Meta is considering a paid subscription in the UK that would remove advertisements from its platform. The BBC reports: Under the plans, people using the social media sites could be asked to pay for an ad-free experience if they do not want their data to be tracked. Meta already provides ad-free subscriptions for Facebook and Instagram users in the EU, starting from euros (5 pounds) a month. A spokesperson for the firm said the company was "exploring the option" of offering a similar service in the UK.

They said the firm was "engaging constructively" with the UK data watchdog about the subscription service, following a consultation in 2024. The Information Commissioner's Office previously said it expected Meta to consider data protection concerns before it launched an ad-free subscription. Meta says personalized advertising allows its platforms to be free at the point of access.

Guidance issued by the regulator in January states that users must be presented with a genuine free choice. Social media platforms such as Meta heavily rely on ad revenues, and the company says personalised advertising allows its platforms to be free. Advertising accounted for more than 96% of its revenue in its latest quarterly financial results.

Two in five tech workers quit in the past year due to inflexible workplace policies around hours, location, and workload intensity, with most citing a desire for remote work and greater autonomy. The Register reports: The findings come from a survey of 26,000 plus staff that operate in 35 markets, including 2,548 respondents in tech, and fly in the face of more and more corporations issuing return to office mandates and demanding long working hours. Amsterdam-based recruitment biz Randstad, which commissioned the research, says 40 percent of the tech people it polled said they resigned due to hardline policies, and 56 percent threatened to seek an alternative if their requests for flexibility were ignored.

Almost three-quarters claim remote work boosts a "sense of community" with colleagues -- versus the average of 58 percent across other sectors -- and 68 percent say they'd trust their employer more if they were more easy going on hours, the intensity of the work and the place where they can work. Graig Paglieri, Randstad Digital boss, said the "IT sector has shown that personalized work benefits and flexible options are essential not only for attracting top talent but also for retaining them in competitive markets. Policies should align with organizational, team and individual needs, ensuring a flexible and tailored approach."

FaunaDB, a serverless database combining relational and document features, will shut down by the end of May due to unsustainable capital demands. The company plans to open source its core technology, including its FQL query language, in hopes of continuing its legacy within the developer community. The Register reports: The startup pocketed $27 million in VC funding in 2020 and boasted that 25,000 developers worldwide were using its serverless database. However, last week, FaunaDB announced that it would sunset its database services. FaunaDB said it plans to release an open-source version of its core database technology. The system stores data in JSON documents but retains relational features like consistency, support for joins and foreign keys, and full schema enforcement. Fauna's query language, FQL, will also be made available to the open-source community. "Driving broad based adoption of a new operational database that runs as a service globally is very capital intensive. In the current market environment, our board and investors have determined that it is not possible to raise the capital needed to achieve that goal independently," the leadership team said.

"While we will no longer be accepting new customers, existing Fauna customers will experience no immediate change. We will gradually transition customers off Fauna and are committed to ensuring a smooth process over the next several months," it added.

The Pentagon has canceled its troubled Defense Civilian Human Resources Management System after years of delays and budget overruns, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said. The project, launched in 2018 with a one-year timeline and $36 million budget, ultimately ran eight years and exceeded costs by $280 million, reaching 780% over budget. "We're not doing that anymore," Hegseth said in a video announcing the cancellation. Officials have 60 days to develop a new plan to modernize DoD's civilian HR systems. The cuts are part of a broader $580 million spending reduction that includes $360 million in diversity, climate change and COVID-19 grant programs, plus $30 million in consulting contracts with Gartner and McKinsey.

Google has confirmed that a technical issue has permanently deleted location history data for numerous users of its Maps application, with no recovery possible for most affected customers. The problem emerged after Google transitioned its Timeline feature from cloud to on-device storage in 2024 to enhance privacy protections. Users began reporting missing historical location data on support forums and social media platforms in recent weeks. "This is the result of a technical issue and not user error or an intentional change," said a Google spokesperson. Only users who manually enabled encrypted cloud backups before the incident can recover their data, according to Google. The company began shifting location storage policies in 2023, initially stopping collection of sensitive location data including visits to abortion clinics and domestic violence shelters.

schwit1 writes:

A compact, deep-sea, cable-cutting device, capable of severing the world's most fortified underwater communication or power lines, has been unveiled by China -- and it could shake up global maritime power dynamics.

The revelation marks the first time any country has officially disclosed that it has such an asset, capable of disrupting critical undersea networks. The tool, which is able to cut lines at depths of up to 4,000 metres (13,123 feet) -- twice the maximum operational range of existing subsea communication infrastructure -- has been designed specifically for integration with China's advanced crewed and uncrewed submersibles like the Fendouzhe, or Striver, and the Haidou series.

prisoninmate shares a report: Highlights of Linux 6.14 include Btrfs RAID1 read balancing support, a new ntsync subsystem for Win NT synchronization primitives to boost game emulation with Wine, uncached buffered I/O support, and a new accelerator driver for the AMD XDNA Ryzen AI NPUs (Neural Processing Units).

Also new is DRM panic support for the AMDGPU driver, reflink and reverse-mapping support for the XFS real-time device, Intel Clearwater Forest server support, support for SELinux extended permissions, FUSE support for io_uring, a new fsnotify file pre-access event type, and a new cgroup controller for device memory.

It's "live-recording the World Wide Web," according to NPR, with a digital library that includes "hundreds of billions of copies of government websites, news articles and data."

They described the 29-year-old nonprofit Internet Archive as "more relevant than ever." Every day, about 100 terabytes of material are uploaded to the Internet Archive, or about a billion URLs, with the assistance of automated crawlers. Most of that ends up in the Wayback Machine, while the rest is digitized analog media — books, television, radio, academic papers — scanned and stored on servers. As one of the few large-scale archivists to back up the web, the Internet Archive finds itself in a particularly unique position right now... Thousands of [U.S. government] datasets were wiped — mostly at agencies focused on science and the environment — in the days following Trump's return to the White House...

The Internet Archive is among the few efforts that exist to catch the stuff that falls through the digital cracks, while also making that information accessible to the public. Six weeks into the new administration, Wayback Machine director [Mark] Graham said, the Internet Archive had cataloged some 73,000 web pages that had existed on U.S. government websites that were expunged after Trump's inauguration...

According to Graham, based on the big jump in page views he's observed over the past two months, the Internet Archive is drawing many more visitors than usual to its services — journalists, researchers and other inquiring minds. Some want to consult the archive for information lost or changed in the purge, while others aim to contribute to the archival process.... "People are coming and rallying behind us," said Brewster Kahle, [the founder and current director of the Internet Archive], "by using it, by pointing at things, helping organize things, by submitting content to be archived — data sets that are under threat or have been taken down...."

A behemoth of link rot repair, the Internet Archive rescues a daily average of 10,000 dead links that appear on Wikipedia pages. In total, it's fixed more than 23 million rotten links on Wikipedia alone, according to the organization.
Though it receives some money for its preservation work for libraries, museums, and other organizations, it's also funded by donations. "From the beginning, it was important for the Internet Archive to be a nonprofit, because it was working for the people," explains founder Brewster Kahle on its donations page: Its motives had to be transparent; it had to last a long time. That's why we don't charge for access, sell user data, or run ads, even while we offer free resources to citizens everywhere. We rely on the generosity of individuals like you to pay for servers, staff, and preservation projects. If you can't imagine a future without the Internet Archive, please consider supporting our work. We promise to put your donation to good use as we continue to store over 99 petabytes of data, including 625 billion webpages, 38 million texts, and 14 million audio recordings.
Two interesting statistics from NPR's article:

• "A Pew Research Center study published last year found that roughly 38% of web pages on the internet that existed in 2013 were no longer accessible as of 2023."

• "According to a Harvard Law Review study published in 2014, about half of all links cited in U.S. Supreme Court opinions no longer led to the original source material."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader jtotheh for sharing the news.

Long-time Slashdot reader invisik reminds us that the "fish doorbell" is still going strong, according to the Associated Press. "Now in its fifth year, the site has attracted millions of viewers from around the world with its quirky mix of slow TV and ecological activism." The central Dutch city of Utrecht installed a "fish doorbell" on a river lock that lets viewers of an online livestream alert authorities to fish being held up as they make their springtime migration to shallow spawning grounds. The idea is simple: An underwater camera at Utrecht's Weerdsluis lock sends live footage to a website. When somebody watching the site sees a fish, they can click a button that sends a screenshot to organizers. When they see enough fish, they alert a water worker who opens the lock to let the fish swim through.
"Much of the time, the screen is just a murky green with occasional bubbles, but sometimes a fish swims past. As the water warms up, more fish show up..."

For weeks Signal has been one of the three most-downloaded apps in the Netherlands, according to a local news site. And now "Higher education institutions in the Netherlands have been looking for an alternative," according to DUB (an independent news site for the Utrecht University community): Employees of the Utrecht University of Applied Sciences (HU) were recently advised to switch to Signal. Avans University of Applied Sciences has also been discussing a switch...The National Student Union is concerned about privacy. The subject was raised at last week's general meeting, as reported by chair Abdelkader Karbache, who said: "Our local unions want to switch to Signal or other open-source software."
Besides being open source, Signal is a non-commercial nonprofit, the article points out — though its proponents suggest there's another big difference. "HU argues that Signal keeps users' data private, unlike WhatsApp." Cybernews.com explains the concern: In an interview with the Dutch newspaper De Telegraaf, Meredith Whittaker [president of the Signal Foundation] discussed the pitfalls of WhatsApp. "WhatsApp collects metadata: who you send messages to, when, and how often. That's incredibly sensitive information," she says.... The only information [Signal] collects is the date an account was registered, the time when an account was last active, and hashed phone numbers... Information like profile name and the people a user communicates with is all encrypted... Metadata might sound harmless, but it couldn't be further from the truth. According to Whittaker, metadata is deadly. "As a former CIA director once said: 'We kill people based on metadata'."
WhatsApp's metadata also includes IP addresses, TechRadar noted last May: Other identifiable data such as your network details, the browser you use, ISP, and other identifiers linked to other Meta products (like Instagram and Facebook) associated with the same device or account are also collected... [Y]our IP can be used to track down your location. As the company explained, even if you keep the location-related features off, IP addresses and other collected information like phone number area codes can be used to estimate your "general location."

WhatsApp is required by law to share this information with authorities during an investigation...

[U]nder scrutiny is how Meta itself uses these precious details for commercial purposes. Again, this is clearly stated in WhatsApp's privacy policy and terms of use. "We may use the information we receive from [other Meta companies], and they may use the information we share with them, to help operate, provide, improve, understand, customize, support, and market our Services and their offerings," reads the policy. This means that yes, your messages are always private, but WhatsApp is actively collecting your metadata to build your digital persona across other Meta platforms...
The article suggests using a VPN with WhatsApp and turning on its "advanced privacy feature" (which hides your IP address during calls) and managing the app's permissions for data collection. "While these steps can help reduce the amount of metadata collected, it's crucial to bear in mind that it's impossible to completely avoid metadata collection on the Meta-owned app... For extra privacy and security, I suggest switching to the more secure messaging app Signal."

The article also includes a cautionary anecdote. "It was exactly a piece of metadata — a Proton Mail recovery email — that led to the arrest of a Catalan activist."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader united_notions for sharing the article.

The latest Facebook whistleblower, a former international lawyer, "cannot grant any of the nearly 100 interview requests she has received from journalists from print and broadcast news outlets in the United States and the United Kingdom," reports the Washington Post (citing "a person familiar with the matter").

That's because of an independent arbiter's ruling that "also bars her from talking with lawmakers in the U.S., London and the EU, according to a legal challenge she lodged against the ruling..." On March 12, an emergency arbiter — a dispute resolution option outside the court system — sided with Meta by ruling that the tech giant might reasonably convince a court that Wynn-Williams broke a non-disparagement agreement she entered as she was being fired by the company in 2017. The arbiter also said that while her publisher Macmillan appeared for the hearing on Meta's motion, Wynn-Williams did not despite having received due notice. The arbiter did not make any assessments about the book's veracity, but Meta spokespeople argued that the ruling meant that "Sarah Wynn Williams' false and defamatory book should never have been published."

Wynn-Williams this week filed an emergency motion to overturn the ruling, arguing that she didn't receive proper notice of the arbitration proceedings to the email accounts Meta knows she uses, according to a copy of the motion seen by The Post. Wynn-Williams further alleged that her severance agreement including the non-disparagement provisions are unenforceable, arguing that it violates laws that protect whistleblowers from retaliation, among other points. In a statement, legal representatives for Wynn-Williams said they were "confident in the legal arguments and look forward to a swift restoration of Ms. Wynn-Williams' right to tell her story."
That book — Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism — is currently #1 on the New York Times best-seller list (and #3 on Amazon.com's best-selling books list). And the incident prompted an article by Wired editor at large Steven Levy titled "Meta Tries to Bury a Tell-All Book." ("Please pause for a moment to savor the irony," Levy writes. "Meta, the company that recently announced an end to fact-checking in posts seen by potentially millions of people, is griping that an author didn't fact-check with them?")

And this led to a heated exchange on X.com between the Wired editor at large and Meta's Chief Technology Officer Andrew Bozworth:

Steven Levy: Meta probably realizes that all-out war on this book will only help its sales. But they are furious that an insider--who signed an NDA!--is going White Lotus on them, showing what it's like on the inside.

Meta CTO Bozworth: Except that it is full of lies, Steven. Shame on you.

Steven Levy: Boz, it would be helpful if Meta called out what it believes are the factual inaccuracies, especially in cases where it calls the book "defamatory."

Meta CTO Bozworth: Sorry you don't get to make up a bunch of stories and then put the burden on the person you lied about. Read the accounts from former employees who have gone through several of the anecdotes and said flatly they did not happen as written and then extrapolate.

Steven Levy: I would love for Sheryl, Mark and Joel to speak out on those anecdotes and give their sides of the story. They are the key subjects of those stories and their direct denial of specific incidents would matter.

Meta CTO Bozworth: Did you read what I wrote? I'm sure you would love to have more fuel for your "nobody wants you to read this" headline, but that's a total bullshit expectation. It isn't unreasonable to expect a journalist like you to do basic diligence. I'm sure you have our comms email!

Steven Levy: Believe me I was in touch with your comms people...

"Italy is using its Piracy Shield law to go after Google," reports Ars Technica, "with a court ordering the Internet giant to immediately begin poisoning its public DNS servers" to prevent people from reaching pirate streams of football games.

"Italy's communication regulator praises the ruling and hopes to continue sticking it to international tech firms." Spotted by TorrentFreak, AGCOM Commissioner Massimiliano Capitanio took to LinkedIn to celebrate the ruling, as well as the existence of the Italian Piracy Shield. "The Judge confirmed the value of AGCOM's investigations, once again giving legitimacy to a system for the protection of copyright that is unique in the world," said Capitanio. Capitanio went on to complain that Google has routinely ignored AGCOM's listing of pirate sites, which are supposed to be blocked in 30 minutes or less under the law. He noted the violation was so clear-cut that the order was issued without giving Google a chance to respond, known as inaudita altera parte in Italian courts.

"China is considering trying to blunt greater U.S. tariffs and other trade barriers," reports the Wall Street Journal, "by offering to curb the quantity of certain goods exported to the U.S., according to advisers to the Chinese government." Tokyo's adoption of so-called voluntary export restraints, or VERs, to limit its auto shipments to the U.S. in the 1980s helped prevent Washington from imposing higher import duties. A similar move from Beijing, especially in sectors of key concern to Washington, like electric vehicles and batteries, would mitigate criticism from the U.S. and others over China's "economic imbalances": heavily subsidized companies making stuff for slim profits but saturating global markets, to the detriment of other countries' manufacturers...

The Xi leadership has indicated a desire to cut a deal with the Trump administration to head off greater trade attacks... Similar to Japan, the Chinese advisers say, Beijing may also consider negotiating export restraints on EVs and batteries in return for investment opportunities in those sectors in the U.S. In some officials' views, they say, that might be an attractive offer to Trump, who at times has indicated an openness to more Chinese investment in the U.S. even though members of his administration firmly oppose it.
The article notes agreements like this are also hard to enforce, "particularly when Chinese companies export to the U.S. from third countries including Mexico and Vietnam."

This week the "Old Vintage Computing Research" blog published a 21,000-word exploration of the DEC PDP-11, the 16-bit minicomputer sold by Digital Equipment Corporation. Slashdot reader AndrewZX calls the blog post "an excellent deep dive" into the machine's history and capabilities "and the classic Venix UNIX that it ran." The blogger still owns a working 1984 DEC Professional 380, "a tank of a machine, a reasonably powerful workstation, and the most practical PDP-adjacent thing you can actually slap on a (large) desk."

But more importantly, "It runs PRO/VENIX, the only official DEC Unix option for the Pros." In that specific market it was almost certainly the earliest such licensed Unix (in 1983) and primarily competed against XENIX, Microsoft's dominant "small Unix," which first emerged for XT-class systems as SCO XENIX in 1984. You'd wonder how rogue processes could be prevented from stomping on each other in such systems when neither the Intel 8086/8088 nor the IBM PC nor the PC/XT had a memory management unit, and the answer was not to try and just hope for the best. It was for this reason that IBM's own Unix variant PC/IX, developed by Interactive Systems Corporation under contract as their intended AT&T killer, was multitasking but single-user since in such an architecture there could be no meaningful security guarantees...

One of Venix's interesting little idiosyncrasies, seen in all three Pro versions, was the SUPER> prompt when you've logged on as root (there is also a MAINT> prompt when you're single-user...

Although Bill Gates had been their biggest nemesis early on, most of the little Unices that flourished in the 1980s and early 90s met their collective demise at the hands of another man: Linus Torvalds. The proliferation of free Unix alternatives like Linux on commodity PC hardware caused the bottom to fall out of the commercial Unix market.
The blogger even found a 1989 log for the computer's one and only guest login session — which seems to consist entirely of someone named tom trying to exit vi.

But the most touching part of the article comes when the author discovers a file named /thankyou that they're certain didn't come with the original Venix. It's an ASCII drawing of a smiling face, under the words "THANK YOU FOR RESCUING ME".

"It's among the last files created on the system before it came into my possession..."

It's all a fun look back to a time when advances in semiconductor density meant microcomputers could do nearly as much as the more expensive minicomputers (while taking up less space) — leaving corporations pondering the new world that was coming: As far back as 1974, an internal skunkworks unit had presented management with two small systems prototypes described as a PDP-8 in a VT50 terminal and a portable PDP-11 chassis.

Engineers were intrigued but sales staff felt these smaller versions would cut into their traditional product lines, and [DEC president Ken] Olsen duly cancelled the project, famously observing no one would want a computer in their home.

Was the cutting of undersea cables part of a larger pattern? Russia and its proxies are accused by western officials of "staging dozens of attacks and other incidents across Europe since the invasion of Ukraine three years ago," reports the Associated Press.

That includes cyberattacks and committing acts of sabotage/vandalism/arson, as well as spreading propaganda and even plotting killings, according to the article. ("Western intelligence agencies uncovered what they said was a Russian plot to kill the head of a major German arms manufacturer that is a supplier of weapons to Ukraine...") The news agency documented 59 incidents "in which European governments, prosecutors, intelligence services or other Western officials blamed Russia, groups linked to Russia or its ally Belarus." [Western officials] allege the disruption campaign is an extension of Russian President Vladimir Putin's war, intended to sow division in European societies and undermine support for Ukraine... The incidents range from stuffing car tailpipes with expanding foam in Germany to a plot to plant explosives on cargo planes. They include setting fire to stores and a museum, hacking that targeted politicians and critical infrastructure, and spying by a ring convicted in the U.K. Richard Moore, the head of Britain's foreign intelligence service, called it a "staggeringly reckless campaign" in November...

The cases are varied, and the largest concentrations are in countries that are major supporters of Ukraine... In about a quarter of the cases, prosecutors have brought charges or courts have convicted people of carrying out the sabotage. But in many more, no specific culprit has been publicly identified or brought to justice.
Despite that, "more and more governments are publicly attributing attacks to Russia," the article points out.

This week a nonprofit, bipartisan think tank on global policy released a report which "found that Russian attacks in Europe quadrupled from 2022 to 2023 and then tripled again from 2023 to 2024," reports the New York Times. Prime Minister Donald Tusk of Poland noted in a social media post on Monday that Lithuanian officials had confirmed his assessment that Russia was responsible for a series of fires in shopping centers in Warsaw and Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital...

London's Heathrow Airport resumed operations late Friday after an electrical fire at a nearby substation forced a full-day closure, causing global travel chaos with hundreds of canceled flights and thousands of stranded passengers. The explosion at a Hayes substation 1.5 miles from the airport knocked out power early Thursday, requiring 70 firefighters to battle a blaze in a transformer containing 25,000 liters of cooling oil.

Despite backup generators, Europe's busiest airport couldn't maintain normal operations, forcing flights to divert to airports across Europe and as far as Bangor, Maine. "Contingencies of certain sizes we cannot guard ourselves against 100%," Heathrow CEO Thomas Woldbye told the BBC. "This is as big as it gets for our airport." British Airways, which planned to carry 100,000 passengers Friday, prioritized long-haul flights to Australia, Brazil and South Africa when operations resumed after 4 p.m.

Web infrastructure provider Cloudflare unveiled "AI Labyrinth" this week, a feature designed to thwart unauthorized AI data scraping by feeding bots realistic but irrelevant content instead of blocking them outright. The system lures crawlers into a "maze" of AI-generated pages containing neutral scientific information, deliberately wasting computing resources of those attempting to collect training data for language models without permission.

"When we detect unauthorized crawling, rather than blocking the request, we will link to a series of AI-generated pages that are convincing enough to entice a crawler to traverse them," Cloudflare explained. The company reports AI crawlers generate over 50 billion requests to their network daily, comprising nearly 1% of all web traffic they process. The feature is available to all Cloudflare customers, including those on free plans. This approach marks a shift from traditional protection methods, as Cloudflare claims blocking bots sometimes alerts operators they've been detected. The false links contain meta directives to prevent search engine indexing while remaining attractive to data-scraping bots.

Meta is testing an AI feature that generates comment suggestions for Instagram posts. Users with access to the test see a pencil icon beside the comment field that activates "Write with Meta AI." The system analyzes photos before offering three comment suggestions, which users can refresh for alternatives. For a photo showing someone smiling with a thumbs-up in their living room, suggested comments include "Cute living room setup" and "Love the cozy atmosphere."

The U.S. Treasury Department's sanctions watchdog removed cryptocurrency mixing tool Tornado Cash from its global blacklist on Friday, following a federal appeals court ruling last November that the Office of Foreign Asset Control couldn't sanction its smart contracts. Despite the delisting of over 100 Ethereum addresses from the Specially Designated Nationals list, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent emphasized continuing concerns about North Korea's digital asset theft operations.

"We remain deeply concerned about the significant state-sponsored hacking and money laundering campaign aimed at stealing, acquiring, and deploying digital assets for the Democratic People's Republic of Korea," Treasury stated. Roman Storm, Tornado Cash co-founder, still faces a July criminal trial for his alleged development role. A Treasury court filing Monday had warned that completely lifting sanctions could have "significantly disruptive consequences for national security."

Microsoft has begun urging Windows 10 users to upgrade their systems ahead of the October 14, 2025 support deadline, but with a solution many find impractical: just buy a new computer. According to StatCounter data, 58.7% of Windows users remain on Windows 10 despite the impending end of security updates and technical assistance.

In emails to Windows 10 users, Microsoft's primary recommendation is to trade in old devices for newer Windows 11-compatible hardware, rather than focusing on alternative solutions.