fidzu : geek

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Techdirt: Earlier this year Nieman Lab broke the story that major news publishers, including The New York Times, The Guardian, and USA Today Co., had started blocking the Internet Archive for fear that AI companies might scrape the nonprofit's repositories for training data. As one of the last bastions of archival history, that is, in case you're not aware, not very good for the public interest. Four months later and Nieman Lab now notes that the number of news outlets blocking the archive has soared to around 340 organizations: "Our new analysis shows that more than 340 local news sites across the United States are now limiting the Internet Archive's ability to access and preserve their stories. Many sites in our sample are owned by five of the seven largest local news publishers in the country: USA Today Co., McClatchy, Advance Local, MediaNews Group, and Tribune Publishing. The latter two are both subsidiaries of the "vulture hedge fund" Alden Global Capital." [...] Regardless of motivation, hiding whatever local news remains behind paywalls, then blocking it from the Internet Archive, in turn makes it harder for everyone else to do real journalism that relies on the historical record, local journalists tell Nieman Lab: "I cover news within a larger news desert in New York's Rockland, Sullivan, and Rockland counties. This means I need to heavily rely on archival data of old news articles from now deceased, or zombie-fied, media outlets," wrote B.J. Mendelson, the editor of The Monroe Gazette newsletter, in one recent petition signed by over 200 journalists. "Without the Internet Archive, my [work] would be incredibly difficult to do." The Internet Archive says it is listening to the concerns raised by local news outlets, while also partnering with journalism groups to train hundreds of newsrooms on archival preservation: "In December, the Internet Archive partnered with the Poynter Institute and Investigative Reporters and Editors to train a cohort of 33 local and national news outlets on how to develop and implement an archiving strategy. The initiative, funded through a Press Forward grant, aims to train 300 newsrooms in digital preservation and in using the Internet Archive's services by the end of 2027."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 Jun 2026 8:00pm GMT

"We look forward to working with Roscosmos on a collaborative approach to address the leaks."

05 Jun 2026 7:03pm GMT

The UK's Government Digital Service is replacing Stripe with Dutch payments provider Adyen for many GOV.UK Pay transactions, including local authorities, police forces, and armed forces units. The three-year deal covers about 1,000 services and is meant to make payments more flexible while keeping the user experience largely unchanged. The Register reports: According to the tender notice published in February 2025, the contract covers around 17 percent of payments made through GOV.UK Pay but more than 70 percent of its organizations and includes the only option allowing users to start taking payments within one working day. At that point the contract had an estimated maximum value of £49 million, although with no guarantees over volume. In a blogpost about the contract award on 2 June, GDS said it will migrate around 1,000 services to the new supplier. "We will make migration as straightforward as possible while complying with Know Your Customer legislation that protects everyone from fraud," wrote Alan Maddrell, senior content designer for the service. "Most importantly, there will be no discernible difference for paying users and no loss in functionality." He added that the change of supplier will help introduce new options including pay by bank, which transfers money directly between bank accounts using open banking services and avoids the need to type in card details. GDS will continue to use WorldPay to process payments for central government, linked organizations and NHS bodies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 Jun 2026 7:00pm GMT

SpaceX won't get easy access to billions of dollars from passive investors.

05 Jun 2026 6:45pm GMT

Developer felt "beaten up," with "no choice" but to shrink data center.

05 Jun 2026 6:23pm GMT

Longtime Slashdot reader Elektroschock writes: The American Business Software Alliance (BSA) does not consider mandatory open-source licensing to be an appropriate indicator of sovereignty. This is among the "pointed messages" they sent to the French government consultation (closed) today. "What protects Europe is the ability to govern, audit, and mitigate risk, not where a company files its corporate papers," said Thomas Boue of BSA. "Criteria of this kind raise costs, reduce access to best-in-class security solutions, and risk conflicting with the EU's international trade commitments."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 Jun 2026 6:00pm GMT

RISC-V has been in the "promising" phase for a long time now, especially for general purpose computing, never really breaking through into the mainstream in any measurable way. While I think that breakthrough is still relatively far away, we now do have newer RISC-V SoCs on the market supporting the RVA23 baseline RISC-V profile. One of them is the SpacemiT Key Stone KЗ, which promises to deliver a massive performance increase over previous RISC-V offerings. It's exactly this chip that's finding its way into complete, turnkey mini PC solutions, like this one from a company called Firefly. The base model comes with 8GB of LDDPR5 RAM and 128GB of storage, at a price of about €300 or so (there's also a 32GB/128GB model at well over €600). This is the first time I'm looking at a complete RISC-V solution where I feel like it might actually make for a good moment to jump in for us enthusiasts. No, the performance won't rival anything Intel or AMD has to offer, but it seems capable enough for a lot of day-to-day tasks, and I'm curious to see just how far along the Linux world is when it comes to RISC-V support. It's not part of our current set of fundraiser incentives, but if you'd like to see this RISC-V mini PC reviewed here on OSNews, you can always donate and add a note that you specifically want to see such a review (so I can gauge interest not just from our few commenters, but also from the more than 99% of our readers who only lurk). As always, you can donate through Ko-Fi, or, if you're European, via a SEPA direct bank transfer (Name: Thom Holwerda - IBAN: SE08 8000 0820 1684 4657 8414 - BIC: SWEDSESS).

05 Jun 2026 3:49pm GMT

I've mentioned it before, but Chris Siebenmann is basically the Raymond Chen of the UNIX world, and today he's filling that role perfectly once again. I recently read Simon Tatham's Nitpicking the shell history scene in Tron: Legacy, where one thing that surprised Tatham was the film using 'login -n root' to become root instead of 'su'. This surprised me because I found that perfectly ordinary, and this turns up both a bit of Unix history and a difference between modern Unixes. Plain 'su' can let you become another user, including root, but what it explicitly doesn't do by default is create a new login shell for that user. If you do 'su root', the new root shell normally inherits most of your environment, your current directory, and so on. Sometimes this is what you want and sometimes you really want a new login environment, and originally in Unix how you got the latter was to run 'login' from your existing shell session (and this meant that login was setuid root, like su). ↫ Chris Siebenmann Unsurprisingly, this distinction has persisted to this day in various UNIX-like operating systems, but in different ways. Some maintain the explicit distinction, while others have more or less standardised on using su for both use cases. It's an interesting bit of UNIX archeology.

05 Jun 2026 12:57pm GMT

Roku, the company that makes TV boxes and sells ad space based on your usage patterns, has released its remote control operating system as open source - and by remote control I don't mean robot stuff or whatever, but actual remote controls, the thing you use to control your TV or whatever from the couch. Roku has announced the official availability of Roku LT OS - a lightweight, highly deterministic open-source operating system that is already used in our industry-changing Roku remote controls. In addition to high-performance automotive platforms, Roku LT OS is designed to be accessible to the broader developer community. The operating system ships with native support for the ESP32 platform, a highly popular SoC among hobbyists and makers. Because ESP32 development boards are widely available online for just a few dollars, developers can get started with Roku LT OS with minimal hardware investment. ↫ Roku's developers blog As far as I can tell, this operating system is entirely new and not based on Linux or something else, but the available documentation is light on details so I can't make much more out of it. Regardless, it's nice to have another open source embedded operating system.

04 Jun 2026 6:21pm GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT

Just trying to answer one simple question: What if the terminal was 3D?

11 May 2026 12:00am GMT

Break the pattern today or the loop will repeat tomorrow.

18 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT