Longtime Slashdot reader Xesdeeni writes: I received an email indicating Intuit will not support Windows 10 for the desktop versions of TurboTax starting this tax year. Laughably, they say "security is a top priority for us" before adding: "To use TurboTax Desktop software for tax year 2025, your computer will need to run on Microsoft Windows 11 [or] TurboTax Online."

I'm just paranoid enough to use the desktop version, since at least it limits what they see to the forms they send to the IRS -- rather than everything. Even if I was willing to endure the added burden of printing and mailing the forms, this would be the end of that, since I'm out on Windows 11 for the reasons you already know.
Here's what they sent: Hi there,

We're reaching out to provide an update on TurboTax Desktop software for tax year 2025. After October 14, 2025, Microsoft will no longer provide software updates, technical assistance, or security fixes for Windows 10 operating system. Because security is a top priority for us, TurboTax Desktop software for tax year 2025 onwards will not be compatible with Windows 10 operating system.

To use TurboTax Desktop software for tax year 2025, your computer will need to run on Microsoft Windows 11 operating system. You can also consider switching to TurboTax Online, which will work on any supported browser (available December 2025).

For more resources and additional information about this change, go to this help article: How does the end of support for Windows 10 affect my TurboTax Desktop experience?

Thanks for being part of the TurboTax family.

Warm regards,

The TurboTax Team Xesdeeni comments: "I've wanted a Linux offering for years now and only kept Windows for such limited products as this. I guess I can completely punt it now."

Last week, following a recent U.S. Customs ruling, Apple reintroduced blood oxygen monitoring to certain Apple Watch models in the U.S., sidestepping an ITC import ban stemming from its legal dispute with medical device maker Masimo. Today, Masimo fired back with a new lawsuit against the U.S. Customs and Border Protection. 9to5Mac reports: The company says US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) overstepped its authority and violated due process when it reversed its earlier decision on August 1 and allowed Apple to restore the feature. Moreover, Masimo says it found out about the decision when Apple publicly announced the return of the feature: "It has now come to light that CBP thereafter reversed itself without any meaningful justification, without any material change in circumstances, and without any notice to Masimo, let alone an opportunity for Masimo to be heard. CBP changed its position on Apple's watch-plus-iPhone redesign through an ex parte proceeding. Specifically, on August 1, 2025, CBP issued an 3 ex parte ruling permitting Apple to import devices that, when used with iPhones already in the United States, perform the same functionality that the ITC found to infringe Masimo's patents. Masimo only discovered this ruling on Thursday, August 14, 2025, when Apple publicly announced it would be reintroducing the pulse oximetry functionality through a software update."

The company is now asking the court for a temporary restraining order and preliminary injunction to block the CBP's decision, and reinstate the original ruling that "determined that Apple's redesigned watches could be imported only to the extent the infringing functionality was completely disabled." As reported by Bloomberg Law, Masimo says the following in its supporting brief: "Each passing day that this unlawful ruling remains in effect irreparably deprives Masimo of its right to be free from unfair trade practices and to preserve its competitive standing in the U.S. marketplace." Masimo further argues that CBP's move "effectively nullified" the ITC's exclusion order against Apple. Apple's appeal of that ban is still pending before the Federal Circuit.

Amazon is plotting a big change to its Fire tablet lineup following years of escalating gripes from consumers and app developers over the company's homegrown operating system. Reuters: As part of a project known internally as Kittyhawk, Amazon plans to release a higher-end tablet as soon as next year offering the Android operating system software for the first time, according to six people familiar with the matter. Since the Fire tablet's introduction in 2011, Amazon has used what is known as a "forked" version of Android with custom modifications that make it work like a unique operating system.

[...] The first Amazon Android tablet, slated for next year, will be pricier than current models, the people said. One of them said Amazon had discussed a $400 price tag, nearly double the cost of its current higher-end $230 Fire Max 11 tablet. IPads, by comparison, range from $350 to $1,200. Reuters could not learn additional specifications for the planned Amazon tablet, such as screen size and speaker quality or memory capacity. Amazon historically has avoided using software or other products from third parties, preferring to develop the services in-house or, barring that, to acquire a competitor.

US tech stocks sold off as warnings that the hype surrounding AI could be overdone hit some of the year's best-performing shares. From a report: Nvidia, the chips group that has surged to become the world's first $4tn company on the back of AI, fell 3.5 per cent on Tuesday, while software group Palantir dropped 9.4 per cent and chip designer Arm shed 5 per cent.

The tech-heavy Nasdaq Composite closed down 1.4 per cent, the biggest one-day drop for the index since August 1. The blue-chip S&P 500 fell 0.7 per cent. European and Asian markets largely followed Wall Street lower on Wednesday. [...] Japan's Nikkei 225 index fell 1.5 per cent and South Korea's Kospi slipped 0.6 per cent. Futures price indicated moderate declines when Wall Street opens.

Traders pinned some of the declines in the US on a critical report on Monday authored by a branch of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Researchers said "95 per cent of organisations are getting zero return" from their investments in generative AI, the technology that has sent US stocks soaring to record highs in recent months.

Google's AI Overviews has returned fraudulent customer service phone numbers in multiple reported incidents.

A Reddit user reported their friend received a fake number when searching "Swiggy [an Indian food delivery firm] customer care number," leading to attempted screen-sharing and money request scams. Facebook user Alex Rivlin encountered scammers after searching "royal caribbean customer service phone number 24 hours usa." The fraudulent representative requested credit card information before Rivlin detected the scam. Google said it is "aware" of the issue and has "taken action" against identified numbers. The company stated it is working to "improve results."

Matt Garman, Amazon's cloud boss, has a warning for business leaders rushing to swap workers for AI: Don't ditch your junior employees. From a report: The Amazon Web Services CEO said on an episode of the "Matthew Berman" podcast published Tuesday that replacing entry-level staff with AI tools is "one of the dumbest things I've ever heard."

"They're probably the least expensive employees you have. They're the most leaned into your AI tools," he said. "How's that going to work when you go like 10 years in the future and you have no one that has built up or learned anything?" Garman said companies should keep hiring graduates and teaching them how to build software, break down problems, and adopt best practices.

He also said the most valuable skills in an AI-driven economy aren't tied to any one college degree. "If you spend all of your time learning one specific thing and you're like, 'That's the thing I'm going to be expert at for the next 30 years,' I can promise you that's not going to be valuable 30 years from now," he said.

Traditional business applications will become the mainframes of the 2030s - functioning but obsolete systems replaced by AI agents, predicts Microsoft corporate vice president Charles Lamanna. AI agents featuring generative AI interfaces, goal-oriented processing, and vector databases will supplant today's form-driven, workflow-based enterprise software within five years, said Lamanna, who leads Microsoft's business applications and platforms division.

The executive projects industry patterns for agent-based systems will solidify within 6-18 months. Microsoft MVP Rocky Lhotka called the 2030 timeline "very forward-looking and optimistic," noting that capital-intensive industries cannot readily replace existing infrastructure with virtual agents.

Protected KVM (pKVM), the hypervisor powering the Android Virtualization Framework, has officially achieved SESIP Level 5 certification (in testing by cybersecurity lab Dekra against the TrustCB SESIP scheme).

Google's security blog called the certification "a watershed moment," and a "new benchmark" for both open-source security — and for the future of consumer electronics. "It provides a single, open-source, and exceptionally high-quality firmware base that all device manufacturers can build upon." This makes pKVM the first software security system designed for large-scale deployment in consumer electronics to meet this assurance bar. The implications for the future of secure mobile technology are profound. With this level of security assurance, Android is now positioned to securely support the next generation of high-criticality isolated workloads. This includes vital features, such as on-device AI workloads that can operate on ultra-personalized data, with the highest assurances of privacy and integrity...

Achieving Security Evaluation Standard for IoT Platforms (SESIP) Level 5 is a landmark because it incorporates AVA_VAN.5, the highest level of vulnerability analysis and penetration testing under the ISO 15408 (Common Criteria) standard. A system certified to this level has been evaluated to be resistant to highly skilled, knowledgeable, well-motivated, and well-funded attackers who may have insider knowledge and access. This certification is the cornerstone of the next-generation of Android's multi-layered security strategy. Many of the TEEs (Trusted Execution Environments) used in the industry have not been formally certified or have only achieved lower levels of security assurance... Looking ahead, Android device manufacturers will be required to use isolation technology that meets this same level of security for various security operations that the device relies on. Protected KVM ensures that every user can benefit from a consistent, transparent, and verifiably secure foundation.
"This achievement represents just one important aspect of the immense, multi-year dedication from the Linux and KVM developer communities and multiple engineering teams at Google developing pKVM and AVF," the post concludes.

"We look forward to seeing the open-source community and Android ecosystem continue to build on this foundation, delivering a new era of high-assurance mobile technology for users."

Duolingo's stock peaked at $529.05 on May 16th. Three months later, it's down 38% — with that drop starting shortly after backlash to the CEO's promise to make it an "AI-first" company.

Yet "The backlash against Duolingo going 'AI-first' didn't even matter," TechCrunch wrote August 7th, noting Duolingo's stock price surged almost 30% overnight. That surge vanished within two days — and instead of a 30% surge, Duolingo now shows a 5% drop over the last eight days.

Yahoo Finance blames the turnaround on OpenAI's GPT-5 demo, "which demonstrated, among many other things, its ability to create a language-learning tool from a short prompt." OpenAI researcher Yann Dubois asked the model to create an app to help his partner learn French. And in a few minutes GPT-5 churned out several iterations, with flashcards, a progress tracker, and even a simple snake-style game with a French twist, a mouse and cheese variation to learn new vocab....

[Duolingo's] corporate lawyers, of course, did warn against this in its annual 10-K, albeit in boilerplate language. Tucked into the risk factors section, Duolingo notes, "It is possible that a new product could gain rapid scale at the expense of existing brands through harnessing a new technology (such as generative AI)." Consider this another warning to anyone making software. [The article adds later that "Rapid development and fierce competition can leave firms suddenly behind — perceived as under threat, inferior, or obsolete — from every iteration of OpenAI's models and from the moves of other influential AI players..."]

There's also irony in the wild swings. Part of Duolingo's successful quarter stemmed from the business's efficient use of AI. Gross margins, the company said, outperformed management expectations due to lower AI costs. And AI conversational features have become part of the company's learning tools, helping achieve double-digit subscriber growth... But the enthusiasm for AI, which led to the initial stock bump this week, also led to the clawback. AI giveth and taketh away.
Meanwhile, this week a blog announced it was "able to activate a long-rumored Practice feature" hidden in Google Translate, notes PC Magazine, with the blogger even sharing a screen recording of "AI-led features within Translate" showing its ability to create personalized lessons. "Google's take on Duolingo is effectively ready for release," the Android Authority blog concluded. "Furthermore, the fact that a Telegram user spotted this in their app suggests that Google is already testing this in a limited fashion."

Duolingo's CEO revisited the backlash to his original "AI-first" promise today in a new interview today with the New York Times, emphasizing his hope that AI would only reduce the company's use of contractors. "We've never laid off any full-time employees. We don't plan to...." But: In the next five years, people's jobs will probably change. We're seeing it with many of our engineers. They may not be doing some rote tasks anymore. What will probably happen is that one person will be able to accomplish more, rather than having fewer people.

NYT: How are you managing that transition for employees?

Every Friday morning, we have this thing: It's a bad acronym, f-r-A-I-days. I don't know how to pronounce it. Those mornings, we let each team experiment on how to get more efficient to use A.I.
Yesterday there was also a new announcement from attorneys at Pomerantz LLP, which calls itself "the oldest law firm in the world dedicated to representing the rights of defrauded investors."

The firm announced it was investigating "whether Duolingo and certain of its officers and/or directors have engaged in securities fraud or other unlawful business practices."

This week workers on Blizzard's "Story and Franchise Development" team "strongly voted" to join America's largest communications and media labor union, the Communications Workers of America.

From the union's announcement: The Story and Franchise Development team is Blizzard's in-house cinematics, animation, and narrative team, producing the trailers, promotional videos, in-game cutscenes, and other narrative content for Blizzard franchises — as well as franchise archival workers and historians. These workers will be the first in-house cinematic, animation, and narrative studio to form a union in the North American game industry, joining nearly 3,000 workers at Microsoft-owned studios who have organized with CWA to build better standards across the video game industry after Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard in 2023...

The announcement is the latest update in organizing the tech and video game industry, as over 6,000 workers in the United States and Canada have organized with the Campaign to Organize Digital Employees (CODE-CWA) since launching over five years ago. Last week, workers at Raven Software secured a historic contract with Microsoft, joining ZeniMax QA developers at CWA, who also secured a contract with the company in June.
"CWA says that Blizzard owner Microsoft has recognized the union," reports the gaming news site Aftermath, in accordance with the labor neutrality policy Microsoft agreed to in 2022, leading to several other union game studios at Microsoft: In July 2024, 500 workers on Blizzard-owned World of Warcraft formed a union that they called "the largest wall-to-wall union at a Microsoft-owned studio," alongside Blizzard QA workers in Austin. Other studios across Microsoft have also unionized in recent years, including at Bethesda, ZeniMax Online Studios, and ZeniMax QA, the latter of which finally reached a contract in May after nearly two years of bargaining. Unionized workers at Raven Studios reached a contract with Microsoft earlier this month.
The CWA's announcement this week included this quote from one organizing committee member (and a cinematic producer). "I'm excited that we have joined together in forming a union to protect my colleagues from things like misguided policies and instability as a result of layoffs."

Three years ago security researcher Eaton Zveare discovered a vulnerability in Jacuzzi's SmartTub interface allowing access to the personal data of every hot tub owner.

Now Zverae says flaws in an unnamed carmaker's dealership portal "exposed the private information and vehicle data of its customers," reports TechCrunch, "and could have allowed hackers to remotely break into any of its customers' vehicles." Zveare, who works as a security researcher at software delivery company Harness, told TechCrunch the flaw he discovered allowed the creation of a ["national"] admin account that granted "unfettered access" to the unnamed carmaker's centralized web portal. With this access, a malicious hacker could have viewed the personal and financial data of the carmaker's customers, tracked vehicles, and enrolled customers in features that allow owners — or the hackers — to control some of their cars' functions from anywhere.

Zveare said he doesn't plan on naming the vendor, but said it was a widely known automaker with several popular sub-brands.

In an interview with TechCrunch ahead of his talk at the Def Con security conference in Las Vegas on Sunday, Zveare said the bugs put a spotlight on the security of these dealership systems, which grant their employees and associates broad access to customer and vehicle information... The flaws were problematic because the buggy code loaded in the user's browser when opening the portal's login page, allowing the user — in this case, Zveare — to modify the code to bypass the login security checks. Zveare told TechCrunch that the carmaker found no evidence of past exploitation, suggesting he was the first to find it and report it to the carmaker.

When logged in, the account granted access to more than 1,000 of the carmakers' dealers across the United States, he told TechCrunch... With access to the portal, Zveare said it was also possible to pair any vehicle with a mobile account, which allows customers to remotely control some of their cars' functions from an app, such as unlocking their cars... "The takeaway is that only two simple API vulnerabilities blasted the doors open, and it's always related to authentication," said Zveare. "If you're going to get those wrong, then everything just falls down."
Zveare told TechCrunch the portals even included "telematics systems that allowed the real-time location tracking of rental or courtesy cars...

"Zveare said the bugs took about a week to fix in February 2025 soon after his disclosure to the carmaker."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

"As employers and tech companies rush to deploy AI software into workplaces to improve efficiency, labor unions are stepping up work with state lawmakers across the nation to place guardrails on its use..." reports the Washington Post.

"Union leaders say they must intervene to protect workers from the potential for AI to cause massive job displacement or infringe on employment rights." In Massachusetts, the Teamsters labor union is backing a proposed state law that would require autonomous vehicles to have a human safety operator who can intervene during the ride, effectively forbidding truly driverless rides. Oregon lawmakers recently passed a bill supported by the Oregon Nurses Association that prohibits AI from using the title "nurse" or any associated abbreviations. The American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations, a federation of 63 national and international labor unions, launched a national task force last month to work with state lawmakers on more laws that regulate automation and AI affecting workers... The AFL-CIO task force plans to help unions take on problematic use of AI in collective bargaining and contracts and in coming months to develop a slate of model legislation available to state leaders, modeled on recently passed and newly proposed legislation in places including California and Massachusetts.
The president of the California Federation of Labor Unions also supports a proposed state law "that would prevent employers from primarily relying on AI software to automate decisions like terminations or disciplinary actions," according to the article. "Instead, humans would have to review decisions. The law would also prohibit use of tools that predict workers' behaviors, emotional states and personality."

Matt Asay answered questions from Slashdot readers in 2010 as the then-COO of Canonical. Today he runs developer marketing at Oracle (after holding similar positions at AWS, Adobe, and MongoDB).

