ICYMI: Could KDE & Gnome Have Their Own Distro?

Having spent the better part of a decade being infamous for its RAM usage, Chrome is now on a bit of an apology tour, according to an article from Lifehacker. Recently, the browser has added many performance features to help curb its memory usage, but Google's efforts to improve Chrome's performance go beyond that. Some features are there purely to save RAM usage and increase speed, but some will also limit resources to increase your battery life, and then there are features that help make the browser feel faster. With the new features in Chrome, you can keep an eye on tab memory load, suspend inactive tabs to help save memory, use energy saver on your laptop, leverage the use of extended preloading, and provide performance issue alerts.

ESET researchers have uncovered Bootkitty, the first-ever UEFI bootkit designed to target Linux systems, according to an article from Cyber Insider. This malware marks a significant evolution in the UEFI threat landscape, previously dominated by Windows-focused bootkits. While Bootkitty appears to be a proof-of-concept and has not yet been observed in active attacks, its existence signals a concerning shift for Linux-based platforms.

Blue Yonder, a prominent supply chain software provider, has been targeted in a ransomware attack, leading to disruption at major retail outlets, according to an article from TechRepublic. Starbucks and several major U.K. supermarkets experienced disruption due to a ransomware attack on the prominent supply chain software provider Blue Yonder. The company disclosed the incident on Thursday, Nov. 21, and it was still working to restore services the following Monday. The disruption to the Blue Yonder platform prevented Starbucks from paying its baristas and managing their schedules, according to the Wall Street Journal. As a result, café managers had to manually calculate their employees’ pay using their scheduled shifts, leaving a larger margin for error as actual hours worked may not line up. Sainsbury’s and Morrisons, two of the largest supermarket chains in the U.K., were also impacted, according to trade magazine The Grocer. Sainsbury’s said it had contingencies in place to mitigate any disruption and had restored all operations.

KDE and GNOME have decided that because they're not big and complicated enough already, they might work better if they have their own custom distributions underneath, according to an article from The Register. What's the worst that could happen? A talk from this year's KDE conference, Akademy 2024, looks like it's going to become real. The talk, by KDE developer Harald Sitter, was titled An Operating System of Our Own, and the idea sounds simple enough: Sitter proposed an official KDE Linux distribution. Now the proposal is gathering steam and a plan is coming together for an official KDE Linux – codenamed “Project Banana.”

Windows 11 24H2 doesn't work well with cache-less WD SSDs, Ubisoft games, Asus devices, fingerprint sensors, and much more. We can now add USB scanners and devices using the eSCL scan protocol to the troublesome issues, according to an article from TechSpot. Microsoft recently confirmed the problem through its ever-growing list of known Windows 11 24H2 problems. Microsoft notes that after installing Windows 11 version 24H2, USB devices supporting eSCL tech may not be discoverable anymore. The eSCL protocol provides support for USB peripherals with no need for specific system drivers. The protocol is the default communication method in MacOS, Linux, and Windows – usually. Thanks to eSCL, networked scanners can be reliably used over Ethernet, Wi-Fi networks, and USB connections. This new issue is caused by a device becoming unable to switch from eSCL mode to USB mode, thus preventing Windows from matching the most suitable system driver with the connected device.

Doctors have long taken for granted a devil’s bargain: Relieving intense pain, such as that caused by surgery and traumatic injury, risks inducing the sort of pleasure that could leave patients addicted, says an article from The Atlantic. Opioids are among the most powerful, if not the most powerful, pain medications ever known, but for many years they have been a source of staggering morbidity and mortality. New research, published in Science Advances, suggests that using opioids to relieve physical suffering without risking addiction is in fact possible. In the study, a team of researchers led by the neuroscientists Francis Lee at Weill Cornell Medicine and Anjali Rajadhyaksha at the Lewis Katz School of Medicine at Temple University blocked the rewarding properties of opioids in mice while preserving the drugs’ analgesic effects.

Researchers have made a discovery that could make quantum computing more compact, potentially shrinking essential components 1,000 times while also requiring less equipment, according to an article from SciTechDaily. A class of quantum computers being developed now relies on light particles, or photons, created in pairs linked or “entangled” in quantum physics parlance. One way to produce these photons is to shine a laser on millimeter-thick crystals and use optical equipment to ensure the photons become linked. A drawback to this approach is that it is too big to integrate into a computer chip. Now, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NTU Singapore) scientists have found a way to address this approach’s problem by producing linked pairs of photons using much thinner materials that are just 1.2 micrometers thick, or about 80 times thinner than a strand of hair. And they did so without needing additional optical gear to maintain the link between the photon pairs, making the overall setup simpler.

The U.K.’s competition regulator has raised concerns about Apple’s dominance in the mobile browser market, according to an article from TechRepublic. The Competition and Markets Authority said (PDF) on Nov. 22 that Apple restricts competition by limiting the use of rival browsers on its iOS devices and effectively requiring developers to use its WebKit browser engine. This could stifle innovation among competitors, leading to reduced choice for consumers. Currently, any browser available for iOS must use WebKit. The CMA report says WebKit limits the ways browser providers can differentiate from one another. It also claims that third-party browsers built with WebKit do not have the same level of access and functionality as Safari.

Now we know who “took down” the Internet Archive site with a DDoS attack. According to an article on Gizmodo, a pro-Palestinian hacktivist group called SN_BLACKMETA has taken responsibility for the hack on X and Telegram. “They are under attack because the archive belongs to the USA, and as we all know, this horrendous and hypocritical government supports the genocide that is being carried out by the terrorist state of ‘Israel,’” the group said on X when someone asked them why they’d gone after the Archive. The group elaborated on its reasoning in a now-deleted post on X. Jason Scott, an archivist at the Archive, screenshotted it and shared it. “Everyone calls this organization ‘non-profit’, but if its roots are truly in the United States, as we believe, then every ‘free’ service they offer bleeds millions of lives. Foreign nations are not carrying their values beyond their borders. Many petty children are crying in the comments and most of those comments are from a group of Zionist bots and fake accounts,” the post said.

Quantum computers have the potential to revolutionize drug discovery, material design and fundamental physics — that is, if we can get them to work reliably, says a Google blog post. Certain problems, which would take a conventional computer billions of years to solve, would take a quantum computer just hours. However, these new processors are more prone to noise than conventional ones. If we want to make quantum computers more reliable, especially at scale, we need to accurately identify and correct these errors. In a paper published today in Nature, we introduce AlphaQubit, an AI-based decoder that identifies quantum computing errors with state-of-the-art accuracy. This collaborative work brought together Google DeepMind’s machine learning knowledge and Google Quantum AI’s error correction expertise to accelerate progress on building a reliable quantum computer. Accurately identifying errors is a critical step towards making quantum computers capable of performing long computations at scale, opening the doors to scientific breakthroughs and many new areas of discovery.

An international team of researchers has observed a rare and unusual supernova, identifying it as the most metal-poor stellar explosion ever recorded, according to an article from SciTechDaily. Named 2023ufx, this supernova resulted from the core collapse of a red supergiant star and occurred on the outskirts of a nearby dwarf galaxy. Both the supernova and the host galaxy were found to have extremely low metallicity, meaning they contain very few elements heavier than hydrogen or helium.

Do you want to see ChatGPT literally “choke?” According to an article from ArsTechnica, typing any one of at least five names into ChatGPT will cause it to respond with “I am unable to produce a response,” or “There was an error in generating a response,” and it will terminate the chat session. These five names (who knows … there may be more) are people who have threatened to sue OpenAI, so their names have been added as hard-coded filters, causing ChatGPT to end the chat session(s). Those names? Well, so far that list includes Brian Hood, Jonathan Turley, Jonathan Zittrain, David Faber, and Guido Scorza.

The James Webb Space Telescope just keeps on shattering its own records, especially when it comes to just how far “into the past” it can see. The James Webb Space Telescope (JWST) has discovered a handful of possible galaxies that could be among the earliest to ever exist, says an article from LiveScience. Located 13.6 billion light-years away and just 200 million years after the Big Bang, the five galaxy candidates are the earliest ever detected, and likely some of the first to have formed in the ancient universe. If confirmed by follow-up observations, the ancient galaxies will offer astronomers a test of their best theories of galaxy formation, along with unique insights into how matter first coalesced across the cosmos. The researchers published their findings Nov. 26 on the preprint database arXiv, so they have not yet been peer-reviewed.

In late November, 2024, NASA released its “Astronomy Picture of the Day” — actually a combo of two pictures, taken two decades apart, reports an article from Newser. The first is a 20-year-old photo taken by the Hubble Space Telescope of the so-called Sombrero Galaxy, a galaxy nearly 30 million light-years away whose oval brim and hazy, glowing, bulging center made it look like a piece of signature Mexican headwear. However, based on a new image taken by the James Webb Space Telescope, “astronomers may have to rename it the visor galaxy,” reports Mashable. That's because the latest photo looks “more like a bull's-eye than a hat,” per Live Science, showing a “more elegant, subtle structure with a smooth inner disk,” a more detailed outer ring, and none of the signature haze in the middle that made the galaxy resemble a sombrero. The discrepancy can be attributed to the fact that the Webb Space Telescope shows the galaxy as seen through mid-infrared wavelengths, which pierces through the cloudy bands of dust and gas that hover around the galaxy. The Hubble Space Telescope's photo was taken in visible light. The clearer picture now offered can shed some light on what the Sombrero Galaxy, aka Messier 104, is made of, and on the fact that it appears to harbor what LiveScience calls a “secret star factory,” as shown by the clumps in its outer ring that are believed to churn out new stars.

Open source Wi-Fi router project OpenWrt and the Software Freedom Conservancy have delivered their first jointly developed hardware platform – the OpenWrt One – and are trumpeting it as a triumph of the right to repair movement, according to an article from The Register. OpenWrt is widely used by commercial router-makers, who take advantage of its GNU General Public License Version 2 to accelerate development of mostly consumer- and SOHO-grade hardware. In January 2024, contributors revealed they had contemplated celebrating the project's 20th anniversary by creating its own hardware. Existing informal efforts to build a device using Banana Pi hardware were felt to demonstrate the task was not immense, and the Software Freedom Conservancy (SFC) – of which OpenWrt is a member project – was willing to help. Fast-forward to November 29 and the device debuted – just in time for Black Friday sales (and probable delivery before Christmas, at least at the time of publication). Known as the OpenWrt One, the box boasts a dual-core MediaTek MT7981B processor, and a MT7697 Wi-Fi 6 chip from the same vendor. You can currently purchase the open source router from AliExpress.

An unknown disease killed 143 people in Democratic Republic of the Congo's southwestern province in November, local authorities told Reuters, according to an article from U.S. News & World Report. Infected people had flu-like symptoms, including high fever and severe headaches, Remy Saki, deputy governor of Kwango province, and Apollinaire Yumba, provincial minister of health, said on Monday. A medical team has been sent to the Panzi health zone to collect samples and carry out an analysis in order to identify the disease.

Amid an unprecedented cyberattack on telecommunications companies such as AT&T and Verizon, U.S. officials have recommended that Americans use encrypted messaging apps to ensure their communications stay hidden from foreign hackers, reports an article from NBC News. The hacking campaign, nicknamed Salt Typhoon by Microsoft, is one of the largest intelligence compromises in U.S. history, and it has not yet been fully remediated. Officials on a news call Tuesday refused to set a timetable for declaring the country’s telecommunications systems free of interlopers. Officials had told NBC News that China hacked AT&T, Verizon and Lumen Technologies to spy on customers.

Candela, the Swedish electric boat maker known for its hydrofoil recreational boats and commercial ferries, is grabbing headlines yet again, according to an article from Electrek. This time the company is announcing a new C-series funding round and the first P-12 electric ferry headed to the US. Specifically, it is slated to be introduced at Lake Tahoe. The P-12 is the company’s first operational hydrofoil electric ferry, and it builds upon the success of the C-7 and C-8 recreational speed boats. All three employ Candela’s sophisticated computer-controlled hydrofoil technology that allows the boats to quite literally fly several feet above the water. Traveling at 25 knots (30 mph), the P-12 is the fastest electric ferry in operation, all while using a fraction of the same energy.

In a stroke of irony, the Chinese government is investigating U.S. chipmaker NVIDIA for allegedly violating its anti-monopoly law by acquiring interconnect provider Mellanox, according to an article from TechRepublic. On Monday, the State Administration for Market Regulation made a statement via China Central Television announcing the investigation, but it does not discuss the specifics of NVIDIA’s suspected violations. The authority approved NVIDIA’s $6.9 billion acquisition of Mellanox, an Israeli company, in 2020 with certain conditions. These aimed to prevent the tech giant from restricting competition in the markets of GPU acceleration, private internetworking devices, and high-speed Ethernet adapters.

A new proof has brought mathematicians one step closer to understanding the hidden order of those “atoms of arithmetic,” the prime numbers, according to an article from Quanta Magazine. The primes — numbers that are only divisible by themselves and 1 — are the most fundamental building blocks in math. They’re also the most mysterious. At first glance, they seem to be scattered at random across the number line. But of course, the primes aren’t random. They’re completely determined, and a closer look at them reveals all sorts of strange patterns, which mathematicians have spent centuries trying to unravel. A better understanding of how the primes are distributed would illuminate vast swaths of the mathematical universe.

Photobucket was sued on December 11, 2024, after a recent privacy policy update revealed plans to sell users' photos — including biometric identifiers like face and iris scans — to companies training generative AI models, according to an article from ArsTechnica. The proposed class action seeks to stop Photobucket from selling users' data without first obtaining written consent, alleging that Photobucket either intentionally or negligently failed to comply with strict privacy laws in states like Illinois, New York, and California by claiming it can't reliably determine users' geolocation. Two separate classes could be protected by the litigation. The first includes anyone who ever uploaded a photo between 2003—when Photobucket was founded—and May 1, 2024. Another potentially even larger class includes any non-users depicted in photographs uploaded to Photobucket, whose biometric data has also allegedly been sold without consent.

Most web browsers currently have a feature called “Do Not Track” hidden in settings. In the case of Mozilla’s Firefox browser, Windows Report has spotted a change in the upcoming version — the setting is gone, according to an article from TechCrunch. But this doesn’t mean what you think it means. As the name suggests, if you have “Do Not Track” enabled when you load a web page, it sends a request to the website stating that you don’t want to be tracked. However, websites have no reason to respect the signal — meaning the setting is useless (and misleading). Even worse, “Do Not Track” isn’t just ignored, it had the opposite effect as it provided a signal to websites that could be used to identify users and track them better. That’s exactly why Apple removed “Do Not Track” from Safari in 2019.

New research found that the protein MANF helps cells manage toxic protein clumps, improving cellular health and potentially aiding treatments for age-related diseases like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s, according to an article from SciTechDaily. Researchers at McMaster University have uncovered a previously unidentified cell-protective role of a protein, potentially paving the way for new treatments for age-related diseases and promoting healthier aging. The team has found that a class of protective proteins known as MANF plays a role in the process that keeps cells efficient and working well. The findings appear in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Researchers cracked a Microsoft Azure method for multifactor authentication (MFA) in about an hour, due to a critical vulnerability that allowed them unauthorized access to a user's account, including Outlook emails, OneDrive files, Teams chats, Azure Cloud, and more, according to an article from Dark Reading. Researchers at Oasis Security discovered the flaw, which was present due to a lack of rate limit for the amount of times someone could attempt to sign in with MFA and fail when trying to access an account, they revealed in a blog post on Dec. 11. The flaw exposed the more than 400 million paid Microsoft 365 seats to potential account takeover, they said. When signing into a Microsoft account, a user supplies their email and password and then selects a pre-configured MFA method. In the case used by the researchers, they are given a code by Microsoft via another form of communication to facilitate sign-in.

According to an article from BC News (Boston College), researchers have paired a specialized diet and a tumor-fighting drug and found the non-toxic combination helps to destroy the two major cells found in an aggressive form of brain cancer, the team reports in the online edition of the Nature group journal Communications Biology. The international team combined a calorie-restricted diet high in fat and low in carbohydrates with a tumor-inhibiting antibiotic and found the combination destroys cancer stem cells and mesenchymal cells, the two major cells found in glioblastoma, a fast-moving brain cancer that resists traditional treatment protocols.

According to an article from Lifehacker, Google doesn't have the best track record when it comes to user privacy, but it's getting better. The company's messaging app, Google Messages, now comes pre-installed on most new Android devices and advertises its conversations as end-to-end encrypted. Based on the way Google publicizes its app, you might think using it means all your chats with friends, family, and colleagues are protected. But they're not. Check out the article to discover when Google Messages does not employ end-to-end encryption.

Three men died when their car veered off an unfinished bridge and fell onto a riverbed in the northern state of Uttar Pradesh, in India, according to an article from the BBC. Police are still investigating the incident, which took place on Sunday, but they believe that Google Maps led the group to take that route. A part of the bridge had reportedly collapsed earlier this year because of floods and while locals knew this and avoided the bridge, the three men were not aware of this and were from outside the area. There were no barricades or sign boards indicating that the bridge was unfinished. Authorities have named four engineers from the state's road department and an unnamed official from Google Maps in a police complaint on charges of culpable homicide.

ChatGPT search has been out now for about a month and a half, following a Halloween announcement from OpenAI, according to an article from Lifehacker. With this new feature, the company finally rolled out an official competitor to AI search engines like Perplexity, Google's AI Overviews, and Microsoft Bing (powered by Copilot). OpenAI originally announced its search plans back in July, with a service called SearchGPT. While SearchGPT was a prototype and launched with a waitlist to try it, ChatGPT search took its place, with OpenAI rolling SearchGPT's main features into its new search feature. The feature originally launched to paid subscribers only, but now, all users can access it.

Google faces a £7 billion legal claim over search engine advertising. A £7 billion legal claim against Google which accuses the tech giant of exploiting its dominant position in the search engine market can proceed to trial, the Competition Appeal Tribunal (CAT) has ruled, according to an article from Yahoo! News. The multi-billion claim, brought by consumer rights campaigner Nikki Stopford, claims the US giant exploited its dominance in the search market to increase advertising costs, which were ultimately passed on to consumers. Ms. Stopford will represent all UK-domiciled consumers aged 16 and over who purchased goods or services from a business selling in the UK which used search advertising services provided by Google. The action is being brought as an opt-out collective action, meaning that everyone in the UK affected is automatically included as a claimant in the case unless they opt out.

The “Asian Murder Hornet” was discovered in a corner of Washington State. Five years later, a massive mobilization has eliminated the invasive species, at least for now, according to an article from the New York Times. The hunt for the “murder hornet” in the northwest corner of Washington State began like a criminal investigation, with bee carcasses creating a crime scene and the public being asked to send tips about the potential culprit’s whereabouts. Search grids were created. Traps were set. Soon, state entomologists were able to capture some of the wayward hornets, affixing tiny tracking devices on the insects to trace them back to their lairs. Crews wearing otherworldly protective equipment moved in to eliminate the nests with vacuums and carbon dioxide. Officials believe it all worked. On Wednesday, five years after the invasive hornets were sighted for the first time in Washington State, state and federal agencies announced that they had successfully eradicated the species from that hot spot and the nation. That dispelled their initial fears that the hornet might spread rapidly enough to establish itself in the United States for good.

TP-Link routers may be banned in the US in the next year, claims an article from CNET and multiple other news outlets. The Shenzhen-based router manufacturer is allegedly under investigation by the Commerce, Defense and Justice Departments over security concerns and ties to Chinese cyberattacks. Sources told the Journal that TP-Link routers are routinely shipped with security flaws, and that the company has resisted engaging with security researchers when those flaws are identified. In October, Microsoft released its own analysis that found that TP-Link routers made up most of the compromised devices in a Chinese “password spraying” hack, referring to the attack as “nation-state threat actor activity.”

Scientists have suggested we could create housing on Mars for future settlers using an Ancient Roman technique of making concrete, according to an article from IFL Science. If humans ever want to set up a home elsewhere in the Solar System, Mars seems like the most viable bet, beating off the competition by not being a hell world, having a surface we could actually stand on, and being at the edge of the habitable zone where liquid water can exist. But it isn't exactly ideal. It lacks a lot of the key materials we need for survival on the planet, such as those to build homes, and breathable air. While the latter may require terraforming, a new paper suggests for the former, we may already have part of the solution pumping through our veins. “Ancient Romans utilized organic additives, including animal blood, primarily to improve the durability and workability of their mortar. However, it is possible to create high-performance concrete using blood as a primary component,” the team explains in their paper. “Although it is a bit strange, blood can be utilized to create strong concrete or bricks for onsite construction on Mars.”

Earlier this year, scientists stumbled upon a potential new treatment for hereditary-patterned baldness, the most common cause of hair loss in both men and women worldwide, according to an article from ScienceAlert. It all started with research on a sugar that naturally occurs in the body and helps form DNA: the 'deoxyribose' part of deoxyribonucleic acid. While studying how these sugars heal the wounds of mice when applied topically, scientists at the University of Sheffield and COMSATS University in Pakistan noticed that the fur around the lesions was growing back faster than in untreated mice.