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EditorDavid @ Slashdot · 01/10/2026 09:34 EDT

How the Free Software Foundation Kept a Videoconferencing Software Free

The Free Software Foundation's president Ian Kelling is also their senior systems administrator. This week he shared an example of how "the work we put in to making sure a program is free for us also makes it free for the rest of the world." During the COVID-19 pandemic, like everyone everywhere, the FSF increased its videoconferencing use, especially videoconferencing software that works in web browsers. We have experience hosting... Read more ›

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Slashdot
BeauHD @ Slashdot · 01/10/2026 08:00 EDT

French-UK Starlink Rival Pitches Canada On 'Sovereign' Satellite Service

An anonymous reader quotes a report from CBC.ca: A company largely owned by the French and U.K. governments is pitching Canada on a roughly $250-million plan to provide the military with secure satellite broadband coverage in the Arctic, CBC News has learned. Eutelsat, a rival to tech billionaire Elon Musk's Starlink, already provides some services to the Canadian military, but wants to deepen the partnership as Canada looks to diversify... Read more ›

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Slashdot
BeauHD @ Slashdot · 01/10/2026 05:00 EDT

Scientists Tried To Break Einstein's Speed of Light Rule

Scientists are putting Einstein's claim that the speed of light is constant to the test. While researchers found no evidence that light's speed changes with energy, this null result dramatically tightens the constraints on quantum-gravity theories that predict even the tiniest violations. ScienceDaily reports: Special relativity rests on the principle that the laws of physics remain the same for all observers, regardless of how they are moving relative to one... Read more ›

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Slashdot
BeauHD @ Slashdot · 01/10/2026 02:00 EDT

Meta Signs Deals With Three Nuclear Companies For 6+ GW of Power

Meta has signed long-term nuclear power deals totaling more than 6 gigawatts to fuel its data centers: "one from a startup, one from a smaller energy company, and one from a larger company that already operates several nuclear reactors in the U.S," reports TechCrunch. From the report: Oklo and TerraPower, two companies developing small modular reactors (SMR), each signed agreements with Meta to build multiple reactors, while Vistra is selling... Read more ›

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Slashdot
BeauHD @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 22:30 EDT

AI Models Are Starting To Learn By Asking Themselves Questions

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: [P]erhaps AI can, in fact, learn in a more human way -- by figuring out interesting questions to ask itself and attempting to find the right answer. A project from Tsinghua University, the Beijing Institute for General Artificial Intelligence (BIGAI), and Pennsylvania State University shows that AI can learn to reason in this way by playing with computer code. The researchers devised... Read more ›

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Slashdot
BeauHD @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 21:02 EDT

AI Is Intensifying a 'Collapse' of Trust Online, Experts Say

Experts interviewed by NBC News warn that the rapid spread of AI-generated images and videos is accelerating an online trust breakdown, especially during fast-moving news events where context is scarce. From the report: President Donald Trump's Venezuela operation almost immediately spurred the spread of AI-generated images, old videos and altered photos across social media. On Wednesday, after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement officer fatally shot a woman in her car,... Read more ›

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Slashdot
BeauHD @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 20:25 EDT

Intel Is 'Going Big Time Into 14A,' Says CEO Lip-Bu Tan

Intel CEO Lip-Bu Tan says the company is "going big time" into its 14A (1.4nm-class) process, signaling confidence in yields and hinting at at least one external foundry customer. Tom's Hardware reports: Intel's 14A is expected to be production-ready in 2027, with early versions of process design kit (PDK) coming to external customers early this year. To that end, it is good to hear Intel's upbeat comments about 14A. Also,... Read more ›

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Slashdot
BeauHD @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 19:45 EDT

Microsoft May Soon Allow IT Admins To Uninstall Copilot

Microsoft is testing a new Windows policy that lets IT administrators uninstall Microsoft Copilot from managed devices. The change rolls out via Windows Insider builds and works through standard management tools like Intune and SCCM. BleepingComputer reports: The new policy will apply to devices where the Microsoft 365 Copilot and Microsoft Copilot are both installed, the Microsoft Copilot app was not installed by the user, and the Microsoft Copilot app... Read more ›

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Slashdot
BeauHD @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 19:02 EDT

Google: Don't Make 'Bite-Sized' Content For LLMs If You Care About Search Rank

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Search engine optimization, or SEO, is a big business. While some SEO practices are useful, much of the day-to-day SEO wisdom you see online amounts to superstition. An increasingly popular approach geared toward LLMs called "content chunking" may fall into that category. In the latest installment of Google's Search Off the Record podcast, John Mueller and Danny Sullivan say that breaking... Read more ›

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Slashdot
BeauHD @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 18:20 EDT

CES Worst In Show Awards Call Out the Tech Making Things Worse

Longtime Slashdot reader chicksdaddy writes: CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, isn't just about shiny new gadgets. As AP reports, this year brought back the fifth annual Worst in Show anti-awards, calling out the most harmful, wasteful, invasive, and unfixable tech at the Las Vegas show. The coalition behind the awards -- including Repair.org, iFixit, EFF, PIRG, Secure Repairs, and others -- put the spotlight on products that miss the point... Read more ›

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Slashdot
BeauHD @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 17:40 EDT

Latest SteamOS Beta Now Includes NTSYNC Kernel Driver

Valve has added the NTSYNC kernel driver to the SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, laying the groundwork for improved Windows game synchronization performance via Wine and Proton. Phoronix reports: For gearing up for that future Proton NTSYNC support, SteamOS 3.7.20 enables the NTSYNC kernel driver and loads the module by default. Most Linux distributions are at least already building the NTSYNC kernel module though there's been different efforts on how to handle... Read more ›

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Slashdot
BeauHD @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 17:02 EDT

Italy Fines Cloudflare 14 Million Euros For Refusing To Filter Pirate Sites On Public 1.1.1.1 DNS

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Italy's communications regulator AGCOM imposed a record-breaking 14.2 million-euro fine on Cloudflare after the company failed to implement the required piracy blocking measures. Cloudflare argued that filtering its global 1.1.1.1 DNS resolver would be "impossible" without hurting overall performance. AGCOM disagreed, noting that Cloudflare is not necessarily a neutral intermediary either. [...] "The measure, in addition to being one of the first... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 16:25 EDT

Microsoft Windows Media Player Stops Serving Up CD Album Info

An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft is celebrating the resurgence of interest in physical media in the only way it knows how... by halting the Windows Media Player metadata service. Readers of a certain vintage will remember inserting a CD into their PC and watching Windows Media Player populate with track listings and album artwork. No more. Sometime before Christmas, the metadata servers stopped working and on Windows 10... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 15:41 EDT

Identity and Ideology in the School Boardroom

The abstract of a paper on NBER: School boards have statutory authority over most elementary and secondary education policies, but receive little attention compared to other actors in education systems. A fundamental challenge to understanding the importance of boards is the absence of data on the policy goals of board members -- i.e., their ideologies -- forcing researchers to conduct tests based on demographic and professional characteristics -- i.e., identities... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 15:01 EDT

The Golden Age of Vaccine Development

Microbiology had its golden age in the late nineteenth century, when researchers identified the bacterial causes of tuberculosis, cholera, typhoid, and a dozen other diseases in rapid succession. Antibiotics had theirs in the mid-twentieth century. Both booms eventually slowed. Vaccine development, by contrast, appears to be speeding up -- and the most productive era may still lie ahead, Works in Progress writes in a story. In the first half of... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 14:25 EDT

America Is Falling Out of Love With Pizza

The restaurant industry is trying to figure out whether America has hit peak pizza. From a report: Once the second-most common U.S. restaurant type, pizzerias are now outnumbered by coffee shops and Mexican food eateries, according to industry data. Sales growth at pizza restaurants has lagged behind the broader fast-food market for years, and the outlook ahead isn't much brighter. "Pizza is disrupted right now," Ravi Thanawala, chief financial officer... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 13:44 EDT

Amazon's New Manager Dashboard Flags 'Low-Time Badgers' and 'Zero Badgers'

Amazon has begun equipping managers with a dashboard that tracks not just whether corporate employees show up to the office but how long they stay once they're there, according to an internal document obtained by Business Insider. The system, which started rolling out in December, flags "Low-Time Badgers" who average less than four hours daily over an eight-week period and "Zero Badgers" who don't badge into any building during that... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 13:05 EDT

Torvalds Tells Kernel Devs To Stop Debating AI Slop - Bad Actors Won't Follow the Rules Anyway

Linus Torvalds has weighed in on an ongoing debate within the Linux kernel development community about whether documentation should explicitly address AI-generated code contributions, and his position is characteristically blunt: stop making it an issue. The Linux creator was responding to Oracle-affiliated kernel developer Lorenzo Stoakes, who had argued that treating LLMs as "just another tool" ignores the threat they pose to kernel quality. "Thinking LLMs are 'just another tool'... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 12:24 EDT

Craigslist at 30: No Algorithms, No Ads, No Problem

Craigslist, the 30-year-old classifieds site that looks virtually unchanged since the dial-up era, continues to draw more than 105 million monthly users and remains enormously profitable despite never spending a cent on advertising or marketing. The site ranks as the 40th most popular website in the United States, according to Internet data company Similarweb. University of Pennsylvania associate professor Jessa Lingel called it the "ungentrified" Internet. Unlike Facebook Marketplace, Etsy,... Read more ›

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Slashdot
msmash @ Slashdot · 01/09/2026 11:45 EDT

iOS 26 Shows Unusually Slow Adoption Months After Release

Apple's iOS 26 appears to be witnessing the slowest adoption rate in recent memory, with third-party analytics from StatCounter indicating that only 15 to 16% of active iPhones worldwide are running the operating system nearly four months after its September release. The figures stand in stark contrast to iOS 18, which had reached approximately 63% adoption by January 2025, and iOS 17, which hit 54% by January 2024. iOS 16... Read more ›

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19.01.2026 21:07
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