Three stable kernels for Thursday
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.7, 6.18.30, and 6.12.88 stable kernels. These kernels do
not include a patch for the Fragnesia local-privilege-escalation exploit that came to light on
May 13, but do include many other important fixes throughout the
tree. Users ar … ⌘ Read more
I’m pleased to announce that express-twtkpr (my ExpressJS library for hosting, editing, and posting to a twtxt.txt file) continues to crawl towards a full release with another (pre-alpha) update published to NPM. This update includes a whole new plugin system, and even a (little) more documentation. Check it out, if you dare (and use it at your own risk): https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-twtkpr
And speaking of plugins, here’s where the fun’s at: announcing express-twtkpr-core-plugins, a set of 3 plugins for your TwtKpr install: emojiButton, uploadButton, and postToMastodon. Like express-twtkpr, this set of plugins is still in pre-alpha, and lacks documentation, examples, tests, installation flexibility, or polish (so also use them at your own risk). Other than that, they work great: https://www.npmjs.com/package/express-twtkpr-core-plugins
Stay tuned for more! 🤘
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 14, 2026
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Front: Fedora AI; Forgejo “carrot” disclosure; memory-management maintainership; huge THPs; mshare; 64KB base pages; DAMON; direct map.
Briefs: Dirty Frag; Fragnesia; Mythos and curl; killswitch; Debian reproducible builds; KDE investment; Quotes …
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more. ⌘ Read more
Yet another Dirty Frag type vulnerability: Fragnesia
Sam James has sent an announcement
to the OSS Security mailing list about another
local-privilege-escalation (LPE) exploit in the same class as Dirty Frag, called
“Fragnesia”. From the disclosure:
This is a separate bug in the ESP/XFRM from dirtyfrag which has received its own patch. However, it is in the same surface … ⌘ Read more
Sovereign Tech Fund invests in KDE
The KDE project has announced
that it has been awarded over €1 million from the Sovereign Tech Fund
to improve its desktop-environment software. “The investment will be
used to strengthen the structural reliability and security of KDE’s core
infrastructure, including Plasma, KDE Linux, and the frameworks underlying
its communication services.” ⌘ Read more
Discord Taunts “Year Of The Linux Desktop” With Linux Client Improvements
Discord, the popular instant messaging and VoIP communication platform, announced some significant improvements being made to their Linux client… ⌘ Read more
KDE Receiving Over 1.2 Million EUR Investment From Sovereign Tech Fund
KDE today announced a significant investment into the project by Germany’s Sovereign Tech Fund. KDE will be receiving €1,285,200 EUR (or roughly 1.5 million USD) over the years 2026 and 2027 to make some significant improvements into their software stack… ⌘ Read more
Google Announces Its Chromebook Successor: the Googlebook
Google is teasing a new line of “Googlebook” laptops for this fall, powered by a new Android-and-ChromeOS-derived operating system that will run Chrome, Android apps, phone-connected apps and files, and deeply integrated Gemini features. The company says Chromebooks will continue “after the launch of Googlebook” and “…all Chromebooks will continue to receive … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft’s $1 Billion AI Data Center Will ‘Switch Off Half of Kenya’
Microsoft and G42’s planned $1 billion AI data center in Kenya has stalled amid disagreements over power commitments, with President William Ruto saying the country would need to “switch off half the country” to support the project at full scale. Tom’s Hardware reports: The project, announced in May 2024 during Ruto’s visit to Washingto … ⌘ Read more
DroneShield insiders sold $67 million in shares. The watchdog has questions
ASIC has launched an investigation into the counter-drone group’s disclosures, six months after a botched contract announcement and a $67 million director sell-off. ⌘ Read more
Challenging UPS and FedEx, Amazon Opens Its Shipping Network to All Businesses
This week Amazon opened up its parcel shipping, fulfillment, and distribution “to businesses of all types and sizes.” Any business can now ship, store, and deliver “using the same supply chain that supports Amazon,” according to Monday’s announcement of “Amazon Supply Chain Services.”
The move sent shares of UPS and FedEx “ … ⌘ Read more
Rocket Lab Reports Growing Demand for Commercial Space Products. Stock Surges 34%
For just the first three months of 2026, Rocket Lab’s launch business reports $63.7 million in revenue, reports CNBC — plus another $136.7 million from its space systems business. Besides beating Wall Street’s expectations, Rocket Lab also announced that its backlog has more than doubled from a year ago to $2.2 … ⌘ Read more
Rush Rescue Mission for NASA’s $500M Space Telescope Passes Key Milestone
NASA’s $500 million Neil Gehrels Swift space observatory was launched in 2004. But it’s now “at risk of falling back through the atmosphere and burning up without intervention,” reports Spaceflight Now.
Fortunately, a mission to prevent that “just passed a notable prelaunch testing milestone.”
On Friday, NASA announced that th … ⌘ Read more
OpenZL 0.2 Released For Meta’s Content-Aware Compression Software
Last October engineers at Meta announced OpenZL as a format-aware compression framework. OpenZL aims to be speedy yet capable of delivering high compression ratios depending upon what is being compressed. OpenZL is viewed as their next leap in data compression beyond their wonderful work on Zstandard (Zstd). This week there’s finally a new OpenZL software release available… ⌘ Read more
Four stable kernels with partial fixes for Dirty Frag
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.5, 6.18.28, 6.12.87, and 6.6.138 stable kernels. These kernels
contain a partial fix for the Dirty\
Frag and Copy Fail 2
security flaws. Kroah-Hartman … ⌘ Read more
Dirty Frag: a zero-day universal Linux LPE
Hyunwoo Kim has announced
the Dirty\
Frag security flaw, a
local-privilege-escalation (LPE) vulnerability similar to the
recently disclosed Copy Fail
flaw:
Because the embargo has now been broken, no patches or CVEs exist for
these vulnerabilities. After consultation with the linux-distros@vs.openwall.org
maintainers, and at the maintainers’ re … ⌘ Read more
Anthropic Raises Claude Code Usage Limits, Credits New Deal With SpaceX
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: At its Code with Claude developer conference on Wednesday, Anthropic announced a deal with SpaceX to utilize the entire compute capacity of the latter’s data center in Memphis, Tennessee. On stage at the conference, CEO Dario Amodei said the deal was intended to increase usage limits … ⌘ Read more
AMD Instinct MI350P: PCIe Add-In Card For High Performance Open-Source AI/Compute
While there is the AMD Instinct MI400 series coming this year, today AMD announced an interesting and arguably overdue offering for the Instinct MI350 series: the MI350P. The AMD Instinct MI350P is a PCIe add-in-card to add Instinct MI350 compute capabilities to existing PCIe 5.0 air-cooled servers as an alternative to the Open Accelerator Module (OAM) currently used by the Instinct MI350 series. ⌘ Read more
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 7, 2026
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Front: LLMs and security; restartable sequences and TCMalloc; Fedora and GNOME bug reports; Prolly trees; Arm on s390.
Briefs: NHS open source; Alpine outage; GCC 16.1; Incus 7.0 LTS; NetHack 5.0.0; PHP license; Quotes; …
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more. ⌘ Read more
Mesa 26.1 Released With Many Improvements For Open-Source Vulkan Drivers
Eric Engestrom just announced another timely feature release of the Mesa drivers. Mesa 26.1 is out today for this collection of predominantly OpenGL and Vulkan drivers for a variety of hardware as well as the likes of Rusticl for OpenCL, Zink for OpenGL-on-Vulkan, various Windows acceleration components, and more… ⌘ Read more
I Am Begging AI Companies to Stop Naming Features After Human Processes
Anthropic announced “dreaming” for AI agents to sort through “memories” at its developer conference. Can we not? ⌘ Read more
VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 Brings More Improvements For Direct3D 12 On Vulkan
Hans-Kristian Arntzen of Valve’s Linux graphics driver team announced the release today of VKD3D-Proton 3.0.1 for Direct3D 12 over the Vulkan API… ⌘ Read more
AMD Expands ROCm Support On Windows WSL To More Ryzen Hardware
Back in March AMD announced the open-source ROCDXG library for improved ROCm support on WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux). The ROCDXG-based solution provides better ROCm compatibility within these Linux confines atop Windows 11 compared to their prior, now-legacy-based WSL support. A new ROCDXG release now available further expands the ROCm WSL2 support to more Ryzen hardware… ⌘ Read more
Rusticl Driver Ready To Go With OpenCL 3.1 Working On Radeon, Zink/Vulkan
The Khronos Group today announced OpenCL 3.1 as the first major spec update in six years and incorporating various features into the core spec for enhancing AI and HPC capabilities. As a very exciting development, Rusticl as Mesa’s lead OpenCL driver implementation is ready to go with same-day OpenCL 3.1 support pending… ⌘ Read more
The retirement of the PHP license
The PHP project has long shipped under its own license — except for
the parts under the Zend Engine License. The PHP project has now announced
that the PHP license has been retired, and the PHP code has been relicensed
under the three-clause BSD license. See this\
blog entry for more details.
Getting here required more than [writing an\ > RFC](https://wiki … ⌘ Read more
OpenCL 3.1 Released To Bolster AI & HPC Workloads
Six years after the debut of OpenCL 3.0 in provisional form, OpenCL 3.1 was announced today by The Khronos Group… ⌘ Read more
Qt’s Latest AI Push Is Letting AI Agents Deal With Performance Profiling
The Qt Group announced today the QML Profiler Skill for Agentic Development. This new “skill” can delegate code performance profiling to AI agents for 2D Qt Quick applications… ⌘ Read more
South Africa’s Draft AI Policy Withdrawn Due to ‘Fictitious’ AI-Generated Citations
An official in South Africa withdrew a draft of the country’s national AI policy, reports a local newspaper, “after it was found the draft policy was compiled using AI, which cited academic articles that were ‘fictitious’.”
Earlier this month, minister in the Presidency Khumbudzo Ntshavheni announced cabinet had … ⌘ Read more
Many Exciting Google Summer of Code 2026 Projects & A Lot Of AI
This week Google announced the selected Google Summer of Code “GSoC” 2026 projects for providing stipends to student developers for engaging in different open-source projects. This year a lot of open-source projects involve AI/LLM adoption but there are also a number of other interesting student projects at large from GNOME Mutter GPU reset recovery to adding new features to FreeBSD… ⌘ Read more
Using Drones for Cloud-Seeding Can Trigger Rain, Company Claims
Monday a company called Rainmaker announced their rain-triggering technology had produced 143 million gallons of freshwater for Utah and Oregon residents — making them “the first private company in history to validate the results of cloud seeding operations.”
The Deseret News reports:
Founded in 2023, Rainmaker uses drones to disperse silver iodid … ⌘ Read more
Amazon Stuck With Months of Repairs After Drone Strikes On Data Centers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Amazon’s cloud customers will need to wait several more months before the US tech company can repair war-damaged data centers and restore normal operations in the Middle East. The announcement comes two months after Iranian drone strikes targeted three Amazon data centers in the … ⌘ Read more
[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for April 30, 2026
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:
Front: Famfs; Python packaging council; Zig concurrency; pages and folios; Strawberry music manager; 7.1 merge window.
Briefs: GnuPG 2.5.19; Copy Fail; Plasma security; Fedora 44; Ubuntu 26.04; Niri 26.04; pip 26.1; RIP Seth Nickell; RIP Tomáš Kalibera; Quotes; …
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patc … ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu’s AI Plans Have Linux Users Looking For a ‘Kill Switch’
Canonical’s plan to add AI features to Ubuntu has sparked pushback from users who are concerned it could follow Windows 11’s AI-heavy direction. “After Canonical’s announcement earlier this week that it’s bringing AI features to Ubuntu, replies included requests for an AI ‘kill switch’ or a way to disable the upcoming features,” reports The Verge. Canoni … ⌘ Read more
UAE To Leave OPEC Amid Hormuz Oil Crisis
fjo3 writes: The United Arab Emirates announced Tuesday that it would exit the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (source paywalled; alternative source), or OPEC, along with the wider group of partners known as OPEC+, effective May 1, in what could be a blow to control over prices by the group, long led in practice by Saudi Arabia. The move “reflects the UAE’s long-term strategi … ⌘ Read more
IBM Updates Linux Patches For Introducing ARM64 KVM Virtualization On s390
At the start of April was the peculiar announcement of IBM collaborating with Arm on “dual architecture” hardware. The initial fruits of that collaboration at least are Linux kernel patches for enabling ARM64 virtualization acceleration on IBM Z servers. As we approach the end of the month, IBM has now posted a second iteration of those patches for enabling AArch64 software to run on IBM s390 via the Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM)… ⌘ Read more
Fedora Linux 44 has been released
The Fedora Project has announced
the release of Fedora Linux 44. There are “what’s new”
articles for Fedora\
Workstation, Fedora\
KDE Plasma Desktop, and Fedora\
Atomic Desktops. The Fedora Asahi Remix for Apple Silicon Macs,
ba … ⌘ Read more
Sovereign Tech Agency Launches New Initiative To Help Open Standards
Germany’s Sovereign Tech Agency (Sovereign Tech Fund) has provided critical financial resources to open-source software projects and maintainers the past several years. This has proven to be an incredible effort and today they announced their newest initiative as the Sovereign Tech Standards… ⌘ Read more
All FOSDEM 2026 videos are online
FOSDEM’s organizers have announced
that all of the video recordings “worth publishing” from FOSDEM 2026 are now available.
Videos are linked from the individual schedule pages for the talks and
the full\ > schedule page. They are also available, organised by room, at
video.fosdem.org/2026.
LWN’s [coverage](https://lwn.net/Arc … ⌘ Read more
Valve Confirms Steam Controller Release Date, $99 Price
Valve just announced that their new Steam Controller will be going on sale on 4 May. Pricing in the US is at $99 USD… ⌘ Read more
Four new stable kernels for Monday
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 7.0.2, 6.18.25, 6.12.84, and 6.6.136 stable kernels. As usual, each
contains important fixes throughout; users are advised to upgrade. ⌘ Read more
California’s Billionaire Tax Has the Signatures to Make the Ballot
California’s proposed billionaire tax appears headed for the November ballot after backers said they gathered more than 1.5 million signatures, well above the threshold needed to qualify. SF Standard reports: Backers of the initiative announced this weekend that more than 1.5 million people signed a petition to bring the one-time, 5% wealth ta … ⌘ Read more
pgBackRest is no longer maintained
David Steele, maintainer of the popular pgBackRest backup and restore project for
PostgreSQL, has archived\
the project and announced that it is no longer being maintained.
After a lot of thought, I have decided to stop working on pgBackRest. I did
not come to this decision lightly. pgBackRest has been my passion project for
the last thirteen years, and I was fortunate to have corporate sponsorship f … ⌘ Read more
[$] Zig explores structured concurrency
Version 0.16.0 of the Zig programming language was
recently announced, and with
it an expanded version of the new Io interface that we
covered in December.
The new interface is based on an idea called structured concurrency that makes writing
correct concurrent applications easier. Zig’s implementation of
the idea is more explicit and verbose than other languages, however, which could
offer an oppor … ⌘ Read more
XWayland 24.1.11 Brings Crash Fixes
Red Hat’s Olivier Fourdan announced today the availability of XWayland 24.1.11 that brings a few bug/regression fixes… ⌘ Read more
New Problem for NASA’s ‘Lunar Gateway’: Corrosion in Two Modules Caused by Supplier
In March, NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman announced that the moon-orbiting “Lunar Gateway” space station was being “paused” to focus instead of missions to the moon’s surface. And Ars Technica agrees that the project was essentially “spending billions of dollars to make it more difficult to reach the lunar … ⌘ Read more
Google To Invest Up To $40 Billion In Anthropic
Google plans to invest up to $40 billion more in Anthropic, starting with $10 billion now and another $30 billion tied to performance milestones. CNBC reports: Anthropic said the agreement expands on a longstanding partnership between the two companies. Earlier this month, Anthropic secured 5 gigawatts worth of computing capacity as part of an announcement with Google and Broadcom … ⌘ Read more
US Special Forces Soldier Arrested For Polymarket Bets On Maduro Raid
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: The Department of Justice announced Thursday that it arrested Gannon Ken Van Dyke, an enlisted member of the US Army’s special forces, for allegedly using “classified, nonpublic” information about the capture of Venezuelan president Nicolas Maduro to notch more than $400,000 in profits on P … ⌘ Read more
GnuPG 2.5.19 released
Werner Koch has announced
the release of GnuPG 2.5.19. This release includes a few new options
and a number of bug fixes, and comes with the reminder that the
GnuPG 2.4 series will reach end-of-life soon
The main features in the 2.5 series are improvements for 64 bit Windows
and the introduction of Kyber (aka ML-KEM or FIPS-203) as PQC encryption
algorithm. Other than PQC support the 2.6 series will not differ a lot
from 2.4 because th … ⌘ Read more
Oracle To Reduce The Frequency Of Solaris 11.4 Updates
Oracle announced today they are going to be reducing the frequency of software updates for Solaris 11.4 and their ZFS Storage Appliance software… ⌘ Read more
France Confirms Data Breach At Government Agency That Manages Citizens’ IDs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The French government agency that handles the issuing and management of citizens’ identity documents, including national IDs, passports, and immigration documents, confirmed Wednesday that it experienced a data breach. In an announcement, the Agence Nationale des Titres Secur … ⌘ Read more