A year after Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) effectively fired thousands of government employees, one federal agency that was affected by those cuts is now preparing to hire hundreds of people.

The General Services Administration (GSA), an agency that oversees the government’s IT department and real estate holdings, is hiring “approximately 400 positions” across its Public Building Service (PBS) division, according to an email obtained by WIRED.

“We’re thrilled to announce that the GSA Strategic Hiring Committee has approved the PBS staffing plan designed to address our workforce needs and strengthen our teams,” states an email sent by PBS chief of staff Donna Dix to employees on Monday.

The email goes on to say that the hiring effort will focus on “the most significant areas of need: facilities management, acquisition, and project management.”

GSA did not respond to a request for comment.

PBS, which manages the federal buildings under GSA’s banner, lost hundreds of employees in March 2025 following DOGE cuts. The agency, WIRED reported at the time, was also instructed to sell off more than 500 government buildings, some of which housed government agencies and the offices of US senators. One of the properties on the list was a sensitive complex housing a CIA facility in Northern Virginia. Since then, the agency has walked back the extent of these plans, and instead doubled down on assisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) expand across the US. WIRED reported in February that GSA and PBS were assisting ICE’s plans to lease offices throughout the US as part of a massive expansion campaign.

This isn’t the first time that PBS has announced plans to rehire or replace federal employees cut by DOGE. In September, hundreds of PBS employees were given the opportunity to return to work months after they accepted a deferred resignation offer, effectively making their half-year separation an extended vacation.

Stephen Ehikian, the former acting head of the GSA, left the agency in September 2025 after conducting extensive layoffs. As of last May, 2,100 workers took deferred resignation and 1,000 more were laid off. “The opportunity we had was to restructure [GSA], slim it down, and now the team’s in a phenomenal position to build it back the way they want,” he told Nextgov at the time. Ehikian’s wife previously worked for Elon Musk’s social media firm X.

Since leaving the government, Ehikian has moved into the private sector, running the enterprise AI firm C3 AI. Earlier this year, the company announced significant cuts to its workforce. Its stock plunged 17 percent following the announcement.

• Dell Pro 5 Micro delivers desktop-class computing in an ultra-compact form
• Single USB-C input allows powering directly from compatible Dell Pro monitors
• Integrated NPU provides 50 TOPS performance for on-device AI acceleration

Dell is shrinking the office desktop computer down to a block which can sit entirely behind a monitor while still doing the work of a full-sized business PC.

The new Dell Pro 5 Micro Desktop ditches the traditional tower for an ultra-compact form, which suits offices where desk space is limited and cable clutter is a visible problem.

Quordle was one of the original Wordle alternatives and is still going strong now more than 1,400 games later. It offers a genuine challenge, though, so read on if you need some Quordle hints today – or scroll down further for the answers.

Enjoy playing word games? You can also check out my NYT Connections today and NYT Strands today pages for hints and answers for those puzzles, while Marc’s Wordle today column covers the original viral word game.

Great iPad Accessories

iPad accessories are endless. Below, we’ve highlighted some of our favorites to round out your tablet experience, and you can find more in our Best iPad Accessories guide.

Zugu Case for $50+: This is our favorite folio case for the iPad for multiple reasons. It’s not only durable (complete with a rigid bumper), but it also has a magnetized cover that stays shut and a flap that allows you to position the screen at eight different angles. The case is magnetic, allowing you to stick it on the fridge securely. It’s also reasonably priced, comes in an array of colors, and has a spot for your Apple Pencil.

Satechi M1 Wireless Mouse for $25: We’re already big fans of Satechi’s accessories at WIRED, and this mouse didn’t disappoint. It has a comfortable ergonomic design, a sleek aluminum finish, and smooth scrolling. It has great battery life too—with a built-in lithium-ion battery, I’ve been using it for the past four months and have yet to charge it.

Mageasy CoverBuddy Case (iPad Pro) for $70: This case allows you to magnetically connect it to Apple’s Magic Keyboard case without having to take off the case each time. It feels durable and doesn’t add too much bulk to the iPad. There’s also a slot for the Apple Pencil Pro or the USB-C version. The company also offers the CoverBuddy Lite for the iPad Air (M2).

Photograph: Brenda Stolyar

Logitech Combo Touch (10th-Gen) for $260: The Combo Touch (8/10, WIRED Recommends) comes with a built-in keyboard, trackpad, and kickstand, making it ideal for getting work done on your iPad. It’s also detachable, so you can easily remove the keyboard when you don’t need it. It connects via Apple’s Smart Connector, meaning you never need to tinker with Bluetooth or bother charging it. It’s also available for the iPad Pro (M4) and M5 (although it does add a bit of weight to such a thin tablet) and the iPad Air (M2).

Casetify Impact Screen Protector for $56: If you’re worried about damaging your iPad screen, I recommend this protector from Casetify. It’s super thin, has excellent touch sensitivity, and is mostly fingerprint-resistant (I’ve wiped some smudges here and there). It’s painless to apply—the company supplies a microfiber cloth, a de-dusting sticker, and wet and dry wipes.

Paperlike Charcoal Folio Case for $70: Paperlike is known for its screen protector, but the company also offers a great case. It’s designed to feel like a sketchbook, complete with a polyester fabric cover that feels lightweight and high-quality. You can also prop your iPad up at two different levels. It doesn’t come with an Apple Pencil slot, but there is a large flap closure that keeps it from falling out. I tested it with the iPad Air, but it’s also available for the iPad Pro (both sizes).

StayGo Mini

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Courtesy of Twelve South

Twelve South StayGo Mini USB-C Hub for $60: Ports are limited regardless of the iPad model. This hub from Twelve South has an 85-watt USB-C port with passthrough charging, a USB-A port, an HDMI port, and a headphone jack. If you have trouble fitting it on an iPad with a case, the included socket-USB-C-to-plug-USB-C cable will fix this.

Apple Magic Trackpad (USB-C) for $140: For a spacious trackpad, the Magic Trackpad 2 is a great choice. Instead of physical buttons, it has Force Touch sensors where you can feel different levels of pressure on the pad. With support for various iPadOS gestures, you won’t have to touch the screen as much. It automatically pairs with your iPad via Bluetooth and recharges with the Lightning port.

Twelve South HoverBar Duo 2.0 for $80: The HoverBar serves two purposes. You can mount it to the side of your bed, kitchen counter, or shelf (to view content comfortably and hands-free), or you can use the included stand at your desk. With the 2nd-gen version, you can now remove the arm from the clamp and attach it directly to the stand, making it easier to swap between both modes.

Power up with unlimited access to WIRED. Get best-in-class reporting and exclusive subscriber content that’s too important to ignore. Subscribe Today.

Good morning! Let’s play Connections, the NYT’s clever word game that challenges you to group answers in various categories. It can be tough, so read on if you need Connections hints.

What should you do once you’ve finished? Why, play some more word games of course. I’ve also got daily Strands hints and answers and Quordle hints and answers articles if you need help for those too, while Marc’s Wordle today page covers the original viral word game.

Just when things had started to feel quiet on the PlayStation front, a fresh wave of leaks has stirred the pot again. There’s chatter around the PlayStation 6, a next-gen handheld, and even some behind-the-scenes changes that hint at how Sony is preparing for what’s next.

None of this is official, of course, but even if part of it holds up, Sony isn’t just building new hardware, but also laying the groundwork for how that hardware will actually work.

What do the latest PlayStation leaks actually say?

According to trusted leaker Moore’s Law is Dead, the biggest headline is around the PlayStation 6, which may not be as far away as expected. Early details suggest that Sony is already deep into development, with timelines hinting at a launch window that’s closer than the typical console cycle would suggest.

But that’s only part of the story. Alongside the PS6 chatter, there’s renewed talk of a dedicated PlayStation handheld. Unlike the PlayStation Portal, which is more of a remote-play device, this new handheld is rumored to be a standalone system capable of running games natively. Think of it as the new PSP or PS Vita.

Another interesting detail is around “PlayGo,” which has reportedly been introduced in the latest PS5 SDK. Think of it as Sony’s version of Xbox’s Smart Delivery. It allows developers to break games into smaller chunks, so each device only downloads the assets it actually needs. That means a standard PS5 wouldn’t need to download higher-resolution textures meant for a PS5 Pro, and potentially, future devices could follow the same logic.

PS6 pricing leaks sound surprisingly… reasonable

According to MLID, now might not be the best time to drop $900 on a PS5 Pro. The claim is pretty bold, but they suggest skipping the current-gen upgrade and waiting, because the base PlayStation 6 could actually end up being cheaper than the PS5 Pro. The reasoning? Sony is reportedly designing the PS6 from the ground up to be more cost-efficient, with cheaper cooling, power delivery, and overall manufacturing.

In fact, some estimates even suggest a bill of materials around $750, which could keep the final price comfortably below $1,000. That’s actually quite cheaper, compared to Microsoft’s upcoming Project Helix, which could go up to $1200. Then again, these are still early leaks and far from official, so it’s worth taking all of this with a pinch of salt for now.

from the reinventing-software dept

Most of the discussions about the impact of the latest generative AI systems on copyright have centered on text, images and video. That’s no surprise, since writers, artists and film-makers feel very strongly about their creations, and members of the public can relate easily to the issues that AI raises for this kind of creativity. But there’s another creative domain that has been massively affected by genAI: software engineering. More and more professional coders are using generative AI to write major elements of their projects for them. Some top engineers even claim that they have stopped coding completely, and now act more as a manager for the AI generation of code, because the available tools are now so powerful. This applies in the world of open source software too. But a recent incident shows that it raises some interesting copyright issues there that are likely to affect the entire software world.

It concerns a project called chardet, “a universal character encoding detector for Python. It analyzes byte strings and returns the detected encoding, confidence score, and language.” A long and detailed post on Ars Technica explains what has happened recently:

The [chardet] repository was originally written by coder Mark Pilgrim in 2006 and released under an LGPL license that placed strict limits on how it could be reused and redistributed.

Dan Blanchard took over maintenance of the repository in 2012 but waded into some controversy with the release of version 7.0 of chardet last week. Blanchard described that overhaul as “a ground-up, MIT-licensed rewrite” of the entire library built with the help of Claude Code to be “much faster and more accurate” than what came before.

Licensing lies at the heart of open source. When Richard Stallman invented the concept of free software, he did so using a new kind of software license, the GPL. This allows anyone to use and modify software released under the GPL, provided they release their own code under the same license. As the above description makes clear, chardet was originally released under the LGPL – one of the GPL variants – but version 7.0 is licensed under the much more permissive MIT license. According to Ars Technica:

Blanchard says he was able to accomplish this “AI clean room” process by first specifying an architecture in a design document and writing out some requirements to Claude Code. After that, Blanchard “started in an empty repository with no access to the old source tree and explicitly instructed Claude not to base anything on LGPL/GPL-licensed code.”

That is, generative AI would appear to allow open source licenses like the GPL to be circumvented by rewriting the code without copying anything directly from the original. That’s possible because AI is now so good at coding that the results can be better than the original, as Blanchard proved with version 7.0 of chardet. And because it is new code, it can be released under any license. In fact, it is quite possible that code produced by genAI is not covered by copyright at all, for the same reason that artistic output created solely by AI can’t be copyrighted. If the license can be changed or simply cancelled in this way, then there is no way to force people to release their own variants only under the GPL, as Stallman intended. Similarly, the incentive for people to contribute their own improvements to the main version is diminished.

The ramifications extend even further. These kind of “AI clean room” implementations could be used to make new versions of any proprietary software. That’s been possible for decades – Stallman’s 1983 GNU project is itself a clean-room version of Unix – but generally requires many skilled coders working for long periods to achieve. The arrival of highly-capable genAI coding tools has brought down the cost by many orders of magnitude, which means it is relatively inexpensive and quick to produce new versions of any software.

In effect, generative AI coding systems make copyright irrelevant for software, both open source and proprietary. That’s because what is important about computer code is not the details of how it is written, but what it does. AI systems can be guided to create drop-in replacements for other software that are functionally identical, but with completely different code underneath.

Companies that license their proprietary software will probably still be able to do so by offering support packages plus the promise that they take legal responsibility for their code in a way that AI-generated alternatives don’t: businesses would pay for a promise of reliability plus the ability to sue someone when things go wrong. But for the open source world these are not relevant. As a result, the latest progress in AI coding seems a serious threat to the underlying development model that has worked well for the last 40 years, and which underpins most software in use today. But a wise post by Salvatore “antirez” Sanfilippo sees opportunities too:

AI can unlock a lot of good things in the field of open source software. Many passionate individuals write open source because they hate their day job, and want to make something they love, or they write open source because they want to be part of something bigger than economic interests. A lot of open source software is either written in the free time, or with severe constraints on the amount of people that are allocated for the project, or – even worse – with limiting conditions imposed by the companies paying for the developments. Now that code is every day less important than ideas, open source can be strongly accelerated by AI. The four hours allocated over the weekend will bring 10x the fruits, in the right hands (AI coding is not for everybody, as good coding and design is not for everybody).

Perhaps a new kind of open source will emerge – Open Source 2.0 – one in which people do not contribute their software patches to a project, as they do today, but instead send their prompts that produce better versions. People might start working directly on the prompts, collaborating on ways to fine tune them. It’s open source hacking but functioning at a level above the code itself.

One possibility is that such an approach could go some way to solving the so-called “Nebraska problem”: the fact that key parts of modern digital infrastructure are underpinned up by “a project some random person in Nebraska has been thanklessly maintaining since 2003”. That person may not receive many more thanks than they have in the past, but with AI assistants constantly checking, rewriting and improving the code, at least the selfless dedication to their project becomes a little less onerous, and thus a little less likely to lead to programmer burn out.

Follow me @glynmoody on Mastodon and on Bluesky. Originally published to Walled Culture.

Filed Under: chardet, copyright, licensing, open source, relicensing

A new report dubbed “BrowserGate” warns that Microsoft’s LinkedIn is using hidden JavaScript scripts on its website to scan visitors’ browsers for installed extensions and collect device data.

According to a report by Fairlinked e.V., which claims to be an association of commercial LinkedIn users, Microsoft’s platform injects JavaScript into user sessions that checks for thousands of browser extensions and links the results to identifiable user profiles.

The author claims that this behavior is used to collect sensitive personal and corporate information, as LinkedIn accounts are tied to real identities, employers, and job roles.

“LinkedIn scans for over 200 products that directly compete with its own sales tools, including Apollo, Lusha, and ZoomInfo. Because LinkedIn knows each user’s employer, it can map which companies use which competitor products. It is extracting the customer lists of thousands of software companies from their users’ browsers without anyone’s knowledge,’ the report says.

“Then it uses what it finds. LinkedIn has already sent enforcement threats to users of third-party tools, using data obtained through this covert scanning to identify its targets.”

BleepingComputer has independently confirmed part of these claims through our own testing, during which we observed a JavaScript file with a randomized filename being loaded by LinkedIn’s website.

This script checked for 6,236 browser extensions by attempting to access file resources associated with a specific extension ID, a known technique for detecting whether extensions are installed.

This fingerprinting script was previously reported in 2025, but it was only detecting approximately 2,000 extensions at that time. A different GitHub repository from two months ago shows 3,000 extensions being detected, demonstrating that the number of detected extensions continues to grow.

While many of the extensions that are scanned for are related to LinkedIn, the script also strangely detected language and grammar extensions, tools for tax professionals, and other seemingly unrelated features.

The script also collects a wide range of browser and device data, including CPU core count, available memory, screen resolution, timezone, language settings, battery status, audio information, and storage features.

BleepingComputer could not verify the claims in the BrowserGate report about the use of the data or whether it is shared with third-party companies.

However, similar fingerprinting techniques have been used in the past to build unique browser profiles, which can enable tracking users across websites.

LinkedIn denies data use allegations

LinkedIn does not dispute that it detects specific browser extensions, telling BleepingComputer that the info is used to protect the platform and its users.

However, the company claims the report is from someone whose account was banned for scraping LinkedIn content and violating the site’s terms of use.

LinkedIn claims the BrowserGate report stems from a dispute involving the developer of a LinkedIn-related browser extension called “Teamfluence,” which LinkedIn says it restricted for violating the platform’s terms.

In documents shared with BleepingComputer, a German court denied the developer’s request for a preliminary injunction, finding that LinkedIn’s actions did not constitute unlawful obstruction or discrimination.

The court also found that automated data collection alone could infringe upon LinkedIn’s terms of use and that it was entitled to block the accounts to protect its platform.

LinkedIn argues the BrowserGate report is an attempt to re-litigate that dispute publicly.

Regardless of the reasons for the report, one point is undisputed.

LinkedIn’s site uses a fingerprinting script that detects over 6,000 extensions running in a Chromium browser, along with other data about a visitor’s system.

This is not the first time that companies have used aggressive fingerprinting scripts to detect programs running on a visitor’s device.

In 2021, eBay was found to use JavaScript to perform automated port scans on visitors’ devices to determine whether they were running various remote support software.

While eBay never confirmed why they were using these scripts, it was widely believed that they were used to block fraud on compromised devices.

It was later discovered that numerous other companies were using the same fingerprinting script, including Citibank, TD Bank, Ameriprise, Chick-fil-A, Lendup, BeachBody, Equifax IQ connect, TIAA-CREF, Sky, GumTree, and WePay.

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