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"Ubuntu has managed to do away with GNU Core Utilities in its default stack," reports the blog It's FOSS. The last three utilities - cp, mv and rm - have been moved to versions from the uutils project (which reimplements utilities in Rust). Everything else, from ls and cat to chmod and du, made that jump in earlier releases... Canonical started "oxidizing" Ubuntu last year, and Ubuntu 25.10 became the first release to ship [ the uutils project's] coreutils as the default. That release also made sudo-rs the default privilege tool, replacing a command that had been in place for decades. 26.04 was the release where the plan did slow down quite a bit, as Canonical kept cp, mv, and rm on their GNU versions due to a bunch of TOCTOU issues that were blocking the full implementation. These were caught during an audit, when Canonical commissioned Zellic for two rounds between December 2025 and March 2026, focusing on the most security-sensitive utilities first. Across both rounds, Zellic raised 113 issues, and 44 of them were assigned CVEs. Canonical says the vast majority have been resolved. Getting here has had its ups and downs, and the last stretch was not clean. In July, uutils cp went back into the archive and came straight out again after it broke live image builds. The fix was quick; as the developers marked it "Critical," the fix went upstream, and the migration landed in time for 26.10. When typing commands, nothing changes for you on the surface. uutils coreutils is designed to be a drop-in replacement for essential GNU tools, and the project treats any divergence from GNU as a bug, further pointing out that some options may still be missing or behave differently. So if you prefer staying on the GNU version, you have the option to install the coreutils-from-gnu package that houses all the required components.

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16 Sep 2026 4:04am GMT

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16 Sep 2026 2:07am GMT

The Los Angeles Times reports: Chen Yilong has racked up plenty of film and TV credits in his two decades as an actor, but with work getting scarcer he signed a contract in August to license the image of his face to a Chinese production studio. Chen's role will be to sit in front of a video camera and make facial expressions at the prompt of a director. A neutral stare. An angry glare. A look of surprise. Using artificial intelligence, the studio will use images of Chen's face to generate an avatar, also known as a "digital human," to star in an AI-generated movie. "If you can't beat it, join it," said Chen, 38, who works in Beijing. The Chinese film and video industry is being transformed by AI-driven storytelling, fueled by rapid advances in video generation software, and at ground zero are the so-called micro dramas that play out on millions of smartphones. Typically just a minute or two in length, the videos are devoured by Chinese audiences... And the cost of producing them has been cut drastically through the use of AI software developed by Chinese technology juggernauts including Kuaishou Technology and TikTok's global owner, ByteDance. The number of Chinese-made micro dramas surged in the first three months of this year to 128,000, according to the China Netcasting Services Assn. More than 95% of them were made with AI, the association said.... Sun Wei founded Feixiang Universe, the Shenzhen-based studio that cast Chen. The fear of accidentally "stealing someone's face" was a big reason she said she decided to license real people's likenesses for an AI production set during China's Tang Dynasty more than 1,000 years ago. Thanks to AI's training data bias, AI-generated performers tend to have similar features and share a homogenous look, Sun said. Many have flawless skin and extremely symmetrical faces, requiring her and other Chinese AI filmmakers to cast a wide net to "buy" new faces and digitize actor's expressions. Lu Beike, who directed the big-budget Chinese series "Three-Body," felt theAI-generated scenes he'd tried came out sub-standard. "Lu added that if 90% of a film was generated by AI, a real human performance could appear jarring. A real actor's expressions carried more nuance and emotion. The skin textures did not match. Sometimes the only solution was to process the live-action material until the person looked a little less real - until they fit back into the 'AI world,' Lu said." But at Sun Wei's studio, they're thrilled they can produce a 90-minute AI film for $500,000 where professional productions used to cost millions of dollars. According to the article, Sun's team works with ChatGPT, Kimi or DeepSeek to flesh out entire screenplays from a short paragraph. The screenwriter takes over, but "to produce the finished product, Sun's team uses Chinese video-generation models to input the type of scenes, backgrounds and performers they want, with the AI generating 15 seconds of footage each time." Still, the article points out that "Similar tools are being tested in the U.S., and the AI trends upending China's entertainment industry may be a harbinger for what's to come in Hollywood, said Michael Berry, a professor specializing in contemporary Chinese culture at UCLA. Already, Chinese companies that sell AI-powered video-generation software are seeking inroads in Hollywood..."

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15 Sep 2026 11:34pm GMT

The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope is the first NASA observatory designed for in-space refueling.

15 Sep 2026 10:26pm GMT

Allegedly fake filmmaker targeted trackers like PassThePopcorn, BroadcasTheNet, and HDBits.

15 Sep 2026 8:19pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space.com: NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory has found a brand new type of an otherwise familiar object -- compact binary systems that steal gas from other stars, but which do so while emitting very low-energy X-rays but copious amounts of ultraviolet. Chandra spotted 84 suspicious object emitting very low-energy X-rays in six galaxies -- four evolved ellipticals and two spirals, namely our near-neighbor the Andromeda Galaxy (M31) and the Pinwheel Galaxy (M101). "We've never encountered a group of objects that act like this," said Mustafa Muhibullah of the University of Alabama in a statement. Compact objects, in the form of black holes, neutron stars and white dwarfs, are the remains of stars that have died. Their small size and powerful gravity means that they're adept at getting close to orbiting companion stars and ripping the stars' outer layers of gas away. The gas swirls around the compact object, falling onto its surface, and this accretionary process usually produces torrents of high-energy X-rays because the stolen gas becomes superheated by the compact object's gravitational vice-like grip. Because of their weak X-rays, Muhibullah's team refer to them as 'hypersoft X-ray sources'. Since low-energy X-rays and ultraviolet light are next to each other on the electromagnetic spectrum, Muhibullah and his team suspect that the low-energy X-rays are spillover from objects emitting prodigious amounts of ultraviolet. Moreover, they think that these objects are lower-level compact binaries. They're hard to find though, because the interstellar medium of hydrogen and helium gas between the stars absorbs ultraviolet light. This could be why we have yet to find any hypersoft X-ray sources in our own galaxy, because we have to look through the interstellar medium through the plane of the Milky Way. Consequently, there could be a large population of hypersoft X-ray sources that remain undiscovered and they could have an important effect on the universe around them. The findings have been published in the journal Nature Astronomy.

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15 Sep 2026 7:04pm GMT

Teen developed acute disseminated encephalomyelitis, a known measles complication.

15 Sep 2026 6:58pm GMT

DXVK 3.1.1 addresses issues in Skyrim Special Edition, Rayman 3, Call of Duty: Ghosts, Painkiller, Corpse Party, and other titles.

15 Sep 2026 6:29pm GMT

Mozilla Thunderbird 156 adds custom OAuth support for POP3, new enterprise policies, and fixes for IMAP, POP3, attachments, OpenPGP, and calendars.

15 Sep 2026 6:16pm GMT

Fedora 45 Beta is now available with Linux kernel 7.2, GNOME 51, KDE Plasma 6.7, kmscon, Anaconda improvements, and updated toolchains.

15 Sep 2026 3:09pm GMT