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While there’s been a clear drop, the Linux user share on Steam for June 2024 still remains about 2% showing the clear upwards trend overall.

Interestingly, this is another month where Simplified Chinese as a language on Steam saw a jump, and quite often we see Linux drop when this happens.

According to Valve the latest operating system details are:

For Linux, the Steam Deck with SteamOS continues propping up the numbers with it being the most popular by far.

Freedesktop SDK 23.08 (Flatpak runtime) 64 bit 6.71% +0.66%

Ubuntu Core 22 64 bit (Steam Snap) 2.97% +0.35%

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The billionaire Barry Diller is exploring a bid to take control of Paramount, the parent company of CBS, MTV and Nickelodeon, according to four people with knowledge of the matter.

Mr. Diller’s digital-media conglomerate, IAC, has signed nondisclosure agreements with National Amusements, Paramount’s controlling shareholder, the people said.

Nondisclosure agreements are a key step in deal making, allowing both sides to exchange confidential information.

Mr. Diller’s interest in Paramount is the latest twist in one of the most complex — and dramatic — efforts to sell a media company in several years.

Paramount reached the brink of a deal in recent months with Skydance, a Hollywood studio, before talks abruptly fell apart.

After Mr. Redstone outbid him for the company, Mr. Diller set his sights on continuing to build his new media empire, striking a series of audacious deals to expand IAC.

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According to a statement from the company, the rocket was not sufficiently clamped down and blasted off from the test stand “due to a structural failure.”

Video of the accidental ascent showed the rocket rising several hundred meters into the sky before it crashed explosively into a mountain 1.5 km away from the test site.

The statement from Space Pioneer sought to downplay the incident, saying it had implemented safety measures before the test, and there were no casualties as a result of the accident.

Located in the Henan province in eastern China, alongside the Yellow River, Gongyi has a population of about 800,000 people.

Typically, during a static fire test, the mass of propellant on board a vehicle combined with strong clamps hold a rocket down.

This was a notable achievement, but the rocket’s engines were provided by a Chinese state-operated firm, the Academy of Aerospace Liquid Propulsion Technology, rather than the private company.

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A couple of months ago, I was sitting in the audience at a tech conference in San Fransisco watching Bloomberg’s Emily Chang interview Reid Hoffman.

Not only had Microsoft (where Hoffman is a board member) hired most of Inflection’s employees — it also licensed the startup’s technology in a way that seemed designed to make its investors whole.

Last Friday, Amazon announced that it is hiring most of the team behind Adept, another would-be OpenAI competitor that raised about $400 million from top-tier investors to build, in the words of CEO David Luan, “a new type of giant model that turns natural language into actions on your machine.”

In an internal memo published by GeekWire’s Taylor Soper, SVP Rohit Prasad said that, like Microsoft with Inflection, Amazon will also be licensing Adept’s technology to “accelerate our roadmap for building digital agents that can automate software workflows.”

Adept’s corporate blog post about the news suggests it was running out of money: “Continuing with Adept’s initial plan of building both useful general intelligence and an enterprise agent product would’ve required spending significant attention on fundraising for our foundation models, rather than bringing to life our agent vision.” Recent reports say the company has been looking to sell itself.

Reid Hoffman, meanwhile, should probably be congratulated for more than just an accurate prediction about the future of these deals — one of Adept’s earliest investors was none other than his venture capital firm, Greylock.

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Hackers could have added malicious code compromising the security of millions or billions of people who installed them, researchers said Monday.

The vulnerabilities, which were fixed last October, resided in a “trunk” server used to manage CocoaPods, a repository for open source Swift and Objective-C projects that roughly 3 million macOS and iOS apps depend on.

“Injecting code into these applications could enable attackers to access this information for almost any malicious purpose imaginable—ransomware, fraud, blackmail, corporate espionage… In the process, it could expose companies to major legal liabilities and reputational risk.”

The three vulnerabilities EVA discovered stem from an insecure verification email mechanism used to authenticate developers of individual pods.

This vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-38367, resided in the session_controller class of the trunk server source code, which handles the session validation URL.

The trunk server relies on RFC822 formalized in 1982 to verify the uniqueness of registered developer email addresses and check if they follow the correct format.

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Australia’s Federal Police (AFP) has charged a man with running a fake Wi-Fi networks on at least one commercial flight and using it to harvest fliers’ credentials for email and social media services.

The man was investigated after an airline “reported concerns about a suspicious Wi-Fi network identified by its employees during a domestic flight.”

The AFP subsequently arrested a man who was found with “a portable wireless access device, a laptop and a mobile phone” in his hand luggage.

It’s alleged the accused’s collection of kit was used to create Wi-Fi hotspots with SSIDs confusingly similar to those airlines operate for in-flight access to the internet or streamed entertainment.

Airport Wi-Fi was also targeted, and the AFP also found evidence of similar activities “at locations linked to the man’s previous employment.”

AFP Western Command Cybercrime detective inspector Andrea Coleman pointed out that free Wi-Fi services should not require logging in through an email or social media account.

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The European Commission writes in a preliminary ruling that the “pay or consent” advertising model that launched last year for Facebook and Instagram users runs afoul of Article 5(2) of the DMA by not giving users a third option that uses less data for ad targeting but is still free to use.

Regulators found in their investigation that Meta gives users a “binary choice” that forces them to either choose to pay a monthly subscription fee to get the ad-free version of Facebook and Instagram or consent to the ad-supported version.

Where Meta runs afoul of its rules, it says, is by not letting users opt for a free version that “uses less of their personal data but is otherwise equivalent to the ‘personalised ads’ based service” and by not allowing them to “exercise their right to freely consent to the combination of their personal data.”

“Our preliminary view is that Meta’s advertising model fails to comply with the Digital Markets Act,” wrote Margrethe Vestager, who leads the region’s competition policy.

“Subscription for no ads follows the direction of the highest court in Europe and complies with the DMA,” Meta spokesperson Matthew Pollard told The Verge in an email.

The commission asserted last week that Apple’s App Store “steering” policies don’t allow sufficient competition.

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Bazzite is one of the best options to get Linux on various gaming handhelds, and the 3.5.0 release is out now that has improvements pretty much everywhere with expanded hardware support.

Games that do not support controller disconnection (e.g., Super Meat Boy) will no longer break after suspend!

Games that do not support controller disconnection (e.g., Super Meat Boy) will no longer break after suspend!

Handheld Daemon will now send fake accelerometer values to the emulated controller, ensuring games cant calibrate without moving the gyro incorrectly.

Handheld Daemon will now send fake accelerometer values to the emulated controller, ensuring games cant calibrate without moving the gyro incorrectly.

There’s also a new boot video and suspend animation, Bazzite updates are smaller in size, bluetooth controller fixes, Wallpaper Engine works again,

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The $3 trillion company intends to mass-produce revamped earbuds with built-in infrared cameras by 2026, according to a new report from analyst and longtime Apple insider Ming-Chi Kuo.

The cameras could help Apple shore up its current and future augmented-reality headsets with enhanced spatial audio features, the analyst wrote.

Citing a supply-chain survey, Kuo indicated that pairing these enhanced buds with Vision Pro goggles could make Apple’s spatial-computing experience more lifelike.

For folks not interested in dropping thousands on an Apple headset, the IR cameras could offer other perks, including bringing “in-air” gestures to AirPods, per Kuo.

The analyst’s report follows an earlier story from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, which noted that Apple was looking into the idea of camera-powered AirPods.

After turning its minimalistic white buds into status symbol in the iPod era, Apple has gradually made them smarter over the years, adding features such as wireless connectivity, noise cancellation, head tracking, touch controls and voice commands.

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If you’re disappointed that the only AI model that will integrate with Apple devices so far will be ChatGPT, it sounds like you won’t have to wait long for that to change.

Apple will announce “at least” one other deal — to add Google Gemini, too — this fall, according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman in his Power On newsletter today.

Anthropic has been mixed up in these rumors as well, and Gurman also suggests Apple could announce a deal with that company at some point, if not this fall.

Beyond chatbot integration lies Apple Intelligence, which is only supposed to emerge, initially, in beta form this fall.

Apple reportedly wants to make AI an avenue for direct profits, not just as a set of features aimed at moving hardware products.

As part of that, Gurman suggests that the company “could eventually” roll out subscription-only Apple Intelligence features.

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Advances in artificial intelligence are leading to medical breakthroughs once thought impossible, including devices that can actually read minds and alter our brains.

Pauzaskie says our brain waves are like encrypted signals and, using artificial intelligence, researchers have identified frequencies for specific words to turn thought to text with 40% accuracy, “Which, give it a few years, we’re probably talking 80-90%.”

Researchers are now working to reverse the conditions by using electrical stimulation to alter the frequencies or regions of the brain where they originate.

But while medical research facilities are subject to privacy laws, private companies - that are amassing large caches of brain data - are not.

The vast majority of them also don’t disclose where the data is stored, how long they keep it, who has access to it, and what happens if there’s a security breach…

With companies and countries racing to access, analyze, and alter our brains, Pauzauskie suggests, privacy protections should be a no-brainer, "It’s everything that we are.

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A prime mover behind the Shirion Collective, a conspiracy-minded, pro-Israel disinformation network seeking to shape public opinion about the Gaza conflict in the US, Australia and the UK, is a tech entrepreneur named Daniel Linden living in Florida who co-wrote a guidebook for OnlyFans users, the Guardian can reveal.

Heidi Beirich, co-founder and chief strategy officer at the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, said of Linden’s Shirion campaigning that his apparent “grifting” is common among extremists, “but his ideology seems very confused”.

The Shirion Collective is an online operation that since late 2023 has appeared on platforms including X, Telegram and GoFundMe to coordinate the spread of pro-Israel and anti-Palestinian propaganda, and the harassment of pro-Palestinian protesters in the west.

The move attracted the attention of critics including Representative Ilhan Omar, who spoke out in Congress against Shirion’s screening of the footage to the University of California, Los Angeles protest encampment.

And since late last year, it has claimed to have developed an AI technology, Project Maccabee, whose goal it has described as “Hitting and creating AGI for the PROTECTION and survival of our people”, and “EXPOSING these putrid antisemites”.

On Amazon, Linden is credited as co-author of a Spanish-language ebook whose title translates as Master OnlyFans in just 7 days!, and whose blurb promises to show readers techniques to build “an account that will give you an average of 2,000 dollars a month”.

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As negotiations to end the long legal brawl between Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and the United States reached a critical point this spring, prosecutors presented his lawyers with a choice so madcap that a person involved thought it sounded like a line from a Monty Python movie.

In April, a lawyer with the Justice Department’s national security division broke the impasse with a sly workaround: How about an American courtroom that wasn’t actually inside mainland America?

By early 2024, leaders in Australia, including Kevin Rudd, the ambassador to the United States, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, began pressuring their American counterparts to reach a deal — not so much out of solidarity with Mr. Assange, or support for his actions, but because he had spent so much time in captivity.

But after a short period of internal discussions, senior officials rejected that approach, drafting a somewhat tougher counteroffer: Mr. Assange would plead to a single felony count, conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information, a more serious offense that encompassed his interactions with Ms. Manning.

Instead, his initial refusal to plead guilty to a felony was rooted in his reluctance to appear in an American courtroom, out of fear of being detained indefinitely or physically attacked in the United States, Ms. Robinson said in the TV interview.

Nick Vamos, the former head of extradition for the Crown Prosecution Service, which is responsible for bringing criminal cases in England and Wales, believes the ruling might have “triggered” an acceleration of the plea deal.

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You can transform it from a sleek work laptop to a decent gaming machine in two minutes flat, one which charges with the world’s first 180W USB-C power adapter.

The product gave me multiple Blue Screens of Death, glitched, felt flimsy in places, and ran hotter and louder than its performance would suggest.

I’m happy to say I’ve only seen the computer fail once during that entire month — an “It looks like Windows didn’t load correctly” error I haven’t been able to reproduce.

We even figured out my mystery issue where the excellent 2560 x 1600 screen would suddenly seem to wash out — that’s due to AMD’s Vari-Bright setting, which attempts to save battery when the integrated GPU is in command.

Despite this replacement coming with a slightly weaker 7840HS, I’ve measured 100.8°C at peak while playing a game — and as high as 92.5°C one day when I was just writing a story in a web browser.

After a month, I’ve decided I could live with the lid flex and the uneven surfaces created by Framework’s modular spacers and touchpad.

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In communications with a federal confidential informant, the pair allegedly planned to “coordinate to get multiple [substations] at the same time.” Clendaniel pleaded guilty to conspiring to damage or destroy electrical facilities in May of this year.

But in a court filing, the ACLU attorneys say Russell has “reason to believe” that the government “intercepted his communications” and subjected him to a warrantless “backdoor search” by querying the Section 702 databases.

And less than a month after that initial query, we disrupted that US person who, it turned out, had researched and identified critical infrastructure sites in the US and acquired the means to conduct an attack.” The defense’s motion to compel the federal government to provide notice of use of Section 702 surveillance of Russell includes both the Politico report and Wray’s speech as exhibits.

The ACLU’s response, filed this Monday, notes that the government “does not dispute that Mr. Russell was subject to warrantless surveillance under Section 702” but instead claims it has no legal obligation to turn over FISA notice in this instance.

Legislators’ attempts to rein in the controversial surveillance authority failed, and multiple amendments requiring the FBI to obtain warrants to search or access Americans’ communications under Section 702 were voted down.

“Especially as recently expanded and reauthorized by Congress, this spying authority could be further abused by a future administration against political opponents, protest movements, and civil society organizations, as well as racial and religious minorities, abortion providers, and LGBTQ people.”

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PipeWire 1.2 was christened today as the latest major feature update to this solution common to the modern Linux desktop for managing audio/video streams.

The just-released PipeWire 1.2 announcement sums up the major changes in this new version as: - Support for asynchronous processing has been implemented.

This adds one cycle of latency but it can avoid having some nodes blocking the processing graph.

Non realtime streams and filters now also use this asynchronous processing instead of their own slightly broken version.

One use case is the explicit sync support that requires 2 extra fds for the timelines.

• The log levels in the pulse server can be dynamically changed with a /core message.

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Players looking forward to Obsidian Entertainment’s next fantasy role-playing game (RPG) will experience some variety in the world that they explore.

Patel says that the “target” for the overall experience is comparable to Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire, a top-down RPG from Obsidian that was released back in 2018, though Patel adds that there’s a lot of “tonal variety” depending on the exact side quest or section of the main path players are on.

Giatta is a magic-wielding Ocean Human, Kai is a brawling Coastal Aumaua, Marius is a Mountain Dwarf ranger, and Yatzli is a spell-slinging Hearth Orlan.

I’ve been interested in Avowed since it was first announced all the way back in 2020 simply by dint of it being an Obsidian Entertainment RPG.

As the developers have shared more details, such as revealing the third-person mode, that interest has only steadily grown.

On that note, we do really need a release date for this — as well as Bethesda Softworks and MachineGames’ Indiana Jones and the Great Circle — soon.

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This year marks the 50th anniversary of Roman Polanski’s Chinatown (1974), the 1930s LA-set crime thriller that has one of Jack Nicholson’s most famous performances, as sardonic detective Jake Gittes.

It’s also nearly half a century since Nicholson played rebellious everyman RP McMurphy, who is incarcerated in a mental institution and engaged in a battle of wills with the sociopathic Nurse Ratched, in Milos Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975).

There was a time when the actor was spotted everywhere: in nightclubs, on chat shows, at basketball matches, at movie premieres.

It is 14 years since his last movie, the rapidly forgotten romcom How Do You Know.

One of his friends, music producer Lou Adler, told the WTF podcast that Nicholson now prefers to spend his time “sitting under a tree and reading a book”.

Nicholson can justifiably claim to be the greatest, most charismatic and versatile of all the stars of his era.

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“Since the rise of large language models like ChatGPT there have been lots of anecdotal reports about students submitting AI-generated work as their exam assignments and getting good grades.

His team created over 30 fake psychology student accounts and used them to submit ChatGPT-4-produced answers to examination questions.

The anecdotal reports were true—the AI use went largely undetected, and, on average, ChatGPT scored better than human students.

Scarfe’s team submitted AI-generated work in five undergraduate modules, covering classes needed during all three years of study for a bachelor’s degree in psychology.

Shorter submissions were prepared simply by copy-pasting the examination questions into ChatGPT-4 along with a prompt to keep the answer under 160 words.

Turnitin’s system, on the other hand, was advertised as detecting 97 percent of ChatGPT and GPT-3 authored writing in a lab with only one false positive in a hundred attempts.

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Microsoft AI boss Mustafa Suleyman incorrectly believes that the moment you publish anything on the open web, it becomes “freeware” that anyone can freely copy and use.

When CNBC’s Andrew Ross Sorkin asked him whether “AI companies have effectively stolen the world’s IP,” he said:

That certainly hasn’t kept many AI companies from claiming that training on copyrighted content is “fair use,” but most haven’t been as brazen as Suleyman when talking about it.

Speaking of brazen, he’s got a choice quote about the purpose of humanity shortly after his “fair use” remark:

Suleyman does seem to think there’s something to the robots.txt idea — that specifying which bots can’t scrape a particular website within a text file might keep people from taking its content.

Disclosure: Vox Media, The Verge’s parent company, has a technology and content deal with OpenAI.

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