LinuxWebLog.com

Debian Libre Live Images Released for Software Freedom Lovers  9to5Linux

Microsoft, Nvidia and OpenAI-rival Anthropic announced strategic partnerships today that will scale Claude on Microsoft Azure and bring up to $15 billion in new investment to the AI startup. Anthropic committed to purchase $30 billion of Azure compute capacity and contract additional capacity up to one gigawatt. Nvidia and Microsoft -- the largest investor in OpenAI -- committed to invest up to $10 billion and up to $5 billion respectively in Anthropic.

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Here are the winners of Google Play’s Best of 2025 awards in Asia Pacific.Here are the winners of Google Play’s Best of 2025 awards in Asia Pacific.

We’re announcing Google Play’s Best of 2025 awards, celebrating the best apps, games and books of the year.We’re announcing Google Play’s Best of 2025 awards, celebrating the best apps, games and books of the year.

Researchers at the University of Vienna extracted phone numbers for 3.5 billion WhatsApp users by systematically checking every possible number through the messaging service's contact discovery feature. The technique yielded profile photos for 57% of those accounts and profile text for 29 percent. The researchers checked roughly 100 million numbers per hour using WhatsApp's browser-based app. The team warned Meta in April and deleted their data. The company implemented stricter rate-limiting by October to prevent such mass enumeration. Meta called the exposed information "basic publicly available information" and said it found no evidence of malicious exploitation. The vulnerability had been identified before. In 2017, Dutch researcher Loran Kloeze published a blog post detailing the same enumeration technique. Meta responded then that WhatsApp's privacy settings were functioning as designed and denied him a bug bounty reward. The researchers collected 137 million U.S. phone numbers. In India, they found nearly 750 million numbers. They also discovered 2.3 million Chinese numbers and 1.6 million Myanmar numbers, despite WhatsApp being banned in both countries. The researchers analyzed the cryptographic keys and found some accounts used duplicate keys. They speculate this resulted from unauthorized WhatsApp clients rather than a platform flaw.

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Qualcomm Updates AI Accelerator Firmware To Fix Power / Performance Issue  Phoronix

Every company would be affected if the AI bubble were to burst, the head of Google's parent firm Alphabet has told the BBC. From the report: Speaking exclusively to BBC News, Sundar Pichai said while the growth of artificial intelligence investment had been an "extraordinary moment", there was some "irrationality" in the current AI boom. It comes amid fears in Silicon Valley and beyond of a bubble as the value of AI tech companies has soared in recent months and companies spend big on the burgeoning industry. Asked whether Google would be immune to the impact of the AI bubble bursting, Mr Pichai said the tech giant could weather that potential storm, but also issued a warning. "I think no company is going to be immune, including us," he said. In a wide-ranging exclusive interview at Google's California headquarters, he also addressed energy needs, slowing down climate targets, UK investment, the accuracy of his AI models, and the effect of the AI revolution on jobs.

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Linus Torvalds: Vibe coding is fine, but not for production  theregister.com

Modnyco is a UK-based embedded solutions partner, specialising in electronics, firmware, and embedded Linux development. We design PCBs, develop firmware, integrate edge AI, and prepare products for certification.  New Electronics

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Startup Valar Atomics said on Monday that it achieved criticality -- an essential nuclear milestone -- with the help of one of the country's top nuclear laboratories. The El Segundo, California-based startup, which last week announced it had secured a $130 million funding round with backing from Palmer Luckey and Palantir CTO Shyam Sankar, claims that it is the first nuclear startup to create a critical fission reaction. It's also, more specifically, the first company in a special Department of Energy pilot program aiming to get at least three startups to criticality by July 4 of next year to announce it had achieved this reaction. The pilot program, which was formed following an executive order President Donald Trump signed in May, has upended US regulation of nuclear startups, allowing companies to reach new milestones like criticality at a rapid pace. There's a difference between the type of criticality Valar reached this week -- what's known as cold criticality or zero-power criticality -- and what's needed to actually create nuclear power. Nuclear reactors use heat to create power, but in cold criticality, which is used to test a reactor's design and physics, the reaction isn't strong enough to create enough heat to make power. The reactor that reached criticality this week is not actually Valar's own model, but rather a blend of the startup's fuel and technology with key structural components provided by the Los Alamos National Laboratory, one of the DOE's research and development laboratories. The combination reactor builds off a separate fuel test performed last year at the laboratory, using fuel similar to what Valar's reactor will use. "Zero power criticality is a reactor's first heartbeat, proof the physics holds," Valar founder Isaiah Taylor said in a statement. "This moment marks the dawn of a new era in American nuclear engineering, one defined by speed, scale, and private-sector execution with closer federal partnership."

