fidzu : geek

Promising trials using engineered antibodies suggest that "functional cures" may be in reach.

29 Nov 2025 12:15pm GMT

The investigation into the June 12 Air India crash that killed 260 people has been marked by tension, suspicion and poor communication between American and Indian officials, including an episode where NTSB chairwoman Jennifer Homendy instructed her black-box specialists not to board a late-night Indian military flight to a remote facility, WSJ reports. When two American recorder experts landed in New Delhi in late June, they received urgent messages from colleagues telling them not to go with the Indians; Homendy had grown concerned about sending U.S. personnel and equipment to an aerospace lab in the remote town of Korwa amid State Department security warnings about terrorism in the region. She made calls to Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy and the CEOs of Boeing and GE Aerospace, and the State Department sent embassy officials to intercept the NTSB specialists at the airport. Homendy eventually delivered an ultimatum: if Indian authorities didn't choose between their Delhi facility and the NTSB's Washington lab within 48 hours, she would withdraw American support from the probe. Indian officials relented. The downloaded data showed someone in the cockpit moved switches that cut off the engines' fuel supply, and India's preliminary report stated one pilot asked the other why he moved the switches while that pilot denied doing so. American government and industry officials now privately believe the captain likely moved the switches deliberately.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

29 Nov 2025 11:00am GMT

The release 25.11 wraps up our year of "rigidity, clarity, performance" with a bouquet of vast under-the-hood improvements. Genode's custom kernel received special tuning of its new CPU scheduler for Sculpt-OS workloads, and became much more scalable with respect to virtual-memory management. Combined, those efforts visibly boost the performance of Sculpt OS on performance-starved hardware like the PinePhone or the i.MX8-based MNT Reform laptop. On account of improving clarity, our new configuration format - now named human-inclined data (HID) - proliferates throughout Genode's tooling. We are also happy to report that almost all Genode components have become interoperable with both XML and HID by now. ↫ Genode OS Framework 25.11 release notes The Genode Framework 25.11 also brings a major change to how important shared components that aren't strictly part of the framework are handled, such as ports like libSDL, sqlite, or gnutls. Before, these could only be built with the Genode build system, which was suboptimal because this isn't designed for building individual components. Several changes have been made to now enable the use of multiple build systems and the Goa SDK, which should make it a lot easier to these crucial components to become the responsibility of wider parts of the community. There's way more, of course, such as the usual driver improvements, including the addition of support for serial-to-USB adapters.

29 Nov 2025 9:48am GMT

Black fungus found growing inside Chernobyl's destroyed reactor may be feeding on radiation, and researchers have tested samples of the same species aboard the International Space Station to explore whether it could eventually shield astronauts from cosmic rays. Ukrainian scientist Nelli Zhdanova first discovered the melanin-rich mould colonizing the walls and ceilings of the exploded reactor building during a May 1997 survey. Her research indicated that the fungal hyphae were actually growing toward sources of ionizing radiation rather than merely tolerating it. In 2007, nuclear scientist Ekaterina Dadachova at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine found that melanised fungi grew 10% faster when exposed to radioactive caesium compared to control samples, leading her to propose "radiosynthesis" -- a process where organisms convert radiation into metabolic energy. The same strain, Cladosporium sphaerospermum, traveled to the ISS in December 2018 and grew an average of 1.21 times faster over 26 days compared to Earth-based controls. Nils Averesch, a biochemist at the University of Florida and co-author of that study, remains cautious about attributing the growth boost to radiation harvesting since zero gravity could also be responsible.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

29 Nov 2025 8:01am GMT

Europe's Airbus said on Friday it was ordering immediate repairs to 6,000 of its widely used A320 family of jets in a sweeping recall affecting more than half the global fleet, threatening upheaval during the busiest travel weekend of the year in the United States and disruption worldwide. From a report: The setback appears to be among the largest recalls affecting Airbus in its 55-year history and comes weeks after the A320 overtook the Boeing 737 as the most-delivered model. At the time Airbus issued its bulletin to the plane's more than 350 operators, some 3,000 A320-family jets were in the air. The fix mainly involves reverting to earlier software and is relatively simple, but must be carried out before the planes can fly again, other than repositioning to repair centres, according to the bulletin to airlines seen by Reuters. Airlines from the United States to South America, Europe, India and New Zealand warned the repairs could potentially cause flight delays or cancellations.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

29 Nov 2025 5:15am GMT

During a Dell earnings call, the company mentioned some staggering numbers regarding the amount of PCs that will not or cannot be upgraded to Windows 11. "We have about 500 million of them capable of running Windows 11 that haven't been upgraded," said Dell COO Jeffrey Clarke on a Q3 earnings call earlier this week, referring to the overall PC market, not just Dell's slice of machines. "And we have another 500 million that are four years old that can't run Windows 11." He sees this as an opportunity to guide customers towards the latest Windows 11 machines and AI PCs, but warns that the PC market is going to be relatively flat next year. ↫ Tom Warren at The Verge The monumental scale of the Windows 10 install base that simply won't or cannot upgrade to Windows 11 is massive, and it's absolutely bonkers to me that we're mostly just letting them get away with leaving at least a billion users out in the cold when it comes to security updates and bug fixes. The US government (in better times) and the EU should've 100% forced Microsoft's hand, as leaving this many people on outdated, unsupported operating system installations is several disasters waiting to happen. Aside from the dangerous position Microsoft is forcing its Windows 10 users into, there's also the massive environmental and public health impact of huge swaths of machines, especially in enterprise environments, becoming obsolete overnight. Many of these will end up in landfills, often shipped to third-world countries so we in the west don't have to deal with our e-waste and its dangerous consequences directly. I can get fined for littering - rightfully so - but when a company like Microsoft makes sweeping decisions which cause untold amounts of dangerous chemicals to be dumped in countless locations all over the globe, governments shrug it off and move on. At least we will get some cheap eBay hardware out of it, I guess.

28 Nov 2025 9:57pm GMT

So my love for the Common Desktop Environment isn't exactly a secret, so let's talk about the project's latest release, CDE 2.5.3, released a few days ago. As the version number suggests, this first new version in two years is a rather minor release, containing only a few bug fixes. For instance, CDE's window manager dtwm picked up support for more mouse buttons, its file manager dtfile now uses sh to find files instead of ksh, and a few more of these rather minor, but welcome, changes and bugfixes. Ever since CDE was released as open source over thirteen years ago, and while considerable work has been done to make it build, install, and run on modern platforms, that's kind of where the steam ran out. CDE isn't being actively developed to build upon its strengths and add new and welcome features and conveniences, but is instead kept in a sort of buildable stasis. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this - it keeps CDE accessible on modern platforms, and that's a huge amount of work that deserves respect and gratitude - but it'd be nice if we lived in a world where there was enough interest (and time and money) to have people work on actually improving it. Of course, the reality is that there'd be very little interest in such an improved CDE, and that's exactly why it isn't happening. On top op the current work the CDE team is doing, you'd need to not only develop new features, but also improve the Motif toolkit to make such new features possible, and make sure such improvements don't break anything else. With such an old codebase, that can't possible be an easy task. Still, I will continue to daydream of a slightly more modernised CDE with some additional niceties we've come to expect over the past 30 years, even if I know full well it's futile.

28 Nov 2025 9:37pm GMT

"We are going to learn just how important the ISS is to leadership."

28 Nov 2025 4:16pm GMT

Buy some laptops, or a streaming stick, to honor the passing of our greatest hero.

28 Nov 2025 12:41pm GMT

Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people's beds. A little over a week later Microsoft Azure had a [widespread outage][Azure outage] that managed to significantly disrupt train service in the Netherlands, and probably also things that matter. Now last week, Cloudflare takes down large swaths of the internet in a way that causes non-tech people to learn Cloudflare exists. And every single time, people share that one XKCD comic.

24 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

After Gandi was bought up and started taking extortion level prices for their domains I've been looking for an excuse to migrate registrar. Last week I decided to bite the bullet and move to Porkbun as I have another domain renewal coming up. However after setting up an account and paying for the transfer for 4 domains, I realized their DNS services are provided by Cloudflare! I personally do not use Cloudflare, and stay far away from all of their products for various reasons.

18 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

The waydroid package prior to version 1.5.4-2 (including aur/waydroid) creates Python byte-code files (.pyc) at runtime which were untracked by pacman. This issue has been fixed in 1.5.4-3, where byte-compiling these files is now done during the packaging process. As a result, the upgrade may conflict with the unowned files created in previous versions. If you encounter errors like the following during the update:

error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files) waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/__pycache__/__init__.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/actions/__pycache__/__init__.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/actions/__pycache__/app_manager.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem

You can safely overwrite these files by running the following command: pacman -Syu --overwrite /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/\*__pycache__/\*

06 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT