fidzu : computers

A fairly big moment for the ReactOS project: it has just received its very first system call from NT6. The system call that has been added is NtGetCurrentProcessorNumberEx, which is used for returning the processor number of the logical processor that a caller is running on. It's unclear how long it will take ReactOS to become compatible with Windows Vista software, but it took Microsoft around half a decade to develop Vista after the release of XP and marked a major upgrade, even if it didn't land well with users at the time. ↫ Paul Hill at Neowin It's a milestone for sure, but not one that's going to make a huge difference for ReactOS at this moment in time. Still, it's a sign of things to come, even if the very nature of the ReactOS project means that whatever things are coming tend to take a while to arrive.

03 Jul 2026 9:38pm GMT

Valve has open-sourced the design for a customizable e-ink front panel for the Steam Machine, dubbed the "Inkterface." "All of it is available on their GitLab under the MIT license, which goes over everything you need to make your own and stick it on the front of your fancy new Steam Machine," reports GamingOnLinux. From the report: They're now calling it the "Inkterface" and there's a good few things you'll need to make it including: 1 x Adafruit ESP32 Feather with 2MB PSRAM. 1 x Adafruit eInk Breakout Friend. 1 x Adafruit 5.83" Monochrome eInk Panel. 13 x M2.5 x 5mm Pan Head Machine Screws. 4 x 1/4" x 1/4" x 3/16" Stepped Magnet SB443-OUT. Valve even provided a video on the GitLab showing it being put together [...].

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Jul 2026 8:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Researchers have found a never-before-seen piece of macOS malware that combines a series of clever tradecraft to infect Macs with stealthy, custom-developed credential-stealing code. The malware is delivered in two stages. The first is distributed in a disk image that masquerades as Maccy, a clipboard manager for Macs. It's compiled as AppleScript that is notable for the way it delivers the second stage. The malware is named PamStealer because the Rust-written infostealer uses the Pluggable Authentication Modules interface built into macOS to validate the target's login password before sending it to an attacker-controlled server. [...] PamStealer shows a native password prompt designed to resemble a system authorization request. Text that appears with the prompt says: "Maccy wants to make changes. Enter your password to allow this." As noted earlier, once a target complies, the malware validates it locally through the PAM API. "This check is done entirely through PAM: there is no call out to dscl, security, osascript or any spawned process to verify the password, as many commodity macOS stealers do," [said Jamf, a security firm for macOS users]. "The result is a quieter routine that keeps only a verified password, and one fewer process chain for defenders to detect on." If the validation fails, PamStealer displays the prompts again until it receives the correct one. Once the target enters the correct password, PamStealer displays a message stating that the file is damaged and can't be installed. This is designed to be a decoy to prevent the target from suspecting anything is amiss. The malware uses tactics to maximize the information it can steal. One tactic is to request the target grant full disk access to the fake Maccy app. It also contains code designed to access ethereum accounts. The various techniques -- particularly the Script Editor lure, a self-contained JXA dropper, a Rust-based second stage, and local validation of credentials through PAM are all noteworthy.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Jul 2026 3:00pm GMT

NASA awarded Rocket Lab deals for three dedicated launches using the company's Electron rocket.

03 Jul 2026 1:55pm GMT

For how often people invoke it, the concept of "hell" in Christianity is remarkably vague and nebulous, as both the Old and New Testament barely go into detail about the concept. As such, I'm glad Microsoft has now given us a clear vision of hell and what, exactly, it looks like, ending centuries of denominational disagreements. Microsoft is currently selling the idea of Windows and Copilot as two separate things: an OS and an assistant riding along on top of it. However, a leaked video shows Project Aion, an internal prototype where Copilot doesn't just sit inside Windows, it becomes Windows, swallowing the Start menu, the taskbar, and three decades of desktop conventions in the process. The footage is reportedly two years old, so Aion is most likely dead by now. But it's the clearest look yet at how far Microsoft was willing to take its agentic AI ambitions. ↫ Alfonso Maruccia at Techspot Everything about this is dreadful. Obviously replacing the entire shell with "AI" nonsense is the main crime against usability here, but on top of that, this new shell is all just websites, all the way down, so everything is slow and stuttery. Since this runs on something called "Win3", which appears to be a very minimal, stripped-down version of Windows intended to only run the Edge browser engine, you can't run Win32 applications. If you do try to run a Win32 application, it will load the application in a remote virtual machine running in the cloud, which I;m sure does wonder for performance, responsiveness, and latency. We can all thank the lord this project is two years old and most likely cancelled by now, but we have no way of knowing if Microsoft is still intending for this to be the future direction of Windows. Since people don't want to use "AI" of their own volition, it only makes sense in the technology industry's sick, twisted mind to force people into using "AI" with efforts like this. Consent has never been Silicon Valley's strength, after all. At the time of writing, Microsoft is 225 billion dollars in the red on "AI", so I wouldn't be surprised if attempts to replace the regular Explorer shell with something "AI"-based is still very much on the table in Redmond.

03 Jul 2026 12:56pm GMT

NetBSD is the only BSD without a Vulkan stack (Mesa and Lavapipe), but that's about to change. The effort to bring Vulkan to NetBSD is now in beta, with prebuilt binaries coming soon. Mesa configures, compiles, links, installs, and registers the Lavapipe software Vulkan driver on NetBSD 10.1 amd64, against LLVM 19.1.7. The driver (libvulkan_lvp.so, ~17 MB) installs into /usr/pkg/lib, and its ICD manifest (advertising Vulkan API 1.4) installs into /usr/pkg/share/vulkan/icd.d/, so a Vulkan loader on the system can discover it. ldd resolves every dependency cleanly. The entire process - environment setup, dependency builds, the Mesa build, and installation - is automated end to end and reproducible on a fresh install. ↫ vulkan-netbsd GitHub page It's important to note that the next step in the process is to port the Vulkan loader, which is required to actually run Vulkan applications. This entire effort is still ongoing and seems to be handled mostly by Dean Howell alone, so expect breakage and incomplete documentation as development progresses. Still, this is a hugely important effort, and seeing it this far along is great news.

03 Jul 2026 12:10pm GMT

New York City's Summer of Ludd festival is teaching people how to live offline.

03 Jul 2026 12:00pm GMT

It's difficult to pinpoint the moment in my life where America started to lose the plot.

03 Jul 2026 11:30am GMT

The US age-adjusted death rate fell to a record low in 2025, likely pushing life expectancy to a record high as overdose deaths declined and mortality improved across all age groups. CNN reports: There were about 689 deaths for every 100,000 people in the US in 2025, according to a new report from the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention -- the lowest rate recorded in more than a century of tracking. The age-adjusted rate has fallen 22% since 2021, landing about 4% lower than it was just before the pandemic in 2019. [...] The top causes of death in the US in 2025 followed longstanding patterns: Heart disease led with nearly 695,000 deaths, followed by cancer with nearly 623,000 deaths. Unintentional injuries, which includes drug overdoses, were the third leading cause of death. Overdose deaths are still high -- about 70,000 people died from an overdose in 2025, preliminary CDC data shows -- but experts say that sharp declines probably played a large role in bringing the age-adjusted death rate down in the US.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Jul 2026 10:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Just trying to answer one simple question: What if the terminal was 3D?

11 May 2026 12:00am GMT

Break the pattern today or the loop will repeat tomorrow.

18 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT