fidzu : geek

This week Raspberry Pi saw its stock price surge more than 60% above its early-February low (before giving up some gains at the end of the week). Reuters notes the rise started when CEO Eben Upton bought 13,224 pounds worth of shares - but there could be another reason. "The rally in the roughly $800 million company has materialised alongside social-media buzz that demand for its single-board computers could pick up as people buy them to run AI agents such as OpenClaw." The Register explains: The catalyst appears to have been the sudden realization by one X user, "aleabitoreddit," that the agentic AI hand grenade known as OpenClaw could drive demand for Raspberry Pis the way it had for Apple Mac Minis. The viral AI personal assistant, formerly known as Clawdbot and Moltbot, has dominated the feeds of AI boosters over the past few weeks for its ability to perform everyday tasks like sending emails, managing calendars, booking appointments, and complaining about their meatbag masters on the purportedly all-agent forum known as MoltBook... In case it needs to be said, no one should be running this thing on their personal devices lest the agent accidentally leak your most personal and sensitive secrets to the web... In this context, a cheap low-power device like a Raspberry Pi makes a certain kind of sense as a safer, saner way to poke the robo-lobster... The Register argues Raspberry Pis aren't as cheap as they used to be "thanks in part to the global memory crunch. Today, a top-specced Raspberry Pi 5 with 16GB of memory will set you back more than $200, up from $120 a year ago." "You know what's cheaper, easier, and more secure than letting OpenClaw loose on your local area network? A virtual private cloud..."

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23 Feb 2026 2:34am GMT

Russia's domestic intelligence agency claimed Saturday that Ukraine can obtain sensitive information from troops using the Telegram app on the front line, reports Bloomberg. The fact that the claims were made through Russia's state-operated news outlet RIA Novosti signals "tightening scrutiny over a platform used by millions of Russians," Bloomberg notes, as the Kremlin continues efforts to "push people to use a new state-backed alternative." Russia's communications watchdog limited access to Telegram - a popular messaging app owned by Russian-born billionaire Pavel Durov - over a week ago for failing to comply with Russian laws requiring personal data to be stored locally. Voice and video calls were blocked via Telegram in August. The pressure is the latest move in a long-running campaign to promote what the Kremlin calls a sovereign internet that's led to blocks on YouTube, Instagram and WhatsApp... Foreign intelligence services are able to see Russia's military messages in Telegram too, Russia's Minister for digital development, Maksut Shadaev, said on Wednesday, although he added that Russia will not block access to Telegram for troops for now. Telegram responded at the time that no breaches of the app's encryption have ever been found. "The Russian government's allegation that our encryption has been compromised is a deliberate fabrication intended to justify outlawing Telegram and forcing citizens onto a state-controlled messaging platform engineered for mass surveillance and censorship," it said in an emailed response.

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22 Feb 2026 11:45pm GMT

Fossil fuels produce NO2, which is linked to asthma attacks, bronchitis, and higher risks of heart disease and stroke, according the EV news site Electrek. But the nonprofit news site Grist.org notes a new analysis showing that those emissions decreased by 1.1% for every increase of 200 electric vehicles - across nearly 1,700 ZIP codes. "A pretty small addition of cars at the ZIP code level led to a decline in air pollution," said Sandrah Eckel, a public health professor at the University of Southern California's Keck School of Medicine and lead author of the study. "It's remarkable." The study was done at the University of Southern California's medical school, by researchers using high-resolution satellite data, reports Electrek: The study, just published in The Lancet Planetary Health and partly funded by the National Institutes of Health, adds rare real-world evidence to a claim that's often taken for granted - that EVs don't just cut carbon over time, they also improve local air quality right now... The researchers ran multiple checks to make sure the trend wasn't driven by unrelated factors. They accounted for pandemic-era changes by excluding 2020 in some analyses and controlling for gas prices and work-from-home patterns. They also saw the expected counterexample: neighborhoods that added more gas-powered vehicles experienced increases in pollution. The findings were then replicated using updated ground-level air monitoring data dating back to 2012... Next, the researchers plan to compare EV adoption with asthma-related emergency room visits and hospitalizations. If those trends line up, it could provide some of the clearest evidence yet of what we already know: that electrifying transportation doesn't just clean the air on paper; it improves public health in practice. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader jhoegl for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

22 Feb 2026 10:34pm GMT

Is the global atmospheric commons destined to be an industrial waste dumping ground?

22 Feb 2026 11:20am GMT

"Accessing and remediating any of these issues can only be performed in the VAB."

21 Feb 2026 11:54pm GMT

The regular, consumer version of Windows 10 isn't the only Windows release reaching or having reached end-of-life, now middling on under the Extended Security Updates program for the many people sticking with the venerable release. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 (October 13, 2026), Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB (October 13, 2026), and Windows Server 2016 (January 12, 2027) are all reaching end-of-life soon, too. On the listed dates, these versions of Windows will receive their final monthly security updates. As with Windows 10 for consumers, however, there's a way out: the Extended Security Updates program will also kick in for these versions, offering critical and important security updates, and support relating to just those. The program will be offered for up to three years after official support ends, and won't be free. For Server 2016 and and Enterprise LTSB 2016, pricing will be $61 per year, but it would double for every year after the first. Pricing for IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB is available upon request. Of course, Microsoft urges you to upgrade to newer versions - Windows Server 2025, Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024, and Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 - but if you're happy with your current version, you can at least get a three-year reprieve, for a price.

21 Feb 2026 1:59pm GMT

Like rocks, egg shells can trap isotopes, allowing us to use them to date samples.

21 Feb 2026 1:00pm GMT

Despite continuous rumors to the contrary, Oracle is still actively developing Solaris, and it's been more active than ever lately. Yesterday, the company pushed out another release for customers with the proper support contracts: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90. Aside from the various package updates to bring them up to speed with the latest releases, this new Solaris version also comes with a slew of improvements for ZFS. ZFS changes in Oracle Solaris 11.4.90 include more flexibility in setting retention properties when receiving a new file system, and adding the ability for zfs scrub and resilver to run before all the blocks have been freed from previous zfs destroy operations. (This requires upgrading pools to the new zpool version 54.) ↫ Alan Coopersmith You can now also set boot environments to never be destroyed by either manual or automatic means, and more work has been done to prevent a specific type of bug that would accidentally kill all running processes on the system. It seems some programs mistakenly use -1 as a pid value in kill() calls. Now in 11.4.90, the kill system call was modified to not allow processes to use a pid of -1 unless they'd specifically set a process flag that they intend to kill all processes first, to help with programs that didn't check for errors when finding the process id for the singular process they wanted to kill. ↫ Alan Coopersmith There's many more changes and improvements, of course, and hopefully, we'll get to see these in the next CBE release as well, so us mere mortals without expensive support contracts can benefit from them too.

21 Feb 2026 12:09pm GMT

I was trading New Year's resolutions with a circle of friends a few weeks ago, and someone mentioned a big one: sleeping better. I'm a visual neuroscientist by training, so whenever the topic pops up it inevitably leads to talking about the dreaded blue light from monitors, blue light filters, and whether they do anything. My short answer is no, blue light filters don't work, but there are many more useful things that someone can do to control their light intake to improve their sleep-and minimize jet lag when they're traveling. My longer answer is usually a half-hour rant about why they don't work, covering everything from a tiny nucleus of cells above the optic chiasm, to people living in caves without direct access to sunlight, to neuropeptides, the different cones, how monitors work, gamma curves, what I learned running ismy.blue, corn bulbs, melatonin, finally sharing my Apple Watch & WHOOP stats. What follows is slightly more than you needed to know about blue light filters and more effective ways to control your circadian rhythm. Spoiler: the real lever is total luminance, not color. ↫ Patrick Mineault And yet, despite a complete and utter lack of evidence blue-light filters do anything at all, even the largest technology companies in the world peddle them without so much as blinking an eye. It's pure quackery, and as always, we let them get away with it.

21 Feb 2026 7:33am 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