fidzu : geek

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Russia is going to further clamp down Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which are used by millions of Russians to get around internet controls and censorship, Russia's digital minister said. In what has been cast by diplomats as Russia's "great crackdown," the authorities have repeatedly blocked mobile internet and jammed major messenger services while giving sweeping powers to cut off mass communications. "The task is reduce VPN usage," Digital Minister Maksut Shadayev said on state-backed messenger MAX late on Monday, adding that his ministry was trying to impose the limits with minimal impact on users. He said decisions had been taken to restrict access to a number of unidentified foreign platforms without giving details.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

01 Apr 2026 3:30am GMT

"I just don't want to get caught flat-footed when we start to have to protect US interests out there."

01 Apr 2026 1:36am GMT

Apple Silicon Macs get a performance boost thanks to better unified memory usage.

31 Mar 2026 11:00pm GMT

Polestar and Volvo are ending Polestar 3 production in Chengdu, China, and consolidating all output of the electric SUV at Volvo's plant in South Carolina. "The move to consolidate global Polestar 3 production in Charleston help[s] generate efficiencies for both companies, whilst also underscoring our confidence in the plant and the role it plays in our manufacturing footprint," said Hakan Samuelsson, chief executive of Volvo Cars. "The U.S. is a very important market for Volvo Cars, both to support our growth ambitions as well as a strategic production site to meet regional and export demands." Ars Technica reports: Volvo had a challenging 2025, with sales falling by 7 percent. Meanwhile, Polestar, which was spun out from the Swedish OEM's performance arm into a standalone startup in 2017, had a rather good 2025, seeing a 34 percent increase in sales. So increasing the proportion of Polestar 3s to come out of South Carolina seems sensible. And as we learned last September, the midsize electric Volvo EX60 will also go into production at the South Carolina site later this year, and then we'll see a still-unnamed hybrid Volvo in 2030. The two companies also announced today that Volvo agreed to extend part of a shareholder loan it made to Polestar and will convert the rest into Polestar shares. Polestar will still owe Volvo $661 million, due at the end of 2031, and another $274 million will become Polestar stock now, with a further $65 million in the second quarter of the year. Since December, Polestar has also raised $1 billion through three equity financing investments.

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31 Mar 2026 11:00pm GMT

bobthesungeek76036 shares a report from the Register: Oracle laid off thousands of employees on Tuesday as it ramps spending on AI infrastructure projects internally and with major technology partners. The layoffs were carried out via email, according to copies of the message viewed by Business Insider. The email told affected workers they would be terminated immediately and to provide a personal email for follow-up. The cuts echo a TD Cowen forecast earlier this year, when the investment bank questioned how Oracle would finance its expanding AI datacenter buildout and suggested headcount reductions could reach 20,000 to 30,000. It is not clear how many employees were notified on Tuesday, but one screenshot that purports to show the number of internal Slack users showed a drop of 10,000 overnight. [...] Oracle employs about 162,000 people, with 58,000 of those in the US and approximately 104,000 internationally. If the rumored cuts of 30,000 are correct, it would amount to 18 percent of the company's workforce. According to posts from Oracle workers on LinkedIn, the cuts were spread through multiple departments around the country, with employees in Kansas, Tennessee, and Texas taking to social media to say they were among those chopped. "This news didn't seem to affect stock price," adds bobthesungeek76036. "ORCL is up 6% for the day."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

31 Mar 2026 10:00pm GMT

The FDA is reportedly planning to allow production of 14 previously banned peptides.

31 Mar 2026 9:51pm GMT

Why do so many people keep falling for the same trick over and over again? With an over $400 billion gap between the money invested in AI data centers and the actual revenue these products generate, Silicon Valley slowly returned to the tested and trusted playbook: advertising. Now, ads are starting to appear in pull requests generated by Copilot. According to Melbourne-based software developer Zach Manson, a team member used the AI to fix a simple typo in a pull request. Copilot did the job, but it also took the liberty of editing the PR's description to include this message: "⚡ Quickly spin up Copilot coding agent tasks from anywhere on your macOS or Windows machine with Raycast." ↫ David Uzondu at Neowin It turns out that Microsoft has added ads to over 1.5 million Copilot pull requests on GitHub, and they're even appearing on GitLab, one of the GitHub alternatives. The reasoning is clear, too, of course: "AI" companies and investors have poured ungodly amounts of money in "AI" that is impossible to recover, even with paying customers. As such, the logical next step is ads, and many "AI" companies are already starting to add advertising to their pachinko machines. It was only a matter of time before Copilot would start inserting ads into the pull requests it ejaculates over all kinds of projects. This isn't the first time a once-free service turns on its users, but it's definitely one of the quickest turnarounds I've ever seen. Usually it takes much longer before companies reach the stage of putting ads in their products to plug any financial bleeding, but with the amount of money poured into this useless black hole, it really shouldn't be surprising we're already there. I'm sure Copilot's competitors, like Claude, will soon follow suit. They're enshittifying Git, and developers are just letting it happen. No wonder worker exploitation is so rampant in Silicon Valley.

30 Mar 2026 9:14pm GMT

By reimplementing these features using capabilities, we made the kernel simpler by moving complex scheme and namespace management out of it which improved security and stability by reducing the attack surface and possible bugs. At the same time, we gained a means to support more sandboxing features using the CWD file descriptor. This project leads the way for future sandboxing support in Redox OS. As the OS continues to move toward capability-based security, it will be able to provide more modern security features. ↫ Ibuki Omatsu Redox seems to be making the right decisions at, crucially, the right time.

30 Mar 2026 9:02pm GMT

Of course, it was only a matter of time before the time-honoured tradition of the demoscene also got infected by "AI". For me personally, generative AI ruins much of the fun. I still enjoy creating pixel art and making little animations and demos. My own creative process remains satisfying as an isolated activity. Alas, obvious AI generated imagery - as well as middle-aged men plagiarizing other, sometimes much younger, hobbyist artists - makes me feel disappointed and empty. It's not as much about effort as it is about the loss of style and personality; soul, if you will. The result is defacement, to echo T. S. Eliot, rather than inspired improvement. Even in more elaborate AI-based works, it's hard to tell where the prompt ends and the pixelling begins. ↫ Carl Svensson A wonderful explanation of the rather unique views on originality, stealing, plagiarism, and related topics within the demoscene, which certainly diverge from many other places.

30 Mar 2026 8:35pm 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

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