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There are reports of IT outages affecting major institutions in Australia and internationally.

The ABC is experiencing a major network outage, along with several other media outlets.

Crowd-sourced website Downdetector is listing outages for Foxtel, National Australia Bank and Bendigo Bank.

Follow our live blog as we bring you the latest updates.

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With the maturity of the EXT4 file-system it’s not too often seeing any huge feature additions for this commonly used Linux file-system but there’s still the occasional wild performance optimization to uncover… With Linux 6.11 the EXT4 file-system can see upwards of a 20% performance boost in some scenarios.

Ted Ts’o sent out the EXT4 updates today for Linux 6.11.

He explained in that pull request: "Many cleanups and bug fixes in ext4, especially for the fast commit feature.

Up to 20% faster for fast devices using async direct I/O thanks to JBD2 optimizations.

Indeed the patch from Huawei’s Zhang Yi to speed up jbd2_transaction_committed() shows off some great improvements:

It’s great continuing to see EXT4 uncover new performance optimizations.

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Energy think tank Ember found that major growth in wind and solar helped push global electricity production past this milestone in 2023.

Its authors say that this rapid growth has brought the world to a crucial turning point where fossil fuel generation starts to decline.

“You also have the invasion of Ukraine which increased the sense of urgency around transitioning to clean power and getting off relying on fossil fuels - not just coal but also gas, and particularly from Russia.

Plans were put in place to help individual member states reach renewable energy targets and deploy technologies at a national scale.

“Certainly you can’t ignore that there was some demand [based] impact on the decrease in use of fossil fuels, but also there was a significant role of wind and solar replacing it.”

Normally this would have meant that the clean energy capacity added around the world last year would have caused fossil fuel generation to drop by 1.1 per cent.

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Due to the ARM64 maintainer for the Linux kernel going on holiday, the ARM64 port updates have been submitted ahead of the opening of the Linux 6.11 merge window that will likely be on Monday or otherwise the following week depending upon if a 6.10-rc8 is warranted.

When it comes to the ARM64 (AArch64) changes for this next kernel version, there’s been a lot of work on virtual CPU hotplug handling so that it should now be properly working on ARM64 ACPI-enabled systems.

Another change with Linux 6.11 ARM64 is expanding the speculative SSBS workaround to more CPU cores.

Arm’s Speculative Store Bypass handling is now being extended for additional affected CPU cores of he A710, A720, X2, X3, X925, N2, and V2.

There are also ARM64 ACPI updates, GICv3 optimizations, perf updates for more hardware, and other smaller changes.

See this merge request for all the ARM64 feature patches slated for Linux 6.11.

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As spotted by SteamDB creator Pavel Djundik, some data in the document was viewable despite the black redaction boxes, including Valve’s headcount and gross pay across various parts of the company over 18 years, and even some data about its gross margins that we weren’t able to uncover fully.

The data breaks Valve employees into four different groups: “Admin,” “Games,” “Steam,” and, starting in 2011, “Hardware.”

If you want to sift through the numbers yourself, I’ve included a full table of the data, sorted by year and category, at the end of this story.

In November 2023, Valve’s Pierre-Loup Griffais told The Verge that he thinks “we’re firmly in the camp of being a full fledged hardware company by now.”

The small number of staff across the board seemingly explains why Valve’s product list is so limited despite its immense business as basically the de facto PC gaming platform.

While we haven’t seen any leaked profit numbers from this new headcount and payroll data, the figures give a more detailed picture of how much Valve is spending on its staff — which, given the massive popularity of Steam, is probably still just a fraction of the money the company is pulling in.

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The Register reports that security researchers at Pen Test Partners recently got access to a British Airways 747, after the airline decided to retire its fleet following a plummet in travel during the coronavirus pandemic.

The team was able to inspect the full avionics bay beneath the passenger deck, with its data center-like racks of modular black boxes that perform different functions for the plane.

Pen Test Partners discovered a 3.5-inch floppy disk drive in the cockpit, which is used to load important navigation databases.

A cybersecurity professor discovered a buffer overflow exploit onboard a British Airways flight last year.

It’s more of a traditional network like you’d find inside an office building, and some of the latest airliners even receive software updates over the air.

Boeing only just resumed production of its troubled 737 Max airplane after software glitches led to two fatal crashes that killed a total of 346 passengers and crew members.

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A change proposal has been filed by Red Hat engineer Miro Hrončok for retiring Python 2.7 within Fedora 41 and to drop packages still depending upon Python 2.

We do not wish to simply orphan the package, as we are afraid it would not receive proper care if taken by somebody else.

If there are potential maintainers interested in maintaining Python 2 in Fedora beyond Fedora 41, they can talk to us and demonstrate their ability and will to take care of Python 2 by joining the maintenance early.

Users who need to run their application in Python 2 should do so on a platform that offers support for it.

Developers who still need to test their software on Python 2 can use containers with older Fedora releases or unsupported CentOS/RHEL versions."

The F41 change proposal still needs the approval of the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo), but it will presumably proceed – well, assuming GIMP 3.0 finally releases this summer so as to not block the Python 2.7 removal.

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The DRM Panic handler in Linux 6.10 that is used for presenting a visual error message in case of kernel panics and similar when CONFIG_VT is disabled continues seeing new features.

With Linux 6.11, the DRM Panic display can now handle monochrome logos.

With the code in Linux 6.10 when DRM Panic is triggered, an ASCII art version of Linux’s mascot, Tux the penguin, is rendered as part of the display.

If ASCII art on error messages doesn’t satisfy your tastes in 2024+, the DRM Panic code will be able to support a monochrome graphical logo that leverages the Linux kernel’s boot-up logo support.

This monochrome logo support in the DRM Panic handler was sent out as part of this week’s drm-misc-next pull request ahead of the Linux 6.11 merge window in July.

This week’s drm-misc-next material also includes TTM memory management improvements, various fixes to the smaller Direct Rendering Manager drivers, and also the previously talked about monochrome TV support for the Raspberry Pi.

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We’re told this “irregularity” was spotted inside TeamViewer’s corporate IT environment on Wednesday, and that the biz immediately called in reinforcements in the form of cyber security investigators, implemented “necessary remediation measures,” and activated its incident response team and processes, according to an announcement on Thursday.

The words “TeamViewer” and “security breach” will make a lot of people’s blood run cold given how pervasively it is used – in homes, organizations, and businesses – so a compromise of the platform could be devastating.

TeamViewer spokesperson Maria Gordienko declined to answer The Register’s specific questions about the incident – including whether it was ransomware or worse – citing the ongoing investigation.

It appears top infosec house NCC Group has already tipped off its customers to the security snafu, and blamed an unnamed advanced persistent threat (APT) team.

H-ISAC noted in its industry bulletin that it had been warned by a friendly intel partner that APT29 – aka Russian intelligence’s Cozy Bear crew – has been “actively exploiting Teamviewer.”

Which could mean the Russians are separately exploiting weaknesses within TeamViewer to get into people’s networks, or taking advantage of poor customer-side security to get in via the remote-desktop software.

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The researchers’ approach involves two main innovations: first, they created a custom LLM and constrained it to use only ternary values (-1, 0, 1) instead of traditional floating-point numbers, which allows for simpler computations.

Second, the researchers redesigned the computationally expensive self-attention mechanism in traditional language models with a simpler, more efficient unit (that they called a MatMul-free Linear Gated Recurrent Unit—or MLGRU) that processes words sequentially using basic arithmetic operations instead of matrix multiplications.

These changes, combined with a custom hardware implementation to accelerate ternary operations through the aforementioned FPGA chip, allowed the researchers to achieve what they claim is performance comparable to state-of-the-art models while reducing energy use.

Researchers claim the MatMul-free LM achieved competitive performance against the Llama 2 baseline on several benchmark tasks, including answering questions, commonsense reasoning, and physical understanding.

The researchers project that their approach could theoretically intersect with and surpass the performance of standard LLMs at scales around 10²³ FLOPS, which is roughly equivalent to the training compute required for models like Meta’s Llama-3 8B or Llama-2 70B.

The article was updated on June 26, 2024 at 9:20 AM to remove an inaccurate power estimate related to running a LLM locally on a RTX 3060 created by the author.

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Last week the GNOME 47 development code saw Wayland DRM lease protocol support for enhancing VR headset handling and separately was also accent color support for GNOME Shell.

Adding to the recent slew of changes landing for GNOME 47, the GNOME Shell and Mutter code can now be successfully compiled – optionally – without any X11 support or requiring any X11 build dependencies.

For those wanting to build a Wayland-only Linux desktop experience without carrying any aging X11 baggage, GNOME 47 will be able to optionally offer Wayland-only support without carrying X11/X.Org support.

That landed today along with this GNOME Shell merge request for being able to disable X11 support too.

In turn this closes a two year old issue tracker over making X11 dependencies optional on GNOME.

GNOME 47 is shaping up to be a very exciting desktop update due for release in September and will be found with the likes of Fedora 41 and Ubuntu 24.10.

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Chinese chip shop Loongson, which has built modest CPUs based on its own MIPS-like architecture, is on the march towards enterprise workloads.

The silicon slinger yesterday announced that 53 software developers have created 105 products compatible with its instruction set architecture (ISA).

Loongson’s list includes a server virtualization platform, a hyperconverged stack, and a cloud management product from the Chinese hardware maker.

Loongson deliberately eschews compatabiilty with either x86 or Arm in favour tech inspired by the permissively-licensed MIPS and RISC-V ISAs.

It’s been a good couple of weeks for the Chinese chip designer, which has also announced adoption of its silicon by a vendor of network-attached storage devices.

As is the news from last week that “nearly one thousand” desktops running on Loongson CPUs have found a home in one district of the city of Fuzhou.

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The latest feature headed to the Google graveyard is continuous scrolling on search results, according to a report from Search Engine Land.

The user experience, which mirrored the endless scrolling behavior of social media feeds, was originally introduced for search results on mobile devices in October of 2021 and then brought over to desktop search results in late 2022.

A Google spokesperson reportedly told Search Engine Land that continuous scroll is being removed today from desktop search results, while the feature will be removed from mobile results “in the coming months.”

In its place on desktop will be Google’s classic pagination bar, allowing users to jump to a specific page of search results or simply click “Next” to see the next page.

On mobile, a “More results” button will be shown at the bottom of a search to load the next page.

Google told Search Engine Land that “this change is to allow the search company to serve the search results faster on more searches, instead of automatically loading results that users haven’t explicitly requested.”

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Threads will now let people like and see replies to their Threads posts that appear on other federated social media platforms, the company announced on Tuesday.

Previously, if you made a post on Threads that was syndicated to another platform like Mastodon, you wouldn’t be able to see responses to that post while still inside Threads.

That meant you’d have to bounce back and forth between the platforms to stay up-to-date on replies.

Thanks to this upgrade, you’ll probably do less of that, but in a screenshot, Meta notes that you can’t reply to replies “yet,” so it sounds like that feature will arrive in the future.

Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg also revealed that Threads’ fediverse integration will be available starting today in more than 100 countries, a significant expansion from its initial availability in the US, Canada, and Japan.

Meta has been vocal about its plans to integrate with the decentralized social networking protocol ActivityPub since launching Threads nearly a year ago, with first testing starting in December.

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As of this past week the change is now in place for Ubuntu 24.10 daily users that will find Wayland-by-default when using the official NVIDIA Linux graphics driver.

The proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver has been the hold-out on Ubuntu in sticking to the GNOME X.Org session out-of-the-box rather than Wayland as has been the default for the past several releases when using other GPUs/drivers.

But for Ubuntu 24.10, the plan is to cross that threshold for NVIDIA now that their official driver has much better Wayland support and has matured into great shape.

Particularly with the upcoming NVIDIA R555 driver reaching stable very soon, the Wayland support is in great shape with features like explicit sync ready to use.

Canonical’s Daniel van Vugt of the Ubuntu desktop team made the change last week for the GDM session manager to drop their NVIDIA-prefers-X11 patches so that NVIDIA Linux users will find Wayland being used by default.

Updated Revert-data-Disable-GDM-on-hybrid-graphics-laptops-with-v.patch to ensure Nvidia 5xx drivers always get Wayland as the default unless there’s a stronger reason why it won’t work (like modeset has been disabled on the kernel command line).

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The Linux kernel community has sadly lost one of its longtime, prolific contributors to the wireless (WiFi) drivers.

His wife shared the news of Larry Finger’s passing this weekend on the linux-wireless mailing list in a brief statement.

Larry Finger began contributing originally to the Broadcom BCM43XX driver back in the day and over the years has contributed a lot to Linux WiFi drivers.

His more recent contributions had been around the RTW88, RTW89, R8188EU, R8712, RTLWIFI, B43 and other Linux networking drivers.

In part to his contributions, the Linux wireless hardware support has come a long way over the past two decades…

Longtime Linux users will certainly remember the days of struggling with WiFi support, resorting to NDISWrapper for using Windows WiFi drivers on Linux, and other headaches compared to today’s largely trouble-free wireless hardware support.

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The teen’s phone was flooded with calls and texts telling her that someone had shared fake nude images of her on Snapchat and other social media platforms.

Berry, now 15, is calling on lawmakers to write criminal penalties into law for perpetrators to protect future victims of deepfake images.

“This kid who is not getting any kind of real consequence other than a little bit of probation, and then when he’s 18, his record will be expunged, and he’ll go on with life, and no one will ever really know what happened,” McAdams told CNN.

The mom and daughter say legislation is essential to protecting future victims, and could have meant more serious consequences for the classmate who shared the deep-fakes.

“If [this law] had been in place at that point, those pictures would have been taken down within 48 hours, and he could be looking at three years in jail…so he would get a punishment for what he actually did,” McAdams told CNN.

“It’s still so scary as these images are off Snapchat, but that does not mean that they are not on students’ phones, and every day I’ve had to live with the fear of these photos getting brought up resurfacing,” Berry said.

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To restore access, IA is now appealing, hoping to reverse the prior court’s decision by convincing the US Court of Appeals in the Second Circuit that IA’s controlled digital lending of its physical books should be considered fair use under copyright law.

An April court filing shows that IA intends to argue that the publishers have no evidence that the e-book market has been harmed by the open library’s lending, and copyright law is better served by allowing IA’s lending than by preventing it.

“This is a fight for the preservation of all libraries and the fundamental right to access information, a cornerstone of any democratic society,” Freeland wrote.

"We believe in the right of authors to benefit from their work; and we believe that libraries must be permitted to fulfill their mission of providing access to knowledge, regardless of whether it takes physical or digital form.

Among the “far-reaching implications” of the takedowns, IA fans counted the negative educational impact of academics, students, and educators—"particularly in underserved communities where access is limited—who were suddenly cut off from “research materials and literature that support their learning and academic growth.”

“Your removal of these books impedes academic progress and innovation, as well as imperiling the preservation of our cultural and historical knowledge,” the letter said.

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With users being bitten in recent days by this behavior when they were just expecting tmp files to be removed, systemd 256.1 is now available and does have a change to avoid inadvertently deleting your all-important home directory.

Thus those trying to do system maintenance without reading the man page could find their /home data deleted.

Initially the bug report was shot down by systemd developer Luca Boccassi of Microsoft with: So an option that is literally documented as saying “all files and directories created by a tmpfiles.d/ entry will be deleted”, that you knew nothing about, sounded like a “good idea”?

Maybe don’t just run random commands that you know nothing about, while ignoring what the documentation tells you?

Just a thought eh Ultimately though after much discussion the past few days, systemd-tmpfiles behavior is now improved upon.

Merged yesterday was this patch that now makes systemd-tmpfiles accept a configuration file when running purge.

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Two new change proposals have been filed for enhancing the KDE offerings with this autumn’s Fedora 41 release.

First, there is a proposal to offer a new Fedora Spin using KDE Plasma Mobile.

Similarly, a Fedora Kinoite Mobile Bootable Container image is also proposed as part of that.

Some find success as well using KDE Plasma Mobile on 2-in-1 laptop devices too.

Those are the newest Fedora 41 change proposals for that feature release due out in October.

These changes still need to be approved by the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo) in the coming weeks.

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