Linux fréttir

Smug faces across all those who opposed the WordPad-ification of Microsoft's humble text editor

Just months after Microsoft added Markdown support to Notepad, researchers have found the feature can be abused to achieve remote code execution (RCE).…

Report warns skills shortages and grid bottlenecks threaten to stall region's capacity push

Only 20 percent of datacenters are considered AI-ready across Europe and the Middle East, despite the growing demand for infrastructure to accelerate AI processing.…

Breaking a big hard problem up into smaller ones? That'll never catch on

FOSDEM 2026 Isaac Freund's River compositor brings a little old-fashioned modularity and customizability to the brave new Wayland world.…

If launching it was crazy in 1999, then what's trying to use it today?

FOSDEM 2026 Michal Pleban knows his old kit inside out, and his talk on the CIDCO MailStation was one of the most interesting of FOSDEM for us – as well as the funniest.…

UK government grilled over progress made to prevent a second life-threatening leak

Legacy IT issues are hampering key technical measures designed to prevent highly sensitive data leaks, UK government officials say.…

Discord has moved to calm a user backlash over its upcoming age verification mandate by clarifying that the "vast majority" of people will never be asked to confirm their age through a face scan or government ID. The platform said it will instead rely on an internal "age prediction" model that draws on account information, device and activity data, and behavioral patterns across its communities to estimate whether someone is an adult. Users whose age the model cannot confidently determine will still need to submit a video selfie or ID. Those not verified as adults or identified as under 18 will be placed in a "teen-appropriate" experience that blocks access to age-restricted servers and channels. The clarification came after users threatened to leave the platform and cancel Nitro subscriptions, and after a third-party vendor used by Discord for age verification suffered a data breach last year that exposed user information and a small number of uploaded ID cards.

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The Chocolate Factory isn't showing ads in Gemini, but AI Mode is fair game

As OpenAI walks the advertising tightrope to balance revenue gains against credibility and safety, ad kingpin Google is roaring ahead to use AI to improve its advertising products.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: The most seductive narrative in American work culture right now isn't that AI will take your job. It's that AI will save you from it. That's the version the industry has spent the last three years selling to millions of nervous people who are eager to buy it. Yes, some white-collar jobs will disappear. But for most other roles, the argument goes, AI is a force multiplier. You become a more capable, more indispensable lawyer, consultant, writer, coder, financial analyst -- and so on. The tools work for you, you work less hard, everybody wins. But a new study published in Harvard Business Review follows that premise to its actual conclusion, and what it finds there isn't a productivity revolution. It finds companies are at risk of becoming burnout machines. As part of what they describe as "in-progress research," UC Berkeley researchers spent eight months inside a 200-person tech company watching what happened when workers genuinely embraced AI. What they found across more than 40 "in-depth" interviews was that nobody was pressured at this company. Nobody was told to hit new targets. People just started doing more because the tools made more feel doable. But because they could do these things, work began bleeding into lunch breaks and late evenings. The employees' to-do lists expanded to fill every hour that AI freed up, and then kept going.

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Because AI won’t only run in Big Tech’s giant GPU garages, and won't tolerate slow connections

The Open Compute Project (OCP) wants to develop specs for distributed datacenters and has decided the all-optical Innovative Optical and Wireless Network (IOWN) stack can make them possible.…

Iceland in October classified the potential collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation -- the ocean current system that ferries warm water northward from the tropics and essentially functions as the country's central heating -- as a national security risk, a designation that amounts to a formal reckoning with the possibility that climate change could render the island nation uninhabitable. Several recent studies have found the AMOC far more vulnerable to breakdown than scientists had long assumed. One, analyzing nine models under high-emission scenarios, saw the current weaken and collapse in every single instance; even under the Paris agreement's emission targets, the researchers estimated a 25% chance of shutdown. Stefan Rahmstorf, an oceanographer at Germany's Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research and a co-author of that study, said it was "wrong to assume this was low probability." Simulations of a post-collapse world project Icelandic winter extremes plunging to minus-50 degrees Celsius, and sea ice surrounding the country for the first time since Viking settlement. Iceland's national strategy for dealing with AMOC risks is scheduled to be finalized by 2028. The country has also flagged that NASA Goddard, a key source of AMOC modeling, has been targeted for significant staff and budget cuts under the current U.S. administration.

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hackingbear writes: China's Bytedance has released Seedance 2.0, an AI video generator which handles up to four types of input at once: images, videos, audio, and text. Users can combine up to nine images, three videos, and three audio files, up to a total of twelve files. Generated videos run between 4 and 15 [or 60] seconds long and automatically come with sound effects or music. Its performance is unfortunately so good that it has forced the firm to block its facial-to-voice feature after the model reportedly demonstrated the ability to generate highly accurate personal voice characteristics using only facial images, even without user authorization. In a recent test, Pan Tianhong, founder of tech media outlet MediaStorm, discovered that uploading a personal facial photo caused the model to produce audio nearly identical to his real voice -- without using any voice samples or authorized data. [...]

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Just change the name to CAIsco already, Chuck

Cisco is on track to deliver its unified management tool Cloud Control later in 2026, but while its users wait for that moment it’s pumping out plenty more agentic tools to manage their networks – and make sure agents behave.…

'Claude DXT's container falls noticeably short of what is expected from a sandbox'

LayerX, a security company based in Tel Aviv, says it has identified a zero-click remote code execution vulnerability in Claude Desktop Extensions that can be triggered by processing a Google Calendar entry.…

Great time to be a liquid cooling startup

GPUs are so hot right now – literally and metaphorically – that they’re driving mergers and acquisitions in the datacenter cooling industry.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Trump administration wants some of the world's largest technology companies to publicly commit to a new compact governing the rapid expansion of AI data centers, according to two administration officials granted anonymity to discuss private conversations. A draft of the compact obtained by POLITICO lays out commitments designed to ensure energy-hungry data centers do not raise household electricity prices, strain water supplies or undermine grid reliability, and that the companies driving demand also carry the cost of building new infrastructure. The proposed pact, which is not final and could be subject to change, is framed as a voluntary agreement between President Donald Trump and major U.S. tech companies and data center developers. It could bind OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Facebook parent Meta and other AI giants to a broad set of energy, water and community principles. None of these companies immediately responded to a request for comment.

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Roses are red, violets are blue ... now get patching

What better way to say I love you than with an update? Attackers exploited a whopping six Microsoft bugs as zero-days prior to Redmond releasing software fixes on February's Patch Tuesday.…

Someday

Microsoft wants you to know that it has found a new way of saving power at its datacenters using high-temperature superconducting (HTS) power delivery systems. And good news: it'll be possible ... someday.…

Academics look at problematic algorithm to inform regulatory discussion

A picture is worth a thousand words or, perhaps, a hundred thousand dollars in extra salary. Academics claim that personality traits inferred using AI photo analysis can predict how depicted individuals will fare in the labor market.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 1966, a beach-ball-size robot bounced across the moon. Once it rolled to a stop, its four petal-like covers opened, exposing a camera that sent back the first picture taken on the surface of another world. This was Luna 9, the Soviet lander that was the earliest spacecraft to safely touchdown on the moon. While it paved the way toward interplanetary exploration, Luna 9's precise whereabouts have remained a mystery ever since. That may soon change. Two research teams think they might have tracked down the long-lost remains of Luna 9. But there's a catch: The teams do not agree on the location. "One of them is wrong," said Anatoly Zak, a space journalist and author who runs RussianSpaceWeb.com and reported on the story last week. The dueling finds highlight a strange fact of the early moon race: The precise resting places of a number of spacecraft that crashed or landed on the moon in the run up to NASA's Apollo missions are lost to obscurity. A newer generation of spacecraft may at last resolve these mysteries. Luna 9 launched to the moon on Jan. 31, 1966. While a number of spacecraft had crashed into the lunar surface at that stage of the moon race, it was among the earliest to try what rocket engineers call a soft landing. Its core unit, a spherical suite of scientific instruments, was about two feet across. That size makes it difficult to spot from orbit. "Luna 9 is a very, very small vehicle," said Mark Robinson, a geologist at the company Intuitive Machines, which has twice landed spacecraft on the moon.

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Nvidia, Qualcomm, and Altera among the first to trial EDA giant's AI chip design agent

The idea of machines that can build even better machines sounds like sci-fi, but the concept is becoming a reality as companies like Cadence tap into generative AI to design and validate next-gen processors that also use AI.…