Linux fréttir

A new study challenges previous research about which sleep stages help people achieve breakthrough moments in problem-solving. Researchers found that N2 sleep, a deeper stage of non-REM sleep, significantly increased participants' likelihood of experiencing sudden insights during a perceptual task. The preregistered study involved 90 participants who performed a visual pattern recognition task before and after a 20-minute daytime nap while researchers monitored their brain activity with EEG. Participants who reached N2 sleep showed an 85.7% rate of achieving insights about a hidden strategy in the task, compared to 63.6% for those who only reached N1 sleep (the first stage of non-rapid eye movement sleep) and 55.5% for participants who remained awake. The findings contradict earlier work by Lacaux and colleagues, which suggested that lighter N1 sleep promoted insight while deeper sleep hindered it. News coverage: Stuck on a problem? Take a nap!

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Eight nations have surpassed 50% IPv6 deployment since June 2024, bringing the total number of countries in the majority IPv6 club to 21, according to the Internet Society. Brazil, Guatemala, Hungary, Japan, Mexico, Puerto Rico, Sri Lanka, and Tuvalu all crossed the threshold over the past year. Tuvalu's adoption coincided with the arrival of Elon Musk's Starlink satellite broadband service, which operates as IPv6-only. The Internet Society's Pulse platform found no IPv6 deployment in the Pacific nation in June 2024, but Starlink now holds 88% market share there and 59% of Tuvalu's internet connections use IPv6. France moved from third place to tie with India for the global lead at 73% IPv6 deployment. Japan rebounded from 49% to 55%, returning to the 50% club after dropping below the mark in mid-2024. Puerto Rico climbed from 49% to 53%. Thailand appears positioned to join next at 49% deployment, followed by Estonia at 46% and the United Kingdom at 45%.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

When it was all about the baud rate

The world of datacenter networking is crammed with exotic technology and capabilities beyond the imaginings of administrators charged with running big iron decades ago. However, while it might have been a slower and more proprietary time, it was also perhaps a little simpler.…

36% of all Chinese undergraduate entrants -- about 1.6 million people -- selected engineering degrees in 2022 (the latest year for which data are available), up from 32% in 2010, according to data from China's Ministry of Education. In Britain and America, which have far fewer students to start with, the proportion hovers around 5%. The surge comes as China's government directs universities to focus on strategic industries and technological bottlenecks. Over 600 Chinese universities now offer undergraduate programs in artificial intelligence, a field the Communist Party vows to dominate by 2030. In 2023, officials started telling universities to overhaul their degree programs, and the education ministry announced an "emergency mechanism" to create degrees more quickly to meet "national priorities." Over half of China's young people now complete some form of higher education through 3,000-odd institutions. Youth unemployment reached 14.9% in May, driving students toward technical fields they believe offer better job prospects.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Finance, health, and national identification details compromised

Multinational grocery and retail megacorp Ahold Delhaize says upwards of 2.2 million people had their data compromised during its November cyberattack with personal, financial and health details among the trove.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from SecurityWeek: Hundreds of printer models from Brother and other vendors are impacted by potentially serious vulnerabilities discovered by researchers at Rapid7. The cybersecurity firm revealed on Wednesday that its researchers identified eight vulnerabilities affecting multifunction printers made by Brother. The security holes have been found to impact 689 printer, scanner and label maker models from Brother, and some or all of the flaws also affect 46 Fujifilm Business Innovation, five Ricoh, six Konica Minolta, and two Toshiba printers. Overall, millions of enterprise and home printers are believed to be exposed to hacker attacks due to these vulnerabilities. The most serious of the flaws, tracked as CVE-2024-51978 and with a severity rating of 'critical', can allow a remote and unauthenticated attacker to bypass authentication by obtaining the device's default administrator password. CVE-2024-51978 can be chained with an information disclosure vulnerability tracked as CVE-2024-51977, which can be exploited to obtain a device's serial number. This serial number is needed to generate the default admin password. "This is due to the discovery of the default password generation procedure used by Brother devices," Rapid7 explained. "This procedure transforms a serial number into a default password. Affected devices have their default password set, based on each device's unique serial number, during the manufacturing process." Having the admin password enables an attacker to reconfigure the device or abuse functionality intended for authenticated users. The remaining vulnerabilities, which have severity ratings of 'medium' and 'high', can be exploited for DoS attacks, forcing the printer to open a TCP connection, obtain the password of a configured external service, trigger a stack overflow, and perform arbitrary HTTP requests. Six of the eight vulnerabilities found by Rapid7 can be exploited without authentication. Brother has patched most of the flaws, but CVE-2024-51978 requires a new manufacturing process to fully resolve, which will apply only to future devices.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Or so hear members of Parliament in the UK

UK lawmakers have learned there is no international protocol for making decisions over how to respond to a prospective life-threatening asteroid strike on Earth.…

Masked networking costs are coming to AI systems

Analysis Moore's Law has run out of gas and AI workloads need massive amounts of parallel compute and high bandwidth memory right next to it – both of which have become terribly expensive. If it weren't for this situation, the beancounters of the world might be complaining about the cost of networking in the datacenter.…

True digital sovereignty begins at the desktop

Opinion Microsoft, tactically admitting it has failed at talking all the Windows 10 PC users into moving to Windows 11 after all, is – sort of, kind of – extending Windows 10 support for another year.…

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.Org: A new study from the University of Bath's School of Management has found that individuals with a higher IQ make more realistic predictions, which supports better decision-making and can lead to improved life outcomes. The research, published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, shows that people with a low IQ (the lowest 2.5% of the population) make forecasting errors that are more than twice as inaccurate as those made by people with a high IQ (the top 2.5% of the population). The research used data from a nationally representative sample of people over 50 in England (English Longitudinal Study of Aging ELSA), assessing their ability to predict their own life expectancy. Individuals were asked to predict their probability of living to certain ages, and these estimates were compared with the probabilities taken from Office for National Statistics life tables (a demographic tool used to analyze death rates and calculate life expectancies at various ages). The study controlled for differences in lifestyle, health, and genetic longevity. By analyzing participants' scores on a variety of cognitive tests, as well as genetic markers linked to intelligence and educational success, Chris Dawson, Professor of Economics and Behavioral Science at the University of Bath, showed that smarter individuals tend to have more accurate beliefs about uncertain future events - they are more skilled at assessing probability. Individuals with a higher IQ are significantly better at forecasting, making fewer errors (both positive and negative) and showing more consistent judgment compared to those with a lower IQ.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pick a provider based on how good their local 4G and 5G coverage is

The UK's telecoms regulator has released an overhauled tool comparing mobile coverage and performance across the country, claiming this will help the millions of Brits missing out on the best local network.…

When police come to investigate tech support, make sure you have your story straight

On Call Welcome once again to On Call, The Register's Friday column that celebrates the frolicsome fun that readers have experienced when asked to deliver tech support.…

The UK government has rejected the 25 billion ($34.39 billion) pound Morocco-UK Power Project, citing a preference for domestic renewable initiatives that offer greater economic and strategic benefits. The project aimed to supply solar and wind energy from the Sahara to power up to seven million UK homes. Reuters reports: "The government has concluded that it is not in the UK national interest at this time to continue further consideration of support for the Morocco-UK Power Project," energy department minister Michael Shanks said in a written statement to parliament. He also said the project did not clearly align strategically with the government's mission to build homegrown power in the UK. Xlinks' Morocco-UK power project would have tapped Moroccan renewable energy via what would have been the world's longest subsea power cable. The plan involved building 3,800 kilometers (2,361 miles) of high-voltage direct current subsea cables from Morocco to southwest England. The company had been seeking a guaranteed minimum price for the electricity supplied, known as contract for difference, from Britain's government.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

But like cloud computing and digital transformation, this may be a buzzword they can't ignore forever

HPE Discover 2025 HPE envisions a future where customer systems are filled with its agentic AI products, but reactions from the HPE Discover show floor in Las Vegas this week suggest the company has a way to go to convince folks to buy in.…

Brazil debuts, Japan bounces back, and tiny Tuvalu soars on Elon's broadband birds

Eight more nations have passed at least 50 percent IPv6 deployment, according to the Internet Society (ISOC).…

The six largest UK accounting firms do not formally monitor how automated tools and AI impact the quality of their audits, the regulator has found, even as the technology becomes embedded across the sector. From a report: The Financial Reporting Council on Thursday published its first AI guide alongside a review of the way firms were using automated tools and technology, which found "no formal monitoring performed by the firms to quantify the audit quality impact of using" them. The watchdog found that audit teams in the Big Four firms -- Deloitte, EY, KPMG and PwC -- as well as BDO and Forvis Mazars were increasingly using this technology to perform risk assessments and obtain evidence. But it said that the firms primarily monitored the tools to understand how many teams were using them for audits, "typically for licensing purposes," rather than to assess their impact on audit quality.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Regulator acknowledges that won’t stop video nasties, but welcomes extra ‘friction’

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Neuroscience News Science Magazine: Surgeons have performed the first fully robotic heart transplant in the U.S., using advanced robotic tools to avoid opening the chest. [...] Using a surgical robot, lead surgeon Dr. Kenneth Liao and his team made small, precise incisions, eliminating the need to open the chest and break the breast bone. Liao removed the diseased heart, and the new heart was implanted through preperitoneal space, avoiding chest incision. "Opening the chest and spreading the breastbone can affect wound healing and delay rehabilitation and prolong the patient's recovery, especially in heart transplant patients who take immunosuppressants," said Liao, professor and chief of cardiothoracic transplantation and circulatory support at Baylor College of Medicine and chief of cardiothoracic transplantation and mechanical circulatory support at Baylor St. Luke's Medical Center. "With the robotic approach, we preserve the integrity of the chest wall, which reduces the risk of infection and helps with early mobility, respiratory function and overall recovery." In addition to less surgical trauma, the clinical benefits of robotic heart transplant surgery include avoiding excessive bleeding from cutting the bone and reducing the need for blood transfusions, which minimizes the risk of developing antibodies against the transplanted heart. Before the transplant surgery, the 45-year-old patient had been hospitalized with advanced heart failure since November 2024 and required multiple mechanical devices to support his heart function. He received a heart transplant in early March 2025 and after heart transplant surgery, he spent a month in the hospital before being discharged home, without complications.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Authors are having a hard time protecting their works from the maws of the LLM makers

Californian courts have not been kind to authors this week, with a second ruling going against an unlucky 13 who sought redress for use of their content in training AI models.…

Apple's Swift programming language is expanding official support to Android through a new "Android Working Group" which will improve compatibility, integration, and tooling. "As it stands today, Android apps are generally coded in Kotlin, but Apple is looking to provide its Swift coding language as an alternative," notes 9to5Google. "Apple first launched its coding language back in 2014 with its own platforms in mind, but currently also supports Windows and Linux officially." From the report: A few of the key pillars the Working Group will look to accomplish include: - Improve and maintain Android support for the official Swift distribution, eliminating the need for out-of-tree or downstream patches - Recommend enhancements to core Swift packages such as Foundation and Dispatch to work better with Android idioms - Work with the Platform Steering Group to officially define platform support levels generally, and then work towards achieving official support of a particular level for Android - Determine the range of supported Android API levels and architectures for Swift integration - Develop continuous integration for the Swift project that includes Android testing in pull request checks. - Identify and recommend best practices for bridging between Swift and Android's Java SDK and packaging Swift libraries with Android apps - Develop support for debugging Swift applications on Android - Advise and assist with adding support for Android to various community Swift packages

Read more of this story at Slashdot.