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Flagship phone scores 5/10 from iFixit as the parts that break most often remain firmly out of reach

Samsung's Galaxy S26 Ultra has once again scored a middling 5/10 from iFixit, suggesting that while the company knows how to build a repairable phone, it still won't quite follow through.…

A handful thrive, most scrape by as companies make billions off their code

Opinion Time and again, I see people begging for companies with deep pockets to fund open source projects. I mean, after all, they've made billions from this code. You'd think they could support the code's creators and maintainers. It would be only fair, right?…

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Astronomers have an answer for a long-running mystery in astrophysics: why is the growth of supermassive black holes so much lower today than in the past? A study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other X-ray telescopes found that supermassive black holes are unable to consume material as rapidly as they did in the distant past. The results appeared in the December 2025 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. [...] The team ran tests of the three main possible scenarios currently being considered for the slowdown of black hole growth. These options were: could the decline in black hole growth be caused by less efficient rates of consumption, or by smaller typical black hole masses, or by fewer actively growing black holes? Their analysis of the data, extending over billions of years of cosmic history, led them to the conclusion that black holes are indeed consuming material less rapidly the later they are found after the Big Bang. The researchers expect this trend of slower-growing black holes to continue into the future.

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BASIC and bit-banging used to guide a simulated lander down to a virtual lunar touchdown

Could Sinclair's 48k Sinclair ZX Spectrum land a spacecraft on the Moon? YouTuber Scott Manley decided to find out, and the answer is… kind of.…

AI and quantum on to-do list for Chief Digital Technology Officer in charge of £140.7M budget. Fancy it?

The UK's Ministry of Defence is looking for a new Chief Digital Technology Officer (CDTO) to take responsibility for a budget of £140.7 million ($188 million) and 400 staff.…

Omnissa telemetry suggests business buyers are loving Apple and Google

End-user compute vendor Omnissa, the company formed by the spin-out of VMware’s virtual desktops, applications, and device management biz, has dug into the telemetry it collects from customers and painted a picture of the world’s enterprise hardware fleet – and the news is better for Google and Apple than it is for Microsoft.…

NASA is reportedly halting work on the lunar Gateway in favor of a more direct push to build a lunar base. The new plan would cost tens of billions over the next decade, though the change could face hurdles because Congress previously funded Gateway specifically. SpaceNews reports: "Starting today, we're building humanity's first deep space outpost," said Carlos Garcia-Galan, program executive for NASA's moon base effort. The lunar base will take place in three phases. Phase 1, running from 2026 to 2028, "is all about getting to the moon reliably," he said. That includes a significant increase in the cadence of lander missions through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services and other programs. It will also focus on developing enabling technologies and getting "ground truth" for potential base locations at the lunar south pole. Phase 2, from 2029 through 2031, starts building the base, he said. That would include building out communications, navigation, power and other infrastructure, developing larges CLPS cargo landers and supporting two crewed missions a year. Phase 3, beginning 2032, will enable "long distance and long duration human exploration" on the moon, he said, with routine logistics missions to the moon and uncrewed cargo return missions from the moon. Garcia-Galan said NASA foresees spending $10 billion each on Phases 1 and 2. Phase 3, lasting to at least 2036, would cost an additional $10 billion or more. The base would leverage existing programs, although with some changes. NASA is planning to revamp the Lunar Terrain Vehicle program after concluding the current approach would take too long to get a crew-capable rover to the moon. "We were projecting a delivery on the lunar surface by 2030," he said. The agency is instead issuing a draft request for proposals for simplified rovers that could be quicker and easier to develop but could be upgraded later. The base, though, would include some new capabilities and technologies. One example Garcia-Galan provided was MoonFall, a drone that would be able to hop from one location to another on the lunar surface. The drones will be "built on the legacy" of Ingenuity, the small Mars helicopter. "We're going to take everything that we learned from Ingenuity's systems, the avionics, all of that, to build this."

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Apple Business combines corporate device management offerings and a way to buy ads

Apple has simplified its business services by combining and rebranding them, and is giving away the reformulated enterprise offering for free.…

Claims its set performance records but looks to be years behind western fare

Alibaba has revealed a new server chip that it says is the most powerful processor ever to use the RISC-V instruction set.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Hong Kong police can now demand phone or computer passwords from those who are suspected of breaching the wide-ranging National Security Law (NSL). Those who refuse could face up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $12,700, and individuals who provide "false or misleading information" could face up to three years in jail. It comes as part of new amendments to a bylaw under the NSL that the government gazetted on Monday. The NSL was introduced in Hong Kong in 2020, in wake of massive pro-democracy protests the year before. Authorities say the laws, which target acts like terrorism and secession, are necessary for stability -- but critics say they are tools to quash dissent. The new amendments also give customs officials the power to seize items that they deem to "have seditious intention." Monday's amendments ensure that "activities endangering national security can be effectively prevented, suppressed and punished, and at the same time the lawful rights and interests of individuals and organizations are adequately protected," Hong Kong authorities said on Monday. Changes to the bylaw was announced by the city's leader, John Lee, bypassing the city's legislative council. The NSL also allows for some trials to be heard behind closed doors.

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'HP IQ' can chat, share files, and record and summarize meetings

You’ve heard the call of Apple Intelligence, jumped for joy over Google Gemini, and cuddled up with Microsoft Copilot. Now, get ready for HP IQ, a local AI and collaboration application HP Inc. hopes will make its business laptops stand apart.…

Breaking free of its IP licensing shackles

Arm CEO Rene Haas took an ice-cold sip of the AI Kool-Aid during a keynote speech at the company’s annual conference on Tuesday, teasing a future product that he thinks will pump the British chip designer's total addressable market (TAM) to $1 trillion by the end of the decade.…

Linux gamers are seeing massive performance gains with Wine's new NTSYNC support, "which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming," reports XDA Developers. Not every game will see a night-and-day difference, but for the games that do benefit from these changes, "the improvements range from noticeable to absurd." Combined with improvements to Wayland, graphics, and compatibility, as well as a major WoW64 architecture overhaul, the release looks less like an incremental update and more like one of Wine's most important upgrades in years. From the report: The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too. Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games. The games that benefit most from NTSYNC are the ones that were struggling before, such as titles with heavy multi-threaded workloads where the synchronization overhead was a genuine bottleneck. For those games, the difference is night and day. And unlike fsync, NTSYNC is in the mainline kernel, meaning you don't need any custom patches or out-of-tree modules for it work. Any distro shipping kernel 6.14 or later, which at this point includes Fedora 42, Ubuntu 25.04, and more recent releases, will support it. Valve has already added the NTSYNC kernel driver to SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, loading the module by default, and an unofficial Proton fork, Proton GE, already has it enabled. When Valve's official Proton rebases on Wine 11, every Steam Deck owner gets this for free. All of this is what makes NTSYNC such a big deal, as it's not simply a run-of-the-mill performance patch. Instead, it's something much bigger: this is the first time Wine's synchronization has been correct at the kernel level, implemented in the mainline Linux kernel, and available to everyone without jumping through hoops.

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Google is expanding Android Automotive from the infotainment screen into the broader non-safety "brain" of software-defined vehicles. With its new Android Automotive OS for Software-Defined Vehicles, the in-car experience will feel "much more cohesive and the latest features will reach your driveway faster," Matt Crowley, Android Automotive's group product manager, writes in a blog post. "From a truly integrated voice experience to proactive maintenance reminders, your car will become a true extension of your digital life," Crowley adds. The Verge reports: With its new software, Google is promising faster over-the-air software updates, better voice assistants, and more proactive vehicle maintenance alerts. Non-driving functions like climate control, lighting, and seating adjustment would fall under Android's control. And the system would move beyond basic infotainment to create a unified ecosystem for features like remote cabin conditioning, digital key management, and personalized driver profiles. For automakers, the new system promises less expensive software development costs and an opportunity to focus on what matters most to them: branding. By providing the "foundational code and a common language for their software," Google says automakers will be free to design cool experiences for their customers. Google says its already working with companies like Renault Group and Qualcomm to bring its new software-defined vehicle version of Android Automotive to more cars. A variety of automakers already use regular Android Automotive, like Volvo, Polestar, General Motors, Nissan, and Honda.

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Cyber rights org retools for the days of AI and unrestrained government

interview The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) on Tuesday appointed Nicole Ozer to succeed Cindy Cohn as the cyber rights group's executive director when Cohn departs this summer.…

OpenAI is shutting down Sora, its generative-AI video creation platform it launched in December 2024. "The move is one of a number of steps OpenAI is taking to refocus on business and coding functions ahead of a potential initial public offering as soon as the fourth quarter of this year," reports the Wall Street Journal. CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday. "We're saying goodbye to Sora," the Sora Team said in a post on X. "To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing. We'll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work." Last week, OpenAI announced plans to combine its Atlas web browser, ChatGPT app, and Codex coding app into a singular desktop "superapp." "We realized we were spreading our efforts across too many apps and stacks, and that we need to simplify our efforts," said CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo. "That fragmentation has been slowing us down and making it harder to hit the quality bar we want." This could behind the decision to kill Sora as the company redirects its resources and top talent towards productivity tools that benefit both enterprises and individual users.

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Crims 'creating a snowball effect' across open source projects

RSAC 2026 Thousands of organizations' cloud environments have been infected with secret-stealing malware as a result of the Trivy supply-chain attack last week, and now the crims that compromised the open source scanners are working with notorious extortion crews like Lapsus$.…

They still look goofy, but at least you might be able to use 'em like a stylus

An undergraduate chemistry researcher has developed a nail polish formulation that will let people use their nails to tap away on touch screens.…

Arm unveiled its first self-developed data center chip, the AGI CPU, designed for handling agentic AI workloads. The new chip was built in partnership with Meta and manufactured by TSMC. Other customers for the new chip include OpenAI, Cloudflare, SAP, and SK Telecom. Reuters reports: The new chip, called the AGI CPU, will address data-crunching needed for a specific type of AI that is able to act on behalf of users with minimal oversight, instead of responding to queries as part of a chatbot. For years, Arm, majority-owned by Japan's SoftBank Group has relied only on intellectual property for revenue, licensing its designs to companies such as Qualcomm and Nvidia and then collecting a royalty payment based on the number of units sold. "It's a very pivotal moment for the company," CEO Rene Haas said in an interview with Reuters. The new chip will be overseen by Mohamed Awad, head of the company's cloud AI business, and Arm has additional designs in the works that it plans to release at 12- to 18-month intervals. TSMC is fabricating the device on its 3-nanometer technology and is made from two distinct pieces of silicon that operate as a single chip. Arm plans to put it into volume production in the second half of this year but has received test chips that function as expected. In addition to the chip itself, Arm is working with server makers such as Lenovo and Quanta Computer to offer complete systems.

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Python interface for LLMs infected with malware via polluted CI/CD pipeline

Two versions of LiteLLM, an open source interface for accessing multiple large language models, have been removed from the Python Package Index (PyPI) following a supply chain attack that injected them with malicious credential-stealing code.…