US Plans Online Portal To Bypass Content Bans In Europe and Elsewhere
The U.S. State Department is reportedly developing a site called freedom.gov that would let users in Europe and elsewhere access content restricted under local laws, “including alleged hate speech and terrorist propaganda,” reports Reuters. Washington views the move as a way to counter censorship. Reuters reports: One source said officia … ⌘ Read more

California’s New Bill Requires DOJ-Approved 3D Printers That Report on Themselves
California’s recently-proposed AB-2047 would require 3D printers sold in the state to be DOJ-approved models equipped with “firearm blocking technology,” banning non-certified machines after 2029 and criminalizing efforts to bypass the software. Adafruit notes that unlike similar legislation proposed in Washin … ⌘ 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

OpenClaw Security Fears Lead Meta, Other AI Firms To Restrict Its Use
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Last month, Jason Grad issued a late-night warning to the 20 employees at his tech startup. “You’ve likely seen Clawdbot trending on X/LinkedIn. While cool, it is currently unvetted and high-risk for our environment,” he wrote in a Slack message with a red siren emoji. “Please keep Clawdbot of … ⌘ Read more

Minecraft Java Is Switching From OpenGL To Vulkan
Minecraft: Java Edition is switching its rendering backend from OpenGL to Vulkan as part of the upcoming Vibrant Visuals update, aiming for both better performance and modern graphics features across platforms like Linux and macOS (via translation layers). GamingOnLinux reports: For modders, they’re suggesting they start making preparations to move away from OpenGL: “Sw … ⌘ Read more

IRS Loses 40% of IT Staff, 80% of Tech Leaders In ‘Efficiency’ Shakeup
The IRS’s IT division has reportedly lost 40% of its staff and nearly 80% of its tech leadership amid a federal “efficiency” overhaul, the agency’s CIO revealed yesterday. The Register reports: Kaschit Pandya detailed the extent of the tech reorganization during a panel at the Association of Government Accountants yesterday, describing it as … ⌘ Read more

Mark Zuckerberg Grilled On Usage Goals and Underage Users At California Trial
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg faced a barrage of questions about his social-media company’s efforts to secure ever more of its users’ time and attention at a landmark trial in Los Angeles on Wednesday. In sworn testimony, Zuckerberg said Meta’s grow … ⌘ Read more

China’s Hottest App of 2026 Just Asks If You’re Still Alive
A bare-bones Chinese app called “Are You Dead?” – whose entire premise is that solo-living users tap daily to confirm they’re still alive, triggering an alert to an emergency contact after two missed check-ins – has rocketed to the top of China’s app store charts and gone viral globally without spending a dime on advertising.

The app wasn’t built for the elder … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft’s New 10,000-Year Data Storage Medium: Glass
Microsoft Research has published a paper in Nature detailing Project Silica, a working demonstration that uses femtosecond lasers to etch data into small slabs of glass at a density of over a Gigabit per cubic millimeter and a maximum capacity of 4.84 terabytes per slab. The slabs themselves are 12 cm by 12 cm and just 2 mm thick, and Microsoft’s accelerated aging … ⌘ Read more

Europe’s Labor Laws Are Strangling Its Ability To Innovate, New Analysis Argues
A new essay in Works in Progress Magazine argues that Europe’s failure to produce a Tesla or a Waymo stems not from insufficient research spending or high taxes – problems California shares in abundance – but from labor laws that make it devastatingly expensive for companies to unwind failed bets. According to estima … ⌘ Read more

Bafta To Reward ‘Human Creativity’ as Film and TV Grapples With AI
Bafta has brought in “human achievement” as a guiding principle for its annual awards as the film and television industry grapples with the rapid adoption of AI tools in many parts of production. From a report: In an interview with the FT, Bafta chair Sara Putt, who is nearing the end of her three-year tenure, said artificial intellige … ⌘ Read more

LLM-Generated Passwords Look Strong but Crack in Hours, Researchers Find
AI security firm Irregular has found that passwords generated by major large language models – Claude, ChatGPT and Gemini – appear complex but follow predictable patterns that make them crackable in hours, even on decades-old hardware. When researchers prompted Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 fifty times in separate conversations, only … ⌘ Read more

A Half-Century of US Labor Data Shows Steady Retreat From Evening and Night Work
Despite the popular notion that the modern economy runs around the clock, a new NBER working paper analyzing fifty years of U.S. labor data from 1973 to 2023 finds that Americans have been steadily and consistently moving away from evening and night work toward traditional daytime hours [PDF].

The share of the wo … ⌘ Read more

New Study Tracks How Businesses Quietly Replaced Freelancers With AI Tools
A new study [PDF] from Ramp’s economics lab has found that businesses are steadily replacing freelance workers hired through platforms like Upwork and Fiverr with AI tools from OpenAI and Anthropic, and the substitution is happening at a fraction of the cost.

The paper, authored by Ryan Stevens, Ramp’s Director of Applied Scienc … ⌘ Read more

Accenture Links Staff Promotions To Use of AI Tools
Accenture has reportedly started tracking staff use of its AI tools and will take this into consideration when deciding on top promotions, as the consulting company tries to increase uptake of the technology by its workforce. From a report: The company told senior managers and associate directors that being promoted to leadership roles would require “regular adoption” of artif … ⌘ Read more

HR Teams Are Drowning in Slop Grievances
Workplace grievances that once fit in a single email are now ballooning into 30-page documents stuffed with irrelevant historical detail, made-up legal precedents, and citations to laws from the wrong country – and UK employment lawyers say generative AI is the likely culprit. Anna Bond, legal director at Lewis Silkin, says the complaints she now sees sometimes cite Canadian legislation or fabrica … ⌘ Read more

The RAM Crunch Could Kill Products and Even Entire Companies, Memory Exec Admits
Phison CEO Pua Khein-Seng, whose company is one of the leading makers of controller chips for SSDs and other flash memory devices, admitted in a televised interview that the ongoing global RAM shortage could force companies to cut back their product lines in the second half of 2026 – and that some may not survive at … ⌘ Read more

Amazon Dethrones Walmart as World’s Biggest Company by Sales
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon has officially dethroned Walmart as the biggest global company by revenue, a milestone attesting to the massive scale the e-commerce and cloud-computing giant has achieved since its humble beginnings in 1994 as an online bookseller in Jeff Bezos’ Seattle-area garage.

Walmart, which had been the largest company by rev … ⌘ Read more

A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments
India’s digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it’s a cheap plastic speaker that sits o … ⌘ Read more

EV Sales Boom As Ethiopia Bans Fossil-Fuel Car Imports
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Post: In 2024, the Ethiopian government banned the import of fossil fuel-powered vehicles and slashed tariffs on their electric equivalents. It was a policy driven less by the country’s climate ambitions and more by fiscal pressures. For years, subsidizing gasoline for consumers has been a major drag on Ethiopia … ⌘ Read more

A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments
India’s digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it’s a cheap plastic speaker that sits o … ⌘ Read more

Claims That AI Can Help Fix Climate Dismissed As Greenwashing
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbot … ⌘ Read more

Trump Has Prepared Speech On Extraterrestrial Life
According to Lara Trump, Donald Trump has prepared but not yet delivered a speech about extraterrestrial life, though the White House says such a speech would be “news to me.” White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt continued: “I’ll have to check in with our speech writing team. Uh, and that would be of great interest to me personally, and I’m sure all of you in t … ⌘ Read more

EPA Faces First Lawsuit Over Its Killing of Major Climate Rule
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The first shot has been fired in the legal war over the Environmental Protection Agency’s rollback of its “endangerment finding,” which had been the foundation for federal climate regulations. Environmental and health groups filed a lawsuit on Wednesday morning in the U.S. Court of Appeals f … ⌘ Read more

Uber Putting $100 Million into EV Charging for Robotaxis
Uber plans to invest $100 million in EV charging infrastructure to support current and future robotaxi fleets in cities like Los Angeles, the Bay Area, and Dallas, “eventually partner[ing] with multiple robotaxi companies on actual robotaxi deployment – WeRide, Waabi, Lucid, Nuro, May Mobility, Momenta, and Waymo of course,” reports CleanTechnica. From the rep … ⌘ Read more

Apple M3 With Asahi Linux Continues Making Progress, No ETA Yet For Shipping
Asahi Linux developers have published a status report following the recent Linux 6.19 kernel release to outline recent progress and upcoming items around Apple Silicon support on Linux. This year will also mark five years that Asahi Linux has been around for bringing Linux to the Apple M-Series hardware… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19.2 & Other LTS Kernels Released To Fix Systems Not Booting
Linux 6.19.1 was released earlier today while it’s since been replaced by Linux 6.19.2 to address fallout from that first point release with some systems not booting. This also resulted in new LTS kernel releases too due to the problematic code being picked up there too… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19.1 Released To Ship Some Early Fixes & Device Quirks
For those preferring to wait for the first point release of a new Linux kernel version before upgrading, Linux 6.19.1 is out today to address some early bugs that made it into the Linux 6.19 kernel stable release one week ago… ⌘ Read more

Linux Gets Rid Of Intel 440BX Driver For Old Pentium CPUs After Being Broken For 19+ Years
As some long overdue housekeeping, the Linux 7.0 kernel has removed an Error Detection And Correction “EDAC” driver for the Intel 440BX and 440GX chipset. The driver is being removed not only because that chipset was just used by old Celerons and Pentium II / Pentium III CPUs but that it’s been in the kernel all this time while being known to be broken for 19+ years… ⌘ Read more

Intel Nova Lake Sound Support In Linux 7.0
Merged for the Linux 6.19 kernel was initial Nova Lake S audio support. Now merged this week for the Linux 7.0 kernel is enabling sound support for additional Nova Lake platforms… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Kernel Confirmed By Linus Torvalds, Expected In Mid-April 2026
An anonymous reader writes: Linus Torvalds has confirmed the next major kernel series as Linux 7.0, reports Linux news website 9to5Linux.com: “So there you have it, the Linux 6.x era has ended with today’s Linux 6.19 kernel release, and a new one will begin with Linux 7.0, which is expected in mid-April 2026. The merge window for L … ⌘ Read more

GNU Linux-Libre 6.19 Deals With More Firmware Blobs In Intel Xe, IWLWIFI & NVIDIA Nova
Building off yesterday’s Linux 6.19 release is now the GNU Linux-libre 6.19-gnu downstream release that strips out support for open-source drivers dependent upon binary-only microcode/firmware and other elements deemed against free software standards, removing the ability to load non-open-source kernel modules, and similar restrictions in the name of software freedom… ⌘ Read more

Linus Torvalds Confirms The Next Kernel Is Linux 7.0
Following Linus Torvalds releasing Linux 6.19 stable, Linus Torvalds is now out with his customary release announcement. Notably he officially confirmed that the next kernel version is Linux 7.0 as the successor to Linux 6.19… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Released With Better Support For Older AMD GPUs, DRM Color Pipeline API
As anticipated due to the extra week for the cycle given end of year holidays, Linus Torvalds today released the Linux 6.19 stable kernel as the first major release of 2026. There is a lot in store with this early 2026 kernel release… ⌘ Read more

A Lot Of Exciting Changes To Look Forward To With Linux 6.20 – Or Linux 7.0
With Linux 6.19 due for release later today it then opens up the next kernel merge window. It could be Linux 6.20 but more than likely the next kernel version will be called Linux 7.0 with Linus Torvalds’ past tradition of bumping the major version number after X.19. Whatever it ends up being called, here is a look at various “-next” changes that have been queuing up ahead of the merge window… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Features Include Many Benefits For Intel & AMD Users
With the Linux 6.19 stable kernel expected to be released tomorrow (8 February), here is a reminder about the top features to expect from this next version of the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Sees Last Minute Scheduler Regression Fixes
Ahead of the planned Linux 6.19 stable kernel release tomorrow, there have been some last-minute fixes submitted for the scheduler code, including for performance regressions… ⌘ Read more

Waymo is Having a Hard Time Stopping For School Buses
Waymo’s robotaxis have racked up at least 24 safety violations involving school buses in Austin since the start of the 2025 school year, and a voluntary software recall the company issued in December after a federal investigation has not fixed the problem.

Austin Independent School District initially reported at least 19 incidents of Waymo vehicles failing to stop fo … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Should Fix Nouveau For The Large Pages Support For Better NVK Performance
The Linux 6.19 merge window had introduced support for larger pages and compression with the Nouveau kernel driver, which ultimately should help provide a performance win to this open-source NVIDIA driver. The Mesa NVK driver was ready to make use of that new kernel driver functionality but then it ended up being disabled due to bugs. Fortunately, for the Linux 6.20~7.0 kernel those issues should be resolved so then the Mesa … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19-rc8 Released Ahead Of Linux 6.19 Stable Next Week
While typically the stable Linux kernel would come after the -rc7 release a week prior, for Linux 6.19 the release is being dragged out by an extra week not due to any scary bugs but rather due to the holiday downtime at the end of the year. As such Linux 6.19-rc8 is out today with the stable v6.19 release expected next Sunday… ⌘ Read more

Walmart Begins Building Out Nationwide EV Charging Network Across America
Walmart, the world’s largest retailer, will be adding spaces for electric vehicle charging to parking lots in 19 different states, reports MLive:

The move follows up on a plan announced in 2023 to build a network of charging stations at Walmart and Sam’s Club stores throughout the U.S… “With a store or club located within 10 … ⌘ Read more

cTGP Graphics Power Setting Coming For Uniwill / TUXEDO Laptops With Linux 7.0
Upstreamed for the Linux 6.19 kernel is the Uniwill laptop platform driver for exposing more features/settings for laptops made by this Taiwanese OEM/ODM, including the laptops from TUXEDO Computers. Coming for the next kernel cycle is further extending the Uniwill platform driver for now having support for adjusting the custom total graphics power “cTGP” for those laptops with a dedicated GPU… ⌘ Read more

Intel Xe Linux Driver Updated To Disable GuC Power DCC For Panther Lake
Queued up in DRM-Next for the Intel open-source graphics driver ahead of the Linux 7.0 kernel cycle is expanding GPU temperature sensor reporting, multi-device SVM prep, multi-queue support for Crescent Island, Nova Lake display support, and other feature work. With the Linux 6.19 stable release fast approaching, DRM-Next is now focusing in on reading early fixes with concluding feature activity for this next merge window… ⌘ Read more

US Life Expectancy Jumps To a Record 79 Years
An anonymous reader shares a report: U.S. life expectancy rose to a record high of 79 years in 2024, an increase of six months from the previous year, reflecting a sharp decline in deaths from COVID-19 and drug overdoses, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said on Thursday.

According to a report from the CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics, life expectancy improve … ⌘ Read more

Mesa NVK Driver Temporarily Disabling Support For Larger Pages Due To Bug
Upstreamed to the Nouveau open-source kernel driver in Linux 6.19 was support for larger pages and with that compression support available with the larger page sizes. Subsequently the Mesa NVK open-source Vulkan driver began making use of the larger pages and compressed image support dependent upon the larger page sizes as it should help with performance. But for now it’s being temporarily disabled due to a discovered issue… ⌘ Read more

Internal Messages May Doom Meta At Social Media Addiction Trial
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: This week, the first high-profile lawsuit – considered a “bellwether” case that could set meaningful precedent in the hundreds of other complaints – goes to trial. That lawsuit documents the case of a 19-year-old, K.G.M, who hopes the jury will agree that Meta and YouTube caused psychological … ⌘ Read more

GTA 6’s Physical Release Could Be Delayed To 2027 Because of Leaks
An anonymous reader shares a report: An insider who correctly leaked information about Oblivion: Remastered and other titles is warning that GTA 6’s physical release could be pushed back. GTA 6 is set to finally launch on November 19, 2026, but fans hoping to get their hands on a physical copy could be stuck waiting even longer.

According to … ⌘ Read more

Revisiting The Linux 6.19 Performance With “NEXT_BUDDY” Now Disabled
Back at the start of the Linux 6.19 kernel cycle I ran benchmarks showing some scheduler performance regressions with the new kernel. Fortunately, two weeks out from the Linux 6.19 stable release, merged this weekend was disabling the scheduler’s NEXT_BUDDY feature due to performance regressions. Here are some fresh benchmarks looking at the latest Linux 6.19 Git state with/without NEXT_BUDDY and comparing it to Linux 6.18 stable for reference. ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19-rc7 Released With Kernel Continuity Plan, A Few Important Fixes
The Linux 6.19 kernel remains on track for its official release two weeks from today, with the extra RC being baked in due to the end of year holidays. Out today is Linux 6.19-rc7 with a few changes worth highlighting for the week… ⌘ Read more

Linux Kernel Continuity Document Added: What Happens If Torvalds’ Git Repo Goes Away?
Following discussions from the 2025 Linux Maintainer Summit, merged overnight for the Linux 6.19 kernel is documentation concerning the Linux kernel project’s continuity in the event that Linus Torvalds’ official Git repository were to disappear or otherwise be inaccessible for continuing the upstream development of the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more