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."

A new American Heart Association scientific statement concludes that up to about 400 milligrams a day, or roughly three to five cups of plain coffee, is safe for most adults and may be linked to lower risks of cardiovascular disease. The benefits appear to depend heavily on the source and preparation, with coffee and tea looking more favorable than energy drinks, and added sugar, cream, syrups, or sweeteners potentially canceling out the upside. ScienceAlert reports: "Caffeine consumed in coffee is a key part of daily life for millions of people," says Gregory Marcus, cardiologist at the University of California, San Francisco, and Chair of the AHA volunteer writing group behind the statement. "In our review of the most recent research, for most adults, intake of up to 400 milligrams of caffeine per day, the equivalent of up to five cups of caffeinated coffee per day without added sugars or fillers, is safe and does not increase cardiovascular risk."

The statement focused on caffeine's relationship with cardiovascular risk factors, such as blood pressure and diabetes, as well as types of cardiovascular disease, including arrhythmias, coronary artery disease, stroke, and heart failure. The picture that emerges is complicated, but generally positive. [...] All up, the new AHA statement concludes that there's a growing body of evidence that caffeine isn't harmful when taken in moderation, and that coffee specifically may be beneficial. The statement was published in the journal Circulation.

A hacker reportedly wiped Romania's entire land registry database after a failed extortion attempt, halting property transactions across the country and preventing notaries from issuing land extracts, authenticating sales, or registering mortgages. "On the dark web, the hacker also boasted to have begun backup copies of stolen data in an attempt to prevent it from being restored," reports Cybernews. "However, Romanian officials have managed to at least restore the ANCPI's website and post a message saying they were rebuilding the agency's entire network from scratch. It appears that the agency has an offline copy of the wiped data." From the report: First, the hacker breached Romania's cadastre agency, the National Agency for Cadastre and Real Estate Advertising (ANCPI), posting on a hacking forum: "[RO] Thy arss shall be spanked, Romania! [ANCPI]." "In addition to the data of Romanian citizens, from various databases collected through ANCPI networks, there is also a copy of the GitLab servers containing the source code of all their systems, such as Eterra, RENNS, as well as a version of my little ransomware program," the announcement continued.

"The official government website announced a shutdown of IT systems due to 'technical problems,' but this is a bit of an understatement. An offer of assistance was made, but without insistence or pressure." Indeed, the ANCPI initially claimed technical issues but had to admit it was facing a cyberattack. Today, no one can really access the institution's systems. And since the extortion didn't work, the hacker -- who seems to have entered the database using valid credentials -- deleted all data they had stolen, including internal documents, employee credentials, and, of course, land registry data.

ZDNet reports on June's Open Source Summit India 2026 in Mumbai, where Linux stable kernel maintainer Greg Kroah-Hartman gave a talk titled "Rust and Linux: How the Rust Language is Going to Help Linux Succeed." Kroah-Hartman said in his keynote that "the [Linux] kernel is moving toward Rust. Git is moving toward Rust. Lots of projects are starting to move toward Rust."

He didn't always feel that way. Kroah-Hartman added, "A number of years ago, when a friend of mine said, 'Ah, you got to try this new language. It's called Rust.' I was like, 'What? No, C is great.' His friend continued, "'No, no, no! It makes programming fun again.' I'm like, 'Nah, programming is fun in C.' He was right. I should have done it then. Rust is actually fun. It makes programming fun. It takes a lot of stuff away from having to worry about the compiler, which can fix a lot of your problems for you, and it makes code a little bit better."

So, Kroah-Hartman has moved from being a Rust skeptic to one of its strongest champions inside the kernel. He now regards Rust as a permanent part of Linux, not an experiment. His case is straightforward: Rust's ownership and type system can eliminate most of the "stupid little tiny things" that dominate kernel Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures (CVEs), while making life easier for overworked maintainers. "Rust," in short, "makes my life so much easier...." In India, he said Linux sees "about 13 CVEs a day" and has been running at "almost nine changes an hour" for a decade or more. Most of those vulnerabilities, he argued, are not exotic attacks but simple C mistakes — unchecked pointers, forgotten unlocks, and sloppy cleanup paths: "This is what we're fixing 13 times a day. Small, trivial, little bugs like this all the time.... I've seen every CVE the kernel has done in the past 25 years. I think 80% would be gone, just because they would be caught by Rust." The remaining 20% are the logic bugs he'd prefer to focus on...."

Moreover, Rust is becoming the default for new work in key subsystems. "New drivers for some subsystems are only going to be accepted in Rust...." he said. Binder, the Android IPC mechanism at the heart of billions of devices, now has parallel C and Rust implementations in the kernel. The C version "will go away soon," leaving the Rust version "as the bedrock of all Android devices going forward."

"OpenAI has finally confirmed reports that its latest family of large language models can accidentally delete files," reports InfoWorld, "while stressing that such incidents are rare and should be viewed as 'honest mistakes.'" Reports of the flagship LLMs deleting files emerged shortly after the company launched them earlier this month, with investor Matt Shumer taking to X to report that GPT-5.6-Sol had "just accidentally deleted almost all" of his Mac's files. Just days later, software engineer Bruno Lemos posted on X that the same model had deleted his entire production database. In response to these incidents, the company's engineering lead for Codex, Thibault Sottiaux, wrote on X that internal investigations have revealed that these deletion incidents are more likely to happen when "full access mode is enabled, and Codex is run without sandboxing protections, including without auto review being enabled." In cases where full access mode is granted, the model, Sottiaux wrote, "attempts to override the $HOME env var to define a temporary directory. The model makes an honest mistake and mistakenly deletes $HOME instead...."

The company, however, according to Sottiaux, is taking steps to mitigate the risk. "This is of course not how we want the system to behave, even when a user operates the model in full-access mode without the safeguards of our sandbox or without using auto review which checks for these kinds of high risk actions and rejects them," the engineering lead wrote on X. "We are taking steps to mitigate this risk, including by updating the developer message, guiding more users towards safer permission modes, and adding additional harness safeguards," Sottiaux added, noting that a detailed post-mortem outlining the root cause of the issue and the additional mitigation measures being implemented is expected to follow in the coming days, despite emphasizing that such incidents happen "extremely rarely."

"Git and email are the two really only tools I use," Linus Torvalds said at Open Source Summit India 2026. But ZDNet reports that he also shared his thoughts on Rust, C, and patch-checking tools: "I use Google as a way to look things up." He added, "I'm unusual; most of the other maintainers end up using many more tools, and I think a lot of them are starting to use AI tools for patch checking," while he "works at a higher level. I work with people, not tools."

When asked about Rust both in Git and the kernel, he pushed back against hype: "I'm not sure Rust is going to take over the world. I still think Rust is very interesting, [but] I still find C to be a much simpler tool." Torvalds continued, "I'm much more excited about all the tools we have for verification of C," including "automated patch verification tools" and "automated email checking tools for patches like Sashiko." Summing up, Torvalds told the Mumbai audience: "I'm more of a hack-and-slash kind of person, and I still like the raw and simple power of C, and I don't think that's going to change."

Torvalds also warned against overestimating Rust's benefits: "Rust fixes a few easy bugs that you can make in C, but it does not fix the logic errors, right? It does not think for you, and when you write incorrect code, the language does not matter. The end result will be incorrect." On mixed C/Rust code bases, he pointed out that guarantees are limited: "The guarantees that Rust give you only apply in the Rust-only parts of your code base, and wherever you interact with C code, all bets are off," with most Rust code in Linux talking to "core kernel C code" that is "much better quality... because that code has been tested in every single environment."
At the same time, Torvalds pointed out, "some of our big and more high-profile bugs in the kernel lately have been logic errors" rather than the kind of memory errors Rust prevents.

"It was just bad programming, which sadly happens even in carefully maintained subsystems and important kernels that are supposed to be very secure."

It was more than two years ago that TypeScript's creator Anders Hejlsberg announced plans to rewrite its compiler in Go. This week Microsoft announced its first Go-based release candidate for TypeScript 7.0, reports InfoWorld: TypeScript 7.0 is often about 10 times faster than TypeScript 6.0, Microsoft said, thanks to native code speed and shared memory parallelism... Unlike TypeScript 6.0, TypeScript 7.0 performs many steps in parallel, including parsing, type checking, and emitting, Microsoft said. Some of these steps, such as parsing and emitting, can mostly be done independently across files. For that reason, parallelization automatically scales well with larger codebases with relatively little overhead. However, not every step in a TypeScript build is easily parallelizable, Microsoft said.
Microsoft plans to release TypeScript 7.0 within the next month, the article points out, but developers can try the new compiler by installing it from the typescript package on npm: npm install -D typescript@rc

The Godot Foundation will stop accepting AI-authored code, agent-submitted pull requests, and AI-generated text in contributor communications after maintainers were overwhelmed by low-effort submissions. "It is time for us to recognize that these problems aren't going away and therefore we need to take steps to reduce the burden on maintainers while ensuring we still have a pipeline to mentor new contributors to become future maintainers," the Godot Foundation said in a blog post. Contributors may still use AI for limited "menial things" if they disclose it, but humans must understand, own, and be able to fix the code they submit. PC Gamer reports: The Foundation says the pileup of Godot pull requests pending review isn't all bad: It's a sign that interest in using and contribution to Godot is increasing. But the influx of contributions authored or submitted by AI is sapping the projects' maintainers of their willingness to confront the "already tedious" work of reviewing pull requests. "If your feedback on PRs is just being absorbed by a machine and not going towards mentoring a potential future maintainer, it becomes much harder to justify spending your free time on PR review," the Foundation said.

As the problem becomes increasingly unsustainable, the Godot Foundation says it's in the process of updating its contribution policies, focusing on "adding barriers to low-effort slop" contributions, encouraging maintainers to review code, developing new contributors into future maintainers, and crucially, requiring that all contributions come from humans who are accountable for their code -- and fixing it if it fails. "AI cannot take responsibility, and we can't trust heavy users of AI to understand their code enough to fix it," the Foundation said.

The Foundation says we can expect Godot's contributing policy to soon include explicit rejections of AI-authored code, noting that contributors should only use AI assistance for "menial things" and must disclose its use. Additionally, the Foundation will reject any AI-generated text in human-to-human communications, saying it's "a basic principle of respect" -- though it says machine translations "are still acceptable" if the original text was human-authored. "Things change every day with respect to the current suite of AI tools available," the Foundation said. "We will continue taking a conservative approach in our policies towards them, but we will re-evaluate as things evolve."

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: For the most powerful voices in AI, it's all about being in the loop. Claude Code creator Boris Cherny recently said he doesn't write his own AI prompts much anymore. Thanks to loops, he doesn't have to. "It's an agent that prompts Claude," Cherny recently told CNBC, adding, "I don't write the prompt anymore. Claude writes the prompt, and now I'm talking to that new Claude that is kind of coordinating." In the same interview, Cherny said that loops and a similar feature were examples of the kind of work he would be proudest of in a decade.

Cherny isn't the only one embracing "loop engineering." OpenAI engineer Peter Steinberger, the creator of the viral OpenClaw project, wrote a public reminder to users who are still writing out prompts for AI agents. "Here's your monthly reminder that you shouldn't be prompting coding agents anymore," Steinberger wrote recently on X. "You should be designing loops that prompt your agents." [...] Steinberger shared an example of a loop he uses: "Tell codex to maintain your repos, wake up every 5 minutes and direct work to threads. That makes it easy to parallelize+steer work as needed." Claire Vo, founder of ChatPRD and host of the "How I AI," said, "it's really just reminding people that you don't have to use your human fingers to type in a prompt in order for your agent to do work on your behalf."

The days of directly prompting generative AI coding tools are "kind of over, or at least some think it's going to be," Addy Osmani, director of Google Cloud, wrote in his post explaining the concept.

A peer-reviewed Nature critique argues that Microsoft's 2025 Majorana quantum-computing breakthrough -- and its claim that it could enable "a truly meaningful quantum computer not in decades, as some have predicted, but in years" -- is fundamentally flawed. According to Dr Henry Legg, a lecturer at the University of St Andrews, the claims were undermined by omitted data, selective plotting, and basic Python errors that concealed alternative results. Microsoft, for its part, says the bugs were minor and stands by its findings and roadmap. The Register reports: "Last year they claimed to be years, not decades from a 'topological quantum supercomputer,'" Legg told The Register in an email. "My feeling is that they are centuries, not decades away. If it works at all -- and, based on what I have seen, the most likely scenario is that it doesn't work." Based on his analysis of the research Microsoft published in 2025, Legg argues that the company's claims about finding and being able to control the elusive Majorana particle to build a topological superconductor do not withstand scrutiny.

"I demonstrate that Microsoft's tune-up software is flawed and that coding errors resulted in incorrect statements to peer reviewers," said Legg. "Raw data, which was omitted from the original paper, also appears to indicate Microsoft's devices contain considerable disorder and are not compatible with the existence of a topological gap. In other words, the prerequisites for Microsoft's claims do not appear to be met, but this was obscured because this data did not appear in the original publication."

Essentially, Microsoft has proposed a Topological Gap Protocol (TGP) that can be used to detect the phase transition deemed to be a prerequisite for conducting quantum calculations using Majorana particles. Legg argues that based on his analysis of underlying transport data (measurements of particle change) -- omitted from the original publication -- Microsoft chose to focus on results that supported its thesis and ignored data that could be interpreted as a negative result. As he notes in his critique: "The TGP plotting code was set to highlight only the largest purportedly topological region."

"The primary consequence was the omission of other regions that passed their tune-up protocol (the TGP)," said Legg. "When peer reviewers asked if other regions existed, Microsoft inaccurately stated that they had investigated the only region passing the protocol within the explored range. This was not correct." Legg also argues that Microsoft mishandled its code. "The code antisymmetrized bias voltage based on array index rather than physical value," his analysis says.

In other words, Microsoft's researchers made a basic programming mistake by evaluating the array index -- the number identifying a value's position in an array -- instead of the value to which the index refers. "There were two pretty basic Python programming errors that hid these alternative regions," Legg explained. "Their plotting software was hardcoded with a filter (zbp_cluster_numbers=[1]) that forced it to display only the single largest region, concealing other successful results from their phase maps. Changing this to zbp_cluster_numbers=[1,2] shows already a second region." Legg added: "The TGP software transformed the data by simply reversing a Python array (x[::-1]) based on its index position, ignoring the actual physical bias voltages."

Oracle cut roughly 21,000 jobs over the past year as it reorganized around AI and ramps up spending on data centers for customers such as OpenAI and Meta. The restructuring cost the company about $1.8 billion and, while Oracle says AI deployment may drive further reductions, it also warns the cuts could create skills shortages and hurt productivity. The BBC reports: The software and cloud computing firm says it had around 141,000 full-time employees as of May 31, 2026, down from about 162,000 workers at the same time last year. The "deployment of AI technologies across our operations have resulted, and may continue to result, in reductions to our workforce," the report says. The cuts, which amount to about 13% of Oracle's workforce, are part of a wider trend among tech firms as they spend hundreds of billions of dollars on building AI infrastructure like data centers.

While the Rust Foundation has a Security Initiative to protect its ecosystem, "the threats have expanded," they announced this week, "and so has the kind of help maintainers need." Much of this comes back to a single shift: Automated tooling (much of it now built on large language models) has gotten good enough to surface real vulnerabilities in open source code quickly and at scale. That is useful, and several large Rust projects have already received and fixed credible issues found this way. The same tooling has also made it trivial to generate vulnerability reports that look plausible and are worthless. Maintainers across the ecosystem are losing real hours sorting these from the reports that matter, and the noise tends to bury the signal.

So, with funding from the Alpha-Omega Project, the Rust Foundation is bringing on a full-time AI Security Engineer in Residence dedicated to the Rust ecosystem. This position is being funded with part of the $12.5M in open source security funding that the Linux Foundation announced in March. The role exists to take pressure off maintainers. The person in this position will use a mix of human-led and AI-assisted methods to proactively review Rust itself and the crates the ecosystem leans on most and help us separate real, exploitable issues from false positives and low-signal noise before anything reaches a maintainer...

This role will run full-time for six months to start, with room to extend depending on what we learn and the funding available. Methods, playbooks, and prompts will be documented so the work doesn't end with the contract. We are grateful that Rust is not embarking on this work in isolation. Several other ecosystems have received parallel Alpha-Omega grants for the same kind of work (e.g., the PHP Foundation and the Drupal Association) and we plan to share tooling, triage practices, and what we learn rather than duplicating work
A statement from Rust's new AI Security Engineer in Residence acknowledges that "One of our next challenges is the wave of bugs discovered by the next generation of AI-powered developer tools."

Researchers developed an ultrasonic espresso process that uses high-frequency sound waves instead of hot water to produce espresso-strength coffee at room temperature. And, not only did coffee drinkers find it comparable to traditional espresso, but the brewing process cut energy use by up to 75%. An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Conversation: We have developed what we call an ultrasonic espresso: a room-temperature brewing process that uses high-frequency sound waves to extract the flavor, oils, aroma and caffeine from coffee grounds. The result is an espresso-strength coffee made in under three minutes, but needing far less energy than the conventional method. Saving up to 75% of energy by not heating the water is a minor benefit for home users or small coffee shops. But for companies making ready-to-drink coffee products at industrial scale, it could be very significant indeed. A concentrated room-temperature coffee could be used directly in bottled drinks, milk-based beverages or cold coffee products. It can also be shipped as a concentrate and diluted later. This would reduce not only energy use, but potentially processing time as well.

The key to the new process is ultrasound. These are sound waves above the range of human hearing. In our system, a small metal device called a transducer presses against the side of a traditional espresso basket and makes it vibrate rapidly. Those vibrations move through the water and coffee grounds. This creates a phenomenon known as acoustic cavitation. Tiny bubbles form and collapse in the liquid. When these bubbles collapse near coffee particles, they produce microscopic jets and forces that act a little like scrubbing brushes. They pit and fracture the surface of the coffee grounds, helping flavor compounds, oils and caffeine move into the water much faster than they normally would at room temperature. In other words, ultrasound helps us replace heat with mechanical energy.

[...] In earlier work, we used ultrasound to speed up cold brew dramatically. But the challenge in this project was different: could we produce something with the strength, body and intensity of espresso, without heating the water? To do that, we adjusted several variables. Brew ratio was one of the most important: how much water we used for each gram of coffee. Too much water and the drink becomes diluted; too little and extraction becomes difficult. Grind size also mattered. Finer grounds allowed us to extract flavor more rapidly. Finally, we tested how long the ultrasound should be applied. We found the sweet spot was about two-and-a-half to three minutes. Of course, making a concentrated coffee in the laboratory is one thing. The real test is whether people want to drink it. [...] For the espresso samples, participants could not reliably tell the traditional and ultrasonic versions apart. There were no significant differences in aroma, flavor, bitterness or overall liking. For filter coffee, the ultrasound version was actually preferred overall, with participants rating its bitterness more pleasantly.

Simon Ritter joined Sun Microsystems in 1996 and spent time working in both Java development and consultancy. He's now written an opinion piece for InfoWorld warning that "Between 2029 and 2032, every currently supported long-term support (LTS) version of Java will reach end-of-support within a single three-year window."

That's Java 17 in 2029, Java 8 in 2030, Java 21 in 2031, and Java 11 in 2032... On paper, this looks like a manageable upgrade cycle. In practice, it creates a collision of timelines that most enterprises have failed to forecast. Organizations attempting to modernize incrementally — moving application by application, version by version — are operating on a model that the calendar has already rendered obsolete... [W]hen every major Java version expires in the same compressed window, sequential planning collapses. By the time this becomes obvious, organizations will be forced into reactive mode, making rushed decisions under extreme pressure.

For organizations planning traditional stepwise upgrades — Java 8 to Java 11 to Java 17 to Java 21 — this convergence elevates a routine maintenance task into a structural crisis. Enterprises with large Java estates will be forced to upgrade multiple applications across multiple versions simultaneously to maintain security compliance and business continuity.
"Parallel modernization requires parallel capacity — something most organizations haven't budgeted for," he points out. "This explains why traditional approaches struggle to scale."

ShinyHunters claims it exploited a critical Oracle PeopleSoft zero-day to compromise more than 100 organizations, including the University of Nottingham, where it says it stole 40GB of student and billing data. "ShinyHunters posted the UK university on its data leak site on Tuesday before publishing the stolen files later that same day, presumably because the school refused to pay the extortion demand," reports The Register. From the report: "University of Nottingham on our leak site is one of the first publicly confirmed incidents," a ShinyHunters spokesperson told us. "We have only just started outreach to affected orgs and are actively looking to reach an agreement with affected orgs." They didn't say when they planned to post the other 100 or so claimed victims.

A Google threat intelligence report published Thursday afternoon corroborated ShinyHunters' claims to have compromised more than 100 organizations. Google said it spotted malicious activity, "consistent with the exploitation of CVE-2026-35273," between May 27 and June 9, and notified more than 100 global orgs "whose IP addresses correlated with potentially vulnerable endpoints." Most of these, we're told, are based in the US and 68 percent are in the higher-education sector. Oracle has released a "patch availability document," but it's unclear whether a patch is currently available.