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What is the Linux Installation Project?
Real companies using Linux!
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- 44% Of GNOME Core Apps Are Written In C, 13% In JavaScript & 10% In Rust
GNOME developer Sophie Herold has shared some interesting end-of-year code stats for the GNOME project. The "GNOME" codebase is up to 6,692,516 lines of code at the end of 2025 with 1,611,526 lines of that being from GNOME apps. Where the data gets interesting is on the programming language breakdown in different areas...
- Blender 5.0 Benchmarks Since Blender 3.0 For CPU Rendering Performance
As part of the many different year-end benchmarks on Phoronix, over the holidays I was curious about how far the Blender 3D modeling software's performance has evolved over the past few years. So in looking at the CPU rendering performance I ran benchmarks of the major releases since Blender 3.0 through the recently released Blender 5.0...
- Linux 6.19 Lands Fix For ARM64 EFI Systems Crashing On Boot
Adding to the early headaches of Linux 6.19 with some regressions in performance and functionality were ARM64 hosts crashing on this in-development kernel version for those platforms using EFI. But a fix is now merged ahead of Linux 6.19-rc3 due out tomorrow...
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- Challenges Face European Governments Pursuing 'Digital Sovereignty'
The Register reports on challenges facing Europe's pursuit of "digital sovereignty":The US CLOUD Act of 2018 allows American authorities to compel US-based technology companies to provide requested data, regardless of where that data is stored globally. This places European organizations in a precarious position, as it directly clashes with Europe's own stringent privacy regulation, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR)... Furthermore, these warrants often come with a gag order, legally prohibiting the provider from informing their customer that their data has been accessed. This renders any contractual clauses requiring transparency or notification effectively meaningless. While technical measures like encryption are often proposed as a solution, their effectiveness depends entirely on who controls the encryption keys. If the US provider manages the keys, as is common in many standard cloud services, they can be forced to decrypt the data for authorities, making such safeguards moot.... American hyperscalers have recognized the market demand for sovereignty and now aggressively market 'sovereign cloud' solutions, typically by placing datacenters on European soil or partnering with local operators. Critics call this 'sovereignty washing'... [Cristina Caffarra, a competition economistand driving force behind the Eurostack initiative] warns that this does not resolve the fundamental problem. "A company subject to the extraterritorial laws of the United States cannot be considered sovereign for Europe," she says. "That simply doesn't work." Because, as long as the parent company is American, it remains subject to the CLOUD Act... Even when organizations make deliberate choices in favour of European providers, those decisions can be undone by market forces. A recent acquisition in the Netherlands illustrates this risk. In November 2025, the American IT services giant Kyndryl announced its intention to acquire Solvinity, a Dutch managed cloud provider. This came as an "unpleasant surprise" to several of its government clients, including the municipality of Amsterdam and the Dutch Ministry of Justice and Security. These bodies had specifically chosen Solvinity to reduce their dependence on American firms and mitigate CLOUD Act risks. Still, The Register provides several examples of government systems that are "taking concrete steps to regain control over their IT."Austria's Federal Ministry for Economy, Energy and Tourism now has 1,200 employees on the European open-source collaboration platform Nextcloud, leading several other Austrian ministries to also implement Nextcloud. (The Ministry's CISO tells the Register "We can see our input in Nextcloud releases. That is a feeling we never had with Microsoft.")France's Ministry of Economics and Finance recently completed NUBO (which the Register describes as "an OpenStack-based private cloud initiative designed to handle sensitive data and services.")In November the International Criminal Court in The Hague announced it was replacing its Microsoft office software with a European alternative. The German state of Schleswig-Holstein is replacing Microsoft products with open-source alternatives for 30,000 civil servantsThanks to long-time Slashdot reader mspohr for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Is Dark Energy Weakening?
An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC:There is growing controversy over recent evidence suggesting that a mysterious force known as dark energy might be changing in a way that challenges our current understanding of time and space. An analysis by a South Korean team has hinted that, rather than the Universe continuing to expand, galaxies could be pulled back together by gravity, ending in what astronomers call a "Big Crunch". The scientists involved believe that they may be on the verge of one of the biggest discoveries in astronomy for a generation. Other astronomers have questioned these findings, but these critics have not been able to completely dismiss the South Korean team's assertions... The controversy began in March with unexpected results from an instrument on a telescope in the Arizona desert called the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument (Desi)... The data hinted that acceleration of the galaxies had changed over time, something not in line with the standard picture, according to Prof Ofer Lehav of University College London, who is involved with the Desi project. "Now with this changing dark energy going up and then down, again, we need a new mechanism. And this could be a shake up for the whole of physics," he says. Then in November the Royal Astronomical Society (RAS) published research from a South Korean team that seems to back the view that the weirdness of dark energy is weirder still. Prof Young Wook Lee of Yonsei University in Seoul and his team went back to the kind of supernova data that first revealed dark energy 27 years ago. Instead of treating these stellar explosions as having one standard brightness, they adjusted for the ages of the galaxies they came from and worked out how bright the supernovas really were. This adjustment showed that not only had dark energy changed over time, but, shockingly, that the acceleration was slowing down... If, as Prof Lee's results suggest, the force that is pushing galaxies away from each other — dark energy — is weakening, then one possibility is that it becomes so weak that gravity begins to pull the galaxies back together.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Sal Khan: Companies Should Give 1% of Profits To Retrain Workers Displaced By AI
"I believe artificial intelligence will displace workers at a scale many people don't yet realize," says Sal Kahn (founder/CEO of the nonprofit Khan Academy). But in an op-ed in the New York Times he also proposes a solution that "could change the trajectory of the lives of millions who will be displaced..." "I believe that every company benefiting from automation — which is most American companies — should... dedicate 1 percent of its profits to help retrain the people who are being displaced."This isn't charity. It is in the best interest of these companies. If the public sees corporate profits skyrocketing while livelihoods evaporate, backlash will follow — through regulation, taxes or outright bans on automation. Helping retrain workers is common sense, and such a small ask that these companies would barely feel it, while the public benefits could be enormous... Roughly a dozen of the world's largest corporations now have a combined profit of over a trillion dollars each year. One percent of that would create a $10 billion annual fund that, in part, could create a centralized skill training platform on steroids: online learning, ways to verify skills gained and apprenticeships, coaching and mentorship for tens of millions of people. The fund could be run by an independent nonprofit that would coordinate with corporations to ensure that the skills being developed are exactly what are needed. This is a big task, but it is doable; over the past 15 years, online learning platforms have shown that it can be done for academic learning, and many of the same principles apply for skill training. "The problem isn't that people can't work," Khan writes in the essay. "It's that we haven't built systems to help them continue learning and connect them to new opportunities as the world changes rapidly."To meet the challenges, we don't need to send millions back to college. We need to create flexible, free paths to hiring, many of which would start in high school and extend through life. Our economy needs low-cost online mechanisms for letting people demonstrate what they know. Imagine a model where capability, not how many hours students sit in class, is what matters; where demonstrated skills earn them credit and where employers recognize those credits as evidence of readiness to enter an apprenticeship program in the trades, health care, hospitality or new categories of white-collar jobs that might emerge... There is no shortage of meaningful work — only a shortage of pathways into it. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader destinyland for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Military Planners Dread the Arctic, 'Where Drones Drop Dead and GPS Goes Haywire'
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Wall Street Journal:Sending drones and robots into battle, rather than humans, has become a tenet of modern warfare. Nowhere does that make more sense than in the frozen expanses of the Arctic. But the closer you get to the North Pole, the less useful cutting-edge technology becomes. Magnetic storms distort satellite signals; frigid temperatures drain batteries or freeze equipment in minutes; navigation systems lack reference points on snowfields. During a seven-nation polar exercise in Canada earlier this year to test equipment worth millions of dollars, the U.S. military's all-terrain arctic vehicles broke down after 30 minutes because hydraulic fluids congealed in the cold. Swedish soldiers participating in the exercise were handed $20,000 night-vision optics that broke because the aluminum in the goggles couldn't handle the minus 40 degree Fahrenheit conditions.... An arctic conflict would force war planners back to basics. Extreme cold makes the most common components brittle. Low temperatures alter the physical properties of rubber, causing seals to lose their elasticity and leak. Traces of water or humidity freeze into ice crystals that can scratch pumps and create blockages. Wires should be insulated with silicone rather than PVC, which can crack. Oil and other lubricants thicken and congeal. In most standard hydraulic systems, fluid becomes syrupy and can affect everything from aircraft controls to missile launchers and radar masts. A single freeze-up can knock out an entire weapons platform or immobilize a convoy. Even the Aurora Borealis interferes with radio communications and satellite-navigation systems, according to the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- OpenAI is Hiring a New 'Head of Preparedness' to Predict/Mitigate AI's Harms
An anonymous reader shared this report from Engadget:OpenAI is looking for a new Head of Preparedness who can help it anticipate the potential harms of its models and how they can be abused, in order to guide the company's safety strategy. It comes at the end of a year that's seen OpenAI hit with numerous accusations about ChatGPT's impacts on users' mental health, including a few wrongful death lawsuits. In a post on X about the position, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman acknowledgedthat the "potential impact of models on mental health was something we saw a preview of in 2025," along with other "real challenges" that have arisen alongside models' capabilities. The Head of Preparedness "is a critical role at an important time," he said. Per the job listing, the Head of Preparedness (who will make $555K, plus equity), "will lead the technical strategy and execution of OpenAI's Preparedness framework, our framework explaining OpenAI's approach to tracking and preparing for frontier capabilities that create new risks of severe harm." "These questions are hard," Altman posted on X.com, "and there is little precedent; a lot of ideas that sound good have some real edge cases... This will be a stressful job and you'll jump into the deep end pretty much immediately." The listing says OpenAI's Head of Preparedness "will lead a small, high-impact team to drive core Preparedness research, while partnering broadly across Safety Systems and OpenAI for end-to-end adoption and execution of the framework." They're looking for someone "comfortable making clear, high-stakes technical judgments under uncertainty."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Researchers Show Some Robots Can Be Hijacked Just Through Spoken Commands
An anonymous Slashdot reader shared this story from Interesting Engineering:Cybersecurity specialists from the research group DARKNAVY have demonstrated how modern humanoid robots can be compromised and weaponised through weaknesses in their AI-driven control systems. In a controlled test, the team demonstrated that a commercially available humanoid robot could be hijacked with nothing more than spoken commands, exposing how voice-based interaction can serve as an attack vector rather than a safeguard, reports Yicaiglobal... Using short-range wireless communication, the hijacked machine transmitted the exploit to another robot that was not connected to the network. Within minutes, this second robot was also taken over, demonstrating how a single breach could cascade through a group of machines. To underline the real-world implications, the researchers issued a hostile command during the demonstration. The robot advanced toward a mannequin on stage and struck it, illustrating the potential for physical harm.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- New Runtime Standby ABI Proposed for Linux Like Microsoft Windows' 'Modern Standby'
Phoronix reports on "an exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list" proposing "a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the 'Modern Standby' functionality found with Microsoft Windows..."Modern Standby is a low-power mode on Windows 11 for letting systems remain connected to the network and appear "sleeping" but will allow for instant wake-up for notifications, music playback, and other functionality. The display is off, the network remains online, and background tasks can wake-up the system if needed with Microsoft Modern Standby... "This series introduces a new runtime standby ABI to allow firing Modern Standby firmware notifications that modify hardware appearance from userspace without suspending the kernel," [according to the email about the proposed patch series]. "This allows userspace to set the inactivity state of the device so that it looks like it is asleep (e.g., flashing the power button) while still being able to perform basic computations..." Those interested can see the RFC patch series for the work in its current form, in particular the documentation patch outlines the proposed /sys/power/standby interface.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Is Russia Developing an Anti-Satellite Weapon to Target Starlink?
