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An Anonymous Coward writes:

Over 3,200 backers secure the future of Jolla's upcoming Linux phone, pushing the project beyond its initial funding milestone:

Just a few days ago, we reported on Jolla's push for a new Linux phone, which needed at least 2,000 pre-orders to move forward. Now, only days later, there's good news: interest in the device has surpassed all expectations.

Jolla's community-funded smartphone project has cleared its production threshold, securing more than 3,200 pre-orders. The strong response ensures that the new Linux phone, developed under the Do It Together (DIT) model, will move forward into manufacturing, with Batch #1 already sold out and Batch #2 now available.

The device is positioned as an independent European Linux phone shaped directly by its users. Pre-orders require a €99 refundable deposit, deducted from the final price of €549 for Batch #2. Markets include the EU, UK, Norway, and Switzerland. According to Jolla, Batch #1 sold out in under 48 hours.

Let's recall the device's hardware specifications. It features a 6.36-inch Full HD AMOLED display, 12GB of RAM, 256GB of storage with microSD expansion, and a high-performance 5G MediaTek platform, powered by Sailfish OS, a privacy-focused Linux-based mobile operating system that offers an alternative to mainstream Android and iOS.

The phone also includes a 50MP main camera, user-replaceable 5,500mAh battery, dual nano-SIM support, Wi-Fi 6, NFC, and a fingerprint reader, as Jolla guarantees a minimum of five years of OS updates and availability of spare components, including back covers and batteries.

The pre-order campaign remains open until January 4, 2026, but once again, the funding goal has already been exceeded by a wide margin, reaching roughly 160 percent. Production will commence once Batch #1 is delivered, with first units expected by the end of the first half of 2026.

For more information, visit Jolla's website.

Previously: New Jolla Phone Now Available for Pre-Order as an Independent Linux Phone

Original Submission

upstart writes:

The National Center for Atmospheric Research has played a leading role in providing data, modelling and supercomputing to researchers around the world – but the Trump administration is set to shut it down:

The Trump administration's decision to close a world-leading research centre for atmospheric science is a blow to weather forecasting and climate modelling that could leave humanity more exposed to the impacts of global warming.

In a statement to USA Today, White House official Russ Vought said the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is a source of "climate alarmism" and will be broken up. "Green new scam research" will be eliminated, while "vital functions" like weather modelling and supercomputing will be moved elsewhere, the White House said.

NCAR's models underpin the reports of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which countries rely on for decisions about how to reduce carbon emissions and adapt to extreme weather.

"Shutting it down would lead to greater uncertainty about what our climate future might be and leave us less able to prepare effectively," says Michael Meredith at the British Antarctic Survey. "It's hard to see this as anything other than shooting the messenger."

NCAR was started in 1960 to facilitate atmospheric science too large-scale for individual universities. Its 830 employees are involved in research "from the ocean floor to the Sun's core", according to its unofficial motto, with programmes to monitor everything from flooding and wildfires to space weather.

At its hilltop laboratory in the Colorado Rockies, NCAR invented the GPS dropsonde, a sensor-laden device that is dropped into hurricanes, revolutionising our understanding of tropical storms. Its researchers developed wind-shear warning systems for airports that have prevented countless crashes.

But perhaps its greatest contribution has been providing data, modelling and supercomputing to other researchers. Weather Underground, which in the 1990s was one of the first to offer local forecasts online, wouldn't have existed without software and weather data from NCAR, according to its founder, meteorologist Jeff Masters.

fliptop writes:

A California-based aerospace startup, Reflect Orbital, has ignited intense debate within the scientific community by proposing an ambitious plan to "sell sunlight" using massive mirrors placed in low Earth orbit:

The company's concept involves deploying large reflective satellites that could redirect sunlight onto specific locations on Earth during nighttime hours.

According to Live Science Plus, this technology could provide artificial illumination to extend daylight, boost agricultural productivity, or allow solar panels to operate after sunset.

Reflect Orbital has filed an application with the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to launch its first experimental satellite, known as EARENDIL-1, as early as 2026. If approved and expanded, the company envisions deploying as many as 4,000 orbital mirrors by the end of the decade.

Each mirror would reportedly unfold to approximately 59 feet (18 meters) across and could illuminate an area on Earth roughly 3 miles (5 kilometers) wide.

Reflect Orbital claims the reflected light could be "up to four times brighter than the full moon," with future iterations potentially becoming even larger and more powerful.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://therecord.media/spotify-disables-scraping-annas

Spotify responded on Monday to an open-source group's decision to publish files over the weekend containing 86 million tracks scraped from the music streaming platform.

Anna's Archive, which calls itself the "largest truly open library in human history," said on Saturday that it discovered a way to scrape Spotify's files and subsequently released a database of metadata and songs.

A spokesperson for Spotify told Recorded Future News that it "has identified and disabled the nefarious user accounts that engaged in unlawful scraping."

"We've implemented new safeguards for these types of anti-copyright attacks and are actively monitoring for suspicious behavior," the spokesperson said. "Since day one, we have stood with the artist community against piracy, and we are actively working with our industry partners to protect creators and defend their rights."

The spokesperson added that Anna's Archive did not contact them before publishing the files. They also said it did not consider the incident a "hack" of Spotify. The people behind the leaked database systematically violated Spotify's terms by stream-ripping some of the music from the platform over a period of months, a spokesperson said.

They did this through user accounts set up by a third party and not by accessing Spotify's business systems, they added.

Anna's Archive published a blog post about the cache this weekend, writing that while it typically focuses its efforts on text, its mission to preserve humanity's knowledge and culture "doesn't distinguish among media types."

"Sometimes an opportunity comes along outside of text. This is such a case. A while ago, we discovered a way to scrape Spotify at scale. We saw a role for us here to build a music archive primarily aimed at preservation," they said.

"This Spotify scrape is our humble attempt to start such a 'preservation archive' for music. Of course Spotify doesn't have all the music in the world, but it's a great start."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Several of Proton's products could be headed elsewhere in Europe in the wake of proposed surveillance laws:

Proton has confirmed the company has begun moving out of Switzerland due to "legal uncertainty" over the newly proposed surveillance law.

Proton's newly launched privacy-first AI chatbot, Lumo, has become the first product to change home yet, "investing in Europe does not equate to leaving Switzerland," a company spokesperson told TechRadar, amid rumors it's exiting the country for good.

The firm behind one of the best VPN and encrypted email services has been very critical of the Swiss government's proposed amendment of its surveillance law since the beginning, already sharing plans to quit Switzerland back in May.

If it passes, the Ordinance on the Surveillance of Correspondence by Post and Telecommunications (OSCPT) will introduce new obligations for virtual private networks (VPNs), messaging apps, and social networks. These measures include mandatory user identification and data retention of up to six months for all services with at least 5,000 users. Providers will also be required to decrypt the communication upon the authorities' request should they own encryption keys.

Lumo – the first to go

Proton launched its ChatGPT competitor, Lumo, in July 2025, to give its users an alternative to Big Tech solutions that truly protect their privacy.

In a blog post about the launch, Proton's Head of Anti-Abuse and Account Security, Eamonn Maguire, explains that the company has decided to invest outside Switzerland for fear of the looming legal changes.

He wrote: "Because of legal uncertainty around Swiss government proposals to introduce mass surveillance – proposals that have been outlawed in the EU – Proton is moving most of its physical infrastructure out of Switzerland. Lumo will be the first product to move."

Talking to a Swiss publication after the launch, Proton's CEO Andy Yen confirmed that the proposed changes to the Swiss surveillance law made the company opt for Germany instead to host Lumo's servers. Proton has also confirmed it's also developing facilities in Norway.

hubie writes:

Beware of OpenAI's 'Grantwashing' on AI Harms:

This month, OpenAI announced "up to $2 million" in funding for research studies on AI safety and well-being. At its surface, this may seem generous, but following in the footsteps of other tech giants facing scrutiny over their products' mental health impacts, it's nothing more than grantwashing.

This industry practice commits a pittance to research that is doomed to be ineffective due to information and resources that companies hold back. When grantwashing works, it compromises the search for answers. And that's an insult to anyone whose loved one's death involved chatbots.

OpenAI's pledge came a week after the company's lawyers argued that the company isn't to blame in the death of a California teenager who ChatGPT encouraged to commit suicide. In the company's attempt to disclaim responsibility in court, they even requested a list of invitees to the teen's memorial and video footage of the service and the people there. In the last year, OpenAI and other generative AI companies have been accused of causing numerous deaths and psychotic breaks by encouraging people into suicide, feeding delusions, and giving them risky instructions.

As scientists who study developmental psychology and AI, we agree that society urgently needs better science on AI and mental health. The company has recruited a group of genuinely credible scientists to give them closed-door advice on the issue, like so many other companies accused of causing harm. But OpenAI's funding announcement reveals how small a fig leaf they think will persuade a credulous public.

Look at the size of the grants. High quality public health research on mental health harms requires a sequence of studies, large sample sizes, access to clinical patients, and an ethics safety net that supports people at risk. The median research project grant from the National Institutes of Mental Health in 2024 was $642,918. In contrast, OpenAI is offering a measly $5,000 to $100,000 to researchers studying AI and mental health, one sixth of a typical NIMH grant at best.

Despite the good ideas Open AI suggests, the company is holding back the resource that would contribute most to science on those questions: records about their systems and how people use their products. OpenAI's researchers have purportedly developed ways to identify users who potentially face mental health distress. A well-designed data access program would accelerate the search for answers while preserving privacy and protecting vulnerable users. European regulators are still deciding if OpenAI will face data access requirements under the Digital Services Act, but OpenAI doesn't have to wait for Europe.

We have seen this playbook before from other companies. In 2019, Meta announced a series of fifty thousand dollar grants to six scientists studying Instagram, safety, and well being. Even as the company touted its commitment to science on user well-being, Meta's leaders were pressuring internal researchers to "amend their research to limit Meta's potential liability," according to a recent ruling in the D.C. Superior Court.

turgid writes:

The Register reports that UNIX V4, the first with the kernel written in C, has been recovered, restored and run.

The source code and binaries were recovered from a 1970s-vintage nine-track tape and posted to the Internet Archive where it can be downloaded.

It's very small: it contains around 55,000 lines of code, of which about 25,000 lines are in C, with under 1,000 lines of comments. But then, the late Dennis M. Ritchie and co-creator Ken Thompson were very definitely Real Programmers, and as is recorded in ancient wisdom: "Real Programmers don't need comments – the code is obvious."

For those who don't already know:

UNIX started out as a quick hack by two geniuses in their spare time, so that they could use a spare computer – an extremely rare thing in the 1960s – to run a simulation game flying the player around a 2D of the Solar System that one of them had written. It was called Space Travel.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://therecord.media/south-korea-facial-recognition-phones

South Korea will begin requiring people to submit to facial recognition when signing up for a new mobile phone number in a bid to fight scams, the Ministry of Science and ICT announced Friday.

The effort is meant to block people from illegally registering devices used for identity theft.

The plan reportedly applies to the country's three major mobile carriers and mobile virtual network operators. The new policy takes effect on March 23 after a pilot that will begin this week.

"By comparing the photo on an identification card with the holder's actual face on a real-time basis, we can fully prevent the activation of phones registered under a false name using stolen or fabricated IDs," the ministry reportedly said in a press release.

In August, South Korean officials unveiled a plan to combat voice phishing scams that included harsher penalties for mobile carriers that do not sufficiently act to prevent the scams were reportedly a central feature of that plan.

South Korea has been plagued by voice phishing scams, with 21,588 reported as of November, the ministry said.

In April, South Korea's SK Telecom was hacked and SIM card data belonging to nearly 27 million subscribers was stolen.

Privacy regulators determined the telecom "did not even implement basic access control," allowing hackers to take authentication data and subscriber information on a mass basis.

Original Submission

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://linuxiac.com/phoenix-emerges-as-a-modern-x-server-written-from-scratch-in-zig/

Phoenix is a new X server written from scratch in Zig, aiming to modernize X11 without relying on Xorg code.

Although Wayland has largely replaced Xorg, and most major Linux distributions and desktop environments have either already dropped support for the aging display protocol or are in the process of doing so, efforts to extend Xorg's life or replace it with similar alternatives continue. Recent examples include projects such as XLibre Xserver and Wayback. And now, a new name is joining this group: Phoenix.

It is a new X server project that takes a fundamentally different approach to X11. Written entirely from scratch in the Zig programming language, it is not yet another fork of the Xorg codebase and does not reuse its legacy code. Instead, according to devs, Phoenix aims to show that the X11 protocol itself is not inherently obsolete and can be implemented in a simpler, safer, and more modern way.

Phoenix is designed for real desktop and professional use, not for full protocol coverage. It supports only the X11 features that modern applications need, including older software like GTK2-based programs. By omitting rarely used or outdated parts, Phoenix keeps things simpler while still supporting many applications.

Right now, Phoenix is still experimental and not ready for daily use. It can run simple, hardware-accelerated apps using GLX, EGL, or Vulkan, but only in a nested setup under another X server. This will stay the case until the project is ready for more demanding use.

On the security side, which is actually one of the aspects for which Xorg receives the most criticism, Phoenix isolates applications by default, and access to sensitive capabilities such as screen recording or global hotkeys is mediated through explicit permission mechanisms. Importantly, this is done without breaking existing clients, as unauthorized access attempts return dummy data rather than protocol errors.

Under the hood, Phoenix includes a built-in compositor that enables tear-free rendering by default, supports disabling compositing for full-screen applications, and is designed to reduce compositor and vsync latency. Proper multi-monitor support is a priority, allowing different refresh rates, variable refresh rate displays, and future HDR support without relying on a single global framebuffer.

hubie writes:

The experiment showed that physical violence is not necessary to scare off gulls:

Shouting at seagulls makes them more likely to leave your food alone, research shows.

University of Exeter researchers put a closed Tupperware box of chips on the ground to pique herring gulls' interest.

Once a gull approached, they played either a recording of a male voice shouting the words, "No, stay away, that's my food", the same voice speaking those words, or the 'neutral' birdsong of a robin.

They tested a total of 61 gulls across nine seaside towns in Cornwall and found that nearly half of those gulls exposed to the shouting voice flew away within a minute.

Only 15% of the gulls exposed to the speaking male voice flew away, while the rest walked away from the food, still sensing danger.

In contrast, 70% of gulls exposed to the robin song stayed near the food for the duration of the experiment.

"We found that urban gulls were more vigilant and pecked less at the food container when we played them a male voice, whether it was speaking or shouting," said Dr Neeltje Boogert of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at Exeter's Penryn Campus in Cornwall.

"But the difference was that the gulls were more likely to fly away at the shouting and more likely to walk away at the speaking.

"So when trying to scare off a gull that's trying to steal your food, talking might stop them in their tracks but shouting is more effective at making them fly away."

The recordings, in which five male volunteers recorded themselves uttering the same phrase in a calm speaking voice and, separately, in a shouting voice, were adjusted to be at the same volume, which suggests gulls can detect differences in the acoustic properties of human voices.

"Normally when someone is shouting, it's scary because it's a loud noise, but in this case all the noises were the same volume, and it was just the way the words were being said that was different," said Dr Boogert.

"So it seems that gulls pay attention to the way we say things, which we don't think has been seen before in any wild species, only in those domesticated species that have been bred around humans for generations, such as dogs, pigs and horses."

An Anonymous Coward writes:

Engineer turns E-ink tablet into computer monitor in Linux — perfect secondary reading screen to reduce eye strain over the network

E-ink enjoyers can upgrade old tablets into part of the desktop experience using a simple server setup

While the traditional computer monitor is a tried-and-true standard, many who use screens insist on a higher standard of readability and eye comfort. For these happy few screen enthusiasts, a recent project and tutorial from software engineer Alireza Alavi offers Linux users the ability to add an E-ink display to their desktop by reusing an existing E-ink tablet.

The project turns an E-ink tablet into a mirrored clone of an existing second display in a desktop setup. Using VNC for network remote control of a computer, this implementation turns the E-ink tablet into both a display and an input device, opening up options from being used as a primarily reading and writing display to also being usable as a drawing tablet or other screen-as-input-device use cases.

The example video above [in article] shows Alavi using the E-ink display as an additional monitor, first to write his blog post about the VNC protocol, then to read a lengthy document. The tablet runs completely without a wired connection, as VNC sharing happens over the network and thus enables a fully wireless monitor experience. The second screen, seen behind the tablet, reveals the magic by displaying the source of the tablet's output.

Many readers will correctly observe that the latency and lag on the E-ink tablet are a bit higher than desirable for a display. This is not due to the streaming connection's efficacy, but rather to the slowness that stems from the old age of the Boox tablet used by Alavi. A newer, more modern E-ink display, such as Modos Tech's upcoming 75Hz E-ink monitor, will get the job done without any such visible latency distractions.

For Linux users wanting to follow along and create a tertiary monitor of their very own, Alavi's blog has all the answers. Setting up a VNC connection between the computer and the tablet display took only around 20 minutes, with help from the Arch Linux wiki.

An Anonymous Coward writes:

https://www.techdirt.com/2025/12/24/lg-forces-tv-owners-to-use-microsoft-ai-copilot-app-you-cant-uninstall-and-nobody-asked-for/

If your product is even a third as innovative and useful as you claim it is, you shouldn't have to go around trying a little too hard to convince people. The product's usefulness should speak for itself. And you definitely shouldn't be forcing people to use products they've repeatedly told you they don't actually appreciate or want.

LG and Microsoft learned that lesson recently when LG began installing Microsoft's Copilot "AI" assistant on people's televisions, without any way to disable it:

"According to affected users, Copilot appears automatically after installing the latest webOS update on certain LG TV models. The feature shows up on the home screen alongside streaming apps, but unlike Netflix or YouTube, it cannot be uninstalled."

To be clear this isn't the end of the world. Users can apparently "hide" the app, but people are still generally annoyed at the lack of control. Especially coming from two companies with a history of this sort of behavior.

Many people just generally don't like Copilot, much like they didn't really like a lot of the nosier features integrated into Windows 11. Or they don't like being forced to use Copilot when they'd prefer to use ChatGPT or Gemini.

You only have to peruse this Reddit thread to get a sense of the annoyance. You can also head over to the Microsoft forums to get a sense of how Microsoft customers are very very tired of all the forced Copilot integration across Microsoft's other products, even though you can (sometimes) disable the integration.

But "smart" TVs are already a sector where user choice and privacy take a backseat to the primary goal of collecting and monetizing viewer behavior. And LG has been at the forefront of disabling features if you try to disconnect from the internet. So there are justifiable privacy concerns raised over this tight integration (especially in America, which is too corrupt to pass even a baseline internet privacy law).

hubie writes:

Examining the use of expressions like "recent studies" or "recent data" in different medical specialties:

According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word recent is defined as "having happened or started only a short time ago." A simple, innocent sounding definition. And yet, in the world of scientific publishing, it may be one of the most elastic terms ever used. What exactly qualifies as "a short time ago"? A few months? A couple of years? The advent of the antibiotic era?

In biomedical literature, "recent" is something of a linguistic chameleon. It appears everywhere: in recent studies, recent evidence, recent trials, recent literature, and so forth. It is a word that conveys urgency and relevance, while neatly sidestepping any commitment to a specific year—much like saying "I'll call you soon" after a first date: reassuring, yet infinitely interpretable. Authors wield it with confidence, often citing research that could have been published in the previous season or the previous century.

Despite its ubiquity, "recent" remains a suspiciously vague descriptor. Readers are expected to blindly trust the author's sense of time. But what happens if we dare to ask the obvious question? What if we take "recent" literally?

In this festive horological investigation, we decided to find out just how recent the recent studies really are. Armed with curiosity, a calendar, and a healthy disregard for academic solemnity, we set out to measure the actual age of those so-called fresh references. The results may not change the course of science, but they might make you raise an eyebrow the next time someone cites a recent paper from the past decade.

[Ed. note: Dec. 30 - The headline has been updated to reflect the fact that the Microsoft researcher who posted the original LinkedIn post stating they want to rewrite all Windows code in Rust later qualified his statement by saying that this is a research project --hubie]

turgid writes:

The Register reports that Microsoft wants to replace all of its C and C++ code bases with Rust rewrites by 2030, developing new technology to do the translation along the way.

"Our strategy is to combine AI and Algorithms to rewrite Microsoft's largest codebases," he added. "Our North Star is '1 engineer, 1 month, 1 million lines of code.'"

The article goes on to quote much management-speak drivel from official Microsoft sources making grand claims about magic bullets and the end of all known software vulnerabilities with many orders of magnitude productivity improvements promised into the bargain.

Unlike C and C++, Rust is a memory-safe language, meaning it uses automated memory management to avoid out-of-bounds reads and writes, and use-after-free errors, as both offer attackers a chance to control devices. In recent years, governments have called for universal adoption of memory-safe languages – and especially Rust – to improve software security.

Automated memory management? Is the magic not in the compiler rather than the runtime? Do these people even know what they're talking about? And anyway, isn't C++2.0 going to solve all problems and be faster than Rust and better than Python? It'll be out Real Soon Now(TM). Plus you'll only have to half-rewrite your code.

Are we witnessing yet another expensive wild goose chase from Microsoft? Windows Longhorn, anyone?

Original Submission

hubie writes:

Swearing boosts performance by helping people feel focused, disinhibited, study finds:

Letting out a swear word in a moment of frustration can feel good. Now, research suggests that it can be good for you, too: Swearing can boost people's physical performance by helping them overcome their inhibitions and push themselves harder on tests of strength and endurance, according to research published by the American Psychological Association.

"In many situations, people hold themselves back—consciously or unconsciously—from using their full strength," said study author Richard Stephens, PhD, of Keele University in the U.K. "Swearing is an easily available way to help yourself feel focused, confident and less distracted, and 'go for it' a little more."

Previous research by Stephens and others has found when people swear, they perform better on many physical challenges, including how long they can keep their hand in ice water and how long they can support their body weight during a chair push-up exercise.

"That is now a well replicated, reliable finding," Stephens said. "But the question is—how is swearing helping us? What's the psychological mechanism?"

He and his colleagues believed that it might be that swearing puts people in a disinhibited state of mind. "By swearing, we throw off social constraint and allow ourselves to push harder in different situations," he said.

To test this, the researchers conducted two experiments with 192 total participants. In each, they asked participants to repeat either a swear word of their choice, or a neutral word, every two seconds while doing a chair push-up. After completing the chair push-up challenge, participants answered questions about their mental state during the task. The questions included measures of different mental states linked to disinhibition, including how much positive emotion participants felt, how funny they found the situation, how distracted they felt and how self-confident they felt. The questions also included a measure of psychological "flow," a state in which people become immersed in an activity in a pleasant, focused way.

Overall, and confirming earlier research, the researchers found that participants who swore during the chair push-up task were able to support their body weight significantly longer than those who repeated a neutral word. Combining the results of the two experiments as well as a previous experiment conducted as part of an earlier study, they also found that this difference could be explained by increases in participants' reports of psychological flow, distraction and self-confidence—all important aspects of a disinhibition.

"These findings help explain why swearing is so commonplace," said Stephens. "Swearing is literally a calorie neutral, drug free, low cost, readily available tool at our disposal for when we need a boost in performance."

Journal Reference:Stephens, R., Dowber, H., Richardson, C., & Washmuth, N. B. (2025). "Don't hold back": Swearing improves strength through state disinhibition. American Psychologist. Advance online publication. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001650 [PDF]

Original Submission