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What is the Linux Installation Project?
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- pearOS is a Linux that falls rather close to the Apple tree
Revived distro returns on Arch with KDE Plasma, global menus, and a familiar macOS-style sheenThe new pearOS distro is a Romanian project that picks up the concepts behind the original Pear Linux from 2011 and updates them. It's not going to turn the distro world upside down, but it's fun, interesting, and a showcase for the versatility and customizability of the Linux desktop.…
- Waterfox browser goes AI-free, targets the Firefox faithful
Even if Mozilla is going to add an AI kill switch, that may not be enough to reassure many.Waterfox, a popular fork of Firefox, is saying nay to AI. Considering how unpopular Mozilla's plan to botify its browser has become, this could win the alternative some converts.…
- KDE Internet of Things Development Restarted For Home Assistant Integration
Announced one year ago was KDE Internet of Things "Kiot" with an emphasis on providing nice integration between the KDE Plasma desktop and Home Assistant for handling open-source home automation. Development on Kiot sadly fell through the cracks for most of the year but development on it recently restarted...
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- Microsoft Made Another Copilot Ad Where Nothing Actually Works
Microsoft's latest holiday ad for its Copilot AI assistant features a 30-second montage of users seamlessly syncing smart home lights to music, scaling recipes for large gatherings, and parsing HOA guidelines -- none of which the software can actually perform reliably when put to the test. The Verge methodically tested each prompt shown in the ad and found that Copilot repeatedly hallucinated interface elements that didn't exist, claimed to highlight on-screen buttons when it hadn't, and abandoned calculations midway through. The smart home interface shown in the ad belongs to "Relecloud," a fictional company Microsoft uses in internal case studies. A Microsoft spokesperson confirmed that both the HOA document and the inflatable reindeer photo were fabricated for the advertisement. The ad closes with Santa Claus asking Copilot why toy production is behind schedule. Further reading: Talking To Windows' Copilot AI Makes a Computer Feel Incompetent.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- All That Cheap Chinese Stuff Is Now Europe's Problem
President Trump's closure of the de minimis customs loophole in May -- which previously allowed Chinese packages valued under $800 to enter the U.S. duty-free -- has redirected a flood of cheap goods toward Europe, where similar exemptions for packages under $175.8 in the EU and $180 in the UK remain intact. The shift has been swift: exports of low-value Chinese packages to the U.S. have dropped more than 40% since May, according to Chinese customs data, and the EU has this year overtaken the U.S. as the largest market for China's roughly $100 billion cheap package trade. Shipments to Hungary and Denmark have quadrupled, and those to Germany, France, and the UK have risen 50% or more. Temu has recorded seven straight months of double-digit U.S. sales declines, per Consumer Edge data tracking credit and debit card transactions. Its European sales, on the other hand: up 56% in the EU and 46% in the UK since May compared to a year ago. The EU agreed last week to impose a $3.5 fee on imported small packages starting in July and to close the de minimis exemption entirely by 2028. The UK plans to follow in 2029.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- FTC: Instacart To Refund $60M Over Deceptive Subscription Tactics
alternative_right writes: Grocery delivery service Instacart will refund $60 million to settle FTC claims that it misled customers with false advertising and unlawfully enrolled them in paid subscriptions. Instacart partners with over 1,800 retailers to provide online shopping, delivery, and pickup services from nearly 100,000 stores across North America. Its platform serves millions of customers and is also used by roughly 600,000 independent shoppers across thousands of cities in Canada and the United States. In a complaint filed on Thursday, the FTC claimed Instacart engaged in multiple deceptive tactics that raised costs for customers, including failing to provide advertised refunds and falsely advertising "free delivery" while still charging mandatory service fees that added up to 15% to order costs. The FTC said Instacart also advertised a "100% satisfaction guarantee," but typically offered only small credits toward future orders rather than full refunds to customers experiencing problems with deliveries or service. The company allegedly hid refund options from "self-service" menus, leading customers to believe credits were their only option.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Microsoft AI Chief: Staying in the Frontier AI Race Will Cost Hundreds of Billions
Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman estimates that staying competitive in frontier AI development will require "hundreds of billions of dollars" over the next five to ten years, a sum that doesn't even account for the high salaries companies are paying individual researchers and technical staff. Speaking on a podcast, Suleyman compared Microsoft to a "modern construction company" where hundreds of thousands of workers are building gigawatts of CPUs and AI accelerators. There's "a structural advantage by being inside a big company," he said. When asked whether startups could compete with Big Tech, Suleyman said "it's hard to say," adding that "the ambiguity is what's driving the frothiness of the valuations." Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg said in September he'd rather risk "misspending a couple of hundred billion" than fall behind in superintelligence.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- 2025 Was the Beginning of the End of the TV Brightness War
The television industry's brightness war may have hit its inflection point in 2025, the year TCL and Hisense released the first consumer TVs capable of 5,000 nits under specific settings -- a figure that would have seemed absurd not long ago when manufacturers struggled to reach 2,000 nits. LG introduced Primary RGB Tandem OLED technology, moving from a three-stack panel design to a four-stack red-blue-green-blue configuration that the company claims can achieve 4,000 nits. The technology appears in the LG G5, Panasonic Z95B and Philips OLED950 and OLED910. RGB mini-LED also emerged as a new category. The technology uses individual small red, green and blue LED backlights instead of white or blue LEDs paired with quantum dots. Hisense demonstrated it at CES 2025, TCL announced its Q10M for China, and Samsung unveiled its own version called micro-RGB. These sets range from $12,000 to $30,000. Sony has confirmed it will debut RGB TV technology in spring 2026. HDR content is currently mastered at a maximum of 4,000 nits. The situation echoes the audio industry's loudness war, The Verge points out, which peaked with Metallica's heavily compressed Death Magnetic in 2008.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Uber is Hiring More Engineers Because AI is Making Them More Valuable, CEO Says
Uber is hiring more engineers rather than fewer because AI tools have made them "superhumans," CEO Dara Khosrowshahi said, pushing back against the industry trend of using productivity gains to justify headcount cuts. Speaking on the "On with Kara Swisher" podcast, Khosrowshahi noted that other tech executives see AI making engineers 20% to 30% more productive and conclude they need 20% to 30% fewer engineers. His view: every engineer has become more valuable. Between 80% and 90% of Uber's developers now use AI tools, according to Khosrowshahi. The company no longer keeps scores of engineers on call to diagnose issues because AI agents are constantly monitoring systems, he said. The latest AI models are producing "hundreds of millions of dollars of benefit" for Uber, he said, describing the company as an "applied AI" business that harnesses the technology for pricing, payments, matching, routing, identification and customer complaints.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- 'How Lina Khan Killed iRobot'
iRobot, the Bedford, Massachusetts-based company that brought the Roomba vacuum cleaner into American homes over its 35-year history, filed for bankruptcy on Sunday and will be acquired by Picea, its Chinese contract manufacturer that also produces competing household devices. The Wall Street Journal's editorial board placed blame for the company's demise on the Federal Trade Commission under Chair Lina Khan, which opposed Amazon's $1.7 billion bid to acquire iRobot. That deal collapsed in January 2024 amid regulatory pressure from both the FTC and European antitrust authorities. Senator Elizabeth Warren and other progressives had urged Khan to block the acquisition, arguing in a September 2022 letter that Amazon is "'almost universally recognized' as the leader in warehouse and fulfillment robotics space" and that the deal "would open up a new market to Amazon's abuses." After the deal fell through, iRobot cut 31% of its workforce and moved "non-core engineering functions to lower-cost regions." The company had shifted production to Vietnam to reduce its exposure to China but was hit by tariffs under Trump's Liberation Day trade measures -- initially 46%, later reduced to 20%. iRobot said the trade uncertainty made it difficult to operate.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- ACM To Make Its Entire Digital Library Open Access Starting January 2026
The Association for Computing Machinery, the world's largest society of computing professionals, announced that all publications and related artifacts in the ACM Digital Library will become freely available to everyone starting January 2026. Authors will retain full copyright to their published work under the new arrangement, and ACM has committed to defending those works against copyright and integrity-related violations. The transition follows what ACM described as extensive dialogue with authors, Special Interest Group leaders, editorial boards, libraries, and research institutions globally. Students, educators, and researchers at institutions of all sizes -- from well-resourced universities to emerging research communities -- will gain unrestricted access to the full catalog of ACM-published work. The Digital Library houses decades of computing research across journals, magazines, conference proceedings, and books.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Food Becoming More Calorific But Less Nutritious Due To Rising Carbon Dioxide
More carbon dioxide in the environment is making food more calorific but less nutritious -- and also potentially more toxic, a study has found. From a report: Sterre ter Haar, a lecturer at Leiden University in the Netherlands, and other researchers at the institution created a method to compare multiple studies on plants' responses to increased CO2 levels. The results, she said, were a shock: although crop yields increase, they become less nutrient-dense. While zinc levels in particular drop, lead levels increase. "Seeing how dramatic some of the nutritional changes were, and how this differed across plants, was a big surprise," she told the Guardian. "We aren't seeing a simple dilution effect but rather a complete shift in the composition of our foods... This also raises the question of whether we should adjust our diets in some way, or how we grow or produce our food." While scientists have been looking at the effects of more CO2 in the atmosphere on plants for a decade, their work has been difficult to compare. The new research established a baseline measurement derived from the observation that the gas appears to have a linear effect on growth, meaning that if the CO2 level doubles, so does the effect on nutrients. This made it possible to compare almost 60,000 measurements across 32 nutrients and 43 crops, including rice, potatoes, tomatoes and wheat.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
- Apple Becomes a Debt Collector With Its New Developer Agreement
Apple released an updated developer license agreement this week that gives the company permission to recoup unpaid funds, such as commissions or any other fees, by deducting them from in-app purchases it processes on developers' behalf, among other methods. From a report: The change will impact developers in regions where local law allows them to link to external payment systems. In these cases, developers must report those payments back to Apple to pay the required commissions or fees. The changed agreement seemingly gives Apple a way to collect what it believes is the correct fee if the company determines a developer has underreported their earnings. [...] In its new developer agreement, Apple states it will "offset or recoup" what it believes it is owed, including "any amounts collected by Apple on your behalf from end-users." This means Apple could recoup funds from developers' in-app purchases -- like those for digital goods, services, and subscriptions -- or from one-time fees for paid applications.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
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- ATM jackpotting gang accused of unleashing Ploutus malware across US
Latest charges join the mountain of indictments facing alleged Tren de Aragua members
A Venezuelan gang described by US officials as "a ruthless terrorist organization" faces charges over alleged deployment of malware on ATMs across the country, illegally siphoning millions of dollars.…
- Sydney Uni data goes walkabout after criminals raid code repo
Attackers helped themselves to historical personal info on 27K people
The University of Sydney is ringing around thousands of current and former staff and students after admitting attackers helped themselves to historical personal data stashed inside one of its online code repositories.…
- NS&I tech overhaul blows past Treasury spending limits
UK state-owned bank admits revised plan runs beyond contract end with Atos
Already £1.4 billion over budget and four years late, a tech transformation project at a UK state-owned bank is outside HM Treasury spending limits and timetable under a revised plan from systems integrator Capgemini.…
- pearOS is a Linux that falls rather close to the Apple tree
Revived distro returns on Arch with KDE Plasma, global menus, and a familiar macOS-style sheen
The new pearOS distro is a Romanian project that picks up the concepts behind the original Pear Linux from 2011 and updates them. It's not going to turn the distro world upside down, but it's fun, interesting, and a showcase for the versatility and customizability of the Linux desktop.…
- HPE tells customers to patch fast as OneView RCE bug scores a perfect 10
Maximum-severity vuln lets unauthenticated attackers execute code on trusted infra management platform
Hewlett Packard Enterprise has told customers to drop whatever they're doing and patch OneView after admitting a maximum-severity bug could let attackers run code on the management platform without so much as a login prompt.…
- UK prepares to wave goodbye to 3G telecoms as tri-hard tech retires
Virgin Media the last to go as users of older mobiles warned to upgrade
Britain is set to become a post-3G nation as Virgin Media O2 (VMO2) prepares to be the last of the country's mobile networks to switch off its 3G service, although it may linger for a while at a few sites.…
- Airbus to migrate critical apps to a sovereign Euro cloud
Tech exec admits not dead cert it'll find the right solution
Exclusive Airbus is preparing to tender a major contract to migrate mission-critical workloads to a digitally sovereign European cloud – but estimates only an 80/20 chance of finding a suitable provider.…
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