nerd

21 Jun 2026

21 Jun 2026 3:36pm GMT

Slashdot

The Rust Ecosystem Gets an AI Security Engineer in Residence

While the Rust Foundation has a Security Initiative to protect its ecosystem, "the threats have expanded," they announced this week, "and so has the kind of help maintainers need." Much of this comes back to a single shift: Automated tooling (much of it now built on large language models) has gotten good enough to surface real vulnerabilities in open source code quickly and at scale. That is useful, and several large Rust projects have already received and fixed credible issues found this way. The same tooling has also made it trivial to generate vulnerability reports that look plausible and are worthless. Maintainers across the ecosystem are losing real hours sorting these from the reports that matter, and the noise tends to bury the signal. So, with funding from the Alpha-Omega Project, the Rust Foundation is bringing on a full-time AI Security Engineer in Residence dedicated to the Rust ecosystem. This position is being funded with part of the $12.5M in open source security funding that the Linux Foundation announced in March. The role exists to take pressure off maintainers. The person in this position will use a mix of human-led and AI-assisted methods to proactively review Rust itself and the crates the ecosystem leans on most and help us separate real, exploitable issues from false positives and low-signal noise before anything reaches a maintainer... This role will run full-time for six months to start, with room to extend depending on what we learn and the funding available. Methods, playbooks, and prompts will be documented so the work doesn't end with the contract. We are grateful that Rust is not embarking on this work in isolation. Several other ecosystems have received parallel Alpha-Omega grants for the same kind of work (e.g., the PHP Foundation and the Drupal Association) and we plan to share tooling, triage practices, and what we learn rather than duplicating work A statement from Rust's new AI Security Engineer in Residence acknowledges that "One of our next challenges is the wave of bugs discovered by the next generation of AI-powered developer tools."

Hacker News

Fossil Fuels Are 40% of Freight Shipping Tonnage, but Half Its Fuel Use

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21 Jun 2026 2:43pm GMT

Slashdot

Canonical's Upcoming AI Tool: Talk to Ubuntu Instead of Typing

This week the Ubuntu desktop's director of engineering announced they're bringing speech-to-text dictation to Ubuntu Desktop, aiming for an experience "that feels like a natural part of the desktop while respecting user privacy and running entirely on local hardware." "Speech recognition has become a common feature on modern platforms, and we think it should be a first-class experience on Ubuntu Desktop as well." More details from the blog It's FOSS: For Ubuntu 26.10, the initial version of Myna is expected to be a desktop dictation tool built around GNOME on Wayland with a push-to-talk mechanism gatekeeping when your microphone accepts input. Using it means holding a hotkey, speaking, and letting go. A small activity indicator shows while it is listening, and the transcribed text lands wherever the cursor was sitting when dictation started. Recognition itself happens inside a sandboxed component called the Canonical Inference Snap, while a Speech Orchestrator manages the session and an Audio Adapter handles whatever the microphone picks up, denoising and chunking it before it ever reaches the model... Speech recognition will happen locally, and an internet connection is not needed once the appropriate model is installed... The audio data won't be sticking around either, being stored in a small in-memory buffer that gets discarded the moment the session ends. Features like dictation into password fields, wake words, continuous listening, voice assistants, voice commands, translation, speaker identification, and automatic language detection are all off the table... You should also know that Canonical is looking for feedback before the specs for Myna are finalized, especially from people who already rely on dictation or assistive tools on Linux.

Hacker News

Who Owns Your ATProto Identity? Hint: It's Probably Not You

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21 Jun 2026 2:09pm GMT

Slashdot

New Super PAC Aims to Rally Tech Workers to Help Limit AI: 'the Guardrails Alliance'

"A grassroots movement is forming among everyday tech workers who are demanding their companies develop and deploy AI responsibly," reports TechCrunch. Hoping to leverage that discontent is a new super PAC called the Guardrails Alliance. The New York Times reports that it launched Thursday with backers that included tech employees and labor unions: Guardrails positions itself as a populist political movement that runs on small donations from people in the trenches of the AI boom. The PAC has about $5 million at its disposal today and planGuardrails will buy ads to support Alex Bores, a New York congressional candidate who became Leading the Future's first target and is running in the primaries next week. s to raise $15 million this cycle - small potatoes compared to deep-pocketed adversaries like Leading the Future, which has more than $100 million from tech leaders like OpenAI president Greg Brockman... "This is not about matching [Leading the Future] dollar for dollar," [said the super PAC's co-founder, political operative Shaunna Thomas]. "What this vehicle is meant to do is be a political home for people who are concerned about the way the anti-regulation AI tech sector is trying to manipulate elections." Meanwhile a former Netflix and Warner Bros. executive has launched the Alliance for Responsible Innovation in the Arts & Media, reports Variety, calling it an AI-focused content coalition that says it's dedicated to supporting "responsible and sustainable AI innovation and the importance of human creativity." The initial members of the coalition, announced Monday, include Disney, the New York Times, Adobe, Condé Nast, the Financial Times, ITV, Advance, BBC, Cambridge University Press & Assessment, U.K. publisher Reach and Wiley. Many of the coalition's members have either struck deals with AI companies or are developing their own AI tools... The group plans to argue for legal and policy guardrails around AI's usage, with its funding directed towards analyses, tools and services focused on advancing those initiatives... One of the group's launch advisers is Damian Collins, OBE, who previously served as the U.K. Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State in the Department for Science, Innovation and Technology under prime ministers Boris Johnson and Liz Truss. "Using AI to break the law can never be an acceptable excuse," he said in a statement. "Laws around personal safety, intellectual property and financial crime still apply in the age of AI. This is why ARIAM has been created and why I'm proud to working with this necessary initiative."