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What is the Linux Installation Project?
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- Debian DSA-6183-1 Node.js Important Denial of Service CVE-2026-21637
Multiple vulnerabilities were discovered in Node.js, which could result in denial of service, side channel attacks or information disclosure. For the stable distribution (trixie), these problems have been fixed in version 20.19.2+dfsg-1+deb13u2. We recommend that you upgrade your nodejs packages.
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- Pine64 FOSDEM 2026 Update Details PineNote and PineTab2 Progress
Pine64 has published a community update following FOSDEM 2026, outlining recent development activity, hardware demonstrations, and production challenges affecting its device lineup. The update highlights progress on PineNote and PineTab2 software, early work on PineTime Pro, and the impact of the ongoing DRAM shortage on several products. The FOSDEM 2026 event provided an opportunity for […]
- Beginners Guide for Env Command on Linux
The env command is an advanced version of printenv with a few more features to tweak your environment variables, like setting new environment variables, printing all environment variables, or executing a command in a modified environment.
- Linux 7.0-rc6 Bringing A Lot Of Audio Quirks / Fixes
The Linux 7.0-rc6 kernel due for release tomorrow has a lot of audio fixes/quirks to correct a wide variety of different hardware issues, mostly different problematic laptops for their speakers and/or microphone behavior under Linux...
- KDE Plasma 6.6 Showing Frequent Performance Advantage Over GNOME 50 With NVIDIA R595 Driver
Earlier this week I provided benchmarks looking at KDE Plasma 6.6's performance advantage over GNOME 50 for Linux gaming with AMD Radeon graphics. That raised the question if the same was true when using NVIDIA graphics with their official Linux graphics driver stack. Here are such benchmarks looking at the KDE Plasma 6.6 and GNOME 50 performance on Ubuntu 26.04 beta while using the new NVIDIA 595.58.03 Linux driver.
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- This Friendly Robot Just Installed 100 MW of Solar Power
Utility-scale solar construction... by robots! It's "one of the largest real-world demonstrations," notes Electrek, with 100 MW of capacity installed by the "Maximo" robots from AES, one of the world's top power companies. Maximo uses AI "to automate the heavy lifting of solar panels and accelerate solar installation," according to their web page, which shows a video of Maximo at work installing a vast field of solar panels in Kern County, California. With assistance from Nvidia, the Maximo team could "develop, test and refine robotic capabilities through physics-based simulation and AI driven modeling before deploying updates in the field,"reports Electrek, and they're aiming for a full GW of solar generating capacity:After completing the first half of the Bellefield complex last summer, Maximo engineers went into a higher gear, with the latest version 3.0 robots consistently surpassing an installation rate of one module per minute, with construction crews installing as many as 24 solar panel modules per hour, per person. If that sounds fast, that's because it is. At full tilt, the latest Maximo robot-equipped crews have nearly doubled the output of traditional installation methods at similar solar locations throughout Southern California. "Reaching 100 MW is an important milestone for Maximo and for the role robotics can play in solar construction," explains Chris Shelton, president of Maximo. "It demonstrates that field robotics can move beyond experimentation and deliver consistent results at utility scale. As solar deployment continues to accelerate globally, technologies that improve installation speed, quality and reliability will become increasingly important...." Like just about every other business that demands a high degree of physical labor, the construction industry is facing huge labor shortages, making machines like Maximo that provide real efficiency gains welcome additions to the job site. "The combination of AI, vision, robotics and simulation driven engineering reduced development and validation timelines," the Maximo team said in a statement, "and increased confidence in field performance as the robotic fleet scaled."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Bluesky's Newest Product: an AI Tool That Gives You Custom Feeds
"What happens when you can describe the social experience you want and have it built for you...?" asks Bluesky? "We've just started experimenting, but we're sharing it now because we want you to build alongside us." Called "Attie" — because it's built with Bluesky's decentralized publishing framework, AT Protocol (which is open source) — the new assistant turns natural language prompts into social feeds, without users having to know how to code. (It's part of Bluesky's mission to "develop and drive large-scale adoption of technologies for open and decentralized public conversation.") Engadget reports:On the Attie website, examples include prompts like, "Show me electronic music and experimental sound from people in my network" or "Builders working on agent infrastructure and open protocol design." "It feels more like having a conversation than configuring software," [writes Bluesky's former CEO/current chief innovation officer, Jay Graber, in a blog post]. "You describe the sort of posts you want to see, and the coding agent builds the feed you described." Graber added that Attie is a separate app from Bluesky and users don't have to use the new AI assistant if they don't want to. However, since Attie and Bluesky were built on the same framework, it could mean there will be some cross-app implementation between the two or any other app built on the AT Protocol. "Attie is open for beta signups today, and we'll be sharing what we learn along the way," Graber