fidzu : geek

Sony announced last month that it plans to pass control of its home entertainment division -- including the two-decade-old Bravia television brand -- to Chinese electronics group TCL through a joint venture in which TCL would hold a 51% stake. The Japanese company was long ago overtaken in sales by South Korea's Samsung and LG and now holds just 2% of the global television market. Sony stopped making its own LCD screens in 2011. Chinese companies supplied 71% of television panels made in Asia last year, according to TCL, and less than 10% are now produced in Japan and Korea. TCL is close to overtaking Samsung as the world's largest television maker. Sony retains valuable intellectual property in image rendering, and the Bravia brand still carries consumer recognition, but its OLED screens are already supplied by Samsung and LG. The company has been shifting toward premium cameras, professional audio, and its entertainment businesses in film, music, and games -- areas where intellectual property is less exposed to Chinese manufacturing scale.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 Feb 2026 10:30am GMT

alternative_right writes: The city of Munich has developed its own measurement instrument to assess the digital sovereignty of its IT infrastructure. The so-called Digital Sovereignty Score (SDS) visually resembles the Nutri-Score and identifies IT systems based on their independence from individual providers and 'foreign' legal spheres. The Technical University of Munich was involved in the development. In September and October 2025, the IT Department already conducted a first comprehensive test. Out of a total of 2780 municipal application services, 194 particularly critical ones were selected and evaluated based on five categories. The analysis already showed a high degree of digital sovereignty: 66% of the 194 evaluated services reached the highest levels (SDS 1 and 2), only 5% reached the critical level 4, and 21% reached the most critical level 5. The SDS evaluates not only technical dependencies but also legal and organizational risks.

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05 Feb 2026 8:00am GMT

"Smell added an emotional and sensory depth that text labels alone could never provide."

05 Feb 2026 5:01am GMT

Valve has pushed back the launch of its Steam Machine, Steam Frame and Steam Controller hardware from its original Q1 2026 window to a vaguer "first half of the year" target, blaming the ongoing memory and storage shortage that has been squeezing the tech industry. The company said in a post today that rising component prices and limited availability forced it to revisit both its shipping schedule and pricing plans. Valve had previously indicated the Steam Machine would be priced at the entry level of the PC space.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

05 Feb 2026 5:00am GMT

Gadgets, desk accessories, widgets - whatever you they were called, they were a must-have feature for various operating systems for a while. Windows in particular has tried making them happen six times, and every time, they failed to really catch on and ended up being killed, only for the company to try again a few years later. Microsoft has been trying to solve the same UX problem since 1997: how to surface live information without making you launch an app. They've shipped six different implementations across nearly 30 years. Each one died from a different fundamental flaw - performance, security, screen space, privacy, engagement. And each death triggered the same reflex: containment. ↫ Pavel Osadchuk There's quite a few memories in this article. I never actually used Active Desktop back when it came out, because I seem to remember the channels feature was either not available in The Netherlands or the available channels were American stuff we didn't care about. The sidebar in Vista had a lot of potential, and I did like the feature, but there weren't a lot of great widgets and we hadn't entered the era of omnipresent notifications begging for out attention just yet, so use cases remained elusive. Now Metro, that's where things came together, at least for me. I was en enthusiastic Windows Phone user - I imported two Windows Phone devices from the US to be an early adopter - and I still consider its live tiles with notifications and other useful information to be the most pleasant user interface for a mobile device, bar none. It may have taken Microsoft six tries, but they nailed it with that one, and I'm still sad the Windows Phone user interface lost out to whatever iOS and Android offered. On desktops and laptops, though, it's a different story, and I don't think the Metro tiles concept ever made any sense there. Widgets as they exist in Windows now mostly seem like an annoying distraction, and I've never seen anyone actually use them. Does anyone even keep them enabled at all?

05 Feb 2026 12:13am GMT

Microsoft Research, in collaboration with various others, has just released LiteBox, a library operating system. LiteBox is a sandboxing library OS that drastically cuts down the interface to the host, thereby reducing attack surface. It focuses on easy interop of various "North" shims and "South" platforms. LiteBox is designed for usage in both kernel and non-kernel scenarios. LiteBox exposes a Rust-y nix/rustix-inspired "North" interface when it is provided a Platform interface at its "South". These interfaces allow for a wide variety of use-cases, easily allowing for connection between any of the North-South pairs. ↫ LiteBox GitHub Page Suggested use-cases are running unmodified Linux applications on Windows, sandboxing Linux applications on Linux, running OP-TEE applications on Linux, and more. It's written in Rust, and the code is available on GitHub under an MIT license.

04 Feb 2026 11:56pm GMT

The window to patch vulnerabilities is shrinking rapidly.

04 Feb 2026 11:08pm GMT

Post reporter was compelled to unlock MacBook Pro with fingerprint, however.

04 Feb 2026 10:41pm GMT

Over the past month or so, several enterprising contributors have taken an interest in the zig libc subproject. The idea here is to incrementally delete redundant code, by providing libc functions as Zig standard library wrappers rather than as vendored C source files. In many cases, these functions are one-to-one mappings, such as memcpy or atan2, or trivially wrap a generic function, like strnlen. So far, roughly 250 C source files have been deleted from the Zig repository, with 2032 remaining. With each function that makes the transition, Zig gains independence from third party projects and from the C programming language, compilation speed improves, Zig's installation size is simplified and reduced, and user applications which statically link libc enjoy reduced binary size. ↫ Andrew Kelley on the Zig Devlog The goal is to replace all of the musl, wasi-libc, and MinGW-w64 C code bundled in Zig with new Zig code.

03 Feb 2026 9:56pm 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

In the recent blog post on the work funded by Sovereign Tech Fund (STF), we provided an overview of the "File Hierarchy for the Verification of OS Artifacts" (VOA) and the voa project as its reference implementation. VOA is a generic framework for verifying any kind of distribution artifacts (i.e. files) using arbitrary signature verification technologies. The voa CLI ⌨️ The voa project offers the voa(1) command line interface (CLI) which makes use of the voa(5) configuration file format for technology backends. It is recommended to read the respective man pages to get …

11 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT