fidzu : geek

The head of the International Energy Agency warned that Europe may have only "six weeks or so" of jet fuel left if oil supplies remain blocked by the Iran war and the Strait of Hormuz stays disrupted. The Associated Press reports: IEA Executive Director Fatih Birol painted a sobering picture of the global repercussions of what he called "the largest energy crisis we have ever faced," stemming from the pinch-off of oil, gas and other vital supplies through the Strait of Hormuz. "In the past there was a group called 'Dire Straits.' It's a dire strait now, and it is going to have major implications for the global economy. And the longer it goes, the worse it will be for the economic growth and inflation around the world," he told The Associated Press. The impact will be "higher petrol (gasoline) prices, higher gas prices, high electricity prices," said Birol, speaking in his Paris office looking out over the Eiffel Tower. Economic pain will be felt unevenly and "the countries who will suffer the most will not be those whose voice are heard a lot. It will be mainly the developing countries. Poorer countries in Asia, in Africa and in Latin America," said the Turkish economist and energy expert who has led the IEA since 2015. But without a settlement of the Iran war that permanently reopens the Strait of Hormuz, "Everybody is going to suffer," he added. "Some countries may be richer than the others. Some countries may have more energy than the others, but no country, no country is immune to this crisis," he said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

16 Apr 2026 8:00pm GMT

FTC aims to stamp out brand-safety standards that hurt Breitbart and Musk's X.

16 Apr 2026 7:08pm GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google is negotiating an agreement with the Department of Defense that would allow the Pentagon to deploy its Gemini AI models in classified settings, the Information reported on Thursday, citing two people with direct knowledge of the discussions. The two parties are discussing an agreement that would allow the Pentagon to use Google's AI for all lawful uses, according to the report. During the negotiations, Google has proposed additional language in its contract with the department to prevent its AI from being used for domestic mass surveillance or autonomous weapons without appropriate human control, the Information reported. The Pentagon will continue to deploy frontier AI capabilities through strong industry partnerships across all classification levels, a Pentagon official said, without confirming any talks with Google.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

16 Apr 2026 7:00pm GMT

An in-app browser allows visual feedback while building websites and more.

16 Apr 2026 6:30pm GMT

IPv6 usage briefly reached 50% across Google services for the first time, marking a major milestone for a protocol created in 1998 to solve IPv4's address shortage. Tom's Hardware reports: [...] IPv6 was dismissed early on as a headache-inducing, hard-to-implement complication that would hardly ever gain any traction -- despite offering 2^128 possible numbers, solving all network number assignments in one fell swoop. That changed over time by force of necessity, and Google's tracking graph shows that for a brief moment in time on March 28, 50% of worldwide users accessed the service over an IPv6 connection, marking a historic first. APNIC's stats show that the protocol is in use by 43% of the world, with Asia and the Americas inching ever close to those 50%. Cloudflare, meanwhile, shows that 40% of traffic is done in IPv6, an actually impressive figure if you consider it's measuring actual transferred packets rather than just counting addresses. The tried-and-true IPv4 and its well-known 123.456.789.123 format from 1980 offers ~4.3 billion addresses in theory, and around 3.7 billion in practice. That always sounded like a lot, but nobody could have predicted just how rapid the explosion of the Internet would be. IANA, the entity controlling the North-American IPv4 space, ran out of IPv4 addresses around 2011, while its European equivalent RIPE NCC could spare no more four-octet addresses nearly seven years ago in 2019. Asian, African, and Latin-American IP registries equally ran out during that timeframe.

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16 Apr 2026 6:00pm GMT

Upcoming sequel wants to capture a "uniquely Ukrainian perspective" on the post-apocalypse.

16 Apr 2026 5:50pm GMT

Tribblix, the Illumos distribution focused on giving you a classic UNIX-style experience, doesn't only support x86. It also has a branch for SPARC, which tends to run behind its x86 counterpart a little bit and has a few other limitations related to the fact SPARC is effectively no longer being developed. The Tribblix SPARC branch has been updated, and now roughly matches the latest x86 release from a few weeks ago. The graphical libraries libtiff and OpenEXR have been updated, retaining the old shared library versions for now. OpenSSL is now from the 3.5 series with the 3.0 api by default. Bind is now from the 9.20 series. OpenSSH is now 10.2, and you may get a Post-Quantum Cryptography warning if connecting to older SSH servers. 'zap install' now installs dependencies by default. 'zap create-user' will now restrict new home directories to mode 0700 by default; use the -M flag to choose different permissions. Support for UFS quotas has been removed. ↫ Tribblix release notes There's no new ISO yet, so to get to this new m34 release for SPARC you're going to have to install from an older ISO and update from there.

15 Apr 2026 8:18pm GMT

Another Haiku monthly activity report, but this time around, there's actually a big ticket item. Haiku has been in a pretty solid and stable state for a while now, so the activity reports have been dominated by fairly small, obscure changes, but during March a major milestone was reached for the ARM64 port. smrobtzz contributed the bulk of the work, including fixes for building on macOS on ARM64, drivers for the Apple S5L UART, fixes to the kernel base address, clearing the frame pointer before entering the kernel, mapping physical memory correctly, the basics for userland, and more. SED4906 contributed some fixes to the bootloader page mapping, and runtime_loader's page-size checks. Combined, these changes allow the ARM64 port to get to the desktop in QEMU. There's a forum thread, complete with screenshots, for anyone interested in following along. ↫ waddlesplash While it's only in QEMU, this is still a major achievement and paves the way for more people to work on the ARM64 port, possibly increasing its health. There's tons of smaller changes and fixes all over the place, too, as usual, and the team mentions beta 6 isn't quite ready yet, still. Don't let that stop you from just downloading the latest nightly, though - Haiku is mature enough to use it.

15 Apr 2026 3:10pm GMT

The editor in chief of this blog was born in 2004. She uses the 1997 window manager, Enlightenment E16, daily. In this article, I describe the process of fixing a show-stopping, rare bug that dates back to 2006 in the codebase. Surprisingly, the issue has roots in a faulty implementation of Newton's algorithm. ↫ Kamila Szewczyk I'm not going to pretend to understand any of this, but I know you people do. Enjoy.

15 Apr 2026 2:00pm GMT

My thoughts on AI-assisted programming.

11 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

I have discovered and shared ~800 open source Rust CLI projects over the past 3 years.

03 Apr 2026 12:00am GMT

All I wanted was to learn how to play guitar, but ended up building a DIY kit for it.

28 Mar 2026 12:00am GMT