Cybersecurity Vets Protest ‘Dangerous’ US Government Ban On Anthropic’s Most Powerful Models
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: A group made up of dozens of cybersecurity experts, including several well-known veterans of the industry, published an open letter to the U.S. government asking it to lift the export control order on Anthropic’s Fable and Mythos models. Accord … ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD 15.1 Released With Updated WiFi Drivers, Better C23 Support & Other Improvements
After some last minute delays pushing the 15.1-RELEASE back by two weeks, FreeBSD 15.1 is now shipping as the newest stable release of this BSD operating system… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.2 Optimization Shows +5% IOPS For EXT4 & XFS After Moving Around Two Lines Of Code
In addition to the surprising impact of /proc/filesystems read optimizations for Linux 7.2, another one of the VFS pull requests for this next kernel version is delivering some nice improvements for EXT4 and XFS around IOmap, the framework that maps file data offsets in memory to their physical locations on storage… ⌘ Read more
The US Government Is Letting a Key Data Center Regulation Expire
The Federal Data Center Enhancement Act (FDCEA) is set to expire in September without an apparent replacement, potentially ending requirements for federal agencies to report on data-center efficiency, resilience, energy and water use, and contractor sustainability. Wired reports: Despite the public backlash, the Office of Management and Budget (OM … ⌘ Read more
FBI Issues Urgent Kali365 Security Warning For Teams, Outlook, OneDrive Users
alternative_right shares a report from The Hill: The FBI released an urgent security warning to the public about a fast-acting scam targeting Microsoft 365 users on Teams, Outlook and OneDrive. The agency warned that the hacking platform Kali365 seeks out OAuth device codes, allowing scammers to sneak past multi-factor auth … ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 Beta Now Properly Handles Notches & Rounded Corners
The community of developers continuing to maintain Ubuntu Touch for smartphones has released the Ubuntu Touch 24.04-2.0 beta ahead of the planned stable release in mid-July… ⌘ Read more
Google Chrome’s Next Update Will Mark the End of Popular Ad Blockers
Google is removing Chrome’s last remaining workarounds for Manifest V2 extensions, effectively ending support for legacy ad blockers such as the original uBlock Origin. 9to5Google reports: CyberNews points out a Chromium commit that removes support for the “kExtensionManifestV2Disabled” flag, which is referred to as “dead code” seeing as Ch … ⌘ Read more
Intel Performance Skills: New Open-Source Project Leveraging AI For Linux Performance Optimizations
The newest open-source project out of Intel is the Intel Performance Skills project that is providing AI agent skills to help with CPU performance analysis and performance optimizations on Linux… ⌘ Read more
Users Cry Foul After AMD Stripped Memory Crypto From Its Consumer CPUs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A decade ago, AMD added a protection to its high-end CPUs to protect them against cold boot attacks and other types of physical exploits that siphon sensitive data out of the connected memory chips. Short for Transparent Secure Memory Encryption, TSME encrypts the entire conten … ⌘ Read more
FreeBSD Receives Funding To Launch AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery
The FreeBSD Project announced today the launch of an AI-Assisted Vulnerability Discovery Project with grant funding provided by the Linux Foundation backed Alpha-Omega project. Alpha-Mega has sponsors including Microsoft, AWS, Google, Anthrophic, OpenAI, and others who will now be helping with FreeBSD uncovering new vulnerabilities by leveraging AI… ⌘ Read more
Trump’s ‘Made In the USA’ Phone Is Just a Reskinned HTC U24 Pro
Longtime Slashdot reader necro81 writes: The heavily promoted, $499 T1 “Trump Phone” was originally said to be “Made in the USA” and ship in September 2025. Later, that was downgraded to “Assembled in the USA.” Given the Trump Organization’s lack of engineering or supply chain expertise, many assumed the “T1” would just be a private-label phone made … ⌘ Read more
GCC Steering Committee Supports Inclusion Of WebAssembly Backend
Last month a new GCC back-end was proposed for WebAssembly to allow C/C++ code to be compiled to WASM with this GNU compiler toolchain. The GCC Steering Committee has evaluated it and approves the notion of WebAssembly back-end for GCC… ⌘ Read more
Britain Unveils Sweeping Ban On Social Media For Under-16s
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from NBC News: British Prime Minister Keir Starmer has announced a sweeping ban on social media use for those under 16, joining other countries around the world seeking to protect children online. “It’s a big step for our country,” Starmer said in a recorded video message released Monday. “Social media is maki … ⌘ Read more
Fox Is Buying Roku For $22 Billion
Fox is buying Roku for $22 billion, combining Fox’s sports, news, entertainment, Tubi, and Fox One offerings with a streaming platform that reaches about 100 million people. The companies say the merger would create the “third-largest player in US television by share of viewing,” while Fox insists Roku will remain open to competing apps after the deal closes. CNN reports: Fox has dabbled in stream … ⌘ Read more
Russian Spam & Profanities Are Now Plaguing The Arch Linux AUR
After days of dealing with 1,500+ packages in the Arch Linux AUR containing malware, the latest headache in the Arch Linux User Repository is Russian spam and offensive messages… ⌘ Read more
Google CEO Largely Avoids Discussing AI In Stanford Commencement Speech
BrianFagioli writes: Google CEO Sundar Pichai delivered Stanford University’s 2026 commencement address, but despite leading one of the companies at the center of the AI boom, he spent very little time discussing artificial intelligence. Instead, the speech focused on optimism, working on hard things, and following your interests. T … ⌘ Read more
Firefox 152 Now Available With JPEG-XL Support Built By Default, Modernized Settings UI
The Firefox 152.0 release binaries are now available ahead of tomorrow’s official unveiling. With Firefox 152 there is now the JPEG-XL support code being compiled by default for the release albeit still disabled at run-time by default behind a preference for now… ⌘ Read more
Swiss Voters Reject Proposal To Cap Population At 10 Million
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Voters in Switzerland have rejected an unprecedented far-right proposal to cap the country’s population at 10 million in a divisive referendum dubbed “the Swiss Brexit.” Some 54.79% of voters were against the proposal by the Swiss People’s party (SVP) and 45.21% were in favor. Turnout was 58.86%. A differ … ⌘ Read more
Reading /proc/filesystems Is Surprisingly Done Very Often & Now As Much As 444% Faster
Reading /proc/filesystems for obtaining a list of file-systems supported by the running kernel is done frequently on Linux. Namely due to being read by the SELinux library (libselinux), reading of /proc/filesystems is done more often than one would typically expect and now the Linux 7.2 kernel is optimizing for it to yield much better performance… ⌘ Read more
Framework Computer Making Progress On Coreboot For Their Modern Intel-Powered Laptops
While we have seen Coreboot work-in-progress support for older Ryzen-powered Framework Laptops, it seems there is a recent uptick in development around supporting Coreboot on Framework Computer’s modern Intel-powered wares… ⌘ Read more
Cache Aware Scheduling Merged For Linux 7.2 For Boosting Modern Intel & AMD CPUs
The scheduler updates were merged this morning for the Linux 7.2 kernel and it’s exciting. Cache Aware Scheduling has finally been merged! This is a win for especially modern Intel and AMD processors with multiple last level caches (LLCs)… ⌘ Read more
Are Many College Students Losing the Ability to Read?
Futurism reports:
in a new essay for The Chronicle Higher Education, university-level literature and writing instructor Tyler Jagt recalls how not a single one of his students could get through an assigned 20-page article, something that he had read “without complaint” as an undergraduate a decade ago.
One student confessed that the reason they didn’t finish was that … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.2 Introducing The Rust Zerocopy Library To Eliminate More “Unsafe” Code
Miguel Ojeda already mailed in the many Rust code changes for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel. This is quite a big Rust code with more than forty thousand new lines of Rust code in the kernel… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.2 To Better Communicate File-System Casefolding For Helping Windows NFS & More
Newly-merged code for the in-development Linux 7.2 kernel will now expose the case-folding (case insensitive) behavior of local file-systems so that Linux file servers and others can properly report the actual behavior rather than guessing if case-folding is actually used/supported… ⌘ Read more
GNU Linux-libre 7.1-gnu Released With More Driver Deblobbing, Unhappy With i486 Removal
Following yesterday’s release of the upstream Linux 7.1 kernel release, GNU Linux-libre 7.1 is out with its new build for de-blobbing various drivers from loading non-free-software microcode/firmware and other sanitizing of the kernel code in the name of software freedom… ⌘ Read more
IT Workers Are Now Struggling to Find Work, as ‘Picky’ Companies Demand AI Skills
“Battered by years of mass layoffs, California tech workers were hoping the job market would rebound this year,” reports the Los Angeles Times. “But things are getting worse.”
The class divide is widening in Silicon Valley as a tiny group of employees is landing unprecedented packages for AI skills, while many others … ⌘ Read more
US-Iran Peace Agreement Prompts Stock Rally, Leaves Some Investors Skeptical and Questions on Speed of Resuming Oil Production
“Asian stocks rallied Monday while oil prices tumbled,” reports CNBC, “after the U.S. and Iran agreed to a peace deal aimed at ending nearly four months of conflict…”
The strongest reaction was seen in energy markets. U.S. … ⌘ Read more
Workers Spend As Much Time ‘Botsitting’ AI As Producing Useful Work, Survey Finds
“As the use of artificial intelligence spreads across companies worldwide, it is relieving workers of tedious old chores but creating new ones,” reports the Los Angeles Times.
“Most people don’t realize the amount of time that they’re spending working on the tools to get the time savings that they’re professing,” sai … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.2 To Raise LLVM/Clang Compiler Requirement, Add Support For Distributed ThinLTO
Among the early pull requests sent in prior to today’s Linux 7.1 release of new material aiming for Linux 7.2 were all the Kbuild updates… ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Updates Six Windows’ Apps. ‘Photos’ Gets Watermarks for Copilot Images (Off by Default)
Microsoft dropped “massive” updates for six stock Windows apps, reports the “Microsoft enthusiast” site Neowin.
Here’s some of their more interesting highlights for Clock, Media Player, Calculator, Voice Recorder, Photos, and Paint:
The Photos app (version 2026.11060.2004.0):
AI wat … ⌘ Read more
UK Scientists See Little Evidence for Claims Smartphones Are Rewiring Kids’ Brains
UK’s Members of Parliament (MP) were “looking for proof that smartphones and social media are rotting children’s brains,” writes The Register — but they got “a less satisfying answer from neuroscientists on Wednesday: nobody can really prove it.”
Appearing before the Science, Innovation and Technology Commit … ⌘ Read more
As ‘Disclosure Day’ Premieres, Steven Spielberg Says He Believes Aliens Really Have Visited Earth
Steven Spielberg grants that his 1977 UFO film Close Encounters was “speculative,” writes the Associated Press, but “Disclosure Day, he insists, is the real deal.”
“It’s my first film that will be considered science fiction that I do not consider to be science fiction,” Spiel … ⌘ Read more
Will Meta’s $14 Billion Bet on AI Ever Pay Off?
“A year after spending over $14 billion to bring in Alexandr Wang and a group of his top Scale AI engineers to revamp its artificial intelligence efforts, Meta is at least back on the map in AI,” reports CNBC, “though it’s still far behind OpenAI, Anthropic and Google in the market.”
Wang’s big accomplishment was the delivery of the Muse Spark AI model in April, marking Meta’s firs … ⌘ Read more
Vintage AMD R600 Graphics Driver Sees Code Cleanups Thanks To GitHub Copilot
Phoronix reports:
The AMD R600 Gallium3D driver saw 59 commits [last] Sunday to Mesa 26.2. Making this code restructuring and code cleaning all the more notable is that the improvements to this old AMD Radeon graphics driver was done in part by GitHub Copilot.
Gert Wollny has been among the few open-source developers … ⌘ Read more
How America’s Energy Department is Building a National Platform for Doing Science with AI
America’s Energy Department “wants to build a single national platform for doing science with AI,” reports Communications of the ACM:
It is called the Genesis Mission, and the idea is to connect the country’s 17 national laboratories, their supercomputers, scientific datasets, and a growing layer o … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.1 Released: New NTFS Driver, Intel FRED For Panther Lake, Faster Arc Graphics
Linus Torvalds just released the stable Linux 7.1 kernel and it’s coming a half-day early thanks to his travel plans… ⌘ Read more
Blizzard Sues To Take Down Another Private World of Warcraft Server, Project Ascension
“Blizzard Entertainment is continuing its crusade against private World of Warcraft servers,” reports the gaming news site Aftermath:
The company filed a new lawsuit on Friday in a California court against the makers of Project Ascension, alleging copyright infringement, Digital Millennium Copyright A … ⌘ Read more
Bitcoin Has Lost Nearly Half Its Value in 11 Months
The price of bitcoin dropped 13% down to $64,394 just in June — but there’s more bad news, reports CNBC.” “Bitcoin has lost nearly half its value since reaching a record high above $123,000 in July 2025.”
While previous bitcoin selloffs were often followed by large rebounds in price, the latest decline may prompt some investors to revisit why they own bitcoin in the first pla … ⌘ Read more
Revised AVX-512 xor_gen() Implementation For Linux RAID Yielding More Performance Gains
A few days back I wrote about Google’s Eric Biggers spearheading an AVX-512 implementation of xor_gen() as the Linux kernel function used for generating and validating parity blocks such as for RAID5/RAID6. That initial implementation was yielding up to 41% better performance while a new implementation has now been posted for scoring some additional victories… ⌘ Read more
pkgcli As PackageKit’s Modern, Nicer Command Line Interface
Open-source developer Matthias Klumpp wrote a blog post today outlining his recent work developing pkgcli, a new and modern command-line interface (CLI) around the PackageKit package management abstraction layer… ⌘ Read more
Four LTS Java Versions Get End-of-Support in a Three-Year Window (2029-2032)
Simon Ritter joined Sun Microsystems in 1996 and spent time working in both Java development and consultancy. He’s now written an opinion piece for InfoWorld warning that “Between 2029 and 2032, every currently supported long-term support (LTS) version of Java will reach end-of-support within a single three-year window … ⌘ Read more
UK Police Officer Accused of Using AI to Fake Evidence
The Sunday Times reports:
A criminal investigation has begun after a police officer allegedly used AI to create evidential material in a “number of cases”. Derbyshire Constabulary said an officer was being investigated over an allegation of suspected perverting the course of justice. The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) confirmed it was engaging with defence lawyers … ⌘ Read more
How Author Dave Eggers Avoids Smartphones, Internet Access, and Flock Cameras
A few weeks ago on a bike ride “inspiration struck” for Dave Eggers, reports SFGate…
Without a pen and paper handy, he was stuck texting the idea to himself. The problem? Eggers doesn’t own a smartphone. “It takes 20 minutes to write a sentence,” Eggers said… It’s a funny predicament for Eggers, given that he’s arguab … ⌘ Read more
Wine-Staging 11.11 Released With 289 Patches Atop Upstream
Following Friday’s exciting release of Wine 11.11 with Wayland driver improvements, Wine-Staging 11.11 is now available for this experimental/testing derivative that continues carrying nearly 300 patches atop the upstream codebase… ⌘ Read more
In today’s #caturday image, Emperor Maximilian the First tries to teach his subjects how to play Sequence, despite never having read the rules himself…
Amazon CEO’s Talks with U.S. Officials Triggered Crackdown on Anthropic Models
The Wall Street Journal reports:
The Trump administration’s decision to halt all foreign use of Anthropic’s most capable AI models was prompted by conversations between Amazon Chief Executive Andy Jassy and U.S. officials including Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, people familiar with the matter said.
Researchers at Am … ⌘ Read more
Shutterstock ‘Evolves’ Into ‘Human-Led, AI-Powered Creative Platform’
Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes:
Shutterstock has unveiled what it calls a “human-led, AI-powered” creative platform that combines its massive library of [human] contributor-created content with AI image and video generation, AI editing, conversational search, prompt enhancement, and automated model selection tools. The company says the goa … ⌘ Read more
GM Updates 250,000 EVs with Vehicle-to-Grid Firmware, Announces Grid-Scale Sodium-Ion Batteries
“Battery breakthroughs will lessen AI’s demand on the electricity grid,” argues The Washington Post’s editoral board, arguing that GM’s latest moves “offer a fresh reminder that resource constraints can be solved by innovation.”
Or As Fortune put it, “America’s electric grid is buck … ⌘ Read more
Vim Classic 8.3 Launched as an AI-Free Vim Fork
This month saw the release of Vim Classic 8.3, the first stable version of a new long-term support fork of Vim maintained without generative AI tools. Linuxiac reports:
The release is based on Vim 8.2.0148 and includes selected bug fixes and patches backported from later upstream Vim releases. Vim Classic was first announced by [SourceHut’s CEO/founder] Drew DeVault in March 20 … ⌘ Read more
Arch Linux Malware Incident: Malicious Commits Found in 1,579 Packages
More than 1,500 user-contributed packages in the Arch Linux User Repository “AUR” were infected with malware, reports Phoronix:
The last message in the thread over this security incident is noting that Arch Linux developers have deleted all the malicious commits they are aware of. Cited was this list that puts the number of malware-af … ⌘ Read more