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Phoronix reports:It's been a turbulent year and 2020 is certainly ending interesting in the Linux/open-source space... If it wasn't odd enough seeing Sony providing a new official Linux driver for their PlayStation 5 DualSense controller for ending out the year, there is also a new Linux port to the Nintendo 64 game console... Yes, a brand new port to the game console that launched more than two decades ago. Open-source developer Lauri Kasanen who has contributed to Mesa and the Linux graphics stack took to developing a new Nintendo 64 port and announced it this Christmas day. This isn't the first time Linux has been ported to the N64 but prior attempts weren't aimed at potentially upstreaming it into the mainline Linux kernel... This fresh port to the N64 was pursued in part to help port emulators and frame-buffer or console games. And also, the announcement adds, "Most importantly, because I can."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

From a report:The thought of eating "astronaut food" brings to mind a kind of instant food that is far from "farm to table." However, recent experiments aboard the ISS are improving our understanding of how to bring the farm directly into space itself. Astronauts just ran a Veg-PONDS 02 experiment on the International Space Station. The experiment used food that was cultivated in space. Potential cultivations could include tomatoes or other plants, NASA says. On November 30th, Kate Rubins took about 6 packs of radishes from the lab and stored them in a refrigerated unit after gathering them up — "freshly grown in space. The process opens new doors for microgravity food processing to enable future long-term moon and Mars missions. The radish sprouts will be sent back to Earth early next year on SpaceX's 22nd Commercial Resupply Services mission, NASA announced... "There comes a point where you have longer and longer duration missions, and you reach a cost-benefit point where it makes sense to grow your own food," said chief scientist of NASA's Utilization and Life Sciences Office at the Kennedy Space Center Howard Levine in a statement. The APH Chamber uses LED lights to improve plant growth, while an automated control system provides water to the plant. 180 sensors track plant growth and monitoring the temperature, humidity and carbon dioxide levels.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

schwit1 quotes Intelligent Living: Plenty is an ag-tech startup in San Francisco, co-founded by Nate Storey, that is reinventing farms and farming. Storey, who is also the company's chief science officer, says the future of farms is vertical and indoors because that way, the food can grow anywhere in the world, year-round; and the future of farms employ robots and AI to continually improve the quality of growth for fruits, vegetables, and herbs. Plenty does all these things and uses 95% less water and 99% less land because of it. Plenty's climate-controlled indoor farm has rows of plants growing vertically, hung from the ceiling. There are sun-mimicking LED lights shining on them, robots that move them around, and artificial intelligence (AI) managing all the variables of water, temperature, and light, and continually learning and optimizing how to grow bigger, faster, better crops. These futuristic features ensure every plant grows perfectly year-round. The conditions are so good that the farm produces 400 times more food per acre than an outdoor flat farm. Another perk of vertical farming is locally produced food. The fruits and vegetables aren't grown 1,000 miles away or more from a city; instead, at a warehouse nearby. Meaning, many transportation miles are eliminated, which is useful for reducing millions of tons of yearly CO2 emissions and prices for consumers. Imported fruits and vegetables are more expensive, so society's most impoverished are at an extreme nutritional disadvantage. Vertical farms could solve this problem.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

This week MSNBC published an opinion piece from a researcher on China (who works on internet censorship and freedom of expression issues) from the advocacy group Human Rights Watch. It examines specific exchanges between a China-based Zoom executive and employees at the company's California headquarters (taken from the 47-page complaint filed by America's Justice Department) showing how Zoom disrupted video meetings commemorating the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square crackdown:It was a fascinating read, not least because few global tech companies that do business in China have ever made public the details of their communications with Chinese authorities on censorship issues, despite repeated calls to do so from human rights organizations and United Nations experts. What the complaint reveals is Beijing's aggressive pursuit of global censorship of topics deemed sensitive or critical of Beijing, and Zoom's failure to adequately protect its users' rights to free expression and privacy... Beijing has long leveraged market access to compel foreign tech companies to meet its censorship demands, whether in China or abroad. Apple has removed hundreds of virtual private network (VPN) apps from China's App Store. In 2019, it also removed a mapping app widely used by pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong from the App Store. LinkedIn blocked content critical of Chinese authorities for users in China. From the complaint, one can see Zoom's fear that if it didn't terminate meetings or suspend accounts upon request, it risked having its China operation shut down at any time, which loomed large in all of its decisions. Companies understandably want access to China's huge market, but they also have a responsibility to respect human rights under the United Nations Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights. Zoom said publicly that it is "dedicated to the free and open exchange of ideas," but when Jin repeatedly framed speech critical of the Chinese government as something that could "do bad things" or "illegal activities," and demanded they be censored, he met no resistance or got any questions from his colleagues at headquarters. The article also blames Jin for making false claims to a Zoom colleague that a private Tiananmen commemoration meeting was supporting terrorism/inciting violence, after which "the colleague quickly terminated the meeting and suspended the host account without any investigation into the matter." And it alleges that Jin also forwarded complaints from operatives who'd intentionally joined public meetings with offending content so those meetings could then be reported and shut down, while "a U.S.-based Zoom employee, knowing they were schemes, facilitated it..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Engadget reports:Electrek notes that Tesla has released its promised holiday update, and the centerpiece appears to be a Boombox mode that pumps media outside as long as you have a recent-enough EV with a pedestrian speaker system, like later Model 3 production runs... Other updates include a smarter Scheduled Departure that preconditions the battery and cabin without plugging in, larger driving visualizations (helpful for Autopilot) and at-a-glance views of the number of open stalls at Superchargers. Electrek's report highlights some additional features:Earlier this week, we reported that it included 3 new in-car video games, but we now have the full release notes with all the details... "You can also customize the sound that your car makes when you press the horn, drive the car or when your car is moving with Summon. Select an option from the dropdown menu or insert your own USB device and save up to five custom sounds."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"Edmund M. Clarke, the FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science Emeritus at Carnegie Mellon University, has died of Covid-19," writes Slashdot reader McGruber. From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:Professor Clarke was best known for his work in model checking, an automated method for detecting design errors in computer hardware and software. CMU president Farnam Jahanian said the world had "lost a giant in computer science" with Mr. Clarke's death. "Ed's pioneering work in model checking applied formal computational methods to the ultimate challenge: computers checking their own correctness," Mr. Jahanian said in a statement. "As systems become ever more complex, we are just beginning to see the wide-reaching and long-term benefits of Ed's insights, which will continue to inspire researchers and practitioners for years to come." In the early 1980s, Mr. Clarke and his Harvard University graduate student, E. Allen Emerson — as well as Joseph Sifakis of the University of Grenoble, who was working separately — developed model checking, which has helped to improve the reliability of complex computer chips, systems and networks. For their work, the Association for Computing Machinery gave the three scientists the prestigious A.M. Turing Award — computer science's Nobel Prize — in 2007. Mr. Clark's citation on the Turing Award website said Microsoft and Intel and other companies use model checking to verify designs for computer networks and software. "It is becoming particularly important in the verification of software designed for recent generations of integrated circuits, which feature multiple processors running simultaneously," the citation page said. "Model checking has substantially improved the reliability and safety of the systems upon which modern life depends."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

In October, Edward Snowden was granted permanent residency in Russia. A new web page by the EFF applauds his past activities as a U.S. whistleblower. "His revelations about secret surveillance programs opened the world's eyes to a new level of government misconduct, and reinvigorated EFF's continuing work in the courts and with lawmakers to end unlawful mass spying." And then they shared this fund-raising pitch written by Edward Snowden: Seven years ago I did something that would change my life and alter the world's relationship to surveillance forever. When journalists revealed the truth about state deception and illegal conduct against citizens, it was human rights and civil liberties groups like EFF — backed by people around the world just like you — that seized the opportunity to hold authority to account. Surveillance quiets resistance and takes away our choices. It robs us of private space, eroding our dignity and the things that make us human. When you're secure from the spectre of judgement, you have room to think, to feel, and to make mistakes as your authentic self. That's where you test your notions of what's right. That's when you question the things that are wrong. By sounding the alarm and shining a light on mass surveillance, we force governments around the world to confront their wrongdoing. Slowly, but surely, grassroots work is changing the future. Laws like the USA Freedom Act have just begun to rein in excesses of government surveillance. Network operators and engineers are triumphantly "encrypting all the things" to harden the Internet against spying. Policymakers began holding digital privacy up to the light of human rights law. And we're all beginning to understand the power of our voices online. This is how we can fix a broken system. But it only works with your help. For 30 years, EFF members have joined forces to ensure that technology supports freedom, justice, and innovation for all people. It takes unique expertise in the courts, with policymakers, and on technology to fight digital authoritarianism, and thankfully EFF brings all of those skills to the fight. EFF relies on participation from you to keep pushing the digital rights movement forward. Each of us plays a crucial role in advancing democracy for ourselves, our neighbors, and our children. I hope you'll answer the call by joining EFF to build a better digital future together. Sincerely, Edward SnowdenRead more of this story at Slashdot.

Mashable reports:The Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency showed off a collection of samples from the asteroid Ryugu on Thursday following the return of the Hayabusa2 probe. The black, gravelly samples from Ryugu contain a whole bunch of small chips collected from the asteroid's subsurface... Normally, space rocks like these are collected after they enter Earth's atmosphere at surface-scorching speeds. These samples from Ryugu are the first ever that can be examined without being damaged during entry, which is key to getting a clear look at and better understanding these celestial rocks, according to a report from NPR.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot summarizes an article from LiveScience: There's a giant asteroid somewhere out in the solar system, and it hurled a big rock at Earth. The evidence for this mystery space rock comes from a diamond-studded meteor that exploded over Sudan in 2008.NASA had spotted the 9-ton (8,200 kilograms), 13-foot (4 meters) meteor heading toward the planet well before impact, and researchers showed up in the Sudanese desert to collect an unusually rich haul of remains. Now, a new study of one of those meteorites suggests that the meteor may have broken off of a giant asteroid — one more or less the size of the dwarf planet Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt — that formed in the presence of water under intermediate temperatures and pressures. The mineral makeup of these space rocks offers clues about the "parent asteroid" that birthed a given meteor, researchers said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A Utah newstation interviewed the men claiming responsibility for removing the original monolith in Utah, who reveal where, why, and how they took it:Homer Manson described how they brought tools, but in the end they were able to simply push the monolith over and it fell on the ground... "We actually passed another crew on the way out, they were going in to destroy it," Any Lewis recounted... "That's exactly what we didn't want to happen, is somebody of that mentality to get a hold of it and completely lose the message behind it," Sylvan Christensen relayed. The monolith was in pieces, but the three men talked about how they rebuilt it. They described how it took a few weeks between consulting with lawyers and speaking with the BLM [America's federal-lands administrating Bureau of Land Management], to bring the monument back to the agency. Lewis posted a video on his Instagram, showing the monolith standing tall in a yard. Just this last Friday [the 18th], they said they drove the monument on a trailer with a tarp to conceal it to deliver it to the BLM. Lewis explained that they donated it back to the BLM in good faith, to help with the investigation. It's their understanding, they indicated, that the monolith will end up on display again. "That's kind of the discussion," Christensen said. "It's ultimately up to the BLM as to where they put it, but that was kind of the gentleman's agreement is that it would get put at Red Butte Garden." If and when this international monolith of mystery ends up back in the public eye — perhaps, according to the guys, at Red Butte Garden in Salt Lake City — they explained how they want it to spark discussion about art on public lands, and responsible land use. Lewis said he wants to use this as a "togetherness moment," where people can come together to make a proposal to the BLM and have a public decision on if there should be a place where people can place art on public lands, and figure out if that's a proper use of art space. He said it would be nice to use the Utah Monolith to present this as a positive story, and show people how to display this art... The BLM said it is still investigating the illegal installation along with the San Juan County Sheriff's Office. The BLM "doesn't want to set a precedent that people can just go out onto public lands and take things away," according to a report from Outside magazine. But Sylvan Christensen points out to the magazine that "We didn't destroy the art. We kind of changed its direction and made it a bigger thing that surrounds environmental awareness and ethical land recreation."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

FrankOVD shares this report from CNET:The people were really into the GMC Hummer EV when the brand finally ripped the cloak off the electric pickup truck earlier this year. So much so that the Hummer EV Edition 1 trim sold out in 10 minutes. Now, GMC is reportedly thinking about building more of them due to overwhelming response. According to dealer sources that spoke to the Detroit Free Press in a report last Tuesday, the brand told its dealer body it could make more of the Edition 1 trucks available... Prices for the Edition 1 trim start at a whopping $112,595 including destination, which makes it the most expensive GM vehicle the automaker sells. Going down the trim lineup, the EV3X [in 2022] will start at $99,995, the EV2X [in 2023] will ring in at $89,995 and the base model [in 2024] will launch with a $79,995 price tag. Performance and capability notch a rung down with each trim, but that's to be expected. Those that pony up six figures for the Edition 1 will be the owners of a 1,000-horsepower supertruck of sorts with an estimated range of 350 miles to a single charge. The Detroit Free Press notes the Hummer 1 "already has 10,000 pre-orders" — and that GMC "promises to have more EVs in the lineup beyond the Hummer pickup, including a Hummer SUV version that GM will officially reveal early next year..."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Basecamp's David Heinemeier Hansson (the creator of Ruby on Rails) announced on Twitter this week that "all the tricks and tooling we used to build the front-end for Hey.com" have now been released as Hotwire (also known as New Magic), "an alternative approach to building modern web applications without using much JavaScript by sending HTML instead of JSON over the wire."This includes our brand-new Turbo framework...a set of complimentary techniques for speeding up page changes and form submissions, dividing complex pages into components, and stream partial page updates over WebSocket. All without writing any JavaScript at all... Hotwire's web page argues HTML over the wire "makes for fast first-load pages, keeps template rendering on the server, and allows for a simpler, more productive development experience in any programming language, without sacrificing any of the speed or responsiveness associated with a traditional single-page application." On Twitter, Hansson called it "a refinement of years of research, experimentation, and SHIPPING HTML AT THE CENTER. It's been a revelation for us. Both for the web, and for our native apps." He shared a 13-minute video demonstration — then added a thoughtful comment about the state of web development today. "Really curious to continue pushing the ECMAScript 6 + ES Modules approach in the browser. This isn't strictly related to Hotwire, but it's part of deconstructing the overly complicated mess we've all made of frontend development. One brick at the time!"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Electrek reports that 2021 will bring one of Tesla's fast-charging Supercharger to a state that's never had one before:Lanai Island, a former pineapple plantation that was almost entirely (98%) purchased by Oracle founder and Tesla board member Larry Ellison for $300 million in 2012, is the first in Hawaii to see a Supercharger permit filed by Tesla... The 145-square-mile island doesn't have any traffic lights, only 30ish miles of paved roads and the 3,400 person population lives almost exclusively in the small Lana'i City. This would seem to indicate that the chargers would be of the Urban Supercharger variety and in likely service of Larry Ellison's Four Seasons Hotels, which rely on Model X vehicles to shuttle guests to and from the airport and around the island's luxury amenities. Ellison plans to convert the island's power from diesel to solar/battery, and obviously Tesla's expertise here is likely to be tapped... Hawaii in general has been massively moving from its diesel generating past to solar power and plans to be 100% renewable before 2040.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Guardian reports:The mass die-off of thousands of songbirds in south-western U.S. was caused by long-term starvation, made worse by unseasonably cold weather probably linked to the climate crisis, scientists have said. Flycatchers, swallows and warblers were among the migratory birds "falling out of the sky" in September, with carcasses found in New Mexico, Colorado, Texas, Arizona and Nebraska. A USGS National Wildlife Health Center necropsy has found 80% of specimens showed typical signs of starvation... The remaining 20% were not in good enough condition to carry out proper tests. Nearly 10,000 dead birds were reported to the wildlife mortality database by citizens, and previous estimates suggest hundreds of thousands may have died... "It looks like the immediate cause of death in these birds was emaciation as a result of starvation," said Jonathan Sleeman, director of the USGS National Wildlife Health Center in Madison, Wisconsin, which received 170 bird carcasses and did necropsies on 40 of them. "It's really hard to attribute direct causation, but given the close correlation of the weather event with the death of these birds, we think that either the weather event forced these birds to migrate prior to being ready, or maybe impacted their access to food sources during their migration...." Most deaths happened around 9 and 10 September during a bout of cold weather that probably meant food was particularly scarce...Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"If you just received a new iPhone 12, Apple Watch or iPad, you might not have gotten immediate satisfaction — Apple was having some iCloud issues," reports CNET:The issue started early on Christmas Day, according to the iCloud account and sign-in entry on Apple's system status page. More than a day later, as of late morning PT Saturday, the Apple system status page indicated that the issue with the storage service remained "ongoing." But by 2 p.m. PT Saturday, the iCloud issue was marked "resolved." No specifics were given about how widespread the problems might have been, only that "some users were affected." The company also noted issues with Apple ID sign-in.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Since 1955 the U.S./Canadian operation that monitors North American airspace with radars and satellite to maintain air sovereignty has also, at Christmas time, been tracking Santa. And this year their trackers received additional support from the U.S. Space Command, a joint-military command drawing its units from five military service branches (including the U.S. Space Force). That command "launched a new reindeer tracker to pinpoint the exact location of Santa's sleigh at any given time during the night," according to NPR's Morning Edition, with General James Dickinson telling them the equipment's official name: Rudolph Infrared Tracking System. "We made some upgrades this year." And that was just the beginning, reports The Hill:Santa knows astronauts need presents, too, and made his first known visit to the International Space Station to deliver them this year. The North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), which tracks Santa's Christmas Eve journey every year, depicted in a tweet Santa arriving at the International Space Station on Christmas Eve... The Federal Aviation Administration cleared Santa for the flight to space on Wednesday, providing him "for the first time ever" with a special commercial space license. The astronauts aboard the ISS recorded a special Christmas video this year. (And a new article in Business Insider expores how astronauts on the space station have celebrated Christmas over the years.) And NORAD is even maintaining a special web site at NORADSanta.org which not only let visitors track Santa, but through December 31st will also offer an arcade with Christmas-themed videogames, a selection of music by the U.S. Air Force Academy Band, and even a gift shop where you can buy "Santa and NORAD gear," including NORAD hoodies and tote bags. Though a pop-up window warns visitors that "Clicking through to this next website does not constitute an official endorsement or approval by the United States Department of Defense or NORAD of any product or service."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times reports on results from a rigorous five-year study in Trondheim, Norway that raises the question: If you increase your heart rate, will your life span follow?The study, one of the largest and longest-term experimental examinations to date of exercise and mortality, shows that older men and women who exercise in almost any fashion are relatively unlikely to die prematurely. But if some of that exercise is intense, the study also finds, the risk of early mortality declines even more, and the quality of people's lives climbs... Their first step was to invite every septuagenarian in Trondheim to participate... More than 1,500 of the Norwegian men and women accepted... All agreed to start and continue to exercise more regularly during the upcoming five years... The first group, as a control, agreed to follow standard activity guidelines and walk or otherwise remain in motion for half an hour most days. (The scientists did not feel they could ethically ask their control group to be sedentary for five years.) Another group began exercising moderately for longer sessions of 50 minutes twice a week. And the third group started a program of twice-weekly high-intensity interval training, or HIIT, during which they cycled or jogged at a strenuous pace for four minutes, followed by four minutes of rest, with that sequence repeated four times... During that time, the scientists noted that quite a few of the participants in the control had dabbled with interval-training classes at local gyms, on their own initiative and apparently for fun... After five years, the researchers checked death registries and found that about 4.6 per cent of all of the original volunteers had passed away during the study, a lower number than in the wider Norwegian population of 70-year-olds, indicating these active older people were, on the whole, living longer than others of their age. But they also found interesting, if slight, distinctions between the groups. The men and women in the high-intensity-intervals group were about 2 per cent less likely to have died than those in the control group, and 3 per cent less likely to die than anyone in the longer, moderate-exercise group. People in the moderate group were, in fact, more likely to have passed away than people in the control group. The men and women in the interval group also were more fit now and reported greater gains in their quality of life than the other volunteers.... Dorthe Stensvold, a researcher at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology who led the new study, believes the study's message can be broadly applicable to almost all of us.. "Adding life to years, not only years to life, is an important aspect of healthy ageing, and the higher fitness and health-related quality of life from high-intensity interval training in this study is an important finding."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

With 25 days until Joe Biden becomes America's next president, Politico writes that throughout the US government, "From lawmakers on Capitol Hill to antitrust enforcers at the Federal Trade Commission, Washington is training its sights on the world's largest social network like never before."Biden's antitrust enforcers will take ownership of a lawsuit the FTC filed this month threatening to dismantle the sprawling company. And his staff will negotiate legislative proposals with congressional leaders who have hammered Facebook for mishandling its users' personal data and spreading hate speech and dangerous falsehoods. It's a historic moment of legislative and regulatory upheaval with profound consequences for Facebook and its Silicon Valley brethren. The Trump era opened the floodgates for Facebook detractors, who accused the world's largest social network of silencing conservatives on one side, and abetting disinformation about the U.S. election on the other. Now, under Biden, the company's critics see a prime opportunity to finally tame Facebook — for the sake of election integrity, privacy and fair play in the digital era... "It's just not a great business strategy to piss off the incoming president," said Sally Hubbard, the director of enforcement strategy at the Open Markets Institute, which has advocated for antitrust enforcement against Facebook, Google and other big tech firms. She and other tech critics are putting pressure on Biden to take a different approach than past administrations, and they already have several allies advising the transition as it prepares to take over next month... The now-president-elect has called for the internet industry's sacred legal liability protections to be revoked, specifically citing Facebook's handling of election-related misinformation. He turned heads in January when he said bluntly, "I've never been a fan of Facebook," a company whose digital reach helped propel the Obama-Biden ticket to the White House in past elections... "[I]t's certainly possible that skepticism about Facebook from the Biden team could result in a greater likelihood of antitrust scrutiny by the Justice Department and the FTC," said Matt Perault, a former Facebook public policy director who now leads Duke University's Center on Science and Technology Policy. "And it's possible that a Biden White House could use their bully pulpit to try to force changes that they can't achieve through executive action or legislation...." Republicans, too, have gripes about Facebook's handling of political speech, with some saying its lack of meaningful competition gives it the leverage to censor users' political views. After the FTC and state attorneys general announced their Facebook lawsuits this month, lawmakers from both sides of the aisle expressed support... But bipartisan frustration with tech has yet to mean lawmakers will set aside partisan differences. Both sides have been frustrated with how Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube police political content, for instance, but Democrats want more moderation and Republicans have called for less... Even with such divisions, the general animosity toward Facebook could help the anti-Facebook advocates to gain traction with the new administration. And they're pushing their agenda hard ahead of the inauguration.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As 2020 came to a close, the city of Helsinki, Finland tried offering "City as a Service" to attract new workers to its growing technology hub. "We will provide selected applicants with a free 90-day relocation package for the entire family," explained the web site for the program (which is now no longer accepting applications). "We'll arrange your housing, daycare, schooling, everything you need — the real deal, just like a Finn." They'd pick you up at the airport, and then offer orientation services, "relocation consultation," and regular get-togethers, even offering in-person introductions to Helsinki-area technology hubs and business networks. (And of course, they'd arrange all the necessary documentation for a 90-day stay and permanent residency applications.) "Are you a 90 Day Finn...?" asked the site. "This is your call for a 90-day audition in Helsinki, featuring an unseen level of work-life balance!" So what happened? The program "received 5,300 applications from across the world in just a month," reports the India Times, citing an article in the Guardian:The report adds that about 30 per cent of the applications came from the US and Canada. The remaining applications, 'evenly spread,' included 50 Britons and one application from Vanuatu. Johanna Huurre from Helsinki Business Hub, an agency that came up with the campaign, told The Guardian, "800 were entrepreneurs seeking to launch startups, 60 were investors, and the remainder were job hunting." "It's been a great campaign to showcase Finland," said Joonas Halla, of Business Finland. "What's good is the practical approach. The tech sector here is really thriving — by one estimate it should create 50,000 new jobs in 2021. We need the talent."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The New York Times reports:Ever since the race to develop a coronavirus vaccine began last spring, upbeat announcements were stalked by ominous polls: No matter how encouraging the news, growing numbers of people said they would refuse to get the shot... But over the past few weeks, as the vaccine went from a hypothetical to a reality, something happened. Fresh surveys show attitudes shifting and a clear majority of Americans now eager to get vaccinated. In polls by Gallup, the Kaiser Family Foundation and the Pew Research Center, the portion of people saying they are now likely or certain to take the vaccine has grown from about 50 per cent this summer to more than 60 per cent, and in one poll 73 per cent — a figure that approaches what some public health experts say would be sufficient for herd immunity... [T]he attitude improvement is striking. A similar shift on another heated pandemic issue was reflected in a different Kaiser poll this month. It found that nearly 75 per cent of Americans are now wearing masks when they leave their homes. The change reflects a constellation of recent events: the uncoupling of the vaccine from Election Day; clinical trial results showing about 95 per cent efficacy and relatively modest side effects for the vaccines made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna; and the alarming surge in new coronavirus infections and deaths... The lure of the vaccines' modest quantities also can't be underestimated as a driver of desire, somewhat like the must-have frenzy generated by a limited-edition Christmas gift, according to public opinion experts... A barrage of feel-good media coverage, including rapt attention given to leading scientists and politicians when they get jabbed and joyous scrums surrounding local health care workers who become the first to be vaccinated, has amplified the excitement, public opinion experts say.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Long-term Slashdot reader couchslug believes that "Howls of anguish from betrayed CentOS 8 users highlight the value of its long support cycles..." Earlier this month it was announced that at the end of 2021, the community-supported rebuild of Red Hat Enterprise Linux, CentOS 8, "will no longer be maintained," though CentOS 7 "will stick around in a supported maintenance state until 2024." This leads Slashdot reader couchslug to an interesting question. "Should competitors like Ubuntu and SUSE offer truly long-term-support versions to seize that (obviously large and thus important to widespread adoption) user base?"As distros become more refined, how important are changes vs. stability for users running tens, thousands and hundreds of thousands of servers, or who just want stability and security over change for its own sake...? Why do you think distro leadership are so eager for distro life cycles? Boredom, progress or what mix of both? What sayeth the hive mind and what distros do you use to achieve your goals? The original submission argues that "Distro-hopping is fun but people with work to do and a fixed task set have different needs." But what do Slashdot's readers thinks? Leave your own thoughts in the comments. And how long do you think a vendor should support a distro?Read more of this story at Slashdot.

America's Federal Aviation Agency signed an agreement with the state of Kansas's department of transportation to establish a 770-nautical mile Kansas Supersonic Transportation Corridor for testing aircraft up to Mach 3, reports Aviation International News:The agreement would provide a critical testing site for the emerging group of supersonic aircraft as civil supersonic flight remains banned over land. Flight testing for models such as Aerion's AS2 and Boom's Overture is expected this decade, while NASA noise trials with the Lockheed Martin X-59 demonstrator are anticipated by 2024. "This year marks 73 years since Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier, and with this supersonic flight corridor Kansas will have a unique role in the next generation of supersonic transportation," said Sen. Jerry Moran (R-Kansas) in the announcement of the agreement... The General Aviation Manufacturers Association (GAMA) lauded the establishment of the corridor, saying it will help in the "re-birth" of civil supersonic travel. "The Kansas Supersonic Transportation Corridor will assist in the assessment of sound mitigating structural and engine designs as well as state of the art atmospheric acoustic modeling that eliminates the sonic boom and shapes the noise signature of an aircraft traveling faster than the speed of sound to a very low volume rumble," said GAMA president and CEO Pete Bunce. "The validation of these technological breakthroughs through the use of sophisticated ground acoustic and telemetry sensors will provide the necessary data to assist global regulators and policymakers in modernizing supersonic flight policies." NASA plans to use the Lockheed Martin X-59 demonstrator to test low-boom noise effects over various populations. "I'm really excited about quiet supersonic technology and its ability to be transformative for flight and our economy," said NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine. Aerion, meanwhile, plans to test "Boom Cruise" technology that is designed to keep the sonic boom from reaching the ground with plans to begin flight trials in 2025, while Boom is looking at low boom technologies for its commercial airliner Overture.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Reuters notes the "miraculous speed" of mRNA vaccines, while also calling it "a glimpse of what's possible if it can be applied post-pandemic to treat cancer or rare diseases." The vaccine market alone is worth about $35 billion each year, and investors apparently believe mRNA companies will capture around two-third of that, leading market researcher Bernstein to evalaute the combined worth of mRNA companies at nearly $180 billion. The technology is the closest thing yet to making medicine digital. MRNA vaccines essentially inject genetic code that instructs a recipients' cells to construct a part of the virus. The body recognizes the produced protein as foreign and mounts a future immune response when exposed. Moderna and BioNTech's vaccines show the technology works fast. Vaccines typically take a decade to develop. They took less than a year... The speed of mRNA therapeutics is a big advantage. For example, flu vaccines only reduce the risk of illness by up to 60% because makers must guess which strains will be prevalent each season. Sometimes they're wrong. Shaving months off means better guesses, and higher efficacy. The bigger opportunity comes from the validation of the mRNA "platform". Instructing cells to produce desired proteins could lead to multiple advances. Perhaps they can instruct the body to more vigorously attack cancerous cells or repair damaged tissue. Producing missing proteins might fight inherited diseases... Success against Covid-19 means these companies will be flush with cash from sales and attract partnerships and scientific talent. That should make 2021 a watershed.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CNN reports:US officials and private sector experts investigating the massive data breach that has rocked Washington increasingly believe the attackers were ultimately discovered because they took a more aggressive "calculated risk" that led to a possible "unforced error" as they tried to expand their access within the network they had penetrated months earlier without detection, according to a US official and two sources familiar with the situation... FireEye was tipped off to the hackers' presence when they attempt to move laterally within the firm's network, according to the sources, a move that suggested the hackers were targeting sensitive data beyond emails addresses or business records. Whether that exposure was the result of a mistake by the attackers or because they took a calculated risk remains unclear, the sources said. "At some point, you have to risk some level of exposure when you're going laterally to get after the things that you really want to get. And you're going to take calculated risks as an attacker," one source familiar with the investigation said... Now, the hackers are attempting to salvage what access they can as the US government and private sector are "burning it all down," sources said, referring to their complete overhaul of networks, which will force the attackers to find new ways of getting the information they seek. Meanwhile, US officials continue to grapple with the fallout and assess just how successful the operation was, the US official said, noting that it is clear the nation-state responsible invested significant time and resources into the effort. While the scope of the hacking campaign remains unclear, government agencies that have disclosed they were impacted have said there is no evidence to date that classified data was compromised. But the way the hackers were discovered suggests the operation was intended to steal sensitive information beyond what was available on unclassified networks and sought to establish long-standing access to various targeted networks, the sources said. The fact that FireEye — not the federal government — discovered the breach has also raised questions about why the attack went undetected at US government agencies. The article also notes FireEye's acknowledgement that the breach "occurred when the hackers, who already had an employee's credentials, used those to register their own device to FireEye's multi-factor authentication system so they could receive the employee's unique access codes."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Ananda Sharma, founder of the app Gyroscope, describes to a local TV station the monolith he discovered during a Christmas-morning jog under a candy-cane red sunrise. "I think I smelled it before I saw it..." He spotted a double rainbow and wanted to peek at that too. At first, he thought the monolith was "a big post," but as he got closer, he smelled the gingerbread scent wafting toward him. The monolith is standing in panels separated by icing... "It made me smile. SFGate spoke to another eye-witness:Alexis Gallagher also happened upon the sweet monolith at about 8:25 a.m. Friday morning, confirming it was made of gingerbread, frosting and gumdrops... "I had a closer look and it looks like there's a plywood skeleton underneath, but I try not to dwell on such mundane realities." Gallagher added that he had to "stop my dog from nibbling on it..." When reached for an official comment, the San Francisco Recreation and Parks Department General Manager told the TV news reporter that the gingerbread monolith "Looks like a great spot to get baked." Then he added more sternly that "we will leave it up until the cookie crumbles." But their article notes it raises several questions for Bay Area residents:Did Christmas-happy aliens beam it down from above? Did some rogue artificial intelligence escape a nearby Google campus, and, driven mad by our plethora of Christmas music...design an art piece to brighten our days? And just how expensive is it to rent a highrise apartment within its crumbly, ginger-pungent walls...? SFGate's report ends with Ananda Sharma noting that it began raining in San Francisco at 11:30 a.m., adding, "not sure what happens to gingerbread in the rain but it probably isn't good."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

"A fake Queen Elizabeth danced across TV screens on Christmas as part of a 'deepfake' speech aired by a British broadcaster," reports CNN:The broadcaster said the video was supposed to offer "a stark warning about the advanced technology that is enabling the proliferation of misinformation and fake news in a digital age." Channel 4 annually accompanies the Queen's traditional speech with an "alternative Christmas message." This message has been aired since 1993. It has long attracted controversy. Previous people to have delivered the alternative speech include Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former president of Iran. Other notable invitees include US whistleblower Edward Snowden, Jesse Jackson and the children who survived the 2017 Grenfell Tower fire. But the 2020 iteration is rather different. This year Channel 4 hired VFX studio Framestore to create a fake Queen Elizabeth, who spoke candidly about personal matters. The video was manipulated using artificial intelligence technology. The deepfake Queen discusses Prince Harry and Meghan's move to North America, saying: "There are few things more hurtful than someone telling you they prefer the company of Canadians." The fake Queen also performed a Tik Tok dance routine... In her real Christmas message, the Queen commended frontline workers for their efforts during the pandemic and offered condolences to families who were unable to celebrate together due to coronavirus-related restrictions. Channel 4 described their video as a "comedic parody," saying it raised an important question. "Is what we see and hear always as it seems?"Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Weighing up to 380,000 pounds and stretching some 100 feet long, the blue whale -- the largest creature to have ever lived on Earth -- might at first seem difficult for human eyes and ears to miss. But a previously unknown population of the leviathans has long been lurking in the Indian Ocean, leaving scientists none the wiser, new research suggests. From a report: The covert cadre of whales, described in a paper published last week in the journal Endangered Species Research, has its own signature anthem: a slow, bellowing ballad that's distinct from any other whale song ever described. It joins only a dozen or so other blue whale songs that have been documented, each the calling card of a unique population. "It's like hearing different songs within a genre -- Stevie Ray Vaughan versus B. B. King," said Salvatore Cerchio, a marine mammal biologist at the African Aquatic Conservation Fund in Massachusetts and the study's lead author. "It's all blues, but you know the different styles." The find is "a great reminder that our oceans are still this very unexplored place," said Asha de Vos, a marine biologist who has studied blue whales in the Indian Ocean but was not involved in the new study. Dr. Cerchio and his colleagues first tuned into the whales' newfound song while in scientific pursuit of a pod of Omura's whales off the coast of Madagascar several years ago. After hearing the rumblings of blue whales via a recorder planted on the coastal shelf, the researchers decided to drop their instruments into deeper water in the hopes of eavesdropping further. A number of blue whale populations, each with its own characteristic croon, have long been known to visit this pocket of the Indian Ocean, Dr. Cerchio said. But one of the songs that crackled through the team's Madagascar recordings was unlike any the researchers had heard.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

IBM has agreed to pay $24.25 million to resolve a pair of investigations by the Federal Communications Commission(FCC) over subsidies awarded to connect schools and libraries to broadband. From a report: IBM's payment will resolve two FCC investigations that have spanned nearly 15 years over its alleged violations of "E-Rate" program rules in connection with New York City and El Paso school districts. Under the agreement, IBM agreed to return $24.25 million to the Universal Service Fund that funds the E-Rate program, but did not admit wrongdoing. The FCC said its investigations found IBM had not satisfied the competitive bidding rules in New York for 2005-2008 and provided ineligible equipment and services in El Paso for 2001. IBM said in a statement it believed it "acted appropriately in its support of the E-rate program, but in the interest of amicably resolving a longstanding matter we are pleased to have reached this settlement." IBM added it had provided internet connectivity to thousands of U.S. schools and libraries and millions of American students through the E-rate program.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares a feature report: At the end of 2019, before the coronavirus pandemic started, the two best-known faces of the pharmaceutical business were the imprisoned Martin Shkreli and the lawsuit-laden opioid makers at Purdue Pharma. The rest of the industry was perhaps best known for the skyrocketing prices of its medicines. In a Gallup Poll of the public's view of various business sectors, pharma was ranked at the bottom, behind the oil industry, advertising and public relations, and lawyers. Who'd have guessed that a year later pharma would be getting credit for saving the world? From cruise lines to meatpackers, business will have plenty to answer for in its handling of the pandemic, but this part of it worked. The Covid-19 vaccines developed by the drug industry, in partnership with governments, will almost certainly prevent hundreds of thousands of American deaths and millions more around the world. They will revive trillions of dollars in economic activity, let grandparents see grandchildren, and finally bring an end to a year that has -- sing it together one last time as the ball drops over an empty Times Square -- really sucked. In a time where almost everything else went wrong, the vaccine effort was something that went (mostly) right.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

MediaTek became the biggest smartphone chipset vendor with 31% market share in the third quarter of 2020, when smartphone sales rebounded during the quarter, according to Counterpoint Research. From a report: MediaTek's strong performance in the US$100-250 price band and growth in key regions like China and India helped it become the biggest smartphone chipset vendor during the third quarter, said Counterpoint. Qualcomm was the biggest 5G chipset vendor in the third quarter of 2020, powering 39% of the 5G phones sold worldwide, Counterpoint indicated. Meanwhile, sales of 5G smartphones doubled during the quarter, accounting for 17% of all smartphones sold. With Apple launching its 5G lineup, 5G smartphone sales will continue to rise in the fourth quarter of 2020, Counterpoint noted. An estimated one-third of all smartphones shipped will be 5G-enabled, Counterpoint said. "The share of MediaTek chipsets in Xiaomi has increased by more than three times since the same period last year," said Counterpoint research director Dale Gai. "MediaTek was also able to leverage the gap created due to the US ban on Huawei. Affordable MediaTek chips fabricated by TSMC became the first option for many OEMs to quickly fill the gap left by Huawei's absence. Huawei had also previously purchased a significant amount of chipsets ahead of the ban."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

For years, quantum computing has been the preserve of academics. New advances, however, are pushing this potentially revolutionary technology toward practical applications. From a report: At the Q2B conference this month, quantum computer makers Google, IBM, Honeywell, IonQ and Xanadu detailed specific steps they expect by 2024 that will push their machines further down the road of commercial practicality. Those achievements include increasing quantum computers' scale, performance and reliability. Private sector spending on quantum computing products and services will likely more than triple to $830 million in 2024, up from $250 million in 2019, according to a forecast from Hyperion Research. "We're in the early industrial era of quantum computing," said Seth Lloyd, an MIT professor who helped found the field in the 1990s. He says the "huge advances" are comparable to the early use of steam engines to power factories, ships and trains. One buzzworthy breakthrough is progress toward error correction, which should let quantum computers perform sustained calculations instead of fleeting spurts of work. That improvement comes through overcoming a fundamental limit with qubits, the basic elements for storing and processing data in a quantum computer. Qubits are easily perturbed by outside forces, but error correction is designed to overcome the finickiness of individual qubits. It'll require bigger machines with many more qubits, but quantum computer makers see progress there, too.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Apple is booting thousands of videogame apps [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source] from its platform in China as the government clamps down harder on such content, illustrating the tech giant's vulnerability to state pressure on its business. From a report: The iPhone maker this month warned Chinese developers that a new wave of paid gaming apps are at risk of removal from its app store, according to a memo viewed by The Wall Street Journal, after the company removed thousands of such apps earlier this year. The Chinese government four years ago began requiring videogames to be licensed before being released, but developers were able to skirt the requirement in Apple's app store. Apple hasn't said why the loophole existed or why the company began closing it this year. Foreign software developers lament the change, citing difficulty securing approval in China for their games.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Japan said it planned to stop the sale of new gasoline-powered cars by the mid-2030s, bucking criticism by Toyota's chief that a hasty shift to electric vehicles could cripple the car industry. From a report: The plan released Friday followed similar moves by the state of California and major European nations, but it has faced resistance from car executives in a country that still makes millions of cars annually running solely on gasoline engines. Japan would still permit the sale of hybrid gas-electric cars after 2035 under the plan. Many models from Japan's top car makers -- Toyota, Honda Motor and Nissan Motor -- come in both traditional and hybrid versions. Earlier this month, Toyota President Akio Toyoda said that if Japan was too hasty in banning gasoline-powered cars and moving to electric vehicles, "the current business model of the car industry is going to collapse." He was speaking on behalf of Japanese car makers in his role as head of a local industry association. Mr. Toyoda said the electricity grid couldn't handle extra summer demand and observed that most of Japan's electricity is generated by burning fossil fuels. Government officials said car makers needed to revise their business models. Prime Minister Yoshihide Suga pointed to a different portion of Mr. Toyoda's comments in which the Toyota chief said he backed the government's goal of making Japan carbon-neutral by 2050. Reducing carbon emissions "should be tackled as a strategy for growth, not as a limitation on growth," Mr. Suga said.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

A growing number of "cryptic species" hiding in plain sight have been unmasked in the past year, driven in part by the rise of DNA barcoding, a technique that can identify and differentiate between animal and plant species using their genetic divergence. From a report: The discovery of new species of aloe, African leaf-nosed bats and chameleons that appear similar to the human eye but are in fact many and separate have thrilled and worried conservationists. Scientists say our planet might be more biologically diverse than previously thought, and estimates for the total number of species could be far higher than the current best guess of 8.7 million. But cryptic discoveries often mean that species once considered common and widespread are actually several, some of which may be endangered and require immediate protection. The Jonah's mouse lemur was only unveiled to the world this summer but is already on the verge of extinction. The newly described Popa langur in Myanmar, previously confused with another species, numbers around 200 and is likely to be classified as critically endangered, threatened by habitat loss and deforestation. The discovery of these cryptic species has been driven in part by the rise of DNA barcoding, a technique that can identify and differentiate between animal and plant species using their genetic divergence. African elephants, Indian vine snakes and South American neotropical birds are among the growing number of unmaskings. Thousands more are expected in the coming years, from living creatures and museum samples.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Threat actors have discovered a way to bounce and amplify junk web traffic against Citrix ADC networking equipment to launch DDoS attacks. From a report: While details about the attackers are still unknown, victims of these Citrix-based DDoS attacks have mostly included online gaming services, such as Steam and Xbox, sources have told ZDNet earlier today. The first of these attacks have been detected last week and documented by German IT systems administrator Marco Hofmann. Hofmann tracked the issue to the DTLS interface on Citrix ADC devices. DTLS, or Datagram Transport Layer Security, is a more version of the TLS protocol implemented on the stream-friendly UDP transfer protocol, rather than the more reliable TCP. Just like all UDP-based protocols, DTLS is spoofable and can be used as a DDoS amplification vector.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Scott Hanselman: Everyone collects utilities, and most folks have a list of a few that they feel are indispensable. Here's mine. Each has a distinct purpose, and I probably touch each at least a few times a week. For me, "util" means utilitarian and it means don't clutter my tray. If it saves me time, and seamlessly integrates with my life, it's the bomb. Many/most are free some aren't. Those that aren't free are very likely worth your 30-day trial, and very likely worth your money. These are all well loved and oft-used utilities. I wouldn't recommend them if I didn't use them constantly. Things on this list are here because I dig them. No one paid money to be on this list and no money is accepted to be on this list.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Redox OS, the micro-kernel based Rust-written operating system, is out with a new Christmas release. From a report: Redox OS 0.6 was released on Christmas Eve with many bug fixes and new features. Redox OS 0.6 features a complete rewrite of its RMM kernel memory manager, improvements to its Relibc C library implementation, Pkgar as a new package format, and Rust code compatibility updates. It's been the better part of two years since Redox 0.5 was released but moving forward they hope to start releasing new updates more often.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

If you bought a wooden chess set after watching "The Queen's Gambit," the price you paid was most likely dictated by just four pieces. From a report: The knights alone can account for as much as 50 percent of the cost of a nice wooden set. While the rest of the pieces can be machine-made, the knights are carved by hand to resemble the head of a horse, a tedious process to make sure all four are exactly the same. The knights in the set used in World Chess Championship matches ($310 for the pieces and $220 for the board) were inspired by a horse carving from the Parthenon in Athens, said Ilya Merenzon, the chief executive of World Chess, the company that licenses the rights to the matches. The process of creating the set when it was redesigned in 2013 required extensive back-and-forth communication with carvers in India to discuss minutiae like the horse's smile. About 10 people specialize in carving knights for the World Chess sets, Mr. Merenzon said. It takes about two weeks to produce 100 sets, with a set of knights requiring about six hours to carve, he said. Chess sales spiked 125 percent after the October premiere of "The Queen's Gambit," a Netflix show about an orphaned chess prodigy, Beth Harmon, who crushes the male-dominated game. Many sets sold out before Christmas. The House of Staunton in Alabama, one of the world's largest chess retailers, offers wooden sets with relatively simple knights, such as the $129 tournament-style set in boxwood and rosewood, as well as sets with more detail. They go all the way up to a luxurious $5,995 set in "antiqued" boxwood and ebony and featuring intricate horses. In the higher-end sets, "you can literally see the teeth carved into the horse's mouth," said Noelle Kendrick, the House of Staunton's business development director. "They are extremely detailed. You can see the mane, the rivets of the mane, if it has a flowing mane." The ornamentation isn't strictly decorative. In tournament play, milliseconds matter, and so does how a piece fits into your hand, Mr. Merenzon said. This is particularly true in the especially fast-paced games that can be used to break ties at tournaments: "blitz"-style games, which generally last less than 10 minutes, and "rapid" games, in which players have 25 minutes to make all their moves. The players tend to move their pieces and press their clock in one swift motion.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

As the United States comes to grips with a far-reaching Russian cyberattack on federal agencies, private corporations and the nation's infrastructure, new evidence has emerged that the hackers hunted their victims through multiple channels. From a report: The most significant intrusions discovered so far piggybacked on software from SolarWinds, the Austin-based company whose updates the Russians compromised. But new evidence from the security firm CrowdStrike suggests that companies that sell software on Microsoft's behalf were also used to break into customers of Microsoft's Office 365 software. Because resellers are often entrusted to set up and maintain clients' software, they -- like SolarWinds -- have been an ideal front for Russian hackers and a nightmare for Microsoft's cloud customers, who are still assessing just how deep into their systems Russia's hackers have crawled. "They couldn't get into Microsoft 365 directly, so they targeted the weakest point in the supply chain: the resellers," said Glenn Chisholm, a founder of Obsidian, a cybersecurity firm. CrowdStrike confirmed Wednesday that it was also a target of the attack. In CrowdStrike's case, the Russians did not use SolarWinds but a Microsoft reseller, and the attack was unsuccessful. A CrowdStrike spokeswoman, Ilina Dimitrova, declined to elaborate beyond a company blog post describing the attempted attack. The approach is not unlike the 2013 attack on Target in which hackers got in through the retailer's heating and cooling vendor. The latest Russian attacks, which are thought to have begun last spring, have exposed a substantial blind spot in the software supply chain. Companies can track phishing attacks and malware all they want, but as long as they are blindly trusting vendors and cloud services like Microsoft, Salesforce Google's G-Suite, Zoom, Slack, SolarWinds and others -- and giving them broad access to employee email and corporate networks -- they will never be secure, cybersecurity experts say. "These cloud services create a web of interconnections and opportunity for the attacker," Mr. Chisholm said. "What we are witnessing now is a new wave of modern attacks against these modern cloud platforms, and we need 2021 defenses." Some reports have confused the latest development with a breach of Microsoft itself. But the company said it stood by its statement last week that it was not hacked, nor was it used to attack customers.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

