All the News that Matters

• [$] BPF signing LSM hook change rejected
  BPF lets users load programs into a running kernel.Even though BPF programs are checked by the verifier toensure that they stay inside certain limits, some users would still like to ensurethat only approved BPF programs are loaded. KP Singh'spatches adding that capability to the kernel were acceptedin version 6.18, but not everyone issatisfied with his implementation. Blaise Boscaccy, who has been working to geta version of BPF code signing with better auditabilityinto the kernel for some time, posteda patch set on top of Singh's changes that alters the loading process tonot invoke security module hooksuntil the entire loading process is complete.The discussion on the patchset is the continuation of along-running disagreement overthe interface for signed BPF programs.
  

• Python Software Foundation withdraws security-related grant proposal
  The Python Software Foundation, earlier this year, successfully obtained a$1.5 million grant from the US National Science Foundation "toaddress structural vulnerabilities in Python and PyPI". The actualgrant came with some strings attached though, in the form of a requirementnot to pursue diversity, equity, and inclusion programs. So the Foundationhas withdrawnthe proposal rather than agree to terms that run counter to its ownmission.
  We're disappointed to have been put in the position where we had to make this decision, because we believe our proposed project would offer invaluable advances to the Python and greater open source community, protecting millions of PyPI users from attempted supply-chain attacks. The proposed project would create new tools for automated proactive review of all packages uploaded to PyPI, rather than the current process of reactive-only review.

• Rust Coreutils 0.3.0 released
  Version0.3.0 of Rust Coreutils, part of the uutils project, has beenreleased. This release adds safe directory traversal for severalutilities, better error handling, and performanceimprovements. The project has upgraded its test suite reference fromGNU coreutils 9.7 to 9.8, and added 16 new tests. It includes a fixfor the date bugthat affected automatic updates in Ubuntu 25.10.
  
  
  

• Security updates for Monday
  Security updates have been issued by Debian (intel-microcode, openjdk-11, openjdk-17, openjdk-21, python-pip, request-tracker4, thunderbird, and tika), Fedora (cef, chromium, complyctl, cri-o1.31, cri-o1.32, cri-o1.33, cri-o1.34, docker-buildkit, docker-buildx, dovecot, fetchmail, gi-docgen, golang-github-facebook-time, insight, mbedtls, mingw-binutils, mingw-python3, mingw-qt5-qtsvg, mingw-qt6-qtsvg, moodle, openssl, perl-YAML-Syck, podman-tui, python-socketio, python-sqlparse, python3.10, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, qt5-qtsvg, runc, samba, squid, sssd, suricata, valkey, wireshark, wordpress, and yarnpkg), Red Hat (libssh), SUSE (aaa_base, afterburn, bind, chromedriver, chrony, firefox, git, govulncheck-vulndb, grub2, ImageMagick, java-11-openjdk, java-17-openjdk, kernel, libssh, libunbound8, libxslt, micropython, mozilla-nss, netty, open-vm-tools, openbao, p7zip, podman, poppler, python-python-socketio, python-urllib3, ruby2.5, rust-keylime, vim, wireshark, and xen), and Ubuntu (linux-aws-6.14).

• Valgrind 3.26.0 released
  Version 3.26.0 of the Valgrindmemory-profiling and debugging framework has been released. Notablechanges include updated support for the Linux TestProject (LTP) to version v20250930, many new Linux syscallwrappers, and the license for Valgrind has been changed from GPLv2 toGPLv3.
  

• Kernel prepatch 6.18-rc3
  Linus has released 6.18-rc3 for testing."Things feel fairly normal, and in fact the numbers say it's been a bitcalmer than usual, but that's likely just the usual fluctuation in pullrequest timing rather than anything else".

• Typst 0.14 released
  Version 0.14 of theTypst document processor has been released.
  If you need to comply with accessibility-related regulations, Typst 0.14 has your back. Typst now generates accessible documents by default, with opt-in support for stricter checks. For those working with complex illustrations, PDFs are now supported as a native image format. In case you're typesetting a book, the new character-level justification will give your layout the final touch. And if you're building a website or blog, many improvements to Typst's HTML export are waiting for you.
  LWN looked at Typst in September.

• Security updates for Friday
  Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (webkit2gtk3), Debian (bind9, chromium, python-internetarchive, and tryton-sao), Fedora (dokuwiki and php-php81_bc-strftime), Mageia (firefox, nss & rootcerts and thunderbird), Slackware (openssl), SUSE (bleachbit, chromium, kernel, mozilla-nss, and python311-uv), and Ubuntu (fetchmail, golang-go.crypto, and linux-oracle-5.4).

• [$] GoFundMe to delete unwanted open-source foundation pages
  Open-source foundations and projects that have charity status inthe US may want to see if GoFundMe has created a profilefor them without permission. The company has operated since 2010 as aself-service fundraising platform; individuals or groups could createpages to raise money for all manner of causes. In June, the company announcedthat it would expand its offerings to "manage all aspects ofcharitable giving" for users through its platform. That seems toinclude creating profiles for nonprofit organizations without theirinvolvement. After pushback, the company saidon October 23 that it would be removing the pages. It has notanswered more fundamental questions about how it planned to disbursefunds to nonprofits that had no awareness of the GoFundMe pages in thefirst place.
  

• Date bug affects Ubuntu 25.10 automatic updates
  The Ubuntu Project has announcedthat a bug in the Rust-based uutils version of thedate command shipped with Ubuntu 25.10 broke automaticupdates:
  
  Some Ubuntu 25.10 systems have been unable to automatically checkfor available software updates. Affected machines include clouddeployments, container images, Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Serverinstalls.
  
  The announcement includes remediation instructions for thoseaffected by the bug. Systems with the rust-coreutils packageversion 0.2.2-0ubuntu2 or earlier have the bug, it is fixed in0.2.2-0ubuntu2.1 or later. It does not impact manual updates using theapt command or other utilities.
  
  Ubuntu embarked on a project to "oxidize" the distribution byswitching to uutils and sudo-rsfor the 25.10 release, and to see if the Rust-based utilities would besuitable for the long-term-release slated for next April. LWN covered that project inMarch.
  
  
  

• Three new stable kernels for Thursday
  Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.17.5, 6.12.55, and 6.6.114 stable kernels. As usual, eachcontains important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised toupgrade.
  
  
  

• [$] Safer speculation-free user-space access
  The Spectre class of hardware vulnerabilities truly is a gift that keeps ongiving. New variants are still being discovered in current CPUs nearlyeight years after the disclosure of thisproblem, and developers are still working to minimize the performance coststhat come from defending against it. The masked user-space accessmechanism is a case in point: it reduces the cost of defending against somespeculative attacks, but it brought some challenges of its own that areonly now being addressed.

• Btrfs support coming to AlmaLinux 10.1
  The AlmaLinux project has announcedthat the upcoming 10.1 release will include support forBtrfs:
  
  Btrfs support encompasses both kernel and userspace enablement, andit is now possible to install AlmaLinux OS with a Btrfs filesystemfrom the very beginning. Initial enablement was scoped to theinstaller and storage management stack, and broader support within theAlmaLinux software collection for Btrfs features is forthcoming.
  
  Btrfs support in AlmaLinux OS did not happen in isolation. This wasproposed and scoped in RFC 0005, and has been built upon prior effortsby the FedoraBtrfs SIG in Fedora Linux and the CentOS Hyperscale SIGin CentOS Stream.
  
  AlmaLinux OS is designed to be binary compatible with Red HatEnterprise Linux (RHEL); Btrfs, however, has never been supported inRHEL. A technology preview of Btrfs in RHEL 6 and 7 ended with thefilesystem being dropped from RHEL 8 andonward. AlmaLinux OS 10.1 is currentlyin beta.
  
  
  

• Security updates for Thursday
  Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (ipa, kernel, and thunderbird), Debian (gdk-pixbuf, gegl, gimp, intel-microcode, raptor2, request-tracker4, and request-tracker5), Fedora (samba and wireshark), Mageia (haproxy, nginx, openssl, and python-django), Oracle (kernel and thunderbird), Red Hat (redis and redis:7), Slackware (bind), SUSE (aws-cli, local-npm-registry, python-boto3, python- botocore, python-coverage, python-flaky, python-pluggy, python-pytest, python- pytest-cov, python-pytest-html, python-pytest-metada, cargo-audit-advisory-db-20251021, fetchmail, git-bug, ImageMagick, istioctl, kernel, krb5, libsoup, libxslt, python-Authlib, and sccache), and Ubuntu (bind9, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.8, linux-gcp, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, and linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8).

• [$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 23, 2025
  Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:
  Front: Git 3.0 topics; Lazy imports for Python; RubyGems; LLMs for patch review; DebugFS. Briefs: Fedora AI policy; OpenBSD 7.8; DigiKam 8.8.0; Forgejo 13.0; KDE Plasma 6.5; RubyGems; Valkey 9.0.0; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Linux Insider"LinuxInsider"

• Open-Source Model Near Breaking Point Despite Trillions in Value
  A coalition of open-source stewards warns that the software industry’s reliance on goodwill to maintain critical infrastructure is unsustainable, despite open source fueling trillions in global economic value. The post Open-Source Model Near Breaking Point Despite Trillions in Value appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• The Linux Foundation Expands Agentic AI Push With Third Major Project
  The Linux Foundation has launched its third major agentic AI initiative in three months, designed to secure communication, enhance interoperability, and drive open-source innovation in multi-agent environments. The post The Linux Foundation Expands Agentic AI Push With Third Major Project appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• TuxCare’s In-Memory CVE Scanner Enhances Linux Security With Radar
  TuxCare Radar is an in-memory CVE scanner that reduces false positives, speeds compliance, and delivers real-time Linux vulnerability detection. The post TuxCare’s In-Memory CVE Scanner Enhances Linux Security With Radar appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Linux Patch Blind Spot Exposes Critical Cybersecurity Risks
  Linux patch delays leave enterprises exposed to long-standing vulnerabilities. Experts warn automation and consistent management are essential to closing this critical security gap. The post Linux Patch Blind Spot Exposes Critical Cybersecurity Risks appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• The Year of the Linux Desktop? This Time, the Data Says Yes
  Linux is making real gains on the desktop. New data shows its market share passing 5% in the U.S., signaling a long-awaited breakthrough. The post The Year of the Linux Desktop? This Time, the Data Says Yes appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• From Kernel to Cloud: Open Source Takes On Security Trade-Offs
  Open-source systems are adopting live patching and isolation technologies to support always-on security and meet enterprise compliance demands in the cloud. The post From Kernel to Cloud: Open Source Takes On Security Trade-Offs appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Kubernetes Cost Optimization May Be Doing More Harm Than Good
  Slashing Kubernetes costs sounds smart — until it backfires. Here’s how to reduce spend safely while improving platform stability and speed. The post Kubernetes Cost Optimization May Be Doing More Harm Than Good appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Is a Security Baseline Enough for Open-Source Software?
  The OpenSSF’s new baseline sets minimum security expectations for open-source projects — but not all developers agree it’s practical, scalable, or sufficient. The post Is a Security Baseline Enough for Open-Source Software? appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• DOD Raises Software Security Expectations With SWFT Initiative
  Open-source software may be in the crosshairs of military and government agencies as the U.S. Department of Defense evaluates the risks of both free and proprietary software. The post DOD Raises Software Security Expectations With SWFT Initiative appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Edera and CIQ Advance Linux Security With Hardened Tools
  With Edera Protect and CIQ's RLC-H, open-source innovators are redefining Linux security through stronger isolation and proactive threat defense. The post Edera and CIQ Advance Linux Security With Hardened Tools appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Qualcomm announces AI accelerators and mysterious racks they’ll run in
  House of the Snapdragon promises – without much detail – this kit will enable coolly efficient inferencing
  Qualcomm has announced some details of its tilt at the AI datacenter market by revealing a pair of accelerators and rack scale systems to house them, all focused on inferencing workloads.…
  

• WSUS attacks hit 'multiple' orgs as Google and other infosec sleuths ring Redmond’s alarm bell
  If at first you don’t succeed, patch and patch again
  More threat intel teams are sounding the alarm about a critical Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) remote code execution vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2025-59287 and now under active exploitation, just days after Microsoft pushed an emergency patch and the US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency added the bug to its Known Exploited Vulnerabilities catalog.…
  

• Get ready to squint! World's smallest pixel is just 300 nm
  How many 1080p screens can you fit on a pinhead? These German physicists reckon about one
  Micro-OLED displays with 1080p (1920x1080) resolution have been around for a few years now, but a group of German researchers has taken things to the next level. They've engineered an OLED pixel so small that an entire 1080p display could fit into a single square millimeter, potentially changing the game for wearable displays.…
  

• Python Foundation goes ride or DEI, rejects government grant with strings attached
  Foundation says it won't compromise policy of inclusivity even if that cash would've really helped
  The Python Software Foundation (PSF) has walked away from a $1.5 million government grant and you can blame the Trump administration's war on woke for effectively weakening some open source security. …
  

• Signal president Meredith Whittaker says they had no choice but to use AWS, and that's a problem
  The problem is the concentration of power in the infrastructure space that means there isn’t really another choice
  Messaging service Signal may be unusual in its deployment of credible end-to-end encryption, but it shares a common availability vulnerability with many other internet services – dependence on Amazon Web Services (AWS).…
  

• Atlas vuln lets crims inject malicious prompts ChatGPT won't forget between sessions
  It can do a lot more than just play 'Eye of the Tiger' daily
  In yet another reminder to be wary of AI browsers, researchers at LayerX uncovered a vulnerability in OpenAI's Atlas that lets attackers inject malicious instructions into ChatGPT's memory using cross-site request forgery.…
  

• HPE's Discovery to succeed Frontier supercomputer with next-gen Cray tech
  Oak Ridge's $500M system due in 2028, paired with a separate Lux AI cluster arriving two years earlier
  HPE is set to build a successor to the Frontier exascale system for America's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, based on the next generation of its Cray supercomputer platform, plus a separate AI cluster to advance machine learning with a multi-tenant cloud-like platform.…
  

• Iran's school for cyberspies could've used a few more lessons in preventing breaches
  Ravin Academy confirms the intrusion on Telegram, says student data was stolen
  Iran's school for state-sponsored cyberattackers admits it suffered a breach exposing the names and other personal information of its associates and students.…
  

• You have one week to opt out or become fodder for LinkedIn AI training
  Nations previously exempt from scraping now in the firing line
  If you thought living in Europe, Canada, or Hong Kong meant you were protected from having LinkedIn scrape your posts to train its AI, think again. You have a week to opt out before the Microsoft subsidiary assumes you're fine with it.…
  

• As AI agents join SaaS, AWS tells users to expect more pricing puzzles
  Cloud giant says choice and flexibility matter more than standardization – for now
  Interview As agentic AI solutions flood the market, users will face a complex environment in terms of deployment and commercial models, with standard practices yet to be resolved, says Olawale Oladehin, AWS director, solutions architecture.…
  

• EU sovereignty plan accused of helping US cloud giants
  Brussels' framework muddies the waters and could hand advantage to foreign hyperscalers, says trade body
  Europe's efforts to reduce reliance on US hyperscalers is under fire from many of the local cloud providers it is designed to help.…
  

• Researchers exploit OpenAI's Atlas by disguising prompts as URLs
  NeuralTrust shows how agentic browser can interpret bogus links as trusted user commands
  Researchers have found more attack vectors for OpenAI's new Atlas web browser – this time by disguising a potentially malicious prompt as an apparently harmless URL.…
  

• X says passkey reset isn't about a security issue – it's to finally kill off twitter.com
  Social media site dispatches crucial clarification days after curious announcement
  X (formerly Twitter) sparked security concerns over the weekend when it announced users must re-enroll their security keys by November 10 or face account lockouts — without initially explaining why.…
  

• Ex-CISA head thinks AI might fix code so fast we won't need security teams
  Jen Easterly says most breaches stem from bad software, and smarter tech could finally clean it up
  Ex-CISA head Jen Easterly claims AI could spell the end of the cybersecurity industry, as the sloppy software and vulnerabilities that criminals rely on will be tracked down faster than ever.…
  

• Everything you know about last week's AWS outage is wrong
  AI wasn't the cause, and multi-cloud is for rubes
  Column AWS put out a hefty analysis of its October 20 outage, and it's apparently written in a continuing stream of consciousness before the Red Bull wore off and the author passed out after 36 straight hours of writing.…
  

• Machine learning saves £4.4M in UK.gov work and pensions fraud detection
  Poor data standards across government hamper scaling, says Parliament spending watchdog
  The UK government's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has saved £4.4 million over three years by using machine learning to tackle fraud, according to the National Audit Office (NAO). However, the public spending watchdog found the department's ability to expand this work is limited by fragmented IT systems and poor cross-government data standards.…
  

• The Chinese Box and Turing Test: AI has no intelligence at all
  It's just good at mass-production copy and paste
  Opinion Remember ELIZA? The 1966 chatbot from MIT's AI Lab convinced countless people it was intelligent using nothing but simple pattern matching and canned responses. Nearly 60 years later, ChatGPT has people making the same mistake. Chatbots don't think – they've just gotten exponentially better at pretending.…
  

• The perfect AWS storm has blown over, but the climate is only getting worse
  When it rains, it pours – and nobody packed an umbrella
  Opinion When your cabbie asks you what you do for a living, and you answer "tech journalist," you never get asked about cloud infrastructure in return. Bitcoin, mobile phones, AI, yes. Until last week: "What's this AWS thing, then?" You already knew a lot of people were having a very bad day in Bezosville, but if the news had reached an Edinburgh black cab driver, new adjectives were needed.…
  

• Frustrated consultant 'went full Hulk' and started smashing hardware
  Four back-to-back weekends of work – and disastrously bad documentation – will do that do a techie
  Who, Me? Welcome to Monday morning and another installment of Who, Me? For the uninitiated, it's The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that tells tales of your greatest misses, and how you rebuilt a career afterward.…
  

• Automattic accuses rival WordPress outfit WP Engine of ‘false advertising, and deceptive business practices’
  FOSS feud re-ignites with massive counter-claim
  The long battle between Automattic and WP Engine has flared again, this time with accusations the latter company issued “false advertising”, and employed “deceptive business practices.”…
  

• UN Cybercrime Treaty wins dozens of signatories, to go with its many critics
  Allows surveillance and cross-border evidence sharing, which worries human rights groups
  The United Nations on Saturday staged a signing ceremony for the Convention against Cybercrime, the world’s first agreement to combat online crime. And while 72 nations picked up the pen, critics continue to point out the convention’s flaws.…
  

• Australia sues Microsoft for misleading M365 users about Copilot subscription options
  PLUS: China demotes tech self-sufficiency goal; Alibaba Cloud quietly quits VMware; India demands deepfake labels; and more!
  Asia In Brief Australia’s Competition & Consumer Commission on Monday commenced legal proceedings against Microsoft for allegedly misleading users of its Microsoft 365 bundle.…
  

• Shaq's new ride gets jaq'ed in haq attaq
  PLUS: Judge spanks NSO; Mozilla requires data use disclosures; TARmageddon meets Rust; And more!
  Infosec In Brief Former basketball star Shaquille O'Neal is 7'1" (215 cm), and therefore uses car customization companies to modify vehicles to fit his frame. But it appears cybercriminals have targeted Shaq’s preferred motor-modder.…
  

• MPs urge government to stop Britain's phone theft wave through tech
  Committee says Apple, Google, and Samsung could render stolen handsets worthless if compelled to act
  The UK's Home Secretary should use her powers to push the tech industry to deploy stronger technical measures against the surge in phone thefts, according to a House of Commons committee.…
  

• Berkeley boffins build better load balancing algo with AI
  One way AI can improve on human work
  Computer scientists at UC Berkeley say that AI models show promise as a way to discover and optimize algorithms.…
  

• Everybody's warning about critical Windows Server WSUS bug exploits ... but Microsoft's mum
  Critical 9.8-rated vulnerability affects Windows Server 2012 - 2025
  Governments and private security sleuths warned that attackers are already exploiting a critical bug in Microsoft Windows Server Update Services, shortly after Redmond pushed an emergency patch for the remote code execution (RCE) vulnerability.…
  

• High-stakes poker scam used rigged card shufflers, X-ray tables, and special glasses
  31 alleged poker schemers nabbed alongside arrest of separate sports betting ring
  The feds on Thursday charged alleged mafia associates and current and former National Basketball Association players and coaches with running rigged poker games and illegal sports betting.…
  

• Sneaky Mermaid attack in Microsoft 365 Copilot steals data
  Redmond says it's fixed this particular indirect prompt injection vuln
  updated Microsoft fixed a security hole in Microsoft 365 Copilot that allowed attackers to trick the AI assistant into stealing sensitive tenant data – like emails – via indirect prompt injection attacks.…
  

• Sora makes slurfect deepfakes of celebs spewing racial epithets
  If you listen closely, you’ll realize Sam Altman and the others are only saying sound-alike words
  Guardrails? What guardrails? Naughty netizens found a way to trick the Sora 2 video generator into producing deepfakes of public figures, including OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and billionaire Mark Cuban, that make it sound as though they're spewing racial slurs. The trick works despite Sora's built-in filters meant to block hateful language.…
  

• Uncle Sam's new power plan will plug AI farms into the grid faster
  Proposal would fast-track hookups for the megawatt-hungry datacenters driving US electricity demand
  The US Energy Secretary wants to see datacenters connected to the grid faster, and has directed the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC) to implement new rules that speed the process.…
  

