The long-running SCO/IBM Unix and Linux ownership dispute has resurfaced yet again, this time through SCO successor Xinuos, which is trying to pursue old license and copyright claims tied to Project Monterey. "The core issue seems to be whether Xinuos even has the right to litigate the matter, or if some ancient legalese in the original agreements means the window for legal argument has long since expired," reports The Register. From the report: [T]he roots of the case are the 1998 alliance between IBM and a company called the Santa Cruz Operation which sold a version of UNIX for x86 CPUs. Those two companies, plus Intel and Sequent, created "Project Monterey" -- an effort to create a unified version of UNIX that could run on multiple processors. By 2001, Project Monterey was close to delivering a unified UNIX, an achievement made possible by blending code from IBM and SCO.

By then, a little project called "Linux" already ran on multiple processors. Big Blue decided Linux was the future and bailed from Project Monterey -- then allegedly contributed some Monterey code to the open-source project and to its own AIX and Z operating systems. SCO felt it owned some of that code, so sued IBM.

SCO and its successors struggled to survive, but interested parties kept the lawsuit alive because the chance to emerge as owner of parts of the Linux codebase, and IBM's code, had the potential to turn into a colossal payday. The case and its successors ended in 2021, with a settlement that saw litigants agree to end the matter without IBM admitting fault. But by then, SCO had sold its software to a biz called Xinuos that decided to fight on.

The Xinuos case has burbled along quietly since, and on June 22nd reached the milestone of a hearing. The matter has become a little more modern, if only because this hearing was held online and the presiding judge appeared to unwittingly be on mute at one point. But the arguments otherwise seemed to revisit Project Monterey, debated the relevance of past litigation, contested who owned what, when they owned it, and how they could prove it. Xinuos argued IBM never had a license for SCO code. Big Blue argued that it did nothing wrong.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Anthropic quickly removed a tracker secretly monitoring Claude Code users in China after a security researcher exposed the hidden code and condemned the spyware-like tracking as a "serious breach of user trust." Last week, a web developer known as "Thereallo" was researching privacy issues in Claude Code and was shocked to find that the AI firm was using "prompt steganography" to hide code that tracks Chinese users "in plain sight." This code wasn't malicious, but it was sending information to Anthropic that most users wouldn't detect, relying on shorthand markers to quietly flag users' timezone, proxy, and potential connection to Chinese AI labs that Anthropic has accused of distillation attacks.

On X, Anthropic engineer Thariq Shihipar confirmed that the tracker was added to Claude Code as an "experiment" in March. According to Shihipar, the code "was meant to prevent account abuse from unauthorized resellers and protect against distillation." Regarding the former, The Washington Post found unauthorized retailers have sold access to free models for $1 a month, and pro subscriptions that can cost $100 monthly sell for "as little as $12." Supposedly, Anthropic has "actually been meaning to take this down for a while," Shihipar said of the hidden code, because engineers have "landed stronger mitigations since then."

Privacy advocates were not happy with the explanation, though, warning that the code is evidence that Anthropic is willing to cross lines to surveil users. That's perhaps especially surprising, considering that Anthropic riled the Trump administration by refusing to allow the US government to use Claude to surveil US users. The AI firm has since sued the White House over the clash. The Post suggested that the tracker incident is a sign that US firms like Anthropic are taking "increasingly aggressive measures" to block Chinese AI firms from copying their models. A more defensive stance has apparently become critical. In the past year, Chinese firms have "consistently matched" US firms' model capabilities "within months," the Post reported. Most recently, "a new, free AI model from Chinese company Zhipu AI was better at finding computer vulnerabilities than Anthropic's Claude Opus 4.8 model, which was released in May," the Post reported.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Microsoft is laying off about 4,800 employees, including 1,600 from Xbox, as it restructures around AI investments and tries to reset its struggling gaming business. "Our business is changing because the world around it is changing. The way technology is built, deployed, and used is transforming faster than at any point in my time here," said Amy Coleman, EVP and chief people officer at Microsoft. "Our customers' needs are shifting, the business models that serve them are shifting, and that means the work itself -- what we do, where we focus, and how we're organized -- has to transform too." She continued: "Companies don't get to choose whether their industry changes; they only get to choose whether they change with it. That means we will need to adjust resources and roles and shift how we operate so we can have the greatest impact for our customers." TechCrunch reports: Coleman stressed that the roles being eliminated today "are not being replaced by AI," but noted, "what is true is that AI is changing how work gets done." "Some of the tasks we do every day can now be automated, and that means we all need to keep learning, keep building new skills, and keep adapting as the work evolves," Coleman wrote. [...] Speaking about the Xbox layoffs, Coleman said little: "We are restructuring to position the business for long-term success. Engineering teams across the company will also evolve their structure and priorities to meet customer needs and innovate for the future."

Of today's 4,800 layoffs at Microsoft, 1,600 will hit Xbox, with about 3,200 cuts in total expected through fiscal year 2027, according to Asha Sharma, CEO of Xbox. In an email she sent to employees on Monday, Sharma called this "the most significant restructure in Xbox history." "Our business today is not healthy," Sharma wrote. "We are operating at margins that are 3-10x lower than comparable platform and publishing businesses." She added that Xbox made bets like its monthly subscription service Game Pass, alongside moves to grow its portfolio of content and invest in multi-platform, among other attempts to breathe life into the business. None of those strategies grew at the expected pace, leading to the core business weakening even as Xbox added more teams and investment. "And now the industry is facing the most severe hardware crisis in its history," Sharma said. "We must reset Xbox."

As part of the shift, Microsoft will transition four of its gaming studios to operate under new management, ensuring preservation of intellectual property and ongoing projects. Specifically Compulsion Games and Double Fine Productions will return to independent studios, according to Sharma. Ninja Theory and Undead Labs are coming under new ownership with funding to complete and grow some of their more popular games. According to Sharma's memo, Xbox is also flattening management hard, cutting the current 14 management layers to no more than five, but ideally three. As part of this major organization redesign, Xbox is making longtime executive Helen Chiang chief operating officer with end-to-end profit and loss authority across content, hardware, platform, and services. Xbox's restructuring plan centers around narrowing focus by dropping sprawling creative bets that don't produce platform-scale returns, and instead homing in on core strategic pillars like Mojang and King, the businesses behind Minecraft and Candy Crush.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Nintendo will stop selling the original Switch in Europe in mid-February 2027, nearly 10 years after the console's launch. In its place, the company will release updated versions of the Switch 2 and several controllers with user-replaceable batteries to comply with new EU regulations. The Verge reports: The news comes as Nintendo is making a bunch of changes to the rest of its lineup due to EU regulations requiring user-replaceable batteries. Starting this summer, the company says it will start introducing updated versions of various devices on "a rolling basis," ahead of the regulations coming into effect on February 18th, 2027. "There is no difference in functionality between current products and revised products containing user-replaceable batteries," Nintendo says.

The Switch 2 is the most notable product being updated -- the new version is expected to start rolling out in the fall -- but there will also be versions of the Joy-Con controllers, Joy-Con 2, Switch 2 Pro Controller, and N64 and GameCube Switch controllers with user-replaceable batteries. "Due to a variety of factors, revised products may not become available in all European countries simultaneously," Nintendo notes.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Relive the action from Silverstone at the 2026 British Grand Prix with plenty of off-track F1 moments – LEGO racing chaos, a British boyband, and more.

Democratic candidate for Senate, who has faced series of scandals, denies allegation reported by Politico

A woman has accused Graham Platner, the Democratic candidate for US Senate in Maine, of sexual assault, according to an exclusive report by Politico.

Jenny Racicot, 41, dated the oyster farmer former marine veteran and alleges he forced her to have sex despite repeated objections.

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We try to teach our children to follow the rules. Now an American president has chosen the opposite tack

I’m rooting for the US as we take on Belgium today in Seattle for a place in the World Cup quarterfinals.

But the game isn’t what it was – before Trump asked the Fifa president, Gianni Infantino, to review the suspension of the US’s top scorer, striker Folarin Balogun, who got a red card in a match against Bosnia and Herzegovina and would otherwise have been suspended from Monday’s match.

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Andrea Shaw and husband appeared on RFK Jr-linked podcast after deaths in May last year of 18-month-olds

An Idaho mother who said her 18-month-old twins died last year after receiving three vaccines has been charged with murder in their deaths, officials said last week.

Andrea Shaw, 23, was indicted on two counts of first-degree murder in the deaths of her toddlers, Tyson and Dallas, who were found dead in a shared bed on 1 May last year.

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Just dropped a couple of days ago: Lane 8’s Summer 2026 Mixtape (4 hours long). Also available on Soundcloud.

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Thomas Hawk posted a photo:

Fusion energy has presented a tantalizing alternative to fossil fuels for the better part of a century, but creating the equivalent of a human-made sun is easier said than done. However, new research from the boffins at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), the Cleveland Clinic, and IBM in support of the Department of Energy’s (DoE) Genesis Mission suggests quantum computers and perhaps a sprinkle of AI could be what the world needs to get fusion power running at scale. Specifically, researchers are looking to quantum processing units (QPUs), like those built by IBM, to find optimal materials to extract the tritium fuel required by some of the most promising reactor designs. On Earth, tritium, a radioactive hydrogen isotope with one proton and two neutrons, is fleetingly rare. Before we can harness fusion to produce energy at scale, we need to figure out a way to mass produce the stuff. According to researchers, molten salts containing a mixture of fluorine, lithium, and beryllium (FLiBe), are one of the more promising candidates for extracting tritium for use in fusion reactors. The idea is that these molten salts, which have historically been used in experimental fission reactors as a coolant, function as a breeder environment for tritium. The trick, as you might expect, is predicting the electronic ground-state energies of FLiBe molecular clusters to better understand how they bind tritium. This is no easy task. These calculations are extremely computationally expensive and prone to error. But as it happens, one of the applications quantum computers have shown the most promise with is optimization and computational chemistry problems. Developing the quantum algorithms necessary to do this isn't easy, but researchers won't stop trying to solve it. As it turns out, the same techniques used by the Cleveland Clinic to simulate 12,635-atom proteins can be applied to FLiBe sims. The process involves using QPUs as an accelerator, similar to how GPUs are used in supercomputers and AI clusters today to perform calculations not easily performed on conventional hardware. In a blog post, IBM explains that parts of the problem are broken down into quantum circuits which can be solved by the QPU. “This allowed the team to more precisely determine the electronic structure of the material and how its atoms behave, particularly how strongly they bind tritium at the fundamental molecular level.” By combining CPUs, GPUs, and QPUs, the researchers say they were able to identify nine potential cluster configurations for producing the tritium fuel needed by fusion reactor designs. “These results add to mounting evidence that quantum-centric supercomputing is now a practical scientific tool for problems that have long challenged chemists, engineers, and materials scientists,” Jerry Chow, CTO of quantum-centric supercomputing at IBM, said in a statement. While quantum computing may show promise, this isn’t a silver bullet to realizing the potential of fusion power. Despite the progress made in recent years toward the development of a self-sustaining fusion reactor, it seems we’ve still got a ways to go. ®

If you listen to the AI industry, coders' days are numbered. Despite these concerns, software developers, at least those with experience, appear to be doing just fine at growing companies. Hiring biz Levels.fyi recently looked at how US compensation for software engineers (SWEs) is related to changes in headcount and found that salary level tends to be correlated with growth. "Generally, the companies paying the most are also the ones still hiring the most," observed Hakeem Shibly, content marketing manager for Levels.fyi, in a LinkedIn post. As an example, he pointed to companies like Anthropic and OpenAI where senior SWE offers are said to be around $810,000 and $605,000 annually. Several large companies with major investments in AI infrastructure occupy a different statistical space – they're still paying well and generating healthy profits, but they're also cutting staff. "Meta, Amazon, Google, and Coinbase all pay near the top of the market, and all four have cut staff in the last two years," said Shibly. In the least desirable quadrant, where eroding headcount meets lower relative compensation, we find companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Salesforce, where AI expenditures and AI liabilities appear to be taking a toll on hiring and compensation. "At certain companies like Block, for example, they did announce in their layoffs that it was specifically because they're increasing their investment in AI and they're cutting people from their organization," Shibly told The Register. "But, at other companies, it's a little bit more ambiguous. They're not necessarily saying that in their layoff announcements. But there has been some correlation – companies that have been spending more money on their AI compute, their AI investment, have been cutting heads as well, even though they're increasing in revenue." As this applies to SWEs, Shibly said, "There's been a bifurcation in the market where the people who are getting paid the most are getting paid much more than they used to be. And the people who are below some certain threshold … they're getting cut and it's harder for them than ever to find jobs." That hasn't been the case in Australia, where technology services firm Adaca last month said that demand for software developers has been growing. The biz reported that there are now 216,000 software and application programmers working in Australia, up from 189,000 in 2025. "We are seeing devs displaced, not replaced," said Adaca founder Lambros Photios in a statement. "They are leaving big tech and finding work anywhere and everywhere else." Looking beyond just SWEs, recent data from Ramp and Revelio suggests AI leads companies to hire more people over time. "If I were a software engineer in this market," said Shibly, "I would prioritize looking for a job at a company that is growing, even if it might not be paying as much, because at least for me personally, I want to be guaranteed that job [will still exist] a couple years down the line. And that's kind of what the data shows." ®

If you can't afford a graphics card these days, here's an alternative solution. Just order thousands of microcontrollers, design your own boards, and build your own cluster over the course of six months after dealing with a healthy dose of setbacks. At the end of it, you might even have something able to light up the equivalent of a QVGA display with a whopping resolution of 320x200 for your efforts and, as electrical engineering and software development YouTuber bitluni said of his creation, nearly the loss of your sanity. Describing his homebrewed GPU cluster as his “nemesis,” bitluni didn’t even intend to build the device, which was designed around 8,192 $0.13 CH570 RISC-V MCUs connected to custom-designed PCBs and controlled by another 256 larger cores with FPUs. The six-month saga actually began after bitluni published a video last year detailing his original homemade GPU, which led to PCB design software firm Altium reaching out about partnering for a project. “The clusters I made before were already challenging my sanity,” bitluni explained in the cluster video he published over the weekend. “I thought I was done with the topic, but the budget and these tools would allow for a cluster of a different magnitude, and the magnitude I had in mind was just insane.” Each one of the CH570 chips bitluni acquired for the project (which he had to go directly to the manufacturer to get) runs at 100 MHz with 12 KB of SRAM, and his six-layer PCB design incorporates 32 rows of 32 chips - at least at first. When he tried to order his “blades” from his PCB manufacturer, the company’s website simply couldn’t process the request because they were so ridiculously complicated. That meant having to split each blade into two pieces, and it also meant that the full design hasn’t been realized yet - according to the video, the next version (which bitluni said he already has the parts for) will have a whopping 32,000 MCUs on it instead of the measly 8,192 version one boasts. Before he got to the completion point, there was troubleshooting to handle, though. When he received the first test blade, several of the MCUs wouldn’t work, or would only function intermittently, requiring a complete redesign, relocating traces in order to avoid interference - and several weeks of waiting to get the replacements. When the replacement test boards arrived, he had another problem: level 0 wouldn’t communicate with level 1 because he crossed his MOSI and MISO lines in the design, sending input into the output channel, and vice versa. “No matter how hard you try, you will get rx and tx wrong on the first try,” bitluni said in the video. He bypassed the error on the few sample boards he received, but the rest were correctly built. At the end of the day, the whole thing worked, including all of the individually connected RGB LEDs associated with each individually programmable MCU that serves as its QVGA equivalent. As for what v1 is capable of, bitluni said he’s planning to share that in his next video on the project, which is when he’ll also release all the design files for the project for anyone insane enough to attempt this themselves. We reached out to bitluni for additional information about his DIY GPU cluster, but didn’t hear back. ®

dumpsterdiversanonymous has added a photo to the pool:

Very nice haul of three for $5. Super sized Art of the Print book by Fritz Eichenberg. He's famous for relief prints in book illustrations, and editing Artist's Proof magazine for Pratt art school in the 1960's. Johannes Lebek is German block print artist from after WWII.

NEW YORK (ANP) - De beursgraadmeters in New York gingen maandag verder omhoog, vooral door flinke koerswinsten van chipbedrijven en andere techconcerns. Beleggers stapten na het lange weekend in de Verenigde Staten weer in deze aandelen, na de recente koersverliezen in de techsector. Dat had te maken met zorgen bij beleggers over de winstgevendheid van de enorme AI-investeringen op de langere termijn door veel technologiebedrijven. Die zorgen verdwenen maandag verder naar de achtergrond.

Techbeurs Nasdaq sloot met een winst van 1,1 procent op 26.121,16 punten. De S&P 500-index ging 0,7 procent omhoog tot 7537,43 punten. De Dow-Jonesindex won 0,3 procent op 53.055,91 punten, een nieuw slotrecord. De Amerikaanse beurzen waren vrijdag dicht vanwege de viering van Onafhankelijkheidsdag op 4 juli.

De Dow steeg donderdag al ruim 1 procent tot een nieuw record en wist maandag de historische grens van 53.000 punten te passeren.

CARACAS (ANP/AFP) - Het dodental van de recente aardbevingen in Venezuela is opgelopen tot 3535, aldus de autoriteiten. Op 24 juni werd het noorden van het Zuid-Amerikaanse land getroffen door twee bevingen vlak na elkaar met een kracht van 7.2 en 7.5. Vooral de noordelijke kustregio La Guaira werd zwaar getroffen.

Er zijn 16.740 gewonden gevallen. De autoriteiten zeggen niets over het aantal nog steeds vermiste mensen. Dat zijn er volgens waarnemers vele duizenden en zou in de tienduizenden kunnen lopen.

Officieel zijn er 856 panden volledig verwoest. Meer dan 17.000 mensen zijn dakloos geworden.

769 photographers and astronomers around the world, representing 66 countries, submitted more than 4,000 images to this year’s ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. The shortlisted photos represent a range of phenomena from aurorae and stars to planets and the moon, captured around the globe. Some photographers focus on the juxtaposition of space and the human environment while others take telescopically captured snapshots of distant galaxies and nebulae, creating striking composite images.

Winners will be announced on September 17, the day after which the public exhibition will open at London’s National Maritime Museum. The show is also accompanied by the book Astronomy Photographer of the Year, Collection 15.

Do stories and artists like this matter to you? Become a Colossal Member today and support independent arts publishing for as little as $7 per month. The article Nebulae, Comets, and Aurorae, Oh My! See the ZWO Astronomy Photographer of the Year Shortlist appeared first on Colossal.

Tighter ties with the mainland have not always helped.