On Me raises $6 million for its digital gift card platform that lets users purchase cards categorized by interests rather than being restricted to specific retailers.

While many Linux users like to try out new distros, especially those new to Linux, Debian and its derivatives have consistently given me what I need. Here are the reasons I've never felt the need to distro-hop.

The terminal looks like an unassuming (sometimes intimidating) black box and feels like it’s only meant for pros or experts. It’s not as inscrutable as it seems though. Anybody can learn to use it and get stuff done. Once you get the hang of it, you’ll often find yourself launching a terminal instead of opening a new browser tab. That’s because the terminal is faster, reliable, and never shows ads.

Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) is one of the greatest ideas ever conceived, and we all rely on and benefit from it every day of our lives. Whether you're using a FOSS app for your own benefit directly or using a service that's built on FOSS, it affects us all.

Overview On December 10, NSFOCUS CERT detected that Microsoft released the December Security Update patch, which fixed 57 security issues involving widely used products such as Windows, Microsoft Office, Microsoft Exchange Server, Azure, etc., including high-risk vulnerability types such as privilege escalation and remote code execution. Among the vulnerabilities fixed by Microsoft’s monthly update this […]

The post Microsoft’s December Security Update of High-Risk Vulnerability Notice for Multiple Products appeared first on NSFOCUS, Inc., a global network and cyber security leader, protects enterprises and carriers from advanced cyber attacks..

The post Microsoft’s December Security Update of High-Risk Vulnerability Notice for Multiple Products appeared first on Security Boulevard.

More than a dozen federal statistical agencies are falling behind on producing high-quality data sets that impact the U.S. economy and government policy.

An annual report from the American Statistical Association finds widespread staffing and spending cuts across the federal government, along with policy changes under the Trump administration, have led to certain public-facing data sets being delayed, suspended or canceled.

Experts who led the report are also concerned by a decline of public trust in federal government data sets.

Former Chief Statistician of the United States Nancy Potok, a co-author of the report, said in a call on Wednesday that “we saw a severe decline in the agency’s ability to meet their missions,” and that the “status quo was no longer satisfactory.”

“What most people noticed was that many statistical products just disappeared. They either were eliminated, in terms of no data collection taking place, because contracts were cut or funding was cut or people weren’t there, or because of the lack of staff and resources,” Potok said.

The association’s annual report found that most statistical agencies lost 20% to 30% of their staff this year, and the Trump administration is pursuing further workforce cuts at these agencies.

The Education Department’s National Center for Education Statistics lost nearly all its employees this year, as part of the Trump administration’s ongoing plans to dismantle the department and reassign its programs to other federal agencies. The statistics office currently has three employees.

President Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics this summer after the agency produced a monthly jobs report that showed hiring had slowed.

The Social Security Administration’s former chief data officer left the agency after filing a whistleblower complaint alleging that the Department of Government Efficiency improperly put the sensitive data of more than 300 million Americans at risk of exposure.

In May, the DOGE posted on X that the Census Bureau conducts more than 100 additional surveys beyond the decennial population count. DOGE wrote that many of those other surveys are “obsolete,” and that the results are “not being used to drive any action.” DOGE said the Census Bureau has terminated five “wasteful surveys.”

“Some of the existing guardrails are really at risk of being pushed and potentially ignored,” Potok said.

The association’s report last year found that federal statistical agencies are having a harder time producing quality data. Part of the problem is that fewer individuals are filling out the surveys that power this data. A national decline in trust in government corresponds with lower response rates for federal statistical surveys.

Potok said the ASA’s report last year found that “status quo is going to deteriorate over time, and something needs to be done.” However, she said those problems have only gotten worse.

“This is an immediate kind of crisis situation that we have found,” Potok said.

Mike Calabria, the current chief statistician of the U.S., said in a keynote address last month that his priorities are strengthening data security at statistical agencies and reversing a “long-term decline in response rates” for statistical surveys.

“People are going to be more reluctant to respond if they don’t believe that their data is going to be secure and protected,” Calabria said on Nov. 6 at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “I’m a very big privacy advocate, and I want to make sure that whatever we do collect does not get hacked or breached, or that people feel confident that the data they give the government is not going to be shared in ways that they haven’t consented to.”

A  senior administration official told Federal News Network that the report’s findings amount to “typical swamp lobbying.”

Potok said the Trump administration has taken some steps to support statistical agencies, “but it was far outweighed by the things that happened that weakened them.”

The administration, she added, has exempted the Census Bureau from a governmentwide hiring freeze that ran through Oct. 15. Now that the freeze is over, agencies have been instructed to only hire one new federal employee for every four that leave.

Connie Citro, former director of the Committee on National Statistics of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, said that these agencies produce “bedrock statistics that the financial world, and in general, the world looks to,” and that budgets are not keeping up with demand for data, which has only accelerated with the rise in artificial intelligence tools.

“These weakened resources weaken the ability for agencies to modernize mentor staff, engage with data users and communicate with stakeholders, and all this is essential to set priorities for innovation and move forward,” Citro said.

Since fiscal 2009, eight of the 13 statistical agencies have lost at least 16% of purchasing power, but have been expected to produce more data.

“While there are strong supporters of federal statistics in Congress, we do not have any vocal champions on the Appropriations Committee,” Steve Pierson, ASA’s director of science policy, said on the call.

The report finds the administration has left key leadership unfilled and pursued “disruptive agency relocations” and eliminated statistical products without input from Congress or the public.

“These losses have affected agency work and undermined innovation, modernization, and communication with data users, leaving agencies struggling to meet expanding demands for data that are more granular, timely, and responsive to policymakers’ needs,” the report states.

The report also cites declining public trust in the data these agencies produce. The percentage of U.S. adults who trust federal statistics fell from 57% in June, to 52% in September, according to the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago.

The percentage of people agreeing or strongly agreeing that they can trust federal statistical agencies to keep information about them confidential declined by six percentage points, from 31% to 25%.

Last month, a federal judge blocked the IRS from sharing data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement. There are several other pending federal lawsuits challenging similar data-sharing agreements with ICE.

The post ‘Bedrock’ federal data sets are disappearing, as statistical agencies face upheaval first appeared on Federal News Network.

© Federal News Network

Washington Gov. Bob Ferguson is setting aside $350,000 from an economic development fund to support Portal Space Systems’ expansion into a new 50,000-square-foot satellite manufacturing facility in Bothell, Wash.

Ferguson announced today that he’s directing the state Department of Commerce to award funds from the Governor’s Economic Development Strategic Reserve Fund to Economic Alliance Snohomish County. The funding will help Portal transition from testing and development to scalable production, with a goal of building four spacecraft a month by 2027.

The expansion is expected to create more than 100 jobs in the next two years, and more than 700 jobs by 2030.

“Strategic Reserve Funds are targeted investments that create good paying jobs and spur innovation across Washington,” Ferguson said in a news release. “This project not only achieves those goals, it also reaffirms our state’s role as a leader in the space industry. I am proud to support pioneering projects like this in Washington.”

Portal already operates an 8,000-square-foot facility in Bothell, where it’s been developing the hardware for its flagship Supernova in-space mobility platform and a smaller spacecraft dubbed Starburst. Supernova will feature an innovative solar thermal propulsion system, which uses concentrated sunlight as a heat source for its thrusters. Both spacecraft are designed to provide greater mobility for commercial and government payloads in orbit.

“We’ve spent the last year proving what’s possible. Now we’re scaling to deliver it,” Portal co-founder and CEO Jeff Thornburg said. “This support from Washington isn’t just about growth. It’s about building a strategic capability for the nation and doing it right here in Bothell.”

Revenue for the Strategic Reserve Fund comes from unclaimed lottery prize money. The funds are intended to attract and retain jobs and economic investment in Washington, limited to highly strategic projects that deliver significant job creation and capital investment. These projects are considered in partnership with local associate development organizations, such as Economic Alliance Snohomish County. The governor determines awards based on recommendations from the Department of Commerce.

“Portal Space Systems represents the kind of bold, future-facing innovation we’re proud to see growing in Washington,” said Commerce Director Joe Nguyen. “With the governor’s new investment, Portal is better equipped to scale up its cutting-edge operations. This strengthens Washington’s position as a hub for world-class talent and national space infrastructure.”

Grants from the Strategic Reserve Fund must be accompanied by private investment. Since its founding in 2021, Portal has raised more than $22 million in venture capital financing and grants, and received a commitment of $45 million in public-private funding through the U.S. Space Force’s STRATFI program.

Five standout holiday Apple deals from major US retailers: AirPods 4, MacBook Air M4, MacBook Pro M5, Apple Watch Series 11, and the AirTag 4-pack.

The post Best Apple Deals for Holiday Shopping appeared first on TechRepublic.

On Tuesday, French AI startup Mistral AI released Devstral 2, a 123 billion parameter open-weights coding model designed to work as part of an autonomous software engineering agent. The model achieves a 72.2 percent score on SWE-bench Verified, a benchmark that attempts to test whether AI systems can solve real GitHub issues, putting it among the top-performing open-weights models.

Perhaps more notably, Mistral didn’t just release an AI model, it released a new development app called Mistral Vibe. It’s a command line interface (CLI) similar to Claude Code, OpenAI Codex, and Gemini CLI that lets developers interact with the Devstral models directly in their terminal. The tool can scan file structures and Git status to maintain context across an entire project, make changes across multiple files, and execute shell commands autonomously. Mistral released the CLI under the Apache 2.0 license.

It’s always wise to take AI benchmarks with a large grain of salt, but we’ve heard from employees of the big AI companies that they pay very close attention to how well models do on SWE-bench Verified, which presents AI models with 500 real software engineering problems pulled from GitHub issues in popular Python repositories. The AI must read the issue description, navigate the codebase, and generate a working patch that passes unit tests. While some AI researchers have noted that around 90 percent of the tasks in the benchmark test relatively simple bug fixes that experienced engineers could complete in under an hour, it’s one of the few standardized ways to compare coding models.

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© Mistral / Benj Edwards

Interview transcript: 

Terry Gerton You’ve reported on an incident that happened just before Thanksgiving, when the Justice Department demanded a massive collection of data from U.S. attorneys. Tell us what they were asking for and why they got such a short deadline to provide it.

Ben Penn Yes, so the Deputy Attorney General’s office on the Monday before Thanksgiving asked all 93 U.S. attorneys’ offices for a collection of basically data points, samples of all the cases that they’re working on that show progress on a variety of White House directives and memos from the political leadership of the Department of Justice. And this was basically, it’s not all that abnormal to do something like this, which is called a data call, for the DOJ headquarters in Washington to seek statistics and basically hold the U.S. attorney’s offices feed to the fire and show them and give them specific data points that demonstrate progress on some of the prior year’s policy priorities. But this one did come across as a little bit grueling given the timing with such short turnaround. They were all told they had only two days before to turn around the data and respond by the Wednesday night before Thanksgiving, and just the sheer volume of all the data and stats that was being asked for. I did hear from folks that that was a little bit noteworthy, but overall, I think what’s interesting here is the request serves as a snapshot, it’s sort of a window into, what are the policy buckets that enforcement, in particular, that this administration is most keen to provide examples of to show the White House that it’s fulfilling its objectives.

Terry Gerton So you sound like there’s two conflicting thoughts there. One is, this is a normal end-of-year data call to get a comprehensive perspective of all the work that DOJ has done over the past year and yet they really had about a 72-hour timeline to do it. Did somebody forget to send the email three weeks earlier, or what’s going on there?

Ben Penn I don’t have any insight there. I will say that it could simply be, we could speculate as to whether the White House, given all that’s been going on this year, with the White House moving DOJ’s agenda closer to its own, if it came from the White House asking to, maybe expressing frustration about, why aren’t there more cases, for instance, on lawsuits against sanctuary city jurisdictions, or, where are political violence cases pursuant to an EO, or executive order that Trump put out after Charlie Kirk was murdered? But we don’t know for sure, and it is possible that this is just, that to be a U.S. attorney is not an easy job and having a tight deadline may just be part of the process.

Terry Gerton You mentioned a couple of specific situations there that they were looking for data on. Tell us more about the investigation of organized political violence after Charlie Kirk’s murder.

Ben Penn Yeah, so in September and shortly after Kirk was assassinated, there was a, it was, I called it an EO earlier, it was actually technically a presidential memorandum that came out and instructed the Attorney General Pam Bondi to basically ensure that there were cases that were being brought that specifically looked at organized political violence and domestic terrorism issues that have been priorities of the department in the past, but specifically in this case it seemed to direct request for information about left-leaning groups and funding sources like the George Soros’ Open Society Foundation, and to look at Antifa and to try to investigate all the possible sources of organized political violence. So that was one of them. There was also a request for information on open cases that had a nexus to cartels or transnational criminal organizations, which stemmed from an Attorney General Pam Bondi memo back in February. There’s also requests for all cases that are all examples of dismissals or cases that were closed in the aftermath of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s memo earlier this year that called for basically scaleback enforcement of the cryptocurrency industry. Those are just some examples.

Terry Gerton I’m speaking with Ben Penn. He’s a senior reporter at Bloomberg Law. So what are the kinds of documents that DOJ should be expecting to get back from this data call?

Ben Penn Yeah, well presumably, assuming all 93 U.S. attorneys’ offices were in compliance with the deadline, they have basically, I would say it’s both numerical and there are probably narrative examples of the types of cases that the department is in the midst of pursuing into cartels or into foreign terrorist organizations. So, but you would also see counts of say, all the U.S. attorneys’ offices combined have brought, say, the X number of lawsuits against sanctuary jurisdictions, or have brought X number of cases under, there was a specific request, for instance, to show the number of cases, criminal prosecutions of adults who sponsored unaccompanied migrant children. That was another recent policy from the Deputy Attorney General asking U.S. attorney’s offices to take a harder stance on looking for any crimes that an adult sponsor of an unaccompanied migrant child may have committed. So they’re looking to tally up all the examples that show how the extent to which the U.S. attorneys’ offices are implementing what the administration wants them to be doing.

Terry Gerton Given now that the data call itself is public knowledge, what would you expect to happen with the data as it’s collected? Will that also be public, do you think? Or will lawmakers want access to it, and what conclusions will people draw?

Ben Penn I would love to provide some transparency into this, Terry. Unfortunately, I would not expect it unless anybody would like to disclose the results to me or to any other member of Congress or reporter. But the existence of this request was an internal email that I obtained. And I believe, it is, at the same time, I could see if the Attorney General, Deputy Attorney General are pleased with the results, you could see them highlighting it in an end-of-year summary of success that we’ve had in enforcing the president’s priorities. That’s something that you would see, but there is no obligation for them to show their work, if you will.

Terry Gerton And might Congress be interested in it as a matter of oversight?

Ben Penn Yeah, I could certainly see that, whether both supporters or critics of this administration would have an interest in knowing the extent of enforcement into political violence, into sanctuary jurisdictions, into cryptocurrency industry. That’s all information that you could expect in an oversight request. Or, subject to the next time one of the senior DOJ officials is testifying on the Hill, we could see questions along those lines. So I’m all about transparency. I would love to see as much robust data that shows what came of this request as possible.

The post DOJ ordered a sweeping data collection from U.S. attorneys on Trump-era priorities days before Thanksgiving first appeared on Federal News Network.

© AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana

With the price of memory and storage rising rapidly with no hope of relief visible in the near future, it makes more sense than ever to try and get the most out of your old PC hardware instead of buying something new.

Five standout holiday Apple deals from major US retailers: AirPods 4, MacBook Air M4, MacBook Pro M5, Apple Watch Series 11, and the AirTag 4-pack.

The post Best Apple Deals for Holiday Shopping appeared first on TechRepublic.

Interview transcript: 

Terry Gerton I want to talk with you about the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. They were pretty quiet during the shutdown, but they’ve got a full quorum now. They haven’t had that in a while. And they’ve got funding. You work with them quite a bit. What do you think is going to change in the near term?

Debra Leder I think we’re going to see a lot of changes, at least over the next several weeks, until there might be another issue with funding down the road. But I think that we can expect the EEOC to come out of the gate running to accomplish some of these tasks that they have been anxious about doing since the current administration took hold in January of 2025. And so although there’s now a new member who makes the quorum for the EEOC Commission, the now chair who was acting chair and previously commissioner, I think has made the priorities well known. And now that there is a quorum, the agency will actually be able to take official action and vote. Things of those nature will make a big difference.

Terry Gerton So talk us through the priorities of the EEOC under this administration and maybe where there are major differences from the prior administration.

Debra Leder So, we are going to see a lot of realignment and adjustment of where the EEOC focuses its attention and its resources. Some of the big ticket items for the new EEOC commission is to align the agency’s policies with the executive orders that were issued, several of the executive orders which were issued in January of 2025 and forward. Those issues including the ferreting out DEI that may be counter to the law in the EEOC’s view, as well as the pregnant workers’ protection regulations in the EEOC’s view, maybe going too far from what Congress passed as the protection act for that, and also to maybe roll back certain protections for certain previously thought to be protected categories, including those of the LGBTQ+ community in terms of sexual orientation and transgender status, gender identity type thing.

Terry Gerton  So those shifting priorities can come into play in a variety of ways. Do you anticipate more aggressive litigation on the part of the EEOC? Maybe just more policy memorandums? How do you think those priorities will actually be put into practice?

Debra Leder  I think in terms of priorities for the regulations, the rules that had been put out during the past administration, including the harassment guidance that was, I think, officially published in April of 2024, and the pregnant workers’ guidance, I think as a first measure or order of business, the EEOC is going to either do a wholesale retraction or an overhaul revision of both of those guidances, for sure. And in terms of litigation resources, we’ll be seeing more priority pattern in practice and systemic litigation, targeted perhaps in ways that it hasn’t been over the past few years, including to what the commission may view as illegal DEI initiatives that employers may have, and then also helping to clarify its view of what employers are obligated to do, especially in the area of religious accommodations and whether or not, and how, to balance religious accommodations versus other interests that are sometimes competing in the workplace.

Terry Gerton So would you anticipate the order of those activities being first publication and education and communication about these new priorities, or new angles on the rules and then moving to enforcement?

Debra Leder  I think the publication angle has already been well disseminated, even though the EEOC didn’t have a quorum. Now, Chair Andrea Lucas has been very vocal about what she sees as the driving priorities of the agency and in her speaking, as well as in the budget that was submitted in May of 2025 in terms of where they’re going to allocate the dollars to that. So I think the agency is already kind of gassed up and ready to go out of the station in terms of that. It’s just how long will it take to undo some of these regulations, given that there is a commenting period and they’re also subject to court challenge, as we’ve seen in the past several years. So knowing that that might not be as fast a process as the EEOC might hope, we’ll at least see a displacement of the disclaimer language and archived language we now currently see on the banner page for the EEOC, and it’s either work under construction or, stay tuned for new upcoming guidelines. But in the interim, I think we’ll see it in the way that the agency works on a day-to-day basis, how they accept charges, which charges they investigate fully, and which they may serve to litigate, and so that, as well as continuing to do the education and outreach to let the community know what their priorities are, what the EEOC is expecting to spend its resources and efforts on.

Terry Gerton  I’m speaking with Debra Leder. She’s a partner in labor and employment law at Akerman. Following on with that assessment of what the priorities are going to be and where you expect to see action, for the employers who deal with EEOC issues, what should they be doing in the near term to prepare for this change in focus from the EEOC?

Debra Leder Hopefully, employers have already been staying aware of, on top of the changing priorities, the realignment from the current administration. And so being insightful, those employers most likely have already started to review their policies, to review their websites, to review their hiring criteria, as well as how they handle compensation issues and to just make sure that the policies are going to be step-in-step alignment with what the EEOC and what the executive orders have asked for. But in terms of really getting up to speed, aside from continuing to monitor what regulations may be updated and not just formal guidance, but we may see more enforcement guidance or Q and A type format from the EEOC to help employers get up to speed on doing that. Employers need to make sure all of their documentation has been reviewed and is ready in the event of what might be a very broad, all encompassing request through the investigation stage of some of the EEOC’s priority issues. So to just buckle up and be ready for that ride.

Terry Gerton And so what will you be watching for as the EEOC really gets its feet under it and and moves out? Are there particular cases or activities that you think are going to be significant here in the short run?

Debra Leder Well, the significant cases are waiting to see how the EEOC is going to interpret, we kind of already know, but from the Bostock versus Clayton County case in terms of transgender, gender identity and sexual orientation protections and whether or not the EEOC is going to — we know the EEOC in their updated guidance on harassment is going to remove those types of protections. We already know that the EEOC, I believe, has not taken any additional charges or is not investigating charges that assert claims on those grounds, although there’s still private cause of action to get a right to sue to bring those issues to the forefront. But bringing it back to what employers can do, they need to continue to be mindful of what might be the federal policies that they’re seeing and how that might compete with state and local laws that are also a moving target on a day-to-day basis, or at least a week-to-week basis. So employers definitely have a challenging thing, but as a lawyer and as the co-editor of my HR Defense blog, which I have to put a pitch in for, we try to stay on top of all these issues and push out information that employers need to know.

The post The EEOC powers up for swift action with full funding, a quorum and new priorities first appeared on Federal News Network.

© AP Photo/David Zalubowski

Ring’s new Familiar Faces feature uses facial recognition to identify visitors, offering convenience while raising fresh privacy and security concerns.

The post Amazon’s Ring Adds Facial Recognition, Raising Privacy Questions appeared first on TechRepublic.

You may have noticed people discussing GitHub alternatives recently. In particular, several projects have migrated to a competitor called Codeberg. Having investigated further, I’m convinced it’s a solid alternative, and it’s not the only one.

Ring’s new Familiar Faces feature uses facial recognition to identify visitors, offering convenience while raising fresh privacy and security concerns.

The post Amazon’s Ring Adds Facial Recognition, Raising Privacy Questions appeared first on TechRepublic.

Amazon says it will allow authors to offer their DRM-free e-books in the EPUB and PDF formats through its self-publishing platform, Kindle Direct Publishing. Starting on January 20, 2026, authors who set their titles as DRM-free will see their books made available in these more open formats.

The e-commerce giant says it will expand the service to additional cities in 2026.

I love the Christmas season, especially nostalgic callbacks to Christmases past. Up until this year, I'd limited my decorating to just my house, but I came across a throwback animated decoration for Linux desktops I couldn't help but install.