cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/47263342

The investment will be used to strengthen the structural reliability and security of KDE's core infrastructure, including Plasma, KDE Linux, and the frameworks underlying its communication services.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/47263342

The investment will be used to strengthen the structural reliability and security of KDE's core infrastructure, including Plasma, KDE Linux, and the frameworks underlying its communication services.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/47263342

The investment will be used to strengthen the structural reliability and security of KDE's core infrastructure, including Plasma, KDE Linux, and the frameworks underlying its communication services.

The investment will be used to strengthen the structural reliability and security of KDE's core infrastructure, including Plasma, KDE Linux, and the frameworks underlying its communication services.

Current approaches to addressing deceptive design largely focus on visible interface manipulations, commonly referred to as "dark patterns". With the rise of generative AI, deception is becoming more difficult to spot and easier to live with, as it is quietly embedded in default settings, automated suggestions, and conversational interactions rather than discrete interface elements. These subtle, normalised forms of influence, which Simone Natale frames as "banal deception", shape everyday digital use and blur the line between AI-enabled assistance and manipulation.

This position paper explores banality as a lens through which to reason through deception in generative AI experiences, especially with chatbots. We explore what Natale describes as users' own involvement in their deception, and argue that this perspective could lead to future work for introducing friction to safeguard users from deception in generative AI interactions, such as empowering users through raising awareness, providing them with intervention tools, and regulatory or enforcement improvements. We present these concepts as points for discussion for the deceptive design scholarly community.

Full paper: PDF | HTML | TeX source

The new report, Permission to Pollute, reveals how the European Commission is taking a chainsaw to permitting rules for energy and industrial infrastructure. This is part of a wider deregulatory push driven by some of Europe’s most polluting industries. Although the EU presents this agenda as the “simplification” of permitting laws, in practice, it risks eroding the hard-won social and environmental protections that underpin these rules.

Since European Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen, took up her second term in office, permitting rules have come under sustained attack from Big Tech, the fossil fuel industry, and mining lobby groups. What’s more, under labels such as “strategic” or “overriding public interest”, harmful projects are increasingly able to side-step normal permitting procedures. But who decides what sort of projects enjoy the label?

Documents obtained by CEO expose how major polluters have lobbied for easier access to permits – and public subsidies – for polluting infrastructure projects. They reveal how the European Commission has actively invited industry players to shape its permitting deregulation agenda. Europe risks not only living with more pollution but paying polluters to create it.

Some of the key industry demands being delivered include:

• fast-tracked permitting for industrial and energy infrastructure, side-lining democratic participation;
• simpler, quicker environmental assessments, meaning less protection;
• more dirty projects classed as ‘strategic’ or ‘public interest’ and therefore getting special treatment in permitting processes, elevated above environmental or social concerns;
• water protection and nature laws opened up to be weakened.

Over the past decade, the AI industry has come to exert an unprecedented economic, political and societal power and influence. It is therefore critical that we comprehend the extent and depth of pervasive and multifaceted capture of AI regulation by corporate actors in order to contend and challenge it. In this paper, we first develop a taxonomy of mechanisms enabling capture to provide a comprehensive understanding of the problem. Grounded in design science research (DSR) methodologies and extensive scoping review of existing literature and media reports, our taxonomy of capture consists of 27 mechanisms across five categories. We then develop an annotation template incorporating our taxonomy, and manually annotate and analyse 100 news articles. The purpose behind this analysis is twofold: validate our taxonomy and provide a novel quantification of capture mechanisms and dominant narratives. Our analysis identifies 249 instances of capture mechanisms, often co-occurring with narratives that rationalise such capture. We find that the most recurring categories of mechanisms are Discourse & Epistemic Influence, concerning narrative framing, and Elusion of law, related to violations and contentious interpretations of antitrust, privacy, copyright and labour laws. We further find that Regulation stifles innovation, Red tape and National Interest are the most frequently invoked narratives used to rationalise capture. We emphasize the extent and breadth of regulatory capture by coalescing forces -- Big AI and governments -- as something policy makers and the public ought to treat as an emergency. Finally, we put forward key lessons learned from other industries along with transferable tactics for uncovering, resisting and challenging Big AI capture as well as in envisioning counter narratives.

Full paper: PDF | HTML | TeX source

The Khronos OpenCL Working Group has released OpenCL 3.1, bringing widely deployed, field-proven capabilities into the core specification to expand functionality, including SPIR-V ingestion, that developers will be able to rely on across conformant implementations.

Features now mandated by OpenCL 3.1 have been deployed as extensions or optional capabilities. This is by design. The OpenCL working group evolves the specification by proving features in the field as extensions first, watching how they get used across multiple implementations, refining them based on developer feedback, and only then graduating them into the core specification.

Every conformant OpenCL 3.1 implementation will be required to consume SPIR-V kernels — a feature that has been one of the most requested by developers. OpenCL 3.1 additionally requires support for the SPIR-V query extension, which enables applications to enumerate the SPIR-V capabilities, extensions, and versions that a device supports, simplifying the adoption of new SPIR-V features as they become available.

Several features essential to HPC and AI kernels are also now mandatory in the core OpenCL 3.1 specification:

• Subgroups, including shuffles, rotations, and an expanded set of supported data types. A fundamental building block for tuned reductions, scans, and matrix kernels.
• Integer dot products, including saturating and accumulating variants, together with extended bit operations: Both map directly to dedicated hardware instructions on a wide range of modern silicon, and both are common building blocks for matrix multiplications and the low-precision arithmetic central to inference workloads.
• A new query for the suggested local work-group size. This gives applications and profilers a runtime hint for the optimal work-group size for a given kernel and device, eliminating the need for manual tuning or repeated size calculations across multiple enqueues and improving performance predictability on diverse hardware.
• A standard device UUID query, matching Vulkan’s VkPhysicalDeviceIDProperties::deviceUUID. This allows applications to correlate the same physical device across APIs, which is essential for multi-device systems and for external memory-sharing scenarios that span OpenCL and Vulkan.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/46555577

Fedora has released Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition 44 to the public.

The Fedora KDE Plasma Desktop Edition is suitable for many needs. It combines the reliable and trusted Fedora Linux base with the KDE Plasma Desktop environment. It provides a selection of KDE applications that are simple by default, but powerful when needed.

Download (Torrent)

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/46379162

The Kubuntu team is thrilled to announce the release of Kubuntu 26.04 LTS, codenamed “Resolute Raccoon”! As a community-driven flavour of Ubuntu, Kubuntu continues its mission to deliver the cutting-edge KDE software ecosystem on top of Ubuntu’s rock-solid foundation. This Long-Term Support release, aligned with Ubuntu’s two-year LTS cycle, brings together the freshest stable KDE software with the reliability and security users depend on for years to come.

Building on the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS base released today by Canonical, Kubuntu 26.04 introduces Plasma 6.6 as the flagship desktop environment, alongside Qt 6.10.2, KDE Frameworks 6.24.0, and the latest KDE Gear 25.12.3 application suite. We’ve also upgraded to Linux kernel 7.0 for enhanced hardware support and performance. Whether you’re a developer, creator, or everyday user, this release emphasises Wayland maturity, modern security, and seamless integration with the open source world.

Kubuntu 26.04 LTS will receive security updates and critical fixes through April 2029, making it an excellent choice for home users, schools, businesses, and anyone who values a dependable, beautiful desktop.

Kubuntu remains completely free to download, use, and share—empowering our global community to innovate without barriers.

Four Exciting New Features for Kubuntu Users

Here are four standout enhancements that Kubuntu 26.04 LTS brings to your desktop:

• Text Recognition in Spectacle: Capture Text, Not Just Images Spectacle, KDE’s built-in screenshot tool, gains one of its most practical new capabilities in Plasma 6.6: built-in OCR text recognition. Capture any screenshot containing text—a document, a web page, an error dialog, a presentation slide—and Spectacle can analyse the image and convert the visible text into selectable, copyable content, right from within the app. No third-party tools required. Multi-language support means it works for users around the world, and the extracted text copies directly to your clipboard for immediate use. It’s the kind of small feature that quickly becomes indispensable.

• A New On-Screen Keyboard for Touch, Accessibility, and Beyond: Plasma 6.6 introduces a fully integrated on-screen keyboard, making Kubuntu a much stronger choice for touchscreen devices, tablets, and users with accessibility needs. The keyboard supports multiple languages and layouts, adjusts its position intelligently to avoid covering input fields, and is easily accessible via the system tray or accessibility settings. It includes standard keys, function keys, and emoji support, and appears automatically when you tap a text input field on touch-enabled hardware. This addition reflects KDE’s ongoing commitment to making the desktop inclusive and usable for everyone.

• Plasma Wayland - The Default, Fully Supported Session: The Plasma Wayland session is the default and fully supported session in Kubuntu 26.04 LTS, delivering improved security, smoother rendering, and better HiDPI display support. For users who need it for legacy hardware or specific workflows, the plasma-session-x11 package remains available in the Ubuntu archive— but it is not installed by default and is not supported by the Kubuntu team.

• Extensive Theming and Configuration Improvements: Plasma 6.6 brings significant advances to theming and desktop configuration, giving users more expressive control over the look and feel of their environment than ever before. Custom global themes have been expanded, colour scheme handling has been refined throughout the shell and applications, and widget customisation options have been deepened across panels and the desktop. Whether you prefer a polished out-of-the-box experience or enjoy crafting every detail of your workspace, Resolute Raccoon gives you the tools to make Kubuntu truly your own.

What’s New Under the Hood

Beyond these highlights, Kubuntu 26.04 LTS inherits Ubuntu’s robust platform upgrades:

• Linux Kernel 7.0: Updated from 6.8, the kernel now enables crash dumps by default on desktop installations, brings the new sched_ext scheduling system for hot-swappable eBPF-based schedulers, and retires the linux-lowlatency package in favour of a leaner lowlatency-kernel tuning approach on top of linux-generic.

• KDE Applications 25.12.3: All KDE Gear applications have been updated to 25.12.3, a stable release, including Dolphin, Konsole, Okular, Kdenlive, and more.

• Qt 6 Ecosystem: Qt 6.10.2 and KDE Frameworks 6.24.0 power the desktop. Qt5 (5.15.1cool1.gif and KDE Frameworks 5 (5.116.0) legacy packages remain in the archive for applications that have not yet completed their Qt6 port.

• Firefox 150 and LibreOffice 26.2: Both core applications are updated, with Firefox delivered as a Snap from the Snap Store and LibreOffice included in the full installation.

• sudo-rs by default: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ships sudo-rs, a memory-safe Rust reimplementation of sudo, as the default sudo provider — improving security without changing everyday usage.

• Rust-powered core utilities: The core OS utilities are now provided by rust-coreutils, bringing performance improvements and memory safety to fundamental command-line tools.

• VA-API hardware video acceleration: AMD and Intel users now get hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding by default via the Video Acceleration API — great for media playback and video work.

• Updated developer toolchain: GCC 15.2, Python 3.14, Rust 1.93, Golang 1.26, LLVM 21, OpenJDK 25, and .NET 10 are all included and ready to use.

• APT 3.2: The package manager gains a new dependency solver, OpenSSL-backed TLS, an automatic pager for commands like apt show and apt list and history and rollback commands like apt history-list or apt history-rollback, which were previously found only in separate apt-rollback tool.

This release marks another milestone in Kubuntu’s long journey as one of Ubuntu’s most beloved flavours. A huge thank you to our volunteer contributors, testers, bug reporters, and the upstream KDE and Ubuntu teams for making Resolute Raccoon a reality.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/46379162

The Kubuntu team is thrilled to announce the release of Kubuntu 26.04 LTS, codenamed “Resolute Raccoon”! As a community-driven flavour of Ubuntu, Kubuntu continues its mission to deliver the cutting-edge KDE software ecosystem on top of Ubuntu’s rock-solid foundation. This Long-Term Support release, aligned with Ubuntu’s two-year LTS cycle, brings together the freshest stable KDE software with the reliability and security users depend on for years to come.

Building on the Ubuntu 26.04 LTS base released today by Canonical, Kubuntu 26.04 introduces Plasma 6.6 as the flagship desktop environment, alongside Qt 6.10.2, KDE Frameworks 6.24.0, and the latest KDE Gear 25.12.3 application suite. We’ve also upgraded to Linux kernel 7.0 for enhanced hardware support and performance. Whether you’re a developer, creator, or everyday user, this release emphasises Wayland maturity, modern security, and seamless integration with the open source world.

Kubuntu 26.04 LTS will receive security updates and critical fixes through April 2029, making it an excellent choice for home users, schools, businesses, and anyone who values a dependable, beautiful desktop.

Kubuntu remains completely free to download, use, and share—empowering our global community to innovate without barriers.

Four Exciting New Features for Kubuntu Users

Here are four standout enhancements that Kubuntu 26.04 LTS brings to your desktop:

• Text Recognition in Spectacle: Capture Text, Not Just Images Spectacle, KDE’s built-in screenshot tool, gains one of its most practical new capabilities in Plasma 6.6: built-in OCR text recognition. Capture any screenshot containing text—a document, a web page, an error dialog, a presentation slide—and Spectacle can analyse the image and convert the visible text into selectable, copyable content, right from within the app. No third-party tools required. Multi-language support means it works for users around the world, and the extracted text copies directly to your clipboard for immediate use. It’s the kind of small feature that quickly becomes indispensable.

• A New On-Screen Keyboard for Touch, Accessibility, and Beyond: Plasma 6.6 introduces a fully integrated on-screen keyboard, making Kubuntu a much stronger choice for touchscreen devices, tablets, and users with accessibility needs. The keyboard supports multiple languages and layouts, adjusts its position intelligently to avoid covering input fields, and is easily accessible via the system tray or accessibility settings. It includes standard keys, function keys, and emoji support, and appears automatically when you tap a text input field on touch-enabled hardware. This addition reflects KDE’s ongoing commitment to making the desktop inclusive and usable for everyone.

• Plasma Wayland - The Default, Fully Supported Session: The Plasma Wayland session is the default and fully supported session in Kubuntu 26.04 LTS, delivering improved security, smoother rendering, and better HiDPI display support. For users who need it for legacy hardware or specific workflows, the plasma-session-x11 package remains available in the Ubuntu archive— but it is not installed by default and is not supported by the Kubuntu team.

• Extensive Theming and Configuration Improvements: Plasma 6.6 brings significant advances to theming and desktop configuration, giving users more expressive control over the look and feel of their environment than ever before. Custom global themes have been expanded, colour scheme handling has been refined throughout the shell and applications, and widget customisation options have been deepened across panels and the desktop. Whether you prefer a polished out-of-the-box experience or enjoy crafting every detail of your workspace, Resolute Raccoon gives you the tools to make Kubuntu truly your own.

What’s New Under the Hood

Beyond these highlights, Kubuntu 26.04 LTS inherits Ubuntu’s robust platform upgrades:

• Linux Kernel 7.0: Updated from 6.8, the kernel now enables crash dumps by default on desktop installations, brings the new sched_ext scheduling system for hot-swappable eBPF-based schedulers, and retires the linux-lowlatency package in favour of a leaner lowlatency-kernel tuning approach on top of linux-generic.

• KDE Applications 25.12.3: All KDE Gear applications have been updated to 25.12.3, a stable release, including Dolphin, Konsole, Okular, Kdenlive, and more.

• Qt 6 Ecosystem: Qt 6.10.2 and KDE Frameworks 6.24.0 power the desktop. Qt5 (5.15.1cool1.gif and KDE Frameworks 5 (5.116.0) legacy packages remain in the archive for applications that have not yet completed their Qt6 port.

• Firefox 150 and LibreOffice 26.2: Both core applications are updated, with Firefox delivered as a Snap from the Snap Store and LibreOffice included in the full installation.

• sudo-rs by default: Ubuntu 26.04 LTS ships sudo-rs, a memory-safe Rust reimplementation of sudo, as the default sudo provider — improving security without changing everyday usage.

• Rust-powered core utilities: The core OS utilities are now provided by rust-coreutils, bringing performance improvements and memory safety to fundamental command-line tools.

• VA-API hardware video acceleration: AMD and Intel users now get hardware-accelerated video encoding and decoding by default via the Video Acceleration API — great for media playback and video work.

• Updated developer toolchain: GCC 15.2, Python 3.14, Rust 1.93, Golang 1.26, LLVM 21, OpenJDK 25, and .NET 10 are all included and ready to use.

• APT 3.2: The package manager gains a new dependency solver, OpenSSL-backed TLS, an automatic pager for commands like apt show and apt list and history and rollback commands like apt history-list or apt history-rollback, which were previously found only in separate apt-rollback tool.

This release marks another milestone in Kubuntu’s long journey as one of Ubuntu’s most beloved flavours. A huge thank you to our volunteer contributors, testers, bug reporters, and the upstream KDE and Ubuntu teams for making Resolute Raccoon a reality.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.ml/post/34660966

As of June 2025, over 1,400 veterans of Israeli intelligence are now working in U.S. tech—with 900 of those coming from Unit 8200 alone. That number comes from a database of people who publicly identify themselves as being both former Israeli intelligence officers and holding a job in U.S. tech on their LinkedIn profiles.

The database was assembled by an independent researcher, who is remaining anonymous for personal security and has dubbed the database the “Eagle Mission” influence network. The 1,400 people are self-identified veterans or active reserve members of Unit 8200, Israeli military intelligence, and the IDF Cyber Defense Directorate working in senior and mid-level engineering and security roles at major U.S. tech firms with offices in Israel, the U.S., and Europe. Drop Site crosschecked many of the records in the database for accuracy.

“This does not mean that every person who served in Unit 8200 is an Israeli spy looking to send classified data back to Tel Aviv,” the researcher emphasized. “But it does create a serious vulnerability. No other country has this kind of access to the American tech sector. We obsess over Chinese involvement in the tech industry and worry about corporate espionage, but Israeli penetration rarely gets mentioned.”

The global tech giant Microsoft is one of the most prominent employers of Unit 8200 alumni, employing roughly 250 veterans of the unit, alongside other major multinational companies including Nvidia, Meta, Google, Intel, and Apple, many of whom employ dozens of individuals drawn from the unit. Microsoft was recently revealed to have closely collaborated with Unit 8200 leadership on the creation of cloud services intended to store millions of private communications of Palestinians living under military occupation in the West Bank and Gaza. Microsoft declined to comment.