Winston Peters’ prized Marsden Point rail spur rolls on
Rail Minister Winston Peters’ prized rail spur at Marsden Pt is rolling on.
A KiwiRail request for proposal (RFP) process closed this week for the proposed 19km rail spur between the North Auckland rail line, Northport, and the Marsden Pt industrial hub. ⌘ Read more
FluidX3D Lands A Big Speed-Up For This OpenCL CFD Software
Released this week was FluidX3D 3.7, the latest feature update to this computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software that is CPU/GPU accelerated by way of OpenCL… ⌘ Read more
The Search for the Next ‘James Bond’ Actor Has Begun
Variety reports:
Amazon MGM Studios started auditioning actors for the part of 007 in the past few weeks, Variety has learned… The next James Bond film will be directed by Denis Villeneuve, the filmmaker behind the “Dune” franchise, “Arrival” and “Sicario.” Amy Pascal of the “Spider-Man” films and David Heyman of the “Harry Potter” series will produce the pict … ⌘ Read more
Trump Phones Start Shipping - But Were There Really 600,000 Preorders?
USA Today reports:
Trump Mobile phones are being shipped this week, the company exclusively confirmed to USA TODAY in an email May 11….
The company’s first smartphone — the T1 Phone — was originally scheduled for release in August. However, the golden gadget’s release was later delayed to October before being pushed back again to … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.1-rc4 Seeing The Latest Laptop Quirks
Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc4 kernel test release due out on Sunday, a new round of x86 platform driver fixes were submitted for the week… ⌘ Read more
Cybercriminal Twins Caught After They Forgot to Turn Off Microsoft Teams Recording
Plus: Instructure’s Canvas ransomware debacle comes to a close, an alleged dark net market kingpin gets arrested, OpenAI workers fall victim to a supply chain attack, and more. ⌘ Read more
Plasma 6.7 Improves Its Built-In Remote Desktop Server, Enhances Plasma Notifications
This week marked the release of the KDE Plasma 6.7 beta and even so there were some last-minute features being squeezed into this popular Linux desktop option. Plasma’s built-in remote desktop server enhancements and improved Plasma notification effects are among the changes topping out this week… ⌘ Read more
TopResume Packages: Everything You Need to Get Hired
Discover ways to save at TopResume, including their free review service and 4-week Career Services Platform trial. ⌘ Read more
Claude Helps Recover Locked $400K Bitcoin Wallet After 11 Years
A Bitcoin holder reportedly recovered 5 BTC worth nearly $400,000 with the help of Anthropic’s Claude. According to X user cprkrn, they changed their wallet password while “stoned” and forgot it, unable to regain access for more than 11 years. Tom’s Hardware reports:
After finding a mnemonic that actually turned out to be their old password a few weeks a … ⌘ Read more
US Clears H200 Chip Sales To 10 China Firms
Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from CNBC: The U.S. has cleared around 10 Chinese firms to buy Nvidia’s second-most powerful AI chip, the H200, but not a single delivery has been made so far, three people familiar with the matter said, leaving a major technology deal in limbo as CEO Jensen Huang seeks a breakthrough in China this week. […] Before U.S. export curb … ⌘ Read more
AI Promised the Audemars Piguet x Swatch Wristwatch. China Will Deliver It
Watch fans spent a week falling in love with colorful Royal Oak wristwatches that didn’t exist—then the real thing arrived. Now, fantasy is becoming a manufacturing opportunity. ⌘ Read more
Meta’s New Reality: Record High Profits. Record Low Morale
Next week, Meta is cutting about 10 percent of its staff. WIRED spoke with more than a dozen current and former employees about what it’s like inside a company where “everyone is unhappy.” ⌘ Read more
OpenAI Trial Wraps Up With ‘Jackass’ Trophy For Challenging Musk
After three weeks of testimony, the Musk v. Altman trial is nearing its end. OpenAI has rested its case, closing arguments are set for Thursday, and jury deliberations are expected to begin afterward. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Joshua Achiam, OpenAI’s chief futurist, was probably the most memorable witness of the day. … ⌘ Read more
[$] 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
Fragnesia Made Public As Latest Linux Local Privilege Escalation Vulnerability
Following last week’s disclosure of the Dirty Frag vulnerability for the Linux kernel, which only finished being patched up in mainline on Monday, Fragnesia is now public as a similar local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability… ⌘ Read more
NetBSD 11.0-RC4 Comes As Hopefully The Last Release Candidate
In addition to FreeBSD 15.1 releasing in the coming weeks, NetBSD 11.0 is also just around the corner as another prominent and major BSD update. NetBSD 11.0-RC4 is now available for last minute testing with this hoping to be the final release candidate… ⌘ Read more
NASA’s Curiosity Rover Got Its Drill Stuck on a Rock. Here’s How They Freed It
This is the first time NASA has encountered a situation like this, and it took nearly a week to resolve. ⌘ Read more
Amazon Employees Are ‘Tokenmaxxing’ Due To Pressure To Use AI Tools
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times (via Ars Technica): Amazon employees are using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks in a bid to show managers they are using the technology more frequently. The Seattle-based group has started to widely deploy its in-house “MeshClaw” product in recent weeks, allowing emplo … ⌘ Read more
Running Four Intel Graphics Cards Under Linux On Ubuntu 26.04
It’s been nearly one year to the week since Intel introduced Project Battlematrix as their initiative for improving their Linux driver support for the Arc Pro B-Series with enhancements such as bettering the multi-GPU support in allowing up to eight Arc Pro GPUs per system as well as other open-source driver optimizations in the era of AI. Recently with the Arc Pro B70 in having four review samples for testing I was finally able to try out the multi-GP … ⌘ Read more
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Testifies In OpenAI Trial
The Musk v. Altman trial entered its third week Monday, with Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella and former OpenAI co-founder and renowned AI researcher Ilya Sutskever taking the stand. Nadella testified that Elon Musk never raised concerns to him that Microsoft’s investments in OpenAI violated any special commitments, and said he viewed the partnership as clearly commercial f … ⌘ Read more
Vulkan 1.4.351 Brings Six New Extensions, Including A Ray-Tracing Improvement
Quietly sneaking out at the end of last week was Vulkan 1.4.351 as the newest spec update to this high performance graphics and compute API… ⌘ Read more
Redesigned Thelio Major Elevates System76’s All-AMD, Open-Source Linux Workstation
A few weeks back we reviewed the redesigned System76 Thelio Mira with a brand new chassis design and powered by the AMD Ryzen 9000 series. This was an interesting Linux-powered desktop manufactured in Colorado while for those needing a bit more performance, since then the redesigned Thelio Major launched. The new System76 Thelio Major provides an updated Thelio case design like Mira while comes packed with the AMD Ryzen Thread … ⌘ Read more
AMD Ryzen AI & Intel NPU Drivers Adding New Power Features With Linux 7.2
Last week’s drm-misc-next pull request of new Direct Rendering Manager and accelerator driver feature material destined for Linux 7.2 include some new power management control features both for the AMD Ryzen AI and Intel NPU drivers… ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.0.6 Released To Finish Mitigating the Dirty Frag Vulnerability
Linux 7.0.6 is out as stable this morning to finish mitigating the Dirty Frag vulnerability that was made public last week… ⌘ 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
Axboe Hacking On New Linux Patches For 60% Increase To Per-Core I/O Performance
Following a presentation at last week’s Linux storage, file-system, memory management and BPF summit (LSFMM) in Croatia where Linux I/O overhead compared to the Storage Performance Development Kit (SPDK) was presented, Jens Axboe was motivated to pursue some new Linux kernel optimizations for greater per-core I/O performance. This lead IO_uring developer and Linux block maintainer has managed to achieve around a 60% increase to … ⌘ Read more
‘Changing of the Guard’? AMD, Intel, and Micron Soar While Nvidia Lags
While Nvidia has dominated the “infrastructure boom” since 2022’s launch of ChatGPT and “the generative AI craze,” CNBC writes that “This week offered the starkest illustration yet of what MIzuho analyst Jordan Klein said could be a ‘changing of the guard in AI.’”
Chipmakers Advanced Micro Devices and Intel notched gains of about 25% … ⌘ Read more
Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.3 Improves Handling Of Desktop Apps, Other Fixes
Ubuntu Touch 24.04-1.3 is out this week as the latest maintenance release for this tablet/smartphone-focused Ubuntu distribution… ⌘ Read more
Hackable Robot Lawn Mower Unlocks a New Nightmare
Plus: Meta officially kills encrypted Instagram DMs, the Trump administration targets “violent left wing extremists,” leaked documents reveal Russia’s school for elite hackers, and more. ⌘ Read more
Fiber Optic Cables Can Eavesdrop On Nearby Conversations
sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: Cold War spies planted bugs in walls, lamps, and telephones. Now, scientists warn, the cables themselves could listen in. A fiber optic technique used to detect earthquakes can also pick up the faint vibrations of nearby speech, researchers reported this week here at the general assembly of the European Geos … ⌘ Read more
Chrome Silently Installs a 4GB AI Model On Your Device Without Consent
Longtime Slashdot reader couchslug shares a report from That Privacy Guy’s Alexander Hanff: Two weeks ago I wrote about Anthropic silently registering a Native Messaging bridge in seven Chromium-based browsers on every machine where Claude Desktop was installed. The pattern was: install on user launch of product A, write configuration … ⌘ Read more
HP Z6 G5 A Continues Working Out Well For Linux-Friendly, High-End Workstation
In late 2023 I reviewed the HP Z6 G5 A workstation that at the time was built around the AMD Ryzen Threadripper PRO 7000 series and NVIDIA RTX Ada Generation graphics. More recently, HP has revised the Z6 G5 A workstation for the latest Threadripper PRO 9000 series and NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell graphics. HP sent over the upgraded Z6 G5 A workstation that I’ve been benchmarking the past few weeks. This workstation remains Linux-friendly down to … ⌘ 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
Sam Altman Had a Bad Day In Court
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: As the trial between Elon Musk and OpenAI ended its second week, the Tesla CEO started scoring points against Sam Altman. His witnesses landed three solid punches in testimony about how Altman runs OpenAI as CEO, raising concerns about his dedication to AI safety, the nonprofit’s mission, and his honesty as a leader of the organization. […] This … ⌘ Read more
Dirty Frag Vulnerability Made Public Early: Root Privilege On All Distributions
One week after the Copy Fail vulnerability, a new Linux local privilege escalation bug has been made public. This time around there are no patches or CVEs yet for this “Dirty Frag” vulnerability as the embargo was broken early and thus the security researcher went ahead and published earlier than anticipated… ⌘ Read more
Aussie tech giant pauses work, devotes entire week to AI
While Australian tech sheds jobs amid AI productivity claims, Canva is making the opposite bet - paying 5300 people to stop working. ⌘ Read more
SR-IOV Support Appears To Be Coming For Next-Gen Ryzen AI NPUs
AMD recently upstreamed Linux support for their next-gen AIE4 NPU. That next-gen AMD NPU support is expected to premiere in Linux 7.2 while this week an interesting new patch series has surfaced for SR-IOV support with those upcoming neural processing units… ⌘ 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
Distributions quote of the week
2,442 days is a fair amount of time, and that’s how long I had been
on the openSUSE Board as its chair when I started this note.That journey began on August 19th, 2019, and it ends today as I am
stepping down as chair of the openSUSE Board.It’s been an intense time for most of it — just a bit calm the last
year and a half. A time of joy and frustration, anger occasionally
and rewarding more often than that.During those years we have seen SUSE and openSUSE carve out from Micro
… ⌘ Read more
GCC Git Lands Fix For Missing AVX-512 Optimizations On AMD Zen 6
Last week marked the release of GCC 16.1 as the first GCC 16 stable release. While that release introduces initial AMD Zen 6 “znver6” support well in advance of those next-generation AMD processors debuting, it’s not yet in perfect shape with just today two missing optimizations around AVX-512 having been merged… ⌘ Read more
Coinbase Lays Off Nearly 700 Workers In ‘AI-Native’ Restructuring
Coinbase is laying off about 700 workers, or 14% of its workforce, as CEO Brian Armstrong says the company is restructuring to become “lean, fast, and AI-native.” Engadget reports: Armstrong claimed he’d seen engineers “use AI to ship in days what used to take a team weeks” and that non-technical teams in the company are “shipping production code,” wh … ⌘ Read more
Intel Drivers With Mesa 26.2 Ready For Xe’s Support In Linux 7.1 To Better Handle Memory
Merged to the Intel Xe kernel graphics driver with Linux 7.1 is an addition to improve the video RAM memory pressure or out-of-memory behavior for Intel graphics with dedicated video memory. Introduced is support for purgeable buffer objects via a new user-space API to provide usage hints for enhancing what is purged under vRAM pressure. Merged this week to Mesa 26.2-devel is support for the Intel Mesa drivers to make … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.1-rc2 Released With Audio Fix For Steam Deck OLED, Other Fixes
Linux 7.1-rc2 is out for testing with its accumulation of initial bug and regression fixes that have been collected over the past week since the Linux 7.1 merge window was capped off… ⌘ Read more
ReactOS Introduces Unified Live/Install Media, New Storage Driver
ReactOS as the “open-source Windows” operating system project striving for binary compatibility with Microsoft Windows has seen some exciting improvements this week… ⌘ 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
Chinese Exports of Green Technologies Surged to Record Levels After Iran War Began
“The war in Iran has sent oil-starved countries scrambling for fuel,” CNN reported this week. And many of those countries now want renewable fuels, the article points out, “leaving them turning to the renewables king of the planet: China.”
Chinese exports of solar technology, batteries and electric vehicle … ⌘ Read more
Linux 7.1-rc2 Bringing Some More Improvements/Fixes For Older AMD GPUs
Merged on Friday ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc2 kernel release due out tomorrow were this week’s batch of Direct Rendering Manager (DRM) kernel graphics / display / accelerator driver fixes… ⌘ Read more
Retina Scan for Diabetes Could Also Reduce Deaths During Pregnancy in Developing Countries
This week Bill Gates wrote a blog post about a special camera from medtech startup Remidio, which delivers high-resolution images of a patient’s retina in seconds. The camera plugs into a phone running an AI system that watches for early signs of diabetes — all without needing a blood draw, e … ⌘ Read more
Disneyland Now Uses Face Recognition on Visitors
Plus: The NSA tests Anthropic’s Mythos Preview to find vulnerabilities, a Finnish teen is charged over the Scattered Spider hacking spree, and more. ⌘ Read more
Why Does Wikipedia Think I’m Evan Spiegel?
For the past week, a photo of me has been plastered on the CEO of Snap’s Wikipedia page. No one, not even Spiegel, seems to care. ⌘ Read more