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.
