Went 2/3 at Magic today: Prosper dominated game 1, Ash and his Knights came within a single planar die roll of winning game 2, and then Atraxa came up with the win in a fairly tight game 3. All in all, not a bad afternoon of Magic.

US Cable TV Industry Faces ‘Dramatic Collapse’ as Local Operators Shut Down - or Become ISPs
America’s cable TV industry “is undergoing its most dramatic collapse in history,” reports Cord Cutters News, “with operators large and small waving the white flag on traditional TV service and pointing their customers toward streaming platforms instead.” Just in 2025 Comcast lost 1.2 … ⌘ Read more

DOJ Charges Super Micro Co-Founder For Smuggling $2.5 Billion In Nvidia GPUs To China
Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from CNN: The co-founder of Super Micro Computer and two others were charged with diverting $2.5 billion worth of servers with Nvidia’s artificial intelligence chips to China, in violation of U.S. laws barring exports to that country without a license. Yih-Shya … ⌘ Read more

AMD Preps More GFX12.1 Enablement For Linux 7.1, Initial VCN 5.0.2 & JPEG 5.0.2 IP
AMD today sent out another batch of AMDGPU kernel graphics driver and AMDKFD kernel compute driver changes to DRM-Next ahead of next month’s Linux 7.1 merge window… ⌘ Read more

OpenAI Acquires Developer Tooling Startup Astral
OpenAI announced it’s acquiring developer tooling startup Astral to strengthen its Codex AI coding assistant, which has over 2 million weekly users and has seen a three-fold increase in user growth since the start of the year. CNBC reports: “Through it all, though, our goal remains the same: to make programming more productive. To build tools that radically change what it … ⌘ Read more

Cloudflare Appeals Piracy Shield Fine, Hopes To Kill Italy’s Site-Blocking Law
Cloudflare is appealing a 14.2 million-euro fine from Italy for refusing to comply with its “Piracy Shield” law, which requires blocking access to websites on its 1.1.1.1 DNS service within 30 minutes. The company argues the system lacks oversight, risks widespread overblocking, and could undermine core Internet infrastru … ⌘ Read more

Samsung Ends $2,899 Galaxy Z TriFold Sales After Just Three Months
Samsung is reportedly ending sales of the Galaxy Z TriFold just months after launch, likely due to “high production costs” and limited supply. 9to5Google reports: The Galaxy Z TriFold launched in South Korea barely four months ago, arriving in Samsung’s home market ahead of a larger debut in the U.S. and other markets in January. The $2,899 s … ⌘ Read more

Intel Compute Runtime 26.09.37435.1 Brings More Features & Performance Optimizations
Following this morning’s Intel Graphics Compiler 2.30.1 release, the Intel Compute Runtime 26.09.37435.1 is now available for this open-source OpenCL and Level Zero compute stack for Intel graphics hardware on Windows and Linux… ⌘ Read more

Asteroid Ryugu Has All of the Main Ingredients For Life
Samples from the asteroid Ryugu contain all five nucleobases – the key building blocks of DNA and RNA. “This strengthens the idea that asteroids may have brought the ingredients for the first living organisms to Earth long ago,” reports New Scientist. From the report: Japan’s Hayabusa 2 spacecraft visited Ryugu in 2018, where it shot two projectiles – one sma … ⌘ Read more

Intel Graphics Compiler 2.30.1 Exposes HF8 Support For Crescent Island
Intel Graphics Compiler 2.30.1 is now available for this LLVM/Clang-based compiler stack used by the Compute Runtime on Linux and under Windows is used both for graphics and compute… ⌘ Read more

Apple Launches AirPods Max 2 With Better ANC, Live Translation
Apple has quietly announced the AirPods Max 2, featuring improved active noise cancellation, an H2 chip, and new features like adaptive audio and AI-powered real-time translation. Like the original model, these headphones start at $549. The Verge reports: As noted by Apple, the AirPods Max 2 offer active noise-cancellation that’s 1.5 times mo … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.1 To Retire UDP-Lite - Allows For Better Performance With Cleansed Code
The upcoming Linux 7.1 kernel cycle is set to retire UDP-Lite support. The UDP-Lite protocol allowed for partial checksums where potentially damaged/corrupted packets are still delivered to the application. Since the Linux 2.6.20 days there has been UDP-Lite support but the kernel is now set to retire it given breakage that has persisted for years and cleaning up the networking code can yield a performance advantage for non-UDP-Lit … ⌘ Read more

The UK Will Invest Billions to Build a Nuclear Fusion Industry
The UK’s science minister is announcing details of a five-year, £2.5 billion investment in nuclear fusion, reports the Times of London, “including building one of the world’s first prototype fusion power plants in Nottinghamshire and developing a UK sector projected to employ 10,000 people by 2030.”

Despite the potentially transformative impact … ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.2 Released With Many Improvements
Just under one year since the long-awaited GIMP 3.0 release, GIMP 3.2 is out today as the first feature release building off the GIMP 3.0 foundation… ⌘ Read more

US Set To Receive $10 Billion Fee For Brokering TikTok Deal
The deal to take control of TikTok’s U.S. business came with an unusual condition, according to people familiar with the matter. The investors — which include Oracle, Abu Dhabi investor MGX, and private-equity firm Silver Lake — “paid the Treasury Department about $2.5 billion when the deal closed in January,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “and are set t … ⌘ 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

AMD ZenDNN 5.2 Brings A Major Redesign, AOCC 5.1 Recently Released
AMD today released ZenDNN 5.2 as the latest versio nof their deep nueral network library that now introduces their next-generation runtime architecture. ZenDNN 5.2 is designed to deliver better performance and geater scalability over earlier versions of this AMD library that began as their take on Intel’s open-source oneDNN… ⌘ Read more

Mesa 26.0.2 Has Plenty Of Graphics Driver Fixes From Intel & RADV Vulkan To Old R300g
Mesa 26.0.2 is now available as the latest bi-weekly stable point release for this set of open-source graphics drivers predominantly used on Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

Swiss E-Voting Pilot Can’t Count 2,048 Ballots After USB Keys Fail To Decrypt Them
A Swiss e-voting pilot was suspended after officials couldn’t decrypt 2,048 ballots because the USB keys needed to unlock them failed. “Three USB sticks were used, all with the correct code, but none of them worked,” spokesperson Marco Greiner told the Swiss Broadcasting Corporation’s Swissinfo service. The canton … ⌘ Read more

Meta To Charge Advertisers a Fee To Offset Europe’s Digital Taxes
Meta will begin charging advertisers a 2-5% “location fee” to offset digital services taxes imposed by several European countries, including the UK, France, Italy, Spain, Austria, and Turkey. Reuters reports: The fee, for image or video ads delivered on Meta platforms including WhatsApp click-to-message campaigns and marketing messages together w … ⌘ Read more

Valve Faces Second, Class-Action Lawsuit Over Loot Boxes
Valve is facing a new consumer class-action lawsuit two weeks after New York sued the video game company for “letting children and adults illegally gamble” with loot boxes. The new lawsuit is similar, alleging that loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and Team Fortress 2 are “carefully engineered to extract money from consumers, including children, t … ⌘ Read more

exfatprogs 1.3.2 Brings Improvements To mkfs.exfat, fsck.exfat
For those making use of Microsoft’s exFAT file-system under Linux, tagged today was exfatprogs 1.3.2 as the newest update to these open-source user-space programs for going along with the Linux kernel’s exFAT file-system driver… ⌘ 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

NVIDIA 595 Linux Driver Running Well In Early Benchmarks
Last week NVIDIA released the 595.45.04 beta Linux driver as their first public build in the R595 release branch. The NVIDIA R595 Linux driver is bringing a number of Vulkan driver improvements, HDR enhancements, DRI3 v1.2 support, and a variety of other improvements. Benchmarking the NVIDIA 595.45.04 Linux driver the past few days on GeForce RTX 50 “Blackwell” have been showing some nice incremental performance improvements over the current NVIDIA 590 driver sta … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA 595 Linux Driver Running Well In Early Benchmarks
Last week NVIDIA released the 595.45.04 beta Linux driver as their first public build in the R595 release branch. The NVIDIA R595 Linux driver is bringing a number of Vulkan driver improvements, HDR enhancements, DRI3 v1.2 support, and a variety of other improvements. Benchmarking the NVIDIA 595.45.04 Linux driver the past few days on GeForce RTX 50 “Blackwell” have been showing some nice incremental performance improvements over the current NVIDIA 590 driver sta … ⌘ Read more

Robotic Surgery Performed Remotely on Patient 1,500 Miles Away
“A surgeon in London says he has performed the UK’s first long-distance robotic operation,” reports the BBC, “on a patient located 1,500 miles (2,400km) away…”

Leading robotic urological surgeon Professor Prokar Dasgupta said it felt “almost as if I was there” as he carried out a prostate removal on [62-year-old] Paul Buxton… It is hoped tha … ⌘ Read more

Steam on Linux Numbers Dropped to 2.23% in February
“In November Steam on Linux use hit an all-time high of 3.2%,” reports Phoronix. And then in December Steam on Linux jumped even higher, to 3.58%.

But January’s numbers settled a little lower, at 3.38%. And last Monday the February numbers were released, showing Steam on Linux at… 2.23%?

Like with prior times where there are wild drops in Linux use, the Steam Survey sh … ⌘ Read more

2/3 of Node.Js Users Run an Outdated Version. So OpenJS Announces Program Offering Upgrade Providers
How many Node.js users are running unsupported or outdated versions. Roughly two thirds, according to data from Node’s nonprofit steward, OpenJS.

So they’ve announced “the Node.js LTS Upgrade and Modernization program” to help enterprises move safely off legacy/end-of-life Node. … ⌘ Read more

Linux 7.0 Adds A New Minor Performance Optimization Shown With AMD Zen 2 CPUs
The Linux event poll “epoll” code for efficient I/O multiplexing and monitoring of file descriptors for seeing when I/O is possible has a new optimization merged today for Linux 7.0… ⌘ Read more

Astronomers Think They’ve Spotted a Galaxy That’s 99.9% Dark Matter
Astronomers have spotted a galaxy they believe is made of 99.9% dark matter, reports CNN — and it’s so faint, it’s almost invisible:

CDG-2, which is about 300 million light-years from Earth, appears to be so rich in dark matter that it could belong to a hypothesized subset of low surface brightness galaxies called “dark galaxies,” which are … ⌘ Read more

Budgie 10.10.2 Brings Improved Labwc Wayland Compositor Integration
Out today is Budgie 10.10.2 as the latest minor update to this open-source desktop environment that began as part of the Solus Linux project… ⌘ Read more

Resources For GNOME Adds Intel Xe GPU Power Usage & Intel NPU Frequency Reporting
Resources, the modern GNOME GTK4/libadwaita-based GUI application for system resource monitoring and an alternative to GNOME System Monitor, is out with a new update. Resources 1.10.2 brings some nice improvements for those running GNOME on modern Intel hardware… ⌘ Read more

ZimaBoard 2: An Interesting Intel-Powered Linux Home Mini Server
For those looking for a low-power, well-built small office / home office Linux server with interesting connectivity options, the ZimaBoard 2 is an interesting option that has been available for some months now and powered by the Intel N150 processor. Besides the interesting single board hardware and well built aluminum chassis, the offering is rounded out by being preloaded with ZimaOS as a Linux-based “personal cloud OS” to easily get hosting for your own SOHO … ⌘ Read more

NVIDIA R595 Linux Driver Beta Brings New Vulkan Support & DRI3 v1.2
Following the recent NVIDIA R595 driver release for Windows, NVIDIA today released the 595.45.04 driver for Linux users as a beta version in the R595 release stream… ⌘ Read more

AMD DCN 4.2 IP, GFX 12.1 Updates For AMDGPU Driver In Linux 7.1 Plus GCN 1.1 APU DC
AMD has begun staging AMDGPU and AMDKFD kernel driver improvements for the upcoming Linux 7.1 cycle… ⌘ Read more

NASA Repairs Artemis 2 Rocket, Continues Eyeing April Moon Launch
NASA is eyeing an April launch window for the upcoming Artemis II mission after it repaired a helium-flow issue on the Space Launch System upper stage rocket. “Work on the rocket and spacecraft will continue in the coming weeks as NASA prepares for rolling the rocket out to the launch pad again later this month ahead of a potential launch in … ⌘ Read more

Accenture Acquires Ookla, Downdetector As Part of $1.2 Billion Deal
Accenture is acquiring Downdetector parent company Ookla from Ziff Davis in a $1.2 billion deal to bolster its network analytics and visibility tools for telecoms, hyperscalers, and enterprises. “The deal, which will transfer all of Ziff Davis’s Connectivity division to Accenture, includes Ookla’s Speedtest, Ekahau, and RootMetrics,” notes The … ⌘ Read more

GIMP 3.2 RC3 Released In Preparation For The Stable GIMP 3.2
Ahead of the stable GIMP 3.2 release hopefully happening soon, GIMP 3.2 RC3 was released this evening for testing… ⌘ Read more

Apple Introduces iPhone 17e With MagSafe and A19
Apple today announced the iPhone 17e with support for MagSafe and an upgraded A19 chip. The base model also gets a bump to 256GB of storage at $599, and Apple is equipping the device with its new scratch-resistant Ceramic Shield 2 glass that’s supposedly 3x more durable than the 16e. Macworld reports: MagSafe would normally mean significantly faster wireless charging speeds to … ⌘ Read more

AIs Can’t Stop Recommending Nuclear Strikes In War Game Simulations
“Advanced AI models appear willing to deploy nuclear weapons without the same reservations humans have when put into simulated geopolitical crises,” reports New Scientist:

Kenneth Payne at King’s College London set three leading large language models — GPT-5.2, Claude Sonnet 4 and Gemini 3 Flash — against each other in simulated war games. The s … ⌘ Read more

Chronic Ocean Heating Fuels ‘Staggering’ Loss of Marine Life, Study Finds
Slashdot reader JustAnotherOldGuy shared this report from the Guardian:

Chronic ocean heating is fuelling a “staggering and deeply concerning” loss of marine life, a study has found, with fish levels falling by 7.2% from as little as 0.1C of warming per decade. Researchers examined the year-to-year change of 33,000 populations in … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic’s Claude Pass ChatGPT, Now #1, on Apple’s ‘Top Apps’ Chart After Pentagon Controversy
“Anthropic may have lost out on doing business with the US government,” reports Engadget, “but it’s gained enough popularity to earn the number one spot on the App Store’s Top Free Apps leaderboard.”

Anthropic’s Claude AI assistant had already leaped to the #2 slot on Apple’s chart by late Friday … ⌘ Read more

Anthropic’s Claude Leaps to #2 on Apple’s ‘Top Apps’ Chart After Pentagon Controversy
Anthropic’s Claude AI assistant “jumped to the No. 2 slot on Apple’s chart of top U.S. free apps late on Friday,” reports CNBC:

The rise in popularity suggests that Anthropic is benefiting from its presence in news headlines, stemming from its refusal to have its models used for mass domestic surveillance or for f … ⌘ Read more

Google Launches Nano Banana 2 Model With Faster Image Generation
Google has launched Nano Banana 2 (Gemini 3.1 Flash Image), a faster, more realistic image generation model that becomes the default across Gemini, Search, Lens, and Flow. TechCrunch reports: The new Nano Banana 2 retains some of the high-fidelity characteristics of the Pro model but produces images faster. The company says you can create images … ⌘ Read more

New York Sues Valve For Enabling ‘Illegal Gambling’ With Loot Boxes
New York state has filed a lawsuit against Valve alleging that randomized loot boxes in games like Counter-Strike 2, Team Fortress 2, and Dota 2 amount to a form of unregulated gambling, letting users “pay for the chance to win a rare virtual item of significant monetary value.” From a report: While many randomized video game loot boxes have dr … ⌘ Read more

Benchmarking 18 Years Of Intel Laptop CPUs: Panther Lake As Much As 95x The Speed Of Penryn
For those curious how far Intel laptop CPU performance has evolved over the past nearly two decades, here are power and performance numbers when re-benchmarking all of the Intel-powered laptop CPUs I have on hand that are still operational from Penryn to Panther Lake. A ThinkPad from 2008 with the Core 2 Duo T9300 “Penryn” was still firing up and working with the latest upstream Intel open-source Linux driver support … ⌘ Read more

Fwupd 2.0.20 Brings New Hardware Support
Fwupd/LVFS lead developer Richard Hughes of Red Hat today released Fwupd 2.0.20 with continuing to advance firmware updating on Linux systems… ⌘ Read more

Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines: Clouds
Climate scientists trying to predict how much hotter the planet will get have long grappled with a surprisingly stubborn problem – clouds, which both reflect sunlight and trap heat, account for more than half the variation between climate predictions and are the main reason warming projections for the next 50 years range from 2 to 6 degrees Celsius.

Two … ⌘ Read more

Modern AMD Graphics Driver Surpasses Six Million Lines Of Code In Linux 7.0
It was less than four years ago that the modern AMDGPU/AMDKFD open-source driver stack was at four million lines of C code and header files. Now with the Linux 7.0 kernel it has surpassed six million lines. Or put another way, by the same calculations Linux 7.0-rc1 is at 39.2 million with the modern AMD kernel graphics driver now making up 15% of the kernel’s entire codebase as the single largest driver… ⌘ Read more

Red Hat Releases Tuned 2.27 For Adaptively Tuning Linux To Different Workloads
Red Hat engineers this weekend released Tuned 2.27, the newest version of their open-source project to provide a tuning profile delivery mechanism for Linux. Tuned makes it easier to adjust Linux power and performance characteristics depending upon the hardware and the different workload(s) for your Linux system deployment. Tuned is a replacement/alternative to Linux’s cpupower and power-profiles-daemon utilities… ⌘ Read more