fidzu : computers

The UK's Ministry of Justice has ordered the deletion of the country's largest court reporting archive [non-paywalled source], a database built by data analysis company Courtsdesk that more than 1,500 journalists across 39 media organizations have used since the lord chancellor approved the project in 2021. Courtsdesk's research found that journalists received no advance notice of 1.6 million criminal hearings, that court case listings were accurate on just 4.2% of sitting days, and that half a million weekend cases were heard without any press notification. In November, HM Courts and Tribunal Service issued a cessation notice citing "unauthorized sharing" of court data based on a test feature. Courtsdesk says it wrote 16 times asking for dialogue and requested a referral to the Information Commissioner's Office; no referral was made. The government issued a final refusal last week, and the archive must now be deleted within days. Chris Philp, the former justice minister who approved the pilot and now shadow home secretary, has written to courts minister Sarah Sackman demanding the decision be reversed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 Feb 2026 6:01pm GMT

Reports of the compact disc's death may have been slightly premature, according to a new analysis from Stat Significant that finds CD sales as a share of U.S. music industry revenue have quietly stabilized after years of steep decline. RIAA data shows CD revenue share fell from 7.15% in 2018 to 3.04% in 2022 but has since flatlined at roughly 3%, coming in at 3.14% in 2023 and 3.06% in 2024. Google search traffic for "CD Player" has ticked upward over the past 16 months after two decades of near-continuous decline, and a May 2023 YouGov poll found 53% of American adults willing to pay for music on CDs -- ahead of vinyl at 44% and online streaming at 50%. Respondents under 45 were more likely to express interest in buying physical formats than older cohorts. But on the supply side, Discogs data shows vinyl remains the dominant format for new physical releases; artists have not meaningfully shifted back toward CD production.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 Feb 2026 5:00pm GMT

HP has quietly launched a gaming laptop subscription service called the OMEN Gaming Subscription that lets customers pay a monthly fee to use one of several gaming laptops but never actually own the hardware, even after paying well past the machine's retail price. The service ranges from $50 a month for an HP Victus 15-inch laptop with an RTX 4050 to $130 a month for an Omen Max 16 with an RTX 5080. At current sale prices, subscribers would exceed the cost of buying the laptop outright within 16 to 19 months; at MSRP, that window stretches to roughly 25 months. In exchange for giving up ownership, subscribers get yearly hardware upgrades, next-day replacements, 24/7 support, and an ongoing warranty. There is a 30-day trial period, but cancelling in the second month triggers steep early termination fees -- $550 for the Victus 15 and $1,430 for the Omen Max 16. Cancellation becomes free only after the 13th month. HP also offers accessories like the HyperX Cloud Alpha Wireless headset as add-on rentals for $8 a month.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 Feb 2026 4:00pm GMT

The EPA is revoking the finding for legal, not scientific, reasons.

11 Feb 2026 3:10pm GMT

Violators were told they would be shot down.

11 Feb 2026 1:16pm GMT

Some brands are already ahead of the curve, while others leave the US in the cold.

11 Feb 2026 12:00pm GMT

Another month, another Redox progress report. January turned out to be a big month for the Rust-based general purpose operating system, as they've cargo and rustc working on Redox. Cargo and rustc are now working on Redox! Thanks to Anhad Singh and his southern-hemisphere Redox Summer of Code project, we are now able to compile your favorite Rust CLI and TUI programs on Redox. Compilers are often one of the most challenging things for a new operating system to support, because of the intensive and somewhat scattershot use of resources. ↫ Ribbon and Ron Williams That's not all for January, though. An initial capability-based security infrastructure has been implemented for granular permissions, SSH support has been improved and now works properly for remoting into aRedox sessions, and USB input latency has been massively reduced. You can now also add, remove, and change boot parameters in a new text editing environment in the bootloader, and the login manager now has power and keyboard layout menus. January also saw the first commit made entirely from within Redox, which is pretty neat. Of course, there's much more, as well as the usual slew of kernel, glibc, and application bugfixes and small changes.

10 Feb 2026 11:42pm GMT

I'm currently building an 80386-compatible core in SystemVerilog, driven by the original Intel microcode extracted from real 386 silicon. Real mode is now operational in simulation, with more than 10,000 single-instruction test cases passing successfully, and work on protected-mode features is in progress. In the course of this work, corners of the 386 microcode and silicon have been examined in detail; this series documents the resulting findings. In the previous post, we looked at multiplication and division - iterative algorithms that process one bit per cycle. Shifts and rotates are a different story: the 386 has a dedicated barrel shifter that completes an arbitrary multi-bit shift in a single cycle. What's interesting is how the microcode makes one piece of hardware serve all shift and rotate variants - and how the complex rotate-through-carry instructions are handled. ↫ nand2mario I understood some of this.

10 Feb 2026 11:33pm GMT

For me, vim is a combination of genuine improvements in vi's core editing behavior (cf), frustrating (to me) bits of trying too hard to be smart (which I mostly disable when I run across them), and an extension mechanism I ignore but people use to make vim into a superintelligent editor with things like LSP integrations. Some of the improvements and additions to vi's core editing may be things that Bill Joy either didn't think of or didn't think were important enough. However, I feel strongly that some or even many of omitted features and differences are a product of the limited environments vi had to operate in. The poster child for this is vi's support of only a single level of undo, which drastically constrains the potential memory requirements (and implementation complexity) of undo, especially since a single editing operation in vi can make sweeping changes across a large file (consider a whole-file ':…s/../../' substitution, for example). ↫ Chris Siebenmann I have only very limited needs when it comes to command-line text editors, and as such, I absolutely swear by the simplicity of nano. In other words, I'm probably not the right person to dive into the editor debate that's been raging for decades, but reading Siebenmann's points I can't help but agree. In this day and age, defaulting an editor that has only one level of undo is insanity, and I can't imagine doing the kind of complex work people who use command-line editors do while being limited to just one window. As for the debate about operating systems that symlink the vi command to vim or a similar improved variant of vi, I feel like that's the wrong thing to do. Much like how I absolutely despise how macOS hides its UNIX-y file system structure from the GUI, leading to bizarre ls results in the terminal, I don't think you should be tricking users. If a user enters vi, it should launch vi, and not something that kind of looks like vi but isn't. Computers shouldn't be lying to users. If they don't want their users to be using vi, they shouldn't be installing vi in the first place.

10 Feb 2026 11:28pm 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