Представлен релиз FreeType 2.14.0, модульного шрифтового движка, предоставляющего единый API для унификации обработки и вывода шрифтовых данных в различных векторных и растровых форматах. Код проекта написан на языке Си и распространяется под BSD-подобной лицензией FreeType.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63840

Вышел релиз Budgie 10.9.3. Основные новшества — адаптация к изменениям в GNOME 49 и подготовка к поддержке Wayland.

Budgie — это модульное пользовательское окружение, включающее в себя такие компоненты, как:

• Budgie Desktop — основной рабочий стол;

• Budgie Desktop View — система отображения иконок;

• Budgie Control Center — центр настроек, основанный на форке GNOME Control Center;

• Budgie Screensaver — хранитель экрана, созданный на основе gnome-screensaver.

Проект распространяется под лицензией GPLv2, а ознакомиться с Budgie можно в дистрибутивах вроде Ubuntu Budgie, Fedora Budgie, Solus, GeckoLinux и EndeavourOS.

( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/opensource/18073539#cut ) )

Сегодня увидела свет библиотека YAFL версии 0.40.12.

YAFL — это библиотека, написанная на Си, содержащая несколько алгоритмов [ Калмановской фильтрации ]( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter ) и биндинги к Python, распространяемая под лицензией Apache-2.0.

( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/opensource/18073158#cut ) )

Специалисты компании GitGuardian зафиксировали масштабную целенаправленную атаку на пользователей GitHub. В результате злоумышленники получили доступ к 327 аккаунтам, через которые было внедрено вредоносное поведение в 817 репозиториев. Они подменяли GitHub Actions — автоматизированные скрипты, используемые в процессе CI/CD — вставляя вредоносные обработчики, собирающие чувствительную информацию.

В ходе атаки произошла утечка как минимум 3325 секретов, включая ключи доступа к сервисам PyPI, GitHub, NPM, DockerHub и различным облачным хранилищам. Данные передавались через переменные окружения, используемые в процессе автоматической сборки и тестирования проектов.

( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/security/18073550#cut ) )

Дмитрий Брант (Dmitry Brant) из организации Wikimedia представил порт драйвера ftape для современных ядер Linux. Драйвер перестал обновляться в 2000 году и был исключён из ядра 2.6.20 в 2006 году из-за проблем при работе на многоядерных системах. Для возобновления возможности компиляции и работы драйвера в дистрибутивах с современными ядрами Linux потребовалась его переработка с учётом изменений внутренних API и подсистем ядра, произошедших за последние 20 лет.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63841

После года разработки вышла очередная версия фреймворка для построения распределенных решений на языке Golang - Ergo Framework 3.1

Ergo Framework – это реализация идей, технологий и шаблонов проектирования из мира Erlang на языке программирования Go. Он построен на акторной модели, сетевой прозрачности и наборе готовых компонентов для разработки. Это значительно упрощает создание сложных и распределенных решений, обеспечивая при этом высокий уровень надежности и производительности.

( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/opensource/18073568#cut ) )

Cybersecurity company ESET thought they'd discovered the first AI-powered ransomware in the wild, which they'd dubbed "PromptLock". But it turned out to be the work of university security researchers...

"Unlike conventional malware, the prototype only requires natural language prompts embedded in the binary," the researchers write in a research paper, calling it "Ransomware 3.0: Self-Composing and LLM-Orchestrated." Their prototype "uses the gpt-oss:20b model from OpenAI locally" (using the Ollama API) to "generate malicious Lua scripts on the fly." Tom's Hardware said that would help PromptLock evade detection:

If they had to call an API on [OpenAI's] servers every time they generate one of these scripts, the jig would be up. The pitfalls of vibe coding don't really apply, either, since the scripts are running on someone else's system.

The whole thing was actually an experiment by researchers at NYU's Tandon School of Engineering. So "While it is the first to be AI-powered," the school said in an announcement, "the ransomware prototype is a proof-of-concept that is non-functional outside of the contained lab environment."

An NYU spokesperson told Tom's Hardware a Ransomware 3.0 sample was uploaded to malware-analsys platform VirusTotal, and then picked up by the ESET researchers by mistake:

But the malware does work: NYU said "a simulation malicious AI system developed by the Tandon team carried out all four phases of ransomware attacks — mapping systems, identifying valuable files, stealing or encrypting data, and generating ransom notes — across personal computers, enterprise servers, and industrial control systems." Is that worrisome? Absolutely. But there's a significant difference between academic researchers demonstrating a proof-of-concept and legitimate hackers using that same technique in real-world attacks. Now the study will likely inspire the ne'er-do-wells to adopt similar approaches, especially since it seems to be remarkably affordable.
"The economic implications reveal how AI could reshape ransomware operations," the NYU researchers said. "Traditional campaigns require skilled development teams, custom malware creation, and substantial infrastructure investments. The prototype consumed approximately 23,000 AI tokens per complete attack execution, equivalent to roughly $0.70 using commercial API services running flagship models."
As if that weren't enough, the researchers said that "open-source AI models eliminate these costs entirely," so ransomware operators won't even have to shell out the 70 cents needed to work with commercial LLM service providers...
"The study serves as an early warning to help defenders prepare countermeasures," NYU said in an announcement, "before bad actors adopt these AI-powered techniques."

ESET posted on Mastodon that "Nonetheless, our findings remain valid — the discovered samples represent the first known case of AI-powered ransomware."

And the ESET researcher who'd mistakenly thought the ransomware was "in the wild" had warned that looking ahead, ransomware "will likely become more sophisticated, faster spreading, and harder to detect.... This makes cybersecurity awareness, regular backups, and stronger digital hygiene more important than ever."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/09/07/054212/first-ai-powered-self-composing-ransomware-was-actually-just-a-university-research-project?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A research team just discovered older mice have more of the protein FTL1 in their hippocampus, reports ScienceAlert.

The hippocampus is the region of the brain involved in memory and learning. And the researchers' paper says their new data raises "the exciting possibility that the beneficial effects of targeting neuronal ferritin light chain 1 (FTL1) at old age may extend more broadly, beyond cognitive aging, to neurodegenerative disease conditions in older people."

FTL1 is known to be related to storing iron in the body, but hasn't come up in relation to brain aging before... To test its involvement after their initial findings, the researchers used genetic editing to overexpress the protein in young mice, and reduce its level in old mice. The results were clear: the younger mice showed signs of impaired memory and learning abilities, as if they were getting old before their time, while in the older mice there were signs of restored cognitive function — some of the brain aging was effectively reversed...

"It is truly a reversal of impairments," says biomedical scientist Saul Villeda, from the University of California, San Francisco. "It's much more than merely delaying or preventing symptoms." Further tests on cells in petri dishes showed how FTL1 stopped neurons from growing properly, with neural wires lacking the branching structures that typically provide links between nerve cells and improve brain connectivity...

"We're seeing more opportunities to alleviate the worst consequences of old age," says Villeda. "It's a hopeful time to be working on the biology of aging."
The research was led by a team from the University of California, San Francisco — and published in Nature Aging..

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/09/06/1922218/switching-off-one-crucial-protein-appears-to-reverse-brain-aging-in-mice?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

In July 791 professional coders were surveyed by Fastly about their use of AI coding tools, reports InfoWorld. The results?

"About a third of senior developers (10+ years of experience) say over half their shipped code is AI-generated," Fastly writes, "nearly two and a half times the rate reported by junior developers (0-2 years of experience), at 13%."

"AI will bench test code and find errors much faster than a human, repairing them seamlessly. This has been the case many times," one senior developer said...

Senior developers were also more likely to say they invest time fixing AI-generated code. Just under 30% of seniors reported editing AI output enough to offset most of the time savings, compared to 17% of juniors. Even so, 59% of seniors say AI tools help them ship faster overall, compared to 49% of juniors. Just over 50% of junior developers say AI makes them moderately faster. By contrast, only 39% of more senior developers say the same.
But senior devs are more likely to report significant speed gains: 26% say AI makes them a lot faster, double the 13% of junior devs who agree. One reason for this gap may be that senior developers are simply better equipped to catch and correct AI's mistakes... Nearly 1 in 3 developers (28%) say they frequently have to fix or edit AI-generated code enough that it offsets most of the time savings. Only 14% say they rarely need to make changes. And yet, over half of developers still feel faster with AI tools like Copilot, Gemini, or Claude.
Fastly's survey isn't alone in calling AI productivity gains into question. A recent randomized controlled trial (RCT) of experienced open-source developers found something even more striking: when developers used AI tools, they took 19% longer to complete their tasks. This disconnect may come down to psychology. AI coding often feels smooth... but the early speed gains are often followed by cycles of editing, testing, and reworking that eat into any gains. This pattern is echoed both in conversations we've had with Fastly developers and in many of the comments we received in our survey...
Yet, AI still seems to improve developer job satisfaction. Nearly 80% of developers say AI tools make coding more enjoyable... Enjoyment doesn't equal efficiency, but in a profession wrestling with burnout and backlogs, that morale boost might still count for something.

Fastly quotes one developer who said their AI tool "saves time by using boilerplate code, but it also needs manual fixes for inefficiencies, which keep productivity in check."

The study also found the practice of green coding "goes up sharply with experience. Just over 56% of junior developers say they actively consider energy use in their work, while nearly 80% among mid- and senior-level engineers consider this when coding."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/09/07/0615217/32-of-senior-developers-say-half-their-shipped-code-is-ai-generated?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The blog OMG Ubuntu notes that Microsoft Copilot chatbot support has been added in the latest Firefox Nightly builds. "Firefox's sidebar already offers access to popular chatbots, including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, Le Chat's Mistral and Google's Gemini. It previously offered HuggingChat too."

As the testing bed for features Mozilla wants to add to stable builds (though not all make it — eh, rounded bottom window corners?), this is something you can expect to find in a future stable update... Copilot in Firefox offers the same features as other chatbots: text prompts, upload files or images, generate images, support for entering voice prompts (for those who fancy their voice patterns being analysed and trained on). And like those other chatbots, there are usage limits, privacy policies, and (for some) account creation needed. In testing, Copilot would only generate half a summary for a webpage, telling me it was too long to produce without me signing in/up for an account.
On a related note, Mozilla has updated stable builds to let third-party chatbots summarise web pages when browsing (in-app callout alerts users to the 'new' feature). Users yet to enable chatbots are subtly nudged to do so each time they right-click on web page. [Between "Take Screenshot" and "View Page Source" there's a menu option for "Ask an AI Chatbot."] Despite making noise about its own (sluggish, but getting faster) on-device AI features that are privacy-orientated, Mozilla is bullish on the need for external chatbots.

The article suggests Firefox wants to keep up with Edge and Chrome (which can "infuse first-party AI features directly.") But it adds that Firefox's nightly build is also testing some non-AI features, like new task and timer widgets on Firefox's New Tab page. And "In Firefox Labs, there are is an option to enable JPEG XL support, a super-optimised version of JPEG that is gaining traction (despite Google's intransigence).

Other Firefox news:
There's good news "for users still clinging to Windows 7," writes the Register. Support for Firefox Extended Support Release 115 "is being extended until March 2026."

Google "can keep paying companies like Mozilla to make Google the default search engine, as long as these deals aren't exclusive anymore," reports the blog It's FOSS News. (The judge wrote that "Cutting off payments from Google almost certainly will impose substantial — in some cases, crippling — downstream harms to distribution partners..." according to CNBC — especially since the non-profit Mozilla Foundation gets most of its annual revenue from its Google's search deal.)
Don't forget you can now search your tabs, bookmarks and browsing history right from the address bar with keywords like @bookmarks, @tabs, and @history. (And @actions pulls up a list of actions like "Open private window" or "Restart Firefox").

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/07/0358226/new-in-firefox-nightly-builds-copilot-chatbot-new-tab-widgets-jpeg-xl-support?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

How do AI tools impact college students? 231 students in an object-oriented programming class participated in a study at Estonia's University of Tartu (conducted by an associate professor of informatics and a recently graduated master's student).

They were asked how frequently they used AI tools and for what purposes. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics, and Spearman's rank correlation analysis was performed to examine the strength of the relationships. The results showed that students mainly used AI assistance for solving programming tasks — for example, debugging code and understanding examples. A surprising finding, however, was that more frequent use of chatbots correlated with lower academic results. One possible explanation is that struggling students were more likely to turn to AI. Nevertheless, the finding suggests that unguided use of AI and over-reliance on it may in fact hinder learning.
The researchers say their report provides "quantitative evidence that frequent AI use does not necessarily translate into better academic outcomes in programming courses."
Other results from the survey:

47 respondents (20.3%) never used AI assistants in this course.
Only 3.9% of the students reported using AI assistants weekly, "suggesting that reliance on such tools is still relatively low."
"Few students feared plagiarism, suggesting students don't link AI use to it — raising academic concerns."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/07/0533233/ai-tool-usage-correlates-negatively-with-performance-in-cs-class-estonian-study-finds?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

USA Today has an update on the curtailing of "mirror life" research:

Kate Adamala had been working on something dangerous. At her synthetic biology lab, Adamala had been taking preliminary steps toward creating a living cell from scratch with one key twist: All the organism's building blocks would be flipped. Changing these molecules would create an unnatural mirror image of a cell, as different as your right hand from your left. The endeavor was not only a fascinating research challenge, but it also could be used to improve biotechnology and medicine. As Adamala and her colleagues talked with biosecurity experts about the project, however, grave concerns began brewing. "They started to ask questions like, 'Have you considered what happens if that cell gets released or what would happen if it infected a human?'" said Adamala, an associate professor at the University of Minnesota. They hadn't.

So researchers brought together dozens of experts in a variety of disciplines from around the globe, including two Nobel laureates, who worked for months to determine the risks of creating "mirror life" and the chances those dangers could be mitigated. Ultimately, they concluded, mirror cells could inflict "unprecedented and irreversible harm" on our world. "We cannot rule out a scenario in which a mirror bacterium acts as an invasive species across many ecosystems, causing pervasive lethal infections in a substantial fraction of plant and animal species, including humans," the scientists wrote in a paper published in the journal Science in December alongside a 299-page technical report...

[Report co-author Vaughn Cooper, a professor at the University of Pittsburgh who studies how bacteria adapt to new environments] said it's not yet possible to build a cell from scratch, mirror or otherwise, but researchers have begun the process by synthesizing mirror proteins and enzymes. He and his colleagues estimated that given enough resources and manpower, scientists could create a complete mirror bacteria within a decade. But for now, the world is probably safe from mirror cells. Adamala said virtually everyone in the small scientific community that was interested in developing such cells has agreed not to as a result of the findings.

The paper prompted nearly 100 scientists and ethicists from around the world to gather in Paris in June to further discuss the risks of creating mirror organisms. Many felt self-regulation is not enough, according to the institution that hosted the event, and researchers are gearing up to meet again in Manchester, England, and Singapore to discuss next steps.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/09/07/1510215/scientists-discuss-next-steps-to-prevent-dangerous-mirror-life-research?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"I have not pulled this, I'm annoyed by having to even look at this, and if you actually expect me to pull this I want a real explanation and not a useless link," Linus Torvalds posted Friday on the Linux kernel mailing list.
Phoronix explains:

It's become a common occurrence seeing "Link: " tags within Git commits for the Linux kernel that point to the latest Linux kernel mailing list patches of the same patch... Linus Torvalds has had enough and will be more strict against accepting pull requests that have link tags of no value. He commented yesterday on a block pull request that he pulled and then backed out of:

"And dammit, this commit has that promising 'Link:' argument that I hoped would explain why this pointless commit exists, but AS ALWAYS that link only wasted my time by pointing to the same damn information that was already there. I was hoping that it would point to some oops report or something that would explain why my initial reaction was wrong.

"Stop this garbage already. Stop adding pointless Link arguments that waste people's time. Add the link if it has *ADDITIONAL* information....

"Yes, I'm grumpy. I feel like my main job — really my only job — is to try to make sense of pull requests, and that's why I absolutely detest these things that are automatically added and only make my job harder."
A longer discussion ensued...

Torvalds: [A] "perfect" model might be to actually have some kind of automation of "unless there was actual discussion about it". But I feel such a model might be much too complicated, unless somebody *wants* to explore using AI because their job description says "Look for actual useful AI uses". In today's tech world, I assume such job descriptions do exist. Sigh...

Torvalds: I do think it makes sense for patch series that (a) are more than a small handful of patches and (b) have some real "story" to them (ie a cover letter that actually explains some higher-level issues)...

Torvalds also had two responses to a poster who'd said "IMHO it's better to have a Link and it _potentially_ being useful than not to have it and then need to search around for it."

Torvalds: No. Really. The issue is "potentially — but very likely not — useful" vs "I HIT THIS TEN+ TIMES EVERY SINGLE F%^& RELEASE".
There is just no comparison. I have literally *never* found the original submission email to be useful, and I'm tired of the "potentially useful" argument that has nothing to back it up with. It's literally magical thinking of "in some alternate universe, pigs can fly, and that link might be useful"

Torvalds: And just to clarify: the hurt is real. It's not just the disappointment. It's the wasted effort of following a link and having to then realize that there's nothing useful there. Those links *literally* double the effort for me when I try to be careful about patches...

The cost is real. The cost is something I've complained about before... Yes, it's literally free to you to add this cost. No, *YOU* don't see the cost, and you think it is helpful. It's not. It's the opposite of helpful. So I want commit messages to be relevant and explain what is going on, and I want them to NOT WASTE MY TIME.

And I also don't want to ignore links that are actually *useful* and give background information. Is that really too much to ask for?

Torvalds points out he's brought this up four times before — once in 2022.

Torvalds: I'm a bit frustrated, exactly because this _has_ been going on for years. It's not a new peeve.

And I don't think we have a good central place for that kind of "don't do this". Yes, there's the maintainer summit, but that's a pretty limited set of people. I guess I could mention it in my release notes, but I don't know who actually reads those either.. So I end up just complaining when I see it.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/09/07/177225/linus-torvalds-expresses-frustration-with-garbage-link-tags-in-git-commits?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

AI Overviews have lowered click-through traffic to Daily Mail sites by as much as 89%, the publisher told a UK government body that regulates competition. So they've joined other top news organizations (including Guardian Media Group and the magazine trade body the Periodical Publishers Association) in asking the regulators "to make Google more transparent and provide traffic statistics from AI Overview and AI Mode to publishers," reports the Guardian:

Publishers — already under financial pressure from soaring costs, falling advertising revenues, the decline of print and the wider trend of readers turning away from news — argue that they are effectively being forced by Google to either accept deals, including on how content is used in AI Overview and AI Mode, or "drop out of all search results", according to several sources... In recent years, Google Discover, which feeds users articles and videos tailored to them based on their past online activity, has replaced search as the main source of click-throughs to content. However, David Buttle, founder of the consultancy DJB Strategies, says the service, which is also tied to publishers' overall search deals, does not deliver the quality traffic that most publishers need to drive their long-term strategies. "Google Discover is of zero product importance to Google at all," he says. "It allows Google to funnel more traffic to publishers as traffic from search declines ... Publishers have no choice but to agree or lose their organic search. It also tends to reward clickbaity type content. It pulls in the opposite direction to the kind of relationship publishers want."

Meanwhile, publishers are fighting a wider battle with AI companies seeking to plunder their content to train their large language models. The creative industry is intensively lobbying the government to ensure that proposed legislation does not allow AI firms to use copyright-protected work without permission, a move that would stop the "value being scraped" out of the £125bn sector. Some publishers have struck bilateral licensing deals with AI companies — such as the FT, the German media group Axel Springer, the Guardian and the Nordic publisher Schibsted with the ChatGPT maker OpenAI — while others such as the BBC have taken action against AI companies alleging copyright theft. "It is a two-pronged attack on publishers, a sort of pincer movement," says Chris Duncan, a former News UK and Bauer Media senior executive who now runs a media consultancy, Seedelta. "Content is disappearing into AI products without serious remuneration, while AI summaries are being integrated into products so there is no need to click through, effectively taking money from both ends. It is an existential crisis."

"At the moment the AI and tech community are showing no signs of supporting publisher revenue," says the chief executive of the UK's Periodical Publishers Association...

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/07/184203/publishers-demand-ai-overview-traffic-stats-from-google-alleging-forced-deals?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

As America's trade talks with China were set to begin last July, a "puzzling" email reached several U.S. government agencies, law firms, and trade groups, reports the Wall Street Journal. It appeared to be from the chair of a U.S. Congressional committee, Representative John Moolenaar, asking recipients to review an alleged draft of upcoming legislation — sent as an attachment. "But why had the chairman sent the message from a nongovernment address...?"

"The cybersecurity firm Mandiant determined the spyware would allow the hackers to burrow deep into the targeted organizations if any of the recipients had opened the purported draft legislation, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal."

It turned out to be the latest in a series of alleged cyber espionage campaigns linked to Beijing, people familiar with the matter said, timed to potentially deploy spyware against organizations giving input on President Trump's trade negotiations. The FBI and the Capitol Police are investigating the Moolenaar emails, and cyber analysts traced the embedded malware to a hacker group known as APT41 — believed to be a contractor for Beijing's Ministry of State Security... The hacking campaign appeared to be aimed at giving Chinese officials an inside look at the recommendations Trump was receiving from outside groups. It couldn't be determined whether the attackers had successfully breached any of the targets.

A Federal Bureau of Investigation spokeswoman declined to provide details but said the bureau was aware of the incident and was "working with our partners to identify and pursue those responsible...." The alleged campaign comes as U.S. law-enforcement officials have been surprised by the prolific and creative nature of China's spying efforts. The FBI revealed last month that a Beijing-linked espionage campaign that hit U.S. telecom companies and swept up Trump's phone calls actually targeted more than 80 countries and reached across the globe...

The Moolenaar impersonation comes as several administration officials have recently faced impostors of their own. The State Department warned diplomats around the world in July that an impostor was using AI to imitate Secretary of State Marco Rubio's voice in messages sent to foreign officials. Federal authorities are also investigating an effort to impersonate White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, the Journal reported in May... The FBI issued a warning that month that "malicious actors have impersonated senior U.S. officials" targeting contacts with AI-generated voice messages and texts.
And in January, the article points out, all the staffers on Moolenaar's committee "received emails falsely claiming to be from the CEO of Chinese crane manufacturer ZPMC, according to people familiar with the episode."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/09/07/1944229/chinese-hackers-impersonated-us-lawmaker-in-email-espionage-campaign?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from the BBC:
Microsoft's Azure cloud services have been disrupted by undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea, the US tech giant says.
Users of Azure — one of the world's leading cloud computing platforms — would experience delays because of problems with internet traffic moving through the Middle East, the company said. Microsoft did not explain what might have caused the damage to the undersea cables, but added that it had been able to reroute traffic through other paths.

Over the weekend, there were reports suggesting that undersea cable cuts had affected the United Arab Emirates and some countries in Asia.... On Saturday, NetBlocks, an organisation that monitors internet access, said a series of undersea cable cuts in the Red Sea had affected internet services in several countries, including India and Pakistan.

"We do expect higher latency on some traffic that previously traversed through the Middle East," Microsoft said in their status announcement — while stressing that traffic "that does not traverse through the Middle East is not impacted".

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/09/07/2149212/microsofts-cloud-services-disrupted-by-red-sea-cable-cuts?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Four years ago a small Microsoft Research team started creating an analog optical computer. They used commercially available parts like sensors from smartphone cameras, optical lenses, and micro-LED lights finer than a human hair. "As the light passes through the sensor at different intensities, the analog optical computer can add and multiply numbers," explains a Microsoft blog post.

They envision the technology scaling to a computer that for certain problems is 100X faster and 100X more energy efficient — running AI workloads "with a fraction of the energy needed and at much greater speed than the GPUs running today's large language models." The results are described in a paper published in the scientific journal Nature, according to the blog post:

At the same time, Microsoft is publicly sharing its "optimization solver" algorithm and the "digital twin" it developed so that researchers from other organizations can investigate this new computing paradigm and propose new problems to solve and new ways to solve them. Francesca Parmigiani, a Microsoft principal research manager who leads the team developing the AOC, explained that the digital twin is a computer-based model that mimics how the real analog optical computer [or "AOC"] behaves; it simulates the same inputs, processes and outputs, but in a digital environment — like a software version of the hardware. This allowed the Microsoft researchers and collaborators to solve optimization problems at a scale that would be useful in real situations. This digital twin will also allow other users to experiment with how problems, either in optimization or in AI, would be mapped and run on the analog optical computer hardware. "To have the kind of success we are dreaming about, we need other researchers to be experimenting and thinking about how this hardware can be used," Parmigiani said.

Hitesh Ballani, who directs research on future AI infrastructure at the Microsoft Research lab in Cambridge, U.K. said he believes the AOC could be a game changer. "We have actually delivered on the hard promise that it can make a big difference in two real-world problems in two domains, banking and healthcare," he said. Further, "we opened up a whole new application domain by showing that exactly the same hardware could serve AI models, too." In the healthcare example described in the Nature paper, the researchers used the digital twin to reconstruct MRI scans with a good degree of accuracy. The research indicates that the device could theoretically cut the time it takes to do those scans from 30 minutes to five. In the banking example, the AOC succeeded in resolving a complex optimization test case with a high degree of accuracy...

As researchers refine the AOC, adding more and more micro-LEDs, it could eventually have millions or even more than a billion weights. At the same time, it should get smaller and smaller as parts are miniaturized, researchers say.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/0125250/microsofts-analog-optical-computer-shows-ai-promise?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Somewhere in Houston, four research volunteers "will soon participate in NASA's year-long simulation of a Mars mission," NASA announced this week, saying it will provide "foundational data to inform human exploration of the Moon, Mars, and beyond."

The 378-day simulation will take place inside a 3D-printed, 1,700-square-foot habitat at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston — starting on October 19th and continuing until Halloween of 2026:

Through a series of Earth-based missions called CHAPEA (Crew Health and Performance Exploration Analog), NASA aims to evaluate certain human health and performance factors ahead of future Mars missions. The crew will undergo realistic resource limitations, equipment failures, communication delays, isolation and confinement, and other stressors, along with simulated high-tempo extravehicular activities. These scenarios allow NASA to make informed trades between risks and interventions for long-duration exploration missions.

"As NASA gears up for crewed Artemis missions, CHAPEA and other ground analogs are helping to determine which capabilities could best support future crews in overcoming the human health and performance challenges of living and operating beyond Earth's resources — all before we send humans to Mars," said Sara Whiting, project scientist with NASA's Human Research Program at NASA Johnson. Crew members will carry out scientific research and operational tasks, including simulated Mars walks, growing a vegetable garden, robotic operations, and more. Technologies specifically designed for Mars and deep space exploration will also be tested, including a potable water dispenser and diagnostic medical equipment...

This mission, facilitated by NASA's Human Research Program, is the second one-year Mars surface simulation conducted through CHAPEA. The first mission concluded on July 6, 2024.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/0310211/a-new-four-person-crew-will-simulate-a-year-long-mars-mission-nasa-announces?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shared this report from Fortune:
The percentage of young Gen Z employees between the ages of 21 and 25 has been cut in half at technology companies over the past two years, according to recent data from compensation management software business Pave with workforce data from more than 8,300 companies.
These young workers accounted for 15% of the workforce at large public tech firms in January 2023. By August 2025, they only represented 6.8%. The situation isn't pretty at big private tech companies, either — during that same time period, the proportion of early-career Gen Z employees dwindled from 9.3% to 6.8%. Meanwhile, the average age of a worker at a tech company has risen dramatically over those two and a half years. Between January 2023 and July 2025, the average age of all employees at large public technology businesses rose from 34.3 years to 39.4 years — more than a five year difference. On the private side, the change was less drastic, with the typical age only increasing from 35.1 to 36.6 years old...

"If you're 35 or 40 years old, you're pretty established in your career, you have skills that you know cannot yet be disrupted by AI," Matt Schulman, founder and CEO of Pave, tells Fortune. "There's still a lot of human judgment when you're operating at the more senior level...If you're a 22-year-old that used to be an Excel junkie or something, then that can be disrupted. So it's almost a tale of two cities." Schulman points to a few reasons why tech company workforces are getting older and locking Gen Z out of jobs. One is that big companies — like Salesforce, Meta, and Microsoft — are becoming a lot more efficient thanks to the advent of AI. And despite their soaring trillion-dollar profits, they're cutting employees at the bottom rungs in favor of automation. Entry-level jobs have also dwindled because of AI agents, and stalling promotions across many agencies looking to do more with less. Once technology companies weed out junior roles, occupied by Gen Zers, their workforces are bound to rise in age.
Schulman tells Fortune Gen Z also has an advantage: that tech corporations can see them as fresh talent that "can just break the rules and leverage AI to a much greater degree without the hindrance of years of bias."
And Priya Rathod, workplace trends editor for LinkedIn, tells Fortune there's promising tech-industry entry roles in AI ethics, cybersecurity, UX, and product operations. "Building skills through certifications, gig work, and online communities can open doors....
"For Gen Z, the right certifications or micro credentials can outweigh a lack of years on the resume. This helps them stay competitive even when entry level opportunities shrink."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/0423228/theres-50-fewer-young-employees-at-tech-companies-now-than-two-years-ago?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Slashdot reader Charlotte Web shared this report from the Register:

Among the software developers who use Microsoft's GitHub, the most popular community discussion in the past 12 months has been a request for a way to block Copilot, the company's AI service, from generating issues and pull requests in code repositories. The second most popular discussion — where popularity is measured in upvotes — is a bug report that seeks a fix for the inability of users to disable Copilot code reviews. Both of these questions, the first opened in May and the second opened a month ago, remain unanswered, despite an abundance of comments critical of generative AI and Copilot...

The author of the first, developer Andi McClure, published a similar request to Microsoft's Visual Studio Code repository in January, objecting to the reappearance of a Copilot icon in VS Code after she had uninstalled the Copilot extension... "I've been for a while now filing issues in the GitHub Community feedback area when Copilot intrudes on my GitHub usage," McClure told The Register in an email. "I deeply resent that on top of Copilot seemingly training itself on my GitHub-posted code in violation of my licenses, GitHub wants me to look at (effectively) ads for this project I will never touch. If something's bothering me, I don't see a reason to stay quiet about it. I think part of how we get pushed into things we collectively don't want is because we stay quiet about it."

It's not just the burden of responding to AI slop, an ongoing issue for Curl maintainer Daniel Stenberg. It's the permissionless copying and regurgitation of speculation as fact, mitigated only by small print disclaimers that generative AI may produce inaccurate results. It's also GitHub's disavowal of liability if Copilot code suggestions happen to have reproduced source code that requires attribution. It's what the Servo project characterizes in its ban on AI code contributions as the lack of code correctness guarantees, copyright issues, and ethical concerns. Similar objections have been used to justify AI code bans in GNOME's Loupe project, FreeBSD, Gentoo, NetBSD, and QEMU... Calls to shun Microsoft and GitHub go back a long way in the open source community, but moved beyond simmering dissatisfaction in 2022 when the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) urged free software supporters to give up GitHub, a position SFC policy fellow Bradley M. Kuhn recently reiterated.
McClure says In the last six months their posts have drawn more community support — and tells the Register there's been a second change in how people see GitHub within the last month. After GitHub moved from a distinct subsidiary to part of Microsoft's CoreAI group, "it seems to have galvanized the open source community from just complaining about Copilot to now actively moving away from GitHub."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://developers.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/0235251/some-angry-github-users-are-rebelling-against-githubs-forced-copilot-ai-features?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Young Americans are abandoning traditional retirement planning for dividend-focused ETFs that promise immediate income and freedom from traditional employment. Income-generating ETFs captured one in six dollars flowing into equity ETFs in 2025, pushing the sector to $750 billion -- with the most aggressive funds offering yields above 8% quadrupling to $160 billion over three years.

The r/dividends subreddit has grown tenfold to 780,000 members over five years, while YouTube channels and Discord servers dedicated to dividend investing proliferate. YieldMax's MSTY fund, offering a 90% distribution rate through complex derivatives, has underperformed MicroStrategy stock by 120 percentage points since February 2024 when dividends are reinvested -- nearly 200 points when payouts are withdrawn. Speaking to Bloomberg, finance professor Samuel Hartzmark identified this as the "free dividends fallacy," where investors fail to recognize that dividends reduce share prices rather than creating additional wealth.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/1235210/the-new-american-hustle-dividends-over-day-jobs?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Подготовлен первый альфа-выпуск FreeBSD 15.0. Установочные сборки сформированы для архитектур amd64, powerpc64le, aarch64 и riscv64. Релиз запланирован на 2 декабря. Обновление до ветки 15.0-ALPHA1 с прошлых выпусков при помощи утилиты freebsd-update пока не реализовано.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63842

An anonymous reader shares a report: OpenAI recently had both good news and bad news for shareholders. Revenue growth from ChatGPT is accelerating at a more rapid rate than the company projected half a year ago. The bad news? The computing costs to develop artificial intelligence that powers the chatbot, and other data center-related expenses, will rise even faster.

As a result, OpenAI projected its cash burn this year through 2029 will rise even higher than previously thought, to a total of $115 billion. That's about $80 billion higher than the company previously expected. The unprecedented projected cash burn, which would add to the roughly $2 billion it burned in the past two years, helps explain why the company is raising more capital than any private company in history.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/1426211/openai-says-its-business-will-burn-115-billion-through-2029?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Two cultivated meat companies have filed a lawsuit against officials in Texas over the law that bans the sales of lab-grown meat in the state for two years. California-based companies UPSIDE Foods, which makes cultivated chicken, and Wildtype, which makes cultivated salmon are suing Attorney General Ken Paxton, Texas Department of State Health Services, Texas Health and Human Services, and Travis County, accusing them of government overreach.

"This law has nothing to do with protecting public health and safety and everything to do with protecting conventional agriculture from innovative out-of-state competition," said Paul Sherman, a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice, a nonprofit law firm that is representing UPSIDE Foods and Wildtype. "That is not a legitimate use of government power." In June, lawmakers passed Senate Bill 261, which bans the sale of lab-grown meat in Texas for two years. Lab-grown meat, also known as cell cultivated meat or cultured meat, is made from taking animal cells and growing them in an incubator or bioreactor until they form an edible product.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/1511251/texas-sued-over-its-lab-grown-meat-ban?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

University of Luxembourg mathematicians tested whether GPT-5 could extend a qualitative fourth-moment theorem to include explicit convergence rates, a previously unaddressed problem in the Malliavin-Stein framework. The September 2025 experiment, prompted by claims GPT-5 solved a convex optimization problem, revealed the AI made critical errors requiring constant human correction.

GPT-5 overlooked an essential covariance property easily deducible from provided documents. The researchers compared the experience to working with a junior assistant needing careful verification. They warned AI reliance during doctoral training risks students losing opportunities to develop fundamental mathematical skills through mistakes and exploration.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/165206/mathematicians-find-gpt-5-makes-critical-errors-in-original-proof-generation?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

The former head of security for WhatsApp filed a lawsuit on Monday accusing Meta of ignoring major security and privacy flaws that put billions of the messaging app's users at risk, the latest in a string of whistle-blower allegations against the social media giant. The New York Times: In the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court of the District of Northern California, Attaullah Baig claimed that thousands of WhatsApp and Meta employees could gain access to sensitive user data including profile pictures, location, group memberships and contact lists. Meta, which owns WhatsApp, also failed to adequately address the hacking of more than 100,000 accounts each day and rejected his proposals for security fixes, according to the lawsuit.

Mr. Baig tried to warn Meta's top leaders, including its chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, that users were being harmed by the security weaknesses, according to the lawsuit. In response, his managers retaliated and fired him in February, he claims. Mr. Baig, who is represented by the whistle-blower organization Psst.org and the law firm Schonbrun, Seplow, Harris, Hoffman & Zeldes, argued in the suit that the actions violated a privacy settlement Meta reached with the Federal Trade Commission in 2019, as well as securities laws that require companies to disclose risks to shareholders.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/1647240/whistle-blower-sues-meta-over-claims-of-whatsapp-security-flaws?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

A 67-year-old US man is still alive more than six months after receiving a kidney from a genetically modified pig. This is the longest a pig organ has survived in a living person. From a report: Researchers say the outcome is a landmark case of successful xenotransplantation -- the process of transplanting organs from animals to humans. The recipient, Tim Andrews, had end-stage kidney disease and had been receiving dialysis for more than two years before he underwent the surgery in January. He has been dialysis-free since receiving the kidney. Andrews was one of three patients to receive genetically modified pig kidneys supplied by the biotechnology company eGenesis in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on compassionate grounds.

Reaching six months' survival is an amazing feat, says Wayne Hawthorne, a transplant surgeon at the University of Sydney in Australia. The first six months is the period of "highest risk for the patient and also the transplant," he adds. Possible complications include anaemia and graft rejection, when the immune system attacks the new organ. "The six-month time point marks that things have gone extremely well," Hawthorne says. Reaching 12 months would be another milestone and a "fantastic long-term outcome," he adds. Previously, the recipient with longest-surviving genetically modified pig organ was a 53-year-old US woman, Towana Looney, who had a functioning pig kidney for four months and nine days. However, the organ was removed earlier this year because her immune system began to reject it.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/1727212/us-man-still-alive-six-months-after-pig-kidney-transplant?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Google has stated in a court filing that "the open web is already in rapid decline," contradicting recent public statements from executives including its CEO Sundar Pichai and Search VP Nick Fox, who maintained in May that web publishing and the web were thriving.

The admission appeared in Google's response to a divestiture proposal, arguing that breaking up the company would accelerate the decline and harm publishers dependent on open-web display advertising revenue. Google's VP of Global Ads Dan Taylor has since clarified the company was referring specifically to open-web display advertising, not the entire open web.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/188234/google-tells-court-open-web-is-already-in-rapid-decline-after-execs-claimed-it-was-thriving?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

RunaWFE Free — это свободная российская система управления бизнес-процессами и административными регламентами. Написана на Java, распространяется под открытой лицензией LGPL. RunaWFE Free использует как собственные решения, так и некоторые идеи проектов JBoss jBPM и Activiti, содержит большое количество компонентов, задача которых обеспечить удобную работу конечного пользователя.

( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/opensource/18071136#cut ) )

Signal has begun rolling out end-to-end encrypted cloud backups in its latest Android beta release. The opt-in feature allows users to restore message history if their phone is lost or damaged. Free backups include all text messages and 45 days of media attachments. A $1.99 monthly subscription extends media storage to 100GB.

Users generate a 64-character recovery key on their device that Signal's servers never access. Backups refresh daily, excluding view-once messages and those set to disappear within 24 hours. The nonprofit cited storage costs as the reason for its first paid tier. iOS and Desktop support will follow the Android rollout. Signal said it stores backup archives without linking them to specific user accounts or payment information.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/1824254/signal-rolls-out-encrypted-cloud-backups-debuts-first-subscription-plan-at-199month?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In what is being called the largest supply chain attack in history, attackers have injected malware into NPM packages with over 2.6 billion weekly downloads after compromising a maintainer's account in a phishing attack.

The package maintainer whose accounts were hijacked in this supply-chain attack confirmed the incident earlier today, stating that he was aware of the compromise and adding that the phishing email came from support [at] npmjs [dot] help, a domain that hosts a website impersonating the legitimate npmjs.com domain.

In the emails, the attackers threatened that the targeted maintainers' accounts would be locked on September 10th, 2025, as a scare tactic to get them to click on the link redirecting them to the phishing sites.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/1843235/hackers-hijack-npm-packages-with-2-billion-weekly-downloads-in-supply-chain-attack?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: All work in IT departments will be done with the help of AI by 2030, according to analyst firm Gartner, which thinks massive job losses won't result. Speaking during the keynote address of the firm's Symposium event in Australia today, VP analyst Alicia Mullery said 81 percent of work is currently done by humans acting alone without AI assistance. Five years from now Gartner believes 75 percent of IT work will be human activity augmented by AI, with the remainder performed by bots alone.

Distinguished VP analyst Daryl Plummer said this shift will mean IT departments gain labor capacity and will need to show they deserve to keep it. "You never want to look like you have too many people," he advised, before suggesting technology leaders consult with peers elsewhere in a business to identify value-adding opportunities IT departments can execute. Plummer said Gartner doesn't foresee an "AI jobs bloodbath" in IT or other industries for at least five years, adding that just one percent of job losses today are attributable to AI. He and Mullery did predict a reduction in entry-level jobs, as AI lets senior staff tackle work they would once have assigned to juniors.

The two analysts also forecast that businesses will struggle to implement AI effectively, because the costs of running AI workloads balloon. ERP, Plummer said, has straightforward up-front costs: You pay to license and implement it, then to train people so they can use it. AI needs that same initial investment but few organizations can keep up with AI vendors' pace of innovation. Adopting AI therefore creates a requirement for near-constant exploration of use cases and subsequent retraining. Plummer said orgs that adopt AI should expect to uncover 10 unanticipated ancillary costs, among them the need to acquire new datasets, and the costs of managing multiple models. The need to use one AI model to check the output of others -- a necessary step to verify accuracy -- is another cost to consider. AI's hidden costs mean Gartner believes 65 percent of CIOs aren't breaking even on AI investments.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/2031235/all-it-work-to-involve-ai-by-2030-says-gartner?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Jaguar Land Rover has extended the shutdown of its UK and overseas factories after a cyberattack forced it to take IT systems offline, disrupting production, dealerships, and suppliers. The BBC reports: Jaguar Land Rover's (JLR) UK factories are now expected to remain closed until at least Wednesday after work was disrupted by a cyber attack just over a week ago. The car plants at Halewood and Solihull and its Wolverhampton engine facility, along with production facilities in Slovakia, China and India, have been unable to operate since the company fell victim to the cyber attack. Staff who work on the production lines have been told to remain at home. JLR shut down its IT systems in response to the attack on 31 August, in order to protect them from damage. However, this caused major disruption. [...]

Under normal circumstances, the company builds about 1,000 cars a day. The production stoppage has had a significant impact on the company's suppliers, with some understood to have told their own staff not to come into work. As well as forcing the factories to stop building cars, it also left dealerships unable to register new cars and garages that maintain JLR vehicles unable to order the parts they needed -- although it is understood workarounds have since been put in place. The attack began at what is traditionally a popular time for consumers to take delivery of new vehicles. The latest batch of new registration plates became available on Monday, September 1.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/2044243/jaguar-land-rover-extends-shutdown-after-cyber-attack?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Kevin Barry, founder and sole developer of Nova Launcher, has left parent company Branch Metrics after being told to stop work on both the launcher and an open-source release. While the app remains on Google Play, the launcher's website currently shows a 404 error. The Verge reports: Mobile analytics company Branch Metrics acquired Nova in 2022. The company's CEO at the time, co-founder Alex Austin, said on Reddit that if Barry were to leave Branch, "it's contracted that the code will be open-sourced and put in the hands of the community." Austin left Branch in 2023, and now with Barry officially gone from the company, too, it's unclear if the launcher will now actually be open-sourced.

"I think the newer leadership since Alex Austin left has put a different focus on the company and Nova simply isn't part of that focus in any way at all," Cliff Wade, Nova's former customer relations lead who left as part of the 2024 layoffs, tells The Verge. "It's just some app that they own but no longer feel they need or want." Wade also said that "I don't believe Branch will do the right thing any time soon with regards to open-sourcing Nova. I think they simply just don't care and don't want to invest time, unless of course, they get enough pressure from the community and individuals who care."

Users have started a change.org petition to ask for the project to be open-sourced, and Wade says it's a "great start" to apply that pressure. Wade said he hasn't personally seen Barry's contract, so couldn't corroborate the claim of a contractual obligation to open-source Nova. Still, he said that the community "deserves" for the launcher to be open-sourced. "Branch just simply needs to do the right thing here and honor what they as a company have stated as well as what then CEO Alex Austin has stated numerous times prior to him leaving Branch."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/2050202/nova-launchers-founder-and-sole-developer-has-left?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Last year, we reported on the efforts of classic iPod fans to preserve playable copies of the downloadable clickwheel games that Apple sold for a brief period in the late '00s. The community was working to get around Apple's onerous FairPlay DRM by having people who still owned original copies of those (now unavailable) games sync their accounts to a single iTunes installation via a coordinated Virtual Machine. That "master library" would then be able to provide playable copies of those games to any number of iPods in perpetuity.

At the time, the community was still searching for iPod owners with syncable copies of the last few titles needed for their library. With today's addition of Real Soccer 2009 to the project, though, all 54 official iPod clickwheel games are now available together in an easily accessible format for what is likely the first time.

[...] Now that the consolidated clickwheel game collection is complete, though, owners of any iPod 5G+ or iPod Nano 3G+ should be able to sync the complete library to their personal device completely offline, without worrying about any server checks from Apple. They can do that by setting up a Virtual Machine using these GitHub instructions or by downloading this torrented Internet Archive collection and creating their own Virtual Machine from the files contained therein. The effort was made possible by GitHub user Olsro, with help from other iPod enthusiasts. To Olsro, completing the project "means this whole part from the early 2000s will remain with us forever."

He also expressed hope that "this Virtual Machine can also be useful towards any security [or] archeologist researcher who want to understand how the DRM worked."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/213205/all-54-lost-clickwheel-ipod-games-have-been-preserved-for-posterity?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: Plex has alerted its customers about a security incident that may have affected user accounts. In an email sent to subscribers, the popular media server company confirmed that an unauthorized third party gained access to one of its databases. The breach exposed emails, usernames, and hashed passwords. Plex emphasized that passwords were encrypted following best practices, so attackers cannot simply read them. The company also reassured users that no credit card data was compromised, since Plex does not store that information on its servers. Still, out of caution, it is requiring all account holders to reset their credentials.

Users are being directed to reset their passwords at plex.tv/reset. During the process, Plex recommends enabling the option to sign out all connected devices. This measure logs out every device associated with the account, including Plex Media Servers, forcing a fresh login with the updated password. The company says it has already fixed the method used by the intruder to gain entry and is conducting additional security reviews. Plex is also urging subscribers to enable two-factor authentication if they have not already done so.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/229201/plex-suffers-security-incident-exposing-user-data-and-urging-password-resets?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

In a new interview with The Telegraph (paywalled), William Shatner revealed he has never earned residuals from reruns of the original Star Trek series, since syndication royalties weren't in place until after the show ended in 1969. "Nobody knew about reruns," said Shatner. "The concept of syndication only came in after 'Star Trek' was canceled when someone from the unions said: 'Wait a minute, you're replaying all those films, those shows.' There was a big strike. But in the end, the unions secured residual fees shortly after 'Star Trek' finished, so I didn't benefit."

The now 94-year-old actor said he's actually only seen a "few" episodes of his work and has "never seen" any of the spinoffs. "I'm gonna tell you something that nobody knows. I've never seen another 'Star Trek' and I've seen as few 'Star Treks' of the show I was on, I've seen as few as possible," he told Entertainment Tonight. "I don't like to look at myself, and I've never seen any other. I love it, I think it's great. I just don't, you know, I don't watch television, per se."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/226203/william-shatner-says-he-didnt-earn-a-penny-from-star-trek-re-runs?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

alternative_right shares a report from The Guardian: It has been estimated that during the height of the coronavirus pandemic 129bn disposable face masks, mostly made from polypropylene and other plastics, were being used every month around the world. With no recycling stream, most ended up either in landfill or littered in streets, parks, beaches, waterways and rural areas, where they have now begun to degrade. Recent research has reported a significant presence of disposable face masks in both terrestrial and aquatic environments.
They left newly bought masks of several different kinds for 24 hours in flasks containing 150ml of purified water, then filtered the liquid through a membrane to see what came out. Every mask examined ... leached microplastics, but it was the FFP2 and FFP3 masks -- marketed as the gold-standard protection against the transmission of the virus -- that leached the most, releasing four to six times as many. And they made an even more worrying discovery.

Subsequent chemical analysis of the leachate found medical masks also released bisphenol B, an endocrine-disrupting chemical that acts like oestrogen when absorbed into the bodies of humans and animals. Taking into account the total amount of single-use face masks produced during the height of the pandemic, the researchers estimated they led to the release of 128-214kg of bisphenol B into the environment. The findings have been published in the journal Environmental Pollution.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/2157248/disposable-face-masks-used-during-covid-have-left-chemical-timebomb?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: For decades, scientists believed Prochlorococcus, the smallest and most abundant phytoplankton on Earth, would thrive in a warmer world. But new research suggests the microscopic bacterium, which forms the foundation of the marine food web and helps regulate the planet's climate, will decline sharply as seas heat up. A study published Monday in the journal Nature Microbiology found Prochlorococcus populations could shrink by as much as half in tropical oceans over the next 75 years if surface waters exceed about 82 degrees Fahrenheit (27.8 Celsius). Many tropical and subtropical sea surface temperatures are already trending above average and are projected to regularly surpass 86 degrees Fahrenheit (30 Celsius) over that same period.

"These are keystone species -- very important ones," said Francois Ribalet, a research associate professor at the University of Washington's School of Oceanography and the study's lead author. "And when a keystone species decreases in abundance, it always has consequences on ecology and biodiversity. The food web is going to change." Prochlorococcus inhabit up to 75% of Earth's sunlit surface waters and produce about one-fifth of the planet's oxygen through photosynthesis. More crucially, Ribalet said, they convert sunlight and carbon dioxide into food at the base of the marine ecosystem. "In the tropical ocean, nearly half of the food is produced by Prochlorococcus," he said. "Hundreds of species rely on these guys."

Though other forms of phytoplankton may move in and help compensate for the loss of oxygen and food, Ribalet cautioned they are not perfect substitutes. "Evolution has made this very specific interaction," he said. "Obviously, this is going to have an impact on this very unique system that has been established." The findings challenge decades of assumptions that Prochlorococcus would thrive as waters warmed. Those predictions, however, were based on limited data from lab cultures. For this study, Ribalet and his team tested water samples while traversing the Pacific over the course of a decade.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/25/09/08/2214205/warming-seas-threaten-key-phytoplankton-species-that-fuels-the-food-web?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

В результате фишинга атакующим удалось перехватить учётные данные сопровождающего 18 популярных NPM-пакетов, в сумме загруженных более 2 миллиардов раз в неделю. Для скомпрометированных пакетов атакующие успели выпустить новые версии, содержащие вредоносный код. Это самая крупная атака на репозиторий NPM, которая затрагивает не только напрямую атакованные проекты, но сотни тысяч пакетов, зависимых от них.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63845

Опубликован релиз классической системы инициализации SysVinit 3.15, которая широко применялась в дистрибутивах Linux во времена до systemd и upstart, а теперь продолжает использоваться в таких дистрибутивах, как Devuan, Slackware, Debian GNU/Hurd и antiX. Код написан на языке Си и распространяется под лицензией GPLv2. Версии применяемых в связке с sysvinit утилит insserv и startpar не изменились. Утилита insserv предназначена для организации процесса загрузки с учётом зависимостей между init-скриптами, а startpar применяется для обеспечения параллельного запуска нескольких скриптов в процессе загрузки системы.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63846

Представлен релиз анонимной сети I2P 2.10.0 и C++-клиента i2pd 2.58.0. I2P представляет собой многослойную анонимную распределенную сеть, работающую поверх обычного интернета, активно использующую сквозное (end-to-end) шифрование, гарантирующую анонимность и изолированность. Сеть строится в режиме P2P и образуется благодаря ресурсам (пропускной способности), предоставляемым пользователями сети, что позволяет обойтись без применения централизованно управляемых серверов (коммуникации внутри сети основаны на применении шифрованных однонаправленных туннелей между участником и peer-ами).

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63844

Google rolled out three big Gemini updates: the app now supports audio uploads (with tiered limits for free vs. paid users), Search gains AI Mode in five new languages, and NotebookLM expands to generate reports, study guides, quizzes, and other formats in over 80 languages. The Verge reports: According to a Monday post on X by Josh Woodward, vice president of Google Labs and Gemini, audio file compatibility was the "#1 request" to the Gemini app. Free Gemini users max out at 10 minutes of audio, and five free prompts each day. AI Pro or AI Ultra users, meanwhile, can upload audio up to three hours in length. All Gemini prompts accommodate up to 10 files across various file formats, including within ZIP files.

Additionally, Google Search's AI Mode has rolled out five new language options: Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese, thanks to the integration of Gemini 2.5 with Search, according to a company blog: "With this expansion, more people can now use AI Mode to ask complex questions in their preferred language, while exploring the web more deeply." The Gemini-powered NotebookLM software is also getting an update in the form of new report styles in over 80 languages based on a user's uploaded documents, files, and other media.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/25/09/09/0030209/gemini-app-finally-expands-to-audio-files?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликован четвёртый выпуск среды рабочего стола Orbitiny Desktop, написанной с нуля с использованием фреймворка Qt. Проект пытается совместить некоторые инновационные идеи, которые раньше не встречались в пользовательских окружениях, с традиционными элементами, такими как панель, меню и размещение пиктограмм на рабочем столе. Работа пока сосредоточена на запуск в окружениях на базе X-сервера, но в будущем не исключается добавление поддержки Wayland. Код написан на языке C++ и распространяется под лицензией GPL.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63847

Starting in 2026, Red Hat's back-office staff in HR, finance, legal, and accounting will be transferred to IBM, while engineering, product, sales, and marketing teams remain at Red Hat -- at least for now. The Register reports: According to a communication sent to employees, those in General & Administrative areas will join IBM, including the lion's share of the people working in the HR, finance, accounting, and legal units at Red Hat. A source told us the switch will be "implemented this year," although in some countries "it might take longer due to legal constraints." The leadership running those teams will remain within the Red Hat fold. Some are nervous about the move, with tech companies -- notably IBM -- eliminating duplicated roles to consolidate back-office functions. In January -- as has happened in recent years -- IBM again forecast annual savings of $3.5 billion, partly through job cuts.

There is no public data on the size of the G&A population within Red Hat but the total workforce is understood to be about 19,000 worldwide, with the bulk of those employed in the engineering, sales, and support divisions. The team remaining at Red Hat will be part of the central Strategy & Operations group managed by Mike Ferris. As such, engineering, product, sales, and marketing personnel will be unaffected. For now at least. "Culture has been dead for at least 1 year now," said Reddit user Purple_Afternoon 966. "The experience might be different depending on the department, but there is nothing left from the open culture praised. We have now micromanagement, decision making from middle management that clearly have no idea of what we do and how and trying to implement ideas that they read somewhere, with no context, data and not giving answer or addressing feedback."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://linux.slashdot.org/story/25/09/09/0039236/red-hat-back-office-team-moving-to-ibm-from-2026?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Разработчики дистрибутива AlmaLinux объявили о решении активировать по умолчанию репозиторий пакетов CRB (CodeReady Builder) через публикацию завтра обновления к выпуску AlmaLinux OS 10.0. В AlmaLinux OS Kitten 10, редакции на базе CentOS Stream 10, данный репозиторий уже включён с конца августа. Для тех, кто не хочет включать CRB, можно использовать команду "dnf config-manager --disable crb".

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=63848

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( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/multimedia/18074908#cut ) )