fidzu : computers

The fight over net neutrality saw another turbulent year in 2025, as federal protections that seemed poised for a comeback in 2024 were first struck down by a court and then preemptively removed by the Trump administration's FCC without a chance for public comment. The removal, The Verge summarizes in a report, was part of Chairman Brendan Carr's "Delete, Delete, Delete" initiative targeting what the agency deems unnecessary regulations. Federal net neutrality rules have now been on and off for 15 years, passing under Obama in 2010, returning in 2015, getting overturned in 2017, and briefly revived in 2024 before courts struck them down again. Matt Wood, vice president of policy and general counsel at nonprofit Free Press, told The Verge that ISPs often feel little financial impact from these rules. "A lot of their complaints about the supposed 'burdens' from these rules are really just ideological in nature," Wood said. States have filled the void. California's 2018 law remains the nation's gold standard, and Maine passed a bipartisan bill in June. John Bergmayer, legal director at Public Knowledge, said state-level laws and the threat of new ones "has kept some of the worst outcomes in check." The National Telecommunications and Information Administration is now pressuring states to exempt ISPs from net neutrality laws to remain eligible for broadband infrastructure funding. Chao Jun Liu of the Electronic Frontier Foundation summed up the year's pattern: "ISPs just want to do whatever they want to do with no limits and nobody telling them how to do it."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Dec 2025 7:10pm GMT

A large-scale study tracking more than 27,500 middle-aged and elderly people over roughly nine years has found that poor sleep quality is associated with accelerated brain aging, and chronic inflammation appears to be one of the key mechanisms driving this effect. Researchers at Sweden's Karolinska Institute assessed participants' sleep across five dimensions -- chronotype, duration, insomnia, snoring and daytime sleepiness -- and later scanned their brains using MRI to estimate biological brain age through machine learning models. The results? For every point decrease in healthy sleep score, the gap between brain age and chronological age widened by approximately six months. Those in the poorest sleep category had brains that appeared roughly one year older than their actual age. Night-owl tendencies, sleep duration outside the 7-8 hour sweet spot and snoring were particularly strongly linked to brain aging. The researchers measured low-grade inflammation using biomarkers including C-reactive protein levels and white blood cell counts. Inflammation accounted for more than 10% of the association between poor sleep patterns and brain aging. The glymphatic system, which clears waste from the brain primarily during sleep, may also play a role, the research added.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Dec 2025 6:30pm GMT

Another year wraps up, and with it comes the annual ritual of taking stock. What were the movies, TV shows and books from this year that stood out to you? Not necessarily the ones that dominated conversation or topped charts, but the ones you found yourself recommending to friends, or returning to for a second watch or read. Share your picks and, if you're inclined, a line or two on what made them stick.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Dec 2025 5:00pm GMT

This time, a Colorado plant scheduled to shut down will be kept on standby.

31 Dec 2025 4:30pm GMT

The past year has seen plenty of hacks and outages. Here are the ones topping the list.

31 Dec 2025 1:15pm GMT

In a year where lofty promises collided with inconvenient research, would-be oracles became software tools.

31 Dec 2025 12:00pm GMT

I'd just like to interject for a moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, Win32/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, loss32 Win32 plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another free component of a fully functioning system made useful by WINE, the ReactOS userland, and other vital system components comprising a full OS as defined by Microsoft. ↫ The loss32 homepage Joking introduction aside, this is exactly what you think it is: a Linux kernel with the Windows user interface running on top through Wine. I'm sure quite a few of use mused about this very concept at some point in time, but hikari_no_yume went a step further and created this working concept. It's rough around the edges and needs a ton of work, but I do think the idea is sound and could offer real benefits for certain types of users. It's definitely a more realistic idea than ReactOS, a project that's perpetually chasing the dragon but never coming even close to catching it. Not having to recreate the entire Windows NT kernel, drivers, and subsystems, and using Linux instead, is simply a more realistic approach that could bring results within our lifetimes. The added benefit here is that this could still run Linux applications, too, of course. hikari_no_yume is looking for help with the project, and I hope they find it. This is a great idea, with an absolutely amazing name, too.

30 Dec 2025 1:39pm GMT

Nina Kalinina has been on an absolute roll lately, diving deep into VisiOn, uncovering Bellcore MGR, installing Linux on a PC-98 machine, and much more. This time, she's ported Windows 2 to run on a machine it was never supposed to run on. I bought my first Apricot PC about three years ago, when I realised I wanted an 8086-based computer. At the time, I knew nothing about it and simply bought it because it looked rad and the price was low. I had no idea that it was not IBM PC-compatible, and that there were very few programs available for it. I have been on a quest to get a modern-ish word processor and spreadsheet program for it ever since. Which eventually made me "port" Windows 2 on it. In this post, I will tell you the story of this port. ↫ Nina Kalinina To get Windows 2 working on the Apricot, Kalinina had to create basic video, keyboard, and mouse drivers, allowing Windows 2 to boot into text mode. I wasn't aware of this, but Windows 2 in text mode is funky: it's rendering all the text you would see in a full Windows 2 user interface, just without any of the user interface elements. Further developing the video driver from scratch turned out to be too big of an undertaking for now, so she opted to extract the video driver from Windows 1 instead - which required a whole other unique approach. The keyboard and mouse drivers were extracted from Windows 1 in the same way. The end result is a fully working copy of Windows 2, including things like Word and Excel, which was the original goal in the first place. There aren't many people around doing stuff like this, and it's great to see such very peculiar, unique itches being scratched. Even if this is only relevant for exactly one person, it's still been worth it.

30 Dec 2025 1:26pm GMT

I knew digital cameras and phones had to do a lot of processing and other types of magic to output anything human eyes can work with, but I had no idea just how much. This is wild.

30 Dec 2025 1:05pm GMT

With the update to driver version 590, the NVIDIA driver no longer supports Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs or older. We will replace the nvidia package with nvidia-open, nvidia-dkms with nvidia-open-dkms, and nvidia-lts with nvidia-lts-open. Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment. Intervention required for Pascal/older users: Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support:

• Uninstall the official nvidia, nvidia-lts, or nvidia-dkms packages.
• Install nvidia-580xx-dkms from the AUR

Users with Turing (20xx and GTX 1650 series) and newer GPUs will automatically transition to the open kernel modules on upgrade and require no manual intervention.

20 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

Peter Jung via arch-announce wrote:

With the update to driver version 590, the NVIDIA driver no longer supports Pascal (GTX 10xx) GPUs or older. We will replace the 'nvidia' package with 'nvidia-open', 'nvidia-dkms' with 'nvidia-open-dkms', and 'nvidia-lts' with 'nvidia-lts-open'. Impact: Updating the NVIDIA packages on systems with Pascal, Maxwell, or older cards will fail to load the driver, which may result in a broken graphical environment. Intervention required for Pascal/older users: Users with GTX 10xx series and older cards must switch to the legacy proprietary branch to maintain support:

• Uninstall the official 'nvidia', 'nvidia-lts', or 'nvidia-dkms' packages.
• Install 'nvidia-580xx-dkms' from the AUR

Users with Turing (20xx and GTX 1650 series) and newer GPUs will automatically transition to the open kernel modules on upgrade and require no manual intervention.

https://archlinux.org/news/nvidia-590-d … l-modules/

20 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT

The following packages may require manual intervention due to the upgrade from 9.0 to 10.0:

• aspnet-runtime
• aspnet-targeting-pack
• dotnet-runtime
• dotnet-sdk
• dotnet-source-built-artifacts
• dotnet-targeting-pack

pacman may display the following error failed to prepare transaction (could not satisfy dependencies) for the affected packages. If you are affected by this and require the 9.0 packages, the following commands will update e.g. aspnet-runtime to aspnet-runtime-9.0: pacman -Syu aspnet-runtime-9.0 pacman -Rs aspnet-runtime

11 Dec 2025 12:00am GMT