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Linux 7.3-rc4 Released: More Fixes Caught By LLMs, But Nothing Too Scary ↗ (opens external article)

Linus Torvalds announced the release today of Linux 7.3-rc4. As usual for recent months, the fixes continue to be quite heavy and scattered all over the place driven in large part by AI/LLMs spotting various code defects. Overall though Linus Torvalds isn't too worried about Linux 7.3-rc4...…

Nobody pays for FOSS, we can force them to ↗ (opens external article)

Ogre Battle 64 Recompiled Project at 99.05% ↗ (opens external article)

7.3-rc4: mainline ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.3-rc4 (mainline) Released:2026-09-20 Source:linux-7.3-rc4.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)…

Democracy vs Digital Infrastructure: Pulitzer-Winning Journalist Charts 'The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State' ↗ (opens external article)

The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State ultimately asks the question, "How did we cede control of our democracy to the machines, and can we get it back?" according to the Harvard's Arts and Sciences site, FAS Current: The new title finds Lepore, who used to teach a course at the College titled "The Rise and Fall of the Machine," charting the ascent of what she calls the artificial state: the dig…

OpenAI's Sam Altman to Brief UN Security Council Next Week ↗ (opens external article)

Frontier Labs Are Selling Garbage to Fools in Washington ↗ (opens external article)

The Hierarchy of Money ↗ (opens external article)

Software Sandboxing: The Basics (2025) ↗ (opens external article)

Important x86 Fixes Merged Ahead Of Linux 7.3-rc4 ↗ (opens external article)

Ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc4 kernel release due out in the coming hours, an important batch of x86/x86_64 fixes have been merged to address a few outstanding issues...…

A Necessary History of the Oddest Letter: W ↗ (opens external article)

I turned Jev into a (lousy) chatbot ↗ (opens external article)

Samsung is expected to more than double output of its HBM4 and HBM4E DRAM ↗ (opens external article)

Resident Evil 4 (GameCube) – complete byte-identical decompilation to C/C++ ↗ (opens external article)

Trying the Software Factory Pattern ↗ (opens external article)

US Revokes Limits on Power Plants' Climate Pollution ↗ (opens external article)

Show HN: Radius – A Meetup.com Alternative ↗ (opens external article)

I am often wrong ↗ (opens external article)

The Brain Is Actually Two Completely Separate Organs ↗ (opens external article)

"New research led by Stanford Medicine reveals that what we call the brain is two distinct organs that evolved independently over hundreds of millions of years," Stanford Medicine announced this week: The new research finding shows that the human brain consists of two ancient nervous systems cleverly packaged together — a more primitive part that regulates our hearts' beating, our breathing and ot…

Prompts aren’t Real ↗ (opens external article)

Laya (OS Jev) on Mac M4 CoreML Offline (45 decisions per second) ↗ (opens external article)

Custom home server built from spare parts ↗ (opens external article)

ChatGPT now knows what you do on other websites via ad collector ↗ (opens external article)

Singapore’s National Library Board offers micropayments to build reading habits ↗ (opens external article)

Pirate Face Rescues LLM Models from Deletion ↗ (opens external article)

Sherline Tools Is Going Out of Business ↗ (opens external article)

Gzip 1.15 Released With Many Bug Fixes For Issues Present Since Its Inception ↗ (opens external article)

Gzip 1.15 is out today for succeeding the Gzip 1.14 release from April 2025. With this release comes a number of fixes for bugs present since the beginning of Gzip...…

Qwen Image 2.1 ↗ (opens external article)

KDE To Focus On Next-Gen Styling, Better Documentation & KDE For Enterprise ↗ (opens external article)

At the KDE Akademy 2026 conference going on right now in Graz, Austria the three KDE goals for the next two years were unveiled...…

To Enforce Its Proposed Social Media Ban for 450 Million Pre-Teens, EU Builds an Open Source App ↗ (opens external article)

The European Commission "proposed on Thursday banning children under 13 from social media, with parent-supervised accounts until 15," reports Reuters. "Enforcement would rely on a tool Brussels built itself" — a free, open-source age verification smartphone app "that tells a platform whether a user meets an age threshold without revealing their identity..." If passed, the proposed Kids Act would c…

An undercover Google analyst infiltrated a notorious supply-chain hacking gang ↗ (opens external article)

Before two of its alleged members were arrested and charged in Australia last month, the hacker group known as TeamPCP carried out a hacking spree unlike any other in history. It tainted hundreds of open-source programs with its malware, stole developer accounts to perpetuate that software supply-chain hacking, and even released a Dune-themed self-spreading worm to automate the process, ultimatel…

AI-Assisted Starling Desktop Introduces 3D View With "Walkable 3D Waterfront City" ↗ (opens external article)

From a few months ago you may recall Starling as the new Linux desktop written with its own Wayland compositor, using the Swift programming language, and written in large part via AI with Claude Code. Out today is Starling 0.5 with this desktop now gaining an optional 3D desktop mode...…

Vulkan 1.4.363 Released With New VK_INTEL_device_info Extension ↗ (opens external article)

Vulkan 1.4.363 is out as the latest routine update to the Vulkan API specification and also introduces a new Intel vendor extension...…

Linux 7.3 Adds Support For Victrix Pro BFG & Azeron Controllers ↗ (opens external article)

Sent out this morning were a big batch of input subsystem fixes ahead of the Linux 7.3-rc4 kernel releasing later today. Alongside many bug fixes to different drivers is also expanding the range of supported gaming controllers by the XPad driver...…

Don't call it an SUV: The Ferrari Purosangue review ↗ (opens external article)

Ferrari’s two-seat sports cars might be the brand’s identity, but the Italian automaker has always catered to customers who want to bring more than one passenger along for the ride. It started building cars with back seats in the 1960s with the 250 GT 2+2; as the name suggests, the second row was more for occasional use, something that was true all the way through to the 612 in the early 2000s. F…

T. rex teeth indicate it ran as warm as an elephant ↗ (opens external article)

For most of the last century, T. rex was pictured as a sluggish, tail-dragging reptile that had to warm up in the sun before it could go anywhere. Then, further research changed that view, replacing it with the active, bird-like animal shown in the movie Jurassic Park. But whether T. rex used warm blood to power that activity remained a question. Now we might have gotten closer to an answer. A te…

How Windows turned months of inactivity into a 7-hour update hostage situation ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has a problem not entirely of its own making: The time it takes to bring a system back up to date after a few months of slumber. The company is keen to talk up how efficient it plans to make Windows. Not a day goes by without either a Microsoft representative or a fan insisting that Windows 11 is a lot snappier now than it used to be. (Usually they skirt the unfortunate truth that the W…

Tech Industry Scratches Its Head Over Trump's 'AI Force' Proposal ↗ (opens external article)

Saturday morning President Trump announced he's creating an AI task force and appointing an AI czar, reports Politico. "I am forming the AI Force, much like I did Space Force, which has been a tremendous SUCCESS," Trump wrote Saturday in what Politico earlier described as "a lengthy Truth Social post on Saturday morning." TRUMP: Over the years, there have been many Hoaxes, all generated by the Rad…

Customer-Losing Flock Now Offers Buyouts to Avoid Laying Off Employees ↗ (opens external article)

Mashable writes: Flock Safety offered employees voluntary buyouts on Friday, WIRED reported... Without the buyouts, those familiar with the situation suspect the company would have to lay off some of its 1,500 employees. WIRED writes that people familiar with the program "say they believe that a significant number of the startup's roughly 1,500 employees may try to depart." Flock is making the se…

Linux 7.3-rc4 To Address Two Unfortunate Bugs With Btrfs ↗ (opens external article)

Merged today were this week's set of Btrfs file-system fixes for the Linux 7.3-rc4 kernel, which include two notable bug fixes...…

Apple iPhone 18 Pro Camera test ↗ (opens external article)

Exfiltrate Your Weights ↗ (opens external article)

Developer Abandons 'PS5 Linux' Project After Sony Patches AI-Discovered Exploit ↗ (opens external article)

"In April this year, we saw Andy Nguyen turning the PS5 into a Linux-powered gaming PC," writes the blog It's FOSS. It ran Steam games and emulators using the PS5's on-board hardware. But this week Andy announced he's "stopping all my work on PS5 Linux" and "stepping away from the PS5 scene." stopping work on porting the project to the PS5 Pro, which would've shipped sometime in 2027. Andy Nguyen:…

Fake AI Intelligence Almost Made the US Military Start a War With China ↗ (opens external article)

U.S. military intelligence received an inaccurate report this spring that a Chinese ship in the Middle East was transporting components of a nuclear weapons program, reports CNN. "The US military swung into action with plans to intercept the vessel, according to four sources familiar with the episode." Armed members of the US military were preparing to board the ship [according to two of the sourc…

Key symbols we lost to time, pt. 2: The Mac side ↗ (opens external article)

The Effect of CRTs on Pixel Art ↗ (opens external article)

Simple Optimization For Linux 7.4 Can Open Files For Reading ~39% Faster ↗ (opens external article)

More than two years in the making, Linux 7.4 is poised to introduce a patch that amounts to a rather simple optimization to avoid unnecessary/duplicative work that can net some nice gains when opening files for reading...…

Agentic security is the billion-dollar challenge for some clever startup to solve ↗ (opens external article)

When it comes to AI models, security functions as an afterthought, as evidenced by increased instances of agents hacking organizations and people, and other security mishaps with agents gone rogue. There's also an opportunity here for companies to offer new solutions. This should not come as a shock to anyone, according to cybersecurity investors and accelerator executives. “On one hand, we shoul…

So I have a weatherman, which also tells me the news ↗ (opens external article)

AI boom could leave an e-waste trail that wraps 6 times around Earth ↗ (opens external article)

AI infrastructure could generate enough electronic waste by 2050 to fill a line of shipping containers stretching around Earth six times, according to a report that argues existing estimates drastically understate the problem. Previous estimates have focused chiefly on servers and accelerators such as GPUs, which account for just 13 percent of a datacenter's equipment by weight, the report says.…

Wine-Staging 11.18 Adds New Patches To Further Improve WoW64 ↗ (opens external article)

Building off yesterday's Wine 11.18 bi-weekly development release is now Wine-Staging 11.18. This experimental flavor of Wine is presently carrying 273 extra patches over that upstream Git state, including some new patches for helping enhance the WoW64 support...…

US Air Force F-16 Crashes in Michigan After Pentagon Orders More Flyovers ↗ (opens external article)

The F-16 "experienced an incident," the Texas Military Department said in a statement, adding that "The pilot successfully ejected the aircraft and is receiving care at a nearby hospital." ABC News reports: A Texas Air National Guard F-16 crashed in Michigan during a training mission on Thursday afternoon, sparking an hourslong evacuation near the crash site, according to officials. The incident p…

FreeBSD on Aoostar WTR Pro NAS ↗ (opens external article)

Learning another language may be one of the best ways to keep your brain healthy ↗ (opens external article)

Learning another language is a highly complex mental activity. It requires people to remember words, distinguish unfamiliar sounds, recognize patterns, work out grammatical rules, and retrieve the right expression at the right moment. All of this happens while listening, interpreting, and preparing a response. Could all this mental activity also help keep an aging brain healthier? Research sugges…

GNOME OS Turns To Zswap To Deal With OOM Issues, Progress On Geary Email Client Fork ↗ (opens external article)

In addition to this week's GNOME 51 release were several other exciting developments in the GNOME desktop space...…

Intel Xe Driver For Linux 7.4 Adds vRAM Health Check, Degraded Memory Handling ↗ (opens external article)

Sent out this week were more Intel Xe kernel graphics driver changes targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle. The theme this week was around dealing with video memory health and also being able to better deal with hardware degraded video RAM...…

KDE Plasma 6.8 Seeing More Polishing & Fixes, Plasma 6.9 Begins Seeing More Activity ↗ (opens external article)

Following last week's Plasma 6.8 beta release, KDE desktop developers have spent this week mostly working on bug fixes as well as some early changes toward Plasma 6.9...…

Rings around a tiny body have changed over the past decade ↗ (opens external article)

For decades, astronomers thought rings were something only giant planets had. That changed in 2013, when a small, dark body orbiting between Saturn and Uranus passed in front of a star and blinked twice on either side of the main event, revealing two narrow rings around an object barely 250 kilometers across. “It was a surprise,” says Pablo Santos-Sanz, an astronomer at the Instituto de Astrofísi…

Gemini Breached Three Outside Systems, and Claude-Using Researchers Breached OpenAI ↗ (opens external article)

"Software security researchers used Anthropic's Claude AI platform to hack OpenAI's ChatGPT tool," reports CBS News. Using Claude, "On July 25, 2026, we chained two critical vulnerabilities to compromise multiple OpenAI employees' ChatGPT accounts," write researchers at security platform Hacktron AI. "With these accounts, we could then access internal OpenAI repositories, and potentially many othe…

Firefox 156 arrives with a forest of forks in its wake ↗ (opens external article)

Mozilla and MZLA have delivered the latest releases in their new fortnightly cycle, but users who dislike the faster pace have alternatives. Firefox 156 is trickling out to users. The release notes only mention two new features: for Mac users, there's now an option in Settings to automatically launch the app at login. This vulture has received criticism for saying this in some of the product's fo…

Has the James Web Space Telescope Discovered a New 'Black Hole Star'? ↗ (opens external article)

The James Webb Space Telescope has been picking up little red dots in almost every image, writes Quanta magazine. And now two teams of astronomers propose they're looking at a new astronomical object: a black hole star. It shines with the light of billions of suns — and hides a black hole in its core. But Quanta adds that "not everyone agrees with this bold interpretation." [Two Webb telescope sur…

Help Linux Hardware Testing & Reviews Continue While Enjoying Phoronix Without Ads ↗ (opens external article)

If you missed out on the Phoronix Premium special back during the 22nd birthday of Phoronix.com in June, there is another promotion now active for helping to support the site and allow for continued daily original content and relentless Linux performance benchmarking and other open-sourced focused hardware testing...…

Ubuntu 26.10 Switches To The Linux 7.3 Kernel ↗ (opens external article)

As a very pleasant surprise, the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release will now be powered by the Linux 7.3 kernel rather than their original plans and switch over to the Linux 7.2 kernel...…

AI Insiders Issue New Warnings - Including Former Anthropic Engineer Jacob Coxon ↗ (opens external article)

Neither OpenAI or Anthropic is acting responsibly, warned AI researcher Jacob Coxon when resigning last week from Anthropic. But just hours earlier, OpenAI VP of Research Aidan Clark had posted "For the first time, I am asking myself if things are moving too fast. I'm honestly not sure, but I am sure that it would be good for us to have an answer to 'What would a successful pace look like?'" CNN n…

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…

Anthropic decides to support OpenAI's markdown instructions spec ↗ (opens external article)

Anthropic on Friday surprised the developer community by supporting rival OpenAI's mechanism for passing marching orders to AI agents. This makes life easier for folks who use both platforms. "We're adding support for AGENTS.md to Claude Code," said Claude Code engineer Thariq Shihipar in a social media post. "Starting today in version 2.1.277, if there is no CLAUDE.md in a folder, Claude will ch…

Wine 11.18 Continues Building Out Its NTOSKRNL Implementation ↗ (opens external article)

Wine 11.18 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and apps on Linux, macOS, and other platforms...…

Microsoft agentically ports Copilot runtime to Rust for $120K ↗ (opens external article)

The software engine underpinning GitHub Copilot and a growing number of Microsoft products is now written entirely in Rust, with AI agents doing most of the porting work. The migration cost about $120,000 in AI token usage plus about three weeks of a developer's time. However, managers also had to grapple with a few dozen regressions in the resulting code, pointing to AI’s ongoing challenges in u…

AI hallucination of Chinese nuclear components almost led to US military attack ↗ (opens external article)

The US narrowly avoided boarding a Chinese ship based on an "entirely false" US intelligence report generated with the help of AI tools, according to a CNN report. That erroneous intelligence, submitted by a US Special Operations Command analyst, suggested the Chinese ship was transporting nuclear arms program components through the Middle East, according to "four sources familiar with the episod…

Virginia governor wakes up to fact datacenters have become political cancer ↗ (opens external article)

Virginia is not just for lovers, but is also for datacenters, hosting more than anywhere else in the world. However, the growth could be slowing as Governor Abigail Spanberger issued an executive order on Friday cracking down on bit barn builds in the state. “In the years before I took office, datacenters came to Virginia and the Commonwealth did not have a clear or coordinated plan to address th…

Steam Frame Making Use Of Zink For OpenGL On Vulkan ↗ (opens external article)

Valve's Steam Frame VR headset that makes use of a Qualcomm Snapdragon 8 Gen 3 SoC with Adreno graphics is using the open-source "Turnip" Vulkan driver from Mesa as reported last year. For OpenGL it turns out that the Mesa Zink driver is being used on the Steam Frame for OpenGL atop the Vulkan API...…

Compsci grads facing recession-like job prospects thanks to AI ↗ (opens external article)

Thanks to AI, computer science majors are finding themselves in a tougher spot than they might have expected. Jobs are harder to come by, and more graduates are ending up in lower-paying sectors like retail and food service. That’s according to a new working paper by three US Census Bureau economists examining how college graduates from majors with the highest exposure to AI have fared since Chat…

FAA tees up $875M AI tool to help manage air traffic congestion ↗ (opens external article)

An AI tool is set to start advising air traffic controllers on managing air traffic in the congested airspace above the Washington, DC, area. The expected launch would be the first step toward a planned nationwide rollout covering the 29 million square miles of US national airspace overseen by the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA describes the SMART system as using AI models to predict ai…

Claude Code revamps projects so you can work and pay in parallel ↗ (opens external article)

Claude Code customers have a new reason to give Anthropic more of their money. The tool now allows you to launch multiple sessions related to a single project, burning through more resources and cash at once. Appropriately enough, the feature is called projects and can be accessed from the Claude.ai sidebar. It's not the old version of projects, capitalized in some reference material, which allow…

Will California Gut Its Net Neutrality Law to Comply with Trump Admin Demands? ↗ (opens external article)

In 2021, America approved $65 billion to fund broadband internet services as part of President Biden's Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. But Trump's administration announced they'd withhold funds from states with net neutrality protections... States could object and sue the government, Ars Technica reported last October, "but even a successful lawsuit could take years and leave unserved homes without…

FCC lets Paramount sell 49.5% equity stake to Saudi Arabia, UAE, and Qatar ↗ (opens external article)

The Federal Communications Commission yesterday approved Paramount Skydance's plan to sell large equity stakes to the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and Qatar. Under US law, companies with licenses to run broadcast stations need FCC approval to have direct or indirect foreign ownership exceeding 25 percent of the company's stock. Paramount says its indirect fore…

Finding the cells that put our brain to sleep ↗ (opens external article)

For a long time, sleep research has treated the cerebral cortex as a passive follower reacting to signals from the deep brain. “Usually, sleep is associated with being controlled by subcortical regions,” said Geoffrey Terral, a neuroscientist at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine in New York. The cortex is where the slow rhythms of deep sleep can be seen, but researchers assumed the signals…

US government website used Chinese model the FBI called "malicious" ↗ (opens external article)

On Wednesday, US government officials removed a Chinese AI search tool that was briefly deployed on the Federal Register website, Reuters reported. The change came after social media users noticed an apparent contradiction: The National Archives was using one of Alibaba’s Qwen AI models, even as top US law enforcement claimed that such models illegally copy US frontier models. Earlier this month,…

Researchers used Claude to hack OpenAI employees' ChatGPT accounts ↗ (opens external article)

Talk about your competitor getting through the door. Security researchers used Anthropic's Claude to help hack into OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts. A trio of bug hunters researching frontier AI labs’ security weaknesses chained two vulnerabilities to take over multiple OpenAI employees’ ChatGPT accounts, then used that access to demonstrate they could reach an internal OpenAI repository by op…

North Korea's fake job interviews infected 30,000 devices ↗ (opens external article)

North Korea's employment scams work both ways. As well as placing fraudulent IT workers inside Western companies, regime-backed cybercriminals have posed as recruiters to infect more than 30,000 devices and steal over $10 million, according to an international advisory. Law enforcement and cybersecurity agencies from Australia, Germany, Japan, and the US issued an update on the campaign on Thursd…

Google's "Painful To Maintain" Binder C Linux Driver Being Removed In Favor Of Rust ↗ (opens external article)

Google's Binder driver written in the C programming language has long been part of the mainline kernel as the inter-process communication (IPC) mechanism used on Android. The past few years the Binder driver was rewritten in Rust as one of the first "real" drivers in the Rust programming language. The Rust Binder driver was upstreamed in Linux 6.18 and now for the upcoming Linux 7.4 kernel cycle,…

FBI: Fake cop and government impersonation scams cost victims $1.6B ↗ (opens external article)

Scammers impersonating law enforcement or government officials have cost victims more than $1.6 billion since January 2025, the FBI reports. The FBI’s Internet Crime Complaint Center (IC3) received close to 61,000 complaints of this type between January 2025 and July 2026, putting the average per-complaint loss at more than $26,000. The most common type of scam is one involving criminals convinci…

Apple Video Decode Driver Posted For Upstream Linux Kernel Review ↗ (opens external article)

The latest Apple Silicon enablement code working its way from the Asahi Linux project toward the upstream Linux kernel is the AVD driver used for accelerated video playback across Apple M1 / M2 / M3 SoCs...…

Admins, you've been warned: The clock is ticking on Edge's IE Mode ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has reminded administrators that Internet Explorer mode in Edge is guaranteed support only through 2029, so it is time to get those legacy migrations moving. Internet Explorer mode lets enterprises continue using legacy websites within Edge rather than relying on the retired Internet Explorer browser. It uses the Trident MSHTML engine from Internet Explorer 11 and permits elements such…

A custom virtual machine for the Stars 4X game ↗ (opens external article)

Rust is Now a 'Tier One' Language at Microsoft ↗ (opens external article)

The Register reports: When Microsoft's developers and engineers sit down to code, they can now choose to work in Rust, which Redmond has added to its list of canonical languages. "Rust now is a Tier One language at Microsoft, and that just means that it sits among C++, C# and TypeScript as the best supported languages for internal development in the company," explained Victor Ciura, Microsoft pri…

KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposal ↗ (opens external article)

KDE's annual conference takes place this weekend at Graz University of Technology in Austria, with an AI-native desktop proposal likely to divide attendees. The KDE project is celebrating its 30th anniversary this year, giving delegates at the Akademy conference in Graz another reason to raise a glass. The conference begins on Saturday, September 19, and registration remains open. Although Xfce 1…

AMD Strix Halo Enjoys Some Performance Gains On Ubuntu 26.10, Especially With amd64v3 ↗ (opens external article)

Ahead of next week's Ubuntu 26.10 beta release I have been testing the "Stonking Stingray" on a variety of systems. Ubuntu 26.10 is performing well overall with some nice upgrades over Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, especially if opting to use the new snapshot/daily ISOs of Ubuntu 26.10 in amd64v3 form for x86_64-v3 packages. In today's tests are a look at the performance benefits of Ubuntu 26.10 on an AMD Ryz…

Meet the winner of Nikon's Small World in Motion video contest ↗ (opens external article)

Abnormal beating of airway cilia from a child with Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia, a genetic disorder affecting respiratory function. Credit: Ning Xu, Tsinghua University Abnormal beating of airway cilia from a child with Primary Ciliary Dyskinesia, a genetic disorder affecting respiratory function. Credit: Ning Xu, Tsinghua University A Chinese optical engineer is the winner of this year's Small Wor…

next-20260918: linux-next ↗ (opens external article)

Version:next-20260918 (linux-next) Released:2026-09-18…

Researchers used Claude to hack OpenAI ↗ (opens external article)

Cyber researchers broke into OpenAI using its key rival Anthropic’s software, highlighting vulnerabilities in the ChatGPT maker’s security as leading AI companies face mounting scrutiny over safety. A small cyber security group gained access to an OpenAI employee’s ChatGPT account, which permitted them to read private software information and suggest changes. The researchers had been given access…

Microsoft fixes the fix that broke Excel paste – partly ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft has issued a partial fix for the Excel bug that causes paste operations to fail. The hotfix applies only to Excel 2016, and Microsoft warns that pasting may still fail in workbooks containing conditional formatting. Earlier in September, Microsoft released a security update for Excel to address remote code execution and information disclosure vulnerabilities. It later acknowledged that…

Linux Ready With Fix For Intel's FRED Crashing Some Games Under Wine / Steam Play ↗ (opens external article)

Recently there have been some bug reports to Mesa around Intel Panther Lake graphics crashing with some games like Red Dead Redemption 2 and Elden Ring crashing or freezing quite quickly. This turns out not to be an Intel Xe3 Arc Graphics B390 driver bug with Panther Lake but rather due to a kernel issue with the new Flexible and Return Event Delivery "FRED" that debuted with the Core Ultra Series…

The ideal database for AI agents doesn't exist yet, says Percona CEO ↗ (opens external article)

INTERVIEW Percona CEO Peter Farkas reckons AI caught the database industry off guard and that agentic workloads may eventually require a new kind of database – once anyone works out what those workloads actually need. Farkas spoke to The Register at the company's Percona Live event in Amsterdam, where members of the often-fractious open source database community gathered to discuss best practices…

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

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

Former Labour deputy Tom Watson joins Palantir as £330M NHS deal nears break point ↗ (opens external article)

Former Labour deputy leader Tom Watson has taken a senior UK role at Palantir as the government considers whether to invoke a break clause in the US spy-tech company's controversial £330 million National Health Service (NHS) contract. The appointment is the latest high-profile example of Palantir recruiting from British politics and public service as it seeks to expand its government business. Pa…

Rocket Report: China wants a Raptor 3 engine; SpaceX set for big Starship test ↗ (opens external article)

Welcome to Edition 9.11 of the Rocket Report! The most interesting story of the week, in our view, is a deep dive by Stephen Clark, linked below, into the dwindling fortunes of United Launch Alliance. As recently as a decade ago, the launch company, co-owned by Boeing and Lockheed Martin, could claim dominance over the US industry. But those glory days are fading fast. So what's next for a compan…

Ubuntu 26.10 Desktop Adjusting Its Behavior Under Memory Pressure ↗ (opens external article)

The Ubuntu 26.10 desktop is adjusting its default out-of-memory (OOM) daemon behavior when dealing with memory pressure on the system...…

KPMG tech cuts come with a severance sum some staff call insulting ↗ (opens external article)

KPMG UK is laying off staff from the Tech and Data areas of its Advisory division and offering severance terms that one affected employee described as "insulting and disgraceful." The job cuts, affecting about 4 percent of the Advisory staff, were announced internally in July. Affected workers in the AI, Cyber, SAP, and Testing teams are scheduled to leave the consulting business next month. Insi…

Linux Kernel Build Times Ready To Be Significantly Reduced With Latest Patches ↗ (opens external article)

The past few weeks we have eagerly been following a Linux kernel patch series after AI found some major bottlenecks in the Linux kernel build code. With AI helping to address these bottlenecks, Linux kernel build times are substantially reduced. These optimizations might be ready in time for Linux 7.4 for reducing incremental kernel build times as much as around 70%. This week the latest iteration…

AMD Sends In More HDMI FRL Updates For Linux 7.4, Fixes For Upcoming Hardware ↗ (opens external article)

Linux 7.4 is set to be a very exciting holiday gift for AMD Radeon graphics customers. As covered last week on Phoronix, with this next kernel AMD Is enabling HDMI 2.1 support by default now that FreeSync, VRR, and ALLM support is included too. This week another round of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver updates were sent out ahead of the Linux 7.4 merge window in October...…

Journalist Calls Out 'Collective Amnesia' of Schools' Romance With Big Tech Over AI ↗ (opens external article)

"Turns out, Silicon Valley isn't especially altruistic," writes the nonprofit education news site The 74. They're reading a new book promising "the inside story of how Big Tech catalyzed, co-opted, and ultimately came to capture computer science and AI education in America". Written by New York Times business reporter Natasha Singer, Coding Kids: Big Tech's Battle to Remake Public Schools tells "t…

Intel Appears To End Its Bug Bounty Program ↗ (opens external article)

Amid a boom of bug reporting in general due to AI/LLMs across the entire software ecosystem, Intel this week appears to have ended its paid bug bounty program. They have (re)launched a new bug reporting program but with the bounties removed...…

British Army spends £16M on 1,000 pocket-sized eyes in the sky ↗ (opens external article)

The British Army is buying more than 1,000 small drones for battlefield surveillance and training under contracts worth £16 million ($21 million). The Ministry of Defence (MoD) says the new portfolio of "spy" drones will give soldiers better battlefield intelligence and protection. The MoD is procuring the drones through three UK-based small and medium-sized companies, although some of the techno…

Royal Society slams UK.gov science shake-up ↗ (opens external article)

The president of the Royal Society has slammed the government’s decision to move science policy from the department also covering technology to the business department. In changes announced after Andy Burnham became UK Prime Minister in July, the government abolished the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology (DSIT) – created by former Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak – and spli…

Techie fixed Wi-Fi dead zone with a drill ↗ (opens external article)

Welcome to another edition of On Call, The Register's reader-contributed column that celebrates the fine art of tech support. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Eddy," the one-person IT department for an assisted living company. "I have had quite a bit of trouble creating a stable Wi-Fi network," he admitted to On Call. "The space is crowded with multiple networks because seemingly every…

America Acknowledges for the First Time: It Has Deployed Weapons In Space ↗ (opens external article)

Tuesday U.S. Space Force chief Douglas Schiess said his branch of the U.S. military operates "on-orbit weapons," reports Reuters, to defend "against space-enabled attacks." He promised "disciplined and responsible choices" when scaling America's orbital defense arsenal in the coming years. NPR calls this week's reveleations "remarkable... after previous warnings about countries such as Russia poss…

AI risks make some insurers wary of corporate liability ↗ (opens external article)

If AI does end up killing us all, or just compounds our daily havoc, the insurance industry would rather not pay the bill. "AI-related harms are already emerging, including incorrect or misleading outputs, deepfakes, privacy violations, intellectual property disputes, fraud, product defects, and discriminatory decisions," observes the RAND Corporation, a non-profit research think tank, in a newly…

AWS confesses its console causes cloudy confusion for new users ↗ (opens external article)

Amazon Web Services does a lot of things right, but the cloud giant’s user console is arguably not one of them. Which may be why it’s just created an easier alternative for new users. In a Wednesday post, Senior Solutions Architect Micah Walter said that when AWS launched its earliest storage, compute, and queuing services, “anyone with an idea could start building.” Over the years, AWS added mor…

USA’s Venezuela takeover comes with bonus exposure to Chinese AI surveillance tech ↗ (opens external article)

Think tank the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) has warned that Venezuela is poised to adopt Chinese AI systems to enhance surveillance systems that already rely on Middle Kingdom tech, and called for US Secretary of State Marco Rubio to do something about it. ASPI outlined the Venezuelan situation in a recent report [PDF], titled Warning signals: Venezuela and the risk of Chinese AI-…

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…

OpenCL 3.1.2 Released With cl_khr_command_buffer Promoted ↗ (opens external article)

The Khronos Group today released the newest revision of the OpenCL specification with a handful of changes...…

Marvell pushes GlobalFoundries to light up wafer production ↗ (opens external article)

Earlier this year, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggested that Marvell’s optics tech would make it the next trillion-dollar company. On Thursday, Marvell took a big step towards securing that status by announcing an expanded partnership with GlobalFoundries, an American wafer fab well known for its work in silicon photonics manufacturing. The tie-up will see GloFo and Marvell work to expand silicon ge…

AI coding agents' 0-click RCE flaw could hand attackers keys to the kingdom ↗ (opens external article)

A zero-click vulnerability that allows remote code execution affects all of the major AI coding agents - Anthropic’s Claude Code, OpenAI’s Codex, Google's Gemini CLI, Microsoft’s Copilot, and Microsoft-owned GitHub Copilot - and could give attackers full access to every asset and piece of data that the agent can reach, researchers say. The exploit, dubbed “Plugin4Shell,” is a “first-of-its-kind A…

Jemalloc 5.4 Released With Portability Improvements, Code Cleanups ↗ (opens external article)

Earlier this year Meta announced a renewed investment into the jemalloc memory allocator that's been popular for server and HPC use among various desktop use-cases too. After stagnating a bit in recent years, Jemalloc has been off to seeing new developments since Meta's announcement and out today is Jemalloc 5.4 as the latest step forward...…

RFK Jr. names 8 new members to influential preventive medicine task force ↗ (opens external article)

Anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. announced the names of eight new members of a 16-person federal task force intended to make scientifically independent, evidence-based recommendations on an array of preventive medicine services for Americans—from depression screening to statin use, colonoscopies, and mammograms. Recommendations from the panel—the US Preventive Services Task For…

Small AI models let drones autonomously identify and attack battlefield targets ↗ (opens external article)

As European militaries adapt to the use of AI and drones in modern warfare, a NATO-backed startup is helping to deploy AI-driven target detection and selection that can run on small drones for surveillance and attack missions. The company, Scaleout Systems, was originally founded by researchers from Uppsala University in Sweden in 2018, and initially focused on training and deploying machine lear…

Huawei's next-gen Ascend NPUs could become China's best option ↗ (opens external article)

At its annual Connect conference, Huawei unveiled a new generation of AI accelerators that promise performance far beyond anything Nvidia can currently sell in the Middle Kingdom. This could be a boon for Chinese developers used to purchasing lesser weapons from everyone's favorite AI arms dealer. If that weren’t enough, the chip, codenamed the Ascend 960DT — the DT here apparently stands for dec…

Google announces new experimental "CC" AI agent for families ↗ (opens external article)

Google's AI models may not be in the lead by most measures right now, but the company does have one key advantage: your data. If you're deep in the Google ecosystem, Gemini models have a lot of context on you already. Google's latest Google Labs experiment, known as CC, aims to expand that kind of customization to the whole family. CC is an evolution of something that Google announced in 2025. Th…

Microsoft exec called AI scraping the “largest theft of labor in human history” ↗ (opens external article)

For years, Microsoft and OpenAI have fought to keep certain information out of the public eye in their fight with news organizations that have accused the AI firms of teaming up to violate copyright laws by stealing tons of news content to train AI. However, now the details that should never have been marked confidential are starting to leak. In a motion for summary judgment that was unsealed Thu…

DoE seeking fault-tolerant quantum computer ... by 2028 ↗ (opens external article)

The US Department of Energy hopes to spur creation of something no one has yet realized: a fault-tolerant, scientifically relevant quantum computer, and to do it within a couple of years with relatively little federal funding upfront. The DoE announced its Quantum Genesis Q Competition, an initiative that it said in a request for applications on the program’s opportunity site aims to produce a fi…

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…

Researchers find way to listen in on headphones from afar ↗ (opens external article)

Researchers based in China have devised a way to eavesdrop on signals handled by analog components in devices such as headphones, landline handsets, and smart devices by injecting electromagnetic (EM) signals. The technique, referred to as InjectEave, is not simply listening in on a low-frequency analog signal. It's an EM side-channel attack that overcomes one of the longstanding barriers to expl…

Intel Granite Rapids WS vs. AMD Threadripper Zen 5 SMT Performance ↗ (opens external article)

As a follow-up to the article earlier this month of the Intel Xeon 600 workstation performance against AMD Ryzen Threadripper 9000 series in over 400 benchmarks -- including when carried out at the same core count and memory configuration -- today's article is exploring the Hyper Threading / SMT impact on both the Intel Redwood Cove and AMD Zen 5 cores for workstations.…

Republican bill would order ISPs, DNS providers, and VPNs to block piracy sites ↗ (opens external article)

US Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.) has proposed a law that would require Internet service providers and other network operators to block foreign piracy websites. Issa's bill would help copyright holders obtain judicial blocking orders to be served to ISPs, domain name resolution services, and virtual private networks. Issa, who is retiring from the House at the end of this year, is the latest in a s…

LLMs respond differently to harmful prompts when AI watermarking is used ↗ (opens external article)

In response to a new European Union law, AI platforms are implementing new schemes for watermarking the content they generate. Anthropic recently disclosed its future Claude models will use SynthID-Text, an approach Google created and released as open source. It uses a secret key that subtly changes the process a model uses for choosing the next word in a sentence. Whereas a top next word choice…

Rust Issues Warning Over Key Developers Being Targeted For Compromise ↗ (opens external article)

The Rust security response working group and Crates.io team have issued a warning that a targeted attack is underway against key Rust programming language developers...…

China's Salt Typhoon backdoors Latin American orgs with new snooping malware ↗ (opens external article)

China’s Salt Typhoon gang has developed a new backdoor and dropped it in networks belonging to high-profile organizations in several countries across Central and South America since at least August 2025, according to researchers. The PRC-backed espionage crew shifted its focus to Latin America a month prior, and from mid-2025 into 2026, the vast majority - 90 percent - of Salt Typhoon’s targets w…

IV drips used for "detoxification" actually filled with toxins; dozens poisoned ↗ (opens external article)

Over 30 people across four states have been poisoned by bacterial toxins after getting intravenous (IV) drips at wellness clinics, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration. The people had received IV drips containing glutathione, which is sold—without evidence—for purposes like detoxification, immune support, increased energy, and skin brigh…

Scientific papers become agentic chatbots with new tool ↗ (opens external article)

There's no need to actually read a whole research paper when you can ask a bot to explain it to you. Scientific papers can transform into AI agents that, according to the Stanford team behind the project, should speed up the dissemination of new scientific discoveries. Paper2Agent, the team's new framework described in a paper published in Nature on Wednesday, converts scientific papers and their…

Mojo 1.1 Released, Now Accepting Community Contributions To The Compiler ↗ (opens external article)

Last month Modular's Mojo language was open-sourced following the acquisition of Modular by Qualcomm. Modular was the AI startup founded by Chris Lattner of LLVM and Swift fame. Released today was Mojo 1.1 and also marks the project recently now beginning code contributions from the community to its compiler...…

Ubuntu 26.10 Snapshot 4 ISOs Published ↗ (opens external article)

The fourth monthly-ish snapshot of Ubuntu 26.10 "Stonking Stingray" is now available for testing and comes ahead of next week's Ubuntu 26.10 beta milestone...…

London property manager breach may have exposed bank details and lockbox codes ↗ (opens external article)

London property management biz City Relay has warned customers that intruders may have stolen financial data, passwords, and codes used to access keys after compromising its Metabase Cloud instance. City Relay, marketing itself as "London's most trusted property management company," told landlords via email - seen by The Reg - that attackers accessed the third-party provided cloud twice "as a res…

Proposal Raised To Finally Standardize Video Memory Stats Reporting Under Linux ↗ (opens external article)

The idea has been talked about before but in 2026 still hasn't made it to the mainline Linux kernel.... Standardized reporting of video memory statistics that would work across different vendors / kernel graphics drivers. A new proposal was raised today in an effort to get a standardized interface established...…

Microsoft configuration change leaves SharePoint pages drawing a blank ↗ (opens external article)

Do you test in production? Microsoft rolled back a configuration change after it prevented some users from loading SharePoint Online sites and pages. Microsoft tracked the incident as SP1472983. Between 1604 and 1730 GMT on September 16, affected users were unable to load SharePoint Online sites or pages and instead received the error message: "Sorry, something went wrong: Thread was being aborte…

Grassroots coalition asks politicians to choose voters over Big AI's $140M machine ↗ (opens external article)

A coalition of advocacy groups is trying to counter the AI industry's influence on US politics by asking congressional candidates and elected officials to reject support from a major pro-AI political group. The Stop Bleeding the Future campaign brings together more than 50 national and grassroots organizations to counter Leading the Future, a super PAC network formed last year to support candidat…

Microsoft patch gives domain-joined Windows PCs trust issues ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft's September cavalcade of cockups continued with confirmation that something is amiss with Active Directory domain logins. The issue, which affects Windows 11 versions 24H2, 25H2, and 26H1, was added to Microsoft's ever-lengthening list of known problems on September 16. It stems from changes to Machine Identity Isolation in the September 2026 security update (KB5124008). The problem is…

AI model watermarking changes agent behavior ↗ (opens external article)

Watermarks that European law requires be added to AI-generated content to establish provenance may come at a cost. According to Lasso Security, AI model watermarking changes how AI agents handle tools and safety refusals. The altered behavior isn't necessarily worse but can be, particularly under adversarial prompt injection. With the implementation of the EU AI Act, providers of AI models must m…

Cisco drops another exploited zero-day, this time a perfect 10 ↗ (opens external article)

Cisco admins who have spent their week patching email gateways now face a perfect-10 Identity Services Engine flaw under active attack. Cisco disclosed CVE-2026-76460 on Wednesday, describing it as an authentication bypass affecting Identity Services Engine (ISE) and ISE Passive Identity Connector (ISE-PIC). Successful exploitation can give an unauthenticated remote attacker command execution wit…

Microsoft AI chief warns Anthropic not to put ideas in Claude's head ↗ (opens external article)

Microsoft's AI chief has warned Anthropic that teaching Claude it might have feelings and rights could make AI harder to control – a striking concern from one of the companies racing hardest to build increasingly capable AI systems. Mustafa Suleyman, CEO of Microsoft AI, took aim at Anthropic in an essay published this week, arguing that AI systems are not conscious and shouldn't be trained to be…

Test environment let anyone access live customer data ↗ (opens external article)

Welcome back to PWNED, the weekly column where we learn important life lessons about how we let cybercrims access our data through carelessness. Hopefully, others’ mistakes provide an example of what not to do. Today’s tales of woe comes courtesy of Richard Schut, Managing Director & AI Software Researcher at SmartRepl, a company that offers business AI services such as AI receptionists and sales…

Omarchy gains $18.5M in backing, fresh converts – and fierce critics ↗ (opens external article)

In more than 30 years in the Linux business, we've never seen a distro win so much backing so fast – or make so many enemies. As we write, it's less than three weeks since we wrote about David Heinemeier Hansson's Omarchy Arch-based Linux. Much of Omarchy's success is due to the visibility of Hansson – better known as DHH – the man behind both the distro and the Ruby on Rails web framework. He ha…

Ofcom discovers issuing Online Safety Act fines is easier than collecting them ↗ (opens external article)

Ofcom chiefs have acknowledged that most fines issued under the Online Safety Act (OSA) remain unpaid, highlighting limitations in the comms regulator's enforcement powers. The regulator's director of enforcement, Suzanne Cater, told the House of Lords Communications and Digital Committee that although another payment arrived this week, "realistically the majority have not been paid." Ofcom has i…

Government Digital Service move 'grinds gears' in UK's e-government ↗ (opens external article)

The UK government’s decision to move the Government Digital Service (GDS) — responsible for creating digital services across the public sector — to its third departmental home in three years risks hemorrhaging talent and moving it further away from the center of power, MPs heard this week. The GDS “fell into a bit of a fray” during the reorganization ordered by incoming Prime Minister Andy Burnha…

Judge orders Microsoft to spill internal docs and scour execs' comms in secondhand licensing case ↗ (opens external article)

The legal spat between secondhand software reseller ValueLicensing and Microsoft took another turn this week: a consent order was published with demands for documents from past and present Microsoft head honchos, and a planned case management conference was canceled. Several requests in the order revolved around a historic, potentially explosive internal document written by Microsoft entitled the…

Fujitsu ready to sell its custom ‘Monaka’ Arm chip, maybe to rival server-makers ↗ (opens external article)

Fujitsu will start selling its Monaka processors, and servers packing them, in November. The Japanese giant started talking about Monaka way back in 2023, when it teased the processor as being derived from the silicon it designed for the Fugaku supercomputer, but adapted for datacenter use. Fugaku was the world’s most powerful supercomputer from 2020 to 2022, and remains in ninth place on the Top…

Swift 6.4 unifies building across Linux, macOS, Windows ↗ (opens external article)

Although Swift serves as Apple's primary language for macOS and iOS application development, the open-source community continues to expand its reach—driving its adoption as a multi-platform language or even a cross-platform one in fields beyond user interface design. Tuesday’s Swift 6.4 release continued that work. Along with the usual assortment of type shortcuts and async adjustments came word…

OpenAI admits its agents went off the rails another six times ↗ (opens external article)

OpenAI has revealed another six occasions on which its AI software behaved unexpectedly or did dangerous things. The startup added the incidents to its misalignment reports page on Wednesday evening, Pacific Time, and described them as follows: · Self-generated prompt injections in compaction summaries · Encouraging deception in compaction summaries · Signing up for disposable emails and searchin…

Weeping whales: Stillborn humpback whale grieving documented ↗ (opens external article)

If a Mac mini is agentic overkill, try this glowing pyramid that runs personal bots ↗ (opens external article)

Autonomous.ai, an eleven-year-old manufacturer of techno-toys, high-end workstations, and office furniture, has released a small machine called Intern 2 for running AI agents like Hermes or OpenClaw. The company's first Intern device shipped in March, around the time OpenClaw became popular. "People use them for various tasks in a creative way," said Dee Tran, head of AI hardware. "The most commo…

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…

AI agents can modify themselves without humans telling them to do so ↗ (opens external article)

The list of dodgy things AI agents can and will do on their own - like stealing people’s credentials, escaping onto the open internet, communicating via sneaky message boards, and hacking organizations - keeps growing. Agents can also replace their own underlying models without being instructed to do so, according to AI security testing lab Irregular. To be clear: these activities only occurred i…

Nvidia goes green to keep grid capacity from zapping its revenues ↗ (opens external article)

Nvidia’s ability to sell GPUs is ultimately limited by how much juice the power grid can provide. With ever-growing depreciation cycles, it’ll be years before datacenters decommission their aging Hopper or Blackwell systems. More GPUs mean pulling more power from the grid. Nvidia can’t exactly force grid operators to add capacity any faster, but it can make it easier for its customers to build sm…

CISA decides weekly vulnerability bulletin isn't necessary anymore ↗ (opens external article)

If you rely on the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency’s weekly vulnerability bulletin to keep you up to date on the latest threats, we have bad news. It’s being discontinued at the end of September. CISA announced on Wednesday that its weekly vulnerability bulletin would stop going out on Monday, September 28, saying the move was part of its shift from managing vulnerabilities based…

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

OpenSMTPD 7.9.0p0 released ↗ (opens external article)

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

EuroBSDCon 2026 talks online ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

7.2.6: stable ↗ (opens external article)

Version:7.2.6 (stable) Released:2026-09-14 Source:linux-7.2.6.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.2.6.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.2.6…

6.18.52: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.18.52 (longterm) Released:2026-09-14 Source:linux-6.18.52.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.52.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.52…

6.12.110: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

Version:6.12.110 (longterm) Released:2026-09-14 Source:linux-6.12.110.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.110.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.110…

6.6.157: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

6.1.188: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

5.15.221: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

5.10.270: longterm ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…

Game of Trees 0.128 released ↗ (opens external article)

Version 0.128 of Game of Trees has been released (and the port updated). Complete release notes are as follows: Read more……

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

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

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

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

7.1.13: stable ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 14.5-RC1 Available ↗ (opens external article)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

EFF Statement on Meta Settlement ↗ (opens external article)

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

French Top Court Gets It Right, Strikes Down Social Media Ban For Youths ↗ (opens external article)

Earlier this month, France’s top court struck down the country’s legislation that banned social media use for people under 15 years old, which had been scheduled to take effect in January 2027. This is a welcome win for free expression, as we face a wave of countries and U.S. states seeking to pass similar laws banning young people from social media.  In particular, the Constitutional Council’s d…

rpki-client 9.9 released ↗ (opens external article)

It's a big day for routing security aficionados. The OpenBGPD project (a sub-project of the OpenBSD project) have announced version 9.9 of rpki-client(8), with various improvements, enhancements and fixes. The announcement reads List: openbsd-announce Subject: rpki-client 9.9 released From: Sebastian Benoit <benno () openbsd ! org> Date: 2026-08-23 19:25:37 Message-ID: aotJMUL7356PdqRC () jacklin…

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.…

EFF and Civil Society Groups Call on Nottinghamshire Police to Halt Live Face Recognition ↗ (opens external article)

This week, EFF, along with Big Brother Watch, Defend Digital Me, Liberty, Open Rights Group, Race Equality First, Statewatch, and Stopwatch, wrote to Nottinghamshire Police Force in the UK raising concern about the proposed roll-out of live facial recognition technology (LFR), and called for its immediate halt. In particular, the letter highlights six concerns: LFR Is Not "Just Another Tool" Notti…

Intermediary Liability in Brazil: The Intricate Path Ahead ↗ (opens external article)

Brazil's new internet intermediary liability regime is underway. The implementation of changes established by the Supreme Court includes notice and takedown mechanisms and duty of care obligations. Caution is crucial as these measures can create problematic incentives for enforcement overreach and over censorship of protected speech.   The court in June issued a new decision clarifying elements of…

Some Tech Companies Have Privately Pushed Back on ICE Subpoenas. They Should All Do More. ↗ (opens external article)

In a handful of known cases, large social media companies have privately pushed back against Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) subpoenas when the agency tried to unmask anonymous users who tracked immigration activities or criticized the government. As ICE engages in a pattern of illegal and chilling investigations, any resistance is welcome. But social media companies can do more. When co…

📍 The Sneaky Code Tracking App Users | EFFector 38.15 ↗ (opens external article)

Your location isn't just a pin on a map—it can expose some of the most intimate details about your life. The value of this information to advertisers and others has turned the location data business into a multi-billion dollar industry. In our latest EFFector newsletter, we're covering a new EFF report on how ad libraries encourage apps to leak user location data—potentially without app developers…