writes in the blog post. "To learn more about Attie, visit: Attie.AI. Come help us find out what this can be." The blog post warns that "Right now, AI is undermining human agency at the same time it's enhancing it," since "The proliferation of low-quality AI-generated content is making public social networks noisier and less trustworthy..." And in a world where "signal is getting harder to find... The major platforms aren't trying to fix this problem."They're using AI to increase the time users spend on-platform, to harvest training data, and to shape what users see and believe through systems they can't inspect and didn't choose. We think AI should serve people, not platforms... An open protocol puts this power directly in users' hands. You can use it to build your own feeds, create software that works the way you want it to, and find signal in the noise. We built the AT Protocol so anyone could build any app they imagine on top of it, but until recently "anyone" really meant "anyone who can code." Agentic coding tools change that. For the first time, an open protocol can be genuinely open to everyone... The Atmosphere [Bluesky's interoperable ecosystem] is an open data layer with a clearly defined schema for applications, which makes it uniquely well-suited for coding agents to build on... Bluesky will continue to evolve as a social app millions of people rely on. Attie will be where we experiment with agentic social. AI is an accelerant on whatever it's applied to. I want it to accelerate decentralizing social and putting power back in users' hands. But I don't think the most interesting things built on AT Protocol will come from us. They're going to come from everyone who picks up these tools and starts building.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Amazon Gambles on $4B Push Into America's Rural Areas, May Soon Carry More Parcels Than USPS
In many rural areas, America's online shoppers can wait half a week or more for deliveries. But Amazon started a $4 billion "rural delivery push" last year, reports Bloomberg, and has now cut delivery times to under 24 hours for 1 in 5 rural and small-town households, with 48-hour delivery to 62% of rural households.The payoff could be huge. Rural shoppers in the US collectively spend $1 trillion a year on clothing, electronics, household goods and other items, representing about 20% of retail purchases excluding cars and gasoline, according to Morgan Stanley. Amazon aims to recondition those shoppers to expect quick delivery, which would play to its strengths and make the company top-of-mind for online purchases... "Rural America is often overlooked," said Sky Canaves, an analyst at EMarketer Inc. who tracks online sales. "This is the opportunity Amazon is trying to seize because e-commerce growth is getting harder to come by...." Amazon's rural push will require a lot more rural business owners willing to make deliveries... Today, Amazon delivers more parcels overall than UPS and FedEx, which are both shedding workers and shrinking their delivery networks, including in rural areas. By picking up the slack, Amazon is expected to become the largest parcel carrier in the US — surpassing the postal service — in 2028, according to the shipping software company Pitney Bowes. Amazon currently delivers two of three orders itself. For rural shoppers, the most visible change will be fewer brown UPS trucks, fewer packages delivered by mail carriers and more small business owners pulling up in their minivans. Amazon's relationship with America's postal service "has become rocky following a dispute over contract terms," notes the Wall Street Journal. But they also share an interesting calculation by Marc Wulfraat, president of MWPVL International, a supply-chain consultancy monitoring the e-commerce company's logistics network. . At Amazon's current pace of constructing 40 to 50 new delivery hubs each year, he estimates Amazon will be able to ship packages to every single U.S. ZIP Code within four years.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Apple Now Requires Device-Level Age Verification in the UK. Could the US Be Next?
Apple unveiled new device-level age restrictions in the UK on Wednesday. "After downloading a new update, users will now have to confirm that they are 18 or older to access unrestricted features," reports Gizmodo. "Users will be able to confirm their age with a credit card or by scanning an ID."For those underage or who have not confirmed their age, Apple will turn on Web Content Filter and Communication Safety, which will not only restrict access to certain apps or websites, but will also monitor messages, shared photo albums, AirDrop, and FaceTime calls for nudity. Apple didn't specify exactly which services and features are banned for under-18 users, but it will likely be in compliance with UK legislation... The British government does not require Apple and other OS providers to institute device-level age checks, but it does restrict minor access to online pornography under the Online Safety Act, which passed in 2023. So far, that restriction has only been implemented at the website level, but UK officials have been worried about easy loopholes to evade the age restrictions, like VPNs. The broader tech industry has been campaigning for some time to use device-level age checks instead in response to the rising tide of under-16 social media and internet bans around the world. Last month, in a landmark social media trial in California, Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also supported this idea, saying that conducting age verification "at the level of the phone is just a lot clearer than having every single app out there have to do this separately." Pornhub-operator Aylo had advocated for device-level restrictions in the UK as well, and even sent out letters to Apple, Google, and Microsoft in November asking for OS-level age verification... The most obvious question: Could this be brought stateside?
