fidzu : computers

Google is accelerating Chrome's major release cadence from four weeks to two starting with version 153 on September 8th. "...our goal is to ensure developers and users have immediate access to the latest performance improvements, fixes and new capabilities," says Google. "Building on our history of adapting our release process to match the demands of a modern web, Chrome is moving to a two-week release cycle." The company says the "smaller scope" of these releases "minimizes disruption and simplifies post-release debugging." They also cite "recent process enhancements" that will "maintain [Chrome's] high standards for stability." 9to5Google reports: There will still be weekly security updates between milestones. This applies to desktop, Android, and iOS, while there are "no changes to the Dev and the Canary channels": "A Chrome Beta for each version will ship three weeks before the stable release. We recommend developers test with the beta to keep up to date with any upcoming changes that might impact your sites and applications." The eight-week Extended Stable release schedule for enterprise customers and Chromium embedders will not change. Chromebooks will also have "extended release options": "Our priority is a seamless experience, so the latest Chrome releases will roll out to Chromebooks after dedicated platform testing. We are adapting these channels for the new two-week browser cycle and we will share more details soon regarding milestone updates for managed devices."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Mar 2026 11:00pm GMT

"Engineers are assessing what allowed the seal to become dislodged to prevent the issue from recurring."

03 Mar 2026 10:54pm GMT

Accenture plans to buy Ookla, which also includes RootMetrics and Ekahau.

03 Mar 2026 10:20pm GMT

FCC to review foreign debt, but Carr indicates it will be a formality.

03 Mar 2026 10:05pm GMT

darwinmac writes: While many users choose Microsoft Office over LibreOffice because of its support for the proprietary formats (.docx, .xlsx, and .pptx), others prefer Office for its "better" ribbon interface. These users often criticize LibreOffice for having a "clunky" UI instead of the "standard" ribbon interface you would find in Word, Excel, and other Office apps. Now, Neowin reports that LibreOffice is fighting back, arguing that its UI is actually superior because it is customizable, with several modes such as the classic toolbar interface, an Office-inspired ribbon layout, a sidebar-focused design, and more. Furthermore, it argues that there is no evidence that the ribbon offers "superior usability" over other interface modes. LibreOffice says in a blog post: Incidentally, the characterization of ribbon-style interfaces as "modern" or "standard," used by several users, is not based on any objective usability parameter or design principle, but is the result of Microsoft's dominance in the market and the huge investments made when the ribbon was introduced in Office 2007 as a new paradigm for productivity software. The idea that "modern" equals "similar to a ribbon" is a normalization effect: the Microsoft interface has become a benchmark because of its ubiquity, not because of its proven advantages in terms of usability. Added to this is the fact that many users evaluate office software through the lens of familiarity with Microsoft Office and consider deviation from it as a problem rather than a design choice. Before this, LibreOffice had also criticized its competitor OnlyOffice, accusing it of being "fake open source" because it believes OnlyOffice is working with Microsoft to lock users into the Office ecosystem by prioritizing the formats mentioned earlier instead of LibreOffice's own OpenDocument Format (ODF).

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Mar 2026 10:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: Users of Meta's AI smart glasses in Europe may be unknowingly sharing intimate video and sensitive financial information with moderators outside of the bloc, according to a report from Sweden's Svenska Dagbladet released last week. Employees in Kenya doing AI "annotation" told the journalists that they've seen people nude, using the toilet and engaging in sexual activity, along with credit card numbers and other sensitive information. With Meta's Ray-Ban Display and other glasses with AI capabilities, users can record what they're looking at or get answers to questions via a Meta AI assistant. If a wearer wants to make use of that AI, though, they must agree to Meta's terms of service that allow any data captured to be reviewed by humans. That's because Meta's large language models (LLMs) often require people to annotate visual data so that the AI can understand it and build its training models. This data can end up in places like Nairobi, Kenya, often moderated by underpaid workers. Such actions are subject to Europe's GDPR rules that require transparency about how personal data is processed, according to a data protection lawyer cited in the report. However, Svenska Dagbladet's reporters said they needed to jump through some hoops to see Meta's privacy policy for its wearable products. That policy states that either humans or automated systems may review sensitive data, and puts the onus on the user to not share sensitive information.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Mar 2026 9:00pm GMT

Have you bought and set up a new phone for someone else lately, especially someone less technologically savvy? It's a bit of a nightmare, with an endless list of confusing steps and dark patterns trying to trick you into signing up for all kinds of services. Joel Chrono (he took his username from the best game ever made) just went through this experience, with new Samsung phones for his parents, and it wasn't great. Without me, my parents would have ended up creating at least one extra Samsung account. Cloud services like OneDrive or Google Photos would be sucking up files and copying them to their servers, getting filled up with the data and then asking them to subscribe to unlock more storage a couple of months down the line. Left on their own, my parents may be seeing ads popping up constantly in OneUI, as well as browsing the web without an adblocker, they would be using default applications that don't work as reliably, that track whatever they do to a certain degree. And of course, all of those AI assistants would be listening in in the background. It really is a nightmare out there, and it's not only affecting my parents, it affects all of those unaware of the dangers that these practices bring. It's a mess all around. ↫ Joel Chrono In this particular case it involves Samsung phones, but the same applies to phones from other brands and even with other operating systems. Do you want to login with these accounts? Please add your credit card and all your personal information! Set up tap-to-pay so we can see where you buy what! Do you want to subscribe to our music service? Do you want access to our streaming service? What about the premium versions? Need more online storage? You're only getting 5GB for free, so if you don't want to lose those priceless pictures of your grand kids you should really upgrade to 1TB! Have you checked out our application store yet? And don't worry, if you say no to any of these questions we'll keep pestering you about them with notifications, fullscreen interstitials and banners in the settings application until your brain dissolves to mush! I have a collection of about a million PDAs, from the early days up until the very fanciest models from right around when the iPhone and Android started taking off. Of course, they're in storage so virtually always out of battery, but when I do turn any of them on, their onboarding process couldn't be simpler. Tap a few locations on the screen to calibrate the touch layer, set the date and time, and that's it - you're at the home screen ready to go. I wish modern smartphones were similar. I wish the greedy bean counters were told to pound sand and the user interface specialists took over again. My wife and I have two young boys, 3 and almost 5. One day, I'll be the out-of-touch dad or grandpa and I'll need their help to set up my brain implant chip or whatever. I hope it won't involve upsells for streaming services.

02 Mar 2026 10:51pm GMT

Microsoft is pushing "AI" hard in Windows, Office, and in their other products, and it's earned them a cute new nickname: Microslop. It turns out the company really doesn't like it when you use this nickname, however, and its official Copilot Discord server - yes, there is an official one - has gone into a complete meltdown over people using the nickname. First the company started banning the word "Microslop" in its Discord server, but after people started circumventing the ban with alternative spellings. That's when all hell broke loose. What started as a simple keyword filter quickly snowballed into users deliberately testing the restriction and posting variations of the blocked term. Accounts that included "Microslop" in their messages first got banned from messaging again. Not long after, access to parts of the server was restricted, with message history hidden and posting permissions disabled for many users. ↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest People don't like "AI". They don't like being forced to use it at work, they don't like it shoved in their face in their operating systems, they don't like every new product being plastered with nonsensical "AI" marketing. It's absolutely no surprise that one of the companies pushing "AI" in the most visible way, a company few people like anyway, gets a nice new nickname. I love that this happened. I hope their brand suffers as much as possible.

02 Mar 2026 8:17pm GMT

If you're following KDE Plasma development, you've most likely run into something called Union, a project KDE is working on to unify their various ways of theming their applications. The problem KDE is facing right now is that after so many decades of development and changes in how people want to develop applications, they ended up with various different ways of writing applications, each with their own theming method. The end result has been that for a while now, theming on KDE is kind of broken. Broken in what way? Most long-time KDE users will be aware that ever since KDE 4, the KDE shell (Plasma using SVG for theming) and KDE applications (QtWidgets using QStyle for theming) use separate theme engines. While this has always been annoying, it's at least manageable in that most theme designers tended to create both a Plasma SVG theme and a QStyle theme that matched. However, things got more complicated when KDE introduced QtQuick, its modern way of creating applications with QML. QtQuick has its own theme, qqc2-desktop-style, to make QtQuick applications look and feel like Breeze, KDE's current theme. Not only do all of these have to be kept in sync manually, QtQuick applications also do not properly inherit all the elements of the QStyle theme you set, leading to many modern KDE applications looking broken when using a non-default theme (and the same applies when using Kvantum; it also cannot properly theme QtQuick applications). In other words, there is currently no way to theme the entire KDE desktop for a consistent look, and if you try, many applications will simply look broken. Union is KDE's answer to this set of problems. Union is a new style engine that takes CSS and processes it into consistent themes for both QtWidget and QtQuick applications. It's quite flexible, and can potentially even be extended to generate GTK themes from that same CSS. Sadly, since the KDE Pasma shell SVG stuff is entirely different, it won't be styled by Union, but KDE might simply retire the SVG stuff entirely and move the Plasma shell to QtQuick's qqc2-desktop-style to address that issue. Union has been in development for a long time, as it's a difficult effort, but progress is definitely being made. KDE is currently already at the stage where they're adapting the current Breeze QStyle to better match the Union Breeze's style, to make the future transition from the separate QStyle/qqc2-desktop-style to the unified, single Union Breeze as seamless as possible. These changes are currently available for testing in the master branch, and will be part of Plasma 6.7 or 6.8. As a KDE user who likes to have a more classic, late '90s theme, but who also values consistency above all else, Union is something I'm very much looking forward to. While it certainly won't fix every single issue right away, it will definitely address the biggest issues with theming on KDE. I'm incredibly happy that KDE's developers still consider theming and user choice and agency over what pixels appear on their screen important enough to undertake an effort like Union.

02 Mar 2026 1:44pm GMT

On Friday, July 18th, 2025, the Arch Linux team was notified that three AUR packages had been uploaded that contained malware. A few maintainers including myself took care of deleting these packages, removing all traces of the malicious code, and protecting against future malicious uploads.

30 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

While starting this post I realized I have been maintaining personal infrastructure for over a decade! Most of the things I've self-hosted is been for personal uses. Email server, a blog, an IRC server, image hosting, RSS reader and so on. All of these things has all been a bit all over the place and never properly streamlined. Some has been in containers, some has just been flat files with a nginx service in front and some has been a random installed Debian package from somewhere I just forgot.

19 Jan 2026 12:00am 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