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The Linux Mint project has at times forked various open-source projects to evolve them on their own such as the Cinnamon desktop starting out as forks of several GNOME 3 components. While their software forks and focus has mostly been at the desktop-level, they are going a bit further down the stack now to develop forks of several APT components that power package management on Debian/Ubuntu systems.

Google recently rewrote the firmware for protected virtual machines in its Android Virtualization Framework using the Rust programming language and wants you to do the same, assuming you deal with firmware.

In a write-up on Thursday, Android engineers Ivan Lozano and Dominik Maier dig into the technical details of replacing legacy C and C++ code with Rust.

"You'll see how easy it is to boost security with drop-in Rust replacements, and we'll even demonstrate how the Rust toolchain can handle specialized bare-metal targets," said Lozano and Maier.

Easy is not a term commonly heard with regard to a programming language known for its steep learning curve.

Nor is it easy to get C and C++ developers to see the world with Rust-tinted lenses. Just last week, one of the maintainers of the Rust for Linux project - created to work Rust code into the C-based Linux kernel - stepped down, citing resistance from Linux kernel developers.

"Here's the thing, you're not going to force all of us to learn Rust," said a Linux kernel contributor during a lively discussion earlier this year at a conference.

There's been some Friday night kernel drama on the Linux kernel mailing list... Linus Torvalds has expressed regrets for merging the Bcachefs file-system and an ensuing back-and-forth between the file-system maintainer.

On Friday a set of fixes were submitted for merging into the current Linux 6.11 cycle. There were little fixes plus two big "fixes" around an rhashtable conversion and a new data structure for managing free lists in the BTree key cache. That later one eliminates the BTree key cache lock and avoids some locking contention that can appear in some multi-threaded workloads.

But this "fixes" pull request touches more than one thousand lines of code and we're now more than half-way through the Linux 6.11 cycle. This is far from the first time that big "fixes" pulls for Bcachefs have been submitted post merge window and not the first time that it's not strictly bug fixes but also heavier more feature-like additions being made via fixes pull requests. Linus Torvalds had enough and responded to the pull request.

Angry Russians displaced after Ukraine crossed the border and invaded the Kursk region last week have vented their frustrations online to President Vladimir Putin.

The criticisms represent an unusually public show of defiance in a country where any cracks at the leader or military can draw harsh punishments.

When AMD announced its Ryzen 9000 series desktop processor lineup at Computex earlier this year, the company touted big performance gains thanks to a massive 16% IPC (instructions per clock/cycle) boost.

While the company's claims probably have not been untrue, the overall performance of a processor is the byproduct of not just IPC but the clock speed too, and this is where a lot of the media who reviewed the chip felt it fell short. For example, the octa-core Ryzen 7 9700X is much more efficient than the 7700X but it leaves performance on the table, at least on Windows 11 it seems.

According to a comparison by the German website PC Games Hardware (PCGH), it seems Windows 11 24H2 may not be the right OS choice if you have a Zen 5-based Ryzen 9000 series CPU. The site found in its comparison that in most instances, the Linux distro Nobara, which is supposedly optimized for gaming, was faster than Windows 11 24H2. And the performance gap was not limited to just gaming either as productivity tests also showed Ryzen 9700X performing better on Linux.

Canonical recently announced a significant policy change regarding Linux adoption in the Ubuntu operating system. The Canonical Kernel Team (CKT), responsible for handling kernel-related issues for any Ubuntu release, will soon begin integrating the latest version of the Linux kernel, even if there is no final stable build out in the wild yet.

As the British company explains, Ubuntu follows a strict, time-based release schedule. Release dates are set six months in advance, and only in "extreme" circumstances can a delay occur. The most recent long-term support version of Ubuntu, 24.04 "Noble Numbat," was released in April 2024.

Meanwhile, developers working on the Linux kernel follow a "loosely time-based release process," with a new major kernel release occurring every two to three months. The actual release date for each new version is described as "fluid," meaning that project leader Linus Torvalds may adjust the upstream development process if a significant bug is discovered.

Malicious hackers can take over control of vacuum and lawn mower robots made by Ecovacs to spy on their owners using the devices’ cameras and microphones, new research has found.

Security researchers Dennis Giese and Braelynn are due to speak at the Def Con hacking conference on Saturday detailing their research into Ecovacs robots. When they analyzed several Ecovacs products, the two researchers found a number of issues that can be abused to hack the robots via Bluetooth and surreptitiously switch on microphones and cameras remotely.

“Their security was really, really, really, really bad,” Giese told TechCrunch in an interview ahead of the talk.

The researchers said they reached out to Ecovacs to report the vulnerabilities but never heard back from the company, and believe the vulnerabilities are still not fixed and could be exploited by hackers.

Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), one of the world’s largest advanced computer chip manufacturers, continues finding its efforts to get its Arizona facility up and running to be more difficult than it anticipated. The chip maker’s 5nm wafer fab was supposed to go online in 2024 but has faced numerous setbacks and now isn’t expected to begin production until 2025. The trouble the semiconductor has been facing boils down to a key difference between Taiwan and the U.S.: workplace culture. A New York Times report highlights the continuing struggle.

One big problem is that TSMC has been trying to do things the Taiwanese way, even in the U.S. In Taiwan, TSMC is known for extremely rigorous working conditions, including 12-hour work days that extend into the weekends and calling employees into work in the middle of the night for emergencies. TSMC managers in Taiwan are also known to use harsh treatment and threaten workers with being fired for relatively minor failures.

TSMC quickly learned that such practices won’t work in the U.S. Recent reports indicated that the company’s labor force in Arizona is leaving the new plant over these perceived abuses, and TSMC is struggling to fill those vacancies. TSMC is already heavily dependent on employees brought over from Taiwan, with almost half of its current 2,200 employees in Phoenix coming over as Taiwanese transplants.

Meta and Google teamed up to run a secret campaign that deliberately targeted 13 to 17-year-olds with Instagram ads on YouTube according to the Financial Times, breaking the search giant’s own rules against advertising to children.

The publication reports that Google directed ads to a subset of users labeled as “unknown” in its advertising systems, in an attempt to disguise the group skewed toward teenagers. According to a Google Ads help page, the “unknown” demographic category refers to people whose age, gender, parental status, or household income are supposedly unidentified, and can allow advertisers to reach “a significantly wider audience” when selected.

A social media trend, dubbed the "Kia Challenge," has appeared to compound the automakers' problems in recent years, with people posting videos showing how to steal Hyundai and Kia cars. At its height, the Kia Challenge was linked to at least 14 reported crashes and eight fatalities, according to figures from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration.

About 9 million vehicles have been impacted by the rash of thefts, including Hyundai Elantras and Sonatas as well as Kia Fortes and Souls. Hyundai and Kia earlier this year agreed to pay $200 million to settle a class-action lawsuit filed by drivers who had their vehicles stolen.

Technology is helping foil car thieves making life miserable for owners of Hyundai and Kia vehicles.

Hyundai and Kia upgraded their cars' anti-theft tech in early 2023. Vehicles equipped with the enhanced software will only start if the owner's key, or an identical duplicate, is in the ignition.

The rate at which the Korean automakers' cars are stolen has fallen by more than half since the companies upgraded their anti-theft software, according to new research from the Highway Loss Data Institute (HLDI). Hyundai and Kia thefts have soared in recent years after criminals discovered that certain car models lacked engine immobilizers — technology that has long been standard in other vehicles.

Back in February of this year you may recall the interesting news that was announced on Phoronix that AMD Quietly Funded A Drop-In CUDA Implementation Built On ROCm: It's Now Open-Source. That open-source ZLUDA code for AMD GPUs has been available since AMD quit funding the developer earlier this year. But now the code has been retracted. It's not from NVIDIA legal challenges but rather AMD reversing course on allowing it to be open-source.

As explained in that article earlier in the year, AMD had quietly funded the ZLUDA developer Andrzej Janik to bring his CUDA-compatible implementation to AMD GPUs and atop the ROCm software stack. ZLUDA start off originally as an open-source CUDA implementation for Intel graphics built atop the Level Zero (hence the ZLUDA name) software stack. While working on ZLUDA, he got it working out rather nicely and various CUDA applications running seamlessly on AMD GPUs as shown and benchmarked in my prior article. But then AMD decided to quit funding the project.

The agreement was reportedly that if/when the contract ended, the ZLUDA code could be open-sourced. That's what happened back in February. But now that code has been retracted from the official public GitHub repository. It's not from legal threats from NVIDIA as one might imagine given its working to support CUDA on non-NVIDIA hardware, but rather from AMD itself.

Janik also noted in his announcement that he had a NVIDIA GameWorks implementation working on AMD GPUs but sadly that code will now never be open-sourced.

Andrzej Janik notes he wants to "rebuild ZLUDA" moving forward and is working on project funding. What wasn't clear from his message whether this means a new ZLUDA focused on the original Intel GPU plans or a new clean sheet design for AMD GPUs. When I asked Janik about it, he's still exploring options.

It will be very interesting to see where ZLUDA goes from here but disappointing that the prior open-source code has been retracted. The GitHub repository is at vosen/ZLUDA while we are eager to see its future direction.