Feed aggregator

The private equity industry is experiencing a quiet reckoning as hundreds of midsize firms find themselves trapped between investors who have lost patience and portfolios of companies they cannot sell at acceptable prices. "There is existential risk for a number [of funds] because of the fundraising environment," said Sunaina Sinha Haldea, global head of private capital advisory at Raymond James. "If existing investors don't come and support them, new investors are highly unlikely to." According to data from Preqin, the average buyout fund that closed in 2025 spent 23 months fundraising, up from 16 months in 2021, and the total number of funds raised fell to 1,191 from 2,679 over the same period. New York's Vestar Capital scrapped plans for its eighth fund in late 2024 and has not invested in a new portfolio company since 2023. The firm's assets under management dropped from $7 billion fifteen years ago to $3.3 billion in 2024. Three-year annualized returns through June 2025 for the Cambridge Associates U.S. Private Equity Index stand at 7.4%, trailing the MSCI World stock index by 11 percentage points annually. The average holding period for buyout deals has stretched to 6.3 years from 5.1 years in 2020. Blue-chip megafunds continue raising capital normally, but smaller firms face existential pressure.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Why one Linux power user abandoned 8 years of distros for Windows 11  Windows Central

Why one Linux power user abandoned 8 years of distros for Windows 11  Windows Central

Why one Linux power user abandoned 8 years of distros for Windows 11  Windows Central

Why one Linux power user abandoned 8 years of distros for Windows 11  Windows Central

Why one Linux power user abandoned 8 years of distros for Windows 11  Windows Central

Why one Linux power user abandoned 8 years of distros for Windows 11  Windows Central

Why one Linux power user abandoned 8 years of distros for Windows 11  Windows Central

Linux gamers finally get official Nvidia GeForce Now support  XDA

Why I trust open-source software more now than I did five years ago  XDA

Apple has acquired Q.AI, a secretive Israeli startup whose technology can analyze facial skin micro-movements to interpret "silent speech," in a deal valued at close to $2 billion that marks the iPhone maker's second-largest acquisition ever, according to backer GV (formerly Google Ventures). The four-year-old company was founded in Tel Aviv in 2022 by Aviad Maizels, Yonatan Wexler and Avi Barliya. Patents filed by Q.AI show its technology being deployed in headphones or smart glasses to enable non-verbal communication with an AI assistant. The acquisition comes as Meta's Ray-Ban smart glasses already let wearers talk to its AI, and Google and Snap are preparing to launch competing devices later this year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

DDR5-4800 vs. DDR5-6000 Performance With The AMD Ryzen 7 9850X3D In 300+ Benchmarks Review  Phoronix

Nvidia launches its native GeForce Now App for Linux  OC3D

An anonymous reader shares a report: Chat & Ask AI, one of the most popular AI apps on the Google Play and Apple App stores that claims more than 50 million users, left hundreds of millions of those users' private messages with the app's chatbot exposed, according to an independent security researcher and emails viewed by 404 Media. The exposed chats showed users asked the app "How do I painlessly kill myself," to write suicide notes, "how to make meth," and how to hack various apps. The exposed data was discovered by an independent security researcher who goes by Harry. The issue is a misconfiguration in the app's usage of the mobile app development platform Google Firebase, which by default makes it easy for anyone to make themselves an "authenticated" user who can access the app's backend storage where in many instances user data is stored. Harry said that he had access to 300 million messages from more than 25 million users in the exposed database, and that he extracted and analyzed a sample of 60,000 users and a million messages. The database contained user files with a complete history of their chats with the AI, timestamps of those chats, the name they gave the app's chatbot, how they configured the model, and which specific model they used. Chat & Ask AI is a "wrapper" that plugs into various large language models from bigger companies users can choose from, Including OpenAI's ChatGPT, Anthropic's Claude, and Google's Gemini.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux gaming devs unite under Open Gaming Collective  The Tech Buzz

Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. can now try out Project Genie.Google AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. can now try out Project Genie.

Nvidia GeForce Now beta officially launches on Linux desktops  Sportskeeda Tech

A Bunch of Developers Have Come Together to Make Linux Gaming Great  It's FOSS

Cairn and The Bard’s Tale Trilogy Lead New GeForce NOW Games as Native Linux GFN App Enters Beta  Wccftech

Cairn and The Bard’s Tale Trilogy Lead New GeForce NOW Games as Native Linux GFN App Enters Beta  Wccftech