Linux fréttir

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Electrek: Tesla's head of production in charge of its Fremont factory, Peter Hochholdinger, is going to hold a similar position at Lucid Motors, an electric car startup looking to soon move to production. Lucid Motors has kind of spun out of Tesla. It was started by a former Tesla board member and executive and it is led by Peter Rawlinson, the former chief engineer of the Tesla Model S. Several other Tesla engineers and executives have also joined the startup and they are now also adding Hochholdinger to the team. Today, the startup announced that the Tesla and Audi veteran is joining as Vice President of Manufacturing and he will lead "Lucid's global manufacturing operations, commencing with Lucid's plant in Casa Grande, Arizona, as well as manufacturing engineering." Rawlinson commented on the hire: "We are delighted to welcome Peter to the Lucid team. Peter's extensive experience and proven leadership in premium-vehicle manufacturing will prove invaluable as we continue our progress towards the launch of Lucid Air and future models. In joining Lucid, Peter is empowered to create an industry-leading manufacturing process that will deliver the quality products our discerning customers demand and deserve."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Postal package triggered test equipment, buildings evacuated, no one exposed

Staff were evacuated today at Facebook's Silicon Valley headquarters after a package believed to contain the chemical weapon sarin was delivered to the antisocial network.…

sciencehabit shares a report: The day that squeamish humans -- and exterminators -- have long feared may have come at last: Cockroaches are becoming invincible. Or at least German cockroaches (Blattella germanica) are, according to a new study. Researchers have found that these creatures, which have long been a prevalent urban pest, are becoming increasingly resistant to almost every kind of chemical insecticide. Not all insecticides are created equal. Some degrade the nervous system, whereas others attack the exoskeleton; they also have to be left out for varying amounts of time. But many insects, including cockroaches, have evolved resistance to at least one of the most commonly-used insecticides. And because cockroaches live only for about 100 days, that resistance can evolve quickly, with genes from the most resistant cockroaches being passed to the next generation. To test resistance in German cockroaches, researchers treated three different colonies in multiple apartment buildings in Indiana and Illinois over the course of 6 months. The populations were tested for their level of resistance to three different insecticides: abamectin, boric acid, and thiamethoxam. One treatment used all three pesticides, one after another, for 3 months before repeating the cycle. In another treatment, researchers used a mixture of insecticides over the full 6 months. A final treatment scenario used just one chemical that the selected roach population had a low resistance to for the entire time. Regardless of the different treatments, the size of most of the cockroach populations didn't drop over time, the researchers wrote last month in Scientific Reports.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Concerns snubbed as DNS overlord signs secretive deal, paves way for $$$ increases

The price caps have been taken off .org domains, meaning that more than 10 million largely non-profit organizations will end up paying more for their online presence each year.…

An anonymous reader shares a report: Amazon's taxes have become a campaign issue. In last week's Democratic debates, two different candidates (Cory Booker and Andrew Yang) called out Amazon for paying $0 in federal income taxes last year, even after listing $4 billion in profits. Joe Biden, Elizabeth Warren, and President Trump himself have brought up the same point at various points on the campaign trail, always directed at Amazon. In a CNN interview after the second debate, Bernie Sanders singled the company out as an example of a broken tax code, saying simply, "I'm going to tax them." "We pay every penny we owe in corporate taxes including $2.6 billion over the past three years," Amazon said when reached for comment. "We've invested $270 billion in the US since 2010 and created more than 275,000 jobs." But there's an awkward truth behind the political back-and-forth: we don't know what Amazon's tax bill really is. Like every other company in America, Amazon's tax returns are private, legally considered to be a trade secret. We don't know which tax breaks they're taking, or how they've structured their finances to avoid various taxes in favor of others. If Amazon says its tax bill was lower because of investments, we simply have to take the company at its word.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Germany's cyber-security agency is working on a set of minimum rules that modern web browsers must comply with in order to be considered secure. From a report: The new guidelines are currently being drafted by the German Federal Office for Information Security (or the Bundesamt fur Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik -- BSI), and they'll be used to advise government agencies and companies from the private sector on what browsers are safe to use. A first version of this guideline was published in 2017, but a new standard is being put together to account for improved security measures added to modern browsers, such as HSTS, SRI, CSP 2.0, telemetry handling, and improved certificate handling mechanisms -- all mentioned in a new draft released for public debate last week. According to the BSI's new draft, to be considered "secure," a modern browser must follow the following requirements, among others: Must support TLS, must have a list of trusted certificates, must support extended validation (EV) certificates, must verify loaded certificates against a Certification Revocation List (CRL) or an Online Certificate Status Protocol (OCSP); the browser must use icons or color highlights to show when communications to a remote server is encrypted or in plaintext, connections to remote websites running on expired certificates must be allowed only after specific user approval; must support HTTP Strict Transport Security (HSTS) (RFC 6797). Further reading: Germany and the Netherlands To Build the First Ever Joint Military Internet.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Gene Kranz may be the most famous flight director in NASA's history. He directed the actual landing portion of the first mission to put men on the moon, Apollo 11, and led Mission Control in saving the crew of Apollo 13 after an oxygen tank exploded on the way to the lunar surface. Now Kranz, 85, has completed another undertaking: the reopening of Mission Control at NASA's Johnson Space Center in Houston. From a report: The room where Kranz directed some of NASA's most historic missions, heralding U.S. exploration of space, was decommissioned in 1992. Since then, it had become a stop on guided tours of the space center but had fallen into disrepair. Kranz led a $5 million multiyear effort to restore Mission Control in time for the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing on July 20. "I walked into that room last Monday for the first time when it was fully operational, and it was dynamite. I literally wept," Kranz said in an interview with NPR. "The emotional surge at that moment was incredible. I walked down on the floor, and when we did the ribbon-cutting the last two days, believe it or not, I could hear the people talking in that room from 50 years ago. I could hear the controllers talking." The room also brought back memories for Kranz of a shared sense of purpose. "That group of people united in pursuit of a cause, and basically the result was greater than the sum of the parts. There was a chemistry that was formed," Kranz said. "[The room] also has a meaning related to the American psyche, that what America will dare, America will do," Kranz said.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Move believed to be response to Seoul's stance on forced labour during WW2

Just a day after the G20 free trade summit ended, Japan has restricted exports of some mobile phone components to South Korea.…

New documents obtained by Motherboard using a Freedom of Information request show how Amazon, Ring, a GPS tracking company, and the U.S. Postal Inspection Service collaborated on a package sting operation with the Aurora, Colorado Police Department in December. From the report: The operation involved equipping fake Amazon packages with GPS trackers, and surveilling doorsteps with Ring doorbell cameras in an effort to catch someone stealing a package on tape. The documents show the design and implementation of a highly elaborate public relations stunt, which was designed both to endear Amazon and Ring with local law enforcement, and to make local residents fear the place they live. The parties were disappointed when the operation didn't result in any arrests. The Aurora Police Department received 25 Amazon boxes, Amazon-branded tape, and Amazon lithium ion stickers as a part of the operation. It also received 15 Ring doorbell cameras and 15 GL300W GPS trackers from 7P Solutions. "Operation Grinch Grab," as it was called internally, involved seven Aurora zip codes. These companies spent days with the Aurora Police Department preparing them for the operation, and discussing local news coverage and rewriting press releases.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Data centre joint venture bankrolled by Singapore sets its sights on Europe

Colocation giant Equinix is about to test a new business model - the company has entered a joint venture to build bit barns specifically for hyperscale customers.…

The hospital technology, typically used to identify human ailments, captured perhaps the world's smallest magnetic resonance image. weiserfireman shares a report: Different microscopy techniques allow scientists to see the nucleotide-by-nucleotide genetic sequences in cells down to the resolution of a couple atoms as seen in an atomic force microscopy image. But scientists at the IBM Almaden Research Center in San Jose, Calif. and the Institute for Basic Sciences in Seoul, have taken imaging a step further, developing a new magnetic resonance imaging technique that provides unprecedented detail, right down to the individual atoms of a sample [Editor's note: the link may be paywalled; alternative source]. The technique relies on the same basic physics behind the M.R.I. scans that are done in hospitals. When doctors want to detect tumors, measure brain function or visualize the structure of joints, they employ huge M.R.I. machines, which apply a magnetic field across the human body. This temporarily disrupts the protons spinning in the nucleus of every atom in every cell. A subsequent, brief pulse of radio-frequency energy causes the protons to spin perpendicular to the pulse. Afterward, the protons return to their normal state, releasing energy that can be measured by sensors and made into an image. But to gather enough diagnostic data, traditional hospital M.R.I.s must scan billions and billions of protons in a person's body, said Christopher Lutz, a physicist at IBM. So he and his colleagues decided to pack the power of an M.R.I. machine into the tip of another specialized instrument known as a scanning tunneling microscope to see if they could image individual atoms. The tip of a scanning tunneling microscope is just a few atoms wide. And it moves along the surface of a sample, it picks up details about the size and conformation of molecules. The researchers attached magnetized iron atoms to the tip, effectively combining scanning-tunneling microscope and M.R.I. technologies.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Wikipedia co-founder calls for strike against Facebook et al

The other Wikipedia co-founder has called for a 48-hour boycott of all social media platforms to demonstrate users' desire to regain control of their data and privacy.…

From a blog post: For 25 years, the Robots Exclusion Protocol (REP) was only a de-facto standard. This had frustrating implications sometimes. On one hand, for webmasters, it meant uncertainty in corner cases, like when their text editor included BOM characters in their robots.txt files. On the other hand, for crawler and tool developers, it also brought uncertainty; for example, how should they deal with robots.txt files that are hundreds of megabytes large? Today, we announced that we're spearheading the effort to make the REP an internet standard. While this is an important step, it means extra work for developers who parse robots.txt files. We're here to help: we open sourced the C++ library that our production systems use for parsing and matching rules in robots.txt files. This library has been around for 20 years and it contains pieces of code that were written in the 90's. Since then, the library evolved; we learned a lot about how webmasters write robots.txt files and corner cases that we had to cover for, and added what we learned over the years also to the internet draft when it made sense.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Another step towards self-reliance amid US trade tiff

China-owned semiconductor giant Tsinghua Unigroup, which already manufactures flash memory, is about to try its luck at making DRAM – a much more complicated endeavour.…

To many, Jony Ive's departure from Apple last week felt very sudden. But a narrative is forming to suggest that he's been slowly drifting apart from the company for several years as the iPhone maker's priorities shifted from product design to operations. Here are some of the highlights from The Wall Street Journal [paywalled] piece: Ive was "dispirited" by Tim Cook who "showed little interest in the product development process," according to sources speaking to the WSJ. Ive grew increasingly frustrated as Apple's board was populated by directors with backgrounds unrelated to the company's core business. Ive disagreed with "some Apple leaders" on how to position the Apple Watch. Ive pushed for the Apple Watch to be sold as a fashion accessory, not as an extension of the iPhone. The product that went on sale was a compromise. Apple only sold a quarter of what the company forecasted in the first year, according to the WSJ, with "thousands" of the $17,000 gold Apple Watch Edition left unsold. Further reading: 'Apple is Not in Trouble Because Jony Ive is Leaving, It Is in Trouble Because He's Not Being Replaced'.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.