Feed aggregator

Intel bins its open-source Gaudi user-space code  Fudzilla.com

AI designs a Linux box in a week, and it boots first time  Fudzilla.com

A new Arctic Report Card recap shows how the Arctic has transformed in just 20 years, warming about twice as fast as the global average and losing most of its oldest sea ice. It's also triggering cascading impacts from "Atlantification" to permafrost-driven "rusting rivers" and more destructive storms. Scientific American reports: The first Arctic Report Card was released by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in 2006. Since then the region has warmed twice as fast as the global average. About 95 percent of the oldest, thickest sea ice is gone -- "the sliver that remains is collected in an area north of Greenland. Even the central Arctic Ocean is becoming warmer and saltier, causing more ice melt and changing how much heat is released into the atmosphere in a way that affects weather patterns around the world. Those are just some of the stark changes 20 years have wrought. The findings were highlighted in the 2025 Arctic Report Card, released on Tuesday. The Arctic Ocean is undergoing what scientists are calling "Atlantification" -- a process where warm, salty water from the Atlantic flows north, changing how waters of different temperatures and densities are layered in the Arctic, disrupting ecosystems and altering how heat moves from the water to the air. [...] The Arctic is simply becoming wetter, with more precipitation falling as rain instead of snow. June snow cover over the entire Arctic is half of what it was 60 years ago, the report found. Permafrost also continues to thaw, releasing once trapped carbon into the atmosphere and disgorging iron and other elements that have turned rivers and streams orange. These "rusting rivers," found in more than 200 watersheds, are more acidic than normal and have elevated levels of toxic metals that endanger local ecosystems. And as the permafrost thaws, the tundra of the Arctic biome is shrinking, and the boreal forest biome is creeping northward, disrupting ecosystems.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The Mabox Linux team have announced the release of Mabox Linux 25.12. The new version includes a series of updates and improvements to the desktop, volume controls, and introduces autotheming to the live session. "The panel configuration menu was recently enhanced to allow for quick configuration of the....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Rhino Linux is an Ubuntu-based distribution which offers a rolling-release upgrade approach. the project's latest snapshot improves on its Lomiri interface support and makes Lomiri available for its PINE64 devices: "As mentioned previously, our collaboration with UBPorts stipulated that we would be assisting in the development of Lomiri....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The MidnightBSD project has announced a new major release, version 4.0, which is available for 32-bit and 64-bit x86 machines. A long list of changes to the base platform and ports collection are covered in the project's release notes. "Removed libdispatch from base. rc.subr(8) now honors ${name}_env in....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The Kicksecure team has announced the availability of a new version of its security-focused, Debian-based distribution. The new version switches from using the Xfce desktop by default to running LXQt and the base system has been updated to use Debian 13. "port to Debian 13 'Trixie' ram-wipe -....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The Emmabuntüs project has announced a new version of their Debian-based distribution. The new release is based on Debian 13 and places a focus on accessibility options: "This new version of our distribution mainly focuses on accessibility improvements, developed as part of our collaboration with our friends at....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. This week in DistroWatch Weekly:
Review: OpenBSD 7.8
News: Jolla is working on a new Linux phone, Germany is saving money with Linux, Ubuntu to package AMD software for AI tasks, Fedora demonstrates how not to use AI tools to manage a system, Haiku ports Go language
Questions and answers:....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The Kali Linux team have announced a new version of their Debian-based distribution. The security and forensics platform includes new updates to the Plasma and GNOME desktops along with better Wayland support for instances running inside virtual machines. "Now that GNOME has moved to only supporting Wayland, and....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Michael Prokop has announced the release of Grml 2025.12, an updated stable release of the project's Debian-based live Linux system designed of system administrators: "We are proud to announce our new stable release, version 2025.12, code-named 'Postwurfsendung'. Like the previous release, version 2025.08, live ISO images are available....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Pop!_OS 24.04, a major new version of System76's desktop Linux distribution, has been released. Based on Ubuntu's latest long-term support version, Pop!_OS 24.04 is the project's first stable version that ships the COSMIC desktop environment, developed in-house: "If you're ambitious enough, or maybe just crazy enough, there eventually....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The Parrot team has announced the availability of a new development snapshot. Parrot 7.0 beta swaps out the MATE desktop for using KDE Plasma by default, while the base distribution has been updated to Debian 13, and several custom applications have received some updates: "This new version introduces....

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: The alleged perpetrator had improper access to virtually every South Korean adult's personal information: names, phone numbers and even the keycode to enter residential buildings. It was one of the biggest data breaches of recent years and it has sent the company it targeted -- Coupang, South Korea's equivalent of Amazon -- reeling, generating lawsuits, government investigation and calls to toughen penalties against such leaks. The leak went undetected for nearly five months, hitting Coupang's radar on Nov. 18 only after a customer flagged suspicious activity. At first, Coupang, which was founded by a Korean-American entrepreneur, said it had experienced a data "exposure" affecting roughly 4,500 customer accounts. But within days, the e-commerce firm revised the figure: The leak exposed up to roughly 34 million user accounts in South Korea -- a sum representing more than 90% of the country's working-age population. Coupang started calling the incident a "leak" after Korean regulators took issue with the company's prior word choice. "The Whole Nation Is a Victim," read one local news headline. An investigation has found that the alleged perpetrator had once worked in South Korea as a software developer for authentication systems at Coupang, which is known for its blockbuster U.S. initial public offering a few years ago. The suspected leaker is believed to be a Chinese national who has moved back to China and is now on the lam, South Korean officials say. They haven't named the person. Even after leaving the firm roughly a year ago, the suspect secretly held on to an internal authentication key that granted him unfettered access to the personal information of Coupang users, South Korean authorities and lawmakers say. The infiltration, using overseas servers, started on June 24. By using the login credentials, the suspect was able to appear as if he were still a Coupang employee when accessing the company's systems.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The EU is moving to soften its planned 2035 ban on internal combustion cars by allowing a small share of low-emission engines. "The less stringent limit would leave room for automakers to continue selling some plug-in hybrids, which have both electric and internal combustion engines and can use the combustion engine to recharge the battery without the need to find a charging station," reports the Associated Press. From the report: The proposal from the EU's executive commission would change provisions of 2023 legislation requiring average emissions in new cars to equal zero, or a 100% reduction from 2021 levels. The new proposal would require a 90% emissions reduction. That means in practical terms that most cars would be battery-only but would leave room for some cars with internal combustion engines. Automakers would have to compensate for the added emissions by using European steel produced by methods that emit less carbon, and through use of climate neutral e-fuels made from renewable electricity and captured carbon dioxide and biofuels made from plants. EU officials say changing the limit will not affect progress toward making the 27-country bloc's economy climate neutral by 2050. That means producing only as much carbon dioxide as can be absorbed by forests and oceans or by abatement methods such as storing it underground. CO2 is the primary greenhouse gas blamed by scientists for climate change.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Reuters investigation found that Meta knowingly tolerated large volumes of scam and illegal ads from China worth billions in revenue. Reuters reports: Though China's authoritarian government bans use of Meta social media by its citizens, Beijing lets Chinese companies advertise to foreign consumers on the globe-spanning platforms. As a result, Meta's advertising business was thriving in China, ultimately reaching over $18 billion in annual sales in 2024, more than a tenth of the company's global revenue. But Meta calculated that about 19% of that money -- more than $3 billion -- was coming from ads for scams, illegal gambling, pornography and other banned content, according to internal Meta documents reviewed by Reuters. The documents are part of a cache of previously unreported material generated over the past four years by teams including Meta's finance, lobbying, engineering and safety divisions. The cache reveals Meta's efforts over that period to understand the scale of abuse on its platforms and the company's reluctance to introduce fixes that could undermine its business and revenues. The documents show that Meta believed China was the country of origin of roughly a quarter of all ads for scams and banned products on Meta's platforms worldwide. Victims ranged from shoppers in Taiwan who purchased bogus health supplements to investors in the United States and Canada who were swindled out of their savings. "We need to make significant investment to reduce growing harm," Meta staffers warned in an internal April 2024 presentation to leaders of its safety operations. To that end, Meta created an anti-fraud team that went beyond previous efforts to monitor scams and other banned activity from China. Using a variety of stepped-up enforcement tools, it slashed the problematic ads by about half during the second half of 2024 -- from 19% to 9% of the total advertising revenue coming from China. Then Meta Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg weighed in. "As a result of Integrity Strategy pivot and follow-up from Zuck," a late 2024 document notes, the China ads-enforcement team was "asked to pause" its work. Reuters was unable to learn the specifics of the CEO's involvement or what the so-called "Integrity Strategy pivot" entailed. But after Zuckerberg's input, the documents show, Meta disbanded its China-focused anti-scam team. It also lifted a freeze it had introduced on granting new Chinese ad agencies access to its platforms. One document shows that Meta shelved yet other anti-scam measures that internal tests had indicated would be effective. The document didn't detail the specifics of those measures. Meta took these steps even as an outside consultant it hired produced research that warned "Meta's own behavior and policies" were fostering systemic corruption in the Chinese market for ads targeting users in other countries, additional documents show. The upshot: Within a few months of Meta's brief crackdown, a new crop of Chinese advertising agencies was flooding Facebook and Instagram with prohibited ads. By mid-2025, banned ads climbed back to about 16% of Meta's China revenue. Rob Leathern, who was a senior director of product management at Facebook until 2020 and is no longer at the company, said the scale of predatory advertising revealed in the documents represents a major breakdown in consumer protections at the social media giant. "The levels that you're talking about are not defensible," he said of the percentage of abusive ads. "I don't know how anyone could think this is okay."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Quilter says its AI designed a complex Linux single-board computer in just one week, booting Debian on first power-up. "Holy crap, it's working," exclaimed one of the engineers. Tom's Hardware reports: LA-based startup Quilter has outlined Project Speedrun, which marks a milestone in computer design by AI. The headlining claims are that Quilter's AI facilitated the design of a new Linux SBC, using 843 parts and dual-PCBs, taking just one week to finish, then successfully booting Debian the first time it was powered up. The Quilter team reckon that the AI-enhanced process it demonstrated could unlock a new generation of computer hardware makers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Quilter says its AI designed a complex Linux single-board computer in just one week, booting Debian on first power-up. "Holy crap, it's working," exclaimed one of the engineers. Tom's Hardware reports: LA-based startup Quilter has outlined Project Speedrun, which marks a milestone in computer design by AI. The headlining claims are that Quilter's AI facilitated the design of a new Linux SBC, using 843 parts and dual-PCBs, taking just one week to finish, then successfully booting Debian the first time it was powered up. The Quilter team reckon that the AI-enhanced process it demonstrated could unlock a new generation of computer hardware makers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Opal — our tool for building AI-powered mini apps — is now directly available in the Gemini web app as a way to create experimental Gems. You can find it in your Gems ma…

Linux Exposing Support For Lenovo ThinkPads Being Able To Detect Hardware Damage  Phoronix