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Apple is paying Google to create a custom Gemini-based model that will run on the company's private cloud servers and power the next version of Siri, according to Bloomberg. The decision marks a departure from Apple's tradition of building core technologies in-house. The arrangement follows a competition Apple held this year between Anthropic and Google, the report said. Anthropic offered a superior model, but Google made more financial sense because of the tech giants' existing search relationship. Neither company is expected to discuss the partnership publicly, the report added. The new Siri will introduce AI-powered web search and other features users have come to expect from voice assistants. The custom model will not flood Siri with Google services or Gemini features already available on Android devices. Instead, it will provide the underlying AI capabilities through an Apple user interface. The company is betting heavily on the revamped Siri to undo years of brand damage.

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Bonus is back. Ally Bank is one of my favorite banks in terms of user interface, practical features, customer service, and reliability. They were my primary checking account for years (the checking can auto-draft from the savings). Unfortunately, their savings account rates have been lagging the top rates by about 1% recently. Despite that, I still keep maintain active accounts there because I use them as my central hub connecting all my many different bank accounts with fast transfers and a clear schedule of exactly when the money will be withdrawn and deposited.

Ally is running a $100 new account bonus by referral only (that’s mine, thanks if you use it). You must first enroll with your name and address by 12/31/25, and then using the same e-mail address open one of two possible account types (Ally Spending, Ally Savings) within 30 days of enrollment and make qualifying transfers to get the $100 bonus. You are not eligible if you are a current customer (with any Ally product), or has had any Ally account open since January 1, 2024.

Thus, my recommendation is to first open a Savings account with this offer (which works for both Savings and Checking but only works if you have no Ally accounts at all), satisfy all the requirements, and then after do this different bonus on your first Checking (allows you to have other Ally accounts).

Here are the details for the Savings Account. Taken from full terms and conditions [pdf].

Ally Bank Savings Account

1. Once your Savings Account is open, setup (within your new account) a monthly automated recurring transfer of any amount and have it start within 30 days of account opening.
2. Complete an automated recurring transfer at least once a month for at least three months in a row.
3. Your $100 Welcome Bonus will be deposited within 30 days of receiving your third consecutive monthly recurring transfer. To be paid, make sure you keep your Savings Account open and in Good Standing through the Payout Date.

What do they mean by “automated recurring transfer”? I tried it out in my Ally account it just means setting up as little as a $1 transfer every month into your savings account. You can connect an external bank account to fund the transfer.

Overall, the requirements are pretty easy for a $100 bonus and it has useful characteristics noted above. I personally use this account nearly every week to manage my interbank transfers. I even hit their maximum limit of 20 linked external accounts.

Bonus is back, now $300. Ally Bank has a new checking account promotion for their “Spending Account”. You must open your first Spending Account by 11/18/2025 and use the promo code GET300, fund it within 30 days of opening, and set up qualifying direct deposits of at least $1,000 a month for two consecutive months. Your first monthly qualifying direct deposit(s) totaling at least $1,000 must post to your Spending Account within 60 days of when you open the account. You’ll then get a $300 bonus within 30 days of the qualifying direct deposits.

If you don’t have an Ally Spending account already but are using their Savings account, this is a good bonus to grab. If you don’t have an Ally Savings account yet, I would open a Savings first grabbing this $100 bonus (which works for both Savings and Checking and only works if you have no Ally accounts at all), satisfy all the requirements, and then after do this bonus on your first Checking (allows you to have other Ally accounts).

Spending Account mini-review. Their Spending Account is solid but nothing extraordinary – a checking account with no monthly fees, no minimums, online bill payments, ATM rebates up to $10 per statement cycle, but it only pays a sad 0.10% APY interest on balances up to $15k and 0.25% APY on balances above $15k. However, it does pair well if you already use the Ally Savings Account. You can set an Ally Savings account to be the automatic (and free) backup funding source if you overdraft the Spending account. You can also have multiple Savings Accounts (useful when they enforced the six withdrawals per month limit). So when Ally was my primary account, I would keep a very minimal amount in my Spending Account, a bigger amount in Savings Account #1 as overdraft backup, and another bigger amount in Savings #2 or Savings #3 or No Penalty CD or whatever.

All deposits would go straight into Savings #1, earning higher interest right away. You can even do mobile check deposit directly into Savings. Bill Pay must come out of Spending/Checking, but all of my 5-10 payments would be scheduled on say the 2nd of the month. (You can request to shift each of your credit card due dates to match up.) I would then schedule a big transfer from Savings #1 to Spending/Checking on the 1st of the month. If a random withdrawal hits my Spending/Checking, it would just trigger an auto-withdrawal from Savings #1. The result: maximum interest earned from Savings and minimal idle cash in Spending/Checking.

While I have used my Ally Bank accounts regularly for years due to their well-designed bank-to-bank transfer service and overall solid customer service, the Ally Savings APY has been lagging during this period of interest rate hikes, usually 1% APY behind the rate leaders. Most of my idle cash has moved into money market mutual funds (like VUSXX or FDLXX) and Treasury bonds, both earning me at least 1% APY more on an after-tax basis due to my local state income tax deduction.

The Internet Archive celebrated archiving its trillionth webpage last month and received congratulations from San Francisco, which declared October 22 "Internet Archive Day." Senator Alex Padilla designated the nonprofit a federal depository library. The organization currently faces no major lawsuits and no active threats to its collections. But these victories arrived after years of bruising copyright battles that forced the removal of more than 500,000 books from the Archive's Open Library. "We survived, but it wiped out the Library," founder Brewster Kahle told ArsTechnica. In 2024, the Archive lost its final appeal in a lawsuit brought by book publishers over its e-book lending model. Damages could have topped $400 million before publishers announced a confidential settlement. Last month, the organization settled another suit over its Great 78 Project after music publishers sought damages of up to $700 million. That settlement was also confidential. In both cases, the Archive's experts challenged publishers' estimates as massively inflated. Kahle had envisioned the Open Library as a way for Wikipedia to link to book scans and help researchers reference e-books. The Archive wanted to deepen Wikipedia's authority as a research tool by surfacing information often buried in books. "That's what they really succeeded at -- to make sure that Wikipedia readers don't get access to books," Kahle said of the publishers. He thinks "the world became stupider" when the Open Library was gutted. The Archive is now expanding Democracy's Library, a free online compendium of government research and publications that will be linked in Wikipedia articles.

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Linux Users Surpass 3% of Steam’s Global Player Base for the First Time  eTeknix

The Steam Deck pushes Linux past a new milestone: 3% of Steam gamers  PCWorld

This minimalist Linux distro is built for small business - and runs like a dream  ZDNET

Linux users now account for over 3% of Steam users  OC3D

Captchas have largely vanished from the web in 2025, replaced by invisible tracking systems that analyze user behavior rather than asking people to decipher distorted text or identify traffic lights in image grids. Google launched reCaptcha v3 in 2018 to generate risk scores based on behavioral signals during site interactions, making bot-blocking technology "completely invisible" for most users, according to Tim Knudsen, a director of product management at Google Cloud. Cloudflare followed in 2022 by releasing Turnstile, another invisible alternative that sometimes appears as a simple checkbox but actually gathers data from devices and software to determine if users are human. Both companies distribute their security tools for free to collect training data, and Cloudflare now sees 20% of all HTTP requests across the internet. The rare challenges that do surface have become increasingly bizarre, ranging from requests to identify dogs and ducks wearing various hats to sliding a jockstrap across a screen to find matching underwear on hookup sites.

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Dodge the AI Overload: Discover a World Where You’re Still in Control  Lifewire

An anonymous reader shares a report: The Content Overseas Distribution Association (CODA), an anti-piracy organization representing Japanese IP holders like Studio Ghibli and Bandai Namco, released a letter last week asking OpenAI to stop using its members' content to train Sora 2, as reported by Automaton. The letter states that "CODA considers that the act of replication during the machine learning process may constitute copyright infringement," since the resulting AI model went on to spit out content with copyrighted characters. Sora 2 generated an avalanche of content containing Japanese IP after it launched on September 30th, prompting Japan's government to formally ask OpenAI to stop replicating Japanese artwork. This isn't the first time one of OpenAI's apps clearly pulled from Japanese media, either -- the highlight of GPT-4o's launch back in March was a proliferation of "Ghibli-style" images. Altman announced last month that OpenAI will be changing Sora's opt-out policy for IP holders, but CODA claims that the use of an opt-out policy to begin with may have violated Japanese copyright law, stating, "under Japan's copyright system, prior permission is generally required for the use of copyrighted works, and there is no system allowing one to avoid liability for infringement through subsequent objections."

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Linux 6.19 Integrates Microsoft ACPI Fan Extensions for Surface Devices  WebProNews

Devuan 6.0 Excalibur Released: Systemd-Free Debian 13 Fork  WebProNews

A developer operating under the handle @XenoPanther has stripped Windows 7 down to 69MB. The OS boots but runs almost nothing because critical files like common dialog boxes and common controls are missing. @XenoPanther described the project on X as "more of a fun proof of concept rather than something usable." The desktop appears and the genuine check remains intact.

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Ransomware intrusions with old Linux kernel bug reemerge  SC Media

NDSS 2025 - Statically Discover Cross-Entry Use-After-Free Vulnerabilities In The Linux Kernel  Security Boulevard

NDSS 2025 - Statically Discover Cross-Entry Use-After-Free Vulnerabilities In The Linux Kernel  Security Boulevard

CISA Alerts on CVE-2024-1086 Linux Kernel Exploit by Ransomware  WebProNews

US government warns Linux flaw is now being exploited for ransomware attacks  TechRadar

An anonymous reader shares a report: arXiv, a preprint publication for academic research that has become particularly important for AI research, has announced it will no longer accept computer science articles and papers that haven't been vetted by an academic journal or a conference. Why? A tide of AI slop has flooded the computer science category with low-effort papers that are "little more than annotated bibliographies, with no substantial discussion of open research issues," according to a press release about the change. arXiv has become a critical place for preprint and open access scientific research to be published. Many major scientific discoveries are published on arXiv before they finish the peer review process and are published in other, peer-reviewed journals. For that reason, it's become an important place for new breaking discoveries and has become particularly important for research in fast-moving fields such as AI and machine learning (though there are also sometimes preprint, non-peer-reviewed papers there that get hyped but ultimately don't pass peer review muster). The site is a repository of knowledge where academics upload PDFs of their latest research for public consumption. It publishes papers on physics, mathematics, biology, economics, statistics, and computer science and the research is vetted by moderators who are subject matter experts.

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