fidzu : computers

Yes, this week YouTube and Meta were found negligent in a landmark case about social media addiction. But "it's still far from certain what this defeat will change," argues The Verge's senior tech and policy editor, "and what the collateral damage could be." If these decisions survive appeal - which isn't certain - the direct outcome would be multimillion-dollar penalties. Depending on the outcome of several more "bellwether" cases in Los Angeles, a much larger group settlement could be reached down the road... For many activists, the overall goal is to make clear that lawsuits will keep piling up if companies don't change their business practices... The best-case outcome of all this has been laid out by people like Julie Angwin, who wrote in The New York Times that companies should be pushed to change "toxic" features like infinite scrolling, beauty filters that encourage body dysmorphia, and algorithms that prioritize "shocking and crude" content. The worst-case scenario falls along the lines of a piece from Mike Masnick at Techdirt, who argued the rulings spell disaster for smaller social networks that could be sued for letting users post and see First Amendment-protected speech under a vague standard of harm. He noted that the New Mexico case hinged partly on arguing that Meta had harmed kids by providing end-to-end encryption in private messaging, creating an incentive to discontinue a feature that protects users' privacy - and indeed, Meta discontinued end-to-end encryption on Instagram earlier this month. Blake Reid, a professor at Colorado Law, is more circumspect. "It's hard right now to forecast what's going to happen," Reid told The Verge in an interview. On Bluesky, he noted that companies will likely look for "cold, calculated" ways to avoid legal liability with the minimum possible disruption, not fundamentally rethink their business models. "There are obviously harms here and it's pretty important that the tort system clocked those harms" in the recent cases, he told The Verge. "It's just that what comes in the wake of them is less clear to me". The article also includes this prediction from legal blogger/Section 230 export Eric Goldman. "There will be even stronger pushes to restrict or ban children from social media." Goldman argues "This hurts many subpopulations of minors, ranging from LGBTQ teens who will be isolated from communities that can help them navigate their identities to minors on the autism spectrum who can express themselves better online than they can in face-to-face conversations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

30 Mar 2026 1:37am GMT

"It's time to charge for access," argues a new opinion piece at The Register. Begging billion-dollar companies to fund open source projects just isn't enough, writes long-time tech reporter Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols: Screw fair. Screw asking for dimes. You can't live off one-off charity donations... Depending on what people put in a tip jar is no way to fund anything of value... [A]ccording to a 2024 Tidelift maintainer report, 60 percent of open source maintainers are unpaid, and 60 percent have quit or considered quitting, largely due to burnout and lack of compensation. Oh, and of those getting paid, only 26 percent earn more than $1,000 a year for their work. They'd be better paid asking "Would you like fries with that?" at your local McDonald's... Some organizations do support maintainers, for example, there's HeroDevs and its $20 million Open Source Sustainability Fund. Its mission is to pay maintainers of critical, often end-of-life open source components so they can keep shipping patches without burning out. Sentry's Open Source Pledge/Fund has given hundreds of thousands of dollars per year directly to maintainers of the packages Sentry depends on. Sentry is one of the few vendors that systematically maps its dependency tree and then actually cuts checks to the people maintaining that stack, as opposed to just talking about "giving back." Sentry is on to something. We have the Linux Foundation to manage commercial open source projects, the Apache Foundation to oversee its various open source programs, the Open Source Initiative (OSI) to coordinate open source licenses, and many more for various specific projects. It's time we had an organization with the mission of ensuring that the top programmers and maintainers of valuable open source projects get a cut of the tech billionaire pie. We must realign how businesses work with open source so that payment is no longer an optional charitable gift but a cost of doing business. To do that, we need an organization to create a viable, supportable path from big business to individual programmer. It's time for someone to step up and make this happen. Businesses, open source software, and maintainers will all be better off for it. One possible future... Bruce Perens wrote the original Open Source definition in 1997, and now proposes a not-for-profit corporation developing "the Post Open Collection" of software, distributing its licensing fees to developers while providing services like user support, documentation, hardware-based authentication for developers, and even help with government compliance and lobbying.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

29 Mar 2026 11:46pm GMT

Project Hail Mary has now grossed $300.8 million globally after earning another $54.1 million this weekend from 86 markets, reports Variety, noting that after just nine days it's now Amazon MGM's highest-grossing film ever. And last weekend it had the best opening for a "non-franchise" movie in three years, adds the Associated Press - the best since 2023's Oppenheimer: Project Hail Mary, which cost nearly $200 million to produce... is on an enviable trajectory. Its second weekend hold was even better than that of Oppenheimer, which collected $46.7 million in its follow-up frame. But the movie is based on a book by The Martian author Andy Weir, described by one news outlet as "a former software engineer and self-proclaimed 'lifelong space nerd'... known for his realistic and clear-eyed approach to scientifically technical stories." Project Hail Mary has plenty of real science in it, whether it be space mathematics, physics, or astrobiology... The film's namesake project is even comprised of the space programs of other nations, such as Roscosmos from Russia, the Chinese space program, and the European Space Agency... The story relies on work NASA has done regarding exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system... [This includes a nearby star named Tau Ceti approximately 12 light years from Earth which is orbited by four planets - two once thought to be in "the habitable zone" where liquid water can exist.] Tau Ceti has long been the setting used by sci-fi authors and storytellers. Isaac Asimov used it for his Robot series. Arthur C. Clarke's "Rama" spacecraft came across a mysterious tetrahedron in the Tau Ceti system. Authors Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson also set stories in Tau Ceti, and it also serves as the extrasolar setting of the 1968 Jane Fonda film Barbarella. Most recently, the Bungie video game Marathon is set in the far-off system, serving as part of the background story for the extraction shooter, about a large-scale plan to colonize the Tau Ceti system. The movie also mentions 40 Eridani A, according to the article, a real star about 16 light-years away that was said to be orbited by the fictional planet Vulcan, home to Star Trek's Mr. Spock. It's also mentioned in Frank Herbert's Dune as the star system of the planets Ix and Richese ("noted for their machine culture and miniaturisation," according to the Stellar Australis site's "Project Dune" page). And in a video on IMAX's YouTube channel, the film's directors explain how for a crucial scene they used non-visible-light photography, which is also an important part of modern astronomy. "Even the credits incorporate real astrophotography into the final moments," the article points out, using the work of award-winning Australian astrophotographer Rod Prazeres. "The only difference between his work of capturing space data in images and what ended up on the big screen was that he gave them 'starless versions' of his photographs to make it easier to place credit text over them." Prazeres wrote on his web site that he was touched the producers "wanted the real thing... In a world where CGI and AI are everywhere, it meant a lot..."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

29 Mar 2026 10:19pm GMT

Why did a leading prediction market feel the need for an in-person bar in DC?

29 Mar 2026 11:35am GMT

Research proceeds on alternatives, but some doubt whether true lie detection is possible.

29 Mar 2026 11:01am GMT

Breathing capacity could have compensated for lower atmospheric oxygen.

28 Mar 2026 12:30pm 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

This guide describes how you can install a Plan 9 network on an OpenBSD machine (it will probably work on any unix machine though). The authentication service (called "authsrv" on Plan 9) is provided by a unix version: authsrv9. The file service is provided by a program called "u9fs". It comes with Plan 9. Both run from inetd. The (diskless) cpu server is provided by running qemu, booted from only a floppy (so without local storage). Finally, the terminal is provided by the program drawterm. The nice thing about this approach is that you can use all your familiar unix tools to get started with Plan 9 (e.g. you can edit the Plan 9 files with your favorite unix editor). I'm assuming you have read at least something about Plan 9, for example the introduction paper Plan 9 from Bell Labs. ↫ Mechiel Lukkien If you're running OpenBSD, you're already doing something better than everyone else, and if you want to ascend to the next level, this is a great place to start. Of course, the final level, where you leave your earthly roots behind and become a being of pure enlightened energy, is running Plan 9 on real hardware as the universe intended, but let's not put the cart before the horse. One day, all of humanity will just be an endless collection of interconnected cosmic Plan 9 servers, more plentiful than the stars in the known universe.

27 Mar 2026 7:40pm GMT

Towards the end of 2024, Dennis Biesma decided to check out ChatGPT. The Amsterdam-based IT consultant had just ended a contract early. "I had some time, so I thought: let's have a look at this new technology everyone is talking about," he says. "Very quickly, I became fascinated." Biesma has asked himself why he was vulnerable to what came next. He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling "a little isolated". He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to "chill", but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness. Yet within months of downloading ChatGPT, Biesma had sunk €100,000 (about £83,000) into a business startup based on a delusion, been hospitalised three times and tried to kill himself. ↫ Anna Moore at The Guardian These stories are absolutely heart-wrenching, and it doesn't just happen to people who have had a history of mental illness or other things you might associate with priming someone for "falling for" an "AI" chatbot. Just a few years in, and it's already clear that these tools pose a real danger to a group of people of indeterminate size, and proper research into the causes is absolutely warranted and needed. On top of that, if there's any evidence of wrongdoing from the companies behind these chatbots - intentionally making them more addictive, luring people in, ignoring established dangers, covering up addiction cases, etc. - lawsuits and regulation are definitely in order. Only yesterday, Facebook and Google lost a landmark trial in the US, ruling the companies intentionally made social media as addictive as possible, thereby destroying a person's life in the process. Countless similar lawsuits are underway all over the world, and I have a feeling that in a few years to decades, we'll look at unregulated, rampant social media the same way we look at tobacco now. Perhaps "AI" chatbots will join their ranks, too.

27 Mar 2026 7:30pm GMT

Today, we're excited to announce a significant step forward in our ongoing commitment to Windows security and system reliability: the removal of trust for all kernel drivers signed by the deprecated cross-signed root program. This update will help protect our customers by ensuring that only kernel drivers that the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP) have passed and been signed can be loaded by default. To raise the bar for platform security, Microsoft will maintain an explicit allow list of reputable drivers signed by the cross-signed program. The allow list ensures a secure and compatible experience for a limited number of widely used, and reputable cross-signed drivers. This new kernel trust policy applies to systems running Windows 11 24H2, Windows 11 25H2, Windows 11 26H1, and Windows Server 2025 in the April 2026 Windows update. All future versions of Windows 11 and Windows Server will enforce the new kernel trust policy. ↫ Peter Waxman at the Windows IT Pro Blog The cross-signed root program was discontinued in 2021, and ran since the early 2000s, so I think it's fair to no longer automatically assume such possibly old and outdated drivers are still to be trusted.

27 Mar 2026 7:18pm GMT

On Friday, July 18th, 2025, the Arch Linux team was notified that three AUR packages had been uploaded that contained malware. A few maintainers including myself took care of deleting these packages, removing all traces of the malicious code, and protecting against future malicious uploads.

30 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT

While starting this post I realized I have been maintaining personal infrastructure for over a decade! Most of the things I've self-hosted is been for personal uses. Email server, a blog, an IRC server, image hosting, RSS reader and so on. All of these things has all been a bit all over the place and never properly streamlined. Some has been in containers, some has just been flat files with a nginx service in front and some has been a random installed Debian package from somewhere I just forgot.

19 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT