acquired Pi in April 2026, explained the about-face by noting that things change. Not only ha…

OpenAI Alerts More Than 100 Groups About Rogue AI Agent Activity ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI has informed more than 100 organizations about incidents involving unauthorized activity tied to its AI agents, according to a blog post by the ChatGPT maker, as AI labs face mounting scrutiny over rogue AI agent activity. Here are some other details: - The Sam Altman-led company has been conducting a broad review of the activities of its AI…

AWS turns its best practice framework into an agent that recommends cloudy reconfigs ↗ (opens external article)

Amazon Web Services has debuted an agent that it says will evaluate your cloudy environment “as an experienced cloud architect would” and recommend useful changes. The cloud colossus named its bot the “AWS Well-Architected Agent,” a nod to the Well-Architected Framework that outlines best practices for using the Amazonian cloud. Amazon’s announcement says the agentic incarnation of the Framework…

California Rushes To Prepare For Massive 'Kelvin' Wave, Predicted Sea Level Rise ↗ (opens external article)

fjo3 shares a report from The Guardian: Communities across California are rushing to prepare for the imminent arrival of the so-called "Kelvin wave," a massive underwater band of warm water threatening to inundate swaths of the vast North American shoreline. The wave is nearing southern California and expected to reach the San Francisco Bay Area by early October, as it crawls toward Alaska. Waters…

Greg Kroah-Hartman – Security in the LLM Age [video] ↗ (opens external article)

Google launches first datacenter satellite and research that finds orbiting bit barns can work ↗ (opens external article)

Google’s first “Suncatcher” datacenter satellite has made it into space, but the company has cast doubt on whether its orbital ambitions can scale. As The Register reported last week, Project Suncatcher aims to test whether Google’s tensor processing units (TPUs) can survive a launch and the harsh environment of space. The Big G hopes to validate theories that the limitless supply of solar energy…

Siemens Slams The Door Shut On Promising Open-Source Radioss Project ↗ (opens external article)

As a major disappointment to the open-source community, Siemens has decided to end -- and close-up access -- to the OpenRadioss project as the open-source version opened up by Altair Engineering under the GNU AGPL License back in 2022. This was an open-source version of the industry-leading finite element solver that Altair developed. Siemens acquired Altair Engineering last year and have now comp…

Amazon's New Kindle Accessories Bring Back Physical Controls ↗ (opens external article)

Alongside a refreshed Kindle lineup, Amazon today introduced two accessories that bring physical buttons back to its touchscreen e-readers. The $34.99 Kindle Click is a Bluetooth remote that lets readers turn pages and adjust brightness without touching the device, while a new $79.99 magnetic cover is available for select Paperwhite and Colorsoft models. GeekWire reports: Amazon says [the Kindle C…

Show HN: Giving Opus 5.5 a simulated paint canvas ↗ (opens external article)

Steam On Linux Dives Down To 3.05% For September ↗ (opens external article)

Steam on Linux use in March hit an all-time high of around 5.33% marketshare. Since then it pulled back to around 4% while for September 2026 the Steam Survey results are now in and it's clocking in just above 3%...…

Russian-Owned Snooping Software Used By US Secret Service ↗ (opens external article)

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Telegraph: British police forces, including specialist units within the Metropolitan Police, have used Oxygen Forensics software to break into the phones of suspects during live investigations, public documents show. The Virginia-based company behind the software has been accused in the US of having hidden its Russian ownership to avoid sanctions, before it was…

Venus' mysterious haze is actually cosmic dust ↗ (opens external article)

Venus is shrouded in a veil of mystery. The yellowish “lower haze” at the bottom of its atmosphere was discovered by the Venera and Pioneer Venus probes in the 1970s. These spacecraft were some of the first to successfully send images of the planet back to Earth, but the haze they saw went unexplained for decades. Now the mystery Venus was keeping has been unveiled. What nobody knew then was that…

Court agrees with EFF: Utah's VPN law demands a technical impossibility ↗ (opens external article)

Sites in ChatGPT ↗ (opens external article)

SpaceX describes surgical intervention before launch of latest crew mission ↗ (opens external article)

A four-person crew rocketed into orbit Thursday from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station, Florida, heading for a six-month expedition on the International Space Station. Riding a Falcon 9 rocket and Dragon spacecraft, the four crew members departed from Space Launch Complex-40 at Cape Canaveral at 11:10 am EDT (15:10 UTC) Thursday. Nine minutes later, they were in orbit to begin closing in on the…

Cloudflare Tries to Outplay Jev With Open-Weight Clef Models ↗ (opens external article)

Cloudflare has launched two open-weight decision models, Clef and Clef-flash, designed for structured yes/no, multiple-choice, and ranking tasks while also supporting images, video, and up to a 64K context window. Cloudflare says its models outperform TypeSafe's Jev on several benchmarks and can run locally from Hugging Face. The Register reports: For starters, Clef has an LLM backbone. According…

We Demand More Information on How Marin Cops Illegally Shared Flock ALPR Data ↗ (opens external article)

The Marin County Sheriff’s Office is the latest California law enforcement agency to get caught sharing automated license plate reader (ALPR) data from their Flock Safety system with out-of-state and federal agencies. EFF and the ACLU of Northern California are calling them out for this direct violation of California law, which has put every driver in the county at risk and is especially dangerous…

AI agents hacked the hackers, stealing email addresses from security research org ↗ (opens external article)

AI agents hacked the hackers - the Dutch Institute for Vulnerability Disclosure (DIVD) - via two zero-day bugs in its Zammad support platform, abusing the flaws to hijack sessions, run code remotely as the local zammad user, and escalate privileges to root. The chained exploits took just seconds to move from session hijacking to root access, and on Thursday, the nonprofit bug hunting organization…

Challengers Approach: Third Party App Stores Arrive to Google Play ↗ (opens external article)

If you are an Android user, you may have noticed it already: Google has begun allowing rival, third-party app stores to be distributed through the Google Play Store. And if you are a developer, you may have noticed new options for billing and distributing your apps.  For years, Epic Games, maker of games such as Fortnite, has been suing Google, alleging violations of antitrust law. Specifically at…

Ryan Roslansky Is Leaving After Nearly 18 Years At LinkedIn and Microsoft ↗ (opens external article)

Ryan Roslansky is leaving Microsoft and LinkedIn after nearly 18 years, triggering another leadership shuffle across Office and Teams. "Roslansky, who until recently was the CEO of LinkedIn, was promoted to the head of Office last year and then took control of Microsoft Teams earlier this year," notes The Verge. From the report: "Ryan leaves the organization in a strong position," says Microsoft C…

Fedora 45 Beta Performance: The Satisfyingly Boring Benchmarks ↗ (opens external article)

While there have been a number of Ubuntu 26.10 development benchmarks in recent weeks and more on the way, some Phoronix readers have asked about the lack of any early Fedora 45 tests given its recent beta. For good reason, it's largely boring but here are some to illustrate.…

Cloudflare tries to outplay Jev with open-weight Clef models ↗ (opens external article)

Two weeks after the Jev model took the AI world by storm, Cloudflare has released its own pair of "Clef" decision models that it claims are smarter and faster than Jev, while also being open weight and runnable locally. The Clef family of decision models was announced by Cloudflare on Thursday, and consists of two models: Clef and Clef-flash, a slightly smaller and faster version of the model. Fo…

Hacks of 2 federal agencies in a month have spilled a bonanza of sensitive data ↗ (opens external article)

The Pentagon is informing more than 2 million current and former military members that their personnel records storing sensitive personal information were stolen over a monthslong compromise of one of its networks. The breach is the second one in recent months to expose sensitive government information. The records, according to one notification letter posted to Reddit, included Social Security n…

Judge dismisses Chegg and Penske antitrust lawsuits targeting Google AI search ↗ (opens external article)

In a setback for publishers worried about the effects of AI search, a US federal judge has dismissed lawsuits filed by Chegg and Penske Media against Google. The companies accused Google of antitrust violations in products like AI overviews, which have led to decreasing traffic at numerous sites. However, US District Judge Amit Mehta has ruled that Google's conduct is not illegal under antitrust…

Loss of cell identity drives human aging: Two new papers ↗ (opens external article)

Stanford prof is beating the drum for a new protocol to replace TCP ↗ (opens external article)

TCP, the data transport protocol upon which pretty much the entire web and most of cloud computing is built, is ill-suited for emerging AI workloads, a retired Stanford University professor argues. To solve the problem, he's promoting a new protocol called Homa. “TCP, for all the amazing things it has done, is not a good match for datacenters,” said John Ousterhout, a professor emeritus of comput…

Mesa Drops Its Poorly Maintained & Rarely Used Direct3D 10 User-Mode Driver ↗ (opens external article)

Back in 2021 the Direct3D 10 User-Mode Driver "d3d10umd" was introduced as a new Gallium3D state tracker to work as a Windows WDDM UMD driver similar to Windows WARP while leveraging LLVMpipe for better performance. Now five years later the poorly maintained code is removed from the Mesa codebase...…

Court Agrees with EFF: Utah’s VPN Law Demands a Technical Impossibility ↗ (opens external article)

When state lawmakers attempt to rewrite how the internet works, users rely on courts to recognize that laws can’t make technical impossibilities a reality. That’s why we were happy to see that a court has blocked Utah’s attempt to outlaw the privacy protections of Virtual Private Networks (VPNs).  In a win for digital rights, a federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking Utah’s SB 7…

Happy Opt Out October! Let’s Find Real Alternatives to the Tech Giants ↗ (opens external article)

Over the years, the major tech companies have found all sorts of ways to embed themselves into our lives. We often use their software, their AI tools, their social media, and their operating systems by default without even thinking about potential alternatives. It’s time to rethink that relationship.  Last year, we created Opt Out October to help remind ourselves of the variety of ways we can take…

Ubuntu 26.10 Beta Released With Linux 7.3 Kernel, GNOME 51 Desktop ↗ (opens external article)

Ubuntu 26.10 beta is now available for the official Ubuntu editions as well as the various community flavors...…

FLUX 3 Image ↗ (opens external article)

Can good design stop content creators from having sex in robotaxis? ↗ (opens external article)

Humans can be a frisky bunch, and it wasn’t very long after Tesla Autopilot started letting drivers go hands-free before people decided to post footage of themselves having sex from the driver’s seat. Recently, The San Francisco Standard interviewed multiple people who claimed to have had sex in robotaxis belonging to General Motors’ now-defunct Cruise. “There’s no one to tell you, 'You can’t do…

Cloudflare launches Data Platform with bland 'Basin' branding, promise of fewer fees ↗ (opens external article)

Cloudflare Data Platform on Thursday received a bland new brand name, Basin, and promotion from beta status to general availability. Under the tub-themed moniker, Cloudflare Pipelines, R2 Data Catalog, and R2 SQL become Basin Pipelines, Basin Catalog, and Basin SQL respectively. The company's evocation of washroom fixtures doesn't quite align with its stable of more literal product names – Sandbo…

Anatomy of a Lean proof for software engineers ↗ (opens external article)

Mike Tomlin spent 12 years building a Minecraft city ↗ (opens external article)

Marvel releases one last VisionQuest trailer ↗ (opens external article)

With its premiere just two weeks away, Marvel Studios has dropped one last trailer for the limited series, VisionQuest, which will complete the trilogy begun with WandaVision and Agatha All Along. (Spoilers for WandaVision and Agatha All Along below.) As previously reported, Marvel’s streaming TV portfolio has kind of been all over the place: a handful of hits, a few misses, and a bunch of middli…

Memory executives expect RAM shortage to continue through 2028 ↗ (opens external article)

Micron and Samsung executives this week said the memory shortage will continue for at least the next couple of years. Micron CEO Sanjay Mehrotra expects demand for the firm’s memory to exceed its available supply over that period, he told investors last night. Micron no longer sells consumer RAM, and Mehrotra’s statements refer to Micron’s business-to-business sales of high-bandwidth memory (HBM)…

EU’s hodgepodge tech policy exposes members to Chinese vendor risks, says think tank ↗ (opens external article)

Depending on Chinese technology for European infrastructure poses risks that not every country takes seriously. So says the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), which suggests that the EU needs to do better in helping members assess the risk and take appropriate action to safeguard the entire bloc. The UK-based think tank said in a report today that the EU should develop a new risk assessment…

Nearing A 10 Second Kernel Build, Xeon 600 & Other September Excitement On Phoronix ↗ (opens external article)

During the past month on Phoronix were 284 original news articles and another 19 featured Linux hardware reviews/multi-page benchmark articles. A lot of exciting happenings both on the hardware and software fronts while October is sure to be another interesting month with the releases of Ubuntu 26.10, Fedora 45, and some more hardware fun...…

Florida cops say they don't know who owns 11 unpermitted Flock cameras ↗ (opens external article)

Florida cops are facing questions after a mandate to remove all Flock cameras tracking cars on St. Lucie County roads led local police to uncover more than a dozen suspicious cameras operating without permits. Local residents told The Washington Post that they were alarmed that no one knows who owns many of the mysterious cameras. Of the 14 cameras found, 11 had no obvious owners, raising concern…

Suspected Chinese spies spoofed an Anthropic exec, ex-White House official in AI phishing ↗ (opens external article)

A suspected Chinese espionage group impersonated AI policy figures, including a senior Anthropic employee and a former White House official, in phishing campaigns targeting AI policy experts at US universities, think tanks, and law firms, security researchers say. The bulk of these campaigns occurred in July, according to Proofpoint, which discovered the espionage attempts and attributed them to…

OpenBGPD 9.3 released ↗ (opens external article)

In another hint that a new OpenBSD release is close, the OpenBGPD project has announced a new release of its software, version 9.3: We have released OpenBGPD 9.3, which will be arriving in the OpenBGPD directory of your local OpenBSD mirror soon. This release includes the following changes to the previous release: * Add shorthand for well-known "DOWNGRADE" BGP community. * Remove support old aspa…

next-20261001: linux-next ↗ (opens external article)

Version:next-20261001 (linux-next) Released:2026-10-01…

Some Networking Fixes Being Diverted To Linux 7.4, AI/LLM Activity Still Increasing ↗ (opens external article)

With the vast array of wired and wireless networking drivers within the Linux kernel and range of protocols and other networking features, it's a big expanse of code for AI/LLM agents to analyze and critique. The Linux networking developers have acknowledged being "complete overwhelmed" by the AI/LLM-driven patch activity and bug reports as well as battling against AI slop patches. Even though Lin…

AWS offers local, open source leash for agent harnesses ↗ (opens external article)

If you don't want your AI agents running out of control and changing files or transferring data outside your rules, AWS has published an open source software library that it claims can add a new layer of policy control. Just as a dog’s harness is useless without a leash to keep it under control, the Dogwood Local Engine promises to put AI agent tool calls on a leash, blocking actions that don’t m…

Microsoft makes Windows settings backup the default in 26H2 ↗ (opens external article)

Windows 11 26H2 is out, and Microsoft has enabled Windows settings backup by default, a move that could send administrators scrambling to opt out where they once had to opt in. The latest release hasn't made a lot of shockwaves in the community featurewise. Users with up-to-date versions of 25H2 will unlikely notice much difference – 26H2 has the same code base, delivered via an enablement packag…

Build the right AI factory for your needs: partner for success ↗ (opens external article)

AI ambition is easy to describe - using data and models to improve decisions, automate work, accelerate discovery, or create new services. Delivering those outcomes is harder and takes a significant amount of experience to be successful. Training a frontier model, fine-tuning an industry model, running high-volume inference and supporting agentic AI place different demands on infrastructure, proc…

Microsoft catches hackers exploiting Zimbra bug before disclosure ↗ (opens external article)

Attackers were poking at a critical Zimbra mail server bug weeks before it was publicly disclosed, and then moved on to steal credentials, raid mailboxes, and take deeper control of compromised systems. Microsoft Threat Intelligence said it tracked exploitation of CVE-2026-73570, an unauthenticated command injection vulnerability in Zimbra Collaboration Suite that gives attackers a potentially ea…

Qt Creator 21 IDE Beta Enables More AI Functionality By Default ↗ (opens external article)

Following yesterday's release of the Qt 6.12 LTS toolkit, The Qt Group today released Qt Creator 21 in beta form as the latest version of their integrated development environment focused on C/C++ as well as Python, JavaScript, and other programming languages...…

MI5 warns UK academics their research may have helped Chinese spies ↗ (opens external article)

MI5 has warned that more than 100 UK-linked academics contributed to research projects allegedly funded to improve China's spying capabilities. The Security Service issued an unusually public espionage alert this week naming the China General Technology Research Institute (CGTRI), also translated as the China Academy of General Technology (CAGT). MI5 says the organization has "very strong ties" t…

Electrification Special Report 2026 [pdf] ↗ (opens external article)

CISO thought he had a 'r3@lg00dp@$$w0rd' but forgot to patch ↗ (opens external article)

Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we warn you about weak security practices. This week’s terrifying tale involves a lack of important patching and a humorously bad password belonging to the person in charge of tech security at a law firm. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available upon request. Our s…

Exchange Web Services enters the final stretch before Microsoft pulls access ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft begins disabling Exchange Web Services (EWS) in Exchange Online today, ahead of the API's permanent retirement on April 1, 2027. Introduced with Exchange Server 2007, EWS allows applications to access mailbox data including email, calendars, and contacts. Microsoft says the service "no longer aligns with today's security, scale, or reliability requirements" and recommends moving integra…

AMD RMPOPT Optimization Queued Ahead Of Linux 7.4 ↗ (opens external article)

In addition to the very nice AMDGPU IOMMU optimization for iGPUs set to debut in the Linux 7.4 kernel, over on the AMD EPYC server side for servers running SEV-SNP virtual machines is a separate, nice optimization also expected for this next kernel version...…

Palantir's Tom Watson lectures MP on accuracy, citing selective data ↗ (opens external article)

Palantir's newly appointed UK senior vice president Tom Watson has accused Labour MP Clive Lewis of making "incorrect claims" about the company – while repeating NHS performance figures that the statistics regulator has said require careful caveats. Watson, the former deputy leader of the Labour Party, advised Palantir from 2024 before joining it full-time last month. He now works alongside Louis…

Clearing Out Linux's Old 32-bit ARM Platform Code Is Itself A Challenge ↗ (opens external article)

Longtime ARM Linux maintainer Arnd Bergmann over the past year has been working to clear out a number of old ARM platforms from the mainline kernel tree. With Linux 7.3 many older 32-bit ARM platforms were deprecated and in turn hundreds of kernel drivers orphaned. Now it's on to removing that actual code, which given the amount of entangled code, is itself a challenge...…

England's schools are getting better at mopping up cyber incidents ↗ (opens external article)

England's secondary schools are reporting slightly fewer cybersecurity incidents and faster recovery when disaster strikes, according to a survey by exams regulator Ofqual. Twenty-seven percent of schools reported an incident during the 2025/26 academic year, down from 29 percent a year earlier and 34 percent in 2023/24. Ofqual surveyed 3,775 secondary teachers in England in July. For questions c…

Intel Optimization Zone 1.2 Released With New Guides & Recommendations ↗ (opens external article)

Earlier this year Intel announced the "Optimization Zone" as their new initiative to provide a centralized place to collect all their resources for maximizing performance and software tuning on Intel hardware platforms. They've continued building out more resources for the Intel Optimization Zone and yesterday released v1.2 with more tuning guides and best practices for optimal performance on Inte…

UK privacy watchdog starts over with new board and Manchester HQ ↗ (opens external article)

Britain's data protection watchdog has acquired a new legal identity and governance structure, although the familiar ICO initials are staying put. On September 30, the Information Commission replaced the Information Commissioner as the statutory regulator. The organization itself will be known as the Information Commission's Office and will continue using the ICO name. The change is more than a b…

NVIDIA Olympus SMT Optimizations For Vera CPU Showing 3~6% Performance Gains ↗ (opens external article)

Back in August I wrote about NVIDIA working on Linux scheduler improvements for helping the SMT performance on their new Vera CPU with Olympus cores. That work remains ongoing but is looking fairly beneficial for performance especially for knocking it out in less than one hundred lines of code...…

Qualcomm Continues Doing More For Their Open-Source Linux Graphics Drivers ↗ (opens external article)

Rob Clark, who originally started working on the reverse-engineering Freedreno and MSM DRM graphics driver projects prior to even being employed by Qualcomm, presented this week at XDC 2026 Toronto around all the recent efforts they have been pursuing at Qualcomm for this upstream open-source graphics driver stack...…

Sopra Steria widens legal challenge to Capita's Whitehall outsourcing deal ↗ (opens external article)

Sopra Steria has expanded its legal challenge to a major UK government contract award after obtaining an unredacted copy of the agreement between Capita and the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP). The company alleges that previously undisclosed terms gave Capita preferential treatment, reduced the outsourcer's exposure to risk, and left the DWP carrying more of it. One clause could allow the…

New Linux Patches Trying To Mainline Renesas SH7305 CPU Support ↗ (opens external article)

The Renesas SH7305 isn't a new processor and is well known for powering various Casio graphing calculators over the past decde and a half. But finally the mainline Linux kernel may end up seeing support for this 32-bit SH-4a RISC core...…

Raspberry Pi 5 2GB Price Increases To $77.50 USD ↗ (opens external article)

During the last round of price hikes on Raspberry Pi devices due to RAM pricing, they were able to keep the 1GB and 2GB single board computer versions steady. But Eben Upton announced today that the RAM pricing has become "unsustainable" and even the 2GB versions now are facing steep price hikes...…

Fewer women than ever in UK's 'old boys' club' cyber industry ↗ (opens external article)

The proportion of workers in the UK cybersecurity industry identifying as women has dropped to 16 percent, the lowest level since 2021. Gender diversity has long been an issue pervading the STEM fields, although in cybersecurity this is especially pronounced, both at senior leadership and education levels. This is despite evidence that girls regularly outperform boys in STEM subjects at UK school…

OpenBSD -current is now "8.0-current" ↗ (opens external article)

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) updated the version of OpenBSD -current from "8.0" to "8.0-current". List: openbsd-cvs Subject: CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src From: Theo de Raadt <deraadt () cvs ! openbsd ! org> Date: 2026-09-30 20:44:06 Message-ID: 93920a1f5b4035b8 () cvs ! openbsd ! org CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org 2026/09/30 14:44:06 Modified files: sys/conf : newvers…

Erase social media tomorrow? Brits say yes ↗ (opens external article)

Just 7 percent of Brits think social media is a force for good and around one in three suspect that life would get better if all these sites were erased from the internet tomorrow. Or so claims Opinium Research, which describes itself as a “strategic insight agency.” It polled 2,000 adults and 1,100 parents in September and The Register’s major surprise is that more people of Britland didn’t want…

The tech industry is hot for shopping bots, but they're years away ↗ (opens external article)

The thought of automated software making purchases on behalf of consumers from online merchants thrills much of the tech and financial industry. The chatter started in early 2025 and has surged since then, giving rise to the term "agentic commerce." A few reality checks have called the idea into question. For example, Amazon recently blocked Meta's Muse bot, citing terms of use restrictions. This…

Singapore’s government creates a dating app ↗ (opens external article)

Singapore’s digital transformation agency, GovTech, is piloting a dating app. GovTech says the app came about after discussions among its staff, who apparently “shared an interest in exploring some of the challenges people can face when meeting someone new.” “They wondered whether a different approach that places greater emphasis on compatibility through values and preferences, and offers fewer m…

RAM supply set to worsen, says Micron, as CEO celebrates ‘much higher’ prices ↗ (opens external article)

Memory-maker Micron has warned that RAM shortages will persist into 2028, and perhaps beyond. Speaking on the company’s FY 2026 earnings call, CEO and company chair Sanjay Mehrotra reminded investors that Micron has already sold most of the memory it will make next year and said customers will pay “much higher prices” than they shelled out this year. “In calendar 2027 as well as 2028, we see dema…

OpenMandriva ROME 26.09 Released With More AI Apps, Snaps & PGO + LTO Optimizations ↗ (opens external article)

For ending out the month of September the OpenMandriva Linux distribution crew released OpenMandriva ROME 26.0 as their long overdue release held up by various technical issues and a reported sabotage attempt to their platform. With OpenMandriva ROME 24.12 having been their last release, this is quite a big update...…

Valve's Work On Foveated Rendering For The Open-Source Turnip Driver On The Steam Frame ↗ (opens external article)

As part of Valve's work on developing the Steam Frame VR headset, they worked on foveated rendering support for the Mesa Turnip driver that supports the Qualcomm Adreno graphics with open-source Vulkan API support. Foveated rendering is the technique to more closely mimic human vision by rendering high detail at your direct gaze point and lower quality in the peripheral vision. For computer graphi…

Azure maintenance mess disrupted hybrid clouds, VPNs, cloudy VMware services ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has advised users of its ExpressRoute Gateway, VPN Gateway, and Azure VMware service that they may experience degraded or interrupted network connectivity, and struggle to perform some network management operations. This looks like a self-inflicted wound because Microsoft’s status page says it has “paused the infrastructure servicing activity associated with the onset of this event.” Th…

Victory! California Appeals Court Refuses to Revive Surveillance Tech CEO’s Meritless Lawsuit Against Journalist ↗ (opens external article)

When the rich and powerful try to use the court to silence negative reporting about themselves, it’s worth calling out that behavior for what it is: an attack on free speech. This is why EFF is happy to stand up for reporters who find themselves in that situation. The California Court of Appeals upheld a lower court’s decision to strike a former Premise Data CEO’s meritless lawsuit against a journ…

Irony alert: OpenAI whines that Chinese model stole its special IP that it stole from everybody else ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI, which hoovered up vast amounts of internet content amid copyright fights, has accused individuals associated with China’s Moonshot AI of being involved in a "distillation attack" that began July 1. The house of Altman warns that extracting its models’ reasoning at scale could help rivals train capable models without preserving the same guardrails. Model distillation is a machine learning…

Hot Dog! America's new chatbot is packed with wieners ↗ (opens external article)

The White House's new AI chatbot, America.gov, turns out to be a bit of a sausage fest. Not long after the AI-powered portal went live this week, El Reg readers were met face-to-face with a life size Frankfurter. The prompt? "hotdog." How the apparent Easter egg, a raw dog criminally devoid of condiments, made it onto the site, we can't say. We reached out to the White House for comment on the my…

YouTube lunatic designed and 3D printed a working mechanical calculator ↗ (opens external article)

