Tuesday a SpaceX Falcon Heavy rocket will launch a special satellite — a state-of-the-art weather-watcher from America's National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

It will complete a series of four GOES-R satellite launches that began in 2016. Space.com drills down into how these satellites have changed weather forecasts: More than seven years later, with three of the four satellites in the series orbiting the Earth, scientists and researchers say they are pleased with the results and how the advanced technology has been a game changer. "I think it has really lived up to its hype in thunderstorm forecasting. Meteorologists can see the convection evolve in near real-time and this gives them enhanced insight on storm development and severity, making for better warnings," John Cintineo, a researcher from NOAA's National Severe Storms Laboratory , told Space.com in an email.

"Not only does the GOES-R series provide observations where radar coverage is lacking, but it often provides a robust signal before radar, such as when a storm is strengthening or weakening. I'm sure there have been many other improvements in forecasts and environmental monitoring over the last decade, but this is where I have most clearly seen improvement," Cintineo said. In addition to helping predict severe thunderstorms, each satellite has collected images and data on heavy rain events that could trigger flooding, detected low clouds and fog as it forms, and has made significant improvements to forecasts and services used during hurricane season. "GOES provides our hurricane forecasters with faster, more accurate and detailed data that is critical for estimating a storm's intensity, including cloud top cooling, convective structures, specific features of a hurricane's eye, upper-level wind speeds, and lightning activity," Ken Graham, director of NOAA's National Weather Service told Space.com in an email.

Instruments such as the Advanced Baseline Imager have three times more spectral channels, four times the image quality, and five times the imaging speed as the previous GOES satellites. The Geostationary Lightning Mapper is the first of its kind in orbit on the GOES-R series that allows scientists to view lightning 24/7 and strikes that make contact with the ground and from cloud to cloud. "GOES-U and the GOES-R series of satellites provides scientists and forecasters weather surveillance of the entire western hemisphere, at unprecedented spatial and temporal scales," Cintineo said. "Data from these satellites are helping researchers develop new tools and methods to address problems such as lightning prediction, sea-spray identification (sea-spray is dangerous for mariners), severe weather warnings, and accurate cloud motion estimation. The instruments from GOES-R also help improve forecasts from global and regional numerical weather models, through improved data assimilation."
The final satellite, launching Tuesday, includes a new sensor — the Compact Coronagraph — "that will monitor weather outside of Earth's atmosphere, keeping an eye on what space weather events are happening that could impact our planet," according to the article.

"It will be the first near real time operational coronagraph that we have access to," Rob Steenburgh, a space scientist at NOAA's Space Weather Prediction Center, told Space.com on the phone. "That's a huge leap for us because up until now, we've always depended on a research coronagraph instrument on a spacecraft that was launched quite a long time ago."

Ancient Slashdot reader ewhac writes: On June 19, 1984, Robert Scheifler announced on MIT's Project Athena mailing list a new graphical windowing system he'd put together. Having cribbed a fair bit of code from the existing windowing toolkit called W, Scheifler named his new system X, thus giving birth to the X Window System. Scheifler prophetically wrote at the time, "The code seems fairly solid at this point, although there are still some deficiencies to be fixed up."

The 1980's and 1990's saw tremendous activity in the development of graphical displays and user interfaces, and X was right in the middle of it all, alongside Apple, Sun, Xerox, Apollo, Silicon Graphics, NeXT, and many others. Despite the fierce, well-funded competition, and heated arguments about how many buttons a mouse should have, X managed to survive, due in large part to its Open Source licensing and its flexible design, allowing it to continue to work well even as graphical hardware rapidly advanced. As such, it was ported to dozens of platforms over the years (including a port to the Amiga computer by Dale Luck in the late 1980's). 40 years later, despite its warts, inconsistencies, age, and Wayland promising for the last ten years to be coming Real Soon Now, X remains the windowing system for UNIX-like platforms.

Proton, the secure-minded email and productivity suite, is becoming a nonprofit foundation, but it doesn't want you to think about it in the way you think about other notable privacy and web foundations. From a report: "We believe that if we want to bring about large-scale change, Proton can't be billionaire-subsidized (like Signal), Google-subsidized (like Mozilla), government-subsidized (like Tor), donation-subsidized (like Wikipedia), or even speculation-subsidized (like the plethora of crypto "foundations")," Proton CEO Andy Yen wrote in a blog post announcing the transition. "Instead, Proton must have a profitable and healthy business at its core."

The announcement comes exactly 10 years to the day after a crowdfunding campaign saw 10,000 people give more than $500,000 to launch Proton Mail. To make it happen, Yen, along with co-founder Jason Stockman and first employee Dingchao Lu, endowed the Proton Foundation with some of their shares. The Proton Foundation is now the primary shareholder of the business Proton, which Yen states will "make irrevocable our wish that Proton remains in perpetuity an organization that places people ahead of profits." Among other members of the Foundation's board is Sir Tim Berners-Lee, inventor of HTML, HTTP, and almost everything else about the web.

Of particular importance is where Proton and the Proton Foundation are located: Switzerland. As Yen noted, Swiss foundations do not have shareholders and are instead obligated to act "in accordance with the purpose for which they were established." While the for-profit entity Proton AG can still do things like offer stock options to recruits and even raise its own capital on private markets, the Foundation serves as a backstop against moving too far from Proton's founding mission, Yen wrote.

Long-time Slashdot reader theodp shared this warning from a long-time AI researcher arguing that data science "is due" for a reckoning over whether results can be reproduced. "Few technological revolutions came with such a low barrier of entry as Machine Learning..." Unlike Machine Learning, Data Science is not an academic discipline, with its own set of algorithms and methods... There is an immense diversity, but also disparities in skill, expertise, and knowledge among Data Scientists... In practice, depending on their backgrounds, data scientists may have large knowledge gaps in computer science, software engineering, theory of computation, and even statistics in the context of machine learning, despite those topics being fundamental to any ML project. But it's ok, because you can just call the API, and Python is easy to learn. Right...?

Building products using Machine Learning and data is still difficult. The tooling infrastructure is still very immature and the non-standard combination of data and software creates unforeseen challenges for engineering teams. But in my views, a lot of the failures come from this explosive cocktail of ritualistic Machine Learning:

- Weak software engineering knowledge and practices compounded by the tools themselves;
- Knowledge gap in mathematical, statistical, and computational methods, encouraged black boxing API;
- Ill-defined range of competence for the role of data scientist, reinforced by a pool of candidates with an unusually wide range of backgrounds;
- A tendency to follow the hype rather than the science.


- What can you do?

- Hold your data scientists accountable using Science.
- At a minimum, any AI/ML project should include an Exploratory Data Analysis, whose results directly support the design choices for feature engineering and model selection.
- Data scientists should be encouraged to think outside-of-the box of ML, which is a very small box - Data scientists should be trained to use eXplainable AI methods to provide context about the algorithm's performance beyond the traditional performance metrics like accuracy, FPR, or FNR.
- Data scientists should be held at similar standards than other software engineering specialties, with code review, code documentation, and architectural designs.
The article concludes, "Until such practices are established as the norm, I'll remain skeptical of Data Science."

In 2016, Phoronix remembered how the early days of Linux kernel mode-setting (KMS) had brought hopes for improved error messages. And one long-awaited feature was errors messages for "Direct Rendering Manager" (or DRM) drivers — something analgous to the "Blue Screen of Death" Windows gives for critical errors.

Now Linux 6.10 is introducing a new DRM panic handler infrastructure enabling messages when a panic occurs, Phoronix reports today. "This is especially important for those building a kernel without VT/FBCON support where otherwise viewing the kernel panic message isn't otherwise easily available." With Linux 6.10 the initial DRM Panic code has landed as well as wiring up the DRM/KMS driver support for the SimpleDRM, MGAG200, IMX, and AST drivers. There is work underway on extending DRM Panic support to other drivers that we'll likely see over the coming kernel cycles for more widespread support... On Linux 6.10+ with platforms having the DRM Panic driver support, this "Blue Screen of Death" functionality can be tested via a route such as echo c > /proc/sysrq-trigger.
The article links to a picture shared on Mastodon by Red Hat engineer Javier Martinez Canillas of the error message being generated on a BeaglePlay single board computer.

Phoronix also points out that some operating systems have even considered QR codes for kernel error messages...

Wednesday The Information reported that OpenAI had doubled its annualized revenue — a measure of the previous month's revenue multiplied by 12 — in the last six months. It's now $3.4 billion (which is up from around $1 billion last summer, notes Engadget).

And now an anonymous reader shares a new report from The Information: OpenAI CEO Sam Altman recently told some shareholders that the artificial intelligence developer is considering changing its governance structure to a for-profit business that OpenAI's nonprofit board doesn't control, according to a person who heard the comments. One scenario Altman said the board is considering is a for-profit benefit corporation, which rivals such as Anthropic and xAI are using, this person said. Such a change could open the door to an eventual initial public offering of OpenAI, which currently sports a private valuation of $86 billion, and may give Altman an opportunity to take a stake in the fast-growing company, a move some investors have been pushing.
More from Reuters: The restructuring discussions are fluid and Altman and his fellow directors could ultimately decide to take a different approach, The Information added. In response to Reuters' queries about the report, OpenAI said: "We remain focused on building AI that benefits everyone. The nonprofit is core to our mission and will continue to exist."
Is that a classic non-denial denial?

Note that the nonprofit's "continuing to exist" does not in any way preclude OpenAI from becoming a for-profit business — with a spin-off nonprofit, continuing to exist...

Friday the Python Software Foundation published several blog posts about this year's "Python Language Summit" May 15th (before PyCon US), which featured talks and discussions by core developers, triagers, and Python implementation maintainers.

There were several lightning talks. One talk came from the maintainer of the PyO3 project, offering Rust bindings for the Python C API (which requires mapping Rust concepts to Python — leaving a question as to how to map Rust's error-handling panic! macro). There was a talk on formalizing the PEP prototype process, and a talk on whether the Python team should have a more official presence in the Apple App Store (and maybe the Google Play Store). One talk suggested changing the formatting of error messages for assert statements, and one covered a "highly experimental" project to support structured data sharing between Python subinterpreters. One talk covered Python's "unsupported build" warning and how it should behave on platforms beyond Python's officially supported list.

Python Foundation blog posts also covered some of the longer talks, including one on the idea of using type annotations as a mechanism for transformers. One talk covered the new interactive REPL interpreter coming to Python 3.13.

And one talk focused on Python's security model after the xz-utils backdoor: Pablo Galindo Salgado, Steering Council member and the release manager for Python 3.10 and 3.11, brought this topic to the Language Summit to discuss what could be done to improve Python's security model... Pablo noted the similarities shared between CPython and xz-utils, referencing the previous Language Summit's talk on core developer burnout, the number of modules in the standard library that have one or zero maintainers, the high ratio of maintainers to source code, and the use of autotools for configuration. Autotools was used by [xz's] Jia Tan as part of the backdoor, specifically to obscure the changes to tainted release artifacts. Pablo confirmed along with many nods of agreement that indeed, CPython could be vulnerable to a contributor or core developer getting secretly malicious changes merged into the project.

For multiple reasons like being able to fix bugs and single-maintainer modules, CPython doesn't require reviewers on the pull requests of core developers. This can lead to "unilateral action", meaning that a change is introduced into CPython without the review of someone besides the author. Other situations like release managers backporting fixes to other branches without review are common.
Much discussion ensued about the possibility of altering workflows (including pull request reviews), identity verification, and the importance of post-incident action plans. Guido van Rossum suggested a "higher bar" for granting write access, but in the end "Overall it was clear there is more discussion and work to be done in this rapidly changing area."

In another talk, Hugo van Kemenade, the newly announced Release Manager for Python 3.14 and 3.15, "started the Language Summit with a proposal to change Python's versioning scheme. The perception of Python using semantic versioning is a source of confusion for users who don't expect backwards incompatible changes when upgrading to new versions of Python. In reality almost all new feature releases of Python include backwards incompatible changes such as the removal of "dead batteries" where PEP 594 marked 19 modules for removal in Python 3.13. Calendar Versioning (CalVer) encompasses a wide array of different versioning schemes that have one property in common: using the release date as part of a release's version... Hugo offered multiple proposed versioning schemes, including:

- Using the release year as minor version (3.YY.micro, "3.26.0")
- Using the release year as major version (YY.0.micro, "26.0.0")
- Using the release year and month as major and minor version (YY.MM.micro, "26.10.0")

[...] Overall the proposal to use the current year as the minor version was well-received, Hugo mentioned that he'd be drafting up a PEP for this change.

Drew Turney reports via Live Science: The "Turing test," first proposed as "the imitation game" by computer scientist Alan Turing in 1950, judges whether a machine's ability to show intelligence is indistinguishable from a human. For a machine to pass the Turing test, it must be able to talk to somebody and fool them into thinking it is human. Scientists decided to replicate this test by asking 500 people to speak with four respondents, including a human and the 1960s-era AI program ELIZA as well as both GPT-3.5 and GPT-4, the AI that powers ChatGPT. The conversations lasted five minutes -- after which participants had to say whether they believed they were talking to a human or an AI. In the study, published May 9 to the pre-print arXiv server, the scientists found that participants judged GPT-4 to be human 54% of the time.

ELIZA, a system pre-programmed with responses but with no large language model (LLM) or neural network architecture, was judged to be human just 22% of the time. GPT-3.5 scored 50% while the human participant scored 67%. "Machines can confabulate, mashing together plausible ex-post-facto justifications for things, as humans do," Nell Watson, an AI researcher at the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE), told Live Science. "They can be subject to cognitive biases, bamboozled and manipulated, and are becoming increasingly deceptive. All these elements mean human-like foibles and quirks are being expressed in AI systems, which makes them more human-like than previous approaches that had little more than a list of canned responses." Further reading: 1960s Chatbot ELIZA Beat OpenAI's GPT-3.5 In a Recent Turing Test Study

A critical vulnerability in the PHP programming language (CVE-2024-4577) has been exploited by ransomware criminals, leading to the infection of up to 1,800 servers primarily in China with the TellYouThePass ransomware. This vulnerability, which affects PHP when run in CGI mode, allows attackers to execute malicious code on web servers. Ars Technica's Dan Goodin reports: As of Thursday, Internet scans performed by security firm Censys had detected 1,000 servers infected by a ransomware strain known as TellYouThePass, down from 1,800 detected on Monday. The servers, primarily located in China, no longer display their usual content; instead, many list the site's file directory, which shows all files have been given a .locked extension, indicating they have been encrypted. An accompanying ransom note demands roughly $6,500 in exchange for the decryption key. The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-4577 and carrying a severity rating of 9.8 out of 10, stems from errors in the way PHP converts Unicode characters into ASCII. A feature built into Windows known as Best Fit allows attackers to use a technique known as argument injection to convert user-supplied input into characters that pass malicious commands to the main PHP application. Exploits allow attackers to bypass CVE-2012-1823, a critical code execution vulnerability patched in PHP in 2012.

CVE-2024-4577 affects PHP only when it runs in a mode known as CGI, in which a web server parses HTTP requests and passes them to a PHP script for processing. Even when PHP isn't set to CGI mode, however, the vulnerability may still be exploitable when PHP executables such as php.exe and php-cgi.exe are in directories that are accessible by the web server. This configuration is extremely rare, with the exception of the XAMPP platform, which uses it by default. An additional requirement appears to be that the Windows locale -- used to personalize the OS to the local language of the user -- must be set to either Chinese or Japanese. The critical vulnerability was published on June 6, along with a security patch. Within 24 hours, threat actors were exploiting it to install TellYouThePass, researchers from security firm Imperva reported Monday. The exploits executed code that used the mshta.exe Windows binary to run an HTML application file hosted on an attacker-controlled server. Use of the binary indicated an approach known as living off the land, in which attackers use native OS functionalities and tools in an attempt to blend in with normal, non-malicious activity.

In a post published Friday, Censys researchers said that the exploitation by the TellYouThePass gang started on June 7 and mirrored past incidents that opportunistically mass scan the Internet for vulnerable systems following a high-profile vulnerability and indiscriminately targeting any accessible server. The vast majority of the infected servers have IP addresses geolocated to China, Taiwan, Hong Kong, or Japan, likely stemming from the fact that Chinese and Japanese locales are the only ones confirmed to be vulnerable, Censys researchers said in an email. Since then, the number of infected sites -- detected by observing the public-facing HTTP response serving an open directory listing showing the server's filesystem, along with the distinctive file-naming convention of the ransom note -- has fluctuated from a low of 670 on June 8 to a high of 1,800 on Monday. Censys researchers said in an email that they're not entirely sure what's causing the changing numbers.

Lynn Conway, a pioneering computer scientist who made significant contributions to VLSI design and microelectronics, and a prominent advocate for transgender rights, died Sunday from a heart condition. She was 85. Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Michael Hiltzik remembers Conway in a column for the Los Angeles Times: As I recounted in 2020, I first met Conway when I was working on my 1999 book about Xerox PARC, Dealers of Lightning, for which she was a uniquely valuable source. In 2000, when she decided to come out as transgender, she allowed me to chronicle her life in a cover story for the Los Angeles Times Magazine titled "Through the Gender Labyrinth." That article traced her journey from childhood as a male in New York's strait-laced Westchester County to her decision to transition. Years of emotional and psychological turmoil followed, even as he excelled in academic studies. [Conway earned bachelor's and master's degrees in electrical engineering from Columbia University in 1961, quickly joining a team at IBM to design the world's fastest supercomputer. Despite personal success, she faced significant emotional turmoil, leading to her decision to transition in 1968. Initially supportive, IBM ultimately fired Conway due to their inability to reconcile her transition with the company's conservative image.]

The family went on welfare for three months. Conway's wife barred her from contact with her daughters. She would not see them again for 14 years. Beyond the financial implications, the stigma of banishment from one of the world's most respected corporations felt like an excommunication. She sought jobs in the burgeoning electrical engineering community around Stanford, working her way up through start-ups, and in 1973 she was invited to join Xerox's brand new Palo Alto Research Center, or PARC. In partnership with Caltech engineering professor Carver Mead, Conway established the design rules for the new technology of "very large-scale integrated circuits" (or, in computer shorthand, VLSI). The pair laid down the rules in a 1979 textbook that a generation of computer and engineering students knew as "Mead-Conway."

VLSI fostered a revolution in computer microprocessor design that included the Pentium chip, which would power millions of PCs. Conway spread the VLSI gospel by creating a system in which students taking courses at MIT and other technical institutions could get their sample designs rendered in silicon. Conway's life journey gave her a unique perspective on the internal dynamics of Xerox's unique lab, which would invent the personal computer, the laser printer, Ethernet, and other innovations that have become fully integrated into our daily lives. She could see it from the vantage point of an insider, thanks to her experience working on IBM's supercomputer, and an outsider, thanks to her personal history.

