‘IPv6 Just Turned 30 and Still Hasn’t Taken Over the World, But Don’t Call It a Failure’
Three decades after RFC 1883 promised to future-proof the internet by expanding the available pool of IP addresses from around 4.3 billion to over 340 undecillion, IPv6 has yet to achieve the dominance its creators envisioned. Data from Google, APNIC and Cloudflare analyzed by The Register shows less tha … ⌘ Read more
DHS Says REAL ID, Which DHS Certifies, Is Too Unreliable To Confirm US Citizenship
An anonymous reader shares a report: Only the government could spend 20 years creating a national ID that no one wanted and that apparently doesn’t even work as a national ID. But that’s what the federal government has accomplished with the REAL ID, which the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) now considers un … ⌘ Read more
Valve’s Linux Efforts, Kernel Improvements & KDE Plasma Wayland Advancements Topped 2025
After looking yesterday at the most viewed Linux hardware reviews and benchmarks of 2025, today’s look is at the most popular open-source/Linux news of the past year. There were 3,286 original news articles on Phoronix during 2025 written by your’s truly, here’s a look back at what excited readers the most over these past twelve months… ⌘ Read more
Public Domain Day 2026 Brings Betty Boop, Nancy Drew and ‘I Got Rhythm’ Into the Commons
As the calendar flips to January 1, 2026, thousands of copyrighted works from 1930 are entering the US public domain alongside sound recordings from 1925, making them free to copy, share, remix and build upon without permission or licensing fees. The literary haul includes William Faulkner’s As I Lay D … ⌘ Read more
European Space Agency Acknowledges Another Breach as Criminals Claim 200 GB Data Haul
The European Space Agency has acknowledged yet another security incident after a cybercriminal posted an offer on BreachForums the day after Christmas claiming to have stolen over 20GB of data including source code, confidential documents, API tokens and credentials.
The attacker claims they gained access … ⌘ Read more
ReactOS Starts 2026 With Another “Major Step” Toward Windows NT6 Compatibility
The ReactOS free software project is turning 30 this year and its “open-source Windows” OS ambitions remain. They are starting out this year with another “major step” towards Windows NT 6.0 compatibility… ⌘ Read more
The Man Taking Over the Large Hadron Collider
Mark Thomson, a professor of experimental particle physics at the University of Cambridge, takes over as CERN’s director general this week, and one of his first major decisions during his five-year tenure will be shutting down the Large Hadron Collider for an extended upgrade. The shutdown starts in June to make way for the high-luminosity LHC – a major overhaul involving powerfu … ⌘ Read more
IceWM 4.0 Improves Alt-Tab Window Switcher, Alpha Blending + 32-bit RGBA Default
For fans of the IceWM X11 window manager, the project kicked off 2026 by releasing IceWM 4.0… ⌘ Read more
You Can’t Trust Your Eyes To Tell You What’s Real Anymore, Says Instagram Head
Instagram head Adam Mosseri closed out 2025 by acknowledging what many have long suspected: the era of trusting photographs as accurate records of reality is over, and the platform he runs will need to fundamentally adapt to an age of “infinite synthetic content.”
In a slideshow posted to Instagram, Mosseri wrote that fo … ⌘ Read more
Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Franz Kafka…
Public Domain Day 2026 in Literature:
(download in epub here, and) Read 20 of the “best books” entering the public domain in 2026!
Waymos Are Now Coming For Your Coveted San Francisco Parking Spots
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the San Francisco Chronicle: A long stretch of curb in San Francisco’s Mission District might contain a whole menagerie of parked vehicles: hatchbacks, SUVs, dusty pick-ups, chic Teslas. And recently, Waymo robotaxis. That’s what Kyle Grochmal saw walking through the northeast Mission District on Monda … ⌘ Read more
SDL 3.4 Released With Many New APIs, Better Emscripten & Native PNG Support
Kicking off the new year for Linux gaming and cross-platform gaming at large is the release of the SDL 3.4 library. SDL is part of the Steam runtime and continues to be widely-used for abstracting software/hardware for creating more portable games and other applications… ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.19 Lands Fix For Dead WiFi With MediaTek MT792x Wireless
Merged to Linux Git on New Year’s Eve was a fix in the form of a code revert for broken MediaTek WiFi on the in-development Linux 6.19 kernel… ⌘ Read more
More Improvements To Old AMD GPU Support On Linux Are Planned For 2026
With Linux 6.19 aging AMD GCN 1.0 and GCN 1.1 GPUs switched the default kernel driver used to provide for much better performance, RADV Vulkan support out-of-the-box, and other improvements compared to using the legacy Radeon DRM kernel driver. For 2026, Timur Kristóf of Valve’s Linux graphics team has more improvements still planned to enhance these older AMD graphics cards on Linux… ⌘ Read more
UK Company Sends Factory With 1,000C Furnace Into Space
A UK-based company has successfully powered up a microwave-sized space factory in orbit, proving it can run a 1,000C furnace to manufacture ultra-pure semiconductor materials in microgravity. “The work that we’re doing now is allowing us to create semiconductors up to 4,000 times purer in space than we can currently make here today,” says Josh Western, CEO of Space … ⌘ Read more
NASA’s Largest Library Is Closing Amid Staff and Lab Cuts
NASA is closing its largest research library at the Goddard Space Flight Center amid budget cuts and campus consolidation, putting tens of thousands of largely non-digitized historical and scientific documents at risk of being warehoused or discarded. The New York Times reports: Jacob Richmond, a NASA spokesman, said the agency would review the library holdings … ⌘ Read more
Heart Association Revives Theory That Light Drinking May Be Good For You
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: For a while, it seemed the notion that light drinking was good for the heart had gone by the wayside, debunked by new studies and overshadowed by warnings that alcohol causes cancer. Now the American Heart Association has revived the idea in a scientific review that i … ⌘ Read more
AMD Ryzen AI Max, Intel Graphics & Other Linux Benchmarks That Commanded 2025
This looks to be a wrap on 2025, Happy New Year to all the Phoronix readers over the past 21+ years. This year on Phoronix there were 226 original Linux hardware reviews and featured benchmark articles written by your’s truly. Plus another 3,286 original open-source/Linux software and hardware news articles this calendar year. Here were the big topics of 2025 for the featured Linux hardware reviews and benchmark articles… ⌘ Read more
Warren Buffett Retires As Berkshire Hathaway CEO After 55 Years
Warren Buffett is retiring as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at age 95, ending a 55-year run that reshaped how generations of Americans think about investing. “The 95-year-old, often referred to as the ‘Oracle of Omaha’ and the ‘billionaire next door,’ will relinquish the title after a career that saw him turn a failing textile firm into one of the most … ⌘ Read more
Ncurses 6.6 Released With Improved Windows Terminal Support, Other Enhancements
Ncurses 6.6 was released today prior to closing out 2025. This programming library update for creating terminal-based text user interfaces (TUIs) features a variety of great improvements for ending out the year… ⌘ Read more
Stewart Cheifet, Computer Chronicles Host, Dies At 87
Pibroch(CiH) writes: According to the obituary linked, Stewart Cheifet of Computer Chronicles fame has died. The obituary states he passed Dec 28, 2025. Cheifet and Digital Research founder Gary Kildall hosted the public television show The Computer Chronicles starting in 1984, and Stewart continued to host the show well into the 1990s. He was well-known for his aff … ⌘ Read more
Tech Startups Are Handing Out Free Nicotine Pouches to Boost Productivity
The Wall Street Journal reports that a growing number of tech startups are stocking offices with free nicotine pouches as founders and employees chase sharper focus and stamina in hyper-competitive AI-era work environments. The Wall Street Journal reports: Earlier this year, two nicotine startups – Lucy Nicotine and Sesh – mad … ⌘ Read more
DarkSpectre Hackers Spread Malware To 8.8 Million Chrome, Edge, and Firefox Users
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cyber Press: A newly uncovered Chinese threat group, DarkSpectre, has been linked to one of the most widespread browser-extension malware operations to date, compromising more than 8.8 million users of Chrome, Edge, Firefox, and Opera over the past seven years. According to res … ⌘ Read more
OpenAI Is Paying Employees More Than Any Major Tech Startup in History
OpenAI is paying employees more than any major tech startup in history, with average stock-based compensation hitting roughly $1.5 million per worker in 2025. “That is more than seven times higher than the stock-based pay Google disclosed in 2003, before it filed for an initial public offering in 2004,” reports the Wall Street Journal. “The … ⌘ Read more
Trump Administration Removes Three Spyware-Linked Execs From Sanctions List
Reuters reports that the United States Department of the Treasury under the Donald Trump administration has lifted sanctions on three executives linked to the spyware firm Intellexa. Reuters reports: The move partially reverses the imposition of sanctions last year by then-President Joe Biden’s administration on seven people … ⌘ Read more
France Targets Australia-Style Social Media Ban For Children Next Year
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: France intends to follow Australia and ban social media platforms for children from the start of the 2026 academic year. A draft bill preventing under-15s from using social media will be submitted for legal checks and is expected to be debated in parliament early in the new year. … ⌘ Read more
Asahi Linux Has Experimental Code For DisplayPort, Apple M3/M4/M5 Bring-Up Still Ongoing
Prominent Asahi Linux developer Sven Peter spoke at this week’s 39th Chaos Communication Congress “39C3” in Hamburg, Germany. He provided an update around the still-in-the-works Apple M3 / M4 / M5 SoC and device support as well as other outstanding features like getting DisplayPort working on Apple Macs under Linux… ⌘ Read more
NJ’s Answer To Flooding: It Has Bought Out and Demolished 1,200 Properties
New Jersey has found its answer to the relentless flooding that has plagued the state’s coastal and inland communities for decades: buy the homes, demolish them and turn the land back into open space permanently. The state’s Blue Acres program has acquired some 1,200 properties since 1995, spending more than $234 million in feder … ⌘ Read more
NASA Craft To Face Heat-Shield Test on Its First Astronaut Flight Next Year
An anonymous reader shares a report: Getting to space is hard. In many ways, getting back is even harder. NASA soon aims to pull off the kind of re-entry it last conducted more than 50 years ago: safely returning astronauts to Earth after they fly to the moon and back. The mission is a big moment for NASA, which will put … ⌘ Read more
JPMorgan Says Javice Firms Billed Millions Just for ‘Attendance’
JPMorgan Chase is now fighting to avoid paying $10.2 million in disputed legal charges racked up by Charlie Javice, the convicted founder of student-finance startup Frank, after court filings revealed her defense team billed more than $5 million simply for attending her fraud trial – including on days when court wasn’t even in session.
A previously se … ⌘ Read more
Net Neutrality Was Back, Until It Wasn’t
The fight over net neutrality saw another turbulent year in 2025, as federal protections that seemed poised for a comeback in 2024 were first struck down by a court and then preemptively removed by the Trump administration’s FCC without a chance for public comment.
The removal, The Verge summarizes in a report, was part of Chairman Brendan Carr’s “Delete, Delete, Delete” initiative targeting wh … ⌘ Read more
Poor Sleep Quality Accelerates Brain Aging
A large-scale study tracking more than 27,500 middle-aged and elderly people over roughly nine years has found that poor sleep quality is associated with accelerated brain aging, and chronic inflammation appears to be one of the key mechanisms driving this effect.
Researchers at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute assessed participants’ sleep across five dimensions – chronotype, duration, i … ⌘ Read more
Slashdot Asks: Your Favorite 2025 Movies, TV Shows and Books?
Another year wraps up, and with it comes the annual ritual of taking stock. What were the movies, TV shows and books from this year that stood out to you? Not necessarily the ones that dominated conversation or topped charts, but the ones you found yourself recommending to friends, or returning to for a second watch or read.
Share your picks and, if you’r … ⌘ Read more
Can Colossal’s Genetically Engineered Animals Ever Be the Real Thing?
Colossal Biosciences, the Texas-based startup now valued at more than $10 billion that has attracted investments from Paris Hilton, Peter Jackson and Tom Brady, claimed earlier this year to have resurrected the dire wolf – an animal that disappeared at the end of the last ice age – but a group of leading canid experts concluded the c … ⌘ Read more
Intel Meteor Lake On Linux Two Years Post-Launch: 93% The Original Performance
As part of the various end-of-year annual benchmarking comparisons and the like on Phoronix, today is a look at how the Intel Core Ultra 7 155H “Meteor Lake” performance has evolved under Ubuntu Linux in the two years since launching. Plus with next-gen Intel Panther Lake laptops expected to be showcased next week at CES, it’s a good time for revisiting the Meteor Lake performance to see the difference two years have made for Intel Met … ⌘ Read more
California To Require All School Districts To Restrict Student Smartphone Use by 2026
Starting in July 2026, every public school district in California will be required to have policies on the books that restrict or prohibit students from using smartphones during the school day, thanks to Assembly Bill 3216 that Governor Gavin Newsom signed into law back in 2024.
The legislation also mand … ⌘ Read more
Finland Seizes Ship Suspected of Severing Undersea Cable To Estonia
Finnish authorities on Wednesday seized a vessel suspected of severing an undersea telecommunications cable that connects Helsinki to Tallinn by dragging its anchor across the Gulf of Finland, the latest in a string of infrastructure incidents that have put Baltic Sea nations on edge since Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.
Police are inves … ⌘ Read more
China Demands Netherlands ‘Correct Mistakes’ Over Seized Chipmaker as Auto Supply Crunch Deepens
China’s Commerce Ministry on Wednesday demanded that the Netherlands “immediately correct its mistakes” over chipmaker Nexperia, escalating a standoff that has disrupted global semiconductor supply chains and triggered warnings from automakers about component shortages. The Dutch government … ⌘ Read more
US Measles Cases Surpass 2,000, Highest in 30 Years: CDC
The U.S. has surpassed 2,000 measles cases for the first time in more than 30 years, according to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. From a report: As of Dec. 23, a total of 2,012 cases have been reported in the U.S. Of those cases, 24 were reported among international visitors to the U.S.
[
]( … ⌘ Read moreArch Linux Installer Adds CUPS, rEFInd Boot, IWD, COSMIC & Power Management Options
Ahead of the January 2026 ISO refresh for Arch Linux, Archinstall 3.0.15 released today as the newest update to this convenient text-based OS installer… ⌘ Read more
NYC Inauguration Bans Raspberry Pi, Flipper Zero Devices
Longtime Slashdot reader ptorrone writes: The January 1, 2026, NYC mayoral inauguration prohibits attendees from bringing specific brand-name devices, explicitly banning Raspberry Pi single-board computers and the Flipper Zero, listed alongside weapons, explosives, and drones. Rather than restricting behaviors or capabilities like signal interference or unauth … ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.19 Closing Out 2025 With Several Laptop Additions
A New Year’s Eve pull request is ready with several Intel/AMD laptop improvements for the ongoing Linux 6.19 kernel cycle. An x86 platform drivers pull request sent to Linus Torvalds today brings several notable driver enhancements with expanding the range of supported laptops… ⌘ Read more
GCC & The GNU Toolchain’s Exciting 2025 With New Languages, More Optimizations
The GCC compiler and the GNU toolchain ecosystem at large had a great year. From new language front-ends for the likes of Algol 68 and COBOL to maturing support for GCC Rust, new performance optimizations from GCC to Glibc, initial AMD Zen 6 “znver6” support merged for GCC 16, and much more. It’s pretty safe to say GCC and the broader GNU ecosystem enjoyed a very successful 2025… ⌘ Read more
Open-Source Crown Game Engine v0.60 Released
While the Godot Engine receives a lot of attention as a prominent open-source game engine, it’s far from the only one in this space. Another open-source game engine capping out 2025 with a new release is the Crown Engine… ⌘ Read more
OpenCV 4.13 Brings More AVX-512 Usage, CUDA 13 Support, Many Other New Features
OpenCV 4.13 is out this New Year’s Eve in providing the latest open-source computer vision (CV) capabilities. OpenCV 4.13 brings a wide variety of enhancements to this widely-used computer vision library… ⌘ Read more
Denmark’s Main Postal Carrier Ends Letter Delivery
PostNord is ending letter delivery in Denmark after a 90%+ collapse in mail volume. It marks the first known case of a national postal carrier abandoning letters entirely – a symbolic milestone of a fully digitized society that’s sparking nostalgia even among people who stopped sending mail years ago. The New York Times reports: Denmark has had a postal service for more than … ⌘ Read more
Israel Deploys World’s First Drone Defense Laser
Israel has operationally deployed Iron Beam, a 100,000-watt laser air-defense system capable of shooting down drones, rockets, and mortars at negligible per-shot cost. According to Tom’s Hardware, it marks the first real-world deployment of a high-energy laser as part of a modern, multi-layered missile defense network. From the report: The Iron Beam is a short-range line-of-sigh … ⌘ Read more
Anyone Else Here
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Cheap Solar Is Transforming Lives and Economies Across Africa
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: South Africans … have found a remedy for power cuts that have plagued people in the developing world for years. Thanks to swiftly falling prices of Chinese made solar panels and batteries, they now draw their power from the sun. These aren’t the tiny, old-school solar lanterns that once … ⌘ Read more
‘Foreign Tech Workers Are Avoiding Travel To the US’
In an opinion piece for Computerworld, columnist Steven Vaughan-Nichols argues that restrictive visa policies and a hostile border climate under the Trump administration are driving foreign tech workers, researchers, and conference speakers away from the U.S. The result, he says, is a gradual shift of talent, events, and long-term innovation toward more welcoming regions … ⌘ Read more