fidzu : computers

An anonymous reader shares a report: China is pulling the plug on a key advantage held by high-frequency traders, removing servers dedicated to those firms out of local exchanges' data centers, according to people familiar with the matter. Commodities futures exchanges in Shanghai and Guangzhou are among those that have ordered local brokers to shift servers for their clients out of data centers run by the bourses, according to the people, who said the move was led by regulators. The change doesn't only affect high-frequency firms but they are likely to feel the biggest impact. The Shanghai Futures Exchange has told brokers they need to get equipment for high-speed clients out by the end of next month, while other clients need to do so by April 30, the people said. The clampdown will hit China's army of domestic high-frequency firms but will also impact a swathe of global firms that are active in the country. Citadel Securities, Jane Street Group and Jump Trading are among the foreign firms whose access to servers is being affected, the people said, asking not to be named as the matter is private.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

16 Jan 2026 3:26pm GMT

Tom's Hardware: Extensive research into the pricing of some of the best hard drives on the market for large capacity, economical storage indicates that prices are beginning to increase sharply, with some of the most popular models on the market seeing increases upwards of 60%. According to research from ComputerBase, pricing analysis on 12 of the most popular mainstream drives on the market indicates an average price increase of 46% over the last 4 months. While the research and price checks on these drives track movement based on European prices (ComputerBase is a German outlet), Tom's Hardware checks on similar or identical SKUs in the U.S. indicate that the trends are indeed replicated, or perhaps worse, on the other side of the pond. CB reports that various drives like Seagate's IronWolf NAS line, Toshiba's Cloud Scale Capacity Drives, Western Digital's WD Red, and Seagate's BarraCuda lines are all showing price increases of between 23% and 66%. As noted, the average price increases clock in at 46% since September 2025.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

16 Jan 2026 2:40pm GMT

theodp writes: Code.org, the nonprofit backed by AI giants Microsoft, Google and Amazon and whose Hour of AI and free AI curriculum aim to make world's K-12 schoolchildren AI literate, points job seekers to its AI Use Policy in Hiring, which promises dire consequences for those who use AI during interviews or take home assignments without its OK. Explaining "What's Not Okay," Code.org writes: "While we support thoughtful use of AI, certain uses undermine fairness and honesty in the hiring process. We ask that candidates do not [...] use AI during interviews and take-home assignments without explicit consent from the interview team. Such use goes against our values of integrity and transparency and will result in disqualification from the hiring process." Interestingly, Code.org CEO Partovi last year faced some blowback from educators over his LinkedIn post that painted schools that police AI use by students as dinosaurs. Partovi wrote, "Schools of the past define AI use as 'cheating.' Schools of the future define AI skills as the new literacy. Every desk-job employer is looking to hire workers who are adept at AI. Employers want the students who are best at this new form of 'cheating.'"

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

16 Jan 2026 2:00pm GMT

Speaking of NixOS' use of 9P, what if you want to, for whatever inexplicable reason, use macOS, but make it immutable? Immutable Linux distributions are getting a lot of attention lately, and similar concepts are used by Android and iOS, so it makes sense for people stuck on macOS to want similar functionality. Apple doesn't offer anything to make this happen, but of course, there's always Nix. And I literally do mean always. Only try out Nix if you're willing to first be sucked into a pit of despair and madness before coming out enlightened on the other end - I managed to only narrowly avoid this very thing happening to me last year, so be advised. Nix is no laughing matter. Anyway, yes, you can use Nix to make macOS immutable. But managing a good working environment on macOS has long been a game of "hope for the best." We've all been there: a curl | sh here, a manual brew install there, and six months later, you're staring at a broken PATH and a Python environment that seems to have developed its own consciousness. I've spent a lot of time recently moving my entire workflow into a declarative system using nix. From my zsh setup to my odin toolchain, here is why the transition from the imperative world of Homebrew to the immutable world of nix-darwin has been both a revelation and a fight. ↫ Carette Antonin Of course it's been a fight - it's Nix, after all - but it's quite impressive and awesome that Nix can be used in this way. I would rather discover what electricity from light sockets tastes like than descend into this particular flavour of Nix madness, but if you're really sick of macOS being a pile of trash for - among a lot of other things - homebrew and similar bolted-on systems held together by duct tape and spit, this might be a solution for you.

16 Jan 2026 12:09am GMT

If you're only even remotely aware of the operating system Plan 9, you'll most likely know that it takes the UNIX concept of "everything is a file" to the absolute extreme. In order to make sure all these files - and thus the components of Plan 9 - can properly communicate with one another, there's 9P, or the Plan 9 Filesystem Protocol. Several Plan 9 applications are 9P file servers, for instance, and even things like windows are files. It's a lot more complicated than this, of course, but that's not relevant right now. Since Plan 9 wasn't exactly a smashing success that took the operating system world by storm, you might not be aware that 9P is actually implemented in a few odd places. My favourite is how Microsoft turned to 9P for a crucial feature of its Windows Subsystem for Linux: accessing files inside a Linux VM running on Windows. To put it briefly: a 9P protocol file server facilitates file related requests, with Windows acting as the client. We've modified the WSL init daemon to initiate a 9P server. This server contains protocols that support Linux metadata, including permissions. A Windows service and driver that act as the client and talks to the 9P server (which is running inside of a WSL instance). Client and server communicate over AF_UNIX sockets, since WSL allows interop between a Windows application and a Linux application using AF_UNIX as described in this post. ↫ Craig Loewen at Microsoft's Dev Blogs This implementation is still around today, so if you're using Windows Subsystem for Linux, you're using a little bit of Plan 9 as glue to make it all come together. Similarly, if you're using QEMU and sharing files between the host and a VM through the VirtFS driver, you're also using 9P. Both NixOS and GNU Guix use 9P when they build themselves inside a virtual machine, too, and there's probably a few other places where you can run into 9P. I don't know, I thought this was interesting.

15 Jan 2026 11:53pm GMT

Pharma execs had avoided conflict with Trump admin, but now join doctors in rebukes.

15 Jan 2026 11:01pm GMT

NYT says US hackers were able to turn off power and then quickly turn it back on.

15 Jan 2026 9:29pm GMT

An interesting new take on Trek includes some characters you already know.

15 Jan 2026 9:09pm GMT

Are you a normal person and thus sick of all the nonsensical, non-browser stuff browser makers keep adding to your browser, but for whatever reason you don't want to or cannot switch to one of the forks of your browser of choice? Just the Browser helps you remove AI features, telemetry data reporting, sponsored content, product integrations, and other annoyances from desktop web browsers. The goal is to give you "just the browser" and nothing else, using hidden settings in web browsers intended for companies and other organizations. This project includes configuration files for popular web browsers, documentation for installing and modifying them, and easy installation scripts. Everything is open-source on GitHub. ↫ Just The Browser's website It comes in the form of scripts for Windows, Linux, or macOS, and can be used for Google Chrome, Microsoft Edge, and Mozilla Firefox. It's all open source so you can check the scripts for yourself, but there are also manual guides for each browser if you're not too keen on running an unknown script. The changes won't be erased by updates, unless the specific settings and configuration flags used are actually removed or altered by the browser makers. That's all there's to it - a very straightforward tool.

14 Jan 2026 12:42am GMT

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

In 2024 the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) started funding work on the ALPM project, which provides a Rust-based framework for Arch Linux Package Management. Refer to the project's FAQ and mission statement to learn more about the relation to the tooling currently in use on Arch Linux. The funding has now concluded, but over the time of 15 months allowed us to create various tools and integrations that we will highlight in the following sections. We have worked on six milestones with focus on various aspects of the package management ecosystem, ranging from formalizing, parsing and writing of …

10 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

Did you know you can have newlines in pathnames? The design is very human and this absolutely doesn't have any unforeseen consequences! Also a friendly reminder that you can store anything on a nameserver if you try hard enough.

Originally posted by me on donotsta.re (2025-12-23)

09 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT