I'm surprised Space:1999 wasn't the very first comment about this! For those not in the know, it was a 1970's UK sci-fi TV show (great first season, not so hot second season) where a nuclear pile on Moonbase Alpha explodes on the moon and hurtles it away from the earth (spoiler: no, they never return to earth). Have we not learned our lesson from Professor Gerry Anderson after all these years? :-)

You should always encrypt uploads to services like WeTransfer - always assume they'll keep the data even if they claim they'll delete it after a few days and don't be surprised if they try to sell it on or train AI on it. It's what I've done for years, even well before AI bots/training was an established thing.

One big issue I have with the UK's Online Safety Act is that the UK government isn't providing a centralised age verification service (or commissioning a non-profit UK organisation to do it, which maybe the government then subsidises?). So what we're going to get is a disparate set of companies providing probably slightly different methods of age verification and a much bigger chance of the verification data being leaked. BTW, I'm a UK adult and have no form of UK photo ID, so I've no idea how they're going to verify my age (maybe my birth certificate?).

In Reddit's case, we've got the issue of a US company (Persona, who the BBC article mentioned but failed to state it's based in San Francisco in the US) verifying the ages of UK users. This brings up the issue of jurisdiction and possible GPDR violations to my mind.

LibreOffice seem to want Windows users to go via the most difficult route first - install Linux in a dual boot scenario to test LibreOffice in Linux. Surely, a Windows user should downlooad and install LibreOffice for Windows first and see if their existing MS Office documents work fine with it (writing in one suite and reading it back in the other and vice versa). Only if Windows LibreOffice is compatible and usable enough for them, should they then consider Linux and its LibreOffice version surely?

I'm in the UK with an "alt-net" ISP (small ISP only covering small towns that were neglected by BT Openreach or Virgin Media) and they offer 500 Mbit/sec unlimited download and upload for £27 ($37 including taxes) a month, 900 Mbit/sec for £30 ($41) and 2300 Mbit/sec for £50 ($68) for either a 12 or 18 month fixed price contract. These T-Mobile prices seem very high to me!

BTW, I just switched to their 900 Mbit/sec plan and they offered it to me for the price of the 500 Mbit/sec plan (no idea why - that offer certainly isn't on their Web site or in the contract renewal reminder e-mail they sent me), plus they just posted me what looks like a better router too.

The recent TV series "Upload" already did this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... - I quite enjoyed the show and it's been renewed for a 4th and final season. Minds were uploaded to a virtual reality scenario and could later then be downloaded (it happened to a clone of the main character's body) with, yes, both versions active at the same time.

I'm surprised no-one's mentioned the Black Mirror season 3 episode "Hated In The Nation", which featured none other than a swarm of robobees. Predictably for Black Mirror, things didn't turn out too well. A little easter egg for season 7's episode 1 ("Common People") is that Rashida Jones' teacher character talks about robobees in her class as a nod to the earlier episode.

I would argue that storing absolute URLs thousands of times in the WordPress site database is incredibly annoying when you can pick up the top-level URL via a $_SERVER[] variable (or just have it hard-coded once in the DB and append relative URLs to it for sub-pages). Anyone doing serious WP development has dev/staging/live environments and will often want to copy a full site between any combination of those environments - cue painful search-replace of all the URLs (sadly WP-CLI's "wp search-replace" only does a half-assed job of this, leaving many old URL strings unchanged).

One thing I would like to see added to WordPress is a read-only Administrator role - the number of times a client who has full admin access does something they shouldn't is ridiculous (e.g. create dozens of other Administrator users [no non-admin users at all in their WP site!] or install random-ass plugins that cause problems for their site). A read-only admin would be a read-write Editor, plus view only access to the same Dashboard view that a normal Administrator would see. That way, they can see all the settings/plugins/theme/etc, but can't change them and have to ask a normal Administrator to make a change.

I'm not terrified of knives - it's guns that I'm truly scared about. The fact that a US citizen can own multiple firearms and carry them concealed is truly nightmarish and really doesn't belong in a civilised country. The vast majority of UK police don't carry a firearm - only special squads used for extreme situations (e.g. hostage-taking, terrorism) carry them and they definitely should be the only people who do.

The UK does have a massive amount of CCTV surveillance (particularly in cities) and you know what - I'm fine with that. You need some disincentive for rowdy/illegal behaviour and CCTV is one of the best tools for that.

Steam's Proton can already use esync and fsync to improve the performance of Windows games. What ntsync gives you is a more accurate implementation that works in corner cases where esync and fsync don't (for some games, you actually have to disable esync/fsync to get them to work) - the perf difference between ntsync and esync/fsync is minimal. What the misleading headline is basing the "perf leap" on is a game using ntsync vs. a game using nothing, which isn't the norm for the vast majority of games run via Proton.

Despite all this DRM, it seems like pirates find it incredibly easy to capture an entire video stream and save it as an unencrypted video file, which then ends up on file download sites, torrent sites and, yep, pirate streaming sites that stream it without DRM.

Once it's available as a normal video file, it's then trivial for the end user to run a video player, pause it and screenshot any frame they like on any device they can play video on. With the splintering of content across many expensive streaming services, piracy has seen a resurgence because of its convenience (all the content you want spread across very few [or even just one] sites)...and no DRM gives you bonuses like unencumbered screenshotting.

A bit surprised there wasn't actually any live video footage during the module descent on NASA's livestream. Instead, we got a fairly basic CGI representation of the module and simulated flames from coming its thrusters. Cue the usual nutcase "fake moon landing" conspiracy theorists to come out of the woodwork...

This is "olds" - the alpha 6 announcement was 8 days ago on 21st February and Phoronix had an article up the same day as the release: https://www.phoronix.com/news/...

I've got to question why the 6th alpha of a desktop UI is even worth a news article in the first place. The move to beta definitely is and then, if there is one or more, the start of release candidates, but only the first alpha was truly newsworthy (since it was the first public release).

The OP got it completely wrong in the very first sentence by claiming the Amazon Appstore is closing down - clearly they didn't fully read the FAQ that they linked to, because the FAQ says nothing of the sort. What's already happened is that the https://amazon.com/getappstore download URL for the app has been replaced by the FAQ (so you can now no longer download and sideload the Amazon Appstore Android app). I'm assuming that on 20th Aug 2025, any installed Amazon Appstore Android app on a non-Fire device will "self-destruct" (i.e. stop working). Any Fire-branded device will still be able to use the Amazon Appstore app and get updates for it, even after 20th Aug 2025.

I bought a dirt cheap (£171) 2-in-1 Lenovo Chromebook last year that's got support until June 2033 - I suspect either the battery or screen will probably die well before that expiry date.

It's only got a bargain basement Intel N100 CPU in it, but I just wanted a laptop to mess around with that was a) stupidly cheap and b) didn't come with Windows - Chromebooks fit that role perfectly for me. The fact it can run Android and Linux apps seamlessly is just icing on the cake - it makes it actually usable when completely offline (which will be when you're moving it out of the house - the main reason to buy a laptop instead of a desktop after all). When it gives up the ghost, hopefully a typical low-end Chromebook will have a faster CPU, which is perhaps the only criticism I can level at this otherwise rather nitfy sub-£200 laptop.