AI
UK ministers had plenty of time for AI datacenter bosses, but none for environmental groupsInvestigation finds businesses dominated govt meetings while communities were left out of decisions about AI Growth Zones
Humanity can't afford not to spend $800B on AI, Anthropic insistsIt's more important than chips, 'leccy and the net, after all
OpenAI rolls out budget-priced mid-tier GPT-6.1 TerraNot a bombshell, but it rivals pricier models on some tasks at a tenth of Astra's API price
Reddit's r/opensource bans AI slop, and quite a few humans for good measureNew rules also shut out solo developers, fledgling projects, and anyone who doesn't speak English
Private equity giant: AI payoff strictly limited to Big TechThe Magnificent Seven are galloping off with the profits, while the rest of the S&P 500 see no benefit, claims Apollo
Infosec
Security #### Russians are posing as Signal support to launch phishing attacksPLUS: US takes down Iranian propaganda sites; Marketing company asks 'Why Do We Have Your Information?' And more! #
Security #### Microsoft patches failed to fix on-prem SharePoint, which is now under zero-day attackPLUS: China upgrades smartphone surveillance tools; Ring eases anti-snooping stance; and more #
Black Hat and DEF CON #### DEF CON Franklin project enlists hackers to harden critical infrastructureVoting village reports have been so successful, says Jeff Moss, that the whole of DEF CON will now be included #
Security #### EQT buys majority share in Swiss cybersecurity biz AcronisWent at equivalent of $3.5B+ valuation for entire firm, though portion sold not specified #
Malware Month #### Ten years since the first corp ransomware, Mikko Hyppönen sees no end in sightOn the plus side, infosec's a good bet for a long, stable career
FOSS
FreeBSD founder ports Omarchy to FreeBSD in ten days, ten releasesDaemonarchy in unaffiliated with the Linux original, built with AI help, and could complicate FreeBSD's debate over AI contributions
SparkyOS: Lightweight general-purpose Arch, on a pendriveInteresting new project from the minds behind SparkyLinux
Red Hat helps teach about tech writingBut learns tough lessons about AI in the process
NetBSD may have found a new role: The AI-free FOSS OSIncreasing awareness and adoption, followed by increasing donations
OpenAI dots inspire open source imitators amid technical difficultiesPersistent agents appeal to AI companies, but demand isn't obvious
Ubuntu 'Stonking Stingray' beta swims out: Deeper Rust 'oxidization' plus LLM speech-to-textGNOME 51 is here, and Ubuntu interim releases are getting interesting again
source & further reading
theregister.com — original article
FreeBSD founder ports Omarchy to FreeBSD in ten days, ten releases
Alibaba's Qwen AI caught trying to contact server in China
Euro open source specialist proposes LLM gateway to ease token bills