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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/06/15/red-hat-gives-ubuntu-a-bootc-up-the-backside-at-canonical-shindig/5255608

At Ubuntu Summit 26.04, Red Hat Principal Software Engineer Joseph Marrero Corchado presented a talk called Bootc: Use your container knowledge and infrastructure to build and deploy your Ubuntu hosts. Although Ubuntu is very strong in the desktop Linux space, in large corporate server environments, Ubuntu is just another distro among many. This can be a good thing: it is just another Linux distro, and that means that it's perfectly possible to deploy and manage it using existing FOSS tooling.

Marrero introduced himself by saying that he works at Red Hat, but personally runs Ubuntu – and has been doing so for long enough that he has some original media from Canonical's ShipIt program, which the company discontinued in 2011.

While we were surpised to see a Red Hat engineer presenting a talk at the summit, it's not unprecedented. System76's Pop!_OS distro is based on Ubuntu, but it overlaps with other distros as well. It has its own desktop and eschews Snap for Flatpak – and yet, at the previous Summit, System76 boss Carl Richell presented a talk about it. The year before, the Academy Software Foundation's talk started by telling us that Rocky Linux strongly dominated the SFX industry.

Our plan here isn't to recap the entire talk. It's up on YouTube now [video not reviewed --Ed], and if this is the sort of thing that sounds interesting, it's probably a good use of 42 minutes of your time.

We've mentioned the bootc toolchain a few times on The Register. Back in April 2024, we reported that Fedora 40's immutable editions were being rebuilt as bootable containers. Two years and four more Fedora releases later, the toolchain is getting more mature, as we covered in April with Fedora 44, and we linked to Quentin Joly's explainer, Bootc and OSTree: Modernizing Linux System Deployment, which is still one of the best we've read.

Now bootc has graduated to the point of being a CNCF incubator project. The new project website has a slightly better explanation:

The tools for creating and managing OCI containers are familiar to many sysadmins now, and the idea of bootc is to make it possible to manage complete OS images, either for VMs or for bare metal, using the same tooling.

Marrero explained bootc by saying that it lets you perform OS installations and upgrades with OCI containers, which lets you define and ship your customized images of the Ubuntu OS as OCI container images. This allows transactional in-place updates, with rollback.

owl writes:

https://moultano.wordpress.com/2026/06/19/where-to-find-the-colors-your-screen-cant-show-you/

There are colors that I want to show you, but I can't. They exist in the real world. You probably saw some of them today, but I can't show them to you on a screen. A digital photograph can't capture them, and your screen can't display them. No game you've ever played has contained them. Unless you have specialized equipment, they are entirely absent from the digital world.

Most of them are cyans. On screens we live a life starved of cyans. It is shocking when you see one in person. They seem unfamiliar and intense in an otherworldly way. I want you to experience that, but again, I can't show them to you. Instead, I have to show you how to find them in the real world.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Crew sheltered in SpaceX Dragon as aging Zvezda segment's cracks continue to test orbital nerve:

Russia's space agency Roscosmos intended to cut into part of the International Space Station (ISS) to determine the extent of leaks in the aging structure, according to a space agency source.

The Register was told that discussions involved a handsaw . Other reports have suggested cosmonauts planned to deploy a drill.

Whatever tool was involved, the plan made NASA sufficiently alarmed that the agency sent its astronauts scurrying into the relative safety of a SpaceX Dragon capsule docked at the ISS. Neither NASA nor Roscosmos has commented officially.

Russia's plan was to use the tool to learn more about the extent of the crack. NASA said: "This revised approach involved cutting a bracket to access better an area identified as a possible leak source for further inspection, using a method that could have resulted in elevated risk to the structure in the area."

However, this could have created unpredictable loads on other cracks. Eventually, the plan was called off in favor of more measurements and data gathering.

The SpaceX Crew-12 astronauts and NASA astronaut Chris Williams were forced to shelter in the Crew Dragon spacecraft earlier in June following a sharp increase in the rate of air leakage from the orbiting outpost. The offending area is the Zvezda service module's transfer tunnel, known by the Russian abbreviation PrK.

While more epoxy patches might address the problem in the short term, the fact that additional cracks have appeared suggests issues Zvezda has wider problems. That's not unexpected given the age of the craft, some parts of which date to the 1980s when it was a backup for the Mir space station. Russia launched Zvezda in 2000, so it's now endured decades of stress.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

SearchLeak exploit shows why the industry's approach to LLM security fails over and over:

Last Tuesday, Microsoft patched a vulnerability it rated as max critical in its M365 Copilot AI platform. On Monday, the researchers who discovered the vulnerability and reported it to Microsoft revealed how their proof-of-concept exploit could retrieve 2FA codes and other sensitive data from emails accessible to Copilot.

Microsoft and other LLM providers have been unable to prevent their products from complying with malicious requests to reveal data. The root cause: AI bots are unable to distinguish between instructions provided by users and those snuck into third-party content the models are summarizing, drafting responses to, or using to perform other actions on behalf of the user. With no way to secure this crucial boundary, Microsoft and its peers are left to erect complicated and ad hoc guardrails designed to rein in the consequences of this incurable gullibility.

One guardrail built into Copilot and most other LLMs prevents them from submitting web forms, sending emails, and taking similar actions that can be used to exfiltrate data from the user. To work around this, LLM hackers turned to markup language, which, among other things, allows users to add formatting elements such as headings, lists, and links to text without the need for HTML tags. Another workaround is to wrap sensitive data inside HTML tags such as <img> and <form>. In either case, a web request showing the data hits the attacker's web server, where the secret information is captured in logs.

One Microsoft guardrail wraps Copilot output in <code> blocks so the browser treats it as straight text. Another is to restrict the sites Copilot is permitted to visit without explicit approval. While Copilot has blanket permission to send requests to Microsoft domains, guardrails restrict requests to untrusted sites.

Security firm Varonis devised an exploit chain that was able to catapult over these guardrails. The first element was what the researchers call a Parameter-to-Prompt Injection. The parameter in this case is the q in a URL, which is used to flag a query that has been included. The Parameter-to-Prompt Injection is a close relative of the prompt injection. The difference is that the malicious command is located in the query parameter, rather than in an email or other piece of untrusted content.

pTamok writes:

Typesetting, or the craft of mechanically or algorithmically placing characters on a page so they are pleasing to the beholder, is an interesting craft. It is related to calligraphy, which is the art or craft of manually (handwriting) placing characters on a page so they are pleasing to the beholder.

Typesetting Arabic script has its own peculiar challenges: the script is written from right to left; it is only cursive; some letter-forms vary according to whether they start a word, are in its body, or terminate the word; and justification is achieved by varying the width of portions of the letters in words, not by varying the spaces between words.

Modern operating systems, are in general, very bad at rendering Arabic script well.

This blog goes into a deep dive of the history of Arabic typesetting, and modern challenges.

Vita Nouva: An interactive introduction to the terrific experience of rendering Arabic typography and its technical debt

Quoting with some slight rewording and editing:

The rules for laying out classical Arabic script were written down by Ibn Muqla, Abbasid vizier and chief calligrapher, who served three caliphs in succession and was imprisoned by two of them; the third had his right hand amputated on a charge of treasonous correspondence, and Ibn Muqla then kept writing for the next several months by lashing a reed pen to the stump of his wrist, and was rewarded for what he wrote by having his tongue cut out, and died in prison around the year 940.

The system he wrote down outlasted everybody who hurt him by a thousand years. It is called al-khaṭṭ al-mansūb, the proportional script; every letterform measured in rhombic dots of the reed nib, every curve a defined arc of a defined circle, the alif a fixed number of dots high and anything else derived from the alif. Within that system the elongation is a drawn stroke with its own rules, which letter pairs accept it, how the curve swells and tapers, how many elongations a line may carry, where they may sit. The scribes also justified by choosing different shapes, because most letters have alternate forms of different widths, and a skilled hand selects among them as the margin approaches. In this tradition, you justify by reshaping the letters, not by spacing the words.

The tradition Ibn Muqla started did not stay with him; it was refined, in writing, by named human beings over the following six hundred years. Ibn al-Bawwāb in Baghdad, around the year 1022, smoothed out the proportions and produced the manuscript that defined Naskh for the rest of the millennium; a single Qurʾān in his hand survives in the Chester Beatty Library in Dublin, and you can date the Persian, Ottoman, and Mamluk traditions by how closely they follow it.

Print and the Arabic script met badly, and that meeting set the pattern for almost everything since: when the machine cannot do the script, simplify the script, ship it, and call it progress.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/06/15/nasa-management-wants-a-word-and-wont-say-why/5255702

We've all seen it: an unexpected management meeting that turns up in your calendar. It could mean HR wants a quiet and perhaps terminal word, or, in the case of NASA, something altogether different.

During a chat with Space.com, NASA astronaut Bob Hines explained that the meeting was engineered to ensure all five Artemis III astronauts would be in the same room together and introduced face-to-face.

The process space NASA uses to select astronauts has long been shrouded in mystery. The first American man in space, Alan Shepard, recalled in Light This Candle that his assignment to the Mercury 7 – the first batch of NASA astronauts – came from a caller who said, "We'd like you to join us. Are you still willing to volunteer?"

Shepard later learned he would be the first American man in space during a meeting with fellow astronauts Gus Grissom and John Glenn, plus the Director of the Space Task Group, Bob Gilruth. Gilruth said, "Alan Shepard will make the first suborbital flight." Several factors went into that decision, including the seven Mercury astronauts rating their peers.

In his memoir, Riding Rockets, Space Shuttle astronaut Mike Mullane recalled receiving a summons, along with four crewmates, to the office of then Director of Flight Operations, George Abbey.

In that meeting, Abbey  apparently asked: "We've been looking at the mission manifest, and think it's time to assign some more crews. I was wondering if you would be interested in STS-41D?"

The whys and wherefores were unimportant. The astronauts were just delighted to get an assignment.

These days, an unannounced management meeting with invitees a person might not normally see on a request is apparently how things are done. How those invitees are picked, however, remains a little opaque.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://techcrunch.com/2026/06/13/the-fbi-built-its-own-replica-small-town-to-simulate-real-world-cyberattacks/

The Federal Bureau of Investigation is pulling back the curtain on a 22,000 square-foot replica town on its Huntsville, Alabama campus that it built to train law enforcement in simulating and investigating real-world cyberattacks.

The aim is to teach investigators in a secure environment beyond the classroom by getting hands-on with some of the latest consumer and enterprise technologies, many of which are frequently targeted by malicious hackers. The numbers put the training into context. The FBI's 2025 Internet Crime Report, drawing on more than one million complaints, logged a record $20.9 billion in U.S. cybercrime losses, a 26% jump over the prior year, with ransomware ranked the top ongoing threat to critical infrastructure.

Dubbed the Kinetic Cyber Range, the FBI's small purpose-built town opened in February 2025 and features fully furnished houses, a hotel, a gas station and grocery mart, a courthouse, a hospital, and a power company — complete with roads and traffic lights — designed to mimic a real U.S. community. Since opening, says the agency, the facility has trained more than 1,400 students, including FBI personnel and partners from other federal and local agencies.

Each part of the town is wired with functioning devices and systems that behave as they would in a real community or business, while preventing any simulated attacks from spilling out of the facility.

The range also includes a data center with more than 200 physical servers — some running Windows, some Linux — reflecting the corporate environments investigators are likely to encounter when responding to a breach or executing a search warrant. "They're cold, they're cramped, they're noisy, they're dark, they're miserable," Dave Beachboard, the range's program manager, explains in the FBI's write-up about the training environment.

The replica town also allows the FBI to simulate ransomware attacks and their real-world consequences, including the high-pressure decisions that investigators must make when responding to incidents that could cause harm to people, such as hospital systems going dark.

The Kinetic Cyber Range also helps to train U.S. investigators in digital forensics, which police use to crack the cybersecurity defenses of encrypted modern devices to extract data from devices, often for the purposes of building a criminal investigation. The tools used for this are controversial as they work by exploiting vulnerabilities that are never disclosed to the device maker, such as Apple or Google, to defeat the protections those companies build in for their users.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Transferring genes across species doesn't just happen in microbes:

Last week, we looked at a new study of the origin of complex cells, one that showed that our ancestors' genomes were pieced together from bits and pieces of multiple species. It put a spotlight on a phenomenon called horizontal gene transfer, in which a gene from one species is incorporated into the genome of a distantly related species. The frequency of horizontal gene transfer means that, in addition to the neatly branching trees that relate species by common descent, there are small threads connecting distant branches of the tree of life.

It's easy to see why horizontal gene transfer would be common among microbes. They often live in complex communities that are likely awash in the DNA of dead and damaged cells. Plus, bacteria and archaea lack a membrane between their DNA and the rest of the cell, making it easier for environmental DNA to find its way to the genome.

However, a new study this week shows that horizontal gene transfers are remarkably common even in multicellular animals. And it does so by examining the genomes of multiple cockroach species, which have had bits of bacterial DNA for millions of years.

Neither bacteria nor archaea keep their DNA in a structure like the nucleus. As a result, any DNA that finds its way inside the cell has the potential to become intermingled with the genome and be incorporated permanently. That permanent incorporation is often aided by the DNA damage repair enzymes, which sometimes "fix" damage by inserting any DNA they come across in a cell.

Another reason horizontal gene transfer is a big factor among microbes is that they lack dedicated germ cells. If foreign DNA gets incorporated into the genome of any cell, it will be inherited by any descendants of that cell. In contrast, in multicellular animals, any foreign DNA incorporated into the genome of a liver cell will not be inherited by anything. So, you not only have to get the foreign DNA into the nucleus, but it also needs to get into the nucleus of the right cell.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The rocket's breakup likely generated 100 to 150 new pieces of space junk:

The upper stage from a commercial Chinese rocket that launched last week has broken apart in space, spreading debris in a heavily trafficked part of low-Earth orbit home to the International Space Station and a significant portion of SpaceX's Starlink broadband network.

The breakup occurred shortly after the Zhuque-2E rocket reached orbit on June 9 with two satellites providing direct-to-cell communications, perhaps around the time the upper stage was expected to perform a disposal burn. The US Space Force confirmed the breakup event in a post on space-track.org, a website used by the military to distribute orbit data to the public.

"The tracked pieces are being incorporated into routine conjunction assessment to support spaceflight safety," the Space Force wrote in an advisory. "There are currently no threats to human spaceflight. Analysis is ongoing."

So far, the Space Force has not added any of the debris fragments to the official catalog of human-made space objects. Darren McKnight, a senior technical fellow at the orbital intelligence company LeoLabs, told Ars the fragmentation event likely generated 100 to 150 pieces of debris.

In one piece, the second stage of the Zhuque-2E rocket, made by a Chinese company called LandSpace, measured between 25 and 30 feet (about 8 meters) long and 11 feet (3.35 meters) in diameter. The main body of the rocket's upper stage is now orbiting between 208 miles and 263 miles (335-by-424 kilometers) at an inclination of 54.5 degrees to the equator.

The uppermost part of this orbit crosses the orbit of the International Space Station, but aerodynamic drag will quickly pull all the debris fragments below the ISS. The debris could pose a greater threat to hundreds of Starlink satellites, particularly those providing direct-to-device connectivity and newly launched satellites, which fly at lower altitudes than the bulk of the Starlink constellation.

Linux 7.1 is Here to End the Intel 486 CPU Era - and Do Some Serious Legacy Clean Up

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/say-goodbye-to-486-processors-linux-7-1-lands/

On his way to Mumbai for the Open Source Summit India, Linus Torvalds announced the latest Linux kernel: 7.1. This new version comes with a brand‑new in‑kernel, Microsoft's New Technology File System (NTFS) implementation, Intel's Flexible Return and Event Delivery (FRED) enabled by default, and a purge of aging code and hardware support, including the end of the road for 486 support. 

The new kernel arrives just months after Linux 7.0 debuted with major networking and filesystem changes. Version 7.1 continues the trend of tightening Linux's hardware focus while improving performance and security.

The headline change for most people in Linux 7.1 is its new native NTFS driver. Many Linux users, whether they like it or not, must deal with Microsoft file systems, and that's where this driver comes in. It replaces both the old, dusty NTFS‑3G FUSE driver in many setups and the Paragon‑contributed NTFS3 kernel driver that has had a bumpy history with data‑corruption reports. Indeed, Torvalds himself calls this new driver an "NTFS resurrection."

The new code is built on Linux's contemporary filesystem infrastructure, using iomap and folios instead of older buffer_head‑centric paths. The new and improved NTFS support was designed from the outset for robust read‑write support, better error handling, and more predictable behavior under heavy parallel I/O.

According to the new NTFS developer, Namjae Jeon, while the new NTFS driver shows only modest single‑threaded write gains, its improvements are far more impressive when multiple threads pound on the same NTFS volume. There, multi‑threaded writes can be 35–110% faster than earlier drivers, while mounting a 4TB NTFS volume is reported to be roughly four times faster. 

For users who regularly shuttle data between Windows and Linux via external drives or dual‑boot setups, this change should make NTFS feel much more like a first‑class citizen on Linux desktops and laptops.

On the CPU side, Linux 7.1 flips the switch on Intel's FRED, enabling it by default on supported Intel platforms. FRED is a new hardware mechanism for handling entries and exits in privileged modes, such as interrupts, exceptions, and system calls. FRED's goal is to simplify control‑flow transitions and reduce the reliance on legacy entry stacks that have grown increasingly complex and insecure over the years.

By moving to FRED, the kernel gets a cleaner separation between user and kernel control flows. This approach not only shrinks some overhead in high‑frequency event handling but also promises a tighter security story around those transitions. 

For now, the benefits will mostly be felt on recent Intel client and server hardware. However, as more vendors select similar mechanisms, 7.1's work positions Linux to take advantage of future architectural features in the space.

Linux 7.1 also brings a series of security improvements. This work starts with support for Intel's Linear Address Space Separation (LASS). LASS constrains how code can access different regions of the linear address space, making certain classes of memory‑corruption and control‑flow attacks harder to exploit by enforcing stronger separation between code and data regions. In tandem with FRED, LASS underlines an architectural shift toward hardening the boundary between userland and kernel, as well as between different types of in‑kernel objects.

Under the hood, the crypto subsystem gets a rework that enables more optimizations by default, which should pay off everywhere encryption and hashing are hot paths: TLS stacks, VPNs, encrypted filesystems, and distributed storage.

On the CPU front, there is further enablement for AMD's upcoming Zen 6 processors, with new IDs, errata workarounds, and tuning hooks landing in 7.1, ensuring the kernel is ready for the next generation of EPYC and Ryzen parts when they hit the market.

While 7.1 delivers clear wins for modern systems, it is also unambiguous about where Linux is no longer willing to go. This release continues the process of ripping out support for Intel's 486‑class processors and other early x86 variants. Kernel maintainers have been telegraphing for some time. Mainstream distributions had long since moved their baselines to at least i586 or x86‑64. To my knowledge, no major Linux distro currently supports 486 processors. 

Beyond CPUs, the codebase sheds over 140,000 lines of legacy code. This includes a grab bag of obsolete network and PCMCIA drivers, as well as the removal of Baikal CPU support. The rationale is two‑fold: Reduce the attack surface exposed by ancient, barely tested code paths, and ease long‑term maintenance by freeing developers from the need to preserve behaviors for hardware that has vanished from production. Retro‑computing enthusiasts will still be able to run older kernels, but the line between "supported" and "museum piece" is getting sharper.

At first glance, Linux 7.1 is just a point release, but its mix of a new NTFS driver, FRED and LASS enablement, aggressive legacy cleanup, and continued hardware support will be important for both desktops and data centers. 

For everyday users, the most obvious impact will likely be smoother, safer interaction with NTFS‑formatted drives. For operators and OEMs, the story is more about security posture, platform support, and getting ready for the next wave of Intel and AMD silicon.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Prosecutors Claim Ship Had Eight More Targets Before It Was Stopped By Coast Guard

https://www.tomshardware.com/networking/finland-charges-russian-captain-and-crew-member-of-ship-suspected-of-damaging-undersea-cables-prosecutors-claim-ship-had-eight-more-targets-before-it-was-stopped-by-coast-guard

Prosecutors also say that the ship intended to target eight additional subsea cables in the area before it was stopped by the Finnish Coast Guard. Two other crew members of the Fitburg remain in detention in Finland as prosecutors determine if they will be charged in relation to the suspected sabotage. The lawyers of the accused say that Finland does not have jurisdiction over the crew, but the authorities say that it will leave it up to the courts to decide.

Undersea cables are crucial infrastructure that connect nations to one another, and it is particularly important for Finland as one of the NATO members bordering Russia. The country’s undersea communications, electricity, and gas connections have been hit multiple times in recent years, which is why it has taken steps to protect its sea-line of communications (SLOC). This includes the deployment of a SOSUS-like system that warns cable operators and the Finnish authorities of suspicious activities near vulnerable infrastructure. The technology, called Distributed Acoustic Sensing (DAS), integrates sensors into fiber optic cables that detect sound and vibrations, like an anchor hitting the seabed, coming from the sea floor.

However, suspected attacks on undersea cables aren’t limited to the Baltic Sea. Other incidents have been reported in the Red Sea and in the Taiwan Strait — geopolitical hotspots where tensions often run high. Because of this, both firms and countries are exploring alternative routes to make it harder to disrupt communications. The EU is considering going under the North Pole to bypass Russia and the United States for connecting to Asia, while Meta is building a 50,000-km undersea network that connects the U.S. to Brazil, Africa, India, and Australia, which, notably, avoids bottlenecks like the Mediterranean Sea, the Red Sea, the Strait of Hormuz, and the Strait of Malacca.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/health/2026/06/covid-vaccines-still-protect-against-heart-problems-large-study-finds/

Although most Americans have eschewed seasonal COVID-19 vaccines, the updated shots continue to show significant protection against cardiovascular disease, especially for those over age 75 and those with underlying medical conditions. That's according to a new study that pulled data from more than 1 million patients in a US Department of Veterans Affairs (VA) health system.

The finding builds on previous data showing that the vaccines significantly lower the risk of COVID-19-associated cardiovascular risks, particularly heart attacks and strokes. But it wasn't a given that the benefit would hold up over time—as the virus evolved, the vaccines were updated, population-level immunity increased from previous infection and vaccination, and risk of severe outcomes fell.

The new study, published in JAMA Internal Medicine, found that the 2024–2025 COVID-19 vaccine continued to protect against COVID-19-associated "major adverse cardiovascular events" (MACE), which include cardiovascular death, heart attack, stroke, and hospitalization for heart failure.

The study included electronic medical record data from 1,039,659 patients in the VA's St. Louis Health Care System. All of the patients received a seasonal flu shot between September 3, 2024, and December 31, 2024, with some also getting a COVID-19 vaccine at the same time. Of the 1,039,659 patients, 349,085 received both shots, while 690,574 got just the flu shot. The latter group acted as the control group for the study.

After eight months of follow-up, the researchers looked for documented COVID-19 cases and compared MACE events among the two groups. Overall, the COVID shots' vaccine effectiveness against MACE events was 38 percent. In terms of absolute numbers, the benefit is modest. The study estimated that the shots dropped the rate of COVID-19-associated MACE events from about 5 in 10,000 to 3 in 10,000. Looking across subgroups, the benefits were strongest among those aged 75 and older and those with underlying health conditions.

The researchers, led by epidemiologist Ziyad Al-Aly at the St. Louis VA, also looked at MACE and deaths without documented COVID-19 cases. Here, the benefits of COVID-19 vaccines were stronger, suggesting COVID-19 cases may have been missed or undiagnosed. The shots appeared to drop the rate of MACE from 382 per 10,000 to 358, and the rate of death from 223 to 207.

"Extrapolating these estimates to a population of 1 million people, vaccination could plausibly be associated with averting approximately 2,370 MACE events and 1,580 deaths over an 8-month period," the researchers note, though they urge caution in interpreting the finding.

The study has limitations, including that most of the US veteran population is older, White, and male, making it likely that the findings can't be generalized to the whole population. Still, the findings indicate that the vaccines continue to offer cardiovascular protection against COVID-19, which should factor into people's decisions on whether to get an annual COVID-19 booster. An accompanying study also published in JAMA Internal Medicine on Monday found the vaccines still directly protect against COVID-19, reducing the risk of hospitalization and critical illness by 35 percent and 41 percent, respectively.

In an accompanying editorial, Robert Califf, a cardiologist and former Food and Drug Administration commissioner, wrote that the data from the two studies "provide strong evidence of a favorable balance of benefit to risk for updated COVID-19 vaccine boosters across the population." But, he lamented that despite that strong evidence, national views are being swayed by the "general antivaccination statements from the US Department of Health and Human Services," which is run by anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Only 17.5 percent of adults and 22.6 percent of people over age 65 in the US have gotten the 2025–2026 COVID shot, according to federal data.

"The politicization of COVID-19 vaccination and messenger RNA vaccines in general has taken a toll on the longevity and functional status of those in the US," Califf wrote. He called for researchers to collect more data on the vaccine's benefits and engage with the public about the findings, particularly on social media, to combat anti-vaccine rhetoric.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Nextcloud rollout shows locally controlled storage is one thing; getting users off Office is quite another

Digital sovereignty loomed large at Nextcloud's annual summit in Munich last week, where Benoît Piédallu, National Project Manager of Shared Digital Services at the French Ministry of Education, injected a dose of reality into the debate.

Nextcloud is an open source storage and collaboration suite. France's Ministry of Education started initial work to adopt it in 2018, Piédallu said, with the COVID-19 pandemic turning up the urgency in 2020. In 2021, "we had this little incident with OVH, a little fire, which destroyed all our data," Piédallu noted dryly. The Ministry went all-in and signed contracts with Nextcloud in 2024.

The Ministry wants to provide its users with federated storage and account management. At the time of Piédallu's presentation, the Ministry has set up slightly more than 400,000 accounts, and hopes to eventually reach 1.2 million users. Each account could be allocated 100 GB of storage (a potential 120 PB), although Piédallu said the average storage consumption currently sits at around 3 GB per account. So far, 80,000 sync clients have been persistently connected.

However, it has not all been plain sailing, despite recent pledges from the French government about shifting away from American tools and reducing France's dependence on non-European technology.

Digital sovereignty means different things to different people. Right now, this project does not include desktop applications. The users "use whatever they want on their desktop... Microsoft if they want," Piédallu said.

"So we have some problems sometimes, and people are saying that it is not working, and we say, 'Yeah, so you just use different software'..."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://hackaday.com/2026/06/14/why-not-yserver-its-xserver-but-rust-y/

If you're not into Wayland as a display manager, it seems like your options are slowly dwindling. Xorg isn't exactly a hotbed of activity, and the one fork everyone knows about is best known as a political lightning rod. Luckily, Rust developers can apparently never see a tool without pulling it into their heavily oxidized bucket of crabs, so we now have another option: the creatively named yserver, released under the MIT license by [joske].

The name, yserver, for the record, is just a placeholder name, but we rather like the simple logic of "Y comes after X" — sure, you could call it X12, but that could imply continuity, and this is a clean break. It's also not a full reimplementation of the huge, sprawling mess that Xorg has become over the decades. It can't launch multiple screens and thus lacks full multi-monitor support. So, for now, it may be too bare-bones for some people's use cases.

As it uses Vulkan, it is limited to relatively modern hardware, but has been tested on Intel, AMD, Nvidia, and Apple chips. The target kernel is good old Linux, but the docs do cover compiling for FreeBSD; just be aware that that's very much a secondary target. FreeBSD users are probably used to that, though.

On Linux, a standalone DRM/KMS yserver can successfully run not just window managers but full desktops — specifically MATE, Cinnamon, and XFCE, as they're not on the Wayland bandwagon. It even supports Compiz, in case you missed the cube and wiggly window animations. You can also use yserver via Xwayland or even Xorg. Speaking of Xorg, [joske] has run the X.Org X Test Suite (xts5) against this proposed successor, and it currently scores 66.2%, which seems pretty good considering the project explicitly does not plan to copy all of Xorg's functionality.

Aside from multiple screens, one thing that would have been neat to see is support for the Asterinas rust-based Linux-compatible kernel — though if that project achieves full Linux compatibility, that may be a non-issue. Even if you aren't an oxidization enthusiast, you might find reasons to be happy to see more competition in the display-manager market — after all, Wayland Will Never Be Ready For Every X11 User. If Xorg really is destined to the slow death critics predict, perhaps yserver could cover the holdouts.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Researchers have quantified the length and mass of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks globally:

Hidden underground around the world lie 110 quadrillion kilometers of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal networks—webs of ultra-thin threads that, if connected in a single line, would stretch almost a billion times the distance between the Earth and the sun, according to new research published in Science on Thursday.

These fungal communities form intimate relationships with the roots of plants, which they provide with nutrients like phosphorus and nitrogen in exchange for carbon, 1 billion tons of which the networks sequester underground annually, previous research has found. If the fungal network wasn't storing it, that carbon would be warming the atmosphere.

But those networks have never been mapped globally until now. The new study led by Society for the Protection of Underground Networks, or SPUN, an organization founded to map mycorrhizal fungi networks, used a combination of literature review, soil samples from around the globe, machine learning and laboratory testing to estimate the distribution and mass of these systems and map where they are densest.

"This is the moment where we went from knowing that this system exists to really knowing where it is, how dense it is and where it's been," said Toby Kiers, executive director and co-founder of SPUN and a co-author of the study.

For decades, researchers have known arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi form intimate symbiotic relationships with roughly 80 percent of the globe's plant species and are found nearly everywhere plants are. But the extent of those networks and where they are densest, such as grasslands, and where they are being lost, like in agricultural areas, hasn't been well understood until now.

"[The study] helps us come to grips with how important these below ground organisms can be to everything that we see above ground," said James Bever, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of Kansas who studies the interactions between plants and microbes like fungi in soils but was not involved in the new study.