fidzu : computers

The SEC has granted the Depository Trust & Clearing Corp., or DTCC, a no-action letter allowing it to custody and recognize tokenized stocks, ETFs, and Treasuries on approved blockchains for three years. "Although this program is a pilot subject to various operational limitations, it marks a significant incremental step in moving markets onchain," SEC Commissioner Hester Peirce said in a statement. Bloomberg reports: With the permission, DTCC will also extend their record-keeping to the blockchain, Michael Winnike, global head of strategy and market solutions at DTCC Clearing & Securities Services, said in an interview. "It's the same legal entitlement, the same stock that you would hold in your account from the DTCC in traditional form," Winnike said. [...] The SEC's authorization of tokenization services only applies to a specific set of securities that trade often. The approval includes the Russell 1000 index which represents the 1,000 largest publicly traded US companies, as well as exchange-traded funds that track major indices and US Treasury bills, bonds and notes, Winnike said. "This allows us both to create value for the markets, while staying in a pre-defined pool of highly-liquid securities to start," said Winnike. The firm's ultimate aspiration is to add its entire depository, which represents $100 trillion in securities, to the blockchain, a move that would require further expansion of the no-action relief from the SEC, he said. Winnike said the tokenization service will help bridge the traditional and digital worlds in part because the new technology will have the same legal entitlements and controls as traditional markets, including freezing or forced transfers if assets are stolen. "This enables participants to adopt and integrate, because they know there is a trusted party that can recover their securities as needed" and can address potential errors, he said. The new blockchain service will also allow investors to move assets all the time, not just Monday through Friday when traditional markets are open. "That creates a lot of new utility," Winnike said. "It brings the two ecosystems together."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Dec 2025 10:00am GMT

Cadmium zinc telluride (CZT), a hard-to-manufacture semiconductor produced by only a handful of companies, is enabling a quiet revolution in medical imaging, science, and security by delivering faster scans, lower radiation doses, and far more precise X-ray and gamma-ray detection. "You get beautiful pictures from this scanner," says Dr Kshama Wechalekar, head of nuclear medicine and PET. "It's an amazing feat of engineering and physics." The BBC reports: Kromek is one of just a few firms in the world that can make CZT. You may never have heard of the stuff but, in Dr Wechalekar's words, it is enabling a "revolution" in medical imaging. This wonder material has many other uses, such as in X-ray telescopes, radiation detectors and airport security scanners. And it is increasingly sought-after. Investigations of patients' lungs performed by Dr Wechalekar and her colleagues involve looking for the presence of many tiny blood clots in people with long Covid, or a larger clot known as a pulmonary embolism, for example. The 1-million-pound scanner works by detecting gamma rays emitted by a radioactive substance that is injected into patients' bodies. But the scanner's sensitivity means less of this substance is needed than before: "We can reduce doses about 30%," says Dr Wechalekar. While CZT-based scanners are not new in general, large, whole-body scanners such as this one are a relatively recent innovation. CZT itself has been around for decades but it is notoriously difficult to manufacture. "It has taken a long time for it to develop into an industrial-scale production process," says Arnab Basu, founding chief executive of Kromek. [...] The newly formed CZT, a semiconductor, can detect tiny photon particles in X-rays and gamma rays with incredible precision -- like a highly specialized version of the light-sensing, silicon-based image sensor in your smartphone camera. Whenever a high energy photon strikes the CZT, it mobilizes an electron and this electrical signal can be used to make an image. Earlier scanner technology used a two-step process, which was not as precise. "It's digital," says Dr Basu. "It's a single conversion step. It retains all the important information such as timing, the energy of the X-ray that is hitting the CZT detector -- you can create color, or spectroscopic images."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Dec 2025 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Do Kwon, the South Korean cryptocurrency entrepreneur behind two digital currencies that lost an estimated $40 billion in 2022, was sentenced in New York federal court on Thursday to 15 years in prison for fraud and conspiracy. Kwon, 34, who co-founded Singapore-based Terraform Labs and developed the TerraUSD and Luna currencies, previously pleaded guilty and admitted to misleading investors about a coin that was supposed to maintain a steady price during periods of crypto market volatility. Kwon was one of several cryptocurrency moguls to face federal charges after a slump in digital token prices in 2022 prompted the collapse of a number of companies. [...] Kwon was accused of misleading investors in 2021 about TerraUSD, a so-called stablecoin designed to maintain a value of $1. Prosecutors alleged that when TerraUSD slipped below its $1 peg in May 2021, Kwon told investors a computer algorithm known as "Terra Protocol" had restored the coin's value. Instead, Kwon arranged for a high-frequency trading firm to secretly buy millions of dollars of the token to artificially prop up its price, according to charging documents. "I made false and misleading statements about why it regained its peg by failing to disclose a trading firm's role in restoring that peg," Kwon said in court. "What I did was wrong." He also faces charges in South Korea, and under his plea deal, prosecutors won't oppose his transfer abroad after he serves half of his U.S. sentence.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

12 Dec 2025 3:30am GMT

Original KOTOR director Casey Hudson returns to Star Wars with new studio Arcanaut.

12 Dec 2025 2:51am GMT

Preview: Order of the Sinking Star started small but became a "combinatoric explosion."

12 Dec 2025 1:50am GMT

Runway joins a competitive field alongside Google, Nvidia, and others.

11 Dec 2025 11:47pm GMT

System76, creator of Pop!_OS and prominent Linux OEM, has just announced the release of Pop!_OS 24.04 LTS - normally not something I particularly care about, but in this case, it comes with the first stable release of COSMIC Desktop. COSMIC is a brand new desktop environment by System76, written in Rust, and after quite some time in development, it's now out in the wild as a stable release. Today is special not only in that it's the culmination of over three years of work, but even more so in that System76 has built a complete desktop environment for the open source community. We're proud of this contribution to the open source ecosystem. COSMIC is built on the ethos that the best open source projects enable people to not only use them, but to build with them. COSMIC is modular and composable. It's the flagship experience for Pop!_OS in its own way, and can be adapted by anyone that wants to build their own unique user experience for Linux. ↫ Carl Richell You don't need to run Pop!_OS to try out COSMIC, as it's already available on a variety of other distributions (although it may take a bit for this stable version to land in the respective repositories).

11 Dec 2025 8:33pm GMT

I'm sure most of us here are aware of the bright red-and-yellow colour scheme called "Hot Dog Stand", included in Windows 3.1. While it's not the only truly garish colour scheme included in Windows 3.1, its name probably did a lot to make it stand out from the others. There's been a ton of speculation about the origins of the colour scheme, and why it was included in Windows 3.1, but it seems nobody ever bothered to look for someone who actually worked on the Windows 3.1 user interface - until now. PC Gamer's Wes Fenlon contacted Virginia Howlett, Microsoft's first user interface designer who joined the company in 1985, and asked her about the infamous colour scheme. It turns out that the origin story for the infamous colour scheme is rather mundane. In Howlett's own words: I do remember some discussion about whether we should include it, and some snarky laughter. But it was not intended as a joke. It was not inspired by any hot dog stands, and it was not included as an example of a bad interface-although it was one. It was just a garish choice, in case somebody out there liked ugly bright red and yellow. ↫ Virginia Howlett, quoted by Wes Fenlon in PC Gamer Howlett then lists a few other included colour schemes that were just as garish, or even more so, as examples to underline her point. Personally, I'm a huge proponent of allowing users to make their interfaces as ugly and garish as they want, as the only arbiter on what's on your screen is you, and nobody else. Hot Dog Stand and similar garish themes need to make a comeback, because there's bound to be some people out there whose vibes align with it.

11 Dec 2025 8:17pm GMT

IBM owns Red Hat which in turn runs Fedora, the popular desktop Linux distribution. Sadly, shit rolls downhill, so we're starting to see some worrying signs that Fedora is going to be used a means to push "AI". Case in point, this article in the Fedora Magazine: Generative AI systems are changing the way people interact with computers. MCP (model context protocol) is a way that enables generate AI systems to run commands and use tools to enable live, conversational interaction with systems. Using the new linux-mcp-server, let's walk through how you can talk with your Fedora system for understanding your system and getting help troubleshooting it! ↫ Máirín Duffy and Brian Smith at Fedora Magazine This "linux-mcp-server" tool is developed by IBM's Red Hat, and of course, IBM has a vested interest in further increasing the size of the "AI" bubble. As such, it makes sense from their perspective to start pushing "AI" services and tools all the way down to the Fedora community, ending up with articles like this one. What's sad is that even in this article, which surely uses the best possible examples, it's hard to see how any of it could possibly be any faster than doing the example tasks without the "help" of an "AI". In the first example, the "AI" is supposed to figure out why the computer is having Wi-Fi connection issues, and while it does figure that out, the solutions it presents are really dumb and utterly wrong. Most notably, even though this is an article about running these tools on a Fedora system, written for Fedora Magazine, the "AI" stubbornly insists on using apt for every solution, which is a basic, stupid mistake that doesn't exactly instill confidence in any of its other findings being accurate. The second example involves asking the "AI" to explain how much disk space the system is using, and why. The "prompt" (the human-created "question" the "AI" is supposed to "answer") is bonkers long - it's a 117 words long monstrosity, formatted into several individual questions - and the output is so verbose and it takes such a scattershot approach that following-up on everything is going to take a huge amount of time. Within that same time frame, it would've been not only much faster, but also much more user-friendly to just open Filelight (installed by default as part of KDE), which creates a nice diagram which instantly shows you what is taking up space, and why. The third example is about creating an update readiness report for upgrading from Fedora 42 to Fedora 43, and its "prompt" is even longer at 190 words, and writing that up with all those individual questions must've taken more time than to just… Do a simple dry-run of a dnf system upgrade which gets you like 90% of the way there. Here, too, the "AI" blurts out so much information, much of which entirely useless, that going through it all takes more time than just manually checking up on a dnf dry run and peaking at your disk space usage. All this effort to set all of this up, and so much effort to carefully craft complex "prompts", only to end up with clearly wrong information, and way too much superfluous information that just ends up distracting you from the task you set out to accmplish. Is this really the kind of future of computing we're supposed to be rooting for? Is this the kind of stuff Fedora's new "AI" policy is supposed to enable? If so, I'm afraid the disconnect between Fedora's leadership and whatever its users actually use Fedora for is far, far wider than I imagined.

11 Dec 2025 7:51pm GMT

The following packages may require manual intervention due to the upgrade from 9.0 to 10.0:

• aspnet-runtime
• aspnet-targeting-pack
• dotnet-runtime
• dotnet-sdk
• dotnet-source-built-artifacts
• dotnet-targeting-pack

pacman may display the following error failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies) for the affected packages. If you are affected by this and require the 9.0 packages, the following commands will update e.g. aspnet-runtime to aspnet-runtime-9.0: pacman -Syu aspnet-runtime-9.0 pacman -Rs aspnet-runtime

11 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people's beds. A little over a week later Microsoft Azure had a [widespread outage][Azure outage] that managed to significantly disrupt train service in the Netherlands, and probably also things that matter. Now last week, Cloudflare takes down large swaths of the internet in a way that causes non-tech people to learn Cloudflare exists. And every single time, people share that one XKCD comic.

24 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

After Gandi was bought up and started taking extortion level prices for their domains I've been looking for an excuse to migrate registrar. Last week I decided to bite the bullet and move to Porkbun as I have another domain renewal coming up. However after setting up an account and paying for the transfer for 4 domains, I realized their DNS services are provided by Cloudflare! I personally do not use Cloudflare, and stay far away from all of their products for various reasons.

18 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT