fidzu : computers

A Soyuz launch at Baikonur damaged Russia's only launchpad capable of sending astronauts and crucial propellant to the ISS. "The rocket itself headed to space without incident, taking three astronauts -- Sergey Kud-Sverchkov and Sergei Mikaev of Russia and Chris Williams of NASA -- to the space station," reports the New York Times. "But the force of the rocket's exhaust shoved a service platform used for prelaunch preparations out of its protective shelter. The platform fell into the flame trench below." From the report: Photos and videos of the launch site the next day showed the platform out of place and mangled. "It's heavily damaged," said Anatoly Zak, who publishes RussianSpaceWeb.com, a close tracker of Russia's space activities, "and so probably it will have to be rebuilt. Maybe some of the hardware can be reused. But it fell down, and it's destroyed." This is the latest embarrassment for the once-proud Russian space program, which the United States relied on from 2011 to 2020 to get NASA astronauts to orbit. The incident also raises questions about the future of the International Space Station if the launchpad cannot be quickly repaired. In a statement issued on Friday, Roscosmos, the state corporation in charge of the Russian space program, confirmed unspecified "damage" at the launchpad. "All necessary parts needed for repairs are at our disposal, and the damage will be dealt with in the near future," it said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Dec 2025 7:00am GMT

At an event in Seoul on Tuesday, Samsung unveiled the Galaxy Z TriFold, a dual-hinged smartphone that unfolds into a 10-inch tablet (source paywalled; alternative source). It launches on Dec. 12 in Korea for about $2,450. The company plans to sell the phone in the U.S., but hasn't shared pricing. Bloomberg reports: Samsung's device has a different hinge design, folding inward from two sides whereas the Mate models take on a Z shape when being folded. When closed, the TriFold's outer screen offers similar dimensions to a regular smartphone. But when unfurled, it provides a tablet-style experience with a 10-inch display, larger than the panel on the Galaxy Z Fold 7. In the tablet-like mode, each of the device's screens can independently run a different app. This provides the equivalent of three separate 6.5-inch bar-style handsets side by side. Using Samsung's DeX software, which has been tweaked for this particular hardware type, you can also run a desktop-like experience directly on the large inner display. (Other Samsung phones must be plugged into an external monitor to activate DeX mode.) In DeX, the TriFold can operate as many as four distinct workspaces that can each run five apps simultaneously. To preempt concerns about potential breakage, Samsung said it has refined the phone's hinges, aluminum frame and display technology to improve long-term durability. The company will also offer a one-time 50% discount on display repair costs should one eventually be needed. At its thinnest point, the TriFold measures 3.9 millimeters (0.15 inch). Inside, it contains a 5,600 milliamp-hour battery, marking the largest capacity that Samsung has used in a folding phone so far. The battery provides as much as 17 hours of consecutive video playback with the TriFold display fully open. However, in specifications shared with Bloomberg, the company didn't say how long it expects the battery to last with typical usage.

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02 Dec 2025 5:13am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Conversation, written by authors Adrian R. Bell, Anne Curry, and Jason Sadler: When you picture medieval warfare, you might think of epic battles and famous monarchs. But what about the everyday soldiers who actually filled the ranks? Until recently, their stories were scattered across handwritten manuscripts in Latin or French and difficult to decipher. Now, our online database makes it possible for anyone to discover who they were and how they lived, fought and travelled. To shed light on the foundations of our armed services -- one of England's oldest professions -- we launched the Medieval Soldier Database in 2009. Today, it's the largest searchable online database of medieval nominal data in the world. It contains military service records giving names of soldiers paid by the English Crown. It covers the period from 1369 to 1453 and many different war zones. We created the database to challenge assumptions about the lack of professionalism of soldiers during the hundred years war and to show what their careers were really like. In response to the high interest from historians and the public (the database has 75,000 visitors per month), the resource has recently been updated. It is now sustainably hosted by GeoData, a University of Southampton research institute. We have recently added new records, taking the dataset back to the late 1350s, meaning it now contains almost 290,000 entries. [...] We hope the database will continue to grow and go on providing answers to questions about our shared military heritage. We are sure that it will unlock many previously untold stories of soldier ancestors.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Dec 2025 3:30am GMT

One of Vladimir Putin's favorite sabres to rattle seems to have lost its edge.

01 Dec 2025 11:36pm GMT

Justices want Cox to crack down on piracy, but question Sony's strict demands.

01 Dec 2025 10:33pm GMT

OpenAI risks increased fines after deleting pirated books datasets.

01 Dec 2025 10:16pm GMT

On its own, the title of this post is just a true piece of trivia, verifiable with the built-in subst tool (among other methods). Here's an example creating the drive +:\ as an alias for a directory at C:\foo: The +:\ drive then works as normal (at least in cmd.exe, this will be discussed more later): However, understanding why it's true elucidates a lot about how Windows works under the hood, and turns up a few curious behaviors. ↫ Ryan Liptak Fascinating doesn't even begin to describe this article, but at the same time, it also makes me wonder at what point maintaining this drive letter charade becomes too burdensome, clunky, and complex. Internally, Windows NT does not use drive letters at all, but for the sake of backwards compatibility and to give the user what they expect, a whole set of abstractions has been crafted to create the illusion that modern versions of Windows still use the same basic drive letter conventions as DOS did 40 years ago. I wonder if we'll ever reach a point where Windows no longer uses drive letters, or if it's possible today to somehow remove or disable these abstractions entirely, and run Windows NT without drive letters, as Cutler surely intended. Vast swaths of Windows programs would surely curl up in fetal position and die, including many core components of the operating system itself - as this article demonstrates, very few parts of Windows can handle even something as mundane as a drive letter outside of A-Z - but it'd make for a great experiment. Someone with just the right set of Windows NT skills must've tried something like this at some point, either publicly or inside of Microsoft.

01 Dec 2025 9:06pm GMT

What do you do if you develop a lightweight browser that doesn't support JavaScript, but you once chose GitHub as the home for your code? You're now in the unenviable position that your own browser can no longer access your own online source repository because it requires JavaScript, which is both annoying and, well, a little awkward. The solution is, of course, obvious: you move somewhere else. That's exactly what the Dillo browser did. They set up a small VPS, opted for cgit as the git frontend for its performance and small size, and for the bug tracker, they created a brand new, very simple bug tracker. To avoid this problem, I created my own bug tracker software, buggy, which is a very simple C tool that parses plain Markdown files and creates a single HTML page for each bug. All bugs are stored in a git repository and a git hook regenerates the bug pages and the index on each new commit. As it is simply plain text, I can edit the bugs locally and only push them to the remote when I have Internet back, so it works nice offline. Also, as the output is just an static HTML site, I don't need to worry about having any vulnerabilities in my code, as it will only run at build time. ↫ Rodrigo Arias Mallo There's more considerations detailed in the article about Dillo's migration, and it can serve as inspiration for anyone else running a small open source project who wishes to leave GitHub behind. With GitHub's continuing to add more and more complexity and "AI" to separate open source code from its licensing terms, we may see more and more projects giving GitHub the finger.

01 Dec 2025 8:04pm GMT

Landlock is a Linux API that lets applications explicitly declare which resources they are allowed to access. Its philosophy is similar to OpenBSD's unveil() and (less so) pledge(): programs can make a contract with the kernel stating, "I only need these files or resources - deny me everything else if I'm compromised." It provides a simple, developer-friendly way to add defense-in-depth to applications. Compared to traditional Linux security mechanisms, Landlock is vastly easier to understand and integrate. This post is meant to be an accessible introduction, and hopefully persuade you to give Landlock a try. ↫ prizrak.me blog I had no idea this existed, even though it seems to plug a hole in the security and sandboxing landscape on Linux by not requiring any privileges and by being relatively simple and straightforward to use. There's even an additional "supervisor" proposal that would bring Android-like permissions not just to, say, desktop applications (see Flatpak), but to every process trying to access anything for the first time. I'm not knowledgeable enough to make any statements about Landlock compared to any other options we have for securing desktop Linux in a user-friendly, non-intrusive manner, but I definitely like its simplicity.

01 Dec 2025 7:46pm GMT

Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people's beds. A little over a week later Microsoft Azure had a [widespread outage][Azure outage] that managed to significantly disrupt train service in the Netherlands, and probably also things that matter. Now last week, Cloudflare takes down large swaths of the internet in a way that causes non-tech people to learn Cloudflare exists. And every single time, people share that one XKCD comic.

24 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

After Gandi was bought up and started taking extortion level prices for their domains I've been looking for an excuse to migrate registrar. Last week I decided to bite the bullet and move to Porkbun as I have another domain renewal coming up. However after setting up an account and paying for the transfer for 4 domains, I realized their DNS services are provided by Cloudflare! I personally do not use Cloudflare, and stay far away from all of their products for various reasons.

18 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

The waydroid package prior to version 1.5.4-2 (including aur/waydroid) creates Python byte-code files (.pyc) at runtime which were untracked by pacman. This issue has been fixed in 1.5.4-3, where byte-compiling these files is now done during the packaging process. As a result, the upgrade may conflict with the unowned files created in previous versions. If you encounter errors like the following during the update:

error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files) waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/__pycache__/__init__.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/actions/__pycache__/__init__.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/actions/__pycache__/app_manager.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem

You can safely overwrite these files by running the following command: pacman -Syu --overwrite /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/\*__pycache__/\*

06 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT