computers

07 Jun 2026

Slashdot

Failing CS Grades Soar At UC Berkeley As Professors See Greater AI Usage

The University of California at Berkeley discovered the percentage of failing grades in multiple CS classes this spring "is significantly higher than past semesters," reports the campus's student newspaper. "Instructors point to students' increased reliance on AI, lack of mathematical preparedness and understaffing as potential contributing factors." According to [coursework platform] Berkeleytime, 35.3% of CS 10 students and 10.6% of CS 61A students received F's in spring 2026. In spring 2025 and spring 2024, the percentage of F's did not exceed 10% for either class. The electrical engineering and computer sciences department's grading guidelines state that 7% of students in lower division courses, including CS 10 and CS 61A, should receive D's and F's... [UC Berkeley teaching professor Dan Garcia, who taught both classes] believes the "primary driver" of these abnormally high failing rates is due to a "vast increase in academic dishonesty" due to students' usage of large language models, such as Claude, ChatGPT and Google Gemini. "Some of the numbers that you saw from the number of students who receive failing grades were because we caught them (cheating) and prosecuted them and are sending their cases to the Center for Student Conduct," Garcia said. "But in other cases, it's students who are leaning a little too hard on LLMs to do their work for them, and then at exam time just really aren't ready." According to Garcia, nearly 30 students in CS 10 were "caught cheating on take-home exams" in spring 2026... In addition to overreliance on AI, Garcia also pointed out that many students are underprepared mathematically, a concern echoed by campus associate teaching professor Gireeja Ranade. Ranade noticed a similar lack of prerequisite mathematical skills in her spring 2026 EECS 127 class, "Optimization Models in Engineering," which she described as "differently challenging" to teach this semester. The class saw a 16.8% F rate, far higher than the 5% of D's and F's that the EECS department describes as "typical" for an upper division course... Both Garcia and Ranade have joined more than 1,300 UC faculty in signing a petition calling for the reinstatement of ACT and SAT standardized testing scores for STEM admissions in the UC system. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

Cheaper EV Sales are Increasing

Sales have increased for Hyundai's under-$35,000 IONIQ 5, totalling 18,395 for the first five months of 2026, reports Electrek, "up 16% from the same period last year." But meanwhile BYD's overseas sales surpassed 160,000 for the first time last month, "up 80% from May 2025 and 19% from the previous record of 135,098 set in April." Through the first five months of 2026, BYD sold 616,263 vehicles overseas. In May, overseas sales accounted for over 41% of BYD's total sales. In several major markets, including the UK, BYD surpassed Tesla and Kia to become the best-selling EV brand through April. "With fuel prices remaining high, more drivers are turning to electric vehicles as a smarter and more economical choice," Bono Ge, BYD UK's Country Manager, said last month. Elsewhere Electrek notes that Toyota's bZ (starting at under $35,000) was the third-best-selling EV in the U.S. in the first three months of 2026, behind only the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y. "Last month, bZ sales doubled from May 2025, with 2,646 units sold." And meanwhile the first Volkswagen ID. Polo and Cupra Raval models "rolled off the production line at the Group's Martorell plant in Spain, the first of several new affordable, mass-market EVs." Starting at €24,995 ($29,000) and €26,000 ($30,100), the ID. Polo and Cupra Raval are the first models from the Group's Electric Urban Car Family... [T]he first customer deliveries are scheduled to begin later this summer and into the fall. Following the ID. Polo and Cupra Raval, Volkswagen will introduce new members to the Electric Urban Car Family, including the ID. Cross, an electric version of the T-Cross, later this year. According to Volkswagen, the ID. Cross will start at around €28,000 ($32,500).

06 Jun 2026

Slashdot

EU's Tech Sovereignty Package Includes 29 Pages on Open Source, Says Open Source Initiative

Friday the Open Source Initiative welcomed the EU's new tech sovereignty package, noting that "over a third of the 29-page document is devoted to Open Source." The nonprofit OSI - maintainers of the Open Source definition - submitted their official feedback in February, and notes that "many" of their key requests were addressed, "as well as some exciting new announcements!" One of the biggest barriers to Open Source adoption has been public procurement. Too often, tenders have been designed around proprietary solutions, ignoring the benefits of Open Source and locking public institutions into closed ecosystems. The OSI called for procurement rules that prioritize interoperability, reusability, and vendor independence. The package takes a major step forward in this area. The EU pledges to make the public sector an anchor consumer for Open Source solutions. The Commission plans to reform procurement rules to remove barriers for Open Source, provide better guidance to EU countries on procurement criteria to avoid excluding Open Source, and uphold the "public money, public code" principle when procuring software development. Both proposals align with the OSI's feedback. The next critical step is the EU's public procurement law reform. The OSI will continue advocating to ensure these pledges translate into action. Beyond procurement, the OSI highlighted challenges faced by Open Source communities in Europe, particularly difficulties accessing investment and expertise to commercialize and scale projects. The Commission has responded by committing to ensure Open Source companies are considered for funding under the European Competitiveness Fund (ECF). It also plans to create "Open Source business accelerators" that will offer mentorship, training, legal and licensing consulting, and business development support, including marketing. Additionally, the Commission will work to raise industry awareness of Open Source solutions by leveraging the EU's existing business support networks. These measures directly address the OSI's concerns and could significantly boost the Open Source ecosystem in Europe... [I]n our feedback, we called for the continuation of the Next Generation Internet (NGI) initiative that has funded many Open Source projects, and for the creation of a European Sovereign Tech Fund to fund ongoing maintenance and features development to meet the EU's needs. We also highlighted the need to mainstream Open Source in other funding opportunities (like the €100bn+ Horizon Europe programme). The Commission's strategy addresses these requests. The NGI will be scaled up under the new name "Open Internet Stack." A new Open Source Maintenance Instrument will fund the "maintenance and security upkeep of essential components." The Commission will also create a list of critical and security-relevant Open Source dependencies to inform funding decisions and promote Open Source solutions as the default approach in Horizon Europe funding. Friday's announcement from the Open Source Initiative notes that the EU is already leading by example in Open Source adoption. It applauds the EU for "deploying a Matrix-based communications system and the openDesk collaboration environment internally, trialing an alternative operating system to replace Windows, which is currently widely used in EU institutions, and expanding its presence on the Fediverse, with Commissioners and key departments already joining the EU's Mastodon server.'

Ars Technica

Scientists ejected from diabetes conference for distributing journal reprints

Those ousted included ADA journal editor-in-chief Steven Kahn and former ADA president Desmond Schatz

06 Jun 2026 8:53pm GMT

Some ancient microbes frozen with Ötzi the Iceman are still growing

What's the difference between a person, an artifact, and an ecosystem?

06 Jun 2026 11:15am GMT

05 Jun 2026

Ars Technica

Baby botulism outbreak: FDA still doesn't know cause—or how to prevent it

In the end, the three companies involved all point the finger at each other.

05 Jun 2026 10:36pm GMT

OSnews

This mini PC with the latest RISC-V SoC might actually be worth it

RISC-V has been in the "promising" phase for a long time now, especially for general purpose computing, never really breaking through into the mainstream in any measurable way. While I think that breakthrough is still relatively far away, we now do have newer RISC-V SoCs on the market supporting the RVA23 baseline RISC-V profile. One of them is the SpacemiT Key Stone KЗ, which promises to deliver a massive performance increase over previous RISC-V offerings. It's exactly this chip that's finding its way into complete, turnkey mini PC solutions, like this one from a company called Firefly. The base model comes with 8GB of LDDPR5 RAM and 128GB of storage, at a price of about €300 or so (there's also a 32GB/128GB model at well over €600). This is the first time I'm looking at a complete RISC-V solution where I feel like it might actually make for a good moment to jump in for us enthusiasts. No, the performance won't rival anything Intel or AMD has to offer, but it seems capable enough for a lot of day-to-day tasks, and I'm curious to see just how far along the Linux world is when it comes to RISC-V support. It's not part of our current set of fundraiser incentives, but if you'd like to see this RISC-V mini PC reviewed here on OSNews, you can always donate and add a note that you specifically want to see such a review (so I can gauge interest not just from our few commenters, but also from the more than 99% of our readers who only lurk). As always, you can donate through Ko-Fi, or, if you're European, via a SEPA direct bank transfer (Name: Thom Holwerda - IBAN: SE08 8000 0820 1684 4657 8414 - BIC: SWEDSESS).

05 Jun 2026 3:49pm GMT

When su replaced login for becoming another UNIX login

I've mentioned it before, but Chris Siebenmann is basically the Raymond Chen of the UNIX world, and today he's filling that role perfectly once again. I recently read Simon Tatham's Nitpicking the shell history scene in Tron: Legacy, where one thing that surprised Tatham was the film using 'login -n root' to become root instead of 'su'. This surprised me because I found that perfectly ordinary, and this turns up both a bit of Unix history and a difference between modern Unixes. Plain 'su' can let you become another user, including root, but what it explicitly doesn't do by default is create a new login shell for that user. If you do 'su root', the new root shell normally inherits most of your environment, your current directory, and so on. Sometimes this is what you want and sometimes you really want a new login environment, and originally in Unix how you got the latter was to run 'login' from your existing shell session (and this meant that login was setuid root, like su). ↫ Chris Siebenmann Unsurprisingly, this distinction has persisted to this day in various UNIX-like operating systems, but in different ways. Some maintain the explicit distinction, while others have more or less standardised on using su for both use cases. It's an interesting bit of UNIX archeology.

05 Jun 2026 12:57pm GMT

04 Jun 2026

OSnews

Roku launches open-source embedded Roku LT OS

Roku, the company that makes TV boxes and sells ad space based on your usage patterns, has released its remote control operating system as open source - and by remote control I don't mean robot stuff or whatever, but actual remote controls, the thing you use to control your TV or whatever from the couch. Roku has announced the official availability of Roku LT OS - a lightweight, highly deterministic open-source operating system that is already used in our industry-changing Roku remote controls. In addition to high-performance automotive platforms, Roku LT OS is designed to be accessible to the broader developer community. The operating system ships with native support for the ESP32 platform, a highly popular SoC among hobbyists and makers. Because ESP32 development boards are widely available online for just a few dollars, developers can get started with Roku LT OS with minimal hardware investment. ↫ Roku's developers blog As far as I can tell, this operating system is entirely new and not based on Linux or something else, but the available documentation is light on details so I can't make much more out of it. Regardless, it's nice to have another open source embedded operating system.

04 Jun 2026 6:21pm GMT