12 Feb 2026

feedSlashdot

Anthropic Safety Researcher Quits, Warning 'World is in Peril'

An anonymous reader shares a report: An Anthropic safety researcher quit, saying the "world is in peril" in part over AI advances. Mrinank Sharma said the safety team "constantly [faces] pressures to set aside what matters most," citing concerns about bioterrorism and other risks. Anthropic was founded with the explicit goal of creating safe AI; its CEO Dario Amodei said at Davos that AI progress is going too fast and called for regulation to force industry leaders to slow down. Other AI safety researchers have left leading firms, citing concerns about catastrophic risks.

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12 Feb 2026 3:44am GMT

feedArs Technica

SpaceX takes down Dragon crew arm, giving Starship a leg up in Florida

SpaceX's crew missions will now launch from Cape Canaveral Space Force Station.

12 Feb 2026 2:23am GMT

feedSlashdot

With Ring, American Consumers Built a Surveillance Dragnet

Ring's Super Bowl ad on Sunday promoted "Search Party," a feature that lets a user post a photo of a missing dog in the Ring app and triggers outdoor Ring cameras across the neighborhood to use AI to scan for a match. 404 Media argues the cheerful premise obscures what the Amazon-owned company has become: a massive, consumer-deployed surveillance network. Ring founder Jamie Siminoff, who left in 2023 and returned last year, has since moved to re-establish police partnerships and push more AI into Ring cameras. The company has also partnered with Flock, a surveillance firm used by thousands of police departments, and launched a beta feature called "Familiar Faces" that identifies known people at your door. Chris Gilliard, author of the upcoming book Luxury Surveillance, called the ad "a clumsy attempt by Ring to put a cuddly face on a rather dystopian reality: widespread networked surveillance by a company that has cozy relationships with law enforcement." Further reading: No One, Including Our Furry Friends, Will Be Safer in Ring's Surveillance Nightmare, EFF Says

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12 Feb 2026 1:45am GMT

feedArs Technica

Trump orders the military to make agreements with coal power plants

The administration's "reasoning" for doing so has little connection to reality.

12 Feb 2026 12:02am GMT

11 Feb 2026

feedArs Technica

El Paso airport closed after military used new anti-drone laser to zap party balloon

"I want to be very, very clear that this should've never happened."

11 Feb 2026 11:50pm GMT

feedSlashdot

Is Linux Mint Burning Out? Developers Consider Longer Release Cycle

BrianFagioli writes: The Linux Mint developers say they are considering adopting a longer development cycle, arguing that the project's current six month cadence plus LMDE releases leaves too little room for deeper work. In a recent update, the team reflected on its incremental philosophy, independence from upstream decisions like Snap, and heavy investment in Cinnamon and XApp. While the release process "works very well" and delivers steady improvements, they admit it consumes significant time in testing, fixing, and shipping, potentially capping ambition. Mint's next release will be based on a new Ubuntu LTS, and the team says it is seriously interested in stretching the development window. The stated goal is to free up resources for more substantial development rather than constant release management. Whether this signals bigger technical changes or simply acknowledges bandwidth limits for a small team remains unclear, but it marks a notable rethink of one of desktop Linux's most consistent release rhythms.

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11 Feb 2026 10:45pm GMT

feedOSnews

The original Secure Boot certificates are about to expire, but you probably won’t notice

With the original release of Windows 8, Microsoft also enforced Secure Boot. It's been 15 years since that release, and that means the original 2011 Secure Boot certificates are about to expire. If these certificates are not replaced with new ones, Secure Boot will cease to function - your machine will still boot and operate, but the benefits of Secure Boot are mostly gone, and as newer vulnerabilities are discovered, systems without updated Secure Boot certificates will be increasingly exposed. Microsoft has already been rolling out new certificates through Windows updates, but only for users of supported versions of Windows, which means Windows 11. If you're using Windows 10, without the Extended Security Updates, you won't be getting the new certificates through Windows Update. Even if you use Windows 11, you may need a UEFI update from your laptop or motherboard OEM, assuming they still support your device. For Linux users using Secure Boot, you're probably covered by fwupd, which will update the certificates as part of your system's update program, like KDE's Discover. Of course, you can also use fwupd manually in the terminal, if you'd like. For everyone else not using Secure Boot, none of this will matter and you're going to be just fine. I honestly doubt there will be much fallout from this updating process, but there's always bound to be a few people who fall between the cracks. All we can do is hope whomever is responsible for Secure Boot at Microsoft hasn't started slopcoding yet.

11 Feb 2026 9:45pm GMT

Microsoft adds and fixes remote code execution vulnerability in Notepad

What happens when you slopcode a bunch of bloat to your basic text editor? Well, you add a remote code execution vulnerability to notepad.exe. Improper neutralization of special elements used in a command ('command injection') in Windows Notepad App allows an unauthorized attacker to execute code over a network. An attacker could trick a user into clicking a malicious link inside a Markdown file opened in Notepad, causing the application to launch unverified protocols that load and execute remote files. ↫ CVE-2026-20841 I don't know how many more obvious examples one needs to understand that Microsoft simply does not care, in any way, shape, or form, about Windows. A lot of people seem very hesitant to accept that with even LinkedIn generating more revenue for Microsoft than Windows, the writing is on the wall. Anyway, the fix has been released through the Microsoft Store.

11 Feb 2026 9:15pm GMT

Kapsule adds easy developer environment containers to KDE Linux

If you're a developer and use KDE, you're going to be interested in a new feature KDE is working on for KDE Linux. In my last post, I laid out the vision for Kapsule-a container-based extensibility layer for KDE Linux built on top of Incus. The pitch was simple: give users real, persistent development environments without compromising the immutable base system. At the time, it was a functional proof of concept living in my personal namespace. Well, things have moved fast. ↫ Herp De Derp Not only is Kapsule now available in KDE Linux, it's also properly integrated with Konsole now. This means you can launch Kapsule containers right from the new tab menu in Konsole for even easier access. They're also working on allowing users to easily launch graphical applications from the containers and have them appear in the host desktop environment, and they intend to make the level of integration with the host more configurable so developers can better tailor their containers to their needs.

11 Feb 2026 6:08pm GMT

30 Jan 2026

feedPlanet Arch Linux

How to review an AUR package

On Friday, July 18th, 2025, the Arch Linux team was notified that three AUR packages had been uploaded that contained malware. A few maintainers including myself took care of deleting these packages, removing all traces of the malicious code, and protecting against future malicious uploads.

30 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

19 Jan 2026

feedPlanet Arch Linux

Personal infrastructure setup 2026

While starting this post I realized I have been maintaining personal infrastructure for over a decade! Most of the things I've self-hosted is been for personal uses. Email server, a blog, an IRC server, image hosting, RSS reader and so on. All of these things has all been a bit all over the place and never properly streamlined. Some has been in containers, some has just been flat files with a nginx service in front and some has been a random installed Debian package from somewhere I just forgot.

19 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

11 Jan 2026

feedPlanet Arch Linux

Verify Arch Linux artifacts using VOA/OpenPGP

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT