fidzu : computers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Australia said on Wednesday it will add YouTube to sites covered by its world-first ban on social media for teenagers, reversing an earlier decision to exempt the Alphabet-owned video-sharing site and potentially setting up a legal challenge. The decision came after the internet regulator urged the government last month to overturn the YouTube carve-out, citing a survey that found 37% of minors reported harmful content on the site, the worst showing for a social media platform. "I'm calling time on it," Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said in a statement highlighting that Australian children were being negatively affected by online platforms, and reminding social media of their social responsibility. "I want Australian parents to know that we have their backs." The decision broadens the ban set to take effect in December. YouTube says it is used by nearly three-quarters of Australians aged 13 to 15, and should not be classified as social media because its main activity is hosting videos. "Our position remains clear: YouTube is a video sharing platform with a library of free, high-quality content, increasingly viewed on TV screens. It's not social media," a YouTube spokesperson said by email.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Jul 2025 10:00am GMT

sciencehabit shares a report from Science.org: Peacocks have a secret hidden in their brightly colored tail feathers: tiny reflective structures that can amplify light into a laser beam. After dyeing the feathers and energizing them with an external light source, researchers discovered they emitted narrow beams of yellow-green laser light. They say the study, published this month in Scientific Reports, offers the first example of a laser cavity in the animal kingdom. [...] Scientists have long known that peacock feathers also exhibit "structural color" -- nature's pigment-free way to create dazzling hues. Ordered microstructures within the feathers reflect light at specific frequencies, leading to their vivid blues and greens and iridescence. But Florida Polytechnic University physicist Nathan Dawson and his colleagues wanted to go a step further and see whether those microstructures could also function as a laser cavity. After staining the feathers with a common dye and pumping them with soft pulses of light, they used laboratory instruments to detect beams of yellow-green laser light that were too faint to see with the naked eye. They emerged from the feathers' eyespots, at two distinct wavelengths. Surprisingly, differently colored parts of the eyespots emitted the same wavelengths of laser light, even though each region would presumably vary in its microstructure. Just because peacock feathers emit laser light doesn't mean the birds are somehow using this emission. But there are still ramifications, Dawson says. He suggests that looking for laser light in biomaterials could help identify arrays of regular microstructures within them. In medicine, for example, certain foreign objects -- viruses with distinct geometric shapes, perhaps -- could be classified and identified based on their ability to be lasers, he says. The work also demonstrates how biological materials could one day yield lasers that could be put safely into the human body to emit light for biosensing, medical imaging, and therapeutics. "I always like to think that for many technological achievements that benefit humans," Dawson says, "some organism somewhere has already developed it through some evolutionary process."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Jul 2025 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google is fond of saying its mission is to "organize the world's information," but who gets to decide what information is worthy of organization? A San Francisco tech CEO has spent the past several years attempting to remove unflattering information about himself from Google's search index, and the nonprofit Freedom of the Press Foundation says he's still at it. Most recently, an unknown bad actor used a bug in one of Google's search tools to scrub the offending articles. The saga began in 2023 when independent journalist Jack Poulson reported on Maury Blackman's 2021 domestic violence arrest. Blackman, who was then the CEO of surveillance tech firm Premise Data Corp., took offense at the publication of his legal issues. The case did not lead to charges after Blackman's 25-year-old girlfriend recanted her claims against the 53-year-old CEO, but Poulson reported on some troubling details of the public arrest report. Blackman has previously used tools like DMCA takedowns and lawsuits to stifle reporting on his indiscretion, but that campaign now appears to have co-opted part of Google's search apparatus. The Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) reported on Poulson's work and Blackman's attempts to combat it late last year. In June, Poulson contacted the Freedom of the Press Foundation to report that the article had mysteriously vanished from Google search results. The foundation began an investigation immediately, which led them to a little-known Google search feature known as Refresh Outdated Content. Google created this tool for users to report links with content that is no longer accurate or that lead to error pages. When it works correctly, Refresh Outdated Content can help make Google's search results more useful. However, Freedom of the Press Foundation now says that a bug allowed an unknown bad actor to scrub mentions of Blackman's arrest from the Internet. Upon investigating, FPF found that its article on Blackman was completely absent from Google results, even through a search with the exact title. Poulson later realized that two of his own Substack articles were similarly affected. The Foundation was led to the Refresh Outdated Content tool upon checking its search console. The bug in the tool allowed malicious actors to de-index valid URLs from search results by altering the capitalization in the URL slug. Although URLs are typically case-sensitive, Google's tool treated them as case-insensitive. As a result, when someone submitted a slightly altered version of a working URL (for example, changing "anatomy" to "AnAtomy"), Google's crawler would see it as a broken link (404 error) and mistakenly remove the actual page from search results. Ironically, Blackman is now CEO of the online reputation management firm The Transparency Company.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Jul 2025 3:30am GMT

Sophisticated group also used novel means to disguise their custom malware.

30 Jul 2025 10:21pm GMT

Senate confirmed Susan Monarez to CDC while Vinay Prasad made a quick exit from FDA.

30 Jul 2025 9:09pm GMT

"A deliberate, coordinated digital attack."

30 Jul 2025 8:47pm GMT

BlueOS kernel is written in Rust, featuring security, lightweight, and generality. It is compatible with POSIX interfaces and supports Rust's standard library. ↫ BlueOS kernel GitHub page This is the kernel for the BlueOS operating system, developed by Vivo, a Chinese consumer electronics company. Sadly, all of the websites and documentation for BlueOS are written in Mandarin, making it virtually impossible to really get a grip on what they're developing, and I certainly don't trust Google Translate or whatever enough to give me a proper, trustworthy, and accurate translation. I hope the company either hires some translators, or perhaps enthusiasts with the right skillset can provide some more insight over the coming years. It seems similar to Huawei's HarmonyOS Next, and it's apparently shipping on one of Vivo's smartwatches.

30 Jul 2025 7:10pm GMT

Last week-end, I was invited to the UNIX Social Camp in Dijon, France to talk about the reasons I still use OpenBSD these days and why should others do so; or at least, have a look at OpenBSD. ↫ Joel Carnat Here's my short pitch as to why you should use OpenBSD: it's the closest you'll get to a traditional, classic UNIX, while still using a modern and maintained operating system. OpenBSD just makes sense, and every time I run into some issue or I want to know how something in OpenBSD works, the answers always make me go "well that makes sense". That's rare in modern computing, and we need to cherish it.

30 Jul 2025 6:57pm GMT

Are you still using LinkedIn, the website where failed tech startup entrepreneurs go to die and "AI" influencers try to sell you on the latest version of the chatbot Florpium like a Utah mom trying to sell leggings that are totally not an MLM? If you are, and the other ten thousand reasons not to use the website incarnation of an ad for a personal injury lawyer along I-11 in Henderson, Nevada, weren't enough, Microsoft just handed you another one. LinkedIn removed transgender-related protections from its policy on hateful and derogatory content. The platform no longer lists "misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals" as examples of prohibited conduct. While "content that attacks, denigrates, intimidates, dehumanizes, incites or threatens hatred, violence, prejudicial or discriminatory action" is still considered hateful, addressing a person by a gender and name they ask not be designated by is not anymore. Similarly, the platform removed "race or gender identity" from its examples of inherent traits for which negative comments are considered harassment. That qualification of harassment is now kept only for behaviour that is actively "disparaging another member's perceived gender", not mentioning race or gender identity anymore. ↫ Matti Schneider at the Open Terms Archive Microsoft joined the chorus of pathetic, spineless US tech companies bowing to far-right extremism long ago, and this is just another sign that Microsoft, like so many other US tech companies, is pulling an IBM. They did learn from the best, after all, and it doesn't surprise me one bit that all of these CEOs click their heels like the good little brownshirts that they are. Anyway, LinkedIn has no value to anyone with even a gram of self-respect, and Microsoft's other products are such utter trash they basically have to make you upgrade at the barrel of a gun. For those using their products - do you hate yourself that much? You deserve so much more.

30 Jul 2025 6:47pm GMT

In October 2024 a team of dedicated developers has started work on the ALPM project. Since then it has been focusing on writing new documentation on many aspects of Arch Linux Package Management that were not thoroughly documented in the past. This article provides an overview of the specifications written by this project and attempts to contextualize them for the reader. The existing stack 📚 With its bash based makepkg tool for package creation, the libalpm C library for interfacing with system state and the central pacman package management tool, the pacman project has defined the …

23 Jul 2025 12:00am GMT

With 20250613.12fe085f-5, we split our firmware into several vendor-focused packages. linux-firmware is now an empty package depending on our default set of firmware. Unfortunately, this coincided with upstream reorganizing the symlink layout of the NVIDIA firmware, resulting in a situation that Pacman cannot handle. When attempting to upgrade from 20250508.788aadc8-2 or earlier, you will see the following errors: linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad103 exists in filesystem linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad104 exists in filesystem linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad106 exists in filesystem linux-firmware-nvidia: /usr/lib/firmware/nvidia/ad107 exists in filesystem To progress with the system upgrade, first remove linux-firmware, then reinstall it as part of the upgrade: # pacman -Rdd linux-firmware # pacman -Syu linux-firmware

21 Jun 2025 12:00am GMT

On Plasma 6.4 the wayland session will be the only one installed when the users does not manually specify kwin-x11. With the recent split of kwin into kwin-wayland and kwin-x11, users running the old X11 session needs to manually install plasma-x11-session, or they will not be able to login. Currently pacman is not able to figure out your personal setup, and it wouldn't be ok to install plasma-x11-session and kwin-x11 for every one using Plasma. tldr: Install plasma-x11-session if you are still using x11

20 Jun 2025 12:00am GMT