Microsoft Upgrades Its WSL2 Kernel Against Linux 6.18 LTS
Microsoft on Friday released linux-msft-wsl-6.18.20.1 as the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) kernel updated against the Linux 6.18 LTS series… ⌘ Read more

FSMOUNT_NAMESPACE Feature Coming For Linux 7.1
Among the new VFS features expected to land for the upcoming Linux 7.1 merge window is FSMOUNT_NAMESPACE… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Upgrades Its WSL2 Kernel Against Linux 6.18 LTS
Microsoft on Friday released linux-msft-wsl-6.18.20.1 as the Windows Subsystem for Linux 2 (WSL2) kernel updated against the Linux 6.18 LTS series… ⌘ Read more

US Demands Reddit Unmask ICE Critic, Summons Firm To Grand Jury
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The Trump administration has stepped up an effort to unmask a Reddit user who criticized Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). After failing to obtain information through a summons issued (PDF) to Reddit, the government reportedly issued a subpoena demanding that Reddit provide the informati … ⌘ Read more

Cage 0.3 Released With New Wayland Protocol Support
Cage as the Wayland compositor providing a kiosk mode for single, maximized apps is out with a new feature release more than six months after its prior version… ⌘ Read more

GNOME-Aligned Amberol 2026.1 Music Player Released, Phosh Improves X11 Support
A few weeks past the GNOME 50 release and there continues to be a lot of ongoing GNOME app activity worth highlighting… ⌘ Read more

CPUID Site Hijacked To Serve Malware Instead of HWMonitor Downloads
Attackers briefly hijacked part of CPUID’s backend and swapped legitimate download links on its site with malware-laced ones. “The issue hit tools like HWMonitor and CPU-Z, with users on Reddit and elsewhere starting to notice something wasn’t right when installers tripped antivirus alerts or showed up under odd names,” reports The Register. F … ⌘ Read more

To Fill Air Traffic Controller Shortage, FAA Turns To Gamers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: As the Trump administration seeks to fill a national shortage of air traffic controllers, officials are targeting a new talent pool: gamers. The Federal Aviation Administration on Friday is making a recruiting push aimed at avid players of video games, as the agency strives to fill thousands of … ⌘ Read more

Artemis II Astronauts Splash Down Off California’s Coast
NASA’s Artemis II crew safely splashed down off the California coast after completing a 10-day trip around the moon and back. “This is not just an accomplishment for NASA,” sad NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. “This is an accomplishment for humanity, again, a historic mission to the moon and back.” From a report: Isaacman is aboard the USS John. P Murtha Nav … ⌘ Read more

Support For AMD GFX11.7 “RDNA 4m” Pending For RADV & RadeonSI Drivers
Back in February we were the first to report on a new AMD “RDNA 4m” target appearing in the AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler. While part of the “RDNA 4” family, it’s graphics IP version is GFX 11.7 (GFX1170) that is associated with the RDNA 3 family but with some ISA changes to align it slightly more with the newer RDNA 4 graphics IP. While the RDNA 4m AMDGPU LLVM shader compiler patches have been out for two months, the Mesa patches have only been … ⌘ Read more

Chimpanzees In Uganda Locked In Vicious ‘Civil War’, Say Researchers
Researchers say the world’s largest known wild chimpanzee community in Uganda fractured into rival factions and has been locked in a vicious “civil war” for the last eight years. “It is not clear exactly why the once close-knit community of Ngogo chimpanzees at Uganda’s Kibale National Park are at loggerheads, but since 2018 the scientist … ⌘ Read more

EU Parliament Fails To Renew Loophole Allowing Tech Firms To Report Abuse
Bruce66423 shares a report from the Guardian: The European parliament has blocked the extension of a law that permits big tech firms to scan for child sexual exploitation on their platforms, creating a legal gap that child safety experts say will lead to crimes going undetected. The law, which was a carve-out of the EU Privacy Ac … ⌘ Read more

Suspect Arrested for Allegedly Throwing Molotov Cocktail at Sam Altman’s Home
San Francisco police arrested a suspect after a Molotov cocktail was allegedly thrown at Sam Altman’s home and threats were later made outside OpenAI’s headquarters. “Thankfully, no one was hurt,” said OpenAI in a statement to WIRED. “We deeply appreciate how quickly SFPD responded and the support from the city in helping k … ⌘ Read more

Intel’s New Shader Compiler “Jay” Merged For Mesa 26.1
It was just a few days ago that Jay was publicly posted as the new shader compiler in-development for Intel GPUs on Linux for both their ANV Vulkan and Iris Gallium3D drivers. While still very experimental, that initial Jay compiler code was merged today for Mesa 26.1-devel… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Begins Removing Copilot Branding From Windows 11 Apps
Microsoft has started stripping Copilot branding out of Notepad in Windows 11, replacing the old Copilot menu with a more generic “writing tools” label. The AI features themselves aren’t going away, but Microsoft seems to be backing off the heavy-handed Copilot branding and extra entry points. Windows Central reports: As promised, Microsoft is now … ⌘ Read more

FBI Extracts Suspect’s Deleted Signal Messages Saved In iPhone Notification Data
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: The FBI was able to forensically extract copies of incoming Signal messages from a defendant’s iPhone, even after the app was deleted, because copies of the content were saved in the device’s push notification database, multiple people present for FBI testimony i … ⌘ Read more

Google News Now Prominently Featuring Polymarket Bets
Futurism found that Google News is surfacing Polymarket betting pages alongside traditional news sources. “The bets often appear in the ‘For you’ section of Google News, which is tailored to a user’s personal interests,” the publication reports. “In one instance, it was even the very top result, as with this bet on the price of Bitcoin.” From the report: In our testin … ⌘ Read more

Google Rolls Out Gmail End-To-End Encryption On Mobile Devices
Gmail’s end-to-end encryption is now available on all Android and iOS devices, letting enterprise users send and read encrypted emails directly in the app without any extra tools. “This launch combines the highest level of privacy and data encryption with a user-friendly experience for all users, enabling simple encrypted email for all customers from s … ⌘ Read more

VMUFAT File-System Driver Proposed For The Linux Kernel
The newest Linux file-system driver proposed for the kernel is… VMUFAT… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Ready For Release With Many Exciting Changes
The Linux 7.0 kernel is gearing up for its stable release and should be out this coming Sunday, 12 April, barring any major last minute issues… ⌘ Read more

France’s Government Is Ditching Windows For Linux
France says it plans to move some government computers from Windows to Linux as part of a broader push for digital sovereignty and reduced dependence on U.S. technology. TechCrunch reports: In a statement, French minister David Amiel said (translated) that the effort was to “regain control of our digital destiny” by relying less on U.S. tech companies. Amiel said that the Fre … ⌘ Read more

AI Is Coming for Car Salesmen
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Drive: An auto dealer software company is pitching AI-powered kiosks designed to replace car salesmen on showroom floors. Automotive News says the industry is “skeptical.” But be honest – would you really rather deal with the average car lot shark than a computer?

Epikar, a South Korean company that cooks up digital management solutions for car dealers, has named its n … ⌘ Read more

Firefox 149 vs. Chrome 147 Web Browser Performance On Linux
It has been a while since featuring a showdown of the Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome web browsers on Linux. With some fresh benchmarks being overdue plus the new JetStream 3 browser benchmark having been announced last week, here is some fresh data for how these two dominant web browsers are competing on the modern Linux desktop from an Intel Panther Lake system running Ubuntu 26.04. ⌘ Read more

Linux 2026 “Spring Cleaning” To Address Some Code Remnants As Far Back As Linux v0.1
A big kernel patch series was posted today by longtime Linux developer Thomas Gleixner. The set of 38 patches amount to some big time “spring cleaning” with addressing some code remnants still around that originated back in the very early Linux v0.1 kernel while some other code being cleaned up dates back to the Linux 1.3~2.1 kernel series from the 90’s… ⌘ Read more

Bitland WMI Laptop Driver Slated For Linux 7.1
Bitland, the Chinese OEM that manufactured systems for Lenovo and other companies until being added to the US Entity List due to being accused of using Uyghur forced labor, is expected to see a WMI driver added to the Linux 7.1 kernel for better supporting Bitland laptops… ⌘ Read more

Vulkan 1.4.349 Released With Data Graph Optical Flow Extension
Vulkan 1.4.349 is out today as a small update to the Vulkan API specification that incorporates various fixes that accumulated over the past week. Plus there is one new extension… ⌘ Read more

Meta Removes Ads For Social Media Addiction Litigation
Meta has started removing ads from law firms seeking clients for social media addiction lawsuits, just weeks after a jury found Meta and YouTube negligent in a landmark case involving harm to a young user. “Lawyers across the country now are seeking new plaintiffs, in the hopes of bringing a class action lawsuit that could result in lucrative verdicts,” reports Axio … ⌘ Read more

Framework Computer To Announce Their Next-Gen Hardware Later This Month
Linux-friendly hardware vendor Framework Computer sent out a notice this morning that they will be announcing their new 2026 hardware products later this month… ⌘ Read more

TUXEDO Laptops Will Enjoy More Features With The Upstream Linux 7.1 Kernel
TUXEDO Computers’ laptops received some heat in the past from upstream Linux kernel developers over their out-of-tree kernel drivers but fortunately that situation has been improving. The Uniwill driver premiered in the Linux 6.19 kernel with that OEM manufacturing many of the TUXEDO Computers laptop models. That Uniwill x86 platform driver enabled more functionality for TUXEDO hardware in the mainline kernel and has continued improvi … ⌘ Read more

Particles Seen Emerging From Empty Space For First Time
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from NewScientist: According to quantum chromodynamics (QCD) – widely considered to be our best theory for describing the strong force, which binds quarks inside protons and neutrons – even a perfect vacuum isn’t truly empty. Instead, it is filled with short-lived disturbances in the underlying energy of spa … ⌘ Read more

US Fertility Rate Falls To All-Time Low
An anonymous reader quotes a report from NPR: Women in the U.S. gave birth to roughly 710,000 fewer children last year compared with the nation’s peak in 2007, according to preliminary data released (PDF) this week by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Lead researcher Brady Hamilton, a demographer with the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, said the latest one percent drop … ⌘ Read more

FEX 2604 Released With Better Memory Savings For Running x86_64 Apps/Games On ARM64
Out today is the newest monthly update to FEX for this emulator for running Linux x86/x86_64 binaries on AArch64 (ARM64) Linux systems, including games and the likes of Steam Play with Windows games. This Valve-sponsored project that is quite important for the upcoming Steam Frame has rolled out more performance improvements, memory savings, and other improvements with FEX 2604… ⌘ Read more

‘Negative’ Views of Broadcom Driving Thousands of VMware Migrations, Rival Says
“One of VMware’s biggest competitors, Nutanix, claims to have swiped tens of thousands of VMware customers,” reports Ars Technica. They said higher prices, forced bundling, licensing changes, and more strained partner relationships have frustrated customers and driven them away from the leading virtualization firm. From … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla Accuses Microsoft of Sabotaging Firefox With Windows and Copilot Tactics
BrianFagioli writes: Mozilla is accusing Microsoft of stacking the deck against Firefox, arguing that design choices in Windows steer users toward Edge even when they explicitly choose another browser. According to Mozilla, parts of Windows still open links in Edge regardless of the default browser setting, includi … ⌘ Read more

Amazon May Sell Trainium AI Chips To Third Parties In Shot At Nvidia
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy says the company may eventually sell its Trainium AI chips directly to outside customers, not just through AWS, which would put Amazon in more direct competition with Nvidia. “There’s so much demand for our chips that it’s quite possible we’ll sell racks of them to third parties in the future,” Jassy wrote in his … ⌘ Read more

Intel NPU Linux Driver To Allow Limiting Frequency For Power & Thermal Management
The Intel IVPU accelerator driver used on Linux for the neural processing unit (NPU) on Core Ultra SoCs saw a patch posted for allowing the NPU clock frequency to be limited in the name of power and thermal management… ⌘ Read more

OpenAI To Limit New Model Release On Cybersecurity Fears
OpenAI is reportedly preparing a new cybersecurity product for a small group of partners, out of concern that a broader rollout could wreak havoc if it were released more widely. If that move sounds familiar, it’s because Anthropic took a similar limited-release approach with its Mythos model and Project Glasswing initiative. Axios reports: OpenAI introduced its “T … ⌘ Read more

Hacker Steals 10 Petabytes of Data From China’s Tianjin Supercomputer Center
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNN: A hacker has allegedly stolen a massive trove of sensitive data – including highly classified defense documents and missile schematics – from a state-run Chinese supercomputer in what could potentially constitute the largest known heist of data from China. The dataset, which al … ⌘ Read more

EFF Is Leaving X
After nearly 20 years on the platform, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it is leaving X. “This isn’t a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue,” the digital rights group said. “The math hasn’t worked out for a while now.” From the report: We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts gen … ⌘ Read more

Waymo Is Offering To Help Cities Fix Their Potholes
Waymo is launching a pilot with cities and Google’s Waze to share pothole data collected by its robotaxis, giving local transportation departments a new way to find and fix road damage more quickly. “We realized, hey, once we’re at scale, we can actually share this data with cities, which is something that they’ve asked for and something that we collect at scale,” said Ar … ⌘ Read more

ASUS Armoury Driver Supports A Few More Laptops With Linux 7.0
Merged back in Linux 6.19 was the ASUS Armoury driver to enhance support for the ROG Ally gaming handhelds and modern ASUS laptops. The ASUS Armoury driver enables various laptop features to be toggled under Linux and since its introduction it has continued expanding support for more ASUS devices. Ahead of Linux 7.0 coming out on Sunday, a few more devices are now supported by this upstream driver… ⌘ Read more

Skilled Older Workers Turn To AI Training To Stay Afloat
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: [Five skilled workers aged 50 and older spoke] to the Guardian about how, after struggling to find work in their fields, they have turned to an emerging and growing category of work: using their expertise to train artificial intelligence models. Known as data annotation, the work involves labeling and evaluatin … ⌘ Read more

Little Snitch Comes To Linux To Expose What Your Software Is Really Doing
BrianFagioli writes: Little Snitch, the well known macOS tool that shows which applications are connecting to the internet, is now being developed for Linux. The developer says the project started after experimenting with Linux and realizing how strange it felt not knowing what connections the system was making. Existing tools … ⌘ Read more

SiFive Raises $400M To Double Down On High Performance RISC-V For Data Centers
RISC-V processor IP purveyor SiFive just announced they have raised $400 million USD in an over-subscribed Series G financing round. This latest funding is so they can further focus on delivering high performance RISC-V designs for the data center… ⌘ Read more

RISC-V Optimized strnlen Implementation For Linux 7.1 Yields Big Speed-Up
In addition to RISC-V discontinuing its eXecute In Place “XIP” kernel support for Linux 7.1, there is an optimized strnlen() function coming for Linux 7.1 on RISC-V as well as some other optimized functions… ⌘ Read more

Valve Developer Improves The Linux Gaming Experience For Limited vRAM Hardware
Natalie Vock of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team primarily working on the RADV Vulkan driver has come up with a new interesting creation: patches to the Linux kernel and KDE for sharply improving the gaming experience for those running systems with limited amounts of video memory. Such as for graphics cards with just 8GB of dedicated vRAM, the patches now available – initially on CachyOS for a nice out-of-the-box experience – p … ⌘ Read more

FFmpeg Introduces Vulkan-Accelerated 360 Degree Video Conversion
Beyond the capabilities of just the Vulkan Video API, the FFmpeg multimedia library has made interesting Vulkan-accelerated adaptations using compute shaders. With Vulkan compute they’ve implemented Apple ProRes video acceleration, FFV1 decode, and other features. The newest Vulkan feature now in place for FFmpeg is 360 degree video conversion… ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Loses Appeals Court Bid To Temporarily Block Pentagon Blacklisting
A federal appeals court denied Anthropic’s bid to temporarily block the Pentagon’s blacklisting, meaning the company remains shut out of Defense Department contracts while the case continues, even though a separate court has allowed other federal agencies to keep using Claude for now. CNBC reports: “In our view, the equitab … ⌘ Read more

AMD Making It Easier To Embed Lemonade AI Capabilities Into Other Apps
The open-source Lemonade local AI server that enables using Ryzen AI NPUs on Linux for LLM usage as well as AMD Radeon GPU support and common x86_64 CPU support (in addition to Microsoft Windows support) is now becoming easier to embed within other apps for AI usage… ⌘ Read more

Mir-Based Miracle-WM 0.9 Introduces A WebAssembly Plugin System
Miracle-WM as the Wayland compositor / window manager built atop Canonical’s Mir project is out with a big new feature release. This “hackable” and i3/Sway-inspired Wayland compositor has landed a WebAssembly-based plug-in system for opening up new possibilities as well as a new Rust API with this week’s v0.9 release… ⌘ Read more