Distro developers began discussing ways to reduce the size of firmware updates last year. Now, in Ubuntu 26.04, it’s introducing meta-packaging to spread Linux firmware across 17 smaller packages in the resolute archives. This resolves a bug filed in 2022.

The sub-packages are:

• linux-firmware-mellanox-spectrum
• linux-firmware-intel-wireless
• linux-firmware-intel-graphics
• linux-firmware-amd-graphics
• linux-firmware-nvidia-graphics
• linux-firmware-intel-misc
• linux-firmware-broadcom-wireless
• linux-firmware-netronome
• linux-firmware-misc
• linux-firmware-qlogic
• linux-firmware-marvell-wireless
• linux-firmware-mediatek
• linux-firmware-marvell-prestera
• linux-firmware-realtek
• linux-firmware-qualcomm-wireless
• linux-firmware-qualcomm-graphics
• linux-firmware-qualcomm-misc

La Suite Meet: https://github.com/suitenumerique/meet

According to complaints filed this Monday in Texas state courts, the TV makers can allegedly use ACR technology to capture screenshots of television displays every 500 milliseconds, monitor the users' viewing activity in real time, and send this information back to the companies' servers without the users' knowledge or consent.

https://system76.com/pop/download/

Release Notes

• Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS includes the new COSMIC Desktop Environment, designed and developed by System76.

• Some GNOME apps are replaced by COSMIC apps

  • GNOME Files (Nautilus) > COSMIC Files
  • GNOME Terminal > COSMIC Terminal
  • GNOME Text Editor > COSMIC Text Editor
  • GNOME Media Player (Totem) > COSMIC Media Player

• Pop!_Shop is replaced by COSMIC Store

• Key components

  • COSMIC Epoch 1
  • Linux kernel 6.17.9
  • Mesa 25.1.5-1
  • NVIDIA Driver 580

• Some games may start partially off-screen. Press F11 or Super+F11 to fullscreen the game

• Display toggle hotkeys and an on-screen display is not supported yet

• COSMIC has a built-in screenshot tool. If you require annotations, we recommend Flameshot, which can be installed from Flathub via COSMIC Store. Version 13.1 or higher is required for COSMIC

• COSMIC is not currently optimized for touch devices. An on-screen-keyboard is in development.

• The COSMIC Desktop will be continuously updated with new features and improvements after release

• Kernels and hardware support are continuously updated in Pop!_OS

• You can follow COSMIC DE feature and improvement progress on the project board

https://github.com/iDescriptor/iDescriptor

Currently it supports AppImage, but Flatpak version will possibly be available in future: https://github.com/iDescriptor/iDescriptor/issues/1

The researchers from the University of Vienna and SBA Research used WhatsApp's contact-discovery feature, which lets you submit a phone number to the platform's GetDeviceList API endpoint to determine whether a phone number is associated with an account and what devices were used.

Without strict rate limiting, APIs like this can be abused to perform large-scale enumeration across a platform.

The researchers found this to be the case with WhatsApp, as they were able to send a high volume of queries directly to WhatsApp's servers, checking more than 100 million numbers per hour.

They ran the entire operation from a single university server using just five authenticated sessions, initially expecting to get caught by WhatsApp. However, the platform never blocked the accounts, never throttled their traffic, never restricted their IP address, and never reached out despite all the abusive activity coming from one device.

The researchers then generated a global set of 63 billion potential mobile numbers and tested all of them against the API. Their queries returned 3.5 billion active WhatsApp accounts.

According to marsf, the long-time locale leader of the Japanese SUMO team, the decision to disband was triggered by the recent introduction of an automated translation system known as Sumobot. Deployed on October 22, the bot began editing and approving Japanese Knowledge Base articles without community oversight.

In a message posted to the SUMO discussion forum, marsf explained that Sumobot’s behavior was unacceptable for several reasons:

• It disregarded Japanese translation guidelines, resulting in literal and sometimes inaccurate text.
• It overrode existing localizations, effectively erasing community-approved work.
• It automatically approved machine-translated content for all archived articles within 72 hours, removing the review window for human contributors.
• It operated without consultation, control, or communication with the Japanese community.

Among the notable improvements, the driver introduces a new environment variable, CUDA_DISABLE_PERF_BOOST, allowing users to disable CUDA’s default behavior of automatically boosting GPU clock speeds to higher power states during compute workloads.

https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/drivers/details/257493/