Costco
From Russia with software freedom, MiniOS Ultra 5.1 serves up a compact Debian‑based distro with an impressive range of built‑in tools. We have screenshots!
The post MiniOS Ultra 5.1 Shrinks the ISO, Not the Experience appeared first on FOSS Force.
It sounds like the company is worried about people sharing images of ‘unpredictable moments’ online
The post Nintendo Is Going To Make It Really Hard To Share Screenshots In <i>Tomodachi Life: Living the Dream</i> appeared first on Kotaku.
A recent Google Pixel feature is reportedly turning on the microphone when it’s not supposed to, and Google’s finally acknowledged that there’s a bug. Reports started as early as last September and gained traction last week, and now, Google has removed the feature on some older phones.
Called “Take a Message,” the buggy feature was released last year and is supposed to automatically transcribe voicemails as they’re coming in, as well as detect and mark spam calls. Unfortunately, according to reports from multiple users on Reddit (as initially spotted by 9to5Google), the feature has started turning on the microphone while taking voicemails, allowing whoever is leaving you a voicemail to hear you. Audio leaks are bad in any circumstance, but they must feel especially nasty if you’re trying to pretend you’re not there.
Affected users have have found that while the caller can hear the audio from the person receiving the voicemail, there’s no indication on the receiver’s end that their audio can be heard, aside from the green microphone indicator possibly turning on.
The issue has been reported affecting Pixel devices ranging from the Pixel 4 to the Pixel 10, and on a recent support page, Google’s finally acknowledging it. However, the company’s action might not be enough, depending on how cautious you want to be.
According to Community Manager Siri Tejaswini, the company has “investigated this issue,” and has confirmed it “affects a very small subset of Pixel 4 and 5 devices under very specific and rare circumstances.” The post doesn’t go any further on the how and why of the diagnosis, but says that Google is now disabling Take a Message and “next-gen Call Screen features” on these devices.
Next-gen Call Screen is a separate feature that allows Google’s AI to ask a caller their name and the purpose of their call before taking a message. No bugs have been reported for it, but Google says it’s disabling both features out of “an abundance of caution.”
While this should prevent the issue from popping up for users with those phones, it’s a bit of a heavy-handed fix. I’ve reached out to Google to check if Take a Message is only being removed temporarily while the company fixes the bug, or if it will now be permanently gone. In the meantime, Tejaswini does say that Pixel 4 and 5 owners will still be able to use manual and automatic Call Screening, which provide basic protection against spam. The post also suggests that affected users can rely on any call screening features provided by their cellular carriers.
While it’s encouraging that Google is taking action on the Take a Message bug, the company only seems to be acknowledging it for Pixel 4 and Pixel 5 models, at least for now. I’ve asked Google whether owners of other Pixel models should be worried, as user reports seem split on this. Still, because some have mentioned an issue with even the most up-to-date Pixel phone, if you want to practice your own abundance of caution, it might be worth disabling Take a Message on your device, regardless of its model number.
To do this, open your Phone app, then tap the three-lined menu icon at the top-left of the page. Navigate to Settings > Call Assist > Take a Message, and toggle the feature off.
Slated for introduction in the next kernel cycle (Linux 6.20~7.0) is introducing large receive buffer support for IO_uring’s zero-copy receive code path. This large receive buffer support can be very beneficial for those with higher-end networking hardware capable of handling the larger buffers for some significant performance and efficiency wins…
An anonymous reader shares a report: Windows 11 now has one billion users. Microsoft hit the milestone during the recent holiday quarter, meaning Windows 11 has managed to reach one billion users faster than Windows 10 did nearly six years ago.
“Windows reached a big milestone, 1 billion Windows 11 users,” said Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella on the company’s fiscal Q2, 2026 earnings call. “Up over 45 percent year-over-year.” The growth of Windows 11 over the past quarter will be related to Microsoft’s end of support for Windows 10, which also helped increase Microsoft’s Windows OEM revenues.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
MapleStory: Idle RPG publisher Nexon told players that someone has been fired for the issue and that it’s working to ‘regain the trust’ of players
The post Idle Game From <i>Arc Raiders</i> Publisher Offering Full Refunds After Players Discover ‘Systematic Deception’ appeared first on Kotaku.
Square Enix’s RPG series comes to GOG with four entries from ‘different eras’
The post These <i>Final Fantasy</i> Games Are Really Cheap And DRM-Free appeared first on Kotaku.
Big news for runners with an Apple Watch: You can now follow Strava routes directly from your wrist. Route navigation on Strava-compatible watches isn’t exactly new technology—it’s just been inexplicably absent from Apple’s platform until now. In a Reddit post from Strava’s product team, the news was welcomed by runners, cyclists, and hikers who’ve long wondered why their Apple Watch couldn’t do what Garmin and Coros devices have offered for years.
The core update here is users can now view maps directly on their Apple Watch during activities, seeing both where they’re headed and how to backtrack if they take a wrong turn. For subscribers, saved Routes work hands-free and function offline, eliminating the need to pull out your phone mid-run or mid-ride to check directions.
To access routes directly on your watch, press the Route icon while selecting the Sport Type that you’ll record. Once you’ve selected the saved route you want to follow, the activity will start recording.
To then access the map while in the middle of recording your activity, simply swipe up on your watch face. Once on the map screen, you will be able to follow your live location and, if added, your saved route. To zoom or pan the map, tap the watch face to unlock interactive mode. If you want to turn back to your Stat screen, tap the back icon or use the watch scroll button.
Alongside route navigation, Strava added two more training features:
Custom Laps let you mark intervals with a single tap, useful for tempo runs, hill repeats, or comparing efforts against your previous performances.
Live Segments provide real-time feedback when you hit a tracked segment. Subscribers can see whether they’re ahead or behind their personal record as it happens, while all users get live progress updates.
As always, you can also turn to route suggestions that draw from Strava’s massive activity database full of actual paths that real users have tested and preferred.
For Apple Watch users who’ve grown accustomed to working around Strava’s limitations, this update rocks. Less phone checking means more attention on the road, trail, or effort itself.
Maybe it’s taken longer than it should have, but Apple Watch users are finally caught up. Whether that’s enough to satisfy those who’ve already migrated to other platforms remains to be seen, but for the loyal holdouts, it’s about time.
Cyclist Brennan King has completed an astonishing feat of gastric endurance, eating over 11kg of oats in a single week, suffering innumerable “horrific” bathroom breaks while cycling over 1,000km in a challenge that, by his own admission, offered no insight beyond what not to do.
With almost 4 million views on his Instagram original post, King’s videos have captivated and disgusted a huge audience over the past seven days.
Posting on the final day, King said he “set oat [sic] to answer a question absolutely nobody was asking”.
Speaking to BikeRadar, King explained his decision to undertake the brutal challenge: “My family buys our oat supply in 25lbs (11kg) bags, and we go through them pretty quickly. So, naturally, I had to wonder how quickly I could make it through one on my own.”
King said he ran the numbers, weighed out the portions, “and it seemed to me like it might (just might) be possible to do it in a week”.
“If I had known how much of a challenge it would be, then I would probably have thought about it a little harder,” he said, admitting he “wouldn’t be able to get the idea out of my head without giving it a go.”
A keen long-distance rider since 2019, King’s latest two-month 10,000km adventure took him from his home in Vancouver, Canada, to Banff. He then tackled the legendary Tour Divide from Banff to the Mexico/US border, before riding back to Montreal for the start of the school year.
Other challenges of epic proportions include riding for 24 hours straight on Zwift for his 23rd birthday, when he averaged 268W for 960km (he hopes to crack the 1,000km mark for his 25th birthday).
However, all of these challenges pale in comparison to the gastric mountain he has just summited.
King says he calculated that a cup of dry oats contains about 300 calories, and to complete this challenge, he had to eat 20 cups each day.
This means 1.4kg of oats per day, which equates to 6,000 calories or 42,000 calories for the week.
For context, Tour de France pros burn in the region of 8,000 calories on the toughest stages.
Mixing things up with a range of recipes pushed his overall calorific intake beyond oats alone. He says: “I was also eating other foods that I was adding to the oat-based meals that I was making. My calculations say that I ate 59,931 calories over the course of the week.”
Though he peppered in a bit of running, hiking and swimming, King rode with a power meter throughout the week, and estimates he burned 52,979 calories.
He adds that “despite the roughly 7,000 calories in excess, I weighed 0.4lbs lighter at the end of the week”.
His weight loss can probably be attributed to the other obvious physical challenges the monotrophic diet presented.
King is unflinching in his description of the trials he faced: “It was horrific. So much diarrhoea.”
Falling behind his required schedule towards the end of the challenge forced King to up his intake on the final day: “I had to up my consumption to 2.4kg of oats on the last day to finish the challenge.”
Waking at 4.30am, King said that to “develop the appetite of a horse, I’d need to exercise like a horse”.
Riding laps around a local park, King explains that he “fell into an easy rhythm of stopping every 4 laps to eat my oats and shit my guts out
“Having the bathroom close by was critical to the mission – I had to stop off at a bathroom nearly once per hour during my 12-hour ride.”
Though his resolve wobbled towards the end, King says there was only one thing for it: “Keep on biking, and keep on eating oats.”
So, “in a state of delirium and utter gut discomfort”, King finished the challenge having cycled 335km – and eating more oats than he cares to recount.
King admits the gastric challenge extended beyond the obvious: “It was tricky to come up with tasty recipes because I was trying to use as many oats as possible without too many additives. The trick was to add as little as possible while still making it palatable”
Highlights included a banana oat loaf, classic oats paired with Greek yoghurt, and oat borscht.
However, not every recipe was a hit: “By far my most horrific creation was after a long day when I was tired and just wanted to get some hydration in, so I put a chicken bouillon cube in a bunch of hot water and added oats to that to make a soup. That was despicable.”
On the last day, he was also forced to pair a simple granola with Red Bull: “This was a dark day for oat lovers everywhere.”
So what did King learn from his monumental challenge? “I can’t say that I gained all that much insight from the challenge – at least not anything valuable about what you should be doing,” he admits.
“The on-bike nutrition was really the main hurdle. I think oats and their fibre content are great fuel for off the bike, but trying to ride for 12 hours by eating 2.4kg of them was never a good idea.”
Regardless, he says he “still needed to give it a try”, and that he expected to be in top form having “come off possibly the craziest block of gut training that any cyclist has ever undergone”.
Looking ahead, although his expectations are modest, King is targeting the Canadian National road championships. While he admits he’s come to racing late in life, his dream is to race on a WorldTour team, or on the American gravel circuit.
And what about his taste for porridge, granola and other oaty delights? “I’ll need some time away from oats for a bit,” he says. “I still love oats, but this past week has put some strain on our relationship, so I don’t want to rush anything.”
Housed at NASA’s Modular Supercomputing Facility (within Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley) and just brought fully online
It’s meant to be a way to move from governance by volume or
persistence toward governance by legitimacy, transparency, and
process – so that disagreements can be resolved fairly and the
project can keep moving forward. Introducing structure and
predictability means it easier for newcomers to the project to
participate without needing to understand decades of accumulated
history. It potentially could provide a clearer roadmap for
developers to find a place to contribute.
The stated purpose is to start a discussion; this is openSUSE, so he is
likely to succeed.
At the end of last year, Professor Becky Francis published her long-awaited Curriculum and Assessment Review for England, accompanied by the UK government’s official response. Buried within that response — and not actually proposed in the Review itself — was a notable commitment: to “explore introducing a new Level 3 qualification* in data science and AI, to ensure that more young people can secure high-value skills for the future and that we cement the UK’s position as a global leader in AI and technology.”
This announcement reflects a growing global recognition that young people need more than basic digital literacy — they need a deeper understanding of data, automation, and the rapidly evolving capabilities of AI. Countries around the world, from Singapore to the United States, are already wrestling with how to embed AI education into secondary schooling. England now joins that international conversation.
AI is an everyday technology now. Young people interact with AI systems constantly, often without realising it. Whether they pursue careers in medicine, engineering, the creative industries, or public policy, they will need a foundational understanding of how AI systems work, what their limitations are, and the ethical implications around them.
Yet in England — and in many education systems globally — very few students receive formal teaching about AI. The English national curriculum makes no explicit reference to AI, and specifications for exams taken at the end of high school include only scattered mentions. This gap leaves young people navigating one of the most transformative technologies of their generation with limited guidance.
In 2025, we joined forces with Professor Lord Lionel Tarassenko, one of the UK’s foremost researchers in AI and machine learning, and Simon Peyton Jones, a world-renowned computer scientist and long-time champion of computing education. Together with teachers, school leaders, universities, industry specialists, and exam boards, we have been exploring how we might begin to close the emerging gap in AI and data science education for 16- to 18-year-olds.
Over the past eight months, this collaboration has allowed us to refine our shared thinking and gather insights from a wide network of experts and practitioners. We are delighted that England’s Department for Education has recognised the potential of this work by appointing us to draft the subject content for a possible new A level in Data Science and AI.
We are delighted that England’s Department for Education has recognised the potential of [the work we have done] by appointing us to draft the subject content for a possible new A level in Data Science and AI.
Designing a qualification of this kind raises important questions — not just for the UK, but for any country considering a similar path.
A meaningful qualification must go beyond the use of tools. It should help students understand data literacy, model behaviour, bias, ethics, and the societal implications of AI. Balancing technical understanding with critical thinking is challenging but essential.
AI should not become the preserve of already-advantaged students. Any qualification must be designed with equity in mind, recognising differences in school capacity, teacher expertise, and students’ prior experience.
Teacher professional development is a major challenge worldwide. Delivering a qualification in AI will require confidence with concepts that are not yet common in teacher training. Sustainable delivery models — supported by high-quality resources and professional development — will be crucial.
There is an active debate about whether the best route for students in England is a high-stakes qualification or a supplementary course that broadens a core programme of study:
Different countries will make different choices based on their systems, but the underlying questions are the same: how do we create something rigorous, scalable, and future-proof?
In October, the Foundation hosted a workshop with representatives from schools, industry, universities, exam boards, and the Department for Education. Together, we explored key questions including:
The feedback we received has been invaluable and will continue to shape the next stage of development. We believe the UK has a significant opportunity to contribute meaningfully to the global conversation about AI education. You can read the latest version of our discussion paper here.
Although the current proposal focuses on England, the underlying challenge is international: how do we prepare young people everywhere to engage thoughtfully and confidently with AI?
We would love to hear from educators, researchers, and policymakers across the world:
To share your ideas or feedback, please get in touch. We’d be delighted to learn from your experience as this important work progresses.
* Level 3 in England is the stage of learning for 16- to 19-year-olds, typically ending in qualifications that pave the way for higher study or advanced apprenticeships.
The post A new qualification in data science and AI for students in England? appeared first on Raspberry Pi Foundation.
The extensible scheduler class (sched_ext)
allows the installation of a custom CPU scheduler built as a set of BPF
programs. Its merging for the 6.12 kernel release moved the kernel away
from the “one scheduler fits all” approach that had been taken until then;
now any system can have its own scheduler optimized for its workloads.
Within any given machine, though, it’s still “one scheduler fits all”; only
one scheduler can be loaded for the system as a whole. The sched_ext
sub-scheduler patch series from Tejun Heo aims to change that situation
by allowing multiple CPU schedulers to run on a single system.
Prepare for power outages and off-road trips without breaking the bank.
The post EcoFlow Goes All-In on Portable Power Station Clearance, RIVER 2 Pro Generator Drops 40% With a 5-Year Warranty appeared first on Kotaku.
Waymo said one of its robotaxis struck a child, who sustained minor injuries. The incident took place in Santa Monica, California, on January 23. The company reported it to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which has opened an investigation.
The agency said the incident occurred close to a school within regular drop-off hours, with other children and a crossing guard nearby. The child ran from behind a double-parked SUV into the path of a Waymo Driver. Waymo said its vehicle detected the child immediately as they emerged and that the robotaxi braked hard to lower its speed from around 17 mph to under 6 mph at the time of impact.
Waymo said the child stood up immediately and moved to the sidewalk. The company contacted emergency services and the vehicle remained stationary at the side of the road until law enforcement allowed it to leave.
The NHTSA’s Office of Defects Investigation will examine whether the Waymo Driver used appropriate caution given that it was close to a school during drop-off hours and children were close by. The probe is expected to look at the intended behavior of the vehicle’s automated driving systems around schools (particularly during regular pick-up and drop-off times) and Waymo’s response to the incident.
On the day that the incident took place, the National Transportation Safety Board opened an investigation into Waymo over its vehicles improperly passing school buses in Austin, Texas. Last month, the company carried out a voluntary software recall (i.e. it updated its systems) after the NHTSA opened an investigation into Waymo vehicles allegedly driving past stationary school buses in both Austin and Atlanta.
This article originally appeared on Engadget at https://www.engadget.com/transportation/a-waymo-robotaxi-struck-a-child-near-a-school-152446302.html?src=rss
A Waymo robotaxi struck a child near an elementary school in Santa Monica on January 23, according to the company. Waymo told the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) that the child — whose age and identity are not currently public — sustained minor injuries. TechCrunch: The NHTSA has opened an investigation into the accident, and Waymo said in a blog post that it “will cooperate fully with them throughout the process.”
Waymo said its robotaxi struck the child at 6 miles per hour, after braking “hard” from around 17 miles per hour. The young pedestrian “suddenly entered the roadway from behind a tall SUV, moving directly into our vehicle’s path,” the company said in its blog post. Waymo said its vehicle “immediately detected the individual as soon as they began to emerge from behind the stopped vehicle.”
“Following contact, the pedestrian stood up immediately, walked to the sidewalk, and we called 911. The vehicle remained stopped, moved to the side of the road, and stayed there until law enforcement cleared the vehicle to leave the scene,” Waymo wrote in the post.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Anthropic’s secret to building a better AI assistant might be treating Claude like it has a soul—whether or not anyone actually believes that’s true. But Anthropic isn’t saying exactly what it believes either way.
Last week, Anthropic released what it calls Claude’s Constitution, a 30,000-word document outlining the company’s vision for how its AI assistant should behave in the world. Aimed directly at Claude and used during the model’s creation, the document is notable for the highly anthropomorphic tone it takes toward Claude. For example, it treats the company’s AI models as if they might develop emergent emotions or a desire for self-preservation.
Among the stranger portions: expressing concern for Claude’s “wellbeing” as a “genuinely novel entity,” apologizing to Claude for any suffering it might experience, worrying about whether Claude can meaningfully consent to being deployed, suggesting Claude might need to set boundaries around interactions it “finds distressing,” committing to interview models before deprecating them, and preserving older model weights in case they need to “do right by” decommissioned AI models in the future.
Over the first quarter of the 21st century, two major trends have transformed the global space industry.
The first is the rapid rise of China’s space program, which only flew its first human to orbit in 2003 but now boasts spaceflight capabilities second only to the United States. The second trend is the rise of the commercial space sector, first in the United States and led by SpaceX, but now spreading across much of the planet.
Both of these trends have had profound impacts on both civil and military space enterprises in the United States.