19 Feb 2026
Slashdot
A $10 Plastic Speaker is the Most Durable Revenue Line in Indian Digital Payments
India's digital payment platforms process trillions of dollars a year through UPI, the government-built real-time payments rail that handles more than 90% of all payment transactions in the country, but one of their largest net revenue line items is not a payment product at all: it's a cheap plastic speaker that sits on a shopkeeper's counter and reads out incoming payments aloud. The roughly 23 million soundboxes deployed across India earn about $220 million a year in rental fees, more than every explicitly UPI-linked revenue line in the ecosystem combined, according to estimates from Bernstein. Each device costs $7-12 to manufacture and earns its platform $7-10 a year in rent. A story adds: PhonePe processes about 48% of all UPI transactions in India. Its net payment processing revenue in H1 FY26 was about $83 million. Its device revenue was about $34 million. Running nearly half of India's real-time payment infrastructure earns PhonePe only 2.4 times what it makes from renting speakers to shopkeepers.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
19 Feb 2026 10:20am GMT
Claims That AI Can Help Fix Climate Dismissed As Greenwashing
An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Guardian: Tech companies are conflating traditional artificial intelligence with generative AI when claiming the energy-hungry technology could help avert climate breakdown, according to a report. Most claims that AI can help avert climate breakdown refer to machine learning and not the energy-hungry chatbots and image generation tools driving the sector's explosive growth of gas-guzzling datacenters, the analysis of 154 statements found. The research, commissioned by nonprofits including Beyond Fossil Fuels and Climate Action Against Disinformation, did not find a single example where popular tools such as Google's Gemini or Microsoft's Copilot were leading to a "material, verifiable, and substantial" reduction in planet-heating emissions. Ketan Joshi, an energy analyst and author of the report, said the industry's tactics were "diversionary" and relied on tried and tested methods that amount to "greenwashing." He likened it to fossil fuel companies advertising their modest investments in solar panels and overstating the potential of carbon capture. "These technologies only avoid a minuscule fraction of emissions relative to the massive emissions of their core business," said Joshi. "Big tech took that approach and upgraded and expanded it." [...] Joshi said the discourse around AI's climate benefits needed to be "brought back to reality." "The false coupling of a big problem and a small solution serves as a distraction from the very preventable harms being done through unrestricted datacenter expansion," he said.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
19 Feb 2026 10:00am GMT
Hacker News
/Deslop
19 Feb 2026 9:45am GMT
Slashdot
Trump Has Prepared Speech On Extraterrestrial Life
According to Lara Trump, Donald Trump has prepared but not yet delivered a speech about extraterrestrial life, though the White House says such a speech would be "news to me." White House Spokesperson Karoline Leavitt continued: "I'll have to check in with our speech writing team. Uh, and that would be of great interest to me personally, and I'm sure all of you in this room and apparently former President Obama, too." The Hill reports: Lara Trump, speaking on the Pod Force One podcast, said the president has played coy when she and her husband Eric have asked about the existence of UFO's and aliens. "We've kind of asked my father-in-law about this... we all want to know about the UFOs... and he played a little coy with us," Lara Trump said. "I've heard kind of around, I think my father-in-law has actually said it, that there is some speech that he has, that I guess at the right time, I don't know when the right time is, he's going to break out and talk about and it has to do with maybe some sort of extraterrestrial life." Obama has clarified in recent days that he has seen no evidence that aliens are real, after comments he made on a podcast with Brian Tyler Cohen seeming to confirm his knowledge of extraterrestrial life went viral. "They're real but I haven't seen them," Obama said on the podcast. "And they're not being kept in... what is it? Area 51. There's no underground facility unless there's this enormous conspiracy and they hid it from the president of the United States." Later, in a post on Instagram, Obama clarified that he was trying to answer in the light-hearted spirit of a speed round of questions and that, "Statistically, the universe is so vast that the odds are good there's life out there." "But the distances between solar systems are so great that the chances we've been visited by aliens is low, and I saw no evidence during my presidency that extraterrestrials have made contact with us. Really!"
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
19 Feb 2026 7:00am GMT
Hacker News
Old School Visual Effects: The Cloud Tank (2010)
19 Feb 2026 6:43am GMT
Stoolap/Node: A Native Node.js Driver That's Surprisingly Fast
19 Feb 2026 6:09am GMT
18 Feb 2026
Ars Technica
Verizon acknowledges "pain" of new unlock policy, suggests change is coming
Report: Verizon's goal is "immediate unlock for all payment methods really soon."
18 Feb 2026 8:58pm GMT
Linuxiac
Bitwarden Community Survey Reveals Top Privacy Tools for 2026

Bitwarden has released its 2026 survey results, showing which browsers, email services, VPNs, and messaging apps are most popular with its users.
18 Feb 2026 8:58pm GMT
Ars Technica
Chevy Bolt, BMW i3, or something else? At $10K, you have lots of EV options
Two of Ars' favorite electric vehicles are now available for not very much money.
18 Feb 2026 8:22pm GMT
Lawsuit: EPA revoking greenhouse gas finding risks “thousands of avoidable deaths”
EPA sued for abandoning its mission to protect public health.
18 Feb 2026 7:48pm GMT
Linuxiac
Pocketblue Brings Fedora Atomic Linux to Mobile Devices

Pocketblue brings Fedora Atomic to select ARM-powered devices, providing users with an immutable Linux system on their phones and tablets.
18 Feb 2026 2:20pm GMT
17 Feb 2026
Linuxiac
COSMIC Desktop 1.0.7 Improves Workspaces Overview

COSMIC Desktop 1.0.7 adds configurable typing actions in Workspaces Overview and resolves several full-screen and tiling-related crashes.
17 Feb 2026 10:46pm GMT