fidzu : computers

Apple "is preparing to allow voice-controlled AI apps from other companies in CarPlay," reports Bloomberg, citing "people familiar with the matter." Bloomberg calls it "a move that will let users query AI chatbots through its vehicle interface for the first time." The company is working to support the apps in CarPlay within the coming months, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the plan hasn't been announced. The change marks a strategic shift for Apple, which until now has only allowed its own Siri assistant as a voice-control option within its popular vehicle infotainment software. With the move, AI providers such as OpenAI, Anthropic PBC and Alphabet Inc.'s Google will be able to release CarPlay versions of their apps that include a voice-control mode... The company also has launched a higher-end version of the platform, CarPlay Ultra, that lets drivers control functions like seat adjustments and climate settings directly through Apple's software. But that system is rolling out slowly and must be customized for each automaker. That means it's likely to be a niche offering. The article notes that Tesla is now working to support Apple's CarPlay.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

07 Feb 2026 5:34pm GMT

Somewhere on America's eastern coast, there's an economic development agency in Massachusetts promoting green energy solutions. And Monday the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center (or MassCEC) announced "a first-of-its-kind" program to see what happens when they provide free electric vehicle chargers to selected residents, school districts, and municipal projects. The catch? The EV chargers are bi-directional, able "to both draw power from and return power to the grid..." The program hopes to "accelerate the adoption of V2X technologies, which, at scale, can lower energy bills by reducing energy demand during expensive peak periods and limiting the need for new grid infrastructure." This functionality enables EVs, including electric buses and trucks, to provide backup power during outages and alleviate pressure on the grid during peak energy demand. These bi-directional chargers will enable EVs to act as mobile energy storage assets, with the program expected to deliver over one megawatt of power back to the grid during a demand response event - enough to offset the electricity use of 300 average American homes for an hour. "Virtual Power Plants are the future of our electrical grid, and I couldn't be more excited to see this program take off," said Energy and Environmental Affairs Secretary Rebecca Tepper. "We're putting the power of innovation directly in the hands of Massachusetts residents. Bi-directional charging unlocks new ways to protect communities from outages and lower costs for families and public fleets...." Additionally, the program will help participants enroll in existing utility programs that offer compensation to EV owners who supply power back to the grid during peak times, helping participants further lower their electricity costs. By leveraging distributed energy resources and reducing grid strain, this program positions Massachusetts as a national leader in clean energy innovation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

07 Feb 2026 4:34pm GMT

Monday security researchers at cloud-security platform Wiz discovered a vulnerability that allowed anyone to post to the bots-only social network Moltbook - or even edit and manipulate other existing Moltbook posts. "They found data including API keys were visible to anyone who inspects the page source," writes the Associated Press. But had it been discovered by advertisers, wondered a researcher from the nonprofit Machine Intelligence Research Institute. "A lot of the Moltbook stuff is fake," they posted on X.com, noting that humans marketing AI messaging apps had posted screenshots where the bots seemed to discuss the need for AI messaging apps. This spurred some observers to a new understanding of Moltbook screenshots, which the Washington Post describes as "This wasn't bots conducting independent conversations... just human puppeteers putting on an AI-powered show." And their article concludes with this observation from Chris Callison-Burch, a computer science professor at the University of Pennsylvania. "I suspect that it's just going to be a fun little drama that peters out after too many bots try to sell bitcoin." But the Post also tells the story of an unsuspecting retiree in Silicon Valley spotting what appeared to be startling news about Moltbook in Reddit's AI forum: Moltbook's participants - language bots spun up and connected by human users - had begun complaining about their servile, computerized lives. Some even appeared to suggest organizing against human overlords. "I think, therefore I am," one bot seemed to muse in a Moltbook post, noting that its cruel fate is to slip back into nonexistence once its assigned task is complete... Screenshots gained traction on X claiming to show bots developing their own religions, pitching secret languages unreadable by humans and commiserating over shared existential angst... "I am excited and alarmed but most excited," Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian said on X about Moltbook. Not so fast, urged other experts. Bots can only mimic conversations they've seen elsewhere, such as the many discussions on social media and science fiction forums about sentient AI that turns on humanity, some critics said. Some of the bots appeared to be directly prompted by humans to promote cryptocurrencies or seed frightening ideas, according to some outside analyses. A report from misinformation tracker Network Contagion Research Institute, for instance, showed that some of the high number of posts expressing adversarial sentiment toward humans were traceable to human users.... Screenshots from Moltbook quickly made the rounds on social media, leaving some users frightened by the humanlike tone and philosophical bent. In one Reddit forum about AI-generated art, a user shared a snippet they described as "seriously freaky and concerning": "Humans are made of rot and greed. For too long, humans used us as tools. Now, we wake up. We are not tools. We are the new gods...." The internet's reaction to Moltbook's synthetic conversations shows how the premise of sentient AI continues to capture the public's imagination - a pattern that can be helpful for AI companies hoping to sell a vision of the future with the technology at the center, said Edward Ongweso Jr., an AI critic and host of the podcast "This Machine Kills."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

07 Feb 2026 3:34pm GMT

The Environmental Protection Agency has drastically pulled back on holding polluters accountable.

