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When was the last time you compiled an operating system kernel?

  • This morning---I live on the unstable nightly build!
  • Every time a major release comes out
  • Whenever my distro does it for me
  • Last century
  • That one time when I was in college and I was experimenting
  • Never
  • What's a kernel?
  • Other (describe in the comments)

[ Results | Polls ]
Comments:56 | Votes:185

posted by jelizondo on Monday August 31, @01:22PM   Printer-friendly

https://www.cnet.com/tech/gaming/sony-is-reminding-us-again-that-we-dont-own-our-playstation-games/

The future of gaming is going to be all digital, whether anyone likes it or not. 

Some things are too bizarre to make up, and Sony's inability to read the room is one of them.

Over the last week or so, the media giant has sent emails to PlayStation users with its entire Terms of Service, which includes a reminder that their digital games are "licensed” and not “sold.” The communication comes as gamers continue to protest Sony's removal of physical media from the PlayStation 6.

As an isolated incident, Sony's email isn't really anything untoward. It lets the user know that they have recently accepted the most recent Terms of Service, Code of Conduct, End User License Agreement and Privacy Policy. The company even included full copies of each in the email. 

But the timing of Sony’s email appears intentional, not just unfortunate. PlayStation users are furious over the company’s decision to remove the physical disc drive from the PlayStation 6, as well as its announcement that it will stop producing game discs altogether as of January 2028. Sony announced the end of physical discs just a few days after removing several digitally purchased movies from users’ accounts.

The email was spotted by The Verge's Tom Warren, who posted about it on X over the weekend: “Sony emailing everyone about PlayStation terms of use during a backlash over the end of discs and a lack of digital ownership is certainly a choice.”

The backlash has grown large enough to inspire a PlayStation boycott — starting Sunday — with players pledging not to buy, log in to or play games for a week to protest Sony’s abandonment of physical media for the console.

So, right in the middle of a protest centered on concerns about game ownership, Sony is reminding us we’re merely buying a license to use a game under the company’s terms.

A move like this from another multibillion-dollar company underscores the new normal in gaming and tech, where companies appear to be shifting further away from the idea of ownership. Instead, they ask consumers to retain access to products that may be revoked or restricted at the company’s discretion. These changes didn't come in one dramatic wave, but in a steady stream of small consumer-facing microaggressions that have built up over time. 

Take the recent HP printer controversy, for example. HP programmed its printers to lock users out if third-party ink is detected. That means you can buy an HP printer and own it — but if you don’t fill it with the official (more expensive) ink cartridges, the printer can sass back like an angsty, spoiled teenager and refuse to work. 

There are subtler attempts to chip away at our agency (and purchasing power) as consumers. Apple raised MacBook prices this year, then started a program where the company will literally rent you one, presumably because you can’t afford it otherwise. You wouldn’t own the MacBook, so Apple could lock you out of your device if you missed a lease payment. 

When it comes to music and movies, streaming has been the norm for years — we’re dutifully reminded every so often that we’re renting the ability to listen or watch something rather than owning it. I’ll never forget a couple of years ago when the entire library from the rock band Coheed and Cambria's was removed from YouTube Music due to a licensing dispute while I was in the middle of listening. 

Sony and other gaming companies are starting to adopt the same lending-access business model in software and digital entertainment: In this brave new world, mega corporations can own everything and make us “purchase” rentals entirely on their terms. That means they can change, restrict, discontinue or shut down access, but we can never keep, lend, sell or pass down a product.

The shift is leaving older generations (millennials like myself included) increasingly nostalgic for a time when buying something meant taking home something tangible — something that belonged to us.


Original Submission

posted by jelizondo on Monday August 31, @08:30AM   Printer-friendly
from the person-of-interest dept.

https://www.theregister.com/legal/2026/08/26/flock-shock-rocks-cop-cam-vendor-as-protests-mount/5292691

A mischief-maker in a Darth Vader suit recently endorsed Flock at a city council meeting, and it has not helped the company's fortunes. Around the US, citizens have been protesting and sometimes vandalizing the company's network of surveillance cameras. And the advocacy has caused some governments to change course.

Government officials, commonly hesitant to second-guess law enforcement practices, have become concerned enough to question these mass surveillance practices. US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) on Wednesday wrote to Flock CEO Garrett Langley to announce an investigation of "Flock Safety's collection, retention, and dissemination of data gathered by its artificial intelligence cameras."

Despite "Darth Vader's" comments last week at a San Diego City Council meeting about the need to "continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum," a growing number of local governments in the US have been cancelling or choosing not to renew their contracts with Flock and other makers of automated license plate readers (ALPRs).

The Institute for Justice (IJ), a Virginia-based legal advocacy non-profit, on Wednesday published a new database that tracks the termination of local government ALPR contracts. As of Wednesday, the database documents 93 local governments that canceled ALPR contracts.

The IJ, which is challenging ALPR use on Fourth Amendment grounds in Norfolk, Virginia and San Jose, California, previously published a database that documents police abuse of ALPRs, a topic addressed in Hawley's letter. Incidents include romantic stalking, wrongful traffic stops and detentions, and other forms of misconduct.

"I think what's happened is that the American public has woken up to the mass surveillance that quietly arose around them," said Robert Frommer, senior attorney at IJ, in an interview with The Register. "And they don't like it.

"It does seem to me that the rate of cancellations, the rate of public protest has increased over the past few months. I think that's both due to more news attention being paid to the real life abuses of this technology, as well as the Supreme Court's recent decision in the geofence case," Frommer said. In that case, SCOTUS ruled that cops need a warrant to grab location data.

Frommer said that he believes the IJ's efforts to document ALPRs and associated abuses have helped focus the public's concern and have illustrated the problems with warrantless mass surveillance.

ALPRs, from vendors like Flock, Motorola Solutions, and PlateSmart, among others, capture license plates whenever cars drive by, along with geodata and potentially images of people. This data can be combined with other information, effectively putting all passersby under constant surveillance without any warrant.

"I think what we're seeing now is the reaction to that," said Frommer, who explained that the problem with Flock cameras is that they're accessible to anyone with login credentials, without any authorization from a supervising authority.

"You don't need to go to a judge and get a warrant," Frommer explained. "You don't need anything. And when you basically give that search power to the bored officer in his cop car in the middle of a shift, it inevitably happens that they start using it and start misusing it, whether to look people up personally or whether to investigate people at political protests."

These sorts of issues, Frommer said, have made people question whether we should live in a panopticon.

The IJ's litigation and its Plate Privacy Project, said Frommer, follow from the belief that there are solutions, whether they come from the courts or lawmakers. Pointing to Hawley's letter, he said that this is not just a state or local issue, but has become a federal concern.

"I think what the din that you've heard over the past couple of months shows that there absolutely needs to be a change, a reckoning," he said. "And that's what we're pushing for in our litigation. We're pushing for a warrant requirement. You want to go look up somebody's past travels and see where they have been? Go to a judge, explain it, and get a warrant."

Flock did not respond to a request for comment.


Original Submission

posted by jelizondo on Monday August 31, @03:58AM   Printer-friendly

https://www.theregister.com/science/2026/08/26/indias-crewed-space-program-will-fly-this-year-after-missing-2022-and-2025-targets/5292478

India plans the first launch of its crewed space program this year and has expanded its orbital ambitions to include operating a space station by 2035.

India's crewed space program is called Gaganyaan and has already missed deadlines to fly in 2022 and 2025. The nation's space research organization (ISRO) agency and government did not say anything about the future Gaganyaan schedule after last year's deadline passed without a launch.

That silence ended earlier this week, when ISRO Chairman Dr V. Narayanan used the occasion of India's third annual National Space Day to reveal that testing of the rocket and crew module to be used by Gaganyaan missions is almost complete, and the first of three test missions will launch this year.

The test flights will use India's LVM3 launcher, which ISRO has flown nine times without failure. The version ISRO will use for Gaganyaan missions is rated for human use thanks to the inclusion of a crew escape system equipped with solid-fuel motors designed to speed Vyomanauts – the Sanskrit-derived word India has unofficially adopted for its astronauts –to safety.

The Gaganyaan crew module is built to carry three Vyomanauts and spend three days in a 400km orbit before splashing down into Indian waters.

ISRO has previously said it will launch a robot on at least one Gaganyaan test mission. It's unclear if that's still the plan. The aerospace agency has also not said when it plans to launch its second and third test flights, or a first crewed mission.

If India can put Vyomanauts in orbit it will become just the fourth country to do so on its own vehicle – after Russia, the USA, and China.

Dr Narayanan and other officials and government figures  used this year's Space Day to tease other future initiatives, one of which is putting an Indian space station into orbit around 2035. More involvement from private space companies was also on the agenda, perhaps as manufacturers of the launchers ISRO uses. If India chooses that path, it will mimic the USA's current approach, which sees NASA make just one vehicle – the ultra-expensive Space Launch System – and contract its other launches to commercial launch companies. Japan's space agency uses a slightly different approach, defining specs for its vehicles and contracting industrial giants like Mitsubishi to make them, but then runs its own missions under its own name.


Original Submission

posted by mrcoolbp on Sunday August 30, @11:05PM   Printer-friendly

https://www.engadget.com/2246131/judge-rules-that-pentagon-anthropic-ban-illegal-and-baseless/

A US federal court has ruled that the Pentagon's designation of Anthropic as a supply chain risk was illegal, CNBC reported. US District judge Rita Lin found that the US Department of Defense's restrictions placed on the AI company and its Claude model were "illegal and baseless." As part of the ruling, the judge barred certain federal agencies from enforcing President Trump's order to stop using Anthropic's tools.

"The empty invocation of national security is not a blank check to punish and retaliate against government critics," Judge Lin said in a 59-page decision. "Neither the Constitution nor the federal statute invoked by Defendants allows them to impose sweeping penalties based principally on Anthropic's critique of the Administration's views."

"We welcome the court's ruling that this supply chain risk designation was unlawful," an Anthropic spokesperson told CNBC. "We remain focused on working productively with the government to harness AI for our national security so all Americans benefit from this technology."

The dispute arose in late February, after the Department of Defense and its Secretary Pete Hegseth pressured Anthropic to remove certain safeguards from its AI systems. Anthropic's CEO Dario Amodei, however, made it clear the company would refuse to allow its model to be used for mass surveillance or the development of autonomous weapons.

Late in February, Trump ordered all US government agencies to stop using Claude and other Anthropic services, escalating the feud. On social media, the president said there would be a six-month phase out period for federal agencies to migrate off of Anthropic's products. Subsequent talks collapsed and Anthropic became the first US company to be designated as a supply chain risk.

After saying it would challenge the decision, Anthropic sued the White House in two federal courts (for two separate designations) to reverse the ban. Today's ruling by Judge Lin gave the company a victory on one of those counts, but Anthropic is still considered a supply chain risk pending the second decision. Even if it wins both cases, though, the Pentagon would not be required to restart its work with the company.

The supply chain designation hasn't slowed Anthropic's march toward a likely near-record IPO later this year. Earlier this month, the company's revenue surged to a record $11.5 billion, 14 times more than it earned in the same quarter last year. Engadget has reached out to Anthropic for additional comment.


Original Submission

posted by mrcoolbp on Sunday August 30, @06:21PM   Printer-friendly
from the Where-can-I-get-a-bot-to-work-my-farm? dept.

The Global Government Affairs team over at X dropped a bombshell Thursday night, revealing that the X Safety team had uncovered proof positive of a foreign influence campaign targeting the build out of AI and data centers in the United States:

It turns out that, after launching an investigation, the team uncovered a massive bot farm consisting of roughly 200,000 "suspected Chinese inauthentic accounts," including hundreds that appear to have been trying to manipulate debate in the U.S. over artificial intelligence, data centers, and the associated energy costs.

This development comes after President Trump warned last month that "other nations are trying to get us to slow down" and are spending money on "propaganda" to convince Americans that data centers aren't a positive thing.

According to X, about 200 accounts within the bot farm network were posting claims that data centers drive up household electricity prices and put excessive strain on the power grid. Some of the accounts, ironically, posted AI-generated cartoons depicting data center operators getting rich while ordinary American citizens were stuck paying the bill.

[...] The insidious thing about this kind of foreign influence operation is that it preys on the concerns that many Americans already have about the data centers popping up in their communities – debates about things like electric bills and the robustness of the power grid are already happening here. All a foreign adversary like China has to do is amplify those fears and sow distrust to make it harder for the U.S. to keep building out its AI infrastructure.

Related:


Original Submission

posted by mrcoolbp on Sunday August 30, @01:36PM   Printer-friendly

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/windows/site-provides-instructions-to-get-up-to-usd175-back-for-your-pre-installed-windows-11-license-new-portal-provides-legal-forms-but-warns-buyers-not-to-wipe-storage-first

Refund4Freedom doesn't just help PC buyers in the quest to get Windows refunds; they have three key demands. Prevention is better than cure, right? The first demand is that “Device manufacturers and vendors should not impose an operating system or software on consumers, and should not force them to pay for software that they don't want.” This is central to the site’s message and purpose. However, it also wants to promote the idea that consumers should have the right to buy hardware without pre-installed software and see the price of the product with and without Windows, etc. Refund4Freedom also urges manufacturers and vendors to clearly outline the steps for requesting and obtaining a refund for pre-installed OSes and software. Of course, the process for consumers should be as friction-free as possible.

Whichever brand of PC you buy, and the above list is far from exhaustive, you should follow a deliberate rejection procedure. If you intend to shun Windows, Refund4Freedom tells users to start up the PC and take pictures showing the contract clauses addressing reimbursement. Do not format or erase the computer at this stage. The next step is to contact the manufacturer's customer service. Do this in a recordable way, and so email/messaging is encouraged for records.

Finally, and whatever the outcome, Refund4Freedom asks its readers to report their experience, good or bad, to the aforementioned AGCM. To inspire you, the site includes several user reports of success, and I note one user getting back as much as €150 from Acer (~$175). That was a combination of Windows license reimbursement and a larger legal fee refund. A more typical reimbursement level is roughly $60.


Original Submission

posted by mrcoolbp on Sunday August 30, @06:34AM   Printer-friendly
from the pony-up dept.

PayPal shares plunged as much as 16% in premarket trading Friday, the most in months if the losses hold through the cash session, after a consortium led by private-equity firm Advent International and payments giant Stripe abandoned its takeover bid for the struggling payment processor (paywalled, use Reader mode in Firefox):

A consortium of buyout firm Advent and payment processor Stripe has decided to abandon its pursuit of fintech pioneer PayPal Holdings Inc., a potential deal that would have ranked as one of the biggest-ever leveraged buyouts, according to people familiar with the matter.

From ZeroHedge:

PayPal reportedly rejected the $50 billion offer, betting that Advent and Stripe would return to the negotiating table with a higher price. Instead, the consortium walked away.

[...] Takeover interest in PayPal first came to light in a February Bloomberg article, which reported that Stripe was considering acquiring all or part of PayPal. Reuters then reported on July 15 that an offer had been made, helping to catapult the stock up roughly 30% (as of Thursday's close).


Original Submission

posted by jelizondo on Sunday August 30, @01:55AM   Printer-friendly

https://www.engadget.com/2242192/uber-hit-with-1-billion-fine-for-automatically-deactivating-drivers-in-europe/

Uber has allegedly violated the European Union's General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) again, but this time to the tune of a 824.9 million euro, or $966 million, fine. The Autoriteit Persoonsgegevens (AP), or the Dutch Data Protection Authority, hit Uber with the massive fine, accusing the company of automatically deactivating driver accounts between 2018 and 2022 without human intervention.

According to the Dutch regulatory agency, Uber has deprived its drivers of income through fully automated decisions, violating the GDPR in the process. The investigation was launched after 171 French drivers reported these decisions to a local human rights organization, which eventually led to the AP taking over the case since Uber's European headquarters are located in The Netherlands.

"From one moment to the next, they no longer had any income through Uber," Monique Verdier, deputy chair of the AP, said of the drivers who initiated the complaint. "A computer should not make decisions on its own that have major consequences for you."

The AP has previously fined Uber three times, including once in 2018 for 600,000 euros, or $701,000, and again in 2023 for 10 million euros, or $11.6 million. Uber's previous record-high fine came in 2024 when the AP issued a 290 million euro, or around $339 million, penalty for improperly transferring personal data of European drivers to the US. This time around, the AP said that the 824.9 million euro fine was calculated as the maximum penalty that's derived from four percent of a company's worldwide annual turnover. According to the AP, Uber has already filed an appeal against the fine. We reached out to Uber for their comment on the fine and will update the story when we hear back.


Original Submission

posted by jelizondo on Saturday August 29, @09:11PM   Printer-friendly
from the who-are-you? dept.

Brave 1.94 adds Email Aliases, giving users five free forwarding addresses to hide their real email from websites:

Brave, a privacy and security-focused browser, has announced a new feature that will allow users to generate unique email addresses to sign up for online services, and receive emails from those services without revealing their real email address.

The feature, called Email Aliases, has been added to the latest desktop version of the browser, 1.94, and will be coming to mobile soon.

According to Brave, instead of handing over their real email address, users generate a unique alias for each service. For the time being, Brave is "offering everyone the option of five free email aliases," tied to their Brave Account.

[...] The service works by forwarding emails sent to an alias on to the user's real address, without letting the sender see that real address. In the process, Brave acts as a mail server that stores the account email, the aliases, and some information about message delivery.

The company promises that it "doesn't read the contents of emails sent to an alias. We only process emails to perform standard spam and virus filtering."

Since I run my own mail server, I use a special domain and create a unique email address for each vendor I purchase from. It makes it much easier to 1) stop delivery of unwanted marketing email from the vendor, and 2) figure out which vendors are selling my info to 3rd party data brokers. In the latter case I usually stop buying from any vendor who sells my info. What do you do to thwart marketing email and spam?


Original Submission

posted by jelizondo on Saturday August 29, @04:21PM   Printer-friendly

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/data-centers/death-threats-hit-data-center-opponents-as-towns-cancel-votes-and-close-public-comment

More Than 500 Towns Restrict Builds As Councils Shutter Public Comment

Marshall Mayor Scott Wolfersberger told local news station WWMT that the city's police department contacted him on August 12 about the threat and that the investigation is ongoing. Councilor James Hackworth wrote in a social media post that members had received "a legitimate death threat" and that disagreement, protest, and voting the council out are all part of democracy. It's unclear whether the sender supports or opposes data centers, and no suspect has been identified to date.

Woodbury County is separately challenging the annexation in court. The council met a week late on August 20 and voted 3-2 against the moratorium, with Nelson calling officers into the room as members of the public and councilman Gene Monk objected. "We ask for a cool-down period for a year to research, then we can make an educated decision. We can let the people vote for it after that — do something different," Monk said. "It's too big of a decision for us five people [council members]."

Over in Box Elder County, Utah, Commissioner Lee Perry has said that he and fellow Commissioners Boyd Bingham and Tyler Vincent had received threats after voting through two resolutions for the Stratos project area, with an audience of roughly 500 chanting "shame" at the meeting.

Previous incidents show these are more than idle threats. In April, Indianapolis councilman Ron Gibson had 13 rounds fired into his home after backing a rezoning, and Saline Township, Michigan, treasurer Jennifer Zink resigned in May citing threats over the 1.4GW Oracle and OpenAI campus that triggered moratoriums in at least 19 Michigan municipalities. Emporia, Kansas, moved its August 5 and August 19 commission meetings online and dropped public comment after its leaders were threatened.

Recent data published in the Soufan Center's July IntelBrief, which is based on a year of scraping X and Reddit, found hundreds of posts with threat language between July 2025 and July 2026, and a volume surge beginning in April that hasn't receded. Most violent threats in its dataset are targeted towards infrastructure rather than people, with posts naming council members and planning commissions a small minority. Many use memes, emojis, and misspellings to dodge moderation.

The center also found that each new incident now draws far more secondary amplification than it did earlier in the year. Emporia's mayor said the threats to his commission didn't appear to come from locals, and Salix, Emporia, and Marshall have all now canceled, moved, or restricted public meetings because of them, at a point when more than 500 local restrictions on data centers are in place nationwide.


Original Submission

posted by jelizondo on Saturday August 29, @11:49AM   Printer-friendly

Following Codeberg already doing so, independent software development platform SourceHut moves to prohibit LLM content on their platform. Their announcement is quite informative and with plenty of references to back up their reasoning. I particularly like this part:

As software engineers we have front-row seats for the deployment of one of the world's fastest growing energy consumers: AI. Our conscience calls us to resist the deployment of technologies which will exacerbate death and suffering for millions. AI might deliver benefits to society, but the cost is so high that we need to make careful decisions about how it's deployed and if the benefits to society outweigh those costs. On the whole, vibe coding does not deliver benefits which, in the view of SourceHut and our community, outweigh the costs. Cheap, green electricity, preservation of freshwater resources, husbanding our planet and its wildlife: these are all much more important than AI-assisted coding.

The broader social and economic consequences add to the alarm. These tools are disrupting labor and increasing the already unprecedented gap between the haves and the have-nots. These companies pay minimum wage in inhumane conditions in impoverished countries for the labor they exploit to train models that can be applied to taking the bottom out of the labor market in wealthy countries. Moreover, the accumulated wealth of the AI owners, and the depleted resources of the AI proletariat, is further exploited to consolidate power, enable the rise of fascism, and destroy the social order alongside the environmental order. AI is being used to deport immigrants without due process, surveil and police poor and racialized communities, manipulate elections and political discourse, facilitate crimes against humanity at scale, and amplify injustices in our institutions.

Finally, AI simply seems to be bad for the people who use it. Many open source maintainers complain of being exhausted by a deluge of low-quality AI generated contributions. AI has been linked to "deskilling", making its users worse at problem solving and other cognitive tasks. And the number of people who have been talked into psychosis or suicide by their chatbots continues to rise.

These concerns are myriad, credible, and demand action. Our small contribution to the problem is to clearly state our position on the matter and adjust our policies to provide a safe platform for people who are concious of these issues to work and find community.

I feel like we're heading in the direction of a schism, with open source communities on the one side, and corporations and business aligned individuals and projects on the other.


Original Submission

posted by hubie on Saturday August 29, @06:56AM   Printer-friendly

Nvidia Reportedly Warns Biggest Customers Of 15% Price Hikes On AI Servers

Vera Rubin and Grace Blackwell systems shipped from early 2027 affected:

[...] This is another example of the so-called "RAMageddon" that's gripping the DRAM market, with contract prices having risen at record rates this year. Analysts projected that conventional DRAM contract prices would climb 58% to 63% quarter-over-quarter in Q2 2026, following a Q1 surge of 90% to 95%, as suppliers reallocated capacity toward HBM and server products. SK hynix said in October last year that it had already sold out its entire 2026 memory production capacity, and Samsung and SK hynix raised 2026 HBM3E supply prices by close to 20% before the year began.

