geek

23 Jun 2026

Slashdot

Walmart, In Biggest Deal In Two Years, Buys Advertising Tech Firm Vibe.co

Walmart is acquiring self-serve connected-TV ad platform Vibe.co for a reported $1.4 billion, adding it to an advertising ecosystem that already includes smart-TV maker Vizio. AdExchanger reports: On Tuesday, Walmart announced that it is buying Vibe.co, the French self-serve ad platform that specializes in helping small brands buy streaming commercials with similar ease and precision as they get from search and social. Vibe has been vying for a bigger share of the ad dollars moving to connected TV, especially in the US, as evidenced by the company's ubiquitous billboards in major cities including New York and San Francisco. Now, Vibe joins Walmart Connect's commerce ecosystem alongside the smart TV maker Vizio. And Vibe's tech is poised to help unify Walmart's growing CTV footprint with the closed-loop attribution provided by its retail sales data. [...] Together, Walmart and Vibe.co strive to "build the best ecosystem for the performance TV market," Vibe CEO and Co-Founder Arthur Querou told AdExchanger. Performance CTV has a high ceiling for growth. The performance budgets dedicated for streaming platforms are still small potatoes compared to search and social, Querou said. Only one-quarter of CTV ad campaigns have lower-funnel objectives, and that number has been static for years, according to data from Advertiser Perceptions. Now that Walmart owns both Vibe and Vizio, advertisers should have an easier time tying streaming campaigns to shopper data. That promise stands to win Walmart more marketing dollars earmarked for retail media and streaming behemoths -- including Amazon. Walmart is especially interested in attracting more small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) who lack the tools, budgets or teams to invest in streaming TV, a Walmart spokesperson told AdExchanger. Other ad platforms, including MNTN and Magnite, have likewise targeted SMB advertisers as a source for continued growth in the CTV market. By adding Vibe.co, Walmart can court SMBs with the pitch that its new self-serve tools will make it easier for them to execute CTV campaigns. Plus, SMBs tend to prioritize performance campaigns, since they are under more pressure to justify tighter ad budgets and thus have to be more selective about which platforms they advertise on. And Walmart is better positioned than most platforms to prove its ads drove performance thanks to its retail data foundation.

Mark Zuckerberg Directed Meta To Create a Prediction Markets App

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Mr. Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta, recently dispatched a small team at his company to create a smartphone app similar to Polymarket and Kalshi, two employees with knowledge of the matter said. Users would not wager money, and the app would probably rely on a video game-like points system instead, one person said, though the company had not ruled out the eventual use of real money betting. The app is internally referred to as "Arena" and would function independently from Meta's social networking apps, which include Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger, said the employees, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss confidential plans. Meta aims to grow the app by leveraging its large social networking audiences and directing them toward using it, they said. The effort, which insiders characterized as experimental but a top priority, is part of a broader push by Mr. Zuckerberg to create new types of apps based on emerging social behavior online. More than 3.56 billion people visit one or more of Meta's apps every day, an amount that has raised questions about whether those platforms have reached a saturation point. Arena is one of a handful of apps that Meta is trying out. Others include one called Meta Photos, another stand-alone app which would create new types of media using artificial intelligence, the employees said. [...] Meta insiders have cautioned that Arena remains in development and may not be released. But as executives search for ways to keep the world's largest social media sites thriving, Mr. Zuckerberg appears to be relying on his well-worn product development strategy: Follow the users.

Digital Euro Expected To Launch By 2029 After EU Backing

The European Parliament's economic committee has backed a digital euro designed to reduce Europe's dependence on US-controlled payment networks such as Visa and Mastercard. The ECB-backed currency is targeted for launch by 2029 after a full parliamentary vote and negotiations with EU member states. Euronews reports: Under the proposal, consumers would be able to hold digital euros in a dedicated wallet, subject to a holding limit that has yet to be determined. The system would support both online and offline payments and is intended to offer a high degree of privacy, with the ECB unable to directly identify users from their payment data. The ECB would provide the underlying infrastructure, while commercial banks and payment service providers would offer digital euro services to customers. Financial institutions are expected to be compensated for their participation in the scheme, while merchants will pay fees that are expected to be lower than those associated with current card transactions. How that compensation should be structured remains one of the most contentious issues ahead of negotiations with EU member states, according to three sources familiar with the discussions. [...] The European Parliament is expected to formalise the committee's position during a plenary vote in Strasbourg in early July. Negotiations with the EU's 27 member states would then begin, with lawmakers aiming to reach a final agreement before the end of the year.

Ars Technica

Trump may be mystery patient in odd case of 79yo getting experimental obesity drug

Public notice of a single "compassionate use" case is odd in every way.

23 Jun 2026 4:16pm GMT

Everyone pays the price as patent holders on seeds stifle innovation

The US is one of a handful of countries that allow patents on plant varieties.

23 Jun 2026 1:59pm GMT

Sony releases trailer for Taika Waititi's Klara and the Sun

Tonally, the trailer gives strong vibes akin to the director's 2016 feature Hunt for the Wilderpeople.

23 Jun 2026 1:55pm GMT

22 Jun 2026

OSnews

Xfce’s new Wayland compositor sees first alpha release

The developer working on Xfwl4, the Wayland compositor for Xfce, has published the new compositor's very first alpha release. Considering it's only been six months or so of work, it's impressive to see the effort reach this state already. The end goal of xfwl4 is to behave as closely as possible to an Xfce desktop running on an X server. Ideally a user could switch between the two without even knowing there's a difference. In reality, of course, it won't be quite that seamless, and there's still more work to be done to get as close as possible to that ideal. This is a first solid cut at it, at the very least. ↫ Brian Tarricone Being the very first alpha release, it won't surprise you there's a few things missing or broken at this point. Still, if you're brave, you can download and build the release and try it out.

22 Jun 2026 6:49pm GMT

Valve opens Steam Machine waitlist

Valve officially made the Steam Machine available (sort of but not really) today, and if you were hoping for the president of the Yacht Collectors' Club to have found a loophole through the RAM and storage crisis, I'll be the bearer of bad news: the base Steam Machine model with 512GB of storage and no controller costs $1049 or €1039. It's clear that this price is significantly higher than Valve had originally anticipated, as the company dedicates the first part of its press announcement to this sticker shock. Steam Machine, like our other hardware products, is made up of many components that we source from manufacturers around the world. The price at which we sell our hardware is a direct result of the cost of these components. We felt like we had a good understanding of how those costs might change over time when we first started sourcing them for Steam Machine back in 2023. That understanding was born from the many years of data we all have about the evolution of PC hardware prices - primarily, that it tends to get cheaper over time as new technology arrives. Over the past year or so, that has changed quickly and significantly, most visibly for RAM and storage components. There are a variety of reasons, all of which are affecting hardware products everywhere. The overall effect is that our original goal for the price of Steam Machine is no longer viable. So the prices we're sharing today reflect the state of the world for manufacturing; or, more accurately, it reflects the price of the components as we've secured them over the past 6 months. Price wasn't the only thing impacted by all of this: availability was as well. There were periods where we found we couldn't source some of our components at all, at any price. More than anything else, this has impacted the number of units we've been able to produce for launch. ↫ Valve press announcement As Valve mentions, availability is also going to be an issue, and thus they've had to settle on a complex reservation and lottery system. Between now and 25 June, you can sign up for a model, after which the entire pool of reservations will be randomised to determine a waitlist order. As machines become available, they will simply go down the list from first to last as determined by that randomisation. In other words, you can't just go out and buy one right away. At this price and for the hardware the Steam Machine contains - an AMD Zen 4 CPU with 6c/12t up to 4.8 Ghz, a custom RDNA3 GPU, and 16GB of DDR5 RAM and 8GB of DDR6 video RAM - you're probably better off sticking with what you already have. Until the "AI" bubble pops and prices come down again, that is. Thanks, "AI" techbros. Everybody despises you.

22 Jun 2026 5:55pm GMT

21 Jun 2026

OSnews

A tale of two path separators

In macOS, you can apparently create files and directories in the Finder with names that include slashes. If you then go into the terminal and take a look with ls, you'll see that the slashes are actually colons. I don't understand all the nuances, but I know this is a side-effect of the fact that macOS has not one but two path separators: the slash (/) and the colon (:). The two separators are used in different contexts, and the system will translate between them as needed. These two separators reflect the two parent systems of modern macOS: classic Mac OS and the Unix-like NeXTSTEP. When they were joined together, Apple's engineers had to build a file system that was compatible with both the classic Mac's file system (the Mac OS Extended File System, aka HFS+), and with NeXTSTEP's file system (the Unix file system, aka UFS). Among other differences, these systems had different path separators: HFS+ used a colon, while UFS used a slash. ↫ Alex Chan (article from 2021) I had no idea macOS worked this way, but it makes sense considering the platform's dual history. What's interesting is that when Apple moved to APFS almost a decade ago, this duality in path separators remained, most likely for backwards compatibility reasons. In a sense, this is somewhat similar to Windows supporting both backward and forward slashes, with the former being a leftover from DOS, and the latter an addition (to Windows) from the UNIX world. None of that beats Windows when using the Japanese or Korean locale, though. Because Japanese and Korean Windows use different codepages than Windows in the Americas and Western Europe, these versions of Windows render the backslash as the yen sign (¥) and and won (₩) sign respectively. As such, something like the Program Files directory actually renders like C:¥Program Files¥ and C:₩Program Files₩. Similar issues occurred in other Windows locales as well, but the impact of this in Japan and South Korea were so widespread that people just expect it to be that way, even if it's easily fixed today. I can't find if Windows 11 still uses ¥/₩ in Japan/South Korea, since the last references of it I can quickly uncover all point to Windows 10.

21 Jun 2026 9:09pm GMT