Hobbit-like Humans May Have Scavenged Komodo Dragons’ Leftovers to Survive
CNN reports:

Prehistoric human relatives, nicknamed “hobbits” due to their short stature, may have been scavengers, rather than skilled hunters capable of taking down big game or building cooking fires, according to new research. The study adds to growing evidence that Homo floresiensis, which had a brain only slightl … ⌘ Read more

New Google Ad Imagines America’s ‘Declaration of Independence’ Written With AI Help
An anonymous reader shared this report from TechCrunch:

Two hundred and fifty years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, a new commercial from Google asks: What if the Founding Fathers had access to Google Workspace?
With the tagline “Group project, but make it 1776,” the ad depicts a large … ⌘ Read more

Are Wars Blurring Lines Between Corporate and National Security?
Subsea cables. Ukrainian power stations. Russian oil refineries. Even airports, water-desalination plants and Amazon data centers.

They’ve all become targets in wartime, notes the Wall Street Journal, and around the world now arguments “are already brewing between companies and governments over new regulations and potential costs.”

In Germany, po … ⌘ Read more

OpenRazer 3.12.4 Fixes Compatibility With Linux 7.2
OpenRazer 3.12.4 is now available as the newest update to these out-of-tree, unofficial Linux drivers for Razer devices. OpenRazer when paired with the likes of Polychromatic or other GUI options is what makes for a nice experience running Razer gaming peripherals under Linux… ⌘ Read more

New DNA Tech Identifies Soldier Killed in America’s Revolution in 1780
South Carolina’s pine forests “have spent centuries hiding a secret as old as America itself,” reports CBS News:

In August 1780, British and American soldiers clashed there, leading to a terrible defeat for the Continental army [fighting for the 13 colonies rebelling against England]. Battlefield archaeologists Jim Legg and Steve Smi … ⌘ Read more

842,000 American Households Lost Power Today During a Heatwave
As America began celebrating its 250th birthday Saturday, 842,000 homes reported power outages, notes ABC News. Figures from tracking site PowerOutage showed states in America’s Northeast and Midwest were impacted by severe weather and extreme heat.

That number, which will fluctuate throughout the day as crews work to restore power, is for households … ⌘ Read more

FEX 2607 Optimizing For Yet-To-Be-Released ARM 256-bit SVE2 Hardware
The FEX Emulator that allows running Linux x86/x86_64 software on ARM64 (AArch64) systems, including the likes of Wine / Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) for Windows gaming on ARM, is out with its newest monthly feature release. The Valve-backed project for running x86_64 games and other software on ARM for the upcoming Steam Frame and other more typical ARM Linux systems has been baking more optimizations and improvements… ⌘ Read more

Did Microsoft Shift Its Profits to Low-Tax Countries?
Microsoft is apparently shifting its profits to countries with low taxes — and out of countries where they have many more employees and significant sales. Back in 2005 Former Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer even said that a low corporate tax rate “is part of the overall advantage of doing business in Ireland,” remembers long-time Slashdot reader theodp. (Ballmer added “It wo … ⌘ Read more

FSF Shares Update on ‘LibrePhone’ and New Automated Site Monitoring Tool
At the end of 2025, the FSF launched LibrePhone project, which is working to “better understand and reverse-engineer the nonfree blobs used by a great majority of (if not all) system on a chip designs available today.” The FSF’s summer newsletter shares this update:

We started with researching the proprietary files in Android phone … ⌘ Read more

AOL’s Owner Bending Spoons Hits Wall Street with $1.7 billion IPO
“The owner of AOL and other tech businesses hit Wall Street with a $1.7 billion initial public offering Wednesday,” reports the Associated Press:

The company is getting $1 billion in proceeds, while the rest is going to shareholders. The stock surged 39.7% in its first day of trading under the symbol “BSP” on the Nasdaq, giving it a market value of $2 … ⌘ Read more

EchoStar’s US Satellite Pay-TV Provider Dish DBS Files for Bankruptcy
EchoStar’s satellite pay-TV unit Dish DBS has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy
protection, reports Reuters. The move also applies to its wireless subsidiaries, according to the article, and “facilitates the wind-down of Dish Wireless’s 5G network operations following an unexpected delay in a spectrum license sale to AT&T… unde … ⌘ Read more

Linux DRM Scheduler Patches Yield Massive Improvement For Job Submission Latency
A set of patches to the Linux kernel’s Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) scheduler that is shared among different kernel graphics drivers is showing the potential of delivering much lower job submission latency when the system is loaded with many runnable CPU processes… ⌘ Read more

Decades-Old Bash Tricks Expose AI Coding Agents To Supply Chain Attacks
Slashdot reader wiredmikey writes: AI security researchers have uncovered a structural security flaw dubbed GuardFall that allows decades-old Bash shell tricks to bypass safeguards in most open source AI coding agents. By exploiting shell behaviors such as quote removal and variable expansion, attackers can hide malicious commands … ⌘ Read more

What Is a Quantum Computer Good For? Absolutely Nothing - Yet
The Verge argues that researchers “have made genuine progress in quantum computing — it’s just been largely incremental and too esoteric to immediately capture the public’s imagination.”

And there are predictions that quantum computers will finally do something useful as soon as 2028:

The drama can overshadow the real progress in quantum computing. … ⌘ Read more

4K @ 60 FPS USB Video Capture Finally Becomes Less Problematic On Linux
One area of Linux hardware testing I haven’t explored much in many years has been modern USB video capture for the lack of said hardware. The last time I did much video capturing on Linux was during the Hauppauge PCI card days. It turns out though that USB video capture of 4K 60 FPS content has been a pain point under Linux but is finally smoothing out with newer versions of the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Phoronix Premium Summer Sale To Help Support Linux Hardware Testing
For those that missed Phoronix turning 22 years old last month when running a special to help support the site, a few readers mentioned recently they missed out on seeing the deal in time. Paired with the US Independence Day holiday and summer sales elsewhere, now through 10 July is a Phoronix Premium summer sale if wishing to view the site ad-free while supporting the daily open-source/Linux news coverage and relentless Linux hardware testing… ⌘ Read more

GNOME Lands ext-background-effect-v1 Support For Background Blur Effect
Added to the Wayland Protocols repository back in May of 2025 was the ext-background-effect-v1 protocol for background blur that had been under discussion since early 2024. The initial focus is on being able to apply a blur effect on a window’s background or otherwise a specified screen region. GNOME 51 has now merged support for ext-background-effect-v1 with the latest Mutter code… ⌘ Read more

Startup Targets Datacenters With 3D-Printed Nuclear Reactor Module
Startup Ampera has unveiled what it calls the first 3D-printed nuclear reactor module, built around a silicon-carbide core and pressure vessel designed for a thorium-based microreactor. The company says future systems could deliver 15 or 30 megawatts for up to 30 years without refueling. When The Register asked about availability, their s … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 Adding More Graphics PCI IDs For Intel Nova Lake S
In addition to this week’s drm-intel-next pull request beginning to lay out the Intel kernel graphics driver changes for Linux 7.3, the first drm-xe-next pull request was sent out on Friday. Intel Nova Lake enablement remains the hot area for the Intel GPU driver code… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2-rc2 Raising The Default RISC-V 64-bit CPU Limit To 256 Cores
A post merge-window change that landed in Linux Git overnight ahead of tomorrow’s Linux 7.2-rc2 release is bumping the default limit on the number of supported CPU cores for RISC-V 64-bit. Now by default Linux will support up to 256 cores with RISC-V 64-bit kernel builds… ⌘ Read more

KWin Compositor In KDE Plasma 6.8 Drops Support For Desktop OpenGL
Along with releasing Plasma 6.7.2 this week, KDE developers continue to be quite busy working on new features and improvements for the Plasma 6.8 release while also furthering along fixes for future Plasma 6.7 point releases… ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Thanks, mate!

On the back of the bench, the badge says: “Gestiftet Verein berg hohenstaufen Göppingen 2013”. I read that as the Mt. Hohenstaufen club donated the bench itself:

On the front of the bench, the badge says: “Gestiftet von Hildegard Schuster, Gesellschafterin der Schwarz-Gruppe, Firma Wackler”. The bronze lady was donated by a shareholder of the Schwarz group, specifically the local Wackler trucking and logistics company. Clip of 27 in original resolution:

The book itself reads: “Zur Erinnerung an Ralph Kobza” It’s in memory of the sales manager of the art foundry next town that created also this statue. My mate took this photo:

Video Game History Foundation Says Piracy Remains the Only Viable Preservation Method
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechSpot: Video Game History Foundation founder Frank Cifaldi recently supported claims that piracy is the only effective way to preserve video games. The comments lay the blame squarely on game companies’ refusal to keep legacy content available or allow archivis … ⌘ Read more

Reading you loud and clear 😅

Alibaba To Ban Claude Code In Workplace Over Alleged Backdoor Risks
Alibaba has reportedly banned employees from using Anthropic’s Claude Code and directed them to its own Qoder platform amid a growing dispute over features that can help identify China-linked users. Reuters reports: The ban is part of a deepening spat between the two companies after Anthropic accused Alibaba of illicitly extracting its Claude AI … ⌘ Read more

GNOME Mutter GPU Reset Recovery Becoming A Reality
While typically quite rare encountering a GPU reset under Linux in most conditions, currently if encountering one under GNOME your session gets wiped out. But thanks to a Google Summer of Code “GSoC” project this year, GNOME’s Mutter compositor is finally seeing real GPU reset recovery handling… ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org the siting lady reads this?

Gestiftet von
Hildegard Schünar
Gesellschafterin
der Schwarz-Gruppe
Firma Wüst's
Anni

Or it is something else? Awesome pics, Lyse! Some oldies I missed (the lady), and some pretty cool new ones. I can’t get enough of nature pics!

GNOME 51 Alpha Released With Numerous Enhancements
In working toward the stable GNOME 51 desktop release due out in September, today marks the alpha release of GNOME 51… ⌘ Read more

UPower 1.91.3 Fixes Behavior To Avoid Degrading Your Laptop Battery Faster
The UPower abstraction layer used for power management on Linux systems, especially laptops and desktops, is out with an important fix today to avoid inadvertently falling back to the laptop battery “fast” charging mode on some laptops that in turn could degrade your laptop battery faster… ⌘ Read more

I just read @kat@yarn.girlonthemoon.xyz’s blog post over here:

https://bubblegum.girlonthemoon.xyz/articles/learning-to-code-like-it-s-the-90s

Jesus, it must be so overwhelming for young people to get started with programming.

When I started programming, there was the built-in ROM BASIC of that PC and probably a bit of BASIC on a floppy, and that was it. Nowadays? Millions of libraries and frameworks and languages and what not – and, much worse, there’s the expectation that you need to make something fancy. When I started, printing something and understanding IF was good enough.

Vulkan Adds Extension For OCP’s Microscaling MX Formats To Help Machine Learning
Vulkan 1.4.356 is out today and it’s interesting for the lone new extension debuting: VK_EXT_shader_ocp_microscaling_types. The VK_EXT_shader_ocp_microscaling_types is for enabling the Open Compute Project’s Microscaling MX data types to help with machine learning workloads with Vulkan… ⌘ Read more

Coreboot + AMD openSIL On MSI Ryzen Motherboard Now Works With Windows 11
With 3mdeb’s Dasharo port of AMD openSIL and Coreboot running on the Gigabyte EPYC motherboard, 3mdeb engineers have been devoting more time to their bring-up of Coreboot+openSIL on the MSI PRO B850-P consumer motherboard for desktop AMD Ryzen. They now even have Microsoft Windows 11 working atop this open-source firmware alternative along with other features implemented… ⌘ Read more

Rust Coreutils cp Ended Up Breaking Ubuntu Image Builds With Latest Incompatibility
While the Rust Coreutils offers better memory safety than GNU Coreutils due to being written in the Rust programming language, subtle incompatibilities continue to be spotted in the Rust Coreutils implementations of the different commands. The latest coming to light this week was the Rust Coreutils cp command breaking Ubuntu image builds due to differences in argument handling… ⌘ Read more

Intel Prepares More Nova Lake Graphics/Display Enablement For Linux 7.3
On Thursday Intel sent out their first batch of Intel kernel graphics driver changes of new feature material targeting the Linux 7.3 kernel. This first batch of drm-intel-next for v7.3 continues to focus heavily on lining up Nova Lake’s Xe3P integrated graphics/display support… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA VR-NVL BMC Device Tree Being Upstreamed For OpenBMC Support
NVIDIA’s latest Linux kernel mailing list patches are for providing the Device Tree for the baseboard management controller (BMC) of their Vera Rubin VR-NVL server platform. With the Linux kernel patches and also for U-Boot, it’s part of the upstreaming effort for supporting the open-source OpenBMC software on their latest hardware… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2-rc2 BPF Code Being Hardened Against JIT Spraying Attacks
Some post-merge-window code changes merged overnight ahead of Linux 7.2-rc2 this weekend is hardening the kernel’s BPF code against JIT spraying attacks… ⌘ Read more

Linux Preparing To Retire Its 32-bit MSR Interfaces
Currently measuring in at 32 patches, SUSE engineer Juergen Gross has been leading the effort to end the Linux kernel’s usage of their 32-bit model specific register (MSR) interfaces so the more modern 64-bit interfaces can be exclusively used. This allows for better code unification and cleaning up the MSR code… ⌘ Read more

ReactOS Implements First Windows NT6 System Call In Step Toward Vista Compatibility
The ReactOS project that is striving to be the “open-source Windows” with Windows driver and software binary compatibility hit another milestone today. ReactOS to date has primarily targeted Windows NT 5.2 as the architecture from Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 but with an eye toward Windows NT 6.0 for Windows Vista and later compatibility with software. ReactOS has now landed their first NT6 system call… ⌘ Read more

Fedora 45 Considering x86_64 Shadow Stack Usage By Default
A change proposal under consideration for Fedora Linux 45 would enable x86_64 Shadow Stack usage by default in the name of better security on modern Intel and AMD systems… ⌘ Read more

EFS File-System Slated For Removal With Linux 7.3 After 20+ Years Unmaintained
The EFS file-system was used for non-ISO9660 CD-ROMs and disk partitions on SGI IRIX before IRIX 6.0 switched over to XFS. Inside the Linux kernel has been a read-only EFS file-system driver without a maintainer for 20+ years while for Linux 7.3 it’s expected to be removed… ⌘ Read more

Linux Kernel Developers Again Discussing AI Agent Attribution - Potentially Dropping It
When AI/LLM agents are used in the creation of Linux kernel patches, the policy for a while now has been that it should be specified using an “Assisted-by” tag as part of the patches/commits. But Linux kernel developers this week have been discussing whether to revise that policy or to potentially eliminate it… ⌘ Read more

RISC-V RVV Vector Performance Benchmarks With The SpacemiT K3 SoC
Since May we have been benchmarking the SpacemiT K3 RISC-V SoC as one of the first to market RISC-V chips supporting the RVA23 profile. The SpacemiT K3 has shown how far RISC-V performance has come in the past half decade and one of the promising elements of this modern RISC-V SoC with its X100/A100 cores is supporting the RISC-V Vector Extension “RVV” 1.0. In this article are some initial benchmarks looking specifically at the RISC-V RVV 1.0 … ⌘ Read more

Intel Posts Initial GCC Compiler Patches For AI Compute Extensions “ACE”
The x86 Ecosystem Advisory Group led by Intel and AMD recently firmed up the AI Compute Extensions (ACE) specification for optimizing x86 for AI computation tasks around matrix multiplication and the like for machine learning workloads. The cross-vendor ACE extension is ultimately a successor to Intel’s Advanced Matrix Extensions (AMX). Posted to the GCC mailing list today by Intel engineers are the initial patches in preparing the compiler … ⌘ Read more

Vibe Coded X11 Server Written In Rust Adds Xinerama, FreeBSD Support & Other Features
One month ago we reported on YSERVER as a modern X11 server written in Rust with the help of Claude Code. Since then YSERVER has continued to advance in supporting more X11 functionality thanks to the help of Claude Code (AI) and out today is version 1.3 o this display server… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma Affected By Arbitrary Code Execution To Break Sandboxes With “Open New Window”
A security disclosure has been made public today for a yet-to-be-patched arbitrary code execution vulnerability with the KDE Plasma desktop… ⌘ Read more

Linux Looking To Retire A Number Of Old ARM Platforms In Early 2027
It’s not only old x86 i486 CPU support being removed from the Linux kernel but a number of older ARM platforms and features are on the chopping block too. A proposal has been laid out for deprecating and then removing a number of outdated ARM platforms and features from the Linux kernel in early 2027… ⌘ Read more

Amazon Blames Piracy Apps With Malware For Killing New Fire Stick Sideloading
Amazon says it is ending sideloading on new Fire Sticks because “apps that facilitate piracy, and other apps, can carry malware,” adding that there is “a good amount of evidence” that sideloaded apps may contain unwanted code or behavior. However, the company did not provide specific examples of Fire Stick users being har … ⌘ Read more

COSMIC Epoch 1.2 Desktop Fixes Flickering Issues For Intel Graphics
Just a week after the COSMIC Epoch 1.1 release with its slick new system monitor, COSMIC Epoch 1.2 is now available for this Rust-based desktop developed by System76… ⌘ Read more

Google Pulls the Plug On Tenor API, Killing GIF Pickers Around the Web
Google has shut down the Tenor API, breaking GIF pickers in services that still relied on it and forcing platforms such as X to migrate elsewhere. 9to5Google notes that the library itself remains available at Tenor.com and “integrations within Google products are also still active, including Gboard, Google Messages, and more.” From the … ⌘ Read more

California Bill To Preserve Online Games Fails Committee Vote
California’s Protect Our Games Act, which would require publishers to warn players before shutting down paid online games and offer refunds or continued access, failed to advance after a state Senate committee vote. Four state senators voted in favor, three voted against, and four abstained. Engadget reports: The committee unanimously voted in favor of g … ⌘ Read more