computers

17 Jun 2026

Slashdot

AI and Brain-Computer Interface Allow Speechless ALS Patient To Work a Full-Time Job

UC Davis researchers say an implanted brain-computer interface has allowed Casey Harrell, an ALS patient who cannot speak, to synthesize sentences from brain activity with 99% accuracy in controlled tests and about 92% accuracy in everyday use. The Register reports that the system has remained usable at home since 2023, helping Harrell communicate naturally, control a computer, and return to full-time work without researchers needing to supervise each session. The Register reports: A team of scientists from the University of California, Davis, published a paper Monday detailing a years-long study of a brain computer interface (BCI) system implanted in a patient with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS, also known as Lou Gehrig's disease), which destroys motor neurons and causes loss of motor control and eventual paralysis. According to the team, their patient, Casey Harrell, has been living with BCI implants since 2023 that are still working today, giving him the ability not only to control a computer cursor with his thoughts, but also to speak. [...] Davis neurosurgeon David Brandman, co-principal investigator and co-senior author of the paper published Monday, as well as the surgeon who placed Harrell's implant, described the results his team published as the crossing of a threshold in BCI technology: Not only has Harrell's implant been working well with daily use since 2023, but it's also incredibly accurate. In controlled tests, the system managed to synthesize sentences from Harrell's brain activity with 99 percent accuracy; outside of the lab in daily use, Harrell still assessed it as being accurate 92 percent of the time. "The key thing to me is that it's enabling everyday communication for a guy who wants to talk but can't," Brandman told The Register in an interview. "Despite being paralyzed [Harrell] has gone back to work full time and has meaningful conversations with his daughter who's never heard the sound of his voice." Prior work in the BCI space, Brandman told us, has either required researchers to be in a patient's home whenever they're using the tech, or for the patient to come to the researchers. That's not the case here, with the system allowing Harrell's home care team to hook him up to the system themselves, enabling him to use the device for more than 3,800 hours in the past few years. Based on the time the study was filed (It published Monday but went into peer review in July 2025) that would mean Harrell was using the device for more than five hours a day, on average. "It is a life that is more full of dynamic action and with friends and family, with colleagues, and it is something that allows me to communicate more in my natural way of communicating than any other technology that I have experienced," Harrell told UC Davis via his BCI system.

HPE Tempts VMware Users, Partners With Year of Free Virtualization Software

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Hewlett Packard Enterprise's (HPE) new virtualization software promotion will likely pique the interest of end users and resellers who are unhappy with Broadcom's pricing of VMware. During its HPE Discover event in Las Vegas this week, HPE announced that customers could use its "HPE Morpheus Software -- VM Essentials" offering for free for "up to one year," per a press release. HPE's website describes its virtualization platform as a "VMware alternative." It includes a hardware virtual machine (HVM) hypervisor and unified management and lets users "manage VMware ESXi and HVM clusters from one console and migrate when you're ready," HPE's website says. "New VM Essentials customers can receive up to one free year of licenses for VM Essentials, a year of HPE Zerto for $1 to support non-disruptive migration to HPE virtual machines, and 0 percent interest on software through HPE Financial Services," HPE's announcement reads, referring to HPE's group for helping IT teams manage funding. Free for a year is cheaper than what Broadcom has charged for VMware vSphere since taking over. VMware prices have skyrocketed due to VMware's parent company eliminating perpetual licenses and bundling products into expensive packages. Notably, per its website, HPE recommends charging $600 per CPU socket per year for VM Essentials; Broadcom has controversially shifted vSphere licensing pricing to a per-core basis. "Customers are feeling quite a bit of pain in the change that some of the virtualization companies have put there, specifically Broadcom," Jeremiah Jenson, VP of HPE's North American channel and partner ecosystem, told CRN. The executive claimed that VM Essentials could bring up to 90 percent cost savings compared to VMware while also helping to "eliminate vendor lock-in and simplify hybrid IT." From March 1 to June 30, HPE has also been offering a free year of VM Essentials via rebate to customers who buy an AMD server and a one-year VM Essentials license. VM Essentials is only available through channel partners, a stark contrast from Broadcom's VMware approach, where the chip giant has drastically reduced the number of resellers that can sell VMware products. HPE's new promotion aims to entice customers to more deeply consider migrating off VMware. [...] HPE also announced that it would give 600 reseller partners who earn the HPE partner program's Private Cloud with Virtualization competency by the end of the year free VM Essentials software licenses for three years. Partners still have to pay support costs, though. The benefit is "a step in the correct direction," said Dean Colpitts, CTO of Canadian managed services provider (MSP) Members IT Group (MITG), which VMware cut from its reseller program after 19 years of partnership a year ago. However, limiting the promotion to 600 partners is "very shortsighted." He believes that HPE should give all of its partners VM Essentials "to facilitate getting [VM Essentials] into customer sites and displacing the competitors." "They need to fling [VM Essentials] as far and as fast as they possibly [can] to immediately gain traction and draw ISVs to them, which will increase adoption even more," he said.

16 Jun 2026

Slashdot

Commodore's Callback 8020 Is a $499 Flip Phone That Blocks Social Media and Browsers

Commodore has unveiled the Callback 8020, a $499 Sailfish OS flip phone that runs most Android apps but deliberately blocks social media, browsers, email, and workplace apps to discourage doomscrolling. The "not dumb dumbphone" still supports messaging, music, maps, ridesharing, hotspots, a removable battery, and plenty of Commodore nostalgia. "The phone uses T9-style texting with predictive input, includes Commodore SID ringtones, ships with a selection of Commodore and Sailfish games, and even includes Snake," reports TechSpot. From the report: Commodore says it has developed patent-pending technology that prevents browsers and social media apps from being sideloaded, while DNS-level blocking should stop them from working even if someone finds a way to install them. Users can still sideload nearly anything else if it's not available on the Commostore, but apps designed for doomscrolling remain off limits. That means useful services such as WhatsApp, SMS, Signal, Telegram, WeChat, Spotify, Uber, Lyft, maps, podcasts, QR scanning, voice notes, and hotspot support work, but the likes of Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Gmail, and browsers do not. The Callback 8020 has a 3.25-inch 480 x 640 internal display, a MediaTek Helio G81 chip, 4GB of RAM, 64GB of storage, a 48MP Sony rear camera, an autofocus front camera, dual SIM support, USB-C, a headphone jack, FM radio, and something many of us miss from flagships: a removable battery. There's no 5G as Commodore argues that 4G VoLTE and Wi-Fi better fit a device meant to discourage constant streaming and scrolling. [...] The main screen is touch-capable but disabled by default, while the outer display keeps things deliberately sparse, showing basics such as time, battery, signal, and notifications via dome LEDs. The 8020 name is a nod to Commodore's 8010 modem from 1980. The phone comes in ProtoPET White, SX Silver, BASIC Beige, a translucent Starlight Edition, and a gold Founders Edition with a 24-karat gold-plated Commodore button. Standard models start at $499, the Starlight version is $549.99, and the Founders Edition costs $640. Preorders open June 30, with shipping targeted for winter. You can watch the launch ad on YouTube.

Ars Technica

Trump admin tries to block Clean Air Act lawsuit over xAI's gas turbines

NAACP lawsuit says xAI uses gas turbines without permits for Grok data center.

16 Jun 2026 10:22pm GMT

Year of free HPE software a “step in the correct direction” in VMware rivalry

Partner tells Ars that HPE should be giving out more free VM Essentials licenses.

16 Jun 2026 10:11pm GMT

Cockroaches scurry around with thousands of pieces of bacterial genomes

Transferring genes across species doesn't just happen in microbes.

16 Jun 2026 9:54pm GMT

OSnews

KDE Plasma 6.7 released

The KDE team released KDE Plasma 6.7 today, and with it comes a long list of improvements, new features, bug fixes, new old themes, and so much more. A new feature that is sure to please those among us who use virtual desktops: you can now have different virtual desktop setups per display. It's been a long-requested feature, so it's great to see it makes its way to the KDE users. I despise virtual desktops, but I'm happy to see something that I assumed was already part of KDE to finally actually become available. Another major feature in KDE Plasma 6.7 is something we've already talked about: the return of the classic Oxygen and Air themes from the KDE 4.x days. These themes have seen extensive work over the past year or so to make them usable on the latest KDE release, which includes tons of bug fixes, visual nips and tucks, and countless additions to the collection of assets required to make a modern KDE theme look complete. This includes a ton of new icons in the old styles, light and dark modes, accent colour support, and much more. There's still work left here, including adding support for QtQuick/Kirigami applications - which brings us to the next major new addition to KDE 6.7 This is also something we've already talked about: Union. I won't repeat what I already explained last time Union came up, but suffice it to say that Union effectively unifies the various different ways KDE applications are themed, allowing theme designers to use relatively standard CSS to create themes that cover every aspect of the KDE user experience. Before Union, theme designers had to create individual, unique themes for a variety of parts of KDE - the Plasma desktop, QtWidgets using QStyle, QtQuick/Kirigami - which was a ton of work, and in the case of QtQuick/Kirigami, wasn't really possible at all. As such, without Union, KDE's theming is essentially broken, and Union fixes that. For now, Union is not enabled by default, and must be installed and enabled separately for testing. Of course, there's a ton of other smaller new features, changes, and bug fixes as well. KDE Plasma 6.7 will find its way to your distribution soon enough.

16 Jun 2026 8:20pm GMT

Apple adds keylogger to iOS App Store for targeted advertising: tied to your account and unencrypted

A week or so ago, Apple announced a bunch of features for the App Store on iOS, including personalised recommendations based on your activity and usage of iOS. It turns out this includes a keylogger (taplogger?) in the App Store, which records every single tap you make, every single letter you enter, and a lot of other information. All of this information is unencrypted and sent to Apple. Now Apple is putting the extensive identifiable analytics they collect in the App Store in action. They record every tap and there's no way to turn it off. They can even calculate your typing speed. ↫ Michael Tsai, quoting Mysk The provided screenshots of the data collected are terrifying, especially because the data is unencrypted, sent to Apple, and fully tied to your user account. Apple clearly wants a slice of that big, juicy advertising pie, and they, too, are discovering that the easiest and best way to serve targeted ads is to collect as much data as they can about you. Of course, this is something the entire internet (but not OSNews!) and several megacorporations are built on by now, but Apple has been incredibly sanctimonious about how it supposedly actually cares about user privacy, making this keylogger yet another case of Apple's hypocrisy on full display. Of course, if you care about privacy, you're entirely free to download your iOS applications from somewhere other than the App Store and install them yours… Oh, wait.

16 Jun 2026 6:41pm GMT

The time the Windows x86 emulator team found code so bad that they fixed it during emulation

Another story from the good old days from Raymond Chen. During an exchange of war stories, a colleague of mine told one from back in the days when Windows included a processor emulator for x86-32 on systems that natively ran some other processor. (This has happened many times. And no, I don't know which processor this particular story applied to.) ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing So the core of the story comes down to this: All in all, it took this program 256 kilobytes of code to initialize 64 kilobytes of data. ↫ Raymond Chen at The Old New Thing The people working on Windows were so offended by this, they added code to the processor emulator just to fix this program.

16 Jun 2026 1:53pm GMT