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SIM swapping is a popular type of fraud in which someone transfers your mobile number to a SIM in their own device. By intercepting any messages or phone calls sent to you, they’re able to access your two-factor authentication codes and other sensitive information. Now, AT&T is offering customers a way to combat this kind of crime.

Available starting today, Wireless Account Lock is an option for AT&T subscribers with postpaid or prepaid wireless accounts. Simply by turning on a switch in the myAT&T app, you can enable Account Lock to prevent unauthorized changes to your account and phone lines.

Also: Your Android phone is getting a big security upgrade for free – here’s what’s new

Wireless Account Lock prevents a variety of actions, including:

• Upgrading your device to a new one
• Changing a SIM card or eSIM
• Changing a phone number
• Transferring a phone number to a different device
• Changing your billing information
• Changing the authorized users for your account

Certain actions are still allowed with Wireless Account Lock turned on. These include:

• Making a payment
• Setting up payment arrangements
• Enrolling in AutoPay
• Making changes to your plans and add-ons
• Suspending your service
• Unlocking a device
• Managing NumberSync
• Changing your E911 address
• Changing your voicemail password

You can apply Wireless Account Lock to any device on your postpaid or prepaid mobile account with AT&T, including smartphones, tablets, smartwatches, hotspots, and laptops. You need to be the account owner or have primary or secondary access to the account to do this.

1. To get started, download the myAT&T app for iOS or Android if you don’t already have it.
2. Sign in to the app and select the number that you want to lock.
3. Tap Continue, select Profile & Settings, and then tap Account Info & Preferences.
4. Under Wireless Account Lock, turn on the switch to enable it. Here, you can also disable it when you want to make any otherwise blocked changes to your account.
5. In response, AT&T will send a confirmation email to your email address and a text to your mobile device.

Also: 7 ways to lock down your phone’s security – before it’s too late

Wireless Account Lock isn’t just for consumers. AT&T offers the same feature for business accounts. Like the consumer version, the business variant will prevent device upgrades, SIM or eSIM changes, number transfers, and other actions.

To enable or disable Account Lock in this instance, sign in to your AT&T business account. Select Account lock settings and turn on Account lock. Here, you’re also able to include or exclude specific features when Account Lock is enabled.

AT&T now joins the other two major US mobile carriers in trying to help customers combat SIM swapping attacks.

T-Mobile offers a SIM Protection feature for both postpaid and prepaid accounts. Using the T-Mobile website or the T-Life app for iOS or Android, you’re able to flip the switch to enable this protection. 

Also: How I upgraded my home Wi-Fi with a VPN-ready router (and why it makes such a big difference)

Verizon’s SIM Protection and Number Lock features are also accessible to postpaid and prepaid subscribers. Instructions and controls for enabling both options are available on the My Verizon website and the My Verizon app.

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When Linus Torvalds posted his now-legendary 1991 announcement about a “hobby” operating system kernel, no one would have predicted that Linux would become the backbone of modern computing. In a speech at the Open-Source Summit, North America, Jonathan Corbet, executive editor of LWN and longtime kernel developer, recounted the Linux kernel’s remarkable journey, highlighting its disruptive beginnings, its unique development model, and the challenges that have shaped its evolution.

Linux just keeps growing

Today, as Corbet said, “We are up to just over 40 million lines of code at this point. It’s fair to say that, indeed, Linux has become big and professional.” The first thing he noted was that, no matter what else was happening in the world, Linux had just kept growing.

Also: 7 things every Linux beginner should know – before downloading their first distro

In a graph of Linux kernel growth, Corbet observed, “If you look at this line, it’s really monotonically upward. It’s always increasing. We’re always building on the kernel, despite the fact that a lot of things were happening in the world over these three decades. We had the dotcom crash in 2000. We had the SCO lawsuit. In 2008, there was the global economic crisis. And of course, we had the COVID pandemic. But you don’t really see an effect on the development speed of Linux from any of these events. We have somehow managed to sustain everything we can do despite all the stuff that has happened in the world.”

How has Linux managed this? 

Corbet believed that what has set Linux apart is its radical openness. 

Unlike the centralized, exclusive development of other Unix-like systems, now largely forgotten, Linux welcomed contributions from anyone willing to submit code. This openness, combined with the GNU General Public License (GPL) 2.0, fostered a unified codebase and prevented fragmentation. “Anybody could be a part of it,” Corbet emphasized, “and as a result, Linux developed a community that you didn’t find in other open projects at that time.” You really won’t find it anywhere else, even now.

Also: This city is dumping Microsoft Office and Windows for OnlyOffice and Linux – here’s why

Of course, for years, no one took Linux seriously. It was dismissed as a toy in an era when Unix fragmentation and the rise of Windows NT dominated industry thinking. The prevailing wisdom held that only large corporations could build operating system kernels, leaving little attention for a community-driven initiative. Yet, as Corbet noted, Linux exemplified Clayton Christensen’s concept of disruptive innovation: a technology dismissed as inferior that quietly matures until it overtakes established players.

Another factor, Corbet explained, was that in the early 1990s, the BSD Unix systems were much more mature than Linux; they were capable of doing more and were more usable. Still, their permissive BSD license model led to a whole bunch of forks. None of them gained the critical mass in terms of either the development community or adoption to dominate Linux. 

Instead, the Linux kernel stayed one thing. It stayed together, in part because its GPLv2 copyright policy meant everybody retains their copyright under the same license. It means that nobody owns Linux, or everybody owns Linux. It is not a company project. It’s not something somebody can pull out from under you, and that makes a huge difference.

Also: Want to ditch Windows? This Linux distro makes that transition easy

Linux was also successful, Corbet believes, because “Linus had no pride. He threw open the door to everybody, and anybody who could send him a patch could participate. And so we’d take it; we’d throw away a lot of stuff. It didn’t work. It seemed wasteful in ways, but there were no boundaries. Anybody could be a part of it. It was a lot more fun, and it was a lot more open.”

You can see how that approach was successful, he added, after the late 1990s when “Linux caught the attention of industry giants. IBM’s 2001 billion-dollar investment marked a turning point, shifting perceptions from skepticism to serious engagement. The dot-com boom fueled a Linux bubble, with startups and venture capital flooding the ecosystem. Yet, when the bubble burst, kernel development continued unabated, underscoring Linux’s independence from any single corporate patron.”

Corbet continued, “Much of the commercial structure around Linux self-destructed over the course of about a month in 2000, but development of the Linux kernel did not slow down. Nothing really changed there, which was perhaps the first object lesson that Linux is truly independent of its corporate patrons.”

Linux’s modular approach

Another reason Linux has been successful is its modular approach. By focusing solely on the kernel while leaving user-space utilities and distributions to others, it accelerated innovation and allowed parallel experimentation. Corbet cited the emergence of Beowulf clusters in the late 1990s. By stringing together commodity PCs running Linux to create supercomputers, Linux began its rise as the only supercomputer operating system and the dominant operating system of today’s data centers and clouds.

Also: I put Linux on this 8-inch mini laptop, and unlocked a new way of computing

Corbet remembered, “I worked in a supercomputing center when this was happening, and I went to them and I said, ‘Hey, we should really be looking at this.’ And they said, “No, no, we have these Crays over here, and that’s all that we’re ever going to need.” That really didn’t age very well. Now, people don’t really talk about Beowulf clusters anymore, for a simple reason. We just call them data centers.”

All of this development was happening over e-mail lists. Today, almost all of Linux’s key development occurs over the Linux Kernel Mailing List (LKML). Sometimes old technology is the best technology.

Beginning with the first Linux Kernel Summit in San Jose, California, on March 30 to March 31, 2001, developers began meeting face-to-face. That was when it became clear that while mailing lists are invaluable, personal connections are still vital. However, Corbet worries that current US visa policies will hamper such gatherings going forward.

A major shift

Corbet then turned his attention to the technical side of the Linux kernel. The Linux kernel’s development model underwent a major shift. “At the 2004 Kernel Summit. We adopted what was called, what we called the new kernel development model. Now it’s just the kernel development model where the first two weeks of every development cycle are what’s called the merge window, where all the new code, new features go in, then for the following weeks we fix the problems. This works well enough at this point that every release takes nine or 10 weeks in total. You can set your clock by the last 15 years; there have been exactly two exceptions.”

Also: The Linux 6.15 kernel arrives – and it’s big a victory for Rust fans

As Linux scaled, its development process faced bottlenecks. The biggest was the reliance on Torvalds to manually apply every patch. The adoption of BitKeeper, a proprietary source code management tool, temporarily alleviated these issues but introduced new dependencies.

Then, in April 2005, things went badly wrong. The “BitKeeper license was abruptly withdrawn, and overnight, we found ourselves without the software tool on which we had built the entire development process. So this brought everything to a halt. We were all kind of sitting there looking at each other, saying, ‘Now what?’ So Torvalds responded by creating Git in 10 days. Today this free and open source version control manager has revolutionized not only Linux development but software collaboration worldwide.

Also: I’ve used virtually every Linux distro, but this one has a fresh perspective

This approach, now used by many projects, enables rapid innovation without sacrificing reliability. Each year, 4,000 to 5,000 developers contribute over 80,000 commits, supported by a diverse array of companies, none of which dominate the project.

Corbet also highlighted the importance of embracing new technologies, such as the Rust programming language, to ensure the kernel’s long-term health and attract new contributors. “If you come back in five or ten years,” he predicted, “you’re going to see a very different looking kernel source base, and I think that’s really important for our sustainability.”

Get the morning’s top stories in your inbox each day with our Tech Today newsletter.

Microsoft Intune administrators may face a few days of stress after Redmond acknowledged a problem with security baseline customizations.

The problem? Those customizations might not be saved during the update process, and the current workaround is to manually reapply customizations after updating baseline policies.

Microsoft Intune is a cloud-based endpoint management service that allows organizations to manage fleets of devices, including configuration and updates. Many admins use Intune for patch and policy management as an alternative to on-premises tools like Windows Server Update Services (WSUS), which was noted as being “no longer in development” with the release of Windows Server 2025.

The biz also has Microsoft Configuration Manager, which has its roots in the venerable Systems Management Server of the 1990s and is an on-premises product to manage a wide variety of products, including servers. The two are sometimes used together.

A security baseline in Intune is a template consisting of configuration settings. Microsoft generally issues a default baseline with recommended values, and an administrator can then tweak those values (or not) depending on the needs of their organization. However, those values not being maintained during the update process is less than ideal, particularly if there are a lot of customizations.

The new problem occurs if an administrator customizes the security baseline, and “affects customers who are updating their baseline version to a more recent version. For example, updating the security baseline from version 23H2 to version 24H2.” Microsoft, it appears, knows best, and the changes will be discarded in favor of the Microsoft-recommended defaults. This is fine for administrators who are happy to blithely accept whatever Microsoft sets as a default, but it is not so good for organizations that want to make their own tweaks.

The current workaround is also a pain – “While we work on the fix,” said the Redmond gang, “we recommend that admins manually reapply their customizations after updating their baseline policies.”

Reports of administrators rolling their eyes so hard that the Earth has shifted slightly on its axis are likely exaggerated. ®