Rocky Linux from CIQ – Hardened: a new take on Rocky Linux that’s fully supported by CIQ, but is also optimized to meet the most stringent security need.s
The post Rocky Linux From CIQ — Hardened Takes Enterprise Linux Security to the Next Level appeared first on FOSS Force.
Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, Maggie, and the gang will now play forever and ever on the streamer.
Police say they’re not going to get direct access to your location data unless you provide it.
Amazon is in the process of overhauling Alexa, introducing a new Alexa+ AI service that will be available free of charge for Prime users (or $20 per month on its own). But as the company plans to roll out this new service, user privacy across Echo devices is taking a hit.
In a March 15 email, Amazon announced its Echo devices will no longer support local processing for Alexa requests, and will stop offering “Do Not Send Voice Recordings” as an option. This means that every request—and its subsequent voice recording—will end up going to Amazon’s cloud. Even a request as simple as “turn off the lights” will be sent to Amazon. This change starts on March 28th, and it includes all spoken commands to Alexa in Echo speakers and smart displays.
According to Amazon’s email (sourced by Ars Technica) it all comes down to Alexa’s new generative AI features. In the email, Amazon says:
As we continue to expand Alexa’s capabilities with generative AI features that rely on the processing power of Amazon’s secure cloud, we have decided to no longer support this feature.
The focus is Amazon’s new Alexa Voice ID feature, which the company is highlighting as a flagship feature in Alexa+. It lets Alexa+ recognize who is speaking to it, and reply accordingly. But even if you choose not to enable Alexa+, or to use Voice ID, Amazon is still taking away local processing.
This move has raised many concerns about user privacy on Amazon devices. The idea that a major tech company can listen in on all requests made through its devices, at any time, doesn’t sit well, especially when users have no choice in the matter.
There really isn’t much that Amazon Echo customers can do here, aside from quitting Alexa. Of course, for many users, Alexa is an integral part of their smart home. The decision now is to continue on using the features users have relied on for years, forgoing privacy, or quit the ecosystem entirely.
Amazon does say that they will automatically delete recordings of all Alexa requests after the processing is done. Plus, Amazon is assuring users that all their recordings are encrypted in transit to Amazon’s secure cloud servers. But given Amazon’s track record, it’s hard to trust their word.
Amazon has a history of mismanaging Alexa voice recordings. In 2023, Amazon paid $25 million in a case over revelations the company stored recordings of children’s voices forever, and it gave employees access to this data, as well as footage from Ring cameras. In the same year, reports showed Amazon was using real conversations in Alexa to train its AI (the one that is now shipping with Alexa+). In the past, company also admitted to letting its employees listen in on audio conversations.
Previously, users at least had the choice to stop sharing their requests to Amazon servers (“Do Not Send Voice Recordings”) as well as not to save them (“Don’t Save Recordings”). Now, Amazon is effectively removing that second choice as well, if you want your device to work as advertised.
As it happens, the “Don’t Save Recordings” toggle is also linked to the Voice ID feature. This is the feature that can identify who is making the request, so Alexa can personalize its response accordingly. That way, your requests for calendar events, reminders, or music don’t interfere with anyone else’s requests in your home. It was already quite useful, and is becoming an even bigger deal with Alexa+. The thing is, if you ask Alexa not to save your recordings, it will also automatically disable Voice ID, and you’ll lose out on all the user-identifying features. Amazon previously warned enabling this feature could affect Voice ID, but now it essentially guarantees it won’t work.
So, your “choice” isn’t really a choice at all. You can either let Amazon process, save, and use your recordings however they want, or you lose out on the Voice ID feature, limiting the usefulness of the product—while still sending your requests to Amazon’s servers.
Eric Migicovsky, founder of Pebble, will release two new smartwatches running the newly open-sourced Pebble operating system through his company Core Devices. The Core 2 Duo, priced at $149 and shipping in July, utilizes unused Pebble 2 frames with the same black-and-white E Ink display.
The device features a 30-day battery life — quadruple its predecessor’s — and incorporates a speaker for AI assistant interaction. Approximately 10,000 units will be available. The Core Time 2, arriving in December at $225, adds touchscreen functionality to the classic Pebble design while maintaining physical buttons and month-long battery life.
Both devices face iPhone integration challenges. Migicovsky cautioned potential tariff increases would be passed to consumers, stating, “We’re going to charge more if it costs more.” “I’m not building a company to sell millions of these,” Migicovsky said. “The goal is to make something I really want.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Overwatch 2 has been swimming in collaboration skins over the past few years, and the crossover the hero shooter did with K-Pop group Le Sserafim remains one of its most popular. It’s so well-liked, in fact, that Blizzard is working with the pop act again for another set of skins for a (mostly) different set of…
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is out later this week and folks, it’s really good! And while one of the big reasons I enjoyed this latest installment is because it’s wonderful to play, it also helps that Shadows is a drop dead gorgeous open-world RPG with some of the best-looking scenery I’ve seen on this generation of…
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is a gorgeous Sengoku-era simulator, but it makes me want to gnaw a hole through my controller.
When it comes to digital assistants, especially on mobile, there are really two most people think of: Siri and Google Assistant. (Sorry, Bixby.) Just as Siri is Apple through and through, Google Assistant is synonymous with Android for me (even if you can download Google Assistant on iPhone).
But it appears Google Assistant’s time is coming to an end, and faster than you might think. Google announced in a blog post on Friday that the company is switching more users from Google Assistant to Gemini “over the coming months,” before retiring its iconic assistant later this year on most devices. That includes not just the built-in assistant on most Android devices, but also downloads on app stores—so iPhone users won’t be able to download Google Assistant, either.
Why the sudden retirement party for Android’s version of Siri? Well, there’s a new player in town, whether or not it’s actually ready for primetime.
In case you missed it, Google is all-in on Gemini, the company’s generative AI assistant. Gemini, formerly Bard, is both a generative AI model, like OpenAI’s GPT models, and an assistant, like ChatGPT. As such, Google can offer Gemini as a tool for users to rely on for traditional assistant tasks, while routinely upgrading it with the company’s latest AI models. Like other big tech companies, Google is rolling out these new AI models at a steady clip, which means Gemini is constantly receiving upgrades. Google Assistant, on the other hand, is not.
If you don’t care for generative AI, or haven’t found Gemini all that reliable, you might be disappointed by this latest announcement. But it isn’t necessarily a surprise. Google has signaled this was the plan for a while now. Since its launch, Google has started rolling out Gemini to more users, either as a built-in solution on Android, or as a standalone app, pushing users to try it out over Google Assistant. In fact, the company quickly began allowing Android users to replace Google Assistant with Gemini, even when Gemini lacked basic assistant features like setting alarms or integrating with your calendar. If you wanted the full assistant experience, Google Assistant was still the way to go.
Of course, that wouldn’t stay the case forever. Google kept adding to Gemini, while actively limiting its legacy assistant. The company started removing Google Assistant features over a year ago, and continues to do so to this day.
In Google’s view, Gemini is simply the better all-around solution. It now offers previously missing assistant features, like playing song requests and setting timers, but also includes the company’s latest AI features, like Gemini Live, which gives Gemini access to your camera to answer questions about your surroundings, and Deep Research, which uses a “reasoning” model to “think” through each step of a problem before solving it. The service has expanded to support more than 40 languages in over 200 countries, so it is now widely available—just as Google Assistant once was.
In theory, it makes sense: New tech replaces the old, and Gemini happens to be the new tech in the game. The problem is, there are still tons of issues with generative AI, issues companies like Google have struggled to stamp out. While Google has added assistant features to Gemini, users continue to report the bot has trouble with basic tasks, such as opening specific apps, setting reminders, or changing smart lights a certain color.
The only devices that won’t make the switch are those that can’t meet the Gemini device requirements, which include those with fewer than 2GB of RAM and running Android 9 or older. If you want to keep using Google Assistant into 2026, you’re going to need a very old Android.
Assassin’s Creed Shadows is, if you count every spin-off and mobile game, the 31st entry in Ubisoft’s long-running historical open-world franchise about sneaky assassins and secret conspiracies. While I consider myself a fan of the series and was excited to play a new Assassin’s Creed adventure set in feudal Japan, I…
We recommend a variety of different Bluetooth tools besides BlueZ, the official implementation of the Bluetooth protocol stack.
Google today announced a $32 billion deal to buy Wiz, an Israeli cloud security company that would become part of Google’s cloud division if the merger is completed.
The all-cash deal requires regulatory approval at a time when the Department of Justice is trying to break up Google by forcing it to sell the Chrome browser after a judge ruled that Google illegally maintained a monopoly. Google is also awaiting a verdict in a separate ad-tech monopoly case brought by the US government.
Google’s announcement this morning said that “Wiz’s products will continue to work and be available across all major clouds, including Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Oracle Cloud platforms.”
Amazon’s God of War TV show was announced years ago and is still sorting itself out behind the scenes. Now, well-known TV writer Ronald D. Moore has confirmed he’s joined the project, adding that it’s already slated for at least two seasons. Also, he’s never really played the games because modern controls are just a…
If all goes according to plan, the Ubuntu project will soon be
replacing many of the traditional GNU utilities with implementations
written in Rust, such as those created by the uutils project, which we covered in
February. Wholesale replacement of core utilities at the heart of a
Linux distribution is no small matter, which is why Canonical’s VP of
engineering, Jon Seager, has released oxidizr. It
is a command-line utility that helps users easily enable or disable
the Rust-based utilities to test their suitability. Seager is calling
for help with testing and for users to provide feedback with their
experiences ahead of a possible switch for Ubuntu 25.10, an interim release
scheduled for October 2025. So far, responses from the Ubuntu
community seem positive if slightly skeptical of such a major
change.
It’s well understood that spiders have poor eyesight and thus sense the vibrations in their webs whenever prey (like a fly) gets caught; the web serves as an extension of their sensory system. But spiders also exhibit less-understood behaviors to locate struggling prey. Most notably, they take on a crouching position, sometimes moving up and down to shake the web or plucking at the web by pulling in with one leg. The crouching seems to be triggered when prey is stationary and stops when the prey starts moving.
But it can be difficult to study the underlying mechanisms of this behavior because there are so many variables at play when observing live spiders. To simplify matters, researchers at Johns Hopkins University’s Terradynamics Laboratory are building crouching spider robots and testing them on synthetic webs. The results provide evidence for the hypothesis that spiders crouch to sense differences in web frequencies to locate prey that isn’t moving—something analogous to echolocation. The researchers presented their initial findings today at the American Physical Society’s Global Physics Summit in Anaheim, California.
“Our lab investigates biological problems using robot physical models,” team member Eugene Lin told Ars. “Animal experiments are really hard to reproduce because it’s hard to get the animal to do what you want to do.” Experiments with robot physical models, by contrast, “are completely repeatable. And while you’re building them, you get a better idea of the actual [biological] system and how certain behaviors happen.” The lab has also built robots inspired by cockroaches and fish.
Food Network chef Guy Fieri shares cover space with Batman and Superman in a new variant release.
Despite spending hundreds of millions on blockbuster films, Netflix continues to churn out critically panned big-budget fare with its latest $300 million flop, “The Electric State,” starring Chris Pratt and Millie Bobby Brown. While the streaming giant has produced acclaimed films by giving talented directors creative freedom — resulting in successes like “The Irishman,” “Marriage Story” and “The Power of the Dog” — it has repeatedly failed to create genuinely compelling blockbusters despite attracting major talent and pouring massive resources into productions like “Red Notice,” “The Gray Man” and now “The Electric State.”
These expensive Netflix “mockbusters” lack the overwhelming sensations that theatrical blockbusters deliver, instead feeling like glorified content designed primarily for home viewing. The Russo brothers’ “Electric State,” with its drab visuals and lifeless performances, exemplifies how Netflix’s biggest productions feel infused with the knowledge they’re merely “content first.”
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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A quality set of tools is critical for most any DIY or home improvement project, and whether you’re doing home repairs or trying your hand at woodworking, cordless tools can make your project go much more smoothly—but the tradeoff comes in the investment required, especially as you’re just starting out.
Right now, you can ease the pain a bit: Many Milwaukee cordless tools and accessories are currently on sale at Home Depot for more than 50% off, making it a good time to build out a new tool kit or expand your existing one.
Cordless power tools can make or break your DIY project, from cutting to driving screws. Here are some deals on power drivers and saws from Milwaukee to help you elevate your DIY game.
The Milwaukee 18-Volt quarter-inch impact driver is on sale for $99, 50% off its usual price. The driver includes a 2-amp-hour battery and a charger as well as a tool bag. This is a great beginner kit, as it comes with an 18-volt battery and compatible charger.
The Milwaukee 18-volt reciprocating saw is on sale for $149, 52% off its regular price. The reciprocating saw comes with a 5-amp-hour battery and a charger. This is a good deal, as larger-capacity batteries can be expensive on their own, making this tool and 18-volt-battery combo a good choice to expand your existing Milwaukee set.
The Milwaukee 18-volt Hackzall reciprocating saw is on sale for $149, 52% off its typical price. This tool set also comes with a 5-amp-hour battery and a charger. The Hackzall version of the reciprocating saw has a compact, one-handed design, making it ideal for squeezing into smaller spaces where a larger tool won’t fit.
Batteries tend to be the most expensive component of cordless tools. They can also wear out over time, lasting for 2-3 years on average. With a few freshly charged batteries on hand, your projects will go faster, so it’s worth picking up some spares at a discount.
The Milwaukee 8-amp-hour, 18-volt battery and charger is on sale for $149, 52% off its usual price. This set is a good deal because higher-capacity chargers last longer and can run more powerful tools. If you have a home shop situation that isn’t close to a power outlet, having an 8-amp-hour battery for your cordless tools will allow you to work for hours without needing to swap the battery.
The Milwaukee 18-volt battery three-pack is on sale for $219, 33% off its regular price. This set of batteries includes two 18-volt cp3 batteries and one 18-volt, 5-amp-hour battery. The cp3 batteries are smaller and lighter, charging in 35 minutes on a Milwaukee rapid charger. The 5-amp-hour battery takes 60 minutes to top up on a rapid charger. This is a good deal on replacement batteries if you already have tools and chargers, but need to replace worn out batteries.
Bits for your drivers are essential, and having a good collection of various types and sizes will help to eliminate those lat-minute trips to the hardware store while working on a project.
The Milwaukee 105-piece driver and drill bit set is on sale for $69, 37% off its typical price. This set includes several sizes and types of driver bits, and 15 sizes of drill bits to fit either an impact driver or a standard drill. This is a good foundational set if you have a range of small projects to work on.
The Milwaukee 90-piece driver bit set is on sale for $49, 51% off its usual price. The bits are a range of sizes and tip types including Philips head, and they come with a case compatible with Milwaukee packout toolboxes. These bits are useful for a range of projects, making this a good choice if you’re building out an impact driver kit.
The Milwaukee 95-piece drill and driver bit set is on sale for $39.97, 34% off its regular price. The set includes a quarter-inch socket adapter, a range of driver bit sizes and types, and a few drill bits. This is a more compact kit that travels easily, and is a good addition to your tool go-bag.
As stock slumps and Americans turn against the automaker, its owners are paying higher insurance premiums.
