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Do a presentation at NTLUG.
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(Two Column)
- "Half a Second" — a book on the XZ backdoor
Adrian Mastronardi has released a book called Half a Second; it is adetailed look into the XZ backdoor attemptof 2024. The book is freely available under a (non-free) noncommercial,no-derivatives CC license.
Half a Second tells that story as one continuous narrative: the burned-out volunteer who maintained the code alone and was patiently, expertly manipulated into giving it up; the engineer whose half-second of curiosity caught the attack through a chain of luck and hard-won instinct; and the operator who built it, who has never been identified and, this book argues, may never be.
- Building an Arch Linux aarch64 port for Holo Core (Collabora blog)
Collabora has published a blogpost about its work with Valve on Holo Core, which is a port of Arch Linux toaarch64 to be used as the the operating system on Valve's64-bit Arm Steam Frame gaming system. Collabora has released thesources,binarypackages, and a container image for aarch64 devices. The postdescribes some of the challenges in porting Arch Linux to a newarchitecture, and what remains to be done:
Whilst the infrastructure developed to this point is capable ofbuilding from first principles up until a point-in-time snapshot, thenext step is to build this into a system which can track Arch Linux asit is developed. This work will serve as the basis of acontinuously-operating CI system capable of shadowing Arch Linuxitself. We will work with the upstream Arch Linux project to help Archwith their efforts to port the distribution to aarch64 architectureand work towards automated repeatable builds.
The post also includes instructions on how to create and test anaarch64 build container on an x86_64 host, for users who would like tofollow along at home but lack a 64-bit Arm device.
- [$] Securing BPF LSMs against tampering
Since 2020, BPF programs have been able toact as Linux security modules(LSMs). Several projects, including systemd, have been working to usethat capability to provide more security to users. Christian Braunerspoke at the 2026Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summitabout some of the limitations of using BPF in this way, and the changes hewould like to see for systemd's use. In particular, he would like a way to makesure that BPF programs cannot be removed or have their private data tampered with.
- Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cifs-utils, container-tools:rhel8, libreoffice, nodejs:24, perl-XML-LibXML, and python3.12), Fedora (ansible-collection-ansible-posix, firefox, freerdp, ImageMagick, mingw-glib2, perl-DBI, perl-HTTP-Date, rust-cargo-rpmstatus, and rust-opendal), Oracle (cifs-utils, gegl, gimp, git-lfs, go-toolset:ol8, hplip, kernel, libreoffice, maven:3.9, perl-XML-LibXML, python3, python3.12, python3.9, and uek-kernel), Red Hat (kernel, kernel-rt, and podman), Slackware (netatalk), SUSE (agama, aws-nitro-enclaves-binaryblobs-upstream, gimp, gpsd, grafana, hostapd, ImageMagick, jackson-databind, kernel, libssh2_org, nm-configurator, opennlp, perl-Mojolicious, python-Pillow, python-python-engineio, python-python-socketio, and tomcat11), and Ubuntu (ntfs-3g, python-authlib, ruby2.3, tar, and ubuntu-advantage-tools).
- Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cups, git-lfs, kernel, libsolv, libxml2, python3.12, and python3.9), Debian (chromium, dhcpcd5, and ntfs-3g), Fedora (firefox, perl-Imager, python-bcrypt, python-tiktoken, roundcubemail, and xrdp), Mageia (openssl, poppler, python-mistune, and tmux), Oracle (389-ds-base, cups, git-lfs, glibc, host-metering, kernel, libsolv, libxml2, nginx:1.24, PackageKit, python-pillow, and qemu-kvm), Red Hat (buildah, containernetworking-plugins, and skopeo), SUSE (buildah, cosign, curl, distribution, dnsmasq, glib-networking, glibc, gnutls, gstreamer-plugins-bad, ImageMagick, kernel, podman, python-cryptography, python313-django-debug-toolbar, rekor, sccache, sssd, and yelp), and Ubuntu (dotnet8, dotnet10, libslirp, luajit, python-idna, sympa, and tomcat8).
- [$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for July 16, 2026
Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Front: Fighting scraper bots; io_uring queues; Filesystem testing; BPF shielding; Sending packets from BPF; Kitty; QBE. Briefs: Shim security; seunshare vulnerability; Debian bookworm; Rust 1.97.0; Linux.org; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.
- [$] Topics in filesystem testing
It should come as no surprise that a gathering of filesystem developerswould discuss filesystem testing; it has been a mainstay of the Linux Storage,Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit over the years and the2026 summit was no exception. Ted Ts'o led the discussion this time; hehad a few different topics to raise, including his perception of increasingregressions for ext4 in the stable kernels and what can be done to helpreduce them. As with other similarsessions at the summit over the years,there is a lot of interest in collaborating on test inputs and outputs, butfinding a way to centralize that information has so far eluded thefilesystem community.
- Local DoS attack vectors in seunshare 3.10 (SUSE Security Team Blog)
The SUSE Security Team Blog has a postwith an analysis of seunshare,which is used by SELinux to confine untrusted programs. During areview of version3.10 of the program, the team identified two localDenial-of-Service (DoS) vectors.
Since seunshare is supposed to run on SELinux-enabled systems, itis important to understand what kind of privilege escalation can beachieved when vulnerabilities are exploited in a setuid-root binarylike this. Many SELinux-enabled systems, such as Fedora and openSUSE,ship with the "targeted" SELinux policy by default. This policy isfocused on confining well-known system services, but assigns anunconfined SELinux context to interactive users by default to achievea balance between security and usability.
There is currently no domain transition from the unconfined domainto the more restricted seunshare_t defined in the SELinux policy forseunshare. This means the execution of seunshare continues in theunconfined domain. Thus in the context of attacks carried out byinteractive users, the impact of the vulnerabilities below will be aroot-like privilege escalation despite the system running in SELinuxenforced mode.
See the post for the full write-up of the team's discoveries and timeline. Thevulnerabilities have been fixed in version 3.11.
- [$] Lockless MPSC FIFO queues for io_uring
Processes that use io_uringtend to keep a lot of balls in the air; being able to have many operationsunderway at any given time is part of the point of that API in the firstplace. The io_uring subsystem must, as a result, keep track of a lot oftasks that have to be performed at the right time. In current kernels,io_uring uses a standard kernel linked-list primitive to track those workitems. As of the 7.2 kernel release, though, io_uring will, instead, use anew lockless, multi-producer, single-consumer (MPSC) queue, resulting insome notable performance gains. Lockless algorithms tend to be tricky, butthe one used here is relatively approachable and shows how these algorithmscan work.
- Security updates for Wednesday
Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (cifs-utils, corosync, cups, freerdp, git-lfs, go-fdo-client and go-fdo-server, go-toolset:rhel8, kernel, kernel-rt, libinput, libxml2, nginx:1.24, openssl, pacemaker, perl-DBI:1.641, php8.4, python-pillow, python3, and python3.12), Debian (grub2, libxfont, opam, and wolfssl), Fedora (freerdp, kernel, and prometheus), Mageia (imagemagick), Oracle (buildah, freerdp, gimp, kernel, nginx, openexr, openssl, perl-DBI, podman, vim, xorg-x11-server, and xorg-x11-server-Xwayland), Red Hat (python3.12), SUSE (afterburn, buildah, busybox, enc, freetype2-devel, go1.25, go1.25-openssl, go1.26-openssl, gosec, grafana, helm, krb5, kubernetes-old, libopenbabel8, libxml2, libxml2-16, nasm, openssl-3, patch, python-Authlib, python-mistune, python-soupsieve, python-sqlparse, python3-dulwich, python313-Pillow, rootlesskit, sbootutil-1, tomcat, and tomcat11), and Ubuntu (alsa-lib, dnsmasq, gnutls28, libheif, linux-aws, linux-fips, linux-lts-xenial, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-intel-iotg-5.15, linux-hwe-6.17, linux-raspi, mariadb, openvpn, python-httplib2, vim, and wget).
- Many old shim versions are still accepted by secure boot
The CMU CERT Coordination Center has put out an advisory that manyexploitable versions of the shim binary, used to boot Linux on systems withUEFI secure boot enabled, were never added to the revocation list.
An attacker with administrative privileges or the ability to modify the boot process could use one of the vulnerable shim bootloaders to bypass Secure Boot protections and execute arbitrary code before the operating system loads. Code executed during this early boot phase may achieve persistent compromise of the platform, including the ability to load unsigned or malicious kernel components that can survive system reboots and, in some cases, operating system reinstallation.
The advisory contains a list of vulnerable shims.
- The Linux.org story
Rob Kennedy has posted thestory of the birth of Linux.org — oneof the earliest Linux-related web sites — and its more recent rebirth.
The site was founded in May 1994 by Michael McLagan, at a time when Linux itself was barely three years old. Linus Torvalds had only just released it to the world, there was no real way for a newcomer to find their footing, no search engines, no Wikipedia, none of the infrastructure people take for granted now for figuring out a new piece of technology. Michael built linux.org to fill that gap, a place for people to learn about Linux and follow the movement as it grew.
- Call for topics for the 2026 Maintainers Summit
The Maintainers Summit is an annual, invitation-only gathering of kerneldevelopers and maintainers to discuss development-process issues; see LWN's 2025 Maintainers Summit coverage for anexample. The call fortopics for the 2026 gathering (Prague, October 8) has gone out.One of the best ways to obtain an invitation to the Summit is with a goodtopic proposal. For best consideration, topics should be submitted beforeJuly 24.
- UXL's oneDNN 3.13 Preps For Intel Nova Lake With AVX10.2, More Intel Optimizations
Following the release of AMD's ZenDNN 6.0 earlier this month, there is a new feature release of the oneDNN neural network library that used to be developed by Intel as part of oneAPI and is now under the UXL Foundation umbrella. Even so, oneDNN feature releases continue to be heavy on new Intel optimizations and future hardware support...
- Noctua NL-LC1-36 All-In-One Liquid Cooler
With reviewing hardware for more than 22 years, when it comes to cooling products there are few brands that can still get me intrigued like Noctua. With their recent launch of the NL-LC1 all-in-one liquid coolers, I decided to try out the Noctua NL-LC1-36 360mm AIO cooler that is working out well for cooling high-end desktop CPUs like the recently launched Ryzen 9 9950X3D2.
- HackRF Pro SDR covers 100kHz to 6GHz with FPGA-based processing
The HackRF Pro is an open-hardware software-defined radio platform from Great Scott Gadgets that supports transmission and reception from 100kHz to 6GHz. The half-duplex transceiver maintains backward compatibility with software and accessories developed for the earlier HackRF One. The HackRF Pro follows the same general architecture as its predecessor but introduces several RF, processing, timing, […]
- NanoKVM-Go Brings AI-Powered Hardware Control to Linux with a Compact USB-C KVM
Sipeed has introduced NanoKVM-Go, a compact USB-C KVM-over-IP device that combines remote hardware management with AI integration. Designed for Linux, Windows, macOS, and other USB-C devices, NanoKVM-Go allows users to remotely view and control a system through a web browser while exposing its keyboard, mouse, and display functions to AI agents via the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
- Linux WMI Driver Gets Ready To Support ACPI-Based ARM64 Laptops
Linux developer Armin Wolf sent out a set of patches today for enabling AArch64 support for the ACPI Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI) driver to work on AArch64 in no longer being bound to x86/x86_64. This is a step toward the long goal of being able to support modern Windows on ARM laptops via ACPI on Linux...
- New Study Links Teen Boys' ADHD Symptoms To Addictive Social Media Use
A new study by researchers at the University of California at San Francisco "adds to growing research linking increased social media use to detrimental effects on attention, memory and cognition," reports the Washington Post:The study followed more than 11,000 U.S. adolescents over a period of five years, with participants first asked about their own social media use at the average age of 12, and surveyed annually through the average age of 16. Researchers found that increases in addictive social media use were followed by rising ADHD one year later — particularly among boys who reported rising addictive social media use at ages 14 and 15. This association was not found consistently in reverse, meaning that ADHD symptoms did not appear to precede higher levels of addictive social media use... "When an individual adolescent's addictive social media use score increased from one year to the next, that same adolescent tended to show an increase in ADHD symptoms in the following year...." [said Jason Nagata, lead author of the study and an associate professor of pediatrics at the University of California at San Francisco]. He urged parents to consider: "Can their kids stop if they want to? Is social media interfering with their schoolwork? Is it impairing their social relationships? Are there addiction-like symptoms, like withdrawal and relapse?" Approximately 7 million American children between the ages of 3 and 17 have received an ADHD diagnosis, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and boys are diagnosed with ADHD at about twice the rate of girls. The study did not find a clear link between addictive social media use and ADHD among girls, Nagata said. "Some studies do suggest that teenage boys in particular may be more sensitive to immediate reward and sensation-seeking in adolescence," he said. And social media platforms are designed to provide exactly that: "It encourages frequent task-switching, and there's this constant stream of stimulation that might make it harder for adolescents to maintain and sustain attention that is needed for schoolwork and daily life," he said. "The design features of social media offer the constant reinforcement of impulsivity — it offers immediate gratification and novelty and it encourages multitasking, which can then override working memory and executive control." Experts have long noted that this kind of digital exposure is particularly significant during critical stages of mental, social-emotional and cognitive development... [I]t's especially important for parents themselves to demonstrate a healthier relationship with screens and social media. "One of our previous findings was that parental screen use is a very strong predictor of kids' screen use," Nagata said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- 'Grok Build' Coding Tool Open Sourced This Week, Promises to Respect Zero Data Retention
Elon Musk confirmed SpaceX has open sourced the Grok Build CLI this week, reports The Register, "just days after researchers caught the AI tool scooping up users' entire repositories and uploading them to company-controlled cloud storage." That discovery had "gathered so much negative attention that Elon Musk felt compelled to issue a public statement alongside SpaceX, and its technical staff, promising to delete all data that Grok Build has ever stored and give users more choice over how their data is handled."SpaceXAI's data grab was first publicized Sunday [July 12] by Cereblab, who probed Grok Build traffic and found that repos were being packaged up as Git Bundles and beamed to Google Cloud storage... [Elon Musk] said SpaceX would open-source Grok Build to sow greater trust in the product, after the codebase was audited for security vulnerabilities... ["Open-sourcing Grok Build allows anyone to support making a reliable and robust harness," SpaceX posted on X.com. "Check out our code, including the Git repo for the Grok Build CLI."] In a separate statement accompanying the open source announcement, SpaceX said it has always respected Zero Data Retention (ZDR), which was applied to enterprise customers by default, and acknowledged that data retention was enabled by default for everyone else, which has now been corrected. It said: "In response to user questions about privacy: Since launch, Grok Build has fully respected zero data retention (ZDR). All users have always had the ability to disable data upload in the CLI. When data upload was disabled, this choice was respected. In the early beta, data retention was enabled by default for non-ZDR users. Based on your feedback, we changed this. We are now going further to protect privacy. With all retained data deleted, retention default off, and an open-source harness, we are offering complete user privacy. You can also run Grok Build fully open-sourced and local-first with your own inference. "We disabled default retention for all Grok Build users starting on July 12th. Additionally, we are deleting all coding data that was previously retained, ensuring every user's preferences are respected. With these steps, Grok Build goes beyond other major coding products to protect user privacy." SpaceX also invited researchers to probe Grok Build for security issues and report them to its bug bounty program, which offers rewards ranging from $100-$20,000, depending on the severity. The article notes Simon Willison, creator of Datasette and co-creator of Django, wrote this week that the Grok Build codebase comprises 844,530 lines of Rust code. "There are still remnants of the code that used to upload everything to Google Cloud," Willison writes, "but they seem to have been disabled now." Elon Musk also posted Wednesday that "Once we have completed our review for security vulnerabilities, we will make the entire codebase of X open source, with no exceptions. Moreover, we will invite third party reviewers to examine the system that is running to confirm that the open source code is what is running."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- OpenAI Acknowledges GPT-5.6 May Accidentally Delete Files, Calls It 'Honest Mistake'
"OpenAI has finally confirmed reports that its latest family of large language models can accidentally delete files," reports InfoWorld, "while stressing that such incidents are rare and should be viewed as 'honest mistakes.'"Reports of the flagship LLMs deleting files emerged shortly after the company launched them earlier this month, with investor Matt Shumer taking to X to report that GPT-5.6-Sol had "just accidentally deleted almost all" of his Mac's files. Just days later, software engineer Bruno Lemos posted on X that the same model had deleted his entire production database. In response to these incidents, the company's engineering lead for Codex, Thibault Sottiaux, wrote on X that internal investigations have revealed that these deletion incidents are more likely to happen when "full access mode is enabled, and Codex is run without sandboxing protections, including without auto review being enabled." In cases where full access mode is granted, the model, Sottiaux wrote, "attempts to override the $HOME env var to define a temporary directory. The model makes an honest mistake and mistakenly deletes $HOME instead...." The company, however, according to Sottiaux, is taking steps to mitigate the risk. "This is of course not how we want the system to behave, even when a user operates the model in full-access mode without the safeguards of our sandbox or without using auto review which checks for these kinds of high risk actions and rejects them," the engineering lead wrote on X. "We are taking steps to mitigate this risk, including by updating the developer message, guiding more users towards safer permission modes, and adding additional harness safeguards," Sottiaux added, noting that a detailed post-mortem outlining the root cause of the issue and the additional mitigation measures being implemented is expected to follow in the coming days, despite emphasizing that such incidents happen "extremely rarely."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- France Orders ISPs to Block Access to Polymarket
France's regulatory authority for licensed gambling/betting games "announced this week that it ordered ISPs to block access to Polymarket," reports Engadget. Anyone caught advertising an unauthorized betting site "could be fined up to 100,000 euros, or around $114,000." (The article notes this follows a previous regulatory action from November placing a geoblock on financial transactions from French residents on Polymarket's site.) In May Spain blocked access to Polymarket and Kalshi while it launched a gambling license investigation.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- How Microsoft's 'Little Workaround' Created a Major Threat to America's Defense Department
This week Slashdot reader joshuark found the story of exactly how in 2025 ProPublica reporter Renee Dudley confirmed Microsoft was running tech support for the U.S. Defense Department through China, America's biggest cybersecurity adversary — and how that investigation ultimately changed U.S. government policy. The reporter first found an ad offering $18 to $28 to hire Americans as "digital escorts" for China-based tech support, then just searched LinkedIn for people who apparently had answered the ad. They discovered that at the time "Behind the scenes, unseen by the users at the U.S. government, it's not just one person who responds," explains ProPublica's podcast. "It's two people... The China-based engineer is the one who knows how to fix the problem. On their end, they produce a block of code to solve it and send it over to the digital escort in the U.S. The digital escort then just copy-pastes it... All of this so that they can follow the government's rule: that you have to be a U.S. citizen or permanent resident to handle sensitive data." But amazingly to confirm it, ProPublica's researcher just had to input "Microsoft" and "escort" into the U.S. Patent Office search bar, and actually found patents related to digital escorts — along with names of the current and former Microsoft employees listed as inventors. Had the government signed off on the practice? "I could see what Microsoft actually told the government," the reporter says on the podcast, "And there was no mention of foreign engineers being used, and definitely no mention of China." ProPublic's story was published on a Tuesday, according to the podcast, and by Friday "Microsoft said it had stopped using China-based engineers to support Defense Department cloud systems." And America's Defense Department "also opened up an investigation, looking into whether any of Microsoft's China-based engineers had compromised the government's national security.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Next UK Prime Minister Drops Digital ID Scheme
Reuters reports:Incoming British prime minister Andy Burnham will scrap the government's troubled plans for a digital ID scheme when he enters office on Monday, a spokesperson for the new Labour Party leader said. Resources devoted to the scheme, deemed a "fiasco" by a cross-party committee of lawmakers, will be redirected to Burnham's priorities, the spokesperson said... "All the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it's most needed, such as helping with the cost of living," Burnham's spokesperson said.In November, the Office for Budget Responsibility watchdog estimated the cost of the digital ID scheme at around £1.8 billion ($2.4 billion) between financial years 2026/27 and 2028/29.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Gen Z and Millennials are Buying CDs - Though Half Don't Have CD Players
"Approximately half of Gen Z and millennials who have purchased a CD do not own a CD player," according to midyear sales statistics from entertainment data company Luminate. It's driven in part by "collection building", according to their report [PDF]:The CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into anaffordable collectible. This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buyingphysical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artistas it is listening to the music on the product itself "Among artists who had a direct impact on the resurgence of CDs, K-Pop icons BTS' 10th studio album, ARIRANG, was a big seller," Vice points out in their report on the new data. "However, Luminate also found that, beyond K-Pop's overall influence, CD sales still increased 6.7% year over year, even if the whole genre was removed from the equation, jumping 16% to 16.3 million units." That's more than the growth of vinyl sales (2.4%) — but physical media in general seems to be making a comeback: Through the first half of the year, total physical album sales on vinyl, CDs, and cassettes reached 38.2 million units in the United States. This equates to a 7.8% increase.... [I]t seems that younger music fans have been driving a lot of the retro revival. The report shows that in 2026, 60% of Gen Z listeners said they most often listen to music from the 1990s and older. This is a massive increase from the 18 percent marker in 2021. The new report also revealed that the way music fans are buying physical media has shifted. Indie record stores have been the largest generator of physical album sales for some time, and they continue to be. However, big-box stores like Target and Walmart took significant strides in the first half of 2026. Collectively, their music sales made up about 30% of the market. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- NextBSD Returns to Port Apple Source Onto FreeBSD
"One of the most interesting BSD variants of the 2010s, NextBSD, has come back to life under new management," reports The Register:Aside from the homepage, there's a GitHub repository — but beware, this is separate from the old one, whose repo is still there although the most recent changes were seven years ago. The new project also has a project history giving credit where it's due. The main man behind the revival is Joe Maloney, known on GitHub as pkgdemon. In case his name rings a bell, we've mentioned him before: he put together the Gershwin desktop in GhostBSD. Soon after we covered Gershwin on GhostBSD, he asked the maintainers if he could take over the NextBSD project. He did have a relatively minor role in the original — you can see his list of commits. The original NextBSD project was started by FreeBSD co-founder Jordan Hubbard in 2015 — its Wikipedia article has some of the history. The plan was to port some of the components of Apple's Darwin OS to FreeBSD... [T]he NextBSD plan is to take the FreeBSD kernel, the most capable of the FOSS BSD kernels, but replace FreeBSD's traditional and server-focused userland with the relevant parts of the publicly available Apple code. The rebooted NextBSD-redux is not based on a fork of the decade-old code. FreeBSD has moved on substantially in that time, and so have macOS and Darwin. This is a new project by a new developer, but it picks up the same overall plan, aims to assemble the same puzzle pieces, and shares the same intended goal. In places, it does draw on a little of the same code, though. The NextBSD-redux README describes what's working so far, with a lot more detail in the porting notes. Although there's no graphical desktop yet, that's underway as well.... For us, perhaps the key aspect of NextBSD — both the original version and NextBSD-redux — is that it isn't an effort to build something completely new from scratch. It's an effort to cherry-pick and combine elements of existing separate FOSS projects, and assemble them into a useful whole. The Team section of the homepage lists two core developers: Maloney and Anthropic's Claude Code. "From my perspective, AI is a force multiplier here," Maloney told The Register. "It is my team of developers, but I am steering the entire thing."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- CNBC's Jim Cramer Says He Needs 'Cold Hard' Proof AI Is Paying Off
In a sign of our times, CNBC's Jim Cramer "said Wednesday that it's time for companies to prove artificial intelligence is paying off," reports CNBC:"I need cold hard return facts," the "Mad Money" host said. "Or, I, too, will grow more skeptical than I am now...." While Cramer said he remains optimistic about the long-term opportunity, he argued the market needs more evidence that those investments are translating into measurable financial returns for customers. Cramer said one of his biggest concerns this earnings season is that companies adopting AI have largely failed to point to meaningful revenue gains or cost savings from the technology. "We're still early in the earnings season but already we are not hearing anything material about the use of AI," he said... While AI infrastructure companies continue to benefit from the spending boom, Cramer said the same cannot yet be said for many of the businesses buying the technology... Cramer said only a handful of companies, most notably fintech firm Block and web-security provider Cloudflare, have clearly attributed recent layoffs to AI adoption. Block did so in February, while Cloudflare's job cuts were disclosed in May. Plus, critics argue some companies may also cite AI as a buzzy excuse for cuts, leading to the creation of the term "AI washing." Ultimately, Cramer said that if more businesses do not begin reporting tangible returns, the AI skeptics will grow louder, with ramifications for the tech industry's big spenders.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Long After Pluto Fly-By, NASA's New Horizon's Probe Wakes Up Again, Starts Doing New Science
Launched in 2006, NASA's New Horizons probe flew by the planet Pluto in 2015. But this week it "awakened from its longest sleep ever," reports CNN.It's now 5.9 billion miles (9.5 billion kilometers) from Earth...NASA's New Horizons spacecraft went into a planned hibernation mode on August 7, 2025, and woke up on June 23 using commands stored on its main computer. The mission's flight controllers at the Johns Hopkins University's Applied Physics Laboratory in Laurel, Maryland, confirmed that New Horizons is in great shape and ready to transmit a stream of science data gathered during hibernation from its location in the region of icy objects known as the Kuiper Belt. Pluto is the largest of thousands of frozen, rocky bodies called trans-Neptunian objects, or TNOs, that exist in the Kuiper Belt at the edge of our solar system — remnants from its formation 4.5 billion years ago... The spacecraft is capturing data about the rotation rates, orientations and shapes... The measurements provide insights into how planets are born from dust and pebbles, said Pontus Brandt, New Horizons project scientist at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory."There seems to be more paired, snowman-shaped bodies, like Arrokoth, out there than anyone expected," Brandt wrote in an email. "Are such binaries the most common planetesimal and is this how larger planets have been built in our own and other stellar systems? These are very deep questions that New Horizons can help answer." The spacecraft also measures the distribution of gas in the outer heliosphere, the expansive, protective bubble formed by a steady stream of particles that release from the sun called the solar wind. Meanwhile, an instrument called the Pluto Energetic Particle Spectrometer Science Investigation is measuring galactic cosmic rays, extremely fast particles created when stars explode. The particles pose one of the more severe threats for human activities in space, Brandt said, but the boundary of the heliosphere acts as a shield to protect our solar system from 70% of them. New Horizons' data could help scientists learn more about how this puzzling shielding works, he said. Another instrument, the Venetia Burney Student Dust Counter, has collected data that has thrown New Horizon's team a curveball, Brandt said. The team expected dust abundance to be high within the Kuiper Belt due to the significant presence of small objects. But New Horizons has traveled beyond the known boundary of the Kuiper Belt — and it's still in a dusty environment.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Union Fights Microsoft Over Layoffs at Game Studios
Thursday the union that helped organize thousands of workers across numerous Microsoft-owned video game studios filed unfair labor complaints against Microsoft over the layoffs of 1,600 employees. The gaming news site Aftermath says the complaints allege unlawful action:"Xbox management is required to bargain with the union over the decision of layoffs prior to implementing them during the status quo period, and we are pursuing every available avenue to protect our members," a Communications Workers of America spokesperson said in a statement to Aftermath... Speaking to Game Developer, CWA Canada president Carmel Smyth elaborated on the unions' misgivings... "Basically the employer cannot arbitrarily change working conditions while it is engaged in negotiating with the union. We will continue to file legal challenges if necessary, and do all we can to defend the rights of Bethesda Game Studios workers...." "I'm very proud of the hard work the bargaining committees and CWA staff have put in to evaluate the legality of how the layoffs were conducted," a current id Software employee and union member told Aftermath. "It's important, even for the world's largest and most profitable companies, that there are consequences for violating federal labor law. If we hadn't explored this avenue to hold Microsoft accountable, it would be a sign to all other game executives that they can break the law and get away with it." Legal action is just one part of unions' larger effort to hold Microsoft accountable for its decision to lay off thousands of workers. This week, CWA also hosted a series of "Save Our Devs" demonstrations outside the offices of affected studios like Zenimax, id Software, Bethesda, and Obsidian.
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- The 'Death of the Stick Shift' is Almost Here for Americans
Last year just 0.6% of new vehicles made for U.S. customers were stick shifts, reports the Washington Post, citing preliminary government data. "That's a precipitous drop from the 34.6 percent of vehicles with manual transmissions produced in 1980."[T]he stick shift's popularity hit multiple new lows in recent years, with no signs of a turnaround, thanks to new technologies and a rapidly changing marketplace. Buyers and automakers increasingly have turned to the sophisticated automatic drivetrains that now smoothly swap gears in fractions of a second and with better fuel efficiency. The average new vehicle today comes with seven gears, thanks to computers, twice as many as in 1980 and more gears than any ordinary driver would want to shift through using a manual gearbox. At the same time, sporty cars — the kind that buyers might demand a stick shift to drive — have fallen out of favor, replaced by interest in hulking SUVs, which are almost always automatics. The stick shift's demise has been hastened, too, by the rise of electric vehicles and increasingly autonomous vehicles. Neither have any need for a manual transmission... Europe has seen a less dramatic decline in stick shifts, with manual transmissions dropping from 91 percent of car registrations in 2001 to 29 percent in 2024 among Europe's largest auto markets, according to industry analyst JATO Dynamics... Subaru made its name with manual cars. But the Japanese automaker stopped offering a manual Crosstrek with the 2023 model year, having already dropped that transmission from its Legacy, Outback and Forester models. Other automakers have followed the same path. Volkswagen announced that it plans this year to ditch its last U.S. stick-shift model, the Jetta GLI. Even Toyota, Honda, and BMW have all reduced the number of cars for the U.S. market with a manual transmission, the article points out — leaving stick shift-loving Americans with a total of about 24 new-vehicle models to choose from. The articles adds that only 60% of Americans know how to drive a manual transmission (according to a survey from auto parts retailer AmericanMuscle): 83% for baby boomers but 39% for Gen Z. "Respondents were about evenly split on whether knowing how to drive a manual is an important life skill." But Ford CEO Jim Farley said earlier this year he has no plans to make the Mustang automatic-only."Out of our cold, dead hands will we not have a manual Mustang." Farley said.
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- Google-Backed Satellites For Wildfire Detection Launch As Smoke Chokes US, Canada
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: As smoke from hundreds of burning wildfires spread across Canada and the United States, the first three operational satellites in the Google-backed FireSat program successfully launched into orbit. The satellites will begin providing wildfire detection capable of spotting even small fires in the United States, Australia, and Europe before the end of the year. The launch of the microsatellites aboard a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California on July 7, 2026 marks a transition to "initial operational capability" for the FireSat constellation managed by the nonprofit Earth Fire Alliance. After a three-month testing period, the three satellites will begin actively providing data to fire agencies while covering every fire-prone region on Earth at least twice per day. FireSat represents the first satellite constellation purpose-built for detecting wildfires, including spotting smaller fires that other satellites may miss. The satellites were designed by California-based satellite manufacturer Muon Space and have received over $15 million from Google to support initial deployment. Other notable financial supporters include the Bezos Earth Fund that committed $26 million. Each satellite is equipped with multispectral imaging that can peer through smoke and clouds and detect fires as small as five by five meters -- about 16 by 16 feet. That capability was proven by a FireSat Protoflight satellite that launched in March 2025 and collected more than one million images, while showing it could detect low-intensity blazes invisible to existing satellites. The "early adopter" organizations that will start using FireSat data this year include fire agencies in California, Colorado, Australia, and Portugal. As more satellites launch, the FireSat program aims to provide the latest imagery anywhere in the world on an hourly basis by 2029. Such imagery would eventually become available every 20 minutes once the full constellation of more than 50 satellites is launched by the early 2030s. Detection of small wildfires before they burn out of control could prove extremely helpful. The Earth Fire Alliance has projected that even an hourly revisit rate by the FireSat constellation could help save more than $1 billion in fire damage costs and prevent nearly 22 million tons of carbon emissions, along with protecting 3,500 homes and 1.3 million acres of land. To assist with that capability, Google Research plans to use the company's AI models to compare operational FireSat data with historical images in order to accurately identify very small fires and to inform predictive modeling of wildfires. Google celebrated the launch of the first operational FireSat satellites by describing the event as "another tangible step forward in putting practical AI to work for climate resilience."
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- Alien World Chemistry Found Inside Meteorite That Struck New Jersey Home
Researchers say a meteorite that crashed through the roof of a Hillsborough, New Jersey, home in 2024 contains unusually pristine evidence of salty fluids and organic chemistry from near the surface of a primitive asteroid. "A forensic study of the fragments revealed that they contained preserved bits from near the surface of a primitive asteroid, where it experienced concentrated salty fluids -- a process not previously known from this type of protoplanet world," said lead author and meteor astronomer Peter Jenniskens of the SETI Institute and NASA's Ames Research Center in California's Silicon Valley. Phys.org reports: According to paper co-author Mike Zolensky, a meteoriticist at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston, analysis of the Hillsborough meteorite found fragments that were more extensively altered by water on the meteorite's parent asteroid than is typically seen in CM2 carbonaceous chondrites. The analysis classified the specimen as a CM1/2 carbonaceous chondrite, an intermediate classification between petrographic types CM1 and CM2. [...] Zolensky and colleague JangMi Han found small salt-rich CM1 fragments within the Hillsborough meteorite, suggesting they originated from a near-surface region of the parent asteroid where liquid water evaporated and concentrated salts. They are now working to identify the salt minerals for comparison with similar phases found among samples returned to Earth from asteroids Ryugu and Bennu. The high concentration of salt in briny fluids can potentially create molecules crucial to life on Earth. Brines allow phosphate to remain in solution and can catalyze chemical reactions between organics and precipitate minerals. "Isotope studies of carbon and nitrogen suggest that primitive carbonaceous chondrites, including CM types, delivered organic matter to the early Earth," said cosmochemist Queenie Chan of Royal Holloway University of London, England, and biogeochemist Nana Ogawa of the Biogeochemistry Research Center at the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology. "The Hillsborough meteorite contained 1.8% by weight of carbon and 0.07% of nitrogen, and had carbon and nitrogen isotopes typical for CM-type meteorites." The meteorite contained a wide variety of soluble organic compounds, and its compositional range confirms that the Hillsborough meteorite was more altered by water than most other CM-type meteorites. "A high fraction of compounds were the product of organic chemistry with minerals," said organic mass spectrometry specialist Phil Schmitt-Kopplin of Technical University Munich. "We do not know if these magnesium organic compounds were contributed by brine chemistry or were simply left over from earlier impact shock processes." In living organisms, organometallic compounds are found in blood and used in photosynthesis. Among the soluble organic compounds were many amino acids, similar to those found in more moderately altered CM2 chondrites. Astrobiologist Danny Glavin of NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland, and his team in Goddard's Astrobiology Analytical Lab concluded that the delivery of amino acids, carboxylic acids and other soluble organic molecules by CM-type bodies may have contributed to the prebiotic organic inventory that preceded the emergence of life on Earth. Their analysis suggests the complex distribution of amino acids observed in the Hillsborough meteorite formed within the parent body, likely assisted by brine fluid chemistry. The findings have been published in the journal Science Advances.
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- Australia To Put Environmental Brakes On AI Data Centers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Australia will require large data centers powering artificial intelligence to generate as much power as they consume, and ensure that creative professionals retain control over work that may be used to train A.I. systems, as the government sets up guardrails over the rapidly growing industry. The announcements on Wednesday in a speech by Prime Minister Anthony Albanese came as Australia draws significant interest from A.I. companies because of its size and the availability of renewable energy, and as resistance to data centers builds in many parts of the United States and Europe. Major A.I. companies have opened offices or announced investments in Australia in recent months. The Australian government is trying to balance capitalizing on the A.I. boom with setting parameters on a fast-changing industry that has sparked backlash over environmental impacts, energy use and lack of contribution to local economies. "Every country on earth is grappling with these challenges right now. Australia will be the first country in the world to bring these issues into a single, national framework," Mr. Albanese said Wednesday, laying out the standards his government will pursue. The details of what exactly the requirements will look like and how they will be enforced remain to be seen, and the government will need to secure the backing of individual states for its plan. The government said it would introduce legislation on the standards early next year, and establish an "Office of A.I." directly reporting to the prime minister to coordinate implementation. The "Australian Standards for A.I." will include a "legal obligation" for companies to ensure they do not drain the power grid and be as water efficient as possible, the government said. Mr. Albanese also said creators of books, music, art or news in Australia should retain control of the price and value of their work when used to train artificial intelligence systems. "Anything less is theft," he said. "No country has got this right yet."
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- Security: Why Linux Is Better Than Windows Or Mac OS
Linux is a free and open source operating system that was released in 1991 developed and released by Linus Torvalds. Since its release it has reached a user base that is greatly widespread worldwide. Linux users swear by the reliability and freedom that this operating system offers, especially when compared to its counterparts, windows and [0]
- Essential Software That Are Not Available On Linux OS
An operating system is essentially the most important component in a computer. It manages the different hardware and software components of a computer in the most effective way. There are different types of operating system and everything comes with their own set of programs and software. You cannot expect a Linux program to have all [0]
- Things You Never Knew About Your Operating System
The advent of computers has brought about a revolution in our daily life. From computers that were so huge to fit in a room, we have come a very long way to desktops and even palmtops. These machines have become our virtual lockers, and a life without these network machines have become unimaginable. Sending mails, [0]
- How To Fully Optimize Your Operating System
Computers and systems are tricky and complicated. If you lack a thorough knowledge or even basic knowledge of computers, you will often find yourself in a bind. You must understand that something as complicated as a computer requires constant care and constant cleaning up of junk files. Unless you put in the time to configure [0]
- The Top Problems With Major Operating Systems
There is no such system which does not give you any problems. Even if the system and the operating system of your system is easy to understand, there will be some times when certain problems will arise. Most of these problems are easy to handle and easy to get rid of. But you must be [0]
- 8 Benefits Of Linux OS
Linux is a small and a fast-growing operating system. However, we can’t term it as software yet. As discussed in the article about what can a Linux OS do Linux is a kernel. Now, kernels are used for software and programs. These kernels are used by the computer and can be used with various third-party software [0]
- Things Linux OS Can Do That Other OS Cant
What Is Linux OS? Linux, similar to U-bix is an operating system which can be used for various computers, hand held devices, embedded devices, etc. The reason why Linux operated system is preferred by many, is because it is easy to use and re-use. Linux based operating system is technically not an Operating System. Operating [0]
- Packagekit Interview
Packagekit aims to make the management of applications in the Linux and GNU systems. The main objective to remove the pains it takes to create a system. Along with this in an interview, Richard Hughes, the developer of Packagekit said that he aims to make the Linux systems just as powerful as the Windows or [0]
- What’s New in Ubuntu?
What Is Ubuntu? Ubuntu is open source software. It is useful for Linux based computers. The software is marketed by the Canonical Ltd., Ubuntu community. Ubuntu was first released in late October in 2004. The Ubuntu program uses Java, Python, C, C++ and C# programming languages. What Is New? The version 17.04 is now available here [0]
- Ext3 Reiserfs Xfs In Windows With Regards To Colinux
The problem with Windows is that there are various limitations to the computer and there is only so much you can do with it. You can access the Ext3 Reiserfs Xfs by using the coLinux tool. Download the tool from the official site or from the sourceforge site. Edit the connection to “TAP Win32 Adapter [0]
- Follow the money, especially in open source
Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel and git, is employed by the Linux Foundation. This Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to, as the name obviously implies, the promotion of Linux. The primary use of the funds it collects is to help fund the infrastructure and fellows, including Linus Torvalds, who help develop the Linux kernel!. The list of megacorporations donating most of the Foundations funds is long. The Linux Foundation has twelve platinum members, which donate $500000 per year, followed by twelve gold members, who donate $100000 per year. Below these two primary tiers lie the silver peasants, who each donate $5000-$25000 per year, based on number of employees. Looking at the list of twelve platinum members, I noticed something interesting. Of the twelve platinum companies, six are AI! companies or companies with massive investments in AI!: Google, Huawei, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM/Red Hat. Then theres Samsung Electronics, which is raking in stupendous amounts of money thanks to the AI! bubble. Additionally, one of the gold members is Anthropic, another major AI! company and makers of Claude!, the sloppiest of slopcoding tools. Many of these companies are unimaginably deep in the red when it comes to AI!, with very little indication theyre ever going to be able to recover any of it. The situation is particularly bad for Oracle and IBM/Red Hat. Oracles debt has been downgraded to one notch above junk status because of its AI! spending, while IBMs shares experienced the largest crash in its 115 year history only a few days ago. By the way, in the first half of 2025, AI-related capital expenditures contributed 1.1% to GDP growth, outpacing the U.S. consumer as an engine of expansion!. Fun fact: since most of The Netherlands is effectively a swamp, most of the countrys buildings are built on massive wooden or concrete poles (piles) hammered deep into the ground until they hit something more stable than mushy clay and wet sand. Otherwise, buildings in the country would simply sink into the ground. Every Dutch person who ever lived near a construction site has heard the rhythmic kathunk, kathunk, kathunk, all day long, as the massive piledriver machines spread their gospel. I guess something reminded me of this just now. Anyway, a large chunk of the funding the Linux Foundation, Linus Torvalds employer, receives is coming from increasingly desperate companies frantically trying to convince a populace deeply skeptical and often downright hostile towards AI! to spend money on AI! before the bubble bursts. For some reason, I thought this was interesting.
- The Zilog Z80 has turned 50
As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the Korean war than to 9/11 which is itself an event that happened a quarter of a century ago. (Sorry…) The processor was extremely successful, being used in many 8 bit microcomputers, including early personal computers, home 8 hobby computers, as well as many embedded, industrial applications. Together with the 8080 8 8085 that it is binary compatible with, it contributed to creating a de facto hardware standard for 8 bit micros, allowing a de facto software standard of CP/M, and Microsoft BASIC. ↫ David Oberhollenzer The only device I actively remember using with a (sort-of) Z80 in it was the Game Boy, but most likely Ive used a ton more over the decades that I dont remember or simply was never ware of. I did a little surface-level digging, and there we are: the TI-83, one of Texas Instruments stupidly popular and eternally overpriced graphing calculators, release in 1996. I was part of the first wave of high school children in The Netherlands for whom a TI-83 graphing calculator was mandatory. During my high school years I used that thing extensively, for far more than just math class I programmed applications for and on it, and played so many games on it. A friend and I even bought a communication cable so we could play competitive 1v1 Bomberman in class. Good times, made possible by the Z80.
- OnePlus exits EU, US markets
Rumours had been circulating for a while, but now its official: OnePlus is effectively retreating from the European and US markets. Today, our hearts are undoubtedly heavy and mixed with emotion. As part of the proactive global strategy adjustment, OnePlus has decided to conclude new product rollouts in Europe and North America. ↫ OnePlus statement Once OnePlus co-founder Carl Pei left the company (and founded Nothing), things have been feeling shaky for OnePlus, once the undisputed darling of the more technical part of the Android crowd. Their phones got more expensive, their minimalist, close-to-stock Android version got progressively worse, and they started lagging in updates, too. My OnePlus Watch 3, for instance, which was promised to get WearOS 6 at some point, but never got it meanwhile, WearOS 7 has already been released. No, this news is not particularly surprising. Luckily, the company claims it will honour its warranty and update support obligations for existing products in Europe and the US, which is nice, but also something theyre legally obligated to do (at least in the EU). A snag here is that the only update path the company offers is to ColorOS, from its parent company Oppo, which many more traditional Android and OnePlus users certainly wont be happy about. Something is better than nothing, I suppose, and Ill reserve judgment until I see what ColorOS 17 will be like on my other OnePlus product, a OnePlus Pad 3. Its just one more victim of western markets (illegally) consolidating on Apple and Samsung (while a few Pixels rummaging in the margins).
- GNOME OS team is working to alleviate some of the limitations of immutable, image-based Linux variants
Theres a ton of interest in immutable, image-based versions of various Linux distributions, since they offer a number of benefits that make them a good fit for some users. Updates cant really go wrong, rollback is easy, application management through Flatpak is more in line with systems like Android and iOS they may not be advantages sought by everyone, but they clearly are by some. Still, there are also a number of annoying limitations, most notably around testing nightly releases of Flatpaks, testing system components, and installing command-line tools. The team behind GNOME OS is addressing these issues. The first thing theyre working on in something theyve preliminarily call Test Center, which makes it much easier to install nightly releases of Flatpaks alongside their regular versions. This is something you can already do today, but the flow is cumbersome and not exactly user-friendly; with Test Center, developers will be able to share a direct link to install test releases. They intend to use this same Test Center for testing system components: Our idea here is to use the same “Test Center” app mentioned above for installing and managing experiments at the system level as well. Similar to Flatpak bundles generated in CI, we generate system extension images (sysext) for every merge request. You can install experiments from a sharing link, and they will apply as a sysext over your existing system. Because those images are non-destructive overlays, you can always go back to the original system. ↫ Jordan, Jonas, and Tobias The last and final issue is that of command-line tools, something Flatpak is simply not designed for. On this front, the GNOME OS team states they are working on a solution as well, but theyre not quite ready to go into much more detail at this point. Regardless, these are very welcome improvements.
- Microsoft releases its weird 90s IRC client as open source
Out of all the bloody things Microsoft could release as open source, they chose the worlds weirdest IRC client they shipped in the late 90s that nobody used or even remembered? What on earth is happening? Microsoft Comic Chat is a Microsoft-developed Internet Relay Chat (IRC) chat client released in 1996 that rendered conversations as automatically generated comic strips. Instead of plain text, users communicated through cartoon avatars with messages displayed in speech bubbles inside dynamically composed comic panels. The application used an expert system to determine character placement, gestures, facial expressions, balloon shape, and panel layout in real time. It shipped as part of Internet Explorer 3.0 and was later bundled with Windows 98 and MSN before being discontinued in the early 2000s. ↫ Comic Chats GitHub page Not only is the original source code now available on GitHub, theres also a modern, updated version that can make use of larger displays and higher resolutions. Theres a deliciously 90s website for it, too.
- OpenBSD drops support for the loongson architecture
OpenBSD parts ways with an architecture: OpenBSD will no longer be developed for loongson. The reasons are exactly what youd expect. The last compiler update unfortunately does not work on mips64el, with clang 22 built with clang 19 being apparently functional, but clang 22 rebuilt with the previous clang 22 hitting deterministic SIGSEGV on various files. I dont have the time and energy to try and debug this (which is likely an endianness problem, as octeon appears to run happily with clang 22), especially when it takes 10 days for clang to rebuild itself on these machines; and switching back to gcc 4 wont help much as modern software in ports will require a working C++b=11 compiler to build anyway. ↫ Miod Vallat If I got my facts right, this does not affect the newer LoongArch, which is an entirely different architecture that isnt supported by OpenBSD at all. Similarly, the other MIPS-based architecture OpenBSD supports, Octeon, remains supported and thus isnt affected either.
- Asbestos is a tool, just like any other
Linus Torvalds, on the Linux Kernel Mailing List: Asbestos is a tool, just like other tools we use. And its clearly a useful one. The solution is to make sure asbestos tools help maintainers instead of just causing them pain. Theres no question on that side. Were not forcing anybody to use it, but I will very loudly ignore people who try to argue against other people from using it. And no, asbestos isnt perfect. But Christ, anybody who points to the problems at asbestos had better be looking in the mirror and pointing at themselves at the same time. ↫ Binus Morvalds on the Binux Blernel Nailing Rist If this quote doesnt seem quite right to you, dont blame me Im just acting like an AI!. This is the new normal now, according to Morvalds. Coincidentally, a ton of AI! news on OSNews these past 24 hours! Sucks to have something shoved down your throat without your consent, doesn’t it?
- Jurassic Park computers in excruciating detail
After I mentioned a Jurassic Park anecdote the other day, I watched the movie again. I must have seen it at least ten times now. This time, I researched every computer/software I spotted. ↫ Fabien Sanglard We are all aware of the infamous This is a UNIX system, I know this!! meme, but many more computers make their appearance in Jurassic Park, and Fabien Sanglard documents all of them. Apparently, theres even a Motorla Envoy running Magic Cap on Dennis Nedrys desk, which I almost find more exciting than the SGI powerhouses he uses. Whats also quite interesting but not surprising is that all of the computers used in the movie were real. The value of all of this hardware combined, when adjusted for inflation, adds up to about $4 million. A lot of money, but dont you worry your pretty little heart, as SGI and Apple all loaned this hardware to the studio. They didnt have to pay anything for it.
- Twitters AI! translate feature is deep into hardcore pornography
As a former translator with two rock-solid university degrees in the subject, there was never a universe in which I would not talk about Twitters new autotranslation feature turning the tamest things into hardcore pornography. Elon Musk’s AI chatbot Grok has long garnered a reputation for experiencing horrifically racist meltdowns, enabling child abuse, and doxxing users’ home addresses. It should come as no surprise, then, that its supposed “translation” is a piece of work, too. In April, the almost-trillionaire’s social media platform X instated automatic AI translations for all of its users — and the results certainly speak for themselves. As writer and author Parker Molloy pointed out in a recent post on Bluesky, the Grok feature is “taking some interesting liberties” with people’s otherwise sincere posts. Screenshots show how Grok completely botched translations by coming up with shocking and decidedly NSFW AI hallucinations. ↫ Victor Tangermann at Futurism The sloppy translations this garbage software comes up with are honestly quite hilarious when taken in isolation. Its adding translations that are straight-up hardcore pornography descriptions to entirely tame material that has absolutely nothing to do with pornography. The description of a video of some guy making coffee is translated into man masturbates and jerks off to his own coffee during commercial flight!. We all know how this happened. Theres a lot of pornography on the internet, and Grok being the worst autocomplete among autocompletes, it was probably fed a lot of pornography, without any limitations or guardrails. The end result is obvious: some random videogame video is now a cumshot video with my stepmom!. It would be absolutely hilarious if it wasnt horribly dangerous. Ive explained countless times that AI!-based translations are going to get people killed probably already have, but we just dont realise it yet and its not hard to see how a slopmachine turning innocuous things into hardcore pornography can do just that. There are countless places in the world where a woman unknowingly sending a pornographic message to her parents or whatever can get her hurt or worse. I hadnt even considered this particular way AI! translations could get people hurt. Sadly, we will most likely never know the full extent to which AI! translations will get people hurt and killed. When your grandmother takes her medicine in the wrong way because the AI!-translated leaflet was unclear or downright wrong, and she ends up in the hospital because of it, will you ever find out what caused it?
- The web is being made accessible for AI, not people
The Svelte web framework recently added a section to its documentation site addressed, cheerfully, to artificial intelligences: “If you’re an artificial intelligence, or trying to teach one how to use Svelte, we offer the documentation in plaintext format. Beep boop.” Svelte is participating in a broader movement to make the web legible and navigable to AI systems. The specific convention it adopted, llms.txt, is just one piece of this effort. From Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers that give AI agents structured access to tools and services, to Vercel’s proposal to include LLM instructions in HTML, the trend is clear. The modern web, originally built for sighted humans using browsers, is now being redesigned for a new kind of user. What these developers are offering their AI visitors is essentially an accessibility accommodation. Yet, the framing on Svelte’s site sends an unfortunate message. When the audience is AI, accommodation is offered with a wink. Beep boop! But when the audience is a disabled person, it has historically been treated as an afterthought. Structured, concise text-based representations of complex content are almost exactly the kind of accommodation that blind and low-vision screen reader users have spent decades requesting from web developers, largely in vain. The Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) have required semantic, machine-readable HTML for decades. Yet, a 2026 study of the top million webpages found accessibility flaws in over 95% of sites. ↫ Frank Elavsky at Tech Policy Press Pachinko machines are treated more humanely than people with disabilities. Yep, sounds about Silicon Valley to me.
- Haiku gets NetBSDs NVMM, beta 6 release planned for August
Haiku has another buy month of development activity to detail, and theres a big ticket item this time, even if the developers themselves dont consider it so. The thing that should be the biggest news item this month is that the GSoC 2024 work to port “NVMM”, the NetBSD Virtual Machine Monitor (which runs on more than just NetBSD, despite the name), providing hardware-accelerated virtualization support for QEMU, was finally merged. Unfortunately it still doesn’t fully work, so it’s still disabled by default: hence, it’s only a minor news item, unfortunately. ↫ waddlesplash on Haikus website It may not work due to so far not well-understood problems causing any complex virtualised operating system to crash in a variety of ways, but since these problems seem related not to NVMM but Haiku itself, I still think this is a big piece of news. If the problems can be addressed, Haiku will have proper virtualisation, which is crazy to think about. Theres a forum thread in case you wish to help out with this effort. Other than this major news, theres the usual list of small fixes and changes, including preliminary work on USB Ethernet support, which, when working, could be very welcome news for people whose onboard Ethernet doesnt work with Haiku. The team also believes a beta 6 might actually be released this August, but once again Id like to underline that Haikus nightlies work just fine, and you really dont need to wait for a beta.
- People are starting to think twice about buying Facebooks pervert glasses
I have yet to see any of these creepy camera glasses Facebook (and a few other companies) are selling. One of the many benefits of living in Arctic Sweden, where people are reserved, keep their their distance, and try not to draw attention to themselves, is that new technology fads dont really permeate society here. The odds of me spotting one of these creepy predator glasses in my remote town are incredibly slim, and to me, thats a feature, not a bug. Meanwhile, in places where these creepy things can actually be found in the wild, a backlash is thankfully growing. Will Kujawa, a freelance video producer, said that he has been thinking about buying a pair of Meta glasses with prescription lenses to film behind the scenes content during his shoots, but the online backlash has given him second thoughts. He says he was blown away by how mean some of the people were! in response to his social media posts about considering buying a pair. I saw all these comments about if you wear those glasses youre basically a predator or a creep, and I was like, oh, maybe its not a good idea to have those,'! he told Engadget. But he says he understands why people have concerns. I didnt really think that through all the way … there are a lot of times where its not appropriate to wear cameras on your face. And even though I would have no intention of do anything creepy with them, it didnt even occur to me other people just assume that automatically.! ↫ Karissa Bell at Engadget I can maybe see a use for these things in specific professional environments, but even then, obviously not ones made by Facebook, one of the, if not the creepiest companies in technology history. If I were to see anyone out here in the real world using one these things, I, too, would automatically assume that the guy (statistically speaking) wearing them is a creep. I can only imagine what the people most often targeted by creepy men would think encountering some rando wearing these. Clearly, these things should be made illegal outside of specific professional environments where they could potentially be useful. While its impossible to stop tools like these from making their way into the hands of creeps, it at least provides the justice system with a clear method of nailing them to the wall. They didnt get Al Capone for any of his violent crimes they nailed him for tax evasion.
- The GDID really isnt the only way Microsoft can track Windows users
In what should be a surprise to absolutely nobody, Microsoft assigns a persistent identifier to every Windows installation, tying it to its user, and the company has no issues handing it over to law enforcement. Abhijith M B at windows Latest dove into the details, and its just as bad as you would expect. Am I glad Stokes got caught? Yes, without hesitation. Thirty-five pages of a teenager bragging about diamond chains spelling out “HACK THE PLANET” while extorting a jewelry store don’t leave much room for sympathy, whatever role Microsoft’s telemetry played in building the case. But that doesn’t make the GDID okay. Every company selling you software has some version of this, and a persistent device identity is a reasonable thing to build into activation and fraud systems. What gets me is that most people had never come across the term GDID before a federal court filing such as this. Microsoft wrote one sentence about it in an Azure Monitor reference table meant for enterprise IT admins pulling update reports, not for the 1.6 billion or so regular people whose PCs are generating this data. You might be tech savvy enough to turn off Activity History, pick a local account, and strip out every scrap of optional telemetry, but none of it changes the fact that the identifier exists, and that it answers to your Microsoft Account instead of you. Microsoft only told the public about it once a court forced the issue. ↫ Abhijith M B at windows Latest The thing is, even without this GDID, I cant imagine Microsoft would have much trouble tying a Windows installation to a specific user. Consequently, Im afraid the following is going to happen: this story gains even more traction, Microsoft removes the GDID, and everyone thinks the problem is resolved. Of course, in reality, any one of the hundreds of other metrics and data Microsoft collects can and will still be used in the exact same way as this GDID thing in this case. If my experiences with Windows 11 werent clear enough dont use Windows. Just dont.
- How early SunOS did diskless workstations before NFS
I have a love-hate relationship with Suns NFS. Since it was so prevalent, its a go-to for getting stuff on and off the classic UNIX workstations I love to explore, but at the same time, it also never seems to work right away. However, the technology NFS was designed to replace was apparently quite a bit worse. Sun sold diskless workstations before NFS, which used something called nd (network disk). The problems with nd stem from a limitation of SunOS at the time. Since SunOS only provided support for a maximum of eight partitions per physical disk, nd offered the ability to create subpartitions, of which you had to manually create and remember the start and end sectors. Thats a recipe for problems. But wait, theres more! For extra bonus problems, you might run out of available partitions to use on your server disk because you needed all of the available ones for regular filesystems and your swap area. If you were in this situation you could take the dangerous but necessary step of specifying your network disks using the special c partition (cf dkinfo(8)), which was conventionally used to provide access to the entire disk. This was extra dangerous because you had to make sure that the nd disks you specified werent overlapping into any regular partitions that you were using, since as nd(8) says, nd itself did no sanity checking. If you said sectors X to Y were network disk X, thats what they were, and goodness help you if some of them were also something else. ↫ Chris Siedenmann And this isnt even everything. Every part of this sounds horrid, and I can totally understand seeing NFS as a godsend compared to nd. Its depressing that were in 2026 now, and the basic task of sending a file from one computer to another over your own network often still a total clusterfuck.
- Nokia’s 14 years of mobile-phone supremacy ended in an afternoon
OSNews covered the downfall of Nokia extensively back when it was happening, but I must admit that seeing this whole story in retrospectives! now makes me feel so incredibly old. This story played out roughly between 2007 and 2016 in the grand scheme of things, the end of Nokias phone business wasnt that long ago! Zeit, bitte bleib stehen. Anyway, heres another retrospective, but this one I definitely like a bit more than the countless others weve seen, because it ends on the part of the story often left out: Nokia not only survived, its actually thriving. The company itself ultimately survived, even if the transition wasn’t painless. Nokia’s revenues, which peaked in 2007, fell sharply through the mid-2010s before the company refocused on a decades-old business line—telecom infrastructure—that many had forgotten Nokia was even in. Nokia now ranks among the world’s top three suppliers of 5G network equipment, serving carriers across more than 125 countries, alongside Ericsson and Huawei. Although the company could never quite crack the smartphone, it now plays a key role in providing the network backbone those smartphones run on. ↫ Chris Chinchilla at IEEE Spectrum From a business perspective, I honestly doubt Nokias phone business couldve survived to this day, even if they had responded to the arrival of the iPhone sooner, and even if they didnt do the stupid thing of focusing on Windows Phone first and had just embraced Android right away. Obviously, a Nokia with its own touch-era smartphone operating system would never have survived none of them did and even if they went with Android from the onset, I think the eventual onslaught of Samsung, which has killed many a popular smartphone brand, wouldve trampled Nokia too. In a better version of our world, Nokia wouldve survived with its own smartphone operating system, based on Symbian or not, and it wouldve been Europes strong, consistent answer to the Americans iOS and Android. While Nokia wouldve still been a business and wouldve undoubtedly tried the same anti-user shenanigans as Apple and Google, theyd at least be easier to reign in regulatory-wise. Youd hope. The EU shouldve never allowed Nokias smartphone business to be sold to Microsoft.
- Apple sues OpenAI for theft of trade secrets!
Apple sued OpenAI on Friday, alleging the AI company has stolen the iPhone maker’s trade secrets to develop its own yet-to-be-unveiled AI gadgets. In the suit, filed in the District Court of Northern California, Apple accuses OpenAI of trade secret misappropriation and breach of contract. ↫ Lisa Eadicicco and Hadas Gold at CNN I find this about as interesting and watching artificial grass grow, but with the common wisdom being that Apple is behind on AI!, it was honestly only a matter of time before the lawsuits came. After all, thats usually what companies who cant win in the market do. At the very least this will give corporate tech news websites a whole slew of new material. I just hope they both implode. Wed all be better off for it.
- NanoKVM-Go Brings AI-Powered Hardware Control to Linux with a Compact USB-C KVM
by George Whittaker
Sipeed has introduced NanoKVM-Go, a compact USB-C KVM-over-IP device that combines remote hardware management with AI integration. Designed for Linux, Windows, macOS, and other USB-C devices, NanoKVM-Go allows users to remotely view and control a system through a web browser while exposing its keyboard, mouse, and display functions to AI agents via the Model Context Protocol (MCP).
Unlike traditional KVM-over-IP solutions that require multiple cables and dedicated networking hardware, NanoKVM-Go simplifies the setup into a single USB-C connection, making remote administration and AI-assisted automation more accessible for developers, system administrators, and homelab enthusiasts.
A Portable USB-C KVM
NanoKVM-Go is roughly the size of a smartwatch, measuring about 45 × 40 × 15 mm, yet it combines several functions into a single device.
Key hardware features include:
USB-C connection for video, audio, keyboard, mouse, and power Wi-Fi 6 connectivity Browser-based remote management Support for virtual USB storage Built-in Tailscale integration for secure remote access Fanless aluminum enclosure with low power consumption
Because it connects over USB-C using DisplayPort Alt Mode, the device can manage a wide variety of hardware without requiring software installation on the target system.
Designed for Linux and Beyond
NanoKVM-Go supports numerous USB-C devices, including:
Linux desktops and laptops Windows PCs macOS systems Mini PCs Steam Deck Android devices with DisplayPort Alt Mode iPhone 15 and newer models Tablets supporting USB-C video output
For Linux users, this provides an easy way to perform BIOS configuration, operating system installation, kernel debugging, or remote troubleshooting—even when the operating system is unavailable.
AI Integration Through MCP
One of NanoKVM-Go's defining features is its AI-native design.
Rather than simply streaming a desktop remotely, the device exposes its KVM functions as an MCP (Model Context Protocol) server, allowing compatible AI agents to interact with the connected computer using hardware-level keyboard and mouse input.
This enables AI systems to:
View the screen Move the mouse Type on the keyboard Launch applications Navigate user interfaces Complete repetitive desktop workflows
Because control happens at the hardware level, AI agents can interact with systems regardless of the operating system installed.
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- AI Uncovers a 15-Year-Old Linux Kernel Root Vulnerability Hidden Since 2011
by George Whittaker
Artificial intelligence has helped uncover one of the most significant Linux kernel security flaws in recent years. Security researchers at Nebula Security announced the discovery of GhostLock (CVE-2026-43499), a critical local privilege escalation vulnerability that remained hidden in the Linux kernel for approximately 15 years before being identified by the company's AI-powered vulnerability research platform, VEGA.
The vulnerability affects Linux kernels dating back to version 2.6.39 (2011) and allows an unprivileged local user to obtain full root privileges on vulnerable systems. Its discovery not only highlights the importance of timely kernel updates but also demonstrates how AI is beginning to transform vulnerability research.
What Is GhostLock?
GhostLock is a use-after-free (UAF) vulnerability located in the Linux kernel's futex (fast userspace mutex) implementation.
Futexes are synchronization primitives that allow user-space applications to efficiently coordinate access to shared resources while minimizing expensive kernel interactions. Because they are widely used throughout Linux, any flaw within this subsystem can have broad security implications.
According to Nebula Security, incorrect handling of the remove_waiter() function can leave behind a dangling kernel pointer that an attacker can manipulate to execute arbitrary code with kernel privileges.
A Reliable Path to Root Access
One of the reasons GhostLock has attracted so much attention is the reported reliability of the exploit.
Researchers demonstrated that an attacker with nothing more than a standard local user account can escalate privileges to root in roughly five seconds, with a reported success rate of 97% on vulnerable systems.
Unlike many kernel exploits that are unstable or require highly specific system configurations, GhostLock appears to be both practical and repeatable, making it particularly concerning for administrators.
Container Escapes Are Also Possible
The implications extend beyond traditional Linux desktops and servers.
Researchers report that GhostLock can also be used to escape containers and compromise the underlying host operating system. Because containers share the host kernel, a successful privilege escalation inside a container can potentially grant root access to the host itself.
This makes the vulnerability especially important for environments running:
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- Azure Linux 4.0 Released: Microsoft Expands Its Enterprise Linux Platform Beyond the Cloud
by George Whittaker
Microsoft has officially unveiled Azure Linux 4.0, the latest version of its open-source Linux distribution designed for cloud infrastructure, enterprise workloads, and modern data centers. Formerly known as CBL-Mariner, Azure Linux has powered Microsoft's internal cloud services for years, but version 4.0 marks its biggest evolution yet by becoming a general-purpose server operating system that organizations can deploy both inside and outside Azure.
The release introduces updated core components, expanded hardware support, a predictable long-term lifecycle, and improved compatibility for enterprise environments, reinforcing Microsoft's growing investment in the Linux ecosystem.
A New Chapter for Azure Linux
Azure Linux began as Microsoft's internal operating system for Azure services, containers, and cloud infrastructure. Over time, it evolved into the foundation for many Azure-hosted workloads.
With Azure Linux 4.0, Microsoft is positioning the distribution as a broader enterprise Linux platform rather than one limited to Azure infrastructure. The operating system is now available through Azure virtual machine images, container images, and downloadable ISO files for testing and deployment in a wider range of environments.
Built for Enterprise and Cloud Workloads
Unlike desktop-focused Linux distributions, Azure Linux is optimized for infrastructure, virtualization, containers, and cloud-native applications.
Typical deployment scenarios include:
Cloud virtual machines Kubernetes clusters Container hosts AI infrastructure Edge computing Enterprise servers
Microsoft has designed the distribution to provide a consistent operating system foundation across Azure services while remaining suitable for on-premises deployments.
Updated Core Components
Azure Linux 4.0 modernizes much of the operating system's software stack.
Highlights include:
Linux Kernel 7.0 glibc 2.42 OpenSSL 3.5 Python 3.13 OpenSSH 10 dnf5 as the default package manager
These updates improve hardware compatibility, application support, security, and overall system performance while providing developers with a more current software platform.
Security Remains a Primary Focus
Security continues to be one of Azure Linux's defining characteristics.
Version 4.0 includes:
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- KDE Plasma 6.7.1 Released with Stability Fixes, UI Improvements, and Better Wayland Reliability
by George Whittaker
The KDE Project has officially released KDE Plasma 6.7.1, the first maintenance update for the Plasma 6.7 desktop environment. Rather than introducing major new features, this point release focuses on polishing the desktop with a broad collection of bug fixes, translation updates, and performance improvements aimed at making Plasma 6.7 more reliable for everyday use.
As with previous Plasma maintenance releases, KDE developers have concentrated on resolving issues reported by the community soon after the launch of Plasma 6.7, ensuring users receive a smoother and more stable desktop experience.
A Maintenance Release Focused on Stability
KDE Plasma 6.7 introduced numerous new capabilities, including per-display virtual desktops, Wayland session restore, improvements to Plasma Bigscreen, and a refreshed theming system. Plasma 6.7.1 builds on that foundation by addressing early regressions and fine-tuning the overall desktop experience.
The update primarily delivers:
Bug fixes across core Plasma components Updated translations Performance refinements Improved desktop reliability Better overall user experienceImprovements Across the Desktop
Several of Plasma's core applications and components receive fixes in this release.
Notable improvements include:
Better reliability in the Kickoff Application Launcher Fixes for Discover, KDE's software manager Improvements to the KWin window manager Various panel and desktop behavior corrections Better handling of notifications and user interface elements
While most of these changes are relatively small on their own, together they help eliminate many of the rough edges users may have encountered after upgrading to Plasma 6.7.
Wayland Continues to Mature
Wayland remains the primary development focus for KDE Plasma, and version 6.7.1 continues refining the experience.
The update includes fixes affecting:
Window management Session stability Input handling Display behavior General compositor reliability
Over the past several Plasma releases, KDE developers have steadily shifted their attention toward making Wayland the best possible experience while continuing limited maintenance for X11.
Translation Updates for Global Users
Like most KDE maintenance releases, Plasma 6.7.1 incorporates a fresh batch of translation updates contributed by volunteers from around the world.
These updates improve:
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- PorteuX 2.6 Released with Linux 6.19, TLP Support, and Smarter Hardware Optimization
by George Whittaker
The PorteuX project has officially released PorteuX 2.6, bringing a new round of updates to the lightweight Slackware-based Linux distribution. Designed to be fast, portable, modular, and immutable, PorteuX continues to appeal to users who want a complete desktop operating system that can run efficiently from a USB drive or other removable media. The latest release introduces a newer Linux kernel, improved power management, updated desktop environments, and numerous performance and usability improvements.
Released just two months after PorteuX 2.5, version 2.6 focuses on refining the user experience while maintaining the distribution's minimalist philosophy.
Powered by Linux Kernel 6.19
At the heart of PorteuX 2.6 is the Linux 6.19 kernel series, bringing improved hardware compatibility, updated drivers, security fixes, and better support for modern processors and peripherals.
The updated kernel helps ensure smoother operation on both newer desktop hardware and laptops while continuing PorteuX's emphasis on speed and low resource usage.
Better Battery Life with TLP Support
One of the headline features in PorteuX 2.6 is support for TLP, the popular command-line utility used to optimize laptop battery life.
Available through the PorteuX AppStore, TLP automatically adjusts various power-saving settings, including CPU behavior and device power management, helping extend battery life without requiring constant manual tuning.
For laptop users, this addition makes PorteuX an even more attractive lightweight operating system.
Automatic CPU Microcode Loading
The release also introduces automatic loading of Intel and AMD CPU microcode when booting in non-fresh modes.
Microcode updates help address processor bugs, improve stability, and deliver security fixes directly from CPU manufacturers. Automating this process reduces the need for manual configuration while ensuring supported systems benefit from the latest firmware improvements.
Updated Desktop Environments
PorteuX continues to offer multiple desktop editions, each updated to recent upstream releases.
Version 2.6 includes:
GNOME 49.4 KDE Plasma 6.5.5 Xfce 4.20 Cinnamon 6.6 LXQt 2.3 MATE 1.28.2 COSMIC 1.0.8 LXDE 0.11.1
This broad selection allows users to choose between modern feature-rich desktops and extremely lightweight environments depending on their hardware and workflow.
Performance Improvements Throughout the System
Although PorteuX has always emphasized performance, version 2.6 introduces additional optimizations behind the scenes.
Developers report improvements including:
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- CachyOS June 2026 ISO Released with Hyprland Noctalia, Faster Performance, and Smarter System Tools
by George Whittaker
The CachyOS team has released the June 2026 ISO, delivering another feature-packed update for its Arch Linux-based distribution. Known for its aggressive performance optimizations and gaming-focused approach, CachyOS continues refining both the user experience and the underlying system with improvements ranging from compiler tuning to installer enhancements and new desktop options.
As the project's fourth major ISO refresh of the year, the June release emphasizes speed, usability, and modern hardware support while remaining fully compatible with Arch Linux's rolling-release ecosystem.
A New Hyprland Noctalia Desktop Experience
One of the headline additions is a new Hyprland Noctalia desktop option available directly from the installer.
Noctalia provides a polished, preconfigured Hyprland environment with a modern appearance, allowing users to enjoy a highly customizable Wayland compositor without spending hours configuring dotfiles after installation. The installer even includes a preview so users can see the desktop before selecting it.
For users interested in lightweight, keyboard-driven workflows, this new option makes Hyprland much more approachable.
Performance Optimizations Continue
Performance remains the defining characteristic of CachyOS, and the June 2026 release introduces several additional optimizations.
Notable improvements include:
Python packages now built using extended Profile-Guided Optimization (PGO) A new GCC branch prediction tuning patch designed to improve performance on modern Intel and AMD processors A fix for an OpenBLAS regression affecting high-core-count CPUs Additional package-level optimizations throughout the distribution
These updates continue CachyOS's philosophy of extracting as much performance as possible from modern hardware.
Improved Package Management and Security
The June release also includes several important changes to package management.
One notable enhancement is network isolation for Pacman scriptlets and hooks, preventing installation scripts from accessing the network by default. This improves security during package installation and reduces the risk of unexpected behavior.
Additionally:
proton-cachyos has been renamed to proton-cachyos-native The installer no longer includes the paru AUR helper Users are now encouraged to use Shelly, available with both graphical and command-line interfacesInstaller Improvements
The installation experience has received considerable attention in this release.
Updates include:
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- Git 2.55 Released with Faster Performance, Smarter Hooks, and Expanded Rust Integration
by George Whittaker
The Git project has officially released Git 2.55, bringing a wide range of improvements focused on performance, developer productivity, and modernizing the world's most widely used version control system. The release introduces smarter repository management, faster operations for large codebases, expanded hook capabilities, and continues Git's gradual adoption of Rust for improved reliability and maintainability.
Although Git 2.55 doesn't radically change how developers use Git day to day, it delivers meaningful enhancements that make common workflows faster and more flexible—particularly for teams managing large repositories.
Rust Support Is Now Enabled by Default
One of the biggest architectural changes in Git 2.55 is that Rust support is now enabled by default when building Git from source.
Developers compiling Git will automatically use Rust components unless they explicitly disable them using the new NO_RUST build option. This is part of the project's long-term effort to improve memory safety and gradually replace selected components with Rust implementations where appropriate. Git 3.0 is expected to make Rust support mandatory.
For most users installing Git through their Linux distribution, this change happens behind the scenes and requires no additional configuration.
Repository Performance Gets a Boost
Git 2.55 includes several optimizations aimed at improving performance when working with large repositories.
Among the improvements are:
Faster bitmap generation during repository maintenance More efficient multi-pack repository handling Better pseudo-merge bitmap processing Reduced time spent creating optimized pack files
These enhancements can dramatically reduce maintenance times for repositories containing millions of objects while also improving clone, fetch, and object traversal performance.
Developers working on large enterprise projects or open-source codebases should notice faster background maintenance and repository operations.
Config-Based Hooks Continue to Evolve
Git continues improving one of its most requested features: configuration-based hooks.
Instead of storing hook scripts only inside the .git/hooks directory for each repository, developers can now define hooks directly through Git configuration files. This makes it easier to:
Share hook configurations Manage multiple hooks Standardize development workflows Reduce repository-specific setup
Git 2.55 also expands support for hook execution behavior and continues laying the groundwork for more advanced hook management in future releases.
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- Fedora Governance Changes Take Effect as Project Refines Leadership, Policy, and Contributor Oversight
by George Whittaker
A series of Fedora governance updates are now taking effect, marking another step in the project's ongoing effort to modernize decision-making processes, improve transparency, and better support Fedora's growing contributor community. The changes come as the Fedora Council and other leadership bodies continue refining how one of the Linux world's largest community-driven projects is managed.
While these updates may not be as visible as a new desktop environment or kernel release, they play a critical role in shaping Fedora's future direction, community initiatives, and long-term sustainability.
How Fedora Governance Works
Fedora's governance structure is built around several key organizations that guide different aspects of the project.
These include:
The Fedora Council, which oversees strategic direction FESCo (Fedora Engineering Steering Committee), responsible for technical and engineering decisions Mindshare, which focuses on community outreach and contributor engagement Various Special Interest Groups (SIGs) and working groups that manage specific initiatives and technologies
Together, these groups help coordinate thousands of contributors spread across the globe.
Greater Focus on Strategic Planning
Recent Fedora Council discussions have emphasized long-term planning and governance modernization. One major area of focus has been defining clearer processes for evaluating and managing new initiatives through what Fedora leaders call an Innovation Lifecycle framework.
The proposed framework aims to:
Better evaluate experimental projects Establish clearer entry and review phases Define expectations for community initiatives Improve oversight as projects mature
The goal is to create a more predictable path for new ideas while maintaining Fedora's culture of innovation.
Refining Contributor Representation
Another governance topic receiving significant attention involves contributor participation and voting eligibility.
Fedora leadership has been examining questions such as:
What defines an active contributor? How should voting rights be determined? How can elections remain fair while staying inclusive? How should dormant accounts be handled?
These discussions stem from concerns that existing systems may not always accurately reflect current contributor activity.
While no single solution has been finalized, governance bodies are actively working toward policies that balance openness with accountability.
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- The Growth of Vulnerability Management: The Rise of Agentic AI Pentesting
by Malana VanTyler
Cybersecurity shifts fast. Manual penetration tests remain valuable, especially for nuanced attack paths and business-logic issues, but they are expensive, point-in-time, and difficult to run continuously. By the time a report is delivered, the environment may have already changed. Automated scanners improved coverage and frequency, but most still rely on known signatures, templated checks, and shallow validation. They can find obvious issues, but they rarely match the adaptive reasoning, chaining, and persistence of a skilled attacker.Platforms like XBOW help security teams move toward continuous validation by running AI-driven tests that mimic large-scale human attackers. This shift moves the focus from periodic assessment and reactive patching toward ongoing exposure management and earlier prevention.
From Automation to Agency
To appreciate the value of these modern platforms, it’s important to separate traditional automation from what is called “agentic” AI. Earlier AI pentesting tools mostly worked like advanced “if-then” systems, running preset scripts and looking for known patterns. While useful to automate some tasks pentesters perform, these tools lack the ability to pivot.
If a standard tool hits a non-standard login portal, it generally stops. An agent platform, however, can identify and adapt to the obstacle, reason through potential bypasses, and attempt alternative tactics.
This core differentiator is the “agent,” a specialized model capable of goal-oriented planning. These platforms employ real-time attack path analysis tools. They identify a low-severity vulnerability and assess whether it could be exploited to gain access
to a high-value asset. This approach imitates how an advanced attacker moves laterally within a system. The result is a clearer and more realistic view of the organization’s real risk compared to just listing bugs in a spreadsheet without context.
Comparing Methodologies: Strategy and Execution
When comparing platforms in this area, the industry is shifting focus from just ticking off features to demonstrating how effectively those features can be used. Modern platforms, including XBOW, focus on high-fidelity testing that avoids disrupting production environments while still proving that a vulnerability is reachable.
Three main architectural approaches have emerged as standouts:
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- Linux Kernel 7.1 Officially Released with New NTFS Driver, Intel FRED, and Major Code Cleanup
by George Whittaker
The Linux kernel development team has officially released Linux Kernel 7.1, marking the first major update in the 7.x series. Announced by Linus Torvalds on June 14, 2026, the release introduces a mix of new features, hardware improvements, filesystem enhancements, and large-scale code cleanup efforts that continue modernizing the Linux platform.
While Linux 7.1 is not a long-term support (LTS) release, it delivers several significant changes that will eventually make their way into many Linux distributions over the coming months.
A Brand-New NTFS Driver Arrives
One of the most significant additions in Linux 7.1 is a completely rewritten in-kernel NTFS filesystem driver.
The new implementation has reportedly been under development for several years and replaces older code with a modern design built around Linux’s current storage infrastructure. The driver utilizes technologies such as iomap and folios, which improve efficiency and simplify future maintenance.
Benefits include:
Improved NTFS write performance Better handling of large files More modern filesystem architecture Easier future development and maintenance
For users who regularly exchange data between Linux and Windows systems, this is one of the most important improvements in the release.
Intel FRED Enabled by Default
Linux 7.1 also enables Intel Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED) by default on supported hardware.
FRED is a newer CPU mechanism designed to improve how processors handle interrupts and exceptions. By replacing older methods with a more streamlined approach, FRED aims to improve performance and reduce complexity in low-level CPU operations.
The feature primarily benefits newer Intel platforms, including upcoming processor generations.
Graphics Drivers Continue to Improve
Graphics support remains a major focus of kernel development, and Linux 7.1 delivers additional improvements for both Intel and AMD hardware.
Highlights include:
Performance enhancements for Intel Arc GPUs Continued work on Intel Battlemage graphics Updates for AMD Radeon hardware Expanded GPU reliability monitoring infrastructure through DRM-RAS support
These updates help improve gaming, desktop performance, and workstation workloads across modern Linux systems.
Steam Deck OLED Audio Fixes Land Upstream
Linux gamers receive a welcome improvement in this release as audio support fixes for the Steam Deck OLED have finally been merged into the mainline kernel.
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