An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Documentation files on more than 100 websites are referencing potentially dangerous executable content that gets installed automatically when visited by many AI agents [including Claude, OpenAI's Codex, and Nous Research's Hermes]. A few dozen companies, some of them Fortune 500s, are among those that executed proof-of-concept code. At least one misconfigured site is directing visitors, human or AI, to live malware.

The potentially dangerous content is in llms.txt and llms-full.txt files, an emerging convention websites employ to provide machine-readable summaries of the site's content and its high-level structure. These files are the AI equivalent of the robots.txt standard that instructs search engines how to index the site's content. Google Lighthouse, a tool for helping web developers, has more here. Correctly configured llms.txt and llms-full.txt files for Cloudflare are here and here. "The trust model is broken," Alon Hertz, one of the researchers, wrote in an interview. "Agents treat vendor docs as ground truth and don't question them -- and neither do the humans supervising them. Agentic AI usage is exploding, and agents are spreading across every layer -- SaaS, cloud, endpoint. As they multiply, so does the supply-chain surface, and today's guards don't cover it."

"An agent doesn't distinguish between a page and a command," the researchers wrote Thursday. "Everything it reads is input, and every input is a potential instruction. Which means the entire corpus of published data that agents are now wired to consume has silently become an execution surface -- and almost none of it carries the integrity guarantees we apply to actual code."

Amazon has agreed to acquire DuckLabs, bringing the team behind the popular open-source DuckDB database into AWS. "The deal fits Amazon's broader push to turn S3, its flagship cloud storage service, into a place where customers analyze data rather than just store it," reports GeekWire. "It gives Amazon a team experienced in building fast, lightweight analytics software that runs directly against data sitting in cloud storage." The DuckDB project itself will remain free and open source under the MIT license, overseen by the independent DuckDB Foundation. From the report: Employees of DuckLabs will join Amazon Web Services, including co-founders and DuckDB creators Hannes Muhleisen and Mark Raasveldt, who will continue leading the team and setting the project's technical direction. They will remain based in Amsterdam, where the team will continue developing DuckDB and related projects. [...] Financial terms were not disclosed. Amazon said it has signed a definitive agreement and expects the acquisition to close shortly. DuckLabs said it expects to become part of AWS in early September. Jordan Tigani, the CEO of MotherDuck, which sells a cloud service built on DuckDB, sees Amazon's acquisition as a predictable move to turn DuckDB's growing popularity into an AWS business. "That's Amazon's playbook, after all: wait until an open source project gets big enough, then launch it as a service," he wrote in a blog post, adding that "they're not acquiring Duck Labs just because they love open source."

Tigani also believes the deal could ultimately strengthen DuckDB, since Amazon has an incentive to keep the project open and widely adopted: "If DuckDB becomes the standard, it is going to drive a lot more compute on their infrastructure, which is where they make their money."

An anonymous reader shared this report from the blog It's FOSS: Canonical has committed funding to a three-year PhD project focused on building a system that can automatically translate large C codebases into Rust. And they are not alone; UK Research and Innovation is matching their funding for the project, which is set to run through the University of Bristol's Programming Languages Research Group.

The PhD is aiming to build an all-encompassing platform that can take a C repository running into hundreds of thousands of lines and translate it into Rust that's "safe, behaviourally correct and maintainable Rust."

The work will be carried out by a student, Alex Wood, who will be supported by Professor Meng Wang leading the work, with Dr. Cristina David and Canonical's Jon Seager serving as co-supervisors.

Cursor has launched Origin, a GitHub-style code hosting platform built directly into its AI coding environment. The company is initially positioning Origin as a low-risk layer on top of GitHub, keeping GitHub as the "source of truth," but the launch landed just as a major GitHub outage highlighted growing concerns about reliability in the age of AI-generated code. VentureBeat reports: Cursor began rolling out Origin, its own code hosting platform, to paid users on Monday morning. Roughly three and a half hours later, GitHub's status page lit up with what became a six-hour-and-forty-two-minute global degradation -- error rates near 20% across pull requests, issues and the API, and near 50% on archive and raw file downloads, according to GitHub's incident log. Enterprise single sign-on went down with it: SAML, OIDC, SCIM provisioning and Team Sync all failed. So did Copilot.

The developer internet did what the developer internet does. "You can now host your repos in Cursor Origin and deploy to Vercel via Cursor Origin which is itself hosted on Vercel," Vercel chief executive Guillermo Rauch posted on X. "And unlike GitHub, it's online [smile emoji]" Asked why he was smiling, Rauch replied: "trying to make light of the situation. We ourselves are stuck because of github rn!" Matt Palmer, who works at Cursor, quote-tweeted his own company's launch with the day's best line: "We were going to ship this earlier, but GitHub was down." A GitHub outage, in other words, delayed the launch of a GitHub competitor.

Product launches get locked weeks in advance, and no evidence suggests Cursor timed this one. But the coincidence did the company an enormous favor, because it dramatized the argument Origin exists to make. For eighteen years, choosing where to host your team's source code has been the least interesting decision an engineering organization makes. Cursor is betting that AI agents have made it interesting again -- and for technical decision makers, that is the real news here. Not a new product, but a new procurement question with a governance problem attached.

Apple is overhauling its EU App Store fees to settle its Digital Markets Act dispute, simplifying the fee structure and "[resolving] Apple's disagreements with the Commission over business terms and alternative distribution." Developers can sign the new terms starting today, and the changes go into effect on October 1. MacRumors reports: The initial acquisition fee and store services fee are being removed for apps distributed outside of the App Store, and Apple will now charge a 5% Core Technology Commission on digital purchases that replaces the prior per-install Core Technology Fee. Commission rates are changing for App Store apps, alternative payments, and apps distributed through alternative app marketplaces or the web.

Developers can offer in-app purchase options alongside alternative payment options in the EU, which is something Apple did not allow before. Apple says there will be presentation requirements so users have a consistent, transparent experience. Developers distributing apps in the EU must select their payment options and maintain those options for 12 months before making changes to "provide consistency and clarity for users." Apple will still use a Notarization process for apps downloadable through the web and through alternative app marketplaces.

Apps in the Kids category or being used by children under 13 will not include links to websites to complete transactions. All apps that use alternative payment processing or link to a website for transactions have to include a parental gate if the user is under 18. Apple is relaxing the rules for operating an alternative app marketplace.

Less than a year ago he was the #1 richest man in the world. 10 weeks ago he was #2. But yesterday Larry Ellison dropped to #8, Forbes reports, falling behind Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang.

Ellison's net worth is now estimated at just $192.6 billion — after a $104 billion decline: Shares of Oracle plunged roughly 54% between hitting a high of just over $250 on June 1 to a low of $114.50 on July 28, though the stock rebounded slightly to $150.52 as of Friday.

A decline followed Oracle telling investors it expected to raise $40 billion through debt and equity financing, with capital expenditures surging 162% to $55.7 billion and spending expected to top $95 billion by fiscal 2027. Jacob Bourne, an analyst at eMarketer, told Reuters there are broader concerns about how Oracle would fund its capital spending to match its revenue projections, and Bank of America analysts separately flagged in a note cautioning that more than 50% of Oracle's remaining performance obligation comes from OpenAI. Melius Research analysts wrote last month that Oracle's spending plans may not hold if OpenAI or Anthropic demands more computing capacity. S&P Global also downgraded Oracle's credit rating in July, arguing the firm's "rapidly expanding" AI infrastructure business could pay off, but may be too expensive and could weaken Oracle's financial position in the meantime.

$443 billion. That's how much Oracle's market valuation has dropped since peaking at $877.1 billion in September, hitting $433.5 billion as of Friday... Oracle, once viewed as a potential winner of the booming AI infrastructure buildout, has since raised concerns among investors who appear to view the firm as taking on too much financial risk to fund its projects. Wall Street has cautioned that mega-cap tech firms may be taking on too much spending to match growing demand for AI products, with firms like Amazon expecting to spend more than $200 billion. Oracle's backlog has exploded to $638 billion, but more than half is reportedly associated with OpenAI, and some analysts have cautioned that most of those funds may not be guaranteed.

Apple is proposing to charge U.S. developers up to 15% when users leave an app through an external purchase link, with lower rates of 10% or 5% for certain programs and smaller developers. The proposal follows years of litigation with Epic Games and a contempt ruling that temporarily barred Apple from collecting any link-out fees. A federal judge will now decide what commission, if any, is reasonable. MacRumors reports: These proposed fees are what developers would pay when someone uses their app, taps a link in the app, and then makes a purchase on the website in the link. So if someone using the Spotify app clicked a link in the app to go to the Spotify website and then purchased a subscription, Spotify would owe Apple a 15 percent fee. Apple says the fees were calculated based on expert analysis, and they are lower than the link-out rates Google is charging in the Epic v. Google case.

Apple submitted the proposal to the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, where Judge Yvonne Gonzalez Rogers has been tasked with determining a reasonable fee for Apple to charge for its intellectual property. The appeals court suggested the commission could be limited to the direct costs of facilitating link-outs, and under that approach, the fee would be zero. Apple says a zero commission would not reflect the value that it provides developers, and its suggested commission gives it fair compensation for the App Store platform.

Google has released Gemini 3.7 Flash just three weeks after 3.6 Flash, focusing on better coding, agentic workflows, and enterprise automation while temporarily cutting API prices in half through the end of 2026. VentureBeat reports: For enterprise developers, the more consequential story may be the combination of those intelligence gains with lower inference costs: through the end of 2026, Gemini 3.7 Flash costs $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens.

Starting Jan. 1, 2027, pricing rises to $1.50 per million input tokens and $7.50 per million output tokens. That means the current discount is temporary, but it gives teams deploying high-volume coding and business agents several months to evaluate whether Google's claimed reductions in retries and manual oversight translate into lower total operating costs. The launch also underscores Google's rapid iteration on its Flash line while its next flagship Pro model remains absent. [...]

Google describes Gemini 3.7 Flash as its "most intelligent workhorse model yet for coding and agents." The company says the model is better at adapting when it encounters roadblocks, clarifying intent when necessary and following instructions with greater fidelity. [...] Google's benchmarks show a large generational improvement in several software engineering tests. [...] Google's own results do not show 3.7 Flash universally displacing higher-priced competitors. They instead suggest a model that has become substantially more competitive in coding and agent workloads while occupying a lower price tier.

The Washington Post shared surprising news this week about five top AI companies.

Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta and Oracle "are spending so much on developing AI and delivering it to customers that they're expected to bleed cash in the coming year, according to a Washington Post analysis of data compiled by S&P Global Market Intelligence." Free cash flow, which measures the cash left over after paying expenses and AI infrastructure costs, is now expected to shrink to almost nothing for the five companies combined in 2026, and decline again to negative $125 billion the following year... AI spending by Amazon and Google pushed the companies to an ignominious milestone: They lost more cash in the past three months than any other large U.S. companies, according to S&P Global data. Investment analysts expect Elon Musk's SpaceX to show even worse cash bleeding this week.

Meta has launched Muse Code, its first AI coding agent that's positioned as a lower-cost rival to Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex. It offers pay-as-you-go pricing and an optional zero-data-retention feature for enterprise users. CNBC reports: Muse Code is the latest major release from AI chief Alexandr Wang, who leads Meta Superintelligence Labs and oversees foundation model development. Wang joined in June of last year as the centerpiece of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's effort to revamp his company's flailing artificial intelligence strategy. "You can install it with one command and then use it to take on complete software engineering tasks across a wide variety of use cases, planning changes, writing code, validating the results," Wang said in an interview on Wednesday.

[...] The new tool, like Anthropic's Claude and OpenAI's Codex assistants, makes it easier for people to build apps within a single user interface while managing fleets of AI-powered digital agents that can help underpin the software development process. Muse Code, available in a preview version, works alongside the company's latest AI model, Muse Spark 1.2. Wang declined to share user statistics related to the company's Muse Spark AI models, but said "adoption has been exciting and strong." The latest Muse Spark model was developed and trained alongside Muse Code, which Wang said improves the overall coding performance.

"GitHub and the Python Package Index (PyPI) have introduced new policies meant to boost supply chain security," reports SecurityWeek, "by preventing the fast propagation of poisoned package versions and the poisoning of old and long-stable releases." To prevent the fast delivery of malicious code through the immediate fetching of brand-new releases, GitHub has introduced a Dependabot cooldown, where the automation tool waits for at least three days after a release has been published before opening a pull request. "Waiting a few days before adopting a new release gives maintainers, security researchers, and automated scanners time to spot a malicious version and get it pulled before it ever reaches your pull requests," GitHub explains.

The three-day cooldown only applies to non-security version bumps, and the behavior can be modified through the configuration option in the dependabot.yml. "Three days as the default balances two goals: it pushes you past the window where most of these attacks live, and it doesn't hold your dependencies back longer than necessary," GitHub notes.
And the Python Package Index (PyPI) "now rejects new files being uploaded to releases that are older than 14 days," according to a recernt blog post from the Python Software Foundation's security developer-in-residence Seth Larson: This restriction was put in place to prevent old and long-stable releases from being poisoned in case publishing tokens or workflows of PyPI projects were compromised... The discussion of this behavior began during PEP 740 (Digital Attestations) back in January 2024. The discussion was restarted in March 2026 after the popular packages LiteLLM and Telnyx were compromised. These packages were compromised due to a "mutable reference" in these projects' usage of the Trivy GitHub Action...

To quantify how disruptive this change would be to existing workflows, the PyPI database was queried for projects that have published new files to old releases... [O]nly 56 projects of 15,000 had published a [Python] 3.14-compatible wheel more than 14 days after a release was available. This topic was brought to the Packaging Summit at PyCon US 2026 by PyPI Safety & Security Engineer, Mike Fiedler. The rough consensus of the discussion was that the summit attendees thought it was "acceptable to require users to bump to the next version" to support new Python versions. With the data and consensus in hand, Seth moved forward with a patch to reject new files on old releases which was merged July 8th, 2026.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: Google is expanding its answer to Apple's age-assurance tools with Wednesday's news that it will bring its Play Signal API to users worldwide by the end of 2026. The technology, already available in Brazil, allows Android developers to identify younger users of their apps in order to provide safer, age-appropriate experiences. The expansion will initially bring the API to Australia and Canada by mid-August, before rolling out globally to all markets by the end of the year.

[...] Like Apple, Google's technology allows developers to obtain a user's age range without needing to access personal information, like their date of birth. Instead, it enables parents to share their child's age range directly with apps. It also lets adults share their age when prompted by app developers as well, allowing for customized experiences. Parents won't have to manage sharing this information on an app-by-app basis, either. To make it easier, Google centralizes these controls inside its parental controls dashboard, Family Link. Once entered, any developer that chooses to incorporate age-range information can access this signal to customize their apps accordingly.

Google notes, however, that the age ranges are not shared by default -- parents must opt in by entering that information. The feature joins other safety tools on Google Play, including those that let developers restrict a child's ability to discover their apps. Parents, meanwhile, can continue to use Google Play's Family Link app to manage their child's screen-time limits, approve app downloads, or set PIN-based content filters for specific apps.

The review embargo has lifted for the new Framework Laptop 13 Pro, and the consensus across the board is that it is a massive leap forward in terms of build quality and battery life. The main issue reviewers complained about is the sky-high price, with the higher-end model jumping dramatically from $2,100 up to $2,900 due to the memory shortage crisis. (Some note that the price "nearly doubled" overnight while they were in the middle of testing.)

In his video review, Marques Brownlee says, "This is their best build yet. They're finally doing what people have been asking for: a premium... modular... laptop." ZDNET agrees that this device "represents a new approach for Framework and a maturation of the brand's catalog," noting that the new construction is "sleek and airtight, with no gaps, spaces, or evidence that was even put together by your hands at all." Tom's Hardware echoes this enthusiasm, declaring that "The Framework Laptop 13 Pro's sturdy design, haptic trackpad, and bigger battery feel like they should have been there all along".

Battery life, which has historically been a weak point for Framework, is now a standout feature. Ars Technica points out that the combination of Intel's efficient Panther Lake chips and a new 74-watt-hour battery is "finally long enough to decisively eliminate 'mediocre-to-poor battery life' as the laptop's biggest downside." They also said it's "Framework's nicest-looking, nicest-feeling, most polished laptop design."

For Linux users, the machine appears to deliver on its promises. Phoronix says the device "is designed with great Linux compatibility in mind," offering a seamless out-of-the-box experience for distributions like Ubuntu and Fedora.

As mentioned above, the overarching complaint is the extreme cost. Ars Technica notes that Framework unfortunately "switched to an exotic new upgradeable LPDDR5X RAM format just in time for those modules to become astronomically expensive." Still, Marques Brownlee summarizes the long-term value proposition perfectly: while it might be painfully expensive on day one, "the longer you keep this laptop, the more it feels worth it" because you can easily repair and upgrade it over time. Compared to Apple's flagship, the Framework is "80% of the quality, way more modular," he says.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Hackaday: Community-led open source project hosting site Codeberg has formally announced that projects whose code is largely or fully machine-generated through LLMs and other 'AI' tools will no longer be welcome. This follows on the heels of a similar ban on cryptocurrency-related projects. The community vote was on two issues, the first being the notion that scraping of project code for the use in LLMs should be forbidden, which was a motion that easily passed. The second motion was on disallowing projects whose code was substantially generated by LLMs like Claude, OpenAI Codex, and similar. This motion passed with 358 in favor versus 144 against.

In the earlier linked blog post the reasoning behind especially this second issue is expanded upon, covering not only "license whitewashing," but also the direct and indirect hardware costs, with the expanding 'AI' datacenter hyperscaling having massively increased hardware costs for Codeberg over the past years, as the costs have been largely externalized. Also covered is the aspect of these LLM-based tools destroying the OSS community, which is something that is backed up by recent studies.

Oracle has signed a 10-year Pentagon contract worth up to $7 billion to provide on-premises software, licenses, maintenance, and consulting for branches of the military. CNBC reports: The contract covers the use of Oracle software in on-premises data centers for branches of the military, the U.S. intelligence community and the Coast Guard, according to a statement. The Central Intelligence Agency was Oracle's first customer. A five-year base period for the contract includes perpetual and subscription-based software licenses, maintenance and consulting, according to one description.

Kirsten Davies, the Department of Defense's chief information officer, said in the release that the agency is saving at least $441 million for taxpayers "by fundamentally improving how we procure on-premises Oracle capabilities."