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Jupiter's Lightning May Have the Force of Nuclear Weapons
How powerful is Jupiter's lightning? Thick clouds cover the view, notes Science magazine. But using an instrument on NASA's Juno spacecraft (orbiting Jupiter for the past decade), researchers determined Jupiter's lightning bolts are 100 to 10,000 times more energetic than earth's:A single bolt of lightning on Earth releases about 1 billion joules of energy. That means the most extreme bolts of jovian lightning carry 10 trillion joules of energy, equivalent to 2400 tons of TNT, or one-sixth the power of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan. Based on the rates of flashes seen by Juno, storms on this tempestuous world can unleash the force of multiple nuclear weapons every minute... The four storms Juno studied were monstrous, says Michael Wong, a planetary scientist at the University of California, Berkeley and one of the study's authors. There were three flashes per second on average, often emerging from the hearts of storms that are 3000 kilometers across, longer than the distance from New York City to Denver. The researchers used the Hubble Space Telescope (and photographs from Juno's camera) to track Jupiter's storms with such precision that their radiometer could then pick out individual lightning flashes, according to the article."It's just a massive ball of gas. It makes sense that there's very energetic lightning happening," says Daniel Mitchard, a lightning physicist at Cardiff University who wasn't involved with the new study. But confirming such suspicions "is exciting," he says, because lightning plays an important role in forging complex chemistry — including the sort that primordial life is built on. Thanks to Slashdot reader sciencehabit for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- What Made Bell Labs So Successful?
Bell Labs "created many of the foundational innovations of the modern age," writes Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation — from transistors and telecommunications satellites to Unix and the C programming language. But what was the secret to its success? he asks in a new article for the Wall Street Journal. Start with its lucky arrival in a "problem-rich" environment, suggests Arno Penzias, winner of one of Bell Labs' 11 Nobel Prizes:It was Bell Labs' responsibility, in other words, to create technologies for designing, expanding and improving an unruly communications network of cables and microwave links and glass fibers. The Labs also had to figure out ways to create underwater conduits, as well as switching centers that could manage the growing number of customers and escalating amounts of data.... Money mattered, too. Being connected to AT&T, the largest company in the world, was an advantage. The Labs' budget was enormous, and accounting conventions allowed its parent company to make huge and continuing investments in R & D. The generous funding, moreover, allowed scientists and engineers to buy and build expensive equipment — for instance, anechoic chambers to create the world's quietest rooms... The most fortunate part of Bell Labs' situation, however, was that in being attached to a monopoly it could partake in long-term thinking... Without competition nipping at its heels, Bell Labs engineers had the luxury of working out difficult ideas over decades. The first conceptualization of a cellular phone network, for instance, came out of the Labs in the late 1940s; it wasn't until the late 1970s that technicians began testing one in Chicago to gauge its potential. The challenge of deploying these technologies was immense. (The regulatory hurdles were formidable, too....) The article also credits the visionary management of Mervin Kelly — who fortunately also "had access to funding in a decade when most executives and universities didn't" to hire the brightest people. (By the early 1980s Bell Labs employed about 25,000 researchers, technicians and support staff, with an annual budget of $2 billion — roughly $7 billion in today's dollars.) "The Labs' involvement in World War II suggested to Kelly that an exciting postwar era of electronics was approaching, but that the technical problems would be so complex that they required a mix of expertise — not just physicists, but material scientists, chemists, electrical engineers, circuitry experts and the like."At Bell Labs, Kelly would sometimes handpick teams and create such a mix, as was the case for the transistor invention in the late 1940s. He came to see innovation arising not from like-minded or similarly trained people conversing with each other, but from a friction of ideas and approaches. It meant hiring researchers who had different personalities and favored a range of experimental angles. It also meant personally designing a campus in Murray Hill where departments were spread apart, so that scientists and engineers would be forced to walk, mingle and engage in serendipitous conversations and debate ideas. Meanwhile, under Kelly, the Labs focused on hiring people who were deeply curious, not just smart. Kelly saw it as his professional duty to do far more than what was expected, with his laboratory and vast resources, to create new technologies... The breakup of AT&T's monopoly, which led to a steady shrinking of Bell Labs' staff, budget and remit, shows us that no matter how forward looking your employees and managers may be, they will not necessarily see the future coming. It likewise suggests that technological progress is too unpredictable for one organization, no matter how powerful or smart, to control. Famously, Bell Labs managers didn't see value in the Arpanet, which eventually led to today's internet. And yet, for at least five decades, Bell Labs created a blueprint for the global development of communications and electronics. In understanding why it did so, I tend to think its ultimate secret may be hiding in plain sight. The secret has to do with Bell Labs' structure — not only being connected to a fabulously profitable monopoly, but being connected to a company that could move theoretical and applied research into a huge manufacturing division that made telecom equipment (at Western Electric) and ultimately into a dynamic operating system (the AT&T network)... Scientists and engineers at the Labs understood their ideas would be implemented, if they passed muster, into the huge system its parent company was running. Bell Labs racked up about 30,000 patents, according to the article, and celebrated its 100th anniversary last April. It is now part of Finland-based Nokia.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Disney Ends $1B OpenAI Investment After Sora's Surprise Closure. What's Next?
Just six days ago — and 30 minutes after a Disney-OpenAI meeting about a project with Sora — Disney's team was "blindsided" with the news Sora was being discontinued, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters, describing OpenAI's move as "a big rug-pull." Even some Sora employees were surprised by the cancellation. It was just 14 weeks ago Disney announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI's AI-powered video generation tool — plus a three-year licensing deal. But that deal "never closed," Reuters adds, citing two other people familiar with the matter, "and no money changed hands." (Although the two sides are still "discussing if there is another way they can partner or invest with one another, one of the people familiar with the matter said.") But Variety wonders if the end of the Sora deal is "a blessing in disguise" for Disney:Before Disney's officially sanctioned AI-generated versions of Mickey Mouse, Darth Vader, Baby Yoda, Deadpool and more debuted in OpenAI's Sora, the AI company abruptly pulled the plug on the video app... [M]any aficionados of Disney's franchises were not, in fact, excited about what Sora's video generator might do to the likes of the Avengers superheroes or the characters from Frozen or Moana. And despite [departed Disney CEO Bob] Iger's bullishness on the Sora deal, other Disney execs were said to be concerned that going into business with OpenAI would expose the Magic Kingdom's crown jewels to the risk of being turned into so much AI slop, according to industry sources. Hollywood unions — for which AI adoption has been a hot-button issue — weren't thrilled about the Disney-Sora deal either. "Disney's announcement with OpenAI appears to sanction its theft of our work and cedes the value of what we create to a tech company that has built its business off our backs," the Writers Guild of America said in December... [S]ources say, Disney was encountering roadblocks in getting the OK from voice actors for the Sora pact... At least publicly, Disney says it is still looking at ways it can tap into the AI ecosystem. The company, in a statement Tuesday, said, "we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators." But at this point, Disney may decide that "meeting fans where they are" means keeping its beloved and world-famous characters away from the AI machinery. Or, as Gizmodo puts it, "Disney Says It Will Find Ways to Peddle Slop Elsewhere After Pulling Out of OpenAI Deal." But Deadline sees the deal's collapses as a lost opportunity:The OpenAI partnership was a template on which to build, potentially allowing for other deals that end the exploitation of human creativity by unscrupulous AI models. It was also the kind of partnership that was palatable for the Human Artistry Campaign and Creators Coalition on AI, lobby groups that have been critical of tech business models and command support from A-listers including Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Dr. Moiya McTier, an advisor to the Human Artistry Campaign, puts it this way: Part of the problem is getting "artsy people and the techie people to talk." OpenAI sinking Sora will not make these discussions easier. It's a move that starkly exposes Hollywood's vulnerability to the capriciousness of big tech.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Do Emergency Microsoft, Oracle Patches Point to Wider Issues?
"Emergency out-of-band fixes issued by enterprise IT giants Microsoft and Oracle have shone a spotlight on issues around both update cycles and patching," reports Computer Weekly:Microsoft's emergency update, KB5085516, addresses an issue that arose after installing the mandatory cumulative updates pushed live on Patch Tuesday earlier this month. According to Microsoft, it has since emerged that many users experienced problems signing into applications with a Microsoft account, seeing a "no internet" error message even though the device had a working connection. This had the effect of preventing access to multiple services and applications. It should be noted that organisations using Entra ID did not experience the issue. But Microsoft's emergency patch comes just days after it doubled down on a commitment to software quality, reliability and stability. In a blog post published just 24 hours prior to the latest update, Pavan Davuluri of Microsoft's Windows Insider Program Team said updates should be "predictable and easy to plan around". Michael Bell, founder/CEO of Suzu Labs tells Computer Weekly that Microsoft's patch for the sign-in bug follows "separate hotpatches for RRAS remote code execution flaws and a Bluetooth visibility bug. Three emergency fixes in eight days does not shout reliability era."Oracle's patch, meanwhile, addresses CVE-2026-21992, a remote code execution flaw in the REST:WebServices component of Oracle Identity Manager and the Web Services Security component of Oracle Web Services Manager in Oracle Fusion Middleware. It carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker with network access over HTTP.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- MacOS 26.4 Adds Warnings For ClickFix Attacks to Its Terminal App
An anonymous Slashdot reader writes: ClickFix attacks are ramping up. These attacks have users copy and paste a string to something that can execute a command line — like the Windows Run dialog, or a shell prompt. But MacRumors reports that macOS 26.4 Tahoe (updated earlier this week) introduces a new feature to its Terminal app where it will detect ClickFix attempts and stop them by prompting the user if they really wanted to run those commands. According to MacRumors, the warning readers "Possible malware, Paste blocked." "Your Mac has not been harmed. Scammers often encourage pasting text into Terminal to try and harm your Mac or compromise your privacy...." There is also a "Paste Anyway" option if users still wish to proceed.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- SystemD Contributor Harassed Over Optional Age Verification Field, Suggests Installer-Level Disabling
It's FOSS interviewed a software engineer whose long-running open source contributions include Python code for the Arch Linux installer and maintaining packages for NixOS. But "a recent change he made to systemd has pushed him into the spotlight" after he'd added the optional birthDate field for systemd's user database:Critics saw it not merely as a technical addition, but as a symbolic capitulation to government overreach. A crack in the philosophical foundation of freedom that Linux is built on. What followed went far beyond civil disagreement. Dylan revealed that he faced harassment, doxxing, death threats, and a flood of hate mail. He was forced to disable issues and pull request tabs across his GitHub repositories... Q: Should FOSS projects adapt to laws they fundamentally disagree with? Because these kinds of laws are certainly in conflict with what a lot of Linux users believe in. A. Unfortunately, in a lot of cases, the answer is yes — at least for any distribution with corporate backing. The small independent distributions are much more flexible to refuse as a protest. If we ignore regulations entirely, we risk Linux being something that companies are not willing to contribute to, and Linux may be shipped on less hardware. I'm talking about things like Valve and System76 (despite them very vocally hating these laws). That does not help us; it just lowers the quality of software contributions due to less investment in the platform and makes Linux less accessible to the average person. We need Linux and other free operating systems to remain a viable alternative to closed systems. Q. Do you think regulations like these will reshape desktop Linux in the next 5-10 years where we might have "compliant Linux" and "Freedom-first Linux"? A. Unfortunately, yes, to some degree this is likely. I imagine the split will be mostly along the lines of independent distributions and those with corporate backing. We're already seeing it as far as which distributions plan on implementing some sort of age verification and which ones are not, and that sucks. I'd rather nobody have to deal with this mess at all, but this is the reality of things now. As I said in the previous response, the corporate-backed distributions really have no choice in the matter. Companies are notoriously risk-adverse, but something like Artix or Devuan? Those are small and independent enough where the individual maintainers may be willing to take on more risk. I was actually thinking about what this would look like if we added it to [Linux system installer] Calamares and chatting about that with the maintainers before that thread got brigaded by bad actors posting personal information and throwing around insults. I completely support the freedom for the distro maintainers to choose their risk tolerance. If the distribution is based out of Ireland or something (like Linux Mint) without these silly laws in the jurisdiction the developer operates in, I think that we should leave it up to them to make a choice here. They think the installer should have a date picker with a flag to disable it, and "We can even default it to off, and corporate distributions using Calamares or those not willing to take the risk could flip it on if they need to. That way if maintainers of the distributions do not wish to collect the birth date, they won't have to, and no forking is required to patch it out."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- IBM Quantum Computer Simulates Real Magnetic Materials and Matches Lab Data
"IBM says its quantum computer can now simulate real magnetic materials and match actual lab experiment results," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, "which is something people have been waiting years to see."Instead of just theoretical output, the system reproduced neutron scattering data from a known material, meaning it lines up with real world physics. It still relies on a mix of quantum and classical computing and this is a narrow use case for now, but it is one of the first times quantum hardware has produced results that scientists can directly validate against experiments, which makes it a lot more interesting than the usual hype. Classical computers "are not great at modeling quantum systems," according to this article at Nerds.xyz. "The math gets messy fast, and scientists end up relying on approximations... Quantum computers are supposed to solve that problem..."If this direction continues, it could start to matter in areas like superconductors, battery tech, and even drug development. Those are the kinds of problems where better simulations can actually lead to better outcomes, not just nicer charts in a research paper. "I am extremely excited about what this means for science," said study co-author Allen Scheie from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. In an announcement from IBM, Scheie calls this "the most impressive match I've seen between experimental data and qubit simulation, and it definitely raises the bar for what can be expected from quantum computers."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Sony is Raising PlayStation 5 Prices Again, Between $100 and $150
Memory and storage shortages and price hikes have "steadily rippled outward across all kinds of consumer tech," reports Ars Technica. "Today's bad news comes from Sony, which is raising prices for PlayStation 5 consoles in the US just eight months after their last price hike."The drive-less Digital Edition will increase from $500 to $600; the base PS5 with an optical drive will increase from $550 to $650; and the PS5 Pro is going up from $750 to a whopping $900. At the beginning of 2025, these consoles cost $450, $500, and $700, respectively... RAM and flash memory chips are in short supply primarily because of demand from AI data centers — memory manufacturers have shifted more production toward making the kind of memory found in AI accelerators like Nvidia's H200, leaving less for the consumer market. And the situation is unlikely to improve any time soon, barring a major shift in demand from the AI industry.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Thousands of Americans Treated With Psilocybin in 2025
In a new 4,000-word article, CNN tells the story of a retired appellate paralegal and grandmother in her early 70s who was treated for depression with psilocybin. CNN notes there's now retreats featuring psilocybin in a few countries — and while psilocybin is illegal under United States federal law, "In Oregon, 5,935 clients received psilocybin services through Oregon's state-regulated program in 2025."High doses of psilocybin are effective in treating depression, a growing body of research suggests, with promise for other conditions, like PTSD and addiction, said Dr. Albert Garcia-Romeu, associate director of the Center for Psychedelic and Consciousness Research at Johns Hopkins University... Some researchers suggest it disrupts entrenched traffic patterns in the brain or grows new neuron connections to change thinking. Others say the results from psilocybin could have to do with its anti-inflammatory effect, Garcia-Romeu said... Colorado became the second state to make psilocybin legal with a 2023 law and issued its first healing center" last year. A law adopted in New Mexico last year established that state's Medical Psilocybin Program, now in development... Psilocybin seems to be "knocking on the door of FDA approval," said Dr. Lynn Marie Morski, president of the Psychedelic Medicine Association, which educates health care providers on the therapeutic use of psychedelics so they can answer patients' questions through the lenses of clinical evidence and harm reduction. Psilocybin therapy first received a "breakthrough therapy" designation for treatment-resistant depression from the US Food and Drug Administration in 2018, and now psilocybin drug products are on track to be submitted to the FDA for possible approval in the not-too-distant future.While psilocybin is illegal under United States federal law, more states are creating their own paths for legal use under state laws.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Linux Maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman Says AI Tools Now Useful, Finding Real Bugs
Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman tells The Register that AI-driven code review has "really jumped" for Linux. "There must have been some inflection point somewhere with the tools...""Something happened a month ago, and the world switched. Now we have real reports." It's not just Linux, he continued. "All open source projects have real reports that are made with AI, but they're good, and they're real." Security teams across major open source projects talk informally and frequently, he noted, and everyone is seeing the same shift. "All open source security teams are hitting this right now...." For now, AI is showing up more as a reviewer and assistant than as a full author of Linux kernel code, but that line is starting to blur. Kroah-Hartman has already done his own experiments with AI-generated patches. "I did a really stupid prompt," he recounted. "I said, 'Give me this,' and it spit out 60: 'Here's 60 problems I found, and here's the fixes for them.' About one-third were wrong, but they still pointed out a relatively real problem, and two-thirds of the patches were right." Mind you, those working patches still needed human cleanup, better changelogs, and integration work, but they were far from useless. "The tools are good," he said. "We can't ignore this stuff. It's coming up, and it's getting better...." [H]e said that for "simple little error conditions, properly detecting error conditions," AI could already generate dozens of usable patches today. The sudden increase in AI-generated reports and AI-assisted work has also spurred a parallel push to build AI into the kernel's own review infrastructure. A key piece of that is Sashiko, a tool originally developed at Google and now donated to the Linux Foundation. Kroah-Hartman said some patches are being generated with AI now. "You have a little co-develop tag for that now. We're seeing some things for some new features, but we're seeing AI mostly being used in the review."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- NASA's First Nuclear-Powered Interplanetary Spacecraft Will Send Helicopters to Mars in 2028
After decades of studying, this week NASA announced "a major step forward in bringing nuclear power and propulsion from the lab to space."NASA will launch the Space Reactor-1 Freedom, the first nuclear powered interplanetary spacecraft, to Mars before the end of 2028, demonstrating advanced nuclear electric propulsion in deep space. Nuclear electric propulsion provides an extraordinary capability for efficient mass transport in deep space and enables high power missions beyond Jupiter where solar arrays are not effective. Steven Sinacore, NASA's program executive for Fission Surface Power who will also oversee the SR-1 Freedom mission, emphasized to CNN that "On the ground the reactor is off. There's no radiation coming from it. It doesn't actually turn on until you're up in space, and that's where the radiation comes from." NASA says they aim to develop the capabilities required "for sustained exploration beyond the Moon and eventual journeys to Mars and the outer solar system." And Space Reactor-1 Freedom will carry a fleet of tiny helicopters (much like Ingenuity) to explore Mars, reports Space.com: Whereas Ingenuity was a technology demonstrator, however, the Skyfall fleet will have concrete tasks. Chief among them is scout: If all goes to plan, the little choppers will help NASA assess the potential of their target area (wherever that happens to be) to support human exploration. The Skyfall helicopters will carry cameras and ground-penetrating radar to scout a future landing site, to understand the slopes and hazards for human-scale landers," Steve Sinacore, the program executive for NASA's Space Reactors Office, said during the briefing. "They will also map and characterize the subsurface water ice to find out where the water ice deposits are, along with the size, depth and other important characteristics," he added... And that might not be the end of the line for SR-1 Freedom; NASA may decide to keep flying the spacecraft out into the solar system after it deploys the Skyfall choppers, according to Sinacore. The mission architecture, like much of NASA's exploration portfolio, is not yet finalized.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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- The first thing vibe coding builds is confidence it will help you succeed
And developers should be confident it won't kill the craft
Secret CEO In 1991, when I was 16, a Norwegian Exchange student gave an inspirational performance of the Three Billy Goats Gruff, in the original Norwegian, at my high school talent night. She delivered this performance with such gusto that every word of her performance stuck in my mind and, to this day, I can recite the Three Billy Goats Gruff in Norwegian.…
- Senators want datacenters to come clean on power consumption
Ratepayer Protection Pledge is unenforceable without hard numbers, Warren and Hawley argue
US senators are pushing to require datacenters and other large energy customers to report consumption, arguing the data is essential to hold them accountable to local communities.…
- AFC Ajax drops ball as flaws let hackers play admin with tickets and bans
Vulns in Dutch football club's systems didn't just expose data – they let outsiders play with accounts, and even lift stadium bans
Dutch football giant AFC Ajax has admitted to a data breach after an attacker gained access to its internal systems, in an incident that looks less like a stray pass and more like the gates left wide open.…
- Lloyds app glitch turned transactions into shared experience for 447k users
A botched update mixed up transaction data across accounts, with thousands now receiving goodwill payouts
A botched overnight software update at Lloyds Banking Group left up to 447,000 customers briefly seeing other people's transactions in its mobile apps, with the bank now acknowledging the scale of the incident and compensating affected users.…
- UK government admits Capita pension portal was crapita at launch
PAC grilling reveals £239M bought a system that couldn't handle the work, the volumes, or placeholder text
A UK government official has admitted Capita did not reach the expected level of performance following the disastrous launch of the Civil Service Pension Scheme (CSPS) web portal late last year.…
- Engineer sabotaged hardware then complained when it didn't work
The 600 km drive to fix the mess was a special treat
On Call Every week is special in its own way, and The Register celebrates that fact by using Friday mornings to deliver a fresh installment of On Call, our weekly reader-contributed column that shares your memories of managing IT messes someone else made.…
- AI companies lick their chops as FCC proposes forcing call center onshoring
You actually think companies are going to pay Americans to take customer service calls in the AI age?
