Stem

Stacey Wales played the AI-generated video of her brother as a victim impact statement during the sentencing of his killer in an Arizona court.

Lukas Fittl writes in detail on the pganalyze blog about the asynchronous I/O capability coming with the PostgreSQL 18 release.

Asynchronous I/O delivers the most noticeable gains in cloud environments where storage is network-attached, such as Amazon EBS volumes. In these setups, individual disk reads often take multiple milliseconds, introducing substantial latency compared to local SSDs.

With traditional synchronous I/O, each of these reads blocks query execution until the data arrives, leading to idle CPU time and degraded throughput. By contrast, asynchronous I/O allows Postgres to issue multiple read requests in parallel and continue processing while waiting for results. This reduces query latency and enables much more efficient use of available I/O bandwidth and CPU cycles.

Inside this week's LWN.net Weekly Edition:

• Front: Debian and essential packages; Custom BPF OOM killers; Speculation barriers for BPF programs; More LSFMM+BPF 2025 coverage.
• Briefs: Deepin on openSUSE; AUTOSEL; Mission Center 1.0.0; OASIS ODF; Redis license; USENIX ATC; Quotes; ...
• Announcements: Newsletters, conferences, security updates, patches, and more.

Science correspondent Hannah Devlin joins Ian Sample to discuss three intriguing science stories from the week, from a global study that puts the UK third from bottom when it comes to flourishing, to a man who intentionally suffered more than 200 snake bites in the quest to find a universal antivenom and a breakthrough in the quest to understand the contents of the charred Herculaneum scrolls buried when Mount Vesuvius erupted

Officials demand device registration, location locking, logs of user activity

India’s telecom regulator has signaled it’s ready to let Starlink and other satellite-broadband providers operate – but only if they agree to strict conditions, including setting up “special monitoring zones” within 50km of land borders where law enforcement and security agencies are permitted to monitor users.…

The weakness creates the possibility of an insider or hacker adding rogue members.

Five clusters of genes from different organisms put into a single bacterial strain.

Five clusters of genes from different organisms put into a single bacterial strain.