fidzu : computers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this summer, nearly 160,000 applicants took the entrance exam for UNAM, Mexico's largest university. For the first time, they did it completely remotely, using a "lockdown" browser and AI-powered webcam proctoring software, over several weeks from late May through early June. It was a disaster. When exam results came in, they bore little resemblance to past results, especially at the top. Between 2021 and 2025, 3.5 percent of test takers scored 100 or more on the 120-question UNAM test. This year, 16.3 percent did so. The story was even worse at the highest of the high end. Between 2021 and 2025, 0.9 percent of test takers scored 110 or more; this year, 5.5 percent did so. The surge in top scores led to accusations of widespread cheating, and UNAM appointed a commission of experts to investigate the situation. The group was given the unwieldy name "la Comision Tecnica de Personas Expertas para la Revision del Proceso de Seleccion de Ingreso a Licenciatura para el Circlo Escolar 2026-2027/1," and it has just submitted its recommendations. The commission believes that the best path forward, given all the concerns, is to administer a "control exam" -- that is, applicants will have to sit for another test, and they will do so in person. This control exam will apply not only to those who secured a spot at UNAM based on this year's test but also to everyone who would have been admitted based on minimum successful scores in their program of study since 2021. About 58,000 people could be affected, and places at UNAM will now depend on the results of the new test. (Details on the control exam should appear soon; classes are currently scheduled to begin on August 10, so everything will have to move quickly unless the school decides to delay classes.) According to Gaceta UNAM, the school's official news publication, the university rector has apologized to honest applicants, since they will now have to prepare for and take the test again despite doing nothing wrong. Still, the control exam is "necessary to give certainty and guarantee equity in access," the rector added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Aug 2026 11:00pm GMT

$100 million deal gives 50,000 Ukrainian drones US-developed AI capabilities.

03 Aug 2026 10:11pm GMT

Apple says its lower-cost MacBook Neo is beginning to displace Windows laptops and Chromebooks in K-12 schools, with several districts purchasing thousands of units. According to the company's latest earnings call, nearly half of the large MacBook Neo purchases made by U.S. educational institutions last quarter reportedly replaced competing platforms. 9to5Mac reports: Apple's commentary highlighted some large district deployments moving to Neo Pinellas County Schools, one of the largest districts in Florida, which is moving its 25k students off Windows and onto MacBook Neo across its 18 high schools. In Washington, Peninsula School District 401 moved over its 8,000 students from Chromebooks to MacBook Neo. Midwest City-Del City School District in Oklahoma purchased more than 6,000 MacBook Neos to become an all-Apple district for students.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Aug 2026 10:00pm GMT

Microsoft reportedly plans to let developers bring Xbox 360 games to PC and next-generation Xbox devices, with a gradual rollout expected between 2027 and 2028. A separate disc-to-digital program would also give players transferable digital licenses tied to their physical Xbox discs, preserving the ability to resell or trade them. The Verge reports: With 360 games, developers can opt into making them backward compatible, and they will have control over things like a game's price and if it's available on Game Pass. The feature is expected to have a "gradual" rollout between 2027 and 2028 "across next-gen devices." The "full launch" of original Xbox games on PC is also set for October 2026; the initial program announced in July included just four games. The document also includes details about a way for players to get a digital version of a game that they already own on a physical disc, which The Verge's Tom Warren reported on in July. The document says that if a player puts an Xbox One or Series game on disc into an Xbox One or Series X console with a disc drive, they'll be granted a digital license that's bound to "that disc and the player's account." The license will stay with a player across Xbox devices, but if the disc "changes hands," the license will transfer to the new person. That should mean that gamers can still trade and sell discs; once the original owner of a disc does so, they can't play the digital version they got from that disc anymore. According to the document, a public beta for the disc-to-digital program was set for July with general availability set for August. We understand Microsoft had originally planned to test its disc-to-digital program with Xbox Insiders in July, but the beta was delayed. It's unclear if the timeline of August general availability is still accurate.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Aug 2026 9:00pm GMT

Also: Cyborg diving suits for cockroaches, why sleepy sperm whales blow bubbles, Betelgeuse's companion star.

03 Aug 2026 8:13pm GMT

The orbiting observatory in minifigure scale.

03 Aug 2026 7:21pm GMT

The best operating system in the world, 9front, released its latest version, "THIS WAS SUPPOSED TO BE FUN". As I'm sure you know, 9front is a fork of plan9, and one that's actually consistently maintained and developed. It brings an improved affinewarp API for scaling and zooming, a new Synaptics driver, and a new driver for UPSs. There's also a new tool called gdbfs, which allows you to mount a remote gdb at /proc. Of course, there's much more than this, including the usual list of bugfixes and small changes. Few of us are worthy of using 9front, but if you are, you already know where to get it and how to update.

03 Aug 2026 3:56pm GMT

Cameron Kaiser's articles are always a right treat, and this one's no different. It's about running MkLinux on the Apple Workgroup Server, the regular Mac rebadged into a server product and predecessor to Apple's first real server product, the Apple Network Server running AIX. The Workgroup Servers were originally marketed with Apple's UNIX variant, A/UX, but with this operating system not surviving the transition to PowerPC processors, Apple started offering other options. A/UX ultimately didn't survive the 1994 68K transition to PowerPC, but in 1996 Apple publicly offered another option: run Linux, using the Mach microkernel. Although MkLinux emerged after the 9150's discontinuation, it's still just an overgrown NuBus Power Mac, so between more RAM, a beefier CPU upgrade and various video cards, by the end of this article we ought to have a configuration that gives us the best of two worlds - classic MacOS and MkLinux - in one server. ↫ Cameron Kaiser I never really stopped to think that MkLinux really was, but it's a lot more interesting than just an early Linux port to PowerPC Macs. In fact, it ran the monolithic Linux kernel as a userspace process on top of the Mach microkernel, which made it a valuable testing ground for Apple's later XNU efforts. It's wild that Apple had an official, blessed Linux operating system as early as the mid '90s, even if its performance was apparently not particularly great - due to the overhead of running it atop Mach - and Jobs canned it as soon as he came back to the company.

03 Aug 2026 12:54pm GMT

Whenever the EU steps in to regulate the big technology companies, the response from news outlets and bloggers (often funded or outright owned by right-wing extremists) is to claim it's just a bunch of dumb , tech-illiterate bureaucrats telling the vastly more intelligent and superior technology companies what to do. Of course, this is just propaganda. Case in point: Something big just happened. As the Open Home Foundation's Android developer for Home Assistant, I was invited by the European Commission (EC) to consult on Android interoperability. The call for feedback was part of the Commission's work under the Digital Markets Act (DMA). For anyone unfamiliar, the DMA is an EU law that defines and regulates "gatekeeper platforms" - those that offer "core" services like search engines, app stores, and messaging platforms - to make digital markets fairer and more open to competition. As you might imagine, I had plenty to say about Google's restrictions on Android, especially the tech giant limiting wake word detection to its own Gemini assistant, a concern I surfaced in our Home Assistant 2026.3 Release Party. To put it plainly, Google had no grounds for limiting Android interoperability in the first place, other than to give itself the upper hand. We knew our community deserved better, and that's what we told the Commission. The result? The EC listened to us and all the other organizations that contributed. On July 16, 2026, the European Commission adopted a decision under the DMA that requires Alphabet (Google's parent company) to open up eleven Android features, including always-on wake word detection, ambient sensor access, and screen automation - to all assistants, on equal terms. ↫ Timothy Nibeaudeau What's really interesting is just how deeply technical and detailed this new EU decision really is. Timothy Nibeaudeau laid out the technical details of how wake word detection on Android works for the European Commission - in short, a DSP runs a really tiny model in a process isolated from the network to detect just a specific wakeword, and only once that wakeword is detected does it hand things off to a larger model running on the actual main SoC - and the EC's new decision accurately and precisely describes this method and wrote their decision to take every detail into account. When I was invited to share these limitations (and others) with the Commission, I didn't hold back. Which is why we were thrilled to discover an impressively precise and technically accurate decision from the EU: it correctly describes the two-stage wake word architecture, the DSP, the isolated process, and the role coupling. The report went down to details we only figured out by reading Android's source code ourselves. ↫ Timothy Nibeaudeau The idea that the European Union and Commission are a bunch of dumb, illiterate bureaucrats imposing impossible, unworkable, unrealistic demands on poor, hardworking, honest technology companies is a bunch of propaganda paid for by these very same companies, and every decision and ruling by the EU around the Digital Markets Act further confirms this by having strong technological underpinnings and being based on the actual workings of the technologies they cover. The EU does a lot of dumb things - as any government body does - but you don't get to enjoy a nearly two-thirds approval rating for nothing, especially not in the face of the state of the world today. The Digital Markets Act has already proven to be incredibly effective, and this is exactly why the right-wing propaganda against it is reaching an ever crazier fever pitch. When basic consumer protection legislation makes the most powerful companies, right-wing media empires, and even the most powerful country in the world throw tamper tantrums like toddlers, you know you're doing something right.

03 Aug 2026 12:19pm 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

Just trying to answer one simple question: What if the terminal was 3D?

11 May 2026 12:00am GMT