LinkedIn Planning To Lay Off 5% of Staff In Latest Tech-Sector Cuts
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: LinkedIn planned to inform staff of layoffs on Wednesday, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters, in a widening of technology sector cuts this year. The Microsoft-owned social network plans to cut about 5% of its headcount as it reorganizes teams and focuses personnel on areas where … ⌘ Read more

Linux Driver Posted For Intel Silicon Security Engine Interface “ISSEI”
Since Intel Meteor Lake has been the Intel Silicon Security Engine to serve as a silicon root-of-trust for secure firmware loading, boot measurements, and similar functionality. This Intel Silicon Security Engine has been built on with Lunar Lake and Panther Lake as well as set to take on more importance with future Intel hardware platforms. We are now seeing a Linux driver come for this silicon RoT with the Intel Silicon Security Engine Inte … ⌘ Read more

KDE Receives $1.4 Million Investment From Sovereign Tech Fund
The German Sovereign Tech Fund has invested 1.2 million euros ($1.4 million USD) in KDE Plasma technologies to help strengthen the structural reliability and security of the desktop environment’s core infrastructure, including Plasma, KDE Linux, and the frameworks underlying its communication services. Longtime Slashdot reader jrepin shares an excerpt fro … ⌘ Read more

Harvard Votes On Limiting ‘A’ Grades
Harvard faculty are voting on a proposal (PDF) to curb grade inflation by limiting solid A grades to 20% of students in a class, plus four additional A’s per course. Axios reports: Grade inflation is at a tipping point at Harvard. A move to make A grades harder to come by at one of the world’s leading universities could influence grading debates at peer institutions. Solid A’s account for nearly two-thi … ⌘ Read more

Fragnesia Made Public As Latest Linux Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
Following last week’s disclosure of the Dirty Frag vulnerability for the Linux kernel, which only finished being patched up in mainline on Monday, Fragnesia is now public as a similar local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability… ⌘ Read more

Meta Employees Launch Protest Against Mouse-Tracking Tech At US Offices
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta employees distributed flyers at multiple U.S. offices on Tuesday to protest the company’s recent installation of mouse-tracking software on their computers, according to photos of the pamphlets seen by Reuters. The flyers, which appeared in meeting rooms, on vending machines and … ⌘ Read more

GCC 16 Produces Faster Binaries Than GCC 15, Competitive Race With LLVM Clang 22
GCC 16.1 released at the end of April as the latest major, annual feature release to the GNU Compiler Collection. Early benchmarks showed some nice leads for GCC 16 over GCC 15. Continued testing of the new GCC 16 compiler has continued to show overall better performance of the resulting binaries than using GCC 15 on the same hardware and same compiler flags. That led many to wonder about the GCC 16 performance up against the latest LLVM … ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime 26.18.38308.1 Brings More Xe3P Enableement, Nova Lake P Support
Intel on Tuesday released a new version of their open-source Compute Runtime for OpenCL and Level Zero support across their integrated and discrete graphics hardware… ⌘ Read more

CERN Open Sources Its KiCad Component Libraries
Ancient Slashdot reader ewhac writes: CERN, a longtime Open Source pioneer, has made several contributions over the years to KiCad (“KEE-kad”), an Open Source EDA (Electronic Design Automation) package widely used in the hobbyist and professional electronics communities. It’s gotten so widely used that users can now submit their KiCad design files directly to several electronics f … ⌘ Read more

Discord Taunts “Year Of The Linux Desktop” With Linux Client Improvements
Discord, the popular instant messaging and VoIP communication platform, announced some significant improvements being made to their Linux client… ⌘ Read more

NetBSD 11.0-RC4 Comes As Hopefully The Last Release Candidate
In addition to FreeBSD 15.1 releasing in the coming weeks, NetBSD 11.0 is also just around the corner as another prominent and major BSD update. NetBSD 11.0-RC4 is now available for last minute testing with this hoping to be the final release candidate… ⌘ Read more

I just wanted to look up 9V block battery prices online and these automatically generated descriptions are getting dumber by the minute:

Datum der Erzeugung: Verfallsdatum minus 7 Jahre

(Date of manufacturing: expiration date minus 7 years)

Or look at this one:

Die leistungsstarke 9 V-Block E Batterie, auch 6LR61 genannt, eignet sich besonders gut für Taschenlampen, Radio oder Kinderspielzeug, die einen gleichbleibenden Strombedarf haben. Ihre max. Spannung beträgt 1,5 V.

(The high performance 9 V block E battery, also known as 6LR61, is particularly suitable for torches, radio or child’s toys, which have a steady power demand. Its max. voltage is 1.5 V.)

The battery is best suited for… devices where it fits. No shit, Sherlock! Has anyboy ever come across 9V block torches? O_o I haven’t.

KDE Receiving Over 1.2 Million EUR Investment From Sovereign Tech Fund
KDE today announced a significant investment into the project by Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund. KDE will be receiving €1,285,200 EUR (or roughly 1.5 million USD) over the years 2026 and 2027 to make some significant improvements into their software stack… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org LOL! That’s brilliant. (We’re going back to that. Some Amazon employees probably already are.)

Why Are Some People Mosquito Magnets?
fjo3 shares a report from Phys.org: Ever felt like mosquitoes bite you while ignoring everyone else? Scientists are now making progress in deciphering the complex chemical cocktail that makes particular people more enticing to these disease-spreading bloodsuckers. “It’s not a misconception – mosquitoes are attracted to some people more than others,” Frederic Simard of France’s Institute of Resear … ⌘ Read more

Sam Altman Testifies That Elon Musk Wanted Control of OpenAI
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the stand Tuesday in Elon Musk’s trial against the company, testifying that Musk repeatedly sought control of OpenAI before leaving in 2018. Altman said he opposed putting AI “under the control of any one person,” while Musk’s lawyer used a pointed cross-examination to attack Altman’s trustworthiness. An anonymous reader shares … ⌘ Read more

Wine Wayland Driver Merges Pointer Warp Support
Wine’s Wayland native driver has taken another step forward with now supporting the pointer warp “wp_pointer_warp_v1” protocol… ⌘ Read more

South Korea Floats ‘Citizen Dividend’ Using AI Profits
South Korea’s presidential policy chief is calling for a “citizen dividend” that would return some AI-driven profits and tax revenue to the public. The Straits Times. From the report: Presidential policy chief Kim Yong-beom said in a Facebook post that a portion of the profits and tax revenue derived from the artificial intelligence boom “should be structurally returned to … ⌘ Read more

OpenZFS 2.4.2 Released With Linux 7.0 Kernel Support, Many Bug Fixes
For those making use of OpenZFS on Linux or FreeBSD, OpenZFS 2.4.2 is out today as the newest stable release of this ZFS file-system implementation… ⌘ Read more

Instructure Pays Canvas Hackers To Delete Students’ Stolen Data
Instructure, the company behind the widely used Canvas learning platform, says it reached an agreement with the hackers who stole 3.5 terabytes of student and university data. The company says it received “digital confirmation” that the information was destroyed and that affected schools and students would not be extorted. The BBC reports: Paying cyb … ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD 15.2 Will Aim For The Nice KDE Desktop Installation Experience
FreeBSD 15.0 had aimed to provide a KDE desktop install option from its text-based OS installer to make for a more compelling FreeBSD out-of-the-box desktop experience. That was then delayed to FreeBSD 15.1 but that didn’t end up materializing. Now the KDE desktop install option is diverted to FreeBSD 15.2… ⌘ Read more

Hi twtxt

Amazon Employees Are ‘Tokenmaxxing’ Due To Pressure To Use AI Tools
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times (via Ars Technica): Amazon employees are using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks in a bid to show managers they are using the technology more frequently. The Seattle-based group has started to widely deploy its in-house “MeshClaw” product in recent weeks, allowing emplo … ⌘ Read more

Google Announces Its Chromebook Successor: the Googlebook
Google is teasing a new line of “Googlebook” laptops for this fall, powered by a new Android-and-ChromeOS-derived operating system that will run Chrome, Android apps, phone-connected apps and files, and deeply integrated Gemini features. The company says Chromebooks will continue “after the launch of Googlebook” and “…all Chromebooks will continue to receive … ⌘ Read more

Our storage box is not reachable for hours, the support response is unhelpful to say the least. Let’s see how long it takes them to actually fix this. Until then, no photo galleries etc. available.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de 100% agree. We’re driving straight into a wall at full throttle. Doing it with a clear warning.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Apropos shit: I did not know about the history of Scheißtag. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schei%C3%9Ftag

Microsoft’s $1 Billion AI Data Center Will ‘Switch Off Half of Kenya’
Microsoft and G42’s planned $1 billion AI data center in Kenya has stalled amid disagreements over power commitments, with President William Ruto saying the country would need to “switch off half the country” to support the project at full scale. Tom’s Hardware reports: The project, announced in May 2024 during Ruto’s visit to Washingto … ⌘ Read more

EU To Crack Down On TikTok, Instagram’s ‘Addictive Design’
The EU plans to target “addictive design” features on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms, including endless scrolling, autoplay, push notifications, and recommendation loops that can steer children toward harmful content. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said new regulation could arrive later this year, alongside an EU age-verification app m … ⌘ Read more

AMD & Intel Roll Out New Linux Updates For Today’s Patch Tuesday
Today’s Patch Tuesday is a busier one than normal for the quarter. Both AMD and Intel have rolled out new updates for Linux customers among other security disclosures today. Thankfully though the vulnerabilities don’t appear to be too widespread or impactful… ⌘ Read more

DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.2 Further Improves NVIDIA Integration For Steam Play Linux Gaming
DXVK-NVAPI 0.9.2 is now available for this implementation of NVIDIA’s NVAPI/NVOFAPI interfaces atop DXVK and VKD3D-Proton that is used in turn by Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) for enhanced NVIDIA Linux gaming support… ⌘ Read more

eBay Rejects GameStop’s $56 Billion Takeover As ‘Neither Credible Nor Attractive’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: EBay on Tuesday rejected a $56 billion takeover bid from the much smaller GameStop over financing doubts, calling the proposal “neither credible nor attractive.” EBay, which has roughly four times GameStop’s market value, also underscored that its turnaround efforts under … ⌘ Read more

IBM s390 Is The Latest Architecture Seeing Rust Linux Kernel Support
An IBM engineer posted the first set of patches enabling the Rust programming language support for the Linux kernel to be built on the s390 architecture… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org

So, it’s plenty good enough for them.

Yeah, but on the other hand, you can’t even log in normally to a Matrix/Element account. I mean using username + password. It’s not expected that you ever log out or lose your browser session. If you do, you must use a one-time backup code (that you must create and save beforehand) to log in again.

To be fair, I can’t say that I fully understand what Matrix is doing in the first place. The text that I quoted reads like they have your keys. But they also claim that they only store this stuff encryped: https://element.io/en/help#encryption5 So … encrypted with what? Only option here is my password, isn’t it? (But if my password was good enough to reclaim an account … why do all the other stuff …)

Matrix takes end-to-end encryption seriously. When I ran a Matrix server for the family, the family members would regularly lose their keys, because they didn’t pay attention to something. That’s on purpose! Or rather, that was on purpose. Maybe it’s different these days?

No clue.

FCC Says Foreign-Made Routers Can Get Updates Until 2029
The FCC has softened its ban on foreign-made consumer routers, allowing vendors to keep issuing broader software and firmware updates for devices already in use in the U.S. through at least January 2029. Dark Reading reports: Under the original FCC ruling, foreign manufacturers were permitted to provide only limited maintenance and security patches to US custom … ⌘ Read more

First Real-Time Brain-Controlled Hearing Device
Researchers at Columbia demonstrated the first real-time brain-controlled hearing system that can identify which speaker a listener is focusing on in a noisy environment and automatically amplify that voice while suppressing others. “This breakthrough addresses the ‘cocktail party effect,’ a major limitation of conventional hearing aids, which often struggle to distinguish betw … ⌘ Read more

Running Four Intel Graphics Cards Under Linux On Ubuntu 26.04
It’s been nearly one year to the week since Intel introduced Project Battlematrix as their initiative for improving their Linux driver support for the Arc Pro B-Series with enhancements such as bettering the multi-GPU support in allowing up to eight Arc Pro GPUs per system as well as other open-source driver optimizations in the era of AI. Recently with the Arc Pro B70 in having four review samples for testing I was finally able to try out the multi-GP … ⌘ Read more

ARCTIC Fan Controller Driver Expected To Land In Linux 7.2
A new driver expected to land in the upcoming Linux 7.2 kernel is the ARCTIC Fan Controller driver to allow fan speed monitoring and PWM controls for this upcoming ARCTIC product. Making this new driver all the more exciting is that it was worked on by ARCTIC directly compared to the typical workflow for such desktop/consumer hardware peripherals often being left up to the reverse-engineering, open-source community… ⌘ Read more

Arts and Cultural Engagement ‘Linked To Slower Pace of Biological Aging’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Singing, painting or visiting a gallery or museum helps people age more slowly, according to the latest study to link taking an active interest in art and culture with improved health. The findings are the first to show that both participating in arts activities and attending … ⌘ Read more

Linux Scheduler Work Helping Boost Gaming Performance On Old “Potato” Hardware
Prominent Linux kernel engineer Peter Zijlstra of Intel has been working on a set of scheduler patches to help with enhancing the behavior and delivering better results, especially for aging hardware he described as a “potato” – an Intel Sandy Bridge desktop CPU with AMD Radeon RX 580 Polaris graphics. Benchmark results are promising from this work for gaming on old hardware while other workloads may ultimately stand to benefit too… ⌘ Read more

Fwupd 2.1.3 Brings Firmware Updating To Modular Smartphones
Fresh off the milestone of Dell and Lenovo becoming premier sponsors of the Linux Vendor Firmware Service (LVFS), there is a new feature release of the Fwupd firmware updating tool for Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

Intel Looking To Move Their Low-Power Mode Daemon Into The Linux Kernel Source Tree
For years Intel has been developing the Low Power Mode Daemon “LPMD” to help their hybrid laptop and desktop CPUs deliver optimal power efficiency under Linux. Intel LPMD leverages hardware hints and other features for optimizing active idle power of the processor and putting the system into lower power modes where possible. This tool could soon call the Linux kernel source tree its new home… ⌘ Read more

BeOS-Inspired Haiku Finally Sees Initial ARM64 SMP Support
The open-source Haiku operating system inspired by BeOS is now seeing multi-core symmetric multi-processing (SMP) support on ARM64 that works at least in a virtualized world. Plus an assortment of other improvements made to this open-source OS over the course of April… ⌘ Read more

Forgot the source: https://hachyderm.io/@robpike/116557975987213548

I’m not always on the same page as Rob Pike, but this hit close to home:

Although trained in physics, I worked in the computing industry with pride and purpose for over 40 years. And now I can do nothing but sit back and watch it destroy itself for no valid reason beyond hubris (if I’m being charitable).

Ineffable sadness watching something I once loved deliberately lose its soul.

I spent my time trying to make it better. Not just write code, but find better or at least different ways to do so. Simpler, cleaner, more general, more comprehensible.

What’s happening today is a complete repudiation of everything I was trying to achieve.

“Simpler, cleaner, more general, more comprehensible”, that’s what I’ve been trying to establish in our teams as well. Obviously not to the same degree, but you get the idea.

And it all goes out the window now. We’re doing the complete opposite – and with full force.

In today’s episode of “everything goes to shit because we want it to”: https://about.gitlab.com/blog/gitlab-act-2/

The supply of deep technical problems is multiplying, and the engineers who can solve them will be among the scarcest and most valuable talent in the market.

And yet:

We’re reevaluating our operational footprint, and are planning to reduce the number of countries by up to 30% where we have small teams.

Oh no, speedy recovery, @movq@www.uninformativ.de! I was down for one day on Saturday. Vomiting through the nose. Not entirely sure what that was, but I reckon something in the food poisoning or sunstroke realm.

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Oh my goodness, hahaha!

To be fair, it depends on your threat model. And I believe it’s very safe to bet that most probably don’t have one. Nor even remotely know what that is. So, it’s plenty good enough for them.

With that new to me detail on top, there’s even less incentive to look at this Matrix hype more closely.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Testifies In OpenAI Trial
The Musk v. Altman trial entered its third week Monday, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former OpenAI co-founder and renowned AI researcher Ilya Sutskever taking the stand. Nadella testified that Elon Musk never raised concerns to him that Microsoft’s investments in OpenAI violated any special commitments, and said he viewed the partnership as clearly commercial f … ⌘ Read more

A Data Center Drained 30 Million Gallons of Water Unnoticed
A Georgia data center developed by QTS used nearly 30 million gallons of water through two unaccounted-for connections before residents complained about low water pressure and the county utility discovered the issue. “All told, the developer, Quality Technology Services, owed nearly $150,000 for using more than 29 million gallons of unaccounted-for water,” … ⌘ Read more