"The drought of upcoming Star Wars movies is coming to an end soon," writes Cinemablend. In May the The Mandalorian and Grogu opens, and one year later there's the release of the Ryan Gosling-led Star Wars: Starfighter. But "there are some insiders who already believe that Starfighter will be a bigger hit than The Mandalorian and Grogu..." According to unnamed sources who spoke with Variety, there's a "sense" that Star Wars: Starfighter, which is directed by Deadpool & Wolverine's Shawn Levy, will be a more satisfying viewing experience. These same sources are allegedly impressed by the early footage they've seen of Ryan Gosling's performance and also suggested that Levy has "recaptured the franchise's spirit of fun." Furthermore, the article states that there's concern that because The Mandalorian and Grogu is spinning out of a streaming-exclusive series, it might not have as much appeal to people who aren't already fans of The Mandalorian... Star Wars: Starfighter, on the other hand, will be accessible to everyone equally. It's set five years after The Rise of Skywalker, which is an unexplored period for the Star Wars franchise onscreen. It's also expected that most, if not all of its featured characters will be brand-new, so no knowledge of past adventures is required. Slashdot reader gaiageek reminds us that 2027 will also see a special 50-year anniversary event in movie in theatres: a "newly restored" version of the original 1977 Star Wars.

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It started Friday when all U.S. federal agencies were ordered to "immediately cease" using Anthropic's AI technology after contract negotiations stalled when Anthropic requested prohibitions against mass domestic surveillance or fully autonomous weapons. But later Friday there were even more repercussions... In a post to his 1.1 million followers on X.com, U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth criticized Anthropic for what he called "a master class in arrogance and betrayal as well as a textbook case of how not to do business with the United States Government or the Pentagon." Our position has never wavered and will never waver: the Department of War must have full, unrestricted access to Anthropic's models for every LAWFUL purpose in defense of the Republic... Cloaked in the sanctimonious rhetoric of "effective altruism," [Anthropic and CEO Dario Amodei] have attempted to strong-arm the United States military into submission — a cowardly act of corporate virtue-signaling that places Silicon Valley ideology above American lives. The Terms of Service of Anthropic's defective altruism will never outweigh the safety, the readiness, or the lives of American troops on the battlefield. Their true objective is unmistakable: to seize veto power over the operational decisions of the United States military. That is unacceptable... In conjunction with the President's directive for the Federal Government to cease all use of Anthropic's technology, I am directing the Department of War to designate Anthropic a Supply-Chain Risk to National Security. Effective immediately, no contractor, supplier, or partner that does business with the United States military may conduct any commercial activity with Anthropic... America's warfighters will never be held hostage by the ideological whims of Big Tech. This decision is final. Meanwhile, Anthrophic said on Friday that "no amount of intimidation or punishment from the Department of War will change our position." (And "We will challenge any supply chain risk designation in court.") Designating Anthropic as a supply chain risk would be an unprecedented action — one historically reserved for US adversaries, never before publicly applied to an American company. We are deeply saddened by these developments. As the first frontier AI company to deploy models in the US government's classified networks, Anthropic has supported American warfighters since June 2024 and has every intention of continuing to do so. We believe this designation would both be legally unsound and set a dangerous precedent for any American company that negotiates with the government... Secretary Hegseth has implied this designation would restrict anyone who does business with the military from doing business with Anthropic. The Secretary does not have the statutory authority to back up this statement. Anthropic also defended the two exceptions they'd requested that had stalled contract negotiations. "[W]e do not believe that today's frontier AI models are reliable enough to be used in fully autonomous weapons. Allowing current models to be used in this way would endanger America's warfighters and civilians. Second, we believe that mass domestic surveillance of Americans constitutes a violation of fundamental rights." Also Friday, OpenAI announced that "we reached an agreement with the Department of War to deploy our models in their classified network." OpenAI CEO Sam Altman emphasized that the agreement retains and confirms OpenAI's own prohibitions against using their products for domestic mass surveillance — and requires "human responsibility" for the use of force including for autonomous weapon systems. "The Department of War agrees with these principles, reflects them in law and policy, and we put them into our agreement. We also will build technical safeguards to ensure our models behave as they should, which the Department of War also wanted. " We are asking the Department of War to offer these same terms to all AI companies, which in our opinion we think everyone should be willing to accept. We have expressed our strong desire to see things de-escalate away from legal and governmental actions and towards reasonable agreements. We remain committed to serve all of humanity as best we can. The world is a complicated, messy, and sometimes dangerous place.

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Si vous êtes à la recherche d'un écran gaming ayant une diagonale de 32 pouces à petit prix, voici une bien belle offre à n'en pas douter. Amazon propose en ce moment l'ASUS TUF Gaming VG32WQ3B à 189,99 € livraison comprise. Un prix déjà vraiment correct, et qui devient assez exceptionnel quand on a...

There's already 5,000 sensors embedded in Antarctica's ice to look for evidence of neutrinos, reports the Washington Post. But in November scientists drilled six new holes at least a mile and a half deep and installed cables with hundreds more light detectors — an upgrade to the massive 15-year-old IceCube Neutrino Observatory to detect the charged particles produced by lower-energy neutrinos interacting with matter: When they do, the neutrinos produce charged particles that travel through the ice at nearly the speed of light, creating a blue glow called Cherenkov radiation... "Within the first couple years, we should be making much better measurements," [said Erin O'Sullivan, an associate professor of physics at Uppsala University in Sweden and a spokesperson for the project.] "There's hope to expand the detector, by an order of magnitude in volume, so the important thing there is we're not just seeing a few neutrino point sources, but we're starting to be a true telescope. ... That's really the dream." The scientists spent seven years planning the upgrade, according to the article. "To drill holes a mile and a half deep takes about 30 hours, and 18 more hours to return to the surface," the article points out. "Then, the race begins because almost immediately, the hole starts to shrink as the water refreezes." ("If it takes too much time, the principal investigator says, "the instruments don't fit in anymore!")

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En juin 2025, AMD officialisait son Ryzen 5 5500X3D, en limitant par contre sa zone de diffusion à l'Amérique latine. Une bien mauvaise nouvelle pour les habitants du reste du monde à la recherche d'un processeur AM4 doté de la 3D V-Cache puisque, peu de temps après, ce Ryzen 5 5500X3D devenait le s...

Interesting Engineering reports: US tech giant Google announced on Tuesday that it will build a new data center in Pine Island, Minnesota. The new facility will be powered by 1.9 gigawatts (GW) of clean energy from wind and solar, coupled with a 300-megawatt battery, claimed to be the 'world's largest', with a 30-gigawatt-hour (GWh) capacity and 100-hour duration... The planned battery would dwarf a 19 GW lithium-ion project in the UAE... Form Energy's batteries work very differently from most large batteries today. Instead of using lithium like the batteries in electric cars, they store electricity by making iron rust and then reversing the rusting process to release the energy when needed... Form's iron-air batteries are heavier and less efficient than their counterparts; they can only return about 50% to 70% of the energy used to charge them, while lithium-ion batteries return more than 90%. However, Form's batteries have one distinct advantage. They are cheaper than lithium-ion batteries, costing about $20 per kilowatt-hour of storage, which is almost three times as cheap... It will store 150 MWh of electricity and can supply to the grid for up to 100 hours, delivering about 1.5 MW at peak output. Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the article.

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CNN reports that images from Iran's capital "have shown cars jammed along Tehran's street, with heavy traffic on major roads after today's wave of attacks by the US and Israel." And though Iran has a population of 93 million, the attacks suddenly plunged Iran into "a near-total internet blackout with national connectivity at 4% of ordinary levels," according to internet monitoring experts at NetBlocks. CNN reports: Since Iran's brutal crackdown earlier this year, the regime has made progress to allow only a subset of people with security clearance to access the international web, experts said. After previous internet shutdowns, some platforms never returned. The Iranian government blocked Instagram after the internet shutdown and protests in 2022, and the popular messaging app Telegram following protests in 2018. The International Atomic Energy Agency announced an hour ago that they're "closely monitoring developments" — keeping in contact with countries in the region and so far seeing "no evidence of any radiological impact." They're also urging "restraint to avoid any nuclear safety risks to people in the region." UPDATE (1 PM PST): Qatar, Bahrain and Kuwait "are shifting to remote learning starting Sunday until further notice following Iranâ(TM)s retaliatory strikes on Saturday," reports CNN.

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A set of patches recently posted to the Linux kernel mailing list have now been queued up to a tip/tip.git branch for planned introduction in Linux 7.1. These patches are for enhancing the Linux perf subsystem support for AMD Instruction-Based Sampling (IBS) improvements with next-gen Zen 6 processors...

En février 2020, NZXT lançait officiellement son boitier H1, destiné aux configurations Mini-ITX. Dans les mois qui ont suivi, des retours d'acheteurs ont commencé à faire sentir qu'il y avait un souci, avec des courts-circuits entrainant parfois jusqu'à des départs de feu chez certains acheteurs. N...

Tuesday Pew Research announced their newest findings: that 54% of America's teens use AI help with schoolwork: One-in-five teens living in households making less than $30,000 a year say they do all or most of their schoolwork with AI chatbots' help. A similar share of those in households making $30,000 to just under $75,000 annually say this. Fewer teens living in higher-earning households (7%) say the same." "The survey did not ask students whether they had used chatbots to write essays or generate other assignments..." notes the New York Times. "But nearly 60% of teenagers told Pew that students at their school used chatbots to cheat 'very often' or 'somewhat often.'" Agreeing with that are the Pew Researchers themselves. "Our survey shows that many teens think cheating with AI has become a regular feature of student life." One worried teenager still told the researchers that AI "makes people lazy and takes away jobs." But another teenager told the researchers that "Everyone's going to have to know how to use AI or they'll be left behind." Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader theodp for sharing the article.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A start-up called Reflect Orbital "proposes to use large, mirrored satellites to redirect sunlight to Earth at night," reports the Washington Post, "with plans to bathe solar farms, industrial sites and even entire cities in light that could, if desired, reach the intensity of daylight...." Slashdot noted their idea in 2022 — but Reflect Orbital now expects to launch its first satellite in April, according to the article. "But its grand vision is largely 'aspirational,' as its young founder, Ben Nowack, told me..." Reflect Orbital's Nowack describes a scene right out of sci-fi: An extremely bright star appears on the northern horizon and makes its way across the sky, illuminating a 5-kilometer circle on Earth, then setting on the southern horizon about five minutes later, just as another such "star" appears in the north. To make the night even brighter, a customer could make 10 "stars" appear at once in the north by ordering them on an app. Two such artificial stars are in development in Reflect Orbital's factory. Nowack showed them to me on a Zoom call. The first to launch is 50 feet across, but he plans later to build them three times that size. If all goes according to plan, he'll have 50,000 of them circling the Earth in 2035 at an altitude of around 400 miles. Nowack plans to start selling the service "in mostly developing nations or places that don't have streetlights yet." Eventually, he thinks, he can illuminate major cities, turn solar fields and farms into round-the-clock operations for any business or municipality that pays for it. He likened his technology to the invention of crop irrigation thousands of years ago. "I see this as much the same thing," he said, arguing that people would no longer have to "wait for the sun to shine." The article adds that Elon Musk's SpaceX "wants to launch as many as a million satellites to serve as orbiting data centers — 70 times the number of satellites now in orbit." (America's satellite-regulation Federal Communications Commission grants a "categorical exclusion" from environmental review to satellites on the grounds that their operations "normally do not have significant effects on the human environment.") The public comment periods for the two proposals close on March 6 and March 9.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cette semaine, la grosse actualité jeux vidéo a été clairement dirigée vers Resident Evil Requiem. Il faut dire que cette fois, contrairement aux deux derniers épisodes, il s'agit d'un jeu inédit avec une nouvelle histoire et un nouveau personnage central. De plus, ce qui avait été montré en amont a...

C’est le genre d’engin apprécié des réparateurs en électronique et des numismates. A 21.27€, le MUSTOOL DM7 fera également le bonheur de beaucoup de monde : philatélistes, entomologistes, maquettistes, peintres de figurines ou autres personnes ayant besoin d’une observation très agrandie.

L’idée du MUSTOOL DM7 est simple, un pied supporte une « webcam » 1080P améliorée par une lentille qui va zoomer sur le sujet placé en dessous. Le retour de la caméra est fait sur un petit écran de 4.3″ placé directement au-dessus. Cela permet de « voir ce que l’on fait » directement. Pratique, très pratique, pour les soudures délicates ou la peinture de détails. L’écran n’est pas de grande qualité, sa définition est en général très limitée mais cela ouvre cette perspective d’une visualisation « en direct ». 

Il est aussi possible de brancher le microscope à un ordinateur et d’avoir un retour de la caméra sur grand écran. Ce qui permet d’autres usages. On pourra toujours utiliser cet écran géant pour du maquettisme ou autre, mais on n’aura pas les mains en dessous. Par contre en termes d’observation, c’est génial : le retour permet de détailler des objets, de prendre des clichés et même des vidéos. Possible ainsi de filmer un détail technique ou un défaut et d’intégrer ce bout de film dans une explication plus large d’un problème. Possible aussi de voir un gros plan d’un élément : insecte, fleur, feuille, etc. Pour le détailler. L’objet est illuminé par une couronne de 8 LEDs autour de la caméra pour une bonne visibilité de l’objet. La mise au point se fait en positionnant la webcam plus ou moins haut sur sa petite colonne puis via une molette de mise au point.

