China, Iran Are Having a Field Day With React2Shell, Google Warns
A critical React vulnerability (CVE-2025-55182) is being actively exploited at scale by Chinese, Iranian, North Korean, and criminal groups to gain remote code execution, deploy backdoors, and mine crypto. The Register reports: React maintainers disclosed the critical bug on December 3, and exploitation began almost immediately. According to Amazon … ⌘ Read more
JPMorgan Steps Further Into Crypto With Tokenized Money Fund
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: JPMorgan Chase is joining the list of traditional financial firms seeking to bring blockchain technology to an investing staple: the money-market fund. The banking giant’s $4 trillion asset-management arm is rolling out its first tokenized money-market fund on the Ethereum blockchain. JPMo … ⌘ Read more
Merriam-Webster’s 2025 Word of the Year Is ‘Slop’
Merriam-Webster crowned “slop” its 2025 Word of the Year, reflecting growing public awareness and and fatigue around low-quality, AI-generated content flooding the internet. “It’s such an illustrative word,” said Greg Barlow, Merriam-Webster’s president. “It’s part of a transformative technology, AI, and it’s something that people have found fascinating, annoying and a little bi … ⌘ Read more
GIMP 3.2-RC2 Brings Bug Fixes & Minor Refinements
GIMP 3.2-RC2 is out today as what could be the last release candidate of GIMP 3.2 before its stable release. This leading open-source image editor/creation alternative to the likes of Adobe Photoshop continues becoming much more refined and polished in the GIMP 3 series… ⌘ Read more
Ford Ends F-150 Lightning Production, Starts Battery Storage Business
Ford has effectively pulled the plug on the all-electric F-150 Lightning, pivoting away from full-size BEV pickups toward hybrids, range-extended EVs (EREVs), and even data-center battery storage. Ars Technica reports: Ford’s announcements today can’t be said to have come out of the blue. Rumors of the F-150’s demise have been circul … ⌘ Read more
Torvalds On Linux Security Modules: “I Already Think We Have Too Many Of Those Pointless Things”
Stemming from a security researcher and his team proposing a new Linux Security Module (LSM) three years ago and it not being accepted to the mainline kernel, he raised issue over the lack of review/action to Linus Torvalds and the mailing lists. In particular, seeking more guidance for how new LSMs should be introduced and raised the possibility of taking the issue to the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board … ⌘ Read more
Russian Ban On Roblox Gaming Platform Sparks Rare Protest
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Several dozen people protested on Sunday in the Siberian city of Tomsk against Russia’s ban on U.S. children’s gaming platform Roblox, a rare show of public dissent as popular irritation over the ban gains some momentum. In wartime Russia, censorship is extensive: Moscow blocks or restricts social media platform … ⌘ Read more
Fedora 44 Could Work Nicely “Out Of The Box” On Snapdragon-Powered Windows ARM Laptops
Longtime Red Hat engineer Hans de Goede who worked on many Intel/AMD laptop enhancements over the years left Red Hat and ended up joining Qualcomm. Now it turns out one of his projects at Qualcomm is enhancing the Fedora Linux support for running nicely out-of-the-box on Snapdragon-powered Windows on ARM laptops… ⌘ Read more
Verizon Refused To Unlock Man’s iPhone, So He Sued the Carrier and Won
A Kansas man who sued Verizon in small claims court after the carrier refused to unlock his iPhone has won his case, scoring a small but meaningful victory against a company that retroactively applied a policy change to deny his unlock request.
Patrick Roach bought a discounted iPhone 16e from Verizon’s Straight Talk brand in February 2 … ⌘ Read more
Flatpak Adds Support For Building OCI Bundles Using Zstd Compressed Layers
Back in November Flatpak 1.17 released with support for sideloading from OCI images and other improvements in working toward the Flatpak 1.18 stable release. Out today is Flatpak 1.17.1 and was then followed quickly by Flatpak 1.17.2 to fix a mistake in the release artifacts… ⌘ Read more
Why Floods Threaten One of the Driest Places in the World
One of the most water-scarce regions on Earth is now experiencing a dramatic atmospheric shift that’s pushing moisture onto Oman’s northern coast at rates more than 1.5 times the global average, according to a Washington Post investigation of global atmospheric data [non-paywalled source]. The change has turned extreme rainfall into a recurrent source of cat … ⌘ Read more
Cloudflare Reveals How Bots and Governments Reshaped the Internet in 2025
Cloudflare’s sixth annual Year in Review report describes an internet increasingly shaped by two forces: automated traffic and government intervention, as global connectivity grew 19% year over year in 2025.
Google’s web crawler now dominates automated traffic, dwarfing other AI and indexing bots to become the single largest so … ⌘ Read more
Google To Retire ‘Dark Web Report’ Tool That Scanned for Leaked User Data
Google has decided to retire its free dark web monitoring tool, saying it wasn’t as helpful as the company hoped. From a report: In a support page, Google announced the discontinuation of the “dark web report” tool, two years after offering it as a free perk to Gmail users before expanding it more broadly. The feature worked by sca … ⌘ Read more
US Tech Force Aims To Recruit 1,000 Technologists
The Trump administration announced Monday the United States Tech Force, a new program to recruit around 1,000 technologists for two-year government stints starting as soon as March – less than a year after dismantling several federal technology teams and driving thousands of tech workers out of their jobs.
The program will primarily recruit early-career software engineers an … ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.19 Features: LUO, PCIe Link Encryption, ASUS Armoury, DRM Color Pipeline API & More
With Linux 6.19-rc1 released, the merge window for Linux 6.19 has now concluded. Here is a summary of the interesting Linux 6.19 new features and changes with this kernel version. ⌘ Read more
AmpereOne M Finally Appears - In The Oracle Cloud With A4
Back in July 2024, Ampere Computing announced AmpereOne M on their road-map for Q4’2024 to provide AmpereOne with 12 channel DDR5 memory compared to eight memory channels with the original AmpereOne processors. Then this past May the AmpereOne M SKUs were announced while Ampere Computing stated these “M” processors had been shipping since Q4 of last year. Since then we haven’t seen or heard anything more about AmpereOne M nor the AmpereOne MX processors … ⌘ Read more
Scientists Thought Parkinson’s Was in Our Genes. It Might Be in the Water
For decades, Parkinson’s disease research has overwhelmingly focused on genetics – more than half of all research dollars in the past two decades flowed toward genomic studies – but a growing body of evidence now points to something far more mundane as a primary culprit: contaminated drinking water.
A landmark study by epide … ⌘ Read more
How Did the CIA Lose a Nuclear Device?
Sixty years after a team of American and Indian climbers abandoned a plutonium-powered generator on the slopes of Nanda Devi, one of the world’s most forbidding Himalayan peaks, the U.S. government still refuses to acknowledge that the mission ever happened. The device, a SNAP-19C portable generator containing plutonium isotopes including Pu-239 – the same material used in the Nagasaki bomb – was … ⌘ Read more
Wayland Protocols 1.47 Released With Updated Color Management Protocol
Following the Color Management protocol introduced in Wayland Protocols 1.41, out today is Wayland Protocols 1.47 with various revisions to that color management and HDR support… ⌘ Read more
Electricity Is Now Holding Back Growth Across the Global Economy
Grid constraints that were once a hallmark of developing economies are now plaguing the world’s richest nations, and new research from Bloomberg Economics finds that rising electricity system stress is directly hurting investment. The analysis examined all G20 countries and found that a one-standard-deviation increase in grid stress relative … ⌘ Read more
LG’s Software Update Forces Microsoft Copilot Onto Smart TVs
LG smart TV owners discovered over the weekend that a recent webOS software update had quietly installed Microsoft Copilot on their devices, and the app cannot be uninstalled. Affected users report the feature appears automatically after installing the latest webOS update on certain models, sitting alongside streaming apps like Netflix and YouTub … ⌘ Read more
Intel Quietly Discontinues Its Open-Source User-Space Gaudi Driver Code
There’s another setback to the open-source driver code around Intel’s Gaudi accelerator support on Linux… ⌘ Read more
Igalia’s Work Improving Futex For Helping Steam Play Gaming On ARM64 Linux
Besides Valve funding FEX-Emu for x86_64 binaries to run on AArch64 Linux as part of their Steam Play (Proton) efforts in being able to get Windows x86/x64 games running on AArch64 SteamOS for the Snapdragon-powered Steam Frame, there is also work happening in kernel-space to help this emulated gaming experience on AArch64… ⌘ Read more
Security Researcher Found Critical Kindle Vulnerabilities That Allowed Hijacking Amazon Accounts
The Black Hat Europe hacker conference in London included a session titled “Don’t Judge an Audiobook by Its Cover” about a two critical (and now fixed) flaws in Amazon’s Kindle. The Times reports both flaws were discovered by engineering analyst Valentino Ricotta (from the cybersecurit … ⌘ Read more
Kernel Graphics Driver Changes Already Begin Lining Up For Linux 6.20~7.0
Even before the Linux 6.19 merge window wrapped up this weekend with the Linux 6.19-rc1 release, there was already the first pull request to DRM-Next of the first batch of new material to be queued for Linux 6.19’s successor… ⌘ Read more
GCC Developers Considering Whether To Accept AI/LLM-Generated Patches
The GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) developers now have a need to set a policy whether AI / Large Language Model (LLM) generated patches will be accepted for this open-source compiler stack… ⌘ Read more
Are Warnings of Superintelligence ‘Inevitability’ Masking a Grab for Power?
Superintelligence has become “a quasi-political forecast” with “very little to do with any scientific consensus, emerging instead from particular corridors of power.” That’s the warning from James O’Sullivan, a lecturer in digital humanities from University College Cork. In a refreshing 5,600-word essay in Noema magazine, he notes t … ⌘ Read more
SpaceX Alleges a Chinese-Deployed Satellite Risked Colliding with Starlink
“A SpaceX executive says a satellite deployed from a Chinese rocket risked colliding with a Starlink satellite,” reports PC Magazine:
On Friday, company VP for Starlink engineering, Michael Nicolls, tweeted about the incident and blamed a lack of coordination from the Chinese launch provider CAS Space. “When satellite opera … ⌘ Read more
Roomba Maker ‘iRobot’ Files for Bankruptcy After 35 Years
Roomba manufacturer iRobot filed for bankruptcy today, reports Bloomberg.
After 35 years, iRobot reached a “restructuring support agrement that will hand control of the consumer robot maker to Shenzhen PICEA Robotics Co, its main supplier and lender, and Santrum Hong Kong Compny.”
Under the restructuring, vacuum cleaner maker Shenzhen PICEA will receive th … ⌘ Read more
Like Australia, Denmark Plans to Severely Restrict Social Media Use for Teenagers
“As Australia began enforcing a world-first social media ban for children under 16 years old this week, Denmark is planning to follow its lead,” reports the Associated Press, “and severely restrict social media access for young people.”
The Danish government announced last month that it had secured an agreement b … ⌘ Read more
The Opt-In Proactive & Crash Time Data Collection On Valve’s Steam Deck
Valve’s Steam Deck with SteamOS features built-in crash data collection as well as for logging other system events worth having knowledge about like the split-lock detection and other events. This is all opt-in by users for data collection by Steam, but for those curious about a bit more insight into this Steam Deck data collection, a presentation at this past week’s Linux Plumbers Conference dove into the matter… ⌘ Read more
CEOS Plan to Spend More on AI in 2026 - Despite Spotty Returns
The Wall Street Journal reports that 68% of CEOs “plan to spend even more on AI in 2026, according to an annual survey of more than 350 public-company CEOs from advisory firm Teneo.”
And yet “less than half of current AI projects had generated more in returns than they had cost, respondents said.”
They reported the most success using AI in marketing … ⌘ Read more
‘Investors in Limbo’. Will the TikTok Deal’s Deadline Be Extended Again?
An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC:
A billionaire investor keen on buying TikTok’s US operations has told the BBC he has been left in limbo as the latest deadline for the app’s sale looms.
The US has repeatedly delayed the date by which the platform’s Chinese owner, Bytedance, must sell or be blocked for American use … ⌘ Read more
Podcast Industry Under Siege as AI Bot Flood Airways with Thousands of Programs
An anonymous reader shared this report from the Los Angeles Times:
Popular podcast host Steven Bartlett has used an AI clone to launch a new kind of content aimed at the 13 million followers of his podcast “Diary of a CEO.” On YouTube, his clone narrates “100 CEOs With Steven Bartlett,” which adds AI-generated animation … ⌘ Read more
Entry-Level Tech Workers Confront an AI-Fueled Jobpocalypse
AI “has gutted entry-level roles in the tech industry,” reports Rest of World.
One student at a high-ranking engineering college in India tells them that among his 400 classmates, “fewer than 25% have secured job offers… there’s a sense of panic on the campus.”
Students at engineering colleges in India, China, Dubai, and Kenya are facing a “jobpo … ⌘ Read more
Early Linux 6.19 Benchmarks On AMD EPYC 9965 2P Excelling For AI & HPC Performance
As the Linux 6.19 merge window winded down this weekend, I began running this development kernel on more systems. While there are some scheduler regressions currently with Linux 6.19 Git, for HPC workloads especially I am seeing some encouraging results using a flagship AMD EPYC 9965 2P server configuration. ⌘ Read more
Polar Bears are Rewiring Their Own Genetics to Survive a Warming Climate
“Polar bears are still sadly expected to go extinct this century,” with two-thirds of the population gone by 2050,” says the lead researcher on a new study from the University of East Anglia in Britain.
But their research also suggests polar bears “are rapidly rewiring their own genetics in a bid to survive,” reports NBC News, in … ⌘ Read more
CentOS Kmods SIG Providing NVIDIA Linux Open GPU Kernel Modules For RHEL/CentOS Users
The CentOS kernel modules “Kmods” special interest group (SIG) is now providing NVIDIA Linux Open GPU Kernel Modules for users of Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its downstreams as well as for CentOS Stream… ⌘ Read more
America Adds 11.7 GW of New Solar Capacity in Q3 - Third Largest Quarter on Record
America’s solar industry “just delivered another huge quarter,” reports Electrek, “installing 11.7 gigawatts (GW) of new capacity in Q3 2025. That makes it the third-largest quarter on record and pushes total solar additions this year past 30 GW…”
According to the new “US Solar Market Insight Q4 2025” rep … ⌘ Read more
Purdue University Approves New AI Requirement For All Undergrads
Nonprofit Code.org released its 2025 State of AI & Computer Science Education report this week with a state-by-state analysis of school policies complaining that “0 out of 50 states require AI+CS for graduation.”
But meanwhile, at the college level, “Purdue University will begin requiring that all of its undergraduate students demonstrate basic … ⌘ Read more
Repeal Section 230 and Its Platform Protections, Urges New Bipartisan US Bill
U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse said Friday he was moving to file a bipartisan bill to repeal Section 230 of America’s Communications Decency Act.
“The law prevents most civil suits against users or services that are based on what others say,” explains an EFF blog post.
“Experts argue that a repeal of Section 230 could … ⌘ Read more
FamFS Hopes To Go Upstream In 2026
The FamFS file-system being developed by Micron hopes to go upstream for Linux in “early-ish 2026”… ⌘ Read more
Time Magazine’s ‘Person of the Year’: the Architects of AI
Time magazine used its 98th annual “Person of the Year” cover to “recognize a force that has dominated the year’s headlines, for better or for worse. For delivering the age of thinking machines, for wowing and worrying humanity, for transforming the present and transcending the possible, the Architects of AI are TIME’s 2025 Person of the Year.”
One cover illustr … ⌘ Read more
FFmpeg Lands Initial Support For JPEG-XS
The widely-used FFmpeg open-source multimedia library has merged initial support for JPEG-XS… ⌘ Read more
Rust Coreutils 0.5 Released - Inching Toward Full GNU Compatibility
Rust Coreutils 0.5 is now available as the latest milestone for this Rust-based alternative to GNU Coreutils. Rust Coreutils 0.5 continues moving closer to “full GNU compatibility” with nearly a 90% pass rate on the GNU test suite… ⌘ Read more
Linux 6.19-rc1 Released From Japan
The Linux 6.19-rc1 kernel is out to cap off the Linux 6.19 merge window. The kernel release is coming the better part of a day earlier due to Linus Torvalds being in Japan for this past week’s Linux Plumbers Conference and Linux Kernel Maintainer Summit… ⌘ Read more
Trump Ban on Wind Energy Permits ‘Unlawful’, Court Rules
A January order blocking wind energy projects in America has now been vacated by a U.S. judge and declared unlawful, reports the Associated Press:
[Judge Saris of the U.S. district court for the district of Massachusetts] ruled in favor of a coalition of state attorneys general from 17 states and Washington DC, led by Letitia James, New York’s attorney gener … ⌘ Read more
New Rule Forbids GNOME Shell Extensions Made Using AI-Generated Code
An anonymous reader shared this report from Phoronix:
Due to the growing number of GNOME Shell extensions looking to appear on extensions.gnome.org that were generated using AI, it’s now prohibited. The new rule in their guidelines note that AI-generated code will be explicitly rejected:
“Extensions must not be AI-generated
While it i … ⌘ Read more
Is the R Programming Language Surging in Popularity?
The R programming language “is sometimes frowned upon by ‘traditional’ software engineers,” says the CEO of software quality services vendor Tiobe, “due to its unconventional syntax and limited scalability for large production systems.” But he says it “continues to thrive at universities and in research-driven industries, and “for domain experts, it remains a power … ⌘ Read more
System76 Launches First Stable Release of COSMIC Desktop and Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS
This week System76 launched the first stable release of its Rust-based COSMIC desktop environment, reports 9to5Linux.
Announced in 2021, it’s designed for all GNU/Linux distributions — and it shipping with Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS (based on Ubuntu 24.04 LTS):
Previous Pop!_OS releases used a version of the COSMIC desktop tha … ⌘ Read more