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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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- The Surprising Spectre BHI Mitigation Performance Impact On Meteor Lake
When recently carrying out performance benchmarks of Intel Meteor Lake performance on Linux since launch day two years ago, the geo mean came in at 93% the original performance. Finding the performance trending clearly lower with an up-to-date Linux software stack compared to in December 2023 was quite surprising considering the rather nice gains we have seen over time on other Intel/AMD hardware. As noted in that article though, one of the possible explanations there is the Spectre BHI "Branch History Injection" vulnerability and microcode plus Linux kernel mitigations having come out post-launch and affecting Meteor Lake CPUs. Sure enough, follow-up tests looking at the Spectre BHI impact have revealed a measurable cost in a number of workloads for the Core Ultra processor.
- IceWM soldiers on while Budgie jumps the Wayland ship
Two new Linux GUIs – plus Phoenix, an experimental new X server in ZigThe new year brings releases from opposite ends of the Linux GUI spectrum: IceWM, an X11 window manager from the late 1990s, and Budgie, a newer full desktop environment that has gone Wayland-native.…
- Linux Lands Safeguard For RISC-V Against Another Microarchitectural Attack Vector
Increasingly complex RISC-V cores aren't magically immune to the speculative execution / side-channel vulnerabilities that have rattled the x86_64 and ARM64 landscape for years. Following recent work on Spectre V1 handling for RISC-V in the Linux kernel, merged this weekend for Linux 6.19-rc5 is another RISC-V attack vector safeguard...
- Linux Kernel 6.19-rc4 Released as Development Marches On
The Linux kernel development cycle continues with the release of Linux 6.19-rc4, the fourth release candidate in the lead-up to the final 6.19 stable kernel. As with previous RC builds, this release is aimed squarely at developers, testers, and early adopters who help identify bugs and regressions before the kernel is finalized.
- How to Upgrade Linux Mint 22.2 to Linux Mint 22.3
Linux Mint 22.3 “Zena” is here, and the upgrade path from Linux Mint 22.2 “Zara” is now open for those who want to upgrade their installations to the latest release of this popular GNU/Linux distribution.
- RAKwireless rolls out WisMesh RAK3312 Meshtastic LoRa starter kit
RAKwireless has released the WisMesh RAK3312 Starter Kit, a modular LoRa mesh communication kit based on the company’s WisBlock ecosystem. The kit is intended for building private, off-grid communication networks using the open-source Meshtastic firmware, without requiring manual firmware flashing or custom hardware assembly. The kit uses the RAK3312 WisBlock Core, which combines an Espressif […]
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- Anthropic Invests $1.5 Million in the Python Software Foundation and Open Source Security
Python Software Foundation: We are thrilled to announce that Anthropic has entered into a two-year partnership with the Python Software Foundation (PSF) to contribute a landmark total of $1.5 million to support the foundation's work, with an emphasis on Python ecosystem security. This investment will enable the PSF to make crucial security advances to CPython and the Python Package Index (PyPI) benefiting all users, and it will also sustain the foundation's core work supporting the Python language, ecosystem, and global community. Anthropic's funds will enable the PSF to make progress on our security roadmap, including work designed to protect millions of PyPI users from attempted supply-chain attacks. Planned projects include creating new tools for automated proactive review of all packages uploaded to PyPI, improving on the current process of reactive-only review. We intend to create a new dataset of known malware that will allow us to design these novel tools, relying on capability analysis. One of the advantages of this project is that we expect the outputs we develop to be transferable to all open source package repositories. As a result, this work has the potential to ultimately improve security across multiple open source ecosystems, starting with the Python ecosystem.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Scott Adams, Creator of the 'Dilbert' Comic Strip, Dies at 68
Scott Adams, who kept cubicle denizens laughing for more than three decades with Dilbert, the bitingly funny comic strip that poked fun at the absurdity of corporate life, died Tuesday. He was 68. From a report: His death was tearfully revealed by his first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, at the start of Real Coffee With Scott Adams. In May, he said on the podcast that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had spread to his bones. "I expect to be checking out from this domain this summer," he said. In a statement he wrote that was read by Miles over six minutes, he said, "Things did not go well for me ... my body fell before my brain." Sprung from Adams' days as a Pacific Bell applications engineer in San Ramon, California, Dilbert debuted in 1989 and at the height of its popularity appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries and in 25 languages with an estimated worldwide readership of more than 150 million. Though it had the appropriate level of cartoon exaggeration, the strip keenly captured office life and struck a nerve with the white-collar class.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- JPMorgan Warns 10% Credit Card Rate Cap Would Backfire on Consumers and Economy
JPMorgan Chase's chief financial officer Jeremy Barnum pushed back hard on Tuesday against President Donald Trump's proposed 10% cap on credit card interest rates, calling the measure "very bad for consumers" and "very bad for the economy" during a call with reporters. The proposed one-year cap, which Trump has said he wants implemented starting January 20, sent banking stocks tumbling last week and prompted financial groups to mount a defense. Barnum said JPMorgan would have to "change the business significantly and cut back" if the cap takes effect, adding that he believes the policy would produce "the exact opposite consequence to what the administration wants." Wall Street analysts remain skeptical the proposal will survive, noting that only Congress can enact such a measure. The average credit card interest rate in November stood at 20.97%, according to Federal Reserve data. Financial industry groups have countered that a 10% cap would result in millions of American households and small businesses losing access to credit entirely. A banking industry body called the potential impact "devastating."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Signal Creator Marlinspike Wants To Do For AI What He Did For Messaging
Moxie Marlinspike, the engineer who created Signal Messenger and set a new standard for private communications, is now trialing Confer, an open source AI assistant designed to make user data unreadable to platform operators, hackers, and law enforcement alike. Confer relies on two core technologies: passkeys that generate a 32-byte encryption keypair stored only on user devices, and trusted execution environments on servers that prevent even administrators from accessing data. The code is open source and cryptographically verifiable through remote attestation and transparency logs. Marlinspike likens current AI interactions to confessing into a "data lake." A court order last May required OpenAI to preserve all ChatGPT user logs including deleted chats, and CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged that even psychotherapy sessions on the platform may not stay private.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Meta Begins Job Cuts as It Shifts From Metaverse to AI Devices
Meta has begun laying off more than 1,000 employees from its Reality Labs division as the company redirects resources away from virtual reality and metaverse products toward AI wearables and smartphone features. The cuts amount to roughly 10% of Reality Labs' 15,000-person workforce, according to an internal post from CTO Andrew Bosworth reviewed by Bloomberg. Reality Labs has lost more than $70 billion since the start of 2021, and top executives discussed budget cuts as deep as 30% for the metaverse group in December. Meta plans to continue developing its Horizon metaverse platform, but the focus will shift almost exclusively to mobile phones rather than the fully immersive VR headsets the company originally envisioned.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Microsoft Pledges Full Power Costs, No Tax Breaks in Response To AI Data Center Backlash
Microsoft announced Tuesday what it calls a "community first" initiative for its AI data centers, pledging to pay full electricity costs and reject local property tax breaks following months of growing opposition from residents facing higher power bills. The announcement in Washington, D.C. marks a clear departure from past practices; Microsoft has previously accepted tax abatements for data centers in Ohio and Iowa. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said the company has been developing the initiative since September. Residential power prices in data center hubs like Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio jumped 12-16% over the past year, faster than the U.S. average. Three Democratic senators launched an investigation last month into whether tech giants are raising residential bills. Microsoft also pledged a 40% improvement in water efficiency by 2030 and committed to replenishing more water than it uses in each district where it operates.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Trump Says Microsoft To Make Changes To Curb Data Center Power Costs For Americans
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: President Donald Trump said in a social media post on Monday that Microsoft will announce changes to ensure that Americans won't see rising utility bills as the company builds more data centers to meet rising artificial intelligence demand. "I never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Therefore, my Administration is working with major American Technology Companies to secure their commitment to the American People, and we will have much to announce in the coming weeks." [...] Trump congratulated Microsoft on its efforts to keep prices in check, suggesting that other companies will make similar commitments. "First up is Microsoft, who my team has been working with, and which will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't 'pick up the tab' for their POWER consumption, in the form of paying higher Utility bills," Trump wrote on Monday. Utilities charged U.S. consumers 6% more for electricity in August from a year earlier, including in states with many data centers, CNBC reported in November. Microsoft is paying close to attention to the impact of its data centers on local residents. "I just want you to know we are doing everything we can, and I believe we're succeeding, in managing this issue well, so that you all don't have to pay more for electricity because of our presence," Brad Smith, the company's president and vice chair, said at a September town hall meeting in Wisconsin, where Microsoft is building an AI data center. While Microsoft is moving forward with some facilities, the company withdrew plans for a data center in Caledonia, Wisconsin, amid loud opposition to its efforts there. The project would would have been located 20 miles away from a data center in the village of Mount Pleasant.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Researchers Beam Power From a Moving Airplane
Researchers from the startup Overview Energy have successfully demonstrated beaming power from a moving airplane to the ground using near-infrared light. It marks the first step toward space-based solar power satellites that could someday transmit energy from orbit to existing solar farms on Earth. IEEE Spectrum reports: Overview's test transferred only a sprinkling of power, but it did it with the same components and techniques that the company plans to send to space. "Not only is it the first optical power beaming from a moving platform at any substantial range or power," says Overview CEO Marc Berte, "but also it's the first time anyone's really done a power beaming thing where it's all of the functional pieces all working together," he says. "It's the same methodology and function that we will take to space and scale up in the long term." [...] Many researchers have settled on microwaves as their beam of choice for wireless power. But, in addition to the safety concerns about shooting such intense waves at the Earth, [Paul Jaffe, head of systems engineering] says there's another problem: microwaves are part of what he calls the "beachfront property" of the electromagnetic spectrum -- a range from 2 to 20 gigahertz that is set aside for many other applications, such as 5G cellular networks. "The fact is," Jaffe says, "if you somehow magically had a fully operational solar power satellite that used microwave power transmission in orbit today -- and a multi-kilometer-scale microwave power satellite receiver on the ground magically in place today -- you could not turn it on because the spectrum is not allocated to do this kind of transmission." Instead, Overview plans to use less-dense, wide-field infrared waves. Existing utility-scale solar farms would be able to receive the beamed energy just like they receive the sun's energy during daylight hours. So "your receivers are already built," Berte says. The next major step is a prototype demonstrator for low Earth orbit, after which he hopes to have GEO satellites beaming megawatts of power by 2030 and gigawatts by later that decade. Plenty of doubts about the feasibility of space-based power abound. It is an exotic technology with much left to prove, including the ability to survive orbital debris and the exorbitant cost of launching the power stations. (Overview's satellite will be built on earth in a folded configuration and it will unfold after it's brought to orbit, according to the company). "Getting down the cost per unit mass for launch is a big deal," Jaffe says. "Then, it just becomes a question of increasing the specific power. A lot of the technologies we're working on at Overview are squarely focused on that."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- You Can Now Reserve a Hotel Room On the Moon For $250,000
A newly founded startup called GRU Space is taking deposits of up to $1 million to eventually build inflatable hotels on the Moon. The bet is that space needs destinations, not just rockets, even if the first customers are essentially early adopters of sci-fi optimism. Ars Technica reports: It sounds crazy, doesn't it? After all, GRU Space had, as of late December when I spoke to founder Skyler Chan, a single full-time employee aside from himself. And Chan, in fact, only recently graduated from the University of California, Berkeley. [...] The GRU in the company's name, by the way, stands for Galactic Resource Utilization. The long-term vision is to derive resources from the Moon, Mars, asteroids, and beyond to fuel human expansion into space. If all that sounds audacious and unrealistic, well, it kind of is. But it is not without foundation. GRU Space has already received seed funding from Y Combinator, and it will go through the organization's three-month program early this year. This will help Chan refine his company's product and give him more options to raise money. Regarding his vision, you can read GRU Space's white paper here. Presently, the company plans to fly its initial "mission" in 2029 as a 10-kg payload on a commercial lunar lander, demonstrating an inflatable structure capability and converting lunar regolith into Moon bricks using geopolymers. With its second mission, the company plans to launch a larger inflatable structure into a "lunar pit" to test a scaled-up version of its resource development capabilities. The first hotel, an inflatable structure, would be launched in 2032 and would be capable of supporting up to four guests at a time. The next iteration beyond this would be the fancier structure, built from Moon bricks, in the style of the Palace of the Fine Arts. "SpaceX is building the FedEx to get us there, right?" Chan said. "But there has to be a destination worthy to stay in. Obviously, there is all kinds of debate around this, and what the future is going to be like. But our conviction is that the fundamental problem we have to solve, to advance humans toward the Moon and Mars, is off-world habitation. We can't keep everyone living on that first ship that sailed to North America, right? We have to build the roads and structures and offices that we live in today."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- EPA To Stop Considering Lives Saved By Limiting Air Pollution
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For decades, the Environmental Protection Agency has calculated the health benefits of reducing air pollution, using the cost estimates of avoided asthma attacks and premature deaths to justify clean-air rules. Not anymore. Under President Trump, the E.P.A. plans to stop tallying gains from the health benefits caused by curbing two of the most widespread deadly air pollutants, fine particulate matter and ozone, when regulating industry, according to internal agency emails and documents reviewed by The New York Times. It's a seismic shift that runs counter to the E.P.A.'s mission statement, which says the agency's core responsibility is to protect human health and the environment, environmental law experts said. The change could make it easier to repeal limits on these pollutants from coal-burning power plants, oil refineries, steel mills and other industrial facilities across the country, the emails and documents show. That would most likely lower costs for companies while resulting in dirtier air. "The idea that E.P.A. would not consider the public health benefits of its regulations is anathema to the very mission of E.P.A.," said Richard Revesz, the faculty director of the Institute for Policy Integrity at New York University School of Law. "If you're only considering the costs to industry and you're ignoring the benefits, then you can't justify any regulations that protect public health, which is the very reason that E.P.A. was set up."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- European Firms Hit Hiring Brakes Over AI and Slowing Growth
European hiring momentum is cooling as slower growth and accelerating AI adoption make both employers and workers more cautious. DW.com reports: [Angelika Reich, leadership adviser at the executive recruitment firm Spencer Stuart] noted how Europe's labor market has "cooled down" and how "fewer job vacancies and a tougher economic climate naturally make employees more cautious about switching jobs." Despite remaining resilient, the 21-member eurozone's labor market is projected to grow more slowly this year, at 0.6% compared with 0.7% in 2025, according to the European Central Bank (ECB). Although that drop seems tiny, each 0.1 percentage point difference amounts to about 163,000 fewer new jobs being created. Just three years ago, the eurozone created some 2.76 million new jobs while growing at a robust rate of 1.7%. Migration has also played a major role in shaping Europe's labor supply, helping to ease acute worker shortages and support job growth in many countries. However, net migration is now stabilizing or falling. In Germany, more than one in three companies plans to cut jobs this year, according to the Cologne-based IW economic think tank. The Bank of France expects French unemployment to climb to 7.8%, while in the UK, two-thirds of economists questioned by The Times newspaper think unemployment could rise to as high as 5.5% from the current 5.1%. Unemployment in Poland, the European Union's growing economic powerhouse, is edging higher, reaching 5.6% in November compared to 5% a year earlier. Romania and the Czech Republic are also seeing similar upticks in joblessness. The softening of the labor market has prompted new terms like the Great Hesitation, where companies think twice about hiring and workers are cautious about quitting stressful jobs, and Career Cushioning, quietly preparing a backup plan in case of layoffs.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Viral Chinese App 'Are You Dead?' Checks On Those Who Live Alone
