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Founded as an Other Bet by Alphabet in 2021, Intrinsic is now joining Google.

Seamus Blackley, one of the original founders of Xbox who helped convince Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer to back a console project more than 26 years ago, told GamesBeat in an interview that he believes Microsoft is quietly sunsetting the platform under the guise of an AI-driven leadership transition. Microsoft recently announced that Asha Sharma, whose career has focused on AI and software as a service, will replace Phil Spencer as Xbox CEO, and that COO and president Sarah Bond is leaving the company. Blackley said he expects Sharma's role to be that of "a palliative care doctor who slides Xbox gently into the night," arguing that Satya Nadella's all-consuming bet on generative AI has turned every business unit -- Xbox included -- into a nail for the same hammer. He compared the appointment to putting someone who doesn't like movies in charge of a major motion picture studio, and advised Sharma to either develop a genuine passion for games or find a way to leave the job soon.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux 6.18 and Several LTS Kernels Are Getting Extended Long-Term Support  9to5Linux

Linux In Scientific Computing And Research Institutions (Adoption Rate)  commandlinux.com

A hacker exploited Anthropic's AI chatbot to carry out a series of attacks against Mexican government agencies, resulting in the theft of a huge trove of sensitive tax and voter information, according to cybersecurity researchers. From a report: The unknown Claude user wrote Spanish-language prompts for the chatbot to act as an elite hacker, finding vulnerabilities in government networks, writing computer scripts to exploit them and determining ways to automate data theft, Israeli cybersecurity startup Gambit Security said in research published Wednesday. The activity started in December and continued for roughly a month. In all, 150 gigabytes of Mexican government data was stolen, including documents related to 195 million taxpayer records as well as voter records, government employee credentials and civil registry files, according to the researchers.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Linux Foundation reveals the "ugly" secret of how open source is draining your budget  The New Stack

Upgrades from Zorin OS 17 to 18 Are Now Available  Zorin Blog

We’ve updated Circle to Search so you can now explore multiple items in a single image.We’ve updated Circle to Search so you can now explore multiple items in a single image.

Launching soon for Pixel 10 and Samsung Galaxy S26 Series, you can offload multi-step tasks to Gemini.

At Samsung Unpacked 2026, we showcased how Samsung Galaxy S26 devices are getting the latest in Android’s AI features.At Samsung Unpacked 2026, we showcased how Samsung Galaxy S26 devices are getting the latest in Android’s AI features.

DVD and Blu-ray sales have been in freefall for years, but the decline is slowing considerably as Gen Z buyers turn to physical media and drive a measurable uptick at video rental stores and retailers across the U.S. Overall disc sales fell just 9% last year after dropping more than 20% in both 2023 and 2024, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, and U.S. consumers spent 12% more on 4K UHD Blu-rays in 2025 than the prior year. The Criterion Collection, a leading boutique Blu-ray label, confirmed significant year-over-year sales increases that its president credits to younger customers. Vidiots, a video store in Los Angeles, averaged 170 rentals a day in January 2026 -- its biggest month ever -- after loaning about 22,000 discs total in 2023 and roughly 50,000 in 2024. Barnes & Noble reported DVD and Blu-ray sales growth of "mid-double digits" over the past year.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

NVIDIA's New Job Postings Reveal A Big Push To Boost Gaming Performance On Linux  HotHardware

This KDE add-on brought Home Assistant controls to my Linux desktop  How-To Geek

React Moves to the Linux Foundation With Launch of the React Foundation  Linuxiac

Proton VPN releases "quality-of-life" update for iOS users — Mac and Linux VPN apps are next  TechRadar

We're introducing a handful of new features and capabilities to Flow.We're introducing a handful of new features and capabilities to Flow.

Learn more about Google’s Project Genie, as well as what makes a world model and what it can do.Learn more about Google’s Project Genie, as well as what makes a world model and what it can do.

The screeching sound that Scotch tape makes when you rip it off a surface -- that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard noise most people try not to think about -- is produced by shock waves from micro-cracks that travel across the peeling tape at supersonic speeds, according to a new paper published in Physical Review E. Researchers led by Sigurdur Thoroddsen of King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia used simultaneous high-speed imaging and synchronized microphones to capture both the propagating fractures and the sound waves they generate in the surrounding air. The team's earlier work, in 2010, had identified a sequence of transverse cracks racing across the width of the adhesive during peeling, and a 2024 follow-up established a direct correspondence between those cracks and the screeching sound, but neither study pinpointed a mechanism. The new findings show that a partial vacuum forms between the tape and the surface as each crack opens, and because the crack moves faster than air can rush in to fill the void, the vacuum travels along until it reaches the tape's edge and collapses into the stationary air outside, producing a discrete sound pulse.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

systemd 260-rc1 Released: New "mstack" Feature, System V Service Scripts No Longer Supported  Phoronix

Nvidia is hiring Linux gaming experts  PCWorld