Tech News

BZip3 is an open-source compressor presented as the spiritual successor to BZip2. In a benchmark using the full Perl 5 source code, it reduced the compressed size by 84% compared to BZip2 and decompressed faster than LZMA. The project is already available for Linux, macOS, and Windows.

A year after the European Union began requiring public repair information for phones, over 80% of models on sale still don’t publish it. Right to Repair Europe reviewed 2,334 records and found that several noncompliant manufacturers still award themselves the top repairability grade.

Internet Archive launched a recurring donation campaign for September 2026: every monthly contribution from $25 gets a 2:1 match and helps sustain its 210 petabytes of self-owned infrastructure, with no ads or sale of user data.

GrapheneOS confirmed from its official Mastodon account, hosted on its own server grapheneos.social, that it’s making progress converting part of its internal infrastructure. The announcement reopens the question of why a security project avoids depending on third-party platforms.

X Corp sent cease-and-desist letters to Nitter on August 24, 2026, demanding the shutdown of all its instances and its repository. After receiving legal advice, the open-source project confirmed it will continue operating and promised more updates soon.

Pangram 4, Pangram Labs’ latest AI-generated text detector, reaches an accuracy that Bryan Cantrill compares to the end of email spam. Cantrill’s essay documents why readers now actively punish those who publish AI-written prose.

The AMD BC-250 is a PlayStation 5 APU discarded for console use that ended up as a crypto mining board and today, with hardware and firmware mods, becomes a low-cost gaming PC. It costs between $70 and $100 on the secondhand market and runs titles like Cyberpunk 2077, GTA V, Counter-Strike 2, and Hitman 3.

Anthropic announced that Claude produced the first computer-verifiable proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem, written in the Lean language. The work, spanning 13 million lines of code, took just 11 days of agents working largely autonomously.

Cerebras updated its inference service documentation with a table of available models and a detailed explanation of its model compression policy: selective per-layer quantization, no architecture pruning in production.

Any Human Ever is a web project that assigns users a fictional but statistically plausible life, chosen at random among the more than 100 billion people who have ever existed. The tool combines historical birth rate and population density data to reconstruct where and when that person might have lived.