fidzu : geek

California-based Karman Industries "says it has developed a cooling system that uses SpaceX rocket engine technology to rein in the environmental impact of data centers," reports the Los Angeles Times, "chilling them with less space, less power and no water." Karman has developed a cooling system similar to the heat pumps in the average home, except its pumps use liquid carbon dioxide as refrigerant, which is circulated using rocket engine technology rather than fans. The company's efficient pumps can reduce the space required for data center cooling equipment by 80%. Over the years, data centers have used fans and air conditioning to blow cold air on the chips. Bigger facilities pass cold liquid through tubes near the chips to absorb the heat. This hot liquid is sent outside to a cooling yard, where sprawling networks of pipes use as much water as a city of 50,000 people to remove the heat. A 50 megawatt data center also uses enough electricity to power a mid-sized city... Cooling systems account for up to 40% of a data center's power consumption and an average midsized data center consumes more than 35,000 gallons of water per day... U.S. data centers will consume about 8% of all electricity in the country by 2030, according to the International Energy Agency... The cooling systems are projected to use up to 33 billion gallons of water by 2028 per year... To serve this seemingly insatiable market, Karman has developed a rotating compressor that spins at 30,000 revolutions per minute - nearly 10 times faster than traditional compressors - to move heat... About a third of Karman's 23-person team came from SpaceX or Rocket Lab, and they co-opted technologies from aerospace engineering and electric vehicles to design the mechanics for the high-speed motors. The system uses a special type of carbon dioxide under high pressure to transfer heat from the data center to the outside air. Depending on the conditions, it can do the same amount of cooling using less than half the energy. Karman's heat pump can either reject heat to air, or route it into extra cooling, or even power generation. The company "recently raised $20 million," according to the article, "and expects to start building its first compressors in Long Beach later this year...."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

26 Jan 2026 5:44am GMT

Brax Technologies just announced "a privacy-focused alternative to locked-down tablets" called open_slate that can double as a consumer tablet and a Linux-capable workstation on ARM. Earlier Brax Technologies built the privacy-focused smartphone BraX3, which co-founder Plamen Todorov says proved "a privacy-focused mobile device could be designed, crowdfunded, manufactured, and delivered outside the traditional Big Tech ecosystem." Just as importantly, BraX3 showed us the value of building with the community. The feedback we received - what worked, what didn't, and what people wanted next - played a major role in shaping our direction going forward. Today, we're ready to share the next step in that journey... They're promising their "2-in-1" open_slate tablet will be built with these guiding principles: Modularity beyond repairability". ("In addition to a user-replaceable battery, it supports an M.2 expansion slot, allowing users to customize storage and configurations to better fit their needs.") Hardware-level privacy and control, with physical switches allowing users to disable key components like wireless radios, sensors, microphones, and cameras. Multi-OS compatibility, supporting "multiple" Android-based operating systems as well as native Linux distributions. ("We're working with partners and the community to ensure proper, long-term OS support rather than one-off ports.") Longevity by design - a tablet that's "supported over time" Brax has already created an open thread with preliminary design specs. "The planned retail price is 599$ for the base version and 799$ for the Pro version," they write. "We will be offering open_slate (both versions) at a discount during our pre-order campaign, starting as low as 399$ for the base version and 529$ for the Pro version for limited quantities only which may sell out in a day or two from launching pre-orders... "Pre-orders will open in February, via IndieGoGo. Make sure to subscribe for notifications if you don't want to miss the launch date." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader walterbyrd for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

26 Jan 2026 4:24am GMT

KDE's "Plasma Login Manager" is apparently dropping support for FreeBSD, the Unix-like operating system, reports the blog It's FOSS. They cite a recently-accepted merge request from a KDE engineer to drop the code supporting FreeBSD, since the login manager relies on systemd/logind: systemd and logind look like hard dependencies of the login manager, which means the software is built to work exclusively with these components and cannot function without them... logind is a component of systemd that is responsible for user session management... This doesn't mean that KDE has abandoned the operating system altogether. FreeBSD users can still run the KDE Plasma desktop environment and continue using SDDM, the current login manager that works just fine on such systems. The article argues FreeBSD users "won't really care much for missing out on this as they have plenty of login manager options available."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

26 Jan 2026 2:04am GMT

How two podcasters turned a Star Trek side project into a full-time career.

25 Jan 2026 12:00pm GMT

9front, by far the best operating system in the whole world, pushed out a new release, titled "GEFS SERVICE PACK 1". Even with only a few changes, this is still, as always, a more monumental, important, and groundbreaking release than any other operating system release in history. Everything changes, today, because exec() now supports shell-scripts as interpreter in #!, improved sam scrolling, TLS by default in ircrc, and more. You're already running 9front, of course, but if you're one of the few holdouts still using something else, download GEFS SERVICE PACK 1 and install it.

25 Jan 2026 11:09am GMT

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to sneak into the earliest parts of the boot process, swap the startup config without breaking anything, and leave without a trace. Are you ready? Let's begin. ↫ Jynn Nelson Genius.

25 Jan 2026 10:56am GMT

Destructive payload unleashed on 10-year anniversary of Russia's attack on Ukraine's grid.

24 Jan 2026 7:08pm GMT

Rice University chemists replicated Thomas Edison's seminal experiment and found a surprising byproduct.

24 Jan 2026 6:36pm GMT

Encrypting the data stored locally on your hard drives is generally a good idea, specifically if you have use a laptop and take it with you a lot and thieves might get a hold of it. This issue becomes even more pressing if you carry sensitive data as a dissident or whistleblower and have to deal with law enforcement. Or, you know, if you're an American citizen fascist paramilitary groups like ICE doesn't like because your skin colour is too brown or whatever. Windows offers local disk encryption too, in the form of its BitLocker feature, and Microsoft suggests users store their encryption keys on Microsoft's servers. However, when you do so, these keys will be stored unencrypted, and it turns out Microsoft will happily hand them over to law enforcement. "This is private data on a private computer and they made the architectural choice to hold access to that data. They absolutely should be treating it like something that belongs to the user," said Matt Green, cryptography expert and associate professor at the Johns Hopkins University Information Security Institute. "If Apple can do it, if Google can do it, then Microsoft can do it. Microsoft is the only company that's not doing this," he added. "It's a little weird… The lesson here is that if you have access to keys, eventually law enforcement is going to come." ↫ Thomas Brewster Microsoft is choosing to store these keys in unencrypted fashion, and that of course means law enforcement is going to come knocking. With everything that's happening in the United States at the moment, the platitude of "I have nothing to hide" has lost even more of its meaning, as people - even toddlers - are being snatched from the streets and out of their homes on a daily basis by fascist paramilitaries. Even if times were better, though, Microsoft should still refrain from storing these keys unencrypted. It is entirely possible, nay, trivial to address this shortcoming, but the odds of the company fixing this while trying to suck up to the current US regime seem small. Everybody, but especially those living under totalitarian(-esque) regimes, should be taking extra care to make sure their data isn't just encrypted, but that the keys are safe as well.

23 Jan 2026 11:43pm 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