Linux fréttir

Get ready for a fight over who steers the global standard for vulnerability identification

The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) nearly let the Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVE) program lapse earlier this year, but a new "vision" document it released this week signals that it now wants more control over the global standard for vulnerability identification.…

A anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft AI launched its first in-house models last month, adding to the already complicated relationship with its OpenAI partner. Now, Microsoft AI chief Mustafa Suleyman says the company is making "significant investments" in the compute capacity required to Microsoft's own future frontier models. "We should have the capacity to build world class frontier models in house of all sizes, but we should be very pragmatic and use other models where we need to," said Suleyman during Microsoft's employee-only town hall on Thursday. "We're also going to be making significant investments in our own cluster, so today MAI-1-preview was only trained on 15,000 H100s, a tiny cluster in the grand scheme of things." Suleyman hinted that Microsoft has ambitions to train models that are comparable to Meta, Google, and xAI's efforts on clusters that are "six to ten times larger in size" than what Microsoft used for its MAI-1-preview. "Much more to do, but it's good to take the first steps," said Suleyman.

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But it reads at about the speed of punch cards

Imagine replacing thousands of LTO-9 tapes with just one cartridge. It's possible – if a Chinese research team's experimental DNA tape storage system reaches its theoretical maximum capacity.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Medical researchers at some institutions in Canada, the United States and Italy are using data created by artificial intelligence (AI) from real patient information in their experiments without the need for permission from their institutional ethics boards, Nature has learnt. To generate what is called 'synthetic data', researchers train generative AI models using real human medical information, then ask the models to create data sets with statistical properties that represent, but do not include, human data. Typically, when research involves human data, an ethics board must review how studies affect participants' rights, safety, dignity and well-being. However, institutions including the IRCCS Humanitas Research Hospital in Milan, Italy, the Children's Hospital of Eastern Ontario (CHEO) in Ottawa and the Ottawa Hospital, both in Canada, and Washington University School of Medicine (WashU Medicine) in St. Louis, Missouri, have waived these requirements for research involving synthetic data. The reasons the institutions use to justify this decision differ. However, the potential benefits of using synthetic data include protecting patient privacy, being more easily able to share data between sites and speeding up research, says Khaled El Emam, a medical AI researcher at the CHEO Research Institute and the University of Ottawa.

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Half of TRACERS satellite duo tripped up by power problems

After a month of receiving the silent treatment, controllers have regained contact with a TRACERS spacecraft that went offline shortly after launch.…

Google Tables, a work-tracking tool and competitor to the popular spreadsheet-database hybrid Airtable, is shutting down. TechCrunch: In an email sent to Tables users this week, Google said the app will not be supported after December 16, 2025, and advised that users export or migrate their data to either Google Sheets or AppSheet instead, depending on their needs. Launched in 2020, Tables focused on making project tracking more efficient with automation. It was one of the many projects to emerge from Google's in-house app incubator, Area 120, which at the time was devoted to cranking out a number of experimental projects. Some of these projects later graduated to become a part of Google's core offerings across Cloud, Search, Shopping, and more. Tables was one of those early successes: Google said in 2021 that the service was moving from a beta test to become an official Google Cloud product. At the time, the company said it saw Tables as a potential solution for a variety of use cases, including project management, IT operations, customer service tracking, CRM, recruiting, product development and more.

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Managarm, Asterinas, Xous – where disaffected code whisperers could go

Between Rust, new file systems, clashes between developers, systemd absorbing its functionality, and more, rumors of possible Linux forks are being muttered again. But there is another, better way.…

The Swiss government could soon require service providers with more than 5,000 users to collect government-issued identification, retain subscriber data for six months and, in many cases, disable encryption. From a report: The proposal, which is not subject to parliamentary approval, has alarmed privacy and digital-freedoms advocates worldwide because of how it will destroy anonymity online, including for people located outside of Switzerland. A large number of virtual private network (VPN) companies and other privacy-preserving firms are headquartered in the country because it has historically had liberal digital privacy laws alongside its famously discreet banking ecosystem. Proton, which offers secure and end-to-end encrypted email along with an ultra-private VPN and cloud storage, announced on July 23 that it is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland due to the proposed law. The company is investing more than $117 million in the European Union, the announcement said, and plans to help develop a "sovereign EuroStack for the future of our home continent." Switzerland is not a member of the EU. Proton said the decision was prompted by the Swiss government's attempt to "introduce mass surveillance."

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Dorm management refuses to cover costs after payment system borked

More than a thousand university students in the Netherlands must continue to travel to wash their clothes after their building management company failed to bring its borked smart laundry machines back online.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: An attempt to ban social media in Nepal ended this week in violent protest with the prime minister ousted, the Parliament in flames and soldiers on the streets of the capital. Now, the very technology the government tried to outlaw is being harnessed to help select the country's next leader, as more than 100,000 citizens are meeting regularly in a virtual chat room to debate the country's future. More than 30 people were killed in clashes with the police during youth-led protests that convulsed the capital in a paroxysm of outrage over wealth inequality, corruption and plans to ban some social media platforms. After the government's collapse on Tuesday, the military imposed a curfew across the capital, Kathmandu, and restricted large gatherings. With the country in political limbo and no obvious next leader in place, Nepalis have taken to Discord, a platform popularized by video gamers, to enact the digital version of a national convention. "The Parliament of Nepal right now is Discord," said Sid Ghimiri, 23, a content creator from Kathmandu, describing how the site has become the center of the nation's political decision making. The conversation inside the Discord channel, taking place in a combination of voice, video, and text chats, is so consequential that it is being discussed on national television and live streamed on news sites.

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US boffins say Beijing's bargain wafers are burning rivals below cost

China is moving to dominate the global market for polysilicon, a key material used in chips, by flooding the industry with cheap, subsidised product to drive producers in other countries out of business.…

Mars Sample Return mission still for the chop

The US House Appropriations Committee has approved a bill that would maintain NASA's budget at the same level as last year. However, lawmakers missed an opportunity to strike out the proposed $85 million relocation of a space vehicle to Houston.…

The Apache Software Foundation has unveiled a major branding overhaul that retires its three-decade-old feather logo after criticism from Native American activists. In its place is a new oak leaf design to symbolize endurance, resilience, and global reach. Along with the new visual identity, the group will emphasize "The ASF" as its shorthand name while keeping its full legal title intact. Apache.org explained: "The oak is one of the most enduring trees and is found around the world. It grows slowly but steadily, supporting vast ecosystems and lasting for centuries. In the same way, The ASF has served as a stable, resilient steward of open source for more than 25 years and is looking to the long future ahead. Choosing the oak leaf as our new logo represents the enduring power of our ethos: community over code."

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The first distro vendor to announces its move says nein, danke

The next kernel will have no new bcachefs code – and the openSUSE versions that use that kernel are going further still.…

Deal promises sovereign datacenters, AI, and cybersecurity to strengthen communication links with US

The UK's Ministry of Defence has signed a £400 million ($540 million) contract with Google sovereign cloud to support security and analytics workloads.…

Slack's complaint sparked a five-year investigation, but Redmond walks away fine-free

The EU has signed off on Microsoft's concessions over Teams bundling, letting Redmond dodge a monster antitrust fine in a deal that will barely rock the boat for anyone.…

Big Brother Watch says a so-called BritCard could turn daily life into one long identity check – and warn that Whitehall can’t be trusted to run

A national digital ID could hand the government the tools for population-wide surveillance – and if history is anything to go by, ministers probably couldn't run it without cocking it up.…

A new study published in Nature links more than 200 severe heat waves directly to greenhouse gas pollution from major fossil fuel producers like ExxonMobil, Chevron, and BP. Researchers found that up to a quarter of these heat waves would have been virtually impossible without emissions from oil, coal, and cement companies. NPR reports: The new study, published Wednesday in the journal Nature, found that 213 heat waves were substantially more likely and intense because of the activity of major fossil fuel producers, also called carbon majors. They include oil, coal and cement companies, as well as some countries. The scientists found as much as a quarter of the heat waves would be "virtually impossible" without the climate pollution from major fossil fuel producers. Some individual fossil fuel companies, such as ExxonMobil, Chevron and BP, had emissions high enough to cause some of the more extreme heat waves, the research found. For the new study, the scientists looked at something called the disaster database, a global list of disasters maintained by university researchers, to identify heat waves "with significant casualties, economic losses and calls for international assistance. The scientists then used historical reconstructions and statistical models to see how human-caused global warming made each heat wave more likely and more intense. Then, to examine the link to major fossil fuel producers, the researchers relied on the Carbon Majors Database to understand the emissions of major oil, gas, coal and cement producers. "We ran a climate model to reconstruct the historical period, and then we ran it again but without the emissions of a specific carbon major, thus deducing its contribution to global warming," Yann Quilcaille, climate scientist at ETH Zurich and lead author of the study, says in an email. While some of the contributions to heat waves came from larger well-known fossil fuel companies, the study found that some smaller, lesser-known fossil fuel companies are producing enough greenhouse gas emissions to cause heat waves too, Quilcaille says.

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UK data watchdog says students behind most education cyberattacks

The UK's data protection watchdog says more than half of cyberattacks in schools are caused by students, and that parents should act early to prevent their offspring from falling into the wrong crowds.…

Science fiction? Battle bots already used in Ukraine

Opinion I've read military science fiction since I was a kid. Besides the likes of Robert A. Heinlein's Starship Troopers, Joe Haldeman's The Forever War, and David Drake's Hammer's Slammers books, where people held the lead roles, I read novels such as Keith Laumer's Bolo series and Fred Saberhagen's Berserker space opera sf series, where machines are the protagonists and enemies. Even if you've never read war science fiction, you certainly at least know about Terminators. But what was once science fiction is now reality on the Ukrainian battlefields. It won't stop there.…