fidzu : computers

France's Constitutional Council has struck down a law that would have banned children under 15 from social media, ruling that it disproportionately restricted freedom of expression and lacked adequate privacy safeguards around age verification. President Emmanuel Macron has asked the government to rewrite the measure, with the goal of putting a revised version in place before spring 2027. Reuters reports: "The Council holds that the contested provisions, on the one hand, disproportionately infringe upon the freedom of expression and communication and, on the other, fail to provide the legal safeguards necessary to ensure the right to respect for private life," it said. French lawmakers had approved the bill in July, becoming the first in Europe to follow Australia, whose world-first ban barred access to platforms including Facebook, Snapchat, TikTok and YouTube for under-16s in December. Lawmakers there are considering stricter penalties after data showed mixed success. Countries around the globe, including China, the United Arab Emirates and Turkey, have either instituted measures intended to curtail or bar access to social media for young people, or have said they were planning them. The European Union has said it was planning to seek stronger protections for children from harmful social media features.

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14 Aug 2026 9:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After its cloud storage provider went defunct, a PBS affiliate decided to sue a data center provider to regain access to 50TB of TV shows, videos, and other data dating back 70 years. As reported this week by Current, a trade newspaper covering public broadcasting, St. Louis affiliate Nine PBS filed a lawsuit against Iron Mountain Data Centers on July 28, seeking access to the data. In the litigation filed in Denver District Court, Nine PBS says that its cloud storage provider, Open Source Storage (OSS), used one of Iron Mountain's Denver data centers to store the channel's data. However, OSS is being unresponsive, and Nine PBS says Iron Mountain has refused to release its data. The data in question includes the station's coverage of the COVID-19 pandemic, East St. Louis' history, The Great Flood of 1993, and over 11,000 files, The Denver Post reported in July. The lawsuit claims that "most" of the data is "unique and irreplaceable," according to the Post. Last month, a judge blocked Iron Mountain from deleting or modifying the data. In a hearing on Wednesday, a judge ruled that Iron Mountain must hand over any physical devices holding the data, Current reported today. The judge also said that Nine PBS must find a third party, such as a former OSS worker, who can help retrieve the data within 30 days and without sharing or corrupting data belonging to other OSS clients. Nine PBS is already communicating with a former OSS employee "who is willing to help," the report said. If complications arise, such as from the data being encrypted, another hearing will be scheduled. Nine PBS and Iron Mountain must provide updates by September 14. Iron Mountain's spokesperson said the company only provides physical infrastructure, such as the building, network connectivity, power, and environmental controls. "Our customers rent space for their servers and other hardware. These are the client's assets. We don't have access to the data on the hardware/servers because they belong to our customers," the company said. If it granted "unauthorized access to third-party hardware without a court order," Iron Mountain said the company would violate basic data privacy protocols, breach its contract with OSS, and "potentially [expose] confidential data belonging to other clients of OSS."

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14 Aug 2026 8:00pm GMT

Today, you can get low-quality knockoffs of just about any popular smartphone on sites like AliExpress or Temu, whether they be iPhones, Galaxy phones, or whatever else. They have terrible build quality, bottom-of-the-barrel components and specifications, and all run outdated versions of Android - badly. At the same time, various consumer electronics brands, once popular in a bygone era, sell the rights to their brand name to unknown companies, who then put these brands on generic hardware to give their products a sheen of legitimacy. That's why today, you can still buy Nokia smartphones, Polaroid cameras, and low-effort Hi-Fi equipment from various once-respected brands. None of this is new, however. In the late '90s and early 2000s, companies were already doing the same thing. In fact, there's one device from this era which combines both business practices - it's both a cheap knockoff of a wildly successful device, and it carries a once-revered brand name. Also, just to add some juice, this story involves stolen source code. Let's take a look at the worst PDA of all time, the Olivetti daVinci. In 1997, Palm launched the Palm Pilot, and it and its successors proved to be a massive hit. Where countless before it had failed, Palm found the magic formula to make pocket computing work. I wrote an in-depth article about Palm over 13 years ago which goes into much (much) more detail, but the reason the Palm Pilot succeeded where things like the Newton, PenPoint OS, and Windows for Pen Computing failed, is that Palm's founder, Jeff Hawkins, realised that they were competing with paper, not with desktop computers. Instead of trying to shove the capabilities of a full personal computer into a (barely) pockatable device, a pocket computer had to be as fast and convenient as paper, and therefore extremely strict about which features to add, and which to omit. To this day, the entirety of smartphone computing stands on the shoulders of Palm. Palm's ideas, implementations, approaches, paradigms, and even people were absorbed by Apple and Google, where they shaped both iOS and Android. The phone you're looking at right now has a ton of Palm DNA in it, still. After all, you're still using the homescreen-with-apps paradigm Palm already perfected in the late '90s and early 2000s. The success of the Palm Pilot and its successors did not go unnoticed. Microsoft, most prominently, felt incredibly threatened by Palm's success: The success of Palm's products got the attention of Microsoft, and the company pretty much announced it was going to crush Palm. According to Hawkins, Microsoft had a sales conference, where, at some point, a big target appeared on the projector screen, with the Palm logo dead in the centre of it: "we are going to crush and kill these guys", was the central message. Hawkins recalls that he got condolence letters after that, stating things like "Sorry Jeff. Too bad." ↫ Thom Holwerda While Microsoft proved to be unable to "kill and crush" Palm, it did manage to build a relatively successful business selling PDAs running various incarnations of Windows CE. Together, Palm and Microsoft dominated the PDA market pretty much throughout its entire existence, and while the market was a mere fraction of the smartphone market of today, other companies still wanted a piece of this pie too. One of these companies was Olivetti, a storied Italian company with a long history making typewriters, computers, and other electronics. I'm not going into detail about Olivetti's history, but the company was renowned for its attention to design, creating iconic products like the Lexikon 80, Lettera 22, Elea 9003, Programma 101, and so, so many more. Olivetti also entered the personal computer market, first with a variety of custom machines featuring Z80 and later Motorola 68000 processors running a variety of custom operating systems developed by Olivetti (including its own UNIX variant, X/OS). After a few machines using MIPS and Alpha processors in the early '90s, the company would eventually focus entirely on Intel-based PCs (including this amazing failure) running Windows. Like so many other computer makers from that era, Olivetti eventually left the PC business by selling it off in 1997. To this day, Olivetti PCs tend to cost more on the used market than those from other brands, despite no technical merits dictating so. At around this time, our current story begins. Seeing the success of the Palm Pilot and the emergence of copycat devices running Microsoft's Windows CE, Olivetti wanted in on the action. And so, in the late '90s, the company introduced the Olivetti daVinci, a line of PDAs whose software looked suspiciously like Palm OS. There's not a ton of information out there about the development history, but it seems that while Olivetti designed the hardware, it contracted the development of the operating system out to a company from Hong Kong, Echolink Design. And this is where things went horribly wrong for Olivetti. The software Echolink Design developed for the daVinci didn't just look like Palm OS, it was Palm OS - at least, according to Palm. After being on the market for about a year, the Palm Pilot maker, then a subsidiary of 3Com, filed for an injunction, alleging that the daVinci operating system designed by Echolink Design contained actual Palm OS source code. In addition, Palm also filed suit against CompanionLink Software, the company that developed the Outlook synchronisation software for the daVinci. Palm won handily, and within a day of the filing, temporary restraining orders were put in place on both Olivetti and CompanionLink, stopping sales of the daVinci and its software dead in its tracks. It seemed to have been a pretty clear-cut case. From The Wall Street Journal at the time: U.S. District Judge James Ware ruled Olivetti's Royal daVinci organizer contains software that appears to have been copied from the operating system for 3Com's Palm organizers. Judge Ware said a review by a software expert found the daVinci software contains private Palm code and even grammatical

14 Aug 2026 7:18pm GMT

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from Kyiv Post: Ukraine's military intelligence (HUR) has identified an Nvidia Jetson Orin computer module inside Russia's new S-71 Monochrome air-launched cruise missile, potentially indicating the use of artificial intelligence technology in the weapon, the agency said Wednesday, Aug. 12. The finding was published in the 'Components in Weapons' section of the HUR's War&Sanctions portal, which documents foreign electronic components found in Russian weapons used against Ukraine. The latest research identified 35 electronic components in Russian weapons, according to the HUR. HUR specialists identified the Nvidia Jetson Orin module in the S-71 Monochrome, a new Russian air-launched cruise missile. The agency said the use of the computer module may indicate the integration of artificial intelligence technologies into the missile. The HUR did not provide further details on the specific functions performed by the Nvidia module in the weapon.

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14 Aug 2026 7:00pm GMT

In the last few days, I built a shoot 'em up game by embedding a tiny custom bytecode VM and rendering the graphics using a fullscreen pixel shader. The result is a 3kB Windows executable. This was done for Langjam Gamejam, a 7-day challenge where you create a programming language and then use it to build a game. The project combines several interests of mine: language tooling, game development, procedural graphics, and demoscene-style size constraints. The game jam format forced me to keep the scope small and explore new ideas. Also, it was fun! ↫ Laurent Le Brun In seven days, Le Brun created a brand new programming language, compiler, bytecode interpreter, a game written in the new language, and rendered it, ending up with a 3kB self-contained executable. It's amazing what humans can do.

14 Aug 2026 6:57pm GMT

A while back, when chatting with a colleague over their computer, I noticed that a logo did not look exactly the same as it did on mine. It looked thinner on theirs and more faithful to the original image. It was rendered at 15px; here is an upscaled version. If you squint, or take a step back, the one from Chrome looks thicker. A bit weird, but swapping the image for an SVG fixed it. Still, I was curious: why was it rendering like this in the first place? I did some digging and found a nifty optimization that Chrome uses when rendering JPEGs at small scales. ↫ Guillaume Técher I love it when people detail their discoveries like this.

14 Aug 2026 6:50pm GMT

Screen-sharing bug lets remote hackers log in without a password.

14 Aug 2026 6:32pm GMT

Airline-backed venture aims to develop a hybrid-electric commercial aircraft.

14 Aug 2026 6:00pm GMT

Judge warns pro se litigants are using chatbots wrong and getting desperate.

14 Aug 2026 5:26pm GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT