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Version:5.15.216 (longterm) Released:2026-08-19 Source:linux-5.15.216.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.15.216.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.15.216

Version:5.10.265 (longterm) Released:2026-08-19 Source:linux-5.10.265.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-5.10.265.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-5.10.265

Chinese robotics giant Unitree surged more than 600% in its Shanghai stock market debut, marking the first mainland Chinese listing by a humanoid robot maker and a major milestone for Beijing's robotics ambitions. The BBC reports: Unitree, officially known as Yushu Technology Co Ltd, was founded in 2016 and now plays a key role in Beijing's ambitions to develop advanced technology. It has become a robotics industry leader, selling devices from sensors and automated arms to four-legged and human-like machines. The firm shipped more than 5,500 humanoid robots last year as demand for the technology grows. Unitree is one of the few companies in the sector to make money, delivering a net profit of 278 million yuan in 2025. It is a fierce rival to developers in the US as it produces robots with similar features but at lower prices. The company is based in Hangzhou, in eastern China. The region is home to a so-called golden cluster zone of robotics firms, which have benefited from huge government investments. That support helped drive a more than threefold increase in the number of Chinese robotics firms between 2020 and 2024, according to state-run China Daily. [...] Unitree's robot dogs start at $2,700, a fraction of the roughly $70,000 price tag for Boston Dynamics' four-legged device, Spot. "They're not exactly comparable because some of Unitree's dogs are much smaller," [said Harold Soh, a researcher from the National University of Singapore]. "But the price is a big difference." Unitree has been selling humanoid robots since 2023, with its $13,500 child-sized G1 model hitting the market the following year. Meanwhile, major US rivals -- including Elon Musk's Tesla -- have yet to start delivering rival products. [...] Some experts expect Unitree's market debut to be a gauge of investor appetite for the fast-growing humanoid robotics sector. The listing has given the public a rare chance to invest in a humanoid robotics company and could set a benchmark for other manufacturers, said Jack Pearson from investment firm RoboStrategy. The listing also marks a "turning point" for China's robotics industry, as Unitree's success comes even as the US is curbing imports of foreign-made robots, Pearson said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version:next-20260819 (linux-next) Released:2026-08-19

A study of more than 64,000 people born around the end of Britain's postwar sugar rationing found that those exposed to less sugar during their first 1,000 days had lower rates of five cancers decades later, including roughly 69% lower liver cancer risk and 36% lower breast cancer risk. They also "showed signs of slower biological aging" and "continued to consume less sugar and had healthier diets overall," according to the authors of a new study published in The Conversation. From the report: After the second world war, sugar remained rationed in Britain for several years. But in September 1953, rationing ended and people started eating a lot more sugar. Consumption nearly doubled. This meant that children born just a few months apart had very different levels of sugar exposure both in the womb and during early childhood. For our study, we used data from over 64,000 people born in Britain between 1951 and 1956. Those born earlier spent a larger share of their first 1,000 days under sugar rationing, while those born later experienced progressively less of it. [...] What is most surprising, however, is not the cancer results or the biological markers of ageing. It's how early-life sugar exposure continued to affect people's diets even 50 years later. We found that people who experienced sugar rationing early in life still consumed less sugar in adulthood, around age 50. They also ate less overall, and their diets were healthier and more diverse. This suggests that the level of sweetness people are exposed to very early in life may shape their taste preferences for a long time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Earlier this month, I published a post about the future of Boxes where I detailed the huge technical rewrite I have been doing, porting to GTK4, Libadwaita, and replacing our SPICE display widget with Libmks. Today, I want to share a structural decision that aligns with that vision and sets up the project for long-term health/sustainability.

I have formally submitted a proposal to remove Boxes from the core-developer-tools set in gnome-build-meta and transition it towards becoming an independent application (with the ultimate goal of applying for GNOME Circle once all criteria are met).

I want to dive into why I am making this move, what it means for users and maintainers, and why I believe this is the right path forward.

There is No Drama Here

First off, let’s get this out of the way: there is zero drama between Boxes and the GNOME project.

Boxes continues to be built by the same core set of contributors, fully committed to the GNOME Human Interface Guidelines (HIG) and deeply integrated into our ecosystem. We aren’t stepping away from GNOME. We are simply right-sizing how Boxes is categorized, distributed, and maintained.

Why Boxes Shouldn’t Be “Core” (and Why Versioning with the OS is Outdated)

The desktop Linux landscape is shifting toward image-based operating systems with atomic updates and immutability. In this model, the underlying operating system provides a slim, reliable base, while applications live on top and update independently at their own pace.

Tying a complex application like Boxes to the biannual GNOME release schedule is not useful anymore. It forces us to hold back features and bug fixes for months just to align with the OS cadence, when users should simply get updates when they are ready and stable.

Furthermore, virtualization isn’t an essential utility that needs to be pre-installed on every single user’s machine by default. Boxes fits much better as a targeted application users explicitly choose to install when they need it.

Flathub-First: Moving Fast and Ending Distribution Bottlenecks

As a maintainer, maintaining separate code paths and stable branches for dozens of traditional distribution packages is simply not sustainable long-term. I can no longer afford to maintain multiple stable branches. Moving forward, I am simplifying maintenance down to one stable branch and one development/nightly branch. To make this sustainable, Flathub is our primary and only officially supported distribution method.

By bundling the virtualization stack in our Flatpak, we ensure that users get a much more tested, consistent, and working virtualization backend regardless of what operating system they are running.

Moving out of Core allows us to heavily discourage downstreams from individually packaging Boxes. Instead, distros should defer their users to the official Flatpak on Flathub. If you are filing bug reports or seeking support, the Flathub build will be the baseline.

Branding and Infrastructure Changes

To reflect this independent status, a few logistical changes are happening alongside this move. We are dropping “GNOME” from the user-facing app branding. Going forward, it will simply be named “Boxes”,  and we will soon be moving to a new website domain (which is currently being finalized). Importantly, our Flatpak application ID will remain org.gnome.Boxes for full continuity and compatibility. This means existing installations, user settings, and Flatpak configurations won’t break, and users won’t need to reinstall anything.

What’s Next?

This change gives us the flexibility to release updates whenever features are ready, iterate faster, and dramatically reduce maintainer burnout, all while delivering a more reliable and consistent user experience via Flathub. Once we settle into this new cadence and finalize our transition, we plan to apply for GNOME Circle.

To set clear expectations on timing: since Boxes currently uses GTK3 in its stable releases, we will soon submit an application for GNOME Circle review following our GTK4/Libadwaita rewrite.

If the Circle application is approved before the GNOME 52 Alpha deadline, the plan is to proceed with the removal from core-developer-tools and transition to Circle in time for the GNOME 52 release in March 2027.

For distribution maintainers wondering about upcoming distro releases: distros targeting GNOME 51 can continue to package the GNOME 50 release of Boxes, which will remain supported for the standard lifecycle of that release. If everything goes according to plan, GNOME 52 won’t include Boxes in the core set anymore. At this point, please don’t package Boxes anymore.

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Optical fibers are already the backbone of global communication systems. Recently, however, physicists have started to explore how their functionality could be boosted further by conveying information via entangled quantum particles -- potentially enabling instantaneous exchanges of information across vast distances. Such a system could eventually be the basis of a future 'quantum internet,' offering a level of security and computing power beyond anything possible today. In new research published in Physical Review Letters, a team led by Xi-Yu Luo at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei has pushed that vision further than ever, entangling two quantum memories across 420 kilometers (261 miles) of optical fiber -- more than four times the previous record.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The release of a new album by Taylor Swift might be a cause for celebration among her fans, but such events have also been linked to a more sombre phenomenon: an increase in fatal car crashes. The team behind a new study say it sheds light on the impact of distracted driving. Writing in the journal Jama Network Open, [Vishal Patel, first author of the study based at Harvard Medical School] and colleagues report how they focused on the release of 10 major albums, launched between 2017 and 2022, selected for having the highest number of Spotify streams over a single day. [...] The team found streaming volume for the top 200 songs in the US was 43% higher on the date of major album releases compared with the days surrounding the releases -- although such data does not reveal whether the music was being streamed in a car. [...] The researchers used data from a population-based registry of fatal US motor vehicle crashes to look at the number of traffic fatalities on the dates these albums were released, as well as for the 10 days either side. After taking into account the day of the week upon which the album was released, as well as federal holidays, and time of year, the researchers found the number of US traffic fatalities showed a relative increase of 15.1% on the date of major album releases, compared with similar days either side. "This is equivalent to approximately 182 fatalities in the US attributable to the release days of the 10 included albums," the team writes. Patel said the release of a new album could distract drivers because accessing music is a search task, not a single button press. "You unlock the phone, open the app, find the release, read down a tracklist, tap the right song. That's several seconds of looking at a screen," he said, adding unfamiliar music also demands more attention, while research has suggested listening to new, high-energy music measurably degrades driving performance. The researchers add the rise in traffic fatalities was greater among certain groups -- such as younger drivers, male drivers, people who were driving alone, and people driving cars with a built-in infotainment platform. The authors say the results suggest that "online music streaming through smartphones may significantly contribute to distracted driving and traffic fatalities."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When an authentication platform goes down, downstream applications go with it. Employees can't sign in, customers get locked out, and scheduled jobs quietly fail.

Cursor has launched Origin, a GitHub-style code hosting platform built directly into its AI coding environment. The company is initially positioning Origin as a low-risk layer on top of GitHub, keeping GitHub as the "source of truth," but the launch landed just as a major GitHub outage highlighted growing concerns about reliability in the age of AI-generated code. VentureBeat reports: Cursor began rolling out Origin, its own code hosting platform, to paid users on Monday morning. Roughly three and a half hours later, GitHub's status page lit up with what became a six-hour-and-forty-two-minute global degradation -- error rates near 20% across pull requests, issues and the API, and near 50% on archive and raw file downloads, according to GitHub's incident log. Enterprise single sign-on went down with it: SAML, OIDC, SCIM provisioning and Team Sync all failed. So did Copilot. The developer internet did what the developer internet does. "You can now host your repos in Cursor Origin and deploy to Vercel via Cursor Origin which is itself hosted on Vercel," Vercel chief executive Guillermo Rauch posted on X. "And unlike GitHub, it's online [smile emoji]" Asked why he was smiling, Rauch replied: "trying to make light of the situation. We ourselves are stuck because of github rn!" Matt Palmer, who works at Cursor, quote-tweeted his own company's launch with the day's best line: "We were going to ship this earlier, but GitHub was down." A GitHub outage, in other words, delayed the launch of a GitHub competitor. Product launches get locked weeks in advance, and no evidence suggests Cursor timed this one. But the coincidence did the company an enormous favor, because it dramatized the argument Origin exists to make. For eighteen years, choosing where to host your team's source code has been the least interesting decision an engineering organization makes. Cursor is betting that AI agents have made it interesting again -- and for technical decision makers, that is the real news here. Not a new product, but a new procurement question with a governance problem attached.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Comcast is activating Wi-Fi motion sensing on millions of compatible Xfinity gateways, allowing the routers to detect movement by measuring disruptions in signals between the gateway and connected devices. The free feature, part of Xfinity Shield, can send activity alerts through the Xfinity app and offers Home, Away, and nighttime monitoring modes without requiring separate motion sensors. The Verge reports: Wi-Fi motion sensing is a technology that has been around for a while, but it's only recently that it's become accurate and reliable enough to catch on. Linksys launched a similar service in 2021, but discontinued it a few years later. Lighting company Wiz launched a line of Wi-Fi-sensing smart bulbs in 2023, and more recently Philips Hue deployed a similar radio-frequency sensing technology in its products (using Zigbee rather than Wi-Fi). Comcast's motion sensing pairs with new modes in the Xfinity app -- Home Watch, Away Watch, and Dark Watch (a night/sleep mode) -- allowing you to turn sensing on or off based on your activities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Disney and ABC are suing the FCC to block an early review of eight station licenses, arguing the Trump administration is using the agency's regulatory power to punish the network over programming and editorial decisions it dislikes. Reuters reports: In a lawsuit (PDF) filed in U.S. District Court in Washington, Disney said the FCC was seeking to coerce and retaliate against "a network that refuses to bow to the administration's demands," calling the agency's actions an "extraordinary assault on free speech." Trump has waged an aggressive series of attacks on the news media and the latest move follows a two-year-long battle between Trump and Disney. Last month, Trump again called for ABC stations to lose their licenses because the network refused to air a prime-time speech on elections. The court case will pose a key test of the free speech rights of media outlets. Disney and ABC asked the court (PDF) to quickly issue a temporary restraining order halting the license renewal proceedings and preventing the FCC from scheduling a hearing. The company said the public comment period ended earlier this month and the FCC could act at any time. The lawsuit alleges that the administration is violating the company's First Amendment free speech rights, saying that the FCC "is using its regulatory power to retaliate against (Disney and ABC) for programming and editorial decisions the administration dislikes." The FCC said the move stemmed from a year-long investigation into whether Disney's diversity policies amounted to unlawful discrimination, an allegation the company denies. U.S. District Judge Loren AliKhan issued an order on Tuesday directing the company and the FCC to propose a schedule for considering the request for a temporary restraining order and told the agency to notify her if it moves to start the process of revoking the ABC licenses.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

RAM prices have exploded over the past year, with some DDR5 kits approaching 500% year-over-year increases and a 128GB kit now selling for $3,399, which is more than 10 times its previous low. Tom's Hardware reports: Things improve as you step down the memory capacities and speed tiers, but not as much as we'd like. You're still looking at $392 for a memory kit that was just $72 last year. To reinforce the point, I pulled the latest average price data from PCPartPicker, comparing where we are today (August 2026) to exactly one year ago. This data is somewhat approximate, but it should be broadly accurate. [...] A standard 64GB (2x32GB) DDR5-5600 kit that would have cost you under $200 last summer is now demanding over $1,100. It is a 5x multiplier on a component that used to be a fairly boring and predictable line item in a PC build budget. If you plan to just wait it out on an older AM4 or LGA1700 motherboard with DDR4, you'd better hope your memory holds out too, because DDR4 isn't safe from the fallout. With DDR5 entirely out of reach for most builders, the resulting scramble for older platforms running DDR4 memory has created a massive knock-on effect, and as a result, DDR4 kits are up anywhere from 120% to nearly 180% across the board. Nowhere near as bad as DDR5 pricing, but it still stings when a kit that was $105 last year is $281 this year. This phenomenon is by no means exclusive to the US, either. German tech site ComputerBase have also been tracking this global trend, reporting just this week that average RAM prices in Europe have skyrocketed by 345% compared to September 2025. Their data shows the squeeze is bleeding into other components too, with hard drive and SSD prices both climbing over 125% in that same timeframe. In fact, the situation is so severe that hyperscale buyers have reportedly already locked in almost all of the global DRAM production capacity for 2027, handing over advance deposits to guarantee their supply of precious DRAM, which is now among the highest-value commodities in the world by weight; mainstream DRAM chips are worth over half as much per kilogram as solid gold.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Your iPhone, SamsungGalaxy, andGoogle Pixel have a 1-year warranty. Unless you cough up extra dough for an extended service plan, you'll pay a hefty fee if you damage the screen and need a replacement (around $329 for an iPhone 17 done directly from Apple). But it doesn't have to be this way. What if you could order the part from the manufacturer and do the repair yourself? That dream is finally being realized for American consumers, thanks to Fairphone. The Dutch company is bringing its repairable and sustainably built Android smartphone -- the Fairphone (Gen 6+) -- to the US. Each one comes with a screwdriver. A replacement screen from Fairphone costs just $90. A new USB-C port is $20. A fresh battery is $40. In all, there are 12 modular elements you can swap yourself. It remains the only smartphone series with a 10/10 repairability scorefrom iFixit, not to mention an unmatched 5-year warranty and software updates through 2033. The new Fairphone (Gen 6+) is a small upgrade over the Gen 6 that the company launched last year. It has a newer Qualcomm Snapdragon 7s Gen 4 processor and double the RAM at 12 GB, but is otherwise largely the same device (hence the "plus" in the name). It now comes in Cobalt Blue, a nod to the miners who extract the cobalt used to make phone batteries, and the company's efforts to improve working conditions in mines in the Democratic Republic of Congo. The new Fairphone is available on Amazon and at Fairphone.com for $650, and it's officially certified to work on T-Mobile and AT&T's networks. While this will mark the U.S. debut of its flagship smartphone, the company first entered the stateside market last year with its repairable earbuds and headphones. It also plans to launch its next-generation Fairbuds 2 wireless earbuds later this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google has agreed to pay $10 million for a massive trove of anonymized Spirit Airlines data following the carrier's shutdown, including internal communications, spreadsheets, booking and frequent-flyer records, transactions, and employee information. CNN reports: Did you ever fly on Spirit Airlines? Or work there? Or send an email to someone who worked there? Then your information will soon be feeding Google's artificial intelligence model. The discount airline halted all operations in May, and it's been selling off its remaining assets through the bankruptcy process ever since. While most of that is planes, equipment, and real estate, there's other things that are valuable, too. It was disclosed late Monday that the company agreed to sell its data to Google for $10 million. That includes emails and internal communications, spreadsheets, transactions with the public including bookings and frequent flyer information as well as human resources information on its employees. The data has been stripped of anything that would allow individuals to be identified, according to the court filing. But it is still a massive amount of useful intelligence.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Researchers published a new Linux intrusion-detection architecture on Monday that handles network-flow analysis using XDP and eBPF. By shifting the workload closer to the metal, the system can examine suspicious traffic and potentially drop it near the very beginning of Linux's packet-processing path.

A sustainable Linux security program depends on more than individual hardening settings, scanners, and monitoring tools. Those controls matter, but they only remain useful when teams understand what they operate, define what secure behavior should look like, assign responsibility, and revisit their assumptions as systems change.

Week 29

This week's icon is for Deimos Hall's project:
Metamorphosis: "Edit metadata"

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!).

Hello all! It’s my first blog ever, so please bear with me.

Recently I’ve been active in Engagement team and helping out with the reboot. Hopefully you noticed our social media accounts are a tad more lively!

Part of the reboot process was dropping all the unrelated activities the team accumulated over the years, like events and such, with the goal on focusing on social media purely. There’s still work to do, but since we started doing weekly meetings (Monday 16:00 CEST, if you’re interested please see our meeting pad!) progress has been steady.

But we need your help in this! Engagement team is quite small, and to properly expand our activities onto other social media we need more contributors. Do you know how to edit images, create graphics? We need YOU for Instagram! Do you know how to make videos (short form or long form)? Our YouTube and TikTok are waiting for you! And let’s not forget that we always welcome new ideas for posts or people sharing their posts on social media for us to boost.

Currently platforms we’re on include:
– Fediverse
– Bsky
– Reddit

We want to (potentially! nothing here is set in stone!) also expand on:
– Facebook
– TikTok
– Instagram
– Improve our LinkedIn
– Improve our YouTube

But this is currently out of reach for us due to not having enough volunteers. We welcome everyone who wants to make world think better about GNOME!

To help developers in reaching us we introduced new labels:

– Newsworthy, for when you want us to share something on social media
– Team: Engagement, for when you want to summon us to discuss something.

We also have an „Engagement Materials” label, when you have some assets for us to use.

Interested? Visit us in #engagement:gnome.org and #socials:gnome.org Matrix rooms.

Written by Victoria Niedzielska. Thanks to other Engagement team members for proofreading the blog post!

Comments welcome here.

Security researchers have disclosed Fence2Pwn, a new Linux kernel exploitation technique that uses KFENCE’s alternate memory-allocation path to bypass protections enforced by the normal slab allocator.