Mesa NVK Driver Temporarily Disabling Support For Larger Pages Due To Bug
Upstreamed to the Nouveau open-source kernel driver in Linux 6.19 was support for larger pages and with that compression support available with the larger page sizes. Subsequently the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver began making use of the larger pages and compressed image support dependent upon the larger page sizes as it should help with performance. But for now it’s being temporarily disabled due to a discovered issue… ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi Preparing To Introduce A Smart Display Module
Raspberry Pi is gearing up to launch another new product: a Raspberry Pi Smart Display Module… ⌘ Read more

Amazon Cuts Another 16,000 Jobs
Amazon announced on Wednesday that it is eliminating approximately 16,000 roles across the company as part of organizational changes that began in October 2025 and are only now being finalized by certain teams. Senior Vice President Beth Galetti shared the news in a memo to employees, framing the reductions as an effort to reduce layers, increase ownership, and remove bureaucracy. The memo follows another memo that t … ⌘ Read more

FreeRDP 3.22 Released With Overhauled SDL-Based Client UI
FreeRDP 3.22 was just released as the newest version of this Apache-licensed open-source Remote Desktop protocol (RDP) implementation for interfacing with another computer over the network… ⌘ Read more

Asteroid 2024 YR4 Has a 4% Chance of Hitting the Moon
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Universe Today: There’s a bright side to every situation. In 2032, the Moon itself might have a particularly bright side if it is blasted by a 60-meter-wide asteroid. The chances of such an event are still relatively small (only around 4%), but non-negligible. And scientists are starting to prepare both for the bad (massive r … ⌘ Read more

Ancient Martian Beach Discovered, Providing New Clues To Planet’s Habitability
alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: New findings from NASA’s Perseverance rover have revealed evidence of wave-formed beaches and rocks altered by subsurface water in a Martian crater that once held a vast lake – considerably expanding the timeline for potential habitability at this ancient site. In an i … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Inadvertently Announces Cloud Unit Layoffs In Email To Employees
Amazon appears to have prematurely acknowledged layoffs inside AWS after an internal email referencing “organizational changes” and “impacted colleagues” was mistakenly sent to cloud employees. CNBC reports: “Changes like this are hard on everyone,” Colleen Aubrey, senior vice president of applied AI solutions at Amazon Web Services, wro … ⌘ Read more

RFC Patches Posted For Klint Integration With The Linux Kernel: Rust-Based Linting Tool
A request for comments (RFC) patch series was sent out today for providing Klint integration with the Linux kernel. Klint is a new linting tool written in the Rust programming language that helps with static code analysis for errors/bugs as well as code styling inconsistencies… ⌘ Read more

US Government Lost More Than 10,000 STEM PhDs Last Year
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Science.org: Some 10,109 doctoral-trained experts in science and related fields left their jobs last year as President Donald Trump dramatically shrank the overall federal workforce. That exodus was only 3% of the 335,192 federal workers who exited last year but represents 14% of the total number of Ph.D.s in science, technol … ⌘ Read more

Apple Updates iOS 12 For the First Time Since 2023
Apple quietly released its first update to iOS 12 since 2023 to keep iMessage, FaceTime, and device activation working on older hardware through January 2027. The update applies to legacy devices like the iPhone 5S, iPhone 6/6 Plus, and 2013-era iPads. Macworld reports: The update appears to be related to a specific issue. According to Apple’s “About iOS 12 Updates” page, … ⌘ Read more

Apple M3 Progress On Linux: Asahi Can Boot To KDE Desktop - But No GPU Acceleration Yet
While the Asahi Linux project has made good progress on bringing Linux to Apple Silicon hardware, much of the success and in turn upstreaming to the Linux kernel has been around the aging M1 and M2 Macs. Apple M3 and newer has been a struggle but progress is being made. One of the Asahi Linux developers shared the ability now to boot to the KDE Plasma desktop with the experimental Asahi Linux code on an M3 MacBook but withou … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Launch AI DinoTracker App That Identifies Dinosaur Footprints
Scientists have released DinoTracker, a free AI-powered app that identifies dinosaur footprints by analyzing shape patterns rather than relying on potentially flawed historical labels. “When we find a dinosaur footprint, we try to do the Cinderella thing and find the foot that matches the slipper,” said Prof Steve Brusatte, a c … ⌘ Read more

SoundCloud Data Breach Impacts 29.8 Million Accounts
A data breach at SoundCloud exposed information tied to 29.8 million user accounts, according to Have I Been Pwned. While SoundCloud says no passwords or financial data were accessed, attackers mapped email addresses to public profile data and later attempted extortion. BleepingComputer reports: The company confirmed the breach on December 15, following widespread reports … ⌘ Read more

Supreme Court To Decide How 1988 Videotape Privacy Law Applies To Online Video
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Supreme Court is taking up a case on whether Paramount violated the 1988 Video Privacy Protection Act (VPPA) by disclosing a user’s viewing history to Facebook. The case, Michael Salazar v. Paramount Global, hinges on the law’s definition of the word “consumer.” … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Releases Prism, a Claude Code-Like App For Scientific Research
OpenAI has launched Prism, a free scientific research app that aims to do for scientific writing what coding agents did for programming. Engadget reports: Prism builds on Crixet, a cloud-based LaTeX platform the company is announcing it acquired today. For the uninitiated, LaTeX is a typesetting system for formatting scientific docume … ⌘ Read more

Amazon To Pay $309 Million To US Shoppers In Settlement Over Returns
Amazon has agreed to pay $309 million and provide additional remedies in a class-action settlement over claims that customers were wrongly denied refunds after returning items. Plaintiffs say (PDF) the deal delivers over $1 billion in total value, including more than $600 million in refunds and operational changes. Reuters reports: Amazon d … ⌘ Read more

Internal Messages May Doom Meta At Social Media Addiction Trial
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, the first high-profile lawsuit – considered a “bellwether” case that could set meaningful precedent in the hundreds of other complaints – goes to trial. That lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old, K.G.M, who hopes the jury will agree that Meta and YouTube caused psychological … ⌘ Read more

Citigroup Mandates AI Training For 175,000 Employees To Help Them ‘Reinvent Themselves’
Citigroup has rolled out mandatory AI training for all 175,000 of its employees across 80 locations worldwide, a sweeping initiative that CEO Jane Fraser describes as helping workers “reinvent themselves” before the technology permanently alters what they do for a living.

The $205 billion bank sent out an in … ⌘ Read more

New Intel Linux Driver Workaround Halves Initial Game Load Time For MHW
In addition to Mesa 26.1 today seeing Vulkan present timing support finally merged to help reduce game stuttering and separately another long-in-development Mesa merge request for DG2 / Meteor Lake to improve performance as much as 260% in some scenarios, there is another merge today to Mesa Git for enhancing Intel graphics on Linux. For Intel Linux gamers the newest Mesa code adds a new DriConf workaround that is capable of halving the initi … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla is Building an AI ‘Rebel Alliance’ To Take on Industry Heavweights OpenAI, Anthropic
Mozilla, the nonprofit organization behind the Firefox browser that has spent two decades battling tech giants over control of the internet, is now turning its attention to AI and deploying roughly $1.4 billion in reserves to fund what president Mark Surman calls a “rebel alliance” of startups … ⌘ Read more

Instagram, Facebook and WhatsApp To Test Premium Subscriptions
An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta plans to test new subscriptions that give people access to exclusive features on its apps, the company told TechCrunch on Monday. The tech giant said the new subscriptions will unlock more productivity and creativity, along with expanded AI capabilities.

In the coming months, Meta said it will offer a premium … ⌘ Read more

GStreamer 1.28 Released With More Rust Code
GStreamer 1.28 is out today as the newest feature release for this widely-used, open-source multimedia framework… ⌘ Read more

Android Phones Are Getting More Anti-Theft Features
An anonymous reader shares a report: Google on Tuesday announced an expanded set of Android theft-protection features, designed to make its mobile devices less of a target for criminals. Building on existing tools like Theft Detection Lock, Offline Device Lock, and others introduced in 2024, the newly launched updates include stronger authentication safeguards and enhanced … ⌘ Read more

GNU C Library Moving From Sourceware To Linux Foundation Hosted CTI
GNU C Library “glibc” developers have decided to move ahead with plans of migrating their core services from Sourcware.org infrastructure over to the Core Toolchain Infrastructure “CTI” project hosted by the Linux Foundation… ⌘ Read more

France To Ditch US Platforms Microsoft Teams, Zoom For ‘Sovereign Platform’ Amid Security Concerns
France will replace the American platforms Microsoft Teams and Zoom with its own domestically developed video conferencing platform, which will be used in all government departments by 2027, the country said. From a report: The move is part of France’s strategy to stop using foreign … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Was Routing Example-Domain Traffic To a Japanese Cable Company for Five Years
Microsoft has quietly suppressed an unexplained anomaly on its network that was routing traffic destined for example.com – a domain reserved under RFC2606 specifically for testing purposes and not obtainable by any party – to sei.co.jp, a domain belonging to Japanese electronics cable maker Sumitomo E … ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Beta 2 Released For Testing
Following the KDE Plasma 6.6 Beta from two weeks ago, a second beta of the upcoming Plasma 6.6 desktop is now available for testing. KDE Plasma 6.6 stable remains on-track for a mid-February release… ⌘ Read more

Doomsday Clock Ticks To 85 Seconds Before Midnight, Its Closest Ever
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists on Tuesday set their symbolic Doomsday Clock to 85 seconds before midnight – the closest the timepiece has ever been to the theoretical point of annihilation since scientists created it during the Cold War in 1947.

The clock now stands four seconds nearer than last year’s setting, and this marks th … ⌘ Read more

Google Axion CPU Performance With The New Google Cloud N4A Instances
Back in 2024 Google rolled out their Axion in-house ARM processors with the Google Cloud C4A instance type. Today they are expanding their Axion offerings in Google Cloud with the N4A instances now out of preview. The Google Cloud N4A instances are designed for scale-out web servers and microservices, containerized applications, back-end application services, databases, data analytics, and cost-effective development/staging/testing environments. ⌘ Read more

Amazon To Shut Down All Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh Stores
Amazon is closing all of its Amazon Go and Amazon Fresh physical stores in a shift to focus on its online same-day delivery service and new big-box retail stores. From a report: The e-commerce giant said Tuesday that some of its shuttered Amazon-branded brick-and-mortar stores would be converted into Whole Foods Market locations. Amazon said its branded stores fail … ⌘ Read more

Systemd Founder Lennart Poettering Announces Amutable Company
Systemd founder and lead developer Lennart Poettering announced the creation of a new company called Amutable. The Amutable company being led by Chris Kühl (CEO), Christian Brauner (CTO) and Lennart Poettering (Chief Engineer) will be focused on delivering determinism and verifiable integrity to Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

OpenAI’s Science Chief Says LLMs Aren’t Ready For Novel Discoveries and That’s Fine
OpenAI launched a dedicated team in October called OpenAI for Science, led by vice president Kevin Weil, that aims to make scientists more productive – but Weil admitted in an interview with MIT Technology Review that the LLM cannot yet produce novel discoveries and says that’s not currently the mission.

U … ⌘ Read more

Pinterest Cuts Up To 15% Jobs To Redirect Resources To AI
Pinterest said on Tuesday it would trim its workforce by less than 15% and reduce office space, as the social media company looks to reallocate resources to AI-focused roles and initiatives. From a report: The announcement comes as the company competes with TikTok and Meta-owned Facebook and Instagram for digital advertising budgets, as these platforms continue to d … ⌘ Read more

TigerVNC 1.16 Released With “w0vncserver” For Sharing Wayland Desktop Sessions
TigerVNC 1.16 is out today for this high performance, multi-platform VNC server and client implementation. Most notable with TigerVNC 1.16 is “w0vncserver” as a new server for sharing Wayland desktops… ⌘ Read more

Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold Will Cost $2,900 in the US
Samsung said today that its Galaxy Z TriFold, the first tri-fold smartphone to ship in the U.S., will be available starting January 30 at a price point of $2,899 – substantially more expensive than any other phone on the U.S. market, including Samsung’s own $2,000 Galaxy Z Fold 7 and a fully loaded 2TB iPhone 17 Pro Max.

The company will only sell the device through its … ⌘ Read more

Zlib-rs Declares A Stable & Complete API For This Rust-Based Zlib Implementation
Following the release of zlib-rs 0.6 last week, the developers behind this Rust-based Zlib implementation have declared their API stable and complete… ⌘ Read more

How Anthropic Built Claude: Buy Books, Slice Spines, Scan Pages, Recycle the Remains
Court documents unsealed last week in a copyright lawsuit against Anthropic reveal that the AI company ran an operation called “Project Panama” to buy millions of physical books, slice off their spines, scan the pages to train its Claude chatbot, and then send the remains to recycling companies.

The company spe … ⌘ Read more

Vulkan VK_EXT_present_timing Merged To Mesa 26.1 For X11 & Wayland
The Vulkan EXT_present_timing was in development for years to help avoid game stuttering and released this past November with Vulkan 1.4.335. This significant extension as of today has been wired up in Mesa 26.1-devel for the key Vulkan drivers and working on both X11 and Wayland… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Is Refreshing the Xbox Cloud Gaming Web Experience
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Thurrott: Microsoft is testing a refresh of the Xbox Cloud Gaming web experience in public preview. “This preview is a first look at our new web interface on your browser and lets you try the updated design and product flow before it is rolled out broadly,” Microsoft’s Patrick Siu explains. “Players who opt in to … ⌘ Read more

ThinkPads On Linux Appear Nearly Ready For Improved Trackpoint Doubletap Handling
Being worked on for a while by Lenovo engineer Vishnu Sankar is nicely handling support for double-tap functionality with TrackPoints on ThinkPads under Linux. The sixth iteration of this enablement work was posted today and is just documentation updates, so it’s looking like this new TrackPoint doubletap code could soon be crossing the threshold for the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Updated Linux Patches For Managing Out-Of-Memory Behavior Via BPF
Being worked on since last year by Google engineer Roman Gushchin was the latest attempt for the Linux kernel to support managing the out-of-memory “OOM” behavior using BPF programs. It’s been a while since there has been anything new to report on that front but published overnight is the latest iteration of those patches… ⌘ Read more

Picolibc Picks Up RISC-V Improvements, Hexagon Support & Better POSIX Compliance
Keith Packard published Picolibc 1.8.11 on Monday as the newest release for his C library designed for embedded 32-bit and 64-bit platforms. Picolibc continues tacking on new CPU architecture support and other features for this project that started out as a conglomeration of the Newlib and AVR Libc C library codebases… ⌘ Read more

ReactOS Celebrates 30 Years
jeditobe writes: ReactOS, the open-source operating system aimed at binary compatibility with Windows, recently marked its 30th anniversary. Launched in 1996, ReactOS has focused on providing a free alternative to Windows, with compatibility for Windows applications and drivers. Though still in development, it has made significant progress in recent years, including improvements to USB support, better hardware compatib … ⌘ Read more

Lawsuit Alleges That WhatsApp Has No End-to-End Encryption
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from PCMag: A lawsuit claims that WhatsApp’s end-to-end encryption is a sham, and is demanding damages, but the app’s parent company, Meta, calls the claims “false and absurd.” The lawsuit was filed in a San Francisco US district court on Friday and comes from a group of users based in countries such as Australi … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I dunno 🤷 You should see all the things™ my wife does 🤣 I guess we’re both the same, we just do it 😅

My hoster broke UDP, so DNS is broken as well and that takes a lot of things with it. No more email for me, I guess.

Let’s hope they’ll fix it soon.

China Hacked Downing Street Phones For Years
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Telegraph: China hacked the mobile phones of senior officials in Downing Street for several years, The Telegraph can disclose. The spying operation is understood to have compromised senior members of the government, exposing their private communications to Beijing. State-sponsored hackers are known to have targeted the phones of some of the … ⌘ Read more

Reddit Lawyers Force Founder to Redact ‘WallStreetBets’ From Miami Event
Reddit has forced Jaime Rogozinski, the founder of infamous r/WallStreetBets, to strip the WallStreetBets name from an upcoming Miami conference after legal threats citing trademark rights. According to a press release, it’s the “first known case of a social media company enforcing trademark control over a user-created community.” F … ⌘ Read more

AMD Radeon Linux Driver Introduces Low-Latency Video Decode Option
AMD’s RadeonSI Gallium3D driver for next quarter’s Mesa 26.1 release is introducing a new low-latency video decode mode. This lower-latency video decoding comes with a trade-off of increased GPU power consumption… ⌘ Read more

Apple Launches AirTag 2 With Improved Range, Louder Speaker
Apple has launched a new AirTag 2 that features improved range, a speaker that’s 50% louder, and expanded Apple Watch-based tracking. Pricing stays the same at $29 (or $99 for four). 9to5Mac reports: The new AirTag comes with an upgraded second-generation Ultra Wideband chip for improved range, including when using Precision Finding. From Apple Newsroom: “ … ⌘ Read more