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Campaigners say the chaos caused by the global IT outage last week underlines the risk of moving towards a cashless society.

Supermarkets, banks, pubs, cafes, train stations and airports were all hit by the failure of Microsoft systems on Friday, leaving many unable to accept electronic payments.

The Payment Choice Alliance (PCA), which campaigns against the move towards a cashless society, lists 23 firms and groups, at least some of whose outlets take only credit or debit cards.

Cash payments increased for the first time in a decade last year, according to UK Finance, which represents banks.

The GMB Union said the outage reinforced what it had been saying for years: that “cash is a vital part of how our communities operate”.

In March, McDonald’s, Tesco, Sainsbury’s and Gregg’s suffered problems with their payment systems.

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With the maturity of the EXT4 file-system it’s not too often seeing any huge feature additions for this commonly used Linux file-system but there’s still the occasional wild performance optimization to uncover… With Linux 6.11 the EXT4 file-system can see upwards of a 20% performance boost in some scenarios.

Ted Ts’o sent out the EXT4 updates today for Linux 6.11.

He explained in that pull request: "Many cleanups and bug fixes in ext4, especially for the fast commit feature.

Up to 20% faster for fast devices using async direct I/O thanks to JBD2 optimizations.

Indeed the patch from Huawei’s Zhang Yi to speed up jbd2_transaction_committed() shows off some great improvements:

It’s great continuing to see EXT4 uncover new performance optimizations.

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The date for the introduction of the EU’s new entry-exit system has been pushed back again until November, allaying fears of long queues at the border during the October half-term holidays.

The launch of the new biometric checks for foreign travellers, including Britons, entering the EU, has been delayed from 6 October until at least 10 November, with many smaller airports yet to have facilities in place.

The move will again raise questions over the readiness of a system that has been long delayed from the planned 2021 start, with the French insisting the additional border controls should not be introduced before the Paris Olympics.

Under the entry-exit system (EES), non-EU citizens will have to register their biometric information – including fingerprints and facial scans – at the border, under the supervision of an EU officer, on their first visit.

There have been warnings of long queues at British points of entry – including the Port of Dover, and Eurostar’s St Pancras terminal – where the French and EU border is physically located in England, before passengers board ferries or trains.

The cross-Channel train operator said the process would add only a few seconds to border queues and not cause chaos, although passengers would have to ensure they arrived in time for the additional layer of biometric checks.

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Due to the ARM64 maintainer for the Linux kernel going on holiday, the ARM64 port updates have been submitted ahead of the opening of the Linux 6.11 merge window that will likely be on Monday or otherwise the following week depending upon if a 6.10-rc8 is warranted.

When it comes to the ARM64 (AArch64) changes for this next kernel version, there’s been a lot of work on virtual CPU hotplug handling so that it should now be properly working on ARM64 ACPI-enabled systems.

Another change with Linux 6.11 ARM64 is expanding the speculative SSBS workaround to more CPU cores.

Arm’s Speculative Store Bypass handling is now being extended for additional affected CPU cores of he A710, A720, X2, X3, X925, N2, and V2.

There are also ARM64 ACPI updates, GICv3 optimizations, perf updates for more hardware, and other smaller changes.

See this merge request for all the ARM64 feature patches slated for Linux 6.11.

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Just last Monday the Southeast Asian nation of Vietnam began requiring face scans on phone banking apps as proof of identity for all digital transactions of around $400 and above.

Late last month, US cyber security firm Resecurity flagged similar concerns when it found a spike in leaked identity documents containing selfies of Singaporeans on the dark web.

Resecurity asserted that some were captured by cyber crime groups that run fake telemarketing or customer support scams and gather selfies so they can sell them to other miscreants.

“Using selfies for identity verification has been growing steadily for around the last five years, but the inflection point was during the pandemic when people were forced to engage digitally,” VP analyst at Gartner, Akif Khan, told The Register.

In his experience, businesses that rely on simple still selfies are typically smaller outfits that have experienced fraud and have implemented a selfie-based stopgap as they scramble to put a proper solution in place.

Khan thinks concern about identity theft from still images and picture IDs found on the dark web is overblown, as most entities will require liveness checks for opening bank accounts and other tasks.

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Europol published a position paper today highlighting its concerns around SMS home routing – the technology that allows telcos to continue offering their services when customers visit another country.

If a crime is committed by a Brit in Germany, for example, then German police couldn’t issue a request for unencrypted data as they could with a domestic operator such as Deutsche Telekom.

Under home routing, the current investigatory powers of public authorities should be retained and a solution must be found that enables lawful interception of suspects within their territory," reads Europol’s paper.

Two possible solutions were suggested, but the wording of the paper clearly favored a legal ban on PETs (service-level encryption) in home routing over making it possible for one EU member state to request the comms from another country.

There is one that was developed for EIOs but cops are concerned this could lead to scenarios where law enforcement efforts are dependent on foreign service providers, which isn’t ideal.

“With this position paper, Europol wishes to open the debate on this technical issue, which at present is severely hampering law enforcement’s ability to access crucial evidence,” it said.

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Officially (and drily) called the Digital Wallet Beta (Cartera Digital Beta), the app Madrid unveiled on Monday would allow internet platforms to check whether a prospective smut-watcher is over 18.

Once verified, they’ll receive 30 generated “porn credits” with a one-month validity granting them access to adult content.

While the tool has been criticized for its complexity, the government says the credit-based model is more privacy-friendly, ensuring that users’ online activities are not easily traceable.

It will be voluntary, as online platforms can rely on other age-verification methods to screen out inappropriate viewers.

It heralds an EU law going into force in October 2027, which will require websites to stop minors from accessing porn.Eventually, Madrid’s porn passport is likely to be replaced by the EU’s very own digital identity system (eIDAS2) — a so-called wallet app allowing people to access a smorgasbord of public and private services across the whole bloc.

“We are acting in advance and we are asking platforms to do so too, as what is at stake requires it,” José Luis Escrivá, Spain’s digital secretary, told Spanish newspaper El País.

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Advances in artificial intelligence are leading to medical breakthroughs once thought impossible, including devices that can actually read minds and alter our brains.

Pauzaskie says our brain waves are like encrypted signals and, using artificial intelligence, researchers have identified frequencies for specific words to turn thought to text with 40% accuracy, “Which, give it a few years, we’re probably talking 80-90%.”

Researchers are now working to reverse the conditions by using electrical stimulation to alter the frequencies or regions of the brain where they originate.

But while medical research facilities are subject to privacy laws, private companies - that are amassing large caches of brain data - are not.

The vast majority of them also don’t disclose where the data is stored, how long they keep it, who has access to it, and what happens if there’s a security breach…

With companies and countries racing to access, analyze, and alter our brains, Pauzauskie suggests, privacy protections should be a no-brainer, "It’s everything that we are.

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A change proposal has been filed by Red Hat engineer Miro Hrončok for retiring Python 2.7 within Fedora 41 and to drop packages still depending upon Python 2.

We do not wish to simply orphan the package, as we are afraid it would not receive proper care if taken by somebody else.

If there are potential maintainers interested in maintaining Python 2 in Fedora beyond Fedora 41, they can talk to us and demonstrate their ability and will to take care of Python 2 by joining the maintenance early.

Users who need to run their application in Python 2 should do so on a platform that offers support for it.

Developers who still need to test their software on Python 2 can use containers with older Fedora releases or unsupported CentOS/RHEL versions."

The F41 change proposal still needs the approval of the Fedora Engineering and Steering Committee (FESCo), but it will presumably proceed – well, assuming GIMP 3.0 finally releases this summer so as to not block the Python 2.7 removal.

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If you’re on Mastodon, you might notice new author bylines appearing alongside articles — including those from The Verge.

Click on the byline, and you’ll jump directly to the author’s fediverse account, allowing you to track their work wherever it’s posted.

You can see how author bylines appear beneath articles in this post, which links you to Mastodon CEO Eugen Rochko’s profile.

It can also lead to a person’s profile on Threads, Flipboard, WordPress with ActivityPub, PeerTube, and others.

