All the News that Matters

• [$] Hardware-assisted Arm VMs for s390
  A recentpatch set from Steffen Eiden and others has set the groundwork for allowinghardware-assisted emulation of Arm CPUs on s390 CPUs.Version two of the posting fixes a handful of smaller problems, but does notdiffer much.The patches were welcomedby the Arm maintainers, pending some discussion of how the collaboration between thearchitectures could be structured to prevent maintainability problems on the Armside. When those details are resolved, the patches could pave the way fortransparently running Arm-based virtual machines (VMs) on s390 hosts at native ornear-native speeds.
  

• Security updates for Tuesday
  Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, kernel-rt, libcap, LibRaw, openssh, thunderbird, and tigervnc), Debian (libarchive and lxd), Fedora (chromium, insight, nodejs20, rust-sequoia-git, and uriparser), Mageia (kernel, kmod-virtualbox), Oracle (kernel, libcap, thunderbird, and uek-kernel), Red Hat (.NET 10.0, .NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, fence-agents, sudo, and systemd), Slackware (httpd), SUSE (freerdp, hauler, helm, himmelblau, kernel, libspectre, thunderbird, trivy, and xen), and Ubuntu (curl, exim4, and sed).

• The retirement of the PHP license
  The PHP project has long shipped under its own license — except forthe parts under the Zend Engine License. The PHP project has now announcedthat the PHP license has been retired, and the PHP code has been relicensedunder the three-clause BSD license. See thisblog entry for more details.
  Getting here required more than writing an RFC. The PHP License gives the PHP Group the authority to change it, which meant tracking down each of the original PHP Group members and getting their written consent. Each approved the proposal. Perforce Software, the successor to Zend Technologies, needed to sign off on the Zend Engine side, as well. They provided a formal letter confirming their full authority and support for the change. I hired an attorney to review the proposal and provide advice on any legal questions that might surface during the discussion period. Speaking of which, I allowed for a six-month community discussion period preceding the vote, which passed unanimously.
  LWN covered the license-change process back in March.

• Alpine Linux systems currently offline
  The Alpine Linux account on fosstodon.org reportsthat all systems hosted at Linode, including its GitLab instance,"are suspended at the moment due to some billing issue". Theyare working to get it resolved, but in the meantime all of theirservices appear to be down.
  
  Update: Alpine Linux's servers are back online.
  
  
  

• [$] Bug-monitoring expectations and Fedora GNOME packages
  For a number of years, users submitting bugs reports against GNOME packages in Fedora havereceived an auto-reply saying that the reports were not activelymonitored; users were encouraged to file bugs with GNOME upstream instead. However,that practice seems to be in conflict with the Fedora Engineering SteeringCommittee (FESCo) policythat package maintainers "deal with reported bugs in a timely manner". OnApril 28, FESCo discussed the disconnect between practice and policy; so far,it has only opted to tweak the wording of the automatic response.
  

• NetHack 5.0.0 released
  Version 5.0.0of the NetHackdungeon-exploration game, a distant relative of Rogue andHack, has been released. NetHack's code is now compliant with theC99 standard, and the release includes more than 3,100bug fixes and changes, detailed in doc/fixes5-0-0.txt(may contain game spoilers). Saved games from previous versions willnot work with NetHack 5.0.0.
  

• Security updates for Monday
  Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (kernel, libcap, libtiff, sudo, and thunderbird), Debian (dovecot, imagemagick, incus, kernel, libexif, linux-6.1, openjdk-25, pyasn1, python-aiohttp, and thunderbird), Fedora (chromium, firefox, GitPython, glibc, insight, krb5, nano, nss, openssh, openvpn, perl-CryptX, python3.14, rust-openssl, rust-openssl-sys, rust-sequoia-git, and xen), Oracle (dtrace, fence-agents, grafana-pcp, libcap, libtiff, sudo, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Red Hat (buildah, fence-agents, firefox, java-11-openjdk with Extended Lifecycle Support, LibRaw, nodejs24, nodejs:24, openssh, python-pyasn1, resource-agents, thunderbird, tigervnc, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Slackware (mozilla), and SUSE (avahi, curl, freeipmi, freerdp, google-guest-agent, google-osconfig-agent, gvim, helm, himmelblau, java-1_8_0-openjdk, kernel, krb5-appl-clients, libsodium, libssh, libtiff-devel-32bit, ntfs-3g_ntfsprogs, openCryptoki, openexr, ovmf, PackageKit, python-jwcrypto, python-Mako, python-PyNaCl, python311, python311-pypdf, sed, trivy, and vim).

• Kernel prepatch 7.1-rc2
  The second 7.1 kernel prepatch is out fortesting. "It's not small, and while it's a bit early to say for sure, Ido suspect we're seeing the same continued pattern of more patches thanusual - probably due to AI tooling - that we saw in 7.0."

• Eden: NHS goes to war against open source
  Terence Eden reportsthat the UK's NationalHealth Service (NHS) is preparing to close almost all of its open-source repositories as aresponse to LLM tools, such as Anthropic's Mythos, becoming moresophisticated at finding security vulnerabilities. He does not, to putit mildly, agree with the decision:
  
  The majority of code repospublished by the NHS are not meaningfully affected by any advancein security scanning. They're mostly data sets, internal tools,guidance, research tools, front-end design and the like. There isnothing in them which could realistically lead to a securityincident.
  
  When I was working at NHSX during the pandemic, we were soconfident of the safety and necessity of open source, we made sure theCovid Contact Tracing app was open sourced the minute it was availableto the public. That was a nationally mandated app, installed onmillions of phones, subject to intense scrutiny from hostile powers -and yet, despite publishing the code, architecture and documentation,the open source code caused zero securityincidents.
  
  Furthermore, this new guidance is in direct contradiction to theUK's TechCode of Practice point 3 "Be open and use open source" whichinsists on code being open.
  

• [$] Version-controlled databases using Prolly trees
  Modern database and filesystems make pervasive use ofB-trees, which are treestructures optimized for storing sorted lists of keys and values on blockdevices.Dolt is an Apache 2.0-licensed project that makes clever use of avariant of a B-tree to support efficient version control for an entire database.The data structure it uses could well be of interest to other projects.
  

• Security updates for Friday
  Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (fence-agents), Debian (chromium, dovecot, and kernel), Fedora (chromium, dotnet10.0, dotnet8.0, dotnet9.0, emacs, glow, jfrog-cli, openbao, pyp2spec, python3.6, rust-rustls-webpki, vhs, and xen), Oracle (grafana, grafana-pcp, PackageKit, sudo, vim, and xorg-x11-server), Red Hat (rhc), SUSE (avahi, bouncycastle, chromium, container-suseconnect, firewalld, gdk-pixbuf, grafana, java-25-openjdk, kernel, libixml11, libmozjs-140-0, libpng12-0, libsodium, libssh, mariadb, Mesa, ntfs-3g_ntfsprogs, openCryptoki, openexr, packagekit, prometheus-postgres_exporter, python-jwcrypto, python-mako, python-Pygments, python-pynacl, python311, python311-pyOpenSSL, python315, radare2, sed, and vim), and Ubuntu (kmod and zulucrypt).

• [$] Restartable sequences, TCMalloc, and Hyrum's Law
  Hyrum's Law states that anyobservable behavior of a system will eventually be depended upon bysomebody. The kernel community is currently contending with a cleardemonstration of that principle. The recent work to address some restartable-sequencesperformance problems in the 6.19 release maintained the documented APIin all respects, but that was not enough; Google's TCMalloclibrary, as it turns out, violates the documented API, prevents other codefrom using restartable features, and breaks with 6.19. But the kernel'sno-regressions rule is forcing developers to find a way to accommodateTCMalloc's behavior.

• GCC 16.1 released
  Version16.1 of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has beenreleased.
  The C++ frontend now defaults to the GNU C++20 dialect and the correspondingparts of the standard library are no longer experimental. SeveralC++26 features receive experimental support, including Reflection(-freflection), Contracts, expansion statements and std::simd.
  Other changes include the introduction of an experimental compilerfrontend for the Algol68 language,ability to output GCC diagnostics in HTML form, and more.
  
  
  

• Seven new stable kernels for Thursday
  Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 7.0.3, 6.18.26, 6.12.85, 6.6.137, 6.1.170, 5.15.204, and 5.10.254 stable kernels. The 7.0.3 and6.18.26 kernels only contain fixes needed for Xen users; the others,though, have backported fixes for the recently disclosed AEAD socket vulnerability. Kroah-Hartman advisesthat all users of the other kernel series must upgrade.
  
  
  

• Security updates for Thursday
  Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (buildah, firefox, gdk-pixbuf2, giflib, grafana, java-1.8.0-openjdk, java-21-openjdk, LibRaw, OpenEXR, PackageKit, pcs, python3.11, python3.12, python3.9, sudo, tigervnc, vim, xorg-x11-server, xorg-x11-server-Xwayland, yggdrasil, and yggdrasil-worker-package-manager), Debian (calibre, firefox-esr, and openjdk-17), Fedora (asterisk, binaryen, buildah, dokuwiki, lemonldap-ng, libexif, libgcrypt, miniupnpd, openvpn, podman, python3.9, rust-rpm-sequoia, skopeo, and xdg-dbus-proxy), Red Hat (buildah, gdk-pixbuf2, and nodejs:20), SUSE (dnsdist, libheif, openCryptoki, polkit, sed, and xen), and Ubuntu (linux-bluefield, python-marshmallow, and roundcube).

Linux Insider"LinuxInsider"

• Edera Is Closing the GPU Security Gap for Autonomous AI
  As AI agents move into production, traditional container security is failing at scale. Edera is addressing this gap with hypervisor-based isolation designed for GPU-heavy, multi-tenant environments. The post Edera Is Closing the GPU Security Gap for Autonomous AI appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Super Productivity App: The Closest Ive Come to a Workflow That Sticks
  Super Productivity stands out with flexible workflows, offline-first design, and free syncing. It adapts to how you work instead of forcing structure, making it one of the most practical tools I've used. The post Super Productivity App: The Closest Ive Come to a Workflow That Sticks appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• ClusterAPI Simplifies Provisioning but Leaves Ops Gaps
  ClusterAPI simplified Kubernetes provisioning, but operations remain complex. Teams still must correlate fragmented signals across systems, driving demand for AI-driven visibility and faster issue resolution. The post ClusterAPI Simplifies Provisioning but Leaves Ops Gaps appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Percona, Chainguard Advance Secure-by-Default Open-Source Databases
  Percona and Chainguard aim to cut CVE patching and reduce overhead with secure-by-default images for open-source databases. The post Percona, Chainguard Advance Secure-by-Default Open-Source Databases appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Rocky Linux Expands Into Enterprise AI Infrastructure
  CIQ is expanding Rocky Linux with enterprise and AI-focused versions designed to simplify deployments and improve GPU performance. The post Rocky Linux Expands Into Enterprise AI Infrastructure appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• The Patching Paradox Driving Most Breaches
  More than half of breaches occur after fixes are available, revealing an execution gap as delayed patching turns known vulnerabilities into ongoing enterprise risk. The post The Patching Paradox Driving Most Breaches appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Lock Down Your Linux Laptop on Public Wi-Fi
  Public Wi-Fi exposes Linux systems to monitoring, spoofed networks, and data interception. This guide shows how to secure your device with VPNs, firewalls, and browser protections. The post Lock Down Your Linux Laptop on Public Wi-Fi appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Percona Spins Off Everest DBaaS Into OpenEverest Project
  Percona is moving its Everest DBaaS platform into OpenEverest, a community-driven project focused on governance, vendor neutrality, and modern data infrastructure. The post Percona Spins Off Everest DBaaS Into OpenEverest Project appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Oracle Declines Community Proposal for Neutral MySQL Foundation
  More than 500 developers are urging Oracle to consider a vendor-neutral foundation for MySQL, warning that limited community input could slow innovation and fragment the ecosystem. The post Oracle Declines Community Proposal for Neutral MySQL Foundation appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• How to Harden Firefox for Better Security on Linux
  This guide shows how to install the latest Firefox build on Linux and adjust key settings to reduce tracking, limit telemetry, and strengthen browser security. The post How to Harden Firefox for Better Security on Linux appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Anthropic comes for the midmarket software spend
  Backed by private equity and banking giants, it will build custom AI systems for business bottlenecks
  There’s gold in midmarket IT spend, and Anthropic - backed by private equity and banking heavyweights and tapping its Claude Partner Network - is coming for it.…
  

• OpenAI exec says company hopes to burn $50B of somebody else's money on compute this year
  If the numbers are large enough, perhaps we won't question the math
  An executive for ChatGPT maker OpenAI said in court testimony on Tuesday that the AI model developer expects to burn $50 billion on computing power before the end of the year.…
  

• Viva la revolución: LinkedIn profile visitor lists belong to the people, says Noyb
  GDPR Article 15 doesn't care if you want to make money by selling users' data back to them
  A LinkedIn feature the average non-paying user likely only glances past could end up setting a legal precedent in the EU regarding how companies treat customer data that they've processed. …
  

• Astera speaks softly and carries a big switch
  High-speed connectivity without NVLink baggage
  Astera Labs unveiled an alternative to Nvidia's NVSwitch for building rack-scale AI systems on Tuesday, claiming it will work with nearly any accelerator.…
  

• Anthropic wants Claude to play with money, unleashes finance agents
  Always bet on backpropagation
  If you've ever read Anthropic's disclaimer that responses generated by Claude may contain mistakes and thought, "That's what I need to spice up financial operations," you're in luck.…
  

• IBM asks DBAs to trust AI to act on their behalf
  With help from Google and Intel, Big Blue brings new automation to Db2
  IBM has added support for Google Vertex AI and Intel Gaudi to boost the AI-based management of its stalwart Db2 database.…
  

• ServiceNow clears agents for landing with new AI control tower
  ServiceNow acquisitions Veza and Traceloop join to monitor agents and AI workflows
  ServiceNow announced an expansion of its AI Control Tower, transforming what began last year as a governance dashboard into what the company now describes as a command center for managing AI assets across an entire enterprise, including those running outside ServiceNow's own platform.…
  

• DIY mystery box will wow your friends by hinting at what the ionosphere is up to
  A rough guide to when your signal will behave, or not
  Shortwave radio enthusiasts are sure to know the problem: You're trying to tune in to your favorite global broadcast only to find that the signal is fuzzy. Is it you? Your equipment? It might just be the conditions in the ionosphere, which you'd know if you built this DIY device. …
  

• Attackers are cashing in on fresh 'CopyFail' Linux flaw
  Researchers dropped a reliable root exploit and it didn’t sit idle for long
  CISA is warning that a newly-disclosed Linux kernel bug dubbed "CopyFail" is already being exploited, just days after researchers dropped a working root-level exploit.…
  

• More missions, less money, higher risk: NASA's back to the '90s playbook
  Faster, better, cheaper is back and history suggests you can't get all three at the same time
  OPINION NASA's budget and its new administrator's statements are evoking a ghost from the agency's past: Faster, better, cheaper.…
  

• Bun posts Rust porting guide, says rewrite is still half-baked
  Zig's no-AI policy is at odds with view that most open source code will be AI-written in future
  Bun creator Jarred Sumner has posted a Zig-to-Rust porting guide, igniting speculation that the project may migrate away from Zig, though Sumner said there is no commitment to rewriting, only that he is "curious to see what a working version of this looks like."…
  

• Real estate giant confirms vishing incident as ShinyHunters and Qilin both come knocking
  Cushman & Wakefield activated incident response protocols after serial extortionists issued separate threats
  Real estate giant Cushman & Wakefield has confirmed a data breach after two cybercrime groups, ShinyHunters and Qilin, separately claimed responsibility for attacks on the company.…
  

• SAP dives deeper into Iceberg with Dremio acquisition
  ERP giant previously leaned on Databricks for integration
  SAP has snapped up Dremio, a data integration and analytics provider, to extend the reach of its data analytics and AI agent-building tools into external data sources.…
  

• VMware claims Cloud Foundation on track for world domination
  Delivers update aimed at reducing hardware bill shock
  VMware has announced an update to its flagship Cloud Foundation (VCF) private cloud suite and tried to make it fit the times by adding features that allow users to run with less hardware.…
  

• ShinyHunters claims dump puts 119K Vimeo emails in the wild
  Vimeo points finger at analytics supplier Anodot, says no logins or card data were touched
  More than 119,000 Vimeo users's email addresses were extracted in a breach traced to a third-party analytics vendor, according to Have I Been Pwned.…
  

• Brit mathematician lets AI agent loose with credit card – cue password leaks, CAPTCHA chaos and more
  Professor Fry's AI experiment shows light and dark sides of agentic tech
  British mathematician Professor Hannah Fry has shared a cautionary experiment involving an AI agent, a set of tasks, and a bank card number Fry's team gave it "to show us what it could do."…
  

• Romance scammers turn sweet talk into £102M payday
  Victims losing £280K a day to fake profiles and sob stories
  Romance fraudsters scammed Britons out of £102 million ($138 million) last year, according to the latest police figures.…
  

• Vodafone dials up full control of joint venture with Three in £4.3B deal
  CK Hutchison takes early cash as UK mobile tie-up moves ahead of schedule
  Vodafone has struck a deal to take full ownership of VodafoneThree, the mobile network formed from last year's merger of its British operations with Three, in a move designed to accelerate its UK ambitions.…
  

• Unexpected item in Windows' bagging area
  Activating Windows will cost more than a couple of cheap carrier bags
  Bork!Bork!Bork! Things must be tough for UK grocery retailer Sainsbury's, judging by the state of Windows Activation on one of its self-service kiosks.…
  

• NHS to close-source hundreds of GitHub repos over AI, security concerns
  Healthcare giant's maintainers handed May deadline to enact the change
  The UK's National Health Service (NHS) is ordering all of its technology leaders to temporarily wall off the organization's open source projects over concerns relating to advanced AI and Anthropic's Mythos.…
  

• Microsoft's bad obsession is showing up in shabby services and slipshod software. Here's proof
  If you can't bother to keep GitHub running, why should we bother with you?
  Opinion It's been another shabby week for Microsoft, and a shabbier one for its users. We learnt that Windows 11's epic habit of trying to corral customers into paid-for Microsoft services just got worse with a low-rent trick. Remote Desktop got a bit more secure, which is good, but in a way that suggests not too much user testing took place. As for GitHub… GitHub got two helpings of Chef Redmondo's Special Sauce.…
  

• Classic ASCII game NetHack debuts version 5.0 just 11 years after last major release
  New monsters! New magic items! An Arm port! And compliance with a dead C standard
  Antiques Code Show Admirers of Roguelike games have a new distraction: Version 5.0 of NetHack dropped last weekend.…
  

• Microsoft to stop taking reservations for 17 Azure VM flavours, kill 13 in 2028
  Haswell’s had its day and Skylake and Cascade Lake are draining away
  Microsoft will stop offering long-term rentals for 17 Azure instance types – most of them powered by CPUs Intel released in the 2010s – again showing that cloud computing isn’t always a seamless and easy choice.…
  

• Singapore boffins get diverse SIEMs singing in harmony with agentic rule translation
  Vendors all use different formats. This tech translates them all so you can smooth your SOC
  Academics from Singapore and China have found a way to make AI useful for cyber-defenders, by creating a technique that translates rules from diverse Security Information and Event Managements (SIEMs) so they’re easier to consume across multiple systems.…
  

• Palantir CEO: 10 percent of the world 'professionally hates us'
  The Iran war has been great for business
  The Iran War has been great for business at Palantir, as the Department of Defense has doubled usage of the company’s Maven targeting system in four months.…
  

• Bad news for OpenClaw stans: Apple’s Mac Mini now starts at $799
  The tiny desktop is no longer Apple's most affordable computer
  The Mac Mini is the latest victim of the AI-fueled RAM-pocalypse. Last week, Apple discontinued the 256 GB version of the system, which cost $599. To get in now, you'll need to drop at least $799 on a 512 GB version.…
  

• Microsoft fixes VS Code after app gives Copilot credit for human's work
  Devs not thrilled that Git extension added the bot as co-author by default
  Imagine working your butt off on a project, only to have VS Code put an attribution into your commit that says Copilot helped you, even if it did not. Microsoft has reversed a change that added a default AI attribution notice after user complaints that the bot was claiming credit for human-authored code.…
  

• Kids say they can beat age checks by drawing on a fake mustache
  46% say age checks are easy to bypass, and nearly a third admit getting around them
  It’s been months since the UK government began requiring stronger age checks under the Online Safety Act, and recent research suggests those measures are falling short of keeping kids away from harmful content. In some cases, even drawing on a mustache has been reported as enough to fool age detection software.…
  

• Hobbyist xenomorphs Raspberry Pi into Alien-themed DIY laptop
  Everything you need to build the PS-85 is available from its designer's website, even if you can't get to space
  We've all been there: You're doing maintenance on a Weyland-Yutani hauler dragging mineral ore back toward Earth, and there’s no terminal handy to tap into the MU/TH/UR AI to check ship systems. Lucky for you, one enterprising maker has created just the machine for the job.…
  

• Hands off my trademark! Notepad++ dev threatens legal action against macOS port
  It's not the fork that's the problem, it's the attempt to make it look official, says original Notepad++ dev Don Ho
  Notepad++ remains a Windows-only app, at least under that name. The beloved developer-focused, open-source text editor recently was ported to macOS by a third party. However, developer Don Ho wants to be perfectly clear that, no matter how convincing the new project might look, it's not official. …
  

• Inside Amazon Web Services' plan to make networking disappear
  The Register gets a look inside AWS' networking lab in Cupertino
  FEATURE In an unassuming three-story office building in Cupertino, California, engineers from Amazon Web Services are busy trying to make networking inconspicuous.…
  

• Shadow IT has given way to shadow AI. Enter AI-BOMs
  If you don't have visibility, you can't understand what to protect
  When it comes to securing enterprise supply chains, now heavily infused with AI applications and agents, a software bill of materials (SBOM) no longer provides a complete inventory of all the components in the environment. Enter AI-BOMs.…
  

• Moving to mainframe can be cheaper than sticking with VMware: Gartner
  Serious Linux VMs will enjoy big iron – if you can learn to love lock-in risks and skills challenges
  VMware users considering a new home might find it cheaper to move to an IBM mainframe than adopting Broadcom’s new licenses, according to Gartner Vice President Analyst Alessandro Galimberti.…
  

• If the vote you rocked, your personal info can be grokked
  Even limited voter rolls can be linked to identify people, research shows
  Your voter data could be used against you. A foreign intelligence service that wished to identify the family members of deployed military personnel could do so by cross-referencing public voter record data and social media posts.…
  

• Hope your holiday was horrid: You botched the last thing you did before leaving
  That box-full-of-old-tech-you-should-probably-have-thrown-out-but-kept-just-in-case got a techie in trouble
  Who, Me? Monday is upon us once again and The Register hopes that when you arrive at your desk, all is well. We offer that sentiment because we use the first day of the working week to bring you a fresh instalment of "Who, Me?" – the reader-contributed column in which you confess to making mistakes, and explain how you survived them.…
  

• Ask.com, former home of search butler Jeeves, closes just as conversational search comes back
  Like actual butlers, this relic of the first dotcom boom has been a quaint anachronism for decades
  In the mid-1990s, search engine designers settled on the user interface that dominates to this day: a text box into which users enter text, and a resulting list of websites.…
  

• Five Eyes spook shops warn rapid rollouts of agentic AI are too risky
  Prioritize resilience over productivity, say CISA, NCSC and their friends from Oz, NZ, Canada
  Information security agencies from the nations of the Five Eyes security alliance have co-authored guidance on the use of agentic AI that warns the technology will likely misbehave and amplifies organizations’ existing frailties, and therefore recommend slow and careful adoption of the tech.…
  

• Just in time for Labour Day, China makes it illegal to fire humans if AI takes their jobs
  PLUS: Samsung cashes in on RAM prices; Booze from space fetches huge price; China's hyperscalers surge
  A Chinese court has ruled that it’s illegal to replace human workers with AI.…
  

• Microsoft's turned Windows into a cesspool, but it wants to do better
  Windows is a mess, GitHub keeps wobbling, Copilot draws flak - what’s wrong at Redmond?
  kettle When it comes to making decisions that piss off your user base, no one knows how to do it like Microsoft. …
  

• Inference is giving AI chip startups a second chance to make their mark
  In a disaggregated AI world, Nvidia can be both a friend and an enemy
  AI adoption is reaching an inflection point as the focus shifts from training new models to serving them. For the AI startups vying for a slice of Nvidia's pie, it's now or never.…
  

• Royal Navy chief backs drones, autonomous weapons in ‘Hybrid Navy’
  Plan mixes crewed ships, robot escorts, and long-range strike to bolster a stretched fleet
  The leader of Britain’s Royal Navy has outlined a “Hybrid Navy” built on a mix of crewed, uncrewed, and autonomous platforms to ensure it can continue to defend the nation and operate overseas.…
  

• Job's a good 'un: Bank of England tech project wins watchdog praise
  PAC: Now why can't everybody else in public sector do it like this?
  Parliament's spending watchdog has held up a successful large-scale public sector tech transformation as a rare example worth emulating, in a striking departure from the usual diet of failure and overspend.…
  

• Usage-based pricing killing your vibe - here's how to roll your own local AI coding agents
  Take those token limits and shove them by vibe coding with a local LLM
  With model devs pushing more aggressive rate limits, raising prices, or even abandoning subscriptions for usage-based pricing, that vibe-coded hobby project is about to get a whole lot more expensive. Fortunately, you're not without cost-saving options.…
  

• UK drivers' agency shrugs off claims of week-long booking site smashes, blames browser configs
  Agency insists everything is working fine, even though users spend days failing to load it
  The DVSA's driving test booking system has spent the week offline, according to frustrated users.…
  

• Brace for the patch tsunami: AI is unearthing decades of buried code debt
  Britain's cyber agency says the bill for years of technical shortcuts is coming due, and it's arriving all at once
  Britain's cyber agency is warning that AI-fuelled bug hunting is about to flush out years of buried flaws, leaving defenders scrambling to keep up.…
  

• ServiceNow under siege as Atlassian adds to ITSM take-outs
  CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes touts 'largest ever quarter for competitive displacements'
  The chase is on. Atlassian reported its largest-ever quarter for taking share from a major IT service management provider, CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said on the company's fiscal third-quarter earnings call Thursday, escalating its rivalry with ServiceNow.…
  

• Mythos complicates the breakup, says Pentagon CTO, but Anthropic is still barred
  Emil Michael says agencies are evaluating the cybersecurity model, not deploying it
  Pentagon CTO Emil Michael pushed back on reports of a thaw in the department’s relationship with Anthropic: The two are not getting back together, even as Mythos draws interest from government agencies.…
  

• Artemis III aims for 'late 2027' for Earth orbit demonstration
  SpaceX and Blue Origin will absolutely be ready in time. Definitely
  Amid the sensational NASA budget cut proposals taking place in the US at the moment, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman has refined the Artemis III launch date to "late 2027."…
  

• Where to buy a non-Apple, non-Google smartphone
  Both Cupertino and Google are imposing ever stricter limits on their phones – but you have alternatives
  As both Apple and Google introduce unwelcome changes in their phone OSes, here's a quick reminder that you do have alternatives to the Gruesome Twosome.…
  

• CIOs ready for another role-change as AI becomes agent of chaos
  If software writes software the risk is “systematic failure at scale”. Someone needs to take charge, argues Forrester
  Forrester predicts that by decade's end, the rush toward agentic AI will grow so chaotic that CIOs will be forced into a new role as enforcer of order.…
  

• Flatpak 1.17.7 To Track The Age Of Configurations For Providing Much Better Performance
  Flatpak 1.17.7 is now available for continuing to advance open-source app sandboxing and distribution on the Linux desktop. Some interesting new features are in tow with this Flatpak update plus there is also an updated XDG-Desktop-Portal release too...

• Intel9s Vulkan Linux Driver Lands Experimental Support For Descriptor Heaps
  After the merge request was open the past three months for code originally authored eight months ago, the Intel "ANV" open-source Vulkan driver for Linux systems is now advertising support for descriptor heaps with the VK_EXT_descriptor_heap extension. But for the moment at least it's treated as experimental...

• Rusticl Driver Ready To Go With OpenCL 3.1 Working On Radeon, Intel Iris & Zink/Vulkan
  The Khronos Group today announced OpenCL 3.1 as the first major spec update in six years and incorporating various features into the core spec for enhancing AI and HPC capabilities. As a very exciting development, Rusticl as Mesa's lead OpenCL driver implementation is ready to go with same-day OpenCL 3.1 support pending...

• Linux 7.1 Features: New NTFS Driver, New Intel + AMD Hardware, Performance Optimizations & Modernization
  The Linux 7.1 development kernel that amounts to nearly 40 million lines has a lot of new features and changes in tow. While Linux 7.1 stable won9t be out until mid-June, here is a look at the interesting changes coming with this next stable version of the Linux kernel.

• Intel Drivers With Mesa 26.2 Ready With Xe In Linux 7.1 To Better Handle vRAM Pressure
  Merged to the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver with Linux 7.1 is an addition to improve the video RAM memory pressure or out-of-memory behavior for Intel graphics with dedicated video memory. Introduced is support for purgeable buffer objects via a new user-space API to provide usage hints for enhancing what is purged under vRAM pressure. Merged this week to Mesa 26.2-devel is support for the Intel Mesa drivers to make use of this new interface...

• Manjaro 26.1 Preview Released With GNOME 50, KDE Plasma 6.6 & Xfce 4.20 Options
  The preview release of the Arch Linux powered Manjaro 26.1 is now available for testing...

• AMD Preps Linux For CPPC HighestFreq Feature Coming With Future ACPI Spec
  An improvement on the way for the AMD P-State Linux CPU frequency scaling driver and the Linux ACPI Collaborative Processor Performance Control (CPPC) code at large is supporting a new "HighestFreq" register to be standardized by a future revision of the ACPI specification...

• OpenCL 3.1 Released To Bolster AI & HPC Workloads
  Six years after the debut of OpenCL 3.0 in provisional form, OpenCL 3.1 was announced today by The Khronos Group...

• Qt9s Latest AI Push Is Letting AI Agents Deal With Performance Profiling
  The Qt Group announced today the QML Profiler Skill for Agentic Development. This new "skill" can delegate code performance profiling to AI agents for 2D Qt Quick applications...

• AlmaLinux 10.2 Beta Released With Legacy 32-bit Software Support
  AlmaLinux 10.2 Beta released today as their next AlmaLinux 10 release coming down the pipe and derived from the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2 state. Plus this AlmaLinux release continues adding more changes on their own...

• NVIDIA Looking To Create New Tool For Generating AutoFDO Profiles For GCC
  NVIDIA compiler engineers are looking to develop a standalone tool that could be upstreamed into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) codebase for generating AutoFDO profiles for consumption by GCC in turn for better benefiting from automatic feedback directed optimizations (FDO) in the name of better performance...

• ROCm 7.2.3 Brings Minor Updates, ROCm XIO Documentation
  Less than one month after releasing ROCm 7.2.2, the ROCm 7.2.3 is now available with some minor improvements to this open-source AMD GPU compute and AI stack...

• Valve9s Steam Controller Now Shipping
  For those eager to get their hands on Valve's new Steam Controller, the gaming controller is now shipping...

• Omarchy 3.7 Linux Distribution Overhauls Gaming Support, Adds Unified CLI
  Omarchy as the Arch Linux based desktop distribution using the Hyprland compositor and led by David Heinemeier Hansson "DHH" is out with a big OS update...

• GCC 16 Compiler Delivering Some Decent Performance Gains Over GCC 15
  With the GCC 16.1 compiler released last Thursday, I have begun running more compiler benchmarks on this first GCC 16 stable feature release. GCC 16 comes heavy on new changes in being the annual feature release and delivering changes from AMD Zen 6 and Arm AGI CPU support to new C++ features and even the Algol 68 programming language front-end. It9s also looking quite good in the performance department relative to the GCC 15 compiler from last year.

• CachyOS Switches Python To Using Tail-Call Interpreter For 5~15% Better Performance
  CachyOS is a very fast out-of-the-box Linux distribution and for those concerned about Python performance, the newest updates to this Arch Linux based distribution will provide even better performance...

• Linux File-System Proliferation A Burden: Requirements Laid Out For Any Future File-Systems
  The growing number of file-systems within the Linux kernel source tree is causing an ongoing burden for upstream developers maintaining the virtual file-system (VFS) code around it and associated code. As a result of the continuing rise of new file-systems being proposed for the Linux kernel, documentation is being introduced to establish clear guidelines for getting new file-systems accepted into the mainline kernel...

• Mesa Begins Seeing Patch Activity For AMD GFX12.1 Graphics
  Since last November we've begun seeing new open-source driver activity for their next-gen GPU IP with their GFX12.1 graphics engine. GFX12 (12.0) was for the Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA4 hardware while GFX 12.1 is some new revision for yet-to-be-known products while there is also GFX13 bring-up and GFX12.5 too...

• Linux 7.1-rc2 Released With Audio Fix For Steam Deck OLED, Other Fixes
  Linux 7.1-rc2 is out for testing with its accumulation of initial bug and regression fixes that have been collected over the past week since the Linux 7.1 merge window was capped off...

• Brush v0.4 Released As "Significant" Release For This Rust-Based Shell
  Brush v0.4 debuted today for this "Bourne Rusty Shell" as a Bash/POSIX-compatible shell written in the Rust programming language...

• ReactOS Introduces Unified Live/Install Media, New Storage Driver
  ReactOS as the "open-source Windows" operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows has seen some exciting improvements this week...

• Many Exciting Google Summer of Code 2026 Projects & A Lot Of AI
  This week Google announced the selected Google Summer of Code "GSoC" 2026 projects for providing stipends to student developers for engaging in different open-source projects. This year a lot of open-source projects involve AI/LLM adoption but there are also a number of other interesting student projects at large from GNOME Mutter GPU reset recovery to adding new features to FreeBSD...

• Turtle Beach WaveFront ISA Sound Cards Seeing Suspend/Resume Support On Linux In 2026
  It's been an interesting 2026 in Linux development with beginning to phase out i486 CPU support, dropping ISDN and amateur "ham" radio support, and other code cleaning in the name of a diminishing user base -- or perhaps even no users left -- for those running such vintage hardware with a modern, up-to-date kernel. Yet ISA sound card drivers have seen an uptick in activity...

• The GNOME-Aligned RustConn Connection Manager Continues Piling On More Features
  One of the interesting GNOME-aligned application developments in recent months has been RustConn as a modern GTK4-based connection manager. RustConn allows managing SSH, RDP, VNC, SPICE, and a variety of other connections from this Rust-written application. It's been steadily tacking on more features and that effort continued with more features landing...

• New NTFS Driver Sees More Fixes With Linux 7.1-rc2
  One of the most prominent changes with the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel release is the introduction of the new NTFS driver in the Linux 7.1 kernel. This new driver provides more features and better performance than the Paragon NTFS3 driver that's been in the kernel the past few years and far better off than the original NTFS read-only driver that previously was in the kernel and for which this new driver is based. Needless to say it's also a big improvement over the NTFS-3G user-space FUSE driver too...

• Linux 7.1 Fixes Audio For The Steam Deck OLED After Being Broken 2 Years On The Upstream Kernel
  It turns out the Steam Deck OLED gaming handheld has not had working audio support with the mainline (upstream) Linux kernel since a change in late 2023 that was merged for Linux 6.8. There was an AMD ASoC audio change that inadvertently broke audio support for the Steam Deck OLED handheld but not affecting the original LCD model. Valve's downstream Steam OS kernel has compensated for this known breakage and other distributions targeting the Steam Deck OLED have carried the patch, but now there is a proper solution upstream ahead of Linux 7.1-rc2...

• FUSEX File-System Being Developed For Extended/Experimental Features
  Miklos Szeredi of Red Hat has been developing the FUSEX file-system as an extended/experimental area for File-System in User-Space "FUSE" development...

• AMD9s GAIA Defaults To Better Model, Continued Improvements For Local AI
  AMD software engineers on Friday released a new version of GAIA "Generative AI Is Awesome" as their open-source software for Windows and Linux leveraging the Lemonade SDK and aiming to make it easy to build AI agents on your PC with all local AI processing across AMD's CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs...

• Linux 7.1-rc2 Bringing Some More Improvements/Fixes For Older AMD GPUs
  Merged on Friday ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc2 kernel release due out tomorrow were this week's batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics / display / accelerator driver fixes...

• KDE Linux Now Using KMSCON For A Better VT Console Experience
  KDE Linux continues making progress as the in-house Linux distribution to best showcase the latest KDE Plasma desktop innovations...

• VideoLAN Publishes Dav2d For Open-Source AV2 Decoder
  While the Alliance For Open Media had been aiming for the AV2 release by the end of 2025, as of right now the AV2 specification remains in a draft status. VideoLAN developers though for months have already been working on dav2d as an open-source AV2 decoder and that code was published this weekend...

• FreeBSD 15.1 Beta Released For Early Testing
  Following last year's release of FreeBSD 15.0, FreeBSD 15.1 is working its way toward release release in June. For kicking off the release dance, FreeBSD 15.1 Beta 1 is available today for testing...

• The text mode lie: why modern TUIs are a nightmare for accessibility
  There is a persistent misconception among sighted developers: if an application runs in a terminal, it is inherently accessible. The logic assumes that because there are no graphics, no complex DOM, and no WebGL canvases, the content is just raw ASCII text that a screen reader can easily parse. The reality is different. Most modern Text User Interfaces (TUIs) are often more hostile to accessibility than poorly coded graphical interfaces. The very tools designed to improve the Developer Experience (DX) in the terminal—frameworks like Ink (JS/React), Bubble Tea (Go), or tcell—are actively destroying the experience for blind users. ↫ Casey Reeves The core reason should be obvious: the command-line interface, at its core, is just a stream of data with the newest data at the bottom, linearly going back in time as you go up. Any screen reader can deal with this fairly easily, and while I personally have no need for such a tool, Ive heard from those that do that kernel-level screen readers are quite good at what they do. TUIs, or text-based user interfaces, made with modern frameworks are actually very different: theyre 2D grid of pixels, where every character cell is a pixel. abandons the temporal flow for a spatial layout.! It should become immediately obvious that screen readers wont really know what to do with this, and Reeves gives countless examples, but the short version is this: the cursor jumps all over the place with every screen update, which makes screen readers go nuts. Various older TUIs, made in a time well before these modern TUI frameworks came about, were designed in a much more terminal-friendly way, or give you options to hide the cursor to solve the problem that way. Irssi, for example, uses VT100 scrolling regions instead of redrawing the whole screen every time something changes. I had never really stopped to think about TUIs and screen readers, as is common among us sighted people. The problems Reeves describes seem to stem not so much from TUIs being inherently inaccessible, but from modern frameworks not actually making use of the terminals core feature set. I really hope this Reeves article shines a light on this problem, and that the people developing these modern TUIs start taking accessibility more seriously.

• Using duplicity to back up your FreeBSD desktop
  Backing up in modern times, we’ve had ZFS snapshots and replication to make this task extremely easy. However, you may not have access to another ZFS endpoint for replication, need to diversify risk by using a non-ZFS tool for backup, or are simply using UFS2, living the old skool life. For these situations, my first recommendation is to lean on Tarsnap for its ease of use and simplicity, making restoration just as easy as backing up. But some situations call for a different approach. Maybe you have a strict firewall at your company that doesn’t allow Tarsnap data streams to egress from your corporate network, or you have internal/easy access to storage endpoints, such as S3-compatible object storage or a large-file storage location with SFTP access. When you are faced with the latter, the duplicity (sysutils/duplicity in ports) utility is available as an easily installable package onto your FreeBSD system. ↫ Jason Tubnor at the FreeBSD Foundation The rest of the article explains how to use duplicity on FreeBSD for the purpose described above.

• Testing MacOS on the Apple Network Server 2.0 ROMs
  Earlier this year, Mac OS and Windows NT-capable ROMs were discovered for Apple’s unique AIX Network Server. Cameron Kaiser has since spent more time digging into just how capable these ROMs are, and has published another one of his detailed stories about his efforts. Well, thanks to Jeff Walther who generously built a few replica ROM SIMMs for me to test, we can now try the 2.0! MacOS ROMs on holmstock, our hard-working Apple Network Server 700 test rig (stockholm, my original ANS 500, is still officially a production unit). And there are some interesting things to report, especially when we pit the preproduction ROMs and this set head-to-head in MacBench, and even try booting Rhapsody on it. ↫ Cameron Kaiser A great read, as always.

• Windows gets a new Run dialog
  With Windows being as old and long-running as it is, theres a ton of old and outdated bits and pieces lurking in every nook and cranny. I have always found these old relics fascinating, especially now that over the past few years, Microsoft has attempted to replace some of those bits and pieces with modern replacements (not always to great success, but thats another story). One of those parts of the UI thats been virtually unchanged since the release of Windows 95 is the Run dialog, but thats about to change: Microsoft has released a completely new Run dialog to early testers. Windows Run, also known as the Run dialog, is a surface that has been around for over 30 years. It has become a heavily relied upon tool for developers and advanced users alike. Users have decades of muscle memory where they hit Win+R, navigate through their Run history, and hit Enter to quickly access various paths and tools. We all have our favorite tool we launch there as well. For us, some of our favorites are wt (Windows Terminal), mstsc (Remote Desktop) and winword (Microsoft Word). But it’s more than jUsT a TeXt BoX tHaT rUnS tHiNgS. The Run dialog can handle navigating both local and network file paths as well. And everything it does, it does fast. Win+R opens the run dialog seemingly instantly. If we wanted to modernize the Run Dialog to fit the modern Windows 11 design style, we had to make sure it did everything just as well as before. We needed to maintain the same performance while also keeping the user interface minimal, just as Windows 95 intended. ↫ Clint Rutkas at the Microsoft Dev Blogs The new Run dialog looks like it belongs in Windows 11, which is a nice improvement, but the most important part is that they actually seem to have made it a little faster. Sure, they may have only shaved off a few milliseconds from its opening time, but considering virtually everything else theyve touched in Windows over the years got considerably slower, thats a good showing for Microsoft. The new feature theyve added is that by typing ~\, you can open your home directory. The one casualty is the browse button, which according to Microsofts data, literally nobody ever used. I know its just a small thing and in the end not even a remotely consequential one, but with an operating system as old and storied as Windows, replacing these ancient parts that millions of people rely on every day absolutely fascinates me. There must be a considerable amount of pressure on the people developing something like this new Run dialog, especially with Windows reputation being at one of its lowest points, so its good to see them being able to deliver. The new Run dialog is available today for testers, and if youre on the Windows Insider Experimental Channel, you can enable it in Settings > System > Advanced. Coincidentally, on my Windows 11 machine that I use for just one stupid video game, this Advanced page displays a loading spinner for five minutes and then just dies. Also, Notepad wont start (one time it showed this dialog), and using the terminal to load it causes the old Win32 version of Notepad to open after 5 minutes of waiting, which then hangs and crashes. People pay money for this.

• GNOME is good, actually
  While Im normally a KDE user, I do keep close tabs on various other desktop environments, and install and set them up every now and then to see how theyre fairing, what improvements theyve made, and ultimately, if my preference for KDE is still warranted. This usually means setting up a nice OpenBSD installation for Xfce, Fedora for GNOME, and less often others for some of the more niche desktop environments. Since GNOME 50 was just released, guess whos time in the round is up? Since everybodys already made up their mind about their preferred desktop eons ago, with upsides and downsides debated far past their expiration date, Im not particularly interested in reviewing desktop environments or Linux distributions. However, after asking around on Fedi, it seemed there was quite a bit of interest in an article detailing how I set up GNOME, what changes I make to the defaults, which extensions I use, what tweaks I apply, and so on. Of course, everything described in this article is highly personal, and Im not arguing that this is the optimal way to tweak GNOME, that the extensions I use are the best ones, or that any visual modifications I make are better than whatever defaults GNOME uses. No, my goal with this article is twofold: one, to highlight that GNOME is a lot more configurable, extensible, and malleable than common wisdom on the internet would have you believe. Its not KDE or one of those cobbled-together tiling Wayland desktops, but its definitely not as rigid as you might think. And two, that GNOME is good, actually. Tools of the trade The first thing I do is install a few crucial tools that make it easier to modify and tweak GNOME. I really dislike lists in articles, but I will begrudgingly use one here: After installing all of these tools, the actual tweaking can commence. Visual tweaks I didnt use to like GNOMEs Adwaita visual style, but over the years, it started growing on me to the point where I dont actively dislike it anymore. With the arrival of libadwaita, it has also become effectively impossible to theme modern GNOME applications, so even if you do change to something else, many of your applications wont follow along. If consistency is something you care about, youll stick to Adwaita, but that leaves one problem unresolved: applications that still use GTK3. These applications will follow a much older version of Adwaita, making them stand out like eyesores among all the modern GTK4 stuff. Luckily, since GTK3 applications are still properly themable, this is easily fixed: just install the adw-gtk3 theme, either by hand, or through your distributions repositories. To enable it, first install the user themes extension through Extension Manager, and then enable the theme in GNOME Tweaks for Legacy Applications!. Any potential GTK3 applications you still use will now integrate nicely with modern libadwaita applications. The one part of GNOME I really do deeply dislike is its icon theme. I cant quite explain why I dislike this icon set so much, but it runs deep, so one of the very first things I do is replace the default GNOME icon set with my personal favourite, Qogir. This is a popular icon set, so its usually available in your distributions repositories, but I always install it from its GitHub page. Changing GNOMEs icon set is as simple as selecting it in GNOME Tweaks. You cant get much more personal taste than an icon set, and there are dozens of amazing sets to choose from in the Linux world. Changing them out and trying out new ones is stupidly easy, and its definitely worth looking at a few that might be more pleasing to you than GNOMEs (or KDEs) default. Lastly, I open Add Water and enable the amazing GNOME theme for LibreWolf. Add Water basically makes this as easy as flipping a switch, so theres no need to copy any files into your LibreWolf profile or whatever. The application also provides a few more small tweaks to fiddle with, like enabling standard tab widths so tabs dont grow and shrink as you close and open tabs, moving the bookmarks bar below the tab bar, and many more. Extensions Since the release of GNOME 3 in 2011, extensions have been the most capable way to modify GNOMEs look, behaviour, and feature set. As far as I can tell, while the extension framework is an official part of the GNOME Shell, the extensions themselves are all third-party and not part of a vanilla GNOME installation. By now, there are over 2800 listed extensions, but that number includes abandoned extensions so its hard to determine the actual number of currently-maintained ones. Whatever the actual number is, theres bound to be things in there youre going to want to use. Here are the extensions I have installed. Lets just start at the top and work our way down. I guess Im forced to do another list. There are countless more extensions to choose from, and youre definitely going to find things you never even thought could be useful. Miscellaneous tweaks Theres a few other things I modify. In GNOME Tweaks, I make it so that double-clicking a windows titlebar minimises it while right-clicking it lowers it; two features I picked up during my years as a BeOS user that I absolutely refuse to give up. I configure the dock from Dash to Dock so that it always remains on top and never hides itself, no matter the circumstances. In Settings, I disable virtual desktops entirely (I dont like virtual desktops), and I make sure tap-to-click is disabled (if Im on a laptop). GNOME is good, actually After making all of these changes, I feel quite comfortable using GNOME, at least on my laptop. Its a nice, coherent experience, and offers what is probably the most polished graphical user interface you can find on Linux, even if it isnt the most full-featured. The third-party application ecosystem, through modern

• How fast is a macOS VM, and how small could it be?
  To assess how small a macOS VM could be, I ran the same VM of macOS 26.4.1 on progressively smaller CPU core and memory allocations, using my virtualiser Viable. The VM’s display window was set to a standard 1600 x 1000, and I ran Safari through its paces and performed some lightweight everyday tasks, including Storage analysis in Settings. Starting with 4 virtual cores and 8 GB vRAM, where the VM ran perfectly briskly with around 5 GB of memory used, I stepped down to 3 cores and 6 GB, to discover that memory usage fell to 3.9 GB and everything worked well. With just 2 cores and 4 GB of memory only 3.1 GB of that was used, and the VM continued to handle those lightweight tasks normally. ↫ Howard Oakley This is good news for people interested in the MacBook Neo who may also want to run a macOS virtual machine on it.

• Email is crazy
  Email is like those creaking old Terminators from the ’70s which continue to function without complaining. Designed for a world that doesn’t exist anymore, it has optional encryption, no built-in auth, three⁺ retrofitted security layers bolted on top, an unstandardized filtering layer and many more quirks. Yet billions of emails arrive correctly every single day. Email is not elegant but nonetheless it is Lindy. In the new age of agentic AI, we can only expect it to metamorphose into another dimension. ↫ Saurabh Sam! Khawase The fact that email is as complicated as it is bad enough, but having it be so dominantly controlled by only a few large gatekeepers like Google and Microsoft surely isnt helping either. I feel like email is no longer really a technology individuals can actively partake in at every level; it feels much more like WhatsApp or iMessage or whatever in that we just get to send messages, and thats it. Running your own mail sever isnt only a complex endeavour, its also a continuous cat-and-mouse game with companies like Google and Microsoft to ensure you dont end up on some shitlist and your emails stop arriving. I settled on Fastmail as my email service, and it works quite well. Still, I would love to be able to just run my own email server, or have some of my far more capable friends run one for a small group of us, but its such a daunting and unpleasant effort few people seem to have the stomach and perseverance for it.

• The day I logged 1 in every 2000 public IPv4: visualizing the AI scraper DDoS
  What if you run a few online services for you and your friends, like a small git instance and a grocery list service, but you get absolutely hammered by AI! scrapers? I cannot impress upon you, reader, that this is not only an attack that is coordinated, it is an attack that is distributed. I run a small set of services, basically only for me and my friends. I am not a hyperscaler, I am not a tech company, I am not even a small platform. I have a git forge where I put the shit I make, and a couple other services where me and my friends backup our files or write our grocery lists. I am not fucking Meta and I cannot scale the fuck up just because OpenAI or Anthropic or Meta or whoever is training a model that weeks wants to suck all the content out of my VPS ONCE MORE until it’s dry. ↫ lux at VulpineCitrus So how much traffic did the author of this piece, lux, get from AI! scraping bots? Within a time period of 24 hours, they were hammered by 2040670 unique IP addresses, 98% of which were IPv4 addresses, which means that 1 out of every 2000 publicly available IPv4 addresses were involved in the scraping. Together, they performed over 5 million requests. And just to reiterate: they were scraping a few very small, friends-only services run by some random person. This is absolutely insane. If, at this point in time, with everything that we know about just how deeply unethical every single aspect of AI! is, youre still using and promoting it, what is wrong with you? If youre so addicted to your AI! girlfriends unending stream of useless, forgettable sycophantic slop, despite being aware of the damage youre doing to those around you, theres something seriously wrong with you, and you desperately need professional help. You dont need any of this. The world doesnt need any of this. Nobody likes the slop AI! regurgitates, and nobody likes you for enabling it. Get help.

• Earliest 86-DOS and PC-DOS code released as open source
  Microsoft is continuing its efforts to release early versions of DOS as open source, and today weve got a special one. We’re stoked today to showcase some newly available source code materials that provide an even earlier look into the development of PC-DOS 1.00, the first release of DOS for the IBM PC. A dedicated team of historians and preservationists led by Yufeng Gao and Rich Cini has worked to locate, scan, and transcribe the stack of DOS-era source listings from Tim Paterson, the author of DOS. The listings include sources to the 86-DOS 1.00 kernel, several development snapshots of the PC-DOS 1.00 kernel, and some well-known utilities such as CHKDSK. Not only were these assembler listings, but there were also listings of the assembler itself! This work offers rare insight into how MS-DOS/PC-DOS came to be, and how operating system development was done at the time, not as it was later reconstructed. ↫ Stacey Haffner and Scott Hanselman Its wild that the source code had to be transcribed from paper, including notes and changes. You can find more information about the process on Gao’s website and Cini’s website.

• Apple gives up on Vision Pro, disbands Vision Pro team
  When Apple unveiled the Vision Pro, almost three (!) years ago, I concluded: If there’s one company that can convince people to spend $3500 to strap an isolating dystopian glowing robot mask onto their faces it’s Apple, but I still have a hard time believing this is what people want. ↫ Thom Holwerda at OSNews (quoting myself is weird) MacRumors Juli Clover, today: Apple has all but given up on the Vision Pro after the M5 model failed to revitalize interest in the device, MacRumors has learned. Apple updated the Vision Pro with a faster M5 chip and a more comfortable band in October 2025, but there were no other hardware changes, and consumers still werent interested. Apple has apparently stopped work on the Vision Pro and the Vision Pro team has been redistributed to other teams within Apple. Some former Vision Pro team members are working on Siri, which is not a surprise as Vision Pro chief Mike Rockwell has been leading the Siri team since March 2025. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors VR  what the Vision Pro is, whether Apples marketing likes to say it or not  has proven to be good for exactly two things: games and porn. The Vision Pro has neither. It was destined to be a flop from the start, as nobody wants to strap an uncomfortable computer to their face that does less than all of the other computers they already have, and what it does do, it does worse. I do wonder if this makes the Vision Pro the most expensive flop in human history. Has any company ever spent more on a product that failed this spectacularly?

• Apple wants to kill your Time Capsule, but they run NetBSD so they cant
  It seems like Apple is finally going to remove support for AFP from macOS, twelve years after first moving from AFP to SMB for its default network file-sharing technology. This change shouldnt impact most people, as its highly unlikely youre using AFP for anything in 2026. Still, there is one small group of people to whom this change has an actual impact: owners of Apples Time Capsule devices. Time Capsules only support AFP and SMB1, and with SMB1 being removed from macOS ages ago, and now AFP being on the chopping block as well, macOS 27 would render your Time Capsule more or less unusable. Its important to note that the last Time Capsule sold by Apple, the fifth generation, was released in 2013, and the product line as a whole was discontinued in 2018. If you bought a Time Capsule in the twilight years of the lines availability, I think you have a genuine reason to be perturbed by Apple cutting you off from your product if you upgrade to macOS 27, but at least you have the option of keeping an older version of macOS around so you can keep interacting with your time Capsule. It still feels like a bit of a shitty move though, as those fifth generation models came with up to 3TB of storage, which can still serve as a solid NAS solution. Thank your lucky stars, then, that open source can, as usual, come to the rescue when proprietary software vendors do what they always do and screw over their customers. Did you know every generation of Time Capsule actually runs NetBSD, and that its trivially easy to add support for Samba 4 and SMB3 authentication to your Time Capsule, thereby extending its life expectancy considerably? TimeCapsuleSMB does exactly that. If the setup completes successfully, your Time Capsule will run its own Samba 4 server, advertise itself over Bonjour (show up automatically in the Network! folder on macOS), and accept authenticated SMB3 connections from macOS. You should then be able to open Finder, choose Connect to Server, and use a normal SMB URL instead of relying on Apple’s legacy stack. You should also be able to use the disk for Time Machine backups. ↫ TimeCapsuleSMB Its compatible with both NetBSD 4 and NetBSD 6-based Time Capsules, although youll need to run a single SMB activation command every time a NetBSD 4-based Time Capsule reboots. This will also disable any AFP and SMB1 support, but that is kind of moot since those are exactly the technologies that dont and wont work anymore once macOS 27 is released. The installation is also entirely reversible if, for whatever reason, you want to undo the addition of Samba 4. This whole saga is such an excellent example of why open source software protects users rights, by design.

• Dillo 3.3.0 released
  Dillo is an amazing web browser for those of us who want their web browsing experience to be calmer and less flashing. Dillo also happens to be a very UNIX-y browser, and their latest release, 3.3.0, underlines that. A new dilloc program is now available to control Dillo from the command line or from a script. It searches for Dillo by the PID in the DILLO_PID environment variable or for a unique Dillo process if not set. ↫ Dillo 3.3.0 release notes You can use this program to control your Dillo instance, with basic commands like reloading the current URL, opening a new URL, and so on, but also things like dumping the current pages contents. I have a feeling more commands and features will be added in future releases, but for now, even the current set of commands can be helpful for scripting purposes. Im sure some of you who live and die in the terminal are already thinking of all the possibilities here. You can now also add page actions to the right-click context menu, so you can do things like reload a page with a Chrome curl impersonator to avoid certain JavaScript walls. This, too, is of course extensible. Dillo 3.3.0 also brings experimental support for building the browser with FLTK 1.4, and implemented a fix specifically to make OAuth work properly.

• Ubuntu is going to integrate AI!, but Canonical remains vague about the how and why
  Ubuntu, being one of the more commercial Linux distributions, was always going to jump on the AI! bandwagon, and Jon Seager, Canonicals VP Engineering, published a blog post with more details. Throughout 2026 we’ll be working on enabling access to frontier AI for Ubuntu users in a way that is deliberate, secure, and aligned with our open source values. By focusing on the combination of education for our engineers, our existing knowledge of building resilient systems and our strengthening silicon partnerships, we will deliver efficient local inference, powerful accessibility features, and a context-aware OS that makes Ubuntu meaningfully more capable for the people who rely on it Ubuntu is not becoming an AI product, but it can become stronger with thoughtful AI integration. ↫ Jon Seager at Ubuntu Discourse The problem with this entire post is that, much like all other corporate communications about AI!, its all deceptively vague, open-ended, and weasely. Adjectives like focused!, principled!, thoughtful!, and tasteful! dont really mean anything, and leave everything open for basically every type of slop AI! feature under the sun. Their claims about open weights and open source models are also weakened by words like favour! and where possible!, again leaving the door wide open for basically any shady AI! companys models and features to find their way into your default Ubuntu installation. Theres also very little in terms of concrete plans and proposed features, leaving Ubuntu users in the dark about what, exactly, is going to be added to their operating system of choice during the remainder of the year. Theres mentions of improved text-to-speech/speech-to-text and text regurgitators, but thats about it. None of it feels particularly inspired or ground-breaking, and the veneer of open source, ethical model creation, and so on, is particularly thin this time around, even for Canonical. I dont really feel like I know a lot more about Canonicals AI! intentions for Ubuntu after reading this post than I did before, other than Ubuntu users might be able to generate text in their email client or whatever later this year. Is that really something anybody wants?

• If 64bit Windows 11 contains a copy of 32bit explorer.exe, could you run it as its shell?
  Raymond Chen published a blog post about how a crappy uninstaller on Windows caused a mysterious spike in the number of Explorer (Windows graphical shell) crashes. It turns out the buggy uninstaller caused repeated crashes in the 32bit version of Explorer on 64bit systems, and  hold on a minute. The how many bits on the what now? The 32-bit version of Explorer exists for backward compatibility with 32-bit programs. This is not the copy of Explorer that is handling your taskbar or desktop or File Explorer windows. So if the 32-bit Explorer is running on a 64-bit system, it’s because some other program is using it to do some dirty work. ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing So I had no idea that 64bit Windows included a copy of the 32bit Explorer for backwards compatibility. It obviously makes sense, but I just never stopped to think about it. This made me wonder though if you could go nuts and do something really dumb: could you somehow trick 64bit Windows into running this 32bit copy of Explorer as its shell? Youd be running 32bit Explorer on 64bit Windows using the 32bit WoW64 binaries where you just pulled the 32bit Explorer binary from, which seems like a really nonsensical thing to do. Since theres no longer any 32bit builds of Windows 11, you also cant just copy over the 32bit Explorer from a 32bit Windows 11 build and achieve the same goal that way, so youd really have to go digging around in WoW64 to get 32bit versions. I guess the answer to this question depends on just how complete this copy of 32bit Explorer really is, and if Windows has any defenses or triggers in place to prevent someone from doing something this uselessly stupid. Of course, theres no practical reason to do any of this and it makes very little sense, but it might be a fun hacking project. Most likely the Windows experts among you are wondering what kind of utterly deranged new designer drug Im on, but I was always told that sometimes, the dumbest questions can lead to the most interesting answers, so here we are.

• 8087 emulation on 8086 systems
  Not too long ago I had a need and an opportunity to re-acquaint myself with the mechanism used for software emulation of the 8087 FPU on 8086/8088 machines. ↫ Michal Necasek Look, when a Michal Necasek article starts out like this, you know youre in for a learnin ol time. The 8087 was a floating-point coprocessor for the 8086 and 8088 processors, since back in those early days, processors did not include an integrated floating-point unit. It wouldnt be until the release of the 486DX, in 1989, that Intel would integrate an FPU inside the processor itself, negating the need for a separate chip and socket. Interestingly enough, Intel also released a cut-down version of the 486 with the FPU removed, the 486SX, for which an optional external FPU did exist.

• How hard is it to open a file?
  Sebastian Wick has a great explanation of why opening files  programmatically  is a lot more complex and fraught with dangers than you might think it is. This issue was relevant for Wick as he is one of the lead developers of Flatpak, for which a number of security issues have recently been discovered, and it just so happens that many of these issues dealt with this very topic. The biggest security issue found was a complete sandbox escape, originating from the fact that flatpak run, the command-line tool to start a Flatpak application, accepted path strings, since flatpak run is assumed to be run by a trusted user. The problem lay in a D-Bus service sandboxed applications could use to create subsandboxes, and this service was built around, you guessed it, flatpak run. The issues in question, including this complete sandbox escape, have been addressed and fixed, but they highlight exactly the dangers that can come from opening files. This subsandboxing approach in Flatpak is built on assumptions from fifteen years ago, and times have changed since then. If youre a programmer who deals with opening files, you might want to take a look at your own code to see if similar issues exist.

• Microsoft Issues Warning About Linux Vulnerability
  The company behind Windows has released information about a flaw that affects millions of Linux systems.
  

• Is AI Coming to Your Ubuntu Desktop?
  According to the VP of Engineering at Canonical, AI could soon be added to the Ubuntu desktop distribution.
  

• Framework Laptop 13 Pro Competes with the Best
  Framework has released what might be considered the MacBook of Linux devices.
  

• The Latest CachyOS Features Supercharged Kernel
  The latest release of CachyOS brings with it an enhanced version of the latest Linux kernel.
  

• Kernel 7.0 Is a Bit More Rusty
  Linux kernel 7.0 has been released for general availability, with Rust finally getting its due.
  

• France Says "Au Revoir" to Microsoft
  In a move that should surprise no one, France announced plans to reduce its reliance on US technology, and Microsoft Windows is the first to get the boot.
  

• CIQ Releases Compatibility Catalog for Rocky Linux
  The company behind Rocky Linux is making an open catalog available to developers, hobbyists, and other contributors, so they can verify and publish compatibility with the CIQ lineup.
  

• KDE Gets Some Resuscitation
  KDE is bringing back two themes that vanished a few years ago, putting a bit more air under its wings.
  

• Ubuntu 26.04 Beta Arrives with Some Surprises
  Ubuntu 26.04 is almost here, but the beta version has been released, and it might surprise some people.
  

• Ubuntu MATE Dev Leaving After 12 years
  Martin Wimpress, the maintainer of Ubuntu MATE, is now searching for his successor. Are you the next in line?
  

• Kali Linux Waxes Nostalgic with BackTrack Mode
  For those who've used Kali Linux since its inception, the changes with the new release are sure to put a smile on your face.
  

• Gnome 50 Smooths Out NVIDIA GPU Issues
  Gamers rejoice, your favorite pastime just got better with Gnome 50 and NVIDIA GPUs.
  

• System76 Retools Thelio Desktop
  The new Thelio Mira has landed with improved performance, repairability, and front-facing ports alongside a high-quality tempered glass facade.
  

• Some Linux Distros Skirt Age Verification Laws
  After California introduced an age verification law recently, open source operating system developers have had to get creative with how they deal with it.
  

• UN Creates Open Source Portal
  In a quest to strengthen open source collaboration, the United Nations Office of Information and Communications Technology has created a new portal.
  

• Latest Linux Kernel RC Contains Changes Galore
  Linux kernel 7.0-rc3 includes more changes than have been made in a single release in recent history.
  

• Nitrux 6.0 Now Ready to Rock Your World
  The latest iteration of the Debian-based distribution includes all kinds of newness.
  

• Linux Foundation Reports that Open Source Delivers Better ROI
  In a report that may surprise no one in the Linux community, the Linux Foundation found that businesses are finding a 5X return on investment with open source software.
  

• Keep Android Open
  Google has announced that, soon, anyone looking to develop Android apps will have to first register centrally with Google.
  

• Kernel 7.0 Now in Testing
  Linus Torvalds has announced the first Release Candidate (RC) for the 7.x kernel is available for those who want to test it.