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HP plans to cut 4,000-6,000 jobs by 2028 "as part of a plan to streamline operations and adopt artificial intelligence," reports Reuters. From the report: HP's teams focused on product development, internal operations and customer support will be impacted by the job cuts, CEO Enrique Lores said during a media briefing call. "We expect this initiative will create $1 billion in gross run rate savings over three years," Lores added. The company laid off an additional 1,000 to 2,000 employees in February, as part of a previously announced restructuring plan. Demand for AI-enabled PCs has continued to ramp externally, reaching over 30% of HP's shipments in the fourth quarter ended October 31.

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Warner Music Group has reached a licensing deal with Suno that will let users create AI-generated music using the voices and likenesses of artists who opt in. WMG says participating artists will have "full control" over how their likeness and music are used. "These will be new creation experiences from artists who do opt in, which will open up new revenue streams for them and allow you to interact with them in new ways," Suno says, adding that users will be able to "build around" an artist's sounds "and ensure they get compensated." WMG is also dropping its previous lawsuit accusing Suno of scraping copyrighted material. "Along with the licensing agreement, Suno is planning to use licensed music from WMG to build next-gen music generation models that it claims will surpass its flagship v5 model," adds The Verge. "It will also start requiring users to have a paid account to download songs starting next year, with each tier providing a specific number of downloads each month." Further reading: First 'AI Music Creator' Signed by Record Label. More Ahead, or Just a Copyright Quandry?

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The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. NTC IT ROSA has announced the release of ROSA 13.1, an updated version of the Russian company's general-purpose Linux distribution for desktops (with GNOME or KDE Plasma) and servers, originally forked from Mandriva Linux. This release comes with a large number of bug fixes reported in ROSA 13.0....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. The Tsurugi project has released Tsurugi Linux 25.11, a major update of the Ubuntu-based specialist distribution designed for digital forensics and incident response investigations (DFIR), malware analysis and open-source intelligence (OSINT) activities. The new version is based on Ubuntu's latest long-term support release. From the changelog: "Totally rebuilt....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. AlmaLinux OS, which is based on Red Hat Enterprise Linux, has a new version, AlmaLinux OS 10.1. The new release introduces the ability to install the distribution on a Btrfs storage volume. "AlmaLinux 10.1 also includes support for the Btrfs filesystem, which has already been available in AlmaLinux....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Jaiden Riordan has announced the release of Ultramarine Linux 43, a new version of the project's Fedora-based desktop distribution with a choice of KDE Plasma, Budgie, GNOME and Xfce desktops: "Ultramarine 43 brings some gas-fired polish and a few surprise features. Budgie has been our (rather acclaimed) Flagship....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. This week in DistroWatch Weekly:
Review: MX Linux 25
News: systemd experiments with musl libc support, Debian Libre Live publishes media for Trixie, Xubuntu reviews website hack
Questions and answers: Why are video drivers special?
Released last week: Finnix 251, Aurora 43, Proxmox 9.1 "Virtual Environment"
Torrent corner: KDE neon, Proxmox
Opinion poll:....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Proxmox Virtual Environment is an open-source virtualisation platform for running virtual appliances and virtual machines. The company's latest release, version 9.1, continues to refine the 9.x branch, which is based on Debian 13 "Trixie". The release announcement reports: "We're proud to present the next iteration of our Proxmox....

The DistroWatch news feed is brought to you by TUXEDO COMPUTERS. Juha Uotila has announced the release of Aurora 43, an important update of the project's Fedora-based immutable Linux distribution made for general desktop use. This version updates the underlying system to Fedora 43 and the KDE Plasma desktop to version 6.5: "Aurora 'Stable' has been updated and is....

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....

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....

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:....

An anonymous reader quotes a report from PCMag: Four new features are coming to Google Maps, including a way to hide your identity in reviews. Maps will soon let you use a nickname and select an alternative profile picture for online reviews, so you can rate a business without linking it to full name and Google profile photo. Google says it will monitor for "suspicious and fake reviews," and every review is still associated with an account on Google's backend, which it believes will discourage bad actors. Look for a new option under Your Profile that says Use a custom name & picture for posting. You'll then be able to pick an illustration to represent you and add a nickname. Google didn't explain why it is introducing anonymous reviews; it pitched the idea as a way to be a business's "Secret Santa." Some users are nervous to publicly post reviews for local businesses as it may be used to track their location or movements. It may encourage more people to contribute honest feedback to its platform, for better or worse. Further reading: Gemini AI To Transform Google Maps Into a More Conversational Experience

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Oracle Linux 9.7 Now Generally Available  Oracle Blogs

Sundar Pichai sits down with Logan Kilpatrick to discuss Gemini 3 on the Google AI: Release Notes podcast.

Poland has launched a new antitrust investigation into Apple's App Tracking Transparency rules, questioning whether Apple misled users about privacy while giving its own apps a competitive advantage over third-party developers. AppleInsider reports: On November 25, Poland's UOKiK has started another investigation into App Tracking Transparency, and whether Apple had restricted competition in mobile advertising. Reuters reports that, to the anti-monopoly regulator, ATT may have limited advertisers' ability to collect user data for advertising purposes while simultaneously favoring Apple's ad program. On November 25, Poland's UOKiK has started another investigation into App Tracking Transparency, and whether Apple had restricted competition in mobile advertising. Reuters reports that, to the anti-monopoly regulator, ATT may have limited advertisers' ability to collect user data for advertising purposes while simultaneously favoring Apple's ad program. This is not the first time that Poland has looked into ATT rules. In December 2021, the regulator held a similar probe following criticism from advertisers. It's not clear what that complaint determined, or if it is still ongoing. Regardless, in the new complaint, the logic is that Apple had a competitive advantage since its own apps were not subject to ATT rules, but third-party apps did have to deal with ATT. Since Apple didn't visibly ask for consent for its first-party apps in the same way, there is a presumption that Apple's rules only applied to other companies. This is despite Apple's repeated insistence that it doesn't use the same kinds of collected data in its own apps and services for marketing purposes, as well as its stance on privacy in general. In short, Apple apps don't use the data, so it doesn't pop up a dialog box asking the user if the app can use the data. There is also the argument that, in setting up an account with Apple, users are providing blanket consent to the company. Implementing ATT on its own apps would therefore be a waste of time, since that consent was already granted. Apple said that it will work with the regulator on the matter, but warned that it could force them to withdraw the feature "to the detriment of European consumers."

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In an essay published in The Verge, Benjamin Riley argues that today's AI boom is built on a fundamental misunderstanding: language modeling is not the same as intelligence. "The problem is that according to current neuroscience, human thinking is largely independent of human language -- and we have little reason to believe ever more sophisticated modeling of language will create a form of intelligence that meets or surpasses our own," writes Riley. Slashdot reader RossCWilliams shares the report, writing: The article goes on to point out that we use language to communicate. We use it to create metaphors to describe our reasoning. That people who have lost their language ability can still show reasoning. That human beings create knowledge when they become dissatisfied with the current metaphor. Einstein's theory of relativity was not based on scientific research. He developed it as thought experiment because he was dissatisfied with the existing metaphor. It quotes someone who said, "common sense is a collection of dead metaphors." And that AI, at best, can rearrange those dead metaphors in interesting ways. But it will never be dissatisfied with the data it has or an existing metaphor. A different critique (PDF) has pointed out that even as a language model AI is flawed by its reliance on the internet. The languages used on the internet are unrepresentative of the languages in the world. And other languages contain unique descriptions/metaphors that are not found on the internet. My metaphor for what was discussed was the descriptions of the kinds of snow that exist in Inuit languages that describe qualities nowhere found in European languages. If those metaphors aren't found on the internet, AI will never be able create them. This does not mean that AI isn't useful. But it is not remotely human intelligence. That is just a poor metaphor. We need a better one. Benjamin Riley is the founder of Cognitive Resonance, a new venture to improve understanding of human cognition and generative AI.

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Proton and Linux are 'vectors for cheat developers,' Rust dev Alistair McFarlane says  TweakTown

Proton and Linux are 'vectors for cheat developers,' Rust dev Alistair McFarlane says  TweakTown

Proton and Linux are 'vectors for cheat developers,' Rust dev Alistair McFarlane says  TweakTown