Linux fréttir

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: In 2023, the Swedish government announced that the country's schools would be going back to basics, emphasizing skills such as reading and writing, particularly in early grades. After mostly being sidelined, physical books are now being reintroduced into classrooms, and students are learning to write the old-fashioned way: by hand, with a pencil or pen, on sheets of paper. The Swedish government also plans to make schools cellphone-free throughout the country. Educational authorities have been investing heavily. Last year alone, the education ministry allocated $83 million to purchase textbooks and teachers' guides. In a country with about 11 million people, the aim is for every student to have a physical textbook for each subject. The government also put $54 million towards the purchase of fiction and non-fiction books for students. These moves represent a dramatic pivot from previous decades, during which Sweden -- and many other nations -- moved away from physical books in favor of tablets and digital resources in an effort to prepare students for life in an online world. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Nordic country's efforts have sparked a debate on the role of digital technology in education, one that extends well beyond the country's borders. US parents in districts that have adopted digital technology to a great extent may be wondering if educators will reverse course, too. As for why Sweden is pivoting away from digital devices, researcher Linda Falth said the move was driven by several factors, including concerns over whether the digitization of classrooms had been evidence-based. "There was also a broader cultural reassessment," Falth said. "Sweden had positioned itself as a frontrunner in digital education, but over time concerns emerged about screen time, distraction, reduced deep reading, and the erosion of foundational skills such as sustained attention and handwriting." Falth noted that proponents of reform believe that "basic skills -- especially reading, writing, and numeracy -- must be firmly established first, and that physical textbooks are often better suited for that purpose." Further reading: Digital Platforms Correlate With Cognitive Decline in Young Users

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darwinmac writes: OnlyOffice has suspended its partnership with Nextcloud after the latter forked its editors into a new project called Euro-Office, according to a report from Neowin. The move comes just days after Nextcloud and partners like IONOS announced the fork as part of a broader push for European digital sovereignty. In a statement, the company accused the project of violating its licensing terms and international intellectual property law, claiming that Euro-Office uses its technology without proper compliance. OnlyOffice also pointed to missing attribution requirements and branding obligations tied to its AGPL-based licensing model. As a result, its 8-year-old partnership, which allowed Nextcloud users to edit and collaborate on office documents right inside their own instance, has been suspended. OnlyOffice also accused Nextcloud of not behaving in a manner expected of a partner, alleging attempts to poach its employees and influence customers against the company. Nextcloud said it forked the OnlyOffice repository instead of collaborating with the company because the project is notoriously difficult to contribute to. It also pointed out that OnlyOffice is a Russian company with Russian employees who leave code comments in Russian. In addition to that, some users may feel uncomfortable using software that could be linked to the Russian government.

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Second-hand ship, seawater cooling, with operations eyed for 2027

Japan is getting more serious about floating datacenters, as Mitsui OSK Lines (MOL) has agreed to a deal with Hitachi to develop one with operations targeted for 2027 or later.…

Anthropic is using copyright takedown notices to try to contain an accidental leak of the underlying instructions for its Claude Code AI agent. According to the Wall Street Journal, "Anthropic representatives had used a copyright takedown request to force the removal of more than 8,000 copies and adaptations of the raw Claude Code instructions ... that developers had shared on programming platform GitHub." From the report: Programmers combing through the source code so far have marveled on social media at some of Anthropic's tricks for getting its Claude AI models to operate as Claude Code. One feature asks the models to go back periodically through tasks and consolidate their memories -- a process it calls dreaming. Another appears to instruct Claude Code in some cases to go "undercover" and not reveal that it is an AI when publishing code to platforms like GitHub. Others found tags in the code that appeared pointed at future product releases. The code even included a Tamagotchi-style pet called "Buddy" that users could interact with. After Anthropic requested that GitHub remove copies of its proprietary code, another programmer used other AI tools to rewrite the Claude Code functionality in other programming languages. Writing on GitHub, the programmer said the effort was aimed at keeping the information available without risking a takedown. That new version has itself become popular on the programming platform.

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Cool, but fossil-fuel additions and AI-era power demand still muddy the climate math

It was a strong year for renewable power expansion in 2025, with solar installations helping push renewables to nearly half of global electricity capacity, but that does not mean the world is yet on pace to meet its renewable energy commitments.…

War, oil shocks, and market nerves could yet knock the AI boom off course

Opinion OpenAI has secured an additional $122 billion in capital from a diverse group of investors and reached a nominal $852 billion valuation, the highest of any pre-IPO tech company.…

Mitchell H. Katz, MD, president and CEO of NYC Health + Hospitals, said hospitals could already replace many radiologists with AI for some imaging tasks -- if regulators allowed it. He argued the technology presents an opportunity to simultaneously cut costs and expand access. Radiology Business reports: Katz -- who has led the 11-hospital organization since 2018 -- said he sees great potential for AI to increase access to breast cancer screening. Hospitals could potentially produce "major savings" by letting the technology handle first reads, with radiologists then double-checking any abnormal screenings. Fellow panelist David Lubarsky, MD, MBA, president and CEO of the Westchester Medical Center Health Network, said his system is already seeing great success in deploying such technology. The AI Westchester uses misses very few breast cancers and is "actually better than human beings," he told the audience. "For women who aren't considered high risk, if the test comes back negative, it's wrong only about 3 times out of 10,000," Lubarsky said. Katz asked fellow hospital CEOs if there is any reason why they shouldn't be pushing for changes to New York state regulations, allowing AI to read images "without a radiologist," Crain's reported. In this scenario, rads could then provide second opinions, if AI flags any images as abnormal. Sandra Scott, MD, CEO of the One Brooklyn Health, a small hospital facing tight margins, agreed with this line of thinking, according to Crain's. "I mean, I'm in charge of a safety-net institution. It would be a game-changer," Scott said about AI being used to replace rads.

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Board-backed account of maintainer ouster is unlikely to settle row over governance, control, and trust

Ruby Central, a nonprofit that supports the Ruby programming language ecosystem, just published an incident report regarding what it calls the September 2025 RubyGems fracture, when ownership of the GitHub code repository behind the RubyGems package manager was wrested from existing maintainers.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: An unknown technical problem caused a number of robotaxis owned by the Chinese tech giant Baidu to freeze on Tuesday in the middle of traffic, trapping some passengers in the vehicles for more than an hour. In Wuhan, a city in central China where Baidu has deployed hundreds of its Apollo Go self-driving taxis, people on Chinese social media reported witnessing the cars suddenly malfunction and stop operating. Photos and videos shared online show the Baidu cars halted on busy highways, often in the fast lane. [...] Local police in Wuhan issued a statement around midnight in China that said the situation was "likely caused by a system malfunction," but the incident is still under investigation. No one was injured, and all passengers have exited the vehicles, the police added. It's unclear how many of Baidu's robotaxis may have been impacted. [...] There were at least two other collisions on the same day, according to photos and videos posted on Chinese social media. A RedNote user in Wuhan confirmed to WIRED that she drove past a white minivan that had gotten into a rear-end collision with a parked robotaxi. The back of the Baidu car was badly damaged, but the two people standing beside the scene looked unharmed, she says. She added that she estimates she also saw at least a dozen more parked robotaxies.

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We could tell you no for free

The UK government will spend about £630,000 running a discussion panel on its digital identity card plans, which minister James Frith said will "consider different perspectives and debate trade-offs" alongside a formal consultation.…

Paris makes sovereignty play as it becomes sole shareholder

The French government has finally closed a deal to purchase the Advanced Computing assets of tech giant Atos, leading to the re-emergence of an old industry name: Bull.…

Flights to resume in 2026 before space tourism biz runs out of cash

Virgin Galactic has reopened suborbital ticket sales with a price rise and a promise for commercial spaceflight operations in Q4 2026.…

Poll finds 15% happy to take orders from a bot even as most question its output and fear job losses

Around 15 percent of Americans would be willing to work for an AI boss, according to a new poll that suggests while robots are not exactly welcome in the corner office, the idea no longer seems quite so far-fetched.…

MIT Technology Review discovered that startup R3 Bio has pitched an ethically and scientifically explosive long-term vision beyond its public work on non-sentient monkey "organ sacks": creating human "brainless clones" or replacement bodies for organs as part of an extreme life-extension agenda. From the report: Imagine it like this: a baby version of yourself with only enough of a brain structure to be alive in case you ever need a new kidney or liver. Or, alternatively, he has speculated, you might one day get your brain placed into a younger clone. That could be a way to gain a second lifespan through a still hypothetical procedure known as a body transplant. The fuller context of R3's proposals, as well as activities of another stealth startup with related goals, have not previously been reported. They've been kept secret by a circle of extreme life-extension proponents who fear that their plans for immortality could be derailed by clickbait headlines and public backlash. And that's because the idea can sound like something straight from a creepy science fiction film. One person who heard R3's clone presentation, and spoke on the condition of anonymity, was left reeling by its implications and shaken by [R3 founder John Schloendorn's] enthusiastic delivery. The briefing, this person said, was like a "close encounter of the third kind" with "Dr. Strangelove." [...] MIT Technology Review found no evidence that R3 has cloned anyone, or even any animal bigger than a rodent. What we did find were documents, additional meeting agendas, and other sources outlining a technical road map for what R3 called "body replacement cloning" in a 2023 letter to supporters. That road map involved improvements to the cloning process and genetic wiring diagrams for how to create animals without complete brains. A main purpose of the fundraising, investors say, was to support efforts to try these techniques in monkeys from a base in the Caribbean. That offered a path to a nearer-term business plan for more ethical medical experiments and toxicology testing -- if the company could develop what it now calls monkey "organ sacks." However, this work would clearly inform any possible human version.

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Researchers say localized warming can extend well past site edges, raising concerns about community impact

Datacenters create heat islands that raise surrounding temperatures by several degrees at distances up to 10 km (over 6 miles), which could have an impact on surrounding communities.…

Hot DRAM! Who is going to drop nearly $400 on an underpowered Linux computer?

Raspberry Pi has introduced a 3 GB variant of the Pi 4 as soaring memory costs are passed on to customers.…

ESET says factory outages, lost revenue, and supply chain disruption are becoming routine

Nearly 80 percent of British manufacturers say they've been hit by a cyber incident in the past year, as new research suggests disruption on the factory floor is no longer an exception but business as usual.…

If you loved the data retention of Microsoft Recall, you'll be thrilled with Claude Code

Anthropic's Claude Code lacks the persistent kernel access of a rootkit. But an analysis of its code shows that the agent can exercise far more control over people's computers than even the most clear-eyed reader of contractual terms might suspect. It retains lots of your data and is even willing to hide its authorship from open-source projects that reject AI.…

A Starlink satellite broke apart in orbit after suffering an unexplained "anomaly," apparently due to an "internal energetic source" rather than a collision. "The incident appears to have created some debris, with fragments likely to fall to Earth over the next few weeks," reports Scientific American. From the report: The satellite lost communication at about 560 kilometers above Earth, Starlink said. While the statement from Starlink, which is a subsidiary of Musk's rocket company SpaceX, merely noted that investigations are ongoing, LeoLabs said its radar observations of the event indicated an "internal energetic source" as the likely cause rather than a collision. The incident underscores the potential hazards of the increasingly large numbers of satellites and other spacecraft in low-Earth orbit -- some 10,000 Starlinks are currently in orbit and counting. Starlink's statement said that "the event poses no new risk" to the International Space Station or to the upcoming launch of NASA's Artemis II mission, targeted for April 1.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Russia is going to further clamp down Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), which are used by millions of Russians to get around internet controls and censorship, Russia's digital minister said. In what has been cast by diplomats as Russia's "great crackdown," the authorities have repeatedly blocked mobile internet and jammed major messenger services while giving sweeping powers to cut off mass communications. "The task is reduce VPN usage," Digital Minister Maksut Shadayev said on state-backed messenger MAX late on Monday, adding that his ministry was trying to impose the limits with minimal impact on users. He said decisions had been taken to restrict access to a number of unidentified foreign platforms without giving details.

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