• OpenAI goes after Microsoft 365 Copilot's lunch with 'company knowledge' feature
  ChatGPT can now rummage through corporate files via connectors, though Redmond still has the deeper hooks
  Updated OpenAI is chalenging Microsoft 365 Copilot with "company knowledge," a new ChatGPT feature that connects to organizational data to generate business-specific answers.…
  

• Apple faces £1.5B payout after losing UK App Store case
  iPhone maker overcharged devs and users, says competition court
  Apple could face claims estimated at around £1.5 billion after it lost a collective case in the UK arguing that its closed systems for apps resulted in overcharging businesses and consumers.…
  

• AI investment is the only thing keeping the US out of recession
  Datacenter infrastructure and model development spending offset high borrowing costs
  AI spending is keeping the US economy out of recession, with datacenter infrastructure and model development providing the only significant growth amid trade turmoil, tariff shocks, and high borrowing costs.…
  

• Microsoft drops surprise Windows Server patch before weekend downtime
  You didn't have plans, did you?
  Microsoft has released an out-of-band update to patch a critical vulnerability in Windows Server Update Services (WSUS).…
  

• Alaska Airlines grounded by mystery IT meltdown
  Failure at primary datacenter leaves planes parked and passengers angry, second incident since July
  Updated Timing is everything – except when it isn't. US carrier Alaska Airlines has grounded its fleet once again due to a mystery IT issue.…
  

• Digital ID is now less about illegal working, more about rummaging through drawers
  Starmer rebrands unpopular scheme as convenience tool after backlash
  UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer has relaunched his digital ID scheme as something that will make people's lives easier, less than four weeks after announcing it as a measure to tackle illegal working.…
  

• Windows Insiders get special anniversary desktop wallpaper
  11 years of filing feedback and all we got was a bloody... not even a T-shirt?
  Microsoft is celebrating 11 years of the Windows Insider Program with custom desktops and maybe a secret hint for users wondering which operating system to consider.…
  

• BBC probe finds AI chatbots mangle nearly half of news summaries
  Google Gemini worst offender with 76% error rate
  Four of the most popular AI chatbots routinely serve up inaccurate or misleading news content to users, according to a wide-reaching investigation.…
  

• How do you solve a problem like Discovery?
  Request For Ideas: How would you move a retired orbiter across the US?
  The White House's Office of Management and Budget is grappling with how to transport Space Shuttle Discovery from the Smithsonian Museum in Virginia to Space Center Houston. How would you do it?…
  

• Shield AI shows off not-at-all-terrifying autonomous VTOL combat drone
  Runways? Where we're going, we don't need runways
  US defense technology biz Shield AI claims it can build a jet-powered vertical take-off and landing (VTOL) autonomous fighter drone that doesn't need a runway to operate.…
  

• Britain's Ministry of Justice just signed up to ChatGPT Enterprise
  OpenAI sweetens the deal with data residency
  OpenAI has signed up the UK's Ministry of Justice as the latest public sector customer for ChatGPT Enterprise.…
  

• New boss took charge of project code and sent two billion unwanted emails
  Techie summoned at 02:00 AM to sort things out sent another 2 billion trying to fix it
  On Call Welcome to another instalment of On Call, The Register's weekly wander through your tales of tech support.…
  

• Iran's MuddyWater wades into 100+ government networks in latest spying spree
  Group-IB says Tehran-linked crew used hijacked mailbox and VPN to sling phishing emails across Middle East
  Iran's favorite muddy-footed cyberespionage crew is at it again, this time breaching more than 100 government entities across the Middle East and North Africa, according to researchers at Group-IB.…
  

• Supermicro warns it will miss revenue forecast by a lazy billion bucks or more
  Mystery customer wants an upgrade that will take some time
  Supermicro has revised its revenue forecast downwards by a couple of billion dollars, but insisted it’s nothing to worry about.…
  

• Intel says server CPUs will be hot again – in a good way, to power AI workloads – any year now
  Chipzilla returns to profit and suggests customers are primed to sign for foundry services once it nails 18A process
  Intel has returned to profitability, grown revenue, and suggested demand for AI will ensure its struggling foundry business wins customers and boosts its datacenter CPU business.…
  

• Cyber exec with lavish lifestyle charged with selling secrets to Russia
  The 0-days have left the building
  Federal prosecutors have charged a former general manager of US government defense contractor L3Harris's cyber arm Trenchant with selling secrets to an unidentified Russian buyer for $1.3 million.…
  

• Clippy rises from the dead in major update to Copilot and its voice interface
  The new Microsoft assistant is a blob named Mico, but you can turn it into everyone’s favorite paper clip.
  Hands On Microsoft’s Clippy was an anthropomorphic assistant ahead of his time, offering to help you with your Office 97 tasks when all you could do was type and click in response. Today, as part of a massive Copilot Fall Release, Redmond is bringing Clippy back – at least as an avatar for its new AI helper named “Mico”.…
  

• Google and Anthropic wave hands about mega TPU deal worth 'tens of billions'
  But AWS is still the AI upstart's primary partner
  Google and Anthropic have struck a deal that will see the AI upstart gain access to up to a million of the web giant’s tensor processing units (TPUs) and involve “tens of billions of dollars.”…
  

• Don't take AI to Thanksgiving: Bots have hidden biases
  It's not a bug, it's a feature
  Large language models, or LLMs, are biased in one way or another - often many. And there may be no way around that.…
  

• Playtime’s over: Crooks swipe Toys R Us Canada customer data and dump it online
  What?! No complimentary credit monitoring?
  The Canadian outpost of retailer Toys R Us on Thursday notified customers that attackers accessed a database, stole some of their personal information, then posted the data online.…
  

• OpenRazer 3.11 Released With Linux Driver Support For Newer Razer Devices
  OpenRazer 3.11 is out as the newest version of these out-of-tree but open-source and community-maintained drivers for Razer devices on Linux. Plus OpenRazer also provides a user-space daemon for controlling Razer RGB lighting and other features. Paired with the likes of the Polychromatic app, OpenRazer makes for a pleasant Razer device experience for gamers and enthusiasts under Linux...

• FreeBSD Celebrates The Milestone Of Reproducible Builds & No Root Needed
  A big focus for the FreeBSD 15.0 development was on supporting reproducible builds as has been a growing trend in the open-source ecosystem in recent years. One month out from the official FreeBSD 15.0 release, the FreeBSD project is today celebrating having crossed the milestone of being able to be built reproducibly and as well now building FreeBSD without requiring root privileges...

• Ubuntu Unity In Need Of More Developers To Survive
  The Ubuntu Unity community flavor of Ubuntu Linux built around the Unity desktop is in a difficult position and at risk for its survival given the lack of developers involved. A call-out has been made in seeking more community developers to contribute to Ubuntu Unity...

• AMD EPYC 9965 "Turin" 2P Performance Seeing Some Gains On Linux 6.18
  Beyond packing many exciting new features and changes, Linux 6.18 is expected to become this year's Long Term Support (LTS) kernel version. Assuming the Linux 6.18 LTS designation, this next kernel version will see lots of use in enterprise environments and thus recently carried out some AMD EPYC 9965 2P "Turin" benchmarks between Linux 6.17 stable and the Linux 6.18 development kernel state...

• OpenIndiana 2025.10 ISOs Available For Download
  OpenIndiana 2025.10 ISOs were published on Sunday as the newest half-year update to this Illumos (OpenSolaris) derived platform...

• AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 Linux Performance For Single & Dual GPU Benchmarks
  Today the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 is officially shipping as the company9s new RDNA4-based offering designed for AI workloads and priced at $1299+ USD. The AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 offers 32GB of GDDR6 video memory and features 128 AI accelerators and rated for 96 TFLOPs peak half-precision compute, up to 1531 TOPS INT4 sparse, and has a 300 Watt TDP. Here are the initial benchmarks of the AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 under Linux with ROCm 7.0 and testing both in single and dual R9700 graphics card configurations.

• Turbosqueeze Realtime Multi-Threaded Compression Aims To Compete With Zstd, Snappy
  Turbosqueeze 1.0 was announced today as a new real-time, multi-threaded compression solution designed for C/C++ programs and aiming to compete with the likes of Zstd, LZ4, and Snappy compression...

• Splash DRM Client Proposed For Linux But Its Future Is Uncertain
  Sent out on Sunday to the Linux kernel mailing list was a proposal for a new Direct rendering Manager (DRM) client for providing "splash screen" type functionality such as for embedded systems and more. But with Plymouth in user-space already being the dominant solution here and upstream developers tending to prefer such functionality in user-space instead, its future remains uncertain with some developers already questioning the value of this proposed solution...

• PanVK Mali Vulkan Driver Lands In-Memory Cache & On-Disk Shader Cache Support
  The PanVK driver for modern Arm Mali Vulkan driver support within Mesa has tapped into Mesa's on-disk shader cache functionality as well as an in-memory cache to provide for a better experience with this open-source driver...

• Intel Xe Driver Patches Allow For Mapping DMA-BUFs Via IOV Interconnects
  In addition to the patches sent out this weekend by Intel for Xe driver preparations for multi-device Shared Virtual Machine (multi-device SVM), another notable patch series making it out this weekend for the Intel Xe open-source kernel graphics driver is support for mapping DMA-BUFs via IOV interconnects...

• Linux 6.18-rc3 Released With Latest Fixes
  The Linux 6.18-rc3 kernel is now available for testing in working toward the Linux 6.18 stable kernel release in just about one month. Linux 6.18 is expected to become this year's Long Term Support "LTS" kernel...

• Debian Establishes Archive Operations Team, Licensing & New Packages Team
  Debian Project Leader Andreas Tille announced today that their "FTP Master" team is being disbanded and instead establishing the Debian Archive Operations Team "Archive Team" and DFSG, Licensing and New Packages Team "DFSG Team" in its place...

• FFmpeg Introduces Vulkan Acceleration For Apple ProRes Video Decoding
  The talented FFmpeg developers continue to be quite innovative with their performance optimizations and other features for this widely-used, open-source multimedia library. The latest addition to FFmpeg this weekend is introducing Vulkan accelerated video decoding for Apple ProRes content...

• EXT4 Patches Enable Block Size Greater Than Page Size Support
  Following the initial VFS changes last year for supporting block sizes larger than the kernel's page size along with the initial XFS file-system patches, Btrfs recently landed its support for block sizes greater than the page size. Now EXT4 is preparing to join the party too for allowing larger block sizes...

• Intel Sends Out Initial Graphics Driver Patches For Multi-Device SVM
  As part of their Project Battlematrix effort, Intel has been working on enhancing their Linux graphics driver support for multi-device usage scenarios with wanting to support up to eight Intel Arc Pro graphics cards per system to help with AI LLMs and other larger use-cases. The latest code posted from Intel engineers is their initial implementation of multi-device Shared Virtual Memory (SVM) support...

• Linux Prepping For "Extreme" Mode On Lenovo Legion Devices
  Derek Clark who has been leading the efforts around Lenovo Legion gaming drivers for Linux and ensuring good support for the Lenovo Legion Go handheld on Linux sent out a new Linux patch series this weekend...

• AMD Begins Sending In "New Stuff" For Their Graphics Driver In Linux 6.19
  AMD on Friday sent in their first patch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver changes they are ready to begin queuing in the DRM-Next tree until the Linux 6.19 merge window kicks off in December and leading to a stable release around February...

• Resources 1.9 Brings Intel Xe GPU Support & Other System Resource Monitoring For GNOME
  Resources is the open-source app aligned with GNOME/GTK for system resource monitoring. Resources has proven to be quite versatile with a nice UI and able to display CPU, GPU, NPU, disk, and other metrics. Out today is Resources 1.9 with the latest capabilities for this app...

• NVIDIA Starts Posting Open-Source Nova Driver Patches To Prep For Next-Gen GPUs
  NVIDIA is taking the open-source and upstream "Nova" kernel graphics driver quite seriously for their hardware. Hitting the mailing lists on Friday night were initial patches in beginning to make preparations toward "next-gen GPU" support. Digging into the comments, it's indeed for post-Blackwell GPUs...

• Servo9s Demo Browser Adds Experimental Mode & More Performance Improvements
  The Servo open-source browser engine is out with their September 2025 development highlights. This Rust-based browser engine originally started by Mozilla continues making steady progress as well as to the "servoshell" demo/example browser implementation...

• KDE Plasma 6.6 Will Cater To Windows Power Users With "winver"
  Plasma 6.5 debuted this week that KDE developers and users have been celebrating. But it's already on to working out fixes for Plasma 6.5.1 as well as new feature activity toward Plasma 6.6...

• FreeBSD 15.0 Beta 3 Brings Working Support For MediaTek MT76 WiFi
  The newest weekly test release of the FreeBSD 15.0 is now available for evaluation ahead of the planned December official release...

• Rust Coreutils 0.3 Released With Some Major Speed-Ups, Better GNU Compatibility
  The uutils project announced tonight the release of Rust Coreutils 0.3, another step forward for this Rust version alternative to GNU Coreutils that has been attracting a lot of interest lately due to Ubuntu 25.10 now using it by default...

• OpenGL Sees New Extensions Added To The Registry
  It's been rare in recent years seeing any new OpenGL extensions given the wild success these days of the Vulkan API with its vast hardware adoption and increasing software support around that modern graphics and compute API. Yet this October has been unusual with now seeing multiple new OpenGL extensions merged to the OpenGL registry...

• The Latest Sheaves Work To Hopefully Improve Linux Performance
  Merged for Linux 6.18 was a new feature called Sheaves as an opt-in, per-CPU array-based caching layer. Plus there is a per-NUMA-node cache of Sheaves called a "Barn". In continuing to build out the Linux kernel usage of Sheaves, a set of initial patches were posted this week to replace the CPU slabs with Sheaves within the slub allocator code...

• Linux Lands Fix For "Serious Performance Regression" Affecting Some Intel Chromebooks
  Merged this week to Linux Git ahead of Linux 6.18-rc3 this Sunday were the latest power management fixes for the kernel. Standing out in the power management code is a fix for a "serious performance regression" affecting some Intel-powered Chromebooks...

• AMD EPYC Turin vs. Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids vs. Graviton4 Benchmarks With AWS M8 Instances
  With Amazon recently launching their M8a AWS instances powered by 5th Gen AMD EPYC "Turin", for their M8 class instance types there now are all the latest-generation CPU options with AMD EPYC Turin (M8a), Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids (M8i), and their in-house Graviton4 processors (M8g). After recently looking at the M7a vs. M8a performance with Amazon EC2, many Phoronix readers expressed interest in seeing an M8a vs. M8i vs. M8g performance showdown so here are those benchmarks.

• Updated AMD ISP4 Driver Posted For Linux With Fixes & Improvements
  AMD's ISP4 image signal processing IP is so far just used by the HP ZBook Ultra G1a laptop but will presumably be used by more of the higher-end AMD Ryzen next-gen laptops. AMD engineers today posted their fifth iteration of their open-source Linux driver for enabling the ISP4 use...

• Vulkan 1.4.330 Released With Five New Extensions
  Vulkan 1.4.330 is out today with a few specification corrections/clarifications plus five new extensions...

• Asahi Linux Still Working On Apple M3 Support, m1n1 Bootloader Going Rust
  The Asahi Linux developers involved with working on Linux support for Apple Silicon M-Series devices have put out a new progress report on their development efforts...

• New Code Allows VCE 1.0 Video Acceleration To Work On AMDGPU Driver For GCN 1.0 GPUs
  Valve contractor Timur Kristóf for their Linux graphics driver team has been working on improving Linux driver support for old AMD Radeon GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 generation GPUs. This has been about improving the AMDGPU driver to fill remaining gaps in GCN 1.0/1.1 support with those graphics cards by default relying on the older "Radeon" DRM kernel graphics driver compared to the AMDGPU driver used by default with GCN 1.2 and later. Another feature gap for AMDGPU is now being addressed with Video Coding Engine 1.0 support...

• Patina 13.0 Released As Rust UEFI Firmware Implementation
  Patina 13.0 is now available as this Rust implementation of UEFI firmware. Patina has been working to replace the core UEFI firmware components in a pure Rust implementation to avoid the use of C code...

• Id like to speak to the Bellcore ManaGeR
  I love it when I discover  usually through people smarter than I  an operating system or graphical user interface Ive never heard of. This time, weve got Bellcore MGR, as meticulously detailed by Nina Kalinina a few weeks ago. I love old computers, and I enjoy looking at old user interfaces immensely. I could spend a whole evening on installing an old version of MS Word and playing with it: Ah, look, how cute, they didnt invent scrollbars just yet!. A special place in my heart is taken by user interfaces that were historically significant and yet fell into relative obscurity (like Windows 2 or BTRON). This is why I absolutely had to try Bellcore MGR. An early windowing system (1984), it was made by the Bell Communications Research, and it looked like Plan 9s older sister. The system was distributed over the Usenet, ported to every conceivable Unix-like system, including Minix, Linux and Coherent, and  eventually  mostly forgotten. The only two videos on YouTube that have something to do with MGR have a bit over 1000 views combined, and dont really show it in the best light possible. And I think its a crying shame. ↫ Nina Kalinina The reference to Plan 9 is apt, as MGR definitely seems to function almost exactly like Plan 9s rio graphical user interface, including things like drawing a rectangle to open a new window. Rio is an acquired taste  to put it very mildly  and it seems MGR fits the same bill. Theres also $home movie, an entire video editor for MGR, which is honestly mind-blowing considering its running on a mere SPARCstation in the late 80s and early 90s. It has an incredibly unique UNIXy flavour: If you dont have 40 minutes to watch the tour, please do spend two minutes on this demo of the $HOME MOVIE! system. It is a suite of tools for the capture, editing and playback of window system sessions on a Sun Sparcstation! based on MGR. It is probably the most Unix way of making videos: the window manager dumps the rendering commands into a file, then the rendering commands can be altered with a set of small tools, some of which are in awk, and then these rendering commands can be packaged into a single demo. ↫ Nina Kalinina Kalinina had to more or less reverse-engineer its unique video format, too, but in doing so managed to upload the original demonstration of $movie home, narrated by its creator and created in $movie home itself, to YouTube. Kalinina also created and uploaded a ready-made hard disk image of Debian 0.93 with Bellcore MGR preinstalled for use in Qemu and 86Box.

• The Linux boot process: from power button to kernel
  You press the power button. A second later a wall of text scrolls by, or a logo fades in, and eventually Linux appears. What happens in between is not magic. It is a careful handshake between tiny programs and a very literal CPU. This part follows that handshake until the very first line of C code inside the Linux kernel runs. ↫ 0xkatos blog Exactly what it says on the tin.

• Upcoming Kwin changes extend battery life
  I think most of us are aware that compositors use multiple planes to render our user interfaces, and in the case of KDEs Kwin specifically, they use two planes  one for the user interface, and one specifically for the mouse cursor. Kwin developer Xaver Hugl has been working on changing Kwin to use more than just two planes, and it turns out this delivers some considerable power use reductions and thus battery life improvements. So, when can you use these changes and test them? Due to various driver issues when trying to use overlays, like slow atomic tests on AMD as well as display freezes on some AMD and NVidia GPUs, this feature is still off by default. However, if you want to experiment anyways or attempt to fix the drivers, starting from Plasma 6.5, you can set the KWIN_USE_OVERLAYS environment variable to enable the feature anyways. If you test it, please report your findings! If there’s problems in the drivers, we’d like to know and have bug reports for the GPU vendors of course, but also if things work well that would be nice to hear. ↫ Xaver Hugl Leave it to Linux graphics-related developers to uncover driver bugs in graphics drivers.

• AI! assistants misrepresent news content 45% of the time
  An extensive study by the European Broadcasting Union and the BBC highlights just how deeply inaccurate and untrustworthy AI! news results really are. AI! sucks even at its most basic function. Its incredible how much money is being pumped into this scam, and how many people are wholeheartedly defending these bullshit generators as if their lives depended on it. If these tools cant even summarise a text  something you learn in early primary school as a basic skill  how on earth are they supposed to perform more complex tasks like coding, making medical assessments, distinguish between a chips bag and a gun? Maybe we deserve it.

• Teenager detained at gunpoint by US cops because AI! mistook a chips bag for a gun
  If youre eating a bag of chips in an area where AI! software is being used to monitor peoples behaviour, you might want to reconsider. Some high school kid in the US was hanging out with his friends, when all of a sudden, he was being swarmed by police officers with with guns drawn. Held at gunpoint, he was told to lie down, after which he was detained. Obviously, this is a rather unpleasant experience, so say the least, especially considering the kid in question is a person of colour. In the US. Anyway, the AI! software used by the police department to monitor citizens behaviour mistook an empty chips bag in his pocket for a gun. US police officers, who only receive a few weeks of training, didnt question what the computer told them and pointed guns at a teenager. In a statement, Omnilert expressed regret over the incident, acknowledging that the image “closely resembled a gun being held.” The company called it a “false positive,” but defended the system’s response, stating it “functioned as intended: to prioritize safety and awareness through rapid human verification.” ↫ Alexa Dikos and Rebecca Pryor at FOX45 News Ive been warning that the implementation of AI! was going to lead to people dying, and while this poor kid got lucky this time, you know its only a matter of time before people start getting shot by US police because theyre too stupid to question their computer overlords. Add in the fact that AI! is well-known to be deeply racist, and we have a very deadly cocktail of failures.

• OpenBSD 7.8 released
  Like clockwork, every six months, we have a new OpenBSD release. OpenBSD 7.8 adds support for the Raspberry Pi 5, tons of improvements to sleep, wake, and hibernate, the TCP stack can now run in parallel on multiple processors, and so much more. DRM has been updated to match Linux 6.12.50, and drivers for the Qualcomm Snapdragon DRM subsystem and Qualcomm DisplayPort controller were added as well. The changelog is, as always, long and detailed, so head on over for the finer details. OpenBSD users will know how to upgrade, and new users can visit the download page.

• What about the icons in pifmgr.dll?
  Raymond Chen has another great post about some of the classic icons from Windows 95, this time focusing on pifmgr.dll. In this file, there are a variety of random-seeming icons, and it turns out theyre random for a reason: they were just a bunch a fun, generic icons intended for people to use when creating PIF files. The icons in pifmgr.dll were created just for fun. They were not created with any particular programs in mind, with one obvious exception. They were just a fun mix of icons for people to use for their own homemade shortcut files. ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing For those of us who didnt grow up with Windows, or who, god forbid, are too young to know, PIF or personal information files are effectively shortcuts to DOS programs for use in a multitasking environment. A PIF file would not only point to the relevant DOS executable, but also contain information about the environment in which said executable was supposed to run. Their history goes back to IBMs TopView, and Microsoft later embraced and adapted them for use in Windows.

• Understanding driver updates through Windows Update
  Microsoft has published a set of short questions and answers about driver updates through Windows Update, and theres one tidbit in there I found interesting. Driver dates might look old, but that is not true. The driver date is descriptive info set by the driver provider and can be any date they choose. When determining which driver to install, Windows Update uses targeting information set by the provider inside the driver files to determine the best driver. This lets the device provider promote the best driver, regardless of the chosen date.  ↫ Microsoft knowledge base article Whenever I do have to fiddle with Windows machines, I always wondered about why some drivers in Windows Update would show some seriously old dates. It turns out the answer is as obvious as it always tends to be: OEMs.

• KDE Plasma 6.5 released
  KDE is on a roll lately, and keeps on rolling with todays release of KDE Plasma 6.5. As the project itself notes, this release focuses on relatively small improvements, refinements, and other niceties, without making any massive changes. With Linux desktops taking accessibility more seriously lately than ever before, I want to focus on the accessibility improvements first. The Orca screen reader now announces caps lock state changes, and screen readers will now describe the Shortcuts and Autostart pages more optimally. Theres also a new grayscale colour filter for people sensitive to colours, developers have done Plasma-wide pass to eliminate bright flashes in the UI, and the desktop zoom feature will now follow the text insertion point as it moves around the UI. Keyboard navigation in various parts of Plasma have been improved, and a few other small changes have been to improve accessiblity. Other changes include rounded bottom window corners (which can be turned off), automatic and scheduled theme and wallpaper transitions (e.g. from light to dark), and a new and improved applications permissions settings panel. A small new feature that will be a massive time saver for me is the ability to favourite items in your clipboard history, so they remain available over time. I reuse certain copied bits of text all the time, and I cant wait to start using this little addition. Remote desktop has also received a ton of love in Plasma 6.5. You can now share your clipboard, and you no longer need to create dedicated RDP user accounts; you can just log in with your normal account credentials as you would expect you could. Plasmas Discover application, used for application and update management, has seen major work to improve its performance  very welcome, for sure. Of course, theres a ton of other changes, too. KDE Plasma 6.5 will find its way to your distribution soon enough.

• Intel, AMD to bring memory tagging to x86, at some point
  Now that ARMs memory tagging, used extensively by Android ROMs such as GrapheneOS and now also by Apple, is becoming the new norm to aid in improving memory safety, the x86 world cant sit idly by. As such, Intel and AMD have announced a ChkTag, x86s version of memory tagging. ChkTag is a set of new and enhanced x86 instructions to detect memory safety violations, such as buffer overflows and misuses of freed memory (use-after-free). ChkTag is designed to be suitable for hardening applications, operating system kernels, hypervisors for virtualization, and UEFI firmware. ChkTag places control in the software developers’ hands to balance their security needs with operational elements that often become prominent when deploying code. For example, ChkTag provides instruction-granular control over which memory accesses are checked. Compilers can offer optimizations and new language features or intrinsics. ChkTag prepares x86 for a future with increasing amounts of code written in memory-safe languages running alongside code in other languages. Furthermore, ChkTag loads tags from linear/virtual memory that can often be committed on demand. ↫ Intel and AMDs announcement Its important to note that ChkTag  why not just call it CheckTag  isnt ready yet, nor is there any indication when it will be included in any processors from Intel and AMD. The goal is to catch certain memory safety problems in hardware. According to Intel and AMDs shared announcement, developers will have fine-grained control over the feature, allowing them to tap into the functionality in whatever way they deem necessary or valuable for their software in specific circumstances. My fear is that Intel and AMD will use this feature as a product differentiator, restricting it to either more expensive processors or to Xeon/Threadripper processors, thereby fracturing the market. This would inevitably lead to spotty support for the feature across the x86 landscape, meaning most ordinary consumer wont benefit from it at all.

• This is how much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services
  I can exclusively reveal today Anthropic’s spending on Amazon Web Services for the entirety of 2024, and for every month in 2025 up until September, and that that Anthropic’s spend on compute far exceeds that previously reported.` Furthermore, I can confirm that through September, Anthropic has spent more than 100% of its estimated revenue (based on reporting in the last year) on Amazon Web Services, spending $2.66 billion on compute on an estimated $2.55 billion in revenue. ↫ Ed Zitron These numbers do not even include what the company spends on Googles services. Going through all the numbers and reporting, Zitron explains that the more successful! Anthropic becomes, the bigger the gap between income from paying customers and its spending on Amazon and Google services becomes. Its simply unsustainable, and the longer we keep this scam going, the worse the consequences will be when the bubble pops. Sadly, nobody will go to jail once hell breaks loose.

• Cartridge chaos: the official Nintendo region converter and more!
  This post is a combination of looks at several oddities among my pile of NES and Famicom cartridges. Why, for example, do I have a copy of Gyromite when I don’t have a R.O.B.? Did I miss something interesting in my MMC blog post? And while it is the Japanese release of Kid Niki: Radical Ninja, is my Kaiketsu Yanchamaru being a little too radical? Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong? Some of these questions will be answered! ↫ Nicole Branagan at Nicole Express A well-written post with tons of weird NES nerdery. Branagan delivers, every time.

• Microsoft breaks USB input in Windows Recovery Environment
  With official support for Windows 10 having officially ended a few days ago, lets take a look and see how its successor, Windows 11, is doing. Microsoft released the`first Patch Tuesday update (KB5066835)`for Windows 11 25H2 this past week and it is probably fair to say that it has been a rough start for the new feature update. Despite the announcement of a wide rollout wherein the new version is`now available for download for everyone, the company has already confirmed large-scale issues. First up, Microsoft was forced to issue an emergency workaround as the update`broke localhost auth`and following that the company today has confirmed another problem where recovery can become impossible if you happen to use a USB keyboard or mouse. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin Yes. This is a real thing. This latest round of patches makes it entirely impossible to navigate the Windows Recovery Environment with USB keyboards and mice. Since its 2025, USB is probably the protocol through which most people connect their keyboard and mice (although to be fair, some laptops probably still default to internal PS/2 for their touchpads). This means that if you run into a problem with Windows 11 that requires you to access the Windows Recovery Environment  perhaps OneDrive did too many lines of cocaine again  you cant actually do anything inside of it. Theres no fix yet, so you either remove the offending patches, hope your PC still has a PS/2 port and you still have PS/2 peripherals, or hope Windows 11 wont fall over and die until Microsoft releases a fix for the issue. Of course, people still using Windows 10, people who arent installing every single Windows 11 update as they become available, and people using real operating systems have nothing to worry about. You cant help but wonder, though  with Microsoft pushing AI! so hard, how many of these recent faceplants are the result of Microsoft engineers frantically trying to meet code quotas using Copilot?

• Servo 0.0.1 released
  Today, the Servo team has released new versions of the servoshell binaries for all our supported platforms, tagged v0.0.1. These binaries are essentially the same nightly builds that were already available from the download page with additional manual testing, now tagging them explicitly as releases for future reference. ↫ Servos official blog Servo is making steady progress, and thats awesome news. Every month a whole slew of new features and improvements make their way into this new browser engine, and Im fairly confident Servo is our best shot at regaining some independence from Google and Apple in the web browser space. Other efforts are either too limited in scope, targeting only a specific niche, already being eaten alive by massive corporations, written in non-memory safe languages, run by people whose code I wouldnt even trust to flush my toilet, or any combination thereof. Servo is it, folks. Our best shot.

• I remember taking a screen shot of a video, and when I opened it in Paint, the video was playing in it!!
  In older versions of Windows, if you had a video playing, took a screenshot, and pasted that screenshot into Paint, you could sometimes see the video continue to play inside Paint. What kind of sorcery enabled this to happen? A few of you will realise instantly why this used to happen: render surfaces. Back in at least the Windows 9x days, playing video involved drawing solid green where you wanted the video to go (the video player window), rendering the video pixels to a surface shared with the graphics card, and then have the graphics card replace said green pixels with the video pixels from the shared surface. This approach has a whole array of benefits, not least of which is that it allowed you to render the video on a thread separate from the main user interface, so that if the main interface was sluggish or locked up, the video would keep rendering properly. You could also create two shared surfaces to render multiple frames at once, thereby eliminating tearing. Knowing this, it should be obvious whats going on with the screenshot and Pain story. Now, when you load the image into Paint or any other image viewer, Windows sends those green pixels to the video card, but if the media player is still running, then its overlay is still active, and if you put Paint in the same place that the media player window is, then the green pixels in Paint get changed into the pixels of the active video. The video card doesn’t know that the pixels came from Paint. Its job is to look for green pixels in a certain region of the screen and change them into the pixels from the shared surface. If you move the Paint window to another position where it doesn’t overlap the media player, or if the media player isn’t playing a video, you will see the bitmap’s true nature: It’s just a bunch of green pixels. ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing Ive never had this particular oddity happen, but I do have vague memories of video player windows rendering tons of green artifacts whenever something went wrong with the video player, the file it was trying to play, or whatever else, and I guess the cause of those green artifacts is the same. In modern operating systems, graphics rendering of the UI is done entirely on the GPU, with only the final composition being sent to your display. As such, the green screen effect no longer occurs.

• The early Unix history of chown() being restricted to root
  Chris Siebenmann with another interesting look at a tiny detail of UNIX history. A few years ago I wrote about the divide in chown() about who got to give away files, where BSD and V7 were on one side, restricting it to root, while System III and System V were on the other, allowing the owner to give them away too. The answer is that the restriction was added in V6, where the V6 chown(2) manual page has the same wording as V7. In Research Unix V5 and earlier, people can chown(2) away their own files; this is documented in the V4 chown(2) manual page and is what the V5 kernel code for chown() does. This behavior runs all the way back to the V1 chown() manual page, with an extra restriction that you cant chown() setuid files. ↫ Chris Siebenmann The deeper levels of this particular rabbit hole need more exploring, though, as eventually Siebenmann hits a roadblock when trying to figure out why, exactly, the restriction was added, and why certain versions chose to not adopt the new restriction. This may be part of the lore of UNIX we wont uncover, until one of the people involved speaks up.

• KDE Unleashes Plasma 6.5
  The Plasma 6.5 desktop environment is now available with new features, improvements, and the usual bug fixes.
  

• Xubuntu Site Possibly Hacked
  It appears that the Xubuntu site was hacked and briefly served up a malicious ZIP file from its download page.
  

• LMDE 7 Now Available
  Linux Mint Debian Edition, version 7, has been officially released and is based on upstream Debian.
  

• Linux Kernel 6.16 Reaches EOL
  Linux kernel 6.16 has reached its end of life, which means you'll need to upgrade to the next stable release, Linux kernel 6.17.
  

• Amazon Ditches Android for a Linux-Based OS
  Amazon has migrated from Android to the Linux-based Vega OS for its Fire TV.
  

• Cairo Dock 3.6 Now Available for More Compositors
  If you're a fan of third-party desktop docks, then the latest release of Cairo Dock with Wayland support is for you.
  

• System76 Unleashes Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta
  System76's first beta of Pop!_OS 24.04 is an impressive feat.
  

• Linux Kernel 6.17 is Available
  Linus Torvalds has announced that the latest kernel has been released with plenty of core improvements and even more hardware support.
  

• Kali Linux 2025.3 Released with New Hacking Tools
  If you're a Kali Linux fan, you'll be glad to know that the third release of this famous pen-testing distribution is now available with updates for key components.
  

• Zorin OS 18 Beta Available for Testing
  The latest release from the team behind Zorin OS is ready for public testing, and it includes plenty of improvements to make it more powerful, user-friendly, and productive.
  

• Fedora Linux 43 Beta Now Available for Testing
  Fedora Linux 43 Beta ships with Gnome 49 and KDE Plasma 6.4 (and other goodies).
  

• USB4 Maintainer Leaves Intel
  Michael Jamet, one of the primary maintainers of USB4 and Thunderbolt drivers, has left Intel, leaving a gaping hole for the Linux community to deal with.
  

• Budgie 10.9.3 Now Available
  The latest version of this elegant and configurable Linux desktop aligns with changes in Gnome 49.
  

• KDE Linux Alpha Available for Daring Users
  It's official, KDE Linux has arrived, but it's not quite ready for prime time.
  

• AMD Initiates Graphics Driver Updates for Linux Kernel 6.18
  This new AMD update focuses on power management, display handling, and hardware support for Radeon GPUs.
  

• AerynOS Alpha Release Available
  With a choice of several desktop environments, AerynOS 2025.08 is almost ready to be your next operating system.
  

• AUR Repository Still Under DDoS Attack
  Arch User Repository continues to be under a DDoS attack that has been going on for more than two weeks.
  

• RingReaper Malware Poses Danger to Linux Systems
  A new kind of malware exploits modern Linux kernels for I/O operations.
  

• Happy Birthday, Linux
  On August 25, Linux officially turns 34.
  

• VirtualBox 7.2 Has Arrived
  With early support for Linux kernel 6.17 and other new additions, VirtualBox 7.2 is a must-update for users.