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Key Linux distributions threatened by Sudo vulnerabilities  SC Media

The latest episode of the Google AI: Release Notes podcast focuses on how Gemini was built from the ground up as a multimodal model — meaning a model that works with tex…

System76 Updates Its Meerkat Linux Mini PCs with Intel Raptor Lake or Arrow Lake CPUs  TechPowerUp

System76 Updates Its Meerkat Linux Mini PCs with Intel Raptor Lake or Arrow Lake CPUs  TechPowerUp

China "is pouring money into building an AI supply chain with as little reliance on the U.S. as possible," the Wall Street Journal noted this weekend. But what does that look like? The New York Times visits Liangzhu, "the coder 'village' at the heart of China's AI frenzy... a quiet suburb of the southern Chinese city of Hangzhou... As China faces off with the United States over tech primacy, Hangzhou has become the centre of China's AI frenzy," with its proximity to tech companies like Alibaba and DeepSeek..." In Liangzhu, many engineers said they were killing time until they could create their own startups, waiting out noncompete agreements they had signed at bigger companies like ByteDance... But some said the government support for Hangzhou's tech scene had scared off some investors. Several company founders, who asked not to be named so they could discuss sensitive topics, said it was difficult for them to attract funds from foreign venture capital firms, frustrating their ambitions to grow outside China. The nightmare situation, they said, would be to end up like ByteDance, the Chinese parent of TikTok, whose executives have been questioned before Congress about the company's ties to the Chinese government. Founders described choosing between two paths for their companies' growth: Take government funding and tailor their product to the Chinese market, or raise enough money on their own to set up offices in a country like Singapore to pitch foreign investors. For most, the first was the only feasible option. Another uncertainty is access to the advanced computer chips that power artificial intelligence systems. Washington has spent years trying to prevent Chinese companies from buying these chips, and Chinese companies like Huawei and Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corp. are racing to produce their own. So far, the Chinese-made chips work well enough to help companies like ByteDance provide some of their AI services in China. Many Chinese companies have created stockpiles of Nvidia chips despite Washington's controls. But it is not clear how long that supply will last, or how quickly China's chipmakers can catch up to their American counterparts... Liangzhu villagers have been hosting film nights. They had recently gathered to watch "The Matrix." Afterward, they decided the movie should be required viewing, Lin said. Its theme — people finding their way out of a vast system controlling society — provided spot-on inspiration. Aspiring founders in Liangzhu, even those who did not go to top universities, believe they could start the next world-changing tech company, said Felix Tao [a 36-year-old former Facebook and Alibaba employee.] "Many of them are super brave to make a choice to explore their own way, because in China that is not the common way to live your life."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Arne Exton has announced the release of a new "DebEX" edition of Exton Linux, based on the upcoming release of Debian 13. It uses the KDE Plasma 6.3.5 desktop and comes with the Calamares system installer: "I have made a new extra version of DebEX KDE Plasma live....

Linux Boot Vulnerability Allows Bypass of Secure Boot Protections on Modern Linux Systems  CyberSecurityNews

Linux Boot Vulnerability Allows Bypass of Secure Boot Protections on Modern Linux Systems  CyberSecurityNews

Intel VSEC/PMT Discovery Driver Expected For Linux 6.17 To Enhance Telemetry  Phoronix

It's now easier to get Mesa 25.1 on the latest Ubuntu 25.04  GamingOnLinux

lsfg-vk aims to bring Lossless Scaling's Frame Generation to Linux  GamingOnLinux

Blender 5.0 Set to Bring HDR Support for Linux Wayland Users  It's FOSS News

Allwinner A527, T527, and A733 datasheets, user manuals, and Linux SDK released  CNX Software

Allwinner A527, T527, and A733 datasheets, user manuals, and Linux SDK released  CNX Software

Linux boot Vujlnerability Allows Bypass of Secure Boot protections on modern Linux systems  Cyber Press

Linux boot Vujlnerability Allows Bypass of Secure Boot protections on modern Linux systems  Cyber Press

Linux boot Vujlnerability Allows Bypass of Secure Boot protections on modern Linux systems  Cyber Press

"Citizen scientists have successfully located thousands of previously unknown pairs of 'eclipsing binary' stars," reports the Washington Post, citing a recent announcement from NASA. The ongoing initiative helps space researchers hunt for "eclipsing binary" stars, a rare phenomenon in which two stars orbit one another, periodically blocking each other's light. These star pairs offer important data to astrophysicists, who consider the many measurable properties of eclipsing binaries — and the information they bear about the history of star formation and destruction — as a foundation of the field... The citizen science project in question, the Eclipsing Binary Patrol, validates images from NASA's Transiting Exoplanet Survey Satellite (TESS) mission. The satellite, launched in 2018, is "exceptionally capable at detecting varying stars," the researchers write in a preprint paper describing the initiative. The researchers used machine learning to identify about 1.2 million potential eclipsing star pairs. Citizen scientists then validated a subset of about 60,000... manually inspecting hundreds of thousands of images of eclipse-like events and weeding out actual binaries from images that tricked the algorithm. "Thankfully," the researchers write, "to the rescue come volunteers from all walks of life that boost the capacity of bandwidth-limited professional astronomers many-fold and help tackle the ever-increasing volume of publicly available astronomical data." Universe Today describes how they limited the dataset to only stars with a magnitude brighter than 15, then used a Python tool to generate a massive dataset of millions of light curves... The outcome of all the work resulted in the identification of 10,001 eclipsing binary systems. 7,936 of them are new to science, while the other 2,065 were previously known, but the study provided updated, more accurate, parameters for their periods, as TESS' dataset provided better insight. There were also some particularly interesting systems that could hold new discoveries, including several that had variable eclipse timings, and plenty that might have a third star, and some that show a significant dynamic between the star being orbited and the one doing the orbiting. All of those systems await further research, but there's another, unspoken factor at play in this data — exoplanets. TESS was originally designed as an exoplanet hunter, and this kind of large scale AI/human collaboration of lightcurve analysis is exactly the kind of work that could potentially produce even more accurate exoplanet catalogues, as evidenced by some of the work already done in this paper. That seems to be the next step for this dataset, with Dr. Kostov telling an interviewer "I can't wait to search them for exoplanets!" Given the data has already been collected, and the team has already been assembled, it's very likely he'll get his chance soon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux Boot Vulnerability Lets Attackers Bypass Secure Boot Protections  gbhackers.com

Linux Boot Vulnerability Lets Attackers Bypass Secure Boot Protections  gbhackers.com