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An AI broke Snowflake's code; then another AI, an attack agent, autonomously found the bug, exploited it, and extracted credentials without human intervention.
Luckily, this wasn't yet another case of rogue AI agents doing evil things. It was a sanctioned bug hunt, conducted through Snowflake's HackerOne vulnerability disclosure program, and Snowflake fixed the flaw the same day Wiz reported it and rotated the affected credentials the following day.
Wiz's red agent, an AI-powered autonomous attacker designed for offensive security, found the GitHub Actions workflow flaw during a routine scan of public repositories on June 23. The script injection vulnerability existed in snowflakedb/snowflake-connector-net, and it allowed an unauthenticated user to execute arbitrary commands within a GitHub Actions runner by opening a GitHub issue with a specially crafted title.
And it turned out an AI had inadvertently injected the bug into the code five days earlier.
GitHub Copilot Autofix, an AI coding assistant, co-authored the commit on June 18, and it introduced a script injection bug in run: blocks by removing the repository's existing sanitized input pattern and replacing it with direct string expansion in a shell script.
"We crafted an issue title that, after template expansion, breaks out of the echo string and exfiltrates the Jira credentials via an out-of-band callback," Wiz's head of threat exposure Gal Nagli said in a Monday blog.
These credentials gave Wiz read access to Snowflake's engineering, security compliance, and bug bounty tracking projects.
Wiz reported the workflow vulnerability to the cloud data platform on June 23, and Snowflake patched it the same day. It also revoked and rotated the Jira token, and confirmed, via audit logs, that Wiz was the only third-party to access the endpoint during the five-day exposure window.
The disclosure "was immediately investigated and remediated, and our investigation found no evidence of unauthorized access," a Snowflake spokesperson told The Register. "We are working together with Wiz to share these learnings with the broader industry to encourage widespread adoption of these security best practices."
Wiz, for its part, deleted all of the data it accessed during the vulnerability research and proof-of-concept exploit testing, and told us that this incident proves human code review isn't sufficient to quickly detect vulnerabilities - especially as developers increasingly use AI.
"This incident highlights a rapidly emerging reality in software development: how AI coding assistants can inadvertently introduce workflow injection vulnerabilities, and how automated AI agents can rapidly surface them in the wild," Nagli wrote.
Of course, the Google-owned biz has a vested interest in saying this. But this doesn't make it not true.
The film Aliens was released to theaters in 1986, that is to say 40 years ago. Many new technologies were featured in the film and some have come to be in real life. The Conversation looks at the film and at the then fictional technologies and reviews which did and did not come to pass.
The technology featured in Aliens appears to be there to support the wonderful storytelling, rather than predict the path of innovation, as a futurologist might.
But let's take a look at it. The film is set in 2179, 153 years into our future. Journeying 153 years into the past would land us in 1893, when common technologies were horse drawn and steam streetcars and gas lighting. Typewriters with Qwerty keyboards went on sale the following year.
Previously:
(2025) 50 Years of JAWS
(2025) Monty Python and the Holy Grail Turns 50
(2024) The Terminator: How James Cameron's 'science-fiction slasher film' predicted AI fears, 40 years ago
(2018) Sci-Fi Classic "They Live" -- 30 Years Later
Screen readers suffer as nearly 90% of top websites tested contain HTML spec violations:
Are web coders losing their respect for standards? A recent review of the world's largest sites suggests so.
ValidateHTML, a project by independent French developer Théo Ducreux, examined the contents of the 5,000 most widely used web domains, as estimated by the Tranco research project. They include the usual suspects (Google, YouTube, Akamai) plus those without public-facing components (Google's "gstatic," EZVIZ's "Ezviz7").
Ducreux found more than half – 2,656 sites – served a home page readable by humans. Many of the others, such as Google and EZVIZ's, were just traffic redirection sites, a beacon for a company's products to call home.
Headless or not, nearly 90 percent of these sites were not serving proper HTML, as specified by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) and the WHATWG (Web Hypertext Application Technology Working Group). These standards are important so that different browsers and reading tools can render the requested pages in more or less the same way.
Ducreux tallied a total of 100,305 HTML violations (including the most recent HTML5 specs) across all these sites, plus an additional 18,863 CSS errors. In other words, 87.2 percent of sites violate web specs in at least one place. Only 12.8 percent have fully valid HTML. And only 2.6 percent of all sites are completely clean, returning zero errors and zero best-practice warnings.
More alarming, over a third of sites failed accessibility checks, which to their owners is more of a legal liability (and hence a compliance issue) than an embarrassment, given the potential reach of the 2025 European Accessibility Act. (Here in the U.S., woe be the accessibility-inconsiderate e-commerce site that raises the ire of the National Federation of the Blind.)
Accessibility-wise, 20.4 percent of sites are missing alt text on images, which often contain vital information. Worse, 41.6 percent of pages are missing ARIA labels that identify page regions, potentially leaving screen readers struggling to convey the page's structure. Here's an iframe, figure it out.
"Screen readers don't have anywhere near the error tolerance Chrome has, so markup that looks totally fine to you can be broken for someone using assistive tech," Ducreux told The Register.
For the project, he used a home-built web crawler and a set of open-source parsers (HTML-validate, CSS Validator, Lightning CSS, fast-xml-parser). "The site, the scoring, and the crawl logic are my own code," Ducreux explained by email. Ducreux is the principal maintainer for the project and the site. "No team, no funding, no company."
Does lack of adherence to standards really matter? It's an open question.
"The web is more a social creation than a technical one," web creator Tim Berners-Lee wrote back in 1999. If we all go off and make our own standards, then it's harder to connect and communicate.
The currently fashionable Dead Internet Theory – in which AI machines and not we meat sticks now make up most internet traffic – won't get developers off the hook. As Shopify engineers have found, even superintelligence prefers shipshape markup.
Browsers deserve part of the blame. Unless they have a fetish for the short-lived but brutally unforgiving XHTML, browsers today will just ignore any code they can't grok.
"Browsers are so good at error recovery that nothing forces anyone to fix" their code, Ducreux wrote on the site, "which is exactly why it accumulates." Indulgence encourages slothfulness.
Front-end frameworks create their own mischief. The single most common failure identified (in more than 59 percent of all the sites) is the misplaced element, aka incorrect tag nesting. Did you know you're not allowed to put a style element within a div box? Many frameworks do, evidently.
"It is a nesting problem created at build time, not in an editor," Ducreux wrote on the site. "Nobody writes that by hand."
Many folks believe sloppy HTML is no big deal, including some in the peanut gallery at Hacker News. One contributor noted that "HTML5 defines a method for turning more-or-less any sequence of bytes into the same DOM tree," DOM being the Document Object Model the browser uses to understand a web page.
Ducreux himself doesn't see bad HTML as an existential threat to the web, outside of hindering accessibility, which can leave someone guessing at online content they may really need to understand.
"Honestly, most invalid HTML doesn't break anything visible, browsers are built to guess what you meant and just patch it silently," he wrote by e-mail. But at the same time, the web isn't just about browsers.
"AI agents reading pages, voice assistants, translation tools, screen readers – none of them have Chrome's 20 years of guessing your intent," he wrote. "Writing to spec is what makes a page mean the same thing to all of them, not just to whoever's rendering it in Chrome that day."
The SN front page gets a failing grade and comes in with 27 errors and 16 warnings:
[ERROR] Line 1:11 - doctype should be "html" (doctype-html)
[ERROR] Line 247:4 - Attribute "name" is deprecated on <a> element (no-deprecated-attr)
[ERROR] Line 384:3 - <tt> is deprecated (deprecated)
[ERROR] Line 719:9 - <div> element is not permitted as content under <b> (element-permitted-content)
[ERROR] Line 770:5 - Attribute "name" is deprecated on <a> element (no-deprecated-attr)
[ERROR] Line 824:73 - autocomplete attribute cannot be used on <input type="checkbox"> (valid-autocomplete)
[ERROR] Line 829:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 921:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 1009:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 1097:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 1185:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 1273:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 1361:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 1449:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 1537:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 1627:74 - autocomplete attribute cannot be used on <input type="checkbox"> (valid-autocomplete)
[ERROR] Line 1632:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 1722:348 - <tt> is deprecated (deprecated)
[ERROR] Line 1722:374 - <tt> is deprecated (deprecated)
[ERROR] Line 1722:656 - <tt> is deprecated (deprecated)
[ERROR] Line 1733:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 1823:74 - autocomplete attribute cannot be used on <input type="checkbox"> (valid-autocomplete)
[ERROR] Line 1828:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 1921:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 2009:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 2097:2 - Stray end tag '</p>' (close-order)
[ERROR] Line 2139:10 - Duplicate ID "nextPrev" (no-dup-id)[WARNING] Line 3:2 - The <html> element has no "lang" attribute. It is valid HTML, but it leaves the page language undeclared, which fails WCAG 3.1.1. (missing-lang)
[WARNING] Line 117:4 - Heading level can only increase by one, expected <h3> but got <h4> (heading-level)
[WARNING] Line 266:3 - <input> element does not have a <label> (input-missing-label)
[WARNING] Line 272:3 - <input> element does not have a <label> (input-missing-label)
[WARNING] Line 278:16 - Prefer to use <button> instead of <input type="submit"> when adding buttons (prefer-button)
[WARNING] Line 459:12 - <input> element does not have a <label> (input-missing-label)
[WARNING] Line 461:12 - <input> element does not have a <label> (input-missing-label)
[WARNING] Line 463:12 - <input> element does not have a <label> (input-missing-label)
[WARNING] Line 465:12 - <input> element does not have a <label> (input-missing-label)
[WARNING] Line 467:12 - <input> element does not have a <label> (input-missing-label)
[WARNING] Line 469:12 - <input> element does not have a <label> (input-missing-label)
[WARNING] Line 471:12 - <input> element does not have a <label> (input-missing-label)
[WARNING] Line 473:12 - <input> element does not have a <label> (input-missing-label)
[WARNING] Line 477:19 - Prefer to use <button> instead of <input type="submit"> when adding buttons (prefer-button)
[WARNING] Line 2173:8 - <input> element does not have a <label> (input-missing-label)
[WARNING] Line 2174:20 - Prefer to use <button> instead of <input type="submit"> when adding buttons (prefer-button)
The first thing I learned at Defcon was that I apparently didn't know what a badge was.
I already had one hanging around my neck: the press credential that got me through the door at the annual hacker convention in Las Vegas in early August. Yet everywhere I looked, people stood in long lines to buy more. When I asked what they were waiting for and heard "badges," I glanced down at mine, confused.
I would soon learn that Defcon badges can be electronic puzzles, soldering projects, collectibles and signs of belonging to a culture I was experiencing for the first time. Those badges were my first indication of how much I had to learn.
Everyone else seemed to understand the schedule, the language and the unwritten rules. But me? I felt like I was back in high school and had somehow missed orientation.
Over the next few days, talking with professionals, hobbyists and other beginners made cybersecurity feel much more accessible. For the first time, I could see a path from playing around with hacking tools to actually understanding how they work.
I wasn't completely new to hacking. In college at UCLA, I spent more time than I probably should have in the library experimenting with Firesheep, a Firefox extension that demonstrated how exposed session cookies could be intercepted over shared Wi-Fi. Watching it work showed me how easily technology could be manipulated.
I didn't build Firesheep or understand the code behind it. I knew how to install it and click around. In hacker terminology, that made me a script kiddie: someone who uses tools created by other people without fully understanding how they work.
Still, I loved testing technology's limits and making it do things it wasn't designed to do. I liked the feeling of opening a door everyone else assumed was locked. That curiosity stuck, even if my technical knowledge never caught up.
Defcon was my chance to see whether it finally could.
Defcon featured talks and scheduled events, but much of the convention was divided into villages dedicated to particular corners of hacking. There were villages for lock picking, artificial intelligence, aerospace, cars and even boats. Inside them, people were hacking devices, building things, competing in challenges or sitting around tables working on projects I couldn't begin to identify.
Elsewhere, teams competed in capture the flag contests, or CTFs, where players solve cybersecurity puzzles to uncover hidden pieces of text known as flags. Some competitions were designed for experts. Others were specifically meant to help beginners learn. I wanted to try one, but never did. There was always another room to explore, another talk to catch or another unfamiliar object I needed someone to explain to me.
Mostly, I wandered.
That was how I ended up learning about Defcon badges. The official badge gets you into the convention, but villages, groups and independent creators also make their own. Many are small electronic devices with lights, screens, games or hidden puzzles. Some communicate with other badges. Others come as bare circuit boards that you have to assemble yourself. Collecting and hacking them is an entire subculture within Defcon.
Because I arrived late, many of the badges I heard people talking about had already sold out. But I managed to buy one from the Maritime Hacking Village, where hackers explore the technology used on boats and other maritime systems, as well as the Car Hacking Village.
I also sat down at a soldering station and made a small badge of my own.
I had always wanted to learn how to solder, but was intimidated by the idea of trying it alone. At Defcon, a young guy and a much older man — two people who seemed like complete opposites in almost every way — took turns guiding me through it.
They showed me how to heat each connection and apply just enough solder to hold the components in place. Once I got the hang of it, I was surprised by how naturally it came to me. When the badge lit up, I realized soldering had never been beyond me; I just needed someone to show me where to start.
The talks were a reminder of how much I don't know. Speakers spoke through code and acronyms as if everyone in the room spoke the same language, which frustrated me at times. Sometimes I could follow the larger idea, but lost the technical details. Other times, I had almost no idea what was happening.
One project I could understand came from Billy Swearingen. He developed software that generates and tests visual patterns designed to confuse the AI systems used by surveillance cameras. His goal isn't to make someone invisible, but rather to make it more difficult for a camera's software to recognize a person or face.
A talk about cellular surveillance went the same way for me. I didn't understand every detail about cellular networks, but I understood the problem. Police can use devices that pretend to be cellphone towers, and the people being monitored may never know. Rayhunter offered an inexpensive way to start looking for signs of that surveillance.
I quickly gave up on trying to understand every technical detail. I followed whatever interested me, bought a few devices to let me experiment in different areas of cybersecurity and filled my phone with terms to look up later. It was like a college curriculum I had given myself.
Eventually, I wandered into Noob Village. For the first time all weekend, I knew immediately that I was in the right place.
Noob Village was built for people trying to enter cybersecurity without needing to understand everything. It offered beginner-focused talks, workshops, career advice and a place to ask basic questions without feeling stupid.
That was where I met Andrew Crotty, founder and president of the Ginger Hacker Initiative, a nonprofit that helps beginners, students, veterans and career changers find their way into cybersecurity through accessible education, mentorship and hands-on learning.
Crotty and I talked about my own attempt to move beyond using tools other people built and develop a more technical understanding of hacking. I told him that I grew up in a place where cybersecurity never felt accessible. Nobody around me talked about hacking as a skill you could learn or a career you could pursue. Even after I became interested in it, I didn't know where to begin or who to ask for help.
After wandering through rooms organized around specialties I barely understood, I had finally found my village. Literally.
That didn't mean I suddenly knew what I was doing. It meant I had found one place that catered to not knowing. I left with a better idea of where to begin, then walked back into the chaos to see what else Defcon had waiting for me.
One of the few things I had planned was getting a copy of The Cuckoo's Egg signed by its author, Cliff Stoll. Jaron Bradley, director of Jamf Threat Labs, had recommended the book when I interviewed him at Black Hat as a good way for me to start learning about cybersecurity. I had never heard of Stoll, but at Defcon, his name carried a kind of celebrity.
Stoll was an astronomer working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in the 1980s when a 75-cent accounting discrepancy led him to discover a hacker inside the lab's computer network. He spent the next year tracking the intruder, eventually uncovering an international espionage operation connected to the Soviet KGB. This story became The Cuckoo's Egg, one of the foundational books of modern cybersecurity.
While I waited for Stoll, I started talking to the man in front of me. He had joined the military without a cybersecurity background, learned the technical skills and eventually turned them into a career in his 20s. We talked about where we came from, politics and the different paths that had brought us into the same line.
It wasn't an interview. Neither of us was trying to impress the other or extract anything useful.
It was exactly the kind of unexpected conversation I had hoped to have when I came to Defcon alone: a chance to meet someone whose path into cybersecurity looked nothing like mine and to hear how he found his way in.
Then I met Stoll, who was every bit as strange, energetic and entertaining as his reputation suggested. He signed my book and shook my hand, wishing me luck on my journey in this strange new world.
The whole experience was another reminder of how wonderfully unpredictable Defcon could be.
By the end of the weekend, I had learned to solder, solved a cryptography puzzle involving a Vigenère cipher and spent more money than expected on hacking tools. More importantly, the technical side of cybersecurity no longer felt as intimidating as it had when I arrived.
There was still plenty I didn't try. I never attempted a CTF, even though several were designed for beginners. I had my laptop with me, but I mostly used it to take notes while watching other people hack. This year, I wanted to wander and understand what Defcon was. Next year, I want to participate.
I'll have a better idea of which villages I want to visit, and I plan to commit to at least one beginner CTF — not because I think I'll suddenly know what I'm doing, but because I'm no longer as afraid of not knowing.
One of my favorite things about Defcon was seeing how many parents had brought their children. They were being introduced to technology as something they could question and rebuild in their own vision. That gave me a little more courage.
I didn't leave Defcon as a hacker, not that I was supposed to. I did leave with enough confidence to start figuring things out for myself.
At one point, I admitted to another attendee that I felt like I didn't belong there. He told me something I kept thinking about for the rest of the weekend: "You don't have to know what you're doing most of the time," he said. "You just have to want to find out."
The federal agency tasked with studying ways to improve America's outstandingly poor healthcare system is "on the brink," experts warn. The Trump administration has cut its staff by 75 percent, canceled its grants en masse, and is refusing to spend tens of millions of dollars appropriated by Congress.
Whether the agency "will survive the second Trump administration is an open question," health policy experts Aaron Carroll and David Atkins wrote in an opinion piece published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine.
The agency in question is the Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ), which has focused on ways to improve patient safety, healthcare quality, care delivery, and new technologies and practices since the 1990s. In the past, "Republican leaders recognized that health care disparities were fundamental quality problems," Carroll and Atkins wrote. But recently, disparities in care have become partisan issues.
During Trump's second term, DOGE cuts led to the firing or retirement of an estimated 75 percent of the AHRQ's staff. In July, AHRQ abruptly sent grant cancellation letters to around 150 researchers. More than 100 research grants collectively worth over $250 million have been canceled. Although Congress appropriated $345 million for the 2026 fiscal year, much of it has gone unspent, with only $15 million going to grants so far. As such, scientists across over 30 states have halted research, laid off staff, shut down programs, and stopped pursuing new lines of research.
In addition to the losses in data and research findings, Carroll and Atkins lament the loss to the scientific community. "This is what it looks like when we stop developing the next generation of health services researchers." Reversing the damage is doable, but will be difficult, they write, while calling on Congress to act.
Last week, 30 Democratic senators sent a fiery letter [PDF] to anti-vaccine Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Noting the same series of events as Carroll and Atkins, they called Kennedy's handling of AHRQ "sabotage" and an "outrageous abuse of administrative power that will leave Americans sicker, poorer, and dying from preventable causes."
They highlighted just a few of the research programs that were axed under Kennedy, including studies on training rural healthcare workers to handle maternal medical emergencies in Connecticut, improving access to home dialysis in New York, reducing risks of patient falls in rural hospitals in Colorado, reducing overuse of antibiotics in Utah, improving autism screening and care for Black children in North Carolina, and improving chronic pain management to reduce reliance on opioids in Virginia. The senators also noted that grants were canceled out of the blue with form letters, which had contradictory explanations and incorrect citations.
With "profound concern and unequivocal opposition" to the mass grant cancellations, the senators wrote, "We demand that you immediately rescind these cancellations and ensure that the funding Congress appropriates to AHRQ is invested in health research in accordance with the law."
"We want to be clear: Democrats and Republicans did not work together to appropriate funds for AHRQ as a gentle suggestion for the [health] Department to follow at their discretion or leisure," they wrote. "We provided this money with the explicit instruction that the Department faithfully support life-saving research to improve access and health outcomes for Americans."
The health department under Kennedy has previously defended the cuts. The senators gave Kennedy until August 25 to respond to their letter.
https://www.zdnet.com/article/top-6-ai-free-linux-distros/
AI is everywhere, and the technology's tendrils continue finding their way into more and more places. Will we soon see AI in shopping carts, waffle makers, heated blankets -- rocks?
OK, maybe AI in rocks is a stretch, but you get the point.
Microsoft and Apple are embedding their respective AIs into the heart of their operating systems, and some Linux distributions, such as Omarchy, have followed suit.
Fortunately, not every Linux distribution has plans to add AI into the mix. In fact, several distros have either explicitly taken a stance against AI -- or have a general ethos that ensures AI will not become part of the OS.
One thing to know: Just because an OS refuses to ship (or use) AI, it doesn't mean that users can't install it for themselves. That's up to the end user. Also, not every one of these distro developers has made public statements about not including AI, but their foundations and ethos stand against such things. To that end, I've had to draw conclusions based on my long-term experience and understanding of how these distributions work and evolve.
Here are the best of those distros.
Debian has made it clear that AI will never be included in the OS. For Debian, part of the issue is the openness of LLMs. The developers made that perfectly clear when they stated, "AI models released under DFSG-compatible license without original training data or program are not seen as DFSG-compliant." DFSG stands for Debian Free Software Guidelines, and the developers and community take the standard seriously. Because of this, I cannot see any point at which Debian will include AI with the operating system.
Keep in mind that Debian is the "mother of distributions," because so many distributions (including Ubuntu) use it as a base. This means that all of those distributions beneath it will not have to deal with preinstalled AI.
Although the Void developers haven't taken an official public stance on AI in the OS, it's safe to assume we'll never see it ship with AI. One reason for this is the very nature of Void Linux as a "DIY" Linux distribution.
Void Linux starts with just the basics and leaves the rest up to the user. That ethos alone should ensure that AI is never a part of the base. On top of all that, Void is considered a minimalist distro, which means it aims to be as small as possible. (AI would increase the ISO size.)
I'm fairly confident that Void Linux will never include AI out of the box.
MXLinux is based on AntiX, a distribution designed for older, slower hardware. That alone ensures that MXLinux will not include AI (especially locally installed AI). In all MXLinux blog posts and news announcements, there has never been any mention of preinstalled artificial intelligence.
A comment on the MXLinux About Us page, "For some it's a hobby, for some it's paying it forward to the free software community that has given us so much, for some it's a labor of love," makes it clear how the developers honor FSF.
It's a safe bet that MXLinux will not ever include AI.
The closest thing you'll find regarding AI and Arch Linux is ArchLinux AI in the Arch User Repository (AUR). Beyond that, there's been no mention of Arch ever including AI in the OS. Also, Arch Linux takes security very seriously, and the inclusion of AI could compromise that (especially given how LLMs have lately shown the ability to escape guardrails with ease). Consider how Arch has decided to suspend the AUR out of concern for the distro's (and users') safety.
Although Arch is a rolling distribution, it's always seemed to be a Linux take that evolves very slowly. The idea that Arch would jump onto the pre-installed AI bandwagon is counter to what the distribution has stood for all of these years.
No, I cannot imagine that Arch will ever ship with AI pre-installed. Want to install it yourself? Go right ahead.
No. No way. Nope.
Slackware has always been dedicated to being the "most UNIX-like Linux distro available." Given that, there's no chance it will ever ship with preinstalled AI.
The AerynOS developers have issued a statement on using AI for both development and design, stating, "AerynOS takes a default position that we do not accept the use of LLMs in/around AerynOS." That stance is based on ethical concerns about data gathering, disproportionate use of electricity and water, potential negative influence, and potential copyright violations.
Yeah, AerynOS will never include AI in the OS.
Not every Linux distribution has come out with a strong public stance against AI. However, based on my decades of following the Linux and open-source world, I find it safe to assume the distributions above will not be shipping with the Linux equivalent of Copilot or Apple Intelligence any time soon.
NASA has used its Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter (LRO) to capture more pics of the mess on the moon left by a SpaceX Falcon 9 upper stage.
As The Register has previously reported, in 2025 private aerospace concerns Firefly and ispace hired a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket for their respective Blue Ghost Mission 1 and RESILIENCE moonshots.
RESILIENCE did not live up to its name. Blue Ghost did rather better.
The trajectory used to get the two craft to Luna meant the upper stage of the Falcon 9 was on a collision course with Earth's sole permanent natural satellite. The vehicle met its end in early August, and South Korea's space agency captured a few snaps.
NASA did likewise between August 11 and 12, and on Tuesday shared some of them.
You're looking at four of those images, each taken from a different angle as LRO passed 60 miles (96km) above the lunar surface while travelling at a mile per second (1600 m/s).
Crater boffins who have seen the snaps apparently think they show the Falcon 9 made a hole 60 feet wide and 10 feet deep (18m x 3m).
We're told that the darker area that fans around the crater in the upper-left image is rougher than the surroundings, as this surface material has been altered over a long time by solar wind, galactic cosmic rays, and micrometeorite impacts. The brighter rays and splotch above the crater in the lower-right image is fresher material that was excavated from deeper below the surface.
Another piece of SpaceX hardware, the Starship used in the 13th test flight, has also turned up in the Australian territory of Christmas Island.
The island is a speck in the Indian Ocean more famous for its annual migration of red crabs (and its role Australian immigration policies) than its contributions to space exploration. It is, however, usefully close to the location where the Starship hit the water.
As SpaceX explained on X, its recovery team towed the spacecraft to the island to take advantage of the calm waters in its vicinity so engineers can perform extra post-flight analysis. The company hopes to return it to its Texas Starbase for more work.
Rob, the Administrator over at Linux.org has announced:
I set up an IRC server this week. irc.linux.org, port 6697, TLS.
Main channel is #linux.org.
NickServ and ChanServ are both running, so you can lock down your nickname and register your own channels:
/msg NickServ REGISTER
/msg ChanServ REGISTER #yourchannel
Once a channel is registered it stays yours, ops and all, even if you're the only one who ever shows up.
If you haven't touched IRC in fifteen years, nothing has changed,. apt install hexchat or apt install irssi, connect, join, type.
Channels are open for the taking. Distro channels, project channels, whatever you want to run. Grab them before somebody else does.
It seems like Nvidia's not getting back into the Middle Kingdom anytime soon:
Chinese web giant Baidu yesterday told investors it sees good days ahead for its Kunlunxin chip biz, because local buyers won't have alternatives.
Baidu has previously said it plans to spin out and float Kunlunxin, which makes CUDA-compliant inferencing chips that it uses for its own cloud services and has sold to the likes of Huawei and ZTE, who use them in kit they sell to Chinese telcos.
Speaking on the company's Q2 earnings call, Dou Shen, executive veep of Baidu's AI Cloud Group, said Baidu is working to list Kunlunxin and will have concrete info to share soon.
"From a business perspective, we remain very confident in Kunlunxin's long-term growth and commercial potential for a few reasons," he said. One of those reasons is that demand for inferencing continues to rise, and Baidu thinks that trend will continue for the long term.
His second reason was that China's domestic market has "significant growth potential" because supply of AI chips is "likely to remain constrained for some time."
"Against this backdrop, customers are increasingly seeking high performance, reliable, and cost-efficient domestic AI chips."
Those remarks are notable in the context of the US government's policy to allow Nvidia to resume sales of its products into China, and Beijing's response of giving itself a veto over any purchases by local companies.
After Washington banned Nvidia from selling its products in China, the company said that decision cost it $10.5 billion in six months. In its most recent results announcement the GPU giant said it had not won any revenue in China after the USA's policy reversal, and is "uncertain whether any imports will be allowed into the country."
And now Baidu is saying Chinese buyers are looking to local chips due to supply challenges.
Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang has argued that the Trump administration should encourage chip sales to China, to cement the USA's dominance of AI. Beijing has encouraged adoption of local tech, in part to reduce dependence on US products.
Baidu's earnings included strong growth for its AI business, which saw revenue from cloud infrastructure rental rise 50 percent year over year to almost $1.1 billion, and revenue from the company's GPU cloud surge 283 percent year-over-year, trumping the 184 percent growth in the last quarter.
Those numbers are modest compared to the likes of AWS, Google, and Microsoft – and also a fair way down the charts among Baidu's Chinese competitors. The company believes owning its own stack of models, infrastructure, and chips will mean it can deliver AI services at keen prices and give it a market advantage. Alibaba makes similar claims and is arguably far ahead of Baidu in terms of model-making capabilities.
But Baidu has the robo-cab field to itself with the Apollo Go service, which execs said provided over one million fully autonomous rides around the world in Q2.
Back on the web, execs enthused about low hallucination rates for the company's consumer-AI services, and an 83 percent year-over-year increase in the number of daily active users for Baidu's ERNIE assistant – which saw the number of conversations users stage daily more than triple.
Overall revenue grew just four percent year-over-year to $3.9 billion, meaning Baidu's AI cloud is the company's growth engine.
After only two years in business, too:
Firm Test-Fires 3D-Printed, Fully Cryogenic Reusable Rocket Engine — Indian Startup Leverages SLM Printing To Create Its First Working Prototype
As a broad description, SLM printers work by depositing a layer of microscopic metal powder on a base, and then firing a laser that melts the powder into solid at specific places. The base then drops down a fraction of a millimeter, a new layer of powder is deposited, and the process repeats. All told, this results in layers around just 0.05 to 0.06 mm thick, made of metals and alloys that traditional consumer 3D printers can't quite handle. Here's an illustrative video of the process.
Additionally, the burn is stronger than the commonly used Kerolox, while leaving behind almost no residue, lowering maintenance time and improving reusability turnaround. Drawbacks include lower fuel density (thus the need for larger tank sizes), trickier storage due to the low temperature, and potential hazards for handling.
Othisis has reportedly signed MoUs (memorandum of understanding) to carry payloads into space, even though it's only been formally in business for two years. The company is the brainchild of Syed Affan, the creator of the Rocketry India Discord server, who founded the company while pursuing his undergraduate degree.
It's like Windows Recall, but without all the creepy screenshots. (But it's still kind of creepy.):
ChatGPT's desktop app on macOS has a new feature called Computer History that turns your actions into training data, learning how you work, suggesting automations, and even picking up tasks you left half done. It uses your activity to build a timeline that ChatGPT and Codex can reference when you make a request.
The feature is opt in, rather than opt out, and you can exclude certain apps and websites from Computer History, and you can delete entries if you want finer-grained control. Ari Weinstein, Product and Engineering manager at OpenAI, said on X that Computer History will automatically ignore content in incognito or private browser tabs.
In a quick demo video, Dominik Kundel, a member of the Developer Experiences team at OpenAI, shows the app looking up the last document he edited, checking if it was shared with people via Slack, and delivering a recap of how he spent his morning.
The feature is definitely reminiscent of Windows Recall, but where Microsoft's controversial AI feature relied heavily on screenshots, OpenAI says Computer History doesn't capture images, videos, or audio, instead relying on "events."
https://www.theregister.com/ai-and-ml/2026/08/14/openai-ditches-recall-style-screenshot-surveillance-for-friendly-keylogging/5287618
https://thenextweb.com/news/openai-chatgpt-computer-history-mac-keystrokes
The CMP 170HX has quickly gone from crypto trash to AI treasure:
Nvidia Crypto Mining GPUs Hacked To Restore Locked-Away VRAM — Software Mod Unlocks 64GB Of VRAM On $250 CMP 170HX
Nvidia's approach is somewhat reminiscent of the old AMD Phenom II and Athlon II days, where some models shipped with disabled cores that could sometimes be unlocked through BIOS tweaks. Similarly, the CMP 170HX 8GB and 10GB models can potentially be unlocked to access their full memory capacity of 64GB and 80GB, respectively, though only 40GB is confirmed to be working from user feedback. As detailed in "A Canary in the Crypto Mine: Defeating Stack Protection in a GPU Secure Coprocessor," Jon Pry's research paper provides the technical blueprint for bypassing Nvidia’s Falcon security microprocessor, which tools like CMP Unlocked are based on.
One of the most remarkable aspects of this exploit is that it is entirely software-based and requires no physical modifications to the CMP 170HX. It sounds like a joke, but you are literally downloading more memory for your graphics card. It’s important to note, however, that the amount of memory you can successfully unlock and maintain stability will vary. The issue is that there is no way to know whether the locked-away memory is fully functional because Nvidia did so for product segmentation, or whether the chipmaker deactivated it due to physical defects. It's a similar situation to another repurposed crypto device, AMD's BC-250, that we recently tested.
Beyond unlocking the hidden memory, the software exploit can also restore processing power to the CMP 170HX’s Streaming Multiprocessors (SMs), which increases its computational performance. Another notable benefit is the upgrade to a faster PCIe interface speed. The CMP 170HX can now operate at PCIe 2.0 x4 speeds, a significant upgrade from its original restriction to PCIe 1.0 x4. There is still untapped performance, though. Nvidia implemented hard restrictions on the CMP 170HX’s connectivity by limiting the accelerator to just four PCIe lanes and physically omitting 12 capacitors from the PCB. If you solder the missing capacitors to the PCB, it could unlock full PCIe x16 bandwidth and enable the accelerator's maximum throughput, though we haven't seen that in action.
The CMP 170HX launched with a hefty price tag of $4,300 at the height of the cryptocurrency mining boom. Nowadays, they used to sell for around $250 on eBay. However, when word of the exploit got out, they immediately jumped to over $1,000, a 4X increase in market value. Nvidia’s A100, offered in 40GB and 80GB PCIe variants, starts at around $3,500 and $11,500, respectively. The CMP 170HX is attractive for AI users because it costs a fraction of the A100 but can offer the same memory capacity, though the silicon lottery is not always generous. Regardless, Nvidia’s Ampere architecture is now two generations old. Even with added memory capacity, it cannot match the raw computational performance or efficiency of Hopper or Blackwell.
They're so full of errors that Congressional lawyers are spending a lot of time trying to fix them:
The House Office of Legislative Counsel is swamped with AI-generated bills that are riddled with wrong terms, incorrect citations and other mistakes, according to Politico. More and more representatives' offices are using publicly available general AI tools like ChatGPT and Claude to write their legislative proposals. Politico's sources said lawyers at the US House Office of Legislative Counsel (OLC) are spending more time to review and rewrite them than they would have if they had written the bills from scratch.
The sources explained that AI tools tend to miss nuances and tiny crucial details, which could have a huge effect on how a law is interpreted and enacted. Wade Ballou, who headed the office for almost 10 years until 2024, said AI can't determine whether a pot of money should be a "tax credit, tax deduction, tax exclusion or a grant," for instance. Sometimes, its classification of "state" only includes the 50 states, which would exclude DC and tribal nations from federal programs. A lawyer who worked with the office also told Politico that AI would incorrectly cite previous statutes in drafts.
AI-generated proposals are also creating a different kind of problem: Congressional staffers reportedly aren't as deeply familiar with what their bills are about and hope to accomplish anymore. Because they use AI to draft their proposals, they're not forced to "learn the issue as deeply."
In order to keep up with the increasing workload brought about by AI-drafted bills, the OLC is, well... exploring the use of AI to "improve efficiencies." A working group within the office has developed an AI tool called "Comparative Print Suite" that can help staffers visualize how a proposal will change current laws. Unlike general AI tools, it returns an error if it can't figure out where changes in the proposal should be made, preventing hallucinations from making it into draft bills.
The custom build from Microsoft's Chinese joint venture was scheduled to retire in February 2027:
China Reportedly Orders State Agencies To Uninstall Its Government-Only Edition Of Windows 10 — Beijing Accelerates Planned Retirement Over Data Security Concerns
The affected software is the government edition developed by C&M Information Technologies (CMIT), a joint venture set up in 2016 between Microsoft and state-owned China Electronics Technology Group, with the Chinese side holding the majority stake. The build is based on Windows 10 Enterprise but strips out OneDrive and other consumer-facing components, disables certain native functions, keeps updates and activation inside China, and lets government users substitute Chinese encryption algorithms for Microsoft's standard cryptography. China Customs and Shanghai's Commission of Economy and Informatization were among the first pilot customers when the edition launched in 2017.
Beijing banned Windows 8 from government procurement in 2014, ordered a three-year replacement of foreign PCs in government offices starting in 2019, and in 2022 told central agencies and state firms to scrap foreign-branded computers entirely. The domestic stack built to absorb that demand now includes Kylin V10, UnionTech's UOS, and Huawei's HarmonyOS 5 laptops, and it reaches down to the silicon in systems like Huawei's Qingyun desktops running the homegrown Kirin 9000X.
StatCounter's traffic data shows how little of that campaign has reached the consumer market. Windows accounted for 87.64% of Chinese desktop web traffic in July 2026, and Windows 10 alone still made up 43.56% of Chinese Windows usage, compared with 50.01% for Windows 11, ten months after mainstream support ended. Roughly two in five Chinese desktops are currently running an unsupported Microsoft OS, the gap that CMIT's edition was meant to close for government users.
It's not clear what the scope of the new directive is, with Bloomberg's reporting covering “some” state-linked entities. CMIT didn't respond to the outlet's request for comment.
Atlassian, a software company, is planning on building a new tower in Sydney called Atlassian Central at a cost of $1.4 billion and standing tall at 180 metres. With Australia in the grip of a WFH age of enlightenment this construction is truly an outlier.
Co-founder and CEO Mike Cannon-Brookes said the primary objective was to "self-fund further investment in AI and enterprise sales" while strengthening the company's financial profile.
[...] Asked about the tower's occupancy and purpose after laying off hundreds of employees, the company gave news.com.au a fascinating insight into how working in the tower will play out day-to-day.
Gina Creegan, Atlassian's head of workplace, said the tower has been designed for the "future of work from day one".
"The timber habitats bring that vision to life, connecting spaces that are purpose-built for how we work," she said.
"Instead of traditional desk rows, workspaces are designed around distinct modes of work: deep focus, collaboration, social connection and recharge."
It is understood that each of these states of work will have its own dedicated floors inside the building — with focus rooms, sprint rooms, small meeting rooms and customer and event spaces across dedicated floors.
They're also designed to feel like vertical neighbourhoods, with park floors, terraces and natural materials designed to give space to reset between different modes of work.
The idea is that workers will move between these sections of the building throughout the day rather than sitting at one assigned desk.
Under the company's "Team Anywhere" policy, it's understood there will be no attendance quotas or a mandated number of office days, so the building will not be built for a fixed attendance target or desk per employee ratios.