computers

24 Jul 2026

Slashdot

World's First Wave Power Generator Receives Certification For Regular Use

"The Norwegian certification agency DNV has certified the commercial wave-driven power generator Corpower C4 for regular use," writes Longtime Slashdot reader Qbertino. "German news site heise.de has a detailed write-up. See a CGI video of the power station and its internals, as well as the company's website [at their respective links]." From the report (translated to English): According to the manufacturer Corpower Ocean, it is the first DNV prototype certificate for a wave energy converter. The certificate confirms that Corpower's technology meets DNV's requirements for structural strength, reliability, and safety, Corpower Ocean announced. The certification process began in the design phase and lasted seven years. DNV oversaw the process from concept development through design, manufacturing, and assembly, to dry-running tests and subsequent operation. This is an important step, said Patrik Moller, CEO and one of the founders of Corpower Ocean. With the certification, wave energy is no longer just a promising technology, but a proven and financially viable one. This opens up new opportunities for project financing, insurance, and investments in commercial applications. The Corpower C4 wave power plant looks like a normal buoy: It consists of a 19-meter-long floating body with a diameter of 9 meters and a weight of approximately 11 tons. The system is anchored to the seabed. A mechanism inside the buoy converts its up-and-down movements in the waves into a rotary motion. This, in turn, drives a generator that produces electricity. The report notes that the company is "planning the first two industrial-scale wave energy farms off the coasts of Portugal and Scotland," which are scheduled to begin operating sometime between 2027 and 2029.

Google Adds Selfie Video As a Log-In Option

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Engadget: You'll now be able to use selfie videos to log into your Google account. It has long been possible to log into Google using your face, via your phone's face unlock or if your passkey login uses biometrics for verification. This is yet another option to get into your account using your face to authenticate your identity, which could be especially useful if you don't have access to the phone or computer you typically use or if you got locked out of your account and none of the other log-in options are working. [...] Google will ask you to turn your head in certain ways during the verification and every time you use the option to log in. The company says it's to fend off impersonation attempts, such as deepfake videos, and prove you're currently in front of the camera. It will, of course, have to save your selfie video and use it for comparison for future logins.The company says it will encrypt your video and only use to help you sign in, but if you ever change your mind, you can delete it from your Google account. It's worth noting the option is currently unavailable for Workspace accounts, child accounts and those enrolled in Google's Advanced Protection Program. You can set it up and give it a try at g.co/signin-selfie.

23 Jul 2026

Slashdot

Oracle Signs 10-Year Software Contract With Pentagon Worth Up To $7 Billion

Oracle has signed a 10-year Pentagon contract worth up to $7 billion to provide on-premises software, licenses, maintenance, and consulting for branches of the military. CNBC reports: The contract covers the use of Oracle software in on-premises data centers for branches of the military, the U.S. intelligence community and the Coast Guard, according to a statement. The Central Intelligence Agency was Oracle's first customer. A five-year base period for the contract includes perpetual and subscription-based software licenses, maintenance and consulting, according to one description. Kirsten Davies, the Department of Defense's chief information officer, said in the release that the agency is saving at least $441 million for taxpayers "by fundamentally improving how we procure on-premises Oracle capabilities."

Ars Technica

Microsoft responds to LG monitors installing McAfee ads on Windows

App is installed through Windows Update when certain LG monitors connect to a PC.

23 Jul 2026 8:47pm GMT

OSnews

FreeBSD ports frozen after someone commits the entire 150MB Linux Copilot binary

A rather unusual announcement was made late last night: the FreeBSD project has frozen their ports repository. For more than 48 hours now, no changes have been accepted or made to the tree, and here's why. A 150MB binary file was recently committed to the ports tree and, as a result, core@ made the decision to implement a temporary freeze of the ports tree in order to implement some clean up efforts. The commit in question severed our ports tree mirroring to github.com due to their filesize hard limit of 100MB, and introduced a blob of questionable licensing into the repository history. ↫ Kyle Evans in freebsd-announce While FreeBSD's ports tree is not hosted by GitHub - it's merely mirrored there - the FreeBSD team believes the community values the GitHub mirror too much, and as such, steps had to be taken to fix this. Ports has not been compromised and users' systems do not appear to be at risk in any way due to this occurrence, which is good news. Curiously, the official announcement makes no mention of which 150MB file, exactly, was committed to ports, but it didn't take for people long to pinpoint the offending commit (screenshot). It turns out someone committed the entire github-copilot-cli Linux binary to ports, as part of the github-copilot-cli port. This FreeBSD port is effectively a way to easily install and run this tool on FreeBSD using Linuxulator, FreeBSD's Linux compatibility layer that allows you to run unmodified Linux binaries on FreeBSD. It's important to note this FreeBSD port is not actually a port of the Linux version of github-copilot-cli to FreeBSD; the FreeBSD "port" merely acts as a setup script to run the unmodified Linux binary using Linuxulator. It's not a "real" port because the tool isn't open source and its license doesn't allow for modifications. That's why the announcement specifically mentions "questionable licensing" - github-copilot-cli is licensed under some custom license specifically made for this tool, and is not open source. Anyway, for whatever reason, the maintainer of this FreeBSD port accidentally made a commit that added the actual, full 150MB Linux binary to FreeBSD ports. I'm assuming that under normal circumstances, building and installing the github-copilot-cli FreeBSD port would merely download the binary off GitHub and set Linuxulator up so that it could run it. Mistakes happen, and since there's clearly nothing malicious going on, there's not much to worry about. In fact, this may lead to new checks and balances to prevent this from happening in the future, which would be good news. The FreeBSD team is working on rolling back, fixing the issue, and investigating how this could have happened. Ports is still frozen at the time of writing, but I'm sure we'll have a more detailed account soon.

23 Jul 2026 8:33pm GMT

Ars Technica

FDA reports new outbreak of explosive diarrhea with 72 cases identified

The FDA hasn't said where the cases are or how they're linked.

23 Jul 2026 7:22pm GMT

Forgot your Google password? Now you can log in with a selfie.

Google's selfie videos can be used for account access, AI Avatars, and age verification.

23 Jul 2026 7:14pm GMT

OSnews

Amiga 1000: ten years ahead of its time

We all know the original Amiga was far ahead of its time, and the Amiga really doesn't need more retrospectives and glazing. However, that doesn't mean we don't want more Amiga retrospectives and glazing. I'm not sure I even saw an Amiga in person until 1987, but I knew just from reading about it that I wanted one. I wasn't able to make it happen until 1991, so I was pretty late to the game. But even in 1991, an Amiga felt like living in the future. I could load several programs and switch between them effortlessly, with the only limit being the amount of memory I had. I could connect to a BBS with a terminal program, start a download, then switch it to the background, fire up a word processor, and do my homework while the download was happening. In some cases, I could even fire up a game and play a game while a download happened in the background. I could download stuff while I played Civilization, which was pretty great. ↫ David L. Farquhar It's 2026, I have an incredibly powerful Linux gaming computer, but since I grew up on DOS and Windows, to this day, I still feel the need the close every other application before launching a game. I don't need to - modern operating systems handle such things just fine, mostly - but it's so ingrained in me it's hard to drop this habit. I wonder if people who grew up with more capable computers than whatever DOS nonsense I grew up with are less inclined to do things like this? Or did memory constraints act as an equaliser? Anyway, the linked article doesn't mention it, but the Amiga is still, somehow, going relatively strong for a platform that's supposed to be dead. Modern(-ish) hardware is getting a bit harder to come by, but AmigaOS 4 and especially MorphOS are still actively being developed, and even running them in virtual machines on x86 has become about as easy as it could be.

23 Jul 2026 11:33am GMT

Rewriting the Futhark type checker

This post is about the evolution of Futhark's type checker, motivated by a large refactoring I am about to merge. It is probably mostly of interest to other language designers, and contains some lessons I wish I had known when we first got started - although I am not particularly well-read in the type checking literature, so it's possible all of this is old hat. ↫ The Futhark Programming Language blog That's a clear introduction - you know what to expect.

23 Jul 2026 8:42am GMT