fidzu : geek

Linux Torvalds expects Linux 7.2 should be released next weekend "unless something really bad pops up," Torvalds said while announcing today's release candidate. But there's something interesting about Linux 7.2-rc7, writes Phoronix. "By the time the Linux kernel typically hits a -rc7 release things have usually settled quite well. But in today's world of AI/LLM coding/review agents, the kernel activity continues at an all-time high." Tons of bug fixes continued to trickle in across the kernel spectrum for all sorts of issues. The HWMON hardware monitoring subsystem saw several critical and high severity bug fixes, on the memory management side was a nasty race condition leading to a use-after-free in the kernel for the past eight years, Btrfs restored its fixup worker infrastructure to deal with silent data loss, lots of AI patches in the networking realm, and the kernel was patched for the Safe RET Interrupt Vulnerability. Linus Torvalds wrote in the 7.2-rc7 announcement: "Another week, another -rc. I can't say that I'm exactly thrilled about the size of this all, but it is what it is: the new normal with a lot of fixes, many of them due to review by various AI tools. And nothing looks particularly scary per se - it's just that there's a lot here. Most of it is fairly small, although we have a couple of larger diffs: s390/zcrypt fixes stand out in the diffstat, and so does btrfs bringing back the fixup worker infrastructure. And some netfilter ipset fixes. But aside from a few places like that, most of this is just lots of tiny fixes. It's pretty much spread all over - drivers (gpu, sound, networking, you name it), filesystems, core networking, arch code...

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Aug 2026 12:59am GMT

A Massachusetts newspaper reports that officials from the town of Littleton (population: 10,141) "claim that five of Littletonâ(TM)s Flock Safety cameras were switched back on by the company without informing the town..." Littleton had temporarily disabled the cameras earlier this year, according to the article, but upon discovering the cameras were still active, city officials say they directed the Town Counsel "to initiate cancellation of the contract with Flock Safety and directed the Town Administrator to coordinate the removal of the six cameras on public ways" with the Department of Public Works. Ironically, it's the same Massachusetts town that last year was breached by a Chinese-state-sponsored hacking group for over 300 days. Flock has also considered dashcams installed in hundreds of thousands Uber, Lyft, and delivery drivers' vehicles "to scan license plates those drivers travelled passed," reports 404 Media, "essentially turning Uber and Lyft drivers into roaming surveillance vehicles, according to a Flock presentation shared with 404 Media... 404 Media first revealed the intended partnership last August when multiple sources provided information on the plan."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

09 Aug 2026 11:15pm GMT

NBC Bay Area brings news from the small idyllic California town of Suisun City (population: 29,518). The city council "declared a state of emergency Saturday after a cyberattack that shut down computer systems including 911 public safety operations." "Malicious software infected and compromised" the East Bay community's information technology systems beginning about 5:45 a.m. Friday, the city said on social media. "The cybersecurity incident hit critical public safety operations, including 911 routing, police and fire dispatch, records and city services," the city said. "There is no imminent threat to the public," the city said. "All public safety services remain active." The city shut down its computer network "to contain the threat and preserve evidence for a federal investigation," it said... Suisun City dispatchers were taking calls for service through the Solano County dispatch center. Suisun City police officers and firefighters continued responding to calls for service, the city said, but online city services and internal operations were unavailable. On Facebook the city said it was "working alongside federal, state and regional agencies, including the FBI, Department of Homeland Security and California Office of Emergency Services to maintain emergency services, investigate the incident and restore systems." But Bay Area PBS station KQED notes "They're only the latest local government in the region to be hit by a cyberattack." Earlier this year, Foster City and Pittsburg experienced other cyberattacks that impacted services in their own jurisdictions. Foster City declared a state of emergency after a March ransomware incident that shut down many services for more than a week. Pittsburg lost almost $1 million to a February phishing attack, though over half of it was recovered.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

09 Aug 2026 10:15pm GMT

The massive Toba eruption seems to have had little climate impact.

09 Aug 2026 11:00am GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

The European Union's Digital Markets Act keeps delivering for EU citizens. Apple is working on a new feature that will support cross-device copy and paste between iOS devices and Windows PCs. Microsoft asked for the feature using Apple's EU interoperability request system for developers, which Apple implemented to comply with the Digital Markets Act. Apple began evaluating the request in March, and on June 26, proposed a project plan. ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors According to Apple, this minor feature is going to cost Apple "significant engineering effort"; I'd estimate it'll cost them about one to two golden statues.

08 Aug 2026 7:50pm GMT

IceWM, the venerable X11 window manager, has put up a new maintenance release, version 4.1.0. It's got a small number of fixes, two very minor new features, as well a few updated translations. That's it.

08 Aug 2026 7:25pm GMT

About 90 percent of the distance driven by Perseverance has been autonomous.

08 Aug 2026 11:30am GMT

Open source WeatherNext model can make accurate predictions with lower-resolution weather data.

08 Aug 2026 11:05am GMT

There's been a small flurry of articles from a variety of sources, all talking about more or less the same thing: Microsoft is trying to explain why Windows 11 is as difficult to develop as it is, in turn justifying why it's become such a mess over the years. I'm picking this one from Windows Central, which is an interview with Microsoft's CVP of Design and Research for Windows and Devices, Marcus Ash. Taking the long, still ongoing transition from the Control Panel to the Settings application as an example, Ash explains why this is such a long and difficult process. Unsurprisingly, Ash says that the reason this has taken so long is that Microsoft prides itself on compatibility with legacy tooling and workflows, so it can't just rush in and modernize everything without first ensuring the modern replacements maintain functionality with what came before. ↫ Zac Bowden at Windows Central This isn't really news to anyone. One of Windows' prized strong points is its often excellent backwards compatibility. This doesn't just apply to individual applications, but also to things like software makers adding settings panels to Control Panel, or complex business applications expecting certain entry points into the Control Panel to exist - and much, much more, all over the operating system. I'm exaggerating, but you can't so much as move a single pixel in the taskbar without breaking some component of some obscure corporate middleware suite from 1999 that somehow still functions as the beating heart of like 187 Fortune 500 companies. Sometimes I wonder if Microsoft is going about this the wrong way entirely. Of course, I have no idea what I'm talking about, but I feel like Microsoft has so man tools at its disposal to deal with this issue that it's not really using to their fullest potential. Specifically, Windows itself has a number of incredibly capable tools in its toolbox to make sure any application ever written for Windows and even DOS, regardless of how many bits it requires, can run. Windows has advanced and highly capable tools for virtualisation and containerisation, and on top of that, Windows NT has a very capable personalities system that feels underutilised, too. Couldn't these tools be harnessed to effectively isolate the entire backwards compatibility problem from the actual Windows operating system people use, and turn them into optional components installed and activated when required by an older application? Isolating backwards compatibility this way would then leave the Windows team much less shackled and more free to improve Windows at every level without having to worry so much about maintaining backwards compatibility. If the components an older application needs are virtualised, containerised, or part of a Windows NT personality and thus frozen in time, the Windows team would be free to work on the "current" version of said component without breaking the application in question. I feel like Microsoft has tried to use these technologies to address backwards compatibility in the past, but in true Microsoft fashion, it always seems to do so halfheartedly, without any real coherent vision behind it. Again, I wish to reiterate I'm by no means qualified enough to make any definitive statements about this, but it sure does feel like Microsoft is underutilising a lot of the tools it already has at its disposal.

06 Aug 2026 10:20pm GMT

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT