computers

23 Apr 2026

Slashdot

Meta Is Laying Off 10% of Its Workforce

Meta is reportedly cutting about 10% of its workforce, or roughly 8,000 jobs, while closing thousands of open roles it had intended to fill. "We're doing this as part of our continued effort to run the company more efficiently and to allow us to offset the other investments we're making," said Janelle Gale, Meta's chief people officer. The company had almost 79,000 employees at the start of the year. Quartz reports: Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg has poured resources into building out AI capabilities, directing spending toward model development, chatbot products, and the engineering talent to support them. Meta set its 2026 capital expenditure guidance at $115 billion to $135 billion, almost double the $72 billion it spent in 2025. Employees have been encouraged to use AI agents internally for tasks such as writing code. The early disclosure, Gale explained, was prompted by the fact that information about the cuts had already made its way into press reports before the company was ready to announce. "I know this is unwelcome news and confirming this puts everyone in an uneasy state, but we feel this is the best path forward, given the circumstances," she wrote. According to the memo, severance for affected workers in the United States will cover 18 months of COBRA health insurance premiums, along with a base pay component of 16 weeks that increases by two weeks for each year of service. Departing employees will have access to job placement assistance and, where applicable, help navigating immigration status. Packages outside the U.S. will vary by country. Meta cut between 10% and 15% of its Reality Labs workforce in January, shut down several VR game studios, and shed about 700 positions across at least five divisions in March.

France Confirms Data Breach At Government Agency That Manages Citizens' IDs

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The French government agency that handles the issuing and management of citizens' identity documents, including national IDs, passports, and immigration documents, confirmed Wednesday that it experienced a data breach. In an announcement, the Agence Nationale des Titres Securises (ANTS) said the data stolen in the breach could include full names, dates and places of birth, mailing and email addresses, and phone numbers on an undisclosed number of citizens. ANTS said the investigation to determine how the breach happened and its impact is ongoing, and people whose data was affected are being notified. ANTS, which said it detected the attack on April 15, did not specify how many people were affected by the breach. But some reporting suggests millions may have had some of their personal information stolen. According to Bleeping Computer, a hacker has advertised the stolen data on a hacking forum, claiming to have a database with 19 million records. The hacker's forum post referenced the same kind of stolen information as mentioned in ANTS' announcement and was published before ANTS publicly disclosed the breach on April 20.

Tim Cook Calls Apple Maps Launch His 'First Really Big Mistake' as CEO

In a recent town hall meeting reported by Bloomberg (paywalled), Apple CEO Tim Cook named the troubled 2012 launch of Apple Maps as his "first really big mistake" in the role. "The product wasn't ready, and we thought it was because we were testing more of local kind of stuff," Cook told staff. MacRumors reports: Reflecting on the debacle, Cook said it was "valuable," noting that he expressed regret to users at the time and suggested they use competing navigation apps instead. "We apologized for it, and we said, 'Go use these other apps. They're better than ours.' And that was some humble pie," Cook said. "But it was the right thing for our users. And so it's an example of keeping the user at the center of the decisions that we made." Cook added: "Now we've got the best map app on the planet. We learned about persistence, and we did exactly the right thing having made the mistake."

22 Apr 2026

Ars Technica

Crypto scam lures ships into Strait of Hormuz, falsely promising safe passage

Ship attacked by Iran after possibly falling for safe passage crypto scam.

22 Apr 2026 10:07pm GMT

Tesla reports Q1 2026 earnings: Still profitable

Car sales are up, battery sales and emissions credits are down.

22 Apr 2026 9:16pm GMT

OSnews

Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux

You can find beauty in the oddest of places. WSL9x runs a modern Linux kernel (6.19 at time of writing) cooperatively inside the Windows 9x kernel, enabling users to take advantage of the full suite of capabilities of both operating systems at the same time, including paging, memory protection, and pre-emptive scheduling. Run all your favourite applications side by side - no rebooting required! ↫ Hailey Somerville Yes, this is exactly what it sounds like. Hailey Somerville basically recreated the first version of WSL - or coLinux, for the old people among us - but instead of running on Windows NT, it runs on Windows 9x. A VxD driver loads a patched Linux kernel using DOS interrupts, and this Linux kernel calls Windows 9x kernel APIs instead of POSIX APIs. A small DOS client application then allows the Linux kernel to use MS-DOS prompts as TTYs. This is a great oversimplification, but it does get the general gist across. Anyway, the end result is that you can use a modern Linux kernel and Windows 9x at the same time, without virtualising or dual-booting. This might be one of the greatest hacks in recent times, and I find it oddly beautiful in its user-facing simplicity.

22 Apr 2026 8:47pm GMT

Ars Technica

Our newsroom AI policy

How Ars Technica uses, and doesn't use, generative AI.

22 Apr 2026 8:40pm GMT

OSnews

Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU92 released

Despite years of apparent stagnation and reported mass layoffs, it seems the Solaris team at Oracle has found somewhat of a renewed stride recently. Both branches of Solaris - the one for paying customers (SRU) and the free one for enthusiasts (CBE) - are receiving regular updates again, and there seems to be a more concerted effort to let the outside world know, too. We've got another update to the SRU branch this week which brings updates to a few important open source packages, like Django, Firefox, Thunderbird, Golang, and others, to address security issues. In addition, this update marks as a change in the release cadence for the commercial branch of Solaris. From here on out, there will be two "Critical Patch Updates" per quarter to address security issues, followed by a Support Repository Update containing new features and larger changes.

22 Apr 2026 8:33pm GMT

20 Apr 2026

OSnews

Some tech company to replace its CEO

I need to post about this because if I don't, people will get mad. Cook will continue on as Apple CEO through the summer, with Ternus set to join Apple's Board of Directors and take over as CEO on September 1, 2026. Cook is going to transition to chairman of the board at Apple, and he will "assist with certain aspects of the company, including engaging with policymakers around the world." ↫ Juli Clover at MacRumors This concludes OSNews' coverage of Keeping Up With the Yacht Class, but rest assured, every other tech site will be milking this for weeks to come. You will still be worrying about how to pay for your next tank of gas.

20 Apr 2026 10:04pm GMT