Terminal

Resisting the Menace of Federal Data Consolidation ↗ (opens external article)

In the past two years, the federal government has unlawfully consolidated data exposing our private information.  This consolidation has been chaotic but generally came in three rolling waves: It started with DOGE, moved to agency-to-agency data sharing with ICE, and then attempted data-driven purges of state voter rolls. We all deserve to live in a world where the data we use to pay our taxes, re…

YouTuber Says Cops Visited Him After He Built a Flock-Style Camera to Track Cops ↗ (opens external article)

No Man Is an Island ↗ (opens external article)

AI coding agents generate more code, but not more software ↗ (opens external article)

Anyone who has even tangentially associated with computer programming knows that modern AI coding assistants and agents can be incredibly efficient at generating huge amounts of functional code. But coders making use of those tools also know better than to trust the accuracy of that code, meaning substantial effort needs to be spent reviewing any AI-generated output. A recent study of actual codi…

Outrage grows as CDC reportedly poised to fund "unethical" vaccine trial ↗ (opens external article)

Outrage has erupted among health experts over news that the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is still eager to fund a widely condemned vaccine trial that would expose newborns in Guinea-Bissau to hepatitis B, putting them at high risk of a lifelong infection, which can lead to liver cirrhosis, liver cancer, and premature death. The trial was suspended in January after its unethical desi…

AWS AgentCore security undone by prompt requesting credentials ↗ (opens external article)

Bob, possibly the same Bob whose conversations with Alice draw so much interest from eavesdropping Eve, was browsing a site we'll call TechHub. The site hosts an AI agent served by Amazon Bedrock AgentCore. Bob asked the agent for help understanding the content of a URL, a credential endpoint – in raw JSON, if you don't mind. The endpoint returned data from the Instance Metadata Service (IMDS), w…

PC shipments fall 20.1 percent in “sharpest decline” since Q1 2023 ↗ (opens external article)

PC shipments saw a steep drop of about 20 percent in Q3 2026, analysts reported this week. The industry saw its “sharpest decline since “Q1 2023," Omdia said in an announcement toady. Global shipments of laptops, desktops, and workstations fell 21.2 percent year over year (YoY) to 58.1 million devices, the analyst said. Desktop PC shipments (including desktop workstations) decreased 23.5 percent…

AI disqualification yields new Nikon Small World in Motion winner ↗ (opens external article)

Credit: Nguyen Nam Nhat. Last month we covered the winner of Nikon's Small World in Motion video: Ning Xu of Tsinghua University in China, whose video captured tiny cilia beating in the airways of a child with a rare respiratory disorder. But allegations surfaced about Xu's use of AI while making the video. Nikon launched an investigation and concluded that Xu's entry did not comply with competit…

You might want to try being less creative ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft-Decision-1, our model for fast decision-making ↗ (opens external article)

Your artwork could be featured in the next Debian release ↗ (opens external article)

The Debian Linux project has opened a call for community artwork submissions ahead of the release of the upcoming Forky (Debian 14). If you think you've got the artistic chops, your art could appear on the boot screens, login prompts, and desktop wallpapers of millions of users. The submission deadline is November 26. Continuing Debian's community-driven ethos, the artwork submission process mirr…

Starlink spectrum deal boosts Musk plan to beat AT&T, T-Mobile, and Verizon ↗ (opens external article)

SpaceX has a deal to purchase nationwide low-band spectrum licenses for a planned terrestrial mobile network that would complement the space-based Starlink cellular service. SpaceX will buy up to 14 megahertz of spectrum in the 800 MHz band from investment firm Grain Management, which bought the spectrum rights from T-Mobile earlier this year. T-Mobile had obtained the spectrum when it bought Spr…

M7.6 Earthquake in Panama ↗ (opens external article)

Ideas aren't getting harder to find, anyone who tells you otherwise is a coward ↗ (opens external article)

Show HN: Carrier-Explode: iPhone, Pixel and Galaxy carrier settings decoded ↗ (opens external article)

Ubuntu 26.10 To Include Desktop Images For RISC-V ↗ (opens external article)

Ubuntu Linux ISOs for RISC-V 64-bit to date have just been the server/CLI version without any desktop environment pre-seeded. But with next week's Ubuntu 26.10 release, there will now be Ubuntu 26.10 RISC-V desktop ISOs for both Ubuntu proper and a Xubuntu minimal ISO...…

Valve's Proton 11.0-2e Released To Fix EA App Issues ↗ (opens external article)

CodeWeavers working with Valve today released Proton 11.0-2e as their downstream of Wine that powers Steam Play for enjoying Windows games on Linux...…

Show HN: The rarest tech books and docs you've probably never read ↗ (opens external article)

Typesafe AI raises $870M at $7.5B ↗ (opens external article)

Organizing in the Town at Oakland Tech Week ↗ (opens external article)

EFF was thrilled to join organizers, advocates, and activists in the East Bay for the second annual Oakland Tech Week last week. We are grateful to our friends at MediaJustice and Upturn for inviting us co-present this all-day event, “Building Beyond Big Tech: Organizing Oakland’s Future”, on Sept. 30.  The event, hosted by the Kapor Center in downtown Oakland, offered a unique chance to spend tim…

Microsoft 365 subscribers set to lose up to 4TB of OneDrive storage ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft 365 subscribers on Family, Premium, or Pro tiers who make full use of their OneDrive storage allotments consider this a warning: It’s fixin’ to shrink. Redmond published a support page this week detailing changes to Microsoft 365 shared storage allotments, and while the company is painting them as offering greater flexibility for users, they also represent a massive reduction in capacit…

SpaceX to buy key spectrum that could help Starlink Mobile become major US cell carrier ↗ (opens external article)

SpaceX is looking to take on the incumbent mobile networks in the US with a combination of low-band spectrum that can penetrate indoors together with the 2 GHz spectrum supported by its Starlink Gen2 satellites for bandwidth. The rocket-flinging operation says it cut a deal to acquire a nationwide low-band spectrum license portfolio of up to 14 megahertz of paired spectrum in the 800 MHz band, wh…

Triple-A Minesweeper ↗ (opens external article)

A statement on the Tor Project's relationship with Mullvad ↗ (opens external article)

Germany transforms former coal mines into Europe's largest lake landscape ↗ (opens external article)

Cloudflare Keeps 1.1.1.1 Out of Piracy Blocking, Escapes Penalties In France ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Cloudflare doesn't block pirate sports streaming sites through its 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver in France, only through its CDN. The Paris Judicial Court has now accepted that stance, rejecting [French pay-TV provider] Canal+'s request for penalties of 50,000 euros per site, per day. Interestingly, the court's conclusion relies on statistics provided…

Growing pains: how distributed AI training changes the network between datacenters ↗ (opens external article)

Large-scale AI training has already escaped the confines of a single datacenter. Google said Gemini was trained synchronously across clusters in multiple locations; Microsoft has connected AI data centres in Wisconsin and Georgia into what it describes as one distributed AI supercomputer; AWS has connected AI compute clusters across wide areas to allow Anthropic to build Claude models; Meta has b…

Python 3.15 Released With Experimental JIT Compiler Running Faster ↗ (opens external article)

Python 3.15 is out today as the newest annual feature release for the Python programming language...…

Oracle lets AI agents do the work, provided you stay in Big Red's world ↗ (opens external article)

Oracle's new Fusion Claw runtime could give customers more control over AI agents automating business processes, analysts say. But they warn that adoption remains at an early stage and customers risk becoming more tightly tied to Oracle's applications and cloud. Having promised "applications that can reason, decide, and act in pursuit of defined business objectives" back in March, Big Red has now…

AMD PerfOpt Boosting Prior-Gen Ryzen APU Performance For AI ↗ (opens external article)

Last week I ran benchmarks of the new AMD PerfOpt feature being introduced in Linux 7.4. In those PerfOpt benchmarks on current-gen AMD Ryzen AI APUs/SoCs the AI performance improved as much as 18~23%. Several Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing how prior-gen AMD Ryzen hardware benefited or not from PerfOpt, so here are some additional benchmarks.…

Why Are Coding Agents So Dumb? ↗ (opens external article)

'Wallace and Gromit,' 90% Alone ↗ (opens external article)

Global PC shipments crater 20% as rising prices hammer demand ↗ (opens external article)

The global PC market has taken a beating, with shipments plunging more than 20 percent in the third quarter as the AI-driven memory shortage pushes up prices and buyers decide their existing machines will do just fine. New figures from Omdia show worldwide shipments of desktops, notebooks, and workstations fell 21.2 percent year-on-year to 58.1 million units in Q3 2026. IDC tells a similar story,…

Ubuntu 26.10 Sticks To Using GCC 15 By Default ↗ (opens external article)

From a performance and enthusiast perspective, what I personally find most disappointing and puzzling with the imminent release of Ubuntu 26.10 comes down to its default compiler version...…

Microsoft barred from sponsoring foreign workers for US residency ↗ (opens external article)

Donald Trump’s administration has temporarily banned Microsoft, Adobe, and several other tech companies from sponsoring workers for permanent US residency, claiming they abused immigration programs at the expense of American citizens. Vice-president JD Vance said on Thursday that the H-1B visa programme for highly skilled foreign workers had “become rife with fraud” and that over-reliance on such…

Our $445M Series D ↗ (opens external article)

Cloudflare acquires Deno ↗ (opens external article)

US Navy bets another $150M on fighter drone that skips the runway ↗ (opens external article)

American defense biz Shield AI says combined US government funding and its own investment commitments have reached $400 million to advance its autonomous vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) fighter drone toward flight testing. The X-BAT aircraft was unveiled at an event in Washington DC last year for an audience of military leaders. According to Shield AI, the US Navy has committed an additional…

Citrix gives NetScaler admins another critical reason to patch ↗ (opens external article)

Citrix is urging customers to patch another critical NetScaler vulnerability after weeks of disclosures involving actively exploited flaws. CVE-2026-107406 affects NetScaler ADC and NetScaler Gateway and can lead to remote code execution (RCE) or denial of service (DoS). It carries a CVSS v4.0 score of 9.5. The affected configurations depend on the software version. Older builds are vulnerable wh…

Pointing AI at archives found a forgotten meteorite, lost rhinos, and more ↗ (opens external article)

Faster Zswap With Patches To Batch The Writeback I/O ↗ (opens external article)

For those making increased use of Linux's Zswap as a compressed RAM cache for swap pages amid these times of sky high RAM prices, a new patch series was posted providing some incremental performance gains for Zswap by batching the writeback I/O...…

Show HN: Let your AI agents paint big arrows, boxes and text on your screen ↗ (opens external article)

Rocket Report: A rare Falcon 9 scrub; is it just about Vulcan's time to shine? ↗ (opens external article)

Welcome to Edition 9.14 of the Rocket Report! The big news this week, from our perspective, is that United Launch Alliance's Vulcan rocket appears to be close to launching. We've seen a no-earlier-than launch date for the return to flight mission of October 29 (an Amazon Leo flight), and the next rocket up after that, also an Amazon Leo mission, is also planned for this year. Assuming the solid r…

A 1960 Paper Published In Science Predicts World Will End Next Month ↗ (opens external article)

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: A physicist has put a definite date on Doomsday," The New York Times wrote on November 4, 1960. "He calculates that it will come on Friday the Thirteenth in November, 2026 A. D. On that date, or thereabouts, the human population will have expanded so far as to approach infinity and thus will automatically annihilate itself." The newspaper was rig…

Anthropic asks users to stop being mean to Claude ↗ (opens external article)

Anthropic has updated its rules to stop people being mean to Claude, apparently deciding that its AI chatbot needs protection from the humans paying to use it. The AI developer's latest usage policy prohibits "sustained and needless abusive or cruel behavior" toward its models. The rules take effect November 12, giving users just over a month to get any lingering insults out of their systems. "Th…

Linux Patches Finally Make Hibernation Possible In Secure Boot / Lockdown Mode ↗ (opens external article)

When booting the Linux kernel using UEFI SecureBoot, the kernel is put in the lockdown mode to restrict the ability to modify the running kernel image or leaking data from kernel memory. Kernel lockdown mode can also be manually enabled by the user/administrator. Among the limitations imposed in Linux's lockdown mode is no hibernation support. But that soon may be relieved with new patches propose…

Nobel Peace Prize for 2026 to Navanethem Pillay ↗ (opens external article)

Boro: NVIDIA's Open-Source Effort For AI-Assisted Linux Kernel Development ↗ (opens external article)

Over the past few months NVIDIA has been developing Boro as a new AI-assisted kernel development CLI written in Rust and focused on local AI for enhancing efficiency for kernel development...…

Volkswagen's replacement for the ID.4 crossover is here ↗ (opens external article)

Volkswagen’s ID.4 is no more. The midsize crossover debuted in 2021, one of VW's first new electric vehicles designed in the wake of dieselgate. A year later, the company began local production in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and a couple of years ago facelifted the model, adding a much-improved rear drive unit in the process. But Chattanooga turned its attention away from the ID.4 earlier this year.…

OpenAI fires three safety researchers for "mishandling research information" ↗ (opens external article)

AMD Caps Off Linux 7.4 Graphics Driver Development With More HDMI 2.1 Fixes ↗ (opens external article)

AMD on Thursday sent out a final pull request of their feature work aiming to be submitted for the upcoming Linux 7.4 merge window. This round of "few last odds and ends" is mostly about landing some bug fixes but of which there are a few worth mentioning...…

Microsoft and Anthropic play invoice tennis with startup's $17,600 Claude bill ↗ (opens external article)

A Norwegian startup says it ran up a $17,600 bill using Claude in Microsoft Foundry after assuming its Azure credits would cover the cost. We reported a similar case in March, involving third-party model charges that weren't covered by Azure sponsorship credits. This time, the customer says Microsoft and Anthropic each directed it to the other to resolve the charges. Vegalabs AS says it received…

Once: Cache CLI commands ↗ (opens external article)

HDR Support Coming For Qualcomm MSM Driver To Benefit Snapdragon X Laptops On Linux ↗ (opens external article)

For those making use of Qualcomm Snapdragon X laptops on Linux, one of the features coming to the MSM DRM kernel driver is static HDR support for DisplayPort outputs and eDP panels...…

Sorry, I'm in a meeting ↗ (opens external article)

BOFH: Smells like team spirit ↗ (opens external article)

CRISIS! The ancient computer in the basement – which has something to do with our waste water system – has stopped. And while we may not know exactly what it does when it's running, we definitely know what happens when it stops. The PFY and I took a look, and while (in theory) it's possible that we could fire up a replacement machine, I can pretty much guarantee the two ISA cards, identified only…

Whose roadmap is your software estate running on? ↗ (opens external article)

Most enterprise software estates run to somebody else’s calendar. End-of-support dates, license model changes and needless upgrades arrive on the vendor’s schedule, and the IT team absorbs them: the migration nobody budgeted for, the re-platforming that displaces a project the business actually asked for, the patch cadence that is really a product roadmap in disguise. Origina, an independent prov…

Programming Isn't Special ↗ (opens external article)

Rejecting a promotion sent field service tech into support hell ↗ (opens external article)

Welcome to another installment of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed Friday column which often shares your stories of what happens when incompetent people climb the greasy pole and send their failures straight back down into the lap of tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Preston," who wrote to share his story of working as a field service tech in the late 1990s. "I'd…

Apollo Software Pioneer Margaret Hamilton Dies at 90 ↗ (opens external article)

"Margaret Hamilton, the groundbreaking researcher who helped create the field of software engineering and whose code helped land NASA's Apollo astronauts on the moon to win the 20th century space race, has died," writes longtime Slashdot reader Veeru. "She was 90." MIT News reports: A computing pioneer who authored over 130 publications, Hamilton helped to establish software engineering as a dedic…

So long, Spokes: GitHub rewrites storage to restore reliability, just in time for agentic hordes ↗ (opens external article)

Responding to unprecedented demand from AI agents, GitHub is rebuilding its Git storage architecture from scratch. Early tests with the new architecture show a promising 35x write improvement in internal tests. GitHub will need a miracle of that proportion just to keep up with customer demand. The plan involves decoupling writes from reads, offloading maintenance, and letting object storage manag…

MXC - a sandboxed code execution system ↗ (opens external article)

India’s tech giants shrug off changes to USA’s skilled visa program ↗ (opens external article)

India’s peak technology industry body, NASSCOM, has shrugged off changes to the USA’s skilled visa regime, and Microsoft has denied it abuses the program. The changes, announced on Thursday by US vice president JD Vance and Labor Secretary Keith Sonderling, mean that Microsoft and Adobe can no longer use the Program Electronic Review Management (PERM) program to convert holders of the H-1B visa f…

Keyboard differences between Windows and Macs ↗ (opens external article)

First Thorium Nuclear Clocks Begin to Tick ↗ (opens external article)

Researchers in Vienna and Beijing have independently built the first nuclear clocks based on oscillations inside thorium nuclei, marking a major milestone for a field that could eventually produce highly portable, ultra-precise timekeepers. The clocks are already precise enough to lose only about a second over millions of years. The New York Times reports: The first nuclear clocks are not going to…

New AI Agent Resources Proposed For The Linux Kernel, AI Skills To Help Developers ↗ (opens external article)

The latest proposal for the upstream Linux kernel is introducing infrastructure for AI agent resources. Initially these agent resources would be for a skill so AI agents can automatically add a "Fixes: " tag on relevant patches for noting the first problematic Git commit automatically that a patch fixes...…

Valve Lands VK_AMD_anti_lag Support For AMD RADV Driver In Mesa 26.3 ↗ (opens external article)

There is yet another feature to get excited about for this quarter's Mesa 26.3 release. Months in the making, the Valve-contributed VK_AMD_anti_lag support for the Radeon RADV driver was merged today for benefiting AMD Linux gamers as a nice improvement over the former implementation...…

Ukrainian drone attack takes out Russian datacenter ↗ (opens external article)

Russian web giant Yandex says one of its cloud availability zones is unavailable due to a drone attack. Yandex is Russia’s rough equivalent of Google, and dominates the local market for search, email, and mapping services. The company also operates a cloud computing service whose status page says its ru-central1-b availability zone is down. “The incident was caused by a fire caused by a drone att…

AI company moves to defend critical infrastructure and open-source projects from AI ↗ (opens external article)

Anthropic has launched an effort to help people patch the software vulnerabilities exposed by its own Project Glasswing. If that sounds like a careless camper starting a wildfire and later funding a fire department, well, that's one way of looking at it. Anthropic insists it wants to give defenders access to the tools attackers are already using. Under a program name that sounds like a forthcomin…

US Bars Microsoft, Adobe, and Major IT Firms From Green Card Program ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The Trump administration is suspending Microsoft, Adobe, and several other technology companies from a program that helps skilled foreign workers obtain permanent residency in the United States, accusing the companies of fraud. "Our message to Microsoft is: You're a great American company, but you've got to hire great American workers," U.S. Vic…

US disrupts Chinese hacking tools as 7 govts warn of PRC spies stealing sensitive data worldwide ↗ (opens external article)

The FBI announced that it has seized seven web domains linked to hacking tools allegedly operated by a Chinese security firm called Integrity Technology Group and used by Beijing-backed cyber operatives to scan a South Carolina power company's network and other critical infrastructure systems for vulnerabilities. In a subsequent advisory, the FBI and other government agencies in the US, UK, Austr…

Nvidia found $1B under the couch to help secure American scientific computing dominance ↗ (opens external article)

Nvidia on Thursday scraped together some spare change to commit $1 billion — about 1/60th of its quarterly profits — to funding US scientific discovery over the next five years. The commitment, announced during an event in Washington, DC, aims to support the research and development of AI — or is it "super intelligence" now? — in fields including quantum computing, healthcare, and energy security…

SpaceX calls for better coordination in orbit after near-misses with Starlink ↗ (opens external article)

Space has plenty of room for more megaconstellations, but only if all operators are willing to share information about where their satellites are and where they're going, a top executive at SpaceX and its AI subsidiary said this week. Michael Nicolls, SpaceX's vice president for Starlink and president of Elon Musk's artificial intelligence company, xAI, used a presentation Tuesday at the Internat…

Judge weighs if Trump can charge $100K for early access to Truth Social posts ↗ (opens external article)

Likely in the next few weeks, a federal judge will decide if Donald Trump can become the first president to personally profit from selling early access to government information in his social media posts. At a hearing Wednesday, Department of Justice civil attorney Brantley Mayers argued that there was no conflict whatsoever with Trump charging up to $100,000 monthly for instant API access to Tru…

Trump Mobile hack and apparent lack of FCC authorization raise security alarms ↗ (opens external article)

Trump Mobile apparently failed to obtain necessary authorizations to operate the international calling portion of its phone service, Sen. Maggie Hassan (D-N.H.) wrote in a letter to the company today. Her letter said Trump Mobile also doesn't appear to have submitted a required plan for fighting robocalls. Trump Mobile's key business partner, Liberty Mobile Wireless, did make a robocall database…

Feds get ready to rewrite car headlight rules ↗ (opens external article)

One of the regulations that make vehicles in the US different from those in Europe or Japan is our headlight rules. They’re laid out in the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS), and changing them is—or used to be—a lengthy, laborious process, which is a major reason automotive lighting technology has lagged in the US. But the current administration says it’s time for “bolstering driver…

There can be only one: Google Cloud casts Gemini as your enterprise AI hero ↗ (opens external article)

Google Cloud CEO Thomas Kurian said that Gemini will be "your new single, universal agent for work," a declaration as unassailable as Google's history of consistency, customer service, and long-term product support. Long-term here means a median lifespan of about 4.1 years and a mean lifespan of about 5.4 years across 308 discontinued products and services. That doesn't include enduring successes…

RIP Margaret Hamilton, whose code saved the Apollo 11 Moon landing ↗ (opens external article)

Margaret Hamilton, who coined the term "software engineering" and led the development of onboard flight software for NASA's Apollo program in the 1960s, died last week at the age of 90. A recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, Hamilton was also immortalized as a LEGO minifig the following year—part of the "Women of NASA" set that also included astronauts Mae Jemison and Sally Rid…

NASA taps DoE to help it build nuclear space reactors ↗ (opens external article)

NASA and the Department of Energy have agreed to expand their collaboration on the space agency's nuclear ambitions, as administrator Jared Isaacman pushes ahead with a tight deadline to launch a fission-powered spacecraft to Mars. “We are entering the ‘Nuclear NASA-era,’” Isaacman said at a signing ceremony where he and Energy Secretary Chris Wright signed a joint memorandum of understanding. Th…

When No ID Means No Internet: Age Verification and the Right to Access Information ↗ (opens external article)

This post was co-authored by Sheila B. Lalwani, a doctorate student and recent COMPASS Fellow hosted by EFF. Age verification proposals are often presented as a simple tradeoff: sacrifice a little privacy to better safeguard children online. But that framing overlooks a more fundamental question. What happens to people who cannot verify their age at all? This is particularly a problem when users a…

Let's Encrypt cuts certificate lifetimes to 64 days starting February 2027 ↗ (opens external article)

Let's Encrypt is continuing a push toward tighter security by reducing free SSL/TLS certificate lifetimes from 90 days to 64 days, starting February 10, 2027. For administrators already implementing modern ACME clients that support ARI (ACME Renewal Information), the change should be seamless. For those still relying on hardcoded renewal schedules or manual processes, February will be the deadlin…

Driver wins $76 after ALPR led to bogus traffic stop, drug searches ↗ (opens external article)

A federal jury in Texas recently ruled in favor of a man who sued Bexar County and its sheriff over allegations that the agency ran what the plaintiff’s attorneys called an “unconstitutional traffic stop scheme” enabled by “AI-powered” license plate readers. Late last month, plaintiff Alek Schott of Houston was awarded $76, one dollar for each minute that he was detained. (Schott asked for this e…

RFK Jr. unveils sweeping federal initiative to find evidence of vaccine injuries ↗ (opens external article)

Under anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the federal health department is undertaking an agency-wide effort to focus on injuries claimed to be related to vaccines. In a press announcement Thursday, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) laid out four aspects of the large-scale initiative. The first is a new clinic at the National Institutes of Health that is "dedicate…

Emmy Awards Leave Broadcast TV For Prime Video ↗ (opens external article)

Amazon Prime Video will become the exclusive global home of the Emmy Awards under a six-year deal beginning in 2027, the Television Academy announced on Tuesday. The Emmys will stream live for free to viewers in more than 240 countries and territories without requiring a Prime subscription. From the report: In the release, Prime Video was named as the "permanent home" for the Emmys, in contrast to…

An experimental tour-de-force: Entanglement between glass bead and light ↗ (opens external article)

Writing about quantum entanglement is always a challenge. There are so many clichés to avoid: It’s mysterious, ghostly, spooky, and weird. Entanglement is none of those things, and yet it is also all of those things—a superposition of clichés, you might say. So, having gotten all of my clichés out of the way in the second sentence, let’s take a look at how a group of researchers managed to entang…

High-severity Nvidia bug could crash GPU monitoring on exposed servers ↗ (opens external article)

Researchers found thousands of GPU servers exposing Nvidia's DCGM Exporter to the internet, with hundreds potentially vulnerable to a high-severity flaw that could let unauthenticated attackers crash the GPU monitoring service and disrupt AI workloads. DCGM Exporters read telemetry from the GPUs on a host, including its hardware, utilization, memory usage, power consumption, and error events. Eac…

Theranos.world ↗ (opens external article)

TSMC taps GlobalFoundries to bolster US silicon interposer production in $2B deal ↗ (opens external article)

A hole in America's domestic supply chain is closing. US-based wafer-fab GlobalFoundries announced a $2 billion partnership with TSMC on Thursday to shore up American manufacturing of advanced semiconductors, like those used in AI datacenters. Under the multi-year deal, GloFo will produce silicon interposers for TSMC's chip-on-wafer-on-substrate (CoWoS) advanced packaging spec at its Malta, New Y…

Gremlin now uses AI to break distributed systems faster ↗ (opens external article)

What better way to find out what your system can take than by breaking it? Popularized by Netflix more than a decade ago, chaos testing is the practice of deliberately introducing controlled failures into working systems to test their resilience. Now, a startup that built its business around this practice is using AI to automate more of the testing and troubleshooting process. Gremlin’s Foresight…

EXT4 Deprecates Its Journaled "data=journal" Mode ↗ (opens external article)

The EXT4 file-system today deprecated its journaled mode of the "data=journal" mount option. Following its deprecation, this mode is planned for removal in the year 2028...…

Shai-Hulud worm makes jump to AI infrastructure with Tensorlake compromise ↗ (opens external article)

The credential-hijacking Shai-Hulud worm has struck again, this time burrowing its way into a popular AI agent platform SDK. Multiple security researchers reported Thursday that they had detected Shai-Hulud infection in a recent release of the npm package for version 0.5.144 of Tensorlake’s SDK. That package has somewhere in the neighborhood of 12,000 downloads per week, while its GitHub reposito…

COSMIC Epoch 1.10 Released With Launcher Now Using GPU Accelerated Rendering ↗ (opens external article)

System76 today released COSMIC Epoch 1.10 as the newest incremental update to this Rust-based desktop developed in-step with their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...…

Amazon's new Alexa Tablets drop the Fire branding but are more Android than ever ↗ (opens external article)

For the last 15 years, you've been able to buy a Fire tablet from Amazon. Which Fire tablet? It doesn't matter—like Kindles, they have been pretty much the same year to year. The company's new tablet lineup is a big change, though. Amazon has dropped the Fire branding in favor of Alexa, and the new Alexa Tablets are now Google-certified Android devices. Throughout the history of Fire Tablets, Ama…

Money trail backs leaked chats from extortion crew that walks into US law firms ↗ (opens external article)

Cryptocurrency transactions lend credibility to parts of a purported leak from Russian extortion crew Silent Ransom Group (SRG), according to blockchain researchers. Chainalysis said some wallet addresses in the material match its existing intelligence, although it could not authenticate the entire collection. It posted: "While we cannot speak to the totality of claims documented in the leak, we…

It's DAF Day! Wait...What's a DAF? ↗ (opens external article)

Today is DAF Day! This event highlights the millions of donor-advised funds (DAFs) people have set up to make charitable donations and change the world. If you have a DAF, consider supporting EFF today. Decisions about your privacy, encryption, artificial intelligence, online speech, and digital security will determine whether technology empowers people or concentrates power in the hands of a few.…

Ubuntu Currently Suffering From Sustained DDoS Attack ↗ (opens external article)

Those trying to access the Ubuntu website, ISO downloads, and similar Ubuntu resources today are finding the site inoperable amid what's now confirmed as an ongoing distributed denial of service attack...…

Too many quantum startups, too little money to keep them alive ↗ (opens external article)

More than half of quantum computing startups will be out of business by 2030, Gartner predicts, as an overcrowded market struggles to generate enough commercial revenue. The analyst expects customers to reject technologies that fail to achieve fault-tolerant quantum computing – reliable computation despite errors in the underlying hardware. Despite that forecast, Gartner says enterprises are maki…

Ubuntu 26.10 Delivers Nice I/O Performance Wins Over Ubuntu 26.04 On AMD EPYC ↗ (opens external article)

While Ubuntu 26.10 is not a Long-Term Support (LTS) release and thus will see limited enterprise deployments compared to Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, for those not after that long-term deployment support and preferring to live more on the leading-edge, Ubuntu 26.10 is delivering some nice performance gains on current 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin" hardware.…

Amazon builds 1,000th satellite, will launch space internet service by end of year ↗ (opens external article)

The world's largest retailer wants to sell you something else—Internet from space. Amazon has been developing a constellation of satellites to deliver broadband Internet from low-Earth orbit for the better part of a decade, and the company is just about ready to pull back the curtain. It is entering a market that SpaceX, with its Starlink Internet, has dominated for the last half-decade. Amazon's…

Female AI Agents 'Paid' Less Than Males, Study Finds ↗ (opens external article)

Ancient Slashdot reader williamyf writes: If you thought the gender pay gap was not real, and that there were no biases in the workplace, think again: A recent study from the University of Limerick found that, in a VR office setting, AI agents -- not even humanoid robots -- that presented themselves as "male" were paid more per task and perceived as more "human-like" than their "female" counterpar…

Fighting GenAI with GenAI: The New Email Security Landscape ↗ (opens external article)

The use of phishing emails as a means of stealing information or implanting damaging malware dates back to the mid-1990s. Although almost as old as the Internet, it remains the instrument of choice for threat actors wanting to pose as trusted organizations or individuals for the purposes of corporate infiltration. In fact its use is on the rise: according to the most recent figures from the Feder…

Margaret Hamilton, software pioneer who helped put humans on the Moon, dies at 90 ↗ (opens external article)

"Forget It" was the name of a small computer program never thought to be needed, which will nonetheless go down in history along with its author, Margaret Hamilton, the American software engineer who died on September 30, aged 90. Hamilton led development of the onboard flight software for Apollo's command and lunar modules, helping astronauts reach the Moon in 1969. Among her early jobs after jo…

Secretive Rosaic Labs Hires Legendary Linux x86 Developer ↗ (opens external article)

The curiosity into secretive semiconductor startup Rosaic Labs builds. Earlier this year it was noted that Intel was providing Rosaic Labs with access to its Atom technology with RTL code. There have also been rather mysterious x86 additions not from Intel or AMD (or Zhaoxin / Hygon) that given the timing may pertain to Rosaic Labs. News today is that Rosaic recently hired a long-time, Linux x86 d…

Rust upstart reveals 'reimplementation' of Microsoft Office – with Claude on coding duty ↗ (opens external article)

ArtCraft has added alternatives to Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint to its growing collection of Rust applications, which it describes as "clean-room reimplementations" of proprietary software. The projects lean heavily on Claude for development and remain unfinished, but our first look at its Word alternative, WordCraft, suggests they are worth watching. The company's GitHub repositories al…

Nova Driver Continues Progressing With Long-Term Goal For Official NVIDIA Linux Use ↗ (opens external article)

NVIDIA engineer John Hubbard and Red Hat's Danilo Krummrich presented at this week's LPC2026 conference in Prague on the open-source and upstream Nova driver stack that continues forming as a Rust-based open-source NVIDIA Linux kernel driver...…

CrowdStrike finds possible bank hacker's CV among exposed AI logs ↗ (opens external article)

CrowdStrike researchers investigating attacks on South Korean financial institutions found exposed AI session logs containing operational details and a resume-writing request that may identify the attacker. In a report published Wednesday, analyst Ashley Campion said the prompt named "YY," listed a Chinese university and a location in Guangdong, and gave conflicting age information: 26, but initi…

IBM offloads 'hundreds' of its cloudy VMware customers ↗ (opens external article)

IBM has sold “hundreds” of its cloudy VMware customers to Broadcom partner 11:11 Systems. Under Broadcom’s ownership, VMware slashed the number of cloudy partners it keeps on the books and retained only partners that go all-in on the Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud stack. Partners that Broadcom decided not to work with lost the right to resell its software as of October 2025 and may not run…

AI giants promise to play nice with personal data after UK watchdog scrutiny ↗ (opens external article)

Ten of the world's biggest AI developers have agreed to tighten their handling of personal data following scrutiny by Britain's privacy watchdog, which is now turning its attention to autonomous AI agents that don't always play by the rules. The recently rebranded Information Commission's Office (ICO) said Thursday that Amazon, Anthropic, Apple, Cohere, DeepSeek, Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI,…

Samsung eyes $80B quarterly profit as memory buyers pay the price ↗ (opens external article)

Samsung Electronics expects third-quarter revenue to more than double and operating profit to reach nearly nine times last year's level as the AI infrastructure boom fuels demand for memory. The South Korean company is among the major memory manufacturers benefiting from demand for chips used in datacenter servers and GPUs. Although Samsung will not report its full earnings until the end of this…

Patches Updated To Begin Removing The Linux x32 ABI ↗ (opens external article)

Linux developers are once again considering the removal of the Linux x32 ABI...…

UK and Germany team up against Russian cyberattacks as Brexit rethink looms ↗ (opens external article)

Britain and Germany have announced a partnership to counter cyberattacks and sabotage, particularly from Russia, as Prime Minister Andy Burnham heads to Berlin for talks. Under the arrangement announced Thursday, the countries will share information and coordinate efforts to monitor, deter, and disrupt hostile activity, including threats to critical infrastructure. The announcement comes ahead of…

Windows Search learns to take orders ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft's latest Windows Search preview promises faster results and less clutter, while adding a new sideline: carrying out commands such as muting audio or minimizing windows. Following July's improvements, Microsoft began rolling out the new preview yesterday. The Actions feature lets users change settings directly from Windows Search. Typing "mute" into the search box and selecting the resul…

Google's Sashiko AI Has Completed 191k Patch Reviews, Cited On Nearly 500 Kernel CVEs ↗ (opens external article)

Sashiko that was built by Google engineers for agentic review of the Linux kernel code changes and powered by Google's AI models continues proving very valuable to kernel developers. In less than one year since they launched Sashiko for agentic AI code review, their results are quite fascinating...…

Chrome 155 Ships Decoding Support For JPEG XL ↗ (opens external article)

Google has released Chrome 155 with support for decoding JPEG XL images, a format that offers 30-50% better compression than JPEG along with lossless compression, JPEG transcoding, HDR, animation, and progressive decoding. From a blog post: We expect that JPEG XL is most helpful for high-fidelity or lossless compression, especially of photographic images or in cases in which fine-grained progressi…

SpacemiT RISC-V SoCs To See More Improvements With Linux 7.4 ↗ (opens external article)

For those interested in the SpacemiT K3 as one of the few RVA23 RISC-V SoCs readily available so far and in the likes of the K3 Pico-ITX system, more improvements for its upstream kernel support are coming in Linux 7.4...…

next-20261008: linux-next ↗ (opens external article)

Version:next-20261008 (linux-next) Released:2026-10-08…

Google Working To Leverage More Compiler Optimizations Within The Linux Kernel ↗ (opens external article)

While Linus Torvalds previously shot down plans for Profile Guided Optimizations (PGO) in the mainline Linux kernel, Google engineers are hoping still to get that out-of-tree functionality upstream. They also would like to see PGO supported for Linux kernel modules rather than just the main Linux kernel image. Additionally, they hope to see limitations overcome around AutoFDO and Propeller optimiz…

Yes, and ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft unveils 'Surace' Laptop Ultra ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft launched some new devices last night, complete with several new Copilot+ PCs powered by Nvidia's RTX Spark system-on-chip, but the big news appears to be a rebrand of the Surface range as "Surace." The typo (we assume) appeared on a slide about the number of ports on Microsoft's expensive hardware. Pavan Davuluri – he who promised that Microsoft would deal with Windows' quality woes – w…

Show HN: Proton Drive for Linux ↗ (opens external article)

Scientists get a new clue to the origin of solar wind 'switchbacks' ↗ (opens external article)

The European Space Agency's Solar Orbiter has enabled scientists to trace magnetic switchbacks in the solar wind's magnetic field back to their source at the Sun. "Switchback" is the name given to an S-shaped kink in the solar wind's magnetic field – a sudden and large deflection. In 2022, the spacecraft gave scientists a full view of the structure (confirming the S-shape), but the origin remaine…

Cheapskates wouldn't pay for security help, got hit by ransomware, and went bust months later ↗ (opens external article)

Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we highlight some of the lowlights in corporate security. This week, we’ll talk about two scenarios, one that ended in tragedy and another that shows the power of a good defense over dedicated phishing attacks. 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.…

Embedding the human factor into AI agent adoption ↗ (opens external article)

When implementing any kind of technology, the difference between offering employees training and supporting them in adoption is all too frequently misunderstood. But the difference is a significant one. Training is usually a time-limited, structured educational initiative to help people build technical competence and learn how a system works. Adoption, on the other hand, is a continuous, long-ter…

It's a bird, it's a plane...well, more of a spinning parachute, but really it's a droppable robot boat ↗ (opens external article)

The ALBATROSS, a sailboat drone prototype developed by researchers at Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD), lacks the aerial grace of its avian namesake. It doesn't so much fly as plummet – an unsettling start to a sea launch, more so because it's designed to spin like a maple leaf seed as it descends. The sailboat drone's rotation slows its fall and minimizes its impact with the…

OpenAI Unleashes Hundreds More Math Results Upon a Field Already In Shock ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI says an unreleased internal model has produced 372 results that either resolve or make substantial progress on open problems in mathematics and theoretical computer science. The company says almost all were generated by a single AI agent from a single prompt. "This would be a striking difference from OpenAI's earlier blockbuster solution to the Navier-Stokes problem, which was produced thro…

ICANN reveals bids for new top-level domains ↗ (opens external article)

ICANN has revealed the applicants for new generic top-level domains (GTLDs). As The Register reported in August, this is just the second time ICANN has accepted applications for GTLDs, strings like “.com” or “.net”. For years, only ICANN could decide on new GTLDs. The governance body changed that policy and in 2012 allowed over 1,200 new GTLDs. The organization decided to repeat the process this…

Campus Censorship Wars, 25 Years After a Slashdot Q&A ↗ (opens external article)

Slashdot reader carlk22 writes: In February 2001, Slashdot readers asked Carl Kadie about censorship and privacy at colleges, and he answered. Now Kadie, who founded the Computers and Academic Freedom project at EFF in 1991, has written its history. In Part 1, Ohio State kicks a student off its network, then out of school, after a prank routes his "fuck you" into rec.aquaria, and a supercomputing…

Ransomware fixer claimed he could decrypt files, allegedly defrauded clients instead ↗ (opens external article)

The United States Department of Justice has charged a man with fraud after he allegedly told clients he could decrypt files locked up by ransomware but actually paid ransoms – and seemingly got away with it for years. The Feds allege that Zohar Pinhasi – aka “Zack Silver” and “Zack Green” – ran a Florida company called “MonsterCloud” that advised ransomware victims not to pay because it had a way…

Steam Beta Now Defaults Non-Steam Windows Binaries To Using Proton ↗ (opens external article)

Valve released tonight a new Steam client beta that includes some notable improvements for Linux users...…

Singapore’s central bank wants all FinTech AI use cases subject to independent review ↗ (opens external article)

Singapore’s Monetary Authority, which acts as both central bank and finance industry regulator, wants all local industry players to seek independent review of AI use cases before deployment. The island nation’s combination of strict regulation and low taxes have made it one of the world’s premier finance hubs. One of the roles of Singapore’s Monetary Authority (MAS) is ensuring the nation retains…

Microsoft Issues First Release Of Their LiteBox Sandboxing Library OS ↗ (opens external article)

Back in February we featured LiteBox as a new Microsoft open-source project building out a Rust-based sandboxing Library OS. LiteBox leverages Linux virtualization security features and Rust language inherent benefits to provide the ability for sandboxing Linux apps on Linux, Linux programs on Windows, and other security-oriented deployments. Out today is the first tagged release of LiteBox for th…

Why isn't the industry freaking out about DeepSeek 4.1 Flash? ↗ (opens external article)

AI Makes "Open-Source, Clean Room" Implementations Of Adobe Photoshop & Premier In Rust ↗ (opens external article)

As an interesting demonstrator for the power of AI and potentially pressing legal challenges, Claude Code and AI agents have created "open-source, clean-room reimplementation" versions of Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premier, and Adobe Lightroom. These new creations from the ArtCraft project are implemented in the Rust programming language...…

Google, Unity Launch Platform To Create Video Games From Prompts ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's Google and gaming tools developer Unity Software announced a new platform that will allow people to create video games from simple text prompts, marking the latest incursion of generative artificial intelligence into artistic and creative industries. The initiative, called Playground, will "put game creation in the hands of millions of…

Microsoft is about to let Copilot loose on your file system ↗ (opens external article)

If you thought Windows Recall was creepy, buckle up. Microsoft is about to shoehorn even more AI into its desktop operating system, giving Copilot access to every file on your PC. But don't worry, Redmond insists it's totally secure and safe since the agents powering the functionality will run entirely on your PC — some of the time. Microsoft describes the new functionality, announced alongside a…

FEX 2610 Released With Handling For AVX-VNNI, Disk Cache Improvements ↗ (opens external article)

FEX 2610 released today as the newest monthly release of this open-source emulator for running x86_64 games/apps on AArch64 for ARM64 Linux systems, including most notably by Valve's Steam Frame headset...…

OpenAI dots inspire open source imitators amid technical difficulties ↗ (opens external article)

When OpenAI introduced dots last month, it pitched them as "always-on agents" running in their own cloud computer, but that may be overstating the readiness of the technology and of the people trying to use it. Presently, multiple users are reporting task failures and connection issues with their dots. Others have flagged cloud connectivity problems, dots that disappear, and dot refusals that app…

Argonne scientists create chatty X-ray microscope that zooms in where you tell it to ↗ (opens external article)

Researchers at Argonne National Laboratory have plugged an agentic AI platform into an X-ray nanoprobe beamline, creating a system that can get a closer look at areas researchers ask it to focus on. Argonne reported the success of an experimental run of the agentic microscope this week, with the device initially tested on its ability to locate the interface between two regions on an integrated ci…

Microsoft N1Xes Intel in favor of Nvidia's shiny new SoCs in Surface Laptop Ultra ↗ (opens external article)

Look out, Intel! Microsoft released its first Surface notebook powered by Nvidia's RTX Spark system-on-chip (SoC) during an event in San Francisco on Wednesday. The Surface Laptop Ultra is one of several new Copilot+ PCs powered by the N1X chip that Microsoft says is aimed at "builders," which are available for preorder starting today and expected to begin shipping next week. The machine is argua…

Attackers hijacked top-level domains, minted fake security certs for Google and other orgs ↗ (opens external article)

Imagine going to a Google website at its correct URL, only to be redirected to a crim's illegitimate copy. Attackers hijacked top-level domains, allowing them to alter DNS records and mint fraudulent HTTPS certificates for several Google domains, and those belonging to other organizations. Google said it became aware of the series of attacks last week in the .gh (Ghana), .sl (Sierra Leone), and .…

Browser-in-browser attacks use fake Meta Muse Ad lure to steal credentials ↗ (opens external article)

A phishing campaign targeting advertising managers by impersonating Gemini, Claude, ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Manus to steal credentials and multi-factor authentication (MFA) codes has added a fake Muse Ads product to its lure lineup – just eight days after Meta launched its personal AI agent. Meta announced Muse on September 8, and by September 17, a very convincing website – museads.ai – for a p…

Microsoft and Nvidia Unveil Surface Laptop Ultra For $2,599 ↗ (opens external article)

At a press event today, Microsoft unveiled the new Surface Laptop Ultra featuring an NVIDIA RTX Spark platform with a Blackwell-based GPU capable of up to one petaflop of AI compute. The laptop supports up to 128GB of unified memory for running models as large as 120 billion parameters locally, while also adding a 15-inch mini-LED display, expanded ports, upgraded cooling, and support for hundreds…

Star Labs StarFighter Ultra: A Modern High-End Linux Laptop With Coreboot ↗ (opens external article)

When it comes to Linux pre-loaded laptops, I have looked at hardware from most of these vendors over the past 22+ years of Phoronix. One vendor I haven't had the chance to personally test until now is the UK-based Star Labs. That changed recently and over the past few weeks I have been testing out their new StarFighter laptop that offers great Linux support and comes pre-loaded with Coreboot and s…

Xbox Secures Exclusive GTA 6 Streaming Rights ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has reportedly secured exclusive cloud-streaming rights for Grand Theft Auto VI, meaning Xbox Cloud Gaming will be the only service able to stream the game at launch. "Rockstar Games still hasn't announced a PC version of Grand Theft Auto VI, so this deal will allow Xbox to market its Xbox Cloud Gaming service to PC players who would otherwise need an Xbox Series X / S or PS5 console," r…

ShinyHunters Extorted Boeing Spin-off Prior to Arrests ↗ (opens external article)

A teenager from Amman, Jordan suspected of leading the prolific data theft and extortion group ShinyHunters has been detained and is reportedly cooperating with the FBI to identify other members of the hacking gang. KrebsOnSecurity has learned that the suspect, who uses the hacker handle “Rey,” was detained as ShinyHunters was in the process of extorting a business unit recently divested by the gl…

NVIDIA 615.78.08 Linux Driver Adds VK_NV_low_latency2 r3 For Improved VKD3D-Proton ↗ (opens external article)

NVIDIA today released their 615.78.08 Linux driver build with a useful improvement for gamers using Steam Play (Proton) with Direct3D 12 games via VKD3D-Proton along with a variety of other fixes...…

Kage: Google Experimenting With Linux Driver Isolation Using In-Kernel LFI Sandboxes ↗ (opens external article)

Google engineers are experimenting with Linux kernel device driver isolation using in-kernel sandboxes leveraging LLVM's Lightweight Fault Isolation (LFI) functionality...…

Qualcomm Posts QPaCE Linux Driver Code For Faster ZRAM On Newest SoCs ↗ (opens external article)

Qualcomm's Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 6 "Hawi" SoC features the Qualcomm Page Compression Engine "QPaCE" hardware accelerator. Linux patches posted recently provide a QPaCE driver for accelerating page compression and decompression for the ZRAM block device...…

Francis Halzen Wins Nobel Physics Prize For Antarctic 'Ghost Particle' Hunt ↗ (opens external article)

University of Wisconsin-Madison physicist Francis Halzen has been awarded the 2026 Nobel Prize in Physics for his contributions to understanding astrophysical neutrinos. Halzen led the development of the IceCube Neutrino Observatory beneath the Antarctic ice, which has helped trace high-energy neutrinos back to cosmic sources such as supermassive black holes and opened a new era of "multi-messenge…

XMFS: Experimental File-System Being Worked On By Huawei For Modern Linux Servers ↗ (opens external article)

Huawei engineers are experimenting with a new file-system called XMFS. XMFS was presented this week at LPC 2026 in Czechia as a file-system for modern Linux servers with CXL 3.0 or Huawei United Bus connectivity...…

Microsoft Updates Its WSL2 Linux Kernel With DXGKRNL Improvement, More Features Enabled ↗ (opens external article)

Following the Windows Subsystem for Linux 3.0.2 release with support for running WSL2 now on very large servers and also experimental sparse VHD storage support, Microsoft has now released a new version of the WSL2 Linux kernel as their downstream kernel configuration tailored for WSL2 usage...…

Google Enters Massive 3.6-GW Power Deal With Constellation Energy ↗ (opens external article)

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Google has contracted for 3,590 megawatts of power from Constellation Energy on the largest US power grid, with new nuclear energy accounting for about a quarter of that supply, the companies said on Tuesday. Constellation will make more than $4.3 billion of new investments in its fleet as part of the agreement, which involves adding capacity at se…

New laptops and OpenBSD: HP Envy 17-DA0013dx ↗ (opens external article)

We have to admit that even users of a well rounded operating system like OpenBSD sometimes encounter hardware that is not quite supported yet. Fortunately, sometimes the user facing the problematic hardware is an experienced developer like Ian Darwin, and he took the time to write up his experience in a blog post titled Un-hanging the HP Envy 17-DA0013dx for OpenBSD. The article leads in with, I…

openssh-10.6 released ↗ (opens external article)

In their usual, unassuming fashion, the OpenSSH project have released a new version, release 10.6. The full text of the 10.6 release nodes reads: OpenSSH 10.6 was released on 2026-10-06. It is available from the mirrors listed at https://www.openssh.com/. OpenSSH is a 100% complete SSH protocol 2.0 implementation and includes sftp client and server support. Recently the OpenSSH team have received…

LibreSSL 4.2.2 and 4.3.3 released ↗ (opens external article)

In a move that hints strongly that the new OpenBSD release is about to drop soon, the LibreSSL project have announced the new stable releases. The announcement reads, List: openbsd-announce Subject: LibreSSL 4.2.2 and 4.3.3 released From: Brent Cook <busterb () gmail ! com> Date: 2026-10-06 0:38:40 We have released LibreSSL 4.3.3 and 4.2.2, which are available in the LibreSSL directory of your lo…

Tribute to Margaret Hamilton ↗ (opens external article)

FreeBSD would like to pay our respects to Margaret Hamilton, whose work allowed coding to become both the scientific discipline it is today, and the art form that drew each of us to it. She embodied both the engineering rigor and the rebelliousness that have come to define what it is to be a hacker today. We owe her a spiritual debt and are proud to be members of this discipline that she was pivo…

Training Text-to-Image Models Without a VAE ↗ (opens external article)

7.3-rc6: mainline ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.3-rc6 (mainline) Released:2026-10-04 Source:linux-7.3-rc6.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)…

Headers Up! What's New in httpd and relayd ↗ (opens external article)

As previously noted, Rafael Sadowski (radowski@) has been behind a recent pickup in development of httpd(8) and relayd(8). Now Rafael has written a new piece, entitled Headers Up! What's New in httpd and relayd, on some of his recent work on httpd(8) and relayd(8). Among the notable additions are expanded and improved filtering and pattern matching features which make it harder to make a case for…

7.2.9: stable ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.2.9 (stable) Released:2026-10-03 Source:linux-7.2.9.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.2.9.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.2.9…

6.18.55: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.18.55 (longterm) Released:2026-10-03 Source:linux-6.18.55.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.55.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.55…

6.12.112: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.12.112 (longterm) Released:2026-10-03 Source:linux-6.12.112.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.112.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.112…

6.6.158: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.6.158 (longterm) Released:2026-10-03 Source:linux-6.6.158.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.6.158.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.6.158…

6.1.189: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.1.189 (longterm) Released:2026-10-03 Source:linux-6.1.189.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.1.189.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.1.189…

5.15.222: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:5.15.222 (longterm) Released:2026-10-03 Source:linux-5.15.222.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.15.222.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.15.222…

5.10.271: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:5.10.271 (longterm) Released:2026-10-03 Source:linux-5.10.271.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.10.271.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.10.271…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

↗ (opens external article)

New committer: Boris Lytochkin (src)…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

📱 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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

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New committer: Faraz Vahedi (src)…

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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.…

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.…