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"The systemd project merged a pull request adding a new birthDate field to the JSON user records managed by userdb in response to the age verification laws of California, Colorado, and Brazil," reports the blog It's FOSS. They note that the field "can only be set by administrators, not by users themselves" - it's the same record that already holds metadata like realName, emailAddress, and location: Lennart Poettering, the creator of systemd, has clarified that this change is "an optional field in the userdb JSON object. It's not a policy engine, not an API for apps. We just define the field, so that it's standardized iff people want to store the date there, but it's entirely optional. " In simple words, this is something that adds a new, optional field that can then be used by other open source projects like xdg-desktop-portal to build age verification compliance on top of, without systemd itself doing anything with the data or making it mandatory to provide. A merge request asking for this change to be repealed was struck down by Lennart, who gave the above-mentioned reasoning behind this, and further noted that people were misunderstanding what systemd is trying to do here. "It enforces zero policy," Poettering said. "It leaves that up for other parts of the system."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 Mar 2026 3:34pm GMT

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21 Mar 2026 2:50pm GMT

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21 Mar 2026 2:46pm GMT

Jeff Bezos "is in early talks to raise $100 billion," reports the Wall Street Journal, "for a new fund that would buy up manufacturing companies and seek to use AI technology to accelerate their path to automation." "The Amazon.com founder is meeting with some of the world's largest asset managers to raise funding for the project." A few months ago, [Bezos] traveled to the Middle East to discuss the new fund with sovereign wealth representatives in the region. More recently, he went to Singapore to raise funding for the effort as well, according to people familiar with the matter. The fund, described in investor documents as a "manufacturing transformation vehicle," is aiming to buy companies in major industrial sectors such as chipmaking, defense and aerospace... Bezos was recently appointed co-CEO of Project Prometheus, a new startup that is building artificial-intelligence models that can understand and simulate the physical world. Bezos plans to use the company's technology to boost the efficiency and profitability of businesses owned by the fund, a playbook that some investment firms are similarly deploying in sectors such as accounting and property management... [Prometheus has also hired employees from OpenAI and Google DeepMind, the article points out.] While much of the AI revolution has been focused on large language models, billions of dollars have begun to flow to companies that are seeking to apply spatially focused AI systems toward industries including robotics and manufacturing... Amazon, one of [America's] largest employers, has closed in on the milestone of having as many robots as humans.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 Mar 2026 2:34pm GMT

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21 Mar 2026 2:22pm GMT

KDE Plasma 6.7 will introduce time zone offsets in the clock and a new type-ahead desktop navigation feature for faster file access.

21 Mar 2026 11:43am GMT

NASA's Hubble Space Telescope unexpectedly captured a rare, early-stage breakup of comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) just days after it first began disintegrating. Phys.org reports: "Sometimes the best science happens by accident," said co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama. "This comet got observed because our original comet was not viewable due to some new technical constraints after we won our proposal. We had to find a new target -- and right when we observed it, it happened to break apart, which is the slimmest of slim chances." Noonan didn't know K1 was fragmenting until he viewed the images the day after Hubble took them. "While I was taking an initial look at the data, I saw that there were four comets in those images when we only proposed to look at one," said Noonan. "So we knew this was something really, really special." Hubble caught K1 fragmenting into at least four pieces, each with a distinct coma, the fuzzy envelope of gas and dust that surrounds a comet's icy nucleus. Hubble cleanly resolved the fragments, but to ground-based telescopes, at the time they only appeared as barely distinguishable, bright blobs. [...] "Never before has Hubble caught a fragmenting comet this close to when it actually fell apart. Most of the time, it's a few weeks to a month later. And in this case, we were able to see it just days after," said Noonan. "This is telling us something very important about the physics of what's happening at the comet's surface. We may be seeing the timescale it takes to form a substantial dust layer that can then be ejected by the gas." The findings have been published in the journal Icarus.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

21 Mar 2026 11:00am GMT

Wine 11.5 introduces C++ build system support, improved Linux integration, and several fixes that enhance stability and compatibility across applications.

20 Mar 2026 10:58pm GMT

OpenShot 3.5 introduces a default QWidget timeline, smoother editing, smaller export files, enhanced stability, and initial ComfyUI AI tool integration.

20 Mar 2026 10:34pm GMT

The verdict, while not a complete loss, could still cost him billions.

20 Mar 2026 10:27pm GMT

Fatal brain infection was thought to be from profound immune suppression. Not anymore.

20 Mar 2026 10:11pm GMT

ULA's Vulcan launch vehicle is grounded after a solid rocket booster anomaly last month.

20 Mar 2026 9:35pm GMT