Google Sues Alleged Chinese Scam Group Behind Massive US Text Message Phishing Ring
Google is suing a Chinese-speaking cybercriminal group it says is responsible for a massive wave of scam text messages sent to Americans this year, according to a legal complaint filed Tuesday. From a report: The group, known as Darcula, sells software that allows users to send phishing text messages en masse … ⌘ Read more
Intel Xeon 6980P vs. AMD EPYC 9755 128-Core Showdown With The Latest Linux Software For EOY2025
Since receiving the Gigabyte R284-A92-AAL1 a while back as a Xeon 6900 series 2U server platform to replace the failed Intel AvenueCity reference server, I have been getting caught-up in fresh Xeon 6980P Granite Rapids benchmarks with the latest software updates over the past year. I’ve provided fresh looks at the DDR5-6400 vs. MRDIMM-8800 performance, the AMX benefits for AI, SNC3 vs. HEX mode, Latency Optimized Mo … ⌘ Read more
Meta Is Considering Charging Business Pages To Post Links
Meta is informing some users that they will soon be restricted in how many link posts they can share each month, unless they pay for its Meta Verified subscription service. As per the notification message: “Starting December 16, certain Facebook profiles without Meta Verified, including yours, will be limited to sharing links in 2 organic posts per month. Subs … ⌘ Read more
Warner Bros Discovery Board Rejects Rival Bid From Paramount
Warner Bros Discovery’s board spurned Paramount Skydance’s $108.4 billion hostile takeover bid on Wednesday, calling the offer “illusory” as it accused the studio giant of misleading shareholders about its financing. From a report: Paramount has been in a race with Netflix to win control of Warner Bros, and with it, its prized film and televisio … ⌘ Read more
Asahi Linux Gets Microphone Working For M2 Pro/Max, Eyes Installer Improvements
The Asahi Linux project is out with their latest status report to highlight upstream improvements made for the newly-minted Linux 6.18 kernel as well as some of their efforts going on downstream within Asahi Linux itself… ⌘ Read more
OpenAI in Talks With Amazon About Investment That Could Exceed $10 Billion
OpenAI is in discussions with Amazon about a potential investment and an agreement to use its AI chips, CNBC confirmed on Tuesday. From the report: The details are fluid and still subject to change but the investment could exceed $10 billion, according to a person familiar with the matter who asked not to be named because the talks a … ⌘ Read more
Uber and DoorDash Try To Halt NYC Law That Encourages Tipping
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Two of the largest food-delivery app companies have made a last-ditch effort to overturn tipping laws in New York City that go into effect in January just as its next mayor, who has been highly critical of the companies and the app industry, takes office. Tips to delivery workers have plummet … ⌘ Read more
Debusine Repositories Enter Beta: Ubuntu PPA-Like User Archives For Debian Linux
Colin Watson announced that Debusine repositories are now available in beta form, which can be used to maintain APT-compatible add-on package repositories for Debian Linux. This comes down to being similar in nature to Personal Package Archives (PPAs) that are popular with Ubuntu Linux… ⌘ Read more
AMD Zen 6 Compiler Support Merged For GCC 16
Ahead of AMD releasing their Zen 6 EPYC and Ryzen processors in 2026, AMD today saw their Zen 6 “znver6” support land into the GCC 16 open-source compiler… ⌘ Read more
Intel Compute Runtime 25.48.36300.8 Brings More Performance Optimizations & Xe3 Fixes
Intel this week released their last planned feature update to their open-source Compute Runtime for 2025. The Intel Compute Runtime 25.48.36300.8 delivers the latest OpenCL and Level Zero performance optimizations, Xe3 workarounds, and other fixes for those on Intel integrated and discrete graphics hardware… ⌘ Read more
AMD Wants Your Logs To Help Optimize PyTorch & ComfyUI For Strix Halo, Radeon GPUs
If you are not satisfied with the current performance for PyTorch or ComfyUI / Stable Diffusion on your Strix Halo APU system or with other consumer RDNA3/RDNA4 Radeon consumer GPUs, AMD engineers are interested in your logs to help better optimize the performance going forward… ⌘ Read more
Senators Count the Shady Ways Data Centers Pass Energy Costs On To Americans
U.S. senators are probing whether Big Tech data centers are driving up local electricity bills by socializing grid upgrade costs onto residents. Some of the tactics they’re using include NDAs, shell companies, and lobbying. Ars Technica reports: In letters (PDF) to seven AI firms, Senators Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.), Ch … ⌘ Read more
The Arctic Is in Dire Straits, 20 Years of Reporting Show
A new Arctic Report Card recap shows how the Arctic has transformed in just 20 years, warming about twice as fast as the global average and losing most of its oldest sea ice. It’s also triggering cascading impacts from “Atlantification” to permafrost-driven “rusting rivers” and more destructive storms. Scientific American reports: The first Arctic Report Card w … ⌘ Read more
Breach At South Korea’s Equivalent of Amazon Exposed Data of Almost Every Adult
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: The alleged perpetrator had improper access to virtually every South Korean adult’s personal information: names, phone numbers and even the keycode to enter residential buildings. It was one of the biggest data breaches of recent years and it has sent the … ⌘ Read more
EU Moves To Ease 2035 Ban On Internal Combustion Cars
The EU is moving to soften its planned 2035 ban on internal combustion cars by allowing a small share of low-emission engines. “The less stringent limit would leave room for automakers to continue selling some plug-in hybrids, which have both electric and internal combustion engines and can use the combustion engine to recharge the battery without the need to find a ch … ⌘ Read more
Opus 1.6 Audio Codec Adds New Machine Learning Functionality
Version 1.6 of libopus as the library for the open-source Opus audio codec is now available. Opus 1.6 brings new machine learning “ML” based features in building atop the machine learning features initially added to Opus 1.5… ⌘ Read more
Meta Tolerates Rampant Ad Fraud From China To Safeguard Billions In Revenue
A Reuters investigation found that Meta knowingly tolerated large volumes of scam and illegal ads from China worth billions in revenue. Reuters reports: Though China’s authoritarian government bans use of Meta social media by its citizens, Beijing lets Chinese companies advertise to foreign consumers on the globe-spanning pl … ⌘ Read more
Dual-PCB Linux Computer With 843 Components Designed By AI Boots On First Attempt
Quilter says its AI designed a complex Linux single-board computer in just one week, booting Debian on first power-up. “Holy crap, it’s working,” exclaimed one of the engineers. Tom’s Hardware reports: LA-based startup Quilter has outlined Project Speedrun, which marks a milestone in computer design by AI. The … ⌘ Read more
Linux Exposing Support For Lenovo ThinkPads Being Able To Detect Hardware Damage
Newer Lenovo ThinkPads are adding the ability to detect and report varying degrees of hardware damage. The Lenovo ThinkPad ACPI driver for Linux is being adapted for being able to communicate said hardware damage to user-space Linux software… ⌘ Read more
Mark Carney Criticised For Using British Spellings In Canadian Documents
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Mark Carney says that amid a fundamental shift to the nature of globalization, his government will catalyze the growth in both the public and private sector. But Canadian linguists say that’s a problem. Language experts have called out the Canadian prime minister’s growing “ut … ⌘ Read more
Intel Quietly Discontinues Its Open-Source User-Space Gaudi Driver Code
Intel has quietly stopped maintaining its open-source user-space driver stack for Gaudi accelerators. Phoronix reports: It turns out earlier this year Intel archived the SynapseAI Core open-source code and is no longer maintained by Intel. The open-source Synapse AI Core GitHub repository was archived in February and README updated … ⌘ Read more
Reporter Suggests Half-Life 3 Will Be a Steam Machine Launch Title
A veteran games journalist claims Half-Life 3 is real and still planned as a Spring 2026 launch title tied to Valve’s next Steam Machine push. Ars Technica reports: On the contrary, veteran journalist Mike Straw insisted on a recent Insider Gaming podcast that “everybody I’ve talked to are still adamant [Half-Life 3] is a game that will be … ⌘ Read more
Volkswagen To End Production At German Plant, a First In Company History
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: The last vehicle will roll off the assembly line at Volkswagen’s plant in Dresden, Germany, on Tuesday, marking the first time in the automaker’s 88-year history that it has closed a plant in its home country. Volkswagen warned of potential production cuts last year, as i … ⌘ Read more
Utah Leaders Hinder Efforts To Develop Solar Energy Supply
Utah Gov. Spencer Cox signed two bills this year that ended solar development tax credits and imposed a new tax on solar generation despite solar power accounting for two-thirds of the new projects waiting to connect to the state’s power grid. The legislation passed by the Republican-controlled Legislature has already had an impact.
Since May, when the … ⌘ Read more
MI6 Chief: We’ll Be as Fluent in Python As We Are in Russian
The new chief of Britain’s Secret Intelligence Service told officers this week that they must become as fluent in programming languages like Python as they are in foreign languages like Russian as the spy agency adapts to what she described as a space between peace and war. Blaise Metreweli, MI6’s first female chief and previously the service’s direc … ⌘ Read more
Racks of AI Chips Are Too Damn Heavy
The weight of AI server racks has reached a point where legacy data centers cannot accommodate them even with significant retrofitting efforts, The Verge reports. Chris Brown, chief technical officer at Uptime Institute, said most retrofitting attempts would require “bulldozing the building and starting over from scratch.”
AI racks are projected to reach 5,000 pounds compared to the 400 to 600 pounds … ⌘ Read more
Intel’s Cache Aware Scheduling Presentation At LPC 2025
One of the exciting Intel innovations to the Linux kernel this year has been around the Cache Aware Scheduling for helping to deliver better performance on modern CPUs with multiple last level caches. The kernel patches have yet to be upstreamed but testing has shown to be quite promising for grouping tasks sharing data to the same LLC domain to help reduce cache misses and cache bouncing. Those wishing to learn more about Cache Aware Scheduling, there wa … ⌘ Read more
US Threatens Penalties Against European Tech Firms Amid Regulatory Fight
U.S. officials excoriated the European Union for discriminating against American technology companies and threatened to penalize European tech companies in return, in a social media post on Tuesday. From a report: The pronouncement appeared to signal a rockier period for U.S.-E.U. trade relations, as the two governments work to fi … ⌘ Read more
Texas Sues TV Makers For Taking Screenshots of What People Watch
mprindle writes: The Texas Attorney General sued five major television manufacturers, accusing them of illegally collecting their users’ data by secretly recording what they watch using Automated Content Recognition (ACR) technology.
The lawsuits target Sony, Samsung, LG, and China-based companies Hisense and TCL Technology Group Corporation. Att … ⌘ Read more
McKinsey Plots Thousands of Job Cuts in Slowdown for Consulting Industry
McKinsey, the consulting giant that has spent a century advising companies on how to cut costs and restructure operations, is now turning that advice inward as it plans to eliminate thousands of jobs across its non-client-facing departments over the next 18 to 24 months.
The firm’s leadership has discussed a roughly 10% headcount redu … ⌘ Read more
@shinyoukai@neko.laidback.moe I think I never watched it. In any case, enjoy reading your books.
High-Speed Traders Are Feuding Over a Way To Save 3.2 Billionths of a Second
A millisecond used to be a big deal for the world’s quickest traders. A dispute over huge trading profits at one of the world’s largest futures exchanges shows they now think a million times faster [non-paywalled source]. From a report: The controversy is about an arcane technical maneuver in which high-speed traders bombar … ⌘ Read more
Tech Giants Can’t Agree On What To Call Their AI-Powered Glasses
The glasses-shaped face computers that tech companies have been building for years now face an identity crisis, and their makers can’t agree on what to call them. Meta has asked a journalist to refer to its Ray-Ban glasses as “AI glasses” to distinguish them from Google Glass. Google, whose Project Aura is a collaboration with Xreal, calls the pro … ⌘ Read more
The Significant Performance Gains For Radeon RADV Ray-Tracing Performance In 2025
As part of my various year-end comparison benchmarking, I recently ran some tests looking at how the Radeon RX 9000 series RDNA 4 performance has evolved since its debut near the beginning of the year. The Vulkan ray-tracing performance in particular was standing out this year as having evolved quite nicely while for conventional OpenGL and Vulkan performance the performance has been largely stable this year with its great at-launch su … ⌘ Read more
The Entry-Level Hiring Process Is Breaking Down
The traditional signals that employers used to evaluate entry-level job candidates – college GPAs, cover letters, and interview performance – have lost much of their value as grade inflation and widespread AI use render these metrics nearly meaningless, writes The Atlantic.
The recent-graduate unemployment rate now sits slightly higher than the overall workforce’s, a reversal … ⌘ Read more
Mozilla Names New CEO, Firefox To Evolve Into A “Modern AI Browser”
Mozilla Corporation has named its new CEO in replacing interim CEO Laura Chambers… ⌘ Read more
Mozilla’s New CEO Bets Firefox’s Future on AI
Mozilla has named Anthony Enzor-DeMeo as its new chief executive, promoting the executive who has spent the past year leading the Firefox browser team and who now plans to make AI central to the company’s future.
Enzor-DeMeo announced on Tuesday that an “AI Mode” is coming to Firefox next year. The feature will let users choose from multiple AI models rather than being locked into a s … ⌘ Read more
Google’s Real Estate Listings ‘Experiment’ Sends Zillow Shares Down More Than 8%
Google’s data partner HouseCanary has begun displaying home listings directly in search results in select markets, sending Zillow’s shares tumbling more than 8% yesterday as investors weighed whether the search giant might eventually cut into the portal business that Zillow dominates.
The experiment places property de … ⌘ Read more
Red Hat Acquires Another AI Company
Last year Red Hat acquired Neural Magic as part of their AI acquisitions and to bolster the open-source AI ecosystem. Today they announced another AI acquisition… ⌘ Read more
SoundCloud Confirms Breach After Member Data Stolen, VPN Access Disrupted
An anonymous reader quotes a report from BleepingComputer: Audio streaming platform SoundCloud has confirmed that outages and VPN connection issues over the past few days were caused by a security breach in which threat actors stole a database containing user information. The disclosure follows widespread reports over the past four … ⌘ Read more
ZLUDA For CUDA On Non-NVIDIA GPUs Enables AMD ROCm 7 Support
The ZLUDA open-source project that has been through several incarnations but ultimately about getting CUDA software up and running on non-NVIDIA GPUs now supports the AMD ROCm 7 series… ⌘ Read more
Servo 0.0.3 Browser Engine Brings Better Performance, Embedding Improvements
Servo 0.0.3 is out today as the newest update to this Rust-based, open-source web layout engine. Servo 0.0.3 incorporates many enhancements made over the past month from better performance to enhancing its embedding API and other improvements like context menus for more web content… ⌘ Read more
MidnightBSD 4.0 Brings Many Changes To This FreeBSD 13 Derived OS
While FreeBSD 15 stable was officially released earlier this month, MidnightBSD continues plotting its own course atop its FreeBSD 13 base. Out today is MidnightBSD 4.0 as the latest iteration of this desktop-minded BSD operating system… ⌘ Read more
OpenShot 3.4 Video Editor Released: One Of Their Largest Updates Ever
OpenShot 3.4 is now available as the latest feature update to this open-source video editor app. OpenShot 3.4 happens to be “one of our largest updates we’ve ever done” with a variety of improvements in tow… ⌘ Read more
PayPal Applies To Become a Bank As US Loosens Regulatory Reins
PayPal has applied to become a US bank by forming a Utah-chartered industrial loan company, signaling a push to deepen its financial services “as companies rush to capitalize on a friendly regulatory environment under the Trump administration,” reports Reuters. From the report: If approved, the move will help PayPal to strengthen its lending offering … ⌘ Read more
Glaciers To Reach Peak Rate of Extinction In the Alps In Eight Years
A new study warns that glaciers in the European Alps will hit their peak extinction rate within eight years, with global glacier loss accelerating toward thousands per year unless emissions are rapidly cut. “Glaciers in the western US and Canada are forecast to reach their peak year of loss less than a decade later, with more than 800 dis … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Will Finally Kill Obsolete Cipher That Has Wrecked Decades of Havoc
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Microsoft is killing off an obsolete and vulnerable encryption cipher that Windows has supported by default for 26 years following more than a decade of devastating hacks that exploited it and recently faced blistering criticism from a prominent US senator. When the so … ⌘ Read more
Fedora Games Lab Looks To Be Revitalized As Modern Linux Gaming Showcase
One of the lesser known Fedora spins under the “Fedora Labs” initiative is the Fedora Games Lab that showcases some open-source games and can serve as an easy demonstrator for Linux gaming. Looking forward to 2026 with Fedora 44, there is a proposal to revitalize Fedora Games Lab to become a better showcase for the modern potential of Linux gaming… ⌘ Read more
Lidar-Maker Luminar Files For Bankruptcy
Once a star of the self-driving hype cycle, lidar maker Luminar has filed for bankruptcy amid legal turmoil, layoffs, and a cooling autonomous-vehicle market. It plans to sell off its assets before shutting down entirely. The Verge reports: As part of its bankruptcy, Luminar is seeking permission to sell both its lidar and semiconductor businesses, the latter of which it has already agreed to … ⌘ Read more
Google Search Homepage Adds a ‘Plus’ Menu
After introducing an AI Mode shortcut earlier this year, Google has now added a new “plus” menu to its Search homepage, highlighting options for image and file uploads. 9to5Google reports: On google.com, the Search bar now has a plus icon at the far left that replaces the magnifying glass. Clicking lets you “Upload image” or “Upload file.” It very much matches the AI Mode experience. Those t … ⌘ Read more