Technology

American companies could get dibs on high-end chips.

Google is updating the Chrome web browser to automatically revoke notification permissions for websites that haven't been visited recently, to reduce alert overload.

Instagram chief Adam Mosseri says AI will empower new creators while forcing society to rethink what’s real online as synthetic content grows.

As a community-driven flavor of Ubuntu, Kubuntu continues its mission to deliver the cutting-edge KDE software ecosystem on top of Ubuntu’s rock-solid foundation. This interim release, aligned with Ubuntu’s six-month cycle, packs in the freshest updates to Plasma, Frameworks, and applications, ensuring a smooth, performant desktop experience for millions of users worldwide.

Building on the Ubuntu 25.10 base released today by Canonical, Kubuntu 25.10 introduces Plasma 6.4 as the flagship update, alongside Qt 6.9, KDE Frameworks 6.17.0, and the latest KDE Gear 25.08 suite.

We’ve also upgraded to Linux kernel 6.17 for enhanced hardware support and efficiency. Whether you’re a developer, creator, or everyday user, this release emphasizes Wayland adoption, modern security, and seamless integration with the open source world.

Kubuntu remains completely free to download, use, and share—empowering our global community to innovate without barriers. Download it now from kubuntu.org/getkubuntu

cross-posted from: https://piefed.social/post/1346194

In a major breakthrough for the digital rights movement, the German government has refused to back the EU's controversial Chat Control regulation today after facing massive public pressure. This blocks the required majority in the EU Council, derailing the plan to pass the surveillance law next week

https://fightchatcontrol.eu/

It seems like OEMs are becoming brave enough to stop bundling a USB charging cable in their phone's packaging.

Microsoft Copilot, not so much

Advertising can and should work better — for people, for publishers, and for brands. That belief is what drives Mozilla’s growing investment in rebuilding digital advertising around trust, transparency and fairness.

Microsoft is removing more methods that help users create local Windows accounts and bypass the Microsoft account requirement when installing Windows 11.

https://archive.ph/2025.10.06-110137/https://www.reuters.com/business/amd-signs-ai-chip-supply-deal-with-openai-gives-it-option-take-10-stake-2025-10-06/

Wendell and I have talked about Gordon a lot over this year, and in honor of him as a mutual friend, we decided to bring back the topic that kicked it all off: Is Intel Actually Screwed? Last time Wendell joined, we talked about Linux benchmarking (linked below) and whether or not x86 was screwed, but now, it's time to get back to what the hell is going on at Intel.

• Watch our Linux benchmarking prep video: https://youtu.be/5O6tQYJSEMw
• And go check out Wendell! https://www.youtube.com/c/Level1Techs

This mouse has ears.

Full paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2509.13581

While it's certainly important to monitor the condition of paved roads, keeping an eye on the surface will only tell you so much. You also need to know what's going on with the underlying asphalt, which is where an embedded layer of electronic fabric is designed to come in.

Feathered poultry farm visitors are scattered by laser beams.

It's wild to read this classic 1991 paper that basically put the numbers behind the RISC vs. CISC flame wars. The authors wanted to figure out which processor architecture was actually better by comparing a RISC champ (MIPS M/2000) against a CISC heavyweight (VAX 8700).

To make it a fair fight, they picked these two specifically because their internal hardware pipelines were shockingly similar, even though the VAX was a massive, expensive beast and the MIPS was a sleek custom chip. This way, they could mostly blame the architecture itself for any performance difference, not the manufacturing tech.

The TLDR is that RISC absolutely crushed it. On average, the VAX had to burn through 2.7 times more CPU cycles to get the same work done. The whole RISC strategy was trading fewer, complex instructions for way simpler, fast ones. Even though the MIPS machine needed more instructions to finish a task, its cycles per instruction (CPI) were so much lower that it won by a huge margin.

The paper shows that the more complex a VAX instruction was (higher VAX CPI), the more simple MIPS instructions were needed to replace it, but the trade-off was always a big net win for RISC.

So why was MIPS so much better? The authors point to a few key architectural wins. First, MIPS had way more registers (32 general-purpose + 16 for floating-point) compared to the VAX's 15, which meant it didn't have to access slow memory as often. Second, basic operations like conditional branches were way faster on MIPS (1-2 cycles) than on the VAX (5 cycles), which was a huge deal. The MIPS architecture was also just smarter about keeping the pipeline full by using things like delay slots, which is basically doing useful work in moments that would have otherwise been wasted cycles—something the VAX couldn't do.

The authors admit their study isn't perfect, and they point out that compiler quality could have skewed the results and they only used a handful of programs for testing. But still, looking back, this paper was basically a prophecy for why modern CPUs, even from Intel, have a RISC-style core under the hood. It laid out the fundamental math for why the RISC approach was the future.

https://archive.ph/aNV7c

Plain old pictures are out; content is in.