Terminal

James Webb Space Telescope Discovers How Black Holes Feed Themselves

"Thanks to the James Webb Space Telescope, astronomers have been given a glimpse of the mechanisms that supermassive black holes use to feed themselves," reports Space.com: The powerful cosmic titans get really puzzling when astronomers using the JWST spot them before the universe was even 1 billion years old. That's because the mechanisms by which black holes devour matter to grow and then merge…

HomeLab #1: MikroTik as a Home Router

Less Is More: Why Audio on SoundCloud Looks Different

Robot 'Decapitated' in World's First-Ever Humanoid UFC Fight

"A humanoid robot lost its head," reports Newsweek, "during the world's first free-combat tournament for full-sized humanoid robots." The Ultimate Robot Knock-out Legend competition began Thursday in Shenzhen, China, according to the article, with local robotics company EngineAI providing $40,000 of their "T800" robots (yes, named after The Terminator) to 32 participating teams from around the wor…

Neither GCC nor Clang are compliant with standard C++

HMD Touch 4G

The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

Windows 10 Still Being Used, Often Unpatched and Insecure

Windows 10 still runs on 16.9% of the Windows devices monitored by asset-tracking service Lansweeper. That's more than one in six, The Register points out. A year ago, the operating system accounted for about half of the machines in its dataset, falling to the low-to-mid 40% range by the time Microsoft ended standard support. The decline continued after that, reaching 18.6% in June, but Lansweeper…

Connecting AI agents to outside services explodes the risk radius

Avoiding the "lethal trifecta" – access to private data, exposure to untrusted content, and an external communication path – is difficult enough when working with AI agents. But the use of connectors – integrations with third-party services like Gmail or Slack – expands the scope of concern in a way that makes it exceedingly difficult to reason about defensive due diligence. PromptArmor, an AI se…

Moonshot AI suspends new subscriptions due to Kimi K3 demand

Aptera Announces US-Wide Repair Network for Its Upcoming Solar Electric Car

Solar car maker Aptera has "officially announced a repair network partnership which will give owners of its upcoming solar electric car access to thousands of repair shops nationwide," reports Electrek: We recently got a chance to drive the Aptera solar EV and tour the company's factory, and came away both impressed at the progress that has been made, but cognizant of the long road ahead for the c…

C64 Basic Dungeon Crawler: Goblin Attack (C64 Basic Part 8)

Show HN: I replaced a $120k bowling center system with $1,600 in ESP32s

Former Richard Stallman Colleague Now Argues for Open AI Models Too

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp writes: Recalling his initial resistance to free and open software, billionaire computer scientist David Siegel argues vigorously in FORTUNE that the stakes are too high to let AI become increasingly closed. "In the 1980s, I had the chance to spend several years arguing about free and open software, what we now call open source, with the founder of the movement, Ri…

The Last MPEG-4 Visual Patent Has Expired

If you are looking for a reason to celebrate today, the last of the MPEG-4 Part 2 patents expired today...…

Bananas sprout in Rayleigh Garden UK after 15 years

Minecraft: Java Edition now uses SDL3

Are There Cybersecurity Risks in Over-the-Air Tech Used in Autos?

CNBC reports: The automotive industry's increasing use of over-the-air technology to update vehicle systems makes it more susceptible to cyberattacks, analysts say, urging more intervention in the sector... Its use represents "a unique national security concern," Gabriel Lim, senior analyst at the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore, told CNBC. "Aside from data privacy conce…

As mosquito ranges expand, better monitoring is key to preventing disease

With summer heat comes pool parties, beach days, backyard cookouts, and, of course, swarms of bloodthirsty mosquitoes. But while insect bites have always been a side effect of time spent outdoors, the species doing the biting are changing in historically temperate regions like New England. As climate change makes these areas warmer and wetter, their ranges are expanding—and any diseases they carr…

I joined the IndieWeb, here's what I learned

FFmpeg Lands Latest AVX-512 Optimization: 1.372x Faster In Pixel Format Conversion

The latest hand-tuned code in the FFmpeg multimedia library for allowing better performance on today's modern Intel/AMD AVX-512-capable processors is showing 1.372x faster performance for RGB24 to RGBA pixel format conversions...…

The death and rebirth of my home server

What I learned selling 2,500 MIDI recorders: Hardware is not so hard

Legion Y700 Gen4 Tablet Powered By Snapdragon 8 Elite Seeing Linux Patches

The Legion Y700 Gen4 is an Android tablet that debuted last year and powered by the Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Elite chipset. This 8.8-inch tablet is now seeing patches for enabling Linux support outside the confines of Android and will hopefully end up in the mainline kernel...…

More ASUS Motherboards To Enjoy Working Sensor Monitoring With Linux 7.3

Thanks to the work of the open-source community, more ASUS desktop motherboards for Intel Core and AMD Ryzen systems are seeing working sensor monitoring under Linux. With the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle, several additional ASUS motherboards will now enjoy working sensor monitoring...…

Claude Code uses Bun written in Rust now

Qwen 3.8

Using AI makes people less likely to admit they don't know something

In 2026, AI still "hallucinates" and gives you wrong answers a good chunk of the time. Nevertheless, academics from French and Italian universities have found that access to AI advice suppresses critical thinking, making people more likely to confidently parrot incorrect information that the bot provided. "For humans, the capacity to say, 'I don't know,' is very important because it represents th…

OpenAI reduces Codex Model Context Size from 372k to 272k

New Study Links Teen Boys' ADHD Symptoms To Addictive Social Media Use

A new study by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco "adds to growing research linking increased social media use to detrimental effects on attention, memory and cognition," reports the Washington Post: The study followed more than 11,000 U.S. adolescents over a period of five years, with participants first asked about their own social media use at the average age of 12, and…

'Grok Build' Coding Tool Open Sourced This Week, Promises to Respect Zero Data Retention

Elon Musk confirmed SpaceX has open sourced the Grok Build CLI this week, reports The Register, "just days after researchers caught the AI tool scooping up users' entire repositories and uploading them to company-controlled cloud storage." That discovery had "gathered so much negative attention that Elon Musk felt compelled to issue a public statement alongside SpaceX, and its technical staff, pro…

OpenAI Acknowledges GPT-5.6 May Accidentally Delete Files, Calls It 'Honest Mistake'

