Canonical pushes AI-assisted C-to-Rust conversion; more headlines from The Register

Canonical said it is backing an effort to convert large volumes of C code to safer Rust using AI tools. Beyond that headline the source gives no details on the project's scope, the tools involved, the timeline or the specific codebase targeted for conversion.

Short headlines in the same roundup: Salesforce partners report they are not seeing meaningful revenue from the Agentforce AI platform; copyright organisations have complained to the FTC that AI companies are "burning books" for training; Go 1.27 expands generics to support methods; Waymo unveiled a 5 nm robo-car chip with ML accelerators promising more than 1,000 TOPS and ultra-low latency.

Security and infrastructure: Russian attackers are impersonating Signal support for phishing campaigns; the US took down Iranian propaganda sites; Microsoft acknowledged that patches did not close an on-premises SharePoint vulnerability now being exploited as a zero-day; China is upgrading smartphone surveillance tools; Ring relaxed its anti-spying policy. Meanwhile, DEF CON's Franklin Project is recruiting hackers to harden critical infrastructure, and Jeff Moss said the Voting Village reports were so successful they will be included in every DEF CON going forward.

Deals and milestones: EQT is acquiring a controlling stake in Swiss backup vendor Acronis at a valuation of $3.5 billion or more (the size of the stake sold was not disclosed). Mikko Hyppönen marks ten years since the first enterprise ransomware attack and sees a long runway for the field. Debian released the final versions for the x86-32 architecture, versions 13.6 and 12.15.

Open source and desktop: A new FOSS project aims to "break Microsoft's second monopoly" after 20 years. GNOME gets a Windows-like look via the Simple-taskbar extension and also via Flashback without extensions. Cinnamon 6.8 will support Wayland as an option. At the same time, a new X11 server called Frame, written directly in assembly, joins yserver, Phoenix, XLibre and Arcan. Perfect 10 CVSS vulnerabilities were found in the Joomla extensions iCagenda and Balbooa Forms, affecting roughly one million sites.