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<title>Nautilus : slashdot selection</title>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php</link>
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<title><![CDATA[Trump Administration Begins Refunding $166 Billion In Tariffs]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/04/20/1711231</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/04/20/1711231</link>
<pubDate>2026-04-20</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				"After a Supreme Court of the United States ruling in Feb. 2026, many tariffs imposed by the Trump administration were declared illegal because the president overstepped his authority," writes Slashdot reader hcs_$reboot. "As a result, the U.S. government now has to refund a massive amount of money, around $160-170+ billion, paid mainly by importers." According to the New York Times, the administration has now begun accepting refund requests, "surrendering its prized source of revenue -- plus interest." From the report:  For some U.S. businesses, the highly anticipated refunds could be substantial, offering critical if belated financial relief. Tariffs are taxes on imports, so the president's trade policies have served as a great burden for companies that rely on foreign goods. Many have had to choose whether to absorb the duties, cut other costs or pass on the expenses to consumers. By Monday morning, those companies can begin to submit documentation to the government to recover what they paid in illegal tariffs.
 
In a sign of the demand, more than 3,000 businesses, including FedEx and Costco, have already sued the Trump administration in a bid to secure their refunds, with some cases filed even before the Supreme Court's ruling. But only the entities that officially paid the tariffs are eligible to recover that money. That means that the fuller universe of people affected by Mr. Trump's policies -- including millions of Americans who paid higher prices for the products they bought -- are not able to apply for direct relief.
 
The extent to which consumers realize any gain hinges on whether businesses share the proceeds, something that few have publicly committed to do. Some have started to band together in class-action lawsuits in the hopes of receiving a payout. Many business owners said they weren't sure how easy the tariff refund process would be, particularly given Mr. Trump's stated opposition to returning the money. The administration has suggested that it may be months before companies see any money. Adding to the uncertainty, the White House has declined to say if it might still try to return to court in a bid to halt some or all of the refunds.  The money will mostly go to importers and companies, since they were the ones that directly paid the tariffs. While individual refunds with interest could take around 60 to 90 days to process, the overall effort will probably move much more slowly because of how large and complicated it will be.
 
There are also legal questions around whether companies would have to pass any of that money on to consumers. Slashdot reader AmiMoJo commented: "This is perhaps the biggest transfer of wealth in American history. Most of those companies will just pocket the refund and not pass any of it on to the consumer. If prices go down at all, they won't be back to pre-tariff levels. You paid the tariffs, but you ain't getting the refund."
		
	
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<title><![CDATA[Brave Browser Introduces 'Origin', a Pay-Once 'Minimalist' Browser]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/04/20/0423212</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/04/20/0423212</link>
<pubDate>2026-04-20</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				The Brave browser "has introduced Brave Origin, a stripped-down version of its browser that removes built-in monetization features like Rewards and other extras tied to its business model," writes Slashdot reader BrianFagioli"
The stripped-down browser is available either as a separate browser download or as an upgrade to the existing Brave install, unlocked through a one-time purchase that can be activated across multiple devices. The idea is simple on paper: pay once, and you get a cleaner, more minimal browsing experience without the add-ons that fund Brave's ecosystem.  What makes the move unusual is the pricing model itself. While paying to support a browser is not controversial, charging users specifically to remove features raises questions about whether those additions are seen as value or clutter.  
The situation gets even stranger on Linux, where Brave Origin is reportedly available at no cost, creating an uneven experience across platforms and leaving some users wondering why they are being asked to pay for something others get for free.
		
	
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<title><![CDATA[Blue Origin Rocket Launches, Successfully Reuses Booster - But Loses Satellite]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/04/20/0248201</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/04/20/0248201</link>
<pubDate>2026-04-20</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				 SpaceNews reports:
Blue Origin's New Glenn suffered a malfunction of its second stage on the rocket's third flight April 19, stranding its payload in an unrecoverable "off-nominal" orbit and dealing the company a setback as it seeks to increase its flight rate...  AST SpaceMobile had planned to launch 45 to 60 satellites this year for its D2D constellation, but BlueBird 7 is the first to launch since BlueBird 6 launched on an Indian LVM3 rocket in December.
 
AST SpaceMobile still expects to have 45 satellites in orbit by the end of the year, the article notes.  (In an earnings call in March, AST SpaceMobile's CEO had promised they'd soon start "stacking" satellites, "batched in groups of either three, four, six or eight in a single launch.")  He'd added that "To support our launch cadence during 2026, we expect the New Glenn booster to be reused every 30 days or less..." 
There's some good news there, SpaceNews points out, since today saw the first successful reflight of a New Glenn first stage rocket:
The booster, called "Never Tell Me The Odds" by Blue Origin, touched down on the company's landing platform, Jacklyn, in the Atlantic Ocean nearly nine and a half minutes after liftoff. The booster launched NASA's ESCAPADE Mars mission on the NG-2 flight in November.   However, the booster reuse on NG-3 was only partial since the stage's biggest component, its BE-4 engines, was new. "With our first refurbished booster we elected to replace all seven engines and test out a few upgrades including a thermal protection system on one of the engine nozzles," Dave Limp, chief executive of Blue Origin, said in an April 13 social media post. "We plan to use the engines we flew for NG-2 on future flights."
 
The satellite will now be "de-orbited", AST SpaceMobile said in a statement.  (They added that "The cost of the satellite is expected to be recovered under the company's insurance policy.") 
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.
		
	
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<title><![CDATA[Voyager 1 is Running Out of Power.  NASA Just Switched Part of It Off]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/04/19/2346255</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/04/19/2346255</link>
<pubDate>2026-04-19</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				After 49  years of space travel, Voyager 1 "is running out of power," reports NPR:
The spacecraft runs on a radioisotope thermoelectric generator &mdash; a device that converts heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. It carries no solar panels, no rechargeable batteries. Just the slow, steady release of nuclear warmth, which diminishes by about 4 watts each year. After nearly five decades, that decline has become critical. 
During a routine maneuver in late February, Voyager 1's power levels fell unexpectedly, bringing the probe dangerously close to triggering an automatic fault-protection shutdown &mdash; a self-preservation response that would have forced engineers into a lengthy and risky recovery process. The team needed to act first.   On April 17, mission engineers sent a sequence of commands to deactivate the Low-energy Charged Particles experiment, known as the LECP, which is one of Voyager 1's remaining science instruments. The LECP has measured ions, electrons, and cosmic rays originating from both our solar system and the galaxy beyond it, helping scientists map the structure of interstellar space in a way no other instrument could...  
Voyager 1 now carries two operational science instruments: one that listens for plasma waves, and one that measures magnetic fields. Engineers believe the latest shutdown could buy the mission roughly another year of breathing room.   The team is also developing a more sweeping power conservation plan they informally call "the Big Bang" &mdash; a coordinated swap of several powered components all at once, trading older systems for lower-power alternatives. If testing on Voyager 2, planned for May and June 2026, goes well, the same procedure will be attempted on Voyager 1 no sooner than July. If it works, there is even a slim chance the LECP could once more continue to work. 
The engineers say they hope to keep at least one instrument operating on each spacecraft into the 2030s. It would leave both still reporting from places no machine has ever gone before.111 
Voyager 1 is now 15 billion miles from Earth, the article points out.  (Radio signals take 23 hours to arrive...) 
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the article.

		
	
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<title><![CDATA[Fructose Isn't Just Sugar. It Acts More Like a Hormone]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/04/18/0444250</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/04/18/0444250</link>
<pubDate>2026-04-18</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				Slashdot reader smazsyr writes: A new review says we've had fructose wrong for decades. The nine authors, led by Richard Johnson at the University of Colorado Anschutz, argue that fructose "is not just another calorie." It is a signal. It tells the liver to make fat and brace for a famine that never comes. That made sense for a bear fattening up on autumn berries. It makes less sense for a person drinking soda in March. 
The review reframes the WHO's sugar guideline, argues ScienceBlog.com, as "less a recommendation about calories and more a warning about a signalling molecule we have been dosing ourselves with, several times a day, for most of a century."
		
	
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<title><![CDATA[Artemis II Astronauts Splash Down Off California's Coast]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/04/11/0052229</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/04/11/0052229</link>
<pubDate>2026-04-11</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				NASA's Artemis II crew safely splashed down off the California coast after completing a 10-day trip around the moon and back. "This is not just an accomplishment for NASA," sad NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman. "This is an accomplishment for humanity, again, a historic mission to the moon and back." From a report:  Isaacman is aboard the USS John. P Murtha Navy recovery vessel, where the astronauts will be brought once they've been retrieved from the Orion capsule, and he shared "there is a lot to celebrate right now on on a mission well accomplished for Artemis II."
 
Isaacman also complimented the crew as "absolutely professional astronauts, wonderful communicators and almost poets" "" as well as "ambassadors from humanity to the stars." "I can't imagine a better crew than the Artemis II crew that just completed a perfect mission right now. We are back in the business of sending astronauts to the moon and bringing them back safely.
 
This is just the beginning. We are going to get back into doing this with frequency, sending missions to the moon until we land on it in 2028 and start building our base." Isaacman also said it's time to start preparing for Artemis III, expected to launch in 2027.  You can watch the moment of the splashdown here.
		
	
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<title><![CDATA[France's Government Is Ditching Windows For Linux]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/04/10/1545234</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/04/10/1545234</link>
<pubDate>2026-04-10</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				France says it plans to move some government computers from Windows to Linux as part of a broader push for digital sovereignty and reduced dependence on U.S. technology. TechCrunch reports:  In a statement, French minister David Amiel said (translated) that the effort was to "regain control of our digital destiny" by relying less on U.S. tech companies. Amiel said that the French government can no longer accept that it doesn't have control over its data and digital infrastructure. The French government did not provide a specific timeline for the switchover, or which distributions it was considering. Microsoft did not immediately comment on the news.
 
[...] France's decision to ditch Windows comes months after the government announced it would stop using Microsoft Teams for video conferencing in favor of French-made Visio, a tool based on the open source end-to-end encrypted video meeting tool Jitsi. The French government said it also plans to migrate its health data platform to a new trusted platform by the end of the year.
		
	
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<title><![CDATA[EFF Is Leaving X]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/04/09/1656219</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/04/09/1656219</link>
<pubDate>2026-04-09</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				After nearly 20 years on the platform, The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) says it is leaving X. "This isn't a decision we made lightly, but it might be overdue," the digital rights group said. "The math hasn't worked out for a while now." From the report:  We posted to Twitter (now known as X) five to ten times a day in 2018. Those tweets garnered somewhere between 50 and 100 million impressions per month. By 2024, our 2,500 X posts generated around 2 million impressions each month. Last year, our 1,500 posts earned roughly 13 million impressions for the entire year. To put it bluntly, an X post today receives less than 3% of the views a single tweet delivered seven years ago. [...]
 
When you go online, your rights should go with you. X is no longer where the fight is happening. The platform Musk took over was imperfect but impactful. What exists today is something else: diminished, and increasingly de minimis.
 
EFF takes on big fights, and we win. We do that by putting our time, skills, and our members' support where they will effect the most change. Right now, that means Bluesky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, YouTube, and eff.org. We hope you follow us there and keep supporting the work we do. Our work protecting digital rights is needed more than ever before, and we're here to help you take back control. 
		
	
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<title><![CDATA[NASA Launches Artemis II Astronauts Around the Moon]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/04/01/2250202</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/04/01/2250202</link>
<pubDate>2026-04-01</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				NASA's Artemis II mission has launched four astronauts around the moon and back, marking humanity's first crewed lunar voyage in 53 years and the first test flight of NASA's Orion capsule and Space Launch System (SLS) with people on board. Five minutes into the flight, Commander Reid Wiseman saw the team's target: "We have a beautiful moonrise, we're headed right at it," he said from the capsule. The Associated Press reports:  Artemis II set sail from the same Florida launch site that sent Apollo's explorers to the moon so long ago. The handful still alive cheered this next generation's grand adventure as the Space Launch System rocket thundered into the early evening sky, a nearly full moon beckoning some 248,000 miles (400,000 kilometers) away.
 
Artemis II commander Reid Wiseman led the charge into space with "Let's go to the moon!" accompanied by pilot Victor Glover, Christina Koch and Canada's Jeremy Hansen. It was the most diverse lunar crew ever with the first woman, person of color and non-U.S. citizen riding in NASA's new Orion capsule.
 
Carrying three Americans and one Canadian, the 32-story rocket rose from NASA's Kennedy Space Center where tens of thousands gathered to witness the dawn of this new era. Crowds also jammed the surrounding roads and beaches, reminiscent of the Apollo moonshots in the 1960s and '70s. It is NASA's biggest step yet toward establishing a permanent lunar presence.  Visit NASA's Artemis II Launch Day blog for the latest updates.
 
 Developing... 
		
	
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<title><![CDATA[AI Data Centers Can Warm Surrounding Areas By Up To 9.1C]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/03/30/2337240</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/03/30/2337240</link>
<pubDate>2026-03-30</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				An anonymous reader quotes a report from New Scientist: Andrea Marinoni at the University of Cambridge, UK, and his colleagues saw that the amount of energy needed to run a data centre had been steadily increasing of late and was likely to "explode" in the coming years, so wanted to quantify the impact. The researchers took satellite measurements of land surface temperatures over the past 20 years and cross-referenced them against the geographical coordinates of more than 8400 AI data centers. Recognizing that surface temperature could be affected by other factors, the researchers chose to focus their investigation on data centers located away from densely populated areas.
 
They discovered that land surface temperatures increased by an average of 2C (3.6F) in the months after an AI data center started operations. In the most extreme cases, the increase in temperature was 9.1C (16.4F). The effect wasn't limited to the immediate surroundings of the data centers: the team found increased temperatures up to 10 kilometers away. Seven kilometers away, there was only a 30 percent reduction in the intensity. "The results we had were quite surprising," says Marinoni. "This could become a huge problem."
 
Using population data, the researchers estimate that more than 340 million people live within 10 kilometers of data centers, so live in a place that is warmer than it would be if the data centre hadn't been built there. Marinoni says that areas including the Bajio region in Mexico and the Aragon province in Spain saw a 2C (3.6F) temperature increase in the 20 years between 2004 and 2024 that couldn't otherwise be explained. University of Bristol researcher Chris Preist said the findings may be more complicated than they look. "It would be worth doing follow-up research to understand to what extent it's the heat generated from computation versus the heat generated from the building itself," he says. For example, the building being heated by sunlight may be part of the effect.
 
The findings of the study, which has not yet been peer-reviewed, can be found on arXiv.
		
	
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<title><![CDATA['Project Hail Mary':  Real Space Science, Real Astrophotography]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/03/29/2216247</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/03/29/2216247</link>
<pubDate>2026-03-29</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				Project Hail Mary has now grossed $300.8 million globally after earning another $54.1 million this weekend from 86 markets, reports Variety, noting that after just nine days it's now Amazon MGM's highest-grossing film ever.    And last weekend it had the best opening for a "non-franchise" movie in three years, adds the Associated Press &mdash; the best since 2023's Oppenheimer:

Project Hail Mary, which cost nearly $200 million to produce... is on an enviable trajectory. Its second weekend hold was even better than that of Oppenheimer, which collected $46.7 million in its follow-up frame.
 
But the movie is based on a book by The Martian author Andy Weir, described by one news outlet as "a former software engineer and self-proclaimed 'lifelong space nerd'... known for his realistic and clear-eyed approach to scientifically technical stories."

Project Hail Mary has plenty of real science in it, whether it be space mathematics, physics, or astrobiology...  The film's namesake project is even comprised of the space programs of other nations, such as Roscosmos from Russia, the Chinese space program, and the European Space Agency... 
The story relies on work NASA has done regarding exoplanets, or planets outside our solar system...  [This includes a nearby star named Tau Ceti approximately 12 light years from Earth which is orbited by four planets &mdash; two once thought to be in "the habitable zone" where liquid water can exist.] Tau Ceti has long been the setting used by sci-fi authors and storytellers. Isaac Asimov used it for his  Robot series. Arthur C. Clarke's "Rama" spacecraft came across a mysterious tetrahedron in the Tau Ceti system. Authors Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson also set stories in Tau Ceti, and it also serves as the extrasolar setting of the 1968 Jane Fonda film Barbarella. Most recently, the Bungie video game Marathon is set in the far-off system, serving as part of the background story for the extraction shooter, about a large-scale plan to colonize the Tau Ceti system. 
The movie also mentions 40 Eridani A, according to the article, a real star about 16 light-years away that was said to be orbited by the fictional planet Vulcan, home to Star Trek's Mr. Spock,  and mentioned in Frank Herbert's Dune as the planet of at least one alien species.  
And in a video on IMAX's YouTube channel, the film's directors explain how for a crucial scene they used non-visible-light photography, which is also an important part of modern astronomy. "Even the credits incorporate real astrophotography into the final moments," the article points out, using the work of award-winning Australian astrophotographer Rod Prazeres.  "The only difference between his work of capturing space data in images and what ended up on the big screen was that he gave them 'starless versions' of his photographs to make it easier to place credit text over them." 
Prazeres wrote on his web site that he was touched the producers "wanted the real thing... In a world where CGI and AI are everywhere, it meant a lot..."
		
	
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<title><![CDATA[Researchers At CERN Transport Antiprotons By Truck In World-First Experiment]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/03/26/065258</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/03/26/065258</link>
<pubDate>2026-03-26</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				An anonymous reader quotes a report from Physics World: Researchers at the CERN particle-physics lab have successfully transported antiprotons in a lorry across the lab's main site. The feat, the first of its kind, follows a similar test with protons in 2024. CERN says the achievement is "a huge leap" towards being able to transport antimatter between labs across Europe. [...] To do so, in 2020 the BASE team began developing a device, known as BASE-STEP (for Baryon-Antibaryon Symmetry Experiment-Symmetry Tests in Experiments with Portable Antiprotons), to store and transport antiprotons. It works by trapping particles in a Penning trap composed of gold-plated cylindrical electrode stacks made from oxygen-free copper that is surrounded by a superconducting magnet bore operated at cryogenic temperatures.
 
The device, which also contains a carbon-steel vacuum chamber to shield the particles from stray magnetic fields, is then mounted on an aluminium frame. This allows it to be transported using standard forklifts and cranes and withstand the bumps and vibrations of transport. In 2024, BASE researchers used the device to transport a cloud of about 105 trapped protons across CERN's Meyrin campus for four hours. After that feat, the researchers began to adjust BASE-STEP to handle antiprotons and yesterday the team successfully transported a trap containing a cloud of 92 antiprotons around the campus for 30 minutes, traveling up to 42 km/h.
 
With further improvements and tests, the team now hope to transport the antiprotons further afield. The first destination on the team's list is the Heinrich Heine University (HHU) in Dusseldorf, Germany, which would take about eight hours. "This means we'd have to keep the trap's superconducting magnet at a temperature below 8.2 K for that long," says BASE-STEP's leader Christian Smorra. "So, in addition to the liquid helium , we'd need to have a generator to power a cryocooler on the truck. We are currently investigating this possibility." If possible to transport to HHU, physicists would then use the particles to search for charge-parity-time violations in protons and antiprotons with a precision at least 100 times higher than currently possible at CERN.
		
	
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<title><![CDATA[Wine 11 Rewrites How Linux Runs Windows Games At the Kernel Level]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/03/24/1946246</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/03/24/1946246</link>
<pubDate>2026-03-24</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				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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<title><![CDATA[CachyOS Dethrones Arch As ProtonDB's Top Linux Gamer Desktop Distro]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/03/15/2048241</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/03/15/2048241</link>
<pubDate>2026-03-15</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				Linux gaming "has gotten to the point where some people claim that Linux runs their games better than Windows does," according to the Android site XDA Developers.  And there's a new surprise on ProtonDB, an "unofficial" community website with crowdsourced data about videogame compatability with the Linux software/gaming compatability layer Proton:

On ProtonDB, one operating system had reigned supreme since 2021: Arch Linux. And I say 'had,' because its streak has just been ended by [Arch-based] CachyOS in an upset that has slowly grown over the past two years.  As reported on Boiling Steam, the number of reports coming from CachyOS has topped that of Arch Linux, which held the crown for the most number of reports since 2021...   
[T]his isn't really a statement that CachyOS is the best gaming distro out there; however, it's seemingly attracting the largest number of gamers who are invested in testing games on Proton and reporting their performance, which is a pretty big milestone if you ask me.

		
	
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<title><![CDATA[Digg Relaunch Fails]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/03/13/1953248</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/03/13/1953248</link>
<pubDate>2026-03-13</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				sdinfoserv writes:  After running a Reddit clone for a couple of months, the Digg beta shut down again. The website is a splash memo from CEO Justin Mezzell, blaming the latest "Hard Reset" on bots.  "Building on the internet in 2026 is different," writes Mezzell. "We learned that the hard way. Today we're sharing difficult news: we've made the decision to significantly downsize the Digg team..."
 
The decision was made after struggling to gain traction and an overwhelming influx of AI-driven bots and spam. "When the Digg beta launched, we immediately noticed posts from SEO spammers noting that Digg still carried meaningful Google link authority," says Mezzell. "Within hours, we got a taste of what we'd only heard rumors about. The internet is now populated, in meaningful part, by sophisticated AI agents and automated accounts. We knew bots were part of the landscape, but we didn't appreciate the scale, sophistication, or speed at which they'd find us."
 
"We banned tens of thousands of accounts. We deployed internal tooling and industry-standard external vendors. None of it was enough. When you can't trust that the votes, the comments, and the engagement you're seeing are real, you've lost the foundation a community platform is built on."
 
Despite the setback, Digg plans to rebuild with a smaller team, with founder Kevin Rose returning to work full-time on a new direction for the platform. "Starting the first week of April, Kevin will be putting his focus back on the company he built twenty+ years ago," writes Mezzell. "He'll continue as an advisor to True Ventures, but Digg will be his primary focus."
 
Slashback: The Rise of Digg.com
		
	
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<title><![CDATA[Microsoft Bans 'Microslop' On Its Discord, Then Locks the Server]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/03/02/1847201</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/03/02/1847201</link>
<pubDate>2026-03-02</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				Over the weekend, Windows Latest noticed that Microsoft's official Copilot Discord server began automatically blocking the term "Microslop." As shown in a screenshot, any message containing the word is automatically prevented from posting, and users receive a moderation notice explaining that the message includes language deemed inappropriate under the server's rules. From the report:  Windows Latest found that sending a message with the word "Microslop" inside the official Copilot Discord server immediately triggers an automated moderation response. The message does not appear publicly in the channel, and instead, only the sender sees the notice stating that the content is blocked by the server because it contains a phrase deemed inappropriate.
 
Of course, the internet rarely leaves things there. Shortly after Windows Latest posted about Copilot Discord server blocking Microslop on X, users began experimenting in the server with variations such as "Microsl0p" using a zero instead of the letter "o." Predictably, those versions slipped past the filter. Keyword moderation has always been something of a cat-and-mouse game, and this isn't any different.
 
What started as a simple keyword filter quickly snowballed into users deliberately testing the restriction and posting variations of the blocked term. Accounts that included "Microslop" in their messages first got banned from messaging again. Not long after, access to parts of the server was restricted, with message history hidden and posting permissions disabled for many users. 
		
	
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<title><![CDATA[Discord Distances Itself From Persona Age Verification After User Backlash]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/02/24/1457221</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/02/24/1457221</link>
<pubDate>2026-02-24</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				Discord is attempting to distance itself from the age verification provider Persona following a steady stream of user backlash. From a report: In an emailed statement to The Verge, Discord's head of product policy, Savannah Badalich, confirms the company "ran a limited test of Persona in the UK where age assurance had previously launched and that test has since concluded." 
After Discord announced plans to implement age verification globally starting next month, users across social media accused Discord of "lying" about how it plans on handling face scans and ID uploads. Much of the criticism was directed toward Discord's partnership with Persona, an age verification provider also used by Reddit and Roblox.
		
	
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<title><![CDATA[New Raspberry Pi 4 Model Splits RAM Across Dual Chips]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/02/09/0644255</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/02/09/0644255</link>
<pubDate>2026-02-09</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				The blog OMG Ubuntu reports that a new version of the Raspberry Pi 4 Model B has been (quietly) introduced. "The key difference? It now uses a dual-RAM configuration."

The Raspberry Pi 4 Model B (PCB 13a) adopts a dual-RAM configuration to 'improve supply chain flexibility' and manufacturing efficiency, per a company product change notice document. Earlier versions of the Raspberry Pi 4 use a single RAM chip on the top of the board. The new revision adds a second LPDDR4 chip to the underside, with a couple of passive components also moved over...  In moving to a dual-chip layout, Raspberry Pi can combine two smaller &mdash; and marginally cheaper &mdash; modules to hit the same RAM totals amidst fluctuating component costs... 
This change will not impact performance (for better or worse). The Broadcom BCM2711 SoC has a 32-bit wide memory interface so the bandwidth stays identical; this is not doubling the memory bus, it's just a physical split, not a logical one.  Plus, the new board is fully compatible with existing official accessories, HATs and add-ons. All operating systems that support the Pi 4 will work, but as the memory setup is different a new version of the boot-loader will need to be flashed first. 
		
	
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<title><![CDATA[Scientists Explored Island Cave, Found 1 Million-Year-Old Remnants a Lost World]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/02/08/0616224</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/02/08/0616224</link>
<pubDate>2026-02-08</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				"A spectacular trove of fossils in a discovered in a cave on New Zealand's North Island has given scientists their first glimpse of ancient forest species that lived there more than a million years ago," reports Popular Mechanics:

The fossils represent 12 ancient bird species and four frog species, including several previously unknown bird species. Taken together, the fossils paint a picture of an ancient world that looks drastically different than it does today. The discovery also fills in an important gap in scientific understanding of the patterns of extinction that preceded human arrival in New Zealand 750 years ago.
The team published a study on the find in Alcheringa: An Australasian Journal of Palaeontology.
 
Trevor Worthy, lead study author and associate professor at Flinders University, said in a statement that "This remarkable find suggests our ancient forests were once home to a diverse group of birds that did not survive the next million years... 
"For decades, the extinction of New Zealand's birds was viewed primarily through the lens of human arrival 750 years ago. This study proves that natural forces like super-volcanoes and dramatic climate shifts were already sculpting the unique identity of our wildlife over a million years ago."  
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot for sharing the article.

		
	
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<title><![CDATA[Brookhaven Lab Shuts Down Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC)]]></title>
<guid isPermaLink="false">slashdot_26/02/08/0545244</guid>
<link>https://electriccafe.org/slashdot.php?id=slashdot_26/02/08/0545244</link>
<pubDate>2026-02-08</pubDate>
<description><![CDATA[				2001:  "Brookhaven Labs has produced for the first time collisions of gold nuclei at a center of mass energy of 200GeV/nucleon." 
2002:  "There may be a new type of matter according to researchers at Brookhaven National Laboratory." 
2010:  The hottest man-made temperatures ever achived were a record 4 trillion degree plasma experiment at Brookhaven National Laboratory in New York... anointed the Guinness record holder."  
2023: "Scientists at Brookhaven National Laboratory have uncovered an entirely new kind of quantum entanglement."  
2026:  On Friday, February 6, "a control room full of scientists, administrators and members of the press gathered" at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) at Brookhaven National Lab in Upton, New York to witness its final collisions, reports Scientific American:

The vibe had been wistful, but the crowd broke into applause as Dar&iacute;o Gil, the Under Secretary for Science at the U.S. Department of Energy, pressed a red button to end the collider's quarter-century saga...    "I'm really sad" [said Angelika Drees, a BNL accelerator physicist].  "It was such a beautiful experiment and my research home for 27 years. But we're going to put something even better there."  
That "something" will be a far more powerful electron-ion collider to further push the frontiers of physics, extend RHIC's legacy and maintain the lab's position as a center of discovery. This successor will be built in part from RHIC's bones, especially from one of its two giant, subterranean storage rings that once held the retiring collider's supply of circulating, near-light speed nuclei...slated for construction over the next decade. [That Electron-Ion Collider, or EIC] will utilize much of RHIC's infrastructure, replacing one of its ion rings with a new ring for cycling electrons. The EIC will use those tiny, fast-flying electrons as tiny knives for slicing open the much larger gold ions. Physicists will get an unrivaled look into the workings of quarks and gluons and yet another chance to grapple with nature's strongest force.  "We knew for the EIC to happen, RHIC needed to end," says Wolfram Fischer, who chairs BNL's collider-accelerator department. "It's bittersweet." 
EIC will be the first new collider built in the US since RHIC. To some, it signifies the country's reentry into a particle physics landscape it has largely ceded to Europe and Asia over the past two decades. "For at least 10 or 15 years," says Abhay Deshpande, BNL's associate laboratory director for nuclear and particle physics, "this will be the number one place in the world for [young physicists] to come."
 
The RHIC was able "to separately send two protons colliding with precisely aligned spins &mdash; something that, even today, no other experiment has yet matched," the article points out:

During its record-breaking 25-year run, RHIC illuminated nature's thorniest force and its most fundamental constituents.   It created the heaviest, most elaborate assemblages of antimatter ever seen. It nearly put to rest a decades-long crisis over the proton's spin. And, of course, it brought physicists closer to the big bang than ever before... 
When RHIC at last began full operations in 2000, its initial heavy-ion collisions almost immediately pumped out quark-gluon plasma. But demonstrating this beyond a shadow of a doubt proved in some respects more challenging than actually creating the elusive plasma itself, with the case for success strengthening as RHIC's numbers of collisions soared. By 2010 RHIC's scientists were confident enough to declare that the hot soup they'd been studying for a decade was hot and soupy enough to convincingly constitute a quark-gluon plasma. And it was even weirder than they thought. Instead of the gas of quarks and gluons theorists expected, the plasma acted like a swirling liquid unprecedented in nature. It was nearly "perfect," with zero friction, and set a new record for twistiness, or "vorticity."  For Paul Mantica, a division director for the Facilities and Project Management Division in the DOE's Office of Nuclear Physics, this was the highlight of RHIC's storied existence. "It was paradigm-changing," he says... 
Data from the final run (which began nearly a year ago) has already produced yet another discovery: the first-ever direct evidence of "virtual particles" in RHIC's subatomic puffs of quark-gluon plasma, constituting an unprecedented probe of the quantum vacuum.
 
RHIC's last run generated hundreds of petabytes of data, the article points out, meaning its final smash "isn't really the end; even when its collisions stop, its science will live on." 
But Science News notes RHIC's closure "marks the end for the only particle collider operating in the United States, and the only collider of its kind in the world. Most particle accelerators are unable to steer two particle beams to crash head-on into one another."
		
	
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