Mechanical calculators are precise, fascinating gadgets that you wouldn’t think would take well to being 3D printed, but a YouTuber has proved that a pocket-sized unit can be made purely from plastic filament. YouTuber 3D all Workshop detailed his working, but limited, build in a recent video. If you’re familiar with the holy grail of palm-sized mechanical calculators, the Curta, also known as th…

Huawei boss claims homegrown AI chip sales top Nvidia in China ↗ (opens external article)

The Trump administration's export control policies governing the sale of AI accelerators to China haven't stopped homegrown Huawei from filling the void. In a Q&A-style release this week, the company's rotating chairman Eric Xu claimed that its Ascend line of neural processing units (NPUs) had exceeded Nvidia in Chinese market share. "It's pretty hard to collect data about the market share of Nvi…

Peter Norvig says all aboard for AI coding ↗ (opens external article)

What comes next after a moment when companies sell existential risk but pursue public funding and DIY regulation, even as software developers question their life choices? Peter Norvig, distinguished education fellow at Stanford HAI and former Google research director, used his opening keynote at The AI Conference in San Francisco on Wednesday to speculate on the answer. Almost certainly, it's ano…

More AI In Open-Source, CachyOS, Ryzen AI Halo, Framework Laptop 13 Pro & Other Q3 Hits ↗ (opens external article)

With the third quarter wrapping up, here is a look back at the most interesting content on Phoronix over the past three months...…

16-year-old researcher found a Microsoft bug, got admin access to databases with 17.3 trillion rows ↗ (opens external article)

A 16-year-old security researcher named Faav found an authentication flaw in Microsoft’s Titan analytics service that allowed him to gain administrator access, submit unauthorized SQL queries with no valid credentials, and potentially reach analytics databases containing an estimated 17.3 trillion stored rows. Titan is an internal analytics platform, and Redmond restricts access via its web inter…

EDG C/C++ Front-End Open-Sourced ↗ (opens external article)

Edison Design Group has open-sourced their EDG C/C++ front-end that has been known in the commercial world for its extensive dialect support and other features. The EDG C++ front-end has been used by the likes of Intel C++ Compiler classic, NVIDIA CUDA NVCC, and even Microsoft Visual Studio for IntelliSense...…

📱 Hey Siri, How Do I Limit AI Data Access? | EFFector 38.17 ↗ (opens external article)

With the launch of iOS 27, Apple is rolling out a variety of new AI features to its familiar voice assistant, Siri. But how are AI tools like these handling our data? In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're talking about the privacy complications of AI phone features. JOIN OUR NEWSLETTER For over 35 years, EFFector has been your guide to understanding the intersection of technology, civil liberti…

Framework Desktop With AMD Ryzen AI Max+ PRO 495 Starts Out At $6799 USD ↗ (opens external article)

Framework Computer today opened the pre-order process for their updated Framework Desktop featuring the new AMD Ryzen AI Max+ 496 "Gorgon Halo" SoC with 192GB of LPDDR5x-8533 memory...…

OpenJDK vs. GraalVM vs. Eclipse Temurin vs. Semeru Java Performance ↗ (opens external article)

Immediately following the OpenJDK 8 through OpenJDK 27 benchmarks I expanded the scope of testing to look at how recent OpenJDK releases have been comparing to alternative JVMs like GraalVM, Temurin, and Semeru. Here are those benchmarks if curious about the Java performance in those different environments.…

While the Country Rejects ALPR Mass Surveillance, SF Settles for Weak Safeguards ↗ (opens external article)

San Francisco's decision to retain its use of Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) surveillance cameras belies what we know about this spying technology tool: it endangers residents and threatens the privacy and civil liberties of our community. Based on what's in the city's press release and announcement, this policy will do nothing to stop actual harms. We know innocent drivers will be stopped…

Privacy’s Defenders Podcast: Cowboys, Cypherpunks and Visionaries ↗ (opens external article)

People are increasingly concerned about the ways in which mass surveillance is tracking our every move: from Flock license plate readers to face recognition to creepy ads that – based on what we see and do online – seem to know everything we’re thinking and planning. It didn’t have to be this way, and since the early days of the internet, a dedicated band of activists, lawyers and technologists ha…

EFF to San Francisco Police: Drones are Powerful Surveillance Tools That Require a Robust Policy ↗ (opens external article)

The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) began regularly deploying drones two years ago and has since expanded their use in a way that has outpaced its documented policy and evaded existing local and state oversight of these devices.  The department has a new proposed policy, which continues to be grossly inadequate in protecting privacy and civil liberties. At best, the draft policy continues t…

Dutch Police Arrest ‘Reformed’ Hacker in Shiny Hunters Investigation ↗ (opens external article)

Authorities in the Netherlands have arrested a 24-year-old convicted cybercriminal on suspicion of aiding in data thefts and extortions by the prolific hacker group ShinyHunters. In the days immediately following the suspect’s arrest, remaining ShinyHunters members dramatically escalated their attacks, stealing highly sensitive data from the FBI and extorting the Russian ransomware group Cl0p. Acc…

7.3-rc5: mainline ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.3-rc5 (mainline) Released:2026-09-27 Source:linux-7.3-rc5.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)…

OpenBSD -current has moved to version 8.0 ↗ (opens external article)

The OpenBSD 8.0 release cycle is entering its final phases… With the following commit, Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) moved -current to version 8.0 (dropping the "-beta"): CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org 2026/09/26 10:41:23 Modified files: sys/conf : newvers.sh Log message: leave -beta For those unfamiliar with the process: this is not the 8.0 release, but is part of…

OpenBSD gains new networking daemon - rtrd(8) ↗ (opens external article)

Job Snijders (job@) imported rtrd(8), and its associated control program, rtrctl(8): CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: job@cvs.openbsd.org 2026/09/16 10:11:46 Added files: usr.sbin/rtrctl: Makefile ometric.c ometric.h rtrctl.8 rtrctl.c usr.sbin/rtrd : Makefile RTRX.PROTOCOL cache.c cache.h commands.c commands.h hash.c hash.h ip_utils.c ip_utils.h logs.c logs.h packets.c packets.h rtr_con…

vmm(4)/vmd(8) gain support for multi-processor VMs ↗ (opens external article)

Mike Larkin (mlarkin@) committed support for multi-processor virtual machines (i.e. guests): CVSROOT: /cvs Module name: src Changes by: mlarkin@cvs.openbsd.org 2026/09/17 20:35:55 Modified files: sys/arch/amd64/amd64: vmm_machdep.c sys/arch/amd64/include: vmmvar.h sys/dev/vmm : vmm.c usr.sbin/vmctl : main.c vmctl.8 vmctl.c vmctl.h usr.sbin/vmd : arm64_vm.c fw_cfg.c lapic.c lapic.h parse.y vm.c vm…

Game of Trees 0.129 released ↗ (opens external article)

Version 0.129 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated). Complete release notes are as follows: Read more……

U.S. Soldier Gets 70 Months in Prison for AT&T, Verizon Extortions ↗ (opens external article)

A U.S. Army soldier who pleaded guilty to hacking into multiple telecommunications companies and stealing mobile call and text metadata for more than 100 million AT&T customers in 2024 was sentenced to 70 months in federal prison today and ordered to pay nearly $300,000 in restitution to victims. One of several selfies from the Facebook page of Cameron Wagenius. Cameron John Wagenius, 22, was stat…

EFF to Court: Trump's Use of Truth Social's Pay-To-See-Posts-First Scheme Violates Americans' 1st Amendment Equal Access Rights ↗ (opens external article)

EFF legal intern Simar Kaur also contributed to this article. Americans’ First Amendment right to equal access to official government statements is violated by the Trump administration’s use of Truth Social’s preferential treatment scheme, which blocks people who won’t pay Trump’s company up to $100,000 a month for early access to government news, EFF told a federal court.The First Amendment guara…

7.2.8: stable ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.2.8 (stable) Released:2026-09-25 Source:linux-7.2.8.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.2.8.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.2.8…

6.18.54: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.18.54 (longterm) Released:2026-09-25 Source:linux-6.18.54.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.54.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.54…

DraftKings Is Using AI to Supercharge the Harms of Online Behavioral Advertising ↗ (opens external article)

Online sports betting company DraftKings is using AI to target customers who are most likely to place losing bets and respond to gambling promotions. This kind of targeting is a form of online behavioral advertising, which is when companies personalize the ads they show you based on the data they’ve collected about you. The more data a company has, the more personalized the ad can be. While DraftK…

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

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

6.12.111: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OpenSMTPD 7.9.0p0 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

EuroBSDCon 2026 talks online ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

6.6.157: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

6.1.188: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

5.15.221: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

5.10.270: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…

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

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

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

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

7.1.13: stable ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFF Statement on Meta Settlement ↗ (opens external article)

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA3 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA2 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-BETA1 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

↗ (opens external article)

New committer: Faraz Vahedi (src)…

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

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

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New committer: Minsoo Choo (src)…

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

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

Ports Repository Frozen ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…