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In 2017, two of Apple's top design and technology executives decided to leave the company to start their own venture with an ambitious vision: to create the next big computing paradigm. That startup, called Humane, is now announcing that it has raised $30 million in a series A round of venture funding to continue developing its mysterious product. From a report: While cofounders Imran Chaudhri and Bethany Bongiorno refuse to reveal what they're working on, its cofounders seem to believe it will have the same kind of impact as the iPhone -- which is saying a lot, given that one of them designed the iPhone's original interface. "We are at a point in terms of computing platforms where there's a certain level of maturation that's led to a decline in innovation," says Humane president and chairman Chaudhri, who worked on the UI design of the iPhone and the iPad during his 21 years at Apple. "For us, it's really about how we actually bring vitality and how we bring a new opportunity to computing. How do we move the needle?" It's impossible to have an opinion about the potential impact of Humane's creation until it reveals at least some details. Tony Fadell, who spearheaded the iPod and also helped bring us the iPhone, left Apple over a decade ago and soon after started talking about "a product that could have a huge impact on a big problem," as he told The New York Times in 2011. His startup Nest's creation turned out to be a thermostat. But Humane is certainly dialing up the expectations for whatever it's working on. The startup's ambitions derive in part from Chaudhri reckoning with the downsides of the products he was instrumental in creating --particularly the ways in which smartphones can nag at and monopolize our attention while siphoning away private data for corporations to profit from. But that doesn't mean that Chaudhri and Bongiorno, a former director of software engineering at Apple who worked with Chaudhri to launch the iPad, believe that technology is a net negative force in society. "We're tech optimists at heart," says Bongiorno, who is Humane's CEO. "But we believe it's also time to question everything to build something better." Instead, they're betting that the time is right for a new, less invasive way to interface with computers. It's a compelling vision, despite the lack of details. "Every product, especially in computing, has a limitation in terms of how far it can go, what it can do before it starts to really become exhausted. That's exhausted in terms of creativity, exhausted in terms of usefulness, exhausted in terms of the experience of using it as well," Chaudhri says. "This is a cyclical thing that's always occurred. Some people from a certain perspective call it a 15-year cycle. We're coming on that for the smartphone." More on this on Jason Calacanis's podcast.

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Graz University of Tech's Daniel Gruss thinks natural sciences can save us

Complexity has broken cybersecurity, but a reappraisal of computer science can keep us safe.…

Amazon has teamed up with Universal Music and Warner Music to remaster thousands of popular streaming tracks to better-than-CD audio quality [Editor's note: the link may be paywalleddd; alternative source], as the music industry tries to lure listeners to pricier subscriptions. From a report: In addition to a standard $10 a month streaming service comparable to Spotify, Amazon offers a high-definition option that delivers songs to smartphones at CD sound quality or better. This service costs $15 a month, or $13 a month for members of its Prime shipping programme. The ecommerce group has spent the past year working to boost its pricier streaming service with albums from stars including Lady Gaga, Nirvana, Ariana Grande and Bob Marley in what it calls "ultra high-definition." To do so, Universal Music went back to the original recordings of albums such as Diana Ross and Marvin Gaye's Diana & Marvin and worked with sound engineers to remaster them. Amazon says the audio will "reveal nuances that were once flattened in files compressed for digital streaming or CD manufacturing." The move comes as the inflow of cash from music streaming has slowed over the past year as the market matures

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Also: Scrubtember becomes Abortober, and the worm returns once more to NASA

In brief The location of the air leak from the International Space Station (ISS) has been identified. According to Russia's Roscosmos, it is in the Zvezda Service Module transfer chamber.…

Nintendo is about to release its biggest product for the holiday season, where it will be up against new-generation consoles from rivals Microsoft and Sony. An early look at the new Mario Kart game for the Switch, featuring augmented reality and your living room as the race track, indicates that Nintendo will be just as competitive. From a report: In Mario Kart Live: Home Circuit, which becomes available from the Japanese gaming giant on Oct. 16, players use their Switch consoles to race and around their home. The action places animated objects in real-world surroundings, along the lines of Pokemon Go. Here's how it works: You, holding your Switch, play through what would look like a regular game of Mario Kart if not for your couch and dinner table in the background. You'll steer around a real toy kart on a track you've plotted out in your house. A camera attached to the kart feeds footage to your Switch screen, allowing you to take control of Mario or Luigi as they collect mushrooms and drive laps. The game, previewed over a Zoom call with a Nintendo representative, looks fun and challenging, with a robust selection of options such as custom races and environments. Everything one might expect from a Mario Kart game is here, from the sound effects to the prominent presence of Lakitu, a friendly monster who sits on a cloud and referees the race, occasionally using a fishing rod to rescue you from danger. You can build elaborate racing tracks out of furniture and cardboard, limited only by the size of your room, which may be a drag for those in New York apartments.

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Open-source projects aim to give researchers, startups a helping hand

IBM has published two open-source artificial intelligence projects it hopes will help astronomers better deal with space junk – and encourage startups to circle Earth with swarms of CubeSats.…

Meanwhile, similar buy Qualtrics continues to enjoy quasi-independence

In pursuit of growth beyond its back-office enterprise lair, SAP is forking out for Emarsys, a customer engagement software company.…

Long-time Slashdot reader Jeremy Allison - Sam shares an announcement from the Software Freedom Conservancy, detailing a new strategy toward improving compliance and the freedom of users of devices that contain Linux-based systems. From the post: The new work has received an initial grant from Amateur Radio Digital Communications (ARDC). Our new initiative features: 1) Litigation to enforce against license violators that do not voluntarily comply in a timely manner.2) Coordinating the development of alternative firmware for devices where none currently exists.3) Collaborating with other organizations to promote copyleft compliance as a feature for consumers to protect their privacy and get more out of their devices. We take this holistic approach because compliance is not an end in itself, but rather a lever to help people advance technology for themselves and the world. [...] ARDC has long served the amateur radio community who were early adopters of Internet communication. These roots have grown from the deeper soils of wireless and digital communication and open access to technical information. Amateur radio operators have long practiced the tradition of individual technical experimentation that benefited the general public. These traditions also form the basis of software freedom. Hobbyists and volunteers built, modified and improved Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) first. Conservancy defends the rights of software developers to examine the code in their devices and assists their work to improve the platforms they rely on and to understand our communication technologies. Copyleft compliance enables this work to continue and expand to new kinds of devices. [...] When companies prevent us from actually modifying the software on our devices, software freedom remains only theoretical. In this new chapter of compliance work, Conservancy will leverage its technical and legal resources to help the public take control of the software on which they rely. This generous grant from ARDC is a first step. Please help in the next step through support of Conservancy's work with a donation. You can also email compliance@sfconservancy.org to let us know about GPL violations or to discuss volunteering on these projects.

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Why buy the full-fat version when you can have this?

First look The Samsung Galaxy S20 Fan Edition (FE) is reminiscent of Apple in the early 1990s. That may not sound like a compliment, but it is.…

And if you're looking to hire techies, send us your job ads for free

Job Alert We're back with another banger. This week's jobs run the spectrum of data scientists to Python devs. Scroll down to find out more.…

An open-source project that can't handle pull requests isn't a good look

Microsoft has open-sourced many of its developer frameworks but the success of these projects is variable, with Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) dubbed "a disaster" by one unhappy developer.…

7.0 release will give devs power to lay out their microservice architecture

Interview Document-store NoSQL database biggie Couchbase is promising application multi-tenancy within a single database as part of the next release of its flagship product.…

Hmmmmmm shares a report from Reuters: Alphabet's Google plans to pay $1 billion to publishers globally for their news over the next three years, its CEO said on Thursday. The move could help it win over a powerful group amid heightened regulatory scrutiny worldwide. CEO Sundar Pichai said the new product called Google News Showcase will launch first in Germany, where it has signed up German newspapers including Der Spiegel, Stern, Die Zeit, and in Brazil with Folha de S.Paulo, Band and Infobae. It will be rolled out in Belgium, India, the Netherlands and other countries. About 200 publishers in Argentina, Australia, Britain, Brazil, Canada and Germany have signed up to the product. "This financial commitment -- our biggest to date -- will pay publishers to create and curate high-quality content for a different kind of online news experience," Pichai said in a blog post. The product, which allows publishers to pick and present their stories, will launch on Google News on Android devices and eventually on Apple devices. "This approach is distinct from our other news products because it leans on the editorial choices individual publishers make about which stories to show readers and how to present them," Pichai said. The product builds on a licensing deal with media groups in Australia, Brazil and Germany in June, which also drew a lukewarm response from the European Publishers Council. Google is negotiating with French publishers, among its most vocal critics, while Australia wants to force it and Facebook to share advertising revenue with local media groups.

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New era, new weapons needed, says Chief of the Defence Staff

Britain's enemies are investing more and more in cyber warfare capabilities, the UK's top general has warned – singling out Russia and its "digital authoritarianism".…

Research finds orgs taking big chances with unpatched email relays

Security company Rapid7 reports that there are more than 139,000 Microsoft Exchange 2010 servers with internet-facing services (Outlook Web Access or OWA) despite the application going out of support this month.…

Forty minutes of picture analysis has been slashed to just five seconds

NASA says its new crater-hunting AI system has found its first evidence of a previously unseen meteorite strike on Mars, needing just five seconds to clock the potential crash site compared to 40 minutes a human would normally take.…

Playing tug o' war with a 1970s IBM mainframe

On Call Is it October? Already? It feels like we still haven't moved on from March. Put such discomfiture to one side in favour of a Friday treat – a tale of brute force and ignorance from those that are forever On Call.…

hackingbear shares a report from CNN: As October 1 arrives, hundreds of millions of people in China are expected to pack highways, trains and planes for the National Day holiday, one of the busiest times for travel in the world's most populous country. In a sign of the government's confidence in keeping the virus under control, the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention said last week that domestic travels can be arranged "as normal" for the upcoming holiday, given all cities in mainland China are marked as low risk for the coronavirus. The expected 550 million trips during the 8-day holiday will be a much-awaited boost to Chinese economic recovery. "I think China has (the virus) under pretty good control," said a 29-year-old traveler flew from Guangzhou to Shanghai. "I'm wearing masks and bringing alcohol wipes with me to clean my hands, especially before eating -- although in Shanghai, few people wear masks now." More than eight months on, China's restrictions on domestic movement have all been lifted. Officially, some cities still require passengers to produce a green health code on their smartphones at train stations and airports to show they're safe to travel, but implementation can be lax in practice. China has not reported any locally transmitted symptomatic case since mid-August, and is rigorously screening overseas arrivals and workers at risk of exposure to the virus. In other coronavirus-related news, vaccine trial participants are reporting day-long exhaustion, fever and headaches -- but say it's worth it. Slashdot reader gollum123 shares a report from CNBC: Luke Hutchison woke up in the middle of the night with chills and a fever after taking the Covid-19 booster shot in Moderna's vaccine trial. Another coronavirus vaccine trial participant, testing Pfizer's candidate, similarly woke up with chills, shaking so hard he cracked a tooth after taking the second dose. High fever, body aches, bad headaches and exhaustion are just some of the symptoms five participants in two of the leading coronavirus vaccine trials say they felt after receiving the shots. While the symptoms were uncomfortable, and at times intense, they often went away after a day, sometimes sooner, according to three participants in the Moderna trial and one in Pfizer's as well as a person close to another participant in Moderna's trial. Hutchison said he's concerned that the pharmaceutical manufacturers have not sufficiently informed the public about potential side effects. If the vaccines are approved, he fears, it might cause a widespread backlash if word spreads, which is why he decided to go public now.

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Kids are being horrible about photo filters, so developers are being asked to help protect mental health

Google has revealed it has adopted “value-neutral” language in the interests of improving both selfies and mental health.…

President Trump said on Twitter that he and First Lady Melania tested positive for COVID-19. Slashdot reader halbot42 shares a report from The New York Times, adding: "President Trump? Karma calling on line 1." President Trump said early Friday morning that he and the first lady have tested positive for the coronavirus, throwing the nation's leadership into uncertainty and escalating the crisis posed by a pandemic that has already killed more than 207,000 Americans and devastated the economy. "Tonight, @FLOTUS and I tested positive for COVID-19," Mr. Trump wrote on Twitter shortly before 1 a.m. "We will begin our quarantine and recovery process immediately. We will get through this TOGETHER!" The president's physician said Mr. Trump was "well" without saying whether he was experiencing symptoms and added that the president would stay isolated in the White House for now. "The president and first lady are both well at this time, and they plan to remain at home within the White House during their convalescence," the physician, Sean P. Conley, said in a statement without saying how long that would be. "Rest assured I expect the president to continue carrying out his duties without disruption while recovering, and I will keep you updated on any future developments." Earlier in the day, one of his closest advisers, Hope Hicks, became infected.

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