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Linus Torvalds Blasts Kernel Dev For 'Making the World Worse' With 'Garbage' Patches

2 months 2 weeks ago
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: You can't say Linux creator Linus Torvalds didn't give the kernel developers fair warning. He'd told them: "The upcoming merge window for 6.17 is going to be slightly chaotic for me. I have multiple family events this August (a wedding and a big birthday), and with said family being spread not only across the US, but in Finland too, I'm spending about half the month traveling." Therefore, Torvalds continued, "That does not mean I'll be more lenient to late pull requests (probably quite the reverse, since it's just going to add to the potential chaos)." So, when Meta software engineer Palmer Dabbelt pushed through a set of RISC-V patches and admitted "this is very late," he knew he was playing with fire. He just didn't know how badly he'd be burned. Torvalds fired back on the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML): "This is garbage and it came in too late. I asked for early pull requests because I'm traveling, and if you can't follow that rule, at least make the pull requests good." It went downhill from there. Torvalds continued: "This adds various garbage that isn't RISC-V specific to generic header files. And by 'garbage," I really mean it. This is stuff that nobody should ever send me, never mind late in a merge window." Specifically, Torvalds hated the "crazy and pointless" way in which one of the patch's helper functions combined two unsigned 16-bit integers into a 32-bit integer. How bad was it? "That thing makes the world actively a worse place to live. It's useless garbage that makes any user incomprehensible, and actively *WORSE* than not using that stupid 'helper.'" In addition to the quality issues, Torvalds was annoyed that the offending code was added to generic header files rather than the RISC-V tree. He emphasized that such generic changes could negatively impact the broader Linux community, writing: "You just made things WORSE, and you added that 'helper' to a generic non-RISC-V file where people are apparently supposed to use it to make other code worse too... So no. Things like this need to get bent. It does not go into generic header files, and it damn well does not happen late in the merge window. You're on notice: no more late pull requests, and no more garbage outside the RISC-V tree." [...] Dabbelt gets it. He replied, "OK, sorry. I've been dropping the ball lately, and it kind of piled up, taking a bunch of stuff late, but that just leads to me making mistakes. So I'll stop being late, and hopefully that helps with the quality issues."

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Big AI Wave Will Lift Arista To $10 Billion Two Years Early

2 months 2 weeks ago

Jayshree Ullal, the chief executive officer of Arista Networks, has been pointing at the $10 billion revenue upper decks since the beginning of the AI boom, but is understandably hesitant about saying when the company would cross that threshold. …

Big AI Wave Will Lift Arista To $10 Billion Two Years Early was written by Timothy Prickett Morgan at The Next Platform.

Timothy Prickett Morgan

Cornell Researchers Develop Invisible Light-Based Watermark To Detect Deepfakes

2 months 2 weeks ago
Cornell University researchers have developed an "invisible" light-based watermarking system that embeds unique codes into the physical light that illuminates the subject during recording, allowing any camera to capture authentication data without special hardware. By comparing these coded light patterns against recorded footage, analysts can spot deepfake manipulations, offering a more resilient verification method than traditional file-based watermarks. TechSpot reports: Programmable light sources such as computer monitors, studio lighting, or certain LED fixtures can be embedded with coded brightness patterns using software alone. Standard non-programmable lamps can be adapted by fitting them with a compact chip -- roughly the size of a postage stamp -- that subtly fluctuates light intensity according to a secret code. The embedded code consists of tiny variations in lighting frequency and brightness that are imperceptible to the naked eye. Michael explained that these fluctuations are designed based on human visual perception research. Each light's unique code effectively produces a low-resolution, time-stamped record of the scene under slightly different lighting conditions. [Abe Davis, an assistant professor] refers to these as code videos. "When someone manipulates a video, the manipulated parts start to contradict what we see in these code videos," Davis said. "And if someone tries to generate fake video with AI, the resulting code videos just look like random variations." By comparing the coded patterns against the suspect footage, analysts can detect missing sequences, inserted objects, or altered scenes. For example, content removed from an interview would appear as visual gaps in the recovered code video, while fabricated elements would often show up as solid black areas. The researchers have demonstrated the use of up to three independent lighting codes within the same scene. This layering increases the complexity of the watermark and raises the difficulty for potential forgers, who would have to replicate multiple synchronized code videos that all match the visible footage. The concept is called noise-coded illumination and was presented on August 10 at SIGGRAPH 2025 in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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Do Kwon Pleads Guilty to US Fraud Charges In $40 Billion Crypto Collapse

2 months 2 weeks ago
Terraform Labs founder Do Kwon pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court to conspiracy to defraud and wire fraud over the $40 billion collapse of TerraUSD and Luna in 2022. Reuters reports: Kwon, 33, who co-founded Singapore-based Terraform Labs and developed the TerraUSD and Luna currencies, entered the plea at a court hearing in New York before U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer. He had pleaded not guilty in January to a nine-count indictment charging him with securities fraud, wire fraud, commodities fraud and money laundering conspiracy. Accused of misleading investors in 2021 about TerraUSD - a so-called stablecoin designed to maintain a value of $1 - Kwon pleaded guilty to the two counts under an agreement with the Manhattan U.S. Attorney's office, which brought the charges. He faces up to 25 years in prison when Engelmayer sentences him on December 11, though prosecutor Kimberly Ravener said the government had agreed to advocate for a prison term of no more than 12 years provided he accepts responsibility for his crimes. "I made false and misleading statements about why it regained its peg by failing to disclose a trading firm's role in restoring that peg," Kwon said in court. "What I did was wrong."

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