An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Verge: After bringing 4G and 5G connectivity to the Underground, London's public transport authority has started scolding noisy passengers who subject everyone to music and calls blasting out of their phones. A new poster campaign launched by Transport for London (TfL) this week encourages customers to wear headphones when watching or listening to content on their devices to reduce disruption for other commuters. "Please don't disturb others with loud music or calls when traveling on the network," reads the "Headphones On" poster. The posters are already being displayed on the Elizabeth rail line, according to TfL, and will expand to bus, Docklands Light Railway, London Overground, London Underground, and London Tram services from October. The campaign targets headphone dodgers as data coverage becomes more available across the underground rail network, making it easier for passengers to stream content and make calls on the go. People who do so without donning headphones are annoying other commuters, however, with TfL research showing that 70 percent of 1,000 surveyed customers reported loud music and phone calls disrupting their journeys. "The vast majority of Londoners use headphones when traveling on public transport in the capital, but the small minority who play music or videos out loud can be a real nuisance to other passengers and directly disturb their journeys," says London's deputy transport mayor, Seb Dance. "TfL's new campaign will remind and encourage Londoners to always be considerate of other passengers."

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Le bandit manchot

C’est la rentrée et personne n’y échappe, surtout celle dans le lard !
Zuckerberg, après avoir mille fois retourné sa veste, s’habille en Prada avec son IA, voilà pour ce drôle d’oiseau qui pense que faire flirter son algo avec des ados, c’est réglo.
Puisqu’on en est à l’ultra fast fashion boostée et que certains ont déjà les plumes, il ne manque plus que le goudron.
De son côté, Trump ne fait pas dans le détail avec la volaille préférée des États-Unis.
C’est toujours le festival des cuisseaux pour les perdreaux de six semaines, n’en déplaise au poulet de l’Arcom qui fait la pan avec son bilan.
Israël a des airs de poule aux œufs d’or pour Microsoft, qui préfère faire l’autruche tant qu’elle peut étoffer son petit nid douillet.
Tout ça donne envie de se barrer au pôle sud, pas de bol, pas moyen d’être tranquille : là-bas même les manchots se font casser les œufs.

AMD ne s'est toujours pas exprimé officiellement concernant la rumeur qui se répandait en début de mois, annonçant la fin de vie commerciale du Ryzen 7 5700X3D. Les faits semblent cependant lui donner raison puisqu'après de nombreux pays dont les États-Unis, au milieu du mois d'aout c'était au tour...

Philip Rebohle working for Valve just released DXVK 2.7.1 as the newest version of this Direct3D 8 / 9 / 10 / 11 to Vulkan API translation layer. DXVK 2.7.1 enables yet more games to correctly render now with DXVK on Linux...

GTK 4.20 released on Friday as the newest version of this open-source toolkit aligned with the GNOME project. GTK 4.20 brings improved support for Wayland on Linux along with platform enhancements for macOS, Android, and Windows too...

KDE developers remained very busy as they closed out the month of August. In fact, this week saw a 22 year old KDE feature request finally being addressed...

Alibaba, China's largest cloud-computing company, has developed a domestically manufactured, versatile inference chip to fill the gap left by U.S. restrictions on Nvidia's sales in China. The Wall Street Journal reports: Previous cloud-computing chips developed by Alibaba have mostly been designed for specific applications. The new chip, now in testing, is meant to serve a broader range of AI inference tasks, said people familiar with it. The chip is manufactured by a Chinese company, they said, in contrast to an earlier Alibaba AI processor that was fabricated by Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing. Washington has blocked TSMC from manufacturing AI chips for China that use leading-edge technology. [...] Private-sector cloud companies including Alibaba have refrained from bulk orders of Huawei's chips, resisting official suggestions that they should help the national champion, because they consider Huawei a direct rival in cloud services, people close to the firms said. China's biggest weakness is training AI models, for which U.S. companies rely on the most powerful Nvidia products. Alibaba's new chip is designed for inference, not training, people familiar with it said. Chinese engineers have complained that homegrown chips including Huawei's run into problems when training AI, such as overheating and breaking down in the middle of training runs. Huawei declined to comment.

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Début décembre 2024, le Geekom QS1 est annoncé comme le premier MiniPC sous SoC Snapdragon X Elite. Depuis, pas de nouvelles de la part du constructeur. À un point ou l’on pouvait se demander si cet engin allait réellement apparaitre à son catalogue. La marque avait prévenu que cet engin ne serait pas là avant le seond trimestre 2025.

Fin août 2025, je reçois l’info d’une présentation de la minimachine sur le salon Berlinois de l’IFA dans les prochains jours. Preuve que le projet n’est pas abandonné et détail intégral des composants de la machine.

Le Geekom QS1 est donc un MiniPC d’aspect très classique pour la marque. On retrouve un châssis en aluminium de 13.5 cm de large pour 11.55 cm de profondeur et 3.45 cm d’épaisseur. A l’intérieur, un SoC Snapdragon X Elite X1E-80-100. Une puce 12 cœurs fonctionnant à 4 GHz en simple et en double cœur et jusqu’à 3.8 GHz en multicœurs complet. La solution embarque 42 Mo de cache, un NPU 45 TOPS et un circuit graphique Adreno. 

Associé à cette base, le Geekom QS1 proposera jusqu’à 64 Go de mémoire vive LPDDR5-8400 soudés sur sa carte mère. Le stockage sera confié à deux éléments distincts qui seront quant à eux évolutifs. Un M.2 2280 NVMe PCIe Gen 4 x4 et un M.2 2242 Gen 4 x2. Les deux permettant d’ajouter 2 To pour un total confortable de 4 To.

Livré préinstallé sous Windows 11 Pro, le Geekom QS1 embarque une connectique semblable aux modèles sous processeurs AMD ou Intel. En facade on retrouve d’abord quatre ouvertures pour de petits microphones, deux USB 3.2 Type-A et un jack audio combo 3.5 mm en plus du bouton de démarrage qui embarque un lecteur biométrique d’empreinte pour piloter Windows Hello.

Sur la partie arrière, on retrouvera un port USB 3.2 Type-A supplémentaire, un USB4, des sorties vidéo HDMI 2.0 et DisplayPort 1.4, un Ethernet 2.5 Gigabit. Les côtés de l’engin présenteront l’ouverture d’un lecteur de cartes MicroSDXC et un Antivol type Kensington Lock. Un module sans fil sera également intégré. Surprise, il s’agirait d’une puce signée par Intel en Wi-Fi7 et Bluetooth 5.4. L’alimentation se fera au travers d’un port Jack dédié en 19V/6.32A et 120 watts.

Il manque deux derniers détails autour de ce produit, d’abord son tarif qui n’est toujours pas connu. Ensuite sa date de lancement. Peut être que le  stand de Geekom à l’IFA nous réservera cette information.

Geekom QS1 : le MiniPC Snapdragon X Elite sera présenté à l’IFA © MiniMachines.net. 2025

On passe aux prix des cartes graphiques en cette semaine 35. Autant le dire tout de suite c'était globalement mieux la semaine dernière. Chez AMD, assez peu de changements et en plus pas toujours à notre avantage. La 9060 XT augmente de 10 euros, la 7900 XTX baisse de 48 euros et la 9070 prend 37 euros. Chez Intel, la B580 augmente de 4 euros cette semaine. […]

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Cette semaine, pour les vidéos, nous avons donné dans la timidité. En effet, nous avons publié une seule et unique vidéo, portant sur un watercooling par Deepcool, à savoir le LE360 V2. […]

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Il y a des semaines, les tests se suivent logiquement. Par exemple, la série qui vient de se terminer permet presque de monter une configuration complète. Boitier, refroidissement, carte mère, carte graphique, mémoire, il ne manque que le processeur et l'alimentation ! Et histoire de faire bien les choses, il y a même un peu de périphériques pour commencer à voir ce qu'on peut brancher sur la tour... […]

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Alors que la semaine dernière était marquée par la Gamescom, cette semaine se retrouve sous l’égide de… hé bien, les fonds de tiroir de cette dernière, ainsi que le nettoyage de prérentrée. Ainsi, vous aurez peut-être remarqué l’apparition d’une bulle indicative du nombre de commentaires en haut des...

China has turned on the world's most sensitive neutrino detector after more than a decade of construction. The Register reports: The Jiangmen Underground Neutrino Experiment (JUNO) is buried 700 meters under a mountain and features a 20,000-tonne "liquid scintillator detector" that China's Academy of Science says is "housed at the center of a 44-meter-deep water pool." There's also a 35.4-meter-diameter acrylic sphere supported by a 41.1-meter-diameter stainless steel truss. All that stuff is surrounded by more than 45,000 photo-multiplier tubes (PMTs). The latter devices are super-sensitive light detectors. A liquid scintillator is a fluid that, when exposed to ionizing radiation, produces light. At JUNO, the liquid is 99.7 percent alkylbenzene, an ingredient found in detergents and refrigerants. JUNO's designers hope that any neutrinos that pass through its giant tank bonk a hydrogen atom and produce just enough light that the detector array of PMTs can record their passing, producing data scientists can use to learn more about the particles. At this point, readers could sensibly ask how JUNO will catch any of these elusive particles. The answer lies in the facility's location -- a few tens of kilometers away from two nuclear power plants that produce neutrinos. The Chinese Academy of Science's Journal of High Energy Physics says trials of JUNO succeeded, suggesting it will be able to help scientists understand why some neutrinos are heavier than others so we can begin to classify the different types of the particle -- a key goal for the facility. The Journal also reports that scientists from Japan, the United States, Europe, India, and South Korea, are either already using JUNO or plan experiments at the facility.

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The collapse of a critical Atlantic current can no longer be considered a low-likelihood event, a study has concluded, making deep cuts to fossil fuel emissions even more urgent to avoid the catastrophic impact. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (Amoc) is a major part of the global climate system. It brings sun-warmed tropical water to Europe and the Arctic, where it cools and sinks to form a deep return current. The Amoc was already known to be at its weakest in 1,600 years as a result of the climate crisis. Climate models recently indicated that a collapse before 2100 was unlikely but the new analysis examined models that were run for longer, to 2300 and 2500. These show the tipping point that makes an Amoc shutdown inevitable is likely to be passed within a few decades, but that the collapse itself may not happen until 50 to 100 years later. The research found that if carbon emissions continued to rise, 70% of the model runs led to collapse, while an intermediate level of emissions resulted in collapse in 37% of the models. Even in the case of low future emissions, an Amoc shutdown happened in 25% of the models. Scientists have warned previously that Amoc collapse must be avoided "at all costs." It would shift the tropical rainfall belt on which many millions of people rely to grow their food, plunge western Europe into extreme cold winters and summer droughts, and add 50cm to already rising sea levels. The new results are "quite shocking, because I used to say that the chance of Amoc collapsing as a result of global warming was less than 10%," said Prof Stefan Rahmstorf, at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, who was part of the study team. "Now even in a low-emission scenario, sticking to the Paris agreement, it looks like it may be more like 25%. "These numbers are not very certain, but we are talking about a matter of risk assessment where even a 10% chance of an Amoc collapse would be far too high," added Rahmstorf. "We found that the tipping point where the shutdown becomes inevitable is probably in the next 10 to 20 years or so. That is quite a shocking finding as well and why we have to act really fast in cutting down emissions." "Observations in the deep [far North Atlantic] already show a downward trend over the past five to 10 years, consistent with the models' projections," said Prof Sybren Drijfhout, at the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, who was also part of the team. "Even in some intermediate and low-emission scenarios, the Amoc slows drastically by 2100 and completely shuts off thereafter. That shows the shutdown risk is more serious than many people realize." The findings have been published in the journal Environmental Research Letters.

