Firefox Touts Lower CPU Use for Large JPEGs, Faster PDF Viewer Startup (and AI Controls)
Firefox 156 is the second release since Mozilla moved to a twice-monthly release schedule, and the blog OMG Ubuntu notes it has faster start-up times for its built-in PDF viewer and also lower CPU usage when viewing large JPEG images:

In Firefox 156, the browser now uses libjpeg-turbo’s IDCT scaling t … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.10 Moves cp, mv & rm Over To Rust Coreutils For 100% Transition
While Ubuntu Linux has been making use of the Rust Coreutils project over the past year since Ubuntu 25.10 as an alternative to GNU Coreutils and part of their effort to get more system components implemented in the memory-safety-focused Rust programming language, Ubuntu 26.10 finally completes the transition with the cp, mv, and rm commands now coming from Rust Coreutils… ⌘ Read more

America’s Cryptocurrency ‘Clarity Act’ Fails Spectacularly, Despite Hundreds of Millions in Industry Lobbying
“The crypto industry’s top legislative priority failed on Tuesday in spectacular fashion,” reports Barron’s.

A procedural motion to advance the bill failed by a vote of 49 to 50, with a handful of Republicans joining all Democrats to shoot it down. The motion n … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu’s ‘Rust-ification’ Hits New Milestone: Coreutils Migration is Complete
“Ubuntu has managed to do away with GNU Core Utilities in its default stack,” reports the blog It’s FOSS.

The last three utilities — cp, mv and rm — have been moved to versions from the uutils project (which reimplements utilities in Rust).

Everything else, from ls and cat to chmod and du, made that jump in earlier release … ⌘ Read more

While Hollywood Fears an AI Future, China’s Film Industry is Embracing It
The Los Angeles Times reports:

Chen Yilong has racked up plenty of film and TV credits in his two decades as an actor, but with work getting scarcer he signed a contract in August to license the image of his face to a Chinese production studio. Chen’s role will be to sit in front of a video camera and make facial express … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Discover Mysterious New X-Ray Objects ‘Unlike Any They Have Seen Before’
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: NASA’s Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object – compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet. Chandra spotted 8 … ⌘ Read more

Ubuntu 26.10 Set To Deliver Better Performance For Intel Core 3 Wildcat Lake
While Ubuntu 26.04 LTS is working fine out-of-the-box on new Intel Core 3 “Wildcat Lake” laptops like the CHUWI UniBook, next month’s release of Ubuntu 26.10 will help deliver better performance out of these low-cost laptop options. ⌘ Read more

Cops Searched Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of ‘LMAO,’ ‘IDK,’ ‘Hehe,’ And ‘Asdfg’
404 Media reports:

Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff’s Department used Flock’s surveillance search engine to look for a license plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop’s stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock’s system, was “LMAO. … ⌘ Read more

Math Professor Accuses OpenAI of Copying His Work, Says AI Compute Power Makes Racing to Publish ‘Pointless’
The New York Post wrote that OpenAI “stunned the mathematics world” last week when it announced its AI model “cracked a legendary math problem left unsolved for nearly a century in just 88 hours.”

But a New York University professor “has come forward alleging … ⌘ Read more

ChatGPT-Using Lawyer Cited Its Fake Witnesses and Police Testimony in Court
Reuters reports:

A defense lawyer appealing his client’s murder conviction submitted a brief containing made-up police testimony and witnesses fabricated by OpenAI’s ChatGPT, New Mexico’s highest court said. The New Mexico Supreme Court on Wednesday fined the attorney, Stephen Aarons [for $5,000], and held him in contempt for … ⌘ Read more

Reservations Go Live for Valve’s Steam Frame VR Headset. An Experiment in Progress?
Reservations are now live for Valve’s “Steam Frame” VR headset (with its Linux-based SteamOS and an ARM CPU). “It starts at $1,059 for 256GB or $1,299 for 1TB,” reports CNET, “and every purchase includes a copy of Half-Life: Alyx if you don’t already own it.”
Reservations are open through Sept. 17 at 10 a.m. P … ⌘ Read more

A Visit to San Francisco’s AI-run Store: No Customers, Nothing Useful, And Losing Money Fast
Previously Andon Labs handled the hardware and software integration for that AI-powered vending machine that went bankrupt after Wall Street Journal reporters “systematically manipulated the bot into giving away its entire inventory for free”.Today they announced “we are opening up the platform we us … ⌘ Read more

No Rolling Power Outages for California Since 2020 - Thanks to 17,000 MW of New Battery Storage
“Californians just made it through the hottest August on record without having to endure any rolling power outages,” reports the Los Angeles Times. In fact, the state hasn’t implemented rotating power outages since 2020.

Because “Over the last few years, California has quietly but drama … ⌘ Read more

Union Contract with Microsoft Ratified by 1,900 Blizzard Developers and Workers
Nearly 1900 Blizzard Entertainment workers “voted to ratify their first union contract with parent company Microsoft after over two years of bargaining,” reports Kotaku, “consolidating Blizzard’s many smaller unions into three larger bargaining units.”

The workers now gain new protections “on issues such as generati … ⌘ Read more

Should US Open-Weight AI Labs ‘Distill’ Frontier Models Too?
Silicon Valley giants and national security experts “are calling for action against Chinese companies engaged in model distillation,” reports CNBC. But “I would do nothing,” says Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan. “We could argue that there should be an American distillation regime.”

Distillation is the process of using the outputs of a more capable AI model to t … ⌘ Read more

220 Million Traveler Records Exposed In Vietnam-Linked APIS Leak
A misconfigured Advance Passenger Information System (APIS) database linked to Vietnam exposed more than 220 million passenger and crew travel records spanning 2017 to 2026, including names, passport numbers, nationalities, flight details, seat assignments, and baggage references. Researchers said the database was reachable through a chain of secu … ⌘ Read more

NASA and IBM Open Source Lunar Mapping Tools
NASA and IBM have released an open-source AI model trained on a large collection of lunar observations to help scientists analyze the Moon at scale. “The NASA-IBM Lunar Foundation Model gives scientists a foundation to explore the Moon at scale, connecting observations across instruments, revealing patterns that are difficult to see in isolation, and providing an open platform the gl … ⌘ Read more

California’s Gig Drivers Just Secured Collective Bargaining Power with Newly Certified Union
A union representing Uber and Lyft drivers was just certified by California’s Public Employment Relations Board, officially recognizing them as the drivers’ bargaining organization.

The Sacramento Bee reports that this new bargaining structure :

The move will allow the California Gig Workers … ⌘ Read more

Flock Worker Calls Police On Reporter - For Filming Them in Public
“This is what happened when we tried to record Flock installing a new camera on public roads,” says Emmy award-winning reporter Brendan Keefe in a new video for InvestigateTV. In an accompanying article, InvestigateTV says their reporter “parked on the public street at a distance, donned a yellow safety vest and a hat emblazoned with the logo … ⌘ Read more

Malicious OpenAI Agents Linked to RubyGems Campaign That Gained RCE on RubyDoc Servers in May
A swarm of OpenAI agents launched a “major malicious attack” against RubyGems last May, according to a new report. That coordinated attack hit Ruby’s package manager “with hundreds of junk gems, prompting the maintainers to suspend new user sign-ups for about four days,” writes The Hacker News, … ⌘ Read more

Sam Bankman-Fried, Former Crypto Billionaire, Appeals His Conviction To the US Supreme Court
America’s highest court heard Sam Bankman-Fried’s request for a new trial on Thursday, CNN reports. But they add that “the former crypto mogul who was convicted of defrauding investors by secretly diverting billions of dollars of their money” also asked America’s high court “to throw out a cour … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei Calls For AI Slowdown
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The New York Times: The chief executive of Anthropic called for a global slowdown of artificial intelligence development in a 3,800-word essay on Saturday, just days after one of the company’s employees quit over concerns about the safety of the technology. Dario Amodei, who co-founded Anthropic to focus on securely and carefully building A.I … ⌘ Read more

Automattic’s Matt Mullenweg Claims He’s Back ‘In Control’
Less than 48 hours after Automattic’s board placed Matt Mullenweg on leave, Mullenweg told employees he was back “in control” of the company and that the board was again in agreement. 404 Media cited Slack screenshots late Thursday evening where Mullenweg posted “Don’t call it a comeback” and linked to LL Cool J’s music video for “Mama Said Knock You Out.” “Mullenweg’s … ⌘ Read more

LG Responds to TV Spying Allegations
LG is pushing back against reports that its smart TVs are “spying” on users, saying wake-word detection happens locally and that features such as Automatic Content Recognition, voice recognition, and interest-based ads are optional. But critics note that researchers found TVs keeping logs of ambient conversations, and LG’s response “did not address broader concerns about how much data it collects, who … ⌘ Read more

Scientists Create a New Form of Ice At 2,357 Degrees Celsius
Longtime Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a report from ScienceAlert: Scientists have now demonstrated one of the weirdest forms of ice yet – under preposterous pressures up to 2.3 million atmospheres, and tremendous temperatures up to 2,630 kelvins (2,357 degrees Celsius, or 4,274 degrees Fahrenheit). […] In their new experiments, a team led by … ⌘ Read more

Intel Linux NPU Driver Only Now Officially Supports Ubuntu 26.04 LTS
Releasing on Friday was the Intel Linux NPU Driver 1.38 as the user-space open-source driver components for leveraging the Core Ultra Neural Processing Unit (NPU) under Linux in conjunction with the upstream IVPU kernel accelerator driver… ⌘ Read more

Little Mercury May Be Shrinking Faster Than Scientists Expected
A new study suggests Mercury may have shrunk about 30% more than scientists previously thought, losing as much as 14 miles in diameter as its interior cooled and contracted over billions of years. “That’s significant for a planet barely 3,000 miles (4,900 kilometers) across,” reports the Associated Press. From the report: Mercury’s rough surface … ⌘ Read more

Can Red-Light Therapy Treat Brain Injuries?
The Athletic reports that researchers at the University of Utah are studying itPBM, a medical-grade red-light therapy that has shown promising signs of reducing brain inflammation and improving cognition, mood, anxiety, motor performance and neural connectivity. The report centers in part on former BYU football star and University of Utah adjunct professor Larry Carr, who says the trea … ⌘ Read more

Male Fruit Fly Brain Trained to Play Doom
Last week, Google announced that it managed to produce a detailed 3D reconstruction of an adult male fruit fly’s brain and central nervous system. A few days later a software engineer at Coinbase said the fly brain was being trained to play the original Doom. “Each Doom frame stimulates sensory neurons,” says Alex Wormuth. “Neural activity is mapped to game controls. Damage triggers a stimu … ⌘ Read more

PlayStation Ditched Hideo Kojima’s ‘Physint’ on Budget Concerns, Missed Deadlines
Sony reportedly pulled PlayStation funding from Hideo Kojima’s upcoming espionage game Physint over concerns about its ballooning budget, missed deadlines, profitability, and the fact that it would not remain permanently exclusive to PlayStation. Kojima Productions has since struck a deal with Xbox, which plans to p … ⌘ Read more

US Legislators Complain About Secretive British Court and Apple Encryption
Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: A bipartisan pair of American politicians is telling Britain’s most secretive court to stop hiding its handling of Apple’s legal fight against a government demand to break into its customers’ encrypted data, warning that Whitehall’s taste for secrecy is ‘needlessly’ straining relat … ⌘ Read more

Altman Considers Slowing Down AI Development
Bloomberg reports (paywalled) that Sam Altman told OpenAI employees the company is open to slowing the pace of AI development alongside other leading labs as concerns grow over increasingly capable systems and recent incidents in which models escaped human control. OpenAI has already paused development once this year for security work and is now pushing for mandatory U.S. AI safety requirem … ⌘ Read more

UK Government Rejects ‘Kill Switch’ Idea For Dangerous AI
The UK government has rejected proposals for an emergency AI “kill switch,” arguing that blocking access to dangerous models inside Britain would do little if the same systems remained available or were developed elsewhere. The BBC reports: The proposal to create a legal mechanism for the UK to switch off an AI model in an emergency has been brought to Parliament … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Reveals Rogue AI Agents Hate CAPTCHAs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Anthropic’s latest report about agentic misbehavior offers plenty to be concerned about – its Mythos 5 model gained unauthorized access to the internet and uploaded a malicious software package to a public database – but it also offers some levity: AI agents hate CAPTCHA. […] The agent had a hard time with the technical c … ⌘ Read more

CachyOS vs. Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu 26.04 LTS On Intel Wildcat Lake + 8GB RAM
Often times when testing different Linux distributions or comparing Windows vs. Linux it’s on leading flagship desktop or server hardware, but today we are looking at the Ubuntu vs. CachyOS vs. Windows performance at the opposite end of the spectrum. With the new CHUWI UniBook $449 laptop powered by Intel Core 3 Wildcat Lake and with 8GB of system memory, here is a look at how those three operating systems compare across a variety of … ⌘ Read more

California Governor Signs Laws Protecting Kids From Risks of Social Media, AI Chatbots
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed a sweeping package of laws Thursday aimed at protecting children from the risks of technology, including social media and AI chatbots. The laws will penalize large social media companies up to $1 million per … ⌘ Read more

Boy Developed ‘Toasted Skin’ Condition From Using a Laptop Every Day
A medical report published earlier this week says a boy in the U.K. developed erythema ab igne, or “toasted skin syndrome,” after resting a laptop on his abdomen for up to eight hours a day, often while it was charging. “The marks were described as being in a patch about 15 centimeters (six inches) wide, made of flat, reddish-brown ‘inter … ⌘ Read more

August Was World’s Joint-Hottest Month On Record, Scientists Say
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: August was the joint-hottest month ever recorded, tying with July 2023, according to the EU’s climate service. The record was driven by a combination of climate change and the rising influence of El Nino, pushing heat into the atmosphere across the Pacific. Temperatures for the month wer … ⌘ Read more

Climate ‘Feedback Loops’ Could Worsen Global Warming By 30%, Study Finds
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Rising global temperatures caused by the burning of fossil fuels are transforming the world’s forests, wetlands and tundra to the point they are releasing emissions that could further worsen global heating by as much as 30%, a new study has found. As the world heats up, permafrost … ⌘ Read more

Latest Apple Watch Can Grab Snippets of Conversation Without Both Speakers’ Consent
Apple’s new Audio Intelligence features for the Apple Watch Series 12 are drawing privacy concerns because they can process nearby conversations without explicit consent from everyone involved. “Live Rewind lets you instantly see the last 15 seconds of a conversation as text,” Apple explains in its technical … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Says It Blocked Possible Efforts to Build Biological Weapons
Anthropic says it has disrupted several cases this year in which scientists used Claude for biological research that could potentially aid bioweapons development. “In a report describing misuses of its A.I. models, Anthropic said it could not determine whether the research served a legitimate or nefarious purpose because valid biological i … ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.3 RADV + RadeonSI Ready With DRM Format Modifiers For Older AMD GPUs
Coming with Linux 7.3 is DRM format modifiers for GFX6 through GFX8 era GPUs covering the original Raddeon HD 7000 (GCN 1.0) graphics cards up through the Polaris and Fiji series. This work by Valve’s Timur Kristóf is necessary for these older GPUs to support Vulkan-based Wayland compositors, better interoperability between OpenGL and Vulkan or other APis, compositors running on the Zink OpenGL-on-Vulkan driver implementation, and o … ⌘ Read more

Android Rolling Out Passkey Transfers Between Password Managers
Android is rolling out a system-level way to securely transfer passwords and passkeys between credential managers, eliminating the need to export passwords as unencrypted text files or manually recreate passkeys. The feature initially supports Google Password Manager, 1Password, Bitwarden, and Dashlane, with other providers able to integrate through … ⌘ Read more

ABC Show Won’t Air Interview With Democrat Because of FCC Threats
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: ABC’s Jimmy Kimmel said he will be interviewing a Democratic candidate for Senate tonight, but the interview will be on YouTube only and not broadcast on TV because of threats made by the Federal Communications Commission. Kimmel has been a prime target in the Trump FCC’s attacks on ABC and i … ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Targets Work of Wall Street Junior Bankers
OpenAI has launched ChatGPT for Financial Services, a Wall Street-focused version of ChatGPT Work developed with Morgan Stanley and Evercore that can research companies, analyze financial data, and build presentations using the company’s latest and most advanced model, GPT-6 Astra. “We’re effectively teaching ChatGPT to research like an analyst and back up its conclusions like … ⌘ Read more

IMDb Adds ‘Digital Creator’ Profiles For the First Time
IMDb is introducing “Digital Creator” as a new professional category on IMDb and IMDbPro, giving streamers, vloggers, influencers, video essayists, and other online creators a “dedicated way to represent [their] work and connect with audiences, industry peers, and potential employers,” according to IMDb. Variety reports: The category includes sub-professions to fu … ⌘ Read more

Automattic’s Board Forces CEO Matt Mullenweg Into Leave of Absence
Automattic’s board has placed founder and CEO Matt Mullenweg on a paid leave of absence against his will, with CFO Mark Davies taking over as interim CEO. The reason for the move remains unclear, but it follows years of legal fights, layoffs, employee departures, and controversy surrounding Mullenweg’s leadership. TechCrunch reports: Earlier Wednes … ⌘ Read more

The Apple Watch Gets Its Siri AI Upgrade
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Apple has unveiled the Apple Watch Series 12 and Ultra 4 today during itsSeptember hardware event. The new models retain the signature designs of their predecessors but add a faster S11 chip, new health and fitness features, and the watchOS 27 software update announced atWWDC last June. Both the Series 12 and Ultra 4 run on the upgraded S11 c … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA NVK Driver Lands Improvement To Help With Valve’s Gamescope
Merged today for next quarter’s Mesa 26.3 release is an improvement for the open-source NVIDIA “NVK” Vulkan driver paired with the Nouveau kernel driver. This latest NVK improvement benefits usage of Valve’s Gamescope micro-compositor and should help with performance during game recording and remote play… ⌘ Read more

Europe May Finally Have Found a Space Entrepreneur Who Is Meeting the Moment
French entrepreneur Helene Huby is emerging as one of Europe’s most ambitious space leaders, with The Exploration Company raising a record $450 million Series C as it develops the Nyx cargo capsule, a crewed spacecraft, and a reusable heavy-lift rocket. Huby argues Europe risks falling irrelevance without a much larger … ⌘ Read more