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The EU says a new age-verification app is technically ready and could let users prove they are old enough to access restricted online content without revealing their identity or personal data. Deutsche Welle reports: Once released, users will be able to download the app from an app store and set it up using proof of identity, such as a passport or national ID card. They can then use it to confirm they are above a certain age when accessing restricted content, without revealing their identity. According to the Commission, the system is similar to the digital certificates used during the COVID-19 pandemic, which allowed people to prove their vaccination status. The app is expected to support enforcement of the bloc's Digital Services Act, which aims to better regulate online platforms. This includes restricting access to content such as pornography, gambling and alcohol-related services. Officials say the app will be "completely anonymous" and built on open-source technology, meaning it could also be adopted outside the EU. [...] While there is no binding EU-wide law yet, the European Parliament has called for a minimum age of 16 for social media access. For now, enforcement would largely fall to individual member states, but the new app is intended to help platforms comply with future national and EU rules.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from UploadVR: A group of independent researchers built a device that can artificially induce smell using ultrasound, with no consumable cartridges required. [...] The team of four are Lev Chizhov, Albert Yan-Huang, Thomas Ribeiro, Aayush Gupta. Chizhov is a neurotech entrepreneur with a background in math and physics, Yan-Huang is a researcher at Caltech with a background in computation and neural systems, and Ribeiro and Gupta are co-researchers on the project with software engineering and AI expertise. Instead of targeting your nose at all, the device directly targets the olfactory bulb in your brain with "focused ultrasound through the skull." The researchers say that as far as they're aware, no one has ever done this before, even in animals. A challenge in targeting the olfactory bulb is that it's buried behind the top of your nose, and your nose doesn't provide a flat surface for an emitter. Ultrasound also doesn't travel well through air. The solution the researchers came up with was to place the emitter on your forehead instead, with a "solid, jello-like pad for stability and general comfort," and the ultrasound directed downward towards the olfactory bulb. To determine the best placement, they say they used an MRI of one of their skulls to "roughly determine where the transducer would point and how the focal region (where ultrasound waves actually concentrate) aligned with the olfactory bulb (the target for stimulation)". [...] According to the researchers, they were able to induce the sensation of fresh air "with a lot of oxygen", the smell of garbage "like few-day-old fruit peels," an ozone-like sensation "like you're next to an air ionizer," and a campfire smell of burning wood. While technically head-mounted, the current device does require being held up with two hands. But as with all such prototypes, it likely could be significantly miniaturized.

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Version:next-20260416 (linux-next) Released:2026-04-16

Some Japanese bullet trains will soon support premium private suites this October, featuring windows with embedded 5G antennas for steadier onboard Wi-Fi and NTT noise-cancelling cabin tech to reduce train noise. The 5G window antennas are designed to maintain line-of-sight connections as trains race past base stations at up to 285 km/h. The Register reports: Rail operator JR Central announced the new tech late last month and will initially deploy a couple of the suites on six trains. The carrier explained that the antennas come from a Japanese company called AGC that weaves microscopic wires through glass to form an antenna. JR Central will connect the windows to an on-train Wi-Fi router. AGC says rival tech relies on 5G signals reaching a train and then bouncing around inside before reaching the Wi-Fi unit. The company says antennas woven into train windows maintain line of sight to nearby 5G base stations. That matters because JR Central's Shinkansen can achieve speeds of up to 285 km/h, which means they speed past cellular network base stations so quickly that it's frequently necessary to reconnect to another radio. AGC says keeping a line of sight connection means its antennas allow increased 5G signal strength, so Wi-Fi service on board trains should be more stable and speedy. The sound-deadening kit JR Central will deploy is called Personalized Sound Zone (PSZ) and comes from Japan's tech giant NTT. The tech uses the same principles applied to noise-cancelling headphones -- determine the waveform of sound and project an inversion of that waveform that cancels out ambient noise.

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I post more and more content on my website. What was visible at glance then is now more difficult to look for. I wanted to implement search, but it is a static website. It means that everything is built once, and then published somewhere as final, immutable pages. I can't send a request for search and get results in return.

Or that's what I thought! Pagefind is a neat javascript library that does two things:

1. It produces an index of the content right after building the static site.
2. It provides 2 web components to insert in my pages: <pagefind-modal> that is the search modal itself, hidden by default, and <pagefind-modal-trigger> that looks like a search field and opens the modal.

The pagefind-modal component looks up the index when the user types a request. The index is a static file, so there is not need for a backend that processes queries. Of course this only works for basic queries, but it's a great rool already!

Pagefind is also easy to customize via a list of CSS variables. Adding it to this website was very straightforward.

Longtime Slashdot reader AmiMoJo shares a report from the Guardian: Households will be called on to boost their consumption of Great Britain's record renewable energy this summer to help balance the power grid and lower energy bills. Under the new plans, people could be encouraged to run dishwashers and washing machines or charge up their electric vehicles when there is more wind and solar power than the electricity grid needs. The plan will be delivered with the help of energy suppliers, which may choose to offer heavily discounted or free electricity to their customers during specific periods when the energy system operator predicts there will be a surplus of electricity. Many suppliers already offer more than 2 million households the opportunity to pay lower rates for electricity used during off-peak hours but this will be the first time that the system operator will use this tool to help balance the grid. The National Energy System Operator (Neso) hopes that by issuing a market notice to call on energy users to increase their consumption it can avoid making hefty payments to turn wind and solar farms off when demand for electricity is low, which are ultimately paid for through energy bills.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the New York Times: Many scientists have contended that humans have evolved very little over the past 10,000 years. A few hundred generations was just a blink of the evolutionary eye, it seemed. Besides, our cultural evolution -- our technology, agriculture and the rest -- must have overwhelmed our biological evolution by now. A vast study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature, suggests the opposite. Examining DNA from 15,836 ancient human remains, scientists found 479 genetic variants that appeared to have been favored by natural selection in just the past 10,000 years. The researchers also concluded that thousands of additional genetic variants have probably experienced natural selection. Before the new study, scientists had identified only a few dozen variants. "There are so many of them that it's hard to wrap one's mind around them," said David Reich, a geneticist at Harvard Medical School and an author of the new study. He and his colleagues found that a mutation that is a major risk factor for celiac disease, for example, appeared just 4,000 years ago, meaning the condition may be younger than the Egyptian pyramids. The mutation became ever more common. Today, an estimated 80 million people worldwide have celiac disease, in which the immune system attacks gluten and damages the intestines. The steady rise of the mutation came about through natural selection, the scientists argue. For some reason, people with the mutation had more descendants than people without it -- even though it put them at risk of an autoimmune disorder. Other findings are even more puzzling. The researchers found that genetic variants that raise the odds of a smoking habit have been getting steadily rarer in Europe for the past 10,000 years. Something is working against those variants -- but it can't be the harm from smoking. Europeans have been smoking tobacco for only about 460 years. The scientists can't see from their research so far what forces might be making these variants more or less common. "My short answer is, I don't know," said Ali Akbari, a senior staff scientist at Harvard and an author of the study. The researchers also found that some variants, like the one linked to Type B blood, became much more common in Europe around 6,000 years ago, while others changed direction over time. For example, a TYK2 immune gene variant that may have once been beneficial later became harmful because it increased tuberculosis risk. The study also found signs of natural selection in 44 out of 563 traits. Variants linked to Type 2 diabetes, wider waists, and higher body fat have become less common, possibly because farming and carbohydrate-heavy diets made once-useful fat-storing traits more harmful. Other findings, such as selection favoring genes linked to more years of schooling, are harder to interpret.

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Boston Dynamics has integrated Google DeepMind into its robotic dog Spot, giving it more autonomous reasoning for industrial inspections like spotting spills and reading gauges. Spot can also now recognize when to call on other AI tools. IEEE Spectrum reports: Boston Dynamics is one of the few companies to commercially deploy legged robots at any appreciable scale; there are now several thousand hard at work. Today the company is announcing that its quadruped robot Spot is now equipped with Google DeepMind's Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6, a high-level embodied reasoning model that brings usability and intelligence to complex tasks. [T]he focus of this partnership is on one of the very few applications where legged robots have proven themselves to be commercially viable: inspection. That is, wandering around industrial facilities, checking to make sure that nothing is imminently exploding. With the new AI onboard, Spot is now able to autonomously look for dangerous debris or spills, read complex gauges and sight glasses, and call on tools like vision-language-action models when it needs help understanding what's going on in the environment around it. "Advances like Gemini Robotics-ER 1.6 mark an important step toward robots that can better understand and operate in the physical world," Marco da Silva, vice president and general manager of Spot at Boston Dynamics, says in a press release. "Capabilities like instrument reading and more reliable task reasoning will enable Spot to see, understand, and react to real-world challenges completely autonomously." You can watch a demo of Spot's new capabilities on YouTube.

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In an interview with Fox News, Ford CEO Jim Farley warned that allowing Chinese vehicle imports could put nearly a million U.S. jobs at risk. He said China's heavily subsidized auto industry has enough excess capacity to supply the entire U.S. market, while also raising serious cybersecurity concerns given how much data modern connected cars collect. Ars Technica reports: "First of all, the Chinese have huge direct support for their auto companies," Farley said, while noting that China has the ability to build an additional 21 million vehicles a year on top of the 29 million that are expected to roll off Chinese production lines in 2026. "They have enough capacity in China to cover all the manufacturing, all the vehicle sales in the United States," Farley said. "Manufacturing is the heart and soul of our country, and for us to lose those exports would be devastating for our country," he continued, before pointing out the cybersecurity worries about Chinese cars. "All the vehicles have 10 cameras. They can collect a lot of data," he said. Farley has praised Chinese EVs like the Xiaomi SU7, even going on podcasts to sing its praises. But he believes Ford's forthcoming affordable Kentucky-built EVs, due to start hitting dealerships next year, have what it takes to be competitive. When asked about new car prices rising an average of 2 percent last year, Farley repeatedly said that Ford had "worked with the administration" so that there's "essentially no big impact" of the Trump tariffs. The CEO justified the rising costs by pointing to the F-150's sales as proof of its value.

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Cal is moving its flagship scheduling software from open source to a proprietary license, arguing that AI coding tools now make it much easier for attackers to scan public codebases for vulnerabilities. "Open source security always relied on people to find and fix any problems," said Peer Richelsen, co-founder of Cal. "Now AI attackers are flaunting that transparency." CEO Bailey Pumfleet added: "Open-source code is basically like handing out the blueprint to a bank vault. And now there are 100x more hackers studying the blueprint." The company says it still supports open source and is releasing a separate Cal.diy version for hobbyists, but doesn't want to risk customer booking data in its commercial product. ZDNet reports: When Cal was founded in 2022, Bailey Pumfleet, the CEO and co-founder, wrote, "Cal.com would be an open-source project [because] limitations of existing scheduling products could only be solved by open source." Since Cal was successful and now claims to be the largest Next.js project, he was on to something. Today, however, Pumfleet tells me that AI programs such as "Claude Opus can scour the code to find vulnerabilities," so the company is moving the project from the GNU Affero General Public License (AGPL) to a proprietary license to defend the program's security. [...] Cal also quoted Huzaifa Ahmad, CEO of Hex Security, "Open-source applications are 5-10x easier to exploit than closed-source ones. The result, where Cal sits, is a fundamental shift in the software economy. Companies with open code will be forced to risk customer data or close public access to their code." "We are committed to protecting sensitive data," Pumfleet said. "We want to be a scheduling company, not a cybersecurity company." He added, "Cal.com handles sensitive booking data for our users. We won't risk that for our love of open source." While its commercial program is no longer open source, Cal has released Cal.diy. This is a fully open-source version of its platform for hobbyists. The open project will enable experimentation outside the closed application that handles high-stakes data. Pumfleet concluded, "This decision is entirely around the vulnerability that open source introduces. We still firmly love open source, and if the situation were to change, we'd open source again. It's just that right now, we can't risk the customer data."

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A Manhattan federal jury found that Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally maintained monopoly power in the ticketing market. The findings follow an antitrust case brought by states after a separate DOJ settlement. CNN reports: The verdict was reached following a lengthy trial in New York federal court that included testimony from top executives in the music and entertainment industries. Jurors began deliberating on Friday. The Justice Department and 39 state attorneys general, including California and New York, and Washington, DC, sued Live Nation in 2024 alleging its combination with Ticketmaster and control of "virtually every aspect of the live music ecosystem" have harmed fans, artists, and venues. During the second week of trial, in a move that surprised even the judge, the Justice Department reached a secret settlement with Live Nation. A handful of states signed onto the deal, but more than two dozen proceeded to trial. Under the DOJ deal, Live Nation agreed to allow competitors, like SeatGeek or StubHub, to offer tickets to its events, cap ticketing service fees at 15%, and divest exclusive booking agreements with 13 amphitheaters. The deal includes a $280 million settlement fund for state damages claims for the handful of states that signed onto the deal. The DOJ settlement requires the judge's approval.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from TorrentFreak: Spotify and several major record labels, including UMG, Sony, and Warner, secured a $322 million default judgment against the unknown operators of Anna's Archive. The shadow library failed to appear in court and briefly released millions of tracks that were scraped from Spotify via BitTorrent. In addition to the monetary penalty, a permanent injunction required domain registrars and other parties to suspend the site's domain names. [...] The music labels get the statutory maximum of $150,000 in damages for around 50 works. Spotify adds a DMCA circumvention claim of $2,500 for 120,000 music files, bringing the total to more than $322 million. The plaintiff previously described their damages request as "extremely conservative." The DMCA claim is based only on the 120,000 files, not the full 2.8 million that were released. Had they applied the $2,500 rate to all released files, the damages figure would exceed $7 billion. Anna's Archive did not show up in court, and the operators of the site remain unidentified. The judgment attempts to address this directly, by ordering Anna's Archive to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, that includes valid contact information for the site and its managing agents. Whether the site will comply with this order is highly uncertain. For now, the monetary judgment is mostly a victory on paper, as recouping money from an unknown entity is impossible. For this reason, the music companies also requested a permanent injunction. In addition to the damages award, [Judge Jed Rakoff] entered a permanent worldwide injunction covering ten Anna's Archive domains: annas-archive.org, .li, .se, .in, .pm, .gl, .ch, .pk, .gd, and .vg. Domain registries and registrars of record, along with hosting and internet service providers, are ordered to permanently disable access to those domains, disable authoritative nameservers, cease hosting services, and preserve evidence that could identify the site's operators. The judgment names specific third parties bound by those obligations, including Public Interest Registry, Cloudflare, Switch Foundation, The Swedish Internet Foundation, Njalla SRL, IQWeb FZ-LLC, Immaterialism Ltd., Hosting Concepts B.V., Tucows Domains Inc., and OwnRegistrar, Inc. Anna's Archive is also ordered to destroy all copies of works scraped from Spotify and to file a compliance report within ten business days, under penalty of perjury, including valid contact information for the site and its managing agents. That last requirement could prove significant, given that the identity of the site's operators remains unknown.

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Snap is laying off about 1,000 employees, or 16% of its workforce, while closing 300 open roles as it tries to cut costs and push toward profitability with more AI-driven efficiency. "While these changes are necessary to realize Snap's long-term potential, we believe that rapid advancements in artificial intelligence enable our teams to reduce repetitive work, increase velocity, and better support our community, partners, and advertisers," CEO Evan Spiegel wrote in a memo, which was included in the company's 8-K filing (PDF). "We have already witnessed small squads leveraging AI tools to drive meaningful progress across several important initiatives." The Verge reports: The changes are expected to save Snap $500 million by the second half of 2026. Snap had about 5,261 full-time employees as of December 2025, and now joins the growing list of tech companies that have already announced significant layoffs this year, including Meta, Amazon, Oracle, GoPro, and Jack Dorsey's Block. "Last fall, I described Snap as facing a crucible moment, requiring a new way of working that is faster and more efficient, while pivoting towards profitable growth," Spiegel wrote. "Over the past several months, we have carefully reviewed the work required to best serve our community and partners, and made tough choices to prioritize the investments we believe are most likely to create long-term value."

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Allbirds made a surprise announcement this morning: it's pivoting from sustainable shoes to AI compute infrastructure, rebranding as NewBird AI after selling its brand assets and closing its U.S. full-price stores. The move sent shares soaring more than 700%. CNBC reports: The move boosted shares of the miniscule market cap company -- it was valued at about $21 million at Tuesday's close -- by more than 700%. The shares, which were under $3 a day ago, jumped to above $17. [...] The new company, which expects to be called NewBird AI, announced a deal to raise up to $50 million in funding, expected to close in the second quarter of 2026. Allbirds announced a deal with American Exchange Group to sell its intellectual property and other assets for $39 million last month. "The Company will initially seek to acquire high-performance, low-latency AI compute hardware and provide access under long-term lease arrangements, meeting customer demand that spot markets and hyperscalers are unable to reliably service," the company said in the announcement.

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Container security failures rarely come from zero-days. They come from the configuration. Misconfigurations don't trigger alerts. They don456't crash systems. Most of the time, they sit quietly in production until something starts probing from the outside or moving laterally from the inside.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Wall Street Journal: Rivian is joining with Redwood Materials to reuse EV batteries for energy storage -- the largest repurposed-battery energy storage system for an automotive manufacturer in the U.S., executives told The Wall Street Journal. Redwood Materials is a battery-recycling firm started by Tesla co-founder JB Straubel. Once completed later this year, Rivian's plant in Normal, Ill., will draw electricity from more than 100 Rivian EV batteries in an area the size of a small parking lot. It will reduce Rivian's dependence on the power grid during peak demand hours. "It saves Rivian money on what it takes to run the plant. It reduces the demand on the grid, which is great," Rivian Chief Executive Officer RJ Scaringe said in an interview. In the Rivian project, the batteries will come from either its test vehicles or from vehicles that have viable batteries but can no longer drive. Those batteries get sent off to Redwood, which integrates them into power storage units. Both companies declined to specify the cost of this project. The setup is expected to initially provide 10 megawatt-hours of energy, equivalent to about 1,000 home-energy battery storage units linked together, Redwood's Straubel said. "These batteries are already built," he said. "We need to integrate them and connect them together, but that can happen quite fast. They don't have to get imported from some other place." [...] Scaringe said that while branching into battery energy storage systems is "not a focus for us as a business right now," Rivian hopes to do more at its sites with Redwood. "There's hopefully a lot more, and there's going to be a lot of batteries we'll have access to," he said.

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A 63-year-old man in Norway appears to be cured of HIV after receiving a stem cell transplant from his brother, who turned out to have a rare mutation that makes immune cells resistant to HIV. "Four years after the transplant, and two years after the man stopped antiretroviral therapy, he still appears to be free of the infection," reports Gizmodo. From the report: According to the report, the man was first diagnosed with myelodysplastic syndrome, a type of cancer that weakens blood cell production from bone marrow, in 2018. Though he seemed to initially respond to treatment, the cancer returned after two years, and doctors decided to perform a stem cell transplant. Because the man also had HIV (diagnosed in 2006), the doctors were hoping to treat both conditions at once, though they knew their chances were low. Most of these cases have involved the use of stem cells taken from people with two copies of a particular mutation in their CCR5 gene, which regulates the CC5R receptor on white blood cells. This mutation, named CCR5-delta 32, makes immune cells naturally resistant to infection from strains of HIV-1 (the most common type of the virus). However, only about 1% of the population carries two copies of the mutation. After initial screening failed to find someone who both possessed the mutation and had compatible bone marrow, the doctors decided to move ahead with the man's brother, who was already known to have compatible bone marrow. But to everyone's surprise, testing on the day of the transplant showed that the brother also had the mutation. Though the man did experience some complications from the procedure, his body successfully started to produce new blood cells with the mutation. The doctors decided to take him off antiretroviral medication two years after the transplant. And in the two years since then, regular follow-up tests have failed to show any signs of the virus in his system. [...] According to AFP, there have only been roughly 10 cases worldwide involving an HIV cure through stem cell transplantation. This is the first to involve a family donor.

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Sony Pictures chief Tom Rothman urged theater owners to cut down the roughly 30 minutes of trailers and ads before movies. "Get off the ad crack," Rothman told the audience at CinemaCon this week. "Get rid of the endless advertising and substantially shorten the long pre-shows." Variety reports: He noted that frequent moviegoers now show up a half hour late to avoid all the spots (something that reserved seating has made easier than ever before). Rothman said that means many people "don't even see the trailers," which results in "enticements gone to waste." Rothman predicted that the 2026 box office, which has already benefitted from hits like "Super Mario Galaxy Movie" and "Project Hail Mary," will rebound in a big way. But he acknowledged that attendance still trails pre-pandemic levels. Rothman has been a vociferous defender of the big screen, pushing studios to embrace longer windows so that movies will stay in cinemas longer. That was a theme that Rothman returned to at CinemaCon, pressing exhibitors to hold strong and agree not to show movies that quickly appear on streaming services or on-demand platforms. "Enforce longer windows," Rothman said. "Yes, even if that means you cannot play every film." In addition to stumping for exhibition, Rothman has practically begged Hollywood to invest in new stories along with all the franchise fare. In a recent New York Times op-ed, for instance, Rothman, the longest-serving studio chief, wrote, "For all the success of films driven by existing intellectual property, originality is essential to movies. Neither movie theaters nor the art form itself can survive without at least some originality. After all, you can't make a sequel to nothing."

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I was a huge fan of Niri already. It's a scrolling tiling window manager. Roughly:

• When I open an app it takes the full height and a pre-configured width on the screen.
• When I open more apps and the screen was already full, it pushes the existing apps off screen.
• It can stack windows in columns to have a more compact view

It means that windows always take the optimal amount of space, and they're very neatly organized. It's extremely pleasant to use and keyboard friendly.

Don't mind the apparent slowness: this was recorded on a 10 year old laptop, opening OBS is enough to make its CPU go brr. When OBS is not running, Niri is buttery smooth.

But now I've learned that Niri supports user-provided GLSL shaders for several animations. Roughly: you can animate how windows appear and disappear (and other events, but let's keep things simple).

Some people out there have created collections of shaders that work wonderfully for Niri:

• https://github.com/liixini/shaders
• https://github.com/XansiVA/nirimation

My personal favorite is the glitchy one.

In a world of uniform UIs, these frivolous, unnecessary and creative ways to interact with users are a breath of fresh air! Those animations are healing my inner 14 year old.

There was a silly little project I’d tried to encourage many folks to attempt last summer. Sri picked it up back in September and after many months, I decided to wrap it up and publish what’s there.

The intention is a simple, 2-sided A4 that folks can print and give out at repair cafes, like the End of 10 event series. Here’s the original issue, if you’d like to look at the initial thought process.

When I hear fairly technical folks talk about Linux in 2026, I still consistently hear things like “I don’t want to use the command line.” The fact that Spotify, Discord, Slack, Zoom, and Steam all run smoothly on Linux is far removed from these folks’ conception of the Linux desktop they might have formed back in 2009. Most people won’t come to Linux because it’s free of shlop and ads — they’re accustomed to choking on that stuff. They’ll come to Linux because they can open a spreadsheet for free, play Slay The Spire 2, or install Slack even though they promised themselves they wouldn’t use their personal computer for work.

The GNOME we all know and love is one we take for granted… and the benefits of which we assume everyone wants. But the efficiency, the privacy, the universality, the hackability, the gorgeous design, and the lack of ads? All these things are the icing on the cake. The cake, like it or not, is installing Discord so you can join the Sunday book club.

Here’s the A4. And here’s a snippet:

 

 

If you try this out at a local repair cafe, I’d love to know which bits work and which don’t. Good luck!