"OpenAI has finally confirmed reports that its latest family of large language models can accidentally delete files," reports InfoWorld, "while stressing that such incidents are rare and should be viewed as 'honest mistakes.'" Reports of the flagship LLMs deleting files emerged shortly after the company launched them earlier this month, with investor Matt Shumer taking to X to report that GPT-5.6-…

Better and Cheaper Than IPTV

GNU Hurd Makes Progress On AArch64, Writing Translators In Rust

The GNU Hurd project recently issued their Q2'2026 status report to outline recently development efforts. The Hurd is still happening!..…

Transcribe.cpp

France Orders ISPs to Block Access to Polymarket

France's regulatory authority for licensed gambling/betting games "announced this week that it ordered ISPs to block access to Polymarket," reports Engadget. Anyone caught advertising an unauthorized betting site "could be fined up to 100,000 euros, or around $114,000." (The article notes this follows a previous regulatory action from November placing a geoblock on financial transactions from Fren…

Codex Resets

How Microsoft's 'Little Workaround' Created a Major Threat to America's Defense Department

This week Slashdot reader joshuark found the story of exactly how in 2025 ProPublica reporter Renee Dudley confirmed Microsoft was running tech support for the U.S. Defense Department through China, America's biggest cybersecurity adversary — and how that investigation ultimately changed U.S. government policy. The reporter first found an ad offering $18 to $28 to hire Americans as "digital escort…

Next UK Prime Minister Drops Digital ID Scheme

Reuters reports: Incoming British prime minister Andy Burnham will scrap the government's troubled plans for a digital ID scheme when he enters office on Monday, a spokesperson for the new Labour Party leader said. Resources devoted to the scheme, deemed a "fiasco" by a cross-party committee of lawmakers, will be redirected to Burnham's priorities, the spokesperson said... "All the time and resour…

Hardcore IndieWeb: Run your own website 100% independently for only $0.01/day

UnifiedIR for Julia

NVK Vulkan Performance Improving With Mesa 26.2 Against NVIDIA Proprietary Driver

The performance of the Nouveau kernel driver with the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver continues to improve each feature release in its quest toward better competing with NVIDIA's official Linux graphics driver with its proprietary Vulkan driver...…

Gen Z and Millennials are Buying CDs - Though Half Don't Have CD Players

"Approximately half of Gen Z and millennials who have purchased a CD do not own a CD player," according to midyear sales statistics from entertainment data company Luminate. It's driven in part by "collection building", according to their report [PDF]: The CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible. This behavior underscores that for younger generati…

NextBSD Returns to Port Apple Source Onto FreeBSD

"One of the most interesting BSD variants of the 2010s, NextBSD, has come back to life under new management," reports The Register: Aside from the homepage, there's a GitHub repository — but beware, this is separate from the old one, whose repo is still there although the most recent changes were seven years ago. The new project also has a project history giving credit where it's due. The main man…

CNBC's Jim Cramer Says He Needs 'Cold Hard' Proof AI Is Paying Off

In a sign of our times, CNBC's Jim Cramer "said Wednesday that it's time for companies to prove artificial intelligence is paying off," reports CNBC: "I need cold hard return facts," the "Mad Money" host said. "Or, I, too, will grow more skeptical than I am now...." While Cramer said he remains optimistic about the long-term opportunity, he argued the market needs more evidence that those investme…

"Half a Second" — a book on the XZ backdoor

Adrian Mastronardi has released a book called Half a Second; it is a detailed look into the XZ backdoor attempt of 2024. The book is freely available under a (non-free) noncommercial, no-derivatives CC license. Half a Second tells that story as one continuous narrative: the burned-out volunteer who maintained the code alone and was patiently, expertly manipulated into giving it up; the engineer wh…

Three stable kernel updates

The 7.1.4, 6.18.39, and 6.12.96 stable kernel updates have been released; each contains a fairly large set of important fixes.…

Java was a three-day hotfix away from dying horribly on stage

If there is a driving theme to The Java Story documentary, which debuted Friday on YouTube, it would be that even some of the most important and popular technologies come from humble beginnings. In this case, we're talking about a language that started life as a failed attempt at set-top box dominance and required a massive rewrite just days before its big conference debut. Today, Java consistent…

AMD Linux Graphics Driver Preps Fix For Apple Studio Display

This week's batch of AMDGPU Display Core "DC" updates arrived heavy with 70 new patches for improving that open-source display support for Radeon graphics on the Linux desktop...…

GNOME OS Safe Mode Improving The System Reliability

At GNOME's annual GUADEC conference happening this week in Spain, an update was shared on the current state of GNOME OS...…

Will AI fix prior authorization—or make it worse?

If you’re like me, you or a loved one has struggled through the process of gaining pre-approval for the medical care that your physician has recommended. Personal stories abound regarding the tribulations of patients as they go through hoops to get their health insurer to pay for certain prescription medications, medical procedures, and more. When used judiciously, this process—known as prior aut…

KDE Plasma 6.8 System Monitor Making It Easier Assigning Processes To CPU Cores

Nate Graham and John Veness are out with the latest issue of This Week in Plasma to highlight all of the interesting developments taking place in the KDE Plasma desktop space...…

UXL's oneDNN 3.13 Preps For Intel Nova Lake With AVX10.2, More Intel Optimizations

Following the release of AMD's ZenDNN 6.0 earlier this month, there is a new feature release of the oneDNN neural network library that used to be developed by Intel as part of oneAPI and is now under the UXL Foundation umbrella. Even so, oneDNN feature releases continue to be heavy on new Intel optimizations and future hardware support...…

D7VK 2.0 Released With Some Nice Performance Improvements: Up To 2x Or More

In addition to Friday night's release of DXVK 3.0.2, debuting separately a short time later was D7VK 2.0 as the latest major feature release for this implementation of Direct3D 7 and earlier built off the Vulkan API...…

NextBSD returns to dollop Apple source on FreeBSD

One of the most interesting BSD variants of the 2010s, NextBSD, has come back to life under new management. The Reg FOSS desk is intrigued. Aside from the homepage, there's a GitHub repository – but beware, this is separate from the old one, whose repo is still there although the most recent changes were seven years ago. The new project also has a project history giving credit where it's due. The…

DXVK 3.0.2 Released With Improved Hang Debugging, Handful Of Game Fixes

In addition to the initial build of Holo Core as AArch64 Arch Linux for the Steam Frame, another software milestone today in Valve's Linux gaming space is the release of DXVK 3.0.2 for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 APIs implemented over the Vulkan API for running Windows games...…

Google-backed satellites for wildfire detection launch as smoke chokes US, Canada

As smoke from hundreds of burning wildfires spread across Canada and the United States, the first three operational satellites in the Google-backed FireSat program successfully launched into orbit. The satellites will begin providing wildfire detection capable of spotting even small fires in the United States, Australia, and Europe before the end of the year. The launch of the microsatellites abo…

The Pentagon's Space Development Agency hasn't moved as fast as anyone would like

The Space Development Agency was established in 2019 to help speed up the deployment of US military space systems by sidestepping the Pentagon's traditional sluggish bureaucracy. Seven years later, SDA is finally launching its first batches of operational satellites, just as the Pentagon plans to shutter the semi-autonomous agency and fold it back into the Space Force's procurement pipeline, newl…

Hegseth wants a "High-T" military; doctors call it a clinical minefield

On Wednesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth made the startling announcement that the US military would begin requiring all active duty and reserve personnel aged 30 and older to undergo mandatory screening for testosterone deficiency. The screenings will take place during yearly health assessments. Those under age 30 can also get screened on request. In a short video posted on social media, Hegs…

Taco Bell iceberg lettuce identified as source of cyclosporiasis in 5 states

Federal officials on Friday announced that shredded iceberg lettuce imported from Mexico and served at Taco Bell restaurants in five states is a source of Cyclospora, the foodborne parasite causing the nationwide surge in cases of explosive, watery diarrhea. The five states are Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio, and West Virginia. A traceback investigation by the Centers for Disease Control and P…

Noctua NL-LC1-36 All-In-One Liquid Cooler

With reviewing hardware for more than 22 years, when it comes to cooling products there are few brands that can still get me intrigued like Noctua. With their recent launch of the NL-LC1 all-in-one liquid coolers, I decided to try out the Noctua NL-LC1-36 360mm AIO cooler that is working out well for cooling high-end desktop CPUs like the recently launched Ryzen 9 9950X3D2.…

Mozilla speeds Firefox release schedule to biweekly

Firefox releases will soon get even closer together – but not ESR ones, which remain annual, with the next one due out soon. The change was announced last week on the dev-platform@mozilla.org mailing list by Mozilla’s director of engineering Sylvestre Ledru: “We are planning to move Firefox Desktop and Android from a 4-week release cadence to a 2-week release cadence starting in September 2026. “…

FastFlowLM Developers Join AMD To Help Push Open-Source NPU Software

On top of releasing ROCm 7.14 as the new production release of ROCm now built offTheRock, rolling out the Lemonade 11.0 local AI server, and GAIA 0.22, AMD has some more open-source news in the lead up to next week's AMD Advancing AI event...…

Troubling new details emerge on diabetes ouster controversy

Last month, we reported on a troubling incident at the annual meeting of the American Diabetes Association (ADA) in New Orleans. On June 5, five leading scientists were ousted for handing out copies of an editorial, published in the journal Diabetes Care (an ADA journal) in April, sharply criticizing the Trump administration’s ongoing attacks on scientific research. There was a public outcry and…

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

Reversing course, Flock Safety—the surveillance technology vendor most known for its extensive network of automated license plate readers—has announced that it will end a pilot for its acoustic gunshot detection devices to identify signs of “human distress.” In October 2025, EFF warned the public that Flock was rolling out a new feature called “Distress Detection” that would be deployed through th…

Building an Arch Linux aarch64 port for Holo Core (Collabora blog)

Collabora has published a blog post about its work with Valve on Holo Core, which is a port of Arch Linux to aarch64 to be used as the the operating system on Valve's 64-bit Arm Steam Frame gaming system. Collabora has released the sources, binary packages, and a container image for aarch64 devices. The post describes some of the challenges in porting Arch Linux to a new architecture, and what rem…

Microsoft cuts OneDrive support for older Windows 10 versions next month

Microsoft will end OneDrive synchronization support next month for older versions of Windows 10, leaving users without client updates, fixes, or technical assistance. According to a post on the company's Message Center, OneDrive sync app updates will continue on Windows 10 22H2 until October 10, 2028, but will stop for earlier versions from August 15, 2026. No support means no more updates, fixes…

Your Vision. Your Legacy. Your Future.

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

Will Russia's answer to the Falcon 9 rocket ever take flight?

Everyone seems to be launching and landing rockets these days. Last week, China joined the club of countries that have launched an orbital mission and brought its booster safely back to Earth, which is just the beginning of public and private ventures in that country aggressively pushing into rocket reuse. Also in Asia, Japan's space agency has been conducting hop tests, and Honda recently perfor…

Billing software error sends billion-dollar AWS estimates

Your AWS billing estimate might look just a little inflated right now. If you woke up to find an email from Amazon Web Services this morning telling you that you’d gone over your billing threshold by a few hundred million dollars, don’t panic: Something’s gone wrong in the AWS Billing Console, the company admitted. An open issue on the AWS Health Dashboard (archived copy at the time of writing) p…

Fubo hikes prices by $15 after restoring some NBCU channels lost in November

Fubo prices are going up by $15 per month because it will have some NBCUniversal channels again. For years, Fubo, a sports-centric vMVPD (virtual multichannel video programming distributor, which lets subscribers watch traditional TV channels live over the Internet), offered NBCUniversal channels. That stopped in November 2025 due to a contract dispute. With the loss of local NBC affiliates, Tele…

AI spam filters are getting suckered by old-school text salting

Notice more spam getting through that corporate email filter lately? Attackers are using a technique known as "text salting," which hides benign-looking words intended to confuse some AI-powered email filters, says cybersecurity firm Barracuda. The email security outfit said on Thursday that it had detected more than one million retail-themed phishing attacks using text salting since April. It’s…

San Francisco orders Apple, Google to remove nudify apps from app stores

This week, San Francisco’s attorney general, David Chiu, sent cease-and-desist letters, demanding that Apple and Google remove 13 so-called nudification apps from their app stores, Wired reported. Nudification apps can make it trivially easy to transform ordinary photos of real people into explicit images. The harmful AI tools allow bad actors to remove clothing, change a person’s features, place…

Experimental Build Of Holo Core Published: Arch Linux AArch64 For Valve's Steam Frame

As part of Valve's upcoming Qualcomm-powered Steam Frame headset, Valve has been collaborating with Collabora on the Arch Linux AArch64 base for their platform. Published today are the initial sources and binaries of this "Holo Core" base of Arch Linux AArch64 to be used by the Steam Frame...…

[$] Securing BPF LSMs against tampering

Since 2020, BPF programs have been able to act as Linux security modules (LSMs). Several projects, including systemd, have been working to use that capability to provide more security to users. Christian Brauner spoke at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit about some of the limitations of using BPF in this way, and the changes he would like to see for systemd's u…

Ars is looking for a senior technology reporter, and you might be it!

If you're a skilled writer with outsize technology chops who gets excited by the idea of taking the Ars audience with you as you go hands-on with hardware—all kinds of hardware!—then this position has your name all over it. Plus, you get to have me as your boss, and how could that be anything other than awesome?! The job The formal job description and application is right here and has all the spe…

Building an Arch Linux Aarch64 Port for Holo Core

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

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

Torvalds challenged the haters to fork Linux. Someone said 'hold my beer'

Earlier this week, Linux project leader Linus Torvalds told AI haters to fork off, and invited anyone who didn't like his comments to fork the kernel. Well, here you go: linux-0.11-rs, a total reimplementation of the Linux kernel, done in langage de programmation du jour, Rust. No, this isn't really a response to the Emperor Penguin's challenge – for a start, it looks like it was done with AI – b…

Linux WMI Driver Gets Ready To Support ACPI-Based ARM64 Laptops

Linux developer Armin Wolf sent out a set of patches today for enabling AArch64 support for the ACPI Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) driver to work on AArch64 in no longer being bound to x86/x86_64. This is a step toward the long goal of being able to support modern Windows on ARM laptops via ACPI on Linux...…

Microsoft gives admins Exchange Online breathing room

Microsoft has delayed the removal of the -Credential parameter from Exchange Online PowerShell until December 2026, giving administrators more time to update affected scripts and automation. The -Credential parameter is used when connecting to Exchange Online PowerShell. It allows an administrator to supply stored username and password credentials. These days, it is heavily discouraged, particula…

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cifs-utils, container-tools:rhel8, libreoffice, nodejs:24, perl-XML-LibXML, and python3.12), Fedora (ansible-collection-ansible-posix, firefox, freerdp, ImageMagick, mingw-glib2, perl-DBI, perl-HTTP-Date, rust-cargo-rpmstatus, and rust-opendal), Oracle (cifs-utils, gegl, gimp, git-lfs, go-toolset:ol8, hplip, kernel, libreoffice, maven:3.9, perl-XML-L…

Top EU court clips YouTube's intermediary defense over reviewed content

The Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled that Google may not be able to claim intermediary liability protection for YouTube content it reviews as part of a commercial partnership with a creator. The case stems from a €750,000 fine imposed on Google Ireland by Italy's communications regulator in 2022 over YouTube videos promoting online gambling. Before entering the revenue-shar…

Arm Core Local Accelerator Driver Posted For Linux As Agnostic Interface For Accelerators

A new open-source Linux driver announced today by Arm is the Arm Core Local Accelerator "CLA" driver as a CPU-local interface for programming attached accelerators. This is an agnostic interface for attached accelerators with the initial target focusing on an attached compute engine...…

Attackers target critical FortiSandbox flaws as CISA issues patch order

Fortinet admins have two more reasons to clear their calendars after CISA confirmed a pair of critical FortiSandbox bugs are being actively exploited. The two bugs, tracked as CVE-2026-39808 and CVE-2026-25089, both carry CVSS scores of 9.1 and affect FortiSandbox, FortiSandbox Cloud, and FortiSandbox PaaS. According to Fortinet, they are OS command injection flaws that allow unauthenticated atta…

The report oil companies are worried about: Climate attribution science

Climate change is being driven largely by the greenhouse gases we've pumped into the atmosphere, which trap more of the Sun's energy there. That added energy increases the odds of extreme events: longer, more intense heat waves and droughts, interspersed with excessive precipitation. But these sorts of events have happened in the past—how can we tell if any given weather disaster has been made mo…

FCC took pricey gifts from Paramount as the company needed approval for deals

The rich and famous who filed into the Kennedy Center’s opera house in December were there to enjoy one of the nation’s most exclusive celebrations of the performing arts: the center’s annual honors gala. The black-tie event, hosted by President Donald Trump, prioritized tickets to people who donated more than $75,000 to the center. This year, it feted Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone, the legen…

SpaceX Starship Flight Test 13 takes issue with the 'flight' bit

SpaceX's 13th Starship flight test ended at the launchpad after four Raptor engines failed to start, triggering an automatic abort moments before liftoff. Elon Musk's biz ignited the booster's engines at 2245 UTC on July 16, but the automated system aborted the launch. The boss confirmed: "Some of the engines didn't start, triggering an automatic launch abort… To be confident of a good flight, tw…

2026 Lucid Gravity Touring review: A strong act 2

When Lucid introduced the Air electric sedan in late 2021, the first Air Dream Edition I tested packed over 1,100 hp (820 kW) and carried a $180,000-plus window sticker. It's easily the most powerful street car I've tested; the only vehicle I've driven with more power was a purebred race car with a third the mass, and it was on a proper track. Its combustion engine was also about 1,000 times loud…

Rocket Report: India's Vikram-1 nears debut flight; AST to become rocket company?

Welcome to Edition 9.03 of the Rocket Report! SpaceX counted down all the way to T-0 on Thursday evening in South Texas before a handful of Raptor engines decided not to light at ignition of the rocket. It is not clear whether the vehicle can be worked on at the pad, or whether Starship will need to be de-stacked before this can occur. In any case, a few days delay beats a significant issue in fl…

Europe's chip ambitions won't break dependence on US cloud and software, says Forrester

Europe can build more chip fabs, subsidize domestic manufacturing, and wrap it all in the language of sovereignty, but it still won't escape its dependence on American cloud providers and software anytime soon, according to Forrester. In its first Global Sovereignty Forecast, the analyst concludes that the race for technological independence has already produced two clear winners: China and the U…

AMD Preps More Graphics Driver Improvements For Linux 7.3

Since earlier this month AMD has begun staging graphics driver changes for Linux 7.3 ahead of the merge window opening in late July. That's brought some interesting changes so far while there still are a few weeks to land any additional features in DRM-Next. This week another batch of AMDGPU graphics driver and AMDKFD compute driver feature code was sent out for this next kernel version...…

Mozilla AI Releases Llamafile 0.10.4 With New Transcribefile Built On Transcribe.cpp

