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Good evening. Tonight, we wrap up our series on free trade and the left. To recap where we were, I started by retelling the story that free trade improves overall productivity, but expressed reserves about the way in which it does so: plant closures and threats thereof, regulatory arbitrage, and so on. Then we went back in history, discussing the progressive roots of free trade as a cause of the peace-and-justice crowd, in the 19th century. Then we looked at the leading exponents of free trade in the 20th century, the neoliberals , ending in an odd place: instead of free trade being a means for the end of peace and prosperity, neoliberalism turns this on its head, instead holding that war, immiseration, apartheid, dictatorship, ecological disaster, all are justified if they serve the ends of the “free market”, of which free trade is a component.

When I make this list of evils I find myself back in 1999, that clearly “we” were right then to shut down the WTO meetings in Seattle. With the distance of time, I start to wonder, not about then, but about now: for all the evil of our days, Trump at least has the virtue of making clear that trade barriers have a positive dot-product with acts of war. As someone who lives in the banlieue of Geneva, I am always amused when I find myself tut-tutting over the defunding of this or that institution of international collaboration.

I started this series by calling out four works. Pax Economica and Globalists have had adequate treatment. The third, Webs of Power, by Starhawk, is one that I have long seen as a bit of an oddball; forgive my normie white boy (derogatory) sensibilities, but I have often wondered how a book by a voice of “earth-based spirituality and Goddess religion” has ended up on my shelf. I am an atheist. How much woo is allowed to me?

choice of axiom

Conventional wisdom is to treat economists seriously, and Wiccans less so. In this instance, I have my doubts. The issue is that a neoliberal is at the same time a true believer in markets, and a skilled jurist. In service of the belief, any rhetorical device is permissible, if it works; if someone comes now and tries to tell me that the EU-Mercosur agreement is a good thing because of its effect on capybara populations, my first reaction is to doubt them, because maybe they are a neoliberal, and if so they would literally say anything.

Whereas if Starhawk has this Earth-mother-spiritual vibe... who am I to say? Yes, I think religion on the whole is a predatory force on vulnerable people, but that doesn’t mean that her interpretation of the web of life as divine is any less legitimate than neoliberal awe of the market. Let’s hear her argument and get on with things.

Starhawk’s book has three parts. The first is an as-I-lived-it chronicle, going from Seattle to Washington to Prague to Quebec City to Genoa, and thence to 9/11 and its aftermath, describing what it was like to be an activist seeking to disrupt the various WTO-adjacent meetings, seeking to build something else. She follows this up with 80 pages of contemporary-to-2002 topics such as hierarchy within the movement, nonviolence vs black blocs, ecological principles, cultural appropriation, and so on.

These first two sections inform the last final 20 pages, in which Starhawk attempts to synthesize what it is that “we” wanted, as a kind of memento and hopefully a generator of actions to come. She comes up with a list of nine principles, which I’ll just quote here because I don’t have an editor (the joke’s on all of us!):

1. We must protect the viability of the life-sustaining systems of the planet, which are everywhere under attack.
2. A realm of the sacred exists, of things too precious to be commodified, and must be respected.
3. Communities must control their own resources and destinies.
4. The rights and heritages of indigenous communities must be acknowledged and respected.
5. Enterprises must be rooted in communities and be responsible to communities and to future generations.
6. Opportunity for human beings to meet their needs and fulfill their dreams and aspirations should be open to all.
7. Labor deserves just compensation, security, and dignity.
8. The human community has a collective responsibility to assure the basic means of life, growth, and development for all its members.
9. Democracy means that all people have a voice in the decisions that affect them, including economic decisions.

Now friends, this is Starhawk’s list, not mine, and a quarter-century-old list at that. I’m not here to judge it, though I think it’s not bad; what I find interesting is its multifaceted nature, that when contrasted with the cybernetic awe of late neoliberalism, that actually it’s the Witch who has the more down-to-earth concerns: a planet to live on, a Rawlsian concern with justice, and a control of the economic by the people.

which leaves us

Former European Central Bank president Mario Draghi published a report some 18 months ago diagnosing a European malaise and proposing a number of specific remedies. I find that we on my part of the left are oft ill-equipped to engage with the problem he identifies, not to mention the solutions. The whole question of productivity is very technical, to the extent that we might consider it owned by our enemies: our instinct is to deflect, “productivity for what”, that sort of thing. Worse, if we do concede the problem, we haven’t spent as much time sparring in the gyms of comparative advantage; we risk a first-round knockout. We come with Starhawk’s list in hand, and they smile at us condescendingly: “very nice but we need to focus on the economy, you know,” and we lose again.

But Starhawk was not wrong. We do need a set of principles that we can use to analyze the present and plot a course to the future. I do not pretend to offer such a set today, but after having looked into the free trade question over the last couple months, I have reached two simple conclusions, which I will share with you now.

The first is that, from an intellectual point of view, we should just ignore the neoliberals; they are not serious people. That’s not a value judgment on the price mechanism, but rather one on those that value nothing else: that whereas classical liberalism was a means to an end, neoliberalism admits no other end than commerce, and admits any means that furthers its end. And so, we can just ignore them. If neoliberals were the only ones thinking about productivity, well, we might need new branches of economics. Fortunately that’s not the case. Productivity is but one dimension of the good, and it is our collective political task to choose a point from the space of the possible according to our collective desires.

The second conclusion is that we should take back free trade from our enemies on the right. We are one people, but divided into states by historical accident. Although there is a productivity argument for trade, we don’t have to limit ourselves to it: the bond that one might feel between Colorado and Wyoming should be the same between Italy and Tunisia, between Canada and Mexico, indeed between France and Brasil. One people, differentiated but together, sharing ideas and, yes, things. Internationalism, not nationalism.

There is no reason to treat free trade as the sole criterion against which to judge a policy. States are heterogeneous: what works for the US might not be right for Haiti; states differ in the degree that they internalize environmental impacts; and they differ as regards public services. We can take these into account via policy, but our goal should be progress for all.

So while Thomas Piketty is right to decry a kind of absolutism among European decisionmakers regarding free trade, I can’t help but notice a chauvinist division being set up in the way we leftists are inclined to treat these questions: we in Europe are one bloc, despite e.g. very different carbon impacts of producing a dishwasher in Poland versus Spain, whereas a dishwasher from China belongs to a different, worse, more sinful category.

and mercosur?

To paraphrase Marley’s ghost, mankind is my business. I want an ever closer union with my brothers and sisters in Uruguay and Zambia and Cambodia and Palestine. Trade is a part of it. All things being equal, we should want to trade with Chile. We on the left should not oppose free trade with Mercosur out of a principle that goods produced far away are necessarily a bad thing.

All this is not to say that we should just doux it (although, gosh, Karthik is such a worthy foe); we can still participate in collective carrot-and-stick exercises such as carbon taxes and the like, and this appreciation of free trade would not have trumped the campaign to boycott apartheid South Africa, nor would it for apartheid Israel. But our default position should be to support free trade with Mercosur, in such a way that does improves the lot of all humanity.

I don’t know what to think about the concrete elements of the EU-Mercosur deal. The neoliberal play is to design legal structures that encase commerce, and a free trade deal risks subordinating the political to the economic. But unlike some of my comrades on the left, I am starting to think that we should want free trade with Bolivia, and that’s already quite a change from where I was 25 years ago.

fin

Emily Saliers famously went seeking clarity; I fear I have brought little. We are still firmly in the world of the political, and like Starhawk, still need a framework of pre-thunk thoughts to orient us when some Draghi comes with a new four-score-page manifesto. Good luck and godspeed.

But it is easier to find a solution if we cull the dimensionality of the problem. The neoliberals had their day, but perhaps these staves may be of use to you in exorcising their discursive domination; it is time we cut them off. Internationalist trade was ours anyway, and it should resume its place as a means to our ends.

And what ends? As with prices, we discover them on the margin, in each political choice we make. Some are easy; some less so. And while a list like Starhawk’s is fine enough, I keep coming back to a simpler question: which side are you on? The sheriff or the union? ICE or the immigrant? Which side are you on? The question cuts fine. For the WTO in Seattle, to me it said to shut it all down. For EU-Mercosur, to me it says, “let’s talk.”

alternative_right shares a report from Phys.org: Astronomers have an answer for a long-running mystery in astrophysics: why is the growth of supermassive black holes so much lower today than in the past? A study using NASA's Chandra X-ray Observatory and other X-ray telescopes found that supermassive black holes are unable to consume material as rapidly as they did in the distant past. The results appeared in the December 2025 issue of The Astrophysical Journal. [...] The team ran tests of the three main possible scenarios currently being considered for the slowdown of black hole growth. These options were: could the decline in black hole growth be caused by less efficient rates of consumption, or by smaller typical black hole masses, or by fewer actively growing black holes? Their analysis of the data, extending over billions of years of cosmic history, led them to the conclusion that black holes are indeed consuming material less rapidly the later they are found after the Big Bang. The researchers expect this trend of slower-growing black holes to continue into the future.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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Version:6.18.20 (longterm) Released:2026-03-25 Source:linux-6.18.20.tar.xz PGP Signature:linux-6.18.20.tar.sign Patch:full (incremental) ChangeLog:ChangeLog-6.18.20

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I wanted to dip my toes into Kubernetes for my homelab, but I knew I would need some flexibility to experiment. So instead of deploying k3s directly on my server, I

1. Installed a base Debian on my server, encrypting the disk with LUKS and using LVM to partition it.
2. Installed the Proxmox hypervisor on that base Debian
3. Spun up a Debian VM, and installed k3s on it.

Proxmox supports several storage plugins. It allows me to create LVM Local Volumes for the VM disks for example.

This setup allows me to spin up fresh VMs for my experiments, all while leaving my production k3s intact. This is great, but it came up with two problems:

1. When I provision the VM for k3s I need to allocate it a massive amount of disk space. This is because k3s uses a local path provisioner to provision new Persistent Volumes directly on the VM.
2. I can't take snapshots of the Persistent Volumes when doing backups. There's a risk that the data will change while I perform the backup.

The situation looks like the following.

On the LVM disk of the host, I create a VM for k3s. This VM has a virtual disk that doesn't rely on LVM, so it can't create LVM Logical Volumes. The local provisioner can only create volumes on the virtual disk, because it can't escape the VM to create volumes on the Proxmox host.

Because the volumes are created on the virtual disk that doesn't rely on LVM, I can't use LVM snapshots to take snapshots of my volumes.

[!question] Why not LVM Thin?

One solution to address the massive disk requirement could be to use LVM Thin: it would allow me to allocate a lot of space in theory, but in practice in only fills up as the VM storage gets used.

I don't want to use LVM Thin because it puts me at risk of overprovisioning. I could allocate more storage than I actually have, and it would be difficult to realize that my disks are filling up before it's too late.

My colleague Quentin mentioned the Proxmox CSI Plugin. It is a plugin that replaces k3s' local path provisioner. Instead of creating the kubernetes Persistent Volumes inside the VM, it calls the Proxmox host, asks it to create a LVM Logical Volume and binds it to a Persistent Volume in kubernetes.

Using the Proxmox CSI volume, the situation would look like this.

It solves the two problems for me:

1. I can now only provision a small disk for the k3s VM, since the Persistent Volumes will be created outside of the VM.
2. Since Proxmox will create LVM Logical Volumes to provision the Persistent Volumes, I can either do a LVM Snapshot from Proxmox or use Kubernete's Volume Snapshot feature, with some caveats.

Setting up the Proxmox-CSI-Plugin for k3s can be a bit involved, but I'm writing a longer blog post about it.

NASA is reportedly halting work on the lunar Gateway in favor of a more direct push to build a lunar base. The new plan would cost tens of billions over the next decade, though the change could face hurdles because Congress previously funded Gateway specifically. SpaceNews reports: "Starting today, we're building humanity's first deep space outpost," said Carlos Garcia-Galan, program executive for NASA's moon base effort. The lunar base will take place in three phases. Phase 1, running from 2026 to 2028, "is all about getting to the moon reliably," he said. That includes a significant increase in the cadence of lander missions through the Commercial Lunar Payload Services and other programs. It will also focus on developing enabling technologies and getting "ground truth" for potential base locations at the lunar south pole. Phase 2, from 2029 through 2031, starts building the base, he said. That would include building out communications, navigation, power and other infrastructure, developing larges CLPS cargo landers and supporting two crewed missions a year. Phase 3, beginning 2032, will enable "long distance and long duration human exploration" on the moon, he said, with routine logistics missions to the moon and uncrewed cargo return missions from the moon. Garcia-Galan said NASA foresees spending $10 billion each on Phases 1 and 2. Phase 3, lasting to at least 2036, would cost an additional $10 billion or more. The base would leverage existing programs, although with some changes. NASA is planning to revamp the Lunar Terrain Vehicle program after concluding the current approach would take too long to get a crew-capable rover to the moon. "We were projecting a delivery on the lunar surface by 2030," he said. The agency is instead issuing a draft request for proposals for simplified rovers that could be quicker and easier to develop but could be upgraded later. The base, though, would include some new capabilities and technologies. One example Garcia-Galan provided was MoonFall, a drone that would be able to hop from one location to another on the lunar surface. The drones will be "built on the legacy" of Ingenuity, the small Mars helicopter. "We're going to take everything that we learned from Ingenuity's systems, the avionics, all of that, to build this."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the BBC: Hong Kong police can now demand phone or computer passwords from those who are suspected of breaching the wide-ranging National Security Law (NSL). Those who refuse could face up to a year in jail and a fine of up to $12,700, and individuals who provide "false or misleading information" could face up to three years in jail. It comes as part of new amendments to a bylaw under the NSL that the government gazetted on Monday. The NSL was introduced in Hong Kong in 2020, in wake of massive pro-democracy protests the year before. Authorities say the laws, which target acts like terrorism and secession, are necessary for stability -- but critics say they are tools to quash dissent. The new amendments also give customs officials the power to seize items that they deem to "have seditious intention." Monday's amendments ensure that "activities endangering national security can be effectively prevented, suppressed and punished, and at the same time the lawful rights and interests of individuals and organizations are adequately protected," Hong Kong authorities said on Monday. Changes to the bylaw was announced by the city's leader, John Lee, bypassing the city's legislative council. The NSL also allows for some trials to be heard behind closed doors.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Linux gamers are seeing massive performance gains with Wine's new NTSYNC support, "which is a feature that has been years in the making and rewrites how Wine handles one of the most performance-sensitive operations in modern gaming," reports XDA Developers. Not every game will see a night-and-day difference, but for the games that do benefit from these changes, "the improvements range from noticeable to absurd." Combined with improvements to Wayland, graphics, and compatibility, as well as a major WoW64 architecture overhaul, the release looks less like an incremental update and more like one of Wine's most important upgrades in years. From the report: The numbers are wild. In developer benchmarks, Dirt 3 went from 110.6 FPS to 860.7 FPS, which is an impressive 678% improvement. Resident Evil 2 jumped from 26 FPS to 77 FPS. Call of Juarez went from 99.8 FPS to 224.1 FPS. Tiny Tina's Wonderlands saw gains from 130 FPS to 360 FPS. As well, Call of Duty: Black Ops I is now actually playable on Linux, too. Those benchmarks compare Wine NTSYNC against upstream vanilla Wine, which means there's no fsync or esync either. Gamers who use fsync are not going to see such a leap in performance in most games. The games that benefit most from NTSYNC are the ones that were struggling before, such as titles with heavy multi-threaded workloads where the synchronization overhead was a genuine bottleneck. For those games, the difference is night and day. And unlike fsync, NTSYNC is in the mainline kernel, meaning you don't need any custom patches or out-of-tree modules for it work. Any distro shipping kernel 6.14 or later, which at this point includes Fedora 42, Ubuntu 25.04, and more recent releases, will support it. Valve has already added the NTSYNC kernel driver to SteamOS 3.7.20 beta, loading the module by default, and an unofficial Proton fork, Proton GE, already has it enabled. When Valve's official Proton rebases on Wine 11, every Steam Deck owner gets this for free. All of this is what makes NTSYNC such a big deal, as it's not simply a run-of-the-mill performance patch. Instead, it's something much bigger: this is the first time Wine's synchronization has been correct at the kernel level, implemented in the mainline Linux kernel, and available to everyone without jumping through hoops.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Google is expanding Android Automotive from the infotainment screen into the broader non-safety "brain" of software-defined vehicles. With its new Android Automotive OS for Software-Defined Vehicles, the in-car experience will feel "much more cohesive and the latest features will reach your driveway faster," Matt Crowley, Android Automotive's group product manager, writes in a blog post. "From a truly integrated voice experience to proactive maintenance reminders, your car will become a true extension of your digital life," Crowley adds. The Verge reports: With its new software, Google is promising faster over-the-air software updates, better voice assistants, and more proactive vehicle maintenance alerts. Non-driving functions like climate control, lighting, and seating adjustment would fall under Android's control. And the system would move beyond basic infotainment to create a unified ecosystem for features like remote cabin conditioning, digital key management, and personalized driver profiles. For automakers, the new system promises less expensive software development costs and an opportunity to focus on what matters most to them: branding. By providing the "foundational code and a common language for their software," Google says automakers will be free to design cool experiences for their customers. Google says its already working with companies like Renault Group and Qualcomm to bring its new software-defined vehicle version of Android Automotive to more cars. A variety of automakers already use regular Android Automotive, like Volvo, Polestar, General Motors, Nissan, and Honda.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

OpenAI is shutting down Sora, its generative-AI video creation platform it launched in December 2024. "The move is one of a number of steps OpenAI is taking to refocus on business and coding functions ahead of a potential initial public offering as soon as the fourth quarter of this year," reports the Wall Street Journal. CEO Sam Altman announced the changes to staff on Tuesday. "We're saying goodbye to Sora," the Sora Team said in a post on X. "To everyone who created with Sora, shared it, and built community around it: thank you. What you made with Sora mattered, and we know this news is disappointing. We'll share more soon, including timelines for the app and API and details on preserving your work." Last week, OpenAI announced plans to combine its Atlas web browser, ChatGPT app, and Codex coding app into a singular desktop "superapp." "We realized we were spreading our efforts across too many apps and stacks, and that we need to simplify our efforts," said CEO of Applications, Fidji Simo. "That fragmentation has been slowing us down and making it harder to hit the quality bar we want." This could behind the decision to kill Sora as the company redirects its resources and top talent towards productivity tools that benefit both enterprises and individual users.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Arm unveiled its first self-developed data center chip, the AGI CPU, designed for handling agentic AI workloads. The new chip was built in partnership with Meta and manufactured by TSMC. Other customers for the new chip include OpenAI, Cloudflare, SAP, and SK Telecom. Reuters reports: The new chip, called the AGI CPU, will address data-crunching needed for a specific type of AI that is able to act on behalf of users with minimal oversight, instead of responding to queries as part of a chatbot. For years, Arm, majority-owned by Japan's SoftBank Group has relied only on intellectual property for revenue, licensing its designs to companies such as Qualcomm and Nvidia and then collecting a royalty payment based on the number of units sold. "It's a very pivotal moment for the company," CEO Rene Haas said in an interview with Reuters. The new chip will be overseen by Mohamed Awad, head of the company's cloud AI business, and Arm has additional designs in the works that it plans to release at 12- to 18-month intervals. TSMC is fabricating the device on its 3-nanometer technology and is made from two distinct pieces of silicon that operate as a single chip. Arm plans to put it into volume production in the second half of this year but has received test chips that function as expected. In addition to the chip itself, Arm is working with server makers such as Lenovo and Quanta Computer to offer complete systems.

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Anthropic is testing a new Claude feature that lets users send a request from their phone and have the AI carry it out directly on their computer, such as opening apps, using a browser, or editing files. The move follows the viral spread of OpenClaw earlier this year, which has gained cult popularity among devs for the ability to run local, 24/7 personal workflows. CNBC reports: Users can now message Claude a task from a phone, and the AI agent will then complete that task, Anthropic announced Monday. After being prompted, Claude can open apps on your computer, navigate a web browser and fill in spreadsheets, Anthropic said. One prompt Anthropic demonstrated in a video posted Monday is a user running late for a meeting. The user asks Claude to export a pitch deck as a PDF file and attach it to a meeting invite. The video shows Claude carrying out the task. [...] Anthropic cautioned that computer use "is still early compared to Claude's ability to code or interact with text." "Claude can make mistakes, and while we continue to improve our safeguards, threats are constantly evolving," Anthropic warned. The company added that it has built the computer use capability "with safeguards that minimize risk," and that Claude will always request permission before accessing new apps. Users can use Dispatch, a feature it released last week in Claude Cowork. That lets users have a continuous conversation with Claude from a phone or desktop and assign the agent tasks.

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When open source nonprofits ask for donations, one common answer is "I only want to fund code, I don't want to fund anything else." GNOME has created a Fellowship Program to fund direct work on GNOME, a program entirely funded by donations. This is a testament to the Foundation's maturity, as it becomes a direct contributor to the project it stewards.

Let's take a step back to address the code-only argument. It is a misguided reaction, but I can see where its proponents are coming from. In the world of proprietary software, you pay to get your software. You don't realize that this bundles the marketing, accounting, legal, and even HR costs.

In the open source world, everyone can see who contributes code and how that code is built and packaged to create a software solution. A lot of things are not shown in git commits though. A few of them are:

• What did it take to create the Human Interface Guidelines to have a coherent suite of applications? How many designers had to meet, what research did they have to do, did they have to meet in person?
• What did it take to create the Developer Documentation to onboard new developers, help them make their first steps, and turn them into bigger contributors over the years?
• What did it take to build a website to advertize all the cool apps that follow the GNOME HIG?
• What did it take to set up the infrastructure the code lives on, and that builds the software we all love?

GNOME, like many other open source projects, is first and foremost a community. This is a group of people with diverse backgrounds, diverse opinions, who try to find common ground to solve problems. They don't always agree on how to solve problems, nor necessarily on what even is a problem in the first place.

The role of The GNOME Foundation is to provide a place to support its community. Its role is to help its contributors find common ground. Its role is to give them the tools and opportunities to do so.

Some people still don't value this, and want The GNOME Foundation to be a vendor for GNOME. They want to fund developers to produce code, because that's a very visible metric.

For them, and for everyone who's ever wanted to give back to GNOME without knowing how, The GNOME Foundation has created a Fellowship Program. It will directly fund a person to work on what few people want to do in their spare time: maintenance.

Round one focuses on sustainability: improving tooling, build systems, test infrastructure, automation, documentation, developer productivity, and ongoing maintainability. We are not funding feature development: the goal is for each fellowship to leave the project in a more efficient and sustainable state.

This is only fueled by our donations. If you want a direct pipeline between your money and GNOME development, this is it. Donate to GNOME, we can't afford not to have them when Big Tech has so much influence on our lives.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: A new hacking group has been rampaging the Internet in a persistent campaign that spreads a self-propagating and never-before-seen backdoor -- and curiously a data wiper that targets Iranian machines. The group, tracked under the name TeamPCP, first gained visibility in December, when researchers from security firm Flare observed it unleashing a worm that targeted cloud-hosted platforms that weren't properly secured. The objective was to build a distributed proxy and scanning infrastructure and then use it to compromise servers for exfiltrating data, deploying ransomware, conducting extortion, and mining cryptocurrency. The group is notable for its skill in large-scale automation and integration of well-known attack techniques. More recently, TeamPCP has waged a relentless campaign that uses continuously evolving malware to bring ever more systems under its control. Late last week, it compromised virtually all versions of the widely used Trivy vulnerability scanner in a supply-chain attack after gaining privileged access to the GitHub account of Aqua Security, the Trivy creator. Over the weekend, researchers said they observed TeamPCP spreading potent malware that was also worm-enabled, meaning it had the potential to spread to new machines automatically, with no interaction required of victims behind the keyboard. [...] As the weekend progressed, CanisterWorm [as Aikido has named the malware] was updated to add an additional payload: a wiper that targets machines exclusively in Iran. When the updated worm infects machines, it checks if the machine is in the Iranian timezone or is configured for use in that country. When either condition was met, the malware no longer activated the credential stealer and instead triggered a novel wiper that TeamPCP developers named Kamikaze. Eriksen said in an email that there's no indication yet that the worm caused actual damage to Iranian machines, but that there was "clear potential for large-scale impact if it achieves active spread." It's unclear what the motive is for TeamPCP. Aikido researcher Charlie Eriksen wrote: "While there may be an ideological component, it could just as easily be a deliberate attempt to draw attention to the group. Historically, TeamPCP has appeared to be financially motivated, but there are signs that visibility is becoming a goal in itself. By going after security tools and open-source projects, including Checkmarx as of today, they are sending a clear and deliberate signal."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Epic Games is cutting more than 1,000 jobs as usage of its flagship title, Fortnite, falls. "The layoffs aren't related to AI," CEO Tim Sweeney noted. Reuters reports: The cuts, along with more than $500 million in savings from lower contracting and marketing spending and unfilled roles would put the company in "a more stable place," Sweeney said in a note to employees. [...] "We've had challenges delivering consistent Fortnite magic," Sweeney said, adding "market conditions today are the most extreme" since the early days of the company founded in 1991. The move marks Epic's second major round of layoffs in three years. In September 2023, the company cut about 830 jobs, or roughly 16% of its workforce. It was not immediately clear what percentage of staff would be impacted by Tuesday's announcement.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

New submitter the_skywise shares a report from Reuters: The U.S. Federal Communications Commission said on Monday it was banning the import of all new foreign-made consumer routers, the latest crackdown on Chinese-made electronic gear over security concerns. China is estimated to control at least 60% of the U.S. market for home routers, boxes that connect computers, phones, and smart devices to the internet. The FCC order does not impact the import or use of existing models, but will ban new ones. The agency said a White House-convened review deemed imported routers pose "a severe cybersecurity risk that could be leveraged to immediately and severely disrupt U.S. critical infrastructure." It said malicious actors had exploited security gaps in foreign-made routers "to attack households, disrupt networks, enable espionage, and facilitate intellectual property theft," citing their role in major hacks like Volt and Salt Typhoon. The determination includes an exemption for routers the Pentagon deems do not pose unacceptable risks.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Version:next-20260324 (linux-next) Released:2026-03-24