Fourth Commerce Commission delay on Bremworth deal frustrating, chair says
Bremworth’s chair says the Commerce Commission’s fourth extension in making a decision on its deal to sell to the owner of Godfrey Hirst is frustrating, but they remain optimistic.
The deal to sell the NZX-listed carpet maker to Mohawk Industries, via local entity Floorscape, which owns Godfrey Hirst, through a scheme of arrangement, was announced in October. ⌘ Read more
KMD Brands launches business review, opens door to possible sale
KMD Brands is reviewing its business and is open to a possible sale after rejecting a Rip Curl de-merger proposal earlier this year.
The dual-listed company announced the review alongside the release of its results for the third quarter of 2026. ⌘ Read more
AI, job cuts and a very fragile mandate
In a week when the Government announced 8,700 public sector roles will go and AI will help fill the gaps, a lunchtime event at Parliament turned into something of a reality check on how fragile trust in AI has become in New Zealand.
One NZ’s second annual AI in Trust report, a nationally representative survey of 1,001 New Zealanders, shows 76% of us have interacted with AI-powered services in the past … ⌘ Read more
AlmaLinux 10.2 Released For Latest Community-Driven RHEL 10.2 Experience
The AlmaLinux project announced the releases today of both AlmaLinux OS 9.8 and AlmaLinux OS 10.2… ⌘ Read more
Pavona Aims To Provide A Certification-Ready, Open-Source Silicon Ecosystem
GlobalPlatform announced today the launch of Pavona as an open-source silicon ecosystem backed by founding members such as Meta, Qualcomm, Tenstorrent, Winbond, and the University of Oxford, among others… ⌘ Read more
EB Games reports $11.4m loss for NZ business as it winds down
Gaming and pop-culture retailer EB Games has released its latest financial report detailing the New Zealand arm’s demise, with the business reporting an $11.4 million loss for its last financial year.
EB Games announced it would be shutting down its New Zealand business and closing all its stores in January. ⌘ Read more
F&P Healthcare lifts dividend after tariff-defying profit rise
Fisher & Paykel Healthcare has lifted its total dividend for the year by 22% after posting a 24% rise in annual net profit after tax, even in the face of US tariffs.
The Auckland-based medical equipment manufacturer’s revenues rose 14% to $2.31 billion across the financial year, while ne … ⌘ Read more
NZ King Salmon scales up after positive half
NZ King Salmon Investments has told investors that the fish firm is recovering on all fronts and that US tariffs are not slowing sales.
The company said net profit after tax for the six months to March 31 was $13.8 million. This compares with a net loss of $20.8m in the prior corresponding period to July 31, 2025. The … ⌘ Read more
Canonical Is Shutting Down Ubuntu Pastebin
“Canonical says Ubuntu Pastebin will be decommissioned at the end of May 2026,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, “as part of an infrastructure modernization effort.”
The announcement only appeared this week, giving the Linux community barely any warning before a service that has been tied to Ubuntu support culture for years suddenly disappears.
Ubuntu Pastebin has long been used for … ⌘ Read more
Apple Preparing New ‘Gen AI’ Website Ahead of WWDC — and New AI Features?
Apple just registered a new subdomain record: genai.apple.com.
The domain was spotted by a MacRumors contributing researcher, and though it doesn’t yet lead to a live web page, they believe it’s tied to Apple’s annual developers conference WWDC which starts June 8, “where the company has promised to announce ‘AI advancements’ … ⌘ Read more
More Videogames Developers Consider Unionization - Some Spurred By Changes to Remote Work Policies
Developers for several top videogames have joined unions under the Communication Workers of America — including Call of Duty, Fallout, Overwatch, Diablo and World of Warcraft. Last month workers on the online game Magic: The Gathering Arena team announced their own CWA union.
T … ⌘ Read more
AMD (Xilinx) is Excluding Linux From the Free Tier For Its FPGA Dev Tool
Long-time Slashdot reader Sun writes:
AMD has announced a change to the way they are licensing Vivado, their FPGA development tool… Hidden between the lines of the announcement [of a new model starting with the 2026.1 release] is the change to the free of charge tier. AMD is adding more devices to be supported in this tier, … ⌘ Read more
Free Software Foundation’s Call for ‘LibreLocals’ Answered on Six Continents - With More Coming
The Free Software Foundation announced this week that “its global call for free software supporters to organize LibreLocals this May resulted in free software supporters organizing forty-six LibreLocal events on six continents thus far.” (And new dates and locations are being added daily. … ⌘ Read more
DreamWorks’ Open-Source MoonRay Renderer Now Part Of The Academy Software Foundation
Back in 2022 it was announced DreamWorks Animation was open-sourcing their MoonRay renderer that has been used in production feature films. It ended up being published as open-source in March 2023 as OpenMoonRay and since then has continued advancing with new feature releases and improvements. Now it’s being contributed to the Academy Software Foundation as the newest project… ⌘ Read more
Spotify, UMG To Let Fans Make Their Own Music With AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Billboard: Spotify and Universal Music Group (UMG) announced a licensing deal for recorded music and publishing rights, enabling Spotify to launch generative AI music models in the future. With this deal, Spotify’s models will allow fans to create covers and remixes of their favorite songs from participating artists and … ⌘ Read more
Meta begins 8,000 global job cuts in AI efficiency push
By Kurt Wagner, Riley Griffin and Olivia Fletcher
Meta Platforms Inc. is alerting thousands of employees that they’re being laid off, part of a previously announced restructuring aimed at reducing costs while the company invests heavily in artificial intelligence. ⌘ Read more
Meta Is in Crisis, Google Search’s Makeover, and AI Gets Booed by Graduates
In this episode of Uncanny Valley, we unpack the mass layoffs at Meta, big announcements at Google I/O, and the latest backlash against AI. ⌘ Read more
CHUWI’s $449 USD Wildcat Lake Laptop Should Work Fine With Linux
CHUWI this week announced their UniBook laptop as a ~$449 USD laptop that aims to compete with Apple’s MacBook Neo. While shipping with Microsoft Windows 11, it should be Linux-friendly and we’ll soon be putting it to the test at Phoronix… ⌘ Read more
Commerce Commission report criticised for flawed rankings
Imagine that a public health authority publishes a report on the nation’s diet. After 22 years of data and a 100-page methodology, it announces the four least nutritious food groups. They are: beverages, snacks, prepared meals and condiments.
The categories tell you nothing, because beverages include both water and vodka, and snacks include both carrot sticks and deep-fried Mars bars. The four least nutritious … ⌘ Read more
Government puts $2.5m towards billion-dollar underground asset striking problem
The Government is putting $2.5 million towards a possibly $1.45 billion problem: the accidental damage of underground cables and pipes.
Infrastructure Minister Chris Bishop announced on Thursday that work on a national underground asset … ⌘ Read more
OpenBSD 7.9 released
The OpenBSD 7.9 release is
out, right on schedule. There is the usual long list of new features,
including improved architecture support, CPU scheduling on heterogeneous
systems, the ability to hibernate a suspended system after a configurable
delay, socket splicing, a
__pledge_open()
system call giving special access to the C library, and much more. See the
announcement and [the full\
changelog]( … ⌘ Read more
VKD3D 2.0 Released For Wine’s Direct3D 12 Implementation Atop Vulkan
Wine developers have announced the release of VKD3D 2.0, the newest feature release for this Direct3D 12 API implementation built atop the Vulkan API. VKD3D is what’s used by upstream Wine for D3D12 compared to Valve’s downstream VKD3D-Proton within Steam Play (Proton)… ⌘ Read more
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 21, 2026
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Front: OpenSUSE site age restrictions; Lots of LSFMM+BPF coverage; The tenth OpenPGP email summit.
Briefs: Firefox 151.0; pgBackRest funding; RIP Peter G. Neumann; Quotes; …
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more. ⌘ Read more
My Food Bag lifts profit and revenue as board weighs possible sale
Listed meal-kit company My Food Bag has reported revenue growth of 6.2% for the second half of the 2026 financial year.
In an NZX announcement on Thursday, My Food Bag (MFB) announced a net profit after tax of $6.7 million, up 5.3% year on year. ⌘ Read more
GitHub’s Internal Repos Breached Via Employee’s Use of Malicious VS Code Extension
Longtime Slashdot reader Himmy32 writes: GitHub has announced on X that their internal repositories have been breached through a compromised VS Code Extension on an employee’s workstation. Bleeping Computer reported that the attack is linked to TeamPCP who have been in the news for a recent campaign affecting Checkm … ⌘ Read more
Software startup Factor bursts out of Taiawa tech hub into the big time
Wellington technology hub Taiawa is celebrating the first exit of one of its in-house startup companies in a $24 million deal announced this week.
The day before BusinessDesk visited Taiawa, NZ company Gentrack revealed it was acquiring Taiawa’s resident startup Factor for $ … ⌘ Read more
Google’s AI Studio Now Lets Anyone Build Android Apps In Minutes
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The AI coding boom is now coming directly for Android app development. On Tuesday at Google IO 2026, the company announced new native Android app creation capabilities in its web-based Google AI Studio, shrinking a process that takes weeks of setup and coding down to minutes. The company also sa … ⌘ Read more
RHEL 10.2 Released With New AI Command Line Assistance
Red Hat today announced the releases of both Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.2 as well as RHEL 9.8… ⌘ Read more
Siren Gold’s Golden Bay mining application is declined
Siren Gold’s application to mine for gold in Golden Bay has been rejected, it announced on May 20.
The application was not on the fast-track approvals process and was declined by New Zealand Petroleum and Minerals (NZPaM), a division of the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment (MBIE) ⌘ Read more
Duncan McFarlane named new Icehouse chair
Icehouse has announced the appointment of Duncan McFarlane as its new chair, succeeding David Downs.
McFarlane, the founder of Indevin Group, New Zealand’s largest wine producer and exporter, will assume his new role on June 1. ⌘ Read more
NZTE’s Peter Chrisp named new DOC conservation director general
Peter Chrisp has been appointed as the new director general of conservation and chief executive of the Department of Conservation (DOC).
The announcement was made by deputy public service commissioner Heather Baggott. ⌘ Read more
Everything Announced at Google I/O 2026: Gemini, Search, Smart Glasses
Google is sprucing up its Gemini models, revamping search, and enabling AI agents in everything. There are also some spiffy new smart glasses coming this fall. ⌘ Read more
StanChart To Cut Over 7,000 Jobs, Boost AI To Replace ‘Lower-Value Human Capital’
The London-headquartered lender Standard Chartered announced plans to cut more than 7,000 jobs by 2030, with CEO Bill Winters saying the bank will replace some “lower-value human capital” through automation and AI while offering retraining to affected workers. “It’s not cost-cutting. It’s replacing in some cases lower-val … ⌘ Read more
Business of Government: Public service Budget blues, rethinking the OIA and more
You don’t need a weatherman
Nicola Willis’s announcement of “fundamental” public service reform can be read through several lenses. ⌘ Read more
AMD Announces The EPYC 8005 Series SKUs From 8 To 84 Cores
Back in late February AMD announced the EPYC 8005 “Sorano” series to succeed EPYC 8004 Siena. At the time details were light while today AMD published the SKU table and more details on the EPYC 8005 series… ⌘ Read more
OpenBSD 7.9 Released With Support For Up To 255 x86_64 CPU Cores, WiFi 6
Theo de Raadt announced the release today of OpenBSD 7.9 as the latest feature update to this unique BSD platform… ⌘ Read more
Mageia 10 RC1 Released With Newer Packages
Following the ISOs dropping a few days ago, today the Mageia 10 release candidate was officially announced for those fond of this Linux distribution with its roots tracing back to Mageia and Mandrake Linux… ⌘ Read more
pgBackRest will continue
In April, David Steele, maintainer of the popular pgBackRest backup and restore project for
PostgreSQL, announced that he had archived\
the project and it would no longer be maintained due to lack of
sponsorship. On May 18, he announced
that a number of sponsors have stepped forward to ensure its continued
development:
Over the last few weeks, a coalition of sponso … ⌘ Read more
Google I/O 2026 Live Blog: All the Gemini and Smart Glasses Updates as They Happen
Follow our live coverage of Google’s annual developer keynote, where the company will announce updates to its Gemini suite of AI tools and more details about Android XR smart glasses. ⌘ Read more
Willis targets agency mergers, 8,700 fewer public service jobs
Finance Minister Nicola Willis has announced a “fundamental overhaul of the public service”, targeting 8,700 fewer core public service jobs by July 2029 alongside a major reduction in the number of government agencies.
In a pre-Budget speech to Business North Harbour, Willis said the Government would reduce core public service numbers to no more than 55,000 full-time-equivalent staff by July 2029 … ⌘ Read more
WHO Declares Ebola Outbreak a Global Health Emergency
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The World Health Organization declared on Saturday that the spread of the Ebola virus in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Uganda was a global health emergency. The announcement was made a day after Africa’s leading public health authority reported that an outbreak in a province in the northeast of the … ⌘ Read more
How to Watch Google I/O
Google I/O is back with updates to Search, Android, Gemini, and a fresh peek at upcoming Android XR smart glasses. Here’s how to watch the announcements live and what to expect. ⌘ Read more
Linus Torvalds: AI-Detected Bug Reports Make Kernel Security List ‘Almost Entirely Unmanageable’
Today Linus Torvalds announced another Linux release candidate on the kernel mailing list. But he also highlighted “documentation updates” to address a new problem.
“The continued flood of AI reports has basically made the security list almost entirely unmanageable, with enormous dupl … ⌘ Read more
AFT Pharmaceuticals appoints new CFO
AFT Pharmaceuticals has announced the appointment of Stuart Houliston as its new chief financial officer.
Houliston, who will officially start in the role on June 15, 2026, brings with him financial expertise from the public markets and accounting profession. ⌘ Read more
Gentrack earnings drop on project delays in Utilities business
Gentrack on Monday reported lower first-half earnings due to delays in revenue from new projects and announced the purchase of Prospero Energy, trading as Factor.
Earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortisation, excluding acquisition costs of $0.6 million, was $7.9m in the six months to March 31 compared to $13m in the prior period. ⌘ Read more
Going with the flow: local government amalgamation
Chris Bishop’s announcement of compulsory local government amalgamation must have reverberated through the rubber chicken circuit supply chain like a sledgehammer.
Fewer local councils mean fewer council dinners, which means less work for caterers. ⌘ Read more
Seven new stable kernels with patches for CVE-2026-46333
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the 7.0.8, 6.18.31, 6.12.89, 6.6.139, 6.1.173, 5.15.207, and 5.10.256 stable kernels. These kernels
contain a patch for [CVE-2026-46333](https://lwn.net/ml/all/2026051554-CVE-2026-46333-662a … ⌘ Read more
Coreboot + AMD openSIL Powered Firmware Published For The Gigabyte MZ33-AR1
3mdeb announced on Thursday their release of Dasharo v0.9 for the Gigabyte MZ33-AR1 EPYC server motherboard. This is the first time seeing AMD openSIL and Coreboot available for a readily-available AMD EPYC server motherboard!.. ⌘ Read more
Anthropic Forms $200 Million Partnership With the Gates Foundation
Anthropic announced today that it is partnering with the Gates Foundation to “commit $200 million in grant funding, Claude usage credits, and technical support for programs in global health, life sciences, education, and economic mobility over the next four years.”
“This commitment is central to Anthropic’s efforts to extend the benefits of A … ⌘ Read more
Cisco To Cut Almost 4,000 Jobs In AI-Driven Restructuring
Cisco’s stock soared 17% after the company announced it will cut nearly 4,000 jobs as it shifts investment and staffing toward higher-growth AI opportunities. CNBC reports: CEO Chuck Robbins wrote in a blog post on Wednesday that the latest round of job cuts will begin on May 14. Cisco is the latest company to announce head count reductions tied to AI. “The companies … ⌘ Read more