fidzu : computers

Staff complain that the constant upheaval is destroying morale.

14 Mar 2026 7:14am GMT

Longtime Slashdot reader tsuliga writes: Two new episodes of Doctor Who that were previously lost have been found. The original Doctor Who episodes were wiped or deleted by the BBC because they were not aware of the future use of re-runs of these shows. Ninety-five of the 253 episodes from the program's first six years are currently missing. How many more episodes are out there waiting to be rediscovered? "The main broadcasters in the UK in the 1960s, 70s, up to the 80s really, junked quite a lot of content," said Justin Smith, a cinema professor at England's De Montfort University and film archivist. "In some ways finding missing 'Doctor Whos' is the holy grail" of classic TV discoveries, Smith said. The two episodes were "The Nightmare Begins" and "Devil's Planet," both of which aired during the show's third series in 1965. It features William Hartnell as the Doctor in a story involving archvillains the Daleks -- pepperpot-shaped metal aggressors whose favorite word is "Exterminate!" Smith said that for fans of the show, "it's got it all, it really has. It is intergalactic, it's got some great performances. It stands up really, really well."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Mar 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: A top Senate administrator on Monday gave aides the green light to use three artificial intelligence chatbots for official work, a reflection of how widespread the use of the products has become in workplaces around the globe. The chief information officer for the Senate sergeant-at-arms, who oversees the chamber's computers as well as security, said in a one-page memo reviewed by The New York Times that aides could use Google's Gemini chat, OpenAI's ChatGPT or Microsoft Copilot, which is already integrated into Senate platforms. Copilot "can help with routine Senate work, including drafting and editing documents, summarizing information, preparing talking points and briefing material, and conducting research and analysis," the memo said. The document later added that "data shared with Copilot Chat stays within the secure Microsoft 365 Government environment and is protected by the same controls that safeguard other Senate data." It's unclear how widely AI is used in the Senate or how widespread it might become, as individual offices and committees set their own rules. The chamber has also not publicly released comprehensive guidance on chatbots, the report notes. In contrast, the House has clearer policies allowing the general use of AI for limited internal tasks but restricting it from sensitive data or for being used for deepfakes and certain decision-making activities.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Mar 2026 3:30am GMT

"This ought to make for some good reading," NASA's mission management team chair said.

14 Mar 2026 12:17am GMT

SMF is the illumos system for managing traditional Unix services (long-lived background processes, usually). It's quite rich in order to correctly accommodate a lot of different use cases. But it sometimes exposes that complexity to users even when they're trying to do something simple. In this post, I'll walk through an example using a demo service and the svcprop(1) tool to show the details. ↫ Dave Pacheco Soalris' system management facility or SMF is effectively Solaris' systemd, and this article provides a deeper insight into one of its features: properties. While using SMF and its suite of tools and commands for basic tasks is rather elementary and easy to get into - even I can do it - once you start to dive deeper into what is can do, things get complex and capable very fast.

13 Mar 2026 11:49pm GMT

Google has announced that it will release Chrome for Linux on ARM64 in the second quarter of this year. Launching Chrome for ARM64 Linux devices allows more users to enjoy the seamless integration of Google's most helpful services into their browser. This move addresses the growing demand for a browsing experience that combines the benefits of the open-source Chromium project with the Google ecosystem of apps and features. This release represents a significant undertaking to ensure that ARM64 Linux users receive the same secure, stable, and rich Chrome experience found on other platforms. ↫ The Chromium Blog While the idea of running Linux on Arm, only to defile it with something as unpleasant as Chrome seem entirely foreign to me, most normal people do actually use Google's browser. Having it available on Linux for Arm makes perfect sense, and might convince a few people to buy an Arm machine for Linux, assuming the platform can get its act together.

13 Mar 2026 11:37pm GMT

I will not pass up an opportunity to make you talk about Plan 9, so let's focus on Acme. Acme is remarkable for what it represents: a class of application that leverages a simple, text-based GUI to create a compelling model of interacting with all of the tools available in the Unix (or Plan 9) environment. Cox calls it an "integrating development environment," distinguishing it from the more hermetic "integrated development environment" developers will be familiar with. The simplicity of its interface is important. It is what has allowed Acme to age gracefully over the past 30 or so years, without the constant churn of adding support for new languages, compilers, terminals, or color schemes. ↫ Daniel Moch While the article mentions you can use Acme on UNIX, to really appreciate it you have to use it on Plan 9, which today most likely means 9front. Now, I am not the kind of person who can live and breathe inside 9front - you need to be of a certain mindset to be able to do so - but even then I find that messing around with Plan 9 has given me a different outlook on UNIX. In fact, I think it has helped me understand UNIX and UNIX-like systems better and more thoroughly. If you're not sure if Plan 9 is something that suits you, the only real way to find out is to just use it. Fire up a VM, read the excellent documentation at 9front, and just dive into it. Most of you will just end up confused and disoriented, but a small few of you will magically discover you possess the right mindset. Just do it.

13 Mar 2026 11:13pm GMT

Meta plans to remove end-to-end encryption (E2EE) from Instagram direct messages by May 8, 2026. "Very few people were opting in to end-to-end encrypted messaging in DMs, so we're removing this option from Instagram in the coming months," says Meta. "Anyone who wants to keep messaging with end-to-end encryption can easily do that on WhatsApp." The Hacker News reports: The American company first began testing E2EE for Instagram direct messages in 2021 as part of CEO Mark Zuckerberg's "privacy-focused vision for social networking." The feature is currently "only available in some areas" and is not enabled by default. Weeks into the Russo-Ukrainian war in February 2022, the company made encrypted direct messaging available to all adult users in both countries. Last week, TikTok said it would not introduce E2EE, arguing it makes users less safe by preventing police and safety teams from being able to read direct messages if needed.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

13 Mar 2026 11:00pm GMT

She made a full recovery, despite the maggots.

13 Mar 2026 10:38pm 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