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Quick Links
https://lwn.net/Articles/1070864/
Terence Eden reports that the UK's National Health Service (NHS) is preparing to close almost all of its open-source repositories as a response to LLM tools, such as Anthropic's Mythos, becoming more sophisticated at finding security vulnerabilities. He does not, to put it mildly, agree with the decision:
The majority of code repos published by the NHS are not meaningfully affected by any advance in security scanning. They're mostly data sets, internal tools, guidance, research tools, front-end design and the like. There is nothing in them which could realistically lead to a security incident.
When I was working at NHSX during the pandemic, we were so confident of the safety and necessity of open source, we made sure the Covid Contact Tracing app was open sourced the minute it was available to the public. That was a nationally mandated app, installed on millions of phones, subject to intense scrutiny from hostile powers - and yet, despite publishing the code, architecture and documentation, the open source code caused zero security incidents.
Furthermore, this new guidance is in direct contradiction to the UK's Tech Code of Practice point 3 "Be open and use open source" which insists on code being open.
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Rightscon, a world summit on human rights in the digital age, has been canceled at the last minute through actions by its host nation's government:
It is with heavy hearts that we share: RightsCon will not proceed in Zambia or online.
We understand this news is deeply upsetting for our community and while we know everyone has questions, our goal right now is to notify you of the event's status because many of you have imminent travel plans.
We do not recommend registered participants travel to Lusaka for RightsCon.Over the last 48 hours we have experienced an overwhelming surge of support from civil society, government representatives, sponsors, and our community as a whole. For this, we wholeheartedly thank you. We'll communicate more information soon.
And there is secondhand coverage:
The Tor Project is deeply saddened by the last-minute cancellation of RightsCon 2026 in Lusaka, Zambia, and online. The right to assemble, associate, and speak freely must not be conditioned on political approval. Convenings like RightsCon are essential precisely because they create space for difficult, urgent, and necessary conversation about power, technology, rights, and accountability.
Tor's work is rooted in the belief that everyone should be able to speak freely, safely, and privately. We build tools that help people connect, communicate, organize, and seek information; especially those facing censorship, surveillance, repression, discrimination, and other forms of vulnerability. The disruption of a space dedicated to advancing these shared goals represents a serious gutpunch to the global human rights community.
- — Tor Project Statement on the Abrupt Cancellation of RightsCon 2026 , The Tor Project.
and
Minister of Technology and Science Felix Mutati first announced the postponement on April 28, saying that Zambia needed more time to ensure the conference "fully [aligns] with national procedures, diplomatic protocols, and the broader objective of fostering a balanced and consensus-driven platform for dialogue."
and
The announcement came as thousands of delegates were en route to Zambia or already there.
On Tuesday, Zambia's Minister of Technology and Science offered the first hint that the conference would be cancelled, telling a Zambian news outlet that participants' security clearances were incomplete and that the government has concerns about the conference's "dialogue."
UPDATED: A message dated 1 May explained the reason for the abrupt cancellation:
Following our April 29 announcement, we at Access Now, the host organization of RightsCon, believe it is important to be transparent about the context that led to the decision. We want to explain, where we can (taking into account the safety of those involved), why this announcement was made on such short notice, only days before we were set to welcome more than 2,600 participants in person, and 1,100 online, representing over 150 countries and 750 institutions.
We believe foreign interference is the reason RightsCon 2026 won't proceed in Zambia or online.
[...] On April 27, one day after a government press release endorsed RightsCon, we received a phone call from MoTS about an urgent issue and were told that diplomats from the People's Republic of China (PRC) were putting pressure on the Government of Zambia because Taiwanese civil society participants were planning to join us in person. This development was extremely concerning and we immediately pushed back. Next, we opened up lines of communication with our Taiwanese participants, as is our practice when there is a potential risk for a specific community. While we needed more information, we continued to feel confident this was something we could address with the government.
Previously:
(2016) Senator Wyden Calls on Digital Rights Activists to Block Legislative Efforts to Weaken Encryption - SoylentNews
(2016) Adblock Plus Un-Invited From IAB Conference - SoylentNews
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Liam Price just cracked a 60-year-old problem that world-class mathematicians have tried and failed to solve. He's 23 years old and has no advanced mathematics training. What he does have is a ChatGPT Pro subscription, which gives him access to the latest large language models from OpenAI.
Artificial intelligence has recently made headlines for solving a number of "Erdős problems," conjectures left behind by the prolific mathematician Paul Erdős. But experts have warned that these problems are an imperfect benchmark of artificial intelligence's mathematical prowess. They range dramatically in both significance and difficulty, and many AI solutions have turned out to be less original than they appeared.
The new solution —which Price got in response to a single prompt to GPT-5.4 Pro and posted on www.erdosproblems.com , a website devoted to the Erdős problems, just over a week ago—is different. The problem it solves has eluded some prominent minds, bestowing it some esteem. And more importantly, the AI seems to have used a totally new method for problems of this kind. It's too soon to say with certainty, but this LLM-conceived connection may be useful for broader applications—something hard to find among recently touted AI triumphs in math.
"This one is a bit different because people did look at it, and the humans that looked at it just collectively made a slight wrong turn at move one," says Terence Tao, a mathematician at the University of California, Los Angeles, who has become a prominent scorekeeper for AI's push into his field. "What's beginning to emerge is that the problem was maybe easier than expected, and it was like there was some kind of mental block."
The question Price solved—or prompted ChatGPT to solve—concerns special sets of whole numbers, where no number in the set can be evenly divided by any other. Erdős called these "primitive sets" because of their connection to similarly indivisible prime numbers.
"A number is prime if it has no other divisors, and this is kind of generalizing that definition from an individual number to a collection of numbers," says Jared Duker Lichtman, a mathematician at Stanford University. Any set of prime numbers is automatically primitive, because primes have no factors (except themselves and the number one).
[...] "There was kind of a standard sequence of moves that everyone who worked on the problem previously started by doing," Tao says. The LLM took an entirely different route, using a formula that was well known in related parts of math, but which no one had thought to apply to this type of question.
"The raw output of ChatGPT's proof was actually quite poor. So it required an expert to kind of sift through and actually understand what it was trying to say," Lichtman says. But now he and Tao have shortened the proof so that it better distills the LLM's key insight.
More importantly, they already see other potential applications of the AI's cognitive leap. "We have discovered a new way to think about large numbers and their anatomy," Tao says. "It's a nice achievement. I think the jury is still out on the long-term significance."
Lichtman is hopeful because ChatGPT's discovery validates a sense he's had since graduate school. "I had the intuition that these problems were kind of clustered together and they had some kind of unifying feel to them," he says. "And this new method is really confirming that intuition."
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Meet The Mushroom That Makes People Have The Exact Same Hallucination
Scientists call them "lilliputian hallucinations," a rare phenomenon involving miniature human or fantasy figures
Biologist Colin Domnauer is reopening an old case that Chinese health officials seem to have stopped caring about. Every summer, residents of the Yunnan province check into hospitals with complaints that they're hallucinating tiny elflike people. They would see the little dudes marching under their doors, scaling their walls, and clinging to their furniture.
Health officials used to care about it. They looked into it some years back and found that the cause was Lanmaoa asiatica, a mushroom that's been eaten in Yunnan for years. It's supposedly got a rich, umami flavor, and locals know that you have to cook it thoroughly, not to bring out that flavor, but to kill off the mushroom's hallucinogenic properties.
Scientists call these "lilliputian hallucinations," a rare phenomenon involving miniature human or fantasy figures. If you've seen the Adult Swim show Common Side Effects, you may be familiar with the surreal trippiness of this apparently very real form of mushroom-based hallucination. What makes this particular hallucinatory mushroom so unusual is that it causes the same kind of hallucinations in different people, across cultures.
It's always the little elf dudes.
[...] What's fascinating is the active compound isn't psilocybin, the hallucinatory chemical found in shrooms people take recreationally or therapeutically. The hallucinations take 12 to 24 hours. to begin and can last for a long time, sometimes long enough to require hospitalization and careful observation. The trip can last so long that it's impractical as a recreational drug, which is why no culture seems to use the mushroom intentionally as a psychedelic. Not yet, at least.
BBC Article:
'They saw them on their dishes when eating': The mushroom making people hallucinate dozens of tiny humans
Only recently described by science, the mysterious mushrooms are found in different parts of the world, but they give people the same exact visions.
Every year, doctors at a hospital in the Yunnan Province of China brace themselves for an influx of people with an unusual complaint. The patients come with a strikingly odd symptom: visions of pint-sized, elf-like figures – marching under doors, crawling up walls and clinging to furniture.
The hospital treats hundreds of these cases every year. All share a common culprit: Lanmaoa asiatica, a type of mushroom that forms symbiotic relationships with pine trees in nearby forests and is a locally popular food, known for its savory, umami-packed flavor. In Yunnan, L. asiatica is sold in markets, it appears on restaurant menus and is served at home during peak mushroom season between June and August.
One must be careful to cook it thoroughly, though, otherwise the hallucinations will set in.
"At a mushroom hot pot restaurant there, the server set a timer for 15 minutes and warned us, 'Don't eat it until the timer goes off or you might see little people,'" says Colin Domnauer, a doctoral candidate in biology at the University of Utah and the Natural History Museum of Utah, who is studying L. asiatica. "It seems like very common knowledge in the culture there."
But outside of Yunnan and a couple of other places, the strange mushroom is largely an enigma.
Domnauer first heard of L. asiatica as an undergraduate from his mycology professor.
"It sounded so bizarre that there could be a mushroom out there causing fairytale-like visions reported across cultures and time," Domnauer says. "I was perplexed and driven by curiosity to find out more."
[...] So Domnauer's first goal has been to pin down the species' true identity. In 2023, he travelled to Yunnan during the peak summertime mushroom season. He surveyed the province's sprawling fungi markets and asked sellers which of their mushrooms "makes you see little people". He purchased the ones that the giggling vendors pointed to, then brought the specimens back to the laboratory to sequence their genomes.
[...] Domnauer also visited the Philippines, where he had heard rumors of a mushroom causing similar symptoms as those from the historical records from China and Papua New Guinea. The specimens he collected there looked slightly different from the Chinese ones – they were smaller and light pink compared to the larger, redder Chinese mushrooms, he says. But his genetic testing revealed that they were indeed the same species.
[...] But it's not psilocybin that's giving the L. asiatica mushrooms their lilliputian effect, says Domnauer.
He and his team are still trying to identify the chemical compound responsible for the hallucinations in L. asiatica. Current tests suggest it is not likely related to any other known psychedelic compound. For one, the trips it produces are unusually long, commonly lasting one to three days after an onset of 12 to 24 hours, and in some cases even causing hospital stays of up to a week. Because of the extraordinarily long duration of these trips and the chance for prolonged side effects such as delirium and dizziness, Domnauer has yet to try the raw mushrooms himself.
These mega-trips might help to explain why people in China, the Philippines and Papua New Guinea do not seem to have a tradition of purposefully seeking out L. asiatica for its psychoactive effects, according to Domnauer's findings. "It was always just eaten for food," Domnauer says, with hallucinations being an unexpected side-effect.
There's another curious factor: other known psychedelic compounds also usually produce idiosyncratic trips that vary not only from person to person but also from one experience to the next within the same individual. With L. asiatica, though, "the perception of little people is very reliably and repeatedly reported", Domnauer says. "I don't know of anything else that produces such consistent hallucinations."
Understanding this mushroom will be no easy feat, Domnauer says, but as with studies of other psychedelic compounds, the scientific research it produces could end up touching on the biggest questions of consciousness and the relationship between mind and reality.
[...] "Now we may understand where in the brain [liliputian hallucinations] originate," says Dennis McKenna, an ethnopharmacologist and director of the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy, a non-profit education center in California, US. He agrees that understanding the mushroom's compounds could lead to new drug discoveries. "Is there a therapeutic application? It remains to be seen," says McKenna.
Researchers estimate that less than 5% of the world's fungal species have been described, so the findings also highlight the "enormous potential" for discovery in the world's ever-dwindling ecosystems, says Furci, whose work focuses on exploring the fungal kingdom. "Fungi hold a very large biochemical and pharmacological library that we're only just beginning to tap into," says Furci. "There's still a world of discoveries to be made."
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Ask.com (known originally as Ask Jeeves) was an answer engine, e-magazine, and former web search engine, operated by Ask Media Group. It was conceptualized and developed in 1996 by Garrett Gruener and David Warthen, based in Berkeley, California.
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ask.com
Ask.com reads:
Every great search
must come to an end.As IAC continues to sharpen its focus, we have made the decision to discontinue our search business, which includes Ask.com. After 25 years of answering the world's questions, Ask.com officially closed on May 1, 2026.
"To the millions who asked..."
We are deeply grateful to the brilliant engineers, designers, and teams who built and supported Ask over the decades. And to you—the millions of users who turned to us for answers in a rapidly changing world—thank you for your endless curiosity, your loyalty, and your trust.
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https://www.phoronix.com/news/Linux-Kernel-Nearly-40M
Ahead of the Linux 7.1-rc1 kernel release due out later today for closing the Linux 7.1 merge window, I was curious if all the code removals would lead to a negative change in line count over Linux 7.0. The removals were not enough and Linux 7.1 Git is fast approaching 40 million lines.
With Linux 7.1 removing ISDN, ham radio, and other old network driver code that yielded a 138k lines of code reduction, I was curious how that would impact the line count for Linux Git. Plus removing some obsolete PCMCIA drivers also happened for Linux 7.1 as did removing some PCI drivers and beginning to remove support for Russia's Baikal CPUs. Linux 7.1 also began decommissioning of the Intel 486 CPU support but that doesn't have much impact on the line count yet, more removals around now useless i486 bits will come in future kernel cycles.
The Git repository for Linux v7.0 came in at 39,621,378 lines between 4,991,874 blank lines, 4,737,829 lines of code comments, and then 29,891,675 lines of detected code as measured by the cloc program.
Even with the removals, Linux 7.1 is still growing larger. Linux Git as of this morning measured by cloc came in at 39,880,636 lines -- or roughly 259k lines of code added this merge window even with all the removals that took place. That 39.8M lines is between 5,015,790 blank lines, 4,775,889 code comments, and 30,088,957 lines as measured by cloc. So Linux 7.1 crossed the threshold of 30 million lines of detected code while with the blank lines and code comments is fast approaching 40 million lines. For the Linux 7.2 cycle is presumably when it will breach 40 million lines in total.
While at it, I also took a read of the current size of the drivers/gpu/drm/amd area with AMDGPU and AMDKFD along with associated code like the display core (DC) and all the auto-generated header files for each GPU. In Linux 7.0 the modern AMD kernel graphics driver stack was at 6,049,235 lines and now rose to 6,162,946 in the current Linux 7.1 Git state.
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There's A Good Reason Semi Trucks Don't Use V8s:
V8 engines are among our favorites . They make big power and sound that is, in the vernacular of Boston, wicked awesome. It's only natural to think that such big engines would power the big semi trucks that transport most cargo in the U.S., but that isn't true. Instead, you're more likely to find an inline-6 under the hood of most modern semis.
There are some important reasons why V8s have fallen out of favor in trucking. A V8 makes great horsepower, but towing heavy loads is all about torque. The inline-6 engines powering most modern semis make between 400 and 600 horsepower. That's not much more power than a well-equipped pickup truck these days, and is likely all the horsepower you really need anyway . However, most pickups don't make anywhere near the 1,000 to 2,000 pound-feet of torque that semi engines do. Big displacement in the 13 to 16-liter range, turbocharging, and diesel power maximize torque, and it shows in those four-digit figures.
Another factor is that in the U.S., semis are typically limited to a maximum weight of 80,000 lbs. Scania makes a 16.4-liter V8 producing 2,350 lb-ft used in Europe, but many of those countries allow heavier loads than we do. A smaller inline-6 can handle lighter American loads just fine.
The fundamental nature of an inline-6 is simpler than a V8. There's only one cylinder head, not two, so it has fewer parts. It's also easier to access and work on, reducing both maintenance costs and the time the truck is off the road. All this, plus its low-revving nature, makes the engine slightly more fuel efficient than a higher-revving V8. It's not much more efficient, but when you're talking six to eight MPG, every little bit helps and makes a big difference over thousands of miles.
The final nail in the V8's coffin was increasingly strict emission regulations for semis. It's easier to get a smaller displacement inline-6 to comply than a bigger V8, so that's what most manufacturers chose to do. In contrast, some companies like Caterpillar simply quit producing semi-trucks, focusing instead on off-highway applications. While electric options like the Tesla Semi may play a role in the future, the inline-6 remains the workhorse of American trucking for now.
Read More: https://www.jalopnik.com/1906098/why-semi-trucks-use-inline-6-not-v8-explained/
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Mitchell Hashimoto says GitHub's outages and workflow failures have made the platform unsuitable for Ghostty's active development.
Ghostty, a modern GPU-accelerated terminal emulator developed by Mitchell Hashimoto, is transitioning its active development away from GitHub due to ongoing reliability issues that have disrupted daily workflows.
Hashimoto announced the decision in an emotional post titled "Ghostty Is Leaving GitHub," stating that the project will gradually eliminate its dependency on GitHub while maintaining the current repository as a read-only mirror. Further details about the new hosting platform will be provided in the coming months, as discussions continue with both commercial and open-source providers.
This decision is significant given Hashimoto's background. He is best known as the co-founder of HashiCorp (departed in 2023), the infrastructure automation company behind widely used tools such as Terraform, Vault, Consul, Nomad, Packer, and Vagrant, which are the de facto standard in DevOps circles today.
In his post, Hashimoto describes the decision as personally difficult rather than a result of casual dissatisfaction. He notes that he used the platform daily for over 18 years, which makes the current decision even harder.
"I'm GitHub user 1299, joined Feb 2008. Since then, I've opened GitHub every single day. Every day, multiple times per day, for over 18 years. Over half my life. A handful of exceptions in there (I'd love to see the data), but I can't imagine more than a week per year."
Hashimoto states he has recently been publicly critical of GitHub due to daily service failures. He kept a journal over the past month, marking each day when a GitHub outage negatively impacted his work, and notes that almost every day was affected.
"For the past month I've kept a journal where I put an "X" next to every date where a GitHub outage has negatively impacted my ability to work. Almost every day has an X. On the day I am writing this post, I've been unable to do any PR review for ~2 hours because there is a GitHub Actions outage".
According to Hashimoto, however, the issue is not with Git itself. He clarifies that the problem lies in the surrounding GitHub infrastructure, including issues, pull requests, GitHub Actions, and related collaboration workflows. For Ghostty, these failures have impacted both maintainers and the broader open-source community, prompting the decision to move away.
However, it is hard not to notice the strong disappointment in his words regarding the popular developer platform.
"It's not a fun place for me to be anymore. I want to be there but it doesn't want me to be there. I want to get work done and it doesn't want me to get work done. I want to ship software and it doesn't want me to ship software. I want it to be better, but I also want to code. And I can't code with GitHub anymore. I'm sorry. After 18 years, I've got to go."
Importantly, Ghostty will not be removed from GitHub immediately. The migration will occur incrementally, and the current GitHub repository will remain available as a read-only mirror. Hashimoto notes that his personal projects and other work will stay on GitHub for now, with Ghostty prioritized due to the significant impact of reliability issues.
What have been your experiences with GitHub - both positive and negative? Do you recommend any alternatives?
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Devuan developer creates GTK2 fork
https://distrowatch.com/dwres.php?resource=showheadline&story=20175
A developer with the Devuan project has created a fork of the GTK2 toolkit with an aim to maintain it, provide fixes, and make it possible for older applications to remain compatible with the GTK toolkit. While GTK2 has not been maintained upstream for years, and it has been dropped from the latest versions of some distributions, it was the basis for many applications, not all of which have migrated to GTK3. The announcement thread has more information and the code has been published in Devuan's git repository.
Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.6 Adds Support for Fedora 44, Ubuntu 26.04 LTS
This release also adds support for the LoongArch64 architecture on Debian 14 Forky/Sid and support for the Mageia 10 distribution.
Trinity Desktop Environment (TDE) R14.1.6 desktop environment has been released today for nostalgic KDE 3.5 users as the sixth maintenance release of the R14.1.x series, adding new features and enhancements.
Coming about five and a half months after Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.5, the Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.6 release introduces support for recent GNU/Linux distributions, including Ubuntu 26.04 LTS (Resolute Raccoon), Fedora Linux 44, and Mageia 10, as well as support for the LoongArch64 architecture on Debian 14 Forky/Sid.
Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.6 also updates the available search engines and graphical UI, adds a "Go to Desktop" action to the Konqueror browser, adds an option for a 3D border to the Kicker application menu, and adds drag and drop support of snapshots into other apps from the KSnapshot screenshot utility.
In addition, this release adds "Compatibility options" and "Currency signs" options under Kxkb's "Miscellaneous options", improves the handling of special unicode characters in TQt (Trinity Qt), and improves arrow key and Page Up/Page Down navigation and scrollbar in the KCharSelect characters tool.
Furthermore, Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.6 brings improvements to various TDE-branded icons, pictures, and artwork, removes the sloppy Flying Konqi wallpaper, adds support for XZ archives to TDE's KIO slave component, and adds support for Poppler 26.04 and later to TDE's graphics utilities.
TDE's TWin (Trinity Window Manager) has been improved as well in this release, with fixes to tiling of maximized windows and opacity-related issues, making using transparency easier and providing an overall better user experience.
Also improved was signature verification in KMail's encrypted emails, language translations in the KVIrc IRC client, and handling of special unicode characters in TQt (Trinity Qt). Moreover, TDE R14.1.6 adds filesystem type indication in the TDE Display Manager's Meta Info property page.
Of course, numerous bugs were fixed, so check out the full release notes for more details about the changes included in Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.6, which you can download for Linux distros, as well as BSD and DilOS systems from the official website. Upgrading from Trinity Desktop Environment R14.1.5 should be straightforward.
Dillo Browser Release 3.3.0
https://dillo-browser.org/release/3.3.0/
https://dillo-browser.org/
Dillo is a fast and small graphical web browser with the following features:
- Multi-platform, running on Linux, BSD, MacOS, Windows (via Cygwin) and even Atari.
- Written in C and C++ with few dependencies.
- Implements its own real-time rendering engine.
- Low memory usage and fast rendering, even with large pages.
- Uses the fast and bloat-free FLTK GUI library.
- Support for HTTP, HTTPS, FTP and local files.
- Extensible with plugins written in any language (see the list of plugins).
- Is free software licensed with the GPLv3.
- Helps authors to comply with web standards by using the bug meter Bugmeter icon.
The Fedora Linux 44 Release is Here!
https://fedoramagazine.org/announcing-fedora-linux-44/
I'm excited to announce that Fedora Linux 44 is here! Keep reading to discover highlights of Fedora Linux 44, or if you are ready, just jump right in and give Fedora Linux 44 a try!
Thanks to everyone who helped!Thank you and congrats to everyone who has contributed to this release. And thanks to everyone who showed up for the virtual release party last Friday. We celebrated a little early this year, just after the go/no-go meeting made the release official. If you weren't able to join us live, you can watch the recording and hear about some of the great work from the contributors involved.
Looking to upgrade?
If you have an existing system, Upgrading Fedora Linux to a New Release is easy. In most cases, it's not very different from just rebooting for regular updates, except you'll have a little more time to grab a coffee.
Ready to Fresh Install?
If this is your first time running Fedora Linux, or if you just want to start fresh with Fedora, download the install media for our flagship Editions (Workstation, KDE Plasma Desktop, Cloud, Server, CoreOS, IoT), or one of our Atomic Desktops (Silverblue, Kinoite, Cosmic, Budgie, Sway), or alternate desktop options (like Cinnamon, Xfce, Sway, or others).
What's new?As usual with Fedora Linux, there are just too many individual changes and improvements to go over in detail. You'll want to take a look at the release notes for that.
Original Submission #1 Original Submission #2 Original Submission #3 Original Submission #4
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The C64C Ultimate will be manufactured using the same tools as the original was back in 1986.
The creators of the C64 Ultimate, a recreation of the iconic '80s personal computer that uses an FPGA chip to accurately replicate the original, have announced a follow-up version that continues in its predecessor's footsteps. The original Commodore 64 first debuted in 1982 and was followed by the Commodore 64C in 1986, which was functionally nearly identical but introduced a slimmer case and a more modern color scheme. It's the same story for the new Commodore 64C Ultimate. It gives the C64 Ultimate a welcome facelift, but there's no new functionality.
To make the C64C an authentic recreation of the original – at least on the outside – the reborn Commodore reacquired the exact same injection tooling molds that were used to manufacture the original's plastic housing 40 years ago. The new C64C Ultimate even features faint semi-circular marks on its housing resulting from melted plastic cooling unevenly inside the molds; a sign of authenticity that would be overly-complicated to fake.
As with the C64 Ultimate, the new C64C Ultimate features upgrades like Wi-Fi, USB, and an HDMI port for connecting it to modern displays. But it also carries forward the same ports from the 1986 version of the computer and is compatible with its '80s-era peripherals like floppy disk and cassette drives. It's available for preorder now starting at $299.99 with shipping expected as early as September, while more premium versions that add upgrades like LED lighting, translucent case, and gold keycaps go up to $499.99.
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Civil liberty concerns spur FAA to revise drone no-fly zones near ICE vehicles:
In January 2026, during the height of protests against immigration raids in Minneapolis, federal agents shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good . Before even gathering all the facts , the Department of Homeland Security labeled the mother of three an "anti-ICE rioter" who "weaponized her vehicle against law enforcement" in an "act of domestic terrorism."
Days later, the feds announced a major expansion of "no-fly zones" in the name of national security. While such no-fly zones used to be about controlling aircraft, they now often focus on small drones. The expanded no-fly zones announced on January 16 prohibited such drones from flying within 3,000 lateral feet and 1,000 vertical feet of federal facilities.
But for the first time, the order extended no-fly zones to ground vehicles belonging to the Department of Homeland Security. Even while the vehicles were in motion. Even if they were unmarked. And even if their routes had not been announced.
This exceptionally ambiguous policy posed real danger to people like Rob Levine , a freelance photojournalist and commercial photographer in Minneapolis for nearly four decades. Since Levine got his remote-pilot certification and bought his first drone in 2016, he has flown a small fleet of DJI quadcopter drones to take aerial photographs and videos of Minnesota's rivers, bridges, and cities, along with crowds gathered for outdoor concerts and parades. More recently, he has documented Twin City residents protesting the increased presence of federal agents in their community.
Levine immediately stopped flying when he saw the no-fly notice. The notice said government agencies could shoot down or seize drones "deemed to pose a credible safety or security threat," and it warned of civil and even criminal penalties for drone operators.
"I saw what these federal agents were willing to do, the violence they were willing to visit upon even constitutional observers here in the Twin Cities who were just photographing what they were doing," Levine told Ars.
Good's killing had occurred just six blocks from his home. "It didn't take much imagination to think what they would do to somebody with a drone, and so for weeks I didn't go fly," he said.
A week after the no-fly zone warning, the situation in Minneapolis escalated further when Customs and Border Protection officers killed Alex Pretti , a 37-year-old intensive care nurse, after wrestling him to the ground and shooting him multiple times.
Levine wanted his drones back in the air. But when he sought guidance from the Federal Aviation Administration, the agency candidly acknowledged that the no-fly zone warning was "ambiguous" and "therefore, any flight carries the risk of inadvertent violation."
Could such a policy possibly be legal?
The FAA had previously only advised that drone pilots avoid flying near "mobile assets" operated by the Department of Defense and Department of Energy, such as naval warships and truck convoys transporting nuclear materials between US national labs. But the "notice to airmen" alert in January— NOTAM FDC 6/4375 —had created the equivalent of roving, 3,000-foot no-fly zones around federal agents' cars and other vehicles operating in cities and towns across the country. And it didn't just affect those trying to film federal agents. Because it was practically impossible to ensure compliance with the new flight restrictions, any drone pilot could be at risk during any flight.
"It created a whole lot of fear in the community," said Vic Moss , CEO and cofounder of the Drone Service Providers Alliance, a drone industry trade association based in Lakewood, Colorado. In a post on March 11 , Moss described the FAA flight restriction as posing an "impossible compliance problem" for drone operators, who could end up "ensnared inside a restricted zone with no way of knowing it."
Drone pilots in the United States must use apps such as Air Control to seek official permission to fly in controlled airspaces. Any drones larger than 0.55 pounds must be registered with the FAA and have a Remote ID module that can "squawk" the drone's identification and location at all times. That makes it easy for federal agents or authorities to see where drone operations are taking place. But the system provided no way for drone operators to avoid unmarked government vehicles in motion.
The no-fly zone restrictions were also exceptional in their length and scope. The FAA regularly issues temporary flight restrictions during natural disasters or to protect the airspace around government officials and sporting events such as professional baseball or football games . Most restrictions last just hours or days and cover specific geographic locations, according to the Electronic Frontier Foundation .
But the restrictions issued on January 16, 2026, would last until October 29, 2027—21 months—while covering many federal facilities and vehicles across the entire United States.
Given these unprecedented restrictions, the Electronic Frontier Foundation joined other members of the News Media Coalition—an international organization that includes more than 50 news organizations—in sending a letter to the FAA's Office of the Chief Counsel.
The letter detailed "significant concerns regarding the FAA's January 16, 2026 sweeping and unprecedented Temporary Flight Restriction." It described the flight restrictions as violating the First Amendment by making it more difficult to record law enforcement officers. The letter also argued that the policy's ambiguity violated the Fifth Amendment to the US Constitution, which guarantees the right to due process before being deprived of liberty or property by the government.
Back in Minnesota, Levine spent weeks looking for lawyers who could help him challenge the FAA flight restriction as a freelance photojournalist—but he was racing against a deadline. One law firm alerted him that he had only 60 days to file a petition regarding the FAA decision. But he couldn't find a law firm willing to back him.
"To me, this was an obviously unconstitutional rule by the FAA," Levine told Ars Technica. "Even when I was looking for a lawyer, I had a lot of sympathetic ears, but nobody offered to take the case or to even help me with it."
Levine eventually called a hotline for the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press , a nonprofit in Washington, DC, that offers free legal services. The organization took the case and filed a lawsuit, designated Levine v. FAA (26-1054), with the Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit on March 16.
They had barely beaten the petition deadline.
By March 16, it was common knowledge in the aviation industry that the FAA was aware of the issues and had prepared a revised version of its flight restriction notice, Moss said. But another federal agency was apparently holding up the revision. Many suspected that the agency responsible for the delay was the Department of Homeland Security (DHS).
"I think anybody with more than four synapses firing at the same time can realize that this was a DHS issue," Moss said.
A Department of Homeland Security spokesperson told Ars only that "DHS routinely coordinates with the FAA on airspace restrictions to support operational security and safety of the Department."
On April 10, Levine and his lawyers pressed ahead by filing an emergency motion seeking to temporarily suspend the FAA flight restriction until the court had a chance to review the case.
That may have expedited the government's next move. On April 15, the FAA removed the no-fly zones by replacing the sweeping flight restrictions with a "national security advisory" titled NOTAM FDC 6/2824 . The revised notice dropped all mentions of flight restrictions and criminal charges. It instead "advised" drone pilots to avoid flying near "covered mobile assets" belonging to the Department of Homeland Security and several other federal agencies.
The revised notice was intended to "clarify drone operations based on user feedback," according to an FAA statement shared with Ars. An FAA spokesperson confirmed that "the revised NOTAM removes the flight prohibition and instead advises pilots to use caution near protected operations while enabling federal security partners to assess and respond to potential threats."
Levine and his lawyers were pleased. "First and foremost, our goal was to get the restriction thrown out so that Rob [Levine] and other journalists could be up in the air again," said Grayson Clary , a staff attorney at the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "So on that front, we think this is already a victory."
But Clary still plans to press ahead with the lawsuit.
"We're cognizant that the FAA is doing this because they don't want to have to defend what they did here on the merits in front of the DC Circuit, and we are going to fight back on that tactical gamesmanship," Clary said. "We do plan to make clear to the DC Circuit that this shouldn't have happened in the first place."
The new FAA advisory wording is "a lot better than it was," but it still comes off as "too ambiguous," according to Moss at the Drone Service Providers Alliance. He suggested that the Department of Homeland Security could handle any potential drone concerns rather than making it an FAA issue.
"If there's somebody harassing them with a drone, then I think there's other ways that can be dealt with," he said.
The FAA advisory is also potentially problematic because it still creates a "chilling effect to dissuade people from taking photos and videos, particularly of immigration enforcement agents, from the air," said Sophia Cope , a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
Like the earlier notice, the new advisory warns that federal agents can seize, damage, or destroy drones "deemed to pose a credible safety or security threat to covered mobile assets."
"The threats that [drones] present to the national security and mission of DHS are evolving, and the approaches to securing the locations and personnel of the Department must also evolve," the Department of Homeland Security spokesperson said. "We ask that the [drone] user community respect the security of DHS operations, personnel and facilities and refrain from operating in vicinity of known enforcement activities, and all federal facilities."
The FAA advisory cites three existing laws as giving the federal agencies authority to seize or destroy drone threats.
But those laws first require federal agencies to have performed risk-based assessments to identify specific drone threats to the covered assets. It's unclear whether agencies have done those assessments, Cope said, and therefore, "they're just disincentivizing people from engaging in lawful, First Amendment protected activity."
That chilling effect was very real for Levine while the initial flight restriction was in place. Hesitation cost him the chance to take aerial photos of protestors putting up roadblocks in his neighborhood to stop federal agents' vehicles toward the end of the US government's Operation Metro Surge . Even when a friend asked him to help take drone videos and photos of a performance art event on February 28, he had to think hard about the risks.
As he tells it, "I eventually just screwed up my courage, as little as I have, and said 'OK, I'm gonna do it.'"
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Linux cryptographic code flaw offers fast route to root
Patches land for authencesn flaw enabling local privilege escalation
https://hackread.com/linux-kernel-vulnerability-copy-fail-full-root-access/
Developers of major Linux distributions have begun shipping patches to address a local privilege escalation (LPE) vulnerability arising from a logic flaw.
The newly disclosed LPE, dubbed Copy Fail (CVE-2026-31431), comes from a vulnerability in the Linux kernel's authencesn cryptographic template.
"An unprivileged local user can write four controlled bytes into the page cache of any readable file on a Linux system, and use that to gain root," the writeup from security biz Theori explains.
The kernel reads the page cache when it loads a binary, so modifying the cached copy amounts to altering the binary for the purpose of program execution. But doing so doesn't trigger any defenses focused on file system events like inotify.
The proof of concept exploit is a 10-line, 732-byte Python script capable of editing a setuid binary to gain root on almost all Linux distributions released since 2017.
Copy Fail is similar to other LPE bugs such as Dirty Cow and Dirty Pipe, but its finders claim it doesn't require winning a race condition and it's more broadly applicable.
It's not remotely exploitable on its own – hence LPE – but if chained with a web RCE, malicious CI runner, or SSH compromise, it could be relevant to an external attacker. The bug is of most immediate concern to those using multi-tenant Linux systems, shared-kernel containers, or CI runners that execute untrusted code.
According to Theori, the vulnerability also represents a potential container escape primitive that could affect Kubernetes nodes, because the page cache is shared across the host.
Linux distros Debian, Ubuntu, and SUSE have issued patches for the problem, as have overseers of other distros.
Red Hat initially said it was going to defer the fix but later changed its
guidance to indicate it will go along with other distros and patch promptly.
The CVE has been rated High severity, 7.8 out of 10.
Theori researcher Taeyang Lee identified the vulnerability, with the help of the company's AI security scanning software, Xint Code.
The number of bug reports has surged in recent months, helped by AI-powered flaw-finders. Microsoft just reported the second largest number of patches ever.
Dustin Childs, head of threat awareness for Trend Micro's Zero Day Initiative, expects this is due to security teams using AI to hunt bugs. "There are many things we could speculate on to justify the size, but if Microsoft is like the other programs out there (including ours), they are likely seeing a rise in submissions found by AI tools," he wrote earlier this month.
AI-assisted vulnerability research recently prompted the Internet Bug Bounty (IBB) program to suspend awards until it can understand how to manage the growing volume of reports.
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Apple wants to kill your Time Capsule, but they run NetBSD so they can't:
It seems like Apple is finally going to remove support for AFP from macOS, twelve years after first moving from AFP to SMB for its default network file-sharing technology. This change shouldn't impact most people, as it's highly unlikely you're using AFP for anything in 2026. Still, there is one small group of people to whom this change has an actual impact: owners of Apple's Time Capsule devices. Time Capsules only support AFP and SMB1, and with SMB1 being removed from macOS ages ago, and now AFP being on the chopping block as well, macOS 27 would render your Time Capsule more or less unusable.
It's important to note that the last Time Capsule sold by Apple, the fifth generation, was released in 2013, and the product line as a whole was discontinued in 2018. If you bought a Time Capsule in the twilight years of the line's availability, I think you have a genuine reason to be perturbed by Apple cutting you off from your product if you upgrade to macOS 27, but at least you have the option of keeping an older version of macOS around so you can keep interacting with your time Capsule. It still feels like a bit of a shitty move though, as those fifth generation models came with up to 3TB of storage, which can still serve as a solid NAS solution.
Thank your lucky stars, then, that open source can, as usual, come to the rescue when proprietary software vendors do what they always do and screw over their customers. Did you know every generation of Time Capsule actually runs NetBSD, and that it's trivially easy to add support for Samba 4 and SMB3 authentication to your Time Capsule, thereby extending its life expectancy considerably? TimeCapsuleSMB does exactly that.
If the setup completes successfully, your Time Capsule will run its own Samba 4 server, advertise itself over Bonjour (show up automatically in the "Network" folder on macOS), and accept authenticated SMB3 connections from macOS. You should then be able to open Finder, choose Connect to Server, and use a normal SMB URL instead of relying on Apple's legacy stack. You should also be able to use the disk for Time Machine backups.
↫ TimeCapsuleSMBIt's compatible with both NetBSD 4 and NetBSD 6-based Time Capsules, although you'll need to run a single SMB activation command every time a NetBSD 4-based Time Capsule reboots. This will also disable any AFP and SMB1 support, but that is kind of moot since those are exactly the technologies that don't and won't work anymore once macOS 27 is released. The installation is also entirely reversible if, for whatever reason, you want to undo the addition of Samba 4.
This whole saga is such an excellent example of why open source software protects users' rights, by design.
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Google has signed a classified deal that allows the US Department of Defense to use its AI models for "any lawful government purpose," The Information reports. The agreement was reported less than a day after Google employees demanded CEO Sundar Pichai block the Pentagon from using its AI amid concerns that it would be used in "inhumane or extremely harmful ways."
If the agreement is confirmed, it would place Google alongside OpenAI and xAI, which have also made classified AI deals with the US government. Anthropic was also among that list until it was blacklisted by the Pentagon for refusing the Department of Defense's demands to remove weapon and surveillance-related guardrails from its AI models.
Citing a single anonymous source "with knowledge of the situation," The Information reports that the deal states that both parties have agreed that the search giant's AI systems shouldn't be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons "without appropriate human oversight and control." But the contract also says it doesn't give Google "any right to control or veto lawful government operational decision-making," which would suggest the agreed restrictions are more of a pinky promise than legally binding obligations. The deal also requires Google to assist with making adjustments to its AI safety settings and filters at the government's request.
"We are proud to be part of a broad consortium of leading AI labs and technology and cloud companies providing AI services and infrastructure in support of national security," a Google spokesperson said in a statement to The Information, adding that the new agreement is an amendment to its existing government deal. "We remain committed to the private and public sector consensus that AI should not be used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weaponry without appropriate human oversight."
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https://read.thecoder.cafe/p/linux-broke-postgresql
On April 3, 2026, Salvatore Dipietro, an engineer at AWS, posted a patch to the Linux kernel mailing list. The reason: on a 96-vCPU Graviton4 machine running Linux 7.0, PostgreSQL throughput had dropped to roughly half of what it produced on Linux 6.x. In this post, we will trace what changed in Linux 7.0, how PostgreSQL manages memory, and what role memory pages play in making the problem appear (or disappear). Get cozy, grab a coffee, and let's begin!
The Problem
Salvatore Dipietro ran pgbench (PostgreSQL's standard benchmarking tool) on a Graviton4 processor with 96 vCPUs. The workload was a benchmark doing simple updates at scale factor 8,470 (i.e., roughly a 847 million row table), simulating 1,024 clients and 96 threads. A serious, high-parallelism load designed to stress the system.
The results were striking. Linux 7.0 delivered roughly half the throughput of Linux 6.x on the same hardware and workload:
Linux 6.x: 98,565 transactions per second
Linux 7.0: 50,751 transactions per second
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