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Contiguous US Breaks Its Record For Hottest Month Ever, NOAA Says

✇Slashdot
By: BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The contiguous United States sizzled to its hottest month ever last month, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. July averaged 76.89 degrees Fahrenheit (24.94 degrees Celsius) across the Lower 48 states, eclipsing the Dust Bowl's July 1936 by an eighth of a degree. Records go back to 1895. [...] Although it was unusually cool in Alaska, hotter-than-normal conditions blanketed the Lower 48, with the most excessive heat in the Mountain West, Southwest, Northern Plains and Southeast. The heat was so widespread that every one of the Lower 48 states was at least 1 degree Fahrenheit (nearly 0.6 degrees Celsius) warmer than the 20th century average, said Russ Vose, chief of monitoring at NOAA's National Center for Environmental Information. [...] The biggest driver of the record heat was nighttime lows that smashed the old mark for hottest minimums by 0.7 degrees, NOAA said. Hotter nights are a classic sign of human-caused climate change, according to scientists and several studies in peer-reviewed literature. NOAA's calculation is based on averaging 24 hours of temperature, not just highs or lows. "If you're talking heat waves, that nighttime low is incredibly important for determining total heat stress," [said meteorologist Jeff Masters of Yale Climate Connections]. "So if it doesn't cool off at night, your body doesn't have time to readjust to all the heat." As nighttime temperatures increase, more people die and lose sleep, studies show. The years 2021 and 1936 tie for America's hottest summer, which is June through August. Through July, 2026 is a shade cooler than 2021, which was powered by record heat in June. Because of climate change, Masters said, "this may be one of the coolest years we're gonna experience for the rest of our lives." What's needed, Masters said, is "to stop burning so many fossil fuels. We also need to be spending money to adapt to the new climate that we've put in place."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Linux Desktop Use Surged To 22% On One Workday, Cloudflare Data Shows

✇Slashdot
By: BeauHD
Cloudflare data suggests desktop Linux usage in North America has climbed to 6.4%, up from 4.1% a year earlier, with one post-holiday workday briefly spiking to 22%. ZDNet reports: [B]elieve it or not, on Monday, July 6, when people were back after the July 4 holiday, Linux usage jumped to a high of 22%. The users of these systems are not AI agents or bots, but real people. I set Cloudflare to count humans rather than bots. If you include people and bots, Linux has a 9.7% market share. That proportion is similar to StatCounter's score. By Cloudflare's count, bots alone come to 19%. These numbers tell us that workers are leading the way to the Linux desktop. [...] However, past performance doesn't explain present trends. So, why are we now seeing such a bump in Linux desktop growth? Experts believe this trend is largely AI developers and Linux users running AI Agents. For example, as David Linthicum, former managing director and chief cloud strategy officer at Deloitte Consulting and AI and cloud influencer, recently observed, while "Windows 11 can technically run local AI workloads, but as you begin using multiple tools, managing different projects, and installing various dependencies, the friction starts to build," it's a different story for Linux users. Linthicum continued: "Linux delivered what I can only describe as a true 'AI desktop' experience. Setup was straightforward, mainstream AI instructions matched what you'd actually see in your environment, and GPU-accelerated apps simply worked -- consistently. I spent far less time troubleshooting and far more time actually executing on projects." As for agents, Linux Foundation CEO Jim Zemlin summed up their role succinctly: "Linux is the OS of choice for AI agents." Desktop Linux is also gaining momentum as frustration with Windows 11 and the end of Windows 10 support push users to alternatives, particularly on older PCs that can't officially upgrade. At the same time, Linux has become much easier to use, install software on, and game with, lowering many of the traditional barriers to switching.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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These components of the site page are not in the code and not editable?

✇WordPress
By: /u/zbutton

These two sections of the website I'm building, a header and a footer, are not visible at all in the code editor. I do not know where they came from or how to remove them. They are not visible in the visual block editor either.

Wanted to move back to wordpress from wix because the wix site editor was pmo. But now wordpress, which I used to think was easy to use, is now betraying me. Please advise kindly. I am not generally a computer person but I built a working blog website with wordpress years ago. Trying to replicate that success now but it's really confusing me.

submitted by /u/zbutton
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Freenet Creator Ian Clarke Shares Progress on Its New Decentralized Network

✇Slashdot
By: BeauHD
Ian Clarke (aka ancient Slashdot reader Sanity), designer of the peer-to-peer communication platform Freenet, is back with an update on the project's progress following the launch of its P2P network in March. He writes: Earlier this year, Slashdot covered the launch of the completely redesigned Freenet. I recently gave a talk about what we've been building since then. Unlike traditional web applications, apps on Freenet have no central server or database; instead application state is distributed across the network. These now include decentralized group chat, publishing, search, and fully decentralized Git hosting. The talk also gets into some of Freenet's internals, including how we use machine learning for network routing.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Google Gemini Hits 1 Billion Users In Record Time

✇Slashdot
By: BeauHD
Gemini has become Google's fastest-growing product ever, reaching 1 billion monthly active users faster than any of the company's 13 other billion-user services. Ars Technica reports: Gemini has wormed its way into virtually every Google product and service, powering email organization in Gmail, document summary in Drive, and much more. Gemini is also core to Google's flagship search experience, with AI Mode and AI Overviews becoming increasingly hard to avoid. The 1 billion-user metric has nothing to do with any of that, though. These 1 billion users may also be encountering Gemini in all those places, but that's not the MAU metric. Pichai is talking only about people who are opening the Gemini app or visiting the Gemini web interface to enter a prompt or access Gemini Live. If you used Gemini only once in the past month, you are part of this cohort.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Microsoft Patches 398 Flaws Including a Windows Driver Zero-Day Under Active Attack

✇The Hacker News
By: [email protected] (The Hacker News)
Microsoft released its monthly security updates on Tuesday, and one of the flaws it closed is already being used in attacks. The bug sits in a core Windows kernel driver that handles network socket operations. An attacker with code already running on a machine can use it to escalate to SYSTEM. That patch goes out first. The flaw is tracked as CVE-2026-68820 (CVSS score: 7.0) and is the only

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Kimwolf v7 Android Botnet Makes HTTP/2 DDoS Traffic Look Like Legitimate Browsing

✇The Hacker News
By: [email protected] (The Hacker News)
Cybersecurity researchers have discovered a new version of the Kimwolf/AISURU Android and Internet of Things (IoT) botnet that comes with significant improvements to improve its operational resilience and conduct distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks. The new version, tracked as Kimwolf v7, was discovered by Palo Alto Networks Unit 42 in February 2026. "Kimwolf v7 adds an HTTP/2-based

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Zoom Annotation Flaws Could Let a Meeting Participant Hijack Another Attendee's Client

✇The Hacker News
By: [email protected] (The Hacker News)
Anyone sharing their screen on a Zoom call could have taken over the computers of everyone watching, and anyone watching could have taken over the presenter's. The flaw sat in the annotation tool, the feature that lets participants draw and type on a shared screen, and it asked nothing of the victim beyond being in the meeting. No click, no download, no prompt, and nothing on screen to show it

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A Zoom Screen-Sharing Bug Let Anyone Take Over Other Devices On a Call

✇Slashdot
By: BeauHD
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: As AI models gain advanced capabilities to find vulnerabilities in software, develop ways to exploit them, and even carry out autonomous hacking sprees, researchers offered a sobering new example on Tuesday, disclosing vulnerabilities in the video conferencing platform Zoom that could have been exploited to take over targets' devices. Anyone on a call that involved screen sharing, whether participants or the host, would have been vulnerable to a silent attack that could be carried out with no indication and no interaction from the victim. Researchers from the digital defense firm A Security say thebugwas discovered in early June using publicly available AI models, and that it took fewer than 20 prompts to uncover the vulnerabilities and create a working attack. Zoom issued a security advisory on Tuesday, including details about fixes the company has already begun rolling out to address the flaws, which affected devices running all operating systems that Zoom supports -- Windows, macOS, Linux, iOS, and Android. The vulnerabilities were specifically in the protocol used to facilitate real-time annotation during screen sharing. The researchers say that their AI bug hunting systems specifically delved into this component because, like human bug hunters, they have been trained that convoluted and obscure functions often contain overlooked vulnerabilities. This is particularly true with proprietary, closed-source software. An established company like Zoom presumably does extensive code review and vetting on all components and functions, but without the benefit of public, open review, esoteric yet complex features like annotation are more likely to contain mistakes. The bugs are now patched, with Zoom issuing both server and client-side fixes—or patches for both Zoom's own servers and the applications that run on customer devices. But the researchers emphasize that it was alarming to contemplate bugs that could have been exploited to take over a target device simply by getting someone onto a Zoom call. "What is interesting for us and what we believe is dangerous is the democratization of these capabilities -- the barrier to entry is dropping rapidly," A Security cofounder Omer Gull told WIRED ahead of the disclosure. "Before it would have taken a team of five people maybe six months with a lot of refining and iteration to find this. Now people can reach the same results with under 20 prompts. And Zoom is an important type of target because people assume trust when using it. They don't see it as a threat."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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How I fixed a massive mobile layout & load speed issue on a client’s site (and 3 things you should check on yours)

✇WordPress
By: /u/Kanis_Kainjas

Hey everyone,

Recently I was troubleshooting a WordPress site where the mobile version was breaking completely — elements overlapping, images loading slowly, and layout shifts causing a terrible user experience.

Since this is a super common issue for business site owners, I wanted to share the step-by-step fix that resolved it:

  1. Mobile Layout Shift (CLS): The main banner was jumping around because fixed heights weren't defined for image containers in the mobile CSS breakpoints. Always set explicit aspect ratios for mobile wrappers.
  2. Unoptimized Assets: Converting background images to .webp and enforcing lazy loading reduced page payload by over 60% without losing quality.
  3. Plugin Overlap: Two conflicting optimization plugins were trying to minify the same scripts, creating layout rendering delays. Keeping just one properly configured caching tool fixed the script execution order.

After these tweaks, the mobile load time dropped from 4.8s to 1.1s, and the visual glitches vanished completely.

If you're running a WP site and noticing layout bugs on mobile, check your CSS containers and caching setup first. Hope this helps someone out there!

submitted by /u/Kanis_Kainjas
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