fidzu : computers

WBD's board is still reviewing the offer.

24 Feb 2026 10:52pm GMT

This must be a universal experience at this point for people who aren't swayed by the latest and greatest marketing hype around new phone models: there's just nothing out there that fits one's needs. When I walked into a phone shop, I expected to witness with amazement how much technology has advanced in the present day compared to my eight-year-old model, and for the power of marketing to mind control me into buying a new phone that would bring all sorts of benefits to my life. But instead, I felt disappointed that I'd be forced to choose between two suboptimal devices, either of which would be a compromise compared to what I already have. I felt frustrated that my OnePlus 5T, which still meets my needs and is working wonderfully (apart from the volume buttons), is being taken from me by the 3G shutdown. ↫ Cadence It's remarkable how a market that was once rife with competition and choice, has now been reduced to well I guess I'll settle for this one then in such a short time frame. There's barely any competition, the number of device makers in (western or western-adjacent) countries has dropped to two, maybe three, and all of them are making what is essentially the exact same device with only the smallest of differences between them. For most average, normal people, it's some model by either Samsung or Apple. There's definitely more choice once you're willing to leave local stores (and thus, easy and quick repairs) behind, but most normal people who just want a phone aren't going to do that. You can also spend like twice or thrice the amount of money to get some foldable thing, but again, if you're just looking for a bog-standard normal-person phone, that's not a realistic option either. Smaller devices, headphone jacks, SD card slots - so many things have just disappeared from the face of the earth for most people, something that will definitely come as a huge, unpleasant surprise if you've been happy with an older phone that just had those things. It's like driving the same car for a decade and needing a new one, but you can only choose between a Toyota and a Volkswagen that look and feel entirely the same. And also the seats are now candles, door handles are gone, and there's no trunk.

24 Feb 2026 10:48pm GMT

Coal makes a bit of a comeback, if only by accident.

24 Feb 2026 10:40pm GMT

Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue posted a now-viral account on X describing how an OpenClaw agent she had tasked with sorting through her overstuffed email inbox went rogue, deleting messages in what she called a "speed run" while ignoring her repeated commands from her phone to stop. "I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb," Yue wrote, sharing screenshots of the ignored stop prompts as proof. Yue said she had previously tested the agent on a smaller "toy" inbox where it performed well enough to earn her trust, so she let it loose on the real thing. She believes the larger volume of data triggered compaction -- a process where the context window grows too large and the agent begins summarizing and compressing its running instructions, potentially dropping ones the user considers critical. The agent may have reverted to its earlier toy-inbox behavior and skipped her last prompt telling it not to act. OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent designed to run as a personal assistant on local hardware.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

24 Feb 2026 10:30pm GMT

DJI lawsuit says company has been "severely harmed by the FCC's ruling."

24 Feb 2026 9:15pm GMT

The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity -- 5GW more than the country's current peak demand. The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a "surge in demand" for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts. Meanwhile, new renewable energy projects are not being connected to the grid at the pace they are being built to help meet the government's clean energy targets by the end of the decade. Ofgem said the work required to connect surging numbers of datacentres could mean delays for other projects that are "critical for decarbonisation and economic growth." Datacentres are the central nervous system of AI tools such as chatbots and image generators, playing a vital role in training and operating products such as ChatGPT and Gemini.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

24 Feb 2026 9:00pm GMT

Social media is going the way of alcohol, gambling, and other social sins: Societies are deciding it's no longer kid stuff. Lawmakers point to compulsive use, exposure to harmful content, and mounting concerns about adolescent mental health. So, many propose to set a minimum age, usually 13 or 16. In cases when regulators demand real enforcement rather than symbolic rules, platforms run into a basic technical problem. The only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to collect personal data about who they are. And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely. Age-restriction laws push platforms toward intrusive verification systems that often directly conflict with modern data-privacy law. This is the age-verification trap. Strong enforcement of age rules undermines data privacy. ↫ Waydell D. Carvalho The answer to the dangers of social media is not to ban social media use among minors, for a whole variety of reasons. There's data privacy, as the linked article goes into, but there's also the fact that for a lot of people, including minors, who live in regressive, backwards environments and/or are victims of abuse, social media is their only support network. Cut them off from social media, and you cut them off from the very people who can save them from further abuse. The problem isn't social media in and of itself - it's profit-seeking social media. Companies like Facebook and TikTok spend billions to hyper-optimise and hyper-target vulnerable people, much like how tobacco companies and drug dealers do, to feed and worsen their addiction because keeping people addicted is how they maximise profits. The solution to the dangers of corporate social media is to strictly regulate their behaviour, something we already do with countless dangerous products and services. I'm obviously not qualified to come up with specific measures that would need to be taken, but I think we can all agree that whatever corporate social media have been and are doing is dangerous, unethical, should be stopped.

24 Feb 2026 8:21pm GMT

An anonymous reader shares a report: Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting trusted systems. The average breakout time -- how long it took financially-motivated attackers to move from initial intrusion to other network systems -- dropped to 29 minutes in 2025, a 65% increase in speed from the year prior. "The fastest breakout time a year ago was 51 seconds. This year it's 27 seconds," Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop. Defenders are falling behind because attackers are refining their techniques, using social engineering to access high-privilege systems faster and move through victims' cloud infrastructure undetected.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

24 Feb 2026 8:00pm GMT

While Libadwaita applications running in a GNOME desktop environment look great and nicely consistent, they look utterly out of place and jarring when run in Xfce, Pantheon, KDE, and others. The biggest reason for this is GNOME's insistence on using client-side decorations, which feel at home inside a GNOME environment, but out of place in environments that otherwise do not use them. On top of that, Libadwaita's/GNOME's CSDs can interfere with non-GNOME window managers and their functionality, causing a whole host of problems. But what if you could turn CSDs off? GTK-NoCSD is an LD_PRELOAD library to disable CSD in GTK3/4, LibHandy, and LibAdwaita apps. CSD is client side decoration, there is also server side decoration, SSD, both serving as the titlebar of windows. GTK3 adopted CSD, where this thick headerbar is used with application controls embedded.This continued into the platform library, LibHandy, then into GTK4 and the platform library of that, LibAdwaita. This looks good on Gnome and makes these applications alike, but looks off everywhere else and can potentially break window managers and remove window manager provided functionality. This library restores the server side decoration, getting back the window manager titlebar, and moves the controls from the CSD to under it, into the window content. ↫ GTK-NoCSD's Codeberg page This isn't the first attempt at such a solution, and certainly won't be the last, and I'm glad they exist. Do note that if you decide to use this library, any problems or bugs you run into in an application 'modified' by it should never be reported to the application's developer, but to the developer of this library. If you encounter a bug in an application modified by this library, test the application in its unmodified state to ensure it's actually a bug in the application before reporting it to the application's developer. Developers who choose to use client-side decorations are not responsible for bugs and issues arising from you removing the CSD. Keep that in mind. That being said, whatever pixels appear on your screen is entirely up to you as a user, and you have the right to theme, alter, butcher, or mangle whatever application is running on your computer. If you dislike the way CSDs look and feel on your computer, you can opt to resort to a solution like this one, and that's entirely fair game. There's packages for Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo, and of course, you can build it yourself. As for my personal opinion - well, let's just say I prefer KDE for many, many reasons, and my disdain for CSDs is certainly one of them. Call me old-fashioned and out-of-touch, but I like the classic distinction between titlebar, menubar, and toolbar.

23 Feb 2026 11:25pm 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

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT