computers

26 Jul 2026

Slashdot

NASA Replaces ULA's Vulcan Centaur With SpaceX Falcon Heavy For Solar Storm Research

There's been a change to NASA's launch of six satellites for solar storms research. Space.com reports that those satellites "were originally slated to lift off on a United Launch Alliance Vulcan Centaur rocket but have now been assigned a SpaceX Falcon Heavy, according to a NASA mission update." [NASA's Sun Radio Interferometer Space Experiment mision - or SunRISE] will fly to space as part of a rideshare mission sponsored by the U.S. Space Force's Space Systems Command. Though it's not stated specifically in the NASA release, that may be a hint as to why the mission's rocket was changed. On its most recent launch [U.S. Space Force mission USSF-87], Vulcan experienced an anomaly in one of its solid rocket boosters - the second such incident to occur during the rocket's four launches to date. Vulcan succeeded in delivering the USSF-87 payload to its designated orbit on that launch, but the recurrence of the booster issue during ascent prompted the Space Force to pause national security launches on Vulcan until it could be addressed. Which mission SunRISE will be manifested on has not yet been released, but Space Force's Space Systems Command [SSC] has already shifted other launches between Vulcan and SpaceX's Falcon 9... Falcon Heavy is SpaceX's heavy-lift launch vehicle... that consists of three modified Falcon 9 first stages, and has launched 12 times since it debuted in 2018. Four of those have delivered national security payloads to orbit, with the most recent of those, USSF-52, launching in December 2023. Falcon Heavy's most recent flight overall occurred this past April, when it sent the Viasat-3 F3 telecom satellite to orbit. Falcon Heavy's next mission will lift off with NASA's Nancy Roman Space Telescope, currently set for no earlier than Aug. 30. SunRISE is scheduled to launch later this year... Sientists will use data collected by the satellites "to improve prediction models for impending space weather, which in turn could lead to mitigation plans to better thwart the effects of such solar events on orbital infrastructure." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

Apple's Smart Glasses Delayed, As Engineers Consider Privacy Concerns

Digital Trends reports: Apple could unveil its first smart glasses at WWDC in June 2027, followed by a consumer release toward the end of the year, according to Bloomberg... Part of the delay reportedly stems from Apple's engineering and marketing teams spending more time refining the product and deciding how to address the privacy concerns... Apple has reportedly considered glasses without cameras, as well as a version where the cameras can analyse the surroundings but cannot record photos or video. Such an approach could still support object recognition, navigation, Siri, calls, and music playback. The company is also expected to favor on-device processing, avoid facial recognition, keep recordings away from AI training, and use a more visible light around the camera.

Google's Anti-search-scraping Lawsuit Dismissed

A U.S. district court "has dismissed Google's case against SerpApi over that company's scraping of search results to train AI models," reports Computerworld. Google had claimed that it was protecting copyright holders - and that SerpApi's actions breached America's Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA): [Google] made two claims: first, that no person shall circumvent a technological measure that effectively controls access to a work protected under this title, and second that no person shall manufacture, import, offer to the public, provide, or otherwise traffic in any technology, product, service, device, or component protected by the Act. SerpApi claimed that the URLs and other links that were being served by Google did not in themselves entail copyright and the judge agreed. In her judgment, she said that there was no indication that the copyright holders had authorized Google to take action against SerpApi. The case is not completely over as the judge has given Google 21 days to amend its complaint to demonstrate that it was acting on behalf of the copyright owners. SerpApi's CEO reacted to the court's ruling as "a win not just for SerpApi, but for all who depend on an open internet. We're pleased that the court rejected Google's attempts to expand the DMCA to assert control over access to public pages. The internet's founding principle - open access to usable information - is essential to driving innovation and ensuring everyone benefits from the promise of data. SerpApi will continue supporting developers, AI companies, researchers, and businesses that rely on access to public search information." Some analysis from Daring Fireball blogger John Gruber: I've come around on SerpApi in the last few months. My initial take was that it surely must be illegal for a company to scrape Google's search results and offer access to that data as an API. But I've come around to the argument that what SerpApi is doing to obtain Google search results is, well, exactly how Google scrapes the rest of the entire web to build its search index. It's all just scraping publicly accessible web pages. This December piece by Mike Masnick at Techdirt is what began to change my mind. In fact, Masnick wrote, Google "built its entire business on scraping the web without asking permission first. And now it wants to use one of the most abused provisions in copyright law to stop others from doing something functionally similar to what made Google a tech giant in the first place." Now Google is even getting heckled about the decision on social media. "If Google wants to refile the suit within the allowed 21 days, it has to admit that site owners have copyright protection of their work and THAT would open the door to them suing Google for scraping their content for AI Overviews."

25 Jul 2026

Ars Technica

SDCC teaser gives us our first good look at Blade Runner 2099

Also: Forging the One Ring in Rings of Power S3 teaser; new Lanterns trailer; Spaceballs: The New One panel.

25 Jul 2026 8:52pm GMT

SpaceX eyes tower catch for next Starship after auspicious end to 13th flight

SpaceX will likely attempt to catch Starship back at the launch pad on its next flight.

25 Jul 2026 5:47pm GMT

With help from data, art museums are reframing the visitor experience

Museums are embracing data-driven curation and a shifting technology landscape.

25 Jul 2026 11:00am GMT

24 Jul 2026

OSnews

The Hurd gets 9pfs, OpenNTPD, dynamic /dev/ entries, and more

The hottest and most promising operating system kernel in development, the GNU Hurd, has published another summary of its most recent quarter of development. Hurd has experimental support for 9pfs now, a work-in-progress port of OpenNTPD, the NTP daemon from OpenBSD, a port of Neovim, and a few more ports here and there. Diving deeper into the actual kernel itself, there's a major improvement to how the Hurd handles entries in /dev/: Mikhail Karpov added some checks for mmap in several places. He also worked on adding storeio to the bootstrap chain. This is actually quite interesting. Currently the Hurd sets device entries in /dev/ statically. For example, I am writing this qoth on a Hurd machine that is using two /dev/ entries for my filesystem: /dev/wd0s1 for swap and /dev/wd0s5 for my root filesystem. However, /dev/wd0s1 through /dev/wd0s16 exist on my computer! Once Mikhail's project is done, then the Hurd will dynamically populate SATA devices at boot time! No more need for static translators! ↫ The Hurd's quartely report The dhcpcd port we talked about earlier this year keeps improving too, which is quite important for future IPv6 support. Of course, there's way more to dive into, and reading about a bunch of people developing their own thing without any regard for or interest in the mainstream always feels a little bit like a cold glass of tonic - the best soft drink - in the depths of hell. Keep at it.

24 Jul 2026 10:44pm GMT

Google Play Services drops support for Android 6.0

Given that Android phones have been around for nearly two decades now, there comes a time when Google has to end support for one of its older software versions. For a couple of years now, Google Play services has been supported on devices running Android 6.0 Marshmallow or newer. That has changed over the past few weeks, with Google deciding to retire this software version after a nearly 11-year run. ↫ Chethan Rao at Android Authority At some point, an operating system version needs to be left behind - and I don't think it's entirely unreasonable to no longer support Google Play Services on an operating system version that's 11 years old. However, this is Android we're talking about, and devices running Android 6.0 were probably sold much more recently than 11 years ago, when the operating system version was new. Hell, I wouldn't be surprised if devices running Android 6.0 are still being sold today. I doubt this is something that will affect many people who read OSNews, but there's bound to be edge cases - Android 6.0 devices silently doing their job that are now just a little less useful. I'm thinking of really cheap tablets that can still play video just fine, retro gaming handhelds that don't magically lose the ability to emulate SNES games, that sort of stuff. The numbers will be small, but if you happen to be among them, this can be a really annoying deprecation.

24 Jul 2026 10:22pm GMT

23 Jul 2026

OSnews

FreeBSD ports frozen after someone commits the entire 150MB Linux Copilot binary

A rather unusual announcement was made late last night: the FreeBSD project has frozen their ports repository. For more than 48 hours now, no changes have been accepted or made to the tree, and here's why. A 150MB binary file was recently committed to the ports tree and, as a result, core@ made the decision to implement a temporary freeze of the ports tree in order to implement some clean up efforts. The commit in question severed our ports tree mirroring to github.com due to their filesize hard limit of 100MB, and introduced a blob of questionable licensing into the repository history. ↫ Kyle Evans in freebsd-announce While FreeBSD's ports tree is not hosted by GitHub - it's merely mirrored there - the FreeBSD team believes the community values the GitHub mirror too much, and as such, steps had to be taken to fix this. Ports has not been compromised and users' systems do not appear to be at risk in any way due to this occurrence, which is good news. Curiously, the official announcement makes no mention of which 150MB file, exactly, was committed to ports, but it didn't take for people long to pinpoint the offending commit (screenshot). It turns out someone committed the entire github-copilot-cli Linux binary to ports, as part of the github-copilot-cli port. This FreeBSD port is effectively a way to easily install and run this tool on FreeBSD using Linuxulator, FreeBSD's Linux compatibility layer that allows you to run unmodified Linux binaries on FreeBSD. It's important to note this FreeBSD port is not actually a port of the Linux version of github-copilot-cli to FreeBSD; the FreeBSD "port" merely acts as a setup script to run the unmodified Linux binary using Linuxulator. It's not a "real" port because the tool isn't open source and its license doesn't allow for modifications. That's why the announcement specifically mentions "questionable licensing" - github-copilot-cli is licensed under some custom license specifically made for this tool, and is not open source. Anyway, for whatever reason, the maintainer of this FreeBSD port accidentally made a commit that added the actual, full 150MB Linux binary to FreeBSD ports. I'm assuming that under normal circumstances, building and installing the github-copilot-cli FreeBSD port would merely download the binary off GitHub and set Linuxulator up so that it could run it. Mistakes happen, and since there's clearly nothing malicious going on, there's not much to worry about. In fact, this may lead to new checks and balances to prevent this from happening in the future, which would be good news. The FreeBSD team is working on rolling back, fixing the issue, and investigating how this could have happened. Ports is still frozen at the time of writing, but I'm sure we'll have a more detailed account soon.

23 Jul 2026 8:33pm GMT