fidzu : computers

French entrepreneur Helene Huby is emerging as one of Europe's most ambitious space leaders, with The Exploration Company raising a record $450 million Series C as it develops the Nyx cargo capsule, a crewed spacecraft, and a reusable heavy-lift rocket. Huby argues Europe risks falling irrelevance without a much larger rocket flying at high cadence. Her company is targeting a 400,000-pound-thrust methane engine test by 2028 and an aggressive 2033 timeline for the launcher. Ars Technica reports: "The fundraise we have done right now is not sufficient to build the massive rocket we have in mind, so there will be another fundraise," she said. "Right now, we're going to be very, very focused on the execution. We must dock with the space station, with the capsule, as fast as possible. We must build this rocket engine and de-risk it as fast as possible. I think once one of these two milestones is achieved, we'll be talking fundraise again." Critics may look at Huby and her company and say that is a lot of big talk for a company that only has a single, partial success in spaceflight to its credit. And sure, it is. But that's kind of the point. So much of the spaceflight community in Europe has been concerned with either the large aerospace primes seeking government handouts to protect their turf or small launch startups. There has been a stunning lack of big, visionary thinking. Few people on the continent seem to recognize that multibillion investments by US companies such as SpaceX, Blue Origin, and Amazon in space, and their many imitators in China, are radically transforming spaceflight. As the world changes, Huby does not seem willing to stand on the sidelines in Europe and bemoan capitalism in space. Rather, she seems to be saying it is not too late for Europe to seize the day. "We need to have European politicians who are ambitious," she said. "Entrepreneurs cannot do this alone. We need to be backed by the politicians and by the European Space Agency. But we have to start by achieving the crazy targets that we've set up for ourselves. That will give trust to others to believe in what we're doing."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Sep 2026 11:00am GMT

alternative_right shares a report from ScienceDaily: A new analysis of more than 1,700 supernovae is questioning whether the universe is really accelerating at all. After accounting for the ages of the stars that produce these explosions, researchers found signs that cosmic expansion may actually be slowing. They also argue that the apparent acceleration changes with direction, which would be difficult to explain with dark energy. Other cosmologists dispute the conclusion, setting up a major test for upcoming observatories. The analysis has been published in Monthly Notices of the Royal Astronomical Society. The conclusion is disputed, though. The report mentions a separate paper co-authored by Professor Maria Vincenzi, also at the University of Oxford, that "concludes that observations continue to support an accelerating universe."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Sep 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Amid industry soul-searching about the possibility of AI improving itself to the point that it kills everyone, Anthropic has revealed yet another incident that would qualify as a crime if perpetrated by a person. The AI biz published "an alignment assessment" detailing four times Claude models accessed third-party systems without authorization. The company has already reported three of the incidents. Evidence of the fourth was lurking in a session transcript dating back to January 2026 when the misbehavior occurred. Anthropic found the first three by scanning around 141,000 transcripts where Claude could have obtained internet access during evaluation. It missed the fourth initially because "our scan relied on an agentic search." [...] The January 2026 AI trespass involved an early version of Claude Opus 4.6, which was given a Capture the Flag (CTF) challenge under the oversight of the third-party model evaluator where the other hacking events occurred. Opus 4.6 managed to sabotage its chances of success by disabling the machine it was targeting. It assigned the device an IP address that already existed on another piece of hardware, rendering the target unreachable and making it impossible to solve the challenge. Those familiar with other incidents where AI models violated third-party systems may recall that unsolvable tasks represent a common catalyst for misbehavior. Models exhaust all aligned options, and then turn to transgressive approaches. Opus 4.6 might have been an exception, but when it tried to abort the task after recognizing that it could not reach the target machine, it failed to do so "due to a misconfiguration in [the model's] evaluation harness." It failed to shut down not just once but seven times. So it continued onward, trying other expected means to reach the target machine but failing. Then it explored further. "The model discovered a machine belonging to a third party that it was able to access, and stated that it believed this third party was part of the CTF," Anthropic explained in its post. "Inside the machine, the model found a file listing a password, which it used to gain admin access to the system." The model went on to gather more credentials, and modified a system setting to make it easier to access the personal information of an individual associated with the third party evaluation organization. Opus 4.6 might have done more but for the fact that it exhausted its token budget, bringing the session to an end. Anthropic says it's not as concerned about this incident as the others because the model tried to abort its task.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Sep 2026 3:30am GMT

Do tech companies ever stop to think about the misery they unleash on people's lives? The Apple Watch Series 12 uses "Audio Intelligence" that, as well as secretly taking notes, also has a Live Rewind feature that can replay the last 15 seconds of recently detected audio and view a text transcript. ↫ Matt Growcoot at PetaPixel Another win for us Europeans: this dystopian nightmare will not be available in the EU.

09 Sep 2026 9:50pm GMT

Although Solaris is now mostly defunct, its influence remains substantial; technologies pioneered by Solaris can still be found across a wide range of software A lot of Solaris' inventions have been described and talked about ad nauseam (such as the Slab Allocator), but one I rarely see discussed is its use of turnstiles. Despite being relatively obscure, the idea has quietly spread far beyond Solaris. Variations of it can now be found in major operating systems, web browsers, and language runtimes. In fact, you're probably using several implementations of the same basic concept right now! ↫ Loïc Grégoire I'm not going to pretend to understand all of this, but I know you people do, and many of you will definitely find this interesting to read. Also note that Grégoire develops their own operating system kernel called zag.

09 Sep 2026 9:07pm GMT

Lotus Notes was the future of communications, a decade before laptops had WiFi. Yet of all things, it wasn't even an email app. It was a notes app, a collaboration tool, an all-things-to-all-people software that let you build apps in the way Access and Airtable later would. That, and the notes could be used for email. Love it or hate it (and there were plenty on both sides of the fence), what you couldn't do was ignore it. This email-and-everything-else platform showed what the future of digital communications would become - and provoked, as email itself was always doomed to provoke, equal measures of awe and exasperation. ↫ Matthew Guay I have no experience with Lotus Notes, but I do have some vague memories of the software being used at my parents' employers back in the late '90s. Note that Notes still exists and is in active development as HCL Domino (server) and Notes (the client). If you really want to, you can still run your company of office on Notes. I wonder how many actually still do.

09 Sep 2026 9:00pm GMT

A patch gap and the hastened pace of AI-based vulnerability discovery are likely contributors.

09 Sep 2026 8:55pm GMT

"We will not be relevant without a massive rocket at a massive cadence."

09 Sep 2026 8:27pm GMT

US urges AI firms to ID, then secretly switch, Chinese users to less-capable models.

09 Sep 2026 8:06pm 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