Feed aggregator

Is WINUX really like using Windows 11 but on Linux? Surprisingly, yes, and here's why.  Windows Central

I ditched Word for the terminal — and I’m never going back  Windows Central

I ditched Word for the terminal — and I’m never going back  Windows Central

I ditched Word for the terminal — and I’m never going back  Windows Central

My distraction-free writing setup: why terminal editors like Neovim work for me  Windows Central

My distraction-free writing setup: why terminal editors like Neovim work for me  Windows Central

My distraction-free writing setup: why terminal editors like Neovim work for me  Windows Central

A research team just discovered older mice have more of the protein FTL1 in their hippocampus, reports ScienceAlert. The hippocampus is the region of the brain involved in memory and learning. And the researchers' paper says their new data raises "the exciting possibility that the beneficial effects of targeting neuronal ferritin light chain 1 (FTL1) at old age may extend more broadly, beyond cognitive aging, to neurodegenerative disease conditions in older people." FTL1 is known to be related to storing iron in the body, but hasn't come up in relation to brain aging before... To test its involvement after their initial findings, the researchers used genetic editing to overexpress the protein in young mice, and reduce its level in old mice. The results were clear: the younger mice showed signs of impaired memory and learning abilities, as if they were getting old before their time, while in the older mice there were signs of restored cognitive function — some of the brain aging was effectively reversed... "It is truly a reversal of impairments," says biomedical scientist Saul Villeda, from the University of California, San Francisco. "It's much more than merely delaying or preventing symptoms." Further tests on cells in petri dishes showed how FTL1 stopped neurons from growing properly, with neural wires lacking the branching structures that typically provide links between nerve cells and improve brain connectivity... "We're seeing more opportunities to alleviate the worst consequences of old age," says Villeda. "It's a hopeful time to be working on the biology of aging." The research was led by a team from the University of California, San Francisco — and published in Nature Aging..

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

I Tested 9 Ubuntu-Based Linux Distros, Here's How I Rank Them  How-To Geek

Imagination PowerVR Driver With Linux 6.18 To Support RISC-V  Phoronix

Cybersecurity company ESET thought they'd discovered the first AI-powered ransomware in the wild, which they'd dubbed "PromptLock". But it turned out to be the work of university security researchers... "Unlike conventional malware, the prototype only requires natural language prompts embedded in the binary," the researchers write in a research paper, calling it "Ransomware 3.0: Self-Composing and LLM-Orchestrated." Their prototype "uses the gpt-oss:20b model from OpenAI locally" (using the Ollama API) to "generate malicious Lua scripts on the fly." Tom's Hardware said that would help PromptLock evade detection: If they had to call an API on [OpenAI's] servers every time they generate one of these scripts, the jig would be up. The pitfalls of vibe coding don't really apply, either, since the scripts are running on someone else's system. The whole thing was actually an experiment by researchers at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. So "While it is the first to be AI-powered," the school said in an announcement, "the ransomware prototype is a proof-of-concept that is non-functional outside of the contained lab environment." An NYU spokesperson told Tom's Hardware a Ransomware 3.0 sample was uploaded to malware-analsys platform VirusTotal, and then picked up by the ESET researchers by mistake: But the malware does work: NYU said "a simulation malicious AI system developed by the Tandon team carried out all four phases of ransomware attacks — mapping systems, identifying valuable files, stealing or encrypting data, and generating ransom notes — across personal computers, enterprise servers, and industrial control systems." Is that worrisome? Absolutely. But there's a significant difference between academic researchers demonstrating a proof-of-concept and legitimate hackers using that same technique in real-world attacks. Now the study will likely inspire the ne'er-do-wells to adopt similar approaches, especially since it seems to be remarkably affordable. "The economic implications reveal how AI could reshape ransomware operations," the NYU researchers said. "Traditional campaigns require skilled development teams, custom malware creation, and substantial infrastructure investments. The prototype consumed approximately 23,000 AI tokens per complete attack execution, equivalent to roughly $0.70 using commercial API services running flagship models." As if that weren't enough, the researchers said that "open-source AI models eliminate these costs entirely," so ransomware operators won't even have to shell out the 70 cents needed to work with commercial LLM service providers... "The study serves as an early warning to help defenders prepare countermeasures," NYU said in an announcement, "before bad actors adopt these AI-powered techniques." ESET posted on Mastodon that "Nonetheless, our findings remain valid — the discovered samples represent the first known case of AI-powered ransomware." And the ESET researcher who'd mistakenly thought the ransomware was "in the wild" had warned that looking ahead, ransomware "will likely become more sophisticated, faster spreading, and harder to detect.... This makes cybersecurity awareness, regular backups, and stronger digital hygiene more important than ever."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MSI unveils MS-CF16 V3.0 Pico-ITX SBC with Alder Lake-N, Amston Lake, and Twin Lake processors  linuxgizmos.com

KDE Release First Alpha of its New Linux Distribution  OMG! Ubuntu

Linux 6.17 Lands Fixes For Upcoming Rust 1.91  Phoronix

Running everything on Linux as root is a bad idea: Here's why, and what to do instead  xda-developers.com

KDE Linux Distribution Is Available for Public Testing, Download Now  9to5Linux

KDE Linux Distribution Is Available for Public Testing, Download Now  9to5Linux

KDE Linux Distribution Is Available for Public Testing, Download Now  9to5Linux

KDE Linux Distribution Is Available for Public Testing, Download Now  9to5Linux

KDE Linux Distribution Is Available for Public Testing, Download Now  9to5Linux