sudo command knows that you will not see any form of visual feedback while entering your password. This was intended as a security feature, as it was believed that an on-screen indicator of the number of characters entered would allow someone to snoop over your shoulder to find out the length of your password. But in Ubuntu 26.04 that is no longer the case. The traditional sudo binary has been replaced by one written in Rust, which Canonical was recently patched to follow the modern convention of displaying asterisks at the password prompt.As you might expect, this prompted an immediate response from Linux graybeards. A bug report has been filed just a few days ago he demanded that the change be reversed, arguing that it could be confusing for users to break a decades-old expectation without any warning. The official response from a Canonical developer was that they see it the other way around and that the change was made to improve the user experience. It was also pointed out that those who want to return to the old prompt style can do so with a configuration change. The problem was immediately marked as ‘Won’t Fix’, but the debate continues.
Speaking of unexpected changes, there are multiple reports that the February security update for Samsung Galaxy devices, which is currently being rolled out, removes several features from the Android recovery menu. After the update is applied to phones like the S25 and Fold 7, long-standing features like the ability to wipe the device’s cache partition or install updates via Android Debug Bridge (ADB) will disappear.
Just like with the change to sudothis is the kind of thing that will annoy power users the most. There’s no official explanation for these changes, and it’s not immediately clear why Samsung would mess with the recovery menu that has remained largely unchanged since Android’s introduction. If 9to5Google mentions, it could be an attempt to prevent users from installing leaked firmware builds – a practice that is caught the attention of the electronic giant’s legal department.
Nowadays, software updates are just one of the things you need to keep an eye on. Add emails, RSS feeds and incoming chat messages and keeping track of the notifications on your computer or smartphone can be a challenge. But that’s nothing compared to the Earlier this week, 800,000 warnings were issued by the Vera Rubin Observatory. The observatory uses a 3.2 gigapixel camera to take long-exposure images of the night sky, which are then compared to previous images to detect visual changes. Astronomers create filters to narrow down what they’re looking forand can be alerted when the automated system detects a match. A preview image is available in seconds, while full resolution images take approximately 80 hours to process. It’s still early days, but once the VRO gets up to speed, it’s expected that as many as seven million alerts will be generated every night.
While talking about large-scale tech projects, Google announced this week that its new data center will be in Minnesota connected to the largest battery in the world. The 300 megawatt array built by Form Energy will use iron-air technologywhich essentially uses a reversible rusting process to store energy produced by renewable sources such as wind and solar energy. If these resources are not available, the data center can operate without battery power for up to 100 hours.
Although heavier and less efficient than lithium-ion batteries, iron-air batteries have the advantage of being significantly cheaper to produce. So while you’re unlikely to see the technology in smartphones anytime soon, it’s perfect for static installations like this.
Finally some sad news from the world of retro computing/games: a very rare copy of Tsukihime Trial was apparently destroyed in transit from one collector to another. It may not look like much – the game was distributed on unbranded floppies by the indie developers at a Japanese convention in 1999 – but it represents one of only 50 known copies. While the occasional damaged package is pretty much unavoidable, this one is particularly egregious because it appears that someone at US Customs deliberately tore the drive into pieces. The buyer has filed a complaint with customs and we are curious to hear what their version of the story sounds like.
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