17:50

Ep. 05 Nov 14, 2025

Open Source Crisis: Google vs. FFmpeg, RHEL 10.1, Valve's New Steam Hardware, UN Brain Tech Warning

This week on the Open Source News Recap, we dive into a major conflict at the heart of the open-source community: FFmpeg vs. Google over AI-generated bug reports. What responsibility do billion-dollar tech companies have to community-maintained projects like FFmpeg? Plus, we cover significant announcements from the enterprise Linux space, including Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 10.1 and 9.7 releases and Canonical’s extended 15-year support for Ubuntu LTS releases. In gaming, Valve just announced new hardware, including the powerful Steam Machine and a new Steam Controller. Finally, we discuss a critical warning from the UN about the need for ethical guardrails around the rapidly advancing Brain Tech Revolution. Show Notes Open Source Conflict: FFmpeg vs. Google Google is using an AI code assistant to analyze and report bugs. This is creating extra load on small, community-maintained open-source projects, like FFmpeg. FFmpeg is a set of tools that read, convert, and re-encode all video formats, and it is leveraged by many sites, including YouTube, Plex, VLC, browsers like Chrome and Firefox, and Amazon. The FFmpeg community thinks it is reasonable that a company worth as much as Google should submit a patch along with their bug reports. This issue raises the question of whether AI-analyzed bugs are even of any value, as one valid bug was related to ancient media from an old Lucas Arts game. https://thenewstack.io/ffmpeg-to-google-fund-us-or-stop-sending-bugs/ Enterprise Linux News Red Hat announced the release of RHEL 10.1 and 9.7. Highlights of the release include: validated hardware drivers for AI accelerators from NVIDIA, AMD, and Intel; improvements around the Command Line Assistant; soft-reboots; and progress on Post-quantum crypto. https://www.redhat.com/en/about/press-releases/red-hat-delivers-evolving-foundation-modern-it-latest-version-red-hat-enterprise-linux Canonical is now providing up to 15 years of commercial support for Ubuntu LTS releases, which highlights the growing maturity in the enterprise Linux space. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Ubuntu-LTS-Canonical-15-Years Valve and Linux Gaming Updates Valve announced a new Steam Controller and new hardware, including the Steam Machine. Support for the new Steam Controller has already been pushed into the SDL3 library. This is a strong indicator of Valve’s commitment to upstreaming Linux-related gaming features. Valve also announced a new wireless VR Headset with controllers, which is slated for early 2026. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Steam-Machines-Frame-2026 Tech Ethics and Decentralization The UN is urging ethical guardrails for the Brain Tech Revolution, warning on the freedom of thought. Brain-monitoring neurotechnology is advancing faster than ethical and legal safeguards, raising concerns about mental privacy. Devices that let you interact with devices using thoughts are especially concerning, as they could compromise people’s rights to free thought. https://news.un.org/en/story/2025/11/1166277 A report by Bybit’s Lazarus Security Lab revealed that 16 major blockchains have built-in fund-freezing capabilities. They used an AI code analysis assistant along with manual review to uncover three types of freeze mechanisms: hardcoded, configuration-based, and on-chain contract freezing. The study suggests that transparency around these mechanisms is important and should be a core pillar of blockchain governance. https://www.investing.com/news/cryptocurrency-news/bybits-lazarus-security-lab-reveals-hidden-fundfreezing-functions-across-16-major-blockchains-4351254

10:05

Ep. 04 Nov 7, 2025

Iron Sysadmin Open Source News Recap: Mastodon Quote Posts, Linux Gaming Growth, & Azure Outage

In this week’s Iron Sysadmin Open Source News Recap, Nate breaks down the biggest tech stories, including the controversial arrival of Quote Posts in Mastodon 4.5, now with anti-harassment controls. We analyze why Linux gaming is surging on Steam, recently surpassing MacOS. Plus, we cover Nvidia’s move into open-source drivers with the new Nova project for their next-gen accelerators , and dive into the details of Microsoft Azure’s 8-hour outage. Tune in for your weekly dose of open source news and community updates! 🎙️ Show Notes: Week of November 7th This week, Nate dives into some big updates for open source social networking, major growth in Linux gaming, an interesting move from Nvidia, and another cloud provider facing downtime. Social Media & Open Source News Mastodon 4.5 Introduces Quote Posts: The platform has finally rolled out quote-posting, a feature that was previously unavailable. Quote posts are considered controversial on platforms like X and Threads due to frequent abuse and being used to single-out users in an effort to harass them. Mastodon aims to mitigate this by allowing users to set quoting permissions, which the platform will then respect, giving users more control over their interactions. https://www.techbuzz.ai/articles/mastodon-4-5-brings-quote-posts-with-anti-harassment-controls Nvidia’s Open Source Initiative: Nvidia engineers are developing a new open-source driver named Nova. The driver is currently being prepared to support select GPU’s, namely the Hopper and Blackwell generations. These do not appear to be gaming adapters, but likely for compute. https://www.techpowerup.com/342552/3-of-steam-users-play-on-linux-a-third-of-them-on-steamos Gaming & Operating Systems Linux Gaming Market Share Rises: Linux gaming now accounts for 3% of all Steam users. This figure is greater than the 2.11% of users on MacOS. Approximately one-third of the Linux users are on SteamOS, with the remaining two-thirds on other Linux distributions. Windows still holds a dominant share at over 94% of Steam users, with 3% of that being Windows 11. https://www.phoronix.com/news/Hopper-Blackwell-Nova-Prep Cloud & Tech Outages Microsoft Azure Suffers Outage: Azure had its own outage last week. The outage began at 3:45 PM UTC on Wednesday and lasted until 12:05 AM Thursday. The core issue affected the “Azure Front Door” (AFD) service, which is the CDN for Azure. This impacted a number of downstream services. The problem sounds like a config mishap: an “inadvertent tennant config”. https://www.crn.com/news/cloud/microsoft-s-eight-hour-azure-outage-5-things-we-ve-learned-so-far Events Defcon 610 Pub Crawl: A reminder that the Defcon 610 Pub Crawl is happening this weekend (November 8th) in Easton, Pennsylvania! https://www.meetup.com/defcon610/events/311572906

11:56

Ep. 03 Oct 31, 2025

IronSysAdmin Open Source News Recap: Nearly 90% of Windows Games on Linux, Ubuntu Drops X11, Stranger Things 5

Join Nate for this week’s open-source news recap, covering a major milestone in Linux gaming viability, a significant shift in the Ubuntu display server, and an update on a fan-favorite Netflix show. The episode also reminds listeners about the upcoming DevCon 610 pub crawl and highlights a funding initiative supporting the open and free internet. Intro & DefCon 610 Announcement Reminder to mark calendars for the DefCon 610 Pub Crawl and CTF on November 8th at Noon. https://www.meetup.com/defcon610/events/311572906/ Linux Gaming Milestone New data shows that nearly 90% of Windows games now run on Linux. The viability of gaming on Linux is higher than ever, largely due to the Proton/WINE translation layer. Nate discusses the nuances of game compatibility, including issues with kernel-level anti-cheat. https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/nearly-90-percent-of-windows-games-now-run-on-linux-latest-data-shows-as-windows-10-dies-gaming-on-linux-is-more-viable-than-ever Ubuntu’s Display Server Shift Ubuntu 25.10 ships without X11, fully embracing Wayland as the default display server]. This transition has caused some controversy online, though many other distributions like Fedora and Red Hat have already made the move. The host notes that X11 was no longer being well-maintained. https://thenewstack.io/ubuntu-25-10-scraps-x11-for-wayland-a-solid-step-forward/ Funding the Open Internet The NLnet Foundation reports on the NGL Zero fund, which is dedicated to furthering the open internet. This grant funded 29 free and open-source projects at every layer of the technology stack, from hardware and infrastructure to web frameworks. https://nlnet.nl/news/2025/20251016-selection-NGI0CommonsFund.html Pop Culture: Stranger Things Season 5 Discussion about the announcement and trailer drop for Stranger Things Season 5. The series, which debuted in 2016, is noted for its 80s nostalgia and focus on nerdy themes. The final season is expected in November. https://arstechnica.com/culture/2025/10/netflix-drops-a-doozy-of-a-trailer-for-stranger-things-s5

20:58

Ep. 02 Oct 24, 2025

AWS East 1 outage wreaks havok on the interent, Bazzite is better than Windows, Fediverse Fuzzing.

Link for the DEF CON 610 Hacker Pubcrawl: https://www.meetup.com/defcon610/events/311572906 On to the news: We can’t not talk about AWS. https://www.techpolicy.press/amazon-cloud-outage-reveals-democratic-deficit-in-relying-on-big-tech/ Technical details: https://www.forbes.com/sites/kateoflahertyuk/2025/10/23/aws-outage-new-analysis-explains-what-went-wrong-and-why/ An issue with Dynamo-db caused a cascading failure Between 11:48 p.m. on Oct. 19 and 2:40 a.m. on October 20, Amazon DynamoDB experienced “increased API error rates” in its Virginia US-East-1 Region, the main region for deploying applications. Caused by a “latent defect” in the services DNS management. This lead to queries for the services endpoint to return empty. And because of how DNS works, even once the issue is fixed, you’ll still have this long tail of failures as dns caches clear and refresh. This apparently lead to high traffic on network load balancers to result in health check failures on the service. And at the same time, new ec2 instances started failing to start up. Even once they were started, they suffered from network connectivity issues. Which then lead to MORE network load balancer issues. On to linux gaming! https://www.windowscentral.com/gaming/linux-supercharges-the-rog-xbox-ally-x-higher-fps-smoother-performance-and-a-big-win-for-handheld-gaming ASUS ROG Xbox Ally X, and xbox handheld that launched recently, apparently well received Buuut once people got their hands on it, they started to feel less great about its software stack. Windows was left a little bloated, and the UI left some room for improvement That is until someone threw bazzite on it, and now its amazing. Im paraphrasing bt have a look at the article, it shows significant FPS improvements on the games that were tested, and basically plays like a steamdeck. And the Fediverse gets a fuzzer https://asml.cyber.harvard.edu/category/projects/ Harvard apparently has an applied social media lab, because of course they do. The ASML has announced an activitypub fuzzer. A tool meant to help Activitypub developers test their api compatibility. The tool mimics common Fediverse activity and helps developers test their applications without putting them into the wild and watching them catch fire. The GIMP has decided to take over ownership if its own snap https://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/2025/10/official-gimp-snap-package-announced Previously the snap was maintained by snapcraft, a community associated with Canonical thats been propping up the snap repos The GIMP project has decided to start managing this build on their own. This doesn;t change how you get gimp on ubuntu however, just who owns the package. If anything this should give users more confidence in the quality of the snap! The Fedora Foundation has changed their stance on AI generated Code https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/23/fedora_agrees_policy_allowing_ai_assisted_code_contribs/ There are strict guidelines around using AI strictly as a code assistant, not as a primary author. This follows a decision last year that prevented any use of AI code.

18:56

Ep. 01 Oct 18, 2025

The Ironsysadmin News Recap for 10/17/2025

It’s END OF 10 week (let’s talk about that) F-Droid facing developer identification issues after google’s software verification announcement. https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/f-droid-project-threatened-by-googles-new-dev-registration-rules/ More NPM supply chain attacks, this time from North Korea https://currently.att.yahoo.com/att/north-korean-hackers-target-crypto-221509651.html Doom Dark Ages gets performance improvements and steam deck verified https://www.gamingonlinux.com/2025/10/doom-the-dark-ages-gets-a-major-performance-upgrade-for-handhelds-now-steam-deck-verified/ Gaming on linux has come a long way https://www.reddit.com/r/linux_gaming/comments/1o50o79/gaming_on_linux_keeps_getting_better_especially/ Gonna be honest, i had trouble watching the video, but he made some good points. Linux gaming has in fact come a long way, and i love seeing folks who are not already linux users giving it a try. Mastodon is working on a new “packs” feature. https://www.theverge.com/news/794988/mastodon-bluesky-starter-packs-fediverse Meant to help user onboarding, by helping them find people to follow I love this alternate approach to a curated outrage algorithm It sounds like packs are meant to be groups of people based on topics. So a topic based on Linux, might include folks like linux influencers, users, developers, folks who you might want to follow. You are notified when you are added to a pack, and can remove yourself if youd like. The open internet is dead.. https://www.techpolicy.press/the-open-internet-is-dead-what-comes-next/ The open internet has been hollowed out by big tech and corporate monopolies.