Just a few months ago we re­leased Nano Banana, our Gemini 2.5 Flash Image model. From restor­ing old pho­tos to gen­er­at­ing mini fig­urines, Nano Banana was a big step in im­age edit­ing that em­pow­ered ca­sual cre­ators to ex­press their cre­ativ­ity. Today, we’re in­tro­duc­ing Nano Banana Pro (Gemini 3 Pro Image), our new state-of-the art im­age gen­er­a­tion and edit­ing model. Built on Gemini 3 Pro, Nano Banana Pro uses Gemini’s state-of-the-art rea­son­ing and real-world knowl­edge to vi­su­al­ize in­for­ma­tion bet­ter than ever be­fore.

How Nano Banana Pro helps you bring any idea or de­sign to life­Nano Banana Pro can help you vi­su­al­ize any idea and de­sign any­thing - from pro­to­types, to rep­re­sent­ing data as in­fo­graph­ics, to turn­ing hand­writ­ten notes into di­a­grams.With Nano Banana Pro, now you can:Gen­er­ate more ac­cu­rate, con­text-rich vi­su­als based on en­hanced rea­son­ing, world knowl­edge and real-time in­for­ma­tion­With Gemini 3’s ad­vanced rea­son­ing, Nano Banana Pro does­n’t just cre­ate beau­ti­ful im­ages, it also helps you cre­ate more help­ful con­tent. You can get ac­cu­rate ed­u­ca­tional ex­plain­ers to learn more about a new sub­ject, like con­text-rich in­fo­graph­ics and di­a­grams based on the con­tent you pro­vide or facts from the real world. Nano Banana Pro can also con­nect to Google Search’s vast knowl­edge base to help you cre­ate a quick snap­shot for a recipe or vi­su­al­ize real-time in­for­ma­tion like weather or sports.

An in­fo­graphic of the com­mon house plant, String of Turtles, with in­for­ma­tion on ori­gins, care es­sen­tials and growth pat­terns.Prompt: Create an in­fo­graphic about this plant fo­cus­ing on in­ter­est­ing in­for­ma­tion.

Step-by-step in­fo­graphic for mak­ing Elaichi Chai (cardamom tea), demon­strat­ing the abil­ity to vi­su­al­ize recipes and real-world in­for­ma­tion.Prompt: Create an in­fo­graphic that shows how to make elaichi chai

We used Nano Banana Pro to pull in real-time weather via Search ground­ing to build a pop-art in­fo­graphic.

Generate bet­ter vi­su­als with more ac­cu­rate, leg­i­ble text di­rectly in the im­age in mul­ti­ple lan­guages­Nano Banana Pro is the best model for cre­at­ing im­ages with cor­rectly ren­dered and leg­i­ble text di­rectly in the im­age, whether you’re look­ing for a short tagline, or a long para­graph. Gemini 3 is great at un­der­stand­ing depth and nu­ance, which un­locks a world of pos­si­bil­i­ties with im­age edit­ing and gen­er­a­tion - es­pe­cially with text. Now you can cre­ate more de­tailed text in mock­ups or posters with a wider va­ri­ety of tex­tures, fonts and cal­lig­ra­phy. With Gemini’s en­hanced mul­ti­lin­gual rea­son­ing, you can gen­er­ate text in mul­ti­ple lan­guages, or lo­cal­ize and trans­late your con­tent so you can scale in­ter­na­tion­ally and/​or share con­tent more eas­ily with friends and fam­ily.

A black and white sto­ry­board sketch show­ing an es­tab­lish­ing shot, medium shot, close-up, and POV shot for a film scene.

The word ‘BERLIN’ in­te­grated into the ar­chi­tec­ture of a city block, span­ning across mul­ti­ple build­ings.Prompt: View of a cozy street in Berlin on a bright sunny day, stark shad­ows. the old houses are oddly shaped like let­ters that spell out “BERLIN” Colored in Blue, Red, White and black. The houses still look like houses and the re­sem­blance to let­ters is sub­tle.

Calligraphy in­spired by mean­ing, show­cas­ing the abil­ity to gen­er­ate ex­pres­sive text with a wider va­ri­ety of tex­tures and fonts.Prompt: make 8 min­i­mal­is­tic lo­gos, each is an ex­pres­sive word, and make let­ters con­vey a mes­sage or sound vi­su­ally to ex­press the mean­ing of this word in a dra­matic way. com­po­si­tion: flat vec­tor ren­der­ing of all lo­gos in black on a sin­gle white back­ground

A bev­er­age cam­paign con­cept show­cas­ing ac­cu­rate trans­la­tion and ren­der­ing of English text into Korean.Prompt: trans­late all the English text on the three yel­low and blue cans into Korean, while keep­ing every­thing else the same

Prompt: A vi­brant, eye-catch­ing “TYPOGRAPHY” de­sign on a tex­tured off-white back­ground. The let­ters are bold, blocky, ex­tra con­densed and cre­ate a 3D ef­fect with over­lap­ping lay­ers of bright blue and hot pink, each with a halftone dot pat­tern, evok­ing a retro print aes­thetic. 16:9 as­pect ra­tio

Blending text and tex­ture in a cre­ative way by in­te­grat­ing the phrase into a wood­chop­ping scene.Prompt: Create an im­age show­ing the phrase “How much wood would a wood­chuck chuck if a wood­chuck could chuck wood” made out of wood chucked by a wood­chuck.

Consistency by de­sign: With Nano Banana Pro, you can blend more el­e­ments than ever be­fore, us­ing up to 14 im­ages and main­tain­ing the con­sis­tency and re­sem­blance of up to 5 peo­ple. Whether turn­ing sketches into prod­ucts or blue­prints into pho­to­re­al­is­tic 3D struc­tures, you can now bridge the gap be­tween con­cept and cre­ation. Apply your de­sired vi­sual look and feel to your mock­ups with ease, en­sur­ing your brand­ing re­mains seam­less and con­sis­tent across every touch­point.

Maintaining the con­sis­tency of up to 14 in­puts, in­clud­ing mul­ti­ple char­ac­ters, across a com­plex com­po­si­tion.Prompt: A medium shot of the 14 fluffy char­ac­ters sit­ting squeezed to­gether side-by-side on a worn beige fab­ric sofa and on the floor. They are all fac­ing for­wards, watch­ing a vin­tage, wooden-boxed tele­vi­sion set placed on a low wooden table in front of the sofa. The room is dimly lit, with warm light from a win­dow on the left and the glow from the TV il­lu­mi­nat­ing the crea­tures’ faces and fluffy tex­tures. The back­ground is a cozy, slightly clut­tered liv­ing room with a braided rug, a book­shelf with old books, and rus­tic kitchen el­e­ments in the back­ground. The over­all at­mos­phere is warm, cozy, and amused.

Prompt: Combine these im­ages into one ap­pro­pri­ately arranged cin­e­matic im­age in 16:9 for­mat and change the dress on the man­nequin to the dress in the im­age

Prompt: Combine these im­ages into one ap­pro­pri­ately arranged cin­e­matic im­age in 16:9 for­mat

A high-fash­ion ed­i­to­r­ial shot set in a desert land­scape that main­tains the con­sis­tency and re­sem­blance of the peo­ple from the 6 in­put pho­tos.Prompt: Put these five peo­ple and this dog into a sin­gle im­age, they should fit into a stun­ning award-win­ning shot in the style if [sic] a fash­ion ed­i­to­r­ial. The iden­tity of all five peo­ple and their at­tire and the dog must stay con­sis­tent through­out but they can and should be seen from dif­fer­ent an­gles and dis­tances in [sic] as is most nat­ural and suit­able to the scene. Make the colour and light­ing look nat­ural on them all, they look like they nat­u­rally fit into this fash­ion show.

Studio-quality cre­ative con­trols: With Nano Banana Pro’s new ca­pa­bil­i­ties we are putting ad­vanced cre­ative con­trols di­rectly into your hands. Select, re­fine and trans­form any part of an im­age with im­proved lo­cal­ized edit­ing. Adjust cam­era an­gles, change the fo­cus and ap­ply so­phis­ti­cated color grad­ing, or even trans­form scene light­ing (e.g. chang­ing day to night or cre­at­ing a bokeh ef­fect). Your cre­ations are ready for any plat­form, from so­cial me­dia to print, thanks to a range of avail­able as­pect ra­tios and avail­able 2K and 4K res­o­lu­tion

Change the look and feel of an im­age for a range of plat­forms by adapt­ing the as­pect ra­tio.Prompt: change as­pect ra­tio to 1:1 by re­duc­ing back­ground. The char­ac­ter, re­mains ex­actly locked in its cur­rent po­si­tion

Lighting and fo­cus con­trols ap­plied to trans­form a scene from day to night.

Obscure or en­lighten a sec­tion of your im­age with light­ing con­trols to achieve spe­cific dra­matic ef­fects.

Prompt: Generate an im­age with an in­tense chiaroscuro ef­fect. The man should re­tain his orig­i­nal fea­tures and ex­pres­sion. Introduce harsh, di­rec­tional light, ap­pear­ing to come from above and slightly to the left, cast­ing deep, de­fined shad­ows across the face. Only sliv­ers of light il­lu­mi­nat­ing his eyes and cheek­bones, the rest of the face is in deep shadow.

Bring out the de­tails of your com­po­si­tion by ad­just­ing the depth of field or fo­cal point (e.g., fo­cus­ing on the flow­ers).

How you can try Nano Banana Pro to­day­Across our prod­ucts and ser­vices, you now have a choice: the orig­i­nal Nano Banana for fast, fun edit­ing, or Nano Banana Pro for com­plex com­po­si­tions re­quir­ing the high­est qual­ity and vi­su­ally so­phis­ti­cated re­sults.Con­sumers and stu­dents: Rolling out glob­ally in the Gemini app when you se­lect ‘Create im­ages’ with the ‘Thinking’ model. Our free-tier users will re­ceive lim­ited free quo­tas, af­ter which they will re­vert to the orig­i­nal Nano Banana model. Google AI Plus, Pro and Ultra sub­scribers re­ceive higher quo­tas. For AI Mode in Search, Nano Banana Pro is avail­able in the U.S. for Google AI Pro and Ultra sub­scribers. For NotebookLM, Nano Banana Pro is also avail­able for sub­scribers glob­ally.Pro­fes­sion­als: We’re up­grad­ing im­age gen­er­a­tion in Google Ads to Nano Banana Pro to put cut­ting-edge cre­ative and edit­ing power di­rectly into the hands of ad­ver­tis­ers glob­ally. It’s also rolling out start­ing to­day to Workspace cus­tomers in Google Slides and Vids.Developers and en­ter­prise: Starting to roll out in the Gemini API and Google AI Studio, and in Google Antigravity to cre­ate rich UX lay­outs & mock­ups; en­ter­prises can start build­ing in Vertex AI for scaled cre­ation to­day and it’s com­ing soon to Gemini Enterprise.Creatives: Starting to roll out to Google AI Ultra sub­scribers in Flow, our AI film­mak­ing tool, to give cre­atives, film­mak­ers and mar­keters even more pre­ci­sion and con­trol over their frames and scenes.

How to iden­tify AI-generated im­ages in the Gemini ap­pWe be­lieve it’s crit­i­cal to know when an im­age is AI-generated. This is why all me­dia gen­er­ated by Google’s tools are em­bed­ded with our im­per­cep­ti­ble SynthID dig­i­tal wa­ter­mark.To­day, we are putting a pow­er­ful ver­i­fi­ca­tion tool di­rectly in con­sumers’ hands: you can now up­load an im­age into the Gemini app and sim­ply ask if it was gen­er­ated by Google AI, thanks to SynthID tech­nol­ogy. We are start­ing with im­ages, but will ex­pand to au­dio and video soon.

In ad­di­tion to SynthID, we will main­tain a vis­i­ble wa­ter­mark (the Gemini sparkle) on im­ages gen­er­ated by free and Google AI Pro tier users, to make im­ages even more easy to de­tect as Google AI-generated.Recognizing the need for a clean vi­sual can­vas for pro­fes­sional work, we will re­move the vis­i­ble wa­ter­mark from im­ages gen­er­ated by Google AI Ultra sub­scribers and within the Google AI Studio de­vel­oper tool.You can find out more about how we’re in­creas­ing trans­parency in AI con­tent with SynthID in our blog post.

The U. S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has pro­posed new rules that would ef­fec­tively end the pub­lic’s abil­ity to chal­lenge im­prop­erly granted patents at their source—the Patent Office it­self. If these rules take ef­fect, they will hand patent trolls ex­actly what they’ve been chas­ing for years: a way to keep bad patents alive and out of reach. People tar­geted with troll law­suits will be left with al­most no re­al­is­tic or af­ford­able way to de­fend them­selves.

We need EFF sup­port­ers to file pub­lic com­ments op­pos­ing these rules right away. The dead­line for pub­lic com­ments is December 2. The USPTO is mov­ing quickly, and stay­ing silent will only help those who profit from abu­sive patents.

Tell USPTO: The pub­lic has a right to chal­lenge bad patents

We’re ask­ing sup­port­ers who care about a fair patent sys­tem to file com­ments us­ing the fed­eral gov­ern­men­t’s pub­lic com­ment sys­tem. Your com­ments don’t need to be long, or use le­gal or tech­ni­cal vo­cab­u­lary. The im­por­tant thing is that every­day users and cre­ators of tech­nol­ogy have  the chance to speak up, and be counted.

Below is a short, sim­ple com­ment you can copy and paste. Your com­ment will carry more weight if you add a per­sonal sen­tence or two of your own. Please note that com­ments should be sub­mit­ted un­der your real name and will be­come part of the pub­lic record.

I op­pose the USPTO’s pro­posed rule changes for in­ter partes re­view (IPR), Docket No. PTO-P-2025-0025. The IPR process must re­main open and fair. Patent chal­lenges should be de­cided on their mer­its, not shut out be­cause of le­gal ac­tiv­ity else­where. These rules would make it nearly im­pos­si­ble for the pub­lic to chal­lenge bad patents, and that will harm in­no­va­tion and every­day tech­nol­ogy users.

Inter partes re­view, (IPR), is­n’t per­fect. It has­n’t elim­i­nated patent trolling, and it’s not avail­able in every case. But it is one of the few prac­ti­cal ways for or­di­nary de­vel­op­ers, small com­pa­nies, non­prof­its, and cre­ators to chal­lenge a bad patent with­out spend­ing mil­lions of dol­lars in fed­eral court. That’s why patent trolls hate it—and why the USPTO’s new rules are so dan­ger­ous.

IPR is­n’t easy or cheap, but com­pared to years of lit­i­ga­tion, it’s a life­line. When the sys­tem works, it re­moves bo­gus patents from the table for every­one, not just the tar­get of a sin­gle law­suit.

IPR pe­ti­tions are de­cided by the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB), a panel of spe­cial­ized ad­min­is­tra­tive judges in­side the USPTO. Congress de­signed  IPR to pro­vide a fresh, ex­pert look at whether a patent should have been granted in the first place—es­pe­cially when strong prior art sur­faces. Unlike  full fed­eral tri­als, PTAB re­view is faster, more tech­ni­cal, and ac­tu­ally ac­ces­si­ble to small com­pa­nies, de­vel­op­ers, and pub­lic-in­ter­est groups.

Here are three real ex­am­ples of how IPR pro­tected the pub­lic:

Personal Audio claimed it had “invented” pod­cast­ing and de­manded roy­al­ties from au­dio cre­ators us­ing its so-called pod­cast­ing patent. EFF crowd­sourced prior art, filed an IPR, and ul­ti­mately knocked out the patent—ben­e­fit­ing  the en­tire pod­cast­ing world.

Under the new rules, this kind of pub­lic-in­ter­est chal­lenge could eas­ily be blocked based on pro­ce­dural grounds like tim­ing, be­fore the PTAB even ex­am­ines the patent.

SportBrain sued more than 80 com­pa­nies over a patent that claimed to cover ba­sic gath­er­ing of user data and send­ing it over a net­work. A panel of PTAB judges can­celed every claim.

Under the new rules, this patent could have sur­vived long enough to force dozens more com­pa­nies to pay up.

For more than a decade, Shipping & Transit sued com­pa­nies over ex­tremely broad “delivery no­ti­fi­ca­tions”patents. After re­peated losses at PTAB and in court (including fee awards), the com­pany fi­nally col­lapsed.

Under the new rules, a troll like this could keep its patents alive and con­tinue car­pet-bomb­ing small busi­nesses with law­suits.

IPR has­n’t ended patent trolling. But when a troll waves a bo­gus patent at hun­dreds or thou­sands of peo­ple, IPR is one of the only tools that can ac­tu­ally fix the un­der­ly­ing prob­lem: the patent it­self. It dis­man­tles abu­sive patent mo­nop­o­lies that never should have ex­isted,   sav­ing en­tire in­dus­tries from preda­tory lit­i­ga­tion. That’s ex­actly why patent trolls and their al­lies have fought so hard to shut it down. They’ve failed to dis­man­tle IPR in court or in Congress—and now they’re count­ing on the USPTO’s own lead­er­ship to do it for them.

First, they want you to give up your de­fenses in court. Under this pro­posal, a de­fen­dant can’t file an IPR un­less they promise to never chal­lenge the paten­t’s va­lid­ity in court.

For some­one ac­tu­ally be­ing sued or threat­ened with patent in­fringe­ment, that’s sim­ply not a re­al­is­tic promise to make. The choice would be: use IPR and lose your de­fenses—or keep your de­fenses and lose IPR.

Second, the rules al­low patents to be­come “unchallengeable” af­ter one prior fight. That’s right. If a patent sur­vives any ear­lier va­lid­ity fight, any­where, these rules would block every­one else from bring­ing an IPR, even years later and even if new prior art sur­faces. One early de­ci­sion—even one that’s poorly ar­gued, or did­n’t have all the ev­i­dence—would block the door on the en­tire pub­lic.

Third, the rules will block IPR en­tirely if a dis­trict court case is pro­jected to move faster than PTAB.

So if a troll sues you with one of the out­ra­geous patents we’ve seen over the years, like patents on watch­ing an ad, show­ing pic­ture menus, or clock­ing in to work, the USPTO won’t even look at it. It’ll be back to the bad old days, where you have ex­actly one way to beat the troll (who chose the court to sue in)—spend mil­lions on ex­perts and lawyers, then take your chances in front of a fed­eral jury.

The USPTO claims this is fine be­cause de­fen­dants can still chal­lenge patents in dis­trict court. That’s mis­lead­ing. A real dis­trict-court va­lid­ity fight costs mil­lions of dol­lars and takes years. For most peo­ple and small com­pa­nies, that’s no op­por­tu­nity at all.

IPR was cre­ated by Congress in 2013 af­ter ex­ten­sive de­bate. It was meant to give the pub­lic a fast, af­ford­able way to cor­rect the Patent Office’s own mis­takes. Only Congress—not agency rule­mak­ing—can rewrite that sys­tem.

The USPTO should­n’t be al­lowed to qui­etly un­der­mine IPR with pro­ce­dural traps that block le­git­i­mate chal­lenges.

Bad patents still slip through every year. The Patent Office is­sues hun­dreds of thou­sands of new patents an­nu­ally. IPR is one of the only tools the pub­lic has to push back.

These new rules rely on the ab­surd pre­sump­tion that it’s the de­fen­dants—the peo­ple and com­pa­nies threat­ened by ques­tion­able patents—who are abus­ing the sys­tem with mul­ti­ple IPR pe­ti­tions, and that they should be lim­ited to one bite at the ap­ple.

That’s ut­terly up­side-down. It’s patent trolls like Shipping & Transit and Personal Audio that have sued, or threat­ened, en­tire com­mu­ni­ties of de­vel­op­ers and small busi­nesses.

When peo­ple have ev­i­dence that an over­broad patent was im­prop­erly granted, that ev­i­dence should be heard. That’s what Congress in­tended. These rules twist that in­tent be­yond recog­ni­tion.

In 2023, more than a thou­sand EFF sup­port­ers spoke out and stopped an ear­lier ver­sion of this pro­posal—your com­ments made the dif­fer­ence then, and they can again.

Our prin­ci­ple is sim­ple: the pub­lic has a right to chal­lenge bad patents. These rules would take that right away. That’s why it’s vi­tal to speak up now.

I op­pose the USPTO’s pro­posed rule changes for in­ter partes re­view (IPR), Docket No. PTO-P-2025-0025. The IPR process must re­main open and fair. Patent chal­lenges should be de­cided on their mer­its, not shut out be­cause of le­gal ac­tiv­ity else­where. These rules would make it nearly im­pos­si­ble for the pub­lic to chal­lenge bad patents, and that will harm in­no­va­tion and every­day tech­nol­ogy users.

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This time I’m re­ally go­ing to do it. I am go­ing to put Linux on my gam­ing PC. Calling it now. 2026 is the year of Linux on the desk­top. Or at least on mine.

To be clear, my desk­top works fine on Windows 11. But the gen­eral ra­tio of cool new fea­tures to egre­gious bull­shit is low. I do not want to talk to my com­puter. I do not want to use OneDrive. I’m sure as hell not go­ing to use Recall. I am tired of Windows try­ing to get me to use Edge, Edge try­ing to get me to use Bing, and every­thing try­ing to get me to use Copilot. I paid for an Office 365 sub­scrip­tion so I could edit Excel files. Then Office 365 turned into Microsoft 365 Copilot, and I tried to use it to open a Word doc­u­ment and it did­n’t know how.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is end­ing sup­port for Windows 10, in­clud­ing se­cu­rity up­dates, forc­ing peo­ple to buy new hard­ware or live with the risks. It’s dis­abling workarounds that let you set up Windows 11 with a lo­cal ac­count or with older hard­ware. It’s turn­ing Xboxes into PCs and PCs into up­sells for its other busi­nesses. Just this week, the com­pany an­nounced that it’s putting AI agents in the taskbar to turn Windows into a “canvas for AI.” I do not think Windows is go­ing to be a bet­ter op­er­at­ing sys­tem in a year, so it feels like a good time to try Linux again.

That’s not to say I know what I’m do­ing. I’ve used Macs for a decade for work, and I dab­bled in Ubuntu 20-something years ago, but oth­er­wise I’ve been a Windows guy since 3.1. At first, that’s be­cause it’s what we had at home, later be­cause that’s where the games were, and fi­nally out of force of habit (and be­cause that’s where the games were). I brought a desk­top to col­lege in­stead of a lap­top (so I could play games), and I’ve been build­ing my own PCs for 18 years. I started my jour­nal­ism ca­reer at Maximum PC mag­a­zine, test­ing gam­ing PC com­po­nents.

I try to stay fa­mil­iar with all the ma­jor op­er­at­ing sys­tems be­cause of my job, so in ad­di­tion to my work MacBook I also have a Chromebook, a ThinkPad, and a col­lec­tion of older hard­ware I refuse to get rid of. I can work pretty well in Windows, in ma­cOS, or in ChromeOS.

All of those pro­jects, ex­cept the Chromebook one, took longer than ex­pected, and cut into my van­ish­ingly rare dis­cre­tionary time. That’s also the time I use for gam­ing, read­ing, star­ing into the void, and half-start­ing or­ga­ni­za­tional pro­jects, so you can see how pre­cious it is to me.

The prospect of in­stead us­ing that time try­ing to get my com­puter back to a base­line level of func­tion­al­ity — that is, as use­ful as it was be­fore I tried in­stalling Linux — is tempt­ing, but it’s also why I haven’t done it yet.

It’s a good time to try gam­ing on Linux. Antonio and Sean have been hav­ing fun with Bazzite, a Linux dis­tro that mim­ics SteamOS; my friend and for­mer col­league Will Smith is co­host­ing a PCWorld pod­cast called Dual Boot Diaries with this ex­act premise.

And what bet­ter de­vice to try it on than my per­sonal desk­top with an AMD Ryzen 7 9800X3D proces­sor and Nvidia GeForce RTX 4070 Super graph­ics card? I just re­built this thing. The Windows in­stall is only like six months old. It’s work­ing about as well as Windows does.

Based on lis­ten­ing to two and a half episodes of Dual Boot Diaries and a brief text con­ver­sa­tion with Will, I’m go­ing to in­stall CachyOS, an Arch-based dis­tro op­ti­mized for gam­ing on mod­ern hard­ware, with sup­port for cut­ting-edge CPUs and GPUs and an al­legedly easy setup.

I don’t ex­pect things to go smoothly. I don’t re­ally know what I’m do­ing, and Linux is still a very small per­cent­age of the PC gam­ing world. As of the most re­cent Steam Hardware & Software Survey — the best proxy we have for PC gam­ing hard­ware info as a whole — just over 3 per­cent of Steam users are run­ning Linux. Of those, 27 per­cent are us­ing SteamOS (and there­fore a Steam Deck), 10 per­cent are us­ing Arch, 6 per­cent are us­ing CachyOS, 4 per­cent are us­ing Bazzite, and the rest are split over a bunch of dis­tros.

So if any­thing goes wrong in my in­stall, it’ll be a lot of fo­rum-hop­ping and Discord search­ing to fig­ure it all out. But I’ve clev­erly arranged it so the stakes are only medium: I have other ma­chines to work on while my desk­top is in­evitably borked (and to run pro­grams like Adobe Creative Suite), and if I end up spend­ing hours of my dis­cre­tionary time learn­ing Linux in­stead of gam­ing, well, that’s not the worst out­come.

​​​Blackouts led to loss of steer­ing and propul­sion on 984-foot-long ves­sel

WASHINGTON (Nov. 18, 2025) — The NTSB said Tuesday that a sin­gle loose wire on the 984-foot-long con­tain­er­ship Dali caused an elec­tri­cal black­out that led to the gi­ant ves­sel veer­ing and con­tact­ing the nearby Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, which then col­lapsed, killing six high­way work­ers.

At Tuesday’s pub­lic meet­ing at NTSB head­quar­ters, in­ves­ti­ga­tors said the loose wire in the ship’s elec­tri­cal sys­tem caused a breaker to un­ex­pect­edly open — be­gin­ning a se­quence of events that led to two ves­sel black­outs and a loss of both propul­sion and steer­ing near the 2.37-mile-long Key Bridge on March 26, 2024. Investigators found that wire-la­bel band­ing pre­vented the wire from be­ing fully in­serted into a ter­mi­nal block spring-clamp gate, caus­ing an in­ad­e­quate con­nec­tion.

​Illustration show­ing how place­ment of wire-la­bel band­ing af­fects the way wires are seated in their ter­mi­nal blocks. (Source: NTSB)

After the ini­tial black­out, the Dali’s head­ing be­gan swing­ing to star­board to­ward Pier 17 of the Key Bridge. Investigators found that the pi­lots and the bridge team at­tempted to change the ves­sel’s tra­jec­tory, but the loss of propul­sion so close to the bridge ren­dered their ac­tions in­ef­fec­tive. A sub­stan­tial por­tion of the bridge sub­se­quently col­lapsed into the river, and por­tions of the pier, deck and truss spans col­lapsed onto the ves­sel’s bow and for­ward­most con­tainer bays.

A seven-per­son road main­te­nance crew and one in­spec­tor were on the bridge when the ves­sel struck. Six of the high­way work­ers died. The NTSB found that the quick ac­tions of the Dali pi­lots, shore­side dis­patch­ers and the Maryland Transportation Authority to stop bridge traf­fic pre­vented greater loss of life.

”Our in­ves­ti­ga­tors rou­tinely ac­com­plish the im­pos­si­ble, and this in­ves­ti­ga­tion is no dif­fer­ent,’ said NTSB Chairwoman Jennifer Homendy. “The Dali, at al­most 1,000 feet, is as long as the Eiffel Tower is high, with miles of wiring and thou­sands of elec­tri­cal con­nec­tions. Finding this sin­gle wire was like hunt­ing for a loose rivet on the Eiffel Tower.

“But like all of the ac­ci­dents we in­ves­ti­gate,this was pre­ventable,” Homendy said. “Implementing NTSB rec­om­men­da­tions in this in­ves­ti­ga­tion will pre­vent sim­i­lar tragedies in the fu­ture.”

Contributing to the col­lapse of the Key Bridge and the loss of life was the lack of coun­ter­mea­sures to re­duce the bridge’s vul­ner­a­bil­ity to col­lapse due to im­pact by ocean-go­ing ves­sels, which have only grown larger since the Key Bridge’s open­ing in 1977. When the Japan-flagged con­tain­er­ship Blue Nagoya con­tacted the Key Bridge af­ter los­ing propul­sion in 1980, the 390-foot-long ves­sel caused only mi­nor dam­age. The Dali, how­ever, is 10 times the size of the Blue Nagoya.

​The com­par­a­tive sizes of the Blue Nagoya and the Dali rel­a­tive to the Key Bridge. (Source: NTSB)

As part of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion, the NTSB in March re­leased an ini­tial re­port on the vul­ner­a­bil­ity of bridges na­tion­wide to large ves­sel strikes. The re­port found that the Maryland Transportation Authority—and many other own­ers of bridges span­ning nav­i­ga­ble wa­ter­ways used by ocean-go­ing ves­sels—were likely un­aware of the po­ten­tial risk that a ves­sel col­li­sion could pose to their struc­tures. This was de­spite long­stand­ing guid­ance from the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials rec­om­mend­ing that bridge own­ers per­form these as­sess­ments.

The NTSB sent let­ters to 30 bridge own­ers iden­ti­fied in the re­port, urg­ing them to eval­u­ate their bridges and, if needed, de­velop plans to re­duce risks. All re­cip­i­ents have since re­sponded, and the sta­tus of each rec­om­men­da­tion is avail­able on the NTS­B’s web­site.

As a re­sult of the in­ves­ti­ga­tion, the NTSB issued new safety rec­om­men­da­tions to the US Coast Guard; US Federal Highway Administration; the American Association of State Highway and Transportation Officials; the Nippon Kaiji Kyokai (ClassNK); the American National Standards Institute; the American National Standards Institute Accredited Standards Committee on Safety in Construction and Demolitions Operations A10; HD Hyundai Heavy Industries; Synergy Marine Pte. Ltd; and WAGO Corporation, the elec­tri­cal com­po­nent man­u­fac­turer; and mul­ti­ple bridge own­ers across the na­tion.

A syn­op­sis of ac­tions taken Tuesday, in­clud­ing the prob­a­ble cause, find­ings and rec­om­men­da­tions, can be found on ntsb.gov​. The com­plete in­ves­ti­ga­tion re­port will be re­leased in the com­ing weeks.

Chrono Divide is a fan-made pro­ject which aims to recre­ate the orig­i­nal “Red Alert 2” from the “Command & Conquer” se­ries us­ing web tech­nolo­gies. The re­sult is a game client that runs in your web browser, with no ad­di­tional plu­g­ins or ap­pli­ca­tions in­stalled.

The pro­ject ini­tially started out as an ex­per­i­ment and was meant to prove that it was pos­si­ble to have a fully work­ing, cross-plat­form RTS game run­ning in a web browser. Now, with a playable ver­sion al­ready avail­able, the end-goal is reach­ing fea­ture par­ity with the orig­i­nal vanilla “Red Alert 2” en­gine.

40 years ago — on November 18, 1985 — a new comic strip ap­peared in the news­pa­per: Calvin and Hobbes.

Hobbes was a stuffed tiger, but in the mind of 6-year-old Calvin he was a wryly ob­ser­vant com­pan­ion for his day-to-day chal­lenges and wildly imag­i­na­tive ad­ven­tures.

Adventures of the beloved duo lasted just a decade. Their cre­ator — car­toon­ist Bill Watterson — walked away from Calvin and Hobbes at the height of its pop­u­lar­ity.

Watterson — who has given few in­ter­views — seam­lessly com­bined the silly, the fan­tas­tic and the pro­found in his strip. That slightly de­mented qual­ity cap­tured ed­i­tor Lee Salem, who spoke with NPR’s Renee Montagne in 2005.

The fol­low­ing ex­change has been edited for length and clar­ity.

Lee Salem: I re­mem­ber it when I first read it, and it all… it lit­er­ally took my breath away. And I cir­cu­lated it in the of­fice, and the re­sponse was im­me­di­ate. It was fresh, it was funny, the art was strong, and here’s this ar­che­typal lit­tle boy liv­ing a life that some of us lived or wanted to live or re­mem­bered liv­ing. …

One of the sin­gle fa­vorites that I have is ac­tu­ally on my wall in the of­fice, and it shows Calvin in bed, ob­vi­ously with a fever or some­thing. He’s got a ther­mome­ter in his mouth. You hear the words from a tele­vi­sion. He’s watch­ing a soap opera — you know, “If you leave your spouse and I’ll leave mine and we can get mar­ried.” And it goes on and on and on, as lurid soap op­eras some­times do. And Calvin turns to the reader with a big grin on his face, and he says, “Sometimes, I learn more when I stay home from school than when I go.” And I just thought that was so funny. And, amaz­ingly, when it ran, we ac­tu­ally got com­plaints from read­ers who said, “Well, you know, you’re ad­vo­cat­ing that chil­dren stay home and watch adult soap op­eras.” And some­how, the whole sense of irony was lost in that, but I don’t think it was lost on me. I love that strip.

Renee Montagne: You know, I de­scribe him as a lit­tle boy with his tiger friend, but there’s so much more to it than that. So there’s one where they’re sit­ting phi­los­o­phiz­ing, as they of­ten do, on the grass, this time un­der a tree. Hobbes is look­ing at the sky and say­ing, “Do you think there’s a god?” And they’re both gaz­ing and think­ing, and then in the fourth panel, Calvin thinks about it. And then do you re­mem­ber what he says?

Salem: Yeah. “Yeah, well, some­one is out to get me.”

Montagne: Calvin was pre­ceded into ex­is­tence by some pretty fa­mous lit­tle boys: Charlie Brown, Dennis the Menace. What made him dif­fer­ent?

Salem: You know, we saw Calvin liv­ing in a world he never made, pop­u­lated by adults and teach­ers, and he was try­ing to deal with that and ac­com­plish what he could. I think Calvin has a bit more per­haps Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in him than Charlie Brown. Hobbes I see al­most as the al­ter ego of Calvin. He’s a bal­anc­ing act that al­lows Calvin to ex­ist. He pro­vides com­men­tary on some of Calvin’s crazy ad­ven­tures and at­ti­tudes.

Montagne: Hobbes goes from be­ing a stuffed tiger when there’s any other per­son in the room, to the real Hobbes we know and love. Is Hobbes real or not?

Salem: He is to me, and ob­vi­ously he is to Calvin. Whether he is to the other char­ac­ters or not is an open ques­tion. But I think one of the things Bill brought to the art board was this won­der­ful abil­ity to take a child’s imag­i­na­tion and fan­tasy life and make it real. It re­ally is ir­rel­e­vant whether Hobbes has an ex­is­tence as we would de­fine it. For Calvin, he is there. He’s a buddy, he’s a com­pan­ion, he’s a friend.

Lee Salem edited Calvin and Hobbes un­til the comic strip ended in 1995. Creator Bill Watterson said at the time that he wanted to ex­plore a can­vas be­yond the four pan­els of a daily news­pa­per, and to work at what he called “a more thought­ful pace,” but has pro­duced lit­tle pub­lic work since then.

40 years ago — on November 18, 1985 — a new comic strip ap­peared in the news­pa­per: Calvin and Hobbes.

Hobbes was a stuffed tiger, but in the mind of 6-year-old Calvin he was a wryly ob­ser­vant com­pan­ion for his day-to-day chal­lenges and wildly imag­i­na­tive ad­ven­tures.

Adventures of the beloved duo lasted just a decade. Their cre­ator — car­toon­ist Bill Watterson — walked away from Calvin and Hobbes at the height of its pop­u­lar­ity.

Watterson — who has given few in­ter­views — seam­lessly com­bined the silly, the fan­tas­tic and the pro­found in his strip. That slightly de­mented qual­ity cap­tured ed­i­tor Lee Salem, who spoke with NPR’s Renee Montagne in 2005.

The fol­low­ing ex­change has been edited for length and clar­ity.

Lee Salem: I re­mem­ber it when I first read it, and it all… it lit­er­ally took my breath away. And I cir­cu­lated it in the of­fice, and the re­sponse was im­me­di­ate. It was fresh, it was funny, the art was strong, and here’s this ar­che­typal lit­tle boy liv­ing a life that some of us lived or wanted to live or re­mem­bered liv­ing. …

One of the sin­gle fa­vorites that I have is ac­tu­ally on my wall in the of­fice, and it shows Calvin in bed, ob­vi­ously with a fever or some­thing. He’s got a ther­mome­ter in his mouth. You hear the words from a tele­vi­sion. He’s watch­ing a soap opera — you know, “If you leave your spouse and I’ll leave mine and we can get mar­ried.” And it goes on and on and on, as lurid soap op­eras some­times do. And Calvin turns to the reader with a big grin on his face, and he says, “Sometimes, I learn more when I stay home from school than when I go.” And I just thought that was so funny. And, amaz­ingly, when it ran, we ac­tu­ally got com­plaints from read­ers who said, “Well, you know, you’re ad­vo­cat­ing that chil­dren stay home and watch adult soap op­eras.” And some­how, the whole sense of irony was lost in that, but I don’t think it was lost on me. I love that strip.

Renee Montagne: You know, I de­scribe him as a lit­tle boy with his tiger friend, but there’s so much more to it than that. So there’s one where they’re sit­ting phi­los­o­phiz­ing, as they of­ten do, on the grass, this time un­der a tree. Hobbes is look­ing at the sky and say­ing, “Do you think there’s a god?” And they’re both gaz­ing and think­ing, and then in the fourth panel, Calvin thinks about it. And then do you re­mem­ber what he says?

Salem: Yeah. “Yeah, well, some­one is out to get me.”

Montagne: Calvin was pre­ceded into ex­is­tence by some pretty fa­mous lit­tle boys: Charlie Brown, Dennis the Menace. What made him dif­fer­ent?

Salem: You know, we saw Calvin liv­ing in a world he never made, pop­u­lated by adults and teach­ers, and he was try­ing to deal with that and ac­com­plish what he could. I think Calvin has a bit more per­haps Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn in him than Charlie Brown. Hobbes I see al­most as the al­ter ego of Calvin. He’s a bal­anc­ing act that al­lows Calvin to ex­ist. He pro­vides com­men­tary on some of Calvin’s crazy ad­ven­tures and at­ti­tudes.

Montagne: Hobbes goes from be­ing a stuffed tiger when there’s any other per­son in the room, to the real Hobbes we know and love. Is Hobbes real or not?

Salem: He is to me, and ob­vi­ously he is to Calvin. Whether he is to the other char­ac­ters or not is an open ques­tion. But I think one of the things Bill brought to the art board was this won­der­ful abil­ity to take a child’s imag­i­na­tion and fan­tasy life and make it real. It re­ally is ir­rel­e­vant whether Hobbes has an ex­is­tence as we would de­fine it. For Calvin, he is there. He’s a buddy, he’s a com­pan­ion, he’s a friend.

Lee Salem edited Calvin and Hobbes un­til the comic strip ended in 1995. Creator Bill Watterson said at the time that he wanted to ex­plore a can­vas be­yond the four pan­els of a daily news­pa­per, and to work at what he called “a more thought­ful pace,” but has pro­duced lit­tle pub­lic work since then.

IT-Security Researchers from the University of Vienna and SBA Research iden­ti­fied and re­spon­si­bly dis­closed a large-scale pri­vacy weak­ness in WhatsApp’s con­tact dis­cov­ery mech­a­nism that al­lowed the enu­mer­a­tion of 3.5 bil­lion ac­counts. In col­lab­o­ra­tion with the re­searchers, Meta has since ad­dressed and mit­i­gated the is­sue. The study un­der­scores the im­por­tance of con­tin­u­ous, in­de­pen­dent se­cu­rity re­search on widely used com­mu­ni­ca­tion plat­forms and high­lights the risks as­so­ci­ated with the cen­tral­iza­tion of in­stant mes­sag­ing ser­vices. The preprint of the study has now been pub­lished, and the re­sults will be pre­sented in 2026 at the Network and Distributed System Security (NDSS) Symposium.

WhatsApp’s con­tact dis­cov­ery mech­a­nism can use a user’s ad­dress book to find other WhatsApp users by their phone num­ber. Using the same un­der­ly­ing mech­a­nism, the re­searchers demon­strated that it was pos­si­ble to query more than 100 mil­lion phone num­bers per hour through WhatsApp’s in­fra­struc­ture, con­firm­ing more than 3.5 bil­lion ac­tive ac­counts across 245 coun­tries. “Normally, a sys­tem should­n’t re­spond to such a high num­ber of re­quests in such a short time — par­tic­u­larly when orig­i­nat­ing from a sin­gle source,” ex­plains lead au­thor Gabriel Gegenhuber from the University of Vienna. “This be­hav­ior ex­posed the un­der­ly­ing flaw, which al­lowed us to is­sue an ef­fec­tively un­lim­ited re­quests to the server and, in do­ing so, map user data world­wide.”

The ac­ces­si­ble data items used in the study are the same that are pub­lic for any­one who knows a user’s phone num­ber and con­sist of: phone num­ber, pub­lic keys, time­stamps, and, if set to pub­lic, about text and pro­file pic­ture. From these data points, the re­searchers were able to ex­tract ad­di­tional in­for­ma­tion, which al­lowed them to in­fer a user’s op­er­at­ing sys­tem, ac­count age, as well as the num­ber of linked com­pan­ion de­vices. The study shows that even this lim­ited amount of data per user can re­veal im­por­tant in­for­ma­tion, both on macro­scopic and in­di­vid­ual lev­els.

* Millions of ac­tive WhatsApp ac­counts were iden­ti­fied in coun­tries where the plat­form was of­fi­cially banned, in­clud­ing China, Iran, and Myanmar.

* Population-level in­sights into plat­form us­age, such as the global dis­tri­b­u­tion of Android (81%) ver­sus iOS (19%) de­vices, re­gional dif­fer­ences in pri­vacy be­hav­ior (e.g., use of pub­lic pro­file pic­tures or “about” tagline), and vari­a­tions in user growth across coun­tries.

* A small num­ber of cases showed re-use of cryp­to­graphic keys across dif­fer­ent de­vices or phone num­bers, point­ing to po­ten­tial weak­nesses in non-of­fi­cial WhatsApp clients or fraud­u­lent use.

* Nearly half of all phone num­bers that ap­peared in the 2021 Facebook data leak of 500 mil­lion phone num­bers (caused by a scrap­ing in­ci­dent in 2018) were still ac­tive on WhatsApp. This high­lights the en­dur­ing risks for leaked num­bers (e.g., be­ing tar­geted in scam calls) as­so­ci­ated with such ex­po­sures.

The study did not in­volve ac­cess to mes­sage con­tent, and no per­sonal data was pub­lished or shared. All re­trieved data was deleted by the re­searchers prior to pub­li­ca­tion. Message con­tent on WhatsApp is “end-to-end en­crypted” and was not af­fected at any time. “This end-to-end en­cryp­tion pro­tects the con­tent of mes­sages, but not nec­es­sar­ily the as­so­ci­ated meta­data,” ex­plains last au­thor Aljosha Judmayer from the University of Vienna. “Our work shows that pri­vacy risks can also arise when such meta­data is col­lected and analysed on a large scale.”

“These find­ings re­mind us that even ma­ture, widely trusted sys­tems can con­tain de­sign or im­ple­men­ta­tion flaws that have real-world con­se­quences,” says lead au­thor Gabriel Gegenhuber from the University of Vienna: “They show that se­cu­rity and pri­vacy are not one-time achieve­ments, but must be con­tin­u­ously re-eval­u­ated as tech­nol­ogy evolves.”

“Building on our pre­vi­ous find­ings on de­liv­ery re­ceipts and key man­age­ment, we are con­tribut­ing to a long-term un­der­stand­ing of how mes­sag­ing sys­tems evolve and where new risks arise,” adds co-au­thor Maximilian Günther from the University of Vienna.

“We are grate­ful to the University of Vienna re­searchers for their re­spon­si­ble part­ner­ship and dili­gence un­der our Bug Bounty pro­gram. This col­lab­o­ra­tion suc­cess­fully iden­ti­fied a novel enu­mer­a­tion tech­nique that sur­passed our in­tended lim­its, al­low­ing the re­searchers to scrape ba­sic pub­licly avail­able in­for­ma­tion. We had al­ready been work­ing on in­dus­try-lead­ing anti-scrap­ing sys­tems, and this study was in­stru­men­tal in stress-test­ing and con­firm­ing the im­me­di­ate ef­fi­cacy of these new de­fenses. Importantly, the re­searchers have se­curely deleted the data col­lected as part of the study, and we have found no ev­i­dence of ma­li­cious ac­tors abus­ing this vec­tor. As a re­minder, user mes­sages re­mained pri­vate and se­cure thanks to WhatsApp’s de­fault end-to-end en­cryp­tion, and no non-pub­lic data was ac­ces­si­ble to the re­searchers”, says Nitin Gupta, Vice President of Engineering at WhatsApp.

The re­search was con­ducted with strict eth­i­cal guide­lines and in ac­cor­dance with re­spon­si­ble dis­clo­sure prin­ci­ples. The find­ings were promptly re­ported to Meta, the op­er­a­tor of WhatsApp, which has since im­ple­mented coun­ter­mea­sures (e.g., rate-lim­it­ing, stricter pro­file in­for­ma­tion vis­i­bil­ity) to close the iden­ti­fied vul­ner­a­bil­ity. The au­thors ar­gue that trans­parency, aca­d­e­mic scrutiny, and in­de­pen­dent test­ing are es­sen­tial to main­tain­ing trust in global com­mu­ni­ca­tion ser­vices. They em­pha­size that proac­tive col­lab­o­ra­tion be­tween re­searchers and in­dus­try can sig­nif­i­cantly im­prove user pri­vacy and pre­vent abuse.

This pub­li­ca­tion rep­re­sents the third study by re­searchers from the University of Vienna and SBA Research ex­am­in­ing the se­cu­rity and pri­vacy of preva­lent in­stant mes­sen­gers such as WhatsApp and Signal. The team in­ves­ti­gates how de­sign and im­ple­men­ta­tion choices in end-to-end en­crypted mes­sag­ing ser­vices can un­in­ten­tion­ally ex­pose user in­for­ma­tion or weaken pri­vacy guar­an­tees.

Earlier this year, the re­searchers pub­lished “Careless Whisper: Exploiting Silent Delivery Receipts to Monitor Users on Mobile Instant Messengers” (distinguished with the Best Paper Award at RAID 2025), which demon­strated how silent pings and their de­liv­ery re­ceipts could be abused to in­fer user ac­tiv­ity pat­terns and on­line be­hav­ior on WhatsApp and sim­i­lar mes­sag­ing plat­forms. Later that same year, “Prekey Pogo: Investigating Security and Privacy Issues in WhatsApp’s Handshake Mechanism” (presented at USENIX WOOT 2025) an­a­lyzed the cryp­to­graphic foun­da­tions of WhatsApp’s prekey dis­tri­b­u­tion mech­a­nism, re­veal­ing im­ple­men­ta­tion weak­nesses of the Signal-based pro­to­col.

“By build­ing on our ear­lier find­ings about de­liv­ery re­ceipts and key man­age­ment, we’re con­tribut­ing to a long-term un­der­stand­ing of how mes­sag­ing sys­tems evolve, and where new risks emerge.” said Maximilian Günther (University of Vienna).

The cur­rent study, “Hey there! You are us­ing WhatsApp: Enumerating Three Billion Accounts for Security and Privacy”, ex­tends this line of re­search to the global scope, show­ing how con­tact dis­cov­ery mech­a­nisms can un­in­ten­tion­ally al­low large-scale user enu­mer­a­tion at an un­prece­dented mag­ni­tude. It will ap­pear in the pro­ceed­ings of the NDSS Symposium 2026, one of the lead­ing in­ter­na­tional con­fer­ences on com­puter and net­work se­cu­rity.

Publication: Gabriel K. Gegenhuber, Philipp É. Frenzel, Maximilian Günther, Johanna Ullrich und Aljosha Judmayer: Hey there! You are us­ing WhatsApp: Enumerating Three Billion Accounts for Security and Privacy. In: Network and Distributed System Security Symposium (NDSS), 2026. Preprint avail­able here.

Michael Larabel is the prin­ci­pal au­thor of Phoronix.com and founded the site in 2004 with a fo­cus on en­rich­ing the Linux hard­ware ex­pe­ri­ence. Michael has writ­ten more than 20,000 ar­ti­cles cov­er­ing the state of Linux hard­ware sup­port, Linux per­for­mance, graph­ics dri­vers, and other top­ics. Michael is also the lead de­vel­oper of the Phoronix Test Suite, Phoromatic, and OpenBenchmarking.org au­to­mated bench­mark­ing soft­ware. He can be fol­lowed via Twitter, LinkedIn, or con­tacted via MichaelLarabel.com.