05 Jun 2026
Ars Technica
Work on Russia's leaky space station module causes astronauts to take shelter
"We look forward to working with Roscosmos on a collaborative approach to address the leaks."
05 Jun 2026 7:03pm GMT
Slashdot
GOV.UK Goes Dutch On Payments As It Dumps Stripe
The UK's Government Digital Service is replacing Stripe with Dutch payments provider Adyen for many GOV.UK Pay transactions, including local authorities, police forces, and armed forces units. The three-year deal covers about 1,000 services and is meant to make payments more flexible while keeping the user experience largely unchanged. The Register reports: According to the tender notice published in February 2025, the contract covers around 17 percent of payments made through GOV.UK Pay but more than 70 percent of its organizations and includes the only option allowing users to start taking payments within one working day. At that point the contract had an estimated maximum value of £49 million, although with no guarantees over volume. In a blogpost about the contract award on 2 June, GDS said it will migrate around 1,000 services to the new supplier. "We will make migration as straightforward as possible while complying with Know Your Customer legislation that protects everyone from fraud," wrote Alan Maddrell, senior content designer for the service. "Most importantly, there will be no discernible difference for paying users and no loss in functionality." He added that the change of supplier will help introduce new options including pay by bank, which transfers money directly between bank accounts using open banking services and avoids the need to type in card details. GDS will continue to use WorldPay to process payments for central government, linked organizations and NHS bodies.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
05 Jun 2026 7:00pm GMT
Ars Technica
S&P 500 rejects SpaceX, also blocking entry for OpenAI and Anthropic
SpaceX won't get easy access to billions of dollars from passive investors.
05 Jun 2026 6:45pm GMT
"We pissed off a lot of people": Giant data center plan cut 50% amid protests
Developer felt "beaten up," with "no choice" but to shrink data center.
05 Jun 2026 6:23pm GMT
Slashdot
BSA Lashes Out At Mandatory Open-Source Licensing
Longtime Slashdot reader Elektroschock writes: The American Business Software Alliance (BSA) does not consider mandatory open-source licensing to be an appropriate indicator of sovereignty. This is among the "pointed messages" they sent to the French government consultation (closed) today. "What protects Europe is the ability to govern, audit, and mitigate risk, not where a company files its corporate papers," said Thomas Boue of BSA. "Criteria of this kind raise costs, reduce access to best-in-class security solutions, and risk conflicting with the EU's international trade commitments."
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
05 Jun 2026 6:00pm GMT
Google Says It Will Replenish More Water Than It Uses At Data Centers
An anonymous reader quotes a report from 9to5Google: There's been a lot of pushback in recent months around the impact of AI data centers on local communities, with the use of water being a key issue for many. Google, in an expansion of its "water stewardship" programs, is making commitments that include replenishing more water than it uses at its data center sites. AI data centers go through a lot of water use in cooling the hardware used to power models, and Google is no exception. While Google stands by saying that the impact of AI data centers on U.S. water consumption is "small," it also says it is focusing on "protecting local water resources in all aspects of our data center operations." In a post, Google explains five new commitments regarding water use at its data centers in the U.S. These include replenishing more water than is consumed at data centers, helping local utilities to modernize water infrastructure, using air-cooled solutions in areas where watersheds are at risk, "transparently" reporting water use at data centers, and focusing on "alternative and reclaimed" water solutions. [...] In a linked paper (PDF), Google says it will replenish 120% of the water it uses at data center sites by 2030. Google is also committing $17 million to new water stewardship projects in Georgia, Iowa, Michigan, Minnesota, Missouri, Nebraska, and Texas in addition to 165 other projects already in place throughout the U.S.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
05 Jun 2026 5:00pm GMT
OSnews
This mini PC with the latest RISC-V SoC might actually be worth it
RISC-V has been in the "promising" phase for a long time now, especially for general purpose computing, never really breaking through into the mainstream in any measurable way. While I think that breakthrough is still relatively far away, we now do have newer RISC-V SoCs on the market supporting the RVA23 baseline RISC-V profile. One of them is the SpacemiT Key Stone KЗ, which promises to deliver a massive performance increase over previous RISC-V offerings. It's exactly this chip that's finding its way into complete, turnkey mini PC solutions, like this one from a company called Firefly. The base model comes with 8GB of LDDPR5 RAM and 128GB of storage, at a price of about €300 or so (there's also a 32GB/128GB model at well over €600). This is the first time I'm looking at a complete RISC-V solution where I feel like it might actually make for a good moment to jump in for us enthusiasts. No, the performance won't rival anything Intel or AMD has to offer, but it seems capable enough for a lot of day-to-day tasks, and I'm curious to see just how far along the Linux world is when it comes to RISC-V support. It's not part of our current set of fundraiser incentives, but if you'd like to see this RISC-V mini PC reviewed here on OSNews, you can always donate and add a note that you specifically want to see such a review (so I can gauge interest not just from our few commenters, but also from the more than 99% of our readers who only lurk). As always, you can donate through Ko-Fi, or, if you're European, via a SEPA direct bank transfer (Name: Thom Holwerda - IBAN: SE08 8000 0820 1684 4657 8414 - BIC: SWEDSESS).
05 Jun 2026 3:49pm GMT
When su replaced login for becoming another UNIX login
I've mentioned it before, but Chris Siebenmann is basically the Raymond Chen of the UNIX world, and today he's filling that role perfectly once again. I recently read Simon Tatham's Nitpicking the shell history scene in Tron: Legacy, where one thing that surprised Tatham was the film using 'login -n root' to become root instead of 'su'. This surprised me because I found that perfectly ordinary, and this turns up both a bit of Unix history and a difference between modern Unixes. Plain 'su' can let you become another user, including root, but what it explicitly doesn't do by default is create a new login shell for that user. If you do 'su root', the new root shell normally inherits most of your environment, your current directory, and so on. Sometimes this is what you want and sometimes you really want a new login environment, and originally in Unix how you got the latter was to run 'login' from your existing shell session (and this meant that login was setuid root, like su). ↫ Chris Siebenmann Unsurprisingly, this distinction has persisted to this day in various UNIX-like operating systems, but in different ways. Some maintain the explicit distinction, while others have more or less standardised on using su for both use cases. It's an interesting bit of UNIX archeology.
05 Jun 2026 12:57pm GMT
04 Jun 2026
OSnews
Roku launches open-source embedded Roku LT OS
Roku, the company that makes TV boxes and sells ad space based on your usage patterns, has released its remote control operating system as open source - and by remote control I don't mean robot stuff or whatever, but actual remote controls, the thing you use to control your TV or whatever from the couch. Roku has announced the official availability of Roku LT OS - a lightweight, highly deterministic open-source operating system that is already used in our industry-changing Roku remote controls. In addition to high-performance automotive platforms, Roku LT OS is designed to be accessible to the broader developer community. The operating system ships with native support for the ESP32 platform, a highly popular SoC among hobbyists and makers. Because ESP32 development boards are widely available online for just a few dollars, developers can get started with Roku LT OS with minimal hardware investment. ↫ Roku's developers blog As far as I can tell, this operating system is entirely new and not based on Linux or something else, but the available documentation is light on details so I can't make much more out of it. Regardless, it's nice to have another open source embedded operating system.
04 Jun 2026 6:21pm GMT
01 Jun 2026
Planet Arch Linux
Today is my first day at JetBrains
Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!
01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT
11 May 2026
Planet Arch Linux
Ratty: A terminal emulator with inline 3D graphics
Just trying to answer one simple question: What if the terminal was 3D?
11 May 2026 12:00am GMT
18 Apr 2026
Planet Arch Linux
Break the loop, move to Berlin
Break the pattern today or the loop will repeat tomorrow.
18 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT