fidzu : geek

The GNOME team has released GNOME 50, the latest version of what is probably the most popular open source desktop environment. It brings fine-grained parental controls, and the groundwork for web filtering so that in future releases, parents and guardians can set content filters for children. Our own kids are still way too young to have access to computers and the internet, but I'm not sure I'll ever resort to these kinds of tools when the time comes. I didn't have any such controls imposed upon me as a child on the early internet, but then, you can't really compare the '90s internet to that of today. The Orca screen reader received a lot of attention in GNOME 50, with a new preference window, both global and per-application settings, and much more. There's also a brand new reduced motion setting, which will tame the animations in the user interface. Document annotation has been overhauled and modernised, and the file manager has been optimised across the board for better performance and lower memory usage. Remote Desktop also saw a lot of work in GNOME 50. It's now hardware-accelerated using VA-API and Vulkan, and thanks to HiDPI support, the session will properly adapt to the screen being used. Kerberos Authentication support has been added, and you can now use the remote webcam locally. There's way more here, like improved support for variable-refresh rates and fractional scaling, HDR screen sharing, fixes for weird NVIDIA driver nonsense, and much, much more. As always, GNOME 50 will find its way to your distribution soon enough.

18 Mar 2026 10:23pm GMT

Remember when it was fun to play around with LLMs?

18 Mar 2026 10:06pm GMT

With today's latest Stitch updates, Google is trying to make "vibe design" happen, reports The Verge's Jay Peters. The AI-native design platform encourages users to describe goals, feelings, or inspiration in "natural language," rather than starting with traditional blueprints. In a blog post, Google Labs Product Manager Rustin Banks says that Stitch can turn those inputs into interactive prototypes, automatically map user flows, and support real-time iteration. It introduces voice capabilities that allow users to "speak directly to [the] canvas" for feedback or changes. Tools like DESIGN.md also help users create reusable design systems across various projects.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Mar 2026 10:00pm GMT

Planned EU ban on nudify apps would likely force Musk to make Grok less "spicy."

18 Mar 2026 9:32pm GMT

PosrtmarketOS, the Linux 'distribution' for mobile devices, now also has an immutable variant, called Duranium. Duranium is an immutable variant of postmarketOS, built around the idea that your device should just work, and keep working. You shouldn't need to know what a terminal is to keep your device running. "Immutable" means the core operating system is read-only and can't be modified while it's running. System updates are applied as complete, verified images rather than individual packages. Either the new image works, or the system falls back to the previous one automatically. No partially-applied state. No debugging audio when you need to make a phone call and no fussing with a broken web browser when you just want to doomscroll cat photos. It also means developers can reproduce the exact state of a user's device, making it much easier to track down and fix issues. ↫ Clayton Craft on the postmarketOS blog Duranium is built around the various functionalities and tooling provided by systemd, meaning the project didn't have to reinvent the wheel. It works similarly to other immutable distributions, in that images for the base are downloaded and installed as a whole, with the preferred application installation method being Flatpak. Security-wise, Duranium uses dm-verity to protect /usr, cryptographically verifying data as it's read. The image simply won't boot if anything's been tampered with. LUKS2 is used to encrypt mutable user and operating system data and configuration on the root file system. Duranium is still under heavy development, but it makes sense to implement something like this now, since in the world of mobile devices, this has become the norm. I'm glad postmarketOS is taking these steps, and I sincerely hope I'll eventually be able to use a postmarketOS device with KDE's Plasma mobile shell at some point in the near future in my day-to-day life. This requires both postmarketOS to improve as well as for the regulatory landscape to break the duopoly on banking and government applications held by Android and iOS, and with the state of the US government as it is, this might actually be something Europe's interested in achieving.

18 Mar 2026 9:14pm GMT

Department of Energy's attempts to prop up coal can look pretty pointless.

18 Mar 2026 9:10pm GMT

DOS didn't have sudo yet. This gross oversight has been addressed. SUDO examines the environment for the COMSPEC variable to find the default command interpreter, falling back to C:\COMMAND.COM if not set. The interpreter is then executed in unprotected real mode for full privileges. ↫ SUDO for DOS' Codeberg page A vital tool, for sure.

18 Mar 2026 9:01pm GMT

Longtime Slashdot reader UnknowingFool writes: Users of Samsung PCs are reporting the inability to access the C: drive after the Windows 11 February update. The bug seems to be in connection with the Samsung Galaxy Connect app, which allows Samsung phones and tablets to connect to Windows machines. [A previous stable version of the app has been re-released to prevent this problem from spreading.] This parody explains the situation with humor. The issue stems from update KB5077181 and is impacting Samsung PCs running Windows 11 25H2 or 24H2. Microsoft and Samsung have confirmed the issue and published a workaround, but as PCWorld notes, it will take some time. The workaround "requires removing the Samsung application, then asking Windows to repair the drive permissions and assigning a new owner, then restoring the Windows default permissions, including patching in some custom code that Microsoft wrote."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Mar 2026 9:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Britain plans to consider requiring labels on AI-generated content to protect consumers from disinformation and deepfakes, the government said on Wednesday, as it outlined other areas of focus to tackle the evolving global challenge. Technology minister Liz Kendall stressed the need to strike the right balance between protecting the creative industries and allowing the AI sector to innovate, saying in a statement that the government would take time to "get this right." The next phase of the government's work on copyright and AI would also look at the harms posed by digital replicas without consent, ways for creators to control their work online and support for independent creative organizations, she said. [...] Louise Popple, a copyright expert at law firm Taylor Wessing, noted that the government had not ruled out a broad exception that would allow AI developers to train on copyright works. "That's a subtle difference of approach and could be interpreted to mean that everything is still up for grabs" she said. "It feels very much like the hard issues are being kicked down the road by the government." In 2024, Britain proposed easing copyright rules to let developers train models on lawfully accessed material, with creators able to reserve their rights. On Wednesday, Kendall said that having engaged with creatives, AI firms, industry bodies, unions and academics, the government had concluded it "no longer has a preferred option." "We will help creatives control how their work is used. This sits at the heart of our ambition for creatives - including independent and smaller creative organizations -- to be paid fairly," she said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

18 Mar 2026 8:00pm 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