SoylentNews

hubie writes:

Researchers have visualized mosquito flight behavior for the first time, which could improve mosquito-control strategies:

After watching hundreds of mosquitoes buzzing around one of their colleagues and collecting 20 million data points, Georgia Tech and Massachusetts Institute of Technology researchers have created a mathematical model that predicts how and where female mosquitoes will fly to feast on humans.

The new study is the first to visualize mosquito flight patterns and provides hard data for improving capture and control strategies. In addition to being a nuisance, mosquitoes transmit diseases such as malaria, yellow fever, and Zika, which cause more than 700,000 deaths every year.

The researchers also designed an interactive, public website to show the paths and behaviors.

The team used 3D infrared cameras to see how the insects moved around inanimate objects based on visual cues and carbon dioxide. Then they put a person in a chamber, dressed him in various shades of clothing, and tracked mosquito trajectories.

[...] Based on their data, the researchers said they don't think mosquitoes swarm because they're following the pack. Each appeared to pick up on the cues independently, then found themselves at the same place at the same time.

"It's like a crowded bar," said David Hu, a professor in Georgia Tech's George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering and the School of Biological Sciences. "Customers aren't there because they followed each other into the bar. They're attracted by the same cues: drinks, music, and the atmosphere. The same is true of mosquitoes. Rather than following the leader, the insect follows the signals and happens to arrive at the same spot as the others. They're good copies of each other."

The study included three experiments that varied visual cues and carbon dioxide. In the first, the researchers used a black sphere as a target. It attracted the mosquitoes, but only when they were flying toward the object. Once they arrived, they didn't stick around, often fluttering past.

When the researchers swapped the black target with something white and added carbon dioxide, mosquitoes slowly found the source, but only if they were nearby. Hu noticed the insects doing a "double take" before settling in around the source.

Introducing a black sphere and CO2 at the same time proved to be the most irresistible scenario: the mosquitoes swarmed, stayed, and attacked.

[...] Once he learned about their attraction to motionless clues, Zuo donned various outfits and stepped into a mosquito chamber. He dressed in all black, all white, or a combination.

Zuo stretched out his arms and let dozens of insects circle him as cameras captured their trajectories. The data was sent to MIT, which determined the mostly likely rules that generated those flight patterns.

[...] The researchers hope their findings can lead to better pest control.

"One tactic is using suction traps that rely on steady cues, such as continuous CO2 release or constant light sources, to attract mosquitoes," Zuo said. "Our study suggests using them intermittently, then activating suction at intervals, might be better. That's because mosquitoes don't tend to stick around their target when both clues aren't used at the same time."

Journal Reference: https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adz7063

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/software/linux/california-moves-to-exempt-linux-from-its-upcoming-age-verification-law-after-backlash-over-forcing-operating-systems-to-collect-users-ages-amendment-proposed-by-the-same-lawmaker-who-wrote-the-original-law

Assembly Bill 1856 (AB 1856), currently moving through California’s legislature ahead of committee reviews in June, would amend the state’s earlier age-assurance law by excluding software distributed under licenses that allow users to “copy, redistribute, and modify the software.”

The amendment follows months of backlash after California passed the original Assembly Bill 1043 (AB 1043), formally known as the Digital Age Assurance Act, in late 2025. The law sought to shift online age verification away from individual websites and apps and down to the operating-system level instead.

Under the original law, operating systems would be required to request a user’s age or birth date during device setup, then expose an “age bracket signal” to apps and app stores. The law, which defined brackets such as “under 13,” “13–15,” “16–17,” and “18+,” immediately raised questions about how such requirements would apply to decentralized, open-source software ecosystems.

Unlike Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android, most Linux distributions are not centrally controlled commercial platforms. Many are community-run projects maintained by volunteers, often without user accounts, telemetry systems, or even formal corporate ownership structures. Critics argued the law’s wording was so broad that it could technically force open-source operating systems to become age-verification platforms.

Privacy advocates, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, criticized the legislation as invasive and warned it could create infrastructure for broader identity tracking online. Linux developers also questioned how California could realistically enforce such requirements on infinitely forkable open-source software projects.

The controversy became particularly heated after reports suggested platforms like SteamOS could still fall under the law due to their ties to proprietary application ecosystems. Valve

AB 1856 does not repeal the original Digital Age Assurance Act. Instead, it narrows the definition of who qualifies as an “operating system provider” under the law. Commercial platforms with proprietary app ecosystems could remain subject to California’s age-assurance requirements even if most open-source Linux distributions are ultimately exempted.

California Assembly Member Buffy Wicks introduced the amendment on February 11, 2026. However, the open-source exemption language appeared in later revisions that began drawing attention across Linux and privacy communities. The latest version is dated May 18, 2026, and as of May 19, 2026, the bill was read a second time and ordered to third reading.

Etiido Uko is a news contributor for Tom's Hardware covering the latest updates in big tech and the PC industry. He is a mechanical engineer and senior technical writer with over nine years of experience in documentation and reporting. He is deeply passionate about all things engineering and technology, and is an expert in gadgets, manufacturing, robotics, automotive, and aerospace.

Original Submission

Researchers Issue Warning About using WiFi routers as surveillance tech

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://gizmodo.com/researchers-issue-warning-about-tech-that-could-turn-every-router-into-a-potential-means-for-surveillance-2000763181

Researchers at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) in Germany say ordinary WiFi networks can be used to identify people with an eerie amount of accuracy.

In a study, the researchers describe using beamforming feedback information (BFI) and machine learning models to identify people walking within a network's range. The team found that this BFI-based technique was able to infer a person's identity with 99.5% accuracy. They presented their findings at the ACM's Conference on Computer and Communications Security last November.

Researchers Identify People Through Ordinary Wi-Fi Routers With 99.5% Accuracy

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.tomshardware.com/tech-industry/researchers-identify-people-through-ordinary-wi-fi-routers-with-99-percent-accuracy

The system, called BFId, requires no specialized hardware, no access to the target Wi-Fi network, and works even if the person being tracked isn't carrying a wireless device. The team tested the attack on 197 participants, the largest dataset ever used in Wi-Fi-based identification works, and plans to present its findings at the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security (CCS) in Taipei.

BFId exploits a different data source: beamforming feedback information (BFI). Introduced in Wi-Fi 5 (802.11ac), beamforming allows access points to steer transmissions toward specific clients. To do this, connected devices periodically measure the wireless channel and send compressed feedback back to the router, which is then broadcast unencrypted on the MAC layer, meaning any Wi-Fi adapter set to monitor mode can capture it passively.

A single eavesdropping device can record BFI from every client on a network simultaneously, capturing multiple perspectives of any person in the area. CSI-based attacks, by contrast, only capture one perspective per malicious node.

The researchers found that BFI substantially outperformed CSI in identification accuracy despite being a lossy, lower-resolution derivative of CSI data. On the same 170-person subset, BFI achieved 99.5% accuracy compared to 82.4% for CSI. The paper attributes this to BFI's compression acting as a form of noise filtering, and to higher spatial resolution, with each BFI data point containing 740 features versus 212 for CSI.

The team tested several potential mitigations, such as reducing the frequency of beamforming reports, which had minimal effect on BFI accuracy, even at heavily degraded sample rates. Encrypting BFI transmissions would require changes to the Wi-Fi standard and could break backward compatibility with existing devices.

"The technology is powerful, but at the same time entails risks to our fundamental rights, especially to privacy," Professor Thorsten Strufe from KASTEL, KIT's cybersecurity institute, said in a press release published on Science Daily.

The researchers noted that IEEE published the 802.11bf amendment in 2025, which formally standardizes Wi-Fi sensing for applications like presence detection and environment monitoring. The team argues the standard lacks adequate privacy protections and is calling for safeguards to be added before Wi-Fi sensing becomes widely deployed.

Original Submission #1  Original Submission #2 

5 ways Pope Leo says AI Could Warp Humanity

jelizondo writes:

Axios reports on the latest papal encyclical:

Pope Leo XIV is warning that the artificial intelligence race could become a new Tower of Babel — a dazzling human achievement that concentrates power, weakens truth and turns people into data points.

The long-awaited document, Magnifica Humanitas ("Magnificent Humanity"), signals that the Vatican is aggressively positioning itself as a central moral authority in the global tech debate.

Leo gave the following warnings:

AI can erode human judgment by offering instant answers that weaken creativity, discernment and the patience needed to seek truth.

AI can simulate care without relationship, making vulnerable users mistake artificial empathy for genuine human connection.

AI can deepen inequality because data, computing power and regulatory influence are concentrated among a small number of actors.

AI can destabilize democracy by amplifying disinformation and blurring the line between fact and fiction.

AI can make war easier by speeding up lethal decisions and distancing humans from responsibility. Leo's starkest line: "No algorithm can make war morally acceptable."

What they're saying: "Pope Leo has announced himself as one of the leading figures in AI ethics now with this document," Meghan Sullivan, director of Notre Dame's Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, tells Axios.

What would you add (or substract) from the point made by the Pope?

"c0lo" writes:

Power prices to fall for most customers, with bigger drops for businesses:

Surging levels of renewable energy and better reliability from coal-fired generators are set to give consumers a break, with benchmark power prices to fall up to 10 per cent for consumers and more for small businesses.

In what will be welcome news for power users weary from years of big tariff hikes, the Australian Energy Regulator (AER) has decided to cut the default market offer (DMO) in several states.

The offer acts as a safety net by setting the maximum, or ceiling, price retailers can charge affected customers.

Fewer than one in 10 households are on a default offer, but experts say they are a key reference by which all other power prices are measured.

Power prices will fall by up to 7.7 per cent in New South Wales, 10.7 per cent in south-east Queensland, and 1.1 per cent in South Australia.

Some customers in South Australia, however, will see an increase of 1.4 per cent.

Climate Change Minister Chris Bowen said the price drops were proof that the growing amount of renewable energy in the grid was gaining momentum.

"We've just hit 50 per cent renewables, and renewables are the cheapest form of energy, and that puts downward pressure on prices," he said.

The falls come amid changes to the regulated pricing system, which now includes flat-rate tariffs and time-of-use charges, which vary during the day.

As well as this, Mr Bowen said the AER had stripped out unnecessary costs that could be recovered from consumers through the default offers.

"We reformed the default market offer to really make sure that only the absolute necessary prices or costs are included, [for example] very minimal allowances for energy companies to go and get new customers," he told AM.

"With a lot of pressure on energy costs, we looked at this and said it was very hard to justify [these sorts of costs] so took them out."

The range in prices is due to some people being on a flat rate, while others are on a time-of-use tariff, which changes throughout the day.

But small businesses in all three regions will see much bigger falls in their power bills, down as much as 12.8 per cent in South Australia, 14 per cent in south-east Queensland, and as much as 20.9 per cent in New South Wales.

In Victoria, which is covered by a separate regulatory regime, benchmark prices will fall by 5 per cent from mid-year under a decision by the Essential Services Commission.

AER chair Clare Savage said today's outcome reflected easing cost pressures in parts of the electricity supply chain.

hubie writes:

From insects to birds to mammals, communication signals follow a common tempo:

Animal communication can look wildly different — flashing lights, chirping calls, croaking songs and elaborate dances. But new research from Northwestern University suggests many of these signals share a surprising feature: They repeat at nearly the same tempo.

In a new study published in journal PLOS Biology, Northwestern scientists found that communication signals across a wide range of species tend to repeat at about 2 hertz, or roughly two beats per second.

The researchers propose this tempo might reflect a shared biological constraint. Animal brains, including humans, may be naturally tuned to process signals arriving at that pace. In other words, two beats per second may be a rhythmic "sweet spot" that enables brains to detect signals more easily and process communication more efficiently.

Understanding this potentially universal tempo could help scientists better interpret animal signaling and social behavior across species. The findings also hint that human perception of rhythms, including beats in popular music and the cadence of speech, may arise from the same neural timing principles found throughout nature.

"There seems to be an abundance of organisms signaling or communicating at a relatively narrow band of tempos," said Northwestern's Guy Amichay, who led the study. "They all seem to stay around 2 or maybe 3 hertz. In principle, they could communicate at other rhythms. Physically, there is nothing preventing them from communicating at, say, 10 hertz, yet they do not. To explain this phenomenon, we propose that this tempo of 2 hertz might be easier to understand because it resonates with your brain. It resonates with the human brain, firefly brain, sea lion brain, frog brain and so on."

"There's a somewhat subtle point here: we suspect that getting the 'carrier' signal in the right tempo range is key to communicating efficiently," said Northwestern's Daniel M. Abrams, the study's senior author. "It might not be that the tempo itself conveys any information, but it just serves as a baseline for getting attention, with actual content sent on top of it like musical notes following along with the beat in a song."

[...] Despite enormous differences in body sizes, habitats and communication methods, the team found that many species repeat signals within a narrow range of roughly 0.5 to 4 hertz (1 to 4 beats per second). The pattern spans animals that communicate through sound, light or movement, suggesting a common underlying principle.

"If you try to catch a firefly, it panics and flickers much faster," Amichay said. "Biomechanically, they are able to signal faster. So, we wondered if there might be a deeper reason why very different systems signal at this tempo and not any other tempo."

[...] According to Amichay, musicologists have long noted that popular songs cluster around 120 beats per minute, which is exactly 2 hertz.

"That rhythm fits our body; it fits our limbs," he said. "We walk roughly at 2 hertz, so it's easy for us to dance to music that's 2 hertz. Of course, more experimental music can have drastically different beats. But if you turn on the radio and hear Taylor Swift — that's often 2 hertz."

[...] "It's tempting to think there's a deeper connection here — that maybe we're all on the same shared wavelength," Amichay said. "But we're still exploring what this might mean."

Journal Reference: Amichay G, Balasubramanian V, Abrams DM (2026) A widespread animal communication tempo may resonate with the receiver's brain. PLoS Biol 24(4): e3003735. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.3003735

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://arstechnica.com/space/2026/05/vast-space-seeks-to-diversify-by-building-satellites-as-well-as-space-stations/

As part of its plan to develop a private space station, Vast Space built and then launched a small demonstration spacecraft in early November. This vehicle then completed dozens of test objectives with flying colors before making a successful de-orbit three months later.

The mission, which tested power, propulsion, tracking, and a multitude of other technologies needed for Vast's Haven-1 space station, was evidently so successful that the company is ready to use its spaceflight capabilities for other purposes. The Long Beach, California-based company announced Tuesday that it plans to begin selling high-powered satellite buses.

"Every single successful space company is diversified in its products," said Max Haot, chief executive of Vast Space, in an interview. "So for us it really was a question of when, not if."

The company's first offering is a 15 kW-class satellite bus capable of supporting a variety of demanding missions. Each satellite is about 3 meters long and 4 meters tall, with a mass of 700 kg and payload capacity of at least 350 kg. They will have a design lifetime of five years and be intended to operate in areas ranging from low-Earth orbit out to lunar orbit. Vast aims to serve a variety of customers, from telecommunications to observation to data services. Haot added that Vast also plans to offer an NVIDIA Space-1 Vera Rubin Module to support orbital data center inferencing needs.

The Vast satellite bus—essentially a backbone providing power, propulsion, and navigation for various payoads—will be based largely on technology ported over from the company's Haven-1 space station, which is due to launch for the first time next year as the world's first private space station. However there will be some new elements needed for the satellite, and Haot said Vast is already moving forward with in-house development of electric propulsion and a deployable solar array for the satellite.

Vast has already signed a customer for four satellites, with an option to purchase up to 200 additional satellites. Haot said the company is targeting a launch of at least 10 Vast Satellites in the fourth quarter of 2027.

With this new product line, Vast is entering an increasingly crowded market. Historically, in the United States, a handful of large companies such as Boeing, Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Maxar, and Sierra Space have manufactured medium and large satellites. Typically these were costly and often bespoke designs that cost tens to often hundreds of millions of dollars.

But a few trends have changed the landscape in recent years. The US government's Space Development Agency has signaled that it prefers proliferated constellations—many satellites spread out present less of a concentrated target than a few larger and more expensive satellites. With the Falcon 9 rocket's increased cadence, as well as rideshare missions, it became easier and sometimes cheaper to get smaller and medium-size satellites into orbit.

