computers

17 Apr 2026

Slashdot

Newly Unsealed Records Reveal Amazon's Price-Fixing Tactics

Newly unsealed records in California's antitrust case against Amazon allegedly show the company pressured third-party sellers to raise prices on rival sites like Walmart, Target, and Wayfair so Amazon could maintain the appearance of offering the lowest price. California says Amazon used tools like Buy Box suppression to punish cheaper listings elsewhere. The Guardian reports: [...] In one previously redacted deposition, marked "highly confidential," Mayer Handler, owner of a clothing company called Leveret, testified that he received an email in October 2022 from Amazon notifying him that one of his products was "no longer eligible to be a featured offer" through Amazon's Buy Box. The tech giant, he testified, had suppressed the item, a tiger-themed, toddler's pajama set, because his company was selling it for $19.99 on Amazon, a single cent higher than what his company was offering it for on Walmart. Afterwards, Handler testified, his company "changed pricing on Walmart to match or exceed Amazon's price" or changed the item's product code to try to throw off Amazon's price tracking system. In response to a question from the Guardian, Handler criticized Amazon for tracking prices across the internet and "shadow" blocking his company's products -- tactics which he said were depriving consumers of "lower prices." "Maybe that's capitalism," he wrote. "Or that's a monopoly causing price hikes on the consumer." In another unsealed deposition, Terry Esbenshade, a Pennsylvania garden store supplier, testified in October 2024 that whenever his products lost Amazon's Buy Box because of lower prices elsewhere on the internet, his sales on Amazon would plummet by about 80%. This financial reality forced him to try to raise his products' prices with other retailers elsewhere, he said. In one instance, Esbenshade testified, he discovered that one of his company's better-selling patio tables had "become suppressed" on Amazon. Esbenshade wasn't sure why, he recalled, until someone at Amazon suggested he look at Wayfair, another online retailer that happened to be selling his patio table below Amazon's price. The businessman went online and set up a new minimum advertised price for the table on Wayfair to ensure it was higher than Amazon's. "So that raised the price up, and, voila, my product came back" on Amazon, he said, thanks to the reinstatement of the Buy Box.

US To Create High-Tech Manufacturing Zone In Philippines

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: An agreement with the Philippines to establish a high-tech industrial hub is the Trump administration's latest effort to lessen China's dominance over global supply chains. The deal to build up American manufacturing across a stretch of the island of Luzon, signed Thursday, will offer U.S. companies access to essential inputs such as critical minerals that bypass Beijing's control. The artificial-intelligence-powered manufacturing hub is planned for a 4,000-acre site given to the U.S. by Manila, said undersecretary of State for Economic Affairs Jacob Helberg. The U.S. will occupy the site rent-free and administer it as a special economic zone. The hub will have diplomatic immunity, such as the protections afforded to an American embassy, and operate under U.S. common law -- the first arrangement of its kind anywhere in the world. The two-year lease is renewable for 99 years. [...] "You can't build anything in Ohio if the minerals and the process materials are controlled by an adversary who can cut you off tomorrow," Helberg said in an interview. [...] The planned manufacturing hub is largely conceptual at this stage, and details, including which American companies will participate and just what they will build in the Philippines, are yet to be determined. [...] The administration will ask companies to put forward proposals to compete for a spot in building out the hub, giving priority to bids that will help move critical minerals processing and manufacturing off Chinese suppliers. Investment will have to come from private-sector companies -- not the U.S. government. Factories approved for operation in the hub will be highly automated, Helberg said, using autonomous systems to operate around the clock. The Philippines has a history of robust manufacturing, particularly in semiconductors, but that has stagnated in recent decades because of high energy and logistics costs. Companies will have to address in their proposals how they will contend with energy costs and workforce needs; they can send American workers overseas or hire locally, Helberg said.

Ars Technica

Rocket Report: Starship V3 test-fired; ESA's tentative step toward crew launch

Blue Origin will soon launch the third flight of its New Glenn rocket, this time with a reused booster.

17 Apr 2026 1:06pm GMT

Recent advances push Big Tech closer to the Q-Day danger zone

Here's which players are winning the race to transition to post-quantum crypto.

17 Apr 2026 11:00am GMT

Slashdot

Reed Hastings Is Leaving Netflix After 29 Years

Reed Hastings is stepping down from Netflix's board in June, ending a 29-year run at the company he co-founded and helped transform from a DVD-by-mail business into a global streaming giant. Hastings said in a shareholder (PDF) letter that heâ(TM)s stepping down to focus on "his philanthropy and other pursuits." Engadget reports: Hastings has served as chairman of Netflix's board since 2023, a role he assumed after stepping down as co-CEO and promoting Greg Peters in his place. "Netflix changed my life in so many ways, and my all-time favorite memory was January 2016, when we enabled nearly the entire planet to enjoy our service," Hastings said in a statement. "My real contribution at Netflix wasn't a single decision; it was a focus on member joy, building a culture that others could inherit and improve, and building a company that could be both beloved by members and wildly successful for generations to come. A special thanks to Greg and Ted, whose commitment to Netflix's greatness is so strong that I can now focus on new things."

Ars Technica

After a saga of broken promises, a European rover finally has a ride to Mars

Europe's first Mars rover mission is now on its fourth rocket: SpaceX's Falcon Heavy

17 Apr 2026 3:15am GMT

16 Apr 2026

OSnews

Nationwide bill to put age verification in operating systems introduced in the US

The title of my article on age verification in Linux and other operating systems had a "for now" added for a reason, and here we are, with two members of the US Congress introducing a bill to add age verification to operating systems. The text of the proposed bill was only published today, and it's incredibly vague and wishy-washy, without any clear definitions and ton of open-ended questions. Still, if passed, the bill would require actual age verification, instead of mere voluntary age reporting that current state-level bills cover. It also seems to eschew the concept of age brackets, giving application developers access to specific ages of users instead. It's a vague mess of a bill that no sane person would ever want passed, but alas, sanity is a rare commodity these days, especially in US Congress. It's introduced by Democrat Josh Gottheimer and Republican Elise M. Stefanik, so it has that bipartisan sheen to it, which could increase its odds of going anywhere. At the same time, though, US Congress is about as useful as a box of matches during a house fire, so for all we know, this will end up going nowhere as its members focus on doing absolutely nothing to reign in the flock of coked-up headless chickens passing for an executive branch over there. If something like this gets passed, every US-based operating system - which includes most open source operating systems and Linux distributions - will probably fall in line when faced with massive fines and legal pressure. This isn't going to be pretty.

16 Apr 2026 8:07pm GMT

15 Apr 2026

OSnews

Tribblix m34 for SPARC released

Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, doesn't only support x86. It also has a branch for SPARC, which tends to run behind its x86 counterpart a little bit and has a few other limitations related to the fact SPARC is effectively no longer being developed. The Tribblix SPARC branch has been updated, and now roughly matches the latest x86 release from a few weeks ago. The graphical libraries libtiff and OpenEXR have been updated, retaining the old shared library versions for now. OpenSSL is now from the 3.5 series with the 3.0 api by default. Bind is now from the 9.20 series. OpenSSH is now 10.2, and you may get a Post-Quantum Cryptography warning if connecting to older SSH servers. 'zap install' now installs dependencies by default. 'zap create-user' will now restrict new home directories to mode 0700 by default; use the -M flag to choose different permissions. Support for UFS quotas has been removed. ↫ Tribblix release notes There's no new ISO yet, so to get to this new m34 release for SPARC you're going to have to install from an older ISO and update from there.

15 Apr 2026 8:18pm GMT

Haiku on ARM64 boots to desktop in QEMU

Another Haiku monthly activity report, but this time around, there's actually a big ticket item. Haiku has been in a pretty solid and stable state for a while now, so the activity reports have been dominated by fairly small, obscure changes, but during March a major milestone was reached for the ARM64 port. smrobtzz contributed the bulk of the work, including fixes for building on macOS on ARM64, drivers for the Apple S5L UART, fixes to the kernel base address, clearing the frame pointer before entering the kernel, mapping physical memory correctly, the basics for userland, and more. SED4906 contributed some fixes to the bootloader page mapping, and runtime_loader's page-size checks. Combined, these changes allow the ARM64 port to get to the desktop in QEMU. There's a forum thread, complete with screenshots, for anyone interested in following along. ↫ waddlesplash While it's only in QEMU, this is still a major achievement and paves the way for more people to work on the ARM64 port, possibly increasing its health. There's tons of smaller changes and fixes all over the place, too, as usual, and the team mentions beta 6 isn't quite ready yet, still. Don't let that stop you from just downloading the latest nightly, though - Haiku is mature enough to use it.

15 Apr 2026 3:10pm GMT