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Apple has reportedly asked Google to look into "seting up servers" for a Gemini-powered upgrade to Siri that meets Apple's privacy standards. The Verge reports: Apple had already announced in January that Google's Gemini AI models would help power the upgraded version of Siri it delayed last year, but The Information's report indicates Apple might lean even more on Google so it can catch up in AI. The original partnership announcement said that "the next generation of Apple Foundation Models will be based on Google's Gemini models and cloud technology," and that the models would "help power future Apple Intelligence features," including "a more personalized Siri." While the announcement noted that Apple Intelligence would "continue to run on Apple devices and Private Cloud Compute," it didn't specify if the new Siri would run on Google's cloud. Apple's Private Cloud Compute is not only underpowered but it's also underutilized in its current state, notes 9to5Mac, "with the company only using about 10% of its capacity on average, leading to some already-manufactured Apple servers to be sitting dormant on warehouse shelves."

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02 Mar 2026 11:00pm GMT

Have you bought and set up a new phone for someone else lately, especially someone less technologically savvy? It's a bit of a nightmare, with an endless list of confusing steps and dark patterns trying to trick you into signing up for all kinds of services. Joel Chrono (he took his username from the best game ever made) just went through this experience, with new Samsung phones for his parents, and it wasn't great. Without me, my parents would have ended up creating at least one extra Samsung account. Cloud services like OneDrive or Google Photos would be sucking up files and copying them to their servers, getting filled up with the data and then asking them to subscribe to unlock more storage a couple of months down the line. Left on their own, my parents may be seeing ads popping up constantly in OneUI, as well as browsing the web without an adblocker, they would be using default applications that don't work as reliably, that track whatever they do to a certain degree. And of course, all of those AI assistants would be listening in in the background. It really is a nightmare out there, and it's not only affecting my parents, it affects all of those unaware of the dangers that these practices bring. It's a mess all around. ↫ Joel Chrono In this particular case it involves Samsung phones, but the same applies to phones from other brands and even with other operating systems. Do you want to login with these accounts? Please add your credit card and all your personal information! Set up tap-to-pay so we can see where you buy what! Do you want to subscribe to our music service? Do you want access to our streaming service? What about the premium versions? Need more online storage? You're only getting 5GB for free, so if you don't want to lose those priceless pictures of your grand kids you should really upgrade to 1TB! Have you checked out our application store yet? And don't worry, if you say no to any of these questions we'll keep pestering you about them with notifications, fullscreen interstitials and banners in the settings application until your brain dissolves to mush! I have a collection of about a million PDAs, from the early days up until the very fanciest models from right around when the iPhone and Android started taking off. Of course, they're in storage so virtually always out of battery, but when I do turn any of them on, their onboarding process couldn't be simpler. Tap a few locations on the screen to calibrate the touch layer, set the date and time, and that's it - you're at the home screen ready to go. I wish modern smartphones were similar. I wish the greedy bean counters were told to pound sand and the user interface specialists took over again. My wife and I have two young boys, 3 and almost 5. One day, I'll be the out-of-touch dad or grandpa and I'll need their help to set up my brain implant chip or whatever. I hope it won't involve upsells for streaming services.

02 Mar 2026 10:51pm GMT

Paramount Skydance plans to combine HBO Max and Paramount+ into a single streaming platform following its acquisition of Warner Bros. Discovery. "As we said, we do plan to put the two services together, which today gives us a little over 200 million direct-to-consumer subscribers," said David Ellison, the company's CEO. "We think that really positions us to compete with the leaders in the space." The deal still needs regulatory approval. The Washington Post reports: He added that Paramount didn't want to make changes to the HBO brand. "Our viewpoint is HBO should stay HBO," Ellison said, noting that his favorite HBO product is "Game of Thrones." If Justice Department regulators allow the deal to go through, it would place recent HBO Max hits, such as "The Pitt" and "A Knight of the Seven Kingdoms," alongside Paramount offerings including "South Park" and "Yellowstone." "They built a phenomenal brand," he said. "They are a leader in the space, and we just want them to continue doing more of it." The deal to buy Warner Bros., valued at about $110 billion, will almost surely attract regulatory scrutiny from the Justice Department because -- without divestments -- it places major swaths of the film, television and news industries under one roof: Warner Bros. and Paramount studios, HBO Max and Paramount+, and CBS and CNN would all have the same parent company. Ellison expressed confidence on the call that the deal wouldn't face hurdles with regulators.

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02 Mar 2026 10:00pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Charter Communications, operator of the Spectrum cable brand, has obtained Federal Communications Commission permission to buy Cox and surpass Comcast as the country's largest home Internet service provider. Charter has 29.7 million residential and business Internet customers compared to Comcast's 31.26 million. Buying Cox will give Charter another 5.9 million Internet customers. The FCC approved the deal on Friday, but the companies still need Justice Department approval and sign-offs from states including California and New York. Opponents of Charter's $34.5 billion acquisition told the FCC that eliminating Cox as an independent entity will make it easier for Charter and Comcast to raise prices. But the FCC dismissed those concerns on the grounds that Charter and Cox don't compete directly against each other in the vast majority of their territories. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr's primary demand from companies seeking to merge has been to eliminate diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) programs and policies. In a press release (PDF), the Carr-led FCC said that "Charter has committed to new safeguards to protect against DEI discrimination," and that Charter's network-expansion plans will bring "faster broadband and lower prices" to rural areas. The merger was approved one day after Charter sent a letter to Carr outlining its actions to end DEI. Charter offers broadband and cable service in 41 states, while Cox does so in 18 states.

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02 Mar 2026 9:00pm GMT

Microsoft is pushing "AI" hard in Windows, Office, and in their other products, and it's earned them a cute new nickname: Microslop. It turns out the company really doesn't like it when you use this nickname, however, and its official Copilot Discord server - yes, there is an official one - has gone into a complete meltdown over people using the nickname. First the company started banning the word "Microslop" in its Discord server, but after people started circumventing the ban with alternative spellings. That's when all hell broke loose. What started as a simple keyword filter quickly snowballed into users deliberately testing the restriction and posting variations of the blocked term. Accounts that included "Microslop" in their messages first got banned from messaging again. Not long after, access to parts of the server was restricted, with message history hidden and posting permissions disabled for many users. ↫ Abhijith M B at Windows Latest People don't like "AI". They don't like being forced to use it at work, they don't like it shoved in their face in their operating systems, they don't like every new product being plastered with nonsensical "AI" marketing. It's absolutely no surprise that one of the companies pushing "AI" in the most visible way, a company few people like anyway, gets a nice new nickname. I love that this happened. I hope their brand suffers as much as possible.

02 Mar 2026 8:17pm GMT

FCC rejects protests because Charter and Cox don't compete directly in most places.

02 Mar 2026 6:19pm GMT

Though the rules are among the strictest in the US, locals say they aren't enough.

02 Mar 2026 3:34pm GMT

Unexpected RAM upgrade is the highlight of an otherwise straightforward refresh.

02 Mar 2026 3:06pm GMT

If you're following KDE Plasma development, you've most likely run into something called Union, a project KDE is working on to unify their various ways of theming their applications. The problem KDE is facing right now is that after so many decades of development and changes in how people want to develop applications, they ended up with various different ways of writing applications, each with their own theming method. The end result has been that for a while now, theming on KDE is kind of broken. Broken in what way? Most long-time KDE users will be aware that ever since KDE 4, the KDE shell (Plasma using SVG for theming) and KDE applications (QtWidgets using QStyle for theming) use separate theme engines. While this has always been annoying, it's at least manageable in that most theme designers tended to create both a Plasma SVG theme and a QStyle theme that matched. However, things got more complicated when KDE introduced QtQuick, its modern way of creating applications with QML. QtQuick has its own theme, qqc2-desktop-style, to make QtQuick applications look and feel like Breeze, KDE's current theme. Not only do all of these have to be kept in sync manually, QtQuick applications also do not properly inherit all the elements of the QStyle theme you set, leading to many modern KDE applications looking broken when using a non-default theme (and the same applies when using Kvantum; it also cannot properly theme QtQuick applications). In other words, there is currently no way to theme the entire KDE desktop for a consistent look, and if you try, many applications will simply look broken. Union is KDE's answer to this set of problems. Union is a new style engine that takes CSS and processes it into consistent themes for both QtWidget and QtQuick applications. It's quite flexible, and can potentially even be extended to generate GTK themes from that same CSS. Sadly, since the KDE Pasma shell SVG stuff is entirely different, it won't be styled by Union, but KDE might simply retire the SVG stuff entirely and move the Plasma shell to QtQuick's qqc2-desktop-style to address that issue. Union has been in development for a long time, as it's a difficult effort, but progress is definitely being made. KDE is currently already at the stage where they're adapting the current Breeze QStyle to better match the Union Breeze's style, to make the future transition from the separate QStyle/qqc2-desktop-style to the unified, single Union Breeze as seamless as possible. These changes are currently available for testing in the master branch, and will be part of Plasma 6.7 or 6.8. As a KDE user who likes to have a more classic, late '90s theme, but who also values consistency above all else, Union is something I'm very much looking forward to. While it certainly won't fix every single issue right away, it will definitely address the biggest issues with theming on KDE. I'm incredibly happy that KDE's developers still consider theming and user choice and agency over what pixels appear on their screen important enough to undertake an effort like Union.

02 Mar 2026 1:44pm 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