geek

18 Jul 2026

Slashdot

Next UK Prime Minister Drops Digital ID Scheme

Reuters reports: Incoming British prime minister Andy Burnham will scrap the government's troubled plans for a digital ID scheme when he enters office on Monday, a spokesperson for the new Labour Party leader said. Resources devoted to the scheme, deemed a "fiasco" by a cross-party committee of lawmakers, will be redirected to Burnham's priorities, the spokesperson said... "All the time and resource that was going to be spent on a national ID scheme will go instead to where it's most needed, such as helping with the cost of living," Burnham's spokesperson said. In November, the Office for Budget Responsibility watchdog estimated the cost of the digital ID scheme at around £1.8 billion ($2.4 billion) between financial years 2026/27 and 2028/29.

Gen Z and Millennials are Buying CDs - Though Half Don't Have CD Players

"Approximately half of Gen Z and millennials who have purchased a CD do not own a CD player," according to midyear sales statistics from entertainment data company Luminate. It's driven in part by "collection building", according to their report [PDF]: The CD has been recontextualized from a functional audio format into an affordable collectible. This behavior underscores that for younger generations, the act of buying physical music is as much about aesthetic ownership and direct financial support for the artist as it is listening to the music on the product itself "Among artists who had a direct impact on the resurgence of CDs, K-Pop icons BTS' 10th studio album, ARIRANG, was a big seller," Vice points out in their report on the new data. "However, Luminate also found that, beyond K-Pop's overall influence, CD sales still increased 6.7% year over year, even if the whole genre was removed from the equation, jumping 16% to 16.3 million units." That's more than the growth of vinyl sales (2.4%) - but physical media in general seems to be making a comeback: Through the first half of the year, total physical album sales on vinyl, CDs, and cassettes reached 38.2 million units in the United States. This equates to a 7.8% increase.... [I]t seems that younger music fans have been driving a lot of the retro revival. The report shows that in 2026, 60% of Gen Z listeners said they most often listen to music from the 1990s and older. This is a massive increase from the 18 percent marker in 2021. The new report also revealed that the way music fans are buying physical media has shifted. Indie record stores have been the largest generator of physical album sales for some time, and they continue to be. However, big-box stores like Target and Walmart took significant strides in the first half of 2026. Collectively, their music sales made up about 30% of the market. Thanks to Slashdot reader fjo3 for sharing the article.

NextBSD Returns to Port Apple Source Onto FreeBSD

"One of the most interesting BSD variants of the 2010s, NextBSD, has come back to life under new management," reports The Register: Aside from the homepage, there's a GitHub repository - but beware, this is separate from the old one, whose repo is still there although the most recent changes were seven years ago. The new project also has a project history giving credit where it's due. The main man behind the revival is Joe Maloney, known on GitHub as pkgdemon. In case his name rings a bell, we've mentioned him before: he put together the Gershwin desktop in GhostBSD. Soon after we covered Gershwin on GhostBSD, he asked the maintainers if he could take over the NextBSD project. He did have a relatively minor role in the original - you can see his list of commits. The original NextBSD project was started by FreeBSD co-founder Jordan Hubbard in 2015 - its Wikipedia article has some of the history. The plan was to port some of the components of Apple's Darwin OS to FreeBSD... [T]he NextBSD plan is to take the FreeBSD kernel, the most capable of the FOSS BSD kernels, but replace FreeBSD's traditional and server-focused userland with the relevant parts of the publicly available Apple code. The rebooted NextBSD-redux is not based on a fork of the decade-old code. FreeBSD has moved on substantially in that time, and so have macOS and Darwin. This is a new project by a new developer, but it picks up the same overall plan, aims to assemble the same puzzle pieces, and shares the same intended goal. In places, it does draw on a little of the same code, though. The NextBSD-redux README describes what's working so far, with a lot more detail in the porting notes. Although there's no graphical desktop yet, that's underway as well.... For us, perhaps the key aspect of NextBSD - both the original version and NextBSD-redux - is that it isn't an effort to build something completely new from scratch. It's an effort to cherry-pick and combine elements of existing separate FOSS projects, and assemble them into a useful whole. The Team section of the homepage lists two core developers: Maloney and Anthropic's Claude Code. "From my perspective, AI is a force multiplier here," Maloney told The Register. "It is my team of developers, but I am steering the entire thing."

