“Imagine a newspaper publisher announcing it will no longer allow libraries to keep copies of its paper,” writes EFF senior policy analyst Joe Mullin. “That’s effectively what’s begun happening online in the last few months.”The Internet Archive — the world’s largest digital library — has preserved newspapers since it went online in the mid-1990s… But in recent months The New York Times...

13 million people live in Moscow, reports CNN. But since early March the city “has experienced internet and mobile service outages on a level previously unseen.” (Though Wi-Fi access to the internet is still available…) Russian social media “is flooded with jokes and memes about sending letters by carrier pigeons or using smartphones as ping-pong paddles…”[Moscow residents] complain they cannot...

“Juicier steaks could soon be served up after barley was given the go-ahead to become Britain’s first gene-edited crop,” reports the Telegraph:In an effort to fatten up cows and get them to market faster, scientists have altered the DNA of Golden Promise barley to increase its fat content… [Regulators have approved the feeding of that barley to cows for further studies.] [T]he small increase...

China’s orbital outpost Tiangong was completed in 2022 and is hosting up to three astronauts at a time, reports CNN. But meanwhile U.S. lawmakers are now signaling there’s not time to develop and launch a replacement for the International Space Station — considered the signal most expensive object ever built — before its deorbiting in 2030. A recent Senate bill calls for the U.S. to...

ReactOS aims to be compatible with programs and drivers developed for Windows Server 2003 and later versions of Microsoft Windows.And Slashdot reader jeditobe reports that the project has now “announced significant progress in achieving compatibility with proprietary graphics drivers.”ReactOS now supports roughly 90% of GPU drivers for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003, thanks to a series of...

Slashdot reader BrianFagioli writes: According to the research firm Gartner, 50% of U.S. consumers say they would prefer to do business with brands that avoid using GenAI in consumer facing content such as advertising and promotional messaging.The survey of 1,539 Americans, conducted in October 2025, also found growing skepticism about the reliability of online information, with 61% saying they...

A free built-in VPN is coming to Firefox on Tuesday, Mozilla announced this week:Free VPNs can sometimes mean sketchy arrangements that end up compromising your privacy, but ours is built from our data principles and commitment to be the world’s most trusted browser. It routes your browser traffic through a proxy to hide your IP address and location while you browse, giving you stronger privacy...

His software brought printing into the digital age, allowing users to stop manually splicing columns of text and graphics and instead create layouts on a virtual pasteboard.

“The systemd project merged a pull request adding a new birthDate field to the JSON user records managed by userdb in response to the age verification laws of California, Colorado, and Brazil,” reports the blog It’s FOSS. They note that the field “can only be set by administrators, not by users themselves” — it’s the same record that already holds metadata like realName, emailAddress, and...

Jeff Bezos “is in early talks to raise $100 billion,” reports the Wall Street Journal, “for a new fund that would buy up manufacturing companies and seek to use AI technology to accelerate their path to automation.” “The Amazon.com founder is meeting with some of the world’s largest asset managers to raise funding for the project.”A few months ago, [Bezos] traveled to the Middle East to discuss...

NASA’s Hubble Space Telescope unexpectedly captured a rare, early-stage breakup of comet C/2025 K1 (ATLAS) just days after it first began disintegrating. Phys.org reports: “Sometimes the best science happens by accident,” said co-investigator John Noonan, a research professor in the Department of Physics at Auburn University in Alabama. “This comet got observed because our original comet was...

War in Iran has disrupted global oil supplies, which is prompting some car shoppers to look for ways to climb off “the gas-price roller coaster.”