Did Virginia Regulators Downplay Data Center Health Concerns?
Politico reports that in the Virginia area alone there’s dozens of data center projects “that altogether need 70 gigawatts of power — equivalent to 70 nuclear plants” — currently seeking connection to their grid. But there’s also concerns about a Virginia data center powered with natural gas and backup diesel generators:
When Virginia’s top environ … ⌘ Read more
Drying Lakebeds Are Releasing Massive Amounts of Carbon, Study Finds
“In many parts of the world, lakes are drying out at a scale so massive that scientists are warning they may be emitting enough greenhouse gases to rival our fossil fuel habit,” reports ScienceAlert:
In a new study published in Science, scientists say the Aral Sea — the world’s largest desiccated lake — has emitted a whopping 204 megaton … ⌘ Read more
Hyundai Claims Humanoid Robot Plan Is Not Part of Talks With Striking Workers
Ars Technica reports:
Hyundai Motor Company’s plan to put humanoid robots to work by 2028 is not part of current negotiations with striking South Korean autoworkers, according to the company.
The automaker is disputing news reports that partial labor strikes by the Hyundai Motor union at the world’s largest automot … ⌘ Read more
Amazon Cracks Down On Use of AI Images By Sellers
CNBC reports:
Amazon is requiring that third-party sellers label any product images or videos that contain “AI-generated people” after New York recently passed a law mandating greater transparency around “synthetic performers” in ads… The policy directs sellers to tag images [and videos or other graphics on listing pages] with specific metadata keywords before they’re uploade … ⌘ Read more
Top Online Sites Debate Cutting Off Google’s Crawlers
Futurism reports:
[Some online publications] are now debating whether to cut Google off entirely, as the Wall Street Journal reports, illustrating an increasingly fraught relationship between the tech giant and the publishers that are creating content its AI models are regurgitating. According to the newspaper, prominent outlets including USA Today, Politico, the Eco … ⌘ Read more
China is Creating a Herd of 100 Elite Yak Clones
CNN reports on yaks “designed and cloned” in secretive, high-altitude labs in Tibet — 2.4 miles (4,000 meters) above sea level. They’re a critical part of the local economy, and researchers “hope to create an ‘elite’ herd of super-yaks, healthier and more fertile than their predecessors.”
Both domestic yaks and their wild cousins have been facing threats for years, with som … ⌘ Read more
Facebook Offers a Verification System Certifying to Other Users That You’re a Real Human
Facebook announced Friday they’re launching a badge “that verifies there’s a real person behind a profile”.
“You record a short video selfie, which we check against your existing profile photos to confirm a match. The process is free and typically takes just a few minutes. Accounts must meet our trus … ⌘ Read more
Fedora Working To Establish Conflict of Interest Policy
Posted this week is a draft copy of the Fedora Conflict of Interest policy being worked on for dealing with identifying, disclosing, and managing any actual, actual, or perceived conflicts of interest within the Fedora Project… ⌘ Read more
Risks of Parkinson’s Disease May Increase With Prolonged Exposure to Road Traffic Noise
A large Danish study found a modest but consistent association between long-term road traffic noise exposure and higher Parkinson’s disease risk, with a 3% increase for every 11.5 dB rise in noise at the most exposed side of a home. The Guardian reports: The researchers modeled noise exposure at the … ⌘ Read more
Trump Threatens New Tariffs Against EU Over Google Fine
President Trump threatened a “substantial” new tariff on the European Union after Brussels fined Google more than $1 billion over alleged illegal trade practices. “The European Union will pay a very big price for this illegal and highly unethical conduct, which I have consistently warned them about,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “The penalties will be entirely reve … ⌘ Read more
Dunno if anyone will find this interesting… But some ~6 months or so ago I experimented briefly with creating a whole bootloader + kernel + userland – Basically an entire OS in the Mu programming language (which as you know I also designed and created) – 6 months later I’ve worked on it some more after spending the last week working on improvements to Mu itself, which is now able to compile itself with its own Mu implemented compiler and now have an os/arch backend called muos/amd64 that boots into a running shell, with a tiny little vfs, UNIX-like semantics, syscalls, read/write, etc. It works pretty nicely, and aside from a small Assembly “nucleus”, most of the Kernel and Userspace is written in Mu.
Kiwi Menu Continues Bringing macOS Vibes To GNOME
Kiwi Menu as the macOS-inspired quick menu option for the GNOME Shell desktop is continuing to enhance its macOS-esque experience on GNOME… ⌘ Read more
Wine 11.14 Released
Wine 11.14 is out with initial WoW64 mode support on FreeBSD, allowing 32-bit Windows applications to run on a 64-bit system without relying on 32-bit multilib support. The release also adds Start Menu icon support in Wine Explorer, 7.1 format conversions in DirectSound, AES-GMAC support in BCrypt, and 21 bug fixes affecting apps and games including Adobe Reader, Heroes of the Storm, and Age of Empires I and II. Additional details can b … ⌘ Read more
GNU C Library 2.44 Released With /etc/tunables.conf, More Optimizations
GNU developers today released GNU C Library “glibc” 2.44 as the newest feature release for this critical library to modern Linux systems and other platforms… ⌘ Read more
KDE Plasma 6.8 Introducing New kscreenctl Tool
KDE developers have been working on kscreenctl as a utility replacement to kscreen-doctor. Plasma and related code has also seen a number of bug/crash fixes coming about this week too… ⌘ Read more
Valve begin improving account switching in the latest Steam Beta
Account switching is still not great on Steam but it seems Valve are aware and have started making some tweaks to make it a smoother experience.
Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more
GE-Proton 11-3 brings better OptiScaler integration, AMD FSR4 improvements and lots of game fixes
GE-Proton 11-3 (and 11-2 just before) is a huge release for the popular compatibility layer for SteamOS / Linux.
Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/07/ge-proton-11-3-brings-better-optiscaler-integration-amd-fsr4-impro … ⌘ Read more
Wine 11.14 brings improvements for DirectSound, BCrypt, FreeBSD
The Wine 11.14 development release is officially out now bringing with it an assortment of new features to improve Windows apps / games on other platforms.
Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more
SpaceX’s Starship Megarocket Hits Key Milestones In Its ‘Lucky 13’ Test Flight
SpaceX’s Friday launch of its massive Starship rocket “went quite smoothly,” reports CNN, with a SpaceX spokesperson calling this mission “Lucky Number 13” (as the 13th integrated flight test for a Starship spacecraft with a Super Heavy rocket booster):
During Starship V3’s inaugural test, there were numerous engine i … ⌘ Read more
OpenAI’s Rogue Agent Went Unnoticed For a Week
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: The OpenAI agent that broke into tech firm Hugging Face went on a dayslong hacking spree that OpenAI didn’t notice until well after the threat was contained and the FBI was alerted, according to people familiar with the investigation. The agent – a program capable of making decisions and executing complex tasks with little or no huma … ⌘ Read more
Instagram Is Now Banning Pickup Artists, Pranksters Who Use Meta Glasses
Instagram is banning videos filmed with Meta smart glasses that harass strangers in public, including prank videos targeting service workers and pickup-artist clips of women who may not realize they are being recorded. “If you’re posting content that is taking advantage of people and harassing them, like a lot of these pickup line … ⌘ Read more
Wine 11.14 Brings WoW64 Mode To FreeBSD, Icon Support In Start Menu
Wine 11.14 was tagged today as the newest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for running Windows games and applications on Linux, macOS, and other platforms… ⌘ Read more
Paramount Agrees to Postpone Warner Bros. Merger Until June 2027
Paramount Skydance has agreed to postpone its $111 billion Warner Bros. Discovery merger until five days after an antitrust trial or June 1, 2027, whichever comes first. The agreement with a 12-state coalition led by California effectively shelves the deal for months while states argue it would reduce competition in cable and theatrical markets. Va … ⌘ Read more
US Accuses American of Allegedly Wiping His Phone Using a ‘Duress’ Password During Border Search
An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The U.S. Justice Department is prosecuting an American for allegedly providing U.S. border authorities with a passcode that wiped the contents of his phone, according to an indictment and media reports. This is thought to be the first … ⌘ Read more
Debian Considering General Resolution Over LLM Usage In The Project
Debian developers are discussing a general resolution whether to permit AI large language model (LLM) usage within the Debian software project… ⌘ Read more
AMD ROCm Committed To Six Week Release Cycle Moving Forward
One of many interesting takeaways from this week’s AMD Advancing AI event in San Francisco was word that ROCm will be on a rigid six week release cycle moving forward… ⌘ Read more
Roku Raises Prices of Streaming Devices By Up To 60%
Roku has raised prices on several streaming devices, blaming memory and component shortages tied to the AI data-center boom. The Roku Ultra jumped from $100 to $150 and the basic Streaming Stick rose from $30 to $40. The Desk reports: In a phone call with The Desk on Friday, a Roku executive said the company made the tough decision to raise prices on its streaming hardwa … ⌘ Read more
Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta Warn Against ‘Premature Restrictions’ of Open-Weight Models
Nvidia, Microsoft, Meta, Palantir, and more than 20 other tech companies signed an open letter urging policymakers not to impose “premature restrictions” on open-weight AI models, warning that broad limits could “stifle competition or drive innovation overseas.” CNBC reports: They wrote that open-weight models st … ⌘ Read more
Anthropic’s New Opus 5 Model Rivals Fable 5 For Half the Price
Anthropic has released Opus 5, a new Claude model that it says comes close to its higher-end Fable 5 model at half the price while improving on Opus 4.8 in knowledge work, coding, and scientific research tasks. “At the same time, Anthropic says it has managed to make the model more resistant to being tricked,” notes Engadget. Additionally, the company says … ⌘ Read more
Qualcomm QCE Driver On The Chopping Block With ~48x Slower Than Armv8 Crypto Extensions
A few days back I wrote about upstream Linux kernel developers marking the Qualcomm crypto accelerator driver as “broken” and “harmful” due to its slow performance, history of bugs, and other limitations. Now this Qualcomm Crypto Engine “QCE” driver might be removed outright from the Linux kernel source tree after discovering it’s even worse than anticipated… ⌘ Read more
Imagination PowerVR Driver Marking BXM-4-64 MC1 GPU As Supported In Linux 7.3
Sent out today was the weekly round of drm-misc-next patches of new Direct Rendering Manager feature material ready to be queued in DRM-Next ahead of the Linux 7.3 merge window… ⌘ Read more
John C. Dvorak, an Early and Influential Technology Journalist, Dies At 80
Longtime Slashdot reader sandbagger shares the passing of John C. Dvorak, an early and influential technology journalist for PC Magazine. He was 80. Talking Biz News reports: Aric Mackey writes, “Widely recognized for his profound impact on the technology industry, John’s career spanned decades of rapid digital evolution. He was … ⌘ Read more
Stripe Eyes $10 Billion Deal For AI Model Marketplace OpenRouter
An anonymous reader quotes a report from PYMNTS.com: Stripe is in talks to buy OpenRouter, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup that could sell for roughly $10 billion, according to The Wall Street Journal. The move would mark a significant step outside payments for a company that processes transactions for much of the internet. It also lands while … ⌘ Read more
Astronomers May Have Discovered First Moon Outside Our Solar System
Astronomers studying the star system CD-35 2722 may have found the first known moon-like object outside our solar system. The classification is unusually tricky, however, because it orbits a brown dwarf rather than a planet, making it clearly an “exosatellite” but forcing scientists to rethink where the line between planet, moon, and fai … ⌘ Read more
The massive Project Zomboid ‘Build 42’ update confirmed for July 29
The incredibly detailed zombie survival game Project Zomboid is set to level up in a huge way with the proper release of Build 42 on July 29th.
Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu Linux Looking To Get Rid Of /etc/debian_version Historical Artifact
Ubuntu Linux has shipped /etc/debian_version that is carried over from upstream Debian and in turn just indicating the Debian Sid development version from which the packages are arrived. Besides it being inaccurate, /etc/os-release has been the long preferred standard for reading the OS release information. Thus finally Ubuntu developers are looking at dropping the /etc/debian_version file… ⌘ Read more
Fedora 45 Looks To Begin Phasing Out In-Kernel Crypto Userspace API
Going along with the upstream Linux 7.2 kernel deprecation of AF_ALG and Linux 7.3 to further restrict this interface for letting user-space programs interact directly with the Linux kernel crypto API, Fedora 45 is looking to follow and help support this transition… ⌘ Read more
AMD Advancing AI 2026: Open, Open-Source & More Open-Source
At this week’s AMD Advancing AI 2026 event, “AI” was mentioned thousands of times in talks and in demos. As expected. Beyond that, the other term likely most heard during the event was “open”… Not particularly new for AMD with their long history of open-source efforts but I’d wager at this year’s AMD Advancing AI 2026 event they were more acutely bringing up open-source, open ecosystems, and open standards. Certainly seemed like an uptick in “open” men … ⌘ Read more
Weather the Swarm is a fun looking co-op action roguelite with destructible terrain
A fun looking sci-fi solo / co-op roguelike with fully destructible environments, Weather the Swarm set to release in 2027.
Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/07/weather-the-swarm-is-a-fun-looking-co-op-action-roguelite-with-destru … ⌘ Read more
007 First Light has Denuvo Anti-Tamper DRM removed
That was fast? 007 First Light only released back at the end of May, and it appears that Denuvo Anti-Tamper DRM has now been removed.
Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more
Humans Can Learn To Echolocate In Just 10 Weeks, and It Rewires the Brain
alternative_right shares a report from ScienceAlert: A study published in PLOS One in 2021 by researchers from Durham University in the UK showed that with 10 weeks of training, both blind and sighted people could learn to echolocate using verbal clicks. While the technique is already used by a number of people with impaired v … ⌘ Read more
Snapdragon X Elite Laptop Experience Still Lackluster On Ubuntu 26.04 LTS
At the end of last year when checking out the latest Linux experience on the Snapdragon X Elite it was a disappointing affair. The performance had regressed and overall a more headache-inducing experience than just running a modern AMD Ryzen AI or Intel Core Ultra laptop on Linux. Given the recent release of Ubuntu 26.04 LTS, I’ve been re-testing the Acer Swift 14 AI laptop with Snapdragon X Elite SoC to see how its performing under … ⌘ Read more
Beam Eye Tracker app adds Linux and macOS support in Beta
The highly rated Steam app Beam Eye Tracker just recently released a public Beta for their impressive looking eye-tracking app for gaming.
Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more
MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls appears to block SteamOS / Linux
MARVEL Tōkon: Fighting Souls has an Open Beta available and sadly they seem to have blocked SteamOS / Linux from playing due to anti-cheat.
Read the full article on GamingOnLinux. ⌘ Read more
Valve’s Steamworks SDK v1.65 brings changes for Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Deck
Valve have updated the Steamworks SDK for games to integrate Steam features - overhauling checks for Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Deck and more.
Read the full article on [GamingOnLinux](https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2026/07/valves-steamworks-sdk-v1-65-brings-changes … ⌘ Read more
World’s First Wave Power Generator Receives Certification For Regular Use
“The Norwegian certification agency DNV has certified the commercial wave-driven power generator Corpower C4 for regular use,” writes Longtime Slashdot reader Qbertino. “German news site heise.de has a detailed write-up. See a CGI video of the power station and its internals, as well as the company’s website [at their respec … ⌘ Read more
Google Adds Selfie Video As a Log-In Option
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: You’ll now be able to use selfie videos to log into your Google account. It has long been possible to log into Google using your face, via your phone’s face unlock or if your passkey login uses biometrics for verification. This is yet another option to get into your account using your face to authenticate your identity, which could be esp … ⌘ Read more
Oracle Signs 10-Year Software Contract With Pentagon Worth Up To $7 Billion
Oracle has signed a 10-year Pentagon contract worth up to $7 billion to provide on-premises software, licenses, maintenance, and consulting for branches of the military. CNBC reports: The contract covers the use of Oracle software in on-premises data centers for branches of the military, the U.S. intelligence community … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft Responds to LG Monitors Installing McAfee Ads On Windows
LG is removing a McAfee pop-up ad from its LG Monitor App Installer after criticism that some LG monitors were silently installing the app through Windows Update and showing ads on every boot. Microsoft says LG agreed to disable the McAfee pop-up, but the broader issue remains: Windows allows certain peripheral companion apps to install autom … ⌘ Read more
AMD EPYC Zen 7 “Florence” Confirmed With ACE, Next-Gen Memory
After announcing the AMD EPYC 9006 “Venice” processors today at AMD Advancing AI 2026, Lisa Su ended her keynote by confirming EPYC Zen 7 “Florence” details as well as EPYC Zen 8 “Ravenna” being in development… ⌘ Read more