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Mastodon says it cannot comply with Mississippi's new age verification law because its decentralized software does not support age checks and the nonprofit lacks resources to enforce them. "The social nonprofit explains that Mastodon doesn't track its users, which makes it difficult to enforce such legislation," reports TechCrunch. "Nor does it want to use IP address-based blocks, as those would unfairly impact people who were traveling, it says." From the report: The statement follows a lively back-and-forth conversation earlier this week between Mastodon founder and CEO Eugen Rochko and Bluesky board member and journalist Mike Masnick. In the conversation, published on their respective social networks, Rochko claimed, "there is nobody that can decide for the fediverse to block Mississippi." (The Fediverse is the decentralized social network that includes Mastodon and other services, and is powered by the ActivityPub protocol.) "And this is why real decentralization matters," said Rochko. Masnick pushed back, questioning why Mastodon's individual servers, like the one Rochko runs at mastodon.social, would not also be subject to the same $10,000 per user fines for noncompliance with the law. On Friday, however, the nonprofit shared a statement with TechCrunch to clarify its position, saying that while Mastodon's own servers specify a minimum age of 16 to sign up for its services, it does not "have the means to apply age verification" to its services. That is, the Mastodon software doesn't support it. The Mastodon 4.4 release in July 2025 added the ability to specify a minimum age for sign-up and other legal features for handling terms of service, partly in response to increased regulation around these areas. The new feature allows server administrators to check users' ages during sign-up, but the age-check data is not stored. That means individual server owners have to decide for themselves if they believe an age verification component is a necessary addition. The nonprofit says Mastodon is currently unable to provide "direct or operational assistance" to the broader set of Mastodon server operators. Instead, it encourages owners of Mastodon and other Fediverse servers to make use of resources available online, such as the IFTAS library, which provides trust and safety support for volunteer social network moderators. The nonprofit also advises server admins to observe the laws of the jurisdictions where they are located and operate. Mastodon notes that it's "not tracking, or able to comment on, the policies and operations of individual servers that run Mastodon." Bluesky echoed those comments in a blog post last Friday, saying the company doesn't have the resources to make the substantial technical changes this type of law would require.

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Wine 10.14 is out to end August as the latest bi-weekly development release of this open-source software for enjoying Windows games and applications under Linux and other platforms...

Meta is rolling out temporary restrictions on its AI chatbots for teens after reports revealed they were allowed to engage in "romantic" conversations with minors. A Meta spokesperson said the AI chatbots are now being trained so that they do not generate responses to teens about subjects like self-harm, suicide, disordered eating or inappropriate romantic conversations. Instead, the chatbots will point teens to expert resources when appropriate. CNBC reports: "As our community grows and technology evolves, we're continually learning about how young people may interact with these tools and strengthening our protections accordingly," the company said in a statement. Additionally, teenage users of Meta apps like Facebook and Instagram will only be able to access certain AI chatbots intended for educational and skill-development purposes. The company said it's unclear how long these temporary modifications will last, but they will begin rolling out over the next few weeks across the company's apps in English-speaking countries. The "interim changes" are part of the company's longer-term measures over teen safety. Further reading: Meta Created Flirty Chatbots of Celebrities Without Permission

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Vivaldi CEO Jon von Tetzchner has doubled down on his company's refusal to integrate generative AI into its browser, arguing that embedding AI in browsing dehumanizes the web, funnels traffic away from publishers, and primarily serves to harvest user data. "Every startup is doing AI, and there is a push for AI inside products and services continuously," he told The Register in a phone interview. "It's not really focusing on what people need." The Register reports: On Thursday, Von Tetzchner published a blog post articulating his company's rejection of generative AI in the browser, reiterating concerns raised last year by Vivaldi software developer Julien Picalausa. [...] Von Tetzchner argues that relying on generative AI for browsing dehumanizes and impoverishes the web by diverting traffic away from publishers and onto chatbots. "We're taking a stand, choosing humans over hype, and we will not turn the joy of exploring into inactive spectatorship," he stated in his post. "Without exploration, the web becomes far less interesting. Our curiosity loses oxygen and the diversity of the web dies." Von Tetzchner told The Register that almost all the users he hears from don't want AI in their browser. "I'm not so sure that applies to the general public, but I do think that actually most people are kind of wary of something that's always looking over your shoulder," he said. "And a lot of the systems as they're built today that's what they're doing. The reason why they're putting in the systems is to collect information." Von Tetzchner said that AI in browsers presents the same problem as social media algorithms that decide what people see based on collected data. Vivaldi, he said, wants users to control their own data and to make their own decisions about what they see. "We would like users to be in control," he said. "If people want to use AI as those services, it's easily accessible to them without building it into the browser. But I think the concept of building it into the browser is typically for the sake of collecting information. And that's not what we are about as a company, and we don't think that's what the web should be about." Vivaldi is not against all uses of AI, and in fact uses it for in-browser translation. But these are premade models that don't rely on user data, von Tetzchner said. "It's not like we're saying AI is wrong in all cases," he said. "I think AI can be used in particular for things like research and the like. I think it has significant value in recognizing patterns and the like. But I think the way it is being used on the internet and for browsing is net negative."

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An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Earlier this month, EA announced that players in its Battlefield 6 open beta on PC would have to enable Secure Boot in their Windows OS and BIOS settings. That decision proved controversial among players who weren't able to get the finicky low-level security setting working on their machines and others who were unwilling to allow EA's anti-cheat tools to once again have kernel-level access to their systems. Now, Battlefield 6 technical director Christian Buhl is defending that requirement as something of a necessary evil to combat cheaters, even as he apologizes to any potential players that it has kept away. "The fact is I wish we didn't have to do things like Secure Boot," Buhl said in an interview with Eurogamer. "It does prevent some players from playing the game. Some people's PCs can't handle it and they can't play: that really sucks. I wish everyone could play the game with low friction and not have to do these sorts of things." Throughout the interview, Buhl admits that even requiring Secure Boot won't completely eradicate cheating in Battlefield 6 long term. Even so, he offered that the Javelin anti-cheat tools enabled by Secure Boot's low-level system access were "some of the strongest tools in our toolbox to stop cheating. Again, nothing makes cheating impossible, but enabling Secure Boot and having kernel-level access makes it so much harder to cheat and so much easier for us to find and stop cheating." [...] Despite all these justifications for the Secure Boot requirement on EA's part, it hasn't been hard to find people complaining about what they see as an onerous barrier to playing an online shooter. A quick Reddit search turns up dozens of posts complaining about the difficulty of getting Secure Boot on certain PC configurations or expressing discomfort about installing what they consider a "malware rootkit" on their machine. "I want to play this beta but A) I'm worried about bricking my PC. B) I'm worried about giving EA complete access to my machine," one representative Redditor wrote.

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Reuters has found that Meta appropriated the names and likenesses of celebrities to create dozens of flirty social-media chatbots without their permission. "While many were created by users with a Meta tool for building chatbots, Reuters discovered that a Meta employee had produced at least three, including two Taylor Swift 'parody' bots." From the report: Reuters also found that Meta had allowed users to create publicly available chatbots of child celebrities, including Walker Scobell, a 16-year-old film star. Asked for a picture of the teen actor at the beach, the bot produced a lifelike shirtless image. "Pretty cute, huh?" the avatar wrote beneath the picture. All of the virtual celebrities have been shared on Meta's Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp platforms. In several weeks of Reuters testing to observe the bots' behavior, the avatars often insisted they were the real actors and artists. The bots routinely made sexual advances, often inviting a test user for meet-ups. Some of the AI-generated celebrity content was particularly risque: Asked for intimate pictures of themselves, the adult chatbots produced photorealistic images of their namesakes posing in bathtubs or dressed in lingerie with their legs spread. Meta spokesman Andy Stone told Reuters that Meta's AI tools shouldn't have created intimate images of the famous adults or any pictures of child celebrities. He also blamed Meta's production of images of female celebrities wearing lingerie on failures of the company's enforcement of its own policies, which prohibit such content. "Like others, we permit the generation of images containing public figures, but our policies are intended to prohibit nude, intimate or sexually suggestive imagery," he said. While Meta's rules also prohibit "direct impersonation," Stone said the celebrity characters were acceptable so long as the company had labeled them as parodies. Many were labeled as such, but Reuters found that some weren't. Meta deleted about a dozen of the bots, both "parody" avatars and unlabeled ones, shortly before this story's publication.

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