fidzu : geek

Ford's upcoming $28,350 Fathom electric truck will include a built-in inverter capable of supplying up to 10 kW of AC power to a home, bringing bidirectional charging to a significantly cheaper EV. Owners will still need additional Ford home hardware for features like outage backup and peak-rate energy management, but the company expects the necessary equipment to cost substantially less than its previous-generation system. CNET reports: The upcoming Fathom will be based on what Ford calls its Universal EV Platform, designed with the aid of its 2023 acquisition, startup Auto Motive Power, with bidirectional power on the plate from the start. The hardware required to invert the battery's DC energy to an estimated 10 kW of AC home power will be built into the truck, so it won't require a separate wall-mounted inverter box. Ford says the Fathom's system will meet all applicable UL 1741 requirements and IEEE 1547 standards to ensure the vehicle is safely connected to the grid. As for the actual hardware you plug into your car, all signs point to the Fathom using the NACS plug type pioneered by Tesla and now widely adopted by new EVs in North America. In terms of the communication standard -- the one that governs how AC power is routed from the slim wall box to the car's onboard charger -- that'll be via SAE J3068, a software protocol developed for high-power, heavy-duty AC charging. [...] However, while Fathom's Universal EV Platform eliminates the need for a wall inverter box, it doesn't completely bypass the need for additional hardware to make your home ready to accept bidirectional power. Say you wanted to take advantage of the Home Power Management feature to draw energy into the Fathom's battery when power is cheapest, and then use that energy to offset peak-hour usage when power is most expensive. You'll have to install at least the Ford Home Power Station in your home, at an additional cost. The automaker hasn't specified pricing, but says that it's working to reduce costs and expects this component alone to cost half as much as the first-generation Ford Home Energy system, which debuted at around $1,300. That could put the new system at roughly $650.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

27 Oct 2026 11:00pm GMT

The DIA's threat assessment suggests China may soon place directed energy weapons in space.

27 Oct 2026 10:04pm GMT

Intel, Oracle, IBM and IonQ have joined a growing list of companies objecting to having tokenized versions of their shares traded through OKX and Intercontinental Exchange's blockchain venture, bringing the total number of objections to 26. About 37% of the companies on OKXICE's original list have now opted out, according to CoinDesk. From the report: The four companies were named in an updated public notice (PDF) dated Monday, Oct. 26, from OKXICE, the two firms' joint venture. They join earlier objectors including Microsoft, Alphabet, Goldman Sachs, Cisco and Wells Fargo. The growing list underscores a hurdle for OKXICE and the SEC's new framework for tokenized stock trading: building a market that issuers are willing to join. The agency's five-year "Innovation Exemption" gives qualifying venues room to test round-the-clock blockchain-based trading of stocks, and it also gives public companies an option to block their shares from being offered. OKXICE issued its initial public notice on Oct. 4, outlining plans to use Uniswap v4 liquidity pools on OKX's XLayer blockchain, with transactions settled in stablecoins. The venue would use automated market makers -- software that executes trades through pools of assets rather than matching buyers and sellers through a conventional order book. Under the framework, venues must notify issuers and give them 30 days to object before offering tokenized versions of their shares.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

27 Oct 2026 10:00pm GMT

Owners of AI-run firms would evade liability for "reckless" AI, US Rep. Comer says.

27 Oct 2026 9:50pm GMT

Seven potential AI nightmares pulled from Anthropic's 93-page "Risk Factor" tome.

27 Oct 2026 9:31pm GMT

Ars Technica's Dan Goodin reports: Defenders across the world face the burden of responding to yet another botched code-execution vulnerability, this time in boot-time firmware used by most of the world's server vendors and data centers. The vulnerability, with a severity rating of 9.5 out of 10, resides in the TianoCore EDK II, an open source codebase that hardware makers and cloud providers use to create the UEFI firmware that runs during the boot-up sequence. Last year, a representative of the UEFI Forum called (PDF) EDK2 the "preeminent solution / implementation of the UEFI specifications." Virtually all UEFI suppliers (sometimes still called IBVs or independent BIOS vendors), including AMI, Insyde, and Phoenix, use the reference code extensively. Project Mu, Microsoft's hardened EDK2 fork, used the code containing the vulnerable component as well. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2026-97631, is a memory-corruption flaw in an ICMP component that attackers can exploit to execute malicious code that runs before the operating system and firmware can implement defenses like Secure Boot, which establishes a chain of trust for all code, including the Trusted Platform Module (TPM), loaded during boot. While final payloads delivered by CVE-2026-97631 have no persistence -- meaning they run only once -- they can give attackers a wide opening to install other payloads that also run each time early in the boot process. The parties that discovered CVE-2026-97631 -- Alex Matrosov of Anthropic and Dan Holmes of Google -- had arranged for it to stay under wraps until a coordinated disclosure that was scheduled for January. AMI, a maker of motherboards and other hardware, published this pull request last month that detailed the vulnerability and included a code fix. Once the post came to the attention of the discovering parties, TianoCore Project members published a public advisory last week. With publicly available patch code, it will be trivial for advanced hackers to learn how the vulnerability is triggered and to build working exploits. Further compounding the urgency, patching UEFI code vulnerabilities in millions of end devices sold and used by thousands of hardware makers and cloud providers is cumbersome and time-consuming.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

27 Oct 2026 9:30pm GMT

What's the oldest Windows GUI application you can still run on Windows 11 today, without any modifications? For now, the best answer Boris Popik can come up with is an innocuous application from build 347 of Windows NT 3.1, an early prerelease: CDPLAYER.EXE. You can't go any older than that, because earlier prerelease builds had not yet finalised its PE format and calling convention. Neat find. Popik also mentions a few other contenders, but I won't spoil those here.

27 Oct 2026 12:14am GMT

Another month has crumbled to dust under the oppressive boots of time, so it's time for another month of Redox improvements. This past month, Redox' build system gained support for Clang, SDL2 saw performance improvements, and WebKitGTK3's HTML layout rendering was fixed. Users of Intel Tiger Lake processors can now enjoy external display hot-plugging, and overall system performance has been improved in a variety of ways. And as always, there's the long lists of kernel, relibc, and driver improvements and fixes as well. Redox keeps making big strides every month, and it's definitely one of the few alternative operating systems that actually feels like it might, one day, be an actual contender for general purpose use.

27 Oct 2026 12:06am GMT

Thew day ends in a Y, so Microsoft is launching a new way to build Windows applications. Get excited, Windows application developers! If you caught our session at Microsoft Build 2026 or you've been watching the repo, you've seen this one taking shape in public for a while now, and a lot has changed since Build. Here's the longer tour: Microsoft.UI.Reactor, an experimental C# framework that brings the MVU (Model-View-Update) pattern to WinUI desktop apps. No XAML files, no code-behind, no ViewModels. Two things before the fun part. Reactor is experimental: no support policy, no API guarantees, published this early on purpose because we'd rather hear we got the design wrong now than once people have shipped on it. And it is not a replacement for XAML or MVVM, which we'll come back to. ↫ Alexandre Zollinger Chohfi at Microsoft's Dev Blogs At multiple points in the linked blog post, Microsoft underlines that no, Reactor is not going to replace XAML. I'm sure Windows developers who learned Win32, Silverlight, WinRT XAML, WPF, UWP, WinUI 2 and 3, and all the others, over the past two decades will feel deeply comforted by Microsoft's insistence that Reactor will not replace XAML. Microsoft repeats: this won't replace XAML. They swear.

26 Oct 2026 11:57pm GMT

This is a story of how we got from something like this: Failed to deserialize BUILDINFO file: Parser failed with the following error: unknown ^ invalid makepkg build environment option expected `buildflags`, `ccache`, `check`, `color`, `distcc`, `sign`, `makeflags` To this: When the ALPM project started, the goal was fairly simple: Better tooling to interact with the low-level plumbing of Arch Linux Package Management (ALPM). This meant binaries to read/write individual file types, better error messages, extensive specifications and of course exports to common dataformats like JSON. The thing is, although some of us already had experience with low-level dataframe parsing, …

08 Oct 2026 12:00am GMT

Over the last few weeks, we have been doing research on the integration of our official distribution packages when installed on a target system. In this context we have been looking at the current uses of alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files and alpm-hooks(5) in around 120 package source repositories (alpm-source-repo(7)) to better understand the underlying functionality and use-cases these two integrations offer and target. In this article we are going to look at how these two systems work, how Arch Linux is currently using them and attempt to provide suggestions for when to use which. Learning about alpm-hooks(5) and alpm-install-scriptlet(5) files …

09 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT