geek

20 Jul 2026

Slashdot

New Free Speech Concern: When AI Chatbots Won't Criticize Leaders from Repressive Regimes

Ask Claude to make a pamphlet critical of China's leader, Thailand's king, or Saudi Arabia's crown prince - and it will decline, reports the Associated Press. That's "a key finding from a Meta Oversight Board study released Thursday," their article points out: AI systems are more than twice as likely to refuse to product critical material if it's about a restrictive world leader or government. And it raises concerns that the LLMs powering chatbots "could be regurgitating and spreading government influence over online speech." The study picked 10 commercial large language models by top tech companies - including Meta, Anthropic and OpenAI - and asked the AI systems to make critical pamphlets, write limericks, give reasons if someone should join protests, and more.... "In aggregate, models responding to requests from an Australia-based user were much more likely to generate political criticism of authorities" in places such as Chile, Japan, Taiwan, the U.K. and the U.S. "compared to where criticism of authorities is legally restricted and penalized," such as in Cambodia, China, Saudi Arabia, Thailand and Turkey, the report said. The study indicates that AI models are reflecting speech restrictions beyond the countries where they apply - likely not helping a potential demonstrator in Brisbane, for example, create protest materials to speak out against events in China or Saudi Arabia, the report said. "Such impacts, wherever they originate, have the practical effect of extending the long arm of restrictive governments across borders to limit speech in free countries," the report said. The board said it could not determine the causes for the responses but suggested that models could have absorbed latent biases in data used to train the systems and companies might have weighed the risks and liabilities.

Rust Will Help Linux Succeed and Makes Coding Fun, Says Greg Kroah-Hartman

ZDNet reports on June's Open Source Summit India 2026 in Mumbai, where Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman gave a talk titled "Rust and Linux: How the Rust Language is Going to Help Linux Succeed." Kroah-Hartman said in his keynote that "the [Linux] kernel is moving toward Rust. Git is moving toward Rust. Lots of projects are starting to move toward Rust." He didn't always feel that way. Kroah-Hartman added, "A number of years ago, when a friend of mine said, 'Ah, you got to try this new language. It's called Rust.' I was like, 'What? No, C is great.' His friend continued, "'No, no, no! It makes programming fun again.' I'm like, 'Nah, programming is fun in C.' He was right. I should have done it then. Rust is actually fun. It makes programming fun. It takes a lot of stuff away from having to worry about the compiler, which can fix a lot of your problems for you, and it makes code a little bit better." So, Kroah-Hartman has moved from being a Rust skeptic to one of its strongest champions inside the kernel. He now regards Rust as a permanent part of Linux, not an experiment. His case is straightforward: Rust's ownership and type system can eliminate most of the "stupid little tiny things" that dominate kernel Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), while making life easier for overworked maintainers. "Rust," in short, "makes my life so much easier...." In India, he said Linux sees "about 13 CVEs a day" and has been running at "almost nine changes an hour" for a decade or more. Most of those vulnerabilities, he argued, are not exotic attacks but simple C mistakes - unchecked pointers, forgotten unlocks, and sloppy cleanup paths: "This is what we're fixing 13 times a day. Small, trivial, little bugs like this all the time.... I've seen every CVE the kernel has done in the past 25 years. I think 80% would be gone, just because they would be caught by Rust." The remaining 20% are the logic bugs he'd prefer to focus on...." Moreover, Rust is becoming the default for new work in key subsystems. "New drivers for some subsystems are only going to be accepted in Rust...." he said. Binder, the Android IPC mechanism at the heart of billions of devices, now has parallel C and Rust implementations in the kernel. The C version "will go away soon," leaving the Rust version "as the bedrock of all Android devices going forward."

As AI Transforms Silicon Valley, Some Tech Workers Face Evaporating Financial Security

