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As the data pool expands, DHS plans to hold onto the data until an immigrant who has requested benefits or otherwise engaged with DHS agencies is either granted citizenship or removed.
[...]
DHS said it "recognizes" that its sweeping data collection plans that remove age restrictions don't conform with Department of Justice policies. But the agency claimed there was no conflict since "DHS regulatory provisions control all DHS biometrics collections" and "DHS is not authorized to operate or collect biometrics under DOJ authorities."
[...]
Currently, DHS is seeking public comments on the rule change, which can be submitted over the next 60 days ahead of a deadline on January 2, 2026. The agency suggests it "welcomes" comments, particularly on the types of biometric data DHS wants to collect, including concerns about the "reliability of technology."
[...]
However, DHS claims that's now appropriate, including in cases where children were trafficked or are seeking benefits under the Violence Against Women Act and, therefore, are expected to prove "good moral character."

"Generally, DHS plans to use the biometric information collected from children for identity management in the immigration lifecycle only, but will retain the authority for other uses in its discretion, such as background checks and for law enforcement purposes," DHS's proposal said.

The changes will also help protect kids from removals, DHS claimed, by making it easier for an ICE attorney to complete required "identity, law enforcement, or security investigations or examinations."
[...]
It's possible that some DHS agencies may establish an age threshold for some data collection, the rule change noted.

A day after the rule change was proposed, 42 comments have been submitted. Most were critical, but as Lynch warned, speaking out seemed risky, with many choosing to anonymously criticize the initiative as violating people's civil rights and making the US appear more authoritarian.

One anonymous user cited guidance from the ACLU and the Electronic Privacy Information Center, while warning that "what starts as a 'biometrics update' could turn into widespread privacy erosion for immigrants and citizens alike."
[...]
"You pitch it as a tool against child trafficking, which is a real issue, but does swabbing a newborn really help, or does it just create a lifelong digital profile starting at day one?" the commenter asked. "Accuracy for growing kids is questionable, and the [ACLU] has pointed out how this disproportionately burdens families. Imagine the hassle for parents—it's not protection; it's preemptively treating every child like a data point in a government file."

Original Submission

Tilley previously made headlines in 2018 when he located a satellite that NASA had lost contact with in 2005. For his new discovery, Tilley published data and a technical paper describing the "strong wideband S-band emissions," and his work was featured by NPR on October 17.

Tilley's technical paper said emissions were detected from 170 satellites out of the 193 known Starshield satellites. Emissions have since been detected from one more satellite, making it 171 out of 193, he told Ars. "The apparent downlink use of an uplink-allocated band, if confirmed by authorities, warrants prompt technical and regulatory review to assess interference risk and ensure compliance" with ITU regulations, Tilley's paper said.

Tilley said he uses a mix of omnidirectional antennas and dish antennas at his home to receive signals, along with "software-defined radios and quite a bit of proprietary software I've written or open source software that I use for analysis work." The signals did not stop when the paper was published. Tilley said the emissions are powerful enough to be received by "relatively small ground stations."

Tilley's paper said that Starshield satellites emit signals with a width of 9 MHz and signal-to-noise (SNR) ratios of 10 to 15 decibels. "A 10 dB SNR means the received signal power is ten times greater than the noise power in the same bandwidth," while "20 dB means one hundred times," Tilley told Ars.

Other Starshield signals that were 4 or 5 MHz wide "have been observed to change frequency from day to day with SNR exceeding 20dB," his paper said. "Also observed from time to time are other weaker wide signals from 2025–2110 MHz what may be artifacts or actual intentional emissions."

The 2025–2110 MHz band is used by NASA for science missions and by other countries for similar missions, Tilley noted. "Any other radio activity that's occurring on this band is intentionally limited to avoid causing disruption to its primary purpose," he said.

The band is used for some fully terrestrial, non-space purposes. Mobile service is allowed in 2025–2110 MHz, but ITU rules say that "administrations shall not introduce high-density mobile systems" in these frequencies. The band is also licensed in the US for non-federal terrestrial services, including the Broadcast Auxiliary Service, Cable Television Relay Service, and Local Television Transmission Service.

While Earth-based systems using the band, such as TV links from mobile studios, have legal protection against interference, Tilley noted that "they normally use highly directional and local signals to link a field crew with a studio... they're not aimed into space but at a terrestrial target with a very directional antenna." A trade group representing the US broadcast industry told Ars that it hasn't observed any interference from Starshield satellites.

[...] While Tilley doesn't know exactly what the emissions are for, his paper said the "signal characteristics—strong, coherent, and highly predictable carriers from a large constellation—create the technical conditions under which opportunistic or deliberate PNT exploitation could occur."

PNT refers to Positioning, Navigation, and Timing (PNT) applications. "While it is not suggested that the system was designed for that role, the combination of wideband data channels and persistent carrier tones in a globally distributed or even regionally operated network represents a practical foundation for such use, either by friendly forces in contested environments or by third parties seeking situational awareness," the paper said.

Much more information in the linked source.

Original Submission

We Did the Math on AI's Energy Footprint. Here's the Story You Haven't Heard.

upstart writes:

We did the math on AI's energy footprint. Here's the story you haven't heard.:

[...] Now that we have an estimate of the total energy required to run an AI model to produce text, images, and videos, we can work out what that means in terms of emissions that cause climate change.

First, a data center humming away isn't necessarily a bad thing. If all data centers were hooked up to solar panels and ran only when the sun was shining, the world would be talking a lot less about AI's energy consumption. That's not the case. Most electrical grids around the world are still heavily reliant on fossil fuels. So electricity use comes with a climate toll attached.

"AI data centers need constant power, 24-7, 365 days a year," says Rahul Mewawalla, the CEO of Mawson Infrastructure Group, which builds and maintains high-energy data centers that support AI.

That means data centers can't rely on intermittent technologies like wind and solar power, and on average, they tend to use dirtier electricity. One preprint study from Harvard's T.H. Chan School of Public Health found that the carbon intensity of electricity used by data centers was 48% higher than the US average. Part of the reason is that data centers currently happen to be clustered in places that have dirtier grids on average, like the coal-heavy grid in the mid-Atlantic region that includes Virginia, West Virginia, and Pennsylvania. They also run constantly, including when cleaner sources may not be available.

Data centers can't rely on intermittent technologies like wind and solar power, and on average, they tend to use dirtier electricity.

Tech companies like Meta, Amazon, and Google have responded to this fossil fuel issue by announcing goals to use more nuclear power. Those three have joined a pledge to triple the world's nuclear capacity by 2050. But today, nuclear energy only accounts for 20% of electricity supply in the US, and powers a fraction of AI data centers' operations—natural gas accounts for more than half of electricity generated in Virginia, which has more data centers than any other US state, for example. What's more, new nuclear operations will take years, perhaps decades, to materialize.

In 2024, fossil fuels including natural gas and coal made up just under 60% of electricity supply in the US. Nuclear accounted for about 20%, and a mix of renewables accounted for most of the remaining 20%.

Gaps in power supply, combined with the rush to build data centers to power AI, often mean shortsighted energy plans. In April, Elon Musk's X supercomputing center near Memphis was found, via satellite imagery, to be using dozens of methane gas generators that the Southern Environmental Law Center alleges are not approved by energy regulators to supplement grid power and are violating the Clean Air Act.

The key metric used to quantify the emissions from these data centers is called the carbon intensity: how many grams of carbon dioxide emissions are produced for each kilowatt-hour of electricity consumed. Nailing down the carbon intensity of a given grid requires understanding the emissions produced by each individual power plant in operation, along with the amount of energy each is contributing to the grid at any given time. Utilities, government agencies, and researchers use estimates of average emissions, as well as real-time measurements, to track pollution from power plants.

This intensity varies widely across regions. The US grid is fragmented, and the mixes of coal, gas, renewables, or nuclear vary widely. California's grid is far cleaner than West Virginia's, for example.

Time of day matters too. For instance, data from April 2024 shows that California's grid can swing from under 70 grams per kilowatt-hour in the afternoon when there's a lot of solar power available to over 300 grams per kilowatt-hour in the middle of the night.

This variability means that the same activity may have very different climate impacts, depending on your location and the time you make a request. Take that charity marathon runner, for example. The text, image, and video responses they requested add up to 2.9 kilowatt-hours of electricity. In California, generating that amount of electricity would produce about 650 grams of carbon dioxide pollution on average. But generating that electricity in West Virginia might inflate the total to more than 1,150 grams.

What we've seen so far is that the energy required to respond to a query can be relatively small, but it can vary a lot, depending on the type of query and the model being used. The emissions associated with that given amount of electricity will also depend on where and when a query is handled. But what does this all add up to?

ChatGPT is now estimated to be the fifth-most visited website in the world, just after Instagram and ahead of X. In December, OpenAI said that ChatGPT receives 1 billion messages every day, and after the company launched a new image generator in March, it said that people were using it to generate 78 million images per day, from Studio Ghibli–style portraits to pictures of themselves as Barbie dolls.

Given the direction AI is headed—more personalized, able to reason and solve complex problems on our behalf, and everywhere we look—it's likely that our AI footprint today is the smallest it will ever be.

One can do some very rough math to estimate the energy impact. In February the AI research firm Epoch AI published an estimate of how much energy is used for a single ChatGPT query—an estimate that, as discussed, makes lots of assumptions that can't be verified. Still, they calculated about 0.3 watt-hours, or 1,080 joules, per message. This falls in between our estimates for the smallest and largest Meta Llama models (and experts we consulted say that if anything, the real number is likely higher, not lower).

One billion of these every day for a year would mean over 109 gigawatt-hours of electricity, enough to power 10,400 US homes for a year. If we add images and imagine that generating each one requires as much energy as it does with our high-quality image models, it'd mean an additional 35 gigawatt-hours, enough to power another 3,300 homes for a year. This is on top of the energy demands of OpenAI's other products, like video generators, and that for all the other AI companies and startups.

But here's the problem: These estimates don't capture the near future of how we'll use AI. In that future, we won't simply ping AI models with a question or two throughout the day, or have them generate a photo. Instead, leading labs are racing us toward a world where AI "agents" perform tasks for us without our supervising their every move. We will speak to models in voice mode, chat with companions for 2 hours a day, and point our phone cameras at our surroundings in video mode. We will give complex tasks to so-called "reasoning models" that work through tasks logically but have been found to require 43 times more energy for simple problems, or "deep research" models that spend hours creating reports for us. We will have AI models that are "personalized" by training on our data and preferences.

This future is around the corner: OpenAI will reportedly offer agents for $20,000 per month and will use reasoning capabilities in all of its models moving forward, and DeepSeek catapulted "chain of thought" reasoning into the mainstream with a model that often generates nine pages of text for each response. AI models are being added to everything from customer service phone lines to doctor's offices, rapidly increasing AI's share of national energy consumption.

"The precious few numbers that we have may shed a tiny sliver of light on where we stand right now, but all bets are off in the coming years," says Luccioni.

Every researcher we spoke to said that we cannot understand the energy demands of this future by simply extrapolating from the energy used in AI queries today. And indeed, the moves by leading AI companies to fire up nuclear power plants and create data centers of unprecedented scale suggest that their vision for the future would consume far more energy than even a large number of these individual queries.

"The precious few numbers that we have may shed a tiny sliver of light on where we stand right now, but all bets are off in the coming years," says Luccioni. "Generative AI tools are getting practically shoved down our throats and it's getting harder and harder to opt out, or to make informed choices when it comes to energy and climate."

To understand how much power this AI revolution will need, and where it will come from, we have to read between the lines.

See also:

• Power Hungry

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2  Original Submission #3 

VPNs mask your real location by routing your internet traffic through a server somewhere else. When you visit a website through a VPN, that website only sees the VPN server's IP address, not your actual location. It's like sending a letter through a P.O. box so the recipient doesn't know where you really live.

So when Wisconsin demands that websites "block VPN users from Wisconsin," they're asking for something that's technically impossible. Websites have no way to tell if a VPN connection is coming from Milwaukee, Michigan, or Mumbai. The technology just doesn't work that way.

Websites subject to this proposed law are left with this choice: either cease operation in Wisconsin, or block all VPN users, everywhere, just to avoid legal liability in the state. One state's terrible law is attempting to break VPN access for the entire internet, and the unintended consequences of this provision could far outweigh any theoretical benefit.
Almost Everyone Uses VPNs

Let's talk about who lawmakers are hurting with these bills, because it sure isn't just people trying to watch porn without handing over their driver's license.

• Businesses run on VPNs. Every company with remote employees uses VPNs. Every business traveler connecting through sketchy hotel Wi-Fi needs one. Companies use VPNs to protect client and employee data, secure internal communications, and prevent cyberattacks.
• Students need VPNs for school. Universities require students to use VPNs to access research databases, course materials, and library resources. These aren't optional, and many professors literally assign work that can only be accessed through the school VPN. The University of Wisconsin-Madison's WiscVPN, for example, "allows UW–‍Madison faculty, staff and students to access University resources even when they are using a commercial Internet Service Provider (ISP)."
• Vulnerable people rely on VPNs for safety. Domestic abuse survivors use VPNs to hide their location from their abusers. Journalists use them to protect their sources. Activists use them to organize without government surveillance. LGBTQ+ people in hostile environments—both in the US and around the world—use them to access health resources, support groups, and community. For people living under censorship regimes, VPNs are often their only connection to vital resources and information their governments have banned.
• Regular people just want privacy. Maybe you don't want every website you visit tracking your location and selling that data to advertisers. Maybe you don't want your internet service provider (ISP) building a complete profile of your browsing history. Maybe you just think it's creepy that corporations know everywhere you go online. VPNs can protect everyday users from everyday tracking and surveillance.

Here's what happens if VPNs get blocked: everyone has to verify their age by submitting government IDs, biometric data, or credit card information directly to websites—without any encryption or privacy protection.

We already know how this story ends. Companies get hacked. Data gets breached. And suddenly your real name is attached to the websites you visited, stored in some poorly-secured database waiting for the inevitable leak. This has already happened, and is not a matter of if but when. And when it does, the repercussions will be huge.

Forcing people to give up their privacy to access legal content is the exact opposite of good policy. It's surveillance dressed up as safety.
"Harmful to Minors" Is Not a Catch-All

Here's another fun feature of these laws: they're trying to broaden the definition of "harmful to minors" to sweep in a host of speech that is protected for both young people and adults.

Historically, states can prohibit people under 18 years old from accessing sexual materials that an adult can access under the First Amendment. But the definition of what constitutes "harmful to minors" is narrow — it generally requires that the materials have almost no social value to minors and that they, taken as a whole, appeal to a minors' "prurient sexual interests."

Wisconsin's bill defines "harmful to minors" much more broadly. It applies to materials that merely describe sex or feature descriptions/depictions of human anatomy. This definition would likely encompass a wide range of literature, music, television, and films that are protected under the First Amendment for both adults and young people, not to mention basic scientific and medical content.

Additionally, the bill's definition would apply to any websites where more than one third of the site's material is "harmful to minors." Given the breadth of the definition and its one-third trigger, we anticipate that Wisconsin could argue that the law applies to most social media websites. And it's not hard to imagine, as these topics become politicised, Wisconsin claiming it applies to websites containing LGBTQ+ health resources, basic sexual education resources, and reproductive healthcare information.

This breadth of the bill's definition isn't a bug, it's a feature. It gives the state a vast amount of discretion to decide which speech is "harmful" to young people, and the power to decide what's "appropriate" and what isn't. History shows us those decisions most often harm marginalized communities.

Let's say Wisconsin somehow manages to pass this law. Here's what will actually happen:

People who want to bypass it will use non-commercial VPNs, open proxies, or cheap virtual private servers that the law doesn't cover. They'll find workarounds within hours. The internet always routes around censorship.

Even in a fantasy world where every website successfully blocked all commercial VPNs, people would just make their own. You can route traffic through cloud services like AWS or DigitalOcean, tunnel through someone else's home internet connection, use open proxies, or spin up a cheap server for less than a dollar.

Meanwhile, everyone else (businesses, students, journalists, abuse survivors, regular people who just want privacy) will have their VPN access impacted. The law will accomplish nothing except making the internet less safe and less private for users.

Nonetheless, as we've mentioned previously, while VPNs may be able to disguise the source of your internet activity, they are not foolproof—nor should they be necessary to access legally protected speech. Like the larger age verification legislation they are a part of, VPN-blocking provisions simply don't work. They harm millions of people and they set a terrifying precedent for government control of the internet. More fundamentally, legislators need to recognize that age verification laws themselves are the problem. They don't work, they violate privacy, they're trivially easy to circumvent, and they create far more harm than they prevent.
A False Dilemma

People have (predictably) turned to VPNs to protect their privacy as they watched age verification mandates proliferate around the world. Instead of taking this as a sign that maybe mass surveillance isn't popular, lawmakers have decided the real problem is that these privacy tools exist at all and are trying to ban the tools that let people maintain their privacy.

Let's be clear: lawmakers need to abandon this entire approach.

The answer to "how do we keep kids safe online" isn't "destroy everyone's privacy." It's not "force people to hand over their IDs to access legal content." And it's certainly not "ban access to the tools that protect journalists, activists, and abuse survivors."

If lawmakers genuinely care about young people's well-being, they should invest in education, support parents with better tools, and address the actual root causes of harm online. What they shouldn't do is wage war on privacy itself. Attacks on VPNs are attacks on digital privacy and digital freedom. And this battle is being fought by people who clearly have no idea how any of this technology actually works.

If you live in Wisconsin—reach out to your Senator and urge them to kill A.B. 105/S.B. 130. Our privacy matters. VPNs matter. And politicians who can't tell the difference between a security tool and a "loophole" shouldn't be writing laws about the internet.

Original Submission

Researchers suggest that the Spicomellus' complex bone structure was used both to attract mates and deter rivals.

Discovering that the dinosaur had such elaborate armor that possibly prioritized form as much as function set the animal apart from its predecessors, which had less, more defensive covering on their bodies.

In addition to showy barbs along Spicomellus' exterior, remains of the animal's tail also provided a stunning new detail for scientists.

Fused vertebrae going down into its tail formed a "handle," likely leading to a club-like weapon at the end — a detail ankylosaur scientists had previously believed not to have evolved until the Cretaceous period, millions of years later.

"To find such elaborate armour in an early ankylosaur changes our understanding of how these dinosaurs evolved," Maidment said.

"It shows just how significant Africa's dinosaurs are, and how important it is to improve our understanding of them," she said.

[Ed. note: The link to the Nature article in the summary contains an embedded sharing token so that one can read the journal article. The link in the citation below is the clean link to the paywalled article page.]

Journal Reference: Maidment, S.C.R., Ouarhache, D., Ech-charay, K. et al. Extreme armour in the world's oldest ankylosaur. Nature 647, 121–126 (2025). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-025-09453-6

Original Submission

[...] Deli bal is a dark amber red and its scent is sharp. The taste is earthy with subtle barnyard notes. There are telltale sensations that announce the presence of grayanotoxin: A herbal bitterness underlies the sweetness of the honey and a burning heat catches the back of the throat.

[...] This is a food that has felled armies. In the 4th century BCE, the Greek military leader Xenophon wrote of soldiers traveling near Trabzon on the Black Sea coast who overindulged on the sweet treat: "Not one of them could stand up, but those who had eaten a little were like people exceedingly drunk, while those who had eaten a great deal seemed like crazy, or even, in some cases, dying men. So they lay there in great numbers as though the army had suffered a defeat, and great despondency prevailed."

[...] "The longer the honey stays in the hive, the higher its quality becomes. The quality is determined by the promille value," he explains. Promille refers to the concentration of the honey. "The higher the promille value, the higher the quality."

"Chestnut honey can be found everywhere, but it really makes a difference," adds Emine. "In terms of the promille value, it can be 600, 700, 800, but elsewhere, it might be 500 in terms of quality."

[...] To Emine, honey "represents health. If my throat is sore, I turn to honey. If I'm coughing, I turn to honey. If I'm feeling weak, I turn to honey again."

[...] Deli bal can be sold legally in Turkey and is legal in many countries. However, the US Food and Drug Administration does not recommend its consumption.

"Consumers should check labeling of honey to ensure it is not labeled as 'mad honey' or marketed for intoxicating qualities," an FDA spokesperson told CNN.

"Eating honey with a high amount of this toxin can lead to 'mad honey' poisoning, with symptoms such as nausea, vomiting, or dizziness. This type of poisoning is rare."

Original Submission

Such resistance can manifest in diverse forms, including public protest, legal action, digital subversion, scholarly critique, and grassroots advocacy. Comparable to civil disobedience, these practices reflect a principled commitment to ethical, legal, or democratic norms perceived to be undermined by the development or deployment of certain AI systems. The term "AI resistance" therefore covers a broad range of actions and is open to multiple interpretations, given that both "resistance" and "artificial intelligence" are expansive and inherently abstract concepts. But what does AI resistance look like in practice?

In the report, we recorded numerous instances of AI resistance, including protests against the environmental impacts of data centers, opposition from big tech employees over military applications of AI, public outcry over the UK's A-level grading fiasco. While not intended to be exhaustive, we surveyed six key areas where such resistance has been particularly active:

1. creative industries
2. migration and border control
3. medical AI
4. higher education
5. defense and security sectors and
6. environmental activism

Thereby, we highlighted key actors in AI resistance, with particular emphasis on the role of civil society in mobilising public opposition. The report also looks at how governments have turned some forms of resistance into law. One example is the EU AI Act, which prohibits certain AI systems like deliberately manipulative AI practices.

The report also points to five main reasons why people push back against AI, each illustrated with real-world examples:

1. First, there are socio-economic concerns, visible for example in the creative industries, where the 2023 Writers Guild of America strike took aim at AI's potential to replace human jobs
2. Second, ethical issues arise when AI systems are opaque or biased, such as migration risk-assessment tools that can unfairly influence decisions about people's futures
3. Third, safety risks are a concern, especially in healthcare, where flawed AI diagnostic results have led medical professionals to speak out
4. Fourth, there are threats to democracy and sovereignty, including the use of AI for large-scale societal manipulation
5. And finally, there's the environmental impact: climate-focused NGOs have highlighted research showing the significant carbon footprint of training large AI models

Journal Reference: Şimşek and Yasar (2025). From Rejection to Regulation: Mapping the Landscape of AI Resistance. Available here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=5287068

Original Submission

Akaysha Energy bags AU$460 million for 1,244MWh BESS in Victoria, Australia:

The financing is underpinned by a 15-year virtual tolling agreement with Snowy Hydro, representing the state-owned generator's first battery offtake agreement.

With a contracted capacity of 220MW, the arrangement constitutes the largest four-hour virtual toll agreement in the Australian market. Snowy Hydro has been active in securing battery storage capacity, with the company signing multiple offtake deals for over 2GWh of battery energy storage across Australia.

Located in southwest Victoria, the Elaine BESS will connect to the National Electricity Market (NEM) through existing transmission infrastructure. The strategic positioning will enable the battery system to manage transmission outage risks and support the integration of renewable energy sources, particularly wind and solar generation, into the grid.

[...] Akaysha Energy has established itself as a leading developer and operator of utility-scale battery storage systems in Australia. The company recently achieved commercial operation of Stage 1 of the 850MW/1,680MWh Waratah Super Battery.

See also:

• Australia's Solar Boom Is Breaking the Grid - Or Is It?

Original Submission

[...] The two available options here are to either try one's chances with the linuxulator-steam-utils workarounds that tries to stuff the Linux client into a chroot, or to go Wine all the way with the Windows Steam client and add more Windows to your OSS.

[...] As it turns out, the low-fuss method to get Steam and GoG Galaxy working is via the the Mizutamari Wine GUI frontend. Simply install it with pkg install mizuma or via the package center, open it from the Games folder in the start menu, then select the desired application's name and then the Install button. Within minutes I had both Steam and the 'classic' GoG Galaxy clients installed and running. The only glitch was that the current GoG Galaxy client didn't want to work, but that might have been a temporary issue. Since I only ever use the GoG Galaxy 1.x client on Windows, this was fine for me.

[...] Aside from gaming, there are many possible qualifications for what might make a 'Windows desktop replacement'. As far as FreeBSD goes, the primary annoyance is having to constantly lean on the Linux or Windows versions of software. This is also true for things like DaVinci Resolve for video editing, where since there's no official FreeBSD version, you have to stuff the Linux version into a chroot once again to run it via the Linux compatibility layer.

Although following the requisite steps isn't rocket science for advanced users, it would simply be nice if a native version existed and you could just install the package. Based on my own experiences porting a non-trivial application like the FFmpeg- and SDL-based NymphCast to FreeBSD – among other OSes – such porting isn't complicated at all, assuming your code doesn't insist on going around POSIX and doing pretty wild Linux-specific things.

FreeBSD now builds reproducibly and without root privilege

An Anonymous Coward writes:

The FreeBSD Foundation is pleased to announce that it has completed work to build FreeBSD without requiring root privilege. We have implemented support for all source release builds to use no-root infrastructure, eliminating the need for root privileges across the FreeBSD release pipeline. This work was completed as part of the program commissioned by the Sovereign Tech Agency.

↫ FreeBSD Foundation blog

This is great news in and of itself, but there's more: FreeBSD has also improved build reproducability. This means that given the same source input, you should end up with the same binary output, which is an important part of building a verifiable chain of trust. These two improvements combined further add to making FreeBSD a trustworthy, secure option – something it already is anyway.

In case you haven't noticed, the FreeBSD project and its countless contributors are making a ton of tangible progress lately on a wide variety of topics, from improving desktop use, to solidifying Wi-Fi support, to improving the chain of trust. I think the time is quite right for FreeBSD to make some inroads in the desktop UNIX-y space, especially for people to whom desktop Linux has strayed too far from the traditional UNIX philosphy (whatever that means).

- https://www.osnews.com/story/143733/freebsd-now-builds-reproducibly-and-without-root-privilege/

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2