fidzu : computers

The Federal Trade Commission and attorneys general from seven states filed an 84-page lawsuit Thursday in federal court in California against Live Nation Entertainment and its Ticketmaster subsidiary. The suit alleges the companies knowingly allow ticket brokers to use multiple accounts to circumvent purchase limits and acquire thousands of tickets per event for resale at higher prices. The FTC claims this practice violates the Better Online Ticket Sales Act and generates hundreds of millions in revenue through a "triple dip" fee structure -- collecting fees on initial broker purchases, then from both brokers and consumers on secondary market sales. FTC Chairman Andrew Ferguson cited President Trump's March executive order requiring federal protection against ticketing practices. The lawsuit arrives one month after the FTC sued Maryland broker Key Investment Group over Taylor Swift tour price-gouging and follows the Department of Justice's 2024 monopoly suit against Live Nation.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Sep 2025 8:01pm GMT

An anonymous reader shares a report: A software update rolling out to Samsung's Family Hub refrigerators in the US is putting ads on the fridges for the first time. The "promotions and curated advertisements" are coming despite Samsung insisting to The Verge in April that it had "no plans" to do so. Samsung is calling it a pilot program for now, which -- I kid you not -- is meant to "strengthen the value" of owning a Samsung smart fridge.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Sep 2025 7:01pm GMT

Chinese AI developer DeepSeek said it spent $294,000 on training its R1 model, much lower than figures reported for U.S. rivals, in a paper that is likely to reignite debate over Beijing's place in the race to develop artificial intelligence. Reuters: The rare update from the Hangzhou-based company -- the first estimate it has released of R1's training costs -- appeared in a peer-reviewed article in the academic journal Nature published on Wednesday. DeepSeek's release of what it said were lower-cost AI systems in January prompted global investors to dump tech stocks as they worried the new models could threaten the dominance of AI leaders including Nvidia. Since then, the company and founder Liang Wenfeng have largely disappeared from public view, apart from pushing out a few new product updates. [...] The Nature article, which listed Liang as one of the co-authors, said DeepSeek's reasoning-focused R1 model cost $294,000 to train and used 512 Nvidia H800 chips. Sam Altman, CEO of U.S. AI giant OpenAI, said in 2023 that what he called "foundational model training" had cost "much more" than $100 million - though his company has not given detailed figures for any of its releases.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Sep 2025 6:02pm GMT

Samsung's "pilot program" is likely just the beginning.

18 Sep 2025 5:32pm GMT

Disney does FCC chair's bidding, suspends Kimmel show over Charlie Kirk comment.

18 Sep 2025 5:10pm GMT

Intel once considered buying Nvidia outright, but its fortunes have shifted.

18 Sep 2025 4:47pm GMT

GNOME 49 has been released, and it's got a lot of nice updates, improvements, and fixes for everyone. GNOME 49 finally replaces the ageing Totem video player with Showtime, and Evince, GNOME's document viewer, is replaced by the new Papers. Both of these new applications bring a modern GTK4 user interface to replace their older GTK3 counterparts. Papers supports a ton of both document-oriented as well as comic book formats, and has annotation features. We've already touched on the extensive accessibility improvements in GNOME Calendar, but other applications have been improved as well, such as Maps, Software, and Web. Software's improvements focus on improving the application's performance, especially when dealing with Flatpaks from Flathub, while Web, GNOME's web browser, comes with improved ad blocking and optional regional blocklists, better bookmark management, improved security features, and more. The remote desktop experience also saw a lot of work, with multitouch input support, extended virtual monitors, and relative mouse input. For developers, GNOME 49 comes with the new GTK 4.20, the latest version of Glib, and Libadwaita 1.8, released only a few days ago. It brings a brand new shortcuts information dialog as its most user-facing feature, on top of a whole bunch of other, developer-oriented features. GNOME 49 will find its way to your distribution of choice soon enough.

17 Sep 2025 10:33pm GMT

It's 2025, and yes, you can still install and run a modern Linux distribution like Debian through a real hardware terminal. While I have used a terminal with the Pi, I've never before used it as a serial console all the way from early boot, and I have never installed Debian using the terminal to run the installer. A serial terminal gives you a login prompt. A serial console gives you access to kernel messages, the initrd environment, and sometimes even the bootloader. This might be fun, I thought. ↫ John Goerzen at The Changelog It seems Debian does a lot of the correct configurations for you, but there's still a few things you'll need to manually change, but none of it seems particularly complicated. Once the installation is completed, you have a system that's completely accessible and usable from a hardware terminal, which, while maybe not particularly important in this day and age of effortless terminal emulators, is still quite a cool thing to have.

17 Sep 2025 8:32pm GMT

Another month, another summary of changes in Haiku, the BeOS-inspired operating system. The main focus this past month has been improving the performance of git status, which has been measurably worse on Haiku than on Linux running on similar hardware. This work has certainly paid off, as the numbers demonstrate. The results are clearly more than worth the trouble, though: in one test setup with git status in Haiku's buildtools repository (which contains the entirety of the gcc and binutils source code, among other things - over 160,000 files) went from around 33 seconds with a cold disk cache, to around 20 seconds; and with a hot disk cache, from around 15 seconds to around 2.5 seconds. This is still a ways off from Linux (with a similar setup in the same repository, git status there with a hot disk cache takes only 0.3 seconds). Performance on Haiku will likely be measurably faster on builds without KDEBUG enabled, but not by that much. Still, this is clearly a significant improvement over the way things were before now. ↫ Haiku Activity & Contract Report, August 2025 There's more than this, of course, such as initial support for Intel's Apollo Lake GPU in the Intel modesetting driver, improvements to USB disk performance, a reduction in power usage when in KDL, and much, much more.

17 Sep 2025 11:33am GMT

https://archlinux.org/news/recent-services-outages/

21 Aug 2025 12:00am GMT

We want to provide an update on the recent service outages affecting our infrastructure. The Arch Linux Project is currently experiencing an ongoing denial of service attack that primarily impacts our main webpage, the Arch User Repository (AUR), and the Forums. We are aware of the problems that this creates for our end users and will continue to actively work with our hosting provider to mitigate the attack. We are also evaluating DDoS protection providers while carefully considering factors including cost, security, and ethical standards. To improve the communication around this issue we will provide regular updates on our service …

21 Aug 2025 12:00am GMT

Starting with 7.4.1-2, the following Zabbix system user accounts (previously shipped by their related packages) will no longer be used. Instead, all Zabbix components will now rely on a shared zabbix user account (as originally intended by upstream and done by other distributions):

• zabbix-server
• zabbix-proxy
• zabbix-agent (also used by the zabbix-agent2 package)
• zabbix-web-service

This shared zabbix user account is provided by the newly introduced zabbix-common split package, which is now a dependency for all relevant zabbix-* packages. The switch to the new user account is handled automatically for the corresponding main configuration files and systemd service units. However, manual intervention may be required if you created custom files or configurations referencing to and / or being owned by the above deprecated users accounts, for example:

• PSK files used for encrypted communication
• Custom scripts for metrics collections or report generations
• sudoers rules for metrics requiring elevated privileges to be collected
• ...

Those should therefore be updated to refer to and / or be owned by the new zabbix user account, otherwise some services or user parameters may fail to work properly, or not at all. Once migrated, you may remove the obsolete user accounts from your system.

04 Aug 2025 12:00am GMT