fidzu : nerd

Voice has lagged in adoption behind screens. OpenAI wants to change that.

02 Jan 2026 9:27pm GMT

Rogue, free-floating planets appear to have two distinct origins.

02 Jan 2026 8:54pm GMT

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02 Jan 2026 8:24pm GMT

President Donald Trump signed into law this month a measure that prohibits anyone based in China and other adversarial countries from accessing the Pentagon's cloud computing systems. From a report: The ban, which is tucked inside the $900 billion defense policy law, was enacted in response to a ProPublica investigation this year that exposed how Microsoft used China-based engineers to service the Defense Department's computer systems for nearly a decade -- a practice that left some of the country's most sensitive data vulnerable to hacking from its leading cyber adversary. U.S.-based supervisors, known as "digital escorts," were supposed to serve as a check on these foreign employees, but we found they often lacked the expertise needed to effectively supervise engineers with far more advanced technical skills. In the wake of the reporting, leading members of Congress called on the Defense Department to strengthen its security requirements while blasting Microsoft for what some Republicans called "a national betrayal." Cybersecurity and intelligence experts have told ProPublica that the arrangement posed major risks to national security, given that laws in China grant the country's officials broad authority to collect data.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Jan 2026 8:01pm GMT

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02 Jan 2026 7:48pm GMT

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02 Jan 2026 7:39pm GMT

"Biggest advantage of lower altitude is that beam diameter is smaller for a given antenna size."

02 Jan 2026 7:03pm GMT

AMD's share of processors among Steam users climbed to 47.27% in December 2025, a 4.66% jump in a single month that continues the company's steady encroachment on Intel's once-dominant position in the gaming CPU market. Intel held roughly 77% of the Steam Hardware Survey five years ago, and that lead has eroded considerably as AMD broke the 40% threshold in the third quarter of 2025 and kept climbing. The gains came despite an ongoing memory shortage that has pushed DDR5 prices to record highs -- AMD's AM5 platform requires DDR5 exclusively, while Intel's Raptor Lake Refresh chips support both DDR4 and DDR5. Many gamers are turning to older AMD Zen 3 processors like the Ryzen 5 5800X, which topped Amazon's bestseller lists during the holiday period and work on DDR4-compatible platforms. Meanwhile, the proportion of Steam users running 32GB of RAM rose to 39.07%, nearly matching the 40.14% still on 16GB, as gamers likely rushed to upgrade before prices climbed further amid AI's demand for memory.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Jan 2026 7:01pm GMT

Icecast 2.5 open-source streaming media server is out, delivering refinements to the web UI, protocol behavior, and API reporting.

02 Jan 2026 6:26pm GMT

The International Publishers Association spent the past year promoting the slogan "Democracy depends on reading," but Atlantic senior editor Adam Kirsch argues that this utilitarian pitch fundamentally misunderstands why people become readers in the first place. The most recent Survey of Public Participation in the Arts found that less than half of Americans read a single book in 2022, and only 38% read a novel or short story. A University of Florida and University College London study found daily reading for pleasure fell 3% annually from 2003 to 2023. Among 13-year-olds, just 14% read for fun almost every day in 2023, down from 27% a decade earlier. Kirsch says to stop treating reading as civic medicine. "It would be better to describe reading not as a public duty but as a private pleasure, sometimes even a vice," he writes. When literature was considered transgressive, moralists couldn't stop people from buying dangerous books. Now that books are deemed virtuous, nobody picks them up. He points to Don Quixote and Madame Bovary -- novels whose protagonists are ruined by their reading habits. Great writers, he notes, never idealized literature the way educators do. The pitch to young readers should emphasize staying up late reading under the covers by flashlight, hoping nobody finds out.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

02 Jan 2026 6:01pm GMT

MiDesktop revives the KDE 1 desktop for modern Linux with a development preview now available for Debian 13 and Ubuntu 24.04 LTS.

02 Jan 2026 2:39pm GMT

Updated Devuan Excalibur 6.1 ISOs are now available, featuring refreshed packages in line with Debian 13.2 and newly unofficial builds for Raspberry Pi.

02 Jan 2026 7:31am GMT