How Python’s Security Response Team Keeps Python Users Safe
This week the Python Software Foundation explained how they keep Python secure. A new blog post recognizes the volunteers and paid Python Software Foundation staff on the Python Security Response Team (PSRT), who “triage and coordinate vulnerability reports and remediations keeping all Python users safe.”

Just last year the PSRT published 16 vulnerabi … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Lands More AMDGPU Fixes For Old Radeon Hardware
Following last week’s main set of DRM kernel graphics driver feature updates for Linux 7.0, merged on Friday to Linux 7.0 Git was the first round of fixes to these Direct Rendering Manager drivers. Dominating most of the code changes in this latest pull were AMDGPU fixes, including more enhancements for aging Radeon graphics processors… ⌘ Read more

@bender@twtxt.net Sweet! So glad that Twtxt still lives, and that everyone’s been keeping busy. My main computer is broken, It’ll take me some time to setup jenny on the R-pi and try to catch-up.

Have a blessed week-end everyone!

KDE Plasma 6.7 Preps More Improvements While Plasma 6.6.1 Fixes Begin Accumulating
This week marked the release of KDE’s Plasma 6.6 desktop as a very successful release that overall is in very robust shape and performing well. While Plasma 6.6 overall is in great shape, there are various bugs - including crash fixes - that have already been queued for the upcoming Plasma 6.6.1. KDE developers are also quite busy on the trek toward Plasma 6.7… ⌘ Read more

Microsoft Deletes Blog Telling Users To Train AI on Pirated Harry Potter Books
Microsoft pulled a year-old blog post this week after a Hacker News thread flagged that it had encouraged developers to download all seven Harry Potter books from a Kaggle dataset – incorrectly marked as public domain – and use them to train AI models on the company’s Azure platform.

The blog, written in November 2024 … ⌘ Read more

Several Meta Employees Have Started Calling Themselves ‘AI Builders’
An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta product managers are rebranding. Some are now calling themselves “AI builders,” a signal that AI coding tools are changing who gets to build software inside the company. One of them, Jeremie Guedj, announced the change in a LinkedIn post last week. “I still can’t believe I’m writing this: as of toda … ⌘ Read more

Drgn v0.1 Released For Very Versatile Programmable Debugger
Drgn is the programmable debugger developed by Meta engineer Omar Sandoval that has proven quite versatile and popular with Linux kernel developers and others. After nearly two dozen releases already, Drgn v0.1 was released this week as another big step forward for this open-source debugger… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Shows Significant PostgreSQL Performance Gains On AMD EPYC
When beginning some early Linux 7.0 kernel benchmarking this week for looking at its performance in its early development state, I started off testing on Core Ultra X7 “Panther Lake” in being hopeful for better performance with the maturing Arc B390 Xe3 graphics and the like. But I ended up finding Intel Panther Lake seeing some performance regressions on Linux 7.0. So next up I turned to an AMD EPYC Turin server since if regressions existed th … ⌘ Read more

GNOME 50 Lands Updated Wayland Color Management v2 Support
Following GNOME 50’s Mutter merging sdr-native color mode support for wide color gamut displays this week, another late addition to Mutter has now been merged ahead of next month’s GNOME 50 stable release… ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Brings Apple Type-C PHY, Snapdragon X2 & Rockchip HDMI 2.1 FRL Additions
Ahead of the Linux 7.0 merge window ending this weekend, the PHY updates were merged this week for this next major kernel release. There are some notable PHY additions particularly for Apple Silicon USB Type-C support as well as additions for Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 laptop SoCs… ⌘ Read more

USB Driver For Google Tensor SoCs, UCSI Thunderbolt Alt Mode In Linux 7.0
All of the Thunderbolt/USB driver changes were merged this week for the nearly-over Linux 7.0 merge window… ⌘ Read more

Meta Begins $65 Million Election Push To Advance AI Agenda
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Meta is preparing to spend $65 million this year to boost state politicians who are friendly to the artificial intelligence industry, beginning this week in Texas and Illinois, according to company representatives. The sum is the biggest election investment by Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagra … ⌘ Read more

Andrew Yang Warns AI Will Displace Millions of White-Collar Workers Within 18 Months
Andrew Yang, the former presidential candidate and longtime Universal Basic Income advocate, published a blog post this week warning that AI is about to displace millions of white-collar workers in the U.S. over the next 12 to 18 months, a wave he has taken to calling “the Fuckening.”

Yang cited a conversa … ⌘ Read more

FDA Reverses Decision and Agrees To Review Moderna’s Flu Vaccine
The Food and Drug Administration has reversed its decision on Moderna’s flu vaccine and has agreed to review it for possible approval, Moderna announced on Wednesday. From a report: Last week, the agency rejected Moderna’s application for review of a new flu vaccine, saying the company’s research design was flawed. But in subsequent discussions … ⌘ Read more

Single Dose of DMT Rapidly Reduces Symptoms of Major Depression
In a small double-blind clinical trial, a single intravenous dose of DMT produced rapid and clinically meaningful reductions in symptoms of major depressive disorder within a week, with effects lasting up to three months in some patients. “Unlike psilocybin and lysergic acid diethylamide ( LSD), whose effects can last for hours, intravenous DMT h … ⌘ Read more

GNOME 50 Merges “sdr-native” Color Mode Support For Wide Color Gamut Displays
As a late stage change for GNOME 50 ahead of its official debut next month and following last week’s GNOME 50 beta is plumbing the Mutter compositor for a new “sdr-native” color mode option… ⌘ Read more

99% of Adults Over 40 Have Shoulder ‘Abnormalities’ on an MRI, Study Finds
Up to a third of people worldwide have shoulder pain; it’s one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints. But medical imaging might not reveal the problem – in fact, it could even cloud it. From a report: In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99 percent of adults over 40 were found to have at least one … ⌘ Read more

The Music Industry Enters Its Less-Is-More Era
The music industry’s long romance with an ever-expanding catalog of songs appears to be souring, as streaming platforms and rights holders confront a daily deluge that now includes 60,000 wholly AI-generated tracks uploaded to Deezer alone – roughly 39% of the French service’s daily intake, a statistic the company shared during Grammys week last month.

Streaming services … ⌘ Read more

Instagram Boss Says 16 Hours of Daily Use Is Not Addiction
Instagram head Adam Mosseri told a Los Angeles courtroom last week that a teenager’s 16-hour single-day session on the platform was “problematic use” but not an addiction, a distinction he drew repeatedly during testimony in a landmark trial over social media’s harm to minors.

Mosseri, who has led Instagram for eight years, is the first high-profile tech ex … ⌘ Read more

Ireland Launches World’s First Permanent Basic Income Scheme For Artists, Paying $385 a Week
Ireland has announced what it says is the world’s first permanent basic income program for artists, a scheme that will pay 2,000 selected artists $385 per week for three years, funded by an $21.66 million allocation from Budget 2026. The program follows a 2022 pilot – the Irish government’s first l … ⌘ Read more

Firmware Upstreamed For Supporting The Qualcomm Snapdragon X2’s Adreno GPU
Upstreamed last week to the linux-firmware.git repository by Qualcomm was the GPU firmware files needed for enabling the Adreno GPU on the new Snapdragon X2 Elite laptop SoC… ⌘ Read more

Where’s The Evidence That AI Increases Productivity?
IT productivity researcher Erik Brynjolfsson writes in the Financial Times that he’s finally found evidence AI is impacting America’s economy. This week America’s Bureau of Labor Statistics showed a 403,000 drop in 2025’s payroll growth — while real GDP “remained robust, including a 3.7% growth rate in the fourth quarter.”

This decoupling — maintaining high output with sig … ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19.1 Released To Ship Some Early Fixes & Device Quirks
For those preferring to wait for the first point release of a new Linux kernel version before upgrading, Linux 6.19.1 is out today to address some early bugs that made it into the Linux 6.19 kernel stable release one week ago… ⌘ Read more

Ars Technica’s AI Reporter Apologizes For Mistakenly Publishing Fake AI-Generated Quotes
Sunday Ars Technica apologized for making Scott Shambaugh’s week a little weirder. Last week Shambaugh learned an AI agent published a “hit piece” about him after he’d rejected the AI agent’s pull request. (And that incident was covered by Ars Technica.)

But then Shambaugh realized their article att … ⌘ Read more

wlroots 0.20 Nears Release With New Protocols, Enhanced Vulkan Renderer
Version 0.20 of the popular wlroots Wayland support library is nearing its official release. Over the past week were two release candidates for wlroots 0.20 were published for this library used by Sway, Wayfire, Cage, Gamescope, and numerous other Wayland compositors… ⌘ Read more

Apple Patches Decade-Old IOS Zero-Day, Possibly Exploited By Commercial Spyware
This week Apple patched iOS and macOS against what it called “an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals.”

Security Week reports that the bugs “could be exploited for information exposure, denial-of-service (DoS), arbitrary file write, privilege escalation, network traffic interception, … ⌘ Read more

US Government Will Stop Pollution-Reduction Credits for Cars With ‘Start-Stop’ Systems
Starting in 2009, the U.S. government have given car manufacturers towards reducing greenhouse gas emissions if they included “start-stop” systems in cars with internal combustion engines. (These systems automatically shut off idling engines to reduce pollution and fuel consumption.)

But this week the ne … ⌘ Read more

Social Networks Agree to Be Rated On Their Teen Safety Efforts
Meta, TikTok, Snap and other social neteworks agreed this week to be rated on their teen safety efforts, reports the Los Angeles Times, “amid rising concern about whether the world’s largest social media platforms are doing enough to protect the mental health of young people.”

The Mental Health Coalition, a collective of organizations focused on des … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Merges Support For Rock Band 4 PS4 / PS5 Guitars Plus More Laptop Quirks
The HID subsystem changes were merged this week for the ongoing Linux 7.0 kernel merge window. Among the Human Interface Devices (HID) work this cycle were supporting more guitars while also adding more device IDs and different laptop quirks… ⌘ Read more

Intel Ends Work On Quantum Compiler Open-Source Bits
Following Intel recently discontinuing a number of open-source projects, this week they formally discontinued their Quantum Passes open-source project that was intended to provide additional passes for their LLVM-based compiler in the Intel Quantum SDK… ⌘ Read more

KDE Plasma 6.6 Sees Last Minute Fixes, Plasma 6.7 Aims For Painless Samba Shares
KDE’s Plasma 6.6 desktop release is due out next week (17 February) and there’s been some last minute fixes to land. Additionally, KDE Plasma developers continue to be quite active in already landing feature work for Plasma 6.7… ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Posts Open-Source Nouveau GSP Driver Support For GA100
One of the latest NVIDIA open-source contributions this week wasn’t for the in-development Nova kernel driver but for enhancing the existing Nouveau kernel driver. The patch posted is for bringing up the NVIDIA GA100 GPU under Nouveau using the GPU System Processor (GSP)… ⌘ Read more

Spotify Says Its Best Developers Haven’t Written a Line of Code Since December, Thanks To AI
Spotify’s best developers have stopped writing code manually since December and now rely on an internal AI system called Honk that enables remote, real-time code deployment through Claude Code, the company’s co-CEO Gustav Soderstrom said during a fourth-quarter earnings call this week.

… ⌘ Read more

FTC Ratchets Up Microsoft Probe, Queries Rivals on Cloud, AI
The US Federal Trade Commission is accelerating scrutiny of Microsoft as part of an ongoing probe into whether the company illegally monopolizes large swaths of the enterprise computing market with its cloud software and AI offerings, including Copilot. From a report: The agency has issued civil investigative demands in recent weeks to companies that compete wi … ⌘ Read more

Intel Nova Lake Sound Support In Linux 7.0
Merged for the Linux 6.19 kernel was initial Nova Lake S audio support. Now merged this week for the Linux 7.0 kernel is enabling sound support for additional Nova Lake platforms… ⌘ Read more

CIA Makes New Push To Recruit Chinese Military Officers as Informants
An anonymous reader shares a report: Just weeks after a dramatic purge of China’s top general, the CIA is moving to capitalize on any resulting discord with a new public video targeting potential informants in the Chinese military. The U.S. spy agency on Thursday rolled out the video depicting a disillusioned mid-level Chinese military o … ⌘ Read more

Palo Alto Chose Not To Tie China To Hacking Campaign For Fear of Retaliation From Beijing
An anonymous reader shares a report: Palo Alto Networks opted not to tie China to a global cyberespionage campaign the firm exposed last week over concerns that the cybersecurity company or its clients could face retaliation from Beijing, according to two people familiar with the matter. The sources … ⌘ Read more

SPARC & Alpha CPU Ports Still Seeing Activity In 2026 With Linux 7.0
In addition to all of the exciting Intel and AMD x86_64 enhancements that have been landing this week so far for the Linux 7.0 kernel, the aging SPARC, Alpha, and Motorola 680x0 “m68k” CPU ports have also seen some patches for this new kernel… ⌘ Read more

Intel Arc B390 Panther Lake Generational Performance Since The Gen9 Graphics Era
Last week on Phoronix we provided initial Linux graphics benchmarks for the new Xe3-based Arc B390 graphics found with the higher-end Panther Lake SoCs with 12 Xe cores. Those benchmarks showed great gains over recent generations of Intel graphics like with Lunar Lake, Meteor Lake, and even Alder/Raptor Lake… But what if you hold onto your laptop for even longer? In this article is an Intel integrated graphics comparison look … ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases New Compute Runtime, Upstreams More SYCL Code To LLVM
Intel today released a new version of their Compute Runtime stack and IGC graphics compiler for Level Zero and OpenCL usage with their integrated and discrete graphics. Separately they also upstreamed more SYCL code this week into mainline LLVM… ⌘ Read more

Sixteen AI Agents Built a C Compiler From Scratch
Anthropic researcher Nicholas Carlini set 16 instances of Claude Opus 4.6 loose on a shared codebase over two weeks to build a C compiler from scratch, and the AI agents produced a 100,000-line Rust-based compiler capable of building a bootable Linux 6.9 kernel on x86, ARM and RISC-V architectures.

The project ran through nearly 2,000 Claude Code sessions and cost abou … ⌘ Read more

Google Lines Up 100-Year Sterling Bond Sale
Alphabet has lined up banks to sell a rare 100-year bond, stepping up a borrowing spree by Big Tech companies racing to fund their vast investments in AI this year. From a report: The so-called century bond will form part of a debut sterling issuance this week by Google’s parent company, according to people familiar with the matter. Alphabet was also selling $15bn of dollar bonds on Mond … ⌘ Read more

Windows 11 vs. Ubuntu Linux Performance For Intel Core Ultra X7 Panther Lake
Last week I began publishing the many exciting Panther Lake benchmarks under Linux from the interesting CPU performance and efficiency to the much anticipated Xe3 graphics with the Intel Arc B390 graphics. Up today is a look at how the out-of-the-box performance for the Intel Core Ultra X7 358H compares under Microsoft Windows 11 and the current Ubuntu Linux 26.04 development state. ⌘ Read more

AI Gold Rush is Resurrecting China’s Infamous 72-hour Work Week - in US
The AI boom has revived a workplace philosophy that China’s own regulators cracked down on years ago: the 72-hour work week, known as 996 for its 9am-to-9pm, six-days-a-week cadence. US startups flush with venture capital are now openly advertising it as a feature, not a bug. Rilla, a New York-based AI company that monitors sales reps in … ⌘ Read more

Blender 5.1 Lands Raycast Nodes, Blender Adjusting Release Cycle Moving Forward
Two interesting bits of Blender news this week for those fond of this leading open-source 3D modeling software… ⌘ Read more

GNU Binutils 2.46 Released With AMD Zen 6 Support, SFrame Version 3
Following last week’s release of GNU Coreutils 9.10, released today is GNU Binutils 2.46 for these commonly used GNU binary utilities on Linux systems and elsewhere… ⌘ Read more

Linux 6.19 Released With Better Support For Older AMD GPUs, DRM Color Pipeline API
As anticipated due to the extra week for the cycle given end of year holidays, Linus Torvalds today released the Linux 6.19 stable kernel as the first major release of 2026. There is a lot in store with this early 2026 kernel release… ⌘ Read more

Intel Releases QATlib 26.02 With New APIs For Zero-Copy DMA
Of Intel’s different CPU accelerator IPs, the arguably most useful and with the greatest customer interest remains around QuickAssist Technology (QAT). Intel QAT allows offloading various compression and encryption tasks for better performance. Intel this week released QATlib 26.02 as the newest version of their user-space library for leveraging QuickAssist Technology on capable hardware… ⌘ Read more

Bitcoin Dropped Nearly 30% This Week. But Why?
Last Sunday, Bitcoin had dropped 13% in three days, to $76,790.

By Thursday it had dropped another 21%, to $60,062.

This morning it’s at $69,549 — up from Thursday, down from Sunday, but 44% lower than its all-time high in October of $123,742. In short, Bitcoin “is down almost 30% this week alone,” reports CNBC:

“This steady selling in our view signals that traditional investors are los … ⌘ Read more

Neocities Founder Stuck in Chatbot Hell After Bing Blocked 1.5 Million Sites
Neocities founder Kyle Drake has spent weeks trapped in Microsoft’s automated support loop after discovering that Bing quietly blocked all 1.5 million websites hosted on his platform, a free web-hosting service that has kept the spirit of 1990s GeoCities alive since 2013.

Drake first noticed the issue last summer and thought … ⌘ Read more