fidzu : computers

Apple has begun rolling out ads in Apple Maps, with sponsored businesses appearing at the top of search results and in the "suggested places" section for users in the U.S. and Canada. Apple says the ads can be based on approximate location, search terms, or the area of the map being viewed, but are not tied to users' Apple Accounts and personal data remains on-device. 9to5Mac reports: Ads appear just like every other business listing, except they have a small blue badge that says 'Ad.' You can see examples of ads [embedded in the article]. Like Apple's ads policy with other services, the company touts user privacy protections for ads in Maps. Per Apple Newsroom: "Ads on Maps builds on Apple's broader privacy-first approach to advertising, and maintains the same privacy protections Maps users enjoy today. A user's location and the ads they see and interact with in Maps are not associated with a user's Apple Account. Personal data stays on a user's device, is not collected or stored by Apple, and is not shared with third parties."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

26 Aug 2026 9:00pm GMT

Judge hasn't ruled on X Corp's preliminary injunction, but Operation Bluebird plows ahead

26 Aug 2026 8:49pm GMT

Last week, 404 Media published a story that revealed an Amazon warehouse where the company scans and destroys thousands of books for AI training data. Today, the publication has released an interview with one of the Amazon employees at the warehouse. "The employee worked at Amazon's VGT3 warehouse, which is housed in the same facility as LAS8, where Amazon operates its print-on-demand business," reports 404 Media. "Both operations are part of a larger complex of Amazon facilities in Las Vegas, Nevada." Slashdot reader alternative_right shares an excerpt from the report: [...] What does it look like when they cut the spines off the books? It's a machine people operate. Each of these machines is just like a little workstation, and there'll be one person at each of these stations. It's really safe because it has a little cover and it has a little area where you slide the book into, remove your fingers from the area, and then you press a button, and it just comes down and slices it. And then you remove the books after the blade is gone. After they cut the spines they have these kind of library carts, kind of like how you would stack books, but instead, it's a stacks of paper and little cardboard things to separate -- I'm guessing -- the different books. I saw the pages being thrown in a shuttle after they were scanned. We were walking by and we went over to one of the shuttles and looked into it because we could tell they were throwing the old books in it or the cut books in it, and it's just a bunch of loose paper like just sheets thrown in there. What do you think about Amazon doing this? At first what they were telling people is that it was for Kindles, but I just didn't believe that. I instantly was like, I don't think that's how they do it because of publication rights and stuff, copyright and everything. Then I saw it was for AI. I don't like it only because I wish I could take these books. There's so much knowledge and so much stuff in them and some of them look like they might be rare, and I've heard that they order rare books, and that's why I say some of these are so obscure. I definitely don't like the idea that they can't be reused or anything like that afterwards. They're reducing the amount of available copies for other people.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

26 Aug 2026 8:00pm GMT

Meta to impose daily limit on child social media use in deal with nearly every state.

26 Aug 2026 7:50pm GMT

The bishops' snub comes as the state continues to attack vaccines.

26 Aug 2026 7:39pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: For decades, console owners have faced a choice between the convenience of digital downloads and the permanence of physical game discs. Soon, Xbox owners will be able to get the best of both worlds for thousands of supported titles as part of a newly announced disc-to-digital program. The program -- announced today ahead of testing for Xbox Insiders starting August 31 -- will let players claim a "digital entitlement" for "most Xbox One and Xbox Series X disc-based games" simply by inserting the disc into a console and launching it. That game will then be playable completely digitally, without the need to ever insert the disc, as long as you (or a member of your family account) is logged in. The digital entitlement will also allow access to features like Xbox Play Anywhere (for play on PC) and Xbox Cloud Gaming, for supported titles. Microsoft says that your physical disc will "continue to work exactly as it always has" after the digital entitlement is claimed. But before you get any ideas, the fine print on the announcement mentions that there is only "one revokable license per game disc," so if you resell that disc or loan it to a friend, that digital entitlement could be transferred to a new account when someone else puts it into their console. A leaked memo obtained by the Verge earlier this month suggests that publishers have to actively opt in to allow their game discs to activate digital entitlements, which could explain why "most" but not all Xbox One and Series X titles are supported. Windows Central separately suggests, based on discussion with unnamed sources, that "some discs may be incompatible due to how they were manufactured at the time," which could explain why original Xbox and Xbox 360 discs are not being discussed for the program. "While not every title will be available at launch, this is an important step toward a future where players can have greater confidence that the games they buy remain with them for years to come," said Xbox Vice President Jason Ronald.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

26 Aug 2026 7:00pm GMT

Right on schedule - as always - there's a new Genode OS Framework release, version 26.08. The highlights of Genode 26.08 are VirtualBox 7, improved PC performance of our custom microkernel, the new ability to transparently reconfigure virtual file systems, revised timing and timeout handling, and a Linux 6.18.19 device-driver environment for ARM. Furthermore, the first version of a Goa-based SDK has become natively available for Sculpt OS. ↫ Release announcement on the Genode website The release announcement linked above is a mere quick overview; if you want all the possible details you could want, the release notes got you covered.

25 Aug 2026 9:13pm GMT

Motif is great, I love how it looks and feels, and I want it to be actively maintained. I want a healthy ecosystem of Motif applications and even window managers and desktop environments, so I can run a real Motif environment. Sadly, while Motif has been open source for a while, the project itself stalled years ago, with little to no activity from anyone involved. That may be changing, as a number of developers decided to take matters into their own hands last year. This fork of Motif was born of a desire to keep Motif (and other X11 technologies) alive and well. The original upstream Sourceforge project hasn't had any activity in over two years, none of the project admins have been active for at least that amount of time, the official bug tracker has disappeared into the void; and the user forum was closed way back in 2017. Sadly, it appears that the original upstream has abandoned the project. I've incorporated some fixes from upstream that have laid dormant for years, a few others from Gentoo, and made a few improvements of my own. I intend to maintain this fork, and in doing so advocate for the continued use of the user interface toolkit that defined an era, and influenced many of the user interfaces that came after it. ↫ Tim Hentenaar at the Motif fork's GitHub page Some of the people involved are people I know online, so I have a bit of faith in this fork being able to stand the test of time, but of course, managing a complex project like this is hard, so who knows how long the enthusiasm remains. Still, this fork has seen five releases since its inception a little over a year ago, which seems promising. It may seem weird for some to have a love for Motif, but I'm the kind of person who installs weird, outdated corporate and industrial software I don't understand on my HP c8000 dual PA-RISC workstation running HP-UX just to enjoy the Motif interfaces they sometimes ship. We all have our quirks. From my experiences talking to people online, I know there's actually a rather solid number of people like me, and I hope that at some point the developers in this group can gain enough critical mass to build something like a basic Linux distribution or desktop environment using the disparate, actively-maintained Motif projects out there that yes, still exist. It's a long shot, but in today's computing landscape, where more and more people feel uncomfortable with "modern" software, I really feel like there's a niche for something like this to exist. A really small niche, surely, but a niche all the same.

24 Aug 2026 8:15pm GMT

AROS, the open source Amiga OS-compatible operating system, now has images available for the Raspberry Pi 3 (although some people state it also works on the Pi 4), in both 32bit and 64bit versions. According to the AROS team, they are quite stable, but not yet complete, so do know what you're getting into. Dan Wood posted a YouTube video about these new images, providing much more insight into how well they work if you want more insight into how well they work. The images are, of course, the basic AROS operating system, so expect a rather barebones experience. If you're used to some of the AROS distributions for x86, which come loaded with software and customisations, these images will feel quite bare to you. It's going to take some time to port over all of these applications and customisations to the ARM version of AROS, but if and once that happens, I expect more complete images to appear as well. Great news for AROS and the Amiga community in general.

24 Aug 2026 7:57pm 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

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT