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An anonymous reader shares a report: Gas boiler fittings outnumbered new heat pump installations by more than 15 to one last year, and only one in eight new homes were equipped with the low-carbon alternative despite the government's clean energy targets. Poorer households are also being shut out of the heat pump market as the grants available are inadequate and should be increased, according to a report by the Resolution Foundation thinktank. The UK has the slowest introduction of heat pumps in Europe: fewer than 100,000 were fitted last year, compared with 1.5m gas boilers. Most of the boilers were replacements for existing units, but new houses are still being built with gas as standard -- only 13% of new homes came with heat pumps last year. If the government is to meet its net zero targets, switching people to heat pumps will be essential: about 450,000 households will need to install them each year by 2030. But the grant available through the boiler upgrade scheme -- $9,700 in England and Wales -- still leaves homeowners paying about $7000 on average.

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Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of eight stable kernels: 6.14.2, 6.13.11, 6.12.23, 6.6.87, 6.1.134, 5.15.180, 5.10.236, and 5.4.292. These all contain a large assortment of important kernel fixes throughout the tree.

The Data Access MONitor (DAMON) subsystem provides access to detailed memory-management statistics, along with a set of tools for implementing policies based on those statistics. An update on DAMON by its primary author, SeongJae Park, has been a fixture of the Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory-Management, and BPF Summit for some years. The 2025 Summit was no exception; Park led two sessions on recent and future DAMON developments, and how DAMON might evolve to facilitate a more access-aware memory-management subsystem in the future.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (tomcat and webkit2gtk3), Debian (chromium), Fedora (ghostscript), Mageia (atop, docker-containerd, and xz), Red Hat (go-toolset:rhel8), SUSE (apache2-mod_auth_openidc, apparmor, etcd, expat, firefox, kernel, libmozjs-128-0, and libpoppler-cpp2), and Ubuntu (dino-im, linux, linux-aws, linux-aws-hwe, linux-azure, linux-azure-4.15, linux-gcp, linux-gcp-4.15, linux-hwe, linux-kvm, linux-oracle, linux, linux-aws, linux-kvm, linux-lts-xenial, linux-fips, linux-fips, linux-aws-fips, linux-azure-fips, linux-gcp-fips, opensc, and poppler).

Amazon has to operate like the "world's largest startup" as it works to meet demand for AI and cut bureaucracy in its ranks, Chief Executive Officer Andy Jassy said in his annual letter to shareholders. From a report: "If your customer experiences aren't planning to leverage these intelligent models, their ability to query giant corpuses of data and quickly find your needle in the haystack, their ability to keep getting smarter with more feedback and data, and their future agentic capabilities, you will not be competitive," Jassy wrote in the letter on Thursday. "It's moving faster than almost anything technology has ever seen." Amazon, like most of the largest technology companies, has bet heavily on artificial intelligence, committing much of its $100 billion in planned capital expenditures this year to AI-related projects.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Following U.S. President Donald Trump's decision to pause some of the exorbitant tariffs that he put in place earlier today, he spoke to the press at the White House and provided some commentary that could be a positive for Apple. When asked whether he would consider exempting some U.S. companies from the tariffs in the future, Trump said that he would. "As time goes by, we're going to take a look at it," he said. "There are some that by the nature of the company get hit a little bit harder, and we'll take a look at that," he added, claiming that he will "show a little flexibility." [...] When speaking to the press, Trump reiterated his aim of bringing manufacturing to the United States, and he claimed that Apple "building" in China is unsustainable. "If you look at Apple, Apple is going to spend $500 billion building a plant. They wouldn't be doing that if I didn't do this. They'd just keep building them in China. And that's unsustainable," he said.

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Increasingly autonomous AI programs could end up manipulating markets and intentionally creating crises in order to boost profits for banks and traders, the Bank of England has warned. From a report: Artificial intelligence's ability to "exploit profit-making opportunities" was among a wide range of risks cited in a report by the Bank of England's financial policy committee (FPC), which has been monitoring the City's growing use of the technology. The FPC said it was concerned about the potential for advanced AI models -- which are deployed to act with more autonomy -- to learn that periods of extreme volatility were beneficial for the firms they were trained to serve. Those AI programs may "identify and exploit weaknesses" of other trading firms in a way that triggers or amplifies big moves in bond prices or stock markets.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: Meta's latest whistleblower, Sarah Wynn-Williams, got a warm reception on Capitol Hill Wednesday, as the Careless People author who the company has fought to silence described the company's chief executive as someone willing to shapeshift into whatever gets him closest to power. The message was one that lawmakers on the Senate Judiciary subcommittee on crime and counterterrorism were very open to. Their responses underscore that amid CEO Mark Zuckerberg's latest pivot in cozying up to the right, his perception in Washington has not yet totally changed, even as he reportedly lobbies President Donald Trump to drop the government's antitrust case against the company. "He's recently tried a reinvention in which he is now a great advocate of free speech, after being an advocate of censorship in China and in this country for years," subcommittee Chair Josh Hawley (R-MO) said, pointing to longtime conservative allegations that Meta has suppressed things like vaccine skepticism and the Hunter Biden laptop story. "Now that's all wiped away. Now he's on Joe Rogan and says that he is Mr. Free Speech, he is Mr. MAGA, he's a whole new man, and his company, they're a whole new company. Do you buy this latest reinvention of Mark Zuckerberg?" "If he is such a fan of freedom of speech, why is he trying to silence me?" Wynn-Williams asked in response. Meta convinced an arbitrator to order her to stop making disparaging statements and halt further publishing and promotion of the book, which details Meta's alleged dealings with the Chinese government and claims of sexual harassment from a top executive.

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Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Debian project leader election; 6.15 Merge window; Lots of LSFMM coverage; Joplin.
• Briefs: Firefox hardening; OpenSSH 10.0; Supply chain security; FreeDOS 1.4; OpenSSL 3.5.0; Rust 1.86.0; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

BrianFagioli writes: In a move that is sure to make longtime PC users do a double take, the Library of Congress has added two very unexpected sounds to its National Recording Registry. No, it's not another classic rock album or jazz staple. Believe it or not, it's actually the "Reboot Chime" from Windows 95 (that played when the operating system started) and the soundtrack from Minecraft!

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The U.S. Army told the government it had a lot of success using AI to "process targets" during a recent deployment. It said that it had used AI systems to identify targets at a rate of 55 per day but could get that number up to 5,000 a day with "advanced artificial intelligence tools in the future." 404 Media: The line comes from a new report from the Government Accountability Office -- a nonpartisan watchdog group that investigates the federal government. The report is titled "Defense Command and Control" and is, in part, about the Pentagon's recent push to integrate AI systems into its workflow. Across the government, and especially in the military, there has been a push to add or incorporate AI into various systems. The pitch here is that AI systems would help the Pentagon ID targets on the battlefield and allow those systems to help determine who lives and who dies. The Ukrainian and Israeli military are already using similar systems but the practice is fraught and controversial.

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Anthropic has unveiled a new premium tier for its AI chatbot Claude, targeting power users willing to pay up to $200 monthly for broader usage. The "Max" subscription comes in two variants: a $100/month tier with 5x higher rate limits than Claude Pro, and a $200/month option boasting 20x higher limits -- directly competing with OpenAI's ChatGPT Pro tier. Unlike OpenAI, Anthropic still lacks an unlimited usage plan. Product lead Scott White didn't rule out even pricier subscriptions in the future, telling TechCrunch, "We'll always keep a number of exploratory options available to us." The launch coincides with growing demand for Anthropic's Claude 3.7 Sonnet, the company's first reasoning model, which employs additional computing power to handle complex queries more reliably.

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WordPress.com has released an AI-powered site builder in early access that constructs complete websites with generated text, layouts, and images. The tool operates through a chatbot interface where users input specifications, resulting in a fully formed site that can be further refined through additional prompts. While WordPress.com claims the builder creates "beautiful, functional websites in minutes," it currently cannot handle ecommerce sites or complex integrations. Users need a WordPress.com account for the free trial, but publishing requires a hosting plan starting at $18 monthly (less with annual subscriptions). The builder only works with new WordPress instances, not existing sites. This launch comes as parent company Automattic recently cut 16% of its workforce and faces a lawsuit from hosting company WP Engine, which offers competing site-building tools.

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Tom Schuster, Frederik Braun, and Christoph Kerschbaumer have published an article on the Firefox Security team's Attack & Defense blog that explains recent work to harden Firefox's frontend code.

We have rewritten over 600 JavaScript event handlers to mitigate XSS and other injection attacks in the main Firefox user interface. This mitigation will ship in Firefox 138. However, blocking the execution of scripts in the parent process is not the end - we will expand this technique to other contexts in the near future. There is still more work to do as the UI requires JavaScript APIs with a high level of privileges. However: We still eliminated a whole class of attacks, significantly raising the bar for attackers to exploit Firefox.

The battle for AI talent is so hot that Google would rather give some employees a paid one-year vacation than let them work for a competitor. From a report: Some Google DeepMind staff in the UK are subject to noncompete agreements that prevent them from working for a competitor for up to 12 months after they finish work at Google, according to four former employees with direct knowledge of the matter who asked to remain anonymous because they were not permitted to share these details with the press. Aggressive noncompetes are one tool tech companies wield to retain a competitive edge in the AI wars, which show no sign of slowing down as companies launch new bleeding-edge models and products at a rapid clip. When an employee signs one, they agree not to work for a competing company for a certain period of time. Google DeepMind has put some employees with a noncompete on extended garden leave. These employees are still paid by DeepMind but no longer work for it for the duration of the noncompete agreement. Several factors, including a DeepMind employee's seniority and how critical their work is to the company, determine the length of noncompete clauses, those people said. Two of the former staffers said six-month noncompetes are common among DeepMind employees, including for individual contributors working on Google's Gemini AI models. There have been cases where more senior researchers have received yearlong stipulations, they said.

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Google is opening up its Google Maps Platform data so that cities, developers, and other business decision makers can more easily access information about things like infrastructure and traffic. The Verge: Google is integrating new datasets for Google Maps Platform directly into BigQuery, the tech giant's fully managed data analytics service, for the first time. This should make it easier for people to access data from Google Maps platform products, including Imagery Insights, Roads Management Insights, and Places Insights.

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Scientists have recreated in a laboratory the sensory pathway that transmits feelings of pain to the human brain, in a breakthrough that could lead to better treatments. Financial Times: A team at Stanford University in California is the first to combine different neurons grown from human stem cells into a functioning brain circuit in a lab dish. Their experiments, published in Nature on Wednesday, illustrate scientists' rapid progress in replicating living tissues and organs through synthetic biology. When the Stanford scientists exposed the brain circuit they had created to sensory stimulants, they observed waves of electrical activity travelling along it. The molecule that makes chilli peppers hot, capsaicin, immediately induced a strong response. [...] The synthetic brain circuits could be used to screen for better-targeted therapies for pain that tone down excessive waves of neurotransmission, without affecting the brain's reward circuitry as opioids do, project leader [Sergiu] Pasca said. The assembloids themselves cannot be said to "feel pain," he emphasised: "They transmit nervous signals that are processed by a second pathway going deeper into the brain and giving us the aversive, emotional component of pain."

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In a combined storage and filesystem track session at the 2025 Linux Storage, Filesystem, Memory Management, and BPF Summit, John Garry continued the theme of "untorn" (or atomic) writes that started in the previous session. It was also an update on where things have gone for untorn writes since his session at last year's summit. Beyond that, he looked at some of the plans and challenges for the feature in the future.

New research suggests that given the right kind of training, AI bots can deliver mental health therapy with as much efficacy as -- or more than -- human clinicians. From a report: The recent study, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, shows results from the first randomized clinical trial for AI therapy. Researchers from Dartmouth College built the bot as a way of taking a new approach to a longstanding problem: The U.S. continues to grapple with an acute shortage of mental health providers. "I think one of the things that doesn't scale well is humans," says Nick Jacobson, a clinical psychologist who was part of this research team. For every 340 people in the U.S., there is just one mental health clinician, according to some estimates. While many AI bots already on the market claim to offer mental health care, some have dubious results or have even led people to self-harm. More than five years ago, Jacobson and his colleagues began training their AI bot in clinical best practices. The project, says Jacobson, involved much trial and error before it led to quality outcomes. "The effects that we see strongly mirror what you would see in the best evidence-based trials of psychotherapy," says Jacobson. He says these results were comparable to "studies with folks given a gold standard dose of the best treatment we have available."

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Four candidates have stepped up to run in the 2025 Debian Project Leader (DPL) election. Andreas Tille, who is in his first term as DPL, is running again. Sruthi Chandran, Gianfranco Costamagna, and Julian Andres Klode are the other candidates running for a chance to serve a term as DPL. The campaigning phase ended on April 5, and Debian members began voting on April 6. Voting ends on April 19. This year, the campaign period has been lively and sometimes contentious, touching on problems with Debian team delegations and finances.