Booking.com Hit By Data Breach
Booking.com says hackers accessed customer reservation data in a breach that may have exposed booking details, names, email addresses, phone numbers, addresses, and messages shared with accommodations. PCMag reports: On Sunday, users reported receiving emails from Booking.com, warning them that “unauthorized third parties may have been able to access certain booking information associated with your reservation.” The … ⌘ Read more

Mark Zuckerberg Is Reportedly Building an AI Clone To Replace Him In Meetings
According to the Financial Times, Meta is developing an AI avatar of Mark Zuckerberg that could interact with employees using his voice, image, mannerisms, and public statements, “so that employees might feel more connected to the founder through interactions with it.” The Verge reports: Meta may start allowing creators … ⌘ Read more

Maine Set To Become First State With Data Center Ban
Maine is on track to become the first U.S. state to impose a temporary statewide ban on new data center construction. “Lawmakers in Maine greenlit the text of a bill this week to block data centers from being built in the state until November 2027,” reports CNBC. “The measure, which is expected to get final passage in the next few days, also creates a council to suggest … ⌘ Read more

Californians Sue Over AI Tool That Records Doctor Visits
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Several Californians sued Sutter Health and MemorialCare this week over allegations that an AI transcription tool was used to record them without their consent, in violation of state and federal law. The proposed class-action lawsuit, filed on Wednesday in federal court in San Francisco, states that, within the p … ⌘ Read more

Servo now on crates.io
The Servo project has announced
the first release of servo as a crate for use as a
library.

As you can see from the version number, this release is not a 1.0
release. In fact, we still haven’t finished discussing what 1.0 means
for Servo. Nevertheless, the increased version number reflects our
growing confidence in Servo’s embedding API and its ability to meet
some users’ needs.

In … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic Asks Christian Leaders for Help Steering Claude’s Spiritual Development
Anthropic recently “hosted about 15 Christian leaders from Catholic and Protestant churches, academia, and the business world” for a two-day summit , reports the Washington Post:

Anthropic staff sought advice on how to steer Claude’s moral and spiritual development as the chatbot reacts to complex and unpredictable et … ⌘ Read more

Sam Altman’s Home Targeted a Second Time, Two Suspects Arrested
“Early Sunday morning, a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI’s CEO,” reportsThe San Francisco Standard, citing reports from the local police department:

The San Francisco Police Department announced the arrest of two suspects, Amanda Tom, 25, and Muhamad Tarik Hussein, 23, who were booked for negligent disch … ⌘ Read more

Robot Birds Deployed by Park to Attract Real Birds - Built By High School Students
“Robotic bird decoys are being deployed at Grand Teton National Park,” reports Interesting Engineering, “to influence the behavior of real sage grouse and help restore a declining population.”. Robotics mentor Gary Duquette describes the machines as “kind of a Frankenbird.” (SFGate shows one of the robot birds … ⌘ Read more

Security updates for Thursday
Security updates have been issued by Debian (firefox-esr, postgresql-13, and tiff), Fedora (bind, bind-dyndb-ldap, cef, opensc, python-biopython, python-pydicom, and roundcubemail), Slackware (mozilla), SUSE (ckermit, cockpit-repos, dnsdist, expat, freerdp, git-cliff, gnutls, heroic-games-launcher, libeverest, openssl-1_1, openssl-3, polkit, python-poetry, python-requests, python311-social-auth-app-django, and SDL2_image-devel), and Ubuntu (dogtag-pki, gdk-pixbuf, linux, linux-aws, … ⌘ Read more

Artemis II Astronauts Break Apollo Record For Farthest Distance Humans Have Traveled From Earth
Artemis II has broken the Apollo 13 record for the farthest distance humans have ever traveled from Earth. NASA reports: The Artemis II crew of NASA astronauts Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, and Christina Koch, along with CSA (Canadian Space Agency) astronaut Jeremy Hansen have set th … ⌘ Read more

Artemis Astronauts Enter Moon’s Gravitational Pull, Catch First Glimpses of Far Side
NASA’s Artemis astronauts are now entering “the lunar sphere of influence,” reports NBC News, “meaning the pull of the moon’s gravity will become stronger than Earth’s.” Now as they begin their swing around the moon, the Artemis astronauts “are chasing after Apollo 13’s maximum range from Earth,” reports t … ⌘ Read more

Dell XPS 13 Snapdragon Elite Laptop Sees New EC Linux Driver To Improve Support
Last month Dell upstreamed the firmware needed for their XPS 13 935 Snapdragon X1 Elite laptop. This makes the Linux outlook for this ARM-based Dell XPS laptop much better than before in not having to worry about extracting necessary firmware blobs from Windows 11. Now another step forward for the Dell XPS 13 9345 is being made with a new EC driver being posted to enhance the hardware support… ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Details Their Upgrade To EPYC Turin For 2x Throughput, 50% Better Perf/Watt
Cloudflare’s technical blog posts about their hardware and software efforts are always a treat to read. Their latest fascinating technical content is on their newest “Gen 13” server platform based around AMD EPYC Turin where they are now achieving 2x throughput and 50% better performance-per-Watt thanks to these latest-generation AMD EPYC server processors paired with software improvements too… ⌘ Read more

Millions Face Mobile Internet Outages in Moscow. ‘Digital Crackdown’ Feared
13 million people live in Moscow, reports CNN.

But since early March the city “has experienced internet and mobile service outages on a level previously unseen.” (Though Wi-Fi access to the internet is still available…) Russian social media “is flooded with jokes and memes about sending letters by carrier pigeons or using sma … ⌘ Read more

Dell Upstreams Firmware For The XPS Snapdragon X Elite Laptop
When it comes to using Qualcomm Snapdragon X1 Elite laptops on Linux, one of the big challenges have involved the need to extract the necessary firmware from the Windows 11 partition due to most vendors not providing the firmware in an easily redistributable and public form. The one exception has been the Lenovo ThinkPad with X1 Elite having upstream firmware in linux-firmware.git while now the Dell XPS model has joined the party too… ⌘ Read more

Debian 13.4 Released With Dozens Of Fixes
Debian 13.4 rolled out today with dozens of security fixes and other general bug fixes with the updated install media for Debian 13 Trixie… ⌘ Read more

ChatGPT, Other Chatbots Approved For Official Use In the Senate
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A top Senate administrator on Monday gave aides the green light to use three artificial intelligence chatbots for official work, a reflection of how widespread the use of the products has become in workplaces around the globe. The chief information officer for the Senate sergeant-at-arms, w … ⌘ Read more

@lyse@lyse.isobeef.org still not as bad as the time a fire started in the breaker panel for my building and I had to personally put it out myself with a fire extinguisher.

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Instagram Discontinues End-To-End Encryption For DMs
Meta plans to remove end-to-end encryption (E2EE) from Instagram direct messages by May 8, 2026. “Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we’re removing this option from Instagram in the coming months,” says Meta. “Anyone who wants to keep messaging with end-to-end encryption can easily do that on WhatsApp.” The Hacker News reports: The … ⌘ Read more

Qatar Helium Shutdown Puts Chip Supply Chain On a Two-Week Clock
Iranian drone strikes shut down a major helium facility in Qatar, removing about 30% of global helium supply and raising concerns for the semiconductor industry, which relies on the gas for chip fabrication. “QatarEnergy declared force majeure on existing contracts on March 4, freeing it from supply obligations to customers,” reports Tom’s Hardwar … ⌘ Read more

Don’t Get Used To Cheap AI
AI services may not stay cheap for long, as companies like OpenAI and Anthropic are currently subsidizing usage to rapidly grow market share. As these companies move toward profitability and potential IPOs, Axios reports that investors will likely push them to increase prices and improve margins. An anonymous reader shares an excerpt from the report: Flashback: Silicon Valley has seen this movie before. The so-called “mil … ⌘ Read more

Digg Relaunch Fails
sdinfoserv writes: After running a Reddit clone for a couple of months, the Digg beta shut down again. The website is a splash memo from CEO Justin Mezzell, blaming the latest “Hard Reset” on bots. “Building on the internet in 2026 is different,” writes Mezzell. “We learned that the hard way. Today we’re sharing difficult news: we’ve made the decision to significantly downsize the Digg team…”

The decision was made after struggling … ⌘ Read more

Backblaze Hosts 314 Trillion Digits of Pi Online
BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Cloud storage company Backblaze has partnered with StorageReview to make a massive dataset containing 314 trillion digits of Pi publicly accessible. The digits were calculated by StorageReview in December 2025 after months of heavy computation designed to stress modern hardware. The dataset now hosted in the cloud weighs in at over … ⌘ Read more

Meta Delays Rollout of New AI Model After Performance Concerns
Meta has delayed the release of its next major AI model after internal tests showed it lagging behind competing systems from Google, OpenAI, and Anthropic. The New York Times reports: The model, code-named Avocado, outperformed Meta’s previous A.I. model and did better than Google’s Gemini 2.5 model from March, two of the people said. But it has not … ⌘ Read more

Live Nation Execs Brag About ‘Robbing’ Ticket Buyers In Slack DMs
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Pitchfork: Earlier this week, the U.S. Department of Justice and Live Nation reached a settlement in the DOJ’s antitrust lawsuit against the concert giant. During the trial, which lasted only a week, representatives for Live Nation had moved to exclude a collection of Slack direct messages from 2022 between … ⌘ Read more

Apple’s App Store In China Gets Lower 25% Commission To Appease Regulators
Apple will cut its App Store commission in China from 30% to 25% starting March 15, with small-business and mini-app rates dropping from 15% to 12%. AppleInsider reports: Chinese regulators have been back and forth with Apple in recent years over the 30% App Store commission. The latest publicly known pressure occurred after Pre … ⌘ Read more

Facial Recognition Error Jails Innocent Grandmother For Months
Mr. Dollar Ton shares a report from the Guardian: Angela Lipps, 50, spent nearly six months in jail after Fargo police identified her as a suspect in an organized bank fraud case using facial recognition software, according to south-east North Dakota news outlet InForum. Lipps told the outlet she had never been to North Dakota and did not commit the c … ⌘ Read more

L’ampleur de l’État-maman et la santé de vos communes en quelques visualisations
Aujourd’hui, un billet un peu différent puisqu’il s’agit d’une visualisation de données, composée de deux parties. La première consiste à faire un état des lieux de l’État-maman, composée de plusieurs graphiques pour comprendre comment la France vit sous perfusion et pourquoi ça ne marche pas. Cette série de graphiques est visible ici. Et la seconde, […] ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA Adds Official Support For RHEL-Compatible Distributions Like AlmaLinux With CUDA 13.2
With CUDA 13.2 that is now shipping, NVIDIA has provided official support for Red Hat Enterprise Linux compatible distributions/downstreams like AlmaLinux to CUDA. With this official NVIDIA CUDA support for these RHEL-compatible distributions, NVIDIA is also allowing the NVIDIA packages to be distributed directly from the OS package repositories… ⌘ Read more

After making three crosses (state and mayoral election) my mate and I went into the wildernes. Well, nature at least. There are heaps of people out there, too. The 13°C (and still raising) are very nice. I’m drowing in sweat, though.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-03-08/

Framework 16 Gen1 Seeing Coreboot + AMD openSIL Port, Framework 13 AMD Gen1 To Follow
Work is underway by 9elements on porting Coreboot plus AMD openSIL to the first-generation Ryzen 7000 series Framework 16 laptop and is expected to be followed by a similar port to the Framework 13 Gen1 laptop too… ⌘ Read more

Smartphone Market To Decline 13% in 2026, Marking the Largest Drop Ever Due To the Memory Shortage Crisis
An anonymous reader shares a report: Worldwide smartphone shipments are forecast to decline 12.9% year-on-year (YoY) in 2026 to 1.1 billion units, according to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker. This decline will bring … ⌘ Read more

IBM Shares Crater 13% After Anthropic Says Claude Code Can Tackle COBOL Modernization
IBM shares plunged nearly 13% on Monday after Anthropic published a blog post arguing that its Claude Code tool could automate much of the complex analysis work involved in modernizing COBOL, the decades-old programming language that still underpins an estimated 95% of ATM transactions in the United States and … ⌘ Read more

Raspberry Pi Stock Rises Over Its Possible Use With OpenClaw’s AI Agents
This week Raspberry Pi saw its stock price surge more than 60% above its early-February low (before giving up some gains at the end of the week). Reuters notes the rise started when CEO Eben Upton bought 13,224 pounds worth of shares — but there could be another reason. “The rally in the roughly $800 million company has materialis … ⌘ Read more

After 16 Years, ‘Interim’ CTO Finally Eradicating Fujitsu and Horizon From the UK’s Post Office
Besides running tech operations at the UK’s Post Office, their interim CTO is also removing and replacing Fujitsu’s Horizon system, which Computer Weekly describes as “the error-ridden software that a public inquiry linked to 13 people taking their own lives.”

After over 16 years of cover … ⌘ Read more

DNA Technology Convicts a 64-Year-Old for Murdering a Teenager in 1982
“More than four decades after a teenager was murdered in California, DNA found on a discarded cigarette has helped authorities catch her killer,” reports CNN:

Sarah Geer, 13, was last seen leaving her friend’s houseï in Cloverdale, California, on the evening of May 23, 1982. The next morning, a firefighter walking home from work found … ⌘ Read more

Researchers Discover Ancient Bacteria Strain That Resists 10 Modern Antibiotics
CNN reports on a 13,000-year-old glacier in a Romanian cave, where scientists say a bacterial strain they thawed and analyzed “is resistant to 10 modern antibiotics used to treat diseases such as urinary tract infections and tuberculosis.”

But there’s no evidence the bacteria is harmful to humans, CNN notes, and … ⌘ Read more

It’s raining and raining and raining and raining. I had hoped my mate canceled the hike today. But he didn’t. He showed up. So, off we went to the Staufeneck Castle Ruin after having a lunch first. The rain drizzling on the umbrella was very nice and I was very glad that he dragged me outside.

It was super wet, though. Entire creeks were coming down on some path sections. A slippery, muddy mess on others. Our boots were already soaked a few kilometers in the trip. The important part was that the feet were warm, though, despite being wet. We barely met anybody in this lousy weather. So we had basically everything for us alone. That’s always great.

Visibility was poor the higher we got. At 13 a low hanging cloud was moving in, 14 is the result just three minutes later. We couldn’t see the castle 300 meters away anymore. No chance. It was really funny, because the houses in town at two kilometers distance were still visible. Poorly, but you could clearly make out the town. Not the castle, there was just a white wall of cloud :-)

On the way back, we warmed up with tea I brought along. After I dropped off my mate at the train station, I bumped into a fellow scout, so my wet feet cooled off completely in these 15 minutes we talked. The rainjacket mostly held up with the protection of the umbrella, just the sleeves were down. My rain trousers, on the other hand, leaked a little bit a the lower ends. I was glad when I could strip all the wet stuff. I would do it again, though. :-) Now, I’m swapping the newspaper in my boots every half an hour to absorb all the moisture.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/wanderung-auf-die-burg-staufeneck-2026-02-21/

Oh, our leaning silo laughs at the Leaning Tower of Pisa. :-D I’m wondering when it collapses. I’m waiting for this to happen for years now.

Amazon Service Was Taken Down By AI Coding Bot
An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon’s cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools [non-paywalled source], leading some employees to raise doubts about the US tech giant’s push to roll out these coding assistants.

Amazon Web Services experienced a 13-hour interruption to one system used by its customers in mid-December after enginee … ⌘ Read more

Britain Lost 14,000 Pubs, a Quarter, in 13 Years
Britain has lost more than 14,000 pubs since 2009, a decline from roughly 54,000 registered public houses and bars to under 40,000 by 2022, according to a new analysis of UK business register data by data analyst Lauren Leek. The North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands lost 25 to 30% of their stock; London saw the smallest decline.

Leek trained a random forest model on … ⌘ Read more

The EU Moves To Kill Infinite Scrolling
Doom scrolling is doomed, if the EU gets its way. From a report: The European Commission is for the first time tackling the addictiveness of social media in a fight against TikTok that may set new design standards for the world’s most popular apps. Brussels has told the company to change several key features, including disabling infinite scrolling, setting strict screen time breaks and changing … ⌘ Read more

Israeli Soldiers Accused of Using Polymarket To Bet on Strikes
An anonymous reader shares a report: Israel has arrested several people, including army reservists, for allegedly using classified information to place bets on Israeli military operations on Polymarket. Shin Bet, the country’s internal security agency, said Thursday the suspects used information they had come across during their military service to i … ⌘ Read more

600% Memory Price Surge Threatens Telcos’ Broadband Router, Set-Top Box Supply
Telecom operators planning aggressive fiber and fixed wireless broadband rollouts in 2026 face a serious supply problem – DRAM and NAND memory prices for consumer applications have surged more than 600% over the past year as higher-margin AI server segments absorb available capacity, according to Counterpoint Research.

… ⌘ Read more

Anna’s Archive Quietly ‘Releases’ Millions of Spotify Tracks, Despite Legal Pushback
Anna’s Archive, the shadow library that announced last December it had scraped Spotify’s entire catalog, has quietly begun distributing the actual music files despite a federal preliminary injunction signed by Judge Jed Rakoff on January 16 that explicitly barred the site from hosting or distributing the copyrigh … ⌘ Read more

Detroit Automakers Take $50 Billion Hit
The Detroit Big Three – General Motors, Ford and Stellantis – have collectively announced more than $50 billion in write-downs on their electric-vehicle businesses after years of aggressive investment into a transition that, even before Republican lawmakers abolished a $7,500 federal tax credit last fall, was already running below expectations.

U.S. EV sales fell more than 30% in the fourth qua … ⌘ Read more

Meta’s New Patent: an AI That Likes, Comments and Messages For You When You’re Dead
Meta was granted a patent in late December that describes how a large language model could be trained on a deceased user’s historical activity – their comments, likes, and posted content – to keep their social media accounts active after they’re gone.

Andrew Bosworth, Meta’s CTO, is listed as the primary autho … ⌘ Read more

Google Warns EU Risks Undermining Own Competitiveness With Tech Sovereignty Push
Europe risks undermining its own competitiveness drive by restricting access to foreign technology, Google’s president of global affairs and chief legal officer Kent Walker told the Financial Times, as Brussels accelerates efforts to reduce reliance on U.S. tech giants. Walker said the EU faces a “competitive parad … ⌘ 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

EPA Reverses Long-Standing Climate Change Finding, Stripping Its Own Ability To Regulate Emissions
President Donald Trump announced Thursday that the Environmental Protection Agency is rescinding the legal finding that it has relied on for nearly two decades to limit the heat-trapping pollution that spews from vehicle tailpipes, oil refineries and factories. From a report: The … ⌘ Read more