Linux fréttir

If that's a step too far, then there are new versions of CDE – and tmux

The oldest of the open source Linux desktops is planning its final steps away from X11, while an even older Unix desktop is getting freshened up.…

Researchers at the Pacific Institute documented 420 water-related conflicts globally in 2024, a record that far surpasses the 355 incidents logged in 2023 and continues a trend that has seen such violence more than quadruple over the past five years. The Oakland-based water think tank's database tracks disputes where water triggered violence, where water systems were targeted, and where infrastructure became collateral damage in broader conflicts. The Middle East reported the most incidents at 138, including 66 tied to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli military destroyed more than 30 wells in Rafah and Khan Yunis, and there were numerous reports of settlers destroying pipelines and tanks in the West Bank. The Russia-Ukraine war accounted for 51 incidents, including strikes that disrupted water service in Ukrainian cities.

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Pushes semiconductor familiarity via chip-shaped edible squares

SK hynix has launched HBM-themed square corn snacks at 7-Eleven, because nothing explains bandwidth like carbs and chocolate.…

An analysis of submissions to next year's International Conference on Learning Representations has found that roughly one in five peer reviews were fully generated by AI, a discovery that came after researchers including Carnegie Mellon's Graham Neubig grew suspicious of feedback on their manuscripts that seemed unusually verbose and requested non-standard statistical analyses. Neubig posted on X offering a reward for anyone who could scan the conference's submissions for AI-generated text, and Max Spero, CEO of detection tool developer Pangram Labs, responded the next day. Pangram screened all 19,490 studies and 75,800 peer reviews submitted to ICLR 2026, finding that 21% of reviews were fully AI-generated and more than half showed signs of AI use. The conference had permitted AI tools for polishing text but prohibited falsified content. Each reviewer was assigned five papers to review in two weeks on average -- a load that senior programme chair Bharath Hariharan described as "much higher than what has been done in the past."

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Training outfit scrambles to fix all-male lineup before December kickoff

Cybersecurity training provider TryHackMe is scrambling to recruit women infosec pros to help with its Christmas challenge following backlash concerning a lack of gender diversity.…

Nvidia's accelerators look pricey, but bullion still wins on cost per ounce

For as long as I have been a reporter and analyst in the IT sector, November has always been supercomputing month. Way before there was a TOP500 ranking of supercomputers in June 1993 but just as I was leaving university, the first Supercomputing Conference was held in Orlando in 1988. And that November SC show set the cadence for high-performance computing for the decades that followed.…

Another reason why the OS seems to swell with every update

Changing text in Microsoft Windows requires freezing string updates well before code changes stop, often leading to strange wording that persists for years.…

ChatGPT can browse the web, write code and analyze images, but ask it what time it is and you might get the correct answer, a confident wrong answer, or a polite refusal -- sometimes all three within minutes of each other. The problem stems from how large language models work. These systems predict answers based on training data and don't receive constant real-time updates about things like time unless they specifically search the internet. AI robotics expert Yervant Kulbashian told The Verge that a language model "is only referencing things that have entered this space," comparing it to a castaway on an island stocked with books but no watch. OpenAI can give ChatGPT access to system clocks, and does so through features like Search. But there are tradeoffs: every clock check consumes space in the model's context window, the finite portion of information it can hold at any given moment. Pasquale Minervini, a natural language processing researcher at the University of Edinburgh, said the leading models also struggle to read analog clock faces and have trouble with calendars.

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Ex-NCSC chief Ciaran Martin asked to examine how forecast ended up online ahead of schedule

The Office for Budget Responsibility (OBR) has drafted in former National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) chief Ciaran Martin to sniff out how its Budget day forecast wandered onto the open internet before the Chancellor had even reached the dispatch box.…

OBR says the scheme will cost £600M a year with no identified savings

The UK government has finally put a £1.8 billion price tag on its digital ID plans – days after the minister responsible refused to name a figure.…

Amazon Web Services has rolled out a DNS resilience feature that allows customers to make domain name system changes within 60 minutes of a service disruption in its US East region, a direct response to the long history of outages at the cloud giant's most troubled infrastructure. AWS said customers in regulated industries like banking, fintech and SaaS had asked for additional capabilities to meet business continuity and compliance requirements, specifically the ability to provision standby resources or redirect traffic during unexpected regional disruptions. The 60-minute recovery time objective still leaves a substantial window for outages to cascade, and the timing of the announcement -- less than six weeks after an October 20th DynamoDB incident and a subsequent VM problem drew criticism -- underscores how persistent US East's reliability issues have been.

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Treasury haul beats early forecasts, yet captures only a fraction of the revenue generated in Britain

The UK government collected just £800 million in Digital Services Tax (DST) from companies such as Amazon, Google, Meta, eBay, and TikTok in the most recent tax year.…

Nordic datacenter operator's cool-climate facilities attract bids amid AI-driven market frenzy

Digital Realty and a consortium including Equinix are competing to acquire atNorth, a Scandinavian datacenter operator, according to reports.…

A quick squeeze of the crimper saved the day ... and a career

On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's weekly reader-contributed column in which we share your stories of delivering excellent tech support amid your colleagues' ambivalence, anger, and unjust admonitions.…

Breaking free from Microsoft is harder than it looks. Airbus began migrating its 100,000-plus workforce from Office to Google Workspace more than seven years ago and it still hasn't completed the switch. The Register: As we exclusively revealed in March 2018, the aerospace giant told 130,000 employees it was ditching Microsoft's productivity tools for Google's cloud-based alternatives. Then-CEO Tom Enders predicted migration would finish in 18 months, a timeline that, in hindsight, was "extremely ambitious," according to Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital. Today, more than two-thirds of Airbus's 150,000 employees have fully transitioned, but significant pockets continue to use Microsoft in parallel. Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register.

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Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney has signed an agreement with Alberta's premier that will roll back certain climate rules to spur investment in energy production, while encouraging construction of a new oil pipeline to the West Coast. From a report: Under the agreement, which was signed on Thursday, the federal government will scrap a planned emissions cap on the oil and gas sector and drop rules on clean electricity in exchange for a commitment by Canada's top oil-producing province to strengthen industrial carbon pricing and support a carbon capture-and-storage project. The deal, which was hailed by the country's oil industry but panned by environmentalists, signaled a shift in Canada's energy policy in favour of fossil fuel development and is already creating tensions within Carney's minority government. Steven Guilbeault, who served as environment minister under Carney's predecessor Justin Trudeau, said he was quitting the cabinet over concerns that Canada's climate plan was being dismantled.

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Fresh court filings try to keep the case about copyright, and in US courts

VMware has come out swinging in its case against Siemens over alleged unlicensed use of its software.…

‘Our soup’s not toxic but this chap’s behavior was’ is the gist of the defense

Food company Campbell’s, best known for its soups and the iconic cans they come in, has parted ways with a vice president for IT after another member of the company’s tech team recorded him criticizing the company’s products.…

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office has issued new guidelines outlining when inventions created with the help of AI can be patented. From a report: USPTO Director John Squires said on Wednesday in a notice set to be published Friday, that the office considers generative AI systems to be "analogous to laboratory equipment, computer software, research databases, or any other tool that assists in the inventive process." "They may provide services and generate ideas, but they remain tools used by the human inventor who conceived the claimed invention," the office said. "When one natural person is involved in creating an invention with the assistance of AI, the inquiry is whether that person conceived the invention under the traditional conception standard." The office reiterated its guidance from last year that AI itself cannot be considered an inventor under U.S. patent law. However, it rejected the approach taken by the PTO during former President Joe Biden's administration for deciding when AI-assisted inventions are patentable, which relied on a standard normally used to determine when multiple people can qualify as joint inventors.

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The CEO of Epic Games, Tim Sweeney, has argued that platforms like Steam should not label games that are made using AI. From a report: Responding to a post on Twitter from a user who suggested that storefronts drop this tag, the industry exec said that it "makes no sense" to flag such content. Sweeney added that soon AI will be a part of the way all games are made. "The AI tag is relevant to art exhibits for authorship disclosure, and to digital content licensing marketplaces where buyers need to understand the rights situation," Sweeney said. "It makes no sense for game stores, where AI will be involved in nearly all future production."

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