fidzu : geek

UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer said social media platforms should remove addictive infinite-scroll features for young users as Britain considers new child-safety measures. "We're consulting on whether there should be a ban for under 16s," Starmer told BBC Radio. "But I think equally important, the addictive scrolling mechanisms are really problematic to my mind. They need to go." Reuters reports: Britain, like other countries, is considering restricting access to social media for children and it is testing bans, curfews and app time limits to see how they impact sleep, family life and schoolwork. Social media companies had designed algorithms that were intended to encourage addictive behavior, and parents were asking the government to intervene, Starmer said. [...] More than 45,000 people had already responded to its consultation on children's online safety, the UK government said, adding that there was still time to contribute before a deadline of May 26. "We want to hear from mums and dads who are worried about the amount of time their children spend online and what they are viewing," Technology Secretary Liz Kendall said on Monday. "We want to hear from teenagers who know better than anyone what it is like to grow up in the age of social media. And we want to hear from families about their views on curfews, AI chatbots and addictive features."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Apr 2026 5:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: Alphabet's Google is facing billions of dollars in potential damage claims as part of mass arbitration tied to the company's online search and advertising technology businesses, which courts have ruled were illegal monopolies. Advertisers are banding together to seek payouts through mass arbitration proceedings. While many companies that displayed ads purchased through Google -- including USA Today Co. and Advance Publications -- have sued for damages since the rulings in 2024, advertiser contracts with the search giant require mandatory arbitration over legal disputes. In arbitration, legal disputes are handled by a mediator, a process that tends to favor companies in individual claims. Mass arbitration -- where 25 or more claims against the same company are pooled together -- have become more common and provide a greater likelihood of settlement awards for claimants. Ashley Keller, a Chicago lawyer whose firm has handled mass arbitrations against DoorDash, Postmates and TurboTax-maker Intuit, said he's already signed up a "significant number" of advertisers to participate in claims against Google. The first of those are expected to be filed this week. "Two federal judges have already adjudicated Google to be a monopolist," Keller said in an interview with Bloomberg. "It seems sensible to seek redress." Keller, who is also representing Texas and other states in a lawsuit against Google for monopolization of advertising technology, estimates potential claims for online search and display ads could reach $218 billion or more, based on calculations from an economist his firm has hired. Similar mass arbitrations have lasted 12 to 24 months between the filing of claims and resolution, he said. "Given the nature of these matters, we cannot estimate a possible loss," Google said in a recent corporate filing. "We believe we have strong arguments against these open claims and will defend ourselves vigorously."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Apr 2026 4:00pm GMT

Researchers at the University of Southern California say they've developed a memristor memory device that continued operating at 700 degrees Celsius. "And crucially, 700 degrees was not the limit, it was simply as hot as their testing equipment could go," adds ScienceAlert. "The device showed no signs of failing." From the report: The device is called a memristor and it's a nanoscale component that can both store information and perform computing operations. Think of it as a tiny sandwich with two electrode layers on the outside and a thin ceramic filling in the middle. The team built theirs from tungsten, the metal with the highest melting point of any element, combined with a ceramic called hafnium oxide, and with a layer of graphene at the bottom. Each material can withstand enormous heat. Together, they turned out to be extraordinary. What makes graphene the key ingredient is the way it interacts with tungsten at the atomic level. In a conventional device, heat causes metal atoms to drift slowly through the ceramic layer until they bridge the two electrodes, short circuiting everything and leaving the device permanently broken. Graphene stops that process dead. Its surface chemistry with tungsten is ... almost like oil and water. Tungsten atoms that drift toward the graphene find they simply cannot take hold, no anchor, no short circuit, no failure. The team used advanced electron microscopy and quantum level computer simulations to understand exactly why, turning a single lucky result into a repeatable principle. The findings have been published in the journal Science.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

14 Apr 2026 3:00pm GMT

What the nostalgic throwback lacks in complexity it makes up for in repetitive charm.

13 Apr 2026 9:58pm GMT

In the 2024-2025 school year, only 78.5% of kindergartners had measles vaccination.

13 Apr 2026 9:32pm GMT

Cellular modems are complex black boxes of legacy code, but Google is making them safer with Rust.

13 Apr 2026 9:12pm GMT

Ever heard of a condition called bixonimania? Did you search the internet or ask your "AI" girlfriend about some symptoms you were experiencing, and this was its answer? Well… The condition doesn't appear in the standard medical literature - because it doesn't exist. It's the invention of a team led by Almira Osmanovic Thunström, a medical researcher at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden, who dreamt up the skin condition and then uploaded two fake studies about it to a preprint server in early 2024. Osmanovic Thunström carried out this unusual experiment to test whether large language models (LLMs) would swallow the misinformation and then spit it out as reputable health advice. "I wanted to see if I can create a medical condition that did not exist in the database," she says. ↫ Chris Stokel-Walker at Nature And "AI" ate it up like quality chocolate. It started appearing in the answers from all the popular "AI" tools within weeks, and later even started showing up as references in published literature, indicating that scientists copy/paste references without actually reading them. This is clearly a deeply concerning experiment, and highlights there may be many, many more nonsensical, fake studies being picked up by "AI" tools. Of course, I hear you say, it's not like propagating fake or terrible studies is the sole domain of "AI", as there are countless cases of this happening among actual real researchers and scientists, too. The issue, though, is that the fake studies concerning "bixonimania" were intentionally made to be as silly and obviously ridiculous as possible. It references Starfleet Acadamy, the lab aboard the Enterprise, the University of Fellowship of the Ring, and many other fake references instantly recognisable as such by real humans. In fact, the studies even specifically mention that "this entire paper is made up" and "fifty made-up individuals aged between 20 and 50 years were recruited for the exposure group". It would take any human only a few seconds after opening one of these papers to realise they're entirely fake - yet, the world's most advanced "AI" tools gobbled them up and spit them back out as pure fact within mere weeks of their publication This shouldn't come as a surprise. After all, "AI" tools have no understanding, no intelligence, no context, and they can't actually make sense of anything. They are glorified pachinko machines with the output - the ball - tumbling down the most likely path between the pins based on nothing but chance and which pins it has already hit. "AI" output understands the world about as much as the pachinko ball does, and as such, can't pick up on even the most obvious of cues that something is a fake or a forgery. It won't be long before truly nefarious forces start doing this very same thing. Why build, staff, and maintain a troll farm when you can just have "AI" generate intentional misinformation which will then be spread and pushed by even more "AI"? Remember, it took one malicious asshole just one long since retracted fake paper to convince millions that vaccines cause autism. I shudder to think how many people are accepting anything "AI" says as gospel.

13 Apr 2026 1:02pm GMT

Version 7.0 of the Linux kernel has been released, marking the arbitrary end of the 6.x series. Significant changes in this release include the removal of the "experimental" status for Rust code, a new filtering mechanism for io_uring operations, a switch to lazy preemption by default in the CPU scheduler, support for time-slice extension, the nullfs filesystem, self-healing support for the XFS filesystem, a number of improvements to the swap subsystem (described in this article and this one), general support for AccECN congestion notification, and more. See the LWN merge-window summaries (part 1, part 2) and the KernelNewbies 7.0 page for more details. ↫ corbet at LWN.net You can compile the kernel yourself, or just wait until it hits your distribution's repositories.

13 Apr 2026 12:19pm GMT

My thoughts on AI-assisted programming.

11 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

It shouldn't be a surprise that companies - and for our field, technology companies specifically - working with the defense industry tends to raise eyebrows. With things like the genocide in Gaza, the threats of genocide and war crimes against Iran, the mass murder in Lebanon, it's no surprise that western companies working with the militaries and defense companies involved in these atrocities are receiving some serious backlash. With that in mind, it seems Red Hat, owned by IBM, is desperately trying to scrub a certain white paper from the internet. Titled "Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge", the 2024 white paper details how Red Hat's products and technologies can make it easier and faster to, well, kill people. Links to the white paper throw up 404s now, but it can still easily be found on the Wayback Machine and other places. It's got some disturbingly euphemistic content. The find, fix, track, target, engage, assess (F2T2EA) process requires ubiquitous access to data at the strategic, operational and tactical levels. Red Hat Device Edge embeds captured, analyzed, and federated data sets in a manner that positions the warfighter to use artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) to increase the accuracy of airborne targeting and mission-guidance systems. Delivering near real-time data from sensor pods directly to airmen, accelerating the sensor-to-shooter cycle. Sharing near real-time sensor fusion data with joint and multinational forces to increase awareness, survivability, and lethality. The new software enabled the Stalker to deploy updated, AI-based automated target recognition capabilities. If the target is an adversary tracked vehicle on the far side of a ridge, a UAS carrying a server running Red Hat Device Edge could transmit video and metadata directly to shooters. ↫ Red Hat white paper titled "Compress the kill cycle with Red Hat Device Edge" I don't think there's something inherently wrong with working together with your nation's military or defense companies, but that all hinges on what, exactly, said military is doing and how those defense companies' products are being used. The focus should be on national defense, aid during disasters, and responding to the legitimate requests of sovereign, democratic nations to come to their defense (e.g. helping Ukraine fight off the Russian invasion). There's always going to be difficult grey areas, but any military or defense company supporting the genocide in Gaza or supplying weapons to kill women and children in Iran is unequivocally wrong, morally reprehensible, and downright illegal on both an international and national level. It clearly seems someone at Red Hat feels the same way, as the company has been trying really hard to memory-hole this particular white paper, and considering its word choices and the state of the world today, it's easy to see why. Of course, the internet never forgets, and I certainly don't intend to let something like this slide. We all know companies like Microsoft, Oracle, and Google have no qualms about making a few bucks from a genocide or two, but it always feels a bit more traitorous to the cause when it's an open source company doing the profiting. It feels like Red Hat is trying to have its cake and eat it too, by, as an IBM subsidiary, trying to both profit from the vast sums of money sloshing around in the US military industrial complex as well as maintain its image as a scrappy open source business success story shitting bunnies and rainbows. It's a long time ago now that Red Hat felt like a genuine part of the open source community. Most of us - both outside and inside of Red Hat, I'm sure - have been well aware for a long time now that those days are well behind us, and I guess Red Hat doesn't like seeing its kill cycle this compressed.

10 Apr 2026 8:04pm GMT

I have discovered and shared ~800 open source Rust CLI projects over the past 3 years.

03 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

All I wanted was to learn how to play guitar, but ended up building a DIY kit for it.

28 Mar 2026 12:00am GMT