fidzu : computers

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Space.com: Astronomers have made a truly mind-boggling discovery using the James Webb Space Telescope (JWST): a runaway black hole 10 million times larger than the sun, rocketing through space at a staggering 2.2 million miles per hour (1,000 kilometers per second). That not only makes this the first confirmed runaway supermassive black hole, but this object is also one of the fastest-moving bodies ever detected, rocketing through its home, a pair of galaxies named the "Cosmic Owl," at 3,000 times the speed of sound at sea level here on Earth. If that isn't astounding enough, the black hole is pushing forward a literal galaxy-sized "bow-shock" of matter in front of it, while simultaneously dragging a 200,000 light-year-long tail behind it, within which gas is accumulating and triggering star formation. "It boggles the mind!" discovery team leader Pieter van Dokkum of Yale University told Space.com. "The forces that are needed to dislodge such a massive black hole from its home are enormous. And yet, it was predicted that such escapes should occur!" "This is the only black hole that has been found far away from its former home," van Dokkum said. "That made it the best candidate [for a] runaway supermassive black hole, but what was missing was confirmation. All we really had was a streak that was difficult to explain in any other way. With the JWST, we have now confirmed that there is indeed a black hole at the tip of the streak, and that it is speeding away from its former host." The research is currently available as a pre-peer-reviewed paper on arXiv.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

20 Dec 2025 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Search Engine Land: Google said today that it is suing SerpApi, accusing the company of bypassing security protections to scrape, harvest, and resell copyrighted content from Google Search results. The allegations: Google said SerpApi: -Circumvented Google's security measures and industry-standard crawling controls. -Ignored website directives that specify whether content can be accessed. -Used cloaking, rotating bot identities, and large bot networks to scrape content at scale. -Took licensed content from Search features, including images and real-time data, and resold it for profit. What Google is saying. "Stealthy scrapers like SerpApi override [crawling] directives and give sites no choice at all," Google wrote, calling the alleged scraping "brazen" and "unlawful." Google said SerpApi's activity "increased dramatically over the past year." [...] If Google wins, reliable SERP data could become harder to get, more expensive, or both -- especially for teams that rely on tools powered by services like SerpApi. As AI already reduces clicks and transparency, Google now appears intent on making it even harder for brands to understand how Search works, how they appear in results, and how to measure success.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

20 Dec 2025 3:30am GMT

Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to move mission-critical systems like ERP, manufacturing, and aircraft design data onto a digitally sovereign European cloud, citing national security concerns and fears around U.S. extraterritorial laws like the CLOUD Act. "I need a sovereign cloud because part of the information is extremely sensitive from a national and European perspective," Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital, told The Register. "We want to ensure this information remains under European control." The Register reports: The driver is access to new software. Vendors like SAP are developing innovations exclusively in the cloud, pushing customers toward platforms like S/4HANA. The request for proposals launches in early January, with a decision expected before summer. The contract -- understood to be worth more than 50 million euros -- will be long term (up to ten years), with price predictability over the period. [...] Jestin is waiting for European regulators to clarify whether Airbus would truly be "immune to extraterritorial laws" -- and whether services could be interrupted. The concern isn't theoretical. Chief Prosecutor of the International Criminal Court (ICC) Karim Khan reportedly lost access to his Microsoft email after Trump sanctioned him for criticizing Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, though Microsoft denies suspending ICC services. Beyond US complications, Jestin questions whether European cloud providers have sufficient scale. "If you asked me today if we'll find a solution, I'd say 80/20."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

20 Dec 2025 1:40am GMT

Google says the lawsuit is its last resort.

19 Dec 2025 10:21pm GMT

Ants with lots of workers tend to put less energy into making them armored.

19 Dec 2025 10:05pm GMT

Inin suggests new low-cost options allowed it to "recalculate production" for full cartridge.

19 Dec 2025 9:30pm GMT

If Excel rules the world, Word rules the legal profession. Jordan Bryan published a great article explaining why this is the case, and why this is unlikely to change any time soon, no matter how many people from the technology world think they can change this reality. Microsoft Word can never be replaced. OpenAI could build superintelligence surpassing human cognition in every conceivable dimension, rendering all human labor obsolete, and Microsoft Word will survive. Future contracts defining the land rights to distant galaxies will undoubtedly be drafted in Microsoft Word. Microsoft Word is immortal. ↫ Jordan Bryan at The Redline by Version Story Bryan cites two main reasons underpinning Microsoft Word's immortality in the legal profession. First, lawyers need the various formatting options Word provides, and alternatives often suggested by outsiders, like Markdown, don't come close to offering even 5% of the various formatting features lawyers and other writers of legal documents require. By the time you add all those features back to Markdown, you've recreated Word, but infinitely worse and more obtuse. Also, and this is entirely my personal opinion, Markdown sucks. Second, and this one you've surely heard before: Word's .docx format is effectively a network protocol. Everyone in the legal profession uses it, can read it, work with it, mark it up, apply corrections, and so on - from judges to lawyers to clients. If you try to work with, say, Google Docs, instead, you create a ton of friction in every interaction you have with other people in the legal profession. I vividly remember this from my 15 years as a translator - every single document you ever worked with was a Microsoft Office document. Sure, the translation agency standing between the end client and the translator might have abstracted the document into a computer-aided translation tool like Trados, but you're still working with .docx, and the translated document sent to the client is still .docx, and needs to look identical to the source, just in a different language. In the technology world, there's a lot of people who come barging into some other profession or field, claiming to know everything, and suggest to "just do x", without any deference to how said profession or field actually operates. "Just use Markdown and git" even if the people involved have no clue what a markup language even is let alone what git is; "just use LibreOffice" even if the people involved will skewer you for altering the formatting of a document even ever so slightly; we all know examples of this. An industry tends to work a certain way not because they're stupid or haven't seen the light - it tends to work that way because there's a thousand little reasons you're not aware of that make that way the best way.

18 Dec 2025 11:28pm GMT

In 1979, VisiCalc was released for the Apple II, and to this day, many consider it the very first spreadsheet program. Considering just how important spreadsheets have become since then - Excel rules the world - the first spreadsheet program is definitely an interesting topic to dive into. It turns out that while VisiCalc was the first spreadsheet program for home computers, it's not actually the first spreadsheet program, period. That honour goes to LANPAR, created ten years before VisiCalc. Ten years before VisiCalc, two engineers at Bell Canada came up with a pretty neat idea. At the time, organizational budgets were created using a program that ran on a mainframe system. If a manager wanted to make a change to the budget model, that might take programmers months to create an updated version. Rene Pardo and Remy Landau discussed the problem and asked "what if the managers could make their own budget forms as they would normally write them?" And with that, a new idea was created: the spreadsheet program. The new spreadsheet was called LANPAR, for "LANguage for Programming Arrays at Random" (but really it was a mash-up of their last names: LANdau and PARdo). ↫ Jim Hall at Technically We Write While there wasn't a graphical user interface on the screen with a grid and icons and everything else we associate with a spreadsheet today, it was still very much a spreadsheet. Individual cells were delinianated with semicolons, you could write down formulas to manipulate these cells, and the program could do forward referencing. The idea was to make it so easy to use, managers at Dell Canada could make budgeting changes overnight, instead of having programmers take weeks or months to do so. I'm not particularly well-versed in Excel and spreadsheets in general, but I can definitely imagine advanced users no longer really seeing the grids and numbers as individual entities, instead visualising everything much more closely to what LANPAR did. Like Neo when he finally peers through the Matrix.

18 Dec 2025 10:01pm GMT

Jamie Zawinski, one of the founders of Netscape and later Mozilla, has dug up the original versions of the iconic Mozilla dinosaur logos, and posted them online in all their glory. While he strongly believes Mozilla owned these logos outright, and that they were released as open source in 1998 or 1999, he can't technically prove that. It has come to my attention that the artwork for the original mozilla.org "dinosaur" logo is not widely available online. So, here it is. As I explained in some detail in my 2016 article "They Live and the secret history of the Mozilla logo", I commissioned this artwork from Shepard Fairey to use as the branding of the newly-founded mozilla.org and our open source release of the Netscape source code, which eventually became Firefox. This happened in March 1998. ↫ Jamie Zawinski The original Mozilla dinosaur logos are works of pure art. They sure don't make logos like this anymore.

18 Dec 2025 9:37pm 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