An anonymous reader quotes a report from Wired: Michele Spagnuolo, the Google engineer arrested in May by U.S. authorities for alleged insider trading on Polymarket, is making a new bold bet. On Wednesday, his legal team filed a motion to dismiss the charges against him. Spagnuolo isn't outright denying that he made money using internal information from Google. Instead, his legal team says that the wagers were not financial instruments subject to regulation by the United States' Commodities Exchange Act but rather good old-fashioned international betting that the U.S. has no authority over.
Spagnuolo, who has been placed on leave from Google, is accused of committing commodities fraud, wire fraud, and money laundering. Using the alias "AlphaRaccoon," he allegedly made a series of wagers on Polymarket's flagship platform that resulted in profits totaling over $1.2 million. According to the criminal complaint, "AlphaRaccoon" correctly wagered that the singer D4vd, who gained notoriety for his suspected connection to a grisly killing, would be Google's most-searched person of the year in 2025. (D4vd was later charged with murder; he pleaded not guilty.) [...] Spagnuolo's lawyers argue that defining swaps to include wagers like who the most-searched person on Google will be each year "would fly in the face of the statute's purpose and history" and lead to "absurd results." They say it would make it so that any wager in the world, from a charity raffle to a local Ping-Pong match, could be classified as a financial instrument. "Spagnuolo is basically making the same argument as the states that are suing prediction markets," says a financial services regulation expert Todd Phillips. "This is the issue that will likely go up to the Supreme Court."
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In addition to disputing the idea that prediction markets offer swaps, Spagnuolo's legal team argues that the U.S. government had no jurisdiction over him in the first place because he's a non-U.S. citizen who was wagering on a non-U.S. platform. Although Polymarket is headquartered in New York, the company's flagship prediction market is banned in the United States and technically is administered by an ostensibly Panama-based entity known as Adventure One QSS. Spagnuolo was living in Zurich, Switzerland, when he allegedly made the Google-related trades on Polymarket. "The extraterritorial argument is interesting and raises the question of whether the U.S. should be the world's prediction markets cop," Philipps says. Spagnuolo's team also claims that the charges should be dismissed because the internal information he supposedly leveraged did not have any commercial value to Google.
I’m an experienced programmer, and I’ve worked in many different languages. Sometimes being a programmer is a two-edged sword. You want to accomplish something, and you can do it easily — but it can be a lot of work to do it right. Maybe more work than you want to do.
Normally, I’ll kick out a few lines of script for something I want and be done, accepting that it isn’t production-hardened. This time, however, I decided to try an AI tool to see whether they could do the work I was too lazy to do myself. While I’ve played with chatbots, I wanted to try one of the dedicated coding agents, in this case, Codex. Outside of asking ChatGPT to write a simple function or find the cause of an error message, I haven’t done much coding with AI assistance, so I was interested to see what these agents brought to the table.
A Radio Problem
The problem was simple: I wanted an easy way to put buttons on my Linux desktop that launched Internet radio stations. Sure, I could open a player and paste in a long URL, but I’m far too lazy to remember all those URLs.
I searched for a way to make Shortwave — an Internet radio player — open a URL from the command line. Apparently, you can’t. Google Gemini suggested writing a script that launches cvlc, the command-line VLC player, with the URL as an argument.
That’s easy, so I did it. Of course, then I had to find the stream URLs for all my favorite stations. It turns out that Radio Browser maintains an extensive database of stations. I considered scraping the site or using its API, but honestly, the little script was becoming too much of a project.
Besides, I was already struggling to manage the media player’s lifetime. I didn’t want a new station playing on top of one that was already running, and I wanted a command to stop playback, so the script had already grown larger than I first imagined.
My first version used a temporary file containing the player’s process ID so a future script execution could kill the old player. That usually works, but it isn’t very robust, and I knew it. But how much work did I really want to do here? I decided I had done enough and turned the rest over to Codex, OpenAI’s coding assistant.
What Can Codex Do?
Codex is more than a chatbot that produces code snippets. With access to a project, and limited access to your machine, it can inspect existing files, edit them, run commands and tests, examine Git history, and manage commits and remotes. OpenAI describes Codex workflows as including coding, testing, analysis, code review, and repository automation.
The important distinction is that Codex works on the actual project. Instead of copying code out of a chat window, I could say, “Have a look at this shell script,” and it examined the script in place. It also noticed that I already had an uncommitted modification and avoided overwriting it. It also understands version control, and that turns out to be one of its really nice features.
Fixing Problems
My first request was:
Have a look at this shell script. I know it needs a trap. Is there a better way to keep it from accidentally killing something with a stale playradio.tmp?
Codex pointed out that a trap was not the only solution. The launcher exits immediately after starting VLC, so it is not around later to receive SIGCLD or clean up after the player. Sure, it could run something to wait around, but there was a cleaner way to get the job done.
It initially suggested verifying that the saved PID still belonged to cvlc. Then it caught a subtler problem in its own proposal: if Linux reused the PID for a different cvlc process, the name check could still kill the wrong player. This is probably very rare, but when it does happen, it will be a mysterious, hard-to-reproduce bug.
The final solution records both the PID and Linux’s process start-time token:
Part of a Codex session. Entire transcripts are on GitHub.
Before sending a signal, the script confirms that both still match. It also uses a private per-user runtime directory, serializes concurrent start and stop operations with flock, sends SIGTERM first, waits for a graceful shutdown, and rechecks the process identity before falling back to SIGKILL. That is considerably more thought than I wanted to put into a desktop radio button. Overkill? Maybe, but it is robust.
Another pleasant surprise was that Codex built a suite of tests to ensure that everything worked as it should. It runs these tests when it makes changes. So it doesn’t just create code. It creates code, executes it with test cases, and fixes any issues it discovers.
Searching the Database — and More
Once the process handling was safe, I asked:
Radio Browser allows you to search via API for radio stations. How hard would it be to make $1 a search string and take the best match, while allowing -u for a URL instead?
Codex checked the current API documentation, found that curl and jq were already installed, and implemented the search. It hides broken stations, orders matches by votes, selects the top result, and reports the selection back to Radio Browser’s click counter. I told it I wanted specific command-line options over several iterations. The program can play a URL, search the database for a station, or even just query the database. It can also give you a list and let you pick. (See the README.md for the entire interface.)
RadioBrowser is human-readable, but also provides the same data via API.
I did make a few requests. For example, if you pass a URI, the program should figure it out and skip the database search. I also wanted the player to be configurable through a PLAYRADIO_PLAYER environment variable. I asked it to fall back on wget if curl wasn’t installed. Missing dependencies should produce useful installation advice rather than mysterious failures. I also asked it to produce a GitHub-style README and a traditional Unix man page.
Human Guidance Still Matters
There were a few places where human intervention improved the result. For example, the PLAYRADIO_PLAYER configuration and its explanatory comment originally appeared near the bottom of the script. That works, but it is inconvenient for someone who wanted to edit the file. I asked Codex to move it near the top.
Another example was the first version of --pick. I had specifically suggested Bash’s select command, so Codex printed the formatted list and then let select print a second numbered list. It worked, but the duplication was distracting and, as far as Codex was concerned, it was what I asked for.
I pointed the duplication out. Codex replaced select with a simple numeric read, keeping the detailed table and adding only one extra row:
1 Jazz One
2 Jazz Two
3 Cancel
Station number:
This is a good example of how I think these tools work best. The AI handles the implementation, edge cases, tests, and documentation, while the human provides design input and flags anything awkward or that doesn’t fit the intended experience.
Does It Scale?
I’m not an expert at using these kinds of tools, but I think this worked very well. I generally asked for what I wanted and then made technical observations about the results.
I also tried this with a script, originally from [Petar Marinov], that I’ve used and modified for years to replace the cd command (see GitHub). I didn’t tell it what to do. I just let it look at the code. It correctly determined what it was supposed to do and made solid suggestions for making it more robust. It suggested features and even a major improvement to make it work not just with cd but with anything that changes pwd, like pushd. Of course, I couldn’t resist getting a man page and a README for free.
One feature I asked the tool to create was a simple bookmark system. It proposed and created a way to create and maintain a bash associative array that it persisted in a configuration file. That worked, but I knew it would be better, on many levels, to keep the bookmarks as proper symlinks. When I pointed this out, the AI did get it, saying:
That has several nice consequences:
changes from cdmark are instantly visible in every shell; no reload or synchronization issue
ls -l ~/.config/cdfunc/bookmarks is already a crude cdmark list
bookmarks can be created or removed manually with ordinary Unix tools
Syncthing/git/backup tools handle them naturally
no parsing, quoting, escaping, or rewriting a bookmarks file
no associative-array initialization at shell startup
broken bookmarks are naturally represented as broken symlinks
I think that’s substantially cleaner.
It also noted that this makes shell completion very simple, which I had not thought about. However, its implementation broke normal shell completion for the commands. It fixed that after I pointed it out. Well, actually, it took two tries to work out all the bugs. This is another case where human guidance is critical.
For a more advanced project, I forked a simple editor, kilo, and added a few Emacs commands. I asked Codex to review it. It found a number of bad edge cases, some in the original code, and fixed them. I then asked it to suggest Emacs-like features it could easily do. We added a ton! (see GitHub). It was impressive how well it analyzed and understood the code. I had done similar modifications to the code a few weeks earlier and, I have to admit, Codex understood the original code base much faster than I had.
Again, though, human guidance is necessary. Emacs uses an Esc prefix for some commands. You can also hold down the Alt key to get the same result. So pressing Alt+W in a terminal sends an Esc character and a W.
Initially, Codex wrote code to detect an Esc, wait a short time for a command, and then, if nothing came, treat it as a bare escape. It even understood that this would be a problem and mentioned it. Alt+W would work, but there was no way for a human to press Esc and then W in the time allotted. I prompted:
Yes I see that in the program. Would it be possible to have it wait indefinitely for ESC UNLESS a caller set some flag. So when other parts of the editor (search/save/etc.) are prompting for input they would set that flag (or call a separate entry point) and, at that point, ESC=>ESC. Any other time ESC is treated as a prefix (and perhaps ESC ESC gets sent as an escape just as a — ahem — escape hatch.
That fixed the problem. It is hard to remember that while Codex seems smart, it doesn’t have human judgment or human-level problem-solving skills. You have to supply that. Sure, it found problems in its own code. It found problems in my code. It devised solutions. But you still have to make sure those solutions make sense and sometimes nudge it — at least — in the right direction.
If you are interested, each of the GitHub repos (playradio, cdfunc, and kilo) has a session directory that contains transcripts of the AI chats that produced the final versions of the code. Admittedly, none of these started from a totally blank slate, but working on an existing code base is certainly a realistic test.
The Git Assistant
One feature I particularly liked was Codex’s ability to manage Git. I didn’t even try the GitHub plugin for Codex, which would probably be even better. I asked it to commit the current version before starting a new feature, which gave me a clean checkpoint. Later I said:
Commit please. I’m going to add a remote GitHub repo. Can you set this as origin and push it after the commit?
Codex committed the changes, added the remote, pushed the branch, configured upstream tracking, and verified that the working tree was clean. The entire evolution is visible in the repository’s history — from process-safety changes, to Radio Browser search, to configuration and documentation, to the interactive station picker.
You can see the final project and follow each commit in the repositories along with transcripts of the AI sessions. Having things in version control is especially useful with a tool like Codex. You can easily see what has changed and roll back if you like.
Wrap Up
The original script solved my immediate problem in a handful of lines. The finished utility solves the same problem safely, handles failures, searches a public database, supports different players, has good documentation, and leaves a traceable Git history. One important note. Codex and other agents have a limited context window, so you won’t get the same results trying to work with extremely large code bases unless you pay for a larger model. But for these tasks, normal consumer Codex worked well.
Could I have written all of that myself? Certainly. Would I have bothered to go this far? Probably not for what is basically a one-off desktop hack.
That may be the most useful role for a coding agent: They don’t always enable you to do something you couldn’t otherwise do. But they make it cheap enough in time and attention span to do all the boring and defensive coding and testing that you know you should do, but so often don’t. Codex didn’t replace me. It just augmented my patience.
Being worked on for over two years has been the latest attempt for async device shutdown support for Linux for getting Linux systems -- especially servers with lots of hardware like many NVMe drives -- to shutdown faster. That work is now up to its 21st version as it works toward hopefully making it to the mainline kernel in the not too distant future...
While Rust programming language use may help with memory safety and other security advantages, the default Linux kernel configuration is now losing randomization of sensitive kernel structures if Rust support is present...
If you find yourself lost in the woods or adrift in the ocean, a GPS-enabled Personal Locator Beacon (PLB) is certainly a handy thing to have as it will pinpoint your location for rescuers. The one [Steve Jernigan] has is relatively affordable considering it might save your life one day, but it turns out that replacement batteries for the unit are extremely expensive and hard to come by because the manufacturer would rather you send the unit back to them for refurbishment. So naturally, he took it apart and figured out how to do it himself.
His DIY battery pack consists of a small custom PCB and pair of off-the-shelf 6 volt lithium manganese dioxide cells in a 3D printed enclosure that slots into the rear of the McMurdo PLB. In assembly video below, [Steve] shows how the pack goes together and demonstrates the use of a two-part potting compound in an effort to keep the elements at bay.
Before anyone says it — putting a homemade battery pack into a device which one day might be the only thing standing between you and death is probably not a great idea. [Steve] mentions in the description of this project that this is meant for backup purposes, and that you should really spring for a legitimate battery if there’s a chance you might actually need to be rescued at some point.
BrianFagioli writes: Perplexity has built a local artificial intelligence engine designed specifically for Apple silicon and the Qwen3.6-35B-A3B model. Called Lily, the engine uses a Rust runtime and custom Metal kernels, with neither PyTorch nor MLX in its execution path. Perplexity says Lily averaged 23 percent faster prompt processing and 35 percent faster token generation than MLX-LM on an M5 Max MacBook Pro with 128GB of unified memory. Lily is more specialized than MLX-LM, which supports a much wider range of models and architectures. Perplexity says it plans to release Lily as open source, but the code is not available yet, leaving its performance claims dependent on internal testing for now.
The longtime Audacity open-source audio editor had been using wxWidgets for years but with today's Audacity 4.0 release they have transitioned to using the Qt6 toolkit...
As a follow up to last month's article about patches being posted for enabling "-mcpu=native -mtune=native" support for RISC-V with the GCC compiler, that code is now merged for what will become the GCC 17.1 release in the early months of 2027...
InputPlumber is the open-source router and remapping daemon for Linux that is particularly popular among Linux gaming handhelds for combining multiple input devices and translating actions into various virtual device formats. InputPlumber supports emulating mouse, keyboard, ad gamepad inputs. With the new InputPlumber 0.79 release there is expanded hardware support and bug fixes...
Brothers and sisters: Let no one deceive himself. If anyone among you considers himself wise in this age, let him become a fool, so as to become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God, for it is written:
God catches the wise in their own ruses,
and again:
The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.
So let no one boast about human beings, for everything belongs to you, Paul or Apollos or Cephas, or the world or life or death, or the present or the future: all belong to you, and you to Christ, and Christ to God.
R. (1) To the Lord belongs the earth and all that fills it. The LORD's are the earth and its fullness; the world and those who dwell in it. For he founded it upon the seas and established it upon the rivers. R. To the Lord belongs the earth and all that fills it. Who can ascend the mountain of the LORD? or who may stand in his holy place? He whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean, who desires not what is vain. R. To the Lord belongs the earth and all that fills it. He shall receive a blessing from the LORD, a reward from God his savior. Such is the race that seeks for him, that seeks the face of the God of Jacob. R. To the Lord belongs the earth and all that fills it.
While the crowd was pressing in on Jesus and listening to the word of God, he was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret. He saw two boats there alongside the lake; the fishermen had disembarked and were washing their nets. Getting into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon, he asked him to put out a short distance from the shore. Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat. After he had finished speaking, he said to Simon, "Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch." Simon said in reply, "Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing, but at your command I will lower the nets." When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish and their nets were tearing. They signaled to their partners in the other boat to come to help them. They came and filled both boats so that the boats were in danger of sinking. When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at the knees of Jesus and said, "Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man." For astonishment at the catch of fish they had made seized him and all those with him, and likewise James and John, the sons of Zebedee, who were partners of Simon. Jesus said to Simon, "Do not be afraid; from now on you will be catching men." When they brought their boats to the shore, they left everything and followed him.
Few pieces of vintage audio gear from the turn of the century (the previous one) inspire the kind of devotion that a Leslie speaker does. Sure, there are plenty of pieces that are rarer or more valuable, but the Leslie speaker has such a big following because of its uniqueness of physically moving sound around a room. Two rotating devices in the speaker physically direct the sound around the cabinet with musician-controlled speed, and this sound remains extremely difficult to reproduce faithfully without the moving components. But originals are enormous and meant for organs, so [Eric] built a 40% replica with a few modern touches for his guitar.
The build starts with a CAD model, where [Eric] works towards making the most accurate enclosure for his speaker as possible. The CAD model heads out to a CNC machine which can care most of the details into the wood, and he eventually is able to finish it, although it took a few tries with stains and paintbrushes of various types. For the speakers themselves, he’s using modern versions including modern brushless motors to drive the rotating elements. Like the original speaker, the high range of sound is sent through a rotating set of horns, of which one is only a counterweight, and the low range is directed out of the bottom of the cabinet through a large rotating drum. Both rotating elements here are 3D printed, and with everything put together and wired up [Eric] has a much more portable, faithful recreation of the original Leslie speaker.
There are some upgrades in the wiring too, which makes it work better with a guitar rather than for an organ. It’s also much lighter, and was a hit when he took it to let a few other guitarists to play as well. It’s not the first time we’ve seen the Leslie’s movement recreated for guitar, but it is the most alike to the classic 1930s-era speaker we’ve seen so far.
"Enshittification of car controls [is] rapidly accelerating," writes longtime Slashdot reader sinij, pointing to a new report from Car and Driver. From the report: Remember when iPhones used to come with free headphones and a phone charger (including the wall plug)? It didn't feel so much like Apple giving you free goodies as it did that the company was providing you with the relevant hardware to use the device. Apple stopped including headphones and charging blocks in 2020. Now, Hyundai is pulling some of its standard hardware from the box, at least for two models.
Hyundai is charging customers extra for a driver's display in the new Elantra generation (more specifically, the Korea-market Avante), as well as the Ioniq 3, Motor1 reported. Both models feature Pleos Connect, Hyundai's new infotainment setup that pairs a center touchscreen with a slim 9.9-inch instrument cluster mounted above the dashboard -- except where it doesn't.
In its domestic market, the instrument cluster screen is offered as a 350,000 won ($255) option for the base trim. Not the most expensive optional extra in the world, but still kind of a slap in the face for a feature traditionally viewed as standard fare. Things are more expensive for the electric Ioniq 3. In the EV's case, the base trim gives customers the full Tesla-screen experience, meaning if customers want the driver's display, they'll need to fork over the additional $5000 necessary to move up to the next-level trim. [...] Hyundai plans to have the setup equipped in 20 million cars globally by the end of the decade.
While the Citroën logo they project onto the pavement looks great, [OrangeTungsten] wasn’t thrilled with how their door-mounted projectors actually functioned. The mechanism for detecting when they should kick on was a bit too clever for its own good, and needed to be simplified a bit. Luckily for us, the process was meticulously documented for anyone else who might find themselves in a similar situation.
Originally, the projector detected when it should turn on by sensing the presence of a tiny magnet using a Hall effect sensor. There are certainly some advantages to this approach, but in practice, [OrangeTungsten] says the retrofitted magnet would keep falling off and leaving the projector inoperative. The fix was simple enough: figure out how the circuit worked, pull out the Hall effect sensor, and replace it with a simple button that would physically make contact with the door frame.
It’s not a terribly complex fix, but it’s a clever solution and well documented, and that goes pretty far around these parts. We were also interested in this one because an examination of the electronics inside the projector uncovered a 8-pin microcontroller — the sole purpose of which would appear to be polling the Hall effect sensor and using its status to throw a transistor which in turn powers the LED.
It’s hard to believe that whoever designed this gadget couldn’t figure out how to turn an LED on and off without a MCU, but we’re living in strange times. We assume there’s some kind of justification for this, such as some flashing or fading effects, but [OrangeTungsten] never mentions the things doing anything more complex than simply turning on and off.
Whatever the rationale was behind the original design of these projectors, the important thing is that the application of some hardware from the parts bin got them up and working again, which is something we never get tired of seeing.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Global heating will reach at least 1.8C under even the most optimistic future, well beyond the Paris agreement goal of 1.5C, according to a UN report that warns every fraction of temperature rise intensifies destructive extreme weather, glacier melt, ecosystem loss, and island and coastal city submersion. The report by the Nairobi-based UN Environment Program confirmed overshooting the 1.5C goal inscribed in the landmark Paris agreement of 2015 was now "unavoidable" and, despite some progress in addressing the human-caused climate crisis driven by burning fossil fuels, likely in the next few years. It said: "There are no good outcomes above 1.5C."
Heating of up to 3C above preindustrial levels could lead to glaciers losing more than a quarter of their mass by 2100, raising sea levels by up to 13cm. Global food production could decline by up to 14% by 2050 if there are not effective strategies to adapt. Human health, water supplies, nature, cities, infrastructure and economies could all be severely damaged. Some losses would be irreversible. Many communities may have to relocate or change their livelihoods. The report said the best hope for humanity to limit damage was to adopt an "overshoot, peak and decline" pathway that required immediate and sustained greenhouse gas emissions cuts combined with steps to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
It described the goal of net zero emissions -- increasingly politically contentious in some countries -- as "an essential milestone that cannot be skipped" and stressed carbon dioxide removal through steps such as establishing vast new forests must occur alongside, not as an alternative to, deep cuts in fossil pollution. Crucially, the authors of the report, titled Limiting Overshoot, said the average global temperature could be returned to 1.5C this century only if heating stayed below about 1.8C. They warned nature's capacity to store carbon was uncertain and would shrink the more the planet heats. [...] The report's authors cited earlier work that found limiting heating to about 1.8C required global emissions to be halved by 2035. They said existing national policies were projected to lead to at least 2.3C heating, but it would still be possible to limit stay below 2C if countries delivered on net zero emissions commitments by mid-century.
Over the time Hackaday has been in existence, the art of 3D printing has evolved from a relatively crude hit-and-miss affair to something approaching what we all imagined back then. You can’t yet walk up to a Star Trek replicator and ask for a part, but a modern state of the art consumer or prosumer grade printer will deliver consistent high-resolution parts, and in a surprisingly short time. [The Next Layer] asks whether consumer FDM printers have now reached the point at which they’re about as good as they’re going to get, and whether other technologies hold the future.
It’s a fair point to make that the resolution of a consumer FDM printer may be close to its mechanical limit. Techniques such as input shaping and the adoption of better CoreXY mechanisms mean that prints which once might have relied on SLA can be done in FDM. Healthy competition in the marketplace has delivered high quality colour printing, with tool-changing printers being no longer solely the preserve of the professional. He uses the example of a mobile phone to make the point that new machines have less of a wow factor to deliver, as increments have become less grand.
It’s a persuasive argument, and looking at the printers around us we can see it in action. The difference in ability between a 2020-ish and a 2026 FDM printer are far smaller than those between the same time periods in the last decade. Compare a MakerBot Cupcake and an Ultimaker II, or the Ultimaker and a Prusa Mini, and each is light years ahead of the last. But the best the Mini can do is surprisingly not as far behind as you’d expect to that of their latest, or of the equivalent from Bambu Labs.
Does this means that nothing new is coming in 3D printing? Of course not. UV printing is coming through and will deliver incredible results, as will SLS printing. It’s interesting he devotes little time to SLA printing, perhaps because it’s not as easy a process as FDM. He makes the point that we’ve never had it so good, as the high-end FDM features will appear in modestly priced machines, and we have those other technologies to look forward to.
It’s an interesting discussion, and you can see it below the break.
Lemonade 11.9 is out today as the newest feature release to this AMD-backed, open-source local AI server solution across Linux, Windows, and macOS. Lemonade has long been focused on offering "100% free and private" AI use with local hardware whether it be GPUs, CPUs, or NPUs. With Lemonade 11.9's release today it's very interesting for having experimental ROCm HRX back-end support with Llama.cpp. HRX is the new exciting thing to watch out for on the AMD ROCm compute landscape...
Insides of the Sears 12 calculator. (Credit: Danalog, YouTube)
Thermal printers are still extremely common today, using small heating elements in combination with temperature-sensitive paper to create a dot matrix-like effect without messing with ink ribbons and complex mechanisms. Of course, even with just a line of elements you still needed one of these per pixel, which at least in the 1970s when the Sears 12 calculator was released added significantly to the cost. The solution here was to wiggle the elements, doubling the resolution of the print head, as detailed in this video by [Danalog].
Using a contemporary Texas Instruments TI-5015 calculator as comparison with its non-wiggling print head, it’s easy to see the advantages here. In an era where electronic calculators didn’t have displays but a thermal printer, this print quality was the selling point, yet adding more thermal elements added to the price tag of the final device and more complexity to the design in terms of driving circuitry.
In this regard adding a way to make the print head move side-to-side at a set rate and tying this fact into the printing would save about half of that circuitry. Inside the Sears 12 is a fairly standard Mitsubishi M58671 calculator IC, but also the whole printer mechanism. When operating, as demonstrated in the video with the cover removed, you can see the whole print head moving rapidly.
With this mechanism this much cheaper Sears 12 definitely gives the TI-5015 a run for its money, even if as noted by [Danalog] the timing would go off a bit after a longer session, resulting slightly wavy printing. Presumably with the massive cost savings of buying a Sears calculator over a TI one, this was deemed an acceptable trade-off.
The FCC is proposing (PDF) a public "robocall mitigation scorecard" that would grade phone companies on how well they block illegal spam calls while avoiding false positives on the legitimate ones. "The Scorecard will empower consumers and encourage providers to continue to combat illegal robocalls by providing the public with an assessment of the effectiveness of voice service providers' efforts to protect consumers from illegal robocalls," the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau said in a public notice. Ars Technica reports: The scorecards could include call-blocking statistics along with data on customer complaints and enforcement actions. The FCC said scorecards could grade providers on a number scale, with letter grades, or by classifying providers as low risk, medium risk, or high risk. The proposed tool would rate wireless, wireline, and VoIP providers on efforts to block robocalls and their "actual results in protecting [consumers] from illegal robocalls," the FCC said. "In practice, that means moving beyond a simple administrative checklist (i.e., did the provider file the right paperwork, did they offer the right tools) and toward a composite set of metrics that reflects both operational practices and measurable outcomes, including how often legitimate calls are blocked."
Whether the tool is useful for consumers will depend on how it's designed, how easy each provider's scorecard is to find, and what data sources it relies on. The proposed scorecard would apply to domestic voice service providers with retail customers, but not telcos that operate solely as wholesale or intermediate providers. "Combatting the scourge of illegal robocalls remains the FCC's top consumer protection priority... As proposed in today's public notice, the FCC aims to develop a scorecard that will give consumers more information about the measures providers are taking to fight illegal robocalls, and it will also incentivize providers to improve their efforts," FCC Chairman Brendan Carr said in a press release.
1Password is facing customer and internal employee backlash after pledging $300,000 to support a Linux distro created by David Heinemeier Hansson, who has regularly published racist and anti-immigrant rhetoric. "The popular password manager is now a 'distinguished corporate patron' of Omacom, the nonprofit foundation that oversees a popular Linux distribution known as Omarchy," reports The Verge. From the report: One viral blog post declared that 1Password "Supports the Ethnic Cleansing of Europe" because of the donation. Others on social media asked for suggestions for alternative password managers so they would not support the funding of a project from Heinemeier Hansson, better known as DHH. The donation has also resulted in internal pushback from employees of 1Password who are disappointed by the affiliation, The Verge has learned. 1Password CEO David Faugno and cofounder Roustem Karimov have since posted internal messages addressing what Faugno describes as "concerns, both internally and externally" that have been raised "due to the polarizing nature" of DHH.
DHH is a Danish entrepreneur best known for creating Ruby on Rails, Basecamp, and the Hey email client. Omarchy is DHH's "opinionated" version of Linux, meaning it's Linux the way he likes to use it. It's based on Arch Linux, with certain apps that install by default. It's also, apparently, one of 1Password's big customer environments. [...] In an internal Slack message obtained by The Verge, 1Password's Karimov downplayed the overtly racist comments from DHH, telling staff the following: "As I said, people have different personal opinions. You believe in your heart that DHH is evil, that you have the moral high ground, and that nothing will change your mind. However, not everyone believes that. It is not fair to claim a monopoly and ostracize team members who might disagree with you. There are people who are afraid to speak up simply because they will be personally attacked."
1Password CEO Faugno took a different approach, trying to reassure staff that "1Password does not endorse hateful, dehumanizing, or exclusionary views, including those shared publicly by DHH." Nonetheless, it seems the company has sacrificed a moral position for a "mission-driven" position. In the same message to staff, Faugno says "the scale and growth of [Omarchy's] use among our customers is significant -- Omarchy has grown to be the second most used Linux distribution among 1Password users." Faugno then tries to create distance, telling staff that its contribution is "to the Omacom Foundation, not an individual." Still, he says "we recognize that Omarchy is associated with DHH, its founder. Our donation is not in any way an endorsement of his personal views or conduct."
On Tuesday, the House of Representatives passed a stopgap measure that would continue funding the US government through early December. While the measure still requires the signature of President Trump, it's widely expected that he will act to avoid a government shutdown immediately before the midterm elections.
This is a normal part of how the US government has operated in recent years, as it's often difficult to build the political support needed to pass a full year's budget in advance. In fact, dissent within the House's Republican caucus prevented them from agreeing on their own measure to keep the government open; instead, the House simply adopted a version of the spending bill that had previously passed the Senate.
From the perspective of scientists and their supporters, that adoption turned out to be a very good thing. Because the Senate's budget bill, passed in early August, contains a provision that blocks the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) from implementing new rules that would give political appointees full control over what science is funded and allow them to cancel any grant at any time. The proposed rule has been widely decried as catastrophic for science, and it faced widespread opposition from scientific and health-focused organizations.
Longtime Slashdot reader Microsplat: CERN plans to have all 2,200+ industrial computers and embedded systems in its accelerator-control infrastructure running Debian 13 by the end of 2026. These are systems used for accelerator control, laboratory equipment and other operational functions ... They also generate and interact with a hefty amount of data, although this Linux.com article refers more broadly to CERN's computing infrastructure. It's unclear whether the Debian migration covers all server infrastructure or what scientific-research-based systems are included. Our shops have done much the same in recent years, mostly due to CentOS and CFEngine getting the can. Phoronix adds some additional context in its article: CERN was a longtime RHEL/CentOS shop, previously co-maintained the Scientific Linux RHEL derivative, moved to CentOS in 2015, and later considered CentOS Stream. CERN says Red Hat's adoption of the "-march=x86-64-v2" compiler flag by default, which it viewed as "forced obsolescence" of older hardware, was the "straw that broke the camel's back."
A new change proposal that's been filed for evaluation with next year's Fedora 46 release is to provide official, native support for the Crystal programming language...
Not long ago, I rented an SUV from a well-known car rental company. Within hours of an employee scanning my driver's license, a high-resolution scan of my ID was available for sale on the dark web.
An exposé published Tuesday by KrebsOnSecurity reports that my license was one of more than 153 million that were available through Nexus, the name of the new ID theft service. Like other driver's licenses available there—including some belonging to journalist Brian Krebs, his mother, an FBI assistant director, and several security researchers—my license was purported to include multiple image files showing both the front and back of the ID. Besides a basic image scan, the files also captured the images in the infrared and ultraviolet spectrums. Presumably, the additional formats may allow cloned-based counterfeit IDs to pass hologram tests.
Growing by the day
Besides advertising the availability of driver's licenses, Nexus offered to sell a bevy of other forms of ID. They included:
As fun as mucking about with simulated environments in a laboratory is, at some point you have to do those field tests to demonstrate that your prototype actually works in the real world, under real conditions. This is what the [Plasma Channel] recently did for their fog harvesting system by setting it up in the Namib desert.
We previously covered the atmospheric water harvesting attempts, using electrostatic precipitation to draw the moisture in the air onto the collectors where it can then be harvested. This is rather different from existing approaches with e.g. fine meshes and hoping that enough water molecules bump into your mesh, so theoretically it should be much more efficient. In the lab it worked well, but reality always has the last word.
The Namib desert is at the top of the world’s most arid regions, competing with the Atacama desert. What it does have going for it is regular fog rolling in that lasts until sunrise, providing a good target for water harvesting. Interestingly, this field test was performed together with the University of Namibia.
Of course, moving the prototype in check-in luggage for the flight to Namibia took some redesigning and testing. Fortunately everything, including the solar panel, arrived intact, allowing trials to commence. This initially took place at the campus of the University of Namibia, joining a number of other atmospheric water harvesting projects that had been previously installed there.
Unfortunately the fog proved to be rather elusive, leading to a few fruitless attempts. It also proved that the salt in the air from the ocean spray, even a few kilometers inland, was highly corrosive, especially to high-voltage electronics. Although the system basically worked, happily harvesting water under the right conditions, it does need some redesign before it’ll be tested next in the Atacama desert.
OpenAI CEO Sam Altman said AI adoption is "non-negotiable" for countries, comparing rejecting it to refusing electricity a century ago and predicting it will unleash an unprecedented boom in entrepreneurship. "The economic growth and benefit to people that can come from this, the value to a country, is too high to ignore," he said. His comments were made during a fireside chat with U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick at the G20 Innovation Ministerial in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. CNBC reports: Altman thinks the public won't be talking as much about AI a decade from now -- it'll be expected everywhere. "A kid growing up today will never be smarter than AI, but he or she will also never have understood a world where every product and service that they interact with is not really smart and really capable and really helpful," he said.
Altman referenced the adoption of electricity multiple times in his comments and drew a line between that and AI. "I think it would be approximately as bad of an idea to say we're not going to have AI in our country as it was to say we're not going to have electricity in our country, you know, back 100 plus years ago," he said.
Altman called cybersecurity one of the biggest challenges to navigate in the age of AI and one that leaders shouldn't sidestep. "I think some things are going to go very wrong with cybersecurity unless people act quite urgently," he said. Altman said that falling short in cyber defense and other areas "could set this technology back a great deal." You can watch a recording of the chat on YouTube.
The Federal Communications Commission today said it will create a robocall mitigation scorecard to rate phone companies on how effectively they block illegal spam calls.
The scorecards could include call-blocking statistics along with data on customer complaints and enforcement actions. The FCC said scorecards could grade providers on a number scale, with letter grades, or by classifying providers as low risk, medium risk, or high risk.
"The Scorecard will empower consumers and encourage providers to continue to combat illegal robocalls by providing the public with an assessment of the effectiveness of voice service providers’ efforts to protect consumers from illegal robocalls," the FCC Consumer and Governmental Affairs Bureau said in a public notice.
NASA has decided to use a simpler spacesuit for its initial missions to the lunar surface, Ars has learned.
The agency announced the decision during an internal meeting this week as it seeks to accelerate its program to land humans at the South Pole of the Moon as early as 2028. At the direction of Artemis Program Manager Jeremy Parsons, NASA will work with Axiom Space to develop a "Sortie Suit" variant of the planned spacesuit for the lunar surface.
Sources said the Sortie Suit will be used for the initial landing missions flown on landers developed both by SpaceX and Blue Origin. Among the goals of the initiative is to lower the mass of the spacesuit, reduce its complexity, and simplify interfaces between the spacesuits and lunar landers.
New York City Public Schools is banning generative AI for students from pre-K through eighth grade for the 2026-27 school year, affecting more than half a million students in the nation's largest school district. ABC News reports: In a statement to ABC News, New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani said that the city is implementing a moratorium on generative AI for students in pre-school or 2-K through eighth grade and will spend the next year "studying the impacts of this technology." Mamdani wrote in part, "the tech industry wants us to believe that A.I.-powered early education is not only inevitable, but necessary." "We do not see it that way," he added.
[...] The district said it is implementing the most expansive AI moratorium in the nation, eliminating software that uses student-facing AI and banning companion chatbots. The city's AI moratorium does not apply to high school students. The district said it will offer twice-yearly AI literacy classes designed to help high school students "think critically" about the technology before they start to "rely" on it.
Earlier this year NVIDIA led an effort with more than two dozen other companies to launch the Open Secure AI Alliance with a focus on keeping open-source AI models secure. The Open Secure AI Alliance today is transitioning from being stewarded by NVIDIA to becoming a Linux Foundation project...
This week Jonathan chats with Benjamin Samuels of Trail of Bits! The conversation focuses on Patch the Planet, a new initiative to help Open Source projects deal with the fallout from AI coding and vulnerability research. What’s the unexpected dichotomy driving the polarized response to LLMs? And what does the future look like for Open Source in the age of AI? Watch to find out!
Did you know you can watch the live recording of the show right on our YouTube Channel? Have someone you’d like us to interview? Let us know, or have the guest contact us! Take a look at the schedule here.
Google hasn't released a frontier-level Gemini Pro AI model since early 2026, but it sure loves rolling out new Gemini Flash variants. Today, Google is announcing its third Flash model release in just six weeks, making it more likely that we'll never see the promised Gemini 3.5 Pro. But no matter, says Google, because Gemini 3.8 Flash is its best reasoning and coding model yet.
Gemini 3.8 Flash comes in two variations. There's the standard Flash, which Google describes as a "workhorse" model that's good for anything from agentic tasks to software development. Then we have Gemini 3.8 Flash Cyber, which runs on the same foundations but has been tuned for vulnerability detection and mitigation.
For developers, Google has the same pitch as it did for the 3.7 Flash release just a couple of weeks ago. API access to the model is available at an "introductory rate" through the end of the year: $0.75 per million input tokens and $3.75 per million output tokens. The regular price will be $1.50 / $7.50, but it's likely there will be new models available long before the price changes. Google probably sees the lower prices as a necessity given that other AI labs have recently dropped token pricing to keep increasingly wary businesses engaged with AI tools.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google escaped a breakup of its advertising technology business on Wednesday, when a judge in Virginia rejected U.S. antitrust enforcers' bid to force a sale of Google's online advertising exchange. While the ad exchange is a small part of Google's business, the ruling is the second powerful symbolic victory against the U.S. Department of Justice in its efforts to force Google to sell assets to address illegal monopolies. U.S. Judge Leonie Brinkema in Alexandria, Virginia, declined to make Google sell AdX, where publishers pay Google a 20% fee to sell ads in auctions that happen instantly when users load websites. She accepted most of the parties' proposed behavioral remedies.
The DOJ and a broad coalition of states sued Google in 2023 over its dominance in markets for advertising technology used by online publishers and websites. In April 2025, Brinkema ruled that Google holds illegal monopolies on servers that host publisher ads and ad exchanges which sit between buyers and sellers. Google unlawfully locked publishers on its ad server into using its AdX, the judge found. The tech giant's anticompetitive conduct "substantially harmed Google's publisher customers, the competitive process, and, ultimately, consumers of information on the open web," Brinkema said at the time.
At a trial last year on remedies in the case, the DOJ argued that Google cannot be trusted to run AdX, given its past behavior. Google argued that a forced sale would be technically difficult and result in a long and painful transition that would hurt customers. During the remedies trial, Google's lawyers warned that forcing it to sell parts of its ad-tech business would cause disruption and damage. [...] The ruling is the third time in a row that a judge has rejected a bid by U.S. antitrust enforcers to break up Big Tech in a crackdown that started during President Donald Trump's first term. In another major Google antitrust case, a judge similarly rejected the DOJ's push to force Google to sell Chrome. It is likely to fuel questions about whether courts are up to the task of checking the industry's unprecedented power over the U.S. economy.
Four federal agencies have been sued amid calls to release information about the secret framework that the Trump administration uses to conduct safety reviews of frontier AI models prior to release.
In a Wednesday press release announcing the lawsuit, a nonpartisan nonprofit called Protect Democracy alleged that “almost no details” have been released to the public or Congress. To everyone except a few vague “trusted partners,” it remains unclear what the government’s review process looks like, which companies are involved in constructing the framework, or what legal authority Trump officials have to conduct the reviews.
“Neither the identities of those entities nor the criteria by which they were selected have been made public,” Protect Democracy said.
Uber is laying off about 3,300 employees, or roughly 10% of its workforce, as part of a restructuring aimed at cutting management layers and redirecting investment toward ridesharing, delivery, and robotaxis. CEO Dara Khosrowshahi announced the changes in an internal email that was also published online.TechCrunch reports: According to the email, the layoffs are part of a restructuring exercise that would shrink the number of managers by 20%, and some personnel in these roles would work as individual contributors going forward.
The ridesharing giant is reducing the number of teams with one or two members by 50%, and letting go staff who are "more than seven layers down from the CEO," per Bloomberg. Khosrowshahi's email said the company is combining its engineering, science, and delivery divisions. The company is also bringing together its delivery operations across restaurants, retail, and direct divisions.
Remote jobs at the company are going away, too, with Uber only allowing less than 1% of its staff to work remotely.
US court rules Google will not have to sell ad exchange after losing antitrust case
Posted on Sept. 2, 2026, 12:30 p.m. | Ars Technica
A US federal judge has sided with Google, ruling that the company will not have to sell its online advertising exchange (previously known as AdX). The US Department of Justice (DOJ) sought this remedy in the long-running ad tech antitrust trial, which Google lost in 2025. However, the remedies imposed upon Google for that loss are shaping up to be minimal.
In this case, the DOJ and a coalition of states sought to prove that Google leveraged its immense market power in online display ads to reduce the reach of competitors. Government lawyers argued that Google had "rigged" ad auctions to give itself an advantage. While the court agreed that Google illegally locked publishers into using its exchange, it did not agree that Google had broken the law when it came to the tools used by advertisers.
Despite the mixed ruling, the DOJ argued during the remedy phase that forcing Google to sell its ad exchange, which facilitates connections between ad buyers and sellers, was the best way to level the playing field. But that won't happen. While the ad exchange represents a relatively small part of Google's revenue, forcing the company to sell may have sent ripple effects through the rest of its ad business. It would also have been a powerful message to Big Tech firms, which have successfully knocked back a recent wave of antitrust cases.
A dark-web identity theft service called Nexus claims to be selling scans of more than 153 million U.S. and Canadian driver's licenses, along with millions of other identity documents. "Based on interviews with individuals whose licenses are available for purchase through the service, it appears to be siphoning images collected by a widely used Louisiana-based identity verification company," reports KrebsOnSecurity. The outlet also reports that the FBI's New Orleans field office has launched an official inquiry into the source of the images. From the report: On Monday, Aug. 31, a source alerted KrebsOnSecurity to a service advertised by a new user on the Russian cybercrime forum Exploit, offering access to digital scans of identity documents on more than 170 million people in North America. The source brought it to my attention because the proprietor of this identity theft service offered my Virginia drivers license as a free sample in their initial sales thread on Exploit. The service, dubbed Nexus, claims to have more than 153 million drivers licenses for people in the United States and Canada, as well as more than 10 million identification cards; more than three million travel documents and/or international IDs; and at least 579,000 medical cards.
[...] The people behind Nexus claim the license images are coming from an active breach at "a major identity verification company" whose customers include multiple Fortune 500 companies. "We have been continuously exfiltrating new data for over a year into our private database," the service enthused in its introductory post on Exploit. "Records are available to preview before purchase with pertinent information redacted. Customer photos are displayed if available." Indeed, over the past 24 hours, the number of drivers license records listed as available in Nexus has increased by nearly 400,000, suggesting that freshly stolen license data is being harvested and uploaded to this service on a semi-regular basis. KrebsOnSecurity traced the apparent source by comparing timestamps on stolen license images with when their owners had their IDs scanned, including at Hertz rental counters and a Planet13 dispensary. Both companies use identity-verification services from Louisiana-based idscan.net, whose technology also scans IDs using infrared and ultraviolet light.
Since the story was published, Krebs reports that the Nexus identity theft service website "vanished from the darkweb, replacing its login page with a plain text message that reads, 'This service is no longer available.'"
With Linux 7.3-rc1 out this week and marking the end of the merge window, it's onto a lot of Linux 7.3 performance testing at Phoronix and looking at all the new features of Linux 7.3. In today's article is a first look at the AMD EPYC Turin server performance on Linux 7.3-rc1 compared to Linux 7.2 stable with a few nice performance improvements to show.
Sir Clive Sinclair and his company were notorious for pushing the limits of electronic parts in search of a low price, and his ZX series 8-bit computers were fine examples of this art. The ZX81 came with a meagre 1K of memory, and a popular upgrade was a 16K RAM pack. [Happy Little Diodes] has opened one up, and to his surprise, found many more parts than expected.
Inside the box is a pair of PCBs connected by ribbon cables, one of which has a selection of 74 chips and the other the 4116 RAM chips and a discrete component power circuit. This complexity comes from that cheapness, the 4116 is an inexpensive DRAM chip and requires an eclectic set of power supplies.
The functions of address selection are straightforward enough, as is the DRAM refresh circuitry. The power supply is clever in that it’s a self-oscillating switcher that provides +12 and -5 volts with a single transistor. We particularly like the quench diode in the 12 V Zener diode regulator circuit.
The ZX81 gave a huge number of British kids their first taste of computing, and learning to use a limited memory space is something that stays with you for life. The film doesn’t mention the most notorious feature of the 16K pack though, that it had been developed with a machine clamped to the desk. Using one in a real-life location was an exercise in not jogging your machine, because the slightest disturbance would trigger a reset.