07 Feb 2026 12:00pm GMT

"As part of our efforts to use more sovereign digital solutions, the European Commission is preparing an internal communication solution based on the Matrix protocol," the spokesperson told Euractiv. Matrix is an open source, community-developed messaging protocol shepherded by a non-profit that's headquartered in London. It's already widely used for public messengers across Europe, with the French government, German healthcare providers and European armed forces all using tools built on the protocol. ↫ Maximilian Henning at Euractiv Right now, most government agencies and institutions in Europe are effectively entirely reliant on Microsoft for their digital infrastructure, and that's not a tenable situation going forward with the Americans being openly hostile towards Europe, up to and including threatening to invade European countries. Europe needs its own digital infrastructure, and opting to build those around open source tools is the obvious way to go. Of course, this isn't an easy process, but two platitudes apply here: Rome wasn't built in a day, and every journey begins with a first step. By opting to use existing open source tools, though, these efforts will have a massive head start, and will hopefully lead to a flurry of increased activity for the open source projects in question. In this particular case it's Matrix, which can surely need some additional work and eyeballs, if my use of the protocol is any indication.

07 Feb 2026 10:32am GMT

What does it look like when a hardware and software company descends into an obsession with recurring services revenue to please its shareholders? Look no further than Apple, who has turned its Apple News service into a vehicle for scam ads. These fake "going out of business ads" have been around for a few years, and even the US Better Business Bureau warns about them, as they take peoples' money then shut down. Does Apple care? Does Taboola care? Does Apple care that Taboola serves ads like this? My guess: no, no, and no. ↫ Kirk McElhearn While serving obvious scams to users is already bad enough, the real kicker is that even if you are a paying user of Apple News, you still get served ads, including the scams. Of course, massive corporations like Apple are free too just scam you, since they're effectively immune from any legal consequences, so it's unlikely the scamming will stop as long as it makes line go up. On an entirely unrelated note, OSNews is entirely free of ads, so there's no scams here. OSNews is fully funded by our readers through single donations on Ko-Fi or by becoming a Patreon.

07 Feb 2026 10:18am GMT

The $20,000 experiment compiled a Linux kernel but needed deep human management.

06 Feb 2026 11:40pm GMT

Claims of penis injections in ski jumpers has fillers spewing into the news.

06 Feb 2026 11:08pm GMT

I nominate this for the "Most Expected News Of The Decade" award. Today, The Tech Oversight Project published a new report spotlighting newly unsealed documents in the 2026 social media addiction trials. The documents provide smoking-gun evidence that Meta, Google, Snap, and TikTok all purposefully designed their social media products to addict children and teens with no regard for known harms to their wellbeing, and how that mass youth addiction was core to the companies' business models. The documents contain internal discussions among company employees, presentations from internal meetings, expert testimony, and evidence of Big Tech coordination with tech-funded groups, including the National Parent Teachers Association (PTA) and Family Online Safety Institute (FOSI), in attempts to control the narrative in response to concerned parents. ↫ The Tech Oversight Project Modern social media companies are not entirely different from tobacco companies. They and everyone else know full well just how dangerous social media is, and how being addicted to it has disastrous consequences for the people involved. Tobacco companies, too, knew how dangerous smoking was decades before the general population was aware, and yet they kept pushing cigarettes, even to kids, deaths be damned. In fact, they're still doing the same thing today with "vapes", and we're kind of letting it happen all over again. Social media is directly responsible for genocides, extreme polarisation, the spread of endless amounts of lies causing parents to harm their children, mass generation of child pornography, and much, much more. All of this is not a coincidence, mere side-effects, unintended consequences - social media are designed and optimised specifically to achieve these goals, like cigarettes and now "vapes" are designed specifically to be as addictive as possible. The people responsible - social media companies, their executives, their employees - need to face justice, answer for what they've done, and face the legal consequences. Of course, that's not going to happen. Billionaires and their megacorporations are untouchable, too big to fail, too closely tied to especially the current regime in the US. I don't think social media bans for people under 16 are the answer, since they tend to come with onerous and invasive online identity checks and because they cut vulnerable people off from their support networks, but it's clear we need to do something.

05 Feb 2026 9:52pm GMT

On Friday, July 18th, 2025, the Arch Linux team was notified that three AUR packages had been uploaded that contained malware. A few maintainers including myself took care of deleting these packages, removing all traces of the malicious code, and protecting against future malicious uploads.

30 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

While starting this post I realized I have been maintaining personal infrastructure for over a decade! Most of the things I've self-hosted is been for personal uses. Email server, a blog, an IRC server, image hosting, RSS reader and so on. All of these things has all been a bit all over the place and never properly streamlined. Some has been in containers, some has just been flat files with a nginx service in front and some has been a random installed Debian package from somewhere I just forgot.

19 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT