fidzu : geek

Axios reports: Some of the world's largest music publishers filed a blockbuster lawsuit against Anthropic late Friday night, alleging "one of the largest and most blatant ongoing thefts of intellectual property in history." The suit is the opening salvo in what is now likely to be a yearslong fight over music, AI, and how intellectual property is protected in a new era of technology... The Sony/Warner lawsuit is notable because it's broad. It alleges Anthropic unlawfully trained its models off "tens of thousands" of music publishers' copyrighted compositions, whereas other lawsuits have focused on a narrower set of works. BMG's lawsuit against Anthropic, for example, claims infringement against 493 compositions. What they're saying: "Defendants Anthropic and its founders Dario Amodei and Benjamin Mann have conducted a brazen campaign of illegally torrenting, scraping, and downloading copyrighted works on a massive scale in order to develop, operate, and reap enormous profits from Anthropic's 'Claude' series of artificial intelligence ('AI') models," the plaintiffs write in the 48-page complaint. They also claim that Anthropic pirated thousands of copyrighted musical works... More details from The Verge: The companies are asking for up to $150,000 per work, plus up to $25,000 for each instance when identifiable copyright data was stripped. In total, the damages could amount to several billion dollars if a court finds in Sony and Warner's favor and awards the maximum amount... The suit alleges that Mann used BitTorrent to download over five million pirated books, and that employees downloaded at least two million more from Pirate Library Mirror. It also claims that Anthropic scraped lyrics from sites like MusixMatch and LyricFind, which paid to license content from the labels.

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29 Aug 2026 11:00pm GMT

The Los Angeles Times first calls Ridley Scott's newest movie "a postapocalyptic thriller that trades zombies for pandemics and asks whether hope can outlast catastrophe." But besides The Dog Stars, Scott is also working on an adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" starring Hugh Jackman, and is thinking about turning one of his past films into a musical. ("I can't tell you which one because they're being difficult.") The common theme, they suggest, is a director who allows his stories to "speak through evocative, immersive images rather than unnecessary exposition." The British director says it's because he got his start in advertising after attending the Royal College of Art in London. After 1982's neon-coated sci-fi thriller "Blade Runner," Scott notably made the iconic Apple Macintosh computer ad "1984," a memorable Orwellian-themed clip that contained suggestions of the dystopias that would continue to fascinate Scott in his filmmaking. "Advertising in England at that point became a competitive art form," he says, pointing to the notorious "Adland Five," a group of directors that included Hugh Hudson, Adrian Lyne, Alan Parker, Scott and his brother Tony. "I've got a show reel which is 50 years old which would entertain the s - out you. Hasn't aged at all. Our visual drive changed the face of how films looked." That's apparent in Scott's latest, "The Dog Stars" (in theaters Friday), a film about survival after the end of the world. It's based on Peter Heller's 2012 novel and set in Colorado 10 years in the future after an aggressive flu has decimated much of the population. Those remaining alive use any means necessary to stay that way, resulting in instability, brutality and, more hopefully, connection... These days, Scott develops movies with his production company, Scott Free, which he founded with his late brother Tony in 1995. Before that he says he struggled to find good scripts. And rarely has someone handed one to him. "I've only ever had three films land on my desk," he says. "One was 'Alien,' which I was fifth choice for after Robert Altman." He makes a face. "Can you imagine offering Robert Altman 'Alien'? How stupid can you get?" Another was 2015 space adventure "The Martian," which Scott says had been sitting on a shelf for two years before it was sent to him. Scott's grounded, semi-comedic take on Andy Weir's novel resulted in seven Oscar nominations. The third screenplay to materialize was "The Dog Stars." "I read it and I was blown away," Scott says. Deadline notes that Scott is already re-writing the third prequel to Alien, citing Scott's comments to French outlet AlloCiné. "The one that just came out [2024's Alien: Romulus] was OK. I think it needs some help. So, I've gone back in." Scott continued, "I've already got a footprint for the next Alien.... I'm picking up where we left off in Covenant with Micheal Fassbender, who now thinks he's Ozymandius." With the sequel bringing back Fassbender's futuristic AI droid, Scott sees an opportunity to explore the repercussions of artificial intelligence in our current world. "I like the fact that AI has gone off the rails," said Scott of where the character is at the end of Covenant. "If we go AI, the moment we discover it's off the rails is too late. It could switch every digital thing off in the world like that. You'd have fucking chaos. It's that kind of stuff that's scary." Scott tells the Los Angeles Times that the malfunctioning AI character fascinates him, and in the movie will be creating a "brave new world for himself... AIs can go off. And if they do, it's like a bomb..." So far, Scott says he hasn't implemented AI technologies into his filmmaking. He holds up his "Treasure Island" Ridleygrams [hand-drawn storyboards] and shakes them at the camera. "I can compete with an AI without any problem making images," he says. "But it's coming, inevitably." Scott was not involved in the forthcoming Prime Video series "Blade Runner 2099," out in November. "I can't blame my lawyers and my agents at that time, but somehow we let 'Blade Runner' go," he says. "And when you're not the author of the actual written word, you don't have a piece." (He was more involved in Noah Hawley's recent "Alien: Earth" series, which he calls "pretty damn good....") Does that mean he thinks about his legacy as a filmmaker? He does, but not often. "When you think of your legacy, you're too near the end," Scott says. "I'm not near the end." He looks up from his drawings. "I've had a riotous time," he says. He corrects himself: "I'm having a riotous time."

