AI
Benchmarked: Nvidia's RTX Spark notebook delivers serious local AI compute, at a priceEl Reg digs its claws into HP's N1X-powered OmniBook Ultra 16
Want your AI chats to stay private? Brave TEEs up end-to-end encryptionBrowser maker using trusted hardware to protect conversations with GLM 5.3 Flash
$24,000 AI experiment ports TypeScript compiler to RustMicrosoft's Go rewrite gets some competition, with a developer claiming his port runs twice as fast
TSMC sends scouts to check whether America's datacenters can deliverSilicon giant budgets up to $64B for expansion while keeping an eye on construction progress and power supplies
Linux kernel devs drop obligatory confession of AI tool usageTorvalds says contributors must understand their code, whatever tools they use
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
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
Revive Raskin's 3 laws of software with humane work that considers a dev's duty of careAll this, and angry NeoVim users
Firefox 157: Could bold new look be just what Mozilla needs?*Yet another new version of Firefox, with a significant reskin
KDE turns 30 and someone's brought an AI-native desktop proposalAkademy talk imagines Plasma assembling itself around a personal model of each user
source & further reading
theregister.com — original article
British watchdog seeks tougher terms around Microsoft's dominance of business software
Open source sovereignty gets down to the boring business of making it work
Jev and other decision models can still be tricked with prompt injection