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After 26 years and over 1,000 episodes, Melvyn Bragg is stepping down as presenter of BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, leaving behind a legacy of intellectual curiosity and broadcasting excellence. While he will no longer host the series, he will remain involved with the BBC and is set to launch a new project in 2026. The BBC reports: Over the last quarter of a century, Melvyn has skilfully led conversations about everything from the age of the Universe to 'Zenobia', Queen of the Palmyrene Empire. He has welcomed the company of the brightest and best academics in their fields, sharing their passion and knowledge with a fascinated audience right around the globe. While he will be much missed on In Our Time, Melvyn will continue to be a friend of Radio 4 with more to come to celebrate his extraordinary career, and a new series in 2026 (details to be announced soon). Melvyn Bragg says: "For a program with a wholly misleading title which started from scratch with a six-month contract, it's been quite a ride! I have worked with many extremely talented and helpful people inside the BBC as well as some of the greatest academics around the world. It's been a great privilege and pleasure. I much look forward to continuing to work for the BBC on Radio 4. Thank you for listening." [...] In Our Time will be back on Radio 4 with a new presenter who will be announced in due course.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Hill: Russian President Vladimir Putin and Chinese President Xi Jinping were caught on a hot mic discussing organ transplants and immortality at the military parade in Beijing on Wednesday. The two leaders were captured on the stream as they walked with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un at Tiananmen Square, with the Russian translator saying: "Biotechnology is continuously developing," according to Reuters. "Human organs can be continuously transplanted. The longer you live, the younger you become, and (you can) even achieve immortality," the translator added. Xi responded by saying that some predict that humans could live up to "150 years old." The Kremlin head later confirmed that the two leaders discussed immortality. "Modern means of healing, and medical means, all kinds of surgical means related to organ replacement, they allow humanity to hope that active life will continue not as it does today. The average age in different countries is different, but nevertheless, life expectancy will increase significantly," Putin told reporters, according to CNN.

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Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Maintaining curl; GNOME governance; Guix in Debian; Tracking untrusted data in the kernel; 32-Bit support; systemd v258.
• Briefs: bcachefs maintenance; Linux from Scratch 12.4; Elf spec; Niri 25.08; Python documentary; GNOME executive director; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Switzerland has launched Apertus, a fully open-source, multilingual LLM trained on 15 trillion tokens and over 1,000 languages. "What distinguishes Apertus from many other generative AI systems is its commitment to complete openness," reports CyberInsider. From the report: Unlike popular proprietary models, where users can only interact via APIs or hosted interfaces, Apertus provides open access to its model weights, training datasets, documentation, and even intermediate checkpoints. The source code and all training materials are released under a permissive open-source license that allows commercial use. Since the full training process is documented and reproducible, researchers and watchdogs can audit the data sources, verify compliance with data protection laws, and inspect how the model was trained. Apertus' development explicitly adhered to Swiss data protection and copyright laws, and incorporated retroactive opt-out mechanisms to respect data source preferences. From a privacy perspective, Apertus represents a compelling shift in the AI landscape. The model only uses publicly available data, filtered to exclude personal information and to honor opt-out signals from content sources. This not only aligns with emerging regulatory frameworks like the EU AI Act, but also provides a tangible example of how AI can be both powerful and privacy-respecting. According to ETH Zurich's Imanol Schlag, technical lead of the project at ETH Zurich, Apertus is "built for the public good" and is a demonstration of how AI can be deployed as a public digital infrastructure, much like utilities or transportation. The model is available via Swisscom's Sovereign Swiss AI Platform. It's also available through Hugging Face and the Public AI Inference Utility.

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Google's September Pixel drop brings the new Material 3 Expressive UI, AI-powered Gboard writing tools, and Bluetooth Auracast upgrades to older Pixel devices, including the Pixel 6 and Pixel Tablet. "Among other tweaks, Google made it possible to add 'Live Effects,' including a few that cover the weather, to your phone's lock screen wallpaper," notes Engadget. "Material 3 Expressive also gives you more control over how the contact cards your phone displays when your friends and family call you look. Even if you're not one to endlessly tweak Android's appearance, as part of the redesign Google has once again reworked the Quick Settings pane in hopes of making it easier to use." On the audio front, Pixel Buds Pro 2 gain intuitive nod-and-shake gesture controls, Adaptive Audio for balanced awareness, and Loud Noise Protection to guard against sudden sound spikes. Voice clarity has also been improved with Gemini Live in noisy environments. A full breakdown of what's new can be found here.

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Just days before Apple's expected launch of the satellite-enabled Apple Watch Ultra 3, Garmin unveiled its Fenix 8 Pro -- the company's first smartwatch with built-in inReach satellite and cellular connectivity, SOS features, and a blindingly bright 4,500-nit microLED display. MacRumors reports: With inReach, the Fenix 8 Pro can send location check-ins and text messages over satellite using the Garmin Messenger app. There is also included cellular connectivity, so the smartwatch can make phone calls, send 30-second voice messages, and provide LiveTrack links and weather forecasts when an LTE connection is available. LiveTrack is a feature that allows the wearer's family and friends to keep track of their location during an activity or adventure. For emergencies, there is an SOS feature that will send a message to the Garmin Response center over a satellite or cellular connection. Garmin Response will then communicate with the user, their emergency contacts, and search and rescue organizations to provide help. Garmin says that its Response team has supported over 17,000 inReach incident responses across over 150 countries. The Fenix 8 Pro smartwatch launches September 8, with the AMOLED model starting at $1,200 and the 51mm microLED version priced at $2,000. Both require a paid inReach satellite plan beginning at $7.99 per month for full functionality.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from 404 Media, written by Jason Koebler: As I do most nights, I was listening to YouTube videos to fall asleep the other night. Sometime around 3 a.m., I woke up because the video YouTube was autoplaying started going "FEEEEEEEE." The video was called "Boring History for Sleep | How Medieval PEASANTS Survived the Coldest Nights and more." It is two hours long, has 2.3 million views, and, an hour and 15 minutes into the video, the AI-generated voice glitched. "In the end, Anne Boleyn won a kind of immortality. Not through her survival, but through her indelible impact on history. FEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE," the narrator says in a fake British accent. "By the early 1770s, the American colonies simmered like a pot left too long over a roaring fire," it continued. The video was from a channel I hadn't seen before, called "Sleepless Historian." I took my headphones out, didn't think much of it at the time, rolled over, and fell back asleep. The next night, when I went to pick a new video to fall asleep to, my YouTube homepage was full of videos from Sleepless Historian and several similar-sounding channels like Boring History Bites, History Before Sleep, The Snoozetorian, Historian Sleepy, and Dreamoria. Lots of these videos nominally check the boxes for what I want from something to fall asleep to. Almost all of them are more than three hours long, and they are about things I don't know much about. Some video titles include "Unusual Medieval Cures for Common Illnesses," "The Entire History of the American Frontier," "What It Was Like to Visit a BR0THEL in Pompeii," and "What GETTING WASTED Was Like in Medieval Times." One of the channels has even been livestreaming this "history" 24/7 for weeks. In the daytime, when I was not groggy and half asleep, it quickly became obvious to me that all of these videos are AI generated, and that they are part of a sophisticated and growing AI slop content ecosystem that is flooding YouTube, is drowning out human-made content created by real anthropologists and historians who spend weeks or months researching, fact-checking, scripting, recording, and editing their videos, and are quite literally rewriting history with surface-level, automated drek that the YouTube algorithm delivers to people. YouTube has said it will demonetize or otherwise crack down on "mass produced" videos, but it is not clear whether that has had any sort of impact on the proliferation of AI-generated videos on the platform, and none of the people I spoke to for this article have noticed any change. "It's completely shocking to me," Pete Kelly, who runs the popular History Time YouTube channel, told Koebler in a phone interview. "It used to be enough to spend your entire life researching, writing, narrating, editing, doing all these things to make a video, but now someone can come along and they can do the same thing in a day instead of it taking six months, and the videos are not accurate. The visuals they use are completely inaccurate often. And I'm fearful because this is everywhere." "I absolutely hate it, primarily the fact that they're historically inaccurate," Kelly added. "So it worries me because it's just the same things being regurgitated over and over again. [...] It's worrying to me just for humanity. Not to get too high brow, but it's not good for the state of knowledge in the world. It makes me worry for the future."

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Tesco is suing Broadcom and reseller Computacenter for at least $134 million, claiming that VMware's perpetual license support agreements were breached after Broadcom's acquisition. The supermarket giant warned it "may not be able to put food on the shelves if the situation goes pear-shaped," writes The Register's Simon Sharwood. From the report: Court documents seen by The Register assert that in January 2021 Tesco acquired perpetual licenses for VMware's vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation products, plus subscriptions to Virtzilla's Tanzu products, and agreed a contract for support services and software upgrades that run until 2026. Tesco claims VMware also agreed to give it an option to extend support services for an additional four years. All of this happened before Broadcom acquired VMware and stopped selling support services for software sold under perpetual licenses. Broadcom does sell support to those who sign for its new software subscriptions. The supermarket giant says Broadcom's subscriptions mean it must pay "excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid," and "is unable any longer to purchase stand-alone Virtualization Support Services for its Perpetually Licensed Software without also having to purchase duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products which it already owns." The complaint also alleges that Tesco's contracts with VMware include eligibility for software upgrades, but that Broadcom won't let the retailer update its perpetual licenses to cover the new Cloud Foundation 9. The filing names Computacenter as a co-defendant as it was the reseller that Tesco relied on for software licenses, and the retailer feels it's breached contracts to supply software at a fixed price. Tesco's filing also mentions Broadcom's patch publication policy, which means users who don't acquire subscriptions can't receive all security updates and don't receive other fixes. The retailer thinks its contracts mean it is entitled to those updates. The filing suggests that lack of support is not just a legal matter, but may have wider implications because VMware software, and support for it "are essential for the operations and resilience of Tesco's business and its ability to supply groceries to consumers across the UK and Republic of Ireland." "VMware Virtualization Software underpins the servers and data systems that enable Tesco's stores and operations to function, hosting approximately 40,000 server workloads and connecting to, by way of illustration, tills in Tesco stores," the filing states. Tesco's filing warns that Broadcom, VMware, and Computacenter are each liable for at least $134 million damages, plus interest, and that the longer the dispute persists the higher damages will climb.

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After years of requests, Instagram is finally releasing a dedicated iPad app on September 3rd... "But it will be slightly different than the mobile app users are accustomed to," reports The Verge. From the report: Most significantly, the iPad app will open directly to a feed of Reels, the company's TikTok competitor -- perhaps a sign of the short-form-video times. [...] Other features will be available on iPad: Stories will still line the top of the homepage, and users will be able to switch to a "Following" tab where they'll be able to swipe between feeds that more resemble the mobile Instagram experience (including a chronological option). The bigger screen means more space and fewer clicks: comments on Reels will appear next to full-size videos, and the DMs page will have your inbox alongside chats, similar to what Messenger looks like on desktop.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: Over the Labor Day weekend, Cloudflare says it successfully stopped a record-breaking distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that peaked at 11.5 terabits per second (Tbps). This came only a few months after Cloudflare blocked a then all-time high DDoS attack of 7.3 Tbps. This latest attack was almost 60% larger. According to Cloudflare, the assault was the result of a hyper-volumetric User Datagram Protocol (UDP) flood attack that lasted about 35 seconds. During that just more than half-minute attack, it delivered over 5.1 billion packets per second. This attack, Cloudflare reported, came from a combination of several IoT and cloud providers. Although compromised accounts on Google Cloud were a major source, the bulk of the attack originated from other sources. The specific target of this attack has not been publicly disclosed, but we can be sure the intent was to overwhelm the victim's network and render online services inoperative. Cloudflare says its globally distributed, fully autonomous DDoS mitigation network detected and neutralized the threat in real time, without notable impact on customer services or requiring manual intervention. This operation highlights both the rising sophistication of attack methods and the resilience of modern internet infrastructure defenses, especially Cloudflare's use of real-time packet analysis, fingerprinting, and rapid threat intelligence sharing across its network.

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Version 2025.9 of the Home Assistant home automation system has been released. Changes include a new experimental dashboard that is eventually meant to become the default, a number of tile-card improvements, a reworked automation editor, several new integrations, and more.

U.S. workers are becoming more stressed about their rising personal debts and financial health, a Bank of America survey showed. From a report: Of the respondents polled by BofA, 47% of employed people said they had a sense of financial well-being, dropping from 52% at the start of the year. Nearly 85% of consumers carried some type of personal debt, while 26% of the workforce was seeking help in areas such as emergency savings, paying down debt, and overall financial wellness, compared with 13% in 2023, according to the May survey of more than 1,000 people working full-time.

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Dolby Vision 2 addresses two widespread TV viewing problems in ways that will likely divide viewers and creators. The format's Content Intelligence feature uses AI and ambient light sensors to brighten notoriously dark content like Game of Thrones' Battle of Winterfell and Apple TV+'s Silo based on room brightness. Authentic Motion grants filmmakers scene-by-scene control over motion smoothing, a feature most cinephiles despise for creating artifacts and making films look like 60fps home videos. Many filmmakers have criticized motion smoothing for undermining artistic intent. Dolby positions the feature as eliminating unwanted judder while maintaining cinematic feel. The format launches in standard and Max tiers for high-end displays.

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The latest status report from the FreeBSD Project says no thanks to code generated by LLM-based assistants. From a report: The FreeBSD Project's Status Report for the second quarter of 2025 contains updates from various sub-teams that are working on improving the FreeBSD OS, including separate sub-projects such as enabling FreeBSD apps to run on Linux, Chinese translation efforts, support for Solaris-style Extended Attributes, and for Apple's legacy HFS+ file system. The thing that stood out to us, though, was that the core team is working on what it terms a "Policy on generative AI created code and documentation." The relevant paragraph says: "Core is investigating setting up a policy for LLM/AI usage (including but not limited to generating code). The result will be added to the Contributors Guide in the doc repository. AI can be useful for translations (which seems faster than doing the work manually), explaining long/obscure documents, tracking down bugs, or helping to understand large code bases. We currently tend to not use it to generate code because of license concerns. The discussion continues at the core session at BSDCan 2025 developer summit, and core is still collecting feedback and working on the policy."

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Version 25.08 of the niri scrollable-tiling Wayland compositor has been released. Notable changes include xwayland-satellite integration, modal exit confirmation, and the introduction of basic support for screen readers:

A series of posts by fireborn earlier this year on the screen reader situation in Linux got me curious: how does one support screen readers in a Wayland compositor? The documentation is unfortunately scarce and difficult to find. Thankfully, @DataTriny from the AccessKit project came across my issue, pointed me at the right protocols, and answered a lot of my questions.

So, as of this release, niri has basic support for screen readers! We implement the org.freedesktop.a11y.KeyboardMonitor D-Bus interface for Orca to listen and grab keyboard keys, and we expose the main niri UI elements via AccessKit. [...]

The current screen reader support and further considerations are documented on the new Accessibility wiki page.

LWN covered niri in July.

Version 12.4 of Linux From Scratch (LFS) and Beyond Linux From Scratch (BLFS) have been released. LFS provides step-by-step instructions on building a customized Linux system entirely from source, and BLFS helps to extend an LFS installation into a more usable system. Notable changes in this release include updates to GNU Binutils 2.45, GCC 15.2, GNU C Library (glibc) 2.42, and Linux 6.15.1. See the Changelog for all updates since 12.3.

The Linux kernel has to handle many different sources of data that should not be trusted: user space, network connections, and removable storage, to name a few. The kernel has to remain secure even if one of these sends garbled (or malicious) data. Benno Lossin has been working on an API for kernel Rust code that makes it harder to accidentally make decisions based on data from user space. That work is now on its fourth revision, and Lossin has asked kernel developers to experiment with it and see where problems remain, making this a good time to look at the proposed API.

During the opening of RustConf 2025 in Seattle, Washington, the Rust Foundation announced a new initiative to provide financial and administrative support to open-source Rust projects. The first project to benefit from the new Rust Innovation Lab is Rustls, an implementation of TLS in Rust. The foundation welcomes inquiries from other projects. Dr. Rebecca Rumbul, Executive Director of the Rust Foundation said:

Rustls is hopefully the first of many really good [...] projects that will find a home in the foundation.

The SAT is billed as "a great way to find out how prepared students are for college." If that's true, recent changes to its format offer an unflattering assessment of the country's aspiring scholars, Bloomberg's editorial board wrote Wednesday. From the piece: [...] Then the pandemic hit. As in-person exams became impractical, hundreds of schools dropped their testing requirements. The SAT and its main competitor, the ACT, lost millions of dollars in revenue. Although both recently started offering digital options, schools have been slow to reinstate their requirements. Today, more than 80% of schools remain test-optional. "If students are deciding to take a test," as one College Board executive put it, "how do we make the SAT the one they want to take?" To anyone familiar with American teenagers, the company's answer should come as no surprise: Make the test easier. The newly digitized format allows a calculator for the entire math section and drastically cuts reading comprehension. Gone are the 500- to 750-word passages about which students would answer a series of questions. Instead, test takers read 25- to 150-word excerpts -- about the length of a social media post -- and answer a single question about each. [...] An effort by the College Board to reemphasize the benefits of deep reading -- for critical thinking, for self-reflection, for learning of all kinds -- might go a long way toward restoring some balance. It should build on efforts to incorporate college prep into school curricula, work with districts to develop coursework that builds reading stamina for all test takers, and consider reducing the cost of its subject-specific Advanced Placement exams that continue to test these skills (now $99), in line with the SAT ($68). Schools, for their part, should recommit to teaching books in their entirety.

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For the first time in more than four years, there are fewer open jobs in the U.S. than there are job seekers. CNN: "This is a turning point for the labor market," Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, wrote Wednesday. "It's yet another crack." The number of job openings fell to an estimated 7.18 million at the end of July, according to Bureau of Labor Statistics data released Wednesday. Job openings not only are at their lowest level in 10 months, but they're also below the number of unemployed workers (at 7.2 million) for the first time since April 2021.

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