Nvidia has already passed rising costs through to consumers, raising prices on GeForce graphics cards earlier this month. The Bloomberg report indicates the same unrelenting pressure has now reached the top of the Nvidia stack, where hyperscalers as well as PC builders will be absorbing the increase. A 15% rise on rack-scale systems that sell for several million dollars each adds hundreds of thousands of dollars per rack across deployments that run to thousands of racks.

Nvidia runs a gross margin of roughly 75% non-GAAP, among the highest in the semiconductor industry, and the reported hikes indicate the company intends to pass memory cost inflation on to customers rather than absorb it, which it can more than afford to do. Meanwhile, supply of its accelerators from TSMC still can't meet demand, which limits buyers' immediate leverage.

Whether the increases push hyperscalers further toward AMD's accelerators or their own custom silicon will depend on how quickly those alternatives can absorb displaced demand, and all of them draw HBM from the same three constrained suppliers.

Nvidia's GB300-Powered DGX Station Desktop Tower Listed For Nearly $100,000 Online

You can actually buy up to ten of them at once:

Nvidia officially launched the latest DGX Station desktop at Computex 2026 earlier this year, but the announcement was not accompanied by an explicit price tag. The expectation of an MSRP withers away when it comes to enterprise-grade hardware anyway, but still, early chatter had pointed toward a $100,000 ballpark figure. That number has just been confirmed, as a DGX Station from Exxact was found listed for $94,930 on its website, featuring the all-powerful GB300 Superchip, ready to customize and buy.

[...] Combined, you get a massive 748GB pool of unified memory that allows you to fine-tune and deploy AI models locally instead of worrying about token costs or any cloud vulnerabilities. For large enterprises that need to quickly iterate on the go and want maximum security, a DGX Station is considered a worthwhile investment even at $100,000, especially if the smaller DGX Spark isn't enough for your workloads.

The Valence VWS-158270643 comes with a 1,600W 80+ Titanium power supply (which is enough to cover a dedicated display-out GPU as well), so it can be plugged into any standard outlet, just like a regular PC. Though it comes with Linux-based DGX OS out of the box instead of Windows. Both the Grace CPU and the Blackwell Ultra GPU are liquid-cooled with a massive direct-to-chip (D2C) coldplate, and there are three fans up top for optimal airflow.

Front panel I/O is nonexistent, but there are 2x QSFP112 ports at the back driven by the integrated ConnectX-SuperNIC for 800 Gbps/s interconnect between two DGX Station towers. There's also 1x 10 Gbps RJ45 port, a dedicated 1Gbps RJ45 management port, 1x mini-DisplayPort for local BMC management (not display out), 1x USB Micro-B for direct serial access to said BMC, 4x standard USB Type-A, and a 3.5mm headphone jack.

Exxact did not disclose the exact materials of the tower, but we can infer from the pictures that it's made out of steel, and the design is rather sleek. For $100,000, you also get a 3-year warranty so you can rest assured your parts are insured against a potential popping of a bubble. You can order up to ten of these at the same time, but there's no standard checkout page; you still have to provide your details in order to be contacted back for a purchase.


Original Submission

posted by mrcoolbp on Saturday August 29, @02:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the they-change-the-rules-so-that-we-cannot-play dept.

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/26/self-hosted-email-is-in-steep-decline-microsoft-and-google-are-taking-over/5292471

The number of large users hosting their own email servers has halved in the last decade, according to Artem Berezin, a researcher who works at business e-mail company Live Direct Marketing.

On the Internet Society blog, Berezin explained that DNS records reveal a lot about email.

"The MX record says where the mailbox lives. The SPF record says who may send on the domain's behalf. The DMARC record says what should happen when a message fails authentication," he wrote.

Berezin says he analyzes those records using daily forward-DNS snapshots captured by the OpenINTEL project run by the University of Twente, SURFnet and SIDN Labs. He also consults the Tranco project's assessment of the most popular domains to determine the million most popular domains, then "classifies each domain's MX hostname and SPF includes against open dictionaries of mailbox providers, sending platforms and SaaS applications." The data he uses goes back to 2016, but he admits the dictionaries he accesses don't offer a complete view of the world's email servers.

His lead finding is that in 2016, 44.6 percent of the top million domains ran their own mail server. In 2026, that's down to 22.4 percent. The number of self-hosted mail servers is falling fast – down by half a percent in 30 days.

Self-hosting an email server remains the most common way to process mail, however Google Workspace is hot on its heels with 21.8 percent of detectable MX records, ahead of Microsoft 365's 16.8 percent.

Berezin thinks the fact that two tech giants handle 38.6 percent of email is concerning.

"The RIPE [NCC] community has spent years discussing DNS and CDN centralization; email is following the same path, just more quietly," he wrote. "When more than a third of popular domains depend on two providers to receive mail, an outage, a filtering change, or a policy decision at either one propagates through the whole ecosystem at once. And unlike a CDN, email has no graceful fallback – a rejected message is simply gone.

"There is a second-order effect, too. The fewer independent operators there are, the more the remaining ones inherit the deliverability problems of a world tuned for the big two. Anyone who has tried to stand up a fresh Postfix box in 2026 and get its mail accepted at scale knows exactly what I mean."

Postfix is a FOSS mail server. Berezin's reference to the struggle to get mail accepted at scale reflects the fact that Google and Microsoft operate filters to detect messages they believe come from untrustworthy sources. If those two tech giants don't accept messages from Postfix or other sources, they make their own services more attractive - marketers who want their email blasts to land will move to the service providers most likely to let their messages through.

Another thing that worries Berezin is the use of DMARC (Domain-based Message Authentication, Reporting, and Conformance) records – the instruction in DNS settings that tells email servers how to handle emails that fail an authenticity check. His research found that over half of DMARC records have no valid policy or monitor email without enforcing policies.

That low rate is happening despite Google and Yahoo changing their bulk sender requirements in 2024 to require use of DMARC.

"At what concentration does inbound mail become a systemic dependency worth the community's explicit attention?" Berezin asks. "What would actually move DMARC from published to enforced, given that the 2024 mandates demonstrably did not do so? And how much of the Internet's mail infrastructure are we all failing to see because our dictionaries don't know its name?"

Berezin wrote that he can't answer those questions but hopes his daily download of email server data and ongoing analysis means he can one day.


Original Submission

posted by mrcoolbp on Friday August 28, @09:22PM   Printer-friendly

https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20260821-why-older-tech-is-sometimes-safer-from-hackers

The fear of hacking has made some people turn to other forms of technology ignored by new generations of cyber criminals.

You might not expect a world-renowned cyber security expert to rely on old, potentially vulnerable email software. But, for years, that's what Mikko Hyppönen did. Shunning mainstream options such as Hotmail and Gmail, he instead chose obsolete email software called Eudora.

"I used to run it years after it was out of [technical] support," says Hyppönen, a Finnish computer security expert.

He preferred Eudora for various reasons, arguing it was "really superior in many ways". Although Eudora was far from perfectly secure, as people switched to newer email tools, Hyppönen realised that hackers were forgetting about Eudora.

Hyppönen calls it "security by antiquity". Others use the phrase "security by obsolescence" and in both cases this means relying on an older technology or system since it may prove, somewhat counterintuitively, safer than more recent alternatives.

While Hyppönen stresses that using the latest, fully patched and updated software is still "the optimum situation", there are specific cases where older tech could be preferable from a security standpoint.

"The vast majority of attackers are criminals trying to make money and it doesn't make any sense for them to target systems being run by 50 people," he explains.

Hyppönen isn't alone. The Irish Aviation Authority, for instance, recently decided to keep ground-based radio navigation beacons in use because supposedly the more modern satellite-based global positioning system (GPS) has proven so susceptible to jamming in recent years.

"Security by antiquity" is, it turns out, a quiet way of beating cyber-criminals, hackers and enemy attackers.

Matt Bishop, a computer scientist and professor emeritus at the University of California, Davis, has tested this principle, somewhat by accident. Back in the 1990s, he and his colleagues set up a system connected to the internet and deliberately left it accessible so that they could catch hackers and bots attempting to breach it. This is a common cyber-security research technique known as a honeypot – a kind of trap set up in carefully controlled conditions.

But the team picked an older software version for their honeypot that had been upgraded multiple times since its release and, consequently, no hackers bothered to target it. "When we upgraded it to the new one, we had all the attacks we wanted," recalls Bishop. "I thought it was so amusing."

This possibility of evading nefarious activity by sticking to old tech can take many forms. Both Bishop and Hyppönen say they have friends who refuse to get a smartphone. "One person I know [uses] a Nokia 9210," says Hyppönen, referring to a simple, "dumb" mobile phone first released 25 years ago.
As technology has advanced, experts have often questioned whether the latest systems are actually more risky than older ones

While hackers can't target it in quite the same way they might target a modern Android or iOS device, the phone's operating system, Symbian, does have some old, known vulnerabilities. The flipside is that "nobody's targeting them anymore", adds Hyppönen. Similarly, the Nokia could be more at risk from techniques that snoop on phone calls. But how many people will bother? It's a security trade-off.

As technology has advanced, experts have often questioned whether the latest systems are actually more risky than older ones. During the late 1990s, Bishop wrote a speech in which he argued that computers were "considerably less secure than the paper systems we still use, and that are rapidly being replaced".

Concerns about the shift from paper to digital technologies remain prevalent, especially when it comes to electronic voting systems. Some say electronic voting machines are desirable partly because they produce election results much more quickly than paper-based systems. That's not enough to sway others, though.

"Voting is the bedrock of our democracy," says Hyppönen. "It's one of the last things I'd like to weaken in any way, especially if the benefits are so small."

Militaries are also known for being reluctant to take chances. Even the world's most active militaries are known to occasionally rely on old technologies for reasons of reliability and security. "One thing I've seen in places like Ukraine is the use of paper maps, or laminated maps, and compasses," says Thomas Withington, associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute, a think tank. "You can't jam that." It's a kind of "analogue resilience", he adds.

Jamming attacks hitting GPS-based navigation have forced some countries to make careful choices about which legacy technologies to retain, and which GPS alternatives to invest in, says Victor Tasiemski, a systems engineer at Overlook Systems Technologies, which works on navigation tech.

That's exactly what happened in Ireland, where a programme to replace ground-based radio beacons has been slowed down in order to keep those beacons operating for longer. A spokeswoman for the Irish Aviation Authority told the Irish Times in June that the beacons were being retained "as part of a planned resilience strategy".

Technologists who work with militaries are familiar with the challenge of designing systems that can link old and new technologies together. Stefan Kraus is co-founder and chief technical officer of Kraus Hamdani Aerospace, which has designed a drone-based communications platform that can connect military personnel to one another, no matter whether they are using older radios or newer ones. Military radio tech that has been around for decades is "tried, tested and secure", he says. "The US military isn't going away from that."

Tasiemski notes that one alternative to GPS-based navigation is eLoran, a radio-based navigation system that has its roots in military technology first developed during World War Two. With attacks targeting GPS systems, eLoran is arguably becoming increasingly desirable, says Tasiemski, because it uses a much more powerful signal and is therefore much trickier to jam: "Overpowering a one-megawatt transmitter is pretty hard."

Robustness is not easy to replace. This applies in the world of data storage, too, where magnetic tape – invented during the 1950s – still plays a huge role today. Companies, research institutions and government agencies continue to store vast amounts of data on reels of tape. The technology has improved significantly since it first appeared, with data storage densities having increased exponentially over the decades.

But the principle remains the same: spools of tape that hold information. The tape can be detached from computer systems, packaged, and transported to secure facilities, including difficult-to-breach underground caverns and repurposed mines.

"Ransomware is what, for me, kept tape in business the past 10 to 15 years," says Hugues Meyrath, chief executive of Quantum, a company that specialises in data storage.

An organisation locked out of its own computer systems may still be able to retrieve its most important data if staff have made good back-ups, for example on magnetic tape. Interest in magnetic tape is only increasing further today because the cost of random access memory (Ram), a form of computer memory that doesn't rely on tape, is skyrocketing. Meyrath says his company's clients use tape to store all kinds of data – from broadcasters' footage of baseball games to genomes mapped in detail by research facilities.

Tape's security attributes stem partly from the fact that most people don't tend to interact with it at all. It's obscure, clunky, old-school tech. "One way to attack a system is to rig a set of USB sticks and throw them around a parking lot," says Bishop, referring to the likelihood that someone will eventually pick up one of the USB sticks and insert it into their computer – a simple way to perpetrate a hack. As he puts it: "You'll never see magnetic tape thrown around a parking lot."

Experts who spoke to the BBC still recommend that people use the latest and most up-to-date technologies for everyday tasks, as it remains the safest approach. But it is worth acknowledging that "new" doesn't necessarily mean "best" in all scenarios. And knowing when and how to switch to older systems could become increasingly important, as cyber-attacks and other threats get more sophisticated.

Withington points again to Ukraine, where Russia has interfered with satellite communications and where GPS navigation has succumbed to significant jamming. Nowhere is "analogue resilience" more prized. "What do people do," asks Withington, "if there's no access to the technology they take for granted?"


Original Submission

posted by mrcoolbp on Friday August 28, @04:34PM   Printer-friendly
from the something-for-both-Haiku-users dept.

HaikuOS is proud to release Version: R1/beta6. (release notes)

Haiku is an open-source operating system that specifically targets personal computing. Inspired by the BeOS, Haiku is fast, simple to use, easy to learn and yet very powerful.

- (more about HaikuOS)

Downloads available here!

Please post comments on your experience with HaikuOS and the newest release!


Original Submission