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:Two NATO-nation intelligence services suspect Russia is developing a new anti-satellite weapon to target Elon Musk's Starlink constellation with destructive orbiting clouds of shrapnel, with the aim of reining in Western space superiority that has helped Ukraine on the battlefield. Intelligence findings seen by The Associated Press say the so-called "zone-effect" weapon would seek to flood Starlink orbits with hundreds of thousands of high-density pellets, potentially disabling multiple satellites at once but also risking catastrophic collateral damage to other orbiting systems. Analysts who haven't seen the findings say they doubt such a weapon could work without causing uncontrollable chaos in space for companies and countries, including Russia and its ally China, that rely on thousands of orbiting satellites for communications, defense and other vital needs. Such repercussions, including risks to its own space systems, could steer Moscow away from deploying or using such a weapon, analysts said. "I don't buy it. Like, I really don't," said Victoria Samson, a space-security specialist at the Secure World Foundation who leads the Colorado-based nongovernmental organization's annual study of anti-satellite systems. "I would be very surprised, frankly, if they were to do something like that." [Later they suggested the research might just be experimental.] But the commander of the Canadian military's Space Division, Brig. Gen. Christopher Horner, said such Russian work cannot be ruled out in light of previous U.S. allegations that Russia also has been pursuing an indiscriminate nuclear, space-based weapon. "I can't say I've been briefed on that type of system. But it's not implausible," he said... The French military's Space Command said in a statement to the AP that it could not comment on the findings but said, "We can inform you that Russia has, in recent years, been multiplying irresponsible, dangerous, and even hostile actions in space." The article also points out that this month Russia "said it has fielded a new ground-based missile system, the S-500, which is capable of hitting low-orbit targets..."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- NVIDIA Drops Pascal Support On Linux, Causing Chaos On Arch Linux
NVIDIA has been "gradually dropping support for older videocards," notes Hackaday, "with the Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs most recently getting axed." "What's more surprising is the terrible way that this is being handled by certain Linux distributions, with Arch Linux currently a prime example.?"On these systems, updating the OS with a Pascal, Maxwell or similarly unsupported GPU will result in the new driver failing to load and thus the user getting kicked back to the CLI to try and sort things back out there. This issue is summarized by [Brodie Robertson] in a recent video. "Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support," explains an announcement on the Arch Linux mailing list. But Hackaday points out that using the legacy option "breaks Steam as it relies on official NVIDIA dependencies, which requires an additional series of hacks to hopefully restore this functionality. "Fortunately the Arch Wiki provides a starting point on what to do."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Waymo Updates Vehicles to Better Handle Power Outages - But Still Faces Criticism
Waymo explained this week that its self-driving car technology is already "designed to handle dark traffic signals," and successfully handled over 7,000 last Saturday during San Francisco's long power outage, properly treating those intersections as four-way stops. But while during the long outage their cars sometimes experienced a "backlog" when waiting for confirmation checks (leading them to freeze in intersections), Waymo said Tuesday they're implementing "fleet-wide updates" to provide their self-driving cars "specific power outage context, allowing it to navigate more decisively." Ironically, two days later Waymo paused their service again in San Francisco. But this time it was due to a warning from the National Weather Service about a powerful storm bringing the possibility of flash flooding and power outages, reports CNBC. They add that Waymo "didn't immediately respond to a request for comment, or say whether regulators required its service pause on Thursday given the flash flood warnings." And they also note Waymo still faces criticism over last Saturday's incident:The former CEO of San Francisco's Municipal Transit Authority, Jeffrey Tumlin, told CNBC that regulators and robotaxi companies can take valuable lessons away from the chaos that arose with Waymo vehicles during the PG&E power outages last week. "I think we need to be asking 'what is a reasonable number of [autonomous vehicles] to have on city streets, by time of day, by geography and weather?'" Tumlin said. He also suggested regulators may want to set up a staged system that will allow autonomous vehicle companies to rapidly scale their operations, provided they meet specific tests. One of those tests, he said, would be how quickly a company can get their autonomous vehicles safely out of the way of traffic if they encounter something that is confusing like a four-way intersection with no functioning traffic lights. Cities and regulators should also seek more data from robotaxi companies about the planned or actual performance of their vehicles during expected emergencies such as blackouts, floods or earthquakes, Tumlin said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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- Death, torture, and amputation: How cybercrime shook the world in 2025
The human harms of cyberattacks piled up this year, and violence expected to increase
The knock-on, and often unintentional, impacts of a cyberattack are so rarely discussed. As an industry, the focus is almost always placed on the economic damage: the ransom payment; the cost of business downtime; and goodness, don't forget those poor shareholders.…
- Stop the slop by disabling AI features in Chrome
The most popular desktop browser is festooned with Google AI, but you can make at least some of it go away
Most of today’s desktop web browsers come with a ton of built-in AI features, but the good news is that, in most cases, no one is forcing you to use them, and you can at least hide them from view. Removing the most egregious AI tools from Chrome is pretty simple, but it requires a few steps.…
- Coming Wi-Fi 8 will bring reliability rather than greater speed
Smarter access-point handoffs, better scheduling, fewer stalls
Wi-Fi 8 will be a step change in connectivity, if Intel can be believed, and will be able to adapt intelligently to local conditions to deliver a reliable service without the slowdowns users often experience when the network is congested.…
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