aeolus (Science and Technology)

Faced with £40B budget hole, UK public sector commits £9B to Microsoft

The Register — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 07:30:06 GMT

Government plans £1.9B annual spending during five-year MoU

The UK public sector expects to spend around £9 billion on Microsoft products and services over five years under its current contract.…

Trump teases ‘approximately’ 100 percent tariff for imported semiconductors

The Register — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 04:27:13 GMT

Exemptions available for chipmakers who promise to build American fabs

World War Fee US president Donald Trump appears to have settled his semiconductor tariff strategy.…

[$] LWN.net Weekly Edition for August 7, 2025

LWN — Thu, 07 Aug 2025 00:51:02 GMT

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

Front: Don't fear the TPM; Python performance; Offensive Debian packages; NNCPNET; 6.17 Merge window; Transparent huge pages; SilverBullet.
Briefs: AUR malware; Secure boot; kbuild and kconfig maintenance; GPU drivers; NVIDIA on AlmaLinux; Proxmox 9.0; Quotes; ...
Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Python 3.13.6 is now available

Python — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 21:35:00 GMT

The latest version of Python 3.13 is now available!

Python 3.13.6

This is the sixth maintenance release of Python 3.13

Python 3.13 is the newest major release of the Python programming language, and it contains many new features and optimizations compared to Python 3.12. 3.13.6 is the sixth maintenance release of 3.13, containing around 200 bugfixes, build improvements and documentation changes since 3.13.5.

Full Changelog

More resources

Online Documentation
PEP 719, 3.13 Release Schedule
Report bugs at https://github.com/python/cpython/issues.
Help fund Python directly (or via GitHub Sponsors), and support the Python community.

Enjoy the new releases

Thanks to all of the many volunteers who help make Python Development and these releases possible! Please consider supporting our efforts by volunteering yourself or through organization contributions to the Python Software Foundation, especially now.

Regards from your package managers,

Thomas Wouters
Ned Deily
Steve Dower
Łukasz Langa

Only ISPs get to determine what constitutes 'affordable' broadband, says team Trump

The Register — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 19:07:20 GMT

A good deal, like beauty, is in the ISP of the beholder, after all - at least if you want BEAD funding

US states that want to make use of rural broadband deployment funds had better not require ISPs to offer what they consider affordable service. According to the Trump Administration, "affordable" is for the ISP alone to define. …

Native NVIDIA support for AlmaLinux OS 9 and 10

LWN — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 17:34:58 GMT

The AlmaLinux project has announced the availability of packages to enable native NVIDIA driver support, including CUDA and Secure Boot, for AlmaLinux 9 and 10.

When AlmaLinux started just 5 years ago, this wouldn't have been possible. With NVIDIA's open source version of their graphics drivers things have changed. This open source version is slowly becoming the flagship driver, with new products being added exclusively to it. With the help of some incredible people in the open source ecosystem and the AlmaLinux community, we were able to do something that has yet to be done in the EL ecosystem - ship Secure Boot signed, open source, NVIDIA kernel modules.

Full documentation is available on the AlmaLinux wiki.

Google, OpenAI, Anthropic get blanket deal to saturate US government with their AI

The Register — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 16:34:09 GMT

Act now and Uncle Sam will throw in ChatGPT Enterprise for your agency for just $1

It's just become a lot easier for US government agencies to procure AI products from Anthropic, Google, and OpenAI, as the firms and the feds have signed a government-wide agreement to streamline purchasing.…

Almeida: a brief introduction on how GPU drivers work

LWN — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 16:16:34 GMT

Daniel Almeida continues his look at graphics drivers on the Collabora blog.

The starting point is to understand that a kernel-mode GPU driver connects a much larger UMD (user-mode driver) to the actual GPU. The UMD will actually implement APIs like Vulkan, OpenGL, OpenCL, and others. These APIs, in turn, will be used by actual programs to describe their workload to the GPU. This includes allocating and using not only the geometry and textures, but also the shaders being used to process said data into the final result. This means that a key aspect of GPU drivers is actually allocating GPU memory to house data related to the current scene being drawn so that it can actually be operated on by the hardware.

[$] Don't fear the TPM

LWN — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:24:04 GMT

There is a great deal of misunderstanding, and some misinformation, about the Trusted Platform Module (TPM); to combat this, Debian developer Jonathan McDowell would like to clear the air and help users understand what it is good for, as well as what it's not. At DebConf25 in Brest, France, he delivered a talk about TPMs that explained what they are, why people might be interested in using them, and how users might do so on a Debian system.

Tuba v0.10.0 released

LWN — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 15:23:38 GMT

Version 0.10.0 of the Tuba fediverse client has been released. Notable changes in this release include a new post composer, an in-app web browser, search history, and many other refinements. See this thread for more details and highlights.