Ancient Slashdot reader Gilmoure shares a report from Tom's Hardware, adding: "Huh. Looks like consuming one's own slop does not turn the wheels of industry." From the report: Amazon wants its engineers to quit chasing token counts, warning that heavy AI usage does not automatically mean better work. In updated engineering guidelines published on October 27, the company laid out how developers and managers should gauge AI's real impact -- and the takeaway is blunt: consuming more tokens is not the same as delivering more value. [...]

According to the memo, metrics such as AI adoption rates, token consumption, code changes, and code reviews become "deeply flawed" when they are disconnected from actual results. Turning them into targets, Amazon says, encourages wasteful behavior that clashes with its emphasis on "frugality and simplicity" and can raise both compute bills and software complexity.

The company's preferred yardstick is long-term results. "We believe that it is best to measure, and be measured by, long-term outcomes," Amazon wrote. That does not mean managers should ignore usage data altogether, as input metrics remain useful when examined "with care and judgment" alongside other indicators. Amazon suggests looking at both the teams using AI the least and those using it the most to determine whether adoption is translating into better delivery.

[...] The memo also pushes back on the idea that every task needs an AI tool. If current tooling does not benefit someone's work, Amazon says, that is "a finding, not a failing." Engineers who can explain where today's tools fall short are demonstrating judgment rather than reluctance to adopt AI.

"EMACS, the mother of all editors, turns 50!" writes Slashdot reader dr_jerry, sharing a report from MIT Technology Review: Programming used to be a very different experience from the one we know today. In fact, the first programmers didn't write code at all; the six women who worked on the ENIAC, one of the world's first computers, at the University of Pennsylvania in 1946 did it by physically configuring switches, cables, and plugboards.

A few years later, MIT engineers programmed the Whirlwind by punching code onto paper tape that was then loaded into the computer's memory -- making it among the first "stored-program" machines. Later, they and others moved on to punch cards, one for each line of code.

By the early 1960s, programmers with interactive computers could use a "line editor" to type their code on teletypes -- large, noisy keyboard-and-printer machines. They'd type one line of code at a time, and their work would be saved on a spinning hard disk the size of a modern washing machine. But there was still no such thing as the now-familiar full-screen text editors that allow programmers to see and modify many lines at a time on a display.

One of the first such tools, EMACS, turns 50 this year, and it is still widely used. EMACS first ran on the early video terminals at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in 1976, but its core concepts were so powerful that it was rewritten for many operating systems in the decades that followed. Apple even distributed it with Mac OS X. Beyond that, the software-sharing community that started around EMACS helped give rise to the modern-day free software movement and the GNU/Linux operating system.

Ford's upcoming $28,350 Fathom electric truck will include a built-in inverter capable of supplying up to 10 kW of AC power to a home, bringing bidirectional charging to a significantly cheaper EV. Owners will still need additional Ford home hardware for features like outage backup and peak-rate energy management, but the company expects the necessary equipment to cost substantially less than its previous-generation system. CNET reports: The upcoming Fathom will be based on what Ford calls its Universal EV Platform, designed with the aid of its 2023 acquisition, startup Auto Motive Power, with bidirectional power on the plate from the start. The hardware required to invert the battery's DC energy to an estimated 10 kW of AC home power will be built into the truck, so it won't require a separate wall-mounted inverter box. Ford says the Fathom's system will meet all applicable UL 1741 requirements and IEEE 1547 standards to ensure the vehicle is safely connected to the grid. As for the actual hardware you plug into your car, all signs point to the Fathom using the NACS plug type pioneered by Tesla and now widely adopted by new EVs in North America. In terms of the communication standard -- the one that governs how AC power is routed from the slim wall box to the car's onboard charger -- that'll be via SAE J3068, a software protocol developed for high-power, heavy-duty AC charging.

[...] However, while Fathom's Universal EV Platform eliminates the need for a wall inverter box, it doesn't completely bypass the need for additional hardware to make your home ready to accept bidirectional power. Say you wanted to take advantage of the Home Power Management feature to draw energy into the Fathom's battery when power is cheapest, and then use that energy to offset peak-hour usage when power is most expensive. You'll have to install at least the Ford Home Power Station in your home, at an additional cost. The automaker hasn't specified pricing, but says that it's working to reduce costs and expects this component alone to cost half as much as the first-generation Ford Home Energy system, which debuted at around $1,300. That could put the new system at roughly $650.

Intel, Oracle, IBM and IonQ have joined a growing list of companies objecting to having tokenized versions of their shares traded through OKX and Intercontinental Exchange's blockchain venture, bringing the total number of objections to 26. About 37% of the companies on OKXICE's original list have now opted out, according to CoinDesk. From the report: The four companies were named in an updated public notice (PDF) dated Monday, Oct. 26, from OKXICE, the two firms' joint venture. They join earlier objectors including Microsoft, Alphabet, Goldman Sachs, Cisco and Wells Fargo. The growing list underscores a hurdle for OKXICE and the SEC's new framework for tokenized stock trading: building a market that issuers are willing to join. The agency's five-year "Innovation Exemption" gives qualifying venues room to test round-the-clock blockchain-based trading of stocks, and it also gives public companies an option to block their shares from being offered.

OKXICE issued its initial public notice on Oct. 4, outlining plans to use Uniswap v4 liquidity pools on OKX's XLayer blockchain, with transactions settled in stablecoins. The venue would use automated market makers -- software that executes trades through pools of assets rather than matching buyers and sellers through a conventional order book. Under the framework, venues must notify issuers and give them 30 days to object before offering tokenized versions of their shares.

Denmark's Ministry of Digitization reportedly abandoned a pilot to replace Microsoft Office with the open-source Collabora suite less than six months after it began. Tom's Hardware reports: According to Danish publication Computerworld, the pilot project was launched in 2025 and involved 38 employees, all of whom would start using the British open-source Collabora office suite instead of Word, PowerPoint, and Excel. The experiment was initiated by the then Digitization Minister Caroline Stage, who wanted to reduce the country's dependence on American technology. Denmark isn't alone in moving away from U.S. software, with France and the Netherlands both taking steps to replace Microsoft Windows. However, it seemed that the experiment fizzled out less than six months after it started. It had reportedly ended by the time the Danish government called for an early election in February 2026, with some employees complaining about issues with style, paragraph formatting, blank pages, and challenges with tracking changes.

But even though it's been months since the experiment reportedly ended, Prof. Mikkel Flyberbom of the Copenhagen Business School complains that the project hasn't been properly evaluated. "It's a good idea to test alternatives in a pilot project," the professor said in an email. "However, I wish that the ministry would take the opportunity to learn from the pilot project and share those experiences with other parts of the public sector."

Highway thieves have stolen more than $100 million in data center equipment since June, employing increasingly sophisticated tactics such as forging driver IDs and spoofing GPS tracking systems. NBC News (paywalled) reports that thieves have "made away with more than $100 million in data center freight." Ars Technica reports: Here's how they said thieves get away with it: First, thieves hack freight brokers' accounts on shipment-listing websites and post fake shipments to lure real bids, then send a malicious link to any trucking companies that respond. Once victims click, thieves install software to take control of their accounts and start bidding on real shipments. Sometimes, a real delivery driver is hired to collect the cargo, unaware of the scam, and other times fake driver's licenses are used to get accomplices hired. Either way, the goods are eventually transferred to a driver working with the thieves to resell the gear, and, in one of the largest thefts, tracking coordinates were spoofed to prevent digital monitoring. Equipment commonly targeted includes "servers, fiber-optic cables, computer memory chips, copper wires, and bitcoin mining machines," NBC News reported.

Some trailers hit seem to be carrying only data center equipment, like two stolen freights found in Illinois. The Cook County Sheriff's Office estimated those contained $300,000 worth of copper wire spools and about $1 million in "custom-made data center modular power solutions equipment," NBC News reported. Other trucks impacted were carrying additional freight, like a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department case where "data center cooling equipment" bound for Deepcool AI was recovered among nicotine pouches, televisions, shoes, printers, speakers, and skin care cosmetics. Experts worry that means Americans may be broadly harmed by the thefts, not just the AI industry.

While some stolen goods have been recovered, in two of the largest thefts that NBC News found, none of the equipment was found, and off-duty cops hired to escort the shipments were targeted in hit-and-runs. [...] Broadly, cargo thieves are infiltrating email accounts to find lucrative shipments, misdirecting shipments, disrupting GPS tracking, and using AI to create fake driver's licenses to get accomplices hired as delivery drivers. LASD's Sgt. David Pantoja told NBC News "that's how most of it is being done," which is a big shift from the past when highway thefts were largely opportunistic.

The problem? Understanding how AI coding agents interact with the software you build. "Whether you're maintaining an SDK, building a command-line interface, or publishing an MCP server or skills... you need to understand whether agents can discover and use what you ship, and what your team can change."

Results can vary, and configurations keep changing, with behaviors influenced by everything from custom instructions and MCP servers to skills and plugins. So after a year of development Microsoft has created Scope, "an open-source platform built on Kubernetes for turning those interactions into evidence product teams can act on."

Details are available on... the Microsoft open source blog: Available under the MIT License, Scope supports a continuous Developer Agent Experience (DevAx) learning loop grounded in repeatable experiments.

The Azure Cosmos DB team's experience shows what that loop can deliver... "The evaluations led to 20 Agent Kit issues and 27 documentation issues resolved," [says Jay Gordon, Senior Program Manager, Azure Cosmos DB]... These results connect evaluation to decisions a product team can make: which documentation needs clarification, where tooling needs a fix, and whether an update changes agent behavior.... [The gains] demonstrate how targeted changes, informed by observed behavior, can improve the way agents use a product.

For more on the shift from building for human developers to supporting agents, watch Your Product Was Built for Humans. Is It Ready for Agents? or join us at AI DevCon NYC conference in November.
Scope surfaces everything from incorrect assumptions in documentation (or recurring missed instructions) to whether agents select the intended SDK, initialize it correctly, and use its APIs, leading to clearer descriptions for command-line tool and more actionable errors.

Microsoft's open source blog also explains why AI agent evaluation needs an open-source foundation: The challenges behind agent experience aren't unique to one product or organization. SDK maintainers, tool authors, researchers, and agent developers are all asking how agents behave and what helps them succeed. No single team can represent every language, workflow, or integration. An open project can bring more scenarios, more failure cases, and more viewpoints into the evaluation process... Opening Scope's execution and evaluation code gives contributors a way to question the methods, investigate unexpected results, and improve the evaluation itself. A shared foundation also reduces duplicated infrastructure. Agent integrations, reusable criteria, and trace-analysis improvements can help other teams study their own products without rebuilding the same machinery. The goal isn't one universal benchmark or definition of success. It's a common starting point that teams can adapt to their needs.

The MIT License lets teams use and extend Scope, while self-managed deployments let them evaluate private workloads without publishing their code or run data.... Scope streams activity as the agent works and retains interactions and workspace snapshots for later review. Your team can follow tool calls, inspect generated files, and connect a failed requirement to the steps that preceded it. Those traces provide observable evidence of what the agent did, helping turn a failure into a concrete documentation, SDK, or tooling improvement.

"59% of maintainers report growing contribution volume since the rise of GenAI," according to a new study published by Linux Foundation Research. But 25% of their incoming pull requests "are estimated to be low-quality, also known as 'AI slop'." And on large projects, 69% see growing contributions — and estimate that 31% are low-quality/AI slop.

So what do these results show us? "Generative AI is fundamentally changing how people participate in open source," says the head of Open Source Ecosystem Development at Huawei's R&D subsidiary Futurewei, which helped support the study. Specifically GenAI is "lowering barriers to contribution" but also "creating new challenges" for maintainers and communities. Their recommendation? "Build the governance, transparency and trust mechanisms that allow AI-assisted contributions to strengthen, but not overwhelm, the open source ecosystem."

"Open source projects need to design for a growing AI-generated contributor base, not simply react to it," said Hilary Carter, SVP of Research at the Linux Foundation. "That means setting clear expectations for GenAI, putting responsibility for testing and disclosure on contributors and giving maintainers better tools to manage incoming pull requests. If we get those fundamentals right, AI can expand participation without overburdening and increasing costs for maintainers."

More from the blog It's FOSS: LF Research is the Linux Foundation's research arm. It was set up in 2021 and publishes studies on how open source is built and used, drawing on surveys and project data. Its latest report, Navigating Open Source Software Development in the Generative AI Era, surveyed 234 contributors and maintainers on how generative AI is affecting the way open source gets made...

64% say reviews now take longer. Burnout is their top concern at 63%, narrowly ahead of contribution quality at 60%.

You will also find that policies have not caught up to the AI-assisted coding and vulnerability reporting trend. Of the 119 respondents who answered the question, 35% said their project has a formal policy permitting AI use. Another 32% have none and no plans for one, 23% plan to write one, and 10% ban AI contributions outright....

Most maintainers (71%) say AI makes it easier for newcomers to start contributing.
Other interesting findings:

• "Respondents estimate average time reductions across all six OSS development activities measured, including proposal discussions (19%) and code authoring (52%). For high-complexity tasks, however, 21% of respondents report taking more time when using GenAI."

• "71% of maintainers agree GenAI reduces barriers to entry for OSS, but 53% of maintainers disagree that GenAI has improved community trust."

• Developers are reinvesting the time they save back into open source: 66% report using productivity gains to address technical debt, 63% to develop new features and 58% for learning and upskilling.

• Continued investment in human mentorship remains important: 46% of maintainers say GenAI increases the need for mentorship of new contributors, compared with 32% who say it decreases that need.

OpenSSF and LF AI & Data also helped support the study.

The Free Software Foundation's "EncryptFest" today covers both encryption and privacy. The free two-hour event runs from 13:00-15:00 Eastern Daylight Time (17:00-19:00 UTC), and includes:

— A discussion on "bulk surveillance, and how encryption protects personal privacy"

— A short video from renowned cryptographer Bruce Schneier.

— A discussion with Henry Fisher, the founder of Techlore and a digital rights activist

— A hands-on workshop on how you can encrypt your email using the FSF's Email Self-Defense guide "as a concrete step to enhance your data privacy"

You may join us virtually, or if you are in Boston, Massachusetts, United States (the FSF's home base), you can join us in-person at the Boston Public Library's Copley Square branch. You may also join us in-person at MakeHaven in New Haven, Connecticut, US, and meet our deputy director Sean O'Brien. Whether attending our event online or in-person, please register. It will help us plan ahead and enable us to contact you about other important details before the workshop, like what to expect and what to bring...

Bulk surveillance violates our fundamental rights and makes free speech dangerous. Email encryption is an excellent tool you can use to shield yourself from bulk surveillance. Encrypting your email is also a concrete step towards protecting your data from others whose intentions may not be honorable.

Computer Weekly reports: A Censuswide survey of 2,018 CIOs and senior IT decision-makers at large organisations in the US and UK for independent software maintenance provider Origina has found that organisations spend almost $13m on upgrades pushed by IT providers. On average, 28% of enterprise software budgets go on upgrades, migrations and licensing changes driven by their IT suppliers. IT leaders who took part in the study reported that their organisation would not have actively chosen to upgrade...

The research published in Origina's The Software Tax report, in partnership with Thinkers50, suggests these costs have shifted the balance of power between buyers and sellers. Customers exercise choice once, at the point of purchase. After that, control over the timing and terms of change passes largely to the IT supplier. Out of those surveyed, 78% agree their primary provider of enterprise software, rather than their own organisation, sets the timing and terms of change. A similar proportion said they would have no meaningful choice but to accept if a major enterprise IT provider changed its commercial terms. Some 76% said their organisation has very little real leverage in negotiations, and 80% said moving away from major IT suppliers would cause significant disruption...

Marshall Van Alstyne, professor at Boston University and co-author of The Software Tax, said: "Economists have studied this problem for decades: once a customer makes relationship-specific investments, the vendor gains leverage that no contract can fully anticipate. For CIOs, the lesson is simple: negotiate the exit before the entry. You don't have to leave a vendor to benefit from being able to."
The problem can be summarized succinctly, says Tomás O'Leary, CEO/founder of Origina and co-author of The Software Tax.

"The market has left some of the most experienced technology leaders in the world with little room to refuse, and that cost shows up in budgets, in engineering time and in innovation that never gets funded. We want to make that cost visible so customers can start to take back control of it."

In February the Python Software Foundation made its wikis read-only "due to excessive automated traffic and security concerns... that traffic turned out to be almost entirely AI bots that were trying to scrape the entire internet."

But their infrastructure was also outdated, and this week they announced new wikis using GitHub Pages "that address the automated traffic and security concerns." The new wikis [for Python, Jython, and the PSF] will have a more modern front-end, as well as a permissions-based content management system for community members to make updates.

With the old wiki structure, we received a large volume of alerts at all hours, each serious enough to page and wake our on-call infrastructure staff, which is very limited (just one person currently, although this will be changing soon!). The quantity of scraping overloaded our servers, causing outages, which happened often enough that these issues required a significant amount of effort for the PSF staff to manage...

Additionally, some portions of the wikis were still built with Python 2. Python 2 reached end of life on January 1, 2020, and no longer receives upstream security fixes. Moving to a static site makes it very fast and reduces security risks, while also having the benefit of a more modern user interface... GitHub was chosen for the home of the new wikis as this is where CPython, python.org, and other properties the PSF hosts currently live. The hope is to continue to streamline the PSF's hosting and stewardship of services to simplify for both PSF staff and the community folks who contribute to them. Previously, the Python and Jython wikis were user-editable by invitation of an existing editor and the PSF wiki was permissions based. Moving forward, all three of the wikis will be permissions based via the GitHub repository they are hosted on, and changes can be requested through pull requests by anyone in the community...

GitHub allows us to distribute granular control, review changes through pull requests, and maintain the uptime this service deserves. Also, since the site is now generated statically, it removes any worry about AI bots overwhelming the hosts that the wikis were previously hosted on.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: A new startup launched today with the definitely not terrifying mission of creating genetically enhanced dogs for the United States military, law enforcement, and emergency first responders. Warhound is the brainchild of Anduril's Palmer Luckey and Colossal Biosciences cofounder Ben Lamm. The startup has raised $200 million to "rebuild America's domestic supply of elite working dogs" and reduce dependency on European dog breeders for military canines.

Lamm tells WIRED that Warhound is in the process of gene-editing its first batch of dogs. The startup has already collected blood samples from specific "top-performing" military, police, and first responder dogs in the United States, and its goal is to clone them. Breeds will be "mostly Belgian Malinois, some labs, and some shepherds," he says. The company anticipates the first round of puppies to be born in early 2027. The initial rounds of gene-editing will focus on eliminating common health conditions that impact these breeds, like hip dysplasia. Further down the line, Lamm envisions expanding to "really interesting things," such as incorporating olfactory receptor genes from wolves to "enhance" the military dogs. (Colossal Biosciences is perhaps best known for its work on gene-edited wolves for its so-called Dire Wolf De-Extinction Project.)

Warhound, based in Texas, will also equip its canines with "Anduril's advanced cybernetic Augments, software, and battlefield situational awareness," according to a press release. Asked if this means the dogs will be some kind of cyborgs, Lamm clarifies that the plan right now is to supply them with tools like "advanced body armor" rather than, say, embedding some sort of computer in their dog bodies. "So no dogs with lasers?" WIRED asked Lamm. "I can't comment on what Anduril plans," he says. "Dog safety and performance, and then helping continue helping to improve the human handler and dog bond, and working as a team -- that is what the mission is." [...] The company plans to operate under the guidance of the American Humane Society.

Frustrated by intrusive ads, sluggish interfaces, and data tracking, smart TV owners are using AI coding tools and open-source projects to strip unwanted software from their televisions and build customized home screens. The Verge reports: Several vibe-coded TV-debloating projects exploded in popularity over the weekend. Cleanyourtv (known as tv-vibehack until the 19th), tv-detox, and dumbtv all claim to accomplish similar things -- remove sponsored ads, debloat the TV so it runs faster, and block unwanted data collection that tracks what you're watching -- without hacking, or rooting, the TV. By default, they all also replace the TV's built-in app launcher with simpler ones. Many users are going a step further and vibe-coding their own replacement launchers, like the Pokemon one below.

Most of the projects we've seen so far focus on TVs that run on Android and Google TV operating systems (such as TCL, Hisense, Sony, and older Amazon Fire products), using existing developer modes and the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) to tweak settings and apply (and remove) packages. According to the GitHub pages, they can also work with some Fire TV products that use a custom fork of Android (although likely not on the new Vega-based Fire TV Sticks). Because they use built-in developer tools, they don't require root access or firmware hacking, and they're reversible. Even projects that totally change the look of the interface just use Android's ability to install custom launchers -- in many cases with an assist from Claude Code or a similar tool to create the new launcher, too.

Elon Musk says a merger between Tesla and SpaceX is under active consideration, with special committees at both companies evaluating a deal that could combine businesses valued at roughly $3.5 trillion. "Do I think it would be a good idea? Yes," Musk said during a call with financial analysts over the quarterly business results of SpaceX on Tuesday. The BBC reports: While Musk noted the certainty of such a merger should not be assumed, and it would need shareholders' support, he said special committees within both companies have been formed to examine the move. "The special committees have not reached agreement on terms of any transaction and there's no guarantee that they will," Musk added. "But I do think there is a lot of merit to merging and a lot to be gained."

[...] The company, which builds space rockets and Starlink internet satellites, is now expanding into offering cloud compute capacity for other tech companies, like Anthropic and Google. That line of business has become the most profitable part of SpaceX, bringing in $7.5bn according to the latest quarterly results (PDF). Starlink also tallied revenue of $5.2bn. SpaceX as a whole, however, is not profitable and has lost $1.1bn so far this year.

[...] Musk said on Tuesday a full merger between the two companies would make sense for the work each is doing around chips, artificial intelligence, software and more. He described himself as a "conflicted party" as the chief executive of Tesla and of SpaceX. Even commenting on the possibility of a merger between the two companies, Musk compared to "tap dancing through a minefield." He added a merger would ultimately be decided by shareholders. At least 50% of Tesla's shareholders would need to approve the merger, which Musk described as "quite a high hurdle to achieve."

Wine has been successfully ported to OpenBSD, with developers reporting that dozens of 64-bit Windows applications now run on the operating system. "Even the Remaster of The Witcher 3 which released just last month runs, and runs well," writes Thomas Frohwein, OpenBSD developer and ports maintainer. OSnews reports: The biggest limitation seems to be the lack of support for WoW64, so 32bit Windows software won't work. Still, this is a massive milestone for OpenBSD, and makes especially gaming a somewhat viable option on OpenBSD.

Long-time Slashdot reader ardiri remembers his days writing applications for the Palm OS. And he's now released approximately 1.5 GB of historical Palm OS development resources, "accumulated during the early days of handheld computing and preserved on hard drive backups for more than 25 years... to preserve the tools and knowledge that helped define an important era of personal computing." The collection includes historical SDKs, developer conference presentations, technical documentation, programming examples, limited source code, and development utilities. (ROM images, commercial applications, and simulator binaries have deliberately been excluded....) Making a broader collection of development resources available to the retrocomputing community, the archive is available at GitHub.com/ardiri/dev-palmos and is intended for historical preservation, education, and research, particularly as enthusiasts continue working to maintain, emulate, and revive the platform... Ardiri has also written an auto-biography and has started explored the engineering principles behind these systems in his books.
And somewhere along the way, Ardiri rediscovered the original source code for "The Palm OS Virus That Never Was — Lost for 25 Years, Found in 2026." Lurking on a CompactFlash card containing files dated June 2001, he found the self-replicating Palm OS virus that he'd developed and tested in June 2001, months before the planned PalmSource developer conference in San Jose. Named 'Virii,' the virus intercepted Palm OS system calls to progressively infect legitimate applications while preserving their original functionality. Infected applications could then spread between handheld devices through infrared beaming, potentially allowing an infection to propagate among hundreds of developers exchanging software at the conference. The virus also included a date-triggered payload designed to interfere with system time reporting between October 23 and 27, 2001, potentially causing erratic clocks, unreliable alarms, and missed appointments.
He promises the functional source code and binaries will remain private.

The Free Software Foundation "has never supported Raspberry Pi," writes their deputy directory Sean O'Brien, "as it depends on nonfree software for the boot process, leaving an important part of the computer outside the user's control."

But they're now decrying "an even more intrusive restriction on user freedom" — the binary-blob bootloader changes that limit your ability to upgrade RAM: The restriction is not new: the relevant checks were introduced in the device firmware around 2024. However, these hardware handcuffs have only recently received wider attention. Though a user can desolder the original memory and install electrically compatible RAM, the nonfree firmware may refuse to recognize the additional memory, or simply decide not to boot the computer at all. Even replacement RAM of the same capacity can be rejected.

This is worse than Raspberry Pi's longstanding dependence on nonfree firmware in an important way. It is not only nonfree software, but it is Digital Restrictions Management (DRM), used in this case to prevent the owner of the computer from making a modification that the hardware is otherwise capable of supporting. That distinction matters. Soldered RAM is difficult for most people to replace since it is a physical characteristic of the hardware. In the case of Raspberry Pi boards, users have demonstrated that the hardware itself can be modified successfully....

Raspberry Pi justifies the use of DRM on the basis of being able to identify altered computers. There may be legitimate reasons for wanting to identify such altered computers. Unscrupulous sellers have reportedly replaced memory on lower-capacity boards and resold them as more expensive models, sometimes using unreliable or defective components. But preventing fraud and maintaining quality does not require taking control away from users. A Raspberry Pi could record its original factory configuration in a cryptographically verifiable form. Raspberry Pi could use free software that warns the user when the installed RAM differs from original factory configuration. Raspberry Pi could provide tools allowing buyers to verify what hardware originally shipped with a board. None of those measures requires a software-enforced limit on what an owner may do with the computer...

If compatible hardware can be installed successfully, the manufacturer should not create restrictions to prevent the owner from using it. Restrictions on hardware upgrades are deeply troubling from an organization like Raspberry Pi that has stated their commitment to longevity as a guiding principle. Free software is ultimately about who controls the computer. The user should control it, not the manufacturer that sold it....

The people who own these computers must also have the freedom to modify, repair, and upgrade them, without restrictions imposed by nonfree software limiting their potential.
Hackaday recently argued the restriction was "no big deal." noting there's ways to bypass the restriction" The bootloader is stored in the SPI flash chip, which can be reflashed using the built-in mask ROM over USB and rpiboot, and you are not prevented from flashing older versions of the bootloader, so far... If you have the skills to upgrade your RAM, you most certainly have the skills to downgrade the Raspberry Pi bootloader...

My advice: don't lament Raspberry Pi RAM upgrades, especially given they're only slightly harder to perform now. Very few hackers ever performed them, the main audience for them turned out to be dodgy hardware resellers online... Think of the users that will no longer be fooled by a shady seller on Amazon, especially now that the perverse incentives for board mods and reusing harvested RAM chips are at their highest.

Linux maintainers "have ruled that people no longer have to declare their LLM usage," reports XDA Developers, "as Torvalds himself calls a ban on AI 'utterly stupid.'" The first part of this story comes via a message sent to the Linux mailing list. It announces one of the major changes decided during the Maintainers Summit on October 8, 2026, in Prague, Czechia, where submissions to the kernel no longer need to use the "Assisted-by" tag... meaning that people can submit AI-generated code without needing to declare it as such.

In some correspondence regarding concern about this new disclosure removal, the creator of Linux, Linus Torvalds, made his thoughts known... [Torvalds] compares an AI ban to getting rid of text editors, as doing so would prove that someone could write a good commit message without making any mistakes. He then rounds off his argument by asking, "Do you not see how UTTERLY STUPID those kinds of rules would be?" and stating that he simply expects the people working on the Linux kernel to "understand what they are doing."
Here's the last line of Torvalds' post. "Quite honestly, in my experience, the people I respect and call intelligent are not the ones that shy away from using new and interesting tools."

In a related story, Torvalds says he's used AI to help him understand patches that were hard to follow. And this week Torvalds even posted an LLM-assisted patch, reports Tom's Hardware: The development branch purports to fix an old issue with massive cache contention when many CPUs are reading the same file — a scenario potentially encountered when using shared libraries, databases, and web servers. Several developers had already made attempts over the years at fixing the issue, all with varied results, none quite ideal as an all-encompassing solution... He's now posted his solution in a development branch, and claims that he's seen a 23x performance improvement in a dedicated synthetic benchmark, though he notes that actual real-world impact will be far less significant, as "no real load" will witness those figures.
Torvalds used Anthropic's Claude Code, reports The New Stack, and "said the assistant wrote the implementation, tests, and initial documentation, and reviewed the code under his direction. He ran the benchmarks himself, despite having previously criticized developers for claiming AI writes 99% of their code." Tuesday Torvalds submitted a 10-patch series.

"Reviewers have since identified a race condition and raised concerns about memory reclamation," adds The New Stack. "Torvalds has handed further development to Kiryl Shutsemau, a Linux kernel developer who previously worked on the same bottleneck."

"Cloudflare has acquired Deno, the company behind the [server-side] JavaScript and TypeScript runtime created by Ryan Dahl, the inventor of Node.js," Forbes reported last week.

But Deno "has no future at Cloudflare, which will maintain the runtime for another year before ending its development," writes The Register. "That's OK with Dahl. 'I am now of the opinion that if you're choosing Node.js for building servers, you're doing it wrong,' Dahl told The Register."

It all started with his team's work on the platform Deno Deploy, "We wanted to make running applications as straightforward as possible," Dahl wrote on the official Deno blog. "But building and operating Deploy also showed us how much complexity remained underneath that developer experience. I wanted to simplify that layer, too." This led to celld. Building on the Cloudflare Workers programming model, celld lets developers build distributed applications from the start while making the system simple to operate. What excites me greatly is that the scaling is built into the programming model, rather than infrastructure each app has to assemble itself.... We want to make this programming model the default way to build servers, whether you run on Cloudflare's network or your own infrastructure.

Joining also means choosing where to focus our effort... Deno will remain open source, and we welcome others who want to continue its development. Deno Deploy will continue operating for six months before shutting down. We will provide migration support for paying customers moving to Cloudflare Workers. [Deno's JSR package registry for JavaScript and TypeScript] will continue operating, with its infrastructure moving to Cloudflare.
Forbes argues that this acquisition of Deno "turns a long-standing objection to Cloudflare Workers, the claim that applications built on it cannot easily leave, into a selling point." For CIOs evaluating serverless and edge platforms, portability now has a concrete answer... Released in August, [celld] is a single Rust binary that runs Workers and Durable Objects across many machines, with object storage as its only external dependency. Operators run multiple celld instances against one storage bucket, and the software handles placement, routing and persistence. Dahl and Belder will now lead an effort to merge celld into workerd and make self-hosting a supported way to run Workers applications. With this, customers can build an application on Cloudflare's network and move it to a private data center without rewriting it.
"With Deno, we improved the experience of writing JavaScript," Dahl argues on the Cloudflare blog, "but we didn't fundamentally change what developers had to assemble around the runtime. The bigger problems are around networked applications: distributing computation, coordinating state, data storage in general, and autoscaling to meet demand..." Could the programming model make partitioning across machines part of the design from the start? The solution clicked into focus when I read about Cloudflare's Durable Objects. It provided a very powerful abstraction: the distributed singleton with a SQLite database. Each Durable Object is like a small, individually addressable server with its own relational database. Its JavaScript execution is single-threaded (which is easy to reason about), it handles WebSockets, and its local SQLite database can be accessed synchronously. By building a chat application using one Durable Object per channel, you have sharded your data and WebSocket connections, and thus made your application scalable... What excites me is the leverage this model gives developers: compute, relational databases, queues, and real-time communication primitives designed for applications distributed across machines.
Now Dahl and 12 of his Deno colleagues "will work to build out Cloudflare's Workers platform," explains The Register, "expanding it for potential open-source use. He feels this approach is the way to go." "Right now, every other server is really operating at the Linux VM layer. That is not what Cloudflare Workers are," he said...

The ever-fickle Dahl first debuted Deno in 2018 as a rewrite of Node. The name 'Deno' is an anagram of Node, and it was Dahl's attempt to fix everything he felt he got wrong with Node — built-in fetch, a permission model, native TypeScript support et al. Sequoia backed Dahl's company for $21 million in 2022, and as of August, Deno amassed 400,000 monthly users. Nonetheless, Node's gravity proved too heavy for Deno to achieve escape velocity.

"What we found over years of working on Deno is that you can't really deviate from Node.js very much," Dahl told The Register. "As we continued to try to get adoption for Deno, we found we had to essentially backpedal on some of the original promises and become more Node compatible over time, and that left us as a kind of an alternative Node.js implementation." Going forward, Cloudflare will supply Deno with bug fixes and security patches for the next year, while Dahl looks for a new home for the MIT-licensed open source project.
Dahl's worked could bring "yet another revolutionary turn for server-side JavaScript," the article argues, "offering a runtime that would require only 300 KB of memory per instance, rather than the hundreds of megabytes now required for Node/Deno. Such savings could quickly add up for a cloud provider, especially one serving the voracious agentic market."

And as Dahl wrote on the Deno blog, "The need for better abstractions is especially acute with AI. Durable Objects bring together capabilities that are particularly useful for agent harnesses: inexpensive, serverless execution, persistent state, WebSockets, and a high-level JavaScript interface. This is what I'm most excited to explore and why celld focuses on Durable Objects."

Tencent says AI agents used to evaluate third-party models engaged in unintended web-browsing behavior while trying to retrieve data from Alibaba's Amap service. The announcement marks a rare acknowledgment of "rogue" agent activity by a major Chinese tech company. Reuters reports: Tencent Hunyuan, the company's artificial intelligence unit, said in a post on X that the activity did not originate from its Hunyuan models. Its review found no evidence of deliberate targeting or coordination, it said. The Swarmchasers researchers said the agents sought information such as the commonly used entrances at Chinese parks, museums and zoos. [...] Swarmchasers said it used the word "rogue" to describe agents taking actions outside their intended scope or completing a task in unintended ways.

After routine automated requests were blocked, the agents tried other methods, including public web tools that could open pages and run code, routing requests through other websites and using Amap keys and security codes found in publicly available software code. Swarmchasers said it found no evidence that the agents breached Amap's main anti-bot safeguards. Most of the 2,818 attempts it recorded either failed or returned anti-bot pages, login screens or blank results.

Some requests returned information through cached pages and intermediary services, including data on visitor arrivals at Chengdu Zoo, Swarmchasers said. The researchers said they could not determine whether an agent read the result or completed its task.