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Alleged Kindle Petit Color prototype surfaces amid leaker’s claims of Amazon fallout

TL;DR A Reddit user posted images of an alleged Kindle Petit Color prototype with a Kaleido 3 color E-Ink display. Claimed features include “progressive color” text, adjustable saturation, detachable bezels, and a November 2025 launch. The leaker says a larger ”Kindle Carta Color” is also in development, but none of these details are confirmed. Every so often, a corporate dispute spills out in public. In the tech world, that can mean unreleased hardware suddenly hitting the internet. That’s w

ForgeFed: ActivityPub-based forge federation protocol

ForgeFed is a federation protocol for software forges and code collaboration tools for the software development lifecycle and ecosystem. This includes repository hosting websites, issue trackers, code review applications, and more. ForgeFed provides a common substrate for people to create interoperable code collaboration websites and applications. Federation means that these websites can interact, allowing the humans using them to interact too, despite being registered on different websites. Fo

Is Amazon testing a cheaper color Kindle?

is a senior reporter who’s been covering and reviewing the latest gadgets and tech since 2006, but has loved all things electronic since he was a kid. Posts from this author will be added to your daily email digest and your homepage feed. A Reddit user, writing in Portuguese, has shared a handful of images of what appears to be a prototype of a small Kindle with a color screen. The device shows the name Kindle Petit Color in the corner of one image, although the post author says that name hasn

Why I ditched Google Authenticator for Proton's new 2FA app - and how to set it up

Proton / Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET ZDNET's key takeaways The makers of Proton VPN have released a 2FA app. The app is available for all major platforms. Proton Authenticator is easy to use, elegant, and free. Unless you're using passkeys, two-factor authentication should be considered a must for security and privacy. If your primary access to the internet is your phone, you are probably using a tool like Authy or Google Authenticator. But what about when you're on the desktop? What do y

Engineering Breakthrough Opens Door to Cheap Hydrogen Power

As an alternative to fossil fuel combustion, hydrogen fuel cells hold tremendous promise. But they’re also notoriously difficult and expensive to manage, which largely explains why we don’t see them everywhere (or anywhere, for that matter, except for a few initiatives that are “exploring” their efficiency). But that may soon change. In a Nature Materials paper published August 8, researchers announced the development of a new type of solid-oxide fuel cell (SOFC) that addresses an underlying pr

A large number of protocols on Ethereum and Solana blockchains have no revenue

Have you heard of disguised unemployment? It refers to a situation where a portion of the workforce appears to be employed, but isn't contributing to the economy's output. Consider the massive capital expenditure loss from ghost cities, which represent unoccupied infrastructure. Something similar can be said for the top smart contract blockchains, which hosts hundreds of decentralized protocols. Of these, only a minority are generating revenue, while the rest produce no yield, loosely represent

MCP overlooks hard-won lessons from distributed systems

Why MCP’s Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices Will Burn Enterprises Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Julien Simon 9 min read · Jul 29, 2025 -- 19 Listen Share The Model Context Protocol (MCP) promises to standardize AI-tool interactions as the “USB-C for AI.” While its simplicity accelerates adoption, MCP systematically overlooks four decades of hard-won lessons from distributed systems. This isn’t an academic concern: enterprises deploying MCP today are buildin

MCP's Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices

Why MCP’s Disregard for 40 Years of RPC Best Practices Will Burn Enterprises Fool me once, shame on you; fool me twice, shame on me. Julien Simon 9 min read · Jul 29, 2025 -- 26 Listen Share The Model Context Protocol (MCP) promises to standardize AI-tool interactions as the “USB-C for AI.” While its simplicity accelerates adoption, MCP systematically overlooks four decades of hard-won lessons from distributed systems. This isn’t an academic concern: enterprises deploying MCP today are buildin

Microsoft 365 apps to soon block file access via FPRPC by default

Microsoft has announced that the Microsoft 365 apps for Windows will start blocking access to files via the insecure FPRPC legacy authentication protocol by default starting late August. These changes apply only to Microsoft 365 apps for Windows and will not affect Microsoft Teams users across Windows, Mac, web, iOS, or Android. "Microsoft 365 apps will block insecure file open protocols like FPRPC by default starting version 2508, with new Trust Center settings to manage these protocols," the

Show HN: Aura – Like robots.txt, but for AI actions

AURA: The Protocol for a Machine-Readable Web AURA (Agent-Usable Resource Assertion) is an open protocol for making websites understandable and operable by AI agents. It proposes a new standard for AI-web interaction that moves beyond fragile screen scraping and DOM manipulation towards a robust, secure, and efficient machine-readable layer for the internet. The web was built for human eyes. AURA is a specification for giving it a machine-readable "API". The Vision: Why AURA? Current AI agen

You know more Finnish than you think

Linguistics illuminates the linguistically obscure – or so I’ve always thought. It’s a common theme of my online output that a little bit of historical linguistics goes a long way, making helpful connections and breaking down psychological barriers. This theme was present in two old posts of mine that used etymology to elucidate two Old English texts, namely Beowulf and The Wanderer. Now, as an unplanned third installment, allow me to show you how familiar a whole language can be. This is the i

Proton fixes Authenticator bug leaking TOTP secrets in logs

Proton fixed a bug in its new Authenticator app for iOS that logged users' sensitive TOTP secrets in plaintext, potentially exposing multi-factor authentication codes if the logs were shared. Last week, Proton released a new Proton Authenticator app, which is a free standalone two-factor authentication (2FA) application for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. The app is used to store multi-factor authentication TOTP secrets that can be used to generate one-time passcodes for authenticatio

These protocols will help AI agents navigate our messy lives

What should these protocols say about security? Researchers and developers still don’t really understand how AI models work, and new vulnerabilities are being discovered all the time. For chatbot-style AI applications, malicious attacks can cause models to do all sorts of bad things, including regurgitating training data and spouting slurs. But for AI agents, which interact with the world on someone’s behalf, the possibilities are far riskier. For example, one AI agent, made to read and send e

Proton now offers a two-factor authentication app

Things have been busy for the privacy-first company, Proton. Just last week, they released the AI chatbot Lumo, and today, the company rolled out Proton Authenticator, its open-source and multiplatform 2FA app. What’s 2FA again? Two-factor authentication is a login method that adds an extra layer of security to further make sure that you are the legitimate owner of the account you’re trying to access. With 2FA activated, you’re usually asked for a code from a 2FA app after entering your passwo

Proton launches free and open-source Authenticator app to take on Google and Microsoft

What just happened? Swiss technology company Proton has expanded its privacy-focused software lineup with the launch of Proton Authenticator, a free and open-source two-factor authentication app. Best known for its encrypted webmail service, Proton also offers a VPN, password manager, cloud storage, and an online document editor. Proton Authenticator is positioned as a privacy-focused alternative to authentication apps from Google, Microsoft, Authy, and Duo. It replaces legacy SMS-based verific

QUIC for the kernel

QUIC for the kernel Ready to give LWN a try? With a subscription to LWN, you can stay current with what is happening in the Linux and free-software community and take advantage of subscriber-only site features. We are pleased to offer you a free trial subscription, no credit card required, so that you can see for yourself. Please, join us! The QUIC transport-layer network protocol is not exactly new; it was first covered here in 2013. Despite carrying a significant part of the traffic on the I

Proton just dropped a 2FA app that does a few things others don’t

Tushar Mehta / Android Authority TL;DR Proton Authenticator is a new free, open-source 2FA app for mobile and desktop. It supports encrypted multi-device sync, local-only storage, and easy import/export of 2FA tokens. The app works with or without a Proton account and avoids things like ads and trackers. Authenticator apps are a great way to help keep your accounts secure, but some of them come with annoying trade-offs. That could be ads, missing features, or making it hard to switch to anot

QUIC for the Kernel

QUIC for the kernel The QUIC transport-layer network protocol is not exactly new; it was first covered here in 2013. Despite carrying a significant part of the traffic on the Internet, QUIC has been anything but quick when it comes to getting support into the Linux kernel. The pace might be picking up, though; Xin Long has posted the first set of patches intended to provide mainline support for this protocol. QUIC was created to address a number of problems that have been observed with TCP on

Proton launches free standalone cross-platform Authenticator app

Proton has launched Proton Authenticator, a free standalone two-factor authentication (2FA) application for Windows, macOS, Linux, Android, and iOS. 2FA authenticator apps are offline tools that generate time-based one-time passwords (TOTPs) that expire every 30 seconds, and which can be used alongside passwords when logging into online accounts, providing the second factor authentication. Proton is a Swiss technology company known for privacy-focused end-to-end encrypted services like Proton

Proton releases a new app for two-factor authentication

Privacy-focused productivity tool company Proton released a new authenticator app today, allowing users to log in to services using dynamically generated two-factor authentication codes. The free app is available on all platforms starting today, including iOS, Android, Windows, macOS, and Linux. The app allows users to sync codes and accounts across devices. The company said that just like its other products, Proton Authenticator is open source and uses end-to-end encryption to protect user dat

Lumo: Privacy-first AI assistant

Artificial intelligence has the power to tackle humanity’s challenges, big and small, from scheduling meetings to modeling molecules. But to truly transform how we live and work for the better, we need an AI assistant(new window) built responsibly — putting people and privacy first. Today, Big Tech is repeating the mistakes from the internet’s early days. Instead of using AI to serve people, they’re turning people into products — and using AI to accelerate the surveillance-capitalism business m

Hyperpb: Faster dynamic Protobuf parsing that's faster than generated code

Today we’re announcing public availability of hyperpb, a fully-dynamic Protobuf parser that is 10x faster than dynamicpb, the standard Go solution for dynamic Protobuf. In fact, it’s so efficient that it’s 3x faster than parsing with generated code! It also matches or beats vtprotobuf’s generated code at almost every benchmark, without skimping on correctness. Don’t believe us? We think our parsing benchmarks speak for themselves. Here, we show two benchmark variants for hyperpb: out-of-the-bo

Hyperpb: 10x faster dynamic Protobuf parsing that's faster than generated code

Today we’re announcing public availability of hyperpb, a fully-dynamic Protobuf parser that is 10x faster than dynamicpb, the standard Go solution for dynamic Protobuf. In fact, it’s so efficient that it’s 3x faster than parsing with generated code! It also matches or beats vtprotobuf’s generated code at almost every benchmark, without skimping on correctness. Don’t believe us? We think our parsing benchmarks speak for themselves. Here, we show two benchmark variants for hyperpb: out-of-the-bo

Proton launches privacy-respecting encrypted AI assistant Lumo

Proton has launched a new tool called Lumo, offering a privacy-first AI assistant that does not log user conversations and doesn't use their prompts for training. Proton is a Swiss company behind proven privacy and security tools and services, including Proton Mail, Proton VPN, and Proton Drive. In June 2024, it transitioned to a non-profit structure, putting user privacy over profits. The introduction of Lumo aligns with this mission, as Proton claims this AI tool is designed to provide help

Proton’s ChatGPT rival is prioritizing privacy with encrypted chats and zero logs

Tushar Mehta / Android Authority TL;DR The company behind Proton Mail and ProtonVPN has announced a new privacy-focused AI chatbot, called “Lumo.” Chats with Lumo are claimed to be end-to-end encrypted and stored directly on your devices. It offers both free and paid tiers and is available on Android and iOS devices, as well as with a web interface. Proton, known for its eponymous VPN and mail client apps, is joining the rally of companies that have embraced artificial intelligence or AI. Ea

4 things Proton's privacy-first AI chatbot Lumo can do - and how to try it

Elyse Betters Picaro / ZDNET Proton, the company responsible for Proton Mail, Proton VPN, and more services, is planning to launch a new AI chatbot called Lumo that aims to preserve your privacy. This new chatbot can do things like summarize documents, create code, and just about anything the other chatbots can do. 1. Stores data locally The difference between Lumo and other chatbots is that Lumo stores all data locally, so you don't have to worry that the company has access to your data. Pro

Proton's privacy-focused Lumo chatbot encrypts all your conversations

What's another AI chatbot in an already crowded field? That's the question Proton is trying to answer today with the release of its new Lumo assistant . And like with its best known service, Proton Mail , the company says Lumo is for those who want a private alternative to what big tech is offering. Proton says every conversation with Lumo is secured with zero-access encryption, meaning only your device can unlock your content. In the context of an AI chatbot, that has several implications. Mos

Proton throws shade at Apple Intelligence privacy as it launches AI chatbot

The company behind encrypted email service Proton Mail has today launched a new freemium AI chatbot which promises that your chats will remain completely private. Proton Lumo offers five protections it says aren’t matched by any of the existing mainstream AI services like ChatGPT and Gemini, and has even thrown shade at Apple Intelligence privacy … Proton Lumo AI chatbot Proton said it launched Lumo because the benefits of AI are too great to miss, but the privacy risks are too serious to ign

Proton’s new privacy-first AI assistant encrypts all chats, keeps no logs

Privacy-focused productivity tools maker Proton on Wednesday released its AI assistant, called Lumo, which it says prioritizes protecting user data. The company says the chatbot keeps no logs of your conversations, has end-to-end encryption for storing chats, and offers a ghost mode for conversations that disappear as soon as you close the window. Available via a web client, as well as Android and iOS apps, Lumo doesn’t require you to have an account to use the chatbot and ask questions. You c