28 Nov 2025
Slashdot
AWS Introduces DNS Failover Feature for Its Notoriously Unreliable US East Region
Amazon Web Services has rolled out a DNS resilience feature that allows customers to make domain name system changes within 60 minutes of a service disruption in its US East region, a direct response to the long history of outages at the cloud giant's most troubled infrastructure. AWS said customers in regulated industries like banking, fintech and SaaS had asked for additional capabilities to meet business continuity and compliance requirements, specifically the ability to provision standby resources or redirect traffic during unexpected regional disruptions. The 60-minute recovery time objective still leaves a substantial window for outages to cascade, and the timing of the announcement -- less than six weeks after an October 20th DynamoDB incident and a subsequent VM problem drew criticism -- underscores how persistent US East's reliability issues have been.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
28 Nov 2025 10:01am GMT
Seven Years Later, Airbus is Still Trying To Kick Its Microsoft Habit
Breaking free from Microsoft is harder than it looks. Airbus began migrating its 100,000-plus workforce from Office to Google Workspace more than seven years ago and it still hasn't completed the switch. The Register: As we exclusively revealed in March 2018, the aerospace giant told 130,000 employees it was ditching Microsoft's productivity tools for Google's cloud-based alternatives. Then-CEO Tom Enders predicted migration would finish in 18 months, a timeline that, in hindsight, was "extremely ambitious," according to Catherine Jestin, Airbus's executive vice president of digital. Today, more than two-thirds of Airbus's 150,000 employees have fully transitioned, but significant pockets continue to use Microsoft in parallel. Finance, for example, still relies on Excel because Google Sheets can't handle the necessary file sizes, as some spreadsheets involve 20 million cells. "Some of the limitations was just the number of cells that you could have in one single file. We'll definitely start to remove some of the work," Jestin told The Register.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
28 Nov 2025 7:31am GMT
Canada Rolls Back Climate Rules To Boost Investments
Canada's Prime Minister Mark Carney has signed an agreement with Alberta's premier that will roll back certain climate rules to spur investment in energy production, while encouraging construction of a new oil pipeline to the West Coast. From a report: Under the agreement, which was signed on Thursday, the federal government will scrap a planned emissions cap on the oil and gas sector and drop rules on clean electricity in exchange for a commitment by Canada's top oil-producing province to strengthen industrial carbon pricing and support a carbon capture-and-storage project. The deal, which was hailed by the country's oil industry but panned by environmentalists, signaled a shift in Canada's energy policy in favour of fossil fuel development and is already creating tensions within Carney's minority government. Steven Guilbeault, who served as environment minister under Carney's predecessor Justin Trudeau, said he was quitting the cabinet over concerns that Canada's climate plan was being dismantled.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
28 Nov 2025 5:01am GMT
27 Nov 2025
Ars Technica
Blast from the past: 15 movie gems of 1985
Beyond the blockbusters: This watch list has something for everyone over the long holiday weekend.
27 Nov 2025 12:15pm GMT
Four-inch worm hatches in woman’s forehead, wriggles to her eyelid
The parasite, typically found in dogs, was visibly moving under her skin.
27 Nov 2025 12:00pm GMT
26 Nov 2025
Ars Technica
ULA aimed to launch up to 10 Vulcan rockets this year—it will fly just once
The company is closer to increasing its Vulcan launch cadence, but it won't happen this year.
26 Nov 2025 11:13pm GMT
OSnews
I work for an evil company, but outside work, I’m actually a really good person
I love my job. I make a great salary, there's a clear path to promotion, and a never-ending supply of cold brew in the office. And even though my job requires me to commit sociopathic acts of evil that directly contribute to making the world a measurably worse place from Monday through Friday, five days a week, from morning to night, outside work, I'm actually a really good person. ↫ Emily Bressler at McSweeney's The tech industry is full of people like this.
26 Nov 2025 10:53pm GMT
KDE to drop X11 session in KDE Plasma 6.8
The KDE project has made the call. Well folks, it's the beginning of a new era: after nearly three decades of KDE desktop environments running on X11, the future KDE Plasma 6.8 release will be Wayland-exclusive! Support for X11 applications will be fully entrusted to Xwayland, and the Plasma X11 session will no longer be included. ↫ The Plasma Team They're following in the footsteps of the GNOME project, who will also be leaving the legacy windowing system behind. What this means in practice is that official KDE X11 support will cease once KDE Plasma 6.7 is no longer supported, which should be somewhere early 2026. Do note that the KDE developers intend to release a few extra bugfix releases in the 6.7 release cycle to stabilise the X11 session as much as possible for those people who are going to stick with KDE Plasma 6.7 to keep X11 around. For people who wish to keep using X11 after that point, the KDE project advises them to switch to LTS distributions like Alma Linux, which intend to keep supporting Plasma X11 until 2032. Xwayland will handle virtually all X11 applications running inside the Wayland session, including X11 forwarding, with similar functionality implemented in Wayland through Waypipe. Also note that this only applies to Plasma as a whole; KDE applications will continue to support X11 when run in other desktop environments or on other platforms. As for platforms other than Linux - FreeBSD already has relatively robust Wayland support, so if you intend to run KDE on FreeBSD in the near future, you'll have to move over to Wayland there, as well. The other BSD variants are also dabbling with Wayland support, so it won't be long before they, too, will be able to run the KDE Plasma Wayland session without any issues. What this means is that the two desktop environments that probably make up like 95% of the desktop Linux user base will now be focusing exclusively on Wayland, which is great news. X11 is a legacy platform and aside from retrocomputing and artisanal, boutique setups, you simply shouldn't be using it anymore. Less popular desktop environments like Xfce, Cinnamon, Budgie, and LXQt are also adding Wayland support, so it won't be much longer before virtually no new desktop Linux installations will be using X11. One X down, one more to go.
26 Nov 2025 10:51pm GMT
Microsoft will start preloading Explorer because it’s so slow
With all the problems Windows is facing, I think one area where Microsoft can make some easy, quick gains is by drastically improving Explorer, Windows' file manager. It seems that in the latest developer releases, they're doing just that. The most impactful change - possibly - is that Microsoft is going to preload Explorer. We're exploring preloading File Explorer in the background to help improve File Explorer launch performance. This shouldn't be visible to you, outside of File Explorer hopefully launching faster when you need to use it. If you have the change, if needed there is an option you can uncheck to disable this called "Enable window preloading for faster launch times" in File Explorer's Folder Options, under View. ↫ Windows Insider Program Team Microsoft is also reordering the context menu in Explorer, and while this may seem like a small set of changes, the new context menu does look much tidier and less busy. They achieve this by moving a few top-level items to a submenu, and reordering some other elements. Sadly, the context menu still retains its own context menu ("Show more options"), which is a traditional Win32 menu - which I still think is one of the most Windows of Windows things of all time. Regardless, I hope these small changes make Explorer more bearable to use for those of you still using Windows, because we all know you need it.
26 Nov 2025 9:56pm GMT
24 Nov 2025
Planet Arch Linux
Misunderstanding that “Dependency” comic
Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people's beds. A little over a week later Microsoft Azure had a [widespread outage][Azure outage] that managed to significantly disrupt train service in the Netherlands, and probably also things that matter. Now last week, Cloudflare takes down large swaths of the internet in a way that causes non-tech people to learn Cloudflare exists. And every single time, people share that one XKCD comic.
24 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT
18 Nov 2025
Planet Arch Linux
Self-hosting DNS for no fun, but a little profit!
After Gandi was bought up and started taking extortion level prices for their domains I've been looking for an excuse to migrate registrar. Last week I decided to bite the bullet and move to Porkbun as I have another domain renewal coming up. However after setting up an account and paying for the transfer for 4 domains, I realized their DNS services are provided by Cloudflare! I personally do not use Cloudflare, and stay far away from all of their products for various reasons.
18 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT
06 Nov 2025
Planet Arch Linux
waydroid >= 1.5.4-3 update may require manual intervention
The waydroid package prior to version 1.5.4-2 (including aur/waydroid) creates Python byte-code files (.pyc) at runtime which were untracked by pacman. This issue has been fixed in 1.5.4-3, where byte-compiling these files is now done during the packaging process. As a result, the upgrade may conflict with the unowned files created in previous versions. If you encounter errors like the following during the update:
error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files) waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/__pycache__/__init__.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/actions/__pycache__/__init__.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/actions/__pycache__/app_manager.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem
You can safely overwrite these files by running the following command: pacman -Syu --overwrite /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/\*__pycache__/\*
06 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT