GoKawiil
Tech News
Google has temporarily stopped accepting product vulnerability submissions under its Open Source Software Vulnerability Rewards Program, citing a surge of automated, mostly invalid AI-generated reports. Supply chain reports and previously submitted reports are unaffected, and researchers can still use the Patch Rewards Program or Cloud VRP. Google says it will rework the OSS VRP and provide an update in Q1 2027.
Google has suspended its Open Source Software Vulnerability Rewards Program as of October 1, citing a sharp increase in automated submissions, most of which were invalid. The company said it plans to provide an update in the first quarter of 2027 and is directing researchers to its other bug bounty programs in the meantime.
A longtime Slashdot community member has announced the creation of Northstar, a new open source web browser. Details on its underlying engine, features, and release timeline were not specified in the announcement.
Google suspended product vulnerability submissions to its Open Source Software Vulnerability Reward Program as of October 1, citing a surge of invalid, AI-generated reports. The company said supply chain reports and Google Cloud VRP submissions are unaffected, and it plans to provide an update on the program by early 2027 while it reworks the process.
Aleph Alpha, a German AI company, released Kolibri on 3 October 2026 under the Apache 2.0 license, with weights published on Hugging Face. It is a mixture-of-experts model with 78.1 billion total parameters but only 3.46 billion active per token, trained from scratch on 768 NVIDIA B200 GPUs across data centers in Germany and Finland on roughly 24 trillion tokens, over a fifth of them German.
A new open-weight AI model called Kolibri has been released, positioned as a 'sovereign' alternative to existing large language models. The release includes benchmark comparisons against models such as Qwen3.6-35B-A3B, Qwen3-Next 80B-A3B, Nemotron 3 Super 120B-A12B and Mistral Small 4 119B-A6B, with metrics focused on non-hallucination rates and grounding accuracy when source documents lack answers.
Kagi announced it is halting direct development of its WebKit-based Orion browser on Linux and Windows, open-sourcing both versions so the community can continue the work. The small team behind Orion will now concentrate solely on the macOS and iOS versions. Kagi said the Linux and Windows builds had drawn an enthusiastic response and active bug-testing from users.
Ai2 released AstaBrief 8B, an 8-billion-parameter open model that converts a research question and retrieved literature excerpts into a fully cited report in a single generation pass. It is now available in Asta's 'Generate a report' feature as a 'Fast mode' alongside a Claude-powered 'Thinking mode,' and Ai2 is also releasing the training data. Across the Asta pipeline, Fast mode averages 51.1 seconds per report versus 178.5 seconds for the proprietary models previously used.
Muse has released open-source code enabling hobbyists to build their own Muse-branded hardware gadgets. The release includes an SDK token system, sample project ideas, and support for adding new boards, aimed at hackers who want to tinker and customize the devices.
A free, open-source macOS utility called Magic Switch has been released on GitHub, allowing users to share an Apple Magic Keyboard, Trackpad, or Mouse across two Macs. The tool avoids the usual requirement of an Apple ID or manually re-pairing devices over USB when switching machines.
Amazon is selling JBL's Soundgear Sense open-ear true wireless earbuds for $83, a 50% cut from their $165 list price. The earbuds use JBL's OpenSound air-conduction design, offer up to 6 hours of battery life (24 hours with the case), Bluetooth 5.3, multipoint pairing, and an IP54 rating for sweat and dust resistance.
Nabu Casa, the commercial partner behind Home Assistant, has renamed its Home Assistant Cloud service to Home Assistant Link. The company says the service, launched in 2018, lets users remotely access their smart home setup and funds development of the open-source platform through subscription revenue directed to the Open Home Foundation.