fidzu : geek

Bell Labs "created many of the foundational innovations of the modern age," writes Jon Gertner, author of The Idea Factory: Bell Labs and the Great Age of American Innovation - from transistors and telecommunications satellites to Unix and the C programming language. But what was the secret to its success? he asks in a new article for the Wall Street Journal. Start with its lucky arrival in a "problem-rich" environment, suggests Arno Penzia, winner of one of Bell Labs' 11 Nobel Prizes: It was Bell Labs' responsibility, in other words, to create technologies for designing, expanding and improving an unruly communications network of cables and microwave links and glass fibers. The Labs also had to figure out ways to create underwater conduits, as well as switching centers that could manage the growing number of customers and escalating amounts of data.... Money mattered, too. Being connected to AT&T, the largest company in the world, was an advantage. The Labs' budget was enormous, and accounting conventions allowed its parent company to make huge and continuing investments in R & D. The generous funding, moreover, allowed scientists and engineers to buy and build expensive equipment - for instance, anechoic chambers to create the world's quietest rooms... The most fortunate part of Bell Labs' situation, however, was that in being attached to a monopoly it could partake in long-term thinking... Without competition nipping at its heels, Bell Labs engineers had the luxury of working out difficult ideas over decades. The first conceptualization of a cellular phone network, for instance, came out of the Labs in the late 1940s; it wasn't until the late 1970s that technicians began testing one in Chicago to gauge its potential. The challenge of deploying these technologies was immense. (The regulatory hurdles were formidable, too....) The article also credits the visionary management of Mervin Kelly - who fortunately also "had access to funding in a decade when most executives and universities didn't" to hire the brightest people. (By the early 1980s Bell Labs employed about 25,000 researchers, technicians and support staff, with an annual budget of $2 billion - roughly $7 billion in today's dollars.) "The Labs' involvement in World War II suggested to Kelly that an exciting postwar era of electronics was approaching, but that the technical problems would be so complex that they required a mix of expertise - not just physicists, but material scientists, chemists, electrical engineers, circuitry experts and the like." At Bell Labs, Kelly would sometimes handpick teams and create such a mix, as was the case for the transistor invention in the late 1940s. He came to see innovation arising not from like-minded or similarly trained people conversing with each other, but from a friction of ideas and approaches. It meant hiring researchers who had different personalities and favored a range of experimental angles. It also meant personally designing a campus in Murray Hill where departments were spread apart, so that scientists and engineers would be forced to walk, mingle and engage in serendipitous conversations and debate ideas. Meanwhile, under Kelly, the Labs focused on hiring people who were deeply curious, not just smart. Kelly saw it as his professional duty to do far more than what was expected, with his laboratory and vast resources, to create new technologies... The breakup of AT&T's monopoly, which led to a steady shrinking of Bell Labs' staff, budget and remit, shows us that no matter how forward looking your employees and managers may be, they will not necessarily see the future coming. It likewise suggests that technological progress is too unpredictable for one organization, no matter how powerful or smart, to control. Famously, Bell Labs managers didn't see value in the Arpanet, which eventually led to today's internet. And yet, for at least five decades, Bell Labs created a blueprint for the global development of communications and electronics. In understanding why it did so, I tend to think its ultimate secret may be hiding in plain sight. The secret has to do with Bell Labs' structure - not only being connected to a fabulously profitable monopoly, but being connected to a company that could move theoretical and applied research into a huge manufacturing division that made telecom equipment (at Western Electric) and ultimately into a dynamic operating system (the AT&T network)... Scientists and engineers at the Labs understood their ideas would be implemented, if they passed muster, into the huge system its parent company was running. Bell Labs racked up about 30,000 patents, according to the article, and celebrated its 100th anniversary last April. It is now part of Finland-based Nokia.

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29 Mar 2026 11:04am GMT

Just six days ago - and 30 minutes after a Disney-OpenAI meeting about a project with Sora - Disney's team was "blindsided" with the news Sora was being discontinued, a person familiar with the matter told Reuters, describing OpenAI's move as "a big rug-pull." Even some Sora employees were surprised by the cancellation. It was just 14 weeks ago Disney announced a $1 billion investment in OpenAI's AI-powered video generation tool - plus a three-year licensing deal. But that deal "never closed," Reuters adds, citing two other people familiar with the matter, "and no money changed hands." (Although the two sides are still "discussing if there is another way they can partner or invest with one another, one of the people familiar with the matter said.") But Variety wonders if the end of the Sora deal is "a blessing in disguise" for Disney: Before Disney's officially sanctioned AI-generated versions of Mickey Mouse, Darth Vader, Baby Yoda, Deadpool and more debuted in OpenAI's Sora, the AI company abruptly pulled the plug on the video app... [M]any aficionados of Disney's franchises were not, in fact, excited about what Sora's video generator might do to the likes of the Avengers superheroes or the characters from Frozen or Moana. And despite [departed Disney CEO Bob] Iger's bullishness on the Sora deal, other Disney execs were said to be concerned that going into business with OpenAI would expose the Magic Kingdom's crown jewels to the risk of being turned into so much AI slop, according to industry sources. Hollywood unions - for which AI adoption has been a hot-button issue - weren't thrilled about the Disney-Sora deal either. "Disney's announcement with OpenAI appears to sanction its theft of our work and cedes the value of what we create to a tech company that has built its business off our backs," the Writers Guild of America said in December... [S]ources say, Disney was encountering roadblocks in getting the OK from voice actors for the Sora pact... At least publicly, Disney says it is still looking at ways it can tap into the AI ecosystem. The company, in a statement Tuesday, said, "we will continue to engage with AI platforms to find new ways to meet fans where they are while responsibly embracing new technologies that respect IP and the rights of creators." But at this point, Disney may decide that "meeting fans where they are" means keeping its beloved and world-famous characters away from the AI machinery. Or, as Gizmodo puts it, "Disney Says It Will Find Ways to Peddle Slop Elsewhere After Pulling Out of OpenAI Deal." But Deadline sees the deal's collapses as a lost opportunity: The OpenAI partnership was a template on which to build, potentially allowing for other deals that end the exploitation of human creativity by unscrupulous AI models. It was also the kind of partnership that was palatable for the Human Artistry Campaign and Creators Coalition on AI, lobby groups that have been critical of tech business models and command support from A-listers including Scarlett Johansson, Cate Blanchett and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. Dr. Moiya McTier, an advisor to the Human Artistry Campaign, puts it this way: Part of the problem is getting "artsy people and the techie people to talk." OpenAI sinking Sora will not make these discussions easier. It's a move that starkly exposes Hollywood's vulnerability to the capriciousness of big tech.

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29 Mar 2026 7:34am GMT

"Emergency out-of-band fixes issued by enterprise IT giants Microsoft and Oracle have shone a spotlight on issues around both update cycles and patching," reports Computer Weekly: Microsoft's emergency update, KB5085516, addresses an issue that arose after installing the mandatory cumulative updates pushed live on Patch Tuesday earlier this month. According to Microsoft, it has since emerged that many users experienced problems signing into applications with a Microsoft account, seeing a "no internet" error message even though the device had a working connection. This had the effect of preventing access to multiple services and applications. It should be noted that organisations using Entra ID did not experience the issue. But Microsoft's emergency patch comes just days after it doubled down on a commitment to software quality, reliability and stability. In a blog post published just 24 hours prior to the latest update, Pavan Davuluri of Microsoft's Windows Insider Program Team said updates should be "predictable and easy to plan around". Michael Bell, founder/CEO of Suzu Labs tells Computer Weekly that Microsoft's patch for the sign-in bug follows "separate hotpatches for RRAS remote code execution flaws and a Bluetooth visibility bug. Three emergency fixes in eight days does not shout reliability era." Oracle's patch, meanwhile, addresses CVE-2026-21992, a remote code execution flaw in the REST:WebServices component of Oracle Identity Manager and the Web Services Security component of Oracle Web Services Manager in Oracle Fusion Middleware. It carries a CVSS score of 9.8 and can be exploited by an unauthenticated attacker with network access over HTTP.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

29 Mar 2026 3:34am GMT

Breathing capacity could have compensated for lower atmospheric oxygen.

28 Mar 2026 12:30pm GMT

A quantum experiment shows that we can formally test if the order of events matters.

28 Mar 2026 12:00pm GMT

Specially equipped nets can help save some species, while allowing fisherman to still catch others.

28 Mar 2026 11:15am GMT

This guide describes how you can install a Plan 9 network on an OpenBSD machine (it will probably work on any unix machine though). The authentication service (called "authsrv" on Plan 9) is provided by a unix version: authsrv9. The file service is provided by a program called "u9fs". It comes with Plan 9. Both run from inetd. The (diskless) cpu server is provided by running qemu, booted from only a floppy (so without local storage). Finally, the terminal is provided by the program drawterm. The nice thing about this approach is that you can use all your familiar unix tools to get started with Plan 9 (e.g. you can edit the Plan 9 files with your favorite unix editor). I'm assuming you have read at least something about Plan 9, for example the introduction paper Plan 9 from Bell Labs. ↫ Mechiel Lukkien If you're running OpenBSD, you're already doing something better than everyone else, and if you want to ascend to the next level, this is a great place to start. Of course, the final level, where you leave your earthly roots behind and become a being of pure enlightened energy, is running Plan 9 on real hardware as the universe intended, but let's not put the cart before the horse. One day, all of humanity will just be an endless collection of interconnected cosmic Plan 9 servers, more plentiful than the stars in the known universe.

27 Mar 2026 7:40pm GMT

Towards the end of 2024, Dennis Biesma decided to check out ChatGPT. The Amsterdam-based IT consultant had just ended a contract early. "I had some time, so I thought: let's have a look at this new technology everyone is talking about," he says. "Very quickly, I became fascinated." Biesma has asked himself why he was vulnerable to what came next. He was nearing 50. His adult daughter had left home, his wife went out to work and, in his field, the shift since Covid to working from home had left him feeling "a little isolated". He smoked a bit of cannabis some evenings to "chill", but had done so for years with no ill effects. He had never experienced a mental illness. Yet within months of downloading ChatGPT, Biesma had sunk €100,000 (about £83,000) into a business startup based on a delusion, been hospitalised three times and tried to kill himself. ↫ Anna Moore at The Guardian These stories are absolutely heart-wrenching, and it doesn't just happen to people who have had a history of mental illness or other things you might associate with priming someone for "falling for" an "AI" chatbot. Just a few years in, and it's already clear that these tools pose a real danger to a group of people of indeterminate size, and proper research into the causes is absolutely warranted and needed. On top of that, if there's any evidence of wrongdoing from the companies behind these chatbots - intentionally making them more addictive, luring people in, ignoring established dangers, covering up addiction cases, etc. - lawsuits and regulation are definitely in order. Only yesterday, Facebook and Google lost a landmark trial in the US, ruling the companies intentionally made social media as addictive as possible, thereby destroying a person's life in the process. Countless similar lawsuits are underway all over the world, and I have a feeling that in a few years to decades, we'll look at unregulated, rampant social media the same way we look at tobacco now. Perhaps "AI" chatbots will join their ranks, too.

27 Mar 2026 7:30pm GMT

Today, we're excited to announce a significant step forward in our ongoing commitment to Windows security and system reliability: the removal of trust for all kernel drivers signed by the deprecated cross-signed root program. This update will help protect our customers by ensuring that only kernel drivers that the Windows Hardware Compatibility Program (WHCP) have passed and been signed can be loaded by default. To raise the bar for platform security, Microsoft will maintain an explicit allow list of reputable drivers signed by the cross-signed program. The allow list ensures a secure and compatible experience for a limited number of widely used, and reputable cross-signed drivers. This new kernel trust policy applies to systems running Windows 11 24H2, Windows 11 25H2, Windows 11 26H1, and Windows Server 2025 in the April 2026 Windows update. All future versions of Windows 11 and Windows Server will enforce the new kernel trust policy. ↫ Peter Waxman at the Windows IT Pro Blog The cross-signed root program was discontinued in 2021, and ran since the early 2000s, so I think it's fair to no longer automatically assume such possibly old and outdated drivers are still to be trusted.

27 Mar 2026 7:18pm 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