fidzu : geek

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: A lobbying trade body for smaller cloud providers is asking the European Commission to impose interim measures blocking Broadcom from terminating the VMware Cloud Service Provider program, calling the decision a death sentence for some tech suppliers and an illegal squeeze on customer choice. As The Reg revealed in January, Broadcom shuttered the scheme, a move sources claimed affects hundreds of CSPs across Europe and curtails options for enterprises buying VMware software and services. The Cloud Infrastructure Service Provider in Europe (CISPE) trade group, representing nearly 50 tech suppliers, filed the complaint today with the EC Directorates-General, accusing Broadcom of bully-boy tactics, and calling for authorities to halt what it terms as "ongoing abuse." Francisco Mingorance, CISPE secretary general, said of the complaint: "Businesses -- both cloud providers and their customers -- are being irreparably damaged by Broadcom's unfair actions, which we believe are illegal. "After imposing outrageous and unjustified price hikes immediately following the acquisition of VMware, Broadcom is now applying the 'coup de grace'. We need urgent intervention to force them to change. The only way to stop bullies is to stand up to them." CISPE claims that, since Broadcom completed its $69 billion takeover of VMware in October 2023, prices have risen tenfold, payment is demanded upfront, products are bundled regardless of customer need, and minimum commitments are based on potential rather than actual consumption. The VMware Cloud Service Provider (VCSP) program officially closed in January and all transactions must be complete by March 31. After that date, only a select group of suppliers will be able to sell VMware subscriptions -- either standalone or as part of a broader service. Across Europe, we're told this equates to hundreds of businesses losing their authorization. For some, the loss of VCSP status effectively destroys their market. Those whose operations were built around VMware must now hand customers to another authorized supplier or begin the costly migration to an alternative platform. Broadcom said in a statement responding to the complaint: "Broadcom strongly disagrees with the allegations by CISPE, an organization funded by hyperscalers, which misrepresent the realities of the market. We continue to be committed to investing significantly in our European VMware Cloud Service Provider partners... helping them offer alternatives to the hyperscalers and meet the evolving needs of European businesses and organizations."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

20 Mar 2026 3:30am GMT

When Google said they were going to require verification from every single Android developer that would end the ability to install applications from outside of the Play Store (commonly wrongfully referred to as "sideloading"), it caused quite a backlash. The company then backtracked a little bit, and said they would come up with an "advanced flow" to make sure installing applications from outside of the Play Store remained possible. Well, Google has detailed this "advanced flow", and as everyone expected, it's such a massive list of onerous hoops to jump through they might as well just lock Android down to the Play Store and get it over with. First, if a developer is verified, you can download their applications to your device and install them the same way you can do now. Second, developers with "limited distribution accounts", such as students or hobby projects, can share their applications with up to 20 devices without verification. Third, and this is where the fun starts, we have unverified developers - basically what all Android developers sharing applications outside of the Play Store are now. Here's the full "advanced flow" as described by Google to allow you to install an application from an unverified developer: Setting aside the fact that developer verification is, in and of itself, a massive problem, I'm kind of okay with a few scary warnings, a disclaimer, and perhaps a single reboot to enable installing applications outside of the Play Store - a few things to make normal people shrug their shoulders and not bother. However, adding enabling developer mode and a goddamn 24-hour waiting period is batshit insanity, and clearly has the intention of discouraging everyone, effectively locking Android to the Play Store. Android is already basically an entirely locked-down, closed-source platform, and once this "advanced flow" comes into force, there's virtually no difference between iOS and Android, especially for us Europeans who get similarly onerous anti-user nonsense when trying to install alternative application stores on iOS. I see no reason to buy Android over iOS at this point - might as well get the faster phone with better update support.

19 Mar 2026 11:51pm GMT

Cloudflare's CEO predicts AI-driven bot traffic will surpass human internet traffic by 2027, as AI agents generate vastly more web requests than people. "If a human were doing a task -- let's say you were shopping for a digital camera -- and you might go to five websites. Your agent or the bot that's doing that will often go to 1,000 times the number of sites that an actual human would visit," Cloudflare CEO Matthew Prince said in an interview at SXSW this week. "So it might go to 5,000 sites. And that's real traffic, and that's real load, which everyone is having to deal with and take into account." TechCrunch reports: Before the generative AI era, the internet was only about 20% bot traffic, with Google's web crawler being the largest, according to Prince, whose infrastructure and security company is used by one-fifth of all websites. But beyond some other reputable crawlers, the only other bots were those used by scammers and bad actors. "With the rise of generative AI, and its just insatiable need for data, we're seeing a rise where we suspect that, in 2027, the amount of bot traffic online will exceed the amount of human traffic that's online," Prince said. The executive also noted that this change to the web would require the development of new technologies, like sandboxes for AI agents that can be spun up on the fly and then torn down when their task has finished. These could come into play when consumers ask AI agents to perform certain tasks on their behalf, like planning a vacation. "What we're trying to think about is, how do we actually build that underlying infrastructure where you can -- as easily as you open a new tab in your browser -- you can actually spin up new code, which can then run and service the agents that are out there," Prince said. He imagines there will soon be a time when millions of these "sandboxes" for agents would be created every second. "I think the thing that people don't appreciate about AI is it's a platform shift," Prince said. "AI is another platform shift ... the way that you're going to consume information is completely different."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

19 Mar 2026 11:00pm GMT

Under Kennedy, the health dept. has wiped out 75 advisory boards, corrupted others.

19 Mar 2026 10:34pm GMT

The UK regulator Ofcom fined 4chan nearly $700,000 (520,000 pounds) for failing to implement age checks and address illegal content risks under the Online Safety Act, but the platform mocked the penalty and signaled it won't pay. A lawyer representing the company responded with an AI-generated cartoon image of a hamster, writing in a follow-up post on X: "In the only country in which 4chan operates, the United States, it is breaking no law and indeed its conduct is expressly protected by the First Amendment." The BBC reports: The fines also include 50,000 pounds for failing to assess the risk of illegal material being published and a further 20,000 pounds for failing to set out how it protects users from criminal content. 4Chan has refused to pay all previous fines from Ofcom. "Companies -- wherever they're based -- are not allowed to sell unsafe toys to children in the UK. And society has long protected youngsters from things like alcohol, smoking and gambling. The digital world should be no different," said Ofcom's Suzanne Cater. "The UK is setting new standards for online safety. Age checks and risk assessments are cornerstones of our laws, and we'll take robust enforcement action against firms that fall short."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

19 Mar 2026 10:00pm GMT

Broadcom says the group is misrepresenting market "realities."

19 Mar 2026 9:29pm GMT

What happens if you make a Linux syscall in a Windows application? So yeah, you can make Linux syscalls from Windows programs, as long as they're running under Wine. Totally useless, but the fact that such a Frankenstein monster of a program could exist is funny to me. ↫ nicebyte at gpfault.net The fact that this works is both surprising and unsurprising at the same time.

19 Mar 2026 9:10pm GMT

DarkSword, a powerful iPhone-hacking technique, has been discovered in use by Russian hackers.

19 Mar 2026 8:11pm GMT

The GNOME team has released GNOME 50, the latest version of what is probably the most popular open source desktop environment. It brings fine-grained parental controls, and the groundwork for web filtering so that in future releases, parents and guardians can set content filters for children. Our own kids are still way too young to have access to computers and the internet, but I'm not sure I'll ever resort to these kinds of tools when the time comes. I didn't have any such controls imposed upon me as a child on the early internet, but then, you can't really compare the '90s internet to that of today. The Orca screen reader received a lot of attention in GNOME 50, with a new preference window, both global and per-application settings, and much more. There's also a brand new reduced motion setting, which will tame the animations in the user interface. Document annotation has been overhauled and modernised, and the file manager has been optimised across the board for better performance and lower memory usage. Remote Desktop also saw a lot of work in GNOME 50. It's now hardware-accelerated using VA-API and Vulkan, and thanks to HiDPI support, the session will properly adapt to the screen being used. Kerberos Authentication support has been added, and you can now use the remote webcam locally. There's way more here, like improved support for variable-refresh rates and fractional scaling, HDR screen sharing, fixes for weird NVIDIA driver nonsense, and much, much more. As always, GNOME 50 will find its way to your distribution soon enough.

18 Mar 2026 10:23pm GMT

On Friday, July 18th, 2025, the Arch Linux team was notified that three AUR packages had been uploaded that contained malware. A few maintainers including myself took care of deleting these packages, removing all traces of the malicious code, and protecting against future malicious uploads.

30 Jan 2026 12:00am 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