GoKawiil
Tech News
In a 2011 talk at the Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin, author and activist Cory Doctorow argued that future policy fights over copyright, security, and control would really be fights about restricting general-purpose computers themselves. He framed the debate as moving beyond copyright disputes into a broader struggle over who controls what computers are allowed to do.
The Interim Computer Museum (ICM) has opened a web presence detailing its mission to preserve computing history through interactive, hands-on exhibits that combine vintage hardware with modern upgrades. The nonprofit operates as a 501(c)(3) charity working alongside SDF Public Access UNIX System, Inc., a 501(c)(7) membership organization, relying on memberships to fund events, remote access and artifact preservation.
Programmer John Carmack reflected on Musashi's Book of Five Rings, drawing a parallel between the evolution of martial arts from combat necessity to hobby and sport, and the trajectory of manual coding skills as AI increasingly automates programming tasks. He suggests that meticulous hand-written coding is shifting from an essential craft into a ceremonial practice, much like traditional martial arts became after losing battlefield relevance.
Physicists at Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden devised a theoretical method that performs a wide range of advanced quantum operations more than a thousand times faster than current techniques. The approach targets the core problem that qubits are extremely fragile and prone to errors from noise, radiation, and heat during lengthy operations. The findings were published in Physical Review Letters.
The US Commerce Department is distributing $300 million in CHIPS Act funding equally among D-Wave Quantum, Rigetti Computing, and Quantinuum, giving each $100 million while also acquiring minority ownership stakes in the companies. The money targets hardware manufacturing challenges like cryogenics, semiconductor fabrication, ion traps, and photonics rather than quantum software development.
Kepler Computing, a seven-year-old San Jose startup, has emerged from stealth mode claiming a novel 3D-stacking method and proprietary material can boost memory chip density without relying on costly EUV lithography. The approach applies to both high-bandwidth memory used in AI systems and SRAM cache found in CPUs and GPUs, and can reportedly be built using existing fabrication plants rather than requiring new facilities.
IEEE Computer Society and ACM have selected Jie Ren of King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Amit Samanta of University of Utah, and Xuan Wu of Oregon State University as the 2026 George Michael Memorial HPC Fellowship recipients. The fellowship recognizes outstanding doctoral students working in high-performance computing.
A research team mined all 214.5 million structure predictions in Google DeepMind's AlphaFold database to search for undiscovered 7TM (seven-transmembrane) folds resembling G-protein-coupled receptors. Using the rhodopsin structure as a reference and the TM-align algorithm, they identified TM184C as a previously unrecognized GPCR-like protein involved in regulating cell-to-cell exchange and autophagy. The analysis required processing 24 tebibytes of compressed structural data on university supercomputing clusters.
Shares of leading quantum computing firms including Rigetti, D-Wave and IonQ climbed sharply even as broader markets fell. The gains follow confirmation that the US government has finalized substantial funding commitments to several of these companies, totaling hundreds of millions of dollars across three firms.
According to a Diamond Online report, NEC quietly halted development of physical quantum computing machines at the end of March 2026, decades after pioneering superconducting qubit research in 1999. Several researchers from the program, including a key leader, have reportedly since joined Fujitsu, which continues investing heavily in the technology. NEC has not confirmed a full exit, stating it still evaluates practical applications and industrialization of quantum technologies with customers.
The database maker Spacetime published a detailed breakdown of how it handles scaling, arguing that scalability splits into three separate dimensions: compute, storage, and networking. It says horizontally scalable storage is coming October 31, 2026, while networking and computation cannot always be scaled horizontally, especially for OLTP workloads with contending transactions.
Bonhams' New York will auction a fully functional Apple-1 motherboard, autographed by Steve Wozniak, as part of its History of Science, Technology & Computing sale running October 4-14. The board, from the second production batch, is estimated to sell for $500,000 to $800,000 and comes with original manuals and a 1978 letter signed by Steve Jobs authorizing a trade-in for the original owner.