An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: A US startup company is offering to help wealthy couples screen their embryos for IQ using controversial technology that raises questions about the ethics of genetic enhancement. The company, Heliospect Genomics, has worked with more than a dozen couples undergoing IVF, according to undercover video footage. The recordings show the company marketing its services at up to $50,000 for clients seeking to test 100 embryos, and claiming to have helped some parents select future children based on genetic predictions of intelligence. Managers boasted their methods could produce a gain of more than six IQ points. [...]

The footage appears to show experimental genetic selection techniques being advertised to prospective parents. A Heliospect employee, who has been helping the company recruit clients, outlined how couples could rank up to 100 embryos based on "IQ and the other naughty traits that everybody wants," including sex, height, risk of obesity and risk of mental illness. The startup says its prediction tools were built using data provided by UK Biobank, a taxpayer-funded store of genetic material donated by half a million British volunteers, which aims to only share data for projects that are "in the public interest".

Selecting embryos on the basis of predicted high IQ is not permitted under UK law. While it is legal in the US, where embryology is more loosely regulated, IQ screening is not yet commercially available there. Asked for comment, managers at Heliospect said the company, which is incorporated in the US, operated within all applicable law and regulations. They said Heliospect was in "stealth mode" before a planned public launch and was still developing its service. They added that clients who screened fewer embryos were charged about $4,000, and that pricing on launch would be in line with competitors. Leading geneticists and bioethicists said the project raised a host of moral and medical issues.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/10/18/2120210/us-startup-charging-couples-to-screen-embryos-for-iq?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликован выпуск дистрибутива CachyOS 241110, основанного на пакетной базе Arch Linux и развиваемого в рамках непрерывной модели доставки обновлений. Дистрибутив примечателен включением оптимизаций для повышения производительности и предоставлением возможности установки различных сред рабочего стола. Помимо базового окружения на основе KDE для установки доступны GNOME, XFCE, i3WM, Wayfire, LXQT, OpenBox, Cinnamon, Cosmic, UKUI, LXDE, Mate, Budgie, Qtile, Hyprland и Sway. Размер установочного iso-образа 2.7 ГБ. Отдельно поставляются сборки (2.9) для носимых устройств (Handheld Edition) с интерфейсом в стиле GameMode и компонентами для любителей компьютерных игр.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62220

The U.S. Federal Trade Commission is investigating farm equipment maker Deere over its repair policies, focusing on whether the company's restrictions on repairs violate customers' "right to repair." Reuters reports: The investigation, authorized on Sept. 2, 2021, focuses on repair restrictions manufacturers place on hardware or software, often referred to by regulators as impeding customers' "right to repair" the goods they purchase. The probe was made public through a filing by data analytics company Hargrove & Associates Inc, which sought to quash an FTC subpoena seeking market data submitted to it by members of the Association of Equipment Manufacturers. Neither HAI nor AEM is a target of the FTC probe [...].

The FTC is probing whether Deere violated the Federal Trade Act's section 5, according to the filing. The law prohibits unfair or deceptive practices affecting commerce, and the FTC has recently used it in a broad array of cases, including against Amazon and pharmacy benefit managers.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://yro.slashdot.org/story/24/10/18/211249/ftc-probing-john-deere-over-customers-right-to-repair-equipment?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Состоялся выпуск 1.19.0 кроссплатформенной (Linux, MacOS, Windows) консольной утилиты hyperfine, написанной на языке Rust и распространяемой по лицензиям Apache-2.0 и MIT.
Утилита предназначена для сравнения производительности других консольных утилит.

Список изменений:

• добавлена опция --reference позволяющая вручную указать команду , с которой будут сравниваться результаты выполнения других команд;

• добавлена опция --conclude , выполняющая команду после выполнения измеряемой команды;

• команда --output= может быть задана для каждой команды;

• переменная окружения $HYPERFINE_ITERATION теперь содержит текущий номер итерации для каждой команды бенчмарка;

• в сообщение об ошибке добавлена информация об итерации;

• в скрипт plot_histogram.py добавлена возможность позиционирования легенды графика на диаграмме. Выходной DPI графика установлен в 600 DPI;

• улучшен скрипт plot_whisker.py;

• исправлена ошибка отображения примерного времени выполнения в эмуляторах терминала с блочным курсором;

• исправлено автодополнение zsh;

• добавлена сборка aarch64-apple-darwin;

• различный рефакторинг кода.

https://www.linux.org.ru/news/opensource/17790889

Phoronix's Michael Larabel reports: Germany's Sovereign Tech Fund (STF) is today celebrating its second anniversary for "empowering public digital infrastructure." In the past two years it has invested more than $24.9 million into sixty open technologies. This effort backed by the German government has provided nearly $25 million USD in open-source funding over the past two years. In this time there has been more than 500 submissions proposing over 114 million euros in work.

This Sovereign Tech Funding has helped open-source projects provide much needed maintenance to their software, enhance the security posture of the software, and make other open-source improvements in the public interest. You can learn more about the Sovereign Tech Fund via their blog.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/10/18/2326255/germanys-sovereign-tech-fund-has-invested-over-249m-in-open-source-in-two-years?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Стартап Trasec развивает язык программирования TrapC, представляющий собой диалект языка Си, обеспечивающий безопасную работу с памятью. Для блокирования ошибок при работе с памятью, таких как выход за границы выделенного буфера и обращение к уже освобождённой памяти, в TrapC применяется фундаментально иной способ работы с указателями и специальный механизм перехвата ошибок на основе обработчиков исключений (trap). Исходный код компилятора для TrapC планируют открыть в 2025 году.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62224

Analogue, a retro gaming company, is releasing a hardware-emulated Nintendo 64 console that can play every N64 game in 4K resolution. TechCrunch reports: Analogue, as is its habit, spent years meticulously re-engineering the N64 in FPGA form -- basically, this means that the new 3D console is, in several important ways, indistinguishable from the original hardware. One hundred percent compatibility with the console's game library is the most obvious one, meaning every single N64 cartridge works with this thing. Perhaps the bigger challenge with the N64, as with many other consoles of that era, is how it produces an image.

The N64 put out an analog video signal intended for display on interlaced CRT displays -- something that directly influenced the gameplay and art styles of countless games for the platform. Many retro games simply look bad on modern high-resolution displays not because they are dated or the art is insufficient, but because the display techs are fundamentally different.

To that end, Analogue has built in a native upscaler that, rather than cleaning up and digitizing the analog video output of the original system (as some upscalers do, with varying degrees of success), produces a natively digital, 4K signal with imitation CRT artifacts and scanlines. This is something they pioneered early on and produced several versions of to reproduce accurate phosphors and display modes for the multi-system Analogue Pocket. [...] The result is simply that games ought to look how you remembered them, which is to say probably a sight better than they actually looked. The Analogue 3D is available for pre-order at 8am PDT on October 21. It's priced at $250.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://games.slashdot.org/story/24/10/18/2349229/the-analogue-3d-drags-the-fondly-remembered-n64-into-the-21st-century?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Доступен корректирующий выпуск Firefox 132.0.2, в котором устранено несколько проблем.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62227

Microsoft has notified customers that it's missing more than two weeks of security logs for some of its cloud products, leaving network defenders without critical data for detecting possible intrusions. From a report: According to a notification sent to affected customers, Microsoft said that "a bug in one of Microsoft's internal monitoring agents resulted in a malfunction in some of the agents when uploading log data to our internal logging platform" between September 2 and September 19.
The notification said that the logging outage was not caused by a security incident, and "only affected the collection of log events." Business Insider first reported the loss of log data earlier in October. Details of the notification have not been widely reported. As noted by security researcher Kevin Beaumont, the notifications that Microsoft sent to affected companies are likely accessible only to a handful of users with tenant admin rights. Logging helps to keep track of events within a product, such as information about users signing in and failed attempts, which can help network defenders identify suspected intrusions. Missing logs could make it more difficult to identify unauthorized access to the customers' networks during that two-week window.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/10/19/0114211/microsoft-says-it-lost-weeks-of-security-logs-for-its-customers-cloud-products?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Компания Microsoft представила проект Hyperlight, развивающий гипервизор, предназначенный для встраивания в приложения с целью изолированного выполнения кода, не заслуживающего доверия или требующего особой защиты. Гипервизор оформлен в виде разделяемой библиотеки, обеспечивающей выполнение отдельных функций в легковесных виртуальных машинах (micro-VM) и организующей обмен данными с этими функциями. Код проекта написан на языке Rust и распространяется под лицензией Apache 2.0.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62226

An anonymous reader quotes a report from the Washington Post: Brandon Barrett arrived here two weeks ago, sick but hopeful, like dozens before him. Just a few years back, he could dead lift 660 pounds. After an injury while training to be a professional dirt-bike rider, he opened a motorcycle shop just north of Buffalo. When he wasn't working, he would cleanse his mind through rigorous meditation. In 2019, he began getting sick. And then sicker. Brain fog. Memory issues. Difficulty focusing. Depression. Anxiety. Fatigue. Brandon was pretty sure he knew why: the cell tower a quarter-mile behind his shop and all the electromagnetic radiation it produces, that cellphones produce, that WiFi routers produce, that Bluetooth produces, that the whole damn world produces. He thought about the invisible waves that zip through our airspace -- maybe they pollute our bodies, somehow? [...]

Then Brandon read about Green Bank, an unincorporated speck on the West Virginia map, hidden in the Allegheny Mountains, about a four-hour drive southwest of D.C. There are no cell towers there, by design. He read that other sick people had moved here and gotten better, that the area's electromagnetic quietude is protected by the federal government. Perhaps it could protect Brandon. It's quiet here so that scientists can listen to corners of the universe, billions of light-years away. In the 1950s, the federal government snatched up farmland to build the Green Bank Observatory. It's now home to the Robert C. Byrd Green Bank Radio Telescope, the largest steerable telescope in the world at 7,600 metric tons and a height of 485 feet. Its 2.3-acre dish can study quasars and pulsars, map asteroids and planets, and search for evidence of extraterrestrial life.

The observatory's machines are so sensitive that terrestrial radio waves would interfere with their astronomical exploration, like a shout (a bunch of WiFi signals) drowning out a whisper (signals from the clouds of hydrogen hanging out between galaxies). So in 1958, the Federal Communications Commission created the National Radio Quiet Zone, a 13,000-square-mile area encompassing wedges of both Virginia and West Virginia, where radio transmissions are restricted to varying degrees. At its center is a 10-mile zone around the observatory where WiFi, cellphones and cordless phones -- among many other types of wave-emitting equipment -- are outlawed. Wired internet is okay, as are televisions -- though you must have a cable or satellite provider. It's not a place out of 100 years ago. More like 30. If you want to make plans to meet someone, you make them in person. Some people move here to work at the observatory. Others come because they feel like they have to. These are the 'electrosensitives,' as they often refer to themselves. They are ill, and Green Bank is their Lourdes. The electrosensitives guess that they number at least 75 in Pocahontas County, which has a population of roughly 7,500. Literary Hub, the BBC, Slate, and the Washingtonian have non-paywalled articles about Green Bank and the "wi-fi refugees" that shelter there.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://mobile.slashdot.org/story/24/10/18/2342223/west-virginia-town-of-green-bank-has-become-a-refuge-for-electrosensitive-people?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Доступен выпуск прослойки DXVK 2.5, предоставляющей реализацию DXGI (DirectX Graphics Infrastructure), Direct3D 8, 9, 10 и 11, работающую через трансляцию вызовов в API Vulkan. Для использования DXVK требуется наличие драйверов с поддержкой API Vulkan 1.3, таких как Mesa RADV 24.0, NVIDIA 535.183.01, Intel ANV 24.0, AMDVLK 2024.Q1.3, AMDGPU-PRO и NVK 24.1. DXVK может применяться для запуска 3D-приложений и игр в Linux при помощи Wine, выступая в качестве более высокопроизводительной альтернативы встроенных в Wine реализаций Direct3D, работающих поверх OpenGL.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62225

The world's biggest trade publisher has changed the wording on its copyright pages to help protect authors' intellectual property from being used to train large language models and other artificial intelligence tools, The Bookseller has reported. From the report: Penguin Random House has amended its copyright wording across all imprints globally, confirming it will appear "in imprint pages across our markets." The new wording states: "No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems," and will be included in all new titles and any backlist titles that are reprinted.
The statement also "expressly reserves [the titles] from the text and data mining exception," in accordance with a European Parliament directive. The move specifically to ban the use of its titles by AI firms for the development of chatbots and other digital tools comes amid a slew of copyright infringement cases in the US and reports that large tranches of pirated books have already been used by tech companies to train AI tools. In 2024, several academic publishers including Taylor & Francis, Wiley and Sage have announced partnerships to license content to AI firms.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/10/19/0121240/penguin-random-house-underscores-copyright-protection-in-ai-rebuff?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Проект развивает Робин Роу (Robin Rowe), бывший профессор компьютерных наук, принимавший участие в комитетах по развитию стандартов С и С++, в своё время создавший графический редактор Cinepaint, использовавшийся при создании некоторых голливудских фильмов, и POSIX-библиотеку libunistd для Windows. Соучредителем компании Trasec выступает Габриэль Пантера (Gabrielle Pantera), занимавшая руководящий пост в компании Disney.

Из особенностей:

•

Проверки выхода за границы массива. В TrapC применяется фундаментально иной способ работы с указателями и специальный механизм перехвата ошибок на основе обработчиков исключений (trap).

•

Проверки use after free.

•

Наличие GC.

•

Выделение памяти через new. *alloc и free нет.

•

Явная инициализация нулями.

•

Строгая типизация.

Исходный код компилятора для TrapC планируют открыть в 2025 году.

https://www.linux.org.ru/news/development/17791896

Компания Red Hat представила бета-версию дистрибутива Red Hat Enterprise Linux 10 и релиз Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5. Готовые установочные образы подготовлены для зарегистрированных пользователей Red Hat Customer Portal (для оценки функциональности также можно использовать iso-образы CentOS Stream 10 и CentOS Stream 9.5, а также бесплатные сборки RHEL для разработчиков). Репозитории с бинарными пакетами RHEL 10 доступны публично. Выпуски сформированы для архитектур x86_64, s390x (IBM System z), ppc64le и Aarch64 (ARM64).

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62230

Разработчики проекта Debian Junior, занимающегося развитием возможностей для комфортной работы детей с дистрибутивом Debian GNU/Linux, объявили о формировании Live-сборок (3 ГБ), содержащих оптимизированное для детей пользовательское окружение и подборку программ, полезных и интересных для детей до 12 лет. Предложенную Live-сборку планируют обновлять еженедельно. Изначально Debian Junior был нацелен на доработку штатного Debian и поддержание набора пакетов для детей.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62232

Компания Microsoft представила выпуск открытой платформы .NET 9, созданной благодаря унификации продуктов .NET Framework, .NET Core и Mono. На основе .NET 9 можно создавать многоплатформенные приложения для браузера, облачных систем, рабочего стола, IoT-устройств и мобильных платформ, используя единые библиотеки и общий процесс сборки, не зависящий от типа приложения. Сборки .NET SDK 9, .NET Runtime 9 и ASP.NET Core Runtime 9 сформированы для Linux, macOS и Windows. .NET Desktop Runtime 9 поставляется только для Windows. Связанные с проектом наработки распространяются под лицензией MIT.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62233

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Space News: SpaceX has been awarded contracts for eight launches under the National Security Space Launch (NSSL) Phase 3 Lane 1 program, the U.S. Space Force's Space Systems Command announced Oct. 18. The contracts worth $733.5 million span seven missions for the Space Development Agency (SDA) and one for the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) projected to launch in 2026. These are part of the NSSL Phase 3 procurement of launch services for U.S. defense and intelligence agencies.

The NSSL Phase 3 Lane 1 program is structured as an Indefinite Delivery, Indefinite Quantity (IDIQ) contract, a flexible procurement method often used in government contracting. The total value of the Lane 1 contract is estimated at $5.6 billion over five years, with Blue Origin, SpaceX, and United Launch Alliance (ULA) selected as the primary vendors to compete for individual task orders. The Space Development Agency is utilizing SpaceX's Falcon 9 rocket to launch small satellites into a low-Earth orbit (LEO) constellation, a network of satellites designed to enhance military communications and intelligence capabilities. SpaceX has already completed two successful launches for the Tranche 0 portion of SDA's constellation.

"The Phase 3 Lane 1 construct allows us to execute launch services more quickly for risk-tolerant payloads, putting more capabilities in orbit faster to support national security," said Brig. Gen. Kristin Panzenhagen, program executive officer for Assured Access to Space at the Space Force. Blue Origin's New Glenn rocket has yet to perform its first launch and will need to complete at least two successful flights to qualify for NSSL certification, while ULA's Vulcan Centaur, which has completed two flights, is still awaiting final certification for the program.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/10/19/008221/spacex-secures-new-contracts-worth-7335-million-for-national-security-space-missions?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Разработчики репозитория Python-пакетов PyPI (Python Package Index) объявили о внедрении поддержки механизма цифровой аттестации для проверки подлинности опубликованных пакетов, которая идёт на смену верификации с использованием цифровых подписей. Ключевым отличием аттестации является то, что публикация пакета заверяется третьим лицом (каталогом пакетов) после получения подтверждения личности публикующего пакет от внешнего провайдера OpenID Connect (например, после проверки, что публикуемый пакет соотносится со связанным с ним репозиторием на GitHub или GitLab).

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62234

sciencehabit shares a report from Science Magazine: From dumping iron into the ocean to launching mirrors into space, proposals to cool the planet through 'geoengineering' tend to be controversial -- and sometimes fantastical. A new idea isn't any less far-out, but it may avoid some of the usual pitfalls of strategies to fill the atmosphere with tiny, reflective particles. In a modeling study published this month in Geophysical Research Letters, scientists report that shooting 5 million tons of diamond dust into the stratosphere each year could cool the planet by 1.6C -- enough to stave off the worst consequences of global warming. The scheme wouldn't be cheap, however: experts estimate it would cost nearly $200 trillion over the remainder of this century -- far more than traditional proposals to use sulfur particles. [...]

The researchers modeled the effects of seven compounds, including sulfur dioxide, as well as particles of diamond, aluminum, and calcite, the primary ingredient in limestone. They evaluated the effects of each particle across 45 years in the model, where each trial took more than a week in real-time on a supercomputer. The results showed diamond particles were best at reflecting radiation while also staying aloft and avoiding clumping. Diamond is also thought to be chemically inert, meaning it would not react to form acid rain, like sulfur. To achieve 1.6C of cooling, 5 million tons of diamond particles would need to be injected into the stratosphere each year. Such a large quantity would require a huge ramp up in synthetic diamond production before high-altitude aircraft could sprinkle the ground-up gems across the stratosphere. At roughly $500,000 per ton, synthetic diamond dust would be 2,400 times more expensive than sulfur and cost $175 trillion if deployed from 2035 to 2100, one study estimates.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/10/19/003230/diamond-dust-could-cool-the-planet-at-a-cost-of-mere-trillions?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

После трёх лет разработки опубликован набор спецификаций OpenMP 6.0 (Open Multi-Processing), определяющих API и способы применения методов параллельного программирования для языков Си, Си++ и Фортран на многоядерных и гибридных (CPU+GPU/DSP) системах с общей памятью и блоками векторизации (SIMD). Предполагается, что начальная поддержка отдельных возможностей OpenMP 6.0 будет включена в состав выпусков LLVM/Clang 20 и GCC 15.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62236

An anonymous reader shares a report: If you dread the thought of calling to change an airline ticket or negotiate your internet bill, a new artificial intelligence tool may provide a solution. DoNotPay, which offers an assortment of consumer-friendly services like tracking subscriptions, generating burner phone numbers, and searching for unclaimed property, now features a bot that will call customer service numbers for users, navigate through phone menus and sit through hold music, then politely but firmly advocate on users' behalf.
The company shared examples of its AI calling a cellphone provider for help porting a phone number and talking with an airline to cancel a flight within the 24-hour cancellation window. Joshua Browder, CEO and founder of DoNotPay, says getting updates on lost luggage and seeking compensation for flight delays are also common use cases. DoNotPay already offered tools to connect to customer service agents via chat windows, and to draft and send emails, faxes, and even snail mail to companies on behalf of users.
But while the service's artificial intelligence had enough smarts to wait on hold for users, then hand over a call when an agent was available, until recently AI models were not capable of carrying on a convincing voice conversation with a human operator in real time. Browder says that changed with Open AI's GPT-4o model, unveiled in May. "That has reduced the delay by about 70%, so instead of it taking three seconds to come up with a response, it now takes under a second, and that's finally fast enough to hold these phone conversations," he says. "So now we're doing thousands of these calls."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/10/19/0129253/donotpay-will-now-call-customer-service-hotlines-for-you?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Сформированы корректирующие обновления для всех поддерживаемых веток PostgreSQL 17.1, 16.5, 15.9, 14.14, 13.17 и 12.21, в которых исправлены 35 ошибок и устранены 3 уязвимости - одна опасная и две неопасных. Также объявлено о прекращении поддержки ветки PostgreSQL 12, обновления для которой больше формироваться не будут.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62238

Longtime Slashdot reader schwit1 shares an op-ed written by Michael R. Bloomberg, founder and majority owner of Bloomberg LP, the parent company of Bloomberg News, UN Special Envoy on Climate Ambition and Solutions, and chair of the Defense Innovation Board: There are government boondoggles, and then there's NASA's Artemis program. More than a half century after Neil Armstrong's giant leap for mankind, Artemis was intended to land astronauts back on the moon. It has so far spent nearly $100 billion without anyone getting off the ground, yet its complexity and outrageous waste are still spiraling upward. The next US president should rethink the program in its entirety. As someone who greatly respects science and strongly supports space exploration, the more I have learned about Artemis, the more it has become apparent that it is a colossal waste of taxpayer money. [...]

A celestial irony is that none of this is necessary. A reusable SpaceX Starship will very likely be able to carry cargo and robots directly to the moon -- no SLS, Orion, Gateway, Block 1B or ML-2 required -- at a small fraction of the cost. Its successful landing of the Starship booster was a breakthrough that demonstrated how far beyond NASA it is moving. Meanwhile, NASA is canceling or postponing promising scientific programs -- including the Veritas mission to Venus; the Viper lunar rover; and the NEO Surveyor telescope, intended to scan the solar system for hazardous asteroids -- as Artemis consumes ever more of its budget. Taxpayers and Congress should be asking: What on Earth are we doing? And the next president should be held accountable for answers.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/10/18/2354259/nasas-100-billion-moon-mission-is-going-nowhere?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликован релиз Phosh 0.43, экранной оболочки для мобильных устройств, основанной на технологиях GNOME и библиотеке GTK. Окружение изначально развивалось компанией Purism в качестве аналога GNOME Shell для смартфона Librem 5, но затем вошло в число неофициальных проектов GNOME и используется в postmarketOS, Mobian, Droidian, некоторых прошивках для устройств Pine64 и редакции Fedora для смартфонов. Phosh использует композитный сервер Phoc, работающий поверх Wayland, а также собственную экранную клавиатуру squeekboard. Наработки проекта распространяются под лицензией GPLv3+.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62239

"Biden forgives more student loans," read Thursday's headline at CNBC.
While this time it was $4.5 billion in student debt for over 60,000 public service workers, "The Biden-Harris Administration has approved $175 billion in student debt relief for nearly 5 million borrowers through various actions," according to an announcement from the White House on Thursday. (So the average amount received by each of the 5 million students is $35,000.) CNN calculates this eliminates roughly 11% of all outstanding U.S. federal student loan debt.
This latest round of forgiveness fixed a loophole in a bipartisan program (passed during the Bush administration in 2007) called Public Service Loan Forgiveness:
"For too long, the government failed to live up to its commitments, and only 7,000 people had ever received forgiveness under Public Service Loan Forgiveness before Vice President (Kamala) Harris and I took office," Biden said in a statement. "We vowed to fix that," he added... Thursday's announcement impacts about 60,000 borrowers who are now approved for approximately $4.5 billion in student debt relief under PSLF.

CNN points out the total $175 billion in forgiven student debt is more than under any other president — though it's still "less than half of the $430 billion that would've been canceled under the president's one-time forgiveness plan, which was struck down by the Supreme Court last year."

The Biden administration has made it easier for about 572,000 permanently disabled borrowers to receive the debt relief to which they are entitled. It also has granted student loan forgiveness to more than 1.6 million borrowers who were defrauded by their college... The Biden administration is conducting a one-time recount of borrowers' past payments and making adjustments if they had been counted incorrectly, bringing many people closer to debt relief.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://news.slashdot.org/story/24/10/19/0226232/new-us-student-loan-forgiveness-brings-total-to-175-billion-for-5-million-people?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"The Wayback Machine, Archive-It, scanning, and national library crawls have resumed," announced the Internet Archive Thursday, "as well as email, blog, helpdesk, and social media communications. Our team is working around the clock across time zones to bring other services back online."
Founder Brewster Kahle told The Washington Post it's the first time in its almost 30-year history that it's been down more than a few hours. But their article says the Archive is "fighting back."
Kahle and his team see the mission of the Internet Archive as a noble one — to build a "library of everything" and ensure records are kept in an online environment where websites change and disappear by the day. "We're all dreamers," said Chris Freeland, the Internet Archive's director of library services. "We believe in the mission of the Internet Archive, and we believe in the promise of the internet." But the site has, at times, courted controversy. The Internet Archive faces lawsuits from book publishers and music labels brought in 2020 and 2023 for digitizing copyrighted books and music, which the organization has argued should be permissible for noncommercial, archival purposes. Kahle said the hundreds of millions of dollars in penalties from the lawsuits could sink the Internet Archive.
Those lawsuits are ongoing. Now, the Internet Archive has also had to turn its attention to fending off cyberattacks. In May, the Internet Archive was hit with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, a fairly common type of internet warfare that involves flooding a target site with fake traffic. The archive experienced intermittent outages as a result. Kahle said it was the first time the site had been targeted in its history... [After another attack October 9th], Kahle and his team have spent the week since racing to identify and fix the vulnerabilities that left the Internet Archive open to attack. The organization has "industry standard" security systems, Kahle said, but he added that, until this year, the group had largely stayed out of the crosshairs of cybercriminals. Kahle said he'd opted not to prioritize additional investments in cybersecurity out of the Internet Archive's limited budget of around $20 million to $30 million a year...
[N]o one has reliably claimed the defacement and data breach that forced the Internet Archive to sequester itself, said [cybersecurity researcher] Scott Helmef. He added that the hackers' decision to alert the Internet Archive of their intrusion and send the stolen data to Have I Been Pwned, the monitoring service, could imply they didn't have further intentions with it.... Helme said the episode demonstrates the vulnerability of nonprofit services like the Internet Archive — and of the larger ecosystem of information online that depends on them. "Perhaps they'll find some more funding now that all of these headlines have happened," Helme said. "And people suddenly realize how bad it would be if they were gone."

"Our priority is ensuring the Internet Archive comes online stronger and more secure," the archive said in Thursday's statement. And they noted other recent-past instances of other libraries also being attacked online:

As a library community, we are seeing other cyber attacks — for instance the British Library, Seattle Public Library, Toronto Public Library, and now Calgary Public Library. We hope these attacks are not indicative of a trend."

For the latest updates, please check this blog and our official social media accounts: X/Twitter, Bluesky and Mastodon.

Thank you for your patience and ongoing support.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/10/19/0510225/internet-archive-services-resume-as-they-promise-stronger-more-secure-return?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

"Six years after the Spectre transient execution processor design flaws were disclosed, efforts to patch the problem continue to fall short," writes the Register:
Johannes Wikner and Kaveh Razavi of Swiss University ETH Zurich on Friday published details about a cross-process Spectre attack that derandomizes Address Space Layout Randomization and leaks the hash of the root password from the Set User ID (suid) process on recent Intel processors. The researchers claim they successfully conducted such an attack.... [Read their upcomong paper here.] The indirect branch predictor barrier (IBPB) was intended as a defense against Spectre v2 (CVE-2017-5715) attacks on x86 Intel and AMD chips. IBPB is designed to prevent forwarding of previously learned indirect branch target predictions for speculative execution. Evidently, the barrier wasn't implemented properly.
"We found a microcode bug in the recent Intel microarchitectures — like Golden Cove and Raptor Cove, found in the 12th, 13th and 14th generations of Intel Core processors, and the 5th and 6th generations of Xeon processors — which retains branch predictions such that they may still be used after IBPB should have invalidated them," explained Wikner. "Such post-barrier speculation allows an attacker to bypass security boundaries imposed by process contexts and virtual machines." Wikner and Razavi also managed to leak arbitrary kernel memory from an unprivileged process on AMD silicon built with its Zen 2 architecture.
Videos of the Intel and AMD attacks have been posted, with all the cinematic dynamism one might expect from command line interaction.

Intel chips — including Intel Core 12th, 13th, and 14th generation and Xeon 5th and 6th — may be vulnerable. On AMD Zen 1(+) and Zen 2 hardware, the issue potentially affects Linux users. The relevant details were disclosed in June 2024, but Intel and AMD found the problem independently. Intel fixed the issue in a microcode patch (INTEL-SA-00982) released in March, 2024. Nonetheless, some Intel hardware may not have received that microcode update. In their technical summary, Wikner and Razavi observe: "This microcode update was, however, not available in Ubuntu repositories at the time of writing this paper." It appears Ubuntu has subsequently dealt with the issue.
AMD issued its own advisory in November 2022, in security bulletin AMD-SB-1040. The firm notes that hypervisor and/or operating system vendors have work to do on their own mitigations. "Because AMD's issue was previously known and tracked under AMD-SB-1040, AMD considers the issue a software bug," the researchers explain. "We are currently working with the Linux kernel maintainers to merge our proposed software patch."
BleepingComputer adds that the ETH Zurich team "is working with Linux kernel maintainers to develop a patch for AMD processors, which will be available here when ready."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/10/19/0619245/spectre-flaws-still-haunt-intel-amd-as-researchers-found-fresh-attack-method?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Компания Google опубликовала релиз web-браузера Chrome 131. Одновременно доступен стабильный выпуск свободного проекта Chromium, выступающего основой Chrome. Браузер Chrome отличается от Chromium использованием логотипов Google, наличием системы отправки уведомлений в случае краха, модулями для воспроизведения защищённого от копирования видеоконтента (DRM), системой автоматической установки обновлений, постоянным включением Sandbox-изоляции, поставкой ключей к Google API и передачей при поиске RLZ-параметров. Для тех, кому необходимо больше времени на обновление, отдельно поддерживается ветка Extended Stable, сопровождаемая 8 недель. Следующий выпуск Chrome 132 запланирован на 14 января.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62237

"Getting sick feels bad in the moment," reports the Washington Post, "and may affect your brain in the longer term."
A new study published in Nature Aging adds to growing evidence that severe infections, including flu, herpes and respiratory tract infections, are linked to accelerated brain atrophy and increased risk of dementia years later. It also hints at the biological drivers that may contribute to neurodegenerative disease.
The current research is a "leap beyond previous studies that had already associated infection with susceptibility to Alzheimer's disease" and provides a "useful dataset," said Rudy Tanzi, a professor of neurology at Harvard Medical School and the director of the McCance Center for Brain Health at Massachusetts General Hospital. Other recent studies have found that the flu shot and the shingles vaccine reduce the risk of subsequent dementia in those who get them. Severe infections have also been linked to subsequent strokes and heart attacks.
"Big infection, big immune response — not good for the brain," said one of the study's co-authors (Keenan Walker, a tenure-track investigator and the director of the Multimodal Imaging of Neurodegenerative Disease Unit at the National Institute on Aging).
And the article also includes this quote from Kristen Funk, an assistant professor of biological sciences at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte (who studies neuroinflammation in neuroinfectious and neurodegenerative diseases). "They really found that there's a range of infections that are associated with this brain atrophy, associated with this cognitive decline."
In turn, most of these infections associated with brain atrophy seem to be risk factors for dementia, according to the researchers' analyses of the UK Biobank data of 495,896 subjects and a Finnish dataset of 273,132 subjects. They found that having a history of infections was associated with an increased risk for Alzheimer's disease years later. The increased risk was even higher for vascular dementia, which is the second-most-common dementia diagnosis after Alzheimer's disease and caused by restriction of blood to the brain...
More-minor infections are not cause for alarm since the data was drawn from patients who had a hospital record of their infections, indicating more-severe cases, experts say.

And speaking of infections, the Post also published an interesting guest column by Dr. Mikkael A. Sekeres, division chief for hematology and medicine professor at the University of Miami's cancer center:
A recent report from the American Association for Cancer Research attributed 13 percent of cancer cases worldwide to infections. Some estimates run as high as 20 percent, with particularly high rates of infection-related cancers in developing countries. Infectious agents linked to cancer include bacteria, such as Helicobacter pylori (H. pylori), and viruses, such as human papillomavirus (HPV), Epstein-Barr virus (EBV), and hepatitis B and C.
But keep in mind that an exceedingly small percentage of infected people develop cancer...

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/10/19/0545239/serious-infections-linked-to-dementia-risk-study-shows?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Разработчики дистрибутива OpenWrt, ориентированного на применение в различных сетевых устройствах, таких как маршрутизаторы, коммутаторы и точки доступа, объявили о переходе на пакетный менеджер APK, развиваемый проектом Alpine. В ноябрьских снапшотах, созданных на базе находящейся в разработке основной ветки OpenWrt, ранее использовавшийся пакетный менеджер opkg уже заменён на инструментарий apk.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62240

Филипп Пизло (Filip Pizlo) представил на конференции SPLASH'24 открытый C/C++ компилятор Fil-C, предоставляющий защиту от проблем, вызванных ошибками при работе с памятью. Проект нацелен на обеспечение полной совместимости с существующим кодом на языках C и C++ - для обеспечения безопасной работы с памятью достаточно просто пересобрать существующий код. Компилятор построен с использованием компонентов от проекта LLVM и распространяется под лицензией Apache 2.0. Runtime поставляется под лицензией BSD. В отличие от недавно анонсированного проекта TrapC, находящегося на стадии проектирования, компилятор Fil-C уже доведён до готовности сборки существующего кода.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62241

Опубликован выпуск инсталлятора Archinstall 3.0, который с апреля 2021 года в качестве опции входит в состав установочных iso-образов Arch Linux. Archinstall работает в консольном режиме и может использоваться вместо предлагаемого по умолчанию ручного режима установки дистрибутива. Код Archinstall написан на языке Python и распространяется под лицензией GPLv3.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62242

После двух месяцев разработки Линус Торвальдс представил релиз ядра Linux 6.12. Среди наиболее заметных изменений: возможность включения Realtime-режима, sched_ext для создания планировщиков CPU через eBPF, вывод QR-кода при аварийных состояниях, механизм Device Memory TCP, механизм резервирования ресурсов SCHED_DEADLINE server, улучшение планировщика задач EEVDF, модуль IPE для задания политик обеспечения целостности.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62243

Значимые изменения:

• Патчсет Linux-RT для построения систем реального времени окончательно включен в кодовую базу ядра вместе с принятием последних изменений в функции printk().

• Добавлена возможность динамически загружать сторонние планировщики CPU как программы BPF.

• Кольцевой буфер теперь позволяет сохранять записи при перезагрузке.

• Теперь ядро может работать с устройствами, размер блока которых превосходит размер страницы памяти.

• Система безопасности Tomoyo может быть скомпилирована в виде загружаемого модуля ядра.

https://www.linux.org.ru/news/kernel/17796373

Цель разработки компилятора – полная совместимость с синтаксисом языков Си и С++ при обеспечении полной безопасности работы с памятью. Заявляется, что для использования достаточно пересобрать существующий код, так уже компилируются и работают bzip2, zip, pcre и ncurses. С незначительными модификациями поддерживается сборка OpenSSH, OpenSSL, CPython, SQLite, Lua, Curl, Lynx, jpeg6b, zsh, xzutils и simdutf.

( [ читать дальше... ]( https://www.linux.org.ru/news/development/17795754#cut ) )

Опубликован релиз десктоп-ориентированного дистрибутива GhostBSD 24.10.1, построенного на базе FreeBSD 14-STABLE и предлагающего пользовательское окружение MATE. Отдельно сообществом формируются неофициальные сборки с Xfce. По умолчанию в GhostBSD применяется файловая система ZFS. Поддерживается как работа в Live-режиме, так и установка на жесткий диск (используется собственный инсталлятор ginstall, написанный на языке Python). Загрузочные образы сформированы для архитектуры x86_64 (2.6 ГБ).

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62245

Спустя 13 лет с момента публикации ветки 1.3 увидел свет релиз легковесного кроссплатформенного графического тулкита FLTK 1.4.0 (Fast Light Toolkit). FLTK написан на языке C++ и распространяется под лицензией лицензии LGPLv2. Ветка FLTK 1.4 отмечена как обратно совместимая с выпусками 1.3.x, т.е. при переходе на FLTK 1.4 не требуется внесение изменений в код, но необходима пересборка из-за изменения ABI. Для визуального построения GUI-интерфейса в рамках проекта развивается оболочка FLUID. Поддерживается работа в Linux (X11 и Wayland), BSD-системах, Windows, macOS и различных UNIX-подобных ОС.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62244

An anonymous reader shared this report from Forbes:

Recent headlines have proclaimed that Chinese scientists have hacked "military-grade encryption" using quantum computers, sparking concern and speculation about the future of cybersecurity. The claims, largely stemming from a recent South China Morning Post article about a Chinese academic paper published in May, was picked up by many more serious publications.
However, a closer examination reveals that while Chinese researchers have made incremental advances in quantum computing, the news reports are a huge overstatement. "Factoring a 50-bit number using a hybrid quantum-classical approach is a far cry from breaking 'military-grade encryption'," said Dr. Erik Garcell, Head of Technical Marketing at Classiq, a quantum algorithm design company. While advancements have indeed been made, the progress represents incremental steps rather than a paradigm-shifting breakthrough that renders current cryptographic systems obsolete. "This kind of overstatement does more harm than good," Dr. Garcell said. "Misrepresenting current capabilities as 'breaking military-grade encryption' is not just inaccurate — it's potentially damaging to the field's credibility...."
In fact, the Chinese paper in question, titled Quantum Annealing Public Key Cryptographic Attack Algorithm Based on D-Wave Advantage, does not mention military-grade encryption, which typically involves algorithms like the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES). Instead, the paper is about attacking RSA encryption (RSA stands for Rivest-Shamir-Adleman, named after its creators)... While factoring a 50-bit integer is an impressive technical achievement, it's important to note that RSA encryption commonly uses key sizes of 2048 bits or higher. The difficulty of factoring increases exponentially with the size of the number, meaning that the gap between 50-bit and 2048-bit integers is astronomically large.
Moreover, the methods used involve a hybrid approach that combines quantum annealing with classical computation. This means that the quantum annealer handles part of the problem, but significant processing is still performed by classical algorithms. The advances do not equate to a scalable method for breaking RSA encryption as it is used in practical applications today.

Duncan Jones, Head of Cybersecurity at Quantinuum, tells Forbes that if China had actually broken AES — they'd be keeping it secret (rather than publicizing it in newspapers).

[ Read more of this story ]( https://it.slashdot.org/story/24/10/19/1752205/debunking-hype-china-hasnt-broken-military-encryption-with-quantum?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Доступен выпуск дистрибутива AlmaLinux 9.5, синхронизированный c новым выпуском Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9.5 и содержащий все предложенные в данном выпуске изменения. Установочные образы подготовлены для архитектур x86_64, ARM64, ppc64le и s390x в форме загрузочного (1 ГБ), минимального (2 ГБ) и полного образа (10 ГБ). Позднее будут сформированы Live-сборки с GNOME, KDE, MATE и Xfce, а также образы для плат Raspberry Pi, контейнеров, WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux) и облачных платформ.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62247

MIT engineers have built a solar-powered desalination system that "ramps up its desalting process and automatically adjusts to any sudden variation in sunlight, for example by dialing down in response to a passing cloud or revving up as the skies clear."
While traditional reverse osmosis systems typically require steady power levels, "the MIT system requires no extra batteries for energy storage, nor a supplemental power supply, such as from the grid." And their results were pretty impressive:
The engineers tested a community-scale prototype on groundwater wells in New Mexico over six months, working in variable weather conditions and water types. The system harnessed on average over 94 percent of the electrical energy generated from the system's solar panels to produce up to 5,000 liters of water per day despite large swings in weather and available sunlight... "Being able to make drinking water with renewables, without requiring battery storage, is a massive grand challenge," says Amos Winter, the Germeshausen Professor of Mechanical Engineering and director of the K. Lisa Yang Global Engineering and Research Center at MIT. "And we've done it."
The system is geared toward desalinating brackish groundwater — a salty source of water that is found in underground reservoirs and is more prevalent than fresh groundwater resources. The researchers see brackish groundwater as a huge untapped source of potential drinking water, particularly as reserves of fresh water are stressed in parts of the world. They envision that the new renewable, battery-free system could provide much-needed drinking water at low costs, especially for inland communities where access to seawater and grid power are limited...
The researchers' report details the new system in a paper appearing in Nature Water. The study's co-authors are Bessette, Winter, and staff engineer Shane Pratt... "Our focus now is on testing, maximizing reliability, and building out a product line that can provide desalinated water using renewables to multiple markets around the world," Pratt adds. The team will be launching a company based on their technology in the coming months.
This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation, the Julia Burke Foundation, and the MIT Morningside Academy of Design. This work was additionally supported in-kind by Veolia Water Technologies and Solutions and Xylem Goulds.
Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 for sharing the news.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://science.slashdot.org/story/24/10/19/1845248/mit-researchers-build-solar-powered-low-cost-drinking-water-desalination-system?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Латиноамериканский Фонд свободного ПО опубликовал полностью свободный вариант ядра Linux 6.12 - Linux-libre 6.12-gnu, очищенный от элементов прошивок и драйверов, содержащих несвободные компоненты или участки кода, область применения которых ограничена производителем. Кроме того, Linux-libre отключает функции ядра по загрузке внешних несвободных компонентов, не входящих в поставку ядра, и удаляет упоминание об использовании несвободных компонентов из документации.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62251

"The foundation behind the Gnome desktop environment is having to go through some serious belt-tightening..." writes Linux Magazine.
From an October 7th announcement by The Gnome Foundation:
Our plan for the previous financial year was to operate a break-even budget. We raised less than expected last year, due to a very challenging fundraising environment for nonprofits, on top of internal changes such as the departure of our previous Executive Director, Holly Million. The Foundation has a reserves policy which requires us to keep a certain amount of money in the bank account, to preserve core operations in the event of interruptions to our income. In order to meet our reserves policy, this year's budget had to reduce our expenditure to below expected income, and generate a small surplus to reinstate the Foundation's financial reserves to the necessary level...
We're asking for your support in several ways:
- Look out for opportunities to volunteer your time and skills in areas where we've had to reduce staff involvement.
- Share ideas on how to organize and improve our activities in this new context.
- Consider making donations to support the GNOME Foundation's core priorities, if you're able...
Through these difficult decisions, the GNOME Foundation is able to meet its reserves policy, ensuring sufficient funds for the coming year. Our budget for the new financial year is realistic and supports four full time staff, who are able to support key operations like finance, infrastructure and events. We are additionally contracting a number of other individuals on a short term or part time basis, to help with fund raising, websites and delivering on our project commitments.
We are going to be looking to the GNOME community to help with the areas that are most affected by our reduced staffing. If you would like to help GNOME with its events, marketing, or fundraising, we would love to hear from you.

In their new budget, "expenses have been greatly reduced," according to an October 10 update:
We are also very relieved to be able to provide a surplus budget for the first time in many years, and doing so while still being able to support the community: events, infrastructure, internships, travel funding, and meeting our commitment to donors for work done in some parts of the stack, e.g.: Flathub, parental controls and GNOME Software.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/10/19/1912204/gnome-foundation-cuts-budget-seeks-more-volunteers-and-donations?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Издание Android Authority получило сведения о намерении компании Google заменить платформу Chrome OS на новую реализацию, построенную на базе платформы Android. О планах задействования отдельных компонентов Android в Chrome OS, таких как ядро и системные библиотеки, сообщалось в июне, но судя по новым сведениям планы более глобальные, чем просто задействование частей Androd в Chrome OS, и сводятся к полной унификации и оставлению только Android с воссозданием интерфейса в стиле Chrome OS поверх данной платформы.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62254

An anonymous readed shared this report from CNN:

[U.S. army boats] are poorly maintained and largely unprepared to meet the military's growing mission in the Pacific, a new government oversight report said this week. The Government Accountability Office released a report on Wednesday that concluded there are "wide-ranging" issues facing Army watercraft, which limit the Army's ability "to meet mission requirements in the Indo-Pacific theater where the need for Army watercraft is most pronounced."
Despite Army policy requiring the vessels to be at least at a 90% mission capable rate — meaning the vessels are ready to perform their mission — the boats currently have a less than 40% capable rate this year. Overall, the fleet of watercraft has dropped by nearly half since 2018, going from 134 vessels to 70 as of May this year, in part due to divestment of vessels in 2018 and 2019... "Army boats have not been ready, capable, or in a mindset they'll have to do something dangerous or in the real world ... for decades now," a retired warrant officer and former chief engineer on Army watercraft told CNN at the time...
[Army spokeswoman Cynthia Smith] said that the Army is "actively" working to address gaps in the watercraft's capability as a whole, and prioritizing improving the current fleet while also "investing in a modernized fleet to meet the needs of the 2040 force." Col. Dave Butler, a spokesman for Army Chief of Staff Gen. Randy George, told CNN that the Army is also looking at possibly replacing the existing fleet of Army watercraft with autonomous vessels in the future. "What we see is the oil industry and other shipping industries are doing this already, we see that happening all around the world," Butler said. "There's no reason the Army shouldn't be thinking that way ... leaders from down at ship level all the way to the Pentagon are looking at this and determining the best way to deploy our forces...
"Maybe the future fleet is all autonomous, we just don't know," he said. "This is all stuff we're looking at in terms of trying to modernize the way we move people, weapons, and equipment."
CNN notes that the report "also said the Army is considering leasing civilian watercraft to bolster its existing fleet and moving all of its watercraft to the Pacific."
The report also included a response from Army Secretary Wormuth, who said the Army is "actively pursuing a holistic approach to mitigate the gaps in Army watercraft capability and capacity."

[ Read more of this story ]( https://tech.slashdot.org/story/24/10/19/0338231/us-army-faces-wide-ranging-issues-with-its-boats-considers-replacing-them-with-autonomous-vessels?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Опубликован 64-й выпуск рейтинга 500 самых высокопроизводительных компьютеров мира. Первое место в 64 редакции рейтинга занял новый кластер El Capitan, запущенный в Ливерморской национальной лаборатории Министерства энергетики США. Кластер насчитывает 11 миллионов процессорных ядер (CPU AMD EPYC 24C 1.8GH с ускорителем AMD Instinct MI300X) и обеспечивает производительность 1.742 экзафлопса. В качестве операционной системы применяется HPE Cray OS (редакция SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 15).

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62256

The Miami Herald reports:
Cuba's electrical grid shut down again early Saturday, leaving the island without electricity after authorities tried but failed to restore power following an earlier nationwide blackout on Friday. The island's Electric Union reported a second "total outage" at 6:15 a.m., just hours after officials reported they had restored power in a few "microsystems" all over the island... The country has been going through its worst economic crisis since the fall of the Soviet Union, and the government lacks money to buy oil in the international market to meet domestic demand.
Cubans irked by the daily blackouts defied the country's Draconian laws punishing criticism of the government and left several comments in official news outlets calling for government officials to resign. The second outage will likely exacerbate public frustration as food begins to spoil because of the lack of refrigeration.
Two hours ago, Reuters reported that Cuba's government "said on Saturday it had made some progress in gradually re-establishing electrical service across the island, including to hospitals and parts of the capital Havana..."
"Most of Cuba's 10 million people, however, remained without electricity on Saturday afternoon."
Traffic lights were dark at intersections throughout Havana, and most commerce was halted...
Cuban officials have said even if the immediate grid collapse is resolved, the electricity crisis will continue. Cuba produces little of its own crude oil, and fuel deliveries to the island have dropped significantly this year, as Venezuela, Russia and Mexico, once important suppliers, have reduced their exports to Cuba.
Mexico experienced a historic drop in production, according to the New York Times, while Venezuela is selling its oil to foreign companies to ease its own economic crisis:
The experts had warned for years: Cuba's power grid was on the verge of collapse, relying on plants nearly a half-century old and importing fuel that the cash strapped Communist government could barely afford... Cuban economists and foreign analysts blamed the crisis on several factors: the government's failure to tackle the island's aging infrastructure; the decline in fuel supplies from Venezuela, Mexico and Russia; and a lack of capital investment in badly needed renewable systems, such as wind and solar.
Jorge Piñon, a Cuban-born energy expert at the University of Texas at Austin, highlighted that Cuba's electricity grid relies on eight very large power plants that are close to 50 years old. "They have not received any operational maintenance much less capital maintenance in the last 12 to 15 years," he said, adding that they have a lifetime of only 25-30 years. "So, number one, it's a structural problem, they are breaking down all the time and that has a domino effect," he said. Compounding the problems, Cuba burns crude oil as a fuel for its plants. Experts said Cuba's own crude oil production is very heavy in sulfur and metals that can impair the thermoelectric combustion process. "So they have to be constantly repairing them, and they're repairing them with Band-Aids," said Mr. Piñon...
"If they can't turn these plants back on there is a concern that this could turn into another mass exodus," said Ricardo Herrero, the director of the Cuba Study Group in Washington. "They are really short on options," he added.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/24/10/19/2253239/after-second-power-outage-10-million-cubans-endure-saturday-afternoon-blackout?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Представлен релиз дистрибутива Rocky Linux 9.5, нацеленного на создание свободной сборки RHEL, способной занять место классического CentOS. Дистрибутив бинарно совместим с Red Hat Enterprise Linux и может использоваться в качестве замены RHEL 9.5 и CentOS 9 Stream. Поддержка ветки Rocky Linux 9 будет осуществляться до 31 мая 2032 года. Установочные iso-образы Rocky Linux подготовлены для архитектур x86_64, aarch64, ppc64le и s390x (IBM Z). Дополнительно предложены live-сборки с рабочими столами GNOME, KDE, Cinnamon и Xfce, опубликованные для архитектуры x86_64.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62258

Tom's Hardware reports on some interesting hardware history being shared on X.com:


AMD engineer Phil Park identified a curious nugget of PC architectural history from, of all places, a year-old Quora answer posted by former Intel engineer [and Pentium Pro architect] Robert Colwell. The nugget indicates that Intel could have beaten AMD to the x86-64 punch if the former wasn't dead-set on the x64-only Itanium line of CPUs.
Colwell had responded on Quora to the question "Shouldn't Intel with its vast resources have been able to develop both architectures?"
This was a marketing decision by Intel — they believed, probably rightly, that bringing out a new 64-bit feature in the x86 would be perceived as betting against their own native-64-bit Itanium, and might well severely damage Itanium's chances. I was told, not once, but twice, that if I "didn't stop yammering about the need to go 64-bits in x86 I'd be fired on the spot" and was directly ordered to take out that 64-bit stuff. I decided to split the difference, by leaving in the gates but fusing off the functionality. That way, if I was right about Itanium and what AMD would do, Intel could very quickly get back in the game with x86. As far as I'm concerned, that's exactly what did happen.
Phil Park continued the discussion on X.com. "He didn't quite get what he wanted, but he got close since they had x86-64 support in subsequent products when Intel made their comeback." (So, Park posted later in the thread, "I think he won the long game.")
Park also shared a post from Nicholas Wilt (NVIDIA CUDA designer who earlier did GPU computing work at Microsoft and built the prototype for Windows Desktop Manager):
I have an x86-64 story of my own. I pressed a friend at AMD to develop an alternative to Itanium. "For all the talk about Wintel," I told him, "these companies bear no love for one another. If you guys developed a 64-bit extension of x86, Microsoft would support it...."
Interesting coda: When it became clear that x86-64 was beating Itanium in the market, Intel reportedly petitioned Microsoft to change the architecture and Microsoft told Intel to pound sand.

[ Read more of this story ]( https://slashdot.org/story/24/10/20/004255/chip-designers-recall-the-big-amd-intel-battle-over-x86-64-support?utm_source=atom1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed ) at Slashdot.

Разработчики дистрибутива Arch Linux объявили о решении перевести весь исходный код компонентов, используемых для формирования пакетов, таких как файлы PKGBUILD, ".install" и ".desktop", на лицензию 0BSD, которую можно рассматривать как аналог перевода в общественное достояние. Ранее исходный код сценариев сборки пакетов в Arch Linux распространялся без указания лицензии, что приводило к неопределённости, позволяло по разному трактовать возможность их использования и создавало проблемы при желании задействовать их в других проектах, имеющих строгую лицензионную политику.

https://www.opennet.ru/opennews/art.shtml?num=62255