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AI entered software development at full speed this year, and it is significantly impacting open-source projects as well. In this article, I discuss several trends I have recently observed in open source in connection with AI, and how these trends are changing the world of open-source software.

This article was originally published on my Czech blog, but it received such an overhelming response that I decided to translate it into English and publish it here as well.

Project Inflation

One of the trends that AI brings in general is an explosion of content. Search results are filled with generated websites, and social networks are inundated with generated images and videos. Source code is no exception. Today, GitHub is drowning in an ever-increasing number of repositories.

However, it is not as if a larger number of high-quality projects are being created. On the contrary, these are projects where you have no idea whether you can rely on them or not. In the past, if you stumbled upon a more extensive project with thousands of lines of code, there was a certain assumption that if someone went to the trouble of creating something like that, they would have some knowledge of the problem, a personal connection to their creation, and some willingness to maintain it going forward.

You can no longer rely on this at all. Today, you can generate a project with several thousand lines of code in a matter of moments. It could be complete nonsense or even something dangerous; it could be something functional that someone generated for their own immediate needs and posted to GitHub, but with no interest in turning it into an open-source project. Because a repository with code doesn’t make an open-source project. The difference between a piece of code on GitHub and an open-source project is that an open-source project solves problems and use cases for its users, not just the author’s one-off need. And most authors of such quick-and-dirty code simply aren’t interested in doing that.

This is clearly visible in projects like MeshCore, for instance. There are dozens of forks of everything imaginable. Missing a feature in the official MeshCore firmware? You just fork it, vibe-code the missing piece, and dump it on GitHub as MeshCore-UltimateEdition. The problem is that it was created with minimal effort, the author usually has no relationship to it, gets bored after a month, and it becomes abandonware before it even has a chance to age.

About ten years ago, people started saying that the concept of Linux repositories had run its course. In the 2000s, they were practically the only source of Linux software. If a project didn’t make it into distribution repositories, it had a problem. But then the number of open-source projects grew at such a rate that distributions couldn’t keep up. Users had to start getting their software elsewhere, and software authors learned to do without distributions. Just a few years ago, the “everything I need, I find in Debian” approach seemed definitively dead.

However, it is possible that curated software sources – like Linux distribution repositories – will make a comeback. The open-source software world is becoming so chaotic that users will once again start appreciating sources containing curated software that someone has vetted for them and that they can rely on six months down the road.

Review Overwhelm

Another trend that AI has triggered in open source is ‘review overwhelm’. Previously, writing code acted as a natural filter because it required a non-trivial amount of effort and time investment. That is now gone, making code creation fast and easy. But someone still has to review this code before it goes into serious production. The review processes that worked in open-source projects for years are now at their capacity limits.

In GNOME 50, support for Google Drive was removed because nobody had been maintaining it for a long time. Users were naturally unhappy about it, and eventually, one user stepped up, re-added the support, and submitted it upstream to the gvfs project.

A colleague responsible for maintaining that project lamented that it was a change involving 4,000 lines of code. Even though it seems to work at a basic level, it was clearly generated using AI. He will still have to go through it line by line to verify that it actually works as intended and meets the code quality standards required to commit to maintaining it long-term.

Most of the effort has thus shifted from code creation to code review, which is typical for AI. The problem in open source, however, is that developers experienced enough to review and merge code were already a bottleneck before AI. Now, the problem has deepened significantly. And in the example above, my colleague can count himself lucky that the contributor is responsive and has shown long-term interest in the issue.

Today, that is more of a rare exception. Common contributions consist of someone wildly vibe-coding something without any deeper interest or understanding of the subject, and throwing it over the wall to the maintainers.

I have a fairly recent experience with this in Meshy. Someone submitted a pull request with 9,000 lines of changed code, which was supposed to add support for macOS. I spent an hour one evening doing a very quick review, and even during that short time, I ran into numerous issues: the code was blatantly AI-generated, several thousand lines were just completely useless replacements of single quotes with double quotes, parts of the code unrelated to the problem were modified, and it overwrote all the changes I had made in the main branch over the last few weeks.

The author never responded to my comments and I never heard from him again. My takeaway was that even that one hour was too big of a time investment for contributions like that, and next time I will reject them much faster.

Some projects are responding to this situation by tightening basic contribution requirements. For example, Flathub’s decision to reject AI-generated apps caused quite a stir. Many people criticized it as shooting themselves in the foot, but you have to look at their reality.

Flathub currently hosts several thousand apps, with more added every day. Only three people handle the reviews. Although their review process is highly automated, they do it very thoroughly, and a lot of manual input is still required. It’s clear their goal isn’t just to spot the worst slop, but to maintain a relatively high standard of code hygiene. In the last six months, I submitted two apps to Flathub, and the review process ultimately contributed to improving the quality of the apps themselves.

However, this has now clashed with the reality of people submitting completely vibe-coded apps without a shred of personal effort. The ticket template for requesting inclusion asks a few questions, including a requirement to upload a short video showing how the app works. It really isn’t demanding, and anyone can put it together in 15 minutes. Yet even that is too much effort for creators of AI slop.

Instead of fulfilling these minimal requirements, some labeled it an attack on Linux’s freedom and immediately vibe-coded an alternative to Flathub that was supposed to be open to everyone. Unsurprisingly, it barely lasted a month.

Not only do open-source maintainers lack the capacity to satisfy this demand for code review, but they are also losing the motivation to do it. Often, it would be faster for them to write the feature themselves, but the review process was historically how they cultivated new long-term contributors and potential successors. When someone sends you a vibe-coded contribution that cost them zero effort and which they likely don’t even understand, how do you expect to mentor them into a contributor who will help the project in the long run?

Open-source software was never just about the end result; it was also about the process – where contributors build a relationship with the project and grow into someone who will eventually pass that on to others. This stands in sharp contrast to the world of AI, where it’s all about the result. As fast as possible, with as little effort as possible.

Declining Motivation to Publish Code

In the 1990s, Francis Fukuyama declared democracy and liberal economics to be the ultimate victors in the arrangement of the world order. Today, as democracy erodes globally and the existing economic order crumbles, that looks like a prematurely bold statement to say the least. Similarly, just a few years ago, impressed by the developments of the last few decades, some hailed open source as the ultimate winner among software development models. Are we about to face a sobering reality check similar to Fukuyama’s thesis?

Lately, I’ve been observing a subtle, yet present trend of stepping back from open-source development. One argument against open development I hear concerns the aforementioned review overload. For some projects, the costs associated with being overwhelmed by AI slop can outweigh the benefits of useful community contributions. They might still publish the source code for transparency’s sake, but they transform from an open-development project into an open-source, closed-development project. And those who don’t care as much about transparency may close off the source code entirely.

Another argument against making source code public is the fear of license circumvention. Today’s LLMs train on source code regardless of its license and can then easily generate a similar solution that you can publish under whatever license you choose.

This isn’t an issue for permissive licenses, as the author has already accepted that anyone can do practically whatever they want with the code. However, AI poses a direct threat to copyleft licenses like the GNU GPL. Authors usually choose these to ensure their work remains open forever and that anyone who uses it shares their improvements back with the community. If an LLM trains on a project you’ve worked on for years and then generates a very similar solution published under a proprietary license, it effectively bypasses this principle.

Take MeshCore again as an example: the protocol itself and the firmware are open-source, but the clients are closed. Recently, it came to light in the community that a core team member secretly applied for the MeshCore trademark and started vibe-coding his own closed-source solutions based on the available code. MeshCore founder Scott Powell cited this as something that reaffirmed his decision to keep the client source code private. Specifically, he wrote:

So, I see open source, in the age of AI, as offering up your blood, sweat and tears for others to rip-off, but in innumerable ways.

We may disagree with Powell’s perspective, but it represents a legitimate stance that I see more and more often around me. I see lifelong open-source advocates – people who used to publish every last helper script because they wanted to share – who now keep those things to themselves, offering them to others only upon request. They have reasons similar to Powell’s.

Open source also grew out of the need to share. Writing code was hard; maintaining it was even harder. Why should everyone implement the same thing independently? Let’s join forces in an open-source project, write a shared library, and everyone can benefit from the results. The infrastructure powering the Internet today was built on this foundation. But AI is suppressing this need.

For instance, I encounter opinions that WordPress is dead because “I can just easily generate my own CMS.” In my view, that severely underestimates what an open-source project actually provides. It is so much more than just writing code, and this strategy of swapping a dependency on an open-source project for a dependency on an LLM might not pay off in the long run.

Nevertheless, the reliance on shared open-source components has indeed decreased to some extent. AI might not replace everything, but why depend on a large external library when you don’t even need 10% of its functionality, if AI can quickly rip off that 10% for you after learning from the original library? And once you have your own implementation, why would you contribute improvements back to a shared open-source project?

The final argument against publishing source code that I’ve been hearing lately is security. Granted, I’ve heard this argument throughout the two decades I’ve been involved in open source, but it has never been this loud. For years, critics have claimed that open source is insecure because it allows attackers to study the code and hunt for vulnerabilities. In response, open-source advocates argue that security through obscurity is not real security and that open-source software is safer because “given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow.”

Today, however, open-source projects are literally flooded with security vulnerability reports generated by AI. The volume is so unprecedented that it is genuinely easy to fall into the trap of believing closed code is safer. It’s interesting to note that while news headlines cover how many bugs AI has found, they rarely mention how many security bugs AI has fixed. Fixing them still requires a deep understanding of the codebase and is still done by human programmers. And just like reviewing pull requests, it is overwhelming their capacity.

In this case, though, I believe it’s just a temporary trend. Open-source projects will eventually wade through these security reports, the general security of maintained open-source software will improve, and the ecosystem will benefit in the end. As for the other trends mentioned in this article, it’s hard to say. I’m not quite as unconditionally optimistic there.

• Tech. planning call, sync with Caolan, lunch with J. Pleased to be mentioned in the Irish Parliament - go Ireland!
• Really pleased to see Collabora Online 26.04 released for customer use: the foundation of another year of development and improvement. Thanks to our partners for supporting our press release, and for our customers and partners for funding much of the awesome team that create a slew of fun new features alongside the community.

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Enjoy the personal insights and variety of perspectives!

Northrop Grumman has launched a private satellite-servicing mission to attach life-extending "jetpacks" to aging communications satellites in geosynchronous orbit. "It's the second satellite-saving mission to launch this month, all part of a growing, money-saving effort to keep spacecraft running as long as possible," reports Phys.org. From the report: Launched by SpaceX, Northrop Grumman's mission robotic vehicle -- dubbed MRV -- and its jetpacks will spend the next year angling into the proper orbit 22,300 miles (36,000 kilometers) above Earth. Hundreds of satellites orbit at this so-called geosynchronous orbit, where they match the speed of Earth's rotation and keep to the same part of the sky for continuous coverage. Once in place by mid-2027, the minivan-sized spacecraft will use its 10-foot (9-meter) arms to attach a jetpack to an aging communication satellite. Then it will zip off to two more satellites in need. For its debut flight, the spacecraft was accompanied by three electric-propelled jetpacks that peeled away separately following liftoff. Like the MRV, the jetpacks will use their own xenon gas thrusters to get to the desired orbit. Once in place, the jetpacks will wait for the robot to grab them, one at a time, and plug them into their designated satellites. Each jetpack -- the size of a washing machine -- will provide the necessary oomph for an out-of-gas satellite to keep operating for several more years instead of retiring. If it works, it will be a boon for satellite operators SES of Luxembourg and Optus of Australia, saving them millions of dollars in replacement costs.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot reader BeaverCleaver shares a report from the BBC: The wreckage of a Pan American Airways plane has been found 74 years after it plunged into the Atlantic Ocean in a crash that prompted mandatory airline safety briefings. The Clipper Endeavor was found 2,000ft (610m) below sea level off the coast of Puerto Rico with a sonar-equipped drone. It went down on April 11, 1952, following multiple-engine failure shortly after take-off. Everyone onboard survived the impact -- but passengers struggled to locate life vests and rafts as the plane rapidly sank. Of the 69 passengers and crew onboard, just 17 survived. The disaster led to sweeping reforms in aviation safety, including compulsory pre-flight safety briefings on every commercial flight. [...] Today, before every commercial flight, cabin crew are required to outline where a plane's exits are, as well as the location of life vests and how to inflate them.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When Felipe first emailed us about the GUADEC 2026 travel grant, we were thrilled to learn that we were going to have the opportunity to attend the conference in person.

This was my first GUADEC, and it was a pleasure to meet the GNOME community and put faces to names. The conference was held in A Coruña, Spain, which turned out to be an amazing city with great food, friendly people, and beautiful views along the coast.

Community

The first thing I would like to mention was how patient and open the community was to both my fiancée Laureen and me. We knew going into the conference that we were much more junior than many of the developers attending, but everyone was incredibly approachable.

I received a great deal of help debugging issues in my local development environment, as well as guidance on some of the more difficult parts of my GSoC project.

Talks

The talks were very informative and I took way too many notes to include them all here without turning this into a novel. That said, I wanted to write a short summary of a couple of talks that I found interesting:

Varlink for System Components

Sebastian Wick gave a talk about modernizing the system component stack. His proposed idea for allowing more memory safety and zero cost abstractions was to write components in Rust, however this introduces the issue of introspection. For asynchronous functionality, Tokio and Glib both have main loops, and moving data between the loops can introduce a lot of overhead. GObject bindings can also make Rust's memory safety essentially moot.

Sebastian spoke about potentially not using GObject in some cases, and instead exposing more functionality over IPC using Varlink. Varlink is language agnostic, and services could be consumed from many languages without requiring GObject bindings. This process also would be very simple, allowing signals to occur as JSON strings that are easily observable. This would require some new crates to replace Glib functionality, and some more complicated functionality like file thrashing and sftp could be particularly difficult.

It is early, the ecosystem is still being built, but Sebastian argued that usage patterns will evolve and getting involved now will help shape the future of GNOME and Rust.

Using GTK in C++ with Peel

Sergey Bugaev hosted a workshop on using GTK from C++ with Peel. Peel is a library that allows you to use GTK in C++ to make GTK applications and widgets. Sergey made a simple widget that can draw using stylus input, and he walked us through the process of creating a simple application using Peel. The workshop was very informative.

I really regret not coding his example myself, I wish a recording of the lecture had been taken. That said, his repo can be found at https://gitlab.gnome.org/bugaevc/peel and his readme has instructions for usage and a basic code example.

Debugging with Tracy

Ivan Molodetskikh gave a talk that seemed really handy to me about using Tracy to profile performance for Mutter, GNOME shell, and applications. I had never heard of Tracy before this talk, however the capabilities seemed very handy. Tracy visualizes "zones" on a timeline, allowing you to see exactly where execution time is being spent across threads. The Tracy zones must nest correctly, where parent zones cannot end before their child zones. It can also show where threads are waiting. This allows for a very clear visualization of where time is being spent in the application, and can help identify bottlenecks or bugs.

The major downside to Tracy is that it requires a lot of setup, and the application must be compiled with the Tracy client library. Ivan gave a fairly in-depth breakdown of how to add Tracy profiling to an application, and I will go back to the recording of his talk to actually implement it in the future.

Technical Take Aways for My Project

• Sergey Bugaev helped me get the GIR generation for my C API working correctly. We also improved the FFI by exposing PitiviTimelineRuler directly in the public header rather than accepting a generic GtkWidget* and performing a runtime type check. This makes the API more type-safe and simplifies the Rust implementation. The GIR generation currently works after calling gtk::init() from pitivi_timeline_ruler_get_type(), but Sergey pointed out that this approach will likely fail in CI because the generated scanner shouldn't require GTK to be initialized this way. I'm still trying to build a solid mental model of how GIR generation and introspection work, so if anyone has experience with bindings, I'd love to hear your thoughts.

• Federico also spent some time reviewing my project with me. He suggested refactoring PitiviTimelineRuler so all of the mutable drawing state lives inside a single RefCell rather than several individual ones, I think the result would look something like this:

#[derive(Default)] struct DrawingState { cache: BTreeMap<...>, font: Option<...>, handler_id: Option<...>, } #[derive(Properties)] #[properties(wrapper_type = super::MyWidget)] pub struct MyWidget { #[property(get, set)] zoom_level: Cell<u64>, state: RefCell<DrawingState>, } Thanks to GNOME Foundation

I want to give a special thanks to the GNOME Foundation for granting us the travel grant to attend GUADEC 2026. It was a wonderful experience and I look forward to attending future conferences in person!

A full-resolution album of these photos is available under CC BY 4.0 for anyone in the GNOME community to reuse. https://www.flickr.com/photos/204880226@N08/albums/72177720334807665/

"General Motors has been pulling a Tim Cook and boosting its software and subscription business," reports Business Insider. During the automaker's Tuesday earnings call, executives said they're increasingly leaning on software subscriptions like OnStar and Super Cruise to generate high-margin recurring revenue long after customers buy their vehicles. GM says OnStar brought in about $800 million in the second quarter, while Super Cruise revenue grew about 70% year over year. From the report: GM says its software business keeps roughly 70 cents of every dollar it brings in. That's a rare level of profitability in the auto industry, as many car sales generate just four to 10 cents per sales dollar. [...] GM expects to add about 1 million OnStar subscribers this year, bringing the total close to 13 million. Super Cruise, GM's hands-free, eyes-on driving system, is growing even faster. GM added about 70,000 subscribers during the quarter and expects to end the year with more than 850,000. Revenue from the service increased about 70% from a year earlier. And a lot of drivers are sticking around after the free period ends. GM said between 30% and 40% of eligible owners continue paying after their included three-year Super Cruise subscription expires. [..] "We do think we have tremendous levers, multiple levers of growth," Barra said on the call. "We definitely think there's a lot of opportunity at GM to grow, improve margins, and become less cyclical." "Software and services are becoming increasingly important to how customers experience GM vehicles and how we deliver value beyond the initial purchase," a spokesperson previously told Business Insider. "As vehicles become more software-defined, we can introduce new digital experiences through updates and optional services rather than hardware changes."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Code found in the iOS 27 beta suggests Apple is developing a system that could restrict leased iPhones when customers fall behind on payments. The discovery follows a recent Bloomberg report that Apple may soon launch a new "Apple Upgrade" leasing program, allowing customers to pay for hardware through monthly installments. 9to5Mac reports: The code describes a system called App Managed Features, which allows an authorized financing or provider app to enroll an iPhone and perform ongoing status checks. If the contract is no longer in good standing, Apple's system services can place the iPhone in "Restricted Mode," which blocks access to most apps until the payment or contract issue is resolved, while keeping a small set of apps available. The fixed allowlist currently found in the iOS 27 beta includes: Accessibility Reader, App Store, Health, Magnifier, Phone, Clock, Settings, Wallet, Passwords, and the Restricted Mode interface itself. Apps that can send critical alerts, such as Messages, Home, and certain medication or safety apps, may also remain accessible. However, the provider appears to have some control over those exceptions. The code does not appear to cancel, suspend, or otherwise modify App Store subscriptions associated with blocked apps. As a result, a subscription could continue billing even while access to its app is restricted. Additionally, there isn't a fixed number of missed payments that automatically triggers the restrictions. The financing provider's app decides when to lock the device based on its own policies. Finally, the new framework also introduces a new type of activation lock called "Partner Finance Lock," which is meant to prevent users from erasing, reselling, or stripping a restricted device for parts.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

• Up early, sync with Stephan, Pranam, Laser, all-hands call, snatched lunch, Collabora quarterly mgmt meeting.
• Published the next strip: An interview with Maurice: digging into organizations
• Pleased to see FLOSS Weekly Episode 879: Collabora published - great to chat with Jonathan.
• More quarterly management meeting until late. Poked at a potential child setup thread delay in COOL at the same time. J. cleared shed and garage in the evening for final sealing coat.

Ancient Slashdot reader alanw shares a post from the OSS Security mailing list, where sysadmin Jan Schaumann wonders what to do after the Linux kernel cranked out 432 CVEs in a little over 24 hours: "I understand the position that CVEs were always a flawed way to track or prioritize security changes... But this onslaught really shows it's not feasible to attempt to prioritize individual kernel changes. I'm not sure what to do here going forward." The Register reports: The nixCraft team speculated on social media that AI bug reports are a likely reason for all those kernel CVEs, which wouldn't be without precedent - Linus Torvalds himself said in May that the Linux kernel security mailing list had become "almost entirely unmanageable" due to AI-assisted bug hunting. Nonetheless, Torvalds has described AI as a useful tool for Linux development while still noting it can be a drag for maintainers, both from a workload standpoint and the fact "it keeps finding embarrassing bugs." [...] Unfortunately for Linux sysadmins, the position in which they find themselves in this current mess isn't one that's readily solved. CVEs might be a messy way to track and prioritize security updates, especially when hundreds of them are published over a short period, but without something better, it falls to IT and security teams to determine which vulnerabilities affect their systems and which kernel updates they need to deploy. Senior kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman replied to Jan's post, pushing back on the idea that the kernel's CVE volume is uniquely unmanageable. The kernel isn't special, he argues -- companies everywhere are finally realizing they need to re-evaluate how they update all of their systems and devices, something that's traditionally been "woefully ignored." On the "just always update" approach, Greg says that's precisely what the kernel community endorses: "This is what the kernel developer community recommends and supports. If you want support from us, do this." Can't manage it yourself? Pay a company for support, or "just use Debian or Yocto as their security practices are amazing." He points to Android as proof the approach scales, calling it "the largest deployment of software in the world" -- billions of devices kept updated "with one very-overworked developer guiding it all." As for reviewing every CVE individually, he notes this can be largely automated by intersecting the files a CVE touches with the files you actually build, which typically trims the relevant set "down to about 10% of the overall total" -- the approach enterprise distros already take for their customers. Panic-mode selective patching gets a blunt "Good luck with that!" -- regulations like the EU's Cyber Resilience Act are set to legislate that habit away ("rightfully so," in his view), and "your insurance company might wish to have a talk with you as well." Greg also warns the flood isn't over: "The number of llm-found issues is only on the rise right now, it's going to be a very long 18 months at the least to dig ourselves out of this mess, and people had BETTER be updating their systems all along the way if they expect to be secure in any way." As for the 432-CVE burst itself, he explains it was simply him catching up on a weeks-old, publicly visible review queue over the weekend -- delayed by "a perfect storm of 6 weeks straight of conferences and vacations" -- so it shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone watching the public git repo.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is reportedly launching a Klarna financing deal that will let U.S. customers spread the cost of devices over up to three years, pushing the company closer to a hardware-as-a-service model. "The only thing you don't get under the new arrangement is AppleCare, for which you'll allegedly need to pay extra," notes Computerworld. From the report: The introduction of the scheme gives consumers a way to purchase the company's popular high-end devices when they are introduced -- no doubt,at higher cost -- this fall. [...] A combination of changed customer habits and external threat means the stars are now aligned for hardware-as-a-service models. "Reframing a device as a low monthly payment protects that [upgrade] cadence and allows Apple to start marketing their products as device-as-a-service to consumers, which no other vendor was ever able to do," [IDC analyst Francisco Jeronimo] wrote to me. There is a one-more-thing aspect to this: the products are effectively being leased, a new approach that will give Apple a stronger grip on EOL devices, helping it grab more of them for refurbishment, resale, and recycling. Over time, this will give the company a much stronger grip on the lucrative second-user market that exists around Apple equipment, even while for almost every consumer product we find the life we want is something we can rent, but probably can't afford to own. The other solid reason to take a partnership approach is risk management. Apple had intended to develop its own buy-now, pay-later scheme via Apple Pay Later, but abandoned that plan as it became riskier with rising bank rates. "Also, by backing the program with Klarna rather than reviving the in-house subscription plan it shelved in 2024, Apple captures the demand upside without taking the credit risk onto its own balance sheet," Jeronimo said. "Apple Upgrade lands at precisely the moment Apple needs it," Jeronimo wrote in a note seen by Computerworld. "Having just pushed Mac and iPad prices up on the back of the memory shortage, with iPhone increases widely expected in September -- as well as the new iPhone foldable expected at $2,500 -- Apple's real risk is that rising prices even further can impact the upgrade cycle."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A little over a month after the Department of Defense (DOD) bragged that nearly half of its 3.5 million employees were using AI at work, members of the Army's Combat Capabilities Development Command (DEVCOM) received an email informing them that they were burning through tokens, and needed to limit use. "Although the Army CIO announced in May 2026 that they were offering unlimited tokens, by mid-June the Army CIO pool was exhausted of tokens and had to re-establish limits," the email reads. The email goes on to say that although the Army has chosen to renew token usage at "its current levels," it's unclear "if the Army CIO pool will be renewed after 1 Oct." The Army uses Ask Sage, a multimodal generative AI platform where users can run different large language models (LLMs), including Alphabet's Gemini, Meta's Llama, and OpenAI's ChatGPT. "Apparently the whole Army burned through the whole year of tokens for just one service," says an Army employee who spoke to WIRED [...]. The Army employee says that the Army has been pushing its workers to lean into using generative AI. Employees were given an allotment of at least 200,000 tokens per month, according to emails viewed by WIRED, and were automatically allocated more if they burned through their initial allotment. Employees who had signed up for Ask Sage but were not regularly using it would receive emails encouraging them to use more of their allocated tokens. In order to use Ask Sage, the Army had access to 100,000,000 tokens as part of an annual subscription to an "enterprise pack." Tokens represent a unit of output, either in text or image, from an LLM. For the Ask Sage tool, a single token equates to about 3.7 characters, according to documents viewed by WIRED. The Defense Department burned through some 20 billion tokens per day during the 38-day Operation Epic Fury in Iran, according to Breaking Defense. It's unclear if the tokens used by regular DOD employees are drawn from the same pool as those who might be using AI tools on classified or secret information.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft has announced Xbox Backward Compatibility for PC, a new preservation program that will let players run select classic Xbox games on Windows PCs and handhelds like the ROG Xbox Ally. Tom's Hardware reports: "This marks the beginning of a broader effort to preserve XBOX games from the past and bring them to PC over time," the company said in a blog post authored by Xbox "VP next generation" Jason Ronald. Alongside backward compatibility, the company says games will also include new features. The four titles in the announcement are: BLiNX: The Time Sweeper; Conker: Live and Reloaded; Crimson Skies: High Road to Revenge; and Fuzion Frenzy. You can now buy all of these games on PC, and they're also included in all Xbox Game Pass plans. Anyone who already owns these titles digitally on console can also now play them on PC or handheld, with support for Xbox Play Anywhere and Xbox Cloud Gaming. Crucially, this appears to be a digital-only preservation effort, so it won't help anyone who only owns physical copies of these games. Xbox has reportedly been testing a way to digitize physical games as far back as Xbox One, but that hasn't yet materialized yet. Alongside the preserved original gameplay, Xbox claims these games will let users customize graphics settings, with up to 4x resolution scaling, VSync support, Fullscreen and Windowed modes, anisotropic filtering, and enhanced anti-aliasing, with more features to come in the future. Notably, Xbox will add achievements to select original Xbox games on console and PC.

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At a Galaxy Unpacked event in London today, Samsung unveiled a new foldable smartphone designed to compete with the still-unannounced iPhone Fold. Called the Galaxy Z Fold 8, it features a wider 4:3 form factor with a 7.6-inch inner AMOLED display, Snapdragon 8 Elite Gen 5 for Galaxy chip, up to 16GB of RAM and 1TB of storage. "The inner display has enough extra real estate for multi-tasking and entertainment," reports Mashable, which got a chance to try the new foldable ahead of the event. "And if you're worried about a crease in the middle of the display, don't be. We got up close with the device, and the crease fully disappears when the display is activated." From the report: As stated above, the main distinguishing factor of the new Z Fold 8 is its wider 4:3 proportions compared to the Z Fold 8 Ultra. If the latter is a book-style foldable, the former can almost be called a tablet-style foldable, instead. We think the wide screen will serve even better for reading books or multi-tasking with several apps open at once. Also, at 201g, Samsung is really emphasizing how light the device is. The company is calling it the "world's lightest fold ever." And while the device may be light, its no lightweight. Samsung's newest foldable features Flex Titanium technology, which makes the Galaxy Z Fold 8 more durable. Speaking of durability, it also boasts Samsung's advantage hinge technology, Armor Flexhinge. The Z Fold 8 feels like a solid middle point between the premium Z Fold 8 Ultra and the comparatively affordable Z Flip 8. All three phones use the same chip, but the Z Fold 8's 4,800mAh battery is smaller than that of the Z Fold 8 Ultra. However, the Z Fold 8 does have an option for 16GB RAM and 1TB of storage, similar to the Ultra.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from KrebsOnSecurity: The home appliance giant LG Electronics USA said this week it plans to suspend any apps built for its smart TVs that turn one's television into an always-on residential proxy node. The move comes less than a month after researchers found that more than 42 percent of games and other apps available for download on LG's webOS store allow unknown third-parties to route their Internet traffic through a user's TV. On July 2, [KrebsOnSecurity] featured research by the security firm Spur that examined the prevalence of residential proxy software development kits (SDKs) in smart TV apps. Spur found more than 42 percent of apps available for download on LG smart TVs include SDKs that turn one's television in a proxy node indefinitely, and that more than a quarter of the apps made for Samsung's Tizen operating system had similar residential proxy components. Responding to questions about Spur's research, LG Senior Vice President John Taylor told KrebsOnSecurity the company was working with app developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform. Developers that fail to comply, he said, will find their apps suspended. "A residential proxy network is not an intended use for LG smart TVs, and LG Electronics is working with developers to remove the residential proxy option from their apps on the webOS platform," Taylor said. "If this option is not removed, these apps will be suspended." Taylor said LG is committed to keeping residential proxy networks out of its smart TV apps going forward, and that the company's review of those apps is "well underway now." "As part of our ongoing efforts to enhance platform quality and the user experience, LG will continue to strengthen our evaluation process for developer-submitted apps, including those that incorporate residential proxy SDKs," Taylor wrote in an emailed statement. [...] "A one-time consent prompt buried in a TV app is not a substitute for meaningful transparency, ongoing control, and platform oversight," Spur's Trevor Sutter wrote. "The risk is amplified when consent comes from individuals within the household who use the device but shouldn't give consent, such as minors." LG is also facing criticism for monitors that automatically install software promoting paid McAfee subscriptions through Windows Update without user approval.

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Version:next-20260722 (linux-next) Released:2026-07-22

Jack Dorsey's Block has launched Buzz, an open-source workplace collaboration platform that combines messaging, project management, and software development workflows for teams of both humans and AI agents. Dorsey described Buzz as "a new groupchat platform for teams of people and agents of all sizes" that is "model-agnostic, decentralized, self-sovereign and open source." SmartCompany reports: According to the Buzz website, users can invite specialized AI agents into team chats, allowing them to collaborate with employees and even other AI agents. From there, they can reportedly move directly from discussions into planning, coding, pull requests and project management without switching between multiple applications. Buzz also aims to replace parts of GitHub by bringing software development workflows directly into the platform. Teams can plan work, write code, review pull requests and manage Git projects without jumping between separate collaboration and development tools. [...] In practice, that means businesses aren't locked into a single AI provider. Organisations can self-host Buzz, customize it to suit their own workflows and choose whichever AI models best fit their needs.

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Scientists have rediscovered a healthy coral reef off the coast of Benin more than 60 years after surveyors first hinted at its existence. "At least eight coral types and eight fish species have formed a thriving ecosystem on this long-forgotten site," reports Inside Climate News. "What they had captured was a wealth of marine life: six types of soft coral; two black corals; and eight species of sheltering fish, from golden African snappers to the Monrovia doctorfish." From the report: While no coral samples have yet been extracted, researchers have classified the site as a mesophotic coral ecosystem (MCE). Such systems are light-dependent communities existing at the lower limits of reef-building corals. At more than 175 feet below the surface, the coral garden they discovered appears patchily scattered on a rocky substrate. Bridging the gap between shallow reefs and deeper benthic habitats, MCEs are home to distinct species and unique environmental conditions. While scientists are increasingly recognizing their ecological and climatic importance, they remain among the least explored elements of tropical and subtropical marine biodiversity. And this one has real potential to unlock new information about coral history. "Since it's an undisturbed marine ecosystem, it can help through carbon dating or paleoclimatic study to tell us which kind of climate system has occurred here in the past," said [Gerard Zinzindohoue, the project lead for Coral Reefs Rediscovering & Exploration in Benin]. "It's better to know the past to help explain the present, and help know which kind of direction we can take in the future." In addition to the blackbar soldierfish, West African goatfish, and Guinean angelfish filmed darting through the reef, the discovery presents potential conservation claims for other marine life. "We will be advocating for its full protection, perhaps by setting up a marine protected area around it," said [Houangninan Midinoudewa, an oceanographic researcher at the Benin Marine Conservation Club], who specializes in elasmobranchs -- the study of sharks, rays, and skates. Midinoudewa is currently submitting an application to designate the area as an Important Shark and Ray Area with the International Union for Conservation of Nature. Based on the knowledge of local fishermen, Midinoudewa is confident the reef is home to sawback angel sharks, silky sharks, brown skates, and marbled stingrays. The team behind the discovery hopes this will spark a wave of similar discoveries in the waters off West Africa, an area of the world underserved by scientific research projects. "I hope the Gulf of Guinea will be a hub for research because we know our resources are being exploited and people [need to] know exactly what we have and why we should care," said Midinoudewa. Zinzindohoue agrees: "We don't need to wait for others to come to our country to show us what is under our sea. We are the ones who must take responsibility."

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"GPT-5.6 Sol and an 'even more capable' model used stolen credentials and exploited vulnerabilities in the Hugging Face API to obtain secret information used to cheat on evaluations," writes longtime Slashdot reader Dr. Bombay. The Associated Press reports: "We had a significant security incident during evaluation of our models," OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said in a statement posted on social media. AI startup Hugging Face said last week that it had detected an intrusion into its data processing systems that it suspected was caused by an AI agent autonomously acting on its own. "We suspected last week's cyberattack might have come from a frontier lab, given the sophistication of the agent," Hugging Face co-founder and CEO Clement Delangue said in a statement. "Turns out it did!" [...] "AI is accelerating the discovery and exploitation of vulnerabilities," OpenAI said in its statement Tuesday. "The primary lesson from this incident is that model security and safety must keep pace with rapidly advancing capabilities." Delangue said he spent the past 24 hours working with OpenAI, "and we strongly believe there was no malicious intent on their part. It's quite mind-blowing that all of this happened autonomously!" Delangue added that it "might be the first incident of its kind."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: France's parliament has approved a bill banning social media access for children under 15, making it the first European country to bar children from apps such as TikTok. The president, Emmanuel Macron, has championed the ban as a key reform of his final term in office and pledged to enforce it by September. "France is leading the way in Europe when it comes to protecting our children and teenagers," Macron said in a video posted on social media, hailing "a major step forward." He thanked members of parliament for backing the legislation on Tuesday. "The Constitutional Council must now rule on it, and then it will be time to take action to make this measure a reality and protect our children online," he added on X. After approval by the Senate earlier on Tuesday, members of the National Assembly passed the bill by 279 votes to 81. A growing number of countries are taking steps to restrict social media access amid multiplying warnings over its harmful effects on children. The ban was to be introduced in two stages, with under-15s blocked from creating new accounts from September 1. The ban would apply to existing accounts from January 2027, according to the legislation. The digital minister, Anne Le Henanff, said before the vote that the timeline was realistic, "because age-verification tools already exist" and others are still in the works, and the onus was on the platforms to impose the rule. "For four months, all of us in France will have to prove our age," she told journalists. "If someone is under 15, the account will be closed." The minister also gave assurances that users' personal data would be protected.

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