Mastodon is working to open up the feature to more outlets, too, but it currently requires “manual review” to prevent “malicious sites framing users as their authors.” However, Mastodon plans on launching “a self-serve system” to manage the sites authors can appear from in the future.

Even though it’s not widely rolled out just yet, it does seem like a neat way to quickly find out who wrote an article and check out their other work across multiple platforms.

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Australia’s Federal Police (AFP) has charged a man with running a fake Wi-Fi networks on at least one commercial flight and using it to harvest fliers’ credentials for email and social media services.

The man was investigated after an airline “reported concerns about a suspicious Wi-Fi network identified by its employees during a domestic flight.”

The AFP subsequently arrested a man who was found with “a portable wireless access device, a laptop and a mobile phone” in his hand luggage.

It’s alleged the accused’s collection of kit was used to create Wi-Fi hotspots with SSIDs confusingly similar to those airlines operate for in-flight access to the internet or streamed entertainment.

Airport Wi-Fi was also targeted, and the AFP also found evidence of similar activities “at locations linked to the man’s previous employment.”

AFP Western Command Cybercrime detective inspector Andrea Coleman pointed out that free Wi-Fi services should not require logging in through an email or social media account.

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Advances in artificial intelligence are leading to medical breakthroughs once thought impossible, including devices that can actually read minds and alter our brains.

Pauzaskie says our brain waves are like encrypted signals and, using artificial intelligence, researchers have identified frequencies for specific words to turn thought to text with 40% accuracy, “Which, give it a few years, we’re probably talking 80-90%.”

Researchers are now working to reverse the conditions by using electrical stimulation to alter the frequencies or regions of the brain where they originate.

But while medical research facilities are subject to privacy laws, private companies - that are amassing large caches of brain data - are not.

The vast majority of them also don’t disclose where the data is stored, how long they keep it, who has access to it, and what happens if there’s a security breach…

With companies and countries racing to access, analyze, and alter our brains, Pauzauskie suggests, privacy protections should be a no-brainer, "It’s everything that we are.

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As negotiations to end the long legal brawl between Julian Assange, the WikiLeaks founder, and the United States reached a critical point this spring, prosecutors presented his lawyers with a choice so madcap that a person involved thought it sounded like a line from a Monty Python movie.

In April, a lawyer with the Justice Department’s national security division broke the impasse with a sly workaround: How about an American courtroom that wasn’t actually inside mainland America?

By early 2024, leaders in Australia, including Kevin Rudd, the ambassador to the United States, and Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, began pressuring their American counterparts to reach a deal — not so much out of solidarity with Mr. Assange, or support for his actions, but because he had spent so much time in captivity.

But after a short period of internal discussions, senior officials rejected that approach, drafting a somewhat tougher counteroffer: Mr. Assange would plead to a single felony count, conspiracy to obtain and disseminate national defense information, a more serious offense that encompassed his interactions with Ms. Manning.

Instead, his initial refusal to plead guilty to a felony was rooted in his reluctance to appear in an American courtroom, out of fear of being detained indefinitely or physically attacked in the United States, Ms. Robinson said in the TV interview.

Nick Vamos, the former head of extradition for the Crown Prosecution Service, which is responsible for bringing criminal cases in England and Wales, believes the ruling might have “triggered” an acceleration of the plea deal.

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The extensible scheduler “sched_ext” code has proven quite versatile for opening up better Linux gaming performance, more quickly prototyping new scheduler changes, Ubuntu/Canonical has been evaluating it for pursuing a more micro-kernel like design, and many other interesting approaches with it.

Torvalds feels the sched_ext code is ready enough and provides real value to the mainline Linux kernel.

This whole patchset was the major (private) discussion at last year’s kernel maintainer summit, and I don’t find any value in having the same discussion (whether off-list or as an actual event) at the upcoming maintainer summit one year later, so to make any kind of sane progress, my current plan is to merge this for 6.11.

I’ve never been a huge believer in trying to make everybody happy with code that is out of tree - we’re better off working together on it in-tree.

And using the “in order to accept this, some other thing has to be fixed first” argument doesn’t really work well either (and that has been discussed for over a decade at various maintainer summits).

So short of any last minute change of plans between now and mid-July when the Linux 6.11 merge window opens, looks for sched_ext in the next kernel cycle.

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Jeremy Soller who is an engineer at System76 and manages a side hustle of leading development on the open-source, Rust-written Redox OS has shared the latest look at this open-source operating system with the System76 COSMIC desktop applications.

Redox OS down to its micro-kernel is leveraging Rust and thus the COSMIC apps – also leveraging Rust – are a great fit for this open-source OS.

Here’s a look at Redox OS from a few years ago when I last gave it a shot, rather basic:

Now here’s the latest look at Redox OS that Solley posted to X with the caption "This is Redox OS, a Rust and micro-kernel based operating system that I created, running three COSMIC DE apps (with only Rust dependencies) that I authored.

Jeremy in follow-up comments also added that they still need to port DRM kernel graphics drivers to make gaming more viable and self-hosting is “very close”.

Nice job to those that continue to be involved in this from-scratch Rust-written open-source OS.

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While ReiserFS is obsolete and will eventually be dropped from the upstream Linux kernel in Linux 6.10 is one last ReiserFS change that was requested by former lead developer Hans Reiser.

ReiserFS lead developer and convicted murderer Hans Reiser a few months back wrote letters to be made public apologizing for his social mistakes and other commentary.

In his written communications he also made a last request for ReiserFS in the Linux kernel: "Assuming that the decision is to remove [ReiserFS] V3 from the kernel, I have just one request: that for one last release the README be edited to add Mikhail Gilula, Konstantin Shvachko, and Anatoly Pinchuk to the credits, and to delete anything in there I might have said about why they were not credited.

Hans credits his improved social and communication skills learned in prison among other details shared in the public letters.

Per the indirect request by Hans Reiser, SUSE’s Jan Kara has now altered the ReiserFS README file with the changes going in today to the Linux 6.10 kernel.

The change landed today as part of the linux-fs merge to Linux 6.10.

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The game is currently in the process of adding monsters from Scarlet and Violet, and that’s where this story begins.

Two of the latest additions to the Pokémon Go roster are Wiglett and Wugtrio, riffs on the designs of Diglett and Dugtrio, who live on beaches and look kind of like garden eels.

OpenStreetMap contributors have discovered “beaches” that were actually located in residential backyards, golf courses, and sports fields.

Entire blog posts, wiki entries, and presentations from OSM mappers exist to bridge the knowledge gap, explaining the purpose of OpenStreetMap data to Pokémon Go users and breaking down Pokémon Go game mechanics for frustrated OSM contributors.

As that OSM blog post implies, not every user who discovers the OpenStreetMap project via Pokémon Go ends up messing with the data.

Though many users are “truth-stretching” vandals who create nonexistent parks, beaches, and footways to encourage specific Pokémon to spawn, others become “very careful, trustworthy” OSM users who “make many worthy additions to the map” by accurately mapping out places where OSM’s data is patchy or outdated.

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For 20 years, a loosely organized group of Wikipedia editors toiled away curating a collection of 15,000 articles on a single subject: the roads and highways of the United States.

People drive on them every day, but they don’t give them much attention,” said editor Michael Gronseth, who goes by Imzadi1979 on Wikipedia, where he dedicated his work to Michigan highways, specifically.

“The New York Times isn’t going to write an article about maintenance on highways in the middle-of-nowhere Texas or Colorado,” said Ben M., a roads editor known as BMACS001 on Wikipedia, who asked to withhold their full name.

After years of permissiveness, a growing contingent of Wikipedia editors started to argue that such a scenario counts as an interpretation of the map, and therefore, it’s illegitimate original research.

Faced with a mass deletion of their hagiographies on Dragonite and Garchomp, the Pokémon editors forked their articles over to a new website, Bulbapedia, where their work continues.

AARoads actually predates Wikipedia, tracing its origins all the way back to the prehistoric internet days of the year 2000, complete with articles, maps, forums, and a collection of over 10,000 photos of highway signs and markers.

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