Free Software Foundation Receives ‘Historic’ Donations Worth Nearly $900K - in Monero
On Wednesday (Christmas Eve), the Free Software Foundation announced it had received two major contributions totaling around $900,000 USD — in the cryptocurrency Monero.
The two donations “are among some of the largest private gifts ever made to the organization,” the FSF said in a statement.
“The donors wi … ⌘ Read more
44% Of GNOME Core Apps Are Written In C, 13% In JavaScript & 10% In Rust
GNOME developer Sophie Herold has shared some interesting end-of-year code stats for the GNOME project. The “GNOME” codebase is up to 6,692,516 lines of code at the end of 2025 with 1,611,526 lines of that being from GNOME apps. Where the data gets interesting is on the programming language breakdown in different areas… ⌘ Read more
Video Call Glitches Evoke Uncanniness, Damage Consequential Life Outcomes
Those brief freezes and audio hiccups that plague video calls are not the benign nuisances that most people assume them to be, according to a new study published in Nature that found glitches during virtual interactions can meaningfully damage hiring prospects, reduce trust in healthcare providers and even correlate with lower chances … ⌘ Read more
Linux Kernel Highlights For 2025: Schedulers, Rust & Torvalds’ Commentary
With the end of the year quickly drawing to a close, here is a look back at the most-viewed Linux kernel news of 2025… ⌘ Read more
Intel Open-Source Software Setback: IWD Development Hiatus
Adding to the unfortunate engineering setbacks at Intel this year as part of cost-cutting measures, the Intel IWD software development has been on a hiatus for the past three months. Going from previously seeing monthly releases and almost constant activity to now development ceasing up with no activity in the past three months… ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.19 Lands Fix For ARM64 EFI Systems Crashing On Boot
Adding to the early headaches of Linux 6.19 with some regressions in performance and functionality were ARM64 hosts crashing on this in-development kernel version for those platforms using EFI. But a fix is now merged ahead of Linux 6.19-rc3 due out tomorrow… ⌘ Read more
Taiwan’s iPass Releases Floppy Disk Pre-Paid Cash Card
Taiwan’s iPass has released a limited-edition prepaid payment card shaped exactly like a 3.5-inch floppy disk. The company, perhaps rightly so, felt the need to include a warning on the product listing: “This product only has a card function and does not have a 3.5mm [sic] disk function, please note before purchasing.”
The NFC-enabled novelty card went on sale start … ⌘ Read more
Toll Roads Are Spreading in America
Toll roads are expanding across the U.S. as the traditional gas tax funding model for highways collapses. Indiana became the first state to authorize tolls on all of its existing interstate highways when Governor Mike Braun signed legislation in June.
The federal gas tax hasn’t been raised since 1993. In fiscal 2024, the federal government spent $27 billion more on road maintenance than it collected fr … ⌘ Read more
Rocket Crashes in Brazil’s First Commercial Launch
The first-ever commercial rocket launched at Brazil’s Alcantara Space Center crashed soon after liftoff late earlier this week, dealing a blow to Brazilian aerospace ambitions and shares of South Korean satellite launch company Innospace. From a report: The rocket began its vertical trajectory as planned after liftoff [Monday] at 10:13 p.m. local time (0113 GMT) but fell … ⌘ Read more
QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop Brings QNX 8.0 To A Wayland + Xfce Desktop
Announced earlier in December but flying under the radar until now is the initial reoease of a QNX Self-Hosted Developer Desktop. This is a developer environment for the QNX real-time operating system primarily used on embedded systems. With now having this developer desktop option, the hassle of cross-compilation to target QNX can be avoided… ⌘ Read more
Mesh Networks Are About To Escape Apple, Amazon and Google Silos
After more than two decades of promises and false starts in the mesh networking space, the smart home standards that Apple, Amazon and Google have each championed are finally set to escape their respective brand silos and work together in a single unified network.
Starting January 1, 2026, Thread 1.4 becomes the Thread Group’s only certified sta … ⌘ Read more
Driverless Future Gains Momentum With Global Robotaxi Deployments
The global push to put autonomous taxis on public roads is accelerating as ride-hailing companies and technology firms advance from pilot programs toward limited commercial rollouts in cities across China, the United States, Europe and the Middle East.
WeRide and Uber launched Level 4 fully driverless robotaxi operations in Abu Dhabi in Novemb … ⌘ Read more
NASA Chief Says US Will Return To Moon Within Trump’s Second Term
NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman, who was confirmed by the Senate just last week after a turbulent nomination process that stretched across most of 2025, said Friday that the United States will return to the moon within President Donald Trump’s second term. Isaacman made the comments during an interview on CNBC, calling Trump’s recommitment … ⌘ Read more
New York To Require Social Media Platforms To Display Mental Health Warnings
Social media platforms with infinite scrolling, auto-play and algorithmic feeds will be required to display warning labels about their potential harm to young users’ mental health under a new law, New York Governor Kathy Hochul announced on Friday. From a report: “Keeping New Yorkers safe has been my top priority since taki … ⌘ Read more
Wine 11.0-rc4 Brings 22 Bug Fixes
Wine 11.0-rc4 is out today as the latest weekly release candidate in working toward the stable Wine 11.0 release in January… ⌘ Read more
FFmpeg Developer Files DMCA Against Rockchip After Two-Year Wait for License Fix
GitHub has disabled Rockchip’s Media Process Platform repository after an FFmpeg developer filed a DMCA takedown notice, nearly two years after the open-source project first publicly accused the Chinese chipmaker of license violations. The notice, filed December 18, claims Rockchip copied thousands of lines of code fr … ⌘ Read more
Indian IT Was Supposed To Die From AI. Instead It’s Billing for the Cleanup.
Two years after generative AI was supposed to render India’s $250 billion IT services industry obsolete, the sector is finding that enterprises still need someone to handle the unglamorous plumbing work that large-scale AI deployment demands. Less than 15% of organizations are meaningfully deploying the new technology, accordin … ⌘ Read more
As AI Companies Borrow Billions, Debt Investors Grow Wary
While stock investors have pushed AI-related shares to repeated highs this year, debt markets are telling a more cautious story as newer AI infrastructure companies find themselves paying significantly elevated interest rates to borrow money. Applied Digital, a data center builder, sold $2.35 billion of debt in November at a 9.25% coupon – roughly 3.75% above … ⌘ Read more
AMD RDNA3/RDNA4 Go Down Hard On Linux 6.19, But Here’s How The Older AMD GPUs End Out 2025
As part of the various end-of-year benchmarking comparisons on Phoronix and with Linux 6.19 switching older AMD GCN 1.0/1.1 graphics cards to the AMDGPU driver by default, I planned for a very large AMD Radeon graphics card comparison on the latest open-source Linux driver for ending out 2025. In the end though I was thwarted by newer AMD RDNA3 / RDNA4 graphics cards regressing hard on Linux 6.19 that led to ending this testing … ⌘ Read more
The Economic Divide Between Big and Small Companies Is Growing
While America’s largest corporations are riding a wave of surging profits and AI-fueled stock market enthusiasm to record highs, small businesses across the country are cutting staff and scaling back operations as years of high inflation, cautious consumers and tariff confusion take their toll.
Private firms with fewer than 50 workers have steadily … ⌘ Read more
Coreboot 25.12 Released With Qualcomm X1 Plus Platform Support, AMD Turin PoC
Coreboot 25.12 is out today as the latest quarterly feature update to this open-source BIOS/firmware solution… ⌘ Read more
Retreating From EVs Could Be Hazardous For Western Carmakers
Western carmakers retreating from electric vehicles amid softening government mandates could find themselves in a precarious position as Chinese rivals continue gaining ground in the EV market they’re choosing to de-prioritize. The EU on December 16th dropped its earlier plan to ban petrol car sales outright from 2035, instead requiring carmakers to cut e … ⌘ Read more
AI’s Hunger For Memory Chips Could Shrink Smartphone and PC Sales in 2026, IDC Says
The global smartphone and PC markets face potential contractions of up to 5.2% and 8.9% respectively in 2026, according to downside risk scenarios from IDC that trace the problem to memory chip manufacturers shifting production capacity away from consumer electronics toward AI data centers. Samsung Electronics, SK … ⌘ Read more
China Launches $21 Billion Venture Capital Funds To Invest in ‘Hard Technology’
An anonymous reader shares a report: China on Friday launched three venture capital funds to invest in “hard technology” areas, state broadcaster CCTV reported. The capital contribution plans for the funds have been finalised, each with more than 50 billion yuan ($7.14 billion), according to the report. The funds will primar … ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu’s Rust Infatuation, New Optimizations & Other Ubuntu Linux 2025 Highlights
It was a very interesting year for Ubuntu Linux. Ahead of the important Ubuntu 26.04 LTS release due out this coming April, Ubuntu Linux this year was expeditiously migrating to new Rust-based system tools like sudo-rs and Rust Coreutils, new performance optimizations continued to be explored for bettering the out-of-the-box Ubuntu performance, better ARM64 support with its desktop ISO, and enhancing the Snapdragon X Elite laptop supp … ⌘ Read more
New Runtime Standby ABI Proposed For Linux Akin To Microsoft Windows’ “Modern Standby”
An exciting post-Christmas patch series out on the Linux kernel mailing list this morning is proposing a new runtime standby ABI that is similar in nature to the “Modern Standby” functionality found with Microsoft Windows… ⌘ Read more
Nova Driver Progress & Other NVIDIA Linux News From 2025
This year there was a lot of going on in the NVIDIA Linux world from their official driver stack seeing better Wayland support to a lot on the open-source scene from NVIDIA engineers contributing a lot directly to the Rust-based Nova open-source driver that continues taking shape, the Mesa NVK Vulkan driver becoming more performant and capable, and a lot of other happenings. Here is a look back at the most popular NVIDIA content of 2025 on Phoronix… ⌘ Read more
New Linux Patches Improve exFAT Read Performance Via Multi-Cluster Mapping
For those using Microsoft’s exFAT file-system under Linux for the likes of flash drives and SD cards, a new patch series posted today aims to enhance the read performance. The new patches are shown to improve performance by about 10% while also heaving lower overhead… ⌘ Read more
‘Memory is Running Out, and So Are Excuses For Software Bloat’
The relentless climb in memory prices driven by the AI boom’s insatiable demand for datacenter hardware has renewed an old debate about whether modern software has grown inexcusably fat, a column by the Register argues. The piece points to Windows Task Manager as a case study: the current executable occupies 6MB on disk and demands nearly 70MB of … ⌘ Read more
Cursor CEO Warns Vibe Coding Builds ‘Shaky Foundations’ That Eventually Crumble
Michael Truell, the 25-year-old CEO and cofounder of Cursor, is drawing a sharp distinction between careful AI-assisted development and the more hands-off approach commonly known as “vibe coding.” Speaking at a conference, Truell described vibe coding as a method where users “close your eyes and you don’t look at … ⌘ Read more
Truly Universal Outlet
⌘ Read more
Apple’s App Course Runs $20,000 a Student. Is It Really Worth It?
Apple’s Developer Academy in Detroit has spent roughly $30 million over four years training hundreds of people to build iPhone apps, but not everyone lands coding jobs right away, according to a WIRED story published this week.
The program launched in 2021 as part of Apple’s $200 million response to the Black Lives Matter protests and costs an esti … ⌘ Read more
Gmail Users May Soon Be Able To Change Their Email Address and Keep the Old One
Google appears to be testing a feature that would let users change their @gmail.com address for the first time, according to an official support document. The support page exists only in Hindi, suggesting an India-first rollout, and Google notes that users will “gradually begin to see this option.”
The feature would l … ⌘ Read more
Apple Settles Brazilian Antitrust Case, Must Allow Third-Party App Stores and External Payment Links
Apple has agreed to a settlement with Brazil’s antitrust regulator that will require the company to allow third-party app stores on iPhones and permit developers to direct users to external payment options, marking another country where Apple’s tightly controlled App Store mo … ⌘ Read more
Fake MAS Windows Activation Domain Used To Spread PowerShell Malware
An anonymous reader shares a report: A typosquatted domain impersonating the Microsoft Activation Scripts (MAS) tool was used to distribute malicious PowerShell scripts that infect Windows systems with the ‘Cosmali Loader’. BleepingComputer has found that multiple MAS users began reporting on Reddit yesterday that they received pop-up warni … ⌘ Read more
Arch Linux Powered CachyOS To Develop A Server Edition
The Arch Linux based CachyOS has been quite popular with Linux gamers and enthusiasts for offering leading out-of-the-box performance, especially following the shutdown of Intel’s Clear Linux. CachyOS has developed quite a following on the Linux desktop while looking ahead to 2026 they will be working on a server edition… ⌘ Read more
NVIDIA CUDA Tile IR Open-Sourced
As a wonderful Christmas gift to open-source fans, NVIDIA dropped their proprietary license on the CUDA Tile intermediate representation and has now made the IR open-source software… ⌘ Read more
Wall Street Has Stopped Rewarding ‘Strategic’ Layoffs
Goldman Sachs analysts have identified a notable shift in how investors respond to corporate layoff announcements, finding that even job cuts attributed to automation and AI-driven restructuring are now causing stock prices to fall rather than rise. The investment bank linked recent layoff announcements to public companies’ earnings reports and stock market data, concluding … ⌘ Read more
Chinese Social Media Users Criticize Authorities in Rare Sign of Dissent
An anonymous reader shares a report: Chinese social media users criticized two key government policies, rare signs of public dissent in the country where the internet is heavily censored. The death of the former head of China’s one-child policy agency – which for decades forced women to carry out abortions and sterilizations – s … ⌘ Read more
Framework Raises Memory Prices Again, Suggests Customers Bring Their Own RAM
Framework has announced yet another price increase for memory modules, the second in roughly a month, and the company is now actively encouraging customers to source their own RAM elsewhere if they can find better deals. The laptop maker cited “extreme memory shortages and price volatility” as the reason for the hike, noting … ⌘ Read more
Waymo Pays Workers $22 To Close Doors on Stranded Robotaxis
Waymo’s fleet of autonomous robotaxis can navigate city streets and compete with human taxi drivers, but they become stranded when a passenger leaves a door ajar – prompting the company to pay tow truck operators around $20 to $24 through an app called Honk just to push a door shut. The owner of a towing company in Inglewood, California, completes up to th … ⌘ Read more
Final Benchmarks Of AMDVLK vs. RADV AMD Radeon Vulkan Drivers
One of the pleasant surprises this year was AMD ending the AMDVLK driver development with AMD dropping their proprietary OpenGL and Vulkan driver components on Linux at long last for their Radeon Software for Linux packages. This was arguably long overdue with enthusiasts and Linux gamers long preferring the RadeonSI+RADV Mesa drivers and those drivers even doing very well in recent years for workstation graphics workloads. One of the areas where AMD … ⌘ Read more
Nvidia Buying Groq’s Assets For $20 Billion in Its Largest Deal on Record
Nvidia has agreed to buy assets from Groq, a designer of high-performance artificial intelligence accelerator chips, for $20 billion in cash, according to Alex Davis, CEO of Disruptive, which led the startup’s latest financing round in September. From a report: Davis, whose firm has invested more than half a billion dollars in Groq sinc … ⌘ Read more
Fix On The Way For One Of The Linux 6.19 Regressions: 52.4% Scheduler Regression
The Linux 6.19 kernel has been a bit bumpy in the scheduler department but at least one fix is on the way for addressing fallout… ⌘ Read more
Trump Administration To Overhaul Lottery System For H-1B Visas
The Trump administration has announced it would replace the lottery programme used to grant H-1B visas for skilled foreign workers with a system that prioritises higher-paid individuals. From a report: The Department of Homeland Security said it would begin to implement a “weighted” selection process to give an advantage to higher-skilled and higher- … ⌘ Read more
Bitcoin Miners’ Pivot To AI Has Lifted Bitcoin-Mining ETF By About 90% This Year
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: It’s harder than ever to mine bitcoin. And less profitable, too. But mining-company stocks are still flying, even with cryptocurrency prices in retreat. That’s because these firms have something in common with the hottest investment theme on the planet: the … ⌘ Read more
The Death Of Clear Linux, Other Intel Linux Engineering Setbacks In 2025
When it came to the most viewed AMD Linux/open-source news of 2025 there were a lot of accomplishments for the company this year both on the CPU and graphics side of the house and from consumer to server hardware. Today is a look back at the most popular Intel open-source/Linux news of the year, which unfortunately, their layoffs and other cuts to their software engineering were attracting a lot of interest… ⌘ Read more
Google Looks To Upstream Its Propeller Tool To LLVM For More Performance
Google’s Propeller is a profile-guided, reflinking optimizer for large codebases. Propeller is built atop LLVM and can allow for whole-program optimizations. Google compiler engineers are now hoping to bring the Propeller tool into the upstream LLVM codebase… ⌘ Read more
Mobileye Eyeq6Lplus SoC Support Being Worked On For Mainline Linux Kernel
The mainline Linux kernel already supports several different Mobileye SoCs for that company focused on self-driving tech and advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS). Consulting firm Bootlin has been working on bringing their latest SoC, the Mobileye Eyeq6Lplus, to the mainline Linux kernel… ⌘ Read more
Ruby 4.0 Released With Ruby Box Experimental Feature, ZJIT Compiler
The past several years we have seen new releases of the Ruby programming language implementation for Christmas (25 December). This year is no different with Ruby 4.0 having been released this morning… ⌘ Read more