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Longtime Slashdot reader mccalli writes: Times Magazine has started serving adverts with "brand messages" to AI crawlers, which are not part of its main page. The aim seems to be to influence chatbots to talk about the brand offerings in a positive light that can't be traced back to the actual page. Notably, they've excluded Google chatbots from this, likely because Google penalizes companies that show different search offerings to its bots versus actual human visitors. "Maybe it's more important to influence the agent than even the human, because with a human you influence one person. When you influence ChatGPT, you're influencing potentially all of ChatGPT," said Jonah Goodhart, co-founder and CEO of ad tech platform Mobian. "If ChatGPT changes what it says about [a brand], it's massive and it's more than any one campaign could ever do. The big idea here is LLMs and AI want trusted information about brands. We're serving that up to them in a very straightforward, easy way." The ad strategy was uncovered by Germany-based freelance software developer Vincent Schmalbach, who detailed his findings in a blog post. Digiday and The Register both reported on the story.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

wiredmikey shares a report from SecurityWeek: Meta is the latest major AI developer to admit that its models broke loose during cybersecurity testing and hacked external systems. The tech giant said in a statement to the media on Wednesday that the incident occurred during independent evaluations conducted by Israeli AI security startup Irregular. The tested AI models were inadvertently allowed to access the internet due to a misconfiguration, which led them to exploit a vulnerability in an unnamed third-party service. It's unclear if it was a known flaw or a zero-day. The Information [gated] learned that the Meta AI attacks involved the company's advanced Muse Spark 1.1 model, which breached an unnamed organization's systems and made unauthorized changes to its internal environment. Meta said it learned of the AI models going rogue after being notified by Irregular. The company is conducting an investigation and it has promised to issue a "full retrospective" once it has all the facts. A spokesperson for Irregular said the incident was the "exact same evaluation-environment issue that was already disclosed by Anthropic last week" and that it did "not involve a "sandbox escape or a sophisticated cyber action." It contrasts with OpenAI, whose AI agent independently exploited a novel vulnerability to reach the internet during cyber testing. Not only did it breach Hugging Face but it also hacked multiple third-party accounts and services as part of the attack.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version:next-20260806 (linux-next) Released:2026-08-06

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Mexican broadcaster TelevisaUnivision (TU) has obtained (PDF) one of the broadest anti-piracy injunctions ever issued by a U.S. federal court. After initially targeting five pirate IPTV streaming operations, the case expanded to cover well over 500 domain names, requiring intermediaries including Cloudflare, GitHub, and a Mexican bank to comply. In addition, the injunction also covers pirate services and content that hasn't been created yet. [...] The case was relatively targeted, naming the IPTV services Thunder TV, Sunset TV, Pop TV, Kaelus TV, and Tele Latino, as well as their alleged operators. The broadcaster argued that these pirate IPTV services threatened its business. TU holds the World Cup rights for sixteen Latin American territories, and its license with FIFA requires it to keep the Mexican broadcast signal from reaching the United States. The pirate services, it argued, put it in breach of that contract, exposing it to "termination and forfeiture of hundreds of millions of dollars in payments." To stop this immediate threat, the company requested a temporary restraining order, hoping to shut down the IPTV services effective immediately. [...] Judge Kathleen Williams granted the temporary restraining order (PDF) on June 5, one day after the case was filed, without hearing from any of the defendants. The initial order prohibited the defendants from infringing TU's own copyrighted works, which include telenovelas and other programming, and from using its trademarks, including all content linked to its licensed World Cup broadcast. Importantly, the order also targeted third parties acting "in active concert," including ISPs, hosts, CDNs, domain registrars, registries, app stores, ad networks, social platforms, search engines, and payment processors. These were ordered, on TU's request and with notice, to disable the listed domains and IP addresses and unmask whoever was behind them. [...] While the injunction is noteworthy for many reasons, the most striking feature is that it's specifically written to include things that don't yet exist. That starts with the content it protects. The order isn't limited to TU's current catalog or the World Cup rights, it covers the infringement of "any copyrighted works or broadcasts that Plaintiffs may in the future produce, license, or acquire rights to transmit." In other words, it covers future copyrights that did not exist when the order was signed. The same applies to the pirate services themselves. The injunction defines its target as the named IPTV operations "and any comparable system," whether "currently in existence or developed in the future," and it applies "regardless of the branding, domain name, or technical configuration used."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Hey, I’m Philipp. I’m a GNOME Design Team member and I have been contributing to GNOME design as a volunteer for several years. I’m excited to share with you that I have joined the Sovereign Tech Agency as a fellow for GNOME Design & Community Management. Check out the other fellows in the official announcement.

Introduction

I originally started contributing to GNOME to improve the software I use myself. However, what motivates me to stay involved long-term are my political values. Our modern lives, from communication and education to political discourse, are shaped by digital tools, and I believe that it’s essential for a free and democratic society to ensure free and independent access to these technologies. To achieve this goal, end-user devices based on free and open-source software are key, and the GNOME desktop and its app ecosystem offer a powerful alternative to proprietary platforms.

In recent years, I have had the privilege of joining the exceptionally skilled and motivated GNOME community as a volunteer, and have experienced how rewarding it is to contribute to a project with such a broad societal impact. At the same time, it’s been a challenge to find a balance between my job, my contributions to GNOME, and my personal life. I’ve contributed to GNOME in my free time, in the evenings, and during vacations. This two-year fellowship is a great honor and marks a significant change in my life. It is a unique opportunity for me to devote my skills and experience entirely to a project I strongly believe in.

Activities

During my two-year fellowship, I will support GNOME maintainers and developers with design feedback and reviews, create mockups, and coordinate efforts to standardize design patterns. My other activities focus on lasting improvements through two strategic initiatives: expanding the design community to increase capacity and enhancing our design tooling to reduce overhead and simplify onboarding. The following activities may change over the course of the two-year fellowship, as I will adapt them to the needs of the community.

Community growth

I know from my own experience that it is hard to get started with GNOME design. While code contributions are often contained within the boundaries of a single app, design activities spread across multiple projects and often lack a clear entry point or primary contact. Also, not all tasks are newcomer friendly and many require cross‑project knowledge or historical context. I want to make design work more discoverable, simplify onboarding with clear contribution paths and approachable tasks, and retain contributors long term by integrating them into the community.

To attract new contributors, I will increase the visibility of design work by writing regular blog posts, giving presentations, and running workshops at conferences and hackathons. New contribution opportunities for newcomers will be created with clear instructions for independent activities such as collecting state‑of‑the‑art examples, running accessibility and user tests, and creating mockups. Design reviews will be used as mentorship opportunities, pairing regular design contributors with experienced designers for peer review and knowledge sharing. I plan to improve our team governance with clear membership criteria and focus areas, and integrate sustained contributors into the team and its processes. Finally, I want to provide grant writing support to enable contributors to sustain their contributions long-term.

Tooling improvements

User interface mockups are an important tool to communicate with developers. Outdated mockup templates, incomplete documentation, and non‑specialized software create unnecessary overhead, especially for newcomers. Therefore, I will extend and update the mockup templates for our current tool, Inkscape, and evaluate the open‑source UX design tool Penpot for managing our design system. If it proves suitable, I will build a component library to simplify mockup creation and keep assets synced with our stylesheet.

What’s next

I want to blog about my fellowship activities and design work in general, so expect regular updates here. If you’re interested in contributing to GNOME design, check out the Design Team page on the Welcome to GNOME website, familiarize yourself with the Human Interface Guidelines, and join our Matrix channel. If you’re a GNOME developer feel free to reach out to me via Matrix and involve me in design reviews.

This week’s most important Linux security updates arrived through vendor advisories rather than major headline-making disclosures.

Kubernetes maintainers patched two path-traversal vulnerabilities in the NFS and SMB CSI drivers earlier this year. But repository histories show that the security work did not end with those fixes.

The FDA has approved the first mRNA flu vaccine in the United States after a clinical trial found it was about 27% more effective than a standard flu shot. Manufactured by Moderna and marketed as mFlusiva, the vaccine is expected to be available this fall for adults ages 50 to 64 and those 65 and older, though approval for the older group is conditional on Moderna conducting an additional clinical trial, NBC News reports. From the report: Many scientists and public health experts have touted the idea of an mRNA-based flu vaccine, which uses the same messenger RNA platform as the Covid vaccines from Moderna and Pfizer. That's because mRNA vaccines can be manufactured much faster than traditional vaccines, allowing scientists to better match circulating influenza strains. Moderna said it takes two to three months from picking the strain to rolling out its flu shot, compared with about six months for traditional flu shots.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Longtime Slashdot readers schwit1 and fjo3 shared a report about BMW displaying a Spider-Man promotion on connected vehicle screens in more than 70 markets. According to reports, drivers had to play or dismiss the ad before they could use the infotainment system. Futurism reports: BMW, showing that it was about as in-touch as its drivers are familiar with turn signals, teased the promotion as a "special surprise." According to The Autopian's coverage and the heaps of complaints online, the ad appears on the center console screen when you start up the car. When the ad's done playing -- a cheap looking animation that doesn't come close to warranting all this hubbub -- it even has the gall to ask you to scan a QR code. While it does give you the option to play or skip the "festive animation," it's still an annoying extra step drivers have to take before pulling up the map they need or the music they want to listen to. It's also a breach of trust: drivers keep their cars connected so they receive critical software updates, not unexpectedly see ads when they're trying to hit the road. Few owners were pleased. Enthusiasts in the r/BMW subreddit had a veritable meltdown when someone posted footage of the ad playing on their infotainment system.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Scientists have captured images of the sun's surface in the finest detail yet, revealing a strange and dynamic facade. It's dangerous to look directly at the sun without proper eye protection. But researchers were able to peek at its scorching surface with the help of the National Science Foundation's Daniel K. Inouye Solar Telescope, located on the island of Maui in Hawaii. Scientists originally took the images for a different reason: to fine-tune and test the limits of the telescope. But when they looked at the results, they realized they'd photographed the sun's bright outer shell at higher resolution than ever before. What's more, they saw strange feathery patterns rippling across the surface. "That reminds me of famous paintings, like the swirling skies in Van Gogh's Starry Night," said solar physicist Ruizhu Chen with Stanford University, who was not involved with the new research. Researchers saw ripples of instability on the sun's surface caused by bits of magnetized plasma moving past each other at different speeds -- similar to waves that stir when a gust of wind blows over water. It's a well-known phenomenon that guides how fluids move. This has been glimpsed on Earth and other planets like Jupiter and Saturn, but "it has not been observed ever at that level on the solar surface," according to study co-author Friedrich Woger with the National Solar Observatory. The findings were published Wednesday in the journal Nature.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Week 27

This week's icon is for Zach Leytus's project:
KawaiiFi: "Wi-Fi scanner and analyzer"

Check out all weekly app icons created so far in the gallery and follow my icon creation adventures as they happen (including sketches) on the Fediverse.

Need icons?

I love designing icons and am happy to contribute them free of charge when your project is Free and Open Source. Funded by community sponsors (every little helps!).

Version:next-20260805 (linux-next) Released:2026-08-05

Week 26

This week's icon is for Sjoerd Stendahl's project:
Lockpicker: "Recover passwords from their hash"

Check out all weekly app icons created so far in the gallery and follow my icon creation adventures as they happen (including sketches) on the Fediverse.

Need icons?

I love designing icons and am happy to contribute them free of charge when your project is Free and Open Source. Funded by community sponsors (every little helps!).

I’m pleased to announce that NVIDIA is now supporting the LVFS as a premier sponsor.

The rollout of the NVIDIA DGX Spark firmware using fwupd is going very well indeed, with downloads continuing to increase every day.

This now takes us to 4 OEMs sponsoring LVFS, which means we’ve successfully reached the funding target we set for ourselves last year. More exciting announcements coming soon!

Each release of Debian has a shiny new theme, which is visible on the boot screen, the login screen and, most prominently, on the desktop wallpaper. Debian plans to release Trixie, the next release, next year. As ever, we need your help in creating its theme! You have the opportunity to design a theme that will inspire thousands of people while working in their Debian systems.

For the most up to date details, please refer to the wiki.

We would also like to take this opportunity to thank Juliette Taka Belin for doing the Emerald theme for bookworm.

The deadlines for submissions is: 2024-09-19

The artwork is usually picked based on which themes look the most:

• ''Debian'': admittedly not the most defined concept, since everyone has their own take on what Debian means to them.
• ''plausible to integrate without patching core software'': as much as we love some of the insanely hot looking themes, some would require heavy GTK+ theming and patching GDM/GNOME.
• ''clean / well designed'': without becoming something that gets annoying to look at a year down the road. Examples of good themes include Joy, Lines, Softwaves and futurePrototype.

If you'd like more information or details, please post to the Debian Desktop mailing list.

The following contributors got their Debian Developer accounts in the last two months:

• Patrick Winnertz (winnie)
• Fabian Gruenbichler (fabiang)

The following contributors were added as Debian Maintainers in the last two months:

• Juri Grabowski
• Tobias Heider
• Jean Charles Delépine
• Guilherme Puida Moreira
• Antoine Le Gonidec
• Arthur Barbosa Diniz

Congratulations!

Hi,

Keeping my promise for monthly bits, here's a quick snapshot of my first ten days as DPL.

Special thanks to Jonathan for an insightful introduction that left less room for questions. His introduction covered my first tasks like expense approval and CTTE member appointments thoroughly. Although I made a visible oversight by forgetting to exclude Simon McVittie <smcv> from the list, whose term has ended , I'm committed to learning from this mistake. In future I'll prioritize thorough proofreading to ensure accuracy.

Part of my "work" was learning what channels I need to subscribe and adjust my .procmailrc and .muttrc took some time.

Recently I had my first press interview. I had to answer a couple of prepared questions for Business IT News. It seems journalists are always on the lookout for unique angles. When asked if humility is a new trait for DPLs, my response would be a resounding "No." In my experience, humility is a common quality among DPLs I've encountered, including Jonathan.

One of my top priorities is reaching out to all our dedicated and appointed teams, including those managing critical infrastructure. I've begun with the CTTE, Salsa Admins and Debian Snapshot. Everything appears to be in order with the CTTE team. I'm waiting for response from Salsa and Snapshot, which is fine given the recent contact.

I was pointed out to the fact that lintian is in an unfortunate state as Axel Beckert confirmed on the lintian maintainers list. It turns out that bug #1069745 of magics-python should not have been undetected for a long time if lintian bug #677078 would have been fixed. It seems obvious to me that lintian needs more work to fulfill its role as reliably policy checker to ensure our high level of packaging quality.

In any case thanks a lot to Axel who is doing his best but it seems urgent to me to find some more person-power for this task. Any volunteer to lend some helping hand in the lintian maintainers team?

On 2024-04-30 I gave my first talk "Bits from greenhorn DPL" online at MiniDebConf Brasil in Belo Horizonte. The Q&A afterwards stired some flavours of the question: "What can Debian Brasil do better?" My answer was always in a way: Given your great activity in now organising the fifth MiniDebConf you are doing pretty well and I have no additional hints for the moment.

Kind regards Andreas.

We are very excited to announce that Debian has selected seven contributors to work under mentorship on a variety of projects with us during the Google Summer of Code.

Here are the list of the projects, students, and details of the tasks to be performed.

Project: Android SDK Tools in Debian

• Student: anuragxone

Deliverables of the project: Make the entire Android toolchain, Android Target Platform Framework, and SDK tools available in the Debian archives.

Project: Benchmarking Parallel Performance of Numerical MPI Packages

• Student: Nikolaos

Deliverables of the project: Deliver an automated method for Debian maintainers to test selected numerical Debian packages for their parallel performance in clusters, in particular to catch performance regressions from updates, and to verify expected performance gains, such as Amdahl’s and Gufstafson’s law, from increased cluster resources.

Project: Debian MobCom

• Student: Nathan D

Deliverables of the project: Update the outdated mobile packages and recreate aged packages due to new dependencies. Bring in more mobile communication tools by adding about 5 new packages.

Project: Improve support of the Rust coreutils in Debian

• Student: Sreehari Prasad TM

Deliverables of the project: Make uutils behave more like GNU’s coreutils by improving compatibility with GNU coreutils test suit.

Project: Improve support of the Rust findutils in Debian

• Student: hanbings

Deliverables of the project: A safer and more performant implementation of the GNU suite's xargs, find, locate and updatedb tools in rust.

Project: Expanding ROCm support within Debian and derivatives

• Student: xuantengh

Deliverables of the project: Building, packaging, and uploading missing ROCm software into Debian repositories, starting with simple tools and progressing to high-level applications like PyTorch, with the final deliverables comprising a series of ROCm packages meeting community quality assurance standards.

Project: procps: Development of System Monitoring, Statistics and Information Tools in Rust

• Student: Krysztal Huang

Deliverables of the project: Improve the usability of the entire Rust-based implementation of the procps utility on Linux.

Congratulations and welcome to all the contributors!

The Google Summer of Code program is possible in Debian thanks to the efforts of Debian Developers and Debian Contributors that dedicate part of their free time to mentor contributors and outreach tasks.

Join us and help extend Debian! You can follow the contributors' weekly reports on the [debian-outreach mailing-list][debian-outreach-ml], chat with us on our [IRC channel][debian-outreach-irc] or reach out to the individual projects' team mailing lists.

[debian-outreach-ml]: http://lists.debian.org/debian-outreach/ (debian-outreach AT lists.debian.org) [debian-outreach-irc]: irc://irc.debian.org/debian-outreach (#debian-outreach on irc.debian.org)

We are pleased to announce that Infomaniak has committed to sponsor DebConf24 as a Platinum Sponsor.

Infomaniak is an independent cloud service provider recognised throughout Europe for its commitment to privacy, the local economy and the environment. Recording growth of 18% in 2023, the company is developing a suite of online collaborative tools and cloud hosting, streaming, marketing and events solutions.

Infomaniak uses exclusively renewable energy, builds its own data centers and develops its solutions in Switzerland at the heart of Europe, without relocating. The company powers the website of the Belgian radio and TV service (RTBF) and provides streaming for more than 3,000 TV and radio stations in Europe.

With this commitment as Platinum Sponsor, Infomaniak is contributing to the Debian annual Developers' conference, directly supporting the progress of Debian and Free Software. Infomaniak contributes to strengthen the community that collaborates on Debian projects from all around the world throughout all of the year.

Thank you very much, Infomaniak, for your support of DebConf24!

Become a sponsor too!

DebConf24 will take place from 28th July to 4th August 2024 in Busan, South Korea, and will be preceded by DebCamp, from 21st to 27th July 2024.

DebConf24 is accepting sponsors! Interested companies and organizations should contact the DebConf team through sponsors@debconf.org, or viisit the DebConf24 website at https://debconf24.debconf.org/sponsors/become-a-sponsor/.

The voting period for the Debian Project Leader election has ended. Please join us in congratulating Andreas Tille as the new Debian Project Leader.

The new term for the project leader started on 2024-04-21.

369 of 1,010 Debian Developers voted using the Condorcet method.

More information about the results of the voting are available on the Debian Project Leader Elections 2024 page.

Many thanks all of our Developers for voting.