One-Third of Web Pages are Now Written With AI, Says Pew Research
A Pew Research senior data scientist analyzed 500,000 English-language webpages from the past five years with an AI detection tool to estimate how many were likely written or edited by AI:
Of all the pages in this sample, 10% show significant signs of AI authorship… If we filter old webpages out of our samples and look at only the pages published … ⌘ Read more
Could Mecha Comet’s Linux PC-Phone Hybrid Be the Future of Linux Smartphones?
3,346 backers pledged $1,198,844 on Kickstarter to build the (modular) handheld Linux computer, the Mecha Comet. It’s slightly bigger and heavier than your smartphone, with a 4-inch AMOLED display and loaded up with things like microphones, speakers, a SIM tray, two USB ports and a mini HDMI port. There’s three separate k … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 Improving RAID 5/6 Benchmark-Based Algorithm Selection
Following the main set of memory management “MM” changes submitted for Linux 7.3, Andrew Morton sent in his “non-MM” pull request of the other patches he’s been collecting from various developers for this next Linux kernel release. Standing out there were some improvements to the RAID 5/6 benchmark-based algorithm selection… ⌘ Read more
The Global Race To Make a Practical Quantum Computer Just Took a Big Leap Forward
It’s “radically different from other quantum computers” reports Phys.org. The Helios system uses trapped ions — charged atoms suspended in free space using electromagnetic fields.
But it operates with 98 qubits — making it the largest trapped-ion quantum computer built so far.
Quantinuum, the company behind the … ⌘ Read more
Twitch And Amazon Hit With Lawsuit for Training AI With Streamers’ Content
A class action filed this week accused Amazon’s Twitch gaming service of using video streams to fuel its AI products without licensing or obtaining permission, reports Engadget:
Earlier this month, Twitch Support posted on X that it added an option to opt out of “having your channel content used to train generative AI content m … ⌘ Read more
OpenAI Faces Safety Scrutiny After Introducing ‘ChatGPT For Teens’
This week OpenAI launched a version of ChatGPT exclusively designed for teenagers between the ages of 13 and 17, reports CTV, “saying this version came with stronger protections around content related to mentions of suicide, self-harm and romantic or sexual chats.”
[Tech analyst Carmi Levy says] “What it’s doing is it’s using cues, it’s sort … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 Better Protects Against Buggy EFI Firmware Taking Down The Rest Of User-Space
The EFI updates were merged today for the in-development Linux 7.3 kernel. Most notable with the EFI updates is now enforcing a timeout foe EFI runtime service completions rather than potentially hanging indefinitely… ⌘ Read more
Iran-linked Cyberattackers Shut Down a UK Power Plant for Four Days
“Iran shut down a British power plant for four days in an unprecedented cyber attack,” reports the Telegraph.
More details from the BBC:
The government said that at no point was there a risk to the UK’s energy system, but the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero (DESNZ) has contacted power companies to advise them about the risk of … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 Delivers Graphics Driver Improvements From Old GPUs To Next-Gen Hardware
The Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) subsystem updates have been merged for the ongoing Linux 7.3 merge window. There is a lot of exciting GPU kernel driver improvements this cycle ranging from some notable enhancements to old AMD Radeon graphics hardware up through enabling support for some next-generation AMD graphics IP blocks to over on the Intel side where Nova Lake S graphics are being enabled by default… ⌘ Read more
Slovakia Finds Russian Backdoor In Traffic Speed Cameras
Slovakia acquired speed cameras to modernize its traffic control– but there was a surprise. Tom’s Hardware cites this story from the Risky Bulletin Newsletter:
Unfortunately, the country’s national security service, the NBU, has discovered that the cameras have multiple security issues. Firstly, they have SMS-activated Russian backdoors. Secondly, live camera f … ⌘ Read more
Stanford Economist Now Believes an AI Job Apocalypse Is Unlikely
“There is still no sign of economy-wide job destruction,” says economist Erik Brynjolfsson. Working with researchers at the Stanford Digital Economy Lab, Brynjolfsson has determined an AI “job apocalypse” is unlikely, reports the Washington Post, “even though it will likely impact entry-level jobs.”
And Brynjolfsson “predicts that demand for experi … ⌘ Read more
23 Years After SimCity 4’s Release, ‘Eternal Commuter’ Bug Finally Fixed
“It began life just a year after SimCity 4’s 2003 launch,” writes the blog PCGamesN. “Now, over 20 years later, it’s still going strong with the arrival of Network Addon Mod update 50.”
The SimCity 4 Network Addon Mod, or simply ‘NAM’ among the community, has long been a de facto recommendation to anyone looking to pick up the class … ⌘ Read more
Canonical is Funding a PhD to Automate C to Rust Translation
An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog It’s FOSS:
Canonical has committed funding to a three-year PhD project focused on building a system that can automatically translate large C codebases into Rust. And they are not alone; UK Research and Innovation is matching their funding for the project, which is set to run through the Universi … ⌘ Read more
ReactOS Merges Support For Job Objects As Step To Running Modern Windows Apps
Merged yesterday to the ReactOS code-base is initial support for Job Objects, which is an important milestone in the road to being able to run more modern Windows software under this open-source operating system striving for Windows driver/application compatibility… ⌘ Read more
Supply Chain Issues Delaying US Grid Batteries’ Installation
Falling prices have made grid-scale storage batteries more attractive, reports Bloomberg. But after decades of stagnant investment, America’s grids “are racing to make the upgrades needed to plug them in,” with supplies straining for the necessary equipment.
Demand for batteries has skyrocketed as electricity use across the U.S. swells, driven by dat … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 Makes Preparations Toward Upstreaming FAMFS File-System
The NVDIMM and direct access (DAX) patches have been merged for the Linux 7.3 cycle. Most of the DAX/NVDIMM activity this cycle is on making preparations for the upcoming submission of Micron’s FAMFS file-system… ⌘ Read more
GCC Patch Adjusting AMD Zen 5 Misprediction Cost Nets 12% Win In Benchmark
An AMD compiler engineer posted a patch on Saturday for the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC). The two-line patch adjusts the misprediction cost for Zen 4 and Zen 5 processors, which ends up yielding a 12% improvement in one SPEC CPU benchmark on Zen 5 and a 9% improvement on Zen 4… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 Introduces New AES Encryption APIs - Will Open Up More Performance
Eric Biggers of Google continues carrying out great work on the Linux kernel crypto code. For Linux 7.3 he’s landed work on new library APIs for most of the AES encryption modes used within the kernel. Moving forward this will open the door to more performance optimizations, reducing code duplication, and other enhancements… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 Input Subsystem Updates Merged With Security Fixes, Other Improvements
The big set of input subsystem updates were merged earlier this week for the Linux 7.3 cycle. It’s a random assortment of different improvements as well as bug/security fixes driven in part by the flow of AI/LLM generated discoveries… ⌘ Read more
Debian is Voting on Whether to Allow AI-Assisted Contributions
Debian developers are voting on whether to ban AI-assisted contributions, reports the blog Linuxiac, with a ballot listing eight proposals and a “None of the above” option.
The first one is still the original proposal to ban LLM-assisted contributions by changing the Debian Social Contract. This would stop generative AI from being used for direct D … ⌘ Read more
Defamation Suit Demanding Elsevier Retract Paper Heads Closer To Trial
Retraction Watch reports:
A trial date has been set in a $1 billion defamation case against Elsevier that alleges the company published what plaintiffs say was a manipulated study about an air purifying technology over objections from peer reviewers. The case has already cost Elsevier a $10,000 sanction from a judge.
Global Plasma … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Blames Windows Gaming Issues On RGB Lighting Devices
BleepingComputer reports:
Microsoft says ongoing issues causing games to crash or fail to launch after installing the August 2026 Windows updates may be caused by peripherals with RGB lighting.
As Microsoft explained when it confirmed it’s investigating on Wednesday, this known issue affects games like ARC Raiders, MARVEL Tokon: Fighting Souls, and … ⌘ Read more
Longtime Linux CIFS/SMB3 Maintainer Passes Away
There is a changing of the guard with Linux 7.3 as the maintainer of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) / SMB3 code within the Linux kernel. Longtime maintainer, principal Linux CIFS author, and current Microsoft employee Steve French has stepped down due to health reasons… ⌘ Read more
Battery Fires At Recycling Centres Are Costing the UK £1bn a Year
Wrongly discarded lithium batteries, such as those in vapes, are causing more than 10 fires a week at U.K. recycling centers, according to figures shared with the Guardian:
The Environment Services Association (ESA), the trade body for waste management companies, said its members had reported 1,518 fires in the year to March 2026. At … ⌘ Read more
eCryptfs Sees Fixes For Potential Malicious Intent, Some Dating Back To Its 2006 Debut
The eCryptfs stacked cryptographic filesystem implementation for the Linux kernel to transparently encrypt files saw a number of bug fixes for the Linux 7.3 kernel. A number of these bug fixes deal with potential maliciously-crafted data and vulnerable going back to the 2006 introduction of eCryptfs as this option known for its use on Ubuntu home directory encryption and Chrome OS… ⌘ Read more
How Will AI Change the Field of Mathematics?
“AI went from being very terrible to seemingly genuinely quite good at a professional level in a very short space of time…” says the Verge’s AI reporter.
But AI systems “are still truly, truly terrible at some areas of math… even the days of the week.”
If you look at academic math papers, a lot of the time you won’t see numbers… So they’re still terrible, but they’re now also … ⌘ Read more
Rush Rescue Mission for NASA’s $500M Space Telescope Fails
Remember that rush rescue mission for NASA’s $500M space telescope? It failed, reports CNN, and the LINK satellite won’t be able to boost the telescope’s orbit. NASA says its decades-old Swift telescope will now continue losing altitude, until it reaches Earth’s atmosphere later this year and burns up.
CNN reports:
Just weeks after LINK lifted off on July … ⌘ Read more
Flock is Secretly Building a Powerful New Prompt-Based AI Tool for Police
Slashdot reader fjo3 shared this article from Wired:
[Flock] has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone … ⌘ Read more
Redox OS Switches To EEVDF-Based Scheduler For 2.6x Throughput
The Rust-written, from-scratch Redox OS operating system has switched to using an EEVDF based scheduler design. In doing so they are promoting a 2.6x increase in throughput and a 782x improvement in fairness… ⌘ Read more
Apple HFS / HFS+ File-System Support Continues Seeing Fixes With Linux 7.3
In early 2025 it was being discussed to potentially drop the HFS and HFS+ file-system support with the code having been orphaned over a decade and becoming a maintenance burden. But that dismal outlook quickly turned around with some developers stepping up to maintain the old Apple file-system support. Over a year later, fortunately, it’s turned out to be a success story with more HFS/HFS+ file-system fixes continuing to work their way into the … ⌘ Read more
Low Emission Zone Led To Better Lung Size, Function Among London Children
Long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shared this report from the Guardian:
Children’s lungs grew bigger and stronger after the most polluting vehicles were restricted from entering London, a study has found. Examinations of London schoolchildren before and after the introduction of the city’s ultra-low emission zone found a restora … ⌘ Read more
Moderna-Merck Vaccine Cuts Recurrence And Spread of Melanoma, Raises New Treatment Hope
Reuters reports “a major success in a new field of cancer treatment this week, as Moderna and Merck announced a personalized mRNA cancer vaccine “reduced the risk of recurrence and spread of melanoma in a late-stage trial”. The vaccine was tested with Merck’s widely used immunotherapy drug Keytruda: … ⌘ Read more
Is AI Really to Blame for High Unemployment Among Recent Graduates? What Economists Say
47% of recent graduates say AI has already impacted hiring in their field, according to an April survey from ZipRecruiter.
“But is AI really the problem, or is it more complicated?” asks NPR. “Here’s what economists have to say.”
According to the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, the unemployment rate … ⌘ Read more
Firefox Announces Free VPN and ‘Startpage’ Search Engine Rolling Out to Android, iOS - Plus GeForce NOW Support
Firefox 154 “brings a number of usability improvements,” writes PC World:
The free built-in VPN, introduced with Firefox 149, continues to offer a selection of virtual locations — temporarily extended to 28 countries until the end of August… The free VPN … ⌘ Read more
Longtime Linux CIFS/SMB3 Maintainer Steps Down
There is a changing of the guard with Linux 7.3 as the maintainer of the Common Internet File System (CIFS) / SMB3 code within the Linux kernel. Longtime maintainer, principal Linux CIFS author, and current Microsoft employee Steve French has stepped down due to health reasons… ⌘ Read more
New York Dethrones San Francisco Bay Area As Largest Tech Talent Market
fjo3 shares a report from SFGATE: The San Francisco Bay Area, epicenter of the artificial intelligence boom, is home to a massive amount of tech workers employed by some of the world’s most valuable companies, from Apple to Nvidia. But for the first time, New York has eclipsed the Bay Area as the home of the largest “tech talent work … ⌘ Read more
Specially Crafted NTFS File-System Image Allows Root Access On Linux With NTFS3 Driver
A reported security vulnerability for the NTFS3 driver has gone unaddressed since being reported earlier this summer. The vulnerability allows a pre-crafted NTFS image on a USB flash drive or similar to allow the user to gain root access to the running Linux system… ⌘ Read more
AMD RDNA 4m Firmware Published For Linux Ahead Of Launch
In addition to AMD’s Friday afternoon big code drop of all the UALink enablement patches for the Linux kernel and the AMDGPU driver, there was another big drop from AMD to end out the week… Upstreamed to the linux-firmware.git repository is all the firmware binaries needed by the open-source driver stack for initializing their forthcoming RDNA 4m “GFX 11.7” graphics… ⌘ Read more
Over 1 Million People Have Clicked LinkedIn’s AI Slop Button
According to a post from chief product officer Hari Srinivasan, “over a million people” have clicked on LinkedIn’s new “Seems like AI slop” button, which launched after one analysis found 41% of the platform’s longform posts were fully AI-generated. The Verge reports: In Thursday’s post, Srinivasan said that users are overall “now experiencing 40% less vie … ⌘ Read more
Sched_ext’s Sub-Scheduler Support Now “Feature Complete” With Linux 7.3
The extensible scheduler framework “sched_ext” that allows for custom schedulers as BPF programs has been working on sub-scheduler support in recent kernel cycles. With Linux 7.3, sub-scheduler support is now deemed feature complete… ⌘ Read more
Red Hat’s Tuned 2.28 To Improve Out-Of-The-Box WiFi Power Savings On Fedora
Tuned 2.28 released this Saturday as the newest version of Red Hat’s tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux. Tuned is used notably out-of-the-box on Fedora Linux for monitoring and adaptively tuning systems… ⌘ Read more
Open-Source Etnaviv Driver Now Able To Run YOLOX
The open-source, reverse-engineered Etnaviv driver stack that began for providing accelerated graphics support on Vivante GPU IP and since expanded to handle Vivante NPUs as well is now able to handle YOLOX object detection… ⌘ Read more
Wine 11.16 brings more ARM64 support improvements
The Wine 11.16 development release is officially out now bringing further enhancements to running Windows games / apps on Linux.
Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.3 x86/mm Lands Patches To Greatly Improve Latency-Sensitive Workloads
The highlight of this week’s x86/mm pull request of changes for the Linux 7.3 kernel are fixes that reduce the time that the TLB flushing code has interrupts disabled. This helps significantly with latency-sensitive workloads but Intel engineer Dave Hansen noted in the pull request that “it’s certainly something to keep an eye on” in looking out for any regressions… ⌘ Read more
‘Off the Charts’ El Nino Is Already the Strongest Since Records Began
A rapidly developing El Nino is already reaching record-setting levels for this time of year and is expected to intensify further over the coming months. “The El Nino has blossomed. It is off the charts. Usual measures of El Nino have blown past prior record levels in the period with good data, even though maximum effects are still severa … ⌘ Read more
China Joins Europe In Scrapping Windows For Linux
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: According to a Bloomberg report, attributed to China’s Ministry of State Security, the country has ordered some government agencies to drop Windows 10 China Government Edition for Chinese-made Linux distributions. Why not Windows 11? Because China, like many other non-US governments, no longer trusts American companies with the … ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.8 Lands Some Enticing Performance Optimizations This Week
This Week in Plasma is out with its latest issue to highlight interesting developments in the trek towards Plasma 6.8… ⌘ Read more
OpenZFS 2.4.4 Released With Linux 7.2 Support, Dozens Of Fixes
OpenZFS 2.4.4 is out today as the newest stable point release for this ZFS file-system implementation for Linux and FreeBSD systems… ⌘ Read more
Township Fights Nuclear Weapons Data Center By Passing a Moratorium on Electrical Infrastructure
Ypsilanti Township, Michigan, has imposed a six-month moratorium on “major electric utility infrastructure” in its latest attempt to delay a proposed $1.2 billion University of Michigan-Los Alamos data center that would support nuclear-weapons research. Township leaders, who have … ⌘ Read more
Wine 11.16 Released With VA-API Hardware Decoding, Better ARM64 Support
Wine 11.16 is out today as the newest bi-weekly development release for this software enabling Windows games and applications to run on Linux and other platforms… ⌘ Read more