fidzu : computers

"Epic Games has confirmed that it is working on a Linux version of its storefront, potentially removing the need for third-party launchers on platforms such as Steam Deck," reports PC Guide: The confirmation came during an Ask Me Anything (AMA) on the Epic Games Store's community Discord server. When a user asked whether Epic had any plans for a Linux version of its launcher, an Epic staff member confirmed that it is coming "soon(TM)" in emoji form. Of course, that is far from confirming any kind of date, but it is official confirmation of a Linux version nonetheless. "On top of that, Nvidia's GeForce Now [cloud gaming] app for Linux is also official, having emerged from beta," writes TechRadar, calling it all part of "a rosier future for Linux gamers." And while it's not related to gaming, OpenAI's ["preview"] release of a ChatGPT app for Linux is another milestone for the platform... OpenAI said: "Linux has been one of the most-requested platforms for the desktop app, and this launch extends ChatGPT and Codex across every major desktop operating system." The Epic Games Store arriving natively is great news for gamers running Linux - including SteamOS - as it means a much more convenient way of playing games from the store, as opposed to the current situation with fudging and workarounds (using a third-party app such as the Heroic Games Launcher)... Epic's own Fortnite doesn't work on Linux (and that's down to Epic actively blocking the game from running due to issues around cheating, which remains a source of controversy). Given the apparent changing attitude here with its launcher being ported over, maybe Epic will reverse course on Fortnite eventually. Some gamers on Reddit are highly skeptical about that possibility though, and as one doubting Redditor put it: "I wouldn't hold my breath."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Aug 2026 5:44am GMT

Politico notes that over 20 local jurisdictions in America "either stopped using Flock cameras or began the process of doing so in July, according to a tracker maintained by DeFlock, an activist group that has been mapping the company. It's the highest amount in a single month since they began tracking in 2021." Some local officials said the public safety promises weren't worth the cost. The cameras "didn't help us with anything. From a utility aspect, they were just kind of not useful," said Eric Couture, a Democratic first selectman in Killingworth, Connecticut, another city that recently canceled its contract with Flock. "I'd say it was a net negative." And their article adds that it's a bipartisan pushback that "runs parallel to sprawling fights over the future of technology in American life, including the rise of increasingly advanced artificial intelligence tools and the construction of massive data centers needed to power them." Salon even argues Flock's cameras "have become a symbol of growing anger over the efforts by technology oligarchs to impose their dystopian fantasies on the country, replacing liberal democracy with a surveillance state... People are sick of tech billionaires trying to control our lives"" By targeting Flock cameras, activists are building momentum for a larger rebellion against the tech industry - and against political leaders who are complicit in their assault on our freedoms. Flock Safety embodies the dishonesty that has been the prevailing theme of tech corporate communications and marketing for at least the past decade. While the cameras are sold to the public as a banal traffic safety measure, they have prompted an outpouring of stories about how they're being used to violate civil liberties and undermine democracy... According to an exhaustive 10-month analysis by Electronic Foundation Frontier, a nonprofit dedicated to defending civil liberties in our digital age, local police were using the cameras to track protesters, such as those at No Kings rallies, who were then put in a national database to be used across all jurisdictions. Despite claims that the cameras only record license plates, the technology-focused outlet 404 Media found that the database is also being used to collect information on individual people whom cops can then search for using descriptions of clothing, race, gender and body type. The Flock uprising, though, is the stirrings of public understanding that none of this inevitable - and we have the right to fight back... Along with protests against data centers, it's a sign that the public is desperate for a way to fight back against not just AI, but also the anti-democratic forces fueling this latest tech wave. Salon's writer also adds that "what stands out about the burgeoning public rebellion against Flock security cameras is just how fun it all is," citing "a national cat-and-mouse game between vandals and cops that is being merrily followed on social media, mostly by people rooting for the vandals." City council meetings in which citizens swarm to protest paying for the cameras are the new must-see TV. In Huntington, West Virginia, a small city in the heart of Appalachia, one man became an internet folk hero when he stood up at a city council meeting and said, "I'm not gonna waste your time; I'm kinda hungry. But one last thing: Every single Flock camera has about 2-3 pounds of copper and about 1-2 grams of gold. Do with that information what you will." He then walked off in triumph.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Aug 2026 3:04am GMT

This week Anthropic announced its Claude chatbot will watermark the text it generates, reports the blog Futurism. "It works by making subtle changes in the AI's word choices across the text it generates, which are supposed to be imperceptible to a human but, in aggregate, form a pattern that is detectable with the tool." Anthropic said it was implementing the watermark system in response to the European Union's landmark AI Act passed in 2024, which requires that AI companies mark content that's been generated or edited by their systems. TechCrunch notes that other companies including Google, Meta, Microsoft, OpenAI, and Synthesia have committed to adhering to the EU's code. But "The news about Claude watermarking kicked off a firestorm on X," reports Forbes, "with users panicking that AI-assisted writing will now bear a kind of permanent 'scarlet letter.'" (Forbes wonders if media companies are normalizing AI "while at the same time stigmatizing the output.") But there's another issue. Anthropic said the watermark indicates Claude processed text, Business Insider points out, "not that it was necessarily the original author. The company said marks can remain after Claude proofreads, translates, summarizes, or otherwise edits content... a watermark shows that Claude processed text, not necessarily that it wrote it." In the days since, "Dozens of people have posted on X since Monday that they had canceled their Claude subscriptions, citing the watermark." Vladislav Rajtmajer, a freelance developer in the Czech Republic, told Business Insider he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Tuesday, citing the watermark as the main reason. He said he uses AI for code reviews and translations, and worried an AI label on code shipped to clients could raise questions about authorship or trigger contract penalties... Richard Echols, an AI consultant in Georgia, also said he canceled his Claude Max subscription on Wednesday and that the watermark was a major factor in his decision. He said he uses Claude to create documentation for businesses and worried the mark could appear when he had written the underlying material himself and used the chatbot only for edits. "Even if you edit your own work that you wrote, they add the watermark anyway," Echols said... Anthropic isn't the only AI lab to use watermarks: Google uses its SynthID technology to watermark AI-generated content, and OpenAI uses SynthID for supported images and audio. Elon Musk's social media platform X also adds a "Made with AI" tag on content it determines to be AI-generated or manipulated. Long-time Slashdot reader kmleon (also a tech consultant and RPG researcher) experienced another issue. He'd built some software using their own custom-built AI tool, only asking Claude to do some testing. "Little did I know that Claude would sometimes decide, since it was involved on the edges... to take credit for all of my work, claiming some parts were either '100%' or 'Co-Authored/Created' by Claude.Ai / Claude Code!" I'm sure the good folks at Anthropic will eventually tweak Claude enough to, hopefully, not make these mistakes in the future.... I only became aware of it today, because I recently setup scanners to catch Claude incorrectly watermarking any content it touches for various projects I'm working on. I found that it has (apparently as far back as Sonnet 4.6, but as recently as today, August 14th, 2026) sometimes been mistakenly over-zealous in taking credit for 100% creating or co-authoring docs, code, images, videos, etc. I've only, so far, found about a dozen instances spanning the past year, and most of them appear to have been injected in the last few weeks, so it is not a common issue (yet). On the bright side? Maybe watermarks can help AI stop training on AI-generated text. Although Forbes also reports that Google "announced on Friday that it will now let users remove the visible watermark from AI-generated images, videos and music created with several of its models."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

17 Aug 2026 2:04am GMT

Regulations reduced prenatal exposure to harmful emissions, but wildfire smoke is erasing gains.

16 Aug 2026 10:00am GMT

Also: Ahsoka S2 teaser, Doomsday trailer, news about MCU's X-Men and Star Wars: Starfighter

15 Aug 2026 9:21pm GMT

"Flamingo missiles were used. A good achievement."

15 Aug 2026 3:46pm GMT

Today, you can get low-quality knockoffs of just about any popular smartphone on sites like AliExpress or Temu, whether they be iPhones, Galaxy phones, or whatever else. They have terrible build quality, bottom-of-the-barrel components and specifications, and all run outdated versions of Android - badly. At the same time, various consumer electronics brands, once popular in a bygone era, sell the rights to their brand name to unknown companies, who then put these brands on generic hardware to give their products a sheen of legitimacy. That's why today, you can still buy Nokia smartphones, Polaroid cameras, and low-effort Hi-Fi equipment from various once-respected brands. None of this is new, however. In the late '90s and early 2000s, companies were already doing the same thing. In fact, there's one device from this era which combines both business practices - it's both a cheap knockoff of a wildly successful device, and it carries a once-revered brand name. Also, just to add some juice, this story involves stolen source code. Let's take a look at the worst PDA of all time, the Olivetti daVinci. In 1997, Palm launched the Palm Pilot, and it and its successors proved to be a massive hit. Where countless before it had failed, Palm found the magic formula to make pocket computing work. I wrote an in-depth article about Palm over 13 years ago which goes into much (much) more detail, but the reason the Palm Pilot succeeded where things like the Newton, PenPoint OS, and Windows for Pen Computing failed, is that Palm's founder, Jeff Hawkins, realised that they were competing with paper, not with desktop computers. Instead of trying to shove the capabilities of a full personal computer into a (barely) pockatable device, a pocket computer had to be as fast and convenient as paper, and therefore extremely strict about which features to add, and which to omit. To this day, the entirety of smartphone computing stands on the shoulders of Palm. Palm's ideas, implementations, approaches, paradigms, and even people were absorbed by Apple and Google, where they shaped both iOS and Android. The phone you're looking at right now has a ton of Palm DNA in it, still. After all, you're still using the homescreen-with-apps paradigm Palm already perfected in the late '90s and early 2000s. The success of the Palm Pilot and its successors did not go unnoticed. Microsoft, most prominently, felt incredibly threatened by Palm's success: The success of Palm's products got the attention of Microsoft, and the company pretty much announced it was going to crush Palm. According to Hawkins, Microsoft had a sales conference, where, at some point, a big target appeared on the projector screen, with the Palm logo dead in the centre of it: "we are going to crush and kill these guys", was the central message. Hawkins recalls that he got condolence letters after that, stating things like "Sorry Jeff. Too bad." ↫ Thom Holwerda While Microsoft proved to be unable to "kill and crush" Palm, it did manage to build a relatively successful business selling PDAs running various incarnations of Windows CE. Together, Palm and Microsoft dominated the PDA market pretty much throughout its entire existence, and while the market was a mere fraction of the smartphone market of today, other companies still wanted a piece of this pie too. One of these companies was Olivetti, a storied Italian company with a long history making typewriters, computers, and other electronics. I'm not going into detail about Olivetti's history, but the company was renowned for its attention to design, creating iconic products like the Lexikon 80, Lettera 22, Elea 9003, Programma 101, and so, so many more. Olivetti also entered the personal computer market, first with a variety of custom machines featuring Z80 and later Motorola 68000 processors running a variety of custom operating systems developed by Olivetti (including its own UNIX variant, X/OS). After a few machines using MIPS and Alpha processors in the early '90s, the company would eventually focus entirely on Intel-based PCs (including this amazing failure) running Windows. Like so many other computer makers from that era, Olivetti eventually left the PC business by selling it off in 1997. To this day, Olivetti PCs tend to cost more on the used market than those from other brands, despite no technical merits dictating so. At around this time, our current story begins. Seeing the success of the Palm Pilot and the emergence of copycat devices running Microsoft's Windows CE, Olivetti wanted in on the action. And so, in the late '90s, the company introduced the Olivetti daVinci, a line of PDAs whose software looked suspiciously like Palm OS. There's not a ton of information out there about the development history, but it seems that while Olivetti designed the hardware, it contracted the development of the operating system out to a company from Hong Kong, Echolink Design. And this is where things went horribly wrong for Olivetti. The software Echolink Design developed for the daVinci didn't just look like Palm OS, it was Palm OS - at least, according to Palm. After being on the market for about a year, the Palm Pilot maker, then a subsidiary of 3Com, filed for an injunction, alleging that the daVinci operating system designed by Echolink Design contained actual Palm OS source code. In addition, Palm also filed suit against CompanionLink Software, the company that developed the Outlook synchronisation software for the daVinci. Palm won handily, and within a day of the filing, temporary restraining orders were put in place on both Olivetti and CompanionLink, stopping sales of the daVinci and its software dead in its tracks. It seemed to have been a pretty clear-cut case. From The Wall Street Journal at the time: U.S. District Judge James Ware ruled Olivetti's Royal daVinci organizer contains software that appears to have been copied from the operating system for 3Com's Palm organizers. Judge Ware said a review by a software expert found the daVinci software contains private Palm code and even grammatical

14 Aug 2026 7:18pm GMT

In the last few days, I built a shoot 'em up game by embedding a tiny custom bytecode VM and rendering the graphics using a fullscreen pixel shader. The result is a 3kB Windows executable. This was done for Langjam Gamejam, a 7-day challenge where you create a programming language and then use it to build a game. The project combines several interests of mine: language tooling, game development, procedural graphics, and demoscene-style size constraints. The game jam format forced me to keep the scope small and explore new ideas. Also, it was fun! ↫ Laurent Le Brun In seven days, Le Brun created a brand new programming language, compiler, bytecode interpreter, a game written in the new language, and rendered it, ending up with a 3kB self-contained executable. It's amazing what humans can do.

14 Aug 2026 6:57pm GMT

A while back, when chatting with a colleague over their computer, I noticed that a logo did not look exactly the same as it did on mine. It looked thinner on theirs and more faithful to the original image. It was rendered at 15px; here is an upscaled version. If you squint, or take a step back, the one from Chrome looks thicker. A bit weird, but swapping the image for an SVG fixed it. Still, I was curious: why was it rendering like this in the first place? I did some digging and found a nifty optimization that Chrome uses when rendering JPEGs at small scales. ↫ Guillaume Técher I love it when people detail their discoveries like this.

14 Aug 2026 6:50pm 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