AV2 v1.0 Specification Released For Next-Gen Video Coding
As expected given AOM Video Model indications last week, the AV2 v1.0 specification was officially released on Friday… ⌘ Read more

Various USB Quirks Merged Ahead Of Linux 7.1-rc6
Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc6 kernel due out on Sunday, this week’s round of USB fixes have been merged with various new device quirks added as well as some patches as a result of scanning tools… ⌘ Read more

Journalist Spots Fugitive Terrorist Using Facial Recognition Software
Slashdot reader Bruce66423 writes: A German court this week sentenced a member of the Red Army Faction — a far-left terrorist organisation that operated in West Germany in the 1970s and 1980s — to jail. [67-year-old Daniela Klettewas was sentenced to 13 years for armed robberies, according to the Guardian, and “she also faces trial for … ⌘ Read more

DuckDuckGo Installs Up 30% After Google Announced AI Search
After Google announced AI-emphasizing changes to its search results, many web surfers began defecting to DuckDuckGo, reports TechCrunch. (They describe DuckDuckGo as “a privacy-focused alternative” that accounts for around 2% of the U.S. search market…)

DuckDuckGo said U.S. app installs went up 18.1% week-over-week on average during the May 20 to May 25 … ⌘ Read more

Software Stocks Have Best Month Since 2001. Talk of ‘SaaSpocalypse’ Subsides
Security company Okta shot up 30% Friday, reported CNBC, while data platform provider Snowflake jumped 50% this week.

They see it as part of a larger trend where software stocks “soared this week,” signaling “some companies are navigating their way through AI disruption better than Wall Street expected” and that investors “may ha … ⌘ Read more

Oh boy, it was bloody humid this morning. Just around 20°C when we left, but climbing rapidly. The flow of air when walking was okay, but as soon as we stopped, streams of sweat were pouring down on us. Luckily, it was cloudy, but the lack of wind was bad. Now, the sun is out, 29°C will be reached in an hour and I’m glad that the house is still cool. It will be a different story in a few weeks or months. Not looking forward to that at ll.

On the bright side, we saw the first tadpoles of the year and an also first, but sadly dead slow worm that probably some bird dropped on a bench next to the fountain. The fly was stuck to its feast and also cactus. The municipality fixed the railing nicely and we came across a giant patch of great looking fire bugs on the summit.

All in all, a successful stroll through the woods but for the humid heat.

https://lyse.isobeef.org/waldspaziergang-2026-05-30/

Cybercrime Crew Claims It Hacked Mike Lindell’s MyPillow
Plus: A ransomware group is now stealing data in person, BusPatrol wants to hand its license plate surveillance data to the cops, and more. ⌘ Read more

Genode OS 26.05 Released, Finishes Moving From GitHub To Codeberg
Genode OS 26.05 is out this week as the latest update for this original open-source operating system framework. With Genode OS 26.05, they have taken various features of their general purpose Sculpt OS operating system and turned them into reusable framework features… ⌘ Read more

One and a half weeks ago, our sunset delivered strong colors: https://lyse.isobeef.org/abendhimmel-2026-05-21/ Apologies for the damn fuzz in the optics.

I rode my bicyle to the scout flea market setup a few weeks ago when I had to stop to admire the morning sun lighting up the fields. https://lyse.isobeef.org/morgensonne-2026-05-08/ Of course, these photos don’t do justice at all.

Most of the time, I take a very very long time to do anything. If I say, for example, “I’ll build an IRC Web Client”, that may not happen for weeks, if not months, until my sub conscience has has time to process everything. It’s like basically a “feeling” of internal readiness. I never talk through it, never actively think about it, it just happens.

On the Money: Tex Edwards, Karen Silk, Kenyon Clarke, Brad Olsen, Eric Crampton, Don Braid, Anna Breman and more
On the Money (OTM) is our column of general frippery we observed within the worlds of business and government this week.

At Thursday’s Mainfreight result, an injustice of national significance was finally raised. ⌘ Read more

Fail File: Warwick Mortimer, businessman and investor
Each fortnight, Victoria Carter speaks to someone about failure, disappointment and what they learned. This week, she talks to Warwick Mortimer, a business owner, property owner/investor in New Zealand and Rarotonga. He describes himself as “seeing opportunities and going for them, and more than 50% of the time being right about them”.

I was really disappointed when: Well, there are usually reasons for disappo … ⌘ Read more

Linux Networking Still Seeing “Significantly Bigger” Pull Requests Due To AI
Last week’s collection of networking subsystem fixes for Linux 7.1 noted craziness continuing with no end in sight with a large pull request of fixes with many of them spurred on by AI/LLM coding agents. This week it’s “significantly bigger” than prior kernel cycles for this late stage of kernel development due to this assistance of large language models… ⌘ Read more

Radeon Software For Linux 26.12 Brings Ubuntu 26.04 Support
While most Linux enthusiasts and desktop users/gamers are comfortable just riding the latest upstream Linux kernel and Mesa drivers shipped by their distribution, for those enterprises preferring the officially blessed and QA’ed driver packages from AMD, last week marked the release of the Radeon Software for Linux 26.12 driver… ⌘ Read more

NZ sharemarket rises nearly 2% for the week
The New Zealand sharemarket had a frantic end to the week, with Tourism Holdings fielding a renewed takeover bid and leading stocks buffeted by a world index rebalancing.

The S&P/NZX 50 Index and the blue-chips were enjoying a solid day but suffered a late fall due to the largest quarterly rebalancing of the MSCI Equity indices. ⌘ Read more

Budget 2026’s thorny political issues
This week’s pre-election Budget suggests the Government believes it will have done just enough to win on Nov 7 this year and is instead setting itself up for the 2029 election, promising looser purse strings then.

That is a confident call. ⌘ Read more

NZ’s early AI adopters are already reaping the benefits
When Air New Zealand updated its uniforms last year, it faced a large and potentially expensive job: updating its library of 18,000 brand images.

“So, what are we going to do?” the airline’s data and AI lead, Mike Parsons, asked rhetorically at one of the last formal Techweek26 sessions in Auckland last week. ⌘ Read more

Intel Arc Pro B70 BMG-G31 Linux Gaming Performance
In recent weeks we have been exploring different areas of the Intel Arc Pro B70 graphics performance on Linux from various OpenCL and Vulkan to Level Zero compute benchmarks, scaling up to four Arc Pro B70 graphics cards, comparing to NVIDIA RTX PRO Blackwell, and other relevant tests. While not intended for gaming, many Phoronix readers keep raising requests for seeing the Arc Pro B70 performance for Linux gaming given the lack of any consumer BMG-G31 GPU. So fo … ⌘ Read more

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for May 28, 2026
Inside this week’s LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Dirk and Linus talk; BPF and GCC; private memory modes; BPF page-cache policies; major page faults; LLM kernel review; tiered-memory support; transparent huge pages; page mappings; Model Openness Tool.

• Briefs: Stenberg security stress; GTK PDF problems; Morton 2004 keynote; OpenBSD 7.9; Bambu’s AGPLv3 violations; Quotes; …

• [Announcements](https://lwn.net/Ar … ⌘ Read more

@movq@www.uninformativ.de @bender@twtxt.net Couldn’t agree more. I’ll check my list tomorrow that I started a few weeks ago.

DuckDuckGo search saw 28% more visits after Google said people love AI mode
Article URL: [https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/duckduckgos-ai-free-search-saw-nearly-28-percent-more-visits-in-the-week-following-googles-insistence-that-people-love-ai-mode/](https://www.pcgamer.com/hardware/duckduckgos-ai-free-search-saw-nearly-28-percent-more-visits-in-the-week-following-googles-insistence-that-people-love-ai-mode/ … ⌘ Read more

The long game: how F&P Healthcare shrugged off a 52-week low
Few New Zealand companies have grown their capital expenditure by 89% in a single year, and there would be even fewer who, having done that, have plans to grow it further.

It is all part of what Fisher & Paykel Healthcare (FPH) CEO Lewis Gradon sees as taking the longer-term view of thing … ⌘ Read more

Meet Mark Zuckerberg’s right-hand man
By Meghan Bobrowsky

Tensions were running high at Meta Platforms.

For weeks, rumours circulated that the company was planning a large layoff as it poured tens of billions of dollars into artificial intelligence. Then, employees were told their keystrokes and mouse clicks would be recorded to help train AI agents to use computers. ⌘ Read more

AI, job cuts and a very fragile mandate
In a week when the Government announced 8,700 public sector roles will go and AI will help fill the gaps, a lunchtime event at Parliament turned into something of a reality check on how fragile trust in AI has become in New Zealand.

One NZ’s second annual AI in Trust report, a nationally representative survey of 1,001 New Zealanders, shows 76% of us have interacted with AI-powered services in the past … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA 610.43.02 Linux Driver Released With Vulkan Improvements, DRM Color Pipeline API
NVIDIA is kicking off the new week with their first Linux driver beta in the R610 driver series that is succeeding the current R595 release branch… ⌘ Read more

I Spent a Week Recording Myself Doing Chores for Money. Who’s the Robot Now?
Cooking. Doing laundry. Tidying up. All your household tasks can be turned into data to train future humanoids—if you’re prepared for the consequences. ⌘ Read more

Commerce Commission’s gas pipe ruling to test who pays for system’s decline
The Commerce Commission’s final decision on gas pipeline regulation this week will test how far it is prepared to go in letting network owners recover costs earlier as gas demand weakens and the future of the network becomes more uncertain.

On Wednesday, the regulator will set the default price-quality path for gas pipeline businesses from Oct 1, 2026 (DPP4). The decision cover … ⌘ Read more

AI ‘capability leap’: 80% of software developers now using it
Late last year, AWS senior engineer Mike Nooney noticed a flurry of activity on social media that indicated something exciting had happened in his field: AI had taken what we described as a “capability leap”.

“So, I thought, let’s get in and have a look at Claude Code and some of the other tools,” he recounted to an audience at last week’s Techweek26 summit. ⌘ Read more

Results are in: BusinessDesk subscribers are a good-looking bunch
When we rolled out our subscriber survey, I thought it would take a few weeks to reach 500 respondents.

It took barely two days. ⌘ Read more

A visual push to start the week ⌘ Read more

NZ sharemarket trades flat, down 0.1%
The New Zealand sharemarket was a little hesitant as it entered a pivotal week for company earnings releases and economic moves.

The S&P/NZX 50 Index reached an intraday high of 13,101.27 but then fell late, closing at 12,970.80, down 21.03 points, or 0.16%. ⌘ Read more

FreeBSD Foundation Executive Director Tries Daily Driving FreeBSD On Laptop
Phoronix reports on a presentation about trying FreeBSD on modern Framework laptop from last week’s Open Source Summit hosted by the Linux Foundation:

With FreeBSD having worked on improving its laptop support over the past two years with some big changes and ongoing efforts for making a nice KDE desktop experience on FreeBS … ⌘ Read more

Trump says he is in no rush for an Iran deal that is far from finished
By Summer Said, Anat Peled and Alexander Ward

President Trump said Sunday he was in no hurry to complete an end-of-war agreement with Iran after spending weeks insisting Tehran had to quickly make nuclear concessions or face renewed attacks. ⌘ Read more

Canonical Is Shutting Down Ubuntu Pastebin
“Canonical says Ubuntu Pastebin will be decommissioned at the end of May 2026,” writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli, “as part of an infrastructure modernization effort.”

The announcement only appeared this week, giving the Linux community barely any warning before a service that has been tied to Ubuntu support culture for years suddenly disappears.

Ubuntu Pastebin has long been used for … ⌘ Read more

Mozilla Brings Web Serial Workflows to Firefox, Collaborates With Adafruit
The Web Serial API lets websites write to (and read from) serial devices using JavaScript, including USB and Bluetooth devices with virtual serial ports. And this week’s Firefox 151 release introduced support for the Web Serial API on desktop.

“Most folks won’t use this API,” acknowledges Mozilla’s blog, “but for our community … ⌘ Read more

I turn 33 this week, my tits are still pretty nice ⌘ Read more

GitHub Copilot & Claude Code Helped With Graphics, WiFi Linux Driver Issues This Week
For those curious about the growing use of AI and coding agents within the Linux kernel, this week there was another large batch of new patches fixed that were generated or co-authored by agents like Claude Code and GitHub Copilot… ⌘ Read more

I really dig #caturday on the Fediverse, so I thought I would start doing it here as well.

For this week, I’d like to introduce my spirit animal, Bowie.

Image

May his supreme laziness (and fuzzy-chunky-monkey cuteness) serve as an inspiration to you, too.

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Linus Torvalds on How AI is Impacting the Hunt for Linux Kernel Bugs
Linus Torvalds spoke this week at the Linux Foundation’s Open Source Summit North America, reports ZDNet — and described how AI is impacting Linux kernel development:

“In the last six months, we’ve seen a lot more commits,” Torvalds noted, estimating that “the last two releases, it’s been about 20% more commits than we had in the previo … ⌘ Read more

Free Software Foundation’s Call for ‘LibreLocals’ Answered on Six Continents - With More Coming
The Free Software Foundation announced this week that “its global call for free software supporters to organize LibreLocals this May resulted in free software supporters organizing forty-six LibreLocal events on six continents thus far.” (And new dates and locations are being added daily. … ⌘ Read more

Linux Mint Making Improvements To Its File Manager, Theme & Dialogs
The Linux Mint project today published their May 2026 status report to outline recent work done to this Ubuntu/Debian-based Linux platform and much of their focus in recent weeks on enhancements to their Cinnamon desktop environment… ⌘ Read more

AV2 Codec Looks Like It Will Be Officially Released Next Week
For years already AV2 has been in development as the successor to AV1 for this wonderful open-source, royalty-free video codec. While there was talk about releasing AV2 by the end of 2025, that didn’t happen but now latest indicators are pointing toward its formal debut next week… ⌘ Read more

The FBI Wants ‘Near Real-Time’ Access to US License Plate Readers
Plus: Google publishes a live exploit for an unpatched flaw, the feds arrest two men accused of creating thousands of nonconsensual deepfake nudes, and more. ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 Merges AMD Dynamic EPP Fixes, Intel Bartlett Lake Scaling Fix
Merged today for Linux 7.1 was this week’s power management fixes with a few notable fixes for both AMD and Intel platforms… ⌘ Read more

This Cannes Film Cost $500,000 to Make. $400,000 Was AI Compute Costs.
Higgsfield AI is debuting a 95-minute fully AI-generated film at Cannes called “Hell Grind” that reportedly cost $500,000 to make, $400,000 of which was spent on compute alone. The project took just two weeks to produce and is intended to showcase the startup’s AI production tools. But it also underscores the current limits of AI f … ⌘ Read more

On the Money: Grant Baker’s book launch, Ray Smith, Nikhil Ravishankar, a great AI speech, and more
On the Money (OTM) is our column of general frippery we observed within the worlds of business and government this week.

It was not the easiest week to be a departmental chief executive. Minister for the Public Service Nicola Willis signalled 9,000 public-sector jobs might go, and several agencies might be folded into on … ⌘ Read more

Linux Sound Subsystem Also Seeing Many Fixes Driven By AI/LLMs
It’s not only the Linux networking subsystem where many fixes have been appearing – including several notable security fixes for local privilege escalation issues – leading to “craziness” from AI / LLMs. The Linux sound subsystem has also been seeing an uptick in activity with many “assisted-by” patches coming about in recent weeks… ⌘ Read more

At Least 80% Responsibility For Ill Health In Old Age Down to Individual, Study Says
A new Oxford Longevity Project report argues that individuals bear at least 80% of the responsibility for ill health in old age. “The report (PDF), launched at the Smart Ageing Summit in Oxford last week, argues that individuals have far greater control over their longevity than is commonly understood,” re … ⌘ Read more

NZ sharemarket down almost 4% year to date
The retirement village stocks stole the show as the New Zealand sharemarket ended a volatile week with a gain of nearly 1%.

The S&P/NZX 50 Index climbed strongly in the late afternoon and closed at 12,991.31, up 113.24 points or 0.88%. ⌘ Read more