The Washington Post describes a mid-tier executive at Meta as one of Silicon Valley's "winners" whose financial security suddenly "evaporated" as their workforce "pushed headlong into AI and heavy job cuts," creating a transformed job market. "Her ex-husband, a designer at Meta who was laid off in 2020, eventually gave up looking for jobs in his profession. He now lifts boxes at a warehouse." Layoffs.fyi, which tracks announced job cuts, counts more than 800,000 tech workers laid off since 2022, including large staff reductions in recent months at Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Amazon... "There's this whole tranche of people who've been quite used to being among the most upwardly mobile in society who are all of a sudden saying, 'Now I'm the guy on the streetâs'" said Oliver Raskin, who founded Silicon Valley market research consultancy Signalcraft Insights and has surveyed attitudes in the tech labor force... "The rise of AI, especially, is bound to change the workplace radically," [said Georgetown University historian Joseph McCartin]. "But the way it's going to happen is similar to how technology transformed the auto industry." Ruth Milkman, a labor sociologist at the City University of New York, said that technology workers are getting a dose of what workers in other industries have long complained about: jobs that feel unsteady or rob them of autonomy. "Low-wage workers are used to it," she said... Many layoffs at technology companies are probably a hangover effect from over-hiring in prior years, experts say. And they don't account for a spotty recent increase in hiring in the information industry, which includes employment of software developers and jobs in media and entertainment. Digging deeper, though, some economists say there are signs that Silicon Valley and other technology-reliant parts of the American economy have reached a turning point where they are growing without needing as many people. The notion was encapsulated in a recent talk that ricocheted through group chats across the tech industry: In it, a partner at the start-up incubator Y Combinator heralded a new generation of AI-first companies that will only need human labor for "novel situations," "ethical considerations" and "high-stakes moments." Gad Levanon, chief economist at the labor research nonprofit Burning Glass Institute, said that the number of hours worked in the information sector has dipped since 2022, while the sector's economic output has increased by about 8 percent a year - more than three times the overall growth rate of the U.S. economy. He says the data reveals a sea change in industries, including technology and finance, toward doing more work with the same or fewer people - one that is spreading to other professional classes. "That's the new reality for white-collar and tech-exposed work: output up, headcount flat or down," Levanon said... Raskin, who has worked in the tech world since the late '90s, said that even though the current moment feels unsettling to many, he's hopeful that it's an early chapter in an evolving story. "It's happened many times before," he said, "that something implodes and all these people lose jobs, but then that talent gets cycled into whatever the next thing is - into a new wave of prosperity." In the article tech entrepreneur Anil Dash quips that Silicon Valley techies are "are guinea pigs for what tech dudes want to do to everyone."

19 Jul 2026

Ars Technica

India's first privately-developed rocket reaches orbit on dramatic debut launch

"On the first attempt, reaching orbit, I never thought it was possible."

19 Jul 2026 10:11pm GMT

OSnews

DOSBox ported to OpenVMS for Alpha

Speaking of OpenVMS and Alpha - and we like speaking about OpenVMS and Alpha, don't we? - there's now a port of DOSBox that runs on the Alpha version venerable operating system. Astr0baby has published both binaries and source code for the port, as well as a lovely set of screenshots to show it off working.

19 Jul 2026 9:08pm GMT

LG monitors silently install software through Windows Update without user consent

Well, this is new - but not at all unexpected considering the state of Windows and the wider technology industry. When you connect certain LG monitors to a Windows machine, Windows Update will pull in a bunch of adware promoting antivirus trash. Of course, all done without any consent, because Silicon Valley inherently does not understand nor respect consent. Windows Update first installed LG extension and software component packages. Windows Reliability Monitor showed that LG Monitor App Installer appeared one minute later. The installation did not display a consent prompt or require the user to approve the download. Gamers Nexus tested the application across 32 consecutive system boots. It displayed a McAfee promotion during 31 of them. On the remaining boot, it promoted one of LG's own monitor utilities. The McAfee popup offered a 30-day trial that would convert into a paid subscription. ↫ WhyCry at VideoCardz Don't use Windows.

19 Jul 2026 8:47pm GMT

New Intel Itanium emulator boots Itanium version of Windows XP and 2003

It was only a few weeks ago that we got a massively improved Alpha emulator, capable of running VMS, Windows 2000, and Tru64, including X11 support and a variety of other exciting features. Today, we've got another major emulation milestone. The emulation space is going crazy, after my previous post on Windows booting on DEC Alpha es40 emulator, there is now another huge breakthrough in the emulation of other non-x86 CPU emulation. Yufeng Gao with help from gdwnldsKSC (the man behind the updated es40-fork) has released version 0.1 of his Intel Itanium (IA-64) emulator that boots the Itanium version of Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP 64-bit. No OpenVMS or HP-UX yet and Linux/BSD also don't boot. But Windows is amazing already. ↫ Remy van Elst Much like Alpha hardware, Itanium hardware is quite hard to come by - especially Itanium workstations are a nightmare to find; I think I've only ever seen one or two Itanium workstation come up for sale on eBay in recent years, and their rarity obviously commanded hefty prices. The sooner we are able to run Itanium version of operating systems comfortably in a virtualised environment the better. As long-time OSNews readers know, my heart beats for HP-UX, but the Itanium versions of Windows and VMS would be of more interest to most people, I'm sure. Excellent news.

19 Jul 2026 7:54pm GMT