Americans Are Destroying Flock Surveillance Cameras
An anonymous reader shares a report: Brian Merchant, writing for Blood in the Machine, reports that people across the United States are dismantling and destroying Flock surveillance cameras, amid rising public anger that the license plate readers aid U.S. immigration authorities and deportations.

Flock is the Atlanta-based surveillance startup valued at $7.5 billion a yea … ⌘ Read more

LLVM Clang 22 Compiler Performance Largely Unchanged Over Clang 21 On AMD Zen 5
With yesterday’s stable release of the LLVM Clang 22 compiler it didn’t take long for Phoronix readers to begin asking about the performance of this half-year feature update to this prominent open-source C/C++ compiler. What I am seeing so far are no big surprises with the performance largely being similar to Clang 21 across various open-source C/C++ workloads in the testing thus far. This initial round of reference benchmark results be … ⌘ Read more

AMD Announces The EPYC 8005 “Sorano” Series
The EPYC 9005 series for high-end Zen 5 server processors is a year and a half old and then at the lower-end of the spectrum is the EPYC 4005 series AM5 server processors that launched last year. On the embedded side is also the EPYC Embedded 2005 series. AMD has now filled the void between with the long-awaited EPYC 8005 series… ⌘ Read more

First British Baby Born Using Transplanted Womb From Dead Donor
A 10-week-old boy named Hugo has become the first baby born in the UK from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor, after his mother Grace Bell – who was born without a viable womb due to a condition called MRKH syndrome, which affects one in every 5,000 women – underwent a 10-hour transplant operation at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford in J … ⌘ Read more

Lutris 0.5.21 Adds Support For Running Games Inside Valve’s Latest Steam Runtime
Lutris 0.5.21 is now available as the latest version of this open-source Linux game manager. With Lutris 0.5.21 comes some new runners for executing games in different environments… ⌘ Read more

D7VK 1.4 Released With More Improvements For Old Direct3D On Vulkan Under Linux
D7VK is the open-source project that began implementing the Direct3D 7 APIs atop Vulkan and with time the scope expanded to include Direct3D 6 support as well as Direct3D 5 support. Out today is D7VK 1.4 for continuing to enhance the support for these older D3D versions on Vulkan under Linux… ⌘ Read more

Stressful People in Your Life Could Be Adding Months To Your Biological Age
A study published last week in PNAS found that people who regularly cause problems or make life difficult – whom the researchers call “hasslers” – are associated with measurably faster biological aging in those around them, at a rate of roughly 1.5% per additional hassler and about nine months of additional biological a … ⌘ Read more

‘Open Source Registries Don’t Have Enough Money To Implement Basic Security’
Google and Microsoft contributed $5 million to launch Alpha-Omega in 2022 — a Linux Foundation project to help secure the open source supply chain. But its co-founder Michael Winser warns that open source registries are in financial peril, reports The Register, since they’re still relying on non-continuous funding from grants … ⌘ Read more

GNU Gawk 5.4 Released With New MinRX Regex Matcher, Faster Reading Of Files
Developers behind the widely-used GNU Awk text processing utility today released Gawk 5.4… ⌘ Read more

Ask Slashdot: What’s Your Boot Time?
How much time does it take to even begin booting, asks long-time Slashdot reader BrendaEM. Say you want separate Windows and Linux boot processes, and “You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive?”

And more importantly, why is it all taking so long?
In a world of 4-5 GHz CPU’s that are thousands of times faster than they were, … ⌘ Read more

Cyber Stocks Slide As Anthropic Unveils ‘Claude Code Security’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Shares of cybersecurity software companies tumbled Friday after Anthropic PBC introduced a new security feature into its Claude AI model. Crowdstrike Holdings was the among the biggest decliners, falling as much as 6.5%, while Cloudflare slumped more than 6%. Meanwhile, Zscaler dropped 3.5%, SailPoint s … ⌘ Read more

Google Announces Gemini 3.1 Pro For ‘Complex Problem-Solving’
Google has introduced Gemini 3.1 Pro, a reasoning-focused upgrade aimed at more complex problem-solving. 9to5Google reports: This .1 increment is a first for Google, with the past two generations seeing .5 as the mid-year model update. (2.5 Pro was first announced in March and saw further updates in May for I/O.) Google says Gemini 3.1 Pro “represents a st … ⌘ Read more

More ISA Differences Come To Light With The New AMD GFX1170 “RDNA 4m”
Earlier this month we spotted the addition of a new GFX1170 GPU target in the AMDGPU LLVM back-end. Making this GFX1170 target interesting is that its marked as an APU/SoC part with “RDNA 4m” while being part of the GFX11 series. The GFX11 series is for RDNA3, GFX115x is for RDNA 3.5, and GFX12 is RDNA4. More ISA changes have now been committed to the AMDGPU LLVM back-end that make a few more instruction differences better aligned with RDNA4. … ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds on How Linux Went From One-Man Show To Group Effort
Linus Torvalds has told The Register how Linux went from a solo hobby project on a single 386 PC in Helsinki to a genuinely collaborative effort, and the path involved crowdsourced checks, an FTP mirror at MIT, and a licensing decision that opened the floodgates.

Torvalds released the first public snapshot, Linux 0.02, on October 5, 1991, o … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de I’ve got the same problem that you had the other day: finding past temperature data. But yeah, it looked much warmer than it actually was. Maybe 5°C? Possibly less when I found myself in the snow- and rainstorm in the end.

With the wind, my fingers were frozen. I should have worn gloves. Without them, I could only put my hands in the pockets of my jacket. That didn’t help much, though, because I frequently stopped to take yet another photo, so they cooled off again right away. :-D

Balancing the big/long, closed umbrella under my arm while I had my hands burried was also a little tricky.

First world problems. :-)

Claude Sonnet 4.6 Model Brings ‘Much-Improved Coding Skills’, Upgraded Free Tier
Anthropic has released Claude Sonnet 4.6, the first upgrade to its mid-tier AI model since version 4.5 arrived in September 2025. The new model features a “1M token context window” and delivers a “full upgrade of the model’s skills across coding, computer use, long-context reasoning, agent planning, knowledge wor … ⌘ Read more

Micron’s PCIe 6.0 SSD Hits Mass Production at 28 GB/s
Micron has begun mass production of the 9650 series, the industry’s first PCIe 6.0 SSD, capable of sequential read speeds up to 28 GB/s and random read performance of 5.5 million IOPS – roughly double the throughput of the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives available today.

The drive targets AI and data center workloads and ships in E1.S and E3.S form factors across two varia … ⌘ Read more

Mazda Finally Admits Its Infotainment System Is the Worst
Mazda, the automaker that for years defended its scroll-wheel infotainment system as a safer alternative to touchscreens, is abandoning the approach entirely in the 2026 CX-5 in favor of a 15.6-inch touchscreen and zero physical buttons.

The current lineup – the CX-50 Hybrid, CX-70 and CX-90 – still relies on a console-mounted scroll wheel and dedicated act … ⌘ Read more

DNF 5.4 Released With Some New Options & AI Contributions Policy
DNF 5.4 is out today as the latest release for this next-generation RPM package management solution used by Fedora, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, and various other RPM-based Linux distributions… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 CXL Enables AMD Zen 5 Address Translation Feature
A long-in-development feature for AMD EPYC Zen 5 server platforms now merged for the Linux 7.0 kernel is ACPI PRMT-based address translation for the Compute Express Link (CXL) subsystem… ⌘ Read more

Lutris 0.5.20 Linux Game Manager Brings New Features, Wine Wayland Option
For fans of Lutris as the open-source desktop client for installing and playing many games on Linux, Lutris 0.5.20 is out today with new features that further enhance the integration with different emulators and compatibility layers… ⌘ Read more

‘Babylon 5’ Episodes Start Appearing (Free) on YouTube
Cord Cutters News reports:

In a move that has delighted fans of classic science fiction, Warner Bros. Discovery has begun uploading full episodes of the iconic series Babylon 5 to YouTube, providing free access to the show just as it departs from the ad-supported streaming platform Tubi… Viewers noticed notifications on Tubi indicating that all five seasons w … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org They certainly don’t. 🫤

Had an idea earlier: How about going all in on sustainability and saving money/energy, so how about telling your customers “AI is a bad idea $because_long_list_of_reasons, here are our alternatives, you’ll thank us in 5 years”? (I bet the customers wouldn’t listen either … 🙄)

ByteDance’s Seedance 2 Criticized Over AI-Generated Video of Tom Cruise Fighting Brad Pitt
1.5 million people have now viewed a slick 15-second video imagining Tom Cruise fighting Brad Pitt that was generated by ByteDance’s new AI video generation tool Seedance 2.0.
But while ByteDance gushes their tool “delivers cinematic output aligned with industry standards,” the cinema industry isn’t h … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic’s Claude Got 11% User Boost from Super Bowl Ad Mocking ChatGPT’s Advertising
Anthropic saw visits to its site jump 6.5% after Sunday’s Super Bowl ad mocking ChatGPT’s advertising, reports CNBC (citing data analyzed by French financial services company BNP Paribas).

The Claude gain, which took it into the top 10 free apps on the Apple App Store, beat out chatbot and AI competitors OpenA … ⌘ Read more

Bit of a remake, of a chubby-looking, quick meme doodle, from 5 years ago.

Bad Map Projection: Zero Declination
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The “Are You Sure?” Problem: Why Your AI Keeps Changing Its Mind
The large language models that millions of people rely on for advice – ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini – will change their answers nearly 60% of the time when a user simply pushes back by asking “are you sure?,” according to a study by Fanous et al. that tested GPT-4o, Claude Sonnet, and Gemini 1.5 Pro across math and medical domains.

The behavior, known in the … ⌘ Read more

The US Is Flirting With Its First-Ever Population Decline
The U.S., whose population the Census Bureau did not expect to start shrinking until 2081, may record its first-ever decline as early as this year because of the Trump administration’s accelerating immigration crackdown. Census data released in late January showed US population growth slowed to just 0.5% in the year prior to July 2025 – the lowest rate since t … ⌘ Read more

AMD openSIL + Coreboot Being Ported To A Modern AM5 Consumer Motherboard
While we are very eager for the AMD openSIL open-source CPU silicon initialization project to achieve production readiness with Zen 6 platforms for ultimately replacing AGESA, there is some experimental excitement on the way for open-source firmware enthusiasts… OpenSIL and Coreboot are being brought to an AM5 motherboard you can buy retail… ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.1 Lands Raycast Nodes, Blender Adjusting Release Cycle Moving Forward
Two interesting bits of Blender news this week for those fond of this leading open-source 3D modeling software… ⌘ Read more

D7VK 1.3 Brings Support For Direct3D 5 On Vulkan
D7VK is a fork of the DXVK project that is an important part of Valve’s Steam Play (Proton) for Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 support atop Vulkan. With D7VK the original goal was a Direct3D 7 implementation on Vulkan. D7VK 1.1 brought experimental Direct3D 6 support and now with today’s release of D7VK 1.3 is support for Direct3D 5… ⌘ Read more

Neocities Founder Stuck in Chatbot Hell After Bing Blocked 1.5 Million Sites
Neocities founder Kyle Drake has spent weeks trapped in Microsoft’s automated support loop after discovering that Bing quietly blocked all 1.5 million websites hosted on his platform, a free web-hosting service that has kept the spirit of 1990s GeoCities alive since 2013.

Drake first noticed the issue last summer and thought … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 25.3.5 Brings Vulkan Driver Fixes & Other Minor Changes – Even For Old The R600g
While Mesa 26.0 stable will be out soon, the belated Mesa 25.3.5 point release is now available for serving as the current latest stable point release… ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Launches Claude Opus 4.6 as Its AI Tools Rattle Software Markets
Anthropic on Thursday released Claude Opus 4.6, its most capable model yet, at a moment when the company’s AI tools have already spooked markets over fears that they are disrupting traditional software development and other sectors.

The new model improves on Opus 4.5’s coding abilities, the company said – it plans more carefully, … ⌘ Read more

Western Digital Plots a Path To 140 TB Hard Drives Using Vertical Lasers and 14-Platter Designs
Western Digital this week laid out a roadmap that stretches its 3.5-inch hard drive platform to 14 platters and pairs it with a new vertical-emitting laser for heat-assisted magnetic recording, a combination the company says will push individual drive capacities beyond 140 TB in the … ⌘ Read more

Krita 6.0 Beta Released - Using Qt6 & Wayland Color Management Support
The first beta release of Krita 6.0 is now available for this featureful digital painting program. Krita 6.0 is re-based against the Qt6 toolkit while Krita 5.3 Beta is also being released at the same time for those sticking to Qt5… ⌘ Read more

Loongson 3B6000 Benchmarks: How China’s LoongArch CPU Compares To AMD Zen 5, Intel Arrow Lake & Raspberry Pi 5
Recently I finally got my hands on a LoongArch processor, the ISA developed by China’s Loongson Technology as an evolution from their earlier use of the MIPS64 ISA and inspired by RISC-V and other modern ISAs. The Loongson-3B6000 features 12 cores / 24 threads with dual channel DDR4 ECC memory support. Here is a look at how that latest-generation LoongArch desktop processor compares to the current gen … ⌘ Read more

What Go Programmers Think of AI
“Most Go developers are now using AI-powered development tools when seeking information (e.g., learning how to use a module) or toiling (e.g., writing repetitive blocks of similar code).” That’s one of the conclusions Google’s Go team drew from September’s big survey of 5,379 Go developers.

But the survey also found that among Go developers using AI-powered tools, “their satisfaction with these tools is m … ⌘ Read more

Can We Slow Global Warming By Phasing Out Super-Pollutant HFCs?
“There’s one big bright spot in the fight against climate change that most people never think about,” reports the Washington Post.

“It could prevent nearly half a degree of global warming this century, a huge margin for a planet that has warmed almost 1.5 degrees Celsius and is struggling to keep that number below 2 degrees…”

[M]ore than 170 c … ⌘ Read more

UK’s First Rapid-Charging Battery Train Ready For Boarding
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: The UK’s first superfast-charging train running only on battery power will come into passenger service this weekend – operating a five-mile return route in west London. Great Western Railway (GWR) will send the converted London Underground train out from 5.30am to cover the full Saturday timetable on the … ⌘ Read more

The UK Paid $5.65 Million For a Bookmarks Site
The UK government paid consulting firm PwC $5.65 million to build its new AI Skills Hub, a site meant to help 10 million workers gain AI skills by 2030 that functions largely as a bookmarking service, directing users to external training courses that already existed before the contract was awarded.

The hub links to platforms like Salesforce’s free Trailhead learning system rather th … ⌘ Read more

AMD EPYC 9755 Delivers Decisive Performance Leadership Over Xeon 6 Granite Rapids With Nearly 500 Benchmarks
Back in December I carried out some fresh benchmarks of the Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC 9755 for these competing 128 core server processors using the latest Linux software stack before closing out 2025. That was done with nearly 200 benchmarks and the AMD EPYC Turin Zen 5 processor delivered terrific performance as we have come to enjoy out of the 5th Gen EPYC line-up over the past year and several mont … ⌘ Read more

Xbox Hardware Revenue Craters 32%
Microsoft’s Xbox hardware revenue fell 32% in the final quarter of 2025 and overall gaming revenue declined 9% year-over-year, according to the company’s latest quarterly earnings, released as part of results showing Microsoft’s total revenue exceeded $80 billion.

Xbox content and services revenue, which includes Game Pass, dropped 5%.

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Libgcrypt 1.12 Released With VAES/AVX-512 Accelerated AES: 2x Performance On AMD Zen 5
Werner Koch released libgcrypt 1.12 as the newest feature release to this library providing the cryptographic building blocks used by GnuPG and other software like email clients, file encryption utilities, and other software… ⌘ Read more

Intel Thermal Daemon 2.5.11 Released With Wildcat Lake Support
With Intel Panther Lake now shipping, open-source Intel engineers working on the client side are turning to tidying up support for their next target: Wildcat Lake. That more cost effective alternative to Panther Lake now has Intel Thermal Daemon support in getting ready for Linux desktops/laptops… ⌘ Read more

Tim Berners-Lee Wants Us To Take Back the Internet
mspohr shares a report: When Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented the world wide web in 1989, his vision was clear: it would used by everyone, filled with everything and, crucially, it would be free. Today, the British computer scientist’s creation is regularly used by 5.5 billion people – and bears little resemblance to the democratic force for humanity he intended.

Since Berner … ⌘ Read more

Android’s Full Desktop Mode Surfaces in Accidental Chromium Leak
A bug report filed on the Chromium Issue Tracker inadvertently exposed Google’s desktop Android interface for the first time, revealing a system codenamed “Aluminum OS” running on existing Chromebook hardware. The report, ostensibly about Chrome Incognito tabs, included screen captures from an HP Elite Dragonfly 13.5 Chromebook running Android 16.

The … ⌘ Read more

The Android ‘NexPhone’: Linux on Demand, Dual-Boots Into Windows 11 - and Transforms Into a Workstation
The “NexDock” (from Nex Computer) already turns your phone into a laptop workstation. Purism chose it as the docking station for their Librem 5 phones.

But now Nex is offering its own smartphone “that runs Android 16, launches Debian, and dual-boots into Windows 11,” acco … ⌘ Read more

Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 Display Support & Old Adreno 225 Enablement For Linux 7.0
Rob Clark this week sent out the latest MSM DRM kernel driver updates for the latest Qualcomm display/graphics enhancements ahead of next month’s Linux 7.0 merge window… ⌘ Read more