Show 17 Sun 03:13 Slashdot [1]

03:13 How Debian Almost Failed to Elect a Project Leader
Five candidates now are running to be Debian's project leader for the coming year. But earlier this week, Slashdot reader Seven Spirals shared LWN's story about what a difficult election it's been: This year, the call for nominations was duly sent out by project secretary Kurt Roeckx on March 3. But, as of March 10, no eligible candidates had put their names forward... There is nobody there to do any campaigning. This being Debian, the constitution naturally describes what is to happen in this situation: the nomination period is extended for another week... Should this deadline also pass without candidates, it will be extended for another week; this loop will repeat indefinitely until somebody gives in and submits their name... In the absence of a project leader, the chair of the technical committee and the project secretary are empowered to make decisions -- as long as they are able to agree on what those decisions should be. Since Debian developers are famously an agreeable and non-argumentative bunch, there should be no problem with that aspect of things... One might well wonder, though, why there seems to be nobody who wants to take the helm of this project for a year. The fact that it is an unpaid position requiring a lot of time and travel might have something to do with it. If that were indeed to prove to be part of the problem, Debian might eventually have to consider doing what a number of similar organizations have done and create a paid position to do this work.

Show 17 Sun 02:54 Engadget [2]

02:54 Steam mods will filter 'off-topic review bombs' from ratings
One of the issues with relying on user reviews to rate content is the possibility that some of those reviews may not be written in entirely good faith. Recently Rotten Tomatoes took new steps to manage the impact of fake reviews submitted for Captain...

02:54 'Dota 2' app rewards you for predicting pro match winners
Valve doesn't just want you to watch Dota 2 eSports matches -- it wants you to have a small stake in them. It just released a Dota Pro Circuit app for Android and iOS that lets you win Shards (the in-game currency for Dota Plus members) by predictin...
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Show 17 Sun 02:39 HackerNews [10]

Show 17 Sun 02:25 AndroidAuthority [6]

02:25 Huawei Mate 20 X review: Android gaming, super-sized
Huawei's 7.2-inch behemoth is an all-round media monster, but its much-touted gaming credentials come up short.

02:25 5 Android apps you shouldn't miss this week! - Android Apps Weekly
The 284th Android Apps Weekly is live! This week we talk about Stardew Valley, Facebook's big problems, and some Android Q stuff along with more Android apps and games news!

02:25 Get unlimited vector designs for your sites and apps for just $35
StockUnlimited offers thousands of vector designs to boost your projects. Right now you can make a huge saving.

02:25 When will folding phones become actually affordable?
The foldable smartphone market is hot. It's also expensive. Why? Let's talk yield, production, exclusivity, overblown specs, and then predict the future.

02:25 We asked, you told us: Most aren't installing the Android Q beta just yet
As beta software is typically unstable, most of you are waiting to install Android Q.

02:25 Score a comprehensive collection of IT training for less than $50
These 14 beginner-friendly certification courses can prepare anyone for a lucrative career in IT.
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Show 17 Sun 01:43 Slashdot [1]

01:43 Google's Bad Data Wiped Another Neighborhood Off the Map
Medium's technology publication ran a 3,600-word investigation into a mystery that began when a 66-year-old New York woman Googled directions to her neighborhood, "and found that the app had changed the name of her community..." It's just as well no one contacted Google, because Google wasn't the company that renamed the Fruit Belt to Medical Park. When residents investigated, they found the misnomer repeated on several major apps and websites including HERE, Bing, Uber, Zillow, Grubhub, TripAdvisor, and Redfin... Monica Stephens, a geographer at the University at Buffalo who studies digital maps and misinformation, immediately suspected the geographic clearinghouse Pitney Bowes. Founded in 1920 as a maker of postage meters -- the machines that stamp mail with proof it's been sent -- Pitney Bowes expanded into neighborhood data in 2016 when it bought the leading U.S. provider, Maponics. In its 15-year run, Maponics had supplied neighborhood data to companies from Airbnb to Twitter to the Houston Chronicle. And it had also just acquired a longtime competitor, Urban Mapping, which has previously supplied Facebook, Microsoft, MapQuest, Yahoo, and Apple. Though Pitney Bowes is far from a household name, the $3.4 billion data broker is "a huge company at this point," says Stephens, with enough influence to inadvertently rename a neighborhood across hundreds of sites... In the early 2000s, Urban Mapping offered new college grads $15 to $25 per hour to comb local blogs, home listings, city plans, and brochures for possible neighborhood names and locations. Maponics, meanwhile, used nascent technologies such as computer vision and natural language processing to pull neighborhoods from images and blocks of text, one former executive with the company said... I visited the Buffalo Central Library to find the source of the error... Sure enough, one of the librarians located a single planning office map that used the "Medical Park" label. It was a 1999 report on poverty and housing conditions -- long since relegated to a dusty shelf stacked with old binders and file folders... Somehow, likely in the early 2000s, this map made its way into what is now the Pitney Bowes data set -- and from there, was hoovered into Google Maps and out onto the wider internet. Buffalo published another map in 2017, with the Fruit Belt clearly marked, and broadcast on the city's open data portal. For whatever reason, Pitney Bowes and its customers never picked that map up. This is not the first time Google Maps has seemed to spontaneously rename a neighborhood. But for Fruit Belt the reporter's query eventually prompted corrections to the maps on Redfin, TripAdvisor, Zillow, Grubhub, and Google Maps. But the article argues that when it comes to how city names are represented online, "the process is too opaque to scrutinize in public. And that ambiguity foments a sense of powerlessness." Pitney Bowes doesn't even have a method for submitting corrections. Yet, "In an emailed statement, a spokesperson for Google defended its use of third-party neighborhood sources. 'Overall, this provides a comprehensive and up-to-date map,' the spokesperson said, 'but when we're made aware of errors, we work quickly to fix them.'"

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Show 16 Sat 23:54 Engadget [2]

23:54 Neil deGrasse Tyson will continue with 'Cosmos' after investigation
Fox and National Geographic have completed their investigation into Neil deGrasse Tyson over alleged sexual misconduct, and have decided to give both Cosmos: Possible Worlds and StarTalk the go-ahead. While the channels didn't reveal their findings (...

23:54 Facebook board member met Cambridge Analytica whistleblower in 2016
Facebook has never said when its execs learned about Cambridge Analytica's misuse of data, but The Guardian might have some insights. Its sources claim Facebook board member Marc Andreessen met Cambridge Analytica whistleblower Christopher Wylie bac...
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Show 16 Sat 22:51 ArsTechnica [2]

22:51 MIT scientists: Heat can act like sound wave when moving through pencil lead
Exotic "second sound" phenomenon could one day help cool future microelectronics.

22:51 Beto O'Rourke outed as Cult of Dead Cow member, phreaker and writer of screeds
In book interview, O'Rourke admits to CDC membershipā”long before Back Orifice.
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Show 16 Sat 22:43 Slashdot [2]

22:43 Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Says Labor Shouldn't Have To Fear Automation
Munky101 tipped us off to some interesting comments from New York's activist congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. TechCrunch reports: It's impossible to discuss the seismic shift toward automation without a conversation about job loss. Opponents of these technologies criticize a displacement that could someday result in wide-scale unemployment among what is often considered "unskilled" roles. Advocates, meanwhile, tend to suggest that reports of that nature tend to be overstated. Workforces shift, as they have done for time immemorial. During a conversation at SXSW this week, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered another take entirely. "We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work," she said in an answer reported by The Verge. "We should be excited by that. But the reason we're not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don't have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem... We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing in and investigating the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in," The Verge quoted Ocasio-Cortez as saying. "Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage." And Ocasio-Cortez cited Bill Gates' suggestion (first floated in a presentation on Quartz) that a robot tax might be a way to make that vision real. "What [Gates is] really talking about is taxing corporations," she reportedly said. "But it's easier to say: 'tax a robot.' " Science fiction writer William Gibson called her comments "shockingly intelligent" for a politician. Fast Company adds that robots "have put half a million people out of work in the United States, and researchers estimate that bots could take 800 million jobs by 2030" -- then quotes Ocasio-Cortez's assessment of the unfair state of labor today. "We should be working the least amount we've ever worked, if we were actually paid based on how much wealth we were producing, but we're not," she said. "We're paid by how little we're desperate enough to accept. And then the rest is skimmed off and given to a billionaire."

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22:43 19-Year-Old WinRAR Vulnerability Leads To Over 100 Malware Exploits
"Last month it was discovered that WinRAR, software used to open .zip archive files, has been vulnerable for the last 19 years to a bug that's easily exploited by hackers and malware distributors," writes SlashGear. Slashdot reader Iwastheone quotes their report: Check Point, the security researchers that revealed the WinRAR bug, explain that the software is exploited by giving malicious files a RAR extension, so that when opened they can automatically extract malware programs. These programs are installed in a PC's startup folder, allowing them to start running anytime the computer is turned on, all without the user's knowledge. Once the bug was disclosed, however, hacker groups really began using it to their advantage, with various nations becoming the target of state-backed cyber-espionage campaigns attempting to collect intelligence. The latest comes from McAfee, the software security firm, which notes that it has identified over 100 unique exploits that use the WinRAR bug, most of them targeting the U.S. WinRar 5.70, released in late January, patches the behavior, but "it must be manually downloaded and installed from the website, leaving most users unaware of the critical update," the article warns. It also estimates that during the last 19 years WinRar has been downloaded over 500 million times.

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Show 16 Sat 22:39 HackerNews [11]

Show 16 Sat 21:13 Slashdot [1]

21:13 Was Venezuela's 5-Day Blackout Caused By Cyberattacks -- or Wildfires?
What caused a devastating five-day blackout in Venezuela? Two engineers with expertise in geospatial technologies believe the answer lies in images from a NASA weather satellite showing thermal activity, which they superimposed onto Google Earth, the AP reports: Within hours of the attack, the government of embattled President Nicolas Maduro began accusing the U.S. of a cyberattack. Maduro has stuck to that narrative, saying hackers in the U.S. first shut down the Guri Dam and then delivered several "electromagnetic" blows. Engineers have questioned that assertion, contending that the Guri Dam's operating system is on a closed network with no internet connection. Several consulted by The Associated Press speculated that a more likely cause was a fire along one of the electrical grid's powerful 765-kilovolt lines that connect the dam to much of Venezuela. The transmission lines traverse through some of Venezuela's most remote and difficult to access regions on their way toward Caracas, making it difficult to obtain any first-hand information that could back up or pinpoint the location of a fire. Working with an expert at Texas Tech University's Geospatial Technologies Laboratory, Jose Aguilar, an expert on Venezuela's electrical grid, said satellite data indicates that on the day of the blackout there were three fires in close proximity to the 765-kilovolt lines transmitting power generated from the Guri Dam, which provides about 80 percent of Venezuela's electricity... Engineers have warned for years that Venezuela's state-run electricity corporation was failing to properly maintain power lines, letting brush that can catch fire during Venezuela's hot, dry months grow near and up the towering structures.

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Show 16 Sat 20:54 Engadget [2]

20:54 Microsoft releases Windows Defender extensions for Chrome and Firefox
Microsoft has developed and started testing Windows Defender Application Guard extensions for both Chrome and Firefox to better protect enterprise PCs. The feature, which used to be an Edge exclusive, keeps PCs safe by opening web pages not included...

20:54 Epic Games Store plans include cloud saves and achievements
Don't worry if you think the Epic Games Store's features are threadbare at the moment -- there's a good chance the features you like are in the pipeline. Epic has posted a public roadmap for its portal, and you can expect a steady stream of addition...
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Show 16 Sat 19:43 Slashdot [2]

19:43 VR Company Co-Founder Spends an Entire Week in a VR Headset
An anonymous reader quotes PC Gamer: Not too long into a 168-hour VR marathon session, Jak Wilmot admits the monotony got to him. Wilmot, who is the co-founder of Disrupt VR, also says this experiment is "quite possibly the dumbest thing" he's ever done. So, why do it? For science, of course. I can't imagine immersing myself in a virtual world for a full week, nonstop night and day. Wilmot did it, though, for the most part -- he allowed himself 30 seconds to switch VR headsets when needed, and 30 seconds without a headset on to eat, if required. Other than those small breaks, he spent every other moment in VR... There doesn't seem to be some big takeaway from this experiment (aside from, perhaps, don't drink coffee while playing VR), though one thing I also found interesting was his integration back into the real world when the experiment was over. "I have never appreciated the smell of outside air so much. One thing we cannot replicate is nature. We can do it visually and auditorally, but there is something about the energy of outside that is amazing," Wilmot observed. PC Gamer calls it "probably at least partially a publicity stunt. But it's still interesting to see how donning a VR headset for an extended period of time and essentially living in virtual worlds can mess with the mind." Wilmot wore VR gear while working -- and even while showering (with the VR gear protected by plastic), blacking out his windows so he couldn't tell day from night, calling it "a week in the future..." "I almost feel like I'm in my own 500-suare-foot spaceship," he says at one point, "and I'm really missing earth, and I'm missing nature." Early on he also reported some mild claustrophobia. You can watch the moment where after seven days he removes the headset and returns to conventional reality, joking "Oh my gosh, the graphics are so good." He reports a slight disorientation as his eyes catch up with real ilfe, and says it changed his perspective on people in the real world, seeing them as "individuals in one collection, one environment -- as avatars."

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19:43 Chicago To Shutdown Composting Business Because Regulations Don't Cover Worms
schwit1 shared an article from Reason's "Volokh Conspiracy" blog: Nature's Little Recyclers is a father-son business that does composting on empty residential lots, transforming organic waste into nutrient-rich soil. Last year, the business's worms processed 10 tons of banana peels and cups from the Chicago Marathon that would otherwise have gone to a landfill. But Chicago officials are going to shut the business down -- and not because the city doesn't think composting is a good thing (the city's sustainability website directs people to Nature's Little Recyclers). Rather, the city's business and zoning regulations weren't designed to accommodate small and innovative operations like Nature's Little Recyclers. "None of these operations met the criteria for garden composting or an on-site organic waste composting operation," said Anel Ruiz, spokesperson for the Department of Public Health, in a statement to Block Club Chicago, adding "Further, these sites are not properly zoned for commercial composting." But another perspective was shared by lawyer Amy Hermalik, associate director of the Institute for Justice Clinic on Entrepreneurship at the University of Chicago. "The city will unofficially imply there's wiggle room, saying it only enforces certain ordinances against 'bad operators,' but that leaves businesses subject to shifting political winds or personal whims, Hermalik said. 'They [the city] have an incredible amount of power to do as they please.'"

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Show 16 Sat 18:39 HackerNews [14]

Show 16 Sat 18:26 lwn.net-comments [17]

18:26 Fixing programmers

> Unfortunately, I have yet to see a stove that comes with a timeout on every burner and doesn't continue to burn your food, your pot, and potentially your house if you forget to turn it off.
Pots are made of metal and hence won't burn, and if the food burns, there will be smoke which will trigger the smoke detector, which is mandatory where I live.

18:26 Fixing programmers

Many pots these days have coatings that burn off, ruining the pot, if it overheats.

18:26 Federated blogging with WriteFreely

Re building and "downloading several dozen packages". The project is at least using go.mod and so the downloads are fully pinned to git commits/tags and checksummed. So it's not quite the wild west of "let's just download the latest version of foo and hope for the best". Personally, I much prefer pointers to vendoring all your deps, but I know opinions differ on that.

They're using the built-in Go webserver which as far as I know has an excellent security record - I would have no worries about exposing it directly to the internet; I have used it a lot commercially/professionally.

The template language *is* documented. It's the standard Go templating system. https://golang.org/pkg/text/template/ https://golang.org/pkg/html/template/
That said, I agree about documenting which resources/methods/vars are available to the templates. The template entry point is Execute or ExecuteTemplate, and the last arg to that is always the "receiver" for the template, but eg https://github.com/writeas/writefreely/blob/cb1bd37f64abc... is unhelpful given it comes in as the empty interface. Generally I consider use of the empty interface in Go as a code smell... https://github.com/writeas/writefreely/blob/32e99d00415c6... is somewhat more discoverable. OTOH, depends on the intended audience - I've been working professionally in Go for over 5 years now so I have no qualms digging through this.

Just FTR, I've no association with WriteFreely and have never heard of it or looked at the code base before this morning.

18:26 Five new stable kernels

I was about to report it myself (avid user of 4.19), so thanks are in order to Alec Ari for already doing so.

18:26 Static site generators

So is Nikola.

Some of the static-site systems even have a Web editor, which sounds strange but happens to be quite convenient.

18:26 Haller: WireGuard in NetworkManager

There hasn't been a request for inclusion of wireguard into the kernel in the last couple of months. What is the state here?

18:26 Downloading packages
From my reading, it's using a bunch of "go get" commands, with no version pinning in sight anywhere. Are those version strings hidden somewhere that I'm unaware of?

18:26 Announcing the release of sway 1.0

Works surprisingly well so far! Glad to have reason to switch to Wayland.

18:26 Announcing the release of sway 1.0

I'm using https://github.com/bugaevc/wl-clipboard as xclip replacement - haven't found any problem yet.

18:26 Downloading packages

"go get" inspects the go.mod and go.sum files in the root of the project.

https://github.com/writeas/writefreely/blob/master/go.mod
https://github.com/writeas/writefreely/blob/master/go.sum

There's been an awful lot of thinking that has gone into this mechanism, and whilst it's not quite finished in Go 1.12, it's pretty close these days. There's a lot of writing about it all at https://research.swtch.com/vgo

18:26 Downloading packages
OK, clearly I'm pretty ignorant about how Go packaging works, and it's not as bad as I had feared. Thanks for enlightening me.

18:26 Downloading packages

No problem. Glad I could help!

18:26 GNOME 3.32 released

Why does the session depend on the Shell, actually? Couldn't it simply restart and continue compositing?

The one thing I miss from X is the ability to reconfigure monitors programmatically with a tool like xrandr.

18:26 Fixing programmers

Well, I more or less agree, and the fact that the syntax and semantics of the switch statement is massively inconsistent with the rest of the language doesn't help at all. So you could say that people are trained to use the C syntax for all statements - except this one which has completely different rules. But it is used rarely enough that peple reflexively try to apply the mental model of the rest of the language to this one statement as well.

I know I do. I still have to basically relearn switch every time I encounter it. And it took me a lot of time and much mental effort to get it the first time. It's just so freakin' odd.

Anyway, fixing people in face of obviously broken tools (instead of fixing the tools) is never the right answer. It's elitist, condescending, and thinking about it, it could also have a component of Stockholm syndrome.

18:26 Static site generators
Any you could recommend? I support the web site of an organization I'm involved with, and they went with WordPress a few years ago to allow it to be updated by nontechnical users. I think I've finally got it locked down mostly satisfactorily, but it would be nice to test a more secure but still friendly alternative.

18:26 Five new stable kernels

No because kernel 4.20.13 worked fine here

18:26 KNOPPIX 8.5.0 released

In a tragic/comedic twist, the ADRIANE website is not really optimized for modern browsers or responsive design.

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Show 16 Sat 18:13 Slashdot [1]

18:13 Las Vegas Approves The Boring Company's Underground Loop
The Boring Company's tunnel project in Chicago is "in doubt" (according to the Chicago Tribune), while a project connecting Washington to Baltimore "is waylaid in the environmental-review process." But it looks like Las Vegas will officially get a tunnel from Elon Musk, CNET reports, "perhaps within this year." The billionaire's Boring Company on Tuesday got the approval from the 14-member board of the Las Vegas Convention and Visitors Authority (LVCVA) to build and operate an underground loop that would carry people in autonomous electric vehicles at the city's convention center. Musk has responded to the approval in a tweet, saying he'll make the tunnel "operational by end of year," even though the convention center's expansion won't be done until 2021, according to LVCVA's release... A LVCVA spokeswoman said in an email that the underground loop will be ready in 2021 if the contract with the Boring company is approved at LVCVA's board meeting on June 11. The Las Vegas Sun has more details, pointing out that travellers would be carried in electric vehicles moving through two parallel tunnels, one running in each direction. And that fleet of electric vehicles "could include Tesla's Model X and Model 3 and a vehicle with capacity for about 16 people â" all manufactured by Musk. All the vehicles would be fully autonomous, meaning they won't have backup drivers, and would move at speeds of up to 50 mph." The mayor of Las Vegas, also a member of the board, actually voted against the tunnel, calling the Boring Company "exploratory at this time" and warning that "we are considering handing over the reins of our most important industry."

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Show 16 Sat 18:01 ArsTechnica [1]

18:01 How a wireless keyboard lets hackers take full control of connected computers
Keystrokes can be recorded, replayed and injected into Fujitsu wireless model.
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Show 16 Sat 17:54 Engadget [2]

17:54 Recommended Reading: Beto O'Rourke and Cult of the Dead Cow
Beto O'Rourke's secret membership in America's oldest hacking group Joseph Menn, Reuters Beto O'Rourke: Democratic presidential candidate and... member of a hacking group? Reuters reports the former Texas congressman once belonged to Cult of the D...

17:54 Stanford study finds Apple Watch can detect irregular heart rhythms
Stanford has released the results of its Apple Watch-based heart study more than a year after it began, and it appears to have been a success, with a few caveats. Only 0.5 percent of the more than 400,000 volunteers received warnings of irregular he...
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Show 16 Sat 16:43 Slashdot [3]

16:43 3-5 Degree Rise in Arctic Temperatures Called 'Inevitable'
An anonymous reader quotes the Guardian: Sharp and potentially devastating temperature rises of 3C to 5C in the Arctic are now inevitable even if the world succeeds in cutting greenhouse gas emissions in line with the Paris agreement, research has found. Winter temperatures at the north pole are likely to rise by at least 3C above pre-industrial levels by mid-century, and there could be further rises to between 5C and 9C above the recent average for the region, according to the UN. Such changes would result in rapidly melting ice and permafrost, leading to sea level rises and potentially to even more destructive levels of warming. Scientists fear Arctic heating could trigger a climate "tipping point" as melting permafrost releases the powerful greenhouse gas methane into the atmosphere, which in turn could create a runaway warming effect. "What happens in the Arctic does not stay in the Arctic," said Joyce Msuya, the acting executive director of UN Environment... Even if all carbon emissions were to be halted immediately, the Arctic region would still warm by more than 5C by the century's end, compared with the baseline average from 1986 to 2005, according to the study from UN Environment. That is because so much carbon has already been poured into the atmosphere. The oceans also have become vast stores of heat, the effect of which is being gradually revealed by changes at the poles and on global weather systems, and will continue to be felt for decades to come. The findings were presented at the UN Environment assembly Wednesday, where a report written by 250 scientists and experts from over 70 countries also warned that "damage to the planet is so dire that people's health will be increasingly threatened unless urgent action is taken."

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16:43 Is Amazon's AWS Approaching 'War' for Control of Elasticsearch?
Long-time Slashdot reader jasenj1 and Striek both shared news of a growing open source controversy. "Amazon Web Services on Monday announced that it's partnering with Netflix and Expedia to champion a new Open Distro for Elasticsearch due to concerns of proprietary code being mixed into the open source Elasticsearch project," reports Datanami. "Elastic, the company behind Elasticsearch, responded by accusing Amazon of copying code, inserting bugs into the community code, and engaging with the company under false pretenses..." In a blog post, Adrian Cockcroft, the vice president of cloud architecture strategy for AWS, says the new project is a "value added" distribution that's 100% open source, and that developers working on it will contribute any improvements or fixes back to the upstream Elasticsearch project. "The new advanced features of Open Distro for Elasticsearch are all Apache 2.0 licensed," Cockroft writes. "With the first release, our goal is to address many critical features missing from open source Elasticsearch, such as security, event monitoring and alerting, and SQL support...." Cockroft says there's no clear documentation in the Elasticsearch release notes over what's open source and what's proprietary. "Enterprise developers may inadvertently apply a fix or enhancement to the proprietary source code," he wrote. "This is hard to track and govern, could lead to breach of license, and could lead to immediate termination of rights (for both proprietary free and paid)." Elastic CEO Shay Banon responded Tuesday to AWS in a blog post, in which he leveled a variety of accusations at the cloud giant. "Our products were forked, redistributed and rebundled so many times I lost count," Banon wrote. "There was always a 'reason' [for the forks, redistributions, and rebundling], at times masked with fake altruism or benevolence. None of these have lasted. They were built to serve their own needs, drive confusion, and splinter the community." Elastic's commercial code may have provided an "inspiration" for others to follow, Banon wrote, but that inspiration didn't necessarily make for clean code. "It has been bluntly copied by various companies and even found its way back to certain distributions or forks, like the freshly minted Amazon one, sadly, painfully, with critical bugs," he wrote.

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15:13 Linux Foundation Launches New Tools Supporting The Open Source Community
"The Linux Foundation is launching a new platform designed to sustain open-source communities," reports SD Times: CommunityBridge was announced at this week's Open Source Leadership Summit. The Linux Foundation plans to launch a number of tools to the open-source community throughout the next two years. The platform is currently being released with Community Bridge Funding to help developers raise and spend funding; CommunityBridge Security for potential vulnerabilities and fixes; and CommunityBridge People for networking and making connections with mentors and mentees. "In making the announcement, Jim Zemlin, executive director of the Linux Foundation, said on stage at the conference that the Linux Foundation would match funding for any organization that donated funds to CommunityBridge projects," reports FierceTelecom. "Following up on those announcements, Microsoft-owned GitHub said it would donate $100,000 to CommunityBridge and invited maintainers of CommunityBridge projects to take part in GitHub's maintainer program."

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Show 16 Sat 14:54 Engadget [2]

14:54 Women in tech: Success still hangs on relationships and privilege
March is Women's History Month and last Friday was International Women's Day. Many organizations, including tech companies, took the opportunity to celebrate the occasion in different ways. Google, for example, partnered with UN Women to share storie...

14:54 This week in tech history: The birth of the internet and the first telephone call
At Engadget, we spend every day looking at how technology will shape the future. But it's also important to look back at how far we've come -- that's what This Week in Tech History will do. Join us every weekend for a recap of historical tech news, a...
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Show 16 Sat 14:39 HackerNews [12]

Show 16 Sat 14:25 AndroidAuthority [4]

14:25 Pop quiz: Can you name the most exciting phones of 2019?
Look at the images in this quiz and name the smartphones they show. There are four choices available for every question, only one of which is correct.

14:25 Make professional-looking videos in minutes with Wave.Video
Wave.Video helps you produce your own videos even if you're not tech savvy. It's just $29 this week.

14:25 Train for a lucrative career in big data for just $35
Break into the big data industry with this 37-hour deep dive into top tools and technologies.

14:25 Huawei Mate 20 X review: Android gaming, super-sized
Huawei's 7.2-inch behemoth is an all-round media monster, but its much-touted gaming credentials come up short.
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Show 16 Sat 14:21 lwn.net [4]

14:21 Haller: WireGuard in NetworkManager
Thomas Haller writes about the WireGuard integration in NetworkManager 1.16. "NetworkManager provides a de facto standard API for configuring networking on the host. This allows different tools to integrate and interoperate ā” from cli, tui, GUI, to cockpit. All these different components may now make use of the API also for configuring WireGuard. One advantage for the end user is that a GUI for WireGuard is now within reach." (See this article for more information on WireGuard.)

14:21 SUSE completes its management transition
Here's a SUSE press release hyping its transition to being "the largest independent open-source company". "As it has for more than 25 years, SUSE remains committed to an open source development and business model and to actively participating in communities and projects to bring open source innovation to the enterprise as high-quality, reliable and usable solutions. This truly open, open source model refers to the flexibility and freedom of choice provided to customers and partners to create best-of-breed solutions that combine SUSE technologies with other products and technologies in their IT landscape through open standards and at different levels in their architecture, without forcing a locked-in stack."

14:21 [$] Federated blogging with WriteFreely
Your editor has never been a prolific blogger; a hard day in the LWN salt mines tends to reduce the desire to write more material for the net in the scarce free time that remains. But, still, sometimes the desire to post something that is not on-topic for LWN arises. Google+ has served as the outlet for such impulses in recent years, but Google has, in its wisdom, decided to discontinue that service. That leaves a bereft editor searching for alternatives for those times when the world simply has to hear his political opinions or yet another air-travel complaint, preferably one that won't vanish at the whim of some corporation. Recently, a simple blog-hosting system called WriteFreely came to light; it offers a platform that just might serve as a substitute for centralized offerings.

14:21 KNOPPIX 8.5.0 released
Remember the KNOPPIX distribution? KNOPPIX 8.5.0 has been released. It includes a 4.20 kernel, several desktop environments, the ADRIANE audio desktop, UEFI secure boot support, and more.
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Show 16 Sat 14:21 Anandtech [3]

14:21 Acer EI491CR: A Curved 49-Inch Monitor with FreeSync 2

Being one of the leading suppliers of monitors for gamers, Acer has not had a single ultra-large, ultra-wide display for gamers. Until now. This week the company finally started to sell its EI491CR, a 49-inch curved monitor that supports AMD’s FreeSync 2 technology.

14:21 Turtle Beach Acquires ROCCAT: a New Gaming Peripherals Giant Is Born

Turtle Beach, a leading supplier of headsets and a developer of various audio technologies, this week signed an agreement to acquire ROCCAT, a maker of gaming peripherals. The move creates a new combined supplier of gaming peripherals with presence all around the world.

At present Turtle Beach is primarily known in the US and some European countries for its gaming headsets for consoles and PCs. By taking over ROCCAT, the company gets keyboards, mice, and a variety of accessories for gamers. Turtle Beach estimates that the merged company will have a total of 48 core product models for various markets. Furthermore, Turtle Beach gains presence in Asia and additional European countries, where ROCCAT is known. To a large degree, Turtle Beach and ROCCAT have no obvious overlap in terms of product portfolio and in terms of distribution channels, allowing them to integrate better. It's not clear if ROCCAT hardware will be rebranded Turtle Beach, or if the ROCCAT brand will remain.

René Korte, the head of ROCCAT, and other employees of the company, will join Turtle Beach and will continue to design peripherals.

Under the terms of the agreement, Turtle Beach will acquire ROCCAT for $14.8 million in cash (net of a working capital adjustment), $1 million in cash or stock (company option), and up to approximately $3.4 million in earnout payments. Turtle Beach expects ROCCAT to contribute about $20 - $24 million to its 2019 revenue as well as over $30 million to its 2020 revenue.

Sales of Turtle Beach totaled $287.4 million in 2018, whereas it net income was $39.2 million. The lion’s share of the company’s revenue was contributed by headsets for game consoles sold in North America, a market where Turtle Beach commanded a ~40% share for the past nine years. Meanwhile, Turtle Beach plans to increase sales of its PC gaming accessories to $100 million in the coming years, so the acquisition of ROCCAT is strategically important for the company.

Related Reading

Source: Turtle Beach

14:21 JapanNext 75 and 86-Inch 4K IPS HDR Monitors: What Separates TVs from Monitors, Anyhow?

Just when you thought that NVIDIA-inspired 65-Inch Big Format Gaming Displays (BFGDs) were huge, JapanNext has rolled-out its new 75 and 86-inch monitors. The JN-IPS7500UHDR-KG and JN-IPS8600UHDR monitors are aimed mostly at multimedia enthusiasts who also need to get some work done, but both LCDs feature profiles for gaming too.

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Show 16 Sat 14:21 The-Verge-Mobile [2]

14:21 A field guide to the wacky future of foldable phones

Remember when people used to joke that every new phone was the same rounded rectangle? Those days are officially gone. Now, handset manufacturers are falling over themselves to one-up each other with designs that go entirely off the rails, because you can build a phone a ton of different ways when you've got screens that can fold.

We've barely seen the first wave of foldable phones, and there are nearly as many different shapes as there are handsets. What should we call them? Back before every phone was effectively a phablet, we had all sorts of categories: flip phones, candy bars, sliders, swivels, the original brick phones, and, of course, the infamous taco.

So we figured it's about time to get this conversation started. Here at The...

14:21 How to turn off autoplay videos on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, and more

You've probably been caught off guard by videos that play automatically on Facebook, Twitter, and other services; in fact, just across the internet in general. They begin playing as soon as you load a page or (if they're more deviously implemented) when you start scrolling through a page to catch your attention.

Automatic video play is a feature that, while nice to have when it's surfacing content that's related to your interests, can be pretty annoying. Autoplay videos can be harmful, too, exposing you to violent, offensive, or otherwise unwanted content that you shouldn't have to see by default. Several browsers, like Google Chrome and Firefox, now have built-in measures to curb autoplay videos, but for the most part, turning them off...

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Show 16 Sat 14:21 The-Verge-Android [2]

14:21 Questions about policing online hate are much bigger than Facebook and YouTube

In the wake of a hate-fueled mass shooting in Christchurch, New Zealand, major web platforms have scrambled to take down a 17-minute video of the attack. Sites like YouTube have applied imperfect technical solutions, trying to draw a line between newsworthy and unacceptable uses of the footage.

But Facebook, Google, and Twitter aren't the only places weighing how to handle violent extremism. And traditional moderation doesn't affect the smaller sites where people are still either promoting the video or praising the shooter. In some ways, these sites pose a tougher problem ā” and their fate cuts much closer to fundamental questions about how to police the web. After all, for years, people have lauded the internet's ability to connect...

14:21 Everything we think we know about Google's mystery gaming announcement

Google is making a big play in gaming next week, but we're still unsure exactly what that entails. For years, the company has toyed with the idea of getting involved in what is now the biggest sector of the entertainment industry, worth an estimated $138 billion dollars as of last fall. And it would make competitive sense: Amazon owns Twitch, Facebook acquired Oculus, and Microsoft has Xbox. The only other major tech company without a serious gaming platform or investment of its own, not counting mobile app stores, is Apple, although even the iPhone maker is now rumored to be working on a game subscription service of its own.

Google has always had many of the pieces required to challenge the likes of Sony and Nintendo. The Android...

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Show 16 Sat 14:20 Bruce-Schneier [3]

14:20 Upcoming Speaking Engagements

This is a current list of where and when I am scheduled to speak:

I'm teaching a live online class called "Spotlight on Cloud: The Future of Internet Security with Bruce Schneier" on O'Reilly's learning platform, Thursday, April 4, at 10:00 AM PT/1:00 PM ET.

The list is maintained on this page.

14:20 I Was Cited in a Court Decision

An article I co-wrote -- my first law journal article -- was cited by the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court -- the state supreme court -- in a case on compelled decryption.

Here's the first, in footnote 1:

We understand the word "password" to be synonymous with other terms that cell phone users may be familiar with, such as Personal Identification Number or "passcode." Each term refers to the personalized combination of letters or digits that, when manually entered by the user, "unlocks" a cell phone. For simplicity, we use "password" throughout. See generally, Kerr & Schneier, Encryption Workarounds, 106 Geo. L.J. 989, 990, 994, 998 (2018).

And here's the second, in footnote 5:

We recognize that ordinary cell phone users are likely unfamiliar with the complexities of encryption technology. For instance, although entering a password "unlocks" a cell phone, the password itself is not the "encryption key" that decrypts the cell phone's contents. See Kerr & Schneier, supra at 995. Rather, "entering the [password] decrypts the [encryption] key, enabling the key to be processed and unlocking the phone. This two-stage process is invisible to the casual user." Id. Because the technical details of encryption technology do not play a role in our analysis, they are not worth belaboring. Accordingly, we treat the entry of a password as effectively decrypting the contents of a cell phone. For a more detailed discussion of encryption technology, see generally Kerr & Schneier, supra.

14:20 Friday Squid Blogging: A Squid-Related Vacation Tour in Hawaii

You can hunt for the Hawaiian bobtail squid.

As usual, you can also use this squid post to talk about the security stories in the news that I haven't covered.

Read my blog posting guidelines here.
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Show 16 Sat 13:43 Slashdot [1]

13:43 Is Believing In Meritocracy Bad For You?
An anonymous reader quotes Fast Company: Although widely held, the belief that merit rather than luck determines success or failure in the world is demonstrably false. This is not least because merit itself is, in large part, the result of luck. Talent and the capacity for determined effort, sometimes called "grit," depend a great deal on one's genetic endowments and upbringing. This is to say nothing of the fortuitous circumstances that figure into every success story. In his book Success and Luck, the U.S. economist Robert Frank recounts the long-shots and coincidences that led to Bill Gates's stellar rise as Microsoft's founder, as well as to Frank's own success as an academic. Luck intervenes by granting people merit, and again by furnishing circumstances in which merit can translate into success. This is not to deny the industry and talent of successful people. However, it does demonstrate that the link between merit and outcome is tenuous and indirect at best. According to Frank, this is especially true where the success in question is great, and where the context in which it is achieved is competitive. There are certainly programmers nearly as skilful as Gates who nonetheless failed to become the richest person on Earth. In competitive contexts, many have merit, but few succeed. What separates the two is luck. In addition to being false, a growing body of research in psychology and neuroscience suggests that believing in meritocracy makes people more selfish, less self-critical, and even more prone to acting in discriminatory ways. The article cites a pair of researchers who "found that, ironically, attempts to implement meritocracy leads to just the kinds of inequalities that it aims to eliminate. "They suggest that this 'paradox of meritocracy' occurs because explicitly adopting meritocracy as a value convinces subjects of their own moral bona fides."

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Show 16 Sat 13:11 ArsTechnica [4]

13:11 How Google influences the conversation in Washington
Google lobbying has shifted into overdrive as Big Tech comes under increased scrutiny.

13:11 Hands-on: What's new in Android Q
Lots of little changes in the first beta of Android Q.

13:11 Wingspan review: A gorgeous birding board game takes flight
Not just a pretty face, the Scythe publisher's newest game is a crowd-pleaser.

13:11 It's time to start caring about āVR cinema,ā¯ and SXSW's stunners are proof
Sit in a punk-rock wheelchair, dote on cute zombies, dance with Reggie Watts, and more.
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Show 16 Sat 12:13 Slashdot [2]

12:13 Facebook's WhatsApp Explores Using Google To Fight Misinformation
An anonymous reader shares a report: WhatsApp is working on a major new feature to tackle the spread of misinformation on its service. The Facebook-owned chat app is internally testing a new option that would allow a user to quickly verify the legitimacy of images they have received on WhatsApp by checking if those images had ever appeared on the web before. [...] The unnamed feature relies on Google's reverse image search function to let WhatsApp users upload an image and find where it has appeared on the web. This is a clever solution by WhatsApp, which protects all messages and media content on its platform with end-to-end encryption. While hugely beneficial to end users, using encryption also significantly curtails WhatsApp's ability to scan the content of messages and media on its platform. In emerging markets, users are exhibiting a growing appetite for sharing information through images. In places like India, WhatsApp's largest market and where the service is grappling with the spread of false information, the feature could potentially help many users quickly verify facts and get more context about the image they have received.

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12:13 Stanford Unveils New AI Institute, Built To Create 'A Better Future For All Humanity'
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Mercury News: Amid a worldwide race for supremacy in artificial intelligence, Stanford University on Monday will unveil a new institute dedicated to using AI to build the best-possible future (Warning: source may be paywalled; alternative source). The Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence is co-directed by Fei-Fei Li, a former chief scientist for AI at Google, now a Stanford computer science professor. The institute will take advantage of Stanford's strength in a variety of disciplines, including AI, computer science, engineering, robotics, business, economics, genomics, law, literature, medicine, neuroscience and philosophy, according to promotional materials. Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates is scheduled to deliver the keynote speech at Monday's official launch. Stanford's AI institute will work in partnership with a number of other university facilities and initiatives, including the Center on AI Safety, the Center for Ethics in Society, the Center for International Security and Cooperation, and the Stanford Institute for Economic Policy Research, plus AI4ALL, which aims to boost diversity in AI fields. The 78 faculty members assigned to the institute reflect the diversity of fields the university intends to cover in its research and teaching, coming from disciplines including computer science, medicine, law, business, economics, environmental science, linguistics, political science and philosophy. Although the institute highlights the importance of AI being "broadly representative of humanity" across gender, ethnicity, nationality, culture and age, its faculty also reflect the gender gap in technology -- only 18 percent are women. About three quarters of the faculty are white. Courses will include "The Politics of Algorithms," "Theoretical Neuroscience," "AI-assisted Health Care" and "Regulating Artificial Intelligence."

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Show 16 Sat 11:54 Engadget [1]

11:54 The Morning After: Qualcomm wins a round vs. Apple
Hey, good morning! You look fabulous. Welcome to your weekend! While we take a look back at some highlight stories this week out of SXSW, there's a trial result in Apple v. Qualcomm, and a presidential candidate's past is quite relevant to our inter...
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Show 16 Sat 10:39 HackerNews [6]

Show 16 Sat 09:13 Slashdot [1]

09:13 Solar Panel Splits Water To Produce Hydrogen
schwit1 shares a report from IEEE Spectrum: A team at Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, or KU Leuven, says it has developed a solar panel that converts sunlight directly into hydrogen using moisture in the air. The prototype takes the water vapor and splits it into hydrogen and oxygen molecules. If it scales successfully, the technology could help address a major challenge facing the hydrogen economy. A small but growing number of facilities are producing "green" hydrogen using electrolysis, which splits water molecules using electricity -- ideally from renewable sources such as wind and solar. Other researchers, including the team in Belgium, are developing what's called direct solar water-splitting technologies. These use chemical and biological components to split water directly on the solar panel, forgoing the need for large, expensive electrolysis plants. KU Leuven sits on a grassy campus in Flanders, the Dutch-speaking northern region of Belgium. Earlier this month, professor Johan Martens and his team at the Center for Surface Chemistry and Catalysis announced their prototype could produce 250 liters of hydrogen per day on average over a full year, which they claim is a world record. A family living in a well-insulated Belgian house could use about 20 of these panels to meet their power and heating needs during an entire year, they predict. The solar panel measures 1.65 meters long -- roughly the height of a kitchen refrigerator, or this reporter -- and has a rated power output of about 210 watts. The system can convert 15 percent of the solar energy it receives into hydrogen, the team says. That's a significant leap from 0.1 percent efficiency they first achieved 10 years ago.

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Show 16 Sat 08:54 Engadget [1]

08:54 Owning a Call of Duty eSports franchise could cost $25 million
Activision Blizzard is apparently making headway with the launch of the city-based Call of Duty League it announced in February. According to ESPN, an esports executive from the company has already been meeting with prospective buyers -- namely profe...
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Show 16 Sat 08:26 lwn.net-comments [20]

08:26 Python dictionary "addition" and "subtraction"

The values in Counter don't need to be integers, or even numbers. Both the constructor and the update method can take either iterables or mappings, and the iterable versions put integer counts in while the mapping versions just directly use the values (with the + operator, in the case of update). There's a note in the documentation [1] (scroll down to grey box) saying the implementation of each method makes minimal assumptions on the value type.

[1] https://docs.python.org/3/library/collections.html#collec...

08:26 Development quotes of the week

PostgreSQL's native JSON support has pretty decent performance (a lot of ActivityPub server software relies on it, for example). In the face of that competition MongoDB didn't have a whole lot going for it even before the SSPL.

08:26 Development quotes of the week

I noticed that Pulp (which is the open source content management component) of Red Hat Satellite simply moved on to using PostgreSQL instead of MongoDB + PostgreSQL and Red Hat has dropped MongoDB completely. No forks seem to have emerged. It may very well be that the license change would get more people to look at traditional databases which have grown support for NoSQL type features. That is probably a good thing.

08:26 Static site generators

You can still have comments in static site generators by hooking up to Discourse. That's what many people do with GitHub pages or gitlab hosting.

A static site generator makes a lot of sense to me since it's easy to host (even for free) and nothing of value is lost versus a CMS type system.

08:26 Jekyll as a static site generator for blogging
I recently moved to using jekyll as the static site generator for my blog ā” I just git commit and push, and shortly thereafter it's updated. I like being able to track my blog history in Git. I've been thinking about running Git on my android phone to push blog entries when I'm away from my computer, but somehow it doesn't seem sufficiently important. āŗ

08:26 The Linux Foundation's CommunityBridge platform

"prefer to use single-point-of-failure, proprietary software rather than FOSS for their infrastructure" sounds a bit snarky ;-)

greetings, eMBee.

08:26 standard plug and play security convenience tradeoff thing
Not for at least 5 years,-

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/12/inside-the-nsas-leaked-catalog-of-surveillance-magic/

the NSA has built and deployed its own USB cables at target locationsā”complete with spy hardware and radio transceiver packed inside."

I also recall a few articles from those key early Snowden days where one of the oddly louder complaints from the government about Snowden's leak related to them having to replace a large number of cables.

The COTTONMOUTH series of implants are USB devices that provide a covert wireless bridge into a target network. They can be integrated into any USB plug, so check your mouse.

08:26 Democracy...

The problem is that almost no policymakers are discussing this policy issue from a technologically informed perspective, and very few technologists truly understand the policy contours of the debate. The result is both sides consistently talking past each other, and policy proposals -- Āthat occasionally become lawĀ -- that are technological disasters.

Democracy. Gotta Love It. It doesn't get you a great solution to every problem, or even a good one. Just better than all the alternatives.

08:26 Static site generators

Static sites can have comments. You just arrange things to generate a new static page which includes the comment after a comment is posted.

That takes the same amount of time as generating a dynamic page and can be reused by every visitor until a new comment is added.

08:26 The creation of the io.latency block I/O controller

How does the 1s tick play with power management? The progress towards tickless systems makes for visibly better battery runtime, and better VM behavior on the server side...

08:26 Democracy...

Or rather, the unattributed cliche I was grasping for was perhaps- Democracy- It will eventually arrive at the optimal solution, after exhausting all the alternatives.

08:26 Fixing programmers

It is also a bad idea to parse comments. It breaks distcc for example, so I submitted a patch fixing this stupidness

https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/3/15/792

08:26 submitted

> Granted, I would have preferred __attribute__ ((fallthrough)) with some syntactic sugar macro.

https://lkml.org/lkml/2019/3/15/792

Because it is needed by distcc.

08:26 Security quotes of the week

I guess I am not the only Russian reader here, so here is the link to the Russian text from the Medusa: https://meduza.io/feature/2019/03/01/k-mobilnomu-izbirate...
It took some time from me to find it out...

08:26 SUSE completes its management transition

I was impressed by the quality of the talks in the OpenSUSE track at Southern California Linux Expo last weekend.

https://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale/17x/schedule/friday

I've never used OpenSUSE beyond Open Build System, but the quality of technical contribution there obviously remains high.

08:26 The creation of the io.latency block I/O controller

The 1s timer is only armed while there's IO happening. No IO, no periodic timer.

08:26 Static site generators

The QEMU website uses Jekyll, which also powers GitHub pages. One advantage for us was that contributions are done with the usual mailing list workflow.

A couple years ago I wrote a tutorial at https://opensource.com/article/17/4/getting-started-jekyll based on my experience building qemu.org.

08:26 Federated blogging with WriteFreely

I tried to subscribe to either your RSS feed or your ActivityPub feed with Hubzilla, but unfortunately neither worked.

08:26 Fixing programmers

> This could be considered a feature.
Yes, by other stick-in-the-muds.

08:26 Fixing programmers

How does this break distcc?

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Show 16 Sat 06:39 HackerNews [9]

Show 16 Sat 06:13 Slashdot [2]

06:13 'Halo Drive' Would Use Black Holes To Power Spaceships
A new study from researchers at Columbia University in New York suggests future spaceships could use black holes as powerful launch pads to explore the universe. The study "envisions firing laser beams that would curve around a black hole and come back with added energy to help propel a spacecraft to near the speed of light," reports Space.com. "Astronomers could look for signs that alien civilizations are using such a 'halo drive,' as the study dubs it, by seeing if pairs of black holes are merging more often than expected." From the report: Study author David Kipping, an astrophysicist at Columbia University in New York, came up with the idea of the halo drive through what he calls "the gamer's mindset." Using what he called a "halo drive" -- named for the ring of light it would create around a black hole -- Kipping found that even spaceships with the mass of Jupiter could achieve relativistic speeds. "A civilization could exploit black holes as galactic waypoints," he wrote in a study accepted by the Journal of the British Interplanetary Society and detailed online Feb. 28 in the arXiv preprint server. The major drawback of a halo drive would be that "one has to travel to the nearest black hole," Kipping said. "It's akin to paying a one-time toll fee to ride the highway system. You have to pay some energy to reach the nearest access point, but after that, you can ride for free as a long as you like." The halo drive works only in close proximity to a black hole, at a distance of about five to 50 times the black hole's diameter. "This is why you have to travel to the nearest black hole first and [why you] can't simply do this across light-years of space," Kipping said. "We still first require a means to travel to nearby stars to ride the highway system. Kipping is now investigating ways to exploit other astronomical systems for relativistic flight. Such techniques "may not be quite as efficient or fast as the halo-drive approach, but these systems possess the deep energy reserves needed for these journeys," Kipping said.

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03:13 Scientists Call For Global Moratorium On Gene Editing of Embryos
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: Leading scientists have called for a global moratorium on the use of powerful DNA editing tools to make genetically modified children. The move is intended to send a clear signal to maverick researchers, and the scientific community more broadly, that any attempt to rewrite the DNA of sperm, eggs or embryos destined for live births is not acceptable. Beyond a formal freeze on any such work, the experts want countries to register and declare any plans that scientists may put forward in the future, and have these discussed through an international body, potentially run by the World Health Organization. Alongside technical debates about the possible benefits of creating genetically modified babies, the scientists said no decisions should be made to go ahead without broad public support. Eric Lander, founding director of the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard in Cambridge, Massachusetts, calls for the moratorium with 16 other experts in the journal Nature. Emmanuelle Charpentier and Feng Zhang, who helped discover and develop the most common gene editing tool, CRISPR, contributed to the article. The call comes four months after Chinese researcher He Jiankui used human embryos modified with CRISPR to create twin girls resistant to HIV.

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Show 16 Sat 02:54 Engadget [3]

02:54 Reddit bans gore-, death-focused channels following NZ mosque attack
Following other social networks, Reddit has also faced people trying to reshare video of a terrorist attack on a mosque in New Zealand. Now two notorious subreddits, r/watchpeopledie and r/Gore have been banned for hosting links to it. Washington Pos...

02:54 Overwatch League teams will play in their home cities next season
The Overwatch League is going on the road next season, as all teams will be playing in their home cities, according to commissioner Nate Nanzer. Last year's inaugural season took place entirely at the Blizzard Arena in Los Angeles, save for the final...

02:54 Netgear's latest gaming router goes on sale in April for $199
Whether you're playing Fortnite, Apex Legends or PUBG, less lag means more wins. Netgear promises its new gaming router will deliver both. The company debuted the Nighthawk Pro Gaming XR300 WiFi Router at SXSW this week. It'll be available worldwide...
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Show 16 Sat 02:39 HackerNews [4]

Show 16 Sat 02:25 AndroidAuthority [8]

02:25 Huawei P30 and P30 Pro: All the rumors in one place
Here's everything we know so far about Huawei's next P-series flagships.

02:25 Xiaomi Mi Band 4 will arrive this year, but probably not in next few months
The source of this info also says that the line of Mi Band trackers is selling incredibly well.

02:25 Train to become a social media marketing professional
These ten social media marketing courses are just $29, but their value to your future career path is off the charts.

02:25 Jury says Apple violated three Qualcomm patents, should pay $31 million
In the seemingly-never-ending saga between Qualcomm and Apple, a new win just landed in Qualcomm's corner.

02:25 Deal: Reminder that the Razer Phone 2 is still only $500
Just a friendly PSA that you can get a very powerful smartphone for a hair under $500.

02:25 Google is going all-in on the squircle icon for the Play Store
Long live the squircle, which will be the default shape for all apps on the Google Play Store soon.

02:25 Deal: Get the Moto G6 for just under $100 if you also get Google Fi service
Once it's gone on Google Fi, it might be gone for good.

02:25 Learn valuable project management skills for a price you pick
You can pay what you want for over 20 hours of instruction on how to ace the PMP certification exam.
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Show 16 Sat 01:43 Slashdot [3]

01:43 Man Arrested For Selling One Million Netflix, Spotify, Hulu Passwords
Police in Australia have arrested a man who allegedly made AU $300,000 (US $211,000) running a website which sold the account passwords of popular online subscription services including Netflix, Spotify, Hulu, PSN, and Origin. From a report: The 21-year-old man was arrested on Tuesday in Sydney, Australia, following an international investigation by the FBI and the Australian Federal Police into the website Wicked Gen. The Wicked Gen website bragged that it had over 120,000 users and almost one million sets of account details, offering monthly and yearly membership plans for those who wanted "access to thousands of premium accounts across a huge range of services." The account passwords, however, were not obtained via legitimate means. Instead the details were typically obtained through credential stuffing using swathes of usernames and passwords leaked through other data breaches, without the knowledge of their genuine owners.

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01:43 Kamala Harris Introduces Bill To Send Millions To Local Governments For Tech Support
Senator and Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris has introduced legislation that would allocate millions of dollars for local government to create dedicated teams that could "update and rebuild" government systems. The Verge reports: The United States Digital Service, an office established in 2014 after the widespread failures of Healthcare.gov, provides IT support for the federal government, bringing technologists into the government to work on tools like federal websites. It's continued to operate under the Trump administration, and some states, Harris' office notes, have experimented with similar teams. Harris' bill, the Digital Service Act, would provide an annual $50 million to the federal service, but it also goes further, allocating $15 million per year to state and local governments to create similar teams. Harris' bill, the Digital Service Act, would provide an annual $50 million to the federal service, but it also goes further, allocating $15 million per year to state and local governments to create similar teams. Under the plan, the national Digital Service would offer two-year grants, giving state and local governments between $200,000 and $2.5 million per year. Those governments would be required to take on 20 percent of costs and to spend at least half of the money on talent, rather than tech. The national Digital Service, under the proposal, would report bi-annually to Congress on the progress of the grantees. The bill would provide funding through 2027.

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00:13 ISPs Strike Deal With Vermont To Suspend State Net Neutrality Law
The state of Vermont has agreed to suspend enforcement of its net neutrality law pending the outcome of a lawsuit against the Federal Communications Commission. In October 2018, five industry groups representing major internet providers and cable companies sued Vermont seeking to block a state law barring companies that do not abide by net neutrality rules from receiving state contracts. But, as Ars Technica reports, "the lobby groups and state agreed to delay litigation and enforcement of the Vermont law in a deal that they detailed in a joint court filing yesterday." From the report: The delay will remain in place until after a final decision in the lawsuit seeking to reverse the FCC's net neutrality repeal and the FCC's preemption of state net neutrality laws. Vermont is one of 22 states that sued the FCC in that case in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. Tech companies and consumer advocacy groups are also opposing the FCC in the same case. Oral arguments were held last month, and DC Circuit judges will likely issue a decision in the coming months. An FCC loss in that case could entirely restore federal net neutrality rules, potentially making the Vermont law redundant. But a partial loss for the FCC could leave the federal repeal in place while allowing states to enforce their own net neutrality laws. The Vermont delay would remain in place until after all appeals are exhausted in the FCC case, which could potentially reach the U.S. Supreme Court.

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Show 15 Fri 23:54 Engadget [1]

23:54 'The Sims 4' will stop supporting 32-bit PCs in June
We hope you weren't determined to run The Sims 4 on the same PC you had when it came out in 2014. The developers have warned that the life simulator will end support for 32-bit operating systems and non-Metal Macs in June 2019. Simply put, it's abo...
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Show 15 Fri 22:43 Slashdot [2]

22:43 Google Play Apps With 150 Million Installs Contain Aggressive Adware
Researchers from Checkpoint Software have identified a massive adware campaign that invaded the Google Play Store with more than 200 highly aggressive apps that were collectively downloaded almost 150 million times. "The 210 apps discovered by researchers from security firm Checkpoint Software bombarded users with ads, even when an app wasn't open," reports Ars Technica. "The apps also had the ability to carry out spearphishing attacks by causing a browser to open an attacker-chosen URL and open the apps for Google Play and third-party market 9Apps with a specific keyword search or a specific application's page. The apps reported to a command-and-control server to receive instructions on which commands to carry out." From the report: Once installed, the apps installed code that allowed them to perform actions as soon as the device finished booting or while the user was using the device. The apps also could remove their icon from the device launcher to make it harder for users to uninstall the nuisance apps. The apps all used a software development kit called RXDrioder, which Checkpoint researchers believe concealed its abusive capabilities from app developers. The researchers dubbed the campaign SimBad, because many of the participating apps are simulator games. "With the capabilities of showing out-of-scope ads, exposing the user to other applications, and opening a URL in a browser, SimBad acts now as an Adware, but already has the infrastructure to evolve into a much larger threat," Checkpoint researchers wrote. The top 14 apps were collectively downloaded a whopping 75 million times, with the No. 1 app receiving 10 million installs and the next 13 getting 5 million downloads each. The next 53 each received 1 million downloads. The remainder received 500,000 or fewer downloads each. Checkpoint has a full list of all the apps here.

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22:43 Renewable Energy Reduces the Highest Electric Rates In the Nation
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Phys.Org: Coal is the primary fuel source for Midwest electric utilities. Michigan Technological University researchers found that increasing renewable and distributed generation energy sources can save Michigan electric consumers money. As renewable energy technologies and access to distributed generation like residential solar panels improve, consumer costs for electricity decrease. Making electricity for yourself with solar has become more affordable than traditional electricity fuel sources like coal. However, as three Michigan Tech researchers contend in a new study, while utility fuel mixes are slowly shifting away from fossil fuels toward renewable sources, Michigan utilities, and U.S. utilities broadly, continue a relationship with fossil fuels that is detrimental to their customers. In the paper, Prehoda and co-authors Joshua M. Pearce, Richard Witte Endowed Professor of Materials Science and Engineering, and Chelsea Schelly, associate professor of sociology, note that in the U.S., "70 percent of coal plants run at a higher cost than new renewable energy and by 2030 all of them will." The researchers provide a breakdown of savings per kilowatt hour by county that Michigan residents could achieve if they produce their own electricity with solar photovoltaic panels. The most significant impacts of distributed generation with solar are in the Upper Peninsula, where residential customers could see savings of approximately 7 cents per kilowatt hour. Assuming the average residential consumer uses 600 kilowatt hours of electricity monthly, this is a savings of $42 per utility bill. Downstate, the average savings per utility bill under the researchers' model is approximately $30 monthly. However, not all Michigan consumers can take advantage of the opportunity to self-generate, as some utilities are blocking additional net-metered distributed generation in their areas. The study has been published in the journal Energies.

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Show 15 Fri 22:41 ArsTechnica [2]

22:41 Report: James Gunn has been un-fired from Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3
After Disney firing in July over tweets, Gunn defected to DC Studios, Suicide Squad.

22:41 Study finds people in Ireland and Scotland made ābog butterā¯ for millennia
Nearly all Irish bog butters sampled were made from dairy rather than animal fats.
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Show 15 Fri 22:39 HackerNews [13]

Show 15 Fri 22:26 lwn.net-comments [30]

22:26 Fixing programmers

What would solve it would be to add another syntactic construct providing an actual multiway conditional, where the code blocks associated with the cases are independent of each other and at most one will be executed.

That would help. But programs using this construct would no longer be C programs. If sticking to a popular and well-understood language standard is of value to you (which makes sense in a large community like the Linux kernel crowd), then this is something not to be thrown away lightly.

OTOH, code that uses the āmetasyntactical sort-of language extensionā¯ is valid C whether the compiler pays attention to it or not. But if you have a compiler that does pay attention, it's probably a good idea to exploit that, much like we exploit our compiler's paying attention to all sorts of other little things that might otherwise slip us by (think āif (foo = bar) ...ā¯).

Like a surgical scalpel, the C programming language is conceptually pretty simple but using it still requires considerable care and attention to detail. I haven't done lots of C programming recently but when I do I'm humble enough to appreciate all the assistance I can get.

22:26 GNOME 3.32 released

But does it have the "mouse locator" accessibility feature working in Wayland yet? You know, where you press Ctrl and a little animated squiggly grows around the cursor. I brought that up years ago, filed in Bugzilla, it was closed and merged with another issue about re-writing some layer, and AFAIK there has been no action on it.

IMHO essential for Wayland usability.

22:26 GNOME 3.32 released

Why is it required for Wayland specifically? Or is it just that X has had it "forever" anyways?

22:26 GNOME 3.32 released

> Why is it required for Wayland specifically? Or is it just that X has had it "forever" anyways?

The latter. Note that it is not Wayland that should have the accessibility features. It is the individual Desktop Environments or Window Managers

22:26 Fixing programmers

> the C committee is run by a bunch of stick-in-the-muds.
This could be considered a feature.

22:26 Fixing programmers

Linux makes heavy use of gcc extensions already, so, their would be little, additional damage done here. Further, my opinion on this is that C would benefit more from proper multiway conditional than from other, invasive additions like threading support, IOW, if someone would implement support for something like this in a compiler I could use, I'd certainly be using it and expect that the standardized language would eventually catch up.

BTW, I've come to dislike if (a = b) warnings as well: Mistyping == as = is another, extremely rare error and some things will always have to be found and fixed via code rewiev and/ or testing. Algorithmic errors are far more common than any kind of syntax misuse.

22:26 Debian project leader candidates emerge

The Debian Constitution provides that Debian Developers may nominate themselves. Ā There is no prohibition against other nominations. Ā There is no requirement that the DPL be a Debian Developer.

Under the Debian Constitution there is only one valid candidate, the nomination period has closed, and no more candidates may be nominated. Those who would like to see a second election have the option to vote None Of The Above in the first.

The refusal by the cabal to allow Debian Developers to vote for the only valid nominated candidate is entirely unconstitutional.

22:26 Fixing programmers

"Switch is fine except that it's not"?

I agree that the fallthrough is mostly useless and that all the time people and computers wasted by typing or processing

break;

statements could have been put to better uses. But overloading the syntax supposed to be used for inline documentation so that yet more useless code has to be added is not the answer, it's the problem taken to the next power.

22:26 Five new stable kernels

Sadly the regression that makes Linux 5.0 give a black screen for a whole class of laptops hasn't been fixed yet :(

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109959

22:26 Debian project leader candidates emerge
I don't really have a horse in this race, but I think that's debatable. The constitution says "For the first week any Developer may nominate themselves as a candidate Project Leader". It doesn't say "any interested person". The person you are referring to is not a developer, and thus does not appear to qualify.

(For the curious, this self-nomination is what's being discussed here.)

22:26 Debian project leader candidates emerge

This sort of thing is analogous to problems in statutory interpretation. One traditional canon in that field is called "expressio unius est exclusio alterius", and if applied here would imply that the mention of one category of permitted nominations would ordinarily exclude others. One might also try to work out what the drafters intended (which should be fairly straightforward since they could just be asked directly). Or there are various other principles that one might apply.

It's also worth mentioning that if anyone were allowed to nominate themselves, then there would be no purpose in specifically listing it under the powers of individual developers (see 3.1(3)).

In any case, if you have a dispute about the interpretation of the constitution, you're free to ask the Secretary (under 7.1(3)).

22:26 Debian project leader candidates emerge

I think it's fairly clear that NOTA would handily defeat this candidate.

22:26 Five new stable kernels

Isn't that a duplicate of bug in Xorg itself? https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=109806#c24

"Not a bug in the kernel, xorg's modesetting driver needs to set all connectors/crtc's directly when using atomic. The legacy path disabled crtc B for you if you stole all its connectors for a different crtc. In the atomic case you need to disable it yourself.

This is a bug in x.org's modesetting driver."

Xorg is slowly rotting away in Wayland's world.

22:26 GNOME 3.32 released

It's also a hack. AIUI, it's just a large fractional scaling multiplier (with who-knows-what cost perf) with a second downsampling pass. I've never understood why fractional scaling is so hard for the Gnome people to pull off when Unity was able to do it without any real problems.

22:26 Debian project leader candidates emerge

TINC [There is no cabal]

22:26 Fixing programmers

Mistyping == as = is another, extremely rare error and some things will always have to be found and fixed via code rewiev and/ or testing.

You want code review and testing, but you also want reasonable compiler warnings. If a developer is made aware of a ā==ā¯ vs. ā=ā¯ typo by a compiler warning while they're writing the code in the first place, the issue doesn't even come up in code review or testing (where it would be more expensive, in terms of developer time, to detect and fix). This is what in security circles we call ādefense in depthā¯.

Algorithmic errors are far more common than any kind of syntax misuse.

Yes, but the syntax problems still exist and are often easier to detect and fix. This is like saying garbage in the street is not important because there are millions of children starving in Africa.

22:26 Fixing programmers

To my mind, requiring explicit break statements lets you do usefulĀ¹ things that would be impossible if there was an implicit break in front of every case

You could fix that by allowing an explicit fallthrough when that's what you want. Unfortunately, as you say it's too late to change the syntax now, so the best we can do is use the compiler to catch cases where the break is left out accidentally.

22:26 Python dictionary "addition" and "subtraction"

Sometimes I think language projects just try to incorporate change because solving problems means making changes in the minds of most people, while accepting the status quo as fine can feel like not solving a problem.

I find the methods quite clear and provide good hints about what sort of data type we're working with here anyway for code that doesn't bother to provide that information in an easily accessible way. Even with the relatively constrained set of semantics for built-in types in basic python, I often find production code where the developers haven't really understood the provided toolkit. I'm not a fan of adding semantic synonyms that offer no specific utility when in practice it's clear that programmers are otten already operating beyond their understanding of their tools.

22:26 Fixing programmers

If only the original designers of C had thought of using a different keyword to indicate continuing to the next case... but that would have meant another keyword to add to the language... or would it have? :-)

I'm almost scared to look up the semantics of continue inside a switch statement.

22:26 Fixing programmers

continue inside a switch has no special semantics - if you're inside a loop construct then it interacts with the loop, otherwise it's an error.

22:26 Federated blogging with WriteFreely

Looks interesting Jon!

22:26 Fixing programmers

Continue and return work the same inside a switch statement as outside a switch statement. They are not special.

The main problem is K&R chose the wrong "default" behavior. Usually you DON'T want to continue, so that should have been the default (that is, the current case is automatically terminated by the next case or the end of the statement), and there should be a special keyword used only when you DO want to fall through.

The one exception is empty cases ("case a: case b: case c: foo(); break;") A special dispensation could have been made that the keyword is not needed to fall through unless there are other statements in the case: empty cases don't need the keyword.

Of course, you need a different keyword. They could have used "continue", but both "break" and "continue" are already useful from within switch statements (to break out of or continue an enclosing loop) so using either one of them as meaningful inside a switch was (IMO) not a good decision. I've definitely run into situations where I wanted to break out of a loop from within a switch statement and having "break" overloaded is annoying.

A "fallthrough" or "nobreak" keyword would have been fine. Or if you REALLY didn't want to add a keyword you could have played tricks with "goto", maybe, allowing "goto case X;" where "case X:" existed somewhere in the current switch statement, plus "goto default;"

But that's not the language we have, so FALLTHROUGH-type comments that are recognized by the compiler are great things and everyone should use them. Even if they're weren't recognized by the compiler, they're recognized by the next programmer to come along and read the code, and make clear that you didn't forget something, so they should still always be used.

22:26 Fixing programmers

> But that's not the language we have, so FALLTHROUGH-type comments that are recognized by the compiler are great things and
> everyone should use them. Even if they're weren't recognized by the compiler, they're recognized by the next programmer to come > along and read the code, and make clear that you didn't forget something, so they should still always be used.

They make clear that someone was using lint (or similar). Not particularly interesting and technically useless as the default case is - well - the default case. Whether or not this is correct is a different conversation, but that's something which can only be determined by looking at the code. There's no more reason to assume that two cases with fallthrough are correct or incorrect than two cases seprated by a break;. I've actually written code where I forgot to omit the break in the past :-).

22:26 Federated blogging with WriteFreely
Have you considered a static site generator? They seem to be all the rage and I'm quite happy with the one that I'm using. Most of them allow authorship in Markdown and the images that are embedded in the posts are uploaded with the rest of the static content so there is no image hosting problem, per se. No comment section, of course. But some offer integration with Discuss or other options. Or, since the comment sections on the internet are always difficult to manage, you can avoid tcomment section entirely.

22:26 Static site generators
I've not looked at static site generators, probably should. Can you name the one you're using?

The lack of comments leaves me rather less than upset in general...the last think I need is another comment area to manage!

22:26 Static site generators

Nikola, Hugo etc seem to do everything that you appear to care about in WriteFreely. They are also far more healthier projects with a larger set of contributors and users. They are not federated and there is no activitypub support etc but it looks like all you need is a static site anyway.

22:26 Static site generators

I use Pelican, it's written in Python, which is (for me) a huge benefit over Jekyll and its derivatives, since it's written in a programming language I can actually understand and write in.

22:26 Fixing programmers

> They make clear that someone was using lint (or similar). Not particularly interesting and
> technically useless as the default case is - well - the default case. Whether or not this is
> correct is a different conversation, but that's something which can only be determined by
> looking at the code. There's no more reason to assume that two cases with fallthrough
> are correct or incorrect than two cases seprated by a break;. I've actually written code
> where I forgot to omit the break in the past :-).

I'm not going to get drawn too far into this conversation because it's ridiculous, but I'll say that the above is at best missing the point.

A fallthrough comment is not trying to tell you whether or not the code will fall through. Obviously it will, there's no break! The comment is telling you that someone thought about it and INTENDED the fallthrough to happen.

If lint or the compiler warns someone about a missing break and they want a break, they'll obviously just add a break. If they get a warning and they intended to fallthrough, they will add a fallthrough comment. If they didn't add either one then you don't know whether they thought about it and intended the fallthrough, or they just forgot.

Of course, even with the comment the fallthrough behavior could be a bug. Code has bugs. But the comment is not telling you the code is bug-free, it's telling you that it's intentional, rather than an omission. That's still a big benefit.

22:26 Static site generators

I use https://github.com/getzola/zola .

22:26 Fixing programmers

C# blocks implicit fallthrough and requires an explicit goto statement referencing another switch label. goto might be considered harmful in general, but its use there seems consistent with the way it's generally used in the kernel.

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Show 15 Fri 21:13 Slashdot [3]

21:13 Apple Dealt Legal Blow as Jury Awards Qualcomm $31 Million
Apple violated three Qualcomm patents and should pay the chipmaker $31 million for infringing on its technology, a jury decided Thursday, giving Qualcomm momentum as it heads into another legal skirmish with the iPhone maker next month. From a report: Qualcomm, which filed the suit in July 2017, alleged Apple had used its technology without permission in some versions of its popular iPhone. The jury awarded Qualcomm the full amount it requested at the start of the two-week trial, which was held in San Diego. One disputed Qualcomm patent covers technology that lets a smartphone quickly connect to the internet once the device is turned on. Another deals with graphics processing and battery life. The third addresses technology that shifts traffic between a phone's apps processor and modem. The $31 million in damages -- or $1.41 per infringing iPhone -- is a drop in the bucket for Apple, a company that briefly became a $1 trillion company last year. But it marks an important victory for Qualcomm, burnishing its reputation as a mobile components innovator. The win also lends credibility to the notion that much of the company's innovation is reflected in iPhones.

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21:13 The Intercept Shuts Down Access To Snowden Trove
An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Daily Beast: First Look Media announced Wednesday that it was shutting down access to whistleblower Edward Snowden's massive trove of leaked National Security Agency documents. Over the past several years, The Intercept, which is owned by First Look Media, has maintained a research team to handle the large number of documents provided by Snowden to Intercept journalists Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald. But in an email to staff Wednesday evening, First Look CEO Michael Bloom said that as other major news outlets had "ceased reporting on it years ago," The Intercept had decided to "focus on other editorial priorities" after expending five years combing through the archive. "The Intercept is proud of its reporting on the Snowden archive, and we are thankful to Laura Poitras and Glenn Greenwald for making it available to us," Bloom wrote. He added: "It is our hope that Glenn and Laura are able to find a new partner -- such as an academic institution or research facility -- that will continue to report on and publish the documents in the archive consistent with the public interest." Poitras reprimanded First Look Media for its decision to shut down its archives, and lay off 4 percent of its staff who had maintained them. "This decision and the way it was handled would be a disservice to our source, the risks we've all taken, and most importantly, to the public for whom Edward Snowden blew the whistle," she wrote. "Late Thursday evening, Greenwald tweeted that both he and Poitras had full copies of the archives, and had been searching for a partner to continue research," reports The Daily Beast.

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21:13 Tesla's New Model Y SUV Hits the Right Note By Playing It Safe
Last night, Tesla CEO Elon Musk unveiled the company's brand new electric SUV, the Model Y. The car is only slightly larger than the Model 3 and shares 75% of its parts, leaving many people wanting more. But, as USA Today reports, "The ho-hum reaction to Tesla's new electric SUV is, oddly enough, exactly what the company needs. [F]or a company that needs a little less pizzazz and a little more substance to make good on its promise to become a sustainable force in the auto industry, the Model Y hit the right marks." From the report: It's essentially a crossover version of the Tesla Model 3 compact car, bearing the design hallmarks of a hatchback and sharing the same architectural platform as its car sibling. That Tesla devotees weren't rewarded with sizzling new features on the Model Y illustrates that the company is getting serious about selling vehicles. After all, a compact SUV is precisely what Americans want: a driveable vehicle that puts safety first and flash second. Versions with five and seven seats will be available, with starting prices ranging from $39,000 for the base version to $60,000 for a performance model. If Musk had tried to break new technological barriers or adopt outlandish styling on the Model Y, he would have risked making the vehicle too difficult to manufacture and unappealing to conventional SUV buyers. The first-available model will start at $47,000 and arrive in fall 2020. You can place a refundable deposit of $2,500 to secure your place in line when the vehicle becomes available. The base model of the Model Y -- the $39,000 version -- won't be available until "sometime in 2021," Musk said. Families can make the Model Y their primary vehicle since the battery range goes from 230 miles to 300 miles depending on the version. That stacks up well against other EVs on the market, such as the Chevrolet Bolt's 238 and the Hyundai Kona's 258. And while techies might not find the Model Y exhilarating, it will come equipped with software and sensors capable of autonomous driving, whenever it becomes legal. But buyers will have to pay for the system upgrade of $3,000 to $5,000.

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Show 15 Fri 20:54 Engadget [5]

20:54 DC Universe will let you try its exclusive shows for free
Streaming services don't usually give out free episodes or allow users to access their lineup without signing up for a trial period anymore. Now, DC Universe is moving away from those practices, perhaps in an effort to give fence-sitting fans and ske...

20:54 Jury decides Apple violated three Qualcomm patents in iPhones
Following a two-week trial, a jury has determined that Apple violated three Qualcomm patents in some iPhones. The jury awarded Qualcomm $31 million, the full amount it was seeking, though Apple had won a ruling to limit the potential payout.

20:54 FCC wants to help identify the floor a 911 call is coming from
The Federal Communications Commission issued a new proposal today designed to help first responders better locate 911 callers. The proposed rules would require cellular providers to provide more detailed locations of callers, including a vertical loc...

20:54 Beto O'Rourke was a member of hacking group Cult of the Dead Cow
Democratic presidential candidate Beto O'Rourke was a member of the influential US-based hacking group Cult of the Dead Cow (CDC), according to a report from Reuters. The former three-term congressman from Texas confirmed his involvement in the group...

20:54 Twitter tests conversation 'subscriptions'
Twitter is testing yet another new feature: a "subscribe to conversation" button that would let users follow a thread without liking or replying to it. Twitter user and software engineer Jane Manchun Wong (who's known for finding this kind of thing)...
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Show 15 Fri 19:43 Slashdot [2]

19:43 Android Q Will Kill Clipboard Manager Apps in the Name of Privacy
Bolstering privacy is one of the primary focuses for Google in Android Q, the latest version of its mobile operating system, and that may spell trouble for some of your favorite apps. From a report: In Android Q, Google has restricted access to clipboard data as previously rumored, which means most apps that currently aim to manage that data won't work anymore. Having an app that sits in the background and collects clipboard data can be a handy way to recall past snippets of data. However, that same mechanism could be used for malicious intent. Google's playing it safe by restricting access to clipboard data to input method editors (you might know those as keyboards). Foreground apps that have focus will also be able to access the clipboard, but background apps won't.

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19:43 Scientists Measure 1.3-Billion-Volt Thunderstorm, the Strongest on Record
An anonymous reader shares a report: Scientists in India observed the highest-voltage thunderstorm ever documented with the help of a subatomic particle you might not hear much about: the muon. The researchers operate the GRAPES-3 telescope, which measures muons, particles that are similar to electrons but heavier. Specifically, the Gamma Ray Astronomy at PeV EnergieS Phase-3 (GRAPES-3) muon telescope measures high-energy particles from outer space called cosmic rays. It typically picks up 2.5 million muons each minute, mapped on a 13-by-13 grid across the sky. But during thunderstorms, it experiences quick changes to the amount of muons it receives. The GRAPES-3 researchers added electric field monitors to the experiment, and devised a way to turn these muon fluctuations into measurements of the voltage of passing storms. A storm on December 1, 2014, led to a relatively enormous 2 percent decrease in the amount of muons that the experiment received. According to their methods, published in Physical Review Letters, this would be equivalent to a 1.3-billion-volt electric potential in the thunderhead. This doesn't refer to a single lightning bolt, but rather the strength of the electric field caused by positively charged water molecules carried by convection to the top of the cloud while negatively charged ice remains lower down. For comparison, most lightning bolts have 100 million volts of electric potential between their ends. Subway tracks carry less than 1,000 volts.

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Show 15 Fri 18:39 HackerNews [22]

Show 15 Fri 18:26 DailyWTF [1]

18:26 Error'd: Do Not Read The Daily WTF

Neil S. wrote, "MSN UK's reverse psychology marketing angle is pretty edgy."

Ā

"Batman & Lorem was a surprise flop at the box office," writes Art O.

Ā

Klaus asks, "Do I want to know, why Feedly associates Coffee with restrooms?"

Ā

"Those idiots, I clearly asked for null_-532419553!" wrote Raymond D.

Ā

Nigel writes, "I just hope their drugs aren't as genuine as their Windows licenses."

Ā

"At this point, I don't even remember how long I'd been waiting to get to this point," writes Jake B.

Ā

[Advertisement] Otter - Provision your servers automatically without ever needing to log-in to a command prompt. Get started today!

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Show 15 Fri 18:13 Slashdot [2]

18:13 EU Expected To Hit Google with Another Massive Antitrust Fine
If you thought the European Commission was done hitting Google with massive fines, think again. From a report: Having already whacked the U.S. company with a $2.7 billion fine in 2017 (for disadvantaging comparison-shopping rivals in its search results) and a $5 billion fine last year (for disadvantaging software rivals in the Android ecosystem,) the Commission will reportedly issue another financial penalty next week. The fine's imminent nature was reported Friday by the Financial Times, citing three unnamed sources. The Commission and Google both declined to provide comment on the report. It is all about Google's restrictions on the "AdSense for Search" boxes that third-party websites use to make it easier for users to search their sites. Searches conducted through the boxes bring up Google ads and, with Google having such a dominant position in the European online search advertising market, the Commission warned the company in 2016 that it believed the company was illegally abusing its position.

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18:13 Amazon Gets an Edge With Its Secret Squad of PhD Economists
An anonymous reader shares a report: With help from outside researchers, Amazon's economists are working on a way to measure inflation using thousands of transactions across its own platform. Automatically analyzing product descriptions allows them to better assess the quality of a dress or a juicer or a bathmat, theoretically creating a more accurate, up-to-date index of how much things cost. That's just one way Amazon is using the squad of economists it has recruited in recent years. The company has turned so many businesses, from retailing to cloud computing, inside out. Now Amazon is upending the traditional role of economists within companies, as well as the field of economics. Amazon is now a large draw from the relatively small talent pool of PhD economists, which in the United States grows by about only 1,000 new graduates every year. Although the definition of "economist" is fuzzy, the discipline is generally understood as the study of how people use resources and respond to incentives. In the past few years, Amazon has hired more than 150 PhD economists, making it probably the largest employer in the field behind institutions like the Federal Reserve, which has hundreds of economists on staff. It was the only company with a recruiting booth at the American Economics Association's annual conference in January, handing out free pens and logoed stress balls.

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Show 15 Fri 17:54 Engadget [7]

17:54 Robot valets are parking cars at an airport in France
After a few years of testing its robot valets, Stanley Robotics will officially put its fleet to use at France's Lyon-Saint-Exupéry airport this week. If you plan to park in the robot-lot anytime soon, you'll leave your car in a special garage...

17:54 VW and its former CEO charged with defrauding investors in diesel scandal
The US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) announced that it is charging Volkswagen and its former CEO Martin Winterkorn for defrauding US investors during the company's "Dieselgate" scandal. The agency accused the company and its top executive...

17:54 Turtle Beach buys Roccat to create a gaming accessory empire
Competition in the gaming gear space might just heat up -- Turtle Beach, best known for its gaming headsets, is buying game accessory maker Roccat for $14.8 million. The company isn't shy about its plans. it's snapping up Roccat to add keyboards, mic...

17:54 A 19-year-old WinRAR bug is being used to install malware
Last month, a 19-year-old bug was discovered in WinRAR, a software used to extract .zip and other file archives on your Windows PC. The company was quick to patch the bug, but users who haven't updated to version 5.70 are still vulnerable. Now, oppor...

17:54 Traeger makes built-in WiFi a standard grill feature
In 2017, Traeger added WiFi connectivity to its line of wood pellet grills with the Timberline series. While being able to control and monitor your grill remotely is more handy than you might think, the privilege was limited to two models with a star...

17:54 Fan uses AI to remaster 'Star Trek: Deep Space Nine' in HD
Unfortunately, you're highly unlikely to see an official remaster of Star Trek: Deep Space Nine. Its special effects were shot on video rather than added to film, making an already daunting remastering process that much more difficult -- and since i...

17:54 Vehicular battle royale 'Notmycar' hits Steam on April 5th
If you're fed up of dying too quickly after dropping into a Fortnite or Apex Legends match, another battle royale game with a fresh twist is on the way -- one in which you might be able to get out of dodge fast when a massive firefight goes down. The...
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Show 15 Fri 17:51 ArsTechnica [5]

17:51 After pushing addictive OxyContin, Purdue now pursuing overdose antidote
Purdue still blames the crisis on illicit drugs but says it won't profit from antidote.

17:51 Epic says its Game Store is not spying on you
But Sweeney says it will stop accessing Steam friends lists without permission.

17:51 ISPs strike deal with Vermont to suspend state net neutrality law
Vermont and ISPs agree to delay law until judges rule on FCC repeal.

17:51 Social media sites struggle to contain video of New Zealand shooting
Video of the massacre spread rapidly on social media.

17:51 Any Steam game can now use Valve's low-latency, DoS-proofed networking
43 percent of gamers have enjoyed reduced latency from the network.
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Show 15 Fri 16:43 Slashdot [5]

16:43 WordPress Now Powers Over One-Third of the Top 10 Million Sites on the Web
WordPress now powers over 1/3rd of the top 10 million sites on the web, according to W3Techs. From a blog post: Our market share has been growing steadily over the last few years, going from 29.9% just one year ago to 33.4% now. We are, of course, quite proud of these numbers! The path here has been very exciting. In 2005, we were celebrating 50,000 downloads. Six years later, in January 2011, WordPress was powering 13.1% of websites. And now, early in 2019, we are powering 33.4% of sites. Our latest release has already been downloaded close to 14 million times, and it was only released on the 21st of February.

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16:43 Beto O'Rourke's Secret Membership in America's Oldest Hacking Group
One thing you might not know about Beto O'Rourke, the former Texas congressman who just entered the race for president is that while a teenager, O'Rourke acknowledged in an exclusive interview to Reuters, he belonged to the oldest group of computer hackers in U.S. history. From the report: The hugely influential Cult of the Dead Cow, jokingly named after an abandoned Texas slaughterhouse, is notorious for releasing tools that allowed ordinary people to hack computers running Microsoft's Windows. It's also known for inventing the word "hacktivism" to describe human-rights-driven security work. Members of the group have protected O'Rourke's secret for decades, reluctant to compromise his political viability. Now, in a series of interviews, CDC members have acknowledged O'Rourke as one of their own. Slashdot interviewed members of the Cult of the Cow in 1999 -- which gave bizarre answers.

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16:43 California Declared Totally Drought Free For First Time in Seven Years
California was declared totally drought free for the first time in more than seven years this week, following unusually abundant winter rains and snowfall statewide, according to the government's weekly report on U.S. drought conditions. From a report: The U.S. Drought Monitor's latest survey reflected an astonishing turnaround - at least for now - from a severe, prolonged dry spell that reduced irrigation supplies to farmers, forced strict household conservation measures and stoked a spate of deadly, devastating wildfires. A relatively small swath of California's southern-most region, including most of San Diego County, remains labeled "abnormally dry" on the drought map index, as does a tiny patch at the state's extreme northern end along the Oregon border. But this week marks the first time since mid-December of 2011 that 100 percent of the state has been classified as being free of drought, defined as a moisture deficit severe enough to cause social, environmental or economic ills. Conditions were classified as normal across 93 percent of the state.

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15:13 Facebook Readies AI Tech To Combat 'Revenge Porn'
Facebook said on Friday it would use AI to combat the spread of intimate photos shared without people's permission, sometimes called "revenge porn," on its social networks. From a report: The new technology is in addition to a pilot program that required trained representatives to review offending images. "By using machine learning and artificial intelligence, we can now proactively detect near nude images or videos that are shared without permission," the social networking giant said in a blog post. "This means we can find this content before anyone reports it." A member of Facebook's community operations team would review the content found by the new technology, and if found to be an offending image, remove it or disable the account responsible for spreading it, the company added.

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15:13 Kids From At Least 112 Countries, Including the US, Go on Strike To Protest Climate Change
It started 29 weeks ago when 16-year-old Swede Greta Thunberg began skipping school on Fridays to protest climate change by standing outside of her nation's parliament building. Today, kids from more than 110 countries, including the United States, are following Thunberg's lead and will play hooky from classes for something they think is ultimately more important: preventing the warming of their planet. Live updates, from The Guardian. Further reading: Thousands of scientists are backing the kids striking for climate change.

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Show 15 Fri 14:54 Engadget [8]

14:54 'No Man's Sky' is getting a massive multiplayer mode
After failing to live up to the hype, No Man's Sky was in danger of becoming a cautionary tale for game developers. But a series of improvements, each more impressive than the last, culminating in the massive Next update released last August, have go...

14:54 EA debuts eSports studio with Madden NFL 19 Challenge
EA is moving deeper into competitive gaming territory by opening an eSports broadcast studio. There are two main studios: the competitive area and a player lounge. The former includes 360-degree sets, spectator cameras and media and audience seating....

14:54 Facebook is relying on AI to tackle revenge porn
Facebook is introducing new revenge porn detection tools that use AI to track down intimate images shared without the subject's consent. It claims machine learning can help it to detect near nude images and videos before a user reports them. A huma...

14:54 Snapchat may launch its own gaming service next month
Snap will launch a gaming platform for its social media app next month, according to Cheddar. The service (codenamed "Project Cognac") has been rumored for awhile, and will reportedly feature externally developed games that will work inside the Snapc...

14:54 Samsung's Notebook 9 goes on sale March 17th
Samsung has revealed its Notebook 9 Pen and Notebook 9 Pro will go on sale this Sunday, March 17th. The 2-in-1 Pen, as the name suggests, comes with an S Pen and has an aluminum body that's just under 1.5 centimeters thick on the 13.3" model. There a...

14:54 Google's iOS keyboard can translate text into more than 100 languages
If you use Google's iOS keyboard Gboard, you can now translate to and from all languages supported by Google Translate -- that's currently 103. This means you can effectively type and translate in any supported language, in any app on your iPhone. Th...

14:54 The best Qi wireless charging power banks
By Nick Guy This post was done in partnership with Wirecutter. When readers choose to buy Wirecutter's independently chosen editorial picks, Wirecutter and Engadget may earn affiliate commission. Read the full Qi wireless charging power banks guide...

14:54 Microsoft is testing Skype group calls for up to 50 people
Skype conference calls could be about to get a whole lot busier. Microsoft is planning to bump up the maximum number of group call participants from 25 to 50 (18 more than can fit into a Group FaceTime call). The audio and video buttons will be enabl...
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Show 15 Fri 14:39 HackerNews [11]

Show 15 Fri 14:25 AndroidAuthority [9]

14:25 Deal: Get 2TB of lifetime cloud backup for $60
Degoo is an ultra-secure cloud storage option for all of your devices, and a lifetime 2TB plan is now on offer.

14:25 Expect 64MP and 100MP+ smartphones by end of 2019, says Qualcomm exec
Think 48MP smartphones are a step too far? Well, it looks like manufacturers aren't going to stop there...

14:25 16 arrested in India for playing PUBG Mobile (Fortnite is still okay, apparently)
The arrests come after the popular battle royale title was banned in the Indian state of Gujarat.

14:25 You can now get cutout wallpapers for your Galaxy S10 via Galaxy Themes store
The move comes a week after Samsung fans created some rather innovative cutout wallpapers, posting them to reddit.

14:25 Google folding display patent emerges, but don't expect a foldable Pixel yet
The patent shows off several use cases for what could potentially become foldable phone. But don't hold your breath for it.

14:25 12 things you need to know in tech today
The Tesla Model Y is here and it's Very Big Deal. Plus, Facebook outage, mid-range Pixel, and more.

14:25 Galaxy Fold wallpapers arrive in full resolution: Download 'em here
The wallpapers include those intended for folding and non-folding displays, as well as animated versions.

14:25 Oppo F11 Pro review: Head-turning hardware
A pop-up selfie camera, a 4,000 mAh battery, and a 48MP camera that's beautifully packaged into a gradient-colored design. This is our Oppo F11 Pro review.

14:25 Royole, company with first foldable phone, looking for $1bn in fundraising
If Royole can raise that much cash, it could become a sizable threat to Samsung and Huawei.
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Show 15 Fri 14:21 lwn.net [5]

14:21 [$] The creation of the io.latency block I/O controller
Sharing a disk between users in Linux is awful. Different applications have different I/O patterns, they have different latency requirements, and they are never consistent. Throttling can help ensure that users get their fair share of the available bandwidth but, since most I/O is in the writeback path, it's often too late to throttle without putting pressure elsewhere on the system. Disks are all different as well. You have spinning rust, solid-state devices (SSDs), awful SSDs, and barely usable SSDs. Each class of device has its own performance characteristics and, even in a single class, they'll perform differently based on the workload. Trying to address all of these issues with a single I/O controller was tricky, but we at Facebook think that we have come up with a reasonable solution.

14:21 Five new stable kernels
Greg Kroah-Hartman has announced the release of the 5.0.2, 4.20.16, 4.19.29, 4.14.106, and 4.9.163 stable kernels. All contain the usual pile of important fixes; users of those series should upgrade.

14:21 GNOME 3.32 released
The GNOME project has released GNOME 3.32, which is code named "Taipei". "This release brings a refreshed visual style, new icons, the demise of the 'application menu' and a new on-screen keyboard, among other things. Improvements to core GNOME applications include a shell extension for desktop icons, improved automation and reader mode in GNOME Web, an 'Application Permissions' panel, and many more." In addition, there is an experimental option for fractional scaling, improvements to GNOME Software, and more. See the release notes for more information.

14:21 Security updates for Friday
Security updates have been issued by Fedora (mingw-poppler and php), Mageia (apache, gnome-keyring, gnupg2, hiawatha, and rsyslog), openSUSE (libcomps and obs-service-tar_scm), and Ubuntu (libvirt and linux-lts-trusty).

14:21 Debian project leader candidates emerge
When Leaderless Debian was written, it seems entirely plausible that there would still be no candidates for the project leader office even after the extended nomination deadline passed. It is now clear that there will be no need to extend the deadline further, since three candidates (Joerg Jaspert, Jonathan Carter, and Sam Hartman) have stepped forward. It seems likely that the wider discussion on the role of the Debian project leader will continue but, in the meantime, the office will not sit empty.
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Show 15 Fri 14:21 Anandtech [6]

14:21 HP Expands 2018 Battery Recall Program, Delayed Announcement Due To Govt Shutdown

HP started a voluntarily recall program of around 50,000 batteries back in early 2018. This year the company expanded the program with another 78,500 battery packs as it had received eight more complaints from its customers. HP initiated this recall in January, however due to the US Government shutdown earlier this year, the recall has only now been publically announced by the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

14:21 NVIDIA's 65-inch Big Format Gaming Display Is Here: HP OMEN X Emperium

Huge displays for entertainment and productivity are getting increasingly popular these days as prices are falling. Last year NVIDIA proposed a reference design for Big Format Gaming Displays: 65-inch monsters featuring a 120/144 Hz refresh rate along with the company’s G-Sync HDR technology. The initiative was supported by three companies: Acer, ASUS, and HP. But while all of them formally announced their BFGD products at CES 2018, only HP has started to sell one - the HP OMEN X Emperium.

14:21 Samsung Begins Mass Production of 12 GB LPDDR4X for Smartphones

Samsung said late on Wednesday that it had started volume production of 12 GB LPDDR4X-4266 memory for high-end smartphones. The chip is the highest-density DRAM for mobile applications. The first smartphone to use Samsung’s 12 GB LPDDR4X DRAM package will be the company’s own Galaxy S10+ handset formally announced last month.

14:21 Acer's TravelMate X514-51: A 14-Inch Commercial Laptop under 1 kg (2.2 lbs)

Acer has introduced its new thin-and-light commercial notebook aimed at small and medium businesses. Outfitted with a 14-inch display and based on Intel’s Core i5/i7 processors, the TravelMate X514-51 weighs only 2.16 pounds (980 grams). The laptop also supports a host of security features required by businesses.

14:21 The ASRock DeskMini 310 Mini-PC Review: A Cost-Effective Mini-STX Platform

Small form-factor PCs and gaming systems have emerged as bright spots in the mature PC market over the last decade or so. Intel's NUC form-factor introduction was the turning point in the SFF segment, though it came with a few limitations for DIY enthusiasts. While mini-ITX systems are quite flexible and compact, Intel realized that the market could do with an option between the NUC and the mini-ITX systems. The mini-STX (5-inch by 5-inch, known as '5x5') form-factor was launched in 2015. ASRock and ECS have introduced a number of mini-STX form-factor boards and systems. Today, we are taking a look at a low-cost H310 chipset-based mini-STX system from ASRock: the DeskMini 310.

14:21 Sony Xperia 1, the Long 21:9 Smartphone, Available for Pre-Order

When Sony introduced its Xperia 1 flagship smartphone at MWC 2019, the company disclosed all technical specifications, but omitted two important details: pricing and launch date. This month some of the company’s partners began to take pre-orders on the product and had to disclose its estimated price. While retailers are taking pre-orders, we still do not know when Sony intends to start shipments.

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Show 15 Fri 14:20 The-Verge-Mobile [2]

14:20 How to hide the Samsung Galaxy S10's hole-punch camera cutout

By now you may have noticed that the new Samsung Galaxy S10s have a new āhole-punchā¯ design on the front-facing camera that allows for thinner bezels along the top of the screen. Samsung went with this design to avoid the generally disliked notch; the S10E and S10 have a circle hole punch, while the S10 Plus has a longer cutout to accommodate the dual lens selfie camera.

But while this does add more screen real estate for those devices, some might find the hole punch a bit annoying to look at. If you prefer a more classic look to your phone, or at least want to disguise the hole punch and make it less prominent, here are two ways to hide the cutout on the new S10 phones.

Option 1: Turn the hole punch off

If you don't mind sacrificing a...

14:20 New Huawei P30 Pro spec leak reveals the secrets of the 10x zoom camera

We're still a few days away from Huawei's official announcement of its new P30 Pro and P30 flagships, but the steady trickle of leaks regarding the phones has quickly turned into a flood. WinFuture has revealed the full specs for both devices, along with official PR images.

The most interesting new addition still appears to be the P30 Pro's camera, which Huawei is bumping up with a hyped camera system that reportedly promises 10x zoom. According to WinFuture, that vaunted 10x figure is achieved through hybrid zoom. Using a periscope system, the P30 Pro has a focal length equivalent of 135mm for an optical zoom of 7.8x, which is combined with software enhancements and data from the main camera sensor to achieve the 10x...

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Show 15 Fri 14:20 The-Verge-Android [8]

14:20 The best early features of Android Q

Yesterday, Google started down the road to Android Q by launching a beta program for this year's major Android update. Android Q will be released to consumers sometime in the third quarter of this year, according to the company's timeline ā” likely in August, if the precedent of the last couple of years continues.

The initial beta isn't really something you should install on your own. everyday Pixel phone; it can be buggy and mostly exists for the purpose of familiarizing developers with the changes that Google is planning. Android Q will give users a tighter grip of their privacy and location settings, prepare for a wave of foldable phones, and refine many areas of the operating system for a smoother, faster experience.

So while I...

14:20 Google's Pixel Call Screen feature has arrived in Canada as a beta

Starting today, Google Pixel users in Canada can opt in to test the Call Screen beta after the feature rolled out last December for US users. The Canadian rollout was first spotted by an Android Police tipster who received the beta invite.

Pixel Call Screen is a handy feature that users can initiate once they receive a call by hitting the āScreen call button.ā¯ From there, Google Assistant vets the caller and displays relevant information, like who's calling, why, and if the caller in question is likely a spam call.

In a nod to privacy concerns, the Google Canada blog details that Call Screen, āprocesses call details on-device, which means these experiences are fast, private to you, and use up less battery.ā¯ Regarding language support,...

14:20 Alphabet-made Chrome extension is designed to tune out toxic comments

Alphabet incubator Jigsaw has released an experimental Chrome extension that's meant to make our online browsing experience a little bit nicer by freeing it of toxic comments. The extension, called Tune, lets you choose to see varying levels of polite or aggressive comments. āZen modeā¯ turns off comments entirely, while āvolume levelsā¯ ranging from āquietā¯ to āblaringā¯ let through different amounts of toxicity (like attacks, insults, profanity, etc).

The open-source extension uses machine learning to determine how likely a comment is to be perceived as toxic. It uses Perspective, an API created in 2017 by Jigsaw and Google's Counter Abuse Technology team, and it's used by news organizations including The New York Times and The Guardian...

14:20 Police in India arrested ten students for playing PUBG

Police in India arrested ten college students after they were caught playing PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds on mobile. Gujarat, a western state in the country, banned the game last week over concerns that it's too addicting and violent. The students were released on bail later today.

The students were apparently āso engrossedā¯ in the game that they didn't look up and notice police approaching to arrest them, one cop told local media.

PUBG is still legal in the rest of India, but Gujarat singled out the game after parents and educators complained that the game was too violent and distracted students from studying. In February, a local minister in Gujarat described it as āa demon in every house,ā¯ according to The Times of India. And even as...

14:20 Looks like Google's thinking about a folding screen of its own

A recent patent application filed by Google suggests the search giant is experimenting with foldable display technology, similar to the panels seen on the Huawei Mate X and Samsung Galaxy Fold. The filing, spotted by Patently Mobile, describes a method for constructing an OLED panel that can be bent repeatedly and used in a āmodern computing device.ā¯

What's interesting here is that Google doesn't produce any displays of its own, and isn't the kind of company that manufacturers its own handsets. Like Apple with its iPhones, Google reportedly outsources manufacturing of the Pixel 3 to Foxconn, and both HTC and LG shared manufacturing duties on the Pixel 2 phones. That doesn't mean it's impossible for a product based on this patent to see...

14:20 The mass shooting in New Zealand was designed to spread on social media

The horrific shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, was designed from the start to get attention, leveraging social media to make sure as many people as possible would hear about the deaths and the hate underpinning them. Officials have reported a āsignificantā¯ number of people are dead from attacks at two mosques. Several people have been arrested so far. New Zealand police have told people to avoid mosques and told mosques to āshut their doors.ā¯

A 17-minute video that seemed to show the shooting was posted to Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and Instagram. A post on 8chan, a message board, included links to a manifesto and a Facebook page where the poster ā” an alleged shooter ā” said a live stream of the attack would be...

14:20 Everyone's favorite farming game is now on Android

Stardew Valley, the laid back farming RPG that was originally released for Windows PCs back in 2016, is now available on Android. Until now, the game's mobile version has been exclusive to iOS, after coming to iPhone and iPad last October. For those keeping track, the release means the game is now available on PC, Mac, Linux, PS4, Xbox One, Nintendo Switch, iOS, Android, and even the now-defunct PlayStation Vita.

Other than the control changes, Stardew Valley's mobile version is the same game as its console equivalents. The basic goal is to build a farm from scratch by building and investing in more and more expensive crops and livestock, but there's also an entire town's worth of characters to build relationships with, and dungeon...

14:20 Google adds translations to its iOS keyboard

Google's third-party iOS keyboard, Gboard, now supports Google Translate. The feature has been available in the Android version of the keyboard since 2017, and can be accessed either by tapping on the Google Translate icon in the suggestion bar, or via the Google button.

The update's patch notes say that āall the languages supported by Google Translateā¯ are available, which at the time of writing includes 103 languages. You can either select between these languages manually, or have the software attempt to detect it automatically.

Gboard's last major iOS update added haptic feedback for the keyboard; another feature that's not available with the built-in iOS keyboard. Meanwhile, its Android version was recently updated with support for b...

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Show 15 Fri 14:20 Bruce-Schneier [2]

14:20 DARPA Is Developing an Open-Source Voting System

This sounds like a good development:

...a new $10 million contract the Defense Department's Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) has launched to design and build a secure voting system that it hopes will be impervious to hacking.
The first-of-its-kind system will be designed by an Oregon-based firm called Galois, a longtime government contractor with experience in designing secure and verifiable systems. The system will use fully open source voting software, instead of the closed, proprietary software currently used in the vast majority of voting machines, which no one outside of voting machine testing labs can examine. More importantly, it will be built on secure open source hardware, made from special secure designs and techniques developed over the last year as part of a special program at DARPA. The voting system will also be designed to create fully verifiable and transparent results so that voters don't have to blindly trust that the machines and election officials delivered correct results.
But DARPA and Galois won't be asking people to blindly trust that their voting systems are secure -- as voting machine vendors currently do. Instead they'll be publishing source code for the software online and bring prototypes of the systems to the Def Con Voting Village this summer and next, so that hackers and researchers will be able to freely examine the systems themselves and conduct penetration tests to gauge their security. They'll also be working with a number of university teams over the next year to have them examine the systems in formal test environments.

14:20 Critical Flaw in Swiss Internet Voting System

Researchers have found a critical flaw in the Swiss Internet voting system. I was going to write an essay about how this demonstrates that Internet voting is a stupid idea and should never be attempted -- and that this system in particular should never be deployed, even if the found flaw is fixed -- but Cory Doctorow beat me to it:

The belief that companies can be trusted with this power defies all logic, but it persists. Someone found Swiss Post's embrace of the idea too odious to bear, and they leaked the source code that Swiss Post had shared under its nondisclosure terms, and then an international team of some of the world's top security experts (including some of our favorites, like Matthew Green) set about analyzing that code, and (as every security expert who doesn't work for an e-voting company has predicted since the beginning of time), they found an incredibly powerful bug that would allow a single untrusted party at Swiss Post to undetectably alter the election results.
And, as everyone who's ever advocated for the right of security researchers to speak in public without permission from the companies whose products they were assessing has predicted since the beginning of time, Swiss Post and Scytl downplayed the importance of this objectively very, very, very important bug. Swiss Post's position is that since the bug only allows elections to be stolen by Swiss Post employees, it's not a big deal, because Swiss Post employees wouldn't steal an election.
But when Swiss Post agreed to run the election, they promised an e-voting system based on "zero knowledge" proofs that would allow voters to trust the outcome of the election without having to trust Swiss Post. Swiss Post is now moving the goalposts, saying that it wouldn't be such a big deal if you had to trust Swiss Post implicitly to trust the outcome of the election.
You might be thinking, "Well, what is the big deal? If you don't trust the people administering an election, you can't trust the election's outcome, right?" Not really: we design election systems so that multiple, uncoordinated people all act as checks and balances on each other. To suborn a well-run election takes massive coordination at many polling- and counting-places, as well as independent scrutineers from different political parties, as well as outside observers, etc.

Read the whole thing. It's excellent.

More info.

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Show 15 Fri 13:43 Slashdot [1]

13:43 Apple Says Spotify Wants 'the Benefits of a Free App Without Being Free'
Apple has responded to Spotify's European Commission (EC) complaint. In a press release, the company said that Spotify "seeks to keep all the benefits of the App Store ecosystem ... without making any contributions to that marketplace." It added that the App Store has generated $120 billion for developers while offering users a secure platform, and that Spotify is seeking to side to sidestep the rules that every other app follows. From a report: "Spotify has every right to determine their own business model, but we feel an obligation to respond when Spotify wraps its financial motivations in misleading rhetoric about who we are," the company wrote. Spotify's main argument was that Apple's own music service, Apple Music, isn't subject to the same restrictions of its own app. "[A]pps should be able to compete fairly on the merits, and not based on who owns the App Store," wrote CEO Daniel Ek. "We should all be subject to the same fair set of rules and restrictions -- including Apple Music." It added that Apple had often stymied it on app updates and locked it out of Apple services, "such as Siri, HomePod and Apple Watch." Finally, it noted that Apple had blocked communication with its own customers on things like special offers. In response, Apple addressed each complaint point by point, while criticizing Spotify's treatment of musicians and artists. It said that it has approved nearly 200 app updates, and "the only time we have requested adjustments is when Spotify has tried to sidestep the same rules that every app follows."

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Show 15 Fri 13:01 ArsTechnica [3]

13:01 HBO's Elizabeth Holmes documentary tells a bloody good story of a bad con job
What film lacks in hard science, it makes up for with answers to how she pulled it off.

13:01 Everything you need to know before Apple's March 25 āit's show timeā¯ event
Apple's TV play has been a long time coming, but there might be new hardware, too.

13:01 Rocket Report: SLS delays prompt NASA action, Brazil considering launch site
"I think we as an agency need to stick to our commitment."
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Show 15 Fri 12:26 lwn.net-comments [14]

12:26 The creation of the io.latency block I/O controller

Well, sounds good. Many many moons ago, I used to handle throttled web server, specifically runs Apache, and I had encountered quite a few oom. Due to my lack of understanding and precautions, I failed to get over it. Looks like something going to assist people like me in a big way. Thank you and the entire fellas for the hard work.

12:26 Five new stable kernels

Are those mandatory configuration flags to get the kernel compiled successfully?? But, why it would get not set by default?? Does it require manual intervention to set it on compile time??

It might not sound rational ...but still ..I just did compile (No VM, all in the physical partition) for 6 different distros and all of them went well.

Anyway, probably I am not able to capture the point, honestly.

12:26 Fixing programmers

> Assuming this problem exists (cf next paragraph), adding a metasyntactical sort-of language extension requiring an explicit something in both cases doesn't solve it.
Actually it does.

12:26 Fixing programmers

> Case in point - who was the idiot that decided that in Windows "tab" should step between fields, and "return" should send the completed form back to the program. It took a MAHOUSIVE training effort to fix that programming blunder, and people STILL get it wrong on a regular basis.

That convention is older than Windows, possibly older than the Apple Mac GUI. The real idiot was the one who later decided to implement this functionality differently on marginal platforms like Acorn's RISC OS.

12:26 Fixing programmers

OK, so I can only speak for my personal experience here. When writing switch statements I sometimes forget the 'break;' at the end of one case. This happens by accident rather more frequently than the times when I deliberately want to use fallthrough. So for me, it saves time to have a warning or error from the compiler when implicit fallthrough is used -- it saves my time in headscratching and debugging when the code doesn't work, and may in some cases stop buggy code from being used in production systems. This has nothing to do with "disagreeing" with the C standard. There are plenty of other cases where the standard allows a particular construct but I prefer to get a warning, because it is empirically more likely to indicate a mistake on my part rather than a deliberate choice, and so the warning helps me be a more productive programmer. YMMV.

A language extension is a great idea. GCC effectively provides a GCC-specific extension to the C language here -- or perhaps you could call it a restriction, since the code allowed with -Wimplicit-fallthrough is a subset of that without the warning. Either way, it's useful in practice to many programmers, and Linux has started making use of it. Pushing it upstream to the ISO C standard would be better still of course.

12:26 Five new stable kernels

Your question is very confusing. Not sure exactly what you were asking but that config flag is not mandatory, presumably someone introduced a bug with this release.

12:26 Five new stable kernels

Most people will never see this error because 1) they are running on Intel processors, rather than AMD and 2) they have never tweaked their kernel config to disable options that aren't applicable to their use case. In particular, it involves going first to "General Setup", enabling "CONFIG_EXPERT", then going to to "Processor type and features", selecting "Supported processor vendors" and in that sub-menu disabling "Support Intel Processors".

12:26 Development quotes of the week

Regarding the SSPL - do the target users have any reasonable alternative to MongoDB? If not I could imagine it working for MongoDB unless someone thinks it worth their time to fork the pre-SSPL version. But that leads to the more interesting question is - is there anything that the MongoDB team can offer large users which would cost them more if they were to do it themselves in-house? Like prioritising certain features or fixes during development?

12:26 Fixing programmers

I think it's older than guis. Wasn't this already the default in things like db2 on the Apple 2? Or am I backprojecting... I cannot remember anything else than tab, shift-tab for moving between fields, enter for submitting and esc for cancelling.

12:26 Fixing programmers

> Pushing it upstream to the ISO C standard would be better still of course.
Or people could just switch to C++ where is this already standardized, along with dozens of other useful features.
https://en.cppreference.com/w/cpp/language/attributes/fal...

12:26 GNOME 3.32 released

Really? For me it was one of the reasons to switch to Wayland. I had different monitors of various sizes and resolutions (1 external 24", 1 external 27", and a 13" laptop display), and Wayland allowed me to scale individual monitors.

My main problem with Wayland for now is that if the GNOME Shell crashes, my whole session is gone. Under X.org, it just restarts the shell.

12:26 Cook: security things in Linux v5.0

> the language is not that complicated, mind you

I find that more than a little condescending.

Even so, it's not about complexity of the language per se. It's about the complexity of using the language in a way to avoid common mistakes. The problem is in the language, not the people.

> inventing one bazillion /*** OMFG !! Not like Pascal !!! ***/ pseudosyntactic tags?

Granted, I would have preferred __attribute__ ((fallthrough)) with some syntactic sugar macro. But this is one. What are the other (bazillion - 1)? Or even your top three pet peeves?

12:26 Python dictionary "addition" and "subtraction"

Doesn't that require the dict values to be integers? The proposal above only expects them to have + and - operators.

12:26 Fixing programmers

The Unix guys worked shoulder-to-shoulder with the C guys

Not just that. The Unix guys basically were the C guys.

I wonder what all the fuss is about. The C language has its problems but as far as I'm concerned break is not one of the bigger ones. It's more of an idiosyncrasy. To my mind, requiring explicit break statements lets you do usefulĀ¹ things that would be impossible if there was an implicit break in front of every case (think Duff's Device), and that, together with the fact that this style of switch is fairly straightforward and minimal to implement in a C compiler based on other stuff you already have, may have been enticing to the designers of the language.

Chances are that if you were designing the C programming language from scratch today you would do various things differently, probably including switch statements. But for better or worse, we're stuck with C - at least the C switch statement - as it has been for almost 50 years, so we must remember to put a break in all the appropriate places. If we can get the compiler to remind us to do that if we forgot, or else to tell it explicitly that we didn't want one, that can only be a good thing - ace programmers of rweikusat2's calibre will of course always do the Right Thingā„¢ from the get-go and should therefore not ever be annoyed by superfluous compiler warnings, but people like you and I (and incidentally like jschrod's, my beard is also fairly white by now) may appreciate an occasional heads-up.

Ā¹ Useful, that is, if you think of C as a high-level portable assembly language.
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Show 15 Fri 12:13 Slashdot [1]

12:13 Consumer Groups Want To Tax Facebook To Save Journalism
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: How to fund ethical journalism in the Facebook era is the multi-billion dollar question of the hour, and a technology-focused consumer group by the name of Free Press believes it has a solution. The group has unveiled a new proposal that suggests taxing all online targeted advertising, then using that money to fund the nation's struggling news empires, big and small. The program would apply a 2 percent tax on companies generating more than $200 million in annual targeted-ad revenues, then use that money to create a "Public Interest Media Endowment." The $2 billion collected annually would then be managed by the government itself, or an outside, existing institution such as the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Such a tax would most obviously apply to both social media giants, but also the giant telecom monopolies increasingly trying to elbow their way into the online ad space. This endowment, in turn, would help fund local journalism, investigative reporting, media literacy, noncommercial social networks, civic-technology projects, and "news and information for underserved communities," suggests the group. "The problem for journalism is that Facebook and Google control nearly 70 percent of this marketplace," Free Press Director Tim Karr told Motherboard via email. "And neither are news organizations. In fact, only one of the top ten digital advertisers in the U.S. (Verizon Media Group/Oath) is in the news business (HuffPost, Techcrunch), and then only partially so."

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Show 15 Fri 11:54 Engadget [3]

11:54 Facebook and YouTube rush to remove New Zealand shooting footage
Facebook and YouTube are working to remove "violent footage" of the New Zealand mass shootings. The gunman -- who killed 49 people and injured 20 in shootings at two mosques in the city of Christchurch -- appeared to livestream his attack to Facebook...

11:54 The Morning After: Here is the Tesla crossover
Hey, good morning! We'll cut to the chase: Here's the new Tesla crossover. It's a new kind of car for the company and will be on roads in 2020. Meanwhile, we've got cheaper NVIDIA GFX cards and a new, even longer number for pi.

11:54 Netflix promises to remove real-life rail tragedy clips from 'Bird Box'
Earlier this year, Netflix apologized to the people of Lac-Mégantic after it came to light that Bird Box used actual footage of the Canadian town's fatal rail disaster. At the time, it said it couldn't make changes to finished content anymore,...
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09:13 Huawei Says It Has a Backup OS In Case It's Cut Off From Android
Huawei has built its own operating system for phones, tablets and computers in case tensions between Huawei and the U.S. escalate even further than they already are. "The OS has been rumored for years, but Huawei confirmed its viability with the South China Morning Post, saying it could be used if the company were cut off from Android or Windows," reports Engadget. "It's seen as a last resort, but given the current discord between the U.S. and Huawei, it's not entirely surprising that the company has a plan B." From the report: Huawei began building the OS in 2012, after the U.S. banned Chinese telecom equipment maker ZTE from using American products and services. This was reportedly seen as a way to prepare for "worst-case scenarios." Now, with Huawei suing the U.S. government and the U.S. saying it might punish Germany if the country works with Huawei on its 5G networks, those worst-case scenarios might not be too far-fetched. At the moment, this doesn't change much. Android and Windows are still the company's first-choice. "We fully support our partners' operating systems -- we love them and our customers love them," a company spokesperson told South China Morning Post. Still, given the state of the U.S.-Huawei relationship, this contingency plan could be significant.

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