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Man Who Cryogenically Froze Late Wife Sparks Debate By Dating New Partner

Slashdot.org - Wed, 11/19/2025 - 02:00
A Chinese man who cryogenically preserved his wife after her death has sparked a heated online debate after it emerged he began dating a new partner in 2020. Some argue it's natural for him to move on, while others say he's being selfish or disrespectful to both his late wife and his current partner. The BBC reports: As a sign of his devotion, Gui Junmin decided to freeze his wife Zhan Wenlian's body after she died from lung cancer in 2017, aged 49, making her China's first cryogenically preserved person. But after a November interview revealed he had been dating a different partner since 2020, Chinese social media has been torn on Mr Junmin's predicament. Whilst some asked why the 57-year-old didn't just "let go" another commenter remarked he appeared to be "most devoted to himself." After Zhan Wenlian was given months to live by doctors, Gui Junmin decided to use cryonics - which is scientifically unproven - to preserve her body once she died. Following her death, he signed a 30-year agreement to preserve his wife's frozen body with the Shandong Yinfeng Life Science Research Institute. Since then, Zhan's body has been stored in a 2,000-litre container at the institute in a vat of -190C liquid nitrogen. Chinese newspaper Southern Weekly revealed that although Mr Junmin lived alone for two years after the procedure, in 2020 he began dating again, despite his wife remaining in cryopreservation. He told the newspaper that a severe gout attack which left him unable to move for two days began to change his mind about the benefits of living alone. Soon after, he started seeing his current partner Wang Chunxia, although Mr Junmin suggested to the paper the love was only "utilitarian" and that she hadn't "entered" his heart.

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A conversation on smarter and safer age assurance for EuropeA conversation on smarter and safer age assurance for EuropeVice President

GoogleBlog - Wed, 11/19/2025 - 01:00
Google outlines a risk-based approach to age verification that protects teens online without sacrificing privacy or access for everyone.Google outlines a risk-based approach to age verification that protects teens online without sacrificing privacy or access for everyone.
Categories: Technology

US Backs Three Mile Island Nuclear Restart With $1 Billion Loan To Constellation

Slashdot.org - Tue, 11/18/2025 - 22:30
An anonymous reader quotes a report from CNBC: The Trump administration will provide Constellation Energy with a $1 billion loan to restart the Crane Clean Energy Center nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, Department of Energy officials said Tuesday. Previously known as Three Mile Island Unit 1, the plant is expected to start generating power again in 2027. Constellation unveiled plans to rename and restart the reactor in Sept. 2024 through a power purchase agreement with Microsoft to support the tech company's data center demand in the region. Three Mile Island Unit 1 ceased operations in 2019, one of a dozen reactors that closed in recent years as nuclear struggled to compete against cheap natural gas. It sits on the same site as Three Mile Island Unit 2, the reactor that partially melted down in 1979 in the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history. The loan would cover the majority to the project's estimated cost of $1.6 billion. The first advance to Constellation is expected in the first quarter of 2026, said Greg Beard, senior advisor to the Energy Department's Loan Programs Office, in a call with reporters. The loan comes with a guarantee from Constellation that it will protect taxpayer money, Beard said.

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Google DeepMind is opening a new AI research lab in Singapore to advance AI in Asia Pacific.Google DeepMind is opening a new AI research lab in Singapore to advance AI in Asia Pacific.

GoogleBlog - Tue, 11/18/2025 - 21:30
Google DeepMind is opening a new AI research lab in Singapore with the goal of accelerating the adoption and real-world benefits of AI across the Asia-Pacific region. Th…
Categories: Technology

Chinese Spies Are Trying To Reach UK Lawmakers Via LinkedIn, MI5 Warns

Slashdot.org - Tue, 11/18/2025 - 21:20
MI5 has warned U.K. lawmakers that Chinese intelligence operatives are using LinkedIn and recruitment fronts to target them for information gathering and long-term cultivation. PBS reports: Writing to lawmakers, House of Commons Speaker Lindsay Hoyle said a new MI5 "espionage alert" warned that Chinese nationals were "using LinkedIn profiles to conduct outreach at scale" on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security. "Their aim is to collect information and lay the groundwork for long-term relationships, using professional networking sites, recruitment agents and consultants acting on their behalf," he said. MI5 issued the alert because the activity was "targeted and widespread," he added. The MI5 alert cited LinkedIn profiles of two women, Amanda Qiu and Shirly Shen, and said other similar recruiters' profiles were acting as fronts for espionage. Home Office Minister Dan Jarvis said that apart from parliamentary staff, others including economists, think tank consultants and government officials have been similarly targeted. Jarvis said the government is rolling out a series of measures to tackle the risk, including investing 170 million pounds ($224 million) to renew encrypted technology used by civil servants to safeguard sensitive work. Opposition parties say authorities are not doing enough and are too wary of jeopardizing trade ties with China.

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Mexico Partially Lifts Longstanding Website Ban On Tor Network

Slashdot.org - Tue, 11/18/2025 - 20:40
Mexico has finally lifted its long-running Tor ban for the main government portal, allowing privacy-focused users, journalists, and activists to access gob.mx again after more than a decade of blocking. That said, the open data portal and the former Tor-compatible whistleblower system remain inaccessible. CyberInsider reports: The development follows a long period of digital censorship that spanned two full six-year presidential terms, those of Enrique Pena Nieto and Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador, and continued into the early months of Claudia Sheinbaum Pardo's current administration. Research conducted by Jacobo Najera and Miguel Trujillo, published in October 2023, documented that 21 federal government agencies were blocking traffic from the Tor network, effectively excluding privacy-conscious users from vital public resources and services.

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Gen Z Officially Worse At Passwords Than 80-Year-Olds

Slashdot.org - Tue, 11/18/2025 - 20:00
A NordPass analysis found that Gen Z is actually worse at password security than older generations, with "12345" topping their list while "123456" dominates among everyone else. The Register reports: And while there were a few more "skibidis" among the Zoomer dataset compared to those who came before them, the trends were largely similar. Variants on the "123456" were among the most common for all age groups, with that exact string proving to be the most common among all users -- the sixth time in seven years it holds the undesirable crown. Some of the more adventurous would stretch to "1234567," while budding cryptologists shored up their accounts by adding an 8 or even a 9 to the mix. However, according to Security.org's password security checker, a computer could crack any of these instantly. Most attackers would not even need to expend the resources required to reveal the password, given how commonly used they are. They could just spray a list of known passwords at an authentication API and secure a quick win.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Cloud-Native Computing Is Poised To Explode

Slashdot.org - Tue, 11/18/2025 - 19:20
An anonymous reader quotes a report from ZDNet: At KubeCon North America 2025 in Atlanta, the Cloud Native Computing Foundation (CNCF)'s leaders predicted an enormous surge in cloud-native computing, driven by the explosive growth of AI inference workloads. How much growth? They're predicting hundreds of billions of dollars in spending over the next 18 months. [...] Where cloud-native computing and AI inference come together is when AI is no longer a separate track from cloud-native computing. Instead, AI workloads, particularly inference tasks, are fueling a new era where intelligent applications require scalable and reliable infrastructure. That era is unfolding because, said [CNCF Executive Director Jonathan Bryce], "AI is moving from a few 'Training supercomputers' to widespread 'Enterprise Inference.' This is fundamentally a cloud-native problem. You, the platform engineers, are the ones who will build the open-source platforms that unlock enterprise AI." "Cloud native and AI-native development are merging, and it's really an incredible place we're in right now," said CNCF CTO Chris Aniszczyk. The data backs up this opinion. For example, Google has reported that its internal inference jobs have processed 1.33 quadrillion tokens per month recently, up from 980 trillion just months before. [...] Aniszczyk added that cloud-native projects, especially Kubernetes, are adapting to serve inference workloads at scale: "Kubernetes is obviously one of the leading examples as of the last release the dynamic resource allocation feature enables GPU and TPU hardware abstraction in a Kubernetes context." To better meet the demand, the CNCF announced the Certified Kubernetes AI Conformance Program, which aims to make AI workloads as portable and reliable as traditional cloud-native applications. "As AI moves into production, teams need a consistent infrastructure they can rely on," Aniszczyk stated during his keynote. "This initiative will create shared guardrails to ensure AI workloads behave predictably across environments. It builds on the same community-driven standards process we've used with Kubernetes to help bring consistency as AI adoption scales." What all this effort means for business is that AI inference spending on cloud-native infrastructure and services will reach into the hundreds of billions within the next 18 months. That investment is because CNCF leaders predict that enterprises will race to stand up reliable, cost-effective AI services.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Red Hat Losing Another Prominent Linux Kernel Engineer

Linux.Slashdot.org - Tue, 11/18/2025 - 18:40
Another highly influential Linux kernel engineer, David Hildenbrand, is leaving Red Hat after a decade of major contributions to memory management, virtualization, and VirtIO. His recent kernel patch updates his maintainer info to a kernel.org address, signaling his departure. He hasn't yet said where he's headed next. Phoronix reports: David Hildenbrand serves as a reviewer for the HugeTLB code, s390 KVM code, and memory management reclaim code. He also serves as an upstream maintainer for the Linux kernel's core memory management code, Get User Pages (GUP) memory management code, kernel samepage merging (KSM), reverse mapping (RMAP), transparent hugepage (THP), memory advice (MADVISE), VirtIO memory driver, and VirtIO balloon driver. Hildenbrand had been employed by Red Hat the past decade in Munich working on QEMU/KVM virtualization, Linux kernel memory management, VirtIO, and related low-level areas. Just this year alone so far in 2025 he's authored or been mentioned on more than one thousand mainline Linux kernel patches.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Categories: Linux

Red Hat Losing Another Prominent Linux Kernel Engineer

Slashdot.org - Tue, 11/18/2025 - 18:40
Another highly influential Linux kernel engineer, David Hildenbrand, is leaving Red Hat after a decade of major contributions to memory management, virtualization, and VirtIO. His recent kernel patch updates his maintainer info to a kernel.org address, signaling his departure. He hasn't yet said where he's headed next. Phoronix reports: David Hildenbrand serves as a reviewer for the HugeTLB code, s390 KVM code, and memory management reclaim code. He also serves as an upstream maintainer for the Linux kernel's core memory management code, Get User Pages (GUP) memory management code, kernel samepage merging (KSM), reverse mapping (RMAP), transparent hugepage (THP), memory advice (MADVISE), VirtIO memory driver, and VirtIO balloon driver. Hildenbrand had been employed by Red Hat the past decade in Munich working on QEMU/KVM virtualization, Linux kernel memory management, VirtIO, and related low-level areas. Just this year alone so far in 2025 he's authored or been mentioned on more than one thousand mainline Linux kernel patches.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Development Release: FreeBSD 15.0-RC1

DistroWatch.com - Tue, 11/18/2025 - 18:35
The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Colin Percival has announced the availability of the first release candidate for the upcoming FreeBSD 15.0, scheduled for final release in early December. The new version will introduce a large number of changes, including the deprecation of fdisk in favor of gpart. Also new in this release is....
Categories: Linux

Distribution Release: Finnix 251

DistroWatch.com - Tue, 11/18/2025 - 18:35
The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Finnix is a small, self-contained, bootable Linux distribution for system administrators, based on Debian's "Testing" branch. The project's latest version, Finnix 251, introduces OCI container images: "Finnix 251 is the first release to distribute official OCI container images. The official Finnix container contains all the same software as....
Categories: Linux

DistroWatch Weekly, Issue 1148

DistroWatch.com - Tue, 11/18/2025 - 18:35
The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. This week in DistroWatch Weekly:
Review: Zorin OS 18
News: NetBSD experiments with sandboxing, postmarketOS unifies its documentation, OpenBSD makes system upgrades more resilient, Canonical offers 15 years of support for Ubuntu, Debian publishes updated media for Trixie
Questions and answers: Deleting a file with a weird name
Released last week:....
Categories: Linux

Distribution Releases: Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10.1, 9.7

DistroWatch.com - Tue, 11/18/2025 - 18:35
The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Red Hat, Inc. has released two updated versions of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL) - 10.1, the first point release of the distribution's latest stable release, and 9.7, an updated build of RHEL's legacy 9.x branch. "During the excitement of the Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 (RHEL) launch....
Categories: Linux

Distribution Release: Nitrux 5.0.0

DistroWatch.com - Tue, 11/18/2025 - 18:35
The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Uri Herrera has announced the release of Nitrux 5.0.0, a major update of the Linux distribution that aims to be "disruptive by design". This is the project's first build featuring an immutable base and the Hyprland Wayland compositor (dropping KDE Plasma in the process). Although Nitrux is built....
Categories: Linux

Distribution Release: SparkyLinux 8.1

DistroWatch.com - Tue, 11/18/2025 - 18:35
The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Paweł Pijanowski has announced the release of SparkyLinux 8.1, the latest stable release of the project's set of Linux distributions based on Debian 13: "This is a quarterly update of the SparkyLinux 8 'Seven Sisters' stable release. SparkyLinux 8 is based on and is fully compatible with Debian....
Categories: Linux

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