Month: February 2026

Serious About Learning Linux? Get 15 O'Reilly Linux and DevOps eBooks for Under $25

From command line to Kubernetes and Terraform, this bundle covers a lot!

Linux 7.0 Makes Preparations For Rust 1.95

Last week was the main feature pull of Rust programming language updates for the Linux 7.0 kernel merge window. Most notable with that pull was Rust...

How the Intel 8087 FPU Knows Which Instructions to Execute

An interesting detail about the Intel 8087 floating point processor (FPU) is that it’s a co-processor that shares a bus with the 8086 or 8088 CPU...

Otto Kekäläinen: Do AI models still keep getting better, or have they plateaued?

The AI hype is based on the assumption that the frontier AI labs are producing better and better foundational models at an accelerating pace. Is that...

NASA says it needs to haul the Artemis II rocket back to the hangar for repairs

A day after NASA officials expressed optimism that they could be ready to launch the Artemis II mission around the Moon next month, the space agency’s...

Arturia’s FX Collection 6 adds two new effects and a $99 intro version

Arturia launched a new version of its flagship effects suite, FX Collection, which includes two new plugins, EFX Ambient and Pitch Shifter-910. FX Collection 6 also...

Miranda’s Unlikely Ocean Has Us Asking If There’s Life Clinging On Around Uranus

If you’re interested in extraterrestrial life, these past few years have given an embarrassment of places to look, even in our own solar system. Mars has...

Sony’s WH-CH720N headphones offer excellent value at full price, but right now they’re a steal.

Sony’s WH-CH720N headphones offer excellent value at full price, but right now they’re a steal.

Jonathan Dowland: Lanzarote

I want to get back into the habit of blogging, but I’ve struggled. I’ve had several ideas of topics to try and write about, but I’ve...

Retrotechtacular: Bleeding-Edge Memory Devices of 1959

Although digital computers are – much like their human computer counterparts – about performing calculations, another crucial element is that of memory. After all, you need...

AppArmor Enhancements Merged For Linux 7.0

The AppArmour security module for the Linux kernel, which most notably is backed by Canonical for Ubuntu, has some small improvements and fixes for Linux 7.0…

Georgia says Elon Musk’s America PAC violated election law

Of course, it’s the guy who constantly complains about voter fraud who may have committed voter fraud. | Image: The Verge For all his bluster about...

Dirk Eddelbuettel: qlcal 0.1.0 on CRAN: Easier Calendar Switching

The eighteenth release of the qlcal package arrivied at CRAN today. There has been no calendar update in QuantLib 1.41 so it has been relatively quiet...

Why Kubernetes 1.35 is a game-changer for stateful workload scaling

With Kubernetes 1.35, the In-Place Pod Resize feature has graduated to GA, and Vertical Pod Autoscaling InPlaceOrRecreate update mode has graduated to beta. This means VPA...

TypeScript 6 Released: Developers Invited to Upgrade to Prepare for the Go Rewrite

The TypeScript team recently released TypeScript 6 in beta. The release serves as a key transition point rather than a full feature release. It focuses on...

Suspect in Tumbler Ridge school shooting described violent scenarios to ChatGPT

The suspect in the mass shooting at Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, Jesse Van Rootselaar, was raising alarms among employees at OpenAI months before the shooting took...

Micasa: A Local-First, Privacy-Focused Home Management TUI

Stop losing receipts. Use micasa to track home maintenance, project quotes, and appliance warranties in a single SQLite file. No cloud. No subscriptions. The post Micasa:...

OpenAI Introduces Harness Engineering: Codex Agents Power Large‑Scale Software Development

OpenAI introduces Harness Engineering, an AI-driven methodology where Codex agents generate, test, and deploy a million-line production system. The platform integrates observability, architectural constraints, and structured...

Claude Code comes to Roadmap, OpenClaw loses its head, and AI workslop

I’m Matt Burns, Director of Editorial at Insight Media Group. Each week, I round up the most important AI developments, explaining what they mean for people...

In Praise of the Proof of Concept

Your project doesn’t necessarily have to be a refined masterpiece to have an impact on the global hacker hivemind. Case in point: this great demo of...

The Pixel 10A and Soundcore Space One are just two of the best deals this week

Welcome to the weekend, folks! The Reviews and Guides team here at The Verge is gearing up for all things Unpacked, but Samsung isn’t the only...

Beyond the vibe code: The steep mountain MCP must climb to reach production

One thing I didn’t do last year was go to any Model Context Protocol (MCP) conferences, largely because I couldn’t see why one very young protocol...

AI Data Centers Turn to High-Temperature Superconductors

Data centers for AI are turning the world of power generation on its head. There isn’t enough power capacity on the grid to even come close...

Aerial_Knight’s DropShot captures the thrill of skydiving and makes it stylish

I’ve always wanted to go skydiving. Aerial_Knight’s DropShot, from indie developer Aerial_Knight, lets me live out that dream – at least in a safe, virtual kind...

Dinosaur eggshells can reveal the age of other fossils

When dinosaur fossils surface at a site, it is often not possible to tell how many millions of years ago their bones were buried. While the...

Stellantis is in a crisis of its own making

Antonio Filosa attends the presentation of the new Fiat 500 Hybrid at the Stellantis FIAT Mirafiori plant in Turin, Italy, in November of 2025. | Elisa...

eCryptfs Sees Renewed Patch Activity With Linux 7.0

We haven’t heard much about eCryptfs in recent years for that stackable in-tree Linux file-system providing per-directory encryption support. The FSCRYPT framework has shown its strong...

Have we leapt into commercial genetic testing without understanding it?

Daphne O. Martschenko and Sam Trejo both want to make the world a better, fairer, more equitable place. But they disagree on whether studying social genomics—elucidating...

Love Complex Automata? Don’t Miss The Archer

[Oliver Pett] loves creating automata; pieces of art whose physicality and motion come together to deliver something unique. [Oliver] also has a mission, and that mission...

6 Best Phones With Headphone Jacks (2026), Tested and Reviewed

Headphone jacks are endangered, but they’re not gone. Here are our favorite smartphones that still let you plug and play.

Best Budget Monitors: I Found 3 Impressive Screens Under $200 (2026)

You might assume all monitors under $200 are terrible. But after trying some out, I found a few that defy expectations.

Souvenirs From the 2026 Winter Olympics Are Being Resold for Big Bucks Online

From pins to mascots to Swatch watches, memorabilia from the Milano Cortina Games is showing up on sites like eBay and Vinted.

Vasudev Kamath: Learning Notes: Debsecan MCP Server

Since Generative AI is currently the most popular topic, I wanted to get my hands dirty and learn something new. I was learning about the Model...

Major government research lab appears to be squeezing out foreign scientists

One of the US government’s top scientific research labs is taking steps that could drive away foreign scientists, a shift lawmakers and sources tell WIRED could...

ollama 0.17 Released With Improved OpenClaw Onboarding

The open-source ollama project that makes it easy to get up and running with a variety of LLMs under Windows, macOS, and Linux is out with...

Password Managers Share a Hidden Weakness

Plus: The cybersecurity community grapples with Epstein files revelations, the US State Department plans an online anti-censorship “portal” for the world, and more.

Linux 7.0 Lands More AMDGPU Fixes For Old Radeon Hardware

Following last week’s main set of DRM kernel graphics driver feature updates for Linux 7.0, merged on Friday to Linux 7.0 Git was the first round...

You Can Now Install—and Update—Microsoft Store Apps Using the Command Line

By typing simple, text-based commands into Windows’ PowerShell, you can quickly install apps directly from the Microsoft Store—all without the typical ads or clutter.

AMD AOMP 23.0-0 Compiler Continues Enhancing Fortran Support

AMD AOMP 23.0-0 was released overnight as the latest build of this LLVM/Clang downstream that continues to carry the very latest AMD patches focused on delivering...

AWS Enables Lambda Function Triggers from RDS for SQL Server Database Events

Unlock the power of event-driven architecture with AWS’s innovative pattern for Amazon RDS SQL Server. This approach decouples database events from processing, enhancing scalability and responsiveness....

Ceph In Linux 7.0 Lands Support For AES256K Keys

For those making use of the Ceph open-source, distributed storage platform, with the upcoming Linux 7.0 kernel they are introducing support for the AES256K key type…

After the 2026 Winter Olympics, Figure Skating Will Never Be the Same

From disappointments to scandals to Madison Chock and Evan Bates’ silver medal, figure skating brought some of the biggest surprises of the Milano Cortina Games. We...

iRestore Elite Laser Hair Growth System Review: Surprisingly Effective

After just two months, my husband saw enough hair regrowth that his college friends commented on it.

‘Narco-Submarine’ Carrying 4 Tons of Cocaine Captured by Mexico’s Navy

Following increased surveillance and patrols of routes used by transnational drug-trafficking networks, Mexican authorities have seized approximately 10 tons of cocaine in the past week alone.

MicroGPT Lets You Peek with Your Browser

Regardless of what you think of GPT and the associated AI hype, you have to admit that it is probably here to stay, at least in...

.NET 11 Preview 1 Arrives With Runtime Async, Zstandard Support, and C# 15 Features

NET 11 Preview 1 is released, featuring Runtime Async as the headline change, moving async method handling from the compiler into the runtime itself. The preview...

ls Cheatsheet

Basic Listing # Use these commands for everyday directory listing. Command Description ls List files in current directory ls /path/to/dir List files in specific directory ls...

Anker’s X1 Pro shouldn’t exist, but I’m so glad it does

The Soundcore Nebula X1 Pro is too weird to exist. It takes the excellent 4K projector and karaoke microphones from Anker’s Nebula X1 and stuffs them...

Cloudflare Introduces Local Uploads for R2 to Cut Cross-Region Write Latency by 75%

Cloudflare has recently introduced Local Uploads for R2 in open beta. The new feature optimizes write performance for globally distributed users without changing bucket location, reducing...

Electric Jeep With Modified Prius Hardware

On the list of cars widely regarded as the most reliable vehicles ever built, up there with the Toyota Land Cruiser, the Honda Civic, and the...

A Powerful To-Do App for Android That Collects Absolutely None of Your Data

It handles time tracking, Jira sync, and Pomodoro timers without going after its users’ data.

Trump Imposes New Tariffs to Sidestep Supreme Court Ruling

The president signed an executive order implementing 10 percent global tariffs after calling the justices who struck down his signature trade policy a “disgrace.”

Ghostty terminal is finally adding scrollbar support

Ghostty’s most-thumbed feature request is finally being answered. Yup, scrollbar support is finally coming in Ghostty 1.3 for Linux and macOS. You’re reading Ghostty terminal is...

KDE Plasma 6.7 Preps More Improvements While Plasma 6.6.1 Fixes Begin Accumulating

This week marked the release of KDE’s Plasma 6.6 desktop as a very successful release that overall is in very robust shape and performing well. While...

Thomas Goirand: Seamlessly upgrading a production OpenStack cluster in 4 hours : with 2k lines shell script

tl;dr: To the question: “what does it take to upgrade OpenStack”, my personal answer is: less than 2K lines of dash script. I’ll here describe its...

The Supreme Court’s Tariff Ruling Won’t Bring Car Prices Back to Earth

Despite Friday’s SCOTUS ruling, many tariffs affecting the auto industry will remain. So will the other dynamics that have led to today’s historically high car prices.

Cloudflare outage on February 20, 2026

On February 20, 2026, at 17:48 UTC, Cloudflare experienced a service outage when a subset of customers who use Cloudflare’s Bring Your Own IP (BYOIP) service...

A Galaxy Composed Almost Entirely of Dark Matter Has Been Confirmed

What scientists thought were four separate star clusters are actually part of one nearly invisible system.

After fueling test, optimism grows for March launch of Artemis II to the Moon

A second fueling test on NASA’s Space Launch System rocket ended Thursday night, giving senior managers enough confidence to move forward with plans to launch four...

How to Build Reusable Modular Unity Packages to Speed Up Development

How many times have you rewritten the same systems across different Unity projects? Or copied entire folders from an old project, only to spend hours fixing...

Microsoft gaming chief Phil Spencer steps down after 38 years with company

Microsoft Executive Vice President for Gaming Phil Spencer announced he will retire after 38 years at Microsoft and 12 years leading the company’s video game efforts....

MAHA moms threaten to turn this car around as RFK Jr. flips on pesticide

Members of the Make America Health Again movement are in open revolt after founder Robert F. Kennedy Jr. publicly backed President Trump’s executive order Wednesday that...

Fury over Discord’s age checks explodes after shady Persona test in UK

Shortly after Discord announced that all users will soon be defaulted to teen experiences until their ages are verified, the messaging platform faced immediate backlash. One...

Friday Squid Blogging: Squid Cartoon

I like this one. As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven’t covered....

FCC asks stations for “pro-America” programming, like daily Pledge of Allegiance

Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr today urged broadcasters to join a “Pledge America Campaign” that Carr established to support President Trump’s “Salute to America 250”...

Government Docs Reveal New Details About Tesla and Waymo Robotaxis’ Human Babysitters

Self-driving-vehicle companies are revealing new details about their safety-critical “remote assistance” programs—but questions remain.

Meta’s flagship metaverse service leaves VR behind

Meta announced today that it will divorce its Horizon Worlds social and gaming service—once promoted as the company’s first major step into the metaverse—from its Quest...

Xbox shakeup: Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond are leaving Microsoft

Xbox ex boss and new Xbox boss | Image: Microsoft After nearly 40 years at Microsoft, Xbox chief and Microsoft Gaming CEO Phil Spencer is leaving...

They Bet Against Trump’s Tariffs. Now They Stand to Make Millions

After the US Supreme Court struck down President Donald Trump’s tariff regime, investment firms are in line for a whopping return on a niche trade.

Red Hat takes on Docker Desktop with its enterprise Podman Desktop build

Red Hat is perhaps the biggest name in enterprise Linux, but it’s also a major cloud-native player thanks to its Kubernetes distribution, OpenShift. What it hasn’t...

Panoramic Film Camera Made from 3D Printed Parts

Even though digital cameras have lowered the barrier of entry to photography dramatically, as well as made it much easier for professionals and amateurs alike to...

Microsoft says today’s Xbox shake-up doesn’t mean game studio layoffs

Xbox has new leaders today, now that Phil Spencer and Sarah Bond are out – and you’d be forgiven for assuming that means yet another round...

Our Reviewers’ Top TV Pick for Gamers Is at Its Lowest Price in Months

This Samsung OLED comes loaded with features specifically for gamers.

SCOTUS rules Trump’s tariffs are illegal — but the fight is far from over

The US Supreme Court struck down some of Donald Trump’s tariffs on foreign imports, which have become a hallmark of the chaos of the second Trump...

Read Microsoft gaming CEO Asha Sharma’s first memo on the future of Xbox

Microsoft Gaming CEO Asha Sharma. | Image: Microsoft Microsoft gaming boss Phil Spencer has just announced he’s leaving the company after 12 years leading Xbox and...

Read Xbox chief Phil Spencer’s memo about leaving Microsoft

Xbox chief Phil Spencer has just announced to employees that he’s leaving Microsoft after 38 years. In a memo entitled “A new chapter for Microsoft Gaming,”...

Xbox chief Phil Spencer is leaving Microsoft

Xbox chief Phil Spencer is leaving Microsoft after nearly 40 years at the software giant. Xbox president Sarah Bond is also leaving Microsoft, in what is...

Sarah Bond is leaving Xbox

Sarah Bond during the May 2024 Bloomberg Technology Summit. | Photo: Bloomberg via Getty Images Sarah Bond, the president and COO of Xbox, is leaving the...

Trump is making coal plants even dirtier as AI demands more energy

Kingston Fossil Plant, a 1.4-gigawatt coal-fired power plant located in Roane County, just outside Kingston, Tennessee on the shore of Watts Bar Lake. | Photo: Getty...

Web scraper sued by Google claims Google is the one scraping the web

SerpApi, a company that offers tools to scrape content on the web, is fighting back against Google’s copyright lawsuit that accuses it of vacuuming up search...

DHS Wants a Single Search Engine to Flag Faces and Fingerprints Across Agencies

Homeland Security aims to combine its face and fingerprint systems into one big biometric platform—after dismantling centralized privacy reviews and key limits on face recognition.

‘Starkiller’ Phishing Service Proxies Real Login Pages, MFA

Most phishing websites are little more than static copies of login pages for popular online destinations, and they are often quickly taken down by anti-abuse activists...

The CDC Has a Leadership Crisis

A 2023 law championed by Republicans requires the CDC have a director confirmed by the Senate. For months, though, it’s had only acting directors—and the White...

Controversial NIH director now in charge of CDC, too, in RFK Jr. shake-up

Jay Bhattacharya, the director of the National Institutes of Health, is now also the acting director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an unusual...

Porting Super Mario 64 To the Original Nintendo DS

Considering that the Nintendo DS already has its own remake of Super Mario 64, one might be tempted to think that porting the original Nintendo 64 version...

NanoClaw’s answer to OpenClaw is minimal code, maximum isolation

Gavriel Cohen built NanoClaw, a lightweight alternative to OpenClaw, in a weekend after learning about security flaws in the popular agentic framework. On this edition of The New...

IEEE Plays a Pivotal Role In Climate Mitigation Talks

IEEE has enhanced its standing as a trusted, neutral authority on the role of technology in climate change mitigation and adaption. Last year it became the...

Intel Hiring More Linux Developers – Including For GPU Drivers / Linux Gaming Stack

As some good news out of Intel today on the Linux/open-source side following last year’s layoffs, they’re hiring for some new Linux software development roles —...

Exclusive eBook: The great Al hype correction of 2025

2025 was a year of reckoning, including how the heads of the top AI companies made promises they couldn’t keep. In this exclusive subscriber-only eBook, you’ll...

Wikipedia blacklists Archive.today, starts removing 695,000 archive links

The English-language edition of Wikipedia is blacklisting Archive.today after the controversial archive site was used to direct a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack against a...

Metadata Exposes Authors of ICE’s ‘Mega’ Detention Center Plans

Comments and other data left on a PDF detailing Homeland Security’s proposal to build “mega” detention and processing centers reveal the personnel involved in its creation.

The Best Chairs and Desks From Branch Are On Sale (We’ve Tested Them All)

Branch makes excellent office essentials, and our top picks are discounted.

Drgn v0.1 Released For Very Versatile Programmable Debugger

Drgn is the programmable debugger developed by Meta engineer Omar Sandoval that has proven quite versatile and popular with Linux kernel developers and others. After nearly...

96% of developers don’t trust AI code: Here’s a step toward the fix

The narrative surrounding software development has shifted dramatically over the last six months. The industry has moved past the initial awe of Large Language Models (LLMs)...

Video Friday: Humanoid Robots Celebrate Spring

Video Friday is your weekly selection of awesome robotics videos, collected by your friends at IEEE Spectrum robotics. We also post a weekly calendar of upcoming...

2026.08: Losing in the Attention Economy

@PUBG Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery! As a reminder, each week, every Friday, we’re sending out this overview of content in the Stratechery bundle;...

OpenAI Launches Frontier, a Platform to Build, Deploy, and Manage AI Agents Across the Enterprise

OpenAI Frontier is an enterprise platform for building, deploying, and managing AI agents, designed to make AI agents reliable, scalable, and integrated into real company systems...

How to Use Documentation as a Marketing Tool

I was recently moved to the marketing team at my company, and that shift has made me reflect more deeply on the role documentation plays in...

Rudra is a new keyboard-driven launcher for GNOME Shell

The world isn’t short on keyboard-based Linux launchers. Albert, Ulauncher, rofi and GNOME Do (if you’re old enough to remember that one) are among those I’ve...

Hackaday Podcast Episode Ep 358: Soft Displays, LCD Apertures, and Mind Controlled Toys

For today’s podcast Elliot Williams is joined by Jenny List, and we’re pushing the limits of mobile connectivity as Jenny’s coming to us from a North...

Auto-Reloading Magnet Dispenser Can Feed Itself

Magnet placement tools are great because they remove finger fumbling while ensuring correct polarity every time. [EmGi] has made a further improvement by making a version...

The reason big tech is giving away AI agent frameworks

As someone who had a front-row seat to the container orchestration wars, I am watching the same movie play out again with AI agent frameworks. It’s...

Why Final Fantasy is now targeting PC as its “lead platform”

For a long time now, PC gamers have been used to the Final Fantasy series treating their platform as somewhat secondary to the game’s core console...

Bits from Debian: Proxmox Platinum Sponsor of DebConf26

We are pleased to announce that Proxmox has committed to sponsor DebConf26 as a Platinum Sponsor. Proxmox develops powerful, yet easy-to-use open-source server solutions. The comprehensive...

“Million-year-old” fossil skulls from China are far older—and not Denisovans

Two skulls from Yunxian, in northern China, aren’t ancestors of Denisovans after all; they’re actually the oldest known Homo erectus fossils in eastern Asia. A recent...

AI Safety Meets the War Machine

Anthropic doesn’t want its AI used in autonomous weapons or government surveillance. Those carve-outs could cost it a major military contract.

It’s outright war for the Iron Throne in House of the Dragon S3 teaser

With HBO’s critically acclaimed A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms gearing up for its season finale on Sunday, it’s time to check in on that other Game...

Supreme Court Rules Most of Donald Trump’s Tariffs Are Illegal

In a 6-3 ruling, justices upended the Trump administration’s signature economic policy, potentially putting the US government on the hook for at least $175 billion in...

HD on a VHS Tape? How Did They Do It?

There was a period from the 1970s to the mid-2000s or so when a fixture underneath the family TV set was a VHS videocassette recorder. These...

Nintendo brings GBA-era Pokémon to the Switch, but not Switch Online subscribers

For my money, the 2004 Game Boy Advance re-releases of Pokémon FireRed and LeafGreen are still the best versions of the original Pokémon games. They fixed most of the bugs...

Supreme Court blocks Trump’s emergency tariffs, billions in refunds may be owed

The Supreme Court ruled Friday that Donald Trump was not authorized to implement emergency tariffs to ostensibly block illegal drug flows and offset trade deficits. It’s...

Potentially Coming to a Browser :near() You

Just before we wrapped up 2025, I saw this proposal for :near(), a pseudo-class that would match if the pointer were to go near the element....

Linux 7.0 Shows Significant PostgreSQL Performance Gains On AMD EPYC

When beginning some early Linux 7.0 kernel benchmarking this week for looking at its performance in its early development state, I started off testing on Core...

How to Install Java on Mac in 2026

Java is the most widely used programming language for enterprise software, Android development, and university computer science courses. Apple doesn’t include Java with macOS, so you...

How to Run Rust on Jupyter Notebooks

If you’ve ever wanted to combine the power of Rust with the interactive goodness of Jupyter notebooks, you’re in the right place. Maybe you’re tired of...

How to Build and Deploy a Production-Ready WhatsApp Bot with FastAPI, Evolution API, Docker, EasyPanel, and GCP

WhatsApp bots are widely used for customer support, automated replies, notifications, and internal tools. Instead of relying on expensive third-party platforms, you can build and deploy...

Ask Hackaday: Do You Have a Dead Man’s Switch?

During the Cold War, the specter of a nuclear “dead man’s switch” was central to the concept of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD). In the event that...

Climate Physicists Face the Ghosts in Their Machines: Clouds

In October 2008, Chris Bretherton lifted off from the coast of northern Chile in a C-130 turboprop plane. It was too dark to see the sandy...

[$] Open-source Discord alternatives

The closed-source chat platform Discord announced on February 9 that it would soon require some users to verify their ages in order to access some content —...

Tesla slashes Cybertruck prices as it tries to move (unpainted) metal

Last night, Tesla made some hefty cuts to Cybertruck pricing in an effort to stimulate some sales. The bombastic tri-motor “Cyberbeast” is $15,000 cheaper at $99,990,...

The three paths AI could take from here – Shawn Wang SWYX interview [Podcast #208]

Today Quincy Larson interviews Shawn Wang. He’s a software engineer, founder of the AI Engineer conference, and host of the Latent Space podcast focused on applying...

The Book of Remind

Dianne Skoll, creator and maintainer of the command-line calendar and alarm program Remind, has announced the release of The Book of Remind. As the name suggests,...

GNOME 50 Lands Updated Wayland Color Management v2 Support

Following GNOME 50’s Mutter merging sdr-native color mode support for wide color gamut displays this week, another late addition to Mutter has now been merged ahead...

An AI coding bot took down Amazon Web Services

Amazon’s cloud unit has suffered at least two outages due to errors involving its own AI tools, leading some employees to raise doubts about the US...

FreeBSD KDE Desktop Installer Script is Ready for Testing

The FreeBSD Foundation is launching an automated KDE installer for the 15.1 release. Join the FreeBSD KDE Installer Call for Testing. The post FreeBSD KDE Desktop...

Security updates for Friday

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (grafana), Debian (gegl, inetutils, libvpx, nova, and python-django), Fedora (azure-cli, chromium, microcode_ctl, python-azure-core, python3.14, and roundcubemail), Red Hat (grafana...

Making infrastructure access lighter, simpler, and smarter

Tailscale’s latest updates treat secure connectivity, access control, and audit observability as one cohesive system, reducing complexity while keeping strict standards.

Code Mode: give agents an entire API in 1,000 tokens

Model Context Protocol (MCP) has become the standard way for AI agents to use external tools. But there is a tension at its core: agents need...

Linux Begins Seeing Early Preparations For PCIe 7.0

While we are on the horizon of seeing PCI Express 6.0 devices, there are already early Linux kernel patches beginning to surface for PCI Express 7.0…

Your Coffee Grinder Is as Important as Your Brewer—Here Are the 5 Best We’ve Tested

We used particle size analysis and real-world testing to find the best conical burr, flat burr, and blade grinders for every budget and style of coffee...

Linux 7.0 Brings Apple Type-C PHY, Snapdragon X2 & Rockchip HDMI 2.1 FRL Additions

Ahead of the Linux 7.0 merge window ending this weekend, the PHY updates were merged this week for this next major kernel release. There are some...

The Download: Microsoft’s online reality check, and the worrying rise in measles cases

This is today’s edition of The Download, our weekday newsletter that provides a daily dose of what’s going on in the world of technology. Microsoft has a new...

Why the era of relying on dozens of “purpose-built” databases is finally coming to an end

What will drive the next wave of innovation in enterprise applications? Ask the experts, and you’ll likely hear a similar answer: data platforms that enable AI...

Epilogue GB Operator Review: Play Your Game Boy Games on a Laptop

Epilogue’s adorable GB Operator plug-in gizmo is a must-have for collectors of retro Nintendo Game Boy games.

Boldr Kelvin Review (2026): Heats Your Body, Heats the Wall

The Boldr Kelvin heater looks cool and promises energy savings and far-infrared heat. Too bad it also heats backward.

jQuery Releases v4: First Major Version in Almost 10 Years

jQuery 4 has launched, celebrating 20 years of innovation in web development. This major update modernizes the library by removing legacy code and outdated browser support...

Microsoft deletes blog telling users to train AI on pirated Harry Potter books

Following backlash in a Hacker News thread, Microsoft deleted a blog post that critics said encouraged developers to pirate Harry Potter books to train AI models...

Ring Cancels Its Partnership with Flock

It’s a demonstration of how toxic the surveillance-tech company Flock has become when Amazon’s Ring cancels the partnership between the two companies. As Hamilton Nolan advises,...

NextSilicon’s Maverick-2: the Future of High-Performance Computing?

A few months back, Sandia National Laboratories announced they had acquired a new supercomputer. It wasn’t the biggest, but it still offered in their eyes something...

Rocket Report: Chinese launch firm raises big money; Falcon 9 back to the Bahamas

Welcome to Edition 8.30 of the Rocket Report! As I write this week’s edition, NASA’s Space Launch System rocket is undergoing a second countdown rehearsal at...

How to Layer Your Clothes to Stay Warm in Any Season (2026)

Whether you’re hiking, climbing, or backpacking, here’s how to use base layers, mid layers, and a shell to be comfortable no matter what nature throws at...

Could AI Data Centers Be Moved to Outer Space?

Massive data centers for generative AI are bad for the Earth. How about launching them into orbit?

OpenTelemetry Project Publishes “Demystifying OpenTelemetry” Guide to Broaden Observability Adoption

The OpenTelemetry open-source observability project recently published a comprehensive guide titled “Demystifying OpenTelemetry” aimed at helping organizations understand, adopt, and scale observability using the OpenTelemetry standard....

The Real Python Podcast – Episode #285: Exploring MCP Apps & Adding Interactive UIs to Clients

How can you move your MCP tools beyond plain text? How do you add interactive UI components directly inside chat conversations? This week on the show,...

Meet Scotland’s Whisky-Sniffing Robot Dog

Inside Dewar’s cavernous whisky warehouses, man’s best mechanical friend—a Boston Dynamics robot dog with an ethanol sensor for a nose—is on the hunt for leaky barrels.

The Best Mushroom Gummies on the Market, Lab-Approved (2026)

These edibles made from functional fungi are not your childhood Flintstone vitamins.

Ubuntu 26.04 Begins Its Feature Freeze

Canonical engineer Utkarsh Gupta announced today on the behalf of the Ubuntu Release Team that the Ubuntu 26.04 “Resolute Raccoon” has entered its feature freeze…

Cloud Hypervisor 51 Brings Performance Improvements, Better QCOW2 v3 Support

Cloud Hypervisor 51 is now available for this Rust-based VMM focused on secure cloud computing. For what began as an Intel open-source project years ago is...

Community service

The bird is a beautiful silver-gray, and as she dies twitching in the lasernet I’m grateful for two things: First, that she didn’t make a sound....

Job titles of the future: Breast biomechanic

Twenty years ago, Joanna Wakefield-Scurr was having persistent pain in her breasts. Her doctor couldn’t diagnose the cause but said a good, supportive bra could help....

The Search Engine for OnlyFans Models Who Look Like Your Crush

Presearch’s “Doppelgänger” is trying to help people discover adult creators rather than use nonconsensual deepfakes.

Mesa KosmicKrisp Driver Is Coming To iOS, More Performance & Vulkan 1.4 Expected

Last year LunarG announced KosmicKrisp as a new Vulkan implementation atop Apple’s Metal API. Initially targeting macOS, KosmicKrisp since was merged to Mesa and has evolved...

USB Driver For Google Tensor SoCs, UCSI Thunderbolt Alt Mode In Linux 7.0

All of the Thunderbolt/USB driver changes were merged this week for the nearly-over Linux 7.0 merge window…

The War Over Prediction Markets Is Just Getting Started

Prediction markets like Kalshi and Polymarket are booming, and so is a fight among regulators, lawmakers, and advocates over their legality.

Gmail Is Killing POP and Gmailify Access. Here’s What It Means for You

If you have multiple email accounts, your Gmail setup may soon need some reorganizing.

Measles cases are rising. Other vaccine-preventable infections could be next.

There’s a measles outbreak happening close to where I live. Since the start of this year, 34 cases have been confirmed in Enfield, a northern borough...

The Olympics and Politics Are More Intertwined Than Ever. Maybe That’s a Good Thing

The Olympics often provide a moment of unity and celebration during times of geopolitical uncertainty. But blind nationalism didn’t win at the 2026 Winter Games.

Leading US Research Lab Appears to Be Squeezing Out Foreign Scientists

House Democrats are demanding answers from the National Institute of Standards and Technology and urging it to halt rumored changes they say could undermine its mission.

Presentation: How WebAssembly Components Enable Safe and Portable Software Extensions

Alex Radovici explains the shift from C-ABI and scripting to the Wasm Component Model (WASI Preview 2). He shares how to build secure plugin systems that...

Podman Test Days: Try the New Backend & Parallel Pulls

The Podman team and the Fedora Quality Assurance team are organizing a Test Week from Friday, February 27 through Friday, March 6, 2026. This is your...

Planet News Roundup

This is a roundup of articles from the openSUSE community listed on planet.opensuse.org. The community blog feed aggregator lists the featured highlights below from Feb. 13...

Eliminating the Impossible

Jeffrey Epstein’s Ties to CBP Agents Sparked a DOJ Probe

Documents say customs officers in the US Virgin Islands had friendly relationships with Epstein years after his 2008 conviction, showing how the infamous sex offender tried...

JDK 26 and JDK 27: What We Know So Far

JDK 26, the first non-LTS release since JDK 25, has reached its second release candidate with a final set of 10 new features, in the form...

Vulkan 1.4.344 Released With New Extension From Valve

Vulkan 1.4.344 is out today as the latest routine spec update for this high performance graphics and compute API. Besides a handful of fixes and clarifications,...

A $10K Bounty Awaits Anyone Who Can Hack Ring Cameras to Stop Sharing Data With Amazon

The Fulu Foundation, a nonprofit that pays out bounties for removing user-hostile features, is hunting for a way to keep Ring cameras from sending data to...

Friday Five — February 20, 2026

How sovereign is your strategy? Introducing the Red Hat Sovereignty Readiness Assessment toolRed Hat believes that sovereignty shouldn’t be a wall but a foundation for the...

Red Hat OpenShift 4.21 brings Kubernetes to Oracle Database Appliance

Red Hat OpenShift 4.21 continues to expand the reach of enterprise Kubernetes into Oracle’s infrastructure portfolio. Our expanded Oracle Cloud Infrastructure support in OpenShift 4.20 brings...

Small models, big impact: The future of scaling enterprise AI agents

In the AI industry, we’ve spent the last 3 years obsessed with scale. We’ve chased parameter counts into the trillions, believing that “bigger” was the only...

Reproducible Builds (diffoscope): diffoscope 313 released

The diffoscope maintainers are pleased to announce the release of diffoscope version 313. This version includes the following changes: [ Chris Lamb ] * Don't fail...

The developer as conductor: Leading an orchestra of AI agents with the feature flag baton

Last month, just a few weeks after Dynatrace finalized its acquisition of DevCycle, Michael Beemer of Dynatrace and Andrew Norris, co-founder and former CEO of DevCycle,...

BleachBit 5.1.0 Beta adds cookie manager and expert mode

BleachBit 5.1.0 beta is out with a new cookie manager, expert mode to prevent accidental data loss, new browser support, and fixes for Linux users. You’re...

An FBI ‘Asset’ Helped Run a Dark Web Site That Sold Fentanyl-Laced Drugs for Years

A staffer of the Incognito dark web market was secretly controlled by the FBI—and still allegedly approved the sale of fentanyl-tainted pills, including those from a...

Want an easy way to manage Podman containers? Here it is.

You’ve heard of Docker Desktop, right? Of course you have. Docker Desktop is a user-friendly GUI app that simplifies managing Docker containers. With this point-and-click tool,...

Lawsuit: ChatGPT told student he was “meant for greatness”—then came psychosis

A Georgia college student named Darian DeCruise has sued OpenAI, alleging that a recently deprecated version of ChatGPT “convinced him that he was an oracle” and...

NASA chief classifies Starliner flight as “Type A” mishap, says agency made mistakes

NASA on Thursday announced it has formally classified the 2024 crewed flight of the Starliner spacecraft as a “Type A” mishap, an acknowledgement that the test...

The essential shift every ITOps leader must make to survive an unrelenting stream of incidents

High-profile IT incidents are becoming more frequent and more severe. A single hour of downtime for a revenue-generating service could cost large enterprises between $100,000 and...

AI agents are accelerating vulnerability discovery. Here’s how AppSec teams must adapt.

It has never been easier to quickly and at scale find security vulnerabilities. Linus’s Law, Eric Raymond’s famous dictum about open source software, states that “given...

Rubik’s WOWCube adds complexity, possibility by reinventing the puzzle cube

There’s something special about the gadget that “just works.” Technology can open opportunity for those devices but also complicate and weigh down products that have done...

Ubuntu 26.04 LTS Moving To OpenJDK 25 By Default

It’s not too surprising but the upcoming Ubuntu 26.04 Long Term Support release will be transitioning to OpenJDK 25 as its default Java version…

How your LLM is silently hallucinating company revenue

LLMs are accelerating work across engineering disciplines, from generating React components and building backend APIs to noodling with SQL. But we all know LLMs make mistakes,...

RP2040 Powers A MIDI-Controlled Soundboard

When you’re livestreaming, it can be tempting to fire off all kinds of wacky sound effects like you’re a morning radio DJ back in the heady...

How will OpenAI compete?

“Jakub and Mark set the research direction for the long run. Then after months of work, something incredible emerges and I get a researcher pinging me...

Meta’s VR metaverse is ditching VR

Horizon Central, the town square of Meta’s metaverse, already runs on the new Meta Horizon game engine. | Image: Horizon Central Meta, after laying off about...

Rising identity complexity: How CISOs can prevent it from becoming an attacker’s roadmap

Identity has always been the thread that stitches enterprise IT together, but the nature of that identity has changed dramatically. Twenty years ago, identity meant a...

Donald Trump Jr.’s Private DC Club Has Mysterious Ties to an Ex-Cop With a Controversial Past

The Executive Branch has a reported membership list that includes Trumpworld elites like David Sacks. A WIRED review of corporate filings reveals an under-the-radar player: a notorious...

Diablo II’s new Warlock is a great excuse to revisit a classic game

Diablo II is one of those storied classic PC games that’s pretty much always fun to come back to—so much so that some players have put...

Intel Vulkan Driver Lands One-Line Change That Can Bring Minor Performance Benefits

Merged today to Mesa 26.1 Git is a one-line change to the Intel “ANV” Vulkan driver that is showing to deliver some slight performance benefits or...

The 10 Best Shows to Stream Right Now (February 2026)

Fallout, Neighbors, and Monarch: Legacy of Monsters are just a few of the TV shows we’re swooning over for February.

‘Pew Pew’: The Chinese Companies Marketing Anti-Drone Weapons on TikTok

On TikTok, Chinese manufacturers are advertising signal-blocking weapons with the breezy cadence of consumer lifestyle advertising.

Inside the Rolling Layoffs at Jack Dorsey’s Block

Workers describe a deteriorating culture at Block, the company behind Square and Cash App, where layoffs continue and employees are expected to use AI tools daily.

Upgrade Your Computer Speakers With These Discounted Edifier M60s

These compact Edifier speakers may not be the fanciest, but they’ll blow your monitor’s built-in speakers out of the water.

Google’s Gemini 3.1 Pro is mostly great

Google on Thursday launched the latest version of its Gemini Pro model. While it’s not the best at every task, Gemini 3.1 Pro, which is officially...

After Search Party backlash, Ring is still avoiding the bigger questions

Siminoff acknowledged in an interview with The New York Times that including maps that showed mass surveillance in an ad was a mistake. | Screenshot from...

From chickens to humans, animals think “bouba” sounds round

Does “bouba” sound round to you? How about “maluma”? Neither are real words, but we’ve known for decades that people who hear them tend to associate...

Fixing a Destroyed XBox 360 Development Kit

As common as the Xbox 360 was, the development kits (XDKs) for these consoles are significantly less so. This makes it even more tragic when someone...

Code Metal Raises $125 Million to Rewrite the Defense Industry’s Code With AI

The Boston startup uses AI to translate and verify legacy software for defense contractors, arguing modernization can’t come at the cost of new bugs.

Perplexity’s Retreat From Ads Signals a Bigger Strategic Shift

The AI search startup once predicted advertising would be a massive business. Now it’s betting on a smaller, more valuable audience.

The Pulse #162: Even fewer middle managers and more flexible teams?

Note: after a two-week hiatus, The Pulse returns. The absence was due to organizing and hosting The Pragmatic Summit in San Francisco. You can access The...

Sony is closing the studio behind the Demon’s Souls and Shadow of the Colossus remakes

Sony is shutting down Bluepoint Games, the PlayStation studio behind well-received remakes of games like Shadow of the Colossus and Demon’s Souls, according to Bloomberg. The...