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EU regulators say Google's Play Store changes still don't meet fairness rules and are preparing a potentially hefty 2026 fine unless Google makes deeper concessions. Reuters reports: Google Play has been in the European Commission's crosshairs since March, with regulators singling out technical restrictions preventing app developers from steering users to other channels for cheaper offers. Another issue is the service fee charged by Google for facilitating an app developer's initial acquisition of a new customer via Google Play which the regulator said goes beyond what is justified. Tweaks to Google Play announced in August to make it easier for app developers to direct customers to other channels and choose a fee model are still falling short, the people said, with the EU antitrust regulator viewing Apple's recent changes to its App Store as a benchmark. [...] Google can still offer to make more changes before regulators impose a fine, likely in the first quarter of the next year, the people said, adding that the timing of any sanction can still change. "We continue to work closely with the European Commission in its ongoing investigation but have serious concerns that further changes would put Android and Play users at risk of malware, scams and data theft. Unlike iOS, Android is already open by design," a Google spokesperson said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

11 Dec 2025 12:10am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: On Tuesday, India's Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade released a proposed framework that would give AI companies access to all copyrighted works for training in exchange for paying royalties to a new collecting body composed of rights-holding organizations, with payments then distributed to creators. The proposal argues that this "mandatory blanket license" would lower compliance costs for AI firms while ensuring that writers, musicians, artists, and other rights holders are compensated when their work is scraped to train commercial models. [...] The eight-member committee, formed by the Indian government in late April, argues the system would avoid years of legal uncertainty while ensuring creators are compensated from the outset. Defending the system, the committee says in a 125-page submission (PDF) that a blanket license "aims to provide an easy access to content for AI developers reduce transaction costs [and] ensure fair compensation for rightsholders," calling it the least burdensome way to manage large-scale AI training. The submission adds that the single collecting body would function as a "single window," eliminating the need for individual negotiations and enabling royalties to flow to both registered and unregistered creators.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Dec 2025 11:30pm GMT

"Much of the AI race comes down to amassing and deploying assets."

10 Dec 2025 11:16pm GMT

Qualcomm has acquired RISC-V startup Ventana to strengthen its CPU ambitions beyond mobile, "reinforcing its commitment and leadership in the development of the RISC-V standard and ecosystem," the company said in a press release. CRN Magazine reports: The San Diego-based company said Ventana's expertise in RISC-V, a free and open alternative to the Arm and x86 instruction set architectures, will enhance its CPU engineering capabilities and complement "existing efforts to develop custom Oryon CPU technology." Financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Qualcomm, which has already been using RISC-V for some products outside the PC and server markets, said Ventana's contributions will boost its "technology leadership in the AI era across all businesses," indicating the broad impact expected by this acquisition. "We believe the RISC-V instruction set architecture has the potential to advance the frontier on CPU technology, enabling innovation across products," Durga Malladi, executive vice president and general manager of technology planning, edge solutions and data center for Qualcomm, said in a statement. "The acquisition of Ventana Micro Systems marks a pivotal step in our journey to deliver industry-leading RISC-V-based CPU technology across products." Further reading: Qualcomm Is Buying Arduino, Releases New Raspberry Pi-Esque Arduino Board

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

10 Dec 2025 10:50pm GMT

I have some potentially devastating news for POWER users interested in using FreeBSD, uncovered late last month by none other than Cameron Kaiser. FreeBSD is considering retiring powerpc64 prior to branching 16, which would make FreeBSD 15 the last stable version to support the architecture. (32-bit PowerPC is already dropped as of FreeBSD 14, though both OpenBSD and NetBSD generally serve this use case, and myself I have a Mac mini G4 running a custom NetBSD kernel with code from FreeBSD for automatic restart.) Although the message says "powerpc64 and powerpc64le" it later on only makes specific reference to the big-endian port, whereas both endiannesses appear on the FreeBSD platform page and on the download server. ↫ Cameron Kaiser There's two POWER9 systems in my office, so this obviously makes me quite sad. At the same time, though, it's hard not to understand any possible decision to drop powerpc64/powerpc64le at this point in time. Raptor's excellent POWER9 systems - the Blackbird, which I reviewed a few years ago, and the Talos II, which I also have - are very long in the tooth at this point and still quite expensive, and thanks to IBM royally screwing up POWER10, we never got any timely successors. There were rumblings about a possible POWER11-based successor from Raptor back in July 2025, but it's been quiet on that front since. In other words, there are no modern powerpc64 and powerpc64le systems available. POWER10 and brand new POWER11 hardware are strictly IBM and incredibly expensive, so unless IBM makes some sort of generous donation to the FreeBSD Foundation, I honestly don't know how FreeBSD is supposed to keep their powerpc64 and powerpc64le ports up-to-date with the latest generation of POWER hardware in the first place. It's important to note that no final decision has been made yet, and since that initial report by Kaiser, several people have chimed in to argue the case that at least powerpc64le (the little endian variant) should remain properly supported. In fact, Timothy Pearson from Raptor Engineering stepped up the place, and stated he's willing to take over maintainership of the port, as Raptor has been contributing to it for years anyway. Raptor remains committed to the architecture as a whole, and we have resources to assist with development. In fact, we sponsor several FreeBSD build machines already in our cloud environment, and have kernel developers working on expanding and maintaining the FreeBSD codebase. If there is any concern regarding hardware availability or developer resources, Raptor is willing and able to assist. ↫ Timothy Pearson Whatever decision the FreeBSD project makes, the Linux world will be fine for a while yet as IBM contributes to its development, and popular distributions still consider POWER a primary target. However, unless either IBM moves POWER hardware downmarket (extremely unlikely) or the rumours around Raptor have merit, I think at least the FreeBSD powerpc64 (big endian) port is done for, with the powerpc64le port hopefully being saved by people hearing these alarm bells.

10 Dec 2025 9:41pm GMT

NPR and PBS stations targeted by group involved in Carr's news-distortion probes.

10 Dec 2025 9:05pm GMT

Secretary of State Marco Rubio waded into the surprisingly fraught politics of typefaces on Tuesday with an order halting the State Department's official use of Calibri, reversing a 2023 Biden-era directive that Mr. Rubio called a "wasteful" sop to diversity. While mostly framed as a matter of clarity and formality in presentation, Mr. Rubio's directive to all diplomatic posts around the world blamed "radical" diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility programs for what he said was a misguided and ineffective switch from the serif typeface Times New Roman to sans serif Calibri in official department paperwork. ↫ Michael Crowley and Hamed Aleaziz at The New York Times

10 Dec 2025 8:43pm GMT

Devstral 2 model scores 72% on industry benchmark, nearing proprietary rivals.

10 Dec 2025 8:38pm GMT

If you're old enough, you no doubt remember that up until the 2.6.0 release of the Linux kernel, an odd number after the first version number indicated a pre-release, development version of the kernel. Even though this scheme was abandoned with the 2.6.0 release in 2003 and since then every single release has been a stable release, it seems the ghosts of this old versioning scheme still roam the halls, because prominent Linux kernel developer Greg Kroah-Hartman just published an explainer about Linux kernel versions. Despite having a stable release model and cadence since December 2003, Linux kernel version numbers seem to baffle and confuse those that run across them, causing numerous groups to mistakenly make versioning statements that are flat out false. So let's go into how this all works in detail. ↫ Greg Kroah-Hartman I genuinely find it difficult to imagine what could possibly be unclear about Linux kernel version numbers. The Linux kernel uses a very generic major.minor scheme, but that's not where the problems lie - it's the actual development process of each of these numbered release that's a bit more complex. This is where we have to talk about things like the roughly 10-week release cycle, containing a 2-week merge window, as well as Torvalds handing off the stable branch to the stable kernel maintainers. The other oddity is when the major version number gets incremented - the first number in the version number. There's no real method to this, as Kroah-Hartman admits Torvalds increments this number whenever the remaining numbers get too high and unwieldy to deal with. Very practical, but it does mean that going from, say, 5.x to 6.x doesn't really imply there's any changes in there that are any bigger or more disruptive than when going from 6.8.x to 6.9.x or whatever. There's a few more important details in here, of course, like where LTS releases come from, but that's really it - nothing particularly groundbreaking or confusing.

09 Dec 2025 8:43pm 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