Linux 8250/16550 UART Serial Driver Seeing Some Modernization Work In 2026
The Linux 8250 serial driver as the universal/legacy driver for 8250 and 16550 type serial ports has been seeing some modernization work recently with a number of 8250 serial patches having now been merged for the Linux 7.2 kernel… ⌘ Read more

New Hygon Model 8 “Suzhou” x86 CPU Support Appears In The GCC Compiler
A seemingly new generation of Hygon x86 processors are on the way with the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) seeing support today for the Hygon Model 8 “Suzhou” c86-4g-m8 processors… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 RISC-V Reduces Kernel Startup Overhead, Eswin SoC Support By Default
Along with the many x86/x86_64 improvements and some ARM64 architecture improvements (albeit slowed down by the AI/LLM noise affecting the development pace), the RISC-V architecture changes were merged last week for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel development… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.7.1 Released With Initial Batch Of Bug Fixes
Following last week’s major Plasma 6.7 release, Plasma 6.7.1 is now available today with an initial assortment of bug fixes… ⌘ Read more

NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope Arrives In Florida
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope has arrived at Kennedy Space Center ahead of a Falcon Heavy launch targeted for no earlier than August 30. The observatory will survey the sky about 1,000 times faster than Hubble with a field of view at least 100 times wider, helping scientists study dark matter, dark energy, and exoplanets. Spaceflight Now report … ⌘ Read more

GM Installs Robots At Flagship EV Factory After Laying Off 1,300 Workers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Dozens of new robot arms have been installed at General Motors’ flagship electric vehicle factory in Detroit – even as 1,300 workers remain out of work following what was supposed to be a temporary layoff. The latest automation push has spurred union pushback over a potent … ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Accidentally Breaks Replying To an Email On Outlook
Microsoft has accidentally introduced a bug in Outlook for Mac that omits the original message from email replies, making it difficult for recipients to follow conversation history. Until Microsoft releases a fix, its suggested workaround is to roll back from version 16.110 and disable automatic updates, which is “great for users in full control of their … ⌘ Read more

Following User Outcry, AMD Reinstates Memory Encryption In Consumer CPUs
Last week, AMD was found to have stripped memory encryption from its consumer CPUs without any warning or notice. Now, following a wave of backlash on social media, the chipmaker has now reinstated the protection, though it still hasn’t explained why the safeguard was disabled in the first place. Ars Technica reports: Following the r … ⌘ Read more

Valve Will Finally Let You Build Your Own Steam Machine With SteamOS For Desktop
With the price of the new Steam Machine starting at $1,049, you might want to consider making your own Steam Machine instead. An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: Valve says that “starting with the SteamOS 3.8 release, you can put together your own Steam Machine using whatever PC parts you want.” St … ⌘ Read more

USB4STREAM Merged For Linux 7.2 To Quickly Send Data Between USB4 Connected Systems
As part of today’s USB/Thunderbolt subsystem updates for the ongoing Linux 7.2 kernel merge window, USB4STREAM was merged as a nifty and exciting addition to opening up some interesting USB4 connnectivity use-cases for high speed, low latency data transfers… ⌘ Read more

Google Invests $75 Million In A24 To Develop AI-Powered Filmmaking Tools
Google is investing roughly $75 million in A24 as part of a research partnership with DeepMind to develop AI-powered filmmaking tools and workflows. “The deal represents the latest marriage between a Hollywood studio and AI in an era where companies have oscillated between partnerships and lawsuits,” reports Variety. From t … ⌘ Read more

Some Electricians Think Building Data Centers Is For Sellouts
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As Big Tech dumps billions of dollars into America’s data center buildout, a slew of opportunities have opened up to the electricians wiring these massive facilities. In some cases, the scale of the projects and the demanding construction timelines are fueling talent wars for the industry’s best and brigh … ⌘ Read more

Intel Optimization Zone 1.1 Lays Out Tuning Recommendations For More Workloads
Back in March Intel announced the Optimization Zone as a new initiative for helping server administrators and developers better maximize the performance of different workloads running on Intel hardware. Out today is the Intel Optimization Zone 1.1 release with more workloads now covered for squeezing out the most performance on Intel CPUs… ⌘ Read more

Valve Prices the Steam Machine At $1,049
Valve’s new Steam Machine will launch June 29 starting at $1,049 and go up from there depending on the configuration. Although it costs considerably more than the PS5 ($599.99) and Xbox Series X ($649.99), “the value proposition for the Steam Machine is that it can play your library of Steam games you may have accumulated over years (or even decades), rather than just PlayStation games, and it’ … ⌘ Read more

Steam Machine Launches, Priced $1049 To $1428 USD
Valve today finally revealed pricing on their SteamOS Linux-powered Steam Machine living room PC. Given the ongoing RAM and storage pricing pressure, the Steam Machine pricing comes in at the high-end… ⌘ Read more

AI Law Firm Wins UK Court Case For First Time
Garfield AI, the UK’s first regulator-approved AI law firm, has won its first court case after helping a freelancer recover 7,000 pounds in unpaid fees. “I was owed money for work I had done, but it felt like the process of recovering it could be too stressful, expensive and time-consuming,” said Tamires Camal Taquidir, a freelancer who had provided HR-related services to a hospitalit … ⌘ Read more

2,000 Retired Google Pixel Phones Get a Second Life As a Private Cloud
UC San Diego researchers are working with Google to build a private cloud from 2,000 retired Pixel Fold motherboards, demonstrating how discarded smartphones could provide useful, low-cost computing capacity. “The full smartphone cluster is expected to launch this fall,” reports The Register. “Depending on how well the initial phas … ⌘ Read more

Benchmarking Bcachefs 1.38.6: The First Release No Longer “Experimental”
Released last week was Bcachefs 1.38.6 with a host of performance improvements to this out-of-tree, copy-on-write file-system. Given all the performance improvements and this being the first release since Kent Overstreet dropped the “experimental” flag on the file-system, I decided to fire up some benchmarks looking at how the Bcachefs file-system performance has changed with this new version. ⌘ Read more

Ubisoft Co-Founder Claude Guillemot Dies In Plane Crash
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Claude Guillemot, co-founder of French video game company Ubisoft, died Friday at the age of 69. According to French media (via Bloomberg), Guillemot died in a plane crash in the French resort town of La Baule. He was one of two people aboard the plane, both of whom died.

Guillemot founded Ubisoft with his fou … ⌘ Read more

Xfce Wayland Compositor Sees First Preview/Alpha Release
Over the past half-year, Xfwl4 has been developed as a Wayland compositor for the Xfce desktop environment. Released this weekend was the first preview release of Xfwl4 in alpha form… ⌘ Read more

Linux Finally Lands Battery/Charger Driver For 14 Year Old Microsoft Surface RT Tablet
It’s been 14 years already since Microsoft announced the Surface RT hybrid tablet as their first-generation Surface device for going up against the Apple iPad. All these years later, this NVIDIA Tegra 3 powered device is finally seeing a mainline Linux kernel driver for supporting battery and charger status… ⌘ Read more

AMD Updates ROCDXG To Deliver Better ROCm Experience On WSL
Back in March AMD introduced ROCDXG to improve their Windows Subsystem for Linux support. This improved Windows Subsystem for Linux “WSL” support with the ROCm compute stack is a cleaneer architecture, open-source compared to their legacy WSL code having closed bits, and more robust handling. Today they issued a new ROCDXG library release to further enhance their WSL support… ⌘ Read more

Several US States Bet That AI Can Solve Their Prison Recidivism Crisis
America’s state prison systems need ways “to keep people from returning to prison,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “when an estimated 40% end up back behind bars within three years.”

Part of the problem comes in the form of filing cabinets, manila folders and legacy digital databases. In other words, records for a single prisoner m … ⌘ Read more

Miracle-WM Aiming For v1.0 Later This Year For Mir-Based Wayland Compositor
Miracle-WM 0.10 released on Sunday as the newest feature release for this Mir-based Wayland compositor. With this new release is also acknowledgement they are hoping to cross the “1.0” milestone later in the year… ⌘ Read more

Valve Creates The Ray-Tracing Inspector “RTI” To Help Further Optimize Linux GPU Drivers
Merged today to Mesa 26.1 is the Ray-Tracing Inspector “RTI” as a new GUI created by developers on Valve’s open-source Linux graphics team. The Ray-Tracing Inspector is designed to help in analyzing and optimizing the Vulkan ray-tracing performance as part of their continued work on further bettering the Radeon RADV RT performance for Steam Play / Linux gaming… ⌘ Read more

OneXPlayer Configuration Driver Merged For Linux 7.2 Along With Other New Hardware
The HID subsystem updates have landed in the Linux 7.2 kernel with some treats that will excite Linux gamers and other desktop users… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 sched_ext Continues Working Toward Sub-Scheduler Support
Merged last week for the Linux 7.2 kernel were all of the sched_ext changes for this extensible scheduler support that allows loading BPF programs from user-space for handling scheduling tasks. Linux 7.2 continues building out sched_ext’s sub-scheduler support… ⌘ Read more

‘Tutor’ Who Took Online Tests for 124 Students Jailed for Three Years
A private tutor who charged money to take dozens of exams for students and submit coursework for them “has been jailed for three years,” reports the BBC, “after his scam earned him £300,000.”

Shahid Adnan completed assignments and online tests for more than 120 students at Liverpool John Moore’s University, the Crown Prosecution Service … ⌘ Read more

TikTok Shows 3x More AI Slop Than YouTube, Report Finds
“About 59% of TikTok videos served to a new account’s For You feed are AI slop,” writes Search Engine Journal, “according to a report from Kapwing, the video creation tool company. That’s roughly three times the rate Kapwing found on YouTube.”

The company manually reviewed over 10,000 TikTok videos across 20 categories and ran a separate fresh-account test, countin … ⌘ Read more

Someone Forked systemd Over Its New Birth Date Field
The blog Linuxiac reports:
A new systemd fork has appeared with a specific purpose: removing systemd’s recently added support for storing a user’s birth date in JSON user records.

The fork, called Liberated systemd, published its first tagged release as v261 shortly after the official systemd 261 release. In other words, the fork follows upstream systemd while reverti … ⌘ Read more

Early AMD GCN GPUs Seeing Improved GPU Recovery - Another Valve-Led Linux Improvement
Early AMD Radeon Graphics Core Next “GCN” GPUs are seeing work to improve the GPU recovery process in the event of hangs. This work is yet another improvement for older AMD GPUs being led by Valve’s open-source Linux graphics driver team… ⌘ Read more

The Secret Revolution in Battery Technology: 3-D Printing
“There’s a revolution in battery technology hiding in plain sight,” reports The Wall Street Journal. “The 3-D printing of batteries has the potential to put energy storage inside any device.

“This will enable lightweight and long-lasting consumer gadgets, long-range military drones and even nanoscale robots.”
Almost all the innovations we regularly hear ab … ⌘ Read more

Is Tesla Planning To Sell Modular AI Data Center Hardware?
Electrek reports:

Tesla wants to sell modular AI data center hardware, according to a new trademark application for a product called “Megapod.” The filing describes a complete, self-contained computing system for AI workloads…

Tesla filed the “Megapod” trademark (serial number 99893717) with the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office this month, through its … ⌘ Read more

UK Official Promises Statements ‘Around VPNs’ and Further Teen Restrictions on Chatbots and Social Media
PC Gamer reports:

The UK government is considering an Australia-style ban on social media for under-16s, with Prime Minister Keir Starmer saying that the ban could take effect as soon as spring next year. As for the much nearer future, Science and Technology Secretary … ⌘ Read more

Cops Keep Getting Arrested for Using Flock’s Cameras to Stalk People
404 Media remembers how a Florida police office looked up his ex-girlfriend’s license plate in the Flock automated license plate reader system at least 69 times in 2024 — even searching for her mom’s license plate at least 24 times. The police office was charged with stalking and hacking-related offenses, serving one day in prison with five … ⌘ Read more

zlib-rs 0.6.4 Released With Fix For Intel Raptor Lake Crash, SIMD Optimizations
As a follow-up to last week’s article around Firefox leveraging zlib-rs and some nice upstream improvements to this Rust-based Zlib implementation, the zlib-rs 0.6.4 release is now available to ship all of these latest enhancements… ⌘ Read more

After Six Years Of Work and Over 360 Patches, Linux 7.2 Finally Removes Bug-Prone strncpy
Tech Times reports:

Linux 7.2’s merge window closed out a cleanup campaign on Friday that most kernel developers had stopped expecting to see end: the complete removal of strncpy(), a C string-copy function that the kernel’s own documentation labels “actively dangerous,” from every subsystem, driv … ⌘ Read more

US Bill Would Mandate AI Chip Location Tracking to Thwart China and Other Adversaries
NBC News reports:

A group of companies that specialize in tracking international shipments of sensitive technologies is backing a Capitol Hill bill that would require America’s most powerful AI chips to incorporate stronger security mechanisms aimed at preventing the chips from reaching China and other adv … ⌘ Read more

The Rust Ecosystem Gets an AI Security Engineer in Residence
While the Rust Foundation has a Security Initiative to protect its ecosystem, “the threats have expanded,” they announced this week, “and so has the kind of help maintainers need.”

Much of this comes back to a single shift: Automated tooling (much of it now built on large language models) has gotten good enough to surface real vulnerabilities in o … ⌘ Read more

Qualcomm Posts Linux Patches For HP EliteBook X G2q X2 Elite Laptop
Last month Qualcomm engineers posted patches bringing up the Lenovo Yoga Slim 7x Gen11 Snapdragon X2 laptop on Linux. Sent out this weekend were a new set of patches from Qualcomm for bringing up the HP EliteBook X G2q laptop model powered by the Snapdragon X2 Elite SoC… ⌘ Read more

Canonical’s Upcoming AI Tool: Talk to Ubuntu Instead of Typing
This week the Ubuntu desktop’s director of engineering announced they’re bringing speech-to-text dictation to Ubuntu Desktop, aiming for an experience “that feels like a natural part of the desktop while respecting user privacy and running entirely on local hardware.”

“Speech recognition has become a common feature on modern platforms, and we think it … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.2 Merges Vulkan Present Timing Support For X11/XWayland
Mesa’s Vulkan windowing system integration (WSI) code now has support for present timing support “VK_EXT_present_timing” with X11 and XWayland… ⌘ Read more

New Super PAC Aims to Rally Tech Workers to Help Limit AI: ‘the Guardrails Alliance’
“A grassroots movement is forming among everyday tech workers who are demanding their companies develop and deploy AI responsibly,” reports TechCrunch.

Hoping to leverage that discontent is a new super PAC called the Guardrails Alliance. The New York Times reports that it launched Thursday with backers t … ⌘ Read more

Google’s Gemini Partially Figures Out A Lengthy Linux Boot Time On Modern ASUS Laptop
Google Antigravity with the Gemini 3.5 Flash model helped a Linux user sort out a situation where his laptop was taking around 36 seconds to boot the kernel, which shouldn’t be the case for the high-end laptop with AMD Ryzen 9 processor and 32GB of RAM. It ended up being yet another case of device firmware issues, but now a Linux kernel patch is pending for working around the issue on the ASUS ROG Strix G16 G614 laptop while … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.2 Begins Making Preparations For NVIDIA “Blackwell-Next”
When going through the VFIO subsystem patches for the ongoing Linux 7.2 merge window, there isn’t too much to get excited about for end users with these changes. But there is the first time mentioning “Blackwell-Next” enablement by NVIDIA for the Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more

Facial Recognition on Public Buses? Kansas City Says Yes
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Associated Press:

Officials in Kansas City, Missouri, are preparing to equip cameras on some public buses with facial recognition software capable of identifying passengers who appear on a list of banned riders or missing persons. Supporters and opponents alike view the effort as a major litmus test for tapping the … ⌘ Read more

Polymarket Paid Dozens to Post Videos of Themselves ‘Winning’ With Fake Bets
In January a college student posted a video showing him winning $100,000 on Polymarket — one of 145 that appeared to show bets adding up to almost $410,000, reports the Wall Street Journal. “But none of those bets were real.”

Instead its creator was “one of dozens of mostly college-age creators Polymarket paid to film thems … ⌘ Read more

Gamers Sue PlayStation: It’s Not Clear They’re Selling Licenses Rather Than Ownership of Games
The gaming news site Aftermath reports:

Four gamers are suing Sony Interactive Entertainment for allegedly breaking a California law that requires digital storefronts selling games to make it clear people are buying licenses, not actually owning the games.

Sony Interactive Entertainment … ⌘ Read more

Broadcom Working On VMware Zero-Copy Buffer Sharing Between VMs And Hypervisor
Interesting feature work for VMware virtualization on Linux now being pursued by Broadcom is to support zero-copy buffer sharing between the VM(s) and host hypervisor, which would equate to an efficiency and performance win… ⌘ Read more

How Millions of Digital Home Devices Are Secretly Powering Cyberattacks
The Wall Street Journal reports on internet-connected devices — and how every year millions of them “can contain a secret digital backdoor that opens up access to your home internet, so that anyone… can surf the web as if they were you.” (And this is especially true for “knockoffs that you buy online”…)

In a video report this wee … ⌘ Read more