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Python Software Foundation: We are thrilled to announce that Anthropic has entered into a two-year partnership with the Python Software Foundation (PSF) to contribute a landmark total of $1.5 million to support the foundation's work, with an emphasis on Python ecosystem security. This investment will enable the PSF to make crucial security advances to CPython and the Python Package Index (PyPI) benefiting all users, and it will also sustain the foundation's core work supporting the Python language, ecosystem, and global community. Anthropic's funds will enable the PSF to make progress on our security roadmap, including work designed to protect millions of PyPI users from attempted supply-chain attacks. Planned projects include creating new tools for automated proactive review of all packages uploaded to PyPI, improving on the current process of reactive-only review. We intend to create a new dataset of known malware that will allow us to design these novel tools, relying on capability analysis. One of the advantages of this project is that we expect the outputs we develop to be transferable to all open source package repositories. As a result, this work has the potential to ultimately improve security across multiple open source ecosystems, starting with the Python ecosystem.

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Scott Adams, who kept cubicle denizens laughing for more than three decades with Dilbert, the bitingly funny comic strip that poked fun at the absurdity of corporate life, died Tuesday. He was 68. From a report: His death was tearfully revealed by his first ex-wife, Shelly Miles, at the start of Real Coffee With Scott Adams. In May, he said on the podcast that he had been diagnosed with prostate cancer, which had spread to his bones. "I expect to be checking out from this domain this summer," he said. In a statement he wrote that was read by Miles over six minutes, he said, "Things did not go well for me ... my body fell before my brain." Sprung from Adams' days as a Pacific Bell applications engineer in San Ramon, California, Dilbert debuted in 1989 and at the height of its popularity appeared in more than 2,000 newspapers across 65 countries and in 25 languages with an estimated worldwide readership of more than 150 million. Though it had the appropriate level of cartoon exaggeration, the strip keenly captured office life and struck a nerve with the white-collar class.

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JPMorgan Chase's chief financial officer Jeremy Barnum pushed back hard on Tuesday against President Donald Trump's proposed 10% cap on credit card interest rates, calling the measure "very bad for consumers" and "very bad for the economy" during a call with reporters. The proposed one-year cap, which Trump has said he wants implemented starting January 20, sent banking stocks tumbling last week and prompted financial groups to mount a defense. Barnum said JPMorgan would have to "change the business significantly and cut back" if the cap takes effect, adding that he believes the policy would produce "the exact opposite consequence to what the administration wants." Wall Street analysts remain skeptical the proposal will survive, noting that only Congress can enact such a measure. The average credit card interest rate in November stood at 20.97%, according to Federal Reserve data. Financial industry groups have countered that a 10% cap would result in millions of American households and small businesses losing access to credit entirely. A banking industry body called the potential impact "devastating."

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Moxie Marlinspike, the engineer who created Signal Messenger and set a new standard for private communications, is now trialing Confer, an open source AI assistant designed to make user data unreadable to platform operators, hackers, and law enforcement alike. Confer relies on two core technologies: passkeys that generate a 32-byte encryption keypair stored only on user devices, and trusted execution environments on servers that prevent even administrators from accessing data. The code is open source and cryptographically verifiable through remote attestation and transparency logs. Marlinspike likens current AI interactions to confessing into a "data lake." A court order last May required OpenAI to preserve all ChatGPT user logs including deleted chats, and CEO Sam Altman has acknowledged that even psychotherapy sessions on the platform may not stay private.

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Meta has begun laying off more than 1,000 employees from its Reality Labs division as the company redirects resources away from virtual reality and metaverse products toward AI wearables and smartphone features. The cuts amount to roughly 10% of Reality Labs' 15,000-person workforce, according to an internal post from CTO Andrew Bosworth reviewed by Bloomberg. Reality Labs has lost more than $70 billion since the start of 2021, and top executives discussed budget cuts as deep as 30% for the metaverse group in December. Meta plans to continue developing its Horizon metaverse platform, but the focus will shift almost exclusively to mobile phones rather than the fully immersive VR headsets the company originally envisioned.

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Microsoft announced Tuesday what it calls a "community first" initiative for its AI data centers, pledging to pay full electricity costs and reject local property tax breaks following months of growing opposition from residents facing higher power bills. The announcement in Washington, D.C. marks a clear departure from past practices; Microsoft has previously accepted tax abatements for data centers in Ohio and Iowa. Brad Smith, Microsoft's president, said the company has been developing the initiative since September. Residential power prices in data center hubs like Virginia, Illinois, and Ohio jumped 12-16% over the past year, faster than the U.S. average. Three Democratic senators launched an investigation last month into whether tech giants are raising residential bills. Microsoft also pledged a 40% improvement in water efficiency by 2030 and committed to replenishing more water than it uses in each district where it operates.

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New VoidLink Cloud-Native Malware Targets Linux Systems With Self-Deletion Capabilities  Cyber Press

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: President Donald Trump said in a social media post on Monday that Microsoft will announce changes to ensure that Americans won't see rising utility bills as the company builds more data centers to meet rising artificial intelligence demand. "I never want Americans to pay higher Electricity bills because of Data Centers," Trump wrote on Truth Social. "Therefore, my Administration is working with major American Technology Companies to secure their commitment to the American People, and we will have much to announce in the coming weeks." [...] Trump congratulated Microsoft on its efforts to keep prices in check, suggesting that other companies will make similar commitments. "First up is Microsoft, who my team has been working with, and which will make major changes beginning this week to ensure that Americans don't 'pick up the tab' for their POWER consumption, in the form of paying higher Utility bills," Trump wrote on Monday. Utilities charged U.S. consumers 6% more for electricity in August from a year earlier, including in states with many data centers, CNBC reported in November. Microsoft is paying close to attention to the impact of its data centers on local residents. "I just want you to know we are doing everything we can, and I believe we're succeeding, in managing this issue well, so that you all don't have to pay more for electricity because of our presence," Brad Smith, the company's president and vice chair, said at a September town hall meeting in Wisconsin, where Microsoft is building an AI data center. While Microsoft is moving forward with some facilities, the company withdrew plans for a data center in Caledonia, Wisconsin, amid loud opposition to its efforts there. The project would would have been located 20 miles away from a data center in the village of Mount Pleasant.

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5 ways Zorin OS makes switching from Windows feel effortless  How-To Geek

AI EdgeLabs Adds Advanced Risk and Compliance Center with Linux Audit Capabilities to Its AI Runtime Platform  01net

New Advanced Linux VoidLink Malware Targets Cloud and container Environments  The Hacker News

I was too advanced for Linux Mint until I discovered these 3 power user features  How-To Geek

Crashing 3 Times a Week and Stealing Data Secretly? A Programmer's Linux Migration: "Finally Deleted Windows 11 Completely"  36Kr

New VoidLink Cloud-Native Malware Attacking Linux Systems with Self-deletion Capabilities  Cyber Security News

Researchers from the startup Overview Energy have successfully demonstrated beaming power from a moving airplane to the ground using near-infrared light. It marks the first step toward space-based solar power satellites that could someday transmit energy from orbit to existing solar farms on Earth. IEEE Spectrum reports: Overview's test transferred only a sprinkling of power, but it did it with the same components and techniques that the company plans to send to space. "Not only is it the first optical power beaming from a moving platform at any substantial range or power," says Overview CEO Marc Berte, "but also it's the first time anyone's really done a power beaming thing where it's all of the functional pieces all working together," he says. "It's the same methodology and function that we will take to space and scale up in the long term." [...] Many researchers have settled on microwaves as their beam of choice for wireless power. But, in addition to the safety concerns about shooting such intense waves at the Earth, [Paul Jaffe, head of systems engineering] says there's another problem: microwaves are part of what he calls the "beachfront property" of the electromagnetic spectrum -- a range from 2 to 20 gigahertz that is set aside for many other applications, such as 5G cellular networks. "The fact is," Jaffe says, "if you somehow magically had a fully operational solar power satellite that used microwave power transmission in orbit today -- and a multi-kilometer-scale microwave power satellite receiver on the ground magically in place today -- you could not turn it on because the spectrum is not allocated to do this kind of transmission." Instead, Overview plans to use less-dense, wide-field infrared waves. Existing utility-scale solar farms would be able to receive the beamed energy just like they receive the sun's energy during daylight hours. So "your receivers are already built," Berte says. The next major step is a prototype demonstrator for low Earth orbit, after which he hopes to have GEO satellites beaming megawatts of power by 2030 and gigawatts by later that decade. Plenty of doubts about the feasibility of space-based power abound. It is an exotic technology with much left to prove, including the ability to survive orbital debris and the exorbitant cost of launching the power stations. (Overview's satellite will be built on earth in a folded configuration and it will unfold after it's brought to orbit, according to the company). "Getting down the cost per unit mass for launch is a big deal," Jaffe says. "Then, it just becomes a question of increasing the specific power. A lot of the technologies we're working on at Overview are squarely focused on that."

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Even Linus Torvalds ,The Creator of Linux, Is Vibe Coding (Why It Signals a Major Shift)  ucstrategies.com

Over a million Windows 11 & 10 users have already downloaded and installed this Linux distro  Neowin

Wow! After years of hard work and countless commits, we have finally reached a huge milestone: GIMP 3.0 is officially released! I am excited as I write this and can't wait to share some incredible new features and improvements in this release. GIMP 2.10 was released in 2018, and the first development version of GIMP 3.0 came out in 2020. GIMP 3.0 released on 16/March/2025. Let us explore how to download and install GIMP 3.0, as well as the new features in this version. Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post Download of the day: GIMP 3.0 is FINALLY Here! appeared first on nixCraft. 2025-03-18T03:45:26Z 2025-03-18T03:45:26Z Vivek Gite

Here is a quick list of all upgradeable packages on FreeBSD using pkg command. This is equivalent to apt list --upgradable command on my Debian or Ubuntu Linux system. Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post How to list upgradeable packages on FreeBSD using pkg appeared first on nixCraft. 2025-03-16T20:25:39Z 2025-03-16T20:25:39Z Vivek Gite

In a move that has sparked significant discussion within the Ubuntu Linux fan-base and community, Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, has announced its intention to explore the potential replacement of GNU Core Utilities with the Rust-based "uutils" project. They plan to introduce new changes in Ubuntu Linux 25.10, eventually changing it to Ubuntu version 26.04 LTS release in 2026 as Ubuntu is testing Rust 'uutils' to overhaul its core utilities potentially. Let us find out the pros and cons and what this means for you as an Ubuntu Linux user, IT pro, or developer. Love this? sudo share_on: Twitter - Facebook - LinkedIn - Whatsapp - Reddit The post Ubuntu to Explore Rust-Based “uutils” as Potential GNU Core Utilities Replacement appeared first on nixCraft. 2025-03-16T12:17:36Z 2025-03-16T12:17:36Z Vivek Gite