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Submission + - Malware pre-installed on TV streaming boxes

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Who Operates the Badbox 2.0 Botnet?

“The cybercriminals in control of Kimwolf — a disruptive botnet that has infected more than 2 million devices — recently shared a screenshot indicating they’d compromised the control panel for Badbox 2.0, a vast China-based botnet powered by malicious software that comes pre-installed on many Android TV streaming boxes. Both the FBI and Google say they are hunting for the people behind Badbox 2.0, and thanks to bragging by the Kimwolf botmasters we may now have a much clearer idea about that.”

Submission + - Eradicating Fujitsu and Horizon from the Post Office

Submitted by Anonymous Coward
An anonymous reader writes: Eradicating Fujitsu and Horizon from the Post Office, step by step

“Decommissioning and replacing an IT system that has caused irreparable harm to thousands of people is not the usual job description of an incoming chief technology officer (CTO), but that’s what Paul Anastassi signed up for when he took on the role at the Post Office.”

Submission + - Tesla "Robotaxi" service reports 5 more crashes in Austin

Submitted by cmseagle
cmseagle writes: Tesla has reported 5 crashes in Austin over the course of December and January. Most of these were minor collisions, but it implies that the taxis may be less safe than human drivers:

The irony is that Tesla’s own numbers condemn it. Tesla’s Vehicle Safety Report claims the average American driver experiences a minor collision every 229,000 miles and a major collision every 699,000 miles. By Tesla’s own benchmark, its “Robotaxi” fleet is crashing nearly 4 times more often than what the company says is normal for a regular human driver in a minor collision, and virtually every single one of these miles was driven with a trained safety monitor in the vehicle who could intervene at any moment, which means they likely prevented more crashes that Tesla’s system wouldn’t have avoided.

More concerningly, they've also upgraded an incident which took place in July from "property damage only" to "Minor w/ Hospitalization":

This means someone involved in a Tesla “Robotaxi” crash required hospital treatment. The original crash involved a right turn collision with an SUV at 2 mph. Tesla’s delayed admission of hospitalization, five months after the incident, raises more questions about its crash reporting, which is already heavily redacted.

Submission + - AI found 12 New OpenSSL zero-days (lesswrong.com)

Submitted by wiredog
wiredog writes: "Our goal was to turn what used to be an elite, artisanal hacker craft into a repeatable industrial process. We do this to secure the software infrastructure of human civilization before strong AI systems become ubiquitous. Prosaically, we want to make sure we don't get hacked into oblivion the moment they come online."

Submission + - T2/Linux restored XAA in Xorg, making 2D graphics fast again. (t2linux.com)

Submitted by ReneR
ReneR writes: T2 Linux has restored XAA in Xorg, bringing fixed-function hardware 2D acceleration back to many older graphics cards that upstream left in software-rendered mode.
Older fixed-function GPUs now regain smooth window movement, low CPU usage, and proper 24-bit bpp framebuffer support: also restored in T2. Tested hardware includes ATi Mach-64 and Rage-128, SiS, Trident, Cirrus, Matrox (Millennium/G450), Permedia2, Tseng ET6000 and even the Sun Creator/Elite 3D. The result: vintage and retro systems and classic high-end Unix workstations that are fast and responsive again.

Submission + - Google Sounds Alarm Over Europe's Tech Sovereignty Package

Submitted by Elektroschock
Elektroschock writes: Kent Walker, Alphabets Global Affairs VP and Chief Legal Officer, pushes against open source policies in the European Union. Mr. Walker is not a European citizen or resident.

The company warned that Brussels’ policies aimed at reducing dependence on American tech companies could harm competitiveness. According to Google, the idea of replacing current tools with open-source programs would not contribute to economic growth.

Submission + - Researchers develop detachable crawling robotic hand (sciencenews.org)

Submitted by fahrbot-bot
fahrbot-bot writes: Science News is reporting that researchers have developed a robotic hand that can not only skitter about on its fingertips, it can also bend its fingers backward, connect and disconnect from a robotic arm and pick up and carry one or more objects at a time. With its unusual agility, it could navigate and retrieve objects in spaces too confined for human hands. Original study published in Nature Communications on January 20, 2026.

When attached to the mechanical arm, the robotic hand could pick up objects much like a human hand. The bot pinched a ball between two fingers, wrapped four fingers around a metal rod and held a flat disc between fingers and palm.

But the bot isn’t constrained by human anatomy. The fingers bend backward just as easily as forward, allowing the robot to hold objects against both sides of its palm simultaneously. It can even unscrew the cap off a mustard bottle while holding the bottle in place.

When the robot was separated from the arm, it was most stable walking on four or five fingers and using one or two fingers for grabbing and carrying things, the team found. In one set of trials with both bots, the hand detached from the robotic arm and used its fingers as legs to skitter over to a wooden block. Once there, it picked up the block with one finger and carried it back to the arm.

The crawling bot could one day aid in industrial inspections of pipes and equipment too small for a human or larger robot to access, says Xiao Gao, a roboticist now at Wuhan University in China. It might retrieve objects in a warehouse or navigate confined spaces in disaster response efforts.

Submission + - KDE Plasma 6.6 released (kde.org)

Submitted by jrepin
jrepin writes: KDE Plasma is a popular desktop (and mobile too) environment for GNU/Linux and other UNIX-like operating systems. Among other things, it also powers the desktop mode of the Steam Deck gaming handheld. The KDE community today announced the latest release: Plasma 6.6 . In this new major release Spectacle can recognize texts from screenshots, a new on-screen keybord and new login manager are available for testing, and a first-time wizard Plasma Setup was added. Your current theme can be saved as a new global theme, which can also be used for the day and night theme switching feature. Emoji selector got a new easier way to select skin tone. If your computer has a camera available you can now connect to a Wi-Fi network by scanning a QR code. Application sound volume can now be changed by scrolling over an application taskbar button via mouse wheel. When screencasting and sharing your desktop you can now filter windows so they are not shared. A setting was added to enable having virtual desktops only on the primary screen. If your device has an ambient light sensor you can enable automatic screen brightness adjustment. Game controllers can now be used as regular input devices. For complete list of new features and changes check out the KDE Plasma 6.6 release announcement and the complete changelog.

Submission + - What is your dual booting UEFE/CMOS choice time, your boot start time?

Submitted by BrendaEM
BrendaEM writes: You want a discrete/separate Windows/Linux boot. You have Windows on one SSD/NVMe, and Linux on another. How long do you have to wait for a chance to choose a boot drive? On which computer? How much time does it take to begin booting, anything? Has hardware become thousands of times more complicated, to warrant the longer start time--in a world of 4-5 GHz CPU's that are thousands of times faster than they were. Is this a symptom of a larger UEFI bloat problem? Now, with memory characterization on some modern motherboards, when building a system, how long to you have to wait to find out of your RAM is incompatible, or your system is DOA, or not?

Comment It's not about the money (Score 1) 51

by couchslug (#65991064) Attached to: Oldest Active Linux Distro Slackware Finally Releases Version 15.0

The "editors" obviously do not care. It's not as if their indifference to quality has not been repeatedly pointed out for many years.

They could and should be replaced by an AI sorting reader submissions. They don't add any value unless flagrant display of indifference has value.

Slashdot's owners clearly don't care or have any idea what to do with the site.

Comment Mechanic here with zero use for that shite (Score 1) 303

https://www.reddit.com/r/Mecha...

covers issues fairly well. Modern vehicles are driving (pun inevitable!) many techs from the industry due to excessive complexity.

The best way to avoid modern hypercomplex vehicles raping your wallet is lease, don't own, so you can hand it back and let it destroy someone else's wallet.

Comment Consider the alternative (Score 2) 45

The idea of exporting Western European democracy to cultures
it does not fit was bipartisan, but reducing the odds of nuclear war by giving the CCP economic skin in the game was an improvement over decades of nuclear standoff.

Nixons and millions of other Americans key error was imagining US businesses were capable of patriotism.

Democracy ensured idiocracy so here we are. I can't blame the rich for taking advantage of thoroughly unappealing bipedal bovines.

Submission + - iOS Zero-Day Exploited in 'Extremely Sophisticated Attack' (securityweek.com)

Submitted by wiredmikey
wiredmikey writes: Apple has rolled out fixes for iOS and macOS systems to resolve a zero-day vulnerability that has been exploited in the wild. Tracked as CVE-2026-20700, the zero-day flaw is described as a memory corruption issue that could be exploited for arbitrary code execution. “Apple is aware of a report that this issue may have been exploited in an extremely sophisticated attack against specific targeted individuals on versions of iOS before iOS 26,” Apple noted in its advisory.

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