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Linus Torvalds On Why AI Works For Him
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Many open-source developers still dislike AI. The latest example is System76 banning AI-generated content from its COSMIC desktop. At Open Source Summit Europe, Linux creator Linus Torvalds offered a different take: "I actually really like using AI," Torvald told Dirk Hohndel, his good friend and head of…
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Firefox 158 Now Available With JPEG-XL Support By Default
Firefox 158 is now available with JPEG XL image support enabled by default, making .jxl images a standard part of the browser rather than an experimental feature. The release also adds JPEG XL to Firefox's default image Accept header, improves Smart Window form filling, and brings new CSS typed-arithmetic support for developers. Phoronix reports: At long…
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Epic Games Delays Disney Project, Asks Developers To Use More AI
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Epic Games delayed the release of an upcoming video-game collaboration with Walt Disney and told its developers to use more artificial intelligence tools to finish the game, according to people familiar with the project. The title had been slated for release in March, but is now delayed with no new date…
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Mark Zuckerberg Says Meta Has Reached AI 'Frontier', Rejects Calls For Slowdown
Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the company has reached the AI "frontier" with its new Muse Wonder model and will be offered as a closed, paid product for businesses. Zuckerberg also rejected calls for an industry-wide slowdown, arguing that AI can be managed with conventional guardrails as Meta continues spending heavily on models, infrastructure, and…
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Google's Fitbit Edge Debuts a Replaceable Battery, Brings Back the Screen
Google has introduced the $179 Fitbit Edge, a new fitness tracker with a 1.34-inch OLED display, built-in GPS, ECG support, week-long battery life, and Fitbit's first user-replaceable battery. "And unlike the Pixel Watch, it's compatible with Android and iPhones via the Google Health app," reports Wired. From the report: The Edge has a user-replaceable…
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Russia Was Not Ready For the Data Center War It Started With Ukraine
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: When Russia began attacking Ukrainian data centers and telecommunication infrastructure, it apparently failed to prepare for possible retaliation. Now Russia's digital services are facing widespread outages after Ukrainian drone strikes knocked out three of the largest data centers owned by Russian tech…
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Hackers Heat French Supermarket Fridges, Sparking Fires and Spoiling Food
Hackers remotely manipulated connected refrigeration systems at hundreds of French supermarkets, reportedly pushing some fridges and freezers to 50C (122F), spoiling food and even sparking fires. According to Reuters, French Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu ordered a cybersecurity investigation into the hacks, with similar incidents reported in Spain…
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AI Coding Agents Generate More Code, But Not More Software
A study of more than 700 software firms found that AI coding agents significantly increase the amount of code developers produce, but not the amount of software companies actually ship. Ars Technica reports: A recent study (PDF) of actual coding practices across hundreds of firms finds that human code review forms a significant "bottleneck" for the overall…
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Amazon In Talks To Buy AI Startup Decart For Around $7 Billion
Amazon is reportedly in talks to acquire AI startup Decart in a deal that could value the company at up to $7 billion. Decart's DOS software helps developers optimize AI models for different processors in weeks rather than months, a capability that could be particularly useful to AWS as it pushes its own Trainium chips. SiliconANGLE reports: The company has…
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Q3 2026 Was Historically Bad For PC Shipments
PC shipments fell 20.1% year over year to 62.7 million units in the third quarter of 2026, the worst Q3 decline IDC has recorded. "The top three PC makers -- Lenovo, Dell, and HP -- also saw their shipments fall by over 20% year over year," reports PCMag. From the report: "If looking at all quarters, then we have seen other quarters in recent years with…
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Should We Beware of Other License Plate Surveillance Companies Besides Flock?
NPR reports: Police officers in cities across the U.S. are quick to extol the virtues of real-time crime centers as a game changer that helps them find missing children, monitor large events from the skies and scope out dangerous scenes before putting an officer in harm's way. Hundreds of police departments have one of these central hubs, which have existed…
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How the US Nuclear Plant Fleet Is Leaning Into AI
"This year, nearly the entire fleet of 94 U.S. nuclear reactors has been offered the chance to integrate AI into its operations, and most have taken it," reports IEEE Spectrum: In August, California-based Atomic Canyon launched NIVA, the Nuclear Industry Virtual Assistant, which was developed in cooperation with nuclear-industry groups. The assistant was…
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Let's Encrypt to Cut SSL Certificate Lifetimes to 64 Days in February 2027
Let's Encrypt "will shorten the default validity period of its TLS certificates from 90 days to 64 days, starting February 10, 2027," reports the blog Linuxiac: All certificates issued or renewed from that date will have a 64-day lifespan unless users explicitly select one of the shorter options already available: 45 or six days. Existing certificates will…
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Game Console Market Craters: Xbox and PS5 Sales Plummet Over 25%
"Video game console sales in the U.S. have cratered," reports Tom's Hardware, with sales through August far below where they'd been in 2025: Mat Piscatella, the video game industry advisor at research firm Circana, shared the numbers on his Bluesky account — PlayStation 5 sales have dropped by 25%, putting it at its lowest point since 2013, when gamers held…
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Research Firm Calls Anthropic's Upcoming IPO 'Unprecedented Test of Investor Gullibity'
CNBC reports: As Anthropic barrels toward a potential $2 trillion market cap on the Nasdaq, one research firm is valuing the artificial intelligence company at a mere $150 billion and says Wall Street is about to face an "unprecedented test of investor gullibility." In a report on Tuesday, independent financial research provider New Constructs called…
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Gas Cars Fall Below 50% of Global New Car Sales for the First Time
"Gas cars are now a minority of the world's new car sales," reports Electrek. Gasoline-only vehicles made up 49% of global new-vehicle sales in the first half of 2026, down from 73% in 2021, according to Mobility Global data first reported by Nikkei. It's the first time on record that they've been under half. But there's a catch: most of the cars taking…
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'The Social Reckoning' Bombs with $5.5 Million Opening
Why didn't The Social Reckoning enjoy the box office success of 2010's The Social Network, asks IndieWire/A>: [T]here wasn't the same urgency in the story being told. The Social Reckoning focuses less on Zuckerberg, and more on data engineer Frances Haugen's decision to blow the whistle on how Facebook's algorithms were promoting political content that…
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Blade Runner, Star Trek, Godzilla, Star Wars + Marvel (and Legos): News From New York Comic-Con
There was some Blade Runner news at New York Comic-Con this weekend — and also some news about Godzilla. Ars Technica reports: We got our first look at Prime Video's new sci-fi series Blade Runner 2099 in July at San Diego Comic-Con. With the show's premiere roughly six weeks away, the streamer unveiled the full trailer this weekend at New York Comic-Con…
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A College Told Flock to Remove Its Cameras. The Company Refused.
The Chicago Sun-Times reports: When Elgin Community College hired Flock Safety to install six surveillance cameras in April 2025, President Peggy Heinrich thought they would "enhance the safety and security of students...." They were supposed to help locate stolen cars and missing people. But Heinrich started to wonder if the cameras were actually making…
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Original RFC1149 Packet Up For Auction At Christies
Long-time Slashdot reader badger.foo writes: As some of you may remember, in 2001 RFC1149 (TCP/IP over carrier pigeon) was implemented. Now one of the packets preserved from that event is up for auction at Christies. Direct link to the auction (current bid: USD 2600) is here. This is a unique chance to own a piece of Internet history! Read more of this…
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US Agency To Rewrite Rules To Finally Address Vehicle Headlight Glare
America's National Highway Traffic Safety Administration "said on Tuesday that it will rewrite its vehicle lighting standards," reports Reuters, "to address concerns about headlight glare and allow for the latest safety-improving lighting technologies." NHTSA said it plans to improve rules for LEDs, dusk sensors, automatic high beams and replaceable light…
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NASA Releases Data from Artemis II Moon Mission, Calls It 'Sights and Sounds of Science'
"What did four astronauts see, notice, and document as they traveled around the Moon during NASA's Artemis II mission?" asks a new NASA web page, offering some fascinating pictures and video: Through photographs, spoken observations, drawings, and annotations, the Artemis II crew created a unique scientific record — one that is now available to the science…
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FBI Arrests Cybersecurity Executive Over Data Breach After Contractor Fails to Update Oracle HR Platform
CNN reports: The FBI arrested a Canadian cybersecurity executive and ransomware expert as part of the investigation of a damaging hack that exposed the sensitive data of current and former FBI employees, according to court documents and people familiar the investigation. Edward Dubrovsky was arrested in the Philadelphia area in recent days... Dubrovsky is…
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Ubuntu Confirms Thursday's Distributed Denial of Service Attack Against Its Web Infrastructure
On Thursday those trying to access the Ubuntu website, ISO downloads, and similar Ubuntu resources on Thursday found the site "inoperable," reports Phoronix, with the disruption confirmed as a distributed denial of service attack. "Our team is working diligently to resolve the incident," according to a Thursday post on Ubuntu Discourse — followed by a later…
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UK Vegetables 20-50% Less Nutritious Than In the 1960s
The Telegraph reports that the nutritional value of fruit and vegetables has fallen by up to 50% since the Sixties, according a new study from researchers at startup studio Deep Science Ventures. The study "found that humans needed to consume twice the number of vegetables to get the same level of minerals such as potassium, magnesium or copper as would…
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AI Execs Game Out 'Political Revolt' after a Catastrophic AI Event
Top executives at Anthropic, OpenAI and other AI companies "are privately gaming out scenarios for a public and political revolt after a catastrophic AI event," reports Axios, one that turns "an already wary public further against the technology and its leaders..." These AI company executives "anticipate a large-scale event, most likely a cyberattack, that…
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Nicolas Cage Didn't Sign Amazon's AI Waiver For 'Spider-Noir'. Series Cancelled.
"Nicolas Cage is speaking out against Amazon," reports Variety. Amazon developed the series Spider-Noir for Prime Video, but then allegedly asked Cage to sign an AI waiver: "Amazon is a very AI-friendly company, to the tune of $50 billion invested in OpenAI," Cage said Saturday during a panel on the Empire Stage at New York Comic Con. "I am not an…
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Ubuntu 26.10 Will Offer a Rust-based GnuPG Replacement Option
The blog It's FOSS reports: You already know that Canonical has been selectively replacing Ubuntu's C-based system components with Rust-written equivalents that don't compromise in terms of functionality, most of the time. Now it looks like the distro's OpenPGP implementation is next, with Sequoia PGP coming preinstalled in Ubuntu 26.10. Canonical wants it…
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Claude Sent Police a Fake Murder Tip. White House Mandates AI Companies Report Security Incidents
AFP reports that an AI model from Anthropic "submitted a fabricated tip about an unsolved homicide to Philadelphia police, authorities said Friday." Claude "was instructed never to log in, create accounts, enter personal data, make purchases, or submit anything destructive, but the instructions did not rule out form submissions," Anthropic said Friday in a…
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OpenAI Disrupts Two AI-Enabled 'False Front' Influence Operations That Included Seven Fake Journalists
OpenAI announced it's recently banned two "influence operations" — one from Russia and one from Iran — that were using its models "to launder geopolitical, conflict-related messaging" in sophisticated "false front" propaganda campaigns: The Iranian operation included a stable of seven "journalist" personas which it used to pitch long-form articles to small…