Uncle Sam is trying to make American call centers great again. The question is whether they will be great because they're filled with local workers or whether this will provide yet another excuse for companies to turn customer service jobs over to AI.…
- AWS would prefer to forget March ever happened in its UAE region
Cloud giant waives an entire month of charges, then erases the billing data. There is literally nothing to see here.
I received an email / billing notification from AWS this week that may be the most diplomatically crafted communication in the history of cloud computing. Here it is, stripped of the usual boilerplate around it:…
- AMD's new desktop CPU oozes cache out of all 16 cores
Turns out massive caches are good for more than games. House of Zen boasts 5-13% perf boost over prior-gen part
AMD aims to extend its lead in desktop gaming with a new CPU, dubbed the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition. This top-of-the-line part has 16 cores fed by an absolutely massive 208 MB pool of cache, with memory spread across both CCDs.…
- Apple signs meaningless deal to make some less-important parts in America
Maybe that's why Tim didn't get an invitation to the President's tech bro club?
Apple's American Manufacturing Program (AMP) is expanding, with new suppliers signed on to produce iPhone components - though those parts will still be shipped overseas for final assembly. Tim Apple may continue avoiding tariffs but he probably won't win a lot of brownie points with President Trump.…
- Staff too scared of the AI axe to pick it up, Forrester finds
Your AI rollout isn't failing – your employees just hate it
If your company isn't seeing great returns from its investment in AI, you might want to look at the humans tasked with deploying it and how you can motivate them. Right now, many employees fear AI-driven job losses and aren't well trained to use the tech, according to Forrester.…
- AI bug reports went from junk to legit overnight, says Linux kernel czar
Greg Kroah-Hartman can't explain the inflection point, but it's not slowing down or going away
Interview I was at a press luncheon at KubeCon Europe this week when, to my surprise, who should sit down next to me but long-term Linux kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman. Greg, who lives in the Netherlands these days, was there to briefly comment on AI, Linux, and security. We spoke about how, over the last month, AI-driven activity around Linux security and code review has "really jumped" in a way no one in the open source world saw coming.…
- Brit lawmaker targeted by AI deepfake fails to get answers from US Big Tech
Appearing before Parliament, Meta, Google and X struggle to explain how fake political video circulated for so long
A member of the UK Parliament's lower house who was the victim of a deepfake AI campaign this week had a rare chance to confront the Big Tech executives who helped spread it. Their answers disappointed.…
- Datacenter batteries are selling years in advance, because AI, says Panasonic
Shifting production from automotive to compute and working on supercapacitors as another way to protect workloads
Major memory makers have already sold all the kit they can make this year, creating shortages and price increases. Datacenter infrastructure buyers may soon face the same issues when trying to get their hands on backup batteries.…
- Scammers have virtual smartphones on speed dial for fraud
They cleverly mimic most traits of a real phone
Smartphones have fast become the basis of our digital identities, securing payment systems and bank accounts. Now virtual devices that pretend to be real handsets have become a key tool for financial scammers, according to one company. …
- Only Trump can decide when cyberwar turns into real war
Four former NSA bosses walk onto the stage at RSAC…
rsac 2026 There's a theoretical red line with cyber warfare. Cross it, and the US will respond with a physical attack like missile strikes. And that line "is whatever the President says it is," according to former NSA boss retired General Paul Nakasone.…
- Oracle: AI agents can reason, decide and act - liability question remains
Fusion Agentic Applications promise autonomous enterprise decisions. Gartner urges caution
Oracle says it's building a suite of AI agents into its cloud-based enterprise applications, claiming they can make and execute decisions autonmomously within business processes. But analysts are urging caution given unresolved questions around data integration and liability.…
- NASA's lunar reboot is long on ambition, short on answers
Exactly how will astronauts get to and from that moonbase?
Opinion NASA's Ignition presentation was heavy on space hardware, but light on details. Not least of which was how astronauts are supposed to get from Earth to its moonbase and back.…
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