UC Berkeley Scientists Hail Breakthrough In Decoding Whale Communication
UC Berkeley researchers working with Project CETI discovered that sperm whales produce vowel-like sounds embedded in their click codas, suggesting a far more complex communication system than previously understood. “It was striking just how structured the system was. I’ve never seen anything like that before with other animals,” … ⌘ Read more

We Can Now Track Individual Monarch Butterflies
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For the first time, scientists are tracking the migration of monarch butterflies across much of North America, actively monitoring individual insects on journeys from as far away as Ontario all the way to their overwintering colonies in central Mexico. This long-sought achievement could provide crucial insights into … ⌘ Read more

Some People Never Forget a Face, and Now We Know Their Secret
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A new study from researchers in Australia reveals that the people who never forget faces look “smarter, not harder.” In other words, they naturally focus on a person’s most distinguishing facial features. “Their skill isn’t something you can learn like a trick,” explains lead author James Dunn, a … ⌘ Read more

OpenZFS 2.4 Squeezes In Some Last Minute Improvements
Following OpenZFS 2.4-rc3 from nearly one month ago is now a fourth release candidate for the upcoming OpenZFS 2.4. A few more features and improvements have been squeezed into this release in nearing the stable milestone… ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.2 RC1 Brings More UI/UX Improvements, Proper SVG Export
Last year GIMP developers expressed a goal of releasing GIMP 3.2 within one year of GIMP 3.0. With GIMP 3.0 having released in March, it looks like their GIMP 3.2 release goal will become a reality with the GIMP 3.2-RC1 debuting today… ⌘ Read more

Electric Vehicle Sales Are Booming In South America
Chinese automakers are rapidly expanding across South America, boosted by the new Chinese-built Port of Chancay, aggressive pricing, local partnerships, and growing regional demand. Reuters reports: China has been ramping up sales since the opening last year of the Port of Chancay, north of Lima. The Chinese-built megaport has halved trans-Pacific shipping times just as C … ⌘ Read more

Google Is Collecting Troves of Data From Downgraded Nest Thermostats
Even after disabling remote control and officially ending support for early Nest Learning Thermostats, Google is still receiving detailed sensor and activity data from these devices, including temperature changes, motion, and ambient light. The Verge reports: After digging into the backend, security researcher Cody Kociemba found that the … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Mitigated the Largest Cloud DDoS Ever Recorded, 15.7 Tbps
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Security Affairs: On October 24, 2025, Azure DDoS Protection detected and mitigated a massive multi-vector attack peaking at 15.72 Tbps and 3.64 billion pps, the largest cloud DDoS ever recorded, aimed at a single Australian endpoint. Azure’s global protection network filtered the traffic, keeping servic … ⌘ Read more

An AI Podcasting Machine Is Churning Out 3,000 Episodes a Week
fjo3 shares a report from TheWrap: There are already at least 175,000 AI-generated podcast episodes on platforms like Spotify and Apple. That’s thanks to Inception Point AI, a startup with just eight employees cranking out 3,000 episodes a week covering everything from localized weather reports and pollen trackers to a detailed account of Charlie Kirk’s as … ⌘ Read more

NetChoice Sues Virginia To Block Its One-Hour Social Media Limit For Kids
NetChoice is suing Virginia to block a new law that limits kids under 16 to one hour of daily social media use unless parents approve more time, arguing the rule violates the First Amendment and introduces serious privacy risks through mandatory age-verification. The Verge reports: In addition to restricting access to legal speech … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 Brings Build Fixes For Google Cloud & Azure, Base Repository Changes
FreeBSD 15.0-RC1 is available today for testing as this leading BSD operating system works toward the stable release in early December… ⌘ Read more

Tech Giants’ Cloud Power Probed As EU Weighs Inclusion In DMA
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Amazon Web Services, Microsoft’s Azure, and Alphabet’s Google Cloud risk being dragged into the scope of the European Union’s crackdown on Big Tech as antitrust watchdogs prepare to study the platforms’ market power. The European Commission wants to decide if any of the trio should face a raft of new restri … ⌘ Read more

‘Buy Now, Pay Later’ is Expanding Fast, and That Should Worry Everyone
An anonymous reader shares a report: When Nigel Morris tells you he’s worried about the economy, you listen. As industry observers know, Morris co-founded Capital One and pioneered lending to subprime borrowers, building an empire on understanding exactly how much financial stress the average American can handle. Now, as an early investor … ⌘ Read more

Wayland-Only Budgie 10.10 Desktop Preview Released
At the start of the year developers behind the Budgie desktop environment hoped for shipping Budgie 10.10 in Q1-2025. We are now in Q4 without a stable release but at long last a preview version is at least available. Budgie 10.10 is the point at which Budgie is going all-in on Wayland in leaving behind the X11 desktop session support… ⌘ Read more

Harvard Has Almost Half a Billion Dollars in Crypto
An anonymous reader shares a report: Harvard is ramping up its holdings in cryptocurrency. The nation’s oldest university reported a $443 million investment in BlackRock’s iShares Bitcoin Trust in the third quarter. The school now holds 6.8 million shares of the exchange-traded fund, up from 1.9 million in the second quarter.

The digital currency amounts to a little less than … ⌘ Read more

systemd 259-rc1 Released With Musl libc Support, New run0 “Empower” Mode
Released a short time ago was systemd 259-rc1 as the first test release toward this next version of this dominant Linux init system and service manager… ⌘ Read more

Is Video Watching Bad for Kids? The Effect of Video Watching on Children’s Skills
Abstract of a paper on NBER: This paper documents video consumption among school-aged children in the U.S. and explores its impact on human capital development. Video watching is common across all segments of society, yet surprisingly little is known about its developmental consequences. With a bunching identificat … ⌘ Read more

Git 2.52 Released With More Preparations Toward Git 3.0
Git 2.52 is out today as the newest feature release of this distributed revision control system and in working toward Git 3.0 that will hopefully release by the end of 2026… ⌘ Read more

Iran Begins Cloud Seeding To Induce Rain Amid Historic Drought
Authorities in Iran have sprayed clouds with chemicals to induce rain, in an attempt to combat the country’s worst drought in decades. From a report: Known as cloud-seeding, the process was conducted over the Urmia lake basin on Saturday, Iran’s official news agency Irna reported. Urmia is Iran’s largest lake, but has largely dried out leaving a vast … ⌘ Read more

AI Use in ‘Call of Duty: Black Ops 7’ Draws Fire From US Lawmaker
An anonymous reader shares a report: The use of AI in the latest Call of Duty has prompted a US lawmaker to call for regulations to prevent artificial intelligence from taking jobs away from human workers. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), who represents a large swathe of Silicon Valley, took aim at Call of Duty: Black Ops 7 after buyers noticed the pop … ⌘ Read more

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Take-Two CEO Says Consoles Aren’t Going Away, But Gaming is Moving Toward PCs
Strauss Zelnick, CEO of Take-Two Interactive, which operates publishing labels including GTA-maker Rockstar Games and 2K, said on Monday that although gaming consoles are not going away, the industry is moving toward PCs in the next decade. From a report: “I think it’s moving towards PC and business is moving towards open … ⌘ Read more

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UK Cyber Ransom Ban Risks Collapse of Essential Services
The UK government has been warned that its plan to ban operators of critical national infrastructure from paying ransoms to hackers is unlikely to stop cyber attacks and could result in essential services collapsing. From a report: The proposal, announced by the Home Office in July, is designed to deter cyber criminals by making it clear any attempt to blackmail … ⌘ Read more

Demi Moore discusses Roswell and aliens with Stephen Colbert
The actress, who was born in Roswell, recently sat down for an interview on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert. During her recent appearance on the sh… ⌘ Read more

SUSE Developer Working To Reimplement SSH Using The Zig Programming Language
SUSE engineer Lucas Mülling is leading an effort to work on implementing SSH within the Zig programming language, a popular language for robust, optimal, and reusable software… ⌘ Read more

Global Web Freedoms Tumble
Global internet freedom declined for a 15th consecutive year, according to Freedom House’s annual report. Semafor: “Always grim reading,” this year’s is particularly sobering, Tech Policy Press noted, with the lowest-ever portion of users living in countries categorized as “free.” Conditions declined in 27 of the 72 countries assessed, with those in Kenya – where anti-corruption protests were quelled, in part, by a seve … ⌘ Read more

Why Hotel-Room Cancellations Disappeared
Hotel cancellation policies have transformed over the past seven years. Travelers once could cancel reservations up until the day before check-in without penalty. That flexibility has largely vanished.

The shift began around 2018 when third-party travel-booking sites deployed “cancel-rebook” strategies, the Atlantic writes. These platforms would monitor hotel rates after securing initial reservati … ⌘ Read more

VKD3D-Proton 3.0 Released: Big Update To Direct3D 12 On Vulkan With FSR4 Support
Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve just announced VKD3D-Proton 3.0 as a major update to this Direct3D 12 implementation atop the Vulkan API that is used by Valve’s Steam Play (Proton)… ⌘ Read more

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Updated LLVM/Clang Compiler Enables AVX 10.2 & APX For Intel Nova Lake
Last month when the LLVM/Clang 22 compiler merged support for Intel Nova Lake with the “-march=novalake” target there was no mentions of AVX10 or Advanced Performance Extensions (APX) support. But last week Intel published a new programming reference manual where they confirmed AVX 10.2 and APX for Nova Lake. Now that it’s official, Intel compiler engineers are updating the LLVM/Clang (and GCC) compiler support to reflect these ISA addition … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic CEO Says He’s ‘Deeply Uncomfortable’ With Unelected Tech Elites Shaping AI
Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei says he’s uneasy about how much power a handful of tech leaders – including himself – have over the future of artificial intelligence. From a report: “I think I’m deeply uncomfortable with these decisions being made by a few companies, by a few people,” Amodei told Anderson Cooper … ⌘ Read more

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AMD Enterprise AI Suite Announced: End-To-End AI Solution For Kubernetes With Instinct
The AMD ROCm blog just announced a new open-source AMD AI software project: the AMD Enterprise AI Suite as well as AMD Inference Microservices (AIMs)… ⌘ Read more

Florida Bill Would Require Cursive Instruction in Elementary Schools
An anonymous reader shares a report: Elementary-school students would have to learn how to write in cursive, under a bill set to be vetted by a House committee next week. Sen. Erin Grall, R-Vero Beach, filed a similar proposal (SB 444) on Monday. The House Student Academic Success Subcommittee is set to review the measure (HB 127) on Nov. … ⌘ Read more

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systemd Lands Experimental Support For musl libc
Systemd today finally merged support for building against and using the musl libc library. This is a win for Linux distributions like postmarketOS, Alpine Linux, and others that use musl by default as their standard C library or offer it as an option… ⌘ Read more

Intel Nova Lake Power Management Bits Prepped Ahead Of Linux 6.19
Intel engineers continue working on the Nova Lake next-gen processor enablement for the Linux kernel. In addition to the Intel Xe3P graphics and other early Nova Lake enablement work already queued in “-next” Git branches ahead of the Linux 6.19 merge window, the initial power management code is also ready for this next kernel cycle… ⌘ Read more

Bezos Returns To CEO Role With AI Startup Project Prometheus
Jeff Bezos has founded an AI startup called Project Prometheus and will serve as its co-chief executive. This is his first formal operational role since stepping down as chief executive of Amazon in July 2021. The company has raised $6.2 billion in funding, The New York Times reports, partly from Bezos. The funding makes Project Prometheus one of the most wel … ⌘ Read more

How Should the Linux Kernel Handle AI-Generated Contributions?
Linux kernel maintainers “are grappling with how to integrate AI-generated contributions without compromising the project’s integrity,” reports WebProNews:

The latest push comes from a proposal by Sasha Levin, a prominent kernel developer at NVIDIA, who has outlined guidelines for tool-generated submissions. Posted to the kernel mailing list, these … ⌘ Read more

Bigfoot hunter has spent decades seeking Florida’s elusive Skunk Ape
According to local folklore, deep in the Florida Everglades lives an undiscovered hominid with a skunk-like stench. From the Yeti of the Himalayas to … ⌘ Read more

GCC Patch Enables Support For The Rust-Based Wild Linker
The Wild linker is a very speedy linker written in the Rust programming language that has become quite competitive with the likes of Mold. A patch sent out this weekend adds Wild support for use with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC)… ⌘ Read more

Red Hat Losing Another Longtime & Prominent Linux Kernel Engineer
Following prominent Linux x86 platform enabler Hans de Goede leaving Red Hat (as recently noted, he recently joined Qualcomm), there is another prominent Linux kernel engineer that will be departing from Red Hat… ⌘ Read more

NVK’s Cooperative Matrix Support Proving Competitive With Official NVIDIA Driver
Karol Herbst at Red Hat who has been a longtime open-source NVIDIA driver contributor as well as Rusticl developer presented at XDC2025 on the NVK Vulkan driver’s cooperatrive matrix extension support. It turns out this Vulkan extension for machine learning / AI is proving fairly competitive with the open-source NVK driver compared to NVIDIA’s official driver stack… ⌘ Read more

Bitcoin Erases Year’s Gain as Crypto Bear Market Deepens
655”Just a little more than a month after reaching an all-time high, Bitcoin has erased the more than 30% gain registered since the start of the year…” reports Bloomberg:

The dominant cryptocurrency fell below US$93,714 on Sunday, pushing the price beneath the closing level reached at the end of last year, when financial markets were rallying following Presiden … ⌘ Read more

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More Tech Moguls Want to Build Data Centers in Outer Space
“To be clear, the current economics of space-based data centers don’t make sense,” writes the Wall Street Journal.

“But they could in the future, perhaps as soon as a decade or so from now, according to an analysis by Phil Metzger, a research professor at the University of Central Florida and formerly of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Executives Discuss How AI Will Change Windows, Programming – and Society
“Windows is evolving into an agentic OS,” Microsoft’s president of Windows Pavan Davuluri posted on X.com, “connecting devices, cloud, and AI to unlock intelligent productivity and secure work anywhere.”

But former Uber software engineer and engineering manager Gergely Orosz was unimpressed. “Can’t see any re … ⌘ Read more

Chinese Astronauts Return From Their Space Station After Delay Blamed on Space Debris Damage
“Three Chinese astronauts returned from their nation’s space station Friday,” reports the Associated Press, “after more than a week’s delay because the return capsule they had planned to use was damaged, likely from being hit by space debris.”

The team left their Shenzhou-20 spacecraft i … ⌘ Read more