fidzu : nerd

The privacy-focused Tails 7.9 is now available with Tor Browser 15.0.16, updated firmware for newer hardware, and a Secure Boot notification fix.

18 Jun 2026 11:52am GMT

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18 Jun 2026 11:34am GMT

Special-effects designer Brian Johnson, known for his groundbreaking work on Space: 1999, The Empire Strikes Back, Alien, and Aliens, has died at the age of 86. Johnson began his career creating models and explosions for Gerry and Sylvia Anderson productions, later designed the iconic Eagle Transporter, and became one of science fiction cinema's most influential behind-the-scenes artists. Longtime Slashdot reader sandbagger remembers the SFX legend, writing: "The Space: 1999 Eagle is one of the great space ships of science fiction."

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18 Jun 2026 11:00am GMT

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18 Jun 2026 10:33am GMT

SonicDE is a new community project focused on preserving KDE's X11 desktop components as upstream Plasma moves fully to Wayland.

18 Jun 2026 9:09am GMT

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18 Jun 2026 9:08am GMT

PipeWire 1.6.7 is out with fixes for silent ports after sample rate changes, ALSA sync regressions, and several smaller audio improvements.

18 Jun 2026 8:24am GMT

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares a report from Autoblog: For years, the Chinese auto industry has employed a hostile price war to kneecap global competitors. Armed with massive state subsidies, cheap raw materials, and an aggressive "scale-first" business model, Chinese automakers flooded the market with electric vehicles priced so low that legacy manufacturers stood no chance to compete. How did they do it? Simple, they couldn't. They did it anyway. Reports from CarNewsChina show that Chinese automakers have been selling vehicles at a loss until a recent law passed by the Chinese government banned below-cost sales of new vehicles. During the ongoing sales slump in China caused by rolled-back subsidies and direct government intervention banning below-cost sales, the truth behind the rapid expansion of the Chinese auto industry has been exposed. "By the first quarter of 2026, China captured 32 percent of the global auto market, with its New Energy Vehicles (NEVs) controlling an incredible 61 percent of global share," the report notes. Yet that dominance has come at a steep cost: throughout 2025, "the profit margin for China's auto industry plunged to 4.4 percent and dropped further to a historic low of 3.2 percent in early 2026." "Gross profit, not net profit, per vehicle, plummeted to a mere $2,000. We can expect the net figure to be loss-making." Autoblog adds: "Data shows over 70 percent of Chinese car sales were loss-making. This left more than half of the country's auto industry in the red. Great Wall Motor (GWM) even saw net profits drop 17 percent despite steady revenue growth." China's EV price war has now hit a wall. New regulations are discouraging below-cost sales, rising material costs are forcing automakers to cut discounts and raise prices, and reduced tax incentives are weakening domestic demand. To sustain growth, manufacturers are increasingly turning to exports.

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18 Jun 2026 7:00am GMT

Peter Parker to Bruce Banner: "I didn't know you could get that big."

18 Jun 2026 6:37am GMT

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Tesco, a retail conglomerate headquartered in the United Kingdom, is moving 40,000 server workloads off of VMware amid "abusive conduct" from Broadcom, recent legal filings claim. Tesco filed a lawsuit in the UK's High Court against Broadcom alleging breach of contract last year. According to a September report from The Register, the lawsuit claimed that in January 2021, Tesco bought perpetual licenses for VMware's vSphere Foundation and Cloud Foundation, a subscription to VMware Tanzu, plus support services until 2026, with the option to extend support for four additional years. But when Broadcom took over VMware in November 2023, it would not honor the deal and instead tried to get Tesco to pay "excessive and inflated prices for virtualization software for which Tesco has already paid" and would not allow it to buy support services for its perpetually licensed software without buying "duplicative subscription-based licenses for those same Software products," the initial complaint read, The Register reported at the time. Tesco, which reported 73.7 billion pounds (about $98.7 billion) in revenue in its fiscal year 2026, has since started migrating away from VMware and Broadcom's mainframe products, according to late-May court filings reported on by The Register today. In January, Broadcom stopped supporting Tesco's VMware products, Tesco said, and Tesco has been paying for third-party support since. In its initial filing, Tesco also said that Broadcom refused to upgrade software or provide all security updates to customers without subscriptions. One of Tesco's recent filings, per The Register, reads: "Faced with Broadcom's abusive conduct, and given the criticality of virtualization and mainframe software and services to its business, Tesco has been forced to incur material costs to procure alternative solutions with reduced functionality, and to migrate to that software in a manner, and on a timeframe, that creates very significant risks to its business." If it works "at exceptional pace," Tesco will be completely off VMware by the end of 2027 at the earliest. However, "the timeframe in which that migration must be undertaken has created and continues to create operational and commercial risk, and at material ongoing cost and disruption to the business," Tesco reportedly noted. Tesco is also dealing with migration challenges related to data security because its new, unnamed virtualization software is incompatible with the Veeam and Zerto products it uses. Tesco initially requested at least 100 million pounds (about $133.6 million) in damages each from Broadcom, VMware, and reseller Computacenter, plus interest. In its recent filings, Tesco said it turned down at least four offers from Broadcom to continue using VMware and Broadcom's mainframe tech. [...] The case is expected to go to court between November 1, 2027, and February 25, 2028, The Register reported. Afterward, it could go to trial. Further reading: HPE Tempts VMware Users, Partners With Year of Free Virtualization Software

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18 Jun 2026 3:30am GMT

Maggot therapy lacks robust data, but it has fans and a fail-safe "bacon therapy."

17 Jun 2026 10:11pm GMT

Elsewhere, beyond-classical quantum hardware, plus classical computing fires back.

17 Jun 2026 8:44pm GMT