fidzu : geek

"Enshittification of car controls [is] rapidly accelerating," writes longtime Slashdot reader sinij, pointing to a new report from Car and Driver. From the report: Remember when iPhones used to come with free headphones and a phone charger (including the wall plug)? It didn't feel so much like Apple giving you free goodies as it did that the company was providing you with the relevant hardware to use the device. Apple stopped including headphones and charging blocks in 2020. Now, Hyundai is pulling some of its standard hardware from the box, at least for two models. Hyundai is charging customers extra for a driver's display in the new Elantra generation (more specifically, the Korea-market Avante), as well as the Ioniq 3, Motor1 reported. Both models feature Pleos Connect, Hyundai's new infotainment setup that pairs a center touchscreen with a slim 9.9-inch instrument cluster mounted above the dashboard -- except where it doesn't. In its domestic market, the instrument cluster screen is offered as a 350,000 won ($255) option for the base trim. Not the most expensive optional extra in the world, but still kind of a slap in the face for a feature traditionally viewed as standard fare. Things are more expensive for the electric Ioniq 3. In the EV's case, the base trim gives customers the full Tesla-screen experience, meaning if customers want the driver's display, they'll need to fork over the additional $5000 necessary to move up to the next-level trim. [...] Hyundai plans to have the setup equipped in 20 million cars globally by the end of the decade.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Sep 2026 7:00am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Global heating will reach at least 1.8C under even the most optimistic future, well beyond the Paris agreement goal of 1.5C, according to a UN report that warns every fraction of temperature rise intensifies destructive extreme weather, glacier melt, ecosystem loss, and island and coastal city submersion. The report by the Nairobi-based UN Environment Program confirmed overshooting the 1.5C goal inscribed in the landmark Paris agreement of 2015 was now "unavoidable" and, despite some progress in addressing the human-caused climate crisis driven by burning fossil fuels, likely in the next few years. It said: "There are no good outcomes above 1.5C." Heating of up to 3C above preindustrial levels could lead to glaciers losing more than a quarter of their mass by 2100, raising sea levels by up to 13cm. Global food production could decline by up to 14% by 2050 if there are not effective strategies to adapt. Human health, water supplies, nature, cities, infrastructure and economies could all be severely damaged. Some losses would be irreversible. Many communities may have to relocate or change their livelihoods. The report said the best hope for humanity to limit damage was to adopt an "overshoot, peak and decline" pathway that required immediate and sustained greenhouse gas emissions cuts combined with steps to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. It described the goal of net zero emissions -- increasingly politically contentious in some countries -- as "an essential milestone that cannot be skipped" and stressed carbon dioxide removal through steps such as establishing vast new forests must occur alongside, not as an alternative to, deep cuts in fossil pollution. Crucially, the authors of the report, titled Limiting Overshoot, said the average global temperature could be returned to 1.5C this century only if heating stayed below about 1.8C. They warned nature's capacity to store carbon was uncertain and would shrink the more the planet heats. [...] The report's authors cited earlier work that found limiting heating to about 1.8C required global emissions to be halved by 2035. They said existing national policies were projected to lead to at least 2.3C heating, but it would still be possible to limit stay below 2C if countries delivered on net zero emissions commitments by mid-century.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

03 Sep 2026 3:30am GMT

The FCC is proposing (PDF) a public "robocall mitigation scorecard" that would grade phone companies on how well they block illegal spam calls while avoiding false positives on the legitimate ones. "The Scorecard will empower consumers and encourage providers to continue to combat illegal robocalls by providing the public with an assessment of the effectiveness of voice service providers' efforts to protect consumers from illegal robocalls," the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau said in a public notice. Ars Technica reports: The scorecards could include call-blocking statistics along with data on customer complaints and enforcement actions. The FCC said scorecards could grade providers on a number scale, with letter grades, or by classifying providers as low risk, medium risk, or high risk. The proposed tool would rate wireless, wireline, and VoIP providers on efforts to block robocalls and their "actual results in protecting [consumers] from illegal robocalls," the FCC said. "In practice, that means moving beyond a simple administrative checklist (i.e., did the provider file the right paperwork, did they offer the right tools) and toward a composite set of metrics that reflects both operational practices and measurable outcomes, including how often legitimate calls are blocked." Whether the tool is useful for consumers will depend on how it's designed, how easy each provider's scorecard is to find, and what data sources it relies on. The proposed scorecard would apply to domestic voice service providers with retail customers, but not telcos that operate solely as wholesale or intermediate providers. "Combatting the scourge of illegal robocalls remains the FCC's top consumer protection priority... As proposed in today's public notice, the FCC aims to develop a scorecard that will give consumers more information about the measures providers are taking to fight illegal robocalls, and it will also incentivize providers to improve their efforts," FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a press release.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Sep 2026 11:00pm GMT

Congress pauses the OMB's attempt to rewrite how research is funded.

02 Sep 2026 9:20pm GMT

The FBI is reportedly investigating a massive data breach that is unfolding in real time.

02 Sep 2026 8:32pm GMT

Carrier scorecards may include call-blocking stats and data on customer complaints.

02 Sep 2026 7:54pm GMT

Virtually all laptop speakers suck. It's the one area where even really expensive laptops tend to fall on their ass, leaving users with a tinny, harsh, and hollow sound experience. While you can't exactly overcome physics - laptop speakers are necessarily small and thus just cannot ever sound as good as proper speakers - there's a lot you can do with proper tuning and software magic. If you're a desktop Linux user, you actually already possess all the plumbing needed to fix your audio; it's just not exposed to you in any way. Luckily, an application called EasyEffects allows you to actually make use of desktop Linux' advanced audio features to massively improve the sound quality of your laptop's speakers. EasyEffects' own description on its GitHub page doesn't really explain what it does or what it's capable of, so here's the description from Wikipedia instead. EasyEffects uses PipeWire to process incoming and outgoing audio streams independently and can apply various sound effects in the form of plug-ins made by different developer teams such as Calf Studio Gear, MDA.LV2 and GStreamer. All plugins have their own presets and can be applicable inside the suite rather than having to use a different mixer or executing a script from the command line. Available output effects are limiter, auto volume, compressor of dynamic range, filter, 30 bands parametric equalizer, bass enhancer, exciter, reverbation, crossfeed, delay, maximizer and spectrum analyzer. Available input effects are WebRTC, limiter, compressor, filter, equalizer, de-esser, reverbation, pitch shift and spectrum analyzer. ↫ EasEffects' Wikipedia page None of this matters, and you can forget everything from these two paragraphs. What matters is that using EasyEffects, you can tune the audio coming out of your speakers to make them sound a lot better. The few laptops on the market that do have decent audio - MacBooks, some Dell XPS laptops, and surely a few more - aren't magically defying physics. While they probably do have objectively higher-quality speakers, the main difference between those laptops and laptops with crappy-sounding speakers is that the former come with built-in tuning from the factory to make them sound much better than they would without any software trickery. If you know your way around audio, you can very much use EasyEffects and tune your laptop speakers from scratch to massively improve how they sound. However, that requires time, experience, knowledge, and expertise that most people lack, including myself. Lucky for us, though, there are countless downloadable presets out there for EasyEffects designed specifically to make laptops sound better. In an ideal world, you'd pick a preset created specifically for your laptop make and model, but odds are you won't find one, so for most laptops you'll have to settle for a generic preset that tries to do its best. I've long settled on the Advanced Auto Gain.json preset from JackHack96, which greatly improves the audio performance on any laptops I've tried it on, but of course, there's countless other presets for you to try to see if there's anything that suits your particular laptop and ears better. Getting all of this up and running is really easy. EasyEffects is most likely packaged by your Linux distribution, and the latest version is always available as a Flatpak from Flathub. Download the preset(s) you want to try, copy them either to ~/.config/easyeffects (if you use your distribution's package) or to ~/.var/app/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects/data/easyeffects/output/ (if you use the Flatpak version). They'll show up right away in the Presets tab in EasyEffects, ready to be turned on and off whenever you want, making it very easy to compare and contrast to find the one you like best. EasyEffects can live in your system tray giving you easy access to your presets without having to open the main window, and it can be set to start automatically at boot. EasyEffects can also be turned on and off on the fly. There's obvious downsides to all of this, too, of course. First, since you're most likely going to be using a generic preset not specifically crafted for your laptop, there's no guarantee the results will be positive for you. Second, not every preset is ideal for every type of audio. Most of my audio consists of YouTube videos with mostly speech; if you listen mostly to music, different presets may yield better results. Third, audio quality is deeply subjective, and what sounds good to my ears may sound like total garbage to yours. Fourth, EasyEffects does take up a tiny fraction of CPU power (I'm talking 0.1-0.2% according to KDE's System Monitor), but I have never seen it have any noticeable performance impact on anything. Even the generic preset I use makes such a massive difference for me on every laptop I've ever tried it on, that I've become convinced EasyEffects and a few of the generic presets should be installed by default by any desktop-oriented Linux distribution. On top of that, Linux laptops OEMs like System76, Nova Custom, Star Labs, and so on, should really take the time to create proper presets for their laptops to improve their sound quality out of the box. I feel like if you're already designing and selling laptops, you probably also have the skills and means to create a decent preset. In fact, I'd take it a step further and urge desktop environments like KDE and GNOME to properly integrate EasyEffects into their sound settings. They shouldn't include the entire application and its user interface, but should make it so that you can configure and manage presets right from the sound settings panels, and switch between presets from their volume applets (as well as turn it off entirely, of course). This would leave the full EasyEffects application for people who need more control, manual tuning, and more advanced features. There's absolutely no reason why speakers on Linux laptops should sound tinny, harsh, and hollow. The Linux desktop has all the technologies and features built right in to make speakers sound much better than they do without any tuning,

27 Aug 2026 8:18pm GMT

Built on a 2 nanometer technology node, the processor's design will contain 11 high-performance cores operating at more than 5.7 GHz, AI inference accelerators for in-transaction fraud detection, a dedicated on-chip data processing unit for I/O acceleration, and a large cache architecture for demanding enterprise workloads. The chip is architected to not contain separate Arm and IBM cores: each processor core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z, or Arm and LinuxONE, instructions concurrently while prioritizing the platform's established performance, security, encryption, and availability characteristics. IBM Z and LinuxONE platforms are capable of scaling to hundreds of cores and tens of terabytes of memory. ↫ IBM press release IBM is still doing some amazing chip architecture design. ServeTheHome has more details of how this works: A key choice here is that IBM implemented AArch64 in full hardware rather than through translation. This design uses a little-endian Arm implementation alongside big-endian z/Architecture, with AArch64 v9.3, SVE and SVE2 support, and 2,792 implemented AArch64 instructions. IBM also claims Arm SystemReady compliance, which matters for how much off-the-shelf Arm software this core can absorb. This is absolutely crazy technology. Arm software sees a native Arm processor. Arm runs unmodified, out-of-the-box, and onto a standard Arm platform. IBM said the 2792 AArch64 instructions are more than twice the Z instructions. IBM made a funny quip about "reduced" in RISC. ↫ Patrick Kennedy at ServeTheHome This is bonkers technology. We can only dream of this ever serving a home.

27 Aug 2026 2:30pm GMT

It's always a special day on OSNews when Haiku has a new release. While OSNews was founded in 1997, it wasn't until 2001, when Eugenia took over and relaunched the site, that we really got going. Eugenia came from BeNews, a popular BeOS news website, which shut down in the wake of Be, Inc's infamous "focus shift" away from BeOS as a general purpose desktop operating system. BeOS continues to have a special place on OSNews ever since. Today marks the release of Haiku R1/beta6, the first official Haiku release in two years. As such, this new beta covers a monumental amount of progress since beta5, progress I've reported on diligently. The highlights of this new beta include a port of Firefox (including branding) and many of its forks, much improve support for Qemu, a new memory allocated largely based on the one from OpenBSD, and improved support for various filesystems. Of course, there's a massive list of performance improvements, memory management changes, as well as a truly massive number of new application ports. It's important to note, as I usually do, that while these Haiku beta releases serve as patches of calm in rough seas, Haiku is generally stable and capable enough that using the project's nightly releases is usually a totally acceptable way of installing and running the operating system. If you're not comfortable running nightly releases, however, and haven't tried Haiku since the previous beta, you're in for a massive overall improvement. Everybody loves Haiku.

27 Aug 2026 11:31am 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