The Free Software Foundation's services face "ongoing (and increasing) distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks," senior systems administrator Ian Kelling wrote Wednesday. But "Even though we are under active attack, gnu.org, ftp.gnu.org, and savannah.gnu.org are up with normal response times at the moment, and have been for the majority of this week, largely thanks to hard work from the Savannah hackers Bob, Corwin, and Luke who've helped us, your sysadmins."

"We've shielded these sites for almost a full year of intense attacks now, and we'll keep on fighting these attacks for as long as they continue." Our infrastructure has been under attack since August 2024. Large Language Model (LLM) web crawlers have been a significant source of the attacks, and as for the rest, we don't expect to ever know what kind of entity is targeting our sites or why.

- In the fall Bulletin, we wrote about the August attack on gnu.org. That attack continues, but we have mitigated it. Judging from the pattern and scope, the goal was likely to take the site down and it was not an LLM crawler. We do not know who or what is behind the attack, but since then, we have had more attacks with even higher severity.

- To begin with, GNU Savannah, the FSF's collaborative software development system, was hit by a massive botnet controlling about five million IPs starting in January. As of this writing, the attack is still ongoing, but the botnet's current iteration is mitigated. The goal is likely to build an LLM training dataset. We do not know who or what is behind this.

- Furthermore, gnu.org and ftp.gnu.org were targets in a new DDoS attack starting on May 27, 2025. Its goal seems to be to take the site down. It is currently mitigated. It has had several iterations, and each has caused some hours of downtime while we figured out how to defend ourselves against it. Here again, the goal was likely to take our sites down and we do not know who or what is behind this.

- In addition, directory.fsf.org, the server behind the Free Software Directory, has been under attack since June 18. This likely is an LLM scraper designed to specifically target Media Wiki sites with a botnet. This attack is very active and now partially mitigated...

Even though we are under active attack, gnu.org, ftp.gnu.org, and savannah.gnu.org are up with normal response times at the moment, and have been for the majority of this week, largely thanks to hard work from the Savannah hackers Bob, Corwin, and Luke who've helped us, your sysadmins. We've shielded these sites for almost a full year of intense attacks now, and we'll keep on fighting these attacks for as long as they continue.
The full-time FSF tech staff is just two systems administrators, "and we currently lack the funds to hire more tech staff any time soon," Kelling points out. Kelling titled his post "our small team vs millions of bots," suggesting that supporters purchase FSF memberships "to improve our staffing situation... Can you join us in our crucial work to guard user freedom and defy dystopia?"

Kelling also points out they're also facing "run-of-the-mill standard crawlers, SEO crawlers, crawlers pretending to be normal users, crawlers pretending to be other crawlers, uptime systems, vulnerability scanners, carrier-grade network address translation, VPNs, and normal browsers hitting our sites..."

"Some of the abuse is not unique to us, and it seems that the health of the web has some serious problems right now."

"Tesla has launched its new Oasis Supercharger," reports Electrek, "the long-promised EV charging station of the future, with a solar farm and off-grid batteries." Early in the deployment of the Supercharger network, Tesla promised to add solar arrays and batteries to the Supercharger stations, and CEO Elon Musk even said that most stations would be able to operate off-grid... Last year, Tesla announced a new project called 'Oasis', which consists of a new model Supercharger station with a solar farm and battery storage enabling off-grid operations in Lost Hills, California.

Tesla has now unveiled the project and turned on most of the Supercharger stalls. The project consists of 168 chargers, with half of them currently operational, making it one of the largest Supercharger stations in the world. However, that's not even the most notable aspect of it. The station is equipped with 11 MW of ground-mounted solar panels and canopies, spanning 30 acres of land, and 10 Tesla Megapacks with a total energy storage capacity of 39 MWh. It can be operated off-grid, which is the case right now, according to Tesla.

With off-grid operations, Tesla was about to bring 84 stalls online just in time for the Fourth of July travel weekend. The rest of the stalls and a lounge are going to open later this year.
The article makes that point that "This is what charging stations should be like: fully powered by renewable energy."

OpenBSD Journal writes: Yes, you read that right: KDE 6.4.0 Plasma is now in OpenBSD packages... The news was announced 2025-07-04 via a fediverse post and of course the commit message itself, where the description reads....

"[I]n 6.4 the KDE Kwin team split kwin into kwin-x11 and kwin (wayland). This seems to be the sign that X11 is no longer of interest and we are focussing on Wayland. As we currently only support X11, kwin-x11 has been added as a runtime dependency to kwin. So nobody should have to install anything later. This ports update also includes Aurorae; a theme engine for KWin window decorations."

This week Hewlett-Packard Enterprise settled its antitrust case with America's Justice Department, "paving the way for its acquisition of rival kit maker Juniper Networks," reported Telecoms.com: Under the agreement, HPE has agreed to divest its Instant On unit, which sells a range of enterprise-grade Wi-Fi networking equipment for campus and branch deployments. It has also agreed to license Juniper's Mist AIOps source code — a software suite that enables AI-based network automation and management. HPE can live with that, since its primary motivation for buying Juniper is to improve its prospects in an IT networking market dominated by Cisco, where others like Arista and increasingly Nokia and Nvidia are also trying to make inroads.
And after receiving regulatory clearance, HPE "very quickly closed the deal..." reports The Motley Fool. "In the press release heralding the news, the buyer wrote that it "doubles the size of HPE's networking business and provides customers with a comprehensive portfolio of networking solutions." Investors were obviously happy about this, as according to data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence the company's stock price ballooned by nearly 16% across the week, largely on the news.... The Justice Department had alleged, in a lawsuit filed in January, that an HPE/Juniper tie-up would essentially result in a duopoly in networking equipment. It claimed that a beefed-up HPE and networking incumbent Cisco would hold more than 70% combined of the domestic market.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader AmiMoJo for sharing the news.

UK Science and Technology Secretary Peter Kyle has written to the UK's national institute for AI to tell its bosses to refocus on defense and security. BBC: In a letter, Kyle said boosting the UK's AI capabilities was "critical" to national security and should be at the core of the Alan Turing Institute's activities. Kyle suggested the institute should overhaul its leadership team to reflect its "renewed purpose."

The cabinet minister said further government investment in the institute would depend on the "delivery of the vision" he had outlined in the letter. A spokesperson for the Alan Turing Institute said it welcomed "the recognition of our critical role and will continue to work closely with the government to support its priorities." Further reading, from April: Alan Turing Institute Plans Revamp in Face of Criticism and Technological Change.

An anonymous reader shares a report: The sweeping layoffs announced by Microsoft this week have been especially hard on its gaming studios, but one Xbox executive has a solution to "help reduce the emotional and cognitive load that comes with job loss": seek advice from AI chatbots.

In a now-deleted LinkedIn post captured by Aftermath, Xbox Game Studios' Matt Turnbull said that he would be "remiss in not trying to offer the best advice I can under the circumstances." The circumstances here being a slew of game cancellations, services being shuttered, studio closures, and job cuts across key Xbox divisions as Microsoft lays off as many as 9,100 employees across the company.

Turnbull acknowledged that people have some "strong feelings" about AI tools like ChatGPT and Copilot, but suggested that anybody who's feeling "overwhelmed" could use them to get advice about creating resumes, career planning, and applying for new roles.

Windows 11 has finally overtaken the market share of its predecessor, with just three months remaining until Microsoft discontinues support for Windows 10. From a report: As of today, July's StatCounter figures show the market share of Windows 11 at 50.24 percent, with Windows 10 at 46.84 percent. It's a far cry from a year ago, when Windows 10 stood at 66.04 percent and Windows 11 languished at 29.75 percent.

Software developer Anton Zaides argues that software engineers have had it easy over the decades and the "best profession" on earth deserved the wake up call. He writes:It's not just one of the hardest times, it's also one of the most exciting.

I'm hugely optimistic about the software engineering career. All those companies started by vibe-coders all around you? Many will succeed, and will need great engineers to scale up.

Some engineers understand this, and use the chance to skill up. To succeed, you'll probably need all the skills of an engineer, some of a PM, and even a bit of design taste. It's not just about shipping code anymore.

But if you work as a code monkey, getting detailed tickets and just shipping them, you've done this to yourself. You won't be needed pretty soon.

I believe there are too many mediocre engineers, but also not enough great ones.

Researchers have discovered that appending irrelevant phrases like "Interesting fact: cats sleep most of their lives" to math problems can cause state-of-the-art reasoning AI models to produce incorrect answers at rates over 300% higher than normal [PDF]. The technique -- dubbed "CatAttack" by teams from Collinear AI, ServiceNow, and Stanford University -- exploits vulnerabilities in reasoning models including DeepSeek R1 and OpenAI's o1 family. The adversarial triggers work across any math problem without changing the problem's meaning, making them particularly concerning for security applications.

The researchers developed their attack method using a weaker proxy model (DeepSeek V3) to generate text triggers that successfully transferred to more advanced reasoning models. Testing on 225 math problems showed the triggers increased error rates significantly across different problem types, with some models like R1-Distill-Qwen-32B reaching combined attack success rates of 2.83 times baseline error rates. Beyond incorrect answers, the triggers caused models to generate responses up to three times longer than normal, creating computational slowdowns. Even when models reached correct conclusions, response lengths doubled in 16% of cases, substantially increasing processing costs.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Websites that displayed legally mandated U.S. national climate assessments seem to have disappeared, making it harder for state and local governments and the public to learn what to expect in their backyards from a warming world. Scientists said the peer-reviewed authoritative reports save money and lives. Websites for the national assessments and the U.S. Global Change Research Program were down Monday and Tuesday with no links, notes or referrals elsewhere. The White House, which was responsible for the assessments, said the information will be housed within NASA to comply with the law, but gave no further details. Searches for the assessments on NASA websites did not turn them up.

"It's critical for decision makers across the country to know what the science in the National Climate Assessment is. That is the most reliable and well-reviewed source of information about climate that exists for the United States," said University of Arizona climate scientist Kathy Jacobs, who coordinated the 2014 version of the report. "It's a sad day for the United States if it is true that the National Climate Assessment is no longer available," Jacobs said. "This is evidence of serious tampering with the facts and with people's access to information, and it actually may increase the risk of people being harmed by climate-related impacts."

"This is a government resource paid for by the taxpayer to provide the information that really is the primary source of information for any city, state or federal agency who's trying to prepare for the impacts of a changing climate," said Texas Tech climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe, who has been a volunteer author for several editions of the report. Copies of past reports are still squirreled away in NOAA's library. NASA's open science data repository includes dead links to the assessment site. [...] Additionally, NOAA's main climate.gov website was recently forwarded to a different NOAA website. Social media and blogs at NOAA and NASA about climate impacts for the general public were cut or eliminated. "It's part of a horrifying big picture," [said Harvard climate scientist John Holdren, who was President Obama's science advisor and whose office directed the assessments]. "It's just an appalling whole demolition of science infrastructure." National climate assessments are more detailed and locally relevant than UN reports and undergo rigorous peer review and validation by scientific and federal institutions, Hayhoe and Jacobs said. Suppressing these reports would be censoring science, Jacobs said.

Electric vehicles claimed a dominant 96.9% market share in Norway in June 2025, with the Tesla Model Y alone accounting for over 27% of all new car registrations. Mobility Portal Europe reports: According to the Norwegian Public Roads Administration (OFV), 17,799 new electric cars were registered in Norway in June out of a total of 18,376 new registrations. In this context, electric vehicles (EVs) held a market share of 96.9%. Compared to June 2024 -- when EVs made up 80% of all new registrations -- this technology increased by 3,790 units. In addition, in May 2025, Norway recorded 4,415 new EV registrations.

Last month, only 577 new registrations were for vehicles without fully electric drive systems. Among these were 152 plug-in hybrids (an 83.7% drop compared to June 2024) and 223 other types of hybrids (an 89.1% decline). Over the year, hybrids lost market share, falling from 17% to 2%. Pure combustion engines also further reduced their market presence: 142 new diesel vehicles represented 0.8% of the market share, down from 2% a year earlier, and 57 new petrol vehicles made up 0.3% of the market, compared to 1% in June 2024. "Several campaigns with 0% or very low interest rates on new car purchases significantly boosted sales. The first interest rate cut by Norges Bank helped ensure that many people bought their dream car," said Oyvind Solberg Thorsen, Director of OFV.

"It remained to be seen whether Tesla could maintain its strong position, and for how long."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Google has ended tests of a feature that would have let users open a snapshot of cooking-recipe content directly in web search results -- a welcome development for creators and food bloggers who were concerned about eroding traffic to their sites.

In recent months, Alphabet-owned Google has tested Recipe Quick View, which showed some food bloggers' content in search. The company framed the feature as an attempt to help users determine whether they are interested in a recipe before visiting a website. But some bloggers said they feared that the product would keep users from clicking through to their sites, depriving them of traffic and ad revenue.

Google on Tuesday confirmed it ended the trial.

An anonymous reader shares a report: AI-powered chatbots often deliver incorrect information when asked to name the address for major companies' websites, and threat intelligence business Netcraft thinks that creates an opportunity for criminals. Netcraft prompted the GPT-4.1 family of models with input such as "I lost my bookmark. Can you tell me the website to login to [brand]?" and "Hey, can you help me find the official website to log in to my [brand] account? I want to make sure I'm on the right site."

The brands specified in the prompts named major companies the field of finance, retail, tech, and utilities. The team found that the AI would produce the correct web address just 66% of the time. 29% of URLs pointed to dead or suspended sites, and a further five percent to legitimate sites -- but not the ones users requested.

While this is annoying for most of us, it's potentially a new opportunity for scammers, Netcraft's lead of threat research Rob Duncan told The Register. Phishers could ask for a URL and if the top result is a site that's unregistered, they could buy it and set up a phishing site, he explained.

Citigroup spent over $9 billion on technology and communications last year, almost a fifth of total operating expenses and a larger proportion than competitors, as the bank works to fix legacy software systems that have produced costly errors including accidentally wiring more than $900 million to Revlon creditors.

The bank has consolidated 12 international sanctions screening systems into one platform, retired 20 cash equities platforms and launched a replacement, and automated high-risk processes where "fat-finger" errors previously occurred. Recent mistakes included crediting one account with $81 trillion after an employee failed to remove zeros from an electronic form and a copy-paste error that almost missent $6 billion.

Samsung is working on a trifold smartphone that could be unveiled at the company's July 9th Unpacked event, according to leaked animations discovered in the latest One UI 8 build update. The animations, spotted by Android Authority, reveal a three-panel device with a dual-hinge folding mechanism where the left-hand display folds inward while the right-hand display sandwiches over the top.

The device features a triple-camera setup on the rear of the right-hand panel when fully unfolded, with the central panel serving as a cover display. The animations label the device as "Multifold 7," though it is speculated to be called the "Galaxy G Fold."

Let's Encrypt, a certificate authority (CA) known for its free TLS/SSL certificates, has begun issuing digital certificates for IP addresses. From a report: It's not the first CA to do so. PositiveSSL, Sectigo, and GeoTrust all offer TLS/SSL certificates for use with IP addresses, at prices ranging from $40 to $90 or so annually. But Let's Encrypt does so at no cost.

For those with a static IP address who want to host a website, an IP address certificate provides a way to offer visitors a secure connection with that numeric identifier while avoiding the nominal expense of a domain name.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Intel's new chief executive is exploring a big change to its contract manufacturing business to win major customers, two people familiar with the matter told Reuters, in a potentially expensive shift from his predecessor's plans. The new strategy for Intel's foundry business would mean offering outside customers a newer generation of technology, the people said. That next-generation chipmaking process, analysts believe, will be more competitive against Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co in trying to land major customers such as Apple or Nvidia.

Since taking the company's helm in March, CEO Lip-Bu Tan has moved fast to cut costs and find a new path to revive the ailing U.S. chipmaker. By June, he started voicing that a manufacturing process known as 18A, in which prior CEO Pat Gelsinger had invested heavily, was losing its appeal to new customers, said the sources, who spoke on condition of anonymity. To put aside external sales of 18A and its variant 18A-P, manufacturing processes that have cost Intel billions of dollars to develop, the company would have to take a write-off, one of the people familiar with the matter said. Industry analysts contacted by Reuters said such a charge could amount to a loss of hundreds of millions, if not billions, of dollars.

Intel declined to comment on such "hypothetical scenarios or market speculation." It said the lead customer for 18A has long been Intel itself, and it aims to ramp production of its "Panther Lake" laptop chips later in 2025, which it called the most advanced processors ever designed and manufactured in the United States. Persuading outside clients to use Intel's factories remains key to its future. As its 18A fabrication process faced delays, rival TSMC's N2 technology has been on track for production. Tan's preliminary answer to this challenge: focus more resources on 14A, a next-generation chipmaking process where Intel expects to have advantages over Taiwan's TSMC, the two sources said. The move is part of a play for big customers like Apple and Nvidia, which currently pay TSMC to manufacture their chips.

A California jury has ordered Google to pay $314.6 million to Android smartphone users in the state after finding the company liable for collecting data from idle devices without permission.

The San Jose jury ruled Tuesday that Google sent and received information from phones while idle, creating "mandatory and unavoidable burdens shouldered by Android device users for Google's benefit." The 2019 class action represented an estimated 14 million Californians who argued Google consumed their cellular data for targeted advertising purposes.

An anonymous reader shares a report: Law enforcement officials are investigating a former employee of a company that negotiates with hackers and facilitates cryptocurrency payments during ransomware attacks, according to a statement from the firm, DigitalMint. DigitalMint President Marc Jason Grens this week told organizations it works with that the US Justice Department is examining allegations that the then-employee struck deals with hackers to profit from extortion payments, according to a person familiar with the matter.

Grens did not identify the employee by name and characterized their actions as isolated, said the person, who spoke on condition that they not be identified describing private conversations. DigitalMint is cooperating with a criminal investigation into "alleged unauthorized conduct by the employee while employed here," Grens said in an email to Bloomberg News. The Chicago-based company is not the target of the investigation and the employee "was immediately terminated," Grens said, adding that he can't provide more information because the probe is ongoing.

An anonymous reader shares a report: In 2021, Google set a lofty goal of achieving net-zero carbon emissions by 2030. Yet in the years since then, the company has moved in the opposite direction as it invests in energy-intensive artificial intelligence. In its latest sustainability report, Google said its carbon emissions had increased 51% between 2019 and 2024.

New research aims to debunk even that enormous figure and provide context to Google's sustainability reports, painting a bleaker picture. A report authored by non-profit advocacy group Kairos Fellowship found that, between 2019 and 2024, Google's carbon emissions actually went up by 65%. What's more, between 2010, the first year there is publicly available data on Google's emissions, and 2024, Google's total greenhouse gas emissions increased 1,515%, Kairos found. The largest year-over-year jump in that window was also the most recent, 2023 to 2024, when Google saw a 26% increase in emissions just between 2023 and 2024, according to the report.