fidzu : geek

Marcel Bucher, a professor of plant sciences at the University of Cologne in Germany, lost two years of carefully structured academic work in an instant when he temporarily disabled ChatGPT's "data consent" option in August to test whether the AI tool's functions would still work without providing OpenAI his data. All his chats were permanently deleted and his project folders emptied without any warning or undo option, he wrote in a post on Nature. Bucher, a ChatGPT Plus subscriber paying $20 per month, had used the platform daily to draft grant applications, prepare teaching materials, revise publication drafts and create exams. He contacted OpenAI support, first receiving responses from an AI agent before a human employee confirmed the data was permanently lost and unrecoverable. OpenAI cited "privacy by design" as the reason, telling Nature it does provide a confirmation prompt before users permanently delete a chat but maintains no backups. Bucher said he had saved partial copies of some materials, but the underlying prompts, iterations, and project folders -- what he describes as the intellectual scaffolding behind his finished work -- are gone forever.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 Jan 2026 4:40pm GMT

Anthropic has a problem that most companies would envy: its AI model keeps getting so good, the company wrote in a blog post, that it passes the company's own hiring test for performance engineers. The test, designed in late 2023 by optimization lead Tristan Hume, asks candidates to speed up code running on a simulated computer chip. Over 1,000 people have taken it, and dozens now work at Anthropic. But Claude Opus 4 outperformed most human applicants. Hume redesigned the test, making it harder. Then Claude Opus 4.5 matched even the best human scores within the two-hour time limit. For his third attempt, Hume abandoned realistic problems entirely and switched to abstract puzzles using a strange, minimal programming language -- something weird enough that Claude struggles with it. Anthropic is now releasing the original test as an open challenge. Beat Claude's best score and ... they want to hear from you.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 Jan 2026 4:01pm GMT

Apple has accused the European Commission of using "political delay tactics" to postpone new app marketplace policies and create grounds for investigating and fining the iPhone maker, a preemptive response to reports that the commission plans to blame Apple for the announced closure of third-party app store Setapp. MacPaw, the developer behind Setapp, said it would shut down the marketplace next month because of "still-evolving and complex business terms that don't fit Setapp's current business model." The EC is preparing to say that Apple has not rolled out changes to address key issues concerning its business terms and their complexity, according to remarks seen by Bloomberg. Apple said it disputes this finding. The company said it submitted a formal compliance plan in October proposing to replace its $0.59 per-install fee structure with a 5% revenue share, but the commission has not responded. "The European Commission has refused to let us implement the very changes that they requested," Apple said. The company also claimed there is no demand in the EU for alternative app stores and disputed that Setapp is closing because of its actions.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

23 Jan 2026 3:21pm GMT

US did not pay $278 million in 2024-2025 dues and millions more in promised funds.

22 Jan 2026 11:07pm GMT

The onslaught includes LLMs finding bogus vulnerabilities and code that won't compile.

22 Jan 2026 10:46pm GMT

Crypto theft was "the worst thing I had ever done."

22 Jan 2026 10:23pm GMT

ReactOS is celebrating its 30th birthday. Happy Birthday ReactOS! Today marks 30 years since the first commit to the ReactOS source tree. It's been such a long journey that many of our contributors today, including myself, were not alive during this event. Yet our mission to deliver "your favorite Windows apps and drivers in an open-source environment you can trust" continues to bring people together. Let's take a brief look at some of the high and low points throughout our history. ↫ Carl Bialorucki at the ReactOS website OSNews has been following ReactOS since about 2002 or so (the oldest reference I could find, but note that our 1997-2001 content isn't available online, so we may have mentioned it earlier), so you can definitely say we all grew up alongside ReactOS' growth and development. All of the events the team mentions in their retrospective on 30 years of ReactOS were covered here on OSNews as well, which is wild to think about. Personally, I don't really know how to feel about the project. On the one hand, I absolutely adore that dedicated, skilled, and talented individuals dedicate their precious free time to something as ambitious as creating a Windows NT-compatible operating system, and there's no denying they've achieved incredible feats of engineering few people in the world are capable of. ReactOS is a hobby operating system that survived the test of time where few others have - AtheOS, Syllable, SkyOS , and so many others mentioned in that oldest reference I linked to are long dead and gone - and that alone makes it a massively successful project. On the other hand, its sheer ambition is also what holds the project down. If you say you're going to offer a Windows NT-compatible operating system, you set expectations so insanely high you'll never even come close to meeting them. Every time I've seen someone try ReactOS, either in writing or on YouTube, they always seem to come away disappointed - not because ReactOS isn't impressive, but because it's inevitably so far removed from its ambitious goals. And that's a real shame. If you take away that ambitious goal of being Windows NT-compatible, and just focus on what they've already achieved as it stands now, there's a really impressive and fun alternative operating system here. I really hope the next 30 years will be kind to ReactOS.

22 Jan 2026 9:11pm GMT

If you have any interest in SGI's IRIX or used IRIX back when it was still current, you're undoubtedly aware of Nekoware, a collection of freeware for IRIX, maintained and kept up-to-date as much as possible. After stagnating in 2015 and a few failed restarts and some infighting (apparently), the project finally relaunched somewhere last year, and a new quarterly release was pushed out. Nekoware 2025Q4 is a clean break from previous releases, and requires that users fully remove any traces of previous installations. It contains the kinds of packages these freeware/open source collections for classic UNIX tended to contain: tons of common open source libraries, command-line tools, and more, including a few emulators. You'll need IRIX 6.5.21 or newer, running on at least a MIPS R5000 processor-equipped SGI machine. Planning for and work on the next release is already underway, and a brand new Nekoware SDK has been released as well, which provides bootstrap functionality and addresses the problem of having to build Nekoware on unstable IRIX environments. Seeing Nekoware resurrected is great news for the surprisingly active IRIX community. As a HP-UX user, I feel some envy.

22 Jan 2026 4:11pm GMT

In January 1976, MOS Technologies presented a demonstration computer for their recently developed 6502 processor. MOS, which was acquired by Commodore later that year, needed to show the public what their low-cost processor was able to. The KIM-1 single board computer came fully assembled with an input keypad, a six-digit LED display, and complete documentation. It was intended for developers, but it turned out that at a price of only $249 the computer was the ideal playground for hobbyists, who could now afford a complete computer. The unforgettable Jim Butterfield described it like this back in 1999: But suddenly there was the KIM-1. It was fully assembled (although you had to add a power supply). Everybody's KIM-1 was essentially the same (although the CPU added an extra instruction during the KIM-1's production life). And this created something that was never before part of the home computer phenomenon: users could quite happily exchange programs with each other; magazines could publish such programs; and people could talk about a known system. We knew the 6502 chip was great, but it took quite a while to convince the majority of computer hobbyists. MOS Technology offered this CPU at a price that was a fraction of what the other available chips cost. We faced the attitude that "it must be no good because it's too cheap," even though the 6502, with its pipelined architecture, outperformed the 8080 and the 6800." ↫ Jim Butterfield Even though there would soon be better equipped and faster home computers (mostly based on the 6502) and the KIM-1 vanished from the collective minds, the home computer revolution started 50 years ago in Jan 1976. Hans Otten keeps the memory alive on his homepage, where you can find a full collection of information about single-board computers and especially the KIM-1.

22 Jan 2026 3:44pm 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

In 2024 the Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) started funding work on the ALPM project, which provides a Rust-based framework for Arch Linux Package Management. Refer to the project's FAQ and mission statement to learn more about the relation to the tooling currently in use on Arch Linux. The funding has now concluded, but over the time of 15 months allowed us to create various tools and integrations that we will highlight in the following sections. We have worked on six milestones with focus on various aspects of the package management ecosystem, ranging from formalizing, parsing and writing of …

10 Jan 2026 12:00am GMT