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Version:7.0.7 (stable) Released:2026-05-14 Source:linux-7.0.7.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-7.0.7.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-7.0.7

Version:6.18.30 (longterm) Released:2026-05-14 Source:linux-6.18.30.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.30.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.30

Version:6.12.88 (longterm) Released:2026-05-14 Source:linux-6.12.88.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.88.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.88

An attacker compromises a Linux container, launches a cryptominer, sets up a way to stay in the system through a background task, and disappears before the investigation even begins. By the time analysts start looking at the logs, the workload has shut down, and the container no longer exists.

Libdex now has DexLimiter, a small utility for bounding how much asynchronous work runs at once.

This is useful when a workload can produce more parallelism than the underlying machine, subsystem, or service should actually handle. Common examples include indexing files, downloading URLs, generating thumbnails, parsing documents, or querying a service with a fixed concurrency budget.

The usual API is dex_limiter_run(). It acquires a permit, starts a fiber, and releases the permit when that fiber finishes.

static DexFuture * load_one_file (gpointer user_data) { GFile *file = user_data; return dex_file_load_contents_bytes (file); } DexLimiter *limiter = dex_limiter_new (8); DexFuture *future = dex_limiter_run (limiter, NULL, 0, load_one_file, g_object_ref (file), g_object_unref);

In this example, no more than eight file loads will run at the same time, regardless of how many files are queued. The returned DexFuture resolves or rejects with the result of the spawned fiber.

One important detail is that dropping the returned future does not cancel a fiber that has already started. Once work has acquired a permit, it is allowed to complete so that the limiter can release the permit cleanly.

For more specialized cases, DexLimiter also supports manual acquire and release:

g_autoptr(GError) error = NULL; if (dex_await (dex_limiter_acquire (limiter), &error)) { do_limited_work (); dex_limiter_release (limiter); }

This is useful when the limited section is not naturally represented by a single fiber. However, callers must release exactly once for every successful acquire. In most cases, dex_limiter_run() is preferable because it handles release on both success and failure paths.

The limit should describe the constrained resource, not the number of items being processed. Remote APIs and databases may need a small limit. CPU-heavy work should usually be near the amount of useful worker parallelism. Local I/O can often tolerate a larger value, depending on the storage system. Separate resources should usually have separate limiters, so one workload does not consume another workload’s concurrency budget.

Finally, dex_limiter_close() can be used during shutdown. Once closed, pending and future acquisitions reject with DEX_ERROR_SEMAPHORE_CLOSED. Work that already holds a permit may continue, but releasing after close does not make new permits available.

The goal is to make bounded parallelism simple: queue as much asynchronous work as you need, but only run as much of it as the system should handle.

Linux administrators are once again dealing with a familiar problem: a local Linux foothold that can potentially become full root access.

An anonymous researcher known as Nightmare-Eclipse, who has already leaked several Windows zero-days this year, has disclosed two more: YellowKey and GreenPlasma. The Register reports: Nightmare-Eclipse described YellowKey as "one of the most insane discoveries I ever found." They provided the files, which have to be loaded onto a USB drive, and if the attacker completes the key sequence correctly, they are granted unrestricted shell access to a BitLocker-protected machine. When it comes to claims like these, we usually exercise some caution, as this bug requires physical access to a Windows PC. However, seeing that BitLocker acts as Windows' last line of defense for stolen devices, bypassing the technology grants thieves the ability to access encrypted files. Rik Ferguson, VP of security intelligence at Forescout, said: "If [the researcher's claim] holds up, a stolen laptop stops being a hardware problem and becomes a breach notification." Despite the physical access requirement, Gavin Knapp, cyber threat intelligence principal lead at Bridewell, told The Register that YellowKey remains "a huge security problem for organizations using BitLocker." Citing information shared in cyber threat intelligence circles, he added that YellowKey can be mitigated by implementing a BitLocker PIN and a BIOS password lock. Nightmare-Eclipse hinted at YellowKey also acting as a backdoor, allegedly injected by Microsoft, although the people we spoke to said this was impossible to verify based on the information available. The researcher also published partial exploit code for GreenPlasma, rather than a fully formed proof of concept exploit (PoC). Ferguson noted attackers need to take the code provided by the researcher and figure out how to weaponize it themselves, which is no small task: in its current state it triggers a UAC consent prompt in default Windows configurations, meaning a silent exploit remains a work in progress. Knapp warned that these kinds of privilege escalation flaws are often used by attackers after they gain an initial foothold in a victim's system. "These elevation of privilege vulnerabilities are often weaponized during post-exploitation to enable threat actors to discover and harvest credentials and data, before moving laterally to other systems, prior to end goals such as data theft and/or ransomware deployment," he said. "Currently, there is no known mitigation for GreenPlasma. It will be important to patch when Microsoft addresses the issue." The other zero-days leaked include RedSun, a Windows Defender privilege escalation flaw; UnDefend, a Windows Defender denial-of-service bug; and BlueHammer, a separate Microsoft vulnerability tracked as CVE-2026-32201 that was patched in April. According to The Register, RedSun and UnDefend remained unfixed at the time of publication, and proof-of-concept code for the flaws was reportedly picked up quickly and abused in real-world attacks.

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For about the past month, I have no longer been with Red Hat.

That is a strange sentence to write after so many years, but life has a way of changing the scenery whether or not one has finished packing. My family and I have made it safely to France, and we are quite happy here. The light is different, the pace is different, and there is a great deal to learn. For now, that is exactly where our attention needs to be.

I also think there is a broader lesson here for people whose safety, immigration status, or family stability may depend on employer flexibility. Do not assume that long tenure, remote work history, or prior verbal guidance will be enough. My own experience left me with the uncomfortable conclusion that these processes can become very narrow exactly when the human stakes are highest. Get things in writing, understand the policy surface area, and protect your family first.

This also means that some of the things I wrote about in my earlier mid-life update remain unresolved. I am currently in France on a visitor visa, which does not authorize work here. Our focus is on integration, language learning, and getting ourselves properly settled for the long term. That takes time, patience, paperwork, and a certain tolerance for being a beginner again.

As a result, I will not be taking on ongoing software maintenance responsibilities for the foreseeable future. I may still scratch the occasional itch where it directly improves my own computing life, but I am not currently able to provide the kind of broad, sustained stewardship that many projects deserve.

That is not an easy thing to say. Open source is entering an especially difficult period. We are now seeing AI systems used not only to generate code, but also to probe, disrupt, and attack critical software infrastructure. I suspect this will have a negative effect on the maintenance burden for a lot of projects, particularly the foundational pieces that distributions, companies, and users all rely on without always seeing the people behind them.

But there is a limit to what can reasonably be carried as unpaid labor, especially when the primary financial beneficiaries are downstream organizations with considerably more resources than the individual maintainers doing the work. At the moment, I need to prioritize my family, our stability, and the next chapter of our life here.

That said, I am still reachable for appropriate professional inquiries, advisory conversations, or consulting opportunities where the structure and location make sense. The best address for that now is christian at sourceandstack dot com.

For now, we are safe, settling in, and doing our best to build something durable out of a rather odd moment in the world. There are worse places to begin again than France.

A trio of preprint papers suggests the universe may not be perfectly uniform on the largest scales, finding tentative 2-to-4-sigma deviations from a core assumption of standard cosmology known as FLRW geometry. Live Science reports: The work combines observations of distant exploding stars and large-scale galaxy surveys to probe whether the universe truly follows a nearly 100-year-old mathematical framework known as Friedmann-Lemaitre-Robertson-Walker (FLRW) cosmology. The analyses revealed mild-but-intriguing deviations from the predictions of the standard model. "We saw a surprising violation of an FLRW curvature consistency test, hinting at new physics beyond the standard model," study co-author Asta Heinesen, a physicist at the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen and Queen Mary University in London, told Live Science via email, referring to the assumption that the space's curvature is the same everywhere. "This could potentially be due to various effects, but more research is needed to address the cause of the FLRW violation that we see empirically." [...] The analyses revealed small but potentially important departures from the predictions of standard FLRW cosmology. Depending on the dataset and analysis method, the discrepancy reached a statistical significance of about 2 to 4 sigma. In physics, sigma measures how likely a result is to arise purely by chance; a 5-sigma result is typically required before scientists claim a discovery, so the new findings remain tentative. Still, the results suggest that something unexpected may be affecting the geometry or expansion of the universe. "The main finding is that you can directly measure Dyer-Roeder and backreaction effects from available cosmological data, and clearly distinguish these effects from other alterations of the standard cosmological model, such as evolving dark energy and modified gravity theories," Heinesen said. "This was previously not possible in such a direct way, and this is what I think is the breakthrough in our work." "If these indicated deviations from an FLRW geometry are real, it would signify that most of the cosmological solutions considered for solving the cosmological tensions -- evolving or interacting dark energy, new types of matter or energy, modified gravity and related ideas within the FLRW framework -- are ruled out," the researchers wrote. The next step will involve applying the new theoretical framework to larger and more precise datasets. "It is to apply our theoretical results to data to test the standard model and to produce constraints on the Dyer-Roeder and backreaction effects," Heinesen said.

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After three weeks of testimony, the Musk v. Altman trial is nearing its end. OpenAI has rested its case, closing arguments are set for Thursday, and jury deliberations are expected to begin afterward. An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: Joshua Achiam, OpenAI's chief futurist, was probably the most memorable witness of the day. He told jurors about a companywide meeting where Musk answered questions about his planned departure from OpenAI in 2018. Musk told the crowd of 50 or 60 people that he was leaving OpenAI to start his own competing AI. He said he wanted to "build it very fast, because he was very worried that someone else, if they got it, would do the wrong thing with it," Achiam said. Achaim said he challenged Musk on the safety of this approach, which he called "unsafe and reckless." "How did Musk respond," OpenAI's lawyer Randall Jackson asked. "Defensively," Achiam said. "We had a pretty tense exchange, and he snapped and called me a jackass." In an effort to prove Achiam's story, OpenAI's lawyers brought a trophy to court that the futurist said he received after his heated exchange with Musk. On the witness stand, Achiam described the trophy as "a small golden jackass, inscribed with: 'never stop being a jackass for safety.'" He said his then-colleagues, Dario Amodei and David Luan, gave it to him as a thank-you for standing up to the Tesla CEO. Lead OpenAI attorney William Savitt told reporters after the day's session that Wednesday had been the first time he'd touched the statue. The futurist had to do without the visual aid, however. Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers did not accept the trophy as evidence, so it did not appear before the jury. Musk and Altman have presented dueling experts on a question at the core of the trial -- was the nonprofit that runs OpenAI hurt or helped by its $13 billion partnership with Microsoft? Musk's expert testified last week that the partnership was indeed hurt, supporting the Tesla CEO's contention that in partnering with Microsoft, OpenAI betrayed the company's nonprofit origins and mission. But on Thursday, OpenAI's expert, John Coates, used Musk's expert's own pie chart and testimony against him. The partnership has "generated value for the nonprofit that I believe he himself accepted was in the $200 billion range in his own testimony," Coates said, referencing Musk expert Daniel Schizer. "If that's not faring well, I don't know what faring well is." In a scored point for Musk, the jury learned Thursday that Microsoft's own CTO once raised concerns about how OpenAI's early nonprofit donors, including LinkedIn cofounder Reid Hoffman, would react to a partnership. "I wonder if the big OpenAI donors are aware of these plans," Chief Technology Officer Kevin Scott said in a 2018 email he was asked to read aloud to jurors. In it, Scott said he doubted donors would appreciate OpenAI using their seed money to "go build a for-profit thing." Scott was being questioned by an OpenAI lawyer, who may have wanted jurors to quickly hear Scott's explanation: that he only had a "vague awareness" of what was happening at OpenAI at the time. Scott also told the jury he wasn't thinking about Musk when he made the remark. "Primarily, I was thinking about Reid Hoffman. He was the OpenAI donor I knew," Scott said, adding, "I wasn't thinking about anyone besides him." Recap: Sam Altman Testifies That Elon Musk Wanted Control of OpenAI (Day Ten) Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Testifies In OpenAI Trial (Day Nine) Sam Altman Had a Bad Day In Court (Day Eight) Sam Altman's Management Style Comes Under the Microscope At OpenAI Trial (Day Seven) Brockman Rebuts Musk's Take On Startup's History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla (Day Six) OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five) Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four) Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)

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A man accused of stealing hard drives containing unreleased Beyonce music, tour plans, and other materials from a rental car in Atlanta has pleaded guilty and accepted a five-year sentence, including two years in custody. Slashdot Bruce66423 shares a report from The Guardian: Kelvin Evans was by the Atlanta police department in September in connection to a July 2025 car robbery where two suitcases containing Beyonce music and tour plans were stolen from a rental car. [...] According to a July police report, Beyonce choreographer Christopher Grant and dancer Diandre Blue called 911 to report a theft from their rental vehicle, a 2024 Jeep Wagoneer, before Beyonce's Cowboy Carter tour dates in Atlanta. An October indictment stated that Evans entered the car on July 8 "with the intent to commit theft." The stolen hard drives contained "watermarked music, some unreleased music, footage plans for the show and past and future set list," according to a police report. Clothing, designer sunglasses, laptops and AirPods headphones were also stolen, Grant and Blue said. Local law enforcement searched for the location of one of the stolen laptops and the AirPods to try and locate the property. One police officer wrote in the report: "I conducted a suspicious stop in the area, due to the information that was relayed to me. There were several cars in the area also that the AirPods were pinging to in that area also. After further investigation, a silver [redacted], which had traveled into zone 5 was moving at the same time as the tracking on the AirPods." Evans was arrested several weeks after Grant and Blue filed a report, and was publicly named as the suspect in September. He was released on a $20,000 bond a month later. At the time of his arrest, Atlanta police said that the stolen property had not been recovered. It is unclear whether it has since been found. Bruce66423 commented: "Just for stealing a couple of suitcases from a car. Funny how the elite punish those who inconvenience them. Can you imagine an ordinary victim see their offender get that sort of sentence?"

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Linux runs the internet. More than 96% of the world's top one million web servers operate on Linux-based systems. That makes every linux server a target by default. Attackers do not go where defenses are strongest; they go where the infrastructure is exposed.

fjo3 shares a report from Phys.org: Ever felt like mosquitoes bite you while ignoring everyone else? Scientists are now making progress in deciphering the complex chemical cocktail that makes particular people more enticing to these disease-spreading bloodsuckers. "It's not a misconception -- mosquitoes are attracted to some people more than others," Frederic Simard of France's Institute of Research for Development told AFP. "But we are not all magnets all the time," the medical entomologist added. A range of sensory cues can cause mosquitoes to pick one human over another -- mainly the smell and heat our bodies give off, and the carbon dioxide we exhale. Female mosquitoes -- which are the only ones that bite -- detect these signals with finely tuned receptors, then choose their target accordingly. "We have known for over 100 years that mosquitoes are attracted by the carbon dioxide that we exhale -- this is the first signal that triggers their behavior" when they are dozens of meters away, Swedish scientist Rickard Ignell told AFP. Within around 10 meters, "mosquitoes will start detecting our odor, and in combination with carbon dioxide," this attracts them even more, said the senior author of a recent study on the subject. As they get closer, body temperature and humidity make particular humans even more enticing. [...] For Ignell's recent study, the researchers released Aedes aegypti mosquitoes -- known for spreading yellow fever and dengue -- on 42 women in a lab, to see which ones they preferred. "We have shown that mosquitoes use a blend of odorous compounds (we identified 27 that the mosquitoes will detect, out of the possible 1,000) for their attraction to us," Ignell said. The woman the mosquitoes most liked to bite -- which included pregnant women in their second trimester -- produced a large amount of a particular compound made by a breakdown of the skin oil sebum. That even a small increase of this compound -- called "1-octen-3-ol", or mushroom alcohol -- made a difference came as a surprise, Ignell emphasized.

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OpenAI CEO Sam Altman took the stand Tuesday in Elon Musk's trial against the company, testifying that Musk repeatedly sought control of OpenAI before leaving in 2018. Altman said he opposed putting AI "under the control of any one person," while Musk's lawyer used a pointed cross-examination to attack Altman's trustworthiness. An anonymous reader shares updates from the testimony via the New York Times: Before Elon Musk left OpenAI in a power struggle in 2018, he wanted to merge the nonprofit artificial intelligence lab with Tesla, his electric car company. Mr. Musk and other OpenAI co-founders met several times to discuss the merger. OpenAI's chief executive, Sam Altman, was even offered a seat on Tesla's board of directors, according to a court document. But folding OpenAI into Tesla would have eliminated the lab's nonprofit status, and that, Mr. Altman said on the witness stand on Tuesday, was something he wanted to avoid. [...] "I believed that A.I. should not be under the control of any one person," Mr. Altman said. [...] Mr. Altman testified about his feud with Mr. Musk. He said he had become worried that Mr. Musk, who provided the early investment money for OpenAI, wanted to take control of the lab. He described what he called a "particularly harrowing moment" when his OpenAI co-founders asked Mr. Musk what would happen to his control of a potential for-profit when he died. Mr. Altman said Mr. Musk had replied that the control would pass to his children. "I was not comfortable with that," Mr. Altman said. When Mr. Musk lost a power struggle for control of the lab, he left, forcing Mr. Altman to find another big financial backer in Microsoft. But Mr. Altman ran into trouble in 2023 when OpenAI's board fired him because, as several of its members have testified in the trial, it didn't trust him. Steven Molo, Mr. Musk's lead lawyer, homed in on Mr. Altman's trustworthiness during an aggressive cross-examination. "Are you completely trustworthy?" Mr. Molo asked. "I believe so," Mr. Altman answered. After questioning Mr. Altman's trustworthiness for nearly 20 minutes, Mr. Molo turned to Mr. Altman's relationship with Mr. Musk. Mr. Altman said that after he met Mr. Musk in the mid-2010s, Mr. Musk had occasionally expressed concern about the dangers of A.I. But Mr. Musk spent far more time saying he was worried that companies like Google would get ahead in A.I. development, Mr. Altman said. (Mr. Musk testified in the trial that he had wanted to create OpenAI to prevent Google from controlling the technology.) Mr. Altman, the lawyer intimated, took advantage of Mr. Musk's concerns and was never sincere about his own A.I. fears. "Are you a person who just tells people things they want to hear whether those things are true or not?" Mr. Molo asked. The lawyer also questioned whether Mr. Atman, who became a billionaire through years of tech investments, was self-dealing through OpenAI. Mr. Molo showed a list of Mr. Altman's personal investments across a number of companies that stand to benefit from their association with OpenAI. They included Helion Energy, a start-up that has deals with Microsoft and OpenAI, and Cerebras, a chip maker in business with OpenAI. Mr. Molo asked if Mr. Altman, who is on OpenAI's board as well as its chief executive, would ever fire himself. "I have no plans to do that," Mr. Altman said. OpenAI's odd journey from nonprofit lab to what it is today -- a well-funded, for-profit company that is still connected to a nonprofit called the OpenAI Foundation with an endowment that could be worth more than $130 billion -- provided grist for Mr. Molo's questions about Mr. Altman's motivations. He implied that Mr. Altman could have continued to build OpenAI as a pure nonprofit. But the only way to build such a valuable charity was to raise billions through a for-profit venture, Mr. Altman responded. Still, the giant sums being raised appeared to upset Mr. Musk. In late 2022, according to court documents, Mr. Musk sent a text to Mr. Altman complaining that Microsoft was preparing to invest $10 billion in OpenAI. "This is a bait and switch," Mr. Musk said at the time. But Mr. Altman, under questioning from his own lawyers, said: "Every step of the way, I have done my best to maximize the value of the nonprofit. I would point out that there are not a lot of historical examples of a nonprofit at this scale." Before Altman took the stand, OpenAI board chair Bret Taylor continued his testimony that began on Monday. He said Elon Musk's 2024 bid to buy the company's assets appeared to conflict with his lawsuit and was rejected because the board did not believe OpenAI's mission should be controlled by one person. "We did not feel like it was appropriate for one person to control our mission," he said. Recap: Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella Testifies In OpenAI Trial (Day Nine) Sam Altman Had a Bad Day In Court (Day Eight) Sam Altman's Management Style Comes Under the Microscope At OpenAI Trial (Day Seven) Brockman Rebuts Musk's Take On Startup's History, Recounts Secret Work For Tesla (Day Six) OpenAI President Discloses His Stake In the Company Is Worth $30 Billion (Day Five) Musk Concludes Testimony At OpenAI Trial (Day Four) Elon Musk Says OpenAI Betrayed Him, Clashes With Company's Attorney (Day Three) Musk Testifies OpenAI Was Created As Nonprofit To Counter Google (Day Two) Elon Musk and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Head To Court (Day One)

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South Korea's presidential policy chief is calling for a "citizen dividend" that would return some AI-driven profits and tax revenue to the public. The Straits Times. From the report: Presidential policy chief Kim Yong-beom said in a Facebook post that a portion of the profits and tax revenue derived from the artificial intelligence boom "should be structurally returned to all citizens." That is because, Mr Kim argued, the economic gains from AI are based at least partly on industrial infrastructure built by the country over five decades. Mr Kim's comments come after tens of thousands of people gathered outside Samsung's main chip hub in April to demand employees get a greater share of AI profits. The company's labour union wants 15 per cent of operating profit handed to chip-division employees. The union has threatened an 18-day strike starting May 21. Workers have pointed to rising payouts at SK Hynix, which in 2025 agreed to allocate 10 per cent of its annual operating profit to a performance bonus pool, as evidence they deserve more pay. "Excess profits in the AI era are, by nature, concentrated," Mr Kim wrote. Memory companies, core engineers and asset holders are highly likely to receive substantial benefits, while much of the middle class may experience only indirect effects.

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Instructure, the company behind the widely used Canvas learning platform, says it reached an agreement with the hackers who stole 3.5 terabytes of student and university data. The company says it received "digital confirmation" that the information was destroyed and that affected schools and students would not be extorted. The BBC reports: Paying cyber criminals goes against the advice of law enforcement agencies around the world, as it can fuel further attacks and offers no guarantee the data has been deleted. In previous cases, criminals have accepted ransom payments but lied about destroying stolen data, instead keeping it for resale. For example, when the notorious LockBit ransomware group was hacked by the National Crime Agency, police found stolen data had not been deleted even after payments had been made. Instructure said in a statement on its website that protecting students' and education staff data was its primary motivation. "While there is never complete certainty when dealing with cyber criminals, we believe it was important to take every step within our control to give customers additional peace of mind, to the extent possible," the company said. Instructure did not set out the terms of the agreement but said that it meant that: - the data was returned to the company - it received "digital confirmation of data destruction" - it had been informed that no Instructure customers would be extorted as a result of the incident - the agreement covers all affected customers, with no need for individuals to engage with the hackers

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Financial Times (via Ars Technica): Amazon employees are using an internal AI tool to automate non-essential tasks in a bid to show managers they are using the technology more frequently. The Seattle-based group has started to widely deploy its in-house "MeshClaw" product in recent weeks, allowing employees to create AI agents that can connect to workplace software and carry out tasks on a user's behalf, according to three people familiar with the matter. Some employees said colleagues were using the software to automate additional, unnecessary AI activity to increase their consumption of tokens -- units of data processed by models. They said the move reflected pressure to adopt the technology after Amazon introduced targets for more than 80 percent of developers to use AI each week, and earlier this year began tracking AI token consumption on internal leader boards. "There is just so much pressure to use these tools," one Amazon employee told the FT. "Some people are just using MeshClaw to maximize their token usage." Amazon has told employees that the AI token statistics would not be used in performance evaluations. But several staff members said they believed managers were monitoring the data. "Managers are looking at it," said another current employee. "When they track usage it creates perverse incentives and some people are very competitive about it."

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Google is teasing a new line of "Googlebook" laptops for this fall, powered by a new Android-and-ChromeOS-derived operating system that will run Chrome, Android apps, phone-connected apps and files, and deeply integrated Gemini features. The company says Chromebooks will continue "after the launch of Googlebook" and "...all Chromebooks will continue to receive support through their device's existing date commitment." The Verge reports: "We'll have more to share on the exact OS branding later this year," Peter Du of Google's global communications team tells The Verge. [...] Googlebooks will have a Magic Pointer feature that offers contextual suggestions whenever you shake your cursor and point it at something on the screen. Google's examples include setting up a meeting by pointing at a date in an email or selecting images of furniture and a living space to visualize them together. Beyond your mouse pointer, Googlebooks will also feature the custom AI-created widgets that Google is also debuting today for Android phones and Wear OS smartwatches. I don't know what kind of horrors people will be able to make into widgets, but Google gives the example of making one to organize your flights, hotel information, restaurant reservations, and another for creating a countdown timer for an upcoming family reunion. (It's always flights, hotels, and restaurants, isn't it?) While there are many outstanding questions to be answered about Googlebooks, the biggest and most obvious ones are what will these laptops look like, what chips will be in them, and what will they cost? We've got none of that so far. Google only has some initial renders of a mysterious Googlebook and the promise that it's working with Acer, Asus, Dell, HP, and Lenovo to make the first models. There are no model names. No specs. Nada. Google isn't even saying if the laptop in its renders is made by a partner or a tease of some first-party Pixel-like Googlebook to come or is just a cool mockup. The one distinct hardware feature shown, the bar of glowing Google-colored light, will be a signature of all Googlebooks. (Sure, bring on the RGB. Why not?)

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Microsoft and G42's planned $1 billion AI data center in Kenya has stalled amid disagreements over power commitments, with President William Ruto saying the country would need to "switch off half the country" to support the project at full scale. Tom's Hardware reports: The project, announced in May 2024 during Ruto's visit to Washington, was supposed to bring a geothermal-powered data center to the Olkaria region in Kenya's Rift Valley. G42 was to lead construction, with the facility running Microsoft Azure in a new East Africa cloud region. The first phase targeted 100 megawatts of capacity and was expected to be operational by this year, with a long-term goal of scaling to 1 gigawatt. President Ruto isn't exaggerating about shutting off half the country's power. Kenya's total installed electricity capacity sits between 3,000 and 3,200 megawatts, and peak demand reached a record 2,444 megawatts in January, according to data from KenGen, the country's government-owned electricity producer. The full 1 gigawatt build would therefore have consumed roughly a third of the country's total capacity, and even the first 100 megawatts would have required a significant share of the Olkaria geothermal complex's output, which currently generates around 950MW across all its plants. John Tanui, principal secretary at Kenya's Ministry of Information, told Bloomberg that the project hasn't been withdrawn and that talks are continuing, adding that the "scale of the data center they [Microsoft] wanted to do still requires some structuring." A separate 60-megawatt project with local developer EcoCloud is also still under discussion. [...] Microsoft is spending $190 billion on capex in 2026, and the company adds approximately 1 gigawatt of data center capacity every three months globally. But power constraints are proving to be a universal bottleneck: nearly half of planned U.S. data center builds this year have been delayed or canceled due to shortages of electrical infrastructure.

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The EU plans to target "addictive design" features on TikTok, Instagram, and other platforms, including endless scrolling, autoplay, push notifications, and recommendation loops that can steer children toward harmful content. European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen said new regulation could arrive later this year, alongside an EU age-verification app meant to make child-safety rules easier to enforce. CNBC reports: "We are taking action against TikTok and its addictive design -- endless scrolling, autoplay, and push notifications. The same applies to Meta, because we believe Instagram and Facebook are failing to enforce their own minimum age of 13," Von der Leyen said. "We are investigating platforms that allow children to go down 'rabbit holes' of harmful content -- such as videos that promote eating disorders or self-harm," she added. The EU's executive arm has also developed its own age verification app, which has the "highest privacy standards in the world," according to Von der Leyen. Member states will soon be able to integrate it into their digital wallets, and it can easily be enforced by online platforms. "No more excuses -- the technology for age-verification is available," the EU chief said. The EU Commission could have a legal proposal prepared as soon as the summer, as it awaits the advice and findings of its 'Special Panel of experts on Child Safety Online.'

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