This has led to an influx of venture capital to back a new generation of companies seeking to build less expensive, more modular satellites that could fill a variety of purposes. There are several prominent, relatively new entrants in this area including K2 Space, Rocket Lab, True Anomaly, Blue Canyon, and Millennium Space Systems.

Haot said most of these companies are still emerging, with products that are not yet mature. In other words, he believes that if Vast Space can execute, it could become a market leader, especially with applications that are power-hungry. Vast has already invested $1 billion in facilities for spacecraft manufacturing, including clean rooms, which can be used for space stations as well as satellites, he said.

The number of satellites in space has exploded in recent years, largely due to the rapid expansion of SpaceX's Starlink constellation. For decades the total number of satellites orbiting Earth numbered about 4,000, but in the last five years that number has grown to about 14,000.

This is just the beginning. By some estimates, in another decade, there will be approximately 500,000 satellites in orbit for the purpose of communications, Earth observation, orbital data centers, and other applications.

Haot expects that about 90 percent of these will be satellites built by SpaceX, Amazon, Blue Origin, or other major players. But even 10 percent of that number, if available to commercial satellite bus manufacturers, would represent 50,000 satellites for Vast and other companies to compete for.

Original Submission

hubie writes:

'Star Wars' used to be the ultimate theatrical experience, but have years of Disney+ spin-offs dulled its multiplex appeal?

Remember "Meet Joe Black", Brad Pitt's remake of '30s drama "Death Takes a Holiday"? What about Bruce Willis's military drama "The Siege"? Or even Adam Sandler's American football comedy "The Waterboy"? They're rarely talked about now, but for a brief period in fall 1998, these three movies — along with Pixar's "A Bug's Life" — came to unexpected prominence in the lives of "Star Wars" fans.

With anticipation for "The Phantom Menace", George Lucas's first big-screen excursion to the Star Wars galaxy in 16 years, comfortably exceeding fever pitch, these films provided an unlikely route back to a galaxy far, far away. Knowing that the first "Episode I" teaser was attached to prints across the States, many "Star Wars" fans bought tickets to these Earth-bound movies, watched a certain red-hot trailer, and then walked out before the feature presentation had even begun.

[...] Yes, it's fair to say that the generations of moviegoers who'd queued around the block to watch the original trilogy in theaters or on VHS — as well as embracing the Special Edition theatrical re-releases in 1997 — were kind of excited about Darth Vader: The Early Years.

How Disney and Lucasfilm must be hoping they can recapture similar excitement ahead of "The Mandalorian and Grogu"'s multiplex debut this month. It may be easier said than done, however, especially with a report in Deadline suggesting that the movie is tracking for the worst opening weekend in "Star Wars" history.

[...] As Disney and Lucasfilm dragged their heels over a new movie, the streamer subsequently became the place to go for new "Star Wars" "content, with "The Book of Boba Fett", "Obi-Wan Kenobi", "Andor", "Ahsoka", "The Acolyte" and "Skeleton Crew" all following in "The Mandalorian"'s footsteps, to varying degrees of success. In the last six-and-a-half years, there have been more hours of live-action "Star Wars" TV than 11 movies had generated in the previous four decades.

kolie writes:

On May 19, 2026 -- Google I/O day -- Google pushed a mandatory, silent auto-update to all users of Antigravity, its six-month-old AI coding platform. When developers returned to their machines, their Integrated Development Environment (IDE) had been replaced with a standalone agent chat interface. No code editor. No file browser. No terminal. No extensions.

Antigravity launched in November 2025 as a free, Visual Studio Code-based IDE with a deeply integrated AI agent. It supported Remote Secure Shell (SSH), Development Containers, Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL), and the full VS Code extension ecosystem. Google's own launch announcement described it as offering "a state-of-the-art, AI-powered IDE equipped with tab completions and inline commands for the synchronous workflow you already know" alongside its agent capabilities. The 2.0 update replaced that product with a multi-agent orchestration interface.

The installer bug. The 2.0 installer deposited its files into the same directory as the existing IDE. Electron applications load resources/app.asar before resources/app/ regardless of which executable is launched. By dropping its app.asar next to the IDE's existing files, the 2.0 installer caused both Antigravity.exe and Antigravity IDE.exe to silently launch the agent chat interface. An independent technical analysis on Hacker News diagnosed it:

Not an Electron bug. Location-based loading is documented behavior. This is a packaging mistake in Google's 2.0 installer assuming two separate Electron products can share an install directory.

Data loss. Google split the application's data directories without migrating user data or issuing any notice. Chat histories, session context, extensions, and workspace settings stored in %AppData%\Roaming\Antigravity were invisible to the new app, which reads only from %AppData%\Roaming\Antigravity IDE. piunikaweb.com documented the directory split. Recovery required eight manual steps: killing processes, backing up AppData folders, completely uninstalling both applications, downloading the IDE from a link buried at the bottom of the download page, and copying data between the two directories.

What is missing from the 2.0 standalone app. The new application does not include a code editor, file browser, integrated terminal, or extension support. Remote SSH is absent. Dev container support is not present. WSL support is broken: the required server binary, Antigravity-reh.tar.gz, was not published to Google's Content Delivery Network (CDN) at launch. Reddit user u/MarcSB1 documented the failed download URLs; u/ScythDreame confirmed: "Antigravity IDE 2.0.1 didn't publish the server binary for Remote-WSL -- 404 on the Google CDN. It is a bug on Google's side." The Google AI Developers Forum independently corroborated this.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

https://www.theregister.com/public-sector/2026/05/20/ai-sackings-reach-new-zealand-which-will-use-it-to-eject-14-percent-of-government-staff/5243076

The wave of layoffs attributable to the adoption of AI has washed up on the shores of New Zealand, which has announced an overhaul of its public service that will see the technology become a "basic expectation" for government agencies and help to make it possible to sack 9,000 staff - about 14 percent of current headcount.

Finance Minister Nicola Willis announced the job cuts yesterday, in a speech that saw her bemoan the fact that New Zealand's government comprises 39 departments and ministries, and compared that to the 16 in Australia and 24 in the UK.

She characterized the nation's public service as "scared of AI, slow to move to the cloud" and said it operates a "complex and fragmented set of overlapping IT solutions."

"Our government is as frustrated as you are by the fragmentation and silos, the complexity, the status-quo thinking and the dangerously slow take up of digital and AI technologies," she added.

Aotearoa's answer is to task its Chief Digital Officer "to embed AI deployment as a basic expectation for all public entities."

Minister Willis mentioned a "recent trial of an AI scribe tool in hospital emergency rooms which has reduced the amount of time clinicians have to spend on file notes and increased the time they spend with patients" as an example of the sort of thing she hopes to replicate.

She said the planned overhaul will therefore "reduce the number of government departments, increase the use of AI and other digital tools, and deliver significant savings."

The government plans to cap departmental budgets and says that combined with redundancies it will save NZ$2.4 billion ($1.4 billion) over four years – less than one percent of all core government spending.

Plenty of tech companies have made substantial redundancies that they justify as necessary to create an appropriate workforce for the age of AI, an explanation we've seen deployed to explain deep cuts at Cisco, Cloudflare, Atlassian, Meta, and Arctic Wolf.

Few governments have done likewise, but one early high-profile effort – the Elon-Musk-led "Department of Government Efficiency" – hoped to use AI to improve government operations but left behind little evidence it had succeeded.

New Zealand is blessed with many resources and extraordinary natural beauty, but has a modest tax base – yet residents expect a high level of government services. Minister Willis's plan is therefore a very big bet on AI.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

FreeBSD isn't Linux, but if you didn't know any better, you'd swear it was.

I'm not gonna lie: I don't give FreeBSD (or any of the BSDs) the attention they deserve. The reason for that is simple: I'm a Linux guy.

[...] FreeBSD is a Unix-like operating system that is descended from the Berkeley Software Distribution. The first version of FreeBSD was released in 1993 and was developed from 386BSD, one of the first fully functional and free Unix clones on affordable hardware. Since its inception, FreeBSD has been the most widely used BSD-derived operating system.

FreeBSD maintains a complete system: kernel, device drivers, userland utilities, and documentation. This is in contrast to Linux, which only provides a kernel and drivers while relying on third parties for system software.

Think of FreeBSD as a more challenging version of Linux. This operating system doesn't hold your hand, so you might learn a thing or two as you install it and the software you require.

Even for a seasoned Linux veteran like me, FreeBSD can often be a head-scratcher.

There's an old adage that goes something like this:

BSD is what you get when a bunch of Unix hackers sit down to try to port a Unix system to the PC. Linux is what you get when a bunch of PC hackers sit down and try to write a Unix system for the PC.

Essentially, FreeBSD is Unix, where Linux is based on Unix. To that end, FreeBSD (and most of the BSDs) make for amazing server operating systems. If you were to ask any long-in-the-tooth geeks about server operating systems, they'd likely say that BSD is what you want. There really isn't a more stable operating system on the planet.

And that's one of the big draws to FreeBSD: it is as rock-solid as they come.

To frame it better... [Ed. note: requisite car analogy follows]

Imagine two companies that make cars. One outsources all of its components from other manufacturers and assembles them in its warehouse. The second builds all of its components and also assembles them in its warehouse.

As you might assume, the second manufacturer's cars most likely work and perform better than the first because it knows every part that goes into creating the car and can make all sorts of adjustments to improve every aspect of it. The first manufacturer, on the other hand, doesn't have nearly the control over how those components are built.

FreeBSD is the manufacturer that builds everything in-house.

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

FBI will pay vendors to help it track and search for vehicles nationwide:

The Federal Bureau of Investigation announced plans to buy nationwide access to a network of license plate readers, saying it will award contracts to one or more vendors that can offer "near real time" information from cameras across the US. The proposed contract is for the FBI Directorate of Intelligence.

"To evaluate and manage threats to personal safety, property, and law enforcement, the FBI requires professional service firms that can provide License Plate Readers (LPRs) for tracking subjects on roads and highways over the US and its territories," the FBI said in a Request for Proposals (RFP) published on May 14. The FBI said the winning bidder or bidders "must provide law enforcement and/or commercial license plate reader data provided through the Contractor's existing platform." The system must cover 75 percent of locations, the FBI said.

The system must offer the ability to search for license plate information "and other descriptive data such as vehicle description information, time/date criteria, and geo-location criteria," the FBI said. "Additionally, the system must provide search result notifications. The Contractor system must have the ability to access and/or query cameras across the United States and its territories. The Contractor system must be capable of providing this data in near real time."

Contractors have to be able "to share/create maps depicting camera coverage (i.e. heat mapping)," and "provide the FBI the source of information (i.e. red-light cameras, repossession vendors, speed cameras, etc.)," the FBI said. The FBI said it needs to be able to search the database for partial or full plate numbers, plate states, addresses, locations where a plate was scanned, and vehicle makes and models.

The RFP divides the proposal into six regions covering the continental US, Hawaii, Alaska, Puerto Rico, and territories such as Guam and the US Virgin Islands. The FBI said it may award contracts to one or two vendors in each region. The deals can be for up to five years, with all deals combined potentially worth $36 million. The FBI said a contractor's system has to be available to FBI users via a website.

Flock and Motorola Solutions are well-positioned to bid on the contract, as 404 Media noted yesterday. Both companies could win part of the job, as the FBI said it may award contracts to multiple vendors to achieve its desired level of access.

Flock's Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) are sold to local police departments. The company boasts of having deals with "over 12,000 public safety customers including cities, towns, counties, and business partners." Motorola Solutions sells license plate reader cameras that can be installed on busy roadways or mounted on police cars.

License plate reader cameras have raised concerns about privacy, data security, and errors in plate number recognition systems leading to wrongful arrests. 404 Media reported last year that local police departments performed searches of the Flock license plate reader system for US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), "giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for."

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

Greek mountaintop ground station aims infrared beams at CubeSats in ESA-backed optical networking trial:

Europe's hunt for secure, high-capacity satellite communications infrastructure has produced a laser-equipped mountaintop ground station in northern Greece.

Lithuanian space and defense biz Astrolight says that it has commissioned a new optical ground station in Greece that will support ESA-backed CubeSat missions testing laser-based communications between satellites and Earth.

The Holomondas Optical Ground Station was built through the PeakSat project, led by the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki with backing from the European Space Agency and Greece's Ministry of Digital Governance. Its job is to receive data from satellites via infrared laser links rather than the radio systems that space operators have relied on for decades.

PeakSat and ERMIS-3, two Greek CubeSats launched in March under ESA's wider Greek IOD/IOV mission program, both carry Astrolight's ATLAS-1 optical communication terminal. Astrolight also built the ground segment, giving the project a fully integrated end-to-end optical communications setup.

Astrolight CEO Laurynas Mačiulis told The Register that the company originally pursued laser communications after concluding it "would need to tap into the optical spectrum," as demand for satellite bandwidth continues to grow. He described optical connectivity as "one of the enabling technologies for further expansion into space."

The company says the station uses an 808-nanometer laser beacon and an optical C-band receiver capable of receiving data at up to 2.5 Gbps. Unlike traditional RF systems, optical links use tightly focused infrared beams that are harder to intercept or jam while also supporting significantly higher throughput.

The engineering problem, however, is slightly more complicated than pointing a laser pointer at the sky and hoping for the best.

"You have two moving objects that try to establish a laser link, which means trying to point a very, very narrow laser pointer at your object, which is potentially tens of thousands of kilometers away, moving at eight kilometers per second," Mačiulis said.

ESA and its partners are pitching optical comms partly as an answer to an increasingly crowded radio spectrum, but the tech is also drawing attention from defense and dual-use operators interested in more resilient communications systems.

"There is a need for networking in space, both for connectivity and tactical reasons, and dual-use defense applications," Mačiulis said, adding that future satellite constellations "will inevitably rely on optical links, because that gives information superiority and security and resistance to jamming electronic warfare."

He added "there's also sovereignty aspects, which means that there will never be a single player – there cannot be just Starlink."

Original Submission

Arthur T Knackerbracket writes:

The EU has chosen Swedish investment giant EQT to run a new €5bn fund aimed at keeping Europe's most promising deep tech companies on home soil:

The EU has chosen Swedish investment giant EQT to run a new €5bn fund aimed at keeping Europe's most promising deep tech companies on home soil.

The European Innovation Council (EIC) has selected Stockholm-headquartered EQT as fund manager for the Scale-up Europe Fund, following a competitive selection process that drew expressions of interest from December 2025 to February 2026.

The fund is the largest of its kind ever launched in Europe and will direct growth capital at high-potential companies across a range of strategic sectors, including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, clean energy, space technology, biotech and medical innovation.

The core goal of the fund is to close a persistent late-stage financing gap that has long pushed European scale-ups to raise capital elsewhere and, in many cases, to relocate abroad altogether.

The new multibillion-euro fund was initially announced back in October 2025, and is designed to build on the ‘choose Europe to start and scale’ strategy launched earlier last year.

With an initial goal of €5bn, the Commission eventually hopes to raise €25bn for the scale-up fund, a spokesperson said at the time.

Sweden’s EQT is one of Europe’s most established global investment firms, and was chosen by the EIC board, it said, on the basis of its track record in growth equity, fundraising capability and commitment to housing a dedicated investment team within the EU.

The firm brings a broad, pan-European presence and a strong institutional infrastructure that the EIC said was well-suited to the scale and ambition of the mandate.

owl writes:

https://obsoletesony.substack.com/p/the-coolest-record-player-ever-made

Back in 1983, portable music was changing fast. Cassette tapes were at their peak, compact discs were the shiny new thing, and vinyl records, once the heart of hi-fi, were fading out. Sony, the company that made music personal with the Walkman, had a wild idea: a turntable you could carry, stand upright, or even mount on a wall. They called it the Flamingo, a name inspired by the idea of balancing on one leg, much like the bird. The PS-F5 and PS-F9 didn't fly off the shelves, but their clever design still turns heads today. This is the story of a record player that did its own thing and earned a quiet spot in tech history.

Original Submission