Mystery around the bizarre psychological phenomenon continues to deepen, despite years of investigation into the matter.

Rust never sleeps. But Rust, the programming language, can be held at bay if enough kernel programmers aren't interested in seeing it implemented. The Linux kernel is not a place to work if you're not ready for some, shall we say, spirited argument. Still, one key developer in the project to expand Rust's place inside the largely C-based kernel feels the "nontechnical nonsense" is too much, so he's retiring. Wedson Almeida Filho, a leader in the Rust for Linux project, wrote to the Linux kernel mailing list last week to remove himself as the project's maintainer. "After almost 4 years, I find myself lacking the energy and enthusiasm I once had to respond to some of the nontechnical nonsense, so it's best to leave it up to those who still have it in them," Filho wrote. While thanking his teammates, he noted that he believed the future of kernels "is with memory-safe languages," such as Rust. "I am no visionary but if Linux doesn't internalize this, I'm afraid some other kernel will do to it what it did to Unix," Filho wrote. Filho also left a "sample for context," a link to a moment during a Linux conference talk in which an off-camera voice, identified by Filho in a Register interview as kernel maintainer Ted Ts'o, emphatically interjects: "Here's the thing: you're not going to force all of us to learn Rust." In the context of Filho's request that Linux's file system implement Rust bindings, Ts'o says that while he knows he must fix all the C code for any change he makes, he cannot or will not fix the Rust bindings that may be affected.

R.I.P. to a good portion of the bow feature, made famous in the iconic "King of the World" scene of the eponymous 1997 movie.

For anyone looking to explore the best Castlevania has to offer, the just-launched Castlevania Dominus Collection is pretty much a no-brainer. It includes a trilogy of games from the Nintendo DS era that show designer Koji Igarashi arguably at the height of his powers: the experiences combine smooth, satisfying action with worlds that are intricate labyrinths to be mastered slowly over time. Bringing that experience to modern platforms alone makes the collection worth it. But the Dominus Collection also goes a step further and includes some smart options for porting over a dual-screen game. Then, it throws in an unexpectedly excellent remaster just for fun. Part of what made Castlevania such a good fit for the DS was how much information...

Enlarge The most significant numbers in today's update are actually about battery life: Intel compared a Lunar Lake system and a Snapdragon X Elite system from the "same OEM" using the "same chassis" and the same-sized 55 WHr battery. In the Procyon Office Productivity test, the Intel system lasted longer, though the Qualcomm system lasted longer on a Microsoft Teams call.

Step one: rob the Iron Bank of Braavos; step two: bid on Heritage Auctions' treasure trove of Westeros relics.

Volkswagen has announced it’s rolling out its improved in-car AI voice assistant, IDA, with both locally processed and cloud-based responses from ChatGPT and other models, starting on September 6th. The first cars getting the feature will be the 2025 Jetta and Jetta GLI and the 82kWh battery version of the 2024 ID.4, with other cars getting it later this year. Drivers in cars that support ChatGPT will need to be subscribed to VW’s Plus Speech with AI service to get it. Down the line, the company says most of its 2025 models will get the new AI voice assistance features, including the ID.4 and ID Buzz (which will both get it free for three years) and the GTI, Golf R, and Tiguan (free for one year). Jetta, Jetta GLI, and Taos owners will...

The filmmakers behind Seeking Mavis Beacon wanted to know what happened to the Black woman who was paid only a couple hundred dollars to be the face of a wildly successful typing program. To find out, they had to do some “trolling.”

A lot of gold deposits are found embedded in quartz crystals. One of the reasons gold is so valuable is because it is highly unreactive—if you make something out of gold, it keeps its lustrous radiance. Even when you can react it with another material, it's also barely soluble, a combination that makes it difficult to purify away from other materials. Which is part of why a large majority of the gold we've obtained comes from deposits where it is present in large chunks, some of them reaching hundreds of kilograms. Those of you paying careful attention to the previous paragraph may have noticed a problem here: If gold is so difficult to get into its pure form, how do natural processes create enormous chunks of it? On Monday, a group of Australian researchers published a hypothesis, and a bit of evidence supporting it. They propose that an earthquake-triggered piezoelectric effect essentially electroplates gold onto quartz crystals. Approximately 75 percent of the gold humanity has obtained has come from what are called orogenic gold deposits. Orogeny is a term for the tectonic processes that build mountains, and orogenic gold deposits form in the seams where two bodies of rock are moving past each other. These areas are often filled with hot hydrothermal fluids, and the heat can increase the solubility of gold from "barely there" to "extremely low," meaning generally less than a single milligram in a liter of water.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis reportedly pushed for the plan.

People are losing a lot more money to Bitcoin ATM scams. In a report released on Tuesday, the Federal Trade Commission said it found the amount of money lost to Bitcoin ATM scams increased nearly 10 times from 2020 to 2023 — going from $12 million to a whopping $114 million. Consumers have already lost $65 million to the ruse in the first half of 2024 alone. Over the years, scams have evolved into different versions of pretty much the same thing: schemes that trick victims into paying scammers. We’ve seen bad actors trick people into sending wire transfers, buying gift cards, and even handing over a pile of cash in a shoebox. This is the Bitcoin ATM variation. Bitcoin ATMs are the physical machines that you can use to purchase or sell...

This team-based FPS combat scene was apparently too familiar to attract all that many players to Concord. .

Enlarge , Clearview AI "built an illegal database with billions of photos of faces" by crawling the web and without gaining consent, including from people in the Netherlands. Clearview AI's technology—which has been banned in some US cities over concerns that it gives law enforcement unlimited power to track people in their daily lives—works by pulling in more than 40 billion face images from the web without setting "any limitations in terms of geographical location or nationality," the Dutch DPA found. Perhaps most concerning, the Dutch DPA said, Clearview AI also provides "facial recognition software for identifying children," therefore indiscriminately processing personal data of minors.

Lady Gaga's Harley Quinn tells Joker what she thought of his explosive talk show interview.

Plus, one of Android's most essential accessibility features is also getting an update with Gemini infusion.

Android 15 has finally arrived. Here are the notable features and upgrades Google is rolling out.

Android 15 has officially arrived — for developers, at least. Google’s next-gen operating system is available in the Android Open Source Project, with support for Pixel phones due to roll out in the coming weeks. You’ll have to wait a little longer if you have a compatible device from Samsung, Motorola, OnePlus, Nothing, or other brands, while Google describes the window for Android 15 coming to those phones as within the “coming months.”

Enlarge The YubiKey 5, the most widely used hardware token for two-factor authentication based on the FIDO standard, contains a cryptographic flaw that makes the finger-size device vulnerable to cloning when an attacker gains temporary physical access to it, researchers said Tuesday. The cryptographic flaw, known as a side channel, resides in a small microcontroller used in a large number of other authentication devices, including smartcards used in banking, electronic passports, and the accessing of secure areas. While the researchers have confirmed all YubiKey 5 series models can be cloned, they haven’t tested other devices using the microcontroller, such as the SLE78 made by Infineon and successor microcontrollers known as the Infineon Optiga Trust M and the Infineon Optiga TPM. The researchers suspect that any device using any of these three microcontrollers and the Infineon cryptographic library contains the same vulnerability. YubiKey-maker Yubico issued an advisory in coordination with a detailed disclosure report from NinjaLab, the security firm that reverse-engineered the YubiKey 5 series and devised the cloning attack. All YubiKeys running firmware prior to version 5.7—which was released in May and replaces the Infineon cryptolibrary with a custom one—are vulnerable. Updating key firmware on the YubiKey isn’t possible. That leaves all affected YubiKeys permanently vulnerable.

The lifted, rugged, off-road version-of-normal trend has come to the Ioniq 5 with the new XLT. , this is the Tesla-style charger plug, which means MY25 Ioniq 5s should be able to fast charge at more than 17,000 Tesla Superchargers throughout the US and Canada. The flip side is that a MY25 Ioniq 5 will require an adapter if the driver wants to charge it with a CCS1 charger, although Hyundai will include that dongle with a new car. The automaker says that as it refreshes other EVs in Q4, they will also only come with J3400 ports. For existing Hyundai EVs with CCS1 ports, J3400 adapters are supposed to be available in Q1 2025.

The village was submerged when a reservoir was created to service the capital, but an astonishing drop in water level is revealing its lost buildings.