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- Save the Date: Fedora Council Video Meeting on 2026 Strategy Summit
Join the Fedora Council public video meeting on Wednesday, February 25, 2026, at 14:00 UTC. Fedora Project Leader Jef Spaleta will share outcomes from the recent 2026 Strategy Summit and outline the strategic direction for the upcoming year. Attendees can ask questions live on Google Meet or submit them early via the Fedora Discussion topic. This is your opportunity to engage directly with leadership regarding Fedora's future.
- Sabayon Linux Creator Now Developing Gentoo-Based, Immutable matrixOS
Longtime Linux users may recall the Sabayon Linux distribution that was Gentoo-based and focused on a nice out-of-the-box experience from the mid 2000s through 2019 before fading away after 2018. Sabayon Linux creator Fabio Erculiani wrote in to Phoronix today to announce he's begun working on a new Linux distribution called matrixOS...
- Google Chrome 145 Released With JPEG-XL Image Support
Back in 2022 Google deprecated and then removed JPEG-XL image support from the Chrome/Chromium browser codebase and now in 2026 it's back. Last month I wrote about JPEG-XL decoding merged back to Chromium/Chrome and that has rolled out today as part of today's Chrome 145 stable debut...
- Cangaroo open-source CAN bus analyzer supports SocketCAN and CAN-FD on Linux
Cangaroo is an open-source CAN bus analyzer for Linux systems used in automotive, robotics, and industrial environments. The desktop application focuses on real-time capture, decoding, and analysis of CAN and CAN-FD traffic, with native integration into the Linux SocketCAN stack. The tool works with a wide range of interfaces supported by the kernel, including SocketCAN […]
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- Microsoft Plans Smartphone-Style Permission Prompts for Windows 11 Apps
Microsoft is planning to bring smartphone-style app permission prompts to Windows 11, requiring apps to get explicit user consent before they can access sensitive resources like the file system, camera and microphone. The company's Windows Platform engineer Logan Iyer said the move was prompted by applications increasingly overriding user settings, installing unwanted software, and modifying core Windows experiences without permission. A separate initiative called Windows Baseline Security Mode will enforce runtime integrity safeguards by default, allowing only properly signed apps, services, and drivers to run. Both changes will roll out in phases as part of Microsoft's Secure Future Initiative, which the company launched in November 2023 after a federal review board called its security culture "inadequate."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Border Officials Are Said To Have Caused El Paso Closure by Firing Anti-Drone Laser
An anonymous reader shares a report: The abrupt closure of El Paso's airspace late Tuesday was precipitated when Customs and Border Protection officials deployed an anti-drone laser on loan from the Department of Defense without giving aviation officials enough time to assess the risks to commercial aircraft, according to multiple people briefed on the situation. The episode led the Federal Aviation Administration to abruptly declare that the nearby airspace would be shut down for 10 days, an extraordinary pause that was quickly lifted Wednesday morning at the direction of the White House. Top administration officials quickly claimed that the closure was in response to a sudden incursion of drones from Mexican drug cartels that required a military response, with Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy declaring in a social media post that "the threat has been neutralized." But that assertion was undercut by multiple people familiar with the situation, who said that the F.A.A.'s extreme move came after immigration officials earlier this week used an anti-drone laser shared by the Pentagon without coordination with the F.A.A. The people spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. C.B.P. officials thought they were firing on a cartel drone, the people said, but it turned out to be a party balloon. Defense Department officials were present during the incident, one person said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Amazon Engineers Want Claude Code, but the Company Keeps Pushing Its Own Tool
Amazon engineers have been pushing back against internal policies that steer them toward Kiro, the company's in-house AI coding assistant, and away from Anthropic's Claude Code for production work, according to a Business Insider report based on internal messages. About 1,500 employees endorsed the formal adoption of Claude Code in one internal forum thread, and some pointed out the awkwardness of being asked to sell the tool through AWS's Bedrock platform while not being permitted to use it themselves. Kiro runs on Anthropic's Claude models but uses Amazon's own tooling, and the company says roughly 70% of its software engineers used it at least once in January. Amazon says there is no explicit ban on Claude Code but applies stricter requirements for production use.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- The "Are You Sure?" Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind
The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice -- ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini -- will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking "are you sure?," according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains. The behavior, known in the research community as sycophancy, stems from how these models are trained: reinforcement learning from human feedback, or RLHF, rewards responses that human evaluators prefer, and humans consistently rate agreeable answers higher than accurate ones. Anthropic published foundational research on this dynamic in 2023. The problem reached a visible breaking point in April 2025 when OpenAI had to roll back a GPT-4o update after users reported the model had become so excessively flattering it was unusable. Research on multi-turn conversations has found that extended interactions amplify sycophantic behavior further -- the longer a user talks to a model, the more it mirrors their perspective.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Anthropic To Cover Costs of Electricity Price Increases From Its Data Centers
AI startup Anthropic says it will ensure consumer electricity costs remain steady as it expands its data center footprint. From a report: Anthropic said it would work with utility companies to "estimate and cover" consumer electricity price increases in places where it is not able to sufficiently generate new power and pay for 100% of the infrastructure upgrades required to connect its data centers to the electrical grid. In a statement to NBC News, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei said: "building AI responsibly can't stop at the technology -- it has to extend to the infrastructure behind it. We've been clear that the U.S. needs to build AI infrastructure at scale to stay competitive, but the costs of powering our models should fall on Anthropic, not everyday Americans. We look forward to working with communities, local governments, and the Administration to get this right."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Meta Auditor EY Raised Red Flag on Data-Center Accounting
Meta Platforms' latest annual report contained an unusual, cautionary note for investors. From a report: The tech giant's auditor, Ernst & Young, raised a red flag over the financial engineering Meta used to keep a $27 billion data-center project off its balance sheet. While EY ultimately blessed Meta's accounting treatment, the firm flagged it as a "critical audit matter." This means it was one of the hardest, riskiest judgments the auditor had to make. Such a warning label is rare for a specific, high-profile transaction at a major audit client. Meta moved the data-center project, called Hyperion, off its books in October into a new joint venture with Blue Owl Capital. Meta owns 20% of the venture; funds managed by Blue Owl own the other 80%. A holding company called Beignet Investor, which owns the Blue Owl portion, sold a then-record $27.3 billion of bonds to investors. The joint venture is known in accounting parlance as a variable interest entity, or VIE. Meta said it isn't the "primary beneficiary" of this entity and so didn't have to put the venture's assets and liabilities on its own balance sheet. Meta's assertion that it lacks power over the venture is debatable and has drawn scrutiny from investors and lawmakers. Meta is a hyperscaler and knows how to run data centers for artificial intelligence, while Blue Owl is a financier. Whether the venture succeeds economically will come down to Meta's decisions and know-how. In its report, EY said auditing Meta's decision "was especially challenging due to the significant judgment required in determining the activities that most significantly affect the VIE's economic performance."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- US Hacking Tool Boss Stole and Sold Exploits To Russian Broker That Could Target Millions of Devices, DOJ Says
Federal prosecutors have revealed that Peter Williams, the former general manager of U.S. defense contractor L3Harris's hacking tools division Trenchant, sold eight stolen software exploits to a Russian broker whose customers -- including the Russian government -- could have used them to access "millions of computers and devices around the world." Williams, a 39-year-old Australian national, pleaded guilty in October and admitted to earning more than $1.3 million in cryptocurrency from the sales between 2022 and 2025. In a sentencing memorandum filed Tuesday ahead of his anticipated February 24 sentencing in a Washington, D.C., federal court, the Justice Department asked the judge for nine years in prison, $35 million in restitution, and a maximum fine of $250,000. Prosecutors described the unnamed Russian buyer -- believed to be Operation Zero, which publicly claims to sell only to the Russian government -- as "one of the world's most nefarious exploit brokers." Williams chose it because, by his own admission, "he knew they paid the most." He also oversaw the wrongful firing of a subordinate who was blamed for the theft.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Siri's AI Overhaul Delayed Again
Apple's long-promised overhaul of Siri has hit fresh problems during internal testing, forcing the company to push several key features out of the iOS 26.4 update that was slated for March and spread them across later releases, Bloomberg is reporting. The new Siri -- first announced at WWDC in June 2024 and originally due by early 2025 -- struggles to reliably process queries, takes too long to respond and sometimes falls back on OpenAI's ChatGPT instead of Apple's own technology, the report said. Apple has instructed engineers to begin testing new Siri capabilities on iOS 26.5 instead, due in May, and internal builds of that update include a settings toggle labeled "preview" for the personal data features. A more ambitious chatbot-style Siri code-named Campo, powered by Google servers and a custom Gemini model, is in development for iOS 27 in September.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Anthropic Safety Researcher Quits, Warning 'World is in Peril'
An anonymous reader shares a report: An Anthropic safety researcher quit, saying the "world is in peril" in part over AI advances. Mrinank Sharma said the safety team "constantly [faces] pressures to set aside what matters most," citing concerns about bioterrorism and other risks. Anthropic was founded with the explicit goal of creating safe AI; its CEO Dario Amodei said at Davos that AI progress is going too fast and called for regulation to force industry leaders to slow down. Other AI safety researchers have left leading firms, citing concerns about catastrophic risks.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet
Ring's Super Bowl ad on Sunday promoted "Search Party," a feature that lets a user post a photo of a missing dog in the Ring app and triggers outdoor Ring cameras across the neighborhood to use AI to scan for a match. 404 Media argues the cheerful premise obscures what the Amazon-owned company has become: a massive, consumer-deployed surveillance network. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who left in 2023 and returned last year, has since moved to re-establish police partnerships and push more AI into Ring cameras. The company has also partnered with Flock, a surveillance firm used by thousands of police departments, and launched a beta feature called "Familiar Faces" that identifies known people at your door. Chris Gilliard, author of the upcoming book Luxury Surveillance, called the ad "a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement." Further reading: No One, Including Our Furry Friends, Will Be Safer in Ring's Surveillance Nightmare, EFF Says
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Is Linux Mint Burning Out? Developers Consider Longer Release Cycle
BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Mint developers say they are considering adopting a longer development cycle, arguing that the project's current six month cadence plus LMDE releases leaves too little room for deeper work. In a recent update, the team reflected on its incremental philosophy, independence from upstream decisions like Snap, and heavy investment in Cinnamon and XApp. While the release process "works very well" and delivers steady improvements, they admit it consumes significant time in testing, fixing, and shipping, potentially capping ambition. Mint's next release will be based on a new Ubuntu LTS, and the team says it is seriously interested in stretching the development window. The stated goal is to free up resources for more substantial development rather than constant release management. Whether this signals bigger technical changes or simply acknowledges bandwidth limits for a small team remains unclear, but it marks a notable rethink of one of desktop Linux's most consistent release rhythms.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- A Hellish 'Hothouse Earth' Getting Closer, Scientists Say
The world is closer than thought to a "point of no return" after which runaway global heating cannot be stopped, scientists have said. From a report: Continued global heating could trigger climate tipping points, leading to a cascade of further tipping points and feedback loops, they said. This would lock the world into a new and hellish "hothouse Earth" climate far worse than the 2-3C temperature rise the world is on track to reach. The climate would also be very different to the benign conditions of the past 11,000 years, during which the whole of human civilisation developed. At just 1.3C of global heating in recent years, extreme weather is already taking lives and destroying livelihoods across the globe. At 3-4C, "the economy and society will cease to function as we know it," scientists said last week, but a hothouse Earth would be even more fiery. The public and politicians were largely unaware of the risk of passing the point of no return, the researchers said. The group said they were issuing their warning because while rapid and immediate cuts to fossil fuel burning were challenging, reversing course was likely to be impossible once on the path to a hothouse Earth, even if emissions were eventually slashed. It was difficult to predict when climate tipping points would be triggered, making precaution vital, said Dr Christopher Wolf, a scientist at Terrestrial Ecosystems Research Associates in the US. Wolf is a member of a study team that includes Prof Johan Rockstrom at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany and Prof Hans Joachim Schellnhuber at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- US Had Almost No Job Growth in 2025
An anonymous reader shares a report: The U.S. economy experienced almost zero job growth in 2025, according to revised federal data. On a more encouraging note: hiring has picked up in 2026. Preliminary data had indicated that the U.S. economy added 584,000 jobs last year. But the Bureau of Labor Statistics revised that number after it received additional state data, and found that the labor market had added 181,000 jobs in all of 2025. This is far fewer than the 1.46 million jobs that were added in 2024. One bright spot was last month, when hiring increased by 130,000 roles. This was significantly more than the 55,000 additions that had been expected by economists. "Job gains occurred in health care, social assistance, and construction, while federal government and financial activities lost jobs," BLS said in a statement.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- EVs Could Be Cheaper To Own Than Gas Cars in Africa by 2040
Electric vehicles accounted for just 1% of new car sales across Africa in 2025, but a study published in Nature Energy by researchers at ETH Zurich finds that EVs paired with solar off-grid charging systems -- solar panels, batteries and an inverter -- could become cheaper to own than gas-powered equivalents across most of the continent by 2040. The analysis considered total cost of ownership including sticker price, financing and fuel or charging costs, but excluded policy-related factors like taxes and subsidies. Electric two-wheelers could reach cost parity even sooner, by the end of the decade, thanks to smaller battery packs. Small cars remain the toughest segment. The biggest obstacle is financing: in some African countries, political instability and economic uncertainty push borrowing costs so high that interest on an EV loan can exceed the vehicle's purchase price. South Africa, Mauritius and Botswana are already near the financing conditions needed for cost parity; countries like Sudan and Ghana would need drastic cuts.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- UK Orders Deletion of Country's Largest Court Reporting Archive
The UK's Ministry of Justice has ordered the deletion of the country's largest court reporting archive [non-paywalled source], a database built by data analysis company Courtsdesk that more than 1,500 journalists across 39 media organizations have used since the lord chancellor approved the project in 2021. Courtsdesk's research found that journalists received no advance notice of 1.6 million criminal hearings, that court case listings were accurate on just 4.2% of sitting days, and that half a million weekend cases were heard without any press notification. In November, HM Courts and Tribunal Service issued a cessation notice citing "unauthorized sharing" of court data based on a test feature. Courtsdesk says it wrote 16 times asking for dialogue and requested a referral to the Information Commissioner's Office; no referral was made. The government issued a final refusal last week, and the archive must now be deleted within days. Chris Philp, the former justice minister who approved the pilot and now shadow home secretary, has written to courts minister Sarah Sackman demanding the decision be reversed.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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- Elon Musk paints exodus of xAI co-founders as 'evolution'
12-strong founding team down to 6 as boss looks Moonwards
Elon Musk has framed the recent exodus of talent from his artificial intelligence startup, xAI, as a necessary growing pain, saying the company's evolution "required parting ways with some people."…
- Supply chain attacks now fuel a 'self-reinforcing' cybercrime economy
Researchers say breaches link identity abuse, SaaS compromise, and ransomware into a cascading cycle
Cybercriminals are turning supply chain attacks into an industrial-scale operation, linking breaches, credential theft, and ransomware into a "self-reinforcing" ecosystem, researchers say.…
- The UK government isn't spending much taxpayer cash on X
Department for Education dropped £27,118. The rest, little to nothing
Most UK government departments have spent little or nothing with social media platform X since July 2024 following an unpublished 2023 evaluation by the Cabinet Office. But the Department for Education has bucked the trend, spending £27,118.…
- Google: China's APT31 used Gemini to plan cyberattacks against US orgs
Meanwhile, IP-stealing 'distillation attacks' on the rise
A Chinese government hacking group that has been sanctioned for targeting America's critical infrastructure used Google's AI chatbot, Gemini, to auto-analyze vulnerabilities and plan cyberattacks against US organizations, the company says.…
- Starlink speeds past terrestrial networks – and regulators
Low-earth orbit broadband is a no-brainer for remote area connectivity, but a brain teaser for lawmakers and networkers
APRICOT 2026 Starlink can sometimes shift data more quickly than is possible on terrestrial networks, and improves connectivity in remote areas. But the space broadband service also presents new technical and regulatory challenges, according to speakers who took to the stage on Tuesday at the Asia Pacific Regional Internet Conference on Operational Technologies (APRICOT) in Jakarta, Indonesia.…
- Microsoft warns that poisoned AI buttons and links may betray your trust
Businesses are embedding prompts that produce content they want you to read, not the stuff AI makes if left to its own devices
Amid its ongoing promotion of AI’s wonders, Microsoft has warned customers it has found many instances of a technique that manipulates the technology to produce biased advice.…
- Lawmakers demand great wall to keep advanced chipmaking gear out of China
Allies that don’t align on chip controls could face US component curbs, they argue
Banning sales to Chinese-government-affiliated companies, apparently, is not enough. A bipartisan group of American lawmakers this week called on the Trump administration to enact a blanket ban on the sale of equipment used in the production of advanced semiconductors to all of China.…
- T-Mobile announces its network is now full of AI by rolling out real-time translation
This AI is so network native, the telco tells us, that it all works on existing hardware - no datacenters involved
T-Mobile is claiming it's now the first wireless carrier to integrate generative AI "directly into a wireless network," and it's rolling out real-time call translation as the first feature delivered on top of its new AI-filled cellular network. …
- Brussels drafts blueprint to spot and swat rogue drones
Action Plan calls for EU-wide drills, industry forums, and expanded identification requirements
The European Commission wants to see stronger EU-wide cooperation over malicious drones via a new action plan. Proposals include a central counter-drone test facility, changing the current rules governing civilian use, and a development boost to Europe's own drones and counter-drone systems.…
- VMware scores early win in Siemens software licensing dispute
Judge agrees with Virtzilla's argument that the case should be heard in the US, not Germany
VMware appears to have secured an early procedural win in the case it brought against German industrial giant Siemens over its alleged use of unlicensed software.…
- Reviving a CIDCO MailStation – the last Z80 computer
If launching it was crazy in 1999, then what's trying to use it today?
FOSDEM 2026 Michal Pleban knows his old kit inside out, and his talk on the CIDCO MailStation was one of the most interesting of FOSDEM for us – as well as the funniest.…
- Cisco looses Splunk to probe and tame its growing agentic menagerie
Just change the name to CAIsco already, Chuck
Cisco is on track to deliver its unified management tool Cloud Control later in 2026, but while its users wait for that moment it’s pumping out plenty more agentic tools to manage their networks – and make sure agents behave.…
- AI can predict your future salary based on your photo, boffins claim
Academics look at problematic algorithm to inform regulatory discussion
A picture is worth a thousand words or, perhaps, a hundred thousand dollars in extra salary. Academics claim that personality traits inferred using AI photo analysis can predict how depicted individuals will fare in the labor market.…
- AI agents spill secrets just by previewing malicious links
Zero-click prompt injection can leak data when AI agents meet messaging apps, researchers warn
AI agents can shop for you, program for you, and, if you're feeling bold, chat for you in a messaging app. But beware: attackers can use malicious prompts in chat to trick an AI agent into generating a data-leaking URL, which link previews may fetch automatically.…
- AFRINIC says it's back on track and will soon deliver the plan that proves it
As the governance policy designed to protect regional internet registries nears completion
APRICOT 2026 After years of strife, the African Network Information Centre (AFRINIC) is weeks away from signing off on a budget and action plan, activity that one of the organization’s newly appointed executives believes demonstrates it is back on track.…
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