Linux fréttir

AI wasn't the cause, and multi-cloud is for rubes

Column AWS put out a hefty analysis of its October 20 outage, and it's apparently written in a continuing stream of consciousness before the Red Bull wore off and the author passed out after 36 straight hours of writing.…

Poor data standards across government hamper scaling, says Parliament spending watchdog

The UK government's Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has saved £4.4 million over three years by using machine learning to tackle fraud, according to the National Audit Office (NAO). However, the public spending watchdog found the department's ability to expand this work is limited by fragmented IT systems and poor cross-government data standards.…

No, it's just good at mass-production copy and paste. And yes, we're correctly applying Betteridge's Law

Opinion Remember ELIZA? The 1966 chatbot from MIT's AI Lab convinced countless people it was intelligent using nothing but simple pattern matching and canned responses. Nearly 60 years later, ChatGPT has people making the same mistake. Chatbots don't think – they've just gotten exponentially better at pretending.…

When it rains, it pours – and nobody packed an umbrella

Opinion When your cabbie asks you what you do for a living, and you answer "tech journalist," you never get asked about cloud infrastructure in return. Bitcoin, mobile phones, AI, yes. Until last week: "What's this AWS thing, then?" You already knew a lot of people were having a very bad day in Bezosville, but if the news had reached an Edinburgh black cab driver, new adjectives were needed.…

"Mozilla is introducing a new privacy framework for Firefox extensions that will require developers to disclose whether their add-ons collect or transmit user data..." reports the blog Linuxiac: The policy takes effect on November 3, 2025, and applies to all new Firefox extensions submitted to addons.mozilla.org. According to Mozilla's announcement, extension developers must now include a new key in their manifest.json files. This key specifies whether an extension gathers any personal data. Even extensions that collect nothing must explicitly state "none" in this field to confirm that no data is being collected or shared. This information will be visible to users at multiple points: during the installation prompt, on the extension's listing page on addons.mozilla.org, and in the Permissions and Data section of Firefox's about:addons page. In practice, this means users will be able to see at a glance whether a new extension collects any data before they install it.

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Four back-to-back weekends of work – and disastrously bad documentation – will do that do a techie

Who, Me? Welcome to Monday morning and another installment of Who, Me? For the uninitiated, it's The Register's weekly reader-contributed column that tells tales of your greatest misses, and how you rebuilt a career afterward.…

FOSS feud re-ignites with massive counter-claim

The long battle between Automattic and WP Engine has flared again, this time with accusations the latter company issued “false advertising”, and employed “deceptive business practices.”…

Slashdot reader joshuark writes: Microsoft says that the File Explorer (formerly Windows Explorer) now automatically blocks previews for files downloaded from the Internet to block credential theft attacks via malicious documents, according to a report from BleepingComputer. This attack vector is particularly concerning because it requires no user interaction beyond selecting a file to preview and removes the need to trick a target into actually opening or executing it on their system. For most users, no action is required since the protection is enabled automatically with the October 2025 security update, and existing workflows remain unaffected unless you regularly preview downloaded files. "This change is designed to enhance security by preventing a vulnerability that could leak NTLM hashes when users preview potentially unsafe files," Microsoft says in a support document published Wednesday. It is important to note that this may not take effect immediately and could require signing out and signing back in.

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Allows surveillance and cross-border evidence sharing, which worries human rights groups

The United Nations on Saturday staged a signing ceremony for the Convention against Cybercrime, the world’s first agreement to combat online crime. And while 72 nations picked up the pen, critics continue to point out the convention’s flaws.…