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Tails 7.7.3 fixes the Dirty Frag Linux kernel vulnerability with kernel 6.12.86 and updates Tor Browser, Tor, and Thunderbird.

11 May 2026 4:14pm GMT

Apple now requires Education Store shoppers in the U.S. and several other countries to verify their student, educator, parent, or homeschool-teacher status through UNiDAYS, ending the previous honor-system approach. 9to5Mac reports: Starting today, Apple requires shoppers in the United States to complete verification when making a purchase via the Education Store. This change also applies to Australia, Hong Kong, Turkey, Canada, and Chile. In many other markets around the world, such as the UK, Apple already required verification. As a refresher, people eligible for Apple's Education Store include current and newly accepted college students and their parents, as well as faculty, staff, and homeschool teachers across all grade levels. Apple is teaming up with UNiDAYS to handle the verification process. Students and educators will be asked to create a UNiDAYS ID and then verify their academic status by logging in to their school's academic portal. Alternatively, users can upload a photo of their student or faculty IDs. Homeschool teachers, meanwhile, will need to provide an identity document such as a driver's license, state ID card, or passport. They'll also need to provide one homeschool document, such as a Letter of Intent (LOI) or Letter of Acknowledgment. Most customers will be verified instantly, and those requiring manual verification should hear back within 24 hours. The same verification process applies both in-store and online for Apple Education Store shoppers. Meanwhile, Apple has added Apple Watch to the Education Store for the first time, offering discounts on the Series 11, SE 3, and Ultra 3.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 May 2026 4:00pm GMT

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11 May 2026 3:09pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Fictional portrayals of artificial intelligence can have a real effect on AI models, according to Anthropic. Last year, the company said that during pre-release tests involving a fictional company, Claude Opus 4 would often try to blackmail engineers to avoid being replaced by another system. Anthropic later published research suggesting that models from other companies had similar issues with "agentic misalignment." Apparently Anthropic has done more work around that behavior, claiming in a post on X, "We believe the original source of the behavior was internet text that portrays AI as evil and interested in self-preservation." The company went into more detail in a blog post stating that since Claude Haiku 4.5, Anthropic's models "never engage in blackmail [during testing], where previous models would sometimes do so up to 96% of the time." What accounts for the difference? The company said it found that training on "documents about Claude's constitution and fictional stories about AIs behaving admirably improve alignment." Related, Anthropic said that it found training to be more effective when it includes "the principles underlying aligned behavior" and not just "demonstrations of aligned behavior alone." "Doing both together appears to be the most effective strategy," the company said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 May 2026 3:00pm GMT

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11 May 2026 2:18pm GMT

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11 May 2026 2:12pm GMT

SparkyLinux 8.3 ships refreshed Debian 13.4-based KDE Plasma, LXQt, MATE, Xfce, and Openbox editions.

11 May 2026 1:54pm GMT

"We wanted to get to an orbital launch vehicle in a few years."

11 May 2026 1:53pm GMT

RPM 6.1 RC1 introduces the first test build for the 6.1 package manager series, with updates across macros, builds, signing, and verification.

11 May 2026 1:39pm GMT

Linux 7.1 started phasing out support for Intel's 37-year-old i486 processor. Linux 7.2 removed drivers for the old AMD Elan 32-bit systems on a chip. And now some i586 and i686 class processors are being removed, reports Phoronix: Supporting those vintage GPUs without the Time Stamp Counter "TSC" instruction are becoming a burden... TSC-capable Intel Pentium processors and the likes will still be supported with this just being for TSC-less i586/i686 CPUs. Among the CPUs impacted by this latest change is the AMD K5 as well as various Cyrix processor models. The K5 was AMD's first entirely in-house designed processor that was first introduced in 1996 to counter the Intel Pentium CPU. TSC "support can now be assumed as a boot requirement for modern Linux," the article points out, which will allow the removal of various non-TSC code paths from the Linux kernel's x86 code. Tom's Hardware remembers the K5 "wasn't a very popular processor as it arrived late, then offered lackluster performance in the competitive environment it joined." Launch SKUs in 1996 were limited to clocks from 75 MHz to 133 MHz, and, due to being late, Intel's Pentium line was already faster. AMD still managed to get an edge on the Cyrix 6x86, though.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 May 2026 11:34am GMT

Cable firm Cox's Supreme Court win may help all tech providers, not just ISPs.

11 May 2026 11:00am GMT

Evidence is growing that sperm carries marks of a father's life experiences, influencing traits in offspring.

10 May 2026 11:15am GMT