And this week Asay contributed an opinion piece to InfoWorld reminding us of open source contributions from companies where "enlightened self-interest underwrites the boring but vital work — CI hardware, security audits, long-term maintenance — that grassroots volunteers struggle to fund." [I]f you look at the Linux 6.15 kernel contributor list (as just one example), the top contributor, as measured by change sets, is Intel... Another example: Take the last year of contributions to Kubernetes. Google (of course), Red Hat, Microsoft, VMware, and AWS all headline the list. Not because it's sexy, but because they make billions of dollars selling Kubernetes services... Some companies (including mine) sell proprietary software, and so it's easy to mentally bucket these vendors with license fees or closed cloud services. That bias makes it easy to ignore empirical contribution data, which indicates open source contributions on a grand scale.
Asay notes Oracle's many contributions to Linux: In the [Linux kernel] 6.1 release cycle, Oracle emerged as the top contributor by lines of code changed across the entire kernel... [I]t's Oracle that patches memory-management structures and shepherds block-device drivers for the Linux we all use. Oracle's kernel work isn't a one-off either. A few releases earlier, the company topped the "core of the kernel" leaderboard in 5.18, and it hasn't slowed down since, helping land the Maple Tree data structure and other performance boosters. Those patches power Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), of course, but they also speed up Ubuntu on your old ThinkPad. Self-interested contributions? Absolutely. Public benefit? Equally absolute.

This isn't just an Oracle thing. When we widen the lens beyond Oracle, the pattern holds. In 2023, I wrote about Amazon's "quiet open source revolution," showing how AWS was suddenly everywhere in GitHub commit logs despite the company's earlier reticence. (Disclosure: I used to run AWS' open source strategy and marketing team.) Back in 2017, I argued that cloud vendors were open sourcing code as on-ramps to proprietary services rather than end-products. Both observations remain true, but they miss a larger point: Motives aside, the code flows and the community benefits.

If you care about outcomes, the motives don't really matter. Or maybe they do: It's far more sustainable to have companies contributing because it helps them deliver revenue than to contribute out of charity. The former is durable; the latter is not.
There's another practical consideration: scale. "Large vendors wield resources that community projects can't match."

Asay closes by urging readers to "Follow the commits" and "embrace mixed motives... the point isn't sainthood; it's sustainable, shared innovation. Every company (and really every developer) contributes out of some form of self-interest. That's the rule, not the exception. Embrace it." Going forward, we should expect to see even more counterintuitive contributor lists. Generative AI is turbocharging code generation, but someone still has to integrate those patches, write tests, and shepherd them upstream. The companies with the most to lose from brittle infrastructure — cloud providers, database vendors, silicon makers — will foot the bill. If history is a guide, they'll do so quietly.

Slashdot reader darwinmac writes: Volkswagen is offering a subscription model for extra horsepower on its ID.3 electric cars. Want to bump your ride from the standard 201 bhp to the full 228 bhp? That will be about £16.50 per month or £165 per year, or a one-time £649 "lifetime" fee that is tied to the car, not you. If you sell it, you have to pay again.

VW defended this to the BBC by saying you are basically paying for a sportier experience without buying a higher powered model upfront, calling it "nothing new." Nothing changes mechanically. You are just paying VW to essentially flip a boolean somewhere in the car's software.

BrianFagioli shares a report from NERDS.xyz: If you run Plex Media Server, it's time to drop everything and update. The company has quietly patched a security issue that affects recent versions of its software, and users are being told to upgrade as soon as possible. According to an email Plex sent to affected customers, versions 1.41.7.x through 1.42.0.x are vulnerable. The newly released build, 1.42.1.10060 or later, contains the fix. Plex says the flaw was found through its bug bounty program, but sadly, it has not publicly shared details about how severe the issue is or whether it could be exploited remotely.

DeepSeek's development of its next-gen R2 AI model was severely delayed after months of failed training attempts on Huawei's Ascend chips, which suffered from unstable hardware, slow interconnects, and immature software. The Register reports: Following the industry rattling launch of DeepSeek R1 earlier this year, the Chinese AI darling faced pressure from government authorities to train the model's successor on Huawei's homegrown silicon, three unnamed sources have told the Financial Times. But after months of work and the help of an entire team of Huawei engineers, unstable chips, glacial interconnects, and immature software proved insurmountable for DeepSeek, which was apparently unable to complete a single successful training run. The failure, along with challenges with data labeling, ultimately delayed the release of DeepSeek R2 as the company started anew, using Nvidia's H20 GPUs instead. The company has reportedly relegated Huawei's Ascend accelerators to inference duty.

Apple has reintroduced blood oxygen monitoring to certain Apple Watch models in the U.S. by shifting the feature's calculations to the paired iPhone, sidestepping an ITC import ban stemming from its legal dispute with medical device maker Masimo. TechCrunch reports: Blood oxygen data will be measured and calculated on the user's paired iPhone, and results can be viewed in the Respiratory section of the Health app. This means users won't be able to view the data on their Apple Watch, as they'll need to do so on their iPhone. Apple says the update announced today is enabled by a recent U.S. Customs ruling, which means that the tech giant is allowed to import Apple Watches with the redesigned Blood Oxygen feature.

The change doesn't affect previously sold models with the original version of the feature or units bought outside the U.S. The redesigned feature only applies to Apple Watches that were sold after the ITC import ban took effect in early 2024. These users can access the redesigned Blood Oxygen feature through an iPhone and Apple Watch software update coming on Thursday.

The Pentagon is poised to cancel two nearly finished Navy and Air Force HR software projects worth over $800 million so new contracts can be awarded to other vendors, including Salesforce, Palantir, and Workday. "The reason for the unusual move: officials at those departments, who have so far put the existing projects on hold, want other firms, including Salesforce and billionaire Peter Thiel's Palantir, to have a chance to win similar projects, which could amount to a costly do-over," reports Reuters. From the report: In 2019, Accenture said it had won a contract to expand an HR platform to modernize the payroll, absence management, and other HR functions for the Air Force with Oracle software. The project, which includes other vendors and was later expanded to include Space Force, grew to cost $368 million and was scheduled for its first deployment this summer at the Air Force Academy. An April "status update" on the project conducted by the Air Force and obtained by Reuters described the project as "on track," with initial deployment scheduled for June, noting that it would end up saving the Air Force $39 million annually by allowing it to stop using an older system. But on May 30, Darlene Costello, then-Acting assistant Secretary of the Air Force, sent out a memo placing a "strategic pause" on the project for ninety days and calling for the study of alternate technical solutions, according to a copy of the memo seen by Reuters that was previously unreported. Costello, who has since retired, was reacting to pressure from other Air Force officials who wanted to steer a new HR project to SalesForce and Palantir, three sources said. [...] The Air Force said in a statement that it "is committed to reforming acquisition practices, assessing the acquisition workforce, and identifying opportunities to improve major defense acquisition programs."

Space Force, which operates within the Air Force, was set to receive the Air Force's new payroll system in the coming months. But it is also pulling out of the project because officials there want to launch yet another HR platform project to be led by Workday, according to three people familiar with the matter. The service put out a small business tender on May 7 for firms to research HR platform alternatives, with the goal of selecting a company that will recommend Workday as the best option, the people said. Now the Air Force and Space Force "want to start over with vendors that do not meet their requirements, leading to significant duplication and massive costs," said John Weiler, director of the Information Technology Acquisition Advisory Council, a government-chartered nonprofit group that makes recommendations to improve federal IT contracting.

In 2022, the Honolulu-based Nakupuna Companies took over a 2019 project with other firms to integrate the Navy's payroll and personnel systems into one platform using Oracle software and known as "NP2". The project, which has cost about $425 million since 2023, according to the Government Accountability Office, was set to be rolled out earlier this year after receiving a positive review by independent reviewer and consulting firm Guidehouse in January, according to a copy obtained by Reuters. But the head of Navy's human resources, now retired Admiral Rick Cheeseman, sought to cancel the project according to a June 5 memo seen by Reuters, directing another official to "take appropriate contractual actions" to cancel the project. Navy leaders instead mandated yet another assessment of project, according to a memo seen by Reuters, leaving it in limbo, two sources said.

