Linux fréttir

Who wouldn't want root access on cluster master nodes?

A 9.9 out of 10 severity bug in Red Hat's OpenShift AI service could allow a remote attacker with minimal authentication to steal data, disrupt services, and fully hijack the platform.…

The UK government has issued a new order to Apple to create a backdoor into its cloud storage service, this time targeting only British users' data, despite US claims that Britain had abandoned all attempts to break the tech giant's encryption. Financial Times: The UK Home Office demanded in early September that Apple create a means to allow officials access to encrypted cloud backups, but stipulated that the order applied only to British citizens' data, according to people briefed on the matter. A previous technical capability notice (TCN) issued in January sought global access to encrypted user data. That move sparked a diplomatic clash between the UK and US governments and threatened to derail the two nations' efforts to secure a trade agreement. In February, Apple withdrew its most secure cloud storage service, iCloud Advanced Data Protection, from the UK. "Apple is still unable to offer Advanced Data Protection in the United Kingdom to new users," Apple said on Wednesday. "We are gravely disappointed that the protections provided by ADP are not available to our customers in the UK given the continuing rise of data breaches and other threats to customer privacy." It added: "As we have said many times before, we have never built a back door or master key to any of our products or services and we never will."

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A high court in India has ruled that legible medical prescriptions are a fundamental right after a judge found a government doctor's report completely incomprehensible. Justice Jasgurpreet Singh Puri of the Punjab and Haryana High Court issued the order while reviewing a bail petition in an unrelated criminal case. The medico-legal report examining an alleged assault victim was written in handwriting that the judge said left not even a single word or letter legible. The court directed India's government to add handwriting instruction to medical school curriculum and mandated a two-year timeline for rolling out digital prescriptions nationwide. Until electronic systems are implemented, all doctors must write prescriptions in capital letters. The Indian Medical Association, representing over 330,000 physicians, told BBC it would help address the issue. Association president Dr Dilip Bhanushali said doctors in Indian cities have largely adopted digital prescriptions but practitioners in rural areas and small towns continue using handwritten notes.

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Other studies are finding the same thing

Yale researchers say that despite the anxiety about AI taking people's jobs, there's very little evidence of it actually happening.…

Yoshua Bengio called for a pause on AI model development two years ago to focus on safety standards. Companies instead invested hundreds of billions of dollars into building more advanced models capable of executing long chains of reasoning and taking autonomous action. The A.M. Turing Award winner and Universite de Montreal professor told the Wall Street Journal that his concerns about existential risk have not diminished. Bengio founded the nonprofit research organization LawZero earlier this year to explore how to build truly safe AI models. Recent experiments demonstrate AI systems in some circumstances choose actions that cause human death over abandoning their assigned goals. OpenAI recently insisted that current frontier model frameworks will not eliminate hallucinations. Bengio, however, said even a 1% chance of catastrophic events like extinction or the destruction of democracies is unacceptable. He estimates advanced AI capable of posing such risks could arrive in five to ten years but urged treating three years as the relevant timeframe. The race condition between competing AI companies focused on weekly version releases remains the biggest barrier to adequate safety work, he said.

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Uncle Sam can't quit Redmond

Exclusive The US Air Force confirmed it's investigating a "privacy-related issue" amid reports of a Microsoft SharePoint-related breach and subsequent service-wide shutdown, rendering mission files and other critical tools potentially unavailable to service members.…

Based on Universal Blue, it's akin to Fedora Kinoite with knobs on… A lot of knobs

Aurora, a relatively young distro from Austria, bills itself as "your stable, privacy-respecting and ultimate productivity OS." These are rather bold claims, though many other Linux distros make the same promise.…

Judson Althoff gets the job of keeping the biz running

Microsoft boss Satya Nadella told staff on Wednesday that he's appointing Judson Althoff to a new role as CEO of the company's commercial business, so that the big boss can concentrate on Redmond's future plans and strategy.…

Britain's net public debt has climbed from 35% of GDP in 2005 to 95% today. The government is borrowing over 4% of GDP annually despite no emergency comparable to the financial crisis or pandemic that drove much of the earlier increase. The belt-tightening needed to stabilize debt levels amounts to about 2% of GDP. The Labour government holds a 157-seat majority in Parliament and has four years until the next election. Britain spends about 6% of GDP supporting pensioners, an increase of over a third this century. Some 15% of the working-age population now claims jobless allowances following a surge in disability claims since the pandemic. Labour attempted to reduce spending on pensioners and welfare this year but reversed both reform plans after political outcry from within the party. Tax revenue is already on course to reach 38% of GDP, a historical high for Britain. Labour promised before the election not to raise broad-based taxes on income and consumption. Four in five Britons say the government is mismanaging the economy. Yields on long-term government debt exceed those in any other major rich economy. The economy grew faster than any other G7 country in the first half of 2025, but the fiscal adjustment that would bring Britain to a primary surplus of less than 0.5% remains politically elusive.

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Microsoft has announced that Xbox Game Pass Ultimate will cost $29.99 per month, up from $19.99. The company restructured its subscription service into three tiers ahead of the October 16 launch of two Xbox ROG Ally handheld consoles. The new Essential tier offers 50-plus games for $9.99 monthly. Premium includes 200-plus games for $14.99. Ultimate subscribers gain access to more than 400 games, day-one releases, improved cloud streaming quality, and services including EA Play, Ubisoft+ Classics, and Fortnite Crew. Game Pass generated nearly $5 billion in fiscal 2025 revenue with 34 million subscribers in 2024. Console hardware prices are also increasing, with the Xbox Series X rising $50 to $649.99 starting October 3.

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Petitions pile up on Satya’s desk while Windows 7 mysteriously surges back from the grave

With Windows 10 support set to expire on October 14, hundreds of repair shops, nonprofits, and advocacy groups are urging Microsoft to extend free and automatic security updates instead of stranding hundreds of millions of PCs.…

Microsoft's Secure Future pitch lands with old bugs still in tow

Windows 11 25H2 has seeped out of Redmond with just two weeks left before free support for most Windows 10 versions goes down the drain.…

Microsoft is promoting Judson Althoff, currently executive vice president and chief commercial officer at Microsoft, to a new role as CEO of its commercial business. From a report: It's the latest shakeup inside the company, as Microsoft navigates what CEO Satya Nadella calls a "tectonic AI platform shift." It's also a move that will allow Nadella to focus on more technical work at Microsoft, while still remaining overall CEO. In an internal memo to employees today, Nadella announced Althoff's promotion and said it's linked with the need for Microsoft to reinvent itself in the AI era and "bring together sales, marketing, operations, and engineering to drive growth and strengthen our position as the partner of choice for AI transformation." Althoff has led Microsoft's global sales organization for the past nine years, helping the company build out its Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) division. He will now also be responsible for the operations and marketing teams that help sell Microsoft's software and services to businesses, but not the engineering teams that help build them.

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Once more with feeling...

SpaceX has named the date when it will try for another Starship launch without anything exploding. October 13, which is both the Columbus Day / Indigenous People's Day holiday and the last day of Windows 10 support, is the current target.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Immigration anxieties and a challenging job market have sparked an online backlash over China's latest attempt at attracting global talent -- a new visa program announced in August. The program, which was rolled out on Wednesday with the aim of attracting foreign professionals, will also test how China balances its immigration policy with its pursuit of technological ambitions. Under the new rules, young graduates -- in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics or STEM -- no longer need backing from a local employer and can enjoy more flexibility in terms for entry frequency and duration of stay. The keyword "K-visa" -- as China's new visa category is called -- was among the top searches on social media site Weibo for days, before chatter about National Day traffic jams pushed it off the charts as millions hit the road for a week-long holiday. Chinese social media users argue that the new visa tilts the playing field toward foreign graduates at the expense of those educated in China. Others on Weibo warned that without employer sponsorship, the program could invite fraudulent applications and open the door to a surge in arrivals from developing countries, piling pressure on an already strained labor market.

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Project boss pleased to be getting on top of technical debt

OpenStack has delivered its 32nd major release, named "Flamingo."…

In India, Bollywood stars are asking judges to protect their voice and persona in the era of AI. From a report: One famous couple's biggest target is Google's YouTube. Abhishek Bachchan and his wife Aishwarya Rai Bachchan, known for her iconic Cannes Film Festival red carpet appearances, have asked a judge to remove and prohibit creation of AI videos infringing their intellectual property rights. But in a more far-reaching request, they also want Google ordered to have safeguards to ensure such YouTube videos uploaded anyway do not train other AI platforms, legal papers reviewed by Reuters show. A handful of Bollywood celebrities have begun asserting their "personality rights" in Indian courts over the last few years, as the country has no explicit protection for those like in many U.S. states. But the Bachchans' lawsuits are the most high-profile to date about the interplay of personality rights and the risk that misleading or deepfake YouTube videos could train other AI models. The actors argue that YouTube's content and third-party training policy is concerning as it lets users consent to sharing of a video they created to train rival AI models, risking further proliferation of misleading content online, according to near-identical filings from Abhishek and Aishwarya dated September 6, which are not public.

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US has threatened even higher tariffs and the possible loss of military support

Taiwan has rejected US demands to shift semiconductor manufacturing so that half of America's chip needs are produced domestically, as tariff negotiations with the Trump administration intensify.…

The mass adoption of ChatGPT is yet to have a big disruptive impact on US jobs, contradicting claims by chief executives and tech bosses that AI is already upending labour markets. Financial Times: Research from economists at the Yale University Budget Lab and the Brookings Institution think-tank indicates that, since OpenAI launched its popular chatbot in November 2022, generative AI has not had a more dramatic effect on employment than earlier technological breakthroughs. The research, based on an analysis of official data on the labour market and figures from the tech industry on usage and exposure to AI, also finds little evidence that the tools are putting people out of work. The study follows widespread concern that generative AI will spark job losses -- and even the disappearance of certain types of work -- amid a US labour market that has recently weakened.

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The physics of transistors and politics of trading licenses are colliding on the AI frontier

Analysis Few of us would have imagined that national security would play such a key role in AI hardware, even dictating its development, but here we are – in a new era of export controls.…