Terminal

Major Banks In Talks To Exploit Debit Card Loophole

JPMorgan, Bank of America, Wells Fargo, PNC, and other major banks have reportedly explored acquiring Fiserv's debit-card networks, STAR and Accel, in a move that could help them bypass federal caps on debit-card transaction fees. A law limits the fees big banks can charge merchants, but only if the transactions are routed through an outside network. There are no caps on these interchange fees ove…

South Korean chip startup FuriosaAI invades European datacenters

Power-efficient South Korean AI chip startup FuriosaAI has landed on European shores. On Tuesday, the chip biz revealed that it had begun fielding its RNGD — pronounced “renegade” — line of AI accelerators at colocation giant Equinix’s LS2 datacenter in Lisbon, Portugal. Founded by June Paik and Hanjoon Kim back in 2017, before LLMs were cool, Furiosa has largely focused its attention on the Sout…

CAI cloud worm gives competitors' malware the boot, then steals secrets and mines for coin

EXCLUSIVE There's no honor among thieves as a new worm steals from other infectious software. It pilfers “multiple” victims’ credentials and mines for cryptocurrency while killing competitors’ processes, including similar secret-harvesting malware. It’s called Cloud AI Infrastructure Attack Framework (CAI), and it’s a centralized botnet that targets cloud-native developer tools like Docker, Kuber…

Microsoft Can Track Users Via a Windows Device ID

A criminal complaint against alleged Scattered Spider member Peter Stokes revealed that Microsoft can associate Windows activity with a persistent "Global Device ID," which investigators used to link his PC to online activity connected to a hack. While unique device IDs are common, the case has raised privacy concerns because the identifier can apparently persist across updates, has no simple opt-…

New Literalism Comes for Museums

NASA calls time on CAPSTONE after four years of lunar orbit lessons

After four years of operations around the Moon, NASA's CAPSTONE mission has bitten the lunar dust, in a manner of speaking. The Cislunar Autonomous Positioning System Technology Operations and Navigation Experiment (CAPSTONE) was launched in 2022, with a primary mission to validate the near-rectilinear halo orbit (NRHO) intended for NASA's "paused" Gateway space station. Launched in June 2022 on…

This race car is made from plant fibers, volcanoes, ... and seawater?

To varying degrees, each form of motorsport combines sport, entertainment, and technological development. As Ars has explored, there are valuable lessons that companies can learn from competition, particularly when the pressure is as intense as Formula 1. If you asked me last month, I would likely have said that when it comes to historic racing, it's almost all about the sport and entertainment,…

Mapping homes you can buy from the US government for <$100k

China sentences official to death for taking $325M in bribes

Reducing Doom Loops with Final Token Preference Optimization

Jim's TrueType QR Code Font

New tool gives CLIs a warm and GUI feeling instead

Using command-line tools is often the best way to get something done, but remembering all those flags is a chore. Now, you can let a simple open-source CLI module turn any command into a GUI for you instead. That’s the solution Jordanian full-stack software engineer Omar Soutari built for his first entry into the FOSS community and released this week. Instagui, as he calls it, parses CLI tools’ h…

MacSurf 1.68 – NetSurf on OS 9 Released

Automated Moderation Is Here to Stay

This blog post is part 1 of a 2-part series. The second part will set 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 crisi…

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…

Facing US export controls, China's DeepSeek plans to make its own chips

DeepSeek, the Chinese startup developing large language models that are competitive with those from US companies like OpenAI and Anthropic, is planning to enter the silicon business, according to Reuters. Citing three people familiar with the matter, Reuters writes that DeepSeek has been working on a move into silicon for about a year. It has been meeting with potential partners in the hardware a…

Amazon Will Stop Accepting New Customers For Mechanical Turk

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: These may be the last days of Amazon's Mechanical Turk. An announcement on the Mechanical Turk website says that on July 30, 2026, the crowdsourcing service will close to new customers. Amazon Web Services says the decision was made after "careful consideration," adding, "Existing customers can continue to use the service as normal. AWS continue…

Predatorgate snoopfest victims launch €8M sueball at spyware maker

Eight victims of Greece’s spyware scandal, later dubbed “Predatorgate,” have sued the Athens-based company behind the program used to surveil them. According to the Predator victims’ lawyer, Zacharias Kesses, each of the plaintiffs is asking for €1 million in moral damages after having their devices hacked between 2020 and 2021. Among those seeking damages is journalist Thanasis Koukakis, who was…

30papers.com – Ilya's 30 essential ML papers, in a beginner friendly format

Dragonflies maneuver like fighter pilots

Credit: Samuel T. Fabian et al., 2026 Credit: Samuel T. Fabian et al., 2026 Male dragonflies are known to engage in mid-air "dogfights" to defend their breeding territory, using different maneuvers than those they employ when hunting prey. A new paper published in the Journal of the Royal Society Interface concluded that relatively simple rules drive that behavior, namely that male dragonflies ar…

Better Auth is joining Vercel

NVIDIA Upstreams Initial Rigel CPU Core Support Into GCC Compiler

That didn't take long... Mere minutes after NVIDIA confirmed some basic Rosa CPU details and its "Rigel" CPU core, merged to the upstream GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase is initial enablement on the NVIDIA Rigel core...…

Razer Certifying Their First Laptop For Linux: Razer Blade 18 RZ09-0582

Razer is a brand synonymous with gaming and finally in 2026 they are in the process of certifying their first laptop for Ubuntu Linux. This laptop going through Ubuntu Linux certification is the Razer Blade 18 RZ09-0582 and it offers incredible performance with the Core Ultra 9 290HX Plus processor and GeForce RTX 5090 graphics but with that also comes a very high price tag.…

Why we built yet another Postgres connection pooler

Software Bonkers

Microsoft fire idTech team at Id software

Court tosses Microsoft's appeal in pre-owned software licenses battle

The UK's Court of Appeal has dismissed Microsoft's appeal against a ruling that ValueLicensing (VL) can resell pre-owned software licences. The judgment, handed down July 7, follows a ruling by the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) in November that customers could resell their licenses, even if Office contained clipart. In 2021, VL filed a claim accusing Microsoft of stifling the market for pre-o…

NVIDIA Confirms Some Rosa CPU Details With Its Rigel Core

In a blog post today talking up the single threaded CPU performance of their Vera CPU with Olympus cores, NVIDIA confirmed a few basic details of their next-gen Rosa CPU featuring their "Rigel" core...…

Chat Control passed first round in EU Parliament

Amazon without the knockoffs

Automating AI Away

Learning Another Language Appears To Slow Brain Aging By Up To 13 Years

A new study suggests multilingualism may slow brain aging, with bilingual people showing brains that appear about six years younger than monolingual speakers and people who speak four languages showing brains that appear up to 13 years younger. Researchers say earlier language learning and higher proficiency appear to strengthen the effect. The Guardian reports: Our brains are made up of billions…

Put all your data and AI to work and get it out of silos and lakehouses

Imagine your refrigerator sits in another building, 100 metres from your kitchen. Every time you cook, you walk over for each ingredient, then walk back to check that you closed the fridge door. That could be another long walk back if you forgot the milk for your morning coffee. Until the agentic era, this was the norm. Data could live in that fridge and get pulled when needed. Applications and h…

NVIDIA 610.43.03 Linux Driver Released With Unspecified Fixes

NVIDIA today published their latest stable driver update for Linux customers in their newest R610 release branch...…

The revenge of the philosophy majors

Woodruff: You shouldn't trust trusted publishing

William Woodruff, better known online as "yossarian", has published a blog post to make the case that users should not place their trust in trusted publishing: Trusted Publishing is a mechanism for establishing trust between an external machine identity (like a CI/CD workflow) and one or more projects on a package index/registry. The "trust" in "Trusted Publishing" refers to that trust relationshi…

Chat Control 1.0 and 2.0 Explained

[$] Faster RCUs and lockless memory allocation

Puranjay Mohan shared some of the work he's been doing recently on improving the performance of read-copy-update (RCU) at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit; his talk would have been nice context to have earlier in the day when Harry Yoo and Alexei Starovoitov led a session about the new kmalloc_nolock() function that allows for lockless allocation from any kern…

Microsoft flips Windows Backup to on by default unless you're in the EU

Microsoft is enabling Windows Backup for Organizations by default in Windows 11 26H2 everywhere except the EU, meaning businesses elsewhere with sovereignty and privacy concerns will be forced opt out instead. Now dubbed "Windows settings backup and restore," the service backs up a device's settings and a list of installed Microsoft Store apps, which can then be restored to a new device. Microsof…

New virus catalog reveals which pathogens pose the greatest threat

In a typical year, scientists discover two or three viruses that have never been seen in people before. The number fluctuates, but the trend has been fairly steady since the 1960s. Most of these viruses attract little attention, and my colleagues and I have often had to search through old medical papers to find any mention of them. Some viruses disappear entirely and are all but forgotten. At the…

Security updates for Tuesday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (nodejs22 and nodejs24), Fedora (clamav, hplip, kernel, kernel-headers, librabbitmq, mingw-expat, mir, perl-Imager, podman-tui, prometheus-podman-exporter, python-rpds-py, rust-ashpd, rust-busd, rust-gtk4-macros, rust-inferno, rust-quick-xml, rust-reqsign-aws-v4, rust-wayland-scanner, and sandogasa), Oracle (container-tools:rhel8, kernel, mariadb:10.1…

Enterprise AI still smarting from leaping before looking

The majority of companies that deploy AI systems end up shooting themselves in the foot with security, according to DigiCert. Seventy-eight percent of enterprises report "experiencing AI-related security incidents or identifying AI-related vulnerabilities," the digital identity biz said in a commissioned survey. Among respondents, 27.7 percent experienced one incident, 21.9 percent experienced mu…

Dua Lipa opens library for banned and censored books in Portugal

98% isn't much

A better way to tie gym shorts (or any drawstring) [video]

DRAM prices are killing the cheap smartphone

Rising memory prices are making budget smartphones commercially unviable to produce, forcing users to delay upgrades, pay more for higher-tier devices, or turn to the second-hand market instead. This is according to analyst Omdia, which estimates memory costs accounted for almost 60 percent of the total bill of materials in sub-$400 smartphones during calendar Q1 of 2026 – and things haven't impr…

Show HN: PostgreSQL performance and cost across 23 EC2 instance types

StreetComplete: Fixing OpenStreetMap, one tiny quest at a time

Europe's company websites are mostly served by US vendors

TUXEDO Computers Switching TUXEDO OS From Ubuntu To Debian Testing

Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers announced they are switching from Ubuntu to Debian as the base for their TUXEDO OS platform...…

9 Mothers (YC P26) Is Hiring in Austin, TX

Fake IT bods on Microsoft Teams coax workers into installing malware

Cybercriminals are using fake IT support calls on Microsoft Teams to persuade employees to surrender control of their PCs before installing the EtherRAT remote access trojan, according to researchers at Palo Alto Networks' Unit 42. Victims receive a phishing email disguised as an employee survey before a follow-up Microsoft Teams call from someone claiming to be IT support. During the call, the a…

ULA's last six Atlas Vs can't launch anything besides Boeing's Starliner

The final flight of United Launch Alliance's Atlas V rocket is still several years off, but an important era for the once-dominant launch company came to a close last week. The final flight of an Atlas V for the Amazon Leo broadband constellation lifted off from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida at 12:30 am EDT (04:30 UTC) last Thursday, sending 29 satellites to orbit to move the netw…

How AI could enable autonomous robot workers in workplaces—and maybe homes

In a world where self-driving robotaxis glide through major city streets without drivers behind the wheel and delivery drones autonomously fly through the skies to drop off orders at customers’ homes, the idea of general-purpose robots helping humans with various tasks in workplaces or even homes may not seem far-fetched. But that future hinges on developing increasingly autonomous robots powered…

US Cyber Agency Is Using Anthropic's Mythos To Audit Government Code

CISA is reportedly using Anthropic's Mythos model to scan government code repositories for security vulnerabilities, with sources saying the audits have already found numerous bugs. Reuters reports: The scanning is being done by CISA's Attack Surface Evaluation team, according to one of the sources. The team is a group within CISA that conducts digital security assessments and hacking exercises ac…

Why skilled workers come to Germany and then leave again

Spain collars alleged pro-Russia hacktivist after FBI tip-off

Spanish police have arrested a man they believe is affiliated with at least two pro-Russia hacktivist groups linked to attacks on critical national infrastructure (CNI). Arrested in March at his home in Palencia, central Spain, the man is suspected of having close ties to CyberArmy of Russia Reborn (CARR) and Z-Pentest, and may have carried out attacks on behalf of NoName057(16). All three hackti…

AF_ALG "Nightmare" Being Further Limited In Linux 7.3 With New Sysctl Knob

The Linux kernel's AF_ALG interface was deprecated in Linux 7.2. This interface for letting user-space programs interact directly with the Linux kernel crypto API has proven to be a "massive attack surface" due to a variety of security concerns. With its deprecation in Linux 7.2, some AF_ALG features are already removed and for Linux 7.3 this interface is being further restrained...…

"I'll Make The Linux Kernel Mailing List Burn": Prominent LLVM Linux Developer Returns

One of the original developers behind the work to allow the Linux kernel to be compiled using LLVM/Clang as an alternative to the GCC compiler is now back in the saddle working on LLVM Linux support. LLVM/Clang support for building the Linux kernel has been important for improving code portability and addressing GCC'isms, making use of LLVM compiler features not yet found with the GNU toolchain, e…

Government's cyber pledge lands 60 signatories, including M&S and, somehow, Capita

After serving as last year’s poster child for retail cyber misery, Marks & Spencer has become one of the first companies to sign up to the UK government's new Cyber Resilience Pledge. The retailer is among 60 organizations that have signed up to the voluntary scheme, launched by technology secretary Liz Kendall on Tuesday. Signatories commit to treating cybersecurity as a board-level responsibili…

EHEA 10Gb Ethernet Driver Being Retired By IBM As A Relic Of Outdated POWER Hardware

In 2026 it's not too surprising when seeing old PCMCIA and ISA drivers being removed from the mainline Linux kernel source tree and old very low-speed network interfaces, with arguably the most surprising fast being how long they lasted in the mainline kernel. Meanwhile for the upcoming Linux 7.3 kernel, one of the first 10Gb Ethernet drivers is already set for retirement from the mainline Linux k…

MPs tell Brit government: Sort out your tech sovereignty or get left out in the cold

MPs are warning the UK has no "coherent strategy" for creating sovereign capabilities across a range of technologies, including AI, space, and quantum computing. A report published Tuesday by the Science, Innovation and Technology Committee says the UK is in a global race for sovereign tech capabilities, with AI emerging as a "central arena" for competition and collaboration. A recent move by the…

Northern Ireland tries (again) to expel Capita from schools IT contract

Four years after its first attempt, Northern Ireland's Education Authority (EANI) is trying once again to replace Capita, with a procurement for an IT services deal worth up to £851 million. An earlier effort to replace the UK tech services company foundered when EANI ended its £485 million contract with Fujitsu by "mutual agreement" after "extensive negotiations" in November 2024. The deal's col…

UK guts planning red tape so datacenters can bypass the neighbors faster

Reform of the Planning and Infrastructure Act 2025 aims to cut a year off the approval process for Nationally Significant Infrastructure Projects (NSIPs) in England and Wales – a category that now includes datacenters. The Ministry of Housing, Communities & Local Government (MHCLG) confirmed that changes under the Act, taking effect later this month, will scrap the statutory requirement for pre-a…

Brussels shows how to remove friction from collaboration

When the Flemish Government set out to renovate its Brussels headquarters, it had two strategic aims. The first was to create a workplace that encouraged hybrid workers to come to the office more regularly, by fashioning a space that fostered connection, teamwork, collaboration, and a deeper sense of wellbeing and belonging. The second goal was sustainability. Another objective was that the gover…

Broadcom and Apple extend custom silicon pact to 2031

Broadcom has signed a deal to provide Apple with custom chips until 2031. The chips and code shop has supplied Apple with silicon since the late 2000s when its wireless products found a home in early iPhone models. Broadcom’s silicon has found its way into iThings ever since. Broadcom’s announcement of its extended relationship with Cupertino is brief, stating only that the two companies “have ag…

GitHub Thumbs Nose At Sony's Controversial End to Physical Media With Its Introduction of Repo CDs

GitHub is offering a limited run of 1,000 CD-ROM copies of public repositories as a pro-physical-media jab at Sony's plan to stop producing PlayStation game discs in 2028. Tom's Hardware reports: The coding and collaboration platform, owned by Microsoft, states that "In light of recent developments in physical media, GitHub is proud to announce that you can now obtain your public repo on CD-ROM."…

Samsung’s profits jump 19x in a year and you don’t need AI to figure out why

Samsung has delivered guidance for its second quarter results and forecast profits 19 times higher than it managed in the same period of 2025. In Q2 last year, the Korean giant’s sales totalled ₩75.7 trillion ($49.7 billion) and operating profit landed at ₩4.68 trillion ($3.1 billion). Fast forward a year, and Samsung told investors that once its accountants finish their work, they’ll report sale…

The Art of Computer Programming by Donald E. Knuth

Research Universities Are Admitting Fewer PhDs, a Bad Sign For Science

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The number of students admitted to Ph.D. programs this fall dropped 15 percent from the previous year, according to data from over 50 top research universities, raising fears that the nation's capacity to produce new science could be diminished. The decline is driven, in part, by a chaotic and unpredictable federal funding environment un…

IBM teases new rackable mainframes that ‘complete’ the z17 family

IBM has posted an announcement that teases the introduction of rack-mounted and single-frame versions of its z17 mainframes. Big Blue’s documentation for the z17 mentions only a model called the ME1 that scales from single-rack to four-rack systems. The Tuesday announcement mentions bundles called the z17 ME2 and IBM z17 MER, respectively a single-frame and rack-mounted affair. The announcement d…

Microsoft Lands Initial AV1 Encoding Using DirectX 12 + HMFT Within Mesa 26.2

The newest, unexpected addition to the Mesa codebase by Microsoft engineers is contributed accelerated AV1 video encoding on the GPU using a combination of DirectX 12 and the Hardware Media Foundation Transform (HMFT) support that is part of the Windows Media Foundation layer...…

AI startup that’s never turned a profit say's it'll totally be around in 2047 to close its $19B lease

In its short life, Anthropic has captured hearts, minds, and wallets – and spooked the US government – but it hasn’t actually turned a profit. That’s not stopping CEO Dario Amodei from signing a two-decade lease with crypto-mining outfit turned AI datacenter operator TeraWulf. Anthropic believes it’s not only going to survive any AI bubble burst but keep operating until 2047, or at least that’s w…

Small AI Models Gain Traction Around the World

locater16 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: One morning in 2019, Adebayo Alonge was in a Cape Town hotel room, preparing to demonstrate his startup's AI answer to a serious problem in African health care: counterfeit medication, which kills thousands of people across the continent every year. The RxScanner is a handheld spectrometer that scans a pill with infrared light, then sends the item's mo…

Supreme Court Allows Texas To Require Age Verification For Mobile Apps

The Supreme Court allowed Texas to enforce a law requiring app stores to verify users' ages and obtain parental consent before minors can download apps. Tech industry groups argue the law broadly restricts young people's access to digital speech, but the court let a 5th Circuit order stand without explanation or noted dissents. CNN notes that the Supreme Court's decision "doesn't resolve the case…

FCC to end Biden-era rule that forces ISPs to list all their fees

The Federal Communications Commission will vote to eliminate a rule that requires Internet service providers to list all of their so-called "passthrough" fees on an easily accessible broadband price label. The FCC vote could also make the price labels themselves a bit harder for consumers to find. ISPs routinely advertise prices much lower than those actually charged to consumers on their monthly…

Vulkan Video H.264/H.265 Encode Now Working For Intel Alchemist GPUs On Linux

Earlier this year Vulkan Video encode was disabled on newer generations of Intel graphics hardware due to insufficient testing with the Intel ANV open-source driver. That impacted Gen12.5 graphics and newer - basically Alchemist and anything newer. Now at least Gen12.5 graphics with the likes of the Arc A-Series is seeing H.264 and H.265 encoding re-enabled...…

South Korea's SK Hynix Launching $28 Billion US Listing To Ride Global AI Wave

SK Hynix is launching a Nasdaq listing expected to raise about $28 billion, giving US investors easier access to one of the biggest beneficiaries of the AI memory-chip boom. Reuters reports: The company will sell 17.79 million new shares in the depository receipt listing on the Nasdaq. Ten ADRs will represent one common share and the stock will be sold in a price range that is due to be revealed o…

Kremlin suspected of flying drones over Europe using Russian shadow fleet

Mysterious drone flights that disrupted major European airports and flew over NATO member military bases hosting US nuclear weapons may be the work of a coordinated Kremlin campaign launched from Russian-linked commercial ships. That recent assessment from the UK-based International Institute for Strategic Studies used automatic identification system (AIS) maritime tracking data and other publicl…

Boffins bet on quantum computers, AI supers to solve fusion fuel dilemma

Fusion energy has presented a tantalizing alternative to fossil fuels for the better part of a century, but creating the equivalent of a human-made sun is easier said than done. However, new research from the boffins at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the Cleveland Clinic, and IBM in support of the Department of Energy’s (DoE) Genesis Mission suggests quantum computers and perhaps a sprinkl…

Zombie 'Who Owns Unix?' Lawsuit Comes Alive Again

The long-running SCO/IBM Unix and Linux ownership dispute has resurfaced yet again, this time through SCO successor Xinuos, which is trying to pursue old license and copyright claims tied to Project Monterey. "The core issue seems to be whether Xinuos even has the right to litigate the matter, or if some ancient legalese in the original agreements means the window for legal argument has long since…

What is the oldest American object ever launched into space?

Did you know that the space shuttle once launched the Statue of Liberty into space? In fact, there were two "Lady Liberties" on board Discovery when it lifted off on its fourth flight in April 1985. To be fair, each statue was only 15 inches tall (38.1 centimeters), but they were also each made of copper that was removed from the full-size statue during its then-still-ongoing restoration. After t…

Software engineers can still rake in big bucks by working for fast-growing companies

If you listen to the AI industry, coders' days are numbered. Despite these concerns, software developers, at least those with experience, appear to be doing just fine at growing companies. Hiring biz Levels.fyi recently looked at how US compensation for software engineers (SWEs) is related to changes in headcount and found that salary level tends to be correlated with growth. "Generally, the comp…

Madlad builds homebrew GPU using 8,192 RISC-V chips

If you can't afford a graphics card these days, here's an alternative solution. Just order thousands of microcontrollers, design your own boards, and build your own cluster over the course of six months after dealing with a healthy dose of setbacks. At the end of it, you might even have something able to light up the equivalent of a QVGA display with a whopping resolution of 320x200 for your effo…

Secret Claude Tracker Shocks Users After Anthropic's Anti-Surveillance Stance

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic quickly removed a tracker secretly monitoring Claude Code users in China after a security researcher exposed the hidden code and condemned the spyware-like tracking as a "serious breach of user trust." Last week, a web developer known as "Thereallo" was researching privacy issues in Claude Code and was shocked to find that the AI fir…

Marek Olšák At Valve Lands RADV Code That Can "Double Performance" With Some VRS Cases

Longtime AMD Linux graphics driver expert Marek Olšák, who joined Valve earlier this year and now focusing more on RADV rather than the RadeonSI Gallium3D driver, has seen some of his latest work now merged for Mesa 26.2. Marek landed a big overhaul to the variable rate shading (VRS) code that in some cases can double the performance...…

GitHub cuts short offer to burn repos on CD after mockery ensues

Monday was the last day to score your own free CD of your GitHub repository, which the Microsoft-owned subsidiary offered to mail to the first 1,000 people who asked. But as of noon eastern time, that offer has been withdrawn (if it was ever genuine) after sparking confusion and ridicule. Last Thursday, GitHub issued a short notice on X extending an offer: In light of recent developments in physi…

Microsoft Lays Off Nearly 5,000 Employees Across Xbox, Commercial Sales

Microsoft is laying off about 4,800 employees, including 1,600 from Xbox, as it restructures around AI investments and tries to reset its struggling gaming business. "Our business is changing because the world around it is changing. The way technology is built, deployed, and used is transforming faster than at any point in my time here," said Amy Coleman, EVP and chief people officer at Microsoft.…

NRC is (sort of) getting rid of "as low as reasonably achievable" standard

Last week, just before the US started its break for the July Fourth holiday, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) proposed a new rule that would change how it regulated exposure to radiation. The Trump administration has been pushing to restart construction of nuclear power plants in the US, and many pro-nuclear advocates have been complaining about the US's existing regulations, portraying th…

Katalyst's satellite rescue mission is now in pursuit of NASA's Swift

High above the remote Pacific Ocean, about halfway between Hawaii and the northernmost part of Australia, an air-launched rocket fired into space on Independence Day weekend to kick off a weekslong pursuit of a NASA astronomy satellite perilously close to falling out of orbit. The endeavor to rescue NASA's Swift satellite is the first mission of its kind. NASA put out a call for commercial compan…

Nintendo Switch 2 Is Getting a Replaceable Battery in Europe

Nintendo will stop selling the original Switch in Europe in mid-February 2027, nearly 10 years after the console's launch. In its place, the company will release updated versions of the Switch 2 and several controllers with user-replaceable batteries to comply with new EU regulations. The Verge reports: The news comes as Nintendo is making a bunch of changes to the rest of its lineup due to EU reg…

EU urged to act after Pegasus infects phone of spyware inquiry MEP

Civil liberties groups have accused the EU of dragging its feet in implementing key measures to prevent spyware infections after Citizen Lab revealed a former member of European Parliament was placed under surveillance during his time in office. Stelios Kouloglou, a former investigative journalist, served as a Greek MEP between 2014 and 2023 and was a substitute member of the inquiry into the use…

Secret Claude tracker shocks users after Anthropic’s anti-surveillance stance

Anthropic quickly removed a tracker secretly monitoring Claude Code users in China after a security researcher exposed the hidden code and condemned the spyware-like tracking as a “serious breach of user trust.” Last week, a web developer known as “Thereallo” was researching privacy issues in Claude Code and was shocked to find that the AI firm was using “prompt steganography” to hide code that t…

Samsung floats 2028 launch for seaborne datacenter

Samsung expects to have its first floating datacenter (FDC) operational by the second calendar quarter of 2028. The Korean conglomerate is one of several companies pursuing waterborne bit barns, as recently covered by The Register. It has now put a specific date on those plans, according to the Seoul Economic Daily, which reports Samsung is weighing multiple candidate projects to commercialize an…

OpenSSH 10.4 released

OpenSSH 10.4 has been released. In addition to a number of security and bug fixes, there are a few notable changes; this release adds experimental support for a composite post-quantum signature scheme combining ML-DSA 44 and Ed25519 as described in this IETF draft. With 10.4, if OpenSSH is compiled with sandbox support it will fail on Linux systems that have not enabled SECCOMP or NO_NEW_PRIVS; pr…

The incredible shrinking Xbox: Five studios, 3,200 employees let go

Last month, Xbox executives laid out some "hard truths" about Microsoft's struggling gaming division that they said would require a difficult "Xbox reset." This morning, Microsoft revealed the brutal shape of that "reset," announcing plans for 3,200 layoffs and the divestment of five smaller studios that the company has spent years acquiring and shepherding. Half of those 3,200 layoffs are effect…

Americans of All Ages Are Spending Less Time Socializing

Americans now spend an average of 35 minutes a day socializing, down from 45 minutes two decades ago, according to American Time Use Survey data. The decline spans all age groups but is sharpest among 15- to 24-year-olds, whose daily socializing has fallen from about an hour to 35 minutes. Axios reports: Sociologists and psychologists point to several trends driving this phenomenon, which Substack…

Microsoft says the world is changing faster than it can keep up as it guts commercial, Xbox teams

Hard times have come to Microsoft employees. Thousands of Microsoft team members reported to work following the US holiday weekend to learn their jobs no longer exist, with Redmond gutting its Commercial business and Xbox team, and spinning off several game studios to cut costs. Microsoft human resources boss Amy Coleman announced that the company is eliminating some 4,800 roles Monday morning in…

F1 in Britain: Automated software to blame for crushing expectations

Formula 1 returned to what is a home race for most of the teams on the grid this past weekend with the British Grand Prix. Yet again this season, we saw the fastest car not win the race, as reliability has been a problem. But racing giveth and racing taketh away, and the beneficiary of one driver's bad luck was another driver who really needed that win. Perhaps the bigger story, though, was the u…

There were not one, but two asteroid encounters this weekend

As the United States of America celebrated its 250th birthday on terra firma with fireworks displays this weekend, two Asian countries made some splashes of their own farther from Earth. On Sunday, an aging Japanese spacecraft named Hayabusa2, which completed its initial sample-return objective more than half a decade ago, found success with an extended mission that saw the vehicle fly by a peanu…

AMD’s Ryzen AI Halo makes local AI look easy, but at $4K, easy doesn't come cheap

A year ago the Ryzen AI Halo, AMD's tiny new AI workstation, would have offered devs and machine learning enthusiasts an Nvidia DGX Spark-like experience at a fraction of the cost. Unfortunately for AMD, time and the ongoing memory shortage, which both AMD itself and Nvidia are partially responsible for, haven't been kind to the consumer electronics industry. Launching at a hair under $4,000, the…

Ryzen AI Developer Platform: AMD's Own Linux Distribution Built Atop Debian

With the AMD Ryzen AI Halo developer platform there is the option of ordering this Ryzen AI Max+ mini PC with either Microsoft Windows 11 or "Linux OS". When receiving a AMD Ryzen AI Halo review sample last month, I fully expected it to just be an Ubuntu LTS install with ROCm preloaded. I was quite surprised when powering it up to find that it's an OS called the AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform 1 "…

AMD Ryzen AI Halo Is An Excellent & Powerful Mini PC With Fully Open-Source Software

Earlier this year AMD announced the Ryzen AI Halo as their in-house mini PC offering built around their leading Ryzen AI Max+ "Strix Halo" platform. After pre-orders began last month, the Ryzen AI Halo is officially beginning to ship this week and over the past few weeks we have been testing it out at Phoronix.…

[$] The kernel's iomap layer

Conversations about the kernel's filesystem implementations often involve a layer called "iomap", but relatively few people can reliably say what iomap actually is. That is just the kind of gap that LWN exists to fill. In short, iomap handles the mapping between data in the filesystem space (identified by a file of interest, and an offset within that file) and in the storage space (which may be a…

UK regulator warns of "arms race" to keep up with AI use in financial services

Regulators are in an “arms race” to keep up with the use of artificial intelligence in financial services, a senior UK official has warned, with millions of people using the technology to help them make personal finance decisions. Sheldon Mills, an executive director at the Financial Conduct Authority, told the FT the watchdog would need greater powers to stay on top of the rapid growth of AI and…

Europe's new import rules are coming for your bargains

Updated: Last week, a small customs fee landed in the EU that may have outsized consequences. Imports of single items from outside the EU are now hit with a new €3 duty, a rule that affects a range of people including electronics hobbyists and techies who prefer their printer toner off-brand. The seller or importer is generally responsible for declaring and paying the duty, but folks who build el…

Linux 7.3 Expected To "Flatten The Pick" For Better Scheduling While Gaming & More

Going back to early May there were patches for improving the Linux scheduler to help with gaming performance on old "potato" hardware by providing better cgroup scheduling. Those patches, referred to as the "flatten the pick" patch series, are now slated for introduction in the Linux 7.3 kernel...…

Security updates for Monday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (container-tools:rhel8, grafana, grafana-pcp, kernel, ruby:2.5, and ruby:3.3), Debian (bird3, chromium, kernel, linux-6.1, mediawiki, nginx, openvpn, php-phpseclib, php8.2, php8.4, and sympa), Fedora (7zip, buildah, chromium, clamav, freerdp, leptonica, mariadb10.11, mariadb11.8, nextcloud, nsd, openqa, openvpn, os-autoinst, pdns, pdns-recursor, perl-…

Even banks and hyperscalers are now sounding the alarm about the AI bubble

KETTLE From international banking worries to the market state of canary-in-the-coal-mine Oracle, the AI bubble is sure looking taut. The Bank for International Settlements, often referred to as "the central bank for central banks", said in a report at the end of June that it was worried the AI bubble was nigh on to popping and taking the global economy with it. Oracle, the hyperscaler with arguab…

Brit supermarket giant triples down on facial recog to nab shoplifters

The UK's second largest supermarket is tripling the number of stores that use facial recognition to try to clamp down on shoplifters – a move privacy campaigners are branding as "shameful." Sainsbury's first trialed the tech at premises in Sydenham and Bath Oldfield Park from September last year, before deploying it to shops across London earlier in 2026. More than 55 Sainsbury's supermarkets use…

Intel i915 Driver Nearly Ready To "Work Well" With RT Linux Kernel Sans Display Support

When it comes to the real-time "RT" patches carried outside of the Linux kernel, a number of them pertain to adjustments around the Intel i915 kernel DRM graphics driver. The mainline Linux kernel and its RT support depend upon not building "PREEMPT_RT" for the i915 driver support while patches have been worked on recently for making this Intel kernel graphics driver code play nicely with real-tim…

Bentley teases its first EV, the Torcal

Bentley is preparing to add a fourth model to its rarified lineup, and today we know what it will be called: the Torcal. The carmaker has been working on its first electric vehicle for a while now; it was seen testing in the Arctic Circle late last year, giving us a sneak peek at the interior. A few weeks ago, another example was spotted at the Nürburgring. Speculation had been mounting over what…

The Czinger 21C might be the wildest car we drive all year

The temptation with a car like the Czinger 21C is to treat it as a collection of extreme specifications, and to be fair, it’s certainly not lacking in that department. At its most basic level, the carbon-fiber-bodied 21C is a hybrid hypercar built around a bespoke 2.88-liter twin-turbocharged flat-plane crank V8 that revs to a searing 11,000 rpm. This power plant is matched up with a three-motor…

Moody Bible Institute breach leaves 2.3M accounts needing salvation, says cyber expert

Data on more than 2.3 million people associated with Moody Bible Institute (MBI) has been exposed online after the Christian college was targeted by ShinyHunters. The attack was first disclosed by MBI in June, and the extortion crew later leaked the stolen data. Have I Been Pwned has since added the cache to its breach notification database, putting a figure on the number of exposed accounts. MBI…

Canonical On Making Ubuntu For ARM64 "Truly A First-Class Architecture"

The Ubuntu Foundations Engineering Manager, Ravi Kant Sharma, with Canonical has provided an update regarding the current ARM64 state on Ubuntu Linux...…

Pioneer DJM-S11 Professional DJ Mixer To Be Supported By Linux 7.3

The Pioneer DJM-S11 is a professional scratch style 2-channel DJ mixer that retails for $2,269 USD. But if currently connecting this expensive piece of kit to Linux, it does nothing and is unusable. With 87 new lines of code, it will begin to work with the Linux 7.3 kernel later this year...…

Uniwill Laptop Driver Preparing A Number Of Features For Linux 7.3

The Unwill laptop driver on Linux for supporting various device-specific features by that major OEM/ODM will be seeing several new features with the Linux 7.3 cycle later this year. One of the most notable users of the Unwill driver is Bavarian Linux PC vendor TUXEDO Computers...…

Secure Unix ancestor KSOS did type safety before Rust made it cool

For the first time, the source code of KSOS, backed by the US Department of Defense in the late 1970s and 1980s, is available to the public in the archives of The Unix Heritage Society (TUHS). TUHS volunteers preserve the historical source code and documentation of the original UNIX – or as much of it as is left. A few days ago, in an email to its mailing list, TUHS founder Warren Toomey announce…

Insert token to continue, says AI. Yeah, about that...

OPINION It is too early to call peak 2026, but if we allow midterms, it's hard to beat Caveman. Caveman is a Claude Code skill that strips away non-essential linguistic components of the AI's output, making it communicate in a parody of a coding Neanderthal. Yes, this is a good way to use the products of an industry expected to spend a trillion dollars on capex this year. Ug fix API. Hyperscalers…

Apprentice developer defied orders – then got a job supporting her weird code

WHO, ME? Welcome to another installment of "Who, Me?" – The Register's Monday column that celebrates mistakes readers make at work and reveals their escape routes. This week, meet a reader we'll Regomize as "Kara" who told us that in 1999 she scored an apprenticeship with a now-bankrupt telecoms equipment manufacturer. The gig saw Kara study software engineering one day a week and spend the rest…

Japan’s asteroid sample retriever rapidly buzzes remote space rock

UPDATED Japan’s Hayabusa2 craft has just buzzed an asteroid, successfully completing the first objective of its extended mission. Hayabusa2 launched in 2014, and four years later arrived at Asteroid Ryugu. In 2019 the craft sent a pair of landers onto Ryugu’s surface and collected samples that it dropped off in the Australian outback in late 2020. Analysis of those samples suggests Ryugu is home…

Zombie ‘who owns Unix?’ lawsuit comes alive again

The ancient dispute over ownership of UNIX, and perhaps Linux too, has returned to court. Again. As The Register has explained many, many, times since this matter first went to court in 2003, the roots of the case are the 1998 alliance between IBM and a company called the Santa Cruz Operation which sold a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Those two companies, plus Intel and Sequent, created “Project…

D7VK's Performance Gains Since Its Inception For Older Direct3D Versions On Linux

In addition to Sunday's release of DXVK 3.0.1, D7VK 1.12 was separately released as the latest version of this implementation for Direct3D 7 and older atop the Vulkan API...…

GitHub Freno: cooperative, highly available throttler service

Kernel prepatch 7.2-rc2

The 7.2-rc2 kernel prepatch is out for testing. Linus said: "It's Sunday afternoon, and rc2 is out. Things look very normal - it's not a small rc2, but it's in line with recent releases, and slightly smaller than rc2 was in 7.1. Let's see how that all continues, but so far so good."…

EY sacks staff for allegedly accessing Australian Prime Minister’s bank account

ASIA IN BRIEF The Down Under outpost of consultancy EY has fired two staff after they allegedly accessed details about bank accounts held by Australian Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Local media report that the pair were employees of the artist formerly known as Ernst and Young, which used them to work on a contract for Australia’s Commonwealth Bank where they allegedly accessed details of the…

Linux 7.2-rc2 Released: "Things Look Very Normal"

Linux 7.2-rc2 is now available for testing in working toward the stable Linux 7.2 release in August...…

DXVK 3.0.1 Released With More Game Fixes, Other Improvements

Following the release of DXVK 3.0 from late June that brought several big changes, DXVK 3.0.1 is out today with shipping various game fixes and other improvements to this important piece of Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for Direct3D Windows games on Linux...…

MFA-optional banks leave safe doors (and accounts) wide open for thieves to pillage

OPINION I write a weekly column called PWNED, about how poor security practices can lead to serious damage. Usually, there’s something funny in the malfeasance, like a CEO who kept every employee’s password in an Excel file on his desktop. However, I wasn’t laughing back in May when professional thieves invaded my 84-year-old mother’s entire financial life and managed to make off with $30,000 fro…

C programmers commit fresh crimes against readability

The Twenty-Ninth International Obfuscated C Code Contest – or IOCCC for short – is back again with the results of the 2025 competition. This year, one of the entrants has a unique new trick up their sleeve: a valid use case. When we reported on last year's event, it had just been revived from a four-year hiatus, so we're happy to see it back so soon. As we write, the judging concluded some three…

Chemical accidents rise as Trump administration proposes weakening safety rules

Physicist Ronald Koopman appeared at a Southern California Air District meeting in 2018 to talk about what seemed like an arcane scientific topic: hydrofluoric acid dispersion and water mitigation testing. Hydrofluoric acid, also known as hydrogen fluoride or HF, is used to manufacture a range of materials, including refrigerants, gasoline, fluorine-based pesticides and fluoropolymers like those…

The missing 500 million: Cosmic bombardment melted Earth's first crust

Earth is the only planet we know of with buoyant, silica-rich continents. But, despite decades of research, geologists still don't agree on how they formed. "The continents started appearing around about four billion years ago—that's the oldest continental rock we know about,” said Tim Johnson, a geologist at Curtin University in Perth, Australia. “The Earth is four and a half billion years old,…

ReactOS "Open-Source Windows" Project Now Capable Of Running Half-Life 2

One month ago it was exciting to see the open-source ReactOS operating system running Valve's Half-Life game. Little to realize less than 30 days later it would also be running Half-Life 2...…

AMD Begins Staging Graphics Driver Changes For Linux 7.3

In addition to Intel beginning to volley graphics driver patches for Linux 7.3, this week AMD also began sending out their pull requests of "new stuff" to DRM-Next for the Linux 7.3 kernel cycle...…

Intel Preparing Linux For IPU8 Web Camera Support With Nova Lake Laptops

More Linux kernel patches have been surfacing that confirm next-gen, high-end Nova Lake laptops will feature IPU8 image processing capabilities...…

OpenRazer 3.12.4 Fixes Compatibility With Linux 7.2

OpenRazer 3.12.4 is now available as the newest update to these out-of-tree, unofficial Linux drivers for Razer devices. OpenRazer when paired with the likes of Polychromatic or other GUI options is what makes for a nice experience running Razer gaming peripherals under Linux...…

FEX 2607 Optimizing For Yet-To-Be-Released ARM 256-bit SVE2 Hardware

The FEX Emulator that allows running Linux x86/x86_64 software on ARM64 (AArch64) systems, including the likes of Wine / Valve's Steam Play (Proton) for Windows gaming on ARM, is out with its newest monthly feature release. The Valve-backed project for running x86_64 games and other software on ARM for the upcoming Steam Frame and other more typical ARM Linux systems has been baking more optimizat…

Historic Photos of NASA's Cavernous Wind Tunnels

Seven stable kernels for Saturday including two security fixes

Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.1.3, 6.18.38, 6.12.95, 6.6.144, 6.1.177, 5.15.211, and 5.10.260 stable kernels. Several kernels in this batch include a fix for a vulnerability introduced in the 6.0 kernel in IPv6 (CVE-2026-53362), which could allow an attacker to escape a container and gain root access. There is also a fix for a use-after-free bug in KVM (CVE-2026-53359) that…

Linux DRM Scheduler Patches Yield Massive Improvement For Job Submission Latency

A set of patches to the Linux kernel's Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) scheduler that is shared among different kernel graphics drivers is showing the potential of delivering much lower job submission latency when the system is loaded with many runnable CPU processes...…

4K @ 60 FPS USB Video Capture Finally Becomes Less Problematic On Linux

One area of Linux hardware testing I haven't explored much in many years has been modern USB video capture for the lack of said hardware. The last time I did much video capturing on Linux was during the Hauppauge PCI card days. It turns out though that USB video capture of 4K 60 FPS content has been a pain point under Linux but is finally smoothing out with newer versions of the Linux kernel...…

Phoronix Premium Summer Sale To Help Support Linux Hardware Testing

For those that missed Phoronix turning 22 years old last month when running a special to help support the site, a few readers mentioned recently they missed out on seeing the deal in time. Paired with the US Independence Day holiday and summer sales elsewhere, now through 10 July is a Phoronix Premium summer sale if wishing to view the site ad-free while supporting the daily open-source/Linux news…

GNOME Lands ext-background-effect-v1 Support For Background Blur Effect

Added to the Wayland Protocols repository back in May of 2025 was the ext-background-effect-v1 protocol for background blur that had been under discussion since early 2024. The initial focus is on being able to apply a blur effect on a window's background or otherwise a specified screen region. GNOME 51 has now merged support for ext-background-effect-v1 with the latest Mutter code...…

Linux 7.3 Adding More Graphics PCI IDs For Intel Nova Lake S

In addition to this week's drm-intel-next pull request beginning to lay out the Intel kernel graphics driver changes for Linux 7.3, the first drm-xe-next pull request was sent out on Friday. Intel Nova Lake enablement remains the hot area for the Intel GPU driver code...…

Linux 7.2-rc2 Raising The Default RISC-V 64-bit CPU Limit To 256 Cores

A post merge-window change that landed in Linux Git overnight ahead of tomorrow's Linux 7.2-rc2 release is bumping the default limit on the number of supported CPU cores for RISC-V 64-bit. Now by default Linux will support up to 256 cores with RISC-V 64-bit kernel builds...…

Confidential computing's core trust mechanism is broken. The fix may not exist

Vendors are trying to position "confidential computing" as the technical backbone of Europe's sovereign cloud ambitions. But new research shows that a security protocol used to prove cryptographic trust in the system may have a fundamental architectural flaw. Confidential computing rests on a mechanism called remote attestation, in which a server cryptographically proves to a client that it is ru…

NASA says it will isolate volunteers from the outside world for a year

For those growing sick of Earth's geopolitics, NASA is looking for volunteers to spend a year living and working in isolated conditions in preparation for a journey to some other celestial orb. The US space agency is set to carry out a simulated deep space mission from no earlier than August 2027 to understand what might happen to its human lab rats during planned crewed missions to the Moon or M…

C++ Details of Asymmetric Fences

David Potter, the man who put Psion in the palm of your hand, logs off at 82

OBITUARY South African-born pioneer of the British tech industry David Potter, the man behind the iconic Psion pocket computers, passed away on 28th June, six days before his 83rd birthday. Potter was the founder of the company of the same name, a pivotal firm in the British technology industry from the 1980s to the 2000s. Psion supplied software for the early computers from Sinclair Research, th…

Amazon Leo constellation nears 400 satellites as broadband launch looms

Amazon says it is preparing to roll out satellite broadband this year after the latest rocket launch brought its Leo constellation up to 396 units. The digital bazaar and cloud computing giant reports that an Atlas V rocket launch on July 2 successfully propelled 29 satellites into low Earth orbit for the Amazon Leo network, formerly known as Project Kuiper until November last. Amazon hasn't fini…

Four vulnerabilities in Guix

The GNU Guix project has announced three vulnerabilities in the guix substitute utility as well as a fourth that affects the guix pull and guix time-machine commands. The impact of the vulnerabilities ranges from remote privilege escalation to local disclosure of sensitive files. The remote exploitation of guix substitute only requires that the vulnerable system attempt to download a binary substi…

AdaptHealth says attackers sweet-talked their way into cloud systems and stole patient data

AdaptHealth says attackers used social engineering to breach its systems and steal sensitive patient data, including passwords associated with insurance billing. The medical equipment company disclosed the attack to the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) on Thursday, noting that attackers accessed internal patient management systems, document storage platforms, and external electronic healt…

[$] Limiting negative dentries

A number of problems related to negative directory entries (dentries) were the topic of a filesystem-track session at the 2026 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit. Negative dentries are used to indicate that a file of a given name does not exist in a directory; it is an optimization that short-circuits the lookup of the file name when the answer is already known. Miklos Sz…

Startup targets datacenters with 3D-printed nuclear reactor module

US startup Ampera has produced what it claims is the first 3D-printed nuclear reactor module. The firm says it is working towards delivering scalable, emission-free power for datacenters, defense applications, and off-grid sites. Ampera unveiled its first nuclear reactor module during an event at the firm's innovation center in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida. More than 100 people attended, including…

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (389-ds-base, bind9.18, evince, fence-agents, freerdp, frr, frr10, gimp, gnutls, hplip, jmc, mariadb:11.8, mysql:8.4, php:7.4, postgresql-jdbc, postgresql:15, postgresql:16, valkey, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Debian (fastnetmon), Fedora (7zip, apptainer, cpp-httplib, mysql8.4, and nmap), Oracle (freerdp, giflib, glib2, glibc, kern…

NetNut cracked as Google and FBI target 2 million-device botnet

Tech companies working with US law enforcement "significantly degraded" the NetNut residential proxy network as part of an ongoing effort to disrupt the tools cybercriminals use to conceal their activity, say researchers. The work was carried out by Google, Lumen, Shadowserver, the FBI, and others, and marks a continuation of the IPIDEA proxy network disruption from January. According to Google C…

AI bills are baffling the C-suite after shift to usage-based pricing

Nearly a third of corporate leaders report difficulty understanding and controlling operating costs when implementing business AI at scale, according to a survey from KPMG. In recent months, Anthropic, OpenAI, and GitHub have shifted some services away from flat-rate subscriptions toward usage-based billing. "As usage-based pricing models become more common, many organizations are still building…

EU appears to find datacenter emissions easier to offset than lobbyists

The European Union's proposed environmental rating system for datacenters may be amended in response to lobbying from IT industry heavyweights, making it easier to offset greenhouse gas emissions using clean energy certificates. According to the Financial Times, the European Commission is weakening its original proposals after pressure from datacenter operators and tech giants. The newspaper clai…

CalyxOS is back

In August 2025, the CalyxOS privacy-focused Android distribution announced that it was pausing all releases while it reworked its release process, security protocols, and changed its signing keys following the departure of one of its founders. The project has now announced that it is "officially back from the hiatus" with the 7.2.2.0 release. CalyxOS 7.2.2.0 is signed by us using a new HSM-based,…

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…

Kernel archive /pub tree restoring

A few astute observers have noticed that some content on kernel.org had disappeared and were understandably concerned. Konstantin Ryabitsev has provided an update via social.kernel.org: There was an unfortunate error while changing the kernel.org primary/secondary mirroring infrastructure, which resulted in the /pub tree suddenly becoming empty. No data was lost, just public mirror copies. Everyth…

Spoofed email from LWN

We were made aware today of an email sent to a reader that was spoofed to appear to be from LWN. The message claimed, among other things, that we were providing personal information about the reader to another site user. As is explained in our privacy policy we do not, and would not, provide such information. If any other readers have received an odd message from LWN, it is an attempt at a hoax; i…

Fedora Council proposes pausing Community Initiatives

Aoife Moloney has, on behalf of the Fedora Council, posted an announcement that the Fedora Council is "proposing we pause the Community Initiatives process as an official project process" because it has decided the current process is ineffective. It is also closing discussion regarding the AI developer desktop initiative covered by LWN in May. The Fedora Objectives/Initiatives framework was never…

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…

Computational Balloon Twisting: The Theory of Balloon Polyhedra [pdf]

The family keeping watch over a 52-year-old pot of soup

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

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

EFF to Gov. Pritzker: Veto Illinois’ HB 5511

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Lawmakers Must Act Now to Prevent Armed Police Drones

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

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

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

Primed for Malware: Stop Selling Compromised Android Devices

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The KIDS Act Would Require Age Checks To Get Online

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

🦅 Domestic Spying Takes an L | EFFector 38.12

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

Scattered Spider Hackers Plead Guilty on Day 1 of Trial

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

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

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

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

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

Canada Is Forging Ahead with Its Dangerous Surveillance Bill

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

EFF Thanks SerpApi For Helping Us Protect Free Speech Online

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

Call for Submissions: Digital Pride

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

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

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

Court Records Should Be Free

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

Field Notes from a Year of OPSEC Training

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

AI Regulation Should Be Rational, Not Retaliatory

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

‘Popa’ Botnet Linked to Publicly-Traded Israeli Firm

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

The Free and Open Web Is Under Attack at the IETF

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

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

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

Onward, Friends

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

EFFecting Change: LGBTQ+ Solidarity Against the Tide of Surveillance

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

Victory! 702 has Expired!

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

Yes to California's Bill to Ban Surveillance Pricing

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

‘News’ Site Keeps Hallucinating EFF Staffers

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

LGBT Q&A: We’re Back With Season 2! 

Last June during Pride, we launched a new initiative—LGBT Q&A—where we answered your most pressing queer-related digital rights questions on EFF’s Instagram and TikTok accounts. No question was too big or too small! You asked us things like what pictures to use on dating apps; how to remove your name from internet searches; why homophobic content doesn't get removed after you report it; and how to…

Congress Just Rushed Through a Disastrous Copyright Office Overhaul

In a voice vote earlier this week, the House of Representatives passed H.R. 6028, the “Legislative Branch Agencies Clarification Act.” The legislation is presented as a technical reorganization of some government agencies, but it’s much more than that.  H.R. 6028 would fundamentally change the U.S. Copyright Office, and not in a good way. The bill removes the Library of Congress’ current superviso…

The 702 Ultimatum: Warrant Requirement or Bust

For months now, Congress has been kicking the ball down the road—temporarily postponing the expiration of the mass surveillance authority Section 702 of FISA in hopes that some consensus could be reached. Now, with the deadline looming, the stakes have never been higher. Nearly every time the statute has come up for renewal, the people demanding privacy and civil liberties have had to compromise,…

Enshittification Merch That Actually Fights Enshittification 

Enshittification isn't just a sweary word to describe the accelerating decay of the online platforms, apps, and services that we rely on.   It's a framework for understanding the structural incentives that make tech companies enemies of their own users over time—the surveillance business model, the erosion of privacy, the monopoly power that eliminates alternatives, the regulatory capture that pre…

🔊 Mass Surveillance for… Loud Music? | EFFector 38.11

Across the country, surveillance companies have spun a vast web of tens of thousands of license plate cameras. The people selling this tech want you to believe that it's for your safety, but how are authorities really using automated license plate readers (ALPR)? In this week's EFFector newsletter, we're looking at how these powerful surveillance networks have become universal people-trackers used…

Who Runs the Ransomware Group ‘The Gentlemen?’

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

How and Why to Fight Back Against Social Media Bans

Several U.S. states are pushing to ban young people from social media entirely. This marks the latest wave of censorship bills masquerading as “children’s online safety” measures, with states like Massachusetts, Idaho, Minnesota, North Carolina, South Carolina, Illinois, and EFF’s home state of California leading the charge. Just a few years ago, lawmakers supporting age-gating laws insisted their…

A Record-Breaking Patch Tuesday for June 2026

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

Tell Congress: Just Say No to NO FAKES

The Senate Judiciary Committee is set to consider and vote on the Nurture Originals, Foster Art, and Keep Entertainment Safe Act (NO FAKES). Instead of targeting the real privacy harms posed by AI-generated replicas, this law would create another layer of internet censorship on top of the already existing legal and voluntary takedown systems. Congress should reject NO FAKES. Take action Tell Congr…

VICTORY: Meta Strips Facial Recognition Code From Smart Glasses App After Public Outcry

Just days after a damning WIRED report exposed that Meta had quietly embedded facial recognition technology (FRT) code into millions of phones, the tech giant has quietly acquiesced in demands to reverse course. Last week, researchers identified code in Meta AI, a companion app for its line of smart glasses, that could convert images of faces into unique biometric signatures to identify strangers…

Cheers to the Winners of EFF’s 18th Annual Cyberlaw Trivia Night! 

On a warm June evening in San Francisco, attorneys and other legally-minded friends of EFF gathered for our 18th Annual Cyberlaw Trivia Night, an annual test of tech-related legal knowledge, and the ability to remember some deeply obscure facts under pressure.  Returning Quizmaster Kurt Opsahl once again guided competitors through six rounds of trivia covering everything from intellectual property…

Internet Age Gates Are a Growing Global Threat

The internet is an essential resource for young people and adults to access information, explore community, and find themselves—both inside countries and across continents. Yet governments around the world continue to introduce and implement legislation requiring all online users to verify their ages before accessing the digital space. In some cases, politicians are going further, putting forth pr…

LGBT Q&A Season 1 Recap: Staying Safer Online

Last year during LGBTQ+ Pride month, we launched an LGBT Q&A where we answered your most pressing digital rights questions on EFF’s Instagram and TikTok  accounts.  Ahead of LGBT Q&A Season 2 launching next week, we’re posting a recap with some of the questions we answered. Check them out below. You wanted to know: How to stay safe when dating online. You asked: I'm a 17 year old trans woman and m…

California’s AB 412 Still Demands Developers Do The Impossible

California lawmakers are again considering A.B. 412, a bill that would require AI developers to identify and disclose copyrighted works used to train generative AI systems. The problem this year is the same as last year: it’s practically impossible to comply with this law. The bill demands information that often does not exist, and cannot realistically be obtained.  EFF submitted an opposition le…

Pulte Appointment Underscores Need to Reform Section 702 Spying

President Trump’s highly politicized appointment of an entirely unqualified acting Director of National Intelligence (DNI) underscores why the government’s warrantless mass spying power must be reformed.  Congress now faces a deadline of Friday, June 12 to reauthorize Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, an unconstitutional program rife with problems, loopholes, and compliance…

EFF Testifies to Congress on Protecting Americans’ Rights from Government AI

Governments must not adopt emerging and powerful AI technologies without also adopting strong and clear safeguards to protect Constitutional rights, EFF Senior Policy Analyst Dr. Matthew Guariglia testified today to the House Homeland Security Subcommittee on Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Protection.  During the hearing on “The AI Security Landscape: How Frontier Models, Agentic AI, and AI Codi…

Move Fast, Surveil Things

Update, June 8, 2026: Following widespread public scrutiny and WIRED’s critical reporting, Meta has stripped the unactivated facial recognition code from its latest Meta AI app update. Meta has deployed facial recognition code to millions of their always-on surveillance glasses, according to new reporting by Wired. EFF’s Threat Lab was able to confirm that the facial recognition code is present th…

We're Fighting Mass Surveillance Tech—and Winning

EFF is on the front lines of the fight against tech-enabled tyranny, but we aren't alone. Our team depends on your help to fight back against the surveillance state. JOIN EFF People around the world are pushing back against the mass surveillance that undermines privacy and free expression for everyone. You can help during EFF's spring membership drive. One of the people who joined the fight for di…

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

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

Netherlands Seizes 800 Servers, Arrests 2 for Aiding Cyberattacks

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

Lawmakers Demand Answers as CISA Tries to Contain Data Leak

Lawmakers in both houses of Congress are demanding answers from the U.S. Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) after KrebsOnSecurity reported this week that a CISA contractor intentionally published AWS GovCloud keys and a vast trove of other agency secrets on a public GitHub account. The inquiry comes as CISA is still struggling to contain the breach and invalidate the leaked cred…

Alleged Kimwolf Botmaster ‘Dort’ Arrested, Charged in U.S. and Canada

Canadian authorities on Wednesday arrested a 23-year-old Ottawa man on suspicion of building and operating Kimwolf, a fast spreading Internet-of-Things botnet that enslaved millions of devices for use in a series of massive distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks over the past six months. KrebsOnSecurity publicly named the suspect in February 2026 after the accused launched a volley of DDoS,…

CISA Admin Leaked AWS GovCloud Keys on Github

Until this past weekend, a contractor for the Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) maintained a public GitHub repository that exposed credentials to several highly privileged AWS GovCloud accounts and a large number of internal CISA systems. Security experts said the public archive included files detailing how CISA builds, tests and deploys software internally, and that it represe…