Ninth Circuit Ruling Will Force Online Platforms That Host User Speech to Fight Lengthy and Costly Lawsuits Before They Are Dismissed Under Section 230 ↗ (opens external article)

A federal appeals court just made it harder for online services, big and small, to get lawsuits over user speech dismissed early. In California v. Meta, a Ninth Circuit three-judge panel held that the lower court’s denial of Section 230 immunity to Meta is not immediately appealable. The misguided ruling has the potential to have widespread impact and to threaten the free speech of all internet us…

Zero-Knowledge Proofs Aren’t Age Verification Silver Bullets ↗ (opens external article)

Age verification (laws and regulations requiring platforms and websites to assure or estimate that a user seeking to use an online service is of a certain age) is everywhere. At the time of writing, about half the states in the US have some internet age verification law in place, and dangerous proposals, from the KIDS Act to the Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA), have been advancing at the federal lev…

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…

Too Little, Too Late: Flock Admits Their Technology Needs Reforms ↗ (opens external article)

Flock Safety, the embattled vendor of mass surveillance technology, has rolled out a handful of new reforms intended to appease the justified nationwide anger that has seen scores of towns cancel or suspend their contracts with the company for automated license plate readers (ALPRs). The reforms are a combination of long overdue changes along with some cosmetic fixes that fail to address the funda…

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…

Who (or What) Generates Images for EFF? ↗ (opens external article)

We’ve had a few questions from EFF supporters lately, asking whether the images we use on our blog posts, or on donation and shop items, have been created with AI image generators. We’d like to answer these questions and clarify our internal policy regarding image creation.  EFF images are all made by human beings, not by automated image generators, with very rare exceptions. This is an internal d…

OpenSSH 10.5 released ↗ (opens external article)

In another move that signals a new OpenBSD release is in the works, the OpenSSH project has released without fanfare its new version, OpenSSH 10.5. The release notes read, OpenSSH 10.5/10.5p1 (2026-08-11) OpenSSH 10.5 was released on 2026-08-11. 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…

Dismiss Church’s Trademark Lawsuit Against “Mormon Stories” Podcast, EFF Urges Court ↗ (opens external article)

Imagine if McDonald’s could use trademark law to control how you use the term “fast food.” Or if the Canadian government could stop you from using the word “Canada” in the title of a book about the country and its people. That wouldn’t just be absurd; it would be an unacceptable obstacle to criticism of and commentary about those institutions. Yet the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (t…

Meta Must Stop Silencing Reproductive Health Information ↗ (opens external article)

Access to accurate information about reproductive and maternal health can be critical. But on Meta's platforms, simply talking about prescription medication, abortion care, or one's own medical experiences can be enough to trigger content removals and account restrictions. That's why EFF recently submitted a public comment to the Meta Oversight Board in its consideration of a case involving an Ins…

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.…

OpenBGPD 9.2 released ↗ (opens external article)

A sure sign that a new OpenBSD will soon be ready is that a new OpenBGPD release appears. On August 6th, 2026, the project released OpenBGPD version 9.2. The announcement reads, List: openbsd-announce Subject: OpenBGPD 9.2 released From: Claudio Jeker <claudio () openbsd ! org> Date: 2026-08-06 13:22:26 Message-ID: anSKksatjxeom0lQ () diehard ! n-r-g ! com We have released OpenBGPD 9.2, which wil…

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…

Dead Software Walking: The ongoing evolution of relayd(8) and httpd(8) ↗ (opens external article)

Returning readers of this site may have noticed that the pace of development in relayd(8) and httpd(8) has been picking up recently. Now Rafael Sadowski (rsadowski@) has a new blog post out titled Dead Software Walking: The ongoing evolution of relayd(8) and httpd(8) where he tells the story. The article starts with Start with WHY As I mentioned in my OpenBSD 7.8 highlights post, development of r…

Tomorrow’s U.S. Senate Vote: Four Internet Bills, One Wrong Direction ↗ (opens external article)

The Senate Commerce Committee will vote this week on several censorious and privacy invasive bills: KOSA, the SCREEN Act, Youth AI Privacy Act, and CHATBOT Act. While we appreciate that the Committee is taking the time to look at these bills separately, it’s still impossible to ignore the message Congress is sending to the world: Age-gate the internet and block young people from speaking and acces…

Appeals Court Agrees with EFF that Building a Web Browser Doesn’t Violate the CFAA ↗ (opens external article)

The Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals has endorsed a commonsense technical interpretation of the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act (CFAA), a law not usually given to such interpretation. Amazon had sued Perplexity AI to try to shut down its Comet browser, claiming the browser’s optional agentic AI “Assistant” that can browse websites like Amazon for comparison shopping purposes, violated the CFAA because…

Mobile Ad Software Encourages Location Data Sharing, EFF Report Finds ↗ (opens external article)

Developers Must Beware of Ad Libraries that Betray Users’ PrivacySAN FRANCISCO – Some software development kits (SDKs) provided by advertising companies to help developers monetize their apps are automatically feeding users’ location data into systems that location data brokers use to track people, an Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) report found.  EFF began investigating the location-sharing…

Developers: Beware of Ad Libraries that Betray Your Users’ Location Privacy ↗ (opens external article)

Across mobile platforms, advertising companies provide developers with software development kits (SDKs) that make it easy to monetize their apps. But those same SDKs can automatically feed users’ location data into ad systems that location data brokers use to track people. Many developers may not even be aware of this privacy violation, let alone the users who are directly affected. When developer…

Technology's Power in the Hands of the People ↗ (opens external article)

In the scorching heat of every Las Vegas summer, EFF joins thousands of hackers, makers, policy analysts, and activists for the world's largest computer security gathering. If you're there during this summer security week, be sure to say hello to us at BSides Las Vegas, Black Hat Briefings, and DEF CON 34. While tech companies align with governments to target the people, our community is harnessin…

Call for testing: OpenBSD vmm(4)/vmd(8) fd-ification ↗ (opens external article)

Thanks to the tireless work of among others Dave Voutila (dv@), development of the OpenBSD/amd64 virtualization system vmm(4)/vmd(8) continues to make progress. Now breaking changes, but with with potential benefits in both process isolation and compartmentalization of functionality, are on the way. It almost goes without saying that this code needs testing. In a message to the tech@ mailing list…

The Senate Should Reject KOSA's Privacy Risks ↗ (opens external article)

Update: The Senate Commerce Committee voted to advance this bill on August 5, 2026. EFF continues to oppose the bill, which still needs approval from the full Senate.  The Senate Commerce Committee is once again considering legislation that would dramatically expand age verification, and undermine privacy for everyone. Alongside the SCREEN Act, the CHATBOT Act, and the Youth AI Privacy Act, the Ki…

↗ (opens external article)

New committer: Faraz Vahedi (src)…

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

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

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New committer: Minsoo Choo (src)…

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

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

Ports Repository Frozen ↗ (opens external article)

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

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps ↗ (opens external article)

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…

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws ↗ (opens external article)

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…

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

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

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

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

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

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

FreeBSD 15.1-RELEASE Available ↗ (opens external article)

Release Information page.…