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The timeline for Google Summer of Code is coming to an end, and us interns are piecing together the final touches to our projects for submission. Thanks to the help of my mentors, and the duck sitting on my monitor, the algorithm that beats the heart of Vocab Crosswords in GNOME Crosswords has been tremendous strides in accuracy and testability. The primary focus shifted to getting the algorithm landed by the end of the summer, and working on the frontend of the application post-GSoC.

Unit Tests

At GUADEC, with the help of Federico, I created unit tests to see how my functions reacted in a given circumstance. Jonathan and I worked on creating different circumstances for the run and helper functions.

Optimization

For user optimization, we don’t want to keep the board at a strict 30×30 grid and only allow for the first viable option. We decided to incorporate a new function to trim the dimensions of the generated grids based on the outermost edges of the letters, create a new board based on the newly calculated dimensions, trim that board down respectively, and copy the words over in the exact respective format. This is due to the libipuz grid’s origin point (0, 0) being fixed at the uppermost left corner cell. All in all, the trimming function essentially does this:

Additionally, it is pretty ideal to have some leeway of choice on how you want your puzzle to look. Some puzzles might generate lanky, while others extensively branched out all the way to the maximum borders, and the rest perhaps condensed together. The ability to rearrange the ordering of the words is already a feature in Crosswords thanks to PuzzleTask. But, it is for known grids of typically 15×15 sandwiched together. What is different with the vocab puzzle is that the rearrangement must still respect the same constraints of intersecting at a single letter nodal point, words cannot be on top of nor right next to each other (edge of nodes must respect space), and no islands (all words must share at least one node with another word). For instance, grids A and B here pertain the same words 1 through 6, but these words can connect differently on the graph, producing two options to choose from.

Tested, I achieved these 3 different versions of grids based off the same word bank:

           

Island Checking

The final component I will implement within GSoC’s timeline is checking for islanding words. Say a user provides a list of words and one word absolutely cannot intersect with any other word, it shares no node. The backtracking algorithm will spend a lot of time trying to place it, or invalidate any graph generation at all. We want to check beforehand if a word would not belong along the rest, and warn the user about it. Because there are many alphabets that exist, we are going to analyze the sets of characters as guint64 bitsets and GHashTable. Every unique character gets its own bit-slot, and every word’s 64-bit mask is compared to available words using bit operations.

I’m happy to announce that the SparkleShare project will receive a grant from the NLnet Foundation’s NGI0 Commons fund!

SparkleShare and NGI0 Commons Sync files with Git

SparkleShare is a Free and Open Source collaboration app. It allows people who are not software developers or otherwise technical (designers, lawyers, students, academics, etc.) to work together and share files in projects that use the Git version control system.

SparkleShare provides an automatic sync algorithm and a friendly user interface to review changes and restore files from history.

What happened?

SparkleShare has been around since 2010. I guess that makes it an “old” project now… Since then, the Mono/C# community active around that time has all but disbanded. The platform underneath slowly started to rot.

Eventually the app had to be removed from Flathub, also due to my own maintainer burnout. Providing maintenance and support next to a full-time job proved too much.

But that’s no longer an issue.

Now I have an opportunity to rebuild and address long-standing issues and feature requests. I have renewed energy to bring back the project better than ever!

The work

The funding proposal is to finish porting to Rust, bring SparkleShare in line with modern security and privacy practices, and design a fresh user interface informed by years worth of community feedback.

The goal is to get a Linux release back on Flathub. I’m planning to post frequent updates, so subscribe or follow me on GitHub or the Fediverse.

Version:7.1.8 (stable) Released:2026-08-09 Source:linux-7.1.8.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.1.8.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.1.8

Version:6.18.44 (longterm) Released:2026-08-09 Source:linux-6.18.44.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.44.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.44

Version:6.12.103 (longterm) Released:2026-08-09 Source:linux-6.12.103.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.103.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.103

Version:6.6.151 (longterm) Released:2026-08-09 Source:linux-6.6.151.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.6.151.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.6.151

"I've been a Linux IT administrator for 30 years now," says crhylove (Slashdot reader #205,956), in a new video on his YouTube channel. "I used to be a data center architect, at one point I was the IT director for 13 school districts... I just haven't been happy overall with all the other operating systems out there... " I've been working really diligently for the last few weeks on a new distro called Spaced Linux that is exactly what I want to use. It's heavily focused on the [zoom-friendly 3D] Compiz desktop, very efficient using the rolling Devuan Ceres backend, and avoids dependency hell by promoting mostly Flatpak usage. It's still early, but it's already working great for me, it's been my daily driver for a few weeks now. There's also user-friendly themes — everything from Linux, Android, GeoWorks, and Mac OS X to Windows 11, Windows XP, and even Windows 3.11 (dark or light theme). And you can also run Windows apps under Wine. "And let me tell you, Nvidia runs perfectly on here now..." he adds in the video. "It just works really, really well out of the box." He's now working on voice-command features, bur argues that Spaced Linux "is already extremely usable, extremely efficient, extremely fast, and extremely reliable.... And it's only going to get better and better."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In these turbulent times, one frequently needs to run some tooling in a sandbox. The goal is mainly to reduce the blast radius: make it so programs within the sandbox cannot damage the host system (e.g. delete or overwrite something unintended), but also, to a lesser extent, to hide most of the filesystem to avoid exfiltrating sensitive data.

Recently, Bartosz Taudul (of Tracy fame) showed how to use systemd-nspawn for this purpose. He creates a container configuration, installs a distro inside, and bind-mounts some cache and project folders from the host. The mounts have an overlayfs on top, so within the container, tools can write over the files, but those writes do not affect the host filesystem.

I also want to share my sandboxing approach. My goal was to make it easy to use and reduce friction as much as possible, so that I always have a sandbox at my fingertips.

The result boils down to spawning a container-like environment, sharing enough of the host filesystem read-only to make all host binaries runnable, and sharing the current working directory read-write. Within this sandbox, you don’t need to install a separate distro—everything from your host just works, while the filesystem is kept mostly isolated (except for the folder where you run the sandbox).

For example, I’ll run the script in a Tracy checkout.

┌ ((8c8d451a)) ~/s/c/tracy └─ box fish Welcome to fish, the friendly interactive shell Type help for instructions on how to use fish yalter@sandbox ~/s/c/tracy>

I can run the build since all my host binaries are accessible:

yalter@sandbox ~/s/c/tracy> meson setup build The Meson build system Version: 1.11.2 Source dir: /home/yalter/source/cpp/tracy Build dir: /home/yalter/source/cpp/tracy/build Build type: native build Project name: tracy Project version: 0.13.1 C++ compiler for the host machine: /usr/bin/ccache c++ (clang 22.1.8 "clang version 22.1.8 (AerynOS)") C++ linker for the host machine: c++ ld.lld 22.1.8 Host machine cpu family: x86_64 Host machine cpu: x86_64 Checking if define "_MSC_VER" exists: NO Run-time dependency threads found: YES Found pkg-config: YES (/usr/bin/pkg-config) 2.5.1 Build targets in project: 1 Found ninja-1.13.2 at /usr/bin/ninja yalter@sandbox ~/s/c/tracy> ninja -C build ninja: Entering directory `build' [2/2] Linking target libtracy.so

The home folder contains the working directory, and is otherwise mostly empty:

yalter@sandbox ~/s/c/tracy> ls -l ~ total 0 drwx------ 4 1000 1000 80 Aug 9 20:20 source/

I can write into the home folder, but the write will go into a tmpfs, and will not affect the host system:

yalter@sandbox ~/s/c/tracy> touch ~/evil yalter@sandbox ~/s/c/tracy> ^D ┌ ((8c8d451a)) ~/s/c/tracy └─ cat ~/evil cat: /home/yalter/evil: No such file or directory

Only changes to the Tracy folder, where I ran the sandbox, persisted on the host, all with correct user ID and everything:

┌ ((8c8d451a)) ~/s/c/tracy └─ ls -l build/ total 28K drwxr-xr-x 1 yalter yalter 48 Aug 9 20:21 libtracy.so.p drwxr-xr-x 1 yalter yalter 496 Aug 9 20:21 meson-info drwxr-xr-x 1 yalter yalter 56 Aug 9 20:21 meson-logs drwxr-xr-x 1 yalter yalter 310 Aug 9 20:21 meson-private drwxr-xr-x 1 yalter yalter 40 Aug 9 20:21 meson-uninstalled -rw-r--r-- 1 yalter yalter 5,3K Aug 9 20:21 build.ninja -rw-r--r-- 1 yalter yalter 545 Aug 9 20:21 compile_commands.json -rwxr-xr-x 1 yalter yalter 14K Aug 9 20:21 libtracy.so The box script #

I use Bubblewrap to spawn the sandbox. This is an unprivileged sandboxing tool used by Flatpak (though, I hear there are plans to replace it with something else).

The script itself composes a long bwrap invocation. Let’s look at some of the parts.

#!/usr/bin/env bash set -euo pipefail # Export ALLOW_NET=0 to disable network access inside the sandbox. # # Keep in mind that if your X11/Xwayland doesn't check Xauth, # then network access lets the sandbox connect to your X11 # via an abstract Unix socket. This is quite dangerous. ALLOW_NET="${ALLOW_NET:-1}" # The current folder that we're binding read-write. REPO="$(readlink -f .)" BWRAP=( bwrap --die-with-parent # Unshare (isolate) a bunch of things inside the sandbox. --unshare-pid --unshare-uts --unshare-cgroup-try --unshare-user-try --cap-drop ALL # Create/mount important folders. --proc /proc --dev /dev --tmpfs /tmp --tmpfs /var --dir /run --dir /etc --hostname sandbox # Warning: this script shares all environment variables. # If on your system the environment can contain secrets, # you may want to clear them: # --clearenv # Bind the current folder read-write and chdir there. --bind "$REPO" "$REPO" --chdir "$REPO" ) # --- Read-only system binds --- SYS_RO_BINDS=( # Folders with binaries and libraries. /usr /bin /sbin /lib /lib64 # Random configuration files that programs tend to need. /etc/alternatives /etc/nsswitch.conf /etc/hosts /etc/localtime /etc/timezone /etc/pki /etc/ca-certificates /etc/ssl /etc/crypto-policies /etc/fonts # I fill these as I bump into problems, more or less. /etc/java /etc/texlive /var/lib/texmf /usr/lib/jvm /usr/share/java ) # Bind all of them read-only. for p in "${SYS_RO_BINDS[@]}"; do [[ -e "$p" ]] && BWRAP+=( --ro-bind "$p" "$p" ) done BWRAP+=( --ro-bind-try /etc/ld.so.cache /etc/ld.so.cache ) # resolv.conf is fun because it's a symlink into /run, # a folder which we do not want to expose. RESOLV_REAL="$(readlink -f /etc/resolv.conf 2>/dev/null || true)" if [[ -n "$RESOLV_REAL" && -f "$RESOLV_REAL" ]]; then BWRAP+=( --ro-bind "$RESOLV_REAL" /etc/resolv.conf ) fi # Unshare the network if needed. if [[ "$ALLOW_NET" -eq 0 ]]; then BWRAP+=( --unshare-net ) fi # Create a fresh home directory. # The username and the path is the same as on the host # so that everything keeps working. BWRAP+=( --setenv HOME "$HOME" --dir "$HOME" ) # --- Home read-only binds --- HOME_RO_BINDS=( .cargo/bin .cargo/config.toml .local/bin .local/lib/node_modules .rustup .fonts .local/share/fonts .local/share/nvim/site/parser .gitconfig .config/git .config/tmux .cache/ms-playwright .cache/corepack ) for rel in "${HOME_RO_BINDS[@]}"; do [[ -e "$HOME/$rel" ]] && BWRAP+=( --ro-bind "$HOME/$rel" "$HOME/$rel" ) done # --- Home overlays --- # The sandbox can write here, but the changes # will not affect the host filesystem. HOME_TMP_OVERLAYS=( .cache/fontconfig .cargo/registry .cargo/git .gradle .npm .cache/npm .local/share/pnpm/store .cache/yarn .cache/cpm .texlive2023 ) for rel in "${HOME_TMP_OVERLAYS[@]}"; do [[ -d "$HOME/$rel" ]] && BWRAP+=( --overlay-src "$HOME/$rel" --tmp-overlay "$HOME/$rel" ) done # Set up $PATH with the paths that we have inside this sandbox. BWRAP+=( --setenv PATH "$HOME/.cargo/bin:$HOME/.local/bin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/bin:/bin" ) # Execute our big commandline and pass it # the rest of the arguments (the command to run). CMD=( "${@:-bash}" ) exec "${BWRAP[@]}" "${CMD[@]}"

Many lines, but most of them are just listing directories to mount.

If you want to run GUI apps in the sandbox, you’ll need to create an XDG_RUNTIME_DIR and mount a Wayland socket:

# Export PASS_WAYLAND=1 to enable Wayland access. # Warning: it is currently NOT SANDBOXED (e.g. with security-context protocol). # See https://niri-wm.github.io/niri/Security-Model.html#unsandboxed-clients # for an example of what that implies. PASS_WAYLAND="${PASS_WAYLAND:-0}" # Export PASS_DRI=1 to enable DRI (GPU) access for hardware acceleration. PASS_DRI="${PASS_DRI:-0}" # Export PASS_X11=1 to enable X11 (Xwayland) access. PASS_X11="${PASS_X11:-0}" if [[ "$PASS_DRI" -eq 1 && -d /dev/dri ]]; then BWRAP+=( --dev-bind /dev/dri /dev/dri ) fi # EGL complains without this. BWRAP+=( --ro-bind /sys /sys ) # Wayland: bind only the socket into a fresh runtime dir. XDG_RT="${XDG_RUNTIME_DIR:-}" WAYLAND_SOCK="${WAYLAND_DISPLAY:-wayland-0}" if [[ "$PASS_WAYLAND" -eq 1 && -n "$XDG_RT" && -S "$XDG_RT/$WAYLAND_SOCK" ]]; then BWRAP+=( --dir /run/user --dir /run/user/1000-sbox --bind "$XDG_RT/$WAYLAND_SOCK" "/run/user/1000-sbox/$WAYLAND_SOCK" --setenv XDG_RUNTIME_DIR /run/user/1000-sbox --setenv WAYLAND_DISPLAY "$WAYLAND_SOCK" ) else BWRAP+=( --unsetenv WAYLAND_DISPLAY ) fi # X11. DISPLAY_VAR="${DISPLAY:-}" if [[ "$PASS_X11" -eq 1 && -n "$DISPLAY_VAR" && -d /tmp/.X11-unix ]]; then BWRAP+=( --ro-bind /tmp/.X11-unix /tmp/.X11-unix --setenv DISPLAY "$DISPLAY_VAR" ) else # Make it harder for accidental X11: unset DISPLAY. BWRAP+=( --unsetenv DISPLAY ) fi

That’s about it for the script. If needed, it’s easy to mount more folders by adding them into one of the arrays. The script doesn’t require elevated privileges to run.

Just remember that the folder where you run it is mounted read-write with the sandbox. When I want to run a dangerous command without affecting the files in the repository I’m working on, I just make a temporary copy:

project > cd .. > git clone project project2 > cd project2 project2 > box fish project2@sandbox > ...some dangerous command... ... project2@sandbox > ^D project2 > cd .. > rm -rf project2

Another trick I recently did: I created a read-only GitHub personal access token, and automatically put it into $GH_TOKEN in the sandbox. This way, commands like gh pr list work in the sandbox without having any write access.

Conclusion #

This is very much not a polished tool, but rather a script I’ve been adding on to here and there for several months. I wanted to share it because I think it’s fairly generic (works on both Fedora and AerynOS at least), and avoids a number of pain points with other sandboxing approaches:

• no extra setup required, just one command
• no separate distro installation, uses the host system binaries and libraries directly. As a corollary, anything you build inside this sandbox will work on the host
• no manual folder binding, passes through the current folder
• paths and UID match the host, no broken file permissions
• no sudo needed

One limitation is that I haven’t been able to make podman run inside this sandbox yet. I tried once briefly, but kept hitting weird errors. Maybe it needs some capabilities exposed; not sure.

This is also obviously not intended as a bulletproof sandbox for running fully untrusted code, in fact I wouldn’t be too surprised if I left some gaping holes by mistake (please let me know if I did).

OpenAI announced Friday it's pausing work on its Astra AI model because of security concerns. The Guardian reports: The company had evaluated the agent, Astra, and found "significant advancements in agentic coding and cybersecurity", which had moved to a "critical" threshold... OpenAI stated that the model was not involved in an incident in which one of its AI agents went rogue during a test, accessed the open web and hacked a startup, Hugging Face... The reports have increased concerns about advancements in AI models and humans' ability to control them. Still, critics of the AI industry have warned that such disclosures from OpenAI and its competitors Anthropic and Meta could be designed to generate hype about the technology's power and thus spur additional interest from investors. To prevent potential rogue behavior from AI agents, OpenAI is "implementing stricter security controls for higher-capability models and associated activities, including isolated testing environments, restricted network and tool access", the company's blogpost stated. It will also install "enhanced model weight protections and encryption, additional monitoring and detection capabilities". The company will pause internal activities involving Astra that do not meet these new requirements. "We believe it's important to be transparent with the public and the safety and security communities about this potential shift in capabilities..." OpenAI wrote in a blog post titled "Responding to the next frontier of critical cyber capabilities." Under our Preparedness Framework, a model reaches the Critical cybersecurity threshold if it can identify and develop functional zero-day exploits of all severity levels in many hardened real-world critical systems without human intervention, or can devise and execute end-to-end novel strategies for cyberattacks against hardened targets given only a high level desired goal. While we continue to benchmark and assess this model, our preliminary evaluations indicate strong enough performance that we cannot rule out Critical capability level at this time... Accordingly, we have scaled up robustness testing of our safeguards and security controls so that they are appropriate for a deployment of these capabilities... - We are implementing stricter security controls for higher-capability models and associated activities, including isolated testing environments, restricted network and tool access, enhanced model weight protections and encryption, additional monitoring and detection capabilities, and sandboxed execution. - We are pausing internal activities involving Astra that do not yet meet these strengthened security control requirements. - We have implemented universal monitoring for risky actions and misalignment across all agentic applications of Astra, including training and evaluation. Monitors evaluate the model's Chain of Thought and trigger a security response to review and interrupt high risk activity. - We will work with relevant government agencies and select AI safety organizations to test the capabilities for this model... We believe advanced cyber-capable models should help defenders identify and address vulnerabilities before attackers do. We're committed to working alongside governments, safety institutes, and civil society to ensure that the frontier capabilities of models like Astra, and those that follow, are deployed responsibly and broadly for the benefit of all humanity.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers believe they've found evidence that brain signals reveal the pitches of notes in imagined musical melodies, reports Medical Express: Study participants were 10 epilepsy patients with electrodes on the surfaces of their brains for clinical monitoring. Participants quietly listened to the first bars of children's tunes, then imagined the melodies of subsequent bars before humming their imagined melodies. Brain activity from the patients carried information about relative pitches within the imagined melodies. Combining note-level pitch predictions over time allowed the research team to recreate melodic changes that reflected the structure of the imagined songs... "The model we created decodes relative pitch classes — such as do, re, mi, fa, sol, and la — rather than exact, absolute pitches," [said tudy co-lead Jii Kwon of Seoul National University]. "This is useful because people often recognize melodies by the relationships between notes, even when the same melody is played in a different key."

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The new GNOME Boxes app for accessing virtual systems has reached beta, announced This Week in GNOME. There's also been more work on the Sushi file previewer for Nautilus, and Papers 51 Beta can now add visual signatures to PDF documents. But Phoronix noted one more announcement. "Germany's Sovereign Tech Agency announced earlier this year a new fellowship program and now as part of that, for the next two years GNOME has a fellow dedicated to working on design and community management... paid to help developers with design feedback and reviews, mock-up creation, and other GNOME design related efforts..." From the blog post by GNOME Design Team member Philipp Sauberzweig: I have been contributing to GNOME design as a volunteer for several years... I believe that it's essential for a free and democratic society to ensure free and independent access to these technologies. To achieve this goal, end-user devices based on free and open-source software are key, and the GNOME desktop and its app ecosystem offer a powerful alternative to proprietary platforms... This two-year fellowship is a great honor and marks a significant change in my life. It is a unique opportunity for me to devote my skills and experience entirely to a project I strongly believe in. During my two-year fellowship, I will support GNOME maintainers and developers with design feedback and reviews, create mockups, and coordinate efforts to standardize design patterns. My other activities focus on lasting improvements through two strategic initiatives: expanding the design community to increase capacity and enhancing our design tooling to reduce overhead and simplify onboarding... To attract new contributors, I will increase the visibility of design work by writing regular blog posts, giving presentations, and running workshops at conferences and hackathons. New contribution opportunities for newcomers will be created with clear instructions for independent activities such as collecting state-of-the-art examples, running accessibility and user tests, and creating mockups. Design reviews will be used as mentorship opportunities, pairing regular design contributors with experienced designers for peer review and knowledge sharing... If you're interested in contributing to GNOME design, check out the Design Team page on the Welcome to GNOME website, familiarize yourself with the Human Interface Guidelines, and join our Matrix channel. If you're a GNOME developer feel free to reach out to me via Matrix and involve me in design reviews. Jakub Beránek from the Rust compiler and infrastructure team also earned a fellowship in Germany's Sovereign Tech program, focusing on improving the Rust toolchain's tooling and infrastructure for Rust's developers. Other fellows include Pablo Neira Ayuso (Linux kernel maintainer for the Netfilter subsystem), CPython core developer Stan Ulbrych, and Python core developer Hugo van Kemenade, FreeBSD contributor Alexander Ziaee.

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Dozens of Flock cameras have been vandalized around Dallas Texas in the last six months, reports a local news station. In Utah, ABC News reports, a county sheriff's office even said Wednesday a Flock camera was even vandalized within days of its being installed. And in the Minnesota city of Winona, "Every Flock license plate reader camera operated by the Winona Police Department has been sawed off and stolen in what investigators believe was a coordinated theft," according to local media: All eight cameras were taken August 1, according to the Winona Police Department. A patrol officer first noticed the cameras had not sent any alerts in 24 hours. When officers checked the locations, they found the cameras had been cut from their poles and taken. The poles were left behind. Two additional Flock cameras on the Mississippi River Bridge, owned by Buffalo County, were also stolen in the same manner... The thefts are part of a broader national trend. Flock cameras have been vandalized and cut down in communities across the country. When someone in Florida filmed a damaged Flock camera lying in the grass in Florida, their footage attracted 980,000 views on social media, according to a local news report, with the uploader saying "Most of the people that are commenting are against Flock cameras." But that report adds it's one of at least five cameras recently damaged just in Florida: - In another incident, investigators "found the black camera and its pole lying on the ground." - Two days later, sheriff's deputies found a camera destroyed "with pieces scattered on the ground. Deputies reported the damage appeared to have been caused by a blunt object." - On July 31, "Police said two camera poles had been intentionally cut in half, causing an estimated $10,000 in damage to the system." In West Virginia 20-year-old Wesley Jackson has been arrested for allegedly vandalizing Flock cameras, with another 20-year-old (a university student) now arrested for being his accomplice, according to a local news report. Ironically, Jackson's arrest was made possible partly by information from... automated license plate readers. But the Washington Post notes there's now a flood of Facebook commenters jokingly offering to provide a fake alibi: "Couldn't have been him — we were out counting blades of grass," said one of the 29,000 commenters on a post about the arrest from the local news station WDTV. Others attested that the man, Wesley Jackson, had been helping them "replace the roof on a homeless shelter," "playing halo 2," "changing the tires" on their car or giving their "doggie a treat" at the time the cameras were destroyed. Meanwhile, the anti-surveillance group DeFlock reports 100 communities have now rejected automated license plate readers. Wednesday an Arizona county sheriff explained to his local Board of Supervisors why he will not renew his office's contract with Flock when it expires next month. Local Arizona media reports: "We have a camera system that can do facial recognition technology and can start building a data set on what our citizens are doing on a day-to-day basis," Teeple told supervisors. "That, in my training and experience, is a huge Fourth Amendment violation." Recently an Arizona man even told his city council he'd be launching AI-powered satellites to monitor "where government officials go, where they stop, who they meet with, and when they return home," reports 404 Media: It would be no different than how the city monitors its citizens using Flock cameras, he said... He said he'd already started compiling profiles on their vehicles, spouses vehicles, children's vehicles, and planned to combine that data with Bluetooth signals, advertising IDs, and commercial data sources, "so our authorized users can replay the movements of every government official and their immediate family," he said. Local businesses would be invited to join the network, to "protect" officials while they shop, eat at restaurants, and move around the city. And CNET reports "a quiet battle is happening across the US" between "towns working to adopt Flock Safety systems and those trying to ban them entirely." From major cities like Los Angeles canceling its Flock contract to towns wrapping Flock AI cams in plastic bags because Flock won't take them down, it's a wild time for surveillance and questions about government accountability.

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To celebrate Quake's 30th anniversary, Bethesda released "a brutal new episode" — a new campaign chapter titled Dawn of the Machine "delivering ferocious combat, labyrinthine level design, and nightmarish realms that twist reality beyond recognition..." Face deadly new twists on familiar foes, including the Rocket Ogre, Demo Dog, Blood Shambler, and more. Each variant introduces lethal new behaviours — from overwhelming firepower to explosive death traps — forcing you to rethink every encounter. Expand your arsenal with brutal variants inspired by classic Quake expansions, including the Super Axe — unleashing lightning on successive strikes — and the Laser Cannon, firing ricocheting projectiles that tear through enemies from every angle... Reality is never stable. Shift between dimensions to solve puzzles and navigate the world, or find hidden secrets scattered throughout the realms. Face enemies that rise again or transform after death, and experience encounters where the rules change without warning — forcing you to adapt or be overrun. More details from Ars Technica: This is part of a series of new campaign chapters, all developed by MachineGames "in collaboration with id Software." MachineGames is best known for making the games in the relatively recent Wolfenstein reboot series, as well as Indiana Jones and the Great Circle. The Quake maps are made by a team dubbed "Quake Club," which includes several MachineGames employees who work on Quake maps in their spare time. The ambition and scope of some of these maps is beyond what was typical for Quake maps back in the late '90s, thanks in part to the team's use of TrenchBroom, a newer map editor that works well on modern systems and is easier to work with and more capable than what folks were using in those days. There are 19 new levels, and they have several new gameplay gimmicks, like a time loop mechanic and a disorienting-but-cool teleportation system that makes it look like the levels are changing on the fly — kind of similar to the multi-time-period levels we saw in Titanfall 2 or Dishonored 2, though in these Quake maps the time shifts happen without player input. There's also new music... The new maps have been added to the campaign list in the remastered version of Quake, and like that remaster, they're available free to anyone who already owns Quake on Steam, as well as Quake on current and last-gen PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo consoles.

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IGN reports: [A] new report suggests that all three memory manufacturers — Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron — have collectively sold through their 2027 memory manufacturing capacity to, you guessed it, AI companies. According to a report from Digitimes and spotted by TweakTown, all DRAM and HBM capacity has been sold through for 2027, with no further supply planned. (The companies themselves have not yet confirmed this to be the case.) Of course, that only means that retail prices are going to go up even further in the near future. Selling through all the capacity for next year would be bad enough for consumers, but the problem is that most of the companies buying up this capacity have done so through long-term purchasing agreements, essentially pre-ordering memory that hasn't even been manufactured yet over a five-year term. Unless more capacity opens up somewhere in the next few years, it's hard to imagine that RAM will become more affordable and less scarce any time soon. It's not just memory that's affected. According to that Digitimes report, NAND storage is growing in demand too. Luckily, NAND capacity hasn't been completely absorbed, because there are more companies supplying the stuff. But it's not exactly hard to see that SSDs have been growing steadily more expensive over the last six months or so.

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"Google should be required to divest the Chrome browser, and prohibited from paying Apple to distribute Google's search engine, the nonprofit advocacy group Public Knowledge argues in a new court filing," MediaPost reports, citing a friend-of-the-court brief filed Tuesday in the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals: The group adds that "independent ownership" of Chrome "would open the distribution channel Google controls and allow Chrome to serve browser users when it makes privacy decisions and determines how to integrate search and (artificial intelligence)..." In September 2025, [U.S. District Court Judge] Mehta issued a remedies order that requires Google to share some data about users' searches with "qualified" competitors and to provide syndicated search results and ads to those competitors. The order also prohibits Google from entering into exclusive distribution contracts for Google Search, Chrome, Google Assistant and the Gemini app for six years, but allows the company to continue to make payments for search-ad revenue or distribution to Apple, Mozilla and others... Google recently appealed Mehta's order. The company argued in its written brief that it "prevailed in the marketplace fair and square," adding that Apple and Mozilla "sensibly chose" Google as the default search engine "because it gave their users the best experience," and because Apple and Mozilla would earn the most ad revenue through the deals. The [U.S.] Justice Department and states countered to the appellate court last week that the liability finding should stand, and also argued that Google should have been banned from paying Apple and Mozilla for placement as the default search engine on their browsers. [Antitrust enforcers had originally asked the judge to order Google to divest Chrome, but he's already rejected that request.] The government did not argue in its appellate papers that Google should be forced to sell Chrome. But Public Knowledge independently contends in its friend-of-the-court brief that divestiture would benefit consumers... "Divestiture would place those decisions with an institution whose success depends on serving browser users primarily...." The group is calling the appellate court's attention to Google's April 2025 decision to preserve tracking cookies — a reversal from its earlier plans to block third-party cookies by default. "Google is in the position of both deciding Chrome's tracking rules while running the advertising business affected by them," Public Knowledge writes. "An independent Chrome could make those decisions on behalf of users alone." But Firefox developer Mozilla filed its own friend-of-the-court brief Thursday warning Firefox could be forced to "exit the browser and browser engine markets" if it can't receive payment from Google for distributing its search engine, according to a later report from MediaPost: Federal and state antitrust enforcers recently asked the appellate court to reverse the portion of Mehta's order that allows those payments to continue. But Mozilla counters in its new friend-of-the-court brief that Mehta's decision regarding those payments was supported by the evidence --including a study it conducted concluding that its revenue would "decline dramatically" if forced to replace Google with Bing as Firefox's default search engine... Google is expected to file new arguments with the appellate court next month.

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Long-time Slashdot reader BrianFagioli is announcing that he's released a new iPhone app that creates a cryptographic witness for photos without uploading the original image. The app hashes the file, signs the hash using a dedicated identity stored in Apple Keychain, and publishes the witness to Nostr relays while keeping the photo inside the app unless the user chooses to export it. Rather than trying to determine whether a scene was genuine, the app — named Veridenz — answers a narrower question, by verifying whether a photo file matches the one that was originally witnessed. Users do not need a Nostr account because the app creates its own signing identity, keeping private documentation separate from a public Nostr profile. "The developer does not collect any data from this app," says its page in Apple's iPhone store. The app's tagline is "Capture. Prove. Verify."

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"If you call 911 in New Orleans, you may hear the sound of an artificial intelligence (AI) agent answering your call instead of a human voice," reports the Shreveport Times: The Orleans Parish Communication District (OPCD) is currently testing out the new tool designed to reduce the volume of calls human dispatchers must handle, which is over a thousand emergency calls a day. New Orleans implemented AI in April to answer 311 calls for non-emergencies. The AI was trained and programmed to provide information to callers, as the OPCD says 50% of 311 calls are for information, according to GovTech. AI is now answering 911 emergency calls in Louisiana's largest city and one of the cities with the highest call rates in the U.S. The OPCD is using Carbyne's AI Emergency Call Triage, with triage being the process of analyzing and prioritizing emergency calls. The AI system assesses incoming calls and can provide immediate feedback to callers. This is intended to handle the increase of calls that are related to one incident, so callers get automatically routed to an AI agent who asks if they are calling regarding the incident. If the answer is yes, then callers can receive information or updates, and if it's no, then the callers are transferred to a human. This combats multitudes of calls piling up and taking longer time to potentially answer an emergency call. The OPCD said the AI will not be used to handle emergency calls, only to direct such calls to a human dispatcher.

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In Georgia the Savannah Police Department "terminated four sworn officers and two civilian employees following an internal investigation into misuse of the department's Flock Safety License Plate Reader system," according to a local news report: All six cases are also under independent criminal investigation by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation... Investigators found that employees were running searches on personal acquaintances and family members. One officer was found to have given someone from an outside law enforcement agency access to SPD's Flock Safety system, which they weren't authorized to do. Elsewhere ABC News reports that a female North Carolina police officer was arrested Wednesday "for allegedly using Flock license plate readers to track her boyfriend's ex-wife, according to police..." The officer is accused of accessing the system for personal use 31 different times, including at least twice when she was off-duty, and listing most of the lookups as motor vehicle infractions. [Police chief Ron] Campurciani "added that the department is looking at 10 other potential misuse cases and said three 'look like they could be problematic.'" And an Ohio news station reports a police officer who recently resigned "while under internal investigation repeatedly used the Flock license plate reader system to search a vehicle registered to someone investigators identified as his likely domestic partner." Meanwhile, 404 Media reported this week that an Iowa county's usage police specifically tells police officers — in all capital letters — not to tell occupants of a vehicle that an automated license plate reader was used for a traffic stop. It also instructs officers to not even mention the use of the ALPR technology in their reports "unless absolutely necessary," according to information they'd obtained from a public records request," suggesting they instead they call the cameras "county resources": It is not just local police in small communities who are creating policies designed to obfuscate Flock usage. Earlier this year, we reported that police in multiple states were being told to be "as vague as permissible" about why they were using Flock because their searches could be obtained using public records requests, and that warning was being shared by the FBI and Department of Justice... In the [Iowa county] public records request, Sheriff Don Phillips said "there is no need" to tell people about the use of Flock... "because the information is verified by the deputy running the license plate. It is common practice for law enforcement to refrain from disclosing investigative methods and sources to prevent criminals from learning how to circumvent them."

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"In a milestone for energy storage technology, Peak Energy has selected Sacramento, California, as the home of America's first manufacturing facility dedicated to grid-scale sodium-ion battery systems," according to the sustainability news site Intelligent Living. The move "represents the first large-scale test of whether sodium-ion technology can deliver on its promise of cheaper, safer, and more sustainable grid storage at a scale that actually moves the needle for the U.S. electricity system." The 183,000-square-foot plant, representing a $71 million investment, will produce up to 4 gigawatt-hours of storage annually when production begins in early 2027. That is enough output each year to serve nearly four million homes, and it signals that sodium-ion technology has moved from laboratory promise to commercial reality... Peak Energy, founded in 2023 by former engineers from Tesla, Enovix, and Fluence, announced its Sacramento site selection on July 8, 2026, after a nationwide search that ultimately chose California over Texas... The factory is designed as a system assembly plant rather than a cell fabrication facility. Peak will receive sodium-ion cells, manufactured to its specifications by Chinese suppliers, and assemble them into complete 30-foot-long, 100,000-pound containerized storage systems. Each GS1.1 unit stores 3.1 megawatt-hours, enough to fully charge more than 40 electric vehicles... In the United States, Peak Energy has emerged as the most advanced grid-scale player. It has secured more than 6 GWh of customer commitments, including a landmark deal with Jupiter Power for up to 4.75 GWh through 2030, valued at up to $500 million. Energy Vault has committed to 1.5 GWh of sodium-ion storage for AI data center applications, and RWE Americas has already deployed Peak's first grid-scale system on the MISO grid in Wisconsin, energized in March 2026. General Motors is codeveloping sodium-ion cells with Peak at its Wallace Battery Cell Innovation Center in Michigan, testing 170- and 190-amp-hour cell formats with domestic production targeted for 2028. China, however, remains the global heavyweight. CATL, the world's largest battery manufacturer, unveiled its TENER Sodium energy storage system in June 2026 with a rated cycle life of 15,000 cycles and a projected 25-to-30-year service life. In April 2026, CATL signed a 60 GWh supply agreement with HyperStrong, the largest sodium-ion deal announced to date. BYD, HiNa Battery, and Farasis are also shipping commercial sodium-ion products, including batteries for a $400 electric scooter already on sale in China... Peak Energy's first commercial shipments from Sacramento are slated for the first quarter of 2027, with contracted deliveries to Jupiter Power, Energy Vault, and RWE Americas following shortly after. The company has publicly stated it needs to deploy over $100 million in product in 2026, up from roughly $10 million in 2025, and the Sacramento facility is sized to meet that demand. At the system level, sodium-ion grid storage is already operating. Peak's pilot installation at the SolarTAC testing facility in Watkins, Colorado, stores 3.5 MWh and has been running since 2025. The RWE Americas deployment in Wisconsin, energized in March 2026, marks the first time sodium-ion batteries have backed up the MISO grid, which serves 15 central U.S. states and the Canadian province of Manitoba... According to the International Energy Agency, sodium-ion manufacturing capacity announcements have accelerated sharply since 2024, with global pipelines now exceeding 400 GWh annually... Researchers are also pushing the technology forward. In May 2026, a team at the National University of Singapore published a breakthrough in all-solid-state sodium batteries that could further reduce costs and eliminate the flammable liquid electrolytes found in both lithium-ion and current sodium-ion designs. "The technology's sweet spot is utility-scale, multi-megawatt-hour installations," the article points out, "where the system-level cost savings from passive cooling and longer cycle life outweigh the per-cell energy density penalty..." The article also points out observations from the American Battery Leadership Coalition, an industry group advocating for sodium-ion policy support, that sodium-ion batteries can be built almost entirely from American materials, including coal, sawdust, and agricultural waste. This week Syntropic Power and UNIGRID Inc. also announced "a major partnership to commercialize UNIGRID's proprietary sodium chromium oxide (NaCrO2) battery technology across North America," reports Interesting Engineering, "targeting one gigawatt-hour (1 GWh) of deployments in 2027. The technology could be used in residential, virtual power plant, and large-scale stationary grid applications..." Independent testing by the ISO-accredited Rochester Institute of Technology (RIT) Battery Development Center revealed something surprising. UNIGRID's 210Ah cells displayed endothermic behavior during charging. This means the chemical reaction actually absorbs heat rather than dumping it into the environment. Coupled with a 97.9% cell-level round-trip energy efficiency and remarkable thermal stability under abuse testing, the battery stays cool on its own. The 210Ah sodium-ion cells deliver up to 218Ah of discharge capacity. It demonstrated exceptional durability, retaining over 99% of its capacity after 1,000 full discharge cycles, as well as heat-absorbing behavior during charging. These validated strengths allow Syntropic to optimize its product designs, enabling platforms like GridSpan [its modular DC platform designed for large-scale energy applications with flexible discharge durations ranging from 20 minutes to 20 hours] to operate safely and efficiently at grid scale without needing complex mechanical cooling systems... Commercialization kicks off with Tenet, a safety-focused, wall-mounted system for residential, light-commercial, and virtual power plant uses... Relying on abundant and widely distributed raw materials like sodium and chromium — rather than lithium and cobalt — protects manufacturers from geopolitical price spikes and material shortages. Apart from offering an alternative to lithium, a successful rollout will demonstrate that the most durable energy storage is the kind that could stay cool entirely on its own. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the news.

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The Dallas Business Journal reported Monday that the U.S. multinational paper goods company Kimberly-Clark announced "that its researchers identified and advanced patented technology transforming fibers from hesperaloe, a low-water-use plant with pointy leaves that thrives in the southwest region of the country, into material for paper towels." Discovering an alternative to conventional wood fiber "could reshape how the company, and the industry at large, manufactures products," according to article. And the move comes "amid growing pressure on manufacturers regarding their reliance on wood fibre from freshly felled trees," reports The Telegraph. "Campaigners claim that more than one million trees are cut down every day..." Unlike trees, hesperaloe can be grown on dry, low-quality farmland unsuitable for most food crops and harvested much more quickly. Kimberly-Clark said it had tested more than 70 potential materials before settling on hesperaloe. Earlier candidates included wheat straw, corn waste, seaweed, algae and chicken feathers. The US consumer goods giant will now develop the fibre at a pilot factory in Yuma, Arizona, working with local growers to determine whether the crop can be cultivated for commercial use in its tissue products. "This represents an exciting moonshot for Kimberly-Clark and the culmination of more than two decades of materials and plant science expertise," said Craig Slavtcheff, who is helping develop the new toilet paper. However, the company said products made from hesperaloe remained years away from supermarket shelves, with further research needed before the fibre could be produced at the scale required for global manufacturing. The US-based company has invested about $250m (£190m) in the project and filed more than 30 patents linked to the technology.

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