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Linus Torvalds warns Linux devs: Stop cluttering patches with automated, useless links  ZDNET

An Associated Press investigation based on tens of thousands of leaked documents revealed Tuesday that American technology companies designed and built core components of China's surveillance apparatus over the past 25 years, selling billions of dollars in equipment to Chinese police and government agencies despite warnings about human rights abuses. IBM partnered with Chinese defense contractor Huadi in 2009 to develop predictive policing systems for the "Golden Shield" project, AP reports, citing classified government blueprints. The technology enabled mass detentions in Xinjiang, where administrators assigned 100-point risk scores to Uyghurs with deductions for growing beards or being aged 15-55. Dell promoted a laptop with "all-race recognition" capabilities on its WeChat account in 2019. Thermo Fisher Scientific marketed DNA kits as "designed" for ethnic minorities including Uyghurs and Tibetans until August 2024. Oracle, Microsoft, HP, Cisco, Intel, NVIDIA, and VMware sold geographic mapping software, facial recognition systems, and cloud infrastructure to Chinese police through the 2010s. The surveillance network tracks "key persons" whose movements are restricted and monitored, with one estimate suggesting 55,000 to 110,000 people were placed under residential surveillance in the past decade. China now has more surveillance cameras than the rest of the world combined.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Here’s how the Pixel Watch team reconfigured complex emergency communications systems for a brand new form on your wrist.Here’s how the Pixel Watch team reconfigured complex emergency communications systems for a brand new form on your wrist.

Pakistan has built surveillance systems that it is actively using to spy on millions of its citizens and to block millions of internet sessions, according to Amnesty International. The Asian nation's Lawful Intercept Management System enables intelligence agencies to tap calls and texts across all four major mobile operators. A Chinese-built firewall, WMS 2.0, currently blocks approximately 650,000 web links and restricts platforms including YouTube, Facebook, and X. The surveillance infrastructure combines technology from Chinese company Geedge Networks, U.S.-based Niagara Networks, France's Thales DIS, Germany's Utimaco, and UAE-based Datafusion. Balochistan province has experienced years-long internet blackouts under the system.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Qualcomm Snapdragon X Elite Linux Performance Improving But Short Of AMD Ryzen & Intel Core Ultra  Phoronix

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. MocaccinoOS 25.09, an updated build of the project's minimalist, Gentoo-based Linux distribution with a custom package manager called "Luet", has been released. The new build continues to be available as a set of live images featuring GNOME, KDE Plasma, MATE and Xfce desktops: "We are excited to announce....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. This week in DistroWatch Weekly:
Review: Shebang 25.8, LibreELEC 12.2.0, Debian GNU/Hurd 2025
News: AerynOS introduces package sets, postmarketOS seeks to encourage patches upstream, Redox imports new COSMIC desktop application, openSUSE extends support for Leap, Debian publishes refreshed Trixie media
Questions and answers: The importance of software updates
Released last week:....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Jin Asanami has announced the release of Kamuriki Linux 4.00, a major update of the project's Debian-based Linux distribution with a classic Windows-like LXQt theme and the Wine compatibility layer for running Windows applications under Linux. The release announcement (in Japanese) divulges the second installment of the new....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Nate Graham has announced the availability of the inaugural release of KDE Linux, a general-purpose Linux distribution built by the KDE project and featuring cutting-edge KDE technologies. KDE Linux comes with an immutable base system with packages from Arch Linux, while everything else is either compiled by the....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The Linux Mint team have announced the release of Linux Mint 22.2 "Zara", an Ubuntu-based version which will receive updates through to 2029. The 22.2 release includes several new features, including new full screen options for the Hypnotix IPTV player, a version of the libAdwaita library to support....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The Linux From Scratch project (also called LFS) has announced the release of version 12.4 of the project's guide. This guide walks the reader through the steps to create a minimal Linux distribution from source code. The release announcement reads: "The Linux From Scratch community announces the release....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The AerynOS project has announced the release of AerynOS 2025.08, a new version of the project's independently-developed, rolling-release Linux distribution for general desktop use and with a custom package manager called "moss": "Closing out August 2025, we are proud to announce our third release of the year. This....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. This week in DistroWatch Weekly:
Review: Tribblix 0m37
News: KDE introduces first-run setup wizard, CalyxOS plans final update before infrastructure overhaul, FreeBSD status update
Tips and tricks: Malware warnings about Linux ISO files
Released last week: GhostBSD 25.02, Br OS 13.0, MODICIA O.S. 6.12.41, FreedomBox 2025-08-28
Torrent corner: Armbian, BigLinux, GhostBSD, Linux....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Sunil Vechalapu has announced the release of a major new update of FreedomBox, a Debian-based Linux distribution for private servers, with a web-based configuration utility. This is the project's first stable released based on Debian 13 "Trixie". (As the distribution's releases don't have version numbers, we took the....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Marco M. Mariani has announced the availability of a major update of MODICIA O.S., a Debian-based multimedia distribution designed primarily for musicians, graphic designers and video makers. This is the project's first build based on the recently-released Debian 13: "The new MODICIA O.S. 6.12.41, code-named 'Caravaggio', marks a....

Ubuntu users faced severe update delays following 36-minute Canonical server downtime  TechRadar

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: X enthusiast and Reddit shareholder Sam Altman had an epiphany on Monday: Bots have made it impossible to determine whether social media posts are really written by humans, he posted. The realization came while reading (and sharing) some posts from the r/Claudecode subreddit, which were praising OpenAI Codex. OpenAI launched the software programming service that takes on Anthropic's Claude Code in May. Lately, that subreddit has been so filled with posts from self-proclaimed Code users announcing that they moved to Codex that one Reddit user even joked: "Is it possible to switch to codex without posting a topic on Reddit?" This left Altman wondering how many of those posts were from real humans. "I have had the strangest experience reading this: I assume it's all fake/bots, even though in this case I know codex growth is really strong and the trend here is real," he confessed on X. He then live-analyzed his reasoning. "I think there are a bunch of things going on: real people have picked up quirks of LLM-speak, the Extremely Online crowd drifts together in very correlated ways, the hype cycle has a very 'it's so over/we're so back' extremism, optimization pressure from social platforms on juicing engagement and the related way that creator monetization works, other companies have astroturfed us so i'm extra sensitive to it, and a bunch more (including probably some bots)." [...] Altman also throws a dig at the incentives when social media sites and creators rely on engagement to make money. Fair enough. But then Altman confesses that one of the reasons he thinks the pro-OpenAI posts in this subreddit might be bots is because OpenAI has also been "astroturfed." That typically involves posts by people or bots paid for by the competitor, or paid by some third-degree contractor, giving the competitor plausible deniability. [...] Altman surmises, "The net effect is somehow AI twitter/AI Reddit feels very fake in a way it really didn't a year or two ago." If that's true, who's fault is it? GPT has led models to become so good at writing, that LLMs have become a plague not just to social media sites (which have always had a bot problem) but to schools, journalism, and the courts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google Quantum AI has been selected to participate in the DARPA Quantum Benchmarking Initiative (QBI).

We’re sharing trending destinations for holiday travel along with an updated analysis on the best time to book, using Google Flights data.We’re sharing trending destinations for holiday travel along with an updated analysis on the best time to book, using Google Flights data.

Lethal Race Condition for Linux: The Trick That Turns a POSIX Signal Into a Weapon  Red Hot Cyber