Le Zoom est de x50 maximum en optique f4.5, ce qui agrandit déjà pas mal ce que l’on fait. Des options d’agrandissement jusqu’à « x1000 » sont possibles mais cela se fera en numérique. C’est à dire par un agrandissement de l’image via le logiciel après la capture en x50. Autrement dit, ne vous attendez pas à des miracles de finesse sur ce poste, un tel agrandissement ne servira dans la plupart des cas à rien. Mais jusqu’en x200 – x300, pour poser un fer à souder à un endroit très précis ou rajouter un mascara coquin à un Ogre du Chaos, c’est utile.

Le MUSTOOL DM7 est alimenté par un câble USB Type-C et peut se satisfaire d’une batterie externe. Ce qui le rend transportable en extérieur et donc parfait pour aller faire de l’observation dehors. Près d’une mare, dans un champ, sous un arbre. Avec une petite coupelle qui ferme pour voir des insectes ou des plantes, c’est assez génial. On ne pourra pas forcément observer des détails directement comme avec un microscope classique x100 ou x150 mais en combinant avec un agrandissement numérique, on obtient de bons résultats. On pourra par exemple refaire la fameuse expérience de l’épiderme d’oignon qui est sans doute pratiquée dans beaucoup de classes de science aujourd’hui. A noter également que le microscope, s’il ne fait qu’un avec l’écran, peut être utilisé sans le pied. Possible donc d’observer des écorces, roches ou autres éléments en le posant directement sur un objet.

En 2019, j’avais publié un billet au sujet d’un microscope de ce type monté sur une imprimante 3D. Cette vidéo donne une bonne idée du rendu de ce type de capteur avec son grossisement initial.

Le MUSTOOL DM7 comme outil technique en électronique

Un très petit composant sur une carte qui pose problème peut ainsi être agrandi de manière importante pour faciliter le travail.

Le même composant affiché sur l’écran de l’appareil est beaucoup plus simple à dessouder, par exemple. Les valeurs des petites résistances peuvent être lues sans difficulté. Les pistes problématiques facilement détectées, etc.

Je n’ai pas ce MUSTOOL DM7 moi-même, mais j’ai acheté il y a longtemps déjà un microscope de ce type. C’est vraiment l’idéal pour les petites soudures comme les bornes des montages ESP32 et autres microcontrôleurs. Idéal aussi pour certaines réparations. Le fait de pouvoir séparer le corps du pied est commode. En effet il est possible de le monter sur un bras qui va être positionné pile où l’on veut, sans entraves : par exemple au-dessus d’une carte mère. Ce n’est pas un appareil de haute qualité, qu’on soit bien clairs là-dessus, cela reste un gadget par rapport à un vrai matériel d’électronicien. Mais ce type de petit appareil m’a rendu maintes et maintes fois service par le passé et continue à se rendre utile aujourd’hui.

Le MUSTOOL DM7 est en promo à 21.27€ chez Banggood. La livraison est à 0.04€… 

Voir l’offre sur Banggood

Si l’idée de ce type d’objet vous intéresse mais que vous voulez un appareil plus « sérieux », le Mustool DM13 est une alternative à 62.99€. Il propose un pied plus grand, de plus grandes sources lumineuses et un écran de 10.1″. Il est évidemment beaucoup moins portable.

Bon Flan : MUSTOOL DM7 un microscope numérique USB à 21€ © MiniMachines.net. 2026

