fidzu : computers

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Cord Cutters News: Sony has notified owners of its recent BRAVIA television models that significant changes to the built-in TV Guide for its OTA TV antenna users and related menu features will take effect starting in late May 2026. The update affects a range of premium sets released between 2023 and 2025, marking another instance of feature adjustments for older smart TV hardware as manufacturers shift focus toward newer product lines. The changes primarily target the program guide functionality for over-the-air antenna TV channels received via the ATSC tuner. After the cutoff date, program information may fail to display on certain channels, limiting the guide's usefulness for planning viewing schedules. Users will often see listings only for channels they have recently watched, rather than a comprehensive overview of available broadcasts. Additionally, channel logos that previously appeared in the guide will disappear, and any thumbnail images accompanying program descriptions will no longer load or show. Further modifications will appear in the television's menu system. For users relying on connected set-top boxes, the dedicated Set Top Box menu option will be removed entirely. In its place, a simpler Control menu will surface, streamlining access but eliminating some specialized navigation previously available. Program thumbnails, which provided visual previews in various menu sections, will also cease to appear across affected interfaces. These adjustments stem from Sony's ongoing efforts to manage backend services and data feeds that support enhanced guide features on its Google TV-powered BRAVIA lineup. As television ecosystems evolve rapidly with advancements in processing power, artificial intelligence integration, and cloud-based content delivery, companies periodically retire select capabilities on prior-generation hardware to optimize resources. The 2023 through 2025 models, while still offering excellent picture quality through advanced OLED and LCD panels with features like XR processing, now fall into the category of devices receiving scaled-back support. These are the models impacted: 2025 models: Bravia 8 II (XR80M2), Bravia 5 (XR50) 2024 models: Bravia 9 (XR90), Bravia 8 (XR80), Bravia 7 (XR70) 2023 models: Bravia A95L series

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

15 Apr 2026 3:30am GMT

The FCC has granted (PDF) Netgear the first exemption from its foreign-made router ban, allowing the company to keep selling new consumer router models made outside the U.S. through Oct. 1, 2027. PCMag reports: The Defense Department reviewed Netgear's application for an exemption and found that its products "do not pose risks to US national security." The FCC's order doesn't elaborate on why. Netgear is based in San Jose, California, although its products are made in Asia. The exemption, known as a conditional approval, lasts until Oct. 1, 2027. It covers a large range of future Wi-Fi models from Netgear, spanning the R, RAX, RAXE, RS, MK, MR, M, and MH series, the Orbi consumer mesh, mobile, and standalone routers under the RBK, RBE, RBR, RBRE, LBR, LBK, and CBK series, as well as cable gateways and cable modems under the CAX and CM series. The exemption isn't a full green light for the future product models from Netgear. The FCC says the company still needs to go through the normal Commission-regulated equipment authorization process for each device. The Oct. 1, 2027 date effectively amounts to a deadline for Netgear to receive FCC certification for the router models; each certification is also permanent, enabling the product to be sold in the US on an ongoing basis. This also suggests that Netgear has an 18-month period to receive FCC certifications for future products.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Apr 2026 11:06pm GMT

Ukraine is replacing more soldiers with robots in the battlefield kill zone.

14 Apr 2026 10:42pm GMT

Some 2023 and 2024 models are also affected.

14 Apr 2026 10:00pm GMT

Microsoft has sharply raised prices across its Surface lineup as RAM and component costs keep climbing. "Both its midrange and flagship Surface lines are now significantly more expensive than they were just a few weeks ago, with the flagship Surface Laptop 7 and Surface Pro 11 now starting at $500 more than they launched at in 2024," reports Windows Central. From the report: The Surface Pro 12-inch, which was previously Microsoft's cheapest modern Surface PC at $799, now starts at $1,049. The flagship Surface Pro 13-inch, which originally launched for $999, now starts at an eyewatering $1,499. It's the same story for the Surface Laptop lines, with the entry-level 13-inch model originally priced at $899, now starting at $1,149. The 13.8-inch flagship Surface Laptop launched at $999, but now costs $1,499, with the 15-inch model now starting at $1,599. This means that Microsoft's midrange devices now cost more than the flagships did when they launched in 2024. [...] Microsoft has raised prices for all SKUs on offer, meaning the high end models are now more expensive too. A top end Surface Laptop 15-inch with Snapdragon X Elite, 64GB RAM and 1TB SSD storage now costs a staggering $3,649. To compare, the 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M5 Pro, 64GB RAM, and 1TB SSD is $3,299, and that comes with a significantly better display and much more power under the hood.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Apr 2026 10:00pm GMT

A few weeks ago, Microsoft made some concrete promises about fixing and improving Windows, and among them was removing useless "AI" integrations. Applications like Notepad, Snipping Tool, and others would see their "AI" features removed. Well, it turns out Microsoft employs a very fringe definition of the concept. Microsoft seems to have stripped away mentions of the "Copilot" brand in the Windows Insider version of the Notepad app. The Copilot button in the toolbar is gone, and instead, you'll find a writing icon which will present you AI-powered writing assistance, such as rewrite, summarize, tone modification, format configuration, and more. Additionally, "AI features" in Notepad settings has been renamed to "Advanced features" and it allows users to toggle off AI capabilities within the app. ↫ Usama Jawad at Neowin If the recent changes to Notepad are any indication, it seems Microsoft is, actually, not at all going to "reducing unnecessary Copilot entry points", as they worded it, but is merely just going to rename these features so they aren't so ostentatiously present. At least, that seems to be the plan for Notepad, and we'll have to see if they have the same plans for the other applications. I mean, they have to push "AI" or look like fools. I just don't understand how a company like Microsoft can be so utterly terrible at communication. While I personally would want all "AI" features yeeted straight from Windows, I'm sure a ton of people are just fine with the features being less in-your-face and stuffed inside a normal menu alongside all the other normal features. They could've just been honest about their intentions, and it would've been so much better. Like virtually every other technology company, Microsoft just seems incapable of not lying.

14 Apr 2026 9:28pm GMT

Do you trust AI chatbots for health advice? What about one in your patient portal?

14 Apr 2026 8:30pm GMT

Ever heard of a condition called bixonimania? Did you search the internet or ask your "AI" girlfriend about some symptoms you were experiencing, and this was its answer? Well… The condition doesn't appear in the standard medical literature - because it doesn't exist. It's the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. "I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database," she says. ↫ Chris Stokel-Walker at Nature And "AI" ate it up like quality chocolate. It started appearing in the answers from all the popular "AI" tools within weeks, and later even started showing up as references in published literature, indicating that scientists copy/paste references without actually reading them. This is clearly a deeply concerning experiment, and highlights there may be many, many more nonsensical, fake studies being picked up by "AI" tools. Of course, I hear you say, it's not like propagating fake or terrible studies is the sole domain of "AI", as there are countless cases of this happening among actual real researchers and scientists, too. The issue, though, is that the fake studies concerning "bixonimania" were intentionally made to be as silly and obviously ridiculous as possible. It references Starfleet Acadamy, the lab aboard the Enterprise, the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and many other fake references instantly recognisable as such by real humans. In fact, the studies even specifically mention that "this entire paper is made up" and "fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group". It would take any human only a few seconds after opening one of these papers to realise they're entirely fake - yet, the world's most advanced "AI" tools gobbled them up and spit them back out as pure fact within mere weeks of their publication This shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, "AI" tools have no understanding, no intelligence, no context, and they can't actually make sense of anything. They are glorified pachinko machines with the output - the ball - tumbling down the most likely path between the pins based on nothing but chance and which pins it has already hit. "AI" output understands the world about as much as the pachinko ball does, and as such, can't pick up on even the most obvious of cues that something is a fake or a forgery. It won't be long before truly nefarious forces start doing this very same thing. Why build, staff, and maintain a troll farm when you can just have "AI" generate intentional misinformation which will then be spread and pushed by even more "AI"? Remember, it took one malicious asshole just one long since retracted fake paper to convince millions that vaccines cause autism. I shudder to think how many people are accepting anything "AI" says as gospel.

13 Apr 2026 1:02pm GMT

Version 7.0 of the Linux kernel has been released, marking the arbitrary end of the 6.x series. Significant changes in this release include the removal of the "experimental" status for Rust code, a new filtering mechanism for io_uring operations, a switch to lazy preemption by default in the CPU scheduler, support for time-slice extension, the nullfs filesystem, self-healing support for the XFS filesystem, a number of improvements to the swap subsystem (described in this article and this one), general support for AccECN congestion notification, and more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 7.0 page for more details. ↫ corbet at LWN.net You can compile the kernel yourself, or just wait until it hits your distribution's repositories.

13 Apr 2026 12:19pm GMT

My thoughts on AI-assisted programming.

11 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

I have discovered and shared ~800 open source Rust CLI projects over the past 3 years.

03 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

All I wanted was to learn how to play guitar, but ended up building a DIY kit for it.

28 Mar 2026 12:00am GMT