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Nine months ago, I had to field quite a few angry comments from folks who told me they intended to drop their GNOME Foundation memberships in the wake of confusing and opaque board behaviour. I say to you now what I told each of them back in September:

Stay and fight.

 

The GNOME Foundation saw a much needed — and long overdue — changing of the guard back in August of 2025. In the past 12 months, the Foundation has finally made the improvements it should have been making over the past decade:

• 2025-05-09 – GNOME’s infra team had its first management review — it was spotless.
• 2025-05-16 – Foundation Reports begin in earnest as a first small step toward a transparent GNOME Foundation. We begin the hunt for a new Treasurer.
• 2025-05-23 – We started a Foundation Handbook to match handbook.gnome.org. (This has since migrated to a wiki.) We started moving all the Foundation’s documents into a central location. Project management began at the Foundation for the first time ever.
• 2025-05-28 – The Foundation publicly acknowledged that attacks on our Matrix servers, using illegal images, constitute crimes.
• 2025-06-06 – Both donate.gnome.org and (later) fellowship.gnome.org are pitched and accepted by the board. We brought on Deepa Venkatraman as Treasurer. Bart Piotrowski set up vault.gnome.org for passwords.
• 2025-06-14 – Andrea Veri completed the transition to donated AWS resources for GNOME infra.
• 2025-06-20 – donate.gnome.org is released, thanks to the hard work of Bart, Sam Hewitt, and Jakub Steiner.
• 2025-06-26 – The “Donate Less” campaign begins, in anticipation of the outbound program that would become fellowship.gnome.org.
• 2025-07-05 – The concept of fellowship.gnome.org goes public. Work on the corresponding donate.gnome.org shell notification starts. We tightened fiscal controls. We added redundancy to all our financial, legal, and operational processes. We interviewed a pipeline of candidates and selected Ignacy Kuchciński to complete the work under the Digital Wellbeing grant.
• 2025-07-12 – We invited postmarketOS to the Advisory Board.
• 2025-07-21 – We started stabilizing the GNOME Foundation’s finances for the long term by redefining the Board Reserve and taking a hard look at balancing year-on-year (annual recurring) revenue and expenses. We added the first-ever redundant signatories on bank accounts.
• 2025-08-08 – We created a shared online space for Advisory Board members to collaborate.
• 2025-09-05 – First corporate sponsor.
• 2025-09-12 – Deepa’s budget process is “the best the Foundation has ever had,” according to multiple directors.
• 2025-10-10 – Digital Wellbeing is delivered. The Foundation gets a much-needed credit card policy.
• 2025-10-24 – A new Finance Advisor arrives. (An important role at a 501c3.)
• 2025-11-28 – The budget is balanced. More importantly, the budget report contains the commitment to balancing recurring expenses and recurring revenue, continuously.
• 2025-12-19 – Deepa joins as a full director and remains Treasurer.
• 2026-01-09 – A new automated accounts payable and accounts receivable system is installed.
• 2026-03-20 – Financial reporting moves from quarterly to monthly.
• 2026-04-17 – The Fellowship Program begins! Users’ donations come full-circle: a percentage of every donation now goes directly to developers.
• 2026-05-15 – Finances are on-target. The Foundation opens a position for Finance Director.
• 2026-05-29 – Four old finance platforms are retired as the finances of the Foundation are automated and simplified. The Foundation introduces a Concern Escalation Policy: if members feel that directors or staff are abusing their positions with policy violations, illegal activity, discrimination, or conflicted behaviour, they’re provided the reassurance that they can blow the whistle without risk of retaliation.

 

That’s a lot for one little nonprofit. But this is the beginning of GNOME Foundation 2.0, not the end. The work must continue and there is still plenty to be done.

If you let your membership expire in recent years, get it back. If you are thinking of leaving, don’t. And if you are thinking of running for board elections, run.

The GNOME Foundation is the healthiest it’s ever been. It’s reducing costs and focusing on its actual mission: GNOME. The excellence demanded of GNOME hackers is now demanded of the Foundation, too. You can be a part of continuing that trajectory.

There has never been a more meaningful time to join the GNOME Foundation board.

 

"Around 570 cables (plus a further 80 planned) carry between 95% and 99% of the world's intercontinental telecommunications data," reports CNN (since fiber cables offer speeds of terabits per second, carry much more data than satellite links). And "networks of green energy cables carrying electricity are also starting to sprawl across the world's seabeds." Now to protect them, the U.S., Australia and the U.K. "are planning to develop new unmanned undersea vehicles" as part of their trilateral security partnership. Western governments see a growing risk of Russian and Chinese sabotage of undersea cables and are also concerned that Iran may seek to exploit the many data networks running through the shallow waters of the Persian Gulf. The "seabed is a battlefield" said Australia's Defence Minister, Richard Marles, in Singapore, calling for tougher action against so-called shadow-fleet vessels... The programme will improve the three nations' reconnaissance and strike capabilities, "and bolster superiority in anti-submarine and anti-surface warfare," as well as mine countermeasures, [according to a statement from their trilateral AUKUS partnership]... The new AUKUS project will sharpen all three countries' ability to respond to threats, including those targeting underwater cables and pipelines, through a range of "cutting edge sensors and weapons systems for undersea drones," UK Defence Secretary John Healey said. Marles said undersea internet cables — "the arteries of modern civilization" — were being cut at an unprecedented rate, with island nations like Australia acutely vulnerable. "Over the past 18 months, we have witnessed a series of attacks against subsea critical infrastructure at a scale and frequency that is historically unprecedented," he said. The UK government has also highlighted the vulnerability of the world's digital highways. "Every international payment, every cross-border trade executed in milliseconds, every flow of data between businesses here in the UK and markets overseas — all travel along the seabed," Telecoms Minister Liz Lloyd said Friday... Last month, the UK said it had tracked three Russian submarines covertly surveying undersea cables in the north Atlantic... A UK parliamentary inquiry warned last year that UK infrastructure might be targeted in a crisis, adding it was "not confident that the UK could prevent such attacks or recover within an acceptable time period." The UK Navy is already exploring the creation of a hybrid force that incorporates the widespread use of underwater drones to combat Russian threats in the Atlantic.

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A historian-turned-software engineer warns that "so little is ever written down" by professional programmers in a new article for Fast Company: Perhaps there's an early design doc, but then it turns out that everything was substantially revised before work began. Maybe there are a few wiki pages explaining known issues, some of which were solved a long time ago and others that have been left to molder in the codebase. Somebody might have left a comment in the code itself, but typically it's a warning not to change something or else something else will break... Software engineering has an ambivalent relationship with documentation. Everyone agrees documentation matters in theory, but in practice it's inconsistent, outdated, or missing entirely. Part of that is simple inertia. Writing documentation is usually less interesting than writing the code itself. But it's also ideological. The Agile movement emerged in part as a reaction against the heavily documented Waterfall methodology, and one of Agile's core values explicitly prioritizes "working software over comprehensive documentation." In escaping bureaucratic overdocumentation, the industry also normalized underdocumentation. High turnover at software jobs always brings "a constant drain of domain knowledge." And he's he's skeptical that generative AI will be able to fill in those gaps: [H]aving it generate documentation on the codebase itself might sound like a solution to the absence of other written information. LLMs can certainly summarize code back to you. But hold up with that idea. Beyond hallucinations, there's a deeper problem: Writing documentation is itself part of the thinking process. Whether I'm writing history or software, putting an approach into words helps refine it before I sink hours into implementation. Documentation also captures intent. An LLM may be able to summarize what a codebase does, but it cannot reliably explain why a developer chose one approach over another, or what trade-offs shaped that decision... An LLM can read code that I've written. It might even scan a large codebase and accurately summarize what it's doing. But it can't assess authorial intent. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader smooth wombat for sharing the article.

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Version:7.1-rc6 (mainline) Released:2026-05-31 Source:linux-7.1-rc6.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)

Axios reports: The American Federation of Teachers, the second-largest teachers' union in the U.S., released a 10-point plan to introduce AI and screen-time guardrails in classrooms. The plan would limit AI use and ban screens for students in prekindergarten through second grade "unless there is a compelling reason," such as supporting students with special needs. The teacher union's president Randi Weingarten warned that young students "are drowning in tech," according to the New York Times, which reports the union president also "called on schools on Wednesday to stop giving digital devices like iPads to children in prekindergarten through second grade." In a speech at the National Press Club in Washington, Weingarten also urged elementary schools to avoid using artificial intelligence tools like OpenAI's ChatGPT, Google's Gemini and Khan Academy's Khanmigo with children [and] called for new national privacy and safety standards for A.I. tools in all schools... "The work of teaching and learning in the earliest grades should be done without A.I." The union's effort reflects a backlash among parents and educators against heavy use of school-issued laptops and apps. Some parents and nonprofit children's groups are also pushing back against campaigns by tech giants like Google and OpenAI to spread their A.I. products in schools... Weingarten said that the union was negotiating safety and privacy standards for A.I. use in schools with "our partners in the A.I. academy," and that Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic had agreed in principle to those standards. Weingarten "laid out a plan for reorienting public schooling toward human abilities and student well-being," according to the article, calling it "a devices down, eyes up, hands-on strategy." And meanwhile school cellphone bans are expanding into broader efforts to establish guardrails around AI in education and limit screen use, reports Axios. "At least 16 states — both red and blue — have introduced bills to limit classroom technology." Schools Beyond Screens formed with fewer than a dozen parents in Los Angeles Unified School District last year, but the nonprofit has grown to include thousands of parents and educators nationwide, SBS policy director Kate Brody tells Axios... McPherson Middle School principal Inge Esping told Axios that the suspension rate at her Kansas school fell 70% after cellphones were banned in 2022. Students also started speaking more with one another and with teachers. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

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Disney's Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu "suffered a catastrophic 70% drop in its second weekend," reports Variety, suggesting the movie isn't finding audiences "beyond an aging group of core fans." "Despite playing on far more screens, The Mandalorian and Grogu landed in third place on weekend charts behind Backrooms and Obsession." (described as "two buzzy horror films.") Suprisingly, both movies were directed by 20-something YouTube stars, "and cost nearly nothing to produce." Analyst Jeff Bock of Exhibitor Relations tells Variety, "We knew indie horror was hot, but we didn't know how hot. It's actually competing with the big summer blockbuster." Directed by 20-year-old Kane Parsons, "Backrooms" has earned $118 million globally so far... With a production budget of roughly $10 million, it's already one of the most profitable movies of the year. Though a sequel hasn't been announced, Parsons has already started toying with the idea of turning "Backrooms" into a film franchise... [The "Backrooms" premise seems to have originated on 4chan, then expanded in a YouTube video Parsons filmed when he was 16.] "Backrooms" also ranked as the biggest debut in history for original horror, as well as the best start for a first-time filmmaker on a non-franchise film. Parsons is the youngest director, by far, to have the No. 1 film at the box office. Based on Parsons' hit web series, "Backrooms" follows a furniture store owner (Chiwetel Ejiofor) who finds a secret doorway that leads him to a seemingly endless stretch of nondescript rooms. When he disappears, his therapist (Renate Reinsve) ventures into the unknown to rescue him. Nearly 85% of audiences were under the age of 35, and more than 50% were 25 or younger, according to PostTrak data. Parsons and [26-year-old Obsession director/writer Curry] Barker are part of a wave of YouTubers who have turned their talents to the big screen — and brought their enormous, youthful fanbases along with them. Earlier this year, YouTube creator Mark Fischback directed, self-financed and distributed the horror film "Iron Lung," which earned a stellar $50 million against a $3 million budget. What's all the more impressive is that "Backrooms" and "Obsession" aren't cannibalizing each other at the box office. In fact, "Obsession" rose 10% from the prior weekend, which was already up a stunning 39% from its solid $17 million debut. It's defying box office norms as the first film since "E.T. The Extraterrestrial" in 1982 to see ticket sales increase in its second and third weekends outside of the holiday season, according to Focus. After three weekends of release, "Obsession" has grossed $106 million domestically and $148 million worldwide against a mere $1 million production budget. The first-weekend box office for The Mandalorian and Grogu was the worst since 2002's Attack of the Clones, but then it's second-weekend drop in sales was also the largest ever, reports ScreenRant. The next-worst drop in sales (for a second weekend) was 2017's The Last Jedi, they point out, but The Last Jedi was dropping from a 2.5x larger debut. Their article suggests The Mandalorian/Grogu box office "may not ever hit a total large enough for the titular duo to return to the big screen," although it could eventually show a profit. "While it likely won't break even in theaters, it will earn additional revenue from merchandising on top of its impending streaming, video on demand, and physical media releases." Variety adds that Disney "is hoping that next summer's Star Wars: Starfighter, an original adventure directed by Shawn Levy and starring Ryan Gosling, serves as a fresh start for the franchise."

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Almost a fifth of the earth's population lives in Africa. And Africa's next generation of power projects "is increasingly being built around solar and wind power and battery storage," reports the Associated Press, "as governments and investors shift away from coal and large hydropower dams in search of cheaper, faster and more reliable electricity." The shift is visible in a $1.5 billion energy agreement between China and Zambia announced in early May that includes three separate 300-megawatt projects spanning solar, wind and coal-fired power. While the inclusion of coal underscores the continent's continuing need for stable baseload electricity, African countries facing rising fuel import bills as a result of the Iran war, unreliable grids and growing industrial demand are increasingly turning to renewable energy projects that can be deployed faster and more cheaply than traditional plants. Of the 322 energy projects announced across Africa in 2025, 173 were solar projects, followed by hydropower at 46, wind at 34, gas at 22 and hybrid energy projects at 14, according to the energy research firm Electron Intelligence... Utility-scale solar power costs have dropped by nearly 90% globally since 2010, while onshore wind costs have fallen around 70%, making renewables the cheapest source of new electricity generation in many African markets... Much of the growth is through distributed solar and battery systems installed directly in mines, factories, telecom towers and homes. "Most official statistics still measure the energy transition the old way, by counting megawatts connected to national grids," [said Matt Tilleard, CEO of CrossBoundary Energy, which invests in renewable energy in Africa]. "But solar and batteries don't need central utilities." Data from the Africa Solar Industry Association shows 23.4 gigawatts of operational solar projects had been tracked across Africa by the end of 2025. But Chinese export figures indicate 58.1 gigawatts of solar panels have been shipped to African countries since 2017, suggesting solar adoption may be growing far faster than official figures capture. Investor Tilleard says "Renewable energy is now unequivocally the fastest, cheapest, and most bankable way to connect people, companies and economies to the megawatts they need to grow." And the article also includes this quote from Mugwe Manga, climate finance lead at FSD Kenya. "Africa is not on the periphery of the global energy transition, it is sitting at its center. The continent holds the world's best renewable resources, and the economics have now decisively turned in favor of clean energy."

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"In the future, AI agents will be able to find one another using the Domain Name System (DNS), instead of crawling about and probing ports or checking configured resources," writes The Register. InfoWorld writes that "numerous proprietary agent registries are on the market, but the Linux Foundation suggests we simply extend the distributed, open Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure we already have." The foundation is now inviting contributions to the DNS-AID project, a standard way for AI agents to discover, verify, and communicate with one another over DNS that requires no new infrastructure. It enables agents and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers to use DNS as a global, vendor-neutral directory. While many details remain to be worked out, the proposal suggests domain owners create a new well-known address that can provide a starting point for agents looking for one another: _index._agents.{domain}. This approach ensures that agent discovery remains scalable, secure, and compatible with the protocols that underly the internet, the Linux Foundation said. The Linux Foundation descrbes DNS-AID as enabling a standard way for AI agents to discover and communicate with one another. "By leveraging the internet's existing Domain Name System (DNS) infrastructure, DNS-AID provides a robust, decentralized alternative to the centralized registries and hardcoded URLs currently limiting AI interoperability." The standard was originally developed by Infoblox, their announcement notes, but "Because the protocol is implementation-agnostic, it functions across any DNS provider, ensuring that organizations maintain control over their agent infrastructure without relying on proprietary, centralized services."

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You can try 570 extinct operating systems at a new "virtual museum," according to a new article by ZDNet. Their reporter downloaded the ancient OS NeXTSTEP, and was "shocked" by how easy it was to run it, "and by the sheer number of operating systems to choose from." Essentially, what you do is download a zipped file, unzip it, change into the newly created directory, and run the executable. VirtualBox then opens to a Debian Linux instance, where you can select from a very long list of operating systems to run... You can run operating systems like Amiga, Apple I/II/III, Atari, Avigo, Commodore 64, Cray, DEC Alpha, Einstein, Game Boy Advance, GE 200, HP 3000, IBM 1130, iPod touch, Jupiter Ace, Lisa, Macintosh, MIPS-based SBCs, Neo, Newton, NeXT, NORC, Palm, and so many more. You can test the earliest mainframes, later mainframes and minicomputers, workstations and Unix variants, home computers, personal computer operating systems, mobile and embedded adOSes, and research-based and obscure systems. As far as Linux is concerned, you can run early Debian and its derivatives, Red Hat and its derivatives, early Slackware, and more... There are two editions of the Virtual OS Museum: full and lite. The full edition is currently 174GB and includes everything you need to run these old-school operating systems. The full version does not require a network connection to run. The Lite version is only 14GB and requires an internet connection because it downloads the full OS image you want to use. Gizmodo notes "this project is all the more remarkable for being the work of one man: Andrew Wartenkin, who has been collecting OS images for over two decades." Of course, Wartenkin didn't write all the emulation software himself, and he maintains a list of credits to give credit where it's due... The Museum itself runs in a virtual machine, which seems kinda fitting — it opens in a virtualized Linux installation and presents you with the full list of available operating systems. Did you know someone has written a GUI for the Commodore 64? Neither did I! There are simulations of ancient mainframes, like the IBM 1130 (yours for the low, low price of $32,280 — or $41,230 with a disk drive — back in 1965). There's also a YouTube channel. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Z00L00Kfor sharing the news.

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This article is also available in the B2B Services section on the gedit website.

Several business-to-business services are possible around gedit:

• Development of a new plugin.
• Development of a new text editor or Integrated Development Environment (IDE) based on the libgedit.
• Code maintenance.
• Training.
• Support.
• Creation of Long-Term Support (LTS) versions.
• Developer Experience (DX) guidance.
• […] Come with your own ideas to collaborate with the gedit project.

Target audience

• Operating System / Linux distributions: for your installed-by-default text editor.
• GTK-based desktop environments: to maintain a text editor or IDE, and to adhere to your Human Interface Guidelines (HIG).
• Scientific sector: to build developer tools.
• Education sector: to build easy-to-learn developer tools.
• New programming languages / development platforms: you're designing and implementing a new programming language, and you need developer tools for your users.
• Older programming languages users: you're a big organization and you have a lot of legacy code. You want better developer tools to be more productive.
• Markup or domain-specific languages: to better promote your language, you would like first-class support for it.

The libgedit shared libraries

gedit is not just a general-purpose text editor application, there is a “libgedit” underneath!

A lot of gedit features are implemented as re-usable code, as a set of shared libraries. So new apps - text editors and IDEs alike - can be built on top. There is an ongoing effort from the gedit project to make more code re-usable.

An example of an IDE based on the libgedit is Enter TeX.

The libgedit is in turn based on the very flexible GTK graphical toolkit.

GTK 3 or GTK 4

The libgedit currently targets GTK 3. If you want to develop with GTK 4, there is the GtkSourceView library (but it doesn't contain all the libgedit features). Another possibility is to first port the libgedit to GTK 4.

The plugin system

gedit has a powerful plugin system mechanism, to extend the application. You can leverage it for prototyping additional features, or as the final solution that requires less efforts than creating a new specialized text editor.

You can also combine the best of both approaches:

• First implement a feature that is based on libgedit.
• Then wrap your feature in a gedit plugin so it can readily be used.
• Finally, as an option, create a custom text editor app, re-using the same implementation of your feature(s), integrating everything well together.

Other developer tools

The text editor part is essential, it is the central feature of an IDE. But other developer tools can be developed as well.

For instance, Devhelp can be used for browsing and searching API documentation. Almost all its code is re-usable; like for gedit, there is a libdevhelp toolkit under the hood.

Advice to not start from scratch

A little advice: please don't create a new text editor or IDE from scratch, base your work on existing, high-level libraries like the libgedit. Even if it looks simple on paper, developing a feature-full text editor is a lot of work.

Use the libgedit from your preferred programming language

libgedit and GTK can be used from a wide range of programming languages, and the support for additional languages can be implemented too. This is thanks to GObject Introspection. See the list of language bindings for the GTK project.

Open-source or proprietary software

libgedit and GTK are licensed under the GNU Lesser General Public License (LGPL), which allows to develop proprietary software on top.

gedit plugins need to be distributed as free/libre software, under the GPL license.

Who to collaborate with

• Sébastien Wilmet, the current maintainer and main developer of gedit and libgedit.
• You? If you're or work for a consultancy company specialized in GNOME, GLib or GTK, and want to be part of this project, don't hesitate to get in touch!

Apple is reportedly working to shrink Google's Gemini models enough to power parts of a long-delayed AI-enhanced Siri on iPhones. But despite Apple's best efforts to run the AI locally, "the iPhone's Gemini makeover will lean heavily on Google and Nvidia in the cloud," reports Ars Technica. That could complicate Apple's privacy-first AI messaging, especially if more complex Siri requests are routed through Google infrastructure and Nvidia's encrypted cloud-computing platform. Ars Technica reports: After inking the Google deal, Apple apparently got to work distilling Google's giant cloud-based Gemini models. Distillation is a process in which a small, less resource-intensive model learns to mimic a large, expensive one. With enough time, this can reliably transfer useful capabilities while pruning less important weights from the model. That may enable Siri to handle some tasks with private local compute, but a cloud component looks inevitable. Processing users' AI data in the cloud could be a problem for Apple. At WWDC, the company will probably promote its years of experience designing chips and how well that positions it for AI. However, The Information claims that Apple has struggled to even get Google's massive undistilled Gemini models running on its custom Private Cloud Compute infrastructure, which is built on on M-series Mac chips. When the smarter Siri rolls out, it will probably route more complex tasks to Google's cloud infrastructure instead of Apple's, but it won't be running on Google TPUs. Apple has reportedly signed a deal with Nvidia to use its Confidential Computing platform for this purpose. Confidential Computing keeps data encrypted on Nvidia GPUs while it's being processed in the cloud, which could help Apple claim it's still sensitive to user privacy concerns. It might even retain its own Private Cloud Compute branding for the system. The iPhone probably won't tell you which version of Gemini is handling individual Siri requests. Device makers designing hybrid systems that rely on local and cloud-based AI like to talk about making the experience feel "seamless." There might be clues, though.

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```Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 brings word that Marcia Lucas, part of the editing team for both Star Wars and Return of the Jedi, has died at age 80 after a battle with metastatic cancer. Married to George Lucas from 1969 to 1983, Marcia is remembered by The Wrap as "a powerful asset in the early days of the Star Wars series, helping shape its voice and identity long before it became the massive global franchise..." She won an Academy Award for Best Film Editing for her work on the original "Star Wars" movie, an award that came four years after she was nominated for editing George's previous film, "American Graffiti." She additionally edited his debut feature, "THX 1138." Beyond these collaborations with her then-husband, Marcia worked as an editor with other acclaimed filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. She was credited as sole editor for Scorsese's "Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore," and served as supervising editor for "Taxi Driver" and "New York, New York." Marcia served as part of a three-person crew editing both "Star Wars" and "Return of the Jedi." On the first film, she worked alongside Paul Hirsch and Richard Chew and was personally responsible for editing the Battle of Yavin — otherwise known as the iconic "trench run" sequence near the end of the film. For "Return of the Jedi," Marcia shared credit with Sean Barton and Duwayne Dunham. "If only Lucas had people like her on the prequels instead of sycophants who worshipped him as a God..." argues this 2015 blog post noting an article calling her "the secret weapon behind Star Wars — including this anecdote from The Secret History of Star Wars : The [Star Wars] Death Star trench run was originally scripted entirely different, with Luke having two runs at the exhaust port; Marcia had re-ordered the shots almost from the ground up, trying to build tension lacking in the original scripted sequence, which was why this one was the most complicated (Deleted Magic has a faithful reproduction of the original assembly, which is surprisingly unsatisfying). She warned George, "If the audience doesn't cheer when Han Solo comes in at the last second in the Millennium Falcon to help Luke when he's being chased by Darth Vader, the picture doesn't work." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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Version:next-20260529 (linux-next) Released:2026-05-29

Dell's stock skyrocketed 32.76% on Friday, "its best day ever," reports CNBC, after Dell "reported its fastest pace for revenue growth for any period since returning to the public market in 2018..." "Shares are now up 234% in 2026." Dell, which reported first-quarter earnings after the bell on Thursday, saw a flood of artificial intelligence-related demand for its servers, which contain graphics processing units from companies like Nvidia. Quarterly revenue soared nearly 88% year over year, with AI server revenue alone increasing 757% from a year earlier to $16.1 billion... Ben Reitzes, head of technology research at [research/investment firm] Melius, said he'd "never seen anything like" Dell's latest quarter. "They beat every line in the model, so this wasn't just AI, it was great execution," Reitzes told CNBC's "Squawk on the Street." "They beat whatever we would've thought...." Morgan Stanley wrote that while they expected a clean beat and raise this quarter, they're "eating our humble pie" off the back of Dell's results. "We got this one wrong, and our model/PT are under review," the analysts wrote. "This was — across the board — one of the most impressive quarters we've seen in our time covering Hardware, especially in the context of what is happening across the component universe."

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Wix is laying off roughly 20% of its workforce, about 1,000 employees, as CEO Avishai Abrahami cites both the rapid evolution of AI and currency pressure from a stronger Israeli shekel against the dollar. The web developer joins a growing list of tech companies making similar cuts, including Amazon, Block, Cisco, Cloudflare, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle and Intuit. Fast Company reports: "We have witnessed the most significant shift in how companies are built since the invention of modern programming languages in the 1970s," [wrote Abrahami]. "This is not just about adopting new tools -- it is about rewiring how companies are built, how they think, how they manage, and how they operate. Companies that embrace this change will not only build faster; they will build things the previous generation literally could not have imagined." Abrahami also cited the poor exchange rate between the Israeli shekel and the U.S. dollar. The Israeli currency has significantly strengthened in the past few quarters against a weakening dollar, and the shekel is up nearly 30% against the greenback over the last year. "As the majority of our teams are Israel-based, a very meaningful portion of our costs are shekel-denominated, while our revenue is largely dollar-denominated," Abrahami explained on X. "This creates a structural pressure on our ability to operate at our current scale. It is a reality that directly shapes what is sustainable for our company."

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Spaceflight Now shared their video of the explosion, which the Orlando Sentinel describes as showing Blue Origin's rocket "become engulfed in flames. The fireball expands out and covers the entire launch pad as the fuselage of the rocket can be seen crumbling into the flames." Blue Origin founder Jeff Bezos said on X.com "It's too early to know the root cause but we're already working to find it. Very rough day, but we'll rebuild whatever needs rebuilding and get back to flying. It's worth it." (SpaceX founder Elon Musk posted "Sorry to see this, I hope you recover quickly.") It's unclear how this will impact future launches. "The rocket was destroyed," reports CBS News, "and as the smoke cleared, there was no sign of the erector-gantry used to move the New Glenn from its hangar to the pad and to raise it from horizontal to vertical. Likewise, one of two tall lightning towers was no longer visible." It was the first such on-pad explosion at the Cape since a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket blew up on nearby pad 40 on Sept. 1, 2016... Blue Origin only has one New Glenn pad, the one that was damaged in the Thursday test. The New Glenn, which has launched three times, is a heavy lift rocket designed to compete head-to-head with SpaceX Falcon 9 and Falcon Heavy rockets. During New Glenn's most recent flight in April, an upper stage malfunction prevented a commercial internet satellite from reaching its planned orbit... The New Glenn destroyed Thursday was to send 48 Leo internet satellites owned by Amazon into space [which were not on board for the hot-fire test] Blue Origin posted on X.com that "Debris from our recent hotfire anomaly may wash ashore in the coming days/weeks. If you encounter any debris, do not touch or approach it for your safety." "Spaceflight is unforgiving, and developing new heavy-lift launch capability is extraordinarily difficult..." NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman posted on X.com. "âWe will provide information on any impacts to the Artemis and Moon Base programs as it becomes available." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader symbolset for sharing the news.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Fortune: The Supreme Court on Tuesday rejected a push to avoid a lawsuit alleging that Facebook and Instagram harmed young users, a decision that comes as social media companies increasingly face legal scrutiny. Parent company Meta appealed after Vermont's highest court allowed a suit filed by its attorney general in 2023 to move forward. The company is facing similar lawsuits from states across the country, accusing it of knowingly designing addictive features. Meta had argued that it can't be sued in Vermont court because neither the company nor the app design has specific ties to the state. Vermont countered that the sites' large number of teen users gives its courts jurisdiction. The Supreme Court declined to hear the appeal in a brief, unexplained order, as is typical. The procedural decision comes after court losses for Meta and YouTube in social media addiction lawsuits in California and New Mexico. [...] Meta, for its part, has said that it has already introduced dozens of tools to support teens and their families and suggested it would have worked with the states on standards for youth social media use. Vermont Attorney General Charity Clark applauded the decision, saying it affirms "that companies that choose to do business in Vermont, like Meta, can be held accountable when they harm kids."

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A senior CIA official, David Rush, was arrested after investigators found more than $40 million in gold bars and about $2 million in cash at his Virginia home. According to the New York Times, "The only charge lodged against David Rush is that he inflated his academic credentials and obtained military leave pay worth tens of thousands of dollars." From the report: The court papers describe Mr. Rush as a "former senior executive service-level employee at a United States government agency." People familiar with the investigation say he until very recently held a senior position at the C.I.A. In a joint statement, the C.I.A. and F.B.I. said the arrest occurred on May 19, after the agency alerted the bureau. "After a C.I.A. internal investigation identified potential violations of the law, C.I.A. Director John Ratcliffe referred the information to the F.B.I. for a law enforcement investigation," the statement said. From last November to March, the court papers say, Mr. Rush asked for, and received, "a significant quantity of foreign currency and tens of millions of dollars in gold bars for work-related expenses." When the C.I.A. conducted a review of where the gold and currency were stashed, the agency was "unable to locate the gold bars or significant amounts of the foreign currency," according to court papers. On May 18, F.B.I. agents searched Mr. Rush's home and found "approximately 303 gold bars, each of which weighed approximately one kilogram," according to an affidavit. Based on the price of gold, the affidavit said, the estimated value of the gold exceeded $40 million. Investigators also seized nearly three dozen luxury watches, many of them Rolexes. The court papers do not indicate why Mr. Rush appears to have kept so much gold, and $2 million in U.S. currency, in his home, or what work project would have required him to amass such wealth.

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NASA has outlined a three-phase plan to build a lunar base at the moon's south pole. The first phase, from 2026 to 2029, will focus on robotic missions, landers, rovers, reactors, satellites, and Blue Origin's Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance test. Later phases will add habitats, power systems, communications, cargo logistics, and rotating crews. Wired reports: According to a recent press conference, phase one will be particularly active: at least 25 missions and 21 surface landings. Without detailing specific dates, the agency said that over the next three years it will send rovers, including manned models for future mobility, drones, surface reactors, new-generation satellites, and payloads to prepare the ground. One of the first key missions will be the test of the Blue Moon Mark 1 Endurance module in fall 2026. Its purpose is to evaluate conditions for a controlled descent and validate navigation and positioning technology. It will not carry astronauts. If the mission is successful, Blue Origin plans a manned version around 2028, possibly with Blue Moon Mark 2. Moon Base II and III missions are also part of the program's 2026 startup. One will send rovers and payloads to evaluate more complex rover operations; the other will carry scientific instruments to study the behavior of materials and systems under extreme lunar conditions. Phase two, starting in 2029, marks the beginning of semipermanent infrastructure assembly and first occupancy operations. NASA plans to install advanced energy systems, including surface reactors, initial habitat elements, and more robust communication networks. Up to 60 tons of cargo will be delivered in 24 missions during this period. Phase three is for scale-up. The infrastructure in place will be strengthened and expanded to form durable centers with constant turnover of personnel. NASA envisions a lunar south pole with habitable modules, reliable power systems, logistics networks for cargo and crew transportation, and the shipment of about 38 tons of cargo annually for maintenance and expansion. "Every mission, crewed and uncrewed, will be a learning opportunity as we return to the lunar surface, build the infrastructure to stay, and master the skills required to live and operate in one of the most demanding and dangerous environments imaginable," said administrator Jared Isaacman in a NASA statement. "We will go for the science, for all we stand to gain from an economic and technological perspective, for the innovations that will make life better here on Earth, and to prepare for where we will inevitably go next."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from MIT News: Currently, lithium hard rock extraction involves baking the rock at over 1,000 Celsius and chemically leaching it to extract lithium. The rest of the rock is discarded. Now, a team of researchers from MIT and elsewhere has developed a low-temperature process for extracting battery-grade lithium from the most common type of lithium-bearing mineral. The process uses a liquid reagent to dissolve the rock into the useful forms of its constituent parts: not just battery-ready lithium salts, but also smelter-grade alumina and cement-ready silica. After the minerals are extracted, the solvent and reagent can be recovered and used again so waste levels approach zero. The researchers estimate the closed-loop process is half the cost of traditional lithium hard rock extraction and could make it cost-competitive with extracting lithium from brine water. "We believe this approach is the lowest-energy, lowest-cost way of getting lithium not only out of hard rock, but period," says Yet-Ming Chiang, MIT's Kyocera Professor of Materials Science and Engineering. "That's what's motivating us to scale this. It will enable the energy transition through batteries that use lithium. This was one of the goals of The Climate Project at MIT -- to work on projects that, within a short number of years, could transition from the lab to commercialization and impact." A paper describing the process has been published in the journal Science.

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