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29 Aug 2026 10:00pm GMT

CNN reports that "A one-time snip of a key gene lowered heart-clogging cholesterol by about 50% over an entire year with no adverse effects, scientists have reported." The overwhelmingly positive results were found in four people who had taken the highest dose of the experimental treatment during a pilot study published in The New England Journal of Medicine in November 2025. That study was extremely small - only 15 patients with dangerously high cholesterol that did not respond to medication. The research was designed to test the safety of five different doses of a gene-altering infusion delivered by CRISPR-Cas9, a biological scissor which cuts a targeted genetic location to modify or turn a gene on or off. "If you'd asked me 15 years ago if we could have done something like this, I would have thought you were crazy," senior study author Dr. Steven Nissen, chief academic officer of the Sydell and Arnold Miller Family Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute at Cleveland Clinic in Ohio, told CNN previously. An update on the study, published Friday in NEJM, appears to answer a key question: Does the intervention last? "Is something like this truly a one and done? That was always the question," said lead study author Dr. Luke Laffin, a preventive cardiologist at Cleveland Clinic's Heart, Vascular & Thoracic Institute. "This new data is essentially saying that the decreases in LDL cholesterol and triglycerides we saw at 60 days after treatment have lasted over a year," Laffin said. "In people who took the highest dose, the reduction seems durable and safe...." If larger clinical trials show similar results, the procedure could be a game changer for young people with severe disease, preventive cardiologist Dr. Ann Marie Navar, an associate professor of cardiology at UT Southwestern Medical Center in Dallas, told CNN previously. "If you're 20 and you have really high cholesterol, it may make a lot more sense to have a one-time treatment that doesn't require you to have to take a pill every single day or shot every two weeks for the next 60 years," said Navar, who was not involved in the study. "The potential for this is just enormous." Being born with this mutation naturally "drastically lowers or even eliminates a person's risk for heart disease," the article points out. And the study's senior author adds "now that CRISPR is here, we have the ability to change other people's genes so they too can have this protection."

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29 Aug 2026 9:00pm GMT

Testing 100 companies found privacy requests often led to confusion and dead ends.

29 Aug 2026 10:50am GMT

Kalshi can't evade Nevada gambling laws by calling bets "swaps," judges rule.

28 Aug 2026 10:14pm GMT

Cancellations have accelerated.

28 Aug 2026 9:33pm GMT

Virtually all laptop speakers suck. It's the one area where even really expensive laptops tend to fall on their ass, leaving users with a tinny, harsh, and hollow sound experience. While you can't exactly overcome physics - laptop speakers are necessarily small and thus just cannot ever sound as good as proper speakers - there's a lot you can do with proper tuning and software magic. If you're a desktop Linux user, you actually already possess all the plumbing needed to fix your audio; it's just not exposed to you in any way. Luckily, an application called EasyEffects allows you to actually make use of desktop Linux' advanced audio features to massively improve the sound quality of your laptop's speakers. EasyEffects' own description on its GitHub page doesn't really explain what it does or what it's capable of, so here's the description from Wikipedia instead. EasyEffects uses PipeWire to process incoming and outgoing audio streams independently and can apply various sound effects in the form of plug-ins made by different developer teams such as Calf Studio Gear, MDA.LV2 and GStreamer. All plugins have their own presets and can be applicable inside the suite rather than having to use a different mixer or executing a script from the command line. Available output effects are limiter, auto volume, compressor of dynamic range, filter, 30 bands parametric equalizer, bass enhancer, exciter, reverbation, crossfeed, delay, maximizer and spectrum analyzer. Available input effects are WebRTC, limiter, compressor, filter, equalizer, de-esser, reverbation, pitch shift and spectrum analyzer. ↫ EasEffects' Wikipedia page None of this matters, and you can forget everything from these two paragraphs. What matters is that using EasyEffects, you can tune the audio coming out of your speakers to make them sound a lot better. The few laptops on the market that do have decent audio - MacBooks, some Dell XPS laptops, and surely a few more - aren't magically defying physics. While they probably do have objectively higher-quality speakers, the main difference between those laptops and laptops with crappy-sounding speakers is that the former come with built-in tuning from the factory to make them sound much better than they would without any software trickery. If you know your way around audio, you can very much use EasyEffects and tune your laptop speakers from scratch to massively improve how they sound. However, that requires time, experience, knowledge, and expertise that most people lack, including myself. Lucky for us, though, there are countless downloadable presets out there for EasyEffects designed specifically to make laptops sound better. In an ideal world, you'd pick a preset created specifically for your laptop make and model, but odds are you won't find one, so for most laptops you'll have to settle for a generic preset that tries to do its best. I've long settled on the Advanced Auto Gain.json preset from JackHack96, which greatly improves the audio performance on any laptops I've tried it on, but of course, there's countless other presets for you to try to see if there's anything that suits your particular laptop and ears better. Getting all of this up and running is really easy. EasyEffects is most likely packaged by your Linux distribution, and the latest version is always available as a Flatpak from Flathub. Download the preset(s) you want to try, copy them either to ~/.config/easyeffects (if you use your distribution's package) or to ~/.var/app/com.github.wwmm.easyeffects/data/easyeffects/output/ (if you use the Flatpak version). They'll show up right away in the Presets tab in EasyEffects, ready to be turned on and off whenever you want, making it very easy to compare and contrast to find the one you like best. EasyEffects can live in your system tray giving you easy access to your presets without having to open the main window, and it can be set to start automatically at boot. EasyEffects can also be turned on and off on the fly. There's obvious downsides to all of this, too, of course. First, since you're most likely going to be using a generic preset not specifically crafted for your laptop, there's no guarantee the results will be positive for you. Second, not every preset is ideal for every type of audio. Most of my audio consists of YouTube videos with mostly speech; if you listen mostly to music, different presets may yield better results. Third, audio quality is deeply subjective, and what sounds good to my ears may sound like total garbage to yours. Fourth, EasyEffects does take up a tiny fraction of CPU power (I'm talking 0.1-0.2% according to KDE's System Monitor), but I have never seen it have any noticeable performance impact on anything. Even the generic preset I use makes such a massive difference for me on every laptop I've ever tried it on, that I've become convinced EasyEffects and a few of the generic presets should be installed by default by any desktop-oriented Linux distribution. On top of that, Linux laptops OEMs like System76, Nova Custom, Star Labs, and so on, should really take the time to create proper presets for their laptops to improve their sound quality out of the box. I feel like if you're already designing and selling laptops, you probably also have the skills and means to create a decent preset. In fact, I'd take it a step further and urge desktop environments like KDE and GNOME to properly integrate EasyEffects into their sound settings. They shouldn't include the entire application and its user interface, but should make it so that you can configure and manage presets right from the sound settings panels, and switch between presets from their volume applets (as well as turn it off entirely, of course). This would leave the full EasyEffects application for people who need more control, manual tuning, and more advanced features. There's absolutely no reason why speakers on Linux laptops should sound tinny, harsh, and hollow. The Linux desktop has all the technologies and features built right in to make speakers sound much better than they do without any tuning,

27 Aug 2026 8:18pm GMT

Built on a 2 nanometer technology node, the processor's design will contain 11 high-performance cores operating at more than 5.7 GHz, AI inference accelerators for in-transaction fraud detection, a dedicated on-chip data processing unit for I/O acceleration, and a large cache architecture for demanding enterprise workloads. The chip is architected to not contain separate Arm and IBM cores: each processor core can natively execute Arm and IBM Z, or Arm and LinuxONE, instructions concurrently while prioritizing the platform's established performance, security, encryption, and availability characteristics. IBM Z and LinuxONE platforms are capable of scaling to hundreds of cores and tens of terabytes of memory. ↫ IBM press release IBM is still doing some amazing chip architecture design. ServeTheHome has more details of how this works: A key choice here is that IBM implemented AArch64 in full hardware rather than through translation. This design uses a little-endian Arm implementation alongside big-endian z/Architecture, with AArch64 v9.3, SVE and SVE2 support, and 2,792 implemented AArch64 instructions. IBM also claims Arm SystemReady compliance, which matters for how much off-the-shelf Arm software this core can absorb. This is absolutely crazy technology. Arm software sees a native Arm processor. Arm runs unmodified, out-of-the-box, and onto a standard Arm platform. IBM said the 2792 AArch64 instructions are more than twice the Z instructions. IBM made a funny quip about "reduced" in RISC. ↫ Patrick Kennedy at ServeTheHome This is bonkers technology. We can only dream of this ever serving a home.

27 Aug 2026 2:30pm GMT

It's always a special day on OSNews when Haiku has a new release. While OSNews was founded in 1997, it wasn't until 2001, when Eugenia took over and relaunched the site, that we really got going. Eugenia came from BeNews, a popular BeOS news website, which shut down in the wake of Be, Inc's infamous "focus shift" away from BeOS as a general purpose desktop operating system. BeOS continues to have a special place on OSNews ever since. Today marks the release of Haiku R1/beta6, the first official Haiku release in two years. As such, this new beta covers a monumental amount of progress since beta5, progress I've reported on diligently. The highlights of this new beta include a port of Firefox (including branding) and many of its forks, much improve support for Qemu, a new memory allocated largely based on the one from OpenBSD, and improved support for various filesystems. Of course, there's a massive list of performance improvements, memory management changes, as well as a truly massive number of new application ports. It's important to note, as I usually do, that while these Haiku beta releases serve as patches of calm in rough seas, Haiku is generally stable and capable enough that using the project's nightly releases is usually a totally acceptable way of installing and running the operating system. If you're not comfortable running nightly releases, however, and haven't tried Haiku since the previous beta, you're in for a massive overall improvement. Everybody loves Haiku.

27 Aug 2026 11:31am 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

This is just a short note on my blog that I have resigned from Arch Linux a package maintainer, developer and security team. I've spent around 10 years as an AUR maintainer, security team, Package Maintainer and then Developer. I implemented support for debug packages, did the initial POC work that would become the git migration and even somehow managed to pull of an online conference during The Plague with the help of others.

01 Aug 2026 12:00am GMT

Good morning from JetBrains Berlin office!

01 Jun 2026 12:00am GMT