OSnews

Follow the money, especially in open source

Linus Torvalds, the creator of the Linux kernel and git, is employed by the Linux Foundation. This Foundation is a non-profit organisation dedicated to, as the name obviously implies, the promotion of Linux. The primary use of the funds it collects is to "help fund the infrastructure and fellows, including Linus Torvalds, who help develop the Linux kernel". The list of megacorporations donating most of the Foundation's funds is long. The Linux Foundation has twelve platinum members, which donate $500000 per year, followed by twelve gold members, who donate $100000 per year. Below these two primary tiers lie the silver peasants, who each donate $5000-$25000 per year, based on number of employees. Looking at the list of twelve platinum members, I noticed something interesting. Of the twelve platinum companies, six are "AI" companies or companies with massive investments in "AI": Google, Huawei, Facebook, Microsoft, Oracle, and IBM/Red Hat. Then there's Samsung Electronics, which is raking in stupendous amounts of money thanks to the "AI" bubble. Additionally, one of the gold members is Anthropic, another major "AI" company and makers of "Claude", the sloppiest of slopcoding tools. Many of these companies are unimaginably deep in the red when it comes to "AI", with very little indication they're ever going to be able to recover any of it. The situation is particularly bad for Oracle and IBM/Red Hat. Oracle's debt has been downgraded to one notch above junk status because of its "AI" spending, while IBM's shares experienced the largest crash in its 115 year history only a few days ago. By the way, in the first half of 2025, "AI-related capital expenditures contributed 1.1% to GDP growth, outpacing the U.S. consumer as an engine of expansion". Fun fact: since most of The Netherlands is effectively a swamp, most of the country's buildings are built on massive wooden or concrete poles (piles) hammered deep into the ground until they hit something more stable than mushy clay and wet sand. Otherwise, buildings in the country would simply sink into the ground. Every Dutch person who ever lived near a construction site has heard the rhythmic kathunk, kathunk, kathunk, all day long, as the massive piledriver machines spread their gospel. I guess something reminded me of this just now. Anyway, a large chunk of the funding the Linux Foundation, Linus Torvald's employer, receives is coming from increasingly desperate companies frantically trying to convince a populace deeply skeptical and often downright hostile towards "AI" to spend money on "AI" before the bubble bursts. For some reason, I thought this was interesting.

18 Jul 2026 5:27am GMT

17 Jul 2026

OSnews

The Zilog Z80 has turned 50

As of writing, the Zilog Z80 processor was officially launched 50 years ago, in July of 1976, less than 4 years after the last human had walked on the moon, decades closer to WWII than to the present day, roughly at a half way point between the Kennedy assassination and the fall of the Berlin wall, closer to the Korean war than to 9/11 which is itself an event that happened a quarter of a century ago. (Sorry…) The processor was extremely successful, being used in many 8 bit microcomputers, including early personal computers, home & hobby computers, as well as many embedded, industrial applications. Together with the 8080 & 8085 that it is binary compatible with, it contributed to creating a de facto hardware standard for 8 bit micros, allowing a de facto software standard of CP/M, and Microsoft BASIC. ↫ David Oberhollenzer The only device I actively remember using with a (sort-of) Z80 in it was the Game Boy, but most likely I've used a ton more over the decades that I don't remember or simply was never ware of. I did a little surface-level digging, and there we are: the TI-83, one of Texas Instruments' stupidly popular and eternally overpriced graphing calculators, release in 1996. I was part of the first wave of high school children in The Netherlands for whom a TI-83 graphing calculator was mandatory. During my high school years I used that thing extensively, for far more than just math class - I programmed applications for and on it, and played so many games on it. A friend and I even bought a communication cable so we could play competitive 1v1 Bomberman in class. Good times, made possible by the Z80.

17 Jul 2026 10:33pm GMT

Ars Technica

Google-backed satellites for wildfire detection launch as smoke chokes US, Canada

The FireSat program can spot wildfires that other satellites miss.

17 Jul 2026 7:50pm GMT

The Pentagon's Space Development Agency hasn't moved as fast as anyone would like

"Missiles are being launched at the joint force every single day in [Operation] Epic Fury."

17 Jul 2026 7:19pm GMT

Hegseth wants a "High-T" military; doctors call it a clinical minefield

"We're turning the clock back on rational healthcare."

17 Jul 2026 6:53pm GMT

16 Jul 2026

OSnews

OnePlus exits EU, US markets

Rumours had been circulating for a while, but now it's official: OnePlus is effectively retreating from the European and US markets. Today, our hearts are undoubtedly heavy and mixed with emotion. As part of the proactive global strategy adjustment, OnePlus has decided to conclude new product rollouts in Europe and North America. ↫ OnePlus statement Once OnePlus' co-founder Carl Pei left the company (and founded Nothing), things have been feeling shaky for OnePlus, once the undisputed darling of the more technical part of the Android crowd. Their phones got more expensive, their minimalist, close-to-stock Android version got progressively worse, and they started lagging in updates, too. My OnePlus Watch 3, for instance, which was promised to get WearOS 6 at some point, but never got it - meanwhile, WearOS 7 has already been released. No, this news is not particularly surprising. Luckily, the company claims it will honour its warranty and update support obligations for existing products in Europe and the US, which is nice, but also something they're legally obligated to do (at least in the EU). A snag here is that the only update path the company offers is to ColorOS, from its parent company Oppo, which many more traditional Android and OnePlus users certainly won't be happy about. Something is better than nothing, I suppose, and I'll reserve judgment until I see what ColorOS 17 will be like on my other OnePlus product, a OnePlus Pad 3. It's just one more victim of western markets (illegally) consolidating on Apple and Samsung (while a few Pixels rummaging in the margins).

16 Jul 2026 10:31pm GMT