Terminal

Recursion Is Lying to You

Pacing the Frontier

Anthropic AI Model Finds Flaws in Tough-to-Crack Encryption Algorithms

Anthropic's Claude Mythos Preview has "found flaws in a weakened version of a digital encryption standard that is in pervasive use throughout the internet," reports The New York Times. Researchers said the model discovered novel attacks against weakened versions of AES and the experimental post-quantum HAWK system, including one that was 200 to 1,000 times faster than previous human-developed meth…

Hulios: An eBPF-powered, transparent Tor gateway for Linux

War machines can run amok with AI in control

AIs not only make life-and-death targeting decisions on the battlefield, but also involve humans in only some stages of the decision-making process. To illustrate how that happens and prompt greater scrutiny of model-enabled killing, Airwars, a not-for-profit transparency watchdog, has published a detailed report, taking apart the ways machine learning powers modern warfare. The investigation, ti…

Uv 0.12.0

Microsoft and Wiz mind-meld agents catch more than 90% of bugs

Two agentic bug-hunting systems from Microsoft and Google-owned Wiz show that when it comes to finding and remediating software vulnerabilities, at least two models’ minds work better than one - and Wiz tells us it’s adding a third. Wiz on Monday said Project Atlas, its bug-hunting AI agent, bested Anthropic’s Mythos Preview and OpenAI’s GPT-5.5 Cyber with its vulnerability-analysis skills, achie…

Donate to GrapheneOS

Judge Blocks First State Law That Would Have Banned Prediction Markets

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Minnesota, the first US state to prohibit prediction markets, was prevented from enforcing the law by a federal court ruling just days before the ban was scheduled to take effect. But while Minnesota was stopped from enforcing a total ban, the state may ultimately be allowed to prohibit some types of prediction-market wagers. The Trump adminis…

New airliner sets record flying 24 hrs nonstop from Australia to France

A new Airbus passenger jet completed an ultra-long test flight between Australia and France lasting more than 24 hours—paving the way for the world’s longest nonstop commercial flights starting up next year. The Airbus A350-1000ULR was developed specifically for Qantas Airways’ planned nonstop flights between Sydney and either New York or London. The Australian airline has ordered a dozen of the…

MCP 2026-07-28 Specification: transport going stateless

Judge blocks first state law that would have banned prediction markets

Minnesota, the first US state to prohibit prediction markets, was prevented from enforcing the law by a federal court ruling just days before the ban was scheduled to take effect. But while Minnesota was stopped from enforcing a total ban, the state may ultimately be allowed to prohibit some types of prediction-market wagers. The Trump administration and the two largest prediction markets—Kalshi…

DEF CON Bans Meta-Style 'Pervert Glasses'

DEF CON has banned "Meta-style glasses with recording capabilities," with no exceptions being made even for those with prescription versions. "Be sure to pack non-violating eyewear if you need them," DEF CON said. The Register reports: [The conference's official photo policy] has not been updated since 2023, predating the recent growth of camera-equipped eyewear developed by Meta with EssilorLuxot…

[$] Progress toward compiling Linux with gccrs

The gccrs project, which is creating a Rust frontend for the GCC compiler, has spent the first half of 2026 focusing on compiling the Linux kernel. By testing the compiler against the kernel crates, the development team has made significant progress toward generating correct code for other Rust programs. As detailed in the project's weekly and monthly reports, this effort has uncovered and resolv…

The iPhone Upgrade Program is being replaced by Apple Upgrade

Discovering Cryptographic Weaknesses with Claude

Steel Bank Common Lisp version 2.6.7

WOFF 1.0: a milestone on W3C's journey of fonts on the web

GrapheneOS Defends Data-Wiping Function That Blocked US Border Search

GrapheneOS is defending its duress-password feature after an environmental activist used it to wipe his Pixel phone during a U.S. Customs search and was later indicted for allegedly destroying property under government control. The nonprofit says the operating system is "completely legal," cannot recover the erased data, and should not be weakened with encryption backdoors. Meanwhile, the activist…

Substack writers, you need a website

AI is storage’s biggest opportunity - and biggest threat

An AI revolution is sweeping through the IT storage world, providing a massively beneficial environment requiring more data to be stored and delivered to AI models and agents, more data to be protected, more data access governance and much better storage operating environments. The downside is that AI can run amok, with data mishaps and deliberate agent-enhanced attacks. We are using AI to make t…

College prof hides prompt to catch AI cheaters, finds human nature is pretty much as we thought

Busted! A college professor who was tired of reading AI responses to essay questions found a unique way to determine if his students were cheating. Sadly but not surprisingly, 32 of the 35 students who took the test fell right into his trap. Jason Gibson, who teaches history and African American studies at Alcorn State University in Mississippi, came up with a rather basic way to trick his studen…

Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?

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

Report: Trump mad RFK Jr. hasn’t cut more vaccines or proven autism link

Ardent anti-vaccine activist and current US Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is reportedly on thin ice with Trump for not being anti-vaccine enough for the president's liking, according to a report late Monday from The Wall Street Journal. Trump has become fixated on the completely false, thoroughly debunked claim that vaccines cause autism, the Journal reported. People familiar with the pr…

DEF CON bans Meta-style 'pervert glasses'

Ahead of DEF CON 2026 opening its doors in Las Vegas next week, conference organizers said they have imposed a ban on “Meta-style glasses with recording capabilities.” Statements made via its social media channels went on to say that no exceptions will be made for those using the devices with prescription lenses. “Be sure to pack non-violating eyewear if you need them,” DEF CON said, before direc…

A walk through of the DeltaNet family of linear attention variants

Review Roundup: Framework Laptop 13 Pro

The review embargo has lifted for the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro, and the consensus across the board is that it is a massive leap forward in terms of build quality and battery life. The main issue reviewers complained about is the sky-high price, with the higher-end model jumping dramatically from $2,100 up to $2,900 due to the memory shortage crisis. (Some note that the price "nearly doubled" ov…

How Do I Profile eBPF Code?

Britain hopes £7.3M will help electric and hydrogen aircraft take off

The UK is stumping up a modest £7.3 million ($9.7 million) to develop the infrastructure needed for electric and hydrogen-powered flight. The Department for Transport (DfT) says the money will be shared among eight projects covering airport charging, hydrogen storage, and flight demonstrations. The funding forms part of a wider £43 million ($57 million) package for next-generation aviation techno…

Show HN: XY – A Fast, composable, GPU-accelerated interactive plotting library

Delayed Gratification – Proud to Be 'Last to Breaking News'

Starling: A New Linux Desktop Written In Swift, Own Wayland Compositor & Written With AI

There's yet another new open-source desktop option for Linux users in the era of new open-source projects largely written via AI/LLMs. Starling is this new project largely written via Claude and using the Swift programming language for the desktop while having its own Wayland compositor implemented in C. It also includes a built-in X11 server for handling X11 clients...…

Kimi K3 Architecture Overview and Notes

Zig's Incremental Compilation Internals

So, you want to make a game engine (2023)

AI-found bugs aren't proving any easier to exploit despite the hype

Anthropic's Project Glasswing may have uncovered tens of thousands of potential security flaws, but new research suggests AI-assisted vulnerability discovery has yet to produce the wave of real-world attacks many expected. In research shared with The Register, VulnCheck analyzed 1,061 publicly attributed AI-assisted vulnerability discoveries from Anthropic's Project Glasswing and the Berkeley Vul…

Harmony Explained: Progress Towards a Scientific Theory of Music (2012)

Anthropeum – Where in the world, and when, does this human artifact belong?

Now Is the Time to Give LLMs Access to the ACM Digital Library

Tons of Peoples' Claude Chats and Creations Are Exposed On Google

An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: Claude is exposing a wealth of users' chats and creations in Google search results, meaning anyone can dig through conversations or other material that people used Claude to make but may not have realized were publicly available for strangers to see. The exposed data includes an AI-powered therapy app that someone appears to have vibe-coded, note…

Stop Killing the Internet: No Digital ID and No Age Verification

Wayfire 0.11 released

Version 0.11 of the wlroots-based Wayfire Wayland compositor has been released. Notable changes include better fractional scaling, per-output ICC profiles, support for additional Wayland protocols, and more.…

Una GPS smart watch – Repairable, USB-C charging, developer-friendly

[$] A report from Debian's new DFSG team

The DFSG, Licensing & New Packages Team (usually shortened to "DFSG team") was created in October 2025 as part of the ftpmaster team split. Its job is to review packages in the new queue for compliance with the Debian Free Software Guidelines (DFSG), among other things, before the packages are allowed to enter the Debian archive. The change was long in coming, and some questions remained after the…

CachyOS Outperforming Windows 11, Slight Advantage Over Ubuntu & Fedora On AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470

A recent mini PC being benchmarked at Phoronix is the BOSGAME VTA-439 that employs the new AMD Ryzen AI 9 HX 470 Gorgon Point SoC. With the BOSGAME mini PC having shipped with Microsoft Windows 11, here are some comparison benchmarks of the out-of-the-box Windows 11 performance up against Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora Workstation 44 while also tossing the rolling-release, highly-optimized Arch Linux…

Bank for charities pulls online services over security fears

CAF Bank, which serves 14,000 charities, has suspended online banking as it fixes a vulnerability in how third-party software connects to its portal. The outage has left some organizations struggling to run payroll after being cut from their accounts. In a message to customers, seen by The Register, the Charities Aid Foundation-owned bank confirm online services had been unavailable since July 24…

Deep space dishes dodge devastation from Spanish wildfires

Radio antennas for the European Space Agency and NASA appear to have escaped the worst effects of wildfires in Spain, though NASA's site sustained some cable damage. Over the weekend, a NASA spokesperson confirmed there was "no significant structural damage observed to antennas or buildings" at the Madrid Deep Space Communications Complex (MDSCC) despite fire ravaging the area. The spokesperson c…

As US measles cases rise, biotech firms start developing new treatments

Up until recently, measles vaccination has been so effective that there’s been little medical or financial incentive to develop treatments for the disease. But as measles cases hit a 35-year high and vaccination rates continue to decline in the US, a handful of biotech companies and academic groups have started working on measles treatments for those infected with the virus as well as vulnerable…

New HIV vaccine shows unprecedented success in preclinical study

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana and libreswan), Debian (openjdk-11 and openjdk-17), Fedora (opkssh, perl-Mojolicious, and rpm), Mageia (libyang, memcached, nginx, packages, and sqlite3), Oracle (.NET 8.0, acl, buildah, compat-openssl11, compat-poppler022, dogtag-pki, git-lfs, glibc, go-fdo-client, golang, httpd:2.4, jackson-annotations, jackson-core, jackson-databind, jacks…

Hugging Face rebuilt a third of its infrastructure after OpenAI agents ran amok

Hugging Face rebuilt around a third of its infrastructure from clean images as part of a sizable cleanup effort following the OpenAI security mishap earlier this month. The revelation is among several additional details disclosed in a postmortem published Monday by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA), with input from Hugging Face. It adds color to the picture painted by the two AI companies in rece…

Uncle Sam needs you to fight for 6G leadership and security, lest Beijing get there first

America wants its allies to come together and help it lead the way in defining 6G communications standards, with security and resilience seen as key goals for next-generation networks. The latest effort to corral international work on 6G comes from the US National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA), which says it is pursuing the objectives of a December 2025 memo from Presid…

Too many AI agents can get in each other's way

Anthropic and OpenAI have both proposed the deployment of agent armies as a way to maximize the notional benefits of artificial intelligence systems. But the optimal agent workforce isn't necessarily the largest. Researchers affiliated with the NTT Research's Physics of Artificial Intelligence (PAI) Lab and Harvard University's Center for Brain Science (CBS) say there's a point at which enterpris…

Hyperscale, hypersensitive: US teacher cuffed for applauding datacenter critics

A Kansas physics teacher discovered that in at least one corner of America's AI buildout, applause can apparently earn you a trip to jail. According to local news reports, Lux Claridge, a 37-year-old physics teacher from Emporia, was arrested after applauding a speaker opposing zoning changes for a proposed hyperscale datacenter, turning what should have been an ordinary planning meeting into nat…

Arizona State Launches Influencer Degree Where Students Must Gain Real Followers

Arizona State University has launched a 120-credit bachelor's degree in content creation that teaches video, podcasting, branding, analytics, media law, and social strategy. For their capstone, students are "expected to build a real social media account and demonstrate audience growth during the program," reports Dexerto. From the report: The Content Creation BA is housed within ASU's Walter Cronk…

Kimi Linear: An Expressive, Efficient Attention Architecture (2025)

Signals are grim for Jodrell Bank Observatory after UK science funding decision

Jodrell Bank Observatory faces an uncertain future after UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) pulled funding. The UK's Particle Physics, Astronomy and Nuclear Physics (PPAN) science budget is decreasing by 2.7 percent over four years, which, coupled with increasing costs, means cuts seem inevitable, and the venerable Jodrell Bank could be on the chopping block. Professor Michele Dougherty, Executive…

DMARC has been public since 2012 but most company domains still don't enforce it

AMD P-State Linux Driver Patches Can Boost 1%-Low FPS Gaming Performance By 31%

A set of patches posted today to the Linux kernel mailing list implement per-core Energy Performance Preference (EPP) boosting for recently-busy CPUs. This feature is designed to have a dramatic impact for Linux gaming and helping especially with the 1% low frame-rates improving by 31.8% on the Valve Steam Deck...…

KDE Developer Fixing Long-Standing Bug Over Very Long Small-File Copy Times

Since 2014 there has been a KDE bug report titled Ridiculously slow file copy (multiple small files). With the Dolphin file manager or other KIO-based KDE programs, copying many small files can be much slower than using the cp command directly or other copying programs like rsync, Finally that issue is in the process of being resolved for addressing very slow copy times when dealing with many smal…

Linux's crypto_rng Abstraction Layer Next On The Chopping Block

In addition to the deprecation and stripping down of AF_ALG, another piece of the Linux kernel crypto code steaming ahead toward removal is the crypto_rng abstraction layer...…

ASUS Laptop Whisper Mode Support Being Worked On For Linux

ASUS laptops support a feature called "Whisper Mode" that intentionally slows down the fan speed and lowers the CPU clock speed in order to keep the device running cool and quiet. The open-source ASUS Armoury Linux kernel driver is now seeing patches to properly support this Whisper Mode on Linux...…

Arista patches actively exploited VeloCloud bug as CISA puts admins on the clock

A critical flaw in Arista's VeloCloud Orchestrator has gone from zero to KEV in short order, with the networking giant confirming attackers are already exploiting it. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-16812, carries a maximum CVSS score of 10.0 and affects VeloCloud Orchestrator On-Prem, the self-hosted version of the software that enterprises use to centrally manage VeloCloud software-defin…

Openreach nudges another 112 exchange areas toward full fiber

Openreach has disclosed another tranche of locations where providers will be barred from selling legacy copper-based services to premises that can receive full fiber as it pushes customers toward newer digital connections. The wholesale arm of BT, Britain's former state-owned telecoms monopoly, Openreach announced the latest batch of exchanges notified for "Stop Sell." There are 112 sites in this…

7.1 Earthquake in Japan

Earth's Biggest Disasters Strike In a Hidden Pattern Every 27 Million Years

A new analysis of 89 major geological events over the past 260 million years found evidence that mass extinctions, volcanic eruptions, ocean crises, and other upheavals may cluster around a roughly 27.5-million-year cycle. The cause remains unknown, with possibilities ranging from mantle activity and orbital changes to speculative galactic influences. Slashdot reader alternative_right shares a rep…

Cisco close to releasing more AI models, this time for deep networking ops

Cisco has developed AI models that can solve networking problems and is close to releasing the tools, plus the Cloud Control agentic ops tool that puts its models to work. Cloud Control is Cisco’s attempt to tame console sprawl, but creating a new interface to its product portfolio driven by agentic AI. The networking giant says Cloud Control will allow users to query their infrastructure to do t…

A Missing Underscore Sent Innocent Man To Prison For 18 Months

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: One missing underscore in a Skyrim-themed username put an innocent Nova Scotia man in prison for 18 months. A 2018 child-luring investigation, which began in Madison, Wisconsin, and eventually extended to Halifax, Canada, was based on a false premise. Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name "fus__ro_dah" (t…

China fights back in AI spat with claim US AI companies distil Chinese models

China’s government has vowed to “take all necessary measures” if the US government imposes new sanctions on AI companies. That threat came on Monday at a media Q&A staged by China’s Ministry of Commerce, during which local reporters asked about allegations that Chinese AI companies have distilled leading American AI models. The source of those allegations was Donald Trump’s Assistant for Science…

Peacock to Be Included With YouTube Premium In Major Streaming Tie-Up

YouTube Premium will include Peacock Premium at no extra charge beginning in early 2027. "The deal brings a slew of premium content to the [$15.99 per month] YouTube Premium subscription, including live sports like the NFL, NBA and MLB and entertainment like Law & Order, Saturday Night Live and Love Island," reports The Hollywood Reporter. "It also has the potential to dramatically scale Peacock,…

Leading AI models (even Grok) are all a bunch of leftist punks

Capitalism may be driving the AI boom, but the LLMs themselves have different economic and social views than many of the companies that built them. Leading AI models subjected to the Political Compass quiz overwhelmingly landed in the libertarian-left quadrant - even "MechaHitler," aka Grok, managed it in half its runs. A self-described “small research lab” working on AI detection tools called Un…

Amazon Trying to Launch a Global Satellite Cellphone Network In 2028

Amazon has asked the FCC to approve a 5,105-satellite constellation launching in 2028 that would provide global direct-to-cell "voice, messaging, data, and emergency services," similar to Starlink's partnership with T-Mobile. The network would use Globalstar spectrum, support future Apple satellite services, and complement Amazon's existing Leo broadband constellation. The Verge reports: Advanced…

Microsoft unveils AI security tools it says outperform competing platforms

Microsoft is introducing new AI tools designed to help customers continuously streamline and automate the process of identifying and reducing their exposure to security risks. The new tools come less than a week after OpenAI lost control of two of its security models when they infiltrated the servers of startup Hugging Face. The hack, Hugging Face added, involved “a swarm of tens of thousands of…

Trump admin exempts SpaceX's Starlink from FCC ban on foreign-made routers

The Trump administration today exempted SpaceX's Starlink routers from the Federal Communications Commission ban on foreign-made routers. A public notice issued by the FCC said Starlink routers received approval from the Department of War (also known as the Department of Defense). SpaceX's exemption is good until February 1, 2028. The FCC kicked off an industry-wide scramble when it updated the C…

Jensen puts his thumb on the scales against open-weights fearmongering

UPDATED Nvidia has made a fortune on the AI boom. But the flames of opposition to open-weights models — that is, models that anyone can download, modify, and run on their own infrastructure — could change that, and Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang isn’t waiting to find out. On Friday, a cadre of tech titans wrote an open letter [PDF] offering a counterpoint to the mounting anti-open-weights rhetoric from…

AMD PMF Testing Tool Slated For Linux 7.3

Looking to be added to the Linux kernel source tree for the upcoming Linux 7.3 cycle is test_amd_pmf, a small testing application for exercising the AMD Platform Management Framework (PMF) interfaces and dumping various system data points...…

Microsoft lays out a buffet of Windows goodies for JavaScript Developers

If you want your JavaScript app to have access to Microsoft's OS features, it's now easier than ever. Redmond is giving JavaScript and TypeScript devs first-class access to some Windows internals to make their lives easier, via new “dynamic projections,” as Microsoft calls these new language bindings. JavaScript applications have been seeping onto the Windows desktop for years. Originally designe…

Nvidia, Tech Giants Launch AI Safety Initiative

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Nvidia and a large group of technology, cybersecurity, and enterprise software companies have launched new initiative aimed at developing and sharing open source tools, models, and techniques for securing AI systems and agents. The new Open Secure AI Alliance aims to give defenders more open tools for testing, auditing and protecting AI models and agen…

Impostor Chinese models pretend they're Claude

Raising suspicion about their training methods, Z.ai's GLM 5.2 and Moonshot AI's Kimi K3 have used the name "Claude" in some conversations and, for GLM, at least, changed behaviors slightly when posing as Anthropic's model. The Chinese open weight models may adopt Claude's persona if prompted to do so, or even without being told so, but a claimed identity isn't always reflected in behavior due to…

Epic diarrhea outbreak has 40% of Americans avoiding fruits and veggies

Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has made it one of his top priorities to convince Americans to "eat real food," including more fresh fruits and vegetables. But, it's a hard sell when those real foods are causing real eruptions of explosive diarrhea across the country. The Food and Drug Administration is investigating six outbreaks of foodborne diarrheal illnesses caused by Cyc…

iOS and macOS 26.6 arrive today, paving the way for iOS and macOS 27

Apple has released iOS, iPadOS, macOS, watchOS, and tvOS 26.6. Apart from potential security hotfixes, these are likely the last updates before the arrival of iOS 27, macOS 27, and so on. All of today's releases include minor bug fixes, and there are numerous security updates: more than 150 for macOS 26.6. Apple also rolled out macOS 14.8.8 and macOS 15.7.8 for older devices, also focused on secu…

A missing underscore sent innocent man to prison for 18 months

One missing underscore in a Skyrim-themed username put an innocent Nova Scotia man in prison for 18 months. A 2018 child-luring investigation, which began in Madison, Wisconsin, and eventually extended to Halifax, Canada, was based on a false premise. Police were looking for a man using the Kik messaging service under the name "fus__ro_dah" (two underscores after "fus"), but they accidentally req…

“Google and Reddit do not own the Internet," web scraper says after court win

After a big court loss last week, Google has confirmed that it won’t give up its fight to block AI bots from scraping its search results. And Reddit is weirdly along for the ride. Curiously invoking the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), Google sued SerpApi last December. The search giant accused the web scraper of circumventing its anti-scraping technology and then selling content scraped…

Codeberg Bans Cryptocurrency and LLM-Generated Code Projects

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Hackaday: Community-led open source project hosting site Codeberg has formally announced that projects whose code is largely or fully machine-generated through LLMs and other 'AI' tools will no longer be welcome. This follows on the heels of a similar ban on cryptocurrency-related projects. The community vote was on two issues, the first being…

Microsoft's solution to AI security: more AI and more acronyms

AI agents can break through security, but they are also the solution to defending against an increasingly dangerous ecosystem of threats. On Monday, Microsoft announced a new security model that it says helped outperform several rival AI systems on a vulnerability benchmark while cutting costs by about half. Unsurprisingly, at Redmond’s security event on Monday, execs touted the tech giant’s AI s…

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

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

5th Circuit blocks Texas law requiring websites to filter "harmful" speech

Texas cannot enforce a law's requirement that websites block minors from seeing harmful speech, the US Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled on Friday. Big Tech lobby groups challenged the Texas "law’s requirement that certain social media-based 'digital service providers' (DSPs) monitor and filter content accessible to known minors to prevent exposure to several categories of potentially ha…

China Begins Mass Production of Homegrown DUV Chip Tools

According to The Information (paywalled), a state-backed Shanghai company has begun mass-producing China's first homegrown immersion DUV lithography machines, with about five units expected this year for SMIC, Hua Hong, and CXMT. Roughly 20 more units are expected in 2027. Tom's Hardware reports: The Information didn't name the manufacturer, but its sources described the operation as having pulled…

Verizon touts $1B dark fiber deal for Google data centers as first of many

Verizon is seeking to tap into Silicon Valley’s AI spending in a big way. The telecom giant revealed a deal worth more than $1 billion to link Google data centers using Verizon’s dark fiber routes—and it’s also tearing copper wiring out of central offices as it converts them into small data centers suitable for supporting AI inference workloads. The telecom company publicly disclosed the Google p…

Experts warn current Starship heat shield tech is a "dead end" for rapid reuse

SpaceX successfully launched its Starship vehicle on Friday and appeared to demonstrate important and credible steps toward fulfilling the massive rocket's immense promise. As soon as the vehicle's next flight, Starship could go orbital, begin delivering satellites into space, and potentially return to the launch site to be 'caught' by the tower. All of this is impressive engineering on a giganti…

ChatGPT Starts Blocking Direct Requests To Copy an Author's Style

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: OpenAI's ChatGPT is now refusing requests to generate text that directly mimics the style of famous authors. When asked to do so, the popular LLM instead offers a response that draws on the "broad qualities" of those authors "while remaining distinct in its own voice," for example. This morning, Ars received the following response to a test pr…

ChatGPT starts blocking direct requests to copy an author's style

OpenAI's ChatGPT is now refusing requests to generate text that directly mimics the style of famous authors. When asked to do so, the popular LLM instead offers a response that draws on the "broad qualities" of those authors "while remaining distinct in its own voice," for example. This morning, Ars received the following response to a test prompt asking for a story introduction in the style of S…

[$] Hazard pointers for the kernel

The kernel's read-copy-update (RCU) subsystem ensures that data will not be deleted until it is known that there are no threads holding references to it. RCU works well and is widely used throughout the kernel, but it can increase memory use and add significant delays before unused kernel objects are cleaned up. Hazard pointers are an alternative approach to lockless data updates that offers bette…

Mysterious 16-Tile & 32-Tile AMX Implementations Talked Up For More Performance

Last October on Phoronix we were first to point out there being some mysterious intrigue around a new x86 implementation from a "corporate entity other than Intel/AMD" with the developer involved not elaborating on the matter. Now that same developer has posted another semi-cryptic message to the Linux kernel mailing list to talk about 16-tile and 32-tile Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX) implement…

Fwupd 2.1.7 Released With Many Bug Fixes

Fwupd 2.1.7 is out today as the newest update to this open-source firmware updating utility that pairs with the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS) for offering a nice firmware upgrade story on Linux systems...…

Tech giants link hands to praise open AI models after OpenAI - Hugging Face attack

In the wake of OpenAI agents attacking Hugging Face, Nvidia has recruited a new posse of partners to promote open source models as the security solution the industry needs. The AI arms dealer announced the foundation, the Open Secure AI Alliance, in a blog post today, describing the mission of the group being “to ensure defenders everywhere have open, frontier tools they can trust and control.” P…

Activist charged with felony after giving border agent "duress code" that wiped his phone

In early 2025, Atlanta resident Samuel Tunick was on his way home following a trip abroad. After landing in the US, customs agents demanded access to his Pixel phone, which was running an alternative version of Android called GrapheneOS. Rather than hand over his data, Tunick used a clever feature of the software to delete everything. Now, he's facing federal charges. The first hearing in this ca…

Cassette simulator rewinds digital audio to a more analog time in hiss-tory

If you have wistful longings for the days when your songs carried the subtle hiss of the cassettes you listened to, we have some reel good news. A new project takes modern music back to the analog era. The project, available on GitHub, is called "Audio Cassette Simulation" and uses FFmpeg to transcode audio files to get that "wish I'd bought some decent tapes instead of the superstore's own-brand…

GNU Binutils 2.47 released

Version 2.47 of GNU Binutils has been released. In addition to the usual bug fixes there are some notable new features in this release including added support for a number of RISC-V standard extensions, a command-line option (-M annotate) which displays the symbol for undefined instructions for AArch64, and more. The 32-bit s390 target has been deprecated with this release.…

Framework Laptop 13 Pro review: Much better battery, much worse price

I've liked the Framework Laptop 13 since the first time I used it, partly because I just think the idea of a repairable and upgradeable laptop is cool and partly because it's not Yet Another Ultraportable Trying To Be A MacBook Air Clone. But the design has always had real shortcomings—the most noticeable and serious being its mediocre battery life. Enter the Framework Laptop 13 Pro. While all pr…

AI has changed data architecture, but storage hasn't caught up

Your GPU dashboard says 70% utilization. On paper, the cluster is busy. In practice, a large chunk of that time is spent with your $40,000 accelerators sitting idle, waiting on a file that lives three network hops away on a NAS box. The compute queue is empty, and the pipeline is fine. The problem is that data is just somewhere else. This is the awkward truth underneath most stalled AI projects.…

Framework Laptop 13 Pro: Aiming To Be One Of The Best Upgradeable Linux Laptops

Back in April, Framework Computer announced the Framework Laptop 13 Pro as a ground-up re-design of their modular/upgradeable laptop. This new Framework Laptop 13 Pro features a much larger battery (74Wh), LPCAMM2 memory support, a full CNC aluminum chassis, haptic touchpad, and a new power-optimized touch display. Paired with the very efficient Intel Core Ultra Series 3 "Panther Lake" SoCs, the F…

What public health professionals can learn from anti-vaccine storytelling

As long as there have been vaccines, there have been people who doubted their science and safety. Back in 19th-century England, people rioted against a mandatory smallpox vaccine, claiming that it violated civil rights and was an affront to human bodily integrity. In the United States, organizations dedicated to resisting vaccines have existed since the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination League of Brook…

Microsoft Defender for Endpoint leaves some Linux boxes defenseless after update

Not content with broken Windows updates, Microsoft has disclosed two problems with Defender for Endpoint on Linux – one that could disable the security service after a reboot, and another that prevents updates on FIPS-enabled Red Hat Enterprise Linux 8 and 9. The more serious problem affected versions 101.26042.0000 through 101.26042.0009 across all supported Linux operating systems. After an upg…

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by Debian (chromium, hplip, and linux-6.1), Fedora (firefox, GitPython, google-osconfig-agent, lego, libgit2, libreswan, libwebsockets, moby-engine, p11-kit, pam, python-idna, rust-libgit2-sys, skopeo, systemd, trafficserver, webkitgtk, and xrdp), Mageia (giflib, graphite2, libnfs, vorbis-tools, wget, and yelp), Red Hat (firefox, thunderbird, and webkit2gtk3), and…

Tech sector pours $1T into AI and sends customers the bill

Spending on AI infrastructure is pushing tech sector expenditure to historic levels, and enterprise customers are already footing the bill through higher software and hardware prices. John-David Lovelock, Distinguished VP Analyst at Gartner, told The Register that tech companies' own technology spending already amounted to around $1 trillion and was set to grow by 34.7 percent in 2026. The coloss…

British Army finds a new eye in the sky after Watchkeeper woes

The UK Ministry of Defence (MoD) is investing up to £400 million in new surveillance drones to replace the British Army's troublesome Watchkeeper fleet. The MoD has selected the Tekever AR5 uncrewed aerial vehicle (UAV) for a fleet of "spy-in-the-sky" aircraft intended to provide real-time intelligence, protect troops, and inform battlefield decisions. The initial order will be for six AR5 drones…

OpenAI's Hugging Face debacle makes a great case for open models

KETTLE So, an OpenAI model broke out of its sandbox last week, made its way to the internet, then hacked its way into Hugging Face, stealing some internal data and credentials in the process. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube where you can subscribe to get notified of the latest episode. That's big news in th…

Ubuntu To Provide Virtualization HWE Stack For Ubuntu 26.04 LTS

Ubuntu has long provided hardware enablement "HWE" stacks for Ubuntu LTS releases to provide a newer kernel and Mesa drivers and more for better supporting new/modern hardware on the long-term support Ubuntu Linux releases. With Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, Canonical will also now be providing a virtualization HWE stack for shipping newer virtualization / confidential computing features...…

Microsoft seeks Supreme Court lifeline in pre-owned license battle

Still smarting from Court of Appeal loss earlier in July, Microsoft has secured an extended stay in the ValueLicensing saga as it seeks the Supreme Court's blessing for one more roll of the dice. The UK's Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) ruled in 2025 that the resale and subdivision of Microsoft on-premises software licenses did not infringe the US corporation's copyright. Microsoft appealed and…

Artist sues AI meme generator for selling deeply personal comic as ad template

Artist Elmer Saflor, who goes by the online handle “Superelmer,” loves that millions of people have shared his “Running Away Balloon” comic since it became a popular meme in 2017. However, just because lots of people have copied it, that doesn’t mean it’s OK for an AI meme generator to commercialize his copyrighted meme as a template for who knows how many ads, he told Ars. That’s why he’s fighti…

AMD "Low Power" CPU Core Type Patches Queued Ahead Of Linux 7.3

Last month I wrote bout new AMD Linux patches introducing a new "low power" CPU core type as an alternative to their standard performance cores and dense efficiency cores. That work now is poised to land with the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel...…

Wayfire Wayland Compositor Closing In On v1.0 Release

The Wayfire modular and extensible Wayland compositor formerly used by default on Raspberry Pi SBCs is nearing its v1.0 release. Wayfire 0.11 was released on Sunday for this Compiz-inspired, wlroots-powered compositor with that being their hopeful last planned version before Wayfire 1.0 releases...…

FreeBSD Developing New NTSYNC Driver For Accelerating Windows NT Sync Primitives

The FreeBSD project published today their Q2-2026 status report that highlights all of their interesting open-source development initiatives for the past quarter. A lot is happening including FreeBSD seeing an AMD ROCm port and also their own NTSYNC driver being created...…

Digital sovereignty is real in Europe. The UK? Not so much

OPINION Sick of relying on proprietary programs and American software giants and hyperclouds? Join the digital sovereignty revolution. It really is the smart thing to do. Honestly, with Donald Trump calling the shots, who knows what he'll do next? Demand that American companies stop providing services to European companies unless Denmark surrenders Greenland? Order Microsoft to disable Windows 11…

NVIDIA & Others Form The Open Secure AI Alliance

NVIDIA and more than two dozen other companies have started the Open Secure AI Alliance for helping to keep open-source AI models secure. The other founding members range from Microsoft to Adobe, IBM, Red Hat, SpaceX, OpenClaw, Palantir, and others...…

The roller coaster works, but the Six Flags kiosk has gone off the rails

What frightens a seasoned IT professional? A screen streaked with unidentified fluid? An error message that only hints at what has gone wrong behind the scenes? Roller coasters are not scary. Nausea-inducing, yes. Scary? No. However, what if the kiosks surrounding the attractions have been lightly touched with the wand of the bork fairy? Would that make strapping oneself into a vehicle to be flun…

FOSS smashed one Microsoft monopoly. After 20 years of failure, it's time to smash another

OPINION The best way to bust out of jail is not to get locked up in the first place. There are options once you're inside, legal and illegal, and all are complicated, time-consuming, and probably won't work. Microsoft Office users have been banged up since 1990, a 36-year stretch normally reserved for the most horrendous crimes. In that time, individuals and organizations alike have built up a pl…

Google goes it alone with a new cybercrime crew taxonomy

Google has created a new taxonomy to describe cybercrime outfits, seemingly abandoning a Microsoft-led effort to create consistent names. The Big G announced its new schema on Saturday in a post that notes its 2022 acquisition of Mandiant and its subsequent incorporation into a new team called the Google Threat Intelligence Group (CTIG). Now that two have become one, Google reckons they need cons…

Manager showed off his DOS prowess – with a command that wiped data

WHO, ME? Mistakes happen, and when readers of The Register make them, we like to share those tales of woe in a Monday column we call "Who, Me?" It's our guide on how not to get ahead in the modern workplace. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as Clay, who in the 1980s was the most junior member of the management team on a Swedish construction site. "We had two site engineers, and they were t…

SpaceX just about nails Starship test flight 13

The 13th flight of SpaceX’s Starship made it off the launchpad on Friday and ticked off just about everything on the company’s to-do list. After delays and engine replacements, Elon Musk’s colosso-launcher took to the skies at beer-o’clock on Friday evening – 5:51PM Texas time. One hour, five minutes and 21 seconds later, Starship made a controlled splashdown in the Indian Ocean, where it floated…

Foxconn drops VMware, adopts hyperconverged upstart Arcfra for workloads including AI

ASIA IN BRIEF Taiwanese mega-manufacturer Foxconn has adopted Singaporean hyperconverged infrastructure vendor (HCI) Arcrfra for some GPU virtualization workloads and to replace VMware in some remote offices. Arcfra launched in 2024 and the next year earned a place on analyst firm Gartner’s Market Guide for Full-Stack HCI Software. Last week, Arcfra launched an update to its Neutree model-as-a-se…

Kernel prepatch 7.2-rc5

The 7.2-rc5 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said: "So it's a bit too big for my liking, but nothing in there strikes me as particularly strange or scary".…

Linux 7.2-rc5 Released: "Once More We Have Quite A Massive -rc5"

In working toward releasing the stable Linux 7.2 kernel in less than one month's time, out today is Linux 7.2-rc5 to ship this week's latest bug/regression fixes and help facilitate more testing of this in-development kernel version...…

First teaser for Apple TV's Neuromancer debuts at SDCC

Apple TV is fast eclipsing HBO as the go-to platform for prestige TV, especially science fiction, with standout fare like Slow Horses, Severance, Foundation, For All Mankind, Murderbot, Silo, Pluribus, and Widow's Bay, among others. Add the upcoming Neuromancer series to that list, an adaptation of William Gibson's hugely influential 1984 cyberpunk novel of the same name. The streaming platform r…

GNU Binutils 2.47 Released With More RISC-V Extensions, New Options

Along with this weekend's release of GNU C Library 2.44, the GNU Binutils 2.47 release is also now available for this important set of binary utilities common to Linux systems and other platforms with the GNU toolchain...…

"KVM Chainsaw" Expected To Hit Linux 7.3 For Dealing With God Data Structure

A patch series that appears destined for the upcoming Linux 7.3 merge window is what's dubbed the "KVM Chainsaw" as a major code clean-up in dealing with the kvm_mmu "god data structure"...…

User Frustrations Over The "Tragic State of FreeBSD Audio/Sound" Support

Besides the FreeBSD graphics and WiFi drivers lagging behind Linux and other operating systems, the FreeBSD audio driver support and handling of audio streams with FreeBSD on the desktop can be problematic depending upon the hardware/system. One of the most active mailing list threads this week in the FreeBSD camp was over the "tragic state" of FreeBSD audio/sound support...…

Auto-CPUFreq 3.1 Adds Monitoring Mode To GUI, New Configuration Options & Fixes

Auto-CPUFreq is one of the open-source projects striving to be a CPU speed and power optimizer for Linux systems to improve battery life without making any real compromises to the user experience. Out today is v3.1 as the newest feature release of Auto-CPUFreq...…

Realtek RTL8723B/RTL8723BS Trying To Be Tacked On To The RTW88 Linux Driver

Since 2017 in Linux 4.12 has been the Realtek rtl8723bs WiFi driver where it was introduced into the staging area and remains there nearly a decade later. The rtl8723bs driver for this Realtek 802.11n WiFi SDIO driver has seen a lot of code cleaning over the years and all these years later still is needing lots of code clean-ups from unnecessary code abstractions to dealing with malicious WiFi APs…

Linux 7.2-rc5 Fixing Longstanding Bug In IPv4 Networking Over Firewire

Firewire still isn't dead yet on Linux. Current plans call for maintaining IEEE-1394 Firewire on Linux at least through 2029 and with today's Linux 7.2-rc5 kernel release is a fix for those wanting to leverage IPv4 networking over Firewire...…

Trump expands voluntary pledge to keep datacenter costs off household power bills

President Trump has expanded his Ratepayer Protection Pledge to include power companies, datacenter developers, cooperatives, and state governments, saying the move will shield consumers from rising energy costs driven by the datacenter boom. In a speech at the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) HQ in Washington, Trump said the pledge will now extend across the full chain of parties whose deci…

The last Space Shuttle returned to Earth 15 years ago

This week marks 15 years since a Space Shuttle last returned from orbit and the end of NASA's Space Shuttle program. Space Shuttle Atlantis landed at the Shuttle Landing Facility (SLF) at Kennedy Space Center 15 years ago this week, marking the final mission for the program. STS-135 was originally designated STS-335, the Launch On Need (LON) mission for the previous STS-134 flight of Space Shuttl…

Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 Released With Support For Notches & Rounded Corners

Following last month's beta release, Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 is now available as the latest feature release for this Ubuntu 24.04 LTS derived mobile operating system for select smartphones and tablets...…

A Debian general resolution on LLM usage

The Debian project is considering a general resolution on the use of large language models in the creation of the distribution. There are three alternatives to consider: a total ban on LLM usage, rejecting LLMs "as far as practical", or explicitly allowing LLM usage subject to a set of conditions. The discussion period has just begun; the beginning of the voting period does not yet appear to have…

SDCC teaser gives us our first good look at Blade Runner 2099

It has been nearly five years since Ridley Scott first announced his plans for a TV spinoff of his sci-fi masterpiece Blade Runner (1982) and the 2017 sequel Blade Runner 2049. It's finally here—or almost, anyway. Prime Video debuted the first teaser for the new 10-episode series, Blade Runner 2099, at San Diego Comic-Con on Friday. We also got a teaser for the third season of Prime Video's Rings…

Fedora Working To Establish Conflict of Interest Policy

Posted this week is a draft copy of the Fedora Conflict of Interest policy being worked on for dealing with identifying, disclosing, and managing any actual, actual, or perceived conflicts of interest within the Fedora Project...…

In remembrance of Dan Williams

On July 21, the kernel community lost Dan Williams, one of its most beloved contributors. Dave Hansen and Thomas Gleixner, both of whom worked with Williams extensively, have written an obituary and allowed LWN to publish it. He will be deeply missed, but he has left us with a lot to remember him by.…

Security updates for Saturday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (compat-openssl11, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, kernel-rt, and sssd), Debian (exim4), Fedora (chromium, dotnet10.0, mbedtls, mupdf, netatalk, python-django5, skopeo, sssd, and wget1), Mageia (libevent and transmission), Oracle (.NET 8.0, 389-ds-base, aardvark-dns, acl, buildah, cifs-utils, dovecot, dracut, galera and mariadb11.8, glibc…

GNU C Library 2.44 released

Version 2.44 of the GNU C Library has been released. Changes include a new /etc/tunables.conf file for the system-wide setting of tunable parameters, a new tunable to control the use of transparent huge pages for read-only executable segments, a number of math-function improvements, a handful of security fixes, and more.…

New stable kernel for ext4 users

Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.12.98 stable Linux kernel with a single fix for a file descriptor leak in ext4. Users of the ext4 filesystem should upgrade.…

How AI drove Shopify back to clean code

E-commerce platform Shopify wants to make reading source code a thing again. And it has an unlikely ally for its back-to-the-roots approach: AI agents. The company is launching a new storefront theme for its customers, aka “merchants,” that it claims is completely understandable by anyone with even a smidgen of HTML knowledge. It is designed to be simpler for both people and machines to digest an…

Kiwi Menu Continues Bringing macOS Vibes To GNOME

Kiwi Menu as the macOS-inspired quick menu option for the GNOME Shell desktop is continuing to enhance its macOS-esque experience on GNOME...…

GNU C Library 2.44 Released With /etc/tunables.conf, More Optimizations

GNU developers today released GNU C Library "glibc" 2.44 as the newest feature release for this critical library to modern Linux systems and other platforms...…

KDE Plasma 6.8 Introducing New kscreenctl Tool

KDE developers have been working on kscreenctl as a utility replacement to kscreen-doctor. Plasma and related code has also seen a number of bug/crash fixes coming about this week too...…

Anti-AI open source has an enemy in common, but almost nothing else

OPINION Linux now being officially not anti-AI might be good news for projects that are explicitly anti-AI, but we foresee problems with conflict over where the money and development effort come from. A couple of weeks ago, reluctant geek superstar Linus Torvalds declared that Linux is not an anti-AI project. The pro-AI folks are jubilant, and they are especially loud on the internet. (They're pr…

BOFH: This printer engineer knows every trick in the book

EPISODE 14 The morning coffee in Mission Control is interrupted by a hesitant tapping at the door. Our current office temp has an issue. "It's the printer," she says, apologetically. "It makes a noise." "When it's printing, or all the time?" the PFY asks. "Sort of both. It starts making the noise before it starts printing, then keeps making the noise for about 20 seconds after." The PFY and I pop…

Wine 11.14 Brings WoW64 Mode To FreeBSD, Icon Support In Start Menu

Wine 11.14 was tagged today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...…

Anthropic debuts Opus 5 at half the price of its Fable sibling

Anthropic released its Opus 5 AI model on Friday, claiming that it "comes close to the frontier intelligence of Claude Fable 5 at half the price." That's welcome news for enterprises beset by rising token costs. Fable 5 prices tokens at $10 / MTok input and $50 / MTok output, while Opus 5 prices tokens at $5 / MTok and $25 / MTok. OpenAI's GPT-5.6 Sol sells for $5 / MTok input and $30 / MTok outp…

Pope's official prayer app commits cardinal sin, leaks 700K+ users' info

Click To Pray, a prayer app endorsed by the Pope with hundreds of thousands of users worldwide, has leaked people’s names and email addresses for months - or longer - according to an ethical hacker who said she found and reported the security vulnerability six months ago to no avail. This app needs to take a vow of silence when it comes to your personal information. The app, available in seven la…

AMD vibe codes its way past the CUDA moat with ROCm.AI

Even as AMD’s GPUs have grown more competitive, the House of Zen has struggled to shake the perception that its chips are less capable because they don’t run CUDA. At its Advancing AI event in San Francisco this week, AMD unveiled ROCm.AI, which promises to let users vibe code their way to faster inference performance. In reality, the so-called CUDA moat has become considerably shallower over the…

Debian Considering General Resolution Over LLM Usage In The Project

Debian developers are discussing a general resolution whether to permit AI large language model (LLM) usage within the Debian software project...…

AMD ROCm Committed To Six Week Release Cycle Moving Forward

One of many interesting takeaways from this week's AMD Advancing AI event in San Francisco was word that ROCm will be on a rigid six week release cycle moving forward...…

Europol flags 4,340 'horrific' URLs linked to The Com

Europol and its partners' investigators flagged 4,340 “horrific” URLs for removal over several weeks in June and July as part of an ongoing crackdown on The Com (short for community), a loosely knit network of online groups whose young members participate in a range of illicit activities. These range from hacking, swatting, and digital extortion to real-life shootings, stabbings, and other physic…

Tech leaders issue letter to train Uncle Sam about value of open weight AI

UPDATED With the US government scrutinizing AI as much as ever, 25 technology companies, industry organizations, and venture capital firms published an open letter on Friday urging policymakers to support open weight AI models. The missive [PDF] of nearly a thousand words can be summarized as "Please don't give Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI control of the US AI market." Coincidentally, those thre…

Qualcomm QCE Driver On The Chopping Block With ~48x Slower Than Armv8 Crypto Extensions

A few days back I wrote about upstream Linux kernel developers marking the Qualcomm crypto accelerator driver as "broken" and "harmful" due to its slow performance, history of bugs, and other limitations. Now this Qualcomm Crypto Engine "QCE" driver might be removed outright from the Linux kernel source tree after discovering it's even worse than anticipated...…

The most advanced robotic servicing satellite–that we know about

Farmers Are Getting Control Of Their Equipment Back

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

Imagination PowerVR Driver Marking BXM-4-64 MC1 GPU As Supported In Linux 7.3

Sent out today was the weekly round of drm-misc-next patches of new Direct Rendering Manager feature material ready to be queued in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window...…

Dev accidentally commits Copilot binary to FreeBSD ports repo

The FreeBSD project froze its ports repository on Wednesday. The reason turns out to be a slightly embarrassing Git-related oopsie where a version of Copilot got uploaded somewhere it should not have been. The announcement of the 2026 Ports Repository Freeze went out on July 21 and remained in effect the following day, as explained in a message on the freebsd-announce mailing list. The mail delic…

Hefty stable kernel updates for Friday

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.5, 6.18.40, 6.12.97, 6.6.145, 6.1.178, 5.15.212, and 5.10.261 stable Linux kernels. This batch of kernels includes a hefty set of updates, possibly the largest ever. 7.1.5-rc1, for example, included more than 2,000 patches, 6.18.40-rc1 included 1,611 patches, and so forth. Users are advised to upgrade.…

Linux Plumbers Conference 2026 registration open

Registration is now open for the 2026 Linux Plumbers Conference, to be held October 5 to 7 in Prague, Czechia. Tickets to this event tend to sell out quickly, so interested attendees probably should not procrastinate.…

ChatGPT wants access to your health records so it can be a better not-doctor

OpenAI is expanding its healthcare footprint by encouraging users to connect Apple Health data and supported medical records to ChatGPT - one day after a user sued the company, alleging the chatbot's medical advice nearly killed him. Health in ChatGPT, as the new feature is called, allows eligible users to connect ChatGPT to Apple's Health app in iOS, giving the chatbot access to health informati…

The Fabled Flatbreads of Uzbekistan (2015)

How to survive boiling water

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

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

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

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

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

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

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

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

Protect Your Privacy with California's DROP Tool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Vision. Your Legacy. Your Future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European Court: Apple Can Not Shirk Off its Interoperability Requirements

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

Don’t Repeat NY’s 3D Printing Blunder

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

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

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

Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership

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

Lessons Learned from CISA’s Recent GitHub Leak

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

Building Our Future Together

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay—Accountability Must Keep Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

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

Help EFF Cut the AI Hype

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

FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFF to Gov. Pritzker: Veto Illinois’ HB 5511

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police Drones

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

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

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

Primed for Malware: Stop Selling Compromised Android Devices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online

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

🦅 Domestic Spying Takes an L | EFFector 38.12

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

Scattered Spider Hackers Plead Guilty on Day 1 of Trial

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

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

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

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

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

Canada Is Forging Ahead with Its Dangerous Surveillance Bill

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

EFF Thanks SerpApi For Helping Us Protect Free Speech Online

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

Call for Submissions: Digital Pride

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

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

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

Court Records Should Be Free

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

‘Popa’ Botnet Linked to Publicly-Traded Israeli Firm

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

Who Runs the Ransomware Group ‘The Gentlemen?’

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

A Record-Breaking Patch Tuesday for June 2026

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

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

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