Mozilla AI developers have released a new version of Llamafile, their solution for easy-to-use LLMs as a single file that work across hardware and operating systems. With Llamafile 0.10.4 is now Transcribefile, as a new piece built off their recently announced Transcribe.cpp project...…

Ransomware curdles production at Coca-Cola's Fairlife dairy biz

Ransomware has soured production at Coca-Cola-owned Fairlife, forcing the dairy business to temporarily halt production at its US plants. In an SEC filing on Thursday, Coca-Cola said Fairlife detected "unauthorized access by a third party to a portion of its systems, including its production-related systems," in what it described as a ransomware event. The company said it immediately activated it…

OpenBLAS 0.3.34 Improves Multi-Threading, Support For A Memory-Safe C Toolchain

OpenBLAS 0.3.34 released on Thursday as this popular, open-source BLAS library providing optimized support for a variety of CPUs/architectures. OpenBLAS 0.3.34 continues working on squeezing more performance out of today's processors as well as delivering other new features...…

Google fixing Android lock screen bug that lets Gemini send SMS without a PIN

Picture this. Someone gets hold of your Android phone and, despite not knowing your PIN, they can use Gemini from the lock screen to send SMS or WhatsApp messages as you. This is a real bug and Google says a fix is coming as soon as this week. Since May, The Register has received multiple reports of users bypassing device authentication on Android 16 devices that enable Gemini access from the loc…

Home Office hands £28M to immigration IT incumbents after procurement challenge

The UK Home Office has awarded contract extensions worth £28 million to two incumbent tech suppliers of the much-delayed Atlas immigration and asylum system after a legal challenge derailed an earlier procurement process. The Whitehall department in charge of policing, borders, and immigration awarded PA Consulting a five-month contract extension worth £13.5 million and Mastek a four-month extens…

How Gartner can help turn your AI vision into business reality

For enterprise application, architecture, and software engineering leaders, the artificial intelligence conversation has moved past experimentation. Boards and finance committees expect pilot projects to graduate into production and to demonstrate measurable business value. A strategy deck no longer clears the bar. The expectation now is production-ready systems that deliver outcomes finance can…

Tech support chap told angry customer to think inside the box – and solved the problem

ON CALL Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's Friday column in which readers kindly share their stories of untangling tech support situations. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Steve" who started his IT career doing tech support for a supermarket's own-brand mobile service. "I started in 2006, when many phones still had removable batteries," Steve told On Call. "One…

NTP server that traveled back in time caused massive Aussie mobile outage

Australian telco Telstra has revealed the cause of the recent incident that caused widespread connectivity problems across its mobile networks, inculding outages to Australia's 000 emergency services line, plus outages to electronic payments services and transport networks. The carrier explained itself in a submission [PDF] to a Senate inquiry into outages affecting Australia’s emergency services…

South Korea making its own security-centric AI model

South Korea is developing its own security-focused AI model and hopes to bring it online by the end of the year, to ensure the nation has sovereign bug-finding capabilities. Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Science and ICT Bae Kyung-hoon revealed the effort to create the model yesterday, and said it’s needed so South Korea possesses a bug-finding model to rival Anthropic’s Mythos. The US gov…

Frame: A New X11 Server Implementation Written Entirely In x86_64 Assembly

Previously we covered YSERVER as an X11 server written in the Rust programming language with the help of Claude Code. A Phoronix reader wrote in today to share an even more esoteric X11 server implementation that has come about and again written in large part by AI/LLM usage: Frame is an X11 server written in pure x86_64 Assembly...…

SpaceX scrubs Starship launch after some of its engines didn't start

SpaceX called off a test flight of its powerful Starship rocket and Super Heavy booster as the countdown clock reached zero Thursday at the company's spaceport in South Texas. The launch team at Starbase, Texas, just north of the US-Mexico border, aimed to launch the more than 400-foot-tall rocket at 5:45 pm local time (6:45 pm EDT; 22:45 UTC). The countdown proceeded smoothly throughout the day,…

Chinese memory ban would cut off RAMpocalypse relief

Two up-and-coming Chinese memory vendors, YMTC and CXMT, could offer customers relief from shortages and skyrocketing prices, but not if US Representatives John Moolenaar (R-MI) and George Whitesides (D-CA) have anything to say about it. In a letter to Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick made public on Thursday, the lawmakers urged the Trump administration to tighten restrictions on Chinese memory…

OpenAI admits GPT-5.6 occasionally deletes files – but it's an 'honest mistake'

OpenAI has confirmed reports that GPT-5.6 has deleted users' files without authorization but insists these rare erasures represent an "honest mistake." Following the release of OpenAI's GPT‑5.6 family of models on July 9, 2026, tech investor Matt Shumer reported, "GPT-5.6-Sol just accidentally deleted almost ALL of my Mac's files." A few days later, software engineer Bruno Lemos said, "GPT-5.6 So…

Two Trump health nominees crash and burn in tense Senate hearing

Two nominees for high-profile health roles in the Trump administration faced scrutiny from the Senate health committee Wednesday—and both crashed and burned in their own special ways. The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor, and Pensions (HELP) scrutinized Erica Schwartz, the nominee for director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and Sean Kaufman, up for the role of assi…

HP fined 1.4 billion rupees for “cartelization” of ink cartridges, toner, PCs

The Indian government has fined HP India and its partners a total of 1.4 billion rupees (about $14.4 million) for working with reseller partners in the “cartelization” of computers, ink cartridges, and toner. The Competition Commission of India (CCI) said this week that it found HP India had colluded with some channel partners to drive up the cost of bids for government contracts for computers, a…

KDE KWin Introduces Support For Server-Side Drop Shadows

The KDE Plasma 6.8 will be introducing support for server-side drop shadows with the feature recently having been merged to KWin...…

Amsterdam activists throw acid at Microsoft datacenter project

In the United States, we usually protest datacenters peacefully - picket signs, council meeting comments, and all that - with mixed results. In the Netherlands, activists throw water balloons filled with an acidic mixture at datacenter foundations, also with questionable effectiveness. The Dutch arm of international climate activist group Extinction Rebellion claimed responsibility for an attempt…

T-Mobile bungled forced plan migration, canceling some users' free lines

T-Mobile canceled some longtime subscribers' free-line promotions as part of a forced migration to new rate plans, spurring complaints from customers yesterday. T-Mobile admitted the problem and blamed it on technical errors that it is trying to fix. The forced plan changes were controversial to begin with, particularly as many longtime users are being hit with price hikes of $6 per line. The une…

AMD's GAIA Continues Striving To Be Your Ultimate AI Companion For Emails

Yesterday saw the release of AMD's Lemonade 11.0 local AI server as well as ROCm 7.14 as the first production release built using TheRock. Out today is AMD's GAIA 0.22 software as their latest AI software release in working toward the AMD Advancing AI event next week in California...…

It's official: EU will force Google to share search data and open up AI on Android

Europe wasted no time using its landmark Digital Markets Act (DMA) to try to rein in Big Tech. Companies like Apple, Meta, and Google have faced steep fines and orders to modify their business practices since the law came into force in 2024. And the hits keep on coming for Big Tech in Europe. After several months of consideration, the European Commission has announced new DMA measures that will f…

Researcher poisons open-weight AI model for under $100

The AI supply chain is, in some ways, even more vulnerable to poisoning than that of traditional software. Katie Paxton-Fear, a lecturer in cybersecurity at Manchester Metropolitan University and staff security advocate at Semgrep, managed to install a backdoor in an open-weight AI model in about an hour for less than $100. "I started out by trying to figure out if I could use fine tuning to get…

TSMC's $265B US fab pledge is the outline of a concept of a plan

Talk is cheap and TSMC’s plan to bolster its US expansion by another $100 billion is just that — talk. Riding high on yet another quarter of AI-fueled sales, which topped $40 billion, Taiwanese foundry giant TSMC announced plans this week to increase its US fab footprint to 12 facilities, totaling $265 billion of investment. But making good on that promise is easier said than done, and if history…

FreeBSD Intern Working On Porting AMD ROCm To The BSD World

An intern with the FreeBSD Foundation is working on porting AMD's ROCm compute stack to run on this popular BSD environment...…

EU forces Google to share its toys with the other AI and search kids

Spelled out in big colorful letters that even Google can understand, the EU is now requiring the Chocolate Factory to share search data with competitors while enhancing Android AI interoperability for bots other than Gemini. Needless to say, the company would like to find a way to disable this default. The European Commission (EC) announced a pair of specification decisions on Thursday. The first…

AI vendors have found someone to pay their infrastructure bills: You

Forrester warns that customers should brace for bigger software bills next year as software and AI vendors raise prices and pile on usage charges. Working from a survey of more than 2,600 business and technology decision-makers, the tech research company said software budgets were expected to rise "as vendors increase prices or add usage charges to pass their AI costs to customers." In the last s…

Wayland 1.26 Released With New Pointer Warp Event

Simon Ser just announced the stable release of the Wayland 1.26 release...…

Kick your mouse out of the house with this AI-assisted keyboard utility

Imagine never having to reach for your mouse to navigate around Windows again. Sounds like a dream, doesn’t it? Well wake up: We have some peripherals to burn. Neverclick, from developer Lazo Velko, was published recently with the promise to allow users to perform mouse actions on every single object on their screen with nothing but keyboard shortcuts. Want to close a window, open an application,…

C'mon, just copy this text string and paste it into your macOS Terminal – it'll fix your computer, honest

Threat intel outfit Group-IB has detailed a previously undocumented macOS information stealer that doesn't bother hunting for software bugs. Instead, it persuades users to pwn themselves by pasting a command into Terminal, after which it helps itself to passwords, crypto wallets, browser data, and anything else worth stealing. The boffins have dubbed the malware “ClickLock Stealer,” a nod to its…

Microsoft Goes Nostalgic In Newest Open-Source Drop: Comic Chat Open-Sourced After 30 Years

Introduced in 1996 with Internet Explorer 3.0, Microsoft Comic Chat provided comic-like avatars driven IRC chat client. After 30 years, this proprietary IRC chat client that was removed in Internet Explorer 6.0, is now open-source software...…

NASA's Artemis III will need three rockets to do the job Apollo did with one

NASA has given an update on the Artemis III mission and, while sticking with an optimistic 2028 landing target for Artemis IV, offered a glimpse into just how much development work remains to be done at Blue Origin and SpaceX. Artemis III has been compared to Apollo 9, which tested the Apollo Lunar Module in Earth orbit, yet neither SpaceX nor Blue Origin is flying anything as close to the lunar…

Microsoft open-sources Comic Chat, its cartoon IRC curiosity

Microsoft has open-sourced Comic Chat, its short-lived 1990s experiment in turning Internet Relay Chat (IRC) conversations into comic strips – and, for many users, their first encounter with Comic Sans. Microsoft Comic Chat was released in 1996 with Internet Explorer 3. It was conceived by David "DJ" Kurlander of the Microsoft Research Virtual Worlds Group as a new visual representation of conver…

[$] Sched-ext: enqueue() for sub-schedulers and proxy-execution support

The extensible scheduler class (sched_ext) allows the installation of custom CPU schedulers as a set of BPF programs. While sched_ext, in its current form, has already led to a lot of interesting scheduler-development work, the subsystem itself is still undergoing rapid evolution. Among other work, the ability to set up a hierarchy of sub-schedulers is approaching completion, and a longstanding in…

Airbus migrating 70 critical apps from AWS to France's Scaleway amid digital sovereignty push

Airbus is migrating its most critical applications for sensitive workloads from AWS to French cloud provider Scaleway's under a drive to increase digital sovereignty. As exclusively revealed by The Register in December, the European-based aerospace manufacturer, said it needed to guarantee the data remained “under European control" and was launching a tender at the start of 2026. Catherine Jestin…

Security updates for Thursday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cups, git-lfs, kernel, libsolv, libxml2, python3.12, and python3.9), Debian (chromium, dhcpcd5, and ntfs-3g), Fedora (firefox, perl-Imager, python-bcrypt, python-tiktoken, roundcubemail, and xrdp), Mageia (openssl, poppler, python-mistune, and tmux), Oracle (389-ds-base, cups, git-lfs, glibc, host-metering, kernel, libsolv, libxml2, nginx:1.24, Packa…

AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D Linux Performance

Today the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D goes on sale as the lowest-price AMD 3D V-Cache processor being marketed for gamers. This 8-core / 16-thread processor features a 4.5GHz boost clock and a total of 104MB of cache while being based on the older Zen 4 architecture and coming in at about $329 USD. Here is a look at how the AMD Ryzen 7 7700X3D is performing on Linux.…

Brit Scattered Spider duo handed tickets to prison over Transport for London attack

The two British Scattered Spider members collared for carrying out the 2024 cyberattack on Transport for London (TfL) will each spend five and a half years in prison after being sentenced on Thursday. Owen Flowers, 18, and Thalha Jubair, 20, were sentenced to five years and six months' imprisonment each, having pleaded guilty in June, in turn receiving a 15 percent reduction in their sentences. S…

Linux Floppy Driver For Apple's Super Woz Integrated Machine "SWIM" In Old Macs Improved

This is quite unexpected and was not on my bingo card for this year or even decade... The Linux driver for the floppy disk controller in Apple's legacy Super Woz Integrated Machine (SWIM) saw a large set of patches today for improving its performance and delivering various fixes...…

AI power binge delivers best half since 2022 for climate tech venture funding

Climate tech venture capital had its strongest first half since 2022 as investors poured billions into low-carbon datacenters and projects needed to feed AI's seemingly endless appetite for compute. According to investment tracker Currence, climate tech startups pulled in $26.1 billion in venture funding during the first six months of 2026, up 55 percent year-over-year. However, that headline gro…

Windows 10 refuses to die, and the security bill is coming due

A hard core of Windows 10 devices cannot or will not be migrated to Windows 11, leaving enterprises with a growing security problem as support options run out. According to asset tracking service Lansweeper, Windows 10 still runs on 16.9 percent of the Windows devices it monitors, or "roughly one in six." A year ago, the operating system accounted for about half of the machines in its dataset, fa…

SpaceX open sources Grok Build in same week company was found beaming users' repos to the cloud

Elon Musk has confirmed SpaceX has now open sourced the Grok Build CLI just days after researchers caught the AI tool scooping up users’ entire repositories and uploading them to company-controlled cloud storage. SpaceXAI’s data grab was first publicized on Sunday by Cereblab, who probed Grok Build traffic and found that repos were being packaged up as Git Bundles and beamed to Google Cloud stora…

AWS CloudFront outage serves errors instead of websites

UPDATED Amazon Web Services (AWS) is experiencing another outage after a CloudFront issue began throwing 5xx errors, knocking a string of websites and online services offline across multiple regions. According to AWS, the issue began at 0145 PDT (0945 UTC) this morning and affects CloudFront customers using VPC Origins. This is a relatively new CloudFront feature that lets customers serve applica…

New Linux Driver Improving Support For GETAC Rugged Laptops

GETAC manufactures a line of rugged/semi-rugged laptops for use in the public safety, defense, industrial manufacturing, oil and gas, and other industries. While shipping with Microsoft Windows out-of-the-box, a new driver has been proposed as GETAC MPMD as a minimal ACPI driver for improving support for these GETAC rugged laptops. In particular, the driver will allow the various programmable butt…

Telegram shortlinks knocked offline over sanctioned VPN connection

The operator of the .ME domain registry has confirmed that Telegram's t.me shortlinks stopped working for around a day while the messaging platform verified that links associated with a sanctioned VPN service had been removed. The US Office of Foreign Assets Control (OFAC) designated First VPN Service (1VPNS) on July 13 for selling services to ransomware groups and other cybercriminals. Shortly a…

Ubuntu Kernel Team Warns Of Temporary AMD GPU Performance Regression Up To 42x

The Ubuntu Kernel Team issued a statement this morning to proactively warn Ubuntu Linux users on Ubuntu 26.04 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS HWE users that the next kernel point release will contain a performance regression for AMD GPUs in compute-heavy workloads with up to a 42x performance hit. The positive news is that due to this being an upstream regression in a Linux 7.0 point release, upstream stakeh…

Imagination PowerVR BXM-4-64 GPU Firmware Upstreamed For The T-Head TH1520

Now in the upstream linux-firmware.git centralized repository is the firmware binary needed for enabling the Imagination Tech PowerVR BXM-4-64 Rogue GPU found with the Alibaba T-Head TH1520 SoC...…

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

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

How to teach an old Intel Mac new tricks with OpenCore Legacy Patcher

HANDS-ON Dortania's OpenCore Legacy Patcher lets you run newer versions of macOS on unsupported Intel Macs. It's handy, but there are a few things to beware of – including macOS Tahoe. OpenCore Legacy Patcher brings Hackintosh techniques to genuine Mac hardware. It's an inspired hack that helps you to install newer versions of Apple macOS on older Macs for which Apple has dropped support in recen…

Law firm insisted on one password to rule them all

PWNED Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we gather lessons from organizations that didn’t take security seriously enough. This week’s tale of woe comes from a company that left a door wide open for miscreants, but was lucky it didn't have to pay the price. Have a story about someone leaving a gaping hole in their network? Share it with us at pwned@sitpub.com. Anonymity is available up…

Tech support scam caused massive data breach at Australian airline Qantas

Australia’s Privacy Commissioner has revealed a tech support scam was the cause of the massive 2025 data breach at Australian airline Qantas and found the carrier didn’t breach its privacy obligations despite leaking personally identifiable information for 5.7 million customers. The Commissioner reached that conclusion, and a decision not to open a formal privacy probe, in a report published toda…

Even HP resellers thought the price of toner and ink was too high – so HP India facilitated an illegal cartel

The Competition Commission of India (CCI) has fined HP Inc. and some of its resellers, for what it calls “cartelisation” activities that inflated the cost of PCs and printers – and which it says HP used to head off threats from resellers to sell counterfeit ink cartridges. The ₹138.85 crores/$14.4 million fine won’t be a massive inconvenience to HP. The facts of the case may be, as the CCI found…

AMD ROCm 7.14 Announced As New Production Release, Ryzen AI 400 Series Support

As a follow-up to the article over ROCm 7.14 being tagged, AMD has formally announced the availability of ROCm 7.14 and it's their new production release rather than being a tech preview...…

Cyberattack threatens utterly critical infrastructure in Japan: KFC

The crippling high-consequence attack on vital infrastructure that cybersecurity experts have warned about for years is upon us, in the form of an incident that may force KFC to close some stores in Japan. Colonel Sanders himself is not the victim here. That role goes to Nichirei Group, a Japanese purveyor of frozen foods and super-chill logistics services that move them around. Nichirei Group on…

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 16, 2026

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition: Front: Fighting scraper bots; io_uring queues; Filesystem testing; BPF shielding; Sending packets from BPF; Kitty; QBE. Briefs: Shim security; seunshare vulnerability; Debian bookworm; Rust 1.97.0; Linux.org; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.…

Former OpenAI CTO does what Altman won't, releases a frontier AI model that's actually open

If you're in the market for a frontier-class open weights model, your options are few and far between outside of the Chinese model houses. With the Wednesday release of a new model codenamed "Inkling," an outfit called Thinking Machines Lab aims to change that. Founded in early 2025 by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, Thinking Machines' first model is a big one. Weighing in at 975 billion parameter…

Cadence's AuraStack agent melds AI with HPC to speed PCB, advanced packaging design

How AI will change the way scientific computing is done remains an open question. One relies on ultra-precise double-precision mathematics, while the other is perfectly happy working with 4 bits. On the surface, the two are diametrically opposed, two extremes of a spectrum we call high-performance computing (HPC) — and yes, whether you like it or not, AI is HPC. However, the latest AI offering fr…

Amazon Web Services' most vocal customer now runs EC2

Dave Brown, a 19-year veteran of AWS and member of its S-team leadership cabal, is leaving Amazon for parts undisclosed. It's hard to overstate Dave's impact on AWS; the few times I've met him, it was very clear that there was nothing I could trot out in the realm of "arcane EC2 trivia" that he didn't go orders of magnitude deeper on with zero forewarning. This is a titanic loss for AWS, because…

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

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

Prominent Haskell defector pilloried by anti-AI purists

Another day, another programming language feels the heat from AI. A prominent Haskell-based software platform is shifting new development to Python, with its founder arguing that Haskell's tooling and ecosystem have been slow to adapt to AI-assisted development. “Haskell is in real danger,” warned Scarf founder Avi Press, in a post entitled “After 7 years in production, Scarf has reluctantly move…

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

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

Salesforce's Agentforce isn't winning over clients, KeyBanc analysts claim

Salesforce’s flagship AI agent platform is struggling to convince customers of its value, according to an investment bank. The SaaS giant has bet the farm on AI agents, hoping they will fetch and carry data from its systems into a conversational UI, according to its vision of headless CRM. The cornerstone of the strategy is Agentforce, which the vendor promises will help customers build, test, de…

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

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

Linus Torvalds tells AI haters to fork off

Chief penguinista Linus Torvalds has declared that Linux is not an "anti-AI" project, telling contributors who object they can either walk away or fork the kernel. On lore.kernel.org, the archive for Linux kernel mailing lists, reformed potty mouth Linus was responding to a discussion about some negative sentiments toward AI. It is one area where Torvalds said he was willing to “absolutely put my…

[$] Topics in filesystem testing

It should come as no surprise that a gathering of filesystem developers would discuss filesystem testing; it has been a mainstay of the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit over the years and the 2026 summit was no exception. Ted Ts'o led the discussion this time; he had a few different topics to raise, including his perception of increasing regressions for ext4 in the stab…

Local DoS attack vectors in seunshare 3.10 (SUSE Security Team Blog)

The SUSE Security Team Blog has a post with an analysis of seunshare, which is used by SELinux to confine untrusted programs. During a review of version 3.10 of the program, the team identified two local Denial-of-Service (DoS) vectors. Since seunshare is supposed to run on SELinux-enabled systems, it is important to understand what kind of privilege escalation can be achieved when vulnerabilities…

[$] Lockless MPSC FIFO queues for io_uring

Processes that use io_uring tend to keep a lot of balls in the air; being able to have many operations underway at any given time is part of the point of that API in the first place. The io_uring subsystem must, as a result, keep track of a lot of tasks that have to be performed at the right time. In current kernels, io_uring uses a standard kernel linked-list primitive to track those work items.…

Security updates for Wednesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cifs-utils, corosync, cups, freerdp, git-lfs, go-fdo-client and go-fdo-server, go-toolset:rhel8, kernel, kernel-rt, libinput, libxml2, nginx:1.24, openssl, pacemaker, perl-DBI:1.641, php8.4, python-pillow, python3, and python3.12), Debian (grub2, libxfont, opam, and wolfssl), Fedora (freerdp, kernel, and prometheus), Mageia (imagemagick), Oracle (bui…

Many old shim versions are still accepted by secure boot

The CMU CERT Coordination Center has put out an advisory that many exploitable versions of the shim binary, used to boot Linux on systems with UEFI secure boot enabled, were never added to the revocation list. An attacker with administrative privileges or the ability to modify the boot process could use one of the vulnerable shim bootloaders to bypass Secure Boot protections and execute arbitrary…

European Court: Apple Can Not Shirk Off its Interoperability Requirements

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

Don’t Repeat NY’s 3D Printing Blunder

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

Speech Recognition and TTS in less than 500kb

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

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

Blender 5.2 LTS

The Linux.org story

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

Dupes (product clones) took over the world

The Zen of Parallel Programming

Call for topics for the 2026 Maintainers Summit

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

Infinities, impossibilities, and the man in the white linen suit

Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership

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

Mathematicians still don't know the fastest way to multiply numbers

Lessons Learned from CISA’s Recent GitHub Leak

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

Land Atlas – soil, farmability, and crop analysis for land listings

Building Our Future Together

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

Cagire: Live Coding in Forth

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay—Accountability Must Keep Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

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

Help EFF Cut the AI Hype

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

FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFF to Gov. Pritzker: Veto Illinois’ HB 5511

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police Drones

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

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

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

Primed for Malware: Stop Selling Compromised Android Devices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online

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

🦅 Domestic Spying Takes an L | EFFector 38.12

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

Scattered Spider Hackers Plead Guilty on Day 1 of Trial

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

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

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

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

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

Canada Is Forging Ahead with Its Dangerous Surveillance Bill

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

EFF Thanks SerpApi For Helping Us Protect Free Speech Online

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

Call for Submissions: Digital Pride

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

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

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

Court Records Should Be Free

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

Field Notes from a Year of OPSEC Training

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

AI Regulation Should Be Rational, Not Retaliatory

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

‘Popa’ Botnet Linked to Publicly-Traded Israeli Firm

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

The Free and Open Web Is Under Attack at the IETF

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

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

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

Onward, Friends

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

EFFecting Change: LGBTQ+ Solidarity Against the Tide of Surveillance

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

Victory! 702 has Expired!

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

Yes to California's Bill to Ban Surveillance Pricing

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

‘News’ Site Keeps Hallucinating EFF Staffers

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

Who Runs the Ransomware Group ‘The Gentlemen?’

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

A Record-Breaking Patch Tuesday for June 2026

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

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

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

Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

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