Three EU Officials Not Sold on Europe’s Homegrown Alternative to Microsoft Teams
Politico EU reports:

The European Commission has rolled out an alternative to Microsoft Teams — but officials using it aren’t impressed, with one describing the tool as “absolute shit.”

The Commission introduced Element Pro over the summer as a “sovereign back-up to Teams,” according to an internal staff memo seen b … ⌘ Read more

This Virus Stole a Human Gene and Won’t Let Go of It
“Scientists have discovered a virus that is a tiny bit human, carrying a gene it stole from our ancestors about 100,000 years ago,” writes the New York Times. “And this virus may be using our own gene to infect us.”

Phys.org explains that it’s “both an important gene for brain function and a jumping gene capable of moving and inserting itself into genomes.”

BC200 is … ⌘ Read more

Physicists Identify ‘Octupolar’ Magnetism, With Implications for Quantum Technologies
While most magnets have two poles (north and south, or positive and negative), recent advances in quantum mechanics have revealed an “octupolar order,” writes Phys.org, where a pattern of particles in a crystalline structure “behaves as if it has eight magnetic poles rather than the familiar two.”

Now, … ⌘ Read more

Surveillance Company Tells Cops It Wants to Add Facial Recognition to Flock Cameras
404 Media reports:

“We will not add facial recognition to our devices,” Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a recent video. But other, third-party companies are telling cops that they are willing to add facial recognition to data gathered by Flock cameras in order to “close that gap.” A company called VIDIZMO i … ⌘ Read more

Arm Working On “TLBID” For Linux To Increase Performance On High Core Count CPUs
Arm sent out an initial set of patches this week working on support in the Linux kernel for TLBI Domains. This “TLBID” feature is an upcoming Arm architecture capability designed to increase performance on high core count systems… ⌘ Read more

As ‘Falcon Heavy’ Launches, SpaceX Plans Dragon and Falcon 9 Phase Out As Starship Ramps Up
Spaceflight Now reports:

“A SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket launched from Florida Thursday night on a classified mission for the National Reconnaissance Office, America’s spy satellite agency… The NRO has previously flown payloads on 22 Falcon 9 rockets but this is the first time it has used the … ⌘ Read more

President Trump Doxxes Senator’s Cellphone in Push For Permanent Daylight Saving Time
U.S. President Donald Trump “doxxed” a U.S. senator today, writes the Washington Sun, by posting his cell phone number “as part of a plea for his Truth Social followers to badger his Republican ally into making daylight saving time permanent.”

When The Washington Sun called the number minutes after Trump’s … ⌘ Read more

Steam On Linux - Down To 3.05% For September?
Phoronix reports:

Steam on Linux use in March hit an all-time high of around 5.33% marketshare. Since then it pulled back to around 4% while for September 2026 the Steam Survey results… indicate a rather steep decline of 0.85%, down to 3.05%. Meanwhile macOS is at 1.92% and Microsoft Windows at 95%… Steam’s Survey reports a 7.42% increase in Chinese use, up to 31.39% overall of t … ⌘ Read more

Researcher, Dartmouth Professor and Provost Face Accusations of Secretly Using AI
“The winner of the Nikon Small World in Motion competition is under investigation,” writes the photography news site PetaPixel , “after scientists accused Dr Ning Xu of using AI in his video.”

The Nikon competition is about showcasing the beauty, complexity, and artistry of the microscopic world. The entries a … ⌘ Read more

The Amazing Work By Valve’s Timur Kristóf On Improving Old AMD GPUs On Linux
Over the past year Timur Kristóf of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team has made multiple very nice improvements to the AMDGPU kernel driver for enhancing support for old (GCN 1.0/1.1 era from a decade ago) graphics cards so that they can better handle Linux gaming and other tasks. This week in Toronto, Kristóf presented on this AMDGPU work that he initially began as a kernel driver development exercise after initially spending years i … ⌘ Read more

Linux Patches Show Promising Results For Lower Latency Of Short Slice Tasks
Linaro engineer Vincent Guittot sent out a set of patches on Friday working on scheduling latency improvements, especially when multiple short slice tasks are running concurrently on the same system… ⌘ Read more

California’s Governor Wants Worker Protections from AI. But FSF Thinks Kill Switches are ‘Dangerous Precedent’
The Guardian reports that California governor Gavin Newsom signed laws on Wednesday “aimed at protecting California workers from the threats of artificial intelligence , including potential job losses and workplace surveillance.”
The laws ban employers from usi … ⌘ Read more

Someone Got Doom In an SQL Database
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Rendering Doom in a database is obviously a bad idea,” Lukas Vogel writes in a lengthy blog post explaining how exactly he managed to render Doom using an SQL database. OK, that’s not entirely accurate. The SQLDoom project uses a small Python client to handle input and output, drive the game’s timing, and display each frame to the screen. Behi … ⌘ Read more

US Judge Rules Flock Search Was Mass Surveillance. Bernie Sanders Proposes ‘Ban Flock Act’
Flock’s cameras offer “indiscriminate mass surveillance,” a U.S. federal judge wrote in a ruling Thursday, as does any system with “continuously updated” location histories for all the vehicles filmed by automated license plate-reading cameras.

The judge’s ruling included italics for emphasis when … ⌘ Read more

Proton Experimental gets fixes for Sword of the Stars II, Plan B: Terraform, Terminator: Dark Fate - Defiance and more
Another fresh upgrade for Proton Experimental to bring further Windows game compatibility enhancements to SteamOS / Linux.

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Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/proton-exp … ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.19 released with Wayland Colour Management, Unicode upgrades, DNS query cache
The Wine 11.19 release is now available for this open source Windows compatibility layer, bringing an assortment of new features and fixes.

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Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/wine-11-19-released-with-wayland-colour-management-unicode-upgrades … ⌘ Read more

Moose: GNOME Gains Another Local AI App Option
Beyond the various local AI agent/chat options not catering to a specific desktop environment, the GNOME desktop has seen Newelle as an AI app catering to GNOME/GTK4. There’s now another local AI option for the GNOME desktop with Moose… ⌘ Read more

KosmicKrisp Now Conformant To Vulkan 1.4, Improving Performance Against Apple’s Metal
KosmicKrisp is the effort led by LunarG for developing a modern Vulkan-on-Metal driver for Apple systems within Mesa. This modern alternative to MoltenVK continues progressing well and now enjoys Vulkan 1.4 conformance and its performance continues inching closer to that of the native Apple Metal API… ⌘ Read more

1 In 8 Cancer Cases Worldwide Are Due to Infections
An estimated 2.3 million cancer cases worldwide in 2024, about one in eight, were attributable to infections, according to a study published in The Lancet Oncology. “This recent Lancet data is a profound reminder that a significant portion of our global cancer burden is fundamentally preventable,” said David Greenberg, MD, of Hackensack Meridian Jersey Shore University … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 To Support The Raspberry Pi 10-Inch Touch Display 2
We are nearing the cut-off of new feature material being accepted to DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.4 merge window. But this week another round of DRM-Misc changes made it, which included some new hardware support and other last minute items… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.3 To Better Support The High-End Turtle Beach VelocityOne Race
Coming with Sunday’s Linux 7.3-rc6 kernel release is support added for the Turtle Beach VelocityOne Race, a high-end $649~700 USD racing wheel and pedal system… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.8 Now Makes Tiled Windows Fit Together More Nicely
There is just over one week to go until the much anticipated KDE Plasma 6.8 desktop release. Some last minute fixes continue flowing into Plasma 6.8 as well as early feature work continuing for Plasma 6.9… ⌘ Read more

Google Tests AI Data Center In Space
Longtime Slashdot reader Geoffrey.landis shares a report from NPR: Google just put a refrigerator-sized satellite into space, part of a research project the company hopes can pave the way for orbiting AI data centers powered by the sun. The prototype satellite has four specialty chips in it called Tensor Processing Units, or TPUs, that Google designed for machine learning and has already deployed i … ⌘ Read more

New Mexico Wants Meta To Pay $40 Billion In Penalties For Cambridge Analytica Scandal
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The state of New Mexico asked a judge on Thursday to order Meta Platforms to pay between $35 billion and $40 billion in penalties after a jury found the company had misled consumers about the privacy of their data on Facebook in a case that came out of the C … ⌘ Read more

Wine 11.19 Released With Wayland Color Management For Vulkan, DNS Query Caching
We are nearing the point of the Wine 12.0 stable release coming up in early 2027 while for now the Wine 11.xx bi-weekly development releases continue. Out today is Wine 11.19 with a few new features and plenty of fixes… ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de Thanks, that was a good read, really took me back. 😍

AI Has Finally Learned To Play Stratego
Researchers from Carnegie Mellon, MIT, NYU, and Stanford have built an AI called Ataraxos that finally cracked Stratego, beating four-time world champion Pim Niemeijer 15 games to one with four draws. Its key advantage was a second neural network that estimates the identities of hidden enemy pieces, letting the system search plausible game states rather than brute-force a massive hidden-informa … ⌘ Read more

The University of Washington Is Moving a Graduate Program to Microsoft’s Campus
Longtime Slashdot submitter theodp writes: GeekWire reports that the University of Washington has moved its Global Innovation Exchange {GIX) program to Microsoft’s campus in a rent-free deal (UW News release). GIX, an institute supporting tech leaders that offers an MS in Technology Innovation, is the first UW program … ⌘ Read more

Apple Tightens macOS ‘Full Disk Access’ Controls As AI Agents ‘Substantially’ Increase Risk
Apple says it will tighten macOS Full Disk Access controls as increasingly capable AI agents raise the risks of apps gaining broad access to users’ files, messages, mail, and browsing history. TechCrunch reports: Days after a journalist claimed that Meta’s Muse app on Mac read their private me … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.4 To Introduce Initial Device Trees For Apple M4, A18 Pro For MacBook Neo
Asahi Linux developer Sven Peter today sent out the pull requests of the Apple SoC Device Tree changes they are ready to upstream for the Linux 7.4 merge window happening later this month. Most notable is the initial Device Tree for Apple systems using the base M4 SoC model as well as for the MacBook Neo with the A18 Pro SoC… ⌘ Read more

Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery to Become Skydance
Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery will operate under the Skydance name once their roughly $110 billion merger closes, which is expected on October 6. The combined company will bring together Paramount+, HBO Max, CBS, CNN, MTV and other networks, along with major franchises including The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, DC and Yellowstone.

Ellison sa … ⌘ Read more

Used Processor Leads To Game Ban
AmiMoJo shares a report from heise online: Anyone buying used hardware for a gaming PC needs to be careful: not just whether the components are still in order but also what the previous owner did with them. A case on Reddit shows this. Someone installed a used AMD processor, a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, in their PC. Because the previous owner was caught cheating, the new owner cannot start several online games.

Th … ⌘ Read more

Intel Ready With A Big Improvement For Battlemage With Linux 7.4
Sent out on Thursday was the last round of planned Intel Xe kernel driver improvements targeting the upcoming Linux 7.4 cycle. There is one big improvement that is set to benefit Intel discrete GPUs with at least Battlemage benefiting nicely… ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu Working On SHA3 For Debian’s APT For If/When SHA2 Is Broken
Ubuntu developer Gianpiero Carpinelli at Canonical has been working on introducing SHA3-256 and SHA3-384 support for Debian’s APT packaging tool in preparing for if/when that SHA2 is broken… ⌘ Read more

EU’s Microsoft Teams Alternative Draws Bad Reviews From Officials
The European Commission has rolled out Element Pro as a self-hosted “sovereign back-up” to Microsoft Teams and the reviews aren’t great. Politico reported that several officials questioned its usefulness and usability, with one calling it “absolute shit.” Politico reports: “I don’t understand the added value here,” one official wrote on an internal s … ⌘ Read more

Judge Dismisses Chegg and Penske Antitrust Lawsuits Targeting Google AI Search
A federal judge has dismissed antitrust lawsuits from Chegg and Penske Media accusing Google of harming publishers by using their content in AI Overviews and other AI search features without compensating them or providing a meaningful opt-out. Ars Technica reports: The lawsuits were filed in 2025, and Google requested … ⌘ Read more

Here’s the highest rated Native Linux Steam games from September 2026
Here’s some of the highest-rated Native Linux games released on Steam during September 2026. Helping you to find something interesting to go and play if Native

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Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/heres-the-highest-rated-native-linux-steam-games-from-septembe … ⌘ Read more

Social Media Harms Democracy By Spreading Rumors, Survey Shows
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: A growing number of people think social media manipulates and divides people and harms democracy, Pew Research Center said on Thursday, echoing rising concern and tighter scrutiny across the world. Companies running popular social platforms, including Meta, Snap, and TikTok, have faced thousands of law … ⌘ Read more

Error-Prone AI Nearly Sparked World War Three Last Month
In an op-ed for The Guardian, authors Timnit Gebru and Emily M. Bender argue that policymakers are focusing too heavily on hypothetical “superintelligence” while overlooking the more immediate danger of deploying unreliable AI in high-stakes settings. They point to an as-yet independently unverified CNN report claiming U.S. officials nearly intercepted a Chinese … ⌘ Read more

AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform OS Updated With ROCm 10.0, Linux 7.2
With the AMD Ryzen AI Halo mini PC that launched this summer that focused on local AI, one of the biggest surprises for me when reviewing the unit was finding that the Linux preload wasn’t just a stock Ubuntu/Debian OS but rather a customized AMD Linux distribution known as AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform. Yesterday the newest version of AMD Ryzen AI Developer Platform was released with some nice software updates… ⌘ Read more

systemd-appd Out For Review To Centralize Tracking Of User’s Apps
The newest systemd component being worked on and drafted for an initial pull request is systemd-appd as a new mechanism to centralizing the tracking of user’s apps… ⌘ Read more

Imagination Talks Up Their Open-Source Vulkan Driver, Volcanic Architecture Plans
Imagination Tech was at XDC 2026 Toronto this week to talk up their ongoing work around their PowerVR Mesa Vulkan driver (and PVR upstream DRM kernel driver) with this driver continuing to improve, plans for supporting their new Volcanic GPU architecture, and other improvements… ⌘ Read more

Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition gets upgrades to improve UI Scaling, Cloud Saving and more
Nice to see Beamdog still improving the classics - with a fresh update now available for Planescape: Torment: Enhanced Edition.

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Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/planescape-torment-enhanced-edition-gets-up … ⌘ Read more

Intel Iris Open-Source Driver Now Supports Efficient 64-bit Addressing Mode
As a follow-up to the news one month ago of Intel Nova Lake P’s graphics introducing a new 64-bit GPU mode, the latest driver-side enablement has now landed for Intel’s Iris Gallium3D OpenGL driver for supporting efficient 64-bit addressing… ⌘ Read more

20% of Swiss Glaciers Lost In Five Years
Swiss glaciers lost 5.5% of their ice volume in the first eight months of 2026, bringing total losses since 2021 to 19.4%. Researchers say some glaciers are now collapsing from within as meltwater carves out large cavities. The Guardian reports: Matthias Huss, a glaciologist at ETH Zurich and lead author of the report, said many people do not realize how fast glaciers are retreating, or that ju … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu’s Next Rust Effort May See OpenPGP Replaced By Sequoia PGP
Canonical engineer Richard Scott McNew published a status update surrounding the Rust programming language efforts in the upcoming Ubuntu 26.10 release. Sequoia PGP is being rolled out to Ubuntu Linux and in a future release may end up replacing OpenPGP… ⌘ Read more

Apex Compute Developing Open-Source Mesa Vulkan Driver For Their Hardware
Apex Compute is the company started in California in 2024 that aims to produce high-efficiency AI accelerators for real-time edge AI inferencing. So far they have an FPGA prototype for licensing and deployment and carries the bold claim of being “20x faster than the NVIDIA Jetson” and at under 10W and one fifth the cost. Making Apex Compute much more interesting to us now is that they are developing an open-source, Mesa-based Vulkan driver … ⌘ Read more

KDE Nearing Decision Point On BuildStream-Based KDE Linux
KDE Linux developers have been experimenting with a build of their Linux distribution based on BuildStream to ship as an OS image rather than a set of Arch Linux packages. They are nearing a point soon where they will decide if they will officially ship this BuildStream-based KDE Linux image… ⌘ Read more

OCTOPATH TRAVELER and OCTOPATH TRAVELER II are coming to GOG in the Preservation Program
The GOG Preservation Program is expanding once again, on October 8th both OCTOPATH TRAVELER and OCTOPATH TRAVELER II will arrive on GOG.

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Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/10/octopath-traveler-and-octopath-traveler-ii-are … ⌘ Read more

Here’s what’s coming to NVIDIA GeForce NOW during October 2026
NVIDIA revealed a bunch of new games coming to their cloud gaming service GeForce NOW during October, plus we had a small fix in the Linux app.

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Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more