Cheeseman's reason for trying to kill the project was his anger over a decision by DOGE earlier this year to cancel a $171 million contract for data services provider Pantheon Data that essentially duplicated parts of the HR project. In an email obtained by Reuters, he threatened to withhold funding from the Nakupuna-led project unless the Pantheon contract was restored. "I am beyond exasperated with how this happened," Cheeseman wrote in a May 7 email to Chief Information Officer Jane Rathbun about the contract cancellation, arguing the Pantheon contract was not "duplicative of any effort." "From where I sit, I'm content taking every dime away from NP2 in order to continue this effort," he added in the email. The pausing of NP2 was "unexpected, especially given that multiple comprehensive reviews validated the technical solution as the fastest and most affordable approach," Nakupuna said in a statement, adding it was disappointed by the change because the project was ready to deploy. The Navy said it "continues to prioritize essential personnel resources in support of efforts to strengthen military readiness through fiscal responsibility and departmental efficiency."

United Launch Alliance's Vulcan Centaur rocket successfully completed its first-ever national security mission, launching the U.S. military's first experimental navigation satellite in 48 years. Space.com reports: The mission saw the company's powerful new Vulcan Centaur rocket take off from Space Launch Complex 41 (SLC-41) at Cape Canaveral Space Force Station in Florida. Vulcan launched with four side-mounted solid rocket boosters in order to generate enough thrust to send its payload directly into geosynchronous orbit on one of ULA's longest flights ever, a seven-hour journey that will span over 22,000 miles (35,000 kilometers), according to ULA.

The payload launching on Tuesday's mission was the U.S. military's first experimental navigation satellite to be launched in 48 years. It is what's known as a position, navigation and timing (PNT) satellite, a type of spacecraft that provides data similar to that of the well-known GPS system. This satellite will be testing many experimental new technologies that are designed to make it resilient to jamming and spoofing, according to Andrew Builta with L3Harris Technologies, the prime contractor for the PNT payload integrated onto a satellite bus built by Northrop Grumman.

The satellite, identified publicly only as Navigation Technology Satellite-3 (NTS-3), features a phased array antenna that allows it to "focus powerful beams to ground forces and combat jamming environments," Builta said in a media roundtable on Monday (Aug. 11). GPS jamming has become an increasingly worrisome problem for both the U.S. military and commercial satellite operators, which is why this spacecraft will be conducting experiments to test how effective these new technologies are at circumventing jamming attacks. In addition, the satellite features a software architecture that allows it to be reprogrammed while in orbit. "This is a truly game-changing capability," Builta said.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: You can't say Linux creator Linus Torvalds didn't give the kernel developers fair warning. He'd told them: "The upcoming merge window for 6.17 is going to be slightly chaotic for me. I have multiple family events this August (a wedding and a big birthday), and with said family being spread not only across the US, but in Finland too, I'm spending about half the month traveling." Therefore, Torvalds continued, "That does not mean I'll be more lenient to late pull requests (probably quite the reverse, since it's just going to add to the potential chaos)." So, when Meta software engineer Palmer Dabbelt pushed through a set of RISC-V patches and admitted "this is very late," he knew he was playing with fire. He just didn't know how badly he'd be burned.

Torvalds fired back on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): "This is garbage and it came in too late. I asked for early pull requests because I'm traveling, and if you can't follow that rule, at least make the pull requests good." It went downhill from there. Torvalds continued: "This adds various garbage that isn't RISC-V specific to generic header files. And by 'garbage," I really mean it. This is stuff that nobody should ever send me, never mind late in a merge window." Specifically, Torvalds hated the "crazy and pointless" way in which one of the patch's helper functions combined two unsigned 16-bit integers into a 32-bit integer. How bad was it? "That thing makes the world actively a worse place to live. It's useless garbage that makes any user incomprehensible, and actively *WORSE* than not using that stupid 'helper.'"

In addition to the quality issues, Torvalds was annoyed that the offending code was added to generic header files rather than the RISC-V tree. He emphasized that such generic changes could negatively impact the broader Linux community, writing: "You just made things WORSE, and you added that 'helper' to a generic non-RISC-V file where people are apparently supposed to use it to make other code worse too... So no. Things like this need to get bent. It does not go into generic header files, and it damn well does not happen late in the merge window. You're on notice: no more late pull requests, and no more garbage outside the RISC-V tree." [...] Dabbelt gets it. He replied, "OK, sorry. I've been dropping the ball lately, and it kind of piled up, taking a bunch of stuff late, but that just leads to me making mistakes. So I'll stop being late, and hopefully that helps with the quality issues."