BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: NordVPN has open sourced its Linux GUI on GitHub, giving the community full access to the code behind its graphical client. The move follows a 70 percent surge in daily active Linux users since the GUI's debut earlier this year, showing clear demand for a user friendly VPN experience on the platform. Alongside the previously open sourced command line tool, the GUI codebase is now available for anyone to audit, modify, and contribute to. While NordVPN's core backend infrastructure remains proprietary, the company says the open source release reflects its commitment to transparency and collaboration with the Linux community. The GUI can also now be installed with a single command using Snap, simplifying setup and ensuring automatic updates across distributions.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: Google announced on Tuesday that it will invest $15 billion in India over the next five years to establish its first artificial intelligence hub in the country. Located in the southern city of Visakhapatnam, the hub will be one of Google's largest globally. It will feature gigawatt-scale data center operations, extensive energy infrastructure and an expanded fiber-optic network, the company said in a statement. The investment underscores Google's growing reliance on India as a key technology and talent base in the global race for AI dominance.

For India, it brings in high-value infrastructure and foreign investment at a scale that can accelerate its digital transformation ambitions. Google said its AI hub investment will include construction of a new international subsea gateway that would connect to the company's more than 2 million miles (3.2 million kilometers) of existing terrestrial and subsea cables. "The initiative creates substantial economic and societal opportunities for both India and the United States, while pioneering a generational shift in AI capability," the company's statement said.

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization projects record production of global cereal crops in the 2025-26 farming season. The forecast covers wheat, corn and rice, and comes as the global stocks-to-use ratio stands around 30.6% -- the world is producing nearly a third more of these foundational crops than it currently uses.

The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in August that American farmers would harvest a record corn crop at record yield per acre. The FAO Food Price Index has risen slightly this year but remains nearly 20% below its peak during the early months of the war in Ukraine. Average calories available per person worldwide have climbed from roughly 2,100 to 2,200 kilocalories daily in the early nineteen-sixties to just under 3,000 kilocalories daily by 2022. Cereal yields have roughly tripled since 1961. Yet the World Bank estimates around 2.6 billion people cannot afford a healthy diet, and current famines in Gaza and Sudan stem from political failures rather than crop failures.

Preteens who use increasing amounts of social media perform poorer in reading, vocabulary and memory tests in early adolescence compared to those who use little or no social media. A study published in JAMA examined data from over 6,000 children ages 9 to 10 through early adolescence. Researchers classified the children into three groups: 58% used little or no social media over several years, 37% started with low-level use but spent about an hour daily on social media by age 13, and 6% spent three or more hours daily by that age.

Even low users who spent about one hour per day performed 1 to 2 points lower on reading and memory tasks compared to non-users. High users performed 4 to 5 points lower than non-social media users. Jason Nagata, a pediatrician at the University of California, San Francisco and study author, said the findings were notable because even modest social media use correlated with lower cognitive scores.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Britain said on Monday it had issued U.S. internet forum site 4chan with a $26,644 fine for failing to provide information about the risk of illegal content on its service, marking the first penalty under the new online safety regime. Media regulator Ofcom said 4chan had not responded to its request for a copy of its illegal harms risk assessment nor a second request relating to its qualifying worldwide. Ofcom said it would take action against any service which "flagrantly fails to engage with Ofcom and their duties under the Online Safety Act" and they should expect to face penalties.

The act, which is designed to protect children and vulnerable users from illegal content online, has caused tension between U.S. tech companies and Britain. Critics of the law have said it threatens free speech and targets U.S. companies. Technology minister Liz Kendall said the government "fully backed" Ofcom in taking action. "This fine is a clear warning to those who fail to remove illegal content or protect children from harmful material," she said. 4chan and Kiwi Farms filed a lawsuit in the United States against Ofcom in August, arguing that the threats and fines issued by the regulator "constitute foreign judgements that would restrict speech under U.S. law." The lawsuit claims that both entities are entirely based in the U.S., have no operations in the U.K., and therefore are not subject to its local laws.

California Governor Gavin Newsom signed three bills on Monday that establish the nation's most comprehensive framework for regulating how technology companies interact with minors. AB 56 requires social media platforms to display health warnings to users under 18. A child must view a skippable ten-second warning upon logging on each day. An unskippable thirty-second warning must appear if a child spends more than three hours on a platform. That warning repeats after each additional hour. The warnings must state that social media "can have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents." Minnesota passed a similar law in July.

SB 243 makes California the first state to regulate AI companion chatbots. The law takes effect January 1, 2026. Companies must implement age verification and disclose that interactions are artificially generated. Chatbots cannot represent themselves as healthcare professionals. Companies must offer break reminders to minors and prevent them from viewing sexually explicit images. The legislation gained momentum after teenager Adam Raine died by suicide following conversations with OpenAI's ChatGPT. A Colorado family filed suit against Character AI after their daughter's suicide following problematic conversations with the company's chatbots.

AB 1043 requires device-makers like Apple and Google to collect birth dates when parents set up devices for children. Device-makers must group users into four age brackets and share this information with apps. Google, Meta, OpenAI, and Snap supported the bill. The Motion Picture Association opposed it.

Climate change has pushed warm-water coral reefs past a point of no return, marking the first time a major climate tipping point has been crossed, according to a report released on Sunday by an international team in advance of the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP30 in Brazil this November. From a report: Tipping points include global ice loss, Amazon rainforest loss, and the possible collapse of vital ocean currents. Once crossed, they will trigger self-perpetuating and irreversible changes that will lead to new and unpredictable climate conditions. But the new report also emphasizes progress on positive tipping points, such as the rapid rollout of green technologies.

"We can now say that we have passed the first major climate tipping point," said Steve Smith, the Tipping Points Research Impact Fellow at the Global Systems Institute and Green Futures Solutions at the University of Exeter, during a media briefing on Tuesday. "But on the plus side," he added, "we've also passed at least one major positive tipping point in the energy system," referring to the maturation of solar and wind power technologies.

The world is entering a "new reality" as global temperatures will inevitably overshoot the goal of staying within 1.5C of pre-industrial averages set by the Paris Climate Agreement in 2015, warns the Global Tipping Points Report 2025, the second iteration of a collaboration focused on key thresholds in Earth's climate system.

"It's not just you: Flatpak flat-out doesn't work in the new Ubuntu 25.10 release," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu: While Flatpak itself can be installed using apt, trying to install Flatpaks with Flatpak from the command-line throws a "could not unmount revokefs-fuse filesystem" error, followed by "Child process exited with code 1". For those who've installed the Ubuntu 'Questing Quokka' and wanted to kit it out with their favourite software from Flathub, it's a frustrating road bump.

AppArmor, the tool that enforces Ubuntu's security policies for apps, is causing the issue. According to the bug report on Launchpad, the AppArmor profile for fusermount3 lacks the privileges it needs to work properly in Ubuntu 25.10. Fusermount3 is a tool Flatpak relies on to mount and unmount filesystems... This is a bug and it is being worked on. Although there's no timeframe for a fix, it is marked as critical, so will be prioritised.
The bug was reported in early September, but not fixed in time for this week's Ubuntu 25.10 release, reports Phoronix: Only [Friday] an updated AppArmor was pushed to the "questing-proposed" archive for testing. Since then... a number of users have reported that the updated AppArmor from the proposed archive will fix the Flatpak issues being observed. From all the reports so far it looks like that proposed update is in good shape for restoring Flatpak support on Ubuntu 25.10. The Ubuntu team is considering pushing out this update sooner than the typical seven day testing period given the severity of the issue.
More details from WebProNews: Industry insiders point out that AppArmor, Ubuntu's mandatory access control system, was tightened in this release to enhance security... This isn't the first time AppArmor has caused friction; similar issues plagued Telegram Flatpak apps in Ubuntu 24.04 LTS earlier this year, as noted in coverage from OMG Ubuntu.

Off the southwest cost of Italy, a remotely operated submarine made "a significant and rare discovery," reports the Independent — a vast white coral reef that was 80 metres tall (262 feet) and 2 metres wide (6.56 feet) "containing important species and fossil traces." Often dubbed the "rainforests of the sea", coral reefs are of immense scientific interest due to their status as some of the planet's richest marine ecosystems, harbouring millions of species. They play a crucial role in sustaining marine life but are currently under considerable threat...

hese impressive formations are composed of deep-water hard corals, commonly referred to as "white corals" because of their lack of colour, specifically identified as Lophelia pertusa and Madrepora oculata species. The reef also contains black corals, solitary corals, sponges, and other ecologically important species, as well as fossil traces of oysters and ancient corals, the Italian Research Council said. It called them "true geological testimonies of a distant past."

Mission leader Giorgio Castellan said the finding was "exceptional for Italian seas: bioconstructions of this kind, and of such magnitude, had never been observed in the Dohrn Canyon, and are rarely seen elsewhere in our Mediterranean". The discovery will help scientists understand the ecological role of deep coral habitats and their distribution, especially in the context of conservation and restoration efforts, he added.
The undersea research was funded by the EU.

Thanks to davidone (Slashdot reader #12,252) for sharing the article.

"Next time Amazon hypes its Prime Days savings, remember this: The prices during the sale aren't always better," writes a Washington Post technology columnist. "I've got the receipts to prove it." I would have saved, on average, almost nothing during Amazon's recent fall "Prime Big Deal Days" — and for some big-ticket purchases, I would have actually paid amore. For the sale that took place Oct. 7 and 8, my family went in prepared. We had a shopping list with prices we'd been tracking... A TV stand he'd been watching jumped 38 percent to $379, from $275 on Oct. 2. Same story for a few other big-ticket items on his list — another console went up from $219.99 to $299. Those products weren't listed as "big deals" on the site, but we certainly didn't expect their prices to spike during Prime Days.

And in other cases, Amazon marketed discounts that turned out to be the exact price it had charged in recent weeks. One example: an Oral-B electric toothbrush was listed as 39 percent off, but actually the same price as in August... Other consumer advocates have warned one common trick is for Amazon to feature artificially inflated "before" prices to make discounts appear larger than they are. Ahead of Amazon's 2017 Prime Day, the nonprofit Consumer Watchdog reported that 61 percent of reference prices on Amazon were higher than any price the company had charged for those items in the prior 90 days... I found products listed as Prime Day discounts that cost the same as I'd paid less than a month earlier. For example, a pack of coronavirus tests I bought on Sept. 12 was the same price on Oct. 8, but listed as "39 percent off." Amazon said I'd gotten a particularly good deal in September, and the Prime Big Deal Days price offers "meaningful savings compared to the typical price customers have paid on Amazon over the last 90 days...."

To actually get a good deal on Amazon, go in with a plan. I use a free website called CamelCamelCamel, which tracks Amazon's historical prices. You can see what's really a discount — and set alerts when prices drop to your target.
The reporter checked every non-grocery purchase they'd made on Amazon for six months. Purchasing the same products on Amazon's "Big Deal Days" would have brought savings of just 0.6%. "And that doesn't include the $139 annual fee to be a member of Amazon Prime."

theodp writes: GeekWire reports that Microsoft is bringing artificial intelligence to every public classroom in its home state -- and sparking new questions about its role in education. The Redmond tech giant on Thursday unveiled Microsoft Elevate Washington, a sweeping new initiative that will provide free access to AI-powered software and training for all 295 public school districts and 34 community and technical colleges across Washington state. The program is part of Microsoft Elevate, the company's broader $4 billion, five-year commitment to support schools and nonprofits with AI tools and training that was announced in July.

"This is our home," Microsoft President Brad Smith said at a launch event on the company's headquarters campus. "A big part of what we're doing today is investing in our home." Smith said Microsoft understands the unease around AI in classrooms but argued that waiting isn't an option. "I don't know that it will be possible to slow down the use of AI, even if someone wanted to," he said. In an interview with KING-TV Seattle, Smith added, "We're making a bigger commitment to this state than we are to any state in the country. [...] Above all else, we want to ensure that people can learn how to use the technology of tomorrow. That's the only way for our kids to succeed in the future."

The event on Thursday also included comedian Trevor Noah, the company's "chief questions officer," as well as Code.org CEO Hadi Partovi. Noah and Partovi both also appeared with Smith at the Microsoft Elevate launch event in July, where Smith told Partovi it was time to "switch hats" from coding to AI, adding that "the last 12 years have been about the Hour of Code [Code.org's flagship event, credited with pushing CS into K-12 classrooms], but the future involves the Hour of AI." Code.org last month committed to "engage 25M learners in an Hour of AI in school year '25/'26" at a meeting of the White House Task Force on AI Education that preceded a White House dinner for top execs from the nation's leading AI companies.

Australia's Queensland state government said on Friday it would run coal power plants at least into the 2040s, reversing a previous plan to pivot rapidly to renewables and in turn making national emissions reduction targets harder to achieve. From a report: The centre-right Liberal National Party won last year's election in Queensland, a huge chunk of land in Australia's northeast where more than 60% of electricity comes from coal-fired plants that are mostly owned by the state.

A new book, by Wall Street Journal reporter Saabira Chaudhuri, traces how disposability became a deliberate business strategy rather than an accidental consequence of modern commerce. The book, titled "Consumed: How Big Brands Got Us Hooked on Plastic," emerged from her reporting on how plastic bottles transformed bottled water from an occasional restaurant treat into an everyday staple.

Excerpts from a Bloomberg story: After World War II, the plastics industry made a conscious pivot. Lloyd Stouffer, an industry figure, openly said plastics should move from durable goods to disposables because companies make more money selling something a thousand times than once. The industry sold consumers on hygiene, convenience, modernity and easier household management. McDonald's dropped polystyrene clamshells in the late 1980s under activist pressure but simply swapped one single-use product for another.

Paper containers still cannot be recycled well once food soaks in. The old diaper-service model disappeared. Companies collected, washed and returned cloth diapers like the milkman, but plastics helped kill that business model. Chaudhuri argues companies built their businesses on disposability and will not change unless regulation forces everyone to move together. Executives admit that if they launch a reusable product but competitors do not, they lose market share and face shareholder backlash. Packaging standardization would improve recycling economics. Colored plastics like red shampoo bottles cannot be recycled in a closed loop and are down-cycled into gray products like pipes.

US datacenters are experiencing a significant shift toward coal-powered energy due to elevated natural gas prices and rapidly growing electricity demand. From a report: According to a research note from financial services firm Jefferies, datacenter operators are racing to connect new capacity to the electrical grid, with accelerated load growth expected during the 2026-2028 period. This spike in demand is driving an unexpected resurgence in coal generation, which has increased nearly 20 percent year-to-date.

The research note, seen by The Register, states: "We raise our estimate for coal generation by ~11 percent (driven by higher capacity factors), and staying elevated through 2027 on favorable fuel pricing vs gas (particularly for existing fleet)." Warnings emerged last year that rising energy demand from the proliferation of data centers in the US risked outstripping available generation capacity, potentially extending the operational life of coal-fired power plants. Further reading: India Needs Coal For the Next Decade and Nobody Wants To Say It.

fjo3 shares a report from the Washington Post: Across vast stretches of farmland in southern Brazil, researchers at a carbon removal company are attempting to accelerate a natural process that normally unfolds over thousands or millions of years. The company, Terradot, is spreading tons of volcanic rock crushed into a fine dust over land where soybeans, sugar cane and other crops are grown. As rain percolates through the soil, chemical reactions pull carbon from the air and convert it into bicarbonate ions that eventually wash into the ocean, where the carbon remains stored. The technique, known as "enhanced rock weathering," is emerging as a promising approach to lock away carbon on a massive scale. Some researchers estimate the method has the potential to sequester billions of tons of carbon, helping slow global climate trends. Other major projects are underway across the globe and have collectively raised over a quarter-billion dollars. [...]

Terradot was founded in 2022 at Stanford, growing out of an independent study between James Kanoff, an undergraduate seeking large-scale carbon removal solutions, and Scott Fendorf, an Earth science professor. Terradot ran a pilot project across 250 hectares in Mexico and began operations in Brazil in late 2023. Since then, the company has spread about 100,000 tons of rock over 4,500 hectares. It has signed contracts to remove about 300,000 tons of carbon dioxide and is backed by a who's who of Silicon Valley. It expects to deliver its first carbon removal credit -- representing one metric ton of verified carbon dioxide removed -- by the end of this year and then scale up from there.

Mozilla Firefox's new "Shake to Summarize" feature earned a spot on TIME's Best Inventions of 2025, allowing users to shake their phone to instantly summarize long web pages. Anthony Enzor-DeMeo, general manager of Firefox, calls it a "testament to the incredible work of our UX, design, product, and engineering teams who brought this innovation to life." Neowin reports: Shake to summarize works exactly how you suspect: you physically shake your phone to generate a summary of a long article. This can be quite handy if you are trying to get the gist of a long read without scrolling through the whole thing. Other ways to activate the feature include tapping the thunderbolt icon in the address bar and selecting "Summarize Page" from the three-dot menu.

For now, the feature is limited to iOS users in the US with their system set to English, but Mozilla promises an Android version is in the works. If you have an iPhone 15 Pro or newer running iOS 26, Apple Intelligence generates the summaries on the device. For older iPhones or those on earlier iOS versions, the page text is sent to Mozilla's servers for processing. You can view the full list of TIME's "Special Mentions" here.

prisoninmate shares a report from 9to5Linux: Dubbed Questing Quokka, Ubuntu 25.10 is powered by the latest and greatest Linux 6.17 kernel series for top-notch hardware support and ships with the latest GNOME 49 desktop environment, defaulting to a Wayland-only session for the Ubuntu Desktop flavor, meaning there's no other session to choose from the login screen. Ubuntu Desktop also ships with two new apps, namely GNOME's Loupe instead of Eye of GNOME as the default image viewer, as well as Ptyxis instead of GNOME Terminal as the default terminal emulator. Also, there's a new update notification that will be shown with options to open Software Updater or install updates directly.'

Other highlights of Ubuntu 25.10 include sudo-rs as the default implementation of sudo, Dracut as the default initramfs-tools, Chrony as the default NTP (Network Time Protocol) client, Rust Coreutils as the default implementation of GNU Core Utilities, and TPM-backed FDE (Full Disk Encryption) recovery key management. Moreover, Ubuntu 25.10 adds NVIDIA Dynamic Boost support and enables suspend-resume support in the proprietary NVIDIA graphics driver to prevent corruption and freezes when waking an NVIDIA desktop. For Intel users, Ubuntu 25.10 introduces support for new Intel integrated and discrete GPUs. Ubuntu 25.10 is available for download here.

YouTube has launched a "second chance" program allowing some creators previously banned for COVID-19 or election misinformation to apply for new channels, as long as their violations were tied to policies that have since been deprecated. Bans for copyright or severe misconduct still remain permanent. The Verge reports: Under political pressure, the company had said last month that it was going to set up this pilot program for "a subset of creators" and "channels terminated for policies that have been deprecated." [...] The new pilot program kicks off today and will roll out to "eligible creators" over the "next several weeks," YouTube says. "We'll consider several factors when evaluating requests for new channels, like whether the creator committed particularly severe or persistent violations of our Community Guidelines or Terms of Service, or whether the creator's on- or off-platform activity harmed or may continue to harm the YouTube community."

The pilot won't be available if you were banned for copyright infringement or for violating YouTube's Creator Responsibility policies, the company says. If you deleted your YouTube channel or Google account, you won't be able to request a new channel "at this time." And YouTube notes that if your channel has been banned, you won't be eligible to apply for a new one until one year after it was terminated. "We know many terminated creators deserve a second chance -- YouTube has evolved and changed over the past 20 years, and we've had our share of second chances to get things right with our community too," YouTube says. "Our goal is to roll this out to creators who are eligible to apply over the coming months, and we appreciate the patience as we ramp up, carefully review requests, and learn as we go."

An anonymous reader shares a report: Over the years, Intel has established itself as a paragon of the open source community, but that could soon change under the x86 giant's new leadership. Speaking to press and analysts at Intel's Tech Tour in Arizona last week, Kevork Kechichian, who now leads Intel's datacenter biz, believes it's time to rethink what Chipzilla contributes to the open source community. "We have probably the largest footprint on open source out there from an infrastructure standpoint," he said during his opening keynote. "We need to find a balance where we use that as an advantage to Intel and not let everyone else take it and run with it."

In other words, the company needs to ensure that its competitors don't benefit more from Intel's open source contributions than it does. Speaking with El Reg during a press event in Arizona last week, Kechichian emphasized that the company has no intention of abandoning the open source community. "Our intention is never to leave open source," he said. "There are lots of people benefiting from the huge investment that Intel put in there." "We're just going to figure out how we can get more out of that [Intel's open source contributions] versus everyone else using our investments," he added.

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit by the National Retail Federation challenging a New York state law that requires retailers to tell customers when their personal data are used to set prices, known as surveillance pricing. From a report: U.S. District Judge Jed Rakoff in Manhattan said the world's largest retail trade group did not plausibly allege that New York's Algorithmic Pricing Disclosure Act violated its members' free speech rights under the Constitution's First Amendment.

The first-in-the-nation law required retailers to disclose in capital letters when prices were set by algorithms using personal data, or face possible civil fines of $1,000 per violation. Governor Kathy Hochul said charging different prices depending on what people were willing to pay was "opaque," and prevented comparison-shopping.