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Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/software/2026/08/18/tim-king-amigados-royalty-dies-aged-70/5289101

According to an AmigaNews report, King's family said he passed at the end of July. King was a superb programmer – although he accomplished rather more than that.

His most widely experienced work was a key component of the original Commodore Amiga's operating system. His port of Cambridge University's TRIPOS OS to the Motorola 68000 CPU became AmigaDOS. His rapid work getting it running on prototype Amiga hardware helped Commodore launch the machine in 1985 after its in-house OS project failed to deliver. As he put it himself: "As a result I have the distinction of having written software used by over 2 million users."

TRIPOS is not well known today, although its Wikipedia article provides a useful overview. King did not create TRIPOS: it was written by Cambridge boffin Dr Martin Richards. TRIPOS was written in the BCPL programming language, which Richards also created. The first recorded "hello, world" example was written in BCPL, which was also used to develop software for the Xerox Alto. Today, however, it is mostly known as the immediate ancestor of the C programming language. This page of scans from Australian Personal Computer magazine gives a good description of TRIPOS.

While a researcher at the University of Bath, King ported TRIPOS from the DEC PDP-11 to the new Motorola 68000 CPU. His next job was at Bristol-based 68000 development tools specialist MetaComCo. For that company, he adapted his new 68K version of TRIPOS to the SAGE IV machines that MetaComCo used.

Meanwhile, Commodore was developing the Amiga in the US, but its in-house operating system for the new hardware, known as CAOS, was badly behind schedule. Commodore went looking for outside help, and it approached MetaComCo, as this Nosher.net potted history documents.

King not only ported TRIPOS to the prototype Amiga hardware, but also integrated the BCPL-based portion with Carl Sassenrath's existing Amiga Exec kernel and the Intuition windowing system. King's contribution substantially influenced the AmigaDOS command line, filesystem, and command structure, as this comparison of the TRIPOS and AmigaDOS manuals demonstrates. We highly recommend this 2022 interview, in which he praises "Exec," whose message-passing design fitted TRIPOS well.

In his history of CAOS, Amiga "Wizard Extraordinaire" Andy Finkel said: "What we now call AmigaDOS was really the backup DOS, based on an already existing OS known as Tripos (developed at the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory by the TRIPOS Research Group, and converted with amazing speed by Metacomco's Dr. Tim King and his band of programmers)."

The BCPL code was rewritten in C for AmigaOS 2, but King was not worried: he had already moved on. He joined Perihelion, a startup created by the late Jack Lang. Lang would go on to co-found the Raspberry Pi Foundation with Eben Upton – whose PhD supervisor was the very same Martin Richards.

At Perihelion, King worked on parallel processing systems, notably the Transputer from David May's INMOS. INMOS intended Transputer software to be written in its unique Occam programming language, which implemented the Communicating Sequential Processes model created by the late Professor Tony Hoare.

This was unfamiliar to developers accustomed to Unix and C, so King drew on ideas from TRIPOS to create Helios, a parallel, cluster-scale, Unix-like OS for machines built from multiple INMOS Transputer chips. Helios-NG is still around as open source: we wrote about it in 2021, and we covered some of the history back then.

Neither the Transputer nor Helios became a major commercial success, so King turned his attention elsewhere. Spotting the rapid growth of commercial internet connectivity, he founded early British ISP UK Online in 1994. He sold it to Easynet in 1996, and it continued as a brand until parent company Sky shut it down in 2011.

King subsequently described himself as a "technical consultant" – first with "outsourcing colossus CSC," then through TJJ Ltd, the consulting company he ran with his wife and business partner, Jessica.

There are some touching tributes in various Amiga communities around the internet, including Reddit /r/amiga and on Hacker News. Both have some contributions from former co-workers. ®

Original Submission

owl writes:

https://fabiensanglard.net/quake_shareware_cd/index.html

In the mid-90s the coolest thing to buy for a PC, besides the incredibly expensive Intel Pentium, was a CD-ROM drive. With their capacity of 640 MiB (three times the storage of PC HDD at the time), CDs allowed enthusiasts to step into a world of multimedia, made of high-resolution 640x480 256 colors palette-indexed photos[1], VOC soundtracks, and play with Video For Windows butter-smooth 12 fps 240x179 videos[2][3] lasting up to several seconds.

...

By June 1996, after three years of hard work, id Software had completed their next title, Quake. As for their previous title, they were going to release both a shareware version and a full version of their game. Since it used a mere 22 MiB of storage, people at id Software had the idea of leveraging the remaining capacity of a CD-ROM. Why not include encrypted versions of the full id catalogue of games? Not only this would cut out the middlemen, it would give instant access to gamers with a simple phone call and a credit card.

The concept was implemented. The CD was announced[4] on July 3, 1996 and released on August 30th[5]. The hacker group GNOMON released Quakecrk.zip only 39 days later[6]. The archive contained QCRACK.EXE, a tool allowing to decrypt every single game on the CD-ROM.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

A tiny UK-developed satellite, roughly the size of a small carry-on suitcase, could help answer one of the biggest questions in cosmology:

An international team of scientists, led by the University of Cambridge, will use the dark side of the Moon as a 'shield' so that the satellite – called CosmoCube – can block out all the noise from Earth and listen for a faint whisper from the very early universe.

This whisper, known as the 21-centimetre line, is a signal emitted by hydrogen atoms in the period between the afterglow of the Big Bang and Cosmic Dawn, when nuclear fusion lit up the first stars. No one has directly observed this era before.

Detecting this signal from more than 13.5 billion years ago is extremely difficult with Earth-based telescopes, since the Earth's ionosphere blocks the right frequencies, and interference from FM radio, satellites and telecommunications drowns it out.

However, the Moon provides a natural shield. As CosmoCube orbits the far side of the Moon, it will be shielded from all the noise of Earth for roughly 40 minutes of each two-hour orbit. Over an expected two-year mission, it will build up 1000 hours of data on one of the last unexplored periods of the universe, helping us understand how the universe transitioned from dark and nearly empty to the complexity we see today.

[...] "This emission from hydrogen after the Big Bang, but before the first stars, will hopefully allow us to understand the role of dark matter in the early universe, how it worked to pull together hydrogen into the first stars and galaxies," said lead author Professor Eloy de Lera Acedo from Cambridge's Cavendish Laboratory.

To study this period, CosmoCube will operate at extremely low frequencies – between 10 and 50 MHz – far outside the range of ground-based telescopes, which is why the Moon will be used as CosmoCube's 'fortress of solitude'.

"There's no other place where you can get the sort of shielding you need to detect such a faint signal, while at the same time looking at the whole of space," said de Lera Acedo, who is also affiliated with the Kavli Institute for Cosmology. "The far side of the Moon is really the only option: it solves multiple problems at once, opening a clear window to the very early universe."

Once in orbit around the Moon, CosmoCube will unfold a long and lightweight radio antenna, sensitive enough to detect the 21-centimetre signal from hydrogen atoms in the early universe when the satellite is on the Moon's far side

[...] "Aside from the science, what makes our mission unique is its size: we're probing the earliest, deepest parts of the dark ages that others don't reach, but with a compact, relatively low-cost platform," said de Lera Acedo.

However, the far side of the Moon may not stay quiet for long: other missions are being planned by the US, India and other countries to take advantage of the Moon's silence.

Journal Reference: de lera Acedo, E., Bacon, D., Grainger, W. et al. The CosmoCube lunar mission for probing the dark ages and cosmic dawn via 21-cm cosmology. Nat Astron 10, 1097–1106 (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41550-026-02946-y

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/cxmt-overtakes-tencent-to-become-chinas-most-valuable-company-17-days-after-its-ipo

Memory Maker CXMT Overtakes Tencent To Become China's Most Valuable Company 17 Days After Its IPO — Now Worth $524 Billion

Tencent reported second-quarter revenue of RMB 204.8 billion ($30.3 billion) on Wednesday, up 11% year-over-year, with capital expenditure climbing 176% to RMB 52.8 billion as the company bought computing capacity for its AI models and agents. Free cash flow went negative at RMB 13.8 billion. Tencent's U.S.-listed shares dropped 5.34% following the report, extending a decline that's reached 26% so far in 2026, even as domestic games revenue grew 17% and marketing services revenue rose 22%.

CXMT held 7.67% of the global DRAM market in 2025, according to sales figures in its IPO prospectus. Its $524 billion market cap now sits at roughly half of Micron's $1 trillion and about 60% of SK hynix's $880 billion, and the company plans to close the output gap with a sixth mega-fab and a 30% DRAM share target by 2030, though it still lacks the EUV lithography tools its rivals use.

CXMT swung to an operating profit of 35.43 billion yuan ($5.2 billion) in the first quarter from a 2.83 billion yuan loss a year earlier, riding DRAM prices that have climbed throughout the ongoing memory shortage. The company became the first semiconductor firm to top mainland China's stock market in its 35-year history when it listed on July 27, raising $8.6 billion in an IPO whose retail tranche was 212 times oversubscribed.

Analysts remain far apart on whether CXMT’s ranking holds water, however, with Nomura's price target of 116 yuan implying further upside, while Morningstar's fair value estimate of 14.90 yuan puts the stock at more than three times what the firm thinks it's worth.

Luke James is a freelance writer and journalist.  Although his background is in legal, he has a personal interest in all things tech, especially hardware and microelectronics, and anything regulatory. 

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Scientists are increasingly relying on powerful data sources and tools that they often cannot fully understand, inspect or verify, according to a new study:

State-of-the-art tools and data like artificial intelligence (AI), satellite imagery, online data and digital sensors are revolutionising the way scientists study the natural world.

But such systems effectively operate as scientific "black boxes" that can increasingly challenge the trust in science.

The new study, by an international team of scientists and available here, addresses the problems of reproducibility, trust and the future of scientific research in an era when critical technologies can shape science and influence knowledge without being fully open to scrutiny.

These technologies can process enormous amounts of information, monitor biodiversity and threats across continents, and reveal patterns that would once have been out of reach.

"However, many of these tools represent true black boxes, by keeping the processes behind those results largely hidden," said Ivan Jarić, researcher from the University of Paris-Saclay, and lead author of the study.

"They are often owned by private companies that intentionally limit access to information about how their systems operate or process data, guided by proprietary constraints and commercial aims".

The paper identifies several types of black boxes that are becoming widely used in ecology and conservation.

One of the most prominent examples are large language models and other AI technologies, increasingly used to analyse massive datasets, interpret satellite imagery, and model ecosystems.

However, researchers often have little or no access to the data used to train these systems, the underlying algorithms, direct system testing, or understanding how and why they generate particular outputs.

fleg writes:

https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2026/08/13/claude-just-broke-a-math-record-that-stood-for-37-years/

"Number theorists spent 37 years moving one number by less than a single percentage point. The number is the proven share of the Riemann zeta function's zeros that sit on the critical line, the place where one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics says all of them belong. Decades of human refinement had carried it to 41.6%. On August 10, Anthropic published a result from an unreleased research version of Claude that moved it to 67.2% in roughly a day and a half.

The Riemann hypothesis has been open since 1859. It predicts the hidden structure behind how prime numbers are distributed, and it carries a million-dollar Clay Institute bounty. The hypothesis itself remains open. What Claude established is that at least two-thirds of the zeros behave the way it predicts, the largest single advance in the record's history."

Original Submission

hubie writes:

"Always finish your antibiotics" is no longer considered medical best practice for all conditions:

Surprised? You're not alone.

A new study has found that almost 90% of Americans believe that it's always best to take the full course of antibiotics, even when you feel better—consistent with long-running but now outdated health campaigns. The reality is more complicated. Sometimes shorter courses are safer, and sometimes longer courses are best.

The survey demonstrates a need for better communication between doctors and patients about what's healthiest.

"Historically, there was very strong guidance by major health organizations and clinicians that you must always finish the course," says Alistair Thorpe, PhD, research assistant professor of population health sciences at University of Utah Health and first author on the study. "Now, we're seeing a growing body of evidence saying that that is not always the case. And oftentimes, shorter durations of antibiotics are as effective and safe as longer alternatives."

[...] One of the main reasons people gave for preferring longer antibiotic courses was that they had been told to "always finish their antibiotic course"—88% of respondents had heard of, and agreed with, this common mantra. Most had been told this by their clinician, and many had also heard it via a public health campaign.

A strong body of scientific evidence shows that, for many common infections, shorter courses of antibiotics work as well as longer courses and are less likely to cause side effects. Still, there are some cases, like tuberculosis, where longer courses are most effective.

The study authors suggest that doctors and public health campaigns use several evidence-informed strategies to better communicate the complex reality of antibiotic course length—for instance, avoiding overly simplistic claims that either shorter or longer courses are universally better, and acknowledging that as scientific evidence accumulates over time, health recommendations can change.

[...] "Discuss with your clinician what the right duration is for you and when the right time is to stop your course," Thorpe says. "Getting advice directly from a clinician on a one-to-one basis about what is most appropriate for you in that situation is the right way to go."

Thorpe emphasizes that the changing recommendations are a positive outcome of increasing knowledge.

"Evidence is growing and guidance is evolving on antibiotic use, which is a normal process and a good sign that we are working to improve how we provide care," he says. "Our knowledge about how best to use antibiotics has changed, but it has changed because we're learning more, and it's important that we make sure we are communicating this well to the public."

Journal Reference: Alistair Thorpe, Rachael A Lee, Julia E Szymczak, et al. US Adults' Perspectives on Antibiotic Durations and Adherence to Therapy for Common Bacterial Respiratory Infections: A National Survey, Open Forum Infectious Diseases, Volume 13, Issue 7, July 2026, ofag407, https://doi.org/10.1093/ofid/ofag407

Original Submission

hubie writes:

The mashup of a black hole and an enormous star has never been seen before and could explain the mysterious little red dots often found in deep-space images:

Astronomers at MIT and elsewhere have spotted an extremely bright red spot in the early universe. The object resembles an enormous star, spanning the size of our solar system. But it also is putting out 100 billion times more energy than any known star can physically produce. In fact, such energies are closer to what a black hole might generate.

The curious combination suggests that the red spot is an entirely new type of astrophysical source. The astronomers are calling it a "black hole star."

In a paper appearing today in the journal Nature, the team presents their analysis of the new object, which they discovered using NASA's James Webb Space Telescope (JWST). The telescope spotted the bright red dot in the very early universe, just a few hundred million years after the Big Bang.

The scientists conclude that the most likely explanation for the strange red dot is that it is a mashup of a black hole and a star — a combination that has never been observed until now. The object is likely a hugely dense cloud of gas, powered not by standard nuclear fusion, but by a central black hole.

"Our picture of this object is evolving very rapidly," says lead author Rohan Naidu, a NASA Hubble Fellow and Pappalardo Fellow at MIT's Kavli Institute for Astrophysics and Space Research (MKI). "We think there is a central black hole that is 100,000 times as massive as the sun. And around this black hole, there would be this very extended envelope of gas that looks like a star the size of the solar system. It's huge."

If the bright red dot is indeed a black hole star, it would help to solve the identity of other mysterious "little red dots" that have appeared in nearly every deep space image JWST has taken to date.

"These little red dots seem to be everywhere in the early universe but essentially disappear by the present day," Naidu says. "What exactly these objects are has been one of the most debated topics of the JWST era."

[...] "When we see something very red in the universe, we often assume that it is surrounded by dust, like soot or ash," Simcoe explains. "The same way that the wildfire smoke from Canada recently made the sky in Boston look bright red, astronomical objects can also appear redder than their intrinsic color when you see them through a veil of dust."

But there were other signatures in the light that didn't quite match up with what physicists expect from dust. The team also observed another strange pattern: The dot's light was extremely bright, except below certain wavelengths, where the light completely disappeared.

"fab23" writes:

If the Markets Reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US Should Nationalize Them:

This essay was written with Nathan E. Sanders, and originally appeared in The Guardian .

If the Markets Reject OpenAI and Anthropic, the US Should Nationalize Them

OpenAI, and then Anthropic , were each formed by AI developers who feared unrestrained corporate AI development—specifically, that companies like Google and Meta would steer the technology towards deleterious, maybe even catastrophically unsafe, outcomes for society. Their founders proclaimed that their new labs, uniquely, could be trusted to develop the technology in humanity's best interest. But each, in turn, were themselves co-opted by the same market incentives, themselves becoming corporate behemoths zealously guarding future investor value rather than the public interest.

It was only a few weeks ago, in June, when OpenAI and Anthropic each filed for their IPOs and were met with buzz about trillion-dollar valuations. The hype around their valuations is so extreme that many worry about their potential for concentrating wealth on a global scale. In an effort to leave something for the rest of us, some observers have proposed that the federal government seize a share of these companies' stock to create a US sovereign wealth fund , or redistribute their revenues to produce a dividend for taxpayers.

Now the headlines are about public backlash to AI datacenters and the AI chip giant Nvidia's slumping stock. The tech and AI giant SpaceX's newly minted stock price tanked just weeks after its IPO. There are even questions about whether the leading AI labs will ever be sustainably profitable . All of a sudden, the makers of ChatGPT and Claude face strong headwinds as they seek to generate the massive equity assets that once felt all but assured.

In fact, evidence suggests the market itself could reassess that these companies offer nothing of financial value. In that case, perhaps we can return them both to their original purposes. If these AI companies should fail in the financial markets, the US should nationalize them and convert them into national labs operated under democratic control that preserve their benefit to the public interest.

The economics of the big AI labs hardly guarantee a booming return on investment. Frontier AI models are both expensive to train and depreciate within months, when a newer model appears. This means that the payback window to extract profit from them is very narrow. Meanwhile, enterprise clients are getting smart about minimizing AI token usage. Even worse, the models are basically commodities; the best ones largely perform and behave similarly, which depresses prices. Perhaps most importantly, open-source and Chinese competitors— lagging only a few months behind the leading labs in capability—give away for free the kinds of models Anthropic and OpenAI sell.

Even setting aside the model training costs, it's not clear whether the unit economics of AI as it's currently conceived will ever be sustainably profitable. Many of these free and open-source models can be run locally: the large ones on private clouds and high-end servers, the smaller ones on anyone's laptop or even cellphone, putting to question the companies' exorbitant capital investment in datacenters.

It's not that OpenAI and Anthropic are not valuable as organizations. They have remarkably talented AI scientists and engineers that are continuously producing innovations driving a global mania for their offerings. These leading labs might not ever be profitable, but their products are doing a lot of good in the world. You may or may not be a user of or believer in their technology, but their staggering, ongoing usage growth suggests that an awful lot of people would be disappointed if the companies simply disappeared.

The problem isn't the people or the products, it's the system. As constituted, OpenAI and Anthropic may not be valuable as market equities. If the market assesses they are not capable of producing a growing financial return on investment for shareholders, the companies will collapse.

Maybe private, for-profit is just not the right economic model under which to develop AI. Perhaps OpenAI should be returned to its private non-profit roots, the legacy they fought so hard to change and which Anthropic's founders spurned . Or possibly both could be reorganized as research centers at universities, returning to academia the scores of high-profile research faculty they have poached .

But a better outcome for society would be to establish public ownership and operation of their product-oriented capabilities. Turn OpenAI and Anthropic into US government agencies producing AI as a public good.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.zdnet.com/article/linux-desktop-use-surged-on-one-workday-cloudflare-data-shows/

Web traffic analysis site StatCounter recently showed that desktop Linux had reached an all-time high of 10.65% in the North American desktop market. Many people, even many Linux fans, dismissed this proportion as fake news. However, the last time I looked at the numbers in 2025, Statcounter only showed a high of just over 5%. As I mentioned in my recent report, Linux doubling its market share in just over a year should get everyone's attention.

I dug deeper and found that data from popular content delivery network Cloudflare also showed that the Linux desktop has been gaining popularity. By its count, desktop Linux has now reached 6.4%. That proportion is not as high as StatCounter's, but it represents significant growth given that Linux accounted for 4.1% of North American operating systems for the same period last year.

Cloudflare's dataset is much larger than StatCounter's. StatCounter monitors about a million websites, while Cloudflare keeps an eye on over 24 million websites. Cloudflare itself claims to cover about 20% of the web. 

A deeper look also reveals that desktop Linux use tends to peak during the work week. For example, believe it or not, on Monday, 6 July, when people were back after the 4 July holiday, Linux usage jumped to a high of 22%. 

The users of these systems are not AI agents or bots, but real people. I set Cloudflare to count humans rather than bots. If you include people and bots, Linux has a 9.7% market share. That proportion is similar to StatCounter's score. By Cloudflare's count, bots alone come to 19%.

These numbers tell us that workers are leading the way to the Linux desktop. That result is not surprising. Historically, they're people who prefer control over their PCs, like open systems, or have a specific workload, such as programming or system administration, where Linux works well. 

Microsoft has long known this requirement. Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), for example, is designed for Windows developers who also need Linux's power and tools. It's been years since Microsoft released WSL user numbers, but in 2020, there were 3.5 million WSL users. 

hubie writes:

When it comes to recording, tracking, and storing data, the concept of "permanence" can be a lot trickier than you'd expect:

More and more, our data—private photos, work documents, confidential information, and so on—are migrating to digital clouds and platforms. In a more recent and perhaps controversial turn of events, some gaming firms are pushing for digital downloads in lieu of physical CDs.

One recurring argument against digital options has been that it's not as "permanent" as their physical counterparts. After all, aren't physical storage systems safer from the whims of a tech firm wiping your cloud storage—or, even worse, forcing you to choose a subscription plan?

But CDs break. Books burn. USBs go defunct. Personally, I—a stickler for physical media—have a very bad track record of breaking my game chips and scratching my movie discs. There are real challenges in dealing with physical storage systems, too, and big players like Microsoft are investing significant resources to overcome the inevitable decay caused by, well, the passage of time.

[...] The following responses may have been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Mohiuddin Ahmed, Computer scientist, Adelaide University, Australia.

Data storage is a contextual matter. Given the transient nature of everything around us, permanent data storage is some sort of a myth at this stage. That said, multiple copies of data and moving them to a new storage every couple of years can be thought of as a practical solution toward permanent data storage.

Francesca Musiani, Research director, Center for Internet and Society at the National Center for Scientific Research, France.

I find the idea of "permanent" data storage quite elusive, not only in our digital "era." Every medium we have ever invented eventually fails, from stone inscriptions that erode to paper burning, CDs' "disc rot" and solid-state drives that gradually lose stored charge. Further, even if a storage medium could survive for centuries, the devices and software needed to read it may not; a perfectly preserved floppy disk is of little use if no one can build or maintain a compatible drive. In this sense, data loss is a techno-historical problem, I would say: preserving information requires preserving the means of interpreting it.

[...]

Jack Cushman, Director, Library Innovation Lab at Harvard Law School; creator of the Public Data Project.

I know of one data storage form that can be permanent: a library. Or rather, a world full of libraries. Libraries aren't perfect storage devices (nothing is), but they are fiercely committed to self-repair. A good library is a collection of people, technologies, and practices that pass an obligation—to remember the things we must remember—from the last generation to the next.

Libraries, rather than better hard drives, are what solve correlated failure, cataloged in the LOCKSS (Lots Of Copies Keep Stuff Safe) threat model. A correlated failure is when you make really great, durable copies of the data you care about, and then they all get hit by an asteroid. Shouldn't have had them all in one physical location. Or a hacker marks them all for deletion (they were all behind one sysadmin), or a government orders them all destroyed (all in one regulatory regime), or they all rot at the same time (all from one flawed batch), or the money to store them dries up (all on one funding source).

On a long enough timeline any copy will break. You need multiple copies with different vulnerabilities so they don't all break at the same time. Then you need to repair the broken ones. A worldwide network of libraries does the repair work, whether the objects are 30 medieval Magna Carta manuscripts or 300,000 government datasets.

[...]

owl writes:

https://ludens.cl/photo/spectra/spectra.html

The biggest lie in color photography is that you can accurately represent the colors of objects by simply recording the amount of red, green and blue in them. This technique - the only one in current mainstream use - gives good results only when the spectral sensitivity curves of the camera precisely match those of the human eye, and when the spectrum of the light used to make the photo is perfectly smooth, and no different kind of light will ever be used!

It's clear that the first of these requirements is hard enough to meet, and that the second one is, simply and plainly, never true.

And that's why photographers are always battling to get the right colors - and never do get them!

Not only in photography is this matter an important one. In daily life it is, too. Lots of electronic technicians hate that stupid problem of not being able to correctly read resistors. It happens that old-style resistors, and some other parts too, are labelled with color bands or dots, instead of numbers. Under some lighting conditions it can be hard to tell a red from an orange, or a green from a blue. This leads to the wrong resistors being installed in equipment, and thus more troubleshooting work.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Firefox says it will keep supporting uBlock Origin even as Microsoft Edge and other Chromium browsers phase it out under Manifest V3:

Firefox recently announced via Bluesky post: "Our support for uBlock Origin isn't going anywhere." The moment comes in response to news that Microsoft Edge is soon going to lock out uBlock Origin and other ad-blocking extensions that run on Manifest V2 architecture.

Once Microsoft Edge moves to Manifest V3, ad-blocking extensions won't have access to the functions needed to properly identify and block ads that occur while browsing websites and watching videos.

Microsoft's move isn't surprising, as Edge is based on Chromium, the open-source browser engine that powers most web browsers today, including Opera, Brave, Vivaldi, and Samsung Browser. Google initiated the migration from Manifest V2 to V3 in Chrome/Chromium, and Microsoft Edge is now following Google's lead.

But Firefox is one of the few web browsers remaining that isn't based on Chromium, and it's now the only major browser to still support uBlock Origin. Neither Safari nor DuckDuckGo—the two other major non-Chromium browsers out there—support uBlock Origin.

For die-hard uBlock Origin fans, Firefox appears to be the only browser left without compromises. With any other browser, you'll need to settle for uBlock Origin Lite (with fewer features and less ad-blocking success) or whatever built-in ad-blocking feature comes with the browser.

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Cloudflare built an AI agent workspace for its employees. Now it's open source:

Cloudflare has open-sourced its Cloudflare OS platform, which it first developed as an internal workspace for employees to build apps using AI agents—including people who are not software developers or engineers. The company also touts a security framework designed to reduce the risk of employee vibe-coding sessions creating serious security flaws or leading to data breaches.

The tech company spent several months building and internally testing Cloudflare OS, which allows employees to describe workflows in natural language so that an AI agent can code them into applications. In an August 5 blog post announcing the open source version's availability on GitHub, the company claims thousands of Cloudflare employees use the platform on a daily basis to "create documents and slides, automate repeatable tasks, and build small apps to visualize data and help them do their work."

"This is a full-on personal app vibe coding platform, in which the sandbox is so secure that you can pretty much go wild—the AI cannot introduce a significant security bug," said Kenton Varda, principal engineer at Cloudflare, in a post on the social media platform X. "We believe a company's security team can feel comfortable giving non-technical users permission to vibe code and then sleep soundly at night."

The security model relies on creating fine-grained app instances so that a document editor app would run each document as a separate instance in a separate sandbox, Varda explained. The Cloudflare OS platform manages who has permission to access each instance, and each individual runs their own copy of the code that they can freely modify.

[...] Cloudflare OS can work with just about any AI model and allows organizations to select the most suitable model for the job at hand. "Not every user needs access to the max thinking mode of the latest frontier lab model," said Sam Rhea, chief information officer at Cloudflare, in a separate blog post. "And we do not need team members spending $20 to summarize their email inbox every hour."

looorg writes:

Owners of Petlibro pet feeders have "service issue" that prevents feeding of the pets. If you can't even bother to feed your own pet? Why do you have them? Also if we can't even depend on the machines to feed pets how are we depending on them to do other more important things. But why do you need cloud access to set a schedule to feed a pet? Or that is to say to open a tray so the pet in question can access the food. As it was when it was not opening it was mocking or taunting the pet with food it could not access.

Pets should now be on their normal feeding schedule again ... Perhaps the service issue was just there to put some of the furries on a diet.

Petlibro says it's working to resolve a 'service issue' that's causing its smart feeders not to dispense food on schedule.

Smart pet-feeder company Petlibro suffered an outage on Tuesday, giving users a harsh reminder of the risks of relying on smart devices.

https://www.theverge.com/tech/979295/petlibro-outage-smart-pet-feeders
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2026/08/pet-owners-say-smart-pet-feeder-outage-led-to-furry-ones-going-unfed/

Original Submission