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Systemd 259 RC1: Linux’s Backbone Evolves with Musl Support and Privilege Overhaul  WebProNews

An outage at Cloudflare that began moments ago has knocked many popular websites, including ChatGPT and X, according to user reports. Cloudflare says on its website: "Cloudflare is aware of, and investigating an issue which potentially impacts multiple customers. Further detail will be provided as more information becomes available." Update: In a statement after the outage was resolved, Cloudflare CTO said: Earlier today we failed our customers and the broader Internet when a problem in Cloudflare network impacted large amounts of traffic that rely on us. The sites, businesses, and organizations that rely on Cloudflare depend on us being available and I apologize for the impact that we caused. Transparency about what happened matters, and we plan to share a breakdown with more details in a few hours. In short, a latent bug in a service underpinning our bot mitigation capability started to crash after a routine configuration change we made. That cascaded into a broad degradation to our network and other services. This was not an attack. That issue, impact it caused, and time to resolution is unacceptable. Work is already underway to make sure it does not happen again, but I know it caused real pain today. The trust our customers place in us is what we value the most and we are going to do what it takes to earn that back.

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The big new RPG Where Winds Meet release works well on Linux  GamingOnLinux

SUSE's Agama 18 OS Installer Released - i586 Support Dropped  Phoronix

MLPerf Client 1.5 Introduces Experimental Linux Support  Phoronix

schwit1 shares a report from the New York Times: Pete Kayll, a musclebound veteran of Britain's Royal Marines, had an unusual instruction for the Bitcoin investors gathered in Switzerland in late October. "Just bite your way out," he told them. It was the final day of a weekend-long cryptocurrency convention on the shore of Lake Lugano, near the Italian border. A small group of investors had lined up in a conference room to have their hands bound with plastic zipties. Now they were learning how to get them off. "Your teeth will get through anything," Mr. Kayll advised. "But it will bloody well hurt." Most people don't go to an international crypto conference expecting to learn how to gnaw through plastic. But after hours of panels devoted to topics like Bitcoin-collateralized loans, these investors were looking for something more practical. They wanted to know what to do if they were grabbed on the street and thrown into the back of a van. Already paranoid about scams, hacks and market turmoil, wealthy crypto investors have lately become terrified about a much graver threat: torture and kidnapping. These threats are known as "wrench attacks," which is a reference to a popular XKCD cartoon where a thief skips the hacking and just uses a wrench to force out the password. According to the NYT, the best way to stay protected is staying low-profile, minimizing visible signs of wealth, using basic physical security tools, and preparing for self-defense. The report specifically recommends avoiding flashy displays of wealth like luxury watches and cars, watching for honey-traps, using hotel door stoppers, practicing escape techniques such as breaking zip-ties, hiring discreet bodyguards, and relying on panic-button apps like Glok to summon help quickly.

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Firefox 145: A Major Release with 32-Bit Linux Support Dropped  Linux Journal

How to View and Monitor Log Files in Linux  TechRepublic

Warren Buffett will step down as CEO of Berkshire Hathaway at the end of 2025, which also means he will no longer write the Annual Shareholder Letter and take questions at the Annual Shareholder’s Meeting which have become so famous. Instead, he is transitioning to an annual “Thanksgiving Letter”, of which the first one just came out. I am happy that he has found another way to communicate with Berkshire Shareholders.

As always, I recommend reading it directly as his writing style is unique and also (relatively) concise. Mostly, the highlights below are a personal exercise to process and help internalize the wisdom shared.

In the first part of the letter, he reminisces about his long life and shows gratitude for the many lucky events that broke his way, starting with an emergency appendectomy as a child.

As he has reminded us in past letters, nearly everyone reading his writing has had multiple lucky breaks already. Buffett notes that he was “born in 1930 healthy, reasonably intelligent, white, male and in America.” Think about each of those individually. We have no control over them. Imagine being born with an incurable genetic disease or in a struggling country constantly ravaged by war.

In the second part, he talks about accelerating his charitable giving plans so that his children can put it to good use. I always find it interesting how Buffett hasn’t been more active at directing his enormous donations towards specific purposes, even though it’s also a way of “investing” his money. I wonder if it is because it’s so hard to measure the true impact of giving. There is no clear, numerical scorecard like share price or annualized return.

In the third part, he addresses the future of Berkshire Hathaway. From what I can see, Buffett has done a careful and thorough job of making sure his life’s “painting” is in good hands. Greg Abel looks to have all the right talents and skills to be the new boss. Ajit Jain and the rest look to be good fits and not in search of fame or power.

As a company, Berkshire remains designed to provide a very high chance of solid returns, a low chance of amazingly-high returns, and the lowest-possible chance of disaster (if BRK falls, nothing else is standing either). I plan to hold my Berkshire shares through this transition, and I hope the culture remains.

Finally, he concludes with some timeless life advice: don’t dwell on your mistakes, keep trying to improve yourself, be kind to others.

Linux Foundation calls for cryptographic agility ahead of the quantum era  The Asian Banker