Google is updating the post-quantum cryptography in Chrome, replacing the experimental Kyber with the fully standardized Module Lattice Key Encapsulation Mechanism (ML-KEM) to enhance protection against quantum computing attacks. BleepingComputer reports: This change comes roughly five months after Google rolled out the post-quantum secure TLS key encapsulation system on Chrome stable for all users, which also caused some problems with TLS exchanges. The move from Kyber to ML-KEM though is not related to those early problems, that got resolved soon after manifesting. Rather, its a strategic choice to abandon an experimental system for a NIST-approved and fully standardized mechanism.

ML-KEM was fully endorsed by the U.S. National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) in mid-August, with the agency publishing the complete technical specifications of the final version at the time. Google explains that despite the technical changes from Kyber to ML-KEM being minor, the two are essentially incompatible, so a switch had to be made. "The changes to the final version of ML-KEM make it incompatible with the previously deployed version of Kyber," explains Google. "As a result, the codepoint in TLS for hybrid post-quantum key exchange is changing from 0x6399 for Kyber768+X25519, to 0x11EC for ML-KEM768+X25519."

Microsoft has abandoned plans to overhaul its Edge browser interface, scrapping the design choice unveiled in February 2023. The redesign -- featuring a sleeker look with rounded tab buttons and increased blur effects -- aimed to give Edge a distinct identity as the company pushed into AI services. The new design never officially launched and the company has no intention to launch it later, according to Microsoft-focused news outlet Windows Central.

A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed to Windows Central that the company is moving away from the rounded tabs concept. Some elements of the redesign will remain, including webpage borders and a repositioned user button, but the majority of the proposed changes have been shelved. The decision marks a retreat from Microsoft's efforts to visually differentiate Edge from Google Chrome and align it with Windows 11's design language.

Google is adding some new features to Chrome that aim to help users organize and keep track of their browser tabs across both desktop and mobile devices. From a report: The search giant announced in a new blog post that tab groups -- which enable Android and desktop Chrome users to keep related pages together in custom-labeled groups -- will start rolling out to Chrome for iOS starting today. Once Chrome is updated, iPhone and iPad users can access the feature by opening the tab grid, long-pressing on a tab, and selecting "Add Tab to New Group." Custom names and colors can then be assigned to the created tab groups to help keep them organized and easily identifiable. Another feature that's rolling out across Android and desktop Chrome apps is the ability to sync those saved tab groups across multiple devices.

Google's new ChromeOS 128 update introduces a feature similar to Windows 11's Snap layouts. Called Snap Groups, the feature enables users to organize on-screen apps in various fullscreen layouts. "When you pair two windows for split-screen display, ChromeOS now forms a Snap group," explains the ChromeOS team. "As a Snap group, you can bring the windows back into focus together, resize them simultaneously, and move them both as a group."

Other notable features of ChromeOS 128 include Optical Character Recognition (OCR), ChromeVox support for the Magnifier tool, isolated web apps (IWA), and improved settings for the camera and microphone on Chromebook devices.

You can view the release notes on the support document here.

Google says it has evidence that Russian government hackers are using exploits that are "identical or strikingly similar" to those previously made by spyware makers Intellexa and NSO Group. From a report: In a blog post on Thursday, Google said it is not sure how the Russian government acquired the exploits, but said this is an example of how exploits developed by spyware makers can end up in the hands of "dangerous threat actors." In this case, Google says the threat actors are APT29, a group of hackers widely attributed to Russia's Foreign Intelligence Service, or the SVR. APT29 is a highly capable group of hackers, known for its long-running and persistent campaigns aimed at conducting espionage and data theft against a range of targets, including tech giants Microsoft and SolarWinds, as well as foreign governments.

Google said it found the hidden exploit code embedded on Mongolian government websites between November 2023 and July 2024. During this time, anyone who visited these sites using an iPhone or Android device could have had their phone hacked and data stolen, including passwords, in what is known as a "watering hole" attack. The exploits took advantage of vulnerabilities in the iPhone's Safari browser and Google Chrome on Android that had already been fixed at the time of the suspected Russian campaign. Still, those exploits nevertheless could be effective in compromising unpatched devices.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Chrome users who declined to sync their Google accounts with their browsing data secured a big privacy win this week after previously losing a proposed class action claiming that Google secretly collected personal data without consent from over 100 million Chrome users who opted out of syncing. On Tuesday, the 9th US Circuit Court of Appeals reversed (PDF) the prior court's finding that Google had properly gained consent for the contested data collection. The appeals court said that the US district court had erred in ruling that Google's general privacy policies secured consent for the data collection. The district court failed to consider conflicts with Google's Chrome Privacy Notice (CPN), which said that users' "choice not to sync Chrome with their Google accounts meant that certain personal information would not be collected and used by Google," the appeals court ruled.

Rather than analyzing the CPN, it appears that the US district court completely bought into Google's argument that the CPN didn't apply because the data collection at issue was "browser agnostic" and occurred whether a user was browsing with Chrome or not. But the appeals court -- by a 3-0 vote -- did not. In his opinion, Circuit Judge Milan Smith wrote that the "district court should have reviewed the terms of Google's various disclosures and decided whether a reasonable user reading them would think that he or she was consenting to the data collection." "By focusing on 'browser agnosticism' instead of conducting the reasonable person inquiry, the district court failed to apply the correct standard," Smith wrote. "Viewed in the light most favorable to Plaintiffs, browser agnosticism is irrelevant because nothing in Google's disclosures is tied to what other browsers do."

Smith seemed to suggest that the US district court wasted time holding a "7.5-hour evidentiary hearing which included expert testimony about 'whether the data collection at issue'" was "browser-agnostic." "Rather than trying to determine how a reasonable user would understand Google's various privacy policies," the district court improperly "made the case turn on a technical distinction unfamiliar to most 'reasonable'" users, Smith wrote. Now, the case has been remanded to the district court where Google will face a trial over the alleged failure to get consent for the data collection. If the class action is certified, Google risks owing currently unknown damages to any Chrome users who opted out of syncing between 2016 and 2024. According to Smith, the key focus of the trial will be weighing the CPN terms and determining "what a 'reasonable user' of a service would understand they were consenting to, not what a technical expert would."

A rare bid to break up Alphabet's Google is one of the options being considered by the Justice Department after a landmark court ruling found that the company monopolized the online search market, Bloomberg News reported Tuesday, citing sources familiar with the matter. From the report: The move would be Washington's first push to dismantle a company for illegal monopolization since unsuccessful efforts to break up Microsoft two decades ago.

Less severe options include forcing Google to share more data with competitors and measures to prevent it from gaining an unfair advantage in AI products, said the people, who asked not to be identified discussing private conversations. Regardless, the government will likely seek a ban on the type of exclusive contracts that were at the center of its case against Google. If the Justice Department pushes ahead with a breakup plan, the most likely units for divestment are the Android operating system and Google's web browser Chrome, said the people. Officials are also looking at trying to force a possible sale of AdWords, the platform the company uses to sell text advertising, one of the people said.

Mozilla's interim CEO Laura Chambers "says the company is reinvesting in Firefox after letting it languish in recent years," reports Fast Company, "hoping to reestablish the browser as independent alternative to the likes of Google's Chrome and Apple's Safari.

"But some of those investments, which also include forays into generative AI, may further upset the community that's been sticking with Firefox all these years..." Chambers acknowledges that Mozilla lost sight of Firefox in recent years as it chased opportunities outside the browser, such as VPN service and email masking. When she replaced Mitchell Baker as CEO in February, the company scaled back those other efforts and made Firefox a priority again. "Yes, Mozilla is refocusing on Firefox," she says. "Obviously, it's our core product, so it's an important piece of the business for us, but we think it's also really an important part of the internet."

Some of that focus involves adding features that have become table-stakes in other browsers. In June, Mozilla added vertical tab support in Firefox's experimental branch, echoing a feature that Microsoft's Edge browser helped popularize three years ago. It's also working on tab grouping features and an easier way to switch between user profiles. Mozilla is even revisiting the concept of web apps, in which users can install websites as freestanding desktop applications. Mozilla abandoned work on Progressive Web Apps in Firefox a few years ago to the dismay of many power users, but now it's talking with community members about a potential path forward.

"We haven't always prioritized those features as highly as we should have," Chambers says. "That's been a real shift that's been very felt in the community, that the things they're asking for . . . are really being prioritized and brought to life."
Firefox was criticized for testing a more private alternative to tracking cookies which could make summaries of aggregated data available to advertisers. (Though it was only tested on a few sites, "Privacy-Preserving Attribution" was enabled by default.) But EFF staff technologist Lena Cohen tells Fast Company that approach was "much more privacy-preserving" than Google's proposal for a "Privacy Sandbox." And according to the article, "Mozilla's system only measures the success rate of ads — it doesn't help companies target those ads in the first place — and it's less susceptible to abuse due to limits on how much data is stored and which parties are allowed to access it." In June, Mozilla also announced its acquisition of Anonym, a startup led by former Meta executives that has its own privacy-focused ad measurement system. While Mozilla has no plans to integrate Anonym's tech in Firefox, the move led to even more anxiety about the kind of company Mozilla was becoming. The tension around Firefox stems in part from Mozilla's precarious financial position, which is heavily dependent on royalty payments from Google. In 2022, nearly 86% of Mozilla's revenue came from Google, which paid $510 million to be Firefox's default search engine. Its attempts to diversify, through VPN service and other subscriptions, haven't gained much traction.

Chambers says that becoming less dependent on Google is "absolutely a priority," and acknowledges that building an ad-tech business is one way of doing that. Mozilla is hoping that emerging privacy regulations and wider adoption of anti-tracking tools in web browsers will increase demand for services like Anonym and for systems like Firefox's privacy-preserving ad measurements. Other revenue-generating ideas are forthcoming. Chambers says Mozilla plans to launch new products outside of Firefox under a "design sprint" model, aimed at quickly figuring out what works and what doesn't. It's also making forays into generative AI in Firefox, starting with a chatbot sidebar in the browser's experimental branch.
Chambers "says to expect a bigger marketing push for Firefox in the United States soon, echoing a 'Challenge the default' ad campaign that was successful in Germany last summer. Mozilla's nonprofit ownership structure, and the idea that it's not beholden to corporate interests, figures heavily into those plans."

Though "It could take years to resolve," the Washington Post imagines six changes that could ultimately result from the two monopoly rulings on Google: Imagine a Google-quality search engine but without ads — or one tailored to children, news junkies or Lego fans. It's possible that Google could be forced to let other companies access its search technology or its essential data to create search engines with the technical chops of Google — but without Google...

Would Apple create a search engine...? The likeliest scenario is you'd need to pick whether to use Google on your iPhone or something else. But technologists and stock analysts have also speculated for years that Apple could make its own search engine. It would be like when Apple started Apple Maps as an alternative to Google Maps.

What if Google weren't allowed to know so much about you? Jason Kint of Digital Content Next, an industry group that includes online news organizations, said one idea is Google's multiple products would no longer be allowed to commingle information about what you do. It would essentially be a divorce of Google's products without breaking the company up. That could mean, for example, that whatever you did on your Android phone or the websites you visit using Chrome would not feed into one giant Google repository about your activities and interests.
The article also wonders if the judge could order Google to be broken up, with separate companies formed out of Android, Google search, and Chrome. (Or if more search competition might make prices drop for the products advertised in search results — or lower the fees charged in Android's app store.) Android's app store might also lose its power to veto apps that compete with Google.

"This is educated speculation," the article acknowledges. "It's also possible that not much will really change. That's what happened after Google was found to have broken the European Union's anti-monopoly laws."

Google has also said it plans to appeal Monday's ruling.

"CrowdStrike has continued doing what gave it such an expansive footprint in the first place," writes CSO Online — "detecting cyber threats and protecting its clients from them."

They interviewed Adam Meyers, CrowdStrike's SVP of counter adversary operations, whose team produced their 2024 Threat Hunting Report (released this week at the Black Hat conference). Of seven case studies presented in the report, the most daring is that of a group CrowdStrike calls Famous Chollima, an alleged DPRK-nexus group. Starting with a single incident in April 2024, CrowdStrike discovered that a group of North Koreans, posing as American workers, had been hired for multiple remote IT worker jobs in early 2023 at more than thirty US-based companies, including aerospace, defense, retail, and technology organizations.

CrowdStrike's threat hunters discovered that after obtaining employee-level access to victim networks, the phony workers performed at minimal enough levels to keep their jobs while attempting to exfiltrate data using Git, SharePoint, and OneDrive and installing remote monitoring and management (RMM) tools RustDesk, AnyDesk, TinyPilot, VS Code Dev Tunnels, and Google Chrome Remote Desktop. The workers leveraged these RMM tools with company network credentials, enabling numerous IP addresses to connect to victims' systems.

CrowdStrike's OverWatch hunters, a team of experts conducting analysis, hunted for RMM tooling combined with suspicious connections surfaced by the company's Falcon Identity Protection module to find more personas and additional indicators of compromise. CrowdStrike ultimately found that over 100 companies, most US-based technology entities, had hired Famous Chollima workers. The OverWatch team contacted victimized companies to inform them about potential insider threats and quickly corroborated its findings.
Thanks to Slashdot reader snydeq for sharing the news.

An anonymous reader shared this report from BleepingComputer: A Chinese hacking group tracked as StormBamboo has compromised an undisclosed internet service provider (ISP) to poison automatic software updates with malware. Also tracked as Evasive Panda, Daggerfly, and StormCloud, this cyber-espionage group has been active since at least 2012, targeting organizations across mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, Nigeria, and various Southeast and East Asian countries.

On Friday, Volexity threat researchers revealed that the Chinese cyber-espionage gang had exploited insecure HTTP software update mechanisms that didn't validate digital signatures to deploy malware payloads on victims' Windows and macOS devices... To do that, the attackers intercepted and modified victims' DNS requests and poisoned them with malicious IP addresses. This delivered the malware to the targets' systems from StormBamboo's command-and-control servers without requiring user interaction.
Volexity's blog post says they observed StormBamboo "targeting multiple software vendors, who use insecure update workflows..." and then "notified and worked with the ISP, who investigated various key devices providing traffic-routing services on their network. As the ISP rebooted and took various components of the network offline, the DNS poisoning immediately stopped."

BleepingComputer notes that "âAfter compromising the target's systems, the threat actors installed a malicious Google Chrome extension (ReloadText), which allowed them to harvest and steal browser cookies and mail data."

Apple's elaborate new ad campaign promises that Safari is "a browser that protects your privacy." And the Washington Post says Apple "deserves credit for making many privacy protections automatic with Safari..."

"But Albert Fox Cahn, executive director of the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, said Safari is no better than the fourth-best web browser for your privacy." "If browser privacy were a sport at the Olympics, Apple isn't getting on the medal stand," Cahn said. (Apple did not comment about this.)

Safari stops third-party cookies anywhere you go on the web. So do Mozilla's Firefox and the Brave browser... Chrome allows third-party cookies in most cases unless you turn them off... Even without cookies, a website can pull information like the resolution of your computer screen, the fonts you have installed, add-on software you use and other technical details that in aggregate can help identify your device and what you're doing on it. The measures, typically called "fingerprinting," are privacy-eroding tracking by another name. Nick Doty with the Center for Democracy & Technology said there's generally not much you can do about fingerprinting. Usually you don't know you're being tracked that way. Apple says it defends against common fingerprinting techniques but Cahn said Firefox, Brave and the Tor Browser all are better at protecting you from digital surveillance. That's why he said Safari is no better than the fourth-best browser for privacy.
Safari's does offer extra privacy protections in its "private" mode, the article points out. "When you use this option, Apple says it does more to block use of 'advanced' fingerprinting techniques. It also steps up defenses against tracking that adds bits of identifying information to the web links you click."

The article concludes that Safari users can "feel reasonably good about the privacy (and security) protections, but you can probably do better — either by tweaking your Apple settings or using a web browser that's even more private than Safari."

Google wants to help ease the pain of comparison shopping across multiple tabs in Chrome with a new AI-powered tool that can summarize your tabs into one page. From a report: The tool, which Google is calling "tab compare," will use generative AI to pull product data from tabs you have open and collect it all into one table. Assuming it works and pulls accurate information, the tool seems like it could be a handy way to look at a number of different products in one unified view.

But while it's potentially useful, the tool could also take away traffic from sites that collect and compare product information -- which might be especially worrying for independent publishers that are already struggling to be seen on Google. I'm also skeptical that Google will correctly pull all of the finer details about various products into the tables it creates with tab compare. I don't always trust Google's accuracy right now! There are some limits on what tab compare can do. The tables it creates are limited to 10 items because "we've just found the column layout doesn't scale very well beyond that," Google spokesperson Joshua Cruz tells The Verge.

Mozilla is following in Google Chrome's footsteps in officially distrusting Entrust as a root certificate authority (CA) following what it says was a protracted period of compliance failures. From a report: A little over a month ago, Google was the first to make the bold step of dropping Entrust as a CA, saying it noted a "pattern of concerning behaviors" from the company. Entrust has apologized to Google, Mozilla, and the wider web community, outlining its plans to regain the trust of browsers, but these appear to be unsatisfactory to both Google and Mozilla.

In an email shared by Mozilla's Ben Wilson on Wednesday, the root store manager said the decision wasn't taken lightly, but equally Entrust's response to Mozilla's concerns didn't inspire confidence that the situation would materially change for the better. "Mozilla previously requested that Entrust provide a detailed report on these recent incidents and their root causes, an evaluation of Entrust's recent actions in light of their previous commitments given in the aftermath of similarly serious incidents in 2020, and a proposal for how Entrust will re-establish Mozilla's and the community's trust," said Wilson.

The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) has expressed disappointment with Google's decision to retain third-party cookies, stating it undermines collaborative efforts. Google's reversal follows a five-year initiative to develop privacy-focused ad technology. While some advertising industry representatives welcomed the move, the W3C's criticism highlights the ongoing debate over online privacy and advertising practices. W3C writes: Third-party cookies are not good for the web. They enable tracking, which involves following your activity across multiple websites. They can be helpful for use cases like login and single sign-on, or putting shopping choices into a cart -- but they can also be used to invisibly track your browsing activity across sites for surveillance or ad-targeting purposes. This hidden personal data collection hurts everyone's privacy.

We aren't the only ones who are worried. The updated RFC that defines cookies says that third-party cookies have "inherent privacy issues" and that therefore web "resources cannot rely upon third-party cookies being treated consistently by user agents for the foreseeable future." We agree. Furthermore, tracking and subsequent data collection and brokerage can support micro-targeting of political messages, which can have a detrimental impact on society, as identified by Privacy International and other organizations. Regulatory authorities, such as the UK's Information Commissioner's Office, have also called for the blocking of third-party cookies.

The job of the TAG as stewards of the architecture of the web has us looking at the big picture (the whole web platform) and the details (proposed features and specs). We try to provide guidance to spec authors so that their new technologies fill holes that need to be filled, don't conflict with other parts of the web, and don't set us up for avoidable trouble in the future. We've been working with Chrome's Privacy Sandbox team (as well as others in the W3C community) for several years, trying to help them create better approaches for the things that third-party cookies do. While we haven't always agreed with the Privacy Sandbox team, we have made substantial progress together. This announcement came out of the blue, and undermines a lot of the work we've done together to make the web work without third-party cookies.

The unfortunate climb-down will also have secondary effects, as it is likely to delay cross-browser work on effective alternatives to third-party cookies. We fear it will have an overall detrimental impact on the cause of improving privacy on the web. We sincerely hope that Google reverses this decision and re-commits to a path towards removal of third-party cookies.

An unexpected disapperance of saved passwords "impacted Chrome web browser users from all over the world," writes Forbes, "leaving them unable to find any passwords already saved using the Chrome password manager." Newly saved passwords were also rendered invisible to the affected users. Google, which has now fixed the issue, said that the problem was limited to the M127 version of Chrome Browser on the Windows platform.

The precise number of users to be hit by the Google password manager vanishing act is hard to pin down. However, working on the basis that there are more than 3 billion Chrome web browser users, with Windows users counting for the vast majority of these, it's possible to come up with an estimated number. Google said that 25% of the user base saw the configuration change rolled out, which, by my calculations, is around 750 million. Of these, around 2%, according to Google's estimation, were hit by the password manager issue. That means around 15 million users have seen their passwords vanish into thin air.

Google said that an interim workaround was provided at the time, which involved the particularly user-unfriendly process of launching the Chrome browser with a command line flag of " — enable-features=SkipUndecryptablePasswords." Thankfully, the full fix that has now been rolled out just requires users to restart their Chrome browser to take effect.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hacker News: Google said it's adding new security warnings when downloading potentially suspicious and malicious files via its Chrome web browser. "We have replaced our previous warning messages with more detailed ones that convey more nuance about the nature of the danger and can help users make more informed decisions," Jasika Bawa, Lily Chen, and Daniel Rubery from the Chrome Security team said. To that end, the search giant is introducing a two-tier download warning taxonomy based on verdicts provided by Google Safe Browsing: Suspicious files and Dangerous files. Each category comes with its own iconography, color, and text to distinguish them from one another and help users make an informed choice.

Google is also adding what's called automatic deep scans for users who have opted-in to the Enhanced Protection mode of Safe Browsing in Chrome so that they don't have to be prompted each time to send the files to Safe Browsing for deep scanning before opening them. In cases where such files are embedded within password-protected archives, users now have the option to "enter the file's password and send it along with the file to Safe Browsing so that the file can be opened and a deep scan may be performed." Google emphasized that the files and their associated passwords are deleted a short time after the scan and that the collected data is only used for improving download protections.

In a blog post today, Google said it has an "updated approach" that won't involve "deprecating third-party cookies" in Chrome. Instead, it's introducing "a new experience in Chrome that lets people make an informed choice that applies across their web browsing," which they'd be able to adjust at any time. Digiday reports: Google executives are already discussing this pivot with regulators including the U.K.'s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) and Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) and plan to do the same with the industry soon. For now, details on what this actually means remain light. And as for a timeline, Google seems to have learned its lesson from the numerous delays to its cookie-killing plans -- there isn't one. "As this moves forward, it remains important for developers to have privacy-preserving alternatives," Anthony Chavez, vp of the Privacy Sandbox, said in the blog post. "We'll continue to make the Privacy Sandbox APIs available and invest in them to further improve privacy and utility."

For those who have poured time and effort into third-party cookie alternatives, fear not: Google will keep the APIs in the Sandbox. Your work isn't going to waste. In fact, the plan is to continue to invest in them, continued Chavez, to further improve "privacy and utility." Plus, additional privacy controls, like the recently announced IP Protection (i.e. IP masking for privacy protection) in Chrome's Incognito mode, will be added to the Sandbox. "We developed the Privacy Sandbox with the goal of finding innovative solutions that meaningfully improve online privacy while preserving an ad-supported internet that supports a vibrant ecosystem of publishers, connects businesses with customers, and offers all of us free access to a wide range of content," Chavez wrote in the blog post. Or, to put it another way, the Sandbox isn't going anywhere anytime soon.

"The latest version of the Linux kernel adds an array of improvements," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu, " including a new memory sealing system call, a speed boost for AES-XTS encryption on Intel and AMD CPUs, and expanding Rust language support within the kernel to RISC-V." Plus, like in all kernel releases, there's a glut of groundwork to offer "initial support" for upcoming CPUs, GPUs, NPUs, Wi-Fi, and other hardware (that most of us don't use yet, but require Linux support to be in place for when devices that use them filter out)...

Linux 6.10 adds (after much gnashing) the mseal() system call to prevent changes being made to portions of the virtual address space. For now, this will mainly benefit Google Chrome, which plans to use it to harden its sandboxing. Work is underway by kernel contributors to allow other apps to benefit, though. A similarly initially-controversial change merged is a new memory-allocation profiling subsystem. This helps developers fine-tune memory usage and more readily identify memory leaks. An explainer from LWN summarizes it well.

Elsewhere, Linux 6.10 offers encrypted interactions with trusted platform modules (TPM) in order to "make the kernel's use of the TPM reasonably robust in the face of external snooping and packet alteration attacks". The documentation for this feature explains: "for every in-kernel operation we use null primary salted HMAC to protect the integrity [and] we use parameter encryption to protect key sealing and parameter decryption to protect key unsealing and random number generation." Sticking with security, the Linux kernel's Landlock security module can now apply policies to ioctl() calls (Input/Output Control), restricting potential misuse and improving overall system security.

On the networking side there's significant performance improvements to zero-copy send operations using io_uring, and the newly-added ability to "bundle" multiple buffers for send and receive operations also offers an uptick in performance...

A couple of months ago Canonical announced Ubuntu support for the RISC-V Milk-V Mars single-board computer. Linux 6.10 mainlines support for the Milk-V Mars, which will make that effort a lot more viable (especially with the Ubuntu 24.10 kernel likely to be v6.10 or newer). Others RISC-V improvements abound in Linux 6.10, including support for the Rust language, boot image compression in BZ2, LZ4, LZMA, LZO, and Zstandard (instead of only Gzip); and newer AMD GPUs thanks to kernel-mode FPU support in RISC-V.
Phoronix has their own rundown of Linux 6.10, plus a list of some of the highlights, which includes:

• The initial DRM Panic infrastructure
• The new Panthor DRM driver for newer Arm Mali graphics
• Better AMD ROCm/AMDKFD support for "small" Ryzen APUs and new additions for AMD Zen 5.
• AMD GPU display support on RISC-V hardware thanks to RISC-V kernel mode FPU
• More Intel Xe2 graphics preparations
• Better IO_uring zero-copy performance
• Faster AES-XTS disk/file encryption with modern Intel and AMD CPUs
• Continued online repair work for XFS
• Steam Deck IMU support
• TPM bus encryption and integrity protection

An anonymous reader shares a report: ChromeOS Flex extends the lifespan of older hardware and contributes to reducing e-waste, making it an environmentally conscious choice. Unfortunately, recent developments hint at a potential end for ChromeOS Flex. As detailed in a June 12 blog post by Prajakta Gudadhe, senior director of engineering for ChromeOS, and Alexander Kuscher, senior director of product management for ChromeOS, Google's announcement about integrating ChromeOS with Android to enhance AI capabilities suggests that Flex might not be part of this future.

Google's plan, as detailed, suggests that ChromeOS Flex could be phased out, leaving its current users in a difficult position. The ChromiumOS community around ChromeOS Flex may attempt to adjust to these changes if Google open sources ChromeOS Flex, but this is not a guarantee. In the meantime, users may want to consider alternatives, such as various Linux distributions, to keep their older hardware functional.