fidzu : computers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Associated Press: The U.S. designated helium as a critical material on Friday because it's indispensable for making semiconductors that are essential to energy generation, and the global supply is at risk of disruption, according to the Energy Department. The designation by the Energy Department means that more federal financing will be available for helium producers and that the government will monitor it more closely. Helium is primarily produced as a byproduct of natural gas processing. The United States is the world's largest producer of natural gas and of helium. Qatar and Russia are the other top helium producers. [...] Helium makes balloons rise, but that's not why the DOE is interested in it. Helium plays an important role in wind, solar and nuclear energy production, space exploration, medical imaging and research. Assistant Secretary of Energy Audrey Robertson said helium's unique properties make it irreplaceable, such as the fact that it's non-combustible and has the lowest boiling point of any gas. The nation needs an ample supply for semiconductors, quantum and super computing, and superconducting magnets, added Robertson, who oversees the Office of Critical Minerals and Energy Innovation. [...] Despite environmental concerns with recovering helium from natural gas, there are also opportunities, said Greeshma Gadikota, director of the Lenfast Center for Sustainable Energy at Columbia University. "If we burn the natural gas, there are a lot of CO2 emissions associated with that," Gadikota said. "But if you just extract the helium and use it, the uses of it don't contribute necessarily to greenhouse gas emissions. "So from a climate standpoint, if we are going to continue down the line of extracting natural gas and recovering helium," she added, "I would prefer to see natural gas being used in a form where we directly produce hydrogen and we produce solid carbon." Hydrogen is a clean burning fuel, and solid carbon can provide permanent carbon sequestration and can be used widely in industrial applications, including rubber and pigments.

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27 Oct 2026 3:30am GMT

The critical PHP2Shell vulnerabilities (CVE-2026-109618 and CVE-2026-109619) have now been successfully exploited in the wild, just days after patches were released and initial exploitation attempts failed. BleepingComputer reports: The malicious activity was caught by Adel Karimi, detection and response lead at Perplexity, whose honeypots recorded evidence of confirmed remote code execution against an Apache mod_php installation running PHP 8.4.26. "This is now confirmed RCE with usable memory disclosure, not just a crash followed by a suspicious process. The response delivered an 800 KiB decoded cookie dump, and a function address derived from that dump using the public exploit's offsets appears in the subsequent execution payload," Karimi shared. "The evidence demonstrates this chain on the intentionally favorable single-worker mod_php profile; it is not a measurement of exploit reliability on other worker counts, PHP builds, or applications," he added. Karimi's findings were also confirmed by Expel threat researcher Marcus Hutchins, who has been tracking a stream of alleged successful PHP2Shell exploitation reports. "This is by far the highest quality confirmation of in-the-wild php2shell exploitation I've seen so far. Deep technical breakdown of a successful exploitation attempt against an Apache mod_php installation running PHP 8.4.26," Hutchins said.

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26 Oct 2026 11:00pm GMT

Employees in the US, Canada, India, and the UK may receive offers to leave MS today.

26 Oct 2026 10:36pm GMT

Skydance, as it begins integrating Paramount and Warner Bros. Discovery, is offering voluntary buyouts to some employees and imposing a five-day-a-week office requirement. Layoffs are also expected as the company targets more than $6 billion in annualized cost savings within three years. Variety reports: The new program was outlined by chairman and CEO David Ellison and co-CEO Ynon Kreiz in a memo to staffers Monday. "As we bring our teams together, we recognize that not everyone will see their future here, and we respect that. To give eligible employees the option to move on in a way that works for them, we are introducing a Voluntary Buyout (VBO) Program," the execs wrote. "Those who qualify will receive an individual communication with their personalized details and terms, and a window to decide whether to accept this one-time offer." They added, "Please know we don't take any of this lightly. We are clear about what we're building: a company that tells the stories people around the world love, embraces new ways to connect with audiences, and leads the next era of media and entertainment. We have the talent, the creative firepower and the ambition to do it, and we will get there together." [...] In the Oct. 26 memo, Ellison and Kreiz also said the new Skydance is moving to a mandatory five-days-per-week in-office policy across the company. "We believe in-person collaboration is vital to our culture and to the success of our business. Especially in a creative company like ours, the best ideas come from people in the same room, sharing perspectives, challenging one another and solving problems," the execs said. "We truly believe this is in the best interest of our company and our people. We've seen the benefits firsthand at Paramount, and we want every part of Skydance to share in them."

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26 Oct 2026 10:00pm GMT

Case study gives a whole new meaning to "bedroom eyes."

26 Oct 2026 8:27pm GMT

Lindsey Fitzharris chats with Ars about her new book, Sleuth-Hound: The Case of the Real Sherlock Holmes.

26 Oct 2026 8:15pm GMT

Thomas Adam, one of the core developers of FVWM, has been working on CoW for a while now. CoW can best be described as "FVWM for Wayland", which uniquely uses the River compositor. River, in turn, is unique in that it does not combine the compositor and window manager into a single program, allowing for a more traditional X11-like approach. Adam released version 0.4 today, which comes with a load of fixes, changes, and minor improvements, as well as one bigger-ticket item: container windows. This PR introduces the concept of a top-level container window. This means a window can be subdivided into columns and rows (called panes) and can be resized independently of one another. The idea for this has been unashamedly stolen from shod. ↫ Thomas Adam I've been keeping an eye on CoW ever since I learned about it when it was first released, and at some point soon I want to build a desktop around it for myself.

26 Oct 2026 1:07am GMT

Speaking of games, if you've ever heard anything about or even played Sonic '06, you know this wasn't the most polished entry in the hedgehog's franchise. In fact, it's probably one of the worst, and considering the average quality of Sonic games, that's quite an achievement. The team that's working on decompiling the game to make it run on the PC obviously had to dive deep into the game's inner workings, and the process learned a lot about why, exactly, the game is so notoriously bad. It really makes you wonder what exactly went wrong? If you look at what limited footage we have of beta content, we can see many effects that aren't present in the final game. Kingdom Valley had full bump maps, Castle Town had more complex geometry and plants, and New City's collision implies a very different building layout at some point in development. It turns out, much of the cut content is actually still in the game, but is simply not enabled for performance reasons in vanilla. Even with the cut-back visuals, the game struggles to reach target FPS on real hardware. It's not surprising that given the crunch Sonic Team were under to get the game out the door, these features were among the first to go. ↫ Isaac Marovitz The article details what, exactly, was turned off for the final release, and it's quite an interesting read. Of course, the team intends to try and address many of these issues, and they think they can push the game and its engine to much greater heights.

26 Oct 2026 12:51am GMT

When thinking about impressive technical achievements in retro games, most people will first point to graphical milestones set by action games like Doom or Quake. Rightfully so, but at least I am personally far more impressed by the early examples of the city builder genre. Simulating whole economies on a large scale with a fraction of today's power seems impossible if modern builder games even struggle on modern machines. Of course this didn't stop developers in the past to develop and run city builder games on significantly weaker hardware. The original SimCity for example lists Intel's 386SX as the CPU in it's system requirements. A CPU which at the time of it's launch ran at magnificent 16 MHz. ↫ Lars Thießen What's even more impressive are some of the other systems the origin al SimCity was ported to, which had even more limited hardware than a 386SX. The Super Nintendo got a SimCity port, which even included fun extras like a Mario statue and Bowser taking up the mantle of the Godzilla disaster, and additional systems the PC version didn't have. Hell, they even worked on a port to the NES, but it was cancelled and thought lost, until a relatively complete and working copy was discovered in 2017. Even this NES version contained features not available in the PC version. Hardware limitations really did breed a lot of innovation back in those days, and sometimes I wonder if programmers and developers could benefit from tasking themselves with working within such limitations today, if only to become a bit more prudent with resources.

26 Oct 2026 12:42am GMT

This is a story of how we got from something like this: Failed to deserialize BUILDINFO file: Parser failed with the following error: unknown ^ invalid makepkg build environment option expected `buildflags`, `ccache`, `check`, `color`, `distcc`, `sign`, `makeflags` To this: When the ALPM project started, the goal was fairly simple: Better tooling to interact with the low-level plumbing of Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM). This meant binaries to read/write individual file types, better error messages, extensive specifications and of course exports to common dataformats like JSON. The thing is, although some of us already had experience with low-level dataframe parsing, …

08 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT