18 Mar 2026
Hacker News
Show HN: Playing LongTurn FreeCiv with Friends
18 Mar 2026 7:01pm GMT
Slashdot
Meta Is Shutting Down VR Social Platform Horizon Worlds
Meta is shutting down its VR social platform Horizon Worlds, which was once a key piece of the pivot to the metaverse. The company said the app will be taken off the Quest store at the end of March, and fully removed from Quest headsets by June 15. After that date, it will shift to a standalone "mobile-only experience." CNBC reports: The shift for Horizon Worlds, which was once a central part of the company's push into virtual reality, comes weeks after Meta cut over 1,000 employees from Reality Labs, the unit responsible for the metaverse. [...] The social platform has never drawn more than a couple hundred thousand active users a month, CNBC previously reported. The virtual 3D social network where avatars could interact and play games with other users officially launched in late 2021. It operated exclusively on the Quest VR platform until Meta launched a mobile app version in September 2023. The mobile version of Horizon Worlds was built to provide an entry point for users without VR headsets, functioning similarly to Roblox.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
18 Mar 2026 7:00pm GMT
SaaS Apocalypse Could Be OpenSource's Greatest Opportunity
Longtime Slashdot reader internet-redstar writes: Nearly a trillion dollars has been wiped from software stocks in 2026, with hedge funds making billions shorting Salesforce, HubSpot, and Atlassian. At FOSDEM 2026, cURL maintainer Daniel Stenberg shut down his bug bounty program after AI-generated slop overwhelmed his team. A new article on HackerNoon argues that most commercial SaaS could inevitably become OpenSource, not out of ideology but economics. The author points to Proxmox replacing VMware at enterprise scale and startups like Holosign replicating DocuSign at $19/month flat as evidence. The catch, the article claims, is that maintainers who refuse to embrace AI tools risk being forked, or simply replicated from scratch, by those who do.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
18 Mar 2026 6:00pm GMT
Hacker News
Show HN: Tmux-IDE, OSS agent-first terminal IDE
18 Mar 2026 5:46pm GMT
EU Inc.: A new harmonised corporate legal regime
18 Mar 2026 5:42pm GMT
Ars Technica
Federal cyber experts called Microsoft's cloud a "pile of shit," approved it anyway
One Microsoft product was approved despite years of concerns about its security.
18 Mar 2026 5:36pm GMT
Slashdot
2026 Turing Award Goes To Inventors of Quantum Cryptography
Dave Knott shares a report from the New York Times: On Wednesday, the Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, said Drs. Charles Bennett and Gilles Brassard had won this year's Turing Award for their work on quantum cryptography and related technologies. The Turing Award, which was introduced in 1966, is often called the Nobel Prize of computing, and it includes a $1 million prize, which the two scientists will share. [...] The two met in 1979 while swimming in the Atlantic just off the north shore of Puerto Rico. They were taking a break while attending an academic conference in San Juan. Dr. Bennett swam up to Dr. Brassard and suggested they use quantum mechanics to create a bank note that could never be forged. Collaborating between Montreal and New York, they applied Dr. Bennett's idea to subway tokens rather than bank notes. In a research paper published in 1983, they showed that their quantum subway tokens could never be forged, even if someone managed to steal the subway turnstile housing the elaborate hardware needed to read them. This led to quantum cryptography. After describing their new form of encryption in a research paper published in 1984, they demonstrated the technology with a physical experiment five years later. Called BB84, their system used photons -- particles of light -- to create encryption keys used to lock and unlock digital data. Thanks to the laws of quantum mechanics, the behavior of a photon changes if someone looks at it. This means that if anyone tries to steal the keys, he or she will leave a telltale sign of the attempted theft -- a bit like breaking the seal on an aspirin bottle.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
18 Mar 2026 5:00pm GMT
Ars Technica
A station wagon is entering one of the hardest 24-hour races in the world
Station wagons used to be family cars, but now they're for going fast, too.
18 Mar 2026 4:02pm GMT
Peter faces a new life cycle in Spider-Man: Brand New Day trailer
"Sometimes Spider-Man has to do the hard thing, even if it breaks Peter Parker's heart."
18 Mar 2026 3:41pm GMT
17 Mar 2026
Linuxiac
Systemd 260 Drops SysV Init Support in Major Cleanup Update

Systemd 260 drops SysV scripts, raises kernel and dependency requirements, and brings key internal changes across the stack.
17 Mar 2026 8:33pm GMT
Free VPN and Split View Are Coming to Mozilla Firefox

Mozilla is adding a free VPN and Split View to Firefox, giving users more privacy and a better way to browse side by side.
17 Mar 2026 5:22pm GMT
System76 Launches New Thelio Mira Desktop with Ryzen 9000 and RTX 5090 Power

System76 introduces the new Thelio Mira desktop with Ryzen 9000 CPUs, improved cooling, and RTX 5090 graphics for demanding workloads.
17 Mar 2026 3:42pm GMT