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Happening in plain sight with Proton, WSL and Edge-for-Linux, says open source advocate

Open source software advocate Eric S Raymond has penned an argument that the triumph of Linux on the desktop is imminent, because Microsoft will soon tire of Windows.…

Get ready for this year’s OWASP Top 10 with us and F5

Webcast  Whether you’re into cybersecurity or application development, you probably also like lists, which means you probably love the OWASP Top 10.…

The parts of Colchester and north Essex currently worst impacted by Covid cases have been revealed.

Private renters in Braintree are paying significantly more for electricity and heating than those in social housing, new figures suggest, as their homes are less energy efficient.

HOSPITALITY bosses admit they will be waiting anxiously to see the impact of new restrictions put in place in response to a rise in coronavirus cases.

A PARTIAL ban on heavy goods vehicles travelling through rural parts of north Essex should be enforced when the new A120 is built, it is claimed.

READER, I married him!

An anonymous reader quotes Teslarati: On August 19th this year, astronomers using the Panoramic Survey Telescope and Rapid Response System observatory in Hawaii spotted an object destined to enter Earth orbit this fall. Designated as object 2020 SO, the item is now believed to be a rocket booster from NASA's Surveyor 2 mission which crash landed on the Moon in 1966 during the Apollo-era of the Cold War's space race. "I suspect this newly discovered object 2020 SO to be an old rocket booster because it is following an orbit about the Sun that is extremely similar to Earth's, nearly circular, in the same plane, and only slightly farther away the Sun at its farthest point," Dr. Paul Chodas, the director of NASA's Center for Near Earth Object Studies, explained in comments to CNN. "That's precisely the kind of orbit that a rocket stage separated from a lunar mission would follow, once it passes by the Moon and escapes into orbit about the Sun. It's unlikely that an asteroid could have evolved into an orbit like this, but not impossible," he said. This specific type of event has only happened once before, namely in 2002 with a Saturn V upper stage from Apollo 12, according to Dr. Chodas.

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Russia wants no-hack pact, CERTs and nuclear agencies to conduct regular chit-chats

Russia has taken the unusual step of posting a proposal for a new information security collaboration with the United States of America, including a no-hack pact applied to electoral affairs.…

Justice won't say why he granted injunction, orders USA and TikTok to keep talking

Made-in-China social video app TikTok has convinced a judge it should remain in app stores for the foreseeable future, dodging a ban that would have seen it expelled from Google Play and Apple's app store from midnight on Sunday US time.…

Alleges silicon has military applications so puts more products on 'get a license before exporting' lists

The US government has told American companies that make semiconductor manufacturing kit that they must obtain a license to exporting their products to China’s largest chipmaker, the Semiconductor Manufacturing International Corporation (SMIC).…

"More top-tier computer OEMs are now offering a broad assortment of Linux desktops," reports ZDNet. "In the latest move, Lenovo, currently the top PC vendor in the world according to Gartner, will roll Ubuntu Linux 20.04 LTS out across 30 of Lenovo's ThinkPads and ThinkStations..." While Lenovo started certifying most of its laptop and PC line on the top Linux distributions since June 2020, this is a much bigger step. Now, instead of simply acknowledging its equipment will be guaranteed to run Linux, Lenovo's selling Ubuntu Linux-powered hardware to ordinary Joe and Jane users. Previously, you could only buy most of these machines if you were a business and had specified you wanted Ubuntu on a customized bid. Now, nearly 30 Ubuntu-loaded devices will now be available for purchase via Lenovo.com. These include 13 ThinkStation and ThinkPad P Series Workstations and an additional 14 ThinkPad T, X, X1, and L series laptops, all with the 20.04 LTS version of Ubuntu... No one's predicting a "Year of the Linux desktop." Companies such as Dell and Lenovo aren't predicting such a game-changing event, but they're selling largely to enterprise companies, which have seen the virtues of using high-end Linux desktops for powerful, forward-looking technologies such as AI, ML, containers, and cloud-native computing. "Our announcement of device certification in June was a step in the right direction to enable customers to more easily install Linux on their own," explains Lenovo's vice president of PCSD software and cloud — but now they're going even further. "Our goal is to remove the complexity and provide the Linux community with the premium experience that our customers know us for. This is why we have taken this next step to offer Linux-ready devices right out of the box."

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Anonymous trove offered to help urban planners cope with expected post-plague bike boom

Exercise-tracking app Strava, notorious for inadvertently revealing the location of military bases, will share a four-billion-record-strong dataset generated by its users in the name of assisting cities to plan for expected post-pandemic bicycle and walking booms.…

The U.S. government has readied an antitrust lawsuit against Google's search engine, accusing the company of "crushing competition to protect and extend monopoly," according to news reports: The move comes after a 14-month long investigation, where the U.S. Department of Justice probed whether Google distorts search results to favour its own products and shuts off access to competitors, sources told Bloomberg. This is significant as Google enjoys a major 90 percent control of the U.S. online search segment and generates an enviable $100 billion revenue. Rivals have long complained of abuse of power to "snuff out the competition".... Sources told Bloomberg action is expected within the next week or two, after the State attorneys general and Justice Department lawyers complete final preparations for the case this week in Washington. Officials met with Google reps the previous week to discuss accusations of search bias against competitors and providing of Google and other partners as default to users... "It's impossible for small search engine competitors to compete with Google's deep pockets and outbid it for valuable placements like Apple's browser," Gabriel Weinberg, CEO of DuckDuckGo, said in his complaint to the Department of Justice. In a recent statement, a spokesperson for DuckDuckGo said the company is pleased that the DoJ "is going to finally address the elephant in the room: Google's obvious, overwhelming, and anti-competitive dominance in search," adding that "a world without search defaults" would benefit consumers. Google's search engine "decides the fates of thousands of businesses online," notes Bloomberg, "and has funded Google's expansion into email, online video, smartphone software, maps, cloud computing, autonomous vehicles and other forms of digital ads."

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University of California at Berkeley has made a big announcement: Transistors based on carbon rather than silicon could potentially boost computers' speed and cut their power consumption more than a thousandfold — think of a mobile phone that holds its charge for months — but the set of tools needed to build working carbon circuits has remained incomplete until now. A team of chemists and physicists at the University of California, Berkeley, has finally created the last tool in the toolbox, a metallic wire made entirely of carbon, setting the stage for a ramp-up in research to build carbon-based transistors and, ultimately, computers. "Staying within the same material, within the realm of carbon-based materials, is what brings this technology together now," said Felix Fischer, UC Berkeley professor of chemistry, noting that the ability to make all circuit elements from the same material makes fabrication easier. "That has been one of the key things that has been missing in the big picture of an all-carbon-based integrated circuit architecture." Heat was used to induce the molecules to join together, in a process Fischer compares to an atomic-scale set of Legos. "They are all precisely engineered so that there is only one way they can fit together. It's as if you take a bag of Legos, and you shake it, and out comes a fully assembled car. That is the magic of controlling the self-assembly with chemistry..." "I believe this technology will revolutionize how we build integrated circuits in the future..." Fischer said.

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Long-time Slashdot reader fahrbot-bot shares a story that all started with a high school student's innocuous question on TikTok, leading academic mathematicians and philosophers to weigh in on "a very ancient and unresolved debate in the philosophy of science," reports Smithsonian magazine. "What, exactly, is math?" Is it invented, or discovered? And are the things that mathematicians work with — numbers, algebraic equations, geometry, theorems and so on — real? Some scholars feel very strongly that mathematical truths are "out there," waiting to be discovered — a position known as Platonism.... Many mathematicians seem to support this view. The things they've discovered over the centuries — that there is no highest prime number; that the square root of two is an irrational number; that the number pi, when expressed as a decimal, goes on forever — seem to be eternal truths, independent of the minds that found them.... Other scholars — especially those working in other branches of science — view Platonism with skepticism. Scientists tend to be empiricists; they imagine the universe to be made up of things we can touch and taste and so on; things we can learn about through observation and experiment. The idea of something existing "outside of space and time" makes empiricists nervous: It sounds embarrassingly like the way religious believers talk about God, and God was banished from respectable scientific discourse a long time ago. Platonism, as mathematician Brian Davies has put it, "has more in common with mystical religions than it does with modern science." The fear is that if mathematicians give Plato an inch, he'll take a mile. If the truth of mathematical statements can be confirmed just by thinking about them, then why not ethical problems, or even religious questions? Why bother with empiricism at all...? Platonism has various alternatives. One popular view is that mathematics is merely a set of rules, built up from a set of initial assumptions — what mathematicians call axioms... But this view has its own problems. If mathematics is just something we dream up from within our own heads, why should it "fit" so well with what we observe in nature...? Theoretical physicist Eugene Wigner highlighted this issue in a famous 1960 essay titled, "The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences." Wigner concluded that the usefulness of mathematics in tackling problems in physics "is a wonderful gift which we neither understand nor deserve."

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"Anyone can access portions of a web portal used by law enforcement to request customer data from Amazon," reports TechCrunch, "even though the portal is supposed to require a verified email address and password..." Only time sensitive emergency requests can be submitted without an account, but this requires the user to "declare and acknowledge" that they are an authorized law enforcement officer before they can submit a request. The portal does not display customer data or allow access to existing law enforcement requests. But parts of the website still load without needing to log in, including its dashboard and the "standard" request form used by law enforcement to request customer data... Assuming this was a bug, we sent Amazon several emails prior to publication but did not hear back... Motherboard reported a similar issue earlier this month that allowed anyone with an email address to access law enforcement portals set up by Facebook and WhatsApp.

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Most of Microsoft's money now comes from its cloud service Azure, points out open-source advocate Eric S. Raymond. Now he posits a future where Windows development will "inevitably" become a drag on Microsoft's business: So, you're a Microsoft corporate strategist. What's the profit-maximizing path forward given all these factors? It's this: Microsoft Windows becomes a Proton-like emulation layer over a Linux kernel, with the layer getting thinner over time as more of the support lands in the mainline kernel sources. The economic motive is that Microsoft sheds an ever-larger fraction of its development costs as less and less has to be done in-house. If you think this is fantasy, think again. The best evidence that it's already the plan is that Microsoft has already ported Edge to run under Linux. There is only one way that makes any sense, and that is as a trial run for freeing the rest of the Windows utility suite from depending on any emulation layer. So, the end state this all points at is: New Windows is mostly a Linux kernel, there's an old-Windows emulation over it, but Edge and the rest of the Windows user-land utilities don't use the emulation. The emulation layer is there for games and other legacy third-party software. Economic pressure will be on Microsoft to deprecate the emulation layer... Every increment of Windows/Linux convergence helps with that — reduces administration and the expected volume of support traffic. Eventually, Microsoft announces upcoming end-of-life on the Windows emulation. The OS itself , and its userland tools, has for some time already been Linux underneath a carefully preserved old-Windows UI. Third-party software providers stop shipping Windows binaries in favor of ELF binaries with a pure Linux API... ...and Linux finally wins the desktop wars, not by displacing Windows but by co-opting it. Perhaps this is always how it had to be.

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