Source: Hacker News
Source: Hacker News
Source: The Register
Linux kernel 7.1 is out, bringing significant changes that have been brewing for years – including the long-promised removal of support for Intel's 486 chip and its contemporaries. More than 140,000 lines of code have been chopped, with more facing deletion. Back in May 2025, we wrote that kernel 6.15 would drop 486 support, but that change was canceled at the last minute. Now it's in: in April, Penguin Emperor Linus Torvalds merged the big change that we described back then. More work is still ahead before this is completely gone, though. The Reg reported on the Russian Baikal family of CPUs way back in 2014, and again in 2021, but now Linux support for Baikal hardware has been removed, as has support for ancient bus mouse ports. We've also previously described 7.1's new NTFS driver, NTFSplus. It's optional for now, but South Korean filesystems boffin Namjae Jeon has revived and rewritten the original read-only NTFS driver from the 1990s. Most importantly, now it's able to write to NTFS volumes as well as read from them, and it's been modernized in line with current kernel filesystem methods. Linux Weekly News (LWN) explained the change in its January Filesystem Medley. Along with the new driver, there's also a new and improved version of the additional ntfsprogs utilities, called ntfsprogs-plus. This gives Linux the ability to repair some forms of NTFS corruption and errors – so we suspect that the various Linux-based live rescue media such as SystemRescue, GParted Live, and Grml may be quick to adopt kernel 7.1. This reminds us of what might have been the first time we reported on some of Namjae's filesystem finesse, when his code to repair exFAT volumes was added back in 2022. NTFSplus stands to completely replace the driver that Paragon Software donated back in 2020, as we described in April. It also seems likely that the old read-only NTFS driver will be removed too, as NTFSplus is based on that code. As it happens, exFAT support has been improved too. Contiguous space for files can be pre-allocated without zeroing the blocks first, making the process faster, and reducing fragmentation so storage media stays faster for longer. There are also improvements in ext4 and Btrfs handling. The swap memory subsystem has been overhauled, and should be faster. With RAM prices still high and thus renewed interest in memory and cache compression tools, we suspect that there's much more to do here. There are, of course, many smaller changes, some of which we've previously covered – including the removal of a whole collection of ancient communications devices. In 2022, our own Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols introduced the new io_uring API. In doing so, he also mentioned the new eBPF functionality, which we had days previously attempted to summarize. In 7.1, those two meet: now eBPF code can handle io_uring scheduling. The extensible kernel scheduler, which we've previously mentioned as an advanced feature of Oracle Linux's UEK-next kernel, has now been merged. Kernel 7.1 has improved power management for both AMD and Intel chips, as well as battery-status reporting on Apple M1 and M2-based laptops. The security of KVM virtualization on Arm has been tightened up, and so has that around accessing PIDs (process IDs) in the /proc virtual filesystem. The CIFS network filesystem – or SMB, as most of us call it – now has explicit support for creating temporary files. Intel FRED support debuted way back in kernel 6.9 but it's now on by default, and it helps performance on AMD processors as well. Kernel Rust support now needs Rust 1.85. For a deep dive into all the changes, as ever, LWN is the place to go. All this and much, much more is described in the articles on the first half of the 7.1 merge window and the rest of the 7.1 merge window. ®
Source: The Verge - All Posts
Fox has announced that it's acquiring Roku outright, in a deal that values the streaming company at $22 billion. Once the deal is complete, Fox content will be promoted more heavily than before on Roku streamers and smart TVs.
The deal will see Fox's TV networks and Tubi streamer combine with Roku's network of streaming devices, smart TV software, and The Roku Channel. The companies say in a press release that by combining they'll become the third-largest player in the US TV industry by viewing share.
"This is a defining moment for Fox, and a natural extension of the deliberate and focused strategy we have been executing for nearly a decad …
Source: Calvin & Muad'Dib
Any road followed precisely to its end leads precisely nowhere.
Source: OSNews
It’s just a ruling from a lower court, but it sets the stage for how European courts are going to deal with the question of who is liable for whatever slop “AI” generates.
The Regional Court of Munich hit Google with a temporary injunction barring the company from spreading false claims about two Munich-based publishers through its AI-generated search overviews (case no. 26 O 869/26). The court classified Google as a direct infringer because the “AI overview” is its own content, not just a list of search results.
Google’s AI overviews had falsely tied two publishing companies to scams, subscription traps, and shady business practices for certain search queries. According to the court, the AI mixed up information about other, genuinely sketchy companies with the plaintiffs and drew connections that didn’t appear in any of the linked sources. The publishers sent Google a cease-and-desist letter, but Google didn’t respond appropriately.
↫ Matthias Bastian at The Decoder
Google tried to argue it doesn’t carry any responsibility or liability for whatever slop its “AI” generate, but the German court does not agree. According to the court, “AI” overviews are not the same as regular search results, because they rewrite findings and just make shit up, thereby making claims that are nowhere to be found in any search results (or in reality in general). Furthermore, the court states that Google develops the “AI”, it runs it, it offers it to users, and Google alone controls its output, and as such, Google is liable for whatever their “AI” produces.
Google also tried to argue that users know not to trust anything an “AI” produces, which is hilarious considering how hard Google is pushing these tools, but the courts state that the ability of users to do further research does not absolve Google of liability. In addition, the court made it very clear that free speech protections absolutely do not apply, because the “AI” expressions are coming from an algorithm, not a person, and are above all an expression of Google’s business activities”.
In other words, if an “AI” tool generates false accusations and misleading statements, the creator of said “AI” is liable. With this ruling in hand, countless other people have a stronger case to make whenever Google or any other company tries to absolve itself from liability from slop just because a pachinko machine generated it.
Excellent news, and the only fair outcome.
Source: OSNews
You’re a smart cookie, so you opted to buy a copy of Microsoft Office for macOS back in 2019 or 2021, eschewing the Office 365 subscription, so you could keep on using Office 2019/2021 forever if you wanted to. Just like in the old days.
I’ve got some bad news.
Microsoft Office 2019 and 2021 for Mac view-only conversion (2026) is a scheduled remote degradation of perpetually-licensed Microsoft Office software for macOS and iOS, set for July 13, 2026 when a license-validation certificate used by the Office apps expires. After Office 2019 for Mac reached end of support in October 2023, Microsoft assured customers their installed apps would “continue to function.” The July 13, 2026 conversion instead drops the apps into a Microsoft-defined “reduced functionality mode,” in which files can be opened and viewed but not edited or saved. By May 30, 2026, the original 2023 end-of-support page had been re-dated and rewritten on Microsoft’s site; the “continue to function” clause was removed.
↫ Consumer Rights Wiki
Microsoft’s advice to the users they’re stealing from is to keep using the applications as mere viewers, switch to the free Office 365 web applications, pay for a 365 subscription, or buy a brand new regular copy of Office 2024. None of these make any sense, and clearly, all of this should be illegal, but it’s not because the software industry is a clown show.
Proprietary software is unethical.
Source: The Register
COMPUTEX 2026: It only took a year and a half but the same silicon at the heart of Nvidia's DGX Spark AI workstations will soon be powering Windows PCs. During his GTC Taiwan keynote on Monday, Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang revealed the N1X, a high-end mobile processor that combines an Arm-based CPU co-designed with MediaTek with a Blackwell based GPU on board. Marketed under the “RTX Spark” banner, Nvidia’s new notebooks and mini PCs signal a deeper push into the a PC arena long dominated by Intel and AMD. But while the PCs are new, the chip powering them isn’t. Nvidia was rumored to be working on the N1X for several years now. At CES in 2025 the GPU slinger fanned the rumor mill flames when it unveiled the DGX Spark — then codenamed Project Digits. The $4,000 AI workstation was powered by a miniaturized Grace Blackwell processor packing 20 ARMv9 CPU cores and a Blackwell GPU with 6,144 CUDA cores, capable of up to 500 teraFLOPS of FP4 compute — or 1 petaFLOP if you happen to have a workload that supports sparsity. That’s fed by 128 GB of unified memory. If that sounds familiar, that’s because the N1X and GB10 are essentially the same chip. The liberal use of the term “up to” in Nvidia’s marketing does, however, suggest that not all SKUs will have all CPU or GPU cores enabled. The silicon may be the same but the operating system isn’t. While Nvidia’s DGX Spark and GB10 partner systems shipped with DGX OS, a lightly customized version of Ubuntu 24.04, RTX Spark systems will ship with Windows. This opens the door to high performance mobile gaming using integrated Nvidia graphics. The GPU giant claims the N1X-based systems should be able to manage 100 frames per second at 1440P in AAA games, presumably with the help of AI upscaling tech like DLSS. With up to 128 GB of unified memory shared between the CPU and GPU, RTX Spark systems should be able to handle creative workloads previously limited to high-end workstations. Nvidia suggests top end RTX Spark systems should be able to handle 3D renders requiring 90-plus gigabytes of memory, edit 12K video, generate AI videos, and run 120 billion parameter LLMs with the large context windows required for local agents. As part of the announcement, Huang teased an appearance alongside Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella to discuss the future of AI PCs during the software titan’s Build conference, which kicks off tomorrow. As for the hardware, Nvidia has clearly set a high bar for quality. In addition to DGX Spark-style Mini PCs, RTX Spark systems will range from 14 to 16-inches in size, feature aluminum chassis, and color accurate OLED displays with Nvidia G-Sync. The first N1X-based PCs and notebooks from the likes of Asus, Dell, HP, Lenovo, Microsoft and MSI are expected to begin rolling out this fall. We’ve asked Nvidia to confirm RTX Spark systems pricing, but don’t expect the top end variants to be cheap. GB10-based systems ranged from $3,000 to $4,000 at launch. Memory prices have only gone up since then with the DGX Spark now retailing for $4,699. ®
