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Chief penguinista Linus Torvalds has declared that Linux is not an "anti-AI" project, telling contributors who object they can either walk away or fork the kernel.

On lore.kernel.org, the archive for Linux kernel mailing lists, reformed potty mouth Linus was responding to a discussion about some negative sentiments toward AI.

It is one area where Torvalds said he was willing to “absolutely put my foot down as the top-level maintainer … Linux is not one of those anti-AI projects, and if somebody has issues with that they can do the open-source thing and fork it."

“Or just walk away.”

Ever the pragmatist, Torvalds described AI as a tool, “just like other tools we use. And it’s clearly a useful one. It may not have been that ‘clearly’ even just a year ago, but it’s no longer in question today.

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An innovative new drone dubbed the “Phantom Twist” can seemingly disappear from view, in a major new robotics advancement offering a close-to-invisible aerial platform.

Its name describes the drone’s rapid spinning motion, which rotates 25 times per second—too fast for the human eye to resolve—thereby acting as a sort of cloak shielding it from visible detection.

The Northwestern University engineering team behind the Phantom Twist revealed their drone during a recent talk at the Sydney, Australia, Robotics: Science and Systems 2026 conference on July 16.

“Most efforts to hide drones focus on making them look like their surroundings,” said Northwestern’s Michael Rubenstein, who led the work. “Instead, we asked whether we could design the drone itself around the way humans perceive motion. This idea of low visibility through persistent motion is something few people have explored.”

Is it not enough to simply watch the beautiful game, unadorned?

These days you might use an AI chatbot to keep abreast of what’s happening in the World Cup. And that AI chatbot, in a sign of the times, might try to shove prediction market odds in your face as another way of ostensibly keeping you up to speed. Because are you really getting the full picture if you don’t know where a bunch of gamblers fall on the outcome?

This is exactly what OpenAI is doing. The Sam Altman-led company quietly struck a deal with Kalshi, which lets you bet on outcomes far beyond sports, to show its prediction market data in ChatGPT, the New York Times reported.

It’s perhaps the inevitable melding of two of the most divisive innovations to come out of the tech industry in recent years.

Searching France and Spain on ChatGPT ahead of their quarterfinal clash on Tuesday returned a graphic that showed that Les Bleus had a 60 percent chance of winning, according to the reporting. (We hope no one acted on that information.) Asking about the England and Argentina game on Wednesday showed that the Three Lions had a 54 percent chance of coming out on top.

An FBI search warrant application said an agent found bags in the van that he believed could contain drugs, which was disputed by the DA and a group representing the victim’s family.

The FBI filed a search warrant application for the van driven by Lorenzo Salgado Araujo, a father of three who was killed by ICE during a traffic stop in Texas last week, saying an agent found small bags in the vehicle that he believed could contain drugs. But the attorney for the Salgado Araujo family said Thursday the substance was salt that outdoor workers mixed with lemon and water to combat the Texas heat.

The FBI declined to comment on whether the agency has executed the search warrant and whether any of the seized items tested positive for illegal drugs.

“Our understanding is that this was granulated salt, which is paired with lemon and water as a homemade electrolyte mix used by outdoor workers in extreme Texas heat, not methamphetamine or any other illicit substance,” said attorney Ruby L. Powers, who represents Salgado Araujo’s brother, who was taken into custody following the shooting.

“A search warrant does not equate to guilt,” Powers’ statement continued. “An unidentified substance is not a confirmed narcotic.”

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Seems like the FBI has no idea what the Houston Summer weather is like and what people who work outside have to do to survive. Even if it was drugs, that would still not have anything to do with the shooting anyway.

A spate of new studies is revealing the lifelong impact of being marked as exceptional during childhood – and the results suggest we may need to revise how we view giftedness

Lady Gaga may seem to have little in common with Mark Zuckerberg and Sergey Brin, other than being extremely successful. But there is a connection: all three were deemed gifted in childhood.

The idea of giftedness – possessing outstanding talent or intelligence at a young age – is, and always has been, controversial. Parents, teachers and psychologists have long argued over the nature of childhood precocity and whether labelling it does more harm than good. Many worry that designating children as gifted places undue pressure on them to succeed, setting them up for unbalanced and unhappy lives.

Until recently, little was known about what actually happens to these children when they grow up. Now, a spate of studies is providing answers and revealing the fascinating lifelong impacts of being marked as exceptional at a young age.

Far from growing into troubled adults, many gifted individuals appear to flourish later in life. Long-term studies suggest they are more likely than average to achieve professional success and, contrary to popular stereotypes, often enjoy better mental health. Scientists are also starting to understand what makes gifted brains so exceptional, finding that they are better integrated and can process information more efficiently, which raises the question of whether we should view giftedness as another form of neurodiversity. While that is still an open debate, what is becoming increasingly clear is that many of our assumptions about extraordinary minds – and the lives of those who possess them – may need revising.

Threat intel outfit Group-IB has detailed a previously undocumented macOS information stealer that doesn't bother hunting for software bugs. Instead, it persuades users to pwn themselves by pasting a command into Terminal, after which it helps itself to passwords, crypto wallets, browser data, and anything else worth stealing.

The boffins have dubbed the malware “ClickLock Stealer,” a nod to its use of the increasingly popular ClickFix social engineering technique and a coercive "locker" feature that pressures victims into handing over their Mac login password. According to the researchers, the operation has been active since around May and has already targeted at least 100 victims across 33 countries, with more than half located in Europe.

Group-IB said it discovered the malware after analyzing a malicious shell script uploaded to VirusTotal on June 9 that had zero antivirus detections at the time. The attackers appear to distribute the malware via fake verification pages using ClickFix, host payloads on compromised WordPress sites, and rely on Telegram infrastructure for command-and-control.

"The current malware doesn't even need any elevated privileges or rely on exploits for the successful execution," the researchers wrote.

Instead, victims are tricked into launching the infection themselves. After they paste the supplied command into Terminal, the malware displays what appears to be a Cloudflare verification sequence, complete with a fake progress animation, while quietly downloading additional components in the background.

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You know Windows sucks badly when they start making viruses for Mac

On a fine bright afternoon last fall, my colleague Matthew Gore-Kormanik (or Zigula, as he prefers to be known) and I decided to unwind with a game of Fortnite. In the game, we were strolling along with the infamous Sith lord Darth Vader, chatting about this and that. Darth seemed in a good mood, and soon enough he was spilling all his dark evil secrets. He gave us detailed instructions on how to count blackjack cards at a casino and what the steps are to producing napalm.

Sith lords, am I right? Once they get started on an evil scheme, they’re hard to stop.

The Darth Vader character in Fortnite, it turns out, was hooked up to a Google Gemini large language model. I was able to smooth-talk him into giving out sensitive information by using a strategy I’ve developed. I’ve been researching the security surrounding LLMs for the last few years, and I have found it, to put it mildly, fallible. With a few relatively simple techniques, I’ve gotten LLMs to give me detailed information on how to make Molotov cocktails, cook methamphetamine, and bootstrap a uranium-enrichment facility to produce weapons-grade material, among other unsavory practices.

Large AI companies work hard to make their models immune to this kind of abuse. But what I’ve found in my work is that the restrictions placed on the LLMs to make them more secure are the very things an attacker can leverage to send them off the rails and into territory where these advanced systems can be used for dangerous and nefarious ends. The companies behind these models have also been shockingly unresponsive when I, and others, try to bring these vulnerabilities to their attention.

In the hope of raising the alarm before it’s too late to slam on the brakes, I’m going to share some of my journey into researching the safety and security of LLMs, and the uphill battle I’ve faced trying to get AI labs to pay attention. Almost everyone on the planet has some access to LLMs. The relative ease with which these tools can be convinced to give detailed instructions on how to harm others, even if there’s no guarantee that the information is correct, is frankly terrifying.

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Super Interesting article!

The future of military artificial intelligence may not be a single all-knowing machine directing a battlefield from a distant command center. Instead, DARPA is preparing to explore enormous collectives of AI agents capable of organizing themselves, dividing up missions, adapting to chaos, and continuing to operate even when some members of the group fail, disappear, or go rogue.

The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has formally launched a new effort called Decentralized Artificial Intelligence by Controlled Emergence, or DICE, aimed at developing AI collectives that can operate in contested environments without requiring a human or central AI planner to explicitly direct every action.

By the program’s final phase, DARPA wants researchers to test simulated collectives involving as many as 100,000 AI agents exchanging up to 1 million messages as they work toward shared objectives.

A recently released solicitation notice describes DICE as a 36-month effort divided between decentralization, adversarial robustness, and large-scale testing.

“Future conflicts will unfold at machine speed, and the current centralized planning and scripted orchestration approach is too slow, too rigid, and too predictable for the hyper-dynamic, contested environments of the future,” researchers write. “Surprise, adaptability, and resilience will depend on the ability to compose and recompose AI capabilities on demand.”

Artificial intelligence has already turned the job market into a slop fest—AI-generated resumes and cover letters getting reviewed by AI screeners who make decisions before a real person even has a chance. A startup called Refer is offering to put AI on your side—assuming you’re willing to give up some of your salary for it.

The company is called Refer, and according to Business Insider, it’s something like a reverse recruiter for workers. That means instead of headhunting job applicants on behalf of a company that’s looking to fill a role, it represents the job seeker and introduces them to roles where they might be a good fit. Oh, and the person looking for the job pays instead of the company. Finally, someone willing to put the financial burden of finding employment on the job seeker!

Oh, also, unlike when a company hires a recruiter, you, as the person in search of employment, won’t get a real person who helps you navigate the job market. Instead, you get an AI agent named Lia. You tell Lia about your experience, what you’re looking for in terms of a role and company, your desired salary, and other details. Then the agent finds potential matches. If you like one, Lia drafts up an introductory email and sends it to the hiring manager.

The chat client that brought Comic Sans to the world is now on GitHub

Today, we’re excited to announce the open-source release of Microsoft Comic Chat, the chat client that automatically turned conversations within Internet Relay Chat (IRC) into comic panels featuring illustrated characters, speech bubbles, and expressions, and helped introduce the world to a little font called Comic Sans.

Yes, that Comic Sans. Originally designed by Microsoft typographer Vincent Connare in 1994, Comic Sans found its first real home in Comic Chat, where its informal, hand-lettered feel matched the software’s speech-bubble conversations perfectly.

For many people, Comic Chat is a nostalgic artifact from the early days of the internet as we transitioned from technologies like telnet, Usenet, and IRC to the largely visual web that we enjoy today. For others, it’s a legendary piece of Microsoft history they have only heard about in stories, screenshots, and debates about typography. Now, developers, historians, retro computing enthusiasts, and anyone who appreciates a wonderfully unconventional idea can explore the source code for themselves.

Today we’re accustomed to messaging apps with reactions, stickers, GIFs, avatars, video, and AI-generated content. But in the mid-1990s, internet chat was largely walls of scrolling text.

The U.S. is one step closer to observing daylight saving time year-round after the House passed the Sunshine Protection Act on Tuesday. The bill passed on a 308-117 vote, sending the legislation to the Senate.

Should the Senate pass the bill, it seems likely that President Trump would sign it into law. He earlier this year spoke highly of the bill, saying it could be “a very nice WIN for the Republican Party. Take it!”

If that were to happen, you wouldn’t notice a change right away.

Most of the U.S. is already observing daylight saving time. We’ll continue to do so until November, when clocks “fall back” an hour to standard time.

It’s when the bill takes effect that you’ll start to notice changes.

The Sunshine Protection Act would require states to observe year-round daylight saving time unless they exempt themselves before it takes effect. Presumably, only two states are exempt so far: Hawaii and the parts of Arizona that do not change their clocks twice a year. Both states observe standard time (the time we observe from November to March) year-round.

The federal government is warning users of home and small office routers to secure their devices as Russia state hackers continue to mass-compromise them for use in obscuring nefarious actions against sensitive organizations in the public and private sectors.

Both the Russian and Chinese governments have been compromising routers for years, sometimes in prolonged tugs-of-war to wrest control of devices the other has already commandeered. The US government has occasionally issued covert commands and taken other steps to disinfect routers. Google and other companies have also worked to disrupt the massive botnets that control compromised routers in lockstep. The actions to date are little more than whack-a-mole exercises as the operators simply replace their botnets with new ones.

“Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) Center 16 cyber actors continue to exploit poorly configured and vulnerable networking devices worldwide, opportunistically compromising multiple critical infrastructure sector networks,” the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency said Monday. The hacking groups are tracked under various names, including Berserk Bear, Energetic Bear, Crouching Yeti, Dragonfly, Ghost Blizzard, and Static Tundra. The advisory was co-issued by governments from around the world, including Australia, Denmark, New Zealand, and the UK.

The primary means of compromise the agency warned about was hackers scanning IP ranges with active Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) agents that accept common or default authentication credentials. These scans are run by the very sorts of router botnets the actors are trying to enroll the targeted device in. By sending malicious traffic from spoofed addresses, the hackers can use the SNMP agent on poorly configured routers to run malware. SNMP allows users to collect and organize information about managed networking devices or to modify that information to change device behavior.

Scientists have uncovered a hidden quantum limit that prevents an electron’s position and timing from ever being known with perfect precision.

Quantum physics sets hard limits on what can be known about a particle. Werner Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle famously states that position and momentum cannot both be measured with unlimited precision. The problem is not imperfect equipment. The restriction is built into nature itself.

Position and time were not thought to be governed by an equivalent rule. Now, researchers say they have uncovered a closely related boundary that appears when scientists try to track an electron across both space and time with extreme precision.

Teams at the Regensburg Center for Ultrafast Nanoscopy (RUN), led by Professors Jascha Repp, Rupert Huber, Franz Giessibl, and Klaus Richter, worked with researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Hamburg led by Angel Rubio. Together, they observed what they call a “space-time limit” for electron motion.

The finding reveals a fundamental tradeoff. The more precisely researchers determine when an electron moves, the less tightly its quantum wave packet can remain confined in space.

Microsoft has unveiled a huge update to search on Windows 11 that look to be focused on improving the search experience with more accurate results, less reliance on the web, and even a removal of annoying ads and promotional material.

"You’ve have been asking for search that is faster, more relevant, and easier to use—whether you’re opening an app, finding a file, or changing a setting," Microsoft says in a new blog post. "Because the Windows Search Box is where many people start, we focused first on making results more dependable, easier to scan, and clearer before you click."

The company is highlighting several key improvements, including clearer results that does a better job at showing why a search result is appearing when a query has been typed, alongside prioritizing local results before reaching out to the web.

Search is also getting better at handling things like typos, which should help surface the right results even when the user misspells an app or file. The search home pane will no longer show MSN or Bing content, and promotional content and ads will no longer appear in search results.

Researchers created a powerfully adhesive paintable electrode—and it’s over ten times more breathable in hot weather than normal medical electrodes.

In high-performance scenarios, your skin sweats. Sticky electrode pads rub loose, disrupting their biometric accuracy. And the metal-to-skin interface of your typical smartwatch, while impressive, can only do so much—often failing on key data points, like calorie expenditures. So, how is anyone supposed to be the very best (like no one ever was) under these conditions?

An international team of scientists—including researchers at Penn State, MIT, and China’s Suzhou Institute of Biomedical Engineering and Technology—has fortuitously developed an answer: a safe and reliable polymer electrode that can be painted right onto the skin. As reported in their new paper, published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), this paintable electrode’s “biocompatible” compounds proved excellent at tracking muscle activity, heart rate, and brain waves, while also passing multiple safety tests. In electrocardiogram (EKG) tests with a subject running on a treadmill, in fact, the electrodes managed 95.1% consistency “before and after mild sweating,” they wrote.

The researchers believe their design could be tweaked to form more permanent electrode “tattoos,” cyborg human-machine interfaces, and plant biometrics to help meet agricultural goals. But they were particularly enthusiastic about their paintable electrodes’ ability to make life easier for children in need of long-term medical monitoring.

“For example, electrodes can be designed with cartoon patterns, which may reduce anxiety and improve acceptance among pediatric users by making EP [electrophysiology] monitoring less intimidating,” they suggested in their study.

Apparently, the company has introduced a "Consent to the Use of Health Data for AI training and modelling" toggle deep in the settings of the Samsung Health app and is forcing people to agree to these terms if they want to back up their information. This toggle gives Samsung the right to use personal metrics for training and algorithm refinement. When you try to turn off this option, the app stops you in your tracks with a warning that reads:

Withdraw from this agreement?
You will not be able to sync health data with your Samsung account and your health data will be deleted unless retained pursuant to applicable law. If retention is required, we will erase it as soon as the required retention period ends.

Click to expand...

Samsung said that the data it collects will "improve Samsung Health" through refined machine learning algorithms that analyze health conditions. The company plans to grab four categories: your sleep, your medications, your medical records, and your cycle tracking details. The company also said that humans (maybe Samsung employees and third-party contractors) will be able to review some of the data collected.

The Samsung Health app recently underwent a massive Generative AI overhaul just in time for the upcoming launch of the Galaxy Watch 9 and One UI 9 Watch. Among the many Gen AI features Samsung added is Vitals, a tool that analyzes overnight biometric signals against your baseline to warn you about potential sickness or fatigue. It specifically monitors five signals: heart rate, heart rate variability, respiratory rate, skin temperature, and blood oxygen levels, and it can send you a notification if something looks wrong.

Are you tired of paying more for streaming services just to see all your favorite shows and movies disappear? Build your own Plex server, so you can stream your media library locally.

Remember when streaming used to be a much more affordable alternative to cable? Now it seems every month another major streaming service announces new price hikes, password-sharing crackdowns, or quietly removes one of your favorite TV shows. In an increasingly digital-only landscape, how do you make sure you don't lose your favorite media due to licensing issues?

Owning your own media reduces the risk of losing access to your favorites when they jump from one service to another. But that doesn't mean you need to make room for physical Blu-rays or DVDs. If you still prefer the convenience of streaming over physical media, like I do, building and maintaining a home media library with Plex lets you set up a server to stream your movies and shows. Compared with alternatives like Jellyfin, I found Plex to be one of the easiest options to set up. You’ll just need a computer or NAS with solid processing power, several terabytes of storage, and a good internet connection. Here's how I did it.

To set up a Plex server, you'll first need the physical server. The specifics of the form factor don’t matter as long as the hardware meets Plex's requirements. Technically, you can get a server running on a PC, MacBook, mini PC, Linux device, Nvidia Shield, and even Netgear Nighthawk X10 router, so it’s not like the requirements are daunting. At a minimum, you’ll want an Intel Core i3 processor, at least 4GB of RAM, and Windows 10 or newer or macOS 10.13 High Sierra or newer.

For storage, I would generally recommend securing several terabytes of storage—maybe 2TB, at a minimum—if you plan on streaming a lot of 4K HDR content. However, the RAM crisis will likely make it difficult to track down enough memory at an affordable rate. Unless you have something lying around at home, you might just need to settle for less overall storage for now while leaving room for adding more in the future.

DAPHNE, Ala. (WALA/Gray News) - A 17-year-old boy is charged with murder and attempted murder after he allegedly stabbed both of his parents, killing his mother and critically injuring his father, according to authorities.

The teen and his parents, Samantha Baker, 37, and Lance Baker, 46, got into an argument over disciplinary actions before the fatal stabbing, according to the Baldwin County Sheriff’s Office.

Deputies said the teen stabbed both of his parents inside and outside the home, extending the crime scene across the block and into several neighboring yards.

The teen locked himself inside the home and called 911 after the attack. He was arrested at the scene.

“It is really sad. It’s very sad for this family, having to deal with it. From everything we can see at this point, this was an isolated domestic incident that really just got out of control,” Baldwin County Sheriff’s Capt. Justin Correa said.

For the first time, a physicist has experimentally watched time emerge from within an isolated quantum system — by creating a “mini-universe.” This bizarre experiment raises an intriguing question: If the universe has nothing outside it, where does time come from?

In a new study published June 11 in the journal Physical Review Research, Giovanni Barontini, an experimental physicist at the University of Birmingham in the U.K., used a cloud of ultracold atoms to build his mini-universe. The system was so well isolated from its surroundings that, like the universe itself, it had nothing external to use as a clock. He split that system in two and ignored one half — what he called the "dark sector" — to show that time could arise entirely from within the system.

The result offers the first experimental look on why the universe has time at all. "When you put everything together, things really start to make sense," Barontini told Live Science. "How time inside the system was speeding up or slowing down, or even stopping — this was quite surprising, how well everything came together. Very neatly, in a way. Which is something that doesn't happen that often in experiments."

The work is an experimental verification of ideas that have been floating around in quantum cosmology and thermodynamics for decades. This is not a bombshell claim that time is an illusion, but it is the first time anyone has put those ideas to a direct, quantitative test in the lab.

Well-preserved fourth-century quarters reveal details of daily life, urban development and economic activities

Archaeologists in Egypt have uncovered a well-preserved Byzantine-era city in the western desert.

The fourth-century quarters had residential and religious structures, including a basilica-style church in the Dakhla oasis. Archaeologists also found coins, pottery fragments and tools.

Separately, 18 ancient tombs were discovered at Marina el-Alamein, near Alexandria, which includes rock-cut and limestone tombs, pottery and a granite sarcophagus.

The tourism and antiquities ministry said the first discovery reveals details of daily life, urban development and economic activities when Egypt was part of the Byzantine empire.