We envisioned LibreLocal as a collage of in-person community meetups that would bring people together to swap ideas, learn from each other, and celebrate free software. When we asked the free software community to organize LibreLocals last year, the response was very inspirational: 29 different meetups were hosted. After we made the global call this year, we were greeted with an even more enthusiastic response… Organizers hosted LibreLocals in cafes, bars, restaurants, libraries, universities, a computer repair shop, and even as part of a field trip to the System Source Museum, a museum dedicated to the history of computing in Hunt Valley, Maryland, USA.

We also learned that a LibreLocal was organized inside Vakil Abad Prison in Mashhad, Iran by a free software supporter. Originally planned to be held in Shiraz, we were informed of this change in location on the LibreLocal wiki page set up for listing all LibreLocals. The updated entry, by another free software supporter in Iran, reads:

“This year, one of our dedicated activists organized a LibrePlanet event from within prison in Iran. Currently serving a sentence for “cyber-crimes” related to his promotion of free software, he continues to introduce the principles of software freedom to his fellow inmates. We have placed this banner to honor his resilience and the community of individuals in prison who continue to stand for technological freedom. His identity will be revealed when it is safe to do so.”

Advocating for user freedom should never result in a prison sentence. We especially admire and respect the bravery and strength of those who fight for software freedom in the most dangerous and oppressive of environments.

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.”

The pipeline plan, previously reported by Rio Grande Valley Business Journal, signals Musk’s intent to accelerate Starship’s development and lay the groundwork for a faster flight rate. The 40-story rocket is central to SpaceX’s push to expand its Starlink broadband network, deploy orbital AI data center satellites, and eventually carry astronauts to the moon and Mars.

Designed to be fully reusable, Starship uses about 630,000 gallons (2.4 million liters) of liquid methane per launch, currently delivered by hundreds of tanker trucks in an hours-long process incompatible with Musk’s expansion plans. Starship has completed 12 test launches since 2023, but Musk aims to ramp up to dozens, hundreds and eventually thousands of launches a year.

Though it is unusual for a space company to build its own natural gas pipeline for launchpad fuel, Starpipe might only be an initial step in a longer-term plan for SpaceX, which has spent years exploring its own drilling operations near Starbase and throughout Texas, according to a Reuters review of Cameron County land records. SpaceX President Gwynne Shotwell told CNBC on June 12, when the company went public, that the company planned to build pipelines and process its own propellant, and was looking into drilling its own natural gas.

[The] longtime market commentator known for his calls on asset bubbles said bitcoin is a “useless, speculative” asset without intrinsic value, speaking on CNBC’s “Squawk Box” Friday. He also said bitcoin hasn’t outperformed during a bull market and questioned its practical use. "[Over] years and years, decades and decades, it will dwindle away, I suspect — not with a bang, but a whimper,” he said. “It’s not a stable form of value — it just halved … for no particular reason in a strong economy, so you can’t depend on it in that way.”

He added that gold has still delivered solid gains over the same period, even after pulling back from its highs. Bitcoin not only hasn’t proved itself as a useful asset to speculate on, it doesn’t provide any real world utility either, Grantham argued. “People don’t use it to make serious trades, they don’t use it to buy their dinner and pay at the supermarket. … What it does is allows crooks to move money around,” he said.

Bitcoin has become notorious over the years for its dramatic bear market crashes, which has taken it down at least 70% from its peak in every cycle.

[University of Oxford’s George Dransfield] suspects these fluffy, wispy worlds are probably white or blue, depending on whether the skies there are cloudy — no shades of cotton-candy pink. The planets are probably mostly hydrogen and helium, although it will take follow-up observations by NASA’s Webb Space Telescope to confirm their chemical makeup.

Detected by NASA’s Tess satellite over the past decade, these two especially puffy-puffs orbit a star in the southern constellation Volans, known as the flying fish. The researchers studied the planets’ orbits using telescopes on Earth to determine their density, from 1,110 light-years away. A light-year is nearly 6 trillion miles (9.7 trillion kilometers). Jupiter, by comparison, is as much as 35 times denser than these two lightweights.

Considered rare in the cosmos, super-puffs are thought to form around the disk of gas and dust around a newborn star where there is more gas than dust. They shed much of the material over time, stripping down even more. NASA’s tally of worlds outside our solar system currently stands at nearly 6,300 confirmed. Fewer than 40 are super-puffs, according to Dransfield.

Since the export ban earlier in June, “Anthropic has worked with the US government to address risks associated with the Covered Models,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick wrote to the company in a letter dated Friday. In light of progress in that work, Lutnick wrote, “I have determined that appropriate safeguards are in place to permit certain trusted partners to access the Claude Mythos 5 Model.”

The letter does not include permission for Anthropic to release Fable, a less powerful version of Mythos. “We received notice from the US government that Mythos 5, our strongest cybersecurity model, can be redeployed to a small group of cyber defenders and infrastructure providers,” Anthropic said in a statement…

Conversations between Anthropic and the government are expected to continue into the weekend, with an eye to restoring access to Fable, as well, a source familiar with the discussions told CNN.

The prevalence of Windows across so many devices and form factors has given Microsoft a massive customer base for decades, but it has also stymied the company’s efforts to roll out new operating systems. Microsoft famously extended the support window for Windows XP numerous times throughout the 2010s as it became apparent that millions of PCs would never be updated. Windows 10 isn’t quite as entrenched as XP was, but it has still been a slog getting people to upgrade to Windows 11 even nearly five years after release.

Unlike many past Windows updates, Windows 11 required some users to buy new PCs with specific CPU technologies and a Trusted Platform Module (TPM). Microsoft was widely criticized for excluding perfectly serviceable PCs, and that’s turning into a problem in 2026. The AI-driven shortage of storage and memory has made system upgrades vastly more expensive, potentially slowing upgrades. Some have also avoided Windows 11 due to Microsoft’s intense focus on AI features.

The result is that Windows 10 remains stubbornly popular. According to StatCounter data, Windows 10 is still running on about 26 percent of PCs, while Windows 11 sits at 72 percent. That means there are still hundreds of millions of active Windows 10 installs, but those machines will be up to date for at least an additional year.

The European Union Aviation Safety Agency has ordered (PDF) urgent inspections of 16 Airbus A380 planes operated by Emirates and Qantas, after cracks were found in a wing component on some aircraft (source paywalled; alternative source).. Cracks were found during earlier inspections of the wing spars structure, a key component of the wing, EASA said in a directive effective Wednesday. EASA determined that they “could reduce the structural integrity of the wing.”

“To address this potential unsafe condition, Airbus determined that an additional special detailed inspection has to be accomplished,” EASA said. The first group of five aircraft, operated by Emirates, need to be inspected immediately, while the second group of 11 aircraft can be inspected later but within 25 flight cycles, EASA said in a separate statement. From the second group, 10 are operated by Emirates and one by Qantas, the aviation safety agency said.

It has published an FAQ for users to make sure that they don’t lose any messages or data in the transition. Most emails will still exist in a Gmail inbox, but customers will need to manually export their drafts, scheduled emails, snippets and auto label instructions.

For the new research published in Nature, an international team of researchers analyzed data from the strongest gravitational wave ever recorded, known as GW250114, detected by the LIGO observatory in January 2025. By isolating the last burst of waves — known as “direct waves” — from this black hole merger, the scientists said they were able to extract information from closer to an event horizon than ever before. “This black hole horizon concept normally appears in science fiction,” lead study author Sizheng Ma of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics in Canada told AFP. “But now we are really able to touch the region around the horizon with gravitational data,” he added. “Sometimes I cannot believe this is really happening.”

The last stage of two black holes merging is like a spoon stirring a glass of water, Ma explained. The resulting swirl in space creates the ripple of gravitational waves that travel at the speed of light in all directions. If the metaphorical spoon is stirring close enough to the black hole’s event horizon, “this offers us a chance to decode the physics around that region,” Ma said. By supporting the theory of general relativity, the results “proved that Einstein was correct again,” he added.

The scientists emphasized that more research was needed to decipher what can be gleaned about event horizons using this method. But they did detect information about how black holes twist space around themselves as they rotate — a phenomenon known as “frame dragging.” “This is similar to pushing a glass into a table and twisting it, so that the tablecloth winds up around it,” Maximiliano Isi, a gravitational wave astrophysicist at Columbia University, told AFP. In the future, the scientists hope to find signs of tiny changes known as quantum fluctuations. “In this way, we can really probe this near-horizon region to look for new physics,” including searching for a deviation from general relativity, Ma said.

Spain will require mobile networks to have backup systems that maintain connectivity when power outages occur. Per a royal decree that will be approved by the end of 2026, mobile network operators (MNOs) and infrastructure companies will need to install batteries or other backups to keep service active for at least four hours during a blackout.

The mobile network rules will apply to businesses that serve at least 500,000 users or generate upwards of 50 million euros ($56.9 million) in annual revenue. The decree will stipulate that half of the population will need to be covered by this failsafe within the first year, then 65 percent in the second year and three quarters in the third.

[…] The decree will require other key infrastructure elements to remain up and running for a certain period after a power outage. For instance, control centers that could impact all of Spain if they were to go offline will need to remain in service for at least 24 hours. Emergency call centers will also need to have plans in place to maintain operations, as Reuters notes.

The U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security denied Polestar an authorization under the Connected Vehicle Rule. Polestar will continue to sell its existing inventory of Polestar 3 and 4 crossovers in the United States and will continue to offer support to customers and access to its service network. But no new 2027 models will set wheels on American soil.

The Connected Vehicle Rule is a regulation that restricts the import and sale of vehicles equipped with Vehicle Connectivity Systems (VCS) and Automated Driving Systems (ADS) tied to foreign adversaries, primarily from China and Russia. Polestar is owned by Chinese auto giant Geely, which has also been the parent company of Swedish brand Volvo since 2010. However, Volvo has recently been granted authorization to sell connected vehicles in the United States.

The rule, set out by the Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS), classifies modern vehicles as mobile data centers and is designed to protect national security by keeping sensitive driver data and vehicle control systems out of the hands of foreign governments. Michael Lohscheller, Polestar CEO, confirms that the company is well aware that the automotive industry is entering a new phase, based on regional dynamics. So, Polestar will shift its strategy to its biggest market as it is preparing its exit from the U.S. market.

The Linux Foundation has announced Akrites, a new initiative to coordinate vulnerability disclosure and remediation for critical open source software as AI dramatically speeds up vulnerability discovery. Founding members include AWS, Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, Red Hat, NVIDIA, IBM, Cisco, JPMorganChase, and others. Akrites will provide a shared Security Incident Response Team (SIRT), a standardized coordinated vulnerability disclosure process, and act as a “maintainer of last resort” for abandoned but widely used packages.

The goal is to reduce duplicate reports, avoid conflicting patches, and help upstream maintainers address vulnerabilities before they can be exploited. As AI makes it easier to find security flaws, can a coordinated industry effort help protect open source, or does it risk giving large corporations too much influence over the ecosystem?

On Thursday, the company adjusted the price of its new MacBook Neo, which will now start at $699 instead of $599, while the base MacBook Air will jump to $1,299 from $1,099, as reported earlier by Bloomberg. The 14-inch MacBook Pro is getting an increase as well, going from $1,699 to $1,999. Meanwhile, the iPad Air will now start at $749 instead of $599, while the iPad Pro is increasing to $1,199 from $999.

As spotted by MacRumors, the M4 Max Mac Studio will now cost $2,499, a big jump from $1,999. The M3 Ultra Mac Studio is now priced at $5,299, up from $3,999. Apple is even raising the prices of its HomePod, which now costs $349 instead of $299, as well as bumping the price of the HomePod mini to $129 instead of $99. The Apple TV also now costs $199 instead of $129.