All the News that Matters

• Date bug affects Ubuntu 25.10 automatic updates
  The Ubuntu Project has announcedthat a bug in the Rust-based uutils version of thedate command shipped with Ubuntu 25.10 broke automaticupdates:
  
  Some Ubuntu 25.10 systems have been unable to automatically checkfor available software updates. Affected machines include clouddeployments, container images, Ubuntu Desktop and Ubuntu Serverinstalls.
  
  The announcement includes remediation instructions for thoseaffected by the bug. Systems with the rust-coreutils packageversion 0.2.2-0ubuntu2 or earlier have the bug, it is fixed in0.2.2-0ubuntu2.1 or later. It does not impact manual updates using theapt command or other utilities.
  
  Ubuntu embarked on a project to "oxidize" the distribution byswitching to uutils and sudo-rsfor the 25.10 release, and to see if the Rust-based utilities would besuitable for the long-term-release slated for next April. LWN covered that project inMarch.
  
  
  

• Three new stable kernels for Thursday
  Greg Kroah-Hartman has released the 6.17.5, 6.12.55, and 6.6.114 stable kernels. As usual, eachcontains important fixes throughout the tree; users are advised toupgrade.
  
  
  

• [$] Safer speculation-free user-space access
  The Spectre class of hardware vulnerabilities truly is a gift that keeps ongiving. New variants are still being discovered in current CPUs nearlyeight years after the disclosure of thisproblem, and developers are still working to minimize the performance coststhat come from defending against it. The masked user-space accessmechanism is a case in point: it reduces the cost of defending against somespeculative attacks, but it brought some challenges of its own that areonly now being addressed.

• Btrfs support coming to AlmaLinux 10.1
  The AlmaLinux project has announcedthat the upcoming 10.1 release will include support forBtrfs:
  
  Btrfs support encompasses both kernel and userspace enablement, andit is now possible to install AlmaLinux OS with a Btrfs filesystemfrom the very beginning. Initial enablement was scoped to theinstaller and storage management stack, and broader support within theAlmaLinux software collection for Btrfs features is forthcoming.
  
  Btrfs support in AlmaLinux OS did not happen in isolation. This wasproposed and scoped in RFC 0005, and has been built upon prior effortsby the FedoraBtrfs SIG in Fedora Linux and the CentOS Hyperscale SIGin CentOS Stream.
  
  AlmaLinux OS is designed to be binary compatible with Red HatEnterprise Linux (RHEL); Btrfs, however, has never been supported inRHEL. A technology preview of Btrfs in RHEL 6 and 7 ended with thefilesystem being dropped from RHEL 8 andonward. AlmaLinux OS 10.1 is currentlyin beta.
  
  
  

• Security updates for Thursday
  Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (ipa, kernel, and thunderbird), Debian (gdk-pixbuf, gegl, gimp, intel-microcode, raptor2, request-tracker4, and request-tracker5), Fedora (samba and wireshark), Mageia (haproxy, nginx, openssl, and python-django), Oracle (kernel and thunderbird), Red Hat (redis and redis:7), Slackware (bind), SUSE (aws-cli, local-npm-registry, python-boto3, python- botocore, python-coverage, python-flaky, python-pluggy, python-pytest, python- pytest-cov, python-pytest-html, python-pytest-metada, cargo-audit-advisory-db-20251021, fetchmail, git-bug, ImageMagick, istioctl, kernel, krb5, libsoup, libxslt, python-Authlib, and sccache), and Ubuntu (bind9, linux, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.8, linux-gcp, linux-gkeop, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-6.8, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-6.8, linux-oracle, linux-azure, linux-azure-5.15, linux-gcp-5.15, linux-gcp-6.8, linux-gke, linux-nvidia, linux-nvidia-6.8, linux-nvidia-lowlatency, and linux-realtime, linux-realtime-6.8).

• [$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for October 23, 2025
  Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:
  Front: Git 3.0 topics; Lazy imports for Python; RubyGems; LLMs for patch review; DebugFS. Briefs: Fedora AI policy; OpenBSD 7.8; DigiKam 8.8.0; Forgejo 13.0; KDE Plasma 6.5; RubyGems; Valkey 9.0.0; Quotes; ... Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

• Fedora Council approves AI-assisted contributions policy
  The Fedora Council has approvedan AI-assistedcontributions policy. This follows severalweeks of discussion, some of which was covered by LWN onOctober 1. The final policy contains substantial differences fromthe initialproposal, and now requires disclosure of AI tools "when thesignificant part of the contribution is taken from a tool withoutchanges".
  
  
  

• KDE Plasma 6.5 released
  KDE Plasma6.5 has been released. Notable newfeatures include automatic light-to-dark theme switching based ontime of day, support for the experimental Wayland picture-in-picture protocol,as well as a number of usabilityand accessibilityimprovements. See the completechangelog for a list of the new features, enhancements,and bug fixes.
  
  
  

• [$] DebugFS on Rust
  DebugFS is the kernel's anything-goes, no-rules interface: whenever a kerneldeveloper needs quick access to internal details of the kernel to debug aproblem, or to implement an experimental control interface,they can expose them via DebugFS. This is possible because DebugFS is not subjectto the normal rules for user-space-interface stability, nor to the rules aboutexposing sensitive kernel information. Supporting DebugFS in Rust drivers is animportant step toward being able to debug real drivers on real hardware. MatthewMaurer spoke atKangrejos 2025 about his recently mergedDebugFS bindings for Rust.
  

• OpenBSD 7.8 released
  OpenBSD 7.8 has beenreleased. As usual, this release includes a long list of changes; seethe changelog forall of the details.
  
  
  

• Security updates for Wednesday
  Security updates have been issued by Fedora (inih, mingw-exiv2, and mod_http2), SUSE (ffmpeg-4, kernel, libqt5-qtbase, protobuf, python-ldap, and python313), and Ubuntu (erlang, ffmpeg, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-oem-6.14, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-6.14, linux-raspi, linux-realtime, linux-aws, linux-azure, linux-azure-6.14, linux-azure-nvidia-6.14, linux-azure-fips, linux-oracle-5.4, and linux-realtime-6.14).

• Valkey 9.0.0 released
  Version9.0.0 of the Valkey distributed key-value database has beenreleased. Notable features of this release include Multipath TCP(MPTCP) support, new filters forclient commands, multi-databasesupport for cluster mode and much more. See the Valkey 9.0.0 RC1release notes for a full list of new features in this majorrelease.
  
  According to a recent blog post, thisrelease includes major improvements to performance and scaling ofValkey clusters to more than 2,000 nodes and one billion requests persecond. Valkey began as afork of the Redis key-value database in March 2024, but hasevolved separately since then.
  
  
  

• [$] Git considers SHA-256, Rust, LLMs, and more
  The Git source-code management system is a foundational tool upon whichmuch of the free-software community is based. For many people, Git simplyworks, though perhaps in quirky ways, so the activity of its developmentcommunity may not often appear on their radar. There is a lot happening inthe Git world at the moment, though, as the project works toward a 3.0release sometime in 2026. Topics of interest in the Git community includethe SHA-256 transition, the introduction of code written in Rust, and howthe project should view contributions created with the assistance of largelanguage models.

• DigiKam 8.8.0 released
  Version8.8.0 of the digiKam photo-management system has been released."This version delivers significant improvements in performance,stability, and user experience, with a particular focus on imageprocessing, color management, and workflow efficiency". Changesinclude an import/export feature for tag hierarchies, focus-pointvisualization for some camera models, automatic use of the monitor colorprofile, and a background-blur tool.

• Security updates for Tuesday
  Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (.NET 8.0, firefox, kernel, kernel-rt, libssh, and perl-JSON-XS), Debian (ark and libphp-adodb), Fedora (chromium and gi-docgen), Mageia (quictls), Oracle (.NET 8.0, .NET 9.0, firefox, httpd, kernel, libsoup3, libssh, microcode_ctl, and webkit2gtk3), SUSE (go1.24, go1.25, krb5, python-ldap, and webkit2gtk3), and Ubuntu (gst-plugins-base1.0, linux, linux-aws, linux-gcp, linux-gke, linux-gkeop, linux-hwe-5.15, linux-ibm, linux-ibm-5.15, linux-lowlatency, linux-lowlatency-hwe-5.15, linux-nvidia, linux-oracle, linux-oracle-5.15, linux-xilinx-zynqmp, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-gcp-fips, linux-intel-iot-realtime, linux-realtime, and python-ldap).

Linux Insider"LinuxInsider"

• Open-Source Model Near Breaking Point Despite Trillions in Value
  A coalition of open-source stewards warns that the software industry’s reliance on goodwill to maintain critical infrastructure is unsustainable, despite open source fueling trillions in global economic value. The post Open-Source Model Near Breaking Point Despite Trillions in Value appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• The Linux Foundation Expands Agentic AI Push With Third Major Project
  The Linux Foundation has launched its third major agentic AI initiative in three months, designed to secure communication, enhance interoperability, and drive open-source innovation in multi-agent environments. The post The Linux Foundation Expands Agentic AI Push With Third Major Project appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• TuxCare’s In-Memory CVE Scanner Enhances Linux Security With Radar
  TuxCare Radar is an in-memory CVE scanner that reduces false positives, speeds compliance, and delivers real-time Linux vulnerability detection. The post TuxCare’s In-Memory CVE Scanner Enhances Linux Security With Radar appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Linux Patch Blind Spot Exposes Critical Cybersecurity Risks
  Linux patch delays leave enterprises exposed to long-standing vulnerabilities. Experts warn automation and consistent management are essential to closing this critical security gap. The post Linux Patch Blind Spot Exposes Critical Cybersecurity Risks appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• The Year of the Linux Desktop? This Time, the Data Says Yes
  Linux is making real gains on the desktop. New data shows its market share passing 5% in the U.S., signaling a long-awaited breakthrough. The post The Year of the Linux Desktop? This Time, the Data Says Yes appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• From Kernel to Cloud: Open Source Takes On Security Trade-Offs
  Open-source systems are adopting live patching and isolation technologies to support always-on security and meet enterprise compliance demands in the cloud. The post From Kernel to Cloud: Open Source Takes On Security Trade-Offs appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Kubernetes Cost Optimization May Be Doing More Harm Than Good
  Slashing Kubernetes costs sounds smart — until it backfires. Here’s how to reduce spend safely while improving platform stability and speed. The post Kubernetes Cost Optimization May Be Doing More Harm Than Good appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Is a Security Baseline Enough for Open-Source Software?
  The OpenSSF’s new baseline sets minimum security expectations for open-source projects — but not all developers agree it’s practical, scalable, or sufficient. The post Is a Security Baseline Enough for Open-Source Software? appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• DOD Raises Software Security Expectations With SWFT Initiative
  Open-source software may be in the crosshairs of military and government agencies as the U.S. Department of Defense evaluates the risks of both free and proprietary software. The post DOD Raises Software Security Expectations With SWFT Initiative appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Edera and CIQ Advance Linux Security With Hardened Tools
  With Edera Protect and CIQ's RLC-H, open-source innovators are redefining Linux security through stronger isolation and proactive threat defense. The post Edera and CIQ Advance Linux Security With Hardened Tools appeared first on LinuxInsider.

• Excel is three sheets to the window on iOS as update borks everything
  iPhone and iPad users vexed by denial of spreadsheets
  Microsoft Excel for the past week has been hanging or crashing on iOS and iPadOS devices, to customers' great annoyance.…
  

• Norks droning on about your dream job while pwning your PC
  Social engineering? Check. Trojanized open source? Check. Lazarus’ pet RAT? Also check
  North Korea's Lazarus Group has successfully compromised Europe's unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) sector with its Operation DreamJob campaign, which promises job seekers lucrative employment opportunities - but then delivers a malware-laced offer and a compromised computer.…
  

• Give Europe some space! 3 companies join forces to reach for the stars
  Airbus, Leonardo and Thales seek to 'strengthen Europe’s strategic autonomy in space'
  Three European aerospace giants plan to combine their space units into a single heavyweight, hoping to boost the continent's space autonomy.…
  

• Blinded by the light: Tesla fixes glaringly bright Cybertruck headlights
  Plus: Model 3/Y recall over battery-pack contactors that can cut drive power
  Feeling a bit blinded by the light when a Cybertruck rolls by? It's not just you — Tesla's recalling most built to date because the boxy pickup's front parking lights are too bright.…
  

• Trump's workforce cuts blamed as America's cyber edge dulls
  The Cyberspace Solarium Commission says years of progress are being undone amid current administration's cuts
  America's once-ambitious cyber defences are starting to rust, according to the latest annual report from the US Cyberspace Solarium Commission (CSC), which warns that policy momentum has slowed and even slipped backwards thanks to Trump-era workforce and budget cuts.…
  

• Microsoft suggests temporary registry hack for stricken smart card users
  When is an issue not an issue? When it's intentional
  Microsoft accidentally broke several things in the October 2025 Windows Update, but smart card authentication was not one of them. That was intentionally broken, and the temporary workaround requires a registry hack.…
  

• Apple's ultra-thin iPhone flops as foldable iPad hits a crease
  Weak demand for iPhone Air and delays to a costly foldable tablet suggest Cupertino's hardware experiments are struggling
  Apple's run of hardware experiments appears to be hitting some turbulence: The company's ultra-thin iPhone Air has reportedly failed to catch on with buyers, while its long-awaited foldable iPad is slipping further down the calendar amid engineering snags and soaring costs.…
  

• Fedora council approves policy allowing AI-assisted contributions
  Intense discussion approves AI – but subject to full responsibility and disclosure
  The Fedora Council has approved AI-assisted contributions to its Linux distribution, following intense debate and subject to strict conditions.…
  

• Google nukes 3,000 YouTube videos that sowed malware disguised as cracked software
  Check Point helps exorcise vast 'Ghost Network' that used fake tutorials to push infostealers
  Google has taken down thousands of YouTube videos that were quietly spreading password-stealing malware disguised as cracked software and game cheats.…
  

• A single DNS race condition brought Amazon's cloud empire to its knees
  Fault in DynamoDB system cascaded through AWS services, knocking major sites offline for hours
  Amazon has published a detailed postmortem explaining how a critical fault in DynamoDB's DNS management system cascaded into a day-long outage that disrupted major websites and services across multiple brands – with damage estimates potentially reaching hundreds of billions of dollars.…
  

• SAP says some customers are dragging their feet on contract sign-offs
  Share price dips as cloud sales outlook disappoints amid slow US public sector bookings
  SAP disappointed investors today after reporting full-year cloud revenue at the bottom end of its guidance range, with execs saying customers in manufacturing and the public sector are taking longer to sign contracts.…
  

• Senators accuse Smithsonian of 'illegal lobbying' over Discovery squabbles
  Cornyn & co ask DoJ to probe respected research institution for trying to 'influence' public
  The saga of the Great Space Shuttle Relocation has taken another turn after US lawmakers asked the Department of Justice to look into alleged lobbying by the Smithsonian museum to prevent a possible transfer of Discovery to Houston, Texas.…
  

• Amazon's AI specs aim to stop delivery drivers getting lost between van and porch
  Why monitor staff through phones or cameras when Bezos' boxshifter can strap surveillance to their heads?
  Amazon is testing AI-powered smart glasses to help its drivers get from their vans to customers' doorsteps.…
  

• Microsoft threatens to ram Copilot into Exchange Server on-prem
  Survey probes interest in AI assistance for locally hosted email setups
  Microsoft's mission to "Copilot all the things" has reached Exchange Server, with a survey asking if admins want the AI assistant on-prem.…
  

• SpaceX pulls plug on 2,500 Starlink terminals tied to Myanmar fraud farms
  Criminal outfits had been using Musk's broadband beacons to run cyber-slavery scams across Southeast Asia
  SpaceX says it has shut down thousands of Starlink terminals that were powering Myanmar's notorious scam compounds after its satellite network was found to be keeping human trafficking and cyber-fraud operations online in the country's lawless border zones.…
  

• Microsoft finance slang defines the eternal optimist: The 'hockey stick on wheels'
  The wheels on Copilot's hockey stick must be giving off smoke by now
  Microsoft's finance division has a term for an overly optimistic projection that seems to march backward year after year: the hockey stick on wheels.…
  

• OpenBSD 7.8 out now, and you're not seeing double, 9front releases 'Release'
  New version includes multithreaded TCP/IP and Raspberry Pi 5 support
  The 59th version of the OpenBSD operating system is here, six months after 7.7, with multiple improvements in various areas.…
  

• UK.gov vows to hack through regulation to get benefit from AI
  Meanwhile, civil services claims 75,000 days could be saved by the tech each year
  Ignoring the skeptics and threat of an AI bubble, the UK government is pushing ahead with AI "sandboxing" and backing a raft of projects it claims could benefit from red-tape cutting.…
  

• Apple’s AirDrop makes weird latency spikes for Wi-Fi wonks, researcher finds
  Cupertino wants you on certain channels, and pushes back if you have your own preferences
  Networking researcher Christoff Visser has found that Apple devices cause Wi-Fi networks to “jitter” due to traffic generated by the Apple Wireless Direct Link (AWDL) tech that powers the peer-to-peer AirDrop filesharing tool.…
  

• With impeccable timing, AWS debuts automated cloud incident report generator
  We could really have used this a couple of days ago, guys
  In the same week that a massive outage of its own cloud inconvenienced millions of customers, AWS has delivered an improved interactive incident reporting service to help its customers explain what happened when their cloud-hosted resources strike trouble.…
  

• IBM is just not into the 'spend megabucks on cloudy GPUs' thing, rents them instead
  Infra revenue soars and AI helps everything … except the share price
  If IBM reveals improved profit margins or a fresh round of redundancies, AI may be the reason, because Big Blue today revealed that its own “Project Bob” developer assistance tools have improved productivity among its coders by 45 percent.…
  

• OpenAI's Atlas shrugs off security concerns over prompt injection
  'Trust no AI' says one researcher
  OpenAI's brand new Atlas browser is more than willing to follow commands maliciously embedded in a web page, an attack type known as indirect prompt injection.…
  

• Ex-Uber CSO is gellin' like a felon with teen cyber crims, explains why they do it
  Meanwhile Sullivan's legal battle continues
  interview Two convicted felons walk into a room at the request of a federal judge who wanted one of them - Joe Sullivan, the former Uber chief security officer found guilty of attempting to cover up a 2016 breach at the rideshare company - to help rehabilitate the other, whom the feds accused of hacking into corporate networks as a teen and participating in a "significant" digital heist.…
  

• NextSilicon Maverick-2 promises to blow away the HPC market Nvidia left behind
  The one chip startup building accelerators for something other than AI boasts performance up 10x that of modern GPUs using a fraction the power
  Researchers and engineers working in particle physics, materials analysis, or drug discovery haven't exactly been spoiled for choice when it comes to chips capable of the highly precise double-precision calculations that these workloads depend. NextSilicon aims to change that with Maverick-2, a chip aimed not at AI but the high-performance computing (HPC) community.…
  

• Reddit to Perplexity: Get your filthy hands off our forums
  Social media site continues legal campaign against those who take its content without a license
  Updated Reddit on Wednesday filed a lawsuit against Perplexity AI and three of its alleged data dealers for trafficking in unlawfully scraped information.…
  

• Salt Typhoon hit governments on three continents with SharePoint attacks
  Plus spy helping spy: Typhoons teaming up
  Security researchers now say more Chinese crews - likely including Salt Typhoon - than previously believed exploited a critical Microsoft SharePoint vulnerability, and used the flaw to target government agencies, telecommunications providers, a university, and a finance company across multiple continents.…
  

• TI CEO says some customers still wary of Trump's import tax roulette
  Company shares lost value on slow-than-expected sales
  The global semiconductor market is recovering, albeit at a slower pace than in previous cycles due to macroeconomic dynamics and ongoing uncertainty caused by US trade policy and tariffs, according to Texas Instruments.…
  

• AlmaLinux gives Btrfs a home after Red Hat kicked it out
  Not the default file system, but in the installer if you want it
  AlmaLinux is to support the Btrfs file system in version 10.1 of its eponymous RHELative operating system.…
  

• Microsoft puts Office Online Server on the chopping block
  The end is nigh, now get thee to 365
  Microsoft will kill Office Online Server next year, creating a headache for anyone using on-premises Office web applications and the beleaguered holdouts sticking with Skype for Business Server.…
  

• Grounded jet engines take off again as datacenter generators
  AI power demands drive operators to repurpose aircraft parts amid gas turbine shortages
  AI-driven datacenter energy needs are causing a shortage of gas turbines to power generators, with some operators reportedly turning to old aircraft engines instead.…
  

• Dropping Nvidia for Amazon's custom chips helped gene therapy startup Metagenomi cut AI bill 56%
  It's not the size of your accelerator, it's how you use it
  Gene editing startup Metagenomi has tapped AWS's Inferentia 2 accelerators to speed the discovery of potentially life-saving therapies, and said its efforts cost 56 percent less than it would have incurred using Nvidia GPUs.…
  

• UK competition cops brand Apple, Google with 'strategic market status' for mobile
  Designation hands CMA broad oversight of their app stores and platforms
  The UK's competition watchdog has officially slapped Apple and Google with "strategic market status," a new legal label that gives the regulator far-reaching powers to rein in how the tech giants run their empires.…
  

• Forking confusing: Vulnerable Rust crate exposes uv Python packager
  Forks of forks of forks, but which ones are patched?
  A vulnerability in the popular Rust crate async-tar has affected the fast uv Python package manager, which uses a forked version that's now patched – but the most widely downloaded version remains unfixed.…
  

• New Linux kernel patch lets you cancel hibernation mid-process
  RFC proposes power-button interrupt – and highlights wider problems with sleep states
  A new Linux kernel patch lets you cancel the process of your machine going into hibernation, but the bigger context of the work may be more important.…
  

• AI bubble inflates Microsoft CEO pay to $96.5M
  480:1 ratio compared to average employee? Must be all that 'leadership' juice
  Months after saying job cuts at Microsoft weighed on him, bossman Satya Nadella has another problem: how to expend his swelling bank balance following another bumper pay rise.…
  

• Jaguar Land Rover cyber-meltdown tipped to cost the UK almost £2B
  That's a lot of extended warranties
  The Jaguar Land Rover (JLR) cyberattack could end up being the costliest such incident in UK history, billed at an estimated £1.9 billion and affecting over 5,000 organizations.…
  

• China's CR450 bullet train clocks 453 km/h in pre-service tests
  Wheeled wonder leaves European rail in the dust
  China's CR450 train hit 453 km/h during pre-service trials, surpassing its CR400 predecessor's 420 km/h and outpacing Deutsche Bahn's 405 km/h test record.…
  

• Royal Navy sharpens claws on Wildcat choppers with anti-drone Martlet missiles
  Laser-guided weapon reaches full service after successful sea trials
  Royal Navy helicopters will soon carry drone-busting lightweight Martlet missiles, now declared fully operational following the anti-ship Sea Venom gaining initial operating capability (IOC) earlier this month.…
  

• Carnegie Mellon team claims vector-based system can turbocharge PostgreSQL
  Researchers say 'Proto-X' fine-tunes databases automatically, delivering multifold performance boosts
  Automated database systems based on vector embedding algorithms could improve the performance of default settings on common PostgreSQL database services by a factor of two to ten, according to a database researcher.…
  

• UK data regulator defends decision not to investigate MoD Afghan data breach
  ICO says probe unnecessary after reviewing ministry's handling of leak
  The UK's data protection regulator declined to launch an investigation into a leak at the Ministry of Defence that risked the lives of thousands of Afghans connected with the British Armed Forces.…
  

• Google porting all internal workloads to Arm, with help from GenAI
  YouTube and Gmail already running on both x86 and homebrew Axion silicon, 70,000 more apps in the conversion queue
  Google has revealed it’s ported around 30,000 of its production packages to the Arm architecture and plans to convert them all so it can run workloads on both its own Axion silicon and x86 processors.…
  

• OpenAI releases bot-tom feeding browser with ChatGPT built in
  Why experience the web for yourself when there's so much privacy to surrender?
  In a bid to grab even more eyeballs, OpenAI has finally released Atlas, its long-teased, ChatGPT-powered web browser. Surfing the web may never be the same now that a bot is doing it for you – while training itself at the same time.…
  

• Fake home invasion vid lands woman in real trouble
  And got arrested instead of earning a viral TikTok
  A Maryland woman who allegedly used AI to fake a home invasion was arrested and charged with making false statements after telling police that the ersatz intruder was part of a prank gone wrong.…
  

• AI eats leisure time, makes employees work more, study finds
  Rise and grind, robot overlords demand
  AI services like OpenAI's ChatGPT have been pitched for potential productivity gains, but their effect has been to make people work more while benefiting less from their labor.…
  

• MCP attack abuses predictable session IDs to hijack AI agents
  The vuln affects the Oat++ MCP implementation
  updated A security flaw in the Oat++ implementation of Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP) allows attackers to predict or capture session IDs from active AI conversations, hijack MCP sessions, and inject malicious responses via the oatpp-mcp server.…
  

• AWS outage turned smart homes into dumb boxes – and sysadmins into therapists
  Amazon's hours-long cloud blackout transformed the future of sleep into a sauna and cat care into chaos
  When Amazon's cloud face-planted on Monday, it didn't just take down some of the world's most popular apps – it took down dignity, comfort, and the occasional cat toilet.…
  

• Is PHP declining? JetBrains says yes. And no
  24,500 devs polled, two blog posts, one confusion
  JetBrains has released its State of the Developer Ecosystem survey, with more than 24,500 responses, revealing AI's impact on developer tools and programming language trends - including the claim that PHP and Ruby are in "long term decline."…
  

• Introducing NTFSplus – because just one NTFS driver for Linux is never enough
  Dev unveils a faster, modernized take on Microsoft's file system for penguin-powered PCs
  Just under four years after the Linux kernel gained built-in read-write access to Windows drives, an alternative option has appeared.…
  

• Microsoft's ancient icon library still lurks deep within Windows 11
  Pixels of the past 'created just for fun'
  The pifmgr.dll still lingers in modern Windows installations - a throwback to a simpler and blockier time, according to veteran Microsoft engineer Raymond Chen.…
  

• SpaceX is behind schedule, so NASA will open Artemis III contract to competition
  Lunar landing reality distortion field slips for Musk's rocketeers
  NASA's Acting Administrator has admitted that SpaceX is behind in plans to return astronauts to the Moon, has reopened lander contract competition, and pushed the deadline for a lunar landing to the end of the Trump administration in 2029.…
  

• AMD Radeon AI PRO R9700 Hitting Retailers Next Week For $1299 USD
  Back in May AMD announced the Radeon AI PRO R9700 with 128 AI accelerators, 32GB of GDDR6 video memory, and other advantages for this AI-focused RDNA4 based graphics card over the RDNA3-based Radeon PRO W7900. The Radeon AI PRO R9700 was supposed to be available in July while today AMD announced it will be going on sale next week...

• KDE Plasma 6.59s Overlay Planes Support Yields Significant Power Savings
  KDE KWin developer Xaver Hugl published a new blog post today outlining the KMS overlay planes support present within the newly-released Plasma 6.5 desktop. While not yet enabled by default, enabling the overlay planes functionality can result in some nice power savings such as during video playback...

• Linux9s Proposed Cache Aware Scheduling Benchmarks Show Big Potential On AMD EPYC Turin
  The past number of months has seen a lot of work by Intel Linux kernel engineers on cache-aware scheduling / load balancing for helping modern CPUs that have multiple caches. With cache aware scheduling, tasks that will likely share resources could be aggregated into the same cache domain to enjoy better cache locality. With the cache aware scheduling patches recently updated and now working past the "request for comments" stage, I was eager to try out these new patches. Especially with a 44% time reduction reported for one of the benchmarks, I was eager to run some tests and the first of those results are being shared today.

• Canonical Academy Announced For New Ubuntu Linux Certifications
  In addition to announced Snap-based silicon-optimized AI large language models, Canonical used the ongoing Ubuntu Summit 25.10 virtual event to announced Canonical Academy. Canonical Academy is their new effort for badges/certifications around Ubuntu Linux...

• Ubuntu 25.10 Unattended Upgrades Broken Due To Rust Coreutils Bug
  Besides the early fallout of switching to Rust Coreutils on Ubuntu 25.10 causing some breakage, a more pressing issue has been discovered: Ubuntu 25.10's unattended upgrades functionality for automatic security updates is currently broken due to a Rust Coreutils bug...

• Canonical Begins Snap9ing Up Silicon-Optimized AI LLMs For Ubuntu Linux
  Canonical's new push for their Snap app packaging/sandboxed format on Ubuntu Linux is for AI large language models (LLMs). Making it more interesting though is that they are working to deliver silicon-optimized AI LLMs for your hardware and to make it easily deployable for Ubuntu sers...

• GTK 4.22 To Natively Support SVG - Including Animations
  GTK has long supported Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) for icons but with up until recently relying on the external librsvg library, the integration hasn't been perfect. But Red Hat engineer Matthias Clasen has been working on having the GTK toolkit natively support SVG...

• ESWIN Launching EBC7702 Mini-DTX RISC-V Board With Dual-Die EIC7702X SoC
  For those looking for a new RISC-V desktop option, ESWIN is launching a EBC7702 mini-DTX board powered by the EIC7702X dual-die SoC. The EBC7702 Mini-DTX is aiming for developers who want RISC-V under their desk for working on AI and other development tasks...

• Linux Looks To Orphan Its ISDN Subsystem
  Integrated Services Digital Network (ISDN) usage is long obsolete even where it had enjoyed some successes in the likes of Germany and Norway. With no activity in years to the ISDN and mISDN subsystem code for the Linux kernel, a patch was sent out today for orphaning the code...

• Qualcomm Plumbing "SSR" Support To Deal With Crashes On AI Accelerators
  Crashes on NPUs and AI accelerators are unfortunately a thing and yet another obstacle to worry about it with modern computing. Qualcomm developers have sent out patches for Sub-System Restart "SSR" functionality for their Qualcomm AI Accelerator (QAIC) driver for Linux to handle restarts when workload crashes occur on their AI accelerator hardware...

• Mesa 25.3-rc2 Release Led By Intel, AMD Radeon & NVK Driver Fixes
  The second weekly release candidate of Mesa 25.3 is now available for testing ahead of the official release in the coming weeks for this quarterly feature update to this set of open-source OpenGL, OpenCL, and Vulkan graphics drivers...

• Oracle OCI Compute E6 Benchmarks For Leading AMD EPYC Turin Performance In The Cloud
  Oracle recently launched their E6 compute shape for Oracle Cloud and powered by AMD EPYC 9005 "Turin" processors. Oracle Cloud Infrastructure also launched their Compute Cloud@Customer X11 and Private Cloud Appliance X11 platforms that are all powered by the E6 compute shape with 5th Gen AMD EPYC. For those curious about the performance and value of the Oracle Cloud E6 shape compared to prior-gen E5 as well as alternatives from Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud, these benchmarks are geared for you.

• OpenZFS 2.4-rc3 Released With New Workarounds For Linux 6.18
  OpenZFS 2.4 stable should be out in the near future while out today is the third release candidate for this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD operating systems...

• Google Develops Code Prefetch Insertion Optimizer For Faster Intel GNR & AMD Turin Performance
  Google engineer Rahman Lavaee today announced their work on a prototype software implementation to automatically insert optimal code prefetches into binaries for faster performance, especially for the latest Intel Granite Rapids and AMD Turin processors with new prefetching instructions...

• Linux 6.19 To Support The XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro Drawing Tablet
  While XP-PEN does provide out-of-tree drivers for their drawing tablets on Linux including the XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro, the Linux 6.19 kernel is set to provide upstream support for the XP-PEN Artist 24 Pro...

• Fedora Will Allow AI-Assisted Contributions With Proper Disclosure & Transparency
  The Fedora Council has finally come to a decision on allowing AI-assisted contributions to the project. The agreed upon guidelines are fairly straight-forward and will permit AI-assisted contributions if it's properly disclosed and transparent...

• Ray AI Engine Pulled Into The PyTorch Foundation For Unified Open AI Compute Stack
  Announced today at the PyTorch Conference was word that the Ray AI compute engine is becoming a project hosted by the PyTorch Foundation...

• Linux 6.18 Hardened Against Specially-Crafted EROFS Images Leading To System Crashes
  The EROFS read-only file-system continues enjoying nice uptick in use from embedded devices to containers. Merged today for Linux 6.18 is some new hardening to the EROFS driver where specially-crafted file-system images could lead to system crashes or infinite loops...

• Sovereign Tech Agency Making 2026 Investments In systemd, PHP, Servo & More
  Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency (nee Sovereign Tech Fund) is out with their latest newsletter where they outlined some new investments in various key open-source projects...

• LLVM Lands Some Long Overdue Tuning Optimizations For AMD Zen 4
  Merged today to the LLVM/Clang compiler codebase are some long overdue adjustments to the AMD Zen 4 "znver4" CPU model for more accurately assessing various latency timings and micro-ops. These values were initially copied over from the Zen 3 (znver3) target but never adjusted properly for Zen 4 until now when an independent contributor took to sorting it out...

• Linux 6.18 Adding AWCC Profile Support For The Dell G15 5530
  For those that happen to have the Dell G15 5530 laptop or considering this Intel Core i7 13650HX + NVIDIA GeForce RTX high-end laptop, the upcoming Linux 6.18 kernel is set to have AWCC platform profile support for this model as a nice enhancement. In turn this patch should also be back-ported to future stable Linux kernel point releases...

• Intel Xe3P_LPD Display Support For Linux Being Built Out Ahead Of Nova Lake
  Earlier this month Intel Linux software engineers began posting patches for enabling Xe3P kernel graphics driver support with initial usage by Nova Lake processors and later the expected Celestial discrete GPUs. That initial Xe3P iGPU support is going into Linux 6.19 but expect more feature additions and optimizations in follow-on kernel cycles in 2026. Similarly the patches have now begun coming out for enabling the display engine capabilities for "Xe3P_LPD" for actually being able to drive displays (monitors) with Xe3P on Nova Lake...

• Intel Nova Lake Support Merged For GCC 16 Compiler
  Following last week LLVM/Clang 22 adding Intel Nova Lake with "-march=novalake" support, the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) has now received similar treatment for the promising next-generation desktop processors...

• Linux 6.19 To Support Sensor Monitoring On The ASUS ROG STRIX X870E-H GAMING WIFI7
  For those that have been considering the ASUS ROG STRIX X870E-H GAMING WIFI7 motherboard for a high-end AMD Ryzen 9000 series desktop, sensor monitoring support will soon be working under Linux...

• OpenBSD 7.8 Released With Raspberry Pi 5 Support, AMD SEV Enablement
  Theo de Raadt released OpenBSD 7.8 today as the newest feature release to this popular BSD operating system...

• AlmaLinux 10.1 Beta Released For Popular RHEL 10 Community Distribution
  Earlier today the AlmaLinux project announced their plans for supporting the Btrfs file-system contrary to the stance by Red Hat with upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux. They have capped off the day now by releasing the AlmaLinux 10.1 beta complete with this new Btrfs support...

• Linux 6.19 To Enable Networking For The EIC7700 SoC Powering The SiFive Premier P550
  Upstreamed for the current Linux 6.18 cycle was finally having mainline support for the ESWIN EIC770 SoC with its four SiFive P550 cores plus having the DeviceTree support for the SiFive HiFive Premier P550 RISC-V development board using that SoC. Sadly not making it though for Linux 6.18 was the Ethernet controller support for the EIC7700 SoC but that is now destined to arrive in Linux 6.19...

• AlmaLinux 10.1 Will Support The Btrfs File-System
  It's been nearly a decade since Red Hat notably deprecated Btrfs back in Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6.8 after it being a tech preview in earlier versions of RHEL. While upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 remains on XFS and supporting the likes of Stratis Storage with LVM, AlmaLinux today announced that their AlmaLinux 10.1 release will support Btrfs...

• Valkey 9.0 Released With Ability To Achieve One Billion Requests / Second
  Valkey as the popular, Linux Foundation backed fork of the Redis key-value database is out today with its big v9.0 release...

• Intel Nova Lake To Feature 6th Gen NPU
  Following the recent Xe3P graphics enablement for Nova Lake as well as Nova Lake compiler target enablement and other early hardware enablement for Intel's Nova Lake processors, today has brought initial enablement for Nova Lake's NPU...

• Revisiting The SNC3 vs. HEX Mode Performance With Intel Xeon 6 Granite Rapids
  Last year following the launch of the Intel Xeon 6900P Granite Rapids processors I ran some benchmarks looking at the SNC3 vs. HEX clustering mode performance. With having an Intel Xeon 6980P server back up and running on a Giga Computing R284-A92-AAL server after my AvenueCity reference server failed nearly one year ago, I revisited the SNC3 vs. HEX clustering performance for those curious how it9s looking on a modern software stack and with new/updated benchmarks.

• TARmageddon Strikes: High Profile Security Vulnerability In Popular Rust Library
  Going public today is CVE-2025-62518, or better known by the name given by the security researchers involved: TARmageddon. The TARmageddon vulnerability affects the popular async-tar Rust library and its various forks like tokio-tar. In turn TARmageddon impacts the uv Python package manager and other users of this library...

• OpenBSD 7.8 released
  Like clockwork, every six months, we have a new OpenBSD release. OpenBSD 7.8 adds support for the Raspberry Pi 5, tons of improvements to sleep, wake, and hibernate, the TCP stack can now run in parallel on multiple processors, and so much more. DRM has been updated to match Linux 6.12.50, and drivers for the Qualcomm Snapdragon DRM subsystem and Qualcomm DisplayPort controller were added as well. The changelog is, as always, long and detailed, so head on over for the finer details. OpenBSD users will know how to upgrade, and new users can visit the download page.

• What about the icons in pifmgr.dll?
  Raymond Chen has another great post about some of the classic icons from Windows 95, this time focusing on pifmgr.dll. In this file, there are a variety of random-seeming icons, and it turns out theyre random for a reason: they were just a bunch a fun, generic icons intended for people to use when creating PIF files. The icons in pifmgr.dll were created just for fun. They were not created with any particular programs in mind, with one obvious exception. They were just a fun mix of icons for people to use for their own homemade shortcut files. ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing For those of us who didnt grow up with Windows, or who, god forbid, are too young to know, PIF or personal information files are effectively shortcuts to DOS programs for use in a multitasking environment. A PIF file would not only point to the relevant DOS executable, but also contain information about the environment in which said executable was supposed to run. Their history goes back to IBMs TopView, and Microsoft later embraced and adapted them for use in Windows.

• Understanding driver updates through Windows Update
  Microsoft has published a set of short questions and answers about driver updates through Windows Update, and theres one tidbit in there I found interesting. Driver dates might look old, but that is not true. The driver date is descriptive info set by the driver provider and can be any date they choose. When determining which driver to install, Windows Update uses targeting information set by the provider inside the driver files to determine the best driver. This lets the device provider promote the best driver, regardless of the chosen date.  ↫ Microsoft knowledge base article Whenever I do have to fiddle with Windows machines, I always wondered about why some drivers in Windows Update would show some seriously old dates. It turns out the answer is as obvious as it always tends to be: OEMs.

• KDE Plasma 6.5 released
  KDE is on a roll lately, and keeps on rolling with todays release of KDE Plasma 6.5. As the project itself notes, this release focuses on relatively small improvements, refinements, and other niceties, without making any massive changes. With Linux desktops taking accessibility more seriously lately than ever before, I want to focus on the accessibility improvements first. The Orca screen reader now announces caps lock state changes, and screen readers will now describe the Shortcuts and Autostart pages more optimally. Theres also a new grayscale colour filter for people sensitive to colours, developers have done Plasma-wide pass to eliminate bright flashes in the UI, and the desktop zoom feature will now follow the text insertion point as it moves around the UI. Keyboard navigation in various parts of Plasma have been improved, and a few other small changes have been to improve accessiblity. Other changes include rounded bottom window corners (which can be turned off), automatic and scheduled theme and wallpaper transitions (e.g. from light to dark), and a new and improved applications permissions settings panel. A small new feature that will be a massive time saver for me is the ability to favourite items in your clipboard history, so they remain available over time. I reuse certain copied bits of text all the time, and I cant wait to start using this little addition. Remote desktop has also received a ton of love in Plasma 6.5. You can now share your clipboard, and you no longer need to create dedicated RDP user accounts; you can just log in with your normal account credentials as you would expect you could. Plasmas Discover application, used for application and update management, has seen major work to improve its performance  very welcome, for sure. Of course, theres a ton of other changes, too. KDE Plasma 6.5 will find its way to your distribution soon enough.

• Intel, AMD to bring memory tagging to x86, at some point
  Now that ARMs memory tagging, used extensively by Android ROMs such as GrapheneOS and now also by Apple, is becoming the new norm to aid in improving memory safety, the x86 world cant sit idly by. As such, Intel and AMD have announced a ChkTag, x86s version of memory tagging. ChkTag is a set of new and enhanced x86 instructions to detect memory safety violations, such as buffer overflows and misuses of freed memory (use-after-free). ChkTag is designed to be suitable for hardening applications, operating system kernels, hypervisors for virtualization, and UEFI firmware. ChkTag places control in the software developers’ hands to balance their security needs with operational elements that often become prominent when deploying code. For example, ChkTag provides instruction-granular control over which memory accesses are checked. Compilers can offer optimizations and new language features or intrinsics. ChkTag prepares x86 for a future with increasing amounts of code written in memory-safe languages running alongside code in other languages. Furthermore, ChkTag loads tags from linear/virtual memory that can often be committed on demand. ↫ Intel and AMDs announcement Its important to note that ChkTag  why not just call it CheckTag  isnt ready yet, nor is there any indication when it will be included in any processors from Intel and AMD. The goal is to catch certain memory safety problems in hardware. According to Intel and AMDs shared announcement, developers will have fine-grained control over the feature, allowing them to tap into the functionality in whatever way they deem necessary or valuable for their software in specific circumstances. My fear is that Intel and AMD will use this feature as a product differentiator, restricting it to either more expensive processors or to Xeon/Threadripper processors, thereby fracturing the market. This would inevitably lead to spotty support for the feature across the x86 landscape, meaning most ordinary consumer wont benefit from it at all.

• This is how much Anthropic and Cursor spend on Amazon Web Services
  I can exclusively reveal today Anthropic’s spending on Amazon Web Services for the entirety of 2024, and for every month in 2025 up until September, and that that Anthropic’s spend on compute far exceeds that previously reported.` Furthermore, I can confirm that through September, Anthropic has spent more than 100% of its estimated revenue (based on reporting in the last year) on Amazon Web Services, spending $2.66 billion on compute on an estimated $2.55 billion in revenue. ↫ Ed Zitron These numbers do not even include what the company spends on Googles services. Going through all the numbers and reporting, Zitron explains that the more successful! Anthropic becomes, the bigger the gap between income from paying customers and its spending on Amazon and Google services becomes. Its simply unsustainable, and the longer we keep this scam going, the worse the consequences will be when the bubble pops. Sadly, nobody will go to jail once hell breaks loose.

• Cartridge chaos: the official Nintendo region converter and more!
  This post is a combination of looks at several oddities among my pile of NES and Famicom cartridges. Why, for example, do I have a copy of Gyromite when I don’t have a R.O.B.? Did I miss something interesting in my MMC blog post? And while it is the Japanese release of Kid Niki: Radical Ninja, is my Kaiketsu Yanchamaru being a little too radical? Who put the ram in the rama-lama-ding-dong? Some of these questions will be answered! ↫ Nicole Branagan at Nicole Express A well-written post with tons of weird NES nerdery. Branagan delivers, every time.

• Microsoft breaks USB input in Windows Recovery Environment
  With official support for Windows 10 having officially ended a few days ago, lets take a look and see how its successor, Windows 11, is doing. Microsoft released the`first Patch Tuesday update (KB5066835)`for Windows 11 25H2 this past week and it is probably fair to say that it has been a rough start for the new feature update. Despite the announcement of a wide rollout wherein the new version is`now available for download for everyone, the company has already confirmed large-scale issues. First up, Microsoft was forced to issue an emergency workaround as the update`broke localhost auth`and following that the company today has confirmed another problem where recovery can become impossible if you happen to use a USB keyboard or mouse. ↫ Sayan Sen at Neowin Yes. This is a real thing. This latest round of patches makes it entirely impossible to navigate the Windows Recovery Environment with USB keyboards and mice. Since its 2025, USB is probably the protocol through which most people connect their keyboard and mice (although to be fair, some laptops probably still default to internal PS/2 for their touchpads). This means that if you run into a problem with Windows 11 that requires you to access the Windows Recovery Environment  perhaps OneDrive did too many lines of cocaine again  you cant actually do anything inside of it. Theres no fix yet, so you either remove the offending patches, hope your PC still has a PS/2 port and you still have PS/2 peripherals, or hope Windows 11 wont fall over and die until Microsoft releases a fix for the issue. Of course, people still using Windows 10, people who arent installing every single Windows 11 update as they become available, and people using real operating systems have nothing to worry about. You cant help but wonder, though  with Microsoft pushing AI! so hard, how many of these recent faceplants are the result of Microsoft engineers frantically trying to meet code quotas using Copilot?

• Servo 0.0.1 released
  Today, the Servo team has released new versions of the servoshell binaries for all our supported platforms, tagged v0.0.1. These binaries are essentially the same nightly builds that were already available from the download page with additional manual testing, now tagging them explicitly as releases for future reference. ↫ Servos official blog Servo is making steady progress, and thats awesome news. Every month a whole slew of new features and improvements make their way into this new browser engine, and Im fairly confident Servo is our best shot at regaining some independence from Google and Apple in the web browser space. Other efforts are either too limited in scope, targeting only a specific niche, already being eaten alive by massive corporations, written in non-memory safe languages, run by people whose code I wouldnt even trust to flush my toilet, or any combination thereof. Servo is it, folks. Our best shot.

• I remember taking a screen shot of a video, and when I opened it in Paint, the video was playing in it!!
  In older versions of Windows, if you had a video playing, took a screenshot, and pasted that screenshot into Paint, you could sometimes see the video continue to play inside Paint. What kind of sorcery enabled this to happen? A few of you will realise instantly why this used to happen: render surfaces. Back in at least the Windows 9x days, playing video involved drawing solid green where you wanted the video to go (the video player window), rendering the video pixels to a surface shared with the graphics card, and then have the graphics card replace said green pixels with the video pixels from the shared surface. This approach has a whole array of benefits, not least of which is that it allowed you to render the video on a thread separate from the main user interface, so that if the main interface was sluggish or locked up, the video would keep rendering properly. You could also create two shared surfaces to render multiple frames at once, thereby eliminating tearing. Knowing this, it should be obvious whats going on with the screenshot and Pain story. Now, when you load the image into Paint or any other image viewer, Windows sends those green pixels to the video card, but if the media player is still running, then its overlay is still active, and if you put Paint in the same place that the media player window is, then the green pixels in Paint get changed into the pixels of the active video. The video card doesn’t know that the pixels came from Paint. Its job is to look for green pixels in a certain region of the screen and change them into the pixels from the shared surface. If you move the Paint window to another position where it doesn’t overlap the media player, or if the media player isn’t playing a video, you will see the bitmap’s true nature: It’s just a bunch of green pixels. ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing Ive never had this particular oddity happen, but I do have vague memories of video player windows rendering tons of green artifacts whenever something went wrong with the video player, the file it was trying to play, or whatever else, and I guess the cause of those green artifacts is the same. In modern operating systems, graphics rendering of the UI is done entirely on the GPU, with only the final composition being sent to your display. As such, the green screen effect no longer occurs.

• The early Unix history of chown() being restricted to root
  Chris Siebenmann with another interesting look at a tiny detail of UNIX history. A few years ago I wrote about the divide in chown() about who got to give away files, where BSD and V7 were on one side, restricting it to root, while System III and System V were on the other, allowing the owner to give them away too. The answer is that the restriction was added in V6, where the V6 chown(2) manual page has the same wording as V7. In Research Unix V5 and earlier, people can chown(2) away their own files; this is documented in the V4 chown(2) manual page and is what the V5 kernel code for chown() does. This behavior runs all the way back to the V1 chown() manual page, with an extra restriction that you cant chown() setuid files. ↫ Chris Siebenmann The deeper levels of this particular rabbit hole need more exploring, though, as eventually Siebenmann hits a roadblock when trying to figure out why, exactly, the restriction was added, and why certain versions chose to not adopt the new restriction. This may be part of the lore of UNIX we wont uncover, until one of the people involved speaks up.

• Windows 11, now with even more AI! where you dont want it
  Microsoft has posted a blog post about detailing its latest round of additions to Windows 11, and as will surely not surprise you, its AI!, all the time, whether you like it or not. Im not even going to detail most of these features!, as Im sure most of them will just become yet another series of checkboxes on whatever debloating tool you prefer. Still, theres one recurring theme running throughout Microsofts recent AI! marketing that really stands out, and this blog post is no different: Until now, the power of AI has often been gated behind your skill at prompting.` The more context you provide and detail you share, the richer response you receive in return. But typing it out can be tedious and time consuming, especially if it takes multiple tries to get it right. With 68% of consumers reporting using AI to support their decision making, voice is making this easier. ↫ Yusuf Mehdi at the Windows Blogs Youre holding it wrong! has become a recurring meme whenever someone places the blame for a shit product on its users, but were really starting to see this line of thinking explode with AI! tools now. If youre getting bad, wrong, or downright made up results out of your text generator  which happens all the time  the problem isnt that the text generator is shit; no, the problem is that the user is shit at manipulating and coercing it into generating the right string of words. This is a major problem for AI! companies, as the obtuseness of input and the inevitable shoddiness of results is most likely putting users off using them, and if theres one thing these companies needs, its users. All of them are hemorrhaging money without any realistic paths towards profitability, so theres a mad scramble to convince and trick people into using AI! tools, and every single recent effort by Microsoft regarding Windows and Office is 100% geared towards this goal. Thats why nothing is sacred, and everything from Notepad to Paint, from the the Windows Start menu to context menus, from the Explorer file manager to your Windows command line is getting Copilot buttons and sparkly icons: Microsoft has to be able to brag about AI! user numbers to keep the scam going. As the bubble gets bigger and bigger, and as we come closer and closer to that satisfying pop, you can expect ever more places in Windows to get AI! features. I cant wait for the sparkle icon to show up when formatting a disk, installing a driver through Device Manager, or during a kernel panic. I cant wait for the blue screen of death to open a Copilot chat that advises you to do something utterly unrelated. You can do it, Microsoft.

• A deep dive into the Silicon Graphics Indigo² IMPACT 10000
  This beautiful purple slab is the Silicon Graphics Indigo² (though, unlike its earlier namesake, not actually indigo coloured) with the upper-tier MIPS R10000 CPU and IMPACT graphics. My recollection was that it worked at the time, but I couldnt remember if it booted, and of course that was no guarantee that it could still power on. If this machine is to stay working and in the collection, were gonna need a Refurb Weekend. ↫ Cameron Kaiser at Old Vintage Computing Research Out of all the retro UNIX workstations of old, the machines from SGI are both the most popular, the most well-known, and thus, also some of the most expensive. Yet, at the same time, everything up until the very last generation or two of MIPS IRIX workstations, generally do not seem to be particularly rare either. The community around SGIs machines and IRIX is also quite thriving still, much more so than the communities of the other commercial UNIX variants. Still, the odds of me completing my collection of final-generation commercial UNIX workstations are low, exactly because of just how rare and stupidly expensive the SGI Tezro is. As always, Cameron Kaiser goes into a level of detail few other people in the world do when it comes to rare or special computers, and this article about the Silicon Graphics Indigo² is no exception. Detailed photographs, an in-depth history of the machine, detailed descriptions of the hardware, the various fixes that needed to be performed, getting it back up and running, and everything else. Theres really nobody else writing these kinds of articles. The weekends here, so sit back, relax, and have fun.

• NLnet sponsors development of WPA3 support for OpenBSD
  The NLnet foundation has sponsored a project to add WPA3 support to OpenBSD, support which in turn can be used by other operating systems. This project delivers the second open-source implementation of WPA3, the current industry standard for Wi-Fi encryption, specifically for the OpenBSD operating system. Its code can also be integrated by other operating systems to enable modern Wi-Fi encryption, thereby enhancing the diversity and resilience of the global IT ecosystem. ↫ NLnet foundation announcement WPA3 support in Linux seems to be the only other open source implementation of WPA3, so this is great news not only for OpenBSD, but also for other operating systems who rely on BSD network drivers through compatibility layers, like Haiku. FreeBSD, meanwhile, is planning to build its own WPA3 implementation, so they, too, might benefit form the work thats going to be done through OpenBSD. October is listed as the start of this project, so work is probably already underway.

• An initial investigation into WDDM on ReactOS
  One of the problems the ReactOS project continually has to deal with is that Windows is, of course, an evolving, moving target. Trying to be a Windows-compatible operating system means youre going to have to tie that moving target down, and for ReactOS, the current focus is on being compatible with Windows Server 2003 or later!. This or later! part is getting a major boost in a very crucial area. The history of ReactOS spans a wider range than the lives of many of the people who work on it today. Incredible individuals have come and gone from the project with vastly different goals for what they want to see developed. In recent years, better hardware support has emerged as one of those goals. As ReactOS gazes towards the world of Vista and beyond, a few questions about how hardware works emerge. Vista introduced massive overhauls to how hardware drivers are written and maintained. Gradually we’re trying to handle many of these overhauls with great success. Today we talk about WDDM, or the Windows Display Driver Model. An initial investigation into WDDM on ReactOS Theres a ton of technical details in the blog post, but the end result is that ReactOS can now tentatively load some WDDM drivers. For instance, ReactOS can run NVIDIAs Windows 7 driver now, and the example used an NVIDIA GTX 1070. Of course, were looking at basic 2D display output only and no 3D acceleration, so dont expect to be running any 3D games on ReactOS any time soon. Still, this is a pretty massive step forward for ReactOS, but of course, a ton more work remains to be done, as is always the case for ReactOS. I do have to say  the fact that WDDM support is now on the table and progress is being made here is great news. ReactOS is not even remotely close to being an alternative to Windows, but even if it never gets there, its a great showcase for what talented, determined developers can do, and they deserve recognition for that.

• How to turn Liquid Glass into a solid interface
  Apple’s new Liquid Glass interface design brings transparency and blur effects to all Apple operating systems, but many users find it distracting or difficult to read. Here’s how to control its effects and make your interface more usable. Although the relevant Accessibility settings are quite similar across macOS, iOS, watchOS, and tvOS, I separate them because they offer different levels of utility in each. I have no experience with (or interest in) a Vision Pro, so I can’t comment on Liquid Glass in visionOS. ↫ Adam Engst at TidBITS An incredibly detailed article showing exactly how to change the relevant settings, and exactly what they do, for each of Apples relevant platforms. I have a feeling quite a few of you will want to bookmark this one.

• KDE Unleashes Plasma 6.5
  The Plasma 6.5 desktop environment is now available with new features, improvements, and the usual bug fixes.
  

• Xubuntu Site Possibly Hacked
  It appears that the Xubuntu site was hacked and briefly served up a malicious ZIP file from its download page.
  

• LMDE 7 Now Available
  Linux Mint Debian Edition, version 7, has been officially released and is based on upstream Debian.
  

• Linux Kernel 6.16 Reaches EOL
  Linux kernel 6.16 has reached its end of life, which means you'll need to upgrade to the next stable release, Linux kernel 6.17.
  

• Amazon Ditches Android for a Linux-Based OS
  Amazon has migrated from Android to the Linux-based Vega OS for its Fire TV.
  

• Cairo Dock 3.6 Now Available for More Compositors
  If you're a fan of third-party desktop docks, then the latest release of Cairo Dock with Wayland support is for you.
  

• System76 Unleashes Pop!_OS 24.04 Beta
  System76's first beta of Pop!_OS 24.04 is an impressive feat.
  

• Linux Kernel 6.17 is Available
  Linus Torvalds has announced that the latest kernel has been released with plenty of core improvements and even more hardware support.
  

• Kali Linux 2025.3 Released with New Hacking Tools
  If you're a Kali Linux fan, you'll be glad to know that the third release of this famous pen-testing distribution is now available with updates for key components.
  

• Zorin OS 18 Beta Available for Testing
  The latest release from the team behind Zorin OS is ready for public testing, and it includes plenty of improvements to make it more powerful, user-friendly, and productive.
  

• Fedora Linux 43 Beta Now Available for Testing
  Fedora Linux 43 Beta ships with Gnome 49 and KDE Plasma 6.4 (and other goodies).
  

• USB4 Maintainer Leaves Intel
  Michael Jamet, one of the primary maintainers of USB4 and Thunderbolt drivers, has left Intel, leaving a gaping hole for the Linux community to deal with.
  

• Budgie 10.9.3 Now Available
  The latest version of this elegant and configurable Linux desktop aligns with changes in Gnome 49.
  

• KDE Linux Alpha Available for Daring Users
  It's official, KDE Linux has arrived, but it's not quite ready for prime time.
  

• AMD Initiates Graphics Driver Updates for Linux Kernel 6.18
  This new AMD update focuses on power management, display handling, and hardware support for Radeon GPUs.
  

• AerynOS Alpha Release Available
  With a choice of several desktop environments, AerynOS 2025.08 is almost ready to be your next operating system.
  

• AUR Repository Still Under DDoS Attack
  Arch User Repository continues to be under a DDoS attack that has been going on for more than two weeks.
  

• RingReaper Malware Poses Danger to Linux Systems
  A new kind of malware exploits modern Linux kernels for I/O operations.
  

• Happy Birthday, Linux
  On August 25, Linux officially turns 34.
  

• VirtualBox 7.2 Has Arrived
  With early support for Linux kernel 6.17 and other new additions, VirtualBox 7.2 is a must-update for users.