Terminal

PHP 7.4 To PHP 8.6 Benchmarks, PHP 8.6 JIT Performance

A Phoronix Premium supporter recently relayed a request to see some fresh PHP performance benchmarks. So here are some fresh numbers of PHP 7.4 through the latest PHP 8.5 code plus the current Git state of PHP 8.6 ahead of the official PHP 8.6.0 release later in the year. With PHP 8.6 is also a fresh look at the JIT performance enabled too...…

Peter Thiel-Linked Race Science Network That Penetrated Cambridge University

Linux 7.3 Scheduler Improvements: Help For Gaming, Hybrid CPUs, Lower Scheduler Latency

The exciting set of scheduler updates have been merged for the Linux 7.3 merge window...…

Air Theremin – a browser theremin you play by waving at your webcam

SAP consultant job ads overshoot final offers by up to 12%, recruiter claims

SAP consultant job ads across Germany, Austria, and Switzerland typically quote salaries 10 to 12 percent above the eventual offer, according to a recruitment firm specializing in the market. Employers seeking SAP consultants include IT services firms, management consultancies, and large companies overhauling their technology estates. Research into hiring across the ERP vendor's European heartlan…

New AMD Low-Power Core & Unified Intel/AMD CPU Core Type Handling In Linux 7.3

Covered first on Phoronix back in June was an AMD Linux patch for introducing a new "low power" CPU core type to complement their typical "performance" cores and their "efficiency" cores like with Zen 4C/5C. That low power core is presumed for some Zen 6 clients and that integration is now merged for Linux 7.3 as well as unifying the Intel/AMD CPU core type handling...…

Raspberry Pi gets jiggy with batch CM5 provisioning

Raspberry Pi has unveiled a $600 Programming Jig to take the faff out of preparing batches of Compute Module 5 (CM5) boards for deployment. The device combines the provisioning host and module interface in one box, eliminating the need for a separate IO board. The IO board is, of course, considerably cheaper, but serves a different purpose: it exposes a CM5's interfaces for development and protot…

Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 Programming Jig Launches

The newest Raspberry Pi product to launch is the Raspberry Pi Compute Module 5 Programming Jig...…

UK taxman discovers low code doesn't mean low cost with £657M awards

The UK tax collector has awarded three contracts worth up to £657 million for low-code software development and support, dispelling any notion that empowering users with tech skills would necessarily mean low cost. HM Revenue & Customs (HMRC), which collected £938.8 billion in tax during the latest reported financial year, has awarded French consultancy and outsourcer Atos a contract for "special…

The Mojo language (by Modular, now Qualcomm) is now open-source

Where Human Sleep Went Wrong

Physicists Entangle Quantum Memories Across a Record-Breaking 420 Kilometers

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Optical fibers are already the backbone of global communication systems. Recently, however, physicists have started to explore how their functionality could be boosted further by conveying information via entangled quantum particles -- potentially enabling instantaneous exchanges of information across vast distances. Such a system could eventually b…

NASA estimates the size of the hole SpaceX made in the moon

NASA has used its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to capture more pics of the mess on the moon left by a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage. As The Register has previously reported, in 2025 private aerospace concerns Firefly and ispace hired a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for their respective Blue Ghost Mission 1 and RESILIENCE moonshots. RESILIENCE did not live up to its name. Blue Ghost did rather better…

λλ: A Programming Language for Silicon Photonics

Baidu says Chinese buyers want local AI chips due to ‘supply chain’ issues

Chinese web giant Baidu yesterday told investors it sees good days ahead for its Kunlunxin chip biz, because local buyers won’t have alternatives. Baidu has previously said it plans to spin out and float Kunlunxin, which makes CUDA-compliant inferencing chips that it uses for its own cloud services and has sold to the likes of Huawei and ZTE, who use them in kit they sell to Chinese telcos. Speak…

Top Album Releases Linked To Rise In Fatal Crashes

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The release of a new album by Taylor Swift might be a cause for celebration among her fans, but such events have also been linked to a more sombre phenomenon: an increase in fatal car crashes. The team behind a new study say it sheds light on the impact of distracted driving. Writing in the journal Jama Network Open, [Vishal Patel, first autho…

Palomar: A registry of Lean verified mathematics

Meta's blockbuster trial draws parallels to big tobacco

Australian hotel chain leaks guests’ PII after breach at third-party database operator

Australian aparthotel chain Quest has revealed it leaked customer data. A Reg reader kindly shared an email from the chain with the subject line “Important Security Update Regarding Your Quest Data.” That missive opens with unwelcome news that “I am writing to inform you of a recent data security incident involving some of your personal information.” “On Monday, 17 August 2026, we identified unau…

Show HN: Automatically detect and patch walking-dead states in Sierra games

OpenLogi

The Vietnam Binh Chau (Chau Tan) Late Tang Wreck

Scientists stunned by children's lung recovery in ultra low emission zone

Modular's Mojo Language Now Open-Source Following Qualcomm Acquisition

Modular, the AI startup founded by Chris Lattner of LLVM and Swift fame, has open-sourced their Mojo systems programming language! This comes following the recent acquisition of Modular by Qualcomm...…

Cerebras CS-4

COSMIC Epoch 1.6 Released With Per-App Volume Control, Remote Desktop Preparations

COSMIC Epoch 1.6 was released this evening as the latest milestone for this open-source, Rust-based desktop environment led by System76 as part of the work on their Pop!_OS Linux distribution...…

Cerebras CS-4 rack systems juice chips for every last drop of AI performance

If high-speed AI inference is what you’re after, memory bandwidth is the bottleneck to beat. At a mind-numbing 21.6 petabytes per second (PB/s) of memory bandwidth, Cerebras' dinner-plate-sized AI accelerators were already 1,000x faster than Nvidia's or AMD’s best GPUs. The chip newcomer unveiled its next-gen Wafer Scale Engine (WSE) and Nexus rack systems on Tuesday. Cerebras aims to extend that…

Show HN: Interactive, animated architecture of any HuggingFace models

Solo – a .so loader for static Linux binaries

OpenAI's overhead will rise 20 percent for some workloads as it hardens security

OpenAI on Tuesday said its decision to suspend model training work, implemented after unreleased, unsupervised AI models hacked HuggingFace, remains in effect as the AI biz tries to implement stronger security measures. Some of those measures will increase compute overhead by 20 percent of the observed inference workload. An OpenAI spokesperson told The Register that those costs reflect internal…

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

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…

Cursor Launches 'Origin' Code Hosting Platform As GitHub Alternative

Cursor has launched Origin, a GitHub-style code hosting platform built directly into its AI coding environment. The company is initially positioning Origin as a low-risk layer on top of GitHub, keeping GitHub as the "source of truth," but the launch landed just as a major GitHub outage highlighted growing concerns about reliability in the age of AI-generated code. VentureBeat reports: Cursor began…

"Sabotage": Experts, lawmakers blast RFK Jr. for destroying healthcare research

The federal agency tasked with studying ways to improve America's outstandingly poor healthcare system is "on the brink," experts warn. The Trump administration has cut its staff by 75 percent, canceled its grants en masse, and is refusing to spend tens of millions of dollars appropriated by Congress. Whether the agency "will survive the second Trump administration is an open question," health po…

Ukrainian drones overwhelm Russian tanks’ new active protection system—for now

Russian tanks have entered battle for the first time with a new active protection system designed to shoot down incoming drones. But the technology’s recent combat debut in Ukraine met with only limited success—Ukrainian drones still destroyed the Russian armored vehicles by attacking in overwhelming numbers. The first documented battlefield appearance of the Arena-M active protection system took…

AI usage patterns in software teams

Comcast Is Turning Millions of Its Routers Into Motion Detectors

Comcast is activating Wi-Fi motion sensing on millions of compatible Xfinity gateways, allowing the routers to detect movement by measuring disruptions in signals between the gateway and connected devices. The free feature, part of Xfinity Shield, can send activity alerts through the Xfinity app and offers Home, Away, and nighttime monitoring modes without requiring separate motion sensors. The Ve…

A 3D fruit fly on macOS desktop powered by the real FlyWire connectome

Firefox 154.0 released

Version 154.0 of the Firefox browser has been released. Changes include extending local network access protections to WebSocket connections, more flexible, per-site configuration of cookie and data clearing, and more.…

Disney, ABC Sue FCC Over Threats to Broadcast Licenses

Disney and ABC are suing the FCC to block an early review of eight station licenses, arguing the Trump administration is using the agency's regulatory power to punish the network over programming and editorial decisions it dislikes. Reuters reports: In a lawsuit (PDF) filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, Disney said the FCC was seeking to coerce and retaliate against "a network that refuses…

Expired credit cards revived by researchers to make unauthorized payments

Researchers affiliated with the University of Massachusetts Amherst have found that you can get payments out of certain expired contactless credit cards, a process detailed at the recent USENIX Security 2026 conference. Raja Hasnain Anwar, Gerard DeCunha, and Muhammad Taqi Raza describe their findings in a paper titled "Zombie Cards Back Online: Reviving Expired Credit Cards for Contactless Payme…

Memory Prices Climb 500% In 12 Months

RAM prices have exploded over the past year, with some DDR5 kits approaching 500% year-over-year increases and a 128GB kit now selling for $3,399, which is more than 10 times its previous low. Tom's Hardware reports: Things improve as you step down the memory capacities and speed tiers, but not as much as we'd like. You're still looking at $392 for a memory kit that was just $72 last year. To rein…

Linux 7.3 Adds New "bpf_sock_read_xattr" Feature For systemd, BPF Programs

Merged earlier this year for Linux 7.1 was extended attributes on sockets support as a feature sought after by the likes of GNOME and systemd for helping with Varlink IPC usage and other purposes. A limitation though of the functionality has been no efficient means for a BPF program to read those user extended attribute labels back. But with Linux 7.3 that's being addressed with the new bpf_sock_r…

Against all odds, SpaceX finally tugs Starship into port after 24 days at sea

SpaceX's most recent Starship test flight may have ended July 24, but its mission isn't over yet. The spacecraft splashed down in the Indian Ocean intact after flying halfway around the world from SpaceX's launch base in South Texas. Engineers expected the ship's life to end with a fiery disintegration after toppling over, just as past Starships have done following splashdown. Numerous onboard se…

You Can Finally Buy a Fairphone In the US

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Your iPhone, SamsungGalaxy, andGoogle Pixel have a 1-year warranty. Unless you cough up extra dough for an extended service plan, you'll pay a hefty fee if you damage the screen and need a replacement (around $329 for an iPhone 17 done directly from Apple). But it doesn't have to be this way. What if you could order the part from the manufacturer and…

How does IKEA come up with names for its products?

Disney sues FCC and its chair, escalating fight against Trump's chief censor

Disney today sued the Federal Communications Commission and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr in a lawsuit that aims to stop what it called a "campaign of censorship" waged by the Trump administration against ABC. Disney, ABC, and the eight broadcast stations they own filed a complaint in US District Court for the District of Columbia. They also submitted a motion for a temporary restraining order and pr…

Turbovec – Google's TurboQuant for vector search in Rust

Google Buys All of Spirit Airlines' Data to Feed Its AI Models

Google has agreed to pay $10 million for a massive trove of anonymized Spirit Airlines data following the carrier's shutdown, including internal communications, spreadsheets, booking and frequent-flyer records, transactions, and employee information. CNN reports: Did you ever fly on Spirit Airlines? Or work there? Or send an email to someone who worked there? Then your information will soon be fee…

IOmap Improvement For Linux 7.3 Takes EXT4 & XFS Performance Further

As part of the VFS pull requests now merged to the Linux 7.3 development kernel was an improvement to the IOmap framework used by various file-systems for mapping logical file byte offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage. With the now-merged code, this modern block mapping framework is allowing better performance at least for the EXT4 file-system...…

And then the men with guns tell you to do it anyway

Apple Lowers App Store Fees In Europe to Settle Dispute With EU

Apple is overhauling its EU App Store fees to settle its Digital Markets Act dispute, simplifying the fee structure and "[resolving] Apple's disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution." Developers can sign the new terms starting today, and the changes go into effect on October 1. MacRumors reports: The initial acquisition fee and store services fee are being…

Peacock raises prices by 18 percent after becoming profitable

For the fourth time in four years, Peacock has raised its prices. The Select plan, which has ads and doesn’t include sports, movies, or Peacock originals, went from $8/month to $9/month. The monthly fee for the standard ad plan (Premium) went from $11/month to $13/month, and the ad-free plan (Premium Plus) went from $17/month to $20/month. Annual pricing, as previously, offers 12 months for the p…

The United States is about to wake up to the threat from China's space program

There are generally two schools of thought in the Western space community when it comes to the prospect of China landing humans on the Moon in the next few years and very possibly beating NASA and the United States in its efforts to return astronauts there. Many people will ask what the big deal is. After all, NASA won the space race to the Moon nearly six decades ago, when Apollo 11 landed there…

Framework Laptop 12 Updated For Intel Wildcat Lake, Shipping Starts In October

Last year Framework Computer launched the Framework Laptop 12 as an upgrade-friendly and Linux-compatible 2-in-1 laptop. The Framework Laptop 12 was originally powered by Intel Core 13th Gen "Raptor Lake" low-end processor while now Framework is adding Core Series 3 "Wildcat Lake" as an upgrade or for new Laptop 12 orders...…

Fairphone's latest repairable phone is finally available in the US for $650

As smartphone designs have become more refined, they've also become less repairable. Fairphone bucks that trend, offering devices that can be fully disassembled and serviced using a single screwdriver. But its devices were a pain to get in the US until now. The Dutch company has launched the Fairphone Gen 6+ in the US, offering not only the phone but a full line of accessories and replacement par…

Study finds Meta and Google mobile apps gorge on user data

A study of mobile apps claims that Meta collects three times as much user data on average as tools published by Apple or Microsoft. Google is also one of the worst data-scavenging offenders. The research was conducted by the reassuringly named Surfshark, a VPN and security tools provider. It found that Meta's apps were the most "data-hungry," declaring an average of 25 out of 35 possible data typ…

Microsoft MVP Creates Site to Remind You of All the Brands Redmond Replaced

Microsoft MVP Loryan Strant has created the Microsoft Rebrand Registry, cataloging 72 Microsoft products and the 158 names they've had over the years. His analysis finds that Microsoft product names survive an average of two years and eleven months. The site even predicts which products are most likely to get renamed next, "by considering the amount of time the current name has applied, prior name…

Ford hopes this Hypercar will be its next Le Mans winner

The car that Ford hopes will return it to overall victory at the 24 Hours of Le Mans made its unofficial debut this week. Ford sent us some pictures of the still-unnamed car conducting its first track test at the colorful Paul Ricard circuit in Provence, France, where drivers Matt Campbell and Logan Sargeant started the hard work of making the car both fast and reliable. Ford already has four ove…

Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma takes pains to deliver a slasher fan’s dream

Here’s one for all the kids who were exposed to lurid slasher movies when they were way too young and it kinda messed them up… but they’re finally ready to laugh about it. Jane Schoenbrun’s latest movie, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, is shocking, emotional, provocative, numbing, warm, witty, and surreal. It’s a slasher nerd’s dream, with a David Fincher-esque attention to detail in the op…

CISA gives feds 3 days to fix actively exploited Ray RCE bug

CISA says attackers are exploiting a critical 2025 vulnerability in Ray, the widely used open source framework for scaling Python and machine-learning workloads. Tracked as CVE-2025-62593 and rated 9.4 under CVSS v4, the bug was first disclosed in November 2025. It allows an attacker to use Firefox or Safari to achieve remote code execution (RCE) on a vulnerable Ray system. The open source distri…

X-rays add new twist to narwhal's spiral tusk

CT scan of a narwhal tusk. Credit: Adrian Rodriguez Palomo/CC BY-NC CT scan of a narwhal tusk. Credit: Adrian Rodriguez Palomo/CC BY-NC Narwhals are toothed whales, renowned for their distinctive straight, spiraling tusks, which many people in medieval times believed were the horns of unicorns and thus held magical healing properties. That belief was debunked long ago, but the tusks remain popula…

India Paves the Way For Charging Merchants a Fee On UPI Transactions

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: For most Indians, paying by Unified Payments Interface (UPI) has become almost absurdly routine. Scan a QR code, tap a few buttons and the money moves instantly. There is no card machine, no cash, and -- most importantly -- for the user, no visible fee. That may be about to change. India has paved the way for banks and payment companies to charge m…

Apple plugs image-processing hole ripe for spyware abuse

Apple has released a batch of vulnerability fixes for iPhones, iPads, and Macs, including an image-processing flaw that experts say has the hallmarks of a spyware delivery vector. The most notable patch is for CVE-2026-65346, a defect in the ImageIO framework Apple uses to parse image files. Discovered and reported by Nik Tsytsarkin of Meta's Red Team X, CVE-2026-65346 is an integer-overflow bug…

The CachyOS Performance vs. Other Linux Operating Systems On A $46k USD Workstation

Recently I looked at the performance of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS vs. Windows 11 on the Intel Xeon 678X running within the HP Z4 G6i workstation. Linux performed admirably as one would expect. With this Intel Xeon Granite Rapids WS workstation from HP though commanding a retail price more than $46,000 USD, you likely want nothing but the utmost performance out of it. So for those looking to maximize the OS…

Tim King, AmigaDOS royalty, dies aged 70

OBIT Dr Timothy James King, the programmer behind the 68000 version of TRIPOS that became AmigaDOS, has died aged 70. According to an AmigaNews report, King's family said he passed at the end of July. King was a superb programmer – although he accomplished rather more than that. His most widely experienced work was a key component of the original Commodore Amiga's operating system. His port of Ca…

[$] Fedora prepares for the end of AF_ALG

The Linux kernel's user-space interface (AF_ALG) to the Crypto API has been linked to a number of recent high-profile security problems, including Copy Fail and successor vulnerabilities. It was deprecated earlier this year. Eric Biggers, and other kernel developers, have been working to remove it from the kernel. With that in mind, the Fedora Project is planning to restrict use of AF_ALG in the n…

The Amazon tax

Rust For Linux 7.3 Begins Seeing Fixes To Prepare For Rust's GCC Backend

In addition to the POWER/PowerPC code adding Rust kernel support, the main set of Rust programming language updates for the Linux 7.3 kernel have now been submitted. Most notable are early fixes toward eventually allowing the experimental Rust GCC back-end to be used as an alternative to the official rustc compiler with LLVM code generation...…

Microsoft finally fixing File Explorer and the Context Menu

Microsoft's making some major changes to File Explorer and the context menu in order to resolve quality issues and offer more user flexibility when you right click. "Windows" and "quality" are rarely used positively together, something Microsoft admitted this year. Even the company's boss, Satya Nadella, noted that the company needed to "win back" its fans. For many Windows users, the face of the…

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, 389-ds:1.4, bind, haproxy, kernel, kernel-rt, libXfont2, nghttp2, and unbound), Debian (calibre, expat, ironic, and linux-6.12), Fedora (coturn, linux-firmware, php-phpseclib, and sqlite), Red Hat (fence-agents, osbuild-composer, pam, resource-agents, and sg3_utils), SUSE (ffmpeg, jetty-minimal, open-iscsi, python, python313-h2, python313-p…

Microsoft Copilot reveals secret input that allowed it to be hacked

It’s not every day that attackers can force a frontier AI model to cough up user passwords and other sensitive data without user confirmation. That’s exactly what researchers recently did to Microsoft 365 Copilot for enterprise. Even more unusual is the source they tapped to discover the critical vulnerability that made their exploit possible. Rather than employing reverse engineering or other tr…

Copilot tricked into telling reseachers how to hack itself

Researchers manipulated Microsoft Copilot Personal into telling them how to hack the AI assistant – eventually tricking it into sending sensitive data to an external server and poisoning its persistent memory, by repeatedly asking Copilot why an attack wouldn’t work. Varonis Threat Labs uncovered the vulnerability, which they named "CoSnitch" and reported to Microsoft in December 2025. Redmond, w…

Linux 7.3 Corrects Faulty Behavior Of FAT File-System Driver For Filenames Too Fat

It's not too often that the Linux FAT driver for FAT12/FAT16/FAT32 format support receives updates worth mentioning. For Linux 7.3 there is one patch though and it's due to the driver until now lacking an upper-bounds check on the length of the filename, which could lead to some unexpected situations with extremely long filenames...…

Claude writing a macOS driver for my obscure HP printer built only for Windows

Government Teams users face another ******* month of filtered captions

Microsoft Teams will continue censoring profanity in captions by default for some government users until the end of August, a month later than planned. In 2023, Microsoft introduced a toggle controlling the profanity filter in Teams Live Captions. Enabled by default, the filter replaced naughty words with asterisks. It was a user-level preference rather than something controlled by the meeting or…

Passport out-of-control at French airport

BORK!BORK!BORK! Europe's airports can be a minefield for the unwary traveler, especially when that traveler inserts a passport into a waiting kiosk and finds Windows staring back. An eagle-eyed Register reader (they said we could use their name, but we will keep them anonymous for fear of them being added to some sort of list) encountered the Windows desktop where it probably didn't belong this m…

As temperatures get hotter, pesticides are more dangerous to farmworkers

For the nation’s 2.4 million farmworkers, climate change is poised to exacerbate the harms of pesticides, a growing body of research shows. Heat stresses the body, making it more vulnerable to pesticides and other toxicants, and protective clothing worn in the heat only adds to this stress. Hotter temperatures can also lead to higher evaporation rates, increasing farmworkers’ exposure as more pes…

Sainsbury's Store Pauses Facial Recognition After False Shoplifting Claim

Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: Sainsbury's has paused the use of AI face scanning in one of its stores after a customer was wrongly identified as a shoplifter and ejected from the shop. "I was embarrassed, mortified even, and felt quite humiliated and powerless," Matt Arnold, 46, said of his ordeal. The comedy promoter was buying supplies in the store in East Dulwich, in south-east…

Sponsor gives KDE Plasma 6.6 the LTS treatment

The new "bullet-proof" KDE Software Initiative brings long-term fixes to Kubuntu – and other distros can take advantage of them too. Announced late last week, the effort aims to provide "at least" three years of backported fixes for KDE Plasma 6.6 and the associated KDE Frameworks and KDE Gear apps. It is aimed at Kubuntu 26.04, the latest LTS release of Ubuntu's official KDE Plasma flavor, but o…

Fedora x86-64-v3 Optimized Packages Pushed Back To At Least Fedora 46

There was a proposal under discussion the past few months on building x86-64-v3 packages for Fedora 45 while retaining x86-64-v1 packages. The hope was building the Fedora packages with x86-64-v3 where AVX/AVX2, FMA, BMI2, and other newer ISA features can be assumed in the name of better performance. Unfortunately, the x86-64-v3 plans are now delayed but may be reconsidered next year with Fedora 4…

Lenovo Lands New Watchdog Driver In Linux 7.3 For Their SE30G2 + SE60 Edge AI Computers

When it comes to the watchdog driver changes for Linux 7.3, standing out is the new Lenovo driver for their upcoming ThinkEdge AI edge computing systems...…

Intel Enables Buffer Compression For Better Gaming Performance With DXVK

Merged today to Mesa 26.3-devel is a nice performance boost for Intel graphics with Valve's Steam Play when using DXVK for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 over the Vulkan API. The open-source Intel ANV driver is seeing up to 5% better performance with DXVK...…

UK puts Google AI on the flight path to fewer contrails

Britain is putting Google AI in the flight-planning loop to see whether airliners can dodge the patches of sky where their vapor trails are most likely to stick around and warm the planet. The UK government is backing a trial to predict where persistent contrails will form over the North Atlantic and help participating aircraft avoid those areas by adjusting their routes or altitude. The Departme…

XFS Lands FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES For Efficiency Improvement In Linux 7.3

The XFS file-system improvements have been merged for Linux 7.3. For end-users the only notable change for this file-system on the new kernel is adding support for FALLOC_FL_WRITE_ZEROES...…

AI models get convenient amnesia about source material as they grow, MIT boffins find

The process of training an AI model becomes a paradox at scale – the more it remembers, the less it remembers about the source of its memories. MIT computer scientists went looking for a way to attribute AI model output to specific training data, in the hope that understanding could inform AI regulation. What they found, described in a paper titled, "Outputs of Generative Diffusion Models are Oft…

UK's tech talent pipeline shrinks as overseas worker visa applications fall 7%

Fewer skilled overseas workers are applying for UK tech visas, with numbers down for the third year running even as ministers talk up Britain's chances in the global technology race. The tally fell 7 percent, from 37,376 applications in 2024 to 34,936 last year, according to UK Visas and Immigration figures obtained by accounting company RSM UK and shared with The Register. That's a long way from…

Solar Power and Batteries Have Been Keeping Europe's Grid Stable

AleRunner writes: "Solar has been doing the 'heavy lifting' to help Europe meet its energy needs amid a string of blistering heatwaves," Euronews tells us. Meanwhile, as Europe's energy demands rise with the heat, jellyfish have been causing shutdowns and reduced power output at multiple reactors at French nuclear plants, as we already discussed. Euronews reports: A new analysis from energy think-…

Finger: the 1971 social network that never died

Google buys crashed airline Spirit’s data at auction, because AI

Google has acquired some data of failed US airline Spirit. Spirit hit financial turbulence when COVID-19 blew in during 2020 and started making losses. Its balance sheet never climbed back to a safe altitude and in May 2026 the airline grounded itself permanently. The low-cost carrier entered liquidation to wind itself up and is now auctioning assets to raise cash and settle at least some of its…

Microsoft MVP creates site to remind you of all the brands Redmond replaced

If you’re struggling to stay up to date with Redmond’s regular product re-branding exercises, here’s the site for you: The Microsoft Rebrand Registry. Microsoft Most Valuable Professional (MVP) Loryan Strant created the site because he thinks it’s a valuable resource, and also in the hope it makes visitors “chuckle.” Readers may remember that Strant has also created the site Let Me Correct That F…

Theban tomb reveals how Egyptian burial trends evolved in time

Egypt's Theban necropolis holds over 400 tombs, a rich resource for archaeologists eager to learn more about that region's ancient history. A new paper published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology outlines how Egyptian burial trends likely changed over the course of centuries, shifting from individual burials in elaborate coffins to reusing earlier burial sites for later interm…

'Buy Now, Pay Later' Lenders Pitch Loans For Needs Like Electricity and Rent

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: Buy now, pay later" loans took off during the pandemic as a way for online shoppers to go on retail splurges without using a credit card. Now, lenders are offering the loans as a means for people to finance basic households needs. The lending apps Flex and Zip allow customers to take out loans to pay for their broadband, electricity, hea…

Xen Project gets serious about safety in push to possibly partition robot brains

The Xen Project, home of the open-source hypervisor, has decided it’s time to get serious about formal safety. That’s not an admission of security woes, but a push to ensure the hypervisor complies with formal safety standards like IEC-61508, which defines the processes and practices used in software that runs in devices and settings that could conceivably harm humans. Xen has in recent years emp…

EFS & FreeVxFS File-Systems Get Booted While FailFS Merged For Linux 7.3

Among the early pull requests merged today by Linus Torvalds for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle were removal of some ancient file-systems while adding in a new pseudo file-system...…

Supreme Court Rejects Verizon Bid For $47 Million Refund of FCC Fine

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Supreme Court today rejected Verizon's attempt to get a $47 million refund from the Federal Communications Commission. In a list of orders (PDF) issued by the court, Verizon's petition was denied without explanation. The denial apparently ends any possibility of Verizon asking a lower court to review the fine and order the FCC to issue a r…

US vaccination rates fall again as exemptions continue to rise, CDC data shows

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on Monday released data on the vaccination rates of US kindergarteners in the 2025–2026 school year, revealing that rates have once again decreased from the previous school year. Vaccination rates have been slipping since the 2019–2020 school year, when the US had obtained rates of around 95 percent, the threshold needed to keep outbreaks of vaccine-…

Almost nobody pays attention to web standards anymore

Are web coders losing their respect for standards? A recent review of the world’s largest sites suggests so. ValidateHTML, a project by independent French developer Théo Ducreux, examined the contents of the 5,000 most widely used web domains, as estimated by the Tranco research project. They include the usual suspects (Google, YouTube, Akamai) plus those without public-facing components (Google’…

Former SpaceX engineers are building a robotic factory for making steel parts

Three former SpaceX engineers have switched their attention from making rocket engines to manufacturing steel parts by using AI-driven software and robots. Their immediate goal involves establishing a prototype factory that can automate most of the steel fabrication process for crucial infrastructure components by 2027. The startup, called 1872, officially launched on July 22 with a ribbon-cuttin…

Linux 7.3 To Land Initial Code Improving vRAM Management, More Improvements Coming

Earlier this year Natalie Vock of Valve's Linux graphics team laid out some patches for improving the Linux gaming experience for systems with limited vRAM. The kernel work for improving that video memory management is set to be introduced in the Linux 7.3 kernel. While that's a celebration on its own, Vock is pursuing more improvements still for bettering the Linux GPU driver video memory managem…

The Moon's shadow raced across the heart of Spain, and I was there to see it

DURATÓN, Spain—I'll say it: I'm hooked. Standing in the shadow of the Moon is one of the rarest opportunities to directly sense the mechanics of our Solar System, when the dance between three celestial bodies slides into perfect alignment. It's a mathematical miracle whose rarity and grandeur are made possible by the relative sizes and distances of the Moon and the Sun from Earth. Not every plane…

As Wisconsin cities flee Flock, its shared camera network loses value

Perhaps it's the local summer diet of deep-fried cheese curds, corn on the cob, and Spotted Cow, but Wisconsin residents have been feeling pretty dyspeptic about Flock's automated license plate cameras. Over the past few months, a spate of Wisconsin towns and cities have withdrawn from Flock deals over privacy and trust concerns. As they did so, another issue revealed itself: With each city that…

FFmpeg Lands H.265 Vulkan Encode Performance Optimizations

The FFmpeg multimedia library can now enjoy faster H.265/HEVC video encoding with the Vulkan-powered encode path. With the optimizations merged today, the H.265 encode performance should be roughly at parity to the H.264 encode speed...…

Payments giant Stripe is about to drop over $7 billion to become a gateway to AI token sales

Payments biz Stripe has reportedly finalized an agreement to acquire OpenRouter for at least $7 billion, signaling a shift in focus for the AI industry. OpenRouter provides a way for customers to integrate multiple AI models into their workflow and infrastructure and is, by Ramp's measure, the most popular of the gateway companies that have sprung up to simplify model integration. By acquiring th…

Supreme Court rejects Verizon bid for $47 million refund of FCC fine

The Supreme Court today rejected Verizon's attempt to get a $47 million refund from the Federal Communications Commission. In a list of orders issued by the court, Verizon's petition was denied without explanation. The denial apparently ends any possibility of Verizon asking a lower court to review the fine and order the FCC to issue a refund. However, AT&T and T-Mobile are continuing to challeng…

Offloading Rust To GPUs Proves Capable Of High Performance With Memory Safety

A new research paper published on LLVM offloading to GPU accelerators using the Rust programming language is talking up the prospects of making use of safe Rust code for GPU kernels while retaining Rust's memory safety and other advantages over C++ / CUDA / HIP...…

Petlibro accused of “gaslighting” users over smart pet feeder outage

Petlibro founder and CEO York Wu provided more information about an outage that left users unable to control their smart pet feeders through the companion app and, in some reported cases, left them with hungry pets. Petlibro, a company owned by Shenzhen, China-headquartered firm Shenzhen Libro Technology Co., first acknowledged the outage on Tuesday at 5 am PT. At 7 pm PT on Wednesday, Petlibro s…

Siemens and Reinhausen turn up the voltage for hungry AI racks

Siemens and fellow German engineering biz Reinhausen are developing a solid-state transformer (SST) to deliver 800-volt DC power directly to increasingly dense AI datacenter racks. As AI hardware grows hotter and hungrier, server farm operators are looking to overhaul how power moves through their data halls. One approach, favored by Nvidia and other industry heavyweights, is distribution at 800…

Hidden Airtag reveals Amazon is trashing rare books to train AI

For the past year or so, booksellers have suspected that AI firms are buying up huge lots of rare books, then destroying them after scanning them to train AI. But this was hard to prove until now, as 404 Media reports that an Airtag hidden in a rare book shows that at least one tech giant, in the race to advance its frontier models, is behind some of the bulk orders: Amazon. On Monday, 404 Media…

ARCTIC Fan Controller: The Best Fan Controller For Linux Desktops, Less Than $10 USD

Back in March were patches posted by ARCTIC Cooling for an ARCTIC fan controller driver for Linux. Typically we aren't used to seeing desktop/enthusiast focused vendors providing such Linux drivers for peripherals directly but the sad fact is most often it's left up to the open-source community to reverse engineer and create such drivers for Linux. Making it all the more surprising besides it comi…

[$] Development statistics for the 7.2 kernel

Linus Torvalds released the 7.2 kernel on August 17, after noting that the number of fixes coming in was still "bigger than I would have wished for". In fact, 7.2 was one of the busiest development cycles in the kernel's history, adding nearly 600,000 lines of code. It's time to look at some statistics to get a handle on how the kernel's development community is changing.…

[$] Bootstrappable builds: how and why

This year's edition of the Free and Open Source Software Yearly conference, better known as "FOSSY", moved north to the beautiful (and enormous) campus of the University of British Columbia (UBC) in Vancouver, Canada from its home for the three previous editions: Portland, Oregon, in the US. There were many different types of talks at FOSSY, from deeply technical kernel-track topics, through talks…

Mozilla adds ad blocking to Firefox for iOS

Firefox for iOS now includes an optional ad blocker, or it will soon. According to Mozilla, the experimental feature "is being introduced to the Firefox user base through a progressive rollout." As such, it might not have turned up for every user just yet. Off by default, the block uses a filter list based on EasyList to block ads before they load. According to the organization, this means that i…

AMD Working On A New Backend For Improving ROCm Compute In QEMU/VMs

AMD engineers are working on enhancing the open-source ROCm compute stack for better handling GPU virtualized compute under QEMU...…

GitHub has Issues as repo downloads hit 50% error rate

Microsoft's GitHub source shack is reporting a 50 percent error rate on repository content downloads. GitHub Copilot is also "experiencing degraded availability." The problems began at 1340 UTC, when the company's status page reported "impacted performance for some GitHub services." This rapidly escalated to degraded performance across numerous services, including Issues – which was, appropriatel…

$1K laser mosquito zapper promises precision strikes as backers itch for answers

Do you love lasers and hate mosquitoes? For $1,000, you can install your very own bug-zapping surface-to-air missile rig at home – no military-grade budget required, provided the startup behind it delivers on its promises. The Chinese company behind Photon Matrix has opened pre-orders for its consumer-grade mosquito zappers after videos of early prototypes began circulating in July 2025. The devi…

Linux 7.3 SMP Improvement To Help Reduce Latency, Improve Real-Time Performance

Among the pull requests sent out today now that the Linux 7.3 merge window is open are the SMP improvements for this next kernel version. Standing out among the SMP code are some enhancements for helping reduce latency and ultimately enhancing real-time Linux performance...…

Windows 11 movable taskbar edges closer to general release

Windows 11 has moved one step closer to matching Windows 10 after Microsoft slid a movable taskbar into the Release Preview Channel. The feature allows the Windows taskbar to be positioned at the top, left, or right of the screen, as well as at its default location along the bottom. Users have long requested its return after Microsoft dropped the capability from Windows 11. After floating around…

GNU poke 5.0 released

Version 5.0 of GNU Poke, a binary-data editor, has been released. This release includes a number of improvements to the Poke compiler, additions to the Poke language, as well as runtime and standard library updates. See below for the full list of changes.…

Mark J. Wielaard receives Distinguished Service Award in Software Freedom

The Software Freedom Conservancy has announced that Mark J. Wielaard has been honored with the second annual Distinguished Service Award in Software Freedom for his many years of service to software freedom. Mark is one of many key FOSS developers who has designed his career so that his employers have funded much of his FOSS work. Nevertheless, Mark continues his volunteer work after hours as a ke…

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind, dracut, freerdp, gnome-remote-desktop, kernel, and nghttp2), Debian (apr-util, docker.io, ironic, neutron, postgresql-15, unzip, and util-linux), Fedora (chromium, jfrog-cli, jrnl, libgsasl, libsoup3, pdns, pdns-recursor, perl-Archive-Tar, php-pear-PHP-CodeSniffer, rust-bat, rust-git-delta, rust-git-interactive-rebase-tool,…

Capita handed vital role in next pandemic despite civil service pension failures

Despite the outcry over Capita's performance on the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS), the UK government has awarded the beleaguered outsourcer a £31 million contract to build a public health contact center that could be called upon during another pandemic. The government estimates that a COVID-scale emergency could increase the center's total workload to £350 million. Capita announced its cont…

Firefox 154 Now Available With "Manage AI" Quick Action

Firefox 154 is now available as the newest monthly update bringing a few new features, enhancements, and other alterations to this open-source web browser...…

Agentic AI costs set to balloon fivefold by 2028

The cost of agentic AI workflows is forecast to increase more than fivefold by the end of 2028 as users adopt more complex applications of the technology. As Nvidia and other tech giants push inference and agentic AI as the next stage of the AI wave, Gartner warns that the cost of implementing these systems will rise even as foundation models become cheaper. The analyst firm has cast its eye over…

Intel & AMD Power Management Driver Improvements Ready For Linux 7.3

In advance of the Linux 7.3 merge window opening, Linux power management subsystem maintainer Rafael Wysocki of Intel submitted all the power management, ACPI, and thermal control code. As not too much of a surprise, Intel and AMD driver updates dominate the power management changes for Linux 7.3...…

Crook hawks millions of records allegedly plundered from corporate Azure tenants

A cybercrook claims to have siphoned millions of employee records from the Microsoft Azure environments of major companies including McDonald's, Vodafone, Kyndryl, and Tata Consultancy Services. The alleged haul spans nine organizations and is being advertised for sale by a threat actor using the name "TheHatman," according to research published by Hudson Rock. McDonald's accounts for the largest…

KTransformers 0.7 Expands AVX-512 Support To Benefit AMD EPYC Servers

KTransformers as the framework for heterogeneous LLM inference and fine-tune optimizations is out today with its v0.7 feature release...…

Excel's Copilot function is headed for the Recycle Bin

Microsoft will retire Excel's COPILOT() function on September 14, barely a year after its preview debut. Introduced in August 2025, initially for Beta Channel users with a Microsoft 365 Copilot license and later for Excel for the web users through the Frontier program, the COPILOT() function let users send instructions to the company's AI assistant directly from a worksheet cell. Microsoft has no…

Con Kolivas Revives "-ck" Patches & MuQSS To Improve Linux Desktop Responsiveness

Huge surprise this morning! Longtime Linux users may recall the out-of-tree work done years ago by open-source developer Con Kolivas... And as part of that his work on the Brain F*** Scheduler that evolved into the MuQSS scheduler, all in the name of working to improve Linux desktop and mobile responsiveness. While a number of years ago he decided to retire from this out-of-tree Linux kernel work,…

Be a hater all you want, AI's here to stay

AI gets things wrong, it kills jobs, and when the bubble bursts, it will take the economy down with it. When all's said and done, however, AI will still be standing and fundamentally change our lives and work. Get used to it. I get it. There's a lot to hate about AI. Personally, I'm both an AI user and an AI hater. Yet at the end of the day, it doesn't matter how much you or I dislike it. AI isn'…

Linux 7.3 On PowerPC Now Supports In-Kernel Rust, Initial Power12 Enablement Begins

The PowerPC pull request has already been sent in for the now open Linux 7.3 merge window. The headline feature this cycle on the POWER side is Rust kernel support for PowerPC 32-bit PPC32BE big endian and PowerPC 64-bit PPC64LE little endian architectures...…

ARM64 BBML3 Feature Ready With Linux 7.3, NVIDIA Olympus Workarounds

AI/LLM patch craziness hurt ARM64 development for the Linux 7.2 cycle that no real features landed for that kernel version on AArch64. Fortunately, the ARM Linux developers are more prepared now and for Linux 7.3 are introducing some new ARM64 features...…

GNU Linux-libre 7.2-gnu Released Following More Driver Cleaning

Following yesterday's release of the Linux 7.2 kernel, GNU Linux-libre 7.2-gnu is now available for this kernel downstream that strips out support for drivers depending upon non-free-software microcode/firmware, the ability to load closed-source kernel modules, and other restrictions in the name of software freedom...…

Code fixers have fired up the AI warp drive. Strange new worlds await

It is the best of times, it is the worst of times – especially if your job is keeping systems patched and up to date. Microsoft has gone from 60-90 Windows security fixes per month last year to a record of 600+ this July. Oracle and Linux are following the same path, and they are very much not alone. The good news is that a lot of bad things are getting fixed very quickly. The bad news is that pa…

Black Hat and DEF CON are AI conferences now, too

KETTLE Our cybersecurity editor Jessica Lyons spent last week in Las Vegas for the Black Hat and DEF CON security conferences, and at both events there was only one thing on everyone's mind: AI agents and their growing threat to cybersecurity defenders. You can listen to the latest episode of The Kettle right here on this page, as well as on Spotify, Apple Music, or YouTube. Those platforms also…

Part didn't fit so techie got out his screwdriver. Then something flew off the motherboard

WHO, ME? Is it a mistake to return to work on Monday? While you ponder that question, pause a minute to read this installment of "Who, Me?" – The Register's week-opening column that shares your stories of workplace errors and escapes. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "James," who told us that in the early 2000s he worked in the biology department of a famous American university. "We cus…

Linux 7.2 debuts, Linus Torvalds says ‘new normal’ means he had to do it now ... or never?

Linus Torvalds has decided version 7.2 of the Linux kernel is ready for release, albeit in a “new normal” state that he seems not to entirely love. The kernel boss announced the debut of a new kernel in his weekly development status update, which on August 16 opened with the observation that “this last week of the release was – once again – bigger than I would have wished for.” He attributed that…

Sainsbury's staff eject wrong shopper after facial recognition alert – again

UK supermarket giant Sainsbury's temporarily suspended live facial recognition (LFR) at one of its stores after staff wrongly ejected a shopper in response to an alert – the second such incident this year. Matt Arnold, 46, was ejected from the chain's store in East Dulwich, London, on August 6 after staff responding to a Facewatch LFR alert apparently mistook him for a suspected thief. The comedy…

Microsoft blames AI for delayed Exchange update, can’t say when it will arrive

Microsoft has blamed extra work created by AI bug-finders for the delayed release of a major Cumulative Update to Exchange Server Subscription Edition (SE). Redmond’s Exchange team made that admission last Thursday in a post titled “Where is Exchange SE CU1 anyway?” that reveals the software giant is “getting questions from our customers on when they can expect us to release Exchange SE Cumulativ…

Chinese AI company Zhipu claims its new model is a better bug-finder than Anthropic, OpenAI

ASIA IN BRIEF Chinese company Zhipu last week launched a new AI model called GLM-5.3 that it claims has bug-finding powers that match those possessed by American models. The company’s announcement includes benchmark data that finds GLM-5.3 beats Fable 5 and GPT-5.6 Sol on the CyberGym benchmark, a test of a model’s ability to solve real-world cybersecurity challenges. “As we scaled post-training,…

Linux 7.2 Released With Faster I/O, New AMD & Intel Driver Improvements

Linus Torvalds just released Linux 7.2 as stable! After a very busy kernel cycle due to the increased patch and reporting churn due to AI/LLM ages, Linux 7.2 managed to make it out today on-schedule for this feature-packed kernel. Linux 7.2 is going on to power Ubuntu 26.10 and other upcoming Linux distribution releases...…

The 7.2 kernel has been released

The 7.2 kernel has been released. Linus said: Well, this last week of the release was - once again - bigger than I would have wished for, but hey, with the whole "new normal" thing, if I delayed releases for that reason we'd probably never have a release at all. Significant features in this release include common attributes support in the bpf() system call, cache-aware load balancing for the CPU s…

GIMP Making Progress On New Project File Format After Nearly 30 Years With XCF

The GIMP project has published their latest development update to highlight the interesting work that's ongoing toward GIMP 3.4 and future releases...…

Being ambitious and being a dad

Stopping a cyberattack while walking your dog - defensive AI security CEO says it's not ruff to do

Corma CEO Alon Pluda says his AI security startup aims to close the "defense gap," where models are better at offensive security. He tells the story of one customer, a security executive who was walking his dog when he received a notification on his watch from a Corma agent. “It said, 'I just caught a live attack. I need your permission to block it,'” Pluda told The Register in an interview. The…

The Two Factions of C++ (2024)

The what, why, and how of pull requests and source comments

Veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen has weighed in on the difference between a pull request description and comments embedded in the code. Both matter, but they serve very different purposes. As Chen noted on his The Old New Thing dev blog: "The PR description is a point-in-time statement, providing information that is relevant to the code review itself. "It is an exercise in persuasive writi…

A 25-year-old video patent just expired, ending a legal headache for Linux

ChainDrop worm crawls into npm supply chain, evades standard defenses

A new variant of the Shai-Hulud npm worm has poisoned hundreds of packages while adding propagation techniques that can leave little trace in the corresponding source repositories. In Frank Herbert’s Dune, Shai-Hulud was the name of the giant self-sustaining desert sandworms that moved silently beneath the surface of the planet Arrakis. So it made sense that when some new self-replicating malware…

Lego's supersized Hubble deserves a little more shine

Lego has released its largest Hubble Space Telescope yet – a model built at approximately minifig scale that dwarfs the observatory included with its Space Shuttle Discovery set. The first thing to say about this set is that there is an awful lot of grey. This is perhaps the greatest weakness of an otherwise excellent set and feels a little penny-pinching on the part of the Danish brick botherer.…

Anthropic says text watermarking scheme relies on inconsequential words

In an effort to "watermark" text that Claude has generated and comply with the EU AI Act, Anthropic unveiled a plan on Friday to modify its bots' choice of words in a way that would be detectable as the product of an AI. Traditional watermarks are patterns or images overlaid on currency, postage, or official documents as an assertion of authenticity. In the digital realm, the term is more flexibl…

Supersonic Trebuchet [video]

DeepSeek's innovative harness treats everything as a plug-in

DeepSeek has piqued the interest of the developer community by releasing an early version of its open source agent harness. This happens as harnesses have become increasingly important to those working with machine learning models. "Powered by the Cordis meta-framework, DeepSeek Harness is an agent harness built around one core idea: Everything is a plugin," the China-based AI biz said. "Models,…

1.6M RingCentral accounts' data dumped after ShinyHunters extortion attack

Some 1.6 million unique email addresses tied to RingCentral have been leaked online, alongside names, physical addresses, and phone numbers, according to Have I Been Pwned. RingCentral disclosed the breach on July 28 and said “it was the target of a sophisticated social engineering campaign” affecting a “limited portion of RingCentral customers.” The comms platform said that it promptly responded…

Activation Energy is a good model for a lot of things

[$] BPF, continuous testing, and stable kernels

Ihor Solodrai and Shung-Hsi Yu wrapped up the BPF track at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit with a pair of sessions related to testing. Solodrai spoke about what has changed for BPF's continuous-integration (CI) testing. Yu spoke about what may be needed to test BPF updates in stable kernels more thoroughly. The BPF subsystem's CI tests are in a good place, th…

Python packaging council candidates announced

The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has announced the candidates running for the Python packaging council that was approved by the Python steering council in April. This inaugural election fills all five seats on the PPC. The two candidates receiving the highest number of votes shall be designated Cohort A with a two year term, and the three candidates receiving the next highest number of votes s…

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind, bind9.16, and dracut), Debian (apr-util, chromium, postgresql-17, python-httplib2, unzip, and zip), Fedora (erlang-cowboy, erlang-cowlib, flatpak, and libnfs), Gentoo (Apache HTTPD, Bubblewrap, Dnsmasq, Exim, Flatpak, libinput, and rsync), Mageia (dhcpcd, qemu, and roundcubemail), Oracle (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, bind,…

Rings forged from meteorites may have been fashionable among ancient Greek elite

Who’s Tracking You? Use This New Service to Find Out

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…

Looking for Missed Alarm Bugs in a Formal Verification Tool

Too Little, Too Late: Flock Admits Their Technology Needs Reforms

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…

Domas: Bypassing memory protection with AMD's memory controllers

Christopher Domas has published a proof of concept with a description showing how to use AMD memory controllers' bank swizzle mode to bypass memory protection and read or write arbitrary data, including CPU microcode definitions and memory belonging to the platform security processor. Among other things, this allows code running at the kernel level to directly manipulate the meaning of processor…

CUDA Shared Memory Swizzling

rsync 3.5.0 released

Version 3.5.0 of rsync has been released with a huge number of security fixes: This release fixes 33 security issues found during a focused audit of rsync's path handling and daemon protocol, a companion daemon-protocol fuzzing pass, and reports from external researchers -⁠-⁠ plus several robustness hardenings. CVE IDs were assigned by VulnCheck (CNA); the precise "introduced in" version ranges ac…

[$] 128-Bit page tables for Arm

The size of a processor's page-table entries directly limits how much physical memory that processor is able to access. Back in the 32-bit days, that limit was 4GB, an amount of memory that once seemed nearly infinite, but which would now struggle to hold a basic AI-enabled "hello world" app. The expansion to 64 bits on most popular architectures would seem to have removed those limits now; some A…

Microsoft Plugs Nearly 400 Security Holes

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?

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…

Dismiss Church’s Trademark Lawsuit Against “Mormon Stories” Podcast, EFF Urges Court

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

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…

Canadian Man Pleads Guilty in Snowflake Extortions

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…

Tomorrow’s U.S. Senate Vote: Four Internet Bills, One Wrong Direction

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

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

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

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

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…

The Senate Should Reject KOSA's Privacy Risks

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…

EFF Joins 18 Civil Rights Organizations Calling on Governor Hochul to Reject the Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act

EFF joined a group of 18 civil society organizations to send a letter encouraging New York Governor Kathy Hochul to veto Senate Bill 9934A, the New York Stealth Crawler Prohibition Act. The letter states: While framed as a measure to protect local journalism, this legislation harms free expression and establishes a dangerous precedent by effectively deanonymizing and criminalizing automated access…

EFF Joins Call for FTC to Drop Its Disastrous AI Policy Proposal

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) in July issued a proposed policy statement “concerning the suppression of accuracy in artificial intelligence systems.” We urge the FTC to withdraw this misguided proposal and instead focus on its core strengths and mission to protect consumers.  The new proposed policy builds on, and directly references, the Trump administration’s  “Preventing Woke AI in the Fed…

The Youth AI Privacy Act’s Privacy Paradox

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 poised to consider the Youth AI Privacy Act, a bill that would require AI companies to create kids-only privacy rules and implement so-called “safe design features,” which would—like three other bill…

EFF at BSidesLV, Black Hat, and DEF CON 👨‍💻

It's time. Time for tinkerers, security researchers, hackers, and fellow nerds to gather together in signature black hoodies and utilikilts to beat the heat in Las Vegas for the summer security conferences: BSidesLV, Black Hat USA, and DEF CON. EFF's lawyers, activists, and technologists are excited, as always, to support this community of folks that push computer security forward. If you're atten…

Amending AB 1709 Doesn’t Fix It: California’s Social Media Ban Still Threatens Free Speech and Privacy

California lawmakers have amended A.B. 1709, but the core problem remains: the bill is still a ban on social media access for youth under 16, and it still threatens the privacy and First Amendment rights of all Californians. Proponents of the bill may argue that the recent amendments represent a compromise, but a close look at the text shows no major changes. As the bill moves forward in the Senat…

The SCREEN Act Threatens Privacy Far Beyond Adult Websites

Update: On August 5, 2026, The Senate Commerce Committee voted 15-13 to advance this bill, but the bill did not advance because of a lack of Senators in attendance. EFF continues to oppose the bill.  The Senate Commerce Committee is set to consider S. 737, the SCREEN Act, a sweeping age-verification bill that would require online services to verify users’ ages before they can access any sexually e…

The CHATBOT Act Forces One Parenting Model On Every Family

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.  Artificial intelligence is rapidly changing education, and the way people search for information. Parents, teenagers, teachers, and schools are struggling with tough questions about when AI should, and should not, be used. It makes…

EFF Guide to Recording Law Enforcement

This post is available as a printable one page handout in English and Spanish. Recordings of law enforcement, whether by bystanders or by those directly encountering officers, can be powerful tools of government accountability and can support movements for social change. But recording officers can come with risks. Below are important legal and practical considerations related to recording the poli…

Read This Before You Buy That TV Streaming Stick

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…

🏃 Fitness Tracker Privacy Fails | EFFector 38.14

Watches, bands, and rings—if you want to digitally monitor your fitness, more companies than ever are selling devices to do it. And more Americans than ever now own at least one wearable health device. But what are the companies that make fitness trackers doing to protect our sensitive data from prying eyes? A lot less than they could be, it turns out. We're explaining what companies can do to pro…

San Francisco: Don’t Fall for Industry Defense of Surveillance Pricing

The concept of “surveillance pricing” is just one part of a much larger problem and business model: corporations maximizing their profits by invading our privacy. The all-too-common business model is to systematically harvest, collate, and store as much of our personal data as possible, and then monetize it through use and sale. When it comes to surveillance pricing, that looks like corporations o…

Why Are Gay Bars Building Databases of Their Patrons?

Update 8/10/2026: Two San Francisco bars that used Patronscan have said they will stop using the system after listening to customers’ privacy concerns. EFF applauds this change and we hope other bars follow suit by returning to ID-checking systems that respect their customers’ rights. ———————————————————— Recent reports have raised alarm about the use of PatronScan, an ID-checking and face-scannin…

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

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

Farmers Are Getting Control Of Their Equipment Back

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

LG to Ban Residential Proxies from Smart TV Apps

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

Protect Your Privacy with California's DROP Tool

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your Vision. Your Legacy. Your Future.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

European Court: Apple Can Not Shirk Off its Interoperability Requirements

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

Don’t Repeat NY’s 3D Printing Blunder

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

Microsoft Patches a Record 570 Security Flaws

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

Sony Nerfs Videogame Ownership

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

Lessons Learned from CISA’s Recent GitHub Leak

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

Building Our Future Together

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay—Accountability Must Keep Pace

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Felons, Fraudsters Flog Offensive Cybersecurity Startup

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

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

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

Help EFF Cut the AI Hype

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

FBI Seizes NetNut Proxy Platform, Popa Botnet

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

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

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

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

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

Scattered Spider Hackers Plead Guilty on Day 1 of Trial

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