Linux fréttir

Time to stand on its own two webbed feet?

Microsoft has open-sourced the Windows Subsystem for Linux, years after the platform's debut.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Germany has dropped its long-held opposition to nuclear power, in the first concrete sign of rapprochement with France by Berlin's new government led by conservative Chancellor Friedrich Merz. Berlin has signalled to Paris it will no longer block French efforts to ensure nuclear power is treated on par with renewable energy in EU legislation, according to French and German officials. The move resolves a major dispute between the two countries that has delayed decisions on EU energy policy, including during the crisis that followed Russiaâ(TM)s full-scale invasion of Ukraine.

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Agent mode arrives, for better or worse

Build Microsoft's GitHub Copilot can now act as a coding agent, capable of implementing tasks or addressing posted issues within the code hosting site.…

Miami-Dade County Public Schools, the nation's third-largest school district, is now deploying Google's Gemini chatbots to more than 105,000 high school students -- marking the largest U.S. school district AI deployment to date. This represents a dramatic reversal from just two years ago when the district blocked such tools over cheating and misinformation concerns. The initiative follows President Trump's recent executive order promoting AI integration "in all subject areas" from kindergarten through 12th grade. District officials spent months testing various chatbots for accuracy, privacy, and safety before selecting Google's platform.

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Large-scale disinfo campaigns could use this in machines that adapt 'to individual targets.' Are we having fun yet?

Fresh research is indicating that in online debates, LLMs are much more effective than humans at using personal information about their opponents, with potentially alarming consequences for mass disinformation campaigns.…

New submitter optical_phiber writes: In March 2025, the New South Wales (NSW) Department of Education discovered that Microsoft Teams had begun collecting students' voice and facial biometric data without their prior knowledge. This occurred after Microsoft enabled a Teams feature called 'voice and face enrollment' by default, which creates biometric profiles to enhance meeting experiences and transcriptions via its CoPilot AI tool. The NSW department learned of the data collection a month after it began and promptly disabled the feature and deleted the data within 24 hours. However, the department did not disclose how many individuals were affected or whether they were notified. Despite Microsoft's policy of retaining data only while the user is enrolled and deleting it within 90 days of account deletion, privacy experts have raised serious concerns. Rys Farthing of Reset Tech Australia criticized the unnecessary collection of children's data, warning of the long-term risks and calling for stronger protections.

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Another distro for Windows users – presumably ones who love bling

LastOS is a tricked-out version of Linux Mint 22.1 with the Cinnamon desktop and some additional tools to make life easier for Windows folks.…

Abstract of a paper featured on NBER: This year marks the 40th anniversary of the NBER Macro Annual Conference, founded in 1986. This paper reviews the evolution of mainstream macroeconomics since then. It presents my views, informed by a survey of a number of researchers who have made important contributions to the field. I develop two main arguments. The first is that, starting from strikingly different positions, there has been substantial convergence, in terms of methodology, architecture, and main mechanisms. Methodology: Explicit micro foundations, explicit treatment of distortions, with, at the same time, an increased willingness to deviate from rational expectations, neoclassical utility and profit maximization. Architecture: The wide acceptance of nominal rigidities as an essential distortion, although with mixed feelings. Mechanisms: The wide nature of the shocks to both the demand and the supply side. The second is that this convergence has been, for the most part, good convergence, i.e. the creation of a generally accepted conceptual and analytical structure, a core to which additional distortions can be added, allowing for discussions and integration of new ideas and evidence, rather than fights about basic methodology. Not everything is right however, with too much emphasis on general equilibrium implications from the start, rather than, first, on partial equilibrium analysis of the phenomenon at hand.

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Researchers and TSMC to benefit from expanded infrastructure

Computex Against a backdrop of mounting tensions between the US and China, with Taiwan typically stuck in the middle, Nvidia is touting two AI supercomputers for the country.…

Veteran OS might be almost out of support, but there's still time for Microsoft to break it

As Microsoft's Build developer shindig begins, many users are once again facing a familiar problem: broken Windows.…

Cybercriminals lifted info including addresses, ID numbers, and financial records from agency systems

A "significant amount of personal data" belonging to legal aid applicants dating back to 2010 in the UK was stolen by cybercriminals, the Ministry of Justice (MoJ) confirmed today.…

"The Danish government plans to evaluate the prospect of beginning a nuclear power programme," reports the Telegraph, noting that this week Denmark lifted a nuclear power ban imposed 40 years ago. Unlike its neighbours in Sweden and Germany, Denmark has never had a civil nuclear power programme. It has only ever had three small research reactors, the last of which closed in 2001. Most of the renewed interest in nuclear seen around the world stems from the expected growth in electricity demand from AI data centres, but Denmark is different. The Danes are concerned about possible blackouts similar to the one that struck Iberia recently. Like Spain and Portugal, Denmark is heavily dependent on weather-based renewable energy which is not very compatible with the way power grids operate... ["The spinning turbines found in fossil-fuelled energy systems provide inertia and act as a shock absorber to stabilise the grid during sudden changes in supply or demand," explains a diagram in the article, while solar and wind energy provide no inertia.] The Danish government is worried about how it will continue to decarbonise its power grid if it closes all of its fossil fuel generators leaving minimal inertia. There are only three realistic routes to decarbonisation that maintain physical inertia on the grid: hydropower, geothermal energy and nuclear. Hydro and geothermal depend on geographic and geological features that not every country possesses. While renewable energy proponents argue that new types of inverters could provide synthetic inertia, trials have so far not been particularly successful and there are economic challenges that are difficult to resolve. Denmark is realising that in the absence of large-scale hydroelectric or geothermal energy, it may have little choice other than to re-visit nuclear power if it is to maintain a stable, low carbon electricity grid. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

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Highest recorded jump in skills gap for more than a decade, recruiter finds

The number of UK tech leaders reporting a dearth in AI skills has more than doubled in the last year, according to research.…

Enormous org has been hit by ransomware again and again, on multiple fronts, over the past year

Top cybersecurity officials within the UK government and the National Health Service (NHS) are asking CEOs of tech suppliers to pledge their allegiance to sound security by signing a public charter.…

CEO Cristiano Amon teases plans for high-speed-low-power inferencing products

Computex Qualcomm is preparing products for the datacenter.…

Yard of Eden just doesn't have the right ring to it

Who, Me? Translating one's life from the wonders of the weekend to the madness of a Monday is never easy, but The Register tries to ease the change by delivering a new installment of Who, Me? It's our reader-contributed column in which you admit to making messes and share your escape routes.…

"Despite many obstacles — and what you may read elsewhere — electric-vehicle sales continue to grow at a healthy pace in the U.S. market," Cox Automotive reported this week. "Roughly 7.5% of total new-vehicle sales in the first quarter were electric vehicles, an increase from 7% a year earlier." An anonymous reader shared this analysis from Autoweek: "Despite a cloud of uncertainty around future EV interest and potential economic headwinds hanging over the automotive industry, consumer demand for electric vehicles has remained stable," according to the J.D. Power 2025 US Electric Vehicle Consideration Study released yesterday. Specifically, the study showed that 24% of vehicle shoppers in the U.S. say they are "very likely" to consider purchasing an EV and 35% say they are "somewhat likely," both of which figures remain unchanged from a year ago... Globally the numbers are even more pro-EV. Electric car sales exceeded 17 million globally in 2024, reaching a sales share of more than 20%, according to a report issued this week by the International Energy Agency. "Just the additional 3.5 million electric cars sold in 2024 compared with the previous year is more than the total number of electric cars sold worldwide in 2020," the IEA said. China, which has mandated increases in EV sales, is the leader in getting electric vehicles on the road, with electric cars accounting for almost half of all Chinese car sales in 2024, the IEA said. "The over 11 million electric cars sold in China last year were more than global sales just 2 years earlier. As a result of continued strong growth, 1 in 10 cars on Chinese roads is now electric." Interesting figures on U.S. EV sales from the article: 2024 EV sales rose 7.3% from 2023, according to Cox Automotive data. "Last year American consumers purchased 1.3 million electric vehicles, which was a new record, according to data from KBB. "Sales have never stopped growing, and the percentage of new cars sold powered purely by gasoline continues to slip.

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One of the two just needs to be made by Nv

Computex Nvidia has opened the NVLink interconnect tech used to stitch its rack-scale compute platforms together to the broader ecosystem with the introduction of NVLink Fusion at Computex this week.…

PLUS: Euro-cops take down investment scammers; Fancy Bear returns to Ukraine; and more

Infosec In Brief The Alabama state government is investigating an unspecified "cybersecurity event" that it said has affected some state systems, but didn't involve the theft of citizen's personal info.…

TechCrunch reports: The world's only net-positive fusion experiment has been steadily ramping up the amount of power it produces, TechCrunch has learned. In recent attempts, the team at the U.S. Department of Energy's National Ignition Facility (NIF) increased the yield of the experiment, first to 5.2 megajoules and then again to 8.6 megajoules, according to a source with knowledge of the experiment. The new results are significant improvements over the historic experiment in 2022, which was the first controlled fusion reaction to generate more energy than the it consumed. The 2022 shot generated 3.15 megajoules, a small bump over the 2.05 megajoules that the lasers delivered to the BB-sized fuel pellet. None of the shots to date have been effective enough to feed electrons back into the grid, let alone to offset the energy required to power the entire facility — the facility wasn't designed to do that. The first net-positive shot, for example, required 300 megajoules to power the laser system alone. But they are continued proof that controlled nuclear fusion is more than hypothetical.

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