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A proposed California bill would require 3D printer makers to use state-certified software to detect and block files for gun parts, but advocates at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) say it would be easy to evade and could lead to widespread surveillance of users' printing activity. The Register reports: The bill in question is AB 2047, the scope of which, on paper, appears strict. The primary goal is clear and simple: to require 3D printer manufacturers to use a state-certified algorithm that checks digital design files for firearm components and blocks print jobs that would produce prohibited parts. [...] Cliff Braun and Rory Mir, who respectively work in policy and tech community engagement at the EFF, claim that the proposals in California are technically infeasible and in practice will lead to consumer surveillance. In a series of blog posts published this month, the pair argued that print-blocking technology -- proposals for which have also surfaced in states including New York and Washington - cannot work for a range of technical reasons. They argued that because 3D printers and other types of computer numerical control (CNC) machines are fairly simple, with much of their brains coming from the computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) software -- or slicer software -- to which they are linked, the bill would establish legal and illegal software. Proprietary software will likely become the de facto option, leaving open source alternatives to rot. "Under these proposed laws, manufacturers of consumer 3D printers must ensure their printers only work with their software, and implement firearm detection algorithms on either the printer itself or in a slicer software," wrote Braun earlier this month. "These algorithms must detect firearm files using a maintained database of existing models. Vendors of printers must then verify that printers are on the allow-list maintained by the state before they can offer them for sale. Owners of printers will be guilty of a crime if they circumvent these intrusive scanning procedures or load alternative software, which they might do because their printer manufacturer ends support." Braun also argued that it would be trivial for anyone who uses 3D printers to make small tweaks to either the visual models of firearms parts, or the machine instructions (G-code) generated from those models, to evade detection. Mir further argued that the bill offers no guardrails to keep this "constantly expanding blacklist" limited to firearm-related designs. In his view, there is a clear risk that this approach will creep into other forms of alleged unlawful activity, such as copyright infringement. [...] Braun and Mir have a list of other arguments against the bill. They say the algorithms are more than likely to lead to false positives, which will prevent good-faith users from using their hardware. Many 3D printer owners also have no interest in printing firearm components. Most simply want the freedom to print trinkets and spare parts while others use them to print various items and sell them as an income stream.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

alternative_right shares a report from 404 Media: An independent privacy audit of Microsoft, Meta, and Google web traffic in California found that the companies may be violating state regulations and racking up billions in fines. According to the audit from privacy search engine webXray, 55 percent of the sites it checked set ad cookies in a user's browser even if they opted out of tracking. Each company disputed or took issue with the research, with Google saying it was based on a "fundamental misunderstanding" of how its product works. The webXray California Privacy Audit viewed web traffic on more than 7,000 popular websites in California in the month of March and found that most tech companies ignore when a user asks to opt-out of cookie tracking. California has stringent and well defined privacy legislation thanks to its California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) which allows users to, among other things, opt out of the sale of their personal information. There's a system called Global Privacy Control (GPC), which includes a browser extension that indicates to a website when a user wants to opt out of tracking. According to the webXray audit, Google failed to let users opt out 87 percent of the time. "Google's failure to honor the GPC opt-out signal is easy to find in network traffic. When a browser using GPC connects to Google's servers it encodes the opt-out signal by sending the code 'sec-gpc: 1.' This means Google should not return cookies," the audit said. "However, when Google's server responds to the network request with the opt-out it explicitly responds with a command to create an advertising cookie named IDE using the 'set-cookie' command. This non-compliance is easy to spot, hiding in plain sight." The audit said that Microsoft fails to opt out users in the same way and has a failure rate of 50 percent in the web traffic webXray viewed. Meta's failure rate was 69 percent and a bit more comprehensive. "Meta instructs publishers to install the following tracking code on their websites. The code contains no check for globally standard opt-out signals -- it loads unconditionally, fires a tracking event, and sets a cookie regardless of the consumer's privacy preferences," the audit said. It showed a copy of Meta's tracking data which contains no GPC check at all.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is rolling out a Chrome feature called "Skills" that lets users save Gemini prompts as reusable one-click workflows they can run across multiple tabs. The feature also includes preset Skills from Google. It's launching first for Chrome desktop users set to US English. The Verge reports: Once you have access to the feature, it can be managed by typing a forward slash ( / ) in Gemini and clicking the compass icon. AI prompts can be saved as Skills directly from your Gemini chat history on desktop, where they'll then be available to reuse on any other desktop devices that are signed into the same Google account on Chrome. The aim is to spare Chrome users from having to manually retype frequently used Gemini prompts or having to copy and paste them over from a saved list. Some of the Skills made by early testers include commands for calculating the nutritional information of online recipes and creating a side-by-side comparison of product specifications while shopping across multiple tabs, according to Google. The company is also launching a library of preset Skills that you can save and use instead of making your own. These ready-to-use Skills can also be customized to better suit your needs, providing a starting point without requiring you to create your own from scratch.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Chicago concert superfan Aadam Jacobs who has recorded more than 10,000 shows since the 1980s is working with Internet Archive volunteers to digitize the collection before the cassettes deteriorate. "So far, about 2,500 of these tapes have been posted on the Internet Archive, including some rare gems like a Nirvana performance from 1989," reports TechCrunch. From the report: For many of these recordings, Jacobs was using pretty mediocre equipment, but the volunteer audio engineers working with the Internet Archive have made these tapes sound great. One volunteer, Brian Emerick, drives to Jacobs' house once a month to pick up more boxes of tapes -- he has to use anachronistic cassette decks to play the tapes, which get converted into digital files. From there, other volunteers clean up, organize, and label the recordings, even tracking down song names from forgotten punk bands. The archive is available here.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said social media platforms should remove addictive infinite-scroll features for young users as Britain considers new child-safety measures. "We're consulting on whether there should be a ban for under 16s," Starmer told BBC Radio. "But I think equally important, the addictive scrolling mechanisms are really problematic to my mind. They need to go." Reuters reports: Britain, like other countries, is considering restricting access to social media for children and it is testing bans, curfews and app time limits to see how they impact sleep, family life and schoolwork. Social media companies had designed algorithms that were intended to encourage addictive behavior, and parents were asking the government to intervene, Starmer said. [...] More than 45,000 people had already responded to its consultation on children's online safety, the UK government said, adding that there was still time to contribute before a deadline of May 26. "We want to hear from mums and dads who are worried about the amount of time their children spend online and what they are viewing," Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said on Monday. "We want to hear from teenagers who know better than anyone what it is like to grow up in the age of social media. And we want to hear from families about their views on curfews, AI chatbots and addictive features."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's Google is facing billions of dollars in potential damage claims as part of mass arbitration tied to the company's online search and advertising technology businesses, which courts have ruled were illegal monopolies. Advertisers are banding together to seek payouts through mass arbitration proceedings. While many companies that displayed ads purchased through Google -- including USA Today Co. and Advance Publications -- have sued for damages since the rulings in 2024, advertiser contracts with the search giant require mandatory arbitration over legal disputes. In arbitration, legal disputes are handled by a mediator, a process that tends to favor companies in individual claims. Mass arbitration -- where 25 or more claims against the same company are pooled together -- have become more common and provide a greater likelihood of settlement awards for claimants. Ashley Keller, a Chicago lawyer whose firm has handled mass arbitrations against DoorDash, Postmates and TurboTax-maker Intuit, said he's already signed up a "significant number" of advertisers to participate in claims against Google. The first of those are expected to be filed this week. "Two federal judges have already adjudicated Google to be a monopolist," Keller said in an interview with Bloomberg. "It seems sensible to seek redress." Keller, who is also representing Texas and other states in a lawsuit against Google for monopolization of advertising technology, estimates potential claims for online search and display ads could reach $218 billion or more, based on calculations from an economist his firm has hired. Similar mass arbitrations have lasted 12 to 24 months between the filing of claims and resolution, he said. "Given the nature of these matters, we cannot estimate a possible loss," Google said in a recent corporate filing. "We believe we have strong arguments against these open claims and will defend ourselves vigorously."

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Researchers at the University of Southern California say they've developed a memristor memory device that continued operating at 700 degrees Celsius. "And crucially, 700 degrees was not the limit, it was simply as hot as their testing equipment could go," adds ScienceAlert. "The device showed no signs of failing." From the report: The device is called a memristor and it's a nanoscale component that can both store information and perform computing operations. Think of it as a tiny sandwich with two electrode layers on the outside and a thin ceramic filling in the middle. The team built theirs from tungsten, the metal with the highest melting point of any element, combined with a ceramic called hafnium oxide, and with a layer of graphene at the bottom. Each material can withstand enormous heat. Together, they turned out to be extraordinary. What makes graphene the key ingredient is the way it interacts with tungsten at the atomic level. In a conventional device, heat causes metal atoms to drift slowly through the ceramic layer until they bridge the two electrodes, short circuiting everything and leaving the device permanently broken. Graphene stops that process dead. Its surface chemistry with tungsten is ... almost like oil and water. Tungsten atoms that drift toward the graphene find they simply cannot take hold, no anchor, no short circuit, no failure. The team used advanced electron microscopy and quantum level computer simulations to understand exactly why, turning a single lucky result into a repeatable principle. The findings have been published in the journal Science.

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Version:next-20260414 (linux-next) Released:2026-04-14

J. Allen Hynek started as an Air Force consultant brought in to help explain away early UFO reports, but over time he grew frustrated with what he saw as the government's effort to minimize unexplained cases rather than seriously investigate them. Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an article from Popular Mechanics, in collaboration with Biography.com, that argues Hynek's shift from skeptic to advocate helped shape modern ufology, and that the Air Force's attempts to control the narrative may have deepened the public distrust and conspiracy thinking that followed. From the report: Do you think the U.S. government is hiding, and possibly reverse-engineering, extraterrestrial technology? Think again. Or better yet, don't think about it at all. Nothing to see here. That's the underlying message of a report released in 2024 by the Department of Defense. The 63-page "Report on the Historical Record of U.S. Government Involvement with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP) " concludes that the DoD's All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO) "found no evidence that any [U.S. Government] investigation, academic-sponsored research, or official review panel has confirmed that any sighting of a UAP represented extraterrestrial technology." The AARO, as The Guardian summarizes, is "a government office established in 2022 to detect and, as necessary, mitigate threats including 'anomalous, unidentified space, airborne, submerged and transmedium objects.'" This report came on the heels of, and in contradiction to, what was arguably the most high-profile hearing on UAPs -- formerly known as unidentified flying objects, or UFOs -- in decades: the August 2023 testimony of "whistleblower" Dave Grusch. [...] The 2024 AARO report stated that during the time Hynek was working with Project Blue Book [the U.S. Air Force's best-known UFO investigation program], "about 75 percent of Americans trusted the [US government] 'to do the right thing almost always or most of the time.'" But, the report noted, since 2007, that number has never risen above 30 percent. "This lack of trust probably has contributed to the belief held by some subset of the U.S. population that the USG has not been truthful regarding knowledge of extraterrestrial craft." Ultimately, the Air Force's efforts to stifle Hynek -- pressuring him to offer the public standard responses to questions he wasn't even allowed to ask -- appears to have backfired. Ironically, the Air Force's attempts to quiet suspicions only fueled them, leading to more conspiracy theories and distrust. People came to believe that the government was hiding the truth, contrary to Hynek's actual revelation: that, in reality, the people at the top may not care much about finding the answers after all.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

It’s been a while since we last shared a major update of Graphs. We’ve had a few minor releases, but the last time we had a substantial feature update was over two years ago.

This does not mean that development has stalled, to the contrary. But we’ve been working hard on some major changes that took some time to get completely right. Now after a long development cycle, we’re finally getting close enough to a release to be able to announce an official beta period. In this blog, I’ll try to summarize most of the changes in this release.

New data types

In previous version of Graphs, all data types are treated equally. This means that an equation is actually just regular data that is generated when loading. Which is fine, but it also means that the span of the equation is limited, the equation cannot be changed afterward, and operations on the equation will not be reflected in the equation name. In Graphs 2.0, we have three distinct data types: Datasets, Generated Datasets and Equations.

Datasets are the regular, imported data that you all know and love. Nothing really has changed here. Generated Datasets are essentially the same as regular datasets, but the difference is that these datasets are generated from an equation. They work the same as regular datasets, but for generated datasets you can change the equation, step size and the limits after creating the item. Finally, the major new addition is the concept of equations. As the name implies, equations are generated based on an equation you enter, but they span an infinite range. Furthermore, operations you perform on equations are done analytically. Meaning if you translate the equation `y = 2x + 3` with 3 in the y-direction, it will change to `y = 2x + 6`. If you perform a derivative, the equation will change to `y = 2x` etcetera. This is a long-requested feature, and has been made possible thanks to the magic of sympy and some trickery on the canvas. Below, there’s a video that demonstrates these three data types.

https://blogs.gnome.org/sstendahl/files/2026/04/Screencast-From-2026-04-14-12-23-56.webm

Revamped Style Editor

We have redesigned the style editor, where we now show a live preview of the edited styles. This has been a pain point in the past, when you edit styles you cannot see how it actually affects the canvas. Now the style editor immediately tells you how it will affect a canvas, making it much easier to change the style exactly to your preferences.

We have also added the ability to import styles. Since Graphs styles are based on matplotlib styles, most features from a matplotlib style generally work. Similarly, you can now export your styles as well making it easier to share your style or simply to send it to a different machine. Finally, the style editor can be opened independently of Graphs. By opening a Graphs style from your file explorer, you can change the style without having to open Graphs.

We also added some new options, such as the ability to style the new error bars. But also the option to draw tick labels (so the values) on all axes that have ticks.

The revamped style editor

Improved data import

We have completely reworked the way data is imported. Under the hood, our modules are completely modular making it possible to add new parsers without having to mess with the code. Thanks to this rework, we have added support for spreadsheets (LibreOffice .ods and Microsoft Office .xlxs) and for sqlite databases files. The UI automatically updates accordingly. For example for spreadsheets, columns are imported by the column name (alphabetical letter) instead of an index, while sqlite imports show the tables present in the database.

The new import dialog

Furthermore, the import dialog has been improved. It is not possible to add multiple files at once, or import multiple datasets from the same file. Settings can be adjusted for each dataset individually. And you can even import just from a single column. We also added the ability to import error-bars on either axes, and added some pop-up buttons that explain certain settings.

Error bars

I mentioned this in the previous paragraph, but as it’s a feature that’s been requested multiple times I thought it’d be good to state this explicitly as well. We now added support for error bars. Error bars can easily be set on the import dialog, and turned on and off for each axis when editing the item.

Reworked Curve fitting

The curve fitting has been reworked completely under the hood. While the changes may not be that obvious as a user, the code has basically been completely replaced. The most important change is that the confidence band is now calculated completely correctly using the delta-method. Previously a naive approach was used where the limits were calculated using the standard deviation each parameter. This does not hold up well in most cases though. The parameter values that are given are also no longer rounded in the new equation names (e.g. 421302 used to be rounded to 421000). More useful error messages are provided when things go wrong, custom equations now have an apply button which improves smoothness when entering new equations, the root mean squared error is added as a second goodness-of-fit measure, you can now check out the residuals of your fit. The residuals can be useful to check if your fit is physically correct. A good fit will show residuals scattered randomly around zero with no visible pattern. A systematic pattern in the residuals, such as a curve or a trend suggests that the chosen model may not be appropriate for the data.

The old version of Graphs with the naive calculation of the confidence band The new version of Graphs with the proper calculation of the confidence band.

UI changes

We’ve tweaked the UI a bit all over the place. But one particular change that is worth to highlight, is that we have moved the item and figure settings to the sidebar. The reason for this, is that the settings are typically used to affect the canvas so you don’t want to lose sight of how your setting affects the canvas while you’re updating. For example, when setting the axes limits, you want to see how your graph looks with the new limit, having a window obstructing the view does not help.

Another nice addition is that you can now simply click on a part of the canvas, such as the limits, and it will immediately bring you to the figure settings with the relevant field highlighted. See video below.

https://blogs.gnome.org/sstendahl/files/2026/04/Screencast-From-2026-04-14-11-30-21.webm

Mobile screen support

With the upcoming release, we finally have full support for mobile devices. See here a quick demonstration on an old OnePlus 6:

https://blogs.gnome.org/sstendahl/files/2026/04/smoll.webm

Figure exporting

One nice addition is the improved figure export. Instead of simply taking the same canvas as you see on the screen, you can now explicitly set a certain resolution. This is vital if you have a lot of figures in the same work, or need to publish your figures in academic journals, and you need consistency both in size and in font sizes. Of course, you can still use the previous setting and have the same size as in the application.

The new export figure dialog

More quality of life changes

The above are just a highlight of some major feature updates. But there’s a large amount of features that we added. Here’s a rapid-fire list of other niceties that we added:

• • Multiple instances of Graphs can now be open at the same time
  • Data can now be imported by drag-and-drop
  • The subtitle finally shows the full file path, even in the isolated Flatpak
  • Custom transformations have gotten more powerful with the addition of new variables to use
  • Graphs now inhibits the session when unsaved data is still open
  • Added support for base-2 logarithmic scaling
  • Warnings are now displayed when trying to open a project from a beta version

And a whole bunch of bug-fixes, under-the-hood changes, and probably some features I have forgotten about. Overall, it’s our biggest update yet by far, and I am excited to finally be able to share the update soon.

As always, thanks to everyone who has been involved in this version. Graphs is not a one-person project. The bulk of the maintenance is done by me and Christoph, the other maintainer. And of course, we should thank the entire community. Both within GNOME projects (such as help from the design team, and the translation team), as well as outsiders that come with feedback, report or plain suggestions.

Getting the beta

This release is still in beta while we are ironing out the final issues. The expected release date is somewhere in the second week of may. In the meantime, feel free to test the beta. We are very happy for any feedback, especially in this period!

You can get the beta directly from flathub. First you need to add the flathub beta remote:

flatpak remote-add --if-not-exists flathub-beta https://flathub.org/beta-repo/flathub-beta.flatpakrepo

Then, you can install the application:
flatpak install flathub-beta se.sjoerd.Graphs

To run the beta version by default, the following command can be used:

sudo flatpak make-current se.sjoerd.Graphs beta

Note that the sudo is neccesary here, as it sets the current branch on the system level. To install this on a per-user basis, the flag –user can be used in the previous commands. To switch back to the stable version simply run the above command replacing beta with stable.

The beta branch on update should get updated somewhat regularly. If you don’t feel like using the flathub-beta remote, or want the latest build. You can also get the release from the GitLab page, and build it in GNOME Builder.

Computer systems, software, applications, and Linux servers are all vulnerable to network security threats. Failure to identify these cybersecurity vulnerabilities, often through modern vulnerability scanning tools, can leave companies exposed

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: For years pop culture has treated April 25 as the "perfect date," thanks to the famous Miss Congeniality line about needing only a light jacket. But new analysis from WeatherBug suggests that idea does not actually hold up when you look at the numbers. After reviewing U.S. weather data from 2018 through today, the company concluded that October 8 delivers the most reliable combination of comfortable temperatures and low rainfall nationwide. According to the analysis, the average conditions on that day land around 66F with just 0.0573 inches of precipitation. The study used population weighted weather data drawn from roughly 20 million daily WeatherBug users across the United States. When the company compared all days of the year, April 25 ranked only 80th, averaging about 60F and roughly 0.1297 inches of rain. The broader dataset also shows July dominating the hottest days of the year while January owns the coldest, with January 20 averaging just 33F nationally. While no single date guarantees perfect weather everywhere in a country as large as the U.S., the numbers suggest early October may quietly offer one of the most reliable windows for comfortable outdoor conditions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: AI experts and the public's opinion on the technology are increasingly diverging, according to Stanford University's annual report on the AI industry, which was released Monday. In particular, the report noted a growing trend of anxiety around AI and, in the U.S., concerns about how the technology will impact key societal areas, such as jobs, medical care, and the economy. [...] Stanford's report provides more insight into where all this negativity is coming from, as it summarizes data around public sentiment of AI across various sources. For instance, it pointed to a report from Pew Research published last month, which noted that only 10% of Americans said they were more excited than concerned about the increased use of AI in daily life. Meanwhile, 56% of AI experts said they believed AI would have a positive impact on the U.S. over the next 20 years. Expert opinion and public sentiment also greatly diverged in particular areas where AI could have a societal impact. Indeed, 84% of experts, the report authors noted, said that AI would have a largely positive impact on medical care over the next 20 years, but only 44% of the U.S. general public said the same. Plus, a majority (73%) of experts felt positive about AI's impact on how people do their jobs, compared with just 23% of the public. And 69% of experts felt that AI would have a positive impact on the economy. Given the supposed AI-fueled layoffs and disruptions to the workplace, it's not surprising that only 21% of the public felt similarly. Other data from Pew Research, cited by the report, noted that AI experts were less pessimistic on AI's impact on the job market, while nearly two-thirds of Americans (or 64%) said they think AI will lead to fewer jobs over the next 20 years. The U.S. also reported the lowest trust in its government to regulate AI responsibly, compared with other nations, at 31%. Singapore ranked highest at 81%, per data pulled from Ipsos found in Stanford's report. Another source looked at regulation concerns on a state-by-state level and concluded that, nationwide, 41% of respondents said federal AI regulation will not go far enough, while only 27% said it would go "too far." Despite the fears and concerns, AI did get one accolade: Globally, those who feel like AI products and services offer more benefits than drawbacks slightly rose from 55% in 2024 to 59% in 2025. But at the same time, those respondents who said that AI makes them "nervous" grew from 50% to 52% during the same period, per data cited by the report's authors.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Back in 2019, we undertook a radical overhaul of how GNOME app icons work. The old Tango-era style required drawing up to seven separate sizes per icon and a truckload of detail. A task so demanding that only a handful of people could do it. The "new" style is geometric, colorful, but mainly achievable. Redesigning the system was just the first step. We needed to actually get better icons into the hands of app developers, as those should be in control of their brand identity. That's where app-icon-requests came in.

As of today, the project has received over a hundred icon requests. Each one represents a collaboration between a designer and a developer, and a small but visible improvement to the Linux desktop.

How It Works

Ideally if a project needs a quick turnaround and direct control over the result, the best approach remains doing it in-house or commission a designer.

But if you're not in a rush, and aim to be a well designed GNOME app in particular, you can make use of the idle time of various GNOME designers. The process is simple. If you're building an app that follows the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines, you can open an icon request. A designer from the community picks up the issue, starts sketching ideas, and works with you until the icon is ready to ship. If your app is part of GNOME Circle or is aiming to join, you're far more likely to get a designer's attention quickly.

The sketching phase is where the real creative work happens. Finding the right metaphor for what an app does, expressed in a simple geometric shape. It's the part I enjoy most, and why I've been sharing my Sketch Friday process on Mastodon for over two years now (part 2). But the project isn't about one person's sketches. It's a team effort, and the more designers join, the faster the backlog shrinks.

Highlights

Here are a few of the icons that came through the pipeline. Each started as a GitLab issue and ended up as pixels on someone's desktop.

Alpaca, an AI chat client, went through several rounds of sketching to find just the right llama. Bazaar, an alternative to GNOME Software, took eight months and 16 comments to go from a shopping basket concept through a price tag to the final market stall. Millisecond, a system tuning tool for low-latency audio, needed several rounds to land on the right combination of stopwatch and waveform. Field Monitor shows how multiple iterations narrow down the concept. And Exhibit, the 3D model viewer, is one of my personal favorites.

You can browse all 127 completed icons to see the full range — from core GNOME apps to niche tools on Flathub.

Papers: From Sketch to Ship

To give a sense of what the process looks like up close, here's Papers — the GNOME document viewer. The challenge was finding an icon that says "documents" without being yet another generic file icon.

The early sketches explored different angles — a magnifying glass over stacked pages, reading glasses resting on a document. The final icon kept the reading glasses and the stack of colorful papers, giving it personality while staying true to what the app does. The whole thing played out in the GitLab issue, with the developer and designer going back and forth until both were happy.

While the new icon style is far easier to execute than the old high-detail GNOME icons, that doesn't mean every icon is quick. The hard part was never pushing pixels — it's nailing the metaphor. The icon needs to make sense to a new user at a glance, sit well next to dozens of other icons, and still feel like this app to the person who built it. Getting that right is a conversation between the designer's aesthetic judgment and the maintainer's sense of identity and purpose, and sometimes that conversation takes a while.

Bazaar is a good example.

The app was already shipping with the price tag icon when Tobias Bernard — who reviews apps for GNOME Circle — identified its shortcomings and restarted the process. That kind of quality gate is easy to understate, but it's a big part of why GNOME apps look as consistent as they do. Tobias is also a prolific icon designer himself, frequently contributing icons to key projects across the ecosystem. In this case, the sketches went from a shopping basket through the price tag to a market stall with an awning — a proper bazaar. Sixteen comments and eight months later, the icon shipped.

Get Involved

There are currently 20 open icon requests waiting for a designer. Recent ones like Kotoba (a Japanese dictionary), Simba (a Samba manager), and Slop Finder haven't had much activity yet and could use a designer's attention.

If you're a designer, or want to become one, this is a great place to start contributing to Free software. The GNOME icon style was specifically designed to be approachable: bold shapes, a defined color palette, clear guidelines. Tools like Icon Preview and Icon Library make the workflow smooth. Pick a request, start with a pencil sketch on paper, and iterate from there. There's also a dedicated Matrix room #appicondesign:gnome.org where icon work is discussed — it's invite-only due to spam, but feel free to poke me in #gnome-design or #gnome for an invitation. If you're new to Matrix, the GNOME Handbook explains how to get set up.

If you're an app developer, don't despair shipping with a placeholder icon. Follow the HIG, open a request, and a designer will help you out. If you're targeting GNOME Circle, a proper icon is part of the deal anyway.

A good icon is one of those small things that makes an app feel real — finished, polished, worth installing. Now that we actually have a place to browse apps, an app icon is either the fastest way to grab attention or make people skip. If you've got some design chops and a few hours to spare, pick an issue and start sketching.

Need a Fast Track?

If you need a faster turnaround or just want to work with someone who's been helping out with GNOME's visual identity for as long as I can remember — Hylke Bons offers app icon design for open source projects through his studio, Planet Peanut. Hylke has been a core contributor to GNOME's icon work for well over a decade. You'll be in great hands.

His service has a great freebie for FOSS projects — funded by community sponsors. You get three sketches to choose from, a final SVG, and a symbolic variant, all following the GNOME icon guidelines. If your project uses an OSI-approved license and is intended to be distributed through Flathub, you're eligible. Consider sponsoring his work if you can — even a small amount helps keep the pipeline going.

Previously, Previously.

Bloomberg's Mark Gurman reports that Apple is developing display-free AI smart glasses aimed at rivaling Meta's Ray-Bans, with multiple frame styles, a distinctive oval camera design, and tight iPhone integration. "The idea is to unveil the product at the end of 2026 or early the following year, with the actual release coming in 2027," writes Gurman. From the report: Like Meta's offering, Apple's glasses will be designed to handle everyday uses: capturing photos and videos, syncing with a smartphone for editing and sharing, handling phone calls, listening to notifications, playing music, and enabling hands-free interaction via a voice assistant. In Apple's case, that assistant will be a significantly upgraded Siri coming in iOS 27. The glasses are part of a broader, three-pronged AI wearables strategy that also includes new AirPods and a camera-equipped pendant. Each device is designed to leverage computer vision to interpret the user's surroundings and feed contextual awareness into Siri and Apple Intelligence. That will enable features like improved turn-by-turn map directions and visual reminders. When Apple typically enters a new product category, it offers clear advantages over what's currently available. We saw this with the original iPod, iPhone, iPad and Apple Watch -- and, even though it was a flop, the Vision Pro. That approach won't be as obvious with Apple's upcoming foldable iPhone, but we should see it on full display with the glasses. According to employees working on the project, Apple's strategy is to outdo competitors by tightly integrating the glasses with the iPhone and offering a higher-end build. While Meta relies heavily on partner EssilorLuxottica SA for frames, Apple is unsurprisingly planning to go at it alone in terms of design. That also should set it apart from Alphabet Inc.'s Google and Samsung Electronics Co., which are leaning on Warby Parker. Apple's design team has whipped up at least four different styles and plans to launch some or all of them, I'm told, as well as many color options. The latest units are made from a high-end material called acetate, which is known to be more durable and luxurious than the standard plastic used by many brands. Here are the designs in testing: - A large rectangular frame, reminiscent of Ray-Ban Wayfarers - A slimmer rectangular design, similar to the glasses worn by Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook - Larger oval or circular frames - A smaller, more refined oval or circular option

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More than 1,000 Hollywood figures, including major actors, writers, and directors, signed an open letter opposing Paramount Skydance's proposed takeover of Warner Bros. Discovery, arguing it would hurt an industry "already under severe strain." The deal is still under regulatory scrutiny in both the U.S. and U.K., while Paramount says the merger would strengthen competition and expand opportunities for creators. NBC News reports: "This transaction would further consolidate an already concentrated media landscape, reducing competition at a moment when our industries -- and the audiences we serve -- can least afford it," the signatories wrote in the letter, published early Monday on a website called Block the Merger. "The result will be fewer opportunities for creators, fewer jobs across the production ecosystem, higher costs, and less choice for audiences in the United States and around the world. Alarmingly, this merger would reduce the number of major U.S. film studios to just four," the signatories added. [T]he open letter illustrates the deep resistance to the deal among many members of Hollywood's creative community. The list of signatories includes A-list stars (Glenn Close, Ben Stiller), celebrated filmmakers (Yorgos Lanthimos, Denis Villeneuve) and acclaimed writers ("The Sopranos" creator David Chase). "Media consolidation has accelerated the disappearance of the mid-budget film, the erosion of independent distribution, the collapse of the international sales market, the elimination of meaningful profit participation, and the weakening of screen credit integrity," the signatories wrote. "Together, these factors threaten the sustainability of the entire creative community," they added. [...] Monday's open letter was spearheaded by a group of advocacy organizations -- including the Committee for the First Amendment, a free speech group led by Fonda, who warned that the merger "would be one of the most destructive threats to free speech and creative expression in our history." In the letter, first reported by The New York Times, the signatories expressed support for California Attorney General Rob Bonta, who has said the merger is "not a done deal." "These two Hollywood titans have not cleared regulatory scrutiny -- the California Department of Justice has an open investigation, and we intend to be vigorous in our review," Bonta said in a Feb. 26 post on X. Paramount Skydance said that they "hear and understand the concerns" and are committed to "protecting and expanding creativity." The studio also reiterated its commitment to releasing a minimum of 30 "high-quality feature films annually with full theatrical releases" and "preserving iconic brands with independent creative leadership" to make sure "creators have more avenues for their work, not fewer."

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This winter I was bored and needed something new, so I spent lots of my free time disassembling and analysing Monster World IV for the SEGA Mega Drive. More specifically, I looked at the 2008 Virtual Console revision of the game, which adds an English translation to the original 1994 release.

My long term goal would be to fully disassemble and analyse the game, port it to C or Rust as I do, and then port it to the Game Boy Advance. I don’t have a specific reason to do that, I just think it’s a charming game from a dated but charming series, and I think the Monaster World series would be a perfect fit on the Game Boy Advance. Since a long time, I also wanted to experiment with disassembling or decompiling code, understanding what doing so implies, understanding how retro computing systems work, and understanding the inner workings of a game I enjoy. Also, there is not publicly available disassembly of this game as far as I know.

As Spring is coming, I sense my focus shifting to other projets, but I don’t want this work to be gone forever and for everyone, especially not for future me. Hence, I decided to publish what I have here, so I can come back to it later or so it can benefit someone else.

First, here is the Ghidra project archive. It’s the first time I used Ghidra and I’m certain I did plenty of things wrong, feedback is happily welcome! While I tried to rename things as my understanding of the code grew, it is still quite a mess of clashing name conventions, and I’m certain I got plenty of things wrong.

Then, here is the Rust-written data extractor. It documents how some systems work, both as code and actual documentation. It mainly extracts and documents graphics and their compression methods, glyphs and their compression methods, character encodings, and dialog scripts. Similarly, I’m not a Rust expert, I did my best but I’m certain there is area for improvement, and everything was constantly changing anyway.

There is more information that isn’t documented and is just floating in my head, such as how the entity system works, but I yet have to refine my understanding of it. Same goes for the optimimzations allowed by coding in assembly, such as using specific registers for commonly used arguments. Hopefully I will come back to this project and complete it, at least when it comes to disassembling and documenting the game’s code.

The FBI searched the Texas home of a 20-year-old man accused of throwing a Molotov cocktail at Sam Altman's San Francisco residence. Authorities say the suspect also made threats at OpenAI's headquarters, and reports indicate he had written extensively about fears over AI and opposition to AI executives. The suspect reportedly authored a Substack blog and was a member of the Discord server PauseAI, an activist group focused on banning the development of the most powerful AI models to protect the public. In one post, they wrote: "These machines have already shown themselves to be unaligned with the interest of the people creating them. Models have often been found lying, cheating on tasks, and blackmailing their own creators whenever convenient; let alone the broader question of aligning them to whatever general 'human interest' may be." The Houston Chronicle reports: The search happened hours before the Justice Department charged 20-year-old Daniel Moreno-Gama with possession of an unregistered firearm and damage and destruction of property by means of explosives. An FBI spokesperson on Monday morning confirmed agents were executing a search warrant in Spring, but provided no other information. Around the same time, FOX News reported the search was being conducted at the home of Daniel Moreno-Gama, 20, who last week was arrested by San Francisco police suspicion of attempted murder, making criminal threats and possession of a destructive device. The charges were first reported by the Associated Press. When Moreno-Gama was arrested Friday, he was carrying a document that "identified views opposed to Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the executives of various AI companies," the Associated Press reported. Moreno-Gama has no criminal history in Harris or Montgomery counties, according to public records. [...] Agents had left the cul-de-sac by 1 p.m. It was unclear if they removed any items from the house. Another incident occurred outside Sam Altman's residence early Sunday morning. "Early Sunday morning, a car stopped and appears to have fired a gun at the Russian Hill home of OpenAI's CEO," reports The San Francisco Standard, citing reports from the local police department. Two suspects were arrested and booked for negligent discharge. UPDATE: The suspect has been charged with attempted murder.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: More than 70 civil liberties, domestic violence, reproductive rights, LGBTQ+, labor, and immigrant advocacy organizations are demanding that Meta abandon plans to deploy face recognition on its Ray-Ban and Oakley smart glasses, warning that the feature -- reportedly known inside the company as "Name Tag" -- would hand stalkers, abusers, and federal agents the ability to silently identify strangers in public. The coalition, which includes the ACLU, the Electronic Privacy Information Center, Fight for the Future, Access Now, and the Leadership Conference on Civil and Human Rights, is demanding Meta kill the feature before launch, after internal documents surfaced showing the company hoped to use the current "dynamic political environment" as cover for the rollout, betting that civil society groups would have their resources "focused on other concerns." Name Tag, as revealed in February by The New York Times, would work through the artificial intelligence assistant built into Meta's smart glasses, allowing wearers to pull up information about people in their field of view. Engineers have reportedly been weighing two versions of the feature: one that would only identify people the wearer is already connected to on a Meta platform, and a broader version that could recognize anyone with a public account on a Meta service such as Instagram. The coalition wants Meta to scrap the feature entirely. In a letter to CEO Mark Zuckerberg on Monday, it argues that face recognition in inconspicuous consumer eyewear "cannot be resolved through product design changes, opt-out mechanisms, or incremental safeguards." Bystanders in public have no meaningful way to consent to being identified, it says. Meta is also urged to disclose any known instances of its wearables being used in stalking, harassment, or domestic violence cases; disclose any past or ongoing discussions with federal law enforcement agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, about the use of Meta wearables or data from them; and commit to consulting civil society and independent privacy experts before integrating biometric identification into any consumer device. "People should be able to move through their daily lives without fear that stalkers, scammers, abusers, federal agents, and activists across the political spectrum are silently and invisibly verifying their identities and potentially matching their names to a wealth of readily available data about their habits, hobbies, relationships, health, and behaviors," write the groups, which also include Common Cause, Jane Doe Inc., UltraViolet, the National Organization for Women, the New York State Coalition Against Domestic Violence, the Library Freedom Project, and Old Dykes Against Billionaire Tech Bros, among others.

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"The new Linux kernel was released and it's kind of a big deal," writes longtime Slashdot reader rexx mainframe. "Here is what you can expect." Linuxiac reports: A key update in Linux 7.0 is the removal of the experimental label from Rust support. That (of course) does not make Rust a dominant language in kernel development, but it is still an important step in its gradual integration into the project. Another notable security-related change is the addition of ML-DSA post-quantum signatures for kernel module authentication, while support for SHA-1-based module-signing schemes has been removed. The kernel now includes BPF-based filtering for io_uring operations, providing administrators with improved control in restricted environments. Additionally, BTF type lookups are now faster due to binary search. At the same time, this release continues ongoing cleanup in the kernel's lower layers. The removal of linuxrc initrd code advances the transition to initramfs as the sole early-userspace boot mechanism. Linux 7.0 also introduces NULLFS, an immutable and empty root filesystem designed for systems that mount the real root later. Plus, preemption handling is now simpler on most architectures, with further improvements to restartable sequences, workqueues, RCU internals, slab allocation, and type-based hardening. Filesystems and storage receive several updates as well. Non-blocking timestamp updates now function correctly, and filesystems must explicitly opt in to leases rather than receiving them by default. Phoronix has compiled a list of the many exciting changes. Linus Torvalds himself announced the release, which can be downloaded directly from his git tree or from the kernel.org website. Linux 7.0 has a major new version number but it's "largely a numbering reset [...], not a sign of some unusually disruptive release," notes Linuxiac.

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