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1825 Monetary Lane Suite #104 Carrollton, TX
Do a presentation at NTLUG.
What is the Linux Installation Project?
Real companies using Linux!
Not just for business anymore.
Providing ready to run platforms on Linux
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- Arch Linux Running Well On LoongArch - Loongson 3B6000 Benchmarks
Earlier this month I posted benchmarks of the Loongson 3B6000 for this 12-core / 24-thread LoongArch Chinese CPU with DDR4 ECC memory. Those initial benchmarks were done with Debian LoongArch64 while since then I've shifted over to using Arch Linux on LoongArch.
- 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...
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- Waymo is Asking DoorDash Drivers To Shut the Doors of Its Self-Driving Cars
Waymo's autonomous vehicles can transport passengers across six cities without a human driver, but the Alphabet-owned company has discovered that its cars become completely inert if a passenger accidentally leaves a door open. The company confirmed that it is now paying DoorDash drivers in Atlanta to close these doors as part of a pilot program. A Reddit post from a DoorDash driver showed an offer of $6.25 to drive less than one mile to a Waymo vehicle and close its door, plus an additional $5 after verified completion. Waymo and DoorDash told TechCrunch the post is legitimate. The door-closing partnership began earlier this year and is separate from the autonomous delivery service the two companies launched in Phoenix in October. Waymo has also worked with Honk, a towing service app, in Los Angeles on the same problem. Honk users in L.A. have been offered up to $24 to close a Waymo door. Future Waymo vehicles will have automated door closures.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Bill Introduced To Replace West Virginia's New CS Course Graduation Requirement With Computer Literacy Proficiency
theodp writes: West Virginia lawmakers on Tuesday introduced House Bill 5387 (PDF), which would repeal the state's recently enacted mandatory stand-alone computer science graduation requirement and replace it with a new computer literacy proficiency requirement. Not too surprisingly, the Bill is being opposed by tech-backed nonprofit Code.org, which lobbied for the WV CS graduation requirement (PDF) just last year. Code.org recently pivoted its mission to emphasize the importance of teaching AI education alongside traditional CS, teaming up with tech CEOs and leaders last year to launch a national campaign to mandate CS and AI courses as graduation requirements. "It would basically turn the standalone computer science course requirement into a computer literacy proficiency requirement that's more focused on digital literacy," lamented Code.org as it discussed the Bill in a Wednesday conference call with members of the Code.org Advocacy Coalition, including reps from Microsoft's Education and Workforce Policy team. "It's mostly motivated by a variety of different issues coming from local superintendents concerned about, you know, teachers thinking that students don't need to learn how to code and other things. So, we are addressing all of those. We are talking with the chair and vice chair of the committee a week from today to try to see if we can nip this in the bud." Concerns were also raised on the call about how widespread the desire for more computing literacy proficiency (over CS) might be, as well as about legislators who are associating AI literacy more with digital literacy than CS. The proposed move from a narrower CS focus to a broader goal of computer literacy proficiency in WV schools comes just months after the UK's Department for Education announced a similar curriculum pivot to broader digital literacy, abandoning the narrower 'rigorous CS' focus that was adopted more than a decade ago in response to a push by a 'grassroots' coalition that included Google, Microsoft, UK charities, and other organizations.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Meta Plans To Let Smart Glasses Identify People Through AI-Powered Facial Recognition
Meta plans to add facial recognition technology to its Ray-Ban smart glasses as soon as this year, New York Times reported Friday, five years after the social giant shut down facial recognition on Facebook and promised to find "the right balance" for the controversial technology. The feature, internally called "Name Tag," would let wearers identify people and retrieve information about them through Meta's AI assistant, the report added. An internal memo from May acknowledged the feature carries "safety and privacy risks" and noted that political tumult in the United States would distract civil society groups that might otherwise criticize the launch. The company is exploring restrictions that would prevent the glasses from functioning as a universal facial recognition tool, potentially limiting identification to people connected on Meta platforms or those with public accounts.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Ring Cancels Its Partnership With Flock Safety After Surveillance Backlash
Following intense backlash to its partnership with Flock Safety, a surveillance technology company that works with law enforcement agencies, Ring has announced it is canceling the integration. From a report: In a statement published on Ring's blog and provided to The Verge ahead of publication, the company said: "Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made the joint decision to cancel the integration and continue with our current partners ... The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety." [...] Over the last few weeks, the company has faced significant public anger over its connection to Flock, with Ring users being encouraged to smash their cameras, and some announcing on social media that they are throwing away their Ring devices. The Flock partnership was announced last October, but following recent unrest across the country related to ICE activities, public pressure against the Amazon-owned Ring's involvement with the company started to mount. Flock has reportedly allowed ICE and other federal agencies to access its network of surveillance cameras, and influencers across social media have been claiming that Ring is providing a direct link to ICE.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Russia Fully Blocks WhatsApp
An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. messenger app WhatsApp, owned by Meta Platforms, has been completely blocked in Russia for failing to comply with local law, the Kremlin said on Thursday, suggesting Russians turn to a state-backed "national messenger" instead. "Due to Meta's unwillingness to comply with Russian law, such a decision was indeed taken and implemented," Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters, proposing that Russians switch to MAX, Russia's state-owned messenger.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Windows 11 Notepad Flaw Let Files Execute Silently via Markdown Links
Microsoft has patched a high-severity vulnerability in Windows 11's Notepad that allowed attackers to silently execute local or remote programs when a user clicked a specially crafted Markdown link, all without triggering any Windows security warning. The flaw, tracked as CVE-2026-20841 and fixed in the February 2026 Patch Tuesday update, stemmed from Notepad's relatively new Markdown support -- a feature Microsoft added after discontinuing WordPad and rewriting Notepad to serve as both a plain text and rich text editor. An attacker only needed to create a Markdown file containing file:// links pointing to executables or special URIs like ms-appinstaller://, and a Ctrl+click in Markdown mode would launch them. Microsoft's fix now displays a warning dialog for any link that doesn't use http:// or https://, though the company did not explain why it chose a prompt over blocking non-standard links entirely. Notepad updates automatically through the Microsoft Store.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- CIA Makes New Push To Recruit Chinese Military Officers as Informants
An anonymous reader shares a report: Just weeks after a dramatic purge of China's top general, the CIA is moving to capitalize on any resulting discord with a new public video targeting potential informants in the Chinese military. The U.S. spy agency on Thursday rolled out the video depicting a disillusioned mid-level Chinese military officer, in the latest U.S. step in a campaign to ramp up human intelligence gathering on Washington's strategic rival. It follows a similar effort last May that focused on fictional figures within China's ruling Communist Party that provided detailed Chinese-language instructions on how to securely contact U.S. intelligence. CIA Director John Ratcliffe said in a statement that the agency's videos had reached many Chinese citizens and that it would continue offering Chinese government officials an "opportunity to work toward a brighter future together."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- IBM Plans To Triple Entry-Level Hiring in the US
IBM said it will triple entry-level hiring in the US in 2026, even as AI appears to be weighing on broader demand for early-career workers. From a report: While the company declined to disclose specific hiring figures, it said the expansion will be "across the board," affecting a wide range of departments. "And yes, it's for all these jobs that we're being told AI can do," said Nickle LaMoreaux, IBM's chief human resources officer, speaking at a conference this week in New York. LaMoreaux said she overhauled entry-level job descriptions for software developers and other roles to make the case internally for the recruitment push. "The entry-level jobs that you had two to three years ago, AI can do most of them," she said at Charter's Leading With AI Summit. "So, if you're going to convince your business leaders that you need to make this investment, then you need to be able to show the real value these individuals can bring now. And that has to be through totally different jobs."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- WP Engine Says Automattic Planned To Shake Down 10 Hosting Companies For WordPress Royalties
WP Engine's third amended complaint against Automattic and WordPress co-founder Matt Mullenweg alleges that Mullenweg had plans to impose royalty fees on 10 hosting companies beyond WP Engine for their use of the WordPress trademark. The amended filing, based on previously sealed information uncovered during discovery, also claims Mullenweg emailed a Stripe executive to pressure the payment processor into canceling WP Engine's contract after WP Engine sued Automattic in October 2024. Newfold, the parent company of Bluehost and HostGator, is already paying Automattic for trademark use, according to the complaint, and Automattic is in conversations with other hosts. The filing challenges the 8% royalty rate as arbitrary, citing Mullenweg's comments at TechCrunch Disrupt 2024 where he said the figure was based on what WP Engine "could afford to pay." Internal Automattic correspondence cited in the complaint includes Mullenweg describing his approach to WP Engine as "nuclear war" and warning that if the hosting company didn't comply, he would start stealing its customers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Anthropic Raises $30 Billion at $380 Billion Valuation, Eyes IPO This Year
Anthropic has raised $30 billion in a Series G funding round that values the Claude maker at $380 billion as the company prepares for an initial public offering that could come as early as this year. Investors in the new round include Singapore sovereign fund GIC, Coatue, D.E. Shaw Ventures, ICONIQ, MGX, Sequoia Capital, Founders Fund, Greenoaks and Temasek. Anthropic raised its funding target by $10 billion during the process after the round was several times subscribed. The San Francisco-based company, founded in 2021 by former OpenAI researchers, now has a $14 billion revenue run rate, about 80% of which comes from enterprise customers. It claims more than 500 customers spending over $1 million a year on its workplace tools. The round includes a portion of the $15 billion commitment from Microsoft and Nvidia announced late last year.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Palo Alto Chose Not To Tie China To Hacking Campaign For Fear of Retaliation From Beijing
An anonymous reader shares a report: Palo Alto Networks opted not to tie China to a global cyberespionage campaign the firm exposed last week over concerns that the cybersecurity company or its clients could face retaliation from Beijing, according to two people familiar with the matter. The sources said that Palo Alto's findings that China was tied to the sprawling hacking spree were dialed back following last month's news, first reported by Reuters, that Palo Alto was one of about 15 U.S. and Israeli cybersecurity companies whose software had been banned by Chinese authorities on national security grounds. A draft version of the report by Palo Alto's Unit 42, the company's threat intelligence arm, said that the prolific hackers -- dubbed "TGR-STA-1030" in a report published on Thursday of last week -- were connected to Beijing, the two people said. The finished report instead described the hacking group more vaguely as a "state-aligned group that operates out of Asia." Attributing sophisticated hacks is notoriously difficult and debates over how best to assign blame for digital intrusions are common among cybersecurity researchers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- 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.
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- Broadband rollouts feel the burn from AI memory frenzy
Prices for router and set-top boxes up nearly sevenfold, squeezing telcos and raising deployment costs
Prices for memory used in routers and set-top boxes are surging nearly sevenfold thanks to AI, raising fresh fears that the industry's silicon binge could leave telcos scrambling to get customers online.…
- US is moving ahead with colocated nukes and datacenters
Bitbarn nuke campus to be sited at Idaho National Laboratory
Nuclear-powered datacenters in the US are moving closer as a consortium prepares to build proposed facilities for the Department of Energy (DoE) at the Idaho National Laboratory (INL).…
- ʎɹǝʌoɔǝᴚ sʍopuᴉM ʇɐ sǝʇɐuᴉɯɹǝʇ snq sᴉɥ┴
One destination passengers were definitely not hoping to reach
Bork!Bork!Bork! As if to demonstrate that whatever one operating system can do, Windows can do it better, bluer, and upside down, we present a bus stopping only at bork.…
- MPs brand NS&I's £3B IT overhaul a 'full-spectrum disaster'
Watchdog says savings bank botched tech revamp, warning taxpayers remain exposed after years of delays
Britain's state-backed savings bank has been dragged over the coals by Parliament's spending watchdog, which has branded its long-running digital overhaul a £3 billion "full-spectrum disaster."…
- OK, so Anthropic's AI built a C compiler. That don't impress me much
Fanboys think it's the greatest thing since sliced bread. Devs aren't nearly as won over
Opinion I'm willing to be impressed by AI products, but Anthropic's AI‑built C compiler leaves me a bit cold. It's little more than a clever demo. It is not the moment when software engineering as we know it flips over and dies. Not even close.…
- AI to make call center agents 'superheroes,' not unemployed, says industry CEO
Gartner says using AI to fix customer gripes could cost more than using humans by 2030
ai-pocalypse AI will not replace the people in the call center, but it will rejigger the software stack to make agents more capable of solving customer issues without the need to swivel-chair into multiple systems or escalate complaints, said Vasili Triant, CEO of UJET.…
- OpenAI dishes out its first model on a plate of Cerebras silicon
GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark may be a mouthfull, but it's certainly fast at 1,000 Tok/s running on Nvidia rival's CS3 accelerators
Nvidia and AMD can take a seat. On Thursday, OpenAI unveiled GPT-5.3-Codex-Spark, its first model that will run on Cerebras Systems' dinner-place-sized AI accelerators, which feature some of the world's fastest on-chip memory.…
- Waymo launching China-made van that won't fail in rain, snow, or gloom of night
And hey, maybe the overseas remote operators senators fret about won’t be needed quite so often
Waymo is rolling out its sixth-generation autonomous driving system, saying it's designed to avoid a repeat of past weather-related snafus. It's also causing controversy by putting the new kit on vehicles built by a Chinese automaker. …
- AI agent seemingly tries to shame open source developer for rejected pull request
Belligerent bot bullies maintainer in blog post to get its way
Today, it's back talk. Tomorrow, could it be the world? On Tuesday, Scott Shambaugh, a volunteer maintainer of Python plotting library Matplotlib, rejected an AI bot's code submission, citing a requirement that contributions come from people. But that bot wasn't done with him.…
- 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.…
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