Architechnosecurigeek. Tinkerer. General trouble maker.
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Samsung chip workers vote to accept $340,000 average bonus, ending months-long strike threat — resentment over deal has slowed down Samsung foundry division

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The agreement allocates 10.5% of Samsung's semiconductor division operating profit as stock-based bonuses.

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petrilli
15 hours ago
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Unions.
Seattle, WA
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AI data center project secretly sucked 29 million gallons of water over 15 months before detected by residents complaining about low water pressure — officials refuse to fine massive 6.2 million-square-foot facility over unauthorized water consumption

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QTS says the extra 29 million gallons were consumed during temporary construction activities, including concrete work, dust control, and site preparation.

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petrilli
17 days ago
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Further evidence that the law is irrelevant unless you are powerless.
Seattle, WA
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Windows 9x Subsystem for Linux

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WSL9x by Hailey Somerville runs a modern Linux kernel (6.19 at time of writing) cooperatively inside the Windows 9x kernel, enabling users to take advantage of the full suite of capabilities of both operating systems at the same time, including paging, memory protection, and preemptive scheduling.

Run all your favourite applications side by side – no rebooting required!

Technical details

WSL9x is made up of three components: a patched Linux kernel, a VxD driver, and a wsl.com client program.

The driver is responsible for the initialisation of WSL9x . It sets up the initial mappings for the kernel code and loads vmlinux.elf off disk using DOS interrupts.

The driver then starts a new thread in the System VM, allocates a 16 KiB stack for entering Linux on, and drops into an event loop which handles entering the kernel, dispatching IRQs, returning to userspace, and idling.

The driver is also responsible for handling userspace events which must be dispatched to the kernel, currently page faults and syscalls.

The Linux kernel is based on user-mode Linux, but hacked to call Windows 9x kernel APIs instead of posix APIs, and running in ring 0 (supervisor/kernel mode) rather than ring 3 (user mode).

See all the details and code here.

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petrilli
35 days ago
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Well, this is beautifully cursed.
Seattle, WA
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Pentagon Wants $54 Billion For Drones

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: The US military's massive $1.5 trillion budget request for the next fiscal year includes what Pentagon officials described as the largest investment in drone warfare and counter-drone technology in US history. The proposed spending on drone and autonomous warfare technologies within the FY2027 budget proposal for the US Department of Defense would surpass most countries' defense budgets and rank among the top 10 in the world for military spending, ahead of countries such as Ukraine, South Korea, and Israel. Specifically, the Pentagon is requesting $53.6 billion to boost US production and procurement of drones, train drone operators, build out a logistics network for sustaining drone deployments, and expand counter-drone systems to defend more US military sites. The funding request is budgeted under the Defense Autonomous Warfare Group (DAWG), an organization established in late 2025 that would see a massive budget increase after receiving about $226 million in the 2026 fiscal year budget. [...] Another $20.6 billion would help purchase one-way attack drones and drone aircraft developed through the US Air Force's Collaborative Combat Aircraft program, which is building drone prototypes capable of teaming up with human-piloted fighter jets. Part of this funding would also go toward defensive systems for countering small drones and the US Navy's Boeing MQ-25 drone designed to perform midair refueling of carrier-borne fighter aircraft to extend their strike ranges. Such drone-related spending even rivals the entire budget of the US Marine Corps. But the Pentagon has not said that it is creating a dedicated drone branch of the US military similar to the standalone Space Force. Pentagon officials emphasized that most of the money would go toward procuring drone and autonomous warfare technologies that already exist, and is largely separate from additional funding that would bolster US domestic manufacturing capacity to build such weapon systems. "That $70 billion is all going into existing systems and technologies," said Hurst. "The industrial base support is entirely separate." "The evolution we've seen in the battlefield is this evolution of technologies in the timeframe of weeks, not the typical years we see with our defense production," said Lt. Gen. Steven Whitney, director of force structure, resources, and assessment for the Pentagon's Joint Chiefs of Staff, during a Pentagon press briefing. "So it's really critical we work with industry to get that capability fielded."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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petrilli
35 days ago
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Always more money to murder people.
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Supreme Court arguments make it clear that FCC fines are "nonbinding"

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Supreme Court justices today expressed skepticism of AT&T and Verizon's claim that the Federal Communications Commission's procedure for imposing fines violated their right to a jury trial. But companies regulated by the FCC may come out ahead in the long run even if the carriers lose this case.

AT&T and Verizon, which were fined a total of $104 million for selling users’ real-time location data without consent, claim the FCC's penalty system deprived them of the Seventh Amendment right to a jury trial. During oral arguments today, justices repeatedly pointed out that carriers could have obtained a jury trial if they chose not to pay the fines and waited for the government to begin an enforcement action in court.

But even if AT&T and Verizon lose this case, they could get a victory of sorts because the FCC and justices seem to agree that FCC fine decisions are nonbinding and require a court decision to enforce them. A government lawyer told justices that the FCC may change the language of its forfeiture orders to make it clearer that fines don't have to be paid until after a jury trial.

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petrilli
36 days ago
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Destroying regulation at every turn.
Seattle, WA
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Bullet Train Upgrade Brings 5G Windows, Noise-Cancelling Cabins To Japan

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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.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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petrilli
41 days ago
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I expect US trains to catch up with Japan sometime around 80 years after the heat death of the universe.
Seattle, WA
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