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An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: David Greene had never heard of NotebookLM, Google's buzzy artificial intelligence tool that spins up podcasts on demand, until a former colleague emailed him to ask if he'd lent it his voice. "So... I'm probably the 148th person to ask this, but did you license your voice to Google?" the former co-worker asked in a fall 2024 email. "It sounds very much like you!" Greene, a public radio veteran who has hosted NPR's "Morning Edition" and KCRW's political podcast "Left, Right & Center," looked up the tool, listening to the two virtual co-hosts -- one male and one female -- engage in light banter. "I was, like, completely freaked out," Greene said. "It's this eerie moment where you feel like you're listening to yourself." Greene felt the male voice sounded just like him -- from the cadence and intonation to the occasional "uhhs" and "likes" that Greene had worked over the years to minimize but never eliminated. He said he played it for his wife and her eyes popped. As emails and texts rolled in from friends, family members and co-workers, asking if the AI podcast voice was his, Greene became convinced he'd been ripped off. Now he's suing Google, alleging that it violated his rights by building a product that replicated his voice without payment or permission, giving users the power to make it say things Greene would never say. Google told The Washington Post in a statement on Thursday that NotebookLM's male podcast voice has nothing to do with Greene. Now a Santa Clara County, California, court may be asked to determine whether the resemblance is uncanny enough that ordinary people hearing the voice would assume it's his -- and if so, what to do about it. Greene's lawsuit cites an unnamed AI forensic firm that used its software to compare the artificial voice to Greene's. It gave a confidence rating of 53-60% that Greene's voice was used to train the model, which it considers "relatively high" confidence. "If I was David Greene I would be upset, not just because they stole my voice," but because they used it to make the podcasting equivalent of AI "slop," said Mike Pesca, host of "The Gist" podcast and a former colleague of Greene's at NPR. "They have banter, but it's very surface-level, un-insightful banter, and they're always saying, 'Yeah, that's so interesting.' It's really bad, because what do we as show hosts have except our taste in commentary and pointing our audience to that which is interesting?"

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A proposal within the Fedora Linux community suggests improving the kernel's DRM Panic screen to a more user-friendly, BSOD-style experience. Phoronix reports: Open-source developer Jose Exposito proposed today a nicer experience for DRM Panic integration on Fedora. Rather than using DRM Panic with just the kernel log contents being encoded in the QR code displayed when a kernel panic occurs, the proposal is to have a customized Fedora web-page with the encoded QR contents to be shown on that web page. Besides having a more pleasant UI/UX, from this web page the intent would also be to make it easier to report this error to the Fedora BugZilla. Being able to easily pass the kernel log to the Fedora bug tracker could help in making upstream aware of the problem(s) and seeing if other users are also encountering similar panics. Right now this idea was just raised earlier today as a "request for comments" on the Fedora mailing list. While a prototype at this point, Exposito already developed a basic web interface for demoing the solution.

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Longtime Slashdot reader 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 keyboard 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.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: More than two years after Broadcom took over VMware, the virtualization company's customers are still grappling with higher prices, uncertainty, and the challenges of reducing vendor lock-in. Today, CloudBolt Software released a report, "The Mass Exodus That Never Was: The Squeeze Is Just Beginning," that provides insight into those struggles. CloudBolt is a hybrid cloud management platform provider that aims to identify VMware customers' pain points so it can sell them relevant solutions. In the report, CloudBolt said it surveyed 302 IT decision-makers (director-level or higher) at North American companies with at least 1,000 employees in January. The survey is far from comprehensive, but it offers a look at the obstacles these users face. Broadcom closed its VMware acquisition in November 2023, and last month, 88 percent of survey respondents still described the change as "disruptive." Per the survey, the most cited drivers of disruption were price increases (named by 89 percent of respondents), followed by uncertainty about Broadcom's plans (85 percent), support quality concerns (78 percent), Broadcom shifting VMware from perpetual licenses to subscriptions (72 percent), changes to VMware's partner program (68 percent), and the forced bundling of products (65 percent). When Broadcom bought VMware, some customers shared horror stories about receiving quotes that showed prices increasing by as much as 1,000 percent. CloudBolt's survey paints a more modest picture. Fourteen percent of respondents said their VMware costs have at least doubled, while 12 percent reported increases of 50-99 percent, 33 percent reported increases of 24-49 percent, and 31 percent reported increases of less than 25 percent. Despite survey participants suggesting smaller price hikes than originally anticipated under Broadcom, companies are still struggling with the pricing changes. Eighty-five percent are concerned that VMware will become even more expensive, according to CloudBolt's survey. [...] CloudBolt's survey also examined how respondents are migrating workloads off of VMware. Currently, 36 percent of participants said they migrated 1-24 percent of their environment off of VMware. Another 32 percent said that they have migrated 25-49 percent; 10 percent said that they've migrated 50-74 percent of workloads; and 2 percent have migrated 75 percent or more of workloads. Five percent of respondents said that they have not migrated from VMware at all. Among migrated workloads, 72 percent moved to public cloud infrastructure as a service, followed by Microsoft's Hyper-V/Azure stack (43 percent of respondents). Overall, 86 percent of respondents "are actively reducing their VMware footprint," CloudBolt's report said.

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A US law firm has accused Lenovo of violating Justice Department strictures about the bulk transfer of data to foreign adversaries, namely China. From a report: The case filed by Almeida Law Group on behalf of San Francisco-based "Spencer Christy, individually and on behalf of all others similarly situated" centers on the Data Security Program regulations implemented by the DOJ last year. According to the suit, these were "implemented to prevent adversarial countries from acquiring large quantities of behavioral data which could be used to surveil, analyze, or exploit American citizens' behavior." The complaint states the DOJ rule "makes clear that sending American consumers' information to Chinese entities through automated advertising systems and associated databases with the requisite controls is prohibited." The case states the threshold for "covered personal identifiers" is 100,000 US persons or more and lists a range of potential identifiers, from government and financial account numbers to IMEIs, MAC, and SIM numbers, demographic data, and advertising IDs.

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Residents of Potters Bar, a small town just north of London, are trying to block what would be one of Europe's largest data centers from being built on 85 acres of rolling farmland that separates their community from the neighboring village of South Mimms. Multinational operator Equinix acquired the land last October after the local council granted planning permission in January 2025, and the company intends to break ground this year on a development it estimates will cost more than $5 billion. The UK government's decision to classify data centers as "critical national infrastructure" and a new "gray belt" land designation that loosens building restrictions on underperforming greenbelt parcels helped clear the path for approval -- even though objections from locals outweighed signatures of support by nearly two-to-one during the public consultation. A protest group of more than 1,000 residents has since appealed to a third-party ombudsman and the UK's Office of Environmental Protection, but has so far failed to overturn the decision.

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Microsoft AI CEO Mustafa Suleyman expects "human-level performance on most, if not all professional tasks" from AI, and believes most work involving "sitting down at a computer" -- accounting, legal, marketing, project management -- will be fully automated within the next year or 18 months. He pointed to exponential growth in computational power and predicted that creating a new AI model will soon be as easy as "creating a podcast or writing a blog."

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Britain has lost more than 14,000 pubs since 2009, a decline from roughly 54,000 registered public houses and bars to under 40,000 by 2022, according to a new analysis of UK business register data by data analyst Lauren Leek. The North East, North West, Yorkshire and the Midlands lost 25 to 30% of their stock; London saw the smallest decline. Leek trained a random forest model on 49,840 pubs and found spatial isolation -- how far a pub stood from its nearest neighbour -- was the single strongest predictor of closure. Median nearest-neighbour distance for surviving pubs is roughly 280 metres; for closed pubs, 640 metres. Each closure pushes remaining pubs further into isolation, a dynamic Leek calls a "spatial death spiral." Much of that isolation traces to ownership. Stonegate, Britain's largest pub company and a holding of PE firm TDR Capital, carries over $4 billion in debt from its 2019 leveraged acquisition of Ei Group. PE-backed and overseas-owned companies now control roughly a quarter to a third of all British pubs.

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Mark Fischbach, the YouTube creator known as Markiplier who has spent nearly 15 years building an audience of more than 38 million subscribers by playing indie-horror video games on camera, has pulled off something that most independent filmmakers never manage -- a self-financed, self-distributed debut feature that has grossed more than $30 million domestically against a $3 million budget. Iron Lung, a 127-minute sci-fi adaptation of a video game Fischbach wrote, directed, starred in, and edited himself, opened to $18.3 million in its first weekend and has since doubled that figure worldwide in just two weeks, nearly matching the $19.1 million debut of Send Help, a $40 million thriller from Disney-owned 20th Century Studios. Fischbach declined deals from traditional distributors and instead spent months booking theaters privately, encouraging fans to reserve tickets online; when prospective viewers found the film wasn't screening in their city, they called local cinemas to request it, eventually landing Iron Lung on more than 3,000 screens across North America -- all without a single paid media campaign.

