fidzu : geek

Longtime Slashdot reader williamyf writes: The Italian company Bending Spoons seems to be on an acquisitions spree. Their recent acquisitions of AOL and Vimeo are not yet finalized, yet on Dec. 2 they announced they are buying Eventbrite, a company specializing in publicizing and organizing local events, for just half a milliard USD. Bending Spoons' portfolio also includes other companies like Evernote and WeTransfer. Further reading: Private Equity Hipsters Are Coming For Your Favorite Apps (2024)

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04 Dec 2025 8:20pm GMT

A massive study of political persuasion shows AIs have, at best, a weak effect.

04 Dec 2025 8:07pm GMT

Valve tells Ars its "trying to unblock" limits caused by open source driver issues.

04 Dec 2025 7:53pm GMT

joshuark shares a report from BleepingComputer: Microsoft has silently "mitigated" a high-severity Windows LNK vulnerability exploited by multiple state-backed and cybercrime hacking groups in zero-day attacks. Tracked as CVE-2025-9491, this security flaw allows attackers to hide malicious commands within Windows LNK files, which can be used to deploy malware and gain persistence on compromised devices. However, the attacks require user interaction to succeed, as they involve tricking potential victims into opening malicious Windows Shell Link (.lnk) files. Thus some element of social engineering, and user technically naive and gullibility such as thinking Windows is secure is required. [...] As Trend Micro threat analysts discovered in March 2025, the CVE-2025-9491 was already being widely exploited by 11 state-sponsored groups and cybercrime gangs, including Evil Corp, Bitter, APT37, APT43 (also known as Kimsuky), Mustang Panda, SideWinder, RedHotel, Konni, and others. Microsoft told BleepingComputer in March that it would "consider addressing" this zero-day flaw, even though it didn't "meet the bar for immediate servicing." ACROS Security CEO and 0patch co-founder Mitja Kolsek found, Microsoft has silently changed LNK files in the November updates in an apparent effort to mitigate the CVE-2025-9491 flaw. After installing last month's updates, users can now see all characters in the Target field when opening the Properties of LNK files, not just the first 260. As the movie the Ninth Gate stated: "silentium est aurum"

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04 Dec 2025 7:19pm GMT

Podcaster faces up to 70 years and a $3.5 million fine for ChatGPT-linked stalking.

04 Dec 2025 6:40pm GMT

A severe spike in global DRAM prices has pushed Samsung Semiconductor to refuse a long-term RAM order from its own sibling, Samsung Electronics. The move is forcing the smartphone division into short, expensive renegotiations, which will likely mean higher costs for consumer devices. PCWorld reports: Samsung subsidiaries are, naturally, going to look to Samsung Semiconductor first when they need parts. Such was reportedly the case for Samsung Electronics, in search of memory supplies for its newest smartphones as the company ramps up production for 2026 flagship designs. But with so much RAM hardware going into new "AI" data centers -- and those companies willing to pay top dollar for their hardware -- memory manufacturers like Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron are prioritizing data center suppliers to maximize profits. The end result, according to a report from SE Daily spotted by SamMobile, is that Samsung Semiconductor rejected the original order for smartphone DRAM chips from Samsung Electronics' Mobile Experience division. The smartphone manufacturing arm of the company had hoped to nail down pricing and supply for another year. But reports say that due to "chipflation," the phone-making division must renegotiate quarterly, with a long-term supply deal rejected by its corporate sibling. A short-term deal, with higher prices, was reportedly hammered out.

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04 Dec 2025 6:18pm GMT

I would think most of us here at OSNews are aware of VisiOn, the graphical multitasking operating system for the IBM PC which was one of the first operating systems with a graphical user interface, predating Windows, GEM, the Mac, and even the Apple Lisa. While VisiOn was technically an "open" platform anybody could develop an application for, the operating system's SDK cost $7000 at the time and required a VAX system. This, combined with VisiOn failing in the market, means nobody knows how to develop an application for it. Until now. Over the past few months, Nina Kalinina painstakingly unraveled VisiOn so that she she could recreate the SDK from scratch. In turn, this allowed developer Atsuko to develop a clean-room application for VisiOn - which is most likely the very first third-party application ever developed and released for VisiOn. I've been following along with the pains Kalinina had to go through for this endeavour over on Fedi, and it sure was a wild ride few would be willing (and capable) to undertake. It took me a month of working 1-2 hours a day to produce a specification that allowed Atsuko to implement a clean-room homebrew application for VisiOn that is capable of bitmap display, menus and mouse handling. If you're wondering what it felt like: this project is the largest "Sudoku puzzle" I have ever tried to solve. In this note, I have tried to explain the process of solving this puzzle, as well as noteworthy things about VisiOn and its internals. ↫ Nina Kalinina The article contains both a detailed look at VisiOn, as well as the full process of recreating its SDK and developing an application with it. Near the end of the article, after going over all the work that was required to get here, there's a sobering clarification: This reverse-engineering project ended up being much bigger than I anticipated. We have a working application, yes, but so far I've documented less than 10% of all the VisiHost and VisiOp calls. We still don't know how to implement keyboard input, or how to work with timers and background processes (if it is possible). ↫ Nina Kalinina I'd love for more people to be interested in helping this effort out, as it's not just an extremely difficult challenge, but also a massive contribution to software preservation. VisiOn may not be more than a small footnote in computing history, but it still deserves to be remembered and understood, and Kalinina and Atsuko have done an amazing amount of legwork for whomever wants to pick this up, too.

03 Dec 2025 10:37pm GMT

Did you know that BG3 players exploit children? Are you aware that Qi2 slows older Pixels? If we wrote those misleading headlines, readers would rip us a new one - but Google is experimentally beginning to replace the original headlines on stories it serves with AI nonsense like that. ↫ Sean Hollister at The Verge I'm a little teapot, short and stout. Here is my handle, here is my spout. When I get all steamed up, hear me shout. Tip me over and pour me out!

03 Dec 2025 10:11pm GMT

You may have noticed that due to "AI" companies buying up all literally all the RAM in the world, prices for consumer RAM and SSDs have gone completely batshit insane. Well, it's only going to get worse, since Micron has announced it's going to exit the market for consumer RAM and is, therefore, retiring its Crucial brand. The reason? You know the reason. "The AI-driven growth in the data center has led to a surge in demand for memory and storage. Micron has made the difficult decision to exit the Crucial consumer business in order to improve supply and support for our larger, strategic customers in faster-growing segments," said Sumit Sadana, EVP and Chief Business Officer at Micron Technology. ↫ Micron's press release First it was the crypto pyramid scheme, and now it's the "AI" pyramid scheme. These MLMs for unimpressive white males who couldn't imagine themselves out of a wet paper bag are ruining not just the environment, software, and soon the world's economy when the bubble pops, but are now also making it extraordinarily expensive to buy some RAM or a bit of storage. Literally nothing good is coming from these techbro equivalents of Harlequin romance novels, and yet, we're forced to pretend they're the next coming of the railroads every time some guy who was voted most likely to die a middle manager at Albertsons in Casper, Wyoming, farts his idea out on a napkin. I am so tired.

03 Dec 2025 10:03pm GMT

Over the course of 2025, every single major cloud provider has failed. In June, Google Cloud had issues taking down Cloud Storage for many users. In late October, Amazon Web Services had a massive outage in their main hub, us-east-1, affecting many services as well as some people's beds. A little over a week later Microsoft Azure had a [widespread outage][Azure outage] that managed to significantly disrupt train service in the Netherlands, and probably also things that matter. Now last week, Cloudflare takes down large swaths of the internet in a way that causes non-tech people to learn Cloudflare exists. And every single time, people share that one XKCD comic.

24 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

After Gandi was bought up and started taking extortion level prices for their domains I've been looking for an excuse to migrate registrar. Last week I decided to bite the bullet and move to Porkbun as I have another domain renewal coming up. However after setting up an account and paying for the transfer for 4 domains, I realized their DNS services are provided by Cloudflare! I personally do not use Cloudflare, and stay far away from all of their products for various reasons.

18 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT

The waydroid package prior to version 1.5.4-2 (including aur/waydroid) creates Python byte-code files (.pyc) at runtime which were untracked by pacman. This issue has been fixed in 1.5.4-3, where byte-compiling these files is now done during the packaging process. As a result, the upgrade may conflict with the unowned files created in previous versions. If you encounter errors like the following during the update:

error: failed to commit transaction (conflicting files) waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/__pycache__/__init__.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/actions/__pycache__/__init__.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem waydroid: /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/actions/__pycache__/app_manager.cpython-313.pyc exists in filesystem

You can safely overwrite these files by running the following command: pacman -Syu --overwrite /usr/lib/waydroid/tools/\*__pycache__/\*

06 Nov 2025 12:00am GMT