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Slashdot (Last Update: 2026-11-08 12:34:00GMT)

Aaron Swartz Would've Been 40 Today. His 'Legacy Lives On' Says FSF

"Aaron Swartz would have turned forty this year," writes FSF deputy director Sean O'Brien. "November 8 is Aaron Swartz Day, when we remember a pioneer of free software and information sharing whose contributions helped shape the modern internet." The Internet Archive will host a hackathon Sunday in San Francisco celebrating Aaron's Swartz's life "and the projects he worked on, many of which are still going strong today," including SecureDrop, OpenLibrary, and Creative Commons. "We are also spreading the word about projects he inspired," including OnionPress and the EFF's Atlas of Surveillancedocumenting police tech use through open source research, now a collaborative effort with volunteers, the University of Nevada, Reno, and the Reynolds School of Journalism. The event is also supported by Free Law Project, and organizers are asking attendees to "bring a color print out of your favorite photos of Aaron for a huge collaborative collage." From the Internet Archive's blog: Aaron was also a co-founder of Creative Commons, where he worked with Lisa Rein developing the RSS-enhanced HTML code that sits behind Creative Commons licenses, much of which is still in use today. The "Quantifying the Commons" project was designed to help measure open-licensed and public-domain works worldwide, and is one of the projects participants can work on. Aaron loved Tor and created tools such as "Tor2web" (with Virgil Griffith) to help more people publish Tor-accessible websites. Onion Press is a Tor-based publishing system designed for decentralized, censorship-resistant publishing, and participants can work on the code base... We also encourage you to have a hackathon in your own town using our materials — or materials of your own. Please let us know if you plan to do this (although it's not required!). If you do let us know, we can include you on our website and help you spread the word about your event. So far, there is an event in Portland sponsored by Portland Civic Lab where they will be screening The Internet's Own Boy and celebrating Aaron's life. "EFF was proud to call Aaron a friend and ally," the digital rights organization posted this week. And the FSF's deputy director writes "It is particularly striking that some of the world's largest companies now rely on technology Swartz helped to develop." One of Swartz's most important technical contributions was his collaboration with John Gruber on Markdown, the simple text formatting system introduced in 2004. Markdown allows users to create structured documents using ordinary text, without requiring proprietary software. More than twenty years later, Markdown has become one of the most popular formats for documentation and publishing, and is widely used in community websites such as forums and wikis. This is not a minor contribution. Companies developing LLMs use Markdown extensively in their products and development tools. OpenAI, for example, recommends Markdown for organizing instructions and communicating structure to its ChatGPT models... Swartz also developed web.py, a public domain framework for building Python applications, and contributed to RSS 1.0, a public internet standard for distributing news and other information between websites. Swartz developed web.py while rewriting the software running Reddit after Reddit acquired Swartz's company Infogami. Reddit recently licensed its content to AI companies, and the FSF's deputy director notes "the enormous scale of the alleged 'piracy' by giant technology corporations" while Aaron himself had "faced criminal prosecution for downloading academic research that he wanted to distribute with no monetary gain." In 2011, federal prosecutors charged Swartz with computer fraud and related offenses after he downloaded millions of academic articles from the JSTOR collection through MIT's university network... Although he was not charged with copyright infringement, he faced aggressive federal prosecution and the possibility of decades in prison before he tragically died by suicide in January 2013, at just twenty-six years old... Swartz helped build tools that made the internet more useful and accessible, and his contributions continue to shape a world he never lived to see. On Aaron Swartz Day, we should remember his achievements and the access-to-knowledge principles that guided them. The companies benefiting from his legacy should respect those same principles by giving users true freedom and control, rather than imposing more restrictions on us all.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NASA Announces It's Looking for New Astronauts

Saturday NASA officials announced it's accepting applications for a new astronaut class, reports the Associated Press: With only 32 active astronauts, the space agency needs more recruits as it looks to expand humanity's presence beyond low-Earth orbit as quickly as possible... "We have far more work than we have astronauts," Artemis III commander Randy Bresnik told The Associated Press on Saturday. Aspiring astronauts have between now and Dec. 3 to submit their applications... [They'll begin their training by early 2028]. By then "we're going to have people on the moon — so don't delay," Bresnik urged potential candidates. Bresnik and his three crewmates will blast into orbit next summer to practice docking their capsule with a pair of lunar landers, one built by Elon Musk's SpaceX and the other by Jeff Bezos' Blue Origin. Their mission will stick close to Earth — no lunar flyby — and serve as a dress rehearsal for the following year's Artemis IV mission that will attempt to land two astronauts near the lunar south pole. The moon base will materialize as more rovers, robots, structures and power grids are launched. The article notes NASA's last call for new astronauts was two years ago, and "More than 8,000 applied, with 10 making the final cut in September 2025."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scifi Magazine 'Starlog' Relaunches, and Back Issues Return to Internet Archive

Slashdot reader sandbagger brings news about the classic science ficdtion magazine Starlog. It's 33-year run from 1976 to 2009 is now available on the Internet Archive. And 17 years after publishing its final issue, Starlog is relaunching, publishing one issue a year starting November 13, according to The Hollywood Reporter: The magazine launched in 1976 and gained a fanbase for being one of the few places to get reliable news and interviews about geek culture. It launched with a cover focusing on Star Trek, one of its key areas of expertise, but the magazine's editors and writers also pioneered coverage of Star Wars. (The new issue chronicles some of the rumors it put out a year before the movie opened). In all, Starlog published 374 issues and more than 25,000 pages... In addition to the film and TV-focused features Starlog was known for, the new Starlog will also delve into futurism, as the cover from Gabriel Yeganyan highlights. The opening story of issue No. 1 looks at the viability of humans farming crops on planets outside of Earth, for example... The revival was announced earlier this year, and includes a podcast hosted by Jordan Hoffman, a veteran journalist who has contributed to The Hollywood Reporter.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

AlpineBSD Announced - an AI-free FOSS OS

Lproven (Slashdot reader #6,030) shares his article about a new OS in the BSD family "combining NetBSD's kernel and libc with a port of the Alpine Linux userland" — and promising it won't use AI-generated code: AlpineBSD is so new that it barely exists yet. There are no installation media available, though it's possible to manually bootstrap an installation. What AlpineBSD does already have is an AI policy, and the plan is to avoid "the output of generative AI models (e.g. LLMs)" as far as possible: "Any software whose code, documentation, binaries, or other assets include, in any part, the output of a generative AI tool such as an LLM, is considered 'tainted' for our purposes...." Back in 2024, the NetBSD project made its position on AI plain. Its commit guidelines say that "code generated by a Large Language Model [...] is presumed to be tainted code...." AlpineBSD's ports repository and source code are hosted on Sourcehut, under the account of sircmpwn, better known as Drew DeVault... We will follow AlpineBSD with interest. There's strong appeal in the plan of combining perhaps the best-known, longest-established AI-free Unix-like kernel with the user-facing parts of pretty much the smallest and cleanest Linux distro there is. The AI advocates often warn LLM skeptics that they risk being left behind. Well, here's an OS for those who don't want to surf the AI wave. The article does acknowledge difficulty installing software using the pkgin package manager (an optional extra), explaining that since 1993 the NetBSD community has had "its own ideas about what is normal... Some folks on the mailing list told us that they never use binary packages anyway — they compile what they need from source code."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft Removes PC-to-PC Migration from Windows 11, Points Users to OneDrive-Based Backup

Windows 11 offered a PC-to-PC Migration feature that "moved files and settings directly between two PCs over Wi-Fi or Ethernet," reports Ghacks. But according to an updated Microsoft support page, the tool is no longer available. "Microsoft's support documentation now redirects users to Windows Backup, a tool that relies on OneDrive cloud storage instead of a direct connection between two computers..." Windows Backup works differently. It requires a personal Microsoft account and backs up supported folders (Desktop, Documents, Pictures, Videos and Music) to OneDrive. Free OneDrive accounts include only 5GB of storage, and Microsoft's own promotional screenshot for Windows Backup shows 4.5GB of that allowance already in use. Years of photos, documents and downloads can exceed the free tier quickly. Windows Backup does carry some extras. It can remember installed apps, Wi-Fi networks, passwords and some settings to speed up setup on a new device. Apps still have to be reinstalled, and supported files are restored from the cloud. Thanks to Slashdot reader joshuark for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Data Centers are Being Powered By Giant Gas Plants, Possibly Increasing Carbon Pollution for Decades

Rather than racing toward their net-zero targets, Amazon and other AI/cloud computing companies "are driving emissions sharply higher," reports the Washington Post: To support their data centers, tech firms are driving construction of a new generation of supersized, gas-fired power plants that could lock in hundreds of millions of tons of climate pollution for decades to come, according to corporate disclosures and an analysis conducted for The Post by a researcher at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Industry estimates show these projects have put the tech sector on course to grow from a modest driver of industrial carbon pollution into one of the world's biggest emitters of greenhouse gases. Some anticipate that its share of global carbon emissions will increase as much as fivefold from 2020 to 2030. That would leave the tech industry churning out more than half the climate pollution created by global aviation or shipping — sectors long associated with driving warming... Already, Amazon's carbon footprint reached 80.85 million metric tons last year — 58% larger than when [Amazon CEO Jeff] Bezos pledged to shrink it. The company has veered far from the path laid out in the Paris agreement, which would have emissions falling steeply by now and dropping to 43% below 2019 levels by 2030. The tech companies say in corporate disclosures and public statements that they remain committed to their net zero targets, and they suggest the emissions surge is temporary — to be mitigated down the road, when new energy technologies enable the data centers to run cleaner and more efficiently. They also stress that they continue to invest in clean energy and rank as some of the world's biggest consumers of it. With some complicated accounting maneuvers and carbon credit purchases, their solar, wind and geothermal installations partly cancel out their gas emissions, according to corporate disclosures. A June report from international insurance/asset management Allianz found the world's data center emissions are on track to double to 643 million tons of CO2 annually between 2020 and 2030, the article points out. And they cite American data centers contributing to the problem: Just two gas projects Amazon signed on to for data centers planned in Texas and Pennsylvania "would produce more carbon pollution than the dirtiest facility in the country," an Alabama coal plant powering 1 million homes. Meta is building a nearly six-square-mile campus in Louisiana "that will consume as much electricity as three cities the size of New Orleans." "A sprawling Microsoft project in West Texas involving a giant gas plant built by Chevron and a Google project in Wyoming that would consume five times as much electricity as every household in that state would vastly expand the emissions associated with those companies." "A data center campus in Pike County, Ohio, that will support OpenAI's artificial intelligence operations will consume significantly more gas power, and, therefore, emit more carbon pollution, than the Microsoft and Google projects combined."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Is Mandating AI Use in the Workplace Backfiring?

Some workplaces are holding mandatory AI training sessions, while others "are requiring employees to use a specific number of tokens," reports the Washington Post, "or log a certain amount of time on AI platforms." The article's headline? "Why mandating AI use in the workplace can backfire." [A] lot of employers are going about it the wrong way, said Arvind Karunakaran, an assistant professor of management science and engineering at Stanford University. "You can consume a lot of tokens without creating a lot of value," Karunakaran said.... The adoption of AI is happening faster than the adoption of the internet did, according to a new report from Stanford's Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. And many users report that AI tools have really helped — whether saving time and costs or increasing innovation. The same report, though, found that one-third of organizations surveyed expected AI-related staff reductions in the coming year. Especially in that context, simply mandating usage won't spark excitement about the technology, Karunakaran said, and neither will insisting that employees use AI to cut turnaround times and ramp up productivity. "People start asking questions like 'What am I as an employee getting out of it?'" he said. The report he co-authored found that in the short-term, mandating AI tools may ramp up productivity. But in the long-to-medium term, employees tend to feel devalued and disengaged. From there, people find ways to mindlessly check the box. When employers present these tools and their use as an opportunity for employees to expand their skills and grow their careers, people are much likelier to use them, Karunakaran said. He suggests that rather than requiring employees use a specific number of tokens, companies should encourage workers to experiment and share their own use cases and success stories. Most workplaces are still shutting employees out of the conversation. More than half of employees said they have less of a say than they'd want on adopting new tech at work, according to a report from Gallup and Jobs for the Future, a work and education nonprofit. Any Slashdot readers want to share your own stories on how AI was introduced at your workplace?

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scientists Find Rare Meteorite From Mars With Signs of Ancient Water

"I didn't think a rock like this existed on Earth," a geologist at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Texas told the Washington Post. It looks like a polished rock, dark brown with a clay-colored stripe — but it's actually one of the oldest Mars meteorites ever found, blasted by an impact from the surface of Mars billions of years ago: Technically speaking it's a collection of eight rock fragments, the largest of which is about the size of a fist. Nearly two pounds of the meteorite was discovered in the Sahara in Mali in 2022, and most is now held by a museum in Maine. Within two years, an initial examination determined the meteorite hailed from Mars; scientists are now finally digging deeper, with stunning results. It offers records of "interactions of water and rock and maybe even an imprint of the Martian atmosphere as it was losing water," says Lee Saper, co-author of a new paper recently published in Science. "It was only after we started looking closely that we realized this meteorite is really unique," said Yang Liu of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, the lead author of a new paper published in Science. "One of the paper's reviewers called it a Rosetta Stone for Mars." Its mix of minerals "tells a story about how the planet's crust formed from cooling magma before it was eventually altered by subsurface water," NASA's JPL says in an announcement. The Washington Post reports: The story begins 4.1 billion years ago, when crystals of a mineral called zircon probably solidified out of molten magma on Mars. "That was a game changer," [said Yang Liu, a planetary scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California], since scientists can date zircon very precisely, and it has been rare in other Mars meteorites. The date immediately put the Teghaza meteorite on special footing, alongside only two other Mars rocks known to have formed by 4 billion years ago... Perhaps most intriguingly, the researchers also saw signs that the rock had been exposed to water during its evolution, a find detailed in work published this summer in Science Advances.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Phoronix (Last Update: 2026-11-08 12:22:24GMT)

Linux 7.5 To Provide More AMD Ryzen AI NPU AIE4 Enablement

Even before the Linux v7.4 merge window was over, there were already two pull requests of drm-misc-next material targeting for what will be Linux 7.5. This week already saw the third drm-misc-next pull request of more feature patches targeting this next kernel version...

AMD PerfOpt Performance Boosting Code Tweaked For Linux 7.4-rc2

Of the many exciting changes in Linux 7.4, one of the exciting out-of-the-box performance improvements is the new "PerfOpt" functionality for AMD SoCs with integrated Radeon graphics. AMD PerfOpt can deliver some nice iGPU performance improvements especially for AI/LLM workloads. With today's Linux 7.4-rc2 kernel release there are a few tweaks to the PerfOpt code in the IOMMU area...

Yunsilicon Working To Upstream Their High Performance Linux Network Driver

Yunsilicon is a Chinese semiconductor startup founded in 2021 that is working on producing high performance networking adapters and DPUs. Over the past month has been their first foray into posting patches to the Linux kernel mailing list and working to get their networking hardware supported by the mainline Linux kernel...

HyprBSD Provides Wayland-Based Desktop Built Atop FreeBSD, Complete With Steam Gaming

While FreeBSD has been working to improve its desktop and laptop experience, that work isn't yet shipping in released form for the OS installer and other ongoing efforts. Now there's a new desktop FreeBSD distribution on the scene with HyprBSD providing a Wayland-based desktop experience and with the Linux binary compatibility layer even an easy route to gaming with Steam...

Undeadly.org (Last Update: 2026-11-06 10:49:57GMT)

OpenBSD top(1) adds flag to show chroot, pledge and unveil status

With one recent commit, the top(1) command on OpenBSD became quite a bit more useful. The commit adds a new -Q flag to show each process' use of the chroot(2), pledge(2) and unveil(2) facilities.

The commit message reads, 

List:       openbsd-cvs
Subject:    CVS: cvs.openbsd.org: src
From:       Klemens Nanni <kn () cvs ! openbsd ! org>
Date:       2026-11-05 17:54:16

CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	src
Changes by:	kn@cvs.openbsd.org	2026/11/05 11:54:16

Modified files:
	usr.bin/top    : display.c machine.c machine.h top.1 top.c 

Log message:
add Q flag/key to show pledge/chroot/unveil usage

Read more…

OpenSSH 10.6p2 released

In an announcement posted on social media, Damien Miller (djm@) writes,
OpenSSH 10.6p2 has been released with a workaround for a critical vulnerability.

If you operate a Linux system that uses musl libc without PAM (Alpine Linux is one example) then stop reading and set PasswordAuthentication=no or disable SSH for these systems IMMEDIATELY.

This vulnerability does not exist on non-Linux systems, Linux/glibc systems and Linux systems that use PAM for password authentication.

We consider the root cause of this bug to be outside OpenSSH itself, but we're in a good position to deliver a mitigation quickly.

Read more…

Work on GEFS (the Good Enough File System) for OpenBSD progresses

As previously reported, Ori Bernstein is working on GEFS, the "Good Enough File System" imported to OpenBSD, and his EuroBSDCon 2026 presentation was very well received. In fact, the video is among the most frequently played from the conference.

Now Ori has followed up with more evolved code that includes several important steps towards makin the new file system fit for general use. In a message to tech@, Ori writes: 

List:       openbsd-tech
Subject:    Re: GEFS on OpenBSD: A very early preview
From:       ori () eigenstate ! org
Date:       2026-10-31 17:08:42

So, it's probably time for a few updates. First
off, thanks to Martijn, and everyone else who
tried it out and sent patches.

Everything is updated and rebased, and the diff
has been regenerated with all of the lastest.

Read more…

emulators/wine (re)entering OpenBSD ports

In his message to the ports@ mailing list, Thomas Frohwein (thfr@) leads in, 
In what might the most surprising port proposal of the year, I'm proud
to present a new port for wine.

talking not about the beverage, but the Windows Emulator that enables running binaries for that operating system on other systems.

Among the editors there is no one with enough recent Windows exposure to comment seriously on this, but we do vaguely remember that a port of this software existed back in the day.

So if this falls within the things you are interested in or actually need, we would encourage you to read the entire emulators/wine thread and the later supplement on new port: emulators/wine-extras: scripts for winetricks and wine-steam to keep up to date on developments.

Then, if you are able, please help the effort by testing the ports and reporting back.

dbupdate(8) added to -current

Theo de Raadt (deraadt@) has committed to -current a (WIP) new utility for updating system databases:

CVSROOT:	/cvs
Module name:	src
Changes by:	deraadt@cvs.openbsd.org	2026/10/20 19:08:58

Added files:
	usr.sbin/dbupdate: Makefile dbupdate.8 dbupdate.sh 

Log message:
initial draft of dbupdate(8) for updating (signed) zoneinfo and cert.pem
from a new cdn.openbsd.org/pub/OpenBSD/dbupdates/ directory.  We can't
do this nicely with syspatch(8) because it requires patches in sequence
so a new tool had to be written.  It is intentionally kept very simple
so that it can be studied because we intend to run this in root cron,
(the non-simple parts figure out quickly when not to update).
looked at by sthen beck lucas dgl

Read more…

OpenBSD 8.0 Released

The OpenBSD project has announced OpenBSD 8.0, its 61st release.

The new release contains a number of significant improvements, including but certainly not limited to:

  • OpenBSD/amd64 kernel virtual address space is now 512GB [See earlier report]
  • Mitigation for AMD Zen-2 operation cache corruption added [See commit]
  • OpenBSD now uses AES instructions (on amd64 and arm64 when available) to increase speed of swap encryption/decryption [See commit]
  • The OpenBSD/loongson hardware platform has been retired [See earlier report]
  • getexecpath(3) added [See commit]
  • drm(4) has been updated to Linux 6.18.53
  • vmm(4)/vmd(8) improvements:
    • files are now used to manage VM ownership [See earlier report]
    • multi-processor VMs are now supported [See earlier report]
  • WPA3 support introduced [See earlier report]
  • syslogd(8) privileged and non-privileged parts now separate binaries [See earlier report]
  • qwz(4) driver for Qualcomm Technologies WCN7850 wireless network devices added [See commit]
  • PF queues break the 4 Gbps barrier [See earlier report]
  • httpd(8) and smtpd(8) are now randomly relinked at boot [See earlier report]
  • httpd(8) has seen many improvements:
    • support for custom HTTP headers [See earlier reports]
    • header block/drop rules for request filtering [See earlier report]
    • improved default crypto methods for HTTPS [See earlier report]
    • cache control for static files [See commit]
  • relayd(8) has received several improvements:
    • improved default crypto methods for HTTPS [See earlier report]
    • support for ECDSA keys and certificates was added [See earlier report]
    • filter rules gained support for Lua patterns(7) [See earlier report]
    • support for multiple resolvable addresses [See commit]
  • rtrd(8), a RTR-To-Router protocol daemon, and its control program, rtrctl(8), were imported [See earlier report]
  • acme-client(1) gained support for external account binding [See commit]
  • Several improvements in OpenBGPD [See earlier reports]
  • A number of incremental improvements in rpki-client(8) [See earlier reports]
  • tmux(1) gained support for floating panes [See commit]
  • LibreSSL 4.4.0 [See earlier reports]
  • OpenSSH 10.6 [See earlier reports]
  • llvm/clang(1)/lld(1) updated to version 22.1.6 [See earlier report]
  • LLVM toolchain added to OpenBSD/sparc64 [See earlier report]
  • compiler-rt, libunwind, libcxxabi, libcxx updated to version 22.1.8

In addition, this release offers a number of bug fixes and as well as numerous improvements in hardware support.

See the full changelog for more details of the changes made over this latest six month development cycle.

The Installation Guide details how to get the system up and running with a fresh install, while those who already run earlier releases should follow the Upgrade Guide, in most cases using sysupgrade(8).

Readers are encouraged to celebrate the new release by donating to the project to support further development of our favourite OS!

Schneier (Last Update: 2026-11-06 22:05:12GMT)

Friday Squid Blogging: New Jurassic Squid Predecessors

News story: “Scientists discover a bizarre Jurassic ‘squid’ unlike anything ever seen.”

Scientists have identified the “fattest” belemnite ever discovered, a bizarre, barrel-shaped squid relative that lived in Wyoming’s ancient seas 160 million years ago. The exceptionally rare fossils reveal a creature unlike anything previously known, potentially a predator of smaller squid-like animals and a surprising survivor of a supposedly vanished family.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered.

Blog moderation policy.

Pinpointing Location of Videos from Background Airplane Sounds

This is fascinating:

The video describes a technique that can reveal where an otherwise unidentifiable recording was made by analyzing its audio for the faint sounds of passing aircraft. The technique is both fascinating and frightening.

It works by looking at Doppler curves, which plot the way a plane’s sound changes as it passes overhead because of the Doppler effect. This is the same familiar Doppler effect that causes the frequency of a siren to rise as it approaches and then fall as it passes by and moves away. More generally, it’s the phenomenon whereby the frequency of a wave perceived by an observer changes when the observer and the source of the wave are moving in relation to one another.

[…]

It’s sound that’s relevant here, though, and specifically the sound of aeroplanes. Early in his video, Colsto brings up a map of the flights that were in the air at the time the video he’s tracing was recorded. Much of this information is publicly available. Aircraft equipped with Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS-B) transmit data about their position, velocity, and altitude, which flight-tracking services collect and make available to the public. While not every plane is tracked, the system provides an enormous amount of information about aircraft movements.

AIs Hacking the Law

In both a 2021 essay and my 2022 book, A Hacker’s Mind, I talk about AIs finding vulnerabilities and exploits—hacking—the legal system.

Here’s some demonstrations of this from Germany:

Legal systems encode the foundations of social order in natural language. Similar to computer systems, the written law can contain vulnerabilities that invite exploitation.1 Courts absorb most exploits through interpretation, and such vulnerabilities rarely surface in the first place. With highly capable AI systems enabling the discovery of vulnerabilities at unprecedented scale, we believe the latter could change.

In testing this hypothesis, we have identified a substantial number of vulnerabilities in the German legal system using LLMs. To our knowledge, none of these have been previously recorded. We share a selection of vulnerabilities below, and present potential exploits for each. We share only those vulnerabilities whose exploitation we believe would not cause serious harm.

We believe that with cheap legal reasoning proliferating, AI systems could jeopardize the functioning of today’s legal systems. In such a world, lawmakers would need to significantly harden the process of legislation, for example by leveraging advanced AI themselves.

Still in its early stages, but definitely something that’s coming.

AI Vulnerability Finding

A comment:

3% of ‘critical’ software security bugs, in all of recorded history, have been found in the last month. This is on pace to find another ~100,000 bugs this year alone, adding ~26% more vulnerabilities to the all time total Do you realize how fucking insane that is?

Yes. It is a new world out there.

Bloatware in Aftermarket Auto Parts

This story is interesting:

One Civic owner purchased a cheap aftermarket head unit off Amazon, and decided to have Claude work its magic on it, like it would a smart TV. What was reportedly discovered isn’t surprising, but is worth knowing about.

Among the pre-installed bloatware—­or spyware, if you’re being less charitable­—was a voice assistant equipped with WebView, an Android system component that lets apps display content off the web. This apparently always used about a third of processing power, even while idle, which isn’t great. There were also Baidu location services, a call recorder (!), a DAB radio client that is pretty much useless in the U.S., and Adobe Acrobat, presumably so your passenger can entertain themselves with PDFs on the go.

It’s interesting because it exposes all the insecurities in this piece of IoT software. But I think the real story is that a random person was able to do this reverse-engineering with the help of AI. Expect a lot more stories like this in the future.

Hiding Capabilities in AI Models

Interesting research: “AI Models Can Provably Hide Arbitrary Capabilities”

Abstract: Capability evaluations aim to surface dangerous model behaviors before deployment, but their reliability depends on the assumption that hidden capabilities can be elicited. We show this assumption does not hold under adversarial conditions by constructing backdoor attacks that embed encrypted neural networks within host model weights, decrypting and executing them only upon receiving a secret trigger. Using digital lockers, these hidden circuits remain provably hard to elicit and interpret under cryptographic assumptions, even given full access to model weights, extending prior work from hiding fixed strings to arbitrary computations. We implement our proof of concept constructions in PyTorch and evaluate elicitation through fine-tuning, weight noising, gradient-based trigger search, and latent adversarial training, using a small chemical reaction prediction task as a proxy for CBRN-relevant capabilities. Our results demonstrate resistance to these methods and, together with our cryptographic guarantees, reveal a limit of elicitation-based capability audits. We release our models to support the improvement of defenses.

LXer (Last Update: 2026-11-08 14:54:29GMT)

Linux 7.5 To Provide More AMD Ryzen AI NPU AIE4 Enablement

Even before the Linux v7.4 merge window was over, there were already two pull requests of drm-misc-next material targeting for what will be Linux 7.5. This week already saw the third drm-misc-next pull request of more feature patches targeting this next kernel version…

Open hardware board gives Echo Dot a second life with Home Assistant

Crowd Supply has launched a campaign for LocalDot, an open-hardware board developed by AAElectronics that converts third-generation Amazon Echo Dots into Home Assistant voice devices. The 83 × 37mm PCB uses an ESP32-S3 and ESP32-P4 for connectivity and audio processing while retaining the original microphones, speaker, buttons, and LEDs. The ESP32-S3 handles Wi-Fi connectivity and…

HyprBSD Provides Wayland-Based Desktop Built Atop FreeBSD, Complete With Steam Gaming

While FreeBSD has been working to improve its desktop and laptop experience, that work isn't yet shipping in released form for the OS installer and other ongoing efforts. Now there's a new desktop FreeBSD distribution on the scene with HyprBSD providing a Wayland-based desktop experience and with the Linux binary compatibility layer even an easy route to gaming with Steam…

Amutable Foundations: A Technical Overview

Lennart Poettering, Michael Vogt, and Joaquim Rocha have put together a detailed overview of what the Amutable Operating System (AOS) and associated infrastructure will look like. The image-based OS approach enables us to enforce some very strict but powerful security properties, which elevate the security posture of the system substantially above traditional Linux systems. Specifically, let's…