After PARC, she was recruited to head a supercomputer program at the Defense Department's Advanced Research Projects Agency, or DARPA -- sailing through her FBI background check so easily that she became convinced that the Pentagon must have already encountered transgender people in its workforce. A figure of undisputed authority in some of the most abstruse corners of computing, Conway was elected to the National Academy of Engineering in 1989. She joined the University of Michigan as a professor and associate dean in the College of Engineering. In 2002 she married a fellow engineer, Charles Rogers, and with him lived active life -- with a shared passion for white-water canoeing, motocross racing and other adventures -- on a 24-acre homestead not far from Ann Arbor, Mich. In 2020, Conway received a formal apology from IBM for firing her 52 years earlier. Diane Gherson, an IBM senior vice president, told her, "Thanks to your courage, your example, and all the people who followed in your footsteps, as a society we are now in a better place.... But that doesn't help you, Lynn, probably our very first employee to come out. And for that, we deeply regret what you went through -- and know I speak for all of us."

Michael Geist Pig Hogger (Slashdot reader #10,379) reminds us that in Canadian law, "fair use" is called "fair dealing" — and that Canadian digital media users just enjoyed a huge win. Canadian user rights champion Michael Geist writes: The Federal Court has issued a landmark decision on copyright's anti-circumvention rules which concludes that digital locks should not trump fair dealing. Rather, the two must co-exist in harmony, leading to an interpretation that users can still rely on fair dealing even in cases involving those digital locks.

The decision could have enormous implications for libraries, education, and users more broadly as it seeks to restore the copyright balance in the digital world. The decision also importantly concludes that merely requiring a password does not meet the standard needed to qualify for copyright rules involving technological protection measures.
Canada's 2012 "Copyright Modernization Act" protected anti-copying technology from circumvention, Geist writes — and Blacklock's Reports had then "argued that allowing anyone other than original subscriber to access articles constituted copyright infringement." The court found that the Blacklock's legal language associated with its licensing was confusing and that fair dealing applied here as well...

Blacklock's position on this issue was straightforward: it argued that its content was protected by a password, that passwords constituted a form of technological protection measure, and that fair dealing does not apply in the context of circumvention. In other words, it argued that the act of circumvention (in this case of a password) was itself infringing and it could not be saved by fair dealing. The Federal Court disagreed on all points...

For years, many have argued for a specific exception to clarify that circumvention was permitted for fair dealing purposes, essentially making the case that users should not lose their fair dealing rights the moment a rights holder places a digital lock on their work. The Federal Court has concluded that the fair dealing rights have remained there all along and that the Copyright Act's anti-circumvention rules must be interpreted in a manner consistent with those rights.
"The case could still be appealed, but for now the court has restored a critical aspect of the copyright balance after more than a decade of uncertainty and concern."

Last week America's energy secretary cheered the startup of a fourth nuclear reactor at a Georgia power plant, calling it "the largest producer of clean energy, and the largest producer of electricity in the United States" after a third reactor was started up there in December.

From the U.S. Energy Department's transcript of the speech: Each year, Units 3 and 4 are going to produce enough clean power to power 1 million homes and businesses, enough energy to power roughly 1 in 4 homes in Georgia. Preventing 10 million metric tons of carbon dioxide pollution annually. That, by the way, is like planting more than 165 million trees every year!

And that's not to mention the historic investments that [electric utility] Southern has made on the safety front, to ensure this facility meets — and exceeds — the highest operating standards in the world....

To reach our goal of net zero by 2050, we have to at least triple our current nuclear capacity in this country. That means we've got to add 200 more gigawatts by 2050. Okay, two down, 198 to go! In building [Unit] 4, we've solved our greatest design challenges. We've stood up entire supply chains.... And so it's time to cash in on our investments by building more. More of these facilities. The Department of Energy's Loan Programs Office stands ready to help, with hundreds of billions of dollars in what we call Title 17 loans... Since the President signed the Inflation Reduction Act and the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law, companies across the nation have announced 29 new or expanded nuclear facilities — across 16 states — representing about 1,600 potential new jobs. And the majority of those projects will expand the domestic uranium production and fuel fabrication, strengthening these critical supply chains...

Bottom line is, in short, we are determined to build a world-class nuclear industry in the United States, and we're putting our money where our mouth is.
America's Energy Secretary told the Washington Post that "Whether it happens through small modular reactors, or AP1000s, or maybe another design out there worthy of consideration, we want to see nuclear built." The Post notes the Energy department gave a $1.5 billion loan to restart a Michigan power plant which was decommissioned in 2022. "It would mark the first time a shuttered U.S. nuclear plant has been reactivated."

"But in this country with 54 nuclear plants across 28 states, restarting existing reactors and delaying their closure is a lot less complicated than building new ones." When the final [Georgia] reactor went online at the end of April, the expansion was seven years behind schedule and nearly $20 billion over budget. It ultimately cost more than twice as much as promised, with ratepayers footing much of the bill through surcharges and rate hikes...

Administration officials say the country has no choice but to make nuclear power a workable option again. The country is fast running short on electricity, demand for power is surging amid a boom in construction of data centers and manufacturing plants, and a neglected power grid is struggling to accommodate enough new wind and solar power to meet the nation's needs...

As the administration frames the narrative of the plant as one of perseverance and innovation that clears a path for restoring U.S. nuclear energy dominance, even some longtime boosters of the industry question whether this country will ever again have a vibrant nuclear energy sector. "It is hard for me to envision state energy regulators signing off on another one of these, given how badly the last ones went," said Matt Bowen, a nuclear scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University, who was an adviser on nuclear energy issues in the Obama administration.
The article notes there are 19 AP1000 reactors (the design used at the Georgia plant) in development around the world. "None of them are being built in the United States."

Solar power in California has reached a new record output, briefly surpassing 100% of power demand. It comes just days after the state exceeded 100% of energy demand with renewables (wind, solar and hydro) over a record 45 days straight, and 69 out of 75. CleanTechnica reports: As you can see [here], at its peak, solar power was providing 102.1% of electricity demand in California. Together, wind, water, and solar peaked at 136.4% of electricity demand! [...] The best news is that California seems to quickly be chopping the duck curve down to size. [...] The solution for the duck curve is clear: energy storage. Store that bursting solar energy produced in the middle of the day and gradually use it in the evening as the sun goes down and electricity demand rises. The good news is that California has been making progress on this very fast! Look at the graph [here] regarding electricity generation from natural gas and note the line for 2023 versus the line for 2024. [...]

The overall story is that California renewable energy continues to lead the way forward. Solar power is now peaking at more than 100% of electricity demand, renewables as a whole are peaking at 134% electricity demand, the duck curve has been shaved down to basically no duck curve at all (but you could now call the battery charge/discharge curve a duck curve), and the whole state (and world) is benefitting. Get ready for more records in the days to come. We're still a few weeks away from the summer solstice. Further reading: Battery-Powered California Faces Lower Blackout Risk This Summer

"Few computer keyboards are as iconic, as influential, or as beige as the IBM Model-M," writes the blog OMG Ubuntu adding that it's "no surprise then that it's been given a modern reimagining by 8BitDo." Following on from their Nintendo NES and Famicom and Commodore 64 homages, 8BitDo has unveiled its latest retro-inspired mechanical keyboard. This one pays tribute to a true computing classic: the IBM Model-M keyboard.

Lest anyone familiar with the real thing get too excited I'll mention up front that 8BitDo's Keyboard-M is a mechanical keyboard, using Kailh Box V2 white switches (swappable, of course) and not the buckling spring mechanism synonymous with the original. On Linux you can enable a buckling spring sound effect for every key press though, should you buy this and want the clatter to accompany it...!

Like 8BitDo's other retro keyboards you can use this over Bluetooth, 2.4G wireless (USB adapter sits underneath), or wired. It has a built-in rechargeable 2000mAh Li-on battery that's good for 200 hours between charges.
"It certainly looks the business," writes the Verge, "especially with the slick new wireless numpad / calculator combo pad 8BitDo will sell alongside it for another $44.99."

And Ars Technica adds that "The M Edition's color scheme, chunkier build, and typeface selection, including on the Tab key with arrows and elsewhere, are nods to IBM's Model M," (noting that the Model M first succeeded the Model F keyboard in 1985). "Of course, the keyboard's naming, and the IBM behemoth and floppy disks strategically placed in marketing images, are notes of that, too..."

"The M Edition also comes with the detachable A and B "Super Buttons" that connect to the keyboard via a 3.5 mm jack and are programmable without software."

"The paint job is pretty faithful to the original," notes Windows Central, "with a combination of gray and white throughout, right down to the accurately recreated LED status panel in the right-hand corner. There are even two key caps with an IBM-inspired blue font on them. It's just tremendous."

Ars Technica offers this advice to unconvinced purists: If you want a real Model M, there's a market of found and restored models available online and in thrift stores and electronics stores. For a modern spin, like USB ports and Mac support, Unicomp also makes new Model M keyboards that are truer to the original IBM design, particularly in their use of buckling spring switches.

"The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has added a critical security bug in Linux to its list of vulnerabilities known to be actively exploited in the wild," reported Ars Technica on Friday.

"The vulnerability, tracked as CVE-2024-1086 and carrying a severity rating of 7.8 out of a possible 10, allows people who have already gained a foothold inside an affected system to escalate their system privileges." It's the result of a use-after-free error, a class of vulnerability that occurs in software written in the C and C++ languages when a process continues to access a memory location after it has been freed or deallocated. Use-after-free vulnerabilities can result in remote code or privilege escalation. The vulnerability, which affects Linux kernel versions 5.14 through 6.6, resides in the NF_tables, a kernel component enabling the Netfilter, which in turn facilitates a variety of network operations... It was patched in January, but as the CISA advisory indicates, some production systems have yet to install it. At the time this Ars post went live, there were no known details about the active exploitation.

A deep-dive write-up of the vulnerability reveals that these exploits provide "a very powerful double-free primitive when the correct code paths are hit." Double-free vulnerabilities are a subclass of use-after-free errors...

Long-time Slashdot reader schwit1 shares the announcement of a new report from the International Energy Forum: The seemingly universal presumption persists that the copper needed for the green transition will somehow be available... This paper addresses this issue by projecting copper supply and demand from 2018 to 2050 and placing both in the historical context of copper mine output...

Just to meet business-as-usual trends, 115% more copper must be mined in the next 30 years than has been mined historically until now. To electrify the global vehicle fleet requires bringing into production 55% more new mines than would otherwise be needed... Our main purpose... is to communicate the magnitude of the copper mining challenge to the broader public that is less familiar with upstream resource issues.
"On the other hand, hybrid electric vehicle manufacture would require negligible extra copper mining..." the report points out.

Wikipedia describes the non-profit as a 73-country organization promoting dialogue about the world's energy needs. The group's announcement ends with a hope that the report "will promote discussion and formulation of alternative policies to be certain the developing world can catch up with the developed world while global initiatives advance with the green energy transition."

"A Swiss biocomputing startup has launched an online platform that provides remote access to 16 human brain organoids," reports Tom's Hardware: FinalSpark claims its Neuroplatform is the world's first online platform delivering access to biological neurons in vitro. Moreover, bioprocessors like this "consume a million times less power than traditional digital processors," the company says. FinalSpark says its Neuroplatform is capable of learning and processing information, and due to its low power consumption, it could reduce the environmental impacts of computing. In a recent research paper about its developments, FinalSpakr claims that training a single LLM like GPT-3 required approximately 10GWh — about 6,000 times greater energy consumption than the average European citizen uses in a whole year. Such energy expenditure could be massively cut following the successful deployment of bioprocessors.

The operation of the Neuroplatform currently relies on an architecture that can be classified as wetware: the mixing of hardware, software, and biology. The main innovation delivered by the Neuroplatform is through the use of four Multi-Electrode Arrays (MEAs) housing the living tissue — organoids, which are 3D cell masses of brain tissue...interfaced by eight electrodes used for both stimulation and recording... FinalSpark has given access to its remote computing platform to nine institutions to help spur bioprocessing research and development. With such institutions' collaboration, it hopes to create the world's first living processor.
FinalSpark was founded in 2014, according to Wikipedia's page on wetware computing. "While a wetware computer is still largely conceptual, there has been limited success with construction and prototyping, which has acted as a proof of the concept's realistic application to computing in the future."

Thanks to long-time Slashdot reader Artem S. Tashkinov for sharing the article.

Benj Edwards and Ashley Belanger reports via Ars Technica: On Wednesday, Axios broke the news that OpenAI had signed deals with The Atlantic and Vox Media that will allow the ChatGPT maker to license their editorial content to further train its language models. But some of the publications' writers -- and the unions that represent them -- were surprised by the announcements and aren't happy about it. Already, two unions have released statements expressing "alarm" and "concern." "The unionized members of The Atlantic Editorial and Business and Technology units are deeply troubled by the opaque agreement The Atlantic has made with OpenAI," reads a statement from the Atlantic union. "And especially by management's complete lack of transparency about what the agreement entails and how it will affect our work."

The Vox Union -- which represents The Verge, SB Nation, and Vulture, among other publications -- reacted in similar fashion, writing in a statement, "Today, members of the Vox Media Union ... were informed without warning that Vox Media entered into a 'strategic content and product partnership' with OpenAI. As both journalists and workers, we have serious concerns about this partnership, which we believe could adversely impact members of our union, not to mention the well-documented ethical and environmental concerns surrounding the use of generative AI." [...] News of the deals took both journalists and unions by surprise. On X, Vox reporter Kelsey Piper, who recently penned an expose about OpenAI's restrictive non-disclosure agreements that prompted a change in policy from the company, wrote, "I'm very frustrated they announced this without consulting their writers, but I have very strong assurances in writing from our editor in chief that they want more coverage like the last two weeks and will never interfere in it. If that's false I'll quit.."

Journalists also reacted to news of the deals through the publications themselves. On Wednesday, The Atlantic Senior Editor Damon Beres wrote a piece titled "A Devil's Bargain With OpenAI," in which he expressed skepticism about the partnership, likening it to making a deal with the devil that may backfire. He highlighted concerns about AI's use of copyrighted material without permission and its potential to spread disinformation at a time when publications have seen a recent string of layoffs. He drew parallels to the pursuit of audiences on social media leading to clickbait and SEO tactics that degraded media quality. While acknowledging the financial benefits and potential reach, Beres cautioned against relying on inaccurate, opaque AI models and questioned the implications of journalism companies being complicit in potentially destroying the internet as we know it, even as they try to be part of the solution by partnering with OpenAI.

Similarly, over at Vox, Editorial Director Bryan Walsh penned a piece titled, "This article is OpenAI training data," in which he expresses apprehension about the licensing deal, drawing parallels between the relentless pursuit of data by AI companies and the classic AI thought experiment of Bostrom's "paperclip maximizer," cautioning that the single-minded focus on market share and profits could ultimately destroy the ecosystem AI companies rely on for training data. He worries that the growth of AI chatbots and generative AI search products might lead to a significant decline in search engine traffic to publishers, potentially threatening the livelihoods of content creators and the richness of the Internet itself.

In 2011 Ross Ulbricht launched an anonymous, Tor-hidden "darknet" marketplace (with transactions conducted in bitcoin). By 2015 he'd been sentenced to life in prison for crimes including money laundering, distributing narcotics, and trafficking in fraudulent identity documents — without the possibility of parole.

Today a U.S. presidential candidate promised to commute that life sentence — Donald Trump, speaking at the national convention of the Libertarian Party as it prepares to nominate its own candidate for president.

Commuting Ulbricht's life sentence is "a top demand" of a political movement that intends to run its own candidate against Trump, reports Semafor: "On day one, we will commute the sentence," Trump said, offering to free the creator of what was once the internet's most infamous drug clearinghouse. "We will bring him home." His speeches more typically include a pledge to execute drug dealers, citing China as a model.

"It's time to be winners," said Trump, asking rhetorically if third party delegates wanted to go on getting single-digit protest votes. "I'm asking for the Libertarian Party's endorsement, or at least lots of your votes...."

"I've been indicted by the government on 91 different things," Trump said. "So if I wasn't a libertarian before, I sure as hell am a libertarian now."
More coverage from NBC News: At times, Trump turned on the crowd, criticizing libertarians' turnout at previous elections. "You can keep going the way you have for the last long decades and get your 3% and meet again, get another 3%," Trump said following jeers from the crowd.
Another high-profile supporter for commuting Ulbricht's sentence is actor-turned documentary maker Alex Winter. Best known for playing slacker Bill S. Preston Esq in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and its sequels, Winter also directed, wrote, and co-produced the 2015 documentary Deep Web: The Untold Story of Bitcoin and the Silk Road (narrated by Keanu Reeves).

Writing earlier this month in Rolling Stone, Winter called Silk Road "inarguably a criminal operation" but also "a vibrant and diverse community of people from around the world. They were not only there for drugs but for the freedom of an encrypted and anonymous space, to convene and discuss everything from politics to literature and art, philosophy and drugs, drug recovery, and the onerous War on Drugs..." It's my firm opinion, and the opinion of many prison-system and criminal-law experts, that [Ulbricht's] sentence is disproportionate to his charges and that he deserves clemency. This case indeed reflects just one of the millions of unjust sentences in the long and failed War on Drugs... No matter what one thinks of Ulbricht, Silk Road, or the crimes that may have been committed, 10 years in prison is more than sufficient and customary punishment for those offenses or sins. Ross Ulbricht should be free.

Founded in 1963, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers held a special event Sunday that they said would be "inspiring engineering for the next 50 years."

The event featured talks on the origins of the internet from 80-year-old "father of the internet" Vint Cerf, along with John Shoch (who helped develop the Ethernet and internetwork protocols at Xerox PARC), Judith Estrin (who worked with Cerf on the TCP project), and Robert Kahn (who with Cerf first proposed the IP and TCP protocols). Ethernet co-inventor Bob Metcalfe also spoke at the end of the event.

Long-time Slashdot reader repett0 was an onsite volunteer, and shares that "it was incredible to meet and greet such a wonderful mix of people making technology happen... [T]he event celebrated many key technologies and innovators from the past 50 years and considerations of what is to come in the next 50 years." Video streams are available and more are coming online (including interviews with key innovators, society leadership, and more). If you could not make this event, follow-on activities continue, including the People-Centered Internet Imagine Workshop where a mix of society is working together to consider how to improve humanity's intersection with ever-expanding abilities thanks to technology.
They add that the event was made possible "through the collaboration of many professional computing societies" including the IEEE, People-Centered Internet, Google, Internet Society, IEEE Computer Society, GIANT Protocol, IEEE Foundation — and volunteers from the SF Bay Area ACM and Internet Society.