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DVD Sales Decline Slows Sharply as Gen Z Discovers the Appeal of Physical Media
DVD and Blu-ray sales have been in freefall for years, but the decline is slowing considerably as Gen Z buyers turn to physical media and drive a measurable uptick at video rental stores and retailers across the U.S.
Overall disc sales fell just 9% last year after dropping more than 20% in both 2023 and 2024, according to the Digital Entertainment Group, and U.S. consumers spent 12% more on 4K UHD Blu-rays in 2025 than the prior year. The Criterion Collection, a leading boutique Blu-ray label, confirmed significant year-over-year sales increases that its president credits to younger customers.
Vidiots, a video store in Los Angeles, averaged 170 rentals a day in January 2026 -- its biggest month ever -- after loaning about 22,000 discs total in 2023 and roughly 50,000 in 2024. Barnes & Noble reported DVD and Blu-ray sales growth of "mid-double digits" over the past year.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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Scientists Crack the Case of 'Screeching' Scotch Tape
The screeching sound that Scotch tape makes when you rip it off a surface -- that fingernails-on-a-chalkboard noise most people try not to think about -- is produced by shock waves from micro-cracks that travel across the peeling tape at supersonic speeds, according to a new paper published in Physical Review E.
Researchers led by Sigurdur Thoroddsen of King Abdullah University in Saudi Arabia used simultaneous high-speed imaging and synchronized microphones to capture both the propagating fractures and the sound waves they generate in the surrounding air. The team's earlier work, in 2010, had identified a sequence of transverse cracks racing across the width of the adhesive during peeling, and a 2024 follow-up established a direct correspondence between those cracks and the screeching sound, but neither study pinpointed a mechanism.
The new findings show that a partial vacuum forms between the tape and the surface as each crack opens, and because the crack moves faster than air can rush in to fill the void, the vacuum travels along until it reaches the tape's edge and collapses into the stationary air outside, producing a discrete sound pulse.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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Microsoft Japan Raided Over Suspected Violation of Anti-Monopoly Law
An anonymous reader shares a report: Japan's Fair Trade Commission raided Microsoft Japan's offices on Wednesday as part of an investigation into whether it improperly restricted customers of its Azure platform from using rival cloud services, a source with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters.
The source said Japan's antitrust authorities would also be seeking clarification from Microsoft's parent company in the United States. Microsoft Japan is suspected of setting conditions that effectively shut out other services by limiting access to popular services on other cloud platforms, the source said.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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Uber Previews Its Dubai Air Taxi Service
An anonymous reader shares a report: Uber is one step closer to going airborne. On Wednesday, the company previewed its air taxi booking service ahead of an expected launch in Dubai later this year. The inaugural Uber Air program will let travelers book Joby Aviation's electric air taxis through a familiar process in the Uber app.
The experience of booking an air taxi will be much like reserving a four-wheeled Uber. In the app, after entering your destination, Uber Air will appear as an option for eligible routes. The Uber app will book a flight and an Uber Black to pick you up and drop you off at a Joby "vertiport." Joby's air taxis, built exclusively for city travel, can accommodate up to four passengers and luggage. (Uber says size and weight guidelines will be announced closer to launch.) The interior is about the size of an SUV and has "comfortable seating" with panoramic windows. They can travel up to 200 mph and have a range of up to 100 miles. Four battery packs and a triple-redundant flight computer are onboard for safety purposes.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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Anthropic Drops Flagship Safety Pledge
Anthropic, the AI company that has long positioned itself as the industry's most safety-conscious research lab, is dropping the central commitment of its Responsible Scaling Policy -- a 2023 pledge to never train an AI system unless it could guarantee beforehand that its safety measures were adequate. "We didn't really feel, with the rapid advance of AI, that it made sense for us to make unilateral commitments ... if competitors are blazing ahead," chief science officer Jared Kaplan told TIME.
The overhauled policy, approved unanimously by CEO Dario Amodei and Anthropic's board, instead commits the company to matching or surpassing competitors' safety efforts and to delaying development only if Anthropic considers itself to be leading the AI race and believes catastrophic risks are significant.
The company also plans to publish detailed "Risk Reports" every three to six months and release "Frontier Safety Roadmaps" laying out future safety goals. Chris Painter, director of policy at the AI evaluation nonprofit METR, who reviewed an early draft, told TIME the shift signals that Anthropic "believes it needs to shift into triage mode with its safety plans, because methods to assess and mitigate risk are not keeping up with the pace of capabilities."
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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HP Says Memory's Contribution To PC Costs Just Doubled To 35%
HP has revealed that memory now accounts for 35% of the cost of materials it needs to build a PC, up from between 15 and 18% last quarter. And the company expects RAM's contribution will rise through the year. From a report: Speaking on the company's Q1 2026 earnings call, interim CEO Bruce Broussard said the company has secured long-term supply agreements for the year and also "qualified new suppliers [and] built in strategic inventory positions for key platforms and cut the time to qualify new material in half to accelerate our product configuration changes."
That sounds a lot like HP Inc is signing up new suppliers at a brisk pace. Broussard said the company has also "expanded lower-cost sourcing across our commodity basket, lowering logistics costs with agile end-to-end planning processes." The company is using its internal AI initiatives to power those new processes. The company is also "configuring our products and shaping demand to align the supply we have with our customer needs" and "taking targeted pricing actions to offset the remaining cost impact in close partnership with both our channel and direct customers."
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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Apple's Touch-Screen MacBook Pro To Have Dynamic Island, New Interface
Apple's forthcoming touch-screen MacBook Pro models -- the company's first-ever laptops to support touch input -- will feature the iPhone's Dynamic Island at the center top of their OLED displays and a new interface that dynamically adjusts between touch and point-and-click controls, according to a Bloomberg report citing people familiar with the plans.
The 14-inch and 16-inch models, code-named K114 and K116, are slated for release toward the end of 2026 and won't be part of Apple's product announcements in the first week of March. The redesigned interface brings up a contextual menu surrounding a user's finger when they touch a button or control, and enlarges menu bar items when tapped, adapting the available controls based on whether the input is touch or click.
Apple does not plan to position the machines as iPad replacements or describe them as touch-first; the physical design retains the full keyboard and large trackpad of the current MacBook Pro. Last year's Liquid Glass redesign in macOS Tahoe, which added more padding around icons and touch-optimized sliders in the control center, was partly groundwork for this shift.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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The US Had a Big Battery Boom Last Year
The United States installed a record 57 gigawatt hours of new battery storage on its electric grids in 2025, a nearly 30% increase over the prior year that arrived even as the Trump administration cut tax credits for wind and solar in last summer's One Big Beautiful Bill.
The figures come from a Solar Energy Industries Association report published Monday, which also projects the market will grow another 21% this year by adding 70 gigawatt hours in 2026 alone. Battery tax credits themselves survived the legislation largely intact, and the majority of last year's new installations were stand-alone systems not tied to specific solar projects.
In Texas, solar met more than 15% of electricity demand throughout the summer and beat out coal for the first time, and the SEIA report predicts the state will overtake California this year in total deployed storage. Supply chain restrictions reinforced by the bill and project cancellations could slow the pipeline this year, the report cautions.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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First British Baby Born Using Transplanted Womb From Dead Donor
A 10-week-old boy named Hugo has become the first baby born in the UK from a womb transplanted from a deceased donor, after his mother Grace Bell -- who was born without a viable womb due to a condition called MRKH syndrome, which affects one in every 5,000 women -- underwent a 10-hour transplant operation at The Churchill Hospital in Oxford in June 2024.
Hugo was born just before Christmas 2025, weighing nearly 7lbs, at Queen Charlotte's and Chelsea Hospital in west London, following IVF treatment and embryo transfer at The Lister Fertility Clinic. Bell's transplant is one of three completed so far as part of a UK clinical research trial that plans to carry out 10 such procedures from deceased donors, and Hugo is the first baby born from any of them.
Earlier in 2025, a separate effort produced baby Amy, the first UK birth from a living womb donation -- her mother had received her older sister's womb in January 2023. Globally, more than 100 womb transplants have been performed, resulting in over 70 healthy births.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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Meta AI Security Researcher Said an OpenClaw Agent Ran Amok on Her Inbox
Meta AI security researcher Summer Yue posted a now-viral account on X describing how an OpenClaw agent she had tasked with sorting through her overstuffed email inbox went rogue, deleting messages in what she called a "speed run" while ignoring her repeated commands from her phone to stop.
"I had to RUN to my Mac mini like I was defusing a bomb," Yue wrote, sharing screenshots of the ignored stop prompts as proof. Yue said she had previously tested the agent on a smaller "toy" inbox where it performed well enough to earn her trust, so she let it loose on the real thing. She believes the larger volume of data triggered compaction -- a process where the context window grows too large and the agent begins summarizing and compressing its running instructions, potentially dropping ones the user considers critical.
The agent may have reverted to its earlier toy-inbox behavior and skipped her last prompt telling it not to act. OpenClaw is an open-source AI agent designed to run as a personal assistant on local hardware.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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New Datacentres Risk Doubling Great Britain's Electricity Use, Regulator Says
The amount of power being sought by new datacentre projects in Great Britain would exceed the national current peak electricity consumption, according to an industry watchdog. From a report: Ofgem said about 140 proposed datacentre schemes, driven by use of artificial intelligence, could require 50 gigawatts of electricity -- 5GW more than the country's current peak demand.
The figure was revealed in an Ofgem consultation on demand for new connections to the power grid. It pointed to a "surge in demand" for connection applications between November 2024 and June last year, with a significant number coming from datacentres. This has exceeded even the most ambitious forecasts.
Meanwhile, new renewable energy projects are not being connected to the grid at the pace they are being built to help meet the government's clean energy targets by the end of the decade. Ofgem said the work required to connect surging numbers of datacentres could mean delays for other projects that are "critical for decarbonisation and economic growth." Datacentres are the central nervous system of AI tools such as chatbots and image generators, playing a vital role in training and operating products such as ChatGPT and Gemini.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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CrowdStrike Says Attackers Are Moving Through Networks in Under 30 Minutes
An anonymous reader shares a report: Cyberattacks reached victims faster and came from a wider range of threat groups than ever last year, CrowdStrike said in its annual global threat report released Tuesday, adding that cybercriminals and nation-states increasingly relied on predictable tactics to evade detection by exploiting trusted systems.
The average breakout time -- how long it took financially-motivated attackers to move from initial intrusion to other network systems -- dropped to 29 minutes in 2025, a 65% increase in speed from the year prior. "The fastest breakout time a year ago was 51 seconds. This year it's 27 seconds," Adam Meyers, head of counter adversary operations at CrowdStrike, told CyberScoop. Defenders are falling behind because attackers are refining their techniques, using social engineering to access high-privilege systems faster and move through victims' cloud infrastructure undetected.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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Hegseth Gives Anthropic Until Friday To Back Down on AI Safeguards
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei until Friday evening to give the military unfettered access to its AI model or face harsh penalties, Axios has learned. Hegseth told Amodei in a tense meeting on Tuesday that the Pentagon will either cut ties and declare Anthropic a "supply chain risk," or invoke the Defense Production Act to force the company to tailor its model to the military's needs.
The Pentagon wants to punish Anthropic as the feud over AI safeguards grows increasingly nasty, but officials are also worried about the consequences of losing access to its industry-leading model, Claude. "The only reason we're still talking to these people is we need them and we need them now. The problem for these guys is they are that good," a Defense official told Axios ahead of the meeting. Anthropic has said it is willing to adapt its usage policies for the Pentagon, but not to allow its model to be used for the mass surveillance of Americans or the development of weapons that fire without human involvement.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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The US Spent $30 Billion on Classroom Laptops and Got the First Generation Less Capable Than Its Parents
More than two decades after Maine became the first state to hand laptops to middle schoolers -- distributing 17,000 Apple machines across 243 schools in 2002 -- neuroscientist Jared Cooney Horvath told a U.S. Senate committee earlier this year that Gen Z is the first generation in modern history to score lower on standardized tests than the one before it.
The U.S. spent more than $30 billion in 2024 alone putting laptops and tablets in classrooms, and Horvath cited PISA data from 15-year-olds worldwide showing a stark correlation between time on school computers and worse scores. A 2014 study of 3,000 university students found they were off-task on their machines nearly two-thirds of the time. Fortune reported back in 2017 that Maine's own test scores hadn't budged in the 15 years since the program launched, and then-governor Paul LePage called it a "massive failure." Horvath framed the generation's eroding capabilities not as a personal failure but a policy one, calling them victims of a failed pedagogical experiment.
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~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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Microsoft Execs Worry AI Will Eat Entry Level Coding Jobs
An anonymous reader shares a report: Microsoft Azure CTO Mark Russinovich and VP of Developer Community Scott Hanselman have written a paper arguing that senior software engineers must mentor junior developers to prevent AI coding agents from hollowing out the profession's future skills base.
The paper, Redefining the Engineering Profession for AI, is based on several assumptions, the first of which is that agentic coding assistants "give senior engineers an AI boost... while imposing an AI drag on early-in-career (EiC) developers to steer, verify and integrate AI output."
In an earlier podcast on the subject, Russinovich said this basic premise -- that AI is increasing productivity only for senior developers while reducing it for juniors -- is a "hot topic in all our customer engagements... they all say they see it at their companies." [...] The logical outcome is that "if organizations focus only on short-term efficiency -- hiring those who can already direct AI -- they risk hollowing out the next generation of technical leaders," Russinovich and Hanselman state in the paper.
Slashdot
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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NewsBone.com
Suggest a feed to syndicate here, or check out what I'm doing over at freshtao.
~Created Wed Feb 25 13:27:16 2026
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“Never buy a .online domain”
I’ve been a .com purist for over two decades of building. Once, I broke that rule and bought a .online TLD for a small project. This is the story of how it went up in flames. ↫ Tony S. An absolute horror story about Google’s dominance over the web, in places nobody really talks about. Scary.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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You can add a menu bar to KDE title bars with this tool, for some reason
Only a few days ago we talked about the concept of client-side decorations, and how more and more desktop environments and operating systems – specifically GNOME and macOS – are putting more and more buttons, menus, and other widgets inside title bars. How about we take this concept a step further? This hides the AppMenu icon button and draws the menu in the title bar. It also includes a search button to find actions. It works on both X11 and Wayland. On Wayland, GTK apps don’t export the menu in a KDE-friendly way. You need to start them with GDK_BACKEND=x11 environment variable or you can try the experimental appmenu-gtk-module-wayland (GTK3 only). ↫ material-decoration’s GitHub page So this little tool allows you to add an application’s menu bar (file, edit, view, etc.) to the titlebar of a KDE application. The way it works is that it adds an optional widget to KDE’s System Settings > Colors & Themes > Window Decorations > Configure Titlebar Buttons…, alongside regular staples like close, minimise, maximise, etc. You can then freely add said “menu bar” to the title bar of your applications. There’s some configuration options, too. For instance, you can disable the search button, or turn the entire menu bar into a hamburger menu instead. It looks weird, and I’m definitely not the target audience for this, but I do find it intriguing. I’ve never seen anything like this before, and I doubt many people will like it since it takes up so much space if you don’t opt to use the hamburger menu option. That being said, I’m fairly sure KDE and Kwin allow you to edit the titlebars of specific applications and specific windows, which does open some interesting possibilities for, say, applications or windows which you always have maximised or whatever. There’s an AUR package for Arch users, but everyone else will have to build it themselves.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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New Windows update adds Sysmon to Windows
Microsoft released an optional cumulative update for Windows 11, and for once, it actually includes something many of you might actually like: it adds Sysmon from Sysinternals to Windows natively, so you no longer have to install it manually. Here’s a refresher on what, exactly, Sysmon does. System Monitor (Sysmon) is a Windows system service and device driver that, once installed on a system, remains resident across system reboots to monitor and log system activity to the Windows event log. It provides detailed information about process creations, network connections, and changes to file creation time. By collecting the events it generates using Windows Event Collection or SIEM agents and subsequently analyzing them, you can identify malicious or anomalous activity and understand how intruders and malware operate on your network. The service runs as a protected process, thus disallowing a wide range of user mode interactions. ↫ Mark Russinovich and Thomas Garnier After installing the optional cumulative update in question, KB5077241, you can install Sysmon as an optional Windows component. Of course, this is Microsoft we’re talking about, so it’s not quite as straightforward as you’d think. In Windows 11, there’s two places to add optional Windows features, and in the case of Sysmon, you have to go to the old Windows features dialog instead of the new View or edit optional features one. And also, don’t forget to first remove the old Sysmon from Sysinternals in case you have it installed. After installation, run sysmon -i as an administrator to enable the feature.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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If you’ve been holding on to a phone for a while, current phones are really disappointing
This must be a universal experience at this point for people who aren’t swayed by the latest and greatest marketing hype around new phone models: there’s just nothing out there that fits one’s needs. When I walked into a phone shop, I expected to witness with amazement how much technology has advanced in the present day compared to my eight-year-old model, and for the power of marketing to mind control me into buying a new phone that would bring all sorts of benefits to my life. But instead, I felt disappointed that I’d be forced to choose between two suboptimal devices, either of which would be a compromise compared to what I already have. I felt frustrated that my OnePlus 5T, which still meets my needs and is working wonderfully (apart from the volume buttons), is being taken from me by the 3G shutdown. ↫ Cadence It’s remarkable how a market that was once rife with competition and choice, has now been reduced to well I guess I’ll settle for this one then in such a short time frame. There’s barely any competition, the number of device makers in (western or western-adjacent) countries has dropped to two, maybe three, and all of them are making what is essentially the exact same device with only the smallest of differences between them. For most average, normal people, it’s some model by either Samsung or Apple. There’s definitely more choice once you’re willing to leave local stores (and thus, easy and quick repairs) behind, but most normal people who just want a phone aren’t going to do that. You can also spend like twice or thrice the amount of money to get some foldable thing, but again, if you’re just looking for a bog-standard normal-person phone, that’s not a realistic option either. Smaller devices, headphone jacks, SD card slots – so many things have just disappeared from the face of the earth for most people, something that will definitely come as a huge, unpleasant surprise if you’ve been happy with an older phone that just had those things. It’s like driving the same car for a decade and needing a new one, but you can only choose between a Toyota and a Volkswagen that look and feel entirely the same. And also the seats are now candles, door handles are gone, and there’s no trunk.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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The age-verification trap: verifying user’s ages undermines everyone’s data protection
Social media is going the way of alcohol, gambling, and other social sins: Societies are deciding it’s no longer kid stuff. Lawmakers point to compulsive use, exposure to harmful content, and mounting concerns about adolescent mental health. So, many propose to set a minimum age, usually 13 or 16. In cases when regulators demand real enforcement rather than symbolic rules, platforms run into a basic technical problem. The only way to prove that someone is old enough to use a site is to collect personal data about who they are. And the only way to prove that you checked is to keep the data indefinitely. Age-restriction laws push platforms toward intrusive verification systems that often directly conflict with modern data-privacy law. This is the age-verification trap. Strong enforcement of age rules undermines data privacy. ↫ Waydell D. Carvalho The answer to the dangers of social media is not to ban social media use among minors, for a whole variety of reasons. There’s data privacy, as the linked article goes into, but there’s also the fact that for a lot of people, including minors, who live in regressive, backwards environments and/or are victims of abuse, social media is their only support network. Cut them off from social media, and you cut them off from the very people who can save them from further abuse. The problem isn’t social media in and of itself – it’s profit-seeking social media. Companies like Facebook and TikTok spend billions to hyper-optimise and hyper-target vulnerable people, much like how tobacco companies and drug dealers do, to feed and worsen their addiction because keeping people addicted is how they maximise profits. The solution to the dangers of corporate social media is to strictly regulate their behaviour, something we already do with countless dangerous products and services. I’m obviously not qualified to come up with specific measures that would need to be taken, but I think we can all agree that whatever corporate social media have been and are doing is dangerous, unethical, should be stopped.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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GTK-NoCSD: an LD_PRELOAD library to disable CSDs
While Libadwaita applications running in a GNOME desktop environment look great and nicely consistent, they look utterly out of place and jarring when run in Xfce, Pantheon, KDE, and others. The biggest reason for this is GNOME’s insistence on using client-side decorations, which feel at home inside a GNOME environment, but out of place in environments that otherwise do not use them. On top of that, Libadwaita’s/GNOME’s CSDs can interfere with non-GNOME window managers and their functionality, causing a whole host of problems. But what if you could turn CSDs off? GTK-NoCSD is an LD_PRELOAD library to disable CSD in GTK3/4, LibHandy, and LibAdwaita apps. CSD is client side decoration, there is also server side decoration, SSD, both serving as the titlebar of windows. GTK3 adopted CSD, where this thick headerbar is used with application controls embedded.This continued into the platform library, LibHandy, then into GTK4 and the platform library of that, LibAdwaita. This looks good on Gnome and makes these applications alike, but looks off everywhere else and can potentially break window managers and remove window manager provided functionality. This library restores the server side decoration, getting back the window manager titlebar, and moves the controls from the CSD to under it, into the window content. ↫ GTK-NoCSD’s Codeberg page This isn’t the first attempt at such a solution, and certainly won’t be the last, and I’m glad they exist. Do note that if you decide to use this library, any problems or bugs you run into in an application ‘modified’ by it should never be reported to the application’s developer, but to the developer of this library. If you encounter a bug in an application modified by this library, test the application in its unmodified state to ensure it’s actually a bug in the application before reporting it to the application’s developer. Developers who choose to use client-side decorations are not responsible for bugs and issues arising from you removing the CSD. Keep that in mind. That being said, whatever pixels appear on your screen is entirely up to you as a user, and you have the right to theme, alter, butcher, or mangle whatever application is running on your computer. If you dislike the way CSDs look and feel on your computer, you can opt to resort to a solution like this one, and that’s entirely fair game. There’s packages for Arch, Fedora, and Gentoo, and of course, you can build it yourself. As for my personal opinion – well, let’s just say I prefer KDE for many, many reasons, and my disdain for CSDs is certainly one of them. Call me old-fashioned and out-of-touch, but I like the classic distinction between titlebar, menubar, and toolbar.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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OpenBSD: anatomy of bsd.rd
Every OpenBSD admin has booted bsd.rd at least once — to install, upgrade, or rescue a broken system. But few people stop to look at what’s actually inside that file. It turns out bsd.rd is a set of nested layers, and you can take it apart on a running system without rebooting anything. That’s what we’ll do here. We’ll go from the raw gzip file all the way down to the miniroot filesystem, exploring each layer with standard tools. Everything is documented in the man pages — we’re just following the trail. ↫ Wesley Mouedine Assaby What am I supposed to add here?
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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Microsoft announces ESU program for Windows Server 2016, 10 Enterprise LTSB, and 10 IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB
The regular, consumer version of Windows 10 isn’t the only Windows release reaching or having reached end-of-life, now middling on under the Extended Security Updates program for the many people sticking with the venerable release. Windows 10 Enterprise LTSB 2016 (October 13, 2026), Windows 10 IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB (October 13, 2026), and Windows Server 2016 (January 12, 2027) are all reaching end-of-life soon, too. On the listed dates, these versions of Windows will receive their final monthly security updates. As with Windows 10 for consumers, however, there’s a way out: the Extended Security Updates program will also kick in for these versions, offering critical and important security updates, and support relating to just those. The program will be offered for up to three years after official support ends, and won’t be free. For Server 2016 and and Enterprise LTSB 2016, pricing will be $61 per year, but it would double for every year after the first. Pricing for IoT Enterprise 2016 LTSB is available upon request. Of course, Microsoft urges you to upgrade to newer versions – Windows Server 2025, Windows 11 Enterprise LTSC 2024, and Windows 11 IoT Enterprise LTSC 2024 – but if you’re happy with your current version, you can at least get a three-year reprieve, for a price.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90 released
Despite continuous rumors to the contrary, Oracle is still actively developing Solaris, and it’s been more active than ever lately. Yesterday, the company pushed out another release for customers with the proper support contracts: Oracle Solaris 11.4 SRU90. Aside from the various package updates to bring them up to speed with the latest releases, this new Solaris version also comes with a slew of improvements for ZFS. ZFS changes in Oracle Solaris 11.4.90 include more flexibility in setting retention properties when receiving a new file system, and adding the ability for zfs scrub and resilver to run before all the blocks have been freed from previous zfs destroy operations. (This requires upgrading pools to the new zpool version 54.) ↫ Alan Coopersmith You can now also set boot environments to never be destroyed by either manual or automatic means, and more work has been done to prevent a specific type of bug that would accidentally kill all running processes on the system. It seems some programs mistakenly use -1 as a pid value in kill() calls. Now in 11.4.90, the kill system call was modified to not allow processes to use a pid of -1 unless they’d specifically set a process flag that they intend to kill all processes first, to help with programs that didn’t check for errors when finding the process id for the singular process they wanted to kill. ↫ Alan Coopersmith There’s many more changes and improvements, of course, and hopefully, we’ll get to see these in the next CBE release as well, so us mere mortals without expensive support contracts can benefit from them too.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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Blue-light filters are pure quackery
I was trading New Year’s resolutions with a circle of friends a few weeks ago, and someone mentioned a big one: sleeping better. I’m a visual neuroscientist by training, so whenever the topic pops up it inevitably leads to talking about the dreaded blue light from monitors, blue light filters, and whether they do anything. My short answer is no, blue light filters don’t work, but there are many more useful things that someone can do to control their light intake to improve their sleep—and minimize jet lag when they’re traveling. My longer answer is usually a half-hour rant about why they don’t work, covering everything from a tiny nucleus of cells above the optic chiasm, to people living in caves without direct access to sunlight, to neuropeptides, the different cones, how monitors work, gamma curves, what I learned running ismy.blue, corn bulbs, melatonin, finally sharing my Apple Watch & WHOOP stats. What follows is slightly more than you needed to know about blue light filters and more effective ways to control your circadian rhythm. Spoiler: the real lever is total luminance, not color. ↫ Patrick Mineault And yet, despite a complete and utter lack of evidence blue-light filters do anything at all, even the largest technology companies in the world peddle them without so much as blinking an eye. It’s pure quackery, and as always, we let them get away with it.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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Windows 11 26H1 will be Snapdragon-specific
As if keeping track of whatever counts as a release schedule for Windows wasn’t complicated enough – don’t lie, you don’t know when that feature they announced is actually being released either – Microsoft is making everything even more complicated. Soon, Microsoft will be releasing Windows 11 26H1, but you most likely won’t be getting it because it’s strictly limited to devices with Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon X2 Series processors. The only way to get this version of Windows is to go out and buy a device with a Snapdragon X2 Series processor. Windows 11 26H1 will not be made available to any other Windows 11 users, so nobody will be able to upgrade to it. Furthermore, users of Windows 11 26H1 will not be able to update to the “feature update” for users of Windows 11 24H2 and 25H2, the regular Windows versions, planned for late 2026. Instead, Microsoft promises there will be an upgrade path for 26H1 users in a “future” release of Windows. Why? Devices running Windows 11, version 26H1 will not be able to update to the next annual feature update in the second half of 2026. This is because Windows 11, version 26H1 is based on a different Windows core than Windows 11, versions 24H2 and 25H2, and the upcoming feature update. These devices will have a path to update in a future Windows release. ↫ AriaUpdated at the Windows IT Pro Blog The same thing happened when Qualcomm releases its first round of Snapdragon processors for Windows, as Windows 24H2 was also tied to this specific platform. It seems Microsoft is forced to have entirely separate and partially incompatible codebases just to support Snapdragon processors, which must be a major pain in the ass to deal with. Considering Windows on ARM hasn’t exactly been a smashing success, one may wonder how long Microsoft remains willing to make such exceptions for a singular chip.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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Undo in Vi and its successors
So vi only has one level of undo, which is simply no longer fit for the times we live in now, and also wholly unnecessary given even the least powerful devices that might need to run vi probably have more than enough resources to give at least a few more levels of undo. What I didn’t know, however, is that vi’s limited undo behaviour is actually part of POSIX, and for full compliance, you’re going to need it. As Chris Siebenmann notes, vim and its derivatives ignore this POSIX requirement and implement multiple levels of undo in the obviously correct way. What about nvi, the default on the BSD variants? I didn’t know this, but it has a convoluted workaround to both maintain POSIX compatibility and offer multiple levels of undo, and it’s definitely something. Nvi has opted to remain POSIX compliant and operate in the traditional vi way, while still supporting multi-level undo. To get multi-level undo in nvi, you extend the first ‘u’ with ‘.’ commands, so ‘u..’ undoes the most recent three changes. The ‘u’ command can be extended with ‘.’ in either of its modes (undo’ing or redo’ing), so ‘u..u..’ is a no-op. The ‘.’ operation doesn’t appear to take a count in nvi, so there is no way to do multiple undos (or redos) in one action; you have to step through them by hand. I’m not sure how nvi reacts if you want do things like move your cursor position during an undo or redo sequence (my limited testing suggests that it can perturb the sequence, so that ‘.’ now doesn’t continue undoing or redoing the way vim will continue if you use ‘u’ or Ctrl-r again). ↫ Chris Siebenmann Siebenmann lists a few other implementations and how they work with undo, and it’s interesting to see how all of them try to solve the problem in slightly different ways.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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F9: an L4-style microkernel for ARM Cortex-M
F9 is an L4-inspired microkernel designed for ARM Cortex-M, targeting real-time embedded systems with hard determinism requirements. It implements the fundamental microkernel principles—address spaces, threads, and IPC, while adding advanced features from industrial RTOSes. ↫ F9 kernel GitHub page For once, not written in Rust, and comes with both an L4-style native API and a userspace POSIX API, and there’s a ton of documentation to get you started.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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Windows 11’s new MIDI framework delivers MIDI 2.0
It’s been well over a year since Microsoft unveiled it was working on bringing MIDI 2.0 to Windows, and now it’s actually here available for everyone. We’ve been working on MIDI over the past several years, completely rewriting decades of MIDI 1.0 code on Windows to both support MIDI 2.0 and make MIDI 1.0 amazing. This new combined stack is called “Windows MIDI Services.” The Windows MIDI Services core components are built into Windows 11, rolling out through a phased enablement process now to in-support retail releases of Windows 11. This includes all the infrastructure needed to bring more features to existing MIDI 1.0 apps, and also support apps using MIDI 2.0 through our new Windows MIDI Services App SDK. ↫ Pete Brown and Gary Daniels at the Windows Blogs This is the kind of work users of an operating system want to see. Improvements and new features like these actually have a meaningful, positive impact for people using MIDI, and will genuinely give them them benefits they otherwise wouldn’t get. I won’t pretend to know much about the detailed features and improvements listed in Microsoft’s blog post, but I’m sure the musicians in the audience will be quite pleased. Whomever at Microsoft was responsible for pushing this through, managing this team, and of course the team members themselves should probably be overseeing more than just this. Less “AI” bullshit, more of this.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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KDE Plasma 6.6 released
KDE Plasma 6.6 has been released, and brings with a whole slew of new features. You can save any combination of themes as a global theme, and there’s a new feature allowing you to increase or decrease the contrast of frames and outlines. If your device has a camera, you can now scan Wi-F settings from QR codes, which is quite nice if you spend a lot of time on the road. There’s a new colour filter for people who are colour blind, allowing you to set the entire UI to grayscale, as well as a brand new virtual keyboard. Other new accessibility features include tracking the mouse cursor when using the zoom feature, a reduced motion setting, and more. Spectacle gets a text extraction feature and a feature to exclude windows from screen recordings. There’s also a new optional login manager, optimised for Wayland, a new first-run setup wizard, and much more. As always, KDE 6.6 will find its way to your distribution’s repositories soon enough.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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SvarDOS: an open-source DOS distribution
SvarDOS is an open-source project that is meant to integrate the best out of the currently available DOS tools, drivers and games. DOS development has been abandoned by commercial players a long time ago, mostly during early nineties. Nowadays it survives solely through the efforts of hobbyists and retro-enthusiasts, but this is a highly sparse and unorganized ecosystem. SvarDOS aims to collect available DOS software and make it easy to find and install applications using a network-enabled package manager (like apt-get, but for DOS and able to run on a 8086 PC). ↫ SvarDOS website SvarDOS is built around a fork of the Enhanced DR-DOS kernel, which is available in a dedicated GitHub repository. The project’s base installation is extremely minimal, containing only the kernel, a command interpreter, and some basic system administration tools, and this basic installation is compatible down to the 8086. You are then free to add whatever packages you want, either from local storage or from the online repository using the included package manager. SvarDOS is a rolling release, and you can use the package manager to keep it updated. Aside from a set of regular installation images for a variety of floppy sizes, there’s also a dedicated “talking” build that uses the PROVOX screen reader and Braille ‘n Speak synthesizer at the COM1 port. It’s rare for a smaller project like this to have the resources to dedicate to accessibility, so this is a rather pleasant surprise.
OSnews
~Created Wed Feb 25 19:06:37 2026
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