Self-Propagating Malware Poisons Open Source Software, Wipes Iran-Based Machines
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A new hacking group has been rampaging the Internet in a persistent campaign that spreads a self-propagating and never-before-seen backdoor – and curiously a data wiper that targets Iranian machines. The group, tracked under the name TeamPCP, first gained visib … ⌘ Read more

Arm Announces AGI CPU For AI Data Centers
Arm announced their first silicon product in history with today’s AGI CPU. The Arm AGI CPU complements their existing IP offerings into a production-ready silicon product for AI data centers… ⌘ Read more

Epic Games To Cut More Than 1,000 Jobs As Fortnite Usage Falls
Epic Games is cutting more than 1,000 jobs as usage of its flagship title, Fortnite, falls. “The layoffs aren’t related to AI,” CEO Tim Sweeney noted. Reuters reports: The cuts, along with more than $500 million in savings from lower contracting and marketing spending and unfilled roles would put the company in “a more stable place,” Sweeney said in … ⌘ Read more

FCC Bans Imports of New Foreign-Made Routers, Citing Security Concerns
New submitter the_skywise shares a report from Reuters: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Monday it was banning the import of all new foreign-made consumer routers, the latest crackdown on Chinese-made electronic gear over security concerns. China is estimated to control at least 60% of the U.S. market for home rout … ⌘ Read more

@zvava@twtxt.net 💪🏻💪🏻💪🏻

@zvava@twtxt.net how is that client coming along? “/me gently pushes zvava towards a working desk” 😂

Intuit Beats FTC In Court, Ending Restrictions On ‘Free’ TurboTax Ads
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: An appeals court invalidated the Biden-era Federal Trade Commission’s attempt to punish Intuit for allegedly deceptive ads that pitched TurboTax as free. Under then-Chair Lina Khan, the FTC determined in 2024 that the TurboTax maker violated US law with deceptive advertising and ordered … ⌘ Read more

Pop!_OS 24.04 vs. Ubuntu 24.04 LTS vs. Ubuntu 26.04 Development Benchmarks
While having the new System76 Thelio Mira desktop in the lab, I took the opportunity to run some benchmarks to see how Pop!_OS 24.04 is currently performing relative to Ubuntu 24.04 LTS for which it is based as well as looking ahead at how Ubuntu 26.04 LTS in its current near-final development form is looking on the same hardware. ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA 595.58.03 Linux Driver Debuts As Stable R595 Build
Building off the NVIDIA 595.45.04 Linux beta driver that brought DRI3 v1.2 support and new Vulkan capabilities, the NVIDIA 595.58.03 Linux driver released this morning as the first stable Linux driver build in the R595 release branch… ⌘ Read more

Blender Optimization Leads To Twice As Fast Performance With CPU Bottlenecked Scenes
Proposed code for Blender’s EEVEE engine can lead to both the OpenGL and Vulkan performance doubling in instancing-heavy scenes that are CPU bottlenecked… ⌘ Read more

Krita 6.0 Released With Qt6 Port & Better Wayland Support
Krita 6.0 debuted today as the Qt6 port of this digital painting program aligned with KDE/Qt development. Krita 6.0 also brings improved Wayland support while Krita 5.3 is being simultaneously released for running on the mature Qt5 toolkit… ⌘ Read more

Canonical Joins Rust Foundation
BrianFagioli writes: Canonical has joined the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member, signaling a deeper investment in the Rust programming language and its role in modern infrastructure. The company already maintains an up-to-date Rust toolchain for Ubuntu and has begun integrating Rust into parts of its stack, citing memory safety and reliability as key drivers. By joining at a higher tier, Canonical is not just ad … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 To Overcome Reporting Limitation For Multiple Batteries Per HID Device
A limitation affecting various gaming headsets, graphic tablets, wireless earbuds, multi-device receivers and more with Linux has been not being able to report multiple batteries per HID device. After patches were proposed last year for dealing with the increasingly common scenario these days of having multiple batteries per device, the upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel is set to address this limitation… ⌘ Read more

OpenBLAS 0.3.32 Brings Improved Detection Of Newer Intel CPUs
OpenBLAS 0.3.32 is now available for this optimized open-source Basic Linear Algebra Subprograms “BLAS” library. Notable with the OpenBLAS 0.3.32 release is improving CPU auto-detection for newer Intel processors… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Talks Up “Expanding The Open-Source Horizon” Around AI & Kubernetes
KubeCon Europe is running this week in Amsterdam and NVIDIA used the event to talk up their open-source work around AI and newest open-source contributions… ⌘ Read more

Cyberattack on a Car Breathalyzer Firm Leaves Drivers Stuck
Last week, hackers launched a cyberattack on an Iowa company called Intoxalock that left some drivers unable to start their court-mandated breathalyzer-equipped cars. Wired reports: Intoxalock, an automotive breathalyzer maker that says it’s used daily by 150,000 drivers across the U.S., last week reported that it had been the target of a cyberattack, result … ⌘ Read more

Trump Administration To Pay French Company $1 Billion To Stop Offshore Wind Farms
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: The Trump administration will pay $1 billion to a French company to walk away from two U.S. offshore wind leases as the administration ramps up its campaign against offshore wind and other renewable energy. TotalEnergies has agreed to what’s essentially a refund of its … ⌘ Read more

GTK3 Toolkit Winding Down To One Release Per Year
The GTK 4.0 toolkit released in December 2020 while the GTK3 toolkit has continued to be maintained given a lot of software still relying on that older version. GTK 3.24.52 was released yesterday and with this version it’s now shifting its release cadence to just one new update per year… ⌘ Read more

Nvidia CEO Says He’s ‘Empathetic’ To DLSS 5 Concerns
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang says he understands the concerns about “AI slop” with DLSS 5 but insists the feature preserves a game’s underlying geometry and artistic intent. “I think their perspective makes sense, ” said Huang during a recent appearance on the Lex Fridman podcast. “And I could see where they’re coming from because I don’t love AI slop myself. You know, all of t … ⌘ Read more

Bipartisan Bill Seeks To Ban Sports Betting On Prediction Market Platforms
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Senators Adam Schiff (D-CA) and John Curtis (R-UT) introduced (PDF) a bill on Monday that could prevent prediction market platforms Kalshi and Polymarket from allowing users to wager money on sports events or play casino-style games. This bipartisan bill would not apply to Fa … ⌘ Read more

Patch Posted To Enable Intel FRED By Default On Linux
Following today’s article exploring the performance benefits of Intel Flexible Return and Event Delivery “FRED” with Panther Lake and also pointing out the rather obscure nature of FRED being disabled-by-default, an Intel Linux kernel engineer posted a patch to now enable FRED by default for better performance… ⌘ Read more

Wing Expands Its Drone Delivery Service To the Bay Area
Wing is expanding its drone delivery service to the San Francisco Bay Area. “The drone delivery startup has been rapidly expanding to metro areas across the US, but is now targeting the tech-friendly Silicon Valley region,” reports Engadget. From the report: Going back to its inaugural deliveries, Wing ferried office supplies across Google’s Mountain View campus in … ⌘ Read more

Apple Prepares To Add Search Ads To Apple Maps
Apple is reportedly preparing to add search ads to Apple Maps, “and it could start to roll out to users by the summer,” reports AppleInsider, citing sources from Bloomberg (paywalled). From the report: Apple will make an announcement as soon as March. This will bring ads to search queries within the navigation app, which will operate similar to Google’s advertising system. Retail … ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Details Their Upgrade To EPYC Turin For 2x Throughput, 50% Better Perf/Watt
Cloudflare’s technical blog posts about their hardware and software efforts are always a treat to read. Their latest fascinating technical content is on their newest “Gen 13” server platform based around AMD EPYC Turin where they are now achieving 2x throughput and 50% better performance-per-Watt thanks to these latest-generation AMD EPYC server processors paired with software improvements too… ⌘ Read more

US Car Buyers Envy What They Cannot Have: Affordable Chinese EVs
Many U.S. consumers are increasingly interested in lower-cost Chinese electric vehicles but steep tariffs and political resistance are keeping them out of the market. A recent survey from Cox Automotive found that 40% of respondents support allowing Chinese auto brands into the U.S. market. Reuters reports: While Chinese autos hit the highways of … ⌘ Read more

Mark Zuckerberg Is Building an AI Agent To Help Him Be CEO
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Mark Zuckerberg wants everyone inside and outside his company to eventually have his or her own personal artificial-intelligence agent. He is starting with himself. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta Platforms, is building a CEO agent to help him do his job (source paywalled; alternative … ⌘ Read more

XMMS Codebase Brought Back To Life By AI With GTK4 + GStreamer/PipeWire Port
Longtime Linux desktop users will likely remember the glorious days of the XMMS music player inspired by Winamp. It’s been about two decades since the last official release but thanks to AI there is now a modern port of the codebase to GTK4 and GStreamer/PipeWire… ⌘ Read more

Walmart: ChatGPT Checkout Converted 3x Worse Than Website
Walmart found that purchases made directly inside ChatGPT converted at only one-third the rate of traditional website checkouts, leading it to abandon OpenAI’s Instant Checkout in favor of routing users through its own platform. Search Engine Land reports: Starting in November, Walmart offered about 200,000 products through OpenAI’s Instant Checkout. Users coul … ⌘ Read more

OnlyFans Owner Dies At 43
Computershack shares a report from NBC News: Leonid Radvinsky, the owner of adult-content platform OnlyFans, has died of cancer at the age of 43, the company said in a statement on Monday. “We are deeply saddened to announce the death of Leo Radvinsky. Leo passed away peacefully after a long battle with cancer,” an OnlyFans spokesperson said. “His family have requested privacy at this difficult time.”

Radvinsky, a Ukrain … ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net both, but neither directly. I know every workaround there is, including those used by developers, to test apps, while working on them. However if “sideloading” becomes so tedious, even the more technical users, cannot be bothered to do it, competing appstores and independent developers, not wanting to send their money and ID to Google, loose users at such rate, they likely won’t be able to justify continuing to maintain their projects, people like me rely on.

Uber’s Deal Blitz To Stop a Robotaxi Monopoly
Uber is aggressively partnering with multiple robotaxi companies to avoid a future dominated by Waymo or Tesla. The ride-hailing giant has struck deals with at least a dozen autonomous vehicle players in recent years. Just last week, it announced a $1.25 billion partnership with Rivian, with plans to deploy up to 50,000 driverless vehicles over the next decade. Business Insider report … ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net @bender@twtxt.net That sounds great! I, too, have taken Friday off work. But I’m slaving away again at the move of one of my best mates.

Intel FRED Can Yield Great Performance - FRED Benchmarks On Panther Lake
With Intel’s new Core Ultra Series 3 “Panther Lake” laptop SoCs, the Xe3-based Arc B390 graphics and much improved CPU performance capture much of the spotlight. One new capability with Panther Lake that isn’t featured as much though is the new FRED capability with Flexible Return and Event Delivery. Today’s Intel Panther Lake testing is looking at the very interesting performance impact of FRED on Linux. ⌘ Read more

@prologic@twtxt.net must be nice. Congrats! I am happy for you! 😂 Off jesting, enjoy mate! The rest of us will continue slaving ourvselves. 😅

Reddit Is Weighing Identity Verification Methods To Combat Its Bot Problem
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: There could be one more step required before creating an account and posting on Reddit in the future. According to Reddit’s CEO, Steve Huffman, the social media platform is exploring different ways to verify a user is human and not a bot. When asked by the TBPN podcast how to c … ⌘ Read more

2nd Van trip coming up this weekend, taking Friday off work. Gonna sleep in the Van tonight and see if I can fiddle with the town water supply (basically our outside tap near the Van haha 😆) and see if I can have a shower in the Van, brush my teeth and go to bed 🛌 – Basically I just want to figure out the rest of the plumbing 🪠

Firefox 149 Now Available With XDG Portal File Picker, Rust-Based JPEG-XL Decoder
Firefox 149.0 release binaries are now available with a wide assortment of improvements for this month’s update to the cross-platform Mozilla web browser solution… ⌘ Read more

@thecanine@twtxt.net congrats on the win! Hopefully it will not turn sour with the next “enter period of time here”. It seems flip-flopping is the law of the land around here.

I never got to ask you, are you affected by this as a developer, or end user, or both?

Linux’s sched_ext Will Prioritize Idle SMT Siblings For Better Performance
A change to the Linux kernel’s extensible scheduler class “sched_ext” for allowing nifty scheduler implementations via BPF programs will begin to prioritize SMT siblings to help with better performance… ⌘ Read more

Qt 6.11 Toolkit Released With “The Same 3D Capabilities As A Game Engine”
Qt 6.11 is out as the latest version of this cross-platform toolkit used by the KDE desktop and widely by both open-source and closed-source applications… ⌘ Read more

Will AI Force Source Code to Evolve - Or Make it Extinct?
Will there be an AI-optimized programming language at the expense of human readability? There’s now been experiments with minimizing tokens for “LLM efficiency, without any concern for how it would serve human developers.”

This new article asks if AI will force source code to evolve — or make it extinct, noting that Stephen Cass, the special projects edi … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Maker Canonical Joins The Rust Foundation
Canonical announced today that they have joined the Rust Foundation as a Gold Member… ⌘ Read more

AMD Posts Latest “pghot” Code For Overhauling Linux Hot Page Tracking & Promotion
One of the core Linux infrastructure improvements that AMD engineers have been working on recently is pghot as a hot-page tracking and promotion subsystem. This proposed addition to the Linux kernel could be quite beneficial especially for those using modern AMD EPYC servers with CXL and multiple memory tiers… ⌘ Read more

Arm Ethos U85 NPU Now Supported By EthosU Gallium3D Driver
Merged overnight for Mesa 26.1 is enabling the Arm Ethos U85 NPU within the EthosU Gallium3D driver so that with Mesa’s TEFLON framework can begin taking on AI workloads… ⌘ Read more

GrapheneOS Refuses to Comply with Age-Verification Laws
An anonymous reader shared this report from Tom’s Hardware:

GrapheneOS, the privacy-focused Android fork, said in a post on X on Friday that it will not comply with emerging laws requiring operating systems to collect user age data at setup. “GrapheneOS will remain usable by anyone around the world without requiring personal information, identification or an acco … ⌘ Read more

Some Microsoft Insiders Fight to Drop Windows 11’s Microsoft Account Requirements
Yes, Microsoft announced it’s fixing common Windows 11 complaints. But what about getting rid of that requirement to have a Microsoft account before installing Windows 11? While Microsoft didn’t mention that at all, the senior editor at the blog Windows Central reports there’s “a number of people” internally pushi … ⌘ Read more

Walmart Announces Digital Price Labels for Every Store in the U.S. By the End of 2026
Walmart is “rolling out digital price tags to replace the old paper ones,” reports CNBC, planning to implement them in all U.S. stores by the end of the year:

Amanda Bailey, a team leader in electronics who works at a Walmart in West Chester, Ohio, estimates that the digital shelf labels — known as DSLs — have … ⌘ Read more

Went 2/3 at Magic today: Prosper dominated game 1, Ash and his Knights came within a single planar die roll of winning game 2, and then Atraxa came up with the win in a fairly tight game 3. All in all, not a bad afternoon of Magic.

Trapped! Inside a Self-Driving Car During an Anti-Robot Attack
A man crossing the street one San Francisco night spotted a self-driving car — and decided to confront its passenger, 37-year-old tech worker Doug Fulop. The New York Times reports the man yelled that “he wanted to kill Fulop and the other two passengers for giving money to a robot.”
A taxi driver would have simply driven away. But Fulop’s vehicle had … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0-rc5 Released: Linux 7.0 “Starting To Calm Down”
Linus Torvalds just issued Linux 7.0-rc5 as we inch toward the stable Linux 7.0 kernel release in April… ⌘ Read more