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An anonymous reader shares a report: A moderator on diyAudio set up an experiment to determine whether listeners could differentiate between audio run through pro audio copper wire, a banana, and wet mud. Spoiler alert: the results indicated that users were unable to accurately distinguish between these different 'interfaces.' Pano, the moderator who built the experiment, invited other members on the forum to listen to various sound clips with four different versions: one taken from the original CD file, with the three others recorded through 180cm of pro audio copper wire, via 20cm of wet mud, through 120cm of old microphone cable soldered to US pennies, and via a 13cm banana, and 120cm of the same setup as earlier. Initial test results showed that it's extremely difficult for listeners to correctly pick out which audio track used which wiring setup. "The amazing thing is how much alike these files sound. The mud should sound perfectly awful, but it doesn't," Pano said. "All of the re-recordings should be obvious, but they aren't."

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Micron has begun mass production of the 9650 series, the industry's first PCIe 6.0 SSD, capable of sequential read speeds up to 28 GB/s and random read performance of 5.5 million IOPS -- roughly double the throughput of the fastest PCIe 5.0 drives available today. The drive targets AI and data center workloads and ships in E1.S and E3.S form factors across two variants: the Pro, available in capacities up to 30.72 TB, and the endurance-oriented Max, topping out at 25.6 TB. Both variants share the same peak sequential and random speeds but diverge on mixed workloads and endurance ratings -- the Max 25.6 TB carries a random endurance rating of 140,160 TBW compared to 56,064 TBW on the Pro 30.72 TB. Power draw holds at 25 watts, unchanged from high-end PCIe 5.0 enterprise SSDs, though the 9650 is Micron's first drive to support liquid cooling alongside air. Consumer platforms are not expected to adopt PCIe 6.0 until 2030.

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Up to a third of people worldwide have shoulder pain; it's one of the most common musculoskeletal complaints. But medical imaging might not reveal the problem -- in fact, it could even cloud it. From a report: In a study published in JAMA Internal Medicine this week, 99 percent of adults over 40 were found to have at least one abnormality in a rotator cuff on magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). The rotator cuff is the group of muscles and tendons in a shoulder joint that keeps the upper arm bone securely in the shoulder socket -- and is often blamed for pain and other symptoms. The trouble is, the vast majority of the people in the study had no problems with their shoulders. The finding calls into question the growing use of MRIs to try to diagnose shoulder pain -- and, in turn, the growing problem of overtreatment of rotator cuff (RC) abnormalities, which includes partial- and full-thickness tears as well as signs of tendinopathy (tendon swelling and thickening). "While we cannot dismiss the possibility that some RC tears may contribute to shoulder symptoms, our findings indicate that we are currently unable to distinguish clinically meaningful MRI abnormalities from incidental findings," the study authors concluded.

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China's courts are now handling more than 550,000 intellectual-property cases a year -- making it the world's most litigious country for IP disputes -- as the nation's own companies, once notorious for copying foreign designs and technology, find themselves on the defensive against a domestic counterfeiting epidemic fueled by excess factory capacity. The problem runs from knockoff "Lafufu" plush toys (cheap copies of Pop Mart's wildly popular Labubu dolls, which prompted a nationwide crackdown and a Shanghai police bust of a $1.7 million stash in July) to copied motorcycles and solar panels. Judges in Shanghai, the preferred venue for IP litigation, are working through cases at a rate of roughly one per day, and it still takes three months for a case to land on a court's docket. Chinese companies are also increasingly clashing abroad: patent-related cases involving Chinese businesses in America surged 56% in 2023, according to data from GEN, a Chinese law firm. Luckin Coffee and Trina Solar have both filed suits against foreign-based copycats.

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Mazda, the automaker that for years defended its scroll-wheel infotainment system as a safer alternative to touchscreens, is abandoning the approach entirely in the 2026 CX-5 in favor of a 15.6-inch touchscreen and zero physical buttons. The current lineup -- the CX-50 Hybrid, CX-70 and CX-90 -- still relies on a console-mounted scroll wheel and dedicated action buttons to navigate a tablet-like screen perched atop the dashboard. Upper-trim CX-70 and CX-90 models do have 12.3-inch touchscreens, but touch input only works when parked and only inside CarPlay; it disables automatically once the car is in drive. The new CX-5 goes the other direction entirely, eliminating all hard buttons including the volume knob and physical climate controls that current models still offer. Mazda says the touchscreen is safe because core functions like climate are pinned to a persistent bottom bar -- an approach Ford, Rivian, and most of the industry adopted years ago.

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Various forms of tools, colloquially known as "AI", have been rapidly pervading all aspects of open-source development. Many developers are embracing LLM tools for code creation and review. Some project maintainers complain about suffering from a deluge of slop-laden pull requests, as well as fabricated bug and security reports. Too many projects are reeling from scraperbot attacks that effectively DDoS important infrastructure. But an AI bot flaming an open-source maintainer was not on our bingo card for 2026; that seemed a bit too far-fetched. However, it appears that is just what happened recently after a project rejected a bot-driven pull request.

Version 6.6.0 of KDE's Plasma desktop environment has been released. Notable additions in this release include the ability to create global themes for Plasma, an "extract text" feature in the Spectacle screenshot utility, accessibility improvements, and a new on-screen keyboard. See the changelog for a full list of new features, enhancements, and bug fixes.

The release is dedicated to the memory of Björn Balazs, a KDE contributor who passed away in September 2025. "Björn's drive to help people achieve the privacy and control over technology that he believed they deserved is the stuff FLOSS legends are made of."

The software industry's decades-old habit of charging companies a flat fee for every employee who uses a product is running into a fundamental problem: AI agents don't sit in chairs, and they don't need licences. As autonomous agents take on tasks that human workers once handled, the per-seat pricing model that made SaaS revenue so predictable is giving way to consumption-based and hybrid alternatives. Snowflake and Databricks (valued at $134 billion) already charge based on usage. Salesforce initially priced its Agentforce customer relations bot at $2 per conversation but faced customer pushback and now offers action-based pricing, upfront credits and fixed fees. ServiceNow's finance chief Amit Zavery said last month that some customers aren't ready for purely consumption-based models. Goldman Sachs estimates US software spending will nearly triple to $2.8 trillion by 2037 as automated tasks blur the boundary between IT and wage budgets, but that money will no longer arrive in the neat recurring instalments that investors and private equity firms have come to expect.

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In December 2025, Canonical announced a plan to develop a universal Public Key Infrastructure called upki. Jon Seager has published an update about the project with instructions on trying it out.

In the few weeks since we announced upki, the core revocation engine has been established and is now functional, the CRLite mirroring tool is working and a production deployment in Canonical's datacentres is ongoing. We're now preparing for an alpha release and remain on track for an opt-in preview for Ubuntu 26.04 LTS.

Security updates have been issued by AlmaLinux (gimp, go-toolset:rhel8, and golang), Debian (roundcube), Fedora (gnupg2, libpng, and rsync), Mageia (dcmtk and usbmuxd), Oracle (gcc-toolset-14-binutils, gimp, gnupg2, go-toolset:ol8, golang, kernel, and openssl), Slackware (libssh, lrzip, and mozilla), SUSE (abseil-cpp, chromium, curl, elemental-toolkit, elemental-operator, expat, freerdp, iperf, libnvidia-container, libsoup, libxml2, net-snmp, openCryptoki, openssl-3, patch, protobuf, python-urllib3, python-xmltodict, python311, screen, systemd, and util-linux), and Ubuntu (alsa-lib, gnutls28, and linux-aws, linux-oracle).

Valve has updated the Steam Deck website to say that the Steam Deck OLED may be out of stock "intermittently in some regions due to memory and storage shortages." From a report: The PC gaming handheld has been out of stock in the US and other parts of the world for a few days, and thanks to this update, we now know why. The update comes shortly after Valve delayed the Steam Machine, Steam Frame, and Steam Controller from a planned shipping window of early 2026 because of the memory and storage crunch. "We have work to do to land on concrete pricing and launch dates that we can confidently announce, being mindful of how quickly the circumstances around both of those things can change," Valve said in a post about that announcement from earlier this month. Its goal is to launch that new hardware sometime in the first half of 2026, and the company is working to finalize its plans "as soon as possible."

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