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Version:6.12.101 (longterm) Released:2026-08-03 Source:linux-6.12.101.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.12.101.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.12.101

Version:6.6.148 (longterm) Released:2026-08-03 Source:linux-6.6.148.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.6.148.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.6.148

Slashdot reader prisoninmate shares this report from 9to5Linux: Coming ten days after the previous Linux kernel security update, which only fixed 12 vulnerabilities that may lead to a privilege escalation, denial of service, or information leaks, the new Debian 13 Linux kernel security update is a massive one, and it patches no less than 68 security vulnerabilities in the Linux 6.12 LTS kernel. Debian 13 "Trixie" kernel security update are CVE-2026-64530, a use-after-free in the traffic-control subsystem leading to remote denial-of-service with potential for remote code execution, and CVE-2026-64531 (a.k.a. OVSwrap), a local-root vulnerability in the Open vSwitch datapath leading to local privilege escalation to root... All Debian 13 "Trixie" users are urged to update their installations to Linux kernel 6.12.100-1 as soon as possible.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Even as Hollywood performers protest and Hollywood studios sue "in their war on AI," reports the Los Angeles Times, "the entertainment industry is deepening its dependence on it." Among hundreds of job postings in late June, more than one in 10 was likely connected to AI. The top studios' public postings suggest they have been recruiting people to build AI tools. They are also recruiting teams to defend their intellectual property against unauthorized AI use. "There are plenty of studios that are hiring [for AI] but never talk about it in public," said Yoland Yan, a co-founder of ComfyUI, a company that helps studios juggle different AI tools. Companies have been hesitant to detail how they use generative AI in film production — partly because they are concerned about consumer and union backlash. Some in Hollywood described AI use as the new cosmetic surgery, where everyone knows it is happening, but few will admit to it... Although some companies may be shy about sharing their AI plans, big stars who don't have to answer to others have been more open about their embrace of the new technology for storytelling. Rejecting AI is like picking a horse and buggy over a car, said "Star Wars" creator George Lucas. "Artificial intelligence means it's much easier for us to make movies," he told a trade magazine earlier this year. "There's nothing you can do about it. That's progress. It's the future." Some in Hollywood have a softer stance on artificial intelligence, with studios cutting deals with AI companies, and filmmakers like Martin Scorsese backing AI companies. Ben Affleck launched an AI film tech company then sold it to Netflix for half a billion dollars. When launching InterPositive, Affleck said he wanted to keep "storytelling human" by building AI tools that could fix lighting, generate missing shots and other things while "keeping creative decisions in the hands of artists...." Disney, Netflix and Amazon had job postings that were about using AI on the creative side of the business. Universal, Paramount, Warner Bros. and Sony had job ads suggesting they were also using AI but for marketing, distribution and audience analytics. The postings suggest the Disney, Netflix and Amazon studios are building repeatable AI workflows for visual effects, animation, sound and dubbing. The companies also seem to be building in-house teams to develop custom generative-AI models, while also using third-party software. None of the jobs advertised were to create AI that wrote scripts or created AI actors. Ironically, the Times used Claude Code to build a scraper to identify the job postings, their article acknowledges. Three Disney jobs were for "content security," assessing AI tools and guarding against piracy, watermarking and rights-protection work. But Disney is also hiring PhD-level talent "to study 'computer graphics and AI' for Pixar and Disney films," according to the article, and "people to 'bridge the gap between research and practical studio application.'" Disney-owned visual effects shops Industrial Light & Magic "was searching for supervisors to 'explore emerging technologies (including AI/Machine Learning)' to develop new production workflows." Audio post-production unit Skywalker Sound "seemed to be recruiting to build proprietary AI models for soundtracks, voice separation, and voice transfer, the process of taking a speaker's tone and pitch, and applying it to new content." Amazon "was hiring a principal AI executive to drive AI-tool adoption across production, plus roles in operations automation and LLM content classification."

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A woman found her police officer ex-boyfriend had used Flock's camera system 600 times to look up the location of her and her daughter, reports the Washington Post (Alternate URL here). (She found out through Have I Been Flocked, described as "a website that aggregates police search logs made available through public records.") But it turns out dozens more police officers have also misused Flock... Authorities have charged or accused at least 50 law-enforcement officers of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes, including to stalk women without their knowledge or consent, a Post analysis of police and court records found. In 26 of these cases, police investigators and prosecutors said the officers used the technology to spy on their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their exes' new partners or women they wanted to meet. In other cases, police or prosecutors have not specified the alleged surveillance targets. Flock's system was used in 46 of the cases analyzed by The Post, while the other cases involved competing products... After The Post relayed its findings to Flock, the company said in a statement it "will soon be announcing better filters and tools to stop abuse before it happens...." In April, the company rolled out a new voluntary "audit assistance" feature, which agencies can choose to enable, that automatically scans officers' searches for suspicious activity, such as queries repeatedly targeting the same vehicle or run by officers off the clock. In an interview with The Post, Flock chief executive Garrett Langley said misuse of its systems is inevitable and that the company is focused on providing tools to catch perpetrators after the fact... "We're not going to change humans, and humans make bad decisions," Langley said. "What we can do is make sure that they know if you use this tool, you will be held accountable...." Through automated license-plate reader systems, or ALPRs, officers could trace the rhythms and travels of their subjects' daily lives, leading in some instances to violent confrontations, moments of psychological manipulation, and threats of coercion and control, the analysis found. - In Wisconsin, a police officer allegedly used Flock to check whether his ex-girlfriend had gone to an abortion clinic, according to a police affidavit for a case set for trial this month. - In Kansas, a police chief who tracked his ex through Flock sneaked up on her while she was intimate with another man, a state police certification body alleged, leading to his firing. - In Florida, a deputy speeding to stop a young actress he'd added to a watch list for a license-plate tool called Guardian nearly caused a head-on crash, according to a police report and video from his dashboard camera. The deputy was arrested in March, and his attorney declined to comment. - And in California, prosecutors said a former deputy, Alexander Vanny, used Flock as part of a months-long campaign of "stalking" and "humiliating" his former fiancée that also involved following her around town and installing a hidden camera in her roommate's bathroom, according to a sentencing brief... While some of the searches resulted in officers' firings, prosecutions and prison sentences, police departments in other cases allowed officers to continue using the systems even after receiving warnings that they were being misused... An array of privacy advocates has argued that Flock could deter bad actors by making simple changes to its product, such as requiring officers to label every search with a criminal case number. Some policing experts also warned that agencies' inconsistencies in developing and enforcing standard procedures for license-plate readers could lead to further misconduct. With no federal laws governing use and only a patchwork of state laws, many of the country's roughly 18,000 police agencies are left to decide their rules on their own... Langley, Flock's chief, has dismissed pushes by activists for the company to further limit how officers use its product. "No one elected me the police chief of America," he told Forbes last year, adding, "I don't think it's our job to police the police." The Post also got this quote from an officer was fired and sentenced to probation after pleading no contest to charges of computer-system misuse, stalking and battery. "Pretty much everybody uses that computer system" improperly in the department, he said, and "they don't audit it [nearly] as much as they should." Flock told The Post it now has over 120,000 cameras in more than 6,000 communities, recording 20 billion license plate scans every month.

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Version:7.2-rc6 (mainline) Released:2026-08-02 Source:linux-7.2-rc6.tar.gz Patch:full (incremental)

We just merged the visual signature UI into Papers (GNOME Document Viewer), developed by Malika Asman during her Outreachy internship (funded by the GNOME Foundation).

Compared to digital signatures, visual signatures do not require a cryptographic certificate. As such, they do not really guarantee the authenticity of a signed document, but they are still widely accepted or required (e.g. in administrative documents).

Here are a few screenshots, the two first ones are context menus that are shown when doing a right click on the document, the third one shows the drawing dialog.

It is possible to import an image file instead of drawing the signature in Papers. Malika implemented a background removal step so that signatures don't look like a plain picture on the document. This is done using the imageproc crate which implements Otsu's method (for those wondering, there is no neural networks or models involved). This gives good results on our test files, let's take for instance this cute GNOME contributor by Jakub:

Once it is imported, the background is correctly removed and we can add this perplexed GNOME contributor to our PDFs:

Note that this is still a rather simple method, so we don't expect it to work in every case. If you have a file that can not be imported properly, please open an issue!

And digital signatures?

These new visual signatures cannot be used directly with digital signatures, but there are plans (and code) to extend the existing digital signature dialog to let users customize the way the signature is drawn on documents, including using one of the visual signatures.

There are other features that did not make it into this release, including the ability to copy/paste visual signatures, those will be for the next cycle!

Papers 51.beta

This is part of Papers 51.beta, there are a few other improvements and bug fixes, including a fix for fractional scaling taking advantage of latest GTK snapping API, read the news here.

Hey y’all! I’m Jagath Ramayanapu (Shyam) from India, and I’m a GNOME GSoC intern this year. This summer, I’m working on bringing app uninstallation directly to the GNOME Shell App Grid.

Previously, to remove an app in GNOME, you had to open GNOME Software, find the app, and click Uninstall. With this feature, users will soon be able to uninstall apps directly from the App Grid’s context menu.

This is the first of a two-part blog on how we are building this feature. In this post, we’ll cover the changes in GNOME Shell’s JavaScript that make it possible.

 

The Problem: Talking to the App Store

GNOME Shell is great at drawing your desktop, but it actually has no idea how to delete an app or clean up user data. To do that, it needs to ask a App Store like GNOME Software to do the heavy lifting.

To solve this, we created a d-bus interface called AppStoreIntegration. You can think of it as a dedicated middleman whose only job is to talk to GNOME Software in the background.

We designed this helper with a few key goals in mind:

At first, I planned to have GNOME Software own this interface. However, that would have tightly coupled the feature to GNOME Software. Based on feedback from my mentor, Adrian Vovk, I moved the ownership of AppStoreIntegration into GNOME Shell instead.

This design makes the interface app store agnostic. Any app store can implement the interface, allowing GNOME Shell to work with different app stores without depending on a specific one.

This interface has two methods :

1. GetUninstallableApps :

• • What it does: The Shell calls this method to ask GNOME Software, “Give me a list of every installed app that the user is actually allowed to uninstall.”
  • What it returns: It returns a dictionary that maps each app’s desktop ID to a set of metadata properties (for example, a boolean flag telling us if the app supports deleting personal data)

2. UninstallApp :

• • What it does: When you click “Uninstall”, the Shell sends this command to GNOME Software.
  • What it accepts: It takes a dictionary containing the app’s id and a boolean purge-data flag (which tells GNOME Software whether it should wipe the user’s saved data along with the app).

Building the Integration Manager

Now that we had our D-Bus contract, we built a helper module in GNOME Shell called js/ui/appStoreIntegration.js Inside this file, we built a class called AppStoreIntegrationManager whose sole purpose is to call those two D-Bus methods.

We designed this manager with a few key goals:

• Keep the Desktop Fast: When the manager connects to the D-Bus proxy, it does it asynchronously. This means if GNOME Software takes a second to wake up, your desktop won’t freeze.
• Cache the Data: We don’t want to call GetUninstallableApps every single time you right-click an icon. Instead, the manager listens for a signal called installed-changed from the system. When it hears this signal, it quietly fetches the list of apps and caches it in memory.
• Track the State: The manager keeps a list (set) of apps that are currently being uninstalled. This gives our UI a simple way to know exactly what is going on at any given moment.

Updating the App Menu

Once we had the cached data, we needed to update the UI in js/ui/appMenu.js.

We added a new “Uninstall” button to the right-click menu, but we had to be careful. We don’t want to show an “Uninstall” button for apps you aren’t allowed to remove (like core system apps).

To fix this, we tied the menu directly to our new manager using reactive signals. Every time you open the menu, a function called _updateUninstallItem runs. It asks the manager: appStoreIntegrationManager.canUninstall(appId). If the answer is false, the button completely hides itself.

Handling the User Interaction

Uninstalling an app isn’t always as simple as deleting a folder. Modern software, like Flatpaks, often leaves behind saved files and personal configurations. We wanted to give users the option to clean up this data, but only if the app store actually supports it.

When you click Uninstall in the right-click menu, the UI triggers a smooth, step-by-step interactive flow:

• Checking for User Data: First, the code checks the metadata we got from D-Bus earlier to see if the app store supports wiping personal data for this specific app.
• The Confirmation Dialog: We pop up a small confirmation window. If the app supports it, this window includes a checkbox asking if you want to clean up your personal files too.
• Waiting in the Background: The desktop interface pauses the uninstallation logic and waits patiently in the background for you to make a decision, ensuring your system remains completely responsive.
• Executing the Uninstall: Once you confirm your choice, the UI fires off the D-Bus command to GNOME Software. It immediately adds the app to a tracking list to prevent you from accidentally clicking the uninstall button multiple times.
• Safe Error Handling: If GNOME Software runs into an unexpected error and fails to uninstall the app, the interface safely catches the problem. It removes the app from the busy tracker and displays a standard system notification to let you know what happened, keeping your desktop totally stable.

Thanks

Building this feature was a fantastic learning experience in bridging different parts of the GNOME ecosystem. A huge thanks to Adrian for mentoring me throughout this project and helping me navigate the architecture.

If you’d like to check out the changes, here’s my MR.

If you run a homelab, you’ve inevitably run into the absolute nightmare that is CGNAT (Carrier-Grade NAT) or strict corporate firewalls. You have a server at home that you want to SSH into, but your ISP doesn’t give you a public IP address. Or maybe you’re at a coffee shop or behind a strict corporate firewall that blocks all outbound SSH connections.

Traditionally, the solutions are:

1. Dynamic DNS and Port Forwarding: Useless if you’re behind CGNAT.
2. Reverse SSH Tunnels / VPS: Requires renting a $5/month VPS and managing keys and infrastructure.
3. Tailscale / ZeroTier: Excellent solutions, but they require installing kernel modules, managing accounts, and trusting a third-party control plane.

What if there was a completely decentralised, free, open-source network of relays already spanning the globe that we could hijack to establish direct, multiplexed, end-to-end encrypted tunnels between any two machines without any accounts or infrastructure?

Enter syncthing-socket and the Syncthing global relay network.

The Syncthing Relay Network

Syncthing is an incredible peer-to-peer file synchronisation tool. To ensure files sync even when both devices are behind strict NATs, the Syncthing community operates a global network of public relays and discovery servers.

These servers are completely open and decentralised. They don’t care what data is being transmitted—they just facilitate STUN/TURN WebRTC connections to punch through NATs.

I vibe-coded syncthing-socket as a standalone, lightweight Go daemon that securely hijacks this exact network to pipe raw TCP sockets, PTY shells, and HTTP proxies!

How syncthing-socket Works

Under the hood, syncthing-socket imports the official Syncthing protocol libraries but throws away the file-syncing logic. Instead, it uses the peer-to-peer WebRTC connection to multiplex raw byte streams using Yamux.

When you start the server, it deterministically generates a Syncthing Device ID from a passphrase and connects to the global relay pool:

$ ./syncthing-socket server --passphrase "my-super-secret" --forward 127.0.0.1:22

This server is now securely listening on the decentralised Syncthing network. The discovery servers know how to route to it, but nobody can connect unless they have the mathematically paired client passphrase.

From anywhere in the world, on any network, you run:

$ ssh -o ProxyCommand="./syncthing-socket client --passphrase 'my-super-secret'" user@ignored_host

syncthing-socket will instantly negotiate a WebRTC STUN/TURN connection via the nearest public relay, establish a direct end-to-end encrypted P2P tunnel, and pipe your SSH connection perfectly through it. If a direct P2P connection isn’t possible, it gracefully falls back to using the relay server as a TURN proxy.

Beyond SSH: SOCKS5 and PTY Shells

Because we established a fully multiplexed Yamux tunnel over WebRTC, we can do much more than just pipe a single TCP socket.

Native PTY Shells:
You can completely drop sshd and use syncthing-socket natively!

# Server ./syncthing-socket server --passphrase "my-secret" --shell # Client ./syncthing-socket client --passphrase "my-secret" --shell

This spawns a remote bash session and pipes your raw local terminal directly into it. It natively supports tab-completion, vim, htop, and even transmits window resizing events (SIGWINCH) over a dedicated control stream so the remote UI always perfectly fits your screen.

Remote SOCKS5 Proxy:
Want to browse the web through your homelab’s internet connection securely?

# Server ./syncthing-socket server --passphrase "my-secret" --socks # Client ./syncthing-socket client --passphrase "my-secret" --socks 127.0.0.1:1080

Just point your browser to socks5://127.0.0.1:1080 and you’re fully proxying your web traffic over an encrypted, decentralised P2P tunnel.

Conclusion

By standing on the shoulders of the incredible Syncthing project, syncthing-socket provides a zero-config, zero-infrastructure, completely decentralised way to punch through CGNATs and firewalls.

Similar Projects

While syncthing-socket fills a specific niche, it’s worth mentioning similar tools in this space. For raw socket routing, there’s gsocket and its clone minisocket. If you just want to share a terminal, tmate (though largely defunct) was a pioneer. For full remote desktop access, solutions like RustDesk, AnyDesk, and TeamViewer exist. In terms of underlying architecture, Magic-Wormhole uses a very similar P2P approach (with a modern Rust replacement being Iroh).

Check out the code on GitHub and take back control of your homelab connectivity!

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: OpenAI has discovered other instances in which autonomous agents have escaped containment as the company expands its investigation of the hacking incident at tech firm Hugging Face that drew global attention this month, two people familiar with the matter said on Friday. The new breakouts were uncovered during the company's publicly announced investigation into how one of its agents escaped what was meant to be a contained testing environment this month, the two people said, and OpenAI is now looking into those instances as well. One of the sources said that the escapes were limited in nature and that none of the agents were thought to have left OpenAI's network. An OpenAI spokesperson referred to a statement issued by the company on Tuesday that said it was reviewing "broader activity from our models" in addition to the Hugging Face intrusion. The discovery of additional rogue behavior at OpenAI, even if limited in nature, could feed growing appetite for regulation coming out of the White House and elsewhere. The expanded investigation by OpenAI was launched shortly before its primary rival, Anthropic, disclosed that its models were also responsible for a series of break-ins that led to breaches at three other companies dating back to April, according to the two sources and a third source familiar with the matter. The recent discovery of other past breakouts at OpenAI has not previously been reported. AI safety experts said the new disclosures paint a portrait of a group of cutting-edge labs whose ability to develop dangerous autonomous hacking agents outstrips their ability to keep them under control. "We have a whole industry where the people designing, developing and putting out these tools aren't keeping up themselves to responsibly develop these things and keep them safe," said Maurice Chiodo, a mathematician who works at Cambridge University's Center for the Study of Existential Risk. Reuters could not establish exactly how many incidents OpenAI investigators found or the timings or circumstances under which they occurred. The three sources said OpenAI and outside experts were examining log data from earlier in the year in a bid to understand what took place.

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Major record labels including Universal, Sony, and Warner have proposed excluding AI-generated songs from official charts unless they are "substantially human made," properly labeled, legally produced, and free from manipulation concerns. The Verge reports: The proposal goes quite a bit further than a labeling proposal put forth by the RIAA, the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry (IFPI), SAG-AFTRA, and others. That would create a set of standardized labels for AI-generated and AI-assisted music. The labels' proposal would require songs be clearly labeled, but it would also keep them off international charts unless they met specific criteria, including being "substantially human made." To be eligible, the songs would also have to respect the terms of service of whatever AI service was used, the model would have to have the rights to any data it was trained on, and "not raise stream or chart manipulation concerns." What sort of concerns and what constitutes "substantially human made" are currently vague. Sony Music, UMG, and Mom+Pop Music did not immediately respond to a request for clarification. The IFPI has thrown its weight behind the labels' proposal, though no charting organization has signaled any immediate plan to adopt the rules [...].

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

More than 81% of Australian children ages 10 to 15 were still using social media three months after the country's under-16 ban took effect, with roughly half saying platforms never checked their age. Reuters reports: In a study published on Friday, eSafety also found most children aged between 10 and 15 were using social media just as frequently in March as they had before the ban came into force on December 10 last year, while parental awareness of their habits decreased. Children's continued social media use took place even as account ownership declined to 42% from 52%, with "statistically significant" reductions across YouTube, Snapchat and TikTok in particular, the report said. "Most under-16s who had social media accounts before commencement were able to either retain them or create new ones at the three-month mark, with social media platforms' failure to implement effective age assurance measures cited as the main reason," eSafety said in a statement [...] Before the ban, nearly 86% of children surveyed reported using at least one age-restricted platform. Three months later, that figure remained above 81%, the report said. About 58% of teenagers reported using social media daily or more often, barely down from roughly 60% before the ban, it found. The report showed minimal change in "sports and physical activity, arts and music, spending time with friends and family, and attendance at community events." Around half the children who retained their accounts said platforms had not checked their age, the most common reason they were able to stay on the services. Others said their accounts listed them as aged 16 or older or that age-checking systems had incorrectly determined they were older. The findings broadly matched snapshot data eSafety published in late March.

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Sony says it will proceed with ending PlayStation disc sales in January 2028 despite petitions, boycott threats, and concerns about digital ownership and the disappearance of the secondhand market. PCMag reports: After Sony's recent earnings call, an investor Q&A session saw analysts ask about its controversial decision to end disc production across all of its consoles. The company hadn't publicly commented since its announcement and had reduced activity on social accounts and other marketing channels. Sony's chief financial officer, Lin Tao, broke that silence during the Q&A. "There are various reasons we made this decision," she said through an interpreter. "The biggest being that the digitalization of content overall has been progressing. That's the big factor. It's not just for PlayStation, but for all kinds of content, digitalization is progressing. "And so when we think about the future, and we put in a lot of thought and time, and we cautiously considered this, and we came to this conclusion, and we're going to cautiously move this forward," Tao said. "We have received various opinions, and people have strong views, and we understand that the community has put forth those views to us," said Tao. [...] Tao says Sony wants to "consider" the emotions of disgruntled customers, especially as titles are "connected to people's fond memories in many cases." Tao also alluded to the possibility of future measures to lessen the blow for anyone unhappy with the decision, but it appears Sony hasn't yet finalized what those may be. "In the future digital ecosystem, how do we engage the gamers is something that we would like to continue to explore," she said.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from NBC News: Cyberattacks targeting municipal water systems have been reported in at least seven states this week, prompting the FBI and the Environmental Protection Agency to warn utilities nationwide that hackers are trying to disrupt critical water infrastructure. In a public service announcement Thursday, the agencies said water and wastewater utilities have reported incidents to the FBI, with some malicious activity degrading water operations. The announcement does not name the states. The warning comes after hackers targeted more than 30 municipal water facilities in Minnesota in an attack that had hallmarks of Iranian meddling, according to a law enforcement official. It is still under investigation. A spokesperson for Minnesota's information technology services agency said Thursday there was no indication the breaches contaminated any municipal water supplies. The federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said in a separate alert that some larger attacks on water infrastructure had "resulted in boil water notices and sustained manual operations," though it did not say where. [...] The federal advisory said the malicious cyber actors, or MCAs, targeted specific brands of control systems used by municipal water utilities, though the FBI and the EPA urged operators of all systems to take precautions. [...] The agencies said the hackers remotely accessed internet-facing devices, changed IP addresses and passwords, and caused utilities to lose monitoring and control capabilities. The federal advisory calls on system operators to remove programmable logical controllers, or PLCs, from direct internet exposure by putting them behind secure gateways and firewalls; use strong passwords; and limit communications between authorized control system devices through access control lists.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has integrated its Nano Banana 2 image generator into Google Earth, allowing users to place AI-generated events and objects onto real satellite imagery. The company says its AI-generated images contain invisible watermarks detectable through Gemini or Lens, but the BBC found those safeguards and some third-party detection tools can be fooled into labeling manipulated Google Earth images as real. From the report: A collapsed Eiffel Tower, a sinkhole swallowing the Great Pyramid of Giza and Russian tanks in Ukraine's capital were among the images BBC Verify was able to create when testing the feature, which was rolled out on Thursday. Google has not yet responded to questions based on BBC Verify's tests, but in a social media post the company said they "take misinformation seriously" and that "we prevent image creation on harmful topics and are continually updating our protections." AI and misinformation expert Henk van Ess has highlighted the risks this feature poses, creating fake images of a non-existent nuclear power plant in Iran, a refugee camp on the US-Mexico border and a fake hospital in Gaza with a bomb crater next to it. He said Google was allowing "invented" imagery to be "welded to genuine coordinates, drawn on genuine imagery." "The forgery does not have to look convincing on its own. It inherits the credibility of the map it was born on," van Ess added. UPDATE 7/31/26 10:54 AM: Google is rolling back the image generation inside of Google Earth: "We know that people uniquely trust Google Earth for a reliable view of the world. We've seen geospatial professionals using this feature for a range of useful purposes, however we've also seen people sharing screenshots of generated imagery that appear to violate our policies. So we're rolling back this feature in Google Earth while we work on implementing stronger guardrails. It's important to note that generated images didn't appear in the main Google Earth experience for others to see and were watermarked as AI generated."

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alternative_right shares a report from Axios: Google has basically stopped sending people to websites (including our site) for answers and information. Instead, it's using AI to answer them on its platform, in its words. Chartbeat data shared with Axios shows Google Search traffic to publishers fell 34% over the past year. That pain is regressive. Over the past two years, small publishers lost 60% of referrals from search overall, medium publishers 47%, large publishers 22%.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Every Linux security patch contains more than a bug fix. It records exactly what assumptions changed, which validation failed, and which code path developers corrected.

New York has sued prediction-market platform Kalshi, alleging it operates an "illegal gambling operation" without state authorization. "No matter what they call themselves, prediction markets like Kalshi are gambling platforms, plain and simple," said New York Attorney General Letitia James in a press release announcing the lawsuit. "By ignoring our laws, Kalshi is running an illegal operation and harming New Yorkers in the process." CNBC reports: In a case filed in a Manhattan state court (PDF), the lawsuit claims that Kalshi accepts wagers as a gambling business in disregard for the state's constitution and laws by not being registered with the New York State Gaming Commission. Governor Kathy Hochul in the press release said the state is taking the action to stop what it views as illegal behavior and bring the company into compliance with New York law. The lawsuit is seeking a permanent injunction against Kalshi. The suit by the state is also seeking a total restitution to users who have placed trades on the platform, a $100,000 penalty for each attempt to offer sports wagering, and another penalty three times the amount the company has gained while allegedly operating in violation of New York law. The state estimates that could total $36 billion.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version:next-20260731 (linux-next) Released:2026-07-31

Google says AI-assisted workflows helped Chrome fix 1,072 security bugs across versions 149 and 150, more than the previous 23 releases combined. The company is also testing twice-weekly security updates and "dynamic patching," which could apply most fixes without requiring users to restart the entire browser. "By leveraging Chrome's multi-process architecture, dynamic patching sequentially replaces background child processes (like the Renderer and GPU) with updated binaries on the fly," says Google in a blog post. PiunikaWeb reports: Alongside dynamic patching, Google is rolling out smarter background updates during periods of minimal user disruption. Starting with Chrome 150 on macOS, the browser takes advantage of the operating system's windowless state. If all Chrome windows are closed but the app remains running in the background, the browser will quietly auto-restart to apply pending updates. For enterprise environments, IT admins can continue to manage fleet-wide deployments through Chrome Enterprise Core or enforce update prompts using the RelaunchNotification policy. Google's long-term vision is a browser that remains continuously protected in the background without interrupting your daily browsing session. In the meantime, you can manually trigger pending updates by clicking the update prompt in the top-right corner of Chrome.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.