An Engineer’s Post Protesting Laptop Surveillance Is Going Viral Inside Meta
Meta employees in the US and UK are organizing against corporate software that tracks workers’ keystrokes and mouse activity. ⌘ Read more
AMD Preps More AIE4 NPU Hardware Enablement For AMDXDNA Driver In Linux 7.2
Since March we have been seeing patches from AMD software engineers beginning to enable their next-generation “AIE4” NPU platform under Linux. We still don’t know for sure when this AIE4 NPU will premiere for sure in new Ryzen AI products, but the Linux enablement continues coming along nicely for the AMDXDNA accelerator driver… ⌘ Read more
Software Developers Say AI Is Rotting Their Brains
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media: On Reddit, Hacker News and other places where people in software development talk to each other, more and more people are becoming disillusioned with the promise of code generated by large language models. Developers talk not just about how the AI output is often flawed, but that using AI to get the job done is often … ⌘ Read more
Meta Employees Launch Protest Against Mouse-Tracking Tech At US Offices
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Meta employees distributed flyers at multiple U.S. offices on Tuesday to protest the company’s recent installation of mouse-tracking software on their computers, according to photos of the pamphlets seen by Reuters. The flyers, which appeared in meeting rooms, on vending machines and … ⌘ Read more
Sovereign Tech Fund invests in KDE
The KDE project has announced
that it has been awarded over €1 million from the Sovereign Tech Fund
to improve its desktop-environment software. “The investment will be
used to strengthen the structural reliability and security of KDE’s core
infrastructure, including Plasma, KDE Linux, and the frameworks underlying
its communication services.” ⌘ Read more
KDE Receiving Over 1.2 Million EUR Investment From Sovereign Tech Fund
KDE today announced a significant investment into the project by Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund. KDE will be receiving €1,285,200 EUR (or roughly 1.5 million USD) over the years 2026 and 2027 to make some significant improvements into their software stack… ⌘ Read more
FCC Says Foreign-Made Routers Can Get Updates Until 2029
The FCC has softened its ban on foreign-made consumer routers, allowing vendors to keep issuing broader software and firmware updates for devices already in use in the U.S. through at least January 2029. Dark Reading reports: Under the original FCC ruling, foreign manufacturers were permitted to provide only limited maintenance and security patches to US custom … ⌘ Read more
CUDA Proves Nvidia Is a Software Company
Nvidia’s real AI moat isn’t “a piece of hardware,” writes Wired’s Sheon Han. It’s CUDA: a mature, deeply optimized software ecosystem that keeps machine-learning workloads tied to Nvidia GPUs. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: What sounds like a chemical compound banned by the FDA may be the one true moat in AI. CUDA technically stands for Compute Unified Device Architecture, … ⌘ Read more
Debian to require reproducible builds
Paul Gevers has slipped an interesting bit of news into a “ bits from the release\
team” message:
Aided by the efforts of the Reproducible Builds project, we’ve
decided it’s time to say that Debian must ship reproducible
packages. Since yesterday, we have enabled our migration software
to block migration of new packages that can’t be reproduced or
existing packages (in testing) that regress in reproducibility.
As Gioe … ⌘ Read more
CUDA Proves Nvidia Is a Software Company
There’s a deep, forbidding moat that surrounds Nvidia—and it has nothing to do with hardware. ⌘ Read more
Open Source Project Shuts Down Over Legal Threats from 3D Printer Company Bambu Lab
The free/open source project OrcaSlicer is a popular fork of 3D printer slicing software from Bambu Lab. But Tuesday independent developer Pawel Jarczak shuttered the project “following legal threats from Bambu Lab,” reports Tom’s Hardware:
Jarczak’s fork of OrcaSlicer would have allowed users to bypass Bamb … ⌘ Read more
《中国软件著作权申请材料》生成器｜不用自己动手
很多安卓开发者第一次上架国内应用商店时，会发现：没有《中国软件著作权》，连审核都提不了。于是，大量开发者只能花钱找代办。但现在，这件事终于可以让 AI 解决了。 其实，软著申请本身并不复杂，个人也能免费申请。唯一需要费时费力解决的是申请表、操作手册、代码等文字材料。 中国软件著作权申请材料 生成器 ⌘ Read more
Open Source Registries Join Linux Foundation Working Group to Address Machine-Generated Traffic
Under the nonprofit Linux Foundation, “a new Sustaining Package Registries Working Group will seek to identify concrete funding, governance, and security practices,” reports ZDNet, “to keep code flowing as download counts grow…. Because software builds, continuous integration pipelin … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Releases Azure Linux 3.0.20260506 With Many Security Fixes
Microsoft released Azure Linux 3.0.20260506 on Saturday in order to ship the latest security fixes affecting a wide variety of open-source software projects… ⌘ Read more
Thousands of Vibe-Coded Apps Expose Corporate and Personal Data On the Open Web
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Security researcher Dor Zvi and his team at the cybersecurity firm he cofounded, RedAccess, analyzed thousands of vibe-coded web applications created using the AI software development tools Lovable, Replit, Base44, and Netlify and found more than 5,000 of them that had v … ⌘ Read more
[$] Forgejo “carrot disclosure” raises security questions
An unusual, some might say hostile, approach to disclosing an alleged
remote-code-execution (RCE) flaw in the Forgejo software-collaboration platform has
sparked a multifaceted conversation. A so-called
“carrot disclosure” in April has raised questions about the
researcher’s methods of unveiling a security problem, Forgejo’s
security policies, and the project’s overall security posture. ⌘ Read more
OpenZL 0.2 Released For Meta’s Content-Aware Compression Software
Last October engineers at Meta announced OpenZL as a format-aware compression framework. OpenZL aims to be speedy yet capable of delivering high compression ratios depending upon what is being compressed. OpenZL is viewed as their next leap in data compression beyond their wonderful work on Zstandard (Zstd). This week there’s finally a new OpenZL software release available… ⌘ Read more
AMD’s Local, Open-Source AI Can Now Easily Interact With Your Gmail
AMD software engineers continue rapidly advancing their open-source software efforts around local AI/LLM use on consumer-class Radeon and Ryzen hardware. AMD GAIA 0.17.6 was released on Thursday with more improvements for local AI processing on Windows, Linux, and even macOS. For those trusting enough in local LLM pipelines to do the right thing, there is even integration now for AMD GAIA to interface with your Gmail account… ⌘ Read more
Nouveau vs. NVIDIA R595 Linux Driver For Workstation Graphics Performance
When having the HP Z6 G5 A workstation in the lab for benchmarking, one of the curiosity-driven tests was seeing how well the latest open-source and upstream Nouveau driver stack is competing against the latest official NVIDIA R595 driver for workstations. The official NVIDIA Linux driver stack remains the best positioned software solution for RTX (PRO) hardware but Nouveau continues evolving while awaiting the Nova kernel driver to rea … ⌘ Read more
Fedora Yet To Decide On x86_64-v3 Packages For Fedora Linux 45
Last month a Fedora Linux change proposal was shared proposing that Fedora 45 be built with x86_64-v3 packages to complement the generic x86_64 (v1) packages currently being compiled. This has the possibility of providing greater performance out of packaged Fedora software but comes with the cost of greater burdens on web mirrors, QA / testing, and related infrastructure impact. The Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee “FESCo” decided toda … ⌘ Read more
AlmaLinux 10.2 Beta Released With Legacy 32-bit Software Support
AlmaLinux 10.2 Beta released today as their next AlmaLinux 10 release coming down the pipe and derived from the upstream Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2 state. Plus this AlmaLinux release continues adding more changes on their own… ⌘ Read more
Can Investors Trust AI Sales Figures? Asks Wall Street Journal Opinion Piece
A Wall Street Journal opinion piece warns of “a troubling trend” in AI’s growth. “Rather than selling software, some AI companies are paying their partners to use it.”
It cites OpenAI’s $1.5 billion joint venture with private-equity firms, Anthropic’s $200 million contribution to a private-equity firm joint venture, and Google’ … ⌘ Read more
AI tool ‘too dangerous to release’ could wreak havoc on businesses
It found a 27-year-old bug in software used in routers worldwide. Experts fear Anthropic’s Mythos model could trigger the next wave of major breaches. ⌘ Read more
AMD’s GAIA Defaults To Better Model, Continued Improvements For Local AI
AMD software engineers on Friday released a new version of GAIA “Generative AI Is Awesome” as their open-source software for Windows and Linux leveraging the Lemonade SDK and aiming to make it easy to build AI agents on your PC with all local AI processing across AMD’s CPUs, GPUs, and NPUs… ⌘ Read more
AI Agent Designed To Speed Up Company’s Coding Wipes Entire Database In 9 Seconds
joshuark shares a report from Live Science: An AI coding agent designed to help a small software company streamline its tasks instead blew a hole through its business in just nine seconds. PocketOS founder Jer Crane, said that the AI coding agent Cursor –powered by Anthropic’s Claude Opus 4.6 model – delet … ⌘ Read more
The Case Against an Imminent Software Developer Apocalypse
ZipNada shares a report from ZDNet: Given the dour headlines as of late concerning the diminishing amounts of entry-level software development jobs, coupled with predictions of applications entirely AI-generated, one could be forgiven for assuming that software developers may soon be an endangered species. However, the data tells a different story. Jam … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.0 Release, Age Verification Laws, Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 & Other April Happenings
A lot happened in the Linux and open-source world during the month of April. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS and Fedora 44 shipped, a lot of news around age attestation/verification laws, the Linux 7.0 kernel was released, Linux 7.1 is bringing many exciting changes as well as removing of old hardware drivers, the Ryzen 9 9950X3D2 Dual Edition CPU was released, we began testing the Intel Arc Pro B70 “BMG-G31”, and much more software and hardware co … ⌘ Read more
The Bloomberg Terminal Is Getting an AI Makeover
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: For its famous intractability, the Bloomberg Terminal has long inspired devotion, bordering on obsession. Among traders, the ability to chart a path through the software’s dizzying scrolls of numbers and text to isolate far-flung information is the mark of a seasoned professional. But as a greater mass of data is fed into the Term … ⌘ Read more
IBM Updates Linux Patches For Introducing ARM64 KVM Virtualization On s390
At the start of April was the peculiar announcement of IBM collaborating with Arm on “dual architecture” hardware. The initial fruits of that collaboration at least are Linux kernel patches for enabling ARM64 virtualization acceleration on IBM Z servers. As we approach the end of the month, IBM has now posted a second iteration of those patches for enabling AArch64 software to run on IBM s390 via the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)… ⌘ Read more
Sovereign Tech Agency Launches New Initiative To Help Open Standards
Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency (Sovereign Tech Fund) has provided critical financial resources to open-source software projects and maintainers the past several years. This has proven to be an incredible effort and today they announced their newest initiative as the Sovereign Tech Standards… ⌘ Read more
Fedora 44 Released For Living On The Leading-Edge Of Linux Innovations
Fedora 44 is officially released for providing the very latest Linux innovations with GNOME 50 being the default desktop of Fedora Workstation 44, an improved KDE experience with Plasma 6.6 complete with the Plasma Log-in Manager, and other up-to-date software packages… ⌘ Read more
Colorado Adds Open-Source Exemption to Age-Verification Bill
Colorado’s “age-attestation” bill left the House committee with new exemptions for open-source operating systems, applications, code repositories, and containerized software distribution, reports the blog Linuxiac:
[The bill] focuses on operating system providers and application stores. Its main requirement is that these providers supply an age-related … ⌘ Read more
Free Software Foundation Says ‘Responsible AI’ Licenses Which Restrict Harmful Uses are Unethical and Nonfree
The Free Software Foundation’s Licensing and Compliance Manager published a blog post this week to explicitly state that”Responsible AI” Licenses (RAIL) are nonfree and unethical. The licenses restrict AI and ML software “from being used in a specific list of h … ⌘ Read more
New NTFS Driver Sees A Number Of Fixes Ahead Of Linux 7.1-rc1
With the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release due out tomorrow to cap off the Linux 7.1 merge window, one of the most notable additions this cycle is the introduction of the new NTFS driver that aims to provide better performance and more modern features than the existing NTFS3 in-kernel driver that was originally contributed by Paragon Software… ⌘ Read more
Newly Deciphered Sabotage Malware May Have Targeted Iran’s Nuclear Program—and Predates Stuxnet
Researchers have finally cracked Fast16, mysterious code capable of silently tampering with calculation and simulation software. It was created in 2005—and likely deployed by the US or an ally. ⌘ Read more
Oracle To Reduce The Frequency Of Solaris 11.4 Updates
Oracle announced today they are going to be reducing the frequency of software updates for Solaris 11.4 and their ZFS Storage Appliance software… ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu 26.04 Allows “sudo apt install rocm” But It’s Months Out-Of-Date
Canonical announced last year that in collaboration with AMD they would be bringing the ROCm software libraries into the Ubuntu archive for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS. The plan has been to ship AMD ROCm AI/ML and HPC libraries in the Ubuntu archive so it would be as easy as sudo apt install rocm for getting started with AMD’s open-source GPU compute stack. With today being the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release day, I decided to revisit the topic… ⌘ Read more
AI Tool Rips Off Open Source Software Without Violating Copyright
A satirical but working tool called Malus uses AI to create “clean room” clones of open-source software, aiming to reproduce the same functionality while shedding attribution and copyleft obligations. “It works,” Mike Nolan, one of the two people behind Malus, who researches the political economy of open source software and currently works for … ⌘ Read more
AMD’s GAIA Makes It Easier To Import/Export Custom AI Agents Across PCs
AMD on the software side continues investing heavily in GAIA “Generative AI Is Awesome” as their cross-platform solution built around the Lemonade SDK for running local AI agents on your AMD-powered hardware from CPUs to GPUs and NPUs. With today’s GAIA update, custom-generated AI agents are now portable with easy import and export support… ⌘ Read more
While New NTFS Driver Merged, NTFS3 Driver Sees Fixes & Minor Changes For Linux 7.1
Last week saw the “NTFS resurrection” as Linux Torvalds put it with the new/overhauled NTFS driver having been merged for Linux 7.1. Even still, the NTFS3 driver that was contributed a few years ago by Paragon Software remains in the mainline kernel and today were some fixes/improvements merged for that existing driver… ⌘ Read more
[$] Digging into drama at The Document Foundation
The Document Foundation (TDF) is
the nonprofit entity behind the LibreOffice productivity suite. Most of the
time, the software takes the spotlight, but that has changed in the past few weeks, and
not for pleasant reasons. TDF has revoked\
foundation membership status from about 30 people who work for or have
contracting statu … ⌘ Read more
A 40-year-old storage company just beat Mike Cannon-Brookes’ Atlassian
Atlassian posted its strongest quarter ever, then got kicked out of the Nasdaq 100. The market has stopped rewarding software and started paying for storage. ⌘ Read more
GNOME Fixes Screencasting Issue With H.264 Recordings Being ~18x Larger Than VP8
A fix today for GNOME Shell’s screen casting/recording service was merged after it was reported that H.264 recordings using the Video Acceleration API (VA-API) are around 18x larger than they should be like when using the VP8 software fallback… ⌘ Read more
Nevada Police Can Now Track Cellphones Without a Warrant
“Nevada quietly signed an agreement earlier this year with a company that collects location data from cellphones, allowing police to track a device virtually in real time,” reports the Associated Press. “All without a warrant.”
The software from Fog Data Science, adopted this January in Nevada through a Department of Public Safety contract, pulls information fr … ⌘ Read more
Remembering Zip Drives - the Trendy Storage Technology of the 1990s
Back in the 1990s, floppy disks “had a mere capacity of 1.44MB,” remembers XDA Developers, “which would soon become absolutely tiny for the increasingly large pieces of software that would come about.”
Floppy disks also felt quite fragile, and while we got “superfloppy” formats that were physically larger and had more capacity, those w … ⌘ Read more
WireGuard For Windows Reaches v1.0
For those making use of the WireGuard open-source, secure VPN tunnel software, WireGuard For Windows 1.0 is finally available… ⌘ Read more
FSF to OnlyOffice: You Can’t Use the GNU (A)GPL to Take Software Freedom Away
Nextcloud joined a project to create a sovereign replacement for Microsoft Office called “Euro-Office”. But after that project forked OnlyOffice, OnlyOffice suspended its partnership with Nextcloud. “They removed all references to our brand/attribute as required by our license,” argued OnlyOffice CEO Lev Bannov on March 30t … ⌘ Read more
Shuttered Startups Are Selling Old Slack Chats, Emails To AI Companies
Some failed startups are reportedly selling old Slack messages, emails, and other internal records to AI companies as training data, creating a new way to cash out after shutting down. Fast Company reports: Shanna Johnson, the CEO of now-defunct software company Cielo24, told the publication that she was able to sell every Slack message, … ⌘ Read more
New NTFS File-System Driver Submitted For Linux 7.1
Making today very exciting in Linux 7.1 merge window land was a pull request being sent out for introducing the new, modern NTFS file-system driver. Linus Torvalds has yet to comment if he’s going to merge the new driver but it looks like it’s ready for providing a better Linux NTFS experience over the current NTFS3 driver that was upstreamed by Paragon Software a few years ago and hasn’t seen too much feature progress… ⌘ Read more
Proton 11.0 Beta Released With More Games Playable On Steam Play
Valve and CodeWeavers have just released Proton 11.0 Beta as their first beta milestone for this software that powers Steam Play now rebased against upstream Wine 11.0… ⌘ Read more