The viral Chinese app Are You Dead? (known as Sileme in Chinese) targets people who live alone by requiring regular check-ins and alerting an emergency contact if the user doesn't respond. It launched in May and is now the most downloaded paid app in China. Cybernews reports: Users need to check in with the app every two days by clicking a large button to confirm that they are alive. Otherwise, the app will inform the user's appointed emergency contact that they may be in trouble, Chinese state-run outlet Global Times reports. The app is marketed as a "safety companion" for those who live far from home or choose a solitary lifestyle. Initially launched as a free app, "eAre You Dead?" now costs 8 yuan, equivalent to $1.15. Despite its growing popularity, the app has sparked criticism in China, where some said they were repulsed by the negative connotation of death. Some suggested the app should be renamed to "Are You Alive?" The app's creators told Chinese media that they will focus on improving the product, such as adding SMS notification features or a messaging function. Moreover, they will consider the criticism over the app's name.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Even Linus Torvalds Is Vibe Coding Now
Linus Torvalds has started experimenting with vibe coding, using Google's Antigravity AI to generate parts of a small hobby project called AudioNoise. "In doing so, he has become the highest-profile programmer yet to adopt this rapidly spreading, and often mocked, AI-driven programming," writes ZDNet's Steven Vaughan-Nichols. Fro the report: [I]t's a trivial program called AudioNoise -- a recent side project focused on digital audio effects and signal processing. He started it after building physical guitar pedals, GuitarPedal, to learn about audio circuits. He now gives them as gifts to kernel developers and, recently, to Bill Gates. While Torvalds hand-coded the C components, he turned to Antigravity for a Python-based audio sample visualizer. He openly acknowledges that he leans on online snippets when working in languages he knows less well. Who doesn't? [...] In the project's README file, Torvalds wrote that "the Python visualizer tool has been basically written by vibe-coding," describing how he "cut out the middle-man -- me -- and just used Google Antigravity to do the audio sample visualiser." The remark underlines that the AI-generated code met his expectations well enough that he did not feel the need to manually re-implement it. Further reading: Linus Torvalds Says Vibe Coding is Fine For Getting Started, 'Horrible Idea' For Maintenance
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Fintech Firm Betterment Confirms Data Breach After Hackers Send Fake $10,000 Crypto Scam Messages
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Betterment, a financial app, sent a sketchy-looking notification on Friday asking users to send $10,000 to Bitcoin and Ethereum crypto wallets and promising to "triple your crypto," according to a thread on Reddit. The Betterment account says in an X thread that this was an "unauthorized message" that was sent via a "third-party system." TechCrunch has since confirmed that an undisclosed number of Betterment's customers have had their personal information accessed. "The company said customer names, email and postal addresses, phone numbers, and dates of birth were compromised in the attack," reports TechCrunch. Betterment said it detected the attack on the same day and "immediately revoked the unauthorized access and launched a comprehensive investigation, which is ongoing." The fintech firm also said it has reached out to the customers targeted by the hackers and "advised them to disregard the message." "Our ongoing investigation has continued to demonstrate that no customer accounts were accessed and that no passwords or other log-in credentials were compromised," Betterment wrote in the email.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Should AI Agents Be Classified As People?
New submitter sziring writes: Harvard Business Review's IdeaCast podcast interviewed McKinsey CEO Bob Sternfels, where he classified AI agents as people. "I often get asked, 'How big is McKinsey? How many people do you employ?' I now update this almost every month, but my latest answer to you would be 60,000, but it's 40,000 humans and 20,000 agents." This statement looks to be the opening shots of how we as a society need to classify AI agents and whether they will replace human jobs. Did those agents take roles that previously would have been filled by a full-time human? By classifying them as people, did the company break protocols or laws by not interviewing candidates for those jobs, not providing benefits or breaks, and so on? Yes, it all sounds silly but words matter. What happens when a job report comes out claiming we just added 20,000 jobs in Q1? That line of thinking leads directly to Bill Gates' point that agents taking on human roles might need to be taxed.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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- Cloud to be an American: Congress votes to kick China off remote GPU services
US House backs bill to regulate remote access to export-controlled chips
Chinese companies may be unable to import the best US GPUs, but they have found a workaround: renting access to that hardware via cloud services. Now, the US House of Representatives is moving to bring that loophole under the export-control law.…
- AI and automation could erase 10.4 million US roles by 2030
Forrester models slow, structural shift rather than sudden employment collapse
AI-pocalypse AI and automation could wipe out 6.1 percent of jobs in the US by 2030 – equating to 10.4 million fewer positions that are held by humans today.…
- Court tosses appeal by hacker who opened port to coke smugglers with malware
Dutchman fails to convince judges his trial was unfair because cops read his encrypted chats
A Dutch appeals court has kept a seven-year prison sentence in place for a man who hacked port IT systems with malware-stuffed USB sticks to help cocaine smugglers move containers, brushing off claims that police shouldn't have been reading his encrypted chats.…
- Birmingham pauses Oracle relaunch to get staff on board
Europe's largest council delays Fusion reimplementation four years after go-live disaster
Birmingham City Council has pushed back the relaunch of its troubled Oracle Fusion ERP system, saying staff need more time to adapt to the vendor's standard processes.…
- Britain goes shopping for a rapid-fire missile to help Ukraine hit back
Project Nightfall aims to deliver a UK-built long-range strike capability at speed
The British government is asking defense firms to rapidly produce a new ground-launched ballistic missile to aid Ukraine's fight against Russia - hardware that might also be adopted by UK's armed forces in future.…
- Fujitsu scores place on £984M UK government framework despite bid boycott
Turns out the voluntary pledge to restrict public sector tendering during Horizon scandal inquiry has loopholes
Fujitsu has won a place on a UK government framework despite its commitment not to compete for new public sector contracts during the ongoing inquiry into the Post Office Horizon scandal.…
- No fire sale for firewalls as memory shortages could push prices higher
In SEC filings, Fortinet and Palo Alto show shrinking product margins taking hold.
PCs and datacenters aren't the only devices that need DRAM. The global memory shortage is roiling the cybersecurity market, with the cost of firewalls expected to balloon and hit both customers and vendors in the pocketbook in 2026, according to research analysts Wedbush.…
- Danish dev delights kid by turning floppy drive into easy TV remote
Just insert a disk and the TV starts playing three-year-old’s favorite shows
Smart TV UIs are hard enough for adults to navigate, let alone preschoolers. When his three-year-old couldn't learn to navigate with a remote, one Danish computer scientist did what any enterprising creator would do: He turned an old floppy disk drive into a kid-friendly content controller that starts streams based on what disk you insert. …
- Apple hopes to save Siri from laughingstock status with infusion of Google Gemini
Partnership between behemoths raises questions about OpenAI's place at the iTable
It may finally be time to take AI on the iPhone siri-ously. Apple and Google on Monday announced a multi-year partnership that will see Apple Foundation Models standing on the shoulders of Google Gemini models, one that will return a small portion of the roughly $20 billion Google pays annually to be Apple's default search provider.…
- Nvidia, Eli Lilly just say yes to making drugs together, using Vera Rubin GPUs
If penicillin was discovered on moldy bread, who's to say the next miracle drug won't be born from AI hallucinations
Nvidia has teamed up with pharmaceutical heavyweight Eli Lilly to plow up to $1 billion into a research lab over the next five years to advance the development of foundation models for AI-assisted drug discovery.…
- PC shipments set to hit the buffers as AI guzzles memory
High-margin infrastructure kit takes precedence, leaving laptops and desktops wanting
Memory shortages will likely stunt PC shipments in 2026, as available supplies will not be able to meet demand thanks to memory makers chasing the lucrative AI infrastructure market instead.…
- Mall display crashes the vibe with Windows activation nag
Digital signage is great, until it isn't
Bork!Bork!Bork! Windows activation is a tricky thing, particularly for digital signage that should be directing customers to in-store bargains but instead shows passersby that someone has yet to give Microsoft their pound of flesh.…
- Don’t bother with the retailer’s website, says Google: Gemini can shop for you
You can check out anytime you like, but please don’t ever leave
Google is aiming to turn Gemini into a one-stop personal shopper with what it hopes will become a global standard for agentic AI commerce, and it's already persuaded major retailers to let Google handle transactions without sending users to their websites. …
- IceWM soldiers on while Budgie jumps the Wayland ship
Two new Linux GUIs – plus Phoenix, an experimental new X server in Zig
The new year brings releases from opposite ends of the Linux GUI spectrum: IceWM, an X11 window manager from the late 1990s, and Budgie, a newer full desktop environment that has gone Wayland-native.…
- Microsoft euthanizes ancient deployment toolkit
Immediate retirement for freebie automation platform
Microsoft has abruptly pulled the plug on the venerable Microsoft Deployment Toolkit (MDT), sending any administrators still clinging to the platform scrambling for alternatives.…
- Claude joins the ward as Anthropic eyes US healthcare data
AI firm promises HIPAA-compliant integrations as chatbot moves into hospital admin
Fresh from watching rival OpenAI stick its nose into patient records, Anthropic has decided now is the perfect moment to march Claude into US healthcare too, promising to fix medicine with yet more AI, APIs, and carefully-worded reassurances about privacy.…
- ISS stint ends early as NASA aborts Crew-11 over crew illness
Sick astronaut back on Earth by Thursday, nature of ailment remains undisclosed
NASA astronaut Mike Fincke has handed command of the ISS to Roscosmos cosmonaut Sergey Kud-Sverchkov as Fincke and the rest of Crew-11 are scheduled to head back to Earth on Wednesday.…
- Microsoft teases targeted Copilot removal for admins
Yes, you can get rid of it – assuming nobody's looked at it in 28 days
Microsoft's latest Windows Insider release introduces a policy allowing admins to remove the Copilot app from managed devices. But there's a catch - actually, several.…
- The world is one bad decision away from a silicon ice age
Venezuela today, Taiwan tomorrow? This might be the last good year for buying hardware
Opinion For a world economy driven by consumerism, it's become markedly unkind to consumers. This goes double – literally – for digital tech, where memory prices have increased by between 100 and 250 percent in six months. If you think GPUs are pricey now, you'll only have to wait six weeks, during which both AMD and Nvidia are expected to demonstrate supply-side economics much as the Road Runner demonstrated gravity to Wile E Coyote.…
- Tories vow to boot under-16s off social media and ban phones in schools
Opposition leader Kemi Badenoch pitches age limits and classroom curbs as fixes for behavior and mental health
The Tories have pledged to kick under-16s off social media, betting that banning teens from TikTok and Instagram will fix what they see as a growing crisis in kids' mental health and classroom behavior.…
- 2026 brings a bumper crop of Microsoft tech funerals
A busy year of end-of-support dates awaits unwary admins
2026 has begun with the familiar sound of Microsoft's software Grim Reaper sharpening a blade as administrators peer glumly at the calendar of carnage ahead.…
- Techie banned from client site for outage he didn’t cause
UPSes don’t work without power, or well-designed electricals
Who, Me? Welcome to Monday morning and another instalment of “Who, Me?” - the weekly reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of what not to do at work, and how to get away with it.…
- Malaysia and Indonesia block X over failure to curb deepfake smut
PLUS: Cambodia arrests alleged scam camp boss; Baidu spins out chip biz; Panasonic’s noodle shop plan; And more!
Asia in Brief The governments of Malaysia and Indonesia have suspended access to social network X, on grounds that it allows users to produce sexual imagery without users’ consent.…
- Meta admits to Instagram password reset mess, denies data leak
PLUS: Veeam patches critical vuln; Crims bribing dark web insiders; UK school takedown; And more
infosec in brief Meta has fixed a flaw in its Instagram service that allowed third parties to generate password reset emails, but denied the problem led to theft of users’ personal information.…
- AI industry insiders launch site to poison the data that feeds them
Poison Fountain project seeks allies to fight the power
exclusive Alarmed by what companies are building with artificial intelligence models, a handful of industry insiders are calling for those opposed to the current state of affairs to undertake a mass data poisoning effort to undermine the technology.…
- Brussels plots open source push to pry Europe off Big Tech
Call for Evidence casts FOSS as a way to break US dependence
The European Commission has launched a fresh consultation into open source, setting out its ambitions for Europe's developer communities to go beyond propping up US tech giants' platforms.…
- Artificial brains could point the way to ultra-efficient supercomputers
Sandia National Labs cajole Intel's neurochips into solving partial differential equations
New research from Sandia National Laboratories suggests that brain-inspired neuromorphic computers are just as adept at solving complex mathematical equations as they are at speeding up neural networks and could eventually pave the way to ultra-efficient supercomputers.…
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