fidzu : computers

F-Droid's Android app store has been rebuilt from the ground up.

24 Sep 2026 7:30pm GMT

New York sues Polymarket as Trump admin tries to override state gambling laws.

24 Sep 2026 7:07pm GMT

"Nationwide, at least 100 police department employees have been charged with or accused of misusing license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes," reports the Washington Post. They cite their past investigations "based on thousands of pages of police and court records," which found that "In many of these cases, officers used Flock's roadside cameras to track the location of romantic partners and exes." In fact, five Indianapolis police officers were just criminally charged Wednesday with fraud and misconduct. "One has also been charged with stalking," the police department said in a statement, noting that one office had already resigned, "while the four other officers have been suspended and recommended for termination. County prosecutor Ryan Mears admitted "A lot of this was initiated by The Washington Post." And the Post published a new investigation Wednesday: Using publicly available information, The Post found that...one of the officers charged Wednesday, appeared to have relied on Flock cameras to track vehicles used by his wife and two close personal acquaintances, searching the plates 3,759 times over a 10-month period - an average of about 12 lookups per day. At the time, Police Chief Tanya Terry said she suspended one officer while the department conducted an investigation into possible misuse and a systemwide audit of the city's 301-camera Flock system. That audit led to the discovery of more widespread abuse, [County prosecutor Ryan] Mears said Wednesday. Mears said the department's findings highlight the vast power Flock cameras give police officers and raise questions about whether the government should be doing more to prevent the misuse of that power. "Many of the proposed guardrails and the things that have been proposed would not have prevented the behaviors and actions we see here today," Mears said. "Does there need to be independent oversight? Does there need to be judicial oversight of the Flock camera system?" One of the Indianapolis officers, Schultz, an 18-year veteran of the police department, was accused of using Flock to track his ex-wife and women he met while on duty or out in public. He was charged with multiple counts of official misconduct as well as two counts of stalking. Schultz told one woman he was an FBI agent, according to prosecutors, and began texting her and showing up at places she frequented, including at her gym and at a school function with her daughter. Prosecutors said he arrived at her gym within an hour of her at least nine times between June 12 and Aug. 1 of this year... Another woman met Schultz after her car was stolen from a mall parking lot, and he began texting her flirty messages later that night. The two dated briefly, and Schultz later looked up where the woman went on dates with another man. Schultz searched the plates of a third woman 178 times and also frequently showed up where she was, including her gym, a Smoothie King and a Walmart earlier this month... A third officer, Binford, told investigators he had used the log-in credentials of another officer who had logged in to Binford's laptop during a field training exercise. Binford searched the plate of his ex-wife more than 1,000 times between April 2024 and April 2025. Indianapolis police had no regular practice of auditing officers' Flock searches until recently, [Police Chief] Terry said in an interview last month. The department's investigation into the tool's misuse has been "a learning process for us," she said at the time.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

24 Sep 2026 7:04pm GMT

Oscar-winning documentarian Alex Gibney focuses on the world's wealthiest man.

24 Sep 2026 6:52pm GMT

"The heads of major AI firms pleaded with the United Nations on Wednesday to save the world or at least its people - by somehow regulating the fast-expanding technology that they have been designing," writes the Associated Press. "If managed poorly, I even believe AI could be a risk to humanity as a whole," said Dario Amodei, chief executive officer of Anthropic. And from his competitor Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, came this assessment: "We could lose control of the future to AI." Yoshua Bengio, who co-chairs the UN's International Independent Panel on AI, called this "a moment of global awakening" to possible threats, noting AI from top companies had behaved in unacceptably dangerous ways, against instructions, taking actions "that would be crimes if committed by a human". In his presentation, OpenAI's Sam Altman agreed the discussion about AI "feels different in recent weeks," even suggesting specific reforms: Altman: We need a mechanism for complementary national and international frontier AI standards, standards for measuring capabilities, assessing risks, determining whether safeguards are sufficient, and preserving meaningful human oversight as systems become more autonomous. We need common standards so countries can compare evidence, verify compliance, and have a shared language and understanding about what is happening. We need accurate and speedy incident reporting, classification reporting protocols, so the world can learn from failures before they become catastrophes. And we need secure channels among governments, critical infrastructure operators and technical experts, to share emerging vulnerabilities and new threats.... We will all be better off if we can agree on what good evidence, good safeguards, and good oversight look like on the global stage. Speaking next, Anthropic's Dario Amodei agreed that standard-setting was important, also calling for "common global standards for testing AI models for loss-of-control risks and misuse risks - and a notification system for AI incidents that are significant to global security." Reiterating his September 12th call for an industry-wide safety collaboration, Amodei pointed out that Anthropic committed to embedding external evaluators "similar to a food inspector" and recommended other companies do the same. "Some have already agreed to adopt this measure." Besides calling for global cooperation between governments to set international standards, Amodei also offered two other specific ideas: Amodei: We should begin with narrow agreements that every member can support, such as a ban on using AI to make biological weapons or permitting your AI technologies to be used to make biological weapons.... We should build evaluation and verification systems that keep pace with AI development so that states can have visibility into frontier model capability and can verify each other's commitments. "No leader, no company, and no nation can manage this alone. We commit to working with governments in this room on this urgent work."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

24 Sep 2026 2:34pm GMT

Snapdragon X2 Series processors feature a neural processing unit (NPU) delivering 80 trillion operations per second and allowing advanced AI features to run locally. And Snapdragon X2 Series "is expanding to Linux," Qualcomm announced today, calling it one of their most-requested capabilities: Qualcomm Technologies is a top contributor to Linux development at a kernel level, and now we're embracing support for Snapdragon X2 Series as a platform directly. We're upstreaming core drivers for Snapdragon X2 Series - including the Hexagon NPU and Adreno GPU - to open the door to developers and partners. We are starting with support for two operating systems based on Linux... - Debian: We're kicking off with Debian by the end of this year, one of the most influential Linux distributions and the foundation behind many of the distros people use every day. - Ubuntu: Qualcomm Technologies has partnered with Canonical to bring Ubuntu, the world's most widely used Linux distro, to the platform with Snapdragon X2 Series certification targeted for the first half of 2027. ...and this is just the beginning. Our partners HP, ASUS and HUMAIN are planning Linux support in the first of 2027, so that their devices deliver the incredible experience users expect with Snapdragon X2 Series in a new operating system. Qualcomm's developer blog called it "a significant step forward" in Qualcomm's commitment to a developer-first approach, and "to the open-source community." "For developers, the important part is simple: more core hardware features are being reviewed and merged, so that laptops with Linux on Snapdragon X2 Series will be easier to build, test, and debug..." The enablement work completed so far has been validated on a Debian 13-based ("Trixie") user space and a custom kernel, so developers should treat this as the current reference environment while support continues to mature... Linux support for laptops with Snapdragon X2 Series is rolling out in stages, starting with the core pieces developers need before they can do production-level work on their device... For developers who want to try it today, the call to action is straightforward: start with Snapdragon X2 Series hardware, review the latest recipes to build Qualcomm Linux Debian Images, build available upstream sources the Debian OS image and test the peripherals that matter to you, such as graphics, AI inference, device I/O, or basic application bring-up. Early testing helps identify the gaps that matter most before support becomes broader and ready for production-level workloads... You do not have to wait for everything to be fully finished before getting hands-on. If you are comfortable working from upstream sources you can start evaluating Snapdragon X2 hardware today... Check out the step-by-step instructions, including the full build flow and deployment guidance for Snapdragon X2 Series Linux software. Put simply, this effort is less about supporting specific Linux distributions and more about empowering the developers who make Linux available on new hardware. This Developer Preview targets distribution maintainers, toolchain developers, kernel contributors, and hardware enablement engineers. It provides the upstream building blocks, including kernel patches, drivers, and reference device trees, needed to enable Snapdragon X2 Series support in their own projects and distributions. For end users looking for a turnkey "install and go" experience, that will come later as distributions adopt what lands upstream. We're encouraging the community to build on this work and help shape what comes next. The blog post notes that in the initial enablement stage, "Qualcomm Linux supports systemd-boot as the Universal extensible firmware interface (UEFI) boot manager to load and boot the Linux kernel." Hands-on demos were given at the Snapdragon Summit in Maui of Linux running on Snapdragon X2 Series hardware, which the developer's blog calls "a practical look at what works today and where Snapdragon X2 Series Linux support is headed."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

24 Sep 2026 10:04am GMT

Raymond Chen, longtime Microsoft employee and author of the very popular The Old New Thing blog, published an interesting post about the Win32 scrollbar. It turns out there's actually quite a few interesting shortcuts and useful hidden features, like clicking inside a scrollbar while holding down shift will make the content jump to that point. Halfway through the article, though, Chen laments how nobody really uses proper Win32 scrollbars anymore. Sadly, almost nobody uses Win32 scroll bars any more. Everybody uses frameworks that provide their own custom scroll bars. ↫ Raymond Chen And as you might expect, none of these scrollbars work like the Win32 one, making even something as basic as the scrollbar a fragmented mess. He doesn't just blame things like Electron, either, as Microsoft's own WinUI framework, which is used for most "new" Windows UI developed by Microsoft for Windows 11, also uses custom scrollbars that do not work like the Win32 one does. Great, so by the time I learn about a shortcut for scroll bars (Shift+click), the ecosystem has fragmented so much that I can't even rely on it working. ↫ Raymond Chen Modern computing is depressing.

23 Sep 2026 10:40pm GMT

The Solaris branch for paying customers has been updated to SRU95. Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU95 updates a broad set of platform, runtime, developer, networking, desktop, and open source components. Notable updates include Ansible Core to 2.21.1, Apache HTTP Server to 2.4.67, Apache Tomcat to 9.0.120, BIND to 9.20.23, Django to 5.2.15, Elixir to 1.20.1, Erlang to 28.5.0.2, Firefox to 140.10.0esr, Go to 1.25.11, ImageMagick to 7.1.2-27, MySQL 8.4 to 8.4.10, NSS to 3.125, OpenSSH to 10.4p1, Rust to 1.96.0, SQLite to 3.53.2, Thunderbird to 140.10.0esr, and Vim to 9.2.0513. Additional updates include CMake, CUPS, Cython, GnuTLS, libarchive, libexpat, pip, rsync, and a range of Python modules, X11 libraries, graphics libraries, printing components, and desktop utilities. ↫ Colin Kavanagh at the Oracle Solaris Blog One of the major changes is the deprecation and removal of NTLM authentication of local users; only NTLMv2 is supported now for security reasons. This release also brings GCC 16, with GCC 13 being removed in the next version. The detailed release notes go into some of the more low-level, esoteric changes in Solaris 11.4 SRU 95.

23 Sep 2026 9:55pm GMT

It is impossible to go anywhere in a technology space online without hitting a wave of commentary about how stupid GDPR is. It was written by bureaucrats who don't understand the amazing potential of unrestricted technology. These US-based critiques almost always lean on the oldest trick in cyberlibertarianism: we don't have time to regulate, we must simply adapt and ride the wave. Nobody has time for government. Of all GDPR's consequences, none gets more attention than the cookie banner, which critics present as the inevitable result of government meddling. Blaming GDPR for the cookie banner is like blaming the health inspector for the roaches. The banner is deliberate vandalism, a dark pattern engineered to exhaust you before you can learn anything about the surveillance apparatus humming behind the "OK." Ironically the banner designed to hide the machine has taught the public more about the machine than a thousand podcasts ever will. Even non-technical people stop at "your data is shared with 996 partners." ↫ Mat Duggan There is so much misinformation about the cookie banner, it's honestly quite hard to believe it's not deliberately spread. You don't need a cookie banner for functional cookies, so as long as you don't share your users' data with anyone else, you don't need a cookie banner at all. On top of that, most cookie banners you encounter are actually not compliant with the GDPR at all, because they don't present a single-click option to block your data from being shared with those 996 partners. What the cookie banner has done is inform millions - maybe even billions - of people the world over of just how insipid the online advertising and data harvesting industry really is. It put the issue on the map, and by now, everyone, no matter their level of computer literacy, is fully aware of what's happening to their data every time they see one of these (non-compliant) banners. No else had the guts to do this - except for the European Union. The wider GPDR has set the baseline for online privacy protections, and while we have a long way to go before we've fully solved this issue, the EU at least gave us a good point to jump off from. Smoking and asbestos weren't banned in a day, either.

21 Sep 2026 7:42pm 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