A start-up called Reflect Orbital "proposes to use large, mirrored satellites to redirect sunlight to Earth at night," reports the Washington Post, "with plans to bathe solar farms, industrial sites and even entire cities in light that could, if desired, reach the intensity of daylight...." Slashdot noted their idea in 2022 — but Reflect Orbital now expects to launch its first satellite in April, according to the article. "But its grand vision is largely 'aspirational,' as its young founder, Ben Nowack, told me..." Reflect Orbital's Nowack describes a scene right out of sci-fi: An extremely bright star appears on the northern horizon and makes its way across the sky, illuminating a 5-kilometer circle on Earth, then setting on the southern horizon about five minutes later, just as another such "star" appears in the north. To make the night even brighter, a customer could make 10 "stars" appear at once in the north by ordering them on an app. Two such artificial stars are in development in Reflect Orbital's factory. Nowack showed them to me on a Zoom call. The first to launch is 50 feet across, but he plans later to build them three times that size. If all goes according to plan, he'll have 50,000 of them circling the Earth in 2035 at an altitude of around 400 miles. Nowack plans to start selling the service "in mostly developing nations or places that don't have streetlights yet." Eventually, he thinks, he can illuminate major cities, turn solar fields and farms into round-the-clock operations for any business or municipality that pays for it. He likened his technology to the invention of crop irrigation thousands of years ago. "I see this as much the same thing," he said, arguing that people would no longer have to "wait for the sun to shine." The article adds that Elon Musk's SpaceX "wants to launch as many as a million satellites to serve as orbiting data centers — 70 times the number of satellites now in orbit." (America's satellite-regulation Federal Communications Commission grants a "categorical exclusion" from environmental review to satellites on the grounds that their operations "normally do not have significant effects on the human environment.") The public comment periods for the two proposals close on March 6 and March 9.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The first DRM-Misc-Next pull request was submitted this week to DRM-Next as new kernel graphics/display driver features to begin queuing for the Linux 7.1 kernel that will release mid-year. Among the early code for DRM-Next are two new drivers...

The Servo project has issued their January 2026 development report that highlights all the interesting changes they made to this open-source browser layout engine last month. With Servo 0.0.5 they have landed many improvements to this engine and also continuing to enhance its ability to embed Servo inside other applications...

Depuis environ une semaine, vous êtes peut-être tombés sur plusieurs articles indiquant des baisses de prix de la DDR5 dans certaines régions du monde. Il est temps de voir si c'est également le cas en France, car lors de notre point précédent, le 15 février 2026, les prix étaient plutôt repartis lé...

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Google on Friday unveiled its plan for its Chrome browser to secure HTTPS certificates against quantum computer attacks without breaking the Internet. The objective is a tall order. The quantum-resistant cryptographic data needed to transparently publish TLS certificates is roughly 40 times bigger than the classical cryptographic material used today. Today's X.509 certificates are about 64 bytes in size, and comprise six elliptic curve signatures and two EC public keys. This material can be cracked through the quantum-enabled Shor's algorithm. Certificates containing the equivalent quantum-resistant cryptographic material are roughly 2.5 kilobytes. All this data must be transmitted when a browser connects to a site. To bypass the bottleneck, companies are turning to Merkle Trees, a data structure that uses cryptographic hashes and other math to verify the contents of large amounts of information using a small fraction of material used in more traditional verification processes in public key infrastructure. Merkle Tree Certificates, "replace the heavy, serialized chain of signatures found in traditional PKI with compact Merkle Tree proofs," members of Google's Chrome Secure Web and Networking Team wrote Friday. "In this model, a Certification Authority (CA) signs a single 'Tree Head' representing potentially millions of certificates, and the 'certificate' sent to the browser is merely a lightweight proof of inclusion in that tree." [...] Google is [also] adding cryptographic material from quantum-resistant algorithms such as ML-DSA (PDF). This addition would allow forgeries only if an attacker were to break both classical and post-quantum encryption. The new regime is part of what Google is calling the quantum-resistant root store, which will complement the Chrome Root Store the company formed in 2022. The [Merkle Tree Certificates] MTCs use Merkle Trees to provide quantum-resistant assurances that a certificate has been published without having to add most of the lengthy keys and hashes. Using other techniques to reduce the data sizes, the MTCs will be roughly the same 64-byte length they are now [...]. The new system has already been implemented in Chrome.

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Ou plutôt l’inverse

A l’ère de l’intelligence artificielle, garder la foi en l’être humain, parfois c’est dur. Faut dire qu’il est chiant, ne serait-ce que pour l’épanouissement du progrès en marche : Si on veut que tout roule, il faudrait augmenter l’humain pour optimiser ses résultats, voire se débarrasser de ses détails encombrants, comme ses exigences en matière de vie privée… Une seule question persiste : les patrons de la tech ont-ils une âme ? Bon weekend et suivez les conseils du pape : que l’ia ne vous fasse pas devenir fou de la messe.

For those on the current FreeBSD 14 series with no immediate plans to move to FreeBSD 15 that debuted at the end of 2025, FreeBSD developers have been preparing for the release of FreeBSD 14.4. Released overnight was the first release candidate of FreeBSD 14.4...