CD Projekt SA, the Polish video-game publisher of Cyberpunk 2077, was sued by an investor who claims the company misled him about the potential of the error-plagued game whose botched release this month caused shares to dive. From a report: Andrew Trampe sued Thursday in federal court in Los Angeles and seeks to represent other investors who bought the company's securities. CD Projekt failed to disclose that Cyberpunk 2077 was "virtually unplayable on the current-generation Xbox or Playstation systems due to an enormous number of bugs," according to the complaint. As a result, Sony Corp. removed Cyberpunk 2077 from the Playstation store, and Sony, Microsoft and the company were forced to offer full refunds for the game, according to the complaint.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader shares an opinion piece from CoinDesk, written by Ryan Zurrer. Zurrer is founder of Dialectic AG, an alternative-assets focused multi-family office. Previously, he was a Director at the Web3 Foundation and led the investment team at Polychain Capital, pioneering the SAFT as a legitimate investment instrument. From the report: Crypto is set to bifurcate and we will begin to see two parallel economic superhighways being built and used. One economic superhighway will be for know your customer (KYC)-compliant "digital currencies" such as central bank digital currencies (CBDC) or corporate-backed digital currencies such as USDC or diem (formerly libra). In parallel, the other economic superhighway will be a detour-filled adventure of crypto-anarchist money Legos being stacked and iterated on by anonymous teams, self-organized via a myriad of DAO-like governance structures. It's all about to get quite strange. Diversification is the only coherent path forward both within crypto ecosystems and beyond during these uncertain times.[...]In 2021, we are going to see layer 2 apps for the first time and not only to entertain or as early experiments. We will see entire micro-economies emerge and transform thousands of people's lives. In 2021, we'll see more anonymous teams governed by DAOs popping up and experimenting with exotic derivatives and porting real-world assets on-chain with NFTs.Layer 2 will also usher in crypto's own "SoMo" (social + mobile native) moment, whereby applications will look to be native and seamless on many of the apps that billions of users already have on their home screen: WeChat, WhatsApp, Facebook, the App Store and so on. This is where corporate-cryptos and CBDCs will have a clear advantage and will foster significant innovation. We'll see the backers of CBDCs and corporate-cryptos spend lavishly to seed ecosystems of layer 2 app development. We'll continue to see consolidation between crypto projects. DeFi yield strategies will begin to stack on one another combining debt, exchange and derivative strategies under unified liquidity while novel layer 1 experiments, often branded abhorrently as "Eth Killers" will ironically need to combine teams, treasuries and economically rebase to survive against Ethereum's accelerating network effects, community and composability. We'll also see an acceleration in "treasury raids" as protocols with enormous sums of money leftover from the 2017 initial coin offering (ICO) era are pressured by their token holders to pay a dividend, tie the treasury to the token or unwind and distribute the funds back to project funders. For those who got into crypto because of ideals like freedom and self-sovereignty, Zurrer says "we're likely to see a significant portion of the space migrating to FATF-compliant regulations regarding KYC/anti-money laundering and primarily transacting in centralized digital currencies." He encourages everyone to "remain open-minded about the innovation that CBDCs and corporate currencies will bring" as they "will drive adoption beyond what we've achieved thus far."Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The Korea Superconducting Tokamak Advanced Research(KSTAR), a superconducting fusion device also known as the Korean artificial sun, set the new world record as it succeeded in maintaining the high temperature plasma for 20 seconds with an ion temperature over 100 million degrees. Phys.Org reports: On November 24 (Tuesday), the KSTAR Research Center at the Korea Institute of Fusion Energy (KEF) announced that in a joint research with the Seoul National University (SNU) and Columbia University of the United States, it succeeded in continuous operation of plasma for 20 seconds with an ion-temperature higher than 100 million degrees, which is one of the core conditions of nuclear fusion in the 2020 KSTAR Plasma Campaign. It is an achievement to extend the 8 second plasma operation time during the 2019 KSTAR Plasma Campaign by more than 2 times. In its 2018 experiment, the KSTAR reached the plasma ion temperature of 100 million degrees for the first time (retention time: about 1.5 seconds) To re-create fusion reactions that occur in the sun on Earth, hydrogen isotopes must be placed inside a fusion device like KSTAR to create a plasma state where ions and electrons are separated, and ions must be heated and maintained at high temperatures. In its 2020 experiment, the KSTAR improved the performance of the Internal Transport Barrier(ITB) mode, one of the next generation plasma operation modes developed last year and succeeded in maintaining the plasma state for a long period of time, overcoming the existing limits of the ultra-high-temperature plasma operation.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

We now have credible video of what appears to be the elusive "Jet Pack Guy" flying around at thousands of feet near Los Angeles International Airport. The Drive reports: The footage doesn't come to us from some random Reddit board or YouTube channel, either. It was taken during an instructional flight from Sling Pilot Academy in the training area off Palos Verdes. We reached out to the flight school, which is based out of Zamperini Field, in Torrance, California for additional details. One of the pilots involved in the bizarre incident told The War Zone that they were flying along their route in the practice area between Palos Verdes and Catalina Island when they caught what appeared to at least resemble a guy in a jet pack flying towards them in the opposite direction at about 3,000 feet. The object passed along the right side of their aircraft and kept going until it was out of sight. There was no communication from the object or about the object on the usually busy radio channel used for the training area. As such, the pilots did report the encounter with the FAA, but because there wasn't really any detail to add, an official report was not filed. They were able to grab the video seen [here]. The FAA issued the following statement: "The FAA has not received any recent reports from pilots who believe they may have seen someone in a jetpack in the skies around Los Angeles. The FAA has taken the sighting reports it has received seriously, and has worked closely with the FBI to investigate them. However, the FAA has been unable to validate the reports." The Drive also said that officials are going to contact the flight school directly to investigate this incident further and they they replayed radar tapes from around the time of previous sightings, but did not see anything abnormal. "No witnesses on the ground have provided any evidence of someone with a jet pack taking off or landing, either," the report adds.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: After over a year of requests from fans and enthusiasts, and months of official teases, Microsoft Flight Simulator has a virtual reality mode. Whether you play the game via Steam or the Windows Store, you can now take advantage of "OpenXR" calls to seemingly any PC-VR system on the market, aided by an "enable/disable VR" keyboard shortcut at any time. This summer, ahead of the game's final-stretch beta test, the developers at Asobo Studio used a screen-share feature in a video call to tease the VR mode to us at Ars Technica. This is never an ideal way to show off VR, in part because the platform requires high refresh rates for comfortable play, which can't be smoothly sent in a pandemic-era video call. But even for a video call, it looked choppy. Asobo's team assured us that the incomplete VR mode was running well -- but of course, we're all on edge about game-preview assurances as of late. Now that users have been formally invited to slap Microsoft Flight Simulator onto their faces, I must strongly urge users not to do so -- or at least heavily temper their expectations. Honestly, Asobo Studio should've issued these warnings, not me, because this mode is nowhere near retail-ready. Ultimately, trying to use the 2020 version of MSFS within its VR mode's "potato" settings is a stupid idea until some kinks get worked out. It's bad enough how many visual toggles must be dropped to PS2 levels to reach a comfortable 90 fps refresh; what's worse is that even in this low-fidelity baseline, you'll still face serious stomach-turning anguish in the form of constant frametime spikes. Turn the details up to a "medium" level in order to savor the incredible graphics engine Asobo built, of course, and you're closer to 45 fps. I didn't even bother finding an average performance for the settings at maximum. That test made me sick enough to delay this article by a few hours. [...] The thing is, my VR stomach can always survive the first few minutes of a bumpy refresh before I have to rip my headset off in anguish -- and this was long enough to see the absolute potential of MSFS as a must-play VR library addition. I don't have an ultrawide monitor, so testing MSFS has always been an exercise in wishing for a better field of view -- to replicate the glance-all-over behavior of actual flight. Getting a taste of that in my headset -- with accurate cockpit lighting, impressive volumetric clouds, and 3D modeling of my plane's various sounds -- made me want to sit for hours in this mode and get lost in compelling, realistic flight. But even the most iron stomachs can only take so much screen flicker within VR before churning, and that makes MSFS's demanding 3D engine a terrible fit for the dream of hours-long VR flight... at least, for the time being.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

fahrbot-bot shares a report from Phys.Org: Researchers from Tokyo Metropolitan University have discovered a way to make self-assembled nanowires of transition metal chalcogenides at scale using chemical vapor deposition. By changing the substrate where the wires form, they can tune how these wires are arranged, from aligned configurations of atomically thin sheets to random networks of bundles. This paves the way to industrial deployment in next-gen industrial electronics, including energy harvesting, and transparent, efficient, even flexible devices. Using a process called chemical vapor deposition (CVD), they found that they could assemble TMC nanowires in different arrangements depending on the surface or substrate that they use as a template. Examples are shown in Figure 2; in (a), nanowires grown on a silicon/silica substrate form a random network of bundles; in (b), the wires assemble in a set direction on a sapphire substrate, following the structure of the underlying sapphire crystal. By simply changing where they are grown, the team now have access to centimeter-sized wafers covered in the arrangement they desired, including monolayers, bilayers and networks of bundles, all with different applications. They also found that the structure of the wires themselves were highly crystalline and ordered, and that their properties, including their excellent conductivity and 1D-like behavior, matched those found in theoretical predictions. The research has been published in the journal Nano Letters.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Sony has published a new "hid-playstation" Linux kernel driver for bringing up the PlayStation 5 DualSense controller and will also be used for supporting other PlayStation hardware on Linux. Phoronix reports: This new Linux kernel driver supports the PlayStation 5 "DualSense" game controller both in USB and Bluetooth modes. All key functionality along with LEDs, motion sensors, touchpad, battery, lightbar, and rumble are all supported by this official Sony Linux driver. The Linux kernel already has the existing "hid-sony" driver while this PlayStation 5 game controller comes with the hid-playstation driver. In announcing the new driver, they are planning to move some of the Sony Interactive Entertainment hardware support from the existing hid-sony to hid-playstation drivers. The hid-sony driver will continue to be maintained and used by broader Sony devices. This new driver follows the move from about a year ago of Sony "officially" maintaining the hid-sony Linux input driver. This new driver comes in at just over 1,400 lines of code in its initial form catering to the PS5 controller. When transitioning support for older hardware to this new driver there is also a promise of unit test coverage and more. The new HID-PlayStation driver is currently under review and isn't yet queued up for mainlining but those wanting to try it out can find the 13 patches up for testing.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

The world stocked up on laptop and desktop computers in 2020 at a level not seen since the iPhone debuted in 2007, and manufacturers still are months away from fulfilling outstanding orders, hardware industry executives and analysts said. Reuters reports: Remote learning and working has upturned the computer market during the coronavirus pandemic, zapping sales of smartphones while boosting interest in bigger devices, which had become afterthoughts to iPhones and Androids over the last decade. "The whole supply chain has been strained like never before," said Gregg Prendergast, Pan-America president at hardware maker Acer Inc. Annual global shipments of PCs, the industry's collective term for laptops and desktops, topped out at about 300 million in 2008 and recently were sinking toward 250 million. Few expected a resurgence. But some analysts now expect 2020 will close at about 300 million shipments, up roughly 15% from a year ago. Tablets are experiencing even faster growth. By the end of 2021, installed PCs and tablets will reach 1.77 billion, up from 1.64 billion in 2019, according to research company Canalys. The virus pressed families into expanding from one PC for the house to one for each student, video gamer or homebound worker. Earlier this month, Sam Burd, president at Dell, said the industry "renaissance" would soon bring devices with AI software to simplify tasks like logging on and switching off cameras. Compared to last year, Dell's online orders from consumers surged 62% in the third quarter.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from TechCrunch: The value of one of the world's most valuable cryptocurrencies is crashing and a recently filed SEC complaint is at the root of the free fall. According to CoinMarketCap, the XRP token's value has declined more than 42% in the past 24 hours and is down more than 63% from its 30-day high of $0.76. It now sits at just $0.27. XRP's price volatility has rivaled the most capricious of cryptocurrencies. Since reaching an all-time-high of $3.84 back in January of 2018, the coin has spent much of the past two years drifting closer and closer to pennies. In the past month, on the back of major rallies from other cryptocurrencies, XRP has seen its biggest rally in years, but those gains were all erased this week by the Ripple CEO Brad Garlinghouse's admission that the SEC was planning to file a sweeping lawsuit against the company during the current administration's final days. The SEC's fundamental argument is that XRP has always been a security and that it should have been registered with the commission from the beginning more than seven years ago. The SEC claims that the defendants in the case -- namely the company Ripple, CEO Bran Garlinghouse and executive chairman Chris Larsen -- generated more than $1.38 billion from sales of the XRP token. The company's line has been that XRP is not a security but is, in fact, a tool for financial institutions, though the coin's volatility has discouraged banks from actually adopting the token. Meanwhile, XRP is present on a number of cryptocurrency exchanges, a fact which could expand the scope of this legal complaint and affect more players in the space.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

On Tuesday, the American Civil Liberties Union filed a new lawsuit demanding information about the FBI's Electronic Device Analysis Unit (EDAU) -- a forensic unit that the ACLU believes has been quietly breaking the iPhone's local encryption systems. The Verge reports: "The FBI is secretly breaking the encryption that secures our cell phones and laptops from identity thieves, hackers, and abusive governments," the ACLU said in a statement announcing the lawsuit, "and it refuses to even acknowledge that it has information about these efforts." The FBI has made few public statements about the EDAU, but the lawsuit cites a handful of cases in which prosecutors have submitted a "Mobile Device Unlock Request" and received data from a previously locked phone. The EDAU also put in public requests for the GrayKey devices that found success unlocking a previous version of iOS. In June 2018, the ACLU filed a FOIA request for records relating to the EDAU, but the FBI has refused to confirm any records even exist. After a string of appeals within the FOIA process, the group is taking the issue to federal court, calling on the attorney general and FBI inspector general to directly intervene and make the records available. "We're demanding the government release records concerning any policies applicable to the EDAU, its technological capabilities to unlock or access electronic devices, and its requests for, purchases of, or uses of software that could enable it to bypass encryption," the ACLU said in a statement.Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Visa said on Wednesday it would allow usage of its cards on Pornhub-owner MindGeek's platforms that host professionally produced adult studio content, but would continue to decline processing payments coming from Pornhub itself. Reuters reports: Visa said its ban remains in effect for those websites that host user-generated content, the most popular being Pornhub, until an ongoing investigation was completed. "Following a thorough review, Visa will reinstate acceptance privileges for MindGeek sites that offer professionally produced adult studio content," a Visa spokesperson said. Visa, like rival Mastercard, had suspended processing payments on Pornhub earlier this month after a New York Times report found unlawful content on its website. Pornhub had denied the allegations, calling the two-biggest payment processing networks' decision "disappointing." Days after the Times report Pornhub said it had pulled content uploaded by unverified users from its platform and would only allow certain partner accounts to upload content.Read more of this story at Slashdot.