Linux fréttir

The Federal Trade Commission (FTC) has published its long-awaited report on how manufacturers limit product repairs. From a report: The "Nixing the Fix" [PDF] report details a host of repair restrictions, especially those imposed by mobile phone and car manufacturers. The anticompetitive practices covered by the FTC range from limited availability of spare parts and diagnostic software to designs that make repairs more difficult than they need to be. In response, the FTC wants to develop new laws and rules surrounding repairs, but it also wants better enforcement of existing legislation like the Magnuson-Moss Warranty Act (MMWA). While debates around right to repair rules in the EU have tended to focus on the environmental impact of sending broken devices to landfills, the FTC's report leads with the impacts they have on people. It says repair restrictions are bad for consumers when they can't easily repair their devices, and adds that these "may place a greater financial burden on communities of color and lower-income Americans." Independent repair shops also suffer as a result of repair restrictions, "disproportionately [affecting] small businesses owned by people of color." [...] According to the FTC, manufacturers are guilty of using numerous tactics that make it difficult for customers and independent businesses to repair their products. Here's the full list from the FTC's report: Product designs that complicate or prevent repair; Unavailability of parts and repair information; Designs that make independent repairs less safe; Policies or statements that steer consumers to manufacturer repair networks; Application of patent rights and enforcement of trademarks; Disparagement of non-OEM parts and independent repair; Software locks and firmware updates; or End User License Agreements

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I thought we were friends

An Apple exec has spoken of his shock after Fortnite creator Epic Games installed a hotfix that allowed it to deploy its own payment methods, thus skirting the 30 per cent App Store tax.…

Move comes days after firm acquired by Muse Group

Open source audio software outfit Audacity, now under new management, is adding some "basic telemetry", much to the alarm of many of its community.…

Just four years to go before planned switch-off

The tiny Suffolk town of Mildenhall is the second place where Openreach has stopped selling copper products as the company develops its strategy for withdrawing legacy telephone lines.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Motherboard: For the Korean research team led by senior author Chang-hee Nam, a plasma physicist and professor at Gwangju Institute of Science & Technology, their breakthrough in laser science may be a physically small feat (striking an area the size of a micron) but will have a huge impact on how we study not only cosmic phenomena from the beginning of time but how we treat cancer as well. After ten years of toiling, the team has demonstrated in a paper published on Thursday in the journal Optica the development of a laser with record-breaking intensity over 10^23 watts per square centimeter. Nam told Motherboard in an email that you can compare the intensity of this laser beam to the combined power of all of the sunlight across the entire planet, but pressed together into roughly the size of a speck of dust or a single red blood cell. This whole burst of power happens in just fractions of a second. "The laser intensity of 10 W/cm is comparable to the light intensity obtainable by focusing all the sunlight reaching Earth to a spot of 10 microns," explained Nam. To achieve this effect, Nam and colleagues at the Center for Relativistic Laser Science (CoReLS) lab constructed a kind of obstacle course for the laser beam to pass through to amplify, reflect, and control the motion of the photons comprising it. Because light behaves as both a particle (e.g. individual photons) as well as a wave, controlling the wavefront of this laser (similar to the front of an ocean wave) was crucial to make sure the team could actually focus its power. Nam explains that the technology to make this kind of precise control possible has been years in the making. Nam said that the ultrahigh power laser design played a role in this discovery by helping remove beam distortions while the deformable mirrors made it possible to have "extremely tight focusing without any aberrations." Beyond being a scientific breakthrough, Nam said that this high-intensity laser will open doors to explore some of the universe's most fundamental questions that had previously only been explored by theoreticians. Nam also said that these lasers have a more terrestrial purpose as well in the form of cancer treatment technology.

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A reminder of golden Start Menu days

Bork!Bork!Bork! There are certain things that do not belong in pizza. One is pineapple. Another is the Windows Start Menu.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: It's safe to say WhatsApp didn't have the ideal start to 2021. Less than a week into the new year, the Facebook-owned instant messaging app had already annoyed hundreds of thousands of users with its scary worded notification about a planned policy update. The backlash grew fast and millions of people, including several high-profile figures, started to explore rival apps Signal and Telegram. Even governments, including India's -- WhatsApp's biggest market by users -- expressed concerns. (In the case of India, also an antitrust probe.) The backlash prompted WhatsApp to offer a series of clarifications and assurances to users, and it also postponed the deadline for enforcing the planned update by three months. Now with the May 15 deadline just a week away, we are able to quantify the real-world impact the aforementioned backlash had on WhatsApp's user base: Nada. The vast majority of users that WhatsApp has notified about the planned update in recent months have accepted the update, a WhatsApp spokesperson told TechCrunch. And the app continues to grow, added the spokesperson without sharing the exact figures.

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Now that's a Buffett overflow error

Bug of the week Here's a programming gremlin that caught our eye this week: a share price exceeded the 32-bit unsigned integer limit of a stock exchange's code.…

We're nicer in person, we swear

In an attempt to make Twitter feel less like a small-town Wetherspoons at closing time, the company will start asking users to reconsider sending tweets its algorithms perceive to be mean.…

A new printer called Forust is using scrap wood to 3D print wooden objects that are as structurally sound as regular carved wood. Created by Andrew Jeffery and a team of researchers at Desktop Metal, the printer prints using fine sawdust that is formed into solid objects. Gizmodo reports: The printer works similarly to an inkjet printer and squirts a binding agent onto a layer of sawdust. Like most 3D printers, the object rises out of the bed of sawdust and then, when complete, can be sanded and finished like regular wood. Jeffrey sees the system as a way to save trees. "Two years ago we started looking into how we might be able to 3D print in new material," he said. "Wood waste was one of the materials we started with early on and realized it could be repurposed and upcycled with 3D printing technology. From there, we focused on building out the process using wood byproducts in order to create real wood-crafted results. We formed the company really to save forests."

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No lessons learned from (literally) decades of media format wars

Something for the Weekend, Sir? Argh, where did I put that old comic? Someone told me it's a collector's item! It has value!…

'Discriminatory or harassing conduct will not be tolerated'

A permaban from Perl events over "unacceptable" behaviour has been reduced to a year for the developer concerned, named by several separate Perl sources as Matt Trout.…

Algos guiding self-driving cars don’t expect to see a STOP sign next to food. So if someone put showing apples at a busy intersection ...

Black Hat Asia Computer vision systems display “correlation bias” that makes it possible to create adversarial images, that could have real-world consequences such as messing with self-driving cars’ ability to accurately interpret road signs.…

I'll talk you through the steps... oh sh-

On Call Corporal Cockup meets Major Outage in this week's episode of On Call as a reader's helpful walkthrough takes down the telephony server.…

Satellite shootdown test still causing operational and diplomatic hassles after 14 years

Tired of space junk and weapons, US military commanders presented to Congress on Wednesday an argument to create a framework for rules-based order in space.…

schwit1 writes: Are there aliens out there? Breakthrough Listen, a privately-funded project searching for evidence of alien life, has released the first results from its survey of 60 million stars in an area looking towards the galactic center, noting that it found no evidence of any technological transmissions signaling an alien civilization from any of those stars. The kind of signals they were looking for were not beacons sent out intentionally by alien civilizations, such as television or radio broadcasts, but unintentional transmissions, such as radar transmissions meant for other purposes but still beamed into space. They found none. The paper can be downloaded here (PDF).

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You know the drill: shake your head in disbelief, then figure out if patching will wipe out a weekend or be merely inconvenient

Cisco has revealed a pair of critical bugs in its HyperFlex hyperconverged infrastructure product.…

Asia is already short millions of trainees; expert warns talent pipeline will dry up in response to government snooping

Black Hat Asia Asian nations in which governments are keen on citizen surveillance struggle to develop ethical hackers, as prospective workers fear their activities may be misunderstood, according to security specialist Mika Devonshire.…

Why are you giving yourself a kick in the innovation economy?

China has protested India’s decision to prevent local carriers using made-in-China 5G kit in network trials.…

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Bloomberg: China's emissions of six heat-trapping gases, including carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide, rose to 14.09 billion tons of CO2 equivalent in 2019, edging out the total of Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development members by about 30 million tons, according to the New York-based climate research group. The massive scale of China's emissions highlights the importance of President Xi Jinping's drive to peak carbon emissions before 2030 and reach net-zero by 2060. China accounted for 27 percent of global emissions. The U.S., the second biggest emitter, contributed 11 percent while India for the first time surpassed the European Union with about 6.6 percent of the global total. Still, China also has the world's largest population, so its per capita emissions remain far less than those of the U.S. And on a historical basis, OECD members are still the world's biggest